June 5, 2025 • 53 mins
The gang talks about the pronatalist right in Trump's orbit, and historical examples of pronatalism from Japan, Spain, and Romania.
Sources:
https://www.vscw.ca/en/node/119
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781438402062/html?lang=en
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15335899
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ypdy05jl9o
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/politics/trump-birthrate-proposals.html
https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/treating-infertility-the-new-frontier-reproductive-medicine
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/2/2155893/-Texas-Republican-channels-Stalin-and-Putin-to-glorify-motherhood
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dot-memo-funds-communities-marriage-birth-rates_n_679bf8d8e4b0e1faebeef9c8
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media Welcome to it could happen here the only
podcast where anti British discrimination is a way of life? James,
are we allowed to say that? Do you remember the training?
I haven't done yet.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I was giving that training my full attention throughout the
duration of the video. Every single time I've watched It's
good various employees for the last half decade or so,
there was no there was no section on anti British discrimination.
Yet again, another example that victimized.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Last time I took that training, there was a straight
up anti Asian racism in it that they didn't address
at all. So I'm assuming if that's okay, then anti
British racism was fine.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Like some shit in those videos, which is wild.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Okay, there you go.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
I think that's a lady who's literally called Karen and
they do her wrong in the in the in the video.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
See I am.
Speaker 5 (00:55):
I am definitely pro British discrimination. But you do get
a point for having Peter O'Toole, so at least it's
it's it's not all the way because the o'tool factor
keeps you from the full might of my wrath.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Frankly, go, yeah, I'm sure that's the case.
Speaker 5 (01:13):
I'm Garson Davis and joined by Mia Wong, James Stubven,
and Robert Evans. This episode, we are talking about babies.
Should there be more?
Speaker 6 (01:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
M hmm.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
We're on a pro natalist kick. We're going to have
that off putting couple who look like vampires but like
not any of the good kinds on the show. Very
excited to have those people on. They seem nice. But
before we do that, we all decided maybe we should
talk about other pro natalist policies in world history and
how well they've worked generally.
Speaker 5 (01:45):
We're going to start by talking about what the US
policy might be, or that the people proposing US policy,
and then we will discuss how those policies went historically.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Yeah, so like to start with Trumps.
Speaker 5 (02:03):
Besides one executive order in February supporting IVF, the new
administration has yet to tackle pro natalist concerns on the
policy front, but a collection of lobbyists, activists, and influencers
are vying for the president's ear while proposing a multitude
of plans to grow the number of heterosexual marriages and
incentivize childbirth. The pronataists certainly think that the new administration
(02:28):
is at the very least ideologically sympathetic, if not in
cahoots with their agenda. The main inns on the pronatalist
front have come from the Peter Thiel tech right wing
of the White House Right. This is like JD. Vance
and previously Elon Musk. Musk has been doom posting for
years about how a drop in fertility rates could be
(02:49):
leading to a large scale population collapse, and at an
anti abortion rally this past January, Vance addressed the crowd
saying quote, I want more babies in the United States
of America, more happy children in our country. And I
want beautiful young men and women who are eager to
welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.
Speaker 6 (03:07):
Uh huh. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
And you got to like whatever you're listening to one
of these things, you got to like have a little
parenthesies anytime anytime someone says baby, there's a little parentheses
there that says white.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
This is this is real Nazi shit.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Like yeah, A lot of this, a lot of the
stuff that's certainly like based on like like great replacement
rhetoric that the alt right, like Trojan Horst and like
pushed forward in like twenty eighteen, which is now so
widely normalized thanks to I mean really, Musk has done
a lot of work in normalizing great replacement stuff.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
Yeah, Tucker calls into Carlson of course.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Well, and Musk's family goes into this, right, like this
is the kind of thing like his grandparents were involved in.
Like it was a little bit less of like the
standard great replacement shit and a little more like focused
on like we need to be breeding high IQ white
people together. Yeah, you chant like that, that is that
is what he inherits. He comes by it honestly, I
guess you could say.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
Well, and oftentimes printles rhetoric is also tied in with
like the tradwife and like loss of traditional family structure
type stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Right.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Vance has laid blame at childless cat ladies and.
Speaker 5 (04:16):
Referred to our quote unquote broken culture that tax masculinity
and turns our nation's youth into androgynous idiots.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
Hey shout out.
Speaker 6 (04:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
I've also started referring to women with kids as catless
child ladies as a result of this.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
I think he's.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Reactions action, I don't know, they very negatively.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Robot.
Speaker 5 (04:41):
A declining birth rate has also been attributed to women
in the workplace who are not getting married and raising
kids at home from an early enough age, and some
of this rheteric has rubbed off on Trump right and
Trump at seapack in twenty twenty three, he said, quote,
we will support baby booms, and we will support baby
bonuses for a new baby boom.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
I want a baby boom cool.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
Trump has floated a five thousand dollars cash quote unquote
baby bonus to American mothers after delivering a baby, calling
this proposal a good idea.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Well, Garrison, that's almost three months at a preschool.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
Oh yeah, I'm sure that's enough.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Not quite three months at a lot of preschools, like,
not even great pre schools. It's very preschools and unbelievably expensive.
Speaker 5 (05:23):
The actual cause of like of a declining birth rate
is due to skyrocketing cost of living, so people aren't
financially stable to have kids in their early twenties anymore,
so instead they're waiting until their thirties.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
That's part of it at least.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
Yes, if you want people to have kids more, you
should make the world more affordable. And a five thousand
dollars baby bonist doesn't actually solve the key issues that
would cause people to be worried about, you know, trying
to like get buried and have kids at a young
age in a world where that seems kind of like
unfathomably expensive. Now, luckily Trump does have a few other
ways of sorting of sorting out this problem. The new Big,
(05:59):
Beautiful bud bill that recently passed the House will create
quote unquote Mega savings accounts for new kids. And here
Mega stands for money accounts for growth and in for
growth and advancement.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Just fucking stop stop it.
Speaker 5 (06:18):
So when parents are guardians open a new Mega savings
account for their kids, the federal government will contribute one
thousand dollars for babies born between January first, twenty twenty
four and December thirty first, twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
That that'll help, great, great.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
I believe California also does it. Yeah, California have something
called the California Child Saving Accounts Program, which already gives
children like up to one thousand dollars. And I think
it's like a college savings account from what I understand.
Speaker 5 (06:48):
Yeah, that's that's pretty much what this is. Although specifically
in the for the Mega accounts, it also lists home ownership.
Oh cool, because this is like a big This is
a big part of this pronatalst thing is you need
to like own a home. We get in a straight marriage,
start having kids in your early twenties.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Yeah, sure, make Instagram videos of yourself chopping would badly
like we understand.
Speaker 6 (07:08):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
The big beautiful budget bill also prohibits Medicare funds. We're
going to planned parent hut great.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, let me tell you, one thousand American dollars, even
with compounding interest, isn't going to do shit to buy
you a home anywhere in the United States.
Speaker 5 (07:22):
Now, the Heritage Foundation's Devasit Center for Life, Religion, and
Family have pushed for a policy that exponentially increases the
child tax credit for each additional child a married couple has.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
This is a little bit.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
Similar to a policy proposed in twenty twenty three by
Republican Representative Brian Slaton of Texas, who proposed increasing property
tax cuts for married heterosexual couples who have never been
divorced and have four or more children starting after marriage.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
So there's a lot of caveats.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
There, Jesus Christy, Yeah, okay, sure, yeah, no, this sign
is are we taking issue with this?
Speaker 2 (08:01):
That is some Yeah, this is part of my British
arity trade. We developed our own religion so that dudes
could get divorced. It is, it is. Yeah, it is
a bill of rights for British guys.
Speaker 5 (08:12):
Obviously a lot of a lot of caveats in there
so that you can have your little like tread Christian family.
But four kids would equal a forty percent cut. Ten
kids would equal no property taxes at all.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Well, I mean, shit, that's hard to argue with. Yeah,
this is property taxes. You also have to own the
property to begin with to be paying property tax.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
Yeah, all of these yea, all these people want you
to be like homeowners with a stay at homework.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
This is like, this is what they want, but they
don't want to actually do things to meaningfully make home
ownership accessible.
Speaker 5 (08:41):
No, this is just like self selecting for like well
off white Christians, right like yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah,
Slaton said in a statement quote, with this bill, Texas
will start saying to couples, get married, stay married, and
be fruitful and multiply unquote.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
For Fox's sake.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
It's a disaster.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
And yeah, I mean and like a lot of this
stuff is too is it's this is the sort of
flailing reaction to like one of the things that actually
drives like declining birthrates, which is not having teen pregnancies
like significantly decreases birth rates because it turns out they're like, oh, yeah, right.
It turns out a huge part of like why birthrates
is so high is just direct social coercion. And if
(09:21):
you stop having that or like you know, the amount
of the coercion decreases, then yeah, like fucking birthrates are
gonna decline because women aren't being forced to have babies
like and you know, and so they're trying to do
all this like you know, unhinged tinkering bullshit to sort
of like deal with the fact that if you don't
force people to have children as teenagers, they won't.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah, because life, they quickly realize there's things in life,
like you know, drugs and stuff. Yeah, they'll go back
to the club.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
In March, Trump called himself the quote unquote fertiliz.
Speaker 5 (09:59):
They president, and the White House is expected to soon
release a report on how to expand access and affordability
of IVF. Now this is where things get sticky insert pun.
There is hot debate amongst advisors and think tanks on
(10:19):
the religious ethics of ivf Right. There's no real consensus
among the pronatalst voices who are lobbying Trump. This sort
of breaks down into the new tech right versus the
more religious Christian family sector of conservatism, and Vance is
kind of caught in the middle of this, but these
groups may end up compromising to form an alliance. Now Heritage,
(10:41):
the Heritage Foundation recommends a program to use government funds
for education that promotes quote unquote natural fertility, teaching women
how to track their mental cycles using charting courses to
both help get pregnant and avoid using birth control. They
propose that food, nutrition, and lifestyle chain could improve quote
(11:01):
unquote natural conception. Instead of using assisted reproductive technologies, Heritage
proposed to something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as
a holistic approach to treating infertility through quote unquote hoonon
balancing and dieting and nutritional adjustments, environmental changes, and surgery unquote.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, you just need some fucking uh some of those
some of those baby teething pills Highlands made that kill babies.
That's that's what you get to take. It's a holistic
approach to you. Some put a bunch of random chemicals
and lead in your body from an unregulated supplement company.
Speaker 5 (11:36):
Heritage itself critiques IVF as failing to address the underlying
causes of infertility as well as you know, out of
concern for embryo.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Personhood rights for fuck sake.
Speaker 5 (11:47):
So they advocate for embryo adoption and have proposed legislation
to make the production of embryo spares.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
Illegal embryo adoption because they believe that these are like
full like people.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
Now, on the other side of the you know, pro
natalist right, you have people like the vampire couple that
Robert mentioned. Simone Collins, a pronatalist activist and failed Pennsylvania
congressional candidate.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
She could still pull it off. Stay in line if
your vote hasn't been counted.
Speaker 5 (12:18):
People her and her husband are self described quote unquote
techno Puritans, and she is the.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Fucking super shit. Like, put these people on a boat
and send it across the Atlantic, Like, can they get scurvy?
Have they already got? They look a little bit like
they may already have scurvy. To be fair, they do
look like they have scurvy. Constantly they deprive them of
lime juice and save the world from a fucking.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Put them on the next starship and see how far
up it gets.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
No, they won't get that.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Let them try. I support the human spirit.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
Collins is also the former managing director of an exclusive
Peter teal In social club called a Dialogue.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
Now.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
She has called the new administration quote unquote inherently pronatalist
and has sent several draft pronatalist executive orders to the
White House, one of which would award a quote unquote
National Medal of Motherhood to mothers with six or more children.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
This is some churchescu shit, Like, I know we're going
to talk about that, but Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5 (13:23):
She herself wants at least seven kids. And she claims
to use special technology to select embryos with high IQs,
which relates back to what Robert was saying earlier. Yes,
so they use IVF to to specifically select the embryos
that they think are like naturally predisposed to have more
(13:44):
desirable traits, including high IQ's. They have not discussed the
exact method. That's why it's called special technology.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
They're looking for one with the big head or something,
So you don't know. I guess I'm not even that
far along that they win the IVF.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
So that's abways pretty fucked up.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
And then I guess finally, one of the few things
that actually has happened in advancement of this ideology was
way back like in February, Trump's Transportation secretary Sean Duffy,
who is a father of nine and has ten siblings,
sent out a memo directing his staff to prioritize transportation
funds to quote give preference to communities with marriage and
(14:19):
birth rates higher than the national average unquote, which would,
in ef fact, mean less money for urban public transit
and instead send it towards like wealthier, rural, white conservative areas.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Yeah, I'd imagine Latino communities have higher marriage rates at
least than like the national average.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
Yeah, I'm not sure if Sean Duffy really wants his
employees to select for that, though.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
No, neither of my I that's kind that's what I'm
That's what I'm that's what I'm wondering for. Yeah, Samuel
Huntington thinks they have higher birth rates, right, Like that's
his whole stick.
Speaker 5 (14:50):
If you look at the full memo, I think this
is this is just like a dog whistle for like
white Christians, Like that is that is really what he's saying, sick,
that is what I have for the.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
Current the current peroneals policies.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
We should go on and ad break and then return
to learn the historical implications of pro natalist policies.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
M h. All right, we are back and we are
spinning our globe, our big ball of pro natalism, and
it is slowing down and is landed on Japan, where
(15:33):
mir is going to explain pronatalist policy.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
Yeah, and I guess I want to open on a
kind of global thing, which is a concern over like
birth rates for like fascists is a really old thing.
I mean it predates fascism. Like this is like like
if you go to like the eighteen seventies, every single
person is complaining about like, oh my god, the birth
rate of the right, well, the white race keeps declining
and we're gonna get like overwhelmed by the Asiatic chords.
(15:58):
And then you go to like the Asiatic words and
it's like Japan has been having the same fucking panic
for literally so long. Like I cannot emphasize enough. You
can just go back through newspaper archives and you just
it's you're literally reading the same article over and over
and over again, going back just decades and decades and decades.
So like the first big modern freak out about birth
(16:20):
rates is in like nineteen eighty seven. Yeah, they have
the first big like japan birth rate declining freak out.
Speaker 4 (16:29):
This has been happening longer than like most of the
people here have been a lie.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
I can remember from my child. It's just been like, oh,
they're panicking about their birth rates again.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
Yeah, so like the running thing with Japanese politics. So
we're roughly doing these in order of like most to
least hinged in terms of like in terms of these
like natalist policies, Japan I think has an interesting series
of sort of political contradictions in their like kind of
pro natalist Paul Wall, it's if they have they have
(16:58):
political contradictions in their pro natalist polics and political contradictions
in their conservative faction. Because Japan is basically like a
one party liberal democratic state. Liberal Democratic Party is the
one party. This is a party established by a World
War two Nazi, but that means that they run all
of politics, so like every political factor effectively runs through them.
(17:18):
They're early attempts in like the nineties are focused on
the deregulation of daycare jobs. So basically their plan is
like in the ninety two thousands, they're like, Okay, we're
going to like deregulate the childcare industry so that we
can have more affordable child There'll be more childcare jobs,
so people can pay for childcare. This is how we're
going to promote this. And this is sort of one
(17:39):
of the first places you see this huge intra intra
class conflict between the peer social conservatives who want to
just like send every woman back to the household to
raise children, and the business people who are like, no,
you can't do that. We need to exploit these women's
labor to like make money. And so the fight that
starts to break out is this fight between like paying
(18:00):
for childcare leave versus like paying for daycare. So originally
that their plan is like, okay, so we're going to
do the daycare stuff. That doesn't work.
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Like, none of these things they're going to do does.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Jack shit, right, Like that's going to be a through
line here, Yeah, yeah, Like no, none of this stuff works.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
And so like like Shinzo Abe, I think is the
most famous person who spends much of time trying to
deal with this and like again, so they have started
worrying about this in nineteen eighty seven. It is now
twenty thirteen. The birth rate keeps declining recipitously. Shinzo wabey
rest and piss you fascist bastard is still trying to
like cook something, right, I'm I'm going to read this
(18:35):
quote from the Archives of Clinical Pediatrics. Shortly after the
formation of Abe's second cabinet, the quote Task Force for
Overcoming Population Decline was established in twenty thirteen, introducing three
key strategies, supporting child rearing, reforming work styles, and promoting marriage,
pregnancy and childbirth. So you can do these are going
to become sort of like the three pillars of Japanese
(18:58):
pro natalist policy, right. A lot of it is focused
on this sort of social push stuff to promote the
traditional family and promote marriage, and this hasn't ever really
worked for this. Supporting child rearing is one that is
going to get a lot of attention in subsequent administrations.
There's a lot of attempts to reduce, like to reduce
(19:20):
the cost of child rearing, where we're going to see
them try like thirty five thousand different proposals to do this.
The one that's actually interesting is reforming work style. So, like,
part of the problem here is that, you know, everyone
in Japan is working a just genuinely unhinged amount unbelievably
(19:43):
staggering overwork, right, I mean, it's one of these things
that's like a persistent social crisis. There's a persistent sort
of suicide crisis because of how long everyone is working
all the time. So shinto Abe's plan for this was
to put into place a soft cap of you can
only work one hundred hours a month of overtime. Now,
this doesn't do shit, right, Like one hundred hours a
(20:05):
month of overtime is enough to kill you, right, like,
you know, especially when like your regular hours are this long.
But this is this is again this problem that he's having,
which is that like, okay, so yes, you probably could
maybe like people maybe would have more children if you
weren't working literally all the time and you weren't just
like being worked to death. But that's really bad for
(20:27):
Japanese business. And and like quote unquote Abba nomics, which
is like abe sort of you know economic plan like
relies on maintaining this extremely high level of labor hours
from everyone in the entire population. And it's also based
on putting more women into the workforce to expand the
size of the workforce to you know, extract more hours
so they can all these people can make more money.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Right.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
They were also supposed to do free preschool for all children,
and this just like didn't happen, which over and over
again they're like, we're gonna do these kind of like
these these kind of like okay, we'll give we'll give
you some kind of welfare state bullshit, but only in
order to like have kids, And it just doesn't happen.
And so you know, this is one of Abe's big initiatives.
(21:08):
But by the time he's like assassinated in twenty twenty two,
he what he was.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Bye.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
By the time his political coalition was finally detonated, Bye
by one by one guy with an electric blunderbuss.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
My favorite politics.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
Oh god, it's so good. It's so good. We have
covered this extensively on the show.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
If you want to hear the happiest I've ever been
during an episode, including the day after Kissinger died, go
find the episode I did right after shits a while
it was assassinated.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
The Holy trinity of great days on the internet. Is
that big stuck boat and the submarine that killed all
those Oh it was amazing, people said, Biden gave us nothing.
Bang is on the timeline.
Speaker 6 (21:57):
There you go.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
So all right, shinzuwape a successor is a guy named
Fumio Kishita who lasts for a little bit, and Kishida
every single Japanese government announces that they're going to spend
like somewhere between twenty and like like fifteen and twenty
billion dollars on pro natalist policies and mostly doesn't happen,
(22:18):
but Kishita promises that he is going to spend twenty
four and a half billion dollars. A lot of this
money is going to be just straight up like child allowance.
So Japan has the system that they've been you know,
they've been sort of implementing over the course of like
all of these fucking reforms, which is just like all right,
we're just gonna like hand you cash. It's still not
(22:38):
enough money to like substantively change stuff. But there's a
lot of different kinds of cash policies they have. They
have cash transfer policies that are just straight up like okay,
here you had a baby, We're going to give you
this amount per month. I think it's like ten to
fifteen thousand yen which hold on, yeah, so it's like
like seventy dollars a month, which is like not. Yeah,
(23:01):
they are trying to expense it research on. They're supposed
to have these like counselors that like come check in
on you and like give you education and stuff. They're
also supposed to just like give you a whole bunch
of basically like child care equipment stuff and make sure
you're getting medical care. And that's supposed to come out
to about like seven hundred dollars ish roughly. You know,
(23:22):
this is like the big sort of plan that they're doing.
And then in twenty twenty four, Kishita is replaced by
like some other dipshit who you know, if he lasts
more than like two years, I guess I'll tell you
his name. But he's you know, attempting to go back
to the sort of childcare side of it, right, which
is his plan involves a bunch of things like childcare
(23:43):
subsidies and very importantly like tuition free high school. So
one of the continuous plans if you like, if you
go back to like what I was talking about with
they were supposed to do free preschool for all children, right,
that never got implemented except in like the last two years,
like Tokyo has started doing it, just like as a city,
(24:05):
because Tokyo is one of the places where, like you know,
the birth rate has been like dropping the fastest or whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Sure, I imagine cost to living is also really high.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
Yeah, cost of living is really high. And it's also
just like you know, if you're working in an urban
like an extremely urban city, you're working a just hideous
number of hours.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Right.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yeah, there's also this there's supposed to be these massive
like investments in providing childcare and nursing, and you can
see these kind of like this this this point where
they've reached this desperation point where they're trying both the
sort of pro business like okay, fuck it will pay
for your childcare and also we will raise taxes to
like hand you money and also nursing stuff. And also
(24:48):
they're trying to there's like giant carve outs for this,
but they're they're they're trying to set up a system
where you can get full pay for couples who both
take parental leave at the same time. So they're trying everything, right,
They're trying like paid childcare. They're trying, fuck it, we'll
just pay people to leave the workforce to have children.
They're trying just straight up cash transfers. They're trying paying
(25:08):
for medical care, especially medical care for disabled kids. And
none of this shit has done anything at all, Right,
like just just absolutely jack shit, right, and if and
if you want to look at like, okay, so, like
what what's sort of actually happening here?
Speaker 5 (25:24):
Right?
Speaker 3 (25:25):
A lot some of it is just like overwork. Some
of it is just if people who can have children
have any kind of freedom and autonomy, they just decide
not to. And so part of this is also just
like and then this has been one of the social
pushes that the conservatives have been dealing with, is they've
been trying to get people to marry younger because people
(25:46):
are marrying later, and thus they are like, you know,
they're having kids later because they're marrying later. So and
this is not working at all, Right, But you can
look at the series of structure contradictions in their political collision,
and then you can look at the fact that like, again,
one of the important ideological things here is that these
people hate immigrants, right, and they don't. They don't want immigrants.
(26:08):
They want they want like Japanese babies, and so this
is kind of like if you look at like, Okay,
why is not of this shit working?
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Right?
Speaker 3 (26:17):
They're trying all these things to just avoid having more
immigrants in the country, and none of it is fucking
working at all. But you know, like, insofar as it's failing,
it's mostly they're trying some limited welfare stuff and they're
doing a bunch of weird ideological stuff, and it is
going to get so much worse when every other country
tries this.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah cool, Well, you know what else is going to
get worse?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Probably the products and services. It's simple of this show.
Speaker 6 (26:43):
Yeah yeah, all right, we're back.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
It's me And predictably, I suppose I am talking about
Franco as Spain. So Francisco Franco attempted to rebuild Spain
after Civil War, both through explicit eugenics and through the
nationalization of women's bodies, abortion and contraceptual bands. Abortion had
been legal, Spain was one of the first countries to
(27:17):
do that. Right when Feliko Monceni, anarchist minister, made that
legal minister of I guess public health that was made illegal.
I think it didn't become legally again until about twenty ten.
In Spain, abortion and a lessa was like a serious
health issue, elective abortion.
Speaker 6 (27:30):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Franco's military in the Civil War consistently used sexual violence
as or weapon, and we can see this as a
kind of prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies. Right. Kibayao,
who is a Francoist general, right, makes his speech in
July nineteen thirty six, quote, our valiant legionnaires and regulas
(27:52):
have shown the red cowards what true men are, and
their women as well. This is totally justified because these
communists and anarchists anocate free love. At least now they
will know what real men are, not the militia gaze.
This is a translation that I'm reading to so people
can go to the original document. But gays is not
the word he used. A better translation would be a
(28:13):
word that begins with f Yeah.
Speaker 6 (28:15):
Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
They will not escape, however much they kick their legs
and scream like this is a general in their army
making explicit rape threats.
Speaker 7 (28:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
They weren't subtle about this. Yes, the Spanish Falange, which
is Spain's fascist party, also had a Cecion Feminina, a
women's section. My PhD supervisor Pamela Ragliff is written extensively
about this. The group very much served as kind of
the Propaganderama state natalist policy. It taught women from a
young age they were inferior and subjugate to men. They
(28:45):
had to go through the organization's programs. To do anything
any engagement with the state, they had to first go
through the women's section.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
If they wanted to get a passport, they wanted to
get a driving license, if they wanted to engage with
the world outside of their homes in any way way,
they had to go through this program, which indoctrinated them
that their highest calling and only value was to have children.
Women's role in the Francoist project then was child bearing
a child rearing Francoist I'm going to use intellectuals here
(29:15):
in like quotation scare quotes, right, frequently turned to phrenology
to justify women's domestic role. They fucking loved a phrenology.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
It's great to go to antique markets in Spain because
you could always buy like a phrenology head you can
acquire like an og one, you know, like I bet
if you know the red place, so that you could
find some find the calibers.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
That's the dream.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
There is actually a lot of those secondhand stores in Portland.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Yeah, shocking.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Hands, spasping me with francoism, and I.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Found a lot of uses for those calipers.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
Let me tell you, no, I mean the phrenologies goals.
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, I've seen them all over down.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah. But I bet you, I bet you was a
re because I bet they're not like og phrenology skulls.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
There's a market in France enter to that just had
a bunch of monks skulls, like real, it seems fine.
There was one that had been turned into a holder
for a Bible, like they'd cut like an L shaped
cut in the skull of pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
It was like three grand and you make a curtsy
for the Quran.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
But like this was a while ago, but seemed like
a good price.
Speaker 5 (30:21):
Just skull Talk, your favorite podcast discussing cranium.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Using the discount code, it could happen here. You can
get ten percent off your skull Bible holder. Yeah that's right, Okay,
so one of the things they did was to increasingly
marginalize midwives and instead like have male doctors taking control
of the child birthing process, because midwives would advocate for
their patients too much, and they didn't feel that women
(30:48):
belonged to work outside the home. Right, A big part
of Franco's pro natalism was the repudiation of an Arco
feminism that had been relatively important to the Spanish Revolution. Right,
the the anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage and free love.
Their follow through on those beliefs varied wildly, right, So
(31:08):
we can see that in some collectivized industries, for instance,
the unions took on the role they would assign women
I guess I was going to say mentors, but apprenticeships, right,
So like they wanted, in for instance, to CNT Transport Union.
Once the revolution had happened and the CNT Transport Union
had been collectivized, women who wished to be tram drivers
(31:30):
or bus drivers could apprentice to men in that position,
so that in order to achieve more gender equality within
that sphere. Right, this is something that the Franco estate hated.
It also had its own kind of unique take on
eugenics that manifested in its pro natalism. Spain couldn't really
(31:52):
do the straight racial eugenics right like that, that doesn't
really work with Spanish history. But instead they saw leftism
as being some kind of genetic defect and something of
a pathogen that spread within society.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
Welcome mine virus.
Speaker 5 (32:09):
Yeah yeah, yeah, god no, it's it's boring from the
same type of fascist right.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
It also practiced something called anti Semitism without Jews at
this time, so there was a very very small Jewish
population space. But nonetheless, Franco was constantly freaking out about
Judeo Bolshevism. He saw liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Judaism, et
cetera as completely antithetical to Spanish nests, and of course
(32:37):
they blame us for their national declient right, something little
fascists like to talk about. This anti leftist eugenics and
pro natalism extended to something called ninos robalos nenzfostats in Catalan.
These children were abducted from their parents. Sometimes this is
when their parents were in jail. Sometimes it was when
(32:58):
the parents have been killed. Some it was when the
mother had been forced into incarceration. By something called the
Women's Protection Board. This, theoretically run by Franca's wife, was
a way of institutionalizing quote unquote fallen women or women
who were quote at risk of falling. It provides a
way to force any woman you want to into an institution.
(33:20):
These children who were taken from their mothers were often
trafficked and some cases sold to approve families by nuns
and priests. I'm going to quote one example from a
BBC article in nineteen seventy one. Manoli, who was twenty
three at the time and not long married, gave birth
to what she was told with a healthy baby boy,
(33:41):
but he was immediately taken away for what were called
routine tests. Nine interminable hours passed. Then a nun who
was a nurse called in for me that my baby
had died. She said they would not let her have
her son's body, nor would they tell her when the
funeral would be. Some of these clinics went as far
as to keep the body of a dead baby in
(34:01):
a freezer and they would bring it out to show mothers.
They even dug grave for babies, but many of those
grave just contained stones or the remains of adults. These
babies were then given or sold to other families and raised,
and in some cases they lived their whole lives and
died without ever knowing who their parents were.
Speaker 4 (34:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
I remember, like I was doing my PhD when the
initial research into this was being done, And it is
fucking horrible for people to find this out right because
the people who were stolen from their families and in
many cases are still alive, right and in most cases
their birth certificately exists with say mother unknown. And that
was a process that existed to protect women who have
(34:47):
had children outside of marriage, but was also used to
steal babies and leave no paper trail. At least in
twenty eleven, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who
was doing this. It's kind of a wild BBC. I've
linked it an article. There was also like a I
guess it's like a podcast, a radio documentary where one
of their reporters had recently had a baby so it
(35:07):
was able to make a make an appointment with the
obg y N who was stealing these babies, and when
she confronted him, he grasped a crucifix and started brandishing
it at her and Jesus first incredible country. The reason
that they did this right was because their their fascism
was a bit of a unique kind that was you know,
(35:29):
Paul Preston said that Franco wasn't fascist, you was something worse.
They had what's called national Catholicism right, which prevented them
from doing sterilization or abortion. So instead they felt that
they could steal these children and and sort of raise
them outside of this leftist kind of pathogen I.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Do love just I'm working on the Salazar episodes right now.
I love how often Iberians are like, we're going to
do fascism just but like we're gonna put some spins
on it, like how the Portuguese were like, we're going
to do fashion. But with us having sex with absolutely everyone,
we're colonizing and trying to make an argument to the
fact that that makes us the good colonizers because of
(36:08):
all the sex assaults were not racist, guys, It's fine.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
We were communing godh Iberia Baby Spain is different, as
the slogan used to go m terms of Francoist tourism
slogan back in the day. Yeah, so the discourse of
quote true Catholic womanhood was essential to Francoist nationalization of women,
and they were raised to serve the patteria right the fatherland,
(36:34):
with their bodies not their minds. In the Republic, Spain
had used secular education to fight its perceived and real
backwardness compared to the rest of Europe. The Francoist predictively opposite.
It returned for its inspiration to succeed century Catholic texts,
and they saw intellectual development as a risk to femininity
and a risk to the ultimate goal of women's lives,
(36:54):
which was motherhood. In terms of I guess birth raise
that they did have. You have a post or baby boom, right,
you have that everywhere that is affected by a large war,
Like you know, there are pretty obvious reasons for this,
and then birth rates do go up until like the
nineteen seventies nineteen eighties, and then they start declining rapidly
and Spain is once again in like a sort of
(37:17):
not so much a birth rate panic. I didn't think,
but it is noted that Spanish birth rates have gone
down since the nineteen eighties, but nonetheless Spanish birth rates
never more particularly high compared to those in the rest
of Europe because Franco was an absolutely wrapped up to
the economy, right, which made it harder for people to
have more children. But yeah, that's what I've got. If
(37:37):
you want to read more on Ninio Slovados, I think
there's a TV series about it now, Stolen Children. I'm
sure you can find it with subtitles. But someone made
a documentary on this that was presented in academic conference
I did, and if I find the link, I will
put it in the show notes.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Hell yeah, well, I think it's time to talk about
Romania now. When it comes to who is the worse
to doing pro natalism, there's a lot of contenders, but
I feel like we got the usane bolt of natalism
right here, and it's such a Jesco regime, so we
got to peel back a little bit here and talk
(38:12):
about you know, when communism first came to Romania, which
was like kind of the end of forty seven, early
nineteen forty eight, and in the first years of the
communist regime, it brought the same changes that communist governments
in Europe all tended to bring in the post war period,
obviously earlier for the USSR. And a lot of these
are good, actually right, not to deny all the horrible
(38:33):
things that were happening, but life changes pretty dramatically in
a positive way for a lot of women. This is
true in Russia as well. Literacy for women rises, the
employment rate for women rises, and this happens across society, right.
A lot of the poorest people in these societies experienced
substantial initial lifts, right. And along with that, lifespan increases
pretty dramatically, rates of accidental death fall pretty dramatically, and
(38:57):
literacy increases. And again, it increases across the board, but
it is particularly significant for women.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
And this is all lovely, These are good things, right. However,
it comes with a problem for a lot of the
leaders And this is not just true in Romania, but
we're talking about Romania here. It comes with a problem
for a lot of the leadership of Romania's Communist Party,
which is that one of the things we see in
every society when people have more and are doing better
and live longer, is that they start having less kids, because,
(39:28):
among other things, all their kids aren't dying.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
One reason why birth rates are high is people are like, yeah,
well like but three of them might live, right, you know,
I gotta I gotta really pump these numbers up. I'm
and have enough kids to keep this fucking farm going, right,
And when that stops happening happening, women are like, well,
maybe I don't need to have eleven kids, yeah, right,
Like if they're all going to live to adults, I
don't need eleven children to be adults, right, So birth
rates start to fall. This freaks out though a lot
(39:52):
of these these communists, because the kind of communists who
are like leading Romania are very traditional Marxists, right, And
Marx was what you call a physiocrat, right, which is
a term that I found for the first time in
a Journal of Family History article, But it's a term
you can find other places. And the basic idea is
that and this is an idea that then it goes
back to the original Marx. More people equals better economy, right,
(40:14):
equals more productivity. So falling fertility is seen as at
potential calamity for the state. You know, obviously this isn't
how it works, Like the US has had fertility rates
falling and like economic prosperity rise in the same period
of time. But this is like a thing that they think,
right then that like if we don't bump up these
birth rates. We're going to deal with like an actual
(40:36):
economic disaster. So by the time nikolaichi Chescu takes over
as party leader on June twenty third, nineteen sixty six,
the problem is serious enough in his eyes that it
had become a crisis and the birth rate had declined
pretty precipitously. In nineteen fifty five, there were about twenty
five point six life births per thousand people in Romania,
(40:56):
and by the time to Chesscu takes over, there's about
fourteen live birth per thousand people. Right now, for reference,
both of those are still higher than the US birth rate.
Right now, we're at about eleven a little less than
eleven live births per thousand people in the country. The
only reason why the US population continues to grow is immigration,
but that's a topic for another day. Cichscu stated that
women needed to use their influence to rebuild the family,
(41:19):
and per that article in the Journal of Family History,
Cichescu declared that backward attitudes and expressions of levity toward
the family must be combated with determination because they result
in an increase in the number of divorces and the
disintegration of the family and then the neglect of the
children's education and training for life. And this is something
that had come alongside the revolution, right that there's a
lot of more critical ideas about these traditional concepts like
(41:42):
the family in the society that it existed before. And
a lot of people are like, well, but you know,
we're we're becoming more scientific, you know, we have like
women have jobs. Now, maybe a lot of these attitudes
about what the family should be are kind of outdated.
And he's saying, no, no, no, no, they're not they're
not you need to go back to having a shitloading kids, right,
And he announces a new initiative to increase the population
(42:04):
of Romania by thirty percent by nineteen ninety so, which
I don't know if the idea that would ever be
possible is a long shot. Right, So that's that's a
massive change in society. But Chichscu isn't a logic thinker guy, right,
He's not like running the numbers hardcore here. He's just
(42:24):
sort of throwing out some shit that sounds good. And
so to encourage the shift, he leashes a famous raft
of new legislation aimed towards pro natalism towards massively increasing
the birth rate. The first step is that abortion is
banned for nearly all women in the country. There are
some exceptions. For example, you can qualify for an abortion
if you've had if you already have five children under
(42:44):
eighteen in the house concurrently, which is nice, and there's
one or two other exceptions based on your age, but
there aren't many exceptions per an article in PubMed. In addition,
employed women under age forty five years are required to
undergo monthly gynicle logic examinations at their workplaces, and any
pregnancies detected are monitored to term. Unmarried persons over twenty
(43:07):
five years of age and childless married couples without a
valid medical reason for infertility are assessed to thirty percent
tax on income.
Speaker 4 (43:14):
Jesus women who refuse.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
To have children have been termed deserters. Despite official pro
natalist policies, it has been estimated that forty percent of
the seven hundred thousand Romanian women pregnant in nineteen eighty
five had illegal abortions. A special unit has been established
within the State Security Police to combat this practice.
Speaker 4 (43:31):
So we're so close to this, we are we are not?
They really want to do all of this. We're like
knocking on the door.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
They are like, that is the thing that I really
want to drive home. Is that the closest that I
have found in all of my rings, the closest direct
graph to what guys like Vance and Musk are suggesting
for US policy is Romanian.
Speaker 4 (43:54):
And it's also the worst this has ever worked.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
When I was a lot younger, when I sixteen, I've
volunteered in an orphanage venere diverting kids in Romania.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Jesus fucking Christ.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
Well, I mean they created a culture of child abandonment, right, Like, yes, yeah,
we'll be talking about that. That shit fucked me up,
and like, yeah, you shouldn't send your sixteen year old
children to do that, to be clear, but like.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
No, and you're you're encountering it after the worst of
it too, which we'll talk about here, not to minimize
the experience, but we'll be discussing where it was at
its worst.
Speaker 6 (44:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
So it's worth noting that while women did start working
at a higher rate after Communist takeover, that started to
plateau by the time that Chicheski, because obviously, like there
was still a lot of communism, doesn't get rid of
men being shitty to women. Right, it does do things
do get a lot better.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
Right, sometimes it empowers shitty man.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
And at the start, like kind of right around when
he announces these this set of fertility laws, he does
try to institute a policy with the goal of increasing
the number of women working at high positions in different
state departments. Right, there is an initial like we're going
to break the grant glass ceiling kind of thing, but
that doesn't last long. He may basically cancels any sort
of messaging or work on the policy. After his wife,
Elena is made a member of the party executive committee.
Speaker 4 (45:07):
He's like, women have gone fired.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Up, look at my wife. Classic chicescu. Yes, classic guy
who's going to die with his wife in a basement. So,
as is always the case with shit like this, women
were not equally impacted by the abortion ban. Largely. The
(45:28):
impacts were pretty widely divergent based on your level of
wealth and social class. And I'm going to quote from
an investigation by the NGO Helsinki Watch, who conducted a
deep investigation and do all of this immediately after the
regime fell. Women were not equally affected by the pro
natalist policies, members of the urban middle class managed somehow
or another to get contraceptives on the black market. Oh
(45:49):
I should also know contraceptives were basically made illegal, with
the exception of like condoms. They could also obtain medical abortions.
A Bucharest student candidly informed Helsinki Watch that several years ago,
when his girlfriend became pregnant, the abortion had cost him
five thousand lay or about fifty dollars on the black market,
and several women with professional degrees reported matter of factly
that they had simply refused to cooperate with government gynecological
(46:10):
inspectors who came to their institutes without suffering any reprisals.
Nor were the most rural segments of the population deeply affected.
The Orthodox Christians had long shunned birth control and abortion,
and others like the ROMA had not practiced it. The
brunt of the policy fell on the lower middle class,
particularly factory workers, single women, urban ROMA, and those from
disorganized or troubled families, none of whom had the money
(46:32):
or connections to circumvent the regulations. Their options were as
limited as they were life threatening. Some used a variety
of would be aborti fascians, others availed themselves of the
services of a back alley abortionist. Still others carried to
term and the number of deaths, the mortality rate for
women as a result of this did like there's a
lot of hideous stuff. There were kind of doing the
shortest version of this, But I don't mean to paper
(46:54):
over that a lot of women died and suffered lasting
injury in fertility and a number of other things because
of different back alley abortions and weird drugs that they
were given. But it's important to note that women who
had money and opposition in the social class could still
gain access to this shit. And that's how it will
work here too, right, Like these Republican congressmen will not
be restricting their family members from having access to this stuff.
(47:19):
They'll be restricting poor people. Right Yeah, Now, the first
thing I should know about this whole raft of policies
Toichesscu introduced is that they did not work. That Journal
of Family History article that I've quoted from a couple
of times. Here ran the numbers to try to analyze
how well did this, like, how did these policies correspond
to birth rates in Romania and It is true that
after the first major laws were pushed in sixty seven
(47:40):
and sixty eight, there was a brief surge in birth rates,
but that fell very quickly and had completely disappeared. By
the nineteen seventies, things were back to baseline. So in
nineteen seventy four to Chesscu launches another push to increase
birth rates, and again they briefly increase and then fall
a year or two later. This process plays out a
couple times throughout the administry, and one of the things
(48:01):
that's important to note is that the increase that happens
after every new sort of like focus on birth rates
is less each time, Right, it gets less effective every time. Now,
the analysis in that paper concluded the birth rate would
only rise when the state applied direct pressures on the population.
Otherwise it dropped, right, because this just doesn't work, Like,
(48:22):
you're not fundamentally changing anything, and none of these incentives
because they're expensive, and in Romania's case, the country literally
didn't have money to provide much of the way of incentives, right,
but they never are going to work. Like, as we
went over earlier, the ones being proposed here are wildly
insufficient to deal with the cost of having kids, let
alone a bunch of fucking kids, and none of the
people in charge of the Republican Party have any interest
(48:44):
in making life affordable for people who are not rich.
Speaker 6 (48:48):
Now.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
The situation that this led to by the time that
Chicheskei regime fell in eighty nine was also pretty catastrophic
because there had been surges in births, right, in births
of kids to parents who, because the people can't get
away from this, tend to be the poor, could not
take care of these kids, right. And there was also
a surge in kids as a result of the general
surge in birth rate, but also as a result of
(49:10):
different sort of issues with nutrition and whatnot. In Romania,
a lot of kids who had different physical and mental
disabilities right who were just abandoned straight away because their
parents could not take care of them. By nineteen ninety
there were an estimated one hundred and thirty thousand children
in orphanages and homes for the handicapped, these institutions that
had been set up in Romania. And there were like
(49:31):
posters that were going around that were part of the
pro natalist campaign that basically said, hey, if you have
a kid, you can't take care of or that's not
like working out for you. The Romanian government can handle
it better than you, So like who cares have another
kid and we'll just drop it off with us if
you can't take care of them, right, Like that was
literally a part of the propaganda campaign that led you
again like one hundred and thirty thousand kids in orphanages.
Speaker 4 (49:52):
Oh fucking Christ.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
Yeah, that hell sinky article I found quoted from a
different piece of western news media, like a team of
journalists that went to a town called the dell Lefter
Chichesco Fell And this is how that article opens. On
the second floor of the state run institution. Here, dazed
toddlers liars sit in iron cribs and close stuffy rooms.
Their foreheads are speckled with flies and with scabs and
(50:14):
bruises that come from banging their heads and mouths on
crib rails. Some cry, but most are silent and appear
bewildered behind their bars, with the doomed air of laboratory
animals down the hall. Other cribs hold smaller children, pale skeletons,
suffering from malnutrition and disease. Despite the heat of the day,
several of the children are wrapped in dirty blankets. From
one still bundle, only a bluish patch of scalp is visible.
(50:36):
Ask if the child inside is alive and orderly, says,
of course and pulls back the covers. The tiny skeleton
stirves turned onto its side and groans.
Speaker 4 (50:46):
Yeah, there's worse.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
This is not the worst like Helsinki article goes into
like how in the homes for the handicapped, the children
are just ignored. They can go months without any real
human contact of the the bare minim of being fed.
There's no one watching these kids like this is some
of the most cruelest and most hideous systematic abuse of
(51:10):
children I've ever heard of. A lot of children die.
AIDS spreads through some of these facilities like wildfire. I
really cannot exaggerate like the horror of these institutions. If
you do want to read more, there's two articles I'll
recommend for you that I'm not going to quote up
from now because we're already going long enough. But there's
the Romanian Orphans are Adults Now, an article in the Atlantic,
(51:33):
that's the title. You should check that out. And then
Chichescu's Children and The Guardian, both of those articles do
a good job of providing additional context and horror on this,
but I think it's important to note that what happened
in Romania is what sounds most familiar to the programs
being pushed today and also easily the worst this has
ever got.
Speaker 5 (51:52):
I mean, yeah, especially combined with like RFK Junior's policies. Yeah,
that is like, yeah, yeah, it takes a lot for
me to be like kind of shocked and horrified these days.
Speaker 4 (52:03):
Yeah, but that stuff is grim. It's some of the
worst shit.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Yeah. Yeah, Oh boy, I remember that the time, there
was like concern if the kids were really nonverbal, yeah,
like or they just had never been talked to. Oh
my god, because right, they've been institutionalized from such a
young like I was there probably about twelve years after
the end of the regimes, so that these kids were
in their teens, I guess, Oh my god. Yeah, I
(52:29):
remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like had
never really been able to play outside very much, and
it was fucking yeah, that shit will fuck you up.
That's a good museum. I'll see if I can find radios,
because if they've maintained one of the old orphanages as
it was like with the iron cribs and shit, and
they have like projections on the walls the kids rocking
and banging their heads someone had filmed. Yeah, that shit
(52:52):
is disturbing. Like I I wouldn't read any of those
articles before going to bed.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
Yeah, anyway, this has been It could happen here all
right bye?
Speaker 7 (53:07):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 4 (53:18):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 7 (53:20):
You can now find sources for it could Happen Here
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Also media Welcome to it could happen here the only
podcast where anti British discrimination is a way of life? James,
are we allowed to say that? Do you remember the training?
I haven't done yet.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I was giving that training my full attention throughout the
duration of the video. Every single time I've watched It's
good various employees for the last half decade or so,
there was no there was no section on anti British discrimination.
Yet again, another example that victimized.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Last time I took that training, there was a straight
up anti Asian racism in it that they didn't address
at all. So I'm assuming if that's okay, then anti
British racism was fine.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Like some shit in those videos, which is wild.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Okay, there you go.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
I think that's a lady who's literally called Karen and
they do her wrong in the in the in the video.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
See I am.
Speaker 5 (00:55):
I am definitely pro British discrimination. But you do get
a point for having Peter O'Toole, so at least it's
it's it's not all the way because the o'tool factor
keeps you from the full might of my wrath.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Frankly, go, yeah, I'm sure that's the case.
Speaker 5 (01:13):
I'm Garson Davis and joined by Mia Wong, James Stubven,
and Robert Evans. This episode, we are talking about babies.
Should there be more?
Speaker 6 (01:21):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
M hmm.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
We're on a pro natalist kick. We're going to have
that off putting couple who look like vampires but like
not any of the good kinds on the show. Very
excited to have those people on. They seem nice. But
before we do that, we all decided maybe we should
talk about other pro natalist policies in world history and
how well they've worked generally.
Speaker 5 (01:45):
We're going to start by talking about what the US
policy might be, or that the people proposing US policy,
and then we will discuss how those policies went historically.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Yeah, so like to start with Trumps.
Speaker 5 (02:03):
Besides one executive order in February supporting IVF, the new
administration has yet to tackle pro natalist concerns on the
policy front, but a collection of lobbyists, activists, and influencers
are vying for the president's ear while proposing a multitude
of plans to grow the number of heterosexual marriages and
incentivize childbirth. The pronataists certainly think that the new administration
(02:28):
is at the very least ideologically sympathetic, if not in
cahoots with their agenda. The main inns on the pronatalist
front have come from the Peter Thiel tech right wing
of the White House Right. This is like JD. Vance
and previously Elon Musk. Musk has been doom posting for
years about how a drop in fertility rates could be
(02:49):
leading to a large scale population collapse, and at an
anti abortion rally this past January, Vance addressed the crowd
saying quote, I want more babies in the United States
of America, more happy children in our country. And I
want beautiful young men and women who are eager to
welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.
Speaker 6 (03:07):
Uh huh. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
And you got to like whatever you're listening to one
of these things, you got to like have a little
parenthesies anytime anytime someone says baby, there's a little parentheses
there that says white.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
This is this is real Nazi shit.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Like yeah, A lot of this, a lot of the
stuff that's certainly like based on like like great replacement
rhetoric that the alt right, like Trojan Horst and like
pushed forward in like twenty eighteen, which is now so
widely normalized thanks to I mean really, Musk has done
a lot of work in normalizing great replacement stuff.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
Yeah, Tucker calls into Carlson of course.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Well, and Musk's family goes into this, right, like this
is the kind of thing like his grandparents were involved in.
Like it was a little bit less of like the
standard great replacement shit and a little more like focused
on like we need to be breeding high IQ white
people together. Yeah, you chant like that, that is that
is what he inherits. He comes by it honestly, I
guess you could say.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
Well, and oftentimes printles rhetoric is also tied in with
like the tradwife and like loss of traditional family structure
type stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Right.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Vance has laid blame at childless cat ladies and.
Speaker 5 (04:16):
Referred to our quote unquote broken culture that tax masculinity
and turns our nation's youth into androgynous idiots.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
Hey shout out.
Speaker 6 (04:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
I've also started referring to women with kids as catless
child ladies as a result of this.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
I think he's.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Reactions action, I don't know, they very negatively.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Robot.
Speaker 5 (04:41):
A declining birth rate has also been attributed to women
in the workplace who are not getting married and raising
kids at home from an early enough age, and some
of this rheteric has rubbed off on Trump right and
Trump at seapack in twenty twenty three, he said, quote,
we will support baby booms, and we will support baby
bonuses for a new baby boom.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
I want a baby boom cool.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
Trump has floated a five thousand dollars cash quote unquote
baby bonus to American mothers after delivering a baby, calling
this proposal a good idea.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Well, Garrison, that's almost three months at a preschool.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
Oh yeah, I'm sure that's enough.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Not quite three months at a lot of preschools, like,
not even great pre schools. It's very preschools and unbelievably expensive.
Speaker 5 (05:23):
The actual cause of like of a declining birth rate
is due to skyrocketing cost of living, so people aren't
financially stable to have kids in their early twenties anymore,
so instead they're waiting until their thirties.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
That's part of it at least.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
Yes, if you want people to have kids more, you
should make the world more affordable. And a five thousand
dollars baby bonist doesn't actually solve the key issues that
would cause people to be worried about, you know, trying
to like get buried and have kids at a young
age in a world where that seems kind of like
unfathomably expensive. Now, luckily Trump does have a few other
ways of sorting of sorting out this problem. The new Big,
(05:59):
Beautiful bud bill that recently passed the House will create
quote unquote Mega savings accounts for new kids. And here
Mega stands for money accounts for growth and in for
growth and advancement.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Just fucking stop stop it.
Speaker 5 (06:18):
So when parents are guardians open a new Mega savings
account for their kids, the federal government will contribute one
thousand dollars for babies born between January first, twenty twenty
four and December thirty first, twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
That that'll help, great, great.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
I believe California also does it. Yeah, California have something
called the California Child Saving Accounts Program, which already gives
children like up to one thousand dollars. And I think
it's like a college savings account from what I understand.
Speaker 5 (06:48):
Yeah, that's that's pretty much what this is. Although specifically
in the for the Mega accounts, it also lists home ownership.
Oh cool, because this is like a big This is
a big part of this pronatalst thing is you need
to like own a home. We get in a straight marriage,
start having kids in your early twenties.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Yeah, sure, make Instagram videos of yourself chopping would badly
like we understand.
Speaker 6 (07:08):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
The big beautiful budget bill also prohibits Medicare funds. We're
going to planned parent hut great.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, let me tell you, one thousand American dollars, even
with compounding interest, isn't going to do shit to buy
you a home anywhere in the United States.
Speaker 5 (07:22):
Now, the Heritage Foundation's Devasit Center for Life, Religion, and
Family have pushed for a policy that exponentially increases the
child tax credit for each additional child a married couple has.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
This is a little bit.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
Similar to a policy proposed in twenty twenty three by
Republican Representative Brian Slaton of Texas, who proposed increasing property
tax cuts for married heterosexual couples who have never been
divorced and have four or more children starting after marriage.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
So there's a lot of caveats.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
There, Jesus Christy, Yeah, okay, sure, yeah, no, this sign
is are we taking issue with this?
Speaker 2 (08:01):
That is some Yeah, this is part of my British
arity trade. We developed our own religion so that dudes
could get divorced. It is, it is. Yeah, it is
a bill of rights for British guys.
Speaker 5 (08:12):
Obviously a lot of a lot of caveats in there
so that you can have your little like tread Christian family.
But four kids would equal a forty percent cut. Ten
kids would equal no property taxes at all.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Well, I mean, shit, that's hard to argue with. Yeah,
this is property taxes. You also have to own the
property to begin with to be paying property tax.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
Yeah, all of these yea, all these people want you
to be like homeowners with a stay at homework.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
This is like, this is what they want, but they
don't want to actually do things to meaningfully make home
ownership accessible.
Speaker 5 (08:41):
No, this is just like self selecting for like well
off white Christians, right like yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah,
Slaton said in a statement quote, with this bill, Texas
will start saying to couples, get married, stay married, and
be fruitful and multiply unquote.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
For Fox's sake.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
It's a disaster.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
And yeah, I mean and like a lot of this
stuff is too is it's this is the sort of
flailing reaction to like one of the things that actually
drives like declining birthrates, which is not having teen pregnancies
like significantly decreases birth rates because it turns out they're like, oh, yeah, right.
It turns out a huge part of like why birthrates
is so high is just direct social coercion. And if
(09:21):
you stop having that or like you know, the amount
of the coercion decreases, then yeah, like fucking birthrates are
gonna decline because women aren't being forced to have babies
like and you know, and so they're trying to do
all this like you know, unhinged tinkering bullshit to sort
of like deal with the fact that if you don't
force people to have children as teenagers, they won't.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah, because life, they quickly realize there's things in life,
like you know, drugs and stuff. Yeah, they'll go back
to the club.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
In March, Trump called himself the quote unquote fertiliz.
Speaker 5 (09:59):
They president, and the White House is expected to soon
release a report on how to expand access and affordability
of IVF. Now this is where things get sticky insert pun.
There is hot debate amongst advisors and think tanks on
(10:19):
the religious ethics of ivf Right. There's no real consensus
among the pronatalst voices who are lobbying Trump. This sort
of breaks down into the new tech right versus the
more religious Christian family sector of conservatism, and Vance is
kind of caught in the middle of this, but these
groups may end up compromising to form an alliance. Now Heritage,
(10:41):
the Heritage Foundation recommends a program to use government funds
for education that promotes quote unquote natural fertility, teaching women
how to track their mental cycles using charting courses to
both help get pregnant and avoid using birth control. They
propose that food, nutrition, and lifestyle chain could improve quote
(11:01):
unquote natural conception. Instead of using assisted reproductive technologies, Heritage
proposed to something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as
a holistic approach to treating infertility through quote unquote hoonon
balancing and dieting and nutritional adjustments, environmental changes, and surgery unquote.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, you just need some fucking uh some of those
some of those baby teething pills Highlands made that kill babies.
That's that's what you get to take. It's a holistic
approach to you. Some put a bunch of random chemicals
and lead in your body from an unregulated supplement company.
Speaker 5 (11:36):
Heritage itself critiques IVF as failing to address the underlying
causes of infertility as well as you know, out of
concern for embryo.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Personhood rights for fuck sake.
Speaker 5 (11:47):
So they advocate for embryo adoption and have proposed legislation
to make the production of embryo spares.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
Illegal embryo adoption because they believe that these are like
full like people.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
Now, on the other side of the you know, pro
natalist right, you have people like the vampire couple that
Robert mentioned. Simone Collins, a pronatalist activist and failed Pennsylvania
congressional candidate.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
She could still pull it off. Stay in line if
your vote hasn't been counted.
Speaker 5 (12:18):
People her and her husband are self described quote unquote
techno Puritans, and she is the.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Fucking super shit. Like, put these people on a boat
and send it across the Atlantic, Like, can they get scurvy?
Have they already got? They look a little bit like
they may already have scurvy. To be fair, they do
look like they have scurvy. Constantly they deprive them of
lime juice and save the world from a fucking.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Put them on the next starship and see how far
up it gets.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
No, they won't get that.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Let them try. I support the human spirit.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
Collins is also the former managing director of an exclusive
Peter teal In social club called a Dialogue.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
Now.
Speaker 5 (13:04):
She has called the new administration quote unquote inherently pronatalist
and has sent several draft pronatalist executive orders to the
White House, one of which would award a quote unquote
National Medal of Motherhood to mothers with six or more children.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
This is some churchescu shit, Like, I know we're going
to talk about that, but Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5 (13:23):
She herself wants at least seven kids. And she claims
to use special technology to select embryos with high IQs,
which relates back to what Robert was saying earlier. Yes,
so they use IVF to to specifically select the embryos
that they think are like naturally predisposed to have more
(13:44):
desirable traits, including high IQ's. They have not discussed the
exact method. That's why it's called special technology.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
They're looking for one with the big head or something,
So you don't know. I guess I'm not even that
far along that they win the IVF.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
So that's abways pretty fucked up.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
And then I guess finally, one of the few things
that actually has happened in advancement of this ideology was
way back like in February, Trump's Transportation secretary Sean Duffy,
who is a father of nine and has ten siblings,
sent out a memo directing his staff to prioritize transportation
funds to quote give preference to communities with marriage and
(14:19):
birth rates higher than the national average unquote, which would,
in ef fact, mean less money for urban public transit
and instead send it towards like wealthier, rural, white conservative areas.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Yeah, I'd imagine Latino communities have higher marriage rates at
least than like the national average.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
Yeah, I'm not sure if Sean Duffy really wants his
employees to select for that, though.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
No, neither of my I that's kind that's what I'm
That's what I'm that's what I'm wondering for. Yeah, Samuel
Huntington thinks they have higher birth rates, right, Like that's
his whole stick.
Speaker 5 (14:50):
If you look at the full memo, I think this
is this is just like a dog whistle for like
white Christians, Like that is that is really what he's saying, sick,
that is what I have for the.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
Current the current peroneals policies.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
We should go on and ad break and then return
to learn the historical implications of pro natalist policies.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
M h. All right, we are back and we are
spinning our globe, our big ball of pro natalism, and
it is slowing down and is landed on Japan, where
(15:33):
mir is going to explain pronatalist policy.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
Yeah, and I guess I want to open on a
kind of global thing, which is a concern over like
birth rates for like fascists is a really old thing.
I mean it predates fascism. Like this is like like
if you go to like the eighteen seventies, every single
person is complaining about like, oh my god, the birth
rate of the right, well, the white race keeps declining
and we're gonna get like overwhelmed by the Asiatic chords.
(15:58):
And then you go to like the Asiatic words and
it's like Japan has been having the same fucking panic
for literally so long. Like I cannot emphasize enough. You
can just go back through newspaper archives and you just
it's you're literally reading the same article over and over
and over again, going back just decades and decades and decades.
So like the first big modern freak out about birth
(16:20):
rates is in like nineteen eighty seven. Yeah, they have
the first big like japan birth rate declining freak out.
Speaker 4 (16:29):
This has been happening longer than like most of the
people here have been a lie.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
I can remember from my child. It's just been like, oh,
they're panicking about their birth rates again.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
Yeah, so like the running thing with Japanese politics. So
we're roughly doing these in order of like most to
least hinged in terms of like in terms of these
like natalist policies, Japan I think has an interesting series
of sort of political contradictions in their like kind of
pro natalist Paul Wall, it's if they have they have
(16:58):
political contradictions in their pro natalist polics and political contradictions
in their conservative faction. Because Japan is basically like a
one party liberal democratic state. Liberal Democratic Party is the
one party. This is a party established by a World
War two Nazi, but that means that they run all
of politics, so like every political factor effectively runs through them.
(17:18):
They're early attempts in like the nineties are focused on
the deregulation of daycare jobs. So basically their plan is
like in the ninety two thousands, they're like, Okay, we're
going to like deregulate the childcare industry so that we
can have more affordable child There'll be more childcare jobs,
so people can pay for childcare. This is how we're
going to promote this. And this is sort of one
(17:39):
of the first places you see this huge intra intra
class conflict between the peer social conservatives who want to
just like send every woman back to the household to
raise children, and the business people who are like, no,
you can't do that. We need to exploit these women's
labor to like make money. And so the fight that
starts to break out is this fight between like paying
(18:00):
for childcare leave versus like paying for daycare. So originally
that their plan is like, okay, so we're going to
do the daycare stuff. That doesn't work.
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Like, none of these things they're going to do does.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Jack shit, right, Like that's going to be a through
line here, Yeah, yeah, Like no, none of this stuff works.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
And so like like Shinzo Abe, I think is the
most famous person who spends much of time trying to
deal with this and like again, so they have started
worrying about this in nineteen eighty seven. It is now
twenty thirteen. The birth rate keeps declining recipitously. Shinzo wabey
rest and piss you fascist bastard is still trying to
like cook something, right, I'm I'm going to read this
(18:35):
quote from the Archives of Clinical Pediatrics. Shortly after the
formation of Abe's second cabinet, the quote Task Force for
Overcoming Population Decline was established in twenty thirteen, introducing three
key strategies, supporting child rearing, reforming work styles, and promoting marriage,
pregnancy and childbirth. So you can do these are going
to become sort of like the three pillars of Japanese
(18:58):
pro natalist policy, right. A lot of it is focused
on this sort of social push stuff to promote the
traditional family and promote marriage, and this hasn't ever really
worked for this. Supporting child rearing is one that is
going to get a lot of attention in subsequent administrations.
There's a lot of attempts to reduce, like to reduce
(19:20):
the cost of child rearing, where we're going to see
them try like thirty five thousand different proposals to do this.
The one that's actually interesting is reforming work style. So, like,
part of the problem here is that, you know, everyone
in Japan is working a just genuinely unhinged amount unbelievably
(19:43):
staggering overwork, right, I mean, it's one of these things
that's like a persistent social crisis. There's a persistent sort
of suicide crisis because of how long everyone is working
all the time. So shinto Abe's plan for this was
to put into place a soft cap of you can
only work one hundred hours a month of overtime. Now,
this doesn't do shit, right, Like one hundred hours a
(20:05):
month of overtime is enough to kill you, right, like,
you know, especially when like your regular hours are this long.
But this is this is again this problem that he's having,
which is that like, okay, so yes, you probably could
maybe like people maybe would have more children if you
weren't working literally all the time and you weren't just
like being worked to death. But that's really bad for
(20:27):
Japanese business. And and like quote unquote Abba nomics, which
is like abe sort of you know economic plan like
relies on maintaining this extremely high level of labor hours
from everyone in the entire population. And it's also based
on putting more women into the workforce to expand the
size of the workforce to you know, extract more hours
so they can all these people can make more money.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Right.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
They were also supposed to do free preschool for all children,
and this just like didn't happen, which over and over
again they're like, we're gonna do these kind of like
these these kind of like okay, we'll give we'll give
you some kind of welfare state bullshit, but only in
order to like have kids, And it just doesn't happen.
And so you know, this is one of Abe's big initiatives.
(21:08):
But by the time he's like assassinated in twenty twenty two,
he what he was.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Bye.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
By the time his political coalition was finally detonated, Bye
by one by one guy with an electric blunderbuss.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
My favorite politics.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
Oh god, it's so good. It's so good. We have
covered this extensively on the show.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
If you want to hear the happiest I've ever been
during an episode, including the day after Kissinger died, go
find the episode I did right after shits a while
it was assassinated.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
The Holy trinity of great days on the internet. Is
that big stuck boat and the submarine that killed all
those Oh it was amazing, people said, Biden gave us nothing.
Bang is on the timeline.
Speaker 6 (21:57):
There you go.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
So all right, shinzuwape a successor is a guy named
Fumio Kishita who lasts for a little bit, and Kishida
every single Japanese government announces that they're going to spend
like somewhere between twenty and like like fifteen and twenty
billion dollars on pro natalist policies and mostly doesn't happen,
(22:18):
but Kishita promises that he is going to spend twenty
four and a half billion dollars. A lot of this
money is going to be just straight up like child allowance.
So Japan has the system that they've been you know,
they've been sort of implementing over the course of like
all of these fucking reforms, which is just like all right,
we're just gonna like hand you cash. It's still not
(22:38):
enough money to like substantively change stuff. But there's a
lot of different kinds of cash policies they have. They
have cash transfer policies that are just straight up like okay,
here you had a baby, We're going to give you
this amount per month. I think it's like ten to
fifteen thousand yen which hold on, yeah, so it's like
like seventy dollars a month, which is like not. Yeah,
(23:01):
they are trying to expense it research on. They're supposed
to have these like counselors that like come check in
on you and like give you education and stuff. They're
also supposed to just like give you a whole bunch
of basically like child care equipment stuff and make sure
you're getting medical care. And that's supposed to come out
to about like seven hundred dollars ish roughly. You know,
(23:22):
this is like the big sort of plan that they're doing.
And then in twenty twenty four, Kishita is replaced by
like some other dipshit who you know, if he lasts
more than like two years, I guess I'll tell you
his name. But he's you know, attempting to go back
to the sort of childcare side of it, right, which
is his plan involves a bunch of things like childcare
(23:43):
subsidies and very importantly like tuition free high school. So
one of the continuous plans if you like, if you
go back to like what I was talking about with
they were supposed to do free preschool for all children, right,
that never got implemented except in like the last two years,
like Tokyo has started doing it, just like as a city,
(24:05):
because Tokyo is one of the places where, like you know,
the birth rate has been like dropping the fastest or whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Sure, I imagine cost to living is also really high.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
Yeah, cost of living is really high. And it's also
just like you know, if you're working in an urban
like an extremely urban city, you're working a just hideous
number of hours.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Right.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yeah, there's also this there's supposed to be these massive
like investments in providing childcare and nursing, and you can
see these kind of like this this this point where
they've reached this desperation point where they're trying both the
sort of pro business like okay, fuck it will pay
for your childcare and also we will raise taxes to
like hand you money and also nursing stuff. And also
(24:48):
they're trying to there's like giant carve outs for this,
but they're they're they're trying to set up a system
where you can get full pay for couples who both
take parental leave at the same time. So they're trying everything, right,
They're trying like paid childcare. They're trying, fuck it, we'll
just pay people to leave the workforce to have children.
They're trying just straight up cash transfers. They're trying paying
(25:08):
for medical care, especially medical care for disabled kids. And
none of this shit has done anything at all, Right,
like just just absolutely jack shit, right, and if and
if you want to look at like, okay, so, like
what what's sort of actually happening here?
Speaker 5 (25:24):
Right?
Speaker 3 (25:25):
A lot some of it is just like overwork. Some
of it is just if people who can have children
have any kind of freedom and autonomy, they just decide
not to. And so part of this is also just
like and then this has been one of the social
pushes that the conservatives have been dealing with, is they've
been trying to get people to marry younger because people
(25:46):
are marrying later, and thus they are like, you know,
they're having kids later because they're marrying later. So and
this is not working at all, Right, But you can
look at the series of structure contradictions in their political collision,
and then you can look at the fact that like, again,
one of the important ideological things here is that these
people hate immigrants, right, and they don't. They don't want immigrants.
(26:08):
They want they want like Japanese babies, and so this
is kind of like if you look at like, Okay,
why is not of this shit working?
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Right?
Speaker 3 (26:17):
They're trying all these things to just avoid having more
immigrants in the country, and none of it is fucking
working at all. But you know, like, insofar as it's failing,
it's mostly they're trying some limited welfare stuff and they're
doing a bunch of weird ideological stuff, and it is
going to get so much worse when every other country
tries this.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah cool, Well, you know what else is going to
get worse?
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Probably the products and services. It's simple of this show.
Speaker 6 (26:43):
Yeah yeah, all right, we're back.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
It's me And predictably, I suppose I am talking about
Franco as Spain. So Francisco Franco attempted to rebuild Spain
after Civil War, both through explicit eugenics and through the
nationalization of women's bodies, abortion and contraceptual bands. Abortion had
been legal, Spain was one of the first countries to
(27:17):
do that. Right when Feliko Monceni, anarchist minister, made that
legal minister of I guess public health that was made illegal.
I think it didn't become legally again until about twenty ten.
In Spain, abortion and a lessa was like a serious
health issue, elective abortion.
Speaker 6 (27:30):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Franco's military in the Civil War consistently used sexual violence
as or weapon, and we can see this as a
kind of prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies. Right. Kibayao,
who is a Francoist general, right, makes his speech in
July nineteen thirty six, quote, our valiant legionnaires and regulas
(27:52):
have shown the red cowards what true men are, and
their women as well. This is totally justified because these
communists and anarchists anocate free love. At least now they
will know what real men are, not the militia gaze.
This is a translation that I'm reading to so people
can go to the original document. But gays is not
the word he used. A better translation would be a
(28:13):
word that begins with f Yeah.
Speaker 6 (28:15):
Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
They will not escape, however much they kick their legs
and scream like this is a general in their army
making explicit rape threats.
Speaker 7 (28:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
They weren't subtle about this. Yes, the Spanish Falange, which
is Spain's fascist party, also had a Cecion Feminina, a
women's section. My PhD supervisor Pamela Ragliff is written extensively
about this. The group very much served as kind of
the Propaganderama state natalist policy. It taught women from a
young age they were inferior and subjugate to men. They
(28:45):
had to go through the organization's programs. To do anything
any engagement with the state, they had to first go
through the women's section.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
If they wanted to get a passport, they wanted to
get a driving license, if they wanted to engage with
the world outside of their homes in any way way,
they had to go through this program, which indoctrinated them
that their highest calling and only value was to have children.
Women's role in the Francoist project then was child bearing
a child rearing Francoist I'm going to use intellectuals here
(29:15):
in like quotation scare quotes, right, frequently turned to phrenology
to justify women's domestic role. They fucking loved a phrenology.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
It's great to go to antique markets in Spain because
you could always buy like a phrenology head you can
acquire like an og one, you know, like I bet
if you know the red place, so that you could
find some find the calibers.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
That's the dream.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
There is actually a lot of those secondhand stores in Portland.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Yeah, shocking.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Hands, spasping me with francoism, and I.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Found a lot of uses for those calipers.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
Let me tell you, no, I mean the phrenologies goals.
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, I've seen them all over down.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah. But I bet you, I bet you was a
re because I bet they're not like og phrenology skulls.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
There's a market in France enter to that just had
a bunch of monks skulls, like real, it seems fine.
There was one that had been turned into a holder
for a Bible, like they'd cut like an L shaped
cut in the skull of pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
It was like three grand and you make a curtsy
for the Quran.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
But like this was a while ago, but seemed like
a good price.
Speaker 5 (30:21):
Just skull Talk, your favorite podcast discussing cranium.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Using the discount code, it could happen here. You can
get ten percent off your skull Bible holder. Yeah that's right, Okay,
so one of the things they did was to increasingly
marginalize midwives and instead like have male doctors taking control
of the child birthing process, because midwives would advocate for
their patients too much, and they didn't feel that women
(30:48):
belonged to work outside the home. Right, A big part
of Franco's pro natalism was the repudiation of an Arco
feminism that had been relatively important to the Spanish Revolution. Right,
the the anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage and free love.
Their follow through on those beliefs varied wildly, right, So
(31:08):
we can see that in some collectivized industries, for instance,
the unions took on the role they would assign women
I guess I was going to say mentors, but apprenticeships, right,
So like they wanted, in for instance, to CNT Transport Union.
Once the revolution had happened and the CNT Transport Union
had been collectivized, women who wished to be tram drivers
(31:30):
or bus drivers could apprentice to men in that position,
so that in order to achieve more gender equality within
that sphere. Right, this is something that the Franco estate hated.
It also had its own kind of unique take on
eugenics that manifested in its pro natalism. Spain couldn't really
(31:52):
do the straight racial eugenics right like that, that doesn't
really work with Spanish history. But instead they saw leftism
as being some kind of genetic defect and something of
a pathogen that spread within society.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
Welcome mine virus.
Speaker 5 (32:09):
Yeah yeah, yeah, god no, it's it's boring from the
same type of fascist right.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
It also practiced something called anti Semitism without Jews at
this time, so there was a very very small Jewish
population space. But nonetheless, Franco was constantly freaking out about
Judeo Bolshevism. He saw liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Judaism, et
cetera as completely antithetical to Spanish nests, and of course
(32:37):
they blame us for their national declient right, something little
fascists like to talk about. This anti leftist eugenics and
pro natalism extended to something called ninos robalos nenzfostats in Catalan.
These children were abducted from their parents. Sometimes this is
when their parents were in jail. Sometimes it was when
(32:58):
the parents have been killed. Some it was when the
mother had been forced into incarceration. By something called the
Women's Protection Board. This, theoretically run by Franca's wife, was
a way of institutionalizing quote unquote fallen women or women
who were quote at risk of falling. It provides a
way to force any woman you want to into an institution.
(33:20):
These children who were taken from their mothers were often
trafficked and some cases sold to approve families by nuns
and priests. I'm going to quote one example from a
BBC article in nineteen seventy one. Manoli, who was twenty
three at the time and not long married, gave birth
to what she was told with a healthy baby boy,
(33:41):
but he was immediately taken away for what were called
routine tests. Nine interminable hours passed. Then a nun who
was a nurse called in for me that my baby
had died. She said they would not let her have
her son's body, nor would they tell her when the
funeral would be. Some of these clinics went as far
as to keep the body of a dead baby in
(34:01):
a freezer and they would bring it out to show mothers.
They even dug grave for babies, but many of those
grave just contained stones or the remains of adults. These
babies were then given or sold to other families and raised,
and in some cases they lived their whole lives and
died without ever knowing who their parents were.
Speaker 4 (34:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
I remember, like I was doing my PhD when the
initial research into this was being done, And it is
fucking horrible for people to find this out right because
the people who were stolen from their families and in
many cases are still alive, right and in most cases
their birth certificately exists with say mother unknown. And that
was a process that existed to protect women who have
(34:47):
had children outside of marriage, but was also used to
steal babies and leave no paper trail. At least in
twenty eleven, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who
was doing this. It's kind of a wild BBC. I've
linked it an article. There was also like a I
guess it's like a podcast, a radio documentary where one
of their reporters had recently had a baby so it
(35:07):
was able to make a make an appointment with the
obg y N who was stealing these babies, and when
she confronted him, he grasped a crucifix and started brandishing
it at her and Jesus first incredible country. The reason
that they did this right was because their their fascism
was a bit of a unique kind that was you know,
(35:29):
Paul Preston said that Franco wasn't fascist, you was something worse.
They had what's called national Catholicism right, which prevented them
from doing sterilization or abortion. So instead they felt that
they could steal these children and and sort of raise
them outside of this leftist kind of pathogen I.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Do love just I'm working on the Salazar episodes right now.
I love how often Iberians are like, we're going to
do fascism just but like we're gonna put some spins
on it, like how the Portuguese were like, we're going
to do fashion. But with us having sex with absolutely everyone,
we're colonizing and trying to make an argument to the
fact that that makes us the good colonizers because of
(36:08):
all the sex assaults were not racist, guys, It's fine.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
We were communing godh Iberia Baby Spain is different, as
the slogan used to go m terms of Francoist tourism
slogan back in the day. Yeah, so the discourse of
quote true Catholic womanhood was essential to Francoist nationalization of women,
and they were raised to serve the patteria right the fatherland,
(36:34):
with their bodies not their minds. In the Republic, Spain
had used secular education to fight its perceived and real
backwardness compared to the rest of Europe. The Francoist predictively opposite.
It returned for its inspiration to succeed century Catholic texts,
and they saw intellectual development as a risk to femininity
and a risk to the ultimate goal of women's lives,
(36:54):
which was motherhood. In terms of I guess birth raise
that they did have. You have a post or baby boom, right,
you have that everywhere that is affected by a large war,
Like you know, there are pretty obvious reasons for this,
and then birth rates do go up until like the
nineteen seventies nineteen eighties, and then they start declining rapidly
and Spain is once again in like a sort of
(37:17):
not so much a birth rate panic. I didn't think,
but it is noted that Spanish birth rates have gone
down since the nineteen eighties, but nonetheless Spanish birth rates
never more particularly high compared to those in the rest
of Europe because Franco was an absolutely wrapped up to
the economy, right, which made it harder for people to
have more children. But yeah, that's what I've got. If
(37:37):
you want to read more on Ninio Slovados, I think
there's a TV series about it now, Stolen Children. I'm
sure you can find it with subtitles. But someone made
a documentary on this that was presented in academic conference
I did, and if I find the link, I will
put it in the show notes.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Hell yeah, well, I think it's time to talk about
Romania now. When it comes to who is the worse
to doing pro natalism, there's a lot of contenders, but
I feel like we got the usane bolt of natalism
right here, and it's such a Jesco regime, so we
got to peel back a little bit here and talk
(38:12):
about you know, when communism first came to Romania, which
was like kind of the end of forty seven, early
nineteen forty eight, and in the first years of the
communist regime, it brought the same changes that communist governments
in Europe all tended to bring in the post war period,
obviously earlier for the USSR. And a lot of these
are good, actually right, not to deny all the horrible
(38:33):
things that were happening, but life changes pretty dramatically in
a positive way for a lot of women. This is
true in Russia as well. Literacy for women rises, the
employment rate for women rises, and this happens across society, right.
A lot of the poorest people in these societies experienced
substantial initial lifts, right. And along with that, lifespan increases
pretty dramatically, rates of accidental death fall pretty dramatically, and
(38:57):
literacy increases. And again, it increases across the board, but
it is particularly significant for women.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
And this is all lovely, These are good things, right. However,
it comes with a problem for a lot of the
leaders And this is not just true in Romania, but
we're talking about Romania here. It comes with a problem
for a lot of the leadership of Romania's Communist Party,
which is that one of the things we see in
every society when people have more and are doing better
and live longer, is that they start having less kids, because,
(39:28):
among other things, all their kids aren't dying.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
One reason why birth rates are high is people are like, yeah,
well like but three of them might live, right, you know,
I gotta I gotta really pump these numbers up. I'm
and have enough kids to keep this fucking farm going, right,
And when that stops happening happening, women are like, well,
maybe I don't need to have eleven kids, yeah, right,
Like if they're all going to live to adults, I
don't need eleven children to be adults, right, So birth
rates start to fall. This freaks out though a lot
(39:52):
of these these communists, because the kind of communists who
are like leading Romania are very traditional Marxists, right, And
Marx was what you call a physiocrat, right, which is
a term that I found for the first time in
a Journal of Family History article, But it's a term
you can find other places. And the basic idea is
that and this is an idea that then it goes
back to the original Marx. More people equals better economy, right,
(40:14):
equals more productivity. So falling fertility is seen as at
potential calamity for the state. You know, obviously this isn't
how it works, Like the US has had fertility rates
falling and like economic prosperity rise in the same period
of time. But this is like a thing that they think,
right then that like if we don't bump up these
birth rates. We're going to deal with like an actual
(40:36):
economic disaster. So by the time nikolaichi Chescu takes over
as party leader on June twenty third, nineteen sixty six,
the problem is serious enough in his eyes that it
had become a crisis and the birth rate had declined
pretty precipitously. In nineteen fifty five, there were about twenty
five point six life births per thousand people in Romania,
(40:56):
and by the time to Chesscu takes over, there's about
fourteen live birth per thousand people. Right now, for reference,
both of those are still higher than the US birth rate.
Right now, we're at about eleven a little less than
eleven live births per thousand people in the country. The
only reason why the US population continues to grow is immigration,
but that's a topic for another day. Cichscu stated that
women needed to use their influence to rebuild the family,
(41:19):
and per that article in the Journal of Family History,
Cichescu declared that backward attitudes and expressions of levity toward
the family must be combated with determination because they result
in an increase in the number of divorces and the
disintegration of the family and then the neglect of the
children's education and training for life. And this is something
that had come alongside the revolution, right that there's a
lot of more critical ideas about these traditional concepts like
(41:42):
the family in the society that it existed before. And
a lot of people are like, well, but you know,
we're we're becoming more scientific, you know, we have like
women have jobs. Now, maybe a lot of these attitudes
about what the family should be are kind of outdated.
And he's saying, no, no, no, no, they're not they're
not you need to go back to having a shitloading kids, right,
And he announces a new initiative to increase the population
(42:04):
of Romania by thirty percent by nineteen ninety so, which
I don't know if the idea that would ever be
possible is a long shot. Right, So that's that's a
massive change in society. But Chichscu isn't a logic thinker guy, right,
He's not like running the numbers hardcore here. He's just
(42:24):
sort of throwing out some shit that sounds good. And
so to encourage the shift, he leashes a famous raft
of new legislation aimed towards pro natalism towards massively increasing
the birth rate. The first step is that abortion is
banned for nearly all women in the country. There are
some exceptions. For example, you can qualify for an abortion
if you've had if you already have five children under
(42:44):
eighteen in the house concurrently, which is nice, and there's
one or two other exceptions based on your age, but
there aren't many exceptions per an article in PubMed. In addition,
employed women under age forty five years are required to
undergo monthly gynicle logic examinations at their workplaces, and any
pregnancies detected are monitored to term. Unmarried persons over twenty
(43:07):
five years of age and childless married couples without a
valid medical reason for infertility are assessed to thirty percent
tax on income.
Speaker 4 (43:14):
Jesus women who refuse.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
To have children have been termed deserters. Despite official pro
natalist policies, it has been estimated that forty percent of
the seven hundred thousand Romanian women pregnant in nineteen eighty
five had illegal abortions. A special unit has been established
within the State Security Police to combat this practice.
Speaker 4 (43:31):
So we're so close to this, we are we are not?
They really want to do all of this. We're like
knocking on the door.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
They are like, that is the thing that I really
want to drive home. Is that the closest that I
have found in all of my rings, the closest direct
graph to what guys like Vance and Musk are suggesting
for US policy is Romanian.
Speaker 4 (43:54):
And it's also the worst this has ever worked.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
When I was a lot younger, when I sixteen, I've
volunteered in an orphanage venere diverting kids in Romania.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Jesus fucking Christ.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
Well, I mean they created a culture of child abandonment, right, Like, yes, yeah,
we'll be talking about that. That shit fucked me up,
and like, yeah, you shouldn't send your sixteen year old
children to do that, to be clear, but like.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
No, and you're you're encountering it after the worst of
it too, which we'll talk about here, not to minimize
the experience, but we'll be discussing where it was at
its worst.
Speaker 6 (44:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
So it's worth noting that while women did start working
at a higher rate after Communist takeover, that started to
plateau by the time that Chicheski, because obviously, like there
was still a lot of communism, doesn't get rid of
men being shitty to women. Right, it does do things
do get a lot better.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
Right, sometimes it empowers shitty man.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
And at the start, like kind of right around when
he announces these this set of fertility laws, he does
try to institute a policy with the goal of increasing
the number of women working at high positions in different
state departments. Right, there is an initial like we're going
to break the grant glass ceiling kind of thing, but
that doesn't last long. He may basically cancels any sort
of messaging or work on the policy. After his wife,
Elena is made a member of the party executive committee.
Speaker 4 (45:07):
He's like, women have gone fired.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Up, look at my wife. Classic chicescu. Yes, classic guy
who's going to die with his wife in a basement. So,
as is always the case with shit like this, women
were not equally impacted by the abortion ban. Largely. The
(45:28):
impacts were pretty widely divergent based on your level of
wealth and social class. And I'm going to quote from
an investigation by the NGO Helsinki Watch, who conducted a
deep investigation and do all of this immediately after the
regime fell. Women were not equally affected by the pro
natalist policies, members of the urban middle class managed somehow
or another to get contraceptives on the black market. Oh
(45:49):
I should also know contraceptives were basically made illegal, with
the exception of like condoms. They could also obtain medical abortions.
A Bucharest student candidly informed Helsinki Watch that several years ago,
when his girlfriend became pregnant, the abortion had cost him
five thousand lay or about fifty dollars on the black market,
and several women with professional degrees reported matter of factly
that they had simply refused to cooperate with government gynecological
(46:10):
inspectors who came to their institutes without suffering any reprisals.
Nor were the most rural segments of the population deeply affected.
The Orthodox Christians had long shunned birth control and abortion,
and others like the ROMA had not practiced it. The
brunt of the policy fell on the lower middle class,
particularly factory workers, single women, urban ROMA, and those from
disorganized or troubled families, none of whom had the money
(46:32):
or connections to circumvent the regulations. Their options were as
limited as they were life threatening. Some used a variety
of would be aborti fascians, others availed themselves of the
services of a back alley abortionist. Still others carried to
term and the number of deaths, the mortality rate for
women as a result of this did like there's a
lot of hideous stuff. There were kind of doing the
shortest version of this, But I don't mean to paper
(46:54):
over that a lot of women died and suffered lasting
injury in fertility and a number of other things because
of different back alley abortions and weird drugs that they
were given. But it's important to note that women who
had money and opposition in the social class could still
gain access to this shit. And that's how it will
work here too, right, Like these Republican congressmen will not
be restricting their family members from having access to this stuff.
(47:19):
They'll be restricting poor people. Right Yeah, Now, the first
thing I should know about this whole raft of policies
Toichesscu introduced is that they did not work. That Journal
of Family History article that I've quoted from a couple
of times. Here ran the numbers to try to analyze
how well did this, like, how did these policies correspond
to birth rates in Romania and It is true that
after the first major laws were pushed in sixty seven
(47:40):
and sixty eight, there was a brief surge in birth rates,
but that fell very quickly and had completely disappeared. By
the nineteen seventies, things were back to baseline. So in
nineteen seventy four to Chesscu launches another push to increase
birth rates, and again they briefly increase and then fall
a year or two later. This process plays out a
couple times throughout the administry, and one of the things
(48:01):
that's important to note is that the increase that happens
after every new sort of like focus on birth rates
is less each time, Right, it gets less effective every time. Now,
the analysis in that paper concluded the birth rate would
only rise when the state applied direct pressures on the population.
Otherwise it dropped, right, because this just doesn't work, Like,
(48:22):
you're not fundamentally changing anything, and none of these incentives
because they're expensive, and in Romania's case, the country literally
didn't have money to provide much of the way of incentives, right,
but they never are going to work. Like, as we
went over earlier, the ones being proposed here are wildly
insufficient to deal with the cost of having kids, let
alone a bunch of fucking kids, and none of the
people in charge of the Republican Party have any interest
(48:44):
in making life affordable for people who are not rich.
Speaker 6 (48:48):
Now.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
The situation that this led to by the time that
Chicheskei regime fell in eighty nine was also pretty catastrophic
because there had been surges in births, right, in births
of kids to parents who, because the people can't get
away from this, tend to be the poor, could not
take care of these kids, right. And there was also
a surge in kids as a result of the general
surge in birth rate, but also as a result of
(49:10):
different sort of issues with nutrition and whatnot. In Romania,
a lot of kids who had different physical and mental
disabilities right who were just abandoned straight away because their
parents could not take care of them. By nineteen ninety
there were an estimated one hundred and thirty thousand children
in orphanages and homes for the handicapped, these institutions that
had been set up in Romania. And there were like
(49:31):
posters that were going around that were part of the
pro natalist campaign that basically said, hey, if you have
a kid, you can't take care of or that's not
like working out for you. The Romanian government can handle
it better than you, So like who cares have another
kid and we'll just drop it off with us if
you can't take care of them, right, Like that was
literally a part of the propaganda campaign that led you
again like one hundred and thirty thousand kids in orphanages.
Speaker 4 (49:52):
Oh fucking Christ.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
Yeah, that hell sinky article I found quoted from a
different piece of western news media, like a team of
journalists that went to a town called the dell Lefter
Chichesco Fell And this is how that article opens. On
the second floor of the state run institution. Here, dazed
toddlers liars sit in iron cribs and close stuffy rooms.
Their foreheads are speckled with flies and with scabs and
(50:14):
bruises that come from banging their heads and mouths on
crib rails. Some cry, but most are silent and appear
bewildered behind their bars, with the doomed air of laboratory
animals down the hall. Other cribs hold smaller children, pale skeletons,
suffering from malnutrition and disease. Despite the heat of the day,
several of the children are wrapped in dirty blankets. From
one still bundle, only a bluish patch of scalp is visible.
(50:36):
Ask if the child inside is alive and orderly, says,
of course and pulls back the covers. The tiny skeleton
stirves turned onto its side and groans.
Speaker 4 (50:46):
Yeah, there's worse.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
This is not the worst like Helsinki article goes into
like how in the homes for the handicapped, the children
are just ignored. They can go months without any real
human contact of the the bare minim of being fed.
There's no one watching these kids like this is some
of the most cruelest and most hideous systematic abuse of
(51:10):
children I've ever heard of. A lot of children die.
AIDS spreads through some of these facilities like wildfire. I
really cannot exaggerate like the horror of these institutions. If
you do want to read more, there's two articles I'll
recommend for you that I'm not going to quote up
from now because we're already going long enough. But there's
the Romanian Orphans are Adults Now, an article in the Atlantic,
(51:33):
that's the title. You should check that out. And then
Chichescu's Children and The Guardian, both of those articles do
a good job of providing additional context and horror on this,
but I think it's important to note that what happened
in Romania is what sounds most familiar to the programs
being pushed today and also easily the worst this has
ever got.
Speaker 5 (51:52):
I mean, yeah, especially combined with like RFK Junior's policies. Yeah,
that is like, yeah, yeah, it takes a lot for
me to be like kind of shocked and horrified these days.
Speaker 4 (52:03):
Yeah, but that stuff is grim. It's some of the
worst shit.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Yeah. Yeah, Oh boy, I remember that the time, there
was like concern if the kids were really nonverbal, yeah,
like or they just had never been talked to. Oh
my god, because right, they've been institutionalized from such a
young like I was there probably about twelve years after
the end of the regimes, so that these kids were
in their teens, I guess, Oh my god. Yeah, I
(52:29):
remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like had
never really been able to play outside very much, and
it was fucking yeah, that shit will fuck you up.
That's a good museum. I'll see if I can find radios,
because if they've maintained one of the old orphanages as
it was like with the iron cribs and shit, and
they have like projections on the walls the kids rocking
and banging their heads someone had filmed. Yeah, that shit
(52:52):
is disturbing. Like I I wouldn't read any of those
articles before going to bed.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
Yeah, anyway, this has been It could happen here all
right bye?
Speaker 7 (53:07):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 4 (53:18):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 7 (53:20):
You can now find sources for it could Happen Here
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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