It Could Happen Here Weekly 148

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
It could happen here.

Speaker 4 (00:29):
It's the podcast where things happen and you do something
about it. I'm your host, Via Wong, and we have
done you know, okay, over the course of this we
have done so many Union episodes that I lost count
a year ago, two years ago, I don't even know.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
I lost count at the dawn of time of how
many of these we've done.

Speaker 4 (00:46):
But something I think some of you probably know this,
but a lot of you don't, is that many unions
have their own unions for the people who to do
staff work, to do sort of a number of other things,
and sometimes unions us their own unions, and this unbelievably sucks.
And to talk about an instance of this happening that

(01:06):
is happening right now, I am talking with Alex Chan,
who is an organizer for the UAW, who is I
don't know what.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
Technical term is.

Speaker 4 (01:14):
I'm going to describe it non legally bindingly as being purged.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
For doing organizing. But yeah, Alex, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Hi, it's nice to be here. I think being purged
is a great way to describe it.

Speaker 4 (01:28):
Yeah, the tentative title for this is the UAW Staff Purge,
So it's not great.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
So why don't we start off.

Speaker 4 (01:35):
I've given a very very brief sort of description of
what a staff union is, but can you talk a
bit more broadly about what a staff union is, what
it does, and why you all are sort of trying
to organize one.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Of course, So in terms of staff unions, yeah, it's
definitely an interesting phenomenon for people who are less familiar
with the labor movement. But when unions have a lot
of staff, sometimes those also need a union to make
sure that they are treated fairly in the workplace. Coincidentally,
this year, there have been a lot of incidents that
have shown why staff unions are happening in the first place.

(02:13):
And so with my union, we are called UAW Staff United.
We are part of Region nine A of the UAW.
UAW is split into a lot of geographic regions, and
nine A covers New York and New England, including Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
New Hampshire, Vermont, not New York State. New York State

(02:37):
is covered by Region nine. So we are a bunch
of temporary organizers and local staff that are organizing for
a lot of things, among them wages, workload, job security, healthcare,
and so on so forth, very normal things that you
would actually see in a lot of the contracts that

(02:58):
we help fight for, in the shops that we work
for and organize, and the units that we help support.
So UAW Staff United otherwise known as.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yuzu like the fruit. Oh that's fun, No, it's cute, right.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
We really love the user imagery a lot. We were
formed in twenty twenty three, first went public in the spring.
I joined the unit in the summer, but I was
just kind of peripherally around and organizing with a lot
of these folks before they went public in the spring.
Got recognized slowly and then slowly came to the bargaining

(03:35):
table in August, and so at this point we have
been at the bargaining table for over a year and
we still do not have a contract. Normally, in most
shops that you would see organizing, that would be cause
for escalation, and so that is actually part of what
we are doing here. After hitting one full year bargaining,
we are still very stuck on items such as wages,

(03:58):
job security, yep, all the very normal things that we
can see in units that we help support and bargain for.
And so the situation that we're facing is slightly more
complicated because of many other internal things that For example,
UAW has another staff union it is called Staff Council,

(04:18):
and that covers more regions of UAW rather than nine A.
It also includes people who are our direct supervisors. On paper,
those people are called lead organizers and they do make
low six figures and yes they are our direct supervisors.
So they are a managerial union and they are what

(04:41):
some people may call a business union, you know, works
closely with management to secure a good deal, that kind
of thing. It's never really been known to agitate in
a contract, and that is partially one reason why UZU
was formed, because we knew that some agitation needed to
happen in order to secure actually good treatment for people

(05:01):
in our position, our position meaning temp and local staff.
Now I keep saying temp staff, right, is that the
next question?

Speaker 5 (05:10):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah, I am so good, I'm one step ahead.

Speaker 4 (05:13):
Yeah, I want to talk about both a the way
your contracts work, and be what the thing you're actually
doing is, because I'm not sure, I'm not sure people
are one hundred percent familiar with what specifically you do
and what a what a sort of like staff you
need organizer does and the difference between you and the
people that are sort of the organizer layer above you

(05:34):
is Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Absolutely, So that has to go a little bit into
how we are hired. And that's why I kept saying
temp staff and local staff. Yeah, our unit is formed
somewhat on our pay structure, and so temp organizers are
hired by the international or the region, and local staff

(05:55):
are hired by the locals, which is kind of a
sub unit of the regions and how different unions are organized.
There could be multiple units in one local, a local
may hire a staffer, but that staffer could be subsidized
by the international, and that is kind of what our
uniformation is like, where funding comes from the international and

(06:18):
this layer of people does the most. In New organizing,
so supporting new shops that form, new campaigns, that are
organizing new unions that are just forming and need to
secure an election or a first contract. Some of our
colleagues go a little bit further into the stage because

(06:39):
of their local staff status where they're supporting contract renewals
or bargaining around the second stage. But a lot of
these has to do with on the ground, worker to worker,
peer to peer organizing, supporting them and many different ways,
including data work, including just resources. Think of how the

(07:02):
parent union might be supporting a new shop. We are
kind of the resources that are supporting the new shop
that can help direct institutional knowledge, that can help direct
logistical or legal information like how or what is necessary
for an election or a petition, that kind of stuff.
And yeah, it's a lot of different tasks and that's

(07:24):
why for a lot of us, our job description is
I'm doing air quotes here a flexible forty.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Hour work week, Jess Christ.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
And of course that usually means a lot more than
that when campaigns ramp up, and so you know, there
are a lot of different models on how to combat that,
but I'll get into that a bit later. So going
back to the difference between us and perhaps our direct supervisors.
Our direct supervisors may be tasked with monitoring the status

(07:54):
of a lot of different campaigns at the same time,
and we might be assigned to one or two or
three at a time to work very very directly with
the organizers and the new workers. Of course, this looks
slightly different across different locals or different campaigns can be

(08:14):
adjusted depending on the shop's needs. But our supervisors, who
are the leads, will be handling a lot of different
campaigns at the same time and just like kind of
overseeing that progress and giving the okay for the next
stage or or whatsoever. So I wanted to go back
a little bit to why we are called temp organizers.

Speaker 3 (08:36):
Yeah, this is nuts. Well, I'm so angry that I
forgat about this.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
So do you know what a temp organizer is?

Speaker 4 (08:46):
Yeah, this is actually weird. So I have friends who
are staff organizers for other unions that it doesn't work
like this. So yeah, I'm going to let you explain it,
because I.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
Mean, do let me know about those in another Yeah,
but for temp organizers in UAW, this is a holdover
from the kind of older model of organizing where theoretically
a worker might come off the shop floor for six
months nine months to do union work and then go
back to the shop floor when that concludes, so that

(09:16):
the job would remain open for them. So temporary, like
the nature is temporary. Someone is coming off to do
union work, and then you know, sometimes it's even part time, right,
sometimes it's even part time, and the worker never stops
working at their original job. But nowadays the model doesn't
look like that anymore, right because, especially in say higher
ed shops, people graduate out of their graduate union jobs.

(09:40):
People may not have their reappointment if they are an
adjunct or contract faculty. And then a lot of our
unit members u zoom meaning a lot of our yu
zoo members come out of a shop that is UAW
whether that means they're legal services or museum workers or
higher ed, but it is less common nowadays to have

(10:01):
a job to return to. However, the model remains the
same in that the temporary organizer job has three month
renewals and a three year cap. Every three months our
contract is renewed, and if we hit three years on
this job, we are no longer hired. Theoretically, you could

(10:22):
be hired to another job internally, but there's no pipeline,
there is no internal movement that way, you would have
to apply to the job like a regular other job
that is a more full term job, or you just
kind of like quote unquote like age out the system
and you're just no longer an organizer. You no longer

(10:43):
have a job. And so this has manifested in a
lot of different ways that a lot of my colleagues
that have gotten tired or burnt out and have decided
to leave before they're three years or leave at their
three years of their own will. There are folks that
have left way earlier than their three years as well
to pursue other opportunities. YUZU at any given time has

(11:08):
about forty to fifty members and that is our nine
a unit. Again, one thing that we have come to
find out is that in the last five years of
this temp organizer model, only three people who have hit
their three year cap have managed to attain full term

(11:30):
jobs in the UAW afterward Cheese. And then there is me, who,
again within the last five years, is the only person
to have been not renewed before their three year term,
very unceremoniously as well as in the middle of very
active campaigns. That brings us to another piece of context,

(11:53):
and the reason why I keep saying five years is
because in twenty eighteen there was a first iteration of
the Yuzu. There was a first attempt to forming this
staff union of temp and local staff. Of course it
was created by different people. But what happened then, especially
under the Administrative Caucus when it was before the reform

(12:14):
leadership septed in, is that everyone was just fired Jesus, Yeah,
everyone was just let go. And there are people still
around organizing these days in other positions or in other
workplaces that you have talked to us about it, and
there are people that are working in user now that
had friends or were peripheral to that happening. So we
are all very familiar with how non renewal is a

(12:37):
very retaliatory practice used in UAW in the past, or
we thought was in the past, because we were so
excited to have this reform leadership come in and now
we are finding out that it is still a tool
that is consistent. And so when we are excited that
there is democratic reform, especially with one member, one vote,

(13:00):
which was extremely extremely exciting to see, we also need
to point out that there are a lot of different
places here that still need to change, especially in how
the union treats its own staff.

Speaker 4 (13:15):
Yeah, and unfortunately we need to go to ads. We'll
come back. I want to circle back around and talk
a bit more about the ways of the UAW is
acting like a fairly conventional boss trying to break a union.

(13:38):
And we are back. So there's something really interesting. I
mean I say interesting, it's something sort of terrible about
the way that the UAW is relying on effectively a
casualized workforce because because you're dealing with these constant renewals,
which are an incredible sort of pressure leverage because it
means you don't have job security. It feels like the

(14:00):
way Amazon works where they're just like trying intentionally instead
of trying to retain people, they're just trying to churn
through as many organizers as possible because like the more
seniority people have and the more experience they have, the
harder it is to like just completely underpay them.

Speaker 3 (14:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
The keyword in here is flexibility.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
Yeah, and it seems like, also on an institutional level,
a terrible idea because you know, you're training a bunch
of organizers and then the moment that they're you know,
the moment they have a bunch of experience, you're just
casting them into the wind and then hiring the less
experienced person.

Speaker 1 (14:33):
It's like you bring up a great point. Actually, something
that I want to touch on is end bargaining. We
have asked for training and we have not been met
with a satisfactory answer. People are not trained. Oh my
god before they take on this position. But yes, you're
absolutely correct with the institutional knowledge aspect. The campaigns that
I'm working on, the organizing committees are real pissed that
I have been suddenly disappeared, And I want to highlight

(14:54):
something that one organizer brought up is that for all
the talk of us being one big union, how we
are the union, how we have a democratic saying in
this process, it's very weird that someone higher up in
the union can just make one of our members disappear.
And that is in reference to my unceremonious departure, of course,
and the points that we, as you you really want

(15:17):
to highlight and emphasize is that we really want to
just hold UAW to the values that it has espoused,
ending tiers, job security for workers, fair wages, like I
said in bargaining, we had asked for training and that
has not gone very well. UW is refusing to bargain
over free speech and continuity representation, which refers to the

(15:40):
hypothetical scenario if Region nine A were to be absorbed
somewhere else the right for user to still exist, and
they refuse to bargain over that we are stuck in
wages at somewhere around three percent per year of four years. Yeah,
it's not great, and there's been a lot of chaos

(16:01):
behind the scenes that it is implied to be a
bad thing to let the members know about the members
that we work with and organize with. But to a
certain point things boil over, and especially in the case
where I am suddenly not renewed, it is really important
in our view that our members know what is happening. Yeah,

(16:22):
that the members know what this is about, because they
get the news landed on them after our social media
posts come out. Because I am told not to inform
the organizers myself, and so the organizers had to hear
about it from my supervisors about a week later with
no details. My non renewal was without cause, without justification,

(16:45):
without reason. They did not give me an answer to
my face. And then as Yuzu kept pushing higher ups
kept flip flopping on who to blame and what the
actual cause was. And what I'm getting is a sense
of surprise that people are angry about this in.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
The first place.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
Yeah, as if this was a normal situation, that people
were just getting fired any other day with a month's notice,
And they're like, we gave her a month's notice.

Speaker 4 (17:13):
Which also like I feel like, like, what was the last
a bit of these people were on a shop floor?

Speaker 3 (17:17):
Like do you know how disruptive it is?

Speaker 4 (17:18):
Like if someone had pulled like so we had when
we were organizing our union, we had we've had a
number of like great writer, skilled staffers, and if like,
if someone had just pulled our staffer out in the
middle of the drive, like all of us would have
been unbelievably pissed, and it would have done incredible about
the damage to the organizing because like union organizing, as
you are well aware, and I think as the audience
should be increasingly aware, it's built on personal relations. You

(17:40):
can't just yank someone out and then not allow them
to even know what's happening. Like that's that's incredibly disruptive.
It pisses people off.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
Yeah, it's been very enraging for a lot of our members,
and so I've been extremely grateful for the support that
I received, whether it be on social media or by
our email campaign to management. And what I've seen from
this is that management was really taken by surprise that
there was a reaction at all, kind of unfortunately for them.

(18:11):
There are a lot of shops and a lot of
units that I have supported and organized with and have
relationships with, and even for the shops that I don't
have relationships with, Yuzu members are working in those shops,
and there is a common understanding that it'd be really
weird for a stafford to be randomly pulled out during

(18:31):
a very active campaign. I've had a rough couple months
of going at it because I think there have been
some really unhealthy dynamics in the workplace with supervision that
was unjust and punishment that was unjust for my attempt
to advocate for different units and attempt to advocate for organizing.

(18:55):
And I think that is why we have reached the
conclusion that retaliation retribution must be involved somehow. On paper,
this was a very oddly handled situation. I was notified
by email on three thirty pm on a Friday before
Labor Day weekend, Jesus Christ. I was not informed by
a meeting, not informed by a call. My supervisor didn't

(19:17):
pick up my calls until two and a half hours later.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
Oh my god, in the meantime.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
Where they were actually informing my co workers that I
had been terminated, and then came back to me saying
that they were busy Jesus, which no firing happens like that.
I'm sorry, but there was no conceivable way where the
HR email happens. And then my supervisor is busy telling
my co workers that I've been let go, which you know,

(19:44):
we are interpreting as intimidation because why else would this
be happening.

Speaker 4 (19:50):
Yeah, but even corporate best layoffs don't work like that,
Like you at least get a meeting.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
No, I didn't get a meeting until the Tuesday after
to talk about transitioning my work, and they had no
plan to transition my work. So currently no one is
handling the work that I was responsible for, which is
so we.

Speaker 3 (20:10):
Just screw your units.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
That's quite dangerous for campaign and higher ED as the
semester ramps up.

Speaker 3 (20:17):
Yeah, yeah, oh god, oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
And of course the hr email was signed in solidarity
and had no name. I didn't want to bring up
that point. There is evidence. Yes, it's extraordinarily funny if
you actually look at it. But yeah, just even if
we didn't have the context of what has happened to

(20:42):
me in the workplace in the last six months, even
just on paper, looking at how this non renewal was handled,
it was handled atrociously. Yeah, and so there is not
much else we can draw from it other than the
fact that I was someone they wanted to get rid
of expeditiously, but just didn't anticipate that people would be
mad about it, which is, you know, to me a

(21:04):
sense that people up there handling it are a little
out of touch, Like, yeah, they haven't experience what it's
like to have this happen, to have a staff a
randomly yanked out during the middle of a really active campaign.

Speaker 4 (21:18):
Yeah, we need to go to ads again, but we will.
We will be back soon. And what are our product services?
We're about to have unionize them and then also ugnize
your staff.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
We are back.

Speaker 4 (21:39):
So it's something we've been talking about in terms of
sort of your specific situation and how it's the terrible
impact and it's had on both you personally and the
organizing that's going on. And I wanted to come around
to talking a bit about the impact that this structure
and the impact that getting denied benefits and stuff like that,

(22:00):
the impact that this has in general on the way
that organizing new shops works.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, I think that the impact this has very concretely
is that it does not let us do good work.
It makes us as organizers scared every three months that
we have to have another plan. It makes us have
to prepare a plan every time that rolls around, and
then you know that takes our focus off of the
organizing that we could be doing. I mentioned earlier about

(22:30):
workload organizers get burnt out extremely easily because there are
no guardrails in place, and then there are plenty plenty
of other circumstances that make it very difficult within this
workplace too. For example, we don't have just cause we
don't have grievance procedures Jesus Christ. And it makes a

(22:51):
very damaging environment, especially when you consider that the members
have to bargain for their own contracts, and then they
look at us and they're like, wait a minute, why
are your contracts that bad? It doesn't inspire trust. It
doesn't inspire faith in how this union would organize for
its workers if the staff are insecure constantly, And we're

(23:13):
not asking for the moon and the stars in Mars,
which is unfortunately what the UW lawyer accused us of
doing so in a bargaining session. We are asking for
very simple guardrails on job security, on workload, on healthcare
that could help cover our dependence on wages that are
not stagnant. You know, they're not even giving us COLA,

(23:36):
which is the phrase for cost of living adjustment, and
christ a lot of us live in New York City
and then there's folks in Boston and hell, even the
transport costs have been a bit of a sticking point
where we're like, can we please just get an MTA
card or the equivalent. But overall, the structure does not

(24:01):
inspire faith in terms of how our contracts are actually
negotiated and who is responsible for these contracts. It is
very difficult to hear from the UAW lawyer that we
are reaching for Mars when we are asking for things
that are very present in our standard contracts that our
members receive. You know, we have taken language from the

(24:22):
contracts that our members have and tried to apply them
for our own situation, and we've been told that they're
too extra. And then, you know, this has been kind
of an odd year for union staff. I wanted to
highlight that. Anya Earlier this year in National Education Association,
their staff were locked out during bargaining eleven ninety nine.

(24:45):
SCIU also just formed their staff union, and during the
drive they had one of the organizers fired. Thirty two
BJSCIU just announced their union and again during their drive,
one of their organizers. They've posted this on social media.
One of the organizers had a miscarriage and then asked

(25:05):
for help, was put on a performance improvement plan, and
then fired after a month. And you know, there are
these really uncomfortable trends of this mistreatment happening because priorities
might be elsewhere, or there is an assumption that we
are more expendable, that maybe we are kennon fodder, But

(25:27):
that really really is not what is supposed to happen
in places that are advocating for fair labor standards. And
I am glad that we're hearing more stories about this.
I'm horrified at the stories that are coming out about this,
but you know, I hope there are more that are

(25:47):
formed because a lot of these things are very extreme.

Speaker 4 (25:52):
Yeah, and it's and it's you know, it's impacting not
just the organizers. I think one of the reasons why
unionisation ratesil declining is like, well, yeah, okay, you guys
can firing all of your organizers, Like yeah, of course,
we're not getting shops for it. And I want to
say what I think about just specifically, like the mood
and the Stars thing is it's like, okay. This is
not to say that this kind of stuff will be
okay at a smaller union, but like, this is not

(26:12):
Like we've had a lot of independent unions on this show,
and those are people, you know, who have formed their
own using completely independently. In the money they've collected is
stuff that's come from them, like putting out their hat
on the street, right. I mean, you know some of
these unions have like a thousand dollars of assets. This
is the UAW. The UAW has hundreds of millions of dollars.
They have unbelievable amounts of money.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
And earlier this year, they were just bragging about how
they are putting so many more millions into new organizing.

Speaker 4 (26:38):
Yeah, and it's like, well, okay, if you're gonna put
if you're gonna put all this money into organizing, and
again they probably should they should be doing more, because
what is the point of sitting on this much money? Right,
It's like you're behaving like a financial institution and not
a and not a union, but like you have the
money to actually like cultivate and develop effective union organizers,

(26:59):
and you have the money to meet like pretty mild
contract contracts that are like I think your contract is
probably significantly cheaper than like the contract that they're negotiating, right,
Like this is just this is nonsense, Like we know
you have this kind of money also because you're paying
your like managerial staff for six figures, So clearly you
can do this and you're simply not. And I think

(27:19):
that should outrage everyone.

Speaker 1 (27:21):
I think that's exactly the response of a lot of
our members because knowing that a lot of our temp
organizers and staff organizers are people that are most passionately
devoting themselves to the labor movement, and you know, are
met with such unstable job conditions is truly horrifying because
this is not this is not a path to careerism

(27:45):
like as a temp organizer, there is not much upward
mobility here. Let me be very clear, there is not
much upward mobility. It's not like this is a cushy job.
There is no real way for me to just like
sit back and relax on piles of bureaucratic money or
something like that. And that reminds me of how I
shout out to our Korean comrades that I've met at

(28:06):
labor notes, where I explained to them what a temporary
organizer's job is like and how many people we handle
and how temporary our status is. I was talking to
some of our equivalents in the auto industry as well,
the union workers there, and they were pretty horrified at

(28:27):
the workload, at the insecurity, at the just again lack
of EQUIVALENCYE. And again I'm not trying to claim that
Korea's labor organizing world is perfect, like absolutely nobody is.
But the chakra to them is like, well, why are
you doing this? Why are you working in this job?

(28:50):
They have asked me this to my face, why are
you working in this job? What is possibly good enough
for that for you, And unfortunately a lot of it
is optimism of the will, and I think that's a
lot of what's keeping us going. And so my last
day is supposedly September twenty eighth, but hopefully this month
there have been fantastic outpourings of support and we are

(29:14):
also picketing the political Leadership conference on the Friday the thirteenth, scary,
and I think that is going to really align with
how YUSUS needed to escalate. I think this is again
just a boiling point, and it has shown how all
of this culminates in a very unfair labor standard and
practice of which we have filed a few charges. But

(29:37):
there's a lot more that needs to be done. And
even if I don't get reinstated, I think that USU
is a great example of how there's still more change
that needs to happen within UAW.

Speaker 3 (29:48):
Yeah, hundred percent.

Speaker 4 (29:49):
I want to close by talking about through line through
a lot of these episodes that we've We've talked with
a lot of people who work for Planned Parenthood, We've
talked for a lot of people who work for NGOs,
and this is the same behavior that they do where
you know, quite frankly, what they are doing is exploiting,
exploiting the labor of people who believe in the cause,
and because people are willing to, you know, because because

(30:12):
people believe in what they're doing, because the work that
they're doing is vital and necessary, These NGOs and these
unions think that they can just continuously exploit the people
who work for them, and this damages the workers, This
damages the people who they're nominally trying to help, and
this damages the entire left because when you're sort of
charting through organizers and when you're sort of fundamentally betraying

(30:35):
the missions that you're supposed to be doing in order
to just do more exploitation, this significantly damages literally the
entire organizing project that we're all fighting for. So Alex,
thank you so much for coming and talking and talking
to us about this and I where can people go
to support you and support you? Zoo?

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Our accounts are UAW staff United on Instagram and Twitter.
Please follow for more. Check out the adorable Yuzu Lemon
logos that we have everywhere. If you're in New York
or Boston, those are our major hubs. We keep an
eye off for future actions.

Speaker 4 (31:11):
Awesome, thank you again for coming on the show. And yeah,
if you are a union staffer, because I know I
know a number of you are listening to this.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
If you're in the UAW, raise hell.

Speaker 4 (31:21):
And if you're not in the UAW and you don't
have your own staff union, consider it.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Yeah, thank you, Robert Evans. Here, this is It could

(31:52):
happen here a podcast about things falling apart, and today
I wanted to take some time to talk about Ukraine,
in particularly to talk about the sort of cultural place
that the Ukrainian resistance against Russia expanded invasion by Russia
has taken in American politics and in American kind of

(32:12):
political culture. Obviously, I am recording this within a few
hours of another attempted assassination on former President Trump, this
one by a guy who, among a confusing milange of
other things, claimed to be a major advocate of Ukrainian
sovereignty and that that was a major reason why he
was angry at the Republicans and angry at former President Trump,

(32:34):
and kind of that at least failed assassination attempt is
sort of in line with a lot of derangement around Ukraine,
and you can find this on the left and the
right in the center. I've come to think that if
you're trying to evaluate sort of how credible someone is
as a geopolitical expert today, one of the best things
you can do is kind of look back to early

(32:55):
February twenty twenty two and see what sort of claims
they were making about what is going to happen, whether
or not Russia was actually going to go into Ukraine
and expand their invasion. And that's obviously, you know, a
bigger topic than I think we're going to get into today.
One of the things that I find really interesting when
I kind of analyze how particularly conservatives have turned on

(33:16):
the Ukrainian cause, is how kind of incomprehensible that seems,
just based on the way in which I was raised
by the conservatives in my life to think about Russia
and to think about like Russian military aggression. You know,
I grew up largely in the post Cold War era,
but my parents were both like raised by Cold warriors.

(33:37):
They mostly grew up on military basis, and I still
grew up with an awful lot of the kind of
Cold War shrapnel, and my sort of ideological training. You know,
the movie Read Dawn was a big part of my childhood.
You know, some of those early James Bond movies where
the Soviet Unions are still the bad guy. You know,
this was all major stuff for me. So it's it's

(33:59):
been particularly disorienting kind of watching Philo Russian attitudes infiltrate
the right and us move from this idea of like
these people are one way or the other kind of
a geopolitical opponent of the United States towards these people
are almost existing in an idealized version of the society
we bring around. It's been a cause of some whiplash

(34:22):
for me and for I think a lot of people
who were raised in that environment and then kind of
came out of those ideological beliefs. And when we look
at the kind of turnaround on the right about this stuff.
One of the people who's been on the bleeding edge
of this has been Vice presidential candidate JD.

Speaker 3 (34:39):
Vance.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
And in fact, Ukraine might mark the first place where
Vance really came in ahead of the rest of his
party on an issue they would all ultimately move in
behind him on back in early twenty twenty two, in
the immediate wake of Russia's expanded invasion, Vance told Steve
Bannon in one of his many ill advised podcast interviews, quote,

(35:00):
I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way
or the other. Now is This paragraph from an article
by Ed Kilgore and New York Magazine makes clear Vance
was swiftly followed by others. Quote Then Congressman Madison Cawthorn
paroted Russian propaganda by saying the Ukrainian government is incredibly
corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,

(35:22):
and his colleague Marjorie Taylor Green called the Ukrainians neo Nazis.
Fox News's Tucker Carlson was a constant font of bitter
hostility towards USAID for Ukraine. Now Cawthorne was and remains
now a stooge. But I think it really is kind
of drilling into the precise wording of his claim here,
the fact that he's so focused on wokeness within the

(35:44):
context of a conflict that seems much more serious than
kind of the standard American culture war bullshit. A lot
of why we're seeing this has to do with the
fallout over the Russia Gate culture war that consumed the
Democrats during the first half of the Trump administration. This
led to the enemy of the enemy is my friend's
sort of thinking among the right, and this was stoked

(36:06):
consciously by Russian propaganda efforts. After Trump left office, these
efforts were redoubled, especially after the war in Ukraine became
an existential issue for Putin's regime. A good example of
the more obvious sort of messaging is this Moscow Times
article from May of twenty twenty three, with the title
Russia to build migrant village for conservative American expats. Quote

(36:29):
Timor Beslangarov, a migration lawyer at Moscow's Vista Foreign Business Support,
claimed that around two hundred families wish to immigrate to
Russia for ideological reasons. The reason is propaganda of radical values.
Today they have seventy genders and who knows what will
come next. Ria Novosti quoted Bessangarov as saying, echoing President

(36:50):
Vladimir Putin's frequently deployed grievances against Western countries comparative gender freedom,
and here we see it again. The focus on hatred
of woke as a j justification for solidarity with Russia.
A sizeable plurality of Americans still support the US sending
aid to Ukraine, and the reality of Russia's invasion is
hideous enough that the bulk of modern Russian propaganda in

(37:12):
this country today seems to focus on the woke issue
more than anything directly relevant to the war. As I
write this, one of the top stories in the country
is how a Tennessee based media network, Tenant Media, hired
a bunch of American influencers like Tim Poole and Dave
Rubin and paid them north of one hundred grand of
video to make Russian propaganda. Now, pool and Ruben and

(37:34):
their fellows claim to be shocked, shocked that a foreign
government was involved in all and deny acting as unregistered
foreign agents or breaking the law in any way. We'll
see how those claims look in a few months. For now,
I think it's illustrative to turn towards a Wired analysis
of the content of dozens of Tenant Media videos written
by Tim Marshman and Drove Merota. It shows us the

(37:57):
kind of propaganda that Russia found fruit full inceding to
an American audience quote. This analysis does not show that
in these videos the influencers were particularly fixated on the
Ukraine War. The word Ukraine appears in the transcript sixty
seven times, about as often as misinformation, Christianity, and Clinton.
It does show the influencers stressing highly divisive culture war

(38:19):
topics in the videos, which carried titles like trans widows
are a thing, and it's getting all caps out of hand,
and race is biological, but gender isn't question mark, question
mark question mark. The word trans appears one hundred and
fifty two times and transgender ninety eight, So sixty seven
times we see Ukraine appear in these transcripts, as opposed

(38:41):
to well over two hundred times for trans and transgender together. Now,
if you want a snapshot of just how absurd and
divorced from reality the culture wars have gotten, the Russian
government funding a clandestine influence operation considered stoking fears about
trans people to have a higher rate of return than
actually propag ggandizing directly about the war in Ukraine. As

(39:03):
absurd as this sounds, these tactics have borne fruit, and
I think the reason why is simple. By building a
sense of solidarity between bigoted American conservatives and what they
see as a similarly conservative Russia. Now Obviously, the reality
of the situation is that Russia is not exactly the
country these people think it is. While it is true

(39:24):
that the number of Russian adults who consider themselves at
least somewhat religious skyrocketed after the fall of the USSR
from eleven percent or so to over fifty percent today,
much of that is likely just explained by the change
away from an expressly atheistic government. Even today, Pew Research
notes quote for most Russians, the return to religion did

(39:45):
not correspond with a return to church. Across all three
waves of ISSPD data, no more than about one in
ten Russians said they attend religious services at least once
a month. The share of regular attenders monthly or more
often was two percent to nineteen ninety one, nine percent
to nineteen ninety eight, and seven percent in two thousand
and eight. For reference, about thirty two percent of Americans

(40:08):
currently attend church, synagogue, mosque, et cetera on a weekly basis.

Speaker 6 (40:13):
Now.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
This is down significantly from forty nine percent in nineteen
fifty eight and does represent a low for church attendance
in US history. But you can see we still beat
the Russians in at least active religiosity by a factor
of like five. Now, one of the modern bugbears of
the right wing in the US is no fault divorce,
which often gets wrapped up in conversations about wokeness. Here,

(40:36):
Russia is also not a bastion of good old fashioned values.
I'm going to quote from an article in Russia Beyond
by Nikolay Schefchenko in twenty sixteen. The ratio in Russian
of divorces to new marriages that year was one to
one point six, meaning that Russians divorce more often than
they marry. In recent decades, over sixty percent of marriages
in Russia ended an official separation. Now, there is precisely

(41:01):
one issue where Russian culture is in reality more in
line with the kind of culture American conservatives claim to desire,
and that is in its treatment of LGBT people and
ethnic minorities. The last years in Putin's Russia have seen
a surge in hate crimes against queer Russians, as LGBT
advocacy organizations have been declared illegal and punished by the government.

(41:23):
This is the Russia our American right wing finds solidarity with,
and we shouldn't forget that right when we're looking at
to what extent do these people see Russia as kind
of embodying the values they would like to bring to
the United States. It has a lot less to do
with actual religiosity, with good old fashioned family values, and
a lot more to do with hate for specific groups

(41:44):
of people. And we're going to talk about what that
means within the context of US politics in a little bit.
But first here's some ads. So earlier this year, I

(42:04):
headed to the Republican National Convention, and I had a
lot on my mind there, But one of the things
I was kind of interested in is hearing the way
in which conservatives talked about Ukraine when they felt like
they were among friends. It was not uncommon to hear
Ukraine referenced in conversations as a geopolitical enemy of the

(42:24):
United States. And you know, this is something I encountered
a number of times, and I wanted to make sure
it wasn't just a fluke of my own experiences there.
And I assure you it was not. Michael Witely, who
Donald Trump picked to chair the RNC, appeared on Fox
News in April and lumped Ukraine in with China and
Iran as aggressive adversaries. Of the United States. Now, you know,

(42:47):
we can quibble on that list for a number of reasons,
but Ukraine, a country we are currently arming and training
to fight in our stead, is just kind of absurd
to describe as an aggressive adversary of the United States.

Speaker 6 (43:00):
Now.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
That very month, Congress voted on a foreign aid package,
which caused a massive split in the Republican Party. The
anti Ukraine side was led by voices like Marjorie Taylor Green,
who told Steve Bannon, the Ukrainian government is attacking Christians.
The Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that.
They're not attacking Christianity. Now, like most things, Green says,

(43:22):
this is not quite accurate. The Guardian noted at the
time quote. In fact, according to figures from the Institute
for Religious Freedom, a Ukrainian group, at least six hundred
and thirty religious sites had been damaged or looted in
Russia's invasion by December last year. Green received a speaking
slot at the RNC, as did tech investor David Sachs,

(43:43):
who spent some of his time on stage arguing that
Joe Biden somehow provoked the Russians to invade Ukraine by
talking about NATO expansion. Now, this is a claim you'll
hear on some segments of the left too, and it
tends to ignore that Russia invaded back in twenty fourteen
after a revolution against a Krimlin back to President Yenikovich,
threw their own plans in the region into disarray. Ukraine

(44:05):
to this day, despite the expanded invasion, is not a
part of NATO, and Biden's administration has been leery not
only of pushing for this, but of supplying Ukraine with
long range weapons to strike inside Russian territory. The fact
that Ukrainians and others did start discussing Ukrainian membership in
NATO after almost a decade of war is certainly not
among the things that we can blame the Biden administration

(44:27):
for starting. As I trolled the RNC talking to attendees
about their feelings on the war, I got a variety
of responses. The most positive believe that Ukraine had been wronged,
but that the war was unwinnable, so the US had
to negotiate some kind of peace. Moore argued that the
Ukrainians were somehow stealing usaid, which they imagined would be

(44:49):
put to better use helping Americans. I found this an
illogical position personally, given that our aid Ukraine has primarily
taken the form of old weapons systems no longer in
use by USA troops unless you want to house homeless
veterans in Bradley fighting vehicles. I don't really see how
what we've sent Zelensky is much used to the kind
of Americans who are actually suffering today. The most enlightening

(45:12):
conversation that I had while I was at the Republican
Convention about their sentiments on Ukraine came when Garrison and
I stumbled upon Rudy Giuliani, seated at the booth for
some streaming network or another, exiled from the main stage
of the event. I introduced myself to Rudy and we
started off just talking about how surreal the mood was

(45:33):
given the recent attempted assassination of the former president.

Speaker 6 (45:37):
He's a conquering hero in history. We would have been
even without a Saturday. It's Saturday. It's surreal.

Speaker 7 (45:44):
I think people feel they're living through history.

Speaker 6 (45:46):
That image of him in Rallying America has to be
one of our ten historical great interest now.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
I included that because it's a fun snapshot of just
how elated Republicans were that week, right before Biden dropped
out and the whole election changed yet again on a dime.
From here, Rudy and I moved to talking a bit
about how badly the Secret Service had fucked up in
protecting Trump, which is not really something I had a
particular disagreement with, although I think Juliani was coming at

(46:15):
it from more of a conspiratorial standpoint than I would.
I think simple incompetence more or less explains everything that
happened that day pretty well. This morphed in fairly short
order into him ranting about how all of this was
Biden's fault and how no one ever gets fired for
incompetence in the Biden administration. He brought up Afghanistan and
that is what led us finally to Ukraine.

Speaker 6 (46:39):
Ukraine would not have happened if he hadn't been a
complete power at over Afghanis. Now, Yeah, what proof is
very simple. Pudin invaded three times under the last four presidents,
because only one president he was scared of.

Speaker 8 (46:52):
It was Trump.

Speaker 6 (46:52):
He invaded under Bush, he invaded under Obama, he invaded
under Biden. He didn't invade under Trump. So don't tell
me he would have invaded on the Trump you had
a chance.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
To what he did now, I responded by pointing out
that Juliani's time frame was a little off. Well, but
I mean I was there in twenty fifteen, and my
friends who were in the Ukrainian military were still fighting
under Trump. You know, the invasion, Yeah, was still happening.
It was just not at the current level that it's at.
Rudy went on to blame Obama for not having given

(47:22):
weapons to Ukraine in a timely fashion.

Speaker 6 (47:25):
The fact of Koroshenko, who is a corrupt pal of Biden's,
told me that, yeah, they were my friends, but I
didn't get any guns until Trump came in. They wanted
me to win with t shootings and stuff.

Speaker 8 (47:41):
He said.

Speaker 6 (47:41):
I didn't have a new what side they were on.
Obama never gave them alls. He gave them money.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
Now, this is again not accurate. By December of twenty nineteen,
the US had provided Ukraine with about one point five
billion dollars in aid since the twenty fourteen invasion. This
did include weapons including javel in, anti tank missiles and
armored vehicles, which is why they had some of these
weapons win the expanded Russian invasion occurred. Rather than loosening

(48:09):
the purse strings. As Russian aggression continued, President Trump withheld
three hundred and ninety one million dollars in aid to
try and get a political favor from Zelenski. We're going
to continue with Rudy Giuliani and my conversation, but first
here's a little bit more ads and we're back. So,

(48:38):
after Juliani made his claim that the United States didn't
send any weapons over to Ukraine until Trump was president,
he said this, he.

Speaker 6 (48:47):
Let Biden handle the money, the last guy in the
world that should be only money to Ukraine now and
Ukraine's gotten two hundred billion and nobody let us order it.
This is the acknowledge to be the seconds most corrupt
country in the world. The fact that they were invaded
by Russia doesn't make them honest. It makes him the victim,

(49:09):
doesn't make them honest. And you care a couple hundred
billion in there without controls? What am I a jackass?
I can't figure out what's happening, and you don't win
now much more do you have? You can let's hunch a
billion company.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
Now, Rudy like most Republicans on this issue always describes
the aid we've sent to Ukraine as it's cash. I
find it interesting that he claims Ukrainian corruption is also
somehow to blame for US not auditing the aid we sent. Now,
there are issues with how the US Defense Department has
audited some of the aid going to Ukraine, but those
are issues with the Defense Department. In fact, it came

(49:43):
out in January of twenty twenty four that the United
States failed to audit about a billion dollars worth of
military aid to Ukraine. Now, first off, this is not cash,
as Juliani repeatedly insinuates. It's all weapons, and there's no
evidence that any of these weapons were ever sold to
another kind of or used outside of Ukraine. They simply
weren't audited the way that they ought to have been

(50:05):
because the Pentagon fired all of the people who should
have been auditing this aid. Right, this is a pretty
common issue with the Pentagon. You can look back to
Iraq and the sheer amount of aid that was sent
to Iraq and then kind of disappeared in the ether
because they just didn't have anyone paying attention to it. Obviously,
because that happened under Republican administration. Juliani isn't concerned at

(50:27):
all about it, but he is deeply concerned about this
kind of fantastical two hundred billion dollars that he believes
has been shotgunned out to Ukrainian mobsters. And here's Rudy again.
As our conversation continued.

Speaker 6 (50:40):
Biden has us consigned to a war without animate in Ukraine.
He doesn't even dare to suggest an end because he's
afraid of confrontation with Russia.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
So he's just going to get more people killed.

Speaker 6 (50:51):
I mean, there probably isn't an American president that's that
more people killed other than an a war than Biden.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
It's interesting you describe it as them not winning, because
I do have trouble. I know. In the lead up
to the expanded invasion of February twenty twenty two, the
expectation from most of the people in our military and
most people internationally was that the Ukrainian military was going
to fold in a manner of days. And they're now
back to about seventeen percent of the country under Russian occupation,
which isn't a massive escalation over where it was previously

(51:20):
because they pushed well because they pushed the Russians out
of Kiev.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
Well, will that end the war?

Speaker 7 (51:26):
Russia can keep seven pay percent.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
I don't think the Ukrainians are willing to send the
war that woman.

Speaker 6 (51:32):
The war is one when you achieve the objective that
has you stopped conducting war. They're not even close to them.
The only way Ukraine says it will stop fighting is
if Russia is pushed out of Ukraine. They haven't been
able to do that. So they're not winning the war.
I mean, nor are they presenting a plan that we're
funding to do that. We're not planning, we're not funding.

(51:56):
We're just endlessly giving them money to keep the status quoth.
We do not have a plan to win them or
end it.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
So I mean when I.

Speaker 6 (52:05):
Tom Towell used to say, the worst thing about American
foreign policy under unrealistic, somewhat left leaning liberals is war
without end. When you go into a war, you've got
to be willing to commit yourself. You've got to be
willing to win it quick, otherwise you're gonna lose. You know,
when we started, when we started losing wars, got this policy,

(52:28):
we fall.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
But if you if you compare where Ukraine is at
right now to the wars in the United States has
gotten involved in in this century. Iraq, you know, around
a decade or so close to twenty years for Afghanistan.
Ukraine is two years since the expanded invasion and kind
of you know war. It's a it's a massive international

(52:50):
conflict between a much smaller nation and a larger one.
When I talk to Ukrainians and they I asked them,
what do you think you need to actually win this?
One of the things they repeatedly say is the ability
to strike Russian assets inside Russia.

Speaker 8 (53:04):
Who doesn't give him? Who does? Who? Prem Yeah, I'm
just one more minutes, we got to go.

Speaker 3 (53:09):
Who prevents that person? Definitely?

Speaker 2 (53:12):
The Biden administration hasn't allowed that.

Speaker 3 (53:14):
He tells us he wants them to win.

Speaker 8 (53:16):
Do you do you think why.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
Would you be supportive under a new Republican administration of
allowing Ukraine to strike inside Russia?

Speaker 6 (53:24):
I would be supportive of sitting down and having a
realistic conversation about a plan. First thing I do is
all that the money we gave.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
Now, of course, Rudy can't support that, so he pivoted
back to arguing that we need to audit Ukraine to
quote find out what happened to the money we gave
him him being Zelensky again, I pointed out that we
aren't giving him money directly, we're sending over weapons. Nevertheless,
our conversation continued. Now, the vast majority of the two

(53:52):
hundred billion that's been sent over, though, is in munitions,
Like we're not talking about have you have you found
it in the American industry, but there has been American
in the American industry.

Speaker 6 (54:03):
You want to defend the American military industrial bumble what
I want to think there is a lot.

Speaker 7 (54:07):
Of weeks of money in the American It.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
Was very much Well, I'm not concerned about money though,
because what.

Speaker 6 (54:12):
We have, the money doesn't get to that.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
There's no javelins winding up outside of Ukraine, there's no
agtms winding up out money. They're they're mostly getting weaponry though,
they're getting Bradley's, they're getting Abrams tanks, they're.

Speaker 6 (54:27):
Getting been on the market selling those things.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Where have they sold them?

Speaker 6 (54:31):
They've been caught three times selling selling where selling weapons
where I'd have to go back and look, they've been
caught three times selling plus.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
They have Now this was just a lie Ukraine has
not been caught selling US weapons. Rudy only claims they
have been because he's consumed a huge amount of Krimlin
funded media that has been arguing since twenty twenty two
that US weapons sent to Ukraine will end up on
the black market. There's no outside evidence that shows that
this has happened, and in fact is yusuf. A research

(55:01):
analyst for the security think tank the Stimson Center recently
told Business Insider, I don't think we've seen any real diversion,
particularly outside the country of weapons. That article continues. Pro
Russian media has aired similar claims of a massed diversion
of arms meant for the front line, some citing a
retracted CBS report that included a source claiming only thirty

(55:23):
percent of weapons sent to Ukraine made it to the battlefield.
One conspiracy Inclined website, purportedly citing anonymous Ukrainians, claimed the
weapons are stolen to such a degree that Ukraine as
of August had already lost the war because of the
black market diversion. Now, in the months since that claim
was made that Ukraine had lost the war because they
had given up all of their weapons. They took a

(55:45):
bunch of those weapons and invaded Russia, punching a hole
through their lines and taking a considerable amount of territory
in the Kursk region, which they occupy to an extent today.
As is always the case with guys like Julian, reality
doesn't matter here. It's about repeating the same talking points
until you get a journalist ignorant enough to take them
as true. And it's the kind of thing where if

(56:07):
you're not up on all of the different claims being
made on the right and all of the claims about
corruption and money being siphoned off and taken by mobsters,
then you're not going to be able to properly argue
with them, right Like, if you don't really know what
you're talking about, you might seed the point to Juliani
that there have been at least three cases of the
Ukrainians caught selling American weapons overseas. Now, when you look

(56:30):
into what you see that this is primarily a claim
that spreads on right wing Facebook pages and there's not
really any evidence of a sizable diversion. But that doesn't
really matter. What matters is in the moment, being able
to kind of spread a point out to the extent
that nobody really questions you want it.

Speaker 3 (56:46):
And I don't know.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
It's the kind of thing that happens a lot in politics,
and it's the kind of thing that is probably pointless
to really address, right Like me arguing with Rudy Giuliani
got him hot and flustered and kind of pissed off,
and certainly me frustrated. But I don't think it accomplished much.
And I really I think kind of the thing that
you have to accept when you're looking at sort of

(57:08):
right wing lies about what's happening in Ukraine or the
lies being told right now about you know, Springfield, Ohio
and the Haitian migrant population over there, there's really a
very little point in actually confronting these people directly about
the disinformation that they put out, because it's not really
a case where they care about the truth one way

(57:29):
or the other. It's a matter of you've kind of
lost the fight if you care at all about trying
to prove reality to them, you know. And that's kind
of a bummer note to end this on. But I
guess I don't really have anything optimistic to say. I
just thought you'd be interested in my little conversation with
Rudy Giuliani and some of the talking points that are

(57:52):
continuing to spread up along the right. So you know,
at the very least, maybe the next time you wind
up in an argument this Thanksgiving with your uncle Ukraine,
you'll be kind of wary for some of the arguments
he's going to bring out, you know, to the extent
that that does anybody any good until next time. I'm
Robert Evans and this is It Could Happen Here. If

(58:12):
you want to see these sources for this episode and
do some reading yourself, they're in the show notes, so
just check them out there and we will be back tomorrow.

Speaker 9 (58:40):
Welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Garrison Davis.
I am joined by James Stout and Nia Wong to
talk about some of our favorite people to hate, the
Heritage Foundation.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
Hello everybody, Hi Garrison.

Speaker 4 (58:53):
Hello, Oh god, I got brought in talked with the
Heritage Foundation.

Speaker 3 (58:57):
Oh no, what a week? What a week?

Speaker 9 (59:00):
So I mean, people have been talking a lot about
the Heritage Foundations Project twenty twenty five because it is
a massive, massive document that is honestly too long to
actually read, but it does it does focus on LGBTQ
issues for a decent a decent chunk of the book,
mainly finding different ways to both legalize and protect discrimination

(59:23):
against LGBTQ people and like banning the public presence of
LGBTQ materials deemed deemed pornographic in public life, especially schools, libraries,
all that.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
Kind of stuff.

Speaker 9 (59:35):
Right, It's kind of this this nationwide don't say gay
bill type thing, along with legalizing and protecting people's people's
right to discriminate against for people. So that's kind of
the bulk of the of the of the tactics that
are laid out in the Heritage Foundation's Project twenty twenty five.

(59:57):
But Trump and a whole bunch of Republicans have been
doing a lot of work to distance themselves from this document.
At the RNC, I was kind of surprised that, like,
I did not hear a single, a single mention of
Project twenty twenty five unless I was the one to
bring it up when talking with people.

Speaker 3 (01:00:12):
They didn't.

Speaker 9 (01:00:12):
They didn't like talking about it because they know it's
kind of just like this toxic thing now. They kind
they kind of showed their power level to use to
use an ancient phrase.

Speaker 4 (01:00:22):
Yeah, who could possibly have guessed for the document where
they talk about bringing back the gold standard was going
to be unpopular with literally everyone, including their own base.

Speaker 9 (01:00:31):
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's the reason why
it's unpopular. I think it's all of like the dictator
fascism stuff. But the gold standard bit's pretty funny. Even
at the Heritage Foundation booth, not a peep about Project
twenty twenty five. It's like the biggest thing they've done
in like the in the last decade, arguably not a
single peep. But they did have a whole bunch of

(01:00:53):
other like merch, a whole bunch of little pamphlets, papers.
I love papers. I love little documents, some little ephemera
to de femera. Yeah, I love collecting all this little stuff.
And it just sits on a pile on my desk
for like, way too long. And in this case, it's
set on a pile on my desk for about two
months and the pile became too big and too unruly.
And now we're going to actually go through the pile

(01:01:15):
of stuff, right and talk about the types of things
that the Heritage Foundation actually did have out on their table,
specifically relating to gender identity. Oh good, which is their
term of choice for these issues. Now, like gender identity
quote unquote transgenderism were frequent talking points at the Republican

(01:01:37):
National Convention, way more so than the Democratic National Convention,
in which they were kind of just brushed aside as
a political inconvenience. But at the R and C these
things were front and center. Almost every single person giving
a speech on the main stage at least name dropped
gender ideology in some way to receive thunderous applause from
the crowd. So it certainly was a very common topic

(01:02:00):
brought up. And here's what the actual literature that was
proliferating at the event had to say about it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:06):
So let's let's start.

Speaker 9 (01:02:07):
Let's start penphlet number one, how to speak up about
gender identity, questions and answers driving the debate, So it's
a debate, is the first thing we want we need
to know about gender identity? Again, I'm not just reading
out all of their propaganda. I think there is some
use in actually learning what they're saying in like their

(01:02:28):
biggest convention and then actually not like debunking, because like,
come on, I know who our audience is. But at
least actually laying out what they're saying and how it
relates to like the actual information I think does does
have sub use. So I will I will be quoting
from the Heritage Foundation saying some pretty stupid things, but
then we will kind of springboard discussion, and I do

(01:02:50):
have some some little fact checks on some of the
like these very common lies that you're now seeing like
get repeated so often you may be trying to be
tricked into thinking that they are real. So we're going
to tackle the quote unquote the big questions. What are sex,
gender and gender identity. I'm sure this five page pamphlet
will tell me all I need to know about the

(01:03:11):
topics of what our sex, gender, gender identity.

Speaker 3 (01:03:14):
Yeah, I can't wait to learn they figured it out,
They figured it out.

Speaker 9 (01:03:17):
There's this centuries long discussions have been haven't resolved. What
do gender dysporia and transgender mean? And how do gender
identity policies affect me and my community? I think this
is largely targeted towards like I mean, it's turned towards
people at the RNC, so like people in like their sixties,
like like grandparents.

Speaker 10 (01:03:38):
Yeah, is this so how to talk to your friend
about the transgenders.

Speaker 9 (01:03:41):
But kind of kind of it's more so like, oh no,
your grandkids are maybe a little gay with it, grandchild?
Exactly what does that mean? What is that about? I
think that's kind of what the main the main demographic is. Okay, anyway,
here we go. The common understanding that there are only

(01:04:02):
two sexes and human beings male and female, determined by
each person's biology, has been the cultural norm and the
basis for our laws since our nation's founding it, though,
has it that's a good question.

Speaker 10 (01:04:16):
I'm not going to do this because I go fund
will take fucking an hour, but this isn't true.

Speaker 9 (01:04:20):
It will and obviously they're not going to mention intersex people.
They're not going to mention any any of that stuff.

Speaker 10 (01:04:25):
Yeah, or that like every indigenous culture has multiple gender words.

Speaker 3 (01:04:30):
Yeah no, no, no, no, we'll just leave that out.

Speaker 9 (01:04:32):
Because only recently have we seen a shift away from
this objective and scientific no citation understanding towards an ideology
that says a person's gender is determined by what they
believe they are parenthesis gender identity rather than their biological sex,
and should be legally recognized. The transgender movement has rapidly

(01:04:54):
advanced laws and policies that give special rights and protections
to some people while infringing on the rights of others. Now,
this is this is a talking point that was brought
up a lot when I was a kid around trans people.
How they have special laws that give them more rights
than your average person. And that's why, like a good

(01:05:16):
like conservative basis should be opposed to them, even if
you're like, you know, an accepting you may not like
agree with them, but you're not going to kill them,
but they shouldn't have like extra rights. That was that
was a big thing, is framing things that either protect
trans people from discrimination or framing things that ensure their
healthcare as like special extra rights not provided to like

(01:05:39):
regular regular Americans.

Speaker 4 (01:05:41):
Yeah, this is like a huge thing with just the
basis of all political conservatism is they all believe that,
like like they all believe that immigrants have like a
secret healthcare system that they have access to, and that
like black people have like welfare, and that like indigenous
people get into schools for free.

Speaker 10 (01:05:56):
And it's just like yep, no, it's all based on
never talking to anyone who isn't like you.

Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:06:02):
In addressing the conflicts that emerge. In addressing the conflicts that.

Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
Emerge, what are you talking about?

Speaker 9 (01:06:10):
The government must protect everyone's rights and fundamental freedoms. The
introduction of the concept of gender identity into recent legislation
raises concerns about privacy, safety, fairness, liberty, and its impact
on children. It threatens the freedom of religion and conscience.

Speaker 3 (01:06:30):
What the freedom of conscience? What does that mean?

Speaker 9 (01:06:37):
Because it's not just a religious objection. My conscience tells
me that trans people are icky, tells me I should
have this person's house. Does that let me have it?

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
I mean it should yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:06:49):
Yeah, yeah, My conscience tells me a whole lot of shit.
It means you can't not like trans people. The government's
going to come for you if you don't like trans people.
Is that what they mean?

Speaker 9 (01:06:57):
I think they are legitimately scared of that. Yeah. But
it also threatens freedom of speech, equal protection, and parental rights.
This radical redefinition of sex could dramatically alter our society,
creating significant disadvantages for some, particularly women and girls. Okay,
all right, so there we go. That's that's that is.
That is the introduction. Now onto page two. All individuals

(01:07:23):
have human dignity and should be treated with respect citation needed,
including those who identify as transgender and knowe. They're very
careful to never actually say trans people are transgender people.
There's people who identify transgender, and there's there's transgender activists
and gender ideology activists. They take great care to never

(01:07:45):
actually say trans people are doing this. They say transactivists
are doing this increases degree of separation. That that's one
kind of a little rhetorical tactic that I noticed when
first looking through this.

Speaker 4 (01:07:57):
Yeah, I think there's this also kind of a lake
see of this sort of trans tipping point and how
accepted things had gotten. We're like, I remember this with
like Alex Jones in like like even like twenty twenty two,
twenty twenty three would say, like the most transphobic thing
you've ever heard, but it would be prefaced with some
trans people or fine people.

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
I don't mean this.

Speaker 9 (01:08:17):
Toage people then say like, yeah, coming to rape your
dog or something.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
Yeah, yeah, anyway.

Speaker 9 (01:08:26):
But by labeling realistic concerns and scientific objections as oppressive,
transgender activists have shut down open, robust dialogue over the
consequences of gender ideology and gender identity policies. The serious
real world effects of gender identity policies on individuals and
communities must be taken into consideration. Many treatments promoted by

(01:08:49):
transgender activists are untested, can cause serious side effects and
come with irreversible developmental consequences when performed on children. So
this is my first kind of pause, because this is
a claim that we've been seeing, i would say, at
an increasing rate ever since Matt Walsh's documentary. This was
like one thing that he really tried to like invent

(01:09:10):
specifically that like quote unquote like puberty blockers cause like sterilization.
I'm like, yeah, you can't reproduce when you're on them, obviously,
but you can when you go off them. But that's
something that like they never talk about. They frame it
as like this permanent thing. Samantha Rosenthal has an opendent
piece in the La Times that talks about like the
very long history of trans healthcare in the United States.

(01:09:33):
Modern trans healthcare goes back to the nineteen sixties, and
hormone therapy has been used to assist cisgender children in
puberty since at least the nineteen forties. These these things
are not untested, These are medical practices with a long
history and saying that there's there's irreversible developmental consequences when
performed on children, Like the FDA approved hormone blockers for
children back in nineteen ninety three. We have been using

(01:09:56):
these for for quite a long time, and these false
claims are actually seeing some like significant harm. I'm gonna
quote from ABC News here.

Speaker 3 (01:10:04):
Quote.

Speaker 9 (01:10:05):
England's National Health Service has banned the use of puberty
blockers for the treatment of gendernus for you, or gender
incongruence in transgender minors. The NHS has not stated it
will restrict puberty blockers for non transgender children and young people.
An NHS spokesperson told ABC News the agency hopes to
have a study into the use of puberty blockers in
place by December of this year, with eligibility criteria yet
to be decided unquote. So they are just like starting

(01:10:28):
to ban these, and of course we've seen this in
the United States as well, but this is like the
National Health Service, this is like a really a really
big organization that's only banning it for trans people, not
versus gender children.

Speaker 6 (01:10:40):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:10:41):
So like it's really devastating.

Speaker 4 (01:10:43):
I think it's important to note too, that this is
the exact one of the exact same lines that anti
vaxxers use, and you know that's anti vax campaigns have
been a lot of those sort of model for how
how attax and transalth care works. But like, yeah, this
is this is literally the lie that these same people
we'll say about vaccines. It's like, oh, the RNA vaccine
is like an untested Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:11:05):
We tested it a motion of the population and everyone's fine.

Speaker 10 (01:11:08):
So you know, I did a clinical trial for COVID
vaccines before they were really suited thousands of other people.

Speaker 4 (01:11:16):
Yeah no.

Speaker 9 (01:11:17):
And in terms of puberty blockers, these have been used
and tested for decades. Like these are not a new technology.

Speaker 4 (01:11:23):
It's even funnier because again it's like, well, well, okay,
so like we will give them to CIS children.

Speaker 3 (01:11:31):
End with this stuff.

Speaker 9 (01:11:32):
It shows I think it is I'm I read one
other quote from a SABC article quote The Endocrine Society
and a national organization of more than eighteen thousand endercronologists,
calls the medication quote unquote fully reversible. Once blockers are stopped,
puberty continues with little to no proven side effects. According
to health professionals, unquote. And there was a recent study
in twenty twenty two in the journal Jama which found

(01:11:54):
the use of puberty blocking drugs did not lead to
an increased chance of receiving gender affirmat therapy in the future,
and actually we're slightly less likely to given the extra
time to explore gender in the body without the onset
of irreversible effects of puberty. Possible bone density losses largely
remediated upon the presence of sex hormones, whether from either

(01:12:15):
just ceasing the blockers or starting HRT. And this study
also says at the end that perhaps we should just
stop using the term puberty blocker, because it makes it
sound like it just completely blocks puberty, like from ever happening,
Like it just is like now you don't go through puberty. Yeah,
And instead opts to say, like, maybe we should just
describe what the drug does mechanistically and clinically, because maybe

(01:12:38):
maybe puberty blockers is just a it implies something more
than what the drug actually like does temporarily. Yeah. So
I found that to be an interesting note. And the
whole point of and this something we'll probably talk about later.
The whole point of this drug is so that you
can have more time to actually decide what you want
to do with your body and your gender. And most

(01:12:58):
people that do go on on blockers, with whether SIS
or not, are doing it to prevent irreversible changes from huberty,
and most people opt to not actually go on cross
sex hormones. And that's like a successful treatment like that
is that that is what the drug is supposed to do.
But there's definitely this idea among these like anti transactivists

(01:13:19):
that like, if you go on blockers, that means you're
more likely to become quote unquote like fully trends in
the future, which also just like isn't true.

Speaker 3 (01:13:27):
But do you know what is reversible?

Speaker 4 (01:13:31):
Not liking their products and services and support this podcast.

Speaker 9 (01:13:34):
You can you can reverse that and make it so
you really like them, which helps us a little bit.
Probably I assume I don't know. I think so, I don't.
I don't I don't do the business thing.

Speaker 3 (01:13:44):
Anyway. Here are the ads. Okay, we are back.

Speaker 9 (01:13:58):
Let let's continue this fine literature from our good enemies
at the Heritage Foundation.

Speaker 3 (01:14:04):
Yeah, great art and layout. As what I'm noticing it
it is it is very well designed.

Speaker 9 (01:14:09):
Yeah, there's these there are some children, these poor kids,
these poor stock photos of children.

Speaker 10 (01:14:16):
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure they gave the heartfelt consent
to being used in it hate propaganda.

Speaker 9 (01:14:23):
The next section is called what are sex, gender, and
gender identity? The best biology, psychology, and philosophy. All support
and understanding that sex is of bodily reality and that
gender is a social manifestation of bodily sex.

Speaker 3 (01:14:39):
The best biology.

Speaker 9 (01:14:41):
That's simply the best philosophy.

Speaker 3 (01:14:47):
Yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 9 (01:14:52):
Now this claim actually does have a citation, so it's true. Now,
let me check the citation. The citation is oh oh
oh wait, wait wait oh, the citation is when Harry
became Sally responding to the transgender movement the Anti trans
Book of two eighteen by Ryan T.

Speaker 3 (01:15:09):
Anderson.

Speaker 9 (01:15:09):
Oh god, that's not a real philosophy, biology, or psychology book.

Speaker 10 (01:15:14):
Oh okay, well he won best Philosopher anyway, I don't
know what you're talking about.

Speaker 9 (01:15:21):
The best all agree, that's so good now. Sex sex
is a biological reality referring to an organism's overall organization
towards sexual reproduction in human beings, just like every other
species that sexually reproduces. This organism includes the chromosomes we
inherit from our parents and the reproductive organs systems natalia

(01:15:41):
and hormones that developed as a consequence. As there are
two reproductive systems, there are two sexes, just like every
other species that sexually reproduces. This is completely consistent. I
get no citation because that's not That is not how
biology actually works. No, nor is your Italian necessarily determined
by your chromosomes. Nope, but sure, why not? The best

(01:16:07):
biology all support this understanding? Yeah, yeah, the.

Speaker 3 (01:16:11):
Best biology from a first grade textbook.

Speaker 4 (01:16:14):
Actually, that's unfair to first grade textbooks, which are largely
blameless in this matter.

Speaker 3 (01:16:18):
It is. It is unfair.

Speaker 10 (01:16:19):
Yeah, No, one's sticking genitalia in a first grade textbook.

Speaker 9 (01:16:23):
This organization isn't just the best way to figure out
which sex you are, it's the only way to make
sense of the concepts of male and female.

Speaker 3 (01:16:34):
Really really yeah, the only way. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:16:37):
What an interesting sociological statement made by the Heritage Foundation. Yeah,
that the only differences are purely mechanistical and there really
is no social basis that determines what the concepts in
male and female relate to. What an interesting opinion that
I'm sure is consistent across all of the heritage foundations.

Speaker 10 (01:16:55):
And yeah, it's going to say, you can pull out
another booklet and call them on their ship with their words.

Speaker 9 (01:17:01):
Gender, by contrast, is the way one expresses their biological sex.
We shouldn't pretend that there are no differences between male
and female, because biological reality is that there are. We
also shouldn't be trapped in rigid gender stereotypes. Transgender activists
deny that sex is a bodily reality. They argue one

(01:17:21):
it's perceived gender identity represents to a person really is,
even if it goes against their biological sex. They deny
their biological reality by suggesting that biological sex is merely
assigned at birth. A little known fun fact, you actually
can like scientifically change your biological sex. Yeah, rules, it
takes a little bit of time, it takes a little
bit of effort, but your biological sex can actually just

(01:17:42):
be like completely changed. This is something that is not
like set.

Speaker 4 (01:17:46):
Also, there is literally there is literally physically a document
where your doctor assigns.

Speaker 3 (01:17:52):
You a sex at birth. I come on, yeah, no,
it is a box that they must take.

Speaker 10 (01:17:59):
It's not even like not a line that they get
to write in whatever they want, you know, like.

Speaker 9 (01:18:03):
But the cool thing is is that when you change
with sex hormones your body is dominant in it actually
changes the sex and the functions of your body. Pretty
interesting stuff. Actually, I don't care about my chromosomes, but
as soon as we want to do more gene tampering,
I guess that that could be fun, but I don't
really care. You can also change body parts, so that's cool.

(01:18:26):
I know they're working on those womb transplants, but I'm
not into that freaky stuff anyway. According to the American
Psychological Association, gender identity refers to a person's internal sense
of being male, female, or something else. Hey, something else nice.
It is distinct from either sex or gender activists claim

(01:18:47):
it is a person's internal sense of gender activists claim.
They also assert that it's more than just male or female.
It's fluid and there's a spectrum of various options beyond
man and woman, like gender fluid, intern gender, or non binary.

Speaker 3 (01:19:01):
I've never heard the term intergender before. That's yeah, that's
it's a new one.

Speaker 10 (01:19:07):
Well, I guess if thatnoledge the existence of intersex people,
that kind of fucks up the premise of the whole thing.

Speaker 3 (01:19:12):
No, this is intergen Maybe.

Speaker 4 (01:19:13):
That's what Yeah, but again, maybe maybe that's what it is.
They can't say intersect. Yeah, it destroys their whole ship.
So they've transposed intersex.

Speaker 9 (01:19:22):
Is it like an identity, it's like an actual, like
completely like medical thing.

Speaker 10 (01:19:27):
I don't think that they fully understand this shit, Garrison.

Speaker 9 (01:19:31):
I think it's it's you're right, You're sorry. Sorry, I forgot.
I'm reading from a heritage, but.

Speaker 10 (01:19:37):
Maybe coming from a place of hate.

Speaker 9 (01:19:39):
All right, let's let's talk about gender dysphoria now. Let's
Dysphoria refers to the distress someone experiences when they have
a disconnection between their bodily, sex, and internal sense of gender.
The diagnostic label gender entity disorder was used by the
DSM until it's reclassification as a gender dysphoria in twenty
thirteen with the release of the DSM five. They really

(01:20:01):
want that old DSM back. They want it back before
the DSM went woke. They really want DSM four. Transgender
can refer to a man who identifies as a woman
or a woman who identifies as man some activists.

Speaker 3 (01:20:12):
Some activists go so far as.

Speaker 9 (01:20:14):
To say that a trans woman is a woman crazy.
Not all people who suffer from gender and dysphoria identify
as transgender, and not everyone who dentifies the transgender sefer
from gender dysphoria. Surprisingly woke statement. It's a surprisingly controversial
and woke statement from Heritage Foundation here, anti transmend anti

(01:20:37):
truthcum Air foundation. What the fuck base, it's the seven
people who get that, you're welcome for everyone else.

Speaker 3 (01:20:46):
I swear to God, that's very funny. It's it's a
little funny. Oh the funny.

Speaker 9 (01:20:55):
I was workshopping some kind of like Tumblr post style joke.
But this I still have like two pages of this pamphlet.
So now, how do gender identity policies affect me and
my community? The question on every Republican grandparents' mind. The
first area of concern privacy. Privacy concerns arise when a
men who identify you as women can enter female only spaces,

(01:21:18):
for example, changing rooms, gym class. They're doing bathroom stuff,
that's what they're doing. The reason we have separate facilities
in the first place is not because of a gender identity,
but because of the bodily difference between males and females.

Speaker 3 (01:21:31):
That's interesting.

Speaker 9 (01:21:33):
I wonder what happens when some of those bodily differences
start to change, or your social rules of male and
female also change, like a young trans girl going into
the men's bathroom that could maybe be a little bit
uncomfortable anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:21:48):
Preventing sexual assault is another.

Speaker 9 (01:21:51):
Major area of concern when gender identity determines who may
enter a women only space. Public safety X efforts such
as Kenneth V. Lanning, former FBI Supervisory Special Agent assigned
to the Behavioral Science Unit.

Speaker 3 (01:22:09):
They're doing the Buffalo Bill.

Speaker 9 (01:22:13):
At the National Center for the Analysis Violent Crime at
the FBI Academy for over twenty years. It is just
the Buffalo bill. Guy explains that predators abuse gender and
the policies to gain access to victims, while victims law
enforcement become less likely to report incidents for fear of
having misunderstood and being accused of discrimination. The primary concern
is not that people who identify as transgender will victimize women,

(01:22:36):
but that predators will exploit gender identity policies to do so.
So this is interesting. They're actually not doing all trans
women are secretly rapists. They are doing what is actually
more like more legit is that no like men will
be fucked up and men will like do fucked up shit.
The thing is, they don't need those policies to do
fucked up shit. Men will do it regardless.

Speaker 4 (01:22:58):
Wait, you are the Herod Foundation, Your your base, your
entire base are chuck is composed of churches who do
this literally every day, Like, come on, what are we
doing here?

Speaker 3 (01:23:08):
But you find it interesting that they take this line
of approach.

Speaker 4 (01:23:12):
I will say, this pamphlet feels like a much more
sort of moderate So this feels like a gateway thing
versus like the stuff that they're stuff that they actually believe,
or like the sort of like more hardcore stuff that
they they distribute.

Speaker 9 (01:23:26):
Well, I'm not sure how to how to segue to
an ad break from this one. I'll be honest.

Speaker 3 (01:23:31):
You know what else the Heritage Foundation supports?

Speaker 9 (01:23:34):
Oh well that only is true capitalism and these ads
that help fuel the turning machine of death and suffering.
Hah Okay, we are back. Let's talk about fairness. Gender

(01:23:55):
identity creates an unfairness when biological males biological males compete
against females in sports and other activities. It also reduces
girl chances of winning athletic scholarships.

Speaker 10 (01:24:11):
Yeah, the other fucking title nine defense every.

Speaker 9 (01:24:15):
Time scholar I'm sure all those trends girls are taken
of all the scholarships.

Speaker 3 (01:24:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:24:21):
Just let's just see where the Heritage Foundation stood on
fucking Title nine, shall we when that came in. I'm
sure they were totally supportive.

Speaker 9 (01:24:28):
Already, several high school girls have lost state championships is
to quote unquote boys who were allowed to compete against them.
These two boys have won fifteen girls state championships that
were held up by ten females in the previous year.

(01:24:49):
I tried to search some of these keywords to find
exactly what they were talking about. The first result was
from the reputable news publication, the Daily Signal, which is
a Heritage Foundation puppet site. The article is just listing
like a handful of like trans girls across the country
who participated in school sports.

Speaker 3 (01:25:07):
And that's like, that's like all it is.

Speaker 9 (01:25:09):
And then of particular interest to James this next sentence, Oh, god,
man who entifies some transgender Well, that's that's an interesting one.
A man whoifies as a transgender has also won the
women's cycling World's title.

Speaker 10 (01:25:26):
I know who they're talking about here. This is someone
called for Runica Ivy. She was formerly known as Rachel
McKinnon when she won the world title. Okay, she won
a UCI Women's Master's Track World Championship. If you want
to find an event where gender affirming hormones are used
on a regular basis, I suggest you check out the
Men's Masters World Track Championship because every fucking year one

(01:25:51):
of those dudes gets popped for using testosterone, and like,
I don't see that in the Heritage Foundation's complaints, Like
this is just asshole, really, they've she has been a
particular target for these people. Cycling has been a particular
target for these people for a very long time, and
it's very funny that they continue to like put out

(01:26:13):
this propaganda which completely misunderstands, like the things that let
you win the Master's Track World Championship are having money
and having time. Like it is inherently unfair. It's it's
a hobby sport right thirty five to forty four. There
are not professional athletes in that age group like the
people doing this. So the people who have the time

(01:26:34):
and the money, they buy the fancy bikes, they travel
to the race. It's if you care, if you care
about fairness in masters cycling, there are a million other
places to go after it.

Speaker 3 (01:26:42):
This is bullshit.

Speaker 9 (01:26:44):
Well it's so, it's so transparent because now the biggest
trans sports controversy has been over a cisgender woman who
just is appearing too masculine, right, Like, like the biggest,
the biggest controversy in this whole trans women and sports
thing at the Olympics ear earlier this year is just

(01:27:04):
actually assis gender woman.

Speaker 10 (01:27:06):
Yeah, but that's the whole thing, right, Like policing the
way people present their gender is what this is about
for them.

Speaker 9 (01:27:13):
Yeah, and they're willing to throw anyone under the bus
as long as it like puts forward like whatever disinformation
they want, with the sole purpose of just changing public opinion,
not actually like caring about any of the people involved.

Speaker 10 (01:27:26):
Here, Yeah, but like a return to like I don't
even think traditional gender roles, but like, let's just say
nineteen thirties gender roles, not even nineteen thirties, right, there
were women fighting in the Spanishil War in the nineteen thirties.

Speaker 4 (01:27:37):
Victorian England gender roles.

Speaker 10 (01:27:39):
Yeah, totally, like it is what they want, and like
they're not throwing emonically funded a bus so much she
is part of a target because she's not a girly
enough girl. Right, she's a woman who punches other people
in the face, and like that's not collateral damage to me.
Like that is part of their thing, right, it's not

(01:28:00):
coincidental that it was a box set.

Speaker 3 (01:28:02):
It's part of their larger political project.

Speaker 8 (01:28:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:28:05):
Yeah, And obviously it's also their conception of womanhood is
also highly racialized. Yes, obvious reasons.

Speaker 10 (01:28:12):
Yeah, it's not coincidental there's an African woman, right.

Speaker 9 (01:28:15):
No, many of the transgirls who are listed in the
Daily Signal article, or transgirls of color. Yeah, that is
who they're going after. They're going after like the most
oppressed person and you can be in the country.

Speaker 3 (01:28:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:28:26):
Now on onto one of our final chapters, How transgenderism
affects your personal liberty.

Speaker 3 (01:28:32):
Transgenderism, that's the good to one.

Speaker 9 (01:28:34):
Transgender policies also violate our freedom speech and freedom of
conscience by forcing people to speak or act in ways
contrary to their personal judgment and deeply held beliefs. In
New York City, you can be fined up to two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars for misgendering.

Speaker 3 (01:28:50):
What's the citation that they do have a citation? Okay,
hit me.

Speaker 9 (01:28:55):
They do go to the NYC Commission, and this isn't true.
Despite the citation, they're trying to take like a city
ordinance and twist it to make it sound like you
will be fined a quarter of a million dollars for
calling some of the wrong pronouns. And that's not where
the audience is. Yeah, it's employment law, right, correct. It
was first written in the early two thousands. It was

(01:29:16):
then revised in twenty fifteen. I'm going to quote from
Snopes quote discrimination it gets a transgender individual could resultant
finds to up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
But these fines won't be handed out for acidentally misusing pronouns.
According to the new guidelines, the Commission can impose civil
penalties up to one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars
for violations of the law, and, in extreme circumstances, two
hundred and fifty thousand for violations that are the result

(01:29:39):
of willful, wanton, and malicious conduct. Yeah, this is for
like employment discrimination.

Speaker 4 (01:29:45):
Yeah, employment discrimination happens literally all the time, and it
never there's almost ever.

Speaker 3 (01:29:50):
Consequences for it. Yeah, but that's where this number comes from.

Speaker 10 (01:29:54):
Right, And it's completely misleading to suggest it like the
work police to get to find you.

Speaker 9 (01:29:59):
Correct, And it's not for misusing pronouns. It's for like
extreme cases of like continuous harassment or like like like
legal discrimination. The next sentence is, quote, both a high
school teacher and a college professor have been sanctioned by
their employers for using biologically correct terms with their students.

Speaker 3 (01:30:19):
Did Jordan Peterson?

Speaker 9 (01:30:21):
Now, obviously those terms are not biologically correct because you
can scientifically change your biological sex. And what they're talking
about here is no just teachers who are just like
harassing their students, who are like calling them by like
the wrong name, calling them by the wrong pronouns. Like
if you did that like assist person over time, Yeah,
you would also get in trouble because that's just like harassment.

Speaker 10 (01:30:40):
Yeah yeah, And like you're just a shit teacher. If
you're fucking going after your students for who they are,
then yeah, you probably shouldn't be a teacher.

Speaker 9 (01:30:49):
They then talk about how transactivists are trying to get
medical providers to provide like gender affirming healthcare. They're complaining
how how Catholic hospitals are getting in trouble for not
wanting to do gender firming health care. They talk about
like an Obama mandate that forces health care plans to
cover gender firming health care and making sure that physicians

(01:31:12):
actually have to do it even if they personally don't
want to be like, no, this is like your job,
you have to provide health care. So they complain about
all that kind of stuff, and then the last section
of the pamphlet is on child development. Transmitter ideology is
now promoted in schools for children are taught that gender
is fluid, falls long a spectrum, and is detached from
bodily sex. In addition, activists seek to punish anyone who

(01:31:34):
expresses any reservations about radical treatment plans for gender dysphoric children.
These plans can include socially transitioning children as young as four,
administering puberty blocking drugs as young as nine, cross sex
hormones is eng as fourteen, and surgery as young as eighteen.
This ideology threatens parental rights. In Ohio, a Catholic family
lost custody of their daughter when they oppose treatment of

(01:31:56):
gender dysphoria with cross sex hormones. So, actually this is
actually a pretty good breakdown of like how gender like
affirming healthcare could work, because yeah, if a kid wants
to like socially start transitioning very young and they want to, yes,
that's great, there's no harm in that. If getting on
puberty blockers at around nine, that makes sense, hormones as

(01:32:18):
a teenager, yeah, and surgery maybe a little bit later. Yeah,
that all seems quite quite reasonable. And in terms of
this Catholic family, So a transfer of parents lost custody
of their seventeen year old trans son in twenty eighteen
after inducing suicidal ideation for refusing to let their child
receive hormone therapy prescribed by a medical team who had

(01:32:39):
been treating the child for two years. Custody was transferred
to his grandparents. So this wasn't the state just like
stealing this child away. It's like, no, you're like basically
abusing this kid. So we're going to move custody over
to the grandparents. Also, like you're opposing this for a
seventeen year old, this is almost like a full legal adult.
I'm going to quote from CNN here quote. The parents'
attorney had argued that the child was no not even

(01:33:00):
quote close to being able to make such a life
altering decision at this time. Unquote, The county prosecuting attorney
argued that the parents wanted to stop the treatment because
it violated their religious beliefs unquote. So yeah, you're so
scared that this seventeen year old is going to make
a choice that you personally find a little bit icky,
like cob on.

Speaker 10 (01:33:18):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can legally imantipate yourself at seventeen, right.

Speaker 9 (01:33:22):
Yeah, and usually you have like medical freedom, at least
in Oregon, you have medical freedom at sixteen. I don't
know what the case by case basis is in a
lot of states. Yeah, but that's that's pretty fucked up.

Speaker 8 (01:33:33):
Now.

Speaker 9 (01:33:33):
There is nothing in the coverage about the family being Catholic.
Heritage might be conflating this other story from Indiana where
Catholic family lost custody of their trans kid in twenty
twenty one for alleged child abuse, and then earlier this year,
the Supreme Court declined to hear the parents' case.

Speaker 3 (01:33:51):
So, so there you go, big a health for them.

Speaker 9 (01:33:54):
They then talk about quote unquote research, what the research
says about transition, The view that social medical transition is
the appropriate treatment for people, including children who feel at
odds with their biological sex is becoming more widely accepted. However,
transitioning treatment, including puberty blocking hormones for children and sex
change surgeries for teens and adults, come with serious consequences. Today,

(01:34:17):
parents are told that puberty blockers and cross sex hormones
may be the only way to prevent their child from
committing suicide. However, according to the DSM five, as many
as ninety eight percent of gender confused boys and eighty
eight percent of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological
sex after naturally passing through puberty. Okay, let's go over

(01:34:37):
this because there's some weird phrasing here.

Speaker 3 (01:34:39):
Because no, that's not it.

Speaker 9 (01:34:41):
That's all with the DSM actually, says a writer named
Micah b broke down this claim in a medium post
from twenty eighteen. This exact sentence has been reused a
lot of like writing publications over time. So accept their
biological sex after naturally passing through puberty is a very
loaded raise. Like a child who suffers from genitisphoria may

(01:35:03):
receive treatment, whether that's through like like speech therapy, like
talking about it with a therapist, or hormone blockers, and
they may then choose to cease treatment and go through
their natural puberty, right like that is, but yeah, that's
not them like like one unquote like naturally passing through puberty.
Like no, that that also involves a degree of treatment. Now,

(01:35:24):
the reason why these numbers might be a little bit
kind of odd, and also they're just false like the
way that they're like being framed here, but in particular
for kids, like the criteria for children having genitusphoria is
different from the criteria for teens and adults, right, does
mean different things. They also say as many as ninety
eight percent. Many reason I say because the DSM five

(01:35:51):
actually says that quote in natal males, persistence has ranged
from two point two percent to thirty percent. In natal
female else, persistance has ranged from twelve percent to fifty percent.
So they took the lowest possible number and switched the
stat around by saying that as many as ninety eight
percent eventually accept their quote unquote biological sex. So that's

(01:36:16):
that's a cute little little flip around. And then also,
according to the DSM, a majority of boys sixty three
to one hundred percent who quote unquote grow out of
gender dysphoria just later turn out to be gay. Right,
there is a difference between like gender dysphoria versus like
gender deviance. That's why you, Yeah, you should like work
with an actual medical team if you have like a

(01:36:36):
kid who's like pre puberty, who has a degree of
gender variance, because yeah, that could result in a whole
bunch of a whole bunch of things, and the fact
that some of them just grew up to be like
gay kids is like the result of like successful medical treatment,
and like it's like like a loving family. Like that
is a good outcome. Similarly, the DSM says that thirty
two to fifty percent of girls whose gender dysphoria does

(01:36:58):
not persist later identify as gay.

Speaker 3 (01:37:01):
So there we go.

Speaker 9 (01:37:03):
That's pretty pretty pretty average stuff. They then go onto
list all of the quote unquote side effects of gender
affirming treatment, saying, quote meanwhile, radical gender affirming therapies post
serious medical risks, including disfiguring acne, high blood pressure, weight gain,
abnormal glucose tolerance, breast cancer, liver disease, thermioprosis, and cardiovascular disease.

(01:37:27):
These are all the consequences of just puberty. Yeah, Like,
depending on what puberty you go through. Yeah, it's gonna
have different effects. That's just how puberty worries. Yeah, they
also include uh and of course sterility, and this is
still a hotly debated topic. There's some recent studies that
show that there's actually a pretty good chance of people

(01:37:50):
who go on estrogen being able to regain fertility after
after like six months of ceasing treatment. It's not consistent, right,
everyone who everyone who go on like HRT has an
understanding that it can affect how they reproduce in the future.
You're definitely encouraged to, like if you want to have
kids or think you might want to have kids in

(01:38:11):
the future, Like you can save your sperms, you can
save your eggs, you can you can get that stuff
ahead of time. Yeah, but this is also something that
people are like working on of being able to like
maintain the ability to have kids even like during or
like after gender affirming health care treatment has like commenced,
So that's cool. Finally, quote, puberty blocking therapies and cross

(01:38:34):
sex hormones are non reversible, largely untested, and highly dangerous,
especially for children. We've already we've already talked about how
all of that is not true. We've already gone through
all of that. Sex assignment surgeries have not been shown
to reduce the extraordinarily high rate of suicide attempts among
people who identify as transgender forty one percent compared to
the general population's four point six percent. So this is

(01:38:55):
also just like not true, Like everything, it's just not true. Also,
there's no there's no citation here. A fear of you
studying the Journal of Adlast and Health found that hormone
therapy for trans youth reduced the rate of depression and
suicide by forty percent. It also found that having like
parental support during this process also heavily impacts the effectiveness

(01:39:16):
of this treatment, specifically on depression and suicide. Like, if
you're going through this treatment and your parents still hate you, yeah,
that's going to actually, it's going to hurt the ability
of this healthcare to actually be effective mentally. An investigation
by doctors of the University of Washington found that trans
youth who received gender affirming health care reduced their risk
of suicide by seventy three percent compared to those who

(01:39:36):
do not receive care, and a policy brief in the
VA wrote quote, since nineteen seventy five, more than two
thousand scientific studies have examined gender affirming care, supported by
over thirty leading medical associations, including the World Health Organization
and the American Medical Association, gender affirming care is deemed
evidence based and effective at reducing suicide rates. This is

(01:39:58):
all widely understood. This is such like an objectionable stance
that even famous woke institution the VA, is like, yeah, no,
it's actually really effective. Okay, And now actually, finally for
this pamphletic quote, the most helpful therapies for children experiencing
gender dysphoria do not try to remake the body to

(01:40:18):
conform with thoughts and feelings, which is impossible, not impossible,
but rather but rather to help people find healthy ways
to manage their tension and move towards accepting the reality
of their bodies. Unfortunately, fifteen states have passed laws of
banning talk therapy for miners who struggle with gender dysphoria,

(01:40:41):
and there's a bill in Congress which would do the same.
There's no bill banning talk therapy. This is a conversion
therapy ban. This isn't This isn't like actual talk therapy,
which is a part of like actual healthcare treatment. This
is against like conversion therapy. That is what they're actually
talking about. So that is the bulk of the pan
I also got given this other kind of I think

(01:41:03):
it's called a fact sheet, which is ironic by the
Heritage Action Group, which is the kind of lobbying activist
arm branch of Heritage. It goes over a whole bunch
of like the same stuff. They particularly don't like that
the Department of Education released a report banning the use
of offensive and inappropriate terms like mother and father in school.

Speaker 3 (01:41:24):
This isn't true.

Speaker 9 (01:41:25):
What they're talking about is that there's been a push
to include just more gender neutral language, like instead of
saying your mom and dad, just say parents. Like yeah,
that makes sense. Yeah, that's that's specifically what they're complaining about.
They complain about like books and schools. They call the
Gender Queer Graphic Novel a book riddled with pornographic and

(01:41:46):
pedophilic content.

Speaker 3 (01:41:47):
Not true. It's just simply isn't true.

Speaker 9 (01:41:51):
All these kind of old lies that we have talked
about on the show like many times before. And then
they also just rehash a whole bunch of of the
claims from the other pamphlet They talk about the claim
that in Virginia a girl was actually assaulted by a
teen boy pretending to be a girl. And this is
not an isolated incident. We've talked about that claim before.
This was a fake story invented by the Daily Wire.
This person was not trans. This was someone who was

(01:42:13):
in a relationship with this girl who's actually assaulted her
in a bathroom. Not a transperson, just a regular cysgender male.
And then they talk about sports. They talk about how
men have more upper body mass, and that puberty blockers
do not change height, organ size, skeletal structure, muscle mass,
or any of the biological characteristics that make men unequal

(01:42:34):
opponents as hormones. Literally, they just list all the things
that hormones actually change, like they actually famously do change
all of those things. Height, skeletal structure, organ size, and
muscle mass. Those are the main things.

Speaker 3 (01:42:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:42:47):
I mean, if that wasn't the case, you could just
take testosterone and you it wouldn't affect you.

Speaker 9 (01:42:52):
Apparently, Yeah, famously, testosterone never changes your muscle mass.

Speaker 3 (01:42:57):
Yeah, just just and soundstronger man who never benefit.

Speaker 9 (01:43:00):
They also complain about how the Biden administration is wanted
people to use preferred pronouns if you work in government,
which is again is just trying to stop people from
like harassing by using the wrong pronouns. It's it's all
just ways to prevent harassment. And they complain about all
that kind of stuff as well. So it's a lot
of the same stuff from the pamphlets. A it's a
pretty fun little fact sheet. Those are the two main

(01:43:20):
pamphlets that were going around the RNC about gender ideology.
That was kind of the most in depth it ever got.
Most of the speeches did not even get into any specifics.
They just like threw out keywords fractual like discussion, this is,
this is this is the most in depth stuff they had.
So this is largely like the bulk of like the
average RNC attendees knowledge. This is actually probably more in

(01:43:41):
depth than most average RNC attendees, at least in terms
of what Heritage is putting out publicly, that is, their
talking points, any any kind of closing thoughts here.

Speaker 3 (01:43:49):
Just dog shit. I didn't know what to say. Yeah,
it's really quite bad.

Speaker 9 (01:43:55):
It's not my favorite, but honestly, I think it's just
so poorly written and I don't know how effective this
is it could be a lot more transphobic. Oddly enough,
they have a lot of like the same lies that
the right has been like workshopping around certain claims around
like trans healthcare and specifically how it relates to like kids.
But I honestly don't see this as a very effective
messaging for heritage.

Speaker 3 (01:44:17):
Yeah, I think it is that, like.

Speaker 10 (01:44:20):
It's that pathway to hate thing, you know that, like
your grandchild has a nose pacing? How do you deal
with this? Yes, that like it. It's it's not if
you come at it too hard, people are going to
be like what the fuck?

Speaker 3 (01:44:33):
But it gets people there.

Speaker 8 (01:44:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:44:36):
I also want to go over this because like we're
gonna be entering the holiday season pretty soon, so whatever
whatever Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners you're forced to attend. Yeah,
you know, if if people start talking with that kind
of stuff, it's probably gonna be claims that are similar
to some of the stuff in here. And these things
are like very easy to like research, especially all of

(01:44:57):
the like puberty blocking stuff like that. There's the it's
so easy to be like this just isn't true, And
most of them just have no idea because if the
information they're getting is in line with this kind of thing.
It is just an alternate reality that that they are
living in. Yeah, and some of them are fueled by
like actual ideological hatred, and some of them are just
actually legitimately just like misinformed.

Speaker 3 (01:45:16):
And that's something.

Speaker 9 (01:45:17):
I can't tell you how your family thinks, because I
don't know your family, but it is it is a
good thing to to like keep in mind that there
is ways to talk about some of the sort of things.
There's also if you just want to avoid it, avoid
it all together and play Nintendo in the basement during
Thanksgiving dinner with your cousins.

Speaker 3 (01:45:35):
That's also.

Speaker 9 (01:45:36):
Yeah, sometimes the move yeap support that. Well, this has
been exciting. We will see you again probably tomorrow for
more breaking news.

Speaker 3 (01:45:50):
And it is news that breaks you slowly of time.
That is that is our demo, News that breaks you.

Speaker 10 (01:45:56):
Yeah, Hi everyone, and welcome to it could happen here.

(01:46:24):
I'm James and today I am joined by Billy Ford
from the United States Institute Piece.

Speaker 3 (01:46:30):
Third time podcast guest Billy, how many.

Speaker 7 (01:46:33):
Think it's my second?

Speaker 3 (01:46:34):
Thanks for second?

Speaker 10 (01:46:35):
Okay, Yeah, well I'll give you a bonus one. Yeah,
and we're here to discuss the revolution in me Emma
and bring you up to date on conflict stuff and
natural disasters stuff and answer some questions people have asked
me by emailing me. So, yeah, thanks for joining us, Biddy.
We're at another crossroads in the conflicts we talked about

(01:46:56):
before we started recording. Can you preaps explain to folks like,
what has happened since ten twenty seven Part two?

Speaker 8 (01:47:03):
Sure?

Speaker 5 (01:47:04):
Yeah, I mean, I think last time we talked, we
were just kind of in the throes of the initial
ten twenty seven phase. I mean, I think zooming out
for a second, the you know, February twenty twenty one coup,
September seventh, twenty twenty one, defensive wars announced and armed
resistance really kicks off. And then twenty twenty three October

(01:47:27):
things really escalate. After a few years of steady gains
by the resistance, then there was a major level change
and the trajectory of the war favoring the resistance forces.

Speaker 1 (01:47:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:47:38):
I think, as you mentioned, there was a second phase
of ten twenty seven in July in early August that.

Speaker 7 (01:47:46):
Took took things kind of to another level.

Speaker 5 (01:47:49):
Although it is kind of just a continuation of a
sustained push by the resistance. I think some have perceived
these moments of October twenty twenty three, inly August two
point four adds real watershed moments. But I think we
can see how these are illustrative or broader trends, trends

(01:48:09):
in which the m R military is losing its capability
to defend strategic positions, it's inability to counter attack on
the resistance side, much greater coordination among resistance armed stakeholders,
growing fighting capability, better weapons access, all these sorts of
factors that have swung the balance of military power further

(01:48:32):
in the favor of resistance forces. But essentially what happened
in July and August was building off of the October advances,
the resistance in northern Shan State, not far from the
Chinese border, pushed further into central Miandmar in collaboration. This
was essentially ethnic based armed organizations collaborating with Bamar People's

(01:48:53):
Defense Forces under the command structure of the National Unity Government,
and they have started making advances into sent to Burma.
So whereas the initial phase of the war and the
enug strategy was to focus on building relationships between the
People's Defense forces under their command with ethnic based armed
organizations and focusing strategically on the peripheries to build those relationships,

(01:49:17):
to build ethnic buy into the broader revolution, to get
access to weapons, and to make SEADI advances. Now we're
at a phase where the resistance is pushing into central Meanmar.
Now the focus is on the city of Mandalay and
central Burma, which is the biggest commercial center of the country.
So yeah, I mean this has sparked another phase of

(01:49:40):
I think pressure and anxiety within Napida and the capital
among the state Administrative council hunta leadership and more energy
on the resistance side, And it's kind of it's it's
occurred alongside advances on multiple other fronts. I mean in
the very north of the country state, starting in March,
the Kachin for has pushed the Memoral military out of it.

(01:50:03):
It was two hundred posts within four months. Similarly in
Rakhine State, which I think, well maybe we'll touch on more. Yeah,
they are account army has made steady advances. So it's
not just in these subregions. It's happening virtually all over
the country at this point.

Speaker 10 (01:50:17):
Yeah, it does seem and like clearly the essays the
Hunter is kind of on the back foot, like it
started to forcibly conscript people, which in turn kind of
get people a choice between the resistance or the military,
and seems like more of them a choosing their resistance.
Some of the conscriptions, you know, people can buy out
of them, which obviously causes not great for the morale

(01:50:39):
of the population. And that's combined with shortages and inflation.
Pretty shit situation for folks living under Hunter.

Speaker 5 (01:50:46):
Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean, I think the memor of military.
I mean there's a big question here about like the
resilience of this mea or military. I mean, frankly in
militaries in other countries have collapsed in are much less pressure.
So there's a question here about like what is holding
this all together, particularly given that its primary resilience factors

(01:51:07):
are heavily degraded. I mean things like it's ideological value.
I mean, it's historically been about but we hold the
country together, we manage the diversity of this complex country,
we defend the Bamar and the Buddhist populations. These factors
are no longer credible. I think it's more than one
hundred thousand homes in central Burma have been burned to

(01:51:28):
the grounds. Most of those are Bamar Buddhists, and you
know someone in the Sanga have risen up. The Buddhist
Songa have risen up in protests, including a recent killing
of a senior monk. So I think that ideological foundation
is totally degraded. The other factors, which are economic, the
economic benefits of being in this institution are also withering,
as like the entire economy is collapsing as your reference.

(01:51:51):
And then the third component is like the social status
that want to cheese through. Being a member of this
institution used to be a place where you could get
economic benefits and social benefits, and now it's really neither.
I mean, you're reviled or a target for resistance assassination
if you're affiliated with the institution. So I think the
question remains as so like what are the key factors

(01:52:12):
keeping it in place given all of these pressures that
it's facing. And happy to go into that, but I
think there it's an interesting case study in institutional resilience
and the challenges faced by a resistance movement that has
major resource constraints and you're fighting up against a military
institution that has learned how to orchestrate and sustain authoritarian

(01:52:37):
governance structures for decades.

Speaker 10 (01:52:39):
So yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we can maybe circle
back to that. One thing I did want to talk
about before we move on to talking about what's happening
in recind State, is I wanted to talk about the
recent flooding that people will have probably seen if they
have these friends on social media or keep it keep
an eye on publications in a region. Can you explain

(01:52:59):
a little bit of about like the scale of the
flooding and it absolutely bungled, if any response from NAPE
door Sure.

Speaker 5 (01:53:06):
Yeah, I think the latest figures that I've seen were
one hundred and sixty thousand displaced, six hundred and thirty
affected by the floods, two one hundred.

Speaker 7 (01:53:15):
And thirty dead, and seventy missing. I think that's what
I saw this morning.

Speaker 5 (01:53:18):
But yeah, I mean I think that gives you a
sense that this is another humanitarian catastrophe on top of
a I think what is now rated the second most
intent violent conflict in the world by Accolade.

Speaker 7 (01:53:31):
So this is just one crisis on top of another.

Speaker 5 (01:53:35):
And yeah, as you kind of alluded to, the Memora
military is incapable and in unwilling to kind of address
the needs here of the population.

Speaker 7 (01:53:45):
I mean, the one factor is that they.

Speaker 5 (01:53:47):
Don't have territorial control to move resources if they had
the political will to provide assistance.

Speaker 7 (01:53:53):
But of course they're doing the exact opposite.

Speaker 5 (01:53:56):
In some of the most flood affected parts of the country,
they are continuing to conduct.

Speaker 7 (01:54:01):
Air strikes on civilian populations.

Speaker 5 (01:54:03):
Yeah, I mean it's it's just kind of a level
of brutality that's kind of hard to have them. But yeah,
I mean there's all these other kind of ancillary effects
of this. I think there's signs of a cholera outbreak
and young gone. The economic conditions, as you mentioned a
little bit earlier, are horrendous. I mean, like the economy
is a lost thirty percent of its value, and it's

(01:54:23):
not a rich country to begin with. Inflation is I
think thirty two percent year on year, with the memoar
Chat having lost two hundred percent of its value, I mean, yeah,
it's two.

Speaker 7 (01:54:34):
Hundred percent less value than it was. Yeah, So this
is like, you know, it's.

Speaker 5 (01:54:39):
Just one catastrophe on top of another, and it's really
testing the memur public's capacity to kind of support one another,
which is that's really been the incredible story here, and
it's not the first time that the Memmour military, the
governing stakeholder, has failed to meet the needs, and that
moment of crisis. Of course, Psycho Nargis, one of the

(01:55:01):
worst natural disasters in the region's history, was another instance
in which the memor military refused international assistance and kind
of instrumentalized humanitarian catastrophe for political aims.

Speaker 8 (01:55:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:55:16):
Yeah, and I think people it's worth reading up on
that if you're interested in like the sort of longer
term history of the conflict and of sort of the
military and Memma. Maybe now it's a good time to
take a break and we'll come back and discuss a
little bit about Rakine State.

Speaker 3 (01:55:40):
And we're back, okay.

Speaker 10 (01:55:42):
So I think if people follow the conflict, they will
have probably seen like a series of conflicting and confusing
articles and messages about what's going on.

Speaker 3 (01:55:53):
In Rakind today.

Speaker 10 (01:55:54):
And some of that is because there's not a great
deal of reporting in the English language, deal of sources
in the English language, and even if there is, that
none of us can really make it to Rakine State
right now. Going through Bangladesh would be quite quite a
challenging thing to do at this time, and so I
guess we should start breaking down if people aren't aware

(01:56:15):
the people who live and have lived for a long
time in Racine State and the conflicts have fixed it
between them and the Burmese state.

Speaker 7 (01:56:22):
Sure yeah, I.

Speaker 5 (01:56:22):
Mean ro Kinda State borders Bangladesh on the western side
of your marts along coastal border as well, and the
site of some of the largest extractive oil and gas projects,
including the terminal for a major gas pipeline that feeds
fourteen percent of u Non Province's GP, So it has
huge strategic value.

Speaker 7 (01:56:42):
It's also China's aiming.

Speaker 5 (01:56:45):
To kind of access the Indian Ocean and circumvent the
Strait of Malacca by going directly to this kind of
regional the country, so it's highly strategically important. But it's
also I think it's the second poorest state in the
entire country and arguably the most conflict affected.

Speaker 7 (01:57:05):
At least since twenty twelve ish.

Speaker 5 (01:57:08):
So the population of rakind State is highly diverse, kind
of the last year to have the broader countries demographics.
It includes a Bamar population, which is the dominant ethnic
group at the national level. The ethnic majority is kind
there's I mean, historically a very large Muslim population of
Rawhinjo Muslims primarily, but also other Muslim minority groups including

(01:57:32):
Kaman Muslims, and then a number of other smaller ethnic
minority groups Mramaji, Kami and others, as well as a
small Hindu population. So you can kind of get the
sense that this is a highly diverse space. I mean,
many of the listeners will have heard twenty sixteen twenty seventeen,
Go was the site of a massive clearance operation and

(01:57:53):
the genocide of Rhinja Muslims, about seven hundred and fifty
thousand of whom were pushed into Bangladesh, and all of
them are still there.

Speaker 7 (01:58:02):
Inhabiting the largest refugee camp in the world.

Speaker 5 (01:58:05):
Yeah, I mean overall conditions for the Hinja, It's hard
to imagine a more difficult set of conditions. The Bangladesh
government is quite impatient, having hosted many hundreds of thousands
of Arhinja, some for seven years but others for actually
for much longer than that. As twenty sixteen twenty seventeen

(01:58:28):
was a moment in a genocide, but there have been
instances of memoir military atrocities against the Hindu population dating
back to the nineteen seventies as well. So this is
a long term kind of situation in which the Bangladesh
have been hosting Rehinja And yeah, I mean I think
conditions in those camps are really really challenging. The major

(01:58:49):
issue now is the arising and security in the camps,
as some Rhinja militia groups have gained ascendency in the camps,
most of which have very little public support.

Speaker 7 (01:59:00):
Population should be noted.

Speaker 5 (01:59:02):
The major dynamic that that's happened recently, I mean the
Arakan Army, which is almost entirely of Kine ethnic groups
and has broad public support among the Rakaine population of
Rikine State, has made massive advances across Rakine State and
now controls virtually all of northern Rakine State and is
pushing south. It took the city of Tondue and the airport,

(01:59:25):
which is the first time a resistance group had taken
an airport. It recently took a naval base, the first
time that has ever happened in the history of the
Memory military. And now it's pushing as far south as Guas,
potentially threatening to control the entire state.

Speaker 7 (01:59:39):
So as this has.

Speaker 5 (01:59:41):
Occurred, the MIMR military is in a state of complete panic,
and as it is losing forces on this front but
also on numerous other fronts, it has attempted to kind
of buttress its forces through force conscription and in the
most potentially the most horrifying move, it is forcibly conscripted

(02:00:02):
the Rowhinja into the MR military. They conducted genocide against
the Rhinda population and now they are forcing them to
wear the uniform of their genocider. It's kind of a
level of horror that's hard to understand. And one way
in which they've undertaken this effort is by collaborating with

(02:00:22):
Rehindra militia forces including ARSA, the Salvation Army and the
Rhindra Saldarity Organization ARSO, which have presence in the camps
and have been facilitating recruitment from the camps. So the
primary aim here as a military one, but a secondary aim,
which is really critical it is undermining inter cohesion in

(02:00:43):
kind state because ultimately, like the MR military operates through coercion,
force and violence, but also through fragmentation so that it
doesn't face a unified resistance, and in this case they
want to incite instability by creating hatred between the Rhindra
and in population and building off of the vitriol that
had built over decades. So this is kind of a

(02:01:06):
new paradigm that everyone is trying to better understand.

Speaker 7 (02:01:10):
But yeah, it's it's kind of a new level of horror.

Speaker 10 (02:01:13):
Yeah, and it's particularly horrific. As you say, I think
sometimes there's a tendency, especially with people who perhaps are
not as familiar with the situation and history there, to
lump ethnic groups in as sort of monolithic actors, right
or homogeneous to be like, Okay, so they're a hinja
as represented by Arsa and the rso have joined the Hunter,
which is not the case. Like every Rhina person I

(02:01:35):
speak to, everyone I speak to in Cox's Bizarre shares
a loathing for those organizations. They're forced conscription of young people,
and yeah, their solidarity with the Hunter that committed the
genocide against and it continues to commit a genocide against
these people. And I think the first thing we need
to do is move away from that kind of homogeneous perspective.
But maybe we could explain there have been a few

(02:01:58):
accusations of the arkon Omy making attacks against a range
of people, right range of specifically Raine of people who
are not armed, who are not part of ours are. Yeah,
can you explain what we know and what we don't
know there?

Speaker 8 (02:02:14):
Sure?

Speaker 7 (02:02:14):
Yeah, I think there's just to start.

Speaker 5 (02:02:17):
There is a massive fog of war in Rekind state,
may be worse than any other part of the country,
so it is really difficult to disentangle fact from fiction here.
But I think there's pretty credible evidence that the army
have committed atrosities against Rahinda civilian populations. In early August,
there was a specific incident in which hundreds of Rahina

(02:02:39):
were killed in a drone strike, and Fortified Rights, which
is a human rights organization, conducted investigation to the incident
and asserts that the Arkon Army was responsible for that.
Of course, the AA disputes these claims. And I think
there's a few recent interviews with the commander in chief

(02:02:59):
of the army to nine where you know, he articulates
the side of the story, which you can find on
Irwadi dot com and I think in a few other
news outlets.

Speaker 10 (02:03:09):
Yeah, the diplomat did one as well. He's been on
a publicity tour, I guess recently.

Speaker 7 (02:03:15):
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 10 (02:03:16):
I don't know if you've seen this, but like his
his tendency to cool hinder people bangladeshis it is unfortunate
given that that's a language that was used to justify
the genocide.

Speaker 5 (02:03:26):
Right, absolutely, Yeah, it reflects kind of the language that
the Memora military used.

Speaker 3 (02:03:31):
Well, Bengali's he'll call them exactly. Yeah, it's very reflective
of that.

Speaker 7 (02:03:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:03:35):
So this is really challenging, and part because I think
that there is kind of an important distinction between the
Metamora military and the ark Army in this case, in
part because the ar Army has like raw public support
among the kind public, and so it has a more
of a legitimate stake to governance than the Memora military,

(02:03:55):
which has none. And so this is it's kind of
an issue that requires a tension and an honest accounting
of the facts and a long process of reconciliation or
because of the ark On Army is likely there to
stay as a governing stakeholder. So that is a really
tricky kind of set of conditions.

Speaker 7 (02:04:15):
And the other side of this is that the rekined public.

Speaker 5 (02:04:18):
I think there is a deep sense of a grievance
among the rekind public, and this is a population that
has also faced years of intense political alienation and persecution.

Speaker 7 (02:04:29):
Not to mention war and violence.

Speaker 5 (02:04:31):
You know, last year when Cyclo and Moca hit the
Kind State, the Memora military did virtually nothing to help them.
So it's a population with legitimate agrievances and they and
their perception is that the international community only focuses on
the revent of public's well being.

Speaker 7 (02:04:46):
And I think the international community can.

Speaker 5 (02:04:47):
Do a better job of showing sympathy for the rekined
public's interests. I think sympathy is not like zero sum
in that sense, and that needs to be done better.
But honestly, like the equating a grievances is also really
kind of unfair and dishonest. And you know, this Hindu
population is marginalized to just such an extreme degree.

Speaker 7 (02:05:08):
And so those are a really interesting report by Doctors
Without Borders not.

Speaker 5 (02:05:11):
Too long ago it that showed that only like six
hundred thousand of the two point eight million Rahinja in
the world within MR, fifty seven percent are living in
camps and Bangladesh or in IDP camps in Memr. So
it's like there's just like a highly vulnerable population that
has experienced genocide.

Speaker 7 (02:05:30):
You know, it's like there are there's a power imbalance, you.

Speaker 3 (02:05:32):
Know, So it's like, I think it's not the same.

Speaker 7 (02:05:35):
I don't know.

Speaker 5 (02:05:35):
The whole process of kind Rhinda reconciliation is one that
deserves immediate and urgent attention, but there's also a long
term process of constructing, you know, a governance structure that
is acceptable and that's not a highly exclusionary of Rhinda
and these sorts of things. So it's a it's a
highly and beyond the fact that like we need more

(02:05:58):
a deliberate investigation these incidents, I think a broader conversational
reconciliation and justice needs to needs to take place.

Speaker 10 (02:06:05):
Yeah, and it's definitely one at least, you know, I
speak to people who are probably on the more progressive
side of the resistance, and it's one that they've acknowledged,
like it's something that they need to address and kind
of the litmus test for like a post hunter me
and Mars, like are there places for these people who
they weren't places for in this state before? But yeah,

(02:06:26):
how we get there is it's difficult, and I don't
think that's not that's not a clear pathway that anyone's
kind of pointed to this yet Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:06:34):
The one thing I would add is like this is
sort of emblematic of broader perceptions of MEMR and approaches
to peace building a MEMR is that there's there's often
a horizontal approach that like we need to work on
the intercommunal level, individual level trust building that sort of thing,
And I think there is a place for that for sure.
But we've done a couple of pieces of research with

(02:06:57):
an academic at ug Austin who has found some really
interesting stuff about like the nature of conflict in the
country and nature of cohesion in the country. And she's
found including through some experimental research studies and designs which
are quite revealing. I think that national identity is often
more important to respondence in her surveys than ethnic identity,

(02:07:20):
which is which kind of cuts against like the traditional
perceptions of how MEMRA is, like, oh, it's this irreconcilable,
fractious place and it's so hard to build trust between communities.

Speaker 7 (02:07:30):
And that sort of thing.

Speaker 5 (02:07:31):
But her research kind of points to the vertical dimension
where it's the nature of memorpolitics and the nature of
governance structures that highly exclusionary, discriminatory governance structures have sustained
conflict for so long in the country, and this is
kind of like the main argument for the resistance. You know,
it's like a lot of the safeholders, at least a

(02:07:52):
critical mass within this resistance movement, they're trying to assert
a new political paradigm in the country, you know, a
more state about political paradigm in which the mem R
military is not a dominant stakeholder, in which violence is
not your source of power, yeah, and which that's not
built on exclusionary norms of belonging.

Speaker 7 (02:08:12):
So it's like it is generally a revolution.

Speaker 5 (02:08:14):
In this sense, and that is why they're they're kind
of pushing against the international pressures to enter into a
power sharing your dream with the MR military, because there's
a perception that if the MEMR military remains in a
position of political power, they will interrupt this reform process
and then violence will persist.

Speaker 7 (02:08:32):
In the country.

Speaker 3 (02:08:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:08:34):
Yeah, And I think that's probably a reasonable assumption to make. Like, again,
this is like one of those things that I see
a lot in different places in the world where I go, right,
that's this tendency to see things, I think from sort
of colonial perspective and just be like, oh, these ethnicities
will squabble and fight, and like that's not necessarily the
case at all, and like if you look even to

(02:08:55):
the PDFs, like I was speaking to someone the other
day who was saying, like, there're a job Mostlim women
fighting with the Koren right now, which is something that
doesn't align up with this idea of like ethnicities which
are clashing and can't combine.

Speaker 3 (02:09:10):
And we saw like.

Speaker 10 (02:09:12):
A statement of solidarity from the Kareni to the Kurdish people,
which doesn't line up with this idea of an inherently
Islamophobic like it you know, sort of massive of Buddhist
people in the Amma, which I think, yeah, it's a
little oversimplified to say that stuff, and I think sometimes reductive,
And it's the analysis of mean Mar like as a

(02:09:34):
place where colonialism is still occurring, and the methods of colonialism,
like lots of the things you describe right, like promoting fractures,
promoting these different ethnic identities which are seen as kind
of zero sum and mutually exclusive. These are things that
the United Kingdom did or Britain did all around the
world for centuries. And it's not rocket science to see

(02:09:56):
how that jumps to another group which especially in some
it is was trained by the British or had relations
with the British, and you know, to see how we
got there.

Speaker 3 (02:10:05):
But I think we'll take a little break here.

Speaker 10 (02:10:08):
We'll come back and I want to discuss the resilience
of the Hunter and how it's hanging on.

Speaker 3 (02:10:22):
All right, we're back.

Speaker 10 (02:10:23):
So for the last little segment of this podcast, I
would like to discuss how the Burmese military is holding
onto power. When I speak to soldiers who have defected,
I speak, I've spoken to about half a dozen I
guess soldiers who have defected over time. It's almost comic
how disorganized and chaotic things are, and at the same

(02:10:45):
time it's terrible the way, like every single one of
them has described to me that their families are essentially
held as collateral to stop them deserting, right, and so
they had to work with the civil disobedience movement to
first extract their families before they themselves took their weapons
in most cases because they get a bounty for their
weapons and went to join their resistance or in some

(02:11:06):
cases went into exile. So like, maybe that gives us
a good view on how the Hunter is. It's continuing
to force people to fight in this war that it's losing.
Can you explain a little bit of how they've held
onto power?

Speaker 5 (02:11:19):
Sure, yeah, I guess the first thing to note is
that rates of defection are totally historic.

Speaker 7 (02:11:24):
I mean, yeah, there's by.

Speaker 5 (02:11:26):
Our account, about fifteen thousand deserters, which is actually not radically.

Speaker 7 (02:11:32):
Different than historical norms.

Speaker 5 (02:11:33):
The mem or military has comparatively high rates of desertion
even before the coup, so that's not far outside of
the norm. But the defection, I think there's about fifty
eight hundred defectors by our account since the coup, which
is unprecedented. There's never never really been defection to resistance
in memr's history. The other factor is the number of

(02:11:56):
individuals who are surrendering without a fight with you know,
with with putting up little resistance. That number is hard
to count, but it's by our by our raid, it
seems to be quite high. There's forms of acts of
disloyalty occurring that are not you know, spurring institutional collapse,
but are that are degrading the memoir of military's fighting capabilities,

(02:12:20):
which is.

Speaker 7 (02:12:20):
A really important dynamic. So say that at the outset outset.

Speaker 5 (02:12:23):
The other thing i'd say is that, like I think
we need to sort of think about this at three levels. So,
like the rank and file soldiers, they are significantly demoralized.
Most did not join the military to fight. They joined
the military for economic stability and for social status, and
neither of those are available to them under this military's leadership.

(02:12:46):
They certainly did not join to commit atrocities against the
Bamar Buddhist population, which is now what they're enforced to.
So I think that population, the large number of rank
and file soldiers, is highly demoralized, and that's where you
have seen lots of desertion defection, often from the front lines.
Though that population's defection desertion is not going to trigger

(02:13:06):
institutional collapse.

Speaker 7 (02:13:07):
At the second level, you have like a commander, Core, Major,
Major and above.

Speaker 5 (02:13:12):
And these I think since Operation ten twenty seven you've
seen their morale to drop. And I mean there's been
the fall of Last Show and the loss of the
Northeast Regional Command, the first time in the Manor's history
that a regional command's been taken. That has sent shockways
through the commander level. The other thing is that min Onlign,

(02:13:35):
the Commander in chief in his attempt to consolidate power
and protect himself from from internal fragmentation.

Speaker 7 (02:13:44):
He's rotating commanders.

Speaker 5 (02:13:47):
Based on loyalty, not based on effectiveness, which is also
degrading the Memora military's fighting capability. But it's also that's
maybe one reason why you have seen less acts of
disloyalty within that layer at the senior level. I mean
most most of those senior Memorr military officials who are
based in Apida, I think they until the fall of

(02:14:08):
Latio and the resistance moving into Mandalay, there was relatively
high levels of sense of security and morale was okay,
I suppose, But the fall of Las SiO and the
ensuing events has really inflamed internal frustration from what we understand.
So this has also triggered some shifts in the way

(02:14:29):
in which the MEMR military operates its patronage structures. So
traditionally the patriot in structure is essentially like a feudal state.
I mean, you have like a commander in chief that
is extremely powerful, has authority to rotate or fire or
arrest virtually anyone.

Speaker 7 (02:14:44):
I mean, just huge amounts of powers centralized there.

Speaker 5 (02:14:47):
The deputy commander in chief has little capability to challenge
the commander in chief's authority. But then you have these
regional commanders that operate as feudal lords.

Speaker 7 (02:14:56):
At the regional level.

Speaker 5 (02:14:58):
They're able to extract huge amount ounts of value or
wealth through attractive industries, illegal industries.

Speaker 7 (02:15:05):
All with total impunity.

Speaker 5 (02:15:06):
But often you know, with the approval of nepidal, and
that approval was often just given. Now it's less it's
less easily given. I mean, you've seen ninety senior officers
shuffled changed positions since the coup, and fifty have been
removed or arrested by our tracking, and you've also seen

(02:15:27):
individuals detained and arrested because I think there's fifteen kernels
or above, mostly brigadier generals and major generals who have
been arrested for business related activities.

Speaker 7 (02:15:40):
Which I think is emblematic of like the.

Speaker 5 (02:15:43):
Restructuring of the patrinage network and centralizing the patronage network
with men online himself. If you do not have his
personal approval, you cannot conduct business activities, including these highly
lucrative scam operations that are generating billions in value, but
also really frustrating that I need. So this whole patient
is structure which is critical to sustaining the Memora military

(02:16:06):
is being reoriented, and we'll see whether or not that
helps sustain the institution or introduces more instability.

Speaker 7 (02:16:12):
But ultimately, the forms.

Speaker 5 (02:16:13):
Of resilience I guess you would call it are the
ones maybe you pointed to.

Speaker 7 (02:16:18):
I mean they're structure. I mean it's like rotating officer.

Speaker 5 (02:16:21):
Commanders and senior officers regularly holding families hostage. Essentially, you know,
a soldier sent to the front lines, its family remains
in the barracks. Payment is often made to the families,
not to the front line's soldier, and there's retribution if
the frontline soldier defects or deserts.

Speaker 7 (02:16:41):
This is also where the fifty eight.

Speaker 5 (02:16:42):
Hundred number I mentioned earlier is likely I radical undercounting
because and also the fifteen thousand desertions because a lot
of people are recorded as KIA when they're.

Speaker 7 (02:16:52):
Actually they've deserted or defected.

Speaker 5 (02:16:55):
So anyways, I'm not sure if that answers your question,
which some thoughts relatively usually Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:17:00):
No, I think it does. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:17:02):
One of the guys I met with described basically his
entire I guess squad went out on a patrol and defected.
I guess the PDF have been I had to describe
it really, but it's basically shit talking them in their
barracks or like in their position for months. Right, They're like,
you see this a lot. It's a kind of unique
feature of the of the conflict in the MMR, like

(02:17:23):
guys with megaphones just being like, you can surrender if
you want. You know, your life is miserable. And I
guess in this case it worked. And yeah, they they
will be read to as kia they went out in
a patrol and never came back.

Speaker 5 (02:17:34):
But yeah, I guess the other dynamic is that, like
you need to align motivation and opportunity for defection desertion,
and the motivation is there in a lot of cases,
but opportunity is not. You know. The resistance is committing
some resources to this these efforts, but it's really limited
given the scale of the challenge. Yeah, there's a lot

(02:17:56):
of factors that need to kind of come together, like
the ability to see communicate with resistance, the ability to
move into resistance, all the areas of the perception that
we were accepted and not phase retribution, the perception that
living conditions are acceptable to them. You know, So there's
all these conditions and given the costs of defection desertion

(02:18:18):
which could be like major attribution against your family, and
deep uncertainty about leaving this institution that is kind of
a state within a state. That's why we're not seeing
the kind of large scale, commander level defection desertion I think.

Speaker 11 (02:18:32):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:18:33):
So, one last thing I wanted to talk about before
we finish up. If people, I guess keep tabs on
the conflict, they would have seen recently a video. I'm
sure you've seen the Kachin Independence Army shooting down in
aircraft with an FN six Chinese man portaal air defense system.
It's what they sort of called manpads. I'm sure women
can carry them to just fine or anyone else for

(02:18:55):
that matter. But I think it happened in January and
the video has just come out. Can you explain this
to nificance of that within the conflict landscape? And we
am A yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:19:04):
I guess there's a couple of points.

Speaker 5 (02:19:05):
One is about China's posture and the other is about
the military balance. I think the Minomour military's air power
is its primary comparative advantage. I think at this point
it has fewer blight infagery forces than the resistance, but
that it's.

Speaker 7 (02:19:22):
Heavy artillery and especially it's air power. You know, that's
how it terrorizes the population.

Speaker 5 (02:19:28):
Yeah, but it's also been a source of it's been
a very powerful mobilizing force. I mean, I think after
Phase one of ten twenty seven, the MMDAA Ko Kong
armed group essentially it took back territory that it proceeds
to be their own and took the town of lau Kai,
which was really surprising.

Speaker 7 (02:19:46):
But a major advance.

Speaker 5 (02:19:47):
And then everyone kind of perceived, Okay, they'll just stay
in the quote Unquoteqo Kong areas, They'll stay where they are.

Speaker 7 (02:19:53):
But I think there's a deep perception.

Speaker 5 (02:19:55):
Among the MDAA but also broader ethnic minority groups that
as long as the mr military is in power and
has air capability, it will terrorize the public.

Speaker 7 (02:20:07):
Even if it cannot reach or.

Speaker 5 (02:20:08):
Ever take back Laukai, it will vomit. And that's exactly
what we saw after ten twenty seven. You saw air
strikes and Laukai, you saw air strikes and lights of the.

Speaker 7 (02:20:17):
Headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army.

Speaker 5 (02:20:19):
You see air strikes in parts of her kind state
that the mem R military has no chance of recapturing.

Speaker 7 (02:20:24):
You know, it's a terrorizing the public thing.

Speaker 3 (02:20:26):
Yeah, it's a punitive thing.

Speaker 7 (02:20:28):
Yeah, it's punitive thing. So and it also is powerfully motivating.

Speaker 5 (02:20:31):
It's like, Okay, now you see the MNDA pushing all
the way to Lascio, and a lot of people didn't
think they would do that. But it's like, if you
have a perception that this MR Military can hurt me
from a distance, they may need to eliminate them altogether
in order to achieve the level of stability and safety
that they pursue. So like it's the double edged sword
in that regard. But going back to your question, I

(02:20:53):
mean think like if the resistance is capable of constraining
the MR military's air capable, it radically changes the balance
of power. I mean, I think there are some elements
of this that are been a primary focus of some
of the international human rights community, for example, constraining access

(02:21:14):
to jet fuel and these sorts of things, trying to
push for an arms embargo, none of which I've succeeded,
but there's been kind of progress on the margins. Although
I think we just saw Russia delivered jet fuel and
the maritime routes in southern Mars.

Speaker 10 (02:21:29):
So yeah, in exchange for the artillery shows that the
Mamma has sent to Russia.

Speaker 5 (02:21:35):
Right, Oh, okay, realize, Okay, yeah, So I mean they're continued,
they're able to sustain that, and you know, and the
Chinese has sold i think six aircrafts last year, so
they still have this fighting capability, and they're still able
to extract foreign exchange essentially by stealing from exporters. But
that's a whole different conversation. But anyway, like I think, yeah,

(02:21:55):
this is a key dynamic if they're able to affect
their their air power. The other thing is that like
China is attempted to play both sides. I mean historically
that's sort of their approach. I mean, they have deep
connections with armed organizations along its border, maybe closer even
than that with the Memware military, but they also provide

(02:22:16):
political legitimacy and material assistance to the Menware military. They
just actually signed an MU on law enforcement and security
or some sort with the military. That's a deep and
abiding relationship, in part because the Chinese don't see an alternative.

Speaker 7 (02:22:31):
I mean, I don't think they have much trust for
dan U G or.

Speaker 5 (02:22:35):
Other resistance groups, and despite the fact that they don't,
they also don't really trust the memorare military or perceive
them to be competent. They see them kind of as
their only potential partner in IPIDOT. But it's kind of
a question as to whether this strategy is still working
for them. I think we've seen lots of acts of
defiance from both sides, the mean or military and resistance

(02:22:57):
groups visa be China.

Speaker 7 (02:22:58):
I mean, they are military.

Speaker 5 (02:23:00):
They've been pressuring them to hold elections for since the coup,
essentially yea, and they're really no closer yeah to that happening.
I mean, I think they dissolve the NLD, something the
Chinese said not to do. And more recently, they've designated
a number of resistance groups as terrorist organizations, which essentially
obviates political negotiations, which I think would certainly frustrate the Chinese,

(02:23:23):
given that they hope to achieve stability through political ingratiations
between a subset of resistance groups and then aneral military.
So there are these kind of acts of defiance also
on the resistance side. I mean, the Chinese are pushing
for ceasefires, and yet the resistance continues to push into
the country, and they're sort of a perception that like,

(02:23:44):
as the resistance groups aligned with China quote.

Speaker 7 (02:23:48):
Unquote aligned with China, maybe they aren't.

Speaker 5 (02:23:51):
A gain ascendency on the battlefield in particular, then China's
influenced gains.

Speaker 7 (02:23:56):
But I'm not sure whether that's the case.

Speaker 5 (02:23:57):
It might actually be in verse, like, as these groups
push to Memmre and have more charge oryal control, maybe
they have more options and they're less dependent on the Chinese.
So that relationship in the north along the Chinese border
is also very much in flux.

Speaker 7 (02:24:12):
I don't think it's clear exactly how that will play out.

Speaker 10 (02:24:14):
Yeah, no, it's not, And I think that's sort of
a big question that's overhanging. Obviously, you have actives that
are more close your line with China, like the United
worst Date Army, who have sort of largely remained aloof
from the conflict or a loof maybe it's her own word,
but are not like directly committing most of their forces
to the Conflict's pretty a better way of saying it, right.

Speaker 7 (02:24:35):
Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 5 (02:24:35):
And now that there's a ton of pressure on them
to stop selling arms to other groups, so we'll see
whether that happens.

Speaker 10 (02:24:42):
Yeah, which is probably where the Kaschin Independence Army was
able to get the surface where missiles from, which brings
us back to that. Yeah, it's it's never not complicated,
but it's always very sad that, like the folks quit
in the middle of this are suffering horrendously and sometimes
suffering kind of out of sight and out of mind

(02:25:03):
for so many people. As you know, a news cycle
continues to kind of either trivialize or completely ignore what's
happening in Memma, which is pretty sad. People often ask me,
like where they can find reliable news sources and where
they can send their money if they want to help
people in Mema. Do you have any good suggestions for that?

Speaker 8 (02:25:22):
Sure?

Speaker 5 (02:25:22):
Yeah, I mean I think for news, I guess for
like day to day news like Fronter Memr is a
fantastic source, as is meanmore Now and the Airwadi. These
are they have English language content that would be really
interesting and accessible. My organization US Institute Piece. You can
check out our website. We publish a lot of analytical

(02:25:43):
work on there related to the conflict. You're welcome to
check there. I think there's a really good another podcast,
it's really good Insight MEMR that is worth checking out.
Started as like a Buddhism oriented podcast talking about in Pasana.
Now its branched into a much broader range of issues.

Speaker 7 (02:26:00):
Some of the best stuff I've.

Speaker 5 (02:26:02):
Heard and actually affiliated with inside mem R is an
organization called Better Burma that provides entering assistance.

Speaker 7 (02:26:08):
And one you could contribute to.

Speaker 5 (02:26:10):
There's an organization called Skills for Humanity that provides a
lot of humanitarian assistance on the ground.

Speaker 3 (02:26:16):
Yeah, and you mentioned.

Speaker 5 (02:26:17):
Liberate the MMR before we started recording. That can also
be a good support.

Speaker 8 (02:26:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:26:23):
Yeah, I think Skills to Humanity also accept maybe they
accept direct I was speaking to them about like medical
equipment that they needed. Yeah, they they accept direct donations
or not. But people who want to volunteer medically let's
want to look out for Yeah, that was fantastic.

Speaker 3 (02:26:39):
Billy.

Speaker 10 (02:26:39):
Is there any way anythink else you'd like to plug?
Like why people can follow you or us i P online.

Speaker 5 (02:26:45):
Us i P dot org. Most of my writing is
on there. I'm on Twitter, Twitter at b I L
L E E, the number four, the letter D. But yeah,
I mean I checked those sources I mentioned. It's there's
not more kind of content in the mainstream media, but
there's there's a lot of really incredible reporting coming from

(02:27:06):
the ground, from people taking incredible risks to share information.
So encourage you to support some of those local outlets.

Speaker 10 (02:27:14):
Yeah, definitely, including financially if you can. It's like doing
the work that really needs to be done. Thank you
so much for your time than we appreciate you being
a host.

Speaker 2 (02:27:23):
Jeez, welcome to It could happen here a podcast that

(02:27:49):
is reported. But I'm very tired. But you know who's
not tired? Garrison Davis, our host for today.

Speaker 9 (02:27:56):
No, I'm probably more tired than you.

Speaker 3 (02:27:58):
I was up to I don't know about that.

Speaker 9 (02:28:01):
No, I was up till nine am. Eest writing desks.

Speaker 2 (02:28:04):
Oh geez. Yeah, I went to bed by like five
or six.

Speaker 3 (02:28:07):
I except for three hours. I'm going right back to
bed after this.

Speaker 9 (02:28:10):
Excellent as is the grind, you know, riseing grind, that's
my motto.

Speaker 2 (02:28:14):
Yeah, I'm going to do the same things. All right, Well, Garrison,
what are we What are we talking about today? What's
our episode about? What's this sewed on?

Speaker 9 (02:28:27):
So it's it's been a while since we've done like
an update on what meme politics are up to. I
think that the last deep dive we did was, like
I wouldn't say, like a year ago when Ron DeSantis,
then presidential.

Speaker 2 (02:28:41):
Hopeful meatball Rod Garrison, meatball rock me.

Speaker 3 (02:28:44):
Sorry, sorry, my polity is putting.

Speaker 9 (02:28:46):
Ron just embraced the fast wave like meme asthetic for
his then failing and dying campaign. And that was kind
of the last that we did one of these big
deep dives into like how meme politics currently operate.

Speaker 3 (02:29:01):
And it's been a long year.

Speaker 9 (02:29:02):
It's felt in some ways much longer than a year
since then, and the meme landscape has changed significantly, And
that's kind of what I want to discuss today. Just
go over the current state of meme politics in September
twenty twenty two.

Speaker 2 (02:29:18):
Great, it's like the State of the Union, but slightly dumber.

Speaker 9 (02:29:24):
But for us, yeah, just for all, for the completely
brain rods, yeah space of online politics, people.

Speaker 2 (02:29:31):
Who have destroyed their minds by spending too much time
on the internet.

Speaker 9 (02:29:35):
Yes, exactly so now that most of these like jokes
and references will be talking about are actually really old
and not actually relevant anymore and are no longer trending.
Now we can talk about how they worked, if they worked,
and what they can tell us about the changing landscape
of meme politics in the Year of Our Lord twenty
twenty four and beyond. So let's start by going all

(02:29:57):
the way back to July fifteenth, which was just a
lifetime ago.

Speaker 2 (02:30:01):
Yeah, that was a thousand years ago. Yes, this was.

Speaker 9 (02:30:04):
This was the first day of the RNC. Vance Is
announced as Trump's running mate. This was before Biden dropped
out of the race, but when we were pretty sure
that he was probably going to hopefully.

Speaker 2 (02:30:16):
That's interesting that you were pretty shit because I I
kind of thought he was going to like make us
like fucking hoist his corpse back into the white asse.

Speaker 9 (02:30:24):
I mean, we got a really good indication about five
days later that his dropout was like imminent. Yeah, yeah,
you're right, and it happened. It happened less than a
week later, So it was it was really on the line.
But anyway, it was. It was a it was a
very different world, very different time. Meanwhile, on the first
day of the RNC, after vance Is announced as the
Republican VP candidate, the Twitter user Rick Rud's Calves posted

(02:30:49):
this tweet quote, I can't say for sure, but he
might be the first VP pick to have admitted in
a New York Times bestseller to fucking and insight out
Latex Glove shoved in between two couch cushions Vance Hillbilly Elogy,
pages one seventy nine to one eighty one. So this
is this is the start of the couch meme. Sure

(02:31:11):
the next few days, the memes spread online with the
help of liberals who were unable to detect the fictitious
nature of the claim. Now, unronic spread is crucial to
the success of mimetic attacks like this, and the couch
fucking claims gained such widespread prominence on Twitter that on
July twenty fifth, the AP decided to do an official
fact check of the claim, running the headline no, JD.

(02:31:34):
Vans did not have sex with a couch. Now this
had two problems. By platforming this story in the AP,
the image of JD's couch coitus was propelled outside the
confines of overly online and Twitter shit posters into the
popular discourse. Now the topic was welcome on news shows,
talk shows, and other respectable publications. The other problem is

(02:31:58):
that you can't defit say JD Vance has never had
sex with a couch.

Speaker 2 (02:32:03):
No, no, I say I would never say that. You
can say it's untrue.

Speaker 9 (02:32:07):
He wrote about sofa sex in his memoir, right, but
not that he's one hundred percent never made love to
a love seat.

Speaker 3 (02:32:13):
Yeah, so making matters worse.

Speaker 9 (02:32:15):
Hours later, the AP removed their fact check, leaving a
web page that just read quote, this story did not
go through our standard editing processes and has been removed.

Speaker 2 (02:32:26):
I gotta know, I do desperately want to know what
actually happened in the background there.

Speaker 3 (02:32:36):
It's it's quite funny. It's it's quite a big fuck up. Now.

Speaker 9 (02:32:40):
This led people to reasonably conclude that if the fact
check was taken down, that really only leads us to
believe one thing is that this is a true claim,
which at this point many people knew that it's not.
I think interestingly, jd Vance has refused to comment on
this claim, which is probably smart, but his continued refusal

(02:33:01):
to even deny the claim adds a bit to the
humorous nature. So the retraction of this fact check became
a news story itself and gave a whole new life
to a meme that had kind of been reaching the
end of its cycle. People created doctored pages of Vance's
book Hill Billy Elegy, where he reflected on tales of
his youth in Ohio, where it was commonplace for young

(02:33:24):
boys rejected by girls to turn to couch cushions for
sexual pleasure. The fake pages were framed as a limited
first edition of the book before per Teal found it
and revised the book for a secondary, wide released copy
the next week. The meme continued to proliferate, having completely
broken out of the Twitter ship posting bubble it was
birthed in, but the peak of the meme was still

(02:33:47):
to come. On August sixth, Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Governor
Tim Walls as her running mate, and the two appeared
together at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During Walls's first speech,
he made a very safe kind of dead Oak style
reference to his vice presidential opponent's viral sticky sofa situation.

Speaker 11 (02:34:06):
Like all regular people I grew up with in the Heartland,
JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon
Valley billionaires, and then wrote a best seller trashing that community.
Come on, that's not what Middle America is. And I
gotta tell you I can't wait to debate the guy,

(02:34:30):
that is, if he's willing to get off the couch
and show up, you'll see what.

Speaker 8 (02:34:38):
I did there.

Speaker 9 (02:34:40):
So, due to the references kind of like explicit sexual context,
this was a bit of an unexpected move.

Speaker 3 (02:34:48):
Yeah, you could say that.

Speaker 9 (02:34:50):
But for those already familiar with the meme, the bit
served as a humorous yet tame in joke, and for
those unfamiliar, the huge crowd reactions and prompted others to
inquire about the context for the whole jd vance couch thing,
once again boosting its popularity as a trend. Now, I
think this was a bit of a gamble from Walls definitely,

(02:35:13):
as acknowledging a viral meme often leads to its impending death,
where recognition and participation of viral trends from the mainstream
establishment signal that something is no longer cool and is
now instead cringe Now. Part of the long lasting presence
of the coconut tree meme is the Harris campaign's wise
unwillingness to make continuing coconut tree references or capitalize on

(02:35:35):
its imagery. The White House going all in on Dark
Brandon using the imagery for merch and Biden increasingly making
references to the meme and interviews and.

Speaker 2 (02:35:43):
Speeches, Oh, I've just killed a dead nuked.

Speaker 9 (02:35:45):
It exactly ultimately led to this meme's death long before
the death of the Biden campaign itself. But this could
be like a delicate balance. Before Biden made a dark
Brandon one of the early chrostic images associated with his
twenty twenty five for re election campaign, the first few
dark branded references from the White House actually increased the

(02:36:05):
memes spread, and I think this is where Walls's joke
was able to succeed. The couch reference was vague enough
and disconnected from the more explicit aspects of the meme,
and paired with Walls's goofy facial expressions and his kind
of dad joke refrain of see what I did there,
it made what could have been a cringe and or

(02:36:26):
crude moment into a charismatic and endearing one. I think
the other thing that makes me lean towards Walls's invocation
of the couch helping more than herting, is that the
meme had already begun to be legitimized by the establishment
when it's the subject of an article in every major
publication and Stephen Colbert is making couch jokes on TV,

(02:36:47):
then it is already broken containment and hit the mainstream.

Speaker 3 (02:36:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:36:51):
I would also add, I think there's a degree to which,
like the dark Brandon stuff was cringey so fast, because
it was very clearly the Biden campaign jumping on to
a meme that Biden himself certainly didn't understand absolutely not,
Whereas I think Walls got a little bit of the
kind of energy Trump used to get in part because

(02:37:12):
it was it was like such a I can't believe
this is happening in American politics. The VP candidate for
the DIMS just accused the Republican VP candidate having sex
with the couch like it was such a wow. This
is like the breaking of a seal kind of moment
which normally the Republicans have kind of had to themselves
these like yes, line crossing moments, And I think that

(02:37:35):
does get attention and energy.

Speaker 3 (02:37:37):
To you.

Speaker 2 (02:37:38):
It was interesting to see them do it and have
it actually work.

Speaker 9 (02:37:41):
Yeah, well, we'll talk about that a little bit later.
How this sort of tactic has been almost entirely monopolized
by the right to the past decade and just now
we're starting to see someone that's change. I think Tim
Wall's making a single Couched reference I believe did very
little to hurt the inevitable trajectory of the JD Vance
Couch meme. In the days after the speech, searches for

(02:38:03):
JD Vance Couch reached an all time high, and as
is the nature for peaks, was followed by a gradual
fall off during the month of August. But crucially, the
spirit of the meme never really fully went away. I
think one aspect that separates the couch meme from Dark
Branded and even Coconut Tree to some degree is that
it's not based on trying to prop up a political

(02:38:25):
figure like Positively, but is instead attacking a widely disliked
figure with slanderous disinformation. And though the couch meme is
well past its peak, there's been no shortage of ways
to make fun of JD.

Speaker 3 (02:38:39):
Vance.

Speaker 9 (02:38:40):
The overall momentum against him specifically has continued on utilizing
memes with a true, untrue, and semi true basis, whether
that be his inability to order donuts or his legitimately
possible interest in dolphin sex as evidenced by his Twitter searches.
Do you know who also likes dolphin sex.

Speaker 3 (02:38:59):
Robert.

Speaker 2 (02:39:01):
I mean, I could be convinced, but I guess let's
check out these ads anyway.

Speaker 3 (02:39:16):
All right, we are so back.

Speaker 9 (02:39:19):
So the right did not take kindly to Walls's acknowledgment
of the whole sofa spectacle.

Speaker 3 (02:39:25):
We were so pissed. They were really pissed. And it's funny.

Speaker 9 (02:39:28):
It's like as if their main guy has not spent
the last ten years making up wild and spewing all
sorts of like offensive lies about his opponents.

Speaker 3 (02:39:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:39:36):
Yeah, that's why they're pissed. Yeah, we're supposed to be
the ones doing this.

Speaker 9 (02:39:41):
So in response, the online right's finest posters cooked up
a memetic counter attack against Tim Walls. And what they
decided on is that Tim Walls once had to get
his stomach pumped from drinking a gallon of horse seamen
with this meme originating from a fake screenshot of an
AP fact check posted by the Twitter account National Conservatism.

Speaker 2 (02:40:06):
See, uh, I'm sure you're going to get into it.
But there's so many reasons why this was always destined
not to work.

Speaker 3 (02:40:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:40:15):
Absolutely, Almost immediately this was seen as like a massive misfire.

Speaker 2 (02:40:19):
Yeah yeah, it made it immediately clear, Oh, you guys
don't understand why what you used to do, like what
you were doing was working. Yeah, like you never actually
understood the principles behind what you were playing around with.

Speaker 9 (02:40:31):
And I think crucially, most of the attacks from these
like weird online figures never actually caught that much traction.
The only ones that succeeded were ones that were just
pairting stuff that Trump was talking about, because I think
Trump actually understands this line of attack much better than
most of these like right wing posters do. But yeah,
it was very clear that this was a failure. Some
of the first horse Seamen posts got immediately ratioed by

(02:40:54):
replies and quote tweets, deeming the meme a manufactured and
desperate attempt to respond to the natural growth of the
couch hooks from a random Twitter shit post to the
Democratic vice presidential candidate's opening speech with.

Speaker 2 (02:41:07):
A guy like Walls, you don't go with horse com
you do something like you you start spreading a rumor
that like he uh cooked a bunch of well done
t bone steaks at a barbecue or totally like that,
totally like something that really hits to the center of
his dad core thing it has. It has to line
up with his vibe right right, right, and his vibe

(02:41:28):
is like you know that nice Midwestern dad who's a
dog shit cook, right like.

Speaker 9 (02:41:33):
Yeah, which is some thing that Walls has actually been
able to like utilize himself with his like white guy
tacos and stuff right like.

Speaker 2 (02:41:39):
Right right exactly. He's leaded into it very smartly.

Speaker 9 (02:41:42):
He lead into it, and then it becomes a strength
that then the right also gets upset about accusing him
of quote unquote anti white racism.

Speaker 2 (02:41:50):
That was quite a moment for American political history.

Speaker 9 (02:41:55):
The other thing with like this horse semen thing is
like you simply just can't force these things to happen.
Like a crucial part of the success of a political
meme like this is that it must have a degree
of unirnic spread by people who genuinely believe it to
be true. Now, the horse semen meme was also intended
to counter the Republican or weird talking point that picked

(02:42:15):
up steam this summer, and for some reason, they chose
to go about this by making an escalatory and just
grossly bizarre claim about Tim Wall's guzzling animal semen. Masterful
gambitzer not a weird thing to say at all. No,
in doing this, the right displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of
why the Jdvan's couch story was successful. The reason why

(02:42:39):
it caught on despite the easily verifiable fact that Jadvance
did not write about pleasuring himself with a couch as
a teenager, is that Jadvance seems like the kind of
guy to have used a couch to masturbate as a
teenager in rural Ohio.

Speaker 3 (02:42:51):
Yeah, you know that adolescence was awkward as.

Speaker 9 (02:42:53):
Shit, absolutely, Like it wasn't successful just because it was
like a weird sex story. It evoked a genuine and
feeling of something a sort of like white trash young
guy might do. On the other hand, swallowing a gallon
of horse seamen, it's such an outlandish jump into fantasy
by comparison.

Speaker 2 (02:43:10):
Yeah, nobody has done that, right. Well, well, Tim Walls
is no mister hands. The vibes simply do not match.
And to be clear, Garre said, mister Hans wasn't swallowing it.
That was part of the problem.

Speaker 9 (02:43:23):
That is true, And like, meanwhile, Vance has the exact
vibe of like a gross little teen gremlin who fucked
it inside out. Rubber gloves shoved between two couch cushions.
So the horse even meme failed to reach outside the
confines of niche right wing Twitter, but conservatives had another
meme up their sleeve. Chronically online far right influencers Cat

(02:43:46):
Turre a CHAIAI Check aka Lips of TikTok and Ian
Miles Chung led the charge in branding Tim Walls as
tampon Tim in reference to a bill Walls assigned requiring
menstrual products be provided in schools. Oh the horror, The
Babylon b wrote JD. Vans is weird. It says guy
who signed bill to put tampons in boys' school bathroom unquote.

(02:44:09):
So similar to the horse thing, this attempt to frame
Tim Walls is weird just didn't work that the meme
never caught on beyond its initial posts. I think part
of the reason why the overly online right is so
focused on painting Walls is weird is not just revenge
for the couch joke, but because Tim Walls is often

(02:44:29):
credited with popularizing the quote Republicans are just plain weird
line of attack, something that's really caught on this past summer. Now,
the oldest clip I can find of Tim Walls positing.
This message comes from December of twenty twenty three. I'll
include that clip here.

Speaker 12 (02:44:45):
And you said, basically, there's no such thing as a
generic Republican.

Speaker 3 (02:44:49):
These guys are weird.

Speaker 4 (02:44:50):
Once they start running, their weirdness shows up.

Speaker 3 (02:44:54):
What do you mean, well, you have weird?

Speaker 8 (02:44:56):
Stand by that?

Speaker 11 (02:44:58):
Well, well, look just the strange things they become obsessed with,
demonizing our children, becoming obsessed with people's personal lives in
their bedrooms, restricting freedoms. I'm surrounded by states who are
spending their time figuring out how to ban Charlotte's Web
in their schools. Why we're banishing hunger from ours with
free breakfast and launch. That's what the public's looking for,

(02:45:18):
That's what they're trying to get to. And they will
weirdly obsess with everything to be mean and cruel and
small in their ideas. And I didn't hear anything last
night that did anything different to that, so I'll stand
by that. I just think Americans know this is just
weird stuff to be focused on.

Speaker 9 (02:45:34):
Now we on nickod happen here and behind the Bastards
have similarly been advocating for this type of framing for
the New Right for quite a long while, Like Robert,
I know you've been like really pushing for this as
a tactic for years now.

Speaker 3 (02:45:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:45:50):
Yeah, if they'd made me the vice presidential candidate three
years ago, I really could have made some progress on this,
but had to see what they've got up.

Speaker 9 (02:45:57):
Like, we decided on the name from Alli's new show,
like very early this year, Like this was way way
before like the Weird Attacks went viral.

Speaker 2 (02:46:06):
It's really the only name we ever considered was weird
Little Guys.

Speaker 9 (02:46:10):
Yeah, because that's how we like internally refer to these freaks.
Because these are all unhinged, anti social freaks, and many
of them revel in being this antagonistic force. I think
part of their self image is the idea that liberals
find them dangerous, and the Weird Attack is very disempowering
for these people. It reframes them from this like scary

(02:46:33):
existential threat to being more akin to your just off putting,
creepy uncle. Here's a clip of Wals himself kind of
explaining the methodology behind this attack.

Speaker 13 (02:46:43):
You've gotten some attention this week for calling Trump Advance
and Republicans in general weird, and I think that You're
the one that set this tone, and there's this shift.
The Harris campaign seems to be following your lead, echoing
this language. Why do you think weird a more effective
attack line against Trump and what Democrats have been done previously,

(02:47:03):
which is argue that he's an existential threat to democracy.

Speaker 11 (02:47:09):
Yeah, and it's an observation on this, and you know,
being a school teacher, I see a lot of things.
But my point on this was is people kept talking about, look,
Donald Trump is going to put women's lives at risk.
That's one hundred percent true. Donald Trump is potentially going
to end constitutional liberties that we have, end voting. I
do believe all those things are a real possibility, but
it gives him way too much power.

Speaker 8 (02:47:30):
Listen to the guy.

Speaker 11 (02:47:31):
He's talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just
whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought,
we just give him way too much credit. And I
think one of the things is is when you just
ratchet down some of the you know, the scariness or whatever,
and just name it what it is. I got to
tell you my observation on this is, have you ever
seen the guy laugh?

Speaker 3 (02:47:52):
That seems very weird?

Speaker 11 (02:47:53):
To me that an adult can go through six and
a half years of being in the public eye if
he has left it's at someone, not with someone. That
is weird behavior. And I don't think you call it
anything else. It is simply what we're observing.

Speaker 8 (02:48:06):
Now.

Speaker 9 (02:48:06):
An interesting side effect of the weird framing is that
it's left these ultra conservatives utterly incapable of effectively combating
this line of attack. They've been so used to being
on the offense that they never really prepared for the
position that they're now stuck in. Over a decade of
they go low, we go high, conditioned the rights to
be completely unable to cope with being put on mimetic defense.

Speaker 3 (02:48:29):
Now.

Speaker 9 (02:48:30):
My favorite retort of the weird claim is from conservative
pundent Helen Andrew, who wrote, quote, calling people weird is
such feminine behavior. Textbook sex difference. Men engage in open conflict,
women police conformity. It's honestly disorienting to hear male politicians
use the line.

Speaker 2 (02:48:51):
I love too that we're talking about how men are
naturally drawn to open, honorable conflict when talking about a
bunch of people who never log off, like everything you.

Speaker 3 (02:49:01):
Do is find the keyboard motherfucker.

Speaker 9 (02:49:03):
It's amazing that they're combating this by saying the weirdest
things imaginable.

Speaker 3 (02:49:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:49:09):
Now, I think this one's only one uped by a
reply to this very post by the author of the
self published Kingmaker trilogy named Airy Mendelssohn Christ who posted
a meme featuring a crowd of NPC wojacks all saying
the word weird, which which I find actually be a
very powerful image depicting all the masses having agreed upon

(02:49:33):
that Republicans are weird. But Mendelssohn wrote quote, it's both
feminine behavior and heard behavior. They all started calling them
weird at once. It was obviously planned, cooked up by
a sophisticated wordsmith, and then distributed by their network.

Speaker 2 (02:49:51):
Yes, only the most sophisticated of wordsmiths knows the word weird.

Speaker 3 (02:49:56):
It's amazing.

Speaker 2 (02:49:57):
You've got to dig deep into the dictionary to hit
that one.

Speaker 9 (02:50:00):
Truly, truly, truly, this must be the work of a
sophisticated word smith.

Speaker 3 (02:50:07):
It's it's phenomenal, that's fucking funny.

Speaker 9 (02:50:11):
So in trying to combat the weird accusation, the right
has mostly opted for either responding with escalation, like in
the case of the horse seamen meme, which only makes
them seem kind of more off putting, or just going
for the classic Uno reverso right, I'm not weird, you're weird.
This is the ultimate sign of desperation and impending defeat.

(02:50:31):
I am rubber, you are glue. Whatever you say bounces
off me and sticks to you. On top of being
a strategy that often signals one has already lost. By
employing this tactic, you make the very basic error of
repeating the enemy's claim against you, thus continuing to amplify
and spread the original attack.

Speaker 3 (02:50:49):
Here's a clip from Trump.

Speaker 14 (02:50:51):
There's something weird with that guy. He's a weird guy.
JD is not weird. He's a solid rock. I happen
to be a very solid rock. We're not weird. We're
other things, perhaps, but we're not weird. But he is
a weird guy. He walks on the stage. Is something
wrong with that guy? And he called me weird? And

(02:51:12):
then the frank news media picks it up. That was
the word of the day, weird, weird, weird. They're all
go on now.

Speaker 9 (02:51:17):
Similarly, I found a Megan Kelly video titled Tucker Carlson
explains why JD Vance is actually normal?

Speaker 2 (02:51:27):
Great should Tucker notes the most normal man alive.

Speaker 9 (02:51:32):
And Trump supporters have brought signs to his rallies that
read Donald Trump is not weird. My I Am not
weird shirt has people asking a lot of questions are
already answered by my shirt. It's it's a very a
very basic mistake. Now, there has been some pushback among
certain swasp people on the left who have historically associated
themselves as like societal outcasts and have found comfort in

(02:51:55):
embracing words like weird and freak, and on a certain level,
I understand this, but I think this point of view
is making the same fundamental error as the conservative right
when they try to flip around the weird accusation onto Democrats, progressives,
and people on the left by primarily using homophobia and transphobia.
We're using the same word to refer to two very
different things. Do they call drag Queen's weird for being transgressive? Meanwhile, Trump,

(02:52:20):
Advance and the far right are weird because they are
oddly reactionary. They're trying to resurrect a long dead world
by forming an authoritary movement behind a reality TV star
who sounds like you're rambling conspiracy theorist uncle. It's a
battle over the terrain of normalcy as a shifting category.
And while I sympathize with some hostility to the hegemony

(02:52:42):
of normalcy, how I often follow outside that category. I
believe it's also paramount that we sabotage reactionary efforts to
gain any territory. So that's kind of the cycle of
weird And we will be back to talk about this
kind of final new stage of meme politics after this break. Okay,

(02:53:09):
we are once again, so back now. I believe this
election will truly be characterized by the complete perliferation of
meme style politics. Now, even without like the use of
a meme image, I think politics, especially this year, has
itself functioned and spread like a meme.

Speaker 12 (02:53:27):
Now.

Speaker 9 (02:53:27):
This is something that's been happening for the past like
eight years, certainly, but the way it's happened this summer,
I think has been slightly unique. The Weird attack is,
you know, the ideal example of this. But even if
you just look back a few months ago, we were
in a very different position. It was a very different story,
and I'll let Stephen Colbert demonstrate that.

Speaker 15 (02:53:47):
So the Biden campaign wants to build on the new
viral trend of handground Pa the phone because reportedly they're
looking for.

Speaker 3 (02:53:54):
A meme page manager.

Speaker 15 (02:53:57):
So look forward to some hot new Biden's social content
like Irmagird, Trumper's hurdler I can't has youth votes, and
of course for the very online skibbitty Biden Biden.

Speaker 12 (02:54:13):
Gwity Biden t dog.

Speaker 9 (02:54:19):
Okay, I I really want to play more of that cliff,
but I'm afraid I already included a little too much.

Speaker 3 (02:54:28):
What a dire situation that is?

Speaker 9 (02:54:30):
That is that that is the peak of the liberals,
mimetic attacks, just truly episcopal. Oh my god, I've become
obsessed with skibbitty Biden just because it demonstrates such like
an inevitable like self defeat that that was like the
best thing these people had, like cooking. As it's kind

(02:54:52):
of obvious by the clip. This led towards the death
of the Biden campaign. They really had nothing in the tank.
Biden was a shambling old man. And then like two
months later, Kamala kicked off her campaign by embracing the
Kamala is Brat Summer, which yes to may have killed
Bratt Summer but it did help secure the vibe shift,
skyrocketing her popularity.

Speaker 2 (02:55:13):
Quite frankly, I was ready for bratt summer today.

Speaker 9 (02:55:15):
Yes, sure, but I think her weaponization of that term,
endorsed by Charlie XCX, I think did help skyrocket her
early popularity and showed an early embrace of online culture.
And I believe the Harris campaign actually owes a lot
more to memes. In a ironic twist of fate, there

(02:55:36):
is a compelling argument to be made that Kamala Harris's
rise to the top of the presidential ticket can at
least be in part tracked back to Republican attacks which
spawned memes. Last year. The account RNC Research, ran by
the GOP posted multiple clips and edits attacking Kamala Harris
for what they saw as odd phrases and awkward moments.

(02:55:59):
Earlier this year, some of those videos from RNC research
went viral outside of right wing Twitter, which led to
an ironic or post ironic embrace of Kamala Harris among
liberal and leftist posters. Now the biggest one was the
Coconut Tree video, which spawned memes that started to pick
up steam in January and didn't peak until July. Another

(02:56:21):
one of RNZ Research's videos, a four minute compilation of
Kamala Harris saying what can be unburdened by what has
been provided the inspiration for the title of a document
that spread around political circles postulating Kamala Harris as the
best successor to Biden if you were to drop out
of the race instead of a messy last minute primary
or an open convention. And I think these memes did

(02:56:43):
a lot to increase Kamala's favorability in the first half
of this year. Kamala prior to this was a relatively
kind of disliked figure nationally. She was one of the
first drop out of the twenty twenty presidential race.

Speaker 2 (02:56:55):
Yeah, she wasn't I wouldn't even say disliked as much
as like not figure like the big The number one
thing people said about her is that she's been a
non entity as a vice president.

Speaker 3 (02:57:06):
Yeah yeah, And she certainly wasn't popular. Yes, definitely not popular.

Speaker 9 (02:57:11):
So although the GP may have inadvertently helped to improve
the public profile of Kamala Harris and have failed to
effectively combat the weird attacks, they have not totally failed
on the me medic warfare front. The past two months,
the right has landed on a somewhat effective memes style
politics by utilizing a combination of disinformation and AI images

(02:57:33):
to create fake news stories that rile up their base
on certain key issues so far, mainly trans people and immigration.

Speaker 3 (02:57:40):
Now.

Speaker 9 (02:57:41):
A few months ago I did an episode on how
the Right's been using memes to create this fake epidemic
of transgender mass shooters, and then in July, a new
anti trans syop went super viral. False claims that the
Algerian Olympic boxer Iman Khleif is transgender or in some
kind of unverified way quote unquote biologically male spread around

(02:58:03):
online with the help of British newspapers and went just
completely viral for a whole week, with the disinformation subsequently
becoming a news story itself. This fake story caught traction
after an Italian boxer quit a match forty five seconds
into a fight after receiving a single hard blow to
the face. Anti trans memes are a well worn part

(02:58:24):
of this type of disinfo ecosystem, and there was no
shortage of trans sports memes now using Khalif, I'm going
to quote from Ruby Hammad in Al Jazeera quote Khalif's
subsequent match was against Hungarian Anna Hamari, who in the
lead up posted and deleted an image that I believe
to be among the most significant of the entire affair

(02:58:45):
because of how it lays the subtext bear. In this
AI generated image that Hamari sourced from Instagram, Khalif was
not merely represented as a man towering over a dainty,
vulnerable white woman, but was denied humanity altogether and drawn
as a super natural, mythical beast unquote. Many other AI
images of Khalif spread throughout this viral trend, some with

(02:59:08):
just Khalif having like a stereotypical like male body that
were AA generated, and others with this like similar like
like kind of like monster ish look. And I think
beyond the actual use of these like AI memes and
kind of anti trans memes using Khalif, I think the
way the actual story spread was like a meme. I
think that's how I was able to gain such like

(02:59:30):
a viral traction in just like a few days.

Speaker 3 (02:59:33):
I think.

Speaker 9 (02:59:34):
The next version of this is the Eating Cat's story,
which started with a post to a Springfield crime watch
Facebook group from someone who shared a fourth hand account
based on a rumor from a neighbor who claims to
have heard the story from a friend who heard the
story from an unnamed source. Now NewsGuard attracted down the
woman who told the Facebook poster about the story, and

(02:59:54):
she told them, quote, I'm not sure I'm the most
credible source because I don't actually know the person who
lost the cat.

Speaker 3 (03:00:00):
I don't have any proof.

Speaker 12 (03:00:03):
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs the people that came in,
they're eating the cats, they're eating they're eating the pets of.

Speaker 8 (03:00:12):
The people that live there.

Speaker 16 (03:00:14):
I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio,
and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there.
He told us there had been no credible reports of
specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by
individuals within the immigrant community.

Speaker 8 (03:00:28):
All I'll seeing people on Tellivien.

Speaker 12 (03:00:29):
Let me just say this is the people on television
say my dog was taken and used for food. So
maybe he said that, and maybe that's a good thing
to say for a city manager.

Speaker 16 (03:00:38):
I'm not taking this from television people on television to say.

Speaker 8 (03:00:41):
Man dog was eaten by the people that went there.

Speaker 9 (03:00:44):
Meanwhile, the Ohio Division of Wildlife told TMZ that the
main photo of an alleged Haitian immigrant carrying a debt goose,
presumably on the way to eat it, was in fact
a random black man removing roadkill from a street in Columbus, Ohio,
with no evidence to suggest he is from Haiti, he
is an immigrant, or was intending to eat said goose.

(03:01:08):
Still jd Vance particularly spent a lot of work boosting
this fake news story.

Speaker 3 (03:01:13):
Also, if he was, what's wrong with eating a goose?

Speaker 9 (03:01:16):
Yes, exactly, Like there's there's so many, so many problems
with the Haitians are eating at pets and wildlife meme,
and we don't we don't have time to like fully
get into it. It's just kind of one anecdote in
this kind of series of mimetic attacks. And I think
one of the guys who was spearheading this was jd Vance,
who spent a lot of effort trying to push the

(03:01:39):
story into the national spotlight, either the day of or
before the postential debate of Vans tweeted quote. In the
last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from
actual residents of Springfield who have said their neighbor's pets
or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It's possible,
of course, that all these rumors will turn out to

(03:02:01):
be false. Do you know what's confirmed that a child
was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right
to be here unquote, And now I think the last
thing that he's referring to was an unfortunate car accident,
and the Haitian man was a legal immigrant, not an
illegal immigrant. And the father of the child who died

(03:02:21):
has been advocating that people stop using his child's death
as this like racist ammunition in this weird culture war debate.

Speaker 3 (03:02:29):
God, it's bleak, which is.

Speaker 9 (03:02:31):
Really hard to see of man pleading that these like
unhinged racists stop using the death of his son. Yeah,
to further like they're just extremely gross and like transparent agenda.

Speaker 2 (03:02:43):
Yeah, it's one of the more disgusting things that's happened.

Speaker 9 (03:02:46):
Part of the spread of the eating a pets story
has been the use of AI images, particularly of black
men kidnapping and eating pets, as well as images of
Trump rescuing cats from what I would describe as a
horde of immigrants, which is what I would assume the
AA prompt would be. Now, these images aren't necessarily meant

(03:03:07):
to be passed off as real, but in the absence
of actual evidence, they serve an important purpose of providing
a visual justice stick in people's minds, and I think
that that's crucially what's going on with all of these
AI images, whether they be of Trump, like saving cats
or holding cats, or they just be like very racist

(03:03:27):
depictions of like black men trying to like eat or
kidnap people's pets. Earlier this year at the RNC, I
know me and Robert went to this panel produced in
part by Microsoft talking about the use of like AI
images in politics and how they're advocating to like, yeah,
not be using AI AI depictions of candidates, which is

(03:03:48):
something that Trump has consistently been doing, posting or retruthing
AI videos of Kamala Harris of people like Taylor Swift
endorsing him, which then led to Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala Harris,
which seemingly upset Trump greatly. Now to me, if you
look at the trans Olympics debacle as well as the

(03:04:09):
Springfield incident, it feels like this like endless series of
new dis info trends is designed so that individual confrontations
just don't matter that much. Like, yeah, pointing out the
whole trans Olympics thing is fake just doesn't matter, because
then they're going to move on to Haitian immigrants or
killing people's pets. Each individual lie is so flimsy, but

(03:04:31):
the constant sequence of them built a structure that has
a degree of stability for conservatives, And this is a
project that they've been like working towards for a long
long time. I know, Robert, we've talked about this.

Speaker 2 (03:04:42):
Yeah, this, I mean I saw the start of this
as like a kid, right, like this is kind of
what what guys like Limbaugh were always doing on sort
of the ground floor level, you know, you could you
can look at I think one of the first big
like cleavage points in our realities was the whole Clinton
death count thing, which, if you're unaware, is this list

(03:05:04):
Conservative started spreading in like nineteen ninety three or four
of all of the people that Bill and Hillary had
supposedly had murdered, right, And it was like guys like
Vince Foster who'd killed himself, who worked for them, and whatnot,
Like it was all bullshit, but it was kind of
the start of this, Like, when you get enough of
these things, it doesn't matter that each of them takes

(03:05:25):
seconds to debunk. They form a sort of like I
a cushion. If you exist within that reality, you can
kind of slide along without touching the ground.

Speaker 9 (03:05:34):
And definitely now, yeah, it forms like a mesh like
net structure that where each individual piece is very weak,
but together it provides an actually like pretty pretty resilient
like resting place for these people's alternate version of reality.

Speaker 3 (03:05:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (03:05:52):
Now, Vance is kind of somewhat admitted in some ways
to having manufactured this media.

Speaker 3 (03:05:59):
Story was interesting to me.

Speaker 9 (03:06:01):
Yeah, And I'm going to put that clip here, and
I'm going to include a bit of a longer clip
than what's usually used in soundbites, just because during this interview,
just Vance's behavior and his like pauses are very odd.
So there's gonna be a few seconds of like dead space.
But that is like in the actual interview.

Speaker 17 (03:06:17):
American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and
I start talking.

Speaker 3 (03:06:21):
About cat memes.

Speaker 17 (03:06:22):
If I have to mean create stories so that the
American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the
American people, then.

Speaker 18 (03:06:31):
That's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you just
said that you're creating a public policy. Sorry, you just
said that you're creating the story.

Speaker 3 (03:06:42):
Is that, Dana.

Speaker 18 (03:06:45):
You just said that this is a story that you created.

Speaker 3 (03:06:48):
So so then the eating dog are not.

Speaker 8 (03:06:51):
We are creating we are, Dana.

Speaker 17 (03:06:54):
It comes from first hand accounts from my constituents. I
say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the
American media focusing on it.

Speaker 19 (03:07:01):
Now.

Speaker 9 (03:07:01):
Vance has subsequently you know, said that no, no, no,
I'm getting this information from first hand accounts from my constituents.
When I say that I'm creating stories, I'm creating a
media story. But it's hard not to see this as
a little bit of like a tactical slip on his part.
Right now, this has all created a very odd situation

(03:07:22):
for the Republican Party, as we've kind of talked about
the past few months. Journalists and researcher Jared Holt wrote, quote,
the Trump campaign seems to be doing the same failed
dance as the Dessantus one at the moment, pander heavily
to terminally online weirdos and get mad when the general
public goes, uh, what the fuck?

Speaker 3 (03:07:40):
Unquote Yeah, and this is the thing.

Speaker 9 (03:07:42):
When you have someone on stage talking about eating pets,
that is a turn off for many normal people because
they immediately clock this as being.

Speaker 3 (03:07:50):
Probably complete bullshit.

Speaker 9 (03:07:52):
Yeah, and we're in a very interesting moment in the
Republican Party considering the right wings electoral losses in twenty eighteen,
twenty twenty, twenty twenty two, and possibly going into twenty
twenty four. This kind of weird culture war grievance, anti
will strategy just might not be electorally viable when matched
against a more normal alternative, and I think making matters worse.

(03:08:13):
The Trump team and the Republican National Committee have spent
the past four years handing over a lot of their
calms and outreach to just certifiable freaks like Laura lumer Ian,
Miles Chung, and limbs of TikTok, people who are very
disconnected from what regular people care about, people that are
only liked by other really online freaks, and.

Speaker 2 (03:08:33):
People who have no crossover appeal.

Speaker 7 (03:08:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:08:35):
Joe Rogan is such a powerful card in their hand
because he has a lot of normal dude appeal, right,
and so when he starts parroting a talking point, he
can actually push it to people Laura Lumer does not
write like if you show a normal person Laura Lumer,
they're like, what the fuck is wrong with that lady's face?

Speaker 9 (03:08:55):
And they're a very double edged sword because although they
are very off putting and that in some ways can
like damaged, can damage Trump, they also carry a degree
of like very real harm. Oh yeah, Whenever all these
people hop onto a trend, a very consistent thing that
has followed is bomb threats being called into whatever their

(03:09:16):
target is. I love doing that, whether that be hospitals
providing trans healthcare, abortion clinics, or in this case, just
schools in Springfield, Ohio, which have now received multiple bomb threats.
And again, like it is a very double edged sword
because obviously that's like very real harm being done. And
you could argue that, you know, that makes the situation

(03:09:37):
worse for the Trump campaign, that the fact that their
attacks that they're spreading are resulting in like bomb threats
being called into schools, but it also creates a degree
of actual harm for like kids and many of the
legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield that are now seeing a
very unprecedented as of recent wave of like extremely racist attacks.

(03:10:00):
There's a good article by Jared Holt in MSNBC that
kind of goes into this topic specifically that I'll link
in the sources below. So yeah, that kind of rounds
up my update on the current state of meme politics,
all of its various forms that's taken these past few months,
from couch fucking jokes to bomb threats in Springfield, and

(03:10:21):
it's a very dominant form. Like I don't remember memes
being this front and center at least in the twenty
twenty election.

Speaker 2 (03:10:27):
Yeah, and I mean they twenty sixteen they kind of were,
but it was like a much rougher and ruder attempt.
There's like so much more buy in by like large organizations.

Speaker 3 (03:10:41):
And Democrats have finally jumped on board to this. Yes, yes, absolutely.

Speaker 9 (03:10:46):
They have long rejected this line of attack as an
illegitimate form of politics, and they are not taking that
stance anymore.

Speaker 2 (03:10:54):
Yeah, they picked the gun up off the table, fucking finally.

Speaker 9 (03:10:57):
Well, that at least doesn't for me. Yeah here, it
could happen here. I will leave us with one closing
soundbit from JD.

Speaker 19 (03:11:05):
Vans something that Governor Walls has called you and Donald Trump,
and that is weird, sure, and it is taken off
the New York Times reports. Then when Donald Trump was
asked about it, he said, not me. They're talking about JD.

Speaker 3 (03:11:20):
Well.

Speaker 17 (03:11:21):
Certainly they've levied that charge against me more than anybody else.

Speaker 3 (03:11:26):
Hey, we'll be.

Speaker 2 (03:11:26):
Back Monday with more episodes every week from now until
the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 20 (03:11:32):
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 3 (03:11:43):
You listen to podcasts.

Speaker 20 (03:11:44):
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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