It Could Happen Here Weekly 197

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alson 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):
All right, it could happen here.

Speaker 4 (00:31):
It's me, it's Robert, and we are gathered here today
to talk about one of the most annoying things that
can happen on your telephone, which is that you can
be sent a tweet from Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Which is just no one needed that.

Speaker 4 (00:49):
It's already really bad. I see really bad things on
my telephone every day. I don't need to see a
tweet from Gavin Newsom. If you're not familiar with this,
you're living a better life than me.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Proud of you.

Speaker 4 (01:01):
But I'm going to give you some context here for
those of you who are not familiar. Gavin Newsom is
the governor of California. He's also kind of been the
presumptive of twenty twenty eight Democratic candidate for quite a while.
He's term limited out running for California governor again, so
he won't be doing that, and his term will end
in January of twenty twenty seven. He had for a
while tried to dismiss claims that he was interested in

(01:23):
the presidency, but he's been a lot more of it
about it recently. Yeah, I don't believe any claims that
he was not interested in this for a long time.
He has definitely tried to cast himself this summer as
the sort of leader of the resistance type figure. Yeah,
he hasn't done that by, for instance, ordering the California
National Guard to go home, protecting people from the massmen

(01:46):
with guns snatching them in the street, or even standing
up for trans kids. Instead, he has focused on I
guess what you could generously call Twitter trolling, like it's well,
we're going.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
To get into it. It's extremely annoying.

Speaker 4 (02:00):
So about a week ago now, I think the eleventh
of August was when he began Newsom began his social
media rebrand. He did this by posting about himself in
all caps as America's favorite governor. His posts since then
have mimicked the Donald. Trump has a pretty distinctive posting.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Style, right.

Speaker 4 (02:19):
Yeah, Newsom's are written in all caps, which Trump doesn't
tend to do. Trump tends to capitalize sporadically and as
far as I can tell, entirely randomly. But Newsom's doing
it in all caps. He uses over uses exclamation marks.
I should say this beef between the two of them
is not new right. Trumps has called him new scum
on true social and I don't think Trump can claim

(02:42):
the intellectual property to new scum.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
I've seen that one.

Speaker 4 (02:45):
Yeah, yeah, like it's up there with like hair Gel,
Hitler and Ussolini. Like anyway, if you if you're buying
a firearm in California, you will hear someone say one
of these things almost without fail.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:58):
The claim the newsman's team is making is that he's
like holding up a mirror to Trump's bigot tree by
doing this Trump style posting. But I think in doing so,
he's really illustrated the difference between him is not as
profound as you'd think or hope. He in one example,
called Scott Presler Nancy Mace. It's got Presler, gay conservative

(03:21):
right wing figure, and then he was called out for
miss gendering presler By.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
This will shock and amaze you, Tommy.

Speaker 4 (03:29):
Laurn Wow yeah, which yeah, no one knows, okay, yeah,
he responded, quote, you sound woke. This really isn't funny.
It's just Bigo tree like comparing gay ment to women
is an old, worn out and lazy jab.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
So when you combine.

Speaker 4 (03:48):
This with him having right wing figures like Charlie Kirk
and Steve Bannon on his.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Podcast and it just for reference, folks, I don't know
how much detail we can get into legally here, but
this being our business, we are aware of the numbers
different podcasts do. And Gavin Newsom's podcast is not like
it does. Okay, but there's certain podcasts about, for example,

(04:12):
bad people in history that lap at several times. So
like the star power that Gavin Newsom has, I'm not
seeing it. We're not talking about a guy who has
shown evidence that he is capable of on his own,
generating like a super loyal fan base or continued interest
in his personality. Now, I'm not saying that's that on

(04:32):
its own isn't a bad thing. A lot of politicians
who are very competent at certain things are not competent
at that, and in fact, most of the worst politicians
we have are also the people who are the best
at that and building a fan base, so to speak.
But what I'm saying is that Gavin Newsom is obsessed
with doing something, being this Trumpian populist figure that he

(04:53):
has not exhibited faculty for. Right, Yes, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 4 (04:59):
Yeah, no, And that's what I'm saying too, is a
he's confusing engagement with actual political action.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
Right, And he's confusing the kind of engagement that you
get on social media when it's someone else's algorithm, And
a lot of the engagement is like, not people who
are going to vote for you or support you, but
people who the algorithm is pushing your content to because
it knows they'll get pissed.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
Off by it, right exactly.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
That I'm not against you know, pissing off conservatives, but
that doesn't help you necessarily, right, Like, there's not a
clear benefit to us in this.

Speaker 4 (05:32):
Yeah, good things piss off conservatives, but pissing off conservatives
are not inherently a good or useful thing.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
It's just a thing.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
It's not enough, right, Like, I again, it can be
I'm not sometimes that's necessary just for morale purposes alone.
But again, I don't really think Gavin Newsom is making
the right scared. I don't think he's breaking their morale.
I think he's just kind of creating content that people
on the left are sharing because it pisses them off.

(06:02):
People on the right are sharing because it makes them laugh.
I think they think it's sad more than anything else.
And obviously you've got a chunk of like a decent
chunk of like centrist dim types who like Newsom, and
I guess maybe it's working for some of them, But
I don't think it's broadening his support. I think there's
a single voter, especially in a fucking swing state, who

(06:23):
is like, I wasn't going to vote for Gavin Newsom
until I saw him mimicking Donald Trump's tweets.

Speaker 4 (06:29):
Yeah, exactly, like he is doing, in a sense what
Harris did, which is this consistently failed Democrat political strategy
that they seem so addicted to that no amount of
losing will break them of it, which is moving to
the right to try and capture moderate Republicans. Right, they've
done this, everything's Trump took the Republican Party closer closer

(06:51):
to fascism right, Like, I want to give an example
of this. His Gavin Newsom talking to Sean Ryan about
transgender athletes.

Speaker 5 (07:03):
I'll be cannon with you. I looked at that issue
and I said, boy, they're just exploiting this. It's a
handful of people. What the hell is this? It's being weaponized.
It was just another cultural issue. Intel two years ago,
there was a state track championship. We had a trans
athlete that was successful, and there was a video of
the girl that lost and she was devastated, and that
video went around everywhere and it was very emotional, it

(07:24):
was very real. I remember calling my team man, I said,
this is legit, and I did this podcast with Charlie Kirk. Unsurprisingly,
he brought it up and he said, tell me that's
not fair. I said, it's not fair. You're right. My
party was pissed. Lgbtqcucus furious with me because I don't
think it's fair.

Speaker 6 (07:38):
It's not.

Speaker 5 (07:38):
But because you oppose sports doesn't make you homophobic, and
my party needs to stop saying that.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah again, I know who he thinks this is going
to help. He believes it's a religion. Effectively among a
lot of establishment dims that there's a whole huge chunk
of voters who are just itching to vote for a
Democrat if they weren't in favor of all of these
icky cultural issues that are hard to touch that the

(08:08):
right is, it spends so much time harping on, and
I think part of what they're seeing and where a
lot of the logical disconnect comes into effect, is that
they see how much money conservatives and time and discourse
conservatives spend talking about this and obsessing over it, and
they believe, well, oh, if we just kind of fold
on these people, then we've taken this great weapon out

(08:31):
of their arsenal, and they'll be helpless because they're stupid.
And I don't think these are fundamentally very smart people
in the political sense of the world. I think they
bad politicians. I think they're bad. I think they were
good politicians in terms of a competency sense at a
prior age to get to where they were, But the
ground has changed and intelligence is largely a product of adaptability,

(08:53):
and they have not proven adaptable. And I think what's
actually going to happen, because we've seen that, is if
they throw trans people under the bus as they're actively
talking about doing the right will grab another chunk of
their coalition and start ruthlessly trying to destroy that group
of people, and these people's suggestion will once again be Okay,

(09:17):
well we gotta, you know, throw those people under the bus,
because then we'll deny them that weapon, and eventually you
won't have any Democrats left.

Speaker 4 (09:26):
Like yeah, right, they'll come off to same sex marriage'll
come off to fucking interracial marriage, and Newsom will try
and find the middle.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (09:33):
Like where he has.

Speaker 3 (09:35):
Received praise for this, he's in the legacy media.

Speaker 4 (09:37):
I want to quote here from a cal Matter's op ed,
which suggests that Newsome was quote someone trying to hold
space for a hard conversation in his podcast.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
He's not.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
You don't have conversations with Charlie Kirk. He's never had
a real one in his life.

Speaker 4 (09:51):
Yeah, the conversation is not hard to have, right, trans
people deserve the same fucking rights as everyone else. It's
very easy to have. Also, he's having this conversation with
someone who agrees with him, Like, I would love to
see him tell a young trans woman that she can't
play on the fucking third s during the high school
volleyball team, because then he's going to see a kid
cry too. I don't want to go over the lake

(10:12):
trans people and compete sports like I've made my living
as an athlete for much of my life. This is bullshit,
and it's fundamentally disrespectful to women athletes to continue to
suggest it they're biologically inferior. But I do want to
talk more about Gavin you some slide into mean politics.
His press office claimed that after the fires in LA

(10:35):
claim this in New York Times in a piece of
our link, he was troubled by the misinformation that came out.
Apparently was his first fucking time in encountering misinformation on
the internet. Like oh wow, Yeah, Well, when you think
about the ease with which he lies, right, yeah, absolute
comfort he has, bullshitting it sort of makes sense until

(10:56):
it hits him. He doesn't care because he's too So
they decided to take the fight to the internet. I
guess they began with Star Wars memes. And then when
the redistricting debate in Texas, so we've covered extensively on
executive disorder was kind of reaching its peak, Newsom sort
of begun this sign I know you are, you said,

(11:17):
you are, But what am I kind of tendency In
his posting, he posted in all block capitals, I'm not
going to shout Donald Trump. If you do not stand down,
we will be forced to leave an effort to redraw
the maps in CAA to offset the rigging of maps.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
In red states.

Speaker 4 (11:32):
But if the other states call off their redistricting efforts,
we will do the same. Thank you for your attention
on this match. Sorry it's hard to readcause it's entirely
unpunctuated apart from at the end there. These tweets aren't
on his personal account or the official governor of California one.
They're on an account called governor use some press office,
but that count does have their little gray tick mark

(11:52):
that you can get in Twitter now for like government accounts.
Then he moved on to AI generated images and signed
his post with initials like Trump does, claiming Kid Rock
had endorsed him, which isn't true. Incidentally, they did this
exactly a year after Donald Trump posted an AI generated
image of Taylor Swift with the Swifties for Trump montage,

(12:15):
which shows how much time they spend looking at Trump's
post rather than doing anything fucking useful. Then they moved
on to mocking Greg Abbott for using a wheelchair, saying
he rolled over for Trump again, like, you do not
build a political coalition by mocking people with disabilities. There
are a million things to fucking hate Greg Abbott for.

(12:35):
I could spend an hour talking about the loathsome shit
he has done, but using a wheelchair is not one
of those things. If you cannot find anything else, that
really shows a paucity of democratic politics right now, let's
take a break and we'll come back.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
Awesome, All right, we're back.

Speaker 4 (13:05):
Unfortunately, and probably predictively, Newsom has received praise from all
over the legacy and media for these posts. The NYT quoted,
it's actually unclear of they quoted. I don't know if
this was just a mistake that they haven't corrected. But
it was phrased like she said it directly, but it
wasn't in quotation mark, so I'm a little unclear. I'm
just gonta assume they quoted this.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
Lady.

Speaker 4 (13:24):
Sarah Roberts, a director for the Center of Critical Internet
Inquiry UCLA, said, quote, mister Nuisan's posts are perhaps grabbing
so much attention because they stand out for the rest
of democratic party's ineffective approach of playing it safe and
proceeding as if its business as usual, and then just
to double down on this useful podcast idiot, John Favreau
tweeted quote, I mean, it's pretty clearly a parody of

(13:46):
Trump's absolutely insane, all caps off to nonsensical posts. Probably,
while all the people in my life who aren't political
junkies keep reaching out to say they don't know much
about Newsom but think the tweets are hilarious, humor and
mockery can be quite effective, neither of them say what
they are effective for. Right, No one seems concerned that

(14:07):
these make no material difference, and he is doing them
instead of doing things that make material difference. Right, I'm
going to play another clip from Chris Hayes here before you.

Speaker 8 (14:17):
Governor Gavin Newsom and his team have figured out a
very entertaining way to deal with Donald Trump at his
own rhetorical level.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
They've got a new social.

Speaker 8 (14:24):
Media strategy that is both I got to say, pretty
damn funny and I think extremely effective, mocking the President
with a spot on impression of his very weird communication stock.
Since Newsom jumped into the ongoing redistricting fight. His official
Twitter account has been posting Trump style. Donald has finished.
He is no longer hot. First the hand so tiny,
and now me, Gavin C. Newson have taken away his step.

(14:46):
Many are saying, we can't even do the big stairs
on Air Force one anymore, uses the little baby stairs
now sad as all the Trump trademarks, all capital letters,
random quotation marks, little parentheticals, complete unhinged absurdity.

Speaker 9 (14:57):
I thought that's a good one.

Speaker 8 (14:58):
I hate kid Rock reference to Trump's infamous I hate
Taylor Swift. Another drags a vice president to it. Not
even JD just Dance Vans can save Trump from the
disastrous maps war he has started. Not even his eyeliner
lines look as pretty as California map lines.

Speaker 9 (15:14):
He will fail as he always does.

Speaker 8 (15:16):
Sad and I, the peacetime governor of our nation's favorite,
will save America once again. Many are now calling me
Gavin Christopher Columbus Newsom because of the maps. Thank you
for your attention to this matter. Beyond the mockery of
Trump's text post, Newsom has also been posting Trump style
AI generated images of himself, including this I think absolute
masterpiece of Newsom deep in a moment of reflection or

(15:38):
prayer link by three Maga icons and the laying of
hands Kid Rock who he hates, Tucker Carlson, and the
angelic spirit of the recently departed Hulk Holgan again a
spot on mockery Trump, who.

Speaker 9 (15:49):
Isn't doing any of this satirically.

Speaker 8 (15:51):
What has been equally hilarious has been to watch the
joke just go soaring over the heads of Trump's sick
ofphants in the media for.

Speaker 9 (15:57):
The last week.

Speaker 10 (15:58):
Devin Newsom, Why am I giving him advice? You had
to stop it with the Twitter thing. I don't know
where his wife is. I want his wife. I would say,
you are making a fool of yourself. Stop it, Do
not let your staff tweet. And if you're doing it yourself,
put the phone away and start over. And if you want.
He's got a big job as governor of California, but

(16:20):
if he wants an even bigger job, he has to
be a little bit more serious.

Speaker 8 (16:22):
Yes, right, be more serious, stop posting exactly like the
President the United States does. Newsome's account responded to that
advice quote, Dana ding Dong Pirno never heard of Hegel
today is melting.

Speaker 9 (16:32):
Down because of me.

Speaker 8 (16:33):
God and c Newsom Fox hate that I am America's
most favorite governor ratings King saving America. Trump has lost
his step and Fox is losing it because when I'm
type American that wins. Thank you for your attention this
matter again. It is just it is a stark reminder
with someone else doing it of how truly utterly deranged
our current president sounds whenever he communicates, and also how

(16:55):
accustomed we've all become to this very very weird behavior.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
I know, we wouldn't be talking about this serus. He
was just bad tweets.

Speaker 4 (17:02):
Right, We're talking about it because I think it shows
a fundamental and ability of the DNC to meet the
moment right now. Yeah, we're talking about it because people
are dying, Yes, and more people will die as a
result of this administration's policies. Other people are being imprisoned,
and like I, you know, the damage being done you know,
to medical science, to the future of humanity, to the

(17:24):
future of this country is tremendous and escalating. And the
fact that like this is the best a major a
major contender for the Democratic presidential candidate in twenty twenty
eight has been able to pull out so far is
like terrifying.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Like and again, obviously no one should be reliant upon
the dims. But unfortunately, also like, what are you got
to do? What am I going to do?

Speaker 1 (17:48):
Right?

Speaker 2 (17:48):
I don't have the resources of the Democratic Party. I
don't have a bunch of elected leaders listening to me. Like,
because of the status of our situation, individual people in
small groups in towns, and you know, we talk about
mutual aid on this show, we talk about unions. All
of these increased personal resiliency. They increase the ability of
groups and of individuals within groups to be resilient. But

(18:11):
none of that is going to stop the fucking DHS
from turning into the SS right Yeah, and the Democratic
Party clearly fucking isn't either. But the fact that this
is what they're doing instead of effective resistance is I mean,
it's important. I wish there was more to say than
we should know how badly they're failing us. Right, Yeah, Like.

Speaker 4 (18:33):
A world where Democrat gets elected in twenty twenty eight,
it's getting less awful less quickly, and we should want them, yes, right,
Like I'm not one of these Like acceleration is.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
No, I just I don't think that's going to help either, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:47):
Yeah, right now.

Speaker 4 (18:48):
It is accelerating and it is bad. There are so
many obvious challenges Democrats can make. And I want to
play Robert. Have you seen this Graham plant for Senate
campaign ad?

Speaker 9 (19:09):
No mane all right, I'm going to.

Speaker 4 (19:10):
Play this for you, like I think it's good as
a contrast, right, But.

Speaker 11 (19:17):
I love most about man of the people. I have
never met people who are more hard scrabble, even in
a place that requires you to work like two or
three different jobs. We have watched this state become essentially
unlivable for working class people, and it makes me deeply angry.
My name is Graham Plattner, and I'm running for US
Senate and Maine to defeat Susan Collins. A decade of

(19:40):
military service, going overseas, farming oysters to feed my community,
diving to lend a hand to other fishermen, trying to
start a family. But everywhere I've gone, it seems like
the fabric of what holds us together is being ripped
apart by billionaires and corrupt politicians profiting off of destroying
our environment, driving our families in the pop and crushing

(20:00):
the middle class. I did four infantry tours in the
Marine corps in the army. I'm not afraid to name
an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy. It's the
billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell
us out. And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins.
I'm not fooled by this fake charade of Collins deliberations
and moderation. The difference between Susan Collins and Ted Cruz

(20:23):
is at least Ted Cruz is honest about selling us
out and not giving a damn. People know that the
system is screwing them. They know it in their bones.
Nobody I know around here can afford a house. Healthcare
is a disaster. Hospitals are closing. We have watched all
of that get ripped away from us, and everyone just
trying to keep it all together. Why can't we have
universal health care like every other first world country. Why

(20:45):
can't we take care of our veterans when they come home.
Why are we funding endless wars and bombing children? Why
are CEO is more powerful than unions? We fought three
different wars since the last time we raised the minimum wage.
I'm not pretending to have all the answers, but I
know that I'm asking the ray questions. When I tell
people around here that I'm running for Senate, sometimes the

(21:05):
initial reaction is what. But when I tell them why,
I'm doing it because I truly do believe that we
can build a system that is going to represent working people,
the number one response has been, well, thank god, somebody's
going to do it. You're supposed to fight for the
things you love. This is our home, and I will
fight tirelessly for it for you. It's maner's first in

(21:31):
Maine always.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
I mean, that didn't seem bad.

Speaker 12 (21:38):
No, it's good.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
That's that's a solid ad.

Speaker 4 (21:40):
Yeah, yeah, Like the BA is reasonably low. But like
that dude hit it, I think.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
I mean, yeah, yeah, Like I would say that's just
outright good, like if I were if I were crafting
an ad to run from other than the fact that
he's lived a different life, but like how he's talking
about the oligarchy, how he's talking about the life act
of progress on things like minimum wage and how unacceptable
it is, and like how the difference between Susan Collins

(22:08):
and Ted Cruise is that at least Ted Cruise is honest, Like, yeah,
I'm on board this guy. Yeah, this guy seems like.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
He rips, But I would vote for that dude. Like, yeah, sure,
he might turn into a fucking fatimen, but.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
Like, I mean, they can all get milkshake ducked. But
he's saying the right things at this point.

Speaker 4 (22:22):
Yeah, it's remarkably straightforward, right like yeah, and yeah, that
seems to evade most Democrats.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
He's he's got the audio of a car ad But
I guess if it works, it works. That's the thing.
I don't know. I'm not familiar with the Platinu race,
so I'm not sure where the polling showing.

Speaker 4 (22:38):
This video is like two days old, Like he's extremely fresh.
So yeah, I will say that visually it hangs together. Dude,
Jesus the same open soel wetsuit. I do, Like he
didn't just buy all this shit, Like didn't buy an
axe and chopping for the first time in this video,
right right right, He.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
Didn't do the normal weird democrat trying to reach out
to a rural thing of like posing awkwardly with a shotgun.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (22:59):
Yeah, like this is a dude, and just like physically
he appears to have done some work with his hands.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Yeah, he looks like a working class guy.

Speaker 4 (23:07):
Yeah, let's compare this to like Newsome has not done
the material things that he could be doing instead of
tweeting right. Trump didn't call it the California National guid
under the Insurrection Act. He used Title ten, Section yeah
one two four zero six of the US Code. That
section states orders for these purposes should be issued through
the governors of the states. It also outlines the procedures

(23:28):
for DC which we don't care about here. I didn't
see why he could at least try to force the
issue in ordering the guard to go home. He's pursuing
a court case yet, but leg forced the crisis because we're.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
Already in one.

Speaker 4 (23:40):
He has not taken a single meaningful action to stop
I snatching people from our communities in California, nor has
his Attorney General taken a single meaningful action to stop
individual sheriff's departments from violating SB fifty four. SB fifty
four if you're not familiar as a California Values Act,
which limits which which inmates can be transferred to ice

(24:02):
custody and when. It doesn't oblige anyone to transfer them,
but it does allow them to transfer them if certain
felonies have been committed in the last fifteen years. The
San Diego Sheriff has been accused of violating this are
linked to a KPBS article on that where they transferred
to someone who, according to claims in the article, had
a twenty one year old conviction. Where As I said
before the cutoff fifteen years, Newsom could do something about

(24:26):
the surveillance which is being installed all over California. These
license plates readers at the ones at San Diego has
spent thousands, if not billions of dollars on these license
plate readers have had their information shared with federal agencies
more than one hundred times in May alone.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
According to cal Matters.

Speaker 4 (24:45):
That is a violation of California law. Specifically, it's Senate
Bill thirty four, which limits the sharing of licensed plate data.
Rob Bonto issued an advisory, but again, this is resulting
in our communities being harassed. Right Californian's being snatched. Newsom
has done nothing about that. He could stand up for

(25:08):
unhouse people, but instead, alongside Todd Glory, he has led
the charge against Todd. Glory is seemingly intent on driving
our city into debt to pursue Castrow approach against thee
unhoused Newsome posed for a photo shoot destroying unhoused people's property.
He hasn't done a single thing that puts him at

(25:28):
any risk. Right. He's presenting himself in this Sean ram
podcast the big risk taker because he spoke out about
fucking teenage girls running, right, But he hasn't put his
neck on the line once for marginalized people in california're anywhere.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Else, absolutely not.

Speaker 4 (25:44):
I think where I want to end is I don't
want you to engage with Newsom's tweets like that doesn't help.
He's going to mistake that for making a difference, right,
because I think for a lot of people in the
legacy media and probably knew some of his friends, the
real tragedy of what's happened in the last eight months
is that they have to see scary, nasty stuff on
their telephones. So seeing something funny on their telephone seems

(26:08):
like an antidote because it's not their community, it's not
their people, and it's not people they fundamentally give a
shit about either. That I think is why to them
this seems effective and hopefully to you, as it does
to me, it seems completely ineffective.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
Yeah, I don't know. How much else to say, it's
nice to see guys like Platner at least seem to
be figuring it out. I've been looking into it, and
there's there's not much polling. There's not really any polling
because I how recently he announced his bid to show
how well he's doing. Other than that, the video has
got like two and a half million views something like that,
which is good and seems to be spreading well online.

(26:44):
But that doesn't translate electorally. What we do have electorally
is that polls in Maine show that the Democratic Party
is historically unpopular, including with Democrats. This is from a
July survey. There's a good article in PBS that's just
they roll right over. Many Democrats think their party is weak.
Ap n O RC whole finds. Oh sorry, this is

(27:07):
actually no, sorry, this is overall across US adults. Sorry.
The initial article I had seemed to be saying that
this was just in May. No, this is this is nationwide, right,
So I mean, I think that what Platner has seen,
the opportunity he's seen is real that there are a
lot of people who are not at all interested in
voting for a Republican who have not been swayed to

(27:27):
the right, who identify as Democrats but hate the party
and think it is weak. Right, Like about two inten Democrats,
according to this poll, described their party positively. One intent
said it was empathetic and inclusive. That's terrible, right, and
that is that I mean, that shows that just what
we were saying kind of based on our gut, which

(27:47):
is it's a bad idea to hang people out to
dry because you don't think you can defend them. You
think that it'll be beneficial politically to make the choice
to you know, let them die basically. Yeah, And it's
it seems like Democrats largely are responding by saying, well,
this party doesn't give a shit about us, and they
are ineffective. They can't do fuck all, right, Yeah, and

(28:09):
that's definitely what's happening. So, yeah, I don't know if
Platner is gonna win, but I'm growing more convinced every
day that there is opportunity for people who are actually
willing to fight these bastards. Yeah, and you understanding that
fighting these bastards isn't just like, well, let's give them
almost everything they want and hope that somehow lets us win.

Speaker 7 (28:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (28:28):
Yeah, talking of like not leaving people out to dry,
for instance, talking about trans women in sports, he says
it's abstraction from the things that impact Americans materially every
single day. Then he said, I'm dedicated to a quality
and justice for all in this country. And I think
the specific topic has become such a touchstone of the
media discussion because it pulls away from the conversation that
needs to be happening is getting every American affordable healthcare.

(28:49):
It's not the best response, it's not the worst one either, Like,
and I think he is right. For most of these
conservative people, they don't care about women's sports, right, They're
not there when women are getting shit priced, women are
getting shit TV time.

Speaker 3 (29:01):
This for them is just a culture war issue.

Speaker 4 (29:04):
He also called the genocide and Gazara a genocide, which
is something that it's like.

Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, I enjoyed the line about where we're just killing
kids with bombs.

Speaker 4 (29:13):
Yeah, yeah, I think that he He didn't mince his
words about it. When asked by ABC, he said he's
following the leader of Israeli scholars on genocide on this issue.
So yeah, like, it's remarkably easy, right to build a
coalition right now of people who are fucking mad. And
a lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they
were sick of this same smami bullshit. Some of them

(29:35):
are to vote Johnal Trump because a hateful, terrible, fucking
people right. Just to be super clear, Yeah, but like
it's so easy, and yet it seems to be evading,
Like you say, the presumptive nominee, that this guy who
for for nearly a decade we have assumed we'll run
in twenty twenty eight. And I guess I know, fuck
Gavin Newsom. I hope that he does not succeed with

(29:57):
his presidential campaign missions.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah all right, well that's yeah, most of what I
got to say about that son of a bit.

Speaker 13 (30:03):
Yep, me too. Let's roll out, Bye bye.

Speaker 14 (30:24):
Hello everyone, I'm welcome to it can happen here. My
name is Daniel Kurd, and I'm a writer, analyst, and
researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics. I'm an associate professor
of political science and a senior non resident fellow at
the Arab Center Washington. I'm also occasional co host of
The Fire These Times. Today, I want to talk about
the attacks on American universities in American academia and what

(30:48):
role Palestine plays in all of this, and maybe end
on what's being done to stop it. So you may
or may not have heard about the attacks on universities
in academia, but given the general onslaught of disastrous news,
even for those of you who have noted something is
happening in higher education may not be keeping up with
the details. So let me give you a brief summary.

(31:11):
A number of universities, including Harvard, Brown, Columbia, and UCLA,
have been investigated for campus anti semitism related to pro
Palestine protests on those campuses over the past two years.
From there, the Trump administration has escalated by slashing federal
funding that those universities receive and forcing those universities to

(31:34):
settle with the administration not only monetarily, but also by
implementing changes to how their universities are run. So, for example,
Columbia University agreed to pay the Trump administration two hundred
and twenty million dollars punish seventy students involved in the
protests in a variety of ways, including by expelling them,

(31:54):
and they agreed to monitor and report their programs for
unlawful dea goals, that's a quote. One of the ways
Columbia has agreed to monitor, as the Intercept reported in April,
is by appointing a vice provost in charge of monitoring
the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department, in
particular for quote balanced curricula. The faculty in that department

(32:18):
will no longer run that department, and as the Middle
East Studies Association, in a statement back in March noted, this,
placing the department under administrative receivership is a quote fundamental
abrogation of the autonomy of university governance. This comes at
a time when the Trump administration has also attacked the
National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the

(32:42):
National Institutes of Health. All of these are federal funding
sources for the majority of research that happens at universities
across disciplines the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities. The Trumpet
administration has also attacked foreign students and the processes by
which they are able to get visa study in the
United States, which is just another way to get at
a major revenue source for many universities. But why is

(33:05):
the Trump administration doing all this. Here is Vice President JD.
Vance speaking to the National Conservatism Conference back in twenty
twenty one.

Speaker 6 (33:13):
We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in
this country.

Speaker 9 (33:17):
Ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 6 (33:18):
The universities do not pursue knowledge and truth. They pursued
deceit and lies. And it's time to be honest about
that fact. And we subsidize, we support, and in our
own ways all of us reinforce the power of universities
to control our lives and control how we live them.
So much of what drives truth and knowledge as we

(33:40):
understand it in this country is fundamentally determined by, supported by,
and reinforced by the universities in this country.

Speaker 14 (33:48):
So that's Vance before him and Trump won the election,
identifying that universities are sites of power. Therefore, he argues
very explicitly that conservatives must destroy these sites of power
or submit them to their will. Are universities truly sites
of power? The short answer is yes, for two reasons.

(34:09):
Number One, as Vance themselves identifies, universities produce knowledge, and
that knowledge produce that universities drives innovation in the private sector,
in tech, in health, and weapons, manufacturing, universities are a
main engine of economic growth. In fact, universities are part
and parcel of American global power. They are a major

(34:33):
source of that power for the United States, whether in
the students and scholars they attract, whether for their research
that they produce that various arms of the American government
can use, or whether for the legitimization that universities provide
for certain frameworks like the frame market liberalism, etc.

Speaker 7 (34:50):
Etc.

Speaker 14 (34:51):
So, really, universities largely generate power for the powers that be,
But sometimes universities are also sites of power that can
challenge orthodoxies. With greater inclusion of scholars and students from
a variety of backgrounds, we get a diversity of thought.
And because of how universities are supposed to run in theory,

(35:13):
as governed by faculty and as sites of free inquiry,
that means sometimes occasionally knowledge is produced that can challenge
power too. That sometimes occasional knowledge production is too much
for the jd vances of today's politics, though, so they're
cracking down. The number two reason why universities are sites

(35:35):
of power is because they offer a promise of social mobility.
And that's generally true too, even the most modest regional
public school in America still offer some of the highest
quality of education you can get around the world, but
that shot at upward social mobility that you can get
with the university of education is definitely getting harder and

(35:59):
costlier and less accessible. There's this book by Mark Busque
I highly recommend reading, titled How the University Works. In it,
the author details how as universities became more corporatized, tuition increased,
university workers were disempowered, and the value of a degree plummeted.

(36:19):
And this process started way before Trump. Clifford Ando, professor
of Classics and History at the University of Chicago, wrote
for Compact magazine recently on what's happening at the University
of Chicago right now for those who may be unaware.
At the University of Chicago, the university is stopping PhD emissions,
it's increasing enrollment numbers, it's slashing budgets, it's even proposing

(36:42):
to teach some courses using chat GPT. Ando argues that
this current dismantling of University of Chicago that we're witnessing
is again not Trump related, but can be traced to
this corporatization of the university where universities prioritized money making,
technology and investments, and as he writes, quote fundamentally corroded

(37:04):
policymaking at universities. So to get a high quality education today,
at a university that isn't trying to trap you as
cheap labor or doesn't just use overworked adjuncts to teach
courses to avoid paying faculty their worth, you need to
either come from money, or you need to be highly
highly exceptional, or you need to accrue exorbitant amounts of debt.

(37:27):
And yet, and yet, marginalized people still made advances in
this system. We saw, for example, more African American presidents
of universities, more women, We saw diversifying scholarship courses, pathways
for students as universities became more inclusive. That's what diversity,
equity and inclusion efforts did. Imperfect as they were, and

(37:51):
even though the university as an institution continues to exploit labor,
continues to exploit their own students, often doesn't deliver enough
on the promise of social mobility. Even delivering a little
was too much for the Jdvanss of the world. They
don't want upward social mobility for some Americans, and they
don't want those challenges to power, even at the margins,

(38:13):
so they're cracking down. The attacks on Harvard, Brown, George Washington, UCLA,
the list goes on, is predicated on attacking DEI Diversity,
equity and inclusion. Conservatives alleged that universities taking a person's
background into consideration and admissions or in hiring or in scholarships, etc.

(38:34):
All of that violates anti discrimination laws. And our conservative
Supreme Court, in its recent ruling in the cases of
Students for Fair Admissions versus University of North Carolina and
Students for Vera Admissions versus Harvard, agreed they overturned the
two thousand and three Grotta versus Bollinger case that had
allowed higher education institutions to consider race and admissions. And

(38:56):
all of this comes at a time after decades of
the university an institution eroded itself. But I would say
attacking DEI wasn't effective enough, especially after the Black Lives
Matter movement. Saying DEI is bad is a harder sell
for an American public fifty one percent of which say

(39:17):
they support Black Lives Matter. And this was according to
a twenty twenty three study by the Pere Research Center. Now,
fifty one percent isn't overwhelming, but it's not nothing either.
So conservatives to attack the university have had to exploit
the weaknesses that already exist within the academy. That has
meant exploiting the way the university's institution has become sensitive

(39:39):
to money and endowments and donors, and that has meant
exploiting the way the university has not actually been a
site of free inquiry or expression for particular people and
particular topics. And by exploiting and expanding that gap, they
are now trying to take those freedoms away from everybody.
This is where Palestine comes in. The truth is attacks

(40:12):
on student protesters for Palestine, attacks on scholars who work
on Palestine or speak on Palestine. That all started before Trump,
and that has become the blueprint for attacking universities and
academic freedom. Generally, they're using the pro Palestine protests, pro
Palestine programming, or just any knowledge production about Palestine as

(40:34):
an excuse to allege anti Semitism. Enter into these investigations
and demand the universities do what they want. After the
Hamas October seventh attacks, we saw student protesters detained like
Mahmud Kriil Columbia and remaisa ouster Get Tufts and many more.
We have seen diplomas withheld, like what Virginia Commonwealth University

(40:58):
attempted to do to many students, including students sitting in Hadad.
We have seen professors put on leave or fired like
what Muhlenberg College did to Mora Finkelstein. The list goes
on and on, but again, a lot of this pattern
started before Trump. In a November twenty twenty three poll
conducted by political scientists Mark Lynch and Shibley Telheme called

(41:22):
the Middle East Scholar Barometer, the results show that sixty
six percent of faculty members who study the Middle East
quote self censor when speaking about the Middle East in
an academic or professional setting, and that number goes up
to seventy seven point four percent when talking about Israel Palestine.
On the Israel Palstonin issue in particular, almost fifty two

(41:44):
percent of scholars have concerns about pressure from external advocacy groups,
and of those who said they self censor, a full
eighty three percent said the issue they most feel the
need to censor themselves about is anything related to criticism
of Israel. This is a crazy number if you consider
that of the same group, only one point six percent

(42:06):
of respondents said they censored criticism of US policy, and
a full ninety eight percent of assistant professors untenured professors
who work on the Middle East quote feel the need
to self censor when speaking about the Palestinian Israeli issue
in an academic or professional capacity. Part of this story,

(42:26):
the censorship story, is the large scale adoption of the
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti Semitism. Back during
his first term, President Trump's Executive Order on Combating Anti
Semitism directed government bodies to take the IRA definition into
consideration when enforcing Title six, which is a part of

(42:47):
the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four that prohibits
discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
The Biden administration didn't overturn any of that either. They
implemented that executive Order themselves throughout their tenure. And this
definition is one definition of anti semitism that critics say
conflates criticism of Israel with anti semitism. In fact, the

(43:11):
main drafter of the IRA definition, ken Stearn, has expressed
concerns that this definition is being used as a quote
blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemit, and it's for
that reason that Human Rights Watch and one hundred and
four other organizations signed a letter urging the UN not
to use this IRA definition. As a result, there are,

(43:33):
of course, a number of competing definitions of antisemitism, such
as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, that has a more
nuanced understanding of one criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism. As
their website notes, the Jerusalem Declaration is a product of
an initiative that originated in Jerusalem and includes in their
numbers international scholars working in anti Semitism studies and related

(43:55):
fields including Jewish Holocaust, Israel, Palestine, and Middle East. But
of course the IRA definition is the one that the
Trump administration wants to follow and the one that universities
are adopting. Maybe it goes without saying, but I'll say
it anyway. It's not because this administration that engages with
the far right and propagates conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement,

(44:19):
It's not like they actually care about anti Semitism. It's
just a tool. As Jewish organizations working to combat anti Semitism,
such as the Nexus Project explicitly point out it's a
way to quote weaponize anti semitism by attacking free speech
DEI foreign students, and in this environment we can understand
why there's so much fear to speak up and so

(44:41):
much self censorship. You can be falsely accused of anti
semitism for bringing up Palestine as a topic of discussion,
for trying to study what's happening, for trying to produce
any sort of knowledge on what's going on. I also
really want to score that this self censorship and fear

(45:04):
that already existed in a space in academia is a
worsening trend today, but it definitely existed before October seventh too.
Take it from me as someone who studies Palestine in
American academia. Palestinian scholars have long been under attack in
the American academy. But after October seventh and before Trump,
this of course got worse. External actors and donors got

(45:26):
involved in campus governance. As we saw in Harvard and
many other places, University administrations cracked down on students, professors, everyone,
often preemptively doing the work of the right wing because
they thought that taking away freedoms from some groups wouldn't
come back to bite them. And this is how Palestine
is now one of the cudgels that Trump is using
to attack universities and the academy. And it's an effective

(45:50):
cudgel because some liberals in universities and outside universities can
also be persuaded to attack scholarship on Palestine and students
who speak on Palestine. But those exceptions to academic freedom
that have long existed in the academy are now being
used to attack everyone. A quick note here to outline
what academic freedom for a faculty member actually means. As

(46:14):
the American Association of University Professors the AAUP notes on
their website, academic freedom has these main elements. Number one,
the freedom to discuss relevant matters in the classroom. Number two,
the freedom to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and
creative expression, and to publish the results of such work.
Number three intramural speech freedom from institutional censorship or discipline

(46:39):
when addressing matters of institutional policy or action. And number
four extramural speech freedom from institutional censorship or discipline when
speaking or writing. As citizens. So faculty members are allowed
to speak on matters as citizens. Being a faculty member
and being a member of the university community does not
take away their right to be citizens. That last one

(47:01):
is worth emphasizing. To maintain universities as sites of free
inquiry and knowledge production, there has to be academic freedom,
and that freedom includes teaching, research, intramulo speech, and extramural speech.
You can't censor people you don't like or don't agree
with and think your institution and your university will continue
to function. You certainly can't do that and think the

(47:23):
right wing won't sniff it out and use it against you.
So what's to be done? Things are happening, People are
fighting back, and just like Palestine has been the Canarian
the coal mine for so many things, including the assault
on American academia, Palestine may be one of those crucial
issues that helps academics and students and faculty to organize

(47:44):
in this moment. For example, because of the arrests of
pro Palestine students and their attempted deportation, the American Association
of University Professors, alongside the Middle Ease Studies Association and
the Night First Amendment Institute, sued the Trump administration over
this policy of arresting and threatening deportation for a lawful

(48:05):
speech on Palestine. The AAUP is also now ap plaintive
in a number of cases challenging the Trump administration on
a tax on DEI, attempting to abolish the Department of Education,
cuts and federal funding of research, etc. An attacks on
students and faculty after October seventh, which set off this
whole barrage of attacks on university since then, have galvanized

(48:26):
people to demand their university administrations uphold academic freedom. In
twenty twenty four, nearly forty chapters of the AAUP were
founded or re established across the US. Even professors who
don't teach or study the Middle East or Palestine are
starting to speak out about the dangers of these moments
and these trends. I think people are starting to realize
that American universities will have to uphold their ideals of

(48:50):
faculty governance, free inquiry, free thought for everyone, or they
really will cease to exist. That's all I have for
you today. I'll be back soon to talk more about
the latest developments in Palestine. Stay strong, everybody, Thanks for listening.

Speaker 7 (49:20):
Welcome to Ikadath to hear a podcast about things falling
apart and also sometimes about how not to put them
back together and how to fail to put them back together.
I am your host, Miya Wong, and today we are
going to be talking about the place where the anti
trians crusade began, North Carolina, and about the recent spade

(49:41):
of anti trans bills that have been passed there. And
with me to talk about this is David Forbes, an
editor and journalist with a trans news network and the
Asheville Blade. David, welcome to the show.

Speaker 9 (49:52):
Thank you.

Speaker 6 (49:53):
So.

Speaker 7 (49:54):
I think some people, if you're listening to the show,
you may remember that North Carolina is the state that
passed the first bathroom bills. But what has gotten significantly
less attention is a everything that happened after that, and
b a series of two really sweeping and hideous anti
trans bills that have been passed in the last month

(50:16):
or so. And David wrote a really really good piece
for Transnus network about both these bills and also how
democrats in the state helped pass them.

Speaker 9 (50:27):
So I want to.

Speaker 7 (50:28):
Talk about that, and I guess the place to start is,
can you talk about what these two bills HB aight
oh five and SB four four to two got started.

Speaker 9 (50:38):
Sure, So of the two, HBAH five is the more
sweeping broadly, at least, they're both terrible anti trans bill.
It affects everything from changing your birth certificate to state
health plans not covering trans healthcare to really ominously like
what jail or prison you get put into if you're

(50:59):
a train person and you're arrested. That one, it's kind
of a laundry list of far right anti trans ideas.
The other SB four forty two is one of those
where it takes some digging. And here I'm really thankful
that TNN's policy analyst, who I think you y'all have
had on your ftim's Kareem Green into the show, was
actually there to yes, was a huge help in reviewing

(51:21):
this bill. I've been covering with North Carolina politics and
it's various horrors for a long time. But even still,
it's good to have like legislative expertise on that. And
SA four forty two changes the definition of child abuse
to not include transphobic child abuse. Essentially, it was written

(51:43):
against the very fictional specter of like, oh, if you
have questions about this trans stuff and you get your
kids pronouns wrong. DSS could come like snatch them overnight,
which is not a thing that has ever happened, no,
including them, especially North Carolina, like yeah, yeah, so, but
what it does is just bluntly open the way, especially

(52:04):
in the state foster care system, for just anti trans
bigotry across the board. You know, at this point it's like, okay, well,
placement can't be NYE based on someone's religion or their
race and being a transfer, you know, it's like that's
that's being added those predicted identities. It's also essentially letting

(52:26):
the ground work for just even more legal sanctioning of
conversion therapy, which is of course torture and abuse. I
think cream summed up as that if you if you
don't have a trans can do abuse, foster care will
provide one for yeah, which is it's really bleakah we chuckle,
but it's we chuckle and like gallows humor because he's
that absurd. So SB four forty two was the one

(52:49):
that kind of went through the whole legislative process first,
and in some ways it had less of a party
line treatment than HB eighth five eventually did so you know,
say credit where do but NC Senate Democrats, of whom
there aren't terribly many, but there are some did universally
vote against this bill. They were like, no, we're not

(53:10):
approving it. However, the GOP has a two thirds majority
in there, so it's really not as necessary. They can
put in sially over right a vito and there where
things really came down to as North Carona House, and
they are nine Democrats joined with the Republicans to pass this,
and then it got to the desk of Governor Josh Stein,
who won in a landslide last year like North Fromine Democrats.

(53:34):
Despite how Jerry mayor of the state is, which we'll
talk about more in a little bit, actually did pretty well.
The GOP no longer had a supermajority in the House,
and the Democratic candid for governor, former Attorney General Josh Stein,
won in a route. So essentially that was supposed to
prevent bills like this from becoming law, because okay, if

(53:54):
the Dems held the line in the North Carolina House,
the Republicans on the supermajority, then the governor vetos it,
then they can varide of the video that didn't happen
so not only did non Democrats side with Republicans Stein sign.

Speaker 7 (54:07):
The bill, yeah, which is hideous.

Speaker 9 (54:10):
Yeah, and it was it was bleakly insulting the way
he did it too, because it was just like he
didn't even issue a statement or oh, like, well we
still believe in trans rights. This is a bureaucratic thing
or even bother to make an excuse. It was just
tuck in a list of bills that he signed that
day alongside like some other bureaucratic stuff involving like retirement

(54:31):
communities and recognizing driver's licenses. So it's it's definitely kind
of insult to injury sort of situation. Interestingly, North Carolina's
gay inc organizations, you're kind of like the mainline nonprofits
and in North find there's like a quality and see
there's a campaignsion the quality, which is regional is based
in the state here in Aashville. They actually had been

(54:51):
very strongly against this bill, despite some Democrats supporting it,
but they stopped short as will become a theme with
condemning or attacking any of the Democrats who did, which
was a giant signal that this is not an issue
you're really going to fight Democrats on. So the governor
then thinks, well, there's no political capital be lost signing
this thing. On the same day, he did veto HBATO five,

(55:14):
along with a bunch of other bills targeting, you know,
in quote marks dei measures, which are basically attempts to
smash out anything that's not far right and further research
shape the state, and he did veto those. The language
you use, though, was definitely what a lot of us
become used to. It's the oh, this was divisive. No
trans people mentioned, no trans healthcare mention, no trans rights mentioned,

(55:37):
just vaguely, well, this is divisive and it's a distraction.
So HBAO five does actually go back to the legislature,
and one Democrat had voted for HBAO five, so there
was a tension turning of Okay, is this guy gonna
still vote for a veto override Representative Dante Pittman, because
it's a big deal, supposedly anyway, for a Democrat to

(55:58):
defy their own governor. It's one thing when it's like
you're just okay, you know the bill's going to pass.
It's still horrible, but it's supposedly a harder bar to
reach or at least that's what there is. You know,
ostensibly pro Queer Democrats are telling us for them to
go on the record and be like, no, I'm joining
with the other party to override your veto and like
give you the middle finger, essentially. But what happened when

(56:18):
he got to the House, he actually did did vote
to hold with the veto. But another representative we've been
out on a pretty dubious excused absence when HBOO five
was originally their Democratic rep Nasif Maajid, voted in favor
and that was enough to make it law. So the
one thing that among Queer and transcing with Carolina, who

(56:39):
liked a lot of other places, voted very heavily against
the Republicans, you know, for the Democratic candidates and all.
That's one reason they did fairly well last year to
stop exactly the sort of legislation becoming law. It just
became law, and it did so thanks to members of
the Democratic Party and in one bill, the Democratic governor.

Speaker 7 (57:08):
Both of these bills are unbelievably draconian, like these are
things that even like two years ago, like banning state
funding for like all trans healthcare.

Speaker 9 (57:19):
Well for the state health plan, we should specify.

Speaker 7 (57:21):
Yeah, yeah, sorry, it is like the state healthcare but
and this is at least my understanding of it, is
that this is a ban on.

Speaker 9 (57:27):
All ages, yes, for anyone on the state health care plan.
So if someone is a state employee or a teacher, yeah,
or like your kids are exactly. And it's kind of
Actually it's close to home for me because I grew
up poor in North Carolina and one of the only
reasons we had healthcare growing up was so my mom,
as poorly paid as she was, was a public school teacher. So,

(57:49):
you know, it's a trans kid in where I was.
Now where we know, you know, it's easier for trans
kids to know who they are. It's not quite as
a race as it was back in the nineties. Yeah,
get health care. A trans adult who's a teacher can't
have their health care covered anymore.

Speaker 7 (58:05):
And that's a thing that like two years ago, Ron
DeSantis wasn't calling for this. No, right, the Daily Wire
at that point, like two years ago is explicitly calling
for trans extorminacious things, but they're not specifically proposing adults
can't use trans healthcare. That's not a thing like, yeah,
that was that was even on the table, and now

(58:25):
you have like, you have a Democrat overwriting their own
governor's veto to get this through.

Speaker 9 (58:30):
Yes, a Democrat in a solidly blue district. Magine's district
is in the middle of Charlotte, which for folks who
may I mean, it's going to sit like Charlotte's the
largest city here, and it is not known for being
like at least on voting law, as it doesn't go
for the GOP generally.

Speaker 7 (58:45):
Yeah, and then this is the same point that I
want to make about this bill, like redefining what child
abuse is like even by the standards of sort of
like far right anti trans bills, those are really weird
and radical.

Speaker 9 (59:01):
Korean said it was one of the worst that she'd
seen in the country as far as like on the
childcare front.

Speaker 7 (59:07):
From my covering of this too, Yeah, this is one
of the worst things I've ever seen. And the Democratic
Party passed.

Speaker 9 (59:13):
It passed with nine Democrats in favor, and the governor
signed it.

Speaker 7 (59:16):
Yeah, that's unbelievably horrifying. Yeah, And the fact that the
queer wargs in the state were unwilling to condemn the
Democrats who passed this is just horrifying.

Speaker 9 (59:28):
It is and actually goes one further than that because
afterwards they didn't even bother to put out perfunctory Oh,
we're disappointing Governor Stein. You know, we will continue to
try to fight this legislation in court or something like that.
They did nothing. Yeah, they just they went silent. So
and you know, their combinations of SB four forty two,
especially before this bill passed, they were all correct. It

(59:50):
is horrible. It does sanction child abuse. It is horrific
on every single front. It is a catastrophe. It is
draconian all that. It didn't stop being so when Democrats
started supporting it. Yeah, the kids hurt by this family's
hurt by this aren't going to be any less hurt
because a Democrat signed on to it.

Speaker 7 (01:00:08):
Yeah. And before we go to break the thing I
want to sort of close this section with is that, like,
you know, I think it's a very very common thing
to focus on, like, Okay, why are you focusing on
the Democrats right now when the Republicans are doing all
of this stuff? And this is a case where very explicitly,
and this is the dynamic I think you've seen across

(01:00:29):
the board with for example, like Chuck Schumer like helping
to get their Republican budget through right. Yes, the stuff
the Republicans are doing, a lot of it can't be
implemented without the support of the Democrats. And the Democrats
have been willing to support the fascist governments implementing this stuff,
and that makes them a collaborationist party, yes, in a

(01:00:53):
lot of extremely important cases. And when that happens. In
North Carolina is one of the places at the forefront.
And it has been at the forefront for like a decade,
for nearly a decade. Yeah, for nearly a decade. It's
like eight years, seven seven, eight years nine nine. As
of this year, it's nine years since HB two. Good
lore along in the spring of twenty sixteen, sixteen, Yeah,

(01:01:14):
oh that is yeah. This is do not do not
go to sleep at five in the morning and then
try to do math live on the area. It will
come for you too, really truly. It was China subtract
sixteenth of twenty Okay, this is this, this, this, this
is this is your one moment of levity and a
bunch of extremely bleak shit. Isn'ta be a trying and

(01:01:36):
failing to do math on air? Look, I can drive
that's I'm thinking to it. But what we were seeing
here is the way in which like resistance to the
GUOPN this is a place like North Carolina is a
state where in the midst of a just unbelievable national
right wing turn right queer people turned out to stop this. Yeah,

(01:01:59):
and their reward for their resistance was the people that
they had put in charge of defending them, and in
as staggering of an example of the banality of evil
as I've ever seen, just signed this horrific piece of
anti trans legislation that couldn't have been passed without them
into effect in the same thing as like fucking as

(01:02:21):
a bunch of regulatory bullshit.

Speaker 9 (01:02:23):
Yeah, and then Gaying did nothing.

Speaker 7 (01:02:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:02:26):
The groups they're supposed to lobby at the football this
is the point of their existence, did nothing.

Speaker 7 (01:02:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:02:32):
At that point, they just they let they let it go,
you know, on the next fundraising cycle, onto the next
AI meme to on your page to boost you know,
content generation or whatever.

Speaker 15 (01:02:42):
And here we are, and we are back.

Speaker 7 (01:02:55):
Now for the brevity of this show, I am not
going to go into my giant rants about how this
is what happened with mid Rand and the French socialists
and how Midrand and the Socialist Party institute of neoliberalisab
in France. But Comma, we are instead of doing that
or me going on another rant about the abromation of
social movements by the NIS of Bolivia, or another rants

(01:03:18):
about the seventeen different iterations of this that we've seen
over the year. See my episodes on Lula, see many many, many,
many many things I've done. We're gonna go back and
talk about this in the context of North Carolina because
I think there's a really very a very important thread
that David you have been pulling on in this piece

(01:03:39):
and in general that is really not well understood anywhere.
That is about the structure and function of the Democratic
Party in the South and the way that North Carolina
has functioned is it's sort of like the moderate human
face of like the Greensboro massacre. Oh my, yeah, And

(01:04:02):
this is one of those where to start thing.

Speaker 9 (01:04:03):
There's a quote that I have in the piece by
civil rights historian Timothy Tyson that, since I read it,
I think over a decade ago, really just kind of
hit me like a hammer and is kind of simple
at the experience I've seen as a you know, impoverished
trans woman living in North Carolina and covering local state
government and how federal government works on the ground here too,

(01:04:24):
like beneath the green ivy of civility but a stone
wall of coercion. Yeah, and that is one of the
better summaries, and it applies other circumstances too, but it
is it just perfectly sums up kind of the historical
real the North kind of Democratic party. And when Tyson
was doing that, he was tracing this whole history from
the eighteen ninety eight Wilmington Cudaeta and massacre, which is

(01:04:48):
one of the most decisive events in American history. And
I'd even say in like the history of the rise
of fascism too, to the current day. He was writing
the late nineties, and it is part of a project
of history. And one of the terms they were using
was has this progressive mystique while you were having governors
on their southern states during the Civil Rights era, where

(01:05:08):
you know, giving angry speeches from courthouses and things like that,
and North Carolina was trying to be the moderate example
of the South. Oh, you know, we put money into
look at all these schools and roads were building this
college system. We're building. We just built Research Triangle Park.
You know, we're attracting. You know, it's the too busy
to hate kind of myth. And on that note, they

(01:05:31):
generally were more careful about repression, but it still happened.
You know, North caronin doesn't make the headlines and something
of the like Selma did, for example, But there was
a history of riots and a brutal attempts of repression
from the forties all the way to the seventies in
North Carolina, and they happened like in almost every city,
major city there is here, you know, and some that

(01:05:53):
weren't so major.

Speaker 7 (01:05:55):
That's the thing that we've talked about a little bit
on the show with the Holy Week uprising and the
sort of the whole wave of riots kind of culminating
in the assassination of Martin Luther King. But like, yeah,
like statistically, most of the riots that happened in that
entire period happened in these small and midsized cities. Yeah,
that have just like the historical memory of which has
been completely fucking buried. Yeah, and with Carolina, as you saying,

(01:06:17):
like it's one of the critical sights of this. Yeah,
Durham was rioting in the forties. Yeah, like that, that's
how far back it goes.

Speaker 9 (01:06:25):
And I think a lot of time people think, oh, well,
not much happened in this era, and I think it's
just a lack of knowledge of history, especially radical history.
Did it not happen or was it suppressed and then erased?

Speaker 7 (01:06:35):
Yeah, yeah, and that.

Speaker 9 (01:06:36):
Happened a lot of this, So you had, you know,
and figures like Governor Terry Samer at the time, who
was you know, famous North Carolina Democrat, And yeah, if
the klan was like openly marching to murder people, he
might say like, Okay, look a massacre's bad news. We
are going to like put the state troopers out to
them from doing that. But a lot of the rights
activist end up dead, yeah, you know, or there's still

(01:06:57):
like violent crackdowns, you know, the Greensboro if he was
a side at both of some really well organized like
civil rights efforts and sit ins and more radical action too,
but also have a lot of repression. You know, by
nineteen seventy nine, when the States boosters are portraying, you know,
all that upheaval is a thing of the past. This
anti racist marched or anti clan Mark, specifically organized by

(01:07:20):
this communist group in Greensboro, was massacred. The clan and
Neo Nazis came in. They just opened fire on people.
Largely they were acquitted later and in ensuing years, a
lot of investigation has been done into this and various
levels of local and state and aft the fact federal
law enforcement were very complicit and things ranging from just

(01:07:42):
kind of trying to sweep it under the rug to
outright especially the local level like cooperating with the clan.
A lot of them were either aware this is going
on and did nothing to stop it, or even actively
fed the clan information. There's a book recently called Morningside
that goes into a lot of a lot of this
detail that courage folks take a look at. But like,
that's the reality of North Carolina, and that's the reality

(01:08:04):
beneath the progressive mystique. And one of the historians quote
the piece mentioned that this is an exquisite instrument of
social control because you've kind of already framed the discussion as, oh,
it's just this genteel civil thing. We'll hear you out.
Just be a little more patient. But if stuff ever
really escalates, there is the option of just flat out

(01:08:26):
smears violence and massacre, and knowing the history of North Carolina,
you know a lot of this was directed at black
North Carolinians, but also it was used to crush labor stuff.
A lot of the people killed in the Greensboro massacre
were also organizing in the textile mills. And North Carolina
under the Democrats under their moderate period, had and continues
to have some of the most draconian anti labor laws

(01:08:49):
in the country, which takes some work. So that's kind
of the reality in North Carolina and of the Democratic
Party here, and they lean on that mystique heavily, and honestly,
I think a lot of it is they evoke because
you know, we're we're the defenders of the sane, sensible
civil status quo. Even sat Mustein's statements about Hbao five
when he did veto it, it's like, well, this is divisive,

(01:09:09):
it's making too many ways. We need to get back
to business, which they mean not as the business garnment.
They literally mean business. We're marketing the state and making
more money, and everything means making more money for the gentry.
So that's kind of the reality North Carolina beneath this
kind of you know how, how things supposedly are better
and more progressive here in the end of the day,

(01:09:31):
you can still get massacred.

Speaker 7 (01:09:33):
Yeah, And I think on a sort of structural level, right,
I think there's going to be people who are being like, well, Okay,
why the fuck do I give? Do I give a
shit about North Carolina? And one And this is something
that you point out in the piece, and something that's
really obvious if you spend literally any time in the South.
Is that what I think? It's thirty six percent of
the South is like, what's what's the actual number? I

(01:09:54):
should have looked this up before.

Speaker 9 (01:09:56):
So of the national population of queer and trans people,
thirty six percent live in the South, which is far
more than any other region, like by a wide march,
I think, under the same twenty twenty three calculation. And
there was another reason story they came out spifickly about
trans people. All these have faults. It is a general
rule that trans people, especially in areas where they are

(01:10:18):
more legally and violently marginalized, are wildly undercounted. But it
maps to about the same numbers I think of trans
people in the country. The ESME population is about thirty
three to thirty six percent live in the South, and
in the twenty twenty three one the next highest amount
live in the Midwest, which is kind of different from
how you see things portrayed that you know, we're just this, ye,
this coastal you know, elite bohemians on a few coastal cities.

(01:10:42):
As a matter of fact, there are a lot of
trains people in the South and the Midwest. Yeah, we've
been here for ages, We're still here. Yeah, Yeah, it's
it's it's it's North Carolina, it's Texas, it's fucking New Orleans,
West Virginia, Florida, you know.

Speaker 7 (01:10:55):
Yeah, and again like in terms of like, okay, so
I'm not in those places, like A, but we all
have a responsibility to all queer people, like as core
people right like we have we have, we have a
responsibility to each other, and we should fucking fight for
each other. And b you can look at what happened
in North Carolina, and it was deliberately This is the

(01:11:16):
place where the right wing's anti trans strategy was born,
and it was exported from the success that they had
in North Carolina to the entire rest of the fucking country, Yes, right,
with the bathroom bills. And this is something we're going
to get into a second with the way the Democratic
Party like didn't react to those bathroom bills. The last

(01:11:37):
point that I want to make here is that this
strategy of control is also very similar to the one
that the Democrats use in places like San Francisco, where
you have this sort of progressive veneer over. You know
that the consolation well, I guess, I guess the constellation
of class forces is getting more similar as as big

(01:11:57):
tech moves into like that part of the South. But
you know, it's this constellation of like, oh, hey, we
are the queer rights Party, but our actual interests are
this combination of housing developers' landlords and tech giants, and
so as a method of social control, we're going to
do this like, hey, we're extremely pro trends stuff, and

(01:12:18):
then we're going to throw a whole bunch of fucking
trends homeless people into concentration camps. Yeah, and that's the
thing that like, you know, we're going to I'm going
to talk more about this on the show another time.
With the ways that Trump's anti homeless executive orders, some
of the models for it are the way that sweeps

(01:12:40):
have been working in places like Oakland's. We've talked about
this on the show before, but yeah, this mechanism of
social control is one that's really really widespread. And the
South operates as a laboratory for that too, in the
same way that it operates as the laboratory for the right.

Speaker 9 (01:12:57):
Yeah, and I think that's really important, because this is
the point I can't I can't hone this point enough
and make it sharp enough. Frankly, folks need to take
it really seriously. Whether you cut the South or not.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
Fascist do.

Speaker 9 (01:13:09):
The var right does, and they have for a long
long time view did not as a place to ignore,
but as a place to consolidate power and try out
their tactics. Too often, the left, even the queer left,
has not. We have all suffered for it. Yeah, and
this is this is the whole thing for the historical
left right. Like one of the things that broke the
American labor movement was the defeat of the CIO in

(01:13:31):
the South.

Speaker 7 (01:13:31):
Yeah, I mean all the way back to I mean
events you were literally talking about, like the defeat of reconstruction.
But this is, this is why this country is like this,
And if you don't want the country to be like this,
you have to fucking fight in the South. Yes, that's
all we've got time for for today, but tomorrow we
will be back talk about the long and sordid history

(01:13:52):
of the Democratic Party's progressive venear in North Carolina and
what truly lies beneath it, and we will look how
the original response to the twenty sixteen bathroom bills set
the stage for both Democratic Party in North Carolina's passing
of anti trans laws today and the future of the

(01:14:12):
rest of the country. Welcome Dick, It Appened Here a
podcast about things falling apart and also sometimes about how

(01:14:36):
claiming that you were going to put things back together
and then not doing it makes things fall apart even worse.
I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we're going
to be continuing with part two of my interview with
David Forbes, an editor and journalist for the Trans News
Network in the Asheville Blade, about the history of the
North Carolina Democratic Parties progressive veneer over their agreement with

(01:14:58):
Republican policy, and importantly, how the Democratic Party's original response
to the anti trans bathroom bills from twenty sixteen paved
the way for where we are today. So enjoy, let's
talk about the original bathroom bills, because I think there's
some knowledge well okay, I don't know. It's been almost

(01:15:21):
a decade. Yeah, so I think people may have forgotten
how this all start. Is let's talk about the first
bathroom bills, what happened, and then how the Democrats kind
of ensured that they would stay in place.

Speaker 9 (01:15:32):
Sure, so there is the big one everyone knows about
is HB two because it became kind of internationally famous
as the North Carolina bathroom Bill, and even I think
for folks who memories may have faded, it has come
up recently as kind of a benchmark, and often a
misinterpreted one. Is we're about to get into for how
far things have shifted, because on paper, it looks like

(01:15:54):
this really horribly backfired, and in some ways it did. Initially,
HB two was a bill that was kind of slapped
in last minute. It clearly drew from the larger anti
trans far right policy circles which North Caroin Republicans are
highly connected to. Those kind of Dems often kind of

(01:16:15):
view themselves their own little like institution, like where the
Democratic moderate it's like North North carnd Democrats have always
been at their best. People of that tuation we talked
about the Republicans here were like, okay, we're now in power,
which they were starting in twenty eleven. Let's try out
this stuff from ALEC. Let's try out this stuff from
some obscure right wing think tank. And that meant they
were plugged in when in the wake of Obergefell, and

(01:16:39):
also in North Carolina as well, the year before you'd
had equal marriage for that whole swath of the South
was kind of imposed by a federal court order or
recognized by federal court order. So they were like, Okay,
this isn't working. There is not just more d there
is more de facto on the ground popular acceptance of
equal marriage. Now that's not the wedge was previously. So

(01:17:02):
what do we shift to wile we shift to trans people,
And so North Caron legislators very eager to try out
far right policies. The North Caron GOP is far right
even by Southern standards, which is interesting because the state's
very split as far as like votes and demographics go.
So twenty sixteens rolled around four years earlier, the Dems

(01:17:22):
had done the usual thing they'd run a super conservative,
super pro business, white guy Democrat. He got trounced by
Pat McCrory, who was the former mayor of Charlotte, and
Rain is like, Oh, I'm a moderate, sensible Republican. I'm
going to bounce out the legislature a little bit. But
unlike too many outside the region and the state who
kind of wrote oka in North Carolina just becoming this

(01:17:42):
red state now like other Southern states have, they knew
their hole was actually really precarious. Now they jerrymandered extensively,
so extensively that like North Carolina. The same year as
HP two pass stopped being recognized as a democracy by
the the policiers a study a matter of fact, the
district Carolina they did a whole commentary later that year

(01:18:04):
that these were the most rigged districts, the most area
districts they'd seen, not just in the US but anywhere
in the world. So that is where we live, That's
where we lived for some time. But the governor's like
the statewide, so he's in a more precarious position, and
they wanted a wedge issue in their view to drive
out conservative votes. They also hate trans people and want

(01:18:26):
to hurt us. So this HB two said that trans
people can't go into bathrooms unless they use the one
matching their birth certificate in any state building in North Carolina.
And this technically also includes like local government buildings, includes
like social services, it includes like any educational setting pretty much.

(01:18:47):
So this was clearly a slab dash affair. They didn't
even have like an enforcement mechanism in there. But I
did a few other things too, I think people forget about,
which is it also stripped the ability of localities to
make their own minimal wage rules, So it was also
an attack on labor because those always go together and
not unrelated. Trans and quick people are only working class demographics,

(01:19:09):
which I don't think gets set enough, and also essentially users.
On reaction to Charlotte adding gender identity to its existing
non discrimination ordinance, there's was a local one, but in reality,
you know, if Chartte had never done that, they would
have done a bill like this pretty shortly. Anyway, it
was kind of just the excuse. And they also struck

(01:19:29):
down all non discrimination ordinances across the state, like local
non discrimination ordinances. So this is a broad attack with
trans people as kind of the point of the spear
as it were, like the ones most in the front lines.
It's a familiar pattern. You go after trans rights, you're
also going after broad rights for any marginalized group because

(01:19:50):
non disformation stuff is being struck down left and right.
And also you're attacking labor yep. So you know, it
really kind of set the model for things to come.
HB two sparks a massive international backlash. I think the
indestment was four hundred million. The state lost four hundred
million as companies pulled out, events pulled out. There was
a boycott, a fairly effective one, honestly, that was started

(01:20:14):
as grassroots though gay inc groups and even like just
random nonprofits and some Democratic Party officials later joined in
on it. So the money's being hemorrhage left and right.
McCrory's being turned into a national laughing stock, if anything,
is proving a rallying point for the other side. Because
twenty sixteen rolls around and in a year where Trump

(01:20:35):
takes North Carolina and generally the Republicans do fairly well
throughout the South, even in a swing states like NC,
McCrory loses. He loses to the Attorney General Roy Cooper
as a Democrat. Now, I would never say his pro
trains are about again some major betrayals he did. He
was more willing to say, at least perfunctory statements about
trains rights than any northbound Democratic politician as a statewide

(01:20:57):
level before and honestly since, including the current governor. And yeah,
he proceeded to win, so he gets in office. North
Carolina gentry are historically plenty fine with big a treat,

(01:21:18):
but the Republicans had by this point broken one of
their cardinal rules, which is they fucked with the money. Yeah,
because like the state was losing money, They were losing
business deals, corporate headquarters and stuff. And this is a
lot of what the status quo, very antire labor says.
Quote that North kid Democrats and Republicans had generally both
supported in varying ways was in danger and you know,

(01:21:39):
some of them persons were losing money. So they basically
tell the Republicans in early twenty seventeen to knock it off, like, Okay,
you've gone far enough. It didn't work, you lost the election.
They still do the Jerry manner had a lot of
power in the state legislature, but they didn't have the
governor's office anymore, so you know, repeal this, like we're
getting too much bad to see. And what really escalated

(01:22:01):
it was basketball is kind of a religion in North Carolina,
especially college basketball, and the NCAA said, look, we'll pull
the tournament out of HB two is still in the books.
And at that point there became like these back and
forth sessions. Earlier in December, there was this compromise effort
where supposedly Charlotte would strike its non discrimination stuff on

(01:22:22):
its end. It was currently like the source of legal challenge.
They'd gone to court to fight to uphold it. And
this should have been a warning sign. The governor, ELEC. Cooper,
at that point brokeer kind of this deal where okay, Charlotte,
you take trains people out of your non screaming short
and insa of your own accord and the state will
repeal HB two. Well that didn't happen. They did the

(01:22:42):
first part, and then the least legislators were like, okay,
well that's nice, we're not doing anything about this. That
should have been a lesson about complying in advance, but
it didn't really seem to take Sadly, so HB two
wastll in the books. By March, you know, March Madness
is coming up and all that, And so they finally
do a repealed and this is still hailed as oh,

(01:23:04):
look like back in the day, like even Republicans, some
Republicans would like repeal a trans bill when it got
this big backlash. Their federal funding was being threatened as
well for the state. It's not like federal education funding
and all. That's not what happened though, And what happened
I think is actually was a lot more ominous and
a lot more revealing. What passed instead was honestly a
second bathroom bill called HB one four to two or

(01:23:27):
HB two point zero, as a lot of activists and
queer folks in the ground Transfer the Ground dubbed it.
And what this bill did was it technically took out
the bathroom ban, but it's put in a bunch of
byzantine provisions about who could use the bathroom wins, so
it would still take a court case for a trans
woman to go use the women's bathroom. It kept all
the anti labor stuff, and it kept all the non

(01:23:48):
discrimination stuff struck down for years, like you couldn't pass
local manscration protections for years, and at this point the
pressure is mounting the Democratic Party for the first time
most of a decade, their votes in the legislature actually
matter because the Republicans they're split between kind of the
capitalists who are hate trains that were using this as

(01:24:08):
a wedge issue and now the money's being fucked with
they're ready to repeal it, and some of the others
who are like, no, no, we really are dedicated to
hating trans people. The state can burn as long as
trans people's lives are made more miserable. So they have
the votes in their own caucus to pass this. So
for once DEM's had a lot of power and they
could have easily been like no floor or peel or nothing,
and they probably would have gotten it through. They did not.

(01:24:31):
They sided with the Republicans. They passed this mess that
essentially kept the status quo. It was just barely enough
for the NCAA, who even noted they even know their corporation.
Basically they know it was reluctant that they were, you know,
putting the tournament back in NC, but they did. The
governor knew. Governor Democratic governor signed it. I probably forget
as mentioned earlier. HB two passed with two Democratic votes.

(01:24:53):
In the first place, this is like not a new
trend of this happening. Heck, anti queer stuff even well
before that would often pass with democratic support as well
as Republican support, often be signed by democratic governors, So
this is not an entirely new thing. And this is
also a point where you can see gay Ink splitting
a bit because gay Ink did actually had actually condemned

(01:25:16):
h two point zero, but once it became passed, they
either offered tempted statements or they backed down, and so
the lesson from HB two wasn't okay. Back in the day,
you know, nine years ago, trans rights used to be
more of a consensus, even among moderate conservatives, at least
basic protections for it. And a good example was how

(01:25:37):
unpopular hbtw was it was repealed under all this backlash.
It did get a backlash, but it wasn't really repealed.
And as a matter of fact, what the far right
learned was that when it comes down to it, the
Democrats North Carolina, it turned out, elsewhere will fold if
trans rights has made an issue.

Speaker 7 (01:25:56):
Yeah, and you know, and you can watch everything that
has happened and since with trans rights has just been
the Democrats folding over and over and over again and
getting weaker and weaker language until we're in this place now,
you know, Like and I think the thing that is
a little bit different is that like you used to
have to like claim you had done something about the

(01:26:17):
anti trans bill, and now you can just sign it
yeh and it becomes law. And this is something that
has does played out across the country. Like there have
been a lot of states where Democratic governors have signed
anti trans bills, yes.

Speaker 9 (01:26:29):
Or vita pro trans bills like in California.

Speaker 7 (01:26:31):
Yeah, And you know even in states where like Pritzker,
the governor of Illinois, has been being held up as
like the big pro trans people I've seen. I see
like even trans leftists doing this, and you know, like
there are a lot of things in Illinois that are
very good for trans people. Because of the weird Pritzker corruption,
his sister is trans. And also the moment the government
was like, oh, hey, we're gonna like sort of make

(01:26:53):
a big show of threatening like healthcare funding, Pritsker just
folded and let all these hospitals stop providing transcrir to youth,
even though it is literally a violation of Illinois like
of Illinois discrimination legislation. Yeah, they just back down and
refuse to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:27:07):
And the way that this starts that there is a
gap between the rhetoric of someone like Pritzker being like,
oh no, like we support trans rights. Trans rights are
in an important civil rights issue, and then you watch
them like allow a bunch of hospitals in Illinois to
stop providing character trans kids. And the place where that
ends is more and more Democrats just straight up voting

(01:27:28):
for this stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:27:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:27:29):
And it's and the Democrats, you know, as you're talking
about with with HB two is like you know, there
were there were Democratic votes on that one.

Speaker 9 (01:27:37):
Yeah, HB one four two especially yeah, the compromise, but
even h ME to itself, Yeah, there were there were
Democrats who score that too.

Speaker 7 (01:27:44):
Yeah. And so this is this is I think the
critical part of this is that like this stuff only
can happen with the support of the Democrats. And that's
why it's happening. It's because because like, and this is
this is something that's incredibly important. Right now, We're like
all of the ship that is happening, all these Republicans
are doing are hideously unpopun like thirty percent approval ratings
across the board for like, all of this just hideously

(01:28:08):
hideously hated. The only way it can happen is if
the Democrats go collaborationists inside with the Republicans, and that's
what they're doing.

Speaker 9 (01:28:16):
Nazis always need Whislims.

Speaker 7 (01:28:18):
Yeah, and they're relying on the image of resistance to
distract everyone from the fact that they're helping these policies
go through. And if you want to stop them, you
have to stop them from collaborating.

Speaker 9 (01:28:38):
I think I also brings up the kind of the
third element in this. You've got the are always fascist,
increasingly fashionst Republican Party, You've got the increasing collaborations Democratic Party,
and especially on queer and trains rights, you have gay
inc which and I go into some examples in the piece.
After HB two point zero they put out some prefernatory statements,
but then they turn to gatekeeping and the ensuing years

(01:29:00):
they very consistently tried to stifle any activism that was
more radical or more principled to try to get this
stuff off the books, and especially if it came to
holding Democratic officials feet the fire. I literally have an
example in the article that I was physically therefore and witnessed,
where a director of the canvass and Equality sees the

(01:29:20):
mic as it was being passed some candidates to answer
a stronger question from some transactivists and change the question
to something that didn't actually put any pressure on them
at all, like just kind of absurd, petty stuff like that.
But the coom of effect has been that, you know,
they turned to thinking about their political careers and their fundraising,

(01:29:40):
and when push comes to shove again and again, they've
shown they won't hold Democrats' feet to the fire. If anything,
they will tell the trains people trying to hold their
feet the fire to shut up. So if you know
that the lobby, the official lobby that's supposed to, you know,
ostensibly on some level stand up for some mild version
of trains and queer rights, will never give someone any

(01:30:01):
shit for breaking ranks, not even like we can dem
officials so and so and they're bigotry or whatever more
we are sorely disappointed in or anyone of the boiler
play things. They won't even go that far. That's too
far for them. So you have Democrats collaborating and a
gay ink structure that has taken the energy and funding

(01:30:22):
out of lat of other queer activism, but will absolutely
will not fight when Democrats are involved. So if you're fascist,
all you have to do is get some Democrats involved.

Speaker 7 (01:30:31):
Yeah, and that's that's how you give VICHI friends Like
that's yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:30:35):
And honestly, this is it's a question I put to
folks because you know, look, I'm honestly dealing with the
North Caround Democrats is one of the things that made
be an anarchist. So so it's you know, I've not
had any faith in them for a very very long time.
But for folks that you know, kind of do put
a little more energie into electoral processes, I just you know,

(01:30:55):
so questions the piece I think are worth asking them,
Like what's the point of people who are just to
support your enemies? Yeah, what's the point of people that
you elect, maybe even like get out you know and
dock doors or whatever to get elected, who then don't
do the one thing they're elected to do? And God
asked too for some of the folks who support some
of these gay ink ords, I was like, if they

(01:31:17):
won't fight, now, what is the point of them, Why
do they deserve any support from US as a community,
or is it far past time to look to other alternatives.
There was only lesson hbto taught as well, which is
if you want even the most die hard bigot to
start losing their nerve to attack their money and their power,

(01:31:39):
and then you don't stop if say, oh you have
to compromise with a pragmatic solution, you ignore them, laugh
in their faces, do whatever, but you keep pressing them
because that was their thing. HQ too, there was a
really effective campaign to boycott and it did have a
substantial effect. You know, the lovely weapon of vicious mockery

(01:32:00):
really came in handy, and even the Hulgans didn't like
becoming a national laughing stock. So there were less about
how stuff could be fought as well. And the more
radical history in North Carolina, you know, there are there
are quier radicals here. You know, my city was hit
by a massive hurricane last year, and honestly was a
lot of US radicals getting out in the ground that

(01:32:20):
kept things from getting even worse. And you know, and
just folks on the ground pitching in outside of government structures,
not waiting for the official nonprofits who were either devastated
or had not planned for this. So there are other alternatives,
you know, and or heck that the hell I have
to remember I could curse here that the fact that

(01:32:42):
civil rights the low Attenson has gone to sitidence, and
there was a lot of organizing in those movements. It's
a lot more Miltonant than folks. Remember that also went
along three decades of riots and cities throughout the state
before the old order even began to budge a little bite.
And the lesson from that Democrats and North kind of
status quo. And I see throughout the South and throughout

(01:33:04):
the country it only budgets even starts to move when
the cost of continuing the way it is become far
too high.

Speaker 7 (01:33:12):
Yeah, And our job is to impose that cost. Yes,
because if we don't impose that cost, they're going to
keep pushing and they are going to continue to write
us out of existence until they have the guns to
do it.

Speaker 9 (01:33:23):
Yeah. And honestly, that is that is a mentality I
think a lot more people need to need to absorb.
And I think one of the lessons from you know,
fighting the far right at some points for my entire
like adult life, basically even a little bit before then
in North Carolina is that the more you fight than
the weaker they are. But also, and this is this

(01:33:45):
is something one of the more experience transfernds the South
I know has emphasized you won't always win, you can
always inflict a cost. Yeah, and I think a little
more like thinking outside of elections, a little more bloody
minded determination can really come in hand of the sense
of like, if our enemies are like, okay, court rules
against us, we're still pressing the attack. Okay, election goes

(01:34:08):
against us, We're still pressing the attack. I think we
can do way meaner and way better than they than
they do on that front. Yep, something goes against us,
that's nice, We're still pressing the attack. You know, there's
nothing in this healthscape of an empire we have to
abide by, especially not in the South.

Speaker 7 (01:34:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:34:26):
Yeah, So if something doesn't go our way once, okay,
learn regroup, redouble, make sure you inflicted some costs, go
out and inflict more of them.

Speaker 7 (01:34:34):
They're not invincible, trust me. Yeah, another gender is possible.
You just have to go out and fight for exactly.

Speaker 15 (01:34:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:34:43):
So I think on that note, David, where can people
find your work.

Speaker 9 (01:34:47):
You can find my stuff for trans News Network at
Transnews dot Network, including this most recent piece. And you
can find some of my local reporting as part of
the Ashville Blade co op at Asheville Blade dot com.

Speaker 7 (01:35:01):
Awesome. And y'all at both the Transduced Network and the
actual Bladey've been doing a bunch of absolutely incredible work.
Thank you, and I encourage everyone to support both because ideally,
the function of journalism is to be the targeting mechanism
of the class, and these are these are two groups
of working class trans journalists to do.

Speaker 9 (01:35:20):
It, and both organizations are worker run.

Speaker 3 (01:35:22):
I should add.

Speaker 7 (01:35:24):
Yep, this has been it could happen here, Go fight them.

Speaker 12 (01:35:46):
This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode,
I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans, working the
week of August twenty first and August twenty seventh.

Speaker 2 (01:36:04):
Yeah, we sure are.

Speaker 12 (01:36:06):
I can't believe Cracker Barrel would do that. It's outrageous.

Speaker 2 (01:36:11):
Yeah, that's clearly the biggest news.

Speaker 12 (01:36:13):
Thankfully they switched it back. They took the cracker out
of the barrel, and thankfully though they've.

Speaker 2 (01:36:18):
Reversed course put the cracker back in.

Speaker 12 (01:36:21):
I really don't understand how it's how it's woke. I mean,
I do understand, because I understand how this messaging works, but.

Speaker 2 (01:36:26):
It doesn't matter anytime anything happens, and they can see
a backlash forming you after the fact, because people were
starting to get pissed off about the fucking cracker barrel
thing in the same way, like that happen with fucking
Games Workshop earlier this year, like they redid their logo
in a shitty way. It's the same like animal bullshit. Yeah,
it's everyone's doing it.

Speaker 12 (01:36:45):
It's it's it's it's not woke. Yeah, it's just incentivizing
like capitalist conformity. This is why they've changed all of
the buildings of like you know, McDonald's pizza Hut to
the same structure, so you can use the property and
resell it over and over and over again without having
to do this big renovation. It's just all about capitalist efficiency.
It's not about woke.

Speaker 2 (01:37:03):
It's got nothing to do with woke. But there's people
whose whole like Chris Rufo, whose whole job is sitting
around and as soon as you started to see the
backlash forming it and realize like, oh, there's probably gonna
be a spree of these companies coming in with these
new minimalist logos, because it's clearly a trend in like consultancies,
right like it started happening. This is not the first one.

(01:37:25):
So I'm just gonna look around until I see one
of these that feels like it's got culture war potential,
and cracker Barrel is an obvious one, like if I'm looking,
if I was looking out there, that's when I would
pick right, Like.

Speaker 12 (01:37:35):
I think they're also responding to, like, you know, the
past few years where we've been removing like racist caricatures
from logos right with like like Entermima's and like Lando
Lakes and using this in a similar way, except they
took quite the white guy leaning against the barrel. Yeah,
so it's part part part of that whole backlash as well.

(01:37:56):
It's funny though I have seen like I don't I
don't know if it's from Chris Rufo, but you know,
people similar in that orbit talking about how this thing
actually is wokeism because minimalism is based on brutalism, which
was invented by communists. So actually turning everything into this
minimalist design is actually a plot from the Frankfurt School,

(01:38:18):
the Communists taking over.

Speaker 2 (01:38:20):
I mean, look, it doesn't matter outside of the fact
that people, whenever you buy into it, like you're you're
helping to feed like if you like, even dunking on.
That's part of the problem is that like, yeah, just
talking about this shit at all fuels the feedback loop, right,
And that's that's what this is, is a feedback loop
that they're very good at manipulating for political purposes. And

(01:38:42):
I'm not going to sit here and lecture you and say,
like stop commenting on this, stop talking about this stuff,
but we do need to understand that this is the
olds in the audience will remember the old Simpsons Halloween
episode where the different like mascots from different companies like
come alive and start murdering people in town. And the

(01:39:02):
solution that's an old ad man gives everyone is like, well,
if you want to stop the monsters, just look away.
Advertising feeds on attention, you know, and as every once
everyone ignores the monsters, they go away. And unfortunately that's
not how things actually work, because there's three hundred and
fifty million people in the country and so whatever you
choose to do about this isn't going to matter. But

(01:39:23):
the feedback loop is going to continue unabated. That much
I can.

Speaker 12 (01:39:26):
Say cracker barrel has fallen and like Christ after three days,
has rose again.

Speaker 2 (01:39:32):
Yeah. Great. Anyway, speaking of memes, unfortunately, we should talk
about this horrible mass shooting that is probably going to
be the big story this week. I mean, I hate
to reduce it to that, but yeah.

Speaker 12 (01:39:47):
We're recording this on Wednesday, a few hours after the shooting.
This is in Minneapolis.

Speaker 2 (01:39:53):
Yes, there was a mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school,
Annunciation School. This happened earlier the day that we're recording this,
So that's going to be Wednesday, August twenty seventh. As
of right now at about two eleven pm PST, two
children are dead, Seventeen people, mostly children, are wounded. The

(01:40:16):
shooter is also dead, and the shooter has been identified
as Robin Westman, who graduated from the school in twenty seventeen.

Speaker 12 (01:40:24):
Their mom also worked at the school until very recently yeap.

Speaker 2 (01:40:28):
And that's not at all an unusual kind of situation.
Mass shooters at schools often are either attending the school
or recently graduated. There's been a couple of cases where
a family member worked at the school. Like this stuff
is all pretty standard for somebody shooting up a school.
What's different is one of the things that's different is
that the shooter basically followed in Brenton Terrant the christ

(01:40:50):
shooters footsteps by covering their firearms and the gear that
they were wearing and draw like I guess drew or
painted on. I'm not sure. It looks like with like
a white paint pat like whiteout or something like that,
a white paint pin and covered it. In the names
of other mass shooters, references to racial annihilation memes like
the Removed Kabab meme, which is in short, a memes

(01:41:12):
celebrating the Bosnian genocide, and it was a meme that
was specifically Brenton Tarrant had signaled in his like manifesto
and I think on his gun he had a remove
Kebob reference. But it's something he signaled and it was
on the shooter's firearm. As well as the names, I
mean Tarrant, there's references to tarrent On there, Timothy mc
McVeigh tem mcvay's name, just the word McVeigh is painted

(01:41:35):
on there. Ted Kazenski, the Unibomber.

Speaker 12 (01:41:38):
A whole bunch of other more recent mass shooters people
who are in like the mass shooter fandom, yeah, as
well as just a collection of memes from like old memes.

Speaker 2 (01:41:49):
Too utterly unrelated to shooting, Like there's a loss meme
on there, and if you're a lot of people are going, wait,
what the fuck really? And if you're too young for
a loss, they're used to be a wet well. I
think there still is a web comic called Control Alt Delete.
It started in like the early two thousands. It might
have gotten started in the late nineties, and it was
part of like this, there's this boom in webcomics in

(01:42:10):
the late nineties when suddenly the people are able to
make their own comics online and make livings off of them.
A whole bunch of guys made gaming comics after Penny Arcade,
which is like the big one that blew up, And
one of them was Tim Buckley, who did a comic
called Control All Delete that was not good and he
tried to have a serious storyline where his character's girlfriend
has a miscarriage, and the strip in which he finds

(01:42:33):
her having a miscarriage is called loss. And it's gotten
to the point where people are abstracting the four panels
into like a minimalist line representation of how the blocking
look like. It's a bit people have done everything like
put loss memes on everything, like that's the joke at
this point, more than a reference to the show is like,
look at this new crazy place. Somebody put a loss meme,

(01:42:54):
and so yeah, it's a game, and a lot of
what we're seeing with the shooter is like, oh, this
is the natural extent of a bunch of things, and
a fucking mass shooter putting a loss meme on the
bear or on the side of their gun before shooting
up a school is the natural furthest craziest extent of
the loss meme. Right.

Speaker 12 (01:43:11):
If this is anything, it is like a mimetic shooting.
It is based on a whole bunch of memes about
other mass shootings as well, specifically in the way that
engages in like anti semitism and racism and includes slurs
and catchphrases. It's not in the way that the shooter
actually believes these things ideologically, it is just to gesture

(01:43:31):
to them as they exist in the lineage of other
mass shootings. It is like it's a perfunctory use of
slurs and of messaging that just kind of wraps around
this whole like nihilistic fandom culture around other mass shooters,
and like that is that's what this shooting is. I've
watched now like seventeen minutes a video of the shooter

(01:43:53):
like showing off their weapons, going through their like diaries
and journals, inspired by a whole bunch of like Eastern
European mass shooters as well, and this shooter reminds me
of participants of what's called the true crime community or TCC.
Not as in like the genre of true crime podcasts
or documentaries, but it's more of an online fandom based

(01:44:16):
on a personal obsession with mass killers themselves and specifically
school shooters. And this community encourages reenactments and tries to
get some people to do their own mass shootings. Yeah,
and this is not the first one of these we've
had in this past year. Now, the shooting in Wisconsin
last December. I spent the repnow, which we reported on
on Nikodeppen here was also in this variant of like

(01:44:39):
Columbiner True Crime Community Shootings. Repnow's name is on one
of this shooter's rifles. Yes, there was a shooting in
Tennessee a few months later which also referenced Repnow, done
by a black white supremacist in cel whose manifesto was
full of like plagiarized memes and other manifestos. It's about this,
like yeah, this complete lack of meaning, Like they they

(01:45:00):
scattershot all of these memes and references and like bits
of manifestos and images to just to make this whole
mess of stuff to look at. But none of it
actually means anything.

Speaker 2 (01:45:12):
Well, and the draining of meaning, the flattening of meaning
is part of the po that's the point taking is
taking a man who shot fucking fifty people to death
and turning that into the same thing as a twenty
year old joke about a comic strip in terms of
its impact and severity, Because if that's no more serious
or meaningful or painful than fucking a joke about Tim

(01:45:33):
Buckley's dumbass cartoon. Like once you get someone in a
mind state where they accept that they're willing to accept
a lot of terrible things, right, And the goal here
is creating content in the form of mass shootings, right,
Like that that is the goal, and that is also
what people are consciously. A lot of people want to
be a part of themselves. You mentioned the last year's

(01:45:55):
shooting that committed by Samantha Rupp now, but there's also
I found a December thirtieth, twenty twenty four article in
Wisconsin Public radiowpr dot org their website. It talks about retnow,
but it also gives the story of thirteen year old
Jamie Sitz, who killed herself in twenty twenty four and
was a member of the true crime community. The police

(01:46:15):
went through her phone and they found a bunch of
memes and reference and like her contributing to online discussions
and telegrams and stuff for PCC. She was obsessed with
the Columbine Kids, right, She like engaged in a lot
of those conversations, and she was posting about her plan
to kill herself, but she was not interested in carrying
out like a mass shooting or killing other people. And

(01:46:37):
that fit in fine within the discourse like people encourage
presents basically, right, Like, yeah, I think part of the
thriller hitary is just wanting to feel like you sitting
on your ass on the computer, you are impacting the
world in part because like you feel like that's the
only chunk of the world that you've got right like,
and that's you know, tied into like the hopelessness and

(01:46:57):
the nihilism of all of this. I found a random
poster on Reddit in a discussion of the TCC community.
I actually really liked this person's summary of it. And
this is like seven years old. Interestingly enough, it's not
a new phenomenon. It dates back to inter war period Germany.
There were many Germans at the time who were fascinated
with the topic of extremely grisly murder and torture, especially
such instances where sexual arousal was involved. The German language

(01:47:20):
even has a word for it, lust mort or lust murder.
Serial killers were on the rise at the time, and
many of them claimed to get extreme amounts of carnal
pleasure from the act of killing or maiming. And there
is this weird vein. I found another study as I
was looking into this that uses the true crime community term.
It's from twenty fifteen by Naomi Barnes of Utah State university,

(01:47:41):
and it was like looking into fandoms that had grown
up around serial killers and around spree killers online. And
Naomi is using the word true crime community for just
the general term of people who are interested in true crime,
not in the way that you and I have been
using it.

Speaker 12 (01:47:56):
Yeah, because we're using this term to refer to like
a specific than them around like around these shootings, not
the general milieu of like true crime podcasts and like
documentaries and people who are into that sort of content.
We're referring to a much more niche group of people
online who operate on like Telegram, discord, tumbler, and other

(01:48:16):
social media accounts. Right, it's based around like specifically like
like an obsession over actually doing these acts and like
and and like they like cause play as these people.
This isn't like your you know, average white woman who
likes listening to true crime podcasts. This is this is
something very different.

Speaker 2 (01:48:31):
No, and that's that's important. But it's also important to
note that, like what you've been talking about, this this
need to recreate and not just prior to actually carrying
out a shooting, because most of them don't ever do that.
There's this need, this obsession with the aesthetics to want
to own clothing and objects and whatnot that like look
like Eric Adyllon or whatever.

Speaker 12 (01:48:51):
Right the column by bandshirt.

Speaker 2 (01:48:52):
Yeah, right, that that And this does extend to the shootings,
Like there's a number of shooters who have like worn
that KMFD I'm sure because one of the columnbind guys wore.

Speaker 12 (01:49:02):
It cementthro up now and I believe this recent shooter
also had had a KMDS shirt picked out.

Speaker 2 (01:49:08):
And what's interesting about that twenty fifteen study is that
it is looking at the true crime community because column
biners were already a thing. There'd been a number of
copycat attacks, but the kind of social fandom around like
that aspect of it had not really taken hold in
a mass level in a way that the internet and
virality could really make use of.

Speaker 12 (01:49:29):
It involved on Tumblr like in that era. Yes, it's
more like an infant compared to like the fully grown
version that it is now.

Speaker 2 (01:49:36):
Yeah, And what's interesting to me is this this paper
kind of catches the communities it's starting to calv off.
And so there's a chunk of the paper where she's
quoting from a couple of different people who went and
visited in one case they visited like Adam Lonza's house
and the Sandy Hook Elementary School, and it's people visiting
places like that, sites associated with like mass shootings and

(01:49:58):
the like. And she gives this mix of people being like, oh,
like the first person he quotes who went to lands
of houses, like, I was actually just really sad and
I just wish none of it had ever taken place,
Like it was all really horrible and it made me
feel bad. But then a bit later she gives you
responses from people who have the opposite reaction, Like there's
this fella Paul, who does not specify which murder site

(01:50:20):
they visited, but specified that it was a place where
a murder victim's body was found. And Paul responded, Honestly,
I felt a static, like, Wow, I'm going to a
place someone was killed. What if there are ghosts the
murderer him or herself? I was absolutely off. My kid.
We dug up some dirt and we keep it in
a little glass bottle.

Speaker 12 (01:50:37):
It's like a religious pilgrimage, right right, And that's the static,
and that's what this starts to document.

Speaker 2 (01:50:42):
And that's where I'm like, oh, this is this study
is mostly about an unrelated just a normal fandom. But
you can see the bits like already popping up in
twenty fifteen, these people who are having these astatic almost
again like almost like psychosexual experiences being at the site
of a mass shooting.

Speaker 12 (01:51:00):
Yeah, and the further centry that is then doing one yourself.
And obviously this also is like a part of like
a suicidal drive, a suicidal attention. A lot of people
kill themselves in the course of the act, right, it's
a way of making your suicide not just be about yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:51:13):
Right. And there's more to say about like the culture
of fame in this country and like how how virality
and whatnot has made it so that like these people
tend to get what they want, or at least they
know they've got a good chance of getting what they want, right,
they're obviously not around to experience it. But like, as
long as you do something sufficiently like weird and bloody,

(01:51:36):
you're likely to get a good amount of attention for
a while.

Speaker 12 (01:51:40):
So that's the actual like background of what this shooting was.
I think now we should probably mention how the shooting's
being talked about more broadly, Yeah, because it takes a
very different angle from the actual like nihilistic, like TCC
fandom aspect. It it is making this more about like
woke contemporary politics I suppose.

Speaker 2 (01:52:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 12 (01:52:03):
Cash Betel's announced that he's investigating this as an anti
Catholic hate crime.

Speaker 2 (01:52:09):
Yeah, which is just not true. I mean, it's almost
certainly by a Catholic, ors somebody who was raised gath Like.

Speaker 6 (01:52:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:52:16):
All the people who hate Catholics most are often lapsed Catholics.

Speaker 12 (01:52:20):
Very early on, people started claiming that this shooter was
trans Now a few years ago, they did change their
name to Robin, and the name change petition stated that
at the time they identified as female. At this point,
we still know very little about the actual shooter beyond
like the videos they posted on YouTube of their weapons

(01:52:40):
and a journal written in cyrillic and a note that
they left to their parents discussing their fear of dying
of cancer due to vaping. I've not been able to
look at their Internet presence or activities in the intervening
years since changing their name, and their current gender identity
is still not very clear. In a translation of their

(01:53:01):
cyrillic journal, they discuss detransition quote, I don't want to
dress girly all the time, but I guess sometimes I
really like it. I know I am not a woman,
but I definitely don't feel like a man. I regret
being trans. I wish I was a girl. I just
know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we
have today. I also can't afford that I only keep

(01:53:24):
my long hair because it is pretty much my last
shred of being trans. I'm tired of being trans. I
wish I never brainwashed myself. I can't cut my hair now,
as it would be an embarrassing defeat and it might
be a concerning change of character that could get me reported.
It just always gets in my way. I will probably

(01:53:45):
chop it on the day of the attack.

Speaker 5 (01:53:50):
Now.

Speaker 12 (01:53:50):
Discussion of gender takes up a very small percentage of
the journal. Most of their writing is about admiration for
previous mass shooters and fantasizing about killing children from a
very young age. On the cover of their journal, alongside
a bunch of other like gun stickers, they do have
a defend a quality progress flag sticker with an AK

(01:54:11):
forty seven YEP. From my perspective, this is just another
one of those memes that they're wrapping into everything. On
one of their magazines. They wrote, I am the wokeler,
why so queerious? Right on the other side of the
magazine had an antiqueer slur. So I view this type
of stuff in the same way I view the inclusion

(01:54:32):
of like the Lost Meme or like Ted Kaczinski or
all this other stuff. This this like memafied version of
trying to throw everything at the wall just to make
everything mean nothing right. And it's it's extremely like obnoxious
and annoying.

Speaker 2 (01:54:45):
But it it works.

Speaker 12 (01:54:47):
But yeah, it works. And I don't know what else
I want to say on this, on like the trends angle.

Speaker 2 (01:54:52):
We don't want to deny that like this is going
to cause a problem, that this is going to be
used by the right, Like there will be there will
certainly be rhetoric. And I've already seen rhetoric from you know,
Jack Posobic in that crowd around it.

Speaker 12 (01:55:05):
About trans people targeting Catholics.

Speaker 2 (01:55:07):
Well, this is why these people shouldn't have weapons or whatever,
like this is why we should put them all in.
And I don't I'm not going to minimize that that
didn't start with this, that that kind of rhetoric, that
conversation and this is useful to that crowd, and you
know that is that is bad. I don't we don't
know what's going to happen or to what extent this is.
Like we're talking right now that they clearly would like

(01:55:28):
to use this and are trying to use this. One
thing that I would point out, and I don't know
if this is certainly not an on balance optimistic thing,
but making Americans focus on a mass shooting for more
than a day or two not as easy as it
used to be.

Speaker 12 (01:55:45):
No, yeah, which is really devastating. It's not good that we're.

Speaker 2 (01:55:49):
There, but like two people dead, I'm just saying, like
Americans ignore way bigger numbers all the time now the right,
You know, there's not always a media campaign like going
to be with this beyond trying to make this huge.
But also they've done that before, right, they did that
with the rep Now shooting, right Like, there were attempts
to make that and it didn't.

Speaker 12 (01:56:10):
Every mass shooting they have tried to pain it's been
done by a transperson, and I think in some ways
that has depowered this rhetoric as a tactic. Yeah, by
claiming every shooter is trans. Most Republicans already believe that
to be the case. So whether this person either was
trans or used to be trans, it may not matter
that much to the right because they already think every

(01:56:31):
shooter is trans. Trump's already targeting queer people. The right
doesn't need an excuse to go after queer people. I
don't think an event like this will make the hammer
come down much harder. This could be a boy who
cried wolf situation for the anti trans right, since their
base already thinks that every mass shooter from the past

(01:56:53):
three years is trans. I did a whole episode on
this last year, called fake trans Terrorists. The Gun Violence
Archive says that there have been two hundred and eighty
six mass shootings in the United States so far in
twenty twenty five. If one or two trans people do
a mass shooting, that would still mean trans people, at
one percent of the population, are less likely to do

(01:57:15):
a shooting compared to CIS people. There was like one
legitimate trans mass shooting targeting a school a few years
ago in Nashville, and if this happens to be the second,
I don't think that this new brain Rod Columbine true
crime community shooting will make much of an impact on
trans people nationwide. Think of how quick conservatives moved on

(01:57:37):
from the Zizians, and certainly being trans is not a
motivating factor of this shooting. If you look at their
writing and videos posted on YouTube before they did this,
this nihilistic meme maximalism has no trans causation. It has
nothing to do with being trans. There's no coherent or
ideological leftist screed, there's no pronoun pins. Their journal talk

(01:58:00):
both about quote unquote hating fascism and inequality, while also
hating Jews, Arabs, Mexicans, Indians, calling Somali's subhuman and criminal,
writing that quote white people should rule the world unquote,
but that minorities should quoe unquote have rights. While talking
about ideological Nazi killers, they remarked, quote, I don't often

(01:58:22):
find myself aligning with these killers specific ideologies unquote. They
said that they disliked racism but also were racist. They
wrote about killing quote unquote fags while also calling themself
one on one of their weapons. This shooter and all
the memes and rhetoric they use is most similar to
the Repnow shooting last December in Wisconsin in terms of

(01:58:45):
the neo Columbiner school shooter obsession, as well as the
white supremacist mimetic black in cell shooting in Anoc, Tennessee,
last January. All these shootings are heavily referential, contradictory, and
intentionally incoherent. Right, every single extremist political faction is represented

(01:59:06):
there because that that is the point, is combining all
of these references to previous mass shooting. So they're incorporating
everything they can and things that they just think are funny,
like just a whole bunch of like meaningless memes.

Speaker 2 (01:59:19):
Yep.

Speaker 12 (01:59:20):
And that's vastly more important than whatever gender identity the
shooter happens to have right now at this point in
twenty twenty five.

Speaker 2 (01:59:28):
All right, Well, anyway, folks, there's going to be a
lot of people going the sky is falling over what
this is going to mean for people and how this
is going to be used, And obviously this is terrible.
I'm not telling you not to feel terrible about a
mass shooting.

Speaker 12 (01:59:44):
You should feel bad about the actual mass shooting.

Speaker 2 (01:59:46):
You should feel bad about the mass shooting. The sky
I mean, this guy's been falling, right, Yeah, Let's give
this one a little bit to see if it makes
the sky fall any faster or if in a week
We're like, no, this guy's still falling at about the
same rate, which isn't good. It's just what happens. It's
where we are, all right, ads, and we're back.

Speaker 12 (02:00:19):
We can safely leave the brain rot in the previous
section and now talk about something totally real. The economy.

Speaker 2 (02:00:26):
Yes, the economy which never kills people.

Speaker 7 (02:00:29):
Okay, so speaking of things that have never killed any one, eye,
that's so not true. The Volkershaw killed so many people.
But a very very critical rubicon was crossed on Monday
of this week when Trump attempted to fire a member
of the Federal Reserve Board, Lisa Cook. Now, Lisa Cook

(02:00:52):
is refusing to step down under the fairly obvious justification
that the president does not have the power to do this.
Trump has been cooking a very weird thing, accusing her
of mortgage fraud as a as a way to remove
her from the Federal Reserve Board. But Trump does not

(02:01:12):
have the power to do this. So we are in
the midst effectively of a confrontation over this, where Lisa
Cook has continued to just not actually leave her position
at the Federal Reserve and is going to court. This
is an extremely significant escalation of what up until this

(02:01:35):
point had largely been a series of attacks on the
Federal Reserve's governor, Jerom Powell. There are a few factors
here that one of the most important things is Trump's
anger over continuing high interest rates or sort of high
interest rates. Trump wants to slash interest rates because he
thinks it will make the economy grow more. Now, when
I said this was the crossing of the rubicon, what

(02:01:58):
this is is this is the beginning of the fight
over whether the Federal Reserve is going to be an
independent density right. Trump has been attempting to, as we've
talked about in the show, appoints Stephan Miran as another
one of the governors on the Federal Reserve's board. Miran
very explicitly wants to eliminate the independence of the Federal

(02:02:19):
Reserve for what to talk about exactly what that means
in a second, But I want to read this quote
from Fortune magazine interport on it describing a JP Morgan
analysis of the situation, because this has really spooked a
bunch of major financial institutions for very obvious reasons. Quote

(02:02:40):
in a note on Friday, JP Morgan analysts, led by
chief economists Bruce Cassman highlighted key proposals such as giving
atwill power to the President to fire FED board members
and fedbank presidents, giving Congress control of the Fed's operating budget,
and shifting the Fed's regulatory responsibility over banks and markets

(02:03:00):
to the Treasury. So this is what Stefan Mihern has
been proposing. This is what looks to be the long
term plan of Trump and the people around him. Eliminating
the Federal Reserve is a long, long time goal of
the far right for an extremely convoluted variety of reasons.

(02:03:20):
The FED in and of itself is an extremely confusing entity.
Its creation has spawns a full century of academic arguments
about what the States even is, and it's complicated to describe.
Also because most of the information will not most, but
a significant portion of the information about it is just
anti Semitic conspiracy. Because this is eliminating the Federal Reserve.

(02:03:43):
In the return to quote unquote sound money is one
of the key elements of a massive network of sort
of right wing, very old right wing conspiracy theories. But
I think that the thing that's best understood by people
kind of is just about the Federal Reserve is the
FED printer meme. And the Federal Reserve is the body
that creates money like that is, that is authorized to

(02:04:05):
create the US dollar. That is why it's a Federal
Reserve bank. It is critical on a level that is
difficult to express to the entire functioning of the world economy. Now,
the Federal Reserve Board is technically a government entity, but
it is it was set up explicitly to be quote

(02:04:26):
unquote non political. Now the extent to which that's true
is fuzzy, obviously, But the point of it was so
that there would be a large scale financial institution that
controls like the money supply effectively, that that controls enormous
portions of US sort of macroeconomics policy through its due
is control of interest rates would not be able to

(02:04:50):
be like directly interfered with by the President or Congress.
That is that it's the whole point of this, you know.
It is effectively a measure to instill confidence that the
US isn't going to just like turn the printers on
and print a bunch of money from every other capitalist
in the world.

Speaker 2 (02:05:05):
Yeah, and like so much. When that promise goes away,
what happens, I don't know.

Speaker 7 (02:05:11):
Yeah, Well, and this is something that I think, I
think is not understood very well.

Speaker 4 (02:05:15):
Right.

Speaker 7 (02:05:15):
The current conflict is largely over Trump wanting to be
able to control the Federal reserves interest rates. Right, So
he wants he wants the lower federal interest rates to
make it make it cheaper to borrow money because he
thinks this will pump more money back into the economy
and this will make the economy grow. And he thinks
that he's being like sabotaged by the Fed. The Fed's
worried about inflation. But I actually think that focusing just

(02:05:38):
on that part of the Federal Reserve is significantly underestimating
how important the Federal Reserve is to the entire structure
of the economy. There are so many just sort of
random things that it does that are not particularly well understood.
I was talking about this earlier in a meeting, but

(02:06:00):
nificant portion of the gold held by countries around the
world is literally just kept in a vault under the
New York Federal Reserve building. And that's just the sort
of seemingly random thing that it does. I was reading
about its payment system for reasons that I'll talk about
in the episode to do about this next week. It
just in a footnote about the payment system, there is
a part where it says that the Federal Reserve runs

(02:06:22):
the payment system for the World Bank. So this is
something that is a critical, critical, an extremely complicated center
of the entire capitalist world.

Speaker 5 (02:06:35):
Right.

Speaker 7 (02:06:35):
Its payment infrastructure has trillions of dollars a year and
moving through it. If this infrastructure stops working or breaks
a little bit, a lot of the very subtle management
of the economy of the Federal Reserve does can stop working.
And you know, again we've been talking mostly about interest
rates and its ability to sort of print money, which

(02:06:57):
is over simplification. But you know, for exameple the Fed
also does these things like carries out these like massive
overnight repo agreements, like inject liquidity into the market. There's
all of these massive we are talking billions and billions
of dollars of financial interventions that you basically never even
hear about that have been stabilizing the economy since two
thousand and eight. And this apparatus, if it is dismantled,

(02:07:21):
if it has directly seized control of by Trump, and
and part of what's going on with this board is
that Trump is trying to get a majority of the
people on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve
to be his appointment so that he can control it directly,
and so they can start bringing it under directly under
the control of I mean the president effectively. Right, this

(02:07:43):
is something where if you unleash the doge people on
the Federal Reserve and the payment systems, the settlements and
clearance systems stop working. We are talking about a catastrophe
that it's unclear to me whether it's even been modeled.
There are so many different complicated things that this institution

(02:08:04):
does that these people do not understand particularly well at
all and think that they can use to just sort
of permanently create a bubble economy that they can ride.
And this is the first sort of shot over the battle.
Isn't even the right where this is the first engagement
over the fight for that. There's also been a lot
of sort of taco analysis of this, arguing that this

(02:08:25):
is actually Trump backing down from trying to fire Jerom
Powell to just try to fire one of the Reserve
board members that's not backing down. There's also a chance
to heal that if this works, he's going to try
to fire Powell too. So we're going to We're gonna
keep watching a situation. I'm going to talk more about
it next week when we know more, and also talk
about what the Federal Reserve is as an institution. And
we're going to continue monitoring the situation because it is

(02:08:48):
extremely important and handing the keys over to these people
is something that is dangerous enough that it is creating
significant pushback among the actual people in finance and in
the banking system who matter.

Speaker 2 (02:09:00):
Great, Well, it's so good. I mean, we'll see if
this means anything other than more suffering for you know people.
I guess that's where I am as like, is there
even a level of fucking with the money that Trump
can do that that's enough to seriously cause consequences for him?
And there must be, but it's just hard to imagine

(02:09:22):
if there was.

Speaker 7 (02:09:23):
It's this.

Speaker 2 (02:09:24):
Yeah, we'll see. I mean, that's the fun thing with
the big stories we've got this week is they're all like, well,
could get a lot worse, could just stay as bad
as it is right now. Well, we'll continue to wait
to see what's going to happen with all of that.
Speaking of something that we don't have to just wait
and wonder what's going to go on, because the news

(02:09:44):
changes every single week. Here's the tariff.

Speaker 1 (02:09:47):
Songs Jazz Bob Rock, Jazz, bo.

Speaker 7 (02:10:04):
Oh boy so and yet another instance of the whole
Trump backing down thing not happening. The tariffs on India
that Trump had been threatening for the purchases of Russian
oil have in fact taken effect. The terriff right on
India is now fifty percent. This is a significant barrier
to any trade between India and the US. It is

(02:10:27):
again sort of unclear whether India is going to bow
to the political pressure here because as with many of
these terriffts. We've talked about this situation with Brazil fairly
extensively on this show. The thing about imposing tariffs on
a country to get them to fall in line with
the American policy is that it pisses off everyone in
the country, regardless of whether or not they would traditionally

(02:10:49):
be US allies. And so there's you know, it creates
a massive countervailing pressure against the financial incentive to fall
in line and stop buying Russian oil. I also, very
briefly want to talk about something that I think is
a sort of part and parcel of the tariff policy
that Garson you mentually want to talk about, which is

(02:11:09):
like the US purchasing ten percent of Intel.

Speaker 12 (02:11:12):
Yes, socialism has been achieved.

Speaker 2 (02:11:14):
We did it.

Speaker 1 (02:11:15):
Uh huh.

Speaker 12 (02:11:16):
Now you can finally call Trump a national socialist.

Speaker 2 (02:11:20):
That's right.

Speaker 7 (02:11:22):
Yeah, And this is sort of a intensification, I guess
of a agree that we talked about a while back
where Intel was talking about giving part of its profits
to the US. This is just the US government is
just buying a stake in these companies. And this is
actually a very very weird maneuver by the US because
the US has obviously bought companies before, right, this is

(02:11:46):
how a lot of the bailout worked. But the thing
about if you look at the bailouts from two thousand
and eight and you look at the US like purchasing
the automakers, the US got these really weird specific shares
that don't give any kind of controlling interest and are
the direct rationale for this that the US should just
own part of the chip manufacturers because they're effectively like

(02:12:07):
domestic national security resources. Significant portions of the market think
that this is going to be a continuing tread and
the US is going to continue buying stakes in these companies.
There is a sort of symbiotic relationship here in the
sense that, like, on the one hand, it's obviously not
great to have sort of stakes in you bought by
the US governments and have US government federal policy directly

(02:12:29):
dictating what these companies do. But on the other hand,
it creates for these actual companies themselves, It creates a
sort of symbiosis right where these people now have effectively
guaranteed state backing that can bail them out of all
of their unbelievably terrible business decisions around basing all of

(02:12:50):
their production around AI. So yeah, and this is all
sort of part of the same hypernationalists direct national socialism,
if you will. Yes, kind of natural sentence, but.

Speaker 12 (02:13:06):
The most stupid form we've ever seen.

Speaker 1 (02:13:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:13:08):
Yeah, I don't know. There's gonna be a lot of
hype about this being like American state capitalism or something,
and I just ignore that, just just ignore it. It's bad.
I think it's it's in the same category as a
lot of the things here, which is that Trump administration
is trying to consolidate as much power over the economy
as they can, both in Federal Reserve and through just

(02:13:29):
straight up taking controlling parts of companies. This is a
trend that's going to continue, and it's not good.

Speaker 12 (02:13:35):
Do you know what is good?

Speaker 5 (02:13:36):
Though?

Speaker 12 (02:13:37):
You beat me to that exactly, that's right. The fact
that we get a nice ninety to to I don't know,
one hundred and twenty second break to listen to these ads.

(02:14:00):
All right, we are back. There has just been so
much news this week. It's kind of outrageous. Trump is
continuing his attacks against the Smithsonian for going woke. He's
promised a Department of Justice lawsuit against California for their
new redistricting map. A GOP house probe has begun to
investigate if the DC crime stats have been faked this

(02:14:21):
whole time, making it look like crime is low even
though it's obviously super high as we all know. Yeah,
as Mia said, we have socialism now with ten percent
of intel and Trump and Hague says announced that they
want to change the name of the Department of Defense
back to the Department of War because it quote unquote
sounds stronger.

Speaker 2 (02:14:43):
Hey, guys, this is this is the.

Speaker 9 (02:14:46):
Only one of those that I that I actually agree with.

Speaker 7 (02:14:48):
They should do this, like calling it anything other than
the Department of war is incredibly dishonest.

Speaker 2 (02:14:54):
Yeah, I wonder that I'll make get a harder short
of get people on board increasing funding.

Speaker 16 (02:15:00):
He used to be called the Department of War, and
it had a stronger sound. And as you know, we
won World War One, we won World War two, we
won everything.

Speaker 17 (02:15:10):
Now we have a Department of Defense with defenders. I
don't know if you people want to standing behind me,
if you take a little vote, if you want to
change it back to what it was when we used
to win wars.

Speaker 9 (02:15:21):
All the time, that's okay with me.

Speaker 13 (02:15:23):
All right, that's coming.

Speaker 16 (02:15:24):
You let me know if you want to do it.
I think Department of War. It just sounded me and
he said, sir, behalf of the Department of Defense.

Speaker 7 (02:15:30):
Defense.

Speaker 16 (02:15:31):
I don't want to be defense only. We want defense,
but we want offense too, If that's okay, So you'll
make a decision.

Speaker 17 (02:15:38):
But you know, as Department of War, we won everything.

Speaker 16 (02:15:43):
We want everything, and I think we're going to have
to go back to that.

Speaker 12 (02:15:47):
All right, man, cool stuff happening in the uffal office.

Speaker 2 (02:15:51):
I mean, I do like that when he starts that speech,
he has to go like we won World War one,
Like he's like, there's a question at the end there
where he's like he's he's like, he's like, just make sure.

Speaker 1 (02:16:05):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:16:05):
I don't really remember if we won that one or not,
but we definitely won the second one and others.

Speaker 12 (02:16:11):
When as to how he would go about change the name,
as it requires an Act of Congress, Trump replied to quote,
We're just gonna do it. I'm sure Congress would go
along if we need that. I don't think we even
need that, But if we need that, I'm sure Congress
will go along.

Speaker 2 (02:16:26):
I don't know that we do we need I don't know.
If what you need to change the name of the
Department of Defense, you do, Yeah, you do. That makes
sense to do that.

Speaker 7 (02:16:36):
Auto macro sense.

Speaker 17 (02:16:37):
Right.

Speaker 7 (02:16:37):
What Trump is suggesting here is wouldn't wouldn't it simply
be more efficient if there was simply a fearer, a
single person to make all the decisions?

Speaker 12 (02:16:45):
He said a lot of things in that vein recently,
is like Congress being more of a symbolic, symbolic branch
of government that if if we need them, they'll probably
just agree with me.

Speaker 7 (02:16:55):
But like we don't.

Speaker 2 (02:16:56):
Really that's your standard dictator stuff.

Speaker 12 (02:16:59):
That's how he's been talking about it recently now. Earlier
this week, a redacted transcript of Gillaine Maxwell Gillan Jizline
Maxwell's meeting with Trump's DOJ has been released, where she
denied that she ever witnessed President Trump engage inappropriate behavior, saying, quote,
I actually never saw the President in any type of
massage setting. The President was never inappropriate with anybody, and

(02:17:20):
the times that I was with him, he was a
gentleman in all respects unquote. She also denied allegations that
Prince Andrew ever had sex with a minor in her home,
saying that a substantiating photograph is quote unquote fake.

Speaker 2 (02:17:32):
Well, I can't imagine why she'd lie, and.

Speaker 12 (02:17:35):
Also claimed that there is no Epstein quote unquote client
lest So yeah, that all about wraps that up. I
think we got to the bottom of the whole Epstein case.
We don't need to worry about this anymore.

Speaker 2 (02:17:46):
I would say, of all of those, the one of
those that I might have believed before she denied it
was that there wasn't an additional client list outside of
what we've already seen, like his black we bele O. Well, yeah,
I wouldn't surprised if they didn't keep all of that
many notes on a criminal conspiracy.

Speaker 12 (02:18:00):
Yeah, I don't think there's a list of being like,
here's all of my pedophile friends in one place.

Speaker 2 (02:18:04):
Here's what does make me wonder now, and this really
is the first time I am which is that they
clearly came to her with a list of here is
all of the things you need to say you didn't see, like.

Speaker 12 (02:18:14):
Maybe or she's just savvy enough to know what to say,
Like I even think, yeah, we don't even need to
an allege a larger conspiracy here. I think everyone involved
in this is quite savvy and knows what they should
say and shouldn't say.

Speaker 2 (02:18:25):
Yeah, I mean I think the conspiracy is obvious, Like
that's that's all there is. There doesn't need to be
an explicit quid pro crow here. Yeah, I don't know.
It's interesting to me that she brings up Prince Andrew.
If nobody brought that up to her, she was asked
about it. That's what I'm saying is I believe there's
a conversation. We're not privy here too, where she got
marching orders in exchange for getting you know, she's basically

(02:18:47):
out on work release, right.

Speaker 12 (02:18:49):
I don't need to jump to such outrageous conspiratorial beliefs
such as that.

Speaker 2 (02:18:53):
I'm okay with it at this point. Yeah, I don't
know what to what extended it was, but yeah, I
don't know this is this is pointless, Like, yeah, I
don't know if this helps with his base. I don't
know that his bass is going to be like, well
if Gilan Maxwell says it, nope, yeah.

Speaker 12 (02:19:11):
I mean people have responded positively, like Margor Taylor Green,
who was previously going on a slight offense that on
the Epstein things, has now fully come around being like, well,
there you go. It's it turns out Trumpet isn't a
pedophile after all. Thank goodness, that was a close call there.

Speaker 2 (02:19:27):
I know this is being disseminated to his influencer network,
right and to the network of people that he uses
for stuff like this. I'm wondering about the actual like
voter base, fan base, like time will tell, and the
folks who are a step or two further than Marjorie
Taylor Green, like the like the people who are more
like on the Rogan side of things, like does this

(02:19:49):
really move the needle for them?

Speaker 7 (02:19:50):
Sure?

Speaker 2 (02:19:51):
I hate having the cares like is Joe roganm gonna
buy this shlot, but this does seem like, yeah, shameful
even for him.

Speaker 12 (02:19:59):
I mean, I think a lot of people can see
that there is an incentive for going to say certain things,
and I think people people are smart enough to understand that.
I don't think she's going to tell the Trump's own
DOJ about like a smoking gun involving Trump. Why would
that help her try to get a pardon from the President.

Speaker 7 (02:20:17):
Yeah, I think I think I think the important thing
for this is that like, the people who are going
to believe this are the people who just don't want
to believe that Trump did this, and this is this
is a reinforcing thing that you can feed them. But
the question is what answer for everyone else? And it's
not particularly compelling for them.

Speaker 12 (02:20:34):
All Right, we have four executive orders to get through
before we close this episode, starting off with cashless bail.
On Monday, Trump signed two executive orders targeting cashless bail,
one specific to Washington, d C. Which directs law enforcement
to charge people federally and hold them in federal custody,
and to use federal funding and services as leverage to
pressure DC to change its cash less bail policies. The

(02:20:57):
other executive order targets cashless bail nation Why, and asks
the Attorney General to make a list of quote states
and local jurisdictions that have, in the Attorney General's opinion,
substantially eliminated cash bail as a potential condition of pre
tray release from custody for crimes that pose a clear
threat to public safety and order, including offenses involving violent,
sexual or indecent acts, or burglary, looting, or vandalism. The

(02:21:19):
Attorney General shall update this list as necessary.

Speaker 7 (02:21:22):
Quote.

Speaker 12 (02:21:22):
So, using that list, Trump's cabinet will then quote identify
federal funds, including grants and contracts currently provided to cashst
bail jurisdictions that may be suspended or terminated unquote. So
it's trying to bribe states and local municipalities to cease
cash's bail policies using federal funds, the same way that
they've tried to do for a whole bunch of other

(02:21:43):
anti WOUE policies Trump has tried to force onto unwilling states.
Second Executive Order from August twenty fifth, titled Prosecuting Burning
of the American Flag. Let's start with a clip from Trump.
I don't want to just place super long Trump clips
because they know that can be annoying. But the way
that he talks about disorder is kind of more interesting

(02:22:05):
than the way the order is written. But we will
talk about some of those smaller details included in the
actual text. But here's a clip from c SPAN.

Speaker 17 (02:22:14):
Flag burning all over the country. They're burning flags all
over the world. They burn the American flag and as
you know, through a very sad chord. I guess it
was a five to four decision. They called it freedom
of speech. But there's another reason, which is perhaps much
more important. It's called death. Because what happens when you

(02:22:35):
burn a flag is the area goes crazy. If you
have hundreds of people, they go crazy. You could do
other things, you can burn this piece of paper, you could,
and it's when you burn the American flag. It incites
riots at levels that we've never seen before. People go
crazy in a way. Both ways. There's some that are

(02:22:57):
going crazy for doing it. There are others that are
angry angry about them doing it. Do you want to
discuss that?

Speaker 9 (02:23:04):
Sure?

Speaker 18 (02:23:04):
What the Executive Order does? Their charges your Department of
Justice with investigating instances of flag burning and then where
there's evidence of criminal activity, that where prosecution wouldn't fall
afoul of the First Amendment, and instructs the Department of
Justice to prosecute those who are engaged in these instances
of flagburn and what.

Speaker 7 (02:23:24):
The penalty is going to be.

Speaker 17 (02:23:25):
If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail,
No early exits, no nothing, You get one year in jail.
If you're burn a flag, you get. And what it
does is insight to write, I hope they use that language.
By the way, did that insight to riot?

Speaker 7 (02:23:41):
I love it?

Speaker 12 (02:23:42):
He is to check, yeah, because God forbid him actually
mean what he's citing?

Speaker 7 (02:23:46):
Trump trump auto pen.

Speaker 12 (02:23:50):
That's right. So included in the order, it says, quote,
notwithstanding the Supreme Court's ruling on Fristman protections, the Court
is never held that American flag desecration, conducted in a
manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action, or
that is an action amounting to quote unquote fighting words,
is constitutionally protected see taxes fee Johnson unquote. The order

(02:24:12):
directs Theatory in General to enforce criminal and civil laws
against acts of American flight discration that cause harm unrelated
to First amendment expression, which could include charging people with
violent crimes, hate crimes, a legal discrimination against American citizens,
what violations of American civil rights, crimes against property and peace,
as well as conspiracies and attempts to violate in aiding

(02:24:35):
and abetting others to violate such laws, so it's like
an anti rioting thing. The dj will also look for
cases where American flag discretion could violate applicable state or
local laws, such as open burning restrictions, disorderly conduct laws,
or destruction of property laws, and will refer such matters
to state and local authorities for potential action. Finally, the
Secretary of State shall deny, prohibit, terminate, or revoke visas residents,

(02:24:59):
permitsture realization proceedings and other immigration benefits, or seek to
deport any foreign national that has engaged in American flag
to secretion activity. So that's how they're going to go
after it. Rob, Are do you anything to say on
this flag burning thing?

Speaker 2 (02:25:14):
I mean they're waiting. I mean, and they didn't wind
up waiting long. Someone did it immediately as they knew
they would, so that they can get a case that
they can take up to the Supreme Court. So we'll see,
We'll see what happens. We'll see. Yeah.

Speaker 12 (02:25:26):
Yeah, they want to prosecute one of these things and
appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court to
maybe change that ruling so they can apply it more broadly. Right,
So it's part of the same test that they've done
with a number of other things that seems unconstitutional, It
seems to violate Supreme Court rulings. Yeah, but the point
is to test that and see if they can change it,
just like they did with abortion.

Speaker 7 (02:25:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:25:46):
Can we go further and if this works, if we
feel like we made progress on this, can we start
pushing and saying other things our incitement?

Speaker 9 (02:25:54):
Right?

Speaker 12 (02:25:55):
You know?

Speaker 2 (02:25:55):
Can we start going after people who aren't even present
who write something that is like, well, this was incitement
to write because they wrote about the police murdering this guy. Right,
like a party of free speech strikes again. This is
the kind of thing where can I wargame out? Would
they try this? If they can get that far? Yeah
they will. If they can get that far. Will they
get that far?

Speaker 5 (02:26:13):
You know?

Speaker 2 (02:26:13):
Is the Supreme Court going to give them everything they
want on this? I don't actually know, Like I really
don't know. So I'm going to try not to doom
spiral too much, just you know, let's see, none of
us have any choice in the matter at this stage.

Speaker 12 (02:26:27):
Finally, let's address the quote additional measures to address the
crime emergency in the District of Columbia. So it's another
executive order from August twenty fifth. Trump wants to establish
an online portal for Americans with law enforcement experience quote
or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join
federal la enforcementities to support the policy goals described in

(02:26:49):
Executive Order one four three three. That's the Making a
DC Safe and Beautiful Order from a few weeks ago. Right,
the Secretary of Defense is instructed to create and begin manning, hiring,
and equipping a specialized unit within the District of Columbia
National Guard who will be deputized to enforce federal law.
To quote the order quote, the Secretary Defense shall immediately

(02:27:12):
begin ensuring that each state's National Army Guard and Air
National Guard are resource trained, organized, an available to assist federal,
state and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and
ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate,
as appropriate under law. In coordination with respective Adjuncts General,
the Secretary Defense style designate an appropriate number of each

(02:27:34):
state's trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for
rapid mobilization for such purposes. In addition, the Secretary Defense
shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick
reaction force that shall be resource trained and available for
rapid nationwide deployment. National Guard walking streets of DC are

(02:27:54):
now carrying firearms after first being deployed without their service weapon,
and since the operation in DC he began on August seventh,
or now been over a thousand arrests, including dozens of
undocumented immigrants. Currently, the Pentagon is planning to deploy thousands
of National Guard to Chicago to continue Trump's alleged crime crackdown.

Speaker 19 (02:28:15):
I would have much more respect for Pritsko. If he'd
call me up and say, I have a problem, can
you help me fix it? I would be so happy
to do it. I don't love not that I don't
have the right to do anything I want to do.
I'm the President of the United States. If I think
our country is in danger, and it is in danger
in these cities, I can do it no problem going

(02:28:35):
in and solving you know his difficulties, but it would
be nice if they'd call and they say, would you
do it?

Speaker 2 (02:28:41):
He's hurt, poor guy. They want to ask him for help.

Speaker 12 (02:28:46):
His little fewings. He's gonna have to He's gonna have
to deploy the national goal without putschool's.

Speaker 7 (02:28:53):
Approval, you know.

Speaker 2 (02:28:54):
Gang. In all of this focus on the people being
killed and persecuted by the government, I don't think any
of us has stopped and spent enough time thinking how
does Donald Trump feel?

Speaker 12 (02:29:05):
And shame on us, you know, shame on us. But
it's not just Chicago. On Friday, the Pentagon told Fox
News at upwards of seventeen hundred National Guard troops will
be mobilized in nineteen states to be deployed across the
country to assist ice in the nationwide hunt for undocumented immigrants.
The Guard will be activated in states like Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada,

(02:29:30):
New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia,
and Wyoming, with effective status ranging from August through mid November,
and operations expected to start in early September. Importantly, as
we saw in DC, national guard from other states might
deploy two other states. Specifically, in the case where Trump

(02:29:52):
doesn't get cooperation from the governor who is in control
of the national Guard of each state, he can deploy
national Guard from somewhere else, like what he did in DC,
pulling national Guard from other Red states being deployed to
d C but mobilized in those Red states. So national
guards from all of these states could be deployed in
a town near you, no matter where you live. And

(02:30:15):
this operation specifically with these like seventeen hundred National Guard
troops is specifically to assist ice. His plan to do this,
like anti crime deployment in Chicago, is a separate yet
similar plan. It's also pulling from national Guard. But these
things are two separate operations according to White House officials.

Speaker 7 (02:30:34):
And I think one of the important things about this
is that, you know, obviously there's the part of this
where it's like, yeah, they want to at the very
least look like they're just occupying cities and they are
arresting huge members of people, But they also just don't
have the manpower to do this kind of stuff, which
is why they're pulling the National Guards. Why they're trying

(02:30:56):
to expand the number of people on ICE. This is
why they're pulling National Guard out to do this kind
of stuff, which that like they don't actually have the
repressive capacity to just occupy cities and they're trying to
find the manpower to be able.

Speaker 20 (02:31:07):
To do it.

Speaker 12 (02:31:09):
So we will keep an eye out in September for
these possible military deployments around the country. Yep, hey everyone,
this is Garrison recording a short update on Thursday since
we have a little bit more information about the Minneapolis,
Minnesota school shooting. So right after we recorded, rumors started

(02:31:30):
circulating that this shooter was linked to neo Nazi, satanic
pedophile groups nine A and seven to six four. Someone
on Twitter found a neo Nazi forum account that they
alleged belonged to the school shooter. This account used in
nine A symbol, and an affiliated Twitter account made other

(02:31:54):
nine A references. These claims gained a lot of traction
from leftist accounts and armchair experts on Twitter and Blue
sky Lots. People were very eager to talk about something
else besides that this shooter was trans and many pinned
the blame on seven sixty four, the child exploitation group

(02:32:14):
that operates on discord and telegram that Blackmaile's children and
encourages some to commit acts of violence like school shootings.
I talked about seven sixty four on my Nihilist Violent
Extremism episode from earlier this year. As these claims spread online,
I remained skeptical because this shooter did not seem to

(02:32:36):
really fit the profile of a nine A or seven
six y four grooming victim. This shooter did not really
seem like an O Nina acolyte. They more closely resembled
the True Crime Community fandom. And while sometimes True Crime
Community or TCC may use O Nina references because other
mass shooters have or because previous mass shooters have been

(02:32:58):
affiliated with Nina and really groups, I did not see
much evidence linking this shooter to nine A based on
the videos they posted to YouTube, And while some Nazi
Satanist types have helped facilitate the Columbiner or TCC fandom,
there was no solid evidence linking a group like seven
to six' four to this latest. Shooting the shooter was

(02:33:21):
in their mid. Twenties they weren't a fourteen year old
being groomed into doing a mass, shooting and then On thursday,
morning the forum account alleged to be The minneapolis shooter
and the source of claims calling them a NINE a
or sen six four grimmy victim started posting again on the.
Forum it wasn't the shooter's. Account the shooter did not

(02:33:43):
fit that. Profile they weren't in a Cult Nazi. Satanist
they were obsessed with mass, killers and translations of their
cerecict journal have helped to substantiate. THIS a journal entry
discussed taking pleasure in dressing up as a school. Shooter
quote TODAY i assembled a school shoot cosplay. Quote and
in translations of their, journal they made explicit references To

(02:34:06):
True Crime COMMUNITY, tcc saying that they might cringe if
they joined an ONLINE tcc community and it could make
them not want to follow through on doing an. Attack
doing ONLINE tcc fandom as mostly full of. Posers, QUOTE
i think joining a community would alienate my future, unquote

(02:34:26):
and QUOTE i feel a very small portion OF tcc
feels AS i. Do harbor's admiration of intent. Unquote one
more update BEFORE i closed the episode earlier, today On,
THURSDAY Rfk junior was asked if he would now be
looking into if gender transition drugs cause. Violence he responded

(02:34:47):
by saying that they were already doing studies looking into,
that and then quickly pivoted to talking about quote launching
studies on the potential contribution of some of THE ssri
drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might
be contributing to violence. Unquote this lines up WITH Rfk
junior's general focus on psychiatric DRUGS SSRIs depression, medication as

(02:35:12):
he has previously. Stated that's all for us today On
It Could Happen.

Speaker 2 (02:35:16):
Here we reported the.

Speaker 9 (02:35:18):
News we reported the.

Speaker 2 (02:35:20):
News, Hey we'll be Back monday with more episodes every
week from now until the heat death of The.

Speaker 20 (02:35:30):
Universe it Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone.
Media for more podcasts from Cool Zone, media visit our
website coolzonmedia dot, com or check us out on The iHeartRadio,
App Apple, podcasts or wherever.

Speaker 15 (02:35:42):
You listen to.

Speaker 20 (02:35:43):
Podcasts can now find sources where it Could happen here
listed directly in episode.

Speaker 7 (02:35:47):
Descriptions thanks for.

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