The Atlanta Shooting Part 1: Purity and Violence

In part 1 of our analysis of the 2021 Atlanta shooting we look at the history of Christian whorephobic violence against Asian women and how purity culture and imperialism led Robert Aaron Long to murder spa workers

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to it could happen here a podcast that is
today about something that did happen here and absolutely sucked.
And with me to talk about the Atlanta shooting is Scarrison. Hello, Hi,
not happy to be here? Yeah, yeah, No, this is
This is not a We're not talking about a current event.

(00:25):
This happened like what was it last year? So yeah,
in case someone's listening and wondering if there was another one. No,
this is specifically talking about Actually there have been a
couple of shootings in Atlanta since then, obviously there. Yes,
we're talking we're talking about is is from from last

(00:46):
year and it ties into many of the topics we
discussed something the show Yeah A. March sixteenth, two one,
Robert Aaron Long, a regular at Young's Asian Massage, refused
to tip after getting a massage shouty a Ton, the
SPA's owner, confronted him about the tip. Long simply walked away.

(01:08):
He got dressed, went to the bathroom, pulled out his
gun and started shooting, leaving shout yit Ton dying on
the floor. Driving from spa to spa, Long shot nine
people and killed eight. The loan wounded survivor Alicia Fernandez
Ortiz got on his knees and begged Long not to shoot.
Long shot him anyways. There's a there's a there's a tendency,

(01:32):
when confronted with true horror, to retreat into abstraction, as
if the abstract is sheltered from the violence of the storm.
I intend, if briefly, to do it myself. But there
is no safety there, only the same violence, repeated again
and again and again in a thousand ways, with a
thousand names, wearing a thousand faces. Because this is hell

(01:53):
and we live in it, so on onto the abstract.
There's a concept in Marxism called trigger um. It's a
German word. It's usually translated as bearer, in the sense
of an individual capitalist being the bearer of capitalist social relations.
They enact this relation by, you know, turning capital into

(02:13):
more capital, which is what makes a capitalists. Uh. There
is you know, literally endless debate over what this actually means.
Most of it is pointless, and the meeting is contested
enough that I'm going to abuse it a bit further
and argue that a person can become a bearer of
historical forces larger than themselves. Robert Aaron Long was the

(02:35):
bearer of a great number of historical forces. He bore
the violence of capitalism, of misogyny, of racism, of horror, phobia,
of whiteness, of Christianity itself, and he unleashed it into
the world. It's just like the idea of like invoking, right,
drawing on these external ideas into yourself, and then becoming
them for like a brief period of time. Yeah, I mean,

(02:57):
I think it's slightly different in that with bearing. It's
it's not so much that that you're briefly invoking them.
It's that you're you're constantly a part of the relation.
So the relation defines you and it and you you
sort of you constantly enacted by the things that you
do and doing, like the relation reel. It's more of

(03:18):
like an ever present thing that is Yeah, Yeah, it's
it's it's yeah. It's something that's just sort of structures
how the society works. Right, Like we're all sort of
like enacting the wage relation, right every time we like,
do you know like doing this right now? Jobs? Yeah,
we are, we are enacting the wage relation. Yeah. And
you know, I think I think a lot of people

(03:41):
after the shooting were left asking, you know why and
you know, we can name social and historical forces, we
can talk about sort of antiation, violence and racism and horophobia,
but what does it actually mean? And you know what,
what are the forces that long and least in this world?
What do they look like? And I think I think

(04:02):
we have we have a good example of this from
right after Long was arrested. Police Captain J. Baker the
Cherokee Sheriff's Department UH said this to reporters at a
press conference. This is about Long in the shooting. He
was pretty much fed up and at the end of
his rope, and yesterday it was a really bad day
for him. And this is what he did. He apparently

(04:24):
has an issue what he considers a sex addiction, and
he sees these locations as something that allow him to
go to these places and it's a temptation for him
that he wanted to eliminate. Now, Yeah, that there there
was a lot going on in in in in those
like two sentences, Um, so you know Cherokee Sheriff's Department,

(04:45):
Oh yeah, there is there is so much going like
there's somebody somebody somebody later. Yeah, it's incredible. One of
the things that we're going to go more into the
next episode. Is it like this, this is where I
what's his name? This is where the guy who just
like drew a random line on a map that he
found from like that he pulled out of his like

(05:06):
national geographic thing who divided Korea and half like this
is where he's from. There's this is yeah, there is
a there's a lot of historical violence in this very
specific part of Georgia that is all coming together here.
And oh yeah, his school was also super racist, Like
there's they had a mascot that was like doing all

(05:26):
the racist stuff. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, And you know,
before we go any further, it's worth mentioning that, like
almost immediately after the Honorable Police Captain gave that press conference,
a bunch of people on the internet found out that
Baker had posted like a shirt that said uh COVID
nineteen and imported virus from China. I remember this? Yeah, Yeah,

(05:52):
Sheriff was pretty pretty racist himself. Yeah, a part of
many many anti Asian tropes relating to conspiracy theories. Yeah,
this is you know this, this this is classic twenties
like anti Asian rhetoric. It's you know, it's stuff that's
led directly to hundreds of attacks nation Americans since the
start of the pandemic. And you know, the race is

(06:12):
on slat, driven by every sector of American society. Now
people immediately start speculating that Jay Baker had collaborated with
Long to cover up the racial like motivation for his violence.
And okay, I think there's some truth to this. The
cops have been collaborating with Long and his family in
various ways. I'm going to read a part of an

(06:34):
article in Vanity Fair written by the journalist Made Jong
called how the Atlantispas shooting the victims the survivors tell
a story of America, which is it's this is one
of the best things that anyone's written about the shooting
so far. I'm going to read a little bit of
it because it's Oh boy. I ring the bell at
the family home, no one answered. Before I could decide

(06:54):
what to do, a police cruiser showed up. An officer
who introduced himself as Sergeant Clement, explained that the neighbors
multiple people had called to report suspicious activity. The one
good thing about Cherokee County, he told me, is that
we look out for each other. It's like how it
used to be in the seventies. I asked Clement what
specifically the neighbors were worried about, to be honest, he said,

(07:15):
what they are worried about is they are afraid of revenge.
What is the context for the like revenge line? Yeah,
I mean it was basically just they were released, like
they were terrified that like Asian people were going to
show up, like to this community and take revenge for
the shooting. Thought they were like attack like the church
or something. Well, no, like they thought they were gonna

(07:37):
show up to like the family's house and like attack
the neighborhood. Ah, when is when is that ever happened? Yeah? Yeah,
you know, and and and you know, and you can
like what what this demonstrates a is just the kind
of community you're dealing with here. And be also, like

(07:58):
you just you have very obvious close connection between the
cops and like Long's family at this point. Yeah, And
I mean in terms of like the covering up, the
covering up of like the anti h violence part of it. Honestly,
I don't even know how intentional that would be, because
I don't think he even recognizes that as racism. And
I'm not sure how much the cops recognize that as

(08:20):
a super big part, since that they are already uh,
pretty pretty racist. I guess most Asian people, Okay, Like
I I don't even know how much they recognize that
as being like a thing that isn't normal. Yeah, but
but I think also, like I don't know it the
the the explicitness to which particularly Baker is being racist

(08:44):
like makes me suspect that he does that he would
have been able to figure it out because he's like,
like you have to go out of your way to
like have a shirt that says like COVID imported from China,
Like yeah, but I don't think that he would consider
that racist, right, Like it's so so racist that, but
but he can't even consider that. He just think it's

(09:04):
just like normal, right, Like he's yeah, I can see
it's like in terms of like them trying to cover
up any kind of anti Asian um stuff leading towards
the shooting, they may not see that as like as
anything to be covered up because they think that's just normal.
So they're not going to like even focus on it
because they're like, yeah, I mean obviously right, Like yeah,
it's just we're so far down the rabbit hole that

(09:28):
it's hard to even like recognize it. I don't know,
I'm just I'm just I'm just it makes it makes
sense consciousness. And I think also the other thing that's
going on here that that's I think the other part
of why they wouldn't have recognized it if they didn't
use that. Like okay, so like like most people see

(09:50):
this and they're you know, they kind of like analytically,
they kind of throw up their hands and they're like, wow,
this is anti agent violence. They talk about like the
stuff the particular dangerous face by like Asian women and
sex workers, and they sort of call it a day,
and the analysis sort of like stops there, and like
they're right, like that this is anti Asian violence. The
violence is primarily inflicted on women, and it particularly on
sex workers or and this is also very important people

(10:13):
who are perceived as sex workers no matter what they
actually do. And yeah, like it's got worse than the pandemic.
But there's a very very specific kind of violence that
Long is doing here. It is and it's not it's
related to, but not identical to the sort of post
COVID stuff. And I think people really like did a

(10:38):
disservice to what happened and did it diservice to help
the people understand it by not actually poking at it,
because this shooting is at its core and evangelical shooting
like this is this is this is evangelical violences, is
Christian violence, and this is this is purity culture. And
you know, if if you want to understand what actually
happens here, you have to actually you have to go
back and you have to understand the Christianity angle be

(11:00):
because it is critical. Now. East Asia's contact with Christianity
in the last two hundred years has been broadly speaking,
extremely bleak. Uh the conclusion of the First Opium War
in eighteen forty two, which Britain forced China to buy
opium to cover Britain's trade deficit with the country, and
then the Britain also stole Hong Kong and then allowed Yeah,

(11:20):
it all also had the effect of allowing Christian missionaries
into the country, and it is genuinely unclear which one
of those acts has the highest body counts. The product
of the Christian missionaries work was the Typing Rebellion, in
which the self proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ waged a
failed war against the ruling Ching dynasty. That like, even
if even if you use like the lower estimates of

(11:41):
the body count, that war makes World War One with
like a minor border skirmish. It is a just incredibly
devastating war. And you know that the product of this
is there's there's famines. There's a such a bunch of
floods that happened at the same time, and this sends
an enormous number of immigrants and refugees fling from their
homes looking for any way to survive. And a lot

(12:03):
of those people find their way to the US and
they get imported by American capitalists who are, you know,
looking for a new labor force to serve as like
a racial racial buffer between right black workers after the
Civil War. And the other thing is like it's really
hard to get to the West coast in there, Like
they don't the Panama Canal. You have to go over
land and it sucks and it's hard, and so they
need a labor force that they can just get to

(12:23):
the West coast. And it's literally easier for people to
come from China, and you know, and so they do,
and it is a it is a brutal existence Chinese
workers are worked at death building the railroads, and they
you know, they struggled to carve out a life for themselves,
and they do halting lead and certain leaps and spurts,
but they create communities, they build towns and temples and

(12:44):
cultures in the beginning of a new society. And that's
when the white working class decides they want to exterminate
them because this is this is a great country. Uh yeah.
White workers, you know, immediately start blaming Chinese workers for
the low wages, and they use their workers organizations to
ethnically climb as the West. The results of this is
a series of masscres that goes on literally for decades,
stretching like into the ninth like this, this, this, these

(13:06):
things starting like the eighteen seventies and they're still going
in like the nineteen like like in the in the
like the early nineteen hundreds. Um. And it's at this
point where Christianity gets involved. Um. I think like most
people who are listening to the show have probably heard
at least in passing with the Chinese Exclusion Act, just
this sort of like the great triumph of like the
dark alliance of racist and the white working class but

(13:28):
what I think is less known about is the page
Act of eight, which band quote lewd and immoral women
from entering the United States. And this is this is like,
this is directly targeted at Asian and Chinese women, um,
who were seen as a threat to the sort of
racial and moral character of the white Christian American nation
because of like they're supposed to like inheritent immorality demonstrated

(13:52):
by the popular US demonstrated by the popular image of
all Chinese women as sex workers. And you know, I think,
like looking back on this, this is extremely recognizable that
this is literally just an anti trafficking panic, like this
whole thing. It's just it's like this this this, this
is like this is like proto this is like proto
q shit um. And you know, and like like there

(14:16):
is there is legitimately like sex trafficking going on, but
the existence of like like the fact that there is
sex trafficking gets used as this sort of like political
and racial image. It gets projected onto just like all
Asian women who get portrayed as trafficking victims and you
simultaneously be like saved but then also expelled from the
US to preserve both there in the U s's purity

(14:39):
and you know, like this image of Asian women is
literally never changed. You will find it today, like to
this day, people find people using like the exact same
racist projections like consciously or unconsciously to talk about Asian
immigrants and like particularly SPA workers. It's it's this like
it's it's this like incredibly toxic mix of like Christian moralism, sexism,
horo phobia, and racism. And the racism element is really

(15:01):
important because like, okay, well this is going on, Like
prostitution is legal in California, Like you could just do
this like there, there's there's no law against it. Um,
you know. It's it's so you think that like oh
hey there, you know that this sort of like Christian
panic would just be targeted against brothels, Like no, it's
it's like very specifically against Asian women. And it's you know,
this is because all of this sort of like the

(15:24):
Christian fears about sex work is you know, and and
their horror phobia is and and still is today incredibly
deeply fused with this sort of like that this is
this is like incredibly racist like concern over the purity
of the race. Yea, and yeah, you know this this
will sound familiar to anyone who has been like paying

(15:46):
attention at all to any of the trafficking panics, and
if the anti trans stuff, any of just interracial dating
was only extremely recently allowed at all of like the
biggest Christian universities, like like they have like they yeah,
not a it is it's a it's a thing. It's
a yeah, and it's and and that's and like the

(16:08):
thing about it it's it's really it's it's really close
to the surface, right, even even when they're not explicitly
just saying it, Like if you look, it's been about
two seconds looking, it's like, oh, this is what's going
on here? Huh yeah, yeah, And you know, so so
that that that's sort of that's sort of one side
of this whole thing, right, is you have this sort

(16:30):
of like you have this sort of like Christian like
anti trafficking panic that that creates that that like you know,
it creates the sort of image of way age women
are and has a lot of effects. But the other
side of this coin is that there is a just
incredible amount of sexual violence that America has inflicted on
Asian women, like particularly through its war. Successive invasions of

(16:51):
the Philippines, China, Korea, and Vietnam saw American soldiers committing
just untold and horrific sexual of violence and Asian women
like to to the extent that like the US essentially
just inherit Japan's like mass military rape system in Korea
and just runs it for itself. Like there's this all

(17:14):
of all of those things came home so massively. All
the things that were normalized to oversee is just came
right back when all the souldiers came back. Yep, yep, yes,
I think I canna stay next year like the and
this this has a like the I don't know, I
think people get the relationship between pop culture depictions and

(17:37):
of you know, racist despictions of people in pop culture
and the actual culture backwards. Like they don't help and
they spread it. But like you know, the the like
me love you long time ship from like Kubrick like
that that doesn't come out of nowhere. That's not just
Kubrick like that's that is that's something that was brought
home by the American racists and you know, like when
when they got back and that stuff like it's it's

(17:59):
not just that like the stuff is being spread by media,
it's that the media is being influenced by the people
who did this stuff and then came home. It is
the full circle thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I mean
even still now, there's such a such a degree of
like Asian women being like an object to possess, even
more so than like it's like even more so than

(18:20):
like regular women, which obviously under under like a lot
of like Pachechal stuff in the States and you know
overseas everywhere, you know, women are seen as objects to possess,
but specifically there's that is so much heightened for uh
women of color and specifically like Asian women. Um that
that idea, I mean you see it everywhere, for like
the libertarian Asian girlfriend trope. You like, you see this

(18:43):
in media all the time. Um that, like the Asian
wife is something you own and it's it's a it's
very extremely pervasive. Yeah. And I think the reason why
is that, like this image gets refreshed every time of
generation comes from from a war in Asia. And you

(19:03):
know that that's what because because the US has been
fighting wars in Asia like forever, I mean basically since
like they've been fighting wars of Asians late Agian hundreds,
and you know, like the violence of each subsect generation
just sort of refreshes this image of like Asian women
as prostitutes bodies are supposed to just be like accessible
to white men at all times. But this has a

(19:26):
sort of there's a kind of clash that happens here too,
because like on the one hand, you have this sort
of like racial and sexual feticization, and on the other
hand you of Christian horror phobia, and this gives you
this culture where like Asian women are at once seen
as like hyperdesirable and hyper available, but are also just
like utterly despised for both. And this sort of like

(19:48):
racist pathology, this like this, like this, like this, this
sexual desire bixed with loathing is at just the absolute
core of of the Atlantic shooting. And as if remind
us if its origin, Long carries out as massacre on
the fifty three anniversary of My lie and We're bad.

(20:19):
So I think we now have enough context to like
go back to long S initial description of why he
carries out the attack, which to self describe sex addiction
is desire to quote eliminate temptation. Yeah, because I mean,
you cannot overstate the degree in which both the police, uh,
the church, and the shooter himself framed this not as
an antigation thing, but as like as a as a

(20:40):
as something addressing his sex addiction. Um, that was the
angle he talked about it. Now, there's all of the
antiation stuff that is like right under the surface, but
it's like probably up so much of what's going on.
But the thing that they were publicly talking about was
this so called sex addiction. Yeah, and and I think
this is this is you know, this is this is
a very important angle of this is we should actually

(21:02):
talk about what that is and because and to understand
because he just not like okay, so like the six
edition is I think like actually sort of a thing
that is a hotly debated Yeah, I don't know. I'm
not a psychiatrist, don't take advice to be. I think
it's the slightly more legit of the two things that
the of the two like fake syndrome things we're gonna

(21:24):
talk about here, but this is not what's going on
with him and you want to understand, Yeah, yeah, what's
going on with this? We need to go back to
enemy of the show. Purity culture. Um, friend friend of
a friend of the pod. Yeah, I'm gonna say no.
I I refused, I had I had friends, And there
are a couple of times and I was like, I

(21:44):
refused to call this friend of the show. Dem it
like I can't pay myself to do it, right. Joshua
Harris just unsubscribed so long. Like by all accounts, is
extremely religious. He's heavily involved both his church and his
high school. Like his high school. Here's a public high school,
but the public high school has like Christian athletic groups,

(22:06):
which is a fun thing that they let you do
in public schools. Um, yeah, it's great. H So you know,
to get it, to get it an understanding of like
the kind of baptism we're dealing with here. Here's a
line from the church's by laws. Quote. We believe that
any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality,

(22:26):
bisexual conduct, beast reality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography, or any
attempt to change one's sex or disagreement with one's biological sex,
is sinful and offensive to God. Yep, you know, and
all of that's in the Bible. Yeah, they have you
can tell because they cite three passages not if we
say that. Well, okay, I know there is there is

(22:48):
beast reality, stuffy city is I think any incest is
in there. Well, I mean they keep doing this stuff.
But parts of the Bible are pro incests, parts of
Bible are Antians. Yeah, it's um. The Bible has a
real sticky relationship with the topic of incest um. But yes,
I'm sure they thoroughly slite all of their passages for

(23:11):
they talked about when they talk about bisexual conduct. Yeah,
it's well, I mean, you know, the one that's great
is the attempting to change one's sex or disagreement with
one's biological sex, a thing that I I'm guessing they're
citing God created males and females and males and females.

(23:32):
He created them, and I don't actually think so because
they're not. They didn't. Okay, Yeah, this this is me.
I'm just I'm just speculating based on my experience in
these in these types of types of groups. Yeah. So
so speaking of these types of groups, so Long is like, Okay,
so Long's church like expels him after the the shooting

(23:55):
the murders. Yeah, but Okay. It's interesting because, like I'm
they violated their own by laws because there's no way
they could have done their expulsion through actual explosion protocol
and that amount of time, because they would have acted
like send people to visit him in jail. See, I
think you're overestimating the degree to which churches care about
what their by laws actually say. Well, I mean it's

(24:16):
the blanking on it. What's the thing, Matt Matt eighteen.
There's like the thing that churches have that's like their
explosion protocol and they like send someone to this. This
is I think you're I think you're slightly overestimating how
much people actually care about that which it's all just
a racket used to prop up the authority of the
leaders and push people towards whatever political gains that the

(24:38):
movement has. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, see speaking of getting
people to submit to the authority and polue against the movements. Yeah.
So we've talked about purity culture on this show, like
we had um. So we're not going to go into
an enormous amount of detail about it here. The very
should at least describe what it is. So the very
very very short version is it's like it's an incredibly patriarchal,

(25:00):
like Evangelical Christian religious system in which like sex before
marriage is seen as like an incredible sin, and there's
just like like focused on like the purity of the wife,
and like like a woman is essentially the property of
her husband, and the entire goal of for existence just
to like bare and raised children. So it was it
was invented, but it was the modern version. It was
invented in the nineties, strongly influenced by a book written

(25:24):
by someone named Joshua Harris. It was called I Kissed
Dating Goodbye. The book promotes a pro courtship to marriage
pipeline instead of dating sitting dating will probably encourage you
to have sex before marriage, which is of course bad um.
And under under all of this, under like the actual
like you know, if you if you if you started
digging into this, all the stuff it talks about in

(25:45):
terms of like sexual purity um is about you know,
women are responsible for men's sexual like um sins, right,
Like if if a man lasts for a woman, that's
the woman's fault, not the man's fault. Right, It's because
women must be presenting in a way that causes that
to happen. Um. Right, So women's women's bodies and clothes

(26:06):
should be designed in a way so that it will
not cause men to stumble. Um. And by stumble they
mean get horny. Um. And you know it's something that
you know, your your body is both this thing that
should be pure, but also you should be ashamed of it,
right because it causes the sin Uh, women can't really
have any sexual desire on their own. Women are going
to really enjoy sex. Um. It's it's specifically for men,

(26:28):
and it's for procreation. Um. It's in in in intense
value tied to your idea of like virginity and virginity
extending out to like personal purity and spiritual purity. Like
if you have sex before marriage, you are like like unclean.
It's it's like it's like your it's like your chewed
up gum, Like you like you would not pick up

(26:50):
someone's Like if you found some chewed up gum on
the street, you wouldn't put it back in your mouth. Right,
So that's the idea, like if you if if you're
not a virgin, you are you are like chewed up gum,
like you are already used your spent um. So you have,
so you save save for marriage so that only your
husband can chew up your gum, and then after your
marriage you're just stuck there forever. Right. It's also like

(27:11):
very very very anti divorce. Um. And there's really no difference,
like there's they don't really there's not much discussion around consent.
Oddly enough, you know, as you know that they surprise
you based on what I all just said, like obviously
they don't care about consent. Um. There's like they view
any they view a sexual assault just as bad as

(27:33):
consensual sex before marriage. They see them as the same thing. Um.
It's it's basically the it's the same structures that they're
both in equal sin uh And I mean that is
that is purity culture one oh one. We could we
could just do an entire episode on purity culture and
we probably would do. We could do like yeah, like yeah, yeah,

(27:54):
I think the really important thing about it is like
this is basically like in terms of they're sort of
being like like I don't know what if you call
it a counterculture, but they're sort of being like an
evangelical cultural machine, Like it's this like this is this
is what they're pushing. Is like as like their mass
movement for for youth expect especially in the nineties and
two thousand's, we have we have stuff like purity rings,

(28:15):
which is like you know, when you when you're a teen,
you'll get like objects or jewelry which are like like
almost like magical items you put on to like show
that I am going to keep myself pure and by
doing this, by doing this action, it's symbolizing that and
therefore internalizing it. There's also um purity balls, which is
not what you'll so when when you use the word

(28:38):
purity ball, certain things will come to mind, right UM.
Unfortunately they're not as fun as what's what you are thinking. UM.
A purity ball is just like a formal dance event,
you know, like a ball that you put on um,
which is meant to. It's a it's a meant to.
Usually it's like fathers take their daughters there and then
their daughters swear to make a ginity pledge um to

(29:02):
protect their purity of mind, body and spirit UM, so
that they will not then infect you know boys, uh
and cause them to stumble and and commit the sin
of lust, which again is an incredibly weird thing to
do at a ball like it. It's so weird. We
also yeah, it's ye most most Yeah, it's well, I

(29:27):
think I think we've got into enough of that. Yeah,
but the specific sort of thing, I think the last
thing I will look at. There there there is one
more thing were But so before that, I do want
to point out that Joshua Harris, who like is in
a lot of ways responsible, like single handedly responsible for
an enormous amount of this, she is Japanese. And uh, yeah,

(29:48):
fucking thanks for that one, buddy, great job, good ship man.
In he announced that he and his wife were divorcing. Yeah,
so you and and and now and now no longer
considers himself like the type of Christian he was before.
I'm I'm unclear what his actual spiritual beliefs at the moment,

(30:09):
but he did he did try to distance himself from
his from from what I've read, like, it's unclear that
he knows. So oh he he knows. He definitely knows.
I can, I can, I can. I can guarantee that
he's he's used to be running. He has a new grift.
Now it sucks, they always get new grifts. But actually

(30:31):
when we will, yeah, we will get into the new
grift industry in the seconds. Um. But yeah, one of
the other things that's that's a big part of this
is like a deep and abiding hatred of porn. Like
all of this is yeah, like as you said, like
in the list of by laws watching porn again, it's
the same as sexual assaults. Yeah, it's it's morally the

(30:52):
same level of sin. Yeah. And and like you know,
I mean and and you can read that both ways
as how seriously they take watching porn and how seriously
I take sexual assault because it does go it does
go both ways. Yeah. Um. And this this thing, the
fact that that this is this is like considered a
sin is the apotheosis like the apothiosis that this is
is poor an addiction, which again like not really dubious existence.

(31:18):
This is this is this is even more dubious and
sex than sex addiction. Like there's no there, this is
this is like this is just fake. Um. But there's
an entire culture that's that's a like developed around stopping
manifest seeing poor and these like there's like these incredibly
elaborate accountability setups where like there's like apps you install
on your stuff, like the ways to alter your IP
addressed to certain sites. Yeah, Robert Aaron Long the shooter,

(31:41):
like he he uses a flip phone instead of a
smartphone because he thinks having a phone will like lead
in presentation. Um now Long. Yeah. And it's the product
of this is that there's like, there's like this entire
industry that is built up around quote unquote treating the
porn addiction. Yeah. Um, and it's it's all bullshit. But
Long had spent at twice been in one of these

(32:04):
facilities called hope Quest. Now, hope Quest is an affiliated
for old friends that focus in the family. But that
that's not actually the part I want to talk about,
because what's more interesting about hope Quest is that it's
founded by roy A. Blankenship, a former ex gay who
left both hope Quests and the X gay community to
live with his husbands. Now fun Now this what a

(32:25):
what a what what what a what a funny pattern
we keep finding out? Yeah? No, Now, I think I
think my two listeners, if you were, if you were
not as cursed as as as we are as we
are and you don't know what it ex gay is, um,
X gays were. There are this movements of like Evangelical Gaze,
who claimed that like this, this is the thing that
starts in like the ninetcent two thousands, they claimed that

(32:47):
like they've gone to conversion therapy and it made them
not gay. Yeah yeah, and and this and you know,
and in partial part of partial was going on here
is they claim that that like they did it voluntarily
because like involuntarily doing conversion therapy had gotten to a
point where it was like bad pr wise, because Jesus Christ,
you were like nturing children and they're still torturing children,
but but this time they're like, no, it's voluntary, and

(33:07):
that this is like the big this is the rights
big cultural campaign against the gay right foods in two thousands,
and uh, like I I would say this, like it's
it's not exactly the same thing as the way they
use detensitioners, but like there's a lot of it's very similar.
And of course obviously that we now have the x
X gay movement yeah yeah, and and you know, and
and and to to like so okay, so like the

(33:28):
X gay movement falls apart in like the late two
thousands and nearly dozen tents because like it doesn't work.
The leaders, all the leaders were initially gay. He said
they were X gay and then kept having gay sex
because that rules. Yeah, and they all kind of realized,
maybe we should stop doing this thing that keeps killing kids. Yeah,
and Blaken Blankenship to his credit, like he'd been a

(33:49):
big person doing this and then he was just like
like one of his friends like suicide and he's like,
oh shit, and so like he stops and he like
he's announce in version therapy and he's now appropriate. So
many of the focus on the family people who were
involved in like love one out all of these escay programs.
So many of them then renounced it, accepted their their gayness,

(34:11):
and then moved to Portland's fucking Oregon. So many of
them didn't though like this, this is what's interesting about this,
so okay. So so while he was sort of figuring
this out, blankets Ship had a founded hope quest, right,
And so he leaves with the people who are running
it now like our X gays, who they're like the
only X gays left who didn't renounce it and who

(34:34):
like still claimed to be X. I mean, they they've
taken their stuff about how like homosexuality should be like
dealt with by saying by having by marrying women and
just not acting on it or whatever, like they they
took thatself out of their bios, but they apparently they
still believe it, like like they they've never they've never
these people have never probably come out against it. And

(34:55):
you know what essentially happened was that like enough of
enough of the ex gays like that, the collapse enough
that like they had to find and they had to
find a new thing to do. And the new thing
they found to do was they went and they went
into the porn addiction treatment industry. Yeah, and also if
if if you want more background like the X gay thing,
you can listen to the my my two part are
on Focus on the Family and James Dobson for Behind

(35:17):
the Bastards. Also for our week on the War on transpeople,
we discussed some of the same stuff for the first episode,
which is the evangelical gay marriage um like thing that
so yeah, we we we have we do we we
do have we do have something like produced scripted stuff
on these topics if you want more background on them. Yeah, Unfortunately,

(35:37):
this is a this is a story where there's like
every single thread you've ever done suddenly is coming together
in one moment of horrific violence. This is where Long
like winds up for treatments for like or and sex

(36:00):
addiction addictions, which I kind of emphasize enough. This is
literally what he's talking about is literally that he watches
porn like like that that's what porn sex addiction like means.
And because none of this is real, the treatments like
don't work because again it's all fake. And I do
would also say hope quest Is operates out of Georgia.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know, so so so.

(36:26):
So he goes into treatment twice and he's he's he
says it like Maverick, which is dislike recovery center. Um,
it doesn't work. And he goes home and his parents
kick him out of his house for watching porn. And
you know, and I think this is something that like
is important to understand, which is that the people inside
of this world really deeply believe this stuff, right and

(36:47):
and like watching porn has real social consequences for them,
and it has you know, and this, this has, this
has has has like a profound affect on how these
people think. I'm going to read a quote from watching
post article Bayliss, who was Long's roommate at Maverick Recovery,
a sober living facility in Roswell, Georgia, in two thousand,

(37:08):
nineteen and two, and the months between his stay at
Hope stays at Hope, Quest said Long felt his very
salvation was at stake, as he told his roommate that
he was quote living in sin and not walking in
the light. He was walking in darkness. So this this
is how these people like see this stuff right, like
like this is this is literally about whether you're you're

(37:30):
like yeah, they're they're talking about like something extremely existential
like it like it is. This all seems very silly
to people who are not inside it because it is
it's it is. It is absurd. But if the people
involved in it, it is like the totality of the universe,
like it is, it is so big. It's like the

(37:51):
biggest thing. It's so important because you're you're determining what you're,
what you will, what's your conscious being will exist for
if for thou the thousands of ears like that, like
this is what they actually believe, So it's super important,
Like it's it is it is worth killing before because
that's that's how important this is. Like like I think,
I think there's no sense to which it is more

(38:13):
important than life or death because you dying, like, okay,
you die, once you go to physical death doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. Yeah, and and this, you know, and
you know, we talked about this, like it's there. There's
those things. There's there's a social consequences. You can get
kicked out of your house. You can kicked out of
your church if you keep doing this, like like these
churches will kick you out. Um and and this, you know,

(38:36):
this makes the ideology at work here incredibly powerful, and
it provides a mixture of this like this, this really
incredible self hatred for like falling into sin and giving
him too temptation, and it also creates a hat of
the temptation itself. And this brings us all the way
up to the shooting. Purity culture. Purity culture is the
key that onlocks, you know, the meeting of Long's words,

(38:59):
we can under stand the explanation that the police gave,
which again, like he apparently has an issue what he
considers a sex addiction and sees these locations as something
that allows him to go to these places, and it's
a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate, you know,
And there there was a at the memorial for for
the shooting last year. UM sex worker organizer Kail and

(39:21):
Jong said this, they hate us so they can hate
themselves less. And I think that's that's a really great Yeah,
that is a really good analysis. Yes, yeah, it's a
perfect calculation of like what's happening here. But this is
the part of the story with the media just violently

(39:43):
and spectacularly fox up to adapt. They they dropped the
purity ball. You might say, yeah, I mean it's it's
it's really horrible there, Like, what they've essentially done is
an act two years of racist violence against people who
had either literally just survived a mass shooting or who
are literally dead. And the way they do this is
the press reads long talking about sex edition addiction, and

(40:05):
they immediately assumed that the women in these massage parlors
have been having sex with them, and they start there's
like this whole hunt that they do to like search
for evidence that massage workers were doing like full service
sex work, based off of again the words of a
literal racist mass murderer and their own racist preconception that
like all Asian women especially SPA workers are also sex workers.

(40:26):
And like, you know, on the one hand, yeah, it's
true that this stuff is fueled by horror phobia, and
also like morally, who gives a ship what they were doing.
But the immediate problem here is that by doing this
witch hunt, you were seeking the police on the survivor
you're putting you're putting a survivors in immense legal and
physical danger. Yeah, and and we we will talk about
this more next episode. But like, these women have already

(40:48):
seen more police violence and police raids than all of
the journalists writing about this combined I've seen in their
entire lives. And if any of these people had bothered
to spend five seconds thinking about what purity culture is,
they would have realized it long is from a fanatically
puritanical culture, a culture where, for example, in massage given
by a woman where the man is like almost entirely naked,

(41:12):
uh is something that would absolutely have been considered a
sexual service. And like you know, and and if you
think about this again for like five seconds, right when
he's talking about removing temptation, he already thinks of all
of these women as sex workers, because that's that's what

(41:32):
he thinks the massage is he thinks like that that
that that's that's how he thinks about massages. It's yeah,
it is it women are the like women do this,
then they caused men to sin, right, it's not it
has nothing to do with what's going on with the man.
It is specifically what the woman is doing. Yeah. Well,
and and and even then like it doesn't actually like
I think I think that the important distinction here is

(41:54):
that it does not matter when Long talks about how
this is a place that was giving into station and
also like like he was giving inemptation and he was
like he was going there for his sex addition, Like
it doesn't actually matter to him whether or not any
of these women have ever like exchange money exact at all.
It doesn't. It doesn't it doesn't need to be, Yeah,

(42:16):
because these people are fucking like it just engulfed in
like it's so totally engulfed in this incredibly like violence
and racist and misogynists homophobic ideology that it just sort
of you know, like that that's just how they think.
And I think that this is where we're going to
return one final time in this episode to race, because

(42:37):
there's a mistake that people make thinking about this analytically
that prevents him from understanding both what's happening in Atlanta
and how sort of capitalists and racist violence happens everywhere.
Which is that like, okay, so right when this happened, um,
like when when the when the press conference dropped, you
got all that there are a lot of people like
I think Glenn Greenwalld did this thing leef fang, Like

(42:58):
there's a whole crew of people who were like, this
isn't about Asian racism at all. This is about him
like hating sex workers. And okay, it is true that
human labor has been transformed into a commodity that can
be bought and sold at will. Now on on a
on a more theoretical level, right, you will see sort

(43:20):
of incredibly theory brain people who will talk about how
you know, in in March's Critique of Political economy, right,
all labor is astracting, interchangeable. Each unit of labor time
is equivalent, identical, and exchangeable. But here in the massage parlor,
this is a deadly simplification this labor. That the labor
that is going on here is Asian. It is indelibly
stamped with race and ethnicity and nationality and hundreds of

(43:42):
years of violence and perception. Um Rumors Paca, a assistant
professor at the Institute of Women's Studies at the University
of Georgia. Rohod a piece last year called white supremacy
in the wellness industry or why it matters that that
this happened at a spa um and I'm going to
read a passage moment because it's very good. Massage spas,

(44:03):
also called salons or parlors like the one where these
crimes took place, are part of a broader industrial complex
that capitalizes on the racist belief that Asian people and
Asian woman in particular, possess magical, spiritual, and sexual healing abilities.
These attitudes belong to an entrenched Orientalist infrastructure in the
United States that connects yoga and meditation and massage to tourism, pleasure,

(44:26):
and escape. Signaled by the exotic tropical flower and the
photo above and there's a photo of flower at a parlor. Yeah,
you know. And and this this labor, the labor of
of of the massage that's happening here is it depends
almost entirely on a very specific performance of a specific

(44:48):
kind of Asian femininity. And you know when this sort
of gender and racialized violence, but when when this gender
and racialized labor comes into contact with Long and all
of the sort of historical forces that he's bearing, Humbird
is the workers, And yeah, I think, yeah, this is

(45:10):
the part of the story of the Lanta shooting that
I think if people know about Atlanta shooting at all, like,
this is the part they know about, right, they know
the story of Robert Aaron Long. But there are other
stories here, stories that aren't stories that in large part
are just not about the US at all. Um. There
are the stories of the victims, the survivors, and the

(45:30):
absolute hell that brought them into the massage parlor in
the first place on the horrific night. And those are
the stories that we're gonna tell in part two. Yeah,
well that doesn't for us today. I do want to say,
I know, uh, I know Christmas planning these for the
anniversary of the shooting, but they proved to be quite

(45:52):
the daunting task to put together. I had to get
I had to get pushed back for a while. So
but but big thanks to you are doing the work too.
Read through all of the horrible things, and if, like
the other thing I said about this, like if if
you think this is bad, wait till part two, which
is even more wide spanning and has horrific and disturbing

(46:16):
violence in a way that will I don't know, reduced
media tears multiple times. And yeah, we'll leave you an
existential dread of the condition of this world. Yeah, And
I guess again there there is there There is ways
to combat it, right, because all of these a lot
of these things, all right, you know, problems with like

(46:36):
viewpoint and ideas in terms of how we view sex,
how we view women, how we view race, um. And
there are things that when you see you can interrogate
in people, um, especially if you're especially if you're a Christian,
if you're if you're going to church. These there are
things to watch out for and you can push back
on because it's and doing so can maybe save people's lives,

(47:00):
because these ideas have a death count. Yeah, and I
think I think there's another part of this too, which
is that you know, I mean, the reason we talk
about purity culture stuff so much, the reason we talk
about the mobilizations of the evangelical rights so much, is
that they keep producing these movements that you know, that
that put that put our lives in danger. And the

(47:24):
only way that we can stop this, and this is
a thing that we can do, is you have to
actually destroy their movement, right you have you have to
you have to actually break their power. You have to
you know, you have to find various ways to break
the power, break the power of these churches, and you
have to find ways to break the power of their
political movements. And that is not an easy task. But

(47:45):
if if we want to live in a world well,
I mean, just point blank, if if we want to
live in a world and not in you know, like
four degrees fahrenheit, like unlivable death scape, like, we have
to deal with these people because they are the source
of almost every right wing movement that that we're facing,

(48:05):
and they have to be crushed before they do this again. Yeah,
and they're they're going to try. I mean, there's yeah.
Because the biggest thing would would say is like reaching
out to people who you know are indus or if
you if you go to church, I think it's your
duty as a Christian to push back on these things

(48:27):
because I'm not gonna bash anyone specifically for whatever religion
they have I understand why people have this. I I
can see how they work. Um. You know, I was
raised in something very similar. Um. But you can you
can still push back on the type of rhetoric that
leads to these things, in the type of like like

(48:48):
objectification and racism that necessitates violence and gets people to
be okay with violence, um, and pushing back against like
a Christian apocalyptic worldviews, and like the idea your your
actions will determine your you know how, the spiritual quality
of your soul and where it's going to reside for

(49:09):
all of eternity. Right. All these things are our ideas
that are pretty pretty like innately dangerous. Um. And there's
ways to do religion that don't have that. Yeah. But
I think I think that is a good enough place
to leave it for today, because I know part two

(49:31):
we're going to have some more more fire. Why why
widespread problems? Yeah, alright, well this has when make it
happen here. You can find us in the social media
places that happened here pods. You can also flee into
the woods to the woods. But but but before you

(49:53):
flee into the woods, subscribe to the pod and leave
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(50:13):
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