Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. Oh, welcome to filth on Fridays. Guys,
pew pew, pew pew. It's a whole new season. Well,
it's not a new season, it's like a new season metaphorically,
it's literally the same second season. But whatever, did you
(00:32):
guys have to square dance in elementary school? I did,
and it was absolute hell, an absolute horror. The reason
why was because our music teacher would always sort us
by size, so whoever you were dancing with was gonna
be about the same size as you. And when I
(00:52):
was in elementary school, I was the tallest gal. And
not only that, I was a little pudgche punch pudge Okay.
I also wore these really ugly bucket hats and I
would wear three watches at a time. And because I
was this big, massive girl, I'd always get paired with
a big, massive guy while all the other teeny tiny
children dance together. And I hated that. I felt I
(01:16):
was being so othered, Like why do we have to
be paired with someone of the same size? No idea?
Like was my elementary music teacher afraid that I'd do
Si dough a tiny boy so hard that he'd be
flung out into outer space or something. So, yeah, it
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was absolutely horrendous having the square dance and music class.
But instead of blaming my music teacher for my negative
square dancing experience, I've decided to be the bigger person
and find even more people to blame. And who's at
the top of my blame list, why none other than
automobile mogul Henry Ford. Yeah, it's Henry Ford's fault that
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we had to square dance in elementary school. He loved
square dancing. He thought square dancing represented the true spirit
of America. It had fallen out of fashion and he
was determined to revive the dance. And it wasn't just
that he loved square dancing. He also did this in
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response to all the new types of music and dance
coming out of the nineteen twenties. Specifically, he hated everything
that had to do with jazz. Jazz to him was filthy, vile, disgusting,
needlessly provocative. People were improvising, for Christ's sakes, and when
(02:55):
people would listen to this music, they would do appalling
things like the Charleston or they'd just be flapping their
arms gyrating their pelvises. An abomination and extremely un American,
and by Unamerican, what Henry Ford meant was that jazz
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was created and made by black people, and many of
the writers and performers of jazz were Jewish. And Henry Ford, Yeah,
he spent a lot of time building cars, but he
also set aside plenty of free time to be a
white supremacist. Yeah, so we're squear dancing because Henry Ford
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wanted us to be real Americans who do traditional old
time white ass dancing. He wanted to promenade Americans back
to the past where we stood in a line and
the only thing that was jiggling was not our asses
but our toes. Cree the theme song This is American Film.
(04:05):
Then I'm Gabby Watts. Every week I tell you a
filthy story from American history. This week's episode, Why We
Square Dance spoilers white supremacy. Henry Ford grew up in Michigan,
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and there he spent his time tinkering with equipment, experimenting
and building his own vehicles. He became an engineer working
in Detroit, founded a few companies that failed until finally
he produced the Model T. And what was special about
that car? It was affordable, so After it came out
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in nineteen oh eight, it quickly became the most popular
car in a man America. Henry Ford didn't just innovate automobiles. No,
he also innovated work. He implemented the assembly line. He
proposed the five day, forty hour work week. And some
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of you guys might be like, ough, he makes us
go to work five times a week, what a bitch?
Well before it was a lot worse. It was like
six days, seven days a week, and sometimes people were
working one bazillion hours. So actually he was pretty good
because he liked people working less. He was like, when
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they work less, they'll be more productive, have higher morale.
And not only that, if they have more leisure time,
they will buy more stuff. And Ford he loved when
people bought stuff. He loved consumerism, not just because he
was a capitalist who was making a lot of money
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off of his cars. He also thought that consumerism would
lead to world peace, because if you're buying stuff, you're
gonna be too busy to start and fight in wars. Yeah,
that's why women be shopping so much, because we're interested
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in world peace. Ford was a pacifist. He opposed World
War One, even though his company ended up making a
lot of wartime vehicles and equipment. But guys, you shouldn't
let your morality get in the way of making oodles
of money. And here's a theory I have. I think
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the reason that Henry Ford was so interested in making
cars was because he had a lot of people he
wanted to drive away from and or run over. Henry Ford,
he wasn't just races. He was also extremely anti Semitic.
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Men can do at all. One thing that Ford did
that seemed progressive at the time was that he hired
thousands of black men to work at his factories in Detroit,
and when they first started, he paid his black employees
the same as his white employees. But if you can
believe it, that didn't last because Ford was super opposed
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to unions, effectively cutting off people from advocating for better
working conditions rights having any say in the business, and
the labor was often dangerous, so he didn't listen to
his employees when they complained, being like, hey, I might
lose my arm or die in your factory. And he
especially didn't listen to his employees who were black. He
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also aggressively surveiled his black employees while they were working,
and then he even hired people to spy on them
outside of work. If they're getting into stuff he didn't
approve of, he'd fire them. And throughout the nineteen twenties,
the jobs for black workers and white workers started segregating,
and the black employees were disproportionately assigned to more dangerous jobs,
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jobs that also didn't get as much pay as jobs
white employees were assigned to. And also in general, Ford
was just really paternalistic to his black employees, like with
the surveillance, he was like, I tell you what to
do at work and outside of work. And of course
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Henry Ford was so anti semitic. How anti semitic was he? Well,
Hitler gave him a shout out in his autobiographical manifesto
Mind comp Now that's someone you want to compliment from.
(09:05):
In nineteen nineteen, Ford bought a newspaper called The Dearborn Independent,
based in a suburb of Detroit. He bought this newspaper
because he wanted an outlet to express his opinions. You know,
sometimes people write in a diary. Other people need a
whole newspaper. Have you guys heard of this rich people
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buying newspapers so that they can express their opinions. What's
up Washington Post? And Ford's main opinions were about pacifism
and anti Semitism, which you wouldn't think those things would
go hand in hand, being anti violence but also hating
a group of people. It's like owning a prius that
(09:50):
saves the environment but using it to run over people.
And why did Henry Ford hate Jewish people? Well, nothing
can actually justify your bigotry, so if you can believe it,
his reasons were really stupid. First, he was convinced that
Jewish people were trying to take over the world. Why
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did he think this because of a book called the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was a fabricated
text published in Russia in nineteen oh three. So he
read a fake book and was like, look, the Jews
are trying to have world domination. So if you're one
of those people who are like, wow, everyone is so
(10:32):
media illiterate nowadays, don't worry. We've always lacked media literacy.
Ford was convinced that the Jews controlled the banks, specifically
this nebulous idea of the International Bank. And then he
was like, the international Bank is what's responsible for the
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United States entering World War One and inciting the war
for their own benefit. So Ford bought The Dearborn Independent
because he needed to warn the American people, I mean
specifically people in Michigan about the scourge of the American Jew.
He's like, watch out, they're in kahoots to take over
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the world. And he was not subtle at all about
his anti semitism. From nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty seven,
the front page of the weekly paper featured a series
called The International Jew The World's Problem. Of course, many
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people hated the newspaper, and after he started the series
The International Jew the World's Problem, a lot of people
started protesting the newspaper. It was removed from libraries and
people were boycotting Ford automobiles, and very briefly he stopped
the series, but less than a year later he sneakily
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started it up again. He's like, they're not gonna notice
that I'm spouting this hateful red rick. But they did,
and actually his anti semitism led to the downfall of
the newspaper. Isn't that nice when a bad guy gets
what's coming to him. I feel like that rarely happens today.
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But what happened was in April nineteen twenty four, the
newspaper started publishing pieces about this attorney named Aaron Sapiro,
and Sapiro was like, guys, you know what you're writing
about me are just full on lies, So I'm gonna
sue you for libel. Dumbasses. That's why you don't go
after lawyers. They know the law. Henry Ford was supposed
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to appear in court, but instead of doing that, because
there's this whole media circus about it, he just shut
down the newspaper and agreed to a settlement. Part of
that settlement was he had to release a formal apology
to Sapiro, and being the little bitch that he was,
he didn't even write the apology himself, but he did
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have to give Sapiro a lot of money, and you'd think, wow,
justice has been served. Henry Ford won't be able to
poison the world with his anti Semitism now. Not exactly,
because even though he lost his newspaper, he was still
doing a lot of other stuff to try to prevent
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Jewish people from taking over the world, because he saw
the threat of the American jew coming from everywhere. He
blamed all things modern on the Jews, from women wearing
shorter skirts to the general blooster societal norms of the time,
and one of the biggest threats out there jazz. Okay,
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let's make Henry Ford's ghost really upset and play some
jazz music. Oh God, ghost screams, turn that racket off.
Here's what one of those articles in The Dearborn Independence
said about jazz in nineteen twenty one. Many people have wondered,
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whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that
invade decent homes and set the young people of this
generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a
Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush,
the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes are
(14:43):
of Jewish origin. Yes, he thought that jazz was making
everyone stupid. It was making people sensual and heaven forbid sexual,
driving good Americans into a frenzy. Jazz must be stopped.
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But the real moron in this situation was Henry Ford,
Because yeah, he was being bigoted against the Jews, but
the Jews didn't even create jazz music. Black people created jazz.
What a dumbass like, Yeah, there are a lot of
Jewish performers and writers, but there are also even more
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black performers and writers. So Henry Ford, he wasn't just
being bigoted, he was also being real dumb. Henry Ford
wasn't even fact checking his racism either way. He hated it,
hated that jazz crap. So what did Henry Ford do
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to combat the evils of jazz? Well, he was determined
to bring us back to the good old days when
America was great without the filth of that terrible music,
where people were listening to music that made them dance
and act appropriate music that would make you dance in
a square be right back after these soothing advertisements. Henry
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Ford hated modernity. He wanted the country to return to
a pastoral, good old boy past, you know, before Jewish
immigration exponentially increased in the late nineteenth century, and perhaps
even when black people were still enslaved. The fact that
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Henry Ford was thirsty and nostalgic for this old time
America was really hypocritical because he hated farming. He grew
up on a farm, and he said in his autobiography
that the only thing he liked about farming was that
it reminded him of his deceased mother. He said, I
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never had any particular love for the farm. It was
the mother on the farm I loved. He's like, oh, Mommy,
how I miss you. But thank gonna see you're gone
so that you don't have to see the horrors of
jazz music. And even though he hated farming, he was like,
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that's when America was great, you know, that's when ladies
were wearing long skirts and I only had to hear
music played by fiddles and shit, none of this jazz
crap existed. Jazz is so evil, you know. It's music
that's played in a wide variety of time signatures. People
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were improvising, which we all know. If you improvise, that's
how the devil gets into your soul. Like, how do
people come up with those notes so fast? It's because
their soul is tethered to hell. Hell makes you creative.
Board started collecting old farming equipment and antiques, and that
wasn't all. He was like, I need to remind people
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how great life used to be when everyone was dancing
in an appropriate manner. So around the same time he
was publishing his anti semitic newspaper in Dearborn. He bought
several historic ends there and made it a hub of
old time music and dance. He hired a dance master
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an old time dance orchestra. He then paid for old
time dance to be introduced into surrounding schools and universities.
He was like, hey, guys, you can use this as good, classic,
pure physical education. He said that square dancing provides quote,
social training, courtesy, good citizenship, along with rhythm, though nothing
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too complicated. Remember this is white people dancing. He hosted
fiddle competitions, made an old time music radio series, made
films about old time musicians, and he and his wife
even wrote and distributed old time dance manuals. And here's
another bad thing about working in a Ford factory, besides
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the racism and the paternalism, was he also made his
employees attend square dancing events. Don't you guys hate it
when you've been toiling at a factory all day and
then your boss is like, now you gotta do some
dosey do promenade. Twirl your partner, but don't twirl her
too hard. That would be crazy. We don't want anyone
to get dizzy. Dizziness is bad ergo also created by
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the Jews. So Henry Ford, he thought that consumerism would
lead to world peace. Ha ha ha ha ha he
he he he. And he also thought that dancing was
great for the body and the spirit, and one of
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the dance manuals he and his wife wrote, he was like,
dancing is great. It has the quote tendency to allay
nervous trouble. It can improve health. It's an important cultural
and social diversion. But of course, he was like, it
has to be a certain kind of dancing. Other dance
could corrupt you. He called square dancing and other folk
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dances the style of dancing which best fits the American temperament. Yes,
Americans should just dance in a square. We should only
be dancing to beats of four and sometimes three if
we're feeling naughty and want to do a waltz. But
nothing else. In the dance manual, he also tried to
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rationalize why this new dancing was bad. He said, dancing
to jazz, or as he called it, ultra modern dancing,
has a one on one quality. He said, It begins
and ends with a single couple, no more as necessary,
the group's spirit of fun is absent. He was also
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like this, dancing takes place in cramped, crowded, possibly sweaty rooms,
he said. Dancing that inspires the group's spirit of fun
requires room. Rooms in cities, especially in cabarets, are expensive.
Hence the form of dancing has been encouraged that enables
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the largest possible number of paining couples to dance together
in the smallest possible space. The result is that, in
the modern method, the movement of the dance is mostly
above the feet. That's right. Jazz dancing and other modern
dances have people dancing above their dogs, above their toesies,
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above their foots. What a terrible thought. You guys know
what's above the feet, hips, waists, arms, chests, and worst
of all, genitals. Henry Ford's like, God, the steaks couldn't
be higher. People are dancing with their pelvis? Is Ford
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believe that the only part of your body that should
touch another body during dancing was the arms? Anything else
was inappropriate and Unamerican? Isn't it great when people disguise
racism and anti semitism with propriety and patriotism. Of the
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many ironies in his square dancing campaign is that what
Ford thought of as square dancing was actually created by
black people and Antebellum America often enslaved people were forced
to dance at white balls as ornaments, you know, but
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usually they didn't have any dance training, so they would
have to observe, you know, the dances of the time,
the French quadrille, etc. And then adapt them because they
had no instruction. Like in square dancing, there's all this
call and response, and black people were actually the people
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who started doing that. So again, Henry Ford is bigoted
and also stupid. Another big irony to all of this
is that he hated modernity, and yet he was the
one who created an affordable car that people could buy,
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thus propelling everyone into a more modern era where you
could just scoot around, and if you could scoot around,
it was easier to get up to all sorts of
modern business. But Henry Ford was probably like, oh, but
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I just wanted people to use my cars so they
could drive real fast to like church, or to like
the barn, or to like, you know, stores that sell
really long skirts for women. At first, a lot of
people saw his square dancing crusade as homie as missionary
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work is innocent, just a guy who wanted to do
some harmless old time cracker barrel style living. And with
his efforts, square dancing did catch on for a few years,
and it would have been really embarrassing if it didn't
because he was funneling so much money into square dance
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education across the country. He was so desperate for the
square dance. He's like a square dance simp. And yeah,
square dancing did catch on for a little bit, but
unfortunately it didn't last. Oh no, no, square dancing could
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not compete with the rhythm and the fun of jazz. Sorry,
Henry Ford, Maybe you should have introduced some other shapes
to square dancing. Maybe a circle if you're feeling crazy,
maybe a triangle. Maybe you should have let people shake
their asses a little bit, like just a hint of jiggle.
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And wouldn't it be nice if that was the end
of the story, that Ford failed to bring square dancing
back to its zen in American culture, that his beliefs
rooted in white supremacy were thwarted. That would be nice
if it was the end of the story. But unfortunately
for us, and specifically for me, in my elementary school
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music classroom, which, by the way, was not a classroom,
it was a trailer outside. Ford's crusade for square dancing
inspired a bunch of other people to get on the
square dancing bandwagon and try to make it a thing again.
One of these crusaders for square dancing was this guy
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named Lloyd Shaw. He was also known as doctor Lloyd
Pappy Shaw. I don't think he was actually a doctor though.
Maybe he was a pappy though. And the nineteen thirties
and forties he traveled across the country with a dance
show that advocated for square dancing to be part of
physical education. There are also other folk dancing groups that
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started advocating for square dancing to become the national folk dance.
But there was infighting amongst the square dance community because
over the decades a new version of square dancing emerged
called modern Western square dancing, and the folk purists were like,
that's not real square dancing. They're like, it's a bastardization
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of it. Sometimes in modern Western square dancing they don't
even have a live fiddle player. If you don't have
a fiddler, how can you even dance? And sometimes with
modern Western square dancing. They just danced to recorded music.
That's disgusting to think. If we keep doing modern Western
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square dancing, we won't be able to employ all of
the fiddlers. The fiddlers need jobs. Despite their differences, the
square dancer rallied and when Ronald Reagan was president, not
only did he introduce crack into neighborhoods, he also signed
a bill that made square dancing the national folk dance.
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The bill said, the American people value the display of
etiquette among men and women, which is a major element
of square dancing. It's a traditional form of family recreation
that dissolves arbitrary social distinctions. Actually, what it was supposed
to do was make everybody white. But unfortunately for the
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square dancers, that bill only made square dancing the national
folk dance between the years nineteen eighty two and nineteen
ninety three. But the square dancers couldn't be stopped, and
they sasheyed their way to the states. They started law
being legislators at the state level to make square dance
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their official state folk dance. And it was pretty easy
to do because most states didn't have official folk dance.
And so today square dancing is the official state dance
in thirty one states, and so unfortunately, Henry Ford got
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his way and many of us had to grow up
square dancing, which was humiliating and also originated from white supremacy.
I think this story does illustrate something about racists. They're
very persistent and sometimes they can be creative in the
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way that they like to legally enshrine white supremacy. Henry
Ford did it with dancing and also just by having
a shit ton of money. But something cool that's happening
right now is I think square dancing line dancing is
being reclaimed. We're shifting the narrative because recently one of
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my friends, Bushwick, was at a lesbian bar and there's
a bunch of diverse lesbians learning how to line dance
and square dance. Yes, diverse lesbians. Henry Ford would have
hated that. He probably couldn't even comprehend the idea of
diverse lesbians. Every episode of American filth we learn a lesson,
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and I think the lesson we learn in this episode
is that perhaps it's pretty easy to change the state dance. Like,
I'm from Georgia, grew up there. That's where I had
to square dance. And I'm thinking it's time for a change.
I'm from Atlanta, the home of krunk music. I'm thinking
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it's time to change Georgia State dance from square dancing
to the Soldier Boy. Because what's really more valuable learning
how to promenade dosey dough sachet but not in a
gay way? Or is it more valuable to learn how
to superman on these hoes? Anyway, any of you guys
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in Georgia let me know if you want to get
in cahoots to change the state dance. Cue the credits.
American Field is a production of School of Humans and
iHeart Podcasts. This episode was written, hosted, and produced by
me Gabby Watts. The theme song is by Jesse and Eiswanger.
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Our exec producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crole, and Brandon Barr.
You can follow along with the show on Instagram at
American filth Pod. Also make sure to give the show
a review, leave some stars, send the show to your friends,
to your family, to your enemy, to all the people
you are talking to on tender Hinge Grinder, Rayah. Do
(31:55):
I have any listeners on Riya? If so, make sure
to send this to all the celebrities on your dating app.
Talk at you, guys next time. School of Humans