Talking About the Atlanta Shooting, Purity Culture, & Anti-Asian American Violence

Today we talk with two experts about the underlying issues that led to the Atlanta Shooting.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Worst Year Ever, a production of I Heart
Radio Together Everything. So don Hello, welcome back to the

(00:23):
Worst Year Ever. Hello, continued into this one. Yeah, because
the year it's not it's not it's not. Well, you
know what, let's not be unreasonable. Things are better in
that this time last year, everything was shut down from
a plague and there was no end in sight. And

(00:44):
now there is a vaccine and we might even get
it out fast enough to avoid states like Florida and
North South Carolina spreading the South African variant of the
virus that is vaccine resistant. Like fingers crossed. There is
some hope for some things at this point in time.
M But that's the name of the show and we're
sticking with it. Mm hmmm. So we're talking, I mean,

(01:09):
we did, we had happened. Well, a lot of things
have happened. UM. I guess it would be fair to
say that mass shooting season has come back, since things
are opening up, back back to normal um as as expected. Um.
And of course, I mean just like a week after
we talked to Christopher Long about anti Asian racism, there

(01:29):
was the mass shooting um in in Atlanta. Uh so
we've got a couple of guests to talk about that.
Um and it's a rough conversation. Um and and I
think there's a lot of good historical context. Uh, it's
it's very interesting. I think you'll find it valuable. Um
it's tough. So why don't we Why don't we before

(01:51):
we go into that, let's each talk about something good
that happened to us in the last week. Just to
a little little palate cleanser. Oh, I don't know. First
thing comes to mind as I saw that video from
The Dog Show of Gabby winning, Gabby, Gabby kicking ass. Guys,
just go to my Twitter and I I retweeted it.

(02:12):
That's the first nice thing that I could think of,
is it's super cute. Does that count of something nice
to share right now? I think it's really cute. Gabby
did good. We should I mean, when we spend so
much time digging into all of the horrible things people do,
we should celebrate the one good thing our species has accomplished,

(02:35):
which is dogs. Yes, the best. Yeah, they're completely unproblematic
good And victory victory on dogs, yeah, victory. The war
against not having dogs has been one conclusively. Tell that
to Peter. But that's that topic for another time. I

(02:56):
think dogs would argue with Peter on that point. I
think so, um, Cody, what about you uh playing music
a lot? That's fun. That's a lot of yardwork yesterday,
which is satisfying. Oh good, Yes, I do enjoy it.
I'm gearing up for gardening season again. I just planted
some potatoes and I'm looking forward to plant more potatoes. Yes, yeah,

(03:21):
good time to be doing it. Food prices are going
to skyrocket this year. Um. The price of corn corn
futures has just leapt enormously. And that means that meat
is going to soar in price in the very near future. Um.
Meat or meat meat meat meat. Meat prices are more
reliant upon bumblebee futures. Um. But and and really what

(03:50):
you want to look at is the sale of drinking horns.
The more drinking horns are are out in the public,
the more expensive meat is going to. Well. I'm assuming
with reopening there's going to be more. So I could
go for a rin fair, I could go for literally
anything where I'm around. I've shared this on certain shows,

(04:10):
I think definitely on my Twitter. My next door neighbor
uh works at the Renaissance Fair and as a performer,
and since the beginning of the pandemic, has made ends
meet by doing several live streams um a week every
week in the evening, you know, doing covers of songs,

(04:33):
but like interjecting jokes like round around, get around, I
get around, She's fast. You know, I'm gonna miss it.
I'm gonna miss it. I'm gonna have to go to
the Renaissance Fair, which I will want to do, but
you know, sometimes you want to hang out in the backyard. Yeah, anyway,
that's fun. I would share. I would actually plug if

(04:56):
people have asked me to share his Patreon, but I
can't do that because that's a safety concern for me
personally as my next stornator. But anyway, Robert, what's yours?
I got my first of the shot of the Fiser vaccine.
It was actually like a week ago, but I'm still um,
you know, And it was if I felt like I

(05:17):
had like maybe a really mild flu for about ten hours.
They say that if you have a reaction after the
first shot, you might have had it. Yeah. I got
really sick actually about it. Almost exactly a year ago,
I got horribly ill at the Richmond gun rally um
that we're like, Um, I don't know if it was COVID.

(05:39):
I don't remember coughing a whole lot or having any
real lung issue, but it served. Um. But yeah, I
I got I got my first vaccine shot. I know
Sophie did too recently. Oh yeah, nice. Yeah, And UM,
I don't know, I've just been kind of on a
little high about how cool the concept of a vaccine is. Um. Yeah,

(06:01):
I I enjoy thinking about how neat those are that
that we figured that out. They're like, they're like right
under dogs in terms of my my list of things
we've done that I think are are are pretty rad. Well,
I'd like to see the virus do the West Mr.
Dog Show, so to see that actually either way, Um well, friends,

(06:26):
let's lead into a tough but necessary conversation. So we uh,
I don't know what two weeks ago was it even?
Two yeah? Two weeks ago? Um. We had Christopher Wong
on to talk about not just kind of the present
epidemic of of anti Asian racism and hate crimes directed

(06:49):
particularly against elderly Asians, but about the long history of
violence towards Asians and anti Asian racism in the United States,
and then the next week, UM, there was a mass
shooting that targeted UM, particularly Asian women working at a
series of massage parlors in Atlanta, UM. And since then

(07:09):
there's been another mass shooting and Boulder that I'm sure
we'll talk about later UM. But we wanted to have
Christopher back on and also we wanted to some details
came out about the shooter UM in Atlanta, UM, and
there's been a bunch of kind of I think vergin
on misinformation about Oh no, this wasn't an anti ation
hate crime, this was about his sex addiction. UM. He

(07:31):
came from a very specific religious background and was kind
of inculcated within a specific thing I think purity culture
is the best term for so. I also brought in
a very good friend of mine, Eve Ettinger, who grew
up in I guess we'd say an adjacent religious community.
And our goal for this week is to kind of
facilitate a conversation between Christopher and Eve and hopefully arrive

(07:51):
at kind of a greater understanding of the dynamics of
the situation and what led to all of those murders. Yes,
I'm glad to be here. Yeah, I'm like I hate
being here for these reasons. Yeah, I don't like having
this expertise, but hey, yeah, yeah, I'm sure a similar

(08:13):
a similar boat. You know. So the day after we
recorded the last episode, UM, I was talking to one
of my friends when we were talking about this, and
I was saying, Okay, the only thing that you could
consider even vaguely good about the sort of like the
the only sort of vague silver lining about the anti

(08:33):
ation violence was that it was basically all people doing
plunt force stuff, which meant, I mean, we were talking
about hundreds of attacks, but you know, the body acut
wasn't that high because it turns out it's extremely hard
to kill people by just beating them to death. And
you know that that all changed last week. Um yeah, yeah,

(08:55):
we we finally got the combination of person who wants
to kill Asian people and has guns, which yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean it was kind of it was one of
those things I think unfortunately, if you were paying attention,
you knew was coming, you know it was. Um, I

(09:17):
felt kind of similarly to when we finally had the
christ Church shooting of just like this is good, this
is going to happen, This is going to happen. The
warning signs you hear the warning signs are Okay, there's
you know it's happened now, um, which is uh Um.
I guess there's a particular kind of horror in seeing that,
seeing it on the horizon and knowing you can't stop it. Yeah.

(09:46):
I grew up with these kinds of guys, like I know,
I know this type, and it's you know, I'm glad
it took this long to happen. I wish it had
never happened, but you know, not surprised. And it's it's
so that people are talking about it now. Could you
give us a little bit of context even sort of

(10:07):
what purity culture is and what you understand of kind
of where this guy's where this guy's religious upbring bringing
would have intersected with his with his actions. Okay, so um,
there's there's just so much to cover in terms of
where this intersect with the anti Asian sentiment that he's

(10:31):
you know, reacting to. Um. But the purity culture essentially, um.
It it's the modern versions of it that you might
have heard, the silver Ring thing, Josh Harris, the courtship stuff,
all of that that I grew up with. Um, really
comes out of a very um, white supremacist, colonizer, white

(10:56):
colonizer kind of mindset where white virginity is seen as
the epitome of purity and this thing that needs to
be protected and that um, you know, you have all
of these conversations happening around UM, like the over sexualization
of black girls and and how they're they're forced to

(11:19):
you know, grow up too quickly because they're treated like
adult adults with sexual agency because in contrast with the
the cult of white virginity, they're not allowed to have
that kind of purity or that kind of um, you know,
idealized innocence. And so the history goes way way way back.

(11:40):
But um, the current current versions of it UM is
pretty heavily religious UM and is based on some really
fundamentalists misinterpretations of various biblical texts and and is treating
things like masturbation as sinful. So you know, for you

(12:04):
just like a short preview of like I grew up
thinking that I had a masturbation addiction because I did
it at all, as and that was something that was
just seen as like so for and for a woman,
someone being raised as a woman to have this extrabe

(12:25):
that like that was seen as sinful, and so I
grew up with this huge sense of shame around that. Um.
And so when you have that kind of you know,
these cultures that are this this subculture that's really repressive
and um really demonizes any kind of sexuality and expression

(12:47):
of sexuality as bad. You just the mindset gets very,
very limited, very quickly. Yeah, and I it's hard. I
think for a lot of well, I don't know that
there's elements of this, I guess all of kind of
mainstream American culture, right this kind of like demonization of
of sex and sexual urges. UM. I think it is

(13:09):
hard for most of us to get into the headspace
of somebody who is being taught that who is being
led to believe that, like this is a major medical
problem that they have, right, Like that's kind of the
and I it seems like that's what this guy felt
like these the fact that these people were providing a
service that he was using because that service was sexual,

(13:30):
was ruining his life. Um Like that that's that's uh,
and that's not a thing this guy, that's what's that's
what he was claimed to the police that he had
a sex addiction. And that he like was was felt.
That's what the police. Okay, So here's the thing. Here's
the thing I've done in my snooping around on his
church's website on the way back way back machine. What's

(13:53):
left up. They have connections to groups that taught similar
stuff to the stuff that I was raised or have
overlapped with the things I was taught. Um that they
have a link on there about internet accountability and there's
a blocking software that they are recommending on the church's
official website. For um that basically my family had something

(14:15):
similar growing up. Would be like if you went to
a sex plate sexually explicit piece of content on the Internet,
it would send an email to your accountability partner notifying
them that you had visited this website. And so that
So when he says sex addiction, I you we don't
need to even jump to the conclusion that he was

(14:36):
actually sexually active at because it was like a sex
addiction in this community could be as little as like
watching forn once a week or jacking off a couple
of times a day, Like that's a sex addiction in
this world. UM, I don't want to go too bar
into the weeds with it. But that's that's you know,

(14:57):
that's the kind of stuff that like, so whenever any
saying oh, these were sex workers, that's a whole jump
that I I'm not comfortable making because and his assertion
that he was, you know, this was his sex addiction.
That doesn't necessarily connect because he doesn't have to be
sexually active to have a sex addiction in this community's

(15:19):
definition of things. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like it's
accurate to say he could have just been like literally
receiving massages and attracted to these people and that thinking
about getting a massage. Yeah. So like so like there's
a whole there's a whole book that was that was
by Josh Harris about lust that was given to Pete

(15:40):
teens around my a the time I was in high school.
I think it came out in like two um no
something I got, but it changed titles a couple of times,
so I'm not I'm not sure what the final one was.
But essentially it was like, if you can masturbate without
thinking about someone, without objectifying human, it's not a sin.

(16:02):
That was the essential premise in that. So if he's
like going there getting a massage and then jacking off
to it later he is committing a sin in his
own mind. So I just want to interject to say
that it is possible that this parlor was sexual in nature.
I haven't seen that officially. I just was looking it
up to check. Um. Yeah, it's like there is, but

(16:27):
it doesn't matter. And also also, I mean, there's a
whole product conversation about how we talk about sex workers
and and the fact that people are dancing around that
aspect of this story when at the end of the day,
it doesn't matter either way. Yeah, I mean, I think
one of the things that's interesting is that is what
I saw very clearly happening, and in part from the

(16:48):
police officer who made the first public comments, who was
himself himself super racist and was sharing anti anti Chinese
um memes related to covid um, was this attempt to
like deflect from claims that this was at all related
in anti Asian bigotry and instead angle it as well,
this is just a troubled young man with um with

(17:10):
a sexual problem, who who had who had a bad day. Yeah,
And I think what's interesting to me is the kind
of layers of white supremacy baked within this, both in
terms of what um, Eve you were talking about with
there's this idea that like particularly white sexuality, there's something

(17:30):
sacred about like innocence and something there. Um. And then
this this there are these other shades of kind of
the the very old some very old standing, um, some
very old standing stereotypes, particularly about Asian UH women, like
Christopher you talked about last time, there was a period
of time when the United States defined any Asian woman

(17:53):
in the United States as a sex worker. And so
I don't I think one thing is clear there in
Katie and Eve, you're both very right to to hesitate
to um make any claims about what was actually happening
at the massage parlor. But regardless of what was going on, UM,
I think it's impossible to disentangle white supremacy in anti

(18:13):
Asian bigotry from this crime. Yeah, absolutely absolutely, Yeah, And
I'm wondering if you had kind of anything more to
say on that angle, Christopher, just based on what what
Eve was talking about a little bit ago. Yeah, continue
do two things here, UM. So One, there was a
Red Canary Song, which is a sex work group security.

(18:34):
I'm going to talk more about you a little bit, um.
They had a vigil for the victims, and one of
people have the vigil was a sex worker organizer. It
was Kyli and Jong, and she was talking about specifically
the the ties between this and Christianity. And I think
this is something that's sort of important, is that racism

(18:57):
has you know, it can wear a lot of different ideologies,
Like you know, you could be sort of like conventional
major republicanism. You can have racist democrats, you can have
sort of racist evangelicals. Even especially in the eight hundreds,
it wears the face of that we're like the workers
movement a lot. But you know, in relation to this
specific thing, she said, quote, they hate us this talking
about sex workers. They hate us, so they can hate

(19:17):
themselves less that it's about you know, it's about like
this is because they hate themselves that they have this
this they displaced this sort of hatred onto other people
and that makes them feel better. And you know they
you know, you're talking about like you're not supposed to
like objectified woman, but that's like all they do. That
that's their whole religion, right, It's just turning women into
objects and turning Yeah, and and this this is replicated,

(19:39):
you know even after you know after the massacre, right
when you know, like social workers show up when the
government shows up. And this is one of the things
she was talking about, is that you know, all the
whole system, like of of clients, of judges, social workers,
of the state just treats to work, particularly Asian sex workers,

(19:59):
exactly the same way as the shooter does. And it
doesn't matter whether they're there to like save them or
whether they're they're too you know, kill them. They they
have they have the same fundamental beliefs and the same
sort of displace much of their own like self hatre
in their own sort of an inability to grapple with
the fact that like what what they are feeling is

(20:21):
from is something they've created and not something that's the
responsibility of the women they are gractifying. And there there's
also something that I think I want to talk about
with the way that sort of massage parlors and sex
work gets conflated. And I want to put another quote
from us is est uh Kay was one of the

(20:42):
co directors of Reckonary song Um said quote the conflation
of massage parlors and sex workers without any nuances very
specific to anti Asian racism against Asian women. Um, and
you know, I know something really interesting. So this is
a quote that was put in The Guardian. Now, The
Guardian when they talked about Red Canary said that they

(21:03):
were quote a grassroots Chinese massage parlor worker coalition, And
I thought that was really weird because I know Red
Canary Song, Like, that's not what yeah right, yeah, yeah.
So here's here's what's on their website. Quote. We are
a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers. So
this is the ship that we're dealing with here, right.
The Guardian went to Red Canary Songs website, wrote down

(21:25):
their description and then change sex workers to massage parlor workers. Wow. Yeah,
it's stunning. It's stunning, and like this this is part
of the part of what's happening here is the media
is completely unprepared to deal with this because you know,
they're like they yeah, because because they're they're also racist. Yeah,

(21:46):
I mean it's the kind of thing. I can't even
know if that was a that was a specific editorial change,
or if that was somebody in their head reading sex
worker and replacing it automatically with the massage parlor both
without interchangeable and I'm thinking about how culturally, for so

(22:06):
long it's been acceptable to make jokes or associations to
that effect, like, oh, you're going to get a time massage?
Is it? You know? And the fact that I mean
I personally have not been into any of those establishments
without seeing an explicit sign about do not touch our
massage therapists. Well, and I was talking I was talking

(22:29):
to a couple of sex worker friends about this after
this happened, and one of the things that was coming
up was, it's so annoying when I'm here to do
my job and you want a massage that's not something
I do, Like, yeah, It's like, that's not my My
training is in here. Yeah, absolutely together. One of the

(23:03):
things this movie think about as an article as readings
in Vanity Fair about a documentary that came out called
Tales of the Grim Sleeper, which was about a serial
killer in Los Angeles who targeted primarily black sex workers
and wasn't caught for a very long time because his
victims were bat black. And there's a quote in there
that I think ties into all of this in a
pretty um a pretty horrifying way. Quote. One of the

(23:27):
most troubling pieces of information presented in the film is
that police officers are reported to have used the unofficial
acronym in h I No Humans Involved to describe the
slayings of prostitutes and drug addicts. That's not just Los Angeles,
although it happened here. That is a thing that that
cops do in HI No Humans Involved. They were they

(23:47):
were sex workers, they were drug addicts, they were you know, um.
And I'm I'm sure not to get us too much
out of out of kind of the topic of today,
but it's all it's all very tied together, kind of
the white there's these this I think people talk too
much about white supremacy as a single thing rather than
a series of interlocking systems. And you've got um these

(24:09):
kind of you've got white supremacy within this, within this
religious um, this strain of religious teaching. You've got it
within law enforcement. UM, you've got it within these various
socio economic systems. You've got it within the immigration system.
And I think all of that, it's like this, the
series of wheels that are kind of working together to
make slangs like what happened in Atlanta inevitable. This was

(24:31):
one of the things that that made This is why
everyone's sort of you know, if if you've been watching
how people have been talking about it afterwards, people just
sort of lost their minds and couldn't analyze it because
I mean, this is a place where basically almost all
of the sites of violence like come together. I mean,
you have a bunch of people who are market workers
who and this is one of the other things about

(24:53):
tying this directly to the police is that you know,
people who work in massage parlors do not call the
cops because, yeah, a very obvious reasons. I mean, there
was there was a report from Butterflies sexer group Battle
Toronto who said that, yeah, if decent of all massage
parlor workers reported some kind of threat of safety at
their work, they don't call the cops because you know,
a lot of those threats, right are from cops who

(25:15):
like constantly, just over and over and over again, do
these raids on uh on massage parlors as part of
the sort of anti trafficking thing. But you know a
lot you know, they'll do these raids and they'll claim, oh,
we we've freed twenty six people from trafficking, and then
you look at what actually happened, and it's no, they
took twenty six people. They took they stripped them all

(25:36):
all of their edification, they took their passports, and they
just sort of kicked them out into the street. And
they never never charged any of the uh never charged
any people in the massage place. But you know, you
you would think, right if if this was actually an
anti trafficking thing, that they would you know, like prosecute
the people who doing the trafficking. But no they don't
because you know the and and this is the other thing.
If if it insofar as you're talking about trafficking, well,

(25:58):
guess who does trafficking. It's the police. Yeah. So I
just want to like put a plug in here for
uh that you're wrong about. Podcast has a couple of
really good episodes on busting mys on on sex trafficking
and like so one of the things that they would
talk they were talking about in one of those episodes
was like, you know, you might have that number like okay,
twenty nine people we rescued or whatever, um, but they

(26:22):
won't count repeats, so it'll be like the same if
they're like raiding the same place over and over again,
and these individuals are repeatedly being arrested. They will identify
them over and over again as a new number, so
they're not there. The numbers are really inflated and they're
really badly calculated. And and I just want to kind

(26:43):
of pan off of the trafficking and the cops. Like
the history of of like the Christian communities, like response
to trafficking as a concept is extremely classist and UM
extremely tied to this like Madonna horror complex UM. And

(27:07):
the way you see it like originate is goes back
to Victorian England and the Salvation Army and they basically
we're uh trying to create a moral panic about children
being trafficked. UM. And there were so many orphans that
were being shoveled around and being used in um you know,

(27:31):
these exploit of labor conditions, and they were trying to
help them, but they wanted to get attention on the issue,
so they staged a uh like they paid someone to
go procure a child. And then you know, the guy
shows up and it's like, okay, we got it, Like

(27:52):
this is happening, so we have proof that is happening,
even though he was the one who's facilitated it just
like the cops facilitate these kinds of stings, I mean
exact saying the exact same method. So the Salvation Army
has been doing this since then, and and it kind
of all goes back to I mean, there's all these
Victorian ideals of white womanhood and what it means. There's

(28:13):
this poem by Coventry Path more than I think is
really important. It's called the Angel in the House, and
it's talking about like the ideal woman, and she's she's pure,
and she's passive, and she's takes care of the children,
and she's completely self sacrificing and self effacing, and and
so anyone who's going out and doing anything and taking
initiative for themselves and having effects on their own terms,

(28:38):
this is something that can't exist according to these these
tropes and the binaries that this and the Christian imagination. Well,
and I think also the Victorian era is crucial, Like
I think people don't understand this. Every before the Victorian era,
like people had way like the people sort of social

(29:00):
and like like sort of sexual cultural politicians way closer
to us. And even like the sixty hundred reception unders
and in the eight hundreds, all the things that we
think of as conservatism or that have been there for
like forever or whatever like that. That's when all of
this is formed because the Victorians are just the worst
people who have ever lived, like you know, influence. We're
gonna talk about, like there's there's a lot of things
happening in this period, right like you know, if if

(29:22):
you want to, if you want to talk about sort
of fancy colonial violence, like these people are like in
in India right there, there's there's there's rebellioning as British rule,
like the British strapped people to cannons to like destroy
their bodies so that like they can't be buried properly.
Like this, this is the kind of stuff these people
are doing. And and you know it's not a coincidence,
Like this, this is this is the moment when you

(29:43):
get both the sort of the Christian solidification of sort
of the submistic woman, and it's also the exact moment
where you get a really solidified by conception of of
you know, this is that the sort of Orientalist conception
of of Asian women as these like submissive butterfly women
who are like dolls. And you get people going to
your and and writing about you know, write writing about

(30:04):
Japanese women like this, and you know this spreads like
wildfire across like mass culture and this is these are
all like all of the tropes that we see today,
like are from the Victorian here with with basically the
exception of the sex worker thing, which is like the
all Asian sex workers and the me love you long
time ship from Kubrick like that's that stuff has to
do with you know, one of the other really horrific

(30:28):
scenes of sort of massive violence Ignizaian women, which is
you know, I would say this like the people in
this region just cannot get a break. So you know,
you have you have the invasion to Philippins by the US.
You start to see mass violence there and then you know,
if you're in China and your career, you get invaded
by Japan and Japan's is of the comfortable women's system.
And you know, people people sort of know about this

(30:49):
is this massix system of sexual slavery. Well people tend
not to know about is that the Americans at the
end of the ward to the Americans essentially inherit this empire,
like they take over. So just six networks and they
inherit the comfort women's system. And there's complicated ways that
this works, but they you know a lot of the
sort of because one of these happens in the Korean

(31:12):
War is Korea is just completely leveled. It's absolutely devastated,
millions of people unemployee, and you get you see these
so camp talents. You have a million women who are
basically forced into sex work by the fact that the
US have annihilated their country. And but you know, and
the way that stuff is organized is you know, it's
this it is descended from the Southern Japanese we're doing

(31:33):
and you know, you see this again repeated in Vietnam
and all the stuff that comes out of that, and
it's you just sort of, you know, you step back
and look at this, and it's just colonialism, imperialism. It's
just this nightmare that never ends. Like the faces changed.
Sometimes it's the French, sometimes the Japanese, sometimes it's the Americans,
but you know, the violence is the same, and it's

(31:55):
just keeps going and going and going, and it's just
you know, and and it you know, the violence sort
of rebounds back and forth between you know what the U. S.
Army does, and it comes back home, that it goes
back abroad again, it comes back home, and you end
up with, you know, the situation we're in today where
just the whole view of Asian women is based on

(32:18):
sort of American sort of imperial fear as an American
imperial victories and defeats, and yeah, there's a lot of
sort of grim aspects of this too where you get
so you know, one of one of the reactions to
this from inside the sort of Asian American community is

(32:42):
you get these sort of nominally anti imperialists, like anti
sex worker groups for people who see this violence that
are like, okay, well the problem here is that they're
sex workers like at all. And this goes to really
bad places real fast. So this is really called a
firm people probably you've probably run into them, who are
trying to sort of like exploit the killings. Is like

(33:02):
a hey, we can do anti sex work stuff, except
you know, a firm in Hawaii was vandalizing massage parlors
with like really terrifying your pitio stuff, and it's like, okay,
it sounds like people that should be casting im moral judgments. Yeah,
what is It's also just you know, but part of
part of the reason if people have a problem, Okay,

(33:28):
this is this is sort of bad. That's a bad
way e splining it, but there's you know, one of
one of the fundamental problems is sort of anti Asian racism,
racism agaust Asian woman is that you know, Asian women
are at all times essentially treated like like how how
the rest of society treats sex workers? Right, Like it's
you know, you you're supposed to be an object of body,

(33:48):
is supposed to be available for white men at all times.
And a lot of people's reactions to this as well,
we need to separate Asian woman from sex work, right
But you know, fundamentally, you know, you're dealing with racism here,
but you're also dealing with the fact that this is
just how we treat sex workers. We arrest them constantly,
We constantly to arrest them, like you know, I talked

(34:09):
about Young Song and the last time. But you know,
it's it's incredibly relevant here that the police just hound
them to their deaths abused them. And you can't really
solve this problem unless you're able to, like unless you
know you're you're you're you're dealing with these problems simultaneously.

(34:29):
Well you're saying, you mean, just like what you're saying earlier,
like these are this is an intersection of a particularly
virulent strain of Christian misogyny with classism with racism. Like
this is where those three things are coming together. And
you know when you look at you know how Christians
treat their own women. You know, I grew up in

(34:53):
a fundamentalist home school, corporateal You are gonna google terms
that that's that's the way to find how I was
raised a quiver whole family and I was I was
raised to UH with the idea that my purpose in
life was to get married and have more babies and
homeschool them and raise them for Jesus and repeat the

(35:16):
process that my mother had a niotis is nine um.
And so you know there was there was there was
this mythology around um, you know what a biblical woman was.
And if you look at the Council of Biblical Manhood
and Womanhood, they've got like these whole treatises um that
you can read about like what they thought an ideal

(35:39):
woman should be. And it goes back to the Angel
in the house kind of trope from the Victorian era
where they had this this neo Victorian nostalgia for for
this idea of woman that that never actually existed, where
you know, the woman is passive, the woman is a receiver,
the woman is constantly sexually available, the woman is fertile.

(35:59):
The women is there to provide for the children and
care of things and make life easy for her husband.
And and so there's all these like gender roles that
they're putting on their own women. Um. But they have
to protect those women because they are ensuring the racial

(36:21):
purity of that community. And so when you step outside
of that, um, of course, they're not going to treat
other women well. They're not treating their own women well.
And and once these these women have no value to
them socially, gonna get a whole lot worse. They can

(36:41):
take out, they can act out, they can take out
their repression you know, yeah on other people. Yes, disposable
and you know, and I think that the purity aspects
very important to this and the even surface looking at
historical violence ignissia women and this is you know, if
we're talking about the pay Jack, which is the act

(37:02):
that like that supposedly banned anyone who was in the
country for quote immoral purposes, who are lewd like this
is the justification for those was again, was you know,
about maintaining American racial purity. They're they're they're very open
about this, and you know, Asian women are you know,

(37:23):
are seen as a threat to a certain American racial period,
and that meant you have to do ethnic cleansing. And
I think, you know, there's a lot of ethnic cleansing
that happens in especially the eight hundreds, but even after that.
And I want to take a moment to see something
about mass shootings in general. Um, that's something I first

(37:46):
started from Vicky Osta. Well, I think there's there's sort
of trust since this which is about mass that the
sort of mass shootings TA today are basically just sort
of individualized versions of the sort of mass communal violence
of the eighteen hundreds of nine hundreds. And so you know,
if if you want to look at what the sort
of model for the shooter is, you know, you can

(38:08):
look at that the sort of anti Chinese riots and
broader anti action riots. Because this is the pressing thing
about this. Every single different Asian American national ethnic group
has their own massacre, but specifically targeted them, you know,
I mean, just just to to go through there. There's
there's the there's a whole just particularly on the West Coast,

(38:29):
this entire wave of ethnic cleansing, and you know, I
mean it starts in the eighteen sixties. But just just
just just to like read some of these so you've
got an understanding like a partial list of just like
how many of them there are. Just there's the Chinese
massacre of seventy one, San Francisco Riots of seventies seven five.
There's and this this is this is one of the
common themes that this is Chinese expulsions from Tacoma, which

(38:50):
you know they'll just run to every Chinese person, it
depends on the ethnic group. There's also like every Indian
person in uh because Everett, I think, just gets run
out to Canada. There's the Spring massacre five. There's a
quote attacks also in that same year in in Seattle
has a riot. They try to give this Nancy Asian riot.
There's the Hell's Canyon massacre, which is another Another thing

(39:12):
that happens is that like rail workers and miners who
are Asian just get slaughtered by particularly white workers who
are just off with them. For like, you know, the
fact that the wages are lower, you know the union. Yeah, yeah,
well it's it's more it's yeah, it's more than that.
Though the Chinese workers were brought in the in the

(39:33):
eighteen hundreds are a lot of a lot of ways
you're supposed to be replacements for sort of enslaved black labor.
And also has to do with the transportation problem where
you can't really like it's actually hard to get across
the US and so there's no good way to serve
a mass like export sort of the newly freed slaves

(39:53):
from the South to the West coast. So they bring
in Asian workers to do this, and you know this,
this just drives white labor insane and they just start
massacring people. And then and and you know, this happens,
and this continues like through the nineteen hundreds, like and
then the nice you know seven, there's something called the
Pacific Coast Race riots where you know this is this
is a multinational riot and it starts, I think it

(40:16):
starts to disconish, but by the end of it, it's
goes to Bellingham and like there there's there's an anti
Chinese right like in Vancouver Jesus. Yeah, and you know this,
this is this is the tradition that the shooter is
working in, right, you know, and there's there's a specificity
of sort of evangelical anti sex worker violence here, but
there's also just you know, this is this is the

(40:37):
modern continuation of just the ethnic cleansing attempts that you know,
in a lot of cases succeeded. You can see this
in California if you if you if you're driving to California,
sometimes they'll just be random Buddhist temples and there's no
Asian people there. And the reason there's no Asian people
there is because every single one of them was ran
out and the rest of the area is completely white.
But you know that the things that they built are

(40:59):
just still there, and I think clean. So I teach
freshman comp and a couple of other classes. So I
teach a lot of young teens just out of high school.
And one of the things that I see all the
time is just an absolute ignorance about American complicity in

(41:20):
these kinds of things. Racism, the scene as something that's
in the past. There's not really a good education about
these things. So the the responsibility of whiteness in all
of these horrific events is never addressed, and so they're
just inheriting the whatever is in their family community, and

(41:44):
it's just it's unaddressed. And so they're coming to this
with this, you know, white innocence again, like I don't
know anything, so I couldn't have done it. And that's
part of what's being preserved by not teaching it. And
this kind of this all it all goes together. There's
this other element of white of American exceptionalism that I

(42:07):
see getting wrapped up in how we don't talk about
these acts of ethnic cleansing that Christopher was just going over.
Because if you look at if you look at what
actually happens in the actually you look at their death toll,
they don't sound wildly different from things that in our
lifetime have occurred in parts of them, at the least
in Africa. And part of I think why we don't
talk about it is that it would mean acknowledging that

(42:28):
the same kind of strains of racial mass violence um
have been are are a central part of American identity,
and we don't like to think about well, and I
think it's I think it's worse than that because you know,
if you start doing that, right, if if you go
to the eight hundreds, you go to the anti Chinese
mass years, you have to go back further. And you
know if when when you go back in the history

(42:49):
of the United States and then this is happening in
the like at the same time, you know, you realize that,
oh yeah, wait, hold on, like this, this entire country
is built on the fact that we ethnically cleansed in
numerable about yeah. Last week, and I just want to
interject because this is I have a relevant story here. Uh.

(43:11):
Last week, as this news broke and we were all
digesting it, I was chatting with um, a Korean American
friend of mine and his wife is from Germany, and
and he said, when these things happen. And over the
past year, I've been thinking about this a lot. And
for my wife, growing up in Germany, they had they

(43:34):
it's illegal to deny the Holocaust. It's taught in their schools.
And I'm not here saying that Germany has everything figured out.
They obviously have a right wing problem, but this element
of their society is a forced reckoning with their history
and with their past, and it's a very, very big difference,

(43:56):
a stark difference from how we are raised, just with
this narrative of America being the best and the democracy
and the great experiment, and it just leaves out everything
that happened getting us to this point, you know, And
I think the purpose it is it's absolutely because because

(44:18):
it gives us. It gives us white people the plausible
deniability of I didn't know, I didn't do it, and
you can just shut down the conversation. They're separates like
those those people did it but not me. Well, you
still are a part of this, and it's still part
of your legacy, and the ramifications of their actions are

(44:39):
still here. So it's on us to to do this work.
The fact that your parents were able to get a
mortgage as a result of you benefiting from these systems,
so shut up. Yes, well, well even even with Germany,
so like so you know Germany, Well, okay, you can
talk a lot about the fact that so much of
the German economy is based on the fact that they

(44:59):
won't pay reparation into all the Holocaust victims because if
they did, it would destroy their g on um. But
you know, one of the other ones. So Germany did
its own genocides in in Africa. There was the Hero
and Rockwood genocide and that one, that one they don't

(45:20):
they don't really recognize it. Yeah, and you know this
this is part of how they avoid sort of Holocaustic
kind belode too, because you know, Himmler's dad, I think
it's either his dad or his grandpa was like the
commanding officer in charge, like one of the commanding officers
who was in charge of the troops that did this genocide. Yeah,
and like you know, there's there's yeah, and there's there's

(45:42):
nothing like you know, and you don't don't really get
this Sablich in German education system, and you know, they
they they deflect blame in similar ways to sort of
the Americans do. I mean, And I think a big
part of why that happens, why why why Germany has
is allowed to get away with ignoring their colonial genocides
and is because if you call Germany to task for

(46:03):
their massacres of the Herrero or the the other ship
they're getting up to in Namibia, you also have to
acknowledge France and England or even did even worse things.
You acknowledge literally every other place. Yeah, then you have
to look at every other recentration. Camps and the treatment
of mentally ill people in Germany were modeled on US practices,

(46:25):
So you don't you can't force a deeper dick dick,
all right, So I partially risend my point about Germany,
but I still say that this cormoral acknowledgement of this
thing that happened is part of the part of what
we need right here. Everything was younger and kind of

(46:53):
more on the libertarian end of things. I was concerned
by German laws restricting free speech as related to the Holocaust,
and I've I've come around to an understanding that it
shouldn't be legal to yell fire in a crowded theater. Right.
Why is that because that is that is an active
speech that can directly result in human harm, so that

(47:14):
you don't have the right to do that. Denial of
the Holocaust, and it's the Holocaust is not specific the
only thing that denial of genocide in general, because we
could say the same thing about the Armenian genocide, which
we just last year had another surgeon. Denial of genocide
is morally identical to urging genocide because that's where it

(47:35):
leads to and one way you'll see this. I there.
I just got sent a couple of leaked conversations between
a group of Pacific Northwest Proud Boys where one of
them that this famous street brawler Um Tiny was was
chatting with another Proud boy about the Holocaust. Um and
someone said, well, you know it didn't happen, right, And
the way the conversation was like, well, then we should

(47:55):
do it, you know, and that I've seen this happen
a bunch within white supremacist spaces. It's a it's and
and oftentimes it will start as a joke, but obviously
we know that that's not where it is. It is
an act of violence to deny the Holocaust, It's an
act of violence to deny any genocide or ethnic cleansing.
These are all because when you are denying it or
when you are hiding it, you are you are saying

(48:18):
I'm I'm okay with this like that. That's where it
always goes to, right, That's that's that's the end result
of that process. And I think there's another aspect of
this that ties the Holocaust together with with with what
Christopher was talking about, with these acts of ethnic cleansing
on the West Coast, with in fact the internment of
Japanese Americans during World War two. Um, and it's the

(48:41):
thing we don't talk about with the Holocaust very much.
The Holocaust is often framed as well the Germans had
all these conspiratorial beliefs about Jewish people, and they did,
and that that was a significant part of it. A
huge driver of the Holocaust was purely economic, was people
wanting the things that Jewish Germans possessed, and then wanting
the things that Jewish people in other parts of the
kind treat possessed. And there were there were elements of

(49:02):
it that we were not that but this is a
big part of the Holocaust was what was called arianization,
which was businesses being taken from Jewish families and given
to arians. And that was not when Christopher says like
reparations have not really been paid. That was never undone
to a large extent. And and let's just so I
grew up in central California in Marselia. All of that

(49:24):
farmland m was taken from Japanese immigrants when they were
put in the concentration camps and given to white farmers.
And nothing has been done to make that right either.
The great part about that is that So the first
people to call for Japanese interment was the white Californian

(49:45):
like farm Owners Association, which is great because you know,
the politics haven't changed basically, yeah, they you know this,
this is this is the thing with the white farmers.
The California white farmers don't have to farm. They stuck
at it, and so they constantly have to import different
sources of labor in order to actually do the farming
because they can't, right, and and this is why sort

(50:05):
of labor politics, like you know, this is why strikes
by undocumented workers are actually extremely They tend to be
very effective in sort of like in sort of agricultural
with puerture California, because you know, again, if these if
if if they can't import and a lot of times
like indigenous sort of workers from Latin America, right, if
they can't do this, literally the whole system shuts down

(50:27):
and like the crops all die because they don't like
the white farmers all know how to do it. And
the the amount of violence that has been inflicted on
people like because these people don't want to farm and
because you know, because they have the sort of whole
racist ideology you know that this is another place where
racist ideology comes in. It's well, okay, we can subjugate
these people to get them into our farming for us,
but like God helps them, if they ever actually start

(50:49):
doing it on their own, we're just gonna we're gonna
take it all from them. Well, there's like, there's this
whole thing. If it's like they're destroying the Central Valley's
ability to produce anything the way they have been because
it's not sustainable and the value used to be maintained
by the indigenous peoples in certain ways, and the agricultural

(51:09):
practices have been completely demolishing all of that work that
was done. So if you're going to be fertile anymore instant,
if you want to be horrified, look at fig Google, like,
do some research and where the salt and sea came from,
stories about it. You know, they're essentially refusing to acknowledge

(51:32):
their own racism is going to kill them. It's it's
a more abus. Do we Okay, do you want to
pivot if we want to do what other sort of
Latin American connection into this? Yeah? Do you do? You
want to pivot briefly and talk about my some of
my Lisa, people who have ever existed the role of

(51:52):
Christian missionaries in this Yeah, I have that resounding yes.
So to get there, I want to talk about the
International Justice Mission. Can we start there? Okay? So if
we're looking at how, um, how Christians have treated sex
work and sex trafficking and all, this, one of the

(52:13):
things that is a really good case study of like
how this is not changed at all from the methods
that the Salvation was Army was using during the Victorian
era to today is to look at the International Justice Mission.
There's a really good article by Melissa Garrett Grant kind
of on rewire that gets into um, what exactly, uh

(52:33):
they have done to sunk Up. But basically it's the
same story. They're collaborating with the police. There are people
who are maybe sex workers, may not be sex workers,
but basically these are people who are poor and the
group is working with the police to facilitate raids and
then they're rescuing them and then putting them in you know,

(52:55):
different housing situations that are conditional on behaving in certain
ways according into the Christian you know, moral code. It's
just it's really really gross. It's really Columnists and and
and it tracks with the same way that Christian missionaries
often act when they are abroad. UM. So I I

(53:19):
grew up in in pretty um missions, heavy church communities.
This was part of the kind of the water I
was swimming in, and I something about it always made
me really uncomfortable, and I was finally able to put
my finger on it when I was UM abroad in
UM for Peace Corps and there would be these Christian

(53:41):
missionaries that would come in to Kurgesy and where I
was working UM and they would say, we're volunteers for
Peace Corps volunteers, even though they weren't and they didn't
have the right visa, and they'd be there to do
missions work, which was illegal, and they would have been
kicked out of the country they've been caught. But because
they said that they were Peace Corps volunteers, we trouble
building certain relationships to certain communities because the conditions of

(54:05):
Bible study being attached to English lessons made people leary
of us. And this is the same kind of stuff
that that is happening when they're quote quote rescuing these
sex workers UM and and so there's this, you know,
to tie this all together. Current American Christian evangelical purity

(54:28):
culture has this particular hero Jim Elliott, who UM not
to not to speculate to why we about people's sexuality
after they're dead, but like, there's a good chance this
guy was gay, and you know that might have made
his whole purity thing a lot easier. UM anyway, UM

(54:50):
he so he so he was one of the missionaries
that was in Ecuador, UM in the fifties, mid fifties, UM.
And they were trying to connect with this untouched people,
which bullshit, but they were trying to connect with this community.

(55:15):
They were working with the Shell Oil company for their resources.
They were staying out of a Shell station and using
the Shell plane to fly in and connect with this community. UM.
And this this community the wire anni UM killed them
and their wives stayed on and tried to connect with

(55:39):
this community and eventually did and lived with them, UM
and taught them English and did the whole colonization thing.
And there's a whole awful history that results from that.
But Jim Elliott's journals were turned into a book by
his wife after his death, and she wrote this book
about their courtship, about their their romantic relationship called passionate

(56:02):
and purity that she where she's codifying these ideals of
you know, you can you can be chased, and you
can be passionate. And you know he checked with my dad,
and you know, he wouldn't even kiss me until he
told me that he loved me. And he wouldn't tell
me that he loved me until he had proposed to me.
You know, all of these, all of these layers that

(56:22):
you see kind of reflected in the current evangelical purity
culture thinking. And so that book really influenced Josh Harris,
who wrote the seminal work I Guess Dating Goodbye and
this later renounced it Um. But a lot of this
like purity culture stuff comes from these same people who

(56:44):
are going into these communities with the assumption that, uh,
their way of life is wrong and needs to be corrected.
And I think there's a there's you know, the sort
the sort of evangelical movement. You know, you see the violence.
This is anothering sort of harping on about, but it's true.

(57:04):
Is you know, you get two reflections with the violence.
You get the certain imperialist violence and you get the
violence at home. And you know, like I grew up
with a like sort of a damage even in like
an evangelical college town, and like, you know, so half
of my friends like our missionaries now and then people
I didn't like I basically you know, they would they

(57:26):
would say things like I'm gonna go join the armies
so I can tell all Muslims m and like that
was like common. And you know this and this, you know,
you get basically both, you know, you have you have
like the there's there's very very little different sort of
ideologically even what's happening here between people who go join
the army to kill Muslims the people who sort of
are like, oh, I'm gonna go save the souls or

(57:46):
whatever of like indigenous people and uh in Ecuador and
you know, the sort of the anti sex worker people
and you know, like these the just like like the
white supreme as murderers who you know, shooting up massage parlors.
It's it's the same sort of body logical apparatus either

(58:07):
all on a crusade. Yeah, yeah, literally, I mean if
you think about the origin of that word, well hopefully
it goes as well as the original one, like and
immediately like I'm down to step the child soldier phase.
But like, but that was the best part. What are
we here for? It? Not that as as a victim

(58:28):
of the child soldier phase. I reject that. I'm changing
my position. I'm with Eve now, I'm I am child
soldier neutral bold. Yeah, I'm not aging. I'm not agist.
That's where it lands for me. I'm not agist. I
think so you believe in children's rights to die about

(58:49):
I do. I think everyone has the right to be.
I mean I agree to an extent. I think parents
have the right to hit their parents back. But anyway,
let's just give ten year olds of cars. Um. I
think we need to make it mandatory that all truck
drivers are under the age of fourteen. I would agree
with you there. I think they would do a lot
better job. I mean, they wouldn't see over the steering whill.

(59:13):
But I don't know that that matters. Yeah, I mean,
we'll just cut a little people in the middle of
the dashhole board. It will be good, It'll be fine. Um.
None of this is very fun to talk about, um,
except for talking about child truck drivers, which which is
fun to It always fun. I mean, I can make
jokes about this all day. But any time I make

(59:35):
a joke about this to someone who's an army, They're like,
oh my god, that really happened, And I'm like, yeah,
I know. I mean that's the problem in general of
like having a trauma that isn't understood by the people
around you, is you're you're probably most people it find
humor helpful way of coping, and then people think that

(59:55):
you're either a monster or making things up because it's
it's seems so strange to hear people laugh about something
like that. So do you want to you want to
you want to jump from this to children and uh,
conspiracy theories, Yeah, and how this is connected the children

(01:00:17):
who kind of wind up in like focused on the
fact that that whenever we we have these like big
panics over sex trafficking and stuff, it's always, um, this
this false idea that there's like four and five year
olds being mass trafficked as opposed to like, well, we
can talk about that too, we can talk about the
whole Like the evangelical community is, you know, protecting dozens

(01:00:41):
and dozens and dozens of sexual predators who are preying
on the children and their Sunday schools and homes and
and get they're focused on we have to fix sex
trafficking outside of this community. Yeah, there's that whole thing. No,
I actually wanted to talk about J D. J R.
Rush Junny Oh yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you've told
me about him. Yeah, So Russ juny Um. The reason

(01:01:04):
he's relevant is this, this church that the shooter went
to is part of a larger group of churches that
has loose ties to h the ideological inheritance of J. R.
Rush Juney. So Rush Junny Um was this Presbyterian philosopher.

(01:01:25):
He was very libertarian, uh you know, free market Austrian
economics kind of guy. But he also had this whole
um interpretation of of theology that really kind of created
what we call Christian dominionism. Now, he was a reconstructionist,
and the idea that reconstructionists have is essentially um America

(01:01:50):
was supposed to be a Christian nation just goes back
to the whole like um is a William Bradford City
on Hill speech, he gets on the Mayflower and which
is you know, he's they're recreating an idea of America
that never existed. So America is supposed to be this
Christian nation. America is the new under the New Covenant,

(01:02:12):
replacing the Jews because the Jews sucked up and American
Christians have inherited this status is God's people, and America
as a nation is supposed to fulfill that. And this
means that we have to institute biblical laws to things
like the stoning of rebellious sons and public execution of

(01:02:33):
the gays and all of these these other sorts of
you know, inhumane Old Testament codes, um. And if they're
established according to some subjects of the reconstructionist thinkers, um.
This is not not all of them believe this, but
a lot of them do. If those things are put

(01:02:54):
in place, then Christ will return good, so kind. So
so there's this, there's this whole and I have so
much that I could say about this. There's this whole
angle that like I think they're stealing some ideas from
Antonio Grahams where they're they're talking about like the seven
spheres of culture that they're supposed to you know, take

(01:03:15):
over and how they're going to approach it. And there's
a whole thing with like a d F and homeschooling
and all that ties in. But essentially the idea of
Christian dominion as part of the Christian mandate and having
that tied to white supremacy. These this church community, this

(01:03:36):
this group of um or the school of thought, also
believes in the Curse of Ham, which the idea that
black people are descended from Ham and Ham was cursed
by Noah for laughing at Noah being drunk and naked
in his tent one day. And therefore, Yeah, a lot

(01:03:59):
of it in America is being like punishment from God,
that is, just for laughing at being passed out they
get in the town. I mean I laughed too, m hmm,
because it's funny. Um. I mean it all, it all

(01:04:19):
like you were both talking about earlier, It all kind
of goes back like the Victorian era isn't isn't where
it all starts, but it's where it all explodes. Um.
And there's the I think Christopher said earlier about how
colonialism in white supremacy is just kind of this nightmare
that never ends, and that is that has been true
for the last couple of hundred years. But I do

(01:04:40):
think it's important to acknowledge that there's a beginning point
to it. There was a period of time before all
of this existed, and there were still plenty of problems, um,
but they were but they were different ones, you know,
And I think about that a lot. I think that
the fact that the Roman Empire um would have would
have looked like the average room citizen would have looked

(01:05:00):
like you was like if you were like, you were
out of your mind. If you had tried to, like
argue that people with different skin colors were different levels
of human they were like, no, no, no, your level
of humanity is determined by whether or not you're a
citizen of the empire that I'm in, Like, it has
nothing to do with your skin color. Like they wouldn't
have wouldn't have gotten that because it hadn't it hadn't
started yet. And the fact that, like the fact that

(01:05:22):
this is all and a lot of what you're seeing
in modern purity culture and in Christian dominionism is this
desire to return to this um, this this period, this
Victorian period where the domination was kind of at its
most unquestionable, right, there was this period in which there
was really no there was no resistance effective on a

(01:05:45):
global level to white supremacist imperialism. UM. I think is
is really important um, just to kind of to understand
what it is they want to go back to, and
also to understand what it looked like when they got
their way, And you know, it looked like the famine Bengal,

(01:06:06):
it looked like um, the Boxer rebellion, it looked like
And it's also really important to know that like it
looked like all of those things. And also it didn't exist,
like the moral purity that they're envisioning literally never existed
the way Christian culture was literally never existed. No, no, yeah, absolutely.

(01:06:27):
I mean Kipling there's some some very good Kipling poems
on that subject, but the one on Mandalay Bay where
he's talking about the way in which colonial um colonial
officers of these of these companies acted in in in Asia. Um,
send me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is
like the worst, where there ain't no tin commandments in

(01:06:49):
a man can raise a thirst, you know this this,
And and the fact of the matter is like these people,
if they got their way, wouldn't be pure. They would
be they would be maintaining you know, brothels for their
own use, and they would be violating all of the
rules that they want to impose on other people. That's
the way it always is. Well, but you know that

(01:07:10):
that's that's that that that's the question. Forgiveness is for
h like it's for them, it is not. It is
not for people they're abusing. Like, well, and that's the thing, Like,
if you look at how they treat the story of
King David, this is their model for political leadership. The
story of King David is like, this guy uses his

(01:07:31):
power as king to rape his neighbor's life and then
sends the dude to the front lines to make sure
he dies so that the guy never finds out that
like he impregnated his wife, and and God forgives him
because he repents, and he's still considered the good king,
Like what the fuck? Like, that's that's that's the model

(01:07:56):
of good leadership. It's not that you are actually morally pure,
it's that you've get God's job done. Yeah, well, unless
you're a descendative ham sorry because he because he laughed
at his at his dad's dick. Yeah, well, don't laugh
at your dad's. If I was going to summarize the Bible,

(01:08:24):
that would be the lesson I would take out of it.
Um shit, Christopher, that we missed. Yeah, you no, I'll
say one last thing about how we get out of
this because you know, and there's no again, there's there's
no good answers to I mean, you know there there

(01:08:45):
are There are absolutely sort of like short term things
you can do that have to do with you know,
bysander trainings, um, you know, having community organizations that you know,
like sort of move people around so that you know,
again people people aren't isolating and can't be picked off
like that. But I mean one of the things that

(01:09:06):
I remember a lot of that I just I could
just could not deal with was particularly Asian liberals. But
we saw a lot of this was people going like, oh,
there's this historic night at the Oscar shooting happened. How
how could this have happened? And I you know, I
I can't think of like a sort of better indictments

(01:09:27):
of politics representation than that. Right, it's oh, hey, we're
finally being represented in music or whatever in film, and
oh they're still killing us. You know, there's a couple
of things that are One is that like people are
using ethnics solidarity as a way to sort of mask
this giant classified and you know, you you get Asian
American groups having like Tony ju who's the founder of

(01:09:50):
door Dash, like speak at their events, and it's like, okay,
this guy like this guy got rich by exploiting Asian workers, right,
and you know you have the pack that like in
New York for example, like Asian Americans have the highest
poverty rate of any rasion through to the city. And
you know, you have to at some point you have
to look at how you deal with this. And you know,

(01:10:12):
one of one of the things going back to Storty
of who we're talking about Ecuador, right, So you know,
the missionaries allied with the oil companies and there's this
sort of incredible imperial violence wreaked on them. But eventually
people start to fight back. And people are finding that
the whole time, but they, you know, they start to
really effectively fight back. And there's the formation of this
group called the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, and

(01:10:37):
they're able to actually, you know, they're able to push
back on the colonialists, are able to push back on
serve oil attraction. They're able to do this because they
have the ability to call an uprising and just bring
down a government. And they've done this like a nine times.
They did this two years ago, like the the the
army like sent units out to stop them, and they

(01:10:59):
like haptured the army units, disarmed them and forced them
to carry the coffins of the people they killed back
to the capital like that. That and that, you know
is the solution is like that is power And Americans
don't really it looks weird to us because we have
no like most Americans have never actually had power, right,
have never actually had the ability to someone deploys the

(01:11:20):
army against you and you disarmed them, right of the
ability to when you know, like when when a when
a mining company hurts you, when when when your community
is under attack, to just shut down a country and
to to to force the people who think that they
have power to sort of you know, to to do
things that make sure they don't harm you. And that

(01:11:40):
that's the only real way out of this. And this
is not just for Asian Americans that like this, This
is the only the only way out for so like
all of the people who have been just devastated by
colonial files, for for black people, for indigenous people. Is
you know, the representation is and when to save is
you actually need power m and you know, that's terrifying,

(01:12:02):
especially for a lot of white people because you know,
in some sense white people have had power, right, like
you know, and there's obviously varying levels of this, but
you know, if you're going to actually deal with this,
you have to smash the systems that cause it, and
you know that that requires power, like you know, in
terms of dealing with the police, terms of dealing with
ice and sort of dealing with the border, in terms

(01:12:23):
of you know, dealing with the evangelical movement that's producing
these killers. Right, you need power and you need some
way to build it, and there's no easy way to
get there, but that's that's what needs to be done.
And I'll just say like that the religious right has
been doing this very effectively for the last thirty years
with their grassroots movements, you know, based off of Phil Shlapleys,

(01:12:46):
you know, fundraising and mailing model. Like they've got it
down and the left really just hasn't figured it out yet. No,
in part because the left can't stop fighting over I
don't know whether or not the real problem with the
Atlanta shooting is that people are calling the Chinese government
out for what's being done to the weakers or whatever,
like there's these everything is so atomized it's impossible to

(01:13:09):
actually build power. Not impossible, but it's not being done
effectively right now. You know. Well, I could say, you know,
last year we had one moment we did were yeah,
but we burned on the police when we burned on
police stations, Like I remember it again, yeah, you know
like mind graft. Yeah, well you know I remember when

(01:13:29):
when when the police like lost control of of like
of Michigan Avenue in Chicago, like they just couldn't hold it.
And yeah, you know that that that that that can happen,
Like that's a that's the thing that we did. Ye yeah,
there's and I And that's part of why we're getting
very off topic here. But it's part of why there
is a concerted effort to not remember last year that way. UM,

(01:13:52):
because what last year was was a large chunk of
the population proving that if enough people get on the
same page about two or three things, there is nothing
that the military and the police can do UM, or
at least not that they're able to do. There's nothing
the police can do in the military largely won't UM.

(01:14:13):
But that's not a thing that that's the thing that
everyone who has is an elected leader has invested interest
in us not well. And you know, and this is
going back to history. Books don't talk about the ways
that it's been successful, and kids are kept in the
dark because we're not given the tools to dismantle the
master's house. Yeah. Um, I don't want to plug two

(01:14:35):
books here real fast about purity culture stuff, if that's okay, Yeah,
if you want to, if you want to go the
other route of you know, de colonizing your mind. Um,
I think that Jessica Valenti is the purity myth is
excellent for a start on this and talking about how
virginity is vague, it doesn't exist, and all those things.

(01:14:55):
And I think a good um, you know, pairing with
that would be Anglich Hands Angela Chen's Ace. It just
came out, um this last year, and it's about a
sexuality and kind of like really breaking down the you know, compulsory,
heteronormative my mindset that we grew up in. Awesome, Thank you. Well,

(01:15:21):
all right, Christopher, you got anything you want to plug
before we roll out today and hopefully don't. Yeah, I
have a I don't know. Yeah, I think this has
been a rough few weeks for you. Yeah, it's it's
been bad. If you want to see me just completely
fall apart on a regular basis, um, I'm at it

(01:15:43):
me h r three on Twitter or the ice must
be destroyed. Guy, I regularly implode. Um I also okay,
I swear I do actually update this and sometimes it
was once a month. But I have a substat called
the long twenty one century. You can also see me implode.
Yeah awesome, thank you well, thank you both, And for

(01:16:07):
those of you at home, remember never laugh at your
dad's dick, all right, and uh that's gonna do it
for us. Here at the Worst Year Ever, um hie.
Also to see you later. Everything everything so dull again.

(01:16:32):
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