Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 116

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. And in the original cadence of this of this website or website, in the original cadence of the show, that was a reference to a civil war, right? A new civil war. It could happen here. That's what season one was made of a splash. Now we kind of covered the dystopia beat in general. But today we're getting back to our motherfucking roots because the state of Texas has recently declared a big old fuck you to the federal government.

R.E. having its national guardsmen deploy razor wire at the border and stop border patrol people from, for example, performing rescues of people who are trapped in the water drowning. It's a whole thing. At least three migrants have already died as a result of this fuckery by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. And now, like, I don't know, 20 states, something near to that have, there may be more by the time you hear this, but something like 20 states have declared that

they're in support of Governor Abbott's refusal to let the feds in and insistence that he's dealing with an invasion and must take on the border, Texas itself. And some of those states are now sending or at least claim they're going to send National Guardsmen. So when this all started happening, we all got a lot of messages. I got about a billion from people being like, is this it? Is this the Civil War? And obviously a big chunk of that comes from right wing memes because they are all talking about like, yeah, let's do it. Let's have us a Civil War.

We're all going to start fighting over some guy posted his handgun collection like we're ready. Butcher revolvers. Yeah. Yeah. Stupid shit. It's stupid shit. But you know, it's not unreasonable to be like this seems like a massive constitutional crisis that's potentially in line with some of the crises that precipitated the original

civil war. You've got a governor completely defying not now not just you know The president and the federal government but the Supreme Court who ruled that you can't just have your fucking Texas goons stop a federal law enforcement agency from doing its job on the border So, you know, how serious is this and is this the kind of thing that's going to lead to a? 24 is new Civil War movie? And my quick take on this is, no, probably not. I think what this is, is in fact, a governor stretching out his authority and testing how

much he can get away with against the overall federal government because he and a lot of other conservative governors want to do things that are directly in contravention of the Civil Rights Act, of the Bill of Rights, of numerous federal protections for their citizens. And this is kind of a way of being like, well, if they won't fuck with us over this, then we can probably start imprisoning journalists and killing people that, or at least imprisoning people that otherwise we would not be able to. Right?

Like this is a right-wing power grab and it's an attempt to see is the central government weak enough that we can get away with this stuff. I don't think they're all going to start shooting at each other. I don't think Greg Abbott wants to get in the shooting war with the federal government over a mostly ginned up. The dimensions of the crisis are ginned up and fake in terms of like what he is claiming it is. There is in fact a humanitarian crisis at our border,

but that's not what his issue is. So that's my quick take. We're going to get into more of all of that. But James, you are our resident border correspondent, board respondent, and you have some very strong feelings on how all of this has been interpreted in the media. So I wanted to pull to you first and then we'll get to Mia and we'll just kind of round table after that. I do. In a rare instance for me, I have strong feelings about the way this has been covered

and strong feelings about the coverage of the border, which I know is a thing I talk about all the time. But I am beyond frustrated with the way this has been covered. It's hugely irresponsible and it's completely context free. Like there are people as they're always are with the border and they're always are with the right who tourists outside things that they understand, and try and generate clicks by the geeing up the fear of a civil war. And yes, I've seen dozens of people sharing headlines about National Guard deployment. So

happened years ago, the National Guard have been deployed to our border for years. I see National Guard troops every day. I had a National Guard guy shooting me and go, shoot at me, shout at me. A friend of ours took one of their rifles. Yes, yes, a friend of ours did. The National Guard have been extremely based

in arming the butterfly center. Yeah, they're there. There's a federal deployment. Texas also has a state deployment. These are different things. And other states have also sent National Guardsmen to the border before by the way. Correct, Kentucky. This is not the first time this has happened. Yeah, yeah. So there's a federal deployment and then there are state deployments. Both of those are distinct things.

So I need to know about the state deployment that is missing in the context-free reporting that you're seeing is that these guys aren't getting any of their federal deployment benefits. So they won't be getting the tri-care, they won't be getting the time towards their retirement, they won't be getting their GI bill, etc. So like the the Texas guys who were deployed on state orders are really that the National Guard are getting bogged by Greg Abbott. Like it's laughable that that like, you know, he's pretending that he cares about Texas while actively screwing over. And Rob and I have spoken to some of those Texas National Guard folks last time we were in Texas. Did not seem to be super motivated to be here.

No, they're the only military unit I've seen try to form a union because they're not in a federal order, so they can attempt to form a union. Get Billy Bragg down to the border, we gotta do this. Yeah, drop in. Let's get Billy Bragg. I'll get him going over the Rio Grande and we'll insert Billy Bragg in there, we'll fix it. It has been the most dangerous deployment that they've had, including deployments to Iraq.

They have unfortunately a habit of drinking and driving, which has not proven healthy for them. They also, there's a quirk of Texas law that means that they can't stop National Guard soldiers from bringing their own firearms. Yeah, which is great. Yeah, and thus they can't stop them accidentally killing each other with their own firearms. Also, yeah, it's good stuff.

A TNG soldier did die trying to save a migrant from the river. Yes, he drowned. So like it has not like it is a very boring but also quite dangerous deployment that, you know, they have really high, they wrote a manifesto a couple of years ago about how bullshit that deployment was, you know, which is really great stuff. And yeah, so much of this has been reported without any context, right? Like, I think genuinely a lot of the people reporting on this are not aware that there have been national... They're a national guard here in California, like I say, I see them all the time. They're not supposed to interdict migrants, but I see them doing surveillance and I see them guarding open air prisons in

Hicombo almost every day. And I think that seems to have been missed by the majority of people covering this. Now, we should talk more about the open air prison part because I think there's a lot of people who seem to be getting the impression that the Biden administration is like actually substantively trying to do something to like help immigrants and like this this fight is like between like pro and anti-immigration is like no this is a fight between whether you think these people should be killed incredibly quickly by a combination of razor wire and rivers or whether you think they should starve the death. Yeah or or a die of dehydration, walking through the desert or die of

hypothermia, walking through the mountains. Like I think I've said some of the podcasts before, but I was helping a three year old girl who was hypothermic last week. And like that is what Joe Biden is doing. That is a Joe Biden policy being enacted by Joe Biden as Joe Biden wants it to be enacted or at very least, I'm sure his personal, like complicity or even understanding is relatively low given his understanding, it seems, of a lot of things. But the Biden administration's policy

is to deter people by making crossing more difficult and more dangerous, which de facto makes it more deadly. What Abbott is doing with his razor wire and his floating fence is a version of the same thing. Like they are not distinctly different. When everyone was up in ours about three people drowning, that's a tragedy. Eight hundred and fifty people died crossing the border in twenty twenty two. That was a normal day. Like the distinction is maybe in degree, but really it's in a static between between Abbott and Biden on this.

And it's just two dudes chestumping each other trying to not look weak. There is not an option in the US system, which allows you to vote for the party that doesn't want migrants to die. Like both of the parties are completely in lockstep on that. And let's be very clear about something. Part of why that is, is because an overwhelming number

of Americans are indifferent or actively hostile to the survival of migrants. Yes. Like, it is incredibly unpopular in this country to think these people are human beings who deserve decent treatment and decent lives. This is a fight that the left has lost comprehensively, mostly in large part, because the left has lost comprehensively, mostly in large

part because the left has completely given up on it, which is why you've got fucking a lot of these Naz bowl assholes saying shit like, you know, this is, we have like, like saying basically protectionist nativist kind of shit. These, right? Yeah, I think that like, leftist media has also and to include, I guess liberal media also has completely. Oh yeah, like being complicit in this right like the amount of stories that you read about migrants that don't talk to migrants. In the next few weeks will be a lot if you care to read them right and that's because people don't want to come here they're either afraid of coming here they don't want to take the time.

coming here or they don't want to take the time. They don't have the language skills. There are people who have the language skills who don't get these jobs and there are people who don't have the language skills and who don't have the understanding of how the border on the ground works as opposed to immigration policy in DC works. And you're going to see a lot of people who don't live at the border, who don't come to the border writing about the border. And yeah, that's how we got here. And that's how we're getting to this largely like a giant panic about a nothing burger. But yeah, it's the reporting has been in continuous fear responsible and that is in some degree complicit. Yeah. And I think this is also the explanation for why is a lot of people going like, why is Biden not like setting the troops? Why is Biden not cracking down? This doesn't fucking give a shit. It's the same policy. He doesn't care. Right? Like there's not actually substantive disagreements except over like whether it should be like some like a really stupid political son over whether it should be like federal troops like on or like federal agents like on the border

or whether it should be the razor wire. Like he doesn't care. Yeah. You know, and to be fair, I will say I don't think this is the start. This right here, I don't think is the start of a civil war. We may if we have one, we may someday see this on like the list of factors contributing to in the years leading up to it. But I will say if we do ever have a shooting civil war, it will be something this dumb. That that I feel absolutely certain of it will. It will be a thing where no one involved really cares about the issue that starts it.

It's just a dick measuring contest that goes too far. I just don't think this is the dick measuring contest. But to be fair, it will be something this dumb. Don't worry, folks. Don't worry if we do start shooting each other. It will be just as stupid as this. Yeah, I do think that like, I think we're extremely likely to start a shooting civil war over this

or in the next few years generally. I do think the chance of shooting in context without a civil war is shooting specifically of migrants, especially in places where they're not safe, like open air detention centers is going up and that scares the shit out of me. Like someone who spends a lot of his life there. And I do think that the might the I mean, we saw in 2018, right? And we've covered

this extensively, the Tree of Life shooting was in large part motivated by right wing rhetoric about caravan of migrants. I was in Tijuana in 2018, I spent months of my life helping people down there. Like, anyone who's scared of those people is paranoid, to say the least, right? They were mostly fine, wonderful, very friendly people. I spent Christmas with them. But yeah, the 2018 Tree of Life shooting

came from paranoia about the border. We're seeing that same paranoia from right wing media and from liberal media now. And I think that it would not be unreasonable to have that fear of individual acts of violence and terrorism along the border. Yeah, I think one of the things we're going to have to do in the near future is get better at understanding

kind of the media dimensions of conflicts like this. And what is an irresponsible way to respond to them? And I think treating this like it is a civil war type deal is kind of feeding into the rights image of itself and their desire to treat this like their revolutionaries. Now, that said, what is the right thing to do? Because like the, what the Biden administration seems to be doing right now

is largely kind of ignoring it. I think at some point they will probably try to nationalize the guard and we'll see what happens then. One thing that's kind of worth noting is that this is primarily gone viral on right wing media. I'm seeing very little of this on mainstream, centrist, liberal media sources. And I'm seeing little on this because most of those sources don't really care about the border unless there's some

way to drum up fear against migrants. They'll do a caravan story, but this just simply doesn't sell. I think when it comes to like what is a responsible way to report on this, I think you have to start by centering what's actually happening to the migrants, what's being done to them, as opposed to focusing on this dick measuring, because that's the actual harm here. The harm here is not that Abbott has been mean to the border patrol, and it's not that Texas and these other states, these rebel states are raising an army to fight the federal government. It's that there's this argument

between the people in power in our country about like how bad should things be for people who are already desperate. And I think that's where you should center your focus. Also, I'm I I've just noticed this on my other screen. This is a bit off topic. But you know that movie Rebel Moon by Zack Snyder? Oh, God. There's an there's an ad for for the canned water company Liquid Death, that just is showing a bunch of imperial troops

from that movie beating a man and then drinking liquid death water as they relax afterwards. And it's the most unhinged ad I've ever seen. It's like running aside a Vox article. I've never seen anything like this before. It's just like, what the, wait a second, what? Zack Snyder, come on. You can't do this. it's just like what the wait a second what Zach Snyder come on you can't do the Zach's no that fucking guy

Jesus talking of advertising buy some liquid death we're back. Yeah. So I want to talk about grift because we talked about advertising a bit. I don't know if you guys have seen the number of like right wing influences. Okay. So I'm, I'm looking at friend of the podcast, Tim Poole's Twitter here. Oh, Tim, there is a guy who is excited to have a civil war where he will be merked immediately by one of his bodyguards. There is a man who's seen combat and knows what it is to hear rounds cracking off over your head. Okay, Tim Pool, I'm just going to quote here. Ha ha ha ha ha, etc. Fuck me, dude. And then

safeandreadymeals.com. Pool is not the only one on the bucket of food grift, right? Alex Jones has been on this too. Oh yeah, a million years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a bit long-time food storage guy, Alex Jones. A lot of these guys are like very clearly geeing up fears of civil war on the right so that they can sell people powdered dried eggs.

Like it's so transparent. Like, it's in the same tweet. Yeah, Sobieck, Trump calls for all willing states to deploy National Guard to Texas border and start the deportations. And then there's a special partner offer from mypatriotsupply.com. God.

Which is the way to fuel your bigotry, I guess. Guys, two things. First off, if you buy your storeable food from some right-wing media grifters deal site, you will spend the apocalypse shitting yourself to death. Like, it's all horrible. If you are going to buy, if you are going to throw a bunch of money on store,

if you are a sane and reasonable person who wants to store food, learn how to make your own jerky, learn how to can food, you can do it very cheaply. It is not expensive to can your own food. If you know what you're doing, you can can stuff that is in season and get it really cheap from the grocery store and you can pickle and do other kinds of canned pressure canning.

It's really economical and it will last a long time. If you are going to spend a shitload of money on storeable freeze dried food, you're going to be spending a bunch of money anyway. Just go buy Mountain House. Buy Mountain House. It's the good stuff. It's tasty. As far as I know, no right winger advertises on them.

And it's actually pretty good food. Yeah, that's what I keep in my car for emergencies. You will not shit ever. Yeah, never again. Yeah, you may never poop again. But, but, yeah. The fucking biscuits and gravy breakfast selection they have. Man, when you're alone in the mountains, that shit is fucking fire. Oh my God.

Yeah, that will, it is like a bung for the digestive system. I just want to plug lentils.org, which I've checked. The concept of lentils. Yeah. Yeah. L lentils. Yeah. Yeah. Lentils. The shit forever. Yeah, it is.

Find balance between the yin and the yang in your post-apocalypse life with mounhouse and lentils.org. It's what I have for you today. You know what's not running on lentils, guys? Unfortunately, this is not an ad pivot. I've just done the old bait and switch. It's this fucking convoy that's going to the border. Oh, this is not an ad pivot. I've just done the old bait switch. It's this fucking convoy that's going to the border. And I'll talk about this a little bit.

Yeah, let's do that. This is where I'm really done with irresponsible reporting. Being like, oh, no, January 6 part two. Here's a link if you want to take part. What the fuck is wrong with you? Stop it. But Yeah, like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Stop it. But I look, right when groups have tried to run convoys, probably a dozen times since 2020, right? I think we can all think of a different convoy that's got stuck under a bridge.

Went drove by my house and then basically didn't get any further than that. Yep, yep, they get lost. They disagree about directions. What a lot of people are going to realize is that the Texas border is 12 hours from anywhere in Texas. When you are in Dallas, I believe this is accurate. When you are in Dallas, it is faster to drive to Chicago

than it is to drive to the border. It is so fucking far away from anything. You could cross Europe in the time it will take you to get down there. Yeah, I love the idea of a convoy of like completely cute little lunatics. Just like you're sending on the town of Motha. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, fucking passing marathon and going where in the Christ are we? Yeah. It is a really good, really beautiful bike ride from Marfa to the border. There's some dirt roads you can take. Oh, and Marfa, by the way, folks, if you're looking to go down to the border, very fun town, you'll have a good time in Marfa. Yeah.

Do you love a bit of Marfa really? Yeah. I'm not going to tell my Marfa story. I'll tell you guys when we're done. But yeah, yeah, it is not like the Salacious, it's just I don't tell it. But yeah, Marfa is near the border. Lots of things are not. It is a very long way from I guess like maybe people could fly to El Paso that's near the border. But yeah, it's this idea. So there's three convoys, right? One, I think is supposed to go from Virginia Beach to Texas. Share is no way. Good luck, guys.

Enjoy spending $7,000 in gas each. Yes, exactly. Where have they not looked at the cost of fuel? Yeah. You fucking idiot. Have fun, homies. Yeah. Another one is going from, I think Las Cruces to Yuma,. Another one is going from I think Las

Cruces to Yuma and the one is going from here at San Isidro to Yuma. Yes, the drive from San Isidro to Yuma is boring AF. But good luck, I guess. Like good luck spending that California. Hopefully they get pulled off at some of the gas stations like East of San Diego where it's still like $6 or $7 a gallon because you're fucked if you need fuel there, and you can't buy it from anyone else. And but yeah, the idea that people are going to spend all their money, like, driving

across the country, it's also just very like, there's the meme right of the like, the old white guy wearing Oakley wrap around or fake Oakley wrap around sunglasses, doing a selfie video in his car to rent about like anything and everything. But like, I think it's very illustrative of how many of these people don't feel safe outside their vehicles and like need the activism to involve their F-250. Yeah. Well, in part because most of them are like, like most Americans, not in great shape, not physically imposing. So if you're sitting in an F-250, you feel big and powerful. Like James, you and I both have trucks. One of

the things about trucks that is nice is that being in a truck, you're elevated above the rest of the road, right? Oh, yeah. And that gets to a lot of people's heads, especially if they have absolutely nothing else going on in their lives, which nobody participating in this fucking caravan does. So they, this is like, it's, it's, it's their, it's emotional support, right? They're sitting in their truck, they've got their gun, they're not breathing hard because they have to like walk around the world. And they, they would desperately prefer that they can, that's where, how their activism,

that's how their participation in the second civil war will occur. Yeah, through the means of truck. Bunch of fucking wankers. Yeah. So I do wanna get into kind of like, what we do feel is the actual threats of this. Again, I think the danger here is you've got a lot

of kind of fights going down about like how far can governments take their anti-trans legislation? How mean can they be to undocumented immigrants? Like how much violence can they deploy in deporting people? What can they do to journalists? What can they do to people speaking out or engaging in protest without violating the Bill of Rights? You know, what can they do to people speaking out or engaging in protest without violating the the the Bill of Rights, you know, what can they do to marginalize communities without violating the Civil Rights Act? I think this is an attempt to set a precedent for ignoring federal control so that they can be crueller to large groups of people within their purview. And I think a lot of this is a reaction to, this is kind of their, what if we lose this election?

I think there is a fear, and I don't necessarily think this fear is actually like born out. I don't think the right's national hopes in terms of its ability to get elected again after Trump are as poor as people want them to be as I might want them to be. Yeah.

But I think there is real fear among the right that if Trump doesn't win this, they're not gonna win the presidency again, right? And I think part of what they are doing is setting up, all right, then we will just take over and take increasing autonomy in our red states, and we will effectively govern them very differently and govern them in contravention

of how the rest of the country and how the federal government, how the Supreme Court says that they can be governed, because we can't be cruel enough without that. And I think that is what they are stepping up to be able to do. If you're asking, you know, what do I think will be sort of like line crossings that could lead to mass social violence in this country. One thing I don't think they're going to take that leap while Democrat is in control of the federal government and the Defense Department. I think they will push for a violent crackdown on everything left of the far right if they win power again, because they talk about that repeatedly, because they promised to do that.

Yeah. And I think that if they lose, there's an off chance. I don't think this is likely, but it's not impossible that protests and violence as acts of protest against Biden winning a second term could snowball into something that resembles an insurgency. Not impossible. I don't think that's the likeliest outcome, but I don't see them starting to shoot at federal troops

now while Biden is in the White House. For one thing, I feel like that's the thing that would really clinch it for Biden. If Texas National Guard starts trying to secede, well, you've made his reelection campaign easier, right? Because now none of the red states, like none of the states that secede, you can't also have an election where those states get to vote

Right like that's that's just not the way it works. Yeah, so I don't feel like that's the likeliest thing I think this is yeah I think I've made it clear what I think and I think it's really clear that it's time for our second ad break That's right. Hopefully it's an ad for the new Trans Pride Oreos. If you go see those. Yeah. No, I've not seen those. What? Wait. Trans fried Oreos? Well, yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's just me. I was just reading a story earlier and I noticed.

Trans fat or no, no, they they have like a blue and a pink. Trans flag Oreo. Oh, well, okay. They have a bunch of fried Oreo. We just saw two years ago. Hold on. This is old. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let's say I don But they have a bunch of fried Oreo. We just got two years ago. Hold on. This is OK. OK. OK. Let's say I don't really have. I just put a link in that to woke woke biscuit.

That's good. I have I have no opinion on on this. I guess it's good Oreos aren't bigoted. Yeah. Well, don't buy these. Give your money to me instead. Yeah, I don't think it really matters either. Ah, we're back. You know, one thing I think about, like part of why this is going viral, and I think part of what's an issue about this, with the way it's being talked about on the left, but also,

you know, the way it's marketable to the right is that the thing about this conversation is that it looks like a Civil War, but it looks like it's exactly perfectly engineered to look like the Leopards of War One. And that is incredibly misleading. It's it's it's basically it's like a marketing thing, right? Because like, yeah, and this is something we've talked about on this show for like literally since day one is that like a civil war in the United States is not going to look like a bunch of states like form an alliance.

And then all they're fighting all of the other states like it's not it's not gonna look like that It's gonna look closer to Syria than it is going to look like Like the the first massive war, but people haven't shaken the like the sort of like brain worms of a civil war is like 16 states fight 16 states even though every single civil war That we've had like in the intervening like hundred like 200 years has not been that And here's here's how wrong Here's how people are comprehensively wrong about this right on the left side you have LMAO you guys are gonna fight the federal government with your AR 15s

They got bombs and planes and like well, we've seen how well our bombs and planes work against insurgencies We're not good at winning those bombs and planes work against insurgencies. We're not good at winning those. If there were a real insurgency and there's certainly ingredients to it, it would actually be a problem for the US. However, that does not look like 16 states declaring themselves seceded and going to,

because that's a conventional war. And you know what happened if Greg Abbott started a conventional war against the US? Greg Abbott doesn't have a fucking bunker, right? Like, he could be blown up. He is, again, nothing against being in a wheelchair, but this is not a man who is capable of living underground and hiding from federal bombers.

Like, that's just not the kind of conflict that you need to be concerned about. Yeah, this man does not have the bin Laden dog in him. He just does not. No, he sure does it. No, he got the idea of Greg Abbott taking to a cave system in doing a Torah Bora at the Bora of Texas. He's hanging out in the fucking... Fucking Big Bend or whatever. Yeah, yeah, Toro Borre and Big Bend. Jesus Christ.

Yeah, yeah, you gotta do it. We'll be outstanding. We would love to see it. Yeah, but unfortunately. The grainy photos of Greg Abbott and like the mountains of southern Texas shaking hands with Mexican revolutionaries as they smuggle rifles to him. Rifles that they also got from the United States. That is what we call the circle of life. Oh, God.

God, we can dream, but it does seem, unfortunately, unlikely. It would be very funny. See, Seal Team go off to Greg Abbott. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Seal Team fighting the Texas Rangers. Oh, if only! Just a bunch of dudes, each with a revolver because they thought it looked cool until the very first time someone was shooting back at them. Yeah. It's a real like, who is on the most HGH competition? Whoever can stop the steroids from flooding in is going to win.

That's the spice in this particular conflict. Yeah, we would love to see Joe Rogan's the Baron Harcone and of making sure everybody's back ops guys have enough gear floating above a fucking table. It would be wonderful in some senses, but yeah, I don't think we're going to see a shoot. It will be interesting to see how like Biden has screwed the pooch in terms of like his media management of this, I would say. And it will be interesting to see how hard he goes in response.

Like, or if he goes hard in response. I think the smart answer would be nationalize the guard if there's things that you can actually prosecute people over, prosecute them and continue to not deal with it in the media. Like his instinct isn't bad in terms of not wanting to feed in directly to the right wing outrage loop, but you still have to go after them for this, right?

And it's the kind of thing it's probably like too much to hope for any real action being taken. But I would say that's probably the smarter option, right? Not to say anything of like what the most moral thing to do is, but the smart option is don't feed into the fundraising loop. Cause we should probably get on that. This is all a fundraising thing, right?

In addition to them testing the waters, that's the biggest dimension of this is, and that's why we talked earlier, all of these guys, Tim Pool and Jack Pasovic, and I'm sure the Daily Wire guys are on it now, are like advertising their storable foods, companies and shit. The point of all this, all right wing messaging,

all far right messaging starts as a grift. It all starts with a product to sell. That's by the way how guns became so enmeshed with the far right messaging starts as a grift. It all starts with a product to sell. That's by the way how guns became so enmeshed with the far right, right? A lot of gun companies realize that like, Americans only need so many guns for like reasonable self-defense and hunting and even recreational purposes.

There's only so many guns a man could shoot at a time. But you can really get people to stockpile shit like crazy. If you convince them they're like preparing to be guerrilla fighters in a future civil war. And so, and a lot of these like gun tuber influencers, that's kind of where they increasingly went because that's where the money was. And so this becomes more and more of a part

of right wing politics because a lot of people on the right have a lot of money to be made in messaging this kind of stuff and selling this kind of stuff. The same thing is true with the Civil War shit. It's true with these like fears that the government, you know, we can sell you storeable food, we can sell you fucking bunkers. All of this stuff comes out of some sort of financial grift. And the biggest thing that most of the people involved in this are hoping for fucking Jack Pasobiec Doesn't want to be fucking hiding underground getting bombed by the US Air Force Jack Pasobiec wants to make another million dollars off of affiliate sales of bullshit, right?

Yeah, that's what and and a lot of these people these guys doing this caravans to the borders They're not planning on spending their own money on gas They're hoping that they can crowd fund a shitload of money. And I'm sure one of them will steal all of it and run away. Right? That's what usually happens with this kind of shit. But that's what they're all hoping to do. And so that's kind of the over... If you want to actually hurt them, if you're looking at...

Where do we... How do we draw a strategic victory out of this? Find a way to damage their ability to profit off of this shit. And I do think part of it is not making this as big a story as it otherwise might be, but that's not simply enough because the right is large enough that just through their media hyping this up, they can make a decent amount of money off this stuff. So more complex solutions are needed. Yeah, I do think we should probably discuss like the potential of Abbott using this in a personal, like a later presidential run, right? Like he's in New Delhi at the moment.

Have you seen this? He sure is. He's a New Delhi hanging out with everybody's favorite pseudo dictator of India Modi. Yeah, like Abbott trying to build this kind of like like electoral alliance and international alliance for like fascist like and international alliance for like, fascist, like, Wolfenstein America is, is, I think, like, it's concerning because like, Trump has a lot

of baggage. And I think, obviously, he has a great degree of personal support, switching in the primaries. But if they don't make, if they don't stick the landing with Trump, I think Abbott is waiting in the wings to to make Perhaps a more competent fascist than Trump and make an attempt at running for the presidency Not good. Anything else to say? Fuck all of them Yeah, that's you. But okay. So the other thing that you actually can do about this is that thing that you actually can do about this is that look this bullshit all of this stuff is going to continue until there's actually some kind of sustained attack by the left on like politically on the

border regime right that was a thing that when I when I was like you know when I was like like coming up by 2016 2017 2018 we were doing we were doing, right? There was Occupy Ice, there was like, there were mass demonstrations, there was like, critical pressure being applied, and we didn't go far enough. Part of the reason we didn't go far enough is a lot of people fucking a lot of very optimistic political groups, like including like PSL, etc., etc., like hijacked a lot of these things and pulled people off of occupations. But you know, there was actually, there were, there have been periods in my lifetime, like not that long ago where there was actually forward progress being made about this shit to the point where like even that where like the

Democrats were trying to co-opt it. And it doesn't fucking have to be like this. Like we don't, we don't have to have hundreds of people fucking dying at the border every year. We don't have to have people in open air fucking prisons. It doesn't have to be like this. We can fight them and we can win, but it requires actually like it requires actually going and fighting. And, you know, you have you have to you have to actually be willing to do this. You have to be willing to commit to the organizing. But if we don't, if we just keep leaving all of this shit to like just the literal howling fascists and then Biden who is like it like on the border doing the same thing but not being but not like howling about it. Yeah, yeah, you know, like this this this this country is going to go into fucking oblivion

and we are we are going like you're you're going to see in your lifetime the US government shooting people on the border like with machine guns, right? If you if we don't stop this fucking now, that is that is what you are going to live to see. And it does not we don't we don't have to we don't have to live in that world. But you have to act now. Yeah, I think that's a great like it is also within our power to like, there is not a voting option, but there is always a mutual aid option at the border. And I know I bang on about this, but like if you are within range of the border, you can go and help.

If you're not, there are migrant communities in your city, in your town who need your help. And like the way we get through to our boomeruncles and Facebook aunts and stuff is by showing them that migrants are people with stories who are just the same as you and they just want a chance to raise their kids somewhere where they're not going to get fucking killed by a car bomb. And the more human interactions, more people are going to have with migrants and the more stories we can tell that center migrants as people, not as numbers or a tsunami or any of this geishumanizing rhetoric, like the more like

we are to take the teeth out of this. And that's something that all of us can do. Yes. All right, so that's a good thing to end on. And obviously, by our storable foods, go to pissingmypantsdriedfoods.net and use promo code. Robert Evans says the apocalypse is coming. It's a very long promo code,

but you will get actually it increases the price by 15%. But please do it. We get more money. Anyway, yeah, we get more money. That's gonna be it for us here at It Could Happen Here. Until next time, I don't know. Go to sleep with dreams of a J. Damn taking out Greg Abbott right in the Austin Capitol building.

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in no small part about the increasing and escalating series of anti-trans laws being passed around the country. It's another one of those episodes, things are getting worse. Things are also getting weird. And with me to talk about worse and weird is Kai and Lee from Health Liberation Now. Welcome to the show. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you both because, okay, very, very odd stuff has been happening. So the main reason I wanted to have you to talk about stuff has been happening in Ohio. So for people who are unaware, Ohio's legislature has been trying to pass a very draconian ban on all gender, for me, care for minors. The state Republican governor vetoed the bill. And this was for about one day, there was a lot of sort of like liberal cheering about like, ah, or compassionate Republicans, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then immediately after that, like, like the next day, when all of us, we haven't even, like, we hadn't even really gotten into the wait hold on, he's gonna do something else. The thing that DeWine did is, you know, and this is being framed as like an attempt to stave off the veto which hasn't worked so far but he immediately implemented a bunch of rules that say that in order to get gender affirming care and this is true of both minors and adults which makes it in a lot of ways more draconian than the actual bill it's quote-unquote supposed to be preventing like getting passed if you want to get gender-affirming care you need

recommendations from a psychiatrist and endocrinologist and a bioethicist and also all gender-affirming care in the state Has to be reported to the government there and there's like other stuff too So this is I the the the technical term for this is this is extremely bad Yeah, yeah, yeah And I mean he also signed an executive order just banning surgery for everyone under 18 too. Yeah, so yeah Yeah, I mean also, I think I believe it was like everyone under 21 also had to go through six months of counseling as well. Yes.

Yeah. So, yeah. At least six months of counseling. Yeah. There's no upper cap. Mm-hmm. And like a lot of this was divine and his spokespeople have ended up like justifying a lot of this like trying to use language from clinicians

working at clinics in Ohio that see trans youth and be like well, you know, they're taking this comprehensive multi-disciplinary approach and most of the people they see like get counseling instead of medical transition so they're actually like using a lot of the testimony against the band to try to justify these rules and regulations. And I don't think they're acting in good faith because when you actually like look at the details or like, well, this would basically make it

almost impossible for anyone at any age to transition. But it's like, you know, it's a very sneaky smart move, right? Like being like, oh, look, we're trying to find a compromise or trying to make sure everyone gets good healthcare. And, you know, unfortunately, sometimes liberals and liberal media will just kind of eat that up without really looking at the details. Yeah. And one of the things that's happening here too is that so, so the U.S. where in places where there's pretty good access to gender affirming healthcare,

it works off of something called an informed consent. An informed consent is like, okay, so you go there, they tell you what is going to happen and you talk to like a nurse or a doctor and then once you know what you're actually getting into, you say yes or no if you want to do something, right? And this is a pretty good system. It still can be really annoying to navigate

because of insurance stuff. And there's definitely problems with it, but it's a much better system than exists in a lot of places. And I think there've been two sets of comparisons about what these restrictions look like. And we're going to get to the comparisons to tarp restrictions on abortion in a second. But I want to talk about another thing that these restrictions are very similar to, which is the British system. And the way the British system works is you get put on a wait list and then you die

or you go to our media. Like those are your options, right? Or you're really wealthy and you can bypass the public healthcare system and go to the private healthcare system. But, you know, like I hope, like I hope you are like the heir to a mansion before you start that process

or you're in serious trouble. The thing about the British system is there's all of these paths of interlocking experts you have to go through and you have to get signatures from every single one of them. What this means is you have this enormous sort of interminable British gender bureaucracy whose only job and the only thing they want to do is stop you from getting healthcare. There's a very, very good philosophy tube episode about this, about what it's actually like to be in that system, and it's terrible. And this is what the kinds of things that are being proposed here are in a lot of... They're not exactly the same as the British system, but it's bringing it much closer to that system,

where it's basically impossible to get healthcare. And the thing about the British system and about these restrictions where, you know, you have to have like a bioethicist and a psychiatrist and endocrinologist and you have to like do all, you have to like jump through all of these soups is that at every single point in the process, there is another gender bureaucrat

who can just by themselves decide that they're just doing a trans health care ban and You know every every individual person you put into the process is another person who could just say no And that's what the British system works. Is that someone in the process just says no and you die in a waitlist? Yeah, I mean we we know Trans people in Britain and in other European countries where they have like a lot of gatekeeping and you know all of them have Warrant us like you do not want this coming to the US. Yeah, you know reminding us like all the time like How much easier are a lot of US trans people have it in terms of accessing healthcare? I just like yeah

I mean it everything I've heard about like the UK healthcare system sounds like Nate Marish heard about like the UK healthcare system sounds like nightmarish. People asking invasive questions about like your sexuality or your trauma history or for youth that often ends up like involving like genital inspections for some reason it just sounds like a horrible dehumanizing violating experience and then yeah like a lot of people like spend years years and years if they you know and are lucky if they do it are able to access care. a lot of people like spend years, years and years if they, you know And are lucky if they do it are able to access care a lot of people have to go private if they can afford to Honestly before I mean technically it was during but before the the full like onslaught of bills started to hit the US like

There there were Brits that were trying to sound the alarm and get the message out to US-based folks. Yeah, like it was around when the Kiribati ruling happened. Kiribati was a detrans woman whose lawyer was affiliated with the ADF with the British branch of Alliance Defending Freedom, which is behind a lot of the, it's like an international Christian nationalist organization that's behind a lot of the healthcare bands in the US as well. Also anti-abortion, anti-birth control. Really nasty people. But anyway, so like Kiribati, this detrans woman, it's like she sued the NHS for allowing her to transition

and originally won her case and that led to basically the end of transitioning for youth. Yeah, she submitted a judicial review. The initial review was favorable to her, but upon further review, the appeals did end up overturning it, but by that point, the damage had already been done. Yeah.

A bunch of people were starting to lose access to care and the likes, and the wheels were starting to spin internally as well in terms of the Tabistock system. And so, as a result, the wait list just end up getting longer and longer and longer. So that was a huge blow that happened in the UK. And like UK trans people like basically like by that point, it's trying to warn people in the US like this is going to come for you to get ready.

Like they'd already been already been like suffering under this like, no anti trans blitz for a while. And they like knew it was going to spread on the borders of the UK. And unfortunately it has. Yeah. In the very early stages of our project when we launched at the beginning of 2021, almost immediately after the Carabell initial ruling, we hosted a transcript of a podcast from Blood and Turf that was trying to deliver this message over to US based comrades. And unfortunately,

it does not appear to have reached as many people as it really needed to. But we do have that available in the event that people can still learn from it because this onslaught is not going to stop. Yeah. It's not. Yeah. And I think one of the things that we're seeing now is that we're now seeing kind of an opening of New fronts in a way where you have in the same state at the same time You have both what I guess I would call the American style approach of just straight-up bands and then this kind of an attempt to implement this sort of British like You know the attempt to implement this sort of like British gender bureaucracy

System and one of the things that's been happening with this is You know, okay, so there's a lot of places where there's inspirations coming for this um, and I think you know, we mentioned it briefly earlier one of the inspirations for this is obviously on tarp restrictions on abortion, where you have these unbelievably restricted, basically these targeted things. Before Roe v. Wade collapsed, there was, you could ban abortions by, for example, passing a bill that says that, okay, if you want to do abortions in a hospital, the walls in the hallways have to be like exactly like this

diameter, which is not the same diameter as like, as as normal hospital walls are. So now you can't do abortions in hospitals. And so they do things like this, right? And this is, you know, and this has been a huge problem for a long time. Anti-opportion activists have been talking about it for ages. The Democratic Party did nothing. So, you know, that's, I think, I think a sort of like forewarning of where this is going. Yeah. A direct parallel is actually over in Arizona, if I remember correctly, because one of the things that they ended up doing down in Arizona is a requirement that they tried to implement was this rather controversial piece where they also had to provide information on abortion

reversal using certain types of hormone care, right? Similar to how in order for people to be able to provide gender affirming care, they have to provide information about detransition and stuff like that. But when you actually start to look at some of the data, not all of it, but some of the data that they are relying on to inform people of this, it is a wildly biased sample or just downright pseudoscience, right? Like they looked at the evidence base for the abortion reversals and it didn't actually work the way that they were saying it was and it was actually coming from very very very

explicitly motivated groups. Right? So like abortion has been difficult to access in Arizona for a very long time, in part because of some of these like obnoxious requirements that people end up putting into place through trap laws. Yeah. And you know, I think it's, it worth noting that like and this is true of both the anti trans bands and the And anti-abortion legislation is that like it's the science. They're just making it up a lot of the time Like, you know, one of the like one of the very famous things is these like fetal heartbeat bills that required like And the thing about like fetal heartbeat bills is that fetuses don't have heartbeats.

You're not hearing a heartbeat like doctors will like force you to listen to this. And it's like that it's not what's happening. It's literally not a heartbeat, but these people like they put a stethoscope to a woman's chest and heard a beating and we're like, oh shit, it's the baby's heart. And it's like, no, it doesn't have a heart like what? This is a fetus like what are you even talking about? But you know and but this kind of stuff right is you know, they're they're they're basically they're They're doing just scientific about practice, right?

They're straight up lying to people and then they're using that as a justification for You know actual legislation which has sort of material impact and carries the force of the law behind it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we've been seeing a lot of very similar kinds of things from these anti-trans legislation. And one of the ways that they've been able to use pseudo science to get restrictions on health care pass, and this is true both of sort of the straight up bands

and also of these kind of like massive bureaucratic restrictions is by allying with groups of sort of right wing detransitioners. And we're going to talk about that more after this ad break because we unfortunately are reliant on ads to cover this stuff. So yeah, here's here's ads. Okay, we are back. And this is the point where we need to talk about the stuff in the Ohio story that is very weird. Now, I think if people have been following the story of sort of anti-trans bills,

one of the things that's been happening a lot is there's been this sort of there's a network of people who detransitioned for various reasons, I don't know, who have become very, very hardline right-wingers and who have basically been doing like circuits of the capitals of, you know, of like state capitals and like going to Capitol Hill and like telling their quote-unquote stories to try to get this, to try to get like all trans healthcare banned. Now, so, and this is, you know, this is something we've covered on the show in the past.

What is very weird about Ohio is that you had a group of these right wing detransitioners who specifically were trying to get, it looked like at the very least, we're trying to get, we're trying to stop the, like the actual like gender affirming care ban from going through and we're in favor of more of the restriction stuff is that is that is that what am I am I getting this right? Not not exactly there's a couple of no different um sorry I'm I can provide my my brief um description here real quick um and then you can retake aspects of that

stuff because something to bear in mind is the fact that like some of the opposition in the Ohio testimonies are actually coming from people who view themselves as very left-wing. These are radical feminists specifically. They are just hard-core. Yeah, I mean, I would say they're they're actual politics They're very reactionary. Yeah, they're I should write one just put they don't they see themselves as being opposed to the right Like that's how they present themselves. They definitely believe that they're anti right wing by there's there's also another Component this one is like

the nuances are sometimes almost impossible to be able to tease out I swear tomato tomato but one of the people who was a proponent for both this current bill and a past bill is actually Corinna Cohn who does not consider herself to be right-wing though she does appear to be working with a number of right-wing people. Yeah. She considers herself to be right-wing, though she does appear to be working with a number of right-wing people, she considers herself to be quote-unquote libertarian. Now, this is a red flag for those of us who have done any sort of like real engagement with certain types of libertarians or political organizing or whatever in that if you actually pay attention to some of the arguments that are being made

or the collaborations that are being made, you can generally tell which direction their politics are truly leaning towards, right? Is it left wing? Is it right wing? And hers have been steering far and far more right wing. Like she uses the excuse of, you know, I want small government and stuff like that. But if you're working with like legislators to put in full on bans, I'm sorry, honey, that's not small government.

That's not government. That is the opposite of small government actually. And so like, like it's kind of hard to sort of like encapsulate the entirety of like the proponents of the opposition into particular political alignments because a lot of it is really based off of like, what are their motivations and who are they willing to work with, which again, tomato tomato, but I'll have to come back to the Karina cone one at some point here too. Cause that one is actually an important timeline in terms of understanding the Ohio bills. Yeah. I mean, basically, I mean, you have like these, you do have like right wing East transition people like Chloe Cole or Prishan Bosley, Laura Becker,

who like do, you know, they'll be hanging out with like the Heritage Foundation or Billboard, Chris or the Q-Shop. Yeah, the Q-Shop. Yeah. Or our duty. Like, and they very much are just working to try to pass these full-on bands. But then, yeah, you have also these like D-Trans Tur and they're more liberal fellow travelers who definitely see themselves as being opposed to the right and are opposed to I mean they they're opposed to the right

because they see right-wing Christians as being a threat to them as well and are at least smart enough to understand that if you know right-wing Christians have their way, they're gonna suffer too. But they also wanna end trans healthcare or restrict it. I mean, some of the, two of the people who helped organize, helped collect the testimony, the group statement that was submitted under the name, are you asking why Max and Kitty Robinson, they have ties to Janice Raymond?

Dead serious. Yeah, they do. Janice Raymond helped publish Max Robinson's book over at Spinifex Press, this Swarff and Turf publisher. So, yeah, they're not actually approached. Yeah, well, we should mention. So Janice Raymond, for people who, we've talked about on the show a few times, but Janice Raymond for people who, uh, some of we've talked about on the show a few times, but Janice Raymond wrote a book called The Transsexual Empire and okay, so people normally leave off the subtitle of it, which is called It's The Transsexual Empire, The Making of the She-Mail.

It's like one of the original, like original anti-trans people, like incredibly violent transphobe, like both in terms of like the career of her work like physically like violently anti-trans and yeah yeah she is she is connected to a lot of the modern anti-trans groups and also the modern like the modern I don't know what you call them people who are attempting to take away trans healthcare but who don't see themselves as anti-trans. I have no idea how to even summarize that in a single term. Bad? I don't know, I got nothing.

Yes, definitely bad. Yeah, yeah. So like, I mean, yeah, and, and I mean, yeah, Max and Kitty fully endorse Janice Raymond's theories. I mean, Janice Raymond, one of the things she's famous for is saying that transsexualism should be morally mandated out of existence. Max Robinson has said that she supports that. They also both, I mean, Janice Raymond focused heavily on trans women overall and also claimed that basically like trans women were committing sexual assaults against women just for existing.

Yeah. Bats and Kitty are also horrible trans misogynists. Kitty makes a lot of propaganda attacking trans women and trying to cast all trans women as predators and yeah, just not people you want on your side because they're not yeah they're a danger to all trans people they're just like yeah trying to find a way to influence trans healthcare in a different way and I mean I am concerned that people will hear like oh look at all these D like these supposedly trans family D trans people who testified against this ban not realizing

that these are actually like, terse within agenda. Who, I mean, part of them, part of what they want to do is to infiltrate, like, queer and trans subcultures and promote, like, perfideology and recruit people. Like, let's put it this way. So Max Robinson, in terms of some of her beliefs, refers to medical transition for like transmasculine folks as a sedo ritual going back to Mary Daly types of descriptions of things. And then Kitty was one of the people that was interviewed for and gave extensive background

information for a BBC article that was released, I believe it was called Something Along the Lines of We Are Being Pressured Into Sex by Some Trans Women. Oh, God. Yes, that one, right? Yeah. So we're feeding into this narrative that trans women are sexual predators right into the British media when they were already having a massive influx of anti-trans media that was, again, feeding into the demonization of trans people as a whole, but then also like controlling trans youth and the likes.

And of course, this article not only did it end up originally platforming like an actual like serial rape. Yeah, Lily Cade, like someone someone. So a serial rape is so prolific that like within like maybe 30 minutes of this article going up like multiple like probably like a dozen people had come forward and been like she raped me like that that that is the person that the BBC was like coming forward to do this shit with. Yeah, she ended up posting basically a manifesto on her website that was even more extreme

than aspects of the article showed off. And then I will also note that this article was originally, I believe it was only translated into Portuguese in order to be moved into BBC Brazil, which is also one of the countries that has one of the highest rates of transfemicide. So, like, these people that decided to go ahead and testify in opposition. Yeah, and like, well, I'm also partially bringing up Max and Kitty, because like they were some of the people who helped like get the testimonies. Like I found a post on Kitty's Tumblr blog

looking for detranscend assisted women who were willing to testify against a ban. And then Max was the one who actually submitted the collective statement from R.E.S. Kingwai. She also submitted an individual statement too. So basically, like they found a bunch of like detrans and desisted terfs on Tumblr to sign a statement and then submit it to like the state of Ohio, which is kind of wild to think about.

Yeah, you don't normally expect to see testimony from Turf Tumblr, let alone be Trans Turf Tumblr, but that is like that isn't even happened. Yeah. Not really who you want to show up for. No. Yeah, it's really, really not good in terms of who you want doing your legislation like. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah.

So, okay, we need to take another ad break and then we will come back and talk more about this. So enjoy your brief capitalistic respite from the horror of capitalism. We are back. In order to properly understand the situation in Ohio, you kind of have to go back several years, right? One of the bills that ended up being proposed in 2020 was HB513. This was another version of a proposed ban on gender affirming care for trans youth in particular.

And it was sponsored by representatives Ron Hood and Bill Dean. This one is interesting because one of the groups that ended up coming out in opposition to it was the Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network. This is the organization that I helped found in 2019 prior to my resignation. They submitted this opposition after my resignation, but it is available on archives. Then in 2021 and the 2022 legislative session,

there was the proposal for HP 454, which was another proposed ban on gender affirming care for trans youth. This time it was being sponsored by Representative Gary Click, who is also the sponsor of the current bill that had recently been vetoed and then the veto vetoed. And in May of 2022, the Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network, or GCAM, testified in tentative support. The testimony was submitted by Corinna Kohn and included suggestions for amendments. These amendments are actually very important.

One of the amendments that she recommended was on data tracking. I believe it says here, the second amendment would be a requirement for physicians, mental health care providers, and other medical health care professionals mandating an annual report to the Ohio Department of Health, the number, age, and sex of minor patients who are receiving gender transition services of any type. This was what she originally proposed as an amendment to the bill. The bill, again, did not end up passing. But now we are seeing HB68, which is the one that merges the ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth and a sports ban, because I guess, you know, trans youth playing chess is somehow like threatening. But so this one was again

represented, like sponsored by Representative Click. And this time, curiously enough, Karina had been working more extensively with Click during various portions of the push for the bill. Right, she testified multiple times, she's posted videos with him, pictures, et cetera. Another person who had originally found at the organization, Carrie Callahan, did originally start opposing. Curiously, she did not note her prior experience with the organization, but she did start to oppose the bill. And then later starts to put out basically a more general call for opposition to HB68,

right? Trying to collect in various types of detransitioned people who were opposed to bans on gender affirming care, right? And then who is it that ends up showing up? It's this weird little like turf group that originally came out of Detrans Turf Tumblr in 2013 that historically that, historically speaking, she had prior working relationships with and even presented their stories to US Path. Yeah, and also, I mean, like, Max Robinson too, like both her, both Max Robinson and Kerry Callahan were both featured in Jesse Singles' Atlantic article too.

Like, there's lots of points of connection. They've known each other since at least 2016 and worked together. Like I can't say for certain how it is that they ended up there. Personally, to me, it seems a little weird that people who had prior working relationships dating back a decade are showing up in the same place again. And they are also showing up in legislative testimony

for the first time in the state where one of the central figures for a long time there is putting out a call to oppose this particular bill. Like the coincidences are racking up a little bit here. It might be good to ask some further questions about what exactly happened, because I have some questions. So, you know, this happened in December of 2023, right? Eventually, Governor DeWine goes ahead and

vetoes. But at the same time, he makes his, you know, proposal for the drafting of new regulations with the, you know, the Department of Health and the likes. And within that is the suggestion of detailed data tracking that is reported to the Department of Health and then to the general public every six months. Focusing on things like, I don't think that he wanted to focus on like the number of people that were doing it, but he did

include a like the nature of the diagnosis. It applies to all ages. It was not originally restricted to trans youth like the original testimony was from from GC can. The time range was also ended up being like it's shortened. He wants it every six months, not every year. But you know, very similar kinds of things, right? In terms of what it is that he is proposing for this mass collection of data and a previous testimony that was submitted to the Ohio legislature. In fact, like not long after that fact, Representative Klick ended up going on an interview with Tony Perkins of Family Research Council

talking about the pending veto. They originally did this interview on January 9th and he noted that the data collection suggestion was originally included in a draft version of his bill, but was removed due to opposition. And so he's glad, actually, that that was included, although he wished that there would be even more restrictions. He actually was going to encourage the governor to also sign an executive order banning the

use of puberty blockers, not just surgery. As far as I can tell, that has not happened, but he did say that he was going to try. But like, it's like, there's definitely some weird kind of like escalations that end up happening and some of the interconnecting threads with individuals that again just happen to keep showing up in the same place over and over and over again, either in support or in opposition. Some folks have been consistently opposed, whereas other people have been kind of flip-flopping. The GCCan organization is one of the ones that flip-flopped. It originally opposed all bands and then now all of a sudden it's like, you know, the person that they are

throwing out into these testimonies was arguing in favor of them. And then like, you know, the quote-un unquote, are you asking why collective and to be fair, Kerry Callahan have also been firmly opposed to full on bands and the Christian right pretty much from the beginning, though for very, very, very different reasons. I mean, some other opposition was like, well, people will go to like, could go to other states where there's less restrictions. Like, no, the stuff we have, you know, Ohio is already like has a lot of restrictions and majority of trans youth like only get counseling and they don't get any, like none of them get surgery.

And most of them, like only a very small number of them get puberty blockers or hormones. So this should be like, this should be an example for the entire country. Like that was kind of carry Gala hands take on things and then like I mean, yeah a lot of the the more like the detransterves like The Robinsons or other members of our you asking why it's like okay Well, they're opposed to the Christian right and they recognize like if the Christian right gains more power and is banning things that's bad not just for trans people but also for you know cis lesbian and gay people and cis women and and you know it will end up hurting them too

So I mean even from a from a self-preservation stance They understand like why they should be opposed to the Christian right But they're still if you actually read their testimony a lot of them do make it clear that they're opposed to transition I like one one person called it like compared medical like trans health care to like a HYDRA and said that like BANDIT would only be cutting off ahead. Like these aren't, yeah and so a lot of them were you know we're also kind of praising you know regulations like the the group statement talks about like it's like, you know, shutting down clinics when improving anyone's quality of care. Ohio's existing programs are known for

their moderation. They don't perform surgery on minors, many clinics out of state do, la da yada. So, um... Max Robinson's testimony also said similar, but that she had an un-good word from an Ohioan. Right. I have a question. Yes, you know what I say? I hear from a good authority from an Ohioan that pediatric gender clinics, they're prescribed

hormones pretty sparingly and don't actually perform any underage transition surgeries. Other states do, though. So there's like this whole thing is like, like they're still kind of scare mongers. Like, oh, but these other states like, were easier to transition as a minor, those are bad. But they're still making it clear that the idea that people having easy access to transition, especially as youth,

is like a bad thing in their minds. I don't think we actually mentioned like how, like if you actually look at the collective statement that are you asking why issued and like who signed it? Like a whole bunch of them didn't actually transition. Like a lot of them are actually desisted, which means that they like never actually medically transitioned.

They considered transitioning or maybe socially transitioned, but then they decided not to medically transition, possibly after, you know, converting to anti-trans feminism or the like. So it's just like a bunch of people who like, I decided not to transition. I'm desisted, like, you know, testifying against a healthcare ban. Um, that's also like a kind of a classic strategy too, was like, they have a bunch of like desisted people along mixed in with people who actually like transition and do transition to kind of like inflate the numbers.

Yeah. This is standard. Yeah, this is very standard. It's an old trick. It's like, oh yeah, you're like, okay. Yeah. And then a bunch of my also like saying the ones who did like, you know, transition and do transition, they're like emphasizing how they, a few of them like are emphasizing

how young they were when they transitioned and you-transitioned. Again, not exactly. Yeah. Not exactly protrans. This collective here with like pretty explicit turf ties, including some of them directly to Drannis Ramond herself, was the bulk of the opposition from de-transitioned people to the bill. I should note that's 15 signatures right there. People are talking about like how there were 19 people

that were opposed. So 15 of them were either like part of the recruitment or actively recruited on detrans turf tumbler. Yeah, and then they're like at least five of them are just assisted, they're not just transitioned transition It's not clear about everyone, but yeah Yeah it's It's weird it's just

It's really weird and it's also been really weird to see the the media just kind of take that see the media just kind of take that testimony of theirs at face value. Well, that's been a problem for a long time, is like getting the media to actually sort of like investigate or care about people's like political views or activism or actually kind of being like sometimes like, I think like, I want to say like the, the, the Bazelon New York Times story we were talking about before has Grace Ladinsky Smith in there without saying that she was you know affiliated with G.C. Cannes. Not just affiliated with. She was the president. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like okay she's just like represented as this like you know as a detour in Swilman without going into like actually she's the head of this

political organization. Yeah. And that's just, you know, this has happened. This has been a problem for years. Yeah, yeah. So it's just like, I mean, just a whole lot of different sketchy characters kind of came out for what's going on in Ohio. I mean, you have like, you know, Republicans and right-wing Christians who just want to straight up ban transition and move towards eliminating it for all trans people and work towards making it as impossible for trans people to live in society as they can. And then you have kind of more like tricky Republicans like

DeWine sort of like pretending to find some kind of compromise and be like oh we're just trying to work for like more comprehensive healthcare that like is just how everyone gets what they need and like sort of like using some of the language that was used by clinicians who are trying to fight against the ban and their testimony and you know trying to to make these claims. But if you actually look at the details, like the regulations they're proposing would make it nearly impossible for anyone

to transition both youth and adults. And then you have these different medical professionals and kind of more liberal transphobic detrans people who want more gay keeping and regulation and control over trans people and are kind of like using detransition and transition regret as justification for that or praising being like, oh, well, Ohio, their youth clinics are already really good because they're very cautious and they use therapy a lot more than they actually allow youth to medically transition. I mean, that argument didn't

seem to work out at all. Instead, it sounds like the governor kind of was like, oh, two thirds of youth only get therapy instead of medical transition. We should do that for everyone. Yeah. It's like sort of like, you know, if you propose restrictions, say, oh, this is great. Then of course the people who are more extreme will just like take that and run with it. And then, you know, you have, you know, detrans turf showing up and testifying for their own weird reasons, you know, probably because of their connections to Kari Galahan.

But you know, this also is a chance for them to launder their image, make it seem like, oh, look, we're good, we're good D-Trans people, we oppose the religious right, we're fighting against these bands, and then people who don't necessarily know any better will maybe- Come and get with us in the woods. Right, right. This is like, that's a strategy. They often pretend to be more trans-friendly than they really are to sort of like draw people in or be able to like influence queer and trans communities and slowly slip in like crypto turf ideology and recruit people. Or just fly out stock people that need spaces.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it's like, there's just a whole lot of different anti-trans groups and individuals like stretching from like paternalistic medical professionals who want more gay keeping, who want to restrict the number of people transitioning like all the way to, you know, like Christian nationalists, you want to just, you know, wipe us out completely and, you know, not only, you know, are basically at war with bodily autonomy in general. They don't want anyone to be the ones

who control what people do with their bodies. Like they also want strict reproductive care and abortion. It's all part of the same war, just control people and I'll sort their version of authoritarian Christianity. And then you have, weird detransterfs. And it's just like all you kind of have to understand like all these different factions and how they sort of like interact together

and how they try to use each other. You know, it can seem overwhelming, but like the more we kind of understand like what we're up against, like the easier it is for us to develop strategies of resistance. And it's like, you know, even though, you know, it can seem like we're up against a lot of different groups,'s like, even though it can seem

like we're up against a lot of different groups, but we're also part of this larger fight for liberation. And we can connect with feminists who are fighting for reproductive autonomy. We can connect with like disability, liberation activists who are fighting for better healthcare for everyone. We do potentially have lots of allies and we do have lots of connections with other movements.

And so when you think about that way, it's like, okay, we're not just one small group up against this whole Goliath. It's like, no, we're part of this larger movement that is fighting so that everyone is free and that everyone gets the health care they deserve. Yeah, and I mean, I think that one of the one of the the sort of tangential things here too is, you know, this is an extremely negative example of the amount of influence that a very very small number of people can wields who have extremely unpopular ideologies. On the other hand, there are a lot of us and the things that we believe are very popular and, you know, the amount of power that we can wield if we are willing

to organize and we are when we understand what we're organizing against is immense and it is enough to drive the people into the fucking ground. Yeah. a new podcast and we're calling it very special episodes. One week, we'll be on the case with special agents from NASA as they crack down on black market moon rocks. H Ross prose on the other side and he goes, hello, Joe, how can I help you? I said, Mr. Perot, what we need is $5 million to get back a moon rock.

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Listen to Chikis and Chill and Dear Chikis as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Ike It App and here. This is me along back with part two of my interview with Kai and Lee from Health Liberation Now about the long origins of anti-trans legislation and policy in Ohio. Let's get right into it. Okay. So the next thing I wanted to sort of ask about is, so this is a very, very long running, I guess, sort of strategy and campaign of sort of right wing or right wing and turf,

do you transition? Like groups advocating for trans health care bans. And I wanted to I wanted to talk about some of the older campaigns that happened. And I want to talk about specifically some of the campaigns to influence WPATH. Oh, boy. Right. Right. So we should we should start by explaining to people what WPATH is because I think unless you're trans, you probably don't know,

you've probably never heard of WPATH. It's like World Professional Association for Trans Healthcare, I believe, is what it, try and double check that. Yeah, yeah. World Professional Association for Transgender Health, formerly known as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Alliance.

They published the standard of care that is usually used to help inform gender-affirming care for trans people. And they have done various versions of this over the course of decades. We are currently on version eight. Yeah, and historically they're a way of administering trans healthcare has involved a lot of like gatekeeping

and psychological assessments are requiring people to do a real life test, which is like making someone live as the gender they're transitioning to for like a year before they can actually access medical transition. So I guess like social transition, but it's like a test to prove whether you're a quote unquote real trans person or not. And like things have, yeah, things have gotten like somewhat better over time, but there's still a lot of medical professionals in, and especially like therapists in WPATH who like still want to require some form of gatekeeping who basically still don't trust trans people to know, you know, who we are and what we need.

And they're like, okay, we need to make sure they get therapy. We need to make sure we do like, oh, the psych tests, what if they regret it? And so, yeah, so I used to be a detransition radical feminist back in the day. And I used to know, I mean, I knew Max and Kitty. I was involved in that particular group for about like six and a half, seven years. And I used to have a blog called Crash Chaos Cats where I wrote about detransitioning and kind of got more, more turfy over time. But like pretty early into my blog about like three months or so in, this gender therapist who worked for the San Francisco Department of Health like left a comment on my blog and was like, I'm interested in talking to de-transition people because I think there are two like, well,

she left a comment that she was interested in talking to de-transition people and talking to me and then we started emailing back and forth and she opened up pretty quickly and said, there are too many F2Ms in San Francisco. There's like too many F2Ms in the San Francisco Bay area. There are too many like, quote unquote, female people transitioning. Which is nuts. I know. It's like, oh no.

It's like, oh no, it's like, oh wow. It's like, it couldn't possibly be that people are just coming to one of the most trans family areas in the country to transition because they think they'll have an easier time there. No, there's gotta be too many people. I mean, I think somewhere early in the conversation, she brought up YouTube influencing people towards transitioning. She thought there was like, you know, pressure to transition in the trans community. So anyway, shit all this stuff, something about like,

you know, oh, people are treating the social problem as a medical problem. And I, you know, immediately kind of turned around and started talking with this other dethrams, radical feminists that I knew, Davor as a hob, and we started scheming like, okay, this like gender therapist who works for the San Francisco Department of Health, like thinks there's too many people transitioning.

How do we exploit this? Like how can we like use this as an opportunity to like cut down on the number of like people transitioning? It wasn't just that connection to the Department of Health. It was also the WPATH. Well, that we found out about that. I was just gonna go into that. Like eventually, first we found out she was working for

the Department of Public Health, and then we found out that she was in WPATH, and she actually was like, you know, talking to the president of WPATH. And that she, like, so she made it clear that, like, she wanted to use the stories of detransition people to try to get more clinicians, to be a take a more cautious approach,

and she also wanted to try to develop psych assessments that could supposedly weed out who the real trans people were, who was going to benefit from transitioning into, who would supposedly go on to regret transitioning and detransition. The thing is, we didn't actually believe that you could tell the difference between someone who would end up like stay trans or do trans as in because we were terfs, right? We thought everyone could be saved by radical feminism. Like,

and we had a bunch of people in our group who thought that they were, you know, quote-unquote true transsexuals, who thought they fit the criteria of someone who would have a successful transition, you know, until they, you know, decided they actually were suffering from internalized misogyny or some other kind of rad fem explanation for gender dysphoria. And the thing is, Devorah also lived in the San Francisco Bay area, so she actually ended up meeting up with this gender therapist. His name was Julie Graham.

And was pretty open with her anti-trans views. I mean, she wasn't completely open with her intentions, like, oh, I'm going to use this person to try to like work towards ending all Transition, but she was she did tell You know Graham, but she didn't think anyone really benefited from it and she told her that you know She said she knew people who have been true transsexuals who had detransitioned and said like lots of really awful things about like trans women being fetishists and just like, you know, all this very anti-trans stuff, but then, you know, is it, oh, but I think we don't have to agree

on everything. I think we can like work together and like, you know, this gender therapist fell for it. Like somehow like, Devorah saying all this very anti-trans stuff, like making it clear that she was opposed to transition, saying like really nasty trans misogynistic shit, like none of that was like objectionable enough program not to like continue to like work with her to continue to be like, hey, do you want to talk to these clinicians about what it is to do transition? And you know, eventually what happened, like that eventually this relationship with this gender therapist eventually led to a presentation at the first US Path Conference by Carrie Callahan, who's

like, she's like kind of an odd figure because she never actually identified as like a radical feminist, but she spent like years hanging out with like detransitioned radical feminists. And she's, she's detransitioned, but she's kind of more of like a weird liberal who believes in more gatekeeping. But she's kind of handy. Like we like like she did this presentation at US Path and she showed some videos of de-transterves, including myself. Like I made one of I made a short video and Max Robinson also made one of those videos. And Carrie Stella was the third person. And Carrie Stella, she did like, she was another like D-Trans Tumblr

dwarf who did this survey that still gets like it was a, it was a survey monkey survey. It's, it's cited by like anti-trans researchers about D-Transition. Yep. Which anyways, so we, so there were three of us who made these short videos. Both me and Max Robinson, by that point, had gone. Like, we had hooked up with these weird terfs who were dantic witches and taken part

in these kind of weird neo-pagan, X-trans reclaiming, female-ness rituals. We had been through this kind of like weird neo-pagan X-trans reclaiming femaleness rituals. We had been through this kind of like religious neo-pagan like conversion practice rituals, which of course that wasn't something that the US people, like those are the people, US fans knew that, but we hit that. We just, I talked about how I thought I had transitioned

due to like internalized misogyny and trauma and all that. We just, you know, I talked about how I thought I had transitioned due to like internalized misogyny and trauma and all that. So I was sort of like spreading a more like kind of watered down turf ideology to the folks over at US Path. This is kind of an intentional strategy if you think about it. Because I want to point out something from the emails about how that presentation was made and then given, where Carrie Callahan noted that her slides were quote unquote, decidedly unradical. She was trying to talk to therapists as a therapist. What that basically meant was she was taking away a lot of the

more objectionable elements, the things that would identify folks like Kai and her previously scrambled state as a turf and being completely opposed to transition and stuff like that. And then putting on, you know, kind of suiting them up, right? Like, you know, getting them in their nice clothes and then presenting them to a professional audience who is then able to take that information and sort of absorb it into their general thinking and then how that's going to play out in terms of their changes or implementations of care in the long term. Yeah, and that's something that like, of care in the long term. Yeah, and that's something that like,

this something that's pretty common with like, a detrans, like anti trans activists across the spectrum, like a lot of people like Chloe Cole, there's a lot of the sort of like just hard line right wingers who didn't talk about stuff like, like some of these people detransition because because like the thing that they're saying now is that they de-transition because they got a vision from God, right?

And they don't start with that because I think, right? I mean, I think there should be more skepticism of people who are like, I got a vision from the Christian God or like the Abrahamic God that told me to de-transition. I think there should be more skepticism of that, but that's not something that like I Don't know if you if you walk into like W path and you tell them I was given a vision from God They're gonna be like what?

whereas this kind of stuff right like you know, but the W path people like and This is something that's kind of complicated about this because I think I think there's a lot of people who see WPATH as one of the organizations that's there to protect trans people and that are sort of allies in this battle against anti-trans stuff. And it's true to a certain extent, but they're also like, this is an organization composed of a bunch of cis doctors, right? Who can be influenced and manipulated and... There's trans members as well, huh? There's a few, but they have less power.

Well, it also seems like the trans people who do end up like in a high position at WPATH, like also tend to be like, end up believing in gatekeeping and restrictions. Like kind of like internalize the general mindset. And so, so it's kind of like their tokens, right? It's kind of handy for like cis medical professionals who want to like control trans people to have some trans people as like figureheads, you know, expressing those views. Oh, well, you know, look, this person saying it and they're trans so like yeah I mean like yeah at

the same like that the first US path I mean just to kind of show how far things still need to come you know the same US path where Carrie did her de-transition presentation Ken Zucker was there and he got he got protested I mean like there was a protest against him and I did, I believe they ended up like canceling at least like one of his presentations. But yeah, so Ken Zucker kind of like this notorious like conversion therapist who focused primarily on trans youth like he had this clinic in Canada, you know, people. I mean, and like going after both like trans youth and gender non-conforming

youth, they tried to like, you know, prevent kids from growing up trans, but they also tried to make, you know, non-conforming youth like more gender conforming as well with justification. Oh, well, it's easier to change the individual than to like make society less bigoted. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, but he was the type of people Like he was one of the medical professionals I was like, you know helping to create like the standards of care for for trans youth for decades and it took a lot of work to To change that and like yeah, he was still given a platform by W path in like 2017 That's not that long ago

Yeah, and that's, I don't know. This is one of these things where like the history of cis doctors treating trans people is really, really bleak in ways that don't get talked about. And the reason, like one of the reasons they don't get talked about from people who know about it is that like, it's fucking bad. Like it's a lot, it's a lot of people getting raped. It's like a lot of like, I mean, like when we talked about sort of like gatekeeping for healthcare, like that was the like one of the original things was like, you know, one of the things that would happen

very, very commonly was, you know, it's like, okay, like, if you want to get healthcare, like you have to let me rape you, like that's the thing that happened all the fucking time. And this is the, and that's not something that's, you know, should be long ago, right? And you can, you can look at like modern WPATH and be like, well, it's obviously like, yes, it has come a long way

from that shit, but simultaneously, yeah, like, I don't know, that's, that's something that, you know, like there are living people who fucking experienced that, right? And, you know, and when, when you, when you look at why these kinds of like D trans campaigns, why these like, like these, these sort of detrans anti trans activists Have been so successful targeting this is like well You know it's it's it's I think I think it's a kind of similar thing to like oh wow I wonder why like the third KKK was successful in the south that it's like hmm Hmm, maybe there are things happening. I mean that that is slightly unfair. That's being a bit unfair to them. But, you know, there's there's still a lot of these sentiments that

there's a lot of sort of like transphobic sentiments that are just kind of like buried beneath the surface. And I think a lot of what we've been seeing over the past, you know, like, like eight ish years. What is time? Hold on. Is that God? OK, I've broken my own rule about not trying to do math life on air. People don't figure out that I can't do subtract. But, you know, that's that's a lot of what's been happening

over the last like eight years is that people figured out that there's still a lot of sort of lingering anti-trans sentiment and they figured out where you can target it in ways that are extremely effective. We need to go to ads, we back in a second with less capitalism. And we're back. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, like, yeah. And we're back. Oh yeah, oh yeah, I mean like, yeah, I mean I feel like like in terms of like medical professionals who want a gatekeeper, like they've been using, you know, detransition and transition regret as like an excuse for controlling people for basically since the beginning of trans healthcare. I mean, that like, you know, that gender therapist, she went looking for us.

She like went looking for D-Trans people to use. She's like, okay, this is how I'm gonna like cut down on the number of people transitioning. I'm gonna find some like D-Transitioned women and then use their experiences. And you know, that's what she tried to do. And like, and I see this happening with other like clinicians too,

like kind of going back to Ohio, Scott Liebowitz, who runs, he's a therapist who runs the Thrive Clinic in Ohio. And he's another one who has used de-transition to justify more psych assessments. And I mean, he was actually one of the therapists featured in one of the New York Times articles that everyone a lot of trans people got mad at the one by Emily Baselon was it like I forget what it's called?

The Jaddle for Gender Therapy. Yes, the Jaddle for Gender Therapy where he's like kind of cast as this like this poor moderate position who's caught between the religious right that wants to ban all trans healthcare and these wacky trans activists who just wanna let everyone transition. It's like he's just trying to find this nuanced approach and make sure that like, teenagers don't transition and regret it.

And you know, yeah, you know, he was like, I mean, like he was trying to stop the healthcare bands in Ohio by pointing out like, oh, look, you know, we're, we do comprehensive care, you know, most, most youth don't go on to medically transition. Like, like Carrie Callahan was also one of the you know, she and her Testimony and in some op-ed pieces that she wrote she was like praising his approach calling it conscious cautious, you know people who want to like restrict care implement more gatekeeping will use like Detransition stories to justify that and then of course like you know, the religious right who wants to completely wipe out all

Transition health care will also use like de-transition stories as well. They'll have their set of de-transition people that they bring out like Chloe Cole to testify for the bans. Yeah, Leba Witz was also one of the co-leads for the adolescent chapter in the standards of care eight from WPATH. This was also partially reported on in the Basalon piece since they were given exclusive access to the draft before the actual final product was officially published. And so this particular chapter,

especially compared to most of the other ones, was it was basically a dumpster fire. Like it was a massive rollback in terms of accurate information. And part of this was actually captured by a white paper that was written by Kelly Winters, a trans woman, you know, she's got a PhD and everything like that. She's been paying attention to this stuff for a really long time has been working in aspects of WPATH and trying to like, you know, kind of help re reshape some of the the transphobia that's been happening.

Yeah, I mean, she's been fighting back against like how trans people are pathologized and you know against paternalistic healthcare for a very long time now. Yeah, so she ended up writing a white paper about version 8 with a significant section focusing on the adolescent chapter and some of the weird like pseudo science laundering that ended up happening because that chapter not only did it include like lip service to things like quote unquote, rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is a,

this is a bunk pseudo diagnosis that was invented by Lisa Littman after surveying a bunch of anti-transparents. But then within that chapter, you also see the laundering of specific studies that are focused on predominantly detransitioned women, predominantly gender-critical or radical feminists. These two papers were Littman 2021, which surveyed a lot of the kind of the old detrans turf groups that we had been connected with right around 2017 or so. So this was before the ROGD paper was published in 2018, but then there was also Let's see. There's the van de busch study, which I believe that was published in like what?

I don't remember what year that was published in like what 20? I don't remember what year that was published in the Vandibush study. Now this study was done by Eli Vandibush who is basically post-trans half of a Agender Critical Detransition Project. And it had a very similar kind of like recruitment strategy, sometimes an overlapping recruitment pool, but the difference is that this happened after the ROGD paper dropped.

ROGD is that's rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is this thing to be like all the kids are suddenly transitioning is like, no, this is yes, yes. Yeah, but that's what that acronym is. Yep. When that paper dropped, a shift in some of the narratives from people who are coming out as detransitioned was also starting to be observed. More people were starting to call themselves as having experienced ROGD. This is where the peak resilience project came from. And so as a result, like this Vandibhash study was also pulling in aspects of that kind of narrative as well, right? And none of this actually makes sense. These are wildly biased sample pools.

It's not going to be generalizable to basically any population. It's only focused on like a very particular subset of people who end up detransitioning and then develop some kind of like political belief connected to it, right? And then it's being used as legitimate data as part of standards of care that is supposed to be like... Yeah, it's just it's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. Well, it is ridiculous, but I don't feel like like I feel like the medical professionals who want more gatekeeping like they just need some

I feel like the medical professionals who want more gatekeeping, like they just need some detransition people to justify it. They don't really care if like the people ended up detransitioning because they like found God or radical feminism or like, or you know, our old group, a lot of the detransition, and I think I already mentioned this before, like a lot of us like talked about how like we had the same kind of dysphoria than any other trans person had. And we're still fighting it off. That was a thing too.

Most of the people I knew still had gender dysphoria. And we're just finding, quote unquote, alternative ways to cope with it. And it's just like, I don't, I mean, a lot of people were trying to talk themselves out of transitioning again. So I don't think the issue here is like, oh, transition didn't work for these people. It's more like they internalized the idea that no one said transition. But

again, like people don't, it's like people don't, yeah, they only care about using detransition in order to reduce the number of trans people or prevent transition. They don't care about transition or detransition that results from transphobia, either internalizing it, internalizing it in anti-trans ideology or not being able to access transition because of living in a transphobic society, coming from a transphobic family, having to go into the closet to find a job, that kind of stuff. Like it's never about like, yeah, it's never about preventing de-transition that results from transphobia. It's just about finding excuse to control us on our access to health care.

There's this perverse incentive structure here, too, because, you know, these doctors are trying to find, you know, they're trying to find something that gives them more ability to do gatekeeping. So it's in their interest to, in order to preserve and increase their own power to find this kind of stuff, which means that they're not actually doing their job. They're going out and trying to find ways to like, they're trying to find, you know, whatever, whatever, like, absolutely dog shit studies or just stuff that probably should be considered medical malpractice.

They don't really care because, again, it's just this loop because that's the thing that they need. So they'll find whatever cranks pseudoscientists just cranking this stuff out and they'll use it. Yeah. I mean, I also feel like this is one of the reasons why there aren't more resources for people who end up de-transitioning too, because they want to be able to use it as a serious story, right?

Because like, really, I mean, okay, like, you know, I de-transitioned and like, it was hard because there weren't as much resources and support out there. And I mean, a lot of the supports I did find were crappy because they were coming from TERFs. But it's like, it's really just kind of like transitioning again in a lot of ways. So it's like, well, if you can create resources to make transitioning easier, you could definitely create a lot of similar resources to make de-transitioning easier, but that's not there. And I feel like one of the reasons that is not there is because if it's easy for someone

to de-transition, get what they need to have a good life and just move on, then it's hard to use those stories. You'll have less people who want to like, you know, who you can indoctrinate into these anti-trans ideologies and use them as part of the anti-trans movement. But also just like, I mean, if it's not scary anymore, if you're just like, okay, this is just an issue of making sure people get the supports they need so they can just get on with their lives, like we just treat it as a practical problem that needs to be solved. Instead of using it to feed a trans panic, like, yeah, it's just

like the, the, there's actually like less reasons for gatekeeping. I mean, I feel like, like creating like basically you're kind of're creating a safety net for in case something unexpected or negative happens. You're like, okay, well, if you transition and things you end up changing your mind or things don't work out the way you think they would, here's all these supports you can turn to. I feel like that's a better long-term thing to work for. So I feel like that's kind of a better long term thing to work for is like, okay, like make sure there are supports for people no matter how their transition turns out. Like if then including, you know,

de-transitioning or if people like, you know, face health complications, like make sure that there's like supports in place for that. Don't use that as an excuse for gatekeeping. Yeah, that's unfortunately one that I know all too well the consequences of. Yeah, and I think also the other thing that's going on is there's just like all of these groups see both trans people and people who do transitions as just not like, like they're, you know, they're, they're, they're violating the, the Conti and Catechorical imperative in the sense

that they're not treating people as actual humans or treating them as objects or jewels. Yes. And once you do, when you do that, right, like everything suddenly, you know, like who cares what happens to these people afterwards because you don't think of them as people. You think of them as just a thing that you're using to do another thing. Oh, yeah, absolutely. The unfortunate thing is that like this can also happen within the community as well when they are trying to advocate for certain kinds of things.

People will end up using each other as tools in order to meet their own personal goals. Speaking of goals, make it your goal to buy these products and services, oh no. We're back. So let's go back a little bit to about like 2019. Some of the bills are starting to go out. We had the test balloon bill that was happening in South Dakota that eventually turned into

2020, right? In this timeframe, an organizing call went out on the site previously known as Twitter by Kerry Callahan that was looking for people that wanted to advocate for better healthcare outcomes for trans and detrans people. During that time frame, I had been starting to go off of my hormones. I started going off of them a few months prior to that point. And in that timeframe, I started experiencing certain types of what seemed like progressive vision loss, right? My brain, I sometimes have a tendency to panic, I guess, especially when it comes to things like health anxiety, my

brain started to make the internal connection did going off of my hormones cause my vision to change, right? And unfortunately, as I started to talk about this online and the likes, I was getting a lot of encouragement from other folks, usually like, you know, gender critical, anti-transparent, that kind of thing. That yes, absolutely, my like the hormones were causing me to have vision loss, right? And it was really impacting my ability to function in my daily life, right? But another part of me at the same time as all of this was starting to feel like I was starting to feel aspects of regret and anger, which made me want to do something. This is a very common narrative, right? It made me want to do something so

that other people would not end up in the situation that I was in. And so I answered this call, probably not the best of decisions that I could have made for myself, but I decided to go ahead and do so. Answered Carrie Calhoun's call. Yes. Yes. I decided to go ahead and say, yes, I will, um, I will connect in with this. I would like to be a part of it. I had to apparently apologize for talking to the wrong clinician, um, in public first, but

choose no You had to apologize for talking to Jack Turbin because he was too affirming and she was mad that you would speak to him because But too willing to respect trans kids. Yes. Yes, because he prescribed puberty blockers I was talking to the wrong clinician and therefore this was not allowed. But anyway, so eventually the actual like organizing committee starts with four people. So it was me, Carrie, Karina Cohn, who was later testifying in favor of some of these bills. And then Grace Lydinsky Smith. There were some other people that were in and out, and then Grace Ladinsky Smith. There were some other people that were in and out, but they ended up dropping off very early on. So it was predominantly the four of us that ended up being the actual formal board at any point in the early stages. And so we started to draft a

lot of this stuff, but over, I was starting to wonder about two things, right? Like after some exchanges with other board members about who it is that we should be predominantly outreaching, should it be clinicians or should it be people that are actually impacted? People who have gone through gender affirming care regardless of how they identify themselves currently currently like what is our main priority? The other board member at the time

Wanted to focus more on the clinician route. I Did not my focus was on if we are going to be doing a quote-unquote patient advocacy Organization we should be focusing on the people that We are supposed to be connected to. Right? Like, those are who we are. Why would we want to put more power into the hands of the clinicians that supposedly harmed people? It doesn't make any sense. Right? And then, like, you know, as these wheels were starting to churn, another part of me was starting to worry So as these wheels were starting to churn, another part of me was starting to worry that over time the trajectory of this organization at that point was going to start advocating for more restrictions or full-out bans later on in the future, possibly even partnering

up with some of the more right-wing groups. I believe I actually, I think I worried about them becoming like the gender carry equivalent to Wolf, which was unfortunately pretty accurate, I would say in terms of my concern. That was part of my formal resignation to the board. I stepped down as vice president about five months after I had joined on because I could not see any recourse within the group for changing directions. I couldn't be party to them hurting other people even if I felt hurt at the time.

I ended up taking a step back. My vision was still having problems, but you know what ended up making that a lot easier actually? It's funny, this is not something that was recommended to me by anybody that I had been talking to about this stuff who had been talking to about this stuff who had been more exposed to anti-trans rhetoric.

Like I talked to blind people. I ended up talking to blind people. I connected with folks from the National Federation for the Blind. It was a group that was recommended to me by somebody I knew from a past job that I had, because she was the daughter of somebody who went blind later in life due to a genetic condition,

and he was a member of the NFB, right? He was part of the Federation. And so that was her recommendation to me. I hadn't reached out at the time. My brain was too focused in doing this weird, we got to save people kind of bullshit direction. But like, eventually, after I'm like, taking a step back from all of this stuff, I decided to go ahead and pursue that suggestion from, you know, this random person in my life, not from

anybody I had been connected to in terms of organizing. When I went there, the only thing that I ever got was acceptance. There was no questioning. Nobody asked what happened. Nobody asked like any sort of details about like my personal views. Like I didn't have to express any forms of like, you know, sorrow, regret or anything like that. A lot of it was focused on, okay, these are the issues that you're currently dealing with. Here are some of the things that you can work on to make your life easier. Here are some supports that you can find within your states.

If you need to do things like get certain kinds of mobility training, using a white cane and the likes. If you need to learn how to use Braille, all of that fun stuff. Here's even like specific doctors that you could try to go to who can really assess what's going on with your vision. Because before that point, I did not have access to specialists. I was living in rural Maine.

There was nothing there. I would have had to travel over three hours to go to Boston for me to be able to see a specialist. Instead, they were able to point me to people who had specializations in retinal conditions. And so when I went there, they did their usual tests. They ruled out some things that were known to run in my family, actually,

but they did ultimately decide that my retinas are not processing correctly and that it's actually likely genetic So unrelated to hormone use comes Related to hormone usage in fact, you know as I was going through that process and I started to reflect on what my vision was like Before I even took hormones let alone stopping it like certain symptoms were actually there just at a much lower degree since like at least my teens I already had

difficulties with my night vision. I had difficulties with color contrasts sometimes. My light sensitivity wasn't nearly as bad. Usually it was only with migraines, but over time, like, you know, that started to break out more where like even just like, you know, there being too much sunlight was painful for me. But like some of this stuff, it definitely predated when I started my transition. But because I wasn't really given space to actually unpack any of this stuff, I didn't really have the ability to make those connections. Instead, what happened was, you know, I joined in on this organizing board. I connect in with three other people that were looking to advocate in very particular directions.

And like my story was not something that was meant to get support. My story was something that was meant to scare people. I was also nominated as the spokesperson, which meant I would have had the responsibility to do things like, you know, respond to the press or give sound quotes or whatever, right? I gave certain kinds of descriptions over to a, like a Democratic candidate that we had been scheduled to meet with, Ryan Starzick at the time down in Arizona, and give the whole spiel, right? A visible trans person with a story that for a lot of people who, like most people are very connected to their senses, whether that's hearing, vision, touch or whatever,

they can't conceptualize a life without them and so it terrifies them, right? But like that doesn't actually help the person be able to get to a point where this is a livable life, it's even a free life. There are certain things that I can do that other people can't do. I can navigate inside the apartment without having the lights on because I know where everything is mapped out on my head and I can rely on touch. I can pour myself a glass of water and not have to worry about it spilling because I can feel where it like goes up. But that's not really something that like we're not even allowed to think about. We're not even allowed

to think about like, okay, so if this thing happens to you And there's documented evidence of it not like something that's completely Imagined like my brain decided it was here's what we can do to help Mm-hmm. That's that's the kind of things that people really need to be able to access right? You know if something happens to you these are the things that you can do to be able to work through this and live a more comfortable life in the way that you are happy with. But I don't really see any of that happening to be perfectly frank. Well, no. standards of care A, because there's this inclusion of aspects of regret and detransition and stuff like that into things like the adolescent chapter.

But you know what they don't include? A chapter for detransition support. Yeah. No, because they're not serious about that. Again, they just want to use it as a scare story and a justification for controlling people or putting them through a bunch of assessments or something like that. Like again, I very much believe that there's a connection between like, uh, a desire for more gatekeeping and psych assessments control over trans

people and not having support for like, do you transition or retransition either? Cause there's not like, is the, I feel like there's even less talk or resources for people to end up retransitioning after detransitioning because no one's trying to figure out like oh like the idea that detransition could just be temporary or that a lot of people you know go on to retransition later on or just confirms for them that they really are trans like that's also a thing that you know cis people don't really want to touch. It's one of these things where,

you know, like pain is useful to these people, but like the actual like people experiencing the pain aren't and you know, and that has its own perverse incentive cycle because like, yeah, if you want to harvest scare stories, you don't want people getting actual help. And that is a absolutely terrible incentive structure for making sure people actually get the care and the help that they need. And it absolutely sucks. Yeah.

I remember realizing like when I was still a D-trans radical feminist, like realizing that a whole lot of like people who wanted to restrict or eliminate transition, like had an investment in my suffering. Because you know, I was, and I was struggling a lot. Like I do, it can really be hard to de-transition like right now because there are, you know, there is a lack of resources and support and understanding. But the thing is, like, I, you know,

I kind of slowly realized over time, it's just like, oh, all these people want to use my story, but they need me to suffer for it to work out for them. They don't have any interest in making my life easier. They don't have any interest in helping me create a good life and being happy. They really do want me to be ruined and miserable forever because that's more valuable

to them. Like my suffering matters more than my happiness to a lot of these people. Like you know that was definitely one of those moments where I was like what like one of those things that eventually you know led me to get disillusioned with the whole thing and be like you know what I get myself involved with but yeah yeah it's just it's it is really like sick and perverse how anti-trans people use suffering. Use both trans and anti-trans people suffering for their own agenda. It's awful. Yeah.

And I think this is something that, you know, there's, this is the sort of, it's also, there's a broader set of incentives here too, which is the sort of the structure of the media market, right? Which is the media, that's like, you know, the entire media broadly, like, you know, if it bleeds, it leads, right? Like that's, that's, that's the, that's the actual media model of, you know, everything from like your like shitty local right wing tabloid to the New York Times, right? And the way that this plays out for trans people and for trans people is that,

the thing that these people, the journalists also are looking for is suffering. They don't really care. None of these people ever report stories that are just like, hey, like I went to a gender clinic and it was great. Like nobody's gonna like they don't think anyone's gonna read that. Like I would read that because, you know, that's, you know, that's great. But like, but like they don't care about that. There's there's no sort of sensationalism there.

The sensationalism is like, you know, you either then this is why you get like the Washington Post interviewing this light, you know like these people who are just Like oh like I was I worked at a gender clinic, but I was secretly doing evil or like, you know Or or or you get all of and this is why a lot of even pro-trans like Media coverage is about things like suicide rates and about things like, you know, like how coverage is about things like suicide rates and about things like how likely you are to die if you don't get the health care that you need because it's the same as infrastructure. The thing that's useful to sell to people is suffering. And I don't know what the solution is to that because, mean, I don't know. I have media that's not based on profit, I guess, but like,

you know, de-commodify the news. But that's one of these things where it's like, you know, like as long as long as like every single, like shitty local newspaper is making all of their money from like crime scare stories. They're not going to report if they're not going to you're not going to get acting reporting about police because they need the police to like give the like feed them all of these shitty crime stories. Right. And this is the same thing here where it's like you're not going to get actual good reporting about trans people and about people who do transition because nobody actually cares about that because the

infrastructure is just suffering and that trickles down through the healthcare system and through, you know, through the legislative system and it trickles down through social networks and what support networks exist and don't exist. And it's a absolutely... Like, if you were just to, like, ask someone, how do you want a society to be run, zero people would answer, we want it to be based on the production of suffering. And yet, we have done this. But it doesn't have to be like this. To sort of finish the David Gray rid quote, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. So let's go build a world that's safe for trans people.

This has been Nicodapent here. You can find more of Lee and Kai's work at healthliberation.com. I recommend you go do it. It is am Jeff Garland. Yes, you are. And we are the hosts of the history of Curb Your Enthusiasm podcast. We're going to watch every single episode. It's 122, including the pilot, and we're going to break them down. And by the way, most of these episodes I have not seen for 20 years. Yeah, me too.

We're going to have guest stars and people that are very important to the show, like Larry David. I did watch Giant Stop a Woman Who's Going Back to Get Hit by a Car. episodes I have not seen for 20 years. Yeah, me too. We're gonna have guest stars and people that are very important to the show, like Larry David. I did once try and stop a woman who was about to get hit by a car, I screamed out, watch out! And she said, don't you tell me what to do! And Cheryl Hines. Mike, why can't you just lighten up and have a good time?

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Tidbits. Yes, tidbits is a great word. Anyway, we're both a wealth of knowledge about this show because we've been doing it for 23 years. So subscribe now. And you could listen to the history of Kerber Enthusiasm on iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts. as they crack down on black market moon rocks. H. Ross prose on the other side and he goes,

hello, Joe, how can I help you? I said, Mr. Perot, what we need is $5 million to get back a moon rock. Another week, we'll unravel a 90s Hollywood mystery. It sounds like it should be the next season of True Detective or something. These Canadian cops trying to solve this 25-year-old mystery of who spiked the Chowder on the Titanic set.

A very special episode is Stranger Than Fiction. It's normal people plop down in extraordinary circumstances. It's a story where you say, this should be a movie. Listen to very special episodes on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up guys? Hola, qué tal? It's your girl Chiquis from the Chiquis and Chill and Dear Chiquis Podcasts. You've been with me for season one and two and now I'm back with season three. I am so excited you guys. Get ready for all new episodes where I'll be

dishing out honest advice and discussing important topics like relationships, women's health and spirituality. For a long time, I was afraid of falling in love. So I had to, and this is a mantra of mine or an affirmation every morning where I tell myself, it is safe for me to love and to be loved. I've heard this a lot that people think that I'm conceited, that I'm a mamona. And a mamona means that you just think you're better than everyone else. I don't know if it's because of how I act in my videos sometimes. I'm like, I'm a baddie. I don't know what it's because of how I act in my videos sometimes. I'm like, I'm a baddie.

I don't know what it is, but I'm chill. It's Chikis and Chill. Hello. Listen to Chikis and Chill and Dear Chikis as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I am once again Robert Evans talking about it happening here.

And in the case of today, because we mean something different every time I introduce the show that way, we're talking about the carceral state and the worst reactive impulses of society coming for people who use drugs recreationally, who either have a problem or don't with them and simply don't want to go to prison for it. And specifically, we're talking about all of that within the context of the state of Oregon where I reside. Because back in 2020, the state of Oregon passed a measure, the first in the nation decriminalizing all simple possession and use of street drugs. So heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana was already legal, but everything is you can't get arrested

for simple possession of small amounts of stuff, right? That's the gist of the law. This passed by a pretty wide margin, 58. something percent of Oregonians voted for it. It was a ballot measure, not something the legislature pushed through. And it came as Oregon like the rest of the country was kind of wrapped in the grip of an escalating drug crisis. In 2020, and again, that's before the ballot measure passed, Oregon had the second highest

rate of drug addiction in the country and ranked nearly last in access to treatment. From 2019 to 2020, opioid overdose deaths in Oregon increased by about 70%. So that makes the case that the problem prior to the ballot measure was pretty severe and that the current state of affairs, which was everything was illegal and you could go to jail for possession of say heroin, was not working out for anybody. However, in the years since the ballot measure passed, overdoses have continued to rise in Oregon and miraculously almost the drug problem did not solve itself overnight. Now we're going to be talking about some reasons for that, but now it is time for me to introduce our guest for the episode, Oregon

Public Defender Grant Hartley. Grant, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Robert. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So first off, I wanted to say, from where you're standing as somebody whose job is to represent Oregonians, generally with the least resources who are charged with crimes, what were you seeing prior to 110 and what are you seeing after it? Well, I think prior to 110 we had a population similar to what we have now, which is individuals who were struggling with houselessness, with housing instability, who were struggling with mental health. And as a result of many of those factors and others were coping with substances.

And as a result of that, many of them would get wrapped into the legal system. And one of the issues with our legal system is that it is based on compulsion. And so when someone came into the system with a drug problem, our first reaction is to compel them into treatment, to force them into treatment, even though we know that that is not effective. And, you know, at times it can be. And generally where you see the most success with it

is where there's more hanging over the person's head, more leverage that the system has. And so, you know, somebody who has a substance use disorder and commits a robbery and is put on probation and they have a choice between going to prison and doing treatment, much more likely to engage in treatment. But when you have low level possession where as a society, we've deemed that should not be punished by prison. And frankly, that should not be punished by prison and frankly that should not be punished by

jail. The problem is that the only tool that the system has is jail. And so if somebody says I'm not ready for treatment, the system says well we're going to put you in jail then and then they go to jail. What little they have is destabilized and they get out without any treatment. And as you mentioned in the opening, the biggest thing is just the incredible dearth of services in our community. There is not nearly enough outpatient treatment, but especially inpatient treatment. And that's important for those healthless folks

because you can't expect somebody to engage in outpatient treatment and then go back and sleep on the street at night and not use. So I think the general gist of what it looked like. Yeah, I think that's all really important to keep in mind and it's particularly important. The reason we're doing this episode is because the last two years really is when it's escalated. We have seen this increasing and very organized campaign against 110 when it's escalated. We have seen this increasing and very organized campaign against 110

and it's being pushed by the police who are angry that they're not able to arrest more people, particularly more homeless people. It's pushed by a lot of business owners who have convinced themselves that the reason why downtown Portland has had such a hard couple of years is because there's too many homeless people and they can go after them and get them off the street

by having them arrested. This is all my opinion, not yours here. But there has been, what is not up for opinion is that there has been an escalating campaign to portray the measure as a disaster and to portray it as the center of particularly Portland's ills, but also more broadly the state of Oregon's ills.

And I think there's a number of reasons why that's dishonest, which we'll talk about. But where that's kind of culminated now is this year, there are two big pushes to get rid of 110. One of them is the push by a ballot measure or to put out a ballot measure, basically repealing 110 as it exists. And the other is a push by the legislature. And you kind of have separate plans pushed by the DIMMs and the Republicans

to, in the case of the Republican plan, basically put things back to the way they were, if not more severe in terms of your ability to arrest people for possession. And the Democrats' plans is to recriminalize possession, but make it all basically the lowest level of misdemeanor. I don't think either of those are good plans, but I wanted to talk about kind of how you would characterize the backlash campaign against 110. And how much of it do you think is rooted in actual problems caused by the measure? No, I mean, it is caused the most of the backlash. I would agree with you that it is a lot of business communities, but it's also just average you know, average Portlanders because what they see is people on the streets

struggling using drugs in public because that is the only place that they can use drugs and You know, that's a problem of houselessness We they people have to ask themselves am I upset that I'm seeing somebody use drugs or am I upset that this person is Sleeping on the street and needing to use the drugs in the street? And that is the same of business owners. They call and complain that there's somebody on the stoop next to them using fentanyl. But is the issue that that person is using fentanyl or is the issue that that person is on the stoop next to them because there are no housing services in our city? And so really, measure 110 is being scapegoated for two

huge issues, which is the influx of synthetic heroin or fentanyl into our community and into every community around the nation. It is not restricted to Portland or to Oregon because we decriminalized. It is everywhere. And then just the houselessness crisis, which is tremendous in our city. It is so bad. And people are essentially arguing that because we decriminalize drugs, more people are on the street. And I just don't think that there is any data to support that. Yeah. And I think part of the reason why people suspect that is again, because of how much dramatically worse the problem has gotten in recent years,

but it's gotten worse everywhere. It's gotten worse in states like Oklahoma, where it is and has remained very illegal to possess this stuff. Oregon is not the state with the worst death problem due to drugs per capita. And the states that are worse or are worse in various ways are all states in which it's criminalized. It's very frustrating to me when you look at like, well, we passed 110 in 2020 and these problems have gotten worse since. And it's like, well, but these are

all problems that have gotten worse everywhere. And they're problems that are not driven by legality or at least the fact that it's no longer criminal to possess heroin. It's driven by the fact that we had a horrible pandemic that traumatized people. They lost loved ones. They lost jobs. They lost support. It's driven by the fact that the price of housing continues to rise. It's driven by inflation. It's driven by the fact that, I mean, to no small part, everybody's got brain worms from social media. That's not a 0% factor in both people's anger at the houseless and in the fact that people are falling through the cracks. We have a million different things. I don't mean to list that as a comprehensive list of our problems either.

Drug addiction and deaths due to overdoses are caused by a variety of things. One of the reasons why the death rate has been so high is that if you're addicted to heroin, you can't just stop doing heroin or the consequences are really, really horrible, worse than a lot of people are going to deal with. And so people keep using and they keep getting drugs that have been tainted with fentanyl

and it's hard not to die doing that. Like rich people can continue to test their kits, people who have had the benefit of not just education, but a stable home in which to do drugs and sort of the resources to know and to be able to test their shit will test their shit. But most street level users don't have that kind of option. And it frustrates me that it's all getting scapegoated on this ballot measure. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about how they're attempting to go after 1-10. Because it looks like right now the primary threat is legislative, in part because if they push another ballot measure,

Oregonians get to vote and we'll see how they vote. But reversing it by almost a 10% lead is not an easy thing to do. And I kind of think Oregonians might surprise them in terms of not being willing to repeal this thing. Legislatively, we don't have really that kind of option against it. If they're able to get a kind of enough people behind an essential repeal, and they'll frame it as, you know, we're just trying to tinker with the law to make it work better. But if they can get enough people behind that, there's really nothing to do about it, right? Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that I, in my opinion, was a strategy

on the part of the opponents of 110 was, I mean, they have some very wealthy financial backers. Yes. And so, you know, it is not cheap to do a ballot measure. And, you know, they know that they can use that money to do media buys and to spread all of the misinformation that they've been spreading thus far. And I think that frankly, there are people in the legislature that don't want to recriminalize, but feel that it is the lesser of two evils. And the unfortunate thing is that what we are essentially doing is delivering them a watered down version of that ballot measure.

And they were intentional in that ballot measure. I mean, they made it as bad as could be. It includes more than just recriminalization. It includes what is commonly known as Len bias law in federal courts, which is essentially that people who deliver a substance that causes an overdose can be prosecuted essentially for murder. And it is a archaic understanding of how the distribution of drugs works or the testing

of drugs works. And so they tried to make it as bad as possible in order for the legislature to essentially go, well, we don't want that to happen. And I would worry about a ballot measure. I mean, I agree with you that it's a big swing and I have faith in the voters of Oregon. But the fact is, is that the media has portrayed this very unfairly. There was an article recently from the editorial board at the Oregonian, and they advocated for recriminalization. And in it, they cited that they want a data-driven approach.

There was not a piece of data in that article. It was all based on misinformation. And the same is true. I mean, law enforcement are the worst about this. You know, they're constantly saying, oh, well, we just want tools so that we can confiscate the drugs and so that we can confiscate the drugs and so that we can refer people to treatment because we all know that's all police officers want to do. And yet when you look at the e-citations that came out of Measure 110, those were meant as to be a referral tool.

And that was one of the big mistakes of 110 is trying to use police officers as an ambassador for treatment. There is a culture in the police community that treats drugs as crimes, right? You are a criminal if you are a drug user. And I'm not saying police are a monolith. I'm saying that is the culture that exists. And to expect them to change that overnight because the voters said they wanted to criminalize was rather naive and it's obvious because just here in Multnomah County, I think in basically a 24 month period, they issued something like 900 E citations

or that was during a 30 month period, excuse me. And during a 24 month period in 2018 and 2019, they arrested more than 3,300 people on PCS. And that is what nearly three times, more than three times as many people when they were able to put handcuffs on the people that they were meeting with. And Multnomah County was actually better than a most.

You look at Washington County, 71 E citations. In 30 months, 71 tickets were given on this. And the ticket was supposed to be the tool by which somebody is referred to treatment. And so, in some ways, Measure 110 had some serious structural and implementation issues, but that doesn't mean that we just go back

to what the voters said. No. And one of the things that was the biggest issue in implementation is that a lot of funds were supposed to be redirected, I think from marijuana sales was one of the places, to treatment facilities and treatment options for people like these people who are supposed to be getting tickets instead of arrested for drug use were supposed to be being kind of pushed gently towards options. But the actual money for those options took more than a year to start arriving. And it is still not at a very good clip. And there's a number of reasons for this.

But like when when they frame it as like will be decriminalized stuff and all these problems kept getting worse, it's like, well, for one thing, they kept getting worse. They were getting worse when everything was illegal at a rapid pace. And number two, you didn't do what was supposed to be half of the measure, which was increasing the amount of care that people had access to.

Yeah, absolutely. And to hear people talk about it now, I mean, during a legislative committee, I think there was one representative or senator who said, well, why did it take so long for this to get implemented? It was 2020 and 2021. Like people are quickly forgetting

how chaotic things were then. And the other thing is that when you put that money into the system, it takes a while to build beds to hire people to do that. And what the opponents of 110 are doing, what the people seeking to recriminalize are doing, they're really preying on our collective impatience. Yeah. You know, it's, they're saying, oh, well, you know, nobody is going and, and, um, voluntarily engaging in treatment. Therefore we must mandate it. And again, no one's voluntarily engaging in treatment because there's no treatment

available to voluntarily engage in. And the idea that by making it criminal, we can somehow fix that, is actually counterproductive, because we're taking all those funds that we could be putting into additional services, into outreach, and we're instead putting it back into law enforcement, or into probation, or into the jails, or into the state lab to test these drugs.

And I want to continue off of that, and I want to talk, bring out some more data too, but first, we have to go do a plug to ads. So, here's ads, folks. All right, we are back. We're back. And I wanted to, I think there's two really good things to keep in mind when as an Oregonian, you're arguing with friends and family about 110, or if you're outside of the state and people bring it up because they saw like a three-minute piece on Fox News where some smarmy asshole talked to a guy on the street, you know, you should be

aware of a couple things. Number one, when people talk about how it's not working, the thing that you should bring up is like, well, what about the 40 years or so of criminalization prior? Like, that led us to this point and in which the acceleration in deaths was highest. Um, and the other thing to bring up is, well, there's these claims that like public disorder, drug use, all this stuff, overdose deaths have gotten worse since one 10. There's no evidence that that's the case, right? Uh, and there was in fact a study into this by New York University that found no evidence of an association

between decriminalization and fatal overdose rates in Oregon and Washington. And I wanna read a couple of quotes from that study. So first off, quote, publicly available calls for service data were used to compare Portland's use of the 911 system to Boise, Idaho, Sacramento, California, and Seattle, Washington before and after 110.

This was between 2018 and 2022. Public initiated calls for service did not change after BM110 was enacted in Portland. Portland's 911 calls for service data align with comparison cities for property, disorderly, and vice offenses with similar seasonally fluctuations. So for one thing, what you'll notice

is that a lot of the articles about 110 started to hit both when we would have winter weather come in and summer weather come in both of those lead the Surges and overdoses and drug use because the weather shitty right people have less to do less options and especially if you're living outside It's a hundred during the day or it's 12 Maybe you want to do drugs more because you're uncomfortable, right? Yeah. So again, I think that it's important. There's this study from New York University on one 10 and, and, you know, it's lack of impact on this stuff. That shouldn't be the final word on this. I'm certain there will be more studies, but that is a word on this.

And they simply have no data on their side of things. You know, there's, there's another study as well. I mean, we, you know, there's a study out of Portland State University. And it's interesting, it was a follow-up study. The full report has not been released yet, but they did release some of their key findings. And it was in the first year PSU met with officers and interviewed them about their perceptions of 110 and how it was going. As you might imagine, officers didn't think it was going well. And they said, oh, well, violent crime is increased

and property crime is increased and overdoses are increased and all because of 110. And what this report found is, that is not true. There was an uptick in property crime, but we cannot say that that has been a result of 110 for years. You need a lot of data in order to look at that. And so, you know, this idea,

and I mean, the ultimate finding of that study was that it is too early to recriminalize it. Based on the data, it is too early to recriminalize. And so, but again, you know, I think that instead, what we are relying on is people's fear and what people see in the street. And I think it's also this idea. The reason we are having this discussion, in my opinion, is two things.

One is public use. Individuals using the street, it's in people's faces. Nobody really cares when someone is in the warmth of their own home using fentanyl. It's when they're on the street. Or I should note when someone's in the White House using fentanyl, because it just came out that the president and high staff were prescribed fentanyl and ketamine in the White House when Trump was in office. So.

Yeah, absolutely. But no one really cares about that. It's when it's in your face that people care. And the other one is the perception that crime is, you know, that again, a lot of crime is caused by drug use. Right? There is an underlying association there. But the idea of criminalizing drugs because of that is the idea that you can

somehow arrest somebody, compel them into treatment, and therefore prevent crimes. Yeah. That, I mean, that's like the precog, the sci-fi sort of things. It's, it is a backward system. No. And we actually know what will stop the drug-related crimes to mostly theft. Right. And one of the things that will, and they've seen this, I believe it's the Netherlands,

that if you're a heroin addict, the government will give you free heroin. You have to take it at a center, like you go in, you sign a thing, and you get your dose, and you take it there. That saves them money based on doing nothing, because when they do nothing, people break into houses and cars, et cetera,

and boats, because it's the Netherlands, in order to steal shit so that they can not get dope sick and just giving the dope to them winds up costing a lot less per addict. Well, the other thing that gets people clean or that stops people from committing crimes is, housing is providing them a roof over their head I mean when people are even even if they're not on the street if they are housing in stable

They're trying to make a living and it is not easy to do so with whether it's a felony record or your you know You're upbringing or whatever reason has held you back if they have housing I mean, there are numerous studies that show that when you put somebody in housing, their likelihood of using drugs drops, their likelihood of committing crimes drops. And yet we are focused on this recriminalization rather than trying to house these individuals.

Yeah, and it's, you know, when you talk about this, when you talk about decriminalization, and in Oregon's context, there's a good reason for this. People talk about Portugal. Portugal, Spain also did this, both Portugal and Spain. And I believe Portugal was first, decriminalized simple possession and use quite a while ago. It's been that way in Portugal for, I think, like 20 years. Like, they have a significant amount of data on it, right? And Oregonians, the people who were pushing for 110 cited it specifically as a reason why this was worthwhile. There was recently, I think, last year, some state officials and whatnot went to Portugal to look into the system. And so as a result, you've seen attacks on the Portuguese drug system, including there was a recent Washington Post article about how Portugal's

starting to regret it. They're going to recriminalize maybe. And the reality of the situation is that there has been a recent surge in illicit drug use in Portugal from 7.8% in 2001 to 12.8% in 2022. That is an increase. It's still below the average in most of Western Europe. It's lower than France and Italy. I believe it's lower than the UK. It's lower than like most of Western Europe. And I just kind of pointing out the fact that Portugal is also dealing with an increase in drug use. Again, saying that that's because of the culture of decriminalization seems silly when there

have been corresponding surges everywhere where it's illegal. But beyond that, it ignores the fact that there have been really significant benefits that we do know are benefits of decriminalization because of how long we've been looking at it. From 2000 to 2008, prison populations in Portugal fell by almost 17%. Overdose rates dropped because in part they funded rehabilitation, which Oregon still has not really done. There was no surge in use and in fact less people seemed to die when the system changed, right? What has increased is some drug-derrelated debris, particularly most of the surges have been in the last literally the last couple of years, which again makes me think it is tied to the global trends that have made a lot of people more

miserable and living in a more difficult situation and at more risk of drug addiction. What happens in Portugal politically, hard to say, but overall decriminalization, we have a lot of data for, seems to have largely been a success. And if that's kind of what we were to see in Oregon with decriminalization, I would be happy even if there's more mess on the streets. Although I don't think that that's inevitable. And this gets us to what I think is kind of the most dangerous point that the opposition, the people who want to recriminalize make. And it's dangerous because it seems like they have a good point, which is people shouldn't be, people, families, just regular people should

not have to see folks using hard drugs on the street as they walk around town. And I agree, it is not reasonable to expect people to walk with their kids to school past somebody shooting a heroin or smoking crack. It's it's fine and not you're not you're not like a some sort of like Narker party pooper. If you don't want your kids to see that, but that's already illegal because it's like it's illegal to drink a beer on the street in Portland. The problem is not that the cops can't do anything about it, it's that again they're choosing not to do anything

about it. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, and again, it is the issue of we have people living on the streets, right? I mean, it is, I completely agree that people shouldn't have to walk past that, but maybe that is an opportunity to talk to their child about the need to make sure that people have a safe place to live. And also, I mean, it's also, you know, if we had safe use locations, you wouldn't see nearly as much of that. And frankly, the system would have a better argument for punishing public use if we had safe use areas because we have put so many people on the street. Yes, somebody who has no place to be and is desperate

and it is addicted using in a place where you can see them is understandable. Somebody who has options for places to be and is choosing to do it in front of people, that's a bit of a different case. And again, I also want to just really, because I've encountered this in arguments about 110 with people, it did not make it legal to do drugs in public. That remains illegal. It's illegal to drink a beer in public. Absolutely. Yeah. Public use is, I mean, but again, these are sort of the narratives that are being perpetuated by, and a lot of it is law enforcement and honestly my take on it is that law enforcement doesn't really care about recriminalizing

possession. They don't. What they want is they want the ability to search people. What that gives them is it gives them the right to say, hey, I have probable cause to believe that you have drugs on you, therefore I'm gonna search you, I'm gonna search your car, I'm gonna search your house, right? It gives them that ability and they, many of them will be very forthright about that. And the biggest infringements on our personal privacy, on our fourth Amendment rights,

on our protected privacy interests has always been drugs. It has always been the criminalization of drugs has eroded our privacy interests. And that's what's really at play here, because I don't think the officers, I mean, and this is again, not a monolith, I'm saying I don't think in general law enforcement really is that concerned with, you know, getting individuals off the street and into treatment. If that were the case, we would have seen far more of those e-citations. Well, you know, we would see the officers doing, there is a statute that allows them to transport people to detox, right?

We don't see that that often because really what is that issue here is the ability to search people based on probable cause that they possess drugs. Yeah, yeah. And we will talk about what people can do if they want to stop the recriminalization of drugs in Oregon. But first, here's some more ads. ["The Last Song of the Year"] We're back.

So Grant, kind of the question I am left with at the end of this here is what do we do to fight back against this? What is actually, what is go, what are the options people have? Obviously, the thing that first occurs to me that is most accessible is make a fuss to your elected leaders. So, you know that this is something you'll think about come vote in season. But first off, how would people do that, I guess? But first off, how would people do that, I guess? Yeah, I mean, you know, figure out who your legislator is, you know, write to them, call them, let them know

that you want to see, you know, realistic fixes to this. You want to see investment in public health, in outreach through peer navigators and case managers that you don't want to see us return to the same war on drugs that has failed. Yeah, it's hard. I will say if you're looking to do research outside of a lot of local news, this is a hard time for local news.

Well, good local reporting gets done in a number of places, including Oregon. Also a lot of smaller local news agencies are very much in the pocket of the people who helped to fund them, which is some of the people funding the attempt to repeal. So if one of the better articles that has been written recently was in The New Yorker. You think it's great? Yeah, there's a, I'm pulling it up right now. There's a great New Yorker piece, A New Drug War in Oregon, that was published just this month, probably the best major outlet piece I've seen on it.

And yeah, it talks a lot about the stabbing wagon, which is a kind of independent, although they've now, should at some point theoretically be getting a significant amount of funding, but like they provide drug users not just with naloxone or Narcan, but with safe use materials like syringes and stuff that are clean. This is down in the south of Oregon in a place called Medford, which has both one of Oregon's worst drug problems and also is a much more conservative area. So obviously these people are very controversial.

And I will say, one of the things this article does well is they get at, even within people who are supportive of 110 110 the conflict between kind of traditional addiction recovery resources and organizations and some of these new often these new organizations are either started by or run by people who have or do currently deal with addiction. And I think covering that conflict is valuable. There's some stuff that frustrates me about it. And this is I think there's a lot of negativity towards stab and wag and its founder that's unfair. I also think some of the things that she has said about traditional addiction recovery resources are very unfair from her point of view. And I think when I look at the problem, the only comprehensive solution is

multiple options for different kinds of people. Because I know a lot of people who have dealt with addiction and recovered, and no two of them did it the same way. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, I think that, you know, both of those are necessary, right? Harm, what I always say is that the beauty of harm reduction is that not only does it ensure that somebody survives long enough to make it to recovery, but it also builds a relationship with that person. It builds a relationship of trust so that you can have a conversation about the need for recovery. As a public defender, I don't get the benefit of the prosecutor or the court or probation to wield power and to make my client do what they should do because I'm

holding power over them. I have to build trust. I have to have a relationship of trust with them and I have to find out what motivates that individual and try to utilize that to encourage positive steps. And that's true of our case managers and social workers that work with us. And that's what the system doesn't have, right? The system is just trying to use the threat of incarceration in order to get individuals who are not ready for recovery to engage in recovery. And that's detrimental. I mean, we need both harm reduction and we need traditional treatment. We need culturally competent treatment, you know, there needs to be wraparound services. And that's one of my concerns here is that, you know, we know that the criminal legal system didn't work. When 110 passed, we had a drug court that dealt with low level possession.

And its graduation rate was around 17%. Yeah. So 17% of people, and graduation meant 90 days of sobriety. And that was 17% of people. That other 83%, if they fail out of program, again, the only tool the system has is jail. And so all they did was did not hook them up with services and instead eventually punish them for not being ready for treatment. And that is not how we get people into recovery.

Yeah. I think that that's a really good point. When I talk about both how people can help if a loved one is starting to deal with drug addiction and if someone you love is getting into a cult or getting pulled into conspiracy theories, it's actually the same advice. I had a friend come to me recently because a loved one of theirs was starting to kind of talk about some really concerning conspiracy theory stuff, right? And they were like, what do I say against this? How do I argue against it? And my answer was like, well, you don't really, you make it clear like, hey, I don't really believe this. I don't find this compelling. But like, you know, I love you and I'm always here to listen if you want to talk about this kind of stuff or you want to talk about whatever. And that is the same if someone's starting to get pulled into a cult or if they're dealing with

drugs. Because as you noted, if they have a pathway out, and they're not going to have to, it's not this kind of thing where you've been yelling at them and then they have to come to you with their head tail between their legs and like, I was wrong, I fucked up. That's a barrier. If like, well, this, this person cares about me and is always going to be like willing to, you know, talk with me like no matter what, well, then that's less of a barrier than you're not, you haven't built a wall that they have to get through. They can just come to you when they're like, I need help. Exactly. I mean, it's based in relationships. And I mean, that's one of the issues, right? Is that too many people, not just in Portland, but everywhere, see individuals on the street

and assume the worst and see them as the other. They don't see them as part of the community. And so they're more than fine with a system locking them up because of their addiction. And, you know, we all need to recognize that, you know, that falling into that lifestyle, you know, whether it is because of, you know, where you were raised, how you were raised, you know, whether you got addicted to pills because your doctor prescribed them. There's a lot of reason. Whether you had childhood trauma, there's a lot of reasons why people get an addiction. And to simply assume that somebody

because they're addicted to drugs is a criminal, a bad person, it is making them the other. And it's so much easier to be punitive when you're just seeing that person them the other. And it's so much easier to be punitive when you're just seeing that person as the other. Yeah. And I did want to note, if people are looking for resources online, both about 110 and how they can help in the fight

to stop it from getting repealed, you can go to HJRA, the Health Justice Recovery Alliance. They have, you can sign up to get information from them. They have community resources. They have updates on what's going on. I think you can find through them a way to automatically send a form message to your elected leaders. So just Google Health Justice Recovery Alliance Oregon

or Health Justice Recovery Alliance 110, and that will take you there. They've got a lot of stuff collected there, both resources if you're having arguments with people about this and information on how you can help at least try to do something. Yeah and I will say also the ACLU has been very active in this as well and you know they have an action plan on their website that you know tells you some of the things that you can do in this. And like I said, I think obviously contacting your legislators, we haven't even started the legislative session yet.

And so there is still room to change this and to at least make it less bad, which these days sometimes it feels like less bad is the goal that we need to strive for. It's harm reduction again. Exactly. That's how I tend to look at the legislative side of things. Well, everybody, that's going to do it for us here at It Could Happen here. Grant, thank you so much. Should you have anything you wanted to plug or direct listeners towards before we roll out here? I mean, I think again, it's just, you know, go to the ACLU website, go to HJRA's website, get involved. But more than just that, no matter what happens during this legislative session, you know, remember that all these folks

on the street are people and they need assistance and, you know, and they need assistance and you know and they they need help and continue or consider you know contributing to a recovery organization or volunteering to go out into the community you know if you have lived experience with addiction consider becoming a peer it is so impactful to have individuals who have struggled with substance use go out in so impactful to have individuals who have struggled with substance use go out in the community and engage individuals who are currently struggling with it. And that is the best trust building. That is the best way to get people into recovery, not through handcuffs and jails.

Thank you very much, Grant. I couldn't agree more. All right, everybody, that's it for us today. We'll be back tomorrow with more of it happening here. Haley Wood or Stealing Superman. I'm hosting a new podcast and we're calling it very special episodes. One week, we'll be on the case with special agents from NASA as they crack down on black market moon rocks. H. Ross prose on the other side and he goes, hello, Joe, how can I help you? I said, Mr. Perot, what we need is $5 million

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And Cheryl Hines. Mike, why can't you just lighten up and have a good time? And Richard Lewis. How am I going to tell him I'm going to leave now? Can you do it on the phone? Do you have to do it in person? What's the deal? Not just on cable.

You have to go in and see human beings help you. And then we're going to have behind the scenes information. Tidbits. Yes, tidbits is a great word. Anyway, we're both a wealth of knowledge about this show because we've been doing it for 23 years so subscribe now and you could listen to the history of cover enthusiasm on I heart radio app Apple podcast or

wherever you happen toicky's podcasts. You've been with me for season one and two, and now I'm back with season three. Yeah! Woo! I am so excited, you guys. Get ready for all new episodes where I'll be dishing out honest advice and discussing important topics like relationships, women's health, and spirituality. For a long time, I was afraid of falling in love.

So I had to, and this is a mantra of mine or an affirmation every morning where I tell myself, it is safe for me to love and to be loved. I've heard this a lot that people think that I'm conceited, that I'm a mamona. And a mamona means that you just think you're better than everyone else. I don't know if it's because of how I act in my videos

sometimes, I'm like, I'm a baddie, I don't know what it is, but I'm chill. It's Chikis and Chill, hello. Listen to Chikis and Chill and Dear Chikis as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. Now, last week I spent a few days in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Showcase. Most of the time at the convention I was just walking around the show floor looking at various

new types of surveillance equipment, AI products and various other bullshit that was being pedaled to the many, many industry attendees of CES. But I was also able to go to a few panels. Now, panels are really interesting because you get to hear people who are working inside industries talk about stuff that they don't usually really publicly talk about very much. And on the first day of the convention, I went to a panel about drone technology. Half of the panel was about how Walmart is launching new delivery drones in Dallas, Texas. The other half was about police drones.

And that's what we're going to be talking about here today. How the police are using drones, why they're using drones, and how you can probably expect to be seeing a lot more drones up in the sky, piloted by either an AI or a police officer. So let's get started. Chula Vista is the southernmost kind of medium-sized city in California, with a population of 278,000 people. Chula Vista has a police force of 289 sworn officers, as well as 120 civilian employees. On top of their nearly 300 officers, they operate a drone fleet 10 hours a day,

seven days a week, launching high-def camera-mounted drones from four locations throughout their small city. I'm going to quote from an article from the MIT Technology Review, which did a deep dive onto Chula Vista's police drones back in February of 2023. Quote, Chula Vista uses these drones to extend the power of its workforce in a number of ways. For example, if only one officer is available when two calls come in, one for an armed suspect and another for shoplifting,

an officer will respond to the first one. But now, CVPD's public information officer, Sergeant Anthony Molina, says that dispatchers can send a drone to surreptitiously trail the suspected shoplifter, unquote. And this really gets at the heart of how these drones are gonna get used. They exist to funnel more people

into the criminal justice system. Instead of having to choose between two calls, one of which actually could relate to saving someone's life, the other just a petty crime. Now the police can easily follow someone doing a petty crime while responding to other calls and eventually catch up. It's a way to just expand the amount of people that can be arrested and thrown into jail.

Nowadays, drones are pretty common tools for police. Over 1,500 departments currently use drones. Usually for special occasions though, like search and rescue, crime scene documentation, protest surveillance, and sometimes tracking suspects. But at the moment, only about a dozen police departments regularly dispatch drones in response to 911 calls. The first of which was Chula Vista PD, who launched their quote, drone as first

responder program back in 2018. With the goal of having an unmanned aerial system or drone be proactively deployed before an officer is on scene. Now we'll hear from Chief Roxana Kennedy of the Chula Vista Police Department talking on the drone technology panel at CES. We are seven miles from the Mexico border and we are the second largest city in San Diego County. We have about 290 officers and we serve a community of about 300,000 but because of the close proximity to the border we have a lot of people that travel back and forth. We have a drone program that I'm awfully proud of and we are responding proactively to calls for service in our community and so we have

drone station from four different locations throughout our city. We have pilots in command that are on the rooftop. And then we have the operation center where we have sworn officers that are part 107 pilots that fly the drones. So we are responding now to calls for service. On average, an officer on scene, a drone pilot on scene that's sharing information with our officers, live streaming that information

on our cell phones or in our computers, they're receiving information about the call within 90 seconds on average. And so what it's doing for us in Chulmista and for our community is we are providing information rapidly, real-time information to officers so that they can make better decisions so that everyone goes home safely. We say the community safer, the officers are safer and the subjects that we encounter are safer. So we're awfully proud of what we're doing. The way police are able to deploy drones

used to be a lot more limited. The use of drones is regulated by the FFA, the Federal Aviation Administration. In most cases, the FFA requires that both hobbyists and police departments only fly drones within the operator's own line of sight. But starting back in 2019, agencies and vendors could start applying for a Beyond Visual Line of Sight or BevLoss Waiver from the FFA to fly drones remotely, allowing for much longer

flights in restricted airspace. Chula Vista PD was the first department to get a bevelos waiver. The MIT Tech Review estimated last year that roughly 225 more departments now have one as well. Another thing that I always talk about because I think it's critical is the concept of why we're using drones, what the benefit is to the community with the use of our drones. And I truly believe that when my officers can pick up their cell phone,

before they even respond to the call, and they can look and see the scene, what's happening, where the individual is, if the person's pacing in the middle of the park, there are no children around, and there's nobody that's within the reach of this individual harming, you might not have to rush into that scene so quickly. Officers can de-escalate, make better decisions, and I mean, this is just a game changer for law enforcement. And right now, you know, we were the first agency to be involved in the integrated pilot

program with the FAA. We're very proud of that, that they trusted us enough for us to be the organization that brought forward all these ideas that are now being utilized in law enforcement. Now, I've watched a lot of videos of police talking about why they're using drones, of drone training companies, talking about why police're using drones of drone training companies talking about why police drones are so important. In one video on their website, this guy from Skyfire Consulting was talking about how police may not have had to kill Tamir Rice if they simply had a drone watching beforehand so they could see that it was a toy gun, which is a ridiculous thing to say,

because in the 911 call that jump started this entire police interaction, it was expressed that the caller thought the gun was probably a toy. And this notion that is simply if police have more ability to surveil, they'll be able to respond safer and apply less deadly force, I think is a pretty suspect premise. Now the effectiveness of drone technology in law enforcement is challenging to verify and quantify. The MIT Tech Review cannot find any third-party studies showing that drones reduce crime, even after interviewing CVPD officers as well as drone vendors and researchers.

Quote, nor could anyone provide statistics on how many additional arrests or convictions came from using drone technology. I was able to find some data on CVPD's website, talking about how many drone initiated interactions resulted in arrests, but quantifying additional arrests seems to be a little challenging.

Now, if you look at Chula Vista PD's own drone response stats, the vast majority of deployments I estimate around 70% are for what the Director of Investigations for the Privacy Rights Group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation refers to as quote, crimes of poverty, unquote, which he believes will be the target of most drone policing as opposed to violent crime. Nearly 30% of Chula Vista's drone deployments are for what's categorized as disturbances. Almost 15% are for psychological evaluations, 10% are for quote, check the area and information, over 7% are for welfare checks, 6.5% is for quote, unknown problem, and over 6% is for suspicious person, and another 6% for traffic accidents.

Now some drone deployments do result in patrol units not having to be dispatched, but CVPD also says that drones have assisted in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not sure if having a drone following someone around is the best thing for a 5150 psychovaluation. The presence of a police officer doesn't always make those situations better either, but I don't see having a drone be a really calming presence if you think someone needs mental help. Funding a whole fleet of heavy-duty surveillance drones and paying dedicated operators costs money.

Now it's unclear to me how many drones Trula Vista PD currently has, and on their website they list 10 different drone models currently being in their fleet, most of them really expensive DJI drones like the DJI Matress, the DJI Inspire, the DJI Phantom, the DJI Maverick, as well as drones from a few other random companies. But nevertheless, Chief Kennedy is very grateful for their local police foundation for heading up the funding for their DFR drone first responder program. Let's hear from her. I don't know if anyone in here is in law enforcement, but many agencies use drones. And there are all different types of drones that are available.

I call them reactive drones or ones that are like the tactical drones that you can use to go in on a hostage situation or a missing person to check in the canyon areas or interior drones. We have drones that go underneath beds, go inside addicts, all types of different drones. And many organizations have drones like that. But a DFR drone is very unique and different because these drones are flying, as you can imagine, 18,000 missions. It puts a lot of wear and tear on them.

So, but that is one of the biggest challenges beyond the fact of funding. So we don't have huge budgets that are allotted for drone programs. And so we've had to be very, very creative at our police department. And we were very blessed to have a police foundation that has taken on the responsibility to help us really start our drone program and continue it going forward. So funding is always going to be a challenge.

And depending upon the drone that you use, there are some drones that you can't use for asset seizure. Funding nor can you get grants for, because sometimes when it comes to foreign-made drones, there are many challenges as well. So you have to think of that. And then we deal with legislation right now. That's the new challenge that we all have.

We had to fight some battles. I'm like I said, I'm agnostic. I want to use what's the best drone out there and protect the information. And we do that with encrypted software programs that are on private servers. But you'll see that there's a lot of discussion about drones and what drones we should be using right now." We'll get back to the chief's offhanded mention of legal battles in a bit here, but Chula Vista's budgetary situation may not be as dire as the chief makes it out to be. On top of their current $55 million operating budget, back in 2020, the La Prensa newspaper revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly been getting hundreds of millions of dollars in high-tech police

equipment, including armored vehicles, facial recognition and phone-breaking software, license plate readers, drones, riot gear, among other miscellaneous technology, as a part of a DHS grant program due to their close proximity to the US-Mexico border. Chula Vista was one such department, and as of 2020, so four years ago, they had already received over $1 million in grant funds from this DHS program titled the quote, Urban Area Security Initiative. Considering Chief Kennedy's budgetary concerns, drones actually have a lot of upsides financially,

as they are often a lot cheaper than alternative surveillance methods, as well as being relatively easy to deploy remotely, either with a joystick or just by clicking a point on a map from a comfy office building. Issues around this ease of use was pointed out by Dave Moss, the director of investigations for the Privacy Rights Group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, up until the last, like, five to 10 years, there was this unspoken check and balance on law enforcement

power. Money. You cannot have a police officer standing on every corner of every street. You can't have a helicopter flying 24-7 because of fuel and insurance is really expensive. But with all these new technologies, we don't have that check and balance anymore. That's just going to result in more people being pulled through the criminal justice system." My officers constantly are on the air now. Is UAS one available? Is UAS one available? Because it's giving them more information. Think about the fact that you can look at your cell phone. I can be anywhere in the world and I can look at it. It lets me know whenever

there's a drunk life and I can walk. I can have visual awareness, aerial overplay of what's happening in my community no matter where I am." Advancements in technology are leading to further normalization of police surveillance. Ten years ago, would people react to news of a 24-hour police drone program the same way they would now? What was once the threat of Big Brother has since become a very sought-after and fetishized nanny state. In the V for Veneta graphic novel, anarchist writer Alan Moore imagined a fascist Britain characterized by surveillance cameras around every corner. And now cities around the

country are setting up their own street-mounted cameras linked to private security cameras and ring doorbell cameras to create a network of live coverage around a whole city which is instantly accessible to police. The more widespread consumer adoption of new technologies like small camera mounted drones and doorbell cameras, the more acceptable it seems for police to add such technology to their arsenal of surveillance tools. It almost becomes expected. Tulavista PD has routinely declined to answer why their drones are always recording both to and from the scene, and the department has put in a lot of effort into managing the backlash against their expanding drone program.

And I'll tell you one thing, even some of the activists, their expanding drone program. It's on, it's off, it is immediately, it is recording because that's the information gatherer for us. As that drone responds, the camera is already going almost three miles down the road to where the scene is and giving us vital information as the officers are responding. But one of the criticism was, well on the way back, is your drone just going in my backyard? What if we're smoking marijuana in our backyard?

And I said, you're in California, does it really matter if I wait? We'll let that one go, right? But we said, okay, we gave your concern. And so what we did was we worked with the software company that we work with and they created an automatic so that as a drone returns, it automatically tilts to the horizon.

So we're not recording anything. If another call came out, we could immediately go back in and apply it for us and it will share that information later on. But the goal is to listen to your community as well. Chief Kennedy's claim here is difficult to back up because CVPD have refused to show the public any of the drone footage they routinely collect. But if we take the chief at her word here anyway, she admits that the drone goes back to recording at street level as soon as there's another 911 call as they record everything

on the way to a scene. And the way she phrases this whole tilt feature is quite misleading because the camera never actually stops recording. She just claims that it tilts slightly upwards in between 911 calls. But it's still capturing footage up to three miles away the entire time it's in the air. Police in Chulibista have flown over 18,000 missions with their drones. That's a lot of footage. When talking about the privacy concerns had by some residents of Chula Vista, Chief Kennedy really emphasized how much her and the department really care about listening to community feedback and how data transparency is so important to CVPD.

Community engagement is essential, especially in law enforcement because there are so many challenges when it comes to misinformation that's out there. And whenever you're a part of what's deemed as a government, everyone thinks that you have some ulterior motive when you're involved with any type of technology. And so we have worked really hard to build very strong relationships with every aspect of our community. So it was about in 2015 when we started talking about the concept and the possibility of drones.

And I laughed and jammed and said, George Jetson, because that's my story that I used to and I love it. Because I made fun of my guys when they said that we want to fly drones. I said, oh, come on, what are we gonna be? George Jetson the blind round the cars and then I saw today they talked about a blind car. So it happens.

Right over here. It happens, all right. And so with the community, we started having these conversations. We created a working group. We started doing community forums. We started asking the community about what would you think if we were able

to do something like this? We even went to some of the organizations that may not always be so supportive of these types of groups. We worked with the ACLU and asked for their input on our policy. So before we ever flew a drone, we called it the crawl, walk, run phase. We're still in the very end of crawl. We're not into walk yet and we've been doing it again also for five years. So you have to make certain that you're transparent and we've provided all types of information that are available if you go to children. All you have to put in is children's drones and it'll come up with us. And you can look at all the things

that we do, all the information that we share, the flight maps that we share. I mean, it's just super important to have those community forums. Every year we do a community forum twice a year where we ask for input from our community. Later on in the panel, Chief Kennedy said that CVPD is quote unquote, extremely transparent about their flight data and quote unquote, have nothing to hide relating to their use of surveillance drones. Which is a curious claim considering the fact that CVPD has historically kept all drone footage hidden from the public and has fought in court to do so. Despite the chief's emphasis on the police's commitment to transparency

and the importance of listening to community feedback, even going as far as to consult the ACLU when developing their drone program. For years now, the Chula Vista Police Department has denied all FOIA and public records requests for any drone footage. In response, Arturo Castanares, a Chula Vista resident and owner of the local bilingual newspaper La Prensa, filed a lawsuit against the city.

CVPD argued that all drone footage should be categorically exempt from the public records requests on the basis that the footage could be used for a future investigation. Just last December, only a few weeks before CES, the California Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that this blanket exemption is invalid and that not all drone first responder footage could be classified as part of a pending or ongoing criminal investigation, pointing to examples such as 911 calls about a roaming mountain lion or a stranded motorist. And police were not happy about this ruling. I'll talk about their reaction at the end of the episode. But controlling the narrative about the drone first responder program has been of the utmost importance to Trula Vista police

as the chief herself expressed at the panel. And we're real good about telling our story. If you don't tell your own story and law enforcement, other people will tell it for you and it might not be the right story. So we've gotten a really good at sharing on our social media and through YouTube channels and everything, success stories of what we're doing.

That is quite the claim there. To paraphrase the Electronic Frontier Foundation, without public access to their drone footage, it makes it very difficult to assess how much privacy you have in Chula Vista and whether police are even following their own rules about when and whether they record sensitive places, like people's homes, backyards, or public protests.

And that's why this recent ruling and the legal precedent it sets is a huge win for actual transparency, and marks the first step towards the public, finally getting a look at how these drones are being used in Chula Vista. With drone first responder programs spreading to police departments across the country, modeled after the one in Trula Vista, combined with the increasing presence of stationary street-level cameras, the ability for police to be watching everywhere without the need for on-the-ground officers creates what the EFF refers to as, quote, a fundamental change in strategy, with police responding to a much, much larger number

of situations with drones, resulting in pervasive, if not persistent surveillance of communities." Speaking of persistent surveillance, near the end of the panel, the chief announced that Chulavista PD is planning to expand their 10-hour day drone first responder program to a constant 24 hour a day drone surveillance program. More than doubling the department's capacity to have eyes in the sky would mean a lot more work hours for drone operators as well as a large increase in the amount of video files being stored indefinitely. But Chief Kennedy claimed that they're looking into offsetting costs by replacing some of

the drone piloting team with AI-assisted piloting and autonomous devices. I assume you're spending a lot of time telling others about the program in addition to using drones, but beyond that, what's it like? Well, my hope is that we'll be moving towards 24-hour operations. Right now, we're from sunrise to sunset. We go until close to 10 o'clock at night, which goes a little bit beyond that. And then one of the challenges, and I know you're only getting like a little piece of the information about exactly how we're doing this, but from the four different locations that we fly on each of the rooftops, we have what's called the piloting command. And that piloting command is contracted through a company, and they just have visual awareness of the sky,

and they work in coordination with our drone pilot. That's inside our operations center. But that's a huge expense for us to pay. We believe for each site right now with the operations that we have we pay about $100,000 per year. So that's $400,000 for four locations beyond all the other processes here. So it can get expensive. My hope is that, and we keep hearing about it,

we've seen some of the testing, and we've been testing it as well in our area, or what's called drum in the box. Or there's some of the systems that are out there right now that organizations are using that are autonomous. And so we're getting there, but we're not quite there because it's very different when you're dealing with flying over people and you're flying into areas where the drone was to drop out the sky and harm

people in our community. That could create tremendous challenges for us. So we're very, as I mentioned, a crawl phase. So to explain how these AI autonomous drones would work, it's essentially this box about the size of a truck bed that can either be mounted in like a police pickup truck or be stored on various rooftops around the city. And someone just needs to point at a place on a map and the drone will fly and pilot itself around obstacles and basically circle around an area to do surveillance. And you can call it back when you're done. This would require a whole bunch of drones to just be launching and being piloted by

themselves. You wouldn't have to train random police officers to become FAA licensed pilots and you could just have the whole thing in the box like it's called a drone in the box. And these are only going to become more common and cheaper. Imagine having 10 of these throw to city, launching from like 10 different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves, constantly going around in communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates linked to 911 calls, creating a whole wealth of footage instantly available to police, live streamed from the air. Matt Sloan, the founder of Skyfire Consulting,

a company here in Atlanta that trains law enforcement agencies on the use of drones and DFR programs, thinks that we'll start seeing autonomous deployment of police drones within the next year or two, as police budgets increase and become allocated for unmanned aerial systems. He referred to the state of drone use by police as, quote, rapidly escalating.

Chula Vista likes to market itself as a pioneer of the smart city movement, which consequently makes them able to receive a whole bunch of grant funding. Now, the idea of the smart city is built around having a massive amount of data to automate certain city services. So for this idea to work, there needs to be a way to collect that data, and these drones are a major part of that. The website for the City of Chula Vista also lists projects like electronic transportation, adaptive traffic signals, an app for non-emergency city services as well as quote crime mapping and police dispatch modernization unquote as also being smart city initiatives. We have what's called live 911 one and that

allows my officers to hear incoming 911 calls before dispatch even puts it into the system they can hear what's going on there. And that is tremendously invaluable to them. We have so many different layers of technology that have really showcased the value. Live 911 is a new piece of software that allows patrol officers to listen to live stream to 911 calls directly and pinpoints the location of the caller via GPS.

Now I don't even have time to get into the many reasons that this could be a bad idea, but simply put, police do not need to respond to every call that goes into 911, let alone be giving random cops this ability to self-dispatch on their own. It just seems like that could have many, many consequences. But anyway, back to drones. According to a 2020 article in the newspaper La Prensa, cities in San Diego County like Chula Vista have received equipment such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance, pole cameras, license plate readers, and cell phone cracking technology used to circumvent

passwords from the Urban Area Security Initiative DHS Grant Program. A lot of these technologies have use in the smart city, idyllic plan for data collection to automate city services. After the drone panel was over and I was walking around the show floor at CES, I couldn't help but notice all of the smart cameras and AI image recognition systems being advertised for law enforcement applications. Software that can almost instantaneously

scan through a wealth of footage and track people's movements, run facial recognition, and identify every article of clothing. Versions of this type of software are already in use by many police departments, and they will only get better, cheaper, and more common. In effect, what this does is remove a lot of the detective legwork. Instead of having to manually map someone's movements and track down what niche Etsy shirt someone's wearing, these AI systems can now do this all automatically.

To quote the MIT Tech Review article on CVPD's DFR drone program, quote, as the technology continues to spread, privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of what happens when drones are combined with licensed plate readers, networks of fixed cameras, and new real-time command centers

that digest and sort through video evidence. This digital dragnet could dramatically expand surveillance capabilities and lead to even more police interactions with demographics that have historically suffered from over-policing." Pedro Rios, a human rights advocate with the American Friends Service Committee and a member of Chula Vista's Community Tech Council

was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, people in the community have no awareness of what images are captured, how the footage is retained, and who has access. It's a big red flag for a city that says it's at the forefront of the smart city movement, unquote. These drones, they're revolutionizing the world. You, I mean, people who are not taking drones seriously right now will be left behind. We have flown 18,150 missions. You can go on our webpage, you can see the flight data. We're extremely transparent. We share all that with our community.

We have nothing to hide. We extremely transparent about the use of their camera-mounted drones, I wonder why they've spent years in court fighting to keep every second of drone footage from being seen by the public. Luckily, after Chief Kennedy talked for like 30 minutes about how much they care about community engagement and how transparent they are with their flight data, I was able to ask the chief how their commitment to transparency

relates to the recent lawsuit she just lost over hiding drone footage. And I also threw in a question about drones at protests. Let's take a listen. Yeah, a question for the chief. So I also threw in a question about drones at protests. Let's take a listen. Yeah, a question for the chief. So I know you talked about the importance of like listening to the community and community engagement. And I'm not sure this is the case for your department, but other departments who've kind of followed suit for your example have been using drones to like surveil First Amendment activity stuff. And I know you recently

lost a court case regarding the availability of drone footage. So I'm curious about kind of what the rationale for that footage is and how that plays into this idea of trying to be transparent with the community for how these drones are being used. It's, that's gonna be a little bit difficult for me to answer because the court case is still moving forward. It's an active case.

If you read it, we didn't lose the case. It was recommended go to a lower court to go back for some clarification under three categories. Now, this is either a straight up lie or a huge cope and a gross mischaracterization. But more on that in a sec. I think it's really important, as I mentioned, there are ethics involved in the ethical responsibility

that you have as a law enforcement agency is super important. So how you utilize your drones and how you do outreach with your community is fundamentally important. And so we don't use our drones for, if there was a protest, we would not use our drones. If there was, if it turned into a riot, 100%. So if people were out there and they have the ability to speak freely, to share their concerns,

and it's in opposition, our goal is to make sure that we keep it safe for all parties involved on either side. So my hope is that other people look at it the same way that we do, and hopefully I've been able to answer it as much as I believe me. I'm dying to give you more, but I can't. Okay? Thank you for those questions.

About folks who are out of time, maybe there could be questions after the session. So yeah, there were no more questions after mine. I kind of shut down that possibility. Anyway, okay. So first of all, the line between a protest and a riot is meaningless. Police can declare a riot for any reason they see fit, including people being in a road marching.

I've seen this happen dozens of times, nearly hundreds of times actually. So just moving on from that immediately, let's go back to the court case. The city of Chula Vista did lose the argument that they were trying to make. They did lose the case. The 4th District Court of Appeals ruled that claiming exemption from the Public Records Act was unlawful and sent the case back to trial court to hammer out the details of how much footage is subject to public disclosure and figure out a process for standardizing the release of the footage.

Now the same day I attended this panel in Las Vegas, January 9th, the city of Chula Vista requested an appeal to the California Supreme Court to prevent the release of their aerial video footage. There is a 60-day waiting period where the High Court will decide whether or not to take the case. And if they decline, finally it will go back to trial court to decide on the process of how selected drone footage shall be made publicly available.

The police are now currently claiming that making DFR footage adhered to the Public Records Act would violate the privacy of Chula Vista residents captured in the videos, which perhaps demonstrates that the aerial videos should have never been captured in the videos, which perhaps demonstrates that the aerial videos should have never been captured in the first place. I'm going to read a press release from the city's communication manager, quote, The city declined to provide the copies because doing so might have violated individual privacy

rights. The city would have to manually review and redact every video recording to protect information considered personal, such as the images of faces, license plates, backyards, and more." So the city is both trying to argue that having to manually review each requested file to determine if the video in question is related to a pending investigation, as well as redacting personal information captured on camera would be way too costly and time-consuming. City officials claim that reviewing and redacting videos from one month to obscure faces, license plates, and backyards would take a full-time employee around 230 days. I'm going to read a little bit more from the city's recent statement. Quote, while the city takes very seriously its obligation

to provide the public access to public records, the city is concerned that the Court of Appeals opinion may compromise significant privacy concerns of members of the public in this case or in future requests, unquote. Somehow, the city is missing the point that this is the very reason the drone footage is being requested to learn the actual nature of this highly influential drone first responder program that's being adopted across the country. If the existence of this footage is such a massive privacy violation, that implies that the recording of said footage itself implicitly violates people's privacy.

And the harder police fight to hide their sweeping collection of aerial footage, all the more suspicious this entire program seems. So that is what I have to say about Chula Vista's drone first responder program. In about a month and a half, the Supreme Court of California will make their decision on whether or not they're going to hear this case. If they decline, then the precedent will be set statewide against this exemption of the Public Records Act by hiding drone footage. So that will be really cool. And then hopefully within the next year, we'll finally be able to see what some of this footage actually looks like, how good their cameras are, how much they can zoom in all of the

Details of how much of the city they're capturing all this kind of stuff How often the drones are in the air all of those types of things that it will be Easier to highlight once we can actually take a look at the footage and I assume that Going through and releasing requested files for one month will probably end up not taking 230 days. But I do know how the police love to love to stretch out these public records requests for as long as they can. As the request that this lawsuit stems from, dates all the way back to April of 2021. So hopefully, hopefully more than three years later,

we'll finally get a look. Special thanks to LaPrenza for starting this lawsuit and doing all of the hard work to actually force the police to be transparent. And if you want to read more, I'd recommend checking out their website to LaPrenza.org, as well as the MIT Tech Review piece, which provided some really, really useful information to fill in the gaps between my own research. So yeah, thank you for listening to It Could Happen Here. It certainly could happen here in terms of seeing more of these little fuckers flying around in the air. production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly, at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

Thanks for listening. Hello, this is Suzie Esmond and Jeff Garland. I'm here. And we are the hosts of the history of Curb Your Enthusiasm podcast. Now we're gonna be rewatching and talking about every single episode and we're gonna break it down and give behind the scenes knowledge that a lot of people don't know and we're gonna be joined by special guests,

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