Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 119

Episode Date: February 24, 2024

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binge worthy podcasts and exclusive Audible Originals. There's more to imagine when you listen. Try Audible for free when you sign up at Audible.com. What if I told you fairy tales had a darker side? He locked her in this dungeon. He ordered her to do this impossible thing. He threatened to kill her multiple times. That's one where Red and Grandma are just dead. She takes the frog and with all her might throws him against the wall.

Join me Miranda Hawkins, as we step into the twisted world of the Brothers Grimm. Listen to the deep dark woods on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show, Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend John Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines,

exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is the second term we can all get behind. Listen to the Daily Show, Ears Edition on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Call zone media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads

package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to Ika Dappen here, a podcast about things falling apart and putting it back together again. I'm Mia Wong. I'm with Garrison. And it is my singular honor and pleasure to introduce our guest, Dr. Julia Serrano. She is the author of many books, including Excluded, Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, Sexed Up, How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Flight Back, Outspoken, A Decade of Transgender Activism and Transfeminism, and Most Famously Whipping Girl, A New Edition

of Which is Coming Out in March. Dr. Serrano, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. I'm really, really, really happy you can join us. So, okay, Whippin' Girl, I think, is really one of quietly the most influential books of the 21st century to the extent that in kind of classic trans woman fashion,

I don't think people realize that the ideas that it introduced have an origin. So for people who haven't read the book and you should, this book is great, I guarantee you have seen its influence. If you've ever heard someone who's not trans referred to as cis, that's from this book. The concept of misgendering is also from this book. The concept of misgendering is also from this book, the word transmissogyny, like also from this book. And this, I think, gets at something from the 2015 second edition preface that you wrote, which is something I've been wondering about is, what is it like to sort of experience

writing a book and have it just like ripple across society like this? Yeah, it's uh, I was very much hoping and you know, as I was writing it, I was hoping that I thought that it would resonate with a lot of trans female and trans feminine people. And I hope trans communities more generally. And the book, this is something that a lot of times people who pick up the book now in like the 2020s don't necessarily realize is that nobody was reading anything about trans people outside of feminists and LGBTQ plus communities. And so I was basically just speaking to those groups. And I thought it would resonate with some people, but yeah, definitely it kind of went out into the world and did a bunch of stuff that I wasn't necessarily expecting.

And I'm very glad that the book has kind of touched a lot of people's lives and changed, you know, kind of societal understanding and quote unquote discourses about trans people. So yeah. It must be kind of bizarre, like being 20 years ago, writing about, you know, like a niche term like cis, and now the richest man in the world thinks it's like the most evil word. Yeah. It's quite bizarre.

And I do want to definitely kind of clear this up and I kind of make this clear in the preface. So I didn't invent like cis versus trans, like A, that's like a prefix that has existed a long time. And I've since seen other people like point out, oh, this person was using it in 1990 something or some German writer like coined cisvestism or something

like back a million years ago. So what I will say is that when I put out the book, I was inspired by Emi Koyama who was and is an awesome activist, intersex activist who's written a lot of really influential, trans related essays over the years. And it was from her blog post. That was the first time I saw

cis and trans and the idea of cis-sexism. And at the time, it was while I was writing the book and it really, I was like, oh my god, this is kind of the overall idea. I was talking about all these different facets of basically double standards between trans and non-trans people. And so I kind of grabbed onto it and I was really worried about it actually because almost nobody was using those terms. It was very niche at the time. And so the book popularized that language. And so now it is kind of funny every once in a while seeing, yes, overreactions by cis people to the idea of cis being a slur or whatever. So, yeah.

And so, yeah, so that's definitely something that is kind of is the one thing I, one thing I did coin in the book that has kind of also taken a life on its own is trans misogyny. So that is something that kind of originated with this book and particularly a chap book that I wrote in 2005 that some of those essays became chapters for the book. And yeah, and so there are other ideas that kind of are out there. Like I think it was one of the first, I think it was the first book to talk about like the idea of cis privilege. I miss gendering as an idea was out there, but I kind of dove into it a little bit deeper. So yeah, so there are definitely things I was doing

at the time that I didn't know whether they'd be to abstract or how they'd be taken up. And so yes, it's been very interesting. Yeah, I wanted to talk about misgendering a bit because I think it's become this word that just means not saying someone's pronouns correctly. And I think that's it. At the very best,

like an incredibly reductionist and simplified version of the analysis that you were presenting. So I guess I have two questions here. One, can you briefly sort of talk about what you were trying to get at when you sort of did your analysis of the process of gendering? And two, what do you think about the way

that it's kind of become flattened into this? I don't know, kind of weirdly narrow thing in modern discourse? Sure. And a lot of the misgendering definitely dovetails with the idea of passing. And a lot of my kind of diving into it in a particular way came from critiques that I had and other trans people had as well. But I put them together in a particularly in the dismantling, I think it's dismantling the sexual privilege chapter, where I go through all these steps that lead to misgendering. Because I think people talk about trans people passing and also the people talk about other marginalized groups passing is whatever dominant majority group. The term obviously had long been used

with regards to people of color passing as white in white racist US and other societies. So it's an old term and a big problem with it is that it makes it sound like we're doing something active, that trans people are actively trying to deceive other people with huge scare quotes around the word deceive. And I really wanted to highlight to people that actually all of us very unconsciously and very compulsively gender every single person we meet. Or at least that's how we're socialized to be. And you can work towards overcoming that. But I wanted to really highlight the fact that we see people, we automatically gender them. And that puts people

who do not quite who your presumptions are wrong about. It puts us in difficult situations. It's a double bind where do you reveal what you supposedly really are or do you just allow people to read you that way? And it works out very differently, for instance, between trans and, say, cis gay people. Because when cis gay people talk about passing as straight, their passing is something that they know that they are not. Whereas for a lot of trans people, people read me as a woman and I understand myself to be a woman. It's a very different

dynamic because it's not like I'm not hiding anything. But people are presuming, what I'm really passing as is I'm passing as cisgender, and people are assuming I'm cisgender when the trans is the thing that I might need to or feel like I need to clear up or other people might put pressure on me to either tell them that I'm trans or be accused of deceiving them. So that's a little bit of kind of how I was approaching it when I started working on that idea and really stressing the idea of you can't understand misgendering unless you understand

that we make assumptions all the time, we gender people very actively. And so trans people are often just reacting to that and dealing with that double bind. Yeah. And this is something that I think is interestingly discussed in the book about, like, kind of this issue with some of the sort of prevailing gender theories, which think about sort of like femininity

and gender as pure performance. But, you know, and this is, I think, like the argument that you were making that I think is really interesting is that something that I think is very obvious to trans people is that so much of gender is how people perceive you and how, you know, and stuff that like you don't have any control over. It's how people sort of gender you, it's how people like construct a gender around you in ways that you don't really have control over. Yeah. And that was a big thing. So in in kind of I was writing the book in the mid 2000s. And so the 1990s is when Judith Butler publishes Gender Trouble, which Butler never said all genders' performance are all genders' drag. But those are like slogans or sound bites that other people took from their book, right? And they were very popular

at the time. There's also, there's a famous sociological article about doing gender. And so people were very focused on the way in which we create gender by doing it particular ways. And a lot of the slogans within trans communities were sort of like, oh, well, you know, I just have to do my gender differently, like more transgressively, and that will like tear down all of gender. And I felt that there was, you know, that is an aspect of things. And most of us, whether trans or cis, most of us have had the experience of maybe trying to perform our genders in a particular way in order to like, trying to perform our genders in a particular way in order to get by in the world, in order to not be harassed by other people.

So we've all had that experience. So while that's true, there's the other partner of that dance and that's perception. And we're all perceiving people very actively and we're like projecting our ideas and meanings onto them. And I felt like that was being under discussed at the time. And that was not only a huge part of Whipping Girl, but that's become a part of a lot of my other books. Like include my most recent books, Sexed Up, How Society Sexualizes us and how we can fight back. One way that I would describe that book is it's talking about sex and sexuality, not from what people do, but from how we perceive and interpret

sex and sexuality, because there are a lot of unconscious ideas, often really horrible ideas, really hierarchical ideas that are kind of built into the way we view the world and interrogating that. And so, yeah, that was a very big part of both Whippin' Girl and then my writings since then. Yeah. And I think that is something where things have gotten better in terms of how we think about gender, which I don't know. Like, things aren't perfect, but it definitely, it definitely improved things a lot. I agree.

We're going to take an ab break and when we come back, we're talking transmisogyny. We're back. Yeah. So the other thing I wanted to sort of talk about was I think in like exactly the opposite process that happened to misgendering, transmasogy has become a lot more expansive than your original sort of kind of narrow conception of it. And I think this has been changing a lot, especially in the last about half decade or so. So I was wondering what you think about the way that this concept is kind of taken on a life of its own in recent years and what it's been doing since? Yeah. So I feel like Transmisogyny, that there are a lot of different dialogues

and discourses about it coming, like people coming from different perspectives with it. And some people feeling like the word is doing things that I never suggested it was doing. It's kind of hard to know like where to actually come in on this. But for me, when I was first writing about it, I was first just noticing that a lot of the quote unquote transphobia that I was facing when people know I was a trans woman was actually,

a lot of it was just misogyny and a lot of it targeted my femininity rather than my transness. And so I wanted to write about that and kind of the way that I framed it in the book was, which I think is a really useful kind of model for thinking about it, is that most of the types of sexism that feminists have described over the many years fall into two sort of camps. One of them being oppositional sexism,

which is the idea that men and women are kind of perfectly opposite mutually exclusive sexes that have different interests and attributes and desires. And so a lot of transphobia and homophobia are kind of like built into this idea that men and women are completely distinct. And then the other one is traditional sexism, which is the idea that femenus and femininity are less legitimate than menus and masculinity. And a lot of cis feminists have kind of viewed all of that as just sexism, right? But when you break it down like that,

it makes it clear that the double bind that a lot of feminists have talked about is actually kind of these two different forms of sexism. So if a cis woman acts appropriately femininely, so appropriate with scare quotes, if a cis woman acts femininely, she'll be seen as appropriate, but she'll be dismissed because femininity

is dismissed in our culture. So that's the way that she'll be delegitimized. Whereas if she acts in ways that are coded as masculine, if she acts assertive or aggressive, then people will malign her for being kind of aberrant or deviant. And so oppositional sexism helps keep traditional sexism in place because you can say that malice and masculinity are superior, but that only works if you can also make a clear distinction between, you know, those people and people who are female and feminine. And so I think this plays out differently. And I want to be really clear about

this because some people have interpreted trans misogyny to mean that trans male and trans masculine people don't experience misogyny, which is something I have never said. And obviously the fact that oppositional sexism is a form of sexism and obviously trans male and trans masculine people experience that. But also depending upon how you're viewed by other people, I feel like the same double-pined that affects cis women affects trans male and trans masculine people differently, where there's this tendency, like in a lot of anti-trans discourses,

to dismiss trans masculine, especially trans masculine youth, as being merely girls, quote unquote, who are like, you know, misled or seduced by gender ideology, right? And there's a lot of real anti-feminine and anti-misogynistic ideas in there, in addition to the fact that it misgenders trans male and, trans masculine people. And then if trans male, trans masculine people, when, when they experience transphobia, there's often, you know, like they're seen as deviant for kind of breaking that role. But often the maleness or their masculinity themselves are not,

you know, denigrated in the same way because being male and being masculine are seen as good in our culture. It's just that if you trans male, trans masculine, it's like, well, you're quote unquote just a woman, so you can't do it. So I think it plays out in this very complex way for a lot of trans male, trans masculine people. I think for trans way for a lot of trans male and trans masculine people. I think for trans female and trans feminine people, because our crossing of oppositional sexism also involves us kind of moving towards the female, towards the feminine, that there's kind of those two forces intersect in a way so that it's like exacerbated. And some of the ways I talk about this in Whipping Girl is that, well, we live in a world where masculinity is seen as natural and femininity is seen

as artificial. And since trans people are also seen as artificial compared to cisgender people, a lot of times we're viewed as doubly artificial. Furthermore, the idea that like women are seen as sex objects, whereas men aren't seen as sex objects, often are transitions or gender transgressions towards the female, towards the feminine, are presumed to be driven by sexual motives that can play out in all sorts of ways, whether this is the idea that we're hypersexual or promiscuous, or that we want to be sexualized by other people or you can see it a lot with the kind of the transgender predator is often coded as like a man who either

has some kind of fetish or perversion or is just literally deceiving people to get into women's restrooms to do something horrific. So those are some of the ways that it plays out. I feel that sometimes people view it in a cut or dried way that either they'll assume that transmasogyny means that trans male transmasculine people don't experience misogyny, which again is not what that's about. Or sometimes people will like try to make really clear distinctions. out, or sometimes people will try to make really clear distinctions. There's kind of language like transmissogyny affected versus transmissogyny exempt. Are the terms yeah, TME and TMA, which are not terms I've used, or that I didn't coin them. They're not in the book. And I think that when I first saw that language and I've seen people use

it in a way that appreciates the fact that some people are non-binary, so it's a non-identity based way. Sometimes this can play out in a really cut or dried sort of manner that, you know, sometimes, you know, whether it's intended this way or not, it can make it seem that like, you know, just boiling down of really complex people's complex experiences with different types of sexism into some people are privileged and some people are marginalized, which I think is a more general problem that happens kind of throughout all social justice movements. Yeah, and trans people are not alien to having complex experiences be boiled down to three and four letter acronyms. I did this in Twitter form, so it was like a thread. So now people can't access threads unless you have an account with Twitter, and it's

from a couple years ago. But one of the things that I talked about was I wrote this essay about 10 years ago about how cis and trans is kind of a useful, those are useful terms, but sometimes people fall in between cis and trans. And sometimes they can be used in a way to talk about different double standards, like cis people are treated one way, trans people are treated another. But sometimes it can be used in a sort of reverse discourse way, where it's like cis people have all the privilege, trans people have none of the privilege, and it can be used to kind of create this strict dichotomy that ends up excluding and invisibilizing some people's experiences. And I feel the same thing

is happening with TME and TMA. So I don't think that those terms need to necessarily be like, I don't think there's anything bad about those terms per se in and in of themselves, but I think sometimes they can be used in ways... And part of why I reference this the CIS and TRANS essay that I wrote many years ago, it appears in my book Outspoken. I forget the complete title right now, which is... But the reason why I bring that up is so sometimes what happens is that when people learn about sexism, cis people might be like, oh, I face the sexism, right? If I'm a woman and I don't shave my legs, I'm facing sexism. And so then trans people say, yeah, but it kind of plays out differently for us. And so sometimes in order to stop people from kind of making those claims, which I think it is

true that, you know, a woman not shaving their legs or if a man decides to put on a dress one day, regardless of whether they're cis or trans, they could experience cis-sexism or transphobia, but it plays out differently for people who are actually members of that marginalized group. And then so then the marginalized group makes the distinction even sharper and it just kind of becomes this escalating situation where the language and kind of battles over it become even more intense. In a recent piece, one of the most recent pieces, if you go to my medium site where my essays usually are now, is it talks about the transmask versus transfeminist discourse in terms of what I call the cultural feminist

doom loop, where the doom loop refers to these ideas where everyone, like both sides, are trying to talk about the reason why their experiences are legitimate, and then that seems as though the other sides are not legitimate, and then that kind of cascades in a way that ends up not being very productive, but takes up a lot of energy on places like Twitter. Yeah, I think that's something we've all seen about one trillion times. Variety of toxic ways. But what isn't toxic is the new third edition of Whipping Girl coming out in March, which you can ask your local bookstore to preorder now. And yeah, join us tomorrow for our discussion with Dr. Serrano of the Anatomy of Moral Panics. This has been a Good Happen Here.

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Try Audible for free when you sign up at audible.com. What if I told you fairy tales had a darker side? He locked her in this dungeon, he ordered her to do this impossible thing, he threatened to kill her multiple times. At this point, she just had it. She takes the frog and with all her might, throws him against the wall.

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I'm your host, Mia Wong. I am happy to be here once again with Garrison Davis and Dr. Julia Serrano, the author of, among many other works, a new edition of Whippin' Girl coming out in March. So kind of pivoting a bit. One of the really bleak aspects of being trans in a hostile world is that we've effectively been forced to become experts in the architects of our own extermination. And I think that's a lot of what kind of the new afterward to the upcoming 2024, 30 edition of Whippin' Girl is about. So I guess I wanted to ask, what do you see as the biggest shifts in sort of

the struggle for trans liberation between the end of the sort of Mitch Fests, like fighting over Mitch Fests era that you wrote, like dream, which you sort of wrote the second, the forward, the preface to the second edition. And then the stuff that's happening now is the third edition is coming out. Sure. I think a huge aspect of trans activism, from my perspective of first coming to trans communities in the 90s, a lot of 90s and zeros era trans activism was overcoming was overcoming basically people's ignorance, their lack of awareness about trans people. This is one of the things that Whippin' Girl, for example, there are a lot of bad ideas about trans people that had been circling, lating for a long time, especially with the culmination of

Janice Raymond's book, The Transsexual Empire, in the late 1970s, 1979, I think, and that influenced a lot of people at, say, places like Mishfest that had trans woman exclusion policies. And I felt like during the 90s through the zeroes, we were constantly making gains that was largely due to people learning more about us and then recognizing largely due to people learning more about us and then recognizing basically shared goals, shared things in common. I think that trans people are marginalized because of mainstream assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality. And those assumptions also hurt LGBTQIA plus people more broadly. They hurt in a sexist world, they hurt cis women, all women, all people who moved through the world perceived as female and feminine. So we all this kind of shared

thing that we're working towards. And I feel like that was where a lot of the progress was happening. And I think what really changed in the mid-2010s, especially the year 2015, which is literally the year after the so-called tipping point time magazine declaring the transgender tipping point, was when it was the beginning of what I would describe as organized anti-trans activism, where it wasn't just that people didn't like us or they detested us, but it was where there was actual coordination between different groups. In the afterward, I describe there's the social conservatives and far right who have always been anti-LGBTQ plus, who took an even who took an even more intense focus on trans people. There were groups that at the time that I wrote Whippin Girl, the term turf wasn't around, or the term gender critical wasn't

around. Now we would call them gender critical or trans exclusionary feminists. They've become kind of a part of that and both those groups working together in a lot of ways on policies. I think one of the things that the average person might not know if you're not like really in kind of highly aware of trans communities and issues is that probably behind the scenes, the anti-transparent movement has probably made more of an impact than any other group. And they are very much like the anti-vax parent movement where it's a lot of people who are, you know, from their standpoint, they're just concerned about their children. They want what's best for

their children. But they actively seek out and often get involved in websites, social media forums, and sometimes actual activist campaigns that buy into a lot of ideas of children being indoctrinated into gender ideology or being infected by social contagion. And there's all this pseudoscience that grows out of that. So I would say that that was the main difference, that there's this organized campaign, and this campaign has just grown and grown and grown to the point now where it's just this a standingly large moral panic that the types of things that like 30% of people in our country believe about trans people is

abhorrent, but that's kind of how it played out. Yeah. I mean, there's been a lot of very common weird pseudoscience myths that sort of came out of that. I wanted to talk a little bit about, quote, unquote, rapid onset gender dysphoria because that's been all over the place. I mean, there's like a New York Times article talking about it like two weeks ago and it's, I don't know, really been a fiasco, especially given how unbelievably tenuous the stuff they sort of faked or not as they faked like unbelievably tenuous to

like quote unquoteunquote study they did that got retracted was. Yeah. And this is something that I actually saw developing firsthand and then did research on in 2019. So let me frame this, I'll tell like my personal, a short version of my oral history of this. So it was around 2017 that I first heard the idea of children becoming trans because of social contagion. And it just seemed to come out of the blue and it's like, why? Gender identity is not contagious. If it was, trans people would have infected way more than like the less than 1% of us that actually exists. Not a very effective contagion as far as contagion scale.

No. 30% and rising, like, no. Like, 1%. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. It's like, once you start looking at it, it seems kind of ridiculous. A lot of it was because, well, you know, you know, my kid was hanging around a trans person who started watching trans videos on YouTube and now they're trans. It's like, yeah, well, maybe they were hanging out with that trans friend and watching the YouTube videos because they are trans and they just hadn't come out yet or they're just, they're still figuring it out. Anyway, so in 2018 is when the Lisa Littman paper

on rapid onset gender dysphoria came out and I wrote this essay at the time talking about all the things wrong with it. And then in 2019, I'm like, where did these ideas come from? And I should say that rapid onset gender dysphoria is basically transgender social contagion wrapped up in a medical-sounding diagnosis. Okay, so if you read the initial descriptions of transgender social contagion and the description

of rapid onset gender dysphoria, they're basically the same. It's that kids are infecting one another, but the idea of rapid onset gender dysphoria was meant to describe this quick infection of transness that supposedly was happening. And so in 2019, I basically did a deep dive. I'm not an investigative reporter, but that's kind of what I did into where the origin of this was. And basically, all of this kind of came down to the website Fourth Wave Now, which often worked in coordination with two other anti-transparent websites.

So Fourth Wave Now is an anti-transparent website, arguably the very first one that came out. And a parent posted the idea that her child was like being infected by transgender social contagion. And it's almost definitely clear now. I will leave a little caveat, even though I think the evidence is pretty strong, that that was Lisa Marchiano, who is anti-trans therapists, who's very, very involved in anti-trans activism right now. Okay, so, and like, everything points to that being her. And she also seems to have, in some capacity, worked with Lisa Lippmann.

So basically the first paper about Rapidon's agendas for her that came out was not Lisa Lippmann's, it was actually Lisa Maciano's, which came out in 2017. So basically kind of grew from these anti-transparent websites. It really quickly, within six months, not only was Lisa Littman doing her survey, Lisa Littman being someone who has no experience in trans health ever before then, just decides to go in and only survey parents from three anti-transparent websites. And it gets taken very seriously just because the media fan the flames. A lot of these groups were very excited to have something that seemed to be a case study

on their side. The paper was heavily critiqued when it came out. There are now, and I describe this in an online essay I have, it's free. If you Google my name and all the evidence against social contagion, it's in there. There are now 10 papers that have tested the idea of rapid onset gender dysphoria and or social contagion and found evidence that contradicts the hypothesis. So it's still being talked about that Pamela Paul, who was an alpade that looked like an article in the New York Times. It's not the first time Pamela Paul and or the New York Times has

done this. They seem to have a particular axe to grind against trans people and putting out specious articles suggesting that gender-firming care, especially for trans youth, is bad when actually all the evidence points to the opposite. So yeah, that's a brief discussion of rapid onset gender disorder, which I think is the most popular of these kind of pseudo-scientific ideas. But there are definitely others. There are about four or five others that I could get into and I do get into in the afterward and in some of my other writings. I don't

use the word pseudoscientific lightly. Basically, there's science, which is where different research groups try to answer a particular question. And if they all get similar answers, then that becomes, okay, well, that seems to be established. Now let's work from there and ask more questions and do more studies. Junk science is when you do kind of a crappy study that doesn't really interrogate all the possibilities that either doesn't use controls or only looks at a bias sampling size or a bias sample or small sample sizes and comes to a conclusion that it wants to come to, that's junk science.

And then student of science is when multiple independent groups all find something different to what you're saying, but you keep touting the thing you're saying is science. And that's definitely where RGD is right now. Same thing with one of these ideas that I talked about way back early in Whipping Girl, and I've written both academic papers and online essays about this concept of auto-gianophilia, which is this really old theory that's just like it's kind of like this zombie. It doesn't matter how many groups find evidence to the contrary. It jibes with what basically certain gender disaffirming practitioners and researchers and anti-transactivists,

it jibes with what they want to say. So it just kind of continues to be out there. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, something that Garrison we were talking about before this is the extent to which the extent to which the rapid onset gender just for your study is almost exactly the same study as the first anti-vax study. Like it has almost exactly the same. It's the same thing where you find a group of people who think their kid has autism because they got vaccinated

or you find a group of people who think their kids are trans because social contagion or something. And then you ask them about it and then you report the results of the study and it's like, well now, and you report the results of you asking the people the thing that they believe. And now it's a study.

And it's, I don't know, it drives me insane, the extent to which he is literally exactly the same thing. Yeah, I mean, that was something. So I didn't know this until H. Bomber Guy, who's a YouTuber, who does really good investigations and video essays. And I saw his autism. And so this is something that, you know, I remember, I'm old enough to remember the Wakefield paper being in the news, and then you've heard lots of people debunking it, and then it's officially retracted. And basically all, you know, the scientific field has settled that it's like vaccines do not cause autism. A lot of that is just like a coincidence of the time that you first start noticing that children may be autistic is like right around the time

after they've had vaccinations. But yeah, it wasn't until the H. Ballmer guy video that he talks about that the Wakefield study is a study of parents, not the children, a study of the parents. And the parents already had, were already suspicious of the vaccines. And so they said, oh, well, it happened right after they had these vaccines.

Just like rapid onset genders for happens. Oh, it happened right after, you know, one of my child's peer, their peers came out as trans. It's like, yeah, maybe they're connected. Maybe that's why they're good friends. You know, most of my friends, you know, like when I go out and stuff like that, you know, a huge chunk of my friends way higher than the average person are trans people. Yeah. And it's not because any of us infected each other, it's just that you have that thing

in common. You also really importantly, when you're part of a stigmatized group, being around other people who won't stigmatize you, often because they're part of that same group, that can be really freeing and really supportive. So yeah. Yeah, certainly. We need to take another ad break. But when we come back, there will be more. I don't know. I'm really kind of blowing the ad pivots on this one.

I'm very sorry. And we are back. So I guess speaking of moral panics. Speaking of social contagions. Yes, moral panics are always very socially contagious. Yeah, it's really truly, really truly they have described their own ideology and they projected it onto everyone else. So one of the things that you talk about both in the afterward and in sexed up is about the relationship between stigma and contagion and how it's this powerful,

incredibly powerful force for mobilizing moral panics. Can you explain sort of how that works? Sure, yeah. So, and this was something that when I was first working on sexed up, it wasn't kind of my idea. I didn't think I was going to write about the concept of stigma that much, but it really ended up being very central, the more kind of research I did into it. And so I think most of us are familiar with the idea of stigma in terms of feeling embarrassment or being made to feel lesser than other people because of some aspect of your person. And there is that aspect of it that's often called like felt stigma.

But then there's the way that other people view stigma, right? And so, you know, people aren't necessarily stigmatized in that way themselves. They might view people who are stigmatized in particular ways. And one aspect of stigma that I learned a lot of this from psychologists. I think it's Paul Rosin. I know the last name is Rosin. And also Carol Nemeroff, and they both worked together and they had other colleagues who worked on this. But a lot of this comes from this really unconscious idea of contagion that seems to be, it's like pancultural, it's just a way that people tend to view the world.

A lot of people and a lot of cultures have essentialist views, contagion is along those lines. It's often described as a type of magical thinking. The idea is if something in your mind has this contagion, if you get too close to it or you interact with it, it can permanently corrupt or taint you. And so it has this kind of contagious like property in people's minds. And so people often view groups who are stigmatized, especially groups that are highly stigmatized as essentially contagious,

where that stigma that they have could rub off on you if you get too close to them. And so this happens when I was really young, the idea of like, if you were friends with a trans person, a lot of times people, or even someone who was gay back then, people be like, oh, so what are you? You must be gay too, right? It's almost as if that stigma would then like kind of migrate to you. And that's a lot of why stigmatized groups

face a lot of ostracization in society. And so this idea of contagion has been around, I think groups who are lesser stigmatized, one of the ways that that plays out is their view is less contagious. So, you know, when I was really young, the idea of if you had a trans person in your life, people would really question you. Whereas, by the time I came out,

you could have a trans friend and that would be fine, it wouldn't necessarily be contagious. Unless, of course, you were interested in them and then that stigma would, if you were like attracted to them, then there's that stigma. And I think that stigma plays a lot into kind of dynamics of, and I've read about this in Sexed Up, that the whole idea of like fetishes and chasers

and all that, that's basically all the stigma that contagion stuff playing out in different ways. Anyway, so I also think that, and I write about in Sex Up, I think people view sex and stigma as really closely intertwined, such that I think people view the average person views heterosexual sex as a stigma contamination act, where the male is the corrupting force, and it's the woman who is corrupted by sex, which is why virgins are pure, but then once a woman has sex, she's become contaminated or tainted. She has a lot of sex, then people view her as ruined. So that idea is built in there. And I think this combination of viewing sex and stigmas kind of

intertwined leads to the sexual predator, the sexual predator stereotype that we're seeing play out in really strong ways with trans people right now. But actually, if you look throughout history, like a lot of marginalized groups, like deal in different ways with the sexual predator trope. And so I think this really clearly plays out with the kind of what I call the groomer explosion that started in 2022 where people were accusing trans people being groomers before then, but it really exploded in 2022. And if you listen to what people are saying, that they're using the word groomer, which sounds like a sexual predator thing, like there's a real thing of grooming children that sexual abusers do. But they're using it against trans people in a way that has nothing to do with that. But what they're talking about is

corrupting, you know, so their children who are presumed to be cisgender and who often, I think this is why a lot of these anti-trans discourses continue to paint like trans children as being girls, right? Like, because then it kind of plays into these feelings of like, you know, transgender people are the adult men, corrupting young girls, it plays into a lot of people's, like messed up heteronormative views of sex and fears of sexual abuse, child abuse,

being a very real thing, but people greatly misinterpret it so that the people who are the usual perpetrators, which are usually by and large straight men who are adults who are close or sometimes even family members of the child in question. But when they say grooming, they just mean corrupting or contaminating. And I think that both grooming and social contagion, I think both of these basically play off of this stigma contamination idea, right? The kids are pure, but then transgender is like a type a really big role, not only in moral panics,

which almost all moral panics are, there's some kind of corrupting force that is often attacking otherwise pure and innocent children. Sometimes it's technology, right? And so people would be like, oh, we have to ban, you know, social media apps, you know, because it's hurting the children or it could be transgender people who are the things we need to ban because they're corrupting the children. But I definitely think that both these ideas of stigma and contagion play a big role in the way in which moral panics, why they resonate with a lot of people, even though they don't make any rational sense. If you just think about them, kind of, from a very realistic,

yeah, practical point of view. And we have to go to ads, but really back in a second. And we're back. This is something that you mentioned briefly in the afterward. And that's something that we've reported on is how a lot of this groomer thing that started in 2022 and a whole bunch of this kind of modern wave of transphobia is mirroring a lot of the anti-gay stuff from the 80s that was pushed forward by a lot of evangelicals meant into mainstream conservatism, and specifically how it functions as this. Yeah, this is sort of like moral panic and even social contagion, the way homosexuality was treated

as this thing. And this sort of social contagion aspect is so common now. I mean, even the way we've already alluded to Musk, even the way he mentions like the woke mind virus is exactly this thing. And it's a really like moral panics and stuff, right? This was kind of predated by the critical race theory, debacle, which then got, you know, turned into the groomer thing. And even now-

It is now the DEI thing, yeah. Exactly. And now it's even changed again. And these moral panics can have devastating results in terms of pushing forward legislation that outlasts the actual moral panic. But the actual things themselves are very short-lived. They don't seem to have very much staying power as cultural moments. They move on so quickly.

Like no one talks about critical race theory anymore. You don't even hear this sort of groomer rhetoric as often as you did two years ago. And it's being replaced by new versions. And yeah, like Mia said, the DEI thing is the current current thing that is wrecking American society if you ask about maybe one-third of the population. But yeah, how do you feel about the life cycle of these moral panics and how they relate to the social contagion aspect? Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with what you're also all the things you're citing that like, I think these are all different variations of kind of the same idea. And I do really appreciate the idea of the

woke mind virus as being kind of like the perfect like the exemplar of this. Yeah. And that, you know, people were, you know, people were complaining about, you know, stuff being woke for a while. And, you know, it is usually it's often coded as something that's woke is like anti-racist or, you know, is something like it's often coded as something that's woke is like anti-racist or you know is something like it's very much associated you know infused with like when people complain about wokeism a lot of times they're like they're racist or they're um or at the very least they have fears about kind of the corruption of pure whiteness being corrupted by increasing people of color and making gains in society, right? But the woke mind virus, because no one could really explain what

woke is, because then it keeps shifting and it refers to trans people or critical race theory and et cetera. And the woke mind virus is like perfect because that's how they think it all works. Like it's just this thing that infects people, especially children and the way in which there is a recent thing just today. I think it was Ackerman the billionaire who's been involved in a lot of this DEI stuff complaining about his child being infected in college with Marxism and Elon Musk had similar issues with his trans daughter becoming pro-Marx or anti-capitalists. And so they just assumed that, like, no, my child was pure, but now they're infected. It's like, well, maybe there are other ideas out there that are better than your idea.

now they're infected. It's like, well, maybe there are other ideas out there that are better than your idea. And maybe that's all it is. But yeah, so I think in all of these cases, yes, I think that there's this idea of a contagion or corruption often involving children. And it is, yeah, a lot of the moral panic, a lot of the literature like the social sciences literature, all moral panics, they often describe them as fleeting. You know, this one, the anti-trans one isn't fleeting enough right now from my perspective. But people will tend to kind of move on like the satanic panic of the 80s, you know,

like that was a really big deal and then all of a sudden it was just gone and no one ever talked about it again. I think the difference here is that a lot of these moral panics are really tied together with what's happening in the country more generally with anti-democratic and authoritative views coming from, particularly the right wing of the country,

like one of the two major political parties, is really pushing a lot of just generally across the board. They're against feminism. They're against people of color, against LGBTQ plus people. They're against people of color, against LGBTQ plus people. And I think it's all wrapped up into the same thing. I think that while individual parts of the moral panic may go away, they may talk about critical race theory for a bit, and then shift to trans people being groomers, then shift to DEI. But I think a lot of this is, they're all intertwined. And actually, I think that's

like the last couple of paragraphs of the afterward, I talk about that as a potentially good thing. Because even though it's been a hard time to be a trans person with all the anti-trans legislation and all the anti-trans news stories, all the pushes back on gender-affirming care. Despite all that, I think the good thing is that I think there are clear sides here. And I think, while this wasn't true early on in the anti-trans backlash in the late 2010s, I think most people realize now that all these things are tied together from the right-wing perspective in this country. It's just against all these things. They want a white Christian, straight minority of people running everything about this country. I think the rest of us really

need to recognize that and work together to defeat that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty good place to end on. Do you have anything else that you wanted to make sure you get in? No, I mean, I feel like we touched, we covered a bunch of the book past, present, and hopefully future being better than the present right now. Hopefully, hopefully. Hopefully, hopefully. Hopefully, yes. So, okay, where can people find a, the new, the new edition of Whippin' Girl and B, you and your work on the internet and or other places?

Sure. Yeah. So the book should be available. So it's available for pre-order right now. So you can do that through like places. I often suggest people go to the seal press, my publisher, because they give lots of options there. But you can also go to your local independent bookstore and say, hey, I'd like the pre-order this book and they will do that for you. So the book will be available everywhere and should be in stores starting in March. As for me, my website, JuliusSarano.com, particularly if you go to

the writings page there, I have like literally links to everything I've written online over the years. So it's kind of a clearinghouse of free writings of mine. There are also links to my books there. And then if you're looking for me on social media, I'm at Julius Serrano on most platforms that I'm at. I don't know how much stronger I can possibly recommend reading Whipping Girl. It had, I don't know, it had an enormous impact on me when I first read it. And yeah, it will, it will do good things for you if you read it too. Yeah. And it's all still incredibly relevant. Like I, I was breezing through like 50 pages just to refresh my memory this morning. And I'm like, Oh, wow, so many of the like inter community trans discourses that are constantly happening have already been addressed like

20 years ago. So many of like I all the time I spend trying to write about like a trans misogyny and like, oh, I I forgot this is already like all like written down. Like I spent so long writing about the Daily Wire movie and like, oh, this is all this work's already been done. I can just like stop. Oh, man. Yeah.

Cannot cannot recommend enough. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you all for the kind words. Yeah, thank you for having me and it was great. And thanks for all you do too. Oh, thank you. Get ready for our 2024 I Heart Podcast Awards presented by the Hartford live at South by Southwest celebrating the best of the best. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative

talent and creators in the industry. Podcasts have always reflected our culture. Watch live Monday, March 11th on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel and listen on iHeartRadio stations across America. And the winner is? The winner. See all of the nominees now at iHeartPodcastAwards.com.

Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award. Discover the best selection of audio books anywhere, plus binge-worthy podcasts and exclusive Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award. Discover the best selection of audiobooks anywhere, plus binge-worthy podcasts and exclusive Audible originals. There's more to imagine when you listen. Try Audible for free when you sign up at Audible.com. What if I told you fairy tales had a darker side? He locked her in this dungeon,

he ordered her to do this impossible thing, he threatened to kill her multiple times. At this point, she just had it. She takes the frog and with all her might throws him against the wall. We see sort of a comical effort to put a dainty tiny slipper on a large ungainly foot. In the Grimm brothers version, the sisters just straight up cut off their toes and heels. Not only is there more to these tales than what was told in bedtime stories, there's a reason they've lasted centuries. And these tales stay with us, they stick in our brains.

The stories existed before the Grimm's, they will exist long after us. Long after the last copy of any known book of yours is rotting in a landfill, the fairy tales are going to exist, they're going to continue. Join me, Miranda Hawkins, as we step into the twisted world of the Brothers Grimm.

Listen to the deep dark woods on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In July, 1881, a man walked into a train station, pulled out a gun and shot the president of the United States. James Garfield's assassination horrified the American people, and they wanted his killer, Charles Gatot, punished.

But Gatot, many experts believed, was insane. What had seemed like a black and white case was now much grayer. Could the justice system truly deliver justice in a situation like this? Gato's trial was extraordinary, but not unique. Important trials have always raised questions and made us reflect on the world we live in. I'm Mira Hayward, and I'm exploring the stories of these trials in my new podcast, History on Trial. Every episode will cover a different trial from American history

and reveal how the legal battles of the past have shaped our present. Listen and subscribe to History on Trial. Now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, your favorite podcast for a daily dose of dystopia. I am once again your guest host, Molly Conger. Today I'm talking to a good friend of mine in one of the brilliant minds behind the melting of Charlottesville's Robert E. Lee statue. Dr. Jolaine Schmidt is going to tell us a little bit about the history of the statue

from its planning and placement to its current state. Melt it into ingots in an undisclosed location. I'm joined today by Dr. Jelaine Schmidt, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, the director of the Memory Project at the University of Virginia's Karsh Institute of Democracy and a steering committee member at the Swords into Plouichers Project. As both a scholar and an activist, Dr. Schmidt has been a leading voice in the Charlottesville community for racial justice and against the Confederate monuments that once stood here. The Swords Into Plosures project announced back in October that they had successfully

dismantled and melted down the bronze statue of Robert E. Lee that once loomed over the Market Street Park in downtown Charlottesville. Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about the past, present, and future of that hunk of bronze. Thanks for having me, Molly. It's great to talk with you about this. I don't think I've called you Professor Schmidt since 2008 when I took one of your classes.

It's been a while, it's been a while. Yeah, yeah, now we just call each other comrades, because we're out there in the streets and in city council and doing the things. So before we get to the final feat of that melted bronze, I want to ground this in the history of that particular object, right? This isn't just any Confederate monument. This is the statue that made Charlottesville household name, the

statue that brought United the Right here, a statue that killed someone. It's a statue that had history in that park for a century before it came down. And before it was removed, you led some really incredible walking tours of the downtown parks to try to tell the story of the way those statues existed in those spaces for generations, why they were there, what they meant, what impact they had on the landscape and the people in the community.

I think I went on about a dozen of those walking tours and I learned something new every single time. So can you talk a little bit about the political atmosphere in 1924 when that statue first went up? Yeah, well, just kind of to back up a little bit about the political atmosphere in 1924 when that statue first went up. Yeah. Well, should you know, just kind of to back up a little bit, like the history of Charlottesville, Virginia, at around the time of the Civil War, over half of the population of the local population was enslaved in Charlottesville and surrounding Albemarle County. And black people were actually the majority of the population of Charlottesville until about 1890. And then it's, you know, has been on this steady decline, you know, since then. So to think

about it, if you look at the history of reconstruction in Charlottesville, black people came out, registered to vote and got politically organized very quickly in the 1860s already. And we're very influential in electing a black delegate from Charlottesville to go to the Constitutional Convention. This is when in order to rejoin the Union, all of the former Confederate states had to get their state constitutions up to snuff. And so, Virginia, as did the other former Confederate states, had a constitutional convention. And our delegate from Charlottesville was James T.S. Taylor. He was a black man from Charlottesville.

He'd been in the United States colored troops. And he had a coalition, had coalesced around him of some progressive whites or savvy whites that threw their lot with him and former enslaved people and represented us and put Charlottesville in the mix for starting a new state constitution in Virginia for finally getting public schools. That's one thing that we can thank, you know, all those reconstruction governments around the South, you know, for getting us those public schools that we wouldn't have otherwise had that we didn't have before, you know. So I say all that backdrop

that if you read the historical sources of the time during reconstruction and post reconstruction in Charlottesville, the white elites were quite upset with the state of affairs that had emerged after the Civil War, in which formerly enslaved people were in leadership, companion political leadership, you know. And so when you look at the history of, you know, then finally, as the new, you know, there was a reconstruction era constitution that started all those wonderful things, such as, you know, public schools, you know, and voting rights for black men, you know. But then as the neo-Confederates or their Confederate sympathizers start to get the upper hand again at the end of reconstruction and in Virginia, that's, you know, more or less in the 1880s, you know, and then there's this steady imposition of

Jim Crow, you know, that's going into, you know, in Richmond, they put in their giant general lease statue in 1890, you know, there. And then in 1902, there's finally, there was this final push that pushed black people out of political office in Virginia. And in 1902, there's finally, there was this final push that pushed black people out of political office in Virginia. And in 1902, a new Jim Crow state constitution was put into effect in 1902. And so you have to, when you think about all of these statues being installed, we have to see it as this, it's really resentment politics, you know, that's come about. That is, if you look at the speeches that are delivered at the installation ceremonies of these statues, and this is where I'm getting to our General Lee

statue in Charlottesville, specifically with this, you go back and look at those at the occasion for the day. And these these installation ceremonies, they were a time for the Neal Confederate organizations, the hosting organizations, in our case, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the United Confederate Veterans, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, okay, were the hosts for this event. And this is a two or three-day occasion. So there's like delegations coming in from all over the state, you know, and, you know, there's this buildup, you know, in the days ahead, you know, leading up to the installation.

This was in May of 1924, you know, so you see, oh, this delegation has arrived from Roanoke and now the governor is coming in and now this and not, you know, and so, you know, the town is just a Twitter, you know this that they are hosting the statewide reunion of the United Confederate veterans and they're hardly are anymore at this time they're you know quite elderly at this point so they're you know there's quite this you know uh celebration and this is also an annual meeting of the sons of Confederate veterans and so the fact that little charlotte'sville is hosting a statewide reunion you meeting of the sons of Confederate veterans. And so the fact that Little Charlottesville is hosting a statewide reunion, you know, of the statewide of all the chapters, you know, of these Neal Confederate veterans is a big deal. And then, and then, you know, they're doing this, you know, within this context is when the unveiling of this statue is occurring, you see. And so it's this whole buildup of kind of

lost cause nostalgia, which is occurring. And in the speeches at the Lee statue unveiling ceremony, it's very instructive to listen to what is being said. You have, of course, kind of local dignitaries and statewide dignitaries are there. The national commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is there, he gives a speech, he was also a Klansman. So this says something there that 1920s Charlottesville

elites were not averse to rubbing shoulders with a known clansman who had been invited to give a speech. Other invited guests, one was a minister who was a graduate of the University of Virginia. And it was just kind of revealing what he said in his speech when he was talking about, he said that the days of Reconstruction were worse than war. You know, and so this, right, exactly, yeah, does beg the question. And that, yeah, goes without saying, of course, that this is, you know, almost exclusively a white audience.

And, you know, the white school kids, school has been canceled for the day, the university has classes canceled for the day, and the businesses are closed. I mean, this is just quite the community event that's going on. So yeah, so reconstruction was worse than war. We're celebrating today, the spirit of Lee, the regeneration of our values.

And, you know, there's just a lot of, of conversation in these, in these inaugurations, ceremonies, you know, for the unveiling of these statues that harken to rebirth and regeneration and, and, you know, and also, you know, kind of recalling, you know, the days of old, you know, and the, and the values, you know, of our veterans, you know, who are now, you know, kind of recalling, you know, the days of old, you know, and the values, you know, of our veterans, you know, who are now, you know, of course, in dwindling number, you know, these Confederate veterans who are there. And so this, and as I said, there's been this whole buildup, you know, for days and days, you know, I mean, of course, for the planning committee, this has been going on for weeks and months, you know, fundraising

and, you know, reserving, you know, blocks, you know, at the weeks and months, fund raising and reserving blocks at the hotels and guest houses and all this kind of thing, banquet halls, etc. But it's also revealing that this installation ceremony for the Lee statue, it is book-ended with clan activity, an uptick in clan activity before and after the installation ceremony. And while we don't have... Well, we do know, but one Klansman, the commander Lee, no relation to the general Lee, but the president and the sons of the Confederate veterans. But to just see all of this uptick in Lascaux nostalgia, and then these acts of intimidation of clan rallies, clan posters that were put fliers around town

and this sort of thing, the atmosphere of intimidation, you know, that this must have been for black residents, you know, of the time, you know, it just, it really gives you pause, you know, just seeing how public space was commandeered, you know, by these people, these neoconfederates, you know, to kind of relive what they considered, you know, by these people, these neoconfederates, you know, to kind of relive what they consider,

you know, kind of the glory days, you know, of the nation, you know, and the kind of values to which they want to return, you know, and this sort of thing. So, yeah, so this is going on, you know, in the 1920s, as, you know, Charlottesville, you know, locked into Jim Crow by then, you know, and, and were 22 years into that Jim Crow state constitution, you know, this is the Mel U, you know, in which, in which this is taking place. Now, of course, black people have their own institutions, you know, that they've founded, you know, namely churches, the Jefferson School African American, what's now the African American Heritage Center, but the Jefferson School of African American, what's now the African American Heritage Center, but the Jefferson School, which was a school for black children,

and the founding of the high school, of a black high school. So this was, you know, the black community had its own nodes of organizational strength, you know, and goings on that were happening, even as, you know, there were these pressures, you know, going on with the consolidation of Jim Crow. Should also mention that, you know, at around the same time in spring of 1924 was the passage of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act. And this was the kind of the codification of the so-called one-drop rule, which designated anyone with a perceived admixture of African American or Native American ancestry to be designated as colored, you know, and kind of bifurcating the population of Virginia into two categories, white or colored. And so this is also occurring, you know, in 1924.

There's a very, you know, there's very much of a legal, you know, a kind of strengthening, you know, of in terms of the tools that are being used to separate the races, quote unquote, you know. And what we're seeing then in the parks, you know, in our public spaces were, you know, kind of designating what were, well, not public spaces. I mean, they were, you know, kind of designated, you know, almost shrine-like, you know, as's a kind of broadcasting of who's in charge is what's going on. Right. I think today the Sons of Confederate Veterans very much separate themselves from the Klan. We're a heritage organization.

We're not the Klan, but you were talking about this sort of Klan activity leading up to the unveiling of the statue. And I was actually just looking back this morning at some of the archival newspapers from that week. And so when the day the statue was placed, if a few weeks before the unveiling, it was still covered, it was shrouded, it was leading up to the big day. So in the front page of the Daily Progress, the day that the statue was put in the park, that little snippet appears in the newspaper right next to a headline about cross burning. These things are happening at the same time, right? And there was a big clan march through town that week. And I think one of the, it's easy to forget that these historical moments were experienced by people, whose words that we

still have, like people who were living in this moment. I think one of, one moment in your historical tour that really has stuck with me all these years is an anecdote about John West, who is for the listener, a man was born into slavery and in this era was one of the largest black landowners in the area. I was a successful businessman. And when the Klan marched by that week, they're wearing their hoods. You don't know who they are. It's mysterious. It's intimidating. But he knew who every single Klansman was because he was their barber and he recognized their shoes. And that just feels so intimate to me, right? That he's looking at the shoes of these men that he knows. And then tomorrow they're going to come in for a shave and a haircut. And he has to say, you know, yes, sir, thank you, sir.

That's right. That's right. And so if you can just imagine like, you know, and here, you know, John West, you know, so here's one of the most, you know, influential black residents of Charlottesville at that time. And he has to live, yeah, in this, you know, that there's this this atmosphere of intimidation that you that yeah, his clients are coming in, you know, they're coming in every 10 days or 14 days to get a trim, get a, you know, touch up, you know, here and there. And yeah. And he knows that these, you know, that these are, you know, the folks who are kind of maintaining, you know, that this public order, you know, that is so, you know, that you better not step out of line. And so just to have one's public space, you know, be demarcated, you know, in such a demonstrative way, you know, in a monumental way, you know. Literally. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Is it really illustrates what's going on, you know, and even in, you know, relationships like that, you know, that are so like, you know, intimate, a barber and a client, you know, and knowing, you know, what your clients are up to, you know, and how you better stay in line, right, for almost a century. So skipping ahead that century, right, when the statue finally came down in 2021, so not too long ago, right? So the city solicited proposals for what was to be done with it, right? A lot of cities put them into storage or moved them to battlefields or museums didn't want them. People say, well, why can't it go to a museum? Museums didn't want it, right? Yeah. So because of my work, I get pulled in on a lot of different statue, statue-related consultations. Let's put it that way. And I was on the George Rogers Clark

committee at the University of Virginia when the university was trying to decide what to do with the very hideous, I call it the genocide trophy. It was a statue of the George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Northwest. It literally said that on the facade. And so we were in consultation with native tribes. We were contacting the various tribal nations who suffered the onslaught of the so-called Northwest Campaign. So these tribes that are in what is now Illinois and Ohio, et cetera, and just asking them, would know, would you like to kind of weigh in, you know, on this and, and, you know, really sad genocide is a real thing. Some folks are just no longer there, you know, or, you know, were, you know, they became such a remnant, you know, as they

were so decimated that, you know, they kind of, you know, morphed into, you know, other tribes, others were, you know, went on, you know, later on to, you know, to, uh, um, Oklahoma or other place, you know, just dispersal, you know, really was, you know, um, you know, so we're in this, you know, kind of year long process trying to figure out what to do with UVA's own statue there, you know, also a gift of Paul Goodlough McIntyre, you know, the same donor who gave the Lee statue to the city, uh, gave this George Rogerske statue to the university. And so in doing that committee work, we made appointments with all the big players, all the, you know, here we are, we're from the University of Virginia, you know, and we've got this, you know, big,

big monument here, you know, the Smithsonian, the, you know, and, you know, we talked to monument here, you know, the Smithsonian, you know, and, you know, we talked to not about this one, but in another instance, talked to, you know, the Civil War museums, battlefields, you know, I mean, we contacted all the responsible, you know, the folks who are going to curate this in a responsible way, you know, because, you know, that's it. It is a monumental work of art, you know, it has stood here for a century. It does have historical value of a sort. And as someone who teaches history and researches history, that's my inclination, my initial inclination is, oh, yeah, well, we should preserve. I mean, that's kind of where I go to. But the problem is it's a very practical one.

This is a material object that is taking up space, literal and figurative space in the world. And it's a 6,000 pounds. Yeah, yeah. The very materiality of it, it is taking up space. And you have to figure out what space is it going to inhabit? This is a very practical question. If it's not in your park anymore, where's it going to inhabit? This is a very practical question.

If it's not in your park anymore, where is it going to be? We contacted all these museums, you know, and in several, you know, different consultations I've been a part of where we've been trying to get rid of statues. Nobody wants them. Nobody responsible wants them. And, you know, and even if they did have an inclination to want to just the expense of it, who wants to reinforce their floors to put a century-old, artistically not exemplary monument? And then care for it. I mean museums have very limited budgets.

They're nonprofit organizations. Why should they be expending all this energy? I love the, my colleague, Aaron Thompson, from John Jay College at CUNY. She's an art crime professor. And she said, she talked with somebody at the Smithsonian who said something to the effect that, we're not America's addict for racist art. That's not our role. It's like, you know, it kind of does throw back the responsibility

to individual communities too. It's like, you know, you have a part to play in this, you know. And so anyway, yeah, so we tried to do the responsible thing. We contacted all the responsible actors out there. They don't want them. And so then the question becomes, okay, the city also doesn't want it sitting on its back lot for forever in perpetuity. You know, they've got things, you know, they've got equipment there, they've got things that, you know, this shouldn't be sitting there. Where is it going to go? Again, this is a material object that exists in the world. It is a problem, you know, like what physical space is it going to occupy? We're just such brute practicality here.

I don't think people quite get what it means to deal with this. And the only people who want it are the very people who shouldn't have it, you know, who want to take this object that's caused us so much pain and to make a shrine out of it, you know, that would continue to attract bad actors, you know, and that it would, you know, when I'm a religious studies scholar, so when I use, I don't use the word shrine lightly, I know what kinds of activities, you know, these engender, you know, and the sorts of emotions that are evoked in the ceremonies around objects that are held to be sacred, that attract kind of devotees. And so you really have to think about what does it mean to be a responsible ethical

actor? It's like, now we're in grown-up world now. It's like, okay, it's like, there is a material object, where are we going to put it? It's like having now we're in grown-up world now. It's like, okay, it's like we want, you know, it's like, there is a material object, where are we going to put it? You know, it's like having a junked car. What do you do with it? You just let it sit in your driveway and make your neighbors mad at you?

Right, and these Confederate statues are sort of the junk cars of the lost cause, right? Because they're not rare, right? Like, you know, especially right after Unite the Right, a bunch of cities, all of a sudden, we're like, we got to get rid of these things. And so suddenly the market is flooded with Confederate statues. Where are you going to put them?

That's right. And that, and that is the question. And they are, and I've used this, this metaphor before, the, the, the metaphor of toxic waste, you know, it's not responsible to say, oh, we want to get rid of our toxic trash here and then ship it down the road to the next town and say, okay, well, we're done with that. That's not responsible to make that next town have to deal with. You know, or maybe there, maybe there were some people in that town that wanted it, you know, but that's not fair to the other people. They have to breathe in that air and drink that water that's poisoned by this.

That's not being responsible. You know what I mean? So, it really is an ethical question, you know, what space these toxic objects are going to inhabit. And so, we were unable to find any responsible actors who would take this on. And so then it kind of, it's like, well, I guess it's kind of on us. We have to, you know, like the Smithsonian is like, we're not the addict for your racist trash. You know, it's like, it's really, it's, it's on us, it's on communities to figure this out.

And if there isn't some sort of organization that can responsibly curate this and care for it, then we really need to think about it. And in the case of this Lee statue of Charlottesville's Lee statue, I think there are about 16 monuments of Lee, kind of equestrian monuments of, of League, like kind of equestrian monuments of this sort, you know, in the country, I can say with confidence that all of the others are of better quality. Charlotte's, I'll say this the absolute worst. Such an important point, right?

Because people are like, well, this is, you know, an important historical piece of art. And that's true of some of them. Some of them are legitimate pieces of, but this one is not. No, it is not. I mean, it looked like he was smuggling hams in his sleeves. Oh, well, yeah, so yeah, it's terrible. It's really a case, the Lee statue from Charlottesville,

is really a case of too many chefs spoiled the soup, you know? soup, you know, the the the the got, you know, they, the the original sculptor Shreddy, you know, was commissioned to do this, this, this work. And he got behind on the commission because he was finishing another, another work of his, which is generally regarded as his magnum opus, which is a monument to general grant. I just love that. It's just perfect poetry. You got to wait and working on my best piece. Right. He finished a beautiful statue of Grant and then he died. And then he died. He died and supposedly it might be apocryphal. I kind of like this tale that supposedly when he's on his deathbed, Shreddy's on his deathbed, and he's still thinking about that unfinished Lee product. He's like, oh, mind the cloth,

you know, keep it damp. Keep the plaster wet, right? Yes, keep the plaster. He'd made a maquette. He'd made a model, play model of the Lee statue for Charlottesville for that next commission, the unfinished commission, and he dies. And so now it's like, well, you know, this is the problem, you know, for, you know, for the philanthropist and the community or the community leaders of Charlottesville who wanted this lease statute. So they find, they find a ringer, you know, this young guy, you know, Leo Lintelli, interesting, you know, Italian immigrant in the 20s, which is kind of interesting, you know, when Lintelli, interesting, you know, Italian immigrant in the 20s, which is kind of interesting.

You know, when you think about, you know, all the hate that was being whipped up. Back before Italians were white, right? That was before Italians were white. I mean, he was, yeah, kind of direct from Italy and from a sculpting background. So maybe they made a little exception for him. I don't know. Anyway, so this young guy, you know, Leo Lintelli, he takes over and, you know, he probably needed a little more practice. I don't know. It just, it didn't turn out well.

It's like the Lego tail on traveler, like a chunky. No, it's just, yeah, there was, we had a sculptor from around here who himself works in in bronze and does monumental work. And he kind of just kind of came and looked at it. And he was just, you know, it just everything's out of proportion. The gauntlets on the glove are too thick. You know, the sword is too long. The tail is too fat. I mean, his feet are bigger than his head. Yeah, at least head on top of his shoulders. It just looks like, you know, kind of like almost like transformer toy or something. I mean, it's just really weird, you know, proportions. It's just, it looks like, you know, kind of like almost like a transformer toy or something. I mean, it's just really weird, you know, proportions. It's just, it just really was not very well executed because apparently the maquette,

the model that had been made just was completely destroyed. The model, the original model by Shreddy was completely turned to dust. And so, Linteli, the successor sculptor had to work from the drawings that remained, you know. And, you know, it just And it just didn't really go very well. And here's the thing, even the boosters at the time, the folks that were planning for the installation of the Lee statue in the 1920s themselves did not think it was very well executed. We have diary entries from the master of ceremonies of the installation ceremony, RTW Dukes. And he says, he writes in his,

in his like day or two before the installation. He says, went on a walk, you know, tonight, you know, went by the park, you know, saw the Lee statue. I do not like it. Me either. This is the guy who's pleased to see the unveiling ceremony in, you know, the next day or two. How embarrassing. Yeah. And there's op-eds even, you know, also they're saying like, wow, you know, that just doesn't

look good at all, you know. So and these are the, these are the support, these are the neo-Confederates, the one there, and they've noticed that too many cooks spoiled the soup, you know, and then apparently the murmurs were sufficient that one of the speakers at the installation ceremony, if I can harken back to that, you know, at the Lee installation ceremony, you know, I guess felt compelled to address the complaints that were apparently circulating. And he said, you know, I'm talking about the proportionality problem that I mentioned

before that just so many, it's just very disjointed, you know, so many parts of the, of the monument are out of proportion to other parts. And so this speaker at the installation ceremony said, you know, there are those who say that the pedestal, you know, upon which the Lee statue is set is too small. But I say the world itself is too small a pedestal for General Lee. I just like, oh yeah, good save. Good save, good save.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, the proportions, I mean, the whole thing, the plinth was too small, the statue was too large for that tiny park. It was never a good spot for him. It was never a good spot. So anyway, all that is to say, it's a very poor work of art, just just on an aesthetic. I mean, and I'm not one that that wants to remove, you know, kind of any moral considerations from aesthetic. There are some people, philosophers who want to parse that out and this sort of thing.

And but even if you believe you could do that, which I do not, you know, it's just really a, a not, it's like having a high school art project, a sea. I give it a sea. It's a high school art project that it's not worth saving. Right. No, even if it had not been this sort of lightning rod in our community, right? That even if this were a beautiful piece of art that was worth saving, I don't know. There's two separate concerns, right?

Like it's not beautiful enough to put into a museum regardless, but then also preserving this object in any capacity just allows it to continue to be this lightning rod. For anyone still asking about, well, what's the problem with recontextualization? Why can't you just put it somewhere else? And I think that's sort of a broader conversation about these statues in general, but for our statue, for that Robert E. Lee statue, right, that it becomes sort of a pilgrimage site for vigilante violence. Oh, yeah. And I don't know that, like, just for the listeners in radio land, just for folks out there listening, that even after the 2017 Unite the Right rally, this statue stood for another four years in our park while we had to wrestle through legal

issues, legislative and judicial entanglements that prevented Charlottesville from removing that statue even after the Unite the Right rally. And during that time, that four-year interim, it's crazy to think about it, huh? For years. For four years after United Right, it was still there. Right. Like this statue made everyone else realize they needed to get rid of theirs, but because of state law and these lawsuits, we were still stuck with ours.

Charlottesville was still stuck with ours. Charlotteville was still stuck with it. And these different groups, some of the same constituencies that had attended United the Right continued to come and make their pilgrimages to the Lee statue and to antagonize community members by putting up their propaganda near the statues and even going to the crash site on 4th Street where a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of Charlottesville counter protesters and killed community member Heather Hire, these

fascists who would make their pilgrimage to Charlottesville, would make sure and still do, on occasion, go to 4th Street and put up their propaganda there as well as if to further antagonize the community at a site of our trauma. It was very clear that this statue would just wherever it would be, it would continue to be a beacon for these people. So really it was just a question of responsibility. Knowing this, knowing that no responsible, historical or artistic institution has the capacity or desire to take it in, what does one do with it? And that it's not an exemplary piece of art. There are 15 other monuments

that are of better quality of Lee. We're not going to forget him. If this particular specimen goes missing and the way we see it, we're doing the art world a favor because as I've said, it was really, you know, not a very good, well-executed piece of art. So, you know, in considering all of that, you know, in seeing in prior removals, for instance, the Johnny Reb, the courthouse Confederate soldier statue was removed, and there was kind of no plan in place about where it would go. And so it ended up, you know, getting

sent to a battlefield that is maintained by a group of Confederate leading folks that that that seemed to favor a kind of lost cause interpretations of the war. So we'd seen that happen already the year before in 2020, that when there isn't a plan, it's one thing to remove it. But then where does it go? Again, this is a physical object that exists in space, in physical space. Where is this material object going to go? If you don't have a plan, then bad things can happen. And then there are... The path of least resistance. Yes, right. The path of least resistance is just to... If someone says,

I will pay to move this and the city is paying to store it, then that's an easy answer. And you can't let that pay the answer. It's like, okay, take it. Right. Yeah. And so that went... So when the county, Albemarle County removed the Johnny Reb statue, the Confederate soldier statue from in front of the courthouse in, I think that was September of 2020. Right.

And we saw how quickly that got sent to this battlefield that is, you know, maintained by these, you know, kind of lost cause type folks. That's when Andrea Douglas and I and Andrea Douglas is the director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center here in Charlottesville. We said, you know, we still do not have the legal authority to remove Charlottesville's Lee statue, but we anticipated that perhaps, you know, in coming year, we might. I said, we need to start making plans now about where the statue should go after its removal. Because otherwise, the same thing that happened to this Johnny Reb, to this Confederate soldier

statue just kind of getting sent down the road, you know, to whatever entity organization that wants it. The same thing is going to happen and we need to have a plan in place in order to kind of capture that so that it doesn't just kind of continue to circulate and to do harm. So that was our motivation. So we kind of, you know, in September of 2020, that's when we really, you know, put the pedal to the metal on starting the planning of this, you know. And we, and mind you, we did not even get permission until I think it was April 1st of 2021, when finally the Virginia Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city of Charlottesville in our efforts to remove the Lee statue. You know, so this was, you know, six, seven months before we even knew if we could do this, but we said, let's start making plans.

So we started having these kinds of conversations with battlefields, with museums, with foundries, just learning the nuts and bolts. What are the possibilities here? It turns out it's very complicated. boundaries, just learning the nuts and bolts. What are the possibilities here? And it turns out it's very complicated. Right. So I know there had been sort of jokes around that was going back over some of the

public discourse over the years that we've been sort of joking as a community for years. Like, why don't we just melt it? Why don't we just melt it? But when did that become a real idea? Like, when did it, when did it, when did that sort of coalesce into something that felt possible? I think, you know, in September 2020, I think when the Johnny Reb statue was removed and it went on, you know, to the Shenandoah Valley Battlefield Foundation, you know, and they have this horrible plaque that they're putting up that talks about how these men died for Virginia. You know, and it's like they died for it. 38% of Virginians were enslaved at that time. So how

are you saying that they died for Virginia? Also, this is from Albemarle County. The majority of people here were enslaved. So how did the people supposedly represented by this statue die for Virginia, fight for Virginia? You know what I mean? So we just like, that was so disturbing, you know, in September of 2020, when that happened, that that's really when I just really started working in earnest, you know, calling foundries. So the idea was always melting. I mean, it wasn't until then because, see, this is funny. When this whole controversy started in 2016, when Zion O'Brien brought up her petition, you know, to consider removing these statues, the position of the activist then was just move the statue. Go back and look at the signs and at the t-shirts.

And it says, hashtag move the statue. We just wanted it moved. Just take it from the central park and put it out in Mac entire park where there's more space. Don't have it downtown. I mean, that was kind of like, that was the edgy. And then- They should have taken the opportunity back then. See, right.

Exactly. That was the opening bid and you should have took it, you know, just these. That offer's not on the table anymore. Yeah, exactly. That, that, that, that would have been good. It would have been more of a tear part on the outskirts of town. So, you know, when the city appointed this Blue Ribbon Commission on race memorials and public spaces to have a series of public meetings, to hear from community members what they wanted to have happen with the statues,

should they be removed, what should happen. And this Blue Ribbon Commission hands their final report to city council, you know, and then city council takes a vote, you know, Charlottesville City Council in February of 2017. And surprising, many people, not some of us who are in the know, but one of the council members said, yes, I would like to propose a resolution to remove the lead, not just move it, not just recontextualize it because that's, you know, if you go back and read that report, it's actually barely, there's a couple of different suggestions. It's like, well, you could move it or you could just do this.

And you know, and city councilwoman, you know, Kristin Zake has said, I would, you know, make a motion to have it removed completely, you know, so it's like said, I would, you know, make a motion to have it removed completely, you know. So it's like, whoa, okay, we're, you know, we're making steps, you know. So it was, it was about, you know, it was getting from move, from move the statue to remove the statue as in take it away, you know. And then it really wasn't until after all the strife, you know, I mean, I think there were some people all along who's Would say tongue-in-cheek. Oh, we should just melt it down, you know, or we you know, she'd you know But but the thought it was just so you know talk about there's much talk of Overton windows these days

But they're just they're just When that was being said it was always in a kind of jocular matter, like, oh, of course, that could never be, but we should melt it down. It was this kind of offhand, right? It wasn't serious. Because how could that ever be? Right? I mean, that, right, really, that was behind, but what it takes is somebody taking that seriously, and like going through the practical steps of what would that look like. And so that's what I started doing in September of 2020.

It's like, I keep hearing people say that they want it melted down. What would that look like? What would it look like? How would you physically do that? How would this happen? I'm a humanities person. This was breaking my brain learning about alloys and, you know, compositions. It becomes an engineering problem. Yeah, it really did. Yeah. And I did, I consulted with, you know, metallurgists, engineers,

you know, folks at various foundries, you know, to, to, you know, consulting and say, well, you have to do this, you have to, you know, consider that. I mean, so yeah, it was really in the fall of 2020, when, you know, kind of in earnest started having conversations, you know, with foundrymen and with engineers, with folks that work in bronze casting, you know. But most of the time, people didn't want to talk to us. Right. When they found out, oh, you want to do something with this with the step? Oh, no, they just, you know, they were, they didn't want to be involved in any controversy or we would get someone who was on

board with it. Yes, we're going to do it. And then, for instance, you know, the company got sold. And new owners were like, what, nothing to do with it, you know, or they won't call us back anymore, or no, or, you know, know, I mean, just things just kept coming up. So it was hard to find anyone who would just engage in a serious way about the questions. And then even when you could, it was kind of like, you know, you'd get somebody for a little bit. And then it was like, you know, like the fish, it's like, you know, catch the fish would swim away, you know, kind of, I don't know. It just, so it was a lot of different conversations with a lot of different people along the way to figure out what are the literal and figurative nuts and bolts of doing this.

I learned a lot about standard width of trailers. It's eight and a half feet. Did you know that? Yeah. Eight and a half feet. Did you know that? Yeah. Eight and a half feet. Yeah, right, right. You know, and, you know, 53 feet long and, you know, and, you know, kind of what, kind of what's the hauling capacity? What's the payload? You know, how do you balance the load? You know, what is done edge? I mean, you're just like all these things, you know, that just very practical steps that one has to

take to melt a statue. And so it seems like, you know, the conclusion that you reached was this object can't keep existing because the fact that it does exist will always be a problem. So the decision was made that it needed to be destroyed, but what was sort of the process of thinking through, what do we do with it now? Like what is the sort of the vision behind, not just taking the statue down

and putting up a different piece of public art, but a different piece of public art that is physically repurposed, that you've remediated this material. Right, right. Yeah, well, we prefer the word transformed, to destroyed or, I mean, it is, definitely it is kind of morphing the material,

it is taking the materials, these raw materials and transforming them into kind of usable, just transforming them into usable ingots, brick-sized pieces of bronze so that they can be made into something new. It's not that we hate art, we want art. Right, Dr. Douglas' background is in art, right? Yes, Dr. Douglas is an art historian. We are the two most unlikely people to be in charge of such a project. I mean, I'm a religious studies scholar. It's like, I spent years of my

life, you know, studying, you know, how people, you know, make sacred values and specifically how they gather around material objects that they regard as sacred. So I don't think that's unlikely at all, right? That this was an object of veneration for a very harmful cause. Yeah, I mean, I guess 17 years, you know, researching a book about a very beloved 400 year old effigy of the Virgin Mary in Cuba. I don't know if you can see my book up here.

Well, there's the Cuban flag. This right here is my book. I'm going over too far. Yeah, I see the Virgin Mary back Cuba. I don't know if you can see my book up here. Well, there's the Cuban flag. This right here is my book. I'm going over too far. Yeah, I see the Virgin Mary back there. Yeah. Anyway, so that's my book up here. Yeah, right here. This is my book, Cachitas Streets. I mean, if somebody, oh, and this has happened before, there have been folks, you know, icon, iconic class, if somebody went and destroyed her image there in that shrine in Cuba, I would be incensed. I would just, I would be beside myself. I mean, it'd be like somebody killed, you know, a family member.

I mean, I'd be on the next plane to get, you know, you'd have to console people. I mean, a 400-year-old, you know, it would just be terrible, you know, doesn't have all the hate wrapped into it that these, you know, statues do and this sort of thing. So what I'm saying is I understand that people have very tender feelings toward these material objects that they have had experiences around them that have bound them together. Religiare, you know, the binding, that's the original, you know, root, Latin root of religion, you know, is to bind, you know, I get that. And so, yeah, I'm not a reflexive iconoclast, you know, I'm a Catholic, I'm a, you know, I'm also a,

you know, participate in these African-inspired religious practices and stuff that, you know, participate in these African inspired religious practices and stuff that, you know, that put a lot of, you know, emphasis upon, you know, sacred material objects. So I am kind of, I mean, it is kind of weird that me, I would be involved in this and that, you know, and Dr. Douglas, you know, but it's precisely because we know the power of these things and the, we're eyewitnesses to what happened here, you know, that we know the power of these things and the eye witnesses to what happened here, you know, that we know the power of it and so how to be responsible for it. And so to take something like that that was so harmful and to be able to use its materials to transform them and to make something that's meaningful and beautiful, and that expresses our community's values, and that includes people rather than kind of sets people apart, you know, or kind of, you know, symbolizing moments in our history where, you know, over half the local population was completely debased, you know, to be able to take the material that was part of that and transform it into something else,

it's just seemed like it just has so much potential. And the name of the project is Swords into Plowshares, which comes from a verse from the prophet Isaiah that they shall turn their swords into plowshares. They shall turn their spears into pruning hooks. So we'll take these implements of destruction and of violence, and we will transform them into instruments to cultivate sustenance, nutrients for a community. I mean, it just, you know, just to just really transform it, you know, from from something so ugly, you know, into something beautiful, you know, and we just thought, you know, let's let's

take the chance. Let's try and do this. Let's do something that's never been done before because none of these statues have ever been like, I don't think ever completely the Confederate ones anyway, have ever been completely destroyed, you know, like this. Most of them are just in storage somewhere. And we said, let's take this chance to transform, let's be responsible first of all and not send our toxic waste down the road to another community. And let's try to do something transformative, you know, for our community. And maybe this can also move the needle in a national and international conversation about art and the potential reparative values of art

and community building. And so, in our Swords and App Applaudsures project, we're hoping to put out a request for proposals, you know, to artists this year in 2024, which is the 100th anniversary of when the lease statue was installed, you know. It would be wonderful if we could have a completed statue in 2027, which would be the 10-year anniversary of the United Right Rally, you know, to have something else to give back to our community, you know, that's a blasting value that, you know, and for us, it's important that we write our narrative. There were people who attacked us, you know, who tried to kind of imprint on us some sort of narrative about what we were about and also kind of reverberated in a national and international way. And we're really taking control of the narrative here. We're saying, we are going to say who we are, and we're going to express that. say who we are. And we're going to express that, you know, and we do value art, you know, we want it to be an art that reflects our values. Right. I think this is a recognition that art does have power. It had the power to harm,

it had the power to bring great harm to this community, but it was, you know, that art was harming people just by existing in that space even before you unite the right. And now those same materials have hopefully the power to bring some repair. Yeah. So it wasn't, it wasn't just the practical, you know, I think you were saying it started out as sort of a practical question is what do you do with this large object? And so the practical answer is you reduce its size, you melt it down, you remove it and you melt it down. But it's not just practical, right? There is incredible symbolic value in using that material, that metal, right? In some of the articles you all talked about, as it was melting,

there were impurities in the metal. So as the statue is being melted down, the impurities are being extracted from it. It's being purified and now it can be repurposed. I think that's really beautiful. Yeah, it is. Yeah, the slag getting pulled off the top and just, yeah, just it was incredible, you know, to see for sure.

And so at this stage, you guys are soliciting community input. I think there's a sort of a community survey out about sort of what parks people frequent, how they're using the parks, how they're engaging with the parks. And you said this year there'll be a request for proposals for artists to sort of what parks people frequent, how they're using the parks, how they're engaging with the parks. And he said, this year there'll be a request for proposals for artists to sort of put forth their vision for this bronze.

Right. And this is, it's nice because this is all coinciding with the city if Charlottesville has for some time wanted to do a renovation of its downtown park. So this is, and this has been a long time coming that part, you know, separated, you know, all of this drama with the statues. But it's just really a nice opportunity to just kind of, for the community to just kind of take stock.

It's like, okay, we're, you know, we're, what are we? You know, going on seven years out from United the Right, you know, we're eight years out from, you know, Zionist initial petition, you know, you know, this statue's been, you know, we're eight years out from, you know, Zionist initial petition, you know, you know, this, this statue's been, you know, taken away, it's been melted. And it just feels like a literal and figurative clearing of the land, you know, it just feels like, you know, people have asked, you know, sometimes it's like, Oh, there's, you know, all that empty space at the parks. And I was like, Yeah, isn't it nice? I mean, to just kind of, I think

it's nice to just have, just push the pause button for, you know, in terms of things that are there for several years and just kind of allow our minds to open, you know, just like the space itself and just to just imagine what that space can look like. I think it's really instructive and I wish more communities could have the opportunity to do this, actually, yes. But for instance, taking that survey, that community members in Charlottesville are doing now about, yeah, where do you, what parts do you go to?

What activities do you engage in there? What do you like? What would you like to see more of? This sort of thing, it's great to consider this. This is something that has been, America's, the United States' public parks has been something that, since the 19th century, is something that's been a real gem in some of our public spaces, in some of our cities. And this is something to celebrate. And it's nice to be able to kind of take stock and to really think about how public spaces can express our professed values.

Right. And instead of sort of reacting to hate, like taking a moment to envision instead of sort of reacting to hate, like taking a moment to envision not our reaction to or, you know, what we don't want, but think about what we do want in that space. Exactly. And what would serve our community. And I think that's sort of where the project is now, right, to sort of envisioning a positive future rather than trying to remediate a negative past. It's so nice because I felt like we were fighting, fighting, fighting for so many years. You know, we're in court or we're protesting or we're going to lobby at the General Assembly or now we're going to city council. I mean, there was just, you know, all, you know, so, so fraught. And so now it's just so free to like, oh, to be able to imagine, you know, and to be thinking forward. Yeah. And constructively and creatively. That's a great feeling. So how can people sort of keep up with Swords into Plowshares, stay up to date on the project and

it's its progress? And more importantly, how can they support Swords into Plowshares? Yeah. So you can visit sipcvill.com, that's S-I-P-C-V-I-L-L-E.com. So SIP Seville, that's Swords into Plowshirts Seville. And we have occasional updates there with news stories about what we're doing and upcoming meetings, which will be happening at the Jefferson School where we'll be kind of presenting results of surveys that we've done, yeah.

And also, visiting speakers who will be coming to talk about, you know, what does art mean in public spaces, you know, so we'll be able to kind of, you know, talk with, you know, some experts that have come in, you know, to advise us on, you know, how to think about, about what we want in our, in our, in our parks going forward. And can people make donations to SIP on the website? Yes, on the website. There is a portal right there on, on sipseville.com. Definitely welcome that as well. And those donations go towards for the ultimate creation of this piece of art?

Correct. Right. It is not cheap to work with that bunch of bonds. It is not. Yeah. So we're putting together a fund to pay the artists, for the commissioning the artists. We're also applying for grants from foundations and this sort of thing too. But of course there are other expenses associated with, you know, processing materials and, yeah, and all that. So, yeah.

So that is S-I-P-C-V-I-L-L-E dot com slash donate to make sure that that artist gets paid. Absolutely. But Jalene, thank you so much for joining us today. Sure. And I'm looking forward to seeing our new beautiful piece of art, hopefully by 2027. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. Well, thank you for your interest, Molly, and thank you to all the listeners and supporters

out there. It means a lot to us that, you know, your interest in us and your support. Appreciate it. I think we all loved those photos of Lee's melting face. In this icon, I gotta say it's iconic. You know, I, yeah, we'll always have that, have that memory. Thank you so much. All right. Get ready for our 2024 I Heart podcast awards presented by the Hartford live at South by Southwest celebrating the best of the best. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators

in the industry. Podcasts have always reflected our culture. Watch live Monday, March 11th on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel and listen on iHeartRadio stations across America. And the winner is? The winner! See all of the nominees now at iHeartPodcastAwards.com. Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award.

Discover the best selection of audiobooks anywhere, plus binge-worthy podcasts and exclusive Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award. Discover the best selection of audiobooks anywhere, plus binge-worthy podcasts and exclusive Audible Originals. There's more to imagine when you listen. Try Audible for free when you sign up at Audible.com. What if I told you fairy tales had a darker side? He locked her in this dungeon. He ordered her to do this impossible thing. He threatened to kill her multiple times.

At this point, she just had it. She takes the frog and with all her might throws him against the wall. We see sort of a comical effort to put a dainty tiny slipper on a large ungainly foot. In the Grimm brothers version, the sisters just straight up cut off their toes and heels. Not only is there more to these tales than what was told in bedtime stories, there's a reason they've lasted centuries. And these tales stay with us, they stick in our brains. The stories existed before the Grimm's,

they will exist long after us. Long after the last copy of any known book of yours is rotting in a landfill, the fairy tales are going to exist, they're going to continue. Join me, Miranda Hawkins, as we step into the twisted world of the Brothers Grimm. Listen to the deep dark woods on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In July 1881, a man walked into a train station, pulled out a gun, and shot the president of the United States. James Garfield's assassination horrified the American people, and they wanted his killer,

Charles Gatot, punished. But Gatot, many experts believed, was insane. What had seemed like a black and white case was now much grayer. Could the justice system truly deliver justice in a situation like this? Gato's trial was extraordinary, but not unique. Important trials have always raised questions and made us reflect on the world we live in. I'm Mira Hayward and I'm exploring the stories of these trials in my new podcast, History on Trial. Every episode will cover a different trial from American history and

reveal how the legal battles of the past have shaped our present. Listen and subscribe to History on Trial. Now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where the host, Robert Evans, one of the hosts, has recently recovered from a terrible, terrible sickness by engaging in some fascinating experiments with TheraFlu, largely using a friend's diabetic needles, just shooting it straight into the veins. My co-host today, Garrison Davis.

Have you ever shot flu medication into your veins, Garrison? No, I've only shot one thing into my veins. Well, speaking of shooting, today's episode of It Could Happen Here is about a shooting. And before you are like, oh man, I don't really have it in me to listen to a horrible story about people dying today. Don't worry, nobody gets shot in this story. Thank God. Miraculously, no one gets shot.

Like against all odds. It's stunning that nobody got shot. This is the tale of a police officer fucking up, not worse than any cop has ever fucked up, because again, he didn't kill anybody, but fucking up in a way that's like more baffling and incompetent than I think I've ever seen before. It's probably the most embarrassing.

And certainly the most embarrassing. And not even really malevolent, just like outrageously incompetent. But I'm gonna let you take over from here, Garrison. So yeah, we are going to be talking about an acorn-involved shooting today. That happened in Florida last November. Finally, we know what the A and A cab stands for. That's right. So we're going to play some clips here, but I think it's important to set the scene so you

kind of understand what you're hearing. So this cop walks up to his patrol car, there is a suspect locked in the back. Sunny day, Houston suburbs, big houses, wide streets. Yeah. Yeah. Now something happens as the cop is about to open up the door. He then dives onto the ground, does two like action roles. Double barrel rolls. And then starts shooting at the car and starts yelling to another officer who's in the area.

And I think we'll just we'll just play the rest here. Yeah. The first clip's about 30 seconds long. And then I just have a few shorter clips kind of that I've kind of stitched together that just, just to get a sense of like what he's saying and what he's communicating after he opens fire on this patrol vehicle. So here is, here is that audio. I'm here! I'm here! What? I'm here! I hate the car!

I hate the car! I hate the car! I'm good, I feel weird, but I'm good. I might have hit my vest. Marky! I don't know. I don't know. I felt like it. Jesse, come back. Alright, so that was a lot of gunfire.

Again, it is shocking that no one died because it's not immediately evident if you just watched the video, but there is somebody who's trapped in the back of that car and there's multiple officers shooting at the car. And here's the thing, the guy, the distance the guy is shooting from got from when I watched the video last, I would estimate maybe about 20 yards. Probably even shorter than that. Maybe sure, maybe more like 15. It's medium to maybe medium long range for a handgun.

For a full-size handgun like that, I'd say it's about medium range. So a competent shooter should be able to hit a target about the size of a human torso at that distance with most of the rounds. But he is not that when I say competent, that is somebody who is bracing themselves and who has two hands on the gun. He is shooting like a character in an action movie. And I cannot imagine. So a lot of those

rounds did not even hit the truck. I imagine they went flying into a neighborhood where we can hear children playing. Yes. Yes. So the the the officer who encountered this acorn, which we will get to in a sec, was named Deputy Jesse Hernandez. He'd been a cop for almost two years. And we'll learn more about his background as we continue on with this little story. The second officer, well, not officer, but a sergeant of this Sheriff's Department, named Beth Roberts, and she's been a cop since 2008. So she has a little bit more experience under her belt. So let's kind of explain what happened here. So there was a series of calls that happened earlier in the day about a vehicle who was kind of driving erratically around a nearby

neighborhood honking its horn, kind of just like making a lot of sounds at like 3 a.m. The suspect was described as a black male in his late 20s. And then a few hours later, a separate call was made by someone talking about how her boyfriend has been refusing to return her vehicle and has been sending her threatening text messages. So this caused police to go to this girlfriend's house. She showed some of these threatening text messages. And they were talking with this woman when her boyfriend approached the scene. So the suspect approached the police in front of his girlfriend's house. Deputy Hernandez himself did a pat down to search for weapons and observed a more thorough search

once the suspect was handcuffed. The missing car was located a few miles away and Hernandez was on his way back to the car to do a tertiary search of the suspect who was currently locked in the backseat with handcuffs. And then as deputy Hernandez passed the passenger side door in acorn fell onto the roof of his car, which is barely, barely audible in the body cam video that we have access to. You would not notice it were you not listening for it? No, no. Three days later, Deputy Hernandez was interviewed by two investigators as a part of the Office of Professional Standards investigation into this incident of discharge

gunfire. And this interview in this report is probably one of the most telling things about how police psychology operates. And wow, okay, so I'm gonna read through a few quotes here from Deputy Hernandez. He talks about how, quote, I'm about to reach for the door handle and simultaneously I hear to at the time what I believe would be a suppressed weapon Off to the side. I definitely heard this noise about the same time I felt an impact on my right side like an upper torso area. I feel the impact my legs just give out I don't know where I'm hit. I think I'm hit. I'm struck. I roll back. I Rolled to the back of the car.

Describing this like he's the hardboiled detective in a novel. I rolled to the back of the car. Now I'm stuck in the street. And I knew where the fire, where the shots came from. I, or I believed where they came from. It was right there as I'm reaching for that door handle. So I'm laying behind the car. I'm yelling shots fire, shots fire, shots fired. I returned fire once I could get cover behind another vehicle that was parked in the driveway there.

So when asked to describe what he felt, because he's not just claiming that he heard a sound. He's claiming he felt like he got hit. Yeah, he felt an impact. He felt an impact and his legs went out from underneath him. Yes. Which again, in the video, he clearly does a double barrel roll. He does a double barrel roll. He does a double barrel roll. That is not, I have seen people get hit and drop.

They do not do double barrel rolls. No, he thinks he's like a little action star. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He says, quote, it felt like an impact to my upper torso around here. And he motions up to his right shoulder on the right side. It was like a sound impact, like almost that quick, I guess. I just love the phrase, it was like a sound impact. Yeah. I think he's saying, I think what he's saying from, from reading it is that like,

we're missing some of the body language that he was going, it was like sound and then like, moving his hands together. Sound impact. Sound. You hear the sound and then we got impact. I think he was actually trying to, which is not like the, which is actually not in person, probably very awkward. But yeah, it does.

It comes across weird. And so more, more, more funny than sound impact for again, an acorn that's falling on a roof. We have quote, my legs weren't working the way I wanted them to be working. I think I yelled at one point to Sergeant Roberts. I think I might have been hit in the leg or something along those lines because I was struggling to get cover. I think at one point I reached up to touch my head. I think I still had the sound in my head. I wasn't sure if I had been hit in the head. I was getting a funny tingling around all sides of my body. And I think some of that money just been adrenaline,

putting together the fact that I, what I just heard and the impact that I felt. I've never been shot before, so I don't know what that's like or, um, you know, unquote. Great. Oh man. So, he is, he's unsure if he would be able to notice if he got shot in the head or not, which is kind of interesting. I mean, I'm sure you could get grazed, but like, come on buddy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one thing, it is true that like, you can be hit like an armor and not be sure if you've gotten hit because it didn't penetrate, but you would also not mistake Acorn Shrapnel hitting you

reasonably for a bullet. Like that's simply not a mistake a reasonable person is going to make. So the investigator asked him like if there was any other sense that there could have been gunfire, like if you saw any like shattered glass coming from the car and Hernandez said no. When asked why he decided to stop firing, Hernandez said that he stopped firing once the empty disc clip moved to cover behind it nearby Tesla and quote, didn't observe any rounds coming back at me. Just just great because there's no- I wonder why. There's the- yeah. Hernandez claimed that he was never able to see the suspect while in the patrol car. And Hernandez remained behind cover

until other deputies arrived and was rushed to a hospital where only then he was informed that he did not in fact to get shot. It's amazing. He made it all the way to a hospital. So, I know. You had a lot of chances,

you had a lot of chances to not fuck that up, man. As soon as the other cops arrive on the scene, he's like, I don't know. I just I just feel so weird Yeah, buddy you you had an adrenaline drop because you panicked like that is why you feel weird like a lot of ways this like mirrors the the police fentanyl things how they can like talk themselves into feeling, into like feeling symptoms. Yes. But, all right. So, Hernandez hadn't been a cop for very long.

He had no prior law enforcement experience before joining this Florida Sheriff's Department, but he did attend West Point and served as a special forces infantry officers in the army for 10 years. So one could maybe assume that the deputies outrageous behavior was the result of some kind of PTSD from serving as special forces. But maybe maybe I could kind of explain some of what's going on here. I had multiple people when I posted this on Twitter be like, oh, this is maybe people with like PTSD shouldn't be cops. And I had to be like, oh, this is maybe people with like PTSD shouldn't be cops.

And I had to be like, no, no, no. Well, see, the funny thing about that is that he never actually served in combat. No, this guy flew a fucking desk. Yeah, which like, you need that in a war, but like this man did not have any combat trauma that caused him to react this way. You know, like I've, like I've had, I've had PTSD.

You know, I've certainly gotten like I can get really jumpy with certain sounds. Yeah. That is not the case for the scare. That six month period where fireworks made us all very unhappy. Yeah. Or like, or like, or like keys dropping was the big one for me because it sounded like a tear gas canister rolling on concrete. Keys or bottles. But, you know, in the many times that I had bottles fall near me and set me off or that fireworks went off near me and set me off, I was often carrying a gun and what I never did was empty it vaguely

in the direction of a car. So he never saw combat. He did claim that he was aware of what suppressed gunfire sounded like. And he affirmed that the noise he heard reminded him what suppressed gunfire sounded like, and he affirmed that the noise he heard reminded him of suppressed gunfire. I'm sorry, bro. What the fuck? Under questioning, Hernandez said that he did not perceive any other sounds, visuals,

or physical indicators of gunfire besides the initial tapping sound and his upper torso feeling. In the interview, he was asked why he decided to fall onto the pavement. And he said, I'm not sure if it was adrenaline or just what, but the numbness in my legs and realizing, okay, I'm going to be on the ground, but also realizing the windows are right there, you know?

I need to be on the ground anyway, so I'm not exposed. So, yeah. And that just kind of led to my legs just kind of gave out on me. Fascinating. He then was asked to explain the two action roles he performed on the road. And Hernandez replied, uh, the rolling. I pressed R and X at the same time. What was I supposed to do?

Pretty much. He said, uh, the rolling, um, kind of reaction to what was going on. And we realized that like my legs are not working the way I need them to work right now, but I can roll over to the next vehicle. So that's kind of where I was trying to get to unquote. Sure. Okay, bro. So after his little action rolls, this is where he started yelling shots fired.

He emptied his clip into the car and told the sergeant that shots were coming from this vehicle and she began firing at the vehicle as well. At what point Hernandez tried to move off to the side because he was concerned about being shot by the other cop. He says, when I was done engaging the vehicle, I was trying to get off to the side over there because I was worried about possibly having, possibly me being in her line of fire now. Sure. Which is great. This is the first reasonable threat that he has expressed.

I would also be concerned about one of them shooting me in that instance. Yes. So after Hernandez's initial explanation of events, the investigator showed him video stills of an acorn coming into frame and bouncing off the roof of his car. Dep... I'm just going to read directly from the report. quote deputy Hernandez asked Acorn.

Investigator Hogan answered Acorn. I'm quote. Amazing. Amazing. Yes, an amazing sentence. This is so perfectly how you would like script it in a really good police procedural comedy. Like if you had some A game writers on the team, and it's gonna take some really good, you need like the wire quality actors to pull those lines off.

Bunk could have pulled them off, right? There's two more lines I want to get to before we take an ad break here. When asked if the sound he heard could have been an acorn instead of suppressed gunfire the deputy answered quote I'm not gonna say no because I mean that's but what 10 second pause in speaking what I heard Three second pause in speaking sound of almost like 12 second pause in speaking I heard sounded what I think would be louder than an acorn hitting the roof of the car. But there's obviously an acorn hitting the roof of a car, unquote. Amazing.

The investigator then had to ask René, does if he was in general familiar with the sound of acorns? Which must be so embarrassing. That is, that is, that is a low point in your career. That is. Hernandez said that he was, he was then asked if the sound could have been what led him to believe the car theft suspect shot him to which the deputy answered, it could be seven second pause and speaking, but I don't think so, but it could be uncorked.

Great. So then Hernandez's lawyer said that they could maybe watch the video again and see if the acorn striking matches the time that he says that he heard the sound. And then they deliberated for a little bit and ultimately Hernandez refused to watch the video a second time once he was told it was an acorn. I mean, yeah, like, come on. What's there to do?

Understandable. No, that's, that's, that's going to really do some damage to your self-esteem right there. Less than a month later, just a few days before a second interview was scheduled, he quit the job. So, you know what? First decision he's made that I believe. or a second interview was scheduled, he quit the job. So. You know what? First decision he's made that I fully agree. I mean, yeah, like what else can you do at this point? This story starts with a bad cop,

but it ends with a good one. Like I mentioned returning to work and everyone's gonna call you like the acorn guy. Like you can't, you can't. It's just not possible. No, anytime there's like a fucking acorn tree. Anywhere new, you get like you okay, man You okay? Do you need to take him? Do you need to call it? Yeah, did you call this it?

Watch out watch out a hundred a hundred times a day guys would be getting on his radio being like I just saw an acorn Dispatch you got a 22 on a. Negative, negative, that is a pine cone. No need for assistance. Just some gunfire. We're good, we're good. Not an acorn. Repeat. We're safe.

Cina's safe. No acorns in sight. All right. Let's take an ad break and we will return to hear about Sargent Roberts's Recollection of Events. [♪ Music Plays Welcome back to Acorn Cop. on the Discovery Channel, two cops, one acorn, no survive. Actually, no, thankfully everyone survived. This would be much, much, much less funny. We would not be laughing about this.

Now there is some permanent psychological damage done to the guy who was shot at, but not shot. And that is, that is unjust and sad, but not enough that we are not willing. Folks, you have a right to laugh at something like this, you know, even if there are some consequences to it. That's just keeping yourself sane in this world. So Sergeant Roberts was a member of the Sheriff's Department for 15 years.

She has a bachelor's degree in criminology from the Florida State University. So that's cool. She's been teaching at the Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission for 10 years. So I think one thing that led to some of them thinking it could have been suppressed gunfire is that in the threatening messages that the suspect had shown to or had sent to his girlfriend included was a close-up picture of this

dark kind of gray cylinder pressed up against the center of the dash in his car. Less than two inches of the cylinder were visible. No parts of a firearm could be seen, but they believed that this was a suppressor. And the victim said that he owned a suppressor. So I think that that's that is one thing that happened in the interview kind of or in the in the like exchange leading up to this incident. But no one got any confirmation that he had a gun on him. Again, he was searched two times. There was no gun found on him. It is possible to hide a gun on you.

It is much more difficult to hide a gun with a suppressor. Like that is a pretty big object. They are larger. It basically doubles or more than doubles the length of the firearm. And it also does so in such a way that makes it difficult to carry in a concealed fashion So when Sergeant Roberts was collecting an affidavit about the stolen car

She said that she heard quote some type of noise and shortly thereafter Jesse who's Hernandez screaming shots fired quote after Jesse, who is Hernandez, screaming shots fired. Quote, it was loud enough that it got my attention and made me think we're about to have a fight with a prisoner or the suspect. Either he's escaped somehow and Jesse is in a tussle with him. I can't tell you exactly what it was, but it made me look and then immediately heard Deputy Hernandez screaming shots fired. So Sergeant Roberts ran out into the street.

Quote, I saw that Hernandez was down. He had his gun pointed to the back of his patrol car. I was drawing my pistol and my magazine that was in my mag pouch somehow flew out again. Amazing police work. These guys, incredible stuff. That's someone who never practiced. Yeah. At which point I thought there was a malfunction. I thought that I dropped the magazine. Somehow I hit the magazine release on my firearm and that that was the magazine that fell out. Turns out it wasn't. It was the one from my bag pouch. At which point I think I fired. So you just have magazines fly, you freak out, you start pulling your trigger.

Yeah, I will say that last part, extremely common experience. Police officers are not well trained, and most of them in terms of combat stuff, and most of them do not shoot regularly. The FBI's done studies of people who kill police officers, and they nearly always train way more often than the police officers they kill trained. Most cops are not putting 150 rounds

a month downrange and like I fire 300 rounds a month in training. And I'm not particularly good. That's what I consider like minimum level of competence. And so it is extremely common in police shootings for the officer to say, I don't know how many I fired or I fired two shots and they fired 17 that happens. But oftentimes even more than that, people will reload and not realize that they reloaded and emptied a second magazine because in an actual violent situation, and it is for that lady, I will say that she just knows that her partner is emptying his firearm. So for her, she's this is less unreasonable.

Right. This is it is it is it is more complicated for Sergeant Roberts. But I think it also points to some of the inherent problems with policing. Oh, good God. Yes. And the way police are trained, like the how quickly it was for her to start firing at a suspect who's locked inside of a patrol car. Yes. Who she knows has been searched multiple times. And who she has not seen shooting. Yeah. She has not seen any gunfire. She's not seen any evidence of that. She's heard one man screaming. And how quickly they decide to use lethal force

is, I think, very notable. Quote, I fired at the vehicle because I saw Deputy Hernandez down on the ground and he tells me that shots are fired and he's hit. And it scared the hell out of me. I thought I was watching him be killed. So, which is, yeah, it gets to like how they are trained to constantly being fear for their lives, their fellow officers be killed. So yeah, it gets to like how they are trained to constantly be in fear for their

lives, their fellow officers lives. Quote, it was the patrol car. That was where the threat was coming from. I'm thinking we've we missed the gun and the pack down. Somehow he shot Jesse from the car and Jesse's down. Shots are being fired. I couldn't tell you exactly where they were coming from, but I fired because of my concern.

Unquote. And you get this is a thing that like does not get represented in fiction. People don't like to talk about it. This happens with soldiers too. I have a friend who was shot in the leg by a 50 cal, by one of our 50 cals, one of his guys' guns, because they were told, anyone from this building over that you see on the thermoscope is an enemy. They saw him on the thermoscope and they lit him up. It was just a series of bad calls being made and nobody checking to confirm because you're in an actual chaotic, dangerous situation, checking to confirm, is there actually a threat

in that area? They're just shooting, you know? It's people panic all the time. It's one of the problems with sending people with guns into neighborhoods. Like this is part of why the way we do policing is such a bad idea, because there's no way to train out all of this. You can train out Acorn guy, maybe, maybe,

but they didn't, but you cannot train out people panicking and doing things with guns that can never be taken back. Well, and one other aspect is like, Hernandez starts firing his gun very shortly after he's yelling shots fired. Like getting that linear cause of events can be tricky because like you are hearing gunfire at the same time you are hearing him yell shots fired because he is shooting. And Roberts said that she wasn't sure if she or Hernandez even shot first. Like all of your memory in these instances can get really kind of blurry. Like all of these like high stress

scenarios, it actually can be hard to remember the exact manner of events. Oh yeah, easily, yes. She said, quote, I'm seeing him on the ground, yelling, shots fired, I'm hit, I'm hit. I thought, I thought I saw a deputy get murdered. I was close enough to see his facial expression. That was fear, anxiety. It was horrible. I'm seeing him kind of trip fall stumble something behind the vehicle at some point is able to kind of post up But he was stumbling crawling on the ground. I don't know how to explain it He wasn't standing up straight. He was not in a tactical position. He was he was off his momentum He was off balance. He was standing behind that car. It did not look like he was in control of himself

Yeah, no. Yeah, that's like what she is saying. I'm not going to say this is like a good response, but it makes sense to me that she reacted the way she did. Most people would, right? Which is why most people should not be given firearms and legal immunity to do whatever with them, right? But most people would have reacted in a widely similar manner without training, you know, without training and experience.

Now, there's one way that she describes his kind of like weird stumbling on the ground. Quote, the auditory tone in his voice was terror. The best way to describe it was like watching a baby giraffe trying to walk for the first time, trying to get out of the road. Oh, that is, that is going to echo in his mind until the day he dies. So, baby giraffe stumbling? Fucking incredible. Learning to walk for the first time?

Do you know what else is learning to walk? I don't know. That doesn't really work now. Do you know what else could perceive acorns as a threat to business? Oh, yeah. We, I mean, the one thing all of our sponsors agree on is that acorns and all trees should be eliminated in the interest of better profit margins. They're dangerous. They're dangerous.

Kill the natural world. Live free. I want to know one other thing as I'm talking about like why they, I'm not surprised they reacted this way and what it says to me about like how I think like I think that a group of Moderately competent civilians with concealed firearms would have responded better than both officers in this situation large not for the reason that they're more smarter or Better trained because they probably aren't but because they go through the world carrying a gun knowing that if anything They do with that gun. They're legally accountable for every shot fired, they're accountable for,

which is a different mind state than what police are trying to do, which is the instant you're you feel endangered, you should draw and be prepared to shoot or shoot immediately because nothing matters more than you getting home and you have qualified immunity on your side. Right. Yeah, which allows you to interpret a very quiet tapping sound as a lethal threat to your life. Now, Sergeant Robert said that she did observe Hernandez move himself into kind of a kneeling shooting stance on his left knee with his right foot planted in front.

But still, quote, it seemed like his motor functions were not operating properly from what I saw. He told me again shots are fired. He's completely out in the open. No one would think that's a good place to take a knee to tactically fire. So yeah, he was still trying to respond in some way, but still very, very baby giraffe coded. It seems. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that seems like a constant thing for this fella. So Roberts also admitted that she did not ever see the suspect. She could not see inside the patrol car and she couldn't hear anything coming from that area. Quote, if there would have been something going on in that vehicle, I don't know if

I necessarily would have heard it. Was I hearing or seeing the windows be blasted out? No, I couldn't see the right side of the vehicle. But based on the circumstances, I'm thinking that somehow he shot Jesse from the back and it struck him some way, somehow. I don't know if the individual's gotten out of the car and he's on the circumstances, I'm thinking that somehow he shot Jesse from the back and it struck him some way somehow. I don't know if the individual's gotten out of the car and he's on the other side, you know, like he's escaped somehow. I couldn't see if the door was wide open. I don't know if he's gotten out and they've had a little tussle.

Is he shooting from the back of the car? All these things are going through my head. But the main thing is that he's in the back of the car. He's got a gun and we missed it and somehow he shot Deputy Hernandez. that he's in the back of the car, he's got a gun, we missed it. And somehow he shot deputy Hernandez. So she also couldn't remember who shot first, but she denied the notion that she started shooting because she thought Hernandez fired his gun first. She was confident in her own her own use of gunfire before before she could tell that Jesse was firing.

Yeah. Interesting. Quote, the threat was someone had shot him. We had an armed suspect in the back of the vehicle. Jesse was shot. I'm watching him, you know, fumble on the road. How do I give him more time? How do I draw the attention to me? How do I save him?

I thought I was watching him get murdered. The tone in his voice, look on his face, the physical reactions. I'm thinking we missed the gun and this is it. How do I get to Jesse to save him? She talks about how she, quote, couldn't let him be shot again. Again, as all of this is it. How do I get to Jesse to save him?" She talks about how she, quote, couldn't let him be shot again. Again, as all of this is like so confident that this has happened and they're so confident in their own use of force. She was also concerned that if

the suspect got away, other people's lives could be in danger, like his girlfriend who was nearby and the friend who was talking to police about their like domestic issue, quote, there was a threat in the back of the patrol car. I had a deputy that was on the ground There was still a threat to Jesse's life. I needed to provide him some sort of cover or bring the attention to me I'm watching him die. I've got to do something. I've got to do something. There's that just like overall just Constantly throughout this interview with the the the professional standards investigation She's just constantly saying how she thought that this man was gonna die.

That's why she responded the way she did. Like she talks about how she can't render aid if there's still a threat. She has to regain control of the situation. All of those are reasonable things to say. Yeah, all of those are reasonable things to say in a real gunfight. Yes, it's just a little bit less, less valid when the

exciting incident is an acorn falling on a roof. Yes. And you're shooting directly at a man who's your own car, been searched two times and is trapped inside who has handcuffs on like. So yeah, after both cops fired off this large valley of bullets, they both repositioned behind cover, called in more backup, and Roberts tended to manage the situation and the other individuals in the area and eventually check in on Deputy Hernandez. Quote, the threat

was still a threat until we were able to remove him from the car. Again, they're not viewing him as a person. They're viewing him as a threat. Like that is, that is, like he's no longer like a human being. He is, he is a threat. That is what he represents now. Yeah. Well, and that is, that is how they're trained to talk. And that is, by the way, like in a court of law, how you should talk, right? You don't, you would not say, if you were involved in the legal defensive shooting, I shot to kill. You would say I shot to stop the threat. That is like how people are trained because that's what plays best in the court. Yeah. No, she all of all of her interview is very polished. She's like, she's very, she's been a cop for 15 years. Like she is. She knows what she's saying here.

Yes. She's been coached before. Yeah. She's, she's aware. So after they were able to get to cover, she called in more resources, quote, that's when we were able to treat it as more of a barricaded armed suspect situation. This poor dude. Yeah, like, what do you do? Like, you're hanging in the back of the car, just bullets flying everywhere. Like, like, it seems like this guy is guilty of having a little bit of having an emotional breakdown with his partner and doing things he should not have done, none of which the penalty for is getting shot at while strapped into a car.

Yeah, he stole his girlfriend's car, he sent her threatening messages, he was described as being abusive in the past. Yeah, yeah. There's bad things, but that doesn't mean you can get executed by police because they heard an acorn. No, that is not what our society has deemed the punishment for those options for those behaviors should be.

So, uh, Roberts closed this interview by saying, quote, I don't think there's anything funny about it. It just went from zero to 100 within the drop of a hat. I know we talk about it all the time, but when it does, it does. And she's talking about how like how fast the situation escalates, like from a very standard interaction towards you're now multiple people are shooting. Like this is, it happens so quickly. It went from zero to 100 within the drop of a hat.

Yeah, that is what happens with shootings. She knew that Hernandez was prior military. And when in training, Hernandez was training on her shift, she described him as quote, a very squared away person. Somebody that if they tell you something, you don't question it. I wanted Jesse on my shift. When I observed him in high stressful situations, he reacted appropriately.

He wasn't afraid to respond. And he's, I think that last part is certainly true. He was not afraid to respond. Well, and this is why again, the, the again, the response from a lot of people when I would talk about this to them is suspecting it had something to do with his military training that he responded this way. Soldiers aren't trained this way. Again, this is panic in the field. But soldiers are generally trained to not err on the side of opening fire blindly because war crimes are a thing they're concerned about and they

have a sense of professional pride against, again, not to say that they do not kill innocent people. They do all the time because that's what war is. But this is not the way, so this is police training. This guy's bias towards reacting this way is the result of police training, not special forces training. She kind of reaffirmed her trust in Hernandez as a person who was reliable, saying when they were on night shift during training, quote, he acted appropriately. He did not lose control of his emotions. I have a lot of respect for him, actually. When he tells you something, it's not something like, are you sure, you know, he tells you something and that's what's happening or that's what happened.

I don't think there's anything malicious about what he did. I'm not mad at him. I'm not upset about it because I truly believe that he thought that's what was happening." I'd be pissed. You almost like... If I was tricked into almost killing someone, I don't understand this reaction. It's this thin blue line shit, right? Yeah, like they have to group together so so hard. Yeah, it's it's and it's like this guy got you into a situation

where you could have shot a child. Like I would never forgive someone who put me in that position for no good reason. Right. Like it's why that's's such an insane response to me. That's so coppery. She has to keep affirming that he has like good judgment and it's so bizarre. No, he doesn't! Like, he very clearly does it.

No, he doesn't! You all watched the video. Yeah, and one thing of like, they were under fire and he shot and his bullet went wide and hit a civilian. And it's like- No, that's like absolutely different scenario. Yeah, that's just a horrible accident, but like his judgment wasn't bad that was just a terrible situation.

This is so different like and that she's still going to bat for him says everything about cop cops, cop brain. Yeah. There's a few lines that I want to read before we close out here that are in the conclusion of the other report. Can't wait. They describe Hernandez's legs as quote, stopped working correctly.

I think it's just a really funny way to phrase it. I would describe his brain that way, but yeah. His legs weren't responding as he intended. But there is no evidence to support anything impacted Deputy Hernandez. No defects or fan on his uniform or his ballistic vest to support the impact. Hernandez's response was not objectively reasonable.

So they, they ruled that Hernandez's response was not objectively reasonable. That it was not appropriate. Positively surprised about that. But they found Sergeant Roberts response as being reasonable because she believed Hernandez has been shot because of his tone of voice, his stumbling attempts to move and stand up. And it's apparent, quote, lack of control over his body. Yeah, I would not call it.

I wouldn't say her response is reasonable. I would say her response is what I would expect most people to do. No, or it is reasonable in terms of how police procedure operates. Like she followed the correct protocols for interacting as a police officer. Yeah, I don't believe under the law she's she would have been found liable by by any court. No, she's they said, quote, Roberts found Deputy Hernandez to be a reliable deputy that she could trust. She had no reason to doubt what Hernandez had been telling her.

She described the auditory tone of Hernandez's voice as terror, the look on his face as being, quote, consistent with being in fear. I love that kind of cop speak consistent with being in fear. I love that kind of cop speak, consistent with being in fear. Yeah, he looked scared. Yeah, amazing. I love. I do want to go over one thing before we come out because this is again something I've been asked by people and you know, maybe this is actionable.

If you ever find yourself handcuffed in the back of a police car and they start shooting at you, you should know how this guy survived because reading the interview with him, he was like, as soon as I realized they were shooting at me, I like, bung myself down sideways and laid flat. I think in front of the seat, he might have been on the seat. I would get in front of the seat if you can. But the reason he survived is that handguns, number one, police carry hollow points in their handguns, which is a bullet that has a hole in the slug, the thing that goes into somebody. And the reason why you make a hollow point is that a hollow point expands

immediately upon impact. So it doesn't penetrate as well, it will not go through armor, and it will not go through objects very well. But when it hits meat, it expands. And so instead of going through a body, it stops and it imparts all of the force from the bullet into that body. So it is better at stopping people. But what that means is when someone is shooting

at something like a car and shooting into the back of a car and you have that whole reinforced trunk and backseat of a police car to go through, those nine millimeter rounds are unlikely to penetrate very far. So if you are laying down in front of the seat or flat on the seat, your odds of not getting hit are pretty good. Like he had, I'm not surprised he survived having done what he did. You know, if you're sitting up and you've got body parts that are like in view of the windows, you're very likely to get hit. But because he did what he did, he essentially saved his own life is what it's my interpretation of what I've read.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's it is a terrifying scenario that there was there was an instant recently of this officer who made his first ever arrest. He had two suspects locked in the back and he got distracted while driving. He drove his car off the road into a lake and both of the suspects drowned. Jesus fucking Christ. Like this is, all these things point towards just inherent problems with the policing system.

Cops bad, avoid at all costs. It's terrifying. Like it is, like these people can just act like this, can kidnap people, can do all these things, and face basically no repercussions. At least Hernandez is no longer a cop, which is good, but like that doesn't fix any of the underlying problems with training that cause people to react like this in the face of a squirrel armed with an acorn being the most dangerous thing that you can encounter. Yeah, it's very bad police work.

Avoid cops. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. So yeah, that is that is what we have to say on the acorn involved shooting. Yeah, great stuff. Watch out for acorns. Watch out for droops also dangerous. They can fall off a tree. Yeah. Pine cones can sometimes be lethal.

Oh yeah, they call those the widow makers. Eyes on the sky, folks. You never know. All right, done. Bye. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us

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