Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 158

Episode Date: November 30, 2024

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  CZM Rewind: An Update on Border Patrol Outdoor Detention CZM Rewind: Agenda 47: Trump's Plan for Education CZM Rewind: Wild Faith: A Conversation with Talia Lavin CZM Rewind: Irregular Naval Warfare And You (Ukraine and Myanmar Edition) CZM Rewind: Whipping Girl, The Book That Changed Everything ft. Dr. Julia Serano You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York,

since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone 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 going to be nothing

new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and people putting them back together. I am back after a lengthy court battle. I've been allowed to return to the podcast, which I'm very grateful for. And I'm joined today by John and Haval, two friends of mine who volunteer out here in Nacumba, a lot, a lot more than I do. And we're going to explain some developments that have happened, give you all an update on a situation here and let you know how you could help. So welcome to the show, both of you. Hello.

Thank you. Good to be back. Yeah, welcome back. If you'd like to just introduce yourself, like your name, like whatever role you play out here, pronouns and any like affiliation with any organization you feel is relevant. So my name is John. I'm someone that lives in the area. This situation just kind of showed up in my backyard.

I was kind of forced into it rather than volunteered into it. And I've been dealing with it nonstop since the beginning. Yeah. I'm one of the main sets of boots on the ground. I'm Haval. I use day them pronouns. And I organize with direct action drumline and zine distro doing a lot of mutual aid, which is how I got involved in all this.

And also with Al-Lotillado helping out on the ground since the beginning with John pretty much, just a little after John started. Yeah. So that's what, nearly six months? If you're not counting May. Yeah, yeah. Wow, yeah. So yeah, it started in May and then it stopped during the summertime.

It picked up again in September and we've been dealing with it nonstop since then. People will have heard briefly from John's father, Sam, in our May episodes about Title 42, which we did. Yeah, it seems like forever ago. It also doesn't seem like very long ago. It's just one big, weird, like collapsing of time. So last time we spoke, last time I spoke with Haval, we had this situation where we had three, distinct concrete camps, right, adjacent to gaps in the wall, which volunteers were servicing with food, water, warm blankets, we were building shelters. And we've heard a lot about those

camps. Does one of you guys want to explain how things have changed since then? And really, particularly in the last, what, six weeks? So, yeah, it's changed quite radically, actually. So between the months of September and December, we were servicing these three camps. And camps, kind of more or less in our immediate area. It was pretty straightforward. Our routine would consist of stopping to each camp two times a day and feeding people, providing them with all of the different things that the US government was not. And I kind of wish things were simpler like they were back then.

Yeah. So at the end of the month of December, Secretary Blinken made a visit to Mexico. I suspect that he pressured the Mexican government to police our border for us. One of the immediate changes that we saw as a result of that was the foundation of two Mexican National Guard camps at two of the gaps that feed into those camps in our area. And that has basically stopped any people coming through those areas. This has not made any less people come into the country, actually. the numbers have been fairly consistent.

It's just that people have been forced to go in through other areas. So there have been many, many new OADs that have popped up west of us. We have to drive quite a bit further towards San Diego to go and service those areas. The main one being sliders, which we're seeing about 200 people come in sometimes in a night. It's not a good scene. whereas those three ones that we were originally servicing had dumpsters and porta-potties at the very least. Yeah.

They still do. They still do. With no one coming in. Yeah. Still there. Exactly. Yeah. Moving at the speed of government.

The new ones don't have that. And people are having to spend. How long were the people there most during that crazy, crazy time just like a few days ago? I think they were up. They were there for up to like 19 hours. Yeah. Going on a day, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Because we first, to backtrack people, like we heard from a member of the community that there have been people seen held there, right, at Sliders. And then we went out there and we kept finding like warm fires, like where people had clearly been there and built fires. We could see where people have scavenged to brush. And a lot of documents ripped up around there. Yeah. The tilt hill signs. Yeah.

Yeah. All these signs. And so we were able to use that to suppose that was a place where people were. and then, I guess, was it eventually someone stayed the night there and that was what allowed us? Are we bumped into people there? Someone bumped into people there? Well, we have an acquaintance that's been very helpful towards the cause that lives just close by to there. And he's kind of the one that sounded the alarm. And from there, like you said, it's a lot more difficult, right?

Like, it's probably a 30-minute drive. It's a steep off-road. So, like, when it rains, it's hard to get to. that makes it more difficult for us to provide stuff for people there. And like, I guess people should realize that we didn't find out about this because Border Patrol called us and said, like, hey, there are people here without food, water or shelter. They don't do that. But yeah, that's not a thing that they do. We actually did one another volunteer. Brendan and I were driving out and we stopped on the road.

I don't think you were with us, John, but we started talking to one of the agents because there was two or a group of people from, I think, Egypt that were, it was the day everyone did the mass exodus. from 177. So we stopped and we're talking to one of the agents and he did slip that there was another camp. He didn't name it. He didn't say where it was. He just said it was that way. And that was around the same time that Morgan had mentioned it to us. So it's, you know, we kind of pulled it out of this agent because we were talking very nonchalantly with him and he was being generally nice.

But yeah, they don't tell us about this stuff. Yeah. And we have to find it myself. And what I think that brings up is that there are potentially more, right? We know for a fact there are. We know that there are more. And like, I think it's obviously people, people think of California and they think of LA and they think of San Diego and they think of the beach and like pleasant weather.

But can you explain? Like, it's been really cold out here and pretty miserable, right, with the wet weather we've been having. This is a pretty unknown part of Southern California. You know, we're a mountainous region just, just east of San Diego within San Diego County. It's, I mean, it's not, it's not crazy high. It's about an average of 3,000 to 4,000 feet above sea level. But yeah, it gets very windy over here.

It gets very unpleasant. It often drops down to freezing. Yeah. And that's if you're out there all night and you have any shelter and any way to get warm and you're potentially wet from crossing a river or crossing a stream that often pops up in the desert can be a really miserable situation. So like it's important that these people receive help. And right now it's just through word of mouth and the local community that we're able to find them.

and give them that help. Yeah. Yeah. So going forward, like we've seen like this movement of migration west, what does that mean for the ability of volunteers to provide services to migrants? And what does it mean for the safety?

Like you said, the push factors haven't changed, right? So people are still coming here. They still have things to get away from that lead them to come here. But they're not coming the same way where we could so easily help them in these three concrete sites. So what does that mean? Well, it takes a lot more time out of our day just to drive there for one. The main one, Sliders, is up a very shitty road. I think they call it sliders because it's so muddy and slydy over there when you're driving. Yeah, I put someone's head into the roof of my trucks driving up there. Not so long ago. Yeah. And, you know, we're not the

only ones that are displeased with this. It makes the life for the Border Patrol more difficult, makes life for the emergency medical services more difficult. And of course, it makes life for the migrants more miserable. And the owner of the property. And the owners of the property in which they're hosting these, you know, detaining these migrants. Yeah. We, I think every single one has been on private property so far, right? And I think we spoke to most of the property owners at this point, and it just seems to

come out of the blue at them. Like, it's a very strange. Permission is never sought. Yeah. And I think, I know one of them is suing the Border Patrol. for it, but I'm sure that would take months, but obviously it does have an impact on a landscape as well. People understand there'll be a cold, so they're cutting down whatever they can to burn, to make shelter, to make their experience a little bit less miserable. So that's the, yeah,

that's kind of a bargaining tool that we try and use when trying to convince the property owners to allow us to build shelters over there. It's just to try and convince them that it'll be good for them to have migrants not be in a position to be forced to have to cut down the vegetation on their land and trash their land. And, uh, you know, by allowing us to build shelters on their property and give firewood to the, to the, to the migrants that are being held on their property, it's better for them in the long run. Yeah. And the first time we went out there, they had created these shelters by just ripping brush and creating these like semi circles that were maybe about a footer. Some of them are very impressive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like two, three feet high. And,

and it was nice, you know, an enclosed so they had some sort of shelter, but yeah, they had to rip all that from the vegetation around the area, which just ruins the ecosystem there, I'm sure. Yeah, and it must tear up your hands as well, like lots of thorny bushes and stuff. Yeah, it's not desirable for anyone.

Talking of things that aren't desirable, we unfortunately have to take an advertising break, so we will do that, hit some stuff that you don't need. All right, we're back. Those are some products and services. Now we're going to talk about the way John B,

being very local to Hukumba, right? How it is like organizing in a rural community and the way that obviously you have people of very disparate political leanings in the area and like how you've managed to like phrase what we're doing and to organize in such a way that at the very least people aren't like actively pissed off at you. Yeah. So first of all, I'm a Quaker. Come from a Quaker family.

And first and foremost, I am doing this for really. religious reasons. And I like to try and remind people of that. So when people try and come at me with anti-immigrant sentiment, I just try and remind them that, you know, this is, this is basically what you're supposed to do according to the Bible. And, you know, to hate on any of these people is very unchristian. And when I do so, it's very hard for them to come at me with any of that stuff. But still, yes, for the most part, the community over here have not been very helpful towards this. They have not been very enthused with all these migrants coming in. And, you know, they've been very regrettably misinformed about it all. They're still looking at various crazy sources for their news,

like YouTube channels and stuff like that. And it's kind of hard to believe. It's like you guys live in the area. You can just drive straight out there. You can talk to me, a person that you guys know, yet you still choose to look up all these various whack jobs on YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. It was I've had something of a problem with the YouTube people, right? Like, there's a whole info, a whole ecosystem of right-wing YouTubers that I think probably most folks don't know about, even if you take an interest in other, like, right-wing conspiracy stuff, as a whole ecosystem of right-wing border YouTubers who have been,

I mean, describe what you've seen, right? We've had, like, a new right-wing fascist out every day, it seems. There's Oreo Express, Anthony Oguero's been out here. J-L-R investigators. J-L-R. Roger Ogden was out here. the other day. Classic.

It's kind of calmed down, though, in the last couple of days. But there was a period in late February where it seemed like they were coming out every single day. Yeah. Just a different guy and a different lifted Jeep. Yeah. Exactly. Just after that whole border, what was it?

Take back our border convoy. Yeah. I got them all riled up to come out here. Actually, what really set them off to be aware of all of this is when Fox did their big piece out here. And they were out here for multiple days. Yeah. That's what kind of like,

on the tap. Yeah, and that's very common anywhere you go on the border, right? Like, Fox has a border reporter, Bill Malugan. People will be familiar with Bill Malugin from publishing a story in 2020, which suggested the police officer had a tampon, used a tampon, put in his Starbucks coffee, which was demonstrably false and didn't really very much look like a tampon. You can Google more about that if that's interesting to you. But like someone who perhaps should have lost a journalistic credibility at that point,

it's now doing border reporting for Fox and this is like when I speak to people all along the border right here Arizona, Texas, yeah, the stuff that Fox puts out very strongly correlates with anti-migrant sentiment both locally and with like these these folks coming in and streaming and they're always asking for donations right like it's not a it then they're not like advert funded or like publicly funded like they're funded by donations for what.

Yeah well I forget the channel that Aguero was on but he's constantly asking for donations and like, oh, thank you, you just dropped $10 or you, thank you for the five spot, blah, like, they all are, sitting in his car. They're hustling. That's what they're grifters. That's what they're out there for. Every, it seems like a third of their broadcast time is spent asking for donations. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like a charity stream, except it's the opposite of charity, I guess. Exactly. So pay me to do hateful things. Streams. Yeah. And I think like that as we get as we look between now and November,

I think it's really important that like the border will be a topic that people who never come to the border will argue about constantly between now and November, right? Fox News will have reporting on it. NBC will have reporting on it. And both of them will have reporting that isn't anchored on what we see every single day out here, which is a wide variety of people from all over the world who are having a very difficult time right here and need our help, right? and we're doing what we can to help them. So I guess what, like, people who are listening to this will in the next, I don't know how long it is until November, what, six months, seven, eight months, they'll have conversations with their family members, with their friends, with people in bars, whatever, regarding the border.

What do you think they should know about, like, what we're seeing and, like, what, because there's this whole border invasion narrative, right? And this is not an invasion. We were just outjoking with some people and helping them get their firewood prepped. Like, these people are not threat. I think people often make the mistake of considering this issue to be a political issue. It really is just a humanitarian issue. The vast majority of the people that I've talked to have very legitimate reasons for needing to come into this country.

Whether they're from Ecuador, you know, you know the situation over there. Recently, there were gangsters that took over a TV station. Right. Or in Guatemala, where I spoke to a man who, told me that his children with college degrees can make enough money to feed their families. Or even in Afghanistan, where people have literally had the Taliban threaten their family's lives. Same with Idaon and the Ayatollah, escaping all of the. Kurdish people in Turkey. I mean, the list goes on. Or, you know, climate refugees, like the Mauritans that we just spoke with earlier.

Yes, they're coming. And they have really. reasonable grounds for asylum over here. Yeah. And it wouldn't be such an quote unquote invasion if they were just allowed to walk through the port of entry. This process is so silly because they cross, they could just do this all at the port of entry. They really could. But the policies just choose not to do this. Yeah.

And that's the part that really doesn't make sense. It's like we're letting them in anyways. Why do we need to make their lives so uncomfortable? Yeah. And dangerous, right? dangerous. I mean, John, you and I were on a water drop, maybe two months ago now, six weeks ago, in slightly west of here, right? Yeah. Do you remember we were driving down to where we were going to get off and we met that family from Guinea? There was a, like, do you want to just describe what you

saw? Because I think it was like, at least for me, there was, like, I've seen it's a lot, but it's still emotionally affected me. So, yeah, there was a, there was a, there was a Guinean woman and her kid. I think he might have been like, what, four or something? Three. Three, yeah. And there was also a Nigerian woman. It's very good. Nigerians speak English and Ghanians speak French. They weren't really able to communicate with one another. And yet they were still traveling side by side because they just teamed up because they were in a desperate situation together.

One of them was, was she in sandals? One of them didn't have shoes at all. Didn't have shoes at all. Right. Yeah. Six weeks is a long time, you know, when you're doing this. Yeah. Well, you see horrible things every day.

Yeah, it's been a very eventful time. Every day feels like a new story. Yeah. And they just kind of sat on the side of the road and were out of breath. And they were just basically asking us to help them. Yeah. I remember the little girl, because we were obviously concerned with this lady who didn't have shoes and trying to help, like, bandage her feet and stuff. But then I remember the little girl just wasn't saying anything.

And I suddenly realized, oh, this little girl is probably very cold. and she was like, you know, early, like mildly hypothermic. Yeah. So I had her wrapped up in a little mylar blanket with me to warm her up. And it's just, I don't know, just for one reason or another, that was a moment where I was like, why on earth are we doing this to a three-year-old? Like, what possible reason could there be, this three-year-old girl to have hypothermia here in like the richest country in the world?

Who could possibly agree that this is a good thing? Yes, yeah. Or another experience I had in the beginning of February where, there was this Colombian man who was in tears who approached me and told me that his daughter was very, very ill. And he dragged me over to a porta potty. And she was there bundled up with like nine blankets or something, not really responding to my questions. He was trying to contact 911, but the responder on 911 or the dispatcher didn't speak Spanish. So I had to communicate with them and navigate the whole situation. Turns out she did

have hypothermia. Yeah. And, but the ambulance would not take him along with the mother and the child to the hospital. So again, it's another case of family separation. Who knows what might have happened. They would have gotten processed separately. He could have ended up in Louisiana and she could have ended up in Riverside or somewhere. Yeah.

And at that point, once again, it's not the government or your taxes that were paid for those people to be reunified, right? That's work that's done by NGOs and voluntary organizations. Exactly. Despite the massive amount of money, we spend on, and we were just talking the other day about how the architectural marvel of sections of the border wall, right, where they've poured concrete at like a 45 plus degree angle and spent millions of dollars for every yard of that. And we don't have enough money to give this three-year-old girl a blanket or to get that family back together. It's pathetic. It's, yeah, it's mind-boggling. Yeah, even today with that dude from Brazil, he came up to me when we first got here, there was some.

starving, wanted food, water, and he was like, I'm sick. I have a fever. So I hooked them up with some cold medicine that we had in our med kit. And then later, when we went back to do the second round of feeding, he got more food. And he was like, thank you so much. We were starving. We were told to when we were dropped off to wait in the mountains at 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. So they were just hadn't really, I don't know if they were on the American side yet or how that worked, didn't really describe it, but had to wait in the mountains before crossing. And so people are getting sick out there. We ran into that dude with the dog. bite on at 1-7-7 he was just we we always go check this one camp because there hasn't been out since

guadena sen al have put their camp on the other side there hadn't been a whole lot of people crossing in this area but we go check it periodically in one morning yeah we saw this man hobbling up towards us as we're driving down the road with a stick and we're like why is he walking like this pulled over and he was bitten by a dog he said he went to take a drink of water and some dogs attacked him two dogs I think yeah yeah he described it of the wolf right like he's a wood wolf yeah yeah Yeah, so we called EMS and they picked them up and took them to the hospitals. Right, but you hadn't been there. It's a long way to walk with a dog bite in your leg.

Yeah, and who knows, Bordavich might not even have emmst them out. They might have just tried to process them with the dog bite. Yeah. Could have gotten infected or infected. Yeah. But just to go back on the mutual aid question that you had earlier, it hasn't all been negative. It's actually been a really great experience in which I've met really great people from all kinds of walks of life. who have just joined together because they see a problem and know that they're the only,

they're the only ones that can make a difference. And it is a sure, easy way to be really important and make a difference in other people's lives. You don't really need to have much more than a good heart and a willingness to work. Yeah. Like, I think we should talk about that more because not that some of us had some like prior life experience, right, working with refugees or migration, but I think most of us just were people who were like, yeah, this isn't right, and I am able to help, and so I'm going to help. So can you talk about, like, how people can help? And then, like you said, I think I've actually got a lot out of this, and that I feel

more affirmed in my belief that, like, we can look after each other without the need to control each other. And, like, we don't necessarily need people with guns and badges to create a society that cares for people who need taking care of. And so perhaps you could describe, like, how people can help. And then what it is that you've got out of this that keeps you wanting to do this? Well, first of all, yeah, we don't have a clear structure of authoritative structure over here. It's we take ideas as a collective.

Different people have contributed different things. There's a woman that really nailed down the PB&J making system. And we've all just been following her lead. Some people came up with the idea of having a cell phone charging station. That was you. and it's just the list goes on. And if you wanted to help, you could just come by to the border, come to one of these sites and just start distributing food or teaming up with us somehow or by donating to the GoFundMe. Yeah.

What's a GoFundMe? So it's a GoFundMe that was set up by my dad. I don't actually know it. It's titled. Like Haucomba Migrant Aid, I think if you search GoFundMe, Hacomba Migrant Aid, it comes out. Samuel Schultz, I think, is by Samuel Schultz. You'll know because it has like $50,000 on it and like maybe seven words as a description. Google or Google.

Because not much else is going down here, I guess. But yeah, people can help that way. And we've had people come who listened, we had two people this morning, right, who'd heard about it on the podcast and it come and helped. Yeah. And it made a really, really great difference. Yeah, they camped out at the sliders and really held it down, which is really important. I mean, for some of us, we, you know, like John and I, we kind of do like a morning shift where we get up really early and make sure to do everything that we need to do,

prepping sandwiches, checking on all the camps. But a lot of people come in in the middle of the night. Sliders had people come in, what, at midnight or 1 a.m. Oh, yeah, all throughout. A group came at midnight. A group came at like 1 a.m. And then there were also more that came at 4 a.m. Yeah.

So, like, having someone on site camping, you know, making sure that people's needs are met and that if any emergencies take. place that they're taking care of. And it's just that smiling face when they get here, it makes a huge difference. Like that dude from Brazil, like earlier he was saying to me, he was like, thank you so much. Like this is like, this is humanity right here. Like I'm a human and I'm like, yes, we will treat you like humans here. Like at the end of the day, you know, uh, these people coming through central America and Mexico, they go through so much, you know, uh, extortion people ripping them off, just feeling unwelcome throughout that whole voice. Yeah. Just having a group of people welcome them into the country and treat them with dignity

is worth more than any bottle of water or sandwich that we can give them. And, you know, that's, that's the main thing that we're doing, I would say. I want to emphasize that people can help in so many ways that you can send us stuff, you can send us money, or you can just show up. If you just have a weekend, that's totally fine. Or a day, it's totally fine. Or if you just want to come and make sandwiches, that's totally fine. Like, we're a very diverse group of people. and some people have had more time than others, but yeah, everyone I think is valued. And like you said, I think like we're the way that we organize without anyone, like, we organized horizontally has allowed us to be so much better.

Like, do you remember the day, there was a day when we ran out of plates and we were like down in Willow and it was just, it was like chaos. And then someone who just arrived that day was like, oh, what if we put the beans in a sandwich bag and give people. That was actually Peter who was over at Sliders right now. Yeah, who's back now after going on Rumpfinger for a while. But yeah, like, if we had been like, no, I'm in charge. We've been doing this for longer, then those people wouldn't have got fed, right?

But because we were, like, willing to listen, then the people got fed. And, like, we were all happier because the people got fed, right? Like, it worked better that way. So, like, as things change, because, like, Border Patrol have said explicitly that they're trying to push people west, right? what do you think like what do we need going forward what do you see like the situation being and like it would be good to explain the context of like the changing seasons here as well yes so uh i think what we're going to see more of is people that are crossing in uh unorthodox areas more people

that are hopping the fence more people that are cutting holes in the walls just popping up all over the place so yeah it would be great to have eyes along the border, people that are willing to travel up and down along the border to find out where these people are coming through. Because for the most part, we don't know oftentimes where these people are coming through. There are a couple of new OADs, open air detention sites that are relatively close to us that we can't find even. Right. Yeah. Like maybe if we had a super fancy drone, we could find them or just boots on the ground. A nice off-road vehicle. Yeah. All those things.

Yeah. Yeah. Then these are all things that cost money that we don't have. But like, we've all put lots of miles on our trucks and lots of miles on our boots trying to, trying to help out. Yeah, my exhaust is falling off from all these bumps. Yeah.

My, uh, my transfer case took a beating. But like, yeah, if we had more people, some of us could focus on feeding people here because there was what, how many people were there when we just left now, 120, something like that.

Yeah. Oh, no, actually probably more. Uh, if you count the new group, I think, you know, a conservative estimate would have been made.

maybe 140. Yeah. So we'd made 140 sandwiches to feed them today, and we'd chop firewood and taken that out. And we'd be given all that out, right? That was after the same thing at breakfast time. That doesn't leave much time to go meander along the border and look for another site.

So if we have more people, we could do that, and that will be really valuable. Also, if you have connection to firewood. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you were a person who can bring us a lot of firewood, we have one homie right now, and he's breaking his back. Cutting wood for us.

So, yeah, that's a definite big need out here. Yeah. Is there other stuff like that people who maybe aren't here but have connections to or they could send that's particularly needed? A nice off-road vehicle. Yeah. If they got one lying around. Firewood is definitely a big thing.

That's a huge need. Yeah. It's getting really cold up here, especially in like sliders to, I think it's higher in elevation. So exposed to. There's nothing between you and the wind. Yeah.

Yeah, it's very cold out there. Yeah, and just other things that are easier for us to get, but we just constantly need, such as jackets, blankets, bread, you make a lot of PBMs. Yeah, tents. Yeah, tense, all these things, right? The wind and the sun destroys everything that we've stockpiled after a while, and we have to keep reimbanking the wheel,

and then sometimes Border Patrol destroys our stuff as well. Or sometimes some Chubs come and destroy our stuff, which... Oh, the Chuds destroying our stuff. Yeah, we've... talk about the destruction of the shelters before we finish, I guess, just to end on a sad note. Well, it's a happy note because we built them again and they're fine. So there were some shelters. I think mostly they were ones that had been built. Well, they were all ones that have been built volunteers. Yeah. And what, John, you saw what happened to the shelters, right?

Yeah. So we built some shelters at one of the sites at one of the main sites. You know, it was very simple just by having a plywood as the frame holding it up. And then nailing down some tarps on it with batons. It was a nice thing. It stood up to the heavy winds that we have here very well. It's incomparably better to not having a shelter out there. Oh, yeah. It's a completely different experience.

Yeah, they're instantly used. Once people cross and it's awesome to see, like, adults that are alone will get out and force families and children in the shelters. Like, yeah, you get it first for sure. Yeah. And yeah, we built those. It was working out good. And then one day the Border Patrol showed up or a company that was subcontracted by them and demolished them all using skip loaders and bulldozers and such.

We showed up the following day. We rebuilt all the shelters. And we were really happy about it. You know, it was kind of a big fuck you to them. You can tear down our stuff, but we'll just come back and build more. Yeah. But then, what was it like a three, four days later? Or the next day, maybe?

I'm not sure. No, it wasn't the next day. Two days. It was close. Yeah. Some guys just showed up and they tore it all up with hammers. A finishing, a tiny little finishing hammer. Yeah.

Luckily, they didn't really come equipped, like maybe with the tools. They didn't really know what they were doing. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that. But still, it's annoying when you put the time into building it, right? And Border Patrol didn't destroy contractors, didn't destroy the shelters. The first of people were like, oh, maybe they're not using this. but there are 140 people there right now, like, in the shelters that got rebuilt for a third time. So, like, I guess even, we do appreciate people donating, and we understand that people's

resources are scarce, and, like, the economy is bad, and the rent is too damn high, etc. But, like, every time we build up enough stuff, we have to, like, we're always running uphill because, like, stuff just gets destroyed, either by the, by the weather or by the Border Patrol, or by volunteer border patrol charts. So like we could, I guess, desperately need your help. And like at some point

the news cycle will move on from the border. And that doesn't mean that we will be able to move on from having people to help here, right? Because like John said, there were people

and people always deserve to be treated with dignity. Is there anything else that you guys think that people should know about a situation here? Or we wrap up? John's looking deep and curious.

It's kind of chill. It is really nice. I like being here. I come here because it makes me happy and my friends are here. Yeah. And like the Sliders location is located in a really awesome. Like you can see down just past the border wall. There's like a nice little train track that used to go from U.S. into Mexico, I guess.

And just beyond that, there's like sheep on a farm that you can see in the distance, like rolling hills. The clouds come through and like say it's a really beautiful place to be and to hang out. And a lot of the locals that don't hate what we're. doing are very nice. The people at the hotel are very supportive. Yeah, we're a great group, really good people. It's always really fun to do anything like this. People are generally enamored by our project and want to be involved and come back a second time. I mean, we're kind of like cowboys. I mean, we're doing this all on our own. We're driving up and down, looking at the sites, looking around, and that whole responsibility is on our shoulders.

Yeah. It feels good to take responsibility for something. It definitely does. We're doing this. Yeah, it's like no one else will, so we got it. We'll just do it. Like, that's fine. It's very, like, it reminds me of the punk scene growing up. But, like, it's a big, important thing. Like you said, Foxy, every national news network has been down here. Every grifting streamer has been down here.

But at the end of the day, it's a few dozen random people who are actually the ones making sure that people don't die here. Yeah. For all the government attention, for all the millions of dollars spent, it's just us. Yeah. Working on a fraction of the, I mean, it costs them more to, fly a helicopter for a few hours than it does for us. We've ever spent in our entire GoFundVee. Yeah.

And yeah, like we get it done. We are very efficient, I guess, in that sense. But yeah, we would love more people. People have come because I listened to Bogg us. And that also like just for me personally means the world to me, like, most of the time we just talk into a microphone and then you can't really see who you're talking to unless you go on like social media. And that's not always the best reflection of humanity.

So like it really means the world to me that someone like listens to this when they're driving to work or you know going on a jog or whatever they're doing and it's like no I will I will go and I will help. I think that is how we solve so many of our problems like there is a massive problem with people not being able to afford rent living on the street in this country and we solve it in the same way by just showing up for each other. And there's also different ways to get plugged in like if the desert's not your thing. It doesn't I mean this is like where the process starts as far as like this space. spectrum of the whole border crisis, or not crisis, but the whole border humanitarian situation we have going on here. So this is what we're doing out here, but there's also airport runs. A lot of them get ditched in the airports. So I think we all we got SD and maybe MDEF. Immigration Defense Law Center kind of hold down. They do airport runs. Border Patrol just, I guess at night, they don't drop them off like after 10 or something. They don't drop them off at the IRIS station. They'll just drop them straight off at the airport. So they need help being fed. A lot of them don't have plane tickets. They need to,

kind of some you know people need blankets because they have to sleep there so we all i mean we all we got is great for that you can plug in with them and i think um alo tra loto and who else is it m deaf as well that's doing the iris street releases so when the border patrol just releases them on the street like a lot of people just get in a cab and go they have the resources they can do that they're already planned but some people don't have any money or they got robbed on the way here so they have nothing they need a lot of help they need to figure out where to go they need a place to stay. So there's the street releases. There's the airport. There's, I think that's kind of, or by just helping with shelters and organizations in whatever city you happen to be living in.

You know, the majority of the migrant, well, not the majority, but a very typical answer migrants give me when I ask them where in the United States they're going to is New York City or Chicago or any of these major cities. Yeah. Lincoln, Nebraska. Yeah. You do get some weird ones like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be. Idaho, have fun. Idaho is beautiful. It is, yeah, yeah.

There was a guy, Havalin, and I met from a minority ethnic group in Russia. We met in September. Like, I remember one of those first really cold nights. And I was talking to this person, and they were in Pennsylvania, and I checked in with them a few weeks ago. And they're, like, happily living in Pennsylvania, can't understand a word anyone else is saying. It's nice to see.

And, yeah, you can help those people in whatever community you're in. And, like, if you're further along the border, there's. aha Samaritans, there's no maswetes, there's humane borders, Tucson Samaritans as well, right? Yeah, all along the border, you know, there are the, there are lots of good people in Texas, right? It's a sidewalk school in Brenoso, Matamoros. There are people at the National Butterfly Center.

They were very nice people who we've heard from before. Like, all along the border and like all around this country, there are things you can do to help. And like, I want to reinforce it. It's not like this panurious thing we do that's miserable. and we all get together and cry every night. Like we do have a nice time, even though we have seen some really stressful things.

Like we all look after one another and hold space for when people do need help or extra time to process something. But it's a very supportive community and we support each other through lots of other things aside from this. And I think a lot of people in general in the 21st century America struggle with isolation

and that's a thing that capitalism does to people, right? It isolates us from each other. And so hopefully, like, I think this is a solution. For me, this has been a really positive thing, but like generally my sense of hope. Yeah. And like what we're doing, this kind of, it's disaster humanitarian relief effort. It's kind of with the way the climate is going in the world and climate, uh, climate change.

Yeah, it's not going to get less common. Yeah, this will just be getting more common. And like this kind of like preparing and building community and like this disaster scenario. is going to, yeah, definitely be more in common. And it's not that easy to do. I mean, it's not that hard to do. You know, you just got to have the intention, and then you just got to get together and do it.

That's all you really need to do. Don't think that if someone had said to us, what, plus or minus 50,000 people probably have come through. I've no idea on the numbers, but somewhere around there. Yeah, probably more than that. Yeah. If we, like, I remember in May when we cleaned up the first OADs, when we were, like, where I first met your mom and dad, John,

We were cleaning up the first our ads and we were like, wow, that was a horrible thing that happened. That was really fucked. If someone had said, right, well, between now and next March, 50,000 people will come through here. And it's mostly going to be you guys who are here picking up trash. And that's all it's going to be. Like, it's on you. It would have seemed overwhelming, right? But I don't think people should feel afraid to confront these big problems because, like, between the group of people who we've assembled here,

we've been able to confront this problem and make it survivable and treat people. with dignity and bring some dignity and humanity into a situation where there wasn't any. Right. Yeah. And there's a role for everybody. No matter what you do, you can find your niche of what, you know, you makes you feel good or something that you're good at, you know. Yeah.

It's finding the little fascists that destroyed our things online and doing all that online footwork or it's building shelters or it's making PB&Js or whatever. Or friends made a website. They made a really good website. Website. Yeah, or even, yeah, just being someone that speaks multiple languages is a huge need out here, especially. I mean, Spanish is pretty common, but the harder language is like, I mean, Mandarin is a huge. Yeah, yeah, if you speak Mandarin and you reach out to us and when we can call you, then that will be huge, right?

They can be a big, real, in a medical emergency, that could be a life or death thing. Yeah. And so there are a ton of ways to help and I've really encouraged people to get involved if they can. Where can people follow along with you to? Do you have, like, social media or anything that you want? I'm going to plug? I don't. I'm going to keep mine private.

We're depriving the world. It's such a beautiful thing. Yeah. How I got involved in this is through members of a drum line that I am part of. So we show up for protest, have been since 2020, direct action drumline on Instagram. We post a lot of different stuff from organizing for Palestine to, you know, we were doing a lot of Black Lives Matter stuff early in 2020. and now it's kind of cross-mixed with border raids since I've been out here.

So we occasionally will make posts so you can follow along there. Al-O-Jolato is a good one to follow on social media, Encopal Wellness on Instagram, Borderlands Relief Collective. I'm sure a lot of the people listening already follow all of these people. But yeah, there's a network through all of that. And so once you start following one or the other, we all tag each other and reshare each other's stuff.

So you can get involved that way and figure out. out what's going on. Yeah. And is it board, what's the website for, that's a great resource. Borderay. dot GitHub.io,

I think. If you give it a Google somewhere around that, you'll find it. It is a good website. And like if you are facing similar issues in your community,

wherever you are, whatever it is, like we've definitely made a lot of mistakes and we've learned a lot. And so we've tried to document the things that we've learned so that you guys don't have

to reinvent the wheel somewhere else, right? Like, you know, you can be an efficient PB&J maker just like us. Yeah. All right. Learn Shirley's technique.

All right. Thank you so much, guys. I really appreciate your time. Likewise. Thank you. Cheers. Welcome to It Could Happen here, the show about how a small group of people are trying to keep making bad things happen. We're going to tell you what they are.

I'm Garrison Davis and joined with me as Dr. James Stout. Hello, Doctor. Hi, Garrison. Thank you for having me. Put some respect to my name. Appreciate it. So today we're going to be talking about something called a. Agenda 47. And actually, we're going to be talking about this this whole week. We've gotten a lot of

requests to talk about the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which is a kind of a roadmap for how a Republican president could change the country if they get elected next year. And although this proposal is scary and quite big, it's a massive, massive book. Yeah. Trump certainly listens to these types of guys, but he doesn't always like really like them. He does what the fuck he wants. Like, ain't no one controlling Trump. He kind of does whatever he wants, right? And, I mean, there certainly are other people, like in Congress, including the speaker,

who are definitely pushing this project 2025. And I think we'll probably talk about this on the show at some other point. But Trump actually has his own plans for if he's going to be elected president again. And we're going to be talking about that. And that is called Agenda 47, which I believe is a subtle reference to the 47. president, which will be him if he gets elected. Yeah. Also the 45th president.

Yeah. Sell more merch that way. So the next few episodes, we're going to be diving into Trump's plans for if he becomes the 47th president of the United States called Agenda 47. He has all of these listed on his website. And one of my favorite parts is that to accompany each one of these policy proposals, he has a video. of him like reading out something on a like a teleprompter and he very often will go off script just completely

and just start talking which which they include the entire transcript for underneath each video which is just fascinating to read totally divorced of like how he talks it's just amazing also all of the videos are embedded on his website via rumble which is just amazing amazing stuff happening

it's perfect So that's kind of the overview of what we're going to be doing this next week and why. And the reason why I have James here, James, you work in education, right? I do. I do some educating, yeah. So you have opinions on education, I would assume.

Yeah, strong ones. As a doctor. Yeah, a doctor of modern European history just to be clear before anyone says to me pictures of their illnesses, please don't. So I'm going to be talking about Trump's plan for education. And by the end, we can see if it gets the James Stout approval as someone who works in education. Yeah, yeah. I'm, you know, I'm open-minded. Let's see what he's got. So,

Trump, now, the problem with us doing these episodes is that all of these are like videos, right, for his policy proposals. And I don't want to subject you, the listener, to just videos of Trump talking. I don't, you don't need to hear that. But there's a part of me, just deep down, a shameful part of me, that when I'm reading these questions, you know, I really want to like slip in to like a bad transgender Trump impression, which I've tried to suppress. I've tried to suppress this urge, but every once in a while, it just, it just sneaks out. So as I'm going through these quotes, I cannot promise that that certain things might start happening.

And it's just, it's just a part of the deal. You've been possessed by the spirit of Donald Trump. Oh, God. So on this note, Trump opens his. education proposal with this line, quote, our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs, which really sets a tone for the rest of what we're going to be talking about today. I do want to highlight that I've been trying for more than a decade, but obviously some other people have been more successful than me in that regard. So over these next like 25 minutes,

I'm going to try to explain what he calls his quote, plan to save American education and give power back to American parents. And the American Parents Line is going to be a reoccurring trend here. So in kind of a broad overview, Trump believes that regular public schools as well as colleges and universities are just so far gone to not only require like massive, massive, aggressive changes, but also frankly, whole new alternatives are needed, which leads us to our first policy proposal.

So Trump says that, Americans are horrified that, quote, once respected universities express support for the savages and jihadists who attacked Israel, unquote. So that's obviously not great. There it is. Savage is very, very quick, just immediate, immediately getting this sort of stuff. Despite spending more money on higher education than any other country, schools are, quote, turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions, unquote.

What does that even mean? They're sympathizing with the alternate dimensions, you know? Oh, I see. The mirror universe version. They're meaning too much sympathy. Yeah. As well as turning into communists and terrorists. To be fair, he is right that, like, one of the areas where you will find, like, the few

whole, no, actually, Twitter is the other area, un-reconstructed Marxist-Leninists is in the academy. that it's there and on X.com, formerly known as Twitter. So to combat this communist and savage and jihadist incursion into universities, Trump is proposing something, quote, unquote, dramatically different. His plan is to seize, quote, billions and billions, unquote, of dollars through taxes, fines and lawsuits against, quote, excessively large private university endowments, unquote, and use that money to, quote, endow a new institution

called the American Academy, unquote. That's already a thing. The American Academy's already... Wait, is he spelling it with an E or it's Y? No, it's with a Y. Okay, so it's a place, not like the institution. So, the American Academy will seek to, quote, make a truly world-class education available to every American,

free of charge, without adding a single dime to the federal debt. And then to do this, quote, the institution will gather an entire university, of the highest quality educational content, unquote. And I love the phrase educational content. Yeah, yeah, this is, this sounds a lot like the short Prager U videos. Yeah, wait, what are you, like, you're starting to, you're starting to suspect certain things, right? Like, what do you think the American Academy is going to be here based on the limited information you have?

Yeah, it doesn't seem like a credible university, does it? It seems a lot like if, if you're a world-class education. Maybe it's what Barry Weiss is doing in Texas. You know, maybe she's going to be helming the American Academy. It sounds like Jordan Peterson's Griffith University is what it sounds like. It's a world-class education after you gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content. So this content, Trump claims, will quote, cover the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills and make that material available to every American citizen online.

for free, unquote. That's a library. What he's describing as a library. We already have those. Not quite. The content part. It's not just a library because, quote, the academy will utilize the latest

breakthrough in computing, unquote. As well as study groups, mentors, and industry partners to provide a truly, quote, top-tier education option for the people. For this next part, I have to do it in the Trump voice because otherwise the grammar won't make any sense.

Whether you want lectures or an ancient history or an introduction to financial accounting or a trading and a skilled trade, the goal will be to deliver it and get it done properly. I love the phrase whether you want lectures or an ancient history. Yeah, yeah, like you can give yourself a history. You could go back to Samaria and insert yourself. Whether you want lectures or.

or an ancient history, or an introduction to financial accounting, or training in a skilled trade. So you will be able to learn all of this online for free, getting a truly top tier education, which sounds like, okay. But Trump specified that your American Academy education will be, quote, unquote, strictly non-political, unquote. Good. I'm really excited to learn an ancient history

from a strictly non-political standpoint. That's great. We can't discuss the formation of the state because there would be a political stance. Furthermore, Donald Trump promised that at American Academy, quote, there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed. None of that's going to be allowed.

How will I teach without jihadism? My personal jihad is to educate the youth of America, but now I can't partake in it. Sorry, not allowed. Not allowed. according to Trump. Very sad. Very sad. So this plan also seeks to help the 40 million Americans who have some college education but no complete degree by granting credit for past coursework at quote unquote legacy institutions and giving Americans quote the chance to complete your education at the American

Academy for free and much more quickly than is now possible or available unquote. So now if there weren't red flags going off already there certainly should be now with that last line more quickly than it's now possible or available, which is a classic tell of an online university scam. Now, the exact details of how the American Academy is supposed to work are kind of unclear, probably because it hasn't been figured out yet. Because it's bullshit, Karas. And quite possibly never will get figured out. Yes. Yeah, many such cases in Agenda 47, as it turns out. But Trump University founder Donald Trump did say that his

American Academy proposal does plan to quote, compete directly with existing and very costly four-year university systems by granting students degree credentials that the US government and all federal contractors will henceforth

recognize. Yeah, they'll recognize them as fucking useless. Not degrees, degree credentials. Yeah. Degrade credentials. Going to put my degree credential up on my wall. This is just another Trump university, an uncredited scam that Trump is hoping to prop up with the federal government this time instead of his business empire.

It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not. That's his entire thing, isn't it? It's not real. It's not real. He's, he's framing this plan as a quote unquote revolution in higher education that will provide a life-changing opportunities by awarding American citizens with quote, the full and complete equivalent of a bachelor's degree.

I love it when he just fucking sends it on. There's going to be one in my episode, which you're here later this week, he just cannot say the word film. And I love that he doesn't fucking try. He just owns it. The full and complete equivalent. That's neither full nor complete if it's an equivalent.

Anyway, Anyway, Trump ends this video with an eloquent, quote, enjoy it, learn from it, and thank you. I'm going to finish you all my lectures that way. And then I'll do like a smoke puff and just disappear. So, yeah, this is the first plan to save American education. That sounds great. I cannot wait to get a full and complete equivalent.

of a bachelor's degree credential. Very, very cool. Yeah, wonderful stuff. But do you know what isn't a scam, James? Can we say that? We might be able to hot water. You sure? I trust my life on every single product and or service

that follows this musical sting. We are back. Do not, I repeat, do not send me any of the advertisers that just aired. I don't care what they are. my life is indebted. I don't care. I don't care. You can send them to, you can send them to Sophie. Her Twitter is at I write okay. At I write okay. Send it to Sophie. All right. So while this Trump University too will remain uncredited, Donald Trump, creator of the Donald Trump board game that

did not sell very well in 1980. The what? Yeah, did you? Yeah, creator of the Donald Trump board game. No. Wow. Okay. Is it like monopoly, but you just like lie and generate... I didn't look too far into it for the bit. I'm gonna be honest here. It's... Yeah, disappointed. I was ready to go in a deep dive. But Donald Trump also plans to attack

the current accreditation system for being run by a communist scourge, which leads us to our second Agenda 47 topic titled, quote, protecting students from the radical left and Marxist maniacs infecting educational institutions,

which I believe he's talking about you, James. Yeah, which is ironic because I'm an anarchist. I'm not a Marxist. You're not a Marxist maniac. No, no, sadly not many such cases. But I do make them read the, uh, the communist manifesto in, uh, in my one-on-one class. It's okay. It's okay. You got to read it. You got to, it's something you should emerge from history education having read. So Trump starts for talking about how quote-unquote academics are, quote, obsessed with indoctrinating America's youth at colleges and universities while charging a ballooning tuition fee. Trump claims to have a quote unquote secret weapon that he will use to quote,

reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left. The college accreditation system. It's called accreditation for a reason. It's called accreditation for a reason. He never extrapolates on that sentence. No, I genuinely don't. I can't fathom what I think he means. They could go in so many directions.

There's no way to know. There's no way to know. It just leaves her hanging. So Trump explains that, quote, accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally, unquote, which is not really what college accreditors do. Both government-run and private accreditation organizations

exist to develop criteria and conduct evaluations to ensure educational quality and authorize if a school qualifies for student aid programs from the Department of Education. That's generally what accreditation institutions do. They don't look out for if students are being ripped off. Like, that's not really their role, but whatever. So upon returning to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., Donald Trump promised

that he will, quote, fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics. So he believes that there's like communists that are running the accreditation system, and that's what's currently ruining colleges. That is his belief. They come in, they sit at the back, the little book happens to be read,

and then we have a criticism circle afterwards where they check how many Marx references you've made in your lecture. So after sending all these communists to the gulag, Trump will then begin to, quote, accept applications for new accreditors. Now, it's unclear, if he's talking about just like the public or private sector here,

but these newer creditors will quote impose real standards and colleges once again and once and for all. Now, what such standards you ask? Thank you, James. You're welcome, Garrison. Trump gave us a handy little list, which includes like some of the more average conservative to libertarian-esque positions, like protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs, offering options for accelerated and low-cost degrees, providing meaningful job placement and career services and implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning or getting their money's worth, right? Which all that sounds like kind of standard politician talk,

right? It's like, okay, sure. But Trump did mention a few other standards that will be imposed once again by this new generation of accreditors, which will also include, quote, defending the American tradition and Western civilization and removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats, unquote. So, DEI, the right's new favorite boogeyman that's responsible from everything from rising university costs to botched surgeries, aviation incidents, and boats malfunctioning and cladding with bridges. It is the villain of the conservative right at the moment. And so because this has been a trending topic among conservatives, Trump's trying to jump on this DEI train, which sounds incredibly dangerous from their perspective. Because this term, he probably never even heard of before like a year ago.

Like, come on. No, I don't think he implemented DEI in his business institutions. I think this is, yeah, it's a word they say when they can't say slurs. They think they found a funny workaround to saying slurs. I mean, that's this thing. It was like every time someone says like critical race theory, woke or DEI, they're really just trying to say a slur. And if you replace. cowards. If you replace those three terms with just a slur, their sentences make a lot more

sense. Because the way they use the word woke does not mean anything in a lot of cases. But if you just replace it for a racial slur, you're like, oh, now I can understand what they're saying. It's a handy trick that really is not fun to think about. Yeah. Or subtle. As a part of this DEI frenzy, Trump has promised to, quote, direct the Department of Education to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination, unquote. Which also kind of calls upon like older, like affirmative action complaints

that conservatives have been talking about for years now. That's what I wondered if he was going after. Yeah, it kind of, it ties into that as well. And Trump added that this race-based discrimination, quote, includes discrimination against Asian Americans, unquote, which is definitely invoking that style of affirmative action, conservative rhetoric from like, 10, 5 years ago.

Yeah, even more recent. When was that Supreme Court case? Oh yeah, that was just like last year. Becky with the bad grades. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So beyond just threatening to sick the DOJ on woke schools, Trump also made the more specific promise that if schools, quote,

persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity, unquote, he will not only make sure that their endowments be taxed, but also, quote, through budget reconciliation, I will advance to measure to have them find up to the entire amount of their endowment, unquote. Does he realize that middle schools have endowments? Like, I teach you the community college. We ain't got an endowment. No, he's, I'm sure that he's going to go after like the Harvard endowment.

Yeah, that's going to track. Yeah. Have fun fining $50 billion from Harvard. That's totally going to happen. But his plan after he seizes these endowments, quote, a portion of the seized funds will then be used as restitution for victims of these illegal and unjust policies, policies that hurt our country so badly. Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers, and now we're going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. So that's cool.

Okay, sure. You're going to use this to pay back white people who've been denied college. admission. Okay. Cool. That sounds like a winning electoral strategy. Yeah, finally the reparations. People have been demanding for decades. Exactly. You know who's had it too hard for too long, James? It's white people who didn't make it through college, Garrison. It's because they didn't get to, it's because they didn't go to Yale. Now they have to go to Princeton. Yeah. Embarrassing.

Right. Why would you even bother? So it's, but it's not just colleges. Trump also threatened to, quote, cut federal funding for any school or program publishing critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto our children. We're not going to allow it to happen, folks. Very cool. Great.

Yeah. I used to teach a gender sociology course, so I look forward to the... Oh, defund. Defund. Yeah, yeah, no. We're going down fighting. We're going to whi-that shit. They will have to fight their way in.

Let me tell you. Don't say that on air. You can't say that. You're going to turn your community college into a... You can't say that. So yeah, he's going to go after regular schools, both colleges, universities, regular schools, if there's doing any CRT, gender ideology. You can tell that some of this was written like a year and a half ago, because no one's talking about critical race theory anymore. Yeah, yeah, he missed it both.

But like, can you imagine teaching a sociology course and just being like, yeah, we're going to skip past race and gender? Politics? We're going to skip past politics. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is a man who himself went to, like, did he go to Harvard or Yale? No, he did not go to either. He was sent to a military school by his father when he was 13 for being annoying.

Then he think he went to a school in Pennsylvania. Respect. And then, what other school did he go to? Critical respect to his dad. Yeah, he went to the New York Military Academy, that he went to Fordham University, and then the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Oh, yeah, Wharton Business School, yeah.

Not a real graduate degree. So the reason why this is all so evils, because Trump thinks that a lot of this stuff is basically forming a new religion. All this woke stuff, quote, the Marxism being preached in our schools is totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it resembles establishing a new religion. Can't let that happen. Can't let that happen. One thing we take a big swing at is Judeo-Christian institutions. To combat this growing threat of religious Marxism, his administration...

I'm sorry, I can't. I cannot look. Oh. His administration will, quote, aggressively pursue potential violations of the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution. That's very simple. I think you quite understand. The full remit of that there. Luckily, we do Russian Orthodox Marxism at my university, so we should be safe. Oh, God. Yeah.

Well... A lot of beards. So, and then in kind of like a laundry list of policies and talking points, Trump pledged to quote, veto the sinister effort to weaponize civics education. Oh, what? We will keep men out of women's sports and will create a new credentialing body that'll be the gold standard anywhere in the world

to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, sport a way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctinate children, but very simply to educate them. No one's ever done. No one has ever created a credentialing body for patriotic teachers who embrace, quote, our way of life before it's never been done. Vino the sinister effort to weaponize civics. Yeah, yeah.

Just imagine him looking for the civics bill. Yeah, very funny. Probably distract him for a while, stuff I'm doing some actual terrible shit. A little bit with that last part with like indoctrinating children and this next little bit will kind of demonstrate how stuff like QAnon didn't simply go away, like, have postulated. Instead, it's just been absorbed into the fabric of American politics. No longer does the boogeyman have to be a DNC pedophilic elite. Now it's been deterioratorialized and destroyed, mutated into just being any schoolteacher or like every trans person, right? Or God forbid, a transgender school teacher. That's going to say. Right. Which is like the prime evil of the current conservative

society. And Trump promises on day one of his new presidency, he will, he will quote, begin to find and remove the radicals, zealots, and Marxists who've infiltrated the Department of Education, and that also includes others, and you know who you are, because we are not going to allow anyone to hurt our children. You know who you are. So this is the weaponization of nearly eight years of QAnon rhetoric, right? That is, that has grown past the need to actually invoke QAnon, plus the two years of the Republican Party, the Daily Wire and lips of TikTok, working to shift Q&ON's kind of disgraced and unfocused momentum towards a manufactured continuation in the form of this transgender groomer craze that's taking over American schools.

Quote, Joe Biden has given these lunatics unchecked power. I will have them fired and escorted from the building, and I will tell Congress that any appropriations bill I sign must reaffirm the president's ability to remove defiant employees from the job. It's all about our children, unquote. I'm just imagining an executive order to remove someone from their lecture hall. I am going to be signing an executive order on this podcast to go to another ad break. We are back. And thank you, James, for reaffirming my ability to remove defiant ads.

Yeah. While you were all away, there several federal agents came in and inserted an ad break. In this last section here, we're going to return to Trump's conception that entire alternatives are needed. to America's broken woke school system. Now focusing on the grade school side rather than just the post-secondary. So in this vein, Trump is courting the growing number

of homeschooling families. So according to a Washington Post poll from last year, Republican homeschoolers outnumber Democrat ones two to one. So he kind of already has the majority of that vote, but still it's something he is going after. According to Trump, ever since, quote, the China virus,

America has seen an estimated 30% increase in homeschooling. enrollment, unquote. Just a funny term is homeschool enrollment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just going to the home school to enroll. I'm going to be enrolling at homeschool. Very funny. And if elected president for a second time, he will do everything to support, quote,

parents who make the courageous choice of homeschool, unquote. Again, the way he uses home, the word homeschool is unlike anyone else I've ever heard talk. It is, it is a very odd use of the English language. Yeah, he doesn't seem to understand parts of speech. Like, he just does what he wants. No. And Trump said he'll work to ensure that homeschoolers will be entitled to all the benefits available to non-homchool students,

like being able to participate in athletic programs, clubs, after-school activities, educational trips, and more. He pledged that in his next term, he will allow 529 education saving his accounts to be used for, quote, costs associated with homeschool education. Current 529 savings accounts allow families to withdraw up to $10,000. year to spend tax-free on tuition for private schools, which Trump called a, quote, tremendous school choice, very important school choice, remember that term, unquote. That term never comes up again in this video. Oh, great.

So Trump is planning to expand this tuition savings program to include homeschooling families as well. With a very unknown system of checks and balances to determine what exactly qualifies as costs related to homeschooling. And often homeschooling is used by abusive parents to just have kids do free labor around the house and they try

to make it count as like education. And like if you're now allowing parents to put money to a savings account to remove $10,000 a year, tax free, spend on education, like what does what does that mean? Does that mean just curriculum? Does that mean like household supplies? Because that's being put towards their

homeschool because they're schooling at home. Very, very unclear and it's kind of refers back to some of the general problems homeschooling, especially in like conservative homeschooling, where just is a large way to abuse children. Not in like the groomer way that right wing people talk about. It's like, no, you're just literally like limiting your kids' access to the outside world because you think if they go outside, they're going to turn gay. So, but even if, oh, sorry, there's one, one final quote from this homeschooling video, which are just fucking phenomenal. To every homeschool family, I will be your champion. Do not vote Democrat.

They're looking to destroy you if you don't mind me saying that. Joe Biden can't put two sentences together, and yet he's looking to destroy you. Do not vote Democrat. Do not vote for Crooked Joe. Vote for Honest Donald. Thank you very much. Honest Donald.

It's funny because in the video, when he says vote for honest Donald, he also starts to crack up because he knows how ridiculous this is. Yeah, God. You don't vote for Crooked Joe. Vote for Honest Donald. Thank you very much.

Very, very cool. They're looking to destroy you if you don't mind me saying. Yeah. If you don't mind me saying, a man who rarely asks permission to say the most insane shit. So, even if parents are not choosing to homeschool,

Trump wants to let voters know that he will fight for parents' rights, which isn't quite a dog whistle, but it does refer to a very specific style of patriarchal rhetoric popularized by hyper-religious conservative think tanks that propose a extremely narrow version of how the American family should operate within society. More on this later. But so what can Trump do to let right-wing religious parents know that he will be their champion and even in like blue states or big cities? As much as Trump might want to be a dictator, He doesn't have unlimited power to impose his war on wokeness in liberal cities.

But Donald Trump, who was impeached for trying to blackmail the president of Ukraine in summer of 2019, does have a plan. He wants to, quote, implement massive funding preferences and favorable treatment, unquote, for states and school districts that make four specific, quote, historic reforms and education that Trump has decreed. these four specific reforms include abolishing tenure for K through 12 teachers so that we can quote remove bad teachers and adopt a merit pay to reward good teachers the second is to quote drastically cut the bloated number of school administrators including the costly and divisive and unnecessary DEI bureaucracy third to adopt a parental bill of rights that includes complete curriculum transparency in your form of universal school choice And lastly, quote, implement the direct election of school principals by the parents.

Trump calls this last bit the ultimate form of local control, something our country has never had or at least has not had for the last 50 years. So those are his four reform plans, which is like, yeah, you know who's had it too easy for too long? Teachers, let's abolish tenure, adopt merit pay, a disaster of a system, cut administrative roles, put more work on teachers, have parents be able to fire fire principals by voting and a vote to elect their own principle. And universal school choice is actually more of a dog whistle that it just refers to a series of like

very racist like urban planning policies to direct rich white people's funding into a very few selected number of schools instead of where they actually like live and instead of the actual district they live in. So there's all of that. And like what Trump keeps coming back to among all these quote unquote reforms,

it all kind of relates to complete parental dominance. And part of this was the parental bill of rights, which you've probably seen some conservatives talking about more these past few years. And this is another quote from Trump here. It's all about the parents

for their children, more than anyone else, parents know what their children need. And if you haven't heard of a parental bill of rights directly, you most certainly have heard of one by another name. The don't say gay bill. That was the parental rights bill, ostensibly targeting education. But these bills

often end up giving parents just complete control over every aspect of the child's life. They dictate how children are allowed to express themselves and allow parents to impose nearly any discipline or punishment they desire. The total control over what the child eats, what they wear, what they read, what they watch, what they see online, and what they're allowed to learn in school, who they're allowed to socialize with. Some of these bills that I read through for this, also bar mandatory masking policies in schools, back when that was a thing, and then are often full of anti-vax talking points and attempts to ban

sex ed and quote-unquote gender politics. As a part of these bills, teachers in school administration are legally required to act as parental surveillance tools to report how a child behaves, how they socialize, how they dress, how they like to be referred to, and who they are friends with. This includes outing children as gay or trans to parents if anyone in the school suspects that the student has a non-heterosexual sexual orientation or is acting in any way inconsistent with their assigned gender at birth. These types of bills often have other consequences, well. In states where some of these bills have passed, like North Carolina, due to legal risks, some elementary schools have been unable to talk about or give out educational materials

on consent or how to identify when child sexual abuse is taking place as a part of the safe touch programs. These programs are basically unable to happen because teachers will now be held personally legally liable if any parent objects to this material. So parental rights bills have been signed into law in six states over the past two legislative years, famously Florida. as well as Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Iowa, and North Carolina. Since then, similar bills have been introduced in more than 25 states, many of which have passed through at least one chamber. Some of them are still in the process of either passing through a second chamber

or being signed by the governor. I'm going to end with two quotes here from Trump that kind of reiterate this parental dominance thing that he's really pushing for. And also people like Ron DeSantis have been pushing for Ted Cruz, a lot of right-wing politicians. Quote, as the saying goes, personnel is policy. And at the end of the day, if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids, we have a major problem. When I'm president, we will put parents back in charge and give them the final say.

We will get back to teaching, reading, writing, and math, called arithmetic. And we will give our kids the high-quality pro-American education they deserve. they're going to teach a math called arithmetic magnificent it's amazing we may spend the most but we're going to be tops in education

no matter no matter where you go anywhere in the world we're going to be tops in education there will be no bottoms in the American education system going forward so this is Donald Trump the second host of the TV show The Apprentice

who has run for public office. This is his plan for education. Dr. James Stout, how do you feel about these education reform proposals? Yeah, it doesn't seem like a great idea, if I'm being honest. Having listened to it, I think perhaps he hasn't got the sharpest grasp on what's going on in the education system. The reason we have education is because your parents don't necessarily know what's best for you, right? Your parents can't be an expert in everything. Yes.

So some of us go and get PhDs so we can. And then we teach your people how the important things about that. By definition, your parents cannot fulfill all the roles that an education system fulfills. Unlike pink-haired communists who have complete total control over every aspect of what a child should learn. It's one of the things when you enter the university, you know, they do a tuberculosis test. and then they pass you a pink hair dye. I mean, you get a nose piercing as well. A lot of this is very much reminiscent of like the fears of like communist education that you see in like the 1930s,

how there's a lot of political, a lot of political tension trying to be raised over the fear that there's communists teaching you in universities and schools. Yeah, it's interesting because at the same time, like. Frankfurt school style stuff. Yeah, yeah. I've written a lot about like, uh, anarchist ideals, educational ideals, right? So at the same time, they were anarchists in Spain being like,

you know, we should do all our classes in the forest. Let's just go out into the forest. Absolutely. There was a school by the sea where they taught kids, like they were just having this incredible utopian education dream, which in many ways, like we still haven't adapted to some of the things that that really could offer. And instead, yeah, we're having this McCarthyism part two.

Well, that is Trump's plan for education in case, in case you didn't know. So watch out for this pink-haired communists. Keep an eye out for any parental bill of rights being proposed in your state. And it probably has little to do with actually protecting children and more to do with making parents just complete dominating force and controlling every aspect of their child's life. And I mean, the other sinister thing about this is like it removes. access to for for kids to talk about things that that they may be upset about. And access to mandated reporters. Like I'm a mandated reporter. Like this seems to get away from that. Exactly. And I mean, the idea that that schools are going to be legally required to out a child if he's, if they're acting like perceived to be deviant in some like gender sexual way. Like all of these things are just ways to enable parental abuse.

in a variety of, like, ways that are explicit and non-explicit. And it's, it's, it's, it's quite, it's upsetting. And that's the, that's the thing that conservatives are currently trying to push for. This is a big topic. This stuff was talking about in the Republican primaries that were completely useless. Constantly, stuff like this is, something this is referred to while invoking this fear of like this pink-haired transgender communist teacher, just currently like the biggest threat to America, according to most conservatives.

Yeah, they can take us down from the inside. That and jihad. which are probably linked somehow. Yeah, yeah. I think, well, the pink-haired jihadist, the famous. Well, that isn't for us today. What are we going to be learning about next for Agenda 47, James? Well, we're going to be learning next about immigration, Donald Trump's border policies.

Many of you will be shocked to hear that they're not very good. And, yeah, I have two classes this summer. If you're in San Diego and you want to get in before they take the Marxism out of the education system. You can. But strike now. I do love how... I do love how much of this is like, do you know who's had it easy for too long?

Transgender teachers. They have any point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The people who are so fucking broke, they have to have like, go fund me's up for their gender reassignment surgery. Great stuff. Wonderful stuff.

Yeah. All right, we will be back tomorrow to talk about Trump's border policies, things that'll probably be totally normal, totally chill. Yeah, it's very, very similar to put fucking stuff. Sadly, they are similar to Biden's, but that's a whole other dystopia.

That's a whole other discussion. All right. See you at the other side. Bye. Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen here, your daily dose of the horrors that are, in fact, already happening all around us. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and I am delighted to be joined today by the critically acclaimed author of Culture Warlords, Journalists, Research, Research,

Expert, and my friend, Talia Lavin. Hello. Yeah, I once introduced to myself at an event as a sandwich historian, which I think was the pinnacle of my public speaking career. But this is the second pinnacle. Hey, Molly, what's up? Thank you so much for coming on today to talk with me about your new book, Wild Faith.

It is coming out in just a few weeks, October 15th, right? Yeah, Wild Faith, how the Christian right is taking over America, not the terrible B movie entitled Wild Faith. The SEO is scrambled on that one. But the book, however, is very good. I mean, first of all, I just want to say, so I've been reading the galley copy that you sent me, which I honestly made me feel very fancy.

I've never received a galley copy of a book that's not out yet before. So I felt, you know, kind of a broadcasting professional with my special book. It's an exclusive club. You're one of like five people that's read it. Oh, my God. That is very exclusive. Yeah. Well, it's about to become a lot less exclusive.

so feel special while you can. That's right. But I realized while I was reading it, you know, I have my little sticky tabs because I'm reading a lot more books lately, regrettably, not a big time book guy. It's always reading. I read a lot of court documents,

but I'm reading a lot of books right now for research for my show. And it's like on my little sticky tabs. And as I'm reading it, I realize I'm not marking passages that I think would be useful for us to talk about in this interview. I'm just putting my little tabs on passages

that just like punched me in the gut, you know? Sorry for punching you. No, but I mean, I mean, with the power of your words, because like, a lot of what I'm reading sucks. It's just, right? Like, I spent all day yesterday reading like 25-year-old issues of resistance, which was the quarterly magazine for a white power music label. So this, I mean, it's a real departure.

So, you know, really just reveling in the richness of. the pros and the fact that it, you know, didn't want to kill me. Yeah, no, I also have experienced neo-Nazi research fatigue and also just like the sort of relentless grimness of plowing through these like fundamentally hostile texts and also like academic texts, which are difficult in their own way. I try to write excessively or just like excitingly. I find that a lot of especially nonfiction sort of journal realism-y books tend to be a little dry, and I'm like, let's not be dry. Let's be, like, spicy and, you know, like, form and function. Like, you're more likely to be moved by a message

if you find the writing compelling, you know? It's just, you have such a way with words. I mean, you know this. You're a professional writer. I don't want to embarrass you on the show. So if you'll- I feel like, I'm twirling my hair and being like, yes, but I do write for a living. indulge me if it's legal, if the publisher will allow this. I just want to read this passage from the introduction that I think is a good jumping off point. And it was one of the first things I marked because I was just like, oh, hell yeah, we're getting into this. There's good words in here. Okay. The Christian right is a force in American politics and has been for decades, half a century, to be precise, during which it has steadily gained power. It started in schoolrooms,

continued in courtrooms, and perseveres with the aid of people who are perfectly willing to call in bomb threats to hospitals and attempt to overturn elections. It features self-proclaimed prophets with a distinct interest in politics, newly-mented apostles with very definite ideas about spiritual battle and its earthly components, and pastors eager to usher in the end of the world. Its adherents have hymns and devotionals and speak in tongues on occasion, and the showiest among them are known to march their cities blowing ram's horns in an effort to topple, as Joshua once did, the wicked cities of the world. They have their own insular world, their own media apparatus. They have legislators who give fire and brimstone speeches from the badly carpeted

rooms where laws are made. They have lawyers, too. And in case the lawyers fail, there's always the promise of congregations that might coalesce into mobs or arsonists whose burning holy zeal coalesces into the tiny pinpoint of a Molotov cocktail. And I knew from from the intro that we were in for a ride. Yeah. It's like cast of characters. The word. worst people ever, but like, let's write about it in an exciting way. I think that one of the themes of the book is really how these extra legal extremist movements, like the anti-abortion terror movement and the legal framework of a movement work together. I actually initially heard about this from a friend who was talking about how like during

the gay rights movement you had sort of the act up, well, demonstrations. the dyans. And then you had the sort of like more respectably coded like gay people who, you know, we're talking to the government and trying to get elected and, you know, really trying to influence research and that every movement needs sort of a radical outside and then a respectable inside. And I'm like, oh, this works in like theocratic movements too, where you have like this, you know, fringe that's burning down clinics and then people steadily working for 50 years to like ban abortion. And they have the same DNA

and they have the same goals. They just go about it differently but complement each other. And I think that's like a running theme in the book is that like you have lawyers and you have legislators and then you have mobs and they're sort of all working

towards the same goals. And that's really what we're seeing, I think, from the Christian right, after decades of building power. Yeah, one of the notes that I wrote down in that vein while I was reading was that, you know, the Christian right, derives its power across a spectrum, right?

From the clinic bomber to the senator. But it's not, you know, you might say with two sides of the same coin. But to me, it looks like this isn't two different spheres of power or two sort of separate but coexisting or comorbid ideologies. They're just different numbers on the same dial, right? It's turning up and turning down. Yeah, it's like the hand that lights the torch and the hand that puts it to the, you know, no, Pire, they perform different functions, but they have really the same goals. And if, like me, you view stripping half the populace of its bodily autonomy, imposing a theocracy, hounding queer people out of public life slash into death as fundamentally violent goals, yeah, I don't think there's like a respectable iteration necessarily. There's just

cosplaying respectability. Right, you can say it with a tie on on the Senate floor, but it's the same message. Yeah, and I think so much of our media apparatus and governmental apparatus is really sort of views like, again, this like form and function, right? Like if you are, if you say something politely, it doesn't really matter what you're saying. Like, if you say something with a suit on in the. register of like, you know, in a calm sort of Mike Pensian, Rush Limbaugh and decaf, as he called himself voice. Jesus, did he say that? Yeah, that's what he called himself when he did a like evangelical

radio show. Yeah, no, no matter what you say, as long as you were like white and you say it politely, like, this is fundamentally sort of fine. And then if you look at it from, you know, a step or two back and you're like, no, actually, no matter how politely you say it, this is like a violent deeply unpopular theocratic agenda that like fundamentally is incompatible with multiracial

democracy. I also think, and I keep running into this like well-meaning liberals being like, but isn't there a separation of church and state? I'm like, I don't know, do you fucking think there is in Alabama?

Do you think there is in Arkansas and all of these, you know, in Texas? Like all of these figures are like, we're Christians, we're Christians, we're making laws for Jesus. We have covenant marriages and we want you to too.

Yeah, like we're going to outlaw divorce because of God. And like, you know, women dying of sepsis in hospital parking lots is what Jesus wants. And like, and I experienced this. I think you probably have to when you like report on, you know, zealots and extremists. And people inevitably wind up like measuring other people's wheat by their own bushel In other words, they're like, they can't really believe this stuff. And it's like, no, they really do. They can't really have these goals.

First of all, they do, but also does it matter? Right. I mean, the question of like impact versus intent, first of all, I think it's perfectly possible to be both a grifter and a true believer at the same time. That's just synergy, baby. Yeah. And also, fundamentally, this is a world premise on grievance,

where it's this idea that like the world has got one over on you, And so, in a sense, grift is just like, well, you know, the world's corrupt and I'm fighting a righteous cause. So what does it matter? The ethics that I sort of skimp on along the way. I mean, once you've amped the stakes up to, we're fighting the literal devil and everyone who's getting in my way is animated by actual demons from hell. I mean, the stakes couldn't be higher. So you do what you have to do. Exactly. And it's this theory of power. And so then people sort of, standing outside of that paradigm who are not keyed into this idea of like we're in an epical spiritual battle like and we must

create like a kingdom of Christ on earth in America to win against the devil and then people outside being like, you're hypocrites and it's like it's not a valid criticism to them because they're like first of all you're not like a Christian if you're a liberal

but also like you're not on our level like we're fighting Lucifer and you're probably a stand, like on his team, if you oppose us. So, you know, a multitude of apparent hypocrisies can be excused by, by the idea that, like, this is a holy war. And in war, there's, like, all kinds of a bear behavior that's okay. Yeah, they're doing holy war crimes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is why, for example, you see a lot of, like, prominent female figures from Phyllis Schlafly, you know, in the 70s and 80s to, like, the trad,

lives now. And it's like, how does this fit in with your overall sort of idea that women should be chased and submissive and meek and silent? I mean, first of all, tradwife stuff is often fetish content. That's fetish content. But yeah, I mean, Phyllis Lafley made a living professionally saying that women shouldn't make a living professionally. But that contradiction doesn't matter. Yeah. I mean, I think I, I call them Valkyries for feminine submission in the book. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, like, if you, believe that this is your calling, your mission, you know, your mission field in the service of the Lord to undo the demonic sort of influence of feminism. Like, of course you're going to speak.

You've been moved by God to do so. Yeah. And of course, like female leaders within the evangelical community, like sort of minority Republicans can be like knocked off their pedestal quicker and easier, but like they still can come out and exist and testify. And Schlafly throughout her very long, prolific and lucrative career, you know, was like, I'm a housewife with six kids. And that was her, that was how she defined herself even while being this incredibly prominent figure. And one of the sort of key architects of the current Christian right coalition of like right-wing Catholics, she and Paul Wyrick and Leonard Leo and some other right. when Catholics brought these Catholic values of being all about abortion to the evangelical

right, which prior to the 70s was like, that's a weird Catholic thing. We don't really care. I wanted to talk about that. So I'm not sure how sort of common knowledge this is, but the Protestant Christian community in the United States did not care about abortion until the 70s. It was not an issue in their communities. They were generally pro-abortion. They were, you know, but the Baptists were in favor.

of Roe v. Wade. Yeah, the fucking Southern Baptist Convention came out in like 74, I think it was, and was like, yeah, we approve of Roe v. Wade. So it's not like, you know, opposition to abortion is baked into Christianity. It is baked into the American evangelical Christianity of post-1975 or so because of this sort of conscious, cynical, political decision. And that I think is so interesting because, you know, when you get into this conversation of, well, what are there? deeply held beliefs and do they really believe it and does that matter? But we can pin down the moment they started believing this and we know why. And it's segregation.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, I would say like people can still like, this is like several generations later of like constant barrages of extremely violent propaganda against abortion. Right. So the belief is sincere today, but you could look at it where it was born. Yeah, exactly. It should have been aborted. Right. Yeah, no, it definitely should not have been carried to term.

But like, it's crazy. And in addition to Mois' book, Randall Bomer does some really good coverage of this. So the sort of general arc is like three sort of 1970s. You had this like generally conservative population of Southern Baptists who were like, on board with McCarthyism, hated the godless reds, but kind of viewed. politics is like worldly and not really there's fear. And we're not particularly politically engaged. And then Brown versus a board of education passes. Immediately the white Christian populace just disinvested wheeze from the public schools, leaving multiple counties in the south without

functionally any public education at all. And this mushroom after rain kind of like patch of patches of parochial schools with church or Christian in the name start popping up and they're all white schools. Their segregation academies is the sort of term of art for these. And they're explicitly under a Christian ageist. Their religious schools are tax exempt as a result. And then in like the late 60s and 70s, the government was like, you can't be tax exempt and like considered a charitable organization if you are segregated and don't have any black students or minority students. And that is what woke the sleeping dragon of the Christian right. Really like, you know, get your filthy government hands off our tax exemptions. Like they just went, you know, nuts.

They were really mobilized, you know, like these are the people who are like throwing tomatoes at Ruby Bridges. Like, you know, they're really politically motivated for the first time. because they're experiencing, like, a consequence for segregation. And so this is when, like, Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed and, you know, James Dobson start sort of coming forward and being more prominent. And then by the sort of mid-70s to 80s, you had these, like, savvier political operators coming out and saying, hey, guys, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. segregation forever is like, it's great that it really fired y'all up, but it has sort of a limited

appeal. And they shot George Wallace. It's over. Yeah. Like there's going to be a ceiling on that. And a lot of people think you suck. So why don't you get it on the ground on this new civil rights struggle abortion where you can fight for the unborn who conveniently will never disagree with you? Right. Their voices don't have to be centered here. We can speak for them. I mean, they're the most convenient political constituency in history. Right, because they're so innocent. And you can't milkshake duck a fetus. He's not even here.

Yeah, he can't talk. Like, he's not going to say shit. So, I mean, that's like the very capsule history. And then, of course, it becomes this idea of, like, the moral majority. And we're the guardians of America's soul. And we're going to get really weird about sex also. It's just like, if you strip it all the way down to the studs, like, The core of this is women are bleeding to death in hospital parking lots because Jerry Falwell didn't want to pay his taxes or stop being racist.

Yeah. That's not fair. No, people sometimes are a little skeptical when I'm like all of the hatreds are interconnected. But then you look at like concrete historical examples of like this world historical wave of misogyny. I mean, it's not that this population was like weird about sex or weird about women, like to start well. I mean, maybe they would have gotten here a different way. But that's how we got here. Yeah, we got here by just like, no, we will pay taxes on our segregation academies.

Bob Jones University's interracial dating ban is perfectly great. And we're going to mobilize about it. And so what you have then now is just like 50 years of political lockstep. And you see this in like other religious communities? I mean, like I know like it's sort of notorious. how much corruption slides by in New York because, like, the chastidic communities vote as a block. Like, it is very useful

to have a congregation that all votes the same way. It's politically useful. I mean, what other populations can you get together once a week as a captive audience and speak to with authority? If you can mobilize those people, and that's what Jerry Falwell saw, right? It's like, this is a great way to get a lot of people to vote the way I want them to vote.

Yeah, and, you know, the truth. church has always been like a really prominent institution in American civil society, especially as the rest of sort of civil society has fallen away and degraded. Like, churches are some of the only social outlets that Americans have. And what's interesting when you talk to evangelicals and ex-evangelicals is just like being a Republican is like part of their religious identity in a major way. It's like, this is how you vote, and this is, you know, how you dress and this is how you go to church and and so on. But like the idea of being a Democrat is like not only, you know,

a little bit out of step with your community. It's heretical. I mean, that's how the demons get in. Yeah, yeah, demoncrats. I mean, like, yeah, it's stupid, but it's also like half of the people saying demoncrats like literally mean Democrats are aligned with Lucifer. And I think that's a point that I don't want to get lost on the listener. This, you know, this idea that people literally have demons in them, that demons are active in the world, that demons are motivating the actions of their enemies, is real for them. And I'm not saying that to be derisive or, you know, it's real. It's real. It is an animating factor for a lot of these people. And that's hard to wrap your mind around. I mean, I struggle with the idea that that is real for them. But like, that's how

you get things like satanic panic. And we see echoes of satanic panic in this idea of, you know, groomers in kids' schools, they really have this fundamental, like, foundational belief in this, whether or not they're calling it demons, that the existence of some sort of ontological evil that is coming for their children. And once you arrive at the place where, like, where you understand that that's real for them, their actions make more sense. Like, they're not behaving irrationally. If you truly believe that these things were happening, you'd act crazy too. Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to get people to step outside their own worldviews. and in both directions, right?

Like, I don't believe that demons are, you know, abroad in the world and motivating, like, every element of political action to someone who... I'm starting to see them some places, but generally no. To someone who does, my viewpoint is incomprehensible and vice versa. So I think part of... I mean, not that I'm like, one of those people that's like, polarization is the big problem.

Like, you know, as opposed to anything with, like, concrete policy, like, you know, you know, where it's like the big problem is we all don't like each other enough. And I'm like, no, the big problem is like people are espousing policies that will cause deaths. And like also that people like believe their political enemies are like literally agents of Satan. I would say is like a bigger problem than polarization and the abstract. But yeah, I mean this doctrine of sort of spiritual warfare, which if you like Google it, it's just like, oh, this is the mindset. And it's like you with a listener to it could happen here.

Like you've been drafted into the spirit war from like birth. Earth. Congratulations, private. You're probably on the side of the devil. So good job. I mean, I don't know. Like, a lot of Americans believe in angels and demons and that's fine. But it's like when that starts impinging on the political sphere in a very serious way, it's like how far would you go if you believed your opponent was under the thrall of like Satan? You would go pretty damn far. That's, I mean, that's why, you know, clinic bombings were, and I guess are on the rise again, right? Like these arsons of clinics, it's not like other kinds of crime in my mind, right? It's not a crime of passion or an interpersonal dispute.

It is people who have been motivated by this belief that this is a place where a genocide is happening, that there's a Holocaust going on in there, that people are ripping, you know, actual living babies limb from limb. And if you really did believe that, their actions make sense. And that's why it happens so often. right? Because these people are motivated by this belief that God commands them to take this action. Yeah. I mean, there's a dual element to that. I mean, first of all, absolutely, yes. I've read some anti-abortion terror manuals speaking of extremely unpleasant research. And it's just really like these people are murderers. It's mass murderers. You're like killing Hitler, right? And wouldn't you, wouldn't you kill baby Hitler?

Exactly. Jeb Bush one. about baby Hitler in like a countrywide scale. And when specific abortion doctors have been mentioned in bright wing media, those guys end up dead. And that's not a coincidence. So there's that element of it, which is the majority of it. It's huge. But there's also this idea of demonic geography where like demons can possess sort of places

like abortion clinics or institutions like Planned Parenthood or even the Democratic Party, which, you know, I read a lot of demonology books and like taxonomies of demons. Pigs in the parlor was this really big hit in like the 70s and it's been like reissued and reissued and millions of copies. And it's just like, on one level, it's really compelling because it's like, are you tired? Are you sad? Are you feeling clumsy? Do you have like persistent stomach aches?

It's demons. And here's how you deal with that. And like in a country with shitty health care. I can totally see why someone who's like really depressed might go to like an exorcist or a deliverance minister, which is the Protestant. If you'll try anything and this guy's going to do it for free. I watch so many videos of deliverance ministers doing their thing and it's like, freaky. It's like people, you know, are just like sitting there and they're like people praying over them and screaming in their face. And they wind up vomiting and crying and it's all very like intense.

And, you know, if you think about it from a placebo effect perspective for like one second, you're like, obviously this person would feel a weight lifted from them. They've had this ecstatic experience. And this isn't the majority of America. This is about 14% of America identifies as white evangelical. So many. Protestants. It's still so many people. Because people keep asking me like, how many people really believe should like this? And I'm like, well, about 80 to 90% of like people who identify as white evangelicals. evangelical Protestants, espouse most of these beliefs. So that's... That's like 30 million people. Yeah, yeah. And then you add in the Catholic right. Which is getting weirder every day.

Yeah, JD Vance. I hate women. Women exist to reproduce, breed, you filthy sow. But like even beyond the adult Catholic convert style weirdness, like right-wing Catholics are an integral part of the Christian right. Like Amy Coney Barrett, you know, Antenon, Scoliet. that kind of thing.

That's another bunch of millions. So this reactionary force has like numerically significant constituency. On the other hand, it definitely punches way above its weight in terms of... Right, they have an outsized influence of both, you know, on the legislative floor and when it comes to, you know, who's wracking up the most bodies. Yeah. And also even like the culture wars, right, like the sort of loudest, culture warriors tend to at least come from

like a background of I'm speaking for God or Christ is king or whatever it is. Like how many times have you and I encountered that in extremist context, but also like the sort of more mainstream me, what the fuck the mainstream is, I don't know, it's full of piss. But like the more mainstream me like Christian

grifter, right? They come from this. I'm speaking from my faith. These are my religious principles. But like it is with no again, just to rewind in our conversation, but like, a full concept of religious liberty and religious freedom absolutely was like an ad slogan coined in the 70s around segregation. Right. Religious freedom to do what? I mean, it's like states rights. States rights to do what? Right. Yeah. Answer the question. Yeah, it's it's religious freedom to have segregated schools,

is the answer to that. And you still see echoes of that with either still religious schools that can't accept federal grant money because they don't let students be gay, right? Like, it's not racial segregation anymore, but they are, you know, refusing to admit gay students. And that is a violation of federal civil rights law. Yeah. But that's where, I mean, that's where that slogan started. And then it's blossom to include basically, like, a gay person came into my shop. Except they didn't. Right. I know. There's no standing. Right. Like, that whole case was built on a lie. whatever. That's... Yeah, no, it's like,

and standing in the Supreme Court is so ridiculous. I mean, in many ways, this Supreme Court is the culmination and embodiment and apotheosis of, like, Christian right theocracy, because you have these, like, absolutely bad shit religious zealots. I mean, Amy Coney-Barrant

is, like, from a cult. And in this unaccountable body, they're passing unpopular, theocratic principles that the majority of the American public disagrees with. But, like, specifically, what they are trying to enact and what they are, what they are enacting is

this theocratic agenda where like the government is in your bedroom, the government is in your doctor's office, like the government is sniffing your panties. And it's, it's gross and it's upsetting. And fundamentally, like, theocracies are just very famously all up in your junk.

Like they're obsessed with like controlling and censoring sexuality of all kinds, but particularly female sexuality and queer sexuality. like snuff those out. And so that's part of the reason why so many abortion arguments. Like, first of all, you have the, like the, you're murdering this cluster of cells, which is a full human baby. Like, do you remember that article in The Guardian a couple of years ago that like showed the actual size of like fetuses at various stages of development? And it was like, it were just like so little like these little like little fingernails. Yeah. And it doesn't

look like a tiny baby doll. that's just very small. Yeah, exactly. It's not like a mini baby. Like tides of gore. It's literally like a tiny cluster of cells. So anti-abortion propaganda, like you are not immune to propaganda.

It has like wormed its way into the popular consciousness just by virtue of its ubiquity and constant reputation being the key to successful propaganda. But so many of these arguments, in addition to this abortion is murder stuff, is also just like, should have kept your legs closed. Right. This is a consequence. God did this to you. Yeah, like sex is a mortal sin and sex should be punished and...

They must be doing it wrong. Like, I'm like, why do you want sex to have consequences and be punished? The, like, intensity of the misogyny around purity culture was so intense. I wanted to ask you, you know, about the experience of writing the book, right? So, you know, your first book, Culture Warlords was traumatizing for you, to craft, right? Because you had to spend so much time in these digital spaces, in some cases, physical spaces with, you know, neo-Nazis, four-chan guys, you know, aspiring terrorists. And so that's traumatic to experience, you know, but largely that experience was alone, like at your computer screen, sort of consuming this content that was eroding your soul. But the second half of

this book is about child abuse, right? And you interviewed, you interviewed, people who grew up in this movement about their lives, about their husbands raping them and their parents beating them as children. And like, how do those experiences compare? And like, what was that? I mean,

how did you prepare to do that? I don't know how they'd begin to do that with care. I mean, I think my goal going in is like, I am not going to betray you. Like, that was my guiding ethos of just like, I view like your trust in me as a sacred thing.

thing. Not like sacred in any formal religious sense, but just like, you know, I view your trust in me as something that I hold very dearly. It's very important. I'm going to treat your pain with as much gentleness and respect as I can. And like, I interviewed over 100 people largely about their experiences with experiencing child abuse in an evangelical milieu as is laid out with painstaking instructions and like all of these parenting manuals. Actually, like, I think reading the parents, printing manuals was even more disturbing than talking to people because, like, people were like, this fucked me up and it was wrong. And then these books are like, no, you must beat your toddler because Jesus says so. And like, here's exactly how to beat your toddler. And here's

what you should use to beat your toddler. And here's the like supremely fucked up like weird ritual that we prescribe. And then like reading those in tandem with like the accounts of people who like this specific thing, like, fucked me up for life and really messed up my ability to have, like, intimacy or self-confidence or whatever, all of that stuff. I mean, it was tough. I definitely took more time. Like, I wrote culture warlords in nine months. So I was, like, totally immersed, constantly. You just like didn't come up for air. Yeah, I don't. And this one, I was like, I need a little more time, guys. Like, um, I wrote it over, you know, almost three years. I also pretentiously started calling this philosophy, guarding your heart.

because I really got lost in the sauce with cultural warlords. Like I was in a dark place while I was writing it and afterwards I was also like it came out in mid-COVID so that didn't help either.

But it was a really rough experience with this. I was like, I'm gonna keep writing. I'm gonna write about sandwiches all the way through. I'm gonna like make sure I have friendships and stuff that's grounding me. I think consciously having that

at the forefront of my mind really helped. That being said, like what was really encouraging was all of these people who had experienced this sort of child abuse industrial complex in the evangelical community where like we really value that someone wants to hear what we have to say and also that it's someone from outside the community is like paying attention and thinks this is important which is not to denigrate like ex-vangelical voices but more to say that like I guess there's a certain validation when someone who's like not didn't. grow up in your corner of

religiosity, dark corner. And sort of bringing it to an outside audience, too, because I think a lot of ex-vangelicals, their audiences largely, their fellow ex-vangelicals. Exactly. And I'm someone who, like, I grew up as a Jew. And I'm like, yeah, this sucked. This is terrible. I'm, like, appalled reading, like,

to train up a child by the pearls or the strong-willed child by James Thompson, which, to be clear, the strong-willed child is a bad thing. It's a bad thing to have a child. wild with us. You have to beat it out of them. Sure. Literally. And I ran into this in the wild recently. I don't know if you have come across this guy online. Do you know the 90s movie The Little Rascals? Oh my God, Alph from the Little Rascals, it turns out to be.

Alfalfa. The guy who played Alfalfa, his name is Bug Hall. He like really like, I don't know, got into a sort of main character situation over some posts about how he beats his infants. He beats infants because that's, I guess, a good way to raise a baby. Yeah. Also, I think he's homeless? No, he's a serf. Oh. He's in a voluntary serfdom arrangement. Oh, my God. Okay, well, he sounds like a big rascal. Yeah, he's a big rascal.

He's continued that trajectory of rascalddom. But don't be your kids. I mean, I will also say the reason why this book focuses so much on child abuse, which, like, I encountered some haters, and losers and doubters along the way who were like, why are you focused so much on child abuse? And I was like, there are a lot of different theories

about like how authoritarianism develops. But one of the big ones is focusing on the pedagogy in authoritarian societies, like societies that become authoritarian, you know, evolve from democracy to authoritarianism. And beating the shit out of people from when they're in infancy and particularly when they just,

display disobedience or ask why or, you know, just deviate from expectation. That's a great way to make an obedient brown shirt. Yeah, exactly. Like, this is a recipe for future authoritarian. Like, the people I spoke to had sort of broken away largely from this culture, but many of the sort of most obedient soldiers in the Army's Army of God are that way because, again, I can't overemphasize how much these parenting manuals, which spanned from like 1970 to 2015,

these texts, you know, the dates that they were published, emphasize having an obedient child. What you want is not like a child who's kind or curious or thoughtful or smart. It's obedient, instantly obedient. Don't make me count to three is the title of one of the books.

And like what you're creating is a culture of people who, A, like empathize with the aggressor at all times. So hence this admiration for strength and even admiration for cruelty, people who are trained to obey and obey without question, and people who are very acclimated to the use of violence. I mean, you're doing fascism in the home. Right. So the, like Alice Miller, the author of the book for Your Own Good, lays out a pretty, she was also a Holocaust survivor. She lays out a pretty strong case for like, you know, early 20th century Germany having this poisonous pedagogy that also involves. beating the shit out of your kids until... Yeah, it was illegal to love your children.

Yeah, to obey you. And how basically this is how you make a torture. And the book is called For Your Own Good. And yeah, I mean, I really think it is like undervalued in politics, like how much this culture of corporal punishment, which is, yeah, Americans have like moved away from universal approval of course. corporal punishment, we're still, like, a lot higher than other Western democracies in that regard. And, like, on a national level, we're the only country in the world that hasn't ratified

the UN conventions on the rights of a child, which include, like, having a name and, like, not being beaten and not being thrown into, like, juvie, solitary. Oh, well, that's why America can't touch that. We need to incarcerate the children. Yeah, the children yearn for the cells. But it's also just like a lot of it actually was like worries that like evangelicals like would sort of object to the interference in their. It's an infringement on their religious freedom to beat the shit out of babies. Yeah.

And their parental rights, which is another buzzword of this movement. Parental rights is a red flag for me. Oh, yeah. No, I hear parental rights and I think you want to beat the shit out of your kids. You don't want your children to learn science. Yeah, you want to homeschool and undereducate your kids or miseducate. You want to cause a measles outbreak. Exactly.

But that's like for us because we're weirdos. We're like obsessively clued in to this stuff. If you're not, like parental rights is like religious freedom is like. It sounds good. Yeah. It's an effective marketing slogan. But like what it means is like we're going to show up at the school board and yell about how. I mean, and Trump has like bought into this obviously.

because he knows where his red is buttered, he has savvy. He's like, you guys do the policy. But like his current parental rights based, his biggest policy that he's advocating is like denying federal funding to any school with any vaccine of mandate, which is basically just like make measles great again. Like bring back diphtheria. I think like, yes, the Maga movement is sort of the efflorescence,

the apotheosis of this steadily building power. but like there's also just like 50 years of of power building behind it. And like even if Trump is defeated at the federal level, which like I profoundly hope he is, sorry to come out as like a, you know, partisan. A voter. Like a hashtag a voter. But like I think it would be just a nauseatingly.

It's a horrifying thought that he, I mean, first of all, he would absolutely enact every item in this theocratic agenda, starting with a national abortion ban. Like, that would happen in the first hundred days, I think, which would just functionally plunge American women into like a very, very dark, septic nightmare. Yeah, the dark place that we're going is a coffin. Yeah, yeah.

But even should he lose, which, you know, hope, there's still 22 states where abortion is outlawed or severely restricted. and these places are becoming care deserts. Like medical residents, my extremely sexy partner is a medical resident. So I know more about the state of medicine than I otherwise would. But residents don't want to do their residencies in states with abortion restrictions.

They're like given a choice. Gynecological providers just aren't practicing there anymore. Like even if, you know, even your primary focus is not. abortions, or even if your primary focus is not, you know, pregnancy care, they just don't want to, they just don't want to work there. Well, it's also, first of all, that, but second of all, it's like, if you're in the ER, you're going to experience pregnancy loss because it happens in one in five pregnancies. Right. So they're choosing to work in states where they're not going to

go to jail for doing medicine. Yeah. Like, they don't want to incur the moral injury of not being able to apply the standard of care to patients in an extremely common situation, such as incomplete miscarriage and, you know, pregnancy loss, whether, you know, self-induced or just like miscarriage is super common and nobody talks about it. It's more common than we've, and ectopic pregnancy is so much more common than people realize. Like, there are so many things that your body could do to betray you that you need a doctor's help with. Just ordinary pregnancy. When then after the, after the baby's born, then your lustrous hair all falls out. Yeah, like, ordinary pregnancy is so fraught with like weird body

horror. But anyway, that's besides the point. Whatever. The point is someone presents with abdominal pain in the ER and it turns out to be an ectopic pregnancy. And like you can't do standard of care like dilation and curators

without checking with the hospital lawyer. Like that is a really bad position for a care provider to be in. So when you have these fundamentally unscientific laws, right? that are produced by people who don't know anything about pregnancy and are like very intentionally ambiguous so that cautious institutions will sort of interpret them, maximally interpret them,

like the life of the mother. How dead does she have to be first? Yeah, she has to be almost dead, right? And then sometimes she winds up dying because almost dead is tough to judge. Like it just winds up this grotesque sort of farce of medicine. and very rectly, like, residents don't want to train, doctors don't want to practice in these places. And so, you know.

Right, so this ends up killing more people than just the ones hemorrhaging in the party lot. There are people who have completely unrelated problems who are now unable to access unrelated kinds of care because the doctors just aren't there. Yeah, or people who have ordinary, wanted pregnancies who can't access neonatal care, who have to drive hours and hours and hours to, like, get checkups. Like, you know, I mean, human. reproduction is like a pretty major part of like life.

A lot of people are doing it. Yeah. Like it's sort of how, you know, it's just people do it all the time. And like not being able to access medical care around like the entire spectrum of like reproduction is pretty catastrophic. But yeah, it also impacts all the people not engaging in in reproduction at this moment in time. Like doctors who are just like, fuck this.

I'm not working out in ER in Tennessee, you know, because I want to be able to to treat patients. Without a lawyer in the room. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and then there are doctors who are bigots and doctors who are happily on board with abortion bans. But like, do you want that to be the only doctor in your county? I don't think so.

You know, it's just, it's a really grim situation. And I just like, I'm such an absolutist about bodily autonomy. It's like, if you don't own your body, you're not a full citizen, period. End of story. Like, if a major organ in your body is treated as a. controlled substance. Like, you are not a full and equal citizen with rights, which I would like to be. I aspire to it. Yeah. So I wanted to ask you one more question about your book and I will let you go. I told you that I wouldn't keep you very long and I lied. But it's like, it's just because I like

talking to you. So it's, I think I've done the majority of the talk is you can't, you can't be like, oh, it's about your book. Which you should buy. listeners. Pre-order it now, wherever you buy your books. And if you like the dulcet tones of my voice, which are, I should have gotten you to narrate my audio books. You brushed that passage. I'm a professional talker now.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I narrated the audio book and then was like, why did I write such complicated sentences afterwards? So now that I read my own writing, like on a regular basis out loud, which is new for me, right? So I have my podcast and I'm writing my little scripts and then I'm reading them into a little microphone. Now that I struggle with that, I noticed while I was reading your book that, oh, I wouldn't be able to read this out loud. Where would I breathe? I know. It was such a good. Because I write like that too. And it's something I'm like really grappling with right now. She's like, call me 10 clubs.

Talia. I'm like, oh, fuck. This sentence is this paragraph. The sentence is a paragraph. Stop it. Like I really, really lost, really lost momentum on that one. Yeah, I know. But like, I managed to get through it. And if you, if you enjoy the dulcet sounds of my. voice who can hear it for like, I don't know, eight hours or whatever. I'm still weird being like, listen to my voice, but, you know. Invite me into your mind. Yeah, but I do think it's nice as an author to read your audiobook because I can like get mad and like, you know, emphasize stuff that I think is important. And also I'm a theater kid. Like, I don't have many opportunities to perform. And it is a

performance and it's it's fun but yeah and that comes out the same time as the physical book yes uh it comes audio ebook physical book with a cool snake on it oh yeah oh i guess this is an audio medium the listener can't see that i'm showing the cool cover yeah it's got a cool snake a red and black snake on the cover i've named him rocco but he has a cross for a tongue if you're looking for a book to give to the metal head in your life oh yeah it's pretty metal metal metal Hellheads, atheists, degenerates. Everyone is going to love this book. It's perfect for everyone.

And if you're light on cash flow, one tip for supporting India authors is ask your library to stock it or your local bookstore because library orders are really important. And you can just put it in a request in your library system. And that is super helpful. Yeah, everybody go to your library's website right now and request that they purchase a copy of Wild Faith by Talia Lavin. Yeah. Tali, where else can people find you online? So I have a newsletter. It's on Buttondown. I left Substack because they were like,

we're never going to censor Nazis, but we will censor porn. And I was like, I don't like your priorities. So I left for Buttondown. So it's buttondown.com slash the sword in the sandwich or if you just Google the sword in the sandwich comes up. Most Tuesdays I read about like the horrific state of politics, et cetera. And then Fridays, I, I write an essay about a different sandwich on Wikipedia's list of notable sandwiches. And so far, I've written 111 sandwiches. The sandwich content alone is worth the price of admission. You need to find out about these sandwiches.

I mean, it just, and I get really deep into like the history and the provenance and like, I'm like, ah, the shifting of peoples led to this sandwich. But I get really deep into it. And then you can also find me on Blue Sky where I'm most of the time now because Twitter is just like robots and Nazis and Nazi robots where I'm at Swords Jew. I'm still on Vichy Twitter as Moby Dick Energy. And, you know, if you want to say hi or invite me to speak at your synagogue or bookstore, I'm at Talia Levenrites at Gmail.com or church if you're like cool. Yeah, if it's like a cool church. Yeah. You show up and they pass you a snake.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, God. I didn't do enough speaking in tongues for this book. Well, Tali, thank you so much for coming on today. Again, the book is Wild Faith by Tali Lavin, and you can pre-order it now wherever books are sold, and you should request it from your library. Yeah, we stand civic services, and I'm a huge fan of public libraries and also of Mali Conger. So thanks for having me on and take care. Bye. Bye. Welcome back to It Could Happen here and our special two-part series, Irregular Naval Warfare and you,

where James and I teach you how you too can challenge the U.S. Navy's dominance of the seas or at least the coasts for fun and profit. Actually today, last episode, we talked about people challenging the U.S. Navy's coastal dominance. Today we're talking about doing the same thing for the Russian Navy. So that's going to be fun. And, of course, the Navy of Myanmar, which is a bit of a different class from the U.S. and Russian Navy, but no less interesting. Yeah, it's still fun.

We love to see a boat lose. Yeah, I just like boats going down, you know. I just hate a boat. Yeah, us, the Yorkers, many. Many such cases. Yeah. I'm going to start with Ukraine, and then we're going to throw to James to talk about our friends in Myanmar and how they have repurposed civilian

technology and stolen weapons to counter a navy without really having one of their own. But first, Ukraine. In 2014, when the Russian army invaded eastern Ukraine and took Crimea, Ukraine lost a significant portion of its already not that impressive navy. Most of their boats were just taken by Russia, along with a number of sailors who defected. A lot of other sailors fled the region, leaving behind their homes in cities like Sebastopol to continue serving their country and a war that a decade later, is still ongoing. One of these sailors, who is a Sebastopol native and had to flee his home

possibly forever in order to continue serving his country, is the current commander of Ukraine's Navy, Admiral Nespa. He leads a navy that is almost without manned ships, and on paper it is utterly incapable of challenging Russia's legendary Black Sea Fleet. Since the age of the Tsars, the Black Sea Fleet has been infamous as a pillar of Russian military power. However, also since the age of the Tsars, it's had a nasty tendency to get utterly housed by enemies that should have been able to beat it, right? Yeah, yeah, not the first time. It's taken an unexpected loot.

Yeah, it has a legendaryity history. That doesn't mean good. There's bad legends out there, you know? Yeah, it's well known. Yeah, today that enemy is Ukraine. Since the expanded Russian invasion in 2022, just two years, Ukraine has destroyed or badly damaged more than a third of the Black Sea fleet, despite having no battleships or destroyers in the sea to counter Russian naval power. They have done enough damage to reopen Odessa and at

least one other port on the Black Sea to international commerce, which has provided Ukraine with a crucial economic and strategic lifeline. And that's a remarkable achievement, sinking a third of the Black Sea fleet and basically when you reopen a port, that means that you have taken away naval dominance from a country that has a Navy, and you don't. That's pretty good. Pretty good stuff. Over the last two years, Ukraine had damaged irreparably or sunk seven active landing ships and one two, seven active landing ships and one landing vessel.

I don't know the difference. They've fucked up a lot of boats. They have destroyed a submarine with sea to ground capability that was docked for repairs. They have sunk a cruiser, the capital ship of the entire Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva. They've also sunk a supply vessel and a handful of patrol boats and missile boats. and a number of other boats have been damaged. That's a significant rate of casualties, especially when you consider that every actually destroyed vessel,

we're looking at a years, multiple years, lead time to replace. You cannot make naval vessels very quickly anymore. Back during the big dub-dub dose, the U.S. did, but nobody really does that anymore. Not with the big ones, at least. You can't just roll through that. We were just yeeding aircraft carriers into the sea. back then. It's just fighting them out.

Yeah, it'll take about a week. Yeah, it's because Rosie's a riveter was really riveting at a high speed. She was quite a riveter. So at the start of hostilities, Turkey, which controls access to the Black Sea, forbade any additional military vessels or at least military vessels of significant size from entering the area. What this means, this has a significant impact on how well Ukraine strikes work, because even if Russia can replace the losses physically,

they can't actually get replacements into the Black Sea easily. They can't sail new shit past the Turks. The Turks are not allowing that right now. So, again, this is a situation that has kind of favored the way in which Ukraine has adapted to countering Russian naval dominance. It is possible that at the present rate of attrition, the Black Sea fleet could be rendered inoperable in less than two years. Like if they keep going at this rate, it's like 18 months or something before there's not really much of a fleet anymore. Now, if Ukraine had accomplished this task with a traditional Navy using standard naval tactics, this would have been an impressive victory, given the disparity in resources between the two nations.

But they have done all this with a mix of cruise missiles, many of which are produced in country, aerial drones, and new bespoke locally produced suicide drone boats. This irregular naval warfare has been successful enough that one Rand Corporation engineer and analyst, Scott Savitz, described the Black Sea Fleet as a fleet in being. quote, it represents a potential threat that needs to be vigilantly guarded against, but one that remains in check for now. And I'm going to quote from a New York Times article on the topic to brought a little more context. Ukraine has effectively turned around 10,000 square miles in the western Black Sea off its southern coast into what the military calls a gray zone, where

neither side can sail without the threat of attack. James Heapy, Britain's armed forces minister, told a recent security conference in Warsaw that Russia's Black Sea fleet had suffered a functional defeat and contended that the liberation of Ukraine's coastal waters in the Black Sea was every bit as important as the successful counter-offensives on land and Kersone and Kharkiv last year. The classical approach that we studied at military maritime academies does not work now, Admiral Nevespapa said, therefore we have to be as flexible as possible and change approaches to planning and implementing work as much as possible. That article is about a year old or so.

So the Neptune anti-ship missile is one of the prides of Ukraine's nascent arms industry. Neptune missiles are credited with destroying the Moscow in April of 2022. Ukraine also has access to several Western anti-ship missiles, including the Storm Shadow and scalp missiles. I believe the Storm Shadow comes from your folks, right, James? It does. Yeah, it's a pretty strong. Yeah.

Yeah. And these seem to be pretty effective missiles. These are obviously much more advanced. These are modern naval weapons, right? These are much more advanced than, for example, the weapons, the Houthis have. These are the kind of things that can counter to some extent modern anti-missile technology. For an example of kind of how that tends to work, they used a barrage of, I believe it was mostly storm shadows, to rain death on the Crimean Port of Sebastopol recently. Seven out of 18 of the missiles fired, made it through Russian air defenses, and these damaged or destroyed four landing ships in a single strike.

And these are sizable naval vessels. This is the most recent attack. Although, after I wrote this, there was another attack on the Kerch Bridge. I'm not really sure how that took place yet. That seems to have shut it down again. But that gives you an idea of what you actually have to do, how much of these missiles you have to put in the air to get some through. And that's not too bad, right?

18 missiles, 7 get through, four ships down. That's a really good rate of return. Especially when you consider that, like, you know, we were talking in our first episode about how the U.S. is spending significant resources on maintaining its, defending its carriers, right? Russia does not have the same ability to keep reducing munitions. No.

And so, like, that's a finite resource, right? Their means of defining their ships and defending really anything against missiles are a finite resource. So any time you can, even if the ship doesn't get sunk, if the ship has to deploy one of these missiles, which the whole country doesn't have very many of, that's still a win. Now, this is, we are talking about irregular naval warfare. And then this is not what most people would have considered a traditional naval conflict prior to the expansion of hostilities in Ukraine. However, we are talking, this is very different than the case of the Houthis, Ukraine is a state. It doesn't have a massive arms industry, but it has one, and it has the supportive nations with sizable arms industries, right? So we are not talking about this part.

We are going to talk about the aspects of Ukrainian irregular naval warfare that are some guys that are hobbyists building shit. This is not that part yet. But I think this information is kind of significant, and that it shows the tactical use of anti-ship cruise missiles and their ability to significantly shape an operational environment, even when the country using them has minimal conventional naval assets of their own. It is largely through the use of these missiles that Ukraine has been able to reopen their Black Sea ports. That matters to people seeking to understand both this conflict and the future of unconventional naval warfare. I mean, I guess you could say this is the future of conventional naval warfare, but I think we're still leaning on the unconventional side at the moment, at least in terms of how doctrine is changing as a result of this.

So maybe I should update how we're defining this. But for our purposes, as people unlikely to have access to cruise missiles, but significantly likely to find ourselves waging an unconventional war than having cruise missiles, it's more relevant to look at the new weapons systems Ukraine has developed that have helped them lock down the Black Sea fleet using civilian hobbyists. And this is where we get to drones. Ukraine's conventional aerial drones are a mix of actual military hardware. I'm talking about stuff like the Bayraktar, the Turkish drone, which is like kind of like

the predator, all right. It's like an actual military product. But the majority in terms of numbers of drones that Ukraine is fielding are civilian drones, or at least drones that started out as civilian technology. A lot of these are now built to be military, but they're still based on these designs that started with people hacking and cobbling together civilian drones. And outside of naval stuff, prior to the war, there had been a lot of veterans and hobbyists who were veterans trying to convince the Ukrainian military that it needed to adopt drone warfare

in a large scale. the kind of drone warfare that you can do with these less expensive drones. And they received a lot of pushback until the war started. And these guys just took to the field and started fucking murking Russian armed units and infantry and killing generals and shit. And now Ukraine has integrated in a way that everyone is going to follow. Like a Ukrainian like battalions have like companies now that are drone assault companies and like line battalions. And within infantry you have people used or artillery using transatliform observers. Yes.

all over. They have set a goal for this year of producing at least a million and ideally more like two million drones. And at least from what I read, that looks like very plausible. Most of these are quite small, right? But that doesn't mean obviously ineffective. I know they buy a lot of their drones in the UK because the UK has consistently kicked itself in the nuts when it comes to like Brexit. And so the pound is significantly weaker and so they're able to get the drones at a cheaper price and then drive them all the way across. You know people who have done that. I was going to go join them but never worked it out. Yeah.

And, you know, there are a number of different, like these drones earlier in the war had an easier time being effective and causing casualties on the Russians than later. This is something that, you know, kind of the hoopla and support, which I think is necessary that Ukraine gets lead some people to discount the degree to which Russian forces have adapted and gotten smarter. And one of the ways in which they've adapted and gotten smarter is in blocking drones. Using drones of their own, you know, one of the stories the last couple of weeks is that Russia has succeeded in carrying out strikes on advanced weapon systems like Sam sites deep in Ukrainian territory. They've extended their kill chain beyond what they used to be capable of, and that's because they've adapted.

They're also adapted with less efficacy at blocking drones and attacks on naval vessels. Some of this has been kind of funny. I want to read a quote from a business insider article here. Russia is painting silhouettes on naval vessels on land to try and trick Ukraine, which keeps me. It keeps destroying its warships. In an intelligence update on Wednesday, the UK Ministry of Defense said that silhouettes of vessels have also been painted on the side of K's, probably to confuse the uncrewed aerial vehicle operators. They showed, there's some images of this. They don't seem convincing to me.

I don't know if I think this is working. This is great. I love this. They'll have a cardboard navy next. Yeah, it's very Bugs Bunny. Yes, it is. But not working as well as bugs would. They've painted a hole in the side of the cliff face.

and drones keep brushing into it. Ukraine keeps throwing drones at it. It's very funny. I mean, obviously, they just, Ukraine just sank, like, or, damn it, badly damaged four boats. So I don't think this is, I haven't seen evidence that this is working well.

Their actual, like, jamming efforts have been much more successful, right? Yeah, they always will be on civilian. One of the things is really interesting compared to Myanmar is that Ukraine tends to rely on modified off-the-shelf civilian drones, right? Your DJI is that kind of thing. In Myanmar,

because of where a lot of the PDFs are, because they increasingly do control the borders, but they haven't always. They have been making their own drones. It's a group called Federal Wings. You can find them on telegram, who make their own drones. And I think those seem to be less,

the jammers that the SAC, the Tampador has, are Chinese-made. They're like jama rifles. You see them all the time in captured weapon caches, but they don't seem to be having as much impact. on these homemade drones, which is really interesting. Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, I've mentioned a couple of times.

We're doing this in part because the odds that people listening might be involved in a regular conflict are not zero. You know, what I think about when I say that is not that there's high odds for any individual person fighting themselves in that situation, but there is, given the number of people who listen to this podcast, probably someone who is not currently involved in a conflict that will find themselves that way in the future. and I base that in part on the fact that all of our friends in Myanmar who are currently fighting a war were a couple of years ago delivery drivers and playing PubG online and not really thinking they would wind up as insurgents.

I've spoken to a number of people who are currently fighting, not in Myanmar, who have listened to our Myanmar podcast and realized the capacity of 3D printing to be very useful. So even in that sense, it's already happening. But yeah, no one in Myanmar, like many of them said, their entire combat. experience was playing PubG. Yeah. And now they are murking ships. Yeah.

So anyway, it bears thinking about this stuff. And this brings me back to Ukraine's irregular drone warfare units, which, again, a lot of these guys started out as civilian enthusiasts who expanded, responded to the outbreak, or at least expansion of hostilities by expanding their hobby into a real world military effort that had a real world effect. Civilian drones were crucial in the Battle of Kiev, allowing Ukraine to do severe damage to that massive Russian armored column heading towards the city, and providing. intel that led to the assassination of multiple general level officers. So it is perhaps not surprising

that Ukraine looked to the same group of volunteer hobbyists when it came time to expand their naval arsenal. And there's a really good article I found in CNN by Sebastian Shukla, Alex Marcotte, and Darya Tarasova. And I actually want to give you the title of this article, yeah, I'll try to throw those in show notes, is exclusive rare access to Ukraine's sea drones, part of Ukraine's fightback in the Black Sea. I haven't really seen the word fightback use that way. But there you go. So I'm going to read a quote from that article. A government-linked Ukrainian fundraising organization called United 24 has sourced money from companies and individuals all around the world, pooling funds to disperse it to a variety

of developers and initiatives from defense to soccer matches. The entire outfit is very security conscious, insisting on strict guidelines on filming and revealing identities. Those who seen and met with declined to give their full names or even their ranks within Ukraine's armed forces. On a creaky wooden jetty, a camouflaged sea drone pilot says he wants to go by shark. In front of him is a long black, hard, show briefcase. He unveils a bespoke, multi-screened mission control, essentially an elaborate

gaming center, complete with levers, joysticks, a monitor and buttons that have covers over switches that shouldn't accidentally be knocked with labels like blast. The developer of the drone, who asked to remain anonymous, said their work on sea drones only began once the war started. It was very important because we did not have many forces to resist the maritime state, Russia, and we needed to develop something of our own because we didn't have the existing capabilities. So again, these are hobbyist design. I mean, this guy's not really a hobbyist anymore, but that's how he started.

He's only not a hobbyist because the military recognized the value of what he was doing. And the current iterations of this sea drone weigh a little over 2,000 pounds with an explosive 661 pound payload, a 500-mile range, and a max speed of 50 miles per hour. That is a significant weapon system. Yeah. Multiple sea drones have been used to strike Russian assets in the black sea. and drones were involved in a successful attack that severely damaged the Kerch Bridge last July, rendering it impassable until September.

So these have had a real battlefield effect, and they probably will continue to do so. The developer of these drones told CNN, these drones are a completely Ukrainian production. They are designed, drawn, and tested here. It's our own production of holes, electronics, and software. More than 50% of the production of equipment is here in Ukraine. And that's really significant because, you know, I think we're all aware of the difficulty Ukraine has had getting weaponry lately from the West as a result of fucking around in Congress. And so it is a necessity for them to be able to develop weapon systems like this that can

interdict and counteract more advanced and expensive weapon systems and can be produced indigenously. I don't think we have seen a mass suicide boat attack. I'm interested in what happens when we do, like with more significant numbers than we've seen deployed. I kind of wonder the degree to which the Russians have got. I've gotten good at spotting this stuff. I've come across at least a couple of stories of these boats likely destroyed on approach. So they certainly don't always work or even a majority of the time.

But given the cost of these things, they don't have to get through the majority of the time. Right. Very much worth it, right? Now, in, you know, that interview with the New York Times, Admiral Nejepapa cautioned that Ukraine is still outgunned in the Black Sea, even though the Russians no longer have supremacy. They still have air superiority. They are still able to launch from the sea long-range missiles at Ukrainian targets, including civilian targets. So this is not, again, a situation that should be portrayed as them having their own way.

Their ability to kind of interdict the sea has been, the primary effects of it have been, number one, the reopening of trade in the Black Sea. And earlier in the war, by locking down the ability of these landing ships to put more troops on ground and by doing damage to the Kerch Bridge, they were able to slow Russian reinforcements and Russian material from entering the war zone in order to, and this aided in some of the advances, particularly in areas like Kersan. At this moment, the situation has changed because, again, the Russians aren't just kind of like sitting around doing the same thing over and over again, or at least not always.

And we don't tend to talk as much about successes on the Russian side of things, but that is an important part of the story. And one of the things the Russians have done is kind of acknowledge that the Black Sea Fleet may not be a fleet in being forever. and certainly cannot be relied upon to handle everything they initially thought it would handle. And so Russian engineers spent a significant period of time building a sizable new railroad that connects Rostov and southern Russia to Maripole in occupied southern Ukraine. This has allowed them to get high volume shipments into the area and supply troops to the area

along Ukraine's southern front without relying on that bridge or relying on naval landings, right? So the fact that Ukraine has been able to take out for landing ships recently is good. That's a win for Ukraine. It reduces Russian capability. But it is not have the same effect that it would have had, for example, two years earlier, right? Yeah. Because Russia has also evolved. And among other things, railroads are a lot easier or a lot harder to destroy, to like take out, right?

It's easy to damage a railroad, but they're easy to fix. It's not, it doesn't take a lot to get some guys over to fix a damage sunk of railroad, fixing a bridge that's been blown up or a sunk boat. is a lot harder. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and there are people within Russia even who are sabotaging railroads. But as you say, it's like, it's very high stakes for them, and it's relatively low cost for the Russian state to fix that stuff.

So like, it's not as effective. Yeah. But I think this gives you an idea of kind of like what we're looking at when we look at this kind of ongoing irregular conflict is the side that does not have access to a functional navy, not able to interdict or destroy fleets, but. able to stop them from dominating the coast. And when you can stop them from dominating the coast, you have effectively denied them terrain that they can act in without being countered. And you have also denied them from stopping you from acting in that same terrain. Even if you don't have total

safety in that area, that opens up the operational possibilities substantially. And this is something that I kind of don't think is going to get put back in the bag, even if some of these Star Wars' ass weapons systems do come out in the near future. You know, maybe that'll have an impact in the immediate term on people like the Houthis, but I don't think that it really will on, you know, for example, what Ukraine's doing, right? Yeah. Russia can't keep up with getting decent small arms, body armor, grenades and shit. Like, there's no way it's going to implement some kind of massive Star Wars system over its Navy,

not right now, not in the middle of a conflict that it's struggling to supply. Yep. You know what? Here's an ad break. All right, we're back and we are traveling around the world, spin your little globe in your head, and look for Myanmar, which is, of course, in Asia. Now, I'm talking about two different, I guess, anti-ship, sabotage or attack, or two different ways of ships have been sunk in Myanmar. I'll start with the first one, which is undoubtedly the flashiest, just because it's fun. So a ship in the port of Yangon about a month ago, so we're recording on the 20th, it's about the 1st of March.

It was in the river, in the river in Yangon, right? And it was carrying, allegedly carrying jet fuel. Now, if you follow Burmese activists, people in the Burmese freedom movement, one of their demands for a long time has been to stop supplying the hunter with jet fuel, which would in turn stop it being able to bomb villages, schools. civilians, PDF formation, just about anyone in the country. It's bombed at some point in the last couple of years. And they haven't been successful, right? They haven't been able to stop the supply of jet fuel coming to the hunter. So they've taken it into their own hands. And what they did

on the 1st of March was that they snuck onto a boat. So this is the story from the Burmese National Unity Governments Ministry of Defense anyway. Combat divers snuck onto this planted a kilogram of TNT or a charge equivalent to a kilogram of TNT. Robert and I have both spoken to people who make explosives in Myanmar, so we definitely know the PDF has access to a range of explosives. They set it on a five-hour fuse, and it blew up in the middle of the night. And there's definitely footage of the ship on fire having blown up. Now, this is pretty remarkable for another reason.

This is like why the United States has units like the Navy SEALs, right? like the higher speed guys, because it is not easy to scuba dive across a harbor, climb onto a ship, set an explosive charge without being detected, and then leave that ship and have the charge go off and sink the ship without you being compromised, without the charge itself being compromised and the ship being saved, right? This is some classic, this is why there are special units within the US military. Now, the PDF very obviously did not have combat divers two years ago. I was looking into hobby scuba diving in Yangon.

The rivers in that area are extremely muddy and visibility is very lows. So the people who you find diving in that area are not so much like hobby scuba divers or free divers, but they're salvage divers. There's a whole little industry of people. And these people are diving in equipment that I would. would not consider safe or reliable. It's clamping an air hose in between your teeth and diving down and trying to find there's a large deposit of coal in one of the rivers in Yangon because of a ship that sunk. There's, of course, copper, which everyone all around the world, including the

Viet Cong in Santee, stealing copper. There's iron, right? So these people are diving down and trying to collect scrap and sell that for whatever minimal amount they can, right? It's an extremely dangerous and extremely low income. It's one of the sort of really high-risk, low-reward jobs that you get in economies where people are really struggling to make ends meet, right? So those are the only divers I can find evidence of in Yangon. I don't think it was them who did this because you have to have a boat above you with a pump if you're diving with a rubber hose in your teeth, right?

So it seems like somebody in within the, they said it was a Yangon PDF. That's who they attribute it to. So that would be one of these, it would likely be an underground group within the PDF, right? Some people living in the city who were able to sneak onto this boat, set a charge, and blow it up. And they would also have to have intelligence at the boat where it was, what it was carrying, etc.

So it's a pretty daring mission that this is the first one like this we've seen and we haven't seen anything since. But it's of course possible that this is a story that we're being told. In fact, they had someone undercover on the ship, right? Or like they had some other means of getting this charge onto the ship. But one way or another, they managed to blow up the ship carrying fuel, which is a significant detriment to the Hurtur, right? That's how they get most of their shit.

It's not overland, especially with more and more. The terrain there is just absolutely, like, even with modern technology, difficult to get significant amounts of shit through. They're resupplying some of their outposts that are 10 miles from a town with helicopters right now. Like, A, the terrain is burly, and B, they don't have, the PDF has denied them access, that any time they send out a convoy, it gets attacked. So, sending out, plus, you know, their land border crossings are increasingly falling into

the hands of the PDFs and the EROs. So getting stuff through the ocean is one of the ways that they can still get stuff. And if this keeps happening, then they will make that more expensive for them. and that they're not exactly a wealthy, like, Hunter, even though, I guess, Minotland just made himself an Air Force one recently. I was just looking at it today. Oh, that's good. Good for him.

He's got himself too luxury. Yeah, they called it dictator class. Like, he's upgraded from president class to dictator class. Yes, he has in many ways. So, yeah, that's one way that the PDF has been blowing up ships in the Yangon River. Robert, do you know who else has been blowing up ships in Yangon? Well, we are sponsored entirely by the British Navy circa the mid-1800s, so I would guess them.

That's right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, lots of repressed feelings and blown up. A lot of cabin boys with deep trauma. Anyway, here's hats. All right, we're back. We hope you enjoyed that ad pivot, one of our best ones yet. And we're talking about the Aricon Army now. So the Arakan army, not to be confused with the Arrakhan Rehingya Salvation Army, different group.

Arirkan is a name of what is now Rakhine state before it was colonized by the Burmese. I think Arirkan was as a king before it was colonized by the Burmese. So that's where that refers to. It's a geographical appellation rather than necessarily an ethnic one. The Rakhine would be the ethnic group. So what the AA have done is sunk, I think, at least four hunter ships now. And most of these ships are kind of, they're like the, they look like big Higgins boats. They're like landing craft or like car ferries, like flat bottom with a bow that goes down, right?

I rode around a lot in the Marshall Islands in little landing craft like that because they can get them in. They don't have like docks so they can just ride that right up to the beach and then drop the front and off you go. And they use them a lot. The hunter doesn't have like per se marines. They don't have maritime infantry, but they use them to transport their regular army around. and they use them to transport them up river. They also use them a lot in Rakhine State to shell AA positions and any townships that they've decided

they want to wipe off the map and kill all the people in, right? So these boats have been a real like thorn in the side of the Arakhan army after Operation 1027 when they joined with two other groups to form the Three Brotherhood Alliance and launch attacks on the Hunter all over Myanmar. And so what they've been doing, it appears, is using underwater mines to sink these ships, which is interesting, right? Like, I guess the mines are like a very old technology, right? Like, it's probably 100 years plus underwater mines have existed.

It seems the reason they're able to get away with using what is a relatively dated technology is because the hunter just doesn't expect to encounter anything, right? And so has not equipped its ships as such. They do have stuff like submarines, but that's not what's getting sunk. What's getting sunk are these big kind of landing craft riverboats. And it seems that they're using mines and then once they disable the ship, they're then attacking it with small boats, small arms, like indirect fire, mortars and stuff. Yeah.

I saw one post that suggested they'd use, which is pretty cool if they did. The Burmese military has these tank destroyers, self-repel. It's a tank. It's a tank is what it is. And they've captured, the AAS captured a number of these, right? and I've seen suggestions that they're using some of these on, like they just set up an ambush along the banks of the river, right? And as a ship comes in, they can maybe disable it with a mine

and then attack it with those. But there are videos online. You can find them of the AA, sinking these ships. And then they've done some amazing drone photography of, like, they obviously they then, like staged their units on the ships, like all saluting the drone, and they have the Arakhan army flags. And they're actually really cool photos of them taking these ships. But again, like, I think this might be the first sinking of a Burmese naval ship since independence from Britain.

Like, I can't think that they really haven't played much of a role at all in its conflicts with the EROs, aside as from like basically kind of just shelling places when they want to do that. But there's never really been any significant opposition to them. And that's changed now. They have to obviously, just like everywhere else, watch out for drones, right? have been used to a massive extent in Myanmar. And like, the AA doesn't have as many, like, associated PDFs. I haven't seen them doing as much of the drone stuff as the PDFs. The PDFs tend to be, like, the more urban folks, right?

The younger folks, the Gen Z folks that we've spoken about before. And a lot of them have been very savvy with their use of drones. Like I said, you can look up federal wings and you can see them dropping bombs with drones on all kinds of stuff with their heavy metal soundtracks that they like. But it wasn't even drones here. It's pretty simple.

It was just mines. So they do love mines in Myanmar with a lot of mines all over that country. But in this case, these, I guess, massive what mines in the rivers, given that the Hunter

is the only entity sending big boats up and down, you could set them at a certain depth where these small boats wouldn't hit them and eventually one of the Hunter boats is going to hit them, I guess.

So it's pretty basic technology, but it's still a massive step forward in terms of like a place where the state had complete impunity, it now doesn't, right? They can't just cruise up and down these rivers shelling people. They were actually using some of the ships to evacuate soldiers and their families from a position. The soldiers, they were trying to like re, rather than surrendering, they were trying to evacuate them and move them to somewhere else. The AA asked them to surrender and they tried to evacuate them, so then they mined the ships and took those out. I think the hunter has tried to spin this.

It's like the AA is attacking civilians. But I think a Burmese Navy ship with a Burmese Navy flag, when those ships have just been shelling you, seems like a legitimate target to me. I think it's very hard. It's a hunter who put children on one of their naval ships rather than the AA who attacked the ship because it had children. You can hear, in one of the things you can hear,

the AA are like attacking the ship in small boats and they're shouting, like there are children on board. and you could hear them acknowledging it. And there are videos of the AA rescuing people who jumped overboard, rescuing them from the river. And then, like, I guess they just held as POWs. Cool. Yeah, it's cool.

It's interesting. Obviously, not many of us have access to underwater mines, but, you know, maybe in a fictional future, we might. Yeah. Well, there you go, folks. This has been a regular naval warfare and you. a podcast about a regular naval warfare and you. Yeah.

Send us to your videos of yourselves. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Go out there. Look, how about this? Every listener, go out and sink one naval vessel, you know? It doesn't matter who's.

Just any boat. Any boat. Any boat. Go take out of boat. You see a fucking super yacht. Knock it out. You see a dingy. Take that fucker out.

People kayaking, fuck them up. You know? Banana boat. Absolutely. a banana boat for sure. One of those weird duck boat car things that they have in some cities that they drive them in San Diego.

Actually, you know what? You don't need to do anything with that. That'll kill everybody on board on its own. Those things are death traps. Just pray for those people. Yeah. But any other boat, yeah. You see a donut, you know, behind a speedboat.

Oh, yeah. Merk it. Anyway, everybody, go away. Welcome to Iqadapen 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 fight 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 happy you can join us. So, okay, Whipping Girl, I think, is really one of quietly the most influential books of the 21st century to the extent that in kind of classic transwoman 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 word trans misogyny, 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 I was very much hoping and 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 did it invent, like, cis versus trans, like, A, that's like, a prefix that has existed a long time. Yeah. 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 cis vestism 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 Emmy 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 bizarre. The 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 chapbook 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. Misgendering 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, and 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 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 kind of, you know, put them together in a, particularly in the dismantling, I think it's dismantling cis sexual privilege chapter, where I kind of 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 and in kind of white racist, you know, U.S. 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 know, 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 is 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 a 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, you know, 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 with some of the sort of prevailing gender theories which thought of which think about sort of like femininity and gender is 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 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 gender's performance or all gender's drag.

Yeah. But that is, but that, those are like slogans or soundbites 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, you know, not, you know, in order, 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 underd disgust 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 a women girl and then my writing, 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 improved things a lot. Agreed. We're going to take an ab break, and when we come back, we're talking trans misogyny. We're back. Yeah, so another thing I wanted to sort of

talk about was, I think in like exactly the opposite process that happened to misgendering. Transmasogyny 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 has kind of taken on a life of its own in recent years and what it's been doing since. Yeah.

So I feel like trans misogyny that there are a lot of different dialogues and discourses about it, 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 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 like kind of 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 there, 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 the idea that femaleness and femininity are less legitimate than maleness 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 scarecognly, with scarecoats. 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, right? And so oppositional sexism helps keep traditional sexism in place. because you can say that maleness 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 transmasculine 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 transmasculine, especially

transmasculine 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 transmasculine people. And then if trans male transmasculine people, 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're trans male, transmasculine, 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, you know, complex way for a lot of trans male and transmasculine. 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 a female or towards a 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 like 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 mental transmasicum people don't experience misogyny, which again is not what that's about.

Or sometimes people will like try to make really clear distinctions. There's kind of language like trans misogyny affected versus trans misogyny exempt are the terms, yeah, TME and TMA. which are not terms I've used and which, 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 very 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 a really complex experience, 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 acronyps. Yeah. I mean, I did this in Twitter form, so it was like a thread. So like 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 like a sort of reverse discourse way where it's like, you know, cis people have all the privilege, trans people of 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 as 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 of themselves, but I think sometimes they can be used in ways. And part of why I referenced 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, um, The reason why I bring that up is, so sometimes what happens is that when people learn about cis-sexism or 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 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 like my medium site where my essays usually are now, is it talks about the transmask versus trans femme discourse in terms of what I call the cultural feminist doom loop, where that and the doom loop refers to kind of 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, and 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 pre-order now. And, yeah, join us tomorrow for our discussion with Dr. Serrano of the anatomy of moral panics.

This has been, it could happen here. Trans people are great. 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 Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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