Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 75

Episode Date: March 18, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What's up y'all this is Questlove and you know at QLS I get to hang out with my friends Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Umpink, Bill and we you know at Questlove Supreme like to nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives. People that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down rabbit holes. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Questlove Supreme.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands.

Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your

podcasts. 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 got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, this is It Could Happen Here, and I am Shereen, and today it's just me. It's me and I am alone.

So that means I am probably going to tell you about some fucked up shit that happened in the Middle East, which is exactly what I'm about to do. I just think some things are purposely under-reported, and even when they are seldom reported about, it's always a bit skewed and biased, so I just try to draw attention to certain countries and their people as best as I can because of this, and today I think we're due for an update on Palestine. Israel continues to dehumanize Palestinians daily and blatantly, and it's not just through murdering them.

Last year, under new Israeli restrictions on foreign entry into the West Bank, foreigners romantically involved with Palestinians must declare their relationship to the occupying Israeli government. Yes, you have to tell them, if you are involved with the Palestinian, why? I don't know, because they're treated as less than human, and this is one of many laws that deny Palestinians of basic human rights and keep them under apartheid rule. I want to talk about all that's happened in just these first few months of 2023 because this cycle of violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank in particular has suddenly surged

to levels that we have not seen in years. As of this recording on March 7th, at least 66 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers since the start of 2023, and at least 17 of those killed have been children. For comparison, in 2022, which was the deadliest year in the West Bank in decades, 48 Palestinians were killed in the combined months of January, February, March, and April. The deaths are increasing day by day, and there hasn't seemed to be a stop to them at all.

2022 saw the highest number of civilians killed by Israeli security forces in the past 17 years, and the highest number of Israelis killed since 2016. Renewed violence flared up between Palestine and Israel in January of this year for many reasons, and it continues to build and intensify after a cascade of concerning events. And before we jump into those events that happened in January and onward, I think we need to look back on 2022 in order to understand this a bit better and to hopefully provide some context. So let's take a look at 2022 and how we got here.

We are going to be focusing on the West Bank with the majority of the data in this episode in particular, the one tomorrow will be more broad. I'm going to explain a little bit about what the West Bank even is just for some more context. The West Bank is a landlocked territory near the coast of the Mediterranean in western Asia that forms the main bulk of the Palestinian territories. It is bordered by Jordan and the Dead Sea to the east and by Israel to the south, west, and north. The West Bank includes East Jerusalem.

It's been under Israeli military occupation since 1967, and its area is split into 165 Palestinian quote unquote islands. These islands are under total or partial civil administration by the Palestinian National Authority or the PNA or PA. There are also 230 Israeli settlements into which Israel law is being pipelined. The West Bank initially emerged as a Jordanian occupied territory after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War before being annexed outright by Jordan in 1950, and it was given its name during this time based on its location on the western bank of the Jordan River.

This annexation was widely considered to be illegal and was only recognized by Iraq, Pakistan, and the UK. The territory remained under Jordanian rule until 1967 when it was captured and occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War. The Oslo Accords, which were signed in 1993 between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel, created administrative districts with varying levels of Palestinian authority in specific areas in the West Bank. There was area A, which is administered exclusively by the PA.

There is area B, which is administered by both the PNA and Israel. And then there's area C, which is administered exclusively by Israel. And this area C, which is controlled exclusively by Israel, accounts for over 60% of the West Bank's territory. 2022 was the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians in nearly two decades. Israeli forces killed more Palestinians in the West Bank in 2022 than in any other year the United Nations began systematically recording Palestinian fatalities in 2005, and they started doing this after the last major Palestinian uprising, aka the Second Intifada that lasted

five years. And knowing that, I want you to keep in mind that unfortunately the number of Palestinians that have been killed by the IDF is far greater than some of the numbers I'm going to say in this episode, and again, that is because I am focusing particularly on the West Bank. I want to talk about Israel's 12-month crackdown that has been happening in the West Bank. Nearly 12 months ago, Israel began what has become a year-long violent crackdown in the West Bank. Israel last year prompted a sweeping Israeli military campaign that they called Operation

Breakwater, beginning March of 2022. It was created after attacks occurred by Palestinians against Israeli settlers. Since then, Operation Breakwater has conducted nearly nightly IDF raids in the West Bank, which of course causes heightened friction between the IDF and the Palestinian population. So far, Israeli security forces have made over 2,000 arrests. And that's way too big of a number. Just to give you an idea of the terrifying scale of this operation, Operation Breakwater is the biggest IDF operation in the West Bank since the Second Intifada that I mentioned

earlier that lasted from 2000 to 2005. Since the start of this operation last year, nearly every day, Israel has conducted raids in the West Bank, which is part of the Palestinian territory, which encompasses the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. And this whole territory has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. In spite of this, because Israel does whatever the fuck it wants because it's already founded upon existing illegally in the first place, thousands of Palestinians, many of them young, have been arrested.

And nearly every week, more Palestinians are being killed. Last year, this all resulted in the highest cumulative death toll in the West Bank since 2004. Russian rights groups and UN experts have said that the bloodshed is due to Israel's excessive use of force and open fire rules during near daily military operations, as well as rising assaults by settlers in the West Bank, where again, Palestinians are living under illegal Israeli occupation. Israel justified their intensifying violence because of the fatal attacks on Israelis by

Palestinian militants, which also spiked last year, which is also very bad. Without blaming the people you've been oppressing for nearly a century for being angry and fighting back, people without an army faced against one of the most powerful armies in the world, it just does not sit right with me. In 2022, Israeli security forces killed at least 152 Palestinians in the West Bank and predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem, compared with 75 Palestinians in 2021. These are figures provided by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs or OCHA.

Four Palestinians in the West Bank were killed by Israeli settlers, not soldiers, settlers. Settlers that have been emboldened and even encouraged in their hate and violence by the Israeli far right, and the Israeli far right is basically the Israeli government at this point. And we're going to get into some of the extremes that these settlers go through in their hate and violence more tomorrow, but for now let's focus on 2022. Most of the Palestinian deaths occurred during Israeli military raids and clashes in the West Bank cities of Jenin and Nablus.

More than half of the Palestinians who were murdered were under the age of 25. They never even had a chance to live their lives with their families and loved ones. Each one of these individuals that were killed have people mourning them and missing them every day, and I never want anyone to forget that. Among those killed last year were also U.S. citizens, El Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akle and 78-year-old Umar Assad, and because of their U.S. citizenship, their deaths gained rare worldwide attention and briefly sharpened international criticism of Israel. Shireen, if you remember, was shot in the head while wearing a press vest.

She was there as a reporter doing her job. No violence was taking place around her. She was targeted and killed. Israel says she was probably killed by a soldier's gunfire unintentionally. And that was that. The world moved on. I did an episode last year about Shireen Abu Akle and how Israel murdered her in broad daylight, so if you guys want to revisit that, that is there.

Back to the episode, I don't want us to forget that this data is regarding the West Bank only. Stories of Palestinians die at the hands of Israel's terrorist organization that they call an army every year. In May of 2021, if you can remember that far back, at least 200 Palestinians were killed in a week of Israeli airstrikes. Just one week. And the deaths included 59 children and 35 women, with nearly 1,300 people wounded.

Women and children made up nearly half of the casualties. 59 children. 59 children that were just taken with families that will never be the same. I just want people to remember these things when I mention numbers, that each number is an actual living child or person. In 2022, in a statement to the Washington Post, Israel's military said that Israeli soldiers used live fire when quote necessary during counterterrorism activities in response to quote violent riots which often include explosive devices, Molotov cocktails, and rocks hurled

at the IDF soldiers and Israeli civilians. Are you kidding me? One of the most powerful and supported armies in the world is saying that it's killing people in response to rocks being thrown at them, armed, and protected soldiers covered in swat gear with all the weapons they could ever fucking dream of. Fighting against a people without an army at all, blaming them in an official statement to the Washington Post for throwing rocks. I mean, just get the fuck out of here.

The IDF are all fucking clowns. And maybe I shouldn't be cursing and I should pretend to be professional, but they make me fucking mad and I think we should all be fucking mad. Because I don't think it's fair and I know life isn't built to be fair, but to terrorize and genocide a population, drive them into a corner and then blame them for having the audacity for fighting back and the only ways accessible to them is fucking ludicrous. You can't both sides a conflict when one of those sides has one of the most advanced and supported armies in the world that oppresses the other side that has no army and no support

of any kind, a side who has rocks in their hands, resorting to violence because absolutely nothing and no one is helping them. A total of 224 Palestinians were killed in 2022, including the 49 people that I mentioned earlier that were murdered during a three-day Israeli assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. 17 were children. And I'm emphasizing this because Palestinian children have started keeping goodbye letters in their pockets in case they're killed by the Israeli army. No child should have to live in fear that they might be killed at any moment, but that's

the reality for Palestinian children. Nearly every day, Palestinians wake up to news that the Israeli military has killed yet another Palestinian. This daily violence against Palestinians has traumatized generations of Palestinian children and their parents have no way to protect them. Many of the casualties in the West Bank in 2022 were young Palestinians who have only ever known military occupation and the oppression of the Israeli government. The West Bank also has to deal with the repressive politics of the Ramallah-based Palestinian

Authority, the PA, which was set up as a caretaker government three decades ago and is now widely unpopular among Palestinians. And I'll get into this more after a quick break, so BRB. Okay, we're back. As I mentioned earlier, the West Bank has to deal with repressive politics of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, which was set up three decades ago and is now widely unpopular among Palestinians. A spokesperson from the Palestinian rights group Al Haq said, people are very, very fed

up, whether it's in Jerusalem or Jenin or Nablus. The last 20 years have not shown any improvements in the situation. This spokesperson spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal by Israeli security forces because the Israeli security forces raided the organization's headquarters in the Ramallah last August. The spokesperson explained that, quote, the near daily raids in areas under control of the PA showed that the sovereignty of the PA does not exist. So they're saying that the Palestinian Authority is basically useless.

If these Israeli raids are happening in areas that are supposedly under control or, quote, the care of the PA, then what the fuck are they even there for? Tor Wensland, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, told the Washington Post last year, quote, we have a new dynamic in the West Bank and around Jerusalem with a, quote, new generation of Israelis and Palestinians in conflict. There is an urgent need to deescalate. He also cited the, quote, growing tension in so-called friction zones, which are areas where Israeli settlements continue to encroach on Palestinian lands and where violence is

mounting. Probably in part due to the frustration with the lack of action by the Palestinian Authority, 2022 also saw the emergence of two new Palestinian militant groups, the Jenin Battalion and the Lion's Den, both led by disaffected young men with local support networks. Meanwhile, Israel's military has repeatedly declined to provide the number of internal investigations they supposedly opened last year regarding their misconduct related to the Palestinian deaths. In September of last year, Israel announced the results of its inquiry into the death

of Shireen Abu Akle, who again was shot in the head while covering a military raid near Jenin last May. The IDF said that it, quote, found a high possibility that Ms. Abu Akle was accidentally killed by IDF gunfire towards suspects identified as armed Palestinian gunmen during an exchange of fire, though it has not released any evidence whatsoever showing the presence of gunmen in the area. An investigation by the Post contradicted the IDF's claim that there was an exchange of fire in the minutes before Abu Akle was killed.

And, surprising absolutely no one, the IDF said it would not pursue criminal charges against its soldiers. No one is being held accountable for the killing of Palestinian life, including Palestinian children. Israel has continued to operate as though they have immunity, which, in a way, they do, thanks to the United States, who does nothing but give Israel more money and weapons and good press. Even more concerning, far-right politician Itamar Ben Gavir, who is Israel's new National

Security Minister, has proposed giving police and soldiers wider latitude to use live ammunition and putting laws in place that would shield them from criminal prosecution for killing or injuring Palestinians. And this should be a red flag for everybody. The al-Haq spokesperson said that many of those killed in Israeli raids last year appear to be either bystanders or victims of excessive force. Let's not forget that they also killed members of the press, who clearly wear press vests in a moment where no violence was ever taking place, just a camera and reporters trying to

raise awareness that the crimes that Israel commits. In early December, Israeli fire killed a teenage girl in Jenin who was on her roof as a raid unfolded nearby. Days earlier, Israeli forces fatally shot a 16-year-old boy who was throwing stones at a checkpoint outside Ramallah. We're getting to the end here, so let's take our last little break, and we'll be right back. And we're back, talking about how the IDF shoots Palestinians as though they're basically

playing a video game. They have shot a teenage girl and then a 16-year-old boy, and there are many disturbing videos of IDF soldiers shooting Palestinians like they are playing a video game. There's one video in particular that I'm thinking about that is so fucking disgusting, where one soldier is crouching down and aiming his gun at a Palestinian who was hiding behind a dumpster. I know that the Palestinian is hiding behind a dumpster because the soldier says something to the effect of, what does he think he's doing behind that dumpster?

And then the soldier shoots and jumps up in pure elation, cheering for himself because he's shot this person. There is another soldier in the frame next to him who seems to be more aware of the camera that is recording them who keeps telling his annoying murderer friend to be professional instead of jumping up and down like he just scored a point in a game, because that is all this is to them. There is much more evidence of this infuriating and horrific attitude and culture of the IDF and Abbey Martin's 2019 film, Gossip Fights for Freedom, which I've probably already

recommended a million times and will continue to recommend. It is free on YouTube. Tor Wensland, who we mentioned earlier, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, said, quote, the continued killings of Palestinians by Israeli security forces in incidents where they did not appear to present an imminent threat to life, are disturbing. He went on to say that quote, I am increasingly concerned by the fragility of the current political and security dynamics, particularly in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said, for this violence to end, the occupation must end. On all sides, there are people who know this. The violence of last year reflects a dangerous mix of on-the-ground and generational changes. And this could only escalate further, as Israel's mostly far-right government becomes more far-right, because Jewish supremacists who have incited violence against Palestinians were recently sworn into office, including Israel's aforementioned new Minister of National Security.

And he's just one of the many cogs in the machine of Israel being controlled by far-right terrorists. And yes, to me they are terrorists. Because literally everything they do was either a crime or a crime against humanity. Regardless, at the end of last year, Israel's new government was sworn into office. It's nationalist, exclusionist, and far, far right. It's the most extreme Israeli government in the nation's history. Benjamin Netanyahu, who's already the country's longest-serving Prime Minister, is at the helm

of the country for the sixth time. And this time he's assembled the most far-right cabinet in Israel's history, with the most notable posts given to ultra-nationalists, one of them being the person we mentioned at Tamar Ben-Gavir, the new Minister of National Security, a.k.a. a position that oversees the police. There's also Bezal El-Samotrik, who will have significant power over Israeli settlements in addition to his role as Finance Minister. The government has promised to expand those settlements, those already illegal settlements.

The members of this new coalition have also made extensive comments denigrating the queer community. They've also called for stricter definitions of who even qualifies as Jewish. In making its vision abundantly clear, the government released policy guidelines at the end of September, announcing the Jewish people's quote, exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel. Toward the end of January, the policies of Netanyahu's newly-sorting government coalition brought out about 80,000 protesters in Tel Aviv.

The protesters were largely focused on the government's proposals to overhaul the judicial system, which could weaken the country's democracy and separation of powers. Quote, unquote, democracy, yet right. But the effects of the policies on the 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel and the 5.2 million Palestinians living in the occupied territories, all of these effects are going to be catastrophic, and only building upon years of policies that Israeli human rights organizations say constitute crimes against humanity. The human rights defenders and experts in Israeli politics emphasize that this government

is not a departure from the previous ones, and yes, it is Netanyahu's sixth time leading the country. But instead of being a new government, it's instead a culmination of Israeli politics that are only drifting farther and farther to the right, and then decades longer of policies that amount to de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank and policies of Jewish supremacy. What's different now, however, is how clearly these ideas are stated in the new government's coalition guidelines by prominent ministers of the fundamentals of how the country runs. This time, it is clear, it is written in the guidelines, there's no longer subtlety to

their hate, it is in writing. The new Israeli government is somewhat of a turn from the brief centrist government of last year, but it's still seeking to implement policies that are anti-Palestinian and anti-liberal. But again, it is certainly not the first Israeli government to do these things. The executive director of the Israeli watchdog Bitzelam, again apologized, probably mispronounced that, said, it's key not to pretend, as many seem to already be doing, that it will somehow be a sudden departure from Israeli quote-unquote democracy. What worries me is that even this level of clarity will not be sufficient to trigger

an adequate international response. And the new Israeli government is shaping up just to be extreme as we anticipated. Israel's parliamentary system is made up of many fragmented parties, and it's slowly been collapsing and there's been turmoil and whatever, because there have been five national elections since 2019. The quote-unquote change government in 2021 brought together opposing parties last year to oust Netanyahu, finally once and for all, right? But that fell apart last summer, and in the ensuing elections, Netanyahu built a coalition

of ultra-orthodox and religious Zionist parties that returned him to power, leading to an even more extreme government. So even they tried to get rid of him, but he came back worse than ever. And so this extreme government is already acting in extreme ways. And again, the new government's ministers have made long-standing attacks on the queer community as well as religious freedom and Israeli and Palestinian civil society as well as who can call themselves Jewish. Above all, there are going to be drastic implications for Palestinians living in the occupied West

Bank and for the civil liberties of Israeli citizens, mostly because Netanyahu's internal coalition negotiations have brought settlers into key ministerial posts. In only days into the government being sworn in, there have been already multiple signs and signals of how these personalities are going to rule. Justice Minister Yarev Levin has introduced legislation that would weaken judicial review and the power of Israel's Supreme Court to strike down legislation. Another proposal would revamp and politicize the country's long-standing process for selecting judges.

And of course, we can't forget about the fucking new National Security Minister, aka Tamar Ben-Gavir, who is part of the Jewish power party. His political ideas are inspired by the late radical iconoclast Rabbi Meir Kahane. Ben-Gavir has stepped into a role that is basically tailor-made to oversee the police both within Israel and the occupied West Bank. And in early January, he, on somehow legal grounds, directed the police to tear down any Palestinian flag in public spaces. And then there's also Finance Minister Bezalel Sumatrik.

He is the head of the Religious Zionism Party, and he's also a settler whose anti-gay rhetoric is prolific to say the least. He has already seized customs revenues that belong to the Palestinian Authority, and he's called the Palestinian Authority a terror-abetting body that he thinks should fall. He also holds newly-created authorities that give him oversight of the West Bank occupation through a role crafted for him in the Defense Ministry. So they're essentially just creating these roles and creating these rules that only allow them to have more control, the Corruption 101, I suppose.

We can also see clearly how Netanyahu and his partners are going to govern in the Coalition's agreement that sets out the new government's guidelines. It's not legally binding, but it states plainly in its ideology that, quote, the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right over all areas of the land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the land of Israel. And this includes, to them, the occupied West Bank. Israeli Human Rights Organization Adullah wrote in a report, This goes further than any previous agreements.

The government has made explicit the Coalition's party's long-standing intent to further entrench Jewish supremacy and Palestinian repression throughout the state of Israel and the occupied West Bank through a two-tiered system of governance on all levels. The new government's approach to the occupied West Bank revolves around the illegal annexation of Palestinian land. The government plans to legalize the illegal outposts that are built on private Palestinian land, and the likely result of that is Palestinians being stripped of rights and protections and left even more vulnerable to violence and the hardships they're already enduring.

The Israeli Rights Organization of Adullah goes on to say that these changes to the judicial system and bestowing ministers like Samatrik with new authorities over the occupation threaten civil rights and individual rights in Israel, but it is mainly going to be a big, big issue against the national minority, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20% of the country. They are going to be the first and most severely damaged by those changes. And clearly the Israeli government, even before all of this but now it is clearly stated, it has all the components of fascism.

And yet the US still appears to be holding out hope that it can somehow work with Netanyahu and his fucking government and its fucking ministers even now. Politics are all a scam, everyone fucking sucks. Israel has been violating Palestinians human rights with impunity for decades, but this new government again just illustrates the most brutal intentions with greater clarity. Bitsolem, another human rights group, said, the hypocrisy is denying that Palestinians have already been living for many years under extreme organized criminal Israeli state violence underwritten by the US.

And the lack of accountability and the acquiescence of the international community is to a great extent responsible for driving this. And as we mentioned in this episode, last year 2022 was the most deadly year for Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank since the UN began recording the deaths in 2005. It was also the year that the most Palestinians have been held in administrative detention. And the attacks on Palestinians throughout the center right government leading up to all of this, the governments of Yar Lapid and Nefatali Bennett, cannot be understated. It's always been bad, now it's just extremely bad and in sharpie.

The US has a role here too, because it continues to supply Israel with billions of dollars of military aid and it has also failed to publicly criticize Netanyahu's new political allies. An analyst covering Israel and Palestine for international crisis group said, there's no way that Netanyahu, as desperate as he is, would have gone to form this kind of coalition if it wasn't for years and years of US abdication of responsibility for what happens here. He just wouldn't have felt that he could do it. It would have been too outlandish. And all of this brings us to 2023, which we will talk about tomorrow because I like short

episodes, so I'll see you there. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into

a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to

do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous. It was the first major social media company to collapse.

Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. This is what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, the Story of MySpace on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or

wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. These are everywhere and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did and that's even way worse than the money he took.

And I am here to help, as a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And welcome back to It Could Happen Here, it's still Shireen and we are going to continue our discussion about Palestine.

Yesterday, we talked about the atrocious things that Israel has done to Palestinians in 2022 and it brought us all to now 2023. And as a reminder, as of this recording on March 7th, at least 66 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers since the start of 2023 and at least 17 of those killed were children. Thursday, January 26th, marked one of the deadliest Israeli army operations in the occupied West Bank since at least 2005. Israeli soldiers invaded a crowded Jenin refugee camp on Palestinian land and massacred nine

Palestinians, wounding at least 20 others. Among these nine Palestinians were two children and a 61-year-old woman. The injuries of the wounded were in the head and chest, indicating that Israeli soldiers were shooting to kill. Israeli soldiers also blocked paramedics from delivering medical aid to the injured and they tear-gassed the children's ward of a hospital. This massacre is the deadliest Israeli attack in the Palestinian West Bank in nearly 20 years.

I just want to repeat some things in case I said that too fast or it's just glossed over, but nine Palestinians were killed, two children, a 61-year-old woman, and the injuries were in the head and the chest. They were shooting to kill. They blocked paramedics from delivering medical aid to the injured and they tear-gassed the children's ward of a hospital. What is the justification of that? Someone please tell me I'm all ears.

Most monstrous things that Israel is doing to Palestinians. And in addition to the massacre in Jenin, Israeli soldiers killed three other Palestinians within 24 hours of the massacre, a child and two young men. This raid on January 26th led the Palestinian Authority, aka the PA, to stop coordinating with Israel on security matters, officially suspending its U.S. supervised security cooperation with Israel, but it's unclear to what extent that will take place. And this spike in violence is occurring on both sides. A day after the raid, aka massacre, in the Jenin refugee camp, a Palestinian gunman

near a synagogue outside of Jerusalem killed seven people and injured three more. Violence is often the response when you lead with violence, and this event marked the deadliest Palestinian attack against Israelis since 2008. Israel's colonization and military occupation of Palestinian land and its violent apartheid rule over millions of Palestinians are the root cause of this violence, but U.S. media largely ignores Israel's violence as Israeli soldiers routinely murder Palestinians, including children destroying their homes and stealing their land. Remember yesterday when I mentioned that we would talk about the heinous things that Israeli

settlers have been doing? Well, on January 28th, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians at least 144 times. The attacks ranged from assaulting Palestinians to setting Palestinian homes and cars on fire. No arrests were made. In fact, Israeli soldiers often allow Israeli settlers to attack Palestinians, even joining in themselves or arresting the Palestinians who have been attacked. Israeli settlers live on stolen Palestinian land in violation of international law. They shouldn't be on Palestinian land in the first place, let alone be given free reign

to attack Palestinians without any sort of consequence. These are all obvious hate crimes that are only supported and encouraged by the military and the government. If a government treats those it oppresses as less than human, its people will only do the same. This January was the deadliest January for Palestinians in 14 years, and Israel's violence shows no signs of stopping. It seems like Israel's new extremist, far-right government is determined to exact more violence

against Palestinians this year than ever before. And with U.S. officials refusing to condemn their actions, Israel's leaders are getting a green light to continue to terrorize Palestinians, never held accountable for the daily violence and apartheid rule over Palestine. Palestinians deserve freedom from Israel's daily violence and, at the very least, fair media coverage so that the world understands what's really going on. On March 3 of this year, Israel killed a 15-year-old Palestinian boy by shooting him in the back. This occurred in the West Bank town of Azun.

When an Israel military vehicle drove into town, teens were hurling rocks at the car. Others responded with live fire, which is a very reasonable response to having a stone thrown at your fucking tank. In addition to shooting and killing a 15-year-old Palestinian boy, a child, in the back. Two others were wounded in this attack, including a child who is currently still in critical condition. Israeli forces have carried out three large-scale raids on Palestinian cities since Israel's new government took office at the end of last year, including one in Nablus on February

22 that led to the largest Palestinian death toll in a single military occupation since 2005. Israeli forces killed at least 11 Palestinians and wounded more than 100 more. Among those killed were a 72-year-old man, a 16-year-old boy, and a 66-year-old man who died of tear gas inhalation. EU armed Palestinian groups have also emerged in response to this violence, and there has been a spate of Palestinian attacks against Israelis. Going back to the fuckery of the Israeli settlers, on February 26, at least 400 Israeli settlers

attacked several Palestinian villages in Nablus, including Hawada, killing one man, and injuring hundreds of others. The violence came after calls were made by Israeli Knesset member Zabaka Fogel, apologies, obviously mispronounced, I tried my best, but this violence came after this Knesset member told the settlers to burn the town down. Settlers burned down more than 30 homes and at least 100 cars while beating Palestinians with metal rods and rocks. None of these settlers were arrested.

About 100 Palestinians are also being treated for tear gas inhalation. In one of the many videos of this event, and yes there are actual videos of shit like this happening without any justice, crowds of Jewish settlers can be heard reciting the Jewish prayer for the dead as they stare at a building in flames. There's a video of Israeli settlers fucking dancing as the violence takes place. And earlier, a prominent Israeli cabinet minister and settler leader had called for Israel to quote, strike without mercy. On March 1st, Bezalel Sumatric, who was Israel's finance minister who also handles civil administration

in the West Bank, said the village of Hawada should be wiped out. He told a journalist, quote, I think Hawada needs to be erased. The state should be the one to do that. Back to that Israeli Knesset member, Zabaka Fogel, again apologies for mispronouncing that. He tweeted that, quote, Hawada closed plus burnt down. That's what I want to see. On an earlier occasion, Fogel said that, quote, 100 Palestinians must be killed in a day.

And he described these Palestinians as terrorists and to force them to the, quote, Israeli will. In response to Sumatric's statement that the Palestinian village of Hawada should be wiped out, the human rights chief of the United Nations, aka Volker Turk, who we mentioned briefly yesterday, he said that these comments are an unfathomable statement of incitement to violence and hostility. He went on to say, the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is a tragedy, a tragedy above all else for the Palestinian people. This was during a report that he presented on the situation in the occupied territories

to the UN Human Rights Council. He said, my report finds that over the reporting period, lethal force has been frequently employed by the Israeli security forces, regardless of the level of threat and at times even as an initial measure rather than a last resort. My office has also documented several cases of apparent extrajudicial targeted killings by members of the ISF, the Israeli security forces. The report finds that 131 Palestinians were killed by the ISF personnel over the past year in a context of law enforcement that is outside any context of hostilities.

These include 65 people who we understand were not armed or not engaged in any attacks or clashes. The occupation is eating away at the health of both societies on every level, from childhood to old age and in every part of life. For this violence to end, the occupation must end. On all sides, there are people who know this. I did mention the end of that report briefly yesterday, but I wanted to mention more of it today just to really give you the whole context of what this report was saying to

the UN. The European Union's envoy to the Palestinians also called for accountability for these settler attacks. It is absolutely necessary for us that accountability is fully insured, that the perpetrators are brought to justice, that those who lost property be compensated. In what seemed like a very rare move, the Defense Minister Yolov Galant said that he signed administrative detention orders for two suspects over this rampage, and he court ordered police to release all seven people who had been detained in connection to the

rampage. Amnesty International condemned this release of the suspects. It also condemned the use of administrative detention, which it said was a practice that violates international law. But Israel doesn't care about that, because it violates international law a lot, and here it is. The Israeli rights group Yesh Din found that 93% of investigations into settler attacks in the occupied West Bank between 2005 and 2022 were closed without indictments.

And even though the U.S. demanded that Netanyahu disavow Symmetric's call for Hawar to be erased, nothing has happened. Netanyahu on the night of the rampage urged people not to take the law into their own hands, but he never publicly addressed Symmetric's statement or responded to the unusual criticism by the U.S., who was obviously a close ally. The situation in Israel today is clear. Israel has become a state for the settlers, where some of these militias have the support of the Israeli ministers such as Symmetric and Ben Gavid.

Israeli settlers who chant Death to Arabs and Mayor Village Burn have the direct support of people in uniform and the Israeli government. And just like the other Israeli settlers who set hundreds of Palestinian homes on fire and uprooted thousands of Palestinian olive trees and got away with their crimes, it is highly unlikely that the Israeli settlers who burned homes in Hawada will be touched. And there have been protests that are actually secular and liberal in a desperate attempt to stop this growing, far-right government. But they don't do much, obviously, when you're in a fascist government regime.

I can't believe we haven't talked about it yet, but President Isaac Herzog, who is Israel's 11th president, and he's been president since 2021, he stepped in after these protests were happening, and with support from President Biden, he was facilitating a compromise between the government and these protesters. And what seemed like a well-intentioned effort to build some kind of consensus, it was only in fact this ill-advised attempt to appease fascists and pander to evil. And any compromise that is offered by Herzog would be skewed toward the ruling majority, which holds the power to interpret its articles at will.

A compromise will also whitewash and empower the ruling fascists, presenting them as responsible and pragmatic actors as they pursue their extremist agenda and as the street opposition loses momentum and disintegrates, slowly but surely. In a recent article, Haaretz said that Herzog's plans were born in sin to whitewash a government led by a criminal defendant who was in a conflict of interest in everything regarding changes in the judicial system and certainly regarding such a radical, quote-unquote, reform. And obviously, the more sinister and dangerous ramifications of such a compromise lies in its focusing on Israel's liberal democracy for the Jews while ignoring its tyranny toward

the Palestinians. In fact, reaching any sort of compromise on domestic affairs is sure to free the government's hand only to widen its oppression, deepen its occupation, and multiply its illegal settlements. Israel has no security solutions in Palestine. Former intelligence officer Chief Ami Ayalon in his biography, Friendly Fire, said of Israel, because of its occupation, Israel's democracy will devolve into tyranny. Let's go back to Itamar bin Gavid, Israel's Minister of Security, who the New Yorker actually called Israel's Minister of Chaos.

He has been convicted of eight charges, including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism, and who, according to former Prime Minister Ahud Olmart, presents a more eminent danger to Israel than a nuclear-armed Iran. And as we mentioned, bin Gavir serves as Minister of Security alongside his genocidal partner in crime, Bezadeh al-Samatrik, the Minister of Finance. Both of these men have risen to the highest echelons of power thanks to their racist campaigns and incitement against Palestinians. Their fanatical religious movement has sprung out of the illegal settlements in the occupied

West Bank, based on the Zionist belief in the necessity to take full control of all of historic Palestine, aka the land of Israel, as they call it, in order to redeem the Jewish people by any means necessary. In other words, Israel's fanatics have a divinely ordained vested interest in greater turmoil in Israel and Palestine that strengthens and expands their base, especially among their youth. After decades of military occupation, polls and surveys suggest that about 60 percent of Jewish Israelis favor segregation from the Palestinian Israelis and 60 percent identify

as right wing today, a number that rises to 70 percent for those aged 18 to 24. This does not bode well for future peace or security. It's not exactly a generation that's going to die out, it's a generation that's being formed as we speak. And even though Palestine has the Palestinian authority or any kind of leadership that is obviously weakening, even when Israel pretends to coordinate with them on security and intelligence matters, it persists on humiliating the Palestinian leaders, undercutting their authority and undermining their legitimacy as it forces settlers to rampage through the Palestinian

neighborhoods and refugee camps without any sort of repercussions. And I know Israel gets called an apartheid state a lot these days, and it isn't apartheid state. But basically, the engine of turmoil and violence today is only because of Israel's decade-long military and civilian occupation, this occupation that has rapidly transformed into an entrenched system of apartheid government because of the two separate set of laws, rules, standards, and structures designed to favor the illegal settlers. And to maintain and expand Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean

Sea, the ruling fascists plan to unleash greater state and settler violence against the Palestinians as this year progresses, and in the process, transform Israel into a fascist garrison state and worsen regional turmoil. Let's take our first break here, we'll continue when we come back, and BRB. Okay, we're back. In 2015, the world was shocked by the kidnapping of Palestinian child Mohammed Abu Khadir from Jerusalem by Israeli settlers who burnt him alive. This was depicted in the HBO show, Our Boys.

It's a decent show, I recommend you swatch it just for more information. It's really hard to watch, but it's still a really good show. But this event, this kidnapping of a Palestinian child who was burnt alive by Israeli settlers, this is the mentality of Israeli settlers in the West Bank today, where burning Palestinians in their homes is celebrated by their political leaders. These groups have carried out dozens of attacks against Palestinian families by burning their homes and their farms, including burning the Palestinian De Wapshe family in the village on Douma in late July 2015, where an 18-month-old Ali De Wapshe and his parents lost their lives.

Between 600,000 and 750,000 Israeli settlers live in at least 250 settlements and outposts built by the Israeli government and settlers across the occupied Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem. That is equivalent to roughly 11% of the total Jewish-Israeli population. They live beyond the, quote, internationally recognized borders of their state on Palestinian land that Israel militarily occupied in 1967 and continues to do so until today. Settlers also lived in the besieged Gaza Strip until 2005, when they were evacuated. The Gaza Strip has also been described as an open-air concentration camp, if you want

an idea of maybe why they left. The majority of settlers are armed, and Palestinians living on the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem suffer from hundreds of Israeli settler attacks each year. Such attacks, which include shootings, stabbings, arson, beatings, and rock throwing, have become more organized over the last few years. Every year, thousands of Palestinian trees and cars and homes are burned by these settlers. Many of these incidents have been recorded on video, showing that the attacks often take place under the protection or in coordination with the Israeli army, sometimes with soldiers

and settlers shooting side by side. Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, as they violate the 4th Geneva Convention, which bans an occupying power from transferring its population to the area it occupies. This is for a variety of reasons, including protecting civilians from the theft of resources by the occupying power and to prevent changes in the demographic makeup of the occupied territory, which both things have happened. Israel is doing that very successfully, unfortunately. The majority of settlements have been built either entirely or partially on private Palestinian

land. Despite being outside of Israel proper, these settlers are granted Israeli citizenship and they receive government subsidies that significantly lower their cost of living. In contrast, Palestinians living in the West Bank are subject to Israeli military law. And there has been an increasing number of settler attacks. Between 2010 and 2019, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded at least 2,955 settler attacks, in which at least 22 Palestinians were killed and at least 1,258 others were injured.

The governance of Nablus, Hebron, and Ramallah had the highest numbers of these incidents. Since the start of 2023, Israeli settler-related violence reached an average of 3 incidents per day, compared with two incidents per day in 2022, still really shitty, and one incident per day in 2021. This is what the UN had told Al Jazeera. And this is the highest daily average of settler-related incidents affecting Palestinians since 2006. And criminal charges are rarely, if ever, pursued. And although not every attack can be tied to another, it seems that since the launch

of Israel's Operation Breakwater last March, it's only driving the surge in violence further. The imbalance between these two forces doesn't get any better when you add politics and leadership into the mix. While Israel is appointing more and more far-right politicians to higher positions of power, there has been a weakening of Palestinian security forces. Palestinian security forces are trained by the U.S. and international forces to patrol the West Bank, round up Palestinian militants, and coordinate with Israeli officials to prevent

attacks on Israelis. But those forces have lost a lot of legitimacy among their own people. Many Palestinians see them as doing Israel's bidding, maintaining Israel's military occupation rather than resisting it. Increasingly, pockets of the West Bank have become no-go zones for the Palestinian authority forces, who now either refuse to enter or find it too dangerous. That includes the Jenin refugee camp, which is a dense, highly populated district. Israel says it's stepping in to fill the void of leadership, intensifying its arrest

raids in these densely populated areas. And unsurprisingly, this leads to deadly clashes. But Israel has occupied the West Bank for nearly 56 years and continues to deepen its grip on it. It says Palestinians are not ready to make peace with Israel, and that the occupation is a security necessity. But it has also allowed and supported hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers across the West Bank, which we've seen manifest in the far-right parades and the rallies that chant

for the quote, death of Arabs. Additionally, Israel's new far-right government vows to legalize dozens of small settlement outposts deep in the heart of the occupied territory, making it harder to envision a future Palestinian state there, which is part of their whole agenda. Younger Palestinians have grown up not knowing anything but Israel's brutal permit regime, which controls Palestinians' entry and movement, and some of their only interactions with Israelis are often with hostile settlers, or with occupation-enforcing soldiers, who raid their homes and jail people for months without charges.

And because of the inaction of both the Palestinian Authority and the international community, some young Palestinians see violent resistance against Israel as their only viable path to freedom, with young militants lionized on social media. Let's take our last break here. We'll be right back, talk about Palestinian leadership, Israel's far-right, and a bunch of other terrible stuff, so whoopee, be right back. And we are back. So as Palestinian leadership weakens, Israel's far-right only gets stronger.

According to polls, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, 87, one of the Middle East's oldest leaders, has lost the support of most Palestinians. Palestinian protesters and activists have long accused Abbas of not taking a more active role in dealing with Israeli aggression. In his 19th year of what was supposed to be a four-year term, Abbas has lost control of Gaza to the militant Hamas, calling off elections for new leadership and allowing government corruption to thrive, never laying out a clear future for Palestinians. But it's not the end of Abbas's reign that worries Palestinians.

It's what comes next when the 87-year-old is no longer president. But the question of who will replace Abbas is not currently at the top of the Palestinian public's agenda. Dr. Mustafa Bagrouti, the head of the Palestine National Initiative movement, said that Palestinians, particularly the younger generation, are no longer viewing the two-state solution as a viable option. They are also recognizing that they can't expect anything from Israeli governments, particularly the incoming one that is discussing annexation, bolstering settlements, and suppressing Palestinian

rights. He said, the notion is strengthening among the young generation that Israel only understands force and opposition. It doesn't matter whether national resistance is violent or not, which is why there's growing support for armed groups in Jenin and Nablus. Bagrouti said that Israel's prevention of a two-state solution will eventually make the Palestinian Authority irrelevant. He said, the PA's current model as a type of subcontractor for Israel, which implements

apartheid against the Palestinians, cannot go on forever, regardless of who runs the PA. On the flip side, Israel's longtime leader Benjamin Netanyahu is back as Prime Minister – surprise, surprise – with a far-right coalition that has laid out a plan for deepening its grip on the West Bank and taking tougher action against Palestinians. And with only a couple months in office in this new year, the government has already sparked a series of controversies, including over the status of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is a very holy and special place for Muslims, and it has been subject

to violence for years because of Israel's government. More far-right politicians have also come into office, including the National Security Minister we mentioned earlier, who essentially wants to give Israeli police and soldiers immunity to use live ammunition, which would shield them from criminal prosecution for killing and injuring Palestinians. Israel is also planning to destroy an entire Palestinian town, beginning their plans last month. Khan al-Ahmad is a town just miles from Jerusalem with nearly 200 Palestinians.

Israel is planning to destroy the entire town in order to expand two illegal, racially segregated settlements nearby. Israel plans to bulldoze all the homes, schools, and businesses in Khan al-Ahmad, forcing families into homelessness. It's a process they've done in countless Palestinian towns. Khan al-Ahmad is simply Israel's latest target. Just miles away from this town, Israel is destroying the Palestinian community of Masafiriata, where over a thousand Palestinians are living in fear that Israeli soldiers will violently

tear down their homes at any given moment. No government should be allowed to forcibly uproot entire communities in order to steal their land. Israel should be no exception. And the fact that it continues to operate in this way as the entire world watches is just shameful. Israeli officials are already prepping for a tense month in April when Ramadan and Passover coincide, which could be a combustible mix for potential religious and nationalist fueled

violence. The Israeli military is inflicting horrific, deadly violence in Palestinians every single day. Instead of condemning Israel or taking any kind of action to protect Palestinian lives, the U.S. continues to turn a blind eye while also continuing to send Israel billions of dollars every year. These billions of dollars are used to commit massacres of Palestinians. The world should bring to account the Israeli government which has encouraged violence against

Palestinians publicly and supported settlers with arms and money to carry out their crimes. The Israeli government just legalized nine illegal settlement outposts. If the international community, including the U.S., does not criminalize settlement activities in the West Bank, Israeli settlers who in recent years have leaned towards the far right in alarming ways will continue to enjoy impunity when they commit crimes against the Palestinian people. And Israel's brutal occupation shows no sign of ending. So we'll continue to hear news like this until any sort of action is taken to defend

Palestinians and end Israel's apartheid rule of Palestine and end the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Until then, we won't stop raising awareness of the crimes against humanity that Israel commits against Palestinians every single day. And that is the episode. Whew, I hope some of that was informative or educational. And I will probably be back with more upsetting news about the Middle East very soon. So goodbye.

Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub, and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse.

Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Season two, Main Accounts, the Story of MySpace, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or

wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love-bombed by the Tinder Swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did, and that's even way worse than the money he took.

But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love-bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dearly beloved, welcome to It Could Happen Here.

We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life, electric word life. It's a thing that only happens with the addition of a couple of ingredients, and one of those ingredients is the subject of our episode today. Come. Oh yeah, you guys like that? Everybody really happy with that? I love that, yeah. I'm feeling not at all like I want to kind of shower.

You can hear the moment where we're all simultaneously questioning every single decision we've ever made in our entire lives. Yeah. Now we're all bonded together. So what's everybody doing today? We've got Mia Wong, Garrison Davis, James Stout, and I should let people know I wasn't joking about the come thing. So those of you who are too online will know this, those of you who are not online enough,

this is one of the online things that you will want to know because it's very funny. And the gist of it is that like four days ago, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson got sent a link to a Twitter account that is, that purports to be spreading like hidden news about the evils of the Chinese communist regime, and they put out a video that was a segment from a British milking fetish pornography video. Now if you're not aware, the milking, as far as I can tell, I believe they're kind of descended from the long lineage of like rubber fetishists, right? And there's like a lot of medical fetish stuff tied into it.

And the idea is that men are entirely wrapped up on hospital gurneys and giant pumps suck the semen out of them. So it's like a cow milk, the machine is very similar to what you would use to milk a cow. This Twitter account put this up claiming that it was the Chinese government stealing the semen of young men. And Jordan Peterson shared it saying it was an unbelievable act of evil. And then everyone had the best day of their lives and an hour or two later, he deleted it.

Now, I have been continuing coward, coward cowards are deleting it. Yeah. So strange. So strange that he left the world of peer reviewed academia. Yeah, it's wild that he's no longer a professor. It's very funny. We're continuing to give him shit for it online, but it set us off down an interesting road. And because some other stuff fell through, we're going to talk about the wide world of

weird right wing come conspiracies. Most of them released are going to be right wing. There's a surprising number of semen based conspiracies. Everybody did research on their own special thing. I wanted to start by talking about this Jordan Peterson come via video and giving kind of some of the some of the background on it. So I believe this last July, the Chinese human sperm bank of Shanghai announced that it was hosting a competition for college students to find out whose semen was the best in terms

of like, you know, a number of modal sperm per milliliter, I think is the way that they judge it. And basically the idea was that they were trying to find like people with sperm concentration greater than 60 million per milliliter. And if they visited a sperm bank a set number of times in a six month period, they could receive a prize that was equivalent to about $1,200. Right. Now, the reason this is happening is that China for the first time as a result of a number

of different policies had negative population growth very recently. And this is the thing that can cause a problem for a country for a variety of reasons. So the government is trying to shore up birth rights. And there are a lot of couples in China that have had issues conceiving. And so there's a huge amount of demand for sperm in the country right now. So this is not a weird story. It is actually a thing that happens all around the world regularly. But right around the time that this happened, a little bit after that, it came out that

a Japanese company started selling what is called in the articles I found an automatic sperm extractor to Chinese sperm banks. Now, this is I'm going to send you all the link. I was hoping you would. Oh, yes. Good friends. Thanks. We're all going to see this.

So the machines price listing on Alibaba where it sells for about $5,000 to $6,000 describes it as a device that merges modern digital technology, automatic control technology and simulation technologies with semen collection and premature ejaculation desensitization training function. So it has a number of purposes, including to help guys stop coming too early, no shame. It's funny that someone built a machine for it. It's extremely funny. And that you can buy on Aliexpress.

It's like I personally am not attaching anything I bought on Alibaba to sensitive parts of my body. $6,000. It's not cheap. But the primary, these are not being used for people who are coming too quickly. This is like the worst ever R2-D2. It is weird. What's the orientation?

Does it stand on the ground and you just approach it? You have to stand up. Yeah. But what if you're a short king? I'm sure they have options. It has like the rough shape of like a handheld massage device, but it's kind of like formed like almost an art deco robot vagina. And basically from what I've read, kind of the reasoning is that like, hey, we need people

to donate sperm. Some people feel weird about just masturbating in a clinic. And we hope this is a more pleasant experience for them. So again, this we're laughing because like, look, a machine designed to capture semen is kind of a funny thing. That's okay. No shame on anybody for that. But the fact that you have both the government trying to encourage people to donate sperm

and this weird machine kind of created fertile ground for a bunch of right-wing weirdos to start making- Fertile ground. Sorry. I know. Fertile ground to make the completely ungrounded claim that like the government was trying to steal people's semen, right? And that is the basis of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's fun little freak out on the internet.

And I will say you should try to find the videos of the automatic sperm extractor, this amazing Japanese machine, because it is fascinating. It is fascinating. Yeah. We should share some of these on the cool zone account. Do they have to like, like, like change, like, I assume they have to like, change it every time. Yes, they change it every time.

Yeah, because you can't clean that. If you watch the video, there's like a, there's a rubber pod that like, comes out like a sea urchin. The thing that the penis goes in is also the capture device. So it is removed with this, the sperm donation when you take it out. So again, this is, you know, a funny because come, but there's nothing sinister here. It's just in the same way that literally everything is, people have like spun it up into a nonsense thing.

But because of this beautiful, beautiful story, which I hope we've all gotten to enjoy. I got to do a lot of work on the, some of you, if you've lived, if you've worked in agriculture, you're not going to be surprised that stealing come is a massive industry. Like it is a, there is a lot of money to be made in stealing semen. There's enough money to be made in stealing semen that there are two different official terms that I have found for semen theft. The first is sperm jacking. How, how can it get better?

How can it get better than that? Oh, Garrison, it gets better because the second, the second is spurgling. Oh my gosh. These are like professionals who like come up with these terms, huh? These are. That is a mocketer. Genius. There actually is.

I did find in my research, there is one actual Chinese based sperm conspiracy. It's just not a very sinister one. There's this Chinese businessman, Jesse Jabe Zhu, who stole, there's this, I think it was a Canadian company. No, it was a U.S. company who had, so this is for like bull semen. And one of the things that you want for bull semen is you don't want, if you're inseminating cows, you want all of the babies to be female generally, right? Because bulls are not very, with outside of certain, if you're like trying to make more

breeders or whatever, if you're in industrial agriculture, you don't want any of the boys, right? You just want to keep making those sweet, sweet lady cows that are more useful to you in a financial sense. So there's a U.S. company that developed a method of before insemination, looking through the sperm and like sorting out the sperm that will make female cows. And that is apparently hard to do. I mean, it sounds like it would be hard to do, right?

And this Chinese businessman was like reverse engineering there. It's kind of actually, it's basically the same story as Jurassic Park. And anyway, this guy has gotten sued for a bunch of money in the U.S. for it. He got chased down by a herd from the Seraptor Cattle. I hope it works out just as well as Jurassic Park. Yeah, it's very funny. I will say there's a couple of really wild lines from this, the CVC story I found. I'm just going to read one to you.

Zoo's activities could best be described as Machiavellian. At various points, he outlined a plan to make XY, that's the American company, quote, feel all the time the sort of Damocleses on their heads and bragged the law is strong, but the outlaws are 10 times stronger. Okay, okay. What is this guy's name? Look, Jesse Jabezu, my hero, the sperm bandit, incredible spermjacker, one of the best sperlers in the business.

This man lives on an island with his cow raptors. What a hero. There was also a case of a Japanese man who illegally took Wagyu cattle sperm to China to try to give them sperm. The Chinese government immediately caught him and was like, no, this is actually incredibly dangerous. You're not allowed to just take animal breeding material into the country without, because there's a wide variety of reasons that that could be in horribly.

So he got in a shitload of trouble. Yeah, anyway, that's my sperm stories, everybody. Thank you for sharing, Robert. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for spurgling my knowledge, Garrison. We're back and James is here to talk to us about the kind of sperm jacking that you do when you don't jack.

I'm talking about jacking your own sperm by keeping it inside of you, semen retention. Yeah. It's it. How was that, James? How beautiful. Was that unscripted? Did you just like do that? Yeah.

Didn't even write that. Yeah. Didn't even write that, Garrison. Yeah. So on the back of his hand, he had a brainwave at two in the morning and he got that down. Those are the kind of things you can do when you've been podcasting as long as I can. Robert's been in the cum space for several years. I've been in those soggy trenches for a long time.

All right, we are after all at work, so let me continue. I'm going to talk about what happens when you keep your cum inside you. Okay. Yeah. This is a thing that Garrison is enjoying. What are we doing today? This is important. This is critical journalism.

We are making content. We're doing it. Okay. Talking of content, let's talk about the content of some Reddit posters. So what is called the semen retention movement, and this will shock many of you, began on Reddit.com. Oh my God. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like if you type that into your phone, it would have finished the sentence the same way.

Yeah. Yeah. What is auto-directed to Reddit.com? Oh, believe me. We're going to go there, Garrison, because when you Google sperm retention, you do indeed find some stuff on Reddit. So. I'll bet.

Now, they've spun off from Reddit, right, then I have their own organization, which is nofap.com, and nofap.com is a community-centered sexual health platform I'm using. I'm allowing them to define themselves here, I guess, designed to help people overcome porn addiction and compulsive sexual behavior, which is not necessarily like the, this isn't the, not all semen retention, as we're going to learn, is based in helping people overcome addiction to porn. But so far as that is a thing that people actually have, and if someone was accusing Robert of being addicted to porn on his timeline this weekend.

That would be because I keep ratioing Jordan Peterson with the, the pornography video that he mistakingly posted. That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. I just want him to respond so I can ask him, Jordan, tell me in your own words what you thought was happening in that video. I really hope he thinks it's like milking, like they have RFID colors and they get fed

based on their production level. That would be great. Yeah. And what did you, you're a, you're a medical doctor. Did you think that CUM actually worked that way and you could just stick a sucker on somebody anyway? Yeah. Just get it out.

Okay. So after, after this movement began on Reddit.com, it quickly pivoted to kind of offering all kinds of weird physical and mental health benefits. And that's where it was adopted by friends of the podcast, the Proud Boys. And luckily we do have a bit of insight into why, into the exact nature of the no fat fascism that the Proud Boys practice, thanks to Kyle Cheney, who's a Politico reporter who was reporting on the trial of one of the Proud Boys accused of sedition on January 6th called Zach Rel.

And that trial, for reasons that I'm not exactly clear on, the Proud Boy, I guess it's like their handbook, like the kind of the Proud Boy vibe was introduced and into the, into the record. Oh yeah. It's in there. Yep. It's, it's in the court record, buddy. It's what the lawyers decided that it was pertinent to the case.

So a Proud Boy may not ejaculate alone more than once in every 30 days. That means he must abstain from pornography during that time. And if he needs to ejaculate, this is really weird. It must be within one yard of a woman. Fascinatingly specific. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

And I like that they've gone with imperial measurements with her consent. So that's nice. The woman may not be a prostitute. So that, that's the Proud Boy's nature then, no fat fascism. But I think, I think the way of, of understanding why some people practice this perhaps best is to, is to go on to Reddit.com. So I found a post by Reddit user, you slash monk191817, it seems like a nice guy. And there are 400, 480 upvotes on this, but what I did was I went to Seaman Retention

and I looked at, you know, sorted by popular posts, found this one from a bunch of numbers. And so this guy has nine years of experience with Seaman Retention. So I'm just going to read, I'm presuming it's his. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Him and some monks off the coast of fucking Linspar. That could not, that could not be healthy. Yeah. No, I don't think it is. There is, I will get to this evidence that you shouldn't do this. So in his nine years of experience, he has experienced the following things. And when retained in our bodies has healing, rejuvenating effects, loss of semen has the opposite effects.

This may not be scientifically proven, but it's proven by experience. That's a red flag. So that's interesting. Getting Reddit medical advice, while attempting any tasks that demands high physical, mental or intellectual abilities, if we are semen retention powered, we would actually enjoy the task which would otherwise seem dull. This is called sexual energy transmutation in layman's terms. Oh no.

Wait, that's the layman's? What is it? What's the non-layman term? It's got even more, I have no idea, sperm-ozoic fucking fission. So for peak performance, it's always necessary to be powered by semen. It would be best to use semen only for regeneration purposes, since nature originally intended it for regeneration and not use it for sexual purposes apart from to create a child. If not serving that purpose, master whatever techniques are useful in not letting the seed

out while having sex. At the end of the day, don't let your seed out like a worthless thing. There's more, so just contain yourself. Okay, great, great. Which is exactly the reason why core religions are based on celibacy, because opposite of regeneration is degeneration, which will cause a man to fall into a lower state controlled by his lower nature rather than when he's subduing it. We should let semen retention be part of our lives, not something that is done for superpowers.

For superpowers are, in my experience, the sudden ecstasy that we feel once we transition from the degenerated to the regenerated state, and that will stabilize after some time, similar to how a flight maintains stable altitude after takeoff. Very similar actually, yeah. That's what you can hear when the engines are spinning up, it's just a dude trying really hard not to nut, and it makes that noise. I'm so excited for the next Marvel film, where the superhero gains his power from. Paul Rudd has to not come so he can get tiny.

No fat man. He didn't, I should add that this person confesses to having lapsed at some point in the nine years. Poser. Poser. Yeah, it's stolen. That's like when I learned Lance Armstrong was on steroids, it's just disappointing. Yeah, no one would have seen it coming, see what I did there, okay.

So this person then urges other posters on the semen retention subreddit to not use streaks to outperform others, or look better about ourselves, or bring others down. The battle with lust is a lifelong fight, and the more we get better at finding victories, yeah buddy, the more we become better at finding victories over internal battles, the better we become as high-valued men, hell yeah brother. I've often wished that if the pandemic hadn't been a thing, and I could force you all to work in a central location, I could have like a wall of murals where I put under each of your faces a quote from an episode that you've participated in, and James, that would be your

quote. The battle against lust is a lifelong struggle. Yeah, I'll get some t-shirts knocked up and we can do a fundraiser. When we eventually get the calls on many offices, do you have a portrait hanging on the wall of each of us with one quote underneath? Yeah, yeah, yeah, like on a plaque with a, yeah, yes, yes, when we get the calls, when we take over the meta offices three weeks from now. There is a marketing company that has been emailing me for about six months, telling

me how cheap it is to buy a billboard by the side of a road, and send a message to a loved one, so maybe, great, maybe I'll get it, we are powered by cement. We can do a banger, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, it will be until I put my positive messages about the controlling lust and holding semen inside our bodies, true, and return men to their former glory. So a lot of the Reddit posts rely on a couple of different studies, right? One of these studies, measured participants, a lot of what they're doing is they're claiming to increase testosterone, right, right out the back, and testosterone does have as long

as Armstrong can tell you some performance enhancing benefits, so yeah, it increases your muscle growth, your recovery from exercise, all that stuff. One of the studies measured participants testosterone levels at baseline before masturbation, and then in 10 minute intervals after masturbation, right? And then they were asked to abstain for three weeks, and they came back, and they did the process again. Testimony was higher in the baseline measurement at the end of the three weeks of abstinence, right?

But the sample size was pretty small, and there's some theorizing that the boost was actually caused by the anticipated masturbation that they were about to do at the second... It was so ready to come. Yeah, yeah, he's got it right, yeah, he's just ready to pop after three weeks. The second study looked at a 45% increase after a few days, seven days of abstinence, but even a study showed this was a temporary peak that returned to normal, even with continuing abstinence. So, there's just these two studies, they're pretty...

They happened a long time ago, we'll post them all in the show notes if you guys want to read more about nofap science, but we should just point out that there is in fact a multitude of evidence, and this is a bad idea, that having sex is actually good for you. So, having sex while trying not to ejaculate is probably not good for you, probably not good for your relationship either, and one would surmise. Unless you're into that, whatever, yeah. Yeah, yeah, if that's your thing, you do you. There was a study that investigated the motivation for semen retention among semen retainers,

and a lot of it seemed like people who felt that either sex or masturbation was unhealthy or wrong or sinful, and there is evidence to show that feeling guilty about yourself or living with stress and self-loathing like that is bad for you, and that will reduce your testosterone level. There's also some evidence that suggests not ejaculating can give you prostate issues, which is... Yeah, and this is like pretty debatable, like most things that people talk about in regards to coming in health, like you can find some studies like the studies on testosterone,

some of them are kind of sketchy. Anyway, don't come or come, either way, it's whatever, but if you do have a chance to fuck one of those Alibaba robots, I recommend it. Don't pass that up. Let's talk about come demons. Hell yeah. Wait, okay, okay, hard pivot here from... So, okay, we are not going as far afield from the no fat people as you would think.

Okay. But, all right, now the year is 2020, everyone on earth has collectively gone insane, this is the summer, this is the summer of 2020, so this is the part of 2020 where fun stuff is happening, this is like late July. Oh, Garrison, that's when we met. So, yeah, we were getting just incredibly poisoned. Yeah, we sure were, that'll be fun in like 20 years. Well, life or death struggle for the fate of the United States and whether or not people

are going to be continuously murdered by the cops as being waged in the streets. Donald Trump and Donald J. Trump, wow, Donald Trump Jr., that one, that's the Trump that I'm looking for here. Trump pet. Yeah, we're looking for, they're cured of COVID-19 on Twitter, and okay, so as we probably all remember, right, the thing that they found was hydroxyl, okay, so one of the first ones that they found before Ivermectin, this is before Ivermectin really. Was it inside of them all along there?

No, this is hydroxychloroquine, a thing that was probable, I hope they weren't full of hydroxychloroquine. I thought it was semen. No, no, we'll get to that. The road is long, but it ends with come demons, we first must walk the road. So the road here is Donald Trump Jr. post a tweet saying, like, saying, this is necessary watching about this video from this doctor named Dr. Stella Emanue, now, okay, who is this person?

She is part of a, oh, okay, I say part of, she runs this thing called Firepower Ministries, which- Oh no. So you know things are going great, she's also part of- I know broadly, yeah, okay, cool. She's also part of America's Frontline Doctors who are- Oh, good. This group. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. We've forgotten. Yeah, these dipshits. Oh my God. Okay. So this is very, very much in the same vein as, I'd, I'd, Architecture 911 Truth. They found a bunch of people who technically have medical degrees or like nurses who were like, no, no, vaccines are bad and hydroxychloroquine, hydroxychloroquine is, we'll, we'll-

Chloroquine? Chloroquine, that one, yeah, it's, it's been, it's been a long day. I, I slept for eight hours, but in like several distinct parts of the day that were not continuous, it's been- Things are going, things are going great. Yeah, you know, better if you'd taken some horse medicine first. Quite possibly. I mean, it's not like it could have gone worse.

Yeah, get some catamony. So, all right, all right, so, so this, this, this person's from the very sketchy doctors who were trying to sell like a bunch of random shit to, to, to cure COVID and okay, so who actually is this person? She is from Cameroon and Dr. Stella Immanuel was caught up in the unbelievably sort of, like, I mean, right, like, yes, objectively right wing, also very, very weird wave of Pentecostalism and Charismatic Christianity that's been sweeping across that part of Africa and as part of sort of, you know, a sort of like, a very sort of long range of

coordinated effort by, by right wing Christian missionaries. So okay, so for, for, for people who don't know your Christianity very well, the Pentecostals and the Charismatic Christians are like firmly in the very, very weird camp of Christians, like these are, these are the people who do faith healing, um, one of the very common sort of Pentecostal things is this belief that like, like you just, you talk to God, like God's in your head and you just have conversations with him. Now, unfortunately for like all of us and this is, you know, a thing that is a not insignificant contributing factor to why the last, I don't know, 10 years have been so bad shit is that

like this, this originally was kind of an isolated Pentecostal thing and like the broader evangelicals were like, no, no, no, God only talks to me, like your pastor, like he's probably not like, you're not like having a conversation in your head with, but that's changed. That's changed. Yeah. This, this shit has, this shit has fucking taken over everywhere. It's really bad.

Um, and these people believe a lot of very, very weird stuff. So what do, I mean, okay, so like, you know, she, she has like some of the sort of standard, like really, really hard line, like David Ike shit, like she believes that the world's being run by aliens and like reptiles and like the vaccine has like alien DNA in it to like take over your day. You know, this is like sort of kind of Facebook moments, Alex Jones shit. Yeah. Right.

Okay. But okay. I'm going to read this quote from Will Sumner. This is a quote from one of her, her sermons, they, which is demons are responsible for serious gynecological problems. And Manuel said, we call them all kinds of names, entromesius, entromesius, we call them molar pregnancies, we call them fibroids, we call them cysts, but most of them are evil deposits from spirit husband, Emmanuel said of the medical insurance, they are responsible

for miscarriages, impotence, men that can't get it up. So all right, all right, immediately we have like, we have, there are several kinds of cum demons here that we're dealing with. So there are like, there's, there's, there's, okay, so a lot of this is drawn from what is a very like a genuinely unbelievably dubious piece of theology. So when I was researching this, right, I saw, I saw someone, there was, there was like a religious scholar who was writing this, he was like, oh, I immediately recognized the theology of this.

This is from, this is from Genesis six. So okay. So I was like, okay, what the fuck are they talking about? So I went back and I read, okay, so I went back and I read the Genesis and I'm going to read the two, this is, this is from Genesis chapter six versus one and two. And I am just going to read these two sentences and I'm going to see if you two can produce cum demons from this. Okay.

Happy to do so. I mean, I, I could produce cum demons from almost anything. That is, that is the power with the right machinery. Okay, but you know what, I think we know exactly what the right machinery is. Look, we know that we can produce cum demons mechanically. Our challenge here is to produce them theologically. Okay. Let's, let's try.

I will, I will use all of, all of my cold knowledge. We must find a way to evacuate the vast deference of the soul. Okay. So I'm using, I'm using the King James translation because that's the translation that all these psychos use and it came to pass when men began to multiply in the face of the earth and daughters were born onto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of man that they were fair and they took them wives of all which they chose. Okay.

So I, I do know, I do know what, what they are doing. So the sons of God, those would be what like fallen angels that have been procreating with women. Yeah. And then like, yeah. And this ties into like the book of Enoch stuff, which was made a little bit like after Genesis, but it kind of, it, it, it like retconned a lot of like the creation story. So I, I can see where they're, where they're pulling cum demons from, but it is, it is

a bit of a stretch. Yeah. They're kind of, you could say cum demons in the way that like God seeded. Yeah. You could see it. Yeah. It's, that's, it is a stretch. No.

Okay. My, my, my analysis of this, I think, I, I think they're pulling this out of their ass. And I think they're pulling this out of their ass. Well, yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's all about cum demons. So yeah, they're. Yeah.

Like just, just, okay. So like I, I, I, I have, I, it is well known for people who follow me on Twitter that I have an immense and powerful disrespect for theology. But what, what, what part of the sons of God, like what, what, what part of that gets you to demons and not like, again, isn't, isn't the whole point of Christianity that we are all God's children? Like is, is, is this not a thing that they tell you in every single fucking, sir? How do you read that and not think they're talking about people and immediately jump

to come demon? Like, here's what's going on. I, I could, I could explain this because this is the King's James version. So this was made in a post book of Enoch world around the, around the alleged birth of Jesus. The book of Enoch got very popular. And this, this introduced the idea of a fallen angel, the fallen angel isn't really in the Bible at all. It's only in, it's only in like non biblical Abrahamic texts.

So this, this idea then kind of got planted into a lot of like Catholic mythology as well. So when they're, they're cause, they had, they have a distinction between like the sons of, like the sons of God versus what was the, what was the thing they used to refer, refer to the daughters? The sons of the daughters of men. Exactly. So the daughters are human where the, the, the sons are like came from God. So that is some type of fallen angel that has been cast down to earth.

Yeah. This is, this is so dubious. They are doing a specific thing, but it's, it's, it's the result of a whole bunch of like mistranslations and a whole bunch of various, various like a Christian and Gnostic texts that have been, that have been misinterpreted for thousands of years by the Catholic church. And it creates a really weird theology that is indistinguishable from like Castlevania. So yeah, I, I, I blame, I blame Martin Luther. This is Martin Luther's fault.

Like the, the, the, the, the cat, this is what Martin Luther, this is what Martin Luther, I specifically, cause okay. So this was already happening. The Catholic church was already doing this, right? But Martin Luther had a chance to fix this shit. And he was like, do you know what I'm going to do instead of that? I am going to, I am going to turn against the peasant revolt and I'm going to do a, I'm going to bring about a level of anti-semitism that is going to allow me to outflank the

inquisition on the right. He could have been fixing this bullshit, but no, anti-semitism, woo, I gotta keep my patron lords in power. He was, he was German. Like there's only so much you can ask. That's true. Yeah. Well, I'm happy that we can all go to sleep at night worrying about the sons of God and

planting semen. Oh, there's also. That's the only thing I ever think about. That's, that's, that's come demon type type one, right? That is, okay. So those are, those are the demons that like they have, they have sex with women and they produce Nephilim from, or sometimes also you get fucked by Nephilim. There's a lot of sort of conflicting sort of theological.

All that stuff comes from the book of Enoch. All that stuff is non-canon to the modern Bible, but it's where, it's where it comes from. Fucking council of Nicaea. Okay. But there's also, there's also a second, there's also the second kind of come demon, right? Which is these are, these, these are, well, okay, so Succubi and Incubi are.

Based. Here we go. I knew it. I was counting down. I was counting down. You had faith. Yeah. The other kind of demon.

So you, you have your Incubi, right? Who are another type of sex demon and the Incubi fuck men so they can steal their semen. And there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's another thing that she talks about, which is that there are witches who have like astral spirit sex with men in their sleep. And if you're like having a sex dream, it's because you're having astral spirit sex. Uh-huh. No, no.

Yeah. I mean, like, I'm like Bill Murray, I've experienced that. Oh, no, that was Bill Murray. Sorry. I, my mistake. I get our lives mixed up often. Oh, wait. I know.

I understand. Yes. Okay. Okay. The cloud, the fog is clearing. I've had, I've had sex with too many sex demons. It's, it's a real issue. Okay.

So, so all right. So we have the sex demons who are like trying to impregnate you. We have the sex demons who are trying to steal your cum. We also have the, actually, we have the astral projecting, projecting witches, right? And the astral projecting witches are trying to steal people's cum as part of an Illuminati plot to create like an even more powerful witch. And the even more powerful witch is going to use gay marriage and children's toys to like destroy the fabric of Western civilization and thus bring about sort of general new world

order, etc. I have heard of this. Honestly, that is. Some of my witch meetings. Yeah. It is not as far from the backstory to Warhammer 40,000 as it should be. That's very sadly true. I didn't want Warhammer 40,000 coming to our cum episode, if I'm honest.

No, no, it's, I mean, look, there's a lot of people who are interested in both semen retention and Warhammer 40,000. That's a tight vendor here, Graham. Yeah. Yeah. They all play Ultramarines. That was a. That's yeah.

Warhammer 40,000 joke for those of you who play, I also learned a couple days ago that I want one of the many crimes of the Emperor 40 K was passing off at a Miri Bacara quote is his own. Oh yeah, that is that was that was a good bit. That was a really good bit. It's little pieces like that that let you know that Dan Abnet's pretty base. Yeah. That was my favorite part of the book.

So funny. Like, that's literally canon. I do have like three pages written on, uh, on testing panic. So we should. Yeah. That's, that's, that's, that's the end of the six demons. Go off. Well, okay.

I, the one thing I will add on is that one of the more funny modern versions of these, if you go on the Benadryl subreddit, the recreational Benadryl subreddit, you can find people who try to take enough Benadryl to have sex with the hat man, which is another, another four of them tried to sub in shadow people, you have to, you have to explain your terms for people here. Yeah. The hat man is a tall, thin man wearing a hat who appears when you take hallucinogenic doses of Benadryl because you can't afford better drugs because you're 17.

Yes. We're younger. And some people, some people find the hat man extremely attractive or some of like the female shadow people variants and they, they try to, they, I have, I have read multiple reports of people explaining their sexual experiences with shadow people. Anyways, the president of the United States and his son were promoting this, so this is great. This website, by the way, absolute adventures on here.

I'm just reading about how to use Christ's blood as a weapon. Amazing. Oh, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. No problems here. Yeah. You're a seaman, everybody.

We can't promise that. I can. I can promise. Any advertiser on this show, I've personally approved to make sure they will not come into your bedroom and steal your seaman. Wow. How do you, how does the approval process work instead of interest? I, I, I cannot divulge private.

They sent Garrison $40. We are going to close off by, by talking about a sperm and testosterone, two, two of our favorite topics for this episode, for some reason, about, about a year ago, a trailer on Fox News dropped for a new batch of Tucker Carlson originals titled The End of Men. It opens with the text that reads, in the current year, the cycle continues. Once a society collapses then, during hard times, well, hard iron sharpens iron, as they say, and those hard times inevitably produce men who are tough, men who are resourceful, men who are strong enough to survive, and then they go on to reestablish order and so

the cycle begins again. Now there's a few funny things about this video from the ripped shirtless dudes milking cows to wrestling each other and shooting bottles of canola oil. They're just, at the gun range, they're just shooting like 10 bottles of canola oil for some reason. Maybe they're the Mussolini's, like they're into the Mussolini stuff, you know, he was a big fan of canola oil. By far the most bizarre.

I suspect they're shooting the canola because it's like a seed oil thing. They think that like seed oil is a really white wing thing. Seed oils are like sucking out your testosterone anyway. It's something very silly, but by far the most bizarre thing in this trailer is a shot of a naked man with outstretched arms, like Jesus on the Carasa style, standing in front of a lake at dusk with a white machine shining a glowing red light on his dick. What? And again, at the climax of the music from 2001 Space Odyssey, there's this man facing

balls first in front of this large red light at the end of this trailer. It should never have been any cause on our podcast or on Fox News for anyone to say the line after the end of the climax of the music from 2001 Space Odyssey. Oh, that's the thing we're objecting to from this episode. That's the line. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it shouldn't have climaxed. It lost its power in that moment.

Considering both like. No, no, one sec, James, that was a very good joke. Thank you. Thank you for thank you for seeing me, buddy. Yeah. So considering both like the text at the beginning and then some of the narration that we just heard in the trailer, they're kind of doing this weird like Kali Yuga thing, right? Yeah, that is that is a bit of a bit of what's going on here because Kali Yuga, again, you

can listen to our episodes on Savitri Devi for a little more information about this. But it's like this weird right wing, like quasi apocalyptic concept that evolved during an intermix between some of the early Nazis and some of the people who are currently behind the present leader of India. It's way too esoteric and weird to get into, but it's one of the things that we're not going to get. Yeah, the real fucked up like it, we're not going to get into it too much. But I think the previous November unsettling that it wound up adjacent to a Tucker Carlson

episode because it's some like weird esoteric Nazi wizard shit. Yes. And that previous November, Joe Rogan posted a Kali Yuga meme which went viral. It's about how hard times create strong men, which create good times, which lead to weak men, which create hard times. It's fucking silly. The accompanying text on the Instagram post that Rogan did said, civilizations move in predictable cycles.

We are in the Kali Yuga, the age of conflict. All of the chaos we're seeing right now is predicted in Hinduism thousands of years ago. So Rogan was probably just like parroting something that he heard from one of his many fashy or agey friends, which considering Rogan's social circle, that could very well just be the same person. Yes. Yeah.

One of his fucking sparring buddies is either friends with the Nazi or just stumbled upon a fucking the wrong podcast and then told him that when they were smoking weed. And you know, that's, I mean, that's honestly too, it's problematic because of his platform, but that's how I learned everything about Esoterica that I learned when I was in my twenties was some. I was smoking weed with some sketchy dude who was going places. You shouldn't have been on the internet. So a few months after Rogan posted this meme, we have Tucker Carlson making this whole mini

series surrounding this hard times creates strong men kind of trend. It's taking cues from the online hemisphere and Tucker posited that weak, unmanly men are leading to the collapse of civilization and a hardening of men is necessary to save it. According to according to Tucker, one of the one of the threats to manhood is a quote unquote total collapse in testosterone levels amongst men in recent years. And the solution goes beyond just your typical like anti soy crusading that Tucker has done in the past. Now Tucker has turned to the cutting edge science of bromopathic medicine as advocated

for by a quote unquote fitness professional named Andrew McGovern, who touts that infrared light and testicle tanning is this deus ex machina for plummeting T levels in men. So obviously half the viewers right now are like, what, that's testicle tanning? That's crazy. But my view is, OK, testosterone levels like crash and nobody says anything about it. That's crazy. So why is it crazy to seek solutions? It's not crazy to seek solutions.

And I think I was recently exposed to a term called bromopathy. And I think there's a lot of people out there right now that are don't trust the mainstream information. This TV special is is constantly referred to as a documentary. So surely you would expect Tucker to try and like interview scientists or like anyone with expertise on this topic. Of course, not actually not not not the case to talk to anyone serious. Andrew McGovern are our bromopathic hero works as a personal trainer at Lifetime Fitness

in Columbus, Ohio. And he hasn't even been a trainer for very long about a decade ago, even a good one about a decade ago. He was the manager of an Abercrombie and Fitch store in Miami. Oh, perfect. Yes. You know, OK. Now, that's where I get all of my prescriptions from is a guy who works at the Abercrombie

and Fitch store. Wait. And but in Miami, hey, if you want to get trend, that's where you get. Yeah. That is that type of dude is emerging here. As of 2017, he was the director of operations for Petland Retail Stores. No. He's getting funnier.

But this guy's resume is highly amusing. But Tucker being a competent journalist did not just interview one person, however, kid Rock was brought on to be the sole voice of reason. You know, Garrison, you laugh, but kid Rock is the other person I've gotten prescription drugs from. So real bastion in the platonic cave of men stands kid Rock and a guy from Abercrombie and Fitch. And we must only be their shadows.

Dude, stop testicle tanning. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't heard anything. Open your mind, Bobby. I'm starting a punk rock band and it's called Testicle Tanning. That's the end of it.

I mean, don't you think at this point when so many of the therapies, the paths they've told us to take have turned out to be dead ends that have really hurt people, why wouldn't open minded people seek new solutions? I don't know what the hell is going on in this world. I'm not even sure if I understood that question, but some days I just want to stop this planet and let me off like kid Rock was not did did not buy in to testicle tanning the same way Tucker seems to. Howard.

Yeah, is kid Rock going to be the voice of reason? That's what I said. I said he was brought out to be the sole voice of reason. Yeah, but we thought you were joking because it's kid Rock. I thought you were joking. I believe you. No, he's the only person that doesn't buy it. Kid Rock stands with science.

It is indeed sweet home Alabama all summer long. Tucker was not the first person to advocate for testicular tanning as the solution to an allegedly problematic dip in testosterone levels dating back to 2015 you can find articles online such as quote former MLB player Gabe Kapler says men who want to get stronger should tan their testicles from complex and quote I put a giant red light on my balls to triple white testosterone levels from a men's health 2017. Is that written by Ben Greenfield by any chance because he normally pops up with these things which which which one had the the men's health one let me let me a guy who inject

his own dick to make it bigger. I have it in my show notes here. This was written by someone named Ben Greenfield. Oh, this ball end has won it. So proud of you today, buddy. I'm so happy we have you on our team. Are you taking are you taking performance enhancing drugs for this podcast? Sadly, Robert.

I'm not. This is so funny. We have stepped into a gold mine of contact with Ben Greenfield, the guy who injected his own dick with stem cells to make it bigger. That's so funny. I compel you if you have any free time in your day, just Google Ben Greenfield penis. There will be several articles that supposedly rep to ball outlets that will just fucking make you unwell.

Well, that's that is great to hear. But despite not being the first person to talk about this particular tanning, Tucker was certainly the most impactful. After the airing of the end of men, testicular tanning showed a 7000 increase in relative search interest on Google and 30 35,000 increase in tweets on the topic. Now, surely some of these things are stuff like what if I was making fun of it, right? I'm sure a lot of it is also a lot of it's also people who are just talking. Talking about it genuinely.

Yeah. To quote a study published in J M I R a dermatology publication, quote, the promotion of testicular tanning generated significant public interest in an evidence lacking and potentially dangerous health trend. Dermatologists and other health care professionals should be aware of these new viral health trends to best counsel patients and combat health misinformation, unquote. So like in terms of actual data, a 2017 meta analysis of studies on sperm counts found that in North America, you're up Australia and New Zealand, men's sperm counts have declined

by about 50% between 1973 and 2011. Now these results have not been enough to really cause broad concern unless you're like a right wing influencer for men, because there doesn't really seem to be an equal drop in testosterone levels. The problems mankind has had on the whole, not enough semen per come shot is not one of them. Yes. And like compared to previous decades, there is this maybe like a 20% decrease in total

testosterone levels amongst adolescent and young adult males. But that's highly fluctual and it's impacted heavily by diet. It's suspected that pollution environmental degradation are also suspected of being contributing factors with plastics like phthalate being known to interfere with the production of hormones like testosterone. But this area of research is still heavily contested, but still that has not stopped fitness YouTubers and conservative influencers from tying this to like the soy boy feminization of men and drumming up panic to grow their social media followings, sell their supplements

and advertise affiliate products. The creme de la creme of red lights for testicular tanning is the juve light. Juve is a light therapy panel company which sells these LEDs. They're like this upscale wellness brand. The smallest model they have costs over a thousand dollars with the full body ones going for around 10 grand. This is when you know it's a grift. If someone is telling you that they need to sell you sunlight, they are having a fucking

laugh. If your friend, Ben Greenfield, advocates that you spend the big bucks on juve, lest you quote, fry your balls to a crisp with a cheap knock off. You wouldn't want to do that, would you? It seems like this is unwise. Yeah, it seems like it's maybe a bad idea. I can teach you how to cook your balls safely without spending any money at all. Get a pair of AA batteries.

Take them right out of your remote control. You stick the active end in a bottle of water, and then you put your hand on your testicles. It'll complete the circuit and power your testicles up with electricity, which you can then ejaculate instead of cum. They'll probably give you superpowers too. Almost certainly, Garrison. Legally, this is not a recommendation to do this. If you do this, that shit's not on us.

Please do not connect batteries to your dick. To quote that JMIR study evaluating the public's interest in testicular tanning, quote, the interest in this topic may be partially explained by the immense attention and advertising men's sexual health and hormone replacement or hormone enhancing therapies receive in the US. Although subsequent media coverage largely disfavored testicular tanning due to lacking evidence of potential dangers, other health influencers came to defend and encourage the practice of testicular tanning, specifically by using UV light. As an example, here is a clip from fitness YouTuber, Elliott Holsey's Strength Camp,

with 1.7 million followers. Blast your balls with sunshine to increase testosterone. Now you can drop your draws and let your balls get kissed by the sun, or you can try one of these light panels. Gross my nuts and be more manly, a 1939 study suggests that UV light exposure to your testicles increases testosterone by 200%. If you want to join me in this experiment, you can find one of these bad boys at HoseyHealth.com. Then just go to PersonalLabs.com, get your blood tested, get your testosterone, then

after 8 to 12 weeks, check it again and find out if the nut rusting really works. So this whole idea goes back to this one 1939 study. 1939? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of good science in 1939.

And if there's one thing I trust, it's science from 1939. Yep. Got any comments on race in this study? So this study was published in the journal Endocrinology and it found that frequent UV irritation to the genitals increased urinary androsterone, a metabolite of testosterone. It increased these levels by nearly 200%, quote unquote. Now you'll be shocked to learn that there may be problems with this study. Guess how many test subjects were included in this in this study?

I'm going to be generous and say eight. So Mia says eight, James and Greenfield. Just one. One. You say one. Robert, how many? How many do you think are in this study? Geez.

I think like seven was sacred to the Nazis. So I'm going to say that five, a grand total of five people are in this study. Wow. I give them too much credit. Oh, they had to pick the sacred Discordian number, bullshit. Three of them are 54 years old and have manic depressive psychosis. The other two are 28. Honestly.

Honestly. Not a bad, not a fairly representative sample for Tucker's audience. I was about to say the same thing. This is actually who watches this show. The other two are 28 and 45 and have a quote psychopathia with depressive features, which is a very old, old timey term to everyone on Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. But I think what actually happened is I think they did this study at an asylum and just found people with depressive psychosis to do the study on.

It's just these five, these five red people, no, no individual graft results were produced. It only showed the quote, unquote typical reaction and there wasn't even a control group for the study. It was good science. Why bother? Not to mention there's many problems with like measuring testosterone in the first place because it changes broadly day to day and by age and it's very kind of unreliable. To quote the JMIR study again, quote, beyond this questionable study, research has shown

that exposure to UV radiation may increase sex steroid hormone levels. However, these studies either do not include human participants or do not specifically evaluate UV radiation exposure to the genitals. There is not a single other study since then that has done anything resembling like peer reviewed science. You know why? Everybody go to go to go fund me. Help cool zone determine whether or not testicle tanning works and we'll get that control

group. My other question about this aren't all these people getting fucking ball cancer? We are about to get to that because, yes, you may think that shining UV lights on your balls might have some long term problems. It's great that last afternoon's come back to the episode again. So Vice interviewed Seth Cohen, a urologist and the director of the sexual dysfunction program at NYU Langdon Health, quote, I'm not aware of any science or data or any journal publications proving that red light therapy improves male testosterone and, quote, we

change recommendations on medical therapies based on a double blind placebo controlled randomized trials, large studies with thousands of patients. That's where you'll find if there's any really statistical significance between red light therapy and a placebo. Could these men who underwent red light therapy and came out and felt stronger and more manly, could that have been a placebo effect? Of course it could, unquote. And as Mia mentioned, we have not really even gotten into the potential dangers yet.

Close direct heat to your testicles actually damages sperm count on top of the risk of giving yourself cancer by blasting concentrated UV light on your genitals for 20 minutes a day every day of the week, which is what is recommended to quote the to quote that study one last time, quote, research shows that excessive exposure to UV radiation may lead to higher rates of genital tumor formation and decreased sperm counts as sperm to Genesis is a temperature dependent. Thus, given the current obsession with optimizing male hormone levels, the high cost of red light therapy and misleading information labeling of testicular tanning by prominent influencers,

there may be an increase in men exposing themselves to UV radiation and developing associated complications. Unquote. Great. Heroic. So almost almost done here. But man, it's pretty it's pretty funny that all of the worst people you know are going to get cancer.

Don't stop them. Yeah. I, you know, there was a period of time in my life when I'd said where I would never wish cancer on anybody. But if you are deliberately exposing your testicles for the sun and to the sun in the hope of getting superpowers because of Nazi science, it's OK. It's OK. Like I'm not going to mourn that.

To be fair, the 1939 study was from the United States. So it couldn't pause. Don't be naughty. I'm talking about the other Nazi science. Oh, yes. Like the Cali Yuga stuff. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think a part of this whole narrative of like the total collapse of men's testosterone levels as as Tucker puts it, man, I fucking wish my life so much easier. But I think this is more about men in power feeling that their position of assumed superiority is being threatened. Really all of our quack science and conspiracy theory stories today all revolve around this like subliminal dog whistle.

It's no mistake that Tucker titled his program the end of men in all the stories were covering today. It is the fear of emasculation that is the hook used to drum up fear and anger about how liberal feminism is eroding manhood. It targets some of young men's sexual insecurities while promoting this like anti woke return to the old ways of rugged masculinity. Yeah. I might add because I think you're missing one aspect of it.

I think you're identifying what he's signaling to his listeners and what they get out of it, but I also think that what he and the other folks who are kind of in positions of power and influence in the right get out of this because they're not they don't believe this. They're not actually motivated by that. No. What this is and what because we do not know specifically why like testosterone rates may be lower white sperm counts are definitely lower, but it likely has to do with a massive

variety of industrial pollutants in the environment. And with the fact that industrial agriculture and the processed nature of a lot of our foods is having a negative impact on all these things like it's consequences of capitalism, right? And because the consequences are getting increasingly hard to ignore, the thing that people like that need to do is find either a cure for them or another way to blame or another thing to blame them on, right? And so if the aspect the things that are horribly unhealthy about the society that we have built is causing men to suffer consequences in their bodies, the thing to do on the right is to

blame that shit on the liberals emasculating men. And the solution is whatever kind of shit we can sell you, right? Like that's what's going on here. That's the motivation. And it happens outside of like man shit too, like that's all the right has anymore. Like their economic theories have been proven disastrously wrong. They have no actual ability to govern in a meaningful way other than by causing harm to people.

So it's entirely about taking the consequences of the world that they advocate and blaming them on someone else and selling you snake oil to deal with it. Yeah, exactly. And so that is that is most of the of the testicular tanning fun that that I got into. We haven't even covered all the things that Ben Greenfield did to his dick in 2017. We'll get back on this subject, but it is time for us to end. This is already over an hour. So I want to leave you all, all of you, all of you beautiful.

First I want to thank all of our beautiful correspondents for their research. And I want to leave all of you with this simple piece of advice. If you feel like your testicles aren't getting enough solar radiation, simply purchase a glass cutter and an old microwave, cut a circular hole in the microwave and back it while it's on. Be OK. That is our legally binding health advice. That's the end of the episode.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads?

From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the Internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub, and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace, because it turned out it was actually

not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, the Story of MySpace on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was loved-bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money he took.

I am here to help, as a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love-bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello. Welcome to It Could Happen Here.

We've got a bit of a downer of an episode here, but this is going to be part one of a two-part series talking about the increasing war on trans people that we've seen both on the rhetorical side and on the actual legislative side. With me today is Mia and Margaret. How are you doing on this fine day? It's been really fun frantically updating my part of the script because they're keep being fucking new bills that are going through committee, so it's great having a good time. I'm doing great.

I'm not aware of anything that's wrong. I assume you all are here to tell me that everything's fine forever. Well, hopefully next episode we'll talk more about how we can deal with this sort of thing. It was my job to handle the bad part of this two-part series, and it was the other people's job to handle the good part. I don't know what they have in plan for the next episode, actually. All I did was watch hours and hours of people advocating for genocide and put together some of the worst bits that I feel like are still worth mentioning.

It's probably worth noting that the two of us who are supposed to be writing about what we do about it both have swords over our shoulders. I can go grab a sword if that is a core part of the advice. I think so. I think whenever I put together episodes like these, I always try to be careful not to... I don't just want to include people who are talking about why myself and others should die just like... I don't want to include that unnecessarily because that's just a bummer.

But I think it is also important to actually hear and understand the types of rhetoric that they are trying to spread and they're trying to normalize, and be aware of what techniques and what rhetorical styles they are trying to employ. I've condensed this down as much as I can. You will still hear a decent amount of pretty gross stuff. I think I should have almost all of the misgendering completely edited out. I should have a whole bunch of things, not included, but there will be a decent amount of rhetoric that you will hear from.

Just as a heads up, that's what's going to be part of this episode. A lot of this is going to be talking about hosts that are employed by the conservative news site ran by Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire. They have really focused in an excruciating extent on anti-trans campaigning and activism for really the past year. This type of stuff got really bad last February and it once again got really bad this February. It's no coincidence that this is also the start of the legislative cycle. This is why they are doing this right now.

It is part of an attempt to actually affect the laws that the United States have around if trans people are allowed to exist. It is purposeful. We may as well just get started here. We're going to start a little bit light, actually. Most of this will be documenting the types of rhetoric they were using in February to March, so the past month and a half. In early February, Candace Owens on her Daily Wire show referred to trans people as demonic,

while advocating for the total ban of transgender healthcare for all ages. The Trans Lives Matter protesters decided to occupy the Oklahoma Capitol building to fight GOP bills that ban gender-conforming surgery for people that are under the age of 21. Of course, that should be banned if you are under the age of 21, honestly, you should never be allowed. If I would go a little further, Oklahoma, if you really want to do something, just ban it altogether.

Yeah, I love that because they're always trying to be like, no, no, no, we're just here to protect the children, whereas we've known this entire time that they're trying to stop anyone from being trans. Yes, this is a pattern that will come up a lot in the research I put together for this, is how last year, they were very much trying to make it like, no, it's just about the kids. Then we were talking about how first they're going to try to limit it to 18 years old, then they're going to limit it to 21 years old, then they're going to limit it to 25 years old, then they're just going to ban it altogether.

That is very clearly what they're doing. They're now just saying the quiet part out loud, so good on us for calling that a year in advance, but now they're emboldened just to say it outright. Candice Owens refers to trans people as demonic later on in that clip. I'm not including that bit because just today, Michael Knowles on his Daily Wire show said that this so-called transgenderism is demonic. The second daily wire person to drum up this satanic panic shit. This is demonic stuff, really demonic stuff, and I made this point, I got in trouble with

our publicists over at Media Matters because I said that the attacks on man's sexual nature and sexual difference and complementarity are demonic, and they are, they go back throughout all of history throughout some of the earliest depictions of demons. One of the most prominent depictions of demons, it comes from an artist, Elifas Levy, who is an occultist who did a depiction of Baphomet. If you just think what's a demon look like, you're probably thinking of this picture. Okay, alright. That's not true.

It's not. Hold on. It's completely wrong. This is really funny to me because for years now, I've been trying to say that being trans is not demonic, it's very clearly alchemical. Please, please get your occult terms right. Thousands of years of alchemical development has delivered onto me estradiol valerite. It's very clearly alchemy, but also it's just extremely funny to me that Knowles tried

to cite Levy, who's like, Baphomet isn't really a demon in Levy's work, but like whatever. It's all, it's extremely funny. He goes on to talk about solvate and coagula, which I've actually been planning to do an episode on for a while, but it's all extremely funny to me. Is it worth describing that Baphomet is the statue of the like hornheaded person with like the tits and a dick? Yes, often falsely identified as a Satan or a demon, but yes, it's a very famous, very famous statue.

Like if you think of like the statue of Satan, this is what Baphomet actually is. It's not Satan, but I mean the use of this like demonic rhetoric is a very, it's very basic like a dehumanizing stuff, trying to dehumanize trans people while also pulling from like the remnants of the satanic panic that still exists in some conservatives minds. Moving on to a friend of the pod, Matt Walsh, one of his recent main targets is actress Dylan Mulvaney. On February 14th, Matt went on a mindless rant while continuously misgendering Mulvaney and attacking her appearance at one point, referring to her as like doing a woman face

a minstrel show routine, which a re-according thing about this is that all of in all of their rhetoric against trans people, they also managed to be incredibly racist and like not understanding what racism actually is, which I mean is not surprising considering there they work for the Daily Wire. I'm not going to actually include the clip of Matt Walsh there because it's just it's just misgendering and like making fun of how someone looks for like a minute and it's all very gross. Who is that actress?

I just, I live under a rock. Dylan Mulvaney, I think she does like Broadway stuff. She's like a New York person. Okay. I've not, I've only, I've only really heard of her based on Matt Walsh's continuing rants against this person. We can't have cross-dressers in the theater. A match-up.

We'd have to, I actually don't know, I literally don't know how far back you'd have to get to get to where people didn't play with gender on stage. I think it's impossible. I think the further back you go, the worse it gets because like things were like only men could be on stage and it's like, well, okay, every Shakespeare performance, et cetera, et cetera. In one of the more bizarre Daily Wire appearances in this, so on February 15th, a young dad who called into the Daily Wire Sports Show, Crane Uncompany, talked about how dads like

him are going to cause dangerous problems if trans inclusivity continues. The hosts of the show agreed and said that violence will be an inevitable response to trans women playing sports. Which wouldn't be right up, but somebody said something about dads being in the stands finding out that for the first time that somebody in the locker room was a male and that they were just hanging it all out in front of their girls, how irate they would get. My view is that, yeah, we're going to have not just one irate dad, we're going to have a lot of irate dads that's going to cause a massive problem in the school system and

it is going to be very dangerous for everybody because people are going to start taking it in their own hands because they're seeing that other people are not. That's exactly what jungle rules, as we call it jungle rules. Exactly. At what point do we say, we've tried to talk this out and hash this out with you. You're not being reasonable. Those are part of my values. So it's not even us saying go in there and handle business, it's saying, I know what's

going to happen the minute that girl runs out of that locker room or a couple of girls. Imagine if a 12 year old girl ran out of the locker room and said that to her just to imagine that how it or whatever men shouldn't be in women's locker room. But if a man that was straight walked into a women's locker room with a trench coat and just showed everything and started shaking like this and got beat to sleep, everybody would be doing this. They'd be clapping. Great job.

If not the same thing happened to somebody who says they think they're a woman in there and does the exact same thing, then it's no, it's a totally different situation. So while we're not advocating for it, I'm telling you what's going to happen because I live in the real world. I know what you would do for your daughter. Yup. That man does not live in the real world. No.

And it's all like, it's just weird like trying to have some form of like denial in their very clear advocating for violence and like advocating for the normalization of just assaulting people. I mean, I even feel like though this is like, this is like last year's anti-trans rhetoric. You know, the like lowest hanging fruit was to come at us about sports, this issue that affects the tiniest percentage of people. Yeah. And it's the blending of the sports issue with like the locker room stuff. Yeah.

And then later on in the show, another caller admitted that he would assault trans women, including his own children. And the Daily Wire hosts refuse to push back on like any of this as this man just advocates child abuse. And I just wanted to say too, as a new father, I've got a new baby boy and I've got a two year old daughter. And not only when I want to beat somebody up for doing that to my daughter, but I would beat my son up if he ever thought about doing something like that in a women's locker room.

It's just again, and I want to make sure and again, we live in the real world. We know what's going to happen because we're not even advocating violence. Like I said, we're telling you what's going to happen. These are the fathers and the brothers and the uncles and the mamas are, it's going to get to a point where they're just going to handle business. Like it's just, it is, it is what it is. We're trying to tell y'all this isn't a threat. This is, it's just a forewarning, it is foreshadowing what's going to happen.

The British are coming. Yeah. But the British is coming. It is a really, really funny thing for an American to say about this because he's, wait, is he saying that they're the British? They're trying to do like a Paul Revere thing. Oh, oh, oh, oh, I thought they were trying to be like, we're going to show up and we're going to handle business us.

No. I think the same. Okay. It's going the opposite. I'm sorry. We are, we are warning that if this insanity continues, then people will start violently assaulting anyone who they suspect of being a man in a bathroom, which will also just lead to like people assaulting like, like butch cis women as well.

Like, no, I mean, it's like, this has already been happening. Like, like one of my friends can't get changed at the local gym, even though they're assigned female at birth because there's no safe place for them to do it because of the way that they read, you know, like, and I don't know, whatever. I mean, that's just one example of something I have, but it's just, it's happening constantly suddenly we have gender police everywhere and everyone is expected to perform masculinity and femininity and like weird cis normative ways. I'm saying that everyone knows.

I'm sorry. I'm just. No, no, no. But I think there's something important about this too, which is like, and anytime someone tries to say like, anytime someone starts talking about the real world, this is the way the world really works, right? That's not an actual description of reality. It's an, it's an aspirational thing, right?

And the way that you make something real is through violence. Yes. And that's what all of this stuff is. Absolutely. And, and specifically speaking of violence and child abuse, the next day on February 16th, Candace Owens was discussing this, this like trans kids TikTok video about his grandmother's transphobic reaction to him coming out. And it's also, it's just extremely gross how these like these media people who are paid

millions of dollars spend their days making fun of trans kids on TikTok, like, like random, like random minors on TikTok who are making videos about their experiences. And they, then these, these like these grifters and these content creators who work on their right, just like blast these kids on their, on their, on their shows, they get like millions of millions of viewers. I mean, this is the entire lips of TikTok platform, but you're now seeing this across like almost every mainstream conservative influencer. So on top of Candace calling being trans a mental illness placed upon you by society,

Candace Owens also said that if she had a trans grandchild, she would beat them with a cane. It is a cry for help. And your grandmother answered that cry for help by telling you that you are loved as you are and that you don't need to fall into this trap of insanity. You're the best grandma ever, by the way, because when I'm a grandma, I get any foolishness like that. I don't know.

I don't want to be a sweet grandma. I really do. I want to be a sweet old lady, but I feel like I might be the kind to hit somebody with a cane. I don't know. I'm not calling you Michael. It's like that will probably be me, but I will, I would have prayed for you. You know, like a thing that I keep thinking about with this, like with this Candace clip

with most of these clips is like, they're just like laughing the whole time to do. They're saying this stuff. Yep. Like it's just a joke to them. Right. Yeah, they believe it. But it's also, it's just like a joke. It's just something they can sort of like casually talk about while like, you know, fucking hanging

out on their show or whatever. Absolutely. Because I mean, the primary goal for these people is content creation and they're making suffering content for as well as like normalizing this type of like violent response. Yeah. And I think the sort of joking thing is a big part of how normalization works. Like I don't think, like I think it would be much harder to have someone just being incredibly serious going like, yeah, I'm going to like beat my child with a cane.

Right. Like if you do when that's sort of like joking, like matter of fact thing, it helps normalize it enormously. Yeah. No, absolutely. I'm just really sad thinking about the, because acceptance by family, a family that doesn't necessarily understand but is willing to accept is like the thing that I think bolsters the spirits of young trans people or adult trans people more than anything else, you know?

And I've been like reading a bunch of history about like trans people from a hundred years ago where their family are like, all right, well, we don't get it, but what's your name now? Yeah. And like a hundred years ago, we, we could have improved from there and this is something that the Daily Wire definitely does continue to harp on across multiple hosts. Even like the next video that, that we have here, Matt, Matt Walsh is doing like this is same thing.

They're talking about if they themselves had trans kids or trans grandkids that they would continue to be as openly vitriolic and even violent against their own children. So this next clip came like a week after Matt Walsh's first unhinged rant attacking Dylan Mulvaney, Walsh claimed that he wouldn't stop barking vitriolic rhetoric if he had a trans kid that in fact he would quote, rather be dead than discover he had a trans kid. A beautiful and innocent kid one day seemingly out of nowhere gets sucked into the gender cult and is devoured by it. All of their innocence and light and beauty just drained out of them, replaced by this

self cannibalizing madness. For a parent to see this happen to a child, it is a fate worse than death. I would rather be dead than have that happen to my kids. Then die. What do we do? Argue with you? I'm not on the debate team. This is a mock trial.

I, I, I keep, I keep thinking whenever these things happen, like I keep thinking about Matt Christman's one good line, which is we should give the Christians what they want and crucify them. Persecute, persecute, all day, every day. So unfortunately there was more to that clip than Walsh just threatening to kill himself. Using the like a groomer and protect the children rhetoric that we saw go viral last year, Walsh promises that mean words are only the beginning. See, the thing that I most despise about Dylan Mulvaney is that part of a movement which

actively seeks to turn my children into Dylan Mulvaney. That's why I'm entitled to my anger and to whatever language I use to convey it. I will say whatever I want to say and I will be justified in saying it because these people are after my kids and yours and everyone else's. And you're worried that I'm being a little rude, but you see, when it comes to my children, the children that I cherish more than my own life. If you think mean words go too far, then you would be very shocked to hear how far I would really go to protect them.

Trust me, words are the least of it. I love this. I would do anything to protect my children unless they're a gay. In which case I'm going to like off myself or something. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I don't know, whatever, the legally actionable things have already been said. Hey, it's not my idea.

It's only Matt Walsh's. This is his idea. You know, I do want to go back for a second to the early parts of this clip. What are you talking about? Like, oh, like you have these like period innocent children and like the light goes out of them. Like this thing that strikes me about that so much is like, she's describing the process exactly in reverse like the thing that he's describing is what is like this is what happens if you do transition to kid like by force.

Like the thing that actually happens when a trans kid transitions is like you can you can literally see this in like, like you can like literally see this in pictures of kids is like you like you can watch the light come back to their eyes as a transition. Totally. No, yeah. Yeah. Like it's one of sort of like it's one of the most beautiful things about being trans is like is experiencing that joy and experiencing like what it is to be yourself and then you

get to watch this fucking dipshit like just literally just like taking the process as it actually happens and then like lying and saying it's like literally like lying and saying that the thing that is making these people have this joy is the like the thing that's fucking killing them. No, absolutely. That's something that's often overlooked when covering this sort of thing is the like just the presence of trans joy and the trans joy that can be experienced when people are given access to the treatments that have been like known to be successful for decades now is

also I mean, I don't know if you're intentionally going in an escalating sense. This is the first person that I'm looking at being like, oh, this man wants to kill me. You know, I am I am going in an escalating. Yeah. Yeah. We escalate pretty far over the next bit. First I think let's let's have a bit of an ad break. Do you know who doesn't want to kill you 50% of the advertisers?

At least at least 50% of the advertisers don't want you dead because instead they want your money. All right, we are back as as previously stated, like when when reporting on this topic before we've always said that the limited focus on transgender minors was simply a form of rhetorical deception, by conjuring concerns that have been like culturally ingrained in us around the protection of children, anti trans activists have been introducing and normalizing anti trans talking points that inevitably get used against trans people of all ages.

Last year, Matt Walsh openly said that quote, it should be illegal for doctors to medically transition anyone of any age, unquote. And as Margaret said, it seems like we were we are moving in a more escalating direction, what that just so happened to correspond as as the month of February continued. So here's a clip from Daily Wire host Michael Knowles from the late February 2023. In order for women to have the right to have their own bathrooms, you have to ban trans genderism entirely, you can't just ban it for the kids, it's got to be entirely in order for women to be able to have their own locker rooms at the gym.

You have to ban transgenderism entirely in order to protect businesses from having to participate in weird occult sexual rituals like the transgender transition. You have to ban transgenderism entirely. So that is just like straight up advocating for genocide, right? There is no difference between this term that the Daily Wire people use, transgenderism and currently existing transgender people. It's like saying we have to eradicate Judaism. What do you mean by that?

You obviously mean exterminating human beings and making it impossible for them to continue on. That is what genocide is. Yeah, and you can hear me, like literally the next thing he says is like, you know, he's talking about like transitioning as an occult ritual, whatever the fuck it is. Like, well, yeah, I know, like he's explicitly saying like what, what, yeah, what does banning transgenderism means? Does it ever like confuse you all when you just have these moments where you're like,

these people believe in sky daddy, like I'm not even anti-religious. I'm not even an atheist. I don't know exactly what I am, but like when you hear people just being like, God has willed me to do this murder or whatever that this is what this person is saying. I'm just like, they think of themselves as like holy warriors who have been chosen by God to eradicate this demonic plague that is infecting like humankind. Yeah, it would be like if all of a sudden they were like, and that's why Gandalf has told me that I must go on a quest.

Like, I'm just like, am I living in the same century as these people? Like, again, not an atheist, but I'm just like, you've decided that sky daddy has told you to march off to murder. Like, yeah, that doesn't even map to a fucking basic understanding, even of religion anyway. Sorry. No, absolutely. And I mean, this unfortunately continues to get worse. Yeah.

The very next day, Michael Knowles defended his eliminationist rhetoric in another unhinged rant about the like, probably about two million trans people in the United States, saying that quote, there can't be a genocide of trans people because it's quote, not a legitimate category of being. They said that I was calling for the extermination of transgender people. They said I was calling for a genocide against I said, what, I must have missed that part of my show. When did I?

Did I say that? I don't, one, I don't know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes. It refers to genetics. It refers to biology. And the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology. That's what the transgender activists say. They say forget about biological sex.

My gender expression doesn't have to have anything to do with my biological sex. Okay, well then there can't be a genocide that refers to genetics. But furthermore, nobody's calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category. It's not a legitimate category of being. There are people who think that they're the wrong sex, but they're mistaken. They're laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.

Okay, so that was a lot. I'm just clinging to my emotional support sword. What solution, Pratel, will you be employing to correct that so-called delusion? Maybe just like one, one at the end. One last one? Yeah. A final one? Not the penultimate solution.

That's not his thing. No, one step further, the very last one. Yeah, I can't think of another word for very last, but yeah. I also like, have these motherfuckers care-typed themselves? No one has. Almost no one has been, goddamn, like the percentage of people who've seen what their genes are, like, I don't know, whatever. Nonsense.

It's nonsense. Yeah, the science does not hold up to the thing you learn in fourth grade that, you know, I don't know when they teach you XX and XY or whatever, but it's like, that's not the current scientific understanding. And I think it's never really been the scientific understanding, that part I'm not as certain about. No, I mean, like it's, and by saying, like, I'm not calling for genocide because the group I'm targeting aren't even a real group of people.

They're not even real people. It's literally, it's literally the talking point of every single genocidal fascist ever in existence. But like, literally, this, oh my God, I cannot find the person who was writing about this. I apologize immensely, but when this clip was first circulating, there was a really interesting article about that was circulating about how, like, not a legitimate category is what, like, the word that gets translated as degenerate, like, that the Nazis used, like, actually means, like, that's like, not a legitimate kind of, like, that very specifically

is what the Nazis used as, like, you know, as, as, as their thing for we need to kill the Jews, right? Like, that, that's, that's very, very specifically what they were doing. No. Genocide does not refer to genetics. No! It fucking doesn't. And, and, you know, you know, you can, you can look at, like, because, like, these people

are, like, just unfathomably fucking stupid, right? Like, they, they, they look at genocide, right? And they see the word gen. And they go, this means genes. Oh, that sounds like a gene. No. But, you know, and I think, I think something that is worth mentioning is that, so Raphael Lemkin is the guy who coins the term genocide, right?

The Lemkin Institute, which is the, the, like, the Lemkin Institute, which is, like, the Institute from this guy that, that does genocide, like, does anti-genocide prevention work. Specifically in the U.S. was, like, there is now a risk of genocide against trans people. So, you know, the Institute of the actual guy who made the term genocide versus a guy who thinks that gen means gene, it's, like, it's just, ugh. No, it's, it's very obvious that, that, saying that transgender people are not a real ontological category is, like, that, that is how you do the Nazis did. That is how you do Nazi stuff, like, I'm under the impression the whole thing with ontology

is accepting that there's, like, multiple ontologies. Like, it's clearly not an ontological concept in his ontological, like, his way of viewing the world. That's one of the problems. You know, I just, like, I don't think he would pass a basic philosophy course in college. You know, okay, I will say this, my, my, my, my arguments against, against, specifically against there being multiple legitimate ontologies is this, is this, these people's fucking ontology who, like, believe that, like, these people, all these fucking freaks literally believe

individually, right, that there is no scientific explanation for lightning and that, like, every act of lightning is an individual act of God. That is not a legitimate ontology, like, fuck that shit, no, I, I, I refuse, I refuse to do fucking, to, to, to, to, to, to, to have, to have there be fucking multiple valent ontological positions. I refuse for there to be multiple, like, worlds, like, no, fuck this shit, there's some that are just wrong and you have to be able to say that shit, otherwise you get this fucking bullshit.

Reality tunnels do, do be funny like that. He, he later added, quote, transgenderism ultimately is a lie. It's a deception. It is a fraud. Fraud is not protected by the First Amendment. Fraud is not a category protected by the principles of free speech. You have no right to fraud. That, you know, here's the thing, I, I will, I will agree with him, you have no right to

fraud, fraud is not protected by free speech, I, I, really, like, have, have, have a, have a real fun time when we fucking come for you on those principles, you know, like, tiny ass show disappears. A few days, a few days later, Knowles once again invoked groomer rhetoric and openly called drag queens pedophiles and explicitly called on, quote, the heavy hand of the state to shut down drag shows and arrest performers and parents. Why is he dressed like Mr. Rogers in a Black Mirror episode? He's just, he's just, mirror universe, Mr. Rogers, he's like just telling you to hate

your neighbor, you know? I don't know how you can watch this and not conclude that the performers are pedophiles. I don't use that word lightly. I know a lot of people on the right use that word and they fling it around and they use it imprecisely. I don't see how you can dance around in a thong or in a leather harness in front of babies and toddlers if you are not a pedophile. So I'm, I would bet, if not the farm, I'd bet a lot of my money that that's the case

and that's being normalized. I don't see how these parents should be permitted to keep their children, they're abusing their children, they're sexually abusing their children by taking them to these events. I don't see how whatever company is hosting this should be allowed to keep its doors open. All of this should be shut down by the heavy hand of the state. All of these people other than the children should be arrested and some of them should face pretty severe consequences. Not great stuff.

He did hedge his bets. He was like, you know, I'm actually not sure about this. That was my favorite part. I think it is interesting that the whole heavy hand of the state line is an interesting little unique gem in their style of rhetoric whenever they explicitly call on the powers of the government to do fascism. I think a lot of this type of rhetoric was leading up to CPAC in which happened in early March.

Before CPAC, anti-transrat Eric was a very central theme across their many speakers. That's like big right wing gathering where all the far right people get together and talk to an empty room. Well, CPAC is the conservative political action conference. It is far right by the world's over to the window, but it's like a mainstream right wing convention in the United States. So the conference featured an array of speakers, including prominent Republican politicians and policymakers, as well as people like Michael Knowles, who are just like right wing pundits.

Many speeches had attacks against gender-affirming healthcare, trans-inclusive sports and bathroom policies, as well as the typical groomer and pedophilia stuff that we saw get super popular last year, as well as framing this word transgenderism as a radical ideology. Now, words like transgenderism and gender ideology are not actually terms that trans people use. These were terms invented by anti-transactivists. I want to be very specific about this because this is a thing I don't think people understand. The term gender ideology was specifically invented by the Catholic Church as a thing

to oppose this and also a sort of a way to oppose gay marriage and queerness in general. And they're all of the shitty, one of the sort of quote-unquote dark secrets in the fucking closet of all of the black people who claim to be radical feminists who are anti-trans. All of these people specifically worked with the Catholic—back when this stuff was first being developed in the late 90s and early 2000s—all of these people worked with the Catholic Church specifically to make sure that more gender-inclusive terminology and stuff—not in terminology, like more gender-inclusive programs and definitions of what gender is

wouldn't be implemented at the UN. So this sort of like Radfemm-Conservative Catholic Alliance is very old and most of the people who are in it will deny that that's what they were doing. But it is. Like, this is Catholic Church shit. The Pope literally had a rant about how gender ideology was colonialism like a week ago. And the Pope does the same demonic rhetoric as these people and, yeah, so—

See, I believe it from him. It makes sense from him. That's his thing. That's his literal job. Yeah, which immediately also it's like, sir, you are the Pope. Like, shut the fuck up about colonization, man. Like, just don't. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

You're from Latin America. That doesn't fucking excuse you. Like, shut up. The Catholic Church. Famously, never, never, never done colonization. But yeah, these words were invented by anti-transactivists to dehumanize transgender people and frame being trans as itself this dangerous ideology or a mental illness in a need of curing. CPAC speakers consistently invoked like grooming and pedophilia stuff in their long anti-LGBTQ

hate rants. Lauren Bobert claimed that educators are attempting to groom children echoing the Libs of Tiktok stuff that got popular in 2021 and 2022. Tulsi Gabbard was at CPAC. She basically claimed that LGBTQ plus people were trying to gain acceptance for pedophiles by labeling them as minor attracted persons and allowing them to teach in schools. This is another conspiracy theory that Libs of Tiktok has boosted for a long time. By the way, I want to hold a fucking grudge here, which is that there were a lot of people

who like claimed to be leftists who in like 2018, 2019, 2020 were like telling all of us that Tulsi Gabbard was a leftist and was like the only anti-imperialist or whatever the fuck. Not sense. Very clearly a fascist. Fuck. Like, she, she, she, like, no, fuck off. You were wrong.

Please admit you were wrong. Please be more careful about who you're gonna fucking back so you don't end up backing this fucking like weird pedo-jacketing dipshit. But you know who you should back. Oh, God. Is it, is it hard? Not yet. Not yet.

Almost, almost. Okay. Oh, sorry. Almost time. Sorry. I have, I have a plan. Matt Gates spoke about an incident in Virginia, which the right wing media sphere has spread disinformation about to falsely frame it as an instance of a trans student abusing inclusive

bathroom policies to attack young girls. Just spreading all kinds of misinformation and disinformation from these right wing hate websites that, that is why they exist is to propagate disinformation. Senator Taylor Greene targeted gender-affirming healthcare, praising her current reintroduction of the 2022 Protect Children's Innocence Act in the House, a bill which would make it a felony to provide gender-affirming care to minors, green spread the lies and disinformation made popular by Matt Walsh, that gender-affirming healthcare is designed to, quote, mutilate your kids and quote, chemically castrate them, stuff that we've debunked on the show before

and many others have debunked. Trump gave a pretty, pretty bad transphobic speech to close out the conference. On the one side, he said that he would keep men out of women's sports, but then closed out CPAC by saying, quote, he would revoke every Biden policy promoting the sexual mutilation and chemical castration of our youth, and I will ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states, unquote. I don't want to include Trump's stuff here because I find his voice to be slightly annoying. Anyway, moving on.

Donald Trump more annoying than Michael Knowles. Shocking. So hard. Challenge level almost impossible. Speaking of Michael Knowles, he gave a speech at CPAC where he advocated that transgenderism must be eradicated to thunderous applause. Now I'm going to play this whole clip here, bear with me. There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism.

It is all or nothing. If transgenderism is true, if men really can become women, then it's true for everybody of all ages. If transgenderism is false, as it is, if men really can't become women, as they cannot, then it's false for everybody too. And if it's false, then we should not indulge it. Everybody since that indulgence requires taking away the rights and customs of so many people. If it is false, then for the good of society and especially for the good of the poor people

who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely. The whole preposterous ideology at every level. Pretty bad stuff, not great to hear a room full of people applaud someone who's very clearly talking about the eradication of an entire group of people. I want to specifically point out the from public life thing because that was something that, you know, like back when the first bathroom bills were happening in 2016, right? You know, like people like trans people who were following this stuff, you know, the thing everyone said was they're trying to erase trans people from public life, right?

Because that's what happens when you can't use a restroom in public, right? It's like it limits your ability to just exist in the public sphere. And we've gotten to a point now where they can just fucking say what we all knew they wanted from the beginning. And that's terrifying. I remember when I hit the kind of uncanny valley space, like when I hit the space where I freaked people out no matter what bathroom I used, you know, like a very conscious thing where I remember it because I pick which bathroom to use based on safety, right?

And like depending on my presentation, it's wildly different depending on what kind of space I'm in. It's wildly different. I don't know. I just I just remember really consciously the first time I like just I picked the men's room and then got like double takes about why I was in there. And it's just like, oh, I like can't do anything anymore. Yeah.

I was like, no, absolutely. After Noel's speech at CPAC arguing for the eradication of transgenderism, quote unquote, daily wire hosts, including Matt Walsh defended him by saying, quote, we are in a war against the most deranged ideology ever invented by the human race. We are fighting to eradicate the ideological equivalent of a parasitic infection. But is a term like eradicate over the top? Does it have a needlessly militant tone? No, definitely not.

The tone may be militant, but not needlessly so. We are, after all, in a war and lives are at stake. We are in a war against the most deranged ideology ever invented by the human race. Plain and simple. We are fighting to eradicate the ideological equivalent of a parasitic infestation and the parasite gender ideology seeks to not only brainwash a generation of children, not only degrade an appropriate womanhood, but also, and manhood, by the way, but also, and most fundamentally, it seeks to eat away at truth itself.

This is coming from somebody who glibly refers to himself as a theocratic fascist. And in cases like this, when they tell you who they are, you should fucking believe them. Like the first bit of that clip is like pretty bad, very clearly fascistic, like it's checking all of the boxes. But then I'm going to continue on to the second part of this clip, and it is incredibly chilling. Can we point out about how his poor choice in plaid is also degrading to masculinity? Really, he is the greatest threat to masculinity right now because of his plaid choice. Eradication of gender ideology, total defeat, is the only option because there's no compromise

with it. There's no living side by side with it. There's no finding common ground. The gender ideologue wants to destroy your culture and your children. You will either rise up against it or lose everything to it. We're so fucked. It's so Nazi, like quote, total defeat is the only option. The gender ideologue wants to destroy your culture and your children.

Like that is less than a stone's throw away from we must just secure the existence of our people and the future for white children. It's right there. It's like, it's so, it's so clear. I think there's like a tiny grain of truth in it, which is that like they are very, very, very close to like permanently losing the battle over where the trans people can exist. That's why they're doing this, right? Because like the only like, like support for trans people getting health care is like 60.

Is that like 60% right? The only thing they have left is just straight up genocide because if they don't fucking kill us all now, right, and they don't right now act to make it impossible for future trans people to be trans, right, they are going to lose. And I will talk about this towards the end of the episode. This is kind of part of my thesis on this. And this is something that Michael Knowles himself actually admits. In one of Michael Knowles first shows after CPAC, he suggests that eradicating transgenderism

would be a simple matter of returning to the state of affairs in 2015. To eradicate transgenderism from public life. And it's a good question. I'm glad people are talking about that. That was the point of my speech. What would it mean to eradicate the preposterous ideology of transgenderism from public life at every level? Put simply, eradicating transgenderism from public life would mean behaving as American

society did before, say, 2015. Before around 2015, we did not have any acceptance of transgenderism in public life. Also, in just like a grim moment of serality, in the middle of that clip, Knowles does an ad read for a company called Rabbit Air, which is an air purifier company who has an office in Pasadena, California. Knowles goes on to blame Obama for leading this wave of trans acceptance in public life. Now this whole 2015 thing is very funny to me, because in a lot of ways, it was actually kind of easier to be trans in 2015 than it is right now.

But I think that this is mostly that for conservatives, it's mostly that young trans people are simply more visible now, mostly due to things like TikTok. There's a more visible presence of trans joy and trans people living, and that is angering conservatives. So they think this is some new recent thing. And because Michael Knowles did an ad break for Rabbit Air, who again has an office in Pasadena, California, I too am going to do an ad break for our fine sponsors. All right, and we're back.

We are almost done. We have one or two more clips to show. I liked the ad for Rabbit Air that just played. Fuck off. So in Michael Knowles' case, I think he isn't even primarily against just like trans equality. He is against modernity. Now when I say modernity, I'm not referring to like industrial civilization, that's many consequences for humans and the planet at large.

Right wing anti-modernism is very different than like anarchist, anti-sive ideas. This idea of modernism isn't really tied to industrial developments. It's more linked to a psycho-spiritual antagonism against modern social progress. It's more akin to the esoteric, super-fascist Julia Savola's idea of like revolt against the modern world and how liberalism is like a plague against moral society and causing mass degeneracy. Michael Knowles' own Twitter bio reads, quote, I am completely opposed to the error of the modernists.

Again, when these people tell you who they are, you have to believe them. Just this week during a speech at the University of Buffalo, Knowles laid out a plan to attack, quote, the logic of so-called gay marriage, the right to fornication, and the feminists who loosened divorce laws. Yeah, I think it's worth pointing out here, right? I think the actual reason why 2015 is the year that he picked out of his head is that 2015 is the year that gay marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court. Sure.

So that 99% chance that he means like 2015 before gay marriage is the thing that he wants to go back to. But here's a clip of him talking about how conservatives have continued to lose the battleground on a whole bunch of topics and how he's going to try to win them back. Now, even many conservatives accept so-called gay marriage. And they have to. They have to accept gay marriage if they accept the illogic of the sexual revolution, which held that all sexual relations are fine and dandy so long as they're consensual.

After the sexual revolution, the only test for sexual ethics became, if it feels good, do it. For most of American history, nobody believes that. For most of American history, there were all sorts of laws against certain sexual behaviors. There were famously laws against sodomy, but there were lots of other laws as well. Laws against fornication. Laws against adultery. Laws against plenty of other destructive sexual behaviors.

Those laws were on the books as recently as 2003 when liberals on the Supreme Court discovered in the Constitution some sort of right to all of those things. He wants all these things to become illegal again. That is his political project. To quote Erie Drennan, quote, none of this is a theoretical exercise. After banning drag or gender reform and care for minors, the Tennessee House yesterday passed a bill that would allow local officials to refuse same-sex interfaith or interracial marriages, unquote.

Now, last year, we titled some of our episodes that cover this wave of anti-trans attacks, quote, like the war on trans people, unquote. And even considering the origin of this podcast, I am often hesitant to entertain fantasies of actual civil conflict in the United States. But in this case, they are the ones who are killing us and trying to make our very existence illegal. It is them who has initiated this type of militant language. The last clip I have here is of Matt Walsh talking about just that.

We aren't even remotely done. This is honestly only the beginning. We've got a lot more in store for you. I promised you a year ago that we were going to war here, and I kept that promise. I'll keep this one, too. There's much more to be done that needs to be done, and we aim to do it. So the battle continues, whether you like it or not. The battle continues.

So a few days ago, the governor of Mississippi brought Matt Walsh to speak during an official press conference about the signing of House Bill 1125, a banning gender-affirming health care for minors. The presence of Matt Walsh at a state of Mississippi official press conference is a clear example of fascism being inserted into the governmental process. And speaking of bills, I'm going to hand this over to Mia to now talk about some of the legislative stuff. Yay.

Wow. This is going to be a long one. I'm sorry, folks. Yeah. Unfortunately, the list of ways in which they are trying to kill us is long, so yeah, this is the inevitable result of that. In one of the very early clips, right, I think, God, I can't remember which one it was. Maybe it was Candice Owens talked about, like, our publicist at Media Matters, right?

And I think there is, in a lot of cases, I think there's a lot of merit to knowing not, like, covering this shit when it's specifically people, like, very specific, like, you know, Alex Jones does this, right? Well, like, he'll say something like, specifically, incredibly inflammatory is a way to sort of get media attention to him. Yeah. But in this case, we can't fucking do that because all of the policy proposals that these people want are getting actually fucking implemented.

So here's from the Human Rights Campaign about how bad things have gotten. Less than two months into 2023, Human Rights Campaign is already tracking 340 anti-LGBTQ bills that have been introduced in state houses across the country. I think it's, like, over 400 now. Oh, yeah. It's, it, this, yeah, I was going to get this. Those numbers are from early, those numbers are from early February, right, or mid-February. Now, yeah, it's something like over 400.

It's really hard to get actual totals because there are so fucking many of them. 150 of those would specifically restrict the rights of transgender people. The highest number of bills targeting transgender people in a single year to date. They also note, as everyone else does, every single successive year breaks the record for the most number of bills targeting trans people. Yeah, those numbers are already out of date. And okay, so on the one hand, right, there are, there are real problems with projects that just track the raw number of bills.

And you know, okay, on the one hand, the, like, the raw numbers are, I think, a good way of actually getting people to sort of understand, like, the level of threat that is happening, like, just sort of, just sort of the raw magnitude of the threats. On the other hand, okay, it's kind of misleading in the sense that almost all these bills are going to fail because most of these, most, most, and this is the incredible important thing here, most, but not all, most of these bills are made by just random state lawmakers with no political backing. And this allows organizations, you know, sort of like, like a lot of the nonprofit groups

who, who work in these sort of legislative spaces to like claim, claim credit for defeating like 90% of the bills and it's like, well, no, like most of those, like almost none of them were ever going to pass in the first place. And the second thing that it does is it puts this sort of cloud out, which makes it really, really difficult. You know, if you're just being, if you're, if you're trying to follow, right, the sort of legislative process here, it gets very, very hard because it's, it's very difficult to sort out which bills have any chance of passing and which ones are just some random

dipshit like first term, like, I don't know, some, some, some, like first term lawmaker from like a part of Mississippi that has two lawmakers, right? Like, but so my, my, my solution to this is we're going to run through the bills that have already been passed. Um, I guess we should just start in Mississippi because we've sort of already talked about, yeah, Governor Tate Rees inviting Matt Walsh to give a speech at the bill signing ceremony. So in Mississippi, a law was passed called the REAP Act, which, you know, that's, that's great.

It's a, that's a, that tells you exactly what they fucking mean by this. This is a bill that bans and this, this is a very, very common pattern for bills. It bans miners from getting hormones, from getting any kind of gender affirming surgery and blocks anyone from getting puberty blockers. Um, we've said this before, we'll say it again, all of this stuff is good. Kids should be able to get these things, kids should be able to get these things easier. They, they, they just unfathomably improve the lives of the children you get them. They make it.

All of, all of the data supports this notion. This has been normalized for literally decades. Yeah. And puberty blockers in particular is, is one of the things that's become the focus of like, oh, it's not safe. It's like puberty blockers were the compromised position, right? And this is something that I think has been lost in a lot of debate about this because you know, we've gotten to the point where everything is being banned, but puberty blockers,

you know, we're a compromised position because you could give people puberty blockers without like actually giving trans kids the hormones that they need. And even that, we, we, you know, we're at a point where satiators just full on banning kids from getting them. This sucks. It's awful. It is killing trans kids. Mississippi also has a ban.

One of the other things about this specific one, and not, not all the states are doing it do this, but the specific bill also bans state money from going to any institution that practices like those like gender for minors. They also have an anti sports law so you can, you know, you can see the sort of like how, how the dominoes went down in terms of like, sorry, you can see how the dominoes fell down in terms of where it started and where it was going, right? You, you first you get your anti-bathome law and then you get, you get your sort of like cute trans people out of sports and then, you know, like a year later, yeah, yeah.

So Iowa also has a ban that's, you know, but basically identical ban on hormone gender firming surgery and puberty blockers, they also passed a bill that bans trans kids from using bathrooms and locker rooms according to the gender and elementary, middle and high schools. And I want to talk a little bit about this because this is going to lead to kids getting fucking raped because it turns out if you force a trans girl into a men's locker room, things are going to go real fucking bad for them. They don't give a shit about this, right?

They simply do not care. But that's, you know, that, that, that, that, that, that's the actual substantive results. Iowa also passed, I've seen it variously refers to as like a don't say trans or like a don't say LGBTQ plus bill. This is a bill that prohibits teachers who teach either from kindergartners to sixth grade from teaching about transness, like at all, you can't teach about gender, you can't teach about like sex, you can't teach about, you know, you can't teach about the fact that you can in fact change your gender and it's good and cool.

The human rights campaign says, quote, this bill would also prohibit schools from providing gender affirming accommodations for their, for transgender students without parental consent and would require school staff to out transgender students. So I read this bill and it's not clear to me how it requires that, but that's what the lawyers are saying and I'm not a lawyer. So it may or may not require that this is another thing, very specifically, this is an everything that that's been happening in the sort of newer waves of these laws are laws that specifically require school counselors, teachers and school staff to out their kids,

like to out kids to their parents, which is unbelievably dangerous. In the last few years alone, there have been a bunch of trans people who were just killed by their parents and, you know, forcibly outing people is like you're exposing them to the risk of abuse, you're exposing them to the risk of unsafe housing environments. No, it's just a little soft whack by your grandma, I remember, just a little, a little tap on the head. Yeah, yeah, it was going to fucking beat you to death. So these bills in Iowa have been passed by the House and the Senate and they're just

like they're just like sitting on a desk waiting for the governor to sign them and the governor is going to. So yeah, that's the situation in Iowa. In Arkansas, you have the hormone puberty blocker gender affirming surgery ban. The Arkansas one is on hold because, you know, and this is this is true for a couple of these is that people have done legal challenges on it. And yeah, yeah, the Arkansas particulars had a huge legal fight. We still don't know how that's legal fights are going on for like a year.

We still haven't gotten a ruling on it yet. They also have a ban on trans kids competing in sports. Alabama made it a classy felony punishable by up to a decade in prison to give transgender kids hormones, puberty blockers, gender affirming surgery. This one's also interesting because it's the only bill. So most of these ones when they do when they say minors, right? It's until you're 18. You can't get it.

For whatever reason, Alabama also bans 18 year olds from getting any of these things. You just have to be 19. That's weird. Yeah. Part part of the bill, you know, about hormone blockers. So okay, so specifically the part of the parts of this bill that are about hormones and hormone blockers are on hold pending sort of resolution of legal challenges. But the judge was like, fuck it, you can do the surgery ban.

So that sucks. Alabama also has bills that have the whole trans kids in schools can't use the right bathroom and, you know, teachers, counselors, and other school officials have to out them. They also have another don't say trans bill that does a very similar thing about you ban teachers from talking about trans until fifth grade. I think a lot of these bills are written by like lobbying groups who just copy and paste the same thing and submit it to a whole bunch of different states. I will say there are weird differences in them.

Like you'll see like different completely scattershot like definitions of what hormones are or like some of these bills trying to define what a woman is. And it's very funny because they have to like do all this weird stuff about like clusters of like chromosomes, but also there's like chromosomal diseases. You can't do this. Like fuck off. It's so funny. We should also mention that like there will be more reporting on this later.

This bill, this episode is already too long, but there have been a bunch of emails released from a bunch of anti trans sort of organizers and fake scientists and stuff about how they've been coordinating all of this. And a lot of the experts that they use for testimony for all of the show up to these capitals are like exactly the same people. And the big guy they have saying that puberty blockers is unsafe like has never worked with a trans person in their life and has no fucking idea what they're talking about. So you know, this is this is this is fun.

Utah also bans also passed a ban banning gender affirming surgeries, puberty blockers and hormones. They also have a ban. I also have a bill forcing students and counselors to out their students to their families. Last year, Utah Governor Spencer Cox was praised by the media for a symbolic veto of a bill that made it illegal for trans students to compete in sports. Cox signed this fucking bill, signed the one signed the one that bans of gender affirming surgeries, puberty blockers and hormones.

Yeah, I think we're talking about this last year. Yeah, I want to we talked we talked we talked about some Utah thing last year. Yeah, well, we talked about yeah, the thing we talked about was him vetoing vetoing that bill. I want to read his thing for why why he packed why so he vetoed the bill that was less bad and signed the one that's worse. And I'm going to read what he said about this quote, while we understand our words will be of little comfort to those who disagree with us, we sincerely hope that we can treat

our transgender families with more love and respect as we work to better understand the science and consequences behind these procedures. Fuck off. Fuck all the way off. He's trying to avoid the Nuremberg trials. I look as a neutral as a neutral objective journalist, I'm obligated to inform you that Spencer Cox was a full time missionary for the Mormon church, which is currently embroiled in a pedophilia scandal after is revealed to have systematically protected church members

and members of the clergy who sexually abused children from church sanctions and legal repercussions. Under Utah law, clergy have the right of penitent privilege, which means they are not required to report child abuse to the authorities as long as the information is revealed during confession. Both the Mormon and Catholic churches, along with Jehovah's Witnesses, have lobbied against all efforts to change this law. Earlier this month, survivors of the Mormon Church rallied in support of a bill that would have ended penitent privilege.

Governor Cox publicly announced his support for the bill being considered in the legislature, but did nothing to pressure legislators to vote for and as of time of recording, the bill is dead, leaving the church free to protect yet another round of pedophiles. Also his name was Cox. Yeah. So South Dakota also, I could do this for every fucking governor on this list and I decided I was going to do it once and not do it for all the rest of them, but fuck them. South Dakota has a sports bill, they also have a ban on puberty blockers hormones, gender

affirming surgery, Arizona has an anti-bathroom bill, Tennessee has a sports ban. It has the basically identical ban on puberty blockers hormones and gender affirming surgery and it also has this, it also has what's been kind of a new innovation, I guess, which is the anti, they have an anti-drag law. Yes. This is the one that's gotten the most amount of traction and has sparked some debate over how much of it can actually be applied against just trans people living their lives because it is tied to the state's pre-existing obscenity laws.

So there's been some debate about this. We will learn more about this as it starts being enforced by law enforcement and the court system. Yeah. I want to talk about it. It sucks. It's not good. Yeah.

I want to talk about it a little bit more. So the specific bill, it makes it illegal for anyone to be underage at a drag show and you know, it basically applies like the rules around the sex offender list for where you can have drag shows. So Governor William Brian Lee, who signed this bill, did drag in high school, which I'm saying, I'm saying here not to point out the hypocrisy, like Governor Lee doesn't see anything, any hypocrisy here, but to get across the fact that Republicans who want to do this stuff will still be able to.

This bill was targeted at a very, very specific group of people. As Jules Gil Peterson points out in your piece, the left hand of the law, which people should go read, this is an attack on a very specific, precarious class of workers. Many of whom are trans, some of whom aren't, who do drag performances. This is, it's a very specific attempt to sort of like neutralize, okay, it's targeting this very specific middle ground between sort of like being in the formal economy and doing sex work. There's this amount of trans people who do sex work.

Drag shows provide a way to sort of like, not exactly enter the middle class, but it provides a legal way for trans people to like have a job that's not fucking that, and those workers are specifically the people being targeted by this. Weirdly, I don't know. The other thing that's unclear is for example, like if a podcast does a live show where there's trans people, like what will happen? We don't know. But the other thing I want to say about this, right, is everyone's talking about this fucking

drag bill. I have seen like basically zero discussion of the fact that they also passed the same fucking ban on puberty blockers, hormones, gender-affirming surgery, which is way, way more destructive and damaging. It's like directly attacking, yeah. So I think I want to push back about the like, yeah, like what you're talking about about like what will happen if you do a live show? Like what will happen?

Because to trans people who live in these states, the state I live in is a red state. Well, it's not supposed to be, but it's a red state and you know, is considering a drag bill and things like that. And I recognize that they're like aimed, they're targeted specifically at drag performances, but there's a fairly easy interpretation of a lot of these things that literally says I can't go to the grocery store. And that is how like a lot of trans people in Tennessee are viewing this right now. And so I don't think it's a disproportionate thing that the drag bill is something that

a lot of people are focusing on. I mean, we all care also about the hormone issues or whatever, but the Tennessee passing the drag law that other states are considering is a new bad thing that could criminalize our very public existence. Yeah, that is part of the kind of discussion around this laws ties to the preexisting obscenity laws and that will heavily depend on the discretion that law enforcement chooses to employ this law. And if it gets taken up to like the court system, how the court's going to interpret

this law. So it is like the vagueness is part of the point because that causes a lot of fear because you really just don't know what it all entails. And yeah, that's fucking weird because you don't know if you going to the store is going to be a felony or not. And how are you supposed to live like that? Yeah, and it, I don't know, the sort of pervasive atmosphere of fear is definitely like part of the point of this, right?

Like part of the way the sort of extermination campaign works is by forcing everyone to sort of live in fear of what what they can and can't do and also live in fear specifically of the police increasing the amount of violence that they're deploying. Yeah. I mean, and all this stuff, like we talked about, they're specifically targeting people's ability to exist in a public life, which is whenever you want to do a genocide. That's one of the things you do is you make people unable to exist in public life. This is literally what the Nazis did, right?

Like you section them off into their own little communities where they cannot actually leave and enter into the outside world. Yep. So, so far, as of writing this, there are seven states with bans on gender, family, care for youth. I was about to become number eight whenever the governor gets around to signing the bill. There are 19 states that ban trans athletes from competing. There are a number of states.

Oh, so other stuff, I forgot how much, so there's like literally while I was like, while I was like waiting to record this episode, there were a few things that happened in like the legislature. So in Florida, there was a bill that got just got out of committee that would ban LGBTQ books, like in all libraries, not just sort of school libraries. So I don't know that that actually has a real chance of passing because it's Florida. There's a lot of movement right now. The situation is very, very sort of fluid and bad is, yeah, how I would say it.

It is. So in closing note, I will save my kind of my ending thesis to start the next episode just because we're going on so long here. But the last thing I will say is I be wary of social media accounts that depend on ramping up and spreading panic to grow their follower accounts. Typically news, news aggregation accounts are not the best source of information because their existence is entirely dependent on causing panic. So like look into the things like beyond just a tweet, like look into stuff before before

you spread it, just as like a general rule of thumb, I'm not calling anybody out here in any way. I'm just saying it is it is a good practice to get into, especially when we're looking into stuff that is about our very existence being criminalized and that can be very depressing and it can suck to be constantly bombarded with. So it's good to stay connected to stuff that's going on in your own state. It's good to stay connected to bills that have a decent transit passing. But be wary of undue panic spreading just constantly nonstop because a big part of being trans

needs to also be like finding joy in living. Yeah, I think I think the very last thing I want to say that will lead into this next episode is we're not fucking done yet. We are still here. We're going to continue to be here. We are going to kick these people's fucking shit in and we are going to fight them for every fucking engine they are going to lose. And next episode is going to be us talking about how we could start doing that.

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Thank you for surviving that last long excruciating episode full of basically just like a bunch of hate speech that we were trying to be like, hey, doesn't this look like hate speech? This is bad. Maybe platforms like Spotify, YouTube, other podcast hosting platforms that I am somehow forgetting the name of, but perhaps they shouldn't be hosting all of this Daily Wire content that is explicitly calling for genocide. As we host it. Anyway, I think it is interesting what the Daily Wire is trying to do here because they

obviously saw what is a woman, the documentary, the quote unquote documentary by Matt Walsh last year, get incredible traction online and boost their subscription service. So now they're doubling down on this because this is how they're going to try to make content. And they are trying out as many rhetorical styles and arguments as possible just to see what sticks. Like it really feels like they're just doing like the shotgun method of like throwing every single possible reason that trans people are icky up against the wall and seeing which one like catches on like they're doing the they're doing a ban and transgenderism entirely.

What is a woman, groomers? They can't be genocided because they don't exist attacking transgenderism as a cover for trans people, right? So it's all these, all these various, various tactics, all these different rhetorical strategies calling them demonic. It's very much trying to be like, if we throw up as much stuff as possible attacking and demonizing trans people, some of these trends will catch on online, right? Some of these will catch on, will be spread to legislators, eventually something will

stick and that is that is very much the tactic that they are trying to use. And I think this is a point I wanted to make last episode, but I think it's still it's useful to hear now kind of in retrospect. Everything all of the like extremism that you heard in in the last episode, all of these like very, very fascist talking points. This is what conservatism is now, right? Like this is the mainstream new right. Sure, you can call it fascist because by definition it is.

But sometimes that term like fascist or fascism, it carries with it this false sense of foreignness. It has like this, it has like this displacement in the time, right? Most people view fascism as something that happens elsewhere or something that happened in the past. By just referring to this stuff as fascist, it creates a distance in people's minds, this this like exotic improbability. But this stuff is like the mainstream conservative platform that the up and coming leaders of the conservative movement are trying to normalize.

This was like the main talking point at CPAC, which is like the biggest conservative convention in the entire country. It is this stuff is is what the conservative platform is now, and I think it is it is just as important to emphasize that this is what the modern conservative mainstream is. And it is it is it is just as important to say that as it is to tie it and tie this rhetoric to the history of fascism, because the Overton window is certainly accelerating, right? Like this thing can both be heavily steeped in the history of fascist rhetoric and also be like the new up and coming version of the conservative right that the daily wire and

its allies are trying to normalize. And I just think that that is that is something that I am trying to focus on a little bit more when I when I'm doing my writing and my research in these topics is that we often will use terms like fascist because these things are are are pretty fascist. And I want to make sure that doesn't like create this false distance in people's in people's minds when they when they think about these bills when they end when they think about this rhetoric. Yeah.

And I think I think the way in which this is simply what the modern right is demands a different kind of response than a lot of what we've been seeing so far. Yeah, you can't simply try to catch them in their contradictions. You can't simply catch them in their hypocrisy. Every every tactic that liberals tried to use against Trump in the lead up to his election and even Republicans tried to use those tactics aren't going to be successful here because they weren't successful back then. You can't you can't like outthink them in in that in that in that way.

Well, but the reason that you like when you when you call out say the governor of Tennessee or a lieutenant governor or whatever Tennessee for about his hypocrisy and how he dressed in dragon stuff, it's not that the thing that that does to defend it a little bit to that calling out is it doesn't make his supporters, it doesn't change his mind, it doesn't expose him as a hypocrite to his base, but it does expose him as a hypocrite to his enemies. And I think it is worth understanding that are the people who have declared us their enemies. It's worth understanding that they are not like morally consistent actors.

You know, it is worth understanding that they don't believe the things they are saying. A lot of their base does, but so I actually do think that there is a point all of the shit talk on Trump and or whatever I think might be part of how Trump didn't get elected again is because he as he got more and more defensive, he looked more and more ridiculous not to his base, but to to the middle, which is basically the Democrats at this point. Yeah, it was able to recruit like a growing moderate oppositional force, which was what beat Trump Trump was not beaten because people liked Biden. He was beaten because they didn't like Trump.

And I think you are you are right in having that beat that is a point to focus on. I think it's it's important to to mention that like fascists do not believe in the absurdity of what they say. It is that that is not necessary to maintain fascism. And I think I think so. The position that we're at right now is a very, very strange one for the left, which is that we are in a position where, you know, when the Republicans tried to run on this shit in in in 2022, they got destroyed, right?

This is this doesn't actually have mass popularity. This is what I wanted to talk about next. I have this is this is the very last section I have written is on this topic because, yeah, this off putting focus on like a genocide and like the culture war stuff seemed to hurt conservatives in the last election cycle. Yeah, really badly. And yet again, they are they are they are still doubling down on it. Voters in some swing states were turned off by the focus on the regression of queer rights

instead of like actually addressing material conditions. This strategy, though, is a core concept of the fascist project, right, instead of addressing material conditions under capitalism to improve people's lives, right wing populists will conjure up this culture war boogeyman to blame all of like society's problems on. And to talk about the social war that is contributing to degeneracy. I also think that they're winning, unfortunately, not winning in a broader sense. But in terms of, yes, this is a very unpopular issue that they're doubling down on. But I think that, you know, I've seen studies where like a higher percentage of the US population

supports anti trans stuff than did two years ago. It's still a minority thing to hate trans people, but it is a growing minority. Yes, which is why like we're talking about how in a lot of ways it's easier to be trans in 2015 than it is now. And kind of on that point, I'm going to play the very final clip of Michael Knowles. We will never have to hear his voice again, hopefully, his annoying little voice. But I'm going to play a bit of a longer clip from him. And this is from his initial like ban at transgenderism entirely rant.

And I'm only going to play this because he actually makes a point that we ourselves have made before when discussing this topic. The conservative right is desperately trying to play catch up, right? Us who believe in like liberation and freedom have been winning historically. And the rights getting very scared and desperate. So in response, they're introducing all of these bills, right? And they're accelerating this types of eliminationist rhetoric. But in this clip, Michael Knowles provides us with our pathway to victory.

We cannot simply hold our ground on these issues. We have to keep pushing forward because as long as we keep going forward and get on the offense, the right will be stuck playing a catch up forever. And it reminds us of a truth in politics that Republicans all too often forget. You're either on offense or you're on defense. You're either making gains in the culture or you're losing ground in the culture. There's no standing still, there's no status quo, there's no neutrality. And what the conservatives have screwed up on for at least 50 years now, probably more

is the libs make some crazy aggressive play. And then we try to dial it back by about 5 to 10%. Or worse, we try to slow it down by about 5 to 10%. So the libs attack the family through feminism, the fundamental political institution. They claim that men and women are basically the same. That takes the culture pretty far to the left. And then conservatives try to inch it back a little bit, but by the time they're even thinking about inching it back, the libs push forward with the normalization of other sexual

practices. They agree with his position so far, yeah. And then by the time the conservatives are trying to dial that back, the libs, they've lurched much further to the left. They're trying to redefine marriage now. They say redefine marriage, well, I don't know, I guess we could come to some kind of terms with the civil union, and by the time you say that, whoop, they've lurched even further to the left.

Now, they're saying, actually, we've got transgenderism. Actually now, a man can become a woman, a man can become a woman, okay, but maybe we shouldn't do it tomorrow. By the time we say that, whoop, oh my gosh, we're now, we're all the way off the screen. Because now they're trying to trans the kids. And there are many conservatives now who are saying, look, if you're a man and you want to put on a dress, that's fine, but just don't do it to children, just don't make me pay for it.

No. That is such an interesting little cliff. No, I mean, it's funny because this is what I've been saying for a long time since about 2015 or so, like looking at the rise all this shit and Trump and all that, is that we were winning culturally. I hate the word culture war now, I mean something different. It means arguing about guns or whatever. But we were winning on a cultural front very dramatically, and I would point to Steven

Universe as the evidence that we are winning. And then they basically had to play to their strengths. And he's talking about it, he's like, look, it's funny that so much of this is happening on a cultural front because it is not a conservative strength. They have some cards in their hand when it comes to cultural stuff, the anti-moderities stuff when it does weird anti-Semitic, almost anti-capitalism or whatever, that's like a strong card they like pulling out all the time. But conservatives overall are not very good at the cultural thing.

What they're good at is politics and violence. And so they're playing to their immediate strengths as hard and fast as they can because they're on their back foot. Yeah, no, they're defaulting to advocating physical violence and enforcing their worldview with violence and doing stuff on the political legislative front because they've realized just screaming about trans people isn't enough. They have to actually start dedicating millions and millions and millions of dollars to pushing these through state legislative cycles, which is why the Daily Wire has spent the past month

and a half harping on this so hard as the legislative cycle for 2023 is starting to ramp up. Yeah, and I think there's another thing here, which is the sort of fundamental disparity. The fact that they've chosen this front, there's a fundamental disparity in what they have to do versus what we have to do. And this is a giant sort of shift in a way that I don't think the left really has much experience with, which is like the thing that is happening in the US right now is that we are the silent majority.

Like this is true consistently over and over again when you look at polling on these issues. Just regular people are like, what the fuck are you guys doing? The problem is that those people haven't been mobilized. And it doesn't matter if you're a majority as long as the sort of like, because again, who the actual majority is in the US or what actual regular people believe has very, very little impact on the kinds of policies that are sort of enacted. But there's a second sort of issue here, which is because of the fact that we are right now, the sort of silent majority, that we have a kind of, I guess, the Gromsian thing would

be like hegemony, but we have an advantage in just how average people behave. They have to kill us. They have to fucking kill us. They have to make it illegal for us to exist. And they could do this, right? There is a real possibility that they can win, right? They are winning on this rent right now. This is what they are, you know, in the places where they have power, this is what they are

doing. All we really have to do is survive. Because if we survive and we're able to stop them, you know, even if we don't get sort of like Argentina style, like hiring mandates for trans people, right? Even if we just hold the ground that we already have, we will win inevitably, right? Like the sort of march of where the culture has been going will favor us. Trans people will be able to sort of exist in public. Trans people will be able to survive unless they kill us right now.

And that's the sort of the key thing that Knowles has realized, right? This is the critical moments where either we win and we and trans people get to continue our lives or they kill us. I would argue that it's not just kill us. I think that even though we're listening to all this exterminationist rhetoric, I think that the odds are that most of these people don't actually envision a future where they're like rounding us up and putting us in camps and gassing us. I think that overall it's a drive back into the closet.

I actually take them at their word that they want to destroy transgenderism. And if transgender people have to die along the way, that's on us. But if we put on appropriate clothing and shut the fuck up, I actually think that that would suit them just fine. And so I actually think they have to kill transgenderism. I think that's true now, but I don't know how true that is as they keep actually having to implement their... They don't think being trans actually exists though, right?

They think it just is people doing these things. So as long as trans people are able to, for one, maybe even not even realize their trans to repress that and just live their lives as if they were cis person, that's what conservatives think trans people already are. And I think that is a large part of it is making us just not able to be trans in public life at all in any capacity. I think that's true, but I don't think they can... I don't think their political path allows them to maintain that position.

I don't think they can... One of the things that's happening with the right right now is they're doing this feedback loop where they get... They're sort of media people, right? Are continuously radicalized by their base, and their base radicalizes them back. And I don't think they can maintain an equilibrium position that doesn't involve... We have to hunt all these people down to make sure they don't go after our kids. I don't think they're going to...

I don't think they're doing that now. I don't think they're even planning that now. But I don't know how they can keep up this cycle without eventually getting to something like that. Well, it's worth being prepared for that type of possibility. But the kind of thing that I feel really strongly about with all of this is to really not... The sky is falling, but it's not falling the way that we sometimes say it is.

And when we say the sky is falling in a way that people look around, they're like, oh, that's just not how the sky is falling to me. Then people get like, well, actually, I think you all are being hyperbolic, right? Yes. And so I think that we do need to be really clear that they are open to the possibility of mass murdering us. And they are actively discussing individual acts of violence being very justified against us.

But currently, I believe the thing that they are trying to do is eradicate the concept of being trans as a thing you can do in American society. And of course, there's a lot of people who believe in death before detransition and all fucking power to... I don't even know where I've fallen all this shit. I literally don't want to opine about it because I don't want to give anyone... I don't want to tell anyone what to do about that shit, right? Yeah.

Everyone makes their own decisions about closeting, not closeting based on their own positions. But I think we do have to be careful about it. And I think one of the reasons is, because from my point of view, they have picked trans people not because they care so much about us, but because we're a wedge issue. We saw this in like, actually, I don't want to name them because I don't want to get whatever, like different large coalitions of LGBT people were perfectly willing to drop the T 20 years ago. If in order to get certain equal rights shit passed, they just straight up like trans people

did all this fucking work organizing for this shit. As soon as it got to like higher up level in the government, they were like, oh, trans people, that's gonna be a problem, we're gonna take them off of there, right? And because we are a wedge issue, and we always have been, and I think the Nazis use us in a very similar way, but even within us, there's trans, sorry, there's wedge issues within that. And so sports was the first wedge issue. I actually believe, I was reading this earlier, but I wasn't reading it for this, so I didn't

take notes. I believe that the majority of Americans do not believe that trans people should be able to compete in high school sports based on their preferred gender. I'm under the impression that that is a minority position to be trans supportive of trans athletes in school. And so that is the wedge issue that they used to open up this divide in order to then come at us, but we're still just a wedge issue. And one of the reasons I think it's so important for people to understand us as a wedge issue

is so that people understand really clearly that they are not fucking stopping with us. This is absolutely about, you can hear it in that guy talking, because one of the other things he's talking about is he's talking about women need to get back in the kitchen and be obedient to their husbands and shit. And one of the reasons that trans people scare them so much is because we like, it's so funny because by and large, like trans men are left out of this discussion and trans women are seeing these like evil monsters or whatever, right? But trans men are absolutely part of it, because it's massive, massive threats, absolutely.

Because it's stealing women from them. It is stealing their fucking wives that they want to have. They want to fucking own women and like, so they can't handle the idea of anyway, whatever. No, a lot of the things they get so mad about is when they see a young trans guy on TikTok and they like, look, sorry, this is going to be like gross, but like, look at this potentially beautiful woman who's now been ruined, like, which is horrible, horrible and gross. It saves the titties. Right.

But that is, we have so many grown men, like thirsting over 14 year old, like AFAB people who are deciding that, hey, maybe I want to start HRT. Maybe I want to use different pronouns. Maybe I want to have a binder. And this, they get so, so mad at that. And I think a big part of not simply, I think it is truly not enough just to hold our ground. We have to keep going forward. And a big part of that is having more intersectionality with trans masculine people.

A big part of that is having a much, much more of a focus on gender nonconforming people and non-binary people. Because we have to keep pushing it forward. We cannot simply hold our ground on this. Because if we simply hold our ground, they can pull out the rug from under us. That's where I'm going to point. That is a massive part of this. And I think, I do believe that we will win.

I fundamentally do. Because if you look at the rights of which young people, Zoomers, and even the generation younger than Zoomers, I do not know what they're called. But if you look at the amount of us who self-identify as non-binary, trans, or gender nonconforming, it is so much bigger than any previous generation. Once people experience a form of freedom, it is hard to take that freedom away. There is so many people who are entering their teens and are realizing they can be so much more free and they don't need to be limited to these weird draconian dualistic notions

of gender. And that's amazing. If you look at a whole new wave of actors and actresses and people in the entertainment industry, almost all of them are non-binary. The person who plays Ellie in The Last of Us is trans. I believe they identify as trans, non-binary, or some form of genderqueer. But this doesn't- They sort of play Ellie like that too.

Anyway, I just like that. No, absolutely. But this is something that keeps happening. We are going to win this because there's so many of us. And we know that it rules to exist like this, and we're not going to let them take it away. I think that is a big part of not only standing our ground, but continuing to move forward with the confidence that we will win in the long run. Yeah, and I think that we can-

And I think that a lot of the stuff, including myself, I'm famously armed. I'm someone who believes in self-defense and all of these things. But I think that we always need to focus on our strengths when it comes to being especially on the offense. And so when I think about strategizing, how do we win, the stuff that you're talking about about staying on the offensive makes so much sense. And I think that to misquote the art of war, you attack your enemy where they are weak and you are strong.

And they are weak at cultural creation. And I don't mean culture wars and culture war issues or whatever. Like art and creativity. And so we win because we say, because our ideas are good and when we express them, people are like, oh, that sounds sick. I want to be free, right? Yeah. Now, at the same time, we need to shore up our weaknesses.

And I think our weaknesses at the moment are in the political sphere, which we're on the back foot right now because of all the- I guess I don't track this stuff as much, but all the judges and shit that got put in under Trump. And we are also not at our strongest, I'm not trying to call us weak here, but like far fewer of us are like weird gun nuts and like militant strategy, protective type people. And we've seen us shoring up that weakness and that rules. But I think it's always important, maybe not always, maybe there would be a time when

this would shift. But overall, I don't think that's our strength. That's not where we go in the offense. That is where we stay, like protecting ourselves. Yes. And- No, I- Drag defense.

Drag defense, screen defense. That has defense in the name. Exactly. And it is crucially important. Exactly. It also terrifies the fascists, right? Yeah. The fact that a 140-pound twink can carry an AR and defend a drag show terrifies fascists.

It utterly destroys their brains. Force equalization is a hell of a thing. Sorry, buddy. The trigger pull is two and a half pounds. Yeah, you know what else is a force equalizer? Swords? The force have advertising. Even pole arms.

As long as we don't have an ad for rabbit air who has an office in Pasadena, California, I'm fine. So I think if you've listened to the show a lot, they're one of the sort of sub themes of a lot of the writing that I do is thinking about what we owe the debt. And on the face of it, it's a sort of nonsensical question, right? You can't have any kind of reciprocal relationship with someone who's dead because they're dead. And this question, this question of what we owe the debt is a question board of grief of a kind of sort of raw and immaculate anguish that comes to the memory of people who are

like you in every way except that you're here and they're not. And this was written, you know, this was written several weeks ago. The people this was written for aren't even the same people that, you know, like that is for now, right? The question in some sense becomes what do we owe the people who have died and were thus denied to live, denied the chance to live the lives that we do? You know, what do we owe them? What do we owe these people that we failed to keep alive?

And this has an answer. This has a very, very definite political answer. We owe them the destruction of the world that killed them. We owe them a future that we owe them the future that they should have had. And we owe them, we owe them a world where they never take another one of this, another one of us again. The world is already fucking burning. It is time to start the counterfire.

Now, one of the things that you that you will hear a lot and this, this is this has been, this has been one of the sort of dominant responses for better or for worse from how people are thinking about these laws is that these laws, you know, these anti-trans laws are unconstitutional and that does not matter. That does not matter for shit, right? Oh, oh, oh, our old friend, the Constitution. Like, I just, I just, I need, I need everyone to understand that the ability of the Supreme Court to strike down a law is not in the Constitution.

None of this shit matters. They're making all of it up. The only thing that actually matters is power and to understand why the law is about power and, you know, and why legality is not actually a tool that we can rely on. I want to, I want to tell the story. I'm not sure if I've told the story on, on, on this, on this podcast before, but I want to tell the story of the worst mistake I ever made as an activist. So the year is 2017.

Donald Trump's executive order 13769, locally known as the Muslim ban, has prevented people from Iran, Iraq, they drop Iraq later, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the country. Now, almost immediately after the Muslim ban is announced, there is a spontaneous wave of airport occupations that sweeps the country. And these protests have two goals. Their immediate goal is to free the people who have been taken captive by immigration authorities before they can be deported.

And the second goal is to end the Muslim ban more broadly. This was, this was actually my, this was my first IRL direct action. I, you know, I remember I was in this train car on the blue line to O'Hare, which is our, our airport in Chicago. And you know, I'm on this train and it's packed and everyone is completely silent. And you know, everyone thinks people are going to get off and as, as we get to this airport, we realize that the entire train is completely full of protesters, like everyone on there is a protestor.

And it goes on and on and on and we get off the train, right? And we're walking through the airport and the way this airport is structured is there's like this overpass that you walk over where you can see the trains coming in and every single train is full of protesters and the trains keep coming and they keep coming and they keep coming. And you know, every, every one and every time a train shows up, everyone starts cheering and it is like, it is, you know, one of the most amazing things I've ever been a part of.

And you know, and we, we start moving and there are just two, you know, this is a fucking, this is an airport, right? Like this is one of the most heavily policed places in the world. There are not enough cops to stop us and you know, they make this one token attempt to try to clear us and they can't do it and they pull back and now we are holding the airport and we do it. And we beat them, we win. The airport releases the detainees, they've been, they've been negotiating with the ACLU,

the ACLU have been trying to get them released. And the person from the ACLU like comes on the mic and announced that they've released everyone and everyone cheers. And then, and then the person on the ACLU person on the mic says they're going to beat the Muslim band in court and everyone goes home. It takes a few hours, but by the end of it, everyone goes home. And here's the thing. The ACLU, several years later, lost that case to the Supreme Court.

The Muslim band continued the entire fucking Trump administration, right? It wasn't repealed until Biden took office. We could have stopped it there, right? We held that fucking airport. Airports across the country and fucking like instead dozens and dozens of states were being held by protesters and we could have stopped them, but we didn't. And we didn't because we trusted the courts, right? We went home, we trusted the ACLU and they lost.

Because again, the law is not about the law, the law is about power. And millions of people suffer the consequences of that. And this is what's going to happen if we if we leave this fight to the courts either either we actually sort of like stand up and actually fight not in the courtroom, but in the streets, in schools, in salons and shop floors, in the places where we have power or we are going to die. That is my intro to this, which is that we cannot we literally like if we try to leave this to the people who have been acting right now, right?

If we leave this to electoralists, if we leave this to sort of legal institutions and if we purely fight self-defense battles, we are going to lose, yeah. So the question from there is how do we hit them back? And what the thing that I specifically wanted to talk about first is I wanted to talk about this thing called power mapping. Now, okay, the moment you say the word map around leftists, people immediately start talking about how the map is not the terrain. And that's true.

True. It is true. It is true. The map is not the terrain. They're different things. Don't confuse them. But both are useful. Yeah.

Like you still want to map when you're hiking, even though it's not actually the terrain. Smash the maps. Smash the maps. We'll walk into map action. Situation is practice. Walk around the city without a map, mess up the maps, sabotage the maps. Yeah. Don't walk through the forest without a fucking map.

Yeah, that's going to get real bad. The forest is dispassionate and cruel and will kill you. So all right. So what is power mapping? So there is a normal version. There is a version of this that gets, you know, it's part of sort of like, I guess you would call like the liberal version of organizer training 101, which is this like pure NGO thing, which is, you know, I guess you could, you could argue it's from like a lens, like from

solid linsky or whatever the fuck. And this, this version about it is, this version is about finding and pressuring quote unquote stakeholders. This is almost completely useless to us. It's largely politically bankrupt and tactically it is simply not going to work, right? Like there is some value in mapping out which specific like legislators and which specific governors are going to like sign bills, right? Yeah.

Like, okay, NGO style pressure campaigns are not going to stop this. This is simply not going to work. And the strategies that people have been employing to sort of stop this, right, which is, you know, relying on our suffering and our pain and relying on medical expertise that doesn't, that doesn't work. It simply does not sway them. It lacks a diversity of tactics. Yeah.

The only language people understand is power. So okay, having said all this, we can strategically use other groups like NGOs or sympathetic lawmakers to do their own pressure campaigns, but that, that, that is not what I'm talking about here. We can leave, we can leave those people in their terrain, they're paid to do it, don't get sucked up into it. But you know, and I will say like, okay, sometimes very strategically, right, like you can, you can show off to people's events and embarrass them because you know who they are and what

they're doing. And that, that, that can be useful sometimes. Like I, I, I, you know, I know shame can be, can be a useful tactic sometimes. Yeah. Like I, I know, I know people who've done union campaigns where like things have turned around when they like showed up to like some NGO person's fundraiser and they're like, hey, you guys aren't paying us. And they're like, and everyone was like, oh my God.

But you know, what, what, what, what are we, what are we actually doing here? And what, what, what, what, what, what I'm specifically talking about is power mapping in the context of direct action and in the context of sort of offensive direct action. And when, when you're thinking about power mapping here, there's two kinds of mappings that are useful. One is physical mapping. And this is something that people don't do enough. I don't know why they don't do this more.

But first of all, one of, one of the things that made the Hong Kong protest work is that Hong Kong had really, really detailed maps, right? There were, you know, they had, they had apps for this that were very, very detailed maps of Hong Kong city streets. They would map where the police were. They would map where the police were moving to. They would map where protesters were. And you know, obviously there are sort of security and tactical considerations to this.

But if we know the terrain better than the police do, we can do a lot of things. This is, this is something that people are successfully employing in the city of Atlanta. Yep. Yep. And anyway, this, this, this is the thing where we have, we actually do have a legitimate advantage in, in, in large cities, which is that like the cops who are in large cities are not from like those, those cities. Right.

You know, and I think, I think we squander this advantage a lot by just like in, in fucking Chicago, there's this one plaza, right? Like pretty close to Trump Tower where every single protest starts. And that's like, it's in the middle of fucking downtown. So I guess people sort of know the way around there, but like, I fucking nobody, like nobody lives there who doesn't make like fucking $700,000 a year, right? Like you're, you're kind of squandering whatever tactical advantage you have. And also, you know, and another sort of, another reason to do mapping and stuff is, is so,

you know, you can, you can plan things out ahead of time, right? You can plan out where your lines of retreat are. You can figure out where choke points are so you don't get kettled, a thing that like I swear to God, no one who arranges the protest in the US fucking ever does. Like I mean, I know some people do it, but like Jesus Christ, you, you can, you can figure out on a map where you're going to get kettled. You can do this. Yeah.

And, you know, and you, you can do other things too with maps, right? You can, you can figure out where the locations are of infrastructure that is particularly vulnerable. You can figure out what roads will cause the maximum amount of server for economic damage if you shut them down. You can figure, you know, you can figure out things like, can you lure the police into places where they can't use their numbers very well, right? Can you spread them out over a hundred different areas and utilize their effectiveness?

And this is the kind of, these are the kind of terms that we need to be thinking about in terms when we're, when we're, when we're physically mapping and physically trying to understand an area, which is that we need to be thinking in very direct tactical terms. We need to figure out what kind of places, you know, and this also, this also works defensively, right? We need to be figuring out, you know, okay, so we have a drag show that's under attack, right? We need to, we need to figure out what kinds of places these people are attacking.

We need to figure out how we can defend them and we need to be thinking again, not, not just like showing up to a place and being like, okay, we're here and these people are across the street, right? Like before that happens and like before a protest starts, before an action starts, there needs to be like work put in to make sure that what we're, that the actions that we're doing are effective, are as effective as possible. So that, that's, that, yeah, that, that, that, that, that, that's one part of this kind of mapping stuff.

If you, if you, if you want more sort of inspiration for this stuff, there's a bunch of, I, oh my god, I'm not forgetting the name of every book, I probably should have actually written the books in here, but there, there, there, you can, some of the, some of the Italian autonomists will talk about this stuff and they have all of these like really wild sort of tactical stuff about like things you could do in a city, like you can mess up stop lights, you can like, I don't know, like they, they, they, they did a lot of stuff with like moving signs around. There's a lot of very weird things in a city that you can do that we don't think about

because we've limited our tactical arsenal to like people show up at a place and yell. Yes, stand, stand outside of a building and yell at the building, end of protest. Yeah. And that, that doesn't work. Like we need to have tactics that are sort of like, that are beyond that. I guess, I guess part of the reason that I'm, I'm starting here is that I want people to like, like go back very much to square one of thinking about what our response needs to be before we start moving because, you know, I like, I'm not, this, this, this is not a

sort of criticism of the people who've been doing track defense, like they've been doing a great job, right? But our standard protest arsenal is not enough. It has not been working and we need, we need to reevaluate what we're doing. It needs to expand and we need to see a better understanding of what diversity of tactics means. I just think that on this particular issue, until fairly recently, our primary threat vector was non-state actors threatening physical violence.

And so the community defense model is actually a very effective response to that threat and has been incredibly effective on numerous times. Now that we are looking at the threat coming from the state in terms of legislative act, legislative action and all that stuff, it does open up a lot more tactical possibility like what you're talking about. And that's cool when people should realize that, yeah, no, I think you're right, we should go back and look from the ground up and like come to new conclusions, new ideas. And I think the other thing of going back to sort of like basics, right, is going back

to the kinds of going, going, going back to changing how we think about the world around us so that we can actually, so that we can more effectively take action and the other kind of thing that we need to do is social mapping. It's figuring out the resources that we have, the resources that they have, where they are, how they function. And this is something that Margaret, you've talked about in your, in your thread about this is very good. Yeah, but one of the things that we need to figure out very quickly is what skills do

we have and what resources do we have? And you know, and this, this expands into a lot of into a lot of different sort of fields, right? Um, you know, there's some of this is sort of territorial, right, like, it's about thinking about like what kinds, like what's physically what spaces are safe for us and which ones aren't and how can we sort of leverage the spaces that we have that are safe and, you know, maneuver in the ones that aren't, how is this changing? There's also something that I, I, I want to sort of think about here, which is this old,

this is all tradition. Do you, do you know what workers inquiry is? I don't know. Okay. So this is, this is a very old Marxist tradition. Um, it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, like Marx was attempting. So the origin of this is Marx was trying to like send out surveys to like workers to figure out what their conditions were.

And people over time took this into more interesting directions of, you know, it turns into a kind of like, like a workers ethnography of, you know, workers sitting down and writing or doing interviews about just literally like what, what their work day is like, what the sort of like labor processes they're involved in are, how does, how does that work? Like who, like how do their bosses work? How are they being managed? How are they resisting them? And you know, and you, there, there, there are other things you can sort of use this

for that are very useful to us, which is, for example, figuring out things like what is the, what does your local economy depend on? What are the sort of important logistics lines in that local economy, you know, who is physically doing the labor that the economy depends on? Who is doing the care labor? Because that's another side of this that gets sort of brushed over a lot. But for example, this, this, this is a large part of why teachers are enormously powerful because teachers are doing a shit ton of care labor that is necessary for the, necessary

for the entire economy to function, but isn't really seen that way, right? And you know, and you, you, you can ask other questions like, you know, what, what, like literally what are the physical conditions under which you and the people around you are working? A lot of the stuff's come to you, like person who works a job, right? There is an advantage that we have as people who do this stuff, which is that we, we will understand the terrain of our own workplaces better than the people who are sitting at the, at the top of the power structure, because we're on the bottom of it, right?

The people who are above us, and this, and this is another thing that that's important about this kind of transphobia is that it's, it's very much an elite thing. This is, I think, especially noticeable in the UK where like you can literally track who is going to be a turf by like what kind of like elite schools they're going to. Okay. But, but, but like literally like if someone goes to eat, like, you know, it's like who goes to eat and right? Like this is, this is the thing.

It tracks who the ruling class is and who, and who is a turf and who's not going to be a turf, right? And then, but this is, this is also true in the US where like, I mean, again, if you look at the media people who are pushing this, it's a bunch of people sitting on like an unbelievable amount of trust fund money and getting a bunch of sort of right wing billionaire money. Yes. So, my experience has been that since Trump's election, the random folks around me have

become substantially less favorable towards me and I think anti-trans stuff is, is popular across class. But I don't know that. I think that's, I think that's true, but I don't think it matters that much because though like, like the ordinary person in your neighborhood who has become transphobic isn't the person who has the capacity to get these laws passed. Okay. That's fair.

The things that they know are not the things that the actual people running these campaigns know. Yeah. Okay. And that, that, that I think is, is what is sort of important about this is that like legislatures, right? Or like, you know, the, the, the, the, the people who are funding, who are funding these campaigns, the people who donate to these, who donate literally, literally donate to

sort of political campaigns, right? These people do not understand what our jobs are. They don't understand what we do. They don't understand how the economy works very well. What the, the, the version of reality that they can see is, is a sort of bureaucratic image of it produced by those abordinates. And you know, that there's a real problem with that, which is that a lot of the time, right, the more powerful a person is, the more likely it is that the version of reality

that they're getting is the version of reality that is just being told to them by the people, by the people below them. And, you know, and, and this, this means that like the, the, the more powerful the people we're dealing with, the less capacity they actually have to understand this. This is true even with four organizations that have like an enormous amount of raw intelligence that, you know, they're sort of spy and surveillance networks have assembled, right? They're, you know, they, they have all this information, but they don't understand it. And they're sort of buried in trying to like, trying and often failing to sort through all

of the information that they have. Yeah, and they try and map it to their worldview, it's how you always end up with like, we found the, like I have a friend who was investigated as the leader of international anarchism. And it took them a really, really long time before they were like, I don't think that's a thing. Yeah. Well, it's like, they don't, they don't understand how our networks work very well because yeah, they have stuff like that.

But this is also true, especially like on the level of the workplace, right? There is a bunch of stuff that we know that cannot be replicated by the people on the top of the org chart. And a lot of that stuff has to do with, we know how to make things stop working in ways that they don't. And that is, that is very sort of useful information to have because if you know how something works, you can make it stop working. And this is, this is the sort of, you know, this is a lot of what the Marxist tradition

sort of was, right? It was an attempt to understand like what workers are doing. The distinction I would make is they were trying to figure out what workers are doing because they were trying to figure out how capitalism works. And I don't care about that enormously. Like that, that's not a thing that actually sort of like, I don't know, whatever, I don't care about whatever esoteric value debates they were having. The decision I would make here is that, you know, the Marxist version of this has its

tendency to collapse knowledge production into just like incredibly bitter and minute debates about Marxism. We are not trying to do that. The thing we're trying to do with our version of this is stop a genocide, right? Our version of inquiry means attack. And when I say, when I'm talking about this kind of stuff, right, I'm talking about, like, you and finding the other people in your workplace who are supportive of this stuff. And, you know, I mean, literally just on like a very, very basic level.

And this is something that you get union organizing, right, is like just figuring out what the fuck they do because like management doesn't know what you do, right? Like I have worked in a lot of places. I have talked to managers a lot. They have no fucking idea what anyone is actually doing. And if you can build up and this is, you know, this is all going, this is all kind of abstract. But if you can figure out how your workplace works and you can figure out how the workplaces of the people around you work and how the workplaces that like actually genuinely matter

to the people who are doing this stuff, you suddenly have leveraged that, you know, that you know, a sort of like traditional protest thing doesn't. And this means for better or for worse, trying to get unions involved. There are upsides and downsides here. The downside is that there just aren't that many unions and there aren't that many people in unions. I also just have like a middling faith in them. Yeah.

They're not. They're working on it. I mean, some of them I'm sure could. And I want to challenge all of them too. And if they do, I will eat my shoe, whatever the saying is, um, so. Yeah. I mean, it is like, they're not going to do unless they're forced to, right? Well, I mean, depending on the, I think some unions do.

Now I'm like suddenly 180 and I mean, like, don't talk shit on unions like that. I don't know. Whatever. Anyway, continue. Okay. So the thing, the other reason that I'm focusing specifically on unions and I'm specifically, I'm focusing a lot on workplace organizing stuff is that, okay. One of the inherent problems of trans organizing is that trans people are not a large enough

minority to enter the most sort of like cynical, like numerically deterministic counts of who matters enough to support, right? Like not yet, right? But as of right now, we're like maybe 2% of the population. Now this will change. It is. It is growing. If the Zuber numbers continue, yeah, we're going to be quite the problem.

I remember marching with my, my first boyfriend in this, this bashback march where we're chanting one in 10 is not enough, and it's just funny cause it's like, it works, there's more of us now. Yeah. And trans are really good at recruiting to LGBT because literally you cannot think I'm cute and be heterosexual. There's no way of making that happen. True.

No, this is like legit, legitimately one of the reasons that I freaking out that I wasn't like a siss hat straight dude was I was dating a non-binary person and I was like, shit, okay. So something happened. There are places where trans people are like enormously overrepresented, right? And there are places where we exist in numbers enough that we actually statistically matter and unions are one of those places because the people, the people who are organizing unions, like trans people are so unbelievably fucking overrepresented in all of that stuff.

And this is, this is as much true of, I mean, okay, so this, this, this is true really especially of any kind of sort of new unionism, like particularly things like grad student unions, right? But it's also true of like, like all, all of the fucking service sector unions that are getting organized. And this has been true for like 20 years. All of the people organizing that, whether they realize it or not are trans. And you know, but this, this means that we actually have leverage there, right?

Because this, this is a part of the economy where if we stop doing our job, shit will actually fall apart, right? Like, you know, actual sort of large scale union campaigns like cannot work without us. And that means that we actually, we have the ability to pressure them into doing shit in a way that's not necessarily true enough. And I'm talking here like specifically about like you, the listener who is trans, which is like statistically, statistically like you, the listener is not trans. If you are, congratulations.

If you're not. I also suspect they are slightly overrepresented in our listener's face. So probably not a majority. Yes. I guess I like, I also want to say that like, I mean, it's funny because the way that defines this allyship is literally just, if you're willing to call yourself sis, you know, because it's like not actually a slur. It's just a description.

It's just a, you know, like the, the not trans word, right? And it's not bad at all. And now that that's a battleground word, it's like pronouns and profile or whatever, you know, it's like, it's actually fairly easy to make it clear where you stand on this kind of issue. And I, I will say, I mean, obviously trans people do a lot of this organizing, but I think that we have a lot, an awful lot of cis people with us. And so you, the cis listener, we also fucking love and respect you because if you've made

it into an hour of us talking about how much this matters, it clearly matters to you too. You know? Yeah. This is probably our like three or whatever the fuck. And both episodes. And soon you won't be allowed to wear pants if you're AFAB. So, you know, this is going to hit everyone. Yeah.

And I think, you know, all of the stuff that I've been saying right about, you know, like another part of this also is literally just like a thing that you can do that is organizing that will help in this stuff is literally just talking to your friends. Yeah. And being like, Hey, here's my eight friends or whatever, here are things. How do you feel about this? You know, and then, and then try and then, you know, using, using this kind of stuff, using this kind of mapping stuff and, you know, using, using what you can learn about

how, you know, this, this, this, this, this part of it has been kind of abstract, but I think intentionally so it's like we are, we are in a place where we need to very rapidly build up capacity for a kind of movements that can actually do things. And I think this is this, this is sort of like the planning phase for that. Yeah. Tracks is. Yeah. And you know, like these are things that are going to have to be created very quickly.

These we are going to have to very quickly figure out, you know, what, what, what levers can be pushed, right? And what one of the things about like the first bathroom bill in North Carolina, right? It didn't get repealed, but it got like amended to be slightly less bad. Yeah. And it got amended to be slightly less bad because the state very quickly ran into trouble with a bunch of corporations who were like, you know, because the initial push that they were like, we're, we're like, okay, we're going to, we're going to pull out of events

in this state. We're going to pull out of like backing your giant, like we're going to pull out of having our giant like fucking sports tournaments here. We're going to pull out of like advertising for like retail stuff. And that got them to sort of like run away very, very quickly, right? And that's been the one big thing they've been actually scared of. And I think this is part of why they've been pushing the sort of like woke, woke corporation, like anti-Disney stuff so hard is that like the kind of backlash that can very quickly

get these people to flip is the kind of backlash that starts actually hurting. If these kinds of bills start hurting their bottom line, these, a lot of these people will flip because a lot of, a lot of even the legislators who are voting for this aren't as hard-lined as the sort of like daily wire people. And if, if their campaign funders are like, hey, you got to fucking turn this around so the economy can go back to normal, like they, they, they will flip on this stuff. Okay. The stuff I was talking about is about things that you can do to begin to mount pressure

campaigns and mountain direct actions. I also wanted to talk about sort of like just survival network stuff because that also was going to be a part of this. And yeah, Margaret, you had a lot of very, very good stuff in a thread that you wrote about this. Yeah. I wrote a thread a week or so ago about all this stuff as I woke up and dooms grilled for a while and, and, you know, and I was just thinking a lot back on, on the organizing

that I know people are doing and stuff like that and trying to put things together. And so some of it's just kind of like tips, right? And I want to say, like again, well, again, to the thread not to something I've said here, I think that we need to focus on what unites us and not what divides us right now. I think that this is not a time for public facing internal conflict. It is not a time for interpersonal conflicts to be aired publicly. I'm not to say that interpersonal conflict doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. We need to, you know, I, I believe mediation is actually one of the most important skills,

actually, frankly. Literally, if you're listening and you have any mediation skills, I think it is the thing that the revolution needs more than anything else off the top of my head. But overall, basically, there's something that MC Sol said, I don't know if it was on a podcast, might have been Twitter a long time ago, and it's really stuck in my head, which is that we need to focus on, we need to deescalate all conflict that isn't with the enemy, which isn't to say that the conflict doesn't happen, is that we need to look how to deescalate it and bring it down in pressure, except when it's with the enemy, like with

someone who's trying to murder all the trans people or someone who's like a white nationalist or whatever, right? We are not looking to deescalate that conflict. We are probably looking to escalate that conflict. We are looking to make it very clear the way in which we are not that person, but, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone else. I have a lot of pet peeves that people who listen to my show are very aware of. Also, this fight will happen on multiple fronts using multiple tactics.

There's this magical phrase, diversity of tactics, and we have to mean it. And diversity of tactics usually means like kind of like, no, you should support my tactic. Like especially if you're like tactic is like riots or something, you know, you often say diversity of tactics, and what you really mean is like my shit rules and your shit sucks. We actually have to straight up mean it. We need to support the people who are focused in legislative action, even though it's not where we are strong, it is a place that is needs to be shored up. We need to focus.

We need to support the people who focus on community defense. We need to focus. We need to support the people who are doing illegal things. We need to support the people who are doing organizing in all kinds of different ways. And if we build organizations that accept diversity of tactics and don't expect to have a sort of hegemony over the movement, we can create a very strong movement. Most of my personal infighting is with people who do want to have a hegemony over a movement. And so you get, I fall into this like trap where I'm like, how do we fucking, anyway,

whatever. Okay. Other things that people can do, if you are not visibly LGBT and you feel like it is safe to do so, or you feel like it is dangerous to do so, and you're willing to be a little bit fucking dangerous because we aren't complicated fucking times, be publicly clear that you support LGBT, whatever, us. And like the day that I wrote this. The clears.

Yeah. Like the day that I wrote this, I live in West Virginia, I go to Lowe's and I'm having a bad day. I'm like, fuck. I'm like, at what point is it going to be a crime for me to go to Lowe's, right? And the guy, just the fucking metalhead guy who seemed kind of like super masculine metal guy, tattoos, and he had his fucking like trans ally support pin on. And if we were in like a big major city, it might have almost seemed like cringy because

it said like ally or whatever on it, right? And I'm fucking over worrying about what's cringy. I'm like, no, thank you. I went up and I thanked him, right? Because it like fucking helped my day. And that kind of shit is going to matter because it is now actually a fairly dangerous thing in some places to be visibly in support of us. And I absolutely appreciate the people who are doing it.

And another thing that we need to support, this is the kind of thing that you've talked a little bit about is that, okay, we need to have support networks. We need to have networks that are protecting trans people, families that are leaving environments. There's so many families that want to leave these states where their child is no longer safe, will be forced to detransition, will not be allowed to transition. There are trans parents in Florida who might be at risk of losing their children, all of these things. People are going to want to move.

We need to support people materially who are trying to move. And there will be organizations that are doing this. If they don't exist yet, you can start them. And if you wait for them to start, that's also sometimes okay. If your plate is full, you can support those organizations in a lot of different ways. We can also support and not shame people who choose to live in red states as a like as a red state trans person. And I think about this a lot about like, because like I'm not planning on moving, right?

You know, it helps that I'm an adult, I'm like settled, whatever, like my mental health is strong, you know, but I'm not planning on going anywhere. And that's why we can't give up these spaces, right? I think that one of the things I kind of mentioned earlier, but is that like, we're not in normal times. We need to take this seriously. We also need to not assume that all this is a foregone conclusion. We need to not assume that this will go down like Nazi Germany.

However, we need to be aware that it might and we need everyone. This is not a trans people thing. This is an everyone thing. We need to think about what that actually means. You know, there's that cliche that is true right now that is like, if you want to know what you have been doing in Germany in 1933, it's what you're doing right now. And like, that's true. This is a time for us to be the kind of person that we want to be.

We are in dangerous and complicated times and it is times that we need to be brave and we need to be brave for each other. Bravery is not the absence of fear. Bravery is doing things despite fear. Bravery is the presence of courage, not the lack of awareness that things are scary and bad. Yes. And that's kind of like my main thing is I want us to not panic, right?

To not assume that we're going to lose, to realize that they are acting this way because they're on their back foot. This was always going to happen in the fact that in a way, we kind of started this fight by like existing and like coming out of the closet and shit. But we basically were like, no, we're allowed to be here and most people were like, yeah, okay, I guess that tracks. I guess you're allowed to be here. And then some small portion were like, these are demons from hell sent to rip the tits

off of the children I'd like to marry. The freaks like Matt Walsh are the ones who declared a quote unquote war on trans people. Right. Because we were coming for their way of life. Not their way of life in terms of like heterosexual marriage. That gets to still exist. That's fine. But compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory cis sexuality is the thing that we are coming

for and their way of life is hegemony. Their way of life is being the only force of power. And so yeah, I guess the other stuff is that we just, okay, what would you do in Nazi Germany? What's what you're doing right now and you should think about what skills you have and how they apply to different things. And then the kind of final point to a lot of this is a specific issue and it's a pet issue of mine and that could be completely wrong. I have a lot of bias about this, but I would fucking love it if liberals would shut the

fuck up about guns right now. It is very hard for me to find a state that is not either in the process of trying to tell me that I can't wear a dress or find a state that is trying to tell me that I can't carry the means to protect myself from the violent bigots who want to kill me because I wear a dress. It is incredibly hard to find states that are not pushing in one of those directions or another. And it is embarrassing.

It is embarrassing that this of all times is the time that liberals are focusing so hard on gun issues, which is a culture war bullshit thing for them. They don't fucking care. They didn't fucking care about abortion. They just want your fucking votes. And we are probably entering a very bad and hard time. However, we can do it. We have done it in the past.

In my reading of history, it basically is this cycle. I kind of don't quite believe in like a forward progress. Everything gets better. Things ebb and flow. And however, we will survive this, not necessarily all of us as individuals, probably, probably there won't be like large numbers of killings as a result of this, but it is possible, right? But it is impossible to stamp out homosexuality. It is impossible to stamp out transsexuality.

We have always been here. We will always be here. And so, yeah, to quote my final quote in that particular thread, I definitely went off thread, but we need to find each other. We need to stop fighting with each other about bullshit. We need to defend each other. We need to be brave. And then I will cite the anarchist prayer, which is that I ask not to be safe from my

enemies, but dangerous to them because, all right, this is what we're fucking doing. And like, we all want to be safe, but that's not something that we're guaranteed. What we are guaranteed is that we can choose how to handle the situation that we're in. And then almost done, almost done. You talked earlier about what we owe the dead. I really liked your way of phrasing that. I really liked a lot of what you were talking about, about all of that. And one thing that I think about when talking about like the Catholic church and shit, right?

One thing that I owe the dead is I owe Sister Dominic, a Catholic nun, to not fucking go back into the closet because when my cousin came out as trans, this woman who is literally married to God, she died a couple years ago, maybe 10 years ago now, before I came out. But my cousin came out before me because it's a contagion because we were always fucking trans and she was completely supportive, completely and immediately in my like, you know, and just this is a woman who dedicated her entire life to, well, to God and saw literally no problem was the most immediately accepting person immediately said, you know, I bet she's always felt that way.

And so I personally owe it to her to tell these Catholics to shut the fuck up because fucking Jesus's wife says it's fine, fuck you. That's what I got. Thank you, Margaret. Yeah. That was fantastic. Where can people find you and some of your other work across the web? Yeah.

I just finished a four part series on Stonewall and the stuff that came before Stonewall, the riots that kind of brought us this movement and how it was all different types of queers and even some hat people working together to bring us as far as we've gotten. And you can find that on my podcast, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. It's with, It Could Happen Here, host Shareen as my guest. And you can also find me talking about The End of the World on Live Like the World is Dying is another podcast that I'm a co-host of. And my most recent book is called Escape from Incel Island, and it is not nonfiction.

It is not something about how people should get better. It's literally about someone with a shotgun who lands on an island full of incels and has to get out alive. Fantastic. Well, thank you for listening through all the way if you are still here. Hopefully you've learned something interesting across these two pretty heavy episodes. We will see you on the other side. What's up y'all, this is Questlove, and you know, at QLS I get to hang out with my friends.

Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpick Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme like to nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives. People that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down rabbit holes. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Questlove Supreme! What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told

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