Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Phyllis Schlafly: The Mother of all Culture Wars

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Robert is joined agin by Teresa Lee to continue discussing Phyllis Schlafly. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I said to do better than the first part. I don't even know what I was just trying to rhyme something with abortion. I don't know what I'm doing anymore, Sophie. What are we all here for?

We're here for part two of your podcast behind the bastard. That doesn't seem right. You're the host. Your name is Robert Evans. And your guest today is the magnificent, wonderful, fantastic, incredibly talented Teresa Lee. Teresa, what would you rhyme with abortion? Let me see. Open the dorsion. It's time for a portion of abortion. Oh, that was so much better. All right. Well, we're still talking about Phyllis Schlafly, who was not a fan of abortion and would not have enjoyed our having yucks about the name abortion. Not the concept, just the word and trying to rhyme it with things.

You have to use a lot of contortions to rhyme with abort. As a fan of poetry and fucking on books, I would think she would love rhymes. But I guess you have to listen to the first episode to know that callback. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we're talking about Goldwater and Rockefeller going against each other in the 64 Republican primaries, right? And how like this is a battle for the soul of the Republican Party because LBJ is obviously going to win the election. Phyllis could see that like something was. That was so nice of you, Robert, to say that there was a soul. Yeah. Everything has a Hitler had a soul, Sophie.

Oh, he definitely had a soul. If you'd seen him dance, you'd know that. Oh, gosh. Strange image from my mental space. For some reason, I pictured him break dancing and it was enjoyable. No, that's the only kind of dancing Hitler got up to. It was just like he actually invented break dancing. Like he actually he had a couple of years on the streets in Harlem teaching.

I don't know where I'm going with any of this. I feel like if he danced more, he would have been happier from the start. I don't think most people are not dancing as much. I do think that dancing is broadly good for you. But I also think that hateful people get really into like hateful dances, like where everybody is like all tense and like right up against each other. Like the like skinhead punky music scene. No, no, no, like the fucking like the like gone with the wind dances,

like the kind of dances rich old southern people slow walking to cello. Yeah, yeah. And just for the record, Hitler actually hated dancing and refused to dance because it made him he felt awkward about his body. So you're right about that. I was just being an asshole for no reason. Let's talk about Goldwater. Speaking of Hitler, let's talk about Barry Goldwater.

So Goldwater and Rockefeller's primary battle is like neck and neck right up to the California primaries. And that was kind of the thing that was going to determine who won this battle. And so this is kind of where Phyllis Schlafly comes in with a ground breaking piece of propaganda. She writes a book called A Choice, Not an Echo. And this was like a pro Goldwater argument. But more than that,

it was it was essentially a conspiracy theory about how the Republican primary was being stolen by king makers within the party who were eastern elites. Yes. And that, yeah, yeah, this is, you know, you know how like in 2016, like Trump supporters talk about Republicans in name only the rhinos, right? How like you've got this, the real party who supports Trump. And then you've got these Republicans in name only who are trying to force their own like corporatist candidates on us.

This is the first time anyone starts talking about that Phyllis Schlafly starts that that line of like propaganda back in 1964. The idea that there's these eastern elites in the party that are fighting against the real Republican party. Whenever someone comes up with a conspiracy theory, they're usually the like the ones doing the conspiring. Like it sounds like these are because it's like the idea that anybody wants to win, that's not a conspiracy.

Like, yeah, it's an election. People want to win. That's people made that clear. But then when you're secretly adding weird facts that aren't true, that's a conspiracy and you're doing that Phyllis. Yeah. And it's well, I mean, yeah, because she's literally a part of this conspiracy to take over the Republican party in the government. Yeah. So she writes this book about how Goldwater is not just a great

candidate, but that there's this like conspiracy within the Republican party to stop him from becoming the candidate. And it is extremely successful. A choice not an echo sells nearly three million copies and went on to hugely influence the California primary and the election. It's generally seen as being a big part of what delivered Goldwater a surprise victory over Rockefeller. And Phyllis for the rest of her life will brag that she self publishes this

book out of her garage and that it just becomes this massive hit that she she just does all by her little old self. And she was adamant that her whole operation was just the result of one mother who cared, you know, writing as a side project while she raised her kids. Because again, this whole period, well, she is a full time, a hard-nosed political operative. She has to lie to everybody on her side and claim that like it's just sort of

a thing she does after tucking the kids in at night. Because you can't have a woman that actually have her career be the center of her life, which it is for Phyllis. But she has to lie about it. She's like the first EL James. Isn't she the woman who wrote 50 Shades of Grey out of her? Like, I mean, not a garage out of her room or whatever. Self published.

Yeah, except for I think EL James actually did self publish her terrible book and Phyllis Schlafly is lying about self publishing her book. So she later told the New York Times quote, 1964 was the most productive year of my life. I was running the Illinois Federation of Republican women. I wrote a choice, not an echo. I self published it. I went to the Republican convention, wrote a second book, The Gravediggers.

Now we're in September. I was giving speeches for Barry Goldwater in a November I had a baby. So she like, this is how she frames her year. And she's she's sort of again, this weird kind of thing in Phyllis where she's clearly very proud about how much she does. But she also has to emphasize as she does in a little bit here, like how she was this was all sort of secondary to her job as a as a as a mother. Like she wasn't she wasn't a mother with a career or she wasn't like she

didn't she doesn't want to be seen as a working mom because she thinks that's evil, even though that's exactly what she is. I'm going to quote now from a town and country magazine write up that summarizes kind of like how Phyllis frames her career during this period. Even as she was traveling across the country to lobby leaders, organize her coalition, give speeches and at one point simultaneously pursue a law degree. Schlafly dismissed her political career as a hobby, a secondary

pursuit to her obligations at home with her six children. I was never gone overnight. She later told the Times reiterating that line of defense. I drive out to give a speech and sometimes I'd bring a nursing baby with me. There was always someone outside willing to take care of a baby rather than listen to a long lecture. So this was a savvy way for Schlafly to frame her activism. Like the moral conservatives that she was courting would didn't like the idea

of women usurping traditional male role models, but they did like the idea of like a young mother self publishing a political treatise about conservatism and how good it was for moms, you know, to be women to be homemakers instead of have careers. They like that idea of her like doing that in between breastfeedings and like that she was able to sounds like a bad like her saying that she gave her baby to someone standing outside that that's like what happens at auditions when you see like people bring their baby, which is fine because it's like you

got to go in for like 10 minutes or whatever. But I'm like that you're describing exactly what being a working mother is like, like if you if you really weren't, then you just be at home. So she's advocating that women shouldn't do this while doing it. And she has to kind of lie about the extent to which she has to frame it as like a hobby, even though like, no, Phyllis, this was your full time fucking job. Like you had a full time job and kids and that's fine. But you hate that for everyone else because you're a giant hypocrite.

But so the only kind of way to sell this to Republicans without her being sort of suspect and a liberated woman is to kind of make it look like she was just kind of this homespun mom who's writing this. But wrote right this book on her free time and, you know, oh, surprisingly, it sells huge and she does it out of her garage. And it's kind of evidence of how like the little guy, these like little conservatives, we don't need the big corrupt publishing industry. And of course, again, this is all a lie.

The reality of the situation is that the John Birch Society bought like three million copies of this book to distribute it for free. And they handled the publication. The publishing house that Phyllis Laughley claims she created to publish it out was just a front company like there were real publishers that the John Birch Society went to and contracted with. They would sometimes order 500,000 copies at a time of propaganda, right? Because it's distributed for free.

It's not selling. Yes, it was number one. All of the sales pretty much came from the John Birch Society buying them to hand these out for free. Sounds like a communism handout. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. Giving money to then give it to other people for free.

Communism. She has to frame this as like, I was just this, this, this plucky little outsider, like in my free time, putting together this book about the things I believed and so many other people believe it that it took off. And the reality is like, no, no, no, you were part of a, she was part, she was the head of a multimillion dollar propaganda campaign by the John Birch Society. And they are the reason this book sold three million copies because they bought like three million copies.

This is what Hillsdale does. Yeah, it's what they all do. They send out so many fundraising emails. I signed up like with a fake email to get them and then they send you free newsletters for the rest of your life. I mean, I didn't get the newsletters, but the whole idea is that if you donate, we'll give out free newsletters to everyone. So you're basically paying for propaganda, which is communism.

Yeah. It's just within their own ranks of communism. Yeah, it's, it's, it's very silly. I mean, it's not silly. It's like this horrible, dangerous propaganda network that's just getting started at this point. This is like the birth of that mass, this massive right wing propaganda. Like the thing that like Ben Shapiro and the fucking turning point USA kids and

like all of these different sort of like Breitbart news, all these different kind of like right wing news and media organizations are part of today. This massive like dark funding network of right wing propaganda is getting off the ground now and Phyllis Schlafly is like its first big success. Now these books, obviously again, we're not being bought by curious readers. Like they were being bought in mass to be handed out and she was, you know, Schlafly's book was just kind of the most successful part of this wave of hard right propaganda that starts being distributed by the John Birch society at

this point. Some of it attacked LBJ. There were other books that obsessed over communist infiltration, but Schlafly's work would go on to have the longest influence because Goldwater secured the nomination at the party's National Convention in July near San Francisco. Goldwater delegates booed Nelson Rockefeller so loudly that he could barely give his concession speech. The same delegates who'd screamed moments earlier cheered when Goldwater

gave his speech, which included the famous declaration that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. This is like Goldwater's speech at the 1964 San Francisco Convention is like a straight up fascist rally. And one of the reporters who's actually there to hear it live was a young Hunter S. Thompson. And he wrote my favorite description of this. I remember feeling genuinely frightened at the violent reaction to that line

that Goldwater said as the human thunder kept building, they mounted their metal chairs and began howling, shaking their fists at Huntley and Brinkley up in the NBC booth. And finally they began picking up those chairs with both hands and bashing them against chairs other delegates were still standing on. It's this like unhinged hatred of the media, hatred of, you know, the party elites, this like the thing that's been at the core of the Republican party ever since that like Trump kind of let loose again, that the respectable

people in the party have always tried to keep locked up. It starts to break out for the first time under Goldwater. And of course, Goldwater was electorally doomed. There were not enough people who believed this and who were willing to admit to being this kind of person in 1964. LBJ actually delivered what's probably the greatest pantsing in the history of national politics. Like no one since has ever lost as badly as Goldwater lost.

Like it is, he is torn apart in this election. And the Republican party just is beaten into the ground. At least that's how it looks from the outside. The reality is that this kind of had more to do with LBJ's strength than a weakness in Goldwater's strategy. And I think that becomes clear like later on. But at the time people like assume, oh, this is, there's a lot of assumptions on the left that like, oh, like the frothing anti-communist wing

of the Republican party lost, like this will, they're going to turn to more reasonable politics now. And that's not what happens as Politico, or as a writeup I found in Politico notes, quote, from Goldwater's insurgency on where the die was cast and the GOP has never returned to a moderate platform. Goldwater's base was in the south and west where his vote against the Civil Rights Act and in favor of states' rights endeared him to a white electorate. And on the whole, Goldwater's geographic and demographic coalition

has endured within the GOP. Democrats owe a debt of gratitude to Goldwater for creating a near consensus among African Americans for their party. Until 1964, presidential nominees from the party of Lincoln would often receive up to a third of the black vote. Goldwater dipped to an estimated 4% of black supporters. And in the 50 years since, the most a GOP nominee could hope for was about 10% of African American votes.

So that's where this all starts with Goldwater. He builds, like, he launches the GOP, his candidacy does, on the path that it's still on today and on the electoral path that it's still on today. And a number of Republican voices at the time thought that Goldwater's defeat was proof that Nixon and Rockefeller had been right to try to open the party up, but Phyllis Schlafly was not convinced of this. And neither were a whole lot of other anti-communist Christian extremists who felt the increasingly liberal culture of the United States

was stealing their children and country from them. The Goldwater campaign was the activation point for a lot of folks who'd become major figures in what people eventually called the new right. Paul Wayrich worked on the campaign, along with Howard Phillips and Richard Vigory, three of the men who later joined with Jerry Falwell to start the moral majority. Falwell and his crew get a lot of credit for birthing the religious right and launching the culture war that's currently, you know, our entire lives. And it's true that they were, like, kind of the faces of this

and the people who, you know, created the term moral majority, but they were really just cripping from Phyllis Schlafly's moral conservatives in 1960, which was the first organized gasp of this sort of thing. Now, after Goldwater's defeat, men like Wayrich and Falwell, kind of like the facemen of the new Republican party, tended to ignore Phyllis Schlafly. They saw her as a once useful propaganda tool that was, like, consigned to the past now. And for a while, Schlafly herself seemed to even believe this.

And as the story goes, it was her husband, Fred, who first suggested what would become her next crusade after Goldwater's failure, stopping the Equal Rights Amendment. Now, if you happen to be a reasonable person and not like a screeching demon, the ERA is pretty much the least offensive amendment you can imagine. It just states, quote, equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any by any state on account of sex, right? Hard to, hard to argue with that.

And nobody seemed to want to argue it when it was first proposed in March of 1972. It was very broadly popular. A lot of Republicans liked it. It was, it was just kind of like, oh, we're saying this, like, and it was seen as kind of more of like a symbolic vote is like, oh, we should announce openly that like we as the United States don't like gender discrimination. That's all that was going on to the ERA. Now, because it was an amendment, though,

it needed to be approved by both the House and the Senate, which it was in March of 1972. So very bipartisan gets through the House and Senate. And then it needed to be sent to the states for ratification. 38 states would have had to ratify the ERA for it to become law. And this seemed easy to do at first. 30 state legislators ratified the ERA during 1972 alone. So they get almost to the finish line in the first year that this thing's on the voting docket.

Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter all supported it. It should have been like a moment of bipartisan achievement. But Phyllis Schlafly decided to declare war on the Equal Rights Amendment. And I'm going to quote now from a write up on her in Town and Country magazine, quote, when she first heard that the Equal Rights Amendment was being debated in Congress, she told her biographer Carol Pheasanthal, shafely thought of it as something between innocuous and mildly helpful. But after a friend asked her to debate a feminist on the ERA at the end of 1971,

she changed her mind. In October of 1972, she founded Stop ERA, an acronym for, and this is a terrible acronym, Stop Taking Our Privileges. Wait, stop your... Yeah, the word stop is in the acronym. It's terrible. Oh, no. The acronym would just stop. I hate it. The whole thing is like, I mean, there's so many layers.

Like the fact that she's debating a feminist and there's two women debating like that by itself is pretty feminist. And then also just like her, like, I don't know. I'm also sensing, I think it's, I'm getting a different read because I heard about our trauma talk in our last episode that I'm feeling like she's still evil, but I also sense she's doing this out of survival. Like when she was getting kicked out of this, you know, like losing relevancy, she was like, well, they'll need a woman at the front of this because a man can't say this

because it's more weaponized if a woman is anti-feminist. Yet she's hurting herself because if she just got on board, she could just have everything with feminism. I don't know. Which is very similar to the character Robert was talking about in Handmaid's Tale, actually, with what you just said. Well, even what Robert said about the bipartisanship of ERA reminds me so much of coronavirus. Like when it came out, it's like, this is not an partisan issue.

We're all just going to handle this like people who want to live. And then all of a sudden it was like, DJ scratch, now it's partisan. What? Since when did living become partisan? Yeah, so... Too sad. It's a bummer. She becomes the chairwoman of Stop ERA and she taps into this network of women. So in creating this, she has this network of women she's built.

So first off, she distributed this book to a bunch of people that built her a fan base and she started a newsletter after that, which is kind of the way as a conservative at this point that you build a political coalition because you get all these hundreds of thousands of people in your newsletter and then you can get them to buy books, you can get them to vote on, like you can organize them as like a donate, mainly you can get them to donate money. So this is kind of how she starts this coalition. And she founds a group, first she found Stop ERA

and then she founds a group called the Eagle Forum, which is like this right wing advocacy organization that is formed around Phyllis Schlafly basically coaching stay-at-home moms to become activists to stop the ERA. So she's trying to organize all of these like conservative religious housewives into a political coalition. She described her recruits in the Atlantic as quote, housewives who didn't even know where their state capital was

and Schlafly instructed them in everything from how to speak to the press and run phone banks to how to dress and smile for the camera. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled on Roe vs. Wade, which made reproductive health care safer for a lot of Americans and also gave all of these like gave Phyllis Schlafly basically a dose of fucking rocket fuel because now the religious rights starts getting like really like, there's a lot going on here at once, which is that you have this equal rights amendment,

which doesn't start out as being controversial, but Schlafly is able to convince a bunch of like Christian housewives, this is going to destroy like the traditional family and take your privileges. And at the same time, like abortion becomes legal, so she weaves it into like that. This ERA is part of this like push and like it's going to make, you know, abortion more common too. She kind of keeps grabbing these different things that are too religious conservative, scary about the 1970s and weaving them all together into this like one gigantic fight. And it's this thing where like she kind of backsides the traditional Republican Party at this point.

So like in 1977, Gerald Ford's wife backs the ERA at the National Women's Conference. In the National Women's Conference of 1977, like one of the conference's goals was taxpayer funded daycare for all children, which Gerald Ford's wife, like the president's wife is a big supporter of. So like the Republican Party structure is like willing to talk about these things that like are very socialist policies at this point. And Schlafly is the person who like calls that straight up communism. And she starts, she organizes these, all these hundreds of thousands of like conservative homemakers

to make this their war, to make like stopping any of this stuff like the crusade that they embark upon. We talked in the Falwell episodes about how like once upon a time abortion was a non-issue for American evangelicals. Like a lot of American right-wingers and evangelicals used to be pro-abortion back in like the 60s and early 70s. And Schlafly gets a lot of credit for making it into a political like culture war issue. And that's kind of like what she's doing in this period. She's taking all of these things that were kind of bipartisan that are now even today, like the idea of like, oh, we should have a national daycare program that used to not be a partisan issue. A lot of conservatives used to support that issue.

Schlafly turns it into like, if you support that, you support communism. Abortion used to not be a big political issue. Schlafly starts organizing and propagandizing to make it into one. She's just creating culture wars. That's Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970s. She's helping to be the midwife to all of these culture wars that are still with us today. Well, she's kind of pushing people into this corner. Yeah, we hadn't been divided about this stuff.

Yeah, you're right. She's pushing people into this corner to where like, you can't debate about this. You can't come to an agreement about this. You can't meet each other in the middle. This is something that we fight over forever now. Right, because there's people who, for religious reasons, will always be on one side, and she forces an entire party to only represent that side, and then forcing the other party to take the other side,

which means that if you fall anywhere in the middle on any other issues, but that's the one thing you won't budge on, you have to join that party, whether or not economically or anything else makes sense for you. Yes, and also she convinces in her propaganda pushes a lot of pushes a lot of people to who push a lot of religious conservatives who hadn't been against abortion to consider that like a key issue for them. Like, again, there'd been a lot of like a decent amount of like evangelicals

who had been OK with with at least some abortions prior to this. And she shuts that shit down. She's a huge part of this becoming a black and white, no compromise. We're just going to fight about this till the heat death of the universe issue. And that's her goal is to make as many of those issues as possible because they create a durable coalition. You can't have coalition switch like they did with the Republican and Democratic Party. They switched in like the early around like civil rights and stuff.

You cannot have your coalition switch. People will not leave your coalition if you convince them that the only thing on the other side is the devil. And like that's Phyllis Schlafly's goal is to create culture wars that cannot be resolved because it means that the Republican Party has a durable electorate to to represent it. And I want to quote there's a woman named Tanya Melik and Melik is generally considered to be one of the founders

of like the modern women's political movement. She was one of the first like women in like mainstream American politics in a big way. She helped organize a bunch of like different kind of grassroots things. And she was she was a conservative activist for most of her career who kind of turned around at a later date and came to regret some of what she'd done. And she was a contemporary of Phyllis's and she watched all of this happen. And so she kind of she's a good she's a good person to go to for like a description of like what Phyllis Schlafly is building

during this period of the early 1970s. Quote it was Schlafly with her authoritarian leadership and expert grassroots organizing who made the religious right a political player. It was Schlafly first of the Goldwater and then of the new right team who unearthed the political gold of misogyny. It was Schlafly who translated fear of women's liberation into a political force in the Republican Party and thereby extended the foundation of the Republican Southern strategy.

Now not only did the strategy flourish on the backlash of the civil rights movement but it was broadened to include a backlash against the women's movement too. Melik claims that Schlafly's tactics were consciously modeled on the moral panic and the fear mongering that right wingers had tried to ignite during the battle over desegregation. A number of the evangelical leaders who made up the moral majority had wound up in expensive battles with the IRS over whether or not they had to desegregate their whites on the religious schools.

We talk about this in the Jerry Falwell episodes. And that's what Falwell and Weyrich had launched the moral majority to fight against school integration. And they'd had some success in like getting a dedicated base of evangelical extremists together but segregation was actually really unpopular. So their initial plan for the moral majority doesn't work out. And by the early 1970s it becomes clear to them to Falwell and Weyrich that they were backing the wrong horse and they start looking for new ideas

as part of their plan to build a new political coalition that in Weyrich's words would be defined by us conservatives in moral terms packaged in non-religious language and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition. So he's trying to basically take religious conservatism, package it in non-religious language and push it on the entire country. And he's looking for a way to do that. And he realizes that while he and Falwell have been fucking around with anti-segregation

Phyllis Schlafly has figured out how to build this coalition on her own in the stop ERA fight. Like she's put together the thing that Falwell wanted to make in the first place. And so like while Falwell is the guy and Weyrich get like the credit for starting the moral majority Phyllis is the one who figures out how to make it work as an electoral coalition. She figures out how to actually find people for this shit. And she does it in a variety of ways. Not just by stoking like she stokes fears about how you know the ERA is going to like

change the nature of relationships between women and men and destroy housewives. She also brings up fears about gay people. She starts to claim that since religious schools have been forced to desegregate the ERA would mean forced gay marriage. So she's again forced gay marriage. She's the first person in an organized way to try to build a coalition around the fear that religious like churches will be forced to marry gay people if gay people get civil rights. Like that's Phyllis Schlafly's invention too.

That shit was with us in the early 2000s. Like I grew up in that shit. That partial birth abortion was a term coined by this group. Was she part of that? I'm sure she had a role in it. I don't know about that specifically. Like they'll reframe things that sound so much like forced any marriage forced marriage by itself sounds bad. You know like yeah like then you're adding all these fears that people have like forced by itself sounds bad forced anything forced lunch.

I'm like I don't know. But it's interesting and like normally when people talk about forced marriage they're talking about like people being forced into marriages. She's talking about that Christians will be forced to recognize gay marriages. Robert you know what won't force you into marriage. I don't know. Oh no no our products and services pick a romantic partner for life for every single one of our listeners. Oh great. My dad will be thrilled for me.

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But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. So yeah we're back. So Schlafly is the first person in like a really organized way to kind of to start propagandizing over the fear of like that churches are going to be forced to conduct gay marriages. Like she brings that into the public. These are all things that are still with us. She's also one of the first people in the first person ending in like an organized way to raise an alarm about unisex bathrooms.

And how like and this idea like she starts trying to freak conservatives out with this idea that like men are going to be using women's rooms and women are going to be using men's rooms and like think of what that will do to your kids. Like again the shit that's with us today in 2020 Schlafly is the person who ignites this fucking culture war consciously. I have a dumb theory that because it's a lot of these rich rich out of touch people that because every most bathrooms in pretty middle class homes are unisex. But I feel like because she grew up in a mansion it's like maybe she just doesn't like sharing bathrooms at all. Like maybe her whole thing is like I cannot believe that someone else a person another person man or woman will be in my bathroom because it's like yeah. Most of the family bathrooms are unisex like I've never been in a home actually never been in a home that separates men and women. Yes but you know you know all of your family members and clearly we're all at more threat from like random strangers even though usually when people are sexually assaulted. Yeah it's dumb.

She again all she does in the 1970s and like early 80s she's just starting culture wars left and right she's a fucking culture arsonist. So she gets everybody like freaking out about bathrooms and women using men's rooms and men using women's rooms and she also gets people lathered up over the possibility that the ERA would lead to women getting sent into combat. So this is like one of her like propaganda lines is that like if we pass the Equal Rights Amendment women will be draftable and then suddenly you'll have women fighting in battle and thankfully like most of the culture wars that she started we're still fighting today. You'll still you'll hear bits about this here and there but like for the most part nobody whines about this one anymore because I guess we've all gotten okay with women getting shot to death. That one's one I would say sometimes you get lost in the binary of these arguments because if I were to break down her emotions and just look at facts I'm like oh in a real debate that's actually a valid point to bring up we can explore because that could be a real fear. And if we're moving towards a place where women and men are you know considered equal which they should be and you're afraid to get drafted well then that there is something to explore there. But really the problem is maybe more with a draft in general of you know it's not really this idea that men and women are equal is this idea that you're afraid of the draft and you thought you were safe so maybe you don't like the draft. Yeah it's she's finding as many ways as possible like she again she's building a coalition and so like it's this mix of like stoking fear and stoking anger.

And Schlafly's work what makes it so groundbreaking is that she found a way to get a whole shit little white ladies to fight actively against their own interests and political rights rather than like this was an amendment that would have given them legal equality. And she convinced them that instead it was going to take away their right to be supported and protected by men. She even created a political lobbying group like the Eagle Forum she described as the alternative to women's lib and she told her followers I think the main goal of the feminist movement was the status degradation of the full time homemaker. So she take what's actually going on here is that people are trying to guarantee and enshrine in law the equality of women and she convinces them no no no if you're a homemaker and a wife. These people hate you and they're trying to destroy your ability like your existence that's what's happening here they want to take this away from you they want to take your family from you. That's the argument she's able to convince these people of she's she's not afraid of shit she is doing all of this because she she's an anti communist like extremist and once the Republican Party to be in power so that it can build all of the nukes in the world and she recognizes that the best way to get and keep power in the party is to unite all these people and that's why she's doing all this propagandizing more than anything she wants to to unite the because like her whole life is is an argument against everything that she actually rallies for right like she's an extremely liberated woman. Well that's why I felt like she's trying to she's actually trying to keep people down. I agree with her wanting power and uniting people but it's like a false flag.

It feels like she wants to keep like take power away from the people who have to follow her because if any of us if any of these women actually get powerful then they may they may change their mind or like you know fight against her or take her place. I think she wants to keep them down while making them feel protected. Yeah and gathering like that's the thing that she's able to do that's so impressive is like so she's both convinces these women that like feminists and whatnot are coming to take their ability their right to be protected by their husband and she's able to garner the support of religious men by appealing to their sense of Christian chivalry. Schlafly's Eagle Form sent out letters to legislators which complained that women lawyers women legislators and women executives feminists were all trying to make simple homemakers and housewives and the letter ended with a note we the wives and working women need you dear senators and representatives to protect us. So she's she's both able to kind of like find and like pull on this fear that these conservative homemakers have these women have over like their place being usurped and kind of the you know the history moving beyond them and she's able to like tug at the sense in these like very conservative men that like you need to protect these women from this this feminist conspiracy is one of the most brilliant pieces of political maneuvering in history Schlafly acting more or less on her own intuition is responsible for building much of what became the religious right with her bare hands like all of these groups this isn't been a coalition before and she's one of the she's one of the ground level workers who's kind of putting it together. Ilsa Hogue who's the former president of narrow which is like our big pro choice organization in the United States and a lifelong opponent of Schlafly wrote a book called the lie that minds that includes really trenchant analysis of the voting block that Phyllis helped to create was kind of like the key figure in creating quote the women involved were overwhelmingly white church going and from the rural and suburban middle

and upper class by definition they had privileges to lose benefiting by association with the white male Christian power structure. These women quickly embraced Schlafly's core message that the push for equality would erase legal differences between women and women they even bought her more tenuous message that the era would lead to support horrors like homosexual marriage unisex bathrooms or women in combat soon she had activated a grassroots army to zealously fight to maintain their privilege at the expense of other women's political social and economic equity. They cast these other women often unmarried single moms gay women and women of color as deserving of shame because of their life choices which sounds familiar because it's where we are today. We never move on from Phyllis Schlafly where can I sign up I want to join this party sounds fun belatedly way rich and fall well of the moral majority realize that like Phyllis has done what they were trying and kind of like failing to do and they quickly moved to rebrand the religious right and do it in the image of the coalition that Phyllis had built Ilsa Hogue continues in her book quote they didn't dwell on the differences between her public facing messages about gender equality when still centered on religious freedom and school segregation they saw the harmony in their ideology and narratives both factions after all were warning their audiences that the new buzzwords of equality whether they were applied to black people gay people or women were tantamount to attacking your family your way of life your privilege status the movement architects had a clear target for this message they had no viable path to gain political dominance with zero support from women given the racist underpinnings of the movement that needed that meant they needed a good portion of white women evangelical white women were already prime since many of them had been involved in the fight against desegregation

white women had always been critical in driving a lot of the behind the scenes organizing of the white supremacist movement a political platform of family autonomy and parental rights a kind of white supremacist maternalism is how Elizabeth Gillespie McRae described this grassroots movement in her book Mothers of Massive Resistance white women in the politics of white supremacy and that's an important term white supremacist maternalism which is like it's it's it's it's charanism right it's like it's it's white suburban moms and their hatred of everything that isn't white sub their hatred and fear of everything that isn't white suburban moms that's white supremacist maternalism that is what Phyllis Schlafly welds into an electoral coalition that she makes the core of the republican party and to this day that's who that's who fucking wins like that that's a major factor in their ability to win elections is white white middle class ladies this idea of motherhood but you're attaching it to this very specific almost like kind of folky old school memory of childhood like and they all similarly they a lot of them grew up similarly so they can just kind of use some buzzwords to like kind of trigger that yeah and it's a lot of it is like also co-opting the fear a lot of these these mothers have over like what's going to have like the world their kids are growing up in because they don't understand it and making that fear you get you know in the 1980s Schlafly and this this white supremacist maternalist coalition are a big part of what launches Reagan into the White House and obviously like one of the things Reagan does is put his wife Nancy up to like be the one of the faces of the war on drugs say no and that's like that's the that that is white supremacist maternalism in a nutshell on the surface you have all of these you have these like white moms scared about their kids and just wanting to protect their children and like that's what we're doing we're strong

we have white moms who want to protect our kids and what actually happens is you have this right wing government put a carceral state into place that arrests hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic people and then monetizes their bodies through forced labor and like that's what happens in the background of this well you've got this but but a big part of why they're able to sell it is this like we have to protect the children sort of thing like Phyllis Schlafly what's going on now they're the pedophile ring I mean it's always about protecting the kids it's always about white kids because it's I mean like yes like this idea that white children are so innocent but then a black teen is dangerous and you're like wait a minute there you're using motherhood in the right way if you're really about protecting people but I think they're stoking this idea because they want to keep Americans or the white Americans in a constant state of almost like adolescence like because even though they say they don't want welfare state if you feel like your child and you need protection from your mom you are going to rely on your government and listen to them as if they're your parents you're not going to think for yourself and I think they this like is a part of this power struggle is like creating this parental dynamic between the government and its constituents and it's stoked by this maternal sort of like imagery. Yeah that's that's a lot of what's going on here and I'm going to continue quoting from Ilza Hogue because I think what she says about Schlafly and what she does is really interesting here quote Schlafly definitely steered these white women towards more public acceptance and folded them into the effort to fight gender parity measures she never asked them to check their racism at the door if anything she told adherents who balked at the racist tendencies of their fellow warriors to swallow their displeasure for the sake of the cause for her these issues were two sides of the same coin as stop

ERA and the Eagle Forum cemented themselves as the new rights ladies auxiliary they found a sphere where they could raise their voices and flex and power without threatening the men in their lives they use their collective weight to throw women's issues to whitewash the racist underbelly of the movement and shore up traditional power systems stop ERA was extremely brand conscious they knew their value was in the perfect combination of fierce advocacy wrapped in unapologetic traditional femininity they were known for baking pies and breads to hand out to lawmakers with the slogan from the lawmakers to the breadwinners they shamelessly flattered male lawmakers is a core part of the lobbying strategy so this is a this is like gut wrenching and horrible but it's also brilliant like Schlafly is incredibly intelligent and effective political operator yeah she was a master using identity politics yeah I mean I like that like I it makes me annoyed that they took this idea of nurturing and make gave it to the right because I'm like I'm very much a diehard leftist like I'm very radical in existence but I'm like I like to nurture I like to big pies yeah now I now you guys took that and made it an extreme conservative thing yeah and it's it's this is really what keeps the Republican Party what brings it back to life right after like and this is what brings Ronald Reagan into office and again once you've got Reagan you've got cuz Reagan was like one of the big guys who rose in defense of Barry Goldwater so like Nixon with Nixon kind of this this sort of corporatist and and you know we're going to be you know a bigger tent party like this idea of what the Republican Party could be collapses because Nixon was a criminal and but what what replaces it is Reagan and this like religious fundamentalist white supremacist sort of view of what the party should fundamentally be like that's that that really really takes a hold under Reagan like obviously Nixon had engaged a bunch of white supremacist shit but like under under Reagan and thanks to kind of the coalition Schlafly builds this like they figure out a way to make it work right

and it becomes like the Republican Party has never stepped away from this shit like the thing they embrace with Schlafly is the cult of southern white womanhood and like like you know this this opposition this violent opposition to feminism and the idea that like there should be any sort of like move for equality between the genders and stuff like they this the Schlafly's that Schlafly in a nutshell and yeah it's it's a real bummer you know what's not a real bummer Robert the products and services that support this podcast yeah yeah hey during the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what they were right I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the FBI sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside an undercover investigation in the first season of alphabet boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns he's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to the heaven listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science the problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price to death sentences in a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday

I'm Molly Herman join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI how many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus it's all made up listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync what you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space and when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories but there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down it's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart and now he's left defending the Union's last outpost this is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts so the coalition that she creates it comes along at this time when like Falwell and and way rich in these these kind of far right religious conservative crusaders were like trying to grapple with the fact that white supremacy was not as easy a way to like open white supremacy they didn't get them votes as easily anymore and like they were seeing these civil rights leaders making advances in society and like open racist appeals losing like their power to convince people and having to like soft pedal their racism

you just have to wrap it differently like you can you can justify the naked imprisonment of tens of thousands of young black men if you just have a concerned mob get on screen and talk about how scary drugs are like that's that's that can work for you like so that's yeah the OP has been kind of playing this balancing act ever since Phyllis Schlafly probably more than any other similar single person crafted the political strategies and laid the propaganda foundation for the electoral strategy that's brought Republicans to power again and again during our lifetimes she is maybe these the main architect of the right wings half century of steady political victories these full of contradictions just to begin with which then just lead into more like even the I mean obviously everyone knows how contradictory the war on drugs is but just on a very basic level on a class level like people say like oh that's a drug neighborhood you to imply it's like a poor neighborhood but every single fucking like Richard like Beverly Hills those are all drug neighborhoods like a mansion literally you read one mansion you can find probably like so much cocaine more than you would find in a whole block in like a you know lower socio economic area but that's not what people care about because they're rich people they just yeah well because it's about white supremacy and like that's what they're really trying to do and they yeah Schlafly like Schlafly isn't the one who has the idea to do that but she's the one who figures out how to actually sell it like right they've been wanting to do they they had been wanting and attempting and doing that like the law had been weaponized and drug policy had been weaponized and stuff before that and like Phyllis isn't even like a huge part of the anti drug crusades she just puts together this coalition and figures out this way of marketing conservatism that lets them do that that lets Reagan get into

the office that lets them justify all of this this like it's it's her she teaches the Republican Party that the path to their success is to just endlessly create a series of unsolvable culture wars that that's how you that's how you gain and keep power yeah by 1985 the era was still three states short of ratification and it it dies on the fine right like it's a long fight starts in 72 ends in 85 but the era is never ratified it's still not an amendment Phyllis killed it basically and by the mid 1980s she was killing more than amendments starting in the late 1970s she pushed to make hating gay people a major plank of the Republican Party she was helping to build her Eagle Forum newsletter published bigoted cartoons that insulted gay and particularly trans people as the AIDS crisis began to tear through the gay community Schlafly became one of the loudest voices against doing a single goddamn thing to help in 1988 when surgeon general see Everett Coop who we did an episode about because he was actually a pretty good guy but we were talking about how shitty the the Reagan's were on age but see Everett Coop starts like this age education program to try to get people basic information about safe sex to try and reduce how many people are dying of AIDS and Schlafly calls it the teaching of safe sodomy and like basically goes toward counter messaging against this very basic education program that the government is really good at twisting words really quickly in a way that like like sounds bad even to some like I am pro education but like the way that those words hit you feel the emotion like you feel a negative connotation immediately yep so adding anti gay rhetoric to her era campaign had allowed Schlafly to unite a number of conservative religious groups behind her banner evangelical and Catholic bigots might not have much in common aside from their hatred of gay people but Schlafly could use that to bring them together I'm going to quote from slate here drawing from long standing opposition to racial integration interracial marriage and mixed race families her pamphlets and articles transposed racial rhetoric onto fears of homosexuality she frequently associated the era with the dangers of sex mixing

homosexual marriage and the threat of homosexual school teachers as early as 1973 she warned that the era would legalize homosexual marriages and open the door to the adoption of children by legally married homosexual couples. The era would enable these gay rights she said because any law that defines a marriage as a union of a man and a woman would have to be amended to replace those words with person. So Schlafly's newsletters like the physical the Phyllis Schlafly report in the Eagle Forum regularly published cartoons depicting gay and lesbian marriages images that showed men dressed as women or women dressed as men gender anarchy and sexual anarchy went hand in hand for Schlafly her 1977 book the power of positive woman of the positive woman compiled these anti gay ideas and exclaimed that fireman who constantly risked their lives on our behalf should have the right to make a judgment that close living and working conditions make a homosexual co worker intolerable so so they're not afraid of going into a burning building but they can't share an office space with the gay person but they're scared of gay people yeah that's wild yeah as the 80s turned to the 90s increasing numbers of right wing activists began to imitate Schlafly's use of anti gay bigotry the campaign against same sex marriage that coalesced in this period and nearly succeeded in making it illegal to be gay and married was based in large part on the work of Phyllis Schlafly she's she's the underpinning ideologically of a lot of this like she gets started the propaganda campaign that turns into you know the attempts to make the defensive marriage act and stuff I'm just gonna start of a counter campaign and just make all marriages illegal and that's what I think that's what they do they move the things so far they move the line so far that in order to be against them you have to be extreme but if I do that then it's like now we're just fighting for marriage you're not fighting for gay marriage or straight marriage it's like marriage is all illegal now if you're a republican you just gotta fight for gay marriage because marriage falls under that I think we ought to I think we ought to do away with with gender entirely and just have you know people people who have people who produce sperm can just generate a bunch of that will throw it in like a wave pool and people who want to have kids go

in there and that's that's it no more no more that's the future that liberals want is just a bunch of come filled wave pools and and no more gender that's the dream wave pools are probably come filled yeah they are all come filled yes that that is that's what Schlafly trying to to prevent she knew that our secret goal was just a bunch of semen encrusted water parks and she was she was fighting to stop our secret schemes so I don't know like she's just she's just a piece of shit she's a real bad fucking person so all of this you know she she helps ignite sort of like the anti gay movement of the 90s and early 2000s and really like obviously homosexuality had been something that people were like murdering folks over in the United States for a long time before Schlafly she figures out the language of how to sell that politically right like that's the thing that she does she doesn't create anti gay bigotry she figures out how to sell it and keep it as keep it politically relevant in the modern age when you have to be less openly hateful that's her talent so when it came to anti Jewish bigotry Schlafly and her organizations were a little bit more cunning they they they had to be careful about their opposition to the Jews the Eagle Forums newsletters never said the Jews but they talked constantly about well financed minorities who were responsible for supporting liberal causes and pushing social change and obviously who's the well financed minorities they're talking about like rich Jewish people in their 1975 book about Kissinger Schlafly and her partner Admiral Ward included the line Henry says some who know him has no God does he have a country so they're asking basically like is Henry Kissinger loyal to the United States or is he like a a wandering Jew without a country which is like an ancient stereotype right this idea that like the Jew Jewish people are not members of the societies they live in their their members of the tribe and like they're they're always working towards other

again they don't Schlafly knows that you can't print the Jews in a bunch of propaganda but you can get everybody convinced that there's well financed minorities and when you name them they're always Jewish who are supporting these social programs you think are evil and it gets the point across to their followers how is she like I just nobody's pointing holes in the logic that she's saying she's like for her country and she's claiming Kissinger is anti his country but then she's literally coming for her fellow countrymen like I'm assuming these gay people protected under the equal rights would be citizen so she's literally doing that she's coming for her countrymen yeah but the people who like Phyllis Schlafly doesn't think those are her countrymen you know that's why factually they are they always focus about wanting to murder us wanting to like yeah definition is that those are her fellow I mean maybe she doesn't like her country it sounds like she doesn't like a country there's about half the country that she wanted purged right that's like that Schlafly that's most hardcore conservatives these days is is is like that and that's what she helps to build is this right wing coalition where she gets a lot of people on board like there's this core this hard evil core of the of the new right that's like the john birch society people who want everybody they disagree with murdered and they're able to Schlafly helps them build this shield of folks who are very culturally conservative don't necessarily want that but she's able to weld them into an electoral coalition and then radicalize them to make them more and more hateful like that's the process that starts with Schlafly and ends with fucking QAnon but they just project a lot because it's like they'll say things like if you don't like it leave but it sounds like they don't like it it sounds like they

like they're literally projecting what they they are doing yeah I mean that doesn't matter it's just like they they're trying to destroy they're trying to destroy the idea of like progressivism like that's all they care about at the core that's what people like like Schlafly these secret these the secret john birch agents you know are are are all about and Schlafly's probably the best of them at doing her job so Phyllis never earned mainstream republican political acknowledgement and like the way that she wanted she kind of wanted to be involved in defense policy the Reagan administration never had a place for her nobody ever really did she never got the job of overseeing the creation of a nuclear arsenal even more gigantic than our current one but she got to see the Reagan push for the Star Wars missile defense system and you know that had been based a lot on the fears that she helped stoke and eventually I think she seems to have accepted that she would be the architect of the republican party's future but she was never going to hold like an office she grew into an elder stateswoman of the radical right never changing never relenting and always certain that her hatred of black people gay people Jewish people and every non-Christian non-conservative would eventually bear electoral fruit she passed her time by arguing with feminists who hated her for many things but partly for the fact that she clearly spent her whole life taking advantage of the wonderful things the women's rights movement had fought so hard to earn for every woman and despite the fact that she was very clearly a liberated career women and valued the progressive achievements that allowed her to do what she'd done Schlafly spent every day of her working life fighting to roll those achievements back in one famous debate feminist mystique author Betty Frieden told Schlafly I'd like to burn you at the stake I consider you a traitor to your sex I consider you an aunt Tom years later Schlafly told an interviewer that freedom had been very ugly to encounter I reject all her ideology most of it based on the absurd notion that the home is a comfortable

concentration camp and the suburban housewife is oppressed by her husband and society Schlafly continued to fight against women's rights and gay rights her whole life in 1996 she made a deal with Pat Buchanan whose campaign she co-chaired to work against yeah to work together to write to write her crusade against legal abortion into the firmament of the Republican Party Bob Dole the party's official candidate in that election wanted to change the GOP stance on abortion to something more tolerant Schlafly threatened a floor fight against his nomination during the convention if Dole even allowed exceptions for rape or incest and she got her wish the GOP's abortion plank has never since relented in 2011 600 pieces of anti-choice legislation were introduced in legislative bodies across the United States these are one way or the other parts of Phyllis Schlafly's legacy that year when questioned about her legacy Schlafly herself responded we are winning the abortion fight really all the Republicans who are elected in 2010 or pro-life including all the women and we're winning that fight especially with young people this was true in the era when that article I found that quote in was written it cites a 2009 Gallup study that found a nine point increase since the 1990s among respondents 18 to 29 years of age who said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances and if I can end this whole terrible story on a semi positive note it would be that things aren't continuing in that direction. While the legal assault on reproductive health has only gotten worse over the last nine years young people are actually more likely to support abortion now than ever and then they were in 2009 when that article was written. I found a really fascinating PRRI study that includes something very inspiring quote over the past five years young people are more likely to have changed their opinion on abortion than any other group 29% reported a change 10% higher than any other age group

young adults have changed their opinion to be more supportive 19% rather than opposed 10% to abortion by a margin of almost two to one. So that's good. Well I think a lot of it is like the framing like they're so good at framing it like when I say I'm like I'll say I'm pro choice but I we shorthand it almost say like I'm for abortion but I'm not like for I'm not like hey everyone let's go get an abortion I think pro choice is this idea that you should have a choice but they've kind of pushed us into the corner where we are screaming about like our abortions but the point is we want a choice not that we all want to go and get an abortion like it's still like the thing can still be painful but this idea that you don't have a choice is even worse. Yeah and it seems like like Schlafly the way that she framed it succeeded in reversing the gains of like the reproductive health movement of the women's rights movement for decades. It does seem like that's I mean they have more political power than ever but in terms of how many people agree with the shit she's saying. That seems to be less than there have been in decades like it seems like the wave might be turning back like the propaganda doesn't work anymore. Finally, but she got decades out of that. Well I think stuff like your podcast help like literally information I think is the only thing that really illuminates all these inconsistencies and I mean I don't know my theory about her is still she sucks but I'm just hearing so much unresolved trauma like her broken up childhood and this this rug being pulled out from her when her dad lost her job. I feel like she's forever distrusting of power structures even though she is she becomes the power structure. She's afraid of these conspiracies because she thinks at any moment the thing she puts her faith in will be taken away.

Like I don't know needs to go to a lot of trauma therapy. I think I don't know if it's trauma or like I think that might be less likely in my reading of her life than that. Like she saw this. I think it was very like like an opportunity. She saw an opening. But it hurt herself. So then that's why I feel like she didn't have all the information. I think you were closest to write about her when you said like she wants to be on top. She wants to be as high as a woman can go and maybe part like she doesn't she doesn't like the idea of other women doing what she's doing. And she actively works to stop it. But she wants she herself wants to be liberated. I don't know. I don't I don't have a great handle. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe maybe maybe I'm reading it wrong. But I feel like all of her biographies everything you find about her is so like written by people who are on the same side of the aisle as her that it is hard for me to get a real like I I want to know more about how she actually felt as a kid when her dad you know her family's financial situation collapsed and her mom had to take like is that what is like seeing her dad you know depressed and out of work and her mom leaving the house.

Like did that did that really put a lot of anger in her. I don't know. But I don't think she actually knows. I think she wouldn't. I don't think she reads to me as someone who has not actually processed it. But of course like you explained earlier like it would have an effect. But I don't think she's aware of it. And it actually comes out in this bigger way where she feels she needs to control everything around her and be on top and always know what's going on. Yeah. I mean I can say like from a personal level as as the kind of person I am like my dad having to like move away from the family and stuff when I was a kid to get work like had an impact on me and kind of made had a had a big lasting impact on like why I hate some of the things I hate like capitalism kind of today. And I don't know maybe I'm reading too much into her. I think maybe she went. I don't know. I just don't know with Phyllis. But I feel like that there's a key to whatever the person she turned into in that aspect of her life. I just don't really understand what it is. Phyllis Schlafly though died in the summer of 2016. She lived way too fucking long. She was 92. What she died. Did she die in a peaceful way like probably she died surrounded by her family and bullshit. It's a shame. I wish she'd gotten hit by an eagle. Yeah. Before she died she got to do one last terrible thing at a St. Louis Trump rally. She endorsed Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States saying I think he has the courage in the end of the energy. You know you have to have energy for that job in order to bring some changes to do what the grassroots want him to do because this is a grassroots uprising. We've been following the losers for so long. Now we've got a guy who's going to lead us to victory and then her spirit just like she croaked and then her spirit just inhabited his body and became a Horcrux.

I hate Phyllis and everything that she stands for. I don't know. It's a real bummer. She engineered Donald Trump being able to gain political power and he was very much the guy she was waiting for her whole life because he's a straight up fascist strongman and that's what she's always wanted and like all of these other Republicans she supported like wound up short to her in some way and I you know she knew that Trump would do the things she wanted which is violently suppress the people she disagreed with politically. Damn. Yeah that's the life of Phyllis Schlafly a woman who spent her whole existence crusading against abortion and a woman whose whole life was a monument to the sad truth that like a lot of there's there's babies out there that maybe oughtn't have stopped being you know you know what I'm saying like mm hmm yeah a real a real nasty woman as somebody would say I just want to clarify I don't I'm not apologizing for and I definitely also hate her but when I when I talk about the childhood stuff because it's more me trying to understand like how do people get so far to this point where they're almost like working against their own interests and their own communities and I truly don't don't mean that in a like a apologist way at all like I know like I feel like sometimes I come off centrist but I don't like her. Let's be clear. Yeah they're just trying to figure out like yeah you're trying to figure out like how did this happen how did she become such a nasty batch is what we're all trying to figure out but there's one positive thing that I kind of hear and kind of applies to everything going on now is like whenever a side like the extreme radical right tries this hard like and throws this much money because sounds like they had money their whole life to oppress or change reality.

It means the other side is actually more powerful than they think because they wouldn't be spending all this time and money to oppress to control if we were actually weak like it's just not it wouldn't be this hard for them to win and they are having a fucking hard time so it feels scary but I think whenever they hear about all this power like it means you're actually powerful. Yep. Yeah I mean it means they're scared of what will happen if they don't violently suppress all resistance because they know that not a lot of people agree with them right like that's the whole like that's why you that's why you do this culture war shit is because your opponent like the people who don't like the things you believe are much more numerous than you but they all believe different things of their own and they're willing to coexist with other people who believe different things. And you are not and your coalition has been built by all of these people who believe that there's nothing but a series of black and white choices and politics and never can be and if you can get enough people you know wrapped around a bunch of issues that are they see as life and death forever then eventually like you won't lose those people right like you they will always vote for your thing even if they don't like you or you're the people that you're you know the candidate you put up because abortion is the big issue right like it's the thing the left is always trying to do this with health care but for whatever reason it just hasn't worked you and I think it's because in part maybe like no one actually believes that the Republican or the Democratic Party is going to do anything about health care anymore like Obama had that chance kind of but we never built anything that really helped people enough so you don't have this you have a lot of people who support single payer health care but you don't have it's not the same kind of electoral coalition as you

know it's like we want to make abortion illegal and hurt gay people and stuff like that's a much more durable coalition because for one thing they know that the Republican Party will continue to do it every time they're in office they will hurt the people I hate because most of the people who for whom single payer health care is a voting issue don't trust any of the candidates who you know run on variants of it to actually do anything it's a very frustrating and bad situation and it's going to kill us all or not that's really my place to determine Teresa you want to plug your pluggable sure you can follow my podcast you can tell me anything if you haven't heard of an episode yet you gotta go back it's one of my earlier guests but you should have to check that out and I think I'm going to I already said this in the last one but I'm selling hats I say cancel me daddy so follow me at Larissa Pion Twitter and Instagram for those links Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests it involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his heart like a lot of guns but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to Alphabet Boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian

astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price to death sentences in a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts