It Could Happen Here - How Democrats Passed North Carolina's New Anti-trans Law

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Mia talks with journalist David Forbes about two recent horrific anti-trans bills in North Carolina and how Democrats made them possible. https://transnews.network/p/nc-dems-anti-trans-betrayals @davidforbes.bsky.social @avlblade.bsky.socialSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. From IHeart podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havocetown.

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.

He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Noah, and I'm 13, and I started this podcast because, honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now you know with Noah de Barroso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it.

Politics is wild, and I'm definitely not here to pay it, but I'm here to make sense of it. Now You Know with Noah DeBarrasso on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. CoolZone Media. Welcome to IKedap to Hear a podcast about things falling apart and also sometimes about how not to put them back together and how to fail to put them back together. I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are going to be talking about the place where the anti-trians crusade began, North Carolina, and about the recent spade of anti-trans bills that have been passed there. And with me to talk about this is David Forbes, an editor and journalist with the Trans News Network and the Asheville Blade. David, welcome to the show. Thank you. So I think some

people, if you're listening to this show, you may remember that North Carolina is the state that passed the first bathroom bills. But what has gotten significantly less attention is, A, everything that happened after that, and B, a series of two really sweeping and hideous anti-trans bills had been passed in the last, like, month or so. And David wrote a really, really good piece for Trans News Network about both these bills and also how Democrats in the state helped pass them. So I want to talk about that. And I guess the place to start is, can you talk about what these two bills, HB 805 and SB 442, got started. Sure.

So of the two, HB805 is the more sweeping broadly, at least. They're both terrible anti-trans bill. It affects everything from changing your birth certificate to state health plans not covering trans health care, to really ominously like what jail or prison you get put into if you're a trans person and you're arrested. Yeah. That one, it's kind of a laundry list of, you know, far-right anti-trans ideas. The other SB 442 is one of those where it takes some digging.

And here I'm really thankful that TNN's policy analyst, I think y'all have had on here a few times, Kareen Green, was actually there to, yes, was a huge help in reviewing this bill. I've been covering North Carolina politics and its various horrors for a long time. But even still, it's good to have, like, legislative expertise on that. And SC-442 changes the definition of child abuse to not include transphobic child abuse, essentially. It was written against the very fictional specter of, like, oh, if you have questions about this trans stuff and you get your kids' pronouns wrong, DSS could come, like, snatch them overnight, which is not a thing that has ever happened. No. Including, especially in North Carolina, like...

Yeah. Yeah, so, but what it does is just bluntly open the way, especially in the state foster care system, for just anti-trans bigotry across the board. You know, at this point, it's like, okay, well, placement can't be nigh based on someone's religion or their race and being a transphote. Yeah. You know, it's like, that's being added to those predict identities. it's also essentially letting the ground work for just even more legal sanctioning of conversion therapy, which is, of course, torture and abuse.

Yeah. I think Corrine summed up as that if you don't have a trans kid to abuse, foster care will provide one for you. Yeah. Which is, it's really bleak. Yeah. We chuckle, but it's we chuckle in the, like, Gallo's humor because it's that absurd. Yeah. So SB 442 was the one that kind of went through the whole legislative process first.

and in some ways it had less of a party line treatment than HB805 eventually did. So, you know, I wouldn't say credit where due, but NC Senate Democrats, of whom there aren't terribly many, but there are some, did universally vote against this bill. They were like, no, we're not approving it. However, the GOP has a two-thirds majority in there, so it's really not as necessary. They can potentially override a veto in there. Where things really came down to was North Carolina House. And there, nine Democrats joined with the Republicans to pass this. And then it got to the desk of Governor Josh Stein, who wanted a landslide last year.

Like, North Carolina Democrats, despite how Jerry Mayor of the State is, which we'll talk about more in a little bit, actually did pretty well. The GOP no longer had a supermajority in the House, and the Democratic candidate for governor, former Attorney General Josh Stein, won in a route. So, essentially, that was supposed to prevent bills like this from becoming law. Yeah. Because, okay, if the Dems held the line in the North Carolina House, the Republicans, the

Republican's no longer supermajority, then the governor vetoes it, then they can't override the veto. That didn't happen. So not only did nine Democrats side with Republicans, Stein signed the bill. Yeah, which is hideous. Yeah. And it was, it was bleakly insulting the way he did it, too, because it was just like, he didn't even issue a statement or, oh, like, well, we still believe in trans rights.

this is a bureaucratic thing, or even bothered to make an excuse, it was just tucked in a list of bills that he signed that day alongside, like, some of their bureaucratic stuff involving, like, retirement communities and recognizing driver's licenses. So it's definitely kind of insult to injury sort of situation. Interestingly, North Carolina's gay ink organizations are kind of like the mainline nonprofits. And in North Carolina, there's like a quality in C. There's the campaign for some of the quality, which is regional, but is based in the state here in Asheville. they actually had been very strongly against this bill, despite some Democrats supporting it, but they stopped short, as will become a theme, with condemning or attacking any of the Democrats

who did, which was a giant signal that this is not an issue you're really going to fight Democrats on. So the governor then thinks, well, there's no political capital be lost signing this thing. On the same day, he did veto HB805, along with a bunch of other bills targeting, you know, in quote marks, DEI measures, which are basically just a ten. to smash out anything that's not far right and further resecate the state. And he did veto those. The language he used, though, was definitely what a lot of us have become used to. It's the, oh, this was divisive.

No trans people mentioned, no trans health care mentioned, no trans rights mentioned, just vaguely, well, this is divisive, and it's a distraction. So, HB 805 does actually go back to the legislature. And one Democrat had voted for HB805, so there was a tension turning of, okay, is this guy going to still vote for a veto override, Representative Dante Pittman, because it's a big deal, supposedly anyway, for a Democrat to defy their own governor. It's one thing when it's like you're just, okay, you know the bill's going to pass. It's still horrible, but it's supposedly a harder bar to reach, or at least that's what various,

you know, ostensibly pro-queer Democrats are telling us for them to go on the record and be like, no, I'm joining with the other party to override your veto and, like, give you the middle finger, essentially. But what happened when he got out of the House? He actually did vote to hold with the veto. But another representative who had been out on a pretty dubious excused absence when HB805 was originally their Democratic rep, Nassif Majid, voted in favor. Yeah.

And that was enough to make it law. So the one thing that among queer and transnational Carolina, who, like a lot of their places, voted very heavily against the Republicans, you know, for the Democratic candidates and all. It's one reason they did fairly well last year. To stop exactly this sort of legislation becoming law, it just became law. And it did so thanks to members of the Democratic Party. And in one bill, the Democratic governor.

There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed. You know how waking up from a dream? A familiar place can look completely alien. Get back, everyone.

He's going to be next. And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him. Burn his body and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, This is Havoc Town, a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in Abistown.

A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire, that not a whole lot was salvageable. the coldest of cold cases. But everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's crime lab, we'll learn

about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you.

Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program, and he had one chance to complete this program, and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning.

Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Noah. I'm 13, and as you might have seen from the news, I got a podcast, and I explain those fake headlines like your uncle would, like your cousin would if he actually did the research Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now you know with Noah DeBarroso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you.

It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it. And I'm watching everything. The majority of the youth, 18 through 24, say they trust Republicans more than Democrats differ on the economy. You kidding. Politics is wild and not. I'm definitely not here to payment, but I'm here to make sense of it.

Just what's happening, why it matters, and what it means for us. Bring your brain. Listen to Now You Know with Noah DeBarras on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Both of these bills are unbelievably draconian. Like, these are things that even, like, two years ago, like banning sex. state funding for like all trans health care for the state health plan we should specify yeah yeah sorry it is like the state health care but comma and this is my understanding of it is that this is a ban on all ages yes for anyone on the state health care plan so if someone is a state employee

or a teacher yeah or like your kids are exactly and this kind of actually it's close to home for me because i grew up poor in north carolina and one of the only reasons we had health care growing up was like my mom, as poorly paid as she was, was a public school teacher. So, you know, it's a trans kid in where I was now, where we know, you know, it's easier for trans kids to know who they are. It's not quite as a race as it was back in the 90s. Yeah. Can't get health care. A trans adult who's a teacher can't have their health care covered anymore.

And that's a thing that, like, two years ago, Ron DeSantis wasn't calling for this. No. Right? The Daily Wire at that point, like two years ago, is explain. explicitly calling for trans extermination's things, but they're not specifically proposing adults can't use trans health care. That's not a thing. Like, that was, that was even on the table. And now you have, like, you have a Democrat overriding their own governor's veto to get this through. Yes. A Democrat in a solidly blue district, Majid's district, is in the middle

of Charlotte, which for folks who may not be familiar with the state, like Charlotte's the largest city here, and it is not known for being, like, at least on voting-wise, it doesn't go for the GOP, generally. Yeah, and then this is the same point that I want to make about this bill, like, redefining what child abuse is. Like, even by the standards

of sort of, like, far-right anti-trans bills, those are really weird and radical. Corrine said it was one of the worst that she'd seen in the country, as far as, like, on the child care front. From my covering of this, too, yeah, this is one of the worst things I've ever seen. And the Democratic Party

passed it. Passed with nine Democrats in favor and the governor signed it. Yeah. That's unbelievably horrifying. Yeah. And the fact that the queer wargs in the state were unwilling to condemn the Democrats who passed this is just horrifying. It is. And actually goes one further than that because afterwards they didn't even bother to put out perfunctory, oh, we're disappointed in Governor Stein, you know, we will continue to try to fight this legislation in court or something like that. They did nothing. Yeah. They just they went silent. So, and, you know, their condemnations of SB 442, especially before this bill passed, they were all correct. It is horrible. Yeah. It does sanction child abuse. It is horrific

on every single front. It is a catastrophe. It is draconian, all that. It didn't stop being so when Democrats started supporting it. Yeah. The kids hurt by this, families hurt by this, aren't going to be any less hurt because a Democrat signed on to it. Yeah. And before we go to break, the thing I want to sort of close this section, with is that like, you know, I think it's a very, very common thing to focus on like, okay, why are you focusing on the Democrats right now when the Republicans are doing all of the stuff? And this is a case where very explicitly, and this is the dynamic I think you've seen across the board with, for example, like Chuck Schumer, like helping to get the Republican budget through, right? Yes. The stuff the Republicans are doing, a lot of it can't be implemented without the support of the Democrats. And the Democrats have been willing to support the fascist governments implementing this stuff. And that makes them a collaborationist party in a lot of extremely important cases. And when that happens, in North Carolina is one of the places at the forefront, and it has been at the forefront for like a decade.

For nearly a decade. Yeah, for nearly a decade. It's like eight years, seven, seven, eight years? Nine. As of this year, it's nine years since HB2 came on. long in the spring of 2016. 3016, yeah. Oh, that is, yeah.

See, this is, do not, do not go to sleep at 5 in the morning and then try to do math live on air. It will come for you too. Really, truly, was trying to subtract 16th of 20. Okay. This is, this, this, this is your one moment of levity and a bunch of extremely bleak shit is going to be trying and failing to do math on air. Look, I can drive.

That's my, that's my, that's my, and I'm sticking to it. But what we were. seeing here is the way in which resistance to the GOP and this is a place like North Carolina is a state where in the midst of a just unbelievable national right wing turn right

queer people turns out to stop this and their reward for their resistance was the people that they had put in charge of defending them in as staggering of an example of the banality of evil as I've ever seen just

signed this horrific piece of anti-trans legislation that couldn't have been passed without them into effect in the same thing as like fucking as a bunch of regulatory bullshit.

Yeah. And then gang did nothing. Yeah. The groups they're supposed to lobby at the club club. This is the point of their existence. Did nothing. Yeah.

At that point. They just, they let it go. You know, on the next fundraising cycle. On to the next AI meme to on your page to boost, you know,

content generation or whatever. And here we are. There's a vile sickness in Abbas town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. The village is ravaged. Entire families have been consumed. You know how waking up from a dream?

A familiar place can look completely alien? Get back everyone. And if you see the devil walking around inside of another man, you must cut out the very heart of him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes in the furthest corner of this town as a warning. From IHeart Podcasts and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town,

a new fiction podcast set in the Bridgewater Audio Universe, starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The devil walks in Aberstown. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.

He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short. short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming and you don't know who's next to you.

And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.

Right now in the backlog will be. identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors.

And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolved. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Noah. I'm 13. And as you might have seen from the news, I got a podcast. And I explain those fake headlines like your uncle would. Like your cousin would if he actually did the research. Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now you know with Noah de Barroso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it.

When I'm watching everything. The majority of the youth, 18 through 24, say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to from the economy. You kidding. Politics is wild and I'm definitely not here to pay it, but I'm here to make sense of it. Just what's happening, why it matters, and what it means for us. Bring your brain. Listen to now you know and know it. de Barrasca on the iHeartRadio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast

and we are back now for the brevity of this show i am not going to go into my giant rant about how this is what happened with midderand and the french socialists and how midderand and the socialist party instituted neoliberalism in france but comma we are instead of, instead of doing that, or me going on another rant about the absorption of social movements by the NIS and Bolivia or another rant about the 17 different iterations of this that we've seen over the years, see my episodes on Lula, see many, many, many, many things I've done. We're going to go back and talk about this in the context of North Carolina because I think there's a really, a very important thread that, David, you have been pulling on in this piece

And in general, that is really not well understood anywhere that is about the structure and function of the Democratic Party in the South. And the way that North Carolina has functioned is it's sort of like the moderate human face of like the Greensboro Massacre. Oh my. Yeah. And this is one of those where to start thing. There's a quote that I have in the piece by civil rights historian Timothy Tyson that since I read it, I think over a decade ago, really just kind of hit me like a hammer and is kind of simple of the experience I've seen as a, you know, impoverished trans woman living in North Carolina

and covering, you know, local state government and how federal government works on the ground here, too, like beneath the green ivy of civility, but a stone wall of coercion. Yeah. And that is one of the better summaries. And it applies to other circumstances, too, but it is, it just perfectly sums up kind of the historical route, the North Time Democratic Party. And when Tyson was doing that, he was tracing this whole history from the 1898 Wilmington coup d'etan massacre, which is one of the most decisive events in American history. And I'd even say in like the history of the rise of

fascism, too, to the current day he was riding the late 90s. And it's part of a project historians. And one of the terms they were using was that North Carolina has this progressive mystique while you were having governors under southern states during the civil rights era, we're giving angry speeches from courthouses and things like that. And North Carolina was trying to be the moderate example of the South. Oh, you know, we put money into, look at all these schools and roads we're building, this college system we're building. We just built Research Triangle Park. You know, we're attracting, you know, it's the too busy to hate kind of myth. And on that note, they generally were more careful about repression, but it still happened.

You know, North Carolina doesn't make the headlines in something like Selma did, for example. But there was a history of riots and a brutal attempt of repression from the 40s all the way to the 70s in North Carolina. And they happened like in almost every city, major city there is here. You know, and some that weren't so major. That's the thing that we've talked about a little bit on the show with the whole week uprising and the sort of the whole wave of riots kind of culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King. but, like, yeah, like, statistically most of the riots that happened in that entire period happened in these small and mid-sized cities that have just, like, the historical memory of which has been completely fucking buried.

Yeah. And North Carolina, as you're saying, like, it's one of the critical sites of this. Yeah. Durham was rioting in the 40s. Yeah. Like, that's how far back it goes. And I think a lot of time people think, oh, well, not much happened in this era. And I think it's just a lack of knowledge of history, especially radical history.

Did it not happen or was it suppressed in the... erased. Yeah, yeah. And that happened a lot of this. So you had, you know, and figures like Governor Terry San for the time, who was, you know, famous North Carolina Democrat. And yeah, if the clan was like openly marching to murder people, he might say like, okay, look, a massacre's bad news. We are going to like put the state troopers out to deter them from doing that. But a lot of civil rights activists end up dead. Yeah. You know, or there's still, there's like violent crackdowns, you know, during the Greensburg, if it was a site, both of some really well-organized like civil rights efforts and sit-ins and more radical action too, but also

a lot of repression. You know, by 1979, when the state's boosters are portraying, you know, all that upheaval is a thing of the past, this anti-racist march or anti-claim march, specifically organized by this communist group in Greensboro was massacred. The claimant of neo-Nazis came in. They just opened fire on people. Largely they were acquitted later. And in suing years, a lot of investigation's been done into this, and various levels of local and state and after-the-fact federal law enforcement were very complicit, and things ranging from just kind of trying to sweep the under the rug, to outright, especially the local level, like, cooperating with the clan.

Yeah. A lot of them were either aware this is going on and did nothing to stop it or even actively fed the clan information. There's a book recently called Morningside that goes into a lot of this detail that I'd encourage folks take a look at. But, like, that's the reality of North Carolina. Carolina. And that's the reality beneath the progressive mystique. And one of the historians, I quote in the piece, mentioned that this is an exquisite instrument of social control. Because you've kind of already framed the discussion as, oh, it's just this genteel civil thing. We'll hear you out. Just be a little more patient. But if stuff ever really escalates, there is the option of just flat out smears of violence and massacre. And knowing the history of North Carolina, you know, a lot of this was directed at black. North Carolinians, but also it was used to crush labor stuff. A lot of the people killed in

the Greensboro Massacre were also organizing in the textile mills. And North Carolina, under the Democrats, under their moderate period, had and continues to have some of the most draconian anti-labor laws in the country, which takes some work. So that's kind of the reality in North Carolina and of the Democratic Party here. And they lean on that mystique heavily. And honestly, I think a lot of it is what they evoke as, you know, were the defenders of the sane, sensible civil status quo. Even Salton's and Stein's statements about HB805 when he did veto it,

he's like, well, this is divisive. It's making too many waves. We need to get back to business, which they mean not just the business government. They literally mean business. You know, as far as marketing the state and making more money and in everything means making more money for the gentry. So that's kind of the reality of North Carolina

beneath this kind of how things supposedly are better and more progressive here. In the end of the day, you can still get massacred. Yeah, and I think on a sort of structural level, right, I think there's going to be people who are being like, well, okay, why the fuck do I give, do I give a shit about North Carolina? And one, and this is something that you point out in the piece, something that's really obvious if you spend literally any time in the South is that, what, I think it's 36%

of the South is, like, what's the actual number I should have looked this up before? So, of the national population of queer and trans people, 36% live in the South, which is far more than any other region, like by a wide margin. I think under the same 20-23 calculation, and there was another reason that came out specifically about trans people. All of these have faults. It is a general rule that trans people, especially in areas where they are more legally and violently marginalized, are wildly undercounted.

But it maps to about the same numbers. I think of trans people in the country, the estimated about 33 or 36 percent live in the South. And in the in the 2023 one, the next highest amount live in the Midwest, which is kind of different from how you see things portrayed, that, you know, we're just this. Yeah, this coastal, like, elite bohemians on a few coastal cities. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of trains people in the South and the Midwest. Yeah. We've been here for ages.

We're still here. Yeah. Yeah. It's North Carolina. It's Texas. It's fucking New Orleans. West Virginia. Florida.

You know? Yeah. And again, like, in terms of like, okay, so I'm not in those places. like, A, we all have a responsibility to all queer people, like, as queer people, right? Like, we have, we have a responsibility to each other, and we should fucking fight for each other. And B, you can look at what happened in North Carolina, and it was deliberately, this is the place where the right wing's anti-trans strategy was born, and it was exported from the success that they had in North Carolina to the entire rest of the fucking country.

Yes. Right? with the bathroom bills, and this is something we're going to get into it a second, with the way the Democratic Party didn't react to those bathroom bills. The last point that I want to make here is that this strategy of control is also very similar to the one that the Democrats use in places like San Francisco, where you have this sort of progressive veneer over, you know, the consolation, well, I guess the consolation of class forces is getting more similar as big tech moves.

into that part of the South. But, you know, it's this constellation of like, oh, hey, we are the queer rights party. But our actual interests are this combination of housing developers, landlords, and tech giants. And so as a method of social control, we're going to do this like, hey, we're extremely pro trans, and then we're going to throw a whole bunch of fucking trans homeless people into concentration camps. Yeah. And that's the thing that, like, you know, we're going to, I'm going to talk more about this on the show

another time with the ways that Trump's anti-homeless executive orders, some of the models for it are the way that sweeps have been working in places like Oakland's. We've talked about this on the show before. But this

mechanism of social control is one that's really, really widespread. And the South operates as a laboratory for that too in the same way that it operates as a laboratory for the right. Yeah. And I think that's really important because since this is a point, I can't, I can't hone this point enough and make it sharp enough, frankly, folks need to take it really seriously. Whether you call the

South or not, fascists do. The far right does. And they have for a long, long time, viewed it not as a place to ignore, but as a place to consolidate power and try out their tactics. Yeah. Too often the left, even the queer left has not. Yeah. We have all suffered for it. Yeah. And this is the whole thing for the historical left, right? Like, one of the things that broke the American labor movement, like, was the defeat of the CIA in the South. Yeah. I mean, all the way back to, I mean, defense, you were literally talking about, like, the defeat of reconstruction. But this is, this is why this country is like this. And if you don't want the country to be like this, you have to fucking fight in the South. Yes. That's all we've got time for for today. But tomorrow,

we will be back to talk about the long and sordid history of the Democratic Party's progressive veneer in North Carolina. and what truly lies beneath it. And we will look at how the original response to the 2016 bathroom bills set the stage for both the Democratic Party in North Carolina's passing of anti-trans laws today and the future of the rest of the country. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.

Or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. There's a vile sickness in Abbas Town. You must excise it. Dig into the deep earth and cut it out. From IHeart Podcasts and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky, this is Havoc Town.

A new fiction podcast sets in the Bridgewater Audio Universe. Starring Jewel State and Ray Wise. Listen to Havoc Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. And I was just like, ah, got you. This technology is already solving so many cases.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Noah, and I'm 13. And I started this podcast because, honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now you know with Noah de Barroso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it. Politics is wild and I'm definitely not here at his payment, but I'm here to make sense of it.

Listen to Now You Know with Noah de Barroso on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.