It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 116

Episode Date: February 3, 2024

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And in the original cadence of this website, or website, in the original cadence of the show, that was a reference to a civil war, right? A new civil war. It could happen here. That's what season one was. Made a big splash. Now we kind of covered the dystopia beat in general. But today, we're getting back to our motherfucking roots.

Because the state of Texas has recently declared a big ol' fuck you to the federal government. recently declared a big old fuck you to the federal government, R.E., having its National Guardsmen deploy razor wire at the border and stop Border Patrol people from, for example, performing rescues of people who are trapped in the water, drowning. It's a whole thing. At least three migrants have already died as a result of this fuckery by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. And now, like, I don't know, 20 states, something near to that,

have, there may be more by the time you hear this, but something like 20 states have declared that they're in support of Governor Abbott's refusal to let the feds in and insistence that he's dealing with an invasion and must take on the border, Texas itself. And some of those states are now sending, or at least claim they're going to send national guardsmen so when this all started happening we all got a lot of messages i

got about a billion from people being like is this it is this the civil war and obviously a big chunk of that comes from right-wing memes because they are all talking about like yeah let's do it let's have us a civil war we're all gonna start it. Some guy posted his handgun collection. Like we're ready. Bunch of revolvers. Yeah. Stupid shit. It's stupid shit.

But, you know, it's not unreasonable to be like, this seems like a massive constitutional crisis that's potentially in line with some of the crises that precipitated the original civil war. You've got a governor completely defying, now not just, you know, the president and the federal government, but the Supreme Court, who ruled that you can't just have your fucking Texas goons stop a federal law enforcement agency from doing its job on the border. So, you know, how serious is this? And is this the kind of thing that's going to lead to A24's new

Civil War movie? And my quick take on this is no, probably not. I think what this is, is in fact, a governor stretching out his authority and testing how much he can get away with against the overall federal government, because he and a lot of other conservative governors want to do things that are directly in contravention of the Civil Rights Act, of the Bill of Rights, of numerous federal protections for their citizens. And this is kind of a way of being like, well, if they won't fuck with us over this, then we can probably start imprisoning journalists and, you know, killing people that, or at least imprisoning people that otherwise we would not be able to, right?

Like this is a right-wing power grab and it's an attempt to see, is the central government weak enough that we can get away with this stuff? I don't think they're all going to start shooting at each other. I don't think Greg Abbott wants to get in a shooting war with the federal government over a mostly ginned up. The dimensions of the crisis are ginned up and fake in terms of like what he is claiming it is. There is, in fact, a humanitarian crisis at our border, but that's not what his issue is. So that's my quick take.

We're going to get into more of all of that. But James, you are our resident border correspondent, borrespondent, and you have some very strong feelings on how all of this has been interpreted in the media so i wanted to pull to you first and then we'll we'll get to mia and we'll just kind of round table after that i do i uh in a rare instance for me i have strong feelings about the way this has been covered and strong feelings about the coverage of the border which i know is a thing i talk about all the time but i am beyond frustrated with the way this has been covered it's hugely irresponsible and it's completely context-free. There are people, as there always are with the border,

and there always are with the right, who just tourist outside things that they understand and try and generate clicks by geeing up the fear of a civil war. I've seen dozens of people sharing headlines about National Guard deployments. It happened years ago. The National Guard had been deployed to our border for years. I see National Guard troops every day.

I had a National Guard guy shoot at me and go, don't shoot at me, shout at me. A friend of ours took one of their rifles. Yes, yes. The National Guard have been extremely based in arming the Butterfly Center. Yeah, they're there. There's a federal deployment. Texas also has a state deployment.

These are different things. And other states have also sent National Guardsmen to the border before, by the way. Correct, Kentucky. This is not the first time this has happened. Yeah, yeah. So there's a federal deployment, and then there are state deployments. Both of those are distinct things something to know about the state deployment that is missing in the context free reporting that you're seeing is that these guys aren't getting

any of their federal deployment benefits so they won't be getting the tricare they won't be getting the the time towards their retirement they won't be getting their gi bill etc so like the uh the texas guys who are deployed on state orders are really that the national guard are getting booked by greg abbott like uh it's it's laughable that that like you know he's pretending that he cares about texas while actively screwing over and robert and i have spoken to some of those texas national guard folks last time we were in texas did not seem to be super motivated to be no they're the only military unit i've seen tried to form a union because they're not in the federal they're not in

the federal orders so they can attempt to form a union get billy bragg down to the border we gotta do this yeah drop him let's get billy back i'll get him going over the rio grande and uh we'll insert billy bragg in there we'll fix it and it has been the most dangerous deployment that they've had including deployments to iraq they they have unfortunately uh a habit of drinking and driving which has not proven healthy for them they also there's a quirk of texas law that means that they can't stop national guard soldiers from bringing their own firearms yeah which is great yeah yeah and thus they can't stop them accidentally killing each other with their own firearms also yeah it's good stuff a tng

soldier did die trying to save a migrant from the river yes he drowned so like it has not like it it is a very boring but also quite dangerous deployment. They have really high... They wrote a manifesto a couple of years ago about how bullshit their deployment was, which is really great stuff. Yeah, so much of this has been reported without any context, right? I think genuinely a lot of the people reporting on this

are not aware there have been... They're a national guard here in California, like I say. I see them all the time. They're not supposed to interdict migrants but i see them doing surveillance and i see them guarding open-air prisons in jacumba almost every day and i think that seems to have been missed by the majority of uh of people covering this now we should talk more about the open-air prison part because i think there's a lot of people who seem to be getting the impression that the biden administration is like actually substantively trying to do something to like help immigrants and like they're like this this fight is like between like pro and anti-immigration it's like

no this is a fight between whether you think these people should be killed incredibly quickly by a combination of razor wire and rivers or whether you think they should starve the death yeah or die of dehydration walking through the desert or die of hypothermia walking through the mountains like i uh i think i've said something on the podcast before but i was helping a three-year-old girl who was hypothermic last week and like that is what joe biden is doing that is a joe biden policy being enacted by joe biden as joe biden wants it to be enacted or at very least yeah i'm sure his personal uh like complicity or even understanding it is is relatively low given his understanding it seems of a lot of things but uh the biden administration's policy is to deter people by making crossing more

difficult and more dangerous which de facto makes it more deadly what abbott is doing with his razor wire and his floating fence is a version of the same thing like they are not distinctly different when everyone was up in arms about those three people drowning that's a tragedy 850 people died crossing the border in 2022 that was a normal day like the distinction is is maybe in degree but really it's it's in aesthetic between between abbott and biden on this and it's just two dudes chest-stamping each other trying to not look weak there is not an option in the u.s system which allows you to vote for the party that doesn't want migrants to die like like both of the parties are completely in lockstep on that and let's uh let's let's be

very clear about something. Part of why that is, is because an overwhelming number of Americans are indifferent or actively hostile to the survival of migrants. Yes. Like this is an, it is incredibly unpopular in this country to think these people are human beings who deserve decent treatment and decent lives. This is a fight that the left has lost comprehensively mostly in large part because the left has completely given up on it which is why you've got

fucking a lot of these nazbol assholes saying shit like you know this is uh we have like like saying basically protectionist nativist kind of shit these days right because i think that like leftist media has also and and to include i guess liberal media also has completely oh yeah like been complicit in this right like the amount of stories that you will read about migrants that don't talk to migrants in the next few weeks will be a lot if you care to read them right and that's because people don't want to come here they're either afraid of coming here or they don't want to take the time they don't have the language skills there are people who have the language skills who don't who don't get to come here they're either afraid of coming here or they don't want to take the time they don't have the language skills there are people who have the language skills who don't

who don't get these jobs and are people who don't have the language skills and who don't have the understanding of how the border on the ground works as opposed to immigration policy in dc works and you're going to see a lot of people who don't live at the border who don't come to the border writing about the border and uh yeah that's how we got here and that's how we're getting to this it's largely like a giant panic about a nothing burger but um yeah it's the reporting has been in continuous fear responsible and that is in some degree complicit yeah and i and i think this is also the explanation for why there's a lot of people going like why is biden not like sending the troops why is biden not cracking down because he doesn't fucking give a shit it's the same policy he doesn't care right like there's not

actually substantive disagreements except over like whether it should be like some like a really stupid political stunt over whether it should be like federal troops like on or like federal agents like on the border or whether it should be the razor wire like he doesn't care yeah you know and to be fair i will say i don't think this is the start this right here i don't think is the start of a civil war we may know if we have one we may someday see this on like the list of factors contributing to in the years leading up to it but i will say if we do ever have a shooting civil war it will be something this dumb that that i feel absolutely certain of it will it will be a thing where no one involved really cares about the issue that starts it it's just a dick

measuring contest that goes too far i just don't think this is the dick measuring contest but to be fair it will be something this dumb don't worry folks don't worry if we do start shooting each other it will be just as stupid as this yeah i do think that like i think we're extremely likely to start shooting civil war over this or in the next few years generally i do think the chance of shooting migrants without a civil war is shooting specifically of migrants especially in places where they're not safe like open air detention centers is going up and yes that scares the shit out of me yeah like someone who spends a lot of his life there and uh i do think that there might the i mean we saw in

2018 right and we've covered this extensively the tree of life shooting was in large part motivated by right-wing rhetoric about a caravan of migrants i was in tijuana in 2018 i spent months of my life helping people down there uh like anyone who's scared of those people uh is paranoid to say the least right they were mostly fine wonderful very friendly people um i spent christmas with them but yeah the 2018 tree of life shooting came from paranoia about the border we're seeing that same paranoia from right-wing media and from liberal media now and i think that it would not be unreasonable to have that fear of individual acts of violence and terrorism along the border yeah i i think uh one of the things we're going to have to do in the near future is get better at understanding kind of the media dimensions of of of conflicts like this and and what is an irresponsible way to respond to them and i think treating this like it is a civil war

type deal is kind of feeding into the rights image of itself and their desire to treat this like they're revolutionaries now that said what is the right thing to do because like the uh the what the biden administration seems to be doing right now is largely kind of ignoring it i think at some point they will probably try to nationalize the guard and we'll see what happens then one thing that's kind of worth noting is that this is primarily gone viral on right-wing media i'm seeing very little of this on like mainstream centrist uh like liberal media sources and i'm seeing little on this because like most of those sources don't really care about the border unless there's some way to like drum up fear

against migrants like that they'll do a caravan story but this just this just simply doesn't sell i think when it comes to like what is a responsible way to report on this i think you have to start by centering what's actually happening to the migrants what's what's being done to them as opposed to focusing on this dick measuring because that's the actual harm here. The harm here is not that, that Abbott has been mean to the border patrol. And it's not that Texas and these other States, these rebel States are raising an army to fight the federal government.

It's that we're, there's this argument between the people in power in our country about like, how bad should things be for people who are already desperate? And I think that's where you should center your focus. Also, I'm, I, I've just noticed this on my other screen.

This is a bit off topic, but you know, that movie rebel moon by Zack Snyder. Oh God. There's an, there's an ad for, for the canned water company, Liquid Death, that just is showing a bunch of, like,

Imperial troops from that movie beating a man and then drinking Liquid Death water as they relax afterwards. It's the most unhinged ad I've ever seen. It's like running aside a Vox article. I've never seen anything like this before. It's just like, what the? Wait a second. What? Zack Snyder, come on. You can't do this. Zack, no. vox article i've never seen anything like this before it's just like what the wait a second what

zach snyder come on you can't do zacks no that fucking guy jesus talking of advertising buy some liquid death we're back yeah so i want to talk about grift because we talked about advertising a bit i don't know if you guys have seen the number of like right-wing uh influencers okay so i'm i'm looking at friend of the podcast tim pool's twitter here oh tim there's a guy who is excited to have a civil war where he will be murked immediately by one of his bodyguards yeah there is a man who's seen combat and uh knows what it is to uh hear rounds cracking off over your head okay tim pool i'm just going to quote here but i have ha ha ha ha ha ha etc fuck me dude and then safe and ready meals.com uh the pool is not the only one on the uh buckets of food grift right alex jones has been on this too oh yeah a million years yeah yeah yeah he's a bit long time uh long time food storage guy at alex jones a lot of these guys are like

very clearly g'ing up fears of civil war on the right so that they can sell people powder dried eggs. Like, it's so transparent. Like, it's in the same tweet. Yeah, Sobiek, Trump calls for all willing states to deploy National Guard to Texas border and start the deportations. And then there's a special partner offer from mypatriotsupply.com. God. Which is the way to fuel your bigotry, I guess. Guys, two things first off if you buy your storable food from some right-wing media grifters deal site you will spend the apocalypse shitting

yourself to death like it's all horrible if you are going to buy if you are going to throw a bunch of money on store if you are a sane and reasonable person who wants to store food learn how to make your own jerky learn how to can food. You can do it very cheaply. It is not expensive to can your own food. If you know what you're doing, you can can stuff that is in season and get it really cheap from the grocery store.

And you can pickle and do other kinds of can't pressure canning. It's really economical and it will last a long time. If you are going to spend a shitload of money on storable freeze-dried food, you're going to be spending a bunch of money anyway. Just go buy Mountain House. Buy Mountain House. It's the good stuff. It's tasty.

As far as I know, no right winger advertises on them and it's actually pretty good food. Yeah. That's what I keep in my car for emergencies. You will not shit ever. Yeah. Ever again.

Yeah, you may never poop again. But, but, yeah. for emergencies you will not shit ever yeah ever again yeah you may never poop again but the fucking biscuits and gravy breakfast selection they have man when you're alone in the mountains that shit is fucking fire oh my god yeah that will it is like a bung for the digestive system yeah i just want to plug lentils.org which i've checked it is a website about yeah lentils the shit forever yeah it is find balance between the yin and the yang in your in your post-apocalypse life with mountain house and lentils.org you know what's not running on lentils guys guys? Unfortunately, this is not an ad pivot. I've just done the old bait and switch. It's this fucking convoy that's going to the border. I'm going to talk about this a little bit. Yeah, let's do that.

This is where I'm really done with irresponsible reporting. Being like, oh, no, January 6th, part two. Here's a link if you want to take part. Like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Stop it. here's a link if you want to take part like what the fuck is wrong with you stop it but i i look right-wing groups have tried to run convoys probably a dozen times since 2020 right i think we can all think of a different convoy that's got stuck under a bridge when drove by my house and then basically didn't get any further than that yep yep they get lost they disagree about directions a lot of what a lot of people are going to realize is that the texas border

is 12 hours from anywhere in texas when you are in dallas i believe this is accurate when you are in dallas it is faster to drive to chicago than it is to drive to the border. It is so fucking far away from anything. You could cross Europe in the time it will take you to get down there. Yeah, I love the idea of a convoy of like,

you know, like completely Q-pilled lunatics just descending on the town of Martha. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fucking passing marathon and going,

where in the christ are we yeah he's being like yeah like it is a really good really beautiful bike ride from martha to the border there's some dirt roads you can take oh and martha by the way folks if you're looking to go down to the border very fun town you'll have a good time in martha yeah do love a bit of martha really uh i'm not gonna tell my martha story i'll tell you guys when we're done but yeah yeah it is not link salacious it's just i don't tell it but yeah martha is near the border lots of things are not it is a very long way from i guess like maybe people could fly to el paso that's near the border um but yeah it's this idea so there's three convoys right one i think is supposed to go

from virginia beach to texas shares no way good luck guys enjoy spending seven thousand dollars in gas yes exactly right if they not look to the cost of fuel yeah you fucking idiot. Have fun, homies. Yeah. Another one is going from, I think, Las Cruces to Yuma, and the one is going from here at San Ysidro to Yuma. Yes, the drive from San Ysidro to Yuma is boring AF, but good luck, I guess.

Like, good luck spending that California. Hopefully they can pull off at some of the gas stations like east of San Diego where it's still like $6 or $7 a gallon because you're fucked if you need fuel there and you can't buy it from anyone else. But yeah, the idea that people are going to spend all their money like driving across. It's also just very like there's a meme right of the like the old white guy wearing Oakley wraparound or fake Oakley wraparound sunglasses doing a selfie video in his car to rant about like anything and everything but like i think it's very illustrative how many of these people don't feel safe outside their vehicles and like need the activism to

involve their uh their f-250 yeah well in part because most of them are like most Americans, not in great shape, not physically imposing. So if you're sitting in an F-250, you feel big and powerful. Like, James, you and I both have trucks. One of the things about trucks that is nice is that being in a truck, you're elevated above the rest of the road, right? Oh, yeah. And that gets to a lot of people's heads, especially if they have absolutely nothing

else going on in their lives, which nobody participating in this fucking caravan does. So they yeah, this is like it's it's it's their it's emotional support, right? They're sitting in their truck. They've got their gun. They're not breathing hard because they have to, like, walk around the world. And they they would desperately prefer that they can. That's where how their activism that's how their participation in the second civil war will will uh occur yeah through the means of truck bunch of bunch of fucking wankers yeah so i do want to get into kind of

like what we do feel is the actual threats of this again i think the danger here is you've got a lot of kind of fights going down about like how far can governments take their anti-trans legislation how mean can they be to undocumented immigrants like how much violence can they deploy in deporting people um what can they do to journalists what can they do to journalists? What can they do to people speaking out or engaging in protest without violating the Bill of Rights? You know, what can they do to marginalized communities without violating the Civil Rights Act? I think this is an attempt to set a precedent for ignoring federal control so that they can be crueler to large groups of people within their purview. And I think a lot of this is a reaction to this is kind of their what if we lose this

election, right? I think there is a fear and I don't necessarily think this fear is actually like born out. I don't think the right's national hopes in terms of its ability to get elected again after Trump are as poor as people want them to be as I might want them to be. Yeah. But I think there is real fear among the right that if Trump doesn't win this, they're not going to win the presidency again. Right. And I think part of what they're doing is setting up. All right, then we will just take over and take increasing autonomy in our red states and we will effectively govern them very differently and govern them in contravention of how the rest of the country and how the federal government, how the Supreme Court says that they can be governed because we can't be cruel enough without that. And I think that is what they are stepping up to be able to do. If you're asking, you know, what do I think will be sort of like line crossings that could lead to mass social violence in this country?

One thing I don't think they're going to take that leap while a Democrat is in control of the federal government and the Defense Department. I think they will push for a violent crackdown on everything left of the far right if they win power again, because they talk about that repeatedly because they promised to do that. And I think that if they lose, there's an off chance, I don't think this is likely, but it's not impossible that protests and violence as acts of protest against Biden winning a second term could snowball into something that resembles an insurgency. Not impossible. I don't think that's the likeliest outcome but i don't see them starting to shoot at federal troops now while biden is in the white house for one thing i feel like that's the

thing that would really clinch it for biden if the texas national guard starts trying to secede well you've made his re-election campaign easier right because now none of the red states like none of the states that secede you can't also have an election where those states get to vote right like that's that's just not the way it works yeah so i don't feel like that's the likeliest thing i think this is yeah i think i've made it clear what i think and i think it's really clear that it's time for our second ad break that's right hopefully it's an ad for the new Trans Pride Oreos. Have you guys seen those? Yeah.

Oh, no. I've not seen those. What? Wait, Trans Fried Oreos? Yeah, well, maybe it's just me. I was just reading a story earlier and I noticed that...

Trans Fat or... No, no. They have like a blue and a pink... Yeah, it's the Trans Fried Oreo. Oh, well, okay. They have a bunch of awesome Pride Oreo. This iso two years ago hold on this is okay okay okay i was about to say either way i don't really have i just put a link in there to woke woke biscuit that's good i i have i have no opinion on on this i i guess it's good oreos aren't bigoted

yeah well don't buy these Give your money to me instead. Yeah. I don't think it really matters either. Ah, we're back. You know, one thing I think about, like part of why this is going viral, and I think part of what's an issue about this with the way it's being talked about on the left, but also, you know, the way it's marketable to the right is that the thing about this conversation is that it looks like it's it's it's exactly perfectly engineered to look like the lead of civil war one and that is incredibly misleading it's it's it's basically it's like a marketing thing right because like yeah and this is something we've talked about on this show for like literally since day one is that like a civil war in the united states is not going to look like a bunch of states like

form an alliance and then all they're fighting all of the other states like it's not it's not going to look like that it's going to look closer to syria than it is going to look like like the the first civil war but people haven't shaken the like the sort of like brain worms of a civil war is like 16 states fight 16 states even though every single civil war that we've had like in the intervening like 100 like 200 years has not been that and here's here's how wrong here's how people are comprehensively wrong about this right on the left side you have lmao you guys are going to fight the federal government with your ar-15s they got bombs and planes and like well we've seen how well our bombs and planes work against insurgencies.

We're not good at winning those. If there were a real insurgency, and there's certainly ingredients to it, it would actually be a problem for the U.S. However, that does not look like 16 states declaring themselves seceded and going to war, because that's a conventional war. And you know what would happen if Greg Abbott started a conventional war against the U.S.? Greg Abbott doesn't have a fucking bunker, right? Yeah.

Like, we could, he could be, he could be blown up. He is, again, nothing against being in a wheelchair, but this is not a man who is capable of, like, living underground and hiding from federal bombers. Like, that's just not the kind of conflict that you need to be concerned about. Yeah, this man does not have the Bin Laden dog in him. He just does not. No, he sure doesn't. No, the idea of Greg Abbott taking to a cave system in... Doing a Tora Bora at the border of Texas.

He's hanging out and fucking... Fucking Big Bend or whatever. Yeah, yeah, Tora Bora in Big Bend. Jesus Christ. fucking big bend or whatever yeah yeah toro boring big bend jesus christ yeah god it will be outstanding we would love to see it yeah but unfortunately grainy photos of greg abbott and like the mountains of southern texas shaking hands with mexican revolutionaries as they smuggle rifles to him rifles that they also got from the United States. That is what we call the circle of life. Oh, God.

Yeah, God, we can dream, but it does seem, unfortunately, unlikely. It would be very funny to see a SEAL team go after Greg Abbott. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. SEAL team fighting the Texas Rangers, if only. If only. Just a bunch of dudes, each with a revolver, because they thought it looked cool until the very first time

someone was shooting back at them. Yeah, it's a real, like, who is on the most HGH competition? Whoever can stop the steroids from flooding in is going to win. That's the spice in this particular conflict. Yeah, we would love to see it. Joe Rogan's the Baron Harkonnen of making sure everybody's spec ops guys have enough gear floating above a fucking table.

Great. It would be wonderful in some senses, but yeah, i don't think we're gonna see a uh a shooting word of order it will be interesting to see how like biden has screwed the pooch in terms of like his media management of this i would say and it will be interesting to see uh how hard he goes in response like or if he goes yeah in response i think the smart answer would be nationalize the guard if there's things that you can actually prosecute people over prosecute them and continue to not deal with it in the media like the his instinct isn't bad in terms of not wanting to feed in directly to the right wing outrage loop but you still have to you still have

to go after them for this. Right. And it's the kind of thing it's probably like too much to hope for any real action being taken. But, but I would say that's probably the smarter option, right? Not to say anything of like what the most moral thing to do is,

but the smart option is don't feed into the fundraising loop. Cause we should probably get in on that. This is all a fundraising thing, right? In addition to them testing the waters, that's the biggest dimension of this is and that's why we talked earlier all of these guys tim pool and jack posobiec and i'm sure the daily wire guys are in it now are like advertising their storable foods companies and shit the point of all this all right wing messaging all far right

messaging starts as a grift it all starts with a product to sell that's by the way how guns became so enmeshed with the far right right a lot of gun companies realize that like americans only need so many guns for like reasonable self-defense and hunting and even even recreational purposes there's only so many guns a man could shoot at a time but you can really get people to stockpile shit like crazy if you convince them they're like preparing to be guerrilla fighters in a in a future civil war and so and a lot of these like gun tuber influencers that's kind of where they increasingly went because that's where the money was and so this becomes more and more of a part of right-wing

politics because a lot of people on the right have a lot of money to be made in, in messaging this kind of stuff and selling this kind of stuff. The same thing is true with the civil war shit. It's true with these like fears that the government, you know, we can sell you storable food. We can sell you fucking bunkers. All of this stuff comes out of some sort of financial grift.

And the biggest thing that most of the people involved in this are hoping for, fucking Jack Posobiec doesn't want to be fucking hiding underground, getting bombed by the U.S. Air Force. Jack Posobiec wants to make another million dollars off of affiliate sales of bullshit, right? Yeah, of shit. That's what, and a lot of these people, these guys doing this caravans to the borders, they're not planning on spending their own money on gas. They're hoping that they can crowdfund a shit of these people, these guys doing this caravans to the borders, they're not planning on spending their own money on gas. They're hoping that they can crowdfund a shitload of money.

And I'm sure one of them will steal all of it and run away, right? That's what usually happens with this kind of shit. But that's what they're all hoping to do. And so that's kind of the over. If you want to actually hurt them, if you're looking at where do we how do we draw a strategic victory out of this? Find a way to damage their ability to profit off of this shit. And I do think part of it is not making this as big a story as it otherwise might be. But that's not simply enough because the right is large enough that just through their media

hyping this up, they can make a decent amount of money off this stuff. So more complex solutions are needed. Yeah, I do think we should probably discuss like the potential of Abbott using this in a personal, like later presidential run, right? Like he's in New Delhi at the moment. Have you seen this? He sure is. He's in New Delhi hanging out with everybody's favorite pseudo dictator of India, Modi.

Yeah. Like Abbott trying to build this kind of uh like electoral alliance and international alliance for uh like fascist like wolfenstein america is uh is i think like it's concerning because like trump has a lot of baggage and like i think obviously has a great degree of personal support especially in the primaries but if they don't make if they don't stick the landing with trump i think abbott is waiting in the wings to uh to make perhaps a more competent fascist than trump and make an attempt at running for the presidency not good anything else to say fuck all of them yeah that's it but okay so the other thing that you actually can do about this is that, look, this bullshit, all of this stuff is going to continue until there's actually some kind of sustained attack by the left politically on the border regime.

That was a thing that when I was coming up, like coming up like 2016 2017 2018 we were doing right there was occupied ice there was like there were mass demonstrations there was like critical pleasure being applied and we didn't go far enough part of the reason we didn't go far enough is a lot of people fucking a lot of very optimistic political groups like including like psl etc etc like hijacked a lot of these things and pulled people off of occupations. But there have been periods in my lifetime, not that long ago, where there was actually forward progress being made about this shit. To the point where the Democrats were trying to co-opt it. And it doesn't fucking have to be like this.

We don't have to have hundreds of people fucking dying at the border every year. We don't have to have people in open-air fucking prisons. It doesn't have to be like this. We can fight them, and we can win, but it requires actually, like, it requires actually going and fighting. And, you know, you have to actually be willing to do this. You have to be willing to commit

to the organizing. But if we don't, if we just keep leaving all of this shit to, like, just the literal howling fascists and then biden who is like it like on on the border doing the same thing but not being but not like howling about it yeah yeah you know like this this this country is going to go into fucking oblivion and we are we are going like you're you're going to see in your lifetime the u.s government shooting people on the border like with machine guns right if you if we don't stop this fucking now that is that is

what you are going to live to see and it does not we don't we don't have to we don't have to live in that world but you have to act now yeah i think that's a great like it is also within our power to like there is not a voting option but there is always a mutual aid option at the border. And I know I bang on about this. But like, if you are within range of the border, you can go and help if you're not there are migrant communities in your city in your town, who need your help. And like, the way we get through to our boomer uncles and and facebook aunts and stuff is is by showing them that migrants are people with stories who are just the same as you and they just want a chance to raise their kids someone where they're not going to get fucking killed by a car bomb and the the more human interactions more people can have with migrants and the more stories we can tell that center migrants as people not as numbers or a tsunami or any of this dehumanizing rhetoric, the more likely we are to take the teeth out of this.

And that's something that all of us can do. Yes. All right. So that's a good thing to end on. And obviously, buy our storable foods. Go to pissingmypantsdriedfoods.net and use promo code Robert Evans says the apocalypse is coming

it's a very long promo code but you will get actually it increases the price by 15% but please do it we get more money anyway yeah we get more money that's gonna be it for us here at it could happen here until next time I don't know

go to sleep with dreams of a JDAM taking out Greg Abbott That's going to be it for us here at It Could Happen Here. Until next time, I don't know. Go to sleep with dreams of a JDAM taking out Greg Abbott. Right in the Austin Capitol building. Just bam, baby. Won't happen, but it is a funny thing to think about. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

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and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is in no small part about the increasing and escalating series of anti-trans laws being passed around the country uh it's another one of those episodes things are getting worse things are also getting weird and with me to talk about worse and weird is kyan lee from health liberation now welcome to the show yeah i'm excited to talk to you both because okay very very odd stuff has been happening so the main reason i wanted to have you two on is to talk about stuff that's been happening in ohio so for

people who are unaware ohio's legislature has been trying to pass a very draconian ban on all gender affirming care for minors the state's republican governor vetoed the bill and this was for about one day there was a lot of sort of like liberal cheering about like ah compassionate republicans blah blah blah and then immediately after that like like like the next day when all of all of us we haven't even like we hadn't even really gotten into the wait hold on he's gonna do something else uh the thing that dewine did is in is you know and this is this is being framed as like an attempt to stave off the veto which hasn't worked so far but he immediately implemented a bunch of rules that say that in order to get gender affirming care and this is true of both minors and adults which makes

it in a lot of ways more draconian than the actual bill it's quote-unquote supposed to be preventing like getting passed if you want to get gender affirming care you need recommendations from a psychiatrist an endocrinologist and a bioethicist and also all gender affirming care in the state has to be reported to the government? And there's other stuff, too. So, this is... The technical term for this is this is extremely bad.

Yeah. Yeah. Put it mildly. Yeah. I mean, he also signed an executive order just banning surgery for everyone under 18, too. Yeah. So, too. Yeah.

So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, also, I think, I believe it was, like, everyone under 21 also had to go through six months of counseling as well. Yes. Yeah. At least six months of counseling. Yeah. There's no upper cap. Mm-hmm. And, like, a lot

of this was DeWine and his spokespeople have ended up justifying a lot of this, trying to use language from clinicians working at clinics in Ohio that see trans youth and be like, well, you know, they're taking this comprehensive multidisciplinary approach. And most of the people they see get counseling instead of medical transition. So they're actually using a lot of the testimony against the ban to try to justify these rules and regulations.

And I don't think they're acting in good faith because when you actually look at the details, you're like, well, this would basically make it almost impossible for anyone at any age to transition. But it's a very sneaky, smart move, right? Like being like, oh, look, we're trying to find a compromise. We're trying to make sure everyone gets good health care. And unfortunately, sometimes liberals and liberal media

will just kind of eat that up without really looking at the details. Yeah, and one of the things that's happening here, too, is that so the U.S., in places where there's pretty good access to gender-affirming healthcare, it works off of something called informed consent. you what is going to happen and you talk you talk to like a nurse or a doctor and then once you know the like what you're actually getting into you say yes or no if you want to do something right and you know this is a this is a pretty good system it still can be really annoying to navigate because of insurance stuff and you know like there's definitely problems with it but it's a it's a much better system than exists in a lot of places and you know i think there have been two sets of comparisons about what these restrictions look like and we're going to get

to the comparisons to uh tarp restrictions on abortion in a second but i want to talk about another thing that these restrictions strike me as very similar to which is the british system and the way the british system works is you get put on a wait list and then you die or you go to armenia like those are those are your options right or or you're really wealthy and you can you can bypass the public health care system and go to the private health care system but you know like i hope like i i hope you were are like the heir to a mansion before you start that process or you're in serious trouble. The thing about the British system is there's all of these paths of interlocking experts you have to go through. You have to get signatures from every single one of them. And what this means is you have this enormous sort of interminable British gender gender bureaucracy whose only job and only the only thing

they want to do is stop you from getting health care there's a very very good um philosophy tube episode about this about what it's actually like to be in that system and it's terrible and this is a this is what the the kinds of things are being proposed here are in a lot of they're not it's not exactly the same as the british system but it's it's bringing it much closer to that system where it's basically impossible to get health care and and the thing about the british system and about these restrictions where you know you have to have like a bioethicist and a psychiatrist and endocrinologist and you have to like do all you have to like jump through all of these hoops is that at every single point in the process there is another gender bureaucrat who can just by themselves decide that they're just doing a trans health care ban and you know every every individual

person you put into the process is another person who can just say no and that's how the system works is that someone in the process just says no and you die in a wait list yeah i mean we we know trans people in britain and in other european countries where they have like a lot of gatekeeping and you know all of them have warned us like you do not want this coming to the u.s yeah um you know reminding us like all the time like how much easier a lot of u.s trans people have it in terms of accessing health care i just like yeah i mean it everything i've heard about like the uk healthcare system sounds like nightmarish people asking invasive questions about like your sexuality or your trauma history or for youth that often ends up like

involving like genital inspections for some reason it just sounds like a horrible dehumanizing violating experience and then yeah and like a lot of people like spend years years and years if they you know and are lucky if they do it are able to access care a lot of people have to go private if they can afford to honestly um before i mean technically it was during but before before the full onslaught of bills started to hit the U.S., there were Brits that were trying to sound the alarm and get

the message out to U.S.-based folks. Yeah, it was around when the Kirabelle ruling happened. Kirabelle was a detrans woman whose lawyer was affiliated with the ADF, with the British branch of Alliance Defending Freedom, which is behind a lot of the

it's like an international Christian nationalist organization that's behind a lot of the healthcare bans in the US as well. Also anti-abortion, anti-birth control. Yeah. Really nasty people. But anyway, so like, Kira Bell,

this detrans woman, it's like she sued the NHS for allowing her to transition and originally won her case, and that led to basically the end of transitioning for youth. Yeah, she submitted a judicial review. The initial review was favorable to her, but upon further review the appeals did end up overturning it but by that point the damage had already been done yeah um a bunch of people were starting to lose access to to care and the likes and the wheels were starting to spin internally as well in terms of the tavistock system and so like as a result like the wait list just end up getting

longer and longer and longer um so that was like a huge blow that happened in the uk and like uk trans people like were basically like by that point it's trying trying to warn people in the us like this is gonna come for you too yeah like get ready like they'd already been already been like suffering under this like no anti-trans blitz for a while, and they knew it was going to spread on the borders of the UK. And unfortunately, it has. In the very early

stages of our project, when we launched at the beginning of 2021, almost immediately after the Kiribati initial ruling, we hosted a transcript of a podcast from Blood and Turf that was trying to deliver this message over to U.S.-based comrades. And unfortunately, it does not appear to have reached as many people as it really needed to. But we do have that available in the event

that people can still learn from it because this onslaught is not going to stop. Yeah, it's not. this onslaught is not going to stop yeah it's not yeah and and i think one of the things that we're seeing now is that we're we're now seeing a kind of an opening of new fronts in a way where you have in the same state at the same time you have both what i guess i would call the american style approach of just straight up bands and then this kind of an attempt to implement this sort of british like uh you know an attempt to implement this sort of like british gender bureaucracy system and one of the things that's been happening with this is you know okay so there's a lot of places where there's inspirations coming for this. And I think, you know, we mentioned it briefly earlier. One of the inspirations for this is obviously TARP restrictions on abortion, where you have these, like, unbelievably restricted, like, basically these targeted things.

uh collapse there was you know you could you could ban abortions by for example you know saying like passing a bill that says that like okay if you want to do abortions in a hospital the the walls in the hallways have to be like exactly like this diameter which is not the same diameter as like as as normal hospital walls are so now you can't do abortions in hospitals and so they do things like this right and this this is you know and this has been a a huge problem for a long time anti-abortion activists have been talking about it for ages uh the democratic party did nothing uh so you know that that's i i think i think a sort of like forewarning of where this is going. Yeah. A direct parallel is actually over in Arizona, if I remember correctly, because one of the things that they ended up doing down in Arizona is a requirement that they tried to implement was this rather controversial piece where they also had to provide information on abortion reversal

using certain types of hormone care, right? Similar to how in order for people to be able to provide gender affirming care, they have to provide information about detransition and stuff like that. But when you actually start to look at some of the data not all of it but some of the data that they are relying on to inform people of this it is a wildly biased sample or just downright pseudoscience right like they looked at the evidence base for the abortion reversals and it didn't actually work the way that they were saying it was and it was actually coming from very very very explicitly motivated groups right so yeah like abortion has been difficult to access in arizona for a very long time um in part because of some of these like obnoxious um requirements that people end up putting into place through trap laws yeah and you know i think it's worth noting that like and this is true of both the anti-trans requirements that people end up putting into place through trap laws.

Yeah. And, you know, I think it's, it's worth noting that like, and this is true of both the anti-trans bans and the, and anti-abortion legislation is that like, it's the science, they're just making it up a lot of the time. Like, you know, one of the, like one of the very famous things was these like fetal heartbeat bills that required like, like one of the very famous things was these like fetal heartbeat bills that required like, and the thing about like fetal heartbeat bills is that fetuses don't have heartbeats.

You're not hearing a heartbeat. Like doctors will like force you to listen to this. It's like, it's not what's happening. It's literally not a heartbeat, but these people like they put a stethoscope to a woman's chest and heard a beating and we're like, Oh shit, it's the baby's heart. And it's like, no, it doesn't to a woman's chest and heard a beating and we're like oh shit it's the baby's heart and it's like no it doesn't have a heart like what wait this is a

fetus like what what are you even talking about but you know and but and this kind of stuff right is you know they're they're they're basically they're they're doing just scientific malpractice right they're straight up lying to people and then they're using that as justification for you know actual legislation which has sort of material impact and like you know carries the force of the law behind it etc etc etc and we've been seeing a lot of very similar kinds of things from from these anti-trans legislation and one of one of the ways that they've been able to use sort of pseudoscience to get restrictions on healthcare passed, and this is true both of sort of the straight-up bans and also of these kind of like massive bureaucratic restrictions, is by allying with groups of sort of right-wing detransitioners. groups of sort of right-wing detransitioners and we're need to talk about the stuff in the ohio story that is very weird now i i think if people have been following the story of sort of anti-trans bills one of the things that's been happening a lot is there's been this sort of,

there's a, there's a network of people who detransitioned for various reasons. I don't know who, who have become very, very hardline right-wingers and who have basically been doing like circuits of, of the, the capitals of, you know,

of like state capitals and like going to Capitol Hill and like telling their quote unquote stories to try to get this, try to get like all trans health care banned. Now, this is something we've covered on the show in the past. What is very weird about Ohio is that you had a group of these right wing detransitioners who specifically were trying to get it looked like a very least we're trying to get it looked like at the very least we're trying to get we're trying to stop the like the actual uh like gender affirming care ban from going through and we're in favor of more of this restriction stuff is that is that what is it am i getting this right not not exactly there's a couple of no okay well um sorry i'm i i can provide my my brief um description here real quick um and then you can retake aspects of that stuff because something to bear in mind is

the fact that um like some of the opposition in the ohio um testimonies are actually coming from people who view themselves as very left-wing. These are radical feminists, specifically. They are just hardcore opposed to Christians. I would say they're actual politics. They're very reactionary. But they call themselves left-wing. They see themselves as being opposed to the right.

That's how they present themselves. They definitely believe that they're anti-right-wing. There's also another component. This one is like... that they're anti-right wing by there's also another component this one is like the nuances are sometimes almost impossible to be able to

tease out I swear tomato tomato but one of the people who was a proponent for both this current bill and a past bill is actually Corinna Cohn who does not consider herself to be um right wing though she does appear to be working with a number of right-wing people she considers herself to be quote-unquote libertarian now this is a red flag yeah um for

for those of us who have done any sort of like real engagement with certain types of libertarians or political organizing or whatever in that if you actually pay attention to some of the arguments that are being made or the collaborations that are being made you can generally tell which direction their politics are truly leaning towards right is it left wing is it right wing and hers have been steering far and far more right wing like she uses the like excuse of you know i i want small government and stuff like that but if you're working with like legislators to put in full-on bans i'm sorry honey that's not small government that's not small government that is the opposite of small government, actually. And so, like, it's kind of hard to sort of, like,

encapsulate the entirety of, like, the proponents of the opposition into particular political alignments, because a lot of it is really based off of, like, what are their motivations and who are they willing to work with which again tomato tomato but i'll have to come back to the corinna cone one at some point here too because that one is actually um an important timeline in terms of understanding the ohio bills and yeah i mean basically i mean you have like these you do have like right-wing east transition people like Chloe Cole

or Prisham Bosley Laura Becker who like do you know they they'll be hanging out with like the Heritage Foundation or Billboard Chris or the Q Shaman or R-Duty they very much are just working

to try to pass these full on bans but then yeah you have also these like detrans turf and their more liberal fellow travelers who definitely see themselves as being opposed to the right and are opposed to...

I mean, they're opposed to the right because they see right-wing Christians as being a threat to them as well and are at least smart enough to understand that if right-wing Christians as being a threat to them as well, and are at least smart enough to understand that if right-wing Christians have their way, they're going to suffer too. But they also want to end trans healthcare or restrict it.

I mean, some of the people who helped organize, helped collect the testimony, the group statement that was submitted under the name Are You Asking Why? Max and Katie Robinson, they have ties to Janice Raymond. Dead serious. Yeah, they do.

Janice Raymond helped publish Max Robinson's book over at Spinifex Press, this swerf and turf publisher. So, yeah, they're not actually pro-trans. Yeah, well, we should should mention so janice raymond

for people who uh someone we've talked about on the show a few times but janice raymond wrote a book called the transsexual empire and okay so people normally leave off the subtitle of it which is called it's the transsexual empire the making of the shemale it's like one of the original like original anti-trans people like incredibly violent transphobe like like both both in terms of like the career of her work like physically like violently anti-trans and yeah yeah she is she is connected to a lot of the modern anti-trans groups and also the modern like the modern i don't know what you'd call them people who are attempting to take away trans health care but who don't see themselves as

anti-trans i have no idea how to even summarize that in a single term yeah bad i don't know i can't yes definitely bad yeah yeah so like i, yeah. So, like, I mean, yeah. And, I mean, yeah, Max and Kitty fully endorse Janice Raymond's theories. I mean, Janice Raymond, one of the things she's famous for is saying that, like, transsexualism should be morally mandated out of existence. Like, Max Robinson has said that she supports that. They also both, I mean, Janice Raymond focused heavily on

trans women overall and also claimed that basically trans women were committing sexual assaults against women just for existing. Max and Kitty are also horrible trans misogynists. I mean, Kitty makes a lot

of propaganda attacking trans women and trying to cast all trans women as predators. horrible trans misogynist who actually makes a lot of propaganda attacking trans women and trying to cast all trans women as predators. Just not people you want on your side. Because they're not. They're a danger to all trans people. They're just like trying to find a way to influence

trans healthcare in a different way. And I mean, I'm concerned that people will hear like, oh, look at all these supposedly trans-friendly, detrans people who testified against this ban, not realizing that these are actually like turfs with an agenda. Who, I mean, part of them, part of what they want to do is to infiltrate like queer and trans subcultures and promote like turf ideology and recruit people. Like, let's put it this way. and recruit people like let's put it this way so max robinson in terms of some of her beliefs um refers to uh medical transition for like trans masculine folks as a sedo ritual going back to mary daly um types of descriptions of things and then kitty was one of the people that was

interviewed for and gave extensive background information for a BBC article that was released. I believe it was called something along the lines of we are being pressured into sex by some trans women. Oh god. Yes, that one, right? So we're feeding into

this narrative that trans women are sexual predators right into the British media when they were already having a massive influx of anti-trans media that was again feeding into the the demonization of trans people as a whole but then also like controlling trans youth and the likes and of course this article not only did it end up originally platforming like an actual like serial rapist yeah lily kade like someone someone a a serial rapist so prolific that like

within like maybe 30 minutes of this article going up like multiple like probably like a dozen people had come forward and been like she raped me like that that that is the person that the bbc was like coming forward to do this

shit with yeah she ended up posting um basically a manifesto um on her website that was even more extreme than aspects of the article showed off and then i will also note that this article was originally i believe it was only translated into into Portuguese in order to be moved into BBC Brazil, which is also one of the countries that has one of the highest rates of transfemicide. So, like, these are the people that decided to go ahead and testify. Yeah, and, like, well, I'm also personally bringing up Max and Kitty because, like, they were some of the people who helped, like, get the testimonies. Like, I found a post on Kitty's Tumblr blog

looking for detrans and desisted women who were willing to testify against a ban. And then Max was the one who actually submitted the collective statement from Are You Asking Why? She also submitted an individual statement, too. So basically, they found a bunch of detrans and desisted TERFs on tumblr to sign a statement and then submit it to like the state of ohio which is kind of wild to think about

yeah you don't normally expect to see testimony from turf tumblr let alone detrans tumblr but that is that hasn't even happened yeah not really who you want to show up for. No. Yeah, it's really not good in terms of who you want doing your legislation. Like, oh god. Yeah. Yeah, so, okay, we need to take another ad break, and then

we will come back and talk more about this. So, enjoy your brief capitalistic respite from the horror of capitalism. We are back. In order to properly understand the situation in Ohio, you kind of have to go back several years, right? One of the bills that ended up being proposed in 2020 was HB 513. This was another version of a proposed ban on gender affirming care for trans youth in particular. And it was sponsored by representatives Ron Hood and Bill Dean. This one is interesting because one of the groups that ended up coming out in opposition to it was the Gender Care Consumer

Advocacy Network. This is the organization that I helped found in 2019 prior to my resignation. They submitted this opposition after my resignation, but it is available on archives. Then in 2021 and the 2022 legislative session, there was the proposal for HP 454, which was another proposed ban on gender affirming care for trans youth. This time it was being sponsored by Representative Gary Click, who is also the sponsor of the current bill that had recently been vetoed and then the veto vetoed. And in May of 2022, the Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network, or GCCAM testified in tentative support. The testimony was submitted by Corinna Cohn and included suggestions for amendments. These amendments are actually very important. One of the amendments that she recommended was on data tracking. I believe it says here,

the second amendment would be a requirement for physicians, mental health care providers, and other medical health care professionals mandating an annual report to the Ohio Department of Health, the number, age, and sex of minor patients who are receiving gender transition services of any type. This was what she originally proposed as an amendment to the bill. The bill, again, did not end up passing. But now we are seeing HB 68, which is the one that merges the ban on gender affirming care for trans youth and a sports ban. Because I guess, you know, trans youth playing chess is somehow like threatening. But so this one was again, represented,

uh, like sponsored by representative click. And this time, curiously enough, um, Corinna had been working more extensively with, uh, click during various portions of the,

um, of the push for the bill, right? You know, she testified multiple times. She's posted videos with him pictures etc another person who had originally founded the organization carrie callahan did originally start opposing curiously she did not note her prior experience with the

organization but she did uh start to oppose the the bill and then later starts to put out basically uh like a more general call for um opposition to hp 68 right you know trying to collect in um you know various types of uh detransitioned people who were opposed to bans on gender affirming care right and then who is it that ends up showing up um it's this weird little like turf group that originally came out of detransTrans Turf Tumblr in 2013 that, historically speaking, she had prior working relationships with and even presented their stories to US Path.

Yeah, and also, I mean, Max Robinson, too. Both Max Robinson and Carrie Callahan were both featured in Jesse Singles' Atlantic article, too. There's lots of points of connection. They've known each other since at least 2016 and worked together. I can't say for certain how it is that they ended up there. ended up there personally to me it seems a little weird that people who had prior working relationships dating back a decade are showing up in the same place again and like they are also showing up in legislative testimony for the first time in the state where some like one of the the central figures for a

long time there is putting out a call to oppose this particular bill like the the coincidences are racking up a little bit here it might be good to ask some further questions about what exactly happened because i i have some questions um so you know, this happened in December of 2023, right? Eventually, Governor DeWine goes ahead and vetoes. But at the same time, he makes his, you know, proposal for the drafting of new regulations with, you know, the Department of Health and the likes. of new regulations with the Department of Health and the likes. And within that is the suggestion of detailed data tracking that is reported to the Department of Health and then to the general public every six months,

focusing on things like, you know, I don't think that he wanted to focus on like the the number of people that were doing it but he did um include a um like the nature of the diagnosis it applies to all ages it was not originally restricted to um trans youth like the original testimony was um from from gc can um the time range was also ended up being like it's it's shortened he wants it every six months not every year um but you know very similar kinds of things right in terms of what it is that he is proposing for this mass collection of data and a previous testimony that was submitted to the Ohio legislature. In fact, like not long after that fact, Representative Click ended up going on an

interview with Tony Perkins of Family Research Council talking about the pending veto. They originally did this interview on January 9th, and he noted that the data collection suggestion was originally included in a draft version of his bill, but was removed due to opposition. And so he's glad, actually, that that was included, although he wished that there would be even more restrictions. He actually was going to encourage the governor to also sign an executive order banning the use of puberty blockers, not just surgery. As far as I can tell, that has not happened, but he did say that he was going to try.

But, like, it's... Like, there's definitely some weird kind of like escalations that end up happening. And some of the like some of the interconnecting threads with individuals that again just happen to keep showing up in the same place over and over and over again, either in support or in opposition. Some folks have been consistently opposed, whereas other people have been kind of flip-flopping. The GC-CAN organization is one of the ones that flip-flopped. It originally opposed all bans, and then now all of a sudden it's like, you know,

the person that they are throwing out into these testimonies was arguing in favor of them. And then, like, you know, the person that they are throwing out into these testimonies was arguing in favor of them. And then like, you know, the quote unquote, are you asking why collective? And to be fair, Carrie Callahan have also been firmly opposed to full on bans and the Christian right pretty much from the beginning, though, for very, very, very different reasons. I mean, some of other opposition was like well people will go to like could go to other states where there's less restrictions like no the the stuff we have in ohio is already like has a lot of restrictions and majority of trans youth like

only get counseling and they don't get any like none of them get surgery and most of them like only a very small number of them get puberty blockers or hormones so this should be like this should be an example for the entire country like that was kind of uh carrie gallaghan's take on things and then like i mean yeah a lot of the the more like the detrans terps like uh the robinsons or other members of are you asking why it's like okay well they're opposed to the Christian right, and they recognize that if the Christian right gains more power and is banning things, that's bad, not just for trans people,

but also for cis-lesbian and gay people and cis-women, and it will end up hurting them too. So, I mean, even from a self-preservation stance, they understand why they should be opposed to the Christian right. But if you actually read their testimony, a lot of them do make it clear that they're opposed to transition or like one one person called it like compared medical like trans health care to like a hydra and said that like banning it would only be cutting off a head like these aren't yeah and so a lot of them were you, we're also kind of praising, you know, regulations like the group statement talks about like it's like, you know, shutting down clinics won't improve anyone's quality of care.

Ohio's existing programs are known for their moderation. They don't perform surgery on minors. Many clinics out of state do. So. minors, many clinics out of state do, blah-da-yah-da, so Max Robinson's testimony also said similar, but that she had

it on good word from an Ohioan. Right. I have questions. Yes, you did say, I hear from good authority from an Ohioan that pediatric gender clinics, they prescribe hormones pretty sparingly and don't actually perform any underage transition surgeries. Other states do, though.

So there's this whole thing, it's like, they're still kind of scaremongers, like, oh, but these other states were easier to transition as a minor, those are bad. But they're still making it clear that the idea that people having easy access to transition especially as youth is a bad thing in their minds. I don't think we actually mentioned that people having easy access to transition especially as youth is like a bad thing uh in

their minds i don't think we actually mentioned like how like if you actually look at the collective uh statement that are you asking why issued and like who signed it like a whole bunch of them didn't actually transition like a lot of them were actually desisted which means that they like never actually medically transitioned they considered transitioning or maybe socially transitioned, but then they decided not to medically transition, possibly after converting to anti-trans feminism or the like.

So it's just a bunch of people who decided not to transition. I'm desisted, testifying against a healthcare ban. That's also kind of a classic strategy too. They have a bunch of desisted people along mixed in with people who actually transition and detransition

to kind of inflate the numbers. This is standard. Yeah, this is very standard. It's an old trick. It's like, oh yeah, you're like, okay. And then a bunch of them are also saying the ones who did transition and detransition, they're emphasizing how they, a few of them are emphasizing how young they were when they transitioned and detransition, they're emphasizing how they, a few of them

are emphasizing how young they were when they transitioned and detransitioned. Again, not exactly pro-trans. This collective here with pretty explicit TERF ties, including

some of them directly to Janice Raymond herself, was the bulk of the opposition from detransitioned people to the bill I should note that's 15 signatures right there people are talking about how there were 19 people that were

opposed so 15 of them were either part of the recruitment or actively recruited on detrans Turf Templar. At least five of them are just assisted. They're not DTransitioned. It's not clear about everyone.

But, yeah. Yeah. It's weird. It's just... It's really weird. And it's also been really weird to see the, the media just kind of take that testimony of theirs at face value. That's been a problem for a long time.

It's like getting the media to actually sort of like, um, investigate or care about people's like political views or activism or actually kind of being like, like sometimes like, I think like, I want to say like the, the baselaw New York Times story we were talking about before has Grace Ladinsky Smith in there without

saying that she was affiliated with GC Can not just affiliated with she was the president yeah so it's like okay she's just like represented as this like you know as a detourance woman without going into like actually she's the head of this political organization. This has been a problem for years.

Just a whole lot of different sketchy characters came out for what's going on in Ohio. You have Republicans and right-wing Christians who just want to straight up ban transition and move towards eliminating it for all trans people and work towards making it as impossible for trans people to live in society as they can. And then you have kind of more like tricky republicans like dewine sort of like

pretending to find some kind of compromise be like oh we're just trying to work for like more comprehensive health care that like so everyone gets what they need and like sort of like using some of the language that was used by clinicians who are trying to fight against the ban and their testimony. And, you know, trying to make these claims. But if you actually look at the details, like the regulations they're proposing would make it nearly impossible for anyone to transition, you know, both different medical professionals and kind of more liberal transphobic detrans people who want more gatekeeping and regulation and control over trans people and are kind of like using detransition and transition regret as a justification for that

or praising being like oh well oh Ohio, their youth clinics are already really good because they're very cautious and they use therapy a lot more than they actually allow youth to medically transition. I mean, that argument didn't seem to work out at all. Instead, it sounds like the governor kind of was like, oh,

two-thirds of youth only get therapy instead of medical transition? We should do that for everyone! It's sort of like, you know, if you propose restrictions and say, oh, this is great, then of course the people who are more extreme will just take that and run with it.

And then, you know, you have D-Trans TERFs showing up and testifying for their own weird reasons, probably because of their connections to carrie gallaghan but you know this also is a chance for them to sort of like you know launder their image make it seem like oh look we're good we're good detrans people we oppose the religious right we're fighting against these bans and then people who don't necessarily

like know any better will like come you know maybe with us in the woods. Right, right. That's a strategy. They often pretend to be more trans-friendly than they really are to draw people in or be able to influence queer and trans communities and slowly slip in crypto-terf ideology and recruit people. Or just flat-out stalk people.

Or stalk, yes. Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, it's like there's just a whole lot of different um you know anti-trans groups and individuals like stretching from like paternalistic medical professionals who want more gatekeeping you want to restrict the number of people transitioning like all the way to you know like christian nationalists you want to just you know wipe us out completely and are basically at war with bodily autonomy in general.

They want to be the ones who control what people do with their bodies. They also want to restrict reproductive care and abortion. It's all part of the same war to just control people and sort their version of authoritarian Christianity. And then you have, you know, weird detrans-terfs. You kind of have to understand all these different factions and how they

interact together and how they try to use each other. It can seem overwhelming, but the more we kind of understand what we're up against, the easier it is for us to you know develop strategies of resistance and it's like you know even though you know it can seem like we're up against a lot of different groups but like you know we're also part of this larger

fight for for liberation and you know we can connect you know with with feminists who are fighting for reproductive autonomy we can can connect with disability, liberation activists who are fighting for better healthcare for everyone. We do potentially have lots of allies. We do have lots of connections with other movements. And so when you think of it that way, it's like, okay, we're not just one small group up against this whole Goliath.

No, we're part of this larger movement that is fighting so that everyone is free and that everyone gets the health care they deserve yeah and i mean i think that one of the one of the the sort of tangential things here too is you know this is an extremely negative example of the amount of influence that a very very small number of people can wield who have extremely unpopular ideologies on the other hand there are a lot of us and the things that we believe are very popular and you know the amount of power that we can wield if we are willing to organize and we are when

we understand what we're organizing against is immense and it is enough to drive these people into the fucking ground oh yeah yeah hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the

people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Mio Wong along back with part two of my interview with kai and lee from health liberation now about the long origins of anti-trans legislation and policy in ohio let's get right into it okay so the the next thing i wanted to sort of ask about is so this is a very very long-running i guess sort of strategy and campaign of sort of right wing or right wing and turf do you transition like groups advocating for trans health care bans and i wanted to i wanted to talk about some of the older campaigns that happened and i wanted to talk about specifically some of the campaigns to influence w path oh boy right right so we should we should start by explaining to people what w path is because i think unless

you're trans you probably don't know you've probably never heard of WPATH. It's like World Professional Association for Trans Health Care, I believe is what it is. I'm trying to double check that. Yeah, yeah. World Professional Association for Transgender Health, formerly known as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Alliance. They publish the standards of care that is usually used to help inform gender-ming care for trans people and they have done various versions of this over the the course of decades we are currently on version eight yeah and um historically they've their way of administering trans health care has involved a lot of like

gatekeeping and psychological assessments or requiring people to do a real life test, which is like making someone live as the gender they're transitioning to for like a year before they can actually access medical transition. So I guess like social transition, but it's like a test to prove whether you're a quote unquote real trans person or not. Yeah. Things have gotten like somewhat better over time,

but there's still a lot of medical professionals, especially therapists in WPATH, who still want to require some form of gatekeeping, who basically still don't trust trans people to know who we are and what we need. And they're like, okay, but we need to make sure they get therapy. We need to make sure we do all the psych tests,

because what if they regret it? And so, yeah. So I used to be a detransitioned radical feminist back in the day. And I used to know, I mean, I knew Max and Kitty. I was involved in that particular group for about like six and a half, seven years. And I used to have a blog

called Crash Chaos Cats where I wrote about detransitioning and kind of got more turfy over time. But pretty early into my blog, about three months or so in, this gender therapist who worked for the San Francisco Department of Health left a comment

on my blog and was like, I'm interested in talking to detransition people because I think there are two like, well, she left a comment that she was interested in talking to detransition people and talking to me. And then like we started emailing back and forth and she opened up pretty quickly and said like, there are too many F2Ms in San Francisco. There's like too many F2Ms in the San Francisco Bay Area.

There are too many like,Ms in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are too many, you know, female people transitioning. Which is nuts! I know. It's like, oh no! It's like, oh wow! It couldn't possibly be that people are just coming to one of the most trans-friendly areas in the country to

transition because they think they'll have an easier time there. No! There's got to be too many people. I think somewhere early in the conversation she brought up youtube influencing people towards transitioning she thought there was like you know pressure to transition in the trans community and so anyway she had all this stuff something about like you know oh people are treating this social problem as a medical problem and i you know immediately kind of turned around and started talking with this other detrans radical feminist that I knew, Devorah Zahav, and we started

scheming like, okay, this gender therapist who works for the San Francisco Department of Health thinks there's too many people transitioning. How do we exploit this? How can we use this as an opportunity to cut down on the number of, like, people transitioning? It wasn't just that connection to the Department of Health.

It was also the WPATH. Well, that, that we found out about that. I was just going to go into that. Like, eventually, first we found out she was working for the Department of Public Health. And then we found out that she was in WPATH. And she actually was, like, you know, talking to the president of WPATH. of WPath. So she made it clear that she wanted to use

the stories of detransitioned people to try to get more clinicians to take a more cautious approach and she also wanted to try to develop psych assessments that could supposedly weed out who the real trans people were, who was going to benefit from transitioning, and who would supposedly go on to

regret transitioning and detransition. The thing is, we didn't actually believe that you could tell the difference between someone who would supposedly go on to regret transitioning and detransition. Now, the thing is, we didn't actually believe that you could tell the difference between someone who would end up state transitioning or detransition because we were TERFs, right? We thought everyone could be saved by radical feminism. And we had a bunch of people in our group who thought that they were, quote unquote, true transsexuals, who thought they fit the criteria of someone who would have a successful transition until they decided they actually were suffering from internalized misogyny or some other kind of rad femme explanation for gender dysphoria. And the thing is, Devorah also lived in the San Francisco Bay Area,

so she actually ended up meeting up with this gender therapist, whose name was Julie Graham. And was pretty open with her anti-trans views. I mean, she wasn't completely open with her intentions. Like, oh, I'm going to use this person to try to work towards ending all transition. But she did tell Graham that she didn't think anyone really benefited from it. And she told her that she said she knew people who had been true transsexuals who had detransitioned and said like lots of really awful things about like trans women being fetishists and just like you know all this very you know anti-trans stuff but then you know is it

oh but i think i can we don't have to agree on everything i think we can like work together and like you know this gender therapist fell for it like somehow like divorcing all this very anti-trans stuff like making it clear that she was opposed to transition saying like really nasty trans misogynistic shit like none of that was like objectionable enough program not to like continue to like work with her to continue to be like hey do you want to talk to these clinicians about what it is to detransition? And eventually what happened that eventually this relationship

with this gender therapist eventually led to a presentation at the first USPATH conference by Carrie Callahan who's like, she's kind of an odd figure because she never actually identified as a radical feminist, but she spent years hanging out

with detransitioned radical feminists. And she's detransitioned, but she's kind of more of like a weird liberal who believes in more gatekeeping, but she's kind of handy. She did this presentation at US Path, and she

showed some videos of det detrans turfs including myself like i made one i made a short video and max robinson also made one of those videos and um carrie stella was the third person and carrie stella she did like she was another like detrans tumblr turf who did this survey um that still gets like it it was a it was a survey monkey survey it's gets cited um by like anti-trans researchers about detransition yep which anyways so we so there were three of us um who made these short videos both me and max robinson by that point had gone like we had hooked up with these weird um TERFs who were dianic witches and taken part in these kind of weird neo-pagan ex-trans reclaiming femaleness rituals we had

been through this kind of like religious neo-pagan like you know conversion practice rituals which of course that wasn't something that the US people, like, those are the people who knew that, but we hit that. I talked about how I thought I had transitioned due to, like, internalized misogyny and trauma and all that. So I was sort of, like, spreading

a more, like, kind of watered-down TERF ideology to the folks over at US Path. This is kind of an intentional strategy if you think about it. water down turf ideology to the folks over at USPATH. This is kind of an intentional strategy, if you think about it. Because I want to point out something from the emails about how that presentation was made and then given, where Carrie Callahan noted that her slides were,-unquote decidedly unradical she was trying to talk to therapists as a therapist um what that basically meant was she was taking away

a lot of the um more objectionable elements the things that would identify folks like kai and her previously scrambled state as a turf and being completely opposed to transition and stuff like that, and then putting on, kind of suiting them up, right? Getting them in their nice clothes and then presenting them to a professional audience who is then able to take that information and absorb it into their general thinking and then how that's going to play out in terms of their changes um or implementations of care in the long term yeah and that's something that like i

this is something that's pretty common with like a detrans uh like anti-trans activists across the spectrum like a lot of people like chloe cold there's a lot of the sort of like just hardline right-wingers who didn't talk about stuff like like some of these people detransition because like the thing that they're saying now is that you transition because they got a vision from god right and they don't start with that because i think right i mean i i think i think there should be more skepticism of people who are like, I got a vision from the Christian god or, like, the Abrahamic god that told me to do transition.

I think there should be more skepticism of that, but that's not something that, like, I don't know. If you walk into, like, WPath and you tell them I was given a vision from god, they're going to be like, what? Whereas this kind of stuff, right? Like, you know, but the WPath people like, and this like what whereas this kind of stuff right like you know but the w path

people like and this is something that's kind of complicated about this because i think there's i think there's a lot of people who see w path as one of the sort of like as one of the organizations that's there to protect trans people and that are sort of allies in this sort of in this battle against anti-trans stuff and it's true to a certain extent but they're also this is an organization composed of a bunch of cis doctors right who can be influenced and manipulated

and there's trans members as well but it also seems like the trans people who do end up in a high position at WPATH also tend to be

end up believing in gatekeeping and restrictions that kind of internalize the general mindset. And so it's kind of like their tokens, right? It's kind of handy for cis medical professionals who want to control trans people to have some trans people as figureheads

expressing those views. Oh, well, look, this person saying it, and they're trans. So, like, yeah. I mean, like, yeah, at the same, like, the first US path, I mean, just to kind of

show how far things still need to come, you know, the same US path where Carrie did her detransition presentation, Ken Zucker was there, and he got protested. I mean, there was a protest against him, and they did, I believe, they ended up canceling

at least one of his presentations. So Ken Zucker, kind of this notorious conversion therapist who focused primarily on trans youth. He had this clinic in Canada. Going after both trans youth and gender non-conforming youth. They tried to

prevent kids from growing up trans, but they also tried to make non-conforming youth more gender conforming as well with the justification, oh, well, it's easier to change the individual than to make make society less bigoted yeah yeah but yeah but he was the type of um like he was one of the medical professionals that was like you know helping to create like the standards of care for for trans youth for decades and it took a lot of work to to change that and like yeah he was still given a platform

by w path in like 2017 that's not that long ago yeah and that's i don't know it's this is one of these things where like the the the history of of cis doctors treating trans people is really really bleak in ways that don't get talked about and the reason like one of the reasons they don't get talked about from people who know about it is that like it's fucking bad like it's a lot it's it's a lot of people getting raped it's like a lot of like i mean and like when we talk about sort of like gatekeeping for health care like that was the like one of the original things was like you know one of the things that would happen very very commonly was you know it's like okay like if you if you want to get health care like you have to let me rape you like that

that's the thing that happened all the fucking time and this is and that that's not something that's you know extremely long ago right and you can you can look at like modern w path and be like well it's obviously like yes it has come a long way from that shit but simultaneously yeah like i don't know that's that's something that you know like there are living people who fucking experience that right and you know and when when you when you look at why these kinds of like detrans campaigns why why these like like these these sort of detrans anti-trans activists have been so successful in targeting this it's like well you know it's it's it's it's i think i think it's a kind of similar thing to like oh wow i wonder why like the third kkk was successful in the south and it's like hmm hmm maybe there are things happening i mean that that is slightly

unfair as being a bit unfair to them but you know there's there's still a lot of these sentiments that there's still a lot of sort of like transphobic sentiments that are just kind of like buried beneath the surface and i think a lot of what we've been seeing over the past you know like like eight ish years what is time hold on is that god okay i've broken my own rule about not trying to do math life on air people don't figure out that i can't do subtract but you know that's that's a lot of what's been happening for the last like eight years is that people figured out that there's still a lot of sort of lingering anti-trans sentiment and they figured out where you can target it in ways that

are extremely effective we need to go to ads we back in a second with less capitalism and we're back oh yeah I mean like I feel like in terms of medical professionals who want to gatekeep they've been using detransition and transition regret as an excuse for controlling people

for basically since the beginning of trans healthcare. That gender therapist, Julie Graham, she went looking for us. She went looking for detrans people to use. She's like, okay, this is how I'm going to cut down on the number of people transitioning.

I'm going to find some detransitioned women and then use their experiences. And that's what she tried to do. And I see this happening with other clinicians too. Going back to Ohio, Scott Leibowitz, he's a therapist who runs the Thrive Clinic in Ohio. the thrive clinic uh in ohio and he's another one who has used like detransition to justify like more psych assessments and i mean he was actually one of the therapists featured in um one of the new york times articles that everyone uh a lot of trans people got mad at the one by um emily bazelon was it, I forget what it's called. The Battle for Gender Therapy. Yes, The Battle for Gender

Therapy, where he's kind of cast as this poor, moderate clinician who's caught between the religious right that wants to ban all trans healthcare and these wacky trans activists who just want to let everyone transition. He's just trying to find this nuanced approach

and make sure that like teenagers don't transition and regret it. And, you know, yeah, you know, he was like, I mean,

like he was trying to stop the healthcare bans in Ohio by pointing out like, Oh, look, you know, we're, we do comprehensive care. You know,

most, most youth don't go on to medically transition. Like Carrie Callahan was also one of the, you know, she and her testimony and in some op-ed pieces that she wrote, she was like praising his approach, calling it cautious. You know, people who want to like restrict care, implement more gatekeeping will use use detransition stories to justify that. And then, of course,

the religious right, who wants to completely wipe out all transition healthcare, will also use detransition stories as well. They'll have their set of detransition people that they bring out, like Chloe Cole, to justify for the bans. Yeah, Leibowitz was also

one of the co-le testify for the bans. Yeah, Leibowitz was also one of the co-leads for the adolescent chapter in the Standards of Care 8 from WPATH. This was also partially reported on in the Bazelon piece since they were given exclusive access to the draft before the actual final product was

officially published. And so this particular chapter, especially compared to most of the other ones, it was basically a dumpster fire. It was a massive rollback in terms of accurate information. And part of this was actually captured by a white paper that was written by Kelly Winters, a trans woman. She's got a PhD and everything like that.

She's been paying attention to this stuff for a really long time, has been working in aspects of WPATH and trying to help reshape some of the transphobia that's been happening. She's been fighting back against how trans people are pathologized and

against paternalistic healthcare for a very long time now. She ended up writing a white paper about version 8 with a significant for a very long time now yeah so she ended up writing a white paper about um version eight with a significant section focusing on um the adolescent chapter and some of the weird um like pseudoscience laundering that ended up happening because that chapter not only did it include like you know lip service to things like quote-unquote rapid onset gender dysphoria which is a this is a bunk pseudo diagnosis that was invented by lisa litman after surveying a bunch

of anti-transparents but then within that chapter you also see the the laundering of specific studies that are focused on um predominantly detransitioned women, predominantly gender critical or radical feminists. These two papers were Littman 2021, which surveyed a lot of the kind of the old detrans TERF groups that we had been connected with right around 2017 or so. So this was before the ROGD paper was published in 2018. But then there was also, let's see, there's the Vanderbush study, which I believe that was published in like, what, 20, I don't remember what year that was published in, the Vanderbush study.

Now, this study was done by Eli Vanderbush, who is basically post-trans, half of a gender critical detransition project. And it had a very similar kind of recruitment strategy, sometimes an overlapping recruitment pool. But the difference is that this happened after the ROGD paper dropped. ROGD, that's Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which is this thing to be like, all the kids are suddenly transitioning. It's like, no, this is... Yeah, but that's what that acronym is. Yep. When that paper dropped, a shift in some of the narratives

from people who are coming out as detransitioned was also starting to be observed. More people were starting to call themselves as having experienced ROGD. This is where the Peak Resilience Project came from. And so as a result, like this Vandenbosch study was also pulling in aspects of that kind of narrative as well, right? And, you know, this, none of this actually makes sense. These are wildly biased sample pools. It's

not going to be generalizable to basically any population. It's only focused on like a very particular subset of people who end up detransitioning and then develop some kind of like political belief connected to it right and then it's being used as legitimate data as part of standards of care that is supposed to be like yeah yeah it's just it's ridiculous it's absolutely ridiculous it is ridiculous but i don't feel like like i feel like the medical professionals who want more gatekeeping like they just need some detransition people to justify it they don't really care if like the people ended up detransitioning because they like found god or radical feminism or like or you know our old group a lot of the detrans and i think i

already mentioned this before like a lot of us like talked about how like we had the same kind of dysphoria than any other trans person had and we're still fighting it off that was the thing too most of the people i knew still had gender dysphoria and we're just finding like quote unquote alternative ways to cope with it and it's's just like, I don't... I mean, a lot of people were trying to talk themselves out of transitioning again. So I don't think the issue here is like, oh, transition didn't work for these people. It's more like they internalized the idea that no one said transition. But again, people don't...

It's like people don't... Yeah, they only care about using detransition in order to reduce the number of trans people or prevent transition. They don't care about transition or detransition that results from transphobia, either internalizing it, internalizing

an anti-trans ideology, or not being able to access transition because of living in a transphobic society, coming from a transphobic family, having to go into the closet to find a job, that kind of stuff. It's never about preventing detransition that results from transphobia. It's just about finding an excuse to control us on our access to healthcare. There's this perverse incentive structure here too because you know these doctors are trying to find you know they're trying to find something that gives

them more ability to do gatekeeping so it's it's in it's in their interest to in order to in order to preserve and increase their own power to find this kind of stuff which means that they're not actually doing their job they're going out and trying to find ways to like they're trying to find you know whatever whatever like absolutely dog shit studies or like just stuff that like probably should be considered medical malpractice like they don't really care because again it's it's it's just this like loop because that's the thing that they need so they'll find whatever like crank pseudoscientist is like cranking this stuff out and they'll use it yeah i mean and also i mean i also feel like this is one of the reasons why there aren't

more resources for people who end up de-transitioning too because they want to be able to use it as a scarce serious story right because like really i mean like okay like you know i do transitioned and like it was hard um because there weren't as much like resources and support out there and i mean a lot of the supports i did find were crappy because they were coming from turfs but it's like it's really just kind of like transitioning again in a lot of ways yeah so it's like well if you can create resources to make transitioning easier you could definitely create a lot of similar resources to make detransitioning easier, but that's not there. And I feel like, like, one of the reasons that is not there is because if, like, if it's easy for someone to detransition, get what they need to have a good life and just move on, then it's hard to use those stories. Like, you'll have

less people who want to, like, you know, who you can kind of, like, you know, indoctrinate into these anti-trans ideologies and use them, you as part of the anti-trans movement but also just like i mean if it's not scary anymore if you just show like okay like this is just an issue of like making people making sure people get the supports they need so they can just get on with their lives like just treat it as a practical problem that needs to be solved instead of using it to feed a trans panic like yeah it's just like the the there's actually like less reasons for gatekeeping i mean i feel like like creating like basically you're kind of like creating a safety net for in case like you know in case something

unexpected or negative happens so you're like okay well if you transition and things you end up changing your mind or things don't work out the way you think they would, here's all these supports you can turn to. So I feel like that's kind of a better long-term thing to work for is like, okay, like make sure there are supports for people no matter how their transition turns out. Like if then including, you know, detransitioning or if people like, you know, face health face health complications make sure that there's supports in place for that. Don't use that as an excuse for gatekeeping.

That's unfortunately one that I know all too well the consequences of. I think also the other thing that's going on is there's just all of these groups also the other thing that's going on is there's just like all of these groups see both trans people and people

who do transitions as just not like they're they're violating the Kantian categorical imperative in the sense that they're not treating people as actual humans or treating them as objects or tools yes and once you do when you do that right like everything

suddenly you know like who cares what happens to these people afterwards because you don't think of them as people you think of them as just a thing that you're using to do another thing oh yeah absolutely the unfortunate thing is that is that this can also happen within the community as well. When they are trying to advocate for certain kinds of things, people will end up using each other as tools in order to meet their own personal goals. Speaking of goals, make it your goal to buy these products and services. Oh no. these products and services oh no we're back so let's go back a little bit to about like 2019 some of the bills are starting to to go out We had the test balloon bill that was happening in South Dakota that eventually turned into 2020, right? In this time frame, an organizing call went out on the, well, the site previously known as Twitter by Carrie Callahan that was looking for people

that wanted to advocate for better healthcare outcomes for trans and detrans people, right? During that timeframe, I had been starting to go off of my hormones. I started going off of them a few months prior to that point. And in that timeframe, I started experiencing certain types of what seemed like progressive vision loss right my my brain i sometimes have a tendency to to panic i guess um especially when it comes to things like health anxiety my brain started to make the internal connection did going off of my hormones cause my vision to change, right? And unfortunately, as I started to talk about this online and the likes, I was getting a lot of encouragement from other folks, usually like, you know, gender critical, anti-transparents,

that kind of thing, that yes, absolutely. the hormones were causing me to have vision loss right and it was really impacting my ability to function in my daily life right but another part of me at the same time as all of this was starting to feel like I was starting to feel aspects of regret and anger which made me want to do something. This is a very common narrative, right? It made me want to do something so that other people would not end up in the situation that I was in. And so I answered this call, probably not the best of decisions that I could have made for myself, but I decided to go ahead and do so. Answered Carrie Callahan's call. Yes, yes. I decided to go ahead and say, yes, I will connect in with this.

I would like to be a part of it. I had to apparently apologize for talking to the wrong clinician in public first. Jesus. No, you had to apologize for talking to Jack Turbin because he was too affirming

and she was mad that you would speak to him because he's too willing to respect trans kids. Yes, yes, because he prescribed puberty blockers. I was talking to the wrong clinician and therefore this was not allowed. But anyway, so eventually the actual organizing committee starts with four people. So it was me, Carrie, Corinna Cohn, who was later testifying in favor of some of these bills. Um, and then Grace Ladinsky Smith, there were some other people that were in and out,

um, but they ended up dropping off, um, very early on. So it was predominantly the four of us that ended up being the actual formal board at any point, um point in the early stages. Right. And so we started to draft a lot of this stuff. But like over I was starting to wonder about two things. Right. Like. After after some exchanges with other board members about who it is that we should be predominantly outreaching, should it be clinicians or should it be people that are actually impacted? People who have gone through gender affirming care, regardless of how they identify themselves currently, like what is our main priority?

The other board member at the time wanted to focus more on the clinician route. I did not. My focus was on if we are going to be doing a patient advocacy organization, we should be focusing on the people that we are supposed to be connected to, right? Like those are who we are. Why would we want to put more power into the hands of the clinicians that supposedly harmed people. It doesn't make any sense. Right. And then, like, you know, as these wheels were starting to turn, another part of me

was starting to worry that over time, the trajectory of this organization at that point was going to start advocating for more restrictions or full-out bans later on in the future, possibly even partnering up with some of the more right-wing groups. I believe I actually, I think I worried about them becoming like the gender care equivalent to Wolf, which was unfortunately pretty accurate, I would say, in terms of my concern. That was part of my formal resignation to the board. I stepped down as vice president about five months after I had joined on because I could not see any recourse within the the group for for changing directions um I couldn't be party to them hurting other people even if I felt hurt at the time and so I ended up taking a step back

um my vision was still having problems um but you know what ended up making that a lot easier actually it's funny this is not something that was recommended to me by anybody that i had been talking to um about this stuff who had been more exposed to anti-trans um rhetoric like i i talked to blind people. I ended up talking to blind people. I connected with folks from the National Federation for the Blind. It was a group that was recommended to me by somebody I knew from a past job that I had because she was the daughter of somebody who went blind later in life due to a genetic condition. And he was a member of the nfb right he was part of the federation um and so that was her recommendation to me um i hadn't reached out

at the time my brain was too focused um in doing this weird we gotta save people kind of bullshit direction but like eventually after i'm like taking a step back from all of this stuff i decided to go ahead and and pursue that suggestion from you know this random person in my life not from anybody i had been connected to in terms of organizing and when when I went there, like, the only thing that I ever got was acceptance. There was no questioning. Nobody asked what happened. Nobody asked, like, any sort of details about, like, my personal views. Like, I didn't have to express any forms of, like, you know, sorrow or regret or anything like that. A lot of it was focused on, okay, these are the issues that you're currently dealing with. Here are some of the things that you can work on to make your life easier. Here are some supports that you can find within your

states. If you need to do things like, you know, get certain kinds of mobility training, using a white cane and the likes. If you need to learn how to use braille, all of that fun stuff. Here's even specific doctors that you could try to go to who can really assess what's going on with your vision. Because before that point, I did not have access to specialists. I was living

in rural Maine. There was nothing there. I would have had to travel over three hours to go to Boston for me to be able to see a specialist. Instead, they were able to point me to people who had specializations in retinal conditions. And so when I went there, they did their usual tests. They ruled out some things that were known to run in my family, actually.

But they did ultimately decide that, like, my retinas are not processing light correctly, and that it's actually likely genetic. So, unrelated to hormone usage. Completely unrelated to hormone usage. In fact, you know, as I was going through that process and I started to reflect on what my vision was like before I even took hormones, let alone stopping it, like certain symptoms were actually there just at a much lower degree since like at least my teens. I already had difficulties with my night vision. I had difficulties with color contrast sometimes. My light sensitivity wasn't nearly as bad. Usually it was only with migraines. But over time, that started to break out more where even even just like you know there being too much sunlight was painful for me but like some of this stuff it definitely predated when i started my transition but because i wasn't

really given space to actually unpack any of this stuff i didn't really have the ability to to make those connections instead what happened was you know i i join in on this organizing board i connect in with uh three other people that were looking to to advocate in very particular directions and like my my story was not something that was meant to get support. My story was something that was meant to scare people. I was also nominated as the spokesperson, which meant I would have had the responsibility to do things like respond to the press

or give sound quotes or whatever, right? I gave certain kinds of descriptions over to a like a Democratic candidate that we had been scheduled to meet with Ryan Starzik at the time down in Arizona. And, you know, give the whole spiel. Right. a story that for a lot of people who like most people are very connected to their senses whether that's hearing vision touch or whatever they can't conceptualize a life without them and so it terrifies them right but like that doesn't actually help the person be able to get to a point where this is a livable life it's even a freeing life, there are certain things that I can do that other people can't do.

I can navigate inside the apartment without having the lights on because I know where everything is mapped out in my head and I can rely on touch. I can pour myself a glass of water and not have to worry about it spilling because I can feel where it goes up. But that's not really something that like, we're not even allowed to think about. We're not even allowed to think about like,

okay, so if this thing happens to you and there's documented evidence of it, not like something that's completely imagined, like my brain decided it was, here's what we can do to help. That's the kind of things that people really need to be able to access right you know if something happens to you these are the things that you can do um to be able to to work through this and live a more comfortable life

um in the way that you are happy with but i don't really see any of that happening, to be perfectly frank. Well, no. I'm also thinking back about the standards of CARE-A, because there's this inclusion of aspects of regret and detransition and stuff like that into things like the adolescent chapter. But you know what they don't include? A chapter for detransition support. Yeah. No, because they're not serious about that again they just want to use it as like a scare story and a justification for controlling people or you know putting them through a bunch of assessments or something like

that like again i i very much believe that there's a connection between like uh a desire for more gatekeeping and psych assessments control over trans people and not having support for detransition or retransition either because there's not I feel like there's even less talk or resources for people who end up retransitioning after detransitioning because no one's trying to figure out

the idea that detransition could just be temporary or that a lot of people go on to retransition later on or just confirms for them that they really are trans. That's also a thing that cis people you know go on to re-transition later on or just confirms for them that they really are trans like that's also a thing that you know cis people don't really want to touch it's one of these things where you know like pain is useful to these people but like the actual like people experiencing the pain aren't and you know and that has its own perverse incentive cycle because like yeah if you want to harvest scare stories you don't want people

getting actual help and that is a absolutely terrible incentive structure for making sure people actually get the care and the help that they need and it absolutely sucks it's just yeah no i remember realizing like when i was still a detrans radical feminist like realizing that a whole lot of like people who wanted to um restrict or eliminate transition like like had an investment in my suffering because you know i was and i was struggling a lot like i do i it can really be hard to do transition like right now because there are you know there is a lack of resources and support and understanding but the thing is like i i you know i kind of slowly realized over time it's just like oh all these people want to use my story but they they need me to suffer for

it to like work out for them like they don't have any interest in making my life easier like they don't have any interest in like helping me like. They don't have any interest in helping me create a good life and being happy. They really do want me to be ruined and miserable forever because that's more valuable to them. My suffering matters more than my happiness to a lot of these people. That was definitely one of those moments where I was like, what? One of those things that eventually led me to get disillusioned with the whole thing and be like, what did I get myself involved with? But yeah, it is really sick and perverse how

anti-trans people use suffering. Use both trans and detrans people suffering for their own agenda. It's awful. Yeah, and I think this is something that you know there's this is the sort of it's also there's a broader set of incentives here too which is the sort of the structure of the media market right which is the media that's like the like you know the entire media broadly

like you know like if it bleeds it leads right like that's that's that's the that's the actual media model of you know everything from like your like shitty local right-wing tabloid to like the new york times right and the way that this plays out for trans people and for detrans people is that like the thing that these people that you know the journalists also are looking for is suffering like they don't really care you know like they like none of these people ever report stories that are just like hey like i went to a gender clinic and it was great like nobody's gonna like they don't think anyone's gonna read that like i would read that because you know that's you know that's great but like but like they don't care about that there's there's no sort of sensationalism there the

sensationalism is like you know you and this is why you get like the washington post interviewing this like you know like these people who are just like oh like i was i worked at a gender clinic but i was secretly doing evil or like you know or or or you get all of and this is why a lot of even pro-trans like media coverage is about things like suicide rates and about things like you know like how like how likely you are to die if you don't get the health care that you need because it's it's the same incentive structure it's the thing the thing that's useful to sell to people is suffering and that i don't know what the solution is to that because i mean i don't know i have have media that's not based on profit i guess but like you know decommodify the news

but that's one of these things where it's like you know like as long as long as like every single like shitty local newspaper is making all of their money from like crime scare stories they're not going to report they're not going to you're not going to get active reporting about police because they need the police to like give that like feed them all of these shitty crime stories right and this is the same thing here where it's like you're not going to get actual good reporting about trans people and about people who do transition because nobody actually cares about that because the incentive structure is just suffering and that trickles down through through the health care system and through you know through a legislative system and it trickles down through social networks and what support networks exist and don't exist

and it's a absolutely like if if you were just to like ask someone how do you want a society to be run? Zero people would answer, we want it to be based on the production of suffering. And yet, we have done this. But it doesn't have to be like this. To sort of finish the David Graeber quote, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. So let's go build a world that's safe for trans people.

This has been It Could Happen Here. You can find more of Lee and Kai's work at healthliberationnow.com. I recommend you go do it. It is great. And go and make the world otherwise. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep keep going that's what my podcast

post run high is all about it's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories their journeys and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together you know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to Thank you. better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I am once again, Robert Evans, talking about it happening here.

And in the case of today, because we mean something different every time I introduce the show that way, we're talking about the carceral state and the worst reactive impulses of society coming for people who use drugs recreationally, who either have a problem or don't with them and simply don't want to go to prison for it. And specifically, we're talking about all of that within the context of the state of Oregon where I reside. Because back in 2020, the state of Oregon passed a measure, the first in the nation, decriminalizing all simple possession and use of street drugs. So heroin, methamphetamine, use of street drugs. So heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana was already legal. But everything is you can't get arrested for simple possession of small amounts of stuff, right? That's the

gist of the law. This passed by a pretty wide margin, 58 point something percent of Oregonians voted for it. It was a ballot measure, not something the legislature pushed through. And it came as Oregon, like the rest of the country, was kind of wrapped in the grip of an escalating drug crisis. In 2020, and again, that's before the ballot measure passed, Oregon had the second highest rate of drug addiction in the country and ranked nearly last in access to treatment. From 2019 to 2020, opioid overdose deaths in Oregon increased by about 70%. So that makes the case that the problem prior to the ballot measure was pretty severe and that the current state of affairs, which was everything was illegal and you could go to jail for possession of, say, heroin, was not working out for anybody. However,

in the years since the ballot measure passed, overdoses have continued to rise in Oregon. And miraculously, almost, the drug problem did not solve itself overnight. Now, we're going to be talking about some reasons for that. But now it is time for me to introduce our guest for the episode, Oregon public defender Grant Hartley. Grant, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Robert. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So first off, I wanted to say, from where you're standing as somebody whose job is to represent Oregonians, generally with the least resources, who are charged with crimes, what were you seeing prior to 110, and what are you seeing after it? Well, I think prior to 110, we had a population similar to what we have now, which is individuals who were struggling

with houselessness, with housing instability, who were struggling with mental health. And as a result of many of those factors and others were coping with substances. And as a result of that, many of them would get wrapped into the legal system. And one of the issues with our legal system is that it is based on compulsion. And so when someone came into the system with a drug problem, our first reaction is to compel them into treatment, to force them into treatment, even though we know that that is not effective. And, you know, at times it can be. And generally where you see the most success with it is where there's more hanging over the person's head, more leverage that the system has.

And so, you know, somebody who has a substance use disorder and commits a robbery and is put on probation and they have a choice between going to prison and doing treatment, much more likely to engage in treatment. But when you have low-level possession, where as a society, we've deemed that it should not be punished by prison, and frankly, that should not be punished by jail, the problem is, is that the only tool that the system has is jail. And so if somebody says, I'm not ready for treatment the system says well we're going to put you in jail then and then they go to jail

they're what little they have is destabilized and they get out without any treatment and as you mentioned in the opening the biggest thing is just the incredible dearth of services in our community there is not not nearly enough outpatient treatment, but especially inpatient treatment. And that's important for those houseless folks because you can't expect somebody to engage in outpatient treatment and then go back and sleep on the street at night and not use. So that's, I think, the general gist of what it looked like. Yeah, I think that's all really important to keep in mind. And it's particularly important.

The reason we're doing this episode is because the last two years really is when it's escalated. We have seen this increasing and very organized campaign against 110. And it's being pushed by the police who are angry that they're not able to arrest more people, particularly more homeless people. It's pushed by a lot of business owners who have convinced themselves that the reason why downtown Portland has had such a hard couple of years is because there's too many homeless people and they can go after them and get them off the street by having them arrested. This is all my opinion, not yours here. What is not up for opinion is that there has been an escalating campaign to portray the measure as a disaster and to portray it as the center of particularly Portland's ills, but also more broadly the state of Oregon's ills. And I think there's a number of reasons why that's dishonest, which we'll talk about. But where that's kind of culminated now is this year there are two big pushes to get rid of 110. This year, there are two big pushes to get rid of 110.

One of them is the push by a ballot measure or to put out a ballot measure basically repealing 110 as it exists. And the other is a push by the legislature. And you kind of have separate plans pushed by the Dems and the Republicans to, in the case of the Republican plan, basically put things back to the way they were, if not more severe in terms of your ability to arrest people for possession. put things back to the way they were, if not more severe in terms of your ability to arrest people for possession. And the Democrats' plans is to recriminalize possession, but make it all basically the lowest level of misdemeanor. I don't think either of those are good plans, but I wanted to talk about kind of how you would characterize the backlash campaign against 110 and how much of it do you think is rooted in actual problems caused by the measure. No, I mean, it has caused most of the backlash. I would agree with you that it is a lot of business communities, but it's also just, you know, average Portlanders, because what they see is people on the streets struggling,

using drugs in public, because that is the only place that they can use drugs. And, you know, that's a problem of houselessness. People have to ask themselves, am I upset that I'm seeing somebody use drugs or am I upset that this person is sleeping on the street and needing to use the drugs in the street? And that is the same of business owners. They call and complain that there's somebody on the stoop next to them using fentanyl. But is the issue that that person is using fentanyl or is the issue that that person is on the stoop next to them because there are no housing services in our city? And so really, Measure 110 is being scapegoated for two huge issues, which is the influx of

synthetic heroin or fentanyl into our community and into every community around the nation. It is not restricted to Portland or to Oregon because we decriminalized. It is everywhere. And then just the houselessness crisis, which is tremendous in our city. It is so bad. And people are essentially arguing that because we decriminalize drugs, more people are on the street. And I just don't think that there is any data to support that.

Yeah. And I think part of the reason why people suspect that is, again, because of how much dramatically worse the problem has gotten in recent years. But it's gotten worse everywhere. It's gotten worse in states like Oklahoma, where it is and has remained very illegal to possess this stuff. Oregon is not the state with the worst death problem due to drugs per capita. And the states that are worse or are worse in various ways are all states in which it's criminalized. It's very frustrating

to me when you look at like, well, we passed 110 in 2020 and these problems have gotten worse since. And it's like, well, but these are all problems that have gotten worse everywhere. And they're problems that are not driven by legality or at least the fact that it's no longer criminal to possess heroin. It's driven by the fact that we had a horrible pandemic that traumatized people. They lost loved ones. They lost jobs. They lost support. It's driven by the fact that the price of housing continues to rise. It's driven by inflation. It's driven by the fact that, I mean, to no small part, everybody's got brain worms from social media. That's not a 0% factor in both people's anger at the houseless and in the fact that

people are falling through the cracks. We have a million different things. I don't mean to list that as a comprehensive list of our problems either. Like drug addiction and drug deaths due to overdoses are caused by a variety of things. And one of the reasons why the death rate has been so high is that if you're addicted to heroin, you can't just stop doing heroin or the consequences are really, really horrible, worse than a lot of people are going to deal with. And so people keep using and they keep getting drugs that have been tainted with fentanyl. And it's hard not to die doing that. Like rich people can continue to test their kids. People who are, you know, have had the benefit of not just education, but a stable home in which to do drugs and sort of the resources to know and

to be able to like test their shit will test their shit. But most street level users don't have that kind of option. And it frustrates me that it's all getting scapegoated on this on this ballot measure. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about how they're attempting to go after 110, because it looks like right now the primary threat is legislative, in part because if they push another ballot measure, Oregonians get to vote, and we'll see how they vote. But reversing it by almost a 10% lead is not an easy thing to do, and I kind of think Oregonians might surprise them in terms of not being willing to repeal this

thing. Legislatively, we don't have really that kind of option against it. If they're able to get a kind of enough people behind an essential repeal, and they'll frame it as, you know, we're just trying to tinker with the law to make it work better. But if they can get enough people behind that, there's really nothing to do about it, right? Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that I, in my opinion, was a strategy on the part of the opponents of 110 was, I mean, they have some very wealthy financial backers. Yes. And so, you know, it is not cheap to do a ballot measure. And, you know, they know that they can use that money to do media buys and to spread all of the misinformation that they've been spreading thus far.

to do media buys and to spread all of the misinformation that they've been spreading thus far. And I think that, frankly, there are people in the legislature that don't want to recriminalize, but feel that it is the lesser of two evils. And the unfortunate thing is, is that what we are essentially doing is delivering them a watered down version of that ballot measure. And they were intentional in that ballot measure. I mean, they made it as bad as could be. It includes more than just recriminalization. It includes what is commonly known as Lend Bias Law in federal courts, which is essentially that people who deliver a substance that causes an overdose can be prosecuted essentially for murder. And it is a archaic understanding of how the distribution of drugs works or the testing of drugs works. And so they tried to make it as bad as possible in order for the legislature

to essentially go, well, we don't want that to happen. And, you know, I would worry about a ballot measure. I mean, I agree with you that it's a big swing and I have faith in the voters of Oregon. But the fact is, is that the media has portrayed this very unfairly. You know, there was an article recently from the editorial board at the Oregonian and they advocated for recriminalization. And in it, they cited that they want a data-driven approach. There was not a piece of data in that article. It was all based on misinformation. And the same is true, I mean, law enforcement are the worst about this. You know, they're constantly saying, oh, well, we just want tools so that we can confiscate the drugs and so that we can refer people to treatment.

Because we all know that's all police officers want to do. And yet when you look at the e-citations that came out of Measure 110, those were meant as to be a referral tool. And that was one of the big mistakes of 110 is trying to use police officers as an ambassador for treatment. There is a culture in the police community that treats drugs as crimes, right? You are a criminal if you are a drug user. And I'm not saying police are a monolith. I'm saying that is the culture that exists. And to expect them to change that overnight because the voters said they want to decriminalize was rather naive. And it's obvious because just here in Multnomah County, I think in basically a 24-month period, they issued something like 900 e-citations. Or that is what, nearly three times, more than three times as many people when they were able to put handcuffs on the people that they were meeting with. And Multnomah County was actually better than the most. You look at Washington County, 71 e-citations. In 30 months,

71 tickets were given on this. And the ticket was supposed to be the tool by which somebody is referred to treatment. And so, you know, in some ways, Measure 110 had some serious structural and implementation issues. But that doesn't mean that we just go back to what the voters said. No. and implementation is that a lot of funds were supposed to be redirected, I think from marijuana sales was one of the places, to treatment facilities and treatment options for people like these people who are supposed to be getting tickets instead of arrested for drug use were supposed to be being kind of pushed gently towards options. But the actual money for those options took more than a year to start arriving. And it is still not at a very good clip. And there's a

number of reasons for this. But like when they frame it as like, well, we decriminalize stuff and all these problems kept getting worse. It's like, well, for one thing, they kept getting worse. They were getting worse when everything was illegal at a rapid pace.

And number two, you didn't do what was supposed to be half of the measure, which was increasing the amount of care that people had access to. Yeah, absolutely. And to hear people talk about it now, I mean, during a legislative committee, I think there was one representative or senator who said, well, why did it take so long for this to get implemented?

It was 2020 and 2021. Like people are quickly forgetting how chaotic things were then. And the other thing is, is that when you put that money into the system, it takes a while to build beds, to hire people to mandate it. And again, no one's voluntarily engaging in treatment because there's no treatment available to voluntarily engage in. And the idea that by making it criminal, we can somehow fix that is actually counterproductive because we're taking all those funds

that we could be putting into additional services, into outreach, and we're instead putting it back into law enforcement or into probation or into the jails or into the state lab to test these drugs. And I want to continue off of that. And I want to talk, bring out some more data too. But first, we have to go do a plug to ads. So here's ads, folks. All right. We are back.

We're back, and I wanted to – I think there's two really good things to keep in mind when, as an Oregonian, you're arguing with friends and family about 110. Or if you're outside of the state and people bring it up because they saw like a three-minute piece on Fox News where some smarmy asshole talked to a guy on the street. You know, you should be aware of a couple of things. Number one, when people talk about how it's not working, the thing that you should bring up is like, what about the 40 years or so of criminalization prior like that led us to this point and at which the acceleration in deaths was highest? And the other thing to bring up is, well, there's these claims that like public disorder, drug use, all this stuff, overdose deaths have gotten worse since 110. There's no evidence that that's the case. Right. And there was, in fact, a study into this by New York University that found no evidence of an association between decriminalization and fatal overdose rates in Oregon and Washington. And I want to I want to read a couple of quotes from that study.

So first off, quote, publicly available calls for service data were used to compare Portland's use of the 911 system to Boise, Idaho, Sacramento, California, and Seattle, Washington, before and after 110. This was between 2018 and 2022. Public initiated calls for service did not change after BM 110 was enacted in Portland. Portland's 911 calls for service data align with comparison cities for property disorderly and vice offenses with similar seasonally fluctuations. So for one thing, what you'll notice is that a lot

of the articles about 110 started to hit both when we would have winter weather come in and summer weather come in. Both of those lead to surges in overdoses and drug use because the weather's shitty, right? People have less to do, less options. And especially if you're living outside, it's 100 during the day or it's 12. Maybe you want to do drugs more because you're uncomfortable, right? Yeah. So again, I think that it's important. There's this study from New York University on 110 and its lack of impact on this stuff, that shouldn't be the final word on this. I'm certain there will be more studies, but that is a word on this and they simply have no data on their side of things. There's another study as well. I mean,

there's a study out of Portland State University and it's interesting. It was a follow-up study. The full report has not been released yet, but they did release some of their key findings. And it was in the first year PSU met with officers and interviewed them about their perceptions of 110 and how it was going. As you might imagine, officers didn't think it was going well. And they said, oh, well, violent crime has increased and property crime has increased and overdoses are increased and all because of 110. And what this report found is that is not true. There was an uptick in property crime, but we cannot say that that has been a result of 110 for years. You need a lot of data in order to look at

that. And so, you know, this idea, and I mean, the ultimate finding of that study was that it is too early to recriminalize it based on the data. It is too early to recriminalize. And so, but again, you know, I think that instead what we are relying on is people's fear and what people see in the street. idea. I mean, the reason we are having this discussion, in my opinion, is two things. One is public use, right? Individuals using the street, it's in people's faces. Nobody really cares when someone is in the warmth of their own home using fentanyl. It's when they're on the street. Or I should note when someone's in the White House using fentanyl, because it just came out that the president and high staff were prescribed fentanyl and ketamine in the White House when Trump was in office. So yeah, absolutely. But no one really cares about that. It's when it's in your face that people care.

And the other one is the perception that crime is, you know, that again, a lot of crime is caused by drug use, right? There's an underlying association there. But the idea of criminalizing drugs because of that is the idea that you can somehow arrest somebody, compel them into treatment, and therefore prevent crimes. Yeah. I mean, that's like the precog, the sci-fi sort of things.

It is a backward system. No, and we actually know what will stop the drug-related crimes, which are mostly theft, right? And one of the things that will, and they've seen this, I believe it's the Netherlands, that if you're a heroin addict, the government will give you free heroin. You have to take it at a center like you go in, you sign a thing and you get your dose and you take it there. That saves them money based on doing nothing, because when they do nothing, people break into houses and cars, et cetera, and boats because it's the Netherlands in order to steal shit so that they can not get dope sick.

And just giving the dope to them winds up costing a lot less per addict. Well, the other thing that gets people clean or that stops people from committing crimes is housing, is providing them a roof over their head. I mean, when people are, even if they're not on the street, if they are housing unstable, they're trying to make a living. And it is not easy to do so with whether it's a felony record or your upbringing or whatever reason has held you back. If they have housing, I mean, there are numerous studies that show that when you put somebody in housing, their likelihood of using drugs drops. Their likelihood of committing crimes drops.

And yet we are focused on this recriminalization rather than trying to house these individuals. Yeah. And it's, you know, when you talk about this, when you talk about decriminalization and in Oregon's context, there's a good reason for this. People talk about Portugal, Portugal, Spain also did this, both Portugal and Spain, and I believe Portugal was first, decriminalized simple possession and use quite a while ago. It's been that way in Portugal for, I think, like 20 years. They have a significant amount of data on it, right? And Oregonians, the people who were pushing for 110, cited it specifically as a reason why this was worthwhile. There was recently, I think last year, some state officials and whatnot went to Portugal to look into the system. And so as a result, you've seen like attacks on the Portuguese drug system, including there was a recent Washington

Post article about how Portugal's starting to regret it. They're going to recriminalize maybe. And the reality of the situation is that there has been a recent surge in illicit drug use in Portugal from 7.8% in 2001 to 12.8% in 2022. That is an increase. It's still below the average in most of Western Europe. It's lower than France and Italy. I believe it's lower than the UK. It's lower than most of Western Europe. And just kind of pointing out the fact that Portugal is also dealing with an increase in drug use, again, saying that that's because of the culture of decriminalization seems silly when there have been corresponding surges everywhere where it's illegal. But beyond that, it ignores the fact that there have been really significant benefits, that we do know are benefits

of decriminalization because of how long we've been looking at it. From 2000 to 2008, prison populations in Portugal fell by almost 17 percent. Overdose rates dropped because in part they funded rehabilitation, which Oregon still has not really done. There was no surge in use. And in fact, less people seem to die when the system changed. Right. What has increased is some drug-related debris, particularly most of the surges have been in the last, literally the last couple of years,

which again, makes me think it is tied to the global trends that have made a lot of people more miserable and living in a more difficult situation and at more risk of drug addiction. What happens in Portugal politically? Hard to say. But overall, decriminalization, we have a lot of data for, seems to have largely been a success. And if that's kind of what we were to see in Oregon with decriminalization, I would be happy, even if there's more mess on the streets. Although I don't think that that's inevitable. And this gets us to what I think is kind of the most dangerous point that the opposition, the people who want to recriminalize make. And it's dangerous because it seems like they have a good point, which is people shouldn't be, people with families, just regular people should not have to see folks using hard drugs

on the street as they walk around town. And I agree. It is not reasonable to expect people to walk with their kids to school past somebody shooting up heroin or smoking crack. It's fine. And you're not like some sort of like nark or party pooper if you don't want your kids to see that. But that's already illegal because it's like it's illegal to drink a beer on the street in Portland. The problem is not that the cops can't do anything about it. It's that, again, they're choosing not to do anything about it. Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, and again, it is the issue of we have people living on the streets, right? I mean, it is, I completely agree that people shouldn't have to walk past that, but maybe that is an opportunity to talk to their child about the need to make sure that people have a safe place to live. And also, I mean, it's also, you know, if we had safe use locations, you wouldn't see nearly as much of that. And frankly, the system would have a better argument for punishing public use if we had safe use areas because we have put so many people on the street. Yes. Somebody who has no place to be and is desperate and is addicted, using in a place where you can see them is understandable.

Somebody who has options for places to be and is choosing to do it in front of people, that's a bit of a different case. And again, I also want to just really, because I've encountered this in arguments about 110 with people, it did not make it legal to do drugs in public. That remains illegal. It's illegal to drink a beer in public. Absolutely. Yeah. Public use is, I mean, but again, these are sort of the narratives that are being perpetuated by, and a lot of it is law enforcement. And honestly, my take on it is that law enforcement doesn't really care about recriminalizing possession. They don't. What they want is they want the ability to search people. What that gives them

is it gives them the right to say, hey, I have probable cause to believe that you have drugs on you. Therefore, I'm going to search you. I'm going to search your car. I'm going to, you know, search your house, right? It gives them that ability. And they, you know, many of them will be very forthright about that. And the biggest infringements on our personal privacy, on our Fourth Amendment rights, on our protected privacy interests has always been drugs. It has always been the criminalization of drugs has eroded our privacy interests. And that's what's really at play here. Because I don't think the officers, I mean, and this is, again, not a monolith. I'm saying I don't think in general, law enforcement Law enforcement really is that concerned with, you know, getting individuals off the street and into treatment. If that were the case, we would have seen far more of those e-citations.

Well, you know, we would see the officers doing, there is a statute that allows them to transport people to detox, right? We don't see that that often because really what is at issue here is the ability to search people based on probable cause that they possess drugs. Yeah, yeah. And we will talk about what people can do if they want to stop the recriminalization

of drugs in Oregon. But first, here's some more ads. We're back. So, Grant, kind of the question I am left with at the end of this here is what do we do to fight back against this? What is actually what is going what are the options people have? this? What is actually, what is going, what are the options people have? Obviously, the thing that first occurs to me that is most accessible is make a fuss to your elected leaders so you know that this is something you'll think about come voting season. But first off, how would people do that, I guess? Yeah, I mean, you know, figure out who your legislator is, you know, write to them, call them, let them know that, you know, you want to see, you know, realistic

fixes to this. You want to see investment in public health, in outreach through peer navigators and case managers that you don't want to see us return to the same war on drugs that has failed. Yeah, it's hard. I will say if you're looking to do research outside of like a lot of local news, this is a hard time for local news. Well, good local reporting gets done in a number of places, including Oregon. Also, a lot of smaller local news agencies are very much in the pocket of the people who helped to fund them, which is some of the people articles that has been written recently was in The New Yorker. It's great. Yeah, there's a I'm pulling it up right now. There's a great New Yorker piece, A New Drug War in Oregon, that was published just this month. Probably the best major outlet piece I've seen on it. And yeah, it's it's it talks a lot about the stabbing wagon, which is a kind of independent, although they now should at some point theoretically be getting a significant amount of funding.

But like they provide drug users not just with naloxone or Narcan, but with safe use materials like syringes and stuff that are clean. This is down in the south of Oregon in a place called Medford, which has both one of Oregon's worst drug problems and also is a much more conservative area. So obviously, these people are very controversial. And I will say, you know, one of the things this article does well is they get at, even within people who are supportive of 110, the conflict between kind of traditional addiction recovery resources and organizations. And some of these new, often these new organizations are either started by or run by people who have or do currently deal with addiction. And I think covering that conflict is

valuable. There's some stuff that frustrates me about it. And this is, I think there's a lot of negativity towards Stab and Wagon and its founder that's unfair. I also think some of the things that she has said about traditional addiction recovery resources are very unfair from her point of view. And I think when I look at the problem, the only comprehensive solution is multiple options for different kinds of people. Because I know a lot of people who have dealt with addiction and recovered, and no two of them did it the same way. Yeah, no, absolutely.

And I mean, I think that both of those are necessary, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, I think that, you know, both of those are necessary, right? Harm, what I always say is that the beauty of harm reduction is that not only does it ensure that somebody survives long enough to make it to recovery, but it also builds a relationship with that person. It builds a relationship of trust so that you can have a conversation about the need for recovery. You know, as a public defender, I don't get the benefit of the prosecutor or the court to or probation to wield power and to make my client do what they should do because I'm holding power over them. I have to build trust, right?

I have to have a relationship of trust with them. And I have to find out what motivates that individual and try to utilize that to encourage positive steps, right? And that's true of our case managers and social workers that work with us. And that's what the system doesn't have, right? The system is just trying to use the threat of incarceration in order to get individuals who are not ready for recovery to engage in recovery. And that's detrimental. I mean, we need both harm reduction and we need traditional treatment. We need culturally competent treatment.

You know, there needs to be wraparound services. And that's one of my concerns here is that, you know, we know that the criminal legal system doesn't work. We know that the criminal legal system didn't work. When 110 passed, we had a drug court that dealt with low level possession and its graduation rate was around 17%. So 17% of people in graduation meant 90 days of sobriety. And that was 17% of people, that other 83%, if they fail at a program, again, the only tool the system has is jail. And so all they did was did not hook them up with services and instead eventually punish them for not being ready for treatment. And that is not how we get people into recovery. Yeah. I think that that's a really good point. When I talk about both how people can help if a loved one is starting to deal with drug addiction and if someone you love is getting into a cult or getting pulled into conspiracy theories, it's actually the same advice. I had a friend come to me recently because a loved one of theirs was starting to kind of talk about some really concerning conspiracy theory stuff, right? And they were like, what do I say against this?

How do I argue against it? And my answer was like, well, you don't really. You make it clear like, hey, I don't really believe this. I don't find this compelling, but like, you know, I love you and I'm always here to listen if you want to talk about this kind of stuff or you want to talk about whatever. And that is the same if someone's starting to get pulled into a cult or if they're dealing with drugs. Because as you noted, if they have a pathway out and they're not going to have to, it's not this kind of thing where you've been yelling at them and then they have to come to you

with their head tail between their legs and like, I was wrong. I fucked up. That's a barrier. If like, well, this person cares about me and is always going to be like willing to, you know, well, this person cares about me and is always going to be willing to talk with me no matter what, well, then that's less of a barrier. Then you haven't built a wall that they have to get through. They can just come to you when they're like, I need help. Exactly. I mean, it's based in relationships. And I mean, that's one of the issues, right, is that too many people, not just in Portland,

issues, right, is that too many people, not just in Portland, but everywhere, see individuals on the street and assume the worst and see them as the other. They don't see them as part of the community. And so they're more than fine with a system locking them up because of their addiction. And, you know, we all need to recognize that, you know, it, that falling into that lifestyle, you know, whether it is because of, you know, where you were raised, how you were raised, you know, whether you got addicted to pills because your doctor prescribed them, there's a lot of reasons, whether you had childhood trauma, there's a lot of reasons why people get an addiction. And, you know, to simply assume that somebody, because they're addicted to

drugs, is a criminal, a bad person, you know, it is making them the other. And it's so much easier to be punitive when you're just seeing that person as the other. Yeah. And I did want to note, if people are looking for resources online, both about 110 and how they can help in the fight to stop it from getting repealed, you can go to HJRA, the Health Justice Recovery Alliance. They have – you can sign up to get information from them. They have community resources. They have, like, updates on what's going on. I think you can find through them a way to, like like automatically kind of send a form message to your elected leaders. So just Google Health Justice Recovery Alliance Oregon or Health Justice Recovery Alliance 110 and that will take you there. They've got a lot of stuff collected there, both resources if you're having arguments with people about this and information on how you can help

at least try to do something. Yeah. And I will say also the ACLU has been very active in this as well. And, you know, they have an action plan on their website that, you know, tells you some of the things that you can do in this. And, you know, like I said, I mean, I think obviously contacting your legislators, we haven't even started the legislation or the legislative session yet. And so there is still room to I tend to look at the legislative side of things. Well, everybody, that's going to do it for us here at It Could Happen Here. Grant, thank you so much. Should you have anything you wanted to plug or direct listeners towards before we roll out here? I mean, I think, again, it's just, you know, go to the ACLU website, go to HJRA's website, get involved. HJRA's website, get involved. But more than just that, no matter what happens during this legislative session, you know, remember that all these folks on the street are people and they

need assistance and, you know, and they need help and continue or consider, you know, contributing to a recovery organization or volunteering to go out into the community. You know, if you have lived experience with addiction, consider becoming a peer. It is so impactful to have individuals who have struggled with substance use go out in the community and engage individuals who are currently struggling with it. And that is the best trust building. That is the best way to get people into recovery, not through handcuffs and jails. Thank you very much, Grant. I couldn't agree more. All right, everybody, that's it for us today. We'll be back tomorrow with more of it happening here. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max.

You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins

you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. of AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged

look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis.

Now, last week, I spent a few days in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Showcase. Most of the time at the convention, I was just walking around the show floor, looking at various new types of surveillance equipment, AI products, and various other bullshit that was being peddled to the many, many industry attendees of CES. But I was also able to go to a few panels. Now, panels are really interesting because you get to hear people who are working inside industries talk about stuff that they don't usually really publicly talk about very much. And on the first day of the convention, I went to a panel about drone technology. Half of the panel was about how Walmart is launching new delivery drones in Dallas, Texas.

The other half was about police drones. And that's what we're going to be talking about here today. How the police are using drones, why they're using drones, and how you can probably expect to be seeing a lot more drones up in the sky piloted by either an AI or a police officer. So let's get started. Chula Vista is the southernmost kind of medium-sized city in California, with a population of 278,000 people. Chula Vista has a police force of 289 sworn officers, as well as 120 civilian employees. On top of their nearly 300 officers, they operate a drone fleet 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, launching high-def camera-mounted drones

from four locations throughout their small city. I'm going to quote from an article from the MIT Technology Review, which did a deep dive onto Chula Vista's police drones back in February of 2023. Quote, Chula Vista uses these drones to extend the power of its workforce in a number of ways. For example, if only one officer is available when two calls come in, one for an armed suspect and another for shoplifting, an officer will respond to the first one. But now, CVPD's public information officer, Sergeant Anthony Molina, says that dispatchers can send a drone to surreptitiously trail the suspected shoplifter, unquote.

And this really gets at the heart of how these drones are going to get used. They exist to funnel more people into the criminal justice system. Instead of having to choose between two calls, one of which actually could relate to saving someone's life, the other just a petty crime, now the police can easily follow someone doing a petty crime while responding to other calls and eventually catch up. It's a way to just expand the amount of people that can be arrested and thrown into jail. Nowadays, drones are pretty common tools for police.

Over 1,500 departments currently use drones, usually for special occasions though, like search and rescue, crime scene documentation, protest surveillance, and sometimes tracking suspects. But at the moment, only about a dozen police departments regularly dispatch drones in response to 911 calls. The first of which was Chula Vista PD, who launched their, quote, drone as first responder program back in 2018, with the goal of having an unmanned aerial system, or drone, be proactively deployed before an officer is on scene. Now we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Chula Vista Police Department talking on the drone technology panel at CES.

We are seven miles from the Mexico border, and we are the second largest city in San Diego County. So we have about 290 officers, and we serve a community of about 300,000. But because of the close proximity to the border, we have a lot of people that travel back and forth. We have a drone program that I'm awfully proud of. We are responding proactively to calls for service in our community. And so we have drones stationed from four different

locations throughout our city. We have pilots in command that are on the rooftop. And then we have a operations center where we have sworn officers that are part 107 pilots that fly the drones. So we are responding now to calls for service on average, an officer on scene, a drone pilot on scene that's sharing information with our officers, live streaming that information on our cell phones or in our computers. They're receiving information about the call within 90 seconds on average. And so what it's doing for us in Chula Vista and for our community is we are providing information rapidly, real-time information to officers so that they can make better decisions so that everyone goes home safely.

We say the community's safer, the officers are safer, and the subjects that we encounter are safer. So we're awfully proud of what we're doing. The way police are able to deploy drones used to be a lot more limited. The use of drones is regulated by the FFA, the Federal Aviation Administration. In most cases, the FFA requires that both hobbyists and police departments only fly drones within the operator's own line of sight. But starting back in 2019, agencies and vendors could start applying for a Beyond Visual Line of Sight, or BEVLOS, waiver from the FFA to fly drones remotely, allowing for much longer flights in restricted

airspace. Chula Vista PD was the first department to get a BEVLOS waiver. The MIT Tech Review estimated last year that roughly 225 more departments now have one as well. Another thing that I always talk about, because I think it's critical, is the concept of why we're using drones. What the benefit is to the community with the use of our drones. what the benefit is to the community with the use of our phones and I truly believe that when my officers can pick up their cell phone before they even respond to the call and they can look and see the scene what's happening where the individual is if the person's pacing in the middle of the park there are no children around and there are nobody there's nobody that's within the reach of this individual harming, you might not have to

rush into that scene so quickly. Officers can de-escalate, make better decisions. And I mean, this is just a game changer for law enforcement. And right now, you know, we were the first agency to be involved in the integrated pilot program with the FAA. We're very proud of that, that they trusted us enough for us to be the organization that brought forward all these ideas that are now being utilized in law enforcement. Now, I've watched a lot of videos of police talking about why they're using drones, of drone training companies talking about why police drones are so important. In one video on their website, this guy from Skyfire Consulting was talking about why police drones are so important. In one video on their website, this guy from Skyfire Consulting was talking about how police may not have had to kill Tamir Rice

if they simply had a drone watching beforehand so they could see that it was a toy gun, which is a ridiculous thing to say because in the 911 call that jump-started this entire police interaction, it was expressed that the caller thought the gun was probably a toy. And this notion that is simply if police have more ability to surveil, they'll be able to respond safer and apply less deadly force, I think is a pretty suspect premise. Now, the effectiveness of drone technology in law enforcement is challenging to verify and quantify.

The MIT Tech Review cannot find any third-party studies showing that drones reduce crime, even after interviewing CVPD officers as well as drone vendors and researchers. Quote, Nor could anyone provide statistics on how many additional arrests or convictions came from using drone technology. I was able to find some data on CVPD's website talking about how many drone-initiated interactions resulted in arrests, but quantifying additional arrests seems to be a little challenging. Now, if you look at Chula Vista PD's own drone response stats. The vast majority of deployments, I estimate around 70%, are for what the director of investigations for the Privacy Rights Group,

the Electronic Frontier Foundation, refers to as, quote, crimes of poverty, unquote, which he believes will be the target of most drone policing, as opposed to violent crime. Nearly 30% of Chula Vista's drone deployments are for what's categorized as disturbances. Almost 15% are for psychological evaluations. 10% are for, quote, check the area and information. Over 7% are for welfare checks. 6.5% is for, quote, unknown problem problem and over 6% is for suspicious person and another 6% for traffic accidents. Now, some drone deployments do result in patrol units not having to be dispatched,

but CVPD also says that drones have existed in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not sure if having a drone following someone around is the best thing for a 5150 psych evaluation. The presence of a police officer doesn't always make the situations better either, but I don't see having a drone be a really calming presence if you think someone needs mental help. funding a whole fleet of heavy duty surveillance drones and paying dedicated operators costs money now it's unclear to me how many drones chula vista pd currently has and on their website they list 10 different drone models currently being in their fleet,

most of them really expensive DJI drones like the DJI Matrix, the DJI Inspire, the DJI Phantom, the DJI Maverick, as well as drones from a few other random companies. But nevertheless, Chief Kennedy is very grateful for their local police foundation for heading up the funding for their DFR drone first responder program. Let's hear from her. I don't know if anyone in here is in law enforcement, but many agencies use drones.

And there are all different types or ones that are like the tactical drones that you can use to go in on a hostage situation or a missing person to check in the canyon areas or interior drones. We have drones that go underneath beds, go inside attics, all types of different drones. And many organizations have drones like that. But a DFR drone is very unique and different because these drones are flying, as you can imagine, 18,000 missions. It puts a lot of wear and tear on them. So, but that is one of the biggest challenges beyond the fact of funding. So we don't have huge budgets that are allotted for drone programs. And so we had to be very very creative in our police department and we were very blessed to have a police foundation that has taken on the responsibility to help us really start our drum program and

continue it going forward so funding is always going to be a challenge and dependent upon the drone that you use there are some drones that you can't get any as you can't use for asset seizure funding, nor can you get grants for because sometimes when it comes to foreign-made drones, there are many challenges as well. So you have to think of that. And then we deal with legislation right now. That's the new challenge that we all have. We had to fight some battles.

Like I said, I'm agnostic. I want to use what's the best drone out there and protect the information. And we do that with encrypted software programs that are on private servers. But you'll see that there's a lot of discussion about drones and what drones we should be using right now. We'll get back to the chief's offhanded mention of legal battles in a bit here, but Chula Vista's budgetary situation may not be as dire as the chief makes it out to be. On top of their current $55 million operating budget, back in 2020, the La Prensa newspaper revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly been getting hundreds of millions of dollars in high-tech police equipment, including armored vehicles, facial recognition and phone breaking software, license plate readers, drones, riot gear, among other miscellaneous technology,

as a part of a DHS grant program due to their close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border. due to their close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border. Chula Vista was one such department, and as of 2020, so four years ago, they had already received over $1 million in grant funds from this DHS program titled the, quote, Urban Area Security Initiative. Considering Chief Kennedy's budgetary concerns, drones actually have a lot of upsides financially, as they are often a lot cheaper than alternative surveillance methods, as well as being relatively easy to deploy remotely, either with a joystick or just by clicking a point on a map from a comfy office building. Issues around this ease of use was pointed out by Dave Moss, the director of investigations for the privacy rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote,

up until the last like five to 10 years, there was this unspoken check and balance on law enforcement power, money. You cannot have a police officer standing on every corner of every street. You can't have a helicopter flying 24-7 because of fuel and insurance is really expensive. But with all these new technologies, we don't have that check and balance anymore. That's just going to result in more people being pulled through the criminal justice system, unquote. My officers constantly are on the air now. Is UAS1 available? Is UAS1 available? Because it's giving them more information. Think about the fact that you can look at your cell phone. I can be anywhere in the world and I can look at, it lets me know whenever there's a drone flight and I can watch, I can have visual awareness, aerial overlay of

what's happening in my community, no matter where I am. Advancements in technology are leading to further normalization of police surveillance. Ten years ago, would people react to news of a 24-hour police drone program the same way they would now? What was once the threat of Big Brother has since become a very sought-after and fetishized nanny state. become a very sought-after and fetishized nanny state. In the V for Veneta graphic novel, anarchist writer Alan Moore imagined a fascist Britain characterized by surveillance cameras around every corner. And now cities around the country are setting up their own street-mounted cameras linked to private security cameras and ring doorbell cameras to create a network of live coverage around a whole city, which is instantly accessible to police. The more widespread consumer adoption of new technologies like small camera

mounted drones and doorbell cameras, the more acceptable it seems for police to add such technology to their arsenal of surveillance tools. It almost becomes expected. Chula Vista PD has routinely declined to answer why their drones are always recording both to and from the scene, and the department has put in a lot of effort into managing the backlash against their expanding drone program. this, they were very concerned about drones in the sense of privacy. What are you doing with these drones as you're responding? You're trying to gather data and information to spy on us, right? And we have had to go to a lot of detail in explaining that as our drone lifts off, it is immediately, it is recording, because that's the information gatherer for us. As that drone responds, the camera is already going almost three

miles down the road to where the scene is and giving us vital information as the officers are responding. But one of the criticism was, well on the way back, is your drone just going in my backyard? What if we're smoking marijuana in our backyard? And I say, if you're in California, it doesn't really matter, but we'll let that one go, right? But we said, okay, we get your concern. And so what we did was we worked with the software company that we work with, and they created an automatic so that as a drone returns, it automatically tilts to the horizon, so we're not recording anything. If another call came out, we could

immediately, we'll go back in and it'll map it for us and it'll share that information later on. But the goal is to listen to your community as well. Chief Kennedy's claim here is difficult to back up because CVPD have refused to show the public any of the drone footage they routinely collect. But if we take the chief at her word here anyway, she admits that the drone goes back to recording at street level as soon as there's another 911 call, as they record everything on the way to a scene. And the way she phrases this whole tilt feature is quite misleading, because the camera never actually stops recording. She just claims that it tilts

slightly upwards in between 911 calls, but it's still capturing footage up to three miles away the entire time it's in the air. Police in Chula Vista have flown over 18,000 missions with their drones. That's a lot of footage. When talking about the privacy concerns had by some residents of Chula Vista, Chief Kennedy really emphasized how much her and the department really care about listening to community feedback and how data transparency is so important to CVPD. essential, especially in law enforcement, because there are so many challenges when it comes to misinformation that's out there. And whenever you're a part of what's deemed as a government, everyone thinks that you have some ulterior motive when you're involved with any type of technology. And so we have worked really hard to build very strong relationships with every aspect of our community.

So it was about in 2015 when we started talking about the concept and the possibility of drones. And I laughed when Shannon said George Jetson, because that's my story that I used to, and I love it, because I made fun of my guys when they said that we wanted to fly drones. I said, oh, come on now. What are we going to be, George Jetson flying around with cars? And then I saw today they talked about a flying car. So it happens right over there it happens all right and so with the community we started having these conversations

we created a working group we started doing community forums we started asking the community about what would you think if we were able to do something like this we even went to some of the organizations that may not always be so supportive of these types of groups. We worked with the ACLU and asked for their input on our policy. So before we ever flew a drone, we call it the crawl, walk, run phase. We're still at the very end of crawl. We're not into walk yet. And we've been doing it again also for five years so um you have to

make certain that you're transparent and we've provided all types of information that are available if you go to uh all you put in is to visit police drones and it'll come up with us and you can look at all the things that we do all the information that we share the flight maps that we share. I mean, it's just super important to have those community forums. Every year, we do a community forum twice a year where we ask for input from our community. Later on in the panel, Chief Kennedy said that CVPD is, quote unquote, extremely transparent about their flight data and, quote unquote,

have nothing to hide relating to their use of surveillance drones, which is a curious claim considering the fact that CVPD has historically kept all drone footage hidden from the public and has fought in court to do so. Despite the chief's emphasis on the police's commitment to transparency and the importance of listening to community feedback, even going as far as to consult the ACLU when developing their drone program. For years now, the Chula Vista Police Department has denied all FOIA and public records requests for any drone footage. In response, Arturo Castanarez, a Chula Vista resident and owner of the local bilingual newspaper La Prensa, filed a lawsuit against the city.

CVPD argued that all drone footage should be categorically exempt from the public records requests on the basis that the footage could be used for a future investigation. Just last December, only a few weeks before CES, the California 4th District Court of Appeals ruled that this blanket exemption is invalid and that not all drone first responder footage could be classified as part of a pending

or ongoing criminal investigation, pointing to examples such as 911 calls about a roaming mountain lion or a stranded motorist. And police were not happy about this ruling. I'll talk about their reaction at the end of the episode. But controlling the narrative about the drone first responder program has been of the utmost importance to Chula Vista police, as the chief herself expressed at the panel. And we're real good about telling our story. If you don't tell your own story in law enforcement, other people will tell it for you and it might not be the right story. So we've gotten really

good at sharing on our social media and through YouTube channels and everything, success stories of what we're doing. That is quite the claim there. To paraphrase the Electronic Frontier Foundation, without public access to their drone footage, it makes it very difficult to assess how much privacy you have in Chula Vista and whether police are even following their own rules about when and whether they record sensitive places, like people's homes, backyards, or public protests. And that's why this recent ruling and the legal precedent it sets is a huge win for actual transparency, and marks the first step towards the public finally getting a look at how these drones are being used in Chula Vista. With drone first responder programs spreading to police departments across the country,

modeled after the one in Chula Vista, combined with the increasing presence of stationary street-level cameras, the ability for police to be watching everywhere without the need for on-the-ground officers creates what the EFF refers to as, quote, a fundamental change in strategy, with police responding to a much, much larger number of situations with drones, resulting in pervasive, if not persistent, surveillance of communities, unquote. Speaking of persistent surveillance, near the end of the panel, the chief announced that Chula Vista PD is planning to expand their 10-hour-a-day drone first responder program to a constant 24-hour-a-day drone surveillance program. More than doubling the department's capacity to have eyes in the sky would mean a lot more work hours for drone operators,

as well as a large increase in the amount of video files being stored indefinitely. But Chief Kennedy claimed that they're looking into offsetting costs by replacing some of the drone piloting team with AI-assisted piloting and autonomous devices. You've clearly been a leader with drones as first responder technology. Looking forward, what is the future hold for the department? I assume you're spending a lot of time telling others about the program in addition to using drones. But beyond that, what's it look like? Well, my hope is that we'll be moving

towards 24-hour operations. Right now, we're from sunrise to sunset. We go until close to 10 o'clock at night, which goes a little bit beyond that. And then one of the challenges, and I know you're only getting a little piece of the information about exactly how we're doing this, but from the four different locations that we fly,

on each of the rooftops, we have what's called a pilot in command and that piloting command is contracted through a company and we and they just have visual awareness of the sky and they work in coordination with our drone pilot that's inside our operations in them but that's a huge expense for us to pay leave for each site right now with the operations that we have, we're paying about $100,000 per year. So that's $400,000 for four locations beyond all the other costs associated. So it can get expensive. My hope is that, and we keep hearing about it, we've seen some some of the testing and we've been testing it as well in our in our area

are what's called drone in the box or there's some of the systems that are out there right now that organizations are using that are autonomous and so we're getting there but we're not quite there because it's very different when you're dealing with flying over people and you're flying into areas where the drone was to drop out of the sky and harm people in our community, that could create tremendous challenges for us. So we're very, as I mentioned, the crawl phase. So to explain how these AI autonomous drones would work, it's essentially this box about the size of a truck bed that can either be mounted in like a pickup truck or be stored on various rooftops around the city. And someone just needs to point at a place on a map

and the drone will fly and pilot itself around obstacles and basically circle around an area to do surveillance. And you can call it back when you're done. This would require a whole bunch of drones to just be launching and being piloted by themselves. You wouldn't have to train random police officers to become FAA licensed pilots. And you could just have the whole thing in the box, like it's called a drone in the box. And these are only going to become more common and cheaper. Imagine having 10 of these throughout a city, launching from like 10 different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves, constantly going around in communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates linked to 911 calls,

creating a whole wealth of footage instantly available to police, live streamed from the air. Matt Sloan, the founder of Skyfire Consulting, a company here in Atlanta that trains law enforcement agencies on the use of drones and DFR programs, thinks that we'll start seeing autonomous deployment of police drones within the next year or two, He referred to the state of drone use by police as, quote,

Chula Vista likes to market itself as a pioneer of the smart city movement, which consequently makes them able to receive a whole bunch of grant funding. Now, the idea of the smart city is built around having a massive amount of data to automate certain city services. So for this idea to work, there needs to be a way to collect that data. And these drones are a major part of that. The website for the city of Chula Vista also lists projects like electronic transportation, adaptive traffic signals, an app for non-emergency city services, as well as, quote, crime mapping and police dispatch modernization, unquote, as also being smart city initiatives. We have what's called 9-9-1-1, and that allows my officers to hear incoming 9-1-1 calls before dispatch even puts it into the system. They can hear what's going on there, and that is tremendously invaluable to them.

We have so many different layers of technology that have really showcased the value. Live 911 is a new piece of software that allows patrol officers to listen to live streamed 911 calls directly and pinpoints the location of the caller via GPS. Now, I don't even have time to get into the many reasons that this could be a bad idea, but simply put, police do not need to respond to every call that goes into 911,

let alone be giving random cops this ability to self-dispatch on their own. It just seems like that could have many, many consequences. But anyway, back to drones. According to a 2020 article in the newspaper La Prensa, cities in San Diego County, like Chula Vista, have received equipment such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance, pole cameras, license plate readers, and cell phone cracking technology used to circumvent passwords from the Urban Area Security Initiative DHS grant program. A lot of these technologies have use in the smart city idyllic plan for data collection to automate city services. After the drone panel was over and I was walking around the show floor at CES, I couldn't help but notice all of the smart cameras and AI image recognition systems being advertised for law enforcement applications. Software that can almost instantaneously scan through a wealth of footage and track people's

movements, run facial recognition, and identify every article of clothing. Versions of this type of software are already in use by many police departments, and they will only get better, cheaper, and more common. In effect, what this does is remove a lot of the detective legwork. Instead of having to manually map someone's movements and track down what niche Etsy shirt someone's wearing, these AI systems can now do this all automatically. To quote the MIT Tech Review article on CVPD's DFR drone program, quote, as the technology continues to spread, privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of what happens when drones are combined with license plate readers, networks of fixed cameras, and new real-time command centers that digest and sort through video evidence. This digital dragnet could dramatically expand

surveillance capabilities and lead to even more police interactions with demographics that have historically suffered from over-policing, unquote. Pedro Rios, a human rights advocate with the American Friends Service Committee and a member of Chula Vista's Community Tech Council, was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, people in the community have no awareness of what images are captured, how the footage is retained, and who has access. It's a big red flag for a city that says it's at the forefront of the smart city movement, unquote. These drones, they're revolutionizing the world. I mean, people who are not taking drones seriously right now will be left behind.

We have flown 18,150 missions. You can go on our webpage, you can see the flight data. We're extremely transparent. We share all that with our community. We have nothing to hide. We are in the business of saving lives, and I believe drones are one of the best de-escalation tools. If they truly have nothing to hide and are extremely transparent

about the use of their camera-mounted drones, I wonder why they've spent years in court fighting to keep every second of drone footage from being seen by the public. Luckily, after Chief Kennedy talked for like 30 minutes about how much they care about community engagement and how transparent they are with their flight data, I was able to ask the chief how their commitment to transparency relates to the recent lawsuit she just lost over hiding drone footage. And I also threw in a question about drones at protests. Let's take a listen.

Yeah, a question for the chief. So I know you talked about the importance of listening to the community and community engagement. And I'm not sure this is the case for your department, but other departments who've kind of followed suit, for example, have been using drones to surveil First Amendment activity stuff. And I know you recently lost a court case regarding the availability of drone footage. So I'm curious about kind of what the rationale for that footage is and how that plays into this idea of trying to be transparent with the community for how these drones are being used. It's, that's gonna be a little bit difficult for me to answer because the court case

is still moving forward. It's an active case. If you read it, we didn't lose the case. It was recommended to go to a lower court to go back for some clarification under three categories. Now, this is either a straight up lie or a huge cope and a gross mischaracterization. But more on that in a sec. I think it's really important, as I mentioned, there are ethics involved in the ethical responsibility that you have as a law enforcement agency is super important. So how you utilize your drones and how you do outreach with your community is fundamentally important. And so we don't use our drones for if there was a protest we would not use our drones if there was if it turned into a riot 100% so if people were out there and they have the ability to to speak freely to

share their concerns and it's in, our goal is to make sure that we keep it safe for all parties involved on either side. So my hope is that other people look at it the same way that we do. And hopefully I've been able to answer it as much as I, believe me, I'm dying to give you more, but I can't. Okay. Thank you for those questions. Folks, we're out of time. Maybe there could be questions after the session. So yeah, there were no more questions after mine.

I kind of shut down that possibility. Anyway, okay. So first of all, the line between a protest and a riot is meaningless. Police can declare a riot for any reason they see fit, including people being in a road marching. I've seen this happen dozens of times, nearly hundreds of times, actually. So just moving on from that immediately, let's go back to the court case.

The city of Chula Vista did lose the argument that they were trying to make. They did lose the case. The 4th District Court of Appeals ruled that claiming exemption from the Public Records Act was unlawful, and sent the case back to trial court to hammer out the details of how much footage is subject to public disclosure, and figure out a process for standardizing the release of the footage. Now, the same day I attended this panel in Las Vegas, January 9th, I attended this panel in Las Vegas, January 9th, the city of Chula Vista requested an appeal to the California Supreme Court to prevent the release of their aerial video footage. There is a 60-day waiting period where the high court will decide whether or not to take the case. And if they decline, finally, it will go back to trial court to decide on the process of how

selected drone footage shall be made publicly available. The police are now currently claiming that making DFR footage adhere to the Public Records Act would violate the privacy of Chula Vista residents captured in the videos, which perhaps demonstrates that the aerial videos should have never been captured in the first place. I'm going to read a press release from the city's communication manager. Quote, The city declined to provide the copies because doing so might have violated individual privacy rights. The city would have to manually review and redact every video recording to protect information considered personal,

such as the images of faces, license plates, backyards, and more. Unquote. So the city is both trying to argue that having to manually review each requested file to determine if the video in question is related to a pending investigation, as well as redacting personal information captured on camera, would be way too costly and time-consuming. way too costly and time-consuming. City officials claim that reviewing and redacting videos from one month to obscure faces, license plates, and backyards would take a full-time employee around 230 days. I'm going to read a little bit more from the city's recent statement. Quote,

While the city takes very seriously its obligation to provide the public access to public records, the city is concerned that the court of opinion may compromise significant privacy concerns of members of the public in this case or in future requests, unquote. Somehow, the city is missing the point that this is the very reason the drone footage is being requested to learn the actual nature of this highly influential drone first responder program that's being adopted across the country. If the existence of this footage is such a massive privacy violation, that implies that the recording of said footage itself implicitly violates people's privacy. violates people's privacy. And the harder police fight to hide their sweeping collection of aerial footage, all the more suspicious this entire program seems. So that is what I have to say

about Chula Vista's drone first responder program. In about a month and a half, the Supreme Court of California will make their decision on whether or not they're going to hear this case. If they decline, then the precedent will be set statewide against this exemption of the Public Records Act by hiding drone footage. So that will be really cool. And then hopefully within the next year, we'll finally be able to see what some of this footage actually looks like, how good their cameras are, how much they can zoom in,

all of the details of how much of the city they're capturing, all this kind of stuff, how often the drones are in the air, all of those types of things that will be easier to highlight once we can actually take a look at the footage. And I assume that going through and releasing requested files from one month will probably end up not taking 230 days. But I do know how the police love to love to stretch out these public records requests for as long as they can. As the request that this lawsuit stems from, it's all the way back to April of 2021. So hopefully, hopefully more than three years later, we'll finally get a look. Special

thanks to LaPrensa for starting this lawsuit and doing all of the hard work to actually force the police to be transparent. And if you want to read more, I'd recommend checking out the website, leprenza.org, as well as the MIT Tech Review piece, which provided some really, really useful information to fill in the gaps between my own research. So yeah, thank you for listening to It Could Happen Here.

It certainly could happen here in terms of seeing more of these little fuckers flying around in the air. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at CoolZoneMedia.com slash sources.

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