It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 125

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

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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. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking

musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us,

and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Callsone Media. Hey, everybody.

Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Shereen. And today is a very special day. It is the 1st of April, aka April Fool's Day. Someone may or may not have been born on this day, but little known fact that I didn't know about until I was an adult was that the first of April is

historically Syrian New Year. That's right. I learned about this as a Syrian in my mid-20s, so it's not exactly very well known, but when I learned about it, I got obsessed with it. So I'm going to talk about that today and just the history of April Fool's Day and how it became April Fool's Day in particular. Because originally, as I said, it started as the Syrian New Year and many researchers consider it the oldest recorded holiday in the history of the Near East. The Syrian calendar is also considered one of the last remaining ancient calendars that is still celebrated up until now. Iyad Yunus, no relation, but he's a doctor in archaeology and ancient languages at the University of Damascus. He said that the celebrations of the new year coincided with the celebrations of the arrival

of spring, and they began the day of the vernal equinox, and they continued until the first of April, aka Syrian New Year's Day. This day is associated with the celebration of the end of the raining season and the start of fertility and the growth of crops and fruits as the celebrations were accompanied with religious rituals in which offerings were made. Yunus also noted that the Syrian calendar is related to Ishtar, who is the first mother goddess, the goddess of life, the morning and evening star at the same time. The ancient texts describe Ishtar as, in her mouth lies the secrets of life. The word Ishtar comes from the Akkadian language. She is known as Inanna or Nana in Sumerian.

And she was the first deity for which we have written evidence of, as well as the world's first goddess of love and war, Anshatalevar named Tammuz. In ancient Mesopotamia, which roughly corresponds to modern Iraq, parts of Iran, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkey, love was a powerful force, capable of upending earthly order and producing sharp changes in status. And Ishtar definitely deserves an episode all for herself. She's completely fascinating and needs more than just a blurb, but I had to at least mention her, and maybe one day I'll do an episode about her, but that's Ishtar for you for now. There are other researchers, though, that have criticized the validity of April 1st as the Syrian New Year. Because of this, the origin of

the Syrian New Year is a Kitu celebration, A-K-I-T-U. It has sparked some controversy, with debates fueled by history and religion. The validity of the ritual is disputed because it is not widely celebrated locally and its relevance is not generally accepted by academia. Some would argue that the celebration of Syrian New Year is useless. Among them is Bashar Khalif, who is a history researcher specializing in the Mashriq. Khalif says that celebrating Akitu, quote, stems from nostalgia and an attempt to escape the present. So what are the origins of Akitu? Akitu marks the Assyrian and Babylonian new year, and it is observed the 1st of April and lasts 12 days. The Akkadians and Chaldeans also have celebrated the holiday. Dr. Joseph Zaytoun, fun fact, Zaytoun means olive,

what a cute name. Dr. Joseph Zaytoun is an expert in Syrian history, and he is one of the historians who considers Akitu, quote, the oldest recorded holiday in the history of the Near East. The earliest reference to this holiday dates back to 2500 BC in Ur, U-R. Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern Tel el-Muqayyir and South Iraq's Deir Qar governorate. According to Syrian researchers, the Akitu holiday was, quote, held for the Sumerian moon god Nana. For the Babylonians, it chronicled the god Marduk's victory over the goddess Timaeat. During the Babylonian era, the first four days were traditionally reserved for religious rituals. Babylonians used to offer prayers and sacrifices and recite the Enuma

Alish, which is the Babylonian epic of creation. The remaining days would include social and political rituals. According to the researcher Hazal Al-Majidi, the Sumerians observed this holiday on March 21st of every year, and this marked the start of the Sumerian New Year. On the other hand, Semitic peoples like the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, they celebrate Akitu on April 1st. What is this word, Akitu? I asked the same thing. I asked my mom the same thing because I'm still a child who thinks my mom knows everything, but she doesn't. She doesn't know what that means. She's never even heard the word and she didn't know the origin of Akitu. And apparently there's no consensus among historians

on the exact meaning of this word. However, researcher El-Majidi details his theory in the books Summer Corpus and Prehistoric Religions and Beliefs. According to El-Majidi, the word Akitu is the name of the feast and the place where celebrations were held. The word appeared in late Sumerian texts as Akiti. The word is then believed to be of Sumerian origin. The sign a means rain, ki means earth, and ti is a verb meaning to draw near. Thus, it roughly translates to drawing water closer to the earth. Very poetic. According to Jameel M. Shaheen, numerous ancient scriptures mention the same

Akiti. For instance, the holiday bears the name Akitu in Aramaic, Akiti Sunanam in Sumerian, Risha Deshita in Akkadian, and Khabi Nisan in Assyrian. Nisan, by the way, is April in Arabic. Risha Deshita and Khabi Nisan are often used in the Levant to mean head of the year and first of April, respectively. On the other hand, Dr. Mahmoud Hussain Al-Amin wrote that the celebrations were held at a specific location known as the House of Celebrations or Akitu, which was outside the city. So this makes Akitu a location as well, a sacred location. In ancient beliefs, the quote Akitu house refers to the gods dwelling on earth. The purpose of having a celebratory feast is to celebrate the gods choosing to temporarily reside in this city,

and the purpose of this house is to guard and cherish that moment forever. And even though now the name Nisan is used for what we know as the month of April, the month of Nisan used to be around the time of the vernal equinox, which starts around March 21st. The vernal equinox is still celebrated throughout greater Iran as Nowruz, which means new day on March 21st. However, in ancient Assyrian, Akkadian, and Babylonian traditions, the spring festival was celebrated in the first days of the month known as Nisan, and the calendar adopted by ancient Assyrians had the month Nisan at the beginning of the calendar year, which lends to the term Chabi Nisan, or the first of Nisan. So let's talk about the Syrian

calendar and April Fool's Day, what we all came here for. Fun fact about me, my birthday is today, April Fool's Day. Wow. And I didn't even know about this history, as I said, until I was an adult person in my mid-20s. But once I learned about this history, especially as a Syrian person who is really proud to be Syrian, it really made me appreciate my birthday and my ancestry a lot more. Because growing up, not gonna lie, it's honestly a pain in the ass birthday. Lots of empty gift boxes and people saying, happy birthday, April Fool's, and just me like rolling my eyes and grimacing throughout the entire day. There is one particularly traumatic memory I have from middle

school where I was given a box of chocolates and the joke was that the chocolates tasted like shit. And I know this because I tasted a chocolate and then I immediately spit it out. And to this day, I don't know what that chocolate was made out of and I hope I never find out. But anyway, it's just a weird ass birthday to have. You know what else is weird? Weird-ass ads. Listen. And we are back. Okay.

Dr. Zaytoon believes it is more accurate to call the calendar that starts on April 1st as a Syrian calendar rather than Assyrian, since all in Syria and Mesopotamia adopted it. He also thinks that the ancient Syrian calendar begins on the 1st of April and that, quote, this calendar was present and endured in multiple Syrian civilizations, including the kingdoms of Ugarit, Elba, Mari, Palmyra, and Damascus. Until the early 20th century, Syrians traditionally began their year on April 1st, but transitioned to the Western calendar during the period of the French Mandate. So it actually wasn't even that long ago that April 1st marked the beginning of a new year in Syria. The rituals of the Syrian new year are linked to April Fool's. There are rituals aimed at, quote, humbling the king, which would start from the fifth day of the celebrations. Lying was also a big part of the celebrations, as the king would abdicate his throne in favor of a criminal sentenced to death. That part is crazy

to me. Enslaved people also became masters and people disguised themselves in costumes and masks to hide their identities until they awoke from the lie the next morning. So the whole day would be a farce, essentially, and you would all knowingly live a lie until the next day everything is suddenly back to normal again. live a lie until the next day everything is suddenly back to normal again. Hannah Sumi, head of the Syriac Cultural Association in Syria, said, After the common folk occupies the king's throne, he blends in with the people incognito. Chaos ensues in Babylon, and on the first of April the king is found, and joy prevails.

And that is the origin of April Fool's Day. The king did not truly disappear. It was but a charade. There's also another reason the 1st of April is associated with an April Fool. Dr. Shaheen writes, until 1564 AD, the Syrian calendar was adopted in most countries. In France, celebration started on March 21st and ended on April 1st, just as the Assyrians and Babylonians did thousands of years ago. After King Charles IX adopted the new Gregorian calendar, celebrations began on December 25th and ended January 1st, which we now all know is the beginning of the new year. However, some of the public still continued to celebrate on April 1st and the people who still held on to this tradition became the target of mockery by the nobility for still believing in April Fool's Day. Other historians speculate that April Fool's Day dates

back to 1582 when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. In the Julian calendar, as well as the Syrian calendar, and also the Hindu calendar, the new year began with the spring equinox on April 1st. But people were slow to get the news, or they failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1st. Those who continued to celebrate the new year during the last week of March through April 1st became the butt of jokes and hoaxes and were called April fools. These pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as April fish in

French, which is Poisson d'Avril. I can't say that correctly and I can't even attempt to do a French accent, but it's the April fish. You're referred to as an April fish and it's symbolizing a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person. So it's kind of like an elevated kick me sign on your back. Interestingly enough, fish are also considered a lucky symbol in many areas of the world and are also important to many New Year's traditions. There was an opinion piece written a few years ago about the marginalization of the holiday of Akitu as part of a quote systemic battle against ancient civilizations. Dr. Shaheen noted that this prohibition has continued until recently. Different regimes and religious figures prohibited it because it is a

pagan feast and has rituals, prayers, and texts that offend the followers of the monotheistic religions. He added that Akitu is witnessing a renaissance among the Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac communities abroad, particularly as a result of religious freedom. He asks, will Akitu return or is it merely a trend that will fade away once again? Many cultures still recognize the significance of April 1st, including the Assyrians. Despite being scattered across the world, Assyrians preserve their history and heritage through holidays like Assyrian New Year on April 1st. first. Assyrian New Year is the spring festival among the indigenous Assyrians of northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran. Celebrations involve parades and parties, food, music, and dancing. Some Assyrians wear traditional costumes or dress

like Assyrian royalty and dance for hours. Celebrations take place throughout Assyria and other areas in the Middle East, along with some in the United States, Europe, and Australia among the Assyrian diaspora communities. The modern observance of Akitu began in the 1960s during the Assyrian intellectual renaissance. However, due to political oppression, the celebrations were largely private until the 1990s, but the event is still largely celebrated by Assyrians residing in Syria. Although the Syrian government does not acknowledge the festival at all, Assyrians still continue with the celebration. In 2002, Assyrians in Syria celebrated the event with a mass wedding of 16 couples and over 25,000 attendees. After the formation of

Turkey, Khabi Nisan, along with Nowruz, were banned from public celebration. Assyrians in Turkey were first allowed to publicly celebrate Khabi Nisan in 2005 after organizers received permission from the government to stage the event, in light of democratic reforms adopted in support of Turkey's EU membership bid. Around 5,000 people, including large groups of visiting ethnic Assyrians from Europe, Syria, and Iraq, took part in the Khabib-Nissan celebrations in Turkey. One of the largest Assyrian New Year celebrations took place in Iraq in 2008. Public celebrations were not allowed by Saddam Hussein's regime prior to the start of the Iraq War. The event was organized by the Assyrian Democratic Movement, or ZOA, and between 45,000 and 65,000 people took part in the parade.

In 2004, George Radonovich of the California State Assembly recognized the Assyrian New Year and extended his wishes to the Assyrian community in California. This was later followed by a letter from our old California governor, Terminator Arnold, to the Assyrian community in California, congratulating them on the annual celebration. I just thought that was pretty interesting because it is a very modern resurgence and like renaissance of this day. So just fun facts. And in the United States, almost 4 million Americans can trace their roots back to an Arab country located in the Middle East or North Africa. And this is according to the Arab American Institute. Each year, many school districts, cities, and states observe Arab American Heritage Month in April. It's meant to honor the historic achievements and cultural contributions

of Arab Americans throughout the nation. On April 1st, 2022, April was officially designated as National Arab American Heritage Month by the federal government. The movement for this recognition was first started in 1989, when Congress declared October 25th as a day to honor Arab American heritage and called it National Arab American Day. But the Arab American community pushed for further recognition. In 2017, a media outlet called Arab America, as well as the non-profit Arab America Foundation, launched an initiative that called on lawmakers to make April National Arab American Heritage Month. Arab America said that April was chosen because it did not conflict with other observances that highlight marginalized communities and that the month symbolizes hope, growth, and new beginnings. And yeah, sure, that can be true with spring starting and flowers

blooming and so on. But I think there might be a little more symbolism there as well. Personally, I think all national holidays are kind of useless unless you get like a day off from work. And giving a marginalized community a day or a month is a rather shallow and also useless acknowledgement of that community. I mean, Columbus also has a day himself, and even though many states now observe it as Indigenous Peoples Day, 16 states, as well as the territory of American Samoa, still observe the second Monday in October as the official public holiday, exclusively called Columbus Day. All this is to say that I would rather lawmakers actually advocate for marginalized communities instead of just tossing them a day or a few weeks where suddenly they exist.

It is still kind of cute to me that Arab American Heritage Month is starting today in April because of all the symbolism. Let's take our second break. I don't have a clever segue. Oh well. And we are back. Okay, where else have we seen April Fool's Day in the world? April Fool's Day has a shockingly global history for a holiday devoted to lies and deception. Historians have also linked April Fool's Day to festivals such as Hilaria in ancient Rome. Hilaria is Latin for joyful, and this day was celebrated in ancient Rome at the end of March by followers of the cult of Sabil. It involved people dressing up in disguises and mocking fellow citizens and even magistrates, and it was said to be inspired by the Egyptian legend of Isis, Osiris, and Seth. There's also speculation that April Fool's Day was tied directly to the vernal

equinox, or the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere, and this is where Mother Nature fooled people with changing unpredictable weather. I like that one. In Latin America, you have few chances to be pranked. Much of Latin America celebrates El Día de los Inocentes, or Day of the Innocents, which is a late December Catholic feast with an extremely unsilly origin that has now somehow become a day of jokes and pranks. In Ebi Alicante, Spain, they mark this day, aka their April Fool's Day in December, by having a town-wide food fight, complete with military strategy and historical lore. Then there's the Els Infernats tradition, which is reportedly more than 200 years old and involves a mock military style takeover of the town where the new rulers get to make up strange laws that others have to abide by and if they don't they get fined and the money

goes to charity when i was reading this earlier i was like oh this is the purge but then it ends up money goes charity and it's like oh it's nice but so for cultures, the day to watch out for is December 28th. In Brazil, however, April 1st is still the prank day of choice, and they cut straight to the chase by calling it Dia das Mentiras, or the Day of Lies. Similarly to Syria, Iran has one of the oldest April Fool's traditions, with the observance of Sista Badad, which also has a prank playing element. It is celebrated on the 13th day of the Persian New Year, on April 1st or April 2nd. Sizda Badad, which is also said to have been celebrated as far back as the 5th century BC, is translated as, quote, getting rid of 13. So it has an appropriately superstitious air. It's also considered a spring festival,

which ties into other April Fool's predecessors, like the ancient Roman celebration of Hilaria. April Fool's Day spread throughout Britain during the 18th century. In Scotland, the tradition became a two-day event, starting with, quote, hunting the gawk. That's a word. G-O-W-K. Gawk is a term for a type of bird, but it's also slang for a fool. On this day, pranking Scots send unsuspecting gawks, the people, not the birds, on fool's errands just to waste their time. And if you don't get gawked, there's always an opportunity for humiliation the very next day, which is Tally Day. Tally Day is for largely harmless derriere-related pranks, aka pranks involving your butt, such as pinning fake tails on someone or sticking kick-me signs on them. April 1st in Poland goes about it the same as any other pro-April Fool's place.

It's called Prima Aprilis. There is a funny parting phrase for prankers, though, that I thought was worth mentioning, which is Prima Aprilis, April Fool's Day. Be careful, you can be wrong. Which is truly like advice to take throughout the entire year. But what about what we've come to know as the typical April Fool's Day pranks? It's not especially surprising that capitalism took like a fun little day like April Fool's Day and ran with it because as we know we live in hell. But in modern times,

people have gone to great lengths to create elaborate April Fool's Day hoaxes. Newspapers, radio, and TV stations and websites have participated in the April 1st tradition of reporting outrageous fictional claims that have fooled their audiences. A few examples. In 1957, the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees. In 1985, Sports Illustrated writer George Plimpton tricked many readers when he ran a made-up article about a rookie pitcher named Sid Finch, who could throw a fastball over 168 miles per hour. In 1992, National Public Radio ran a spot with former President Richard Nixon, saying that he was

running for president again. Only it was an actor, not Nixon, and this segment was all an April Fool's Day prank that caught the country by surprise. In 1996, Taco Bell duped people when it announced that it agreed to purchase Philadelphia's Liberty Bell and intended to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. In 1998, after Burger King advertised a quote, left-handed whopper, scores of clueless customers requested this fake sandwich. And then Google also notoriously hosts an annual April Fool's Day prank that has included everything from a telepathic search to the ability to play Pac-Man on Google Maps. This is a sentence that made me laugh from history.com. For the average trickster, there is always the classic April Fool's Day prank of covering the toilet seat with plastic wrap or swapping the contents of sugar and

salt containers. I'm sorry, I had to mention that because like the sugar and salt is very innocent, but I, for one, have never heard of covering the toilet in plastic wrap. That seems cruel and crazy, and history.com, wow. Anyway, impressively, the joke of April Fool's Day has endured for centuries. And at this point, to have my life contribute any part to this joke is an honor, actually. I live for bits. And April Fool's Day is basically the longest running bit of all time. So it was only right that I was born today.

And that, my friends, is our episode today. I hope you had fun. I'm going to go do something for my birthday, even though this is the past, but today is my birthday and I'm doing something now for you. Anyway, that's it. Bye. 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 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 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. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get

out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. to naked app and hear a podcast about things falling apart and putting it back together again uh we're going fast in this intro because we have a lot of stuff to get to and the thing that we have a lot of stuff to get to about is the election for candidates for the council of presidents for national nurses united and in order to talk about that i guess the reason we're talking about that i you know okay i should i should have ran this one through

my head before we started this but yeah i'm here today with john jahed and rosa uh to talk about yeah there's slate movement thing i don't Uh, called shift change and why they're running, how they met, et cetera, et cetera. And yeah, some other stuff about the union. So all three of you,

welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Yeah. So I guess the place we should start for this for, so we, we,

we talked to shift change last year, but I think for people who don't remember that, or, you know, I mean, it's been, God, I don't know. I don't know how long I've lost track of time. Can you explain a bit about what you're running for and specifically what it is, sort of how it works? I'll just start real quick, like in case it's not clear, we're all members of a large national nurses union called National Nurses United. And so we're from individual parts of that union, which is kind of an umbrella over California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee, which I'm a part of. Rosita is a part of Minnesota Nurses Association, which Jehed is a part of. NYSNA, which is New York State Nurses Association, which Zinnia Green as a part of minnesota nurses association which jahed is a part of nizna which is new york state nurse association which senya green is a part of and then we also have michigan nurses association and the dc nurses association and our group shift change is like

a caucus which is like whenever workers inside of a union get together because they want to change how the union works um and we're running what's something called a slate where we have to have groups of people running together for specific union offices. And so we have a lot of people running, not just us three or us four for the council presidents, but we also have candidates running for the board of vice presidents and also delegates for our convention. And hopefully that's a good basis for starting out the conversation.

Yeah. So I guess the first question I wanted to ask, because I think this is an interesting story, is how did you three meet? Because this is mostly a very different group of people from last time. How did we meet? Oh, my. That is a good story.

So if you're not aware, or if you've been living under a rock, you know, there's a lot of violence that's happening in the world. And specifically, there's violence that's happening in Palestine. And John, I and Jihad all met as nurses who were looking to really be involved in Palestine solidarity work. And so we met on a space. We connected there. And, you know, our politics pretty much align that we believe that oppressed people should be liberated. And that was one of the largest ways that we met each other. And we became, I mean, I feel like Jihad and John are part of my family. Definitely, we have really connected on the solidarity front for that, but also as nurses organizing and really seeing where the fault lines are within our own union. We haven't talked about specifically the nurses organizing

that's been going on for Palestine Solidarity stuff on the show before. It's really interesting. Even though we haven't met in person yet, we're looking forward to meeting in April at the Labor Notes conference. But despite the fact that we haven't met in person, there is a lot of chemistry among the group.

And we have a lot of similar visions, especially when it came to organizing for Palestine. So I joined Rosita and John and others in Nurses for Palestine chat group. And that group is active in highlighting the suffering of the Palestinian people and the politics behind it and how nurses can be in the front lines, not only to take care of patients, but also for other health care workers around the world. And that's a huge part of this because this genocide that's going on has claimed the lives of so many innocent civilians, as well as physicians and nurses and other healthcare workers, medics, etc. From that big group, or almost you can call it national,

there are smaller chapters now in different cities. There's healthcare workers for Palestine, Twin Cities, where I am from, and Chicago and San Francisco, and there's in Seattle and Boston. There's a lot of movement among healthcare workers where they focus their attention that hospitals, healthcare facilities, healthcare professionals are not a target during a military conflict and all the war crimes that have been committed need to be answered for. So from that, we kind of sprouted a smaller group and with the election coming up for

the National Nurses United, we thought we could take that more of a like a grassroots movement to make a bigger change because we believe, you know, have the politicians and all the people up in the highest echelon of powers, if you will, listen and do what actually the base needs. And, you know, there's no better way of doing it by but having your own union representing what the nurses in the union want and their policies and statements should reflect what the nurses need. And that's what we hear. And that's why we call ourselves Shift Change. on to that is that like when we first all came together there was a call from palestinian trade unions to push our own trade unions here in the u.s which have historically not really taken strong positions on things like international conflicts or you know what's going on in palestine in particular and our union just adopted bds language within the last year, the California Nurse Association National Nurses Organizing Committee. And that took an extraordinary amount of pressure from rank and file nurses to get the leadership to agree that this was an important stance.

We noticed that unions had just gone through, you know, democratic reform processes who had been taken over by rank and file workers. The UAW with Sean Fain had adopted much more quickly resolutions in favor of peace and ceasefire. And, you know, as workers, we're against war of all kinds. But in particular, this is a particularly egregious um situation where nurses have borne the brunt of like all the health care workers who are being um targeted specifically in palestine and gaza the majority of those of those health care workers are nurses so we believe there's a direct connection between you between our work here and the support of those nurses over there. positive policy changes we want,

but it'll build a stronger union for everybody so that we can fight the bosses at the bedside, making sure that our patients are taken care of in our communities. So I'll let it go. So that's a bit of a segue into the next thing I wanted to ask about, which was, okay, so you've talked about how you all met through Palestinian Solidarity Organ organizing, how that's

one of the important things for why y'all are doing this. But I wanted to, yeah, see if you can go into more detail about the specific things that brought you to running for this. Rosita, why don't you give a little bit of an account of your story of how you first heard about shift changes like a thing? Because I think that's kind of that I think that would be fun. So I first heard of shift change last year and, you know, I was very apprehensive. I was like, oh, wow, who's this new group that's coming in?

coming in and, you know, I kept, I was hearing from my very own union that, you know, there was a group out there that was challenging and that maybe had gotten some things wrong and, you know, they just, you know, needed to kind of be put aside. And so I did join one of the calls. There was an outreach call to kind of figure out whose shift change is. And I thought it was pretty interesting. I thought, you know, here are some very motivated union members who see that there's something that needs to change within our union, which is part of what we do as organizers. We see that there may be something that needs to change even within our own union. And we as rank and file or we as union members should be able to have that voice to change it. And what I was seeing was that their voice was being really suppressed.

Instead of saying, hey, how can we move towards what you're asking and really come to a place where we can understand where you're coming from? Instead, it was, no, we're not going to listen to their voices. We're not going to, you know, even engage with, with this group. They're the, this rogue group out there. That's like, you know, causing all this ruckus, which makes me, you know, I'm, I'm somebody who loves and gravitates towards ruckus. Um, that's just my personality. So it just made me more curious. And then, you know, when we started organizing, um, for, you know, the Palestine solidarity, John came in and I was like, Oh wait, I think I know this guy. Like, you know, he's one, he's one of those shift change guys. And it just made me more curious. And, you know,

we've had great conversations and I really, really understand, you know, the motivation and because of some things that have happened to me within our union that has made me really recognize there are ways that we can make positive changes for our union and as organizers as nurses we have to strive for those and we have to have the ability to have our voices heard and to motivate each other to make those changes. Because if we are the union, then we should be able to change our union towards what we want to see out of our union.

And that's probably the most important thing. I was going to say, Jahed, do you want to talk a little bit about your experience with the Minnesota Nurse Association strike in 2022 and then watching the nurses forward people because I think that kind of ties in well. Sorry, before we do that, we have to do an ad break before

I'm also going to get yelled at by my bosses. Ad break. Hey, ads. Alright, we're back from ads. Hell yeah, let's do this. I thought my two cents would be a good fit after what Rosita just said. Everybody has their own unique experience and how they became interested.

I'm a member of Minnesota Nurses Association and we went on strike two years ago to request and demand better contract with the Fairview system here in the Twin Cities area. Eventually, there was a contract, and it was ratified. After that, there was a contract and it was ratified. After that, there was an election. And even though I'm a member, I'm an active member, I serve on some committees with M&A. And recently, I joined the Government Affairs Committee. You know, I haven't been really engaged in the politics of the union until a new slate, another troublemakers, if you will,

another group of troublemakers, you know, who called themselves nurses forward. They ran against the current board and actually they won. They won in a landslide last November. And that was a huge change and an inspiration for me, really, that rank and file nurses, and they're all, you know, nurses working on the floors, and I know some of them personally, and I trusted these guys knew what they're talking about. And they were running on a platform that made sense, where all the rank and file nurses have a say and they are well informed because there's a lot of stuff that goes behind doors that nurses are not brevity to. And that, you know, makes things sound a little shady sometimes where, you know, unions are, say, endorsing a

politician and this politician kind of drops the ball or does something that's not in the interest of the union, and yet they're still supporting them. We need to know why and how that came to be. So that kind of gave me an inspiration. And the moment John came in and recruited me, if you will, and I thought, sure, you know, if we, if we can do affect some change in the local level, I think it's time to change in the national level. So we're hoping for the best here. And we're trying to do our best to get a good result. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, that was something I remember from last time is this issue of transparency and this issue of the union acting. I don't know if autonomously is the right word, but the union acting just sort of doing stuff that members were just like finding out about afterwards.

Yeah. And I, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I think like that's on a kind of basic i mean there's obviously a political level to it but on just the sort of basic what is a union level you you would think that your union wouldn't be doing that and yet comma i was just going to comment on that um i think one of the biggest parallels that i've been able to see is you know we spend a lot of time of ours as nurses fighting against the hospital industry, right? It's the big boss, as we call it, you know,

we march on the boss, or, you know, we have, you know, rallies around it, or we do petitions. And, you know, we're constantly fighting this big entity of the hospital industry, which oftentimes keeps us in the dark about policies or about changes that they're making or, you know, various things. And I can't help but to see the parallels between our fight with the hospital industry and then comes our fight with our own union. So, you know, how can we within our union change that so that we're not seeing both entities as the same. I don't want to be in a union that I also am feeling is the same entity that

we are fighting a bedside. So that transparency for us is extremely important. That autonomy, that accountability is extremely important because why should we be having two parallel fights with our own union and with the hospital industry uh i was just gonna say like that the um that's what what inspired us the first time around was that it felt like we were struggling both against like you you've got to fight against management why do i have to also at the same time turn around

and fight like with union staff about basic stuff that's like all i have to also at the same time turn around and fight like with union staff about basic stuff that's like all they have to do is like nurses are really smart i know it's hard like it's a shocking idea that nurses might know a thing or two and the idea that we that they have to come up in focus group amongst themselves to tell us what our values are right like i think i can walk around my unit and i can tell i can find us what our values are right like i think i can walk around my unit and i can tell i can find out what nurses values are real fast i mean we may not all agree on every single thing right there's a there's a pretty wide amount of ideological like alignment in our union we're not all we're not all in lockstep about everything except for how important it is

that nurses are actually leading and driving um how the union works and so uh we have you know the main core thing and i think this is what's so important about union organizing in particular is that you can set aside disagreements on one thing and you focus on the thing that's the that's your your shared material interest regardless because we all do the same kind of work it's really important yeah and that's and that yeah but that also makes it doubly important that the institution that you're using to do this is actually doing the things you want it to do when not fighting you at every step one of the things that you mentioned uh we were talking about this was how this kind of stuff in the union was impacting palestinian solidarity organizing i was wondering if you could talk a bit about that

oh i can i can take that one and then jihad can actually um add into it but so i was part of social justice committee i was actually the chair for the entire california for nnu um and one of the biggest things is you know of course we're speaking out for our communities we're speaking out for oppression against oppression and specifically for marginalized communities so i thought it would be pretty easy for us to align ourselves with our resolutions that we have just passed in actually october the 8th of 2023 and i i ran across a lot of barriers um i wanted our union my union to put out a statement about a c-spire, to put out a statement about a ceasefire and to put out a statement about how bombing hospitals and killing our healthcare worker colleagues was wrong. And

I was constantly, you know, barriers were put up. I was told I could not do a vigil. told I could not throw I could not do a vigil I could not initiate that I could not speak on behalf of me being a nurse um and so that infuriated me I felt really really betrayed by my union that we had just signed all these resolutions specifically talking about um aggression talking about apartheid and yet I was being told that i could not speak up and then i was ghosted on a few times i would start sending emails i was like hey what's you know going on how come i can't do this and there would be no answer or i would say hey i want to do a vigil nope you can't do a vigil nope there's no signs that you can use nope nope no and so i just kept getting all these no answers um and a few of us got together we got a petition going

and we sent it in. We're like, hey, look, these are all the reasons why we as nurses feel that we should be speaking out against what's happening right now. And this is even in the early times, even, you know, really, you know, the end of October, beginning of the next month. And, you know, it took them a long time to get it out. And it was a very middle of the road statement. At that time, I had asked the union to sign on and endorse one of the largest and one of the first union rallies in support of Palestine that had been called by the Palestinian trade unions specifically for us to rally around. And they refused. And on that morning, I submitted publicly my resignation to the Racial Social Justice Committee. I felt that it was an absolute dishonor for me to sit in that position and to be the face of a committee that says it stands for social justice and yet was putting up barriers for us to speak out as nurses. And that really was a huge

deal for me. It was a huge deal for many other people that saw that as a gesture of solidarity, but it was more, it was about my ethics and it was about my moral standing. I could not legitimately sit in that position while my union was stifling and censoring my voice. It's a brave thing that you take a stab like that. And it's also, it's the right thing to do. And you should never have had to do this in the first place like jesus christ oh i don't know i mean i don't know it's just deeply and incredibly frustrating like just hearing hearing that and watching them just like ignore ignore the things that they ignore the resolution that they just passed and i don't know that's absolutely terrible i hope they i hope they lose hypocrisy much yeah

yeah well if i may add to what rosita just said uh first of all i have to say rosita is the bravest person i know and what her positions and her ethics are of the highest caliber. So I'm honored to be running with her during this time. You know, from example here in Minnesota, you know, nurses as part of the Government Affairs Committee, I was involved in. I came kind of toward the end, so I can't take credit for it, but it was the Keeping Nurses at the Bedside bill. It was adopted, it passed the House. Now in Minnesota, we have all three branches basically in the hands of Democrats. It passed the House and the Senate, and yet the governor vetoed it. Why? Because there was pressure from corporate, you know, the bigwigs told him, if you do it, we're going to pull some investment or something. Or, I don't know, maybe we won't have you on the board after you retire, something like that.

So I don't know. But that kind of triggered us. It was really a stab in the back, if you will. But it's still, you know, the union itself could do better. It can be more sensitive to its members needs and their demands. For example, we were trying to get a resolution or a statement that was back in October about a ceasefire here through the union, even though it's, I would say, inconsequential for them to say. But they even refused to hear the suggestion or the movement to issue a statement.

That was the old board. Toward the end of the reign of the old board, there was more effort. I think it was mid-December. And a weak, really watered-down resolution was adopted calling for ceasefire. The new board came, and the first or second meeting in February, there was a much more robust resolution that was adapted at a much higher nays versus nays in that. There was no nays, actually. There were some abstentions, like three out of 14. So there is a movement. there's a grassroots rank and file nurses who are pushing

toward change. The same thing, I'm also not only a nurse, but also a nursing faculty at Minnesota State University in Mankato. And I belong to another union, the faculty union. In the very beginning, there was just kind of deafening silence. Nobody wants to hear anything. It reminded me of the period after 9-11. If you speak anything against the government or anything, you critique what the government did or didn't do,

you are on the other side. You know, remember that if you're not with us, you're against us argument. And it's the same thing. It was the same thing here. I know people who lost their jobs because they were speaking out for Palestine or against the atrocities that the Israelis were committing. And that's from within unions and health care organizations, people who lost their livelihoods because of it. And they are labeled as anti-Semitic or anything like that.

So they were trying to kind of silence people, scare them with all these labels and, you know, illegitimate ways of really conducting a civil discourse or having someone hear a different point of view. So, you know, from that sprouted this huge movement among nurses and healthcare professionals, that we want this to go wider, even at the national level, during the primaries, where a lot of organizing was happening for, you know, uncommitted votes for the primaries for Joe Biden. And that made them feel, you know, the pressure. And as you can see, the U.S. vetoed a ceasefire resolution, I think, three times before. And yet this week, they allowed one to pass because there is a lot of political pressure because they are doing their own calculation, I understand, but still, there is a grassroots movement that affects this change.

I just want to tie in to everything that we're saying around organizing, because I think so much, a lot of people come to unions with the idea that this is how they, you know, you get a chance to build a platform to make a case for the right policies, right? get a chance to build a platform to make a case for the right policies right and we you know we push things through legislation and lobbying and then for some reason like the governor decides that they're not going to pass it you know our union like my part of the union california nurse association national nurses organizing committee this is really this two, was at one point powerful, was so organized and so powerful that they forced the state of California, which is one of the largest economies in the world, to pass

a ratio bill that was that Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor, after it was passed, those little nurses, I can't believe we were letting them do this. Our union at one point was powerful enough to help end Arnold Schwarzenegger's political career. And so when we talk about getting things passed,

it requires a lot of power. And a lot of people don't understand that power means getting people together to commit to take collective action. And that might mean occupying a capital. That might mean doing things that are a little bit outside the law, right? But we understand that if we don't have the power, then none of these idealistic things that we want to have see change in the world or happen in the world can happen. And we've seen, we're talking about this idea

of you're either with us against us or against us. People who are advocating for building that power and that power comes through defending our contracts, defending our coworkers through grievance fights,

making sure that we are taking aggressive action when it comes to strikes and getting a strong contract language in the first place. People who are advocating for that are being labeled like the enemy inside the union. It's very difficult when you put so much of your time and energy into union work, which anyone who's a committed unionist can tell you of all the countless amounts of their free time

that they spend away from their family, away from their friends, away from their kids, doing the work of making sure that, you know, the union is strong to be kind of accused of being not on the team, right. Or not being for everyone else, not being a team player when you're always committed, you know, to building the power of the team. I mean, this is why we're running is because those of us who are making the case that we need to be an organized union, we need a union full of people who know how to fight, how to push back, how to stand up for those of us who might be weaker than others, to be labeled troublemakers or pains in the ass, or they even call us anti-union or union busting

which is really just it hurts right um it's very stressful but it's worth it to us because our principles and our commitment to our co-workers and building um a workplace that's uh you know a just place a place that takes care of all the people in our communities, people who would otherwise be denied the care that they deserve. We know that we can only do that by being organized, building relationships, and taking action together as a union to fight. And we know what that looks like. We have members of Shift Change who have been there when they've been occupying capital buildings, running politicians out of office. I want our union to be, I tell everybody this, I want our union to be strong and powerful. And I want it to be frightening to people who stand in the way of nurses and our patients.

And this is all connected. You know, what we see, you know, our government willing to let happen to people halfway across the world. I always tell people, my coworkers, you know, what we let our bosses get away with the least of us, they'll do to any of us if they have the chance. And so all of us come from the point of view that we have to build our power. That power has to be, you know, honed through our fights at our work,

making sure that our working conditions are good because we know when nurses have good working conditions, patients get the care they need. And when we're powerful and strong at the bedside, we can be powerful and strong out in the community where we need to take our fights and we want to make the world a better place for everybody. you know there i don't think there's any coincidence that you know rosita is you know an indigenous woman her family's from refugees from american foreign policy abroad she had learned to be a nurse in gaza um senya's family is from the dominican republic her family like fled like a u.s-backed dictator there trujillo and i don't think that there's any to me there's no it's not a coincidence that we're all here doing this work of building the kind of powerful union that we know that all of our co-workers deserve that our communities deserve the whole world deserves four troublemakers hell yeah

someone smarter than me once said good trouble didn't someone say once that they've been called MAGA supporters or something they were telling everybody that we were you know weird right wing Trumpy people and

I think that anyone who knows any of us would know that that is absolutely the furthest from the truth but it is what it is you know they people will say whatever they have to say to scare people away from us um because that's easier than doing the right thing which is to make sure that our union is a bottom up, uh, movement led by nurses. They're very afraid of us doing, getting our stuff together.

Cause there's, you know, there's always, it's easier to get along with the boss and it is to get along with your coworkers. Sometime. I think anyone will tell you that as long as that, you know,

we all know people who are friends with the boss because that's an easy thing to be it's hard to stick up for people who otherwise can't stick up for themselves just in the in the you know for our elections so the fact that we're even running our union doesn't want everyone to know about elections and the way that it's kind of we just give you the list that we're going to endorse just vote for them and no questions asked that that's just how it should be um so the fact that you know there's not a lot of information about the elections that go on in the nnu what does it mean what does it mean to be in you know in a council of presidents what does it even mean to be a delegate um We are often spoon fed the delegate

position, just be a delegate. And they're not told exactly what that means. What does that mean for us? What does that mean in our resolutions? What does that mean when we go to convention? Those things should not be a mystery to us. We shouldn't have to poke and prod to get that information about elections. And so that's also one of the things that we're trying to highlight as well. We should be very informed. And I think that's also another parallel between our U.S. government who chooses, you know, they kind of sometimes expect us not to go to the polls because it works in their favor, to not be informed voters because it works in their favor. So we can kind of see that same parallel. And that's one of the things that, you know, I think John has made a great way of highlighting

that and has really essentially, you know, paved the way for making that information known as well as Xenia. Xenia is, can I say this? She's a full badass because she, she, her and John, like I have have to say like they are so on it of getting that information out and it's extremely important because we want our nurses to be informed we want all of us to be informed yeah so on that note uh when is the election and if you're in the union how do you vote ballots go out um april 5th we have to have you have to have your ballot in oakland in the uh office by may we're telling people may 17th because they're going to be counted

um the morning of may 18th you will get if you are a member a dues paying member in good standing um you will get a ballot in the mail. But we are also telling people because we are finding that there's kind of like two lists of people, you know, in particularly our VA nurses, VA nurses are telling us that they have not been getting back, they didn't get ballots last election. And so we're encouraging everyone to send emails to the election officers to get a ballot if you haven't gotten one. To make sure that there's a list of people paying dues. And they faithfully take your dues out of your check. And then there's a list of people who receive ballots.

You know, definitely very normal and cool. The sort of thing that we expect from any sort of union that is, you know, buying for the nurses. And so we have an election email. Does anyone have that off the top of their heads? I will pull it up real quick as we were talking. That's fine. We'll just show notes. Yes.

Yeah, it will be in the description. In the meantime, you know, people can go to our website. We have a website where you can read about our story, our philosophy, our platform, all the things that people should know, and how to request a ballot and how to email the union and everything. The address is shiftchange, NNU, one word,.org. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you three so much for coming on the show and hope,

hope you beat them. I'm looking forward to us having a victory call where we can. Yeah. I'm excited. Thank you. Thank you for having us. We appreciate it. Yeah.

And this has been a kid happened here. You too. Also list dear listener can go make trouble for your bosses, your political leaders and people in your union. If they're not doing what you want them to do. Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. 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? 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex 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.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it.

Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how we try to put things back together again. It's sort of the Humpty Dumpty of podcasts. And of course, all the King's Horses and all the King's Men can't put us back together again. It's sort of the Humpty Dumpty of podcasts. And of course, all the King's horses and all the King's men can't put us back together again, because the attendance of power will never solve our problems for us. It's up to us to collectively solve our own problems. I'm your guest host, with all the dramatic metaphors, Margaret Giljoy. Today, it's one of those things falling apart episodes. Today, we're going to be talking about the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, a research

institute in Bloomington, Indiana. Its mission is to, quote, foster and promote a greater understanding of human sexuality and relationships through research, outreach, education, and historical preservation. The Kinsey Institute, in many ways, isn't just a sexual research center. It's the sexual research center. We're going to be talking to Dev Montanez, who last week gave me a tour of the center. But first, being me, I want to give you all context. I'm going to talk about history. I'm going to talk about a different Institute for Sexual Research called, well, the Institute for Sexual Research, except it was in Berlin from 1919 to 1933. So they called it the Institute for Sexual Wissenschaft. History sometimes

remembers it as Hirschfeld's Institute after Magnus Hirschfeld, the director of it. For 14 years, the Institute researched human sexuality. They offered consulting on matters of sex to straight and gay people. They pioneered a ton of transsexual medical practices, including pushing for the shocking at the time idea that trans people are happier if we're just allowed to socially transition and live as our preferred gender, which they observed led to a dramatic drop in suicide rates. This is medical practice that has continued, and we have more and more research about that to this day. The Institute coined the terms transvestite and transsexual. They performed the first gender confirmation surgery in known history on a woman named Dora Richter in 1930. They performed the first gender confirmation surgery in known history on a woman named Dora Richter in 1930. They worked alongside pro-homosexual advocacy groups.

Germany led the Western world in acceptance of LGBT folks in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was founded by three Jewish researchers, the most famous of whom is the director Magnus Hirschfeld. The institute itself, however, is famous today for one thing. Imagine a picture of a book burning. The first picture that comes to your mind is probably black and white, and it's of Nazis. This photo is used any time someone wants to say something like, the Nazis are bad, they burned books. What usually goes unsaid when this photo is reproduced is what books those Nazis were burning. They were burning the Institute. On May 6, 1933,

Nazis burned around 20,000 books, destroying endless amounts of research into homosexuality, transsexuality, and cross-dressing. Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist of the Nazis, was present. He gave a speech to 40,000 people during that book burning. So ended the Institute for Sexual Research. The first trans woman to undergo gender confirmation surgery, Dora Richter, she was either killed in this attack or she was arrested and died in prison shortly thereafter. Her exact fate is unknown. Magnus himself was out of the country at the time, and he never returned. He died in exile in France. This, I believe, is the context we need to hold on to when we talk about

the Kinsey Institute, when we talk about what they're facing today, as we watch people running for office in this country, wielding flamethrowers to burn books and campaign ads, while librarians face criminal penalties for making books available to students. Eventually, the Nazis were defeated, of course. They were defeated through force of arms, after great loss of life, and a coming together of ideological enemies like capitalists and authoritarian communists. Shortly thereafter, in 1947, a bisexual polyamorous sexologist named Alfred Charles Kinsey founded his own institute for sex Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, 77 years ago for those keeping track. Thereafter, he produced work that's foundational

to modern sexology. Most famous today is the Kinsey Scale, which broke homosexuality and heterosexuality out of a binary. Maybe the most famous at the time of his work, though, was his 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and his later book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which are often called the Kinsey Reports, which offered groundbreaking analysis like, it turns out women enjoy sex also. 37% of men had had, quote, overt homosexual experience to orgasm, which shocked the hell out of the world. Well, it probably shocked about 67% of the world. Since then, the Kinsey Institute has been one of the premier sexology research institutes and archives in the world. And now, in the 2020s, it finds itself at the center of a culture war and conservative backlash. For decades, the right-wing has tried and failed to find evidence that Kinsey himself was a pedophile. Last February, the Republican government of Indiana voted for House Bill 1001, which bars state money from funding the Institute.

ours state money from funding the Institute. To tell us what's happened with that, what the future of the Institute is likely to be, and how all this ties into the culture wars that we're living through right now, we have Dev Montanez, the admin coordinator of the Institute and a student at Indiana University. Hi, Dev.

Hey. Thanks for listening to my long intro. It's good for me to, you know, know some of the history behind the place that I'm at 40 hours a week. So, could you introduce yourself a little bit about the work that you do at the Institute? And I don't know, maybe what brought you there, but just, yeah. Sure. So I started back in early 2022 as kind of the person who was spearheading the 75th anniversary celebrations that we were going to have. And I am lucky enough that I have a background in DIY punk.

And so my organization skills are largely from that and not from any type of institution somehow those skills go over really well in academia okay a few of my friends that are like postdocs and stuff that are now in you know academic worlds are like oh yeah this has helped me you know running shows has really helped me run research projects oh yeah because because it's all about having your own initiative and working with people exactly and interesting yeah it's been it's been great to see and kind of be in the middle of it yeah yeah I'm I was originally at Rutgers and then I didn't finish my degree there dropped out because of financial issues, of course, as that's what happens when you're in college.

Yeah. And I was in Bloomington for a long time, almost seven years, I want to say, before I started working here. And I started working here and I was like, well, I get like a little bit of tuition reimbursement for working here. I might as well finish it. So now I'm at the purpose of or at the standstill of my life where I am back in school and working full time. Yeah. Mainly just to get it over with. Get working full time over with?

Well, I wish. Get the degree over with yeah yeah no if i have the debt i might as well have it yeah so okay so you work for the kinsey institute and the kinsey institute is totally fine and on solid footing and is completely okay so this is the thing that surprised me um you know when I came and visited the Kinsey Institute, and thank you for the tour of the Institute. The Kinsey Institute is such a monolith, such a thing that has existed for so long. people being really mad at it. Like it's hard for me to imagine that it's in trouble. And it seems too big to fail, but like not too big, but too institutional, too important.

Like I can't imagine someone saying, oh, we want to get rid of this incredibly important historical thing. I guess that's what a lot of the culture wars actually are about. So what's going on? Okay. So last summer, it was like the budget vote, I think, for Indiana government, state government. Someone, Larissa Sweet is her name, the representative who proposed this, basically decided to say, Kinsey Institute is perverts and we shouldn't fund them with state money. Which would, you know, I guess understandable, but we're not funded by state money. Okay. but we're not funded by state money. Only like a small percentage of the university as a whole

is funded by state government money. So it's not quite like your tax dollars are paying for us to exist. We are able to utilize the services of the university, which is very helpful in the case of being if we were like a non-profit we'd probably have to do a lot of that work like legwork in terms of like upkeep of a building like we'd have to do that on our own right but the you know the university the the state government does not fund us we We're funded by donors. We're funded by grants that we receive and endowments that exist that other people have given us because they believe in the work that we do and they want to see it continue.

So why are they trying to go after the wrong source of your funding? And how does it end up impacting you? the wrong source of your funding and how does it end up impacting you like that they've passed this you know essentially law to take money away from you that you weren't using yeah so the the big thing is that there is a lot of misinformation about alfred kinsey and his first book, The Sexual Behavior of the Human Male. And there is a table within it of Dr. Kinsey, when he did his research, he interviewed people specifically to ask them, you know, when were you first realizing your sexual arousal? And some people said, you know, I was this age. I was 12.

I was five. And as a child, you know that you play around with your body because you're learning it. Right. Because you've never used most of these things before. It's brand new. these things before it's brand new and so he had years in there ages in there that were younger than anyone that is conservative would want to believe that you would be sexually aroused right unless you were going to marry a heterosexually into a pastor yeah yeah exactly yeah child marriage is coming back so there there's that too. Yeah.

So there's that that exists. It's a lot of people who don't understand the research that he does, period. There was a lot of backlash when he did his work because people didn't want to believe that anyone was having premarital sex, that anyone was a homosexual and it was normal, or that any woman enjoys sex because it's for one thing only. Right. So they looked at this chart that said five-year-olds experience sexual attraction and said he's interviewing five-year-olds is that basically or or rather that he was doing experiments on five-year-olds they think that his work is like physical because he is a zoologist right biologist by nature and i'm gonna guess they think that any research that you do has to be with a person in one room and not you know social interviews or oral histographies like they don't put those two things together right and i was reading that they have a lot of i was expecting when i when i looked at this i was

expecting to find like op-eds from the 50s or something but i'm finding things from 2023 of people throwing a fit about the fact that he during some of this he did like i mean he was kinky it seemed like right he like filmed himself fucking and he filmed his wife fucking and he a bunch of consenting adults had some sex that he was around for and that's like meant to mean that he's a horrible weird monster yeah and truly none of my work has anything to do with or literally anyone's work has anything to do with what Kinsey might have done when he was here because he died so like within eight years of the institute even being a thing yeah so he i don't know he just it's not important to the work that we do now even if he was a kinky person like people that get into sex research are interested in sex so he wanted to try stuff out i guess yeah like who doesn't that's like the

point of being alive no i know actually the the point of being alive is buying goods and services from our advertisers. I don't know if you knew this. I think you thought it was about seeking joy. But it's actually about filling the gaping mall at the center of your life with products like these ones. And we're back. Okay, so obviously people have a problem with this man who's been dead since the 50s and therefore are mad at this institute that keeps track of a lot of stuff over the years,

like an archive. When they try to pull state funding from you how does that impact you you were saying that that's like not you know is it does it primarily impact you because everyone's suddenly aware of and mad at you again or does it actually also like is it going to cut your funding like what's happening so what's happening is there's now a i don't want to say like a disagreement but there's there's a there's people trying to figure out how to be compliant with this law which means that they need to go into certain administrative burdens to prove that we don't get these funds. Okay.

That's really all that it is. Otherwise, we are pretty good standing. It's more so, at least now, the Board of Trustees voted on Friday, and they basically brought in the president's recommendation of do not separate us from the from the university and so that happened on friday uh march 1st okay was the day that that went through so we are all feeling pretty good we all kind of had a little bit of a not so much a victory lap but like a we've been carrying this for the last six months of worrying about what's going to happen to this place that we all love and that carries so many things because if the librarians who are around and the archivists who are around aren't the people

handling the collection and the legislature later decides iu university can't hold anything that is obscene and obscene is you know eye of the beholder yeah it could easily mean that this like 600 000 artifacts that we hold in our collections are gone and we have stuff that spans 2 000 years it's not just items that are around today and everything that we get is donated we don't buy any of the items per se people just mail them to us the kind of things that normally if you mail to someone you might get in trouble yes exactly and i that was kind of the people still think they're going to get in trouble yeah kind of the point like i've heard that people have like shipped porn in cereal boxes as a way to like hide them because they're still worried that the Comstock Law is around in a way that will make these items be destroyed.

Yeah. Well, okay. Oh, there's so many parts of this that I want to talk about. I actually thought about this because I mailed a book from the Kinsey Institute to someone last week. And as I was packaging it up, I was thinking to myself, this used to be a crime. I was thinking to myself, this used to be a crime. The Comstock laws, for anyone who's curious, there was this historical pervert named Comstock. And by that, I mean, he was the largest collector of porn of his era who was on a wild crusade against perversion and birth control and all of these things.

And he went around and stopped people. He got all these laws passed that you can't pass pornographic materials through the US mail. That was like his big contribution to society besides ruining an awful lot of people's lives. And that's coming up again, like the ghost of the Comstock laws. Do you want to talk about that? the comstock laws do you want to talk about that yeah so we have book bans happening within libraries i honestly am not positive what is happening within indiana libraries but there is a group of let's say parent groups but i don't even know that they're actually still parents of children it's usually like women in their mid 50s and later who are running for superintendent or the school board whatever and now coming up with

these ways that children can't interact with items that maybe have never been illegal in the past, so to speak. Like, if any book mentions sex of any kind, it can't be around. If anyone is a homosexual in any of the books, it's banned in their eyes. And, you know, a majority of our books are a lot of those things. I'm sure there's some straight stuff in there if you look really hard. Well, today I was in the reading room that we have and we had out the, it was called the like wild edibles of the Eastern North America.

And it was a book written by Alfred Kinsey because he was a, he was like an Eagle Scout. Yeah. Like loved nature. He was one of the first Eagle Scouts actually. Yeah. You know more about him than I do. I just read about him in order to prepare this introduction. But a lot of those groups, uh, like Moms for Liberty, they have, they're the ones who are like a big crusade right now when i first started we just got a statue installed behind our building of alfred kinsey and that is kind of when the majority of the threats that we would get started when they started talking about this statue i have talked to people that have worked here for like 20 years and they have said they've never seen threats come

in like this ever before yeah so it's people talking about like bombing the statue i get calls about you know being a sexual predator or a deviant or, you know, you guys should all die. And it's very directed at us. Right. It's less of being directed at like a random abstract thing. Right. We have gotten a lot of harassment in terms of like people who because they think, oh, you do sex research, so you want a picture of my dick. So. Interesting, yeah.

So that will happen at times. You all should do an exhibit of the dick pics that have been donated so kindly to your institution and the individuals who work for it. There's like a rating system underneath. I'm sure our curator,becca passman will love that we actually just got in um donated to us was the cynthia plaster casters her dick molds that she did of the in the 80s she's like a famous uh groupie of like rock stars. So we have like Jimi Hendrix penis, you know, bronze mold.

And that's the next big exhibition that's supposed to happen. But we also have like Jello Biafra, which is hilarious. Would you all get, nevermind. I was thinking about how y'all can make some money. Lots of people are thinking about that. Yeah.

Okay. Huh? Well, thinking about how y'all can make some money lots of people are thinking about that yeah okay huh well no it's okay so it's so interesting to me right because it seems like their attempt to shut you down legislatively was a swing and a miss right it was this thing that they they thought that they had this thing that they're like haha we're gonna get those perverts by cutting off their funding and then everyone was like well that's not where the funding comes from. And the university was like, we kind of like this place. It's been around for 77 years. It's literally the only reason anyone outside of Indiana has ever heard of us. Yeah. Is that kind of a... We had like a series of listening sessions with the higher administration of like the public, well, the university public coming in. And just basically a lot of them saying the Kinsey Institute is the only reason why I came to IU.

The fact that this is here allows me to do my research, even if their research is in like Eastern European, you know, like Fabergé eggs. Right. So it gives people a chance to see that like academic freedom and like freedom to research what you want is possible and not just possible, but like encouraged. Right. Like as an R1 university, we we should be doing we should be researching things that aren't or taboo at times yeah and are actually trying to help the world rather than making money for some investor somewhere right no and because that seems like the entire point of academia right academia okay this is really interesting to me because I have kind of a bit of a love-hate relationship with academia. And, you know, there's a lot of critiques that can be laid at sort of ivory tower and locking away information and things. time that is absolutely a right-wing culture war thing is to be anti-intellectual and in this case specifically shut down the academy's ability to preserve and transfer knowledge like the problem

from my point of view is the when there are limits to how well the information can be transferred rather than the right-wing anti-intellectualism why well, anti-intellectualism broadly, I'm not trying to make a case for any other kind of it, is a problem with the actual existence of this knowledge, right? It's this like forbidden knowledge that no one should know that 37% of men in the 1940s like got it handy, you know? Exactly. the weird thing is that our collections are literally open to anyone who wants to come we don't mean to test it in any way well yeah that happens often yeah uh which to me is great and is kind of hard to come across in any archive. Usually if you have an archive,

like you need to have a affiliation with a university or a company in order to come and look at some of these things. Yeah. I mean, that's not to say that like anyone comes in and they are doing lewd things like that. We talk with everyone that comes in right there's there's no mystery happening really okay there's no sex dungeon i was a little disappointed yeah

it's really boring it's just a beige hallway for the most part. But you know what isn't boring that I have to interject quickly is supporting, like I'm never bored while I'm in the process of exchanging little pictures of dead people for products and services

like the ones that support this podcast. And we're back. And I feel really guilty for literally cutting you off mid-sentence in order to do that. I'm so sorry. It's okay. It's weird to be on the other side of this to actually see you do that. Yeah. One of the big things that happened when I first started was Bloomington has a big pride. Bloomington as a whole is what they call like a blue pocket in the rest of the red, the sea of red of Indiana. But I've also heard people say like, you know,, Indiana went to Obama in 2008. It's not as red as people really think it is. Right. It just came out today that we're the 50th in voter turnout.

Whoa. That's bad. That's really bad. That's impressive, but yeah. Yeah. But people are so disheartened like it feels it's really hard when these people are yelling about how conservative indiana is constantly that it gets in everyone's head that oh it doesn't matter that what i do which i have a love hate yeah i

have a love hate relationship with voting but right I also understand that I kind of need to in this capacity of where I am because it really can change on a dime. Right. I think my personal representative, he was elected by like 11 votes. Wow. And he is a horrible, horrible man.

Yeah. Yeah, i i can't when i get his fucking mailers that just say some dumb shit about trans laws and i just go i can't with this yeah i get pissed yeah because he wore a cowboy hat in his mailers no but he looks like you get those yeah okay yeah that makes sense there's no cowboys where i live it's the mountains you take off the cowboy hat and put on a real tree baseball cap like everyone else in this town poser okay sorry anyway uh-huh so a lot of what's going on is that people think that indiana is super right wing and as And as someone who came here from the East Coast, I love it here. It's really beautiful in Indiana. I like not being around a lot of people.

Bloomington says that it's a really small town, but it really is like 80,000 people when the students aren't here, which is still, to to me a lot of people yeah but it is small comparatively to anywhere on the east coast right but everyone i've met here i will say there's great organizers that live here there's a great amount of community and just like building of coalitions between people that i haven't really seen elsewhere. Okay. Which is really important. And it's not just through the university,

which I think is most people think it's all here, but there's so many people outside of the university that do amazing work that maybe came here to go to school, but ended up staying or just came here because this used to be like the folk punk capital. That's true. That is whatever, when I was going to Bloomington,

that is what everyone asked. No one asked me about the Kinsey Institute. Everyone asked me about folk, uh, folk punk. Yeah. My interests align more to the Kinsey Institute person. No one get mad at me.

Well, okay. So what's interesting is, so in my mind, you're like, oh, okay. The right wing came for the Kinsey Institute and they just failed.

Right. And is that missing the fact that you had a lot of organizers and a lot of people working to defend the Kinsey Institute? I think so. I wouldn't even say that it was a failure. It was more of, they really don't understand what we do and even how these institutions work. I think is the real thing is that they are so caught up in how things should work they don't actually look into how like neoliberalism is everywhere and it is i don't think they understand what that is and how much it's infected how bureaucratic everything is

and how everything is interconnected constantly so that's why they thought tax money would be the thing but it's actually this complicated capitalist system yes okay i mean maybe if they listen to some some other people and they're talking about capitalism they would probably get more yeah you know more people to come behind them but for the most part the folks folks who are loud and proud about that, they don't know what we do. They don't know who we are either. They think they do. That's good, since they're trying to murder you. Yeah, the director got doxxed the first year I was here.

That was fun. Yeah, that's fun. And there was a protest with some three percenters on campus. And we work very closely with Bloomington Pride a lot of the time. And so there's always the worry of people showing up there. Yeah. But again, like I said, everyone here is, there's so many good organizers that they've kept this town safe for so long. And I think they'll continue to do that.

That's cool i i like when we learn and when we reinforce the fact that the thing that keeps us safe is is organizing and is like community organizing and getting people together to keep track of what's going on and counter it yeah one of the big things that we focus on in terms of like our research goals is well-being and that's always something that like has stuck with me because to me the well-being is we us keeping each other safe and i remember when this all first happened i remember talking to the director and just being like those people aren't going to help us we are going to help each other yeah it's like oh yeah you're right we are it's like yeah we're not like we kind of can't count on everyone else sometimes these big institutions because we know what we're doing but they maybe don't know what we're doing and maybe it's time that we just tell more people

about it i like that i also like that it specifically points out that they did right by hiring a DIY punk into their institution. You know? Yeah. I get a lot of weird flack for not being an academic. Right. But then it comes to things like this and it's like, oh, I always hear like, well, we made the right choice.

Yeah. Which is nice to feel, unfortunately, in a job. Yeah, no, that makes some sense. If people want to support you all as individuals who are facing this trouble or the Kinsey Institute in general, or even just like if you have advice for people who are stuck engaging in the culture war more directly because they don't live on the coasts. What would you say? How can people support?

To support each other, we have a nice queer sports league here. And I suggest playing kickball with your friends. It's been really great. And also doing a honky-tonk night that's our big uh our big thing cool uh i'm really proud of everyone that have put has put that stuff together because it has created a a world that has brings people from all different parts together of the town yeah for the institute if you want to go to kinseyinstitute.org, that is kind of where you can see everything. You can support us by coming and learning more about sexual research and your history, because it's all of our history in terms of learning about how people lived and how we have like the most mundane things. Yeah. We talked about Hirschfeld earlier earlier we have a scrapbook of his and that is like the oldest thing of his that is like his personal item that we have yeah along with like published items but that's like the big thing yeah he was

almost 50 when he started the institute, I think. I'm like kind of doing the math in my head really quickly because he was born in the 19th century. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking about this stuff. I'm so glad that this didn't, you know, when we first talked about this, we didn't know which way the vote was going to go. I'm glad to do a little bit of a celebratory talk about this important institution. And yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. And if you want to hear me more, I have a different podcast. It's Cool People Did Cool Stuff. And it's also on Cool Zone Media, which is the thing you're listening to right now. I hope you all are doing as well as you can

with everything that's going on and putting each other back together again because we're all, no, I'm not even going to close with a Humpty Dumpty metaphor. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they don't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Welcome to Crap Nair. I'm Andrew Sage of the YouTube channel Andrewism. I have been digging into political cults lately, drawn from the work of Dennis Turish and Tim Walforth in their book On the Edge, Political Cults Left and Right. I've spoken before about the cult recruitment process, the contradictory positions held by cult members, ideological totalism, and the commonalities of

political cults, including rigid belief systems, immunity to falsification, authoritarianism, arbitrary leadership, deification of leaders, intense activism, and the use of loaded language. If you want the details on all that, you can check out the first episode in the Political Cult series, or you can check out my video on the topic, or you can pick up the book on Political Cults yourself, as I said, On the Edge, Political Cults Left and Right. Previously, I've touched on the LaRouche movement and the United Red Army of Japan. Today we'll be looking at another case study, this time of the various groups associated with Fred Newman, who fused politics seamlessly with psychotherapy. Today I'm joined by...

Oh, this is my cue. Oh no, I've been waiting for my cue and I missed it. It's Mia Wong Wong misser of cues sometimes host of this podcast I don't this guy's name sounds really familiar but I cannot remember what he was up to so I'm very excited

yeah he has some interesting connections very interesting connections if people want to learn more about him they can of course pick up the book or they can check out Terror, Love, and Brainwashing, Attachments and Cults in Totalitarian Systems by Alexandra Stein. But anyway, let's get into it. Fred Newman was a Korean war veteran who earned a PhD in the philosophy of science from Stanford University. the philosophy of science from Stanford University. With no formal training in psychology, Newman took a turn towards Maoism in the mid-1960s, as one is apt to do in the mid-1960s.

In a time when the mantra, the personal is political, was coming into prominence, there was a greater interest in fusing personal development and political action. So that era birthed new psychotherapies catering to a mass market that sought both happiness and social justice. Psychotherapy became something like a secular religion, which of course opened it up to charlatans who would propagate their innovative therapies and gain a following without actually testing or without any scrutiny of the effectiveness of the ideas by 1970 newman assembled a small collective in manhattan sharing an apartment on the upper west

side by this time post the class by this time post the collapse of the students for a democratic society in the broader new left and coinciding with the fervor of the cultural revolution people were looking for a new direction in a time when the psychotherapy bubble was growing newman as another of those charismatic therapists would attract a group of individuals who were yearning for hope newman's collective was first named if dot...then, and it was indeed a fusion of radical 60s politics and the new age therapy of the 70s. Newman's concept of social therapy or crisis normalization blurred the lines between therapy and political activities, and the group would give rise to the Centers for Change, the CFC, by 1973, which proudly identified itself as a Marxist-Leninist Maoist organization. The communal roots of Newman's group had cast a cult-like aura from its inception. Corps members were expected to leave their jobs, sell their possessions, and sustain themselves through activities like fundraising on street corners while embracing shared living spaces within the group.

Now, buckle up for a bit of a crossover episode here, because from 1973 to 1974, Newman crossed paths with Lyndon LaRouche. Oh god, of course. Yes, of course he did. Mind you, he links up with LaR larouche just after larouche had completed operation mop up so he was just attacking his enemies on the left and started shifting right if you use those terms and newman is like yeah this is my guy this is who i want to link up with so their collaboration formed the united front comprisingising of LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees, the NCLC, at Newman's Center for Change, and a third group led by Eugenio Parente Ramos, which later transformed into the Communist Party USA Provisional. Which I have to note, I have to note, is distinct from the Communist Party USA that most people know about.

Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure there's another. I'm pretty sure it's also distinct from the Communist Party USA Revolutionary Committee and also the Communist Party USA Provisional Committee. I think those are, if I'm remembering correctly, those are all separate organizations. Yes, yes, they are. Yeah, Perentis Group is actually connected with the National Labor Federation. So anyway, these joint forums were established and activities were coordinated among these groups. By 1974, in fact, the Center for Change disbanded and Newman and his followers merged into the NCLC. Oh, my God.

There was sort of a convergence between LaRouche and Newman and their perspectives of leadership, cadre formation and the manipulation of membership as LaRouche's apocalypse, fear mongering and elitism would merge very well with Newman's use of psychotherapy. Of course, and you learn this quickly with cult leaders, they don't get along well for long with other cult leaders, so the fusion with LaRouche led to inevitable clashes.

While within the NCLC, the Newman group continued its operation, and tensions eventually reached a breaking point. Later, in August 1974, Newman and his 38 followers left the NTLC to establish the International Workers' Party, or IWP, which he declared was the vanguard of the working class. Oh, I love the 70s. Indeed. Still, Newman's association with LaRouche had a big impact on his thinking and future development. He aligned with a lot of LaRouche's ideologies and was just as dismissive of various left movements. Even though they split, they still shared a disdain for common citizens, their group's members, and the principles of a free society. Yet despite dismissing most left

movements and saying that liberalism is fascism, Newman would occasionally dip his toes into democratic primaries, infiltrate existing leftist organizations, and utilize prominent black leaders to advance his own objectives. But I realize I haven't fully explained the focus of Newman's ideology. In most cases, cult leaders' ideologies ultimately hinge on follow me, I'm the best, but they have their unique quirks here and there as well. Lucky for us, Newman published a book on his ideas the same year he parted with LaRouche in 1974. So the book was called Power and Authority, and he basically cooked up a theory about the mind and society that became the gospel for his cult

and the ultimate manual for keeping his followers in check. According to Newman, revolution wasn't just about overthrowing the bourgeoisie, you also had to overthrow the bourgeoisie ego inside people's minds. So in a sense, we're cooking, you know, because you do have to sort of undo that brainwashing that

you get in a capitalist society i mean there's nothing wrong there necessarily but you see he was taking cues from marx lenin and larouche and his solution involved something called a proletarian psychotherapy where the workers of the mind took down the rulers of the mind through therapy sessions that would attack the bourgeois ego of course he would be the one leading the therapy because you know he hated freudian and other psychotherapies as just boosting the bourgeois ego and he especially hated that regular therapy is aimed to cut the emotional umbilical cord with the therapist and restore a healthy independent ego when his

social therapy meant to build up a forever dependent proletarian ego that would only wither away when the proletarian state withers away so basically never newman's doctrines worked for his purposes though his followers were stuck in this loop of dependency for over 25 years. He had an additional component to his control mechanisms though. He developed a concept called friendosexuality. So in his organizations, casual sexual relationships were arranged, where a designated friend that you also had sex with monitored and critiqued individuals to maintain control. If pregnancies ever arose, they were usually told to get abortions. And as for Newman himself, his inner circle was referred to as his harem or his wives,

and they served as both trusted lieutenants in the administration and trusted lieutenants in the bedroom if you dig yeah so yeah now let's get into little segments that we call newman and the fbi sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g because after the iwp was formed and briefly flirted with marlene dixon's democratic workers party which was another cult newman ended up contacting the fbi by the way we are still in 1974 very eventful year so what happened was a guy named Jim Rutherford bailed on Newman's cult and took the child that was probably conceived in the cult with him but you see the child's mother Anne Green who stayed in the cult and she wanted her child back so Newman recruited two cult members that were also lawyers to get the fbi involved in finding rutherford and the child so they dial up the fbi set up a meeting between

green and the agents and then green spilled the tea that rutherford used to roll with the weather underground and also had connections with a fugitive named jane alpert fast forward to 1976 and newman's iwp gets exposed by a splinter group for working with the FBI. But instead of denying it, Newman pins the blame on Anne Green and the two lawyers and basically pretends that they acted on their own without his direction. Because obviously the man's only looking out for himself. So that was a fun little aside, right? A little collaboration with the FBI. collaboration with the FBI.

Yeah, and it's like, if you're going to be a snitch, at least have like, at least have the basic decency and self-respect to admit that you were the snitch and not blame me on someone else. No, but a cult leader wouldn't have to do that, though. No. Terrible stuff. Carrying on chronologically, in 1977, Fred Newman shifted his focus to the political scene of New York City's Upper West Side, and basically rebranded his group as the New York City Unemployed

and Welfare Council. At this point, he abandoned the idea of an open vanguard formation and instead, while recruiting through therapy, gained political influence within other groups and formed broad and ill-defined front organizations that could pursue the cult's goals without too much heat on himself personally. Newman was actually able to get one of his cult members elected on the local school board and that led to some liberals digging into Newman's background and group dynamics where they found that indeed he was running a therapy cult where they relinquished jobs, severed political ties, and surrendered all property and savings to the cult. Cut off from the

outside world, busy with group activities, and trapped in endless meetings, the Newmanites lacked feedback from reality, which kept them in line. So Newman's electoral victory in the form of the school board member of his own cult gave him a taste for electoral activism. So when he crossed paths with Black nationalist lenora fulani together they formed the new alliance party or nap in 1979 i'll just call it the nap right i feel like we need to start like a party counter when we're at like four five already yeah yeah yeah iwp the nap yeah the communist party professional yeah flanny ran for lieutenant governor of new york in 1982 and in 1988 and ran for president becoming the first black woman to do so gaining ballot status in all 50 states and receiving nearly 1 million dollars in federal

matching funds she ran again in 1992 and again qualified for ballot status in all 50 states this time receiving 2 million dollars in federal matching funds and she secured a whopping 73,708 votes that's always a depressing thing with these like vanity electoral campaigns is seeing how much money they spent getting like 7 votes. Yeah, but I mean, you'll never

guess where this money was going. Oh no. In the background, Newman's financial maneuvers seem to be funneling a lot of the party's funds into other organizations affiliated with Newman. Lauren Redwood, a working class lesbian, actually shared her experiences working under the NAP in a letter to a gay newspaper in San Francisco. I won't read the whole thing, but she basically talks about how she was excited to help a black woman run for president, and she even found a lover while working on the campaign in Indiana. But, quote, 48 hours to prepare. I quit my job, left my home, my friends, put my belongings in storage,

found a home for my pet, and gave the use of my car to NAP in exchange for their taking over the payments. As a working-class lesbian, I thought I had finally found a political movement which included me. What I found instead was an oppressive, disempowering, misogynistic organization. All my decisions were made for me by someone else. I was told where to go and who to go with. I worked seven days a week, 16 to 20 hours a day. I had two days off in two and a half months. There was an incredible urgency which overrode any personal needs or considerations, an urgency that meant complete self-sacrifice. I felt totally powerless over my life. Forced into a very submissive role where all control of my life belonged to someone else.

I had given up everything for the campaign. My job, my home, and my support system. I felt desperate. And later in the letter, she said that I was completely exhausted. So tired I was unable to work well. Being unable to work, I had no income, as I was expected to raise my salary myself in addition to raising money for the campaign. And she also spoke about losing herself in this social therapy thing that Newman was doing,

as a lot of independent thought was discouraged. This was Newman's whole MO, you know, manipulating individual distress to transform members into political activists under total control. Replacing the traditional support structures that people would have been coming from with the cult as a new family. And despite some claims of dissolution, the evidence suggested that the International Workers' Party to exist even as the NAP was in existence as members divested assets and funding towards the IWB the whole time. Now it's quite interesting to learn the justification for why Newman picked Lenora Fulani in particular, and then would also link up later with some of the people that I'm about to talk about.

So, you're familiar with Antonio Gramsci, right? Yeah. He introduced the concept of the organic intellectual, suggesting that each social class naturally produces a stratum capable of projecting its historic mission and hegemony. On the flip side, Lenin, in his What Is To Be Done manifesto, envisioned a vanguard of professional revolutionaries from the intellectual elite to bring socialism to the working class. Newman was influenced by both concepts and considered his core group to be a vanguard mainly composed of white, middle-class, traditional intellectuals, often working as therapists for

Newmanite fronts. But here's the twist, he borrowed Gramsci's organic leaders term and connected it with people of color that had organic bases of support in their communities and would use them to advance the interests of his secretive white vanguard. Ah, the PSL. Indeed. So that's why Newman would create his own version of the Rainbow Coalition with his Rainbow Assembly and also would engage with people like Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, and others. Yeah. However, and political incoherence goes brr,

he'd also link up with vague populist movements like Ross Perot's Reform Party, who he'd worked to register voters for, and in an effort to gain more voters for the right-winger Ross Perot's Reform Party, Newman and Fulani would encourage the Patriotic Party and the Independence Party of New York to link up with Perot. And then, in 1999, the Newmanites threw their support behind the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign. So in addition to his political activities,

Fred Newman wore many hats. He considered himself a playwright and served as the artistic director of the Castillo Theatre. He also directed training at the Eastside Institute for Short-Term Psychotherapy, authored books featured at the Castillo Bookstore, and operated social therapy centres in various cities cities describing them as a unique development community despite the deprivations imposed on his followers as you can imagine newman lived quite comfortably in 1993 he bought a substantial greenwich village brownstone for nearly a million dollars i mean who says a cult revolution and therapy can't be profitable right i keep i keep thinking about that uh oh god i forget which of the the nepali maoist parties it was but one one of the the guys who was the head of one of the the nepalese

maoist parties who'd been like fighting a guerrilla war for a long time, the end of it was he moved into the house of the guy, the mansion of the guy who'd been Nepal's chief security minister. That's wild. It's a revolution because it goes in a circle and you end up right back where you were. I don't remember that one.

That's a good quote. quote yeah a lot of these organizations are like blatantly cults but of course newman fulani and others would always deny that they were in a cult as cultists always do so you look at the evidence and the evidence points to cult yeah my my my not a cult t-shirts raising a lot of questions that are answered by the by the t-shirt yeah yeah i love how when i first introduced my my organization i have to apply disclaimers were actually not a cult you know like that one meme King of the hill. Right? So one critic of Newman wrote an article called Inside the New Alliance Party. Dennis Surratt.

And despite initially thinking that the NAP was a progressive organization, he ended up detailing psychological control, racism, sexism, and the use of millions of dollars to manipulate well-meaning individuals, particularly targeting the black community. The internal structure was, of course, hierarchical, as Newman lived luxuriously while the rank-and-file members worked long hours and even faced mandatory taxes to support newman's seaside mansion oh my god newman's political positions were opportunistic obviously they changed based on the perceived benefits to him and his attacks on individuals organizations were ruthless when they failed to support him when members joined whether through politics or therapy, they were required to reveal all their resources and turn them over to the organization. They had to go through mandatory psychotherapy sessions, which served as a method to recruit vulnerable individuals, exploit their weaknesses, and control their behavior. Now, in article Marina Ortez who was a former leader in the new alliance party

explained why she resigned from the NAP. What happened was the leadership told her to put her child in foster care. I assume because the child and her child care was getting in the way of her full dedication to the cause. So she revealed the NAP did not live up to its claims of promoting democracy, obviously, and would use manipulative tactics and obstruct minority empowerment, and had a long history of attacking progressives and embracing Perot's 1992 presidential bid and the harsh treatment dissenting voices. In the end, in the book On the Edge, Dennis Tureish and Tim Walforth end up terming Newman's work New Age Leninism, which I think is a really good phrase to use to describe what he was doing.

He had a strong knack for manipulating politics, and even with Newman dead and gone, the Newmanites have already proved themselves skilled political operatives regardless of their actual size. So the potential for someone to fill his role in the future definitely remains, especially given the state of US politics. US politics. Yeah. If you want to learn more, like I said, definitely read on the edge and also check out the article, how totalism works by Alexandra Stein,

who was a survivor of a different cult who ended up doing a dissertation on Newman. As for final words, stay away from cults, please. If it has democratic workers party or people's party of such and such or popular support of the scrutinize it a little bit you know look let's look at the structure let's look what they're asking you to do uh especially if the leadership considers themselves a vanguard despite having like 15 members.

Honestly, you probably shouldn't follow a group of any size that considers itself a vanguard. But that's typical for someone like me to put forward. That's it. That's all I have to say on New One.

Check on your friend with sexuals they're probably going through it right now all power to all the people peace 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

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It's the one with the green guy on it. podcasts it's the one with the green guy on it welcome to it could happen here a podcast coming to you from a country ruled by nine unelected dipshits and hideous costumes you can at a whim destroy your life i'm your host bia wong with me is james stout hi me i'm excited to hear about the supreme council or uh whatever they're called like the jedi council it's a problematic comparison in a lot of ways but like the thing i immediately think of is the extent is is like like iran like i don't like i do not like iran right but iran gets so much shit for having the shura council right which is like this council that's like above their parliament above their president it can make a bunch of decisions as a bunch of power that's like we also have a shura council

except instead of protecting the islamic revolution it's designed to protect like the ideology of a bunch of right-wingers from harvard and it's like well this is great no for sure like yes yeah we have a group of unelected half-dead people whose entire thing is to protect like capital and specifically the theft of land from indigenous peoples that the thing that that they uh they love to do and again to defend iran here like we did this first like this is like that one won't get ever clipped out and used in other contexts that's great we kind of pioneered this right like we were we were trying to try to like take the uh give give monarchism a soft landing you know so we uh we had some other unelected half-dead people yeah and this this has the the results

of this have been disastrous and are widely regarded by everyone as a disaster. So we're going to be talking about a few cases that the Supreme Court is going to do. And also, we're going to be talking about the Supreme Court and how it relates to sort of liberal, what I guess I would call sort of liberal NGO or sort of progressive NGO political and legal strategy because all of that stuff needs to be thrown out the window immediately and it hasn't been. So,

all right, let's, let's start with Texas bill for a very gay, a basically just like a turbo fascism bill that lets Texas police racially profile someone and go, I think this person's here legally and immediately arrest them. Yeah. Crucially it's,

it's, I think right. Like, yeah. So it's i think right like yeah so it's like again we are giving the texas police like the the heroes who ran away from uvalde we are giving them the power to go i did this person isn't white i think they're here legally i can arrest them and then if they do arrest someone who's undocumented there's the basically the way it works so it's

it's it sets up a series of um like criminal penalties like prison time i think if you repeat offender you get a felony but mostly what it does is it lets the judge immediately just deport them now yeah this is uh to use a technical term obviously insanely illegal like constitutionally like it is the constitution is very clear that that immigration is is you know constitutionally the purview of the federal government um it's very funny reading like scotus blog because people have to sort of pretend that like people are making real legal arguments here yeah it's like when uh when donald trump is ever like i we're looking at donald trump's policies uh next week spoiler alert but like i've been writing about his proposed immigration

policies and you have to be like no this shit's just fucking it's not legal it's just not like yeah some crackpot old dude who thinks the fringes on the flag mean that you're under adultery law that he's got a fucking argument but he's wrong like this is reddit illegal shit yeah and so so this bill was supposed to go into effect there there's a whole series of very convoluted court battles over it and this real court was just like yeah this can go into effect and until basically until the case goes on and then eventually it eventually didn't go into effect because another federal court was like, obviously, this is insane. We can't let this go into effect. What the fuck are you guys talking about?

And, like, this bill, the legal justification for this is batshit. It's so. Okay, they're trying to invoke the state war clause, which is this, is this really like old timey law? Okay. So the thing, the thing about like the 1700s and the 1800s is that it takes a significant amount of time to get people from, I don't know,

you're, you're, you're, you're drawing your like border militia from Kentucky and you're, you're moving it to Texas, right? That takes a lot of time. And so basically it was like okay so if if you're texas and you're getting attacked by someone you're supposed to be able

to use your own troops to defend it and you're supposed to be able to like sort of semi-autonomously run your own defense policy right and that was supposed to be a thing to let to allow states to like you know use their militia to do stuff before like federal troops got there um abbott is arguing that people crossing the border from mexico is an invasion and that this allows him to like legally allows him to start doing this stuff and this is like it's it's funny because you can even see that the biden administration people being like you've got to be fucking kidding me because like obviously like i mean it's not it's not like biden doesn't want to murder people coming over the border but you know by his people are like well okay like no

obviously this is not a war right i mean just yeah we are not in fact what are you talking about yeah no yeah i mean that that was kind of always the obvious end point with this of invasion military age males rhetoric right was like okay well we better shoot them all like that that was clearly what they were shooting for yeah and and it's it's really it's gotten really it's gotten really really grim and it's it's gotten you know again it's literally getting to this point where they're trying to argue that there is a physical war going on and and you read these articles about it and the press will be like well they're saying this because like people are crossing the border and like there's cartels it's like what the fuck are you talking about this has nothing like this

is nothing this is literally nonsense like it is they they are pointing at the sky and going the sky is orange and the press is going well if you like if you stare directly into the sun and then blink it looks like maybe the sky is a little bit orange it's like what the fuck are you people doing it's i it's it's genuinely at least it's some of the worst journalistic malpractice i've ever seen you see this like every single time they're trying to do this sort of like balance it's like no there's no actual sort of balance here but on the other hand this doesn't matter because the supreme court was just like yeah this can go into effect right and and like the other thing you'll see like i guess this was more in the trump era right was like uh yeah you'd see

someone trump would do a thing and everyone rather than just being like this one's fucking illegal everyone uh can we just wrap this up seth aberson would write 75 000 tweets about how like it was going to result and people began to have this belief that like the fucking supreme court was made up of like magical rainbow unicorns who were gonna sweep in and save us all from fascism like these are the same people who are hanging out with the guys who had their fascist statues and taking massive kickbacks. It's just... None of this legality stuff, I guess... No, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. That's the problem. Yeah. And I think this is something that you were hinting at earlier, but it shouldn't factor in our organizing. I see so many people pin so much hope on X court case or Y court case. Institutions created by people who owned other human beings are not going to fucking save us. Yeah, and this is something that the right has actually, I think, understood it very well,

partially in the way that they've been able to sort of institutionally capture huge portions of the court system and because they understand that the law is fucking meaningless and you know it's it's you can because and you you can just tell the cops to do whatever the fuck you want one of the strategies they've been using has like if specifically to get this bill through is by just having judges issue like temporary injunctions and other injunctions to like allow something to go into effect but then you know with the intention of just never letting them expire right so what you're getting basically is just judges implementing policy by fiat

by continuously going oh well this can go this can go because we're giving like a we're you know we're on like our 38th one month injunction and right you know and this is the thing that like the Biden administration's plan to deal with this is to be like well you shouldn't be is the thing that like the biden administration's plan to deal with this is to be like well you shouldn't be able to do that but like how are you going to stop them right the court system is set up in such a way that these people are just feudal lords

they're almost completely autonomous the only people who can overrule them are the people above them but the problem there too and this this is something the Republicans have been using very effectively. Is that. It takes time. For a court above it. To you know just to overrule. The like insane thing the court below them is doing. And if the court below them is just constantly churning out. Just nonsense.

Over and over again. Then they can just do whatever the fuck they want. Because even if the court above them. Actually did want to do something about this, which in very rare cases sometimes happens, they literally can't because they're just sort of swamped by all of this just absolute bullshit

that's being thrown out. Yeah, if you take a case which, just to not make this like a partisan thing, if you take a case in which the Supreme Court might line up with the uh i guess a lot of republican positions but also a position that many people listening to this podcast might take for instance california's gun laws right california passes so many fucking gun laws so often that the time that it takes for even if they are like contravening something like the

bruin decision right um or the spirit of the Bruin decision it takes so long for them to pass all the way up and maybe eventually go to the supreme court maybe not right that in effect California can do things which seem like the supreme court would say they were unconstitutional it doesn't really matter because they can still do them right and with the go through the ninth circuit in california you can make decisions that affirm those and like it doesn't matter it doesn't matter what's constitutional or or more importantly like what's just um if you look if you're looking for the justices for justice you're looking in the wrong place

yeah exactly and when it comes to border stuff like as before the me is talking about like that kills people you know like like and some of the most desperate people on earth like i've been to that border in texas you know like you're not swimming across that river because you think you might get a playstation 5 when you get to the other side. It's fucking dangerous. And the journey to get there, people who tend to come across the land border to Texas, migrants aren't fucking stupid. They have access to all the same news and information that you do. They have smartphones that might be a little bit older, but they can still read shit.

And they know that the Ninth Circuit is kinder. So if they have the money, they will come to California. Some people end up in California without very much money. We've seen that a lot with African migrants in Tijuana. But a lot of the people going to Texas, it's because that's the land route walking north and they don't have the finances to go anywhere else. And those people are extremely,

there are any number of reasons why they they have a legitimate right to asylum or just a right not to be fucking profiled or like any other person of color living in texas has yeah a basic right not to be profiled and demonizing those people is being used as a like a trojan horse just to do straight up racism law yeah and then meanwhile like you know you have fucking clarence thomas who's sitting there who has gotten more kickbacks than every single one of these people who's crossed the border of their total wealth combined yes is sitting there being like nah fuck you it's legal to throw these people into the chainsaw like it's fine yeah exactly like i don't really know how people maintain their faith in a system which, yeah, holds this dude completely unaccountable for very obviously being bent.

Like, bent as in corrupt. I'm not using a homophobic slur. No, this is the way. What? That's a homophobic. Yeah, I think it's really British. British English is wild. Yeah, yeah.

I've never heard either of those. Oh, really? Okay. No. Yeah, welcome to the podcast where I say British things and Ian bleeps some of them out. Do you know what else says British things and occasionally has some of them bleated out?

It's Chumba Casino presented by wankers. and we're back from whatever insane gap we should at some point do an episode about the gambling law changes i'm sure that'll be fine with yeah it'll be good go down well it'll be great oh boy so we're there there are some other so So, OK, so the Texas Senate Bill 4 case is coming in sort of like mid late April, which is now this month, by the way, which is nuts. Great. So it's not. There were a couple of other cases coming down the pipeline that we wanted to talk about because so obviously the Supreme Court, you know, has directly already done stuff with sb4 but the laws they're still still in the process of hearing the lawsuit um there's also a case about method press stone which is an aborter fact which is you know one of the ways that if you are you're in a place where it is illegal for you to normally get an abortion this is a way you can do it so okay the the the basis of this case is that um in 2016 and 2021 the fda did one of the few good things it's ever done and there were some sort of changes to

legal classifications around for pristone that allowed you to get it not not allowed you to get it without having to get it directly prescribed by a doctor so you know you could have nurse practitioners do it and also it was a thing that didn't work like you you can get it without having to get it directly prescribed by a doctor so you know you could have nurse practitioners do it and also it was a thing that didn't work like you you can get it over the counter like it was it was not a thing that suddenly that requires an enormous amount of sort of doctor bullshit and it also used to require physical visits so you'd have to go find a doctor in another state and get them to private to you and so that all went away you're able to get it through telemedicine and immediately basically after i i get i guess probably the peak of the republican counter revolution in the last four years where they destroyed the national well they destroyed the

tattered remains of roe a bunch of like deranged right-wing groups set about to get mesopristone banned and so basically what they're trying to do is is overturn they're trying to get mesopristone banned. And so basically what they're trying to do is overturn they're trying to get its approval by the FDA overturn and also the approval for the generic version of it overturned. Right. And this is the whole strategy here

is very weird because okay, so this is one of the things about the US and part of the reason all of this court stuff is so weird because of the structure of the sort of regional autonomy of the courts you can basically just do court shopping you can go find some like guy who's basically a feudal baron in texas and be like hey you hate abortion like here write some piece of paper that says this is legal now and so there have been a series of sort

of battles over different levels of courts yeah you know like approving or disapproving some things this is actually this is one of these cases that's actually so obviously it's the the the immediate consequence here is if the supreme court decides that you can ban this it's going to get really really fucking bad for a lot of people but this is also a case that feeds into another trend that's been happening, which is the Republicans attempting to use the court system to just completely annihilate the federal bureaucracy. Because the other thing that's at stake here, and this is, you know, obviously the people's access to getting abortions is the most important part of it. The subsequent, less important part of it is that right now there is a there are national standards for for prescriptions right there's unified national like the fda has unified national standards for food safety and like and if this gets knocked out that's like

gone yeah and so suddenly large massive parts i mean like courts having the ability to just sort of go in and nuke like fda approvals for stuff right states being able to like this is going to rip like tear like like tearing the fucking guts out of the entire american sort of like legal bureaucracy it's it's coming apart yeah it's yeah and and the and the like the medical your access to medicines that someone else doesn't want you to have yeah this is one of these cases that has you know there's there's sort of two elements at work here right there's there there's there's there's the there's the immediate like republicans are trying to ban every single way you can possibly get an abortion to force people to have kids because this is you know this is part of their sort of reactionary

ideology and then there's the other part of it where there's been there's been a few other cases like this too um one of the one of the things it looks like they're trying to do is get we're gonna i'm gonna do a full episode about this at some point when I can get a good labor lawyer to talk about it but they're trying to overturn the National Labor Relations Act which is the act that basically sets up the right to unionization and the whole process of how labor mediation

works and I mean there's other ones where I mean like really substantively enormous parts of the American sort of the American state are just being torn apart in ways that are specifically designed to just allow corporations and these like fiefdom judges to have effectively unlimited political power yeah yeah i don't know it's so fucking bleak like it's uh i mean it's also predictable right like it's kind

of the nature of of the state and it's the nature of these people to want to honestly take away like the state ultimately is not there to protect you it's there to protect capital and like it's a failure of our organizing when we uh when we we keep going back to the state and asking it to do something that fundamentally has no interest in doing yeah and this is really a substantive issue with you know i i remember this this was the aclu strategy under trump i've talked about this on the show before it's the aclu strategy under trump was to go to the courts and win there i mean this is this has been the sort of what the political strategy dating back to sort of the civil rights era. And that's – you can't do this anymore because it doesn't even like – whether or not you are correct – like legally correct about a thing, right?

Which used to be what this was sort of hinged on and whether you could convince justice to do this. Like this doesn't matter anymore. whether this was just sort of hinged on and whether you could convince justice to this, like this doesn't matter anymore. Like Dave, you know, like if you, if you read the ruling on,

on like, if you actually go through and read the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, right? Like the league, the legal logic in there is deranged. It's just like, yeah,

we didn't have this X number of years ago. So fuck it. Like you can't do this now. And it's like, this is, this is nonsense, but it doesn't matter because the the act the actual weight of the law is not is not you know a sort of like series of debates about like logic or about the efficacy or the meaning of text it's just about

who has the power to point guns at people and the answer is you don't have that you you dear listener do not have that power. Okay, do you know who else is going to destroy the American federal bureaucracy? Oh, yes, yes, I do, Mia. It's the products and services that support this podcast. And we are back for more horrors so we're going to talk about one more case which is grab pass versus johnson which is a case to decide whether or not you can make it illegal to be homeless yeah yeah talking pointing guns at people this one's uh this one's about pointing guns at homeless people, which is great.

Great and good. So this is one I've been following a little bit, just because one thing that Todd Gloria loves to do is criminalize poverty. And I happen to unfortunately live in a city of which he is mayor. In San Diego, we have seen all the things they told you republicans would do our democrat mayor is doing and what the grants pass versus johnson case is about it's a city of grants pass which i guess is a place in oregon and it's whether they can criminalize sleeping on the street if there are no safe shelter beds available so that the idea here being that like

again like this is you one has to understand i'm speaking from the logic of the state when i try to explain this like that if there is a shelter bed to go to they can compel you to go to it with with threat of of prosecution right or criminalization But if there is not a shelter bed to go to, then your culpability changes. You're not refusing to take shelter, there is no shelter for you to take. Grants Pass is obviously trying to criminalize people even when there are shelter beds available. Now what's interesting about Grants Pass is that, not the place, the court case. What's interesting about the court case is that you'll see these big liberal cities filing amicus briefs. So amicus, it literally means, it's from amicus curiae, friend of the

court, right? Which they can do in favor of either side. San Diego, Los Angeles, other large democratic cities, I'm sure, are all filing briefs in favor of criminalizing living on the street, even when there are not shelter beds available. Now, if we look at the San Diego context specifically, one of the questions which will come up in this case is, what is a safe shelter bed? So what San Diego likes to do currently is put people in tents, in parking lots, where they often flood because San Diego is not designed to deal with rain and because our city has completely failed to clear out storm drains, resulting in people losing their homes

this winter, right? And so some of these parking lots flood where people are forced to live. These tents are not like they're not even good tents actually uh they they managed to buy this is remarkable actually if you were buying a tent lear can you think of any what there's no way for me to phrase this they bought fucking tents with slurs on the side i don't know how you managed to do yeah it's uh like the the tents are quote eskimo brand jesus christ yeah it's it's it's a it's incredible stuff like it's i did see there was no way to be like what would you be concerned

about when buying a tent because slur on the side would not have come up i would not think about that why why would you why would there be why would there be slurs on the side of your tent yeah yeah what were you doing here how could you given the purchasing power of the third largest city in california somehow elect to purchase a tent which is racist uh like i don't know but that's why i am not a member of the san diego democrat party so one of the things that will come up is what constitutes a safe shelter. In practice, again, this doesn't matter hugely other than it's a Supreme Court giving a nod to local governments to further criminalize being unhoused, to drive unhoused people further from services, further from sight, right?

In San Diego's case, that means into canyons, into rivers, rivers flood, canyons get extremely hot in the summer. More than one person every single day already dies on our streets here in an extremely wealthy and prosperous area of the world. This will make it worse because they will get that nod to continue criminalizing people rather than trying to help them. In practice, what cities will do, including San Diego, is just hold back a few shelter beds to allow them to

anyone right like in practice they're still going to cite people even if the demand for beds is much higher than the provision of beds so like in that case they will still continue to find it's not a workaround but they think it is right that they can just criminalize being unhoused in this fashion. But it represents a nod from the top down to go even harder after people who are too poor to make rent at a time when rent is less affordable than it has been in generations. And so it's one to watch. It's one where, yet again, you find the Democrats,

I guess, lining up on the the right hand side of the issue the right wing side of the issue the state violence side of the issue right and it will i'm sure open up the door to more what they call camping bans which is a euphemism again they are bans on being unhoused within city limits right and uh i think it's it's one to keep an eye on but again like i don't i it's clarence thomas the guy who goes to the billionaire's house with the racist statues and the nazi statues like he's not the guy who's going to come in swinging for for the person who has to sleep under the underpass because they can't make rent you know like and like and like if you think the fucking liberal justices are going to give a shit either, like, these are the people whose fundamental political principles that the police have the right to, like, okay, there is a decision that I can't remember the fucking name of that was a, it should have been a very, very basic, you are guaranteed due process thing, right, under the Fourth Amendment.

and this and in a 9-0 decision the supreme court ruled that the cop the cops are allowed to violate people's due process because if they didn't do this there couldn't be a functional police force in this country because this is how the police were doing all their fucking work so if you think those people right that was 9-0 9-0 decision that was that a fucking Ruth Bader Ginsburg special. Right? If you think those people are going to be like, oh, hey, damn, maybe people who don't own property have rights. Like, no. No.

Like... Yeah, no, like, look, we're faced with a choice between, like, liberty and the necessity of maintaining a state's capacity to do violence to anyone at any time. They chose the latter, right? And I guess if I can get on my soapbox for a minute, you need to stop expecting these people to come and save you. Specifically, with reference to the fucking Grant's case, the person who is going to stop your unhoused neighbor dying is you.

It's not an NGO. It's not the city. It's not the county. It's not an ngo it's not the city it's not the county it's not the feds those people fundamentally that they're the incentive is not for them to care like your incentive as a person who shares humanity with that person is to care and to do something and like yeah i guess like don't wait take the time you would have spent reading about a fucking supreme court case and make sandwiches and go hand them out because that is the only way we solve this. And I think that's as good a place as any to stop.

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