It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 30

Episode Date: April 16, 2022

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You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,

there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and some other stuff from time to time. I'm Robert Evans. apart and some other stuff from time to time. I'm Robert Evans. And today we are going to chat once again with Romeo Kokriatsky. Romeo, you are a Ukrainian journalist and an anarchist. We chatted with you right before the Russian expanded invasion of Ukraine. And now we're talking with you again, now that the war has entered certainly a different phase as Russian troops pull out of the north of the country, pull out from around Kiev and focus their remaining unblowed up forces to the fight around the Donbass. How are you doing, Romeo? Yeah, thanks for having me on.

It's been tough. We'll get into this a little later on, but obviously learning that a town not far from your home has undergone a genocide is not the easiest thing to live through.

And knowing that that is not even the worst of the atrocities that we're going to discover in the coming weeks and months is, is put to put the mental strain. Yeah. Let me tell you. Yeah. I don't think,

I think thankfully very few people understand the experience of, of learning that a genocide has occurred next door essentially. Yep. And yeah, what you wanted to talk about specifically, obviously, when we talk about the act of genocide, we're talking about the massacre in Bucca, an exact death count. Bucca, sorry.

An exact death count is not available right now, but I think at least 280 civilians killed is the last number I've gotten. Yeah, that's the last like confirmed number but obviously a lot of these people um have been tossed into mass graves they're lying around in various residences it's it's gonna it's gonna be a long time before um yeah able to to come to any kind of accurate count of how many uh residents were were Yeah, and for a brief overview of just kind of like what has been seen

in the executions there, we have civilians often hands tied behind their backs so they were clearly restrained, executed after having been restrained. Some of them were just left in the street. Some of them dumped into mass graves. Satellite imagery from before the town was liberated by Ukrainian forces shows corpses lying in the street in the same position they were

discovered in when the Ukrainian military moved in, which is as solid open source confirmation of the genocide as you're going to get with any kind of genocide. So that's the situation. Obviously, the usual crew of bad actors and Russia defenders have kind of slid into the most common allegation I'm seeing, at least online, is people saying it must have been the Azov battalion that did it, even though they're 440 miles away, encircled by the Russian army. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, it's the, you're seeing like a lot of kind of bad open source responses to it with people being like, well, why would the bodies, if you look at the satellite imagery, why are the bodies so evenly spaced?

Which is just like, they're not. It's just like people, people recognizing that if you like circle shit on a grainy image and tweet about how it's suspicious, you'll provide enough plausible deniability for other people to to doubt a genocide. You know, it's it's it's the same shit we saw with Syria. where someone was claiming that they could see bodies being carted away by the Ukrainians for, you know, investigation and reburial that the corpses were quote unquote moving.

You can see, you can see this guy's hand move. Yeah. You're looking at dead bodies, but no one's fucking moving there. And by the way, when you move dead bodies, they move like pieces of the,

what a shock. It's a shock. When you're driving over a street that has been turned over by tank treads and you're, you're transporting human corpses. Those corpses are going to get jostled around. Yeah. It's definitely,

I don't know. You know, I don't want to be labor on this too much because I think we've talked a lot about how this, this disinfo works. I think what you came on specifically to talk about and what's really worth getting into in some detail is um this manifesto that was published on ria which is a russian government controlled uh news agency um it's this i don't know how it's a fascist manifesto. You can find it if you just Google

RIA publishes Russian fascist manifesto, the new voice of Ukraine has a translation of it up, if you want to read this thing. But it's pretty striking. And the kind of focus of this is on justifying the denazification campaign. And it opens one of the opening lines is when the theory that people are good, the government is bad, no longer holds true. Admitting this fact is the basis of the denazification party all of its associated measures and the fact itself is the subject matter of the policy and the fact that this came out within a day or two of the discovering of the elements of genocide in in bucha um yeah is pretty predominant i'd say like pretty noteworthy yeah uh so i had to translate this and let me tell you it took um a pretty big pretty big toll on my sanity for a couple of days here um and i'm gonna

be honest as a ukrainian reading this this was if you have ever i don't know if some of your listeners may have been at protests, counter protests against fascists or far right demonstrators where they're chanting that they will murder you. This is exactly how I felt. This is this was nothing less than someone reaching through the screen and telling me that they want to kill me and everyone I love personally um because i am uh because i want their independence so there's this the the kind of theme of this article the term that they use most often is denazification and i think it really um it is incredibly vital to explain just what this denazification means because normally like you and i robert i think we both call ourselves anti-fascists and we are pretty anti-nazi um that i i think that's a that's a pretty mainstream position to to not like nazis and be anti-nazi so the r the Russians use this term denazification to someone

that has no context, no idea of what it refers to beyond the obvious meaning, get rid of Nazis, sounds like something even laudable. The problem is what the Russians mean by Nazis is not what you and I or any other normal, sane, rational human being would consider a nazi this article does not justify uh its its thesis that ukrainians are nazis at all in fact um there are there is a whole series of paragraphs um that states that ukraine does not meet like any criteria of being nazi um to to quote a bit from this um as horrible as it is um it reads there isn't after all a single important nazi party no fewer no fully racist laws only their curtailed variants in the form of repressions against the rest language as a result there is no opposition and resistance to the regime. A particular feature of Nazified Ukraine is its amorphousness,

eminence, and ambivalentness, which allows for the masking of Nazism as a desire to move towards a quote-unquote independent and quote-unquote European, Western, and pro-American path of development, in reality, towards degradation, while insisting that quote-unquote ukraine doesn't have any nazism only private and singular excesses so the article itself admits that ukraine is not nazi in any way that we would recognize the term yeah and it's basically saying that like

it's nazi it's not there's no furor and there's no race like racialist laws um but the thing that makes it a nazi is wanting closer union with europe as opposed to russia um and of course it it notes like the so-called laws against the russian language which i'm not aware of anything happening i think what they're referring to is like attempts to encourage the Ukrainian language in Ukraine. Yeah, there are no laws or sanctions or repressions of the Russian language in Ukraine. There never have been. And in fact, when I was there, one of the difficulties I had with my interpreter is he he he only spoke Ukrainian. And so you can obviously you can speak with people who speak Russian if you speak Ukrainian.

But it's a little bit like confusing. And most people we were talking to spoke Russian natively. Like it's the idea that it's somehow like been that the Russian language has been somehow like attacked in Ukraine feels very silly as someone who like repeatedly encountered the Russian language while in Ukraine. feels very silly as someone who like repeatedly encountered the russian language while in ukraine yeah it's it's simply propaganda um and the fact is that the russians define ukrainian nazism not as having nazi values or a nazi party or anything that we would associate with with nazism but in fact simply the simply that ukraine wants to be independent of russia that in itself is proof positive to the russians of our nazism and nothing else so when people hear this word denazification what they don't mean getting rid of like far right elements in ukraine no they mean being anti-russian or being or simply wanting to be separate from russia is itself a far right position in russia's eyes and that is enough to call for our um pretty much complete extermination yeah and you know to kind of go into this article a little

more, one of the things that I find interesting about it is this line here. The fact that the Ukrainian electorate chose Poroshenko's piece, Poroshenko is the president before Zelensky, and Zelensky's piece should not be misled. I think they probably meant misread, maybe. Ukrainians are quite satisfied with the shortest path to peace through Blitzkrieg, which the last two Ukrainian presidents transparently hinted at when they were elected. I how I don't understand how anything Ukraine has done could be considered a Blitzkrieg since they never invaded Russian territory and in fact lost territory to Russia in 2014. russian territory and in fact lost territory to russia in 2014 um that's a weird definition of a blitzkrieg i'm wondering if you can shed some light on what they might even mean on that or is it just just complete fallacy what they mean is basically that ukraine in so within russian propaganda you have to understand we're talking about a completely separate universe, a different reality. So the way every every single aspect of what you and pro-Russian culture and pro-Russian

sentiments in Ukraine during the Euromaidan. In Russia's reality, Ukraine carried out a genocide against these people in Ukraine, in everywhere except the puppet authorities of the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics. So basically, Ukraine carried out this blitzkrieg. The reason Ukraine is so, quote unquote, Nazified is because in this Russian alternative reality, Ukraine genocided all of the Russians, all the ethnic Russians, the Russian speakers, anyone with pro-Russian sentiments. And this is what they mean when they refer to this uh this blitzkrieg that they that well um ukraine went through they quickly killed everyone who was pro us and now uh and now everyone out everyone who

is left is a nazi um like the the latter part of this paragraph really makes that clear. They say it was this method of, quote unquote, appeasement of internal anti-fascists through total terror that was used in Odessa, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Mariupol and other Russian cities. cities russian this quote-unquote appeasement that they're referring to is a sarcastic way of referring to their um supposed genocide of these people of russian speakers of um ethnic russians in ukraine again that is not only untrue it's also ludicrous because everyone in ukraine is has some russian ancestry because it's a mixed country. Everyone is everything. Yeah. The entire Eastern European region is not some ethnic enclave.

It is, in fact, a melting pot, which the Soviet Union worked very hard to change. One of the things I kept encountering in Evdivka, which was is still under fire today and was under fire in 2014 for an idea of like how long chunks of the country have been in like now it's spread all over Ukraine, but parts of Ukraine have been under continuous artillery fire for nearly a decade. But I kept encountering these old ladies who had grown up in the Soviet Union and were saying like, I don't understand why they're doing this. They like I've always considered myself Russian. And now this is happening like, I don't understand why they're doing this. They like I've always considered myself Russian. And now this is happening. Like, I don't understand it.

I don't understand it. It doesn't make any sense. In terms of like the denialism that we've been seeing lately, one of the reasons I argued for because we had a debate in the in the editor's room at Envy when we were looking at this piece. We had a debate over whether we were going to translate and publish it. claims of genocide denial that we we are seeing popping up um across various uh parts of um of the western left and the anti-imperialist left or whatever you call it um and i think there's no better way to push back against these arguments than to present the russians own words to them yeah like this is such an openly genocidal fascist piece um using pure the pure logic of of quite like of just fascism that is impossible i think to really um say that this is like a fabrication or the like the Russians aren't like this.

Well, they're telling you in their own words, this is what they're like. Yeah. And I think the like putting focus on this isn't this wasn't written by, you know, some like far right extremist for some minor like online site that has like a audience of 2000, like Russian fascists or whatever. No, this was a major article published in one of the Russian main media outlets by a respected political scientist within Russia. Yeah.

And that's, that's the thing that I think really needs to be gotten across is the degree to which I think there's a desire to believe that the Putin regime is like on its last legs and that most people recognize how fucked up the political status quo is there and that support for the regime is like pretty minimal as a result. And that support for the regime is like pretty minimal as a result. And I I'm not I'm not seeing the evidence of that. And when I talked to I just we just did an interview with the Russian anarchist who his attitude was to change over time because, again, the severe casualties Russia has taken have not really had a chance to totally filter out socially into Russia. I think people are still becoming aware of the scale of losses, and it's going to take some time for that knowledge to to really circulate. to really circulate. But I think this article represents how a very large chunk of the Russian populace are seeing what's going on in Ukraine. And that's problematic for a number of reasons. For one thing, with this kind of logic that we see in this article, there's not much you can't justify, right? Like there's very little that if you if people believe what's being said in this article, there's very little you

couldn't do. There's very few weapons you couldn't deploy, right? That's one of the arguments this is making is that you have to exactly soldiers who have been not suffied have to be wiped out completely. There's there's no soldiers who have been not suffied. Anyone who has ever taken arms against Russia and anyone who has ever supported anyone who has taken arms against Russia, which at the current moment is over 90 percent, 95% of the Ukrainian population must. And I quote from this must be liquidated. Yeah, not,

not the, the, it makes an argument a little higher up that these people can't be reeducated. So they can't even be sent to camps to gulags. They can't be made to do forced labor. They must be liquidated, eliminated.

And this is nothing less than simply saying well we are going to have to kill the grand majority of Ukrainians yeah and I I don't I don't know uh what more like you can for the folks who are kind of on the, because there's this tendency, I think, within the chunks of the left that are not, they haven't lost their minds. They're not, they don't buy the Russian propaganda. They do see what's happening in Ukraine is terrible. They see the war is terrible, but they still have this attitude of, well, the best thing is to end it quickly. And like, you know, we should we should push for some sort of negotiation. And first off, I'm saying like, whatever the Ukraine as a country decides is acceptable to them in terms of peace. I'm not going to argue against one way or the other, because that's not my place. But I don't see how you can negotiate with people who have this attitude towards you and towards the existence of your people. I really don't see long term where there's kind of an option for peace for Ukraine with this kind of rhetoric existing in Russia outside of smashing the Russian military to the greatest extent possible. Yeah, I mean, I feel the same way, and that is a very terrifying thought. It's not great. Yeah, because my attitude towards wars is that it's best when they're over.

Yeah, exactly. Right. I have no I have no strong desire to see to like bomb Russian cities. Well, I mean, OK, that's that's a little bit of lie, but no one no one can blame someone living in Ukraine right now for feeling a bit of a desire for for vengeance, even though I don't think that's particularly likely to help matters yeah probably not and i i generally don't want to um see like a world war in europe or anything like that but i i really when i rack my brains of what can be done like how you can live with like the, these people aren't, you know,

thousands of kilometers away or on the other side of the continent, they're literally the neighboring state. Um, and I, I just, I don't have any answers of how Ukraine is supposed to move forward while Russia remains in its current configuration. Like I don't see a future, a coexistence of any kind that's possible when they are literally calling for our extermination. I think that's also kind of the question of how do we have, there's this phrase that you heard a lot, particularly kind of in the post-World War II period of like the need for a rules-based international order. And the United States was as much a part as anyone of making sure that that was never anything more than a friendly lie, right? You had a couple of brief moments here and there where it was attempted to be imposed. Yugoslavia or, know, Bosnia being kind of a clear example, but it was always,

you know, in between a bunch of illegal wars on behalf of a bunch of different states and illegal fundings of insurgent groups and all sorts of sketchy stuff and kind of culminated. And I think you can, we keep going back to Syria, which is an important part of like what allowed what's happening in Ukraine to happen. But the the invasion of Iraq by the United States was another one. Right. This idea that like and the things that like torture and stuff by U.S. forces, this this the fact that I mean, that's what the Russian diplomats. Yeah, that's what Russian diplomats always bring up in in the U.N. and in other like international bodies, whenever they're pressed on this question of human rights, they always invariably point to the US and say, well,

the US did this, this and this in Iraq. How come the US gets to do whatever it wants with no pushback? And the implication being that Russia also believes it should be able to do whatever it wants with no pushback. And obviously, like the fact that the United States committed war crimes does not mean that Russia should get to commit war crimes. But from a point of view of like if we're looking at things from an international perspective, yeah, if the United States is going to do shit like that, well, other countries are going to do shit like that and see it as like, well, there there isn. Why are we bound by an international order but not you? And one of the things that's so frightening about the kind of rhetoric coming out of Russia is that it shows those kind of dreams that people had in the wake of World War II, which again,, there was no like golden age after World War Two. The United States went right to regime change in Africa and Latin America, all sorts of fucked up shit.

But it shows that like any kind of international hope of something like that ever existing has has fallen apart. We are we are if people want something like that. And I do believe that some sort of rules-based international order – and I'm not talking about like UN global government. I'm talking about broad-ranging international agreements that, for example, you don't get to fire chemical weapons at civilians. You know, like I think that would be nice, a nice thing to exist. And I think part of what we're seeing here is that any chance of having that has kind of been reset to zero. Not that it was ever a reality, but I think the kind of I think the rhetoric around the fact that that ever existed has completely dissolved now. has completely dissolved now.

And maybe that's not particularly bad because it's bad for people to believe something exists when it doesn't because that international order never did really exist. But I think what we're seeing here is kind of the final collapse of any belief that there are international standards of morality and behavior for states? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why Ukraine's President Zelensky gets a lot of props from a lot of people right now. But one of the things that I personally rate as absolutely,

as the kids say, based in recent days was Zelensky's address in front of the UN where he called them basically cowards. If they don't kick Russia out and they can't even enforce their main their main goal, which is peace, then they should dissolve. And honestly, I don't see any, any issues with that argument. That seemed. Yeah. Completely rational. What, what is the point of this organization?

If it cannot even do something as simple or not simple, but if it cannot do something as straightforward as punish the perpetrators of genocide. Yeah. What exactly is the point of it? That's exactly kind of where i am which is like why are we like right now we have this issue where like after russian evidence of russian genocide was uncovered russia set to the the un the human rights uh whatchamacallit um

that they are uh human rights council yeah herman rights council that they're a permanent member of and like it like basically filed a complaint against Ukraine for doing the genocide that they did. And, you know, there's talk about we could dissolve and reform the council without Russia. We could kick it like there's there's options, I guess, in a parliamentary sense. But broadly speaking, when one of the people sitting on that council has is in the process of carrying out a genocide, which they are justifying in this way through their through their media organs. What is the fucking point of having that? It's just like it was like the night of the invasion. I sat and I watched everything happening in the UN. And my thought the whole time as like every all of these

international representatives were like, you can't do this, right? You have to stop, you have to stop like, try like begging for there to be some sort of peace and Russia just going ahead and doing it. It was like, you know, what we what we saw it not dissimilar to some of the shit that happened in the lead up to the Iraq war, where it was like, okay, well, a lot of people agree this is fucked up. I guess that doesn't mean anything. And it didn't mean anything. And that's, why have it? Why pretend that it means anything? I guess that's where I am. I it's it's the same um to draw parallel to to u.s politics it's it's the same as um like the the the democratic party during the trump era saying oh

mr president you can't do all of these obviously legal things you're doing that's bad you should stop yes like here's here investigations that prove that you're doing that's bad you should stop yes like here's here investigations that prove that you're doing the bad things please stop mr president with all you violated the emoluments clause okay like okay are you gonna enforce are you gonna enforce any of this like without enforcement all of this common condemnation is literally just noise it doesn't react it doesn't result in anything in the material world that will have an effect in curtailing or restricting this behavior now or in the future. And if you cannot do that, then what I like to was in Iraq during the war against ISIS and hanging out primarily with not just Kurds, but like Kurds who were natives of Mosul, when we were kind of back in Erbil away from the front, the number one organization, the number one group that they complained about was not the United States, nor was it ISIS. It was the United Nations, who were generally viewed to be a bunch of, like they saw them the way like people see like trust fund kids. They were a bunch of rich

assholes tooling around in Land Rovers, staying in nice hotels and burning money on fucking bullshit. And that's, I don't know, it's so the idea of the United Nations as what it was supposed to be, which is like, yeah, we should things like what the Nazis did shouldn't be allowed to get nearly as far as they didn't. And perhaps if all of the nations were sitting together and saying, well, that's bad, right? We don't want people doing that. Maybe some of these bad things would stop happening. that, maybe some of these bad things would stop happening. And what it has turned into is, yeah, it's a jobs program for fucking yuppies. It's not that there aren't individual things within the UN. I've certainly been to a lot of places, particularly refugee camps that had infrastructure because of UNHCR, even though that's a very flawed organization. I can't deny that a lot of people got access to some basic survival gear that was necessary because of UNHCR, United Nations Humanitarian Crisis Relief. But overall, it's just, it's nothing. There's a really, I think my favorite piece of graffiti ever, which was spotted in Sarajevo during the Serbian encirclement and and shelling of that city.

And it's a spray painting of UN in the style of the UN's logo. And then underneath it, United Nothing. And that was the attitude of a lot of people in the city as they watched the UN bicker over what was to be done about the fact that an army had surrounded a city full of civilians and was pounding high-rise apartment buildings with artillery and tank cannons all day long. Man, that sure sounds real familiar. It's a good thing that never happened again. I don't know what you're talking about. That sounds – Real familiar. It's a good thing that never happened again.

I don't know what you're talking about. That sounds. But I mean, yeah, it's it's anyway. Romeo, is there anything else you wanted to get through today as we stare at this thing? This bad thing? Honestly, I just as much as normally I would encourage people to not pollute their brains with, with fascist agit prop. In this case,

I would recommend people read through my translation at the new voice. If you don't trust me for whatever reason, you can pull up the original and Google translate it, machine translate it yourself. It'll be a serviceable translation and just read it for yourself um because i want to make it very clear that russia is no longer simply like some hyper capitalist kleptocratic oligarchy it is literally fascist it is using fascist rhetoric and fascist techniques to eliminate an ethnic group it considers to be inferior to its own um in order to take its land

and resources for itself it is there is no greater distillation of fascism on this planet right now than the russian federation yeah they are doing and i really would like people to understand especially if you consider yourself anti-imperialist or anti-fascist or anything the russian federation is a fascist government um on the level of nazi germany and it is attempting to uh to literally this article is called what shall we do with the Ukrainians yeah the Ukrainian

question the Ukrainian question you know and this article is proposing a solution to the Ukrainian question so again mostly that's what posing a solution to the Ukrainian question. So again, mostly that's what I would like to leave your listeners,

Robert, with an understanding. And again, you don't have to trust me. You can go and read this for yourself. That the, the greatest fascist threat on this planet right now is not the United States of America. As shocking as that may sound. America as shocking as that may sound

and as hard as that may be to buy it is the Russian Federation and it is right now trying to genocide the country and the people that I belong to yeah so I don't know

maybe make a note of that folks put that in your in your mental Rolodex. It's I don't know. I hope you continue to stay safe. I'm glad your area of Ukraine is at least less under under the gun than it was earlier in this war. than it was earlier in this war. I'm glad, broadly speaking, that the Russian Federation has bitten off a hell of a lot more than they were able to chew and now are doing their chewing without nearly as many teeth.

And yeah, I hope that process continues and I hope the siege of Mariupol is lifted. Yeah, thanks a lot. I really appreciate letting me make an appearance and going through this with me. And yeah, I think we share the same hopes here. Yeah. All right, everybody.

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Put them back together. All that good stuff. Co-hosts here today, Garrison Davis, our buddy Chris, and of course, the great St. Andrew. Andrew. Blessings be upon you. Take it away. Take it away. Take it away. Good morning. And in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.

Wow. Speaking of the Truman Show. Solid reference. Well done. Thank you. I want to spend today's episode discussing a concept that has been brought up in the work of James E. Scott and Christopher Ryan. That's the idea of human domestication and before people start clicking off i'm not gonna go all and prim or anything you know it's just

i think it's an interesting thing to think about i think that scott explores it in a very interesting way in chapter two of against the green and so relating it i guess to the truman show because i mean why did i bring it up truman lives in a suburban picket fence american dream dome of a world that's meant to keep him you know contained and content and ignorant about the fact that he's on a TV show. Truman is trapped in this world that he cannot conform to, but he cannot escape, at least initially. And so you could tell that, you know, there's something wrong and he's probably felt that way for a long time.

It's only over the course of the movie that he develops a sufficient awareness of his condition to leave home and become a true man thank you very much all right all right good episode guys yeah yeah um and humans like truman have been stewards and cultivators of the natural environment for a long time, right? We're not the only creatures who do that, by the way. I see a lot of people who see, who kind of like adopt this assumption that humans just like imposing our will on the environment that is otherwise unscathed by our presence and all that. And I mean, yeah, we do a lot of very, very terrible stuff to the environment,

but a lot of our actions are also beneficial. And we are the only creatures to shape and sometimes harm and sometimes benefit the natural environment. I mean, beavers, elephants, prairie dogs, bees, ants, termites, and not to mention the networks of trees and other plants that all

manipulate their environments to suit them and their comfort and their survival, you know. But there's no nature as we know it, as we see it, that sort of untouched wild idea, without the activities of humans. You know, humans have been planting seeds and tubers, shaping the evolution of many plant species, burning undesirable flora, weeding out competition, pruning, thinning, trimming, transplanting, mulching, relocating, bark wringing, coppicing, watering and fertilizing. And for animals, you know, we have hunted even selectively you know

spared females for reproductive age or hunted based on life cycles or fish selectively managed streams to promote spawning and shellfish beds you know transplanted the eggs and young of birds and fish and even raised juveniles in some cases that's kind of how we ended up domesticating a lot of animals and i'm going to get into that so through fire through plow through hunting through a whole array of different activities humans have domesticated whole environments you know well before you know the full the first society is based on you know fully domesticated wheat and barley and goats and sheep. The spectrum of subsistence modes that we have utilized, whether it be hunting, foraging, pastoralism, or farming, have existed and complemented each other in a sort of harmony

of millennia. And I mean, those of you who have read Dawn of Everything, you kind of see that picture coming into shape as it progressed through the book. But of course, James C. Scott also discussed it years before in Against the Green. So as he says, enter the domus. Just as we transformed our landscapes, we transformed ourselves. The domus was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and grain stores, people and domesticated animals, and hangers-on like mice and rats and corvids, all co-evolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen. You know, dogs and pigs and cats, all of them, their entire evolution was shaped by their relation to the stumas.

And humans are not the exception. Of course, there are some animals that are easier to domesticate than others. Which is why you don't see people commonly riding or herding zebras and gazelle. They don't make the best cattle or ride um and probably knock your brains out if you tried so it's probably best to stick to the ones that we have sort of quavered with like you know llamas and goats and sheep and pigs and over generations you see that domesticated creatures unlike their wild counterparts develop a level of submissiveness and a decreased weariness of their surroundings

right so that emotional dampening is basically a condition of life because when you're in that domus you know you're under human supervision that instant reaction to predator, you know, you're under human supervision. That instant reaction to predator and, you know, prey, they're no longer the most powerful pressures because you're in this sort of cultivated environment. Your physical protection and nutrition is more secure than it would be in a more wild environment. So a domesticated animal is less alert to its surroundings, less aware of its surroundings

than its cousins in the wild. And we could see as well, you know, with human sedentism, there's also been, you know, a reduction in mobility and that, of course, had consequences for our health. To be very honest with you,

I was actually kind of concerned about covering this. And I was trying to figure out a way to cover this in a way that doesn't make me look like I'm trying to like retire into the deeps of Amazonia or something. I find it interesting to think about how environments shape us. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can think about these things without becoming a hermit and

hiding in the woods. As attractive as an idea as that may be at times. For sure. For sure. I have this kind of canon in my head of you know like the whole idea of multiverses yeah i figure somewhere in the multiverse is a

version of myself we have retired into the forest and gone through this whole kind of like anime training arc and emerged as this like one punch man beast of a human. I would also like to be in that timeline. I think that'd be very interesting. Yeah, like I train so hard that all my hair falls out. I'm able to snap trees with just a breath. It's like, yeah. Might be the quintessential wild man. Yeah. And I mean, I'm sure there's also a multiverse version of me where

i'm president or something i don't know it might be pretty interesting to see like actually be kind of cool i just had an idea of like this um this team of versions of oneself that team up to fight the evil versions of themselves across the multiverse. It's kind of like Kang the Conqueror, except I think in most versions of the multiverse, he is evil. Yes, I've definitely read that comic before,

of the good ones fighting the bad ones. I mean, the Injustice comics and video games are pretty big staples of that genre yeah but of course in Injustice it's different characters whereas it'll be interesting to see a cast

that's all just one person oh just like the same dude the exact same person but they all grew up in such different environments. Even though they share the exact same DNA, they're like different people. I think it'll be an interesting commentary on society. Because we do live in one after all.

We do live in a society. For better or for worse. Yeah. But anyway, like I was saying, you know, environments shape us. We shape environments. And to me, we need to start shaping our environments again so we could either shape up or ship out of existence as a species, right?

You know, because the way the trajectory we're on is not sustainable. we're on is not sustainable um so we can see of course in this transition to the domus um this sedentary green growing sort of community that you know in archaeological studies of the bones of the inhabitants you could see like repetitive stress injuries shaping their bodies you know like the skeletal signatures of like grinding grain and you know like uh cutting and sewing and kneeling and bending and moving in you know very repetitive ways you know and of course with these concentrations of people we also see like epidemics and stuff and parasites starting to fester not just within humans or just not just within species but also like cross species pathogens and stuff yeah you know and so as we all on this kind of same arc sharing this micro environment sharing our germs and parasites

you end up getting more and more brutal versions of like wild diseases you know because they basically go through the the iron gauntlet of you know like the the disease thunderdome where only one could come out as victorious and so they battled out and became these more refined and more severe forms, which is why you see in Europe where they had these high population densities, the diseases that developed there when they were introduced to the quote-unquote new world, you know, it really ravaged the population that didn't really live

in that level of density. Not to say they didn't have cities, because they did. They had cities and villages and collaborations and such of people spanning across large areas, but it wasn't organized in quite the same way. It wasn't generalizing quite fairly, but it's two whole continents. quite severely but you know it's two whole continents yeah um we also see that like

nutritional stress starts to develop in the bones and teeth of um more quote-unquote domiciled humans um you see like iron deficiency anemia in people whose diets were consisting increasingly of grains and you know as they settled you know their diets became narrower you know less variety um in both plants and proteins and so that ended up leading to, you know, like declining tooth size and a reduction in stature and skeletal robustness. And of course, this change in like our physiology and dimorphism has a history such as like a lot further back than just the Neolithic. with the fact than just the Neolithic, but sedentism and crowding definitely left an immediate and legible mark on the archaeological record. I do find it interesting. I read this book, I think last year, called Botany of Desire, And in it, the guy, what is his name? And in it, Michael Poulan talks about

how the plants we thought we were domesticating domesticated us too. You know, because if you think about it, you know, you're up in the garden on your hands and knees day after day, sun and rain, weeding and fertilizing and untangling and protecting and reshaping an environment just to suit your little tomato plant, your little potato plant. And I mean, the plant kind of has it made. They don't have to worry about the sort of things they would usually have to worry about outside of the domus.

You are there to make sure that their competitors are weeded out. You are there to make sure they get all the nutrients they need. You are there to make sure that no insects and stuff come and ravage them. And you even help to fertilize them as well. And so, you know, it's kind of like, I want to say a mutual relationship because as, you know, these domesticated plants have continued along this path of domestication, a lot of them can no longer thrive without our help. And in the same way, you know, we can't just not go on without them you know we also are dependent yeah on like a handful of domesticated cultivars like we can't just suddenly switch and just be like oh we're not gonna grow wheat and corn and potatoes anymore yeah i mean that's been the

foundation of our diets for too long now that That's what most of our food production, I actually don't have percentages, I won't say most, I'll just say a lot of our food production is centered around that. And so we can't just jump out of that. Especially with population increases, we just have grown increasingly reliant on a few, like, grains and cereals and starches.

So, yeah, we do, we need them more than they need us in a lot of senses. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly, because, I mean, a lot of them, they do still have, like, wild counterparts that can always, you know, take over. It's just the wild counterparts are

generally less appetizing yeah than the ones you've gotten used to i'm sure a lot of people have seen that picture of the different types of bananas out there um or you know the different types of corn out there um of course a lot of corn species that are edible because, you know, they were cultivated in Mesoamerica. I would like to try them because the corn that I've grown up with, gotten used to, I'm not sure what it's called, but I don't like it. I find the texture and taste of it to be kind of, for lack of a better word, revolting. So, I mean, like, and I've been this way for like a long, long time, right? Like I, growing up, used to be refusing to eat like an entire plate of food because it had corn in it. I didn't like corn.

later food because it had corn in it i didn't like one i know people used to point out the irony in the fact that i would readily eat like corn pie or i would eat popcorn or i would eat like cornbread yeah but to me it's it's not the same you know like corn on the cob and and stuff is it's not the same and so like i've've tried some different types of corn. Like, I've tried those kind of, like, soft baby corns that you get in, like, soups and stuff. Oh, yeah. And those are delicious. You know, I wouldn't set your sights too much on those various corn varieties. Because one of the oldest ways of eating corn, before we had really nice soft kernels, one of the oldest ways is we would we would take we would take the the hard the the hard corn kernels um pop them

inside a inside like a frying pan to make the starch expand then crush that up and mix it with like a liquid to have a very disgusting starchy gruel and that was the way that we ate corn for a long time and eventually that was you know eventually we were able to turn this into tortillas and stuff. But for a long time, it was just kind of corn gruel. It's pretty gross. This was a major problem during the Irish potato famine because, in short, the potato crops failed. And so the British government imported a bunch of what they called Indian corn at the time, which was corn grown in the United States.

And this was even though Irish people were growing plenty of corn to feed themselves. But that corn was being exported. And the Indian corn was seen. It was harder. So it was seen as of lower quality. So they had to develop a bunch of methods of grinding it down. So it was seen as of lower quality. So they had to develop a bunch of methods of grinding it down. And eventually the government was just like, hey, just soak it for like several days and then boil it in water for hours and add some milk or some grease if you have it.

And some of the problems it caused is that like the Irish people were starving to death. And because when you're starving to death, your stomach is not as hearty as it is when you're not starving to death. And because when you're starving to death, your stomach is not as hearty as it is when you're not starving to death. And so the corn, even after being boiled, would cut their stomachs and there is a feel lining and cause, in some cases, people would die. So yeah, corn!

See, I could add that to my reasons to despise corn. Like anti-Irish violence I'm gonna I will briefly rant about corn subsidies because I don't think I've actually done that on this show yet we could do it with the whole episode of corn subsidies

there's a thing about that'll be high traffic domus that's like like in terms of terms of domestication, in terms of human domestication, and in terms of the extent to which we're being shaped, you have to be, I think,

very careful to make sure that you're attributing agency to the thing that actually has agency, because there's a tendency to sort of attribute stuff to, you know, okay, well, this is just the way the technical process works and because this is the way the technical process works here are the social structures that inevitably result out of it and that's true to some extent but you know for example like if we're talking about like

who's domesticating whom we look at corn it's like well yeah okay so we grow and grow an enormous amount of corn but it's not because of sort of like like that that's the the reason we have so much corn is entirely political it's entirely about the fact that like there's a corn lobby in the u.s that is enormously powerful and because of the way the senate works and because of the way sort of like the primaries work uh you have to be pro corn and this means that the American corn industry has billions and billions of dollars in subsidies that like, this is, this is like the only thing every economist across the entire political

spectrum agrees on. Like you will, you will get like the heritage foundation agreeing with like Marxists who are agreeing with like, like the, the standard liberal comments. Everyone agrees. This is awful.

The free trade people agree with this, the anti-free trade people agree with this. And it just sticks there because of, you know, because of a very sort of a very contingent set of political processes and i think that that's something that's important to keep in mind when you're thinking about stuff like domestication which is that like yes on the one hand that it is true that you are being shaped by the production process but it's also true like like, for example, you know, if you go back to the women in the story who, you know, you can see in their bones, right, that they've been sort of, like, bending over, like, husking crops and stuff. Well, it's like, well, it's true to some extent that that's because of the production process, but the production process works like that because of social reasons. Like, okay, like, why is it women doing this work, right?

works like that because of social reasons like okay like why is it women doing this work right like there's there's always simultaneously sort of human constructed social systems operating at the same time as you have these mechanical systems and people love to attribute all of it to the mechanical systems in a way that loses you know it it naturalizes things that are bad and could actually be changed and loses the capacity for sort of well yeah i mean our sort of culpability in both the fact that it could be different than the fact that we do it this way yeah i mean yeah it's still i think it's still important to like think about like how reliant we still are on it as a resource in terms of maize and corn syrup

and glucose. We rely on it for so many facets beyond just eating corn on the cob. Yeah, exactly. It's like a figure-eight infinity loop here. We've tied ourselves into a knot.

Yeah, but a lot of this tied ourselves into a knot. Yeah. But it's like, like a lot of this stuff also has to do with the fact, like, you know, part of the reason that there's, we use corn syrup is there were like taxes on sugar and you could get, you could get around.

And this has all these, all these like, yeah, there's all these sort of feedback cycles of like, we become dependent on something because of a social process, but now we're dependent on the physical process. And it's, yeah.

I mean, you can, you can like tie this into the idea of, like, once you switch over to large-scale agriculture, we need to kind of have some body that governs how it works because now we're no longer reliant on smaller, more, like, individualized farms or forest farming. We're instead reliant on a bigger, you know,

like, a bigger stake in the land. So if that fails, we're all more in trouble. Now, agriculture does not equal sieve. That's not an actually sound anthropology. If you look at anthropology, that's actually not a super sound argument. I think you can read the dot of everything. They make that point pretty clear. thing that make they make that point pretty clear but still when you do have when you do have a large population relying on very few like um very large crop like like of only a small diversity of

large crops and there's a lot there's a lot there's a lot more stakes on it so you're gonna you know there's gonna be processes that are gonna have like authoritative hierarchical elements to help organize those crops so that we don't get famines. Which, of course, if you look at Maoist China, you can see that worked out very well. Yeah, and I should note, for the record, when we're talking about the Irish potato famine, that a lot of people didn't die because the government imported corn,

which they stopped doing after the first year of the famine because of Trevelyan. Anyway, we'll be doing an episode on the potato famine i didn't want to completely shit on the corn that was imported by the government because it was critical it's just also eating corn doesn't historically as as was brought up earlier eating corn historically does not mean what you you think about now yeah well and you know we will also do things on on the mao famines and part of that also was that the centralization of agriculture was a like epochal disaster in a lot of ways that took like decades to recover from which yeah is a is a fun time yes and when chris says a fun time here he is not being literal for those in the audience who are wondering

thank you thank you andrew for that clarification i was i was slightly i was slightly confused yes he is he is slash j he is not slash srs yeah i mean it occurs to me that i i'm not sure i've ever gone back into the records to see if anyone in my family died from the famines i know people died later i don't know if people died specifically from that which is a good time is a again when chris has a good time what they actually mean is not a good time. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, back to Against the Grain. Back to Against the Grain.

So as we're talking about, you know, this reliance on this one staple, whether it be corn or grain or any cereal, really, it kind of brings to mind, and also when we talk about the centralization of farming and how, you know, we've grown to be so reliant on these single things. And not only that, but less people know about the processes that go into our food than ever before. We see kind of like, as time progresses, and as James C. Scott points out, hunter-gatherers, you know, they had this host of natural rhythms that they had to observe. You know, they had like the movements of herds, the seasonal migrations of birds,

you know, the resting and nesting places of fish, cycles of a whole host of different fruits and nuts. And if you're in the Caribbean, you would know about things like mango season and plum season and chinette season, all these different seasons and different times of year. And to keep track of all those, plus several more because they had such diverse diets. several more because they had such diverse diets. I mean, the way to track the appearance of, you know, different mushrooms, the locations of different types of game, you know, all these activities, they require toolkits, right?

You know, different techniques that have to be mastered, have to be understood, have to be shared from generation to generation. They also, in addition to that, these foragers, they had the ability to cultivate lots of different stands of cereal. They had the different tools. They had to know how to make sickles and slingshots and blowdarts and all these different tools would have used spears arrows and um they also would have had to recognize the seasonality of sometimes different ecosystems you know they might have been crossing over white lands and forests and savannas and arid environments and And so they had to understand these rhythms and they had to be generalists and opportunists

that could take advantage of these different rhythms, all the different episodic bounties that nature may provide. Or rather not provide, but bring their way that they would have to kind of fight for in some cases. But they have this sort of metronome, right? Farmers, on the other hand, you know, as we sort of move to that sort of farming dominant, sedentary sort of way of life, you know, you're largely confined to this one single food web, right? Your routine has a particular tempo.

You still have to observe, you know, different seasonalities and different movements, one single food web, right? Your routine has a particular tempo. You still have to observe, you know, different seasonalities and different movements, but it's a bit more limited. You know, you have a handful of crops that you have to bring successfully to harvest every year. And I mean, it's complex. A lot of things you have to look out for,

whether it be, you know, diseases and pathogens and, you know and different insects and pests that may come at your crops you have to look out for those different things but it's usually closer, less expansive

range of activities at least in comparison to hunter-gatherers. On the other hand, farming and the nuances of cereal grain farming are far more complex, require far more skill and a much wider range of knowledges than you know working on an assembly line you know um as i believe adam smith points out in wealth of nations you know you have all these people on this assembly line making pins but alexis de toqueville asks what can be expected of a man who has spent 20 years of his life putting heads on pins you know there's sort of a restriction in terms of a contraction in terms of the range of knowledges and expertises that one can be expected to take on. And so I guess that kind of links into my whole idea of anti-work.

It's this idea of moving outside and beyond this kind of restriction to one or two or a few rigorous activities that you're expected to do for the rest of your life. And also opening people up to exploring a wider range of knowledges and expertises and experiences and practices that they can weave into their everyday life. So rather than just one minutely choreographed routine of dance steps you know

there's a bit more expression a bit more freedom in terms of you know how we live in terms of how we work in terms of how we educate in terms of how we build, how we socialize, being able to sort of not just march to one beat, but sort of generate a cacophony of music. Absolutely. Because I think no matter whether or not you own a share in the pin making factory, I think you're still going gonna face alienation from your environment by just doing the same repetitive task eight hours a day like i don't i don't think that's actually much better uh yeah yeah exactly exactly and it requires

transmission and so for those who haven't seen I did a video on anti-work sort of discussing it so you can check that out when this comes out I suppose I just want to point out that right now we live in a society

that is governed by institutions that often demand behavior that conflicts with our innate capacities and predilections you know the millions of social, sharing environments, you know, where communal and individual rights and such were valued and respected. I mean, to sort of draw back to the Truman Show analogy, it's almost as if, you know if we went from living in the world to living in a zoo of our own

making. We were just being... Well, I guess we're watching ourselves in this zoo. Yeah. It's like the zookeeper who lives inside the zoo and is also the attraction. Exactly. And so I think that

while obviously we can't switch back to foraging, it's not necessarily desirable, I do think that we need to reconsider our approaches to health and security and work and leisure and the way we relate to the natural world. You have to sort of change the story and change how we organize. It's going to take trial and error, of course. Anyone who's organized can tell you that it is far from easy and is replete with setback and failure but I think we have a responsibility to

remake this status quo to right the wrongs of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And that's it. Woo! Throw in a couple of air horns here, Daniel.

Make sure they're pitched lower so that it's not horrible to listen to. No, never do that. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast oh yeah it could happen here the only podcast that is on right now in your ears where you can listen to us talk about things falling apart and occasionally more optimistic stuff garrison

is this one of the more optimistic stuff days not really uh oh great it's thing it's things falling apart but in a slightly amusing way oh well that's fine too yeah it's it's gonna be fine um so have has any as any of y'all's familiar with with the devious licks? Vaguely. Yeah. So I'm sure all of the lick fans are going to be really excited about today's episode because the first half we'll be talking about all of the licks. So for those unfamiliar, the devious licks meme challenge thing started with this video by a kid who had stolen, quote unquote stolen, a bunch of like COVID masks from his school and then was showing off his harvest on TikTok, played over, you know, played over a song or something as as you do on the tiktoks so they posted the video with this caption uh a month into school absolutely devious lick um i i and lick i think lick just

means like stealing like like you like stole something and like that's like that is a lick um i was so sad when i first heard about this i i heard i heard someone say devious licks and i was like they're like oh the tiktok channels and i was like oh shit people are like walking up to like like they're gonna like lick the underside of a bridge or something and then it was not that unfortunately unfortunately not yeah it is it is it is a real loss um so this this video went very very viral on tiktok very very quickly um mostly among kids of whom's like their in-person school had just, had just started. This was this thing in like late August, early September of last year.

You know, first with, you know, the initial video then subsequently inspired a bunch of copycat school related heists that then posted into TikToks. First, with people just stealing small, mostly low-stakes things, usually inside the bathrooms. Stuff like toilet paper rolls, paper towel rolls, soap from soap dispensers, light bulbs, floor tiles, just small things. But after a while the small fry wasn't was not enough anymore people started to get more um brazen uh more more more devious you might say with their legs wow yeah they they were they moved on to like full-on toilet heists um and uh you

know electric hand dryers they stole a teacher's entire desk um and a uh whole bathroom sink so incredible yeah and eventually they kind of dropped all pretense of this being heisting and just started just like destroying the bathrooms uh not even stealing things anymore yeah garrison you and i have a friend who works at a school where this has been. We got accused of, like, pushing disinformation when we talked about this on Worst Year. But it's like, no, we know people who work at a school that has not had functional student bathrooms in months. It absolutely happened. And it's very funny.

Just to clarify my opinion on it, very funny. Yes. It's, um, yes. to clarify my opinion on it very funny yes it's um yes they but yeah just just it it started it started with stealing and then just got turned into let's just destroy the bathrooms which is pretty funny kids rock kids rock so obviously uh schools teachers and principals were uh scrambling um their confusion only upseated uh by their being upset because obviously they shouldn't have allowed children to be born into a world where tiktok could exist really is on them and you know all of the upsetness by teachers and schools only like contributed to the meme

with like kids posting their principals reactions to it you know like like people like like announcing over the intercom new rules about how to prevent the bathroom destruction. Schools were having to station staff members outside of bathrooms to check and hopefully ward off any possible destructive shenanigans. It was this entire thing. And it got to the point where tiktok actually had to step in to kind of curb this meme they banned the hashtag devious slick they took down any

content that had anything to do with the trend and this seemed to work um after a few weeks the meme kind of reached the end of its virality cycle uh teachers got to breathe a sigh of relief maybe there would be no more smashed bathrooms or stolen desks oh you fools you fools um but uh their calm did not last long uh by the end of september there were rumors percolating around that uh devious yeah i got you garrison percolating percolating come on i don't know but it was it was it was it was it was said that the devious licks may not have a wooden stick through its heart and we may have only witnessed the the first wave with something much darker lurking around the corner on parent, teacher, and law enforcement groups started circulating some purported shenanigan plans from the kids on TikTok. There was this month-by-month

calendar detailing to kids what sick pranks they should play on their school for the for the entire rest of the year uh and a few versions of this calendar were spread around but they all shared the same basic overall structure and prank ideas just some like wording and phrasing changed and the first upcoming challenge for the month of october was slap a teacher sorry This spread beyond Facebook and including to local news. Oh, now another TikTok challenge getting a lot of attention tonight, and it's a violent one targeting teachers. The Nevada Joint Union superintendent asking parents now to tell their kids not to participate in this challenge. It encourages students to actually slap their teachers. encourages students to actually slap their teachers.

So although the smack a teacher line was what really got this thing to go viral on Facebook, the main screenshot and calendar that was being circulated, the actual October challenge was listed as smack a staff member on the backside. That was the actual phrasing, which is a little bizarre. Smack a staff member on the back side uh november is uh kiss your friend's girlfriend at school so again weird phrasing uh december is deck the halls and show your balls in school halls which is that one was probably written by a child um but then we get other stuff like january is jab abreast uh so more more sexual assault jokes um february we have mess up school signs march is make a mess in the courtyard or cafeteria um april this one's weird

april is a grab some eggs but eggs is in quotation marks with a z at the end um may is ditch day that's fine uh june is flip off the front office okay who cares and july is spray a neighbor's fence wow graffiti scary um so yeah that is that is that is the calendar of challenges uh some of these seem more i mean we talked about this a couple of months ago and my feeling was that this started as something real just like legitimate kids doing a thing yeah and and this this shit was where it was it became nonsense was just like people sharing things that were going to anger boomers this and we will we will get into this um so yeah as as news about the tiktok challenges spread on facebook uh media orgs picked up on the trend and started shouting out headlines like tiktok's shocking school

challenges list 2021 revealed and devious licks asks students via tikt TikTok to smack a staff member. The nation's teachers are feeling burnt out. So great, great headlines there. So all of that sounds so obviously very scary. If teens around the country are all united in this planned destruction of our entire civilization that we could all be brought onto the brink of via teens destroying their schools. That would be kind of fun. But if you stop and think about the wording of that list for a sec, you might

notice some things that just seem off. No Gen Z kids are saying smack a staff member on the backside. That is not what it backside. You are the first member of Generation Z to say backside. Backside. And the challenge for April is grab some eggs, and eggs in quotation marks with a Z at the end.

Because, yeah, all of the cool kids today use a Z at the end of words to make them sound cool. Again, it's some like fucking Gen X or maybe elder millennial piece of shit trying to make people angry on the Internet. And he's just like, April, what? What goes with April? April. Eggs. Eggs.

Excellent. I don't know something. But like all of the language feels like what's what what someone would write if they were trying to imitate what a cool 90s kid would talk like on tv yeah yeah it's a lot of people trying to write john hughes movies yeah but so but all of all this was very viral for like it was for the end of september this was this was all massive and we we will don't worry i will explain why we're talking about this now because this does this this will circle back to actually current events um i'm not not just talking about a september 2021 trend this this does this does relate to

stuff happening currently um but yeah like suspicious language aside the idea that the youths are purposely plotting on the tiktoks to assault teachers and wreak havoc all year long, frightened many an adult, especially those that work in the education sector, who might have to face the possibility of a coordinated Zoomer wrath. And, you know, the past two years had already been kind of a shit show for schools with switching to remote learning, then back to in-person. There's all the debate around masks and vaccinations, then back to in-person there's all all debate all the debate around masks and vaccinations and the risk of being inside around densely packed you know groups of filthy germ-ridden children um plus there's all these kids that got used to being home alone for so long learning have to like

like having to learn now how to like socialize in the class environment um all while dealing with like the same mental trauma that we've all been dealing with around uh around the plague so so just having faced the actual very real september devious licks the the promise of a year-long tiktok wave of destruction uh obviously frightened many parents and teachers with educators on facebook uh you know starting to take this list as a very real threat with school districts you know issuing warnings and and parents were, you know, informed like in mass about this very, very real, very real threat. Educators beware. That's the warning from the California Teachers Association. The group sent this message to educators, letting them know about a potential TikTok trend, calling for students to slap a staff member.

Seminole County schools just sent this letter to principals warning them of TikTok's October challenge saying quote in the latest TikTok trend students are asked to calmly walk up to their teachers slap them and then run off making sure they capture the whole thing on camera. Okay and we are back. So yeah, sure enough, news of teachers getting slapped began to circulate from local media into the national sphere, alongside headlines like TikTok-inspired slap-a-teacher challenge assault reported at Braintree's East Middle School, and Covington police say disabled teacher injured in suspected tiktok challenge assault by student uh yeah so there was there was there was a there was a few slapping incidents reported onto mainstream

on on onto mainstream news all all tied to the to the tiktok assault a teacher thing um as a student in louisiana was arrested and faced felony charges with police saying the assault was prompted by a quote prompted by a viral social media application known as tiktok we've done the notorious hacker 4chan again everything circles back application known as tiktok um so yeah in october there were definitely incidents of students hitting teachers um but it's like that that in and of itself is not up for debate this this there yes uh but the actual scale of content spreading this list and the subsequent slapping videos on the tiktok platform is something to question uh because writing writing off of the

september dv slicks trend almost all media uh police parents educators were super quick to link this list and these few teacher thwackings to the social media platform used by gen z the application known as tiktok um and so we we have we have all this talk on the news and on Facebook. But the thing is, if you check TikTok, if you're actually on TikTok around this time, you wouldn't find any viral videos of teachers getting slapped or anything about this TikTok list of challenges at all. It wasn't actually there. It wasn't actually on TikTok. This wasn't actually a thing. it wasn't actually there like it wasn't actually on tiktok this this wasn't actually a thing uh so you know then you know you might be thinking well maybe tiktok is doing what they did previously to shut down the original organic dv slicks challenge what if they're just doing this like

preemptively to taking down any content related to the list any like corresponding hashtags etc etc uh but when journalists asked tiktok if this was the case, they denied this, saying that we have not seen anything of this nature on our app. TikTok said the first time they saw the list was of screenshots of it on other websites. It was not from TikTok. It wasn't actually there. So as more and more news circulated and blame was continuing to be put on TikTok for propagating this list of challenges and, you know, encouraging teacher assaults, uh, the social media platform made a public statement addressing the issue saying, quote, the rumored slap a teacher dare is an insult to educators everywhere. And while this is not a trend on TikTok, if at any point it shows up, content will be removed. not a trend on TikTok. If at any point it shows up, content will be removed. So as much as you would search online on TikTok or wherever, you wouldn't find any evidence of this list actually being spread through TikTok at all. The only thing that you would find about this on TikTok is either

kids reacting to news clips talking about this or teachers on tiktok complaining about this as well it wasn't actually a trend uh the the list was being shared online a lot like it was very viral but almost exclusively in facebook groups uh for boomers or adults or teachers or police uh but people seemed real scared it's fine to call all those groups boomers, Garrison. Okay, noted. Yeah. It's like a mental ethnicity now. People seem really scared. Schools were scared.

News media loves turning this list into a looming boogeyman. But it wasn't kids actually spreading it or turning into a challenge which leaves you to wonder where did this even come from and how did it actually get so viral so multiple and multiple fully separate investigative kind of ordeals into the alleged tiktok list of challenges uh placed its original point of virality in the hands of of wait wait for it wait for it i'm waiting a police officer oh good so officer david gomez a school resource cop who runs a popular facebook page under the banner of uh quote the truth about youth which is oh boy pretty cool so gobez works at a school in idaho big shocker

and back in september his facebook page had over 33 000 followers now it has over 66 000 and he uses it as a sort of information hub for parents, educators, and concerned citizens to talk about the dangers of kids on the internet and all of that jazz. Um, you know, Gomez basically tries to be like a kind of like influencer for this whole like concerned adult corner of the internet. He, he, he writes these long, long posts about like school life and digital safety, touching on many topics from like how your kids are secretly buying weed and vape pens, or how to tell if your kid is looking at

pornographic materials. Stuff of this nature. Here's a few posts from him from just a few days ago. Lots of inappropriate behaviors posted on Snapchat. Desensitize kids to reality nude photos drugs parties crimes etc

kids can order almost any illegal drug and have it delivered to them on most any place on snapchat oh if only if only so he's like he's like one of these types of guy he like you know you know who yeah yeah yeah god if we only lived in that world i would be on snapchat so hard i would be i love i love the idea that snapchat desensitizes kids to reality by telling them about parties and well i mean any time i look I have a profound negative mental health reaction whenever someone tells me about a party. So why wouldn't children? So as the original devious licks challenge was dying down near the end of September,

on September 22nd, Officer Gomez posted this list of challenges to his thousands of followers. In the next few days, the challenge list from his page circulated around the web, prompting many nervous school emails, terrified newscasts, and ending up actually making the list of challenges go completely viral. When asked about the origin of the list, he said the first place that he'd seen it is in a smaller private Facebook group for people working in drug and alcohol enforcement and education. He called it a drug recognition group. It's like a group of like cops and stuff who are like, I found this bag of leaves. What is it? Can I arrest this person? It's like it's these people who like, yeah, post random stuff to figure out what drugs they're looking at. So he claims he first saw it in this Facebook group, but admitted

that he was unsure if it had actually originated from kids or not, let alone on TikTok. He just posted it because he thought, you know, better safe than sorry. But you know, it's funny because Officer Gomez's intention may just have been to spread the word about this because he thought it was an actual threat. But it turns out that he was just the one that gave it online life in the first place. So yeah, but for like the actual origin of it, like for it actually came up, as best as we can tell um it seems to it seems to have stem from a school in california um a principal claims that a student sent them this list albeit albeit a slightly more vulgar version more in line with how kids kind of talk

now the teacher then uploaded it to a teacher facebook group it was then shared to this drug recognition group with officer gomez and then gomez or someone along this process rewrote it to add the weird like boomer gen like like like a 90s cool kid language and then gomez posted it and then that results in like the cool kids attitude and then he posts it it goes, but there's no evidence that it was ever on TikTok, like, at all. Like, there's no, like, it's not actually ever on TikTok until the cop posts it. So, the other funny thing is that all of these slapping incidents reported on the news, including the one that resulted in an arrest, also turns out to have nothing to do with the challenge list or TikTok. It was just a regular interpersonal conflict between a student and a teacher.

Because that happens. That happens just every once in a while. But it had nothing to do with TikTok, according to the school and according to the police after the investigation. Sure, we had a substitute teacher chokeslam one of the kids in my class, and we didn't even have a TikTok. We barely had the internet back then. It was a pretty good day at school. The principal had to come in and apologize. It was very fun.

That, that sounds great. It was great. Yeah. So, uh, so yeah, like in the end,

we're going to, the, the, the full arc of this, right. It starts in September with the actual real devious licks that that that did that did exist it was on tiktok but it was just you know stealing stuff from bathrooms uh it takes off bathrooms and and then eventually kind of just like making

bathrooms into a mess um so but this this this takes off it's it goes it. It goes pretty, pretty viral. Then TikTok starts to crack down on it. And after like three to four weeks, the meme dies. People are bored. There's too much enforcement. It's not fun anymore. And then we have this calendar list of challenges, right? Possibly trying to spin off of like the devious licks thing

and glom on from the previous trend. Or it was perhaps just written as a non-serious joke. But the thing is, it's not actually found on TikTok, right? So even if this list was originally made by a kid, it was not known by other kids on a national

level, either online or in person. But where it does get visibility is through adults. And not on TikTok, but on Facebook. Initially being passed around by teachers and school administrators and other adults on ran on the facebook platform and really accelerating from there right we have we have we have gomez and then it's all over facebook it's all over instagram it's all over news articles tv stations and eventually does go it eventually does get to TikTok, but not with kids talking about it instead of with teachers talking about it. But at this point,

the story of the TikTok slap a teacher challenge was just too like enticing, right? It had like enough of a grain of truth by piggybacking off of the real devious licks, but it was able to grow into this like entire false reality because there were enough ingredients for a good story. And that's where perceptions of truth really flourish in, is good stories.

And then we found out a few weeks ago there was this article by Taylor Lawrence in the Washington Post that there actually may have been some kind of behind-the-scenes fuckery making this trend

go as viral as it did um and we will we will get into that after after this after this ad break so have fun listening to these ads and then we will talk about uh the behind the scenes of making these these false online trends hello we are We are back. So, turns out there's lots of fuckery happening to make narratives, to make stories, right? It's all, you know,

turns out that not everything you read on the internet is true. Pretty shocking revelation here. So, it came out a few weeks ago that Facebook was actually paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a national campaign to turn the public opinion negatively towards TikTok. The campaign was placing, it included placing like op-eds and letters to editors of like, you know, major news outlets, promoting false stories about like the growth of alleged TikTok trends that actually had started on Facebook and then, you know, trying to push reporters and politicians into helping them, you know, damage the perception of TikTok on like a nationwide level.

Eventually, you know, Facebook was obviously funding this because, you know, TikTok is their biggest competitor at the moment. So it's actually pretty interesting. So it's with this Republican digital consulting firm called Targeted Victory. So this was the thing that Facebook was actually paying for to prompt these false stories. Targeted Victory has been routinely working for Facebook over the years. You know, they were involved in the 2016 congressional hearings around Facebook doing stuff like with like election medley stuff, you know, all the stuff related to like Cambridge Analytica. They had a small part to play in that kind of thing as well.

So they also receive a lot of Republican funding. um they got i think over over uh 237 million dollars in 2020 uh according to data compiled by open secrets which is uh yeah it's uh that biggest biggest payments came from a national gop congressional committee uh and america first action which is a a super pack ran by pro trump folks so that this is this is the group that was that was doing a lot of the behind the scenes stuff to specifically tie tiktok onto onto onto making it look bad to specifically make facebook look good and push people more onto facebook when this article first dropped i know robert you said that hey this is a interesting interesting little thing that is probably worth talking about in terms of how it affects politics and social media and the intersection thereof. Yeah, maybe a little bit.

So a lot of the news dropped about this because of employees with the firm were tasked to undermine TikTok through nationwide media and lobbying campaign. And then lots of their internal emails for this effort were shared with Washington Post so this is this is how we kind of found out about this more recently their task was to quote get the message out that while meta like Facebook is the current punching bag TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is number one in sharing data that young teens are using according to the director of the firm so this is that's the type of stuff they're talking about behind the scenes in terms of how they're trying to push push stuff to get people stop talking about how bad facebook is because this was also right after all of like

the facebook bright part stuff was happening in terms of how much facebook pushes extremist content um to you know boomers and stuff um and then the other thing that they were doing was specifically trying to craft messaging to get uh bills passed and try to get uh attorneys general to to focus on to focus on this to launch investigations into how like tiktok harms children and teens um and that part actually was successful. You can look at the emails talking about this plan. And then soon after, there was actually a coalition of a state attorney general to launch a probe into whether TikTok is harmful to children and teens. So you can actually look at the behind the scenes stuff that they were trying to do,

and then see how fast they were successful in doing this stuff. And all this also comes at the point that Facebook was, for the first time, actually losing users. And as soon as TikTok was launched and got so much more popular, it also took down a whole bunch of users from Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook, obviously. So Facebook researchers said that teens were spending about three times as more time on TikTok than Instagram. And this was all part of the same kind of overall effort to both do stuff to influence elections and politics, but also just do stuff to make kids think Facebook is cool, which... Good luck with that one. Then in terms of the devious l stuff uh in in other emails that that were

that were leaked uh we got we got targeted victory uh people urging their partners to push uh false stories to look or you know stories that are sometimes tied in truth but amplifying them um tying tiktok to various like dangerous trends, you know, in terms of like save the children rhetoric, right? This idea that face that, that TikTok is harmful to the wellbeing of kids. One of the emails, uh, has, has a line here saying that the dream would be to get stories with headlines, like from dances to danger, how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids. So that's the type of headlines they're like trying to push yeah it's one of the things that they do is try to amplify negative tiktok coverage

they have this google document titled bad tiktok clips which was shared internally and included links to dubious news stories citing tikt TikTok as the original point of various dangerous teen trends. And they were trying to take these stories and push them out through other means, you know, so on Facebook and stuff, right? To take any instance of this and boost it inorganically, right? It's people's jobs to use social media to affect public opinion. So one trend that Targeted Victory specifically was enhancing was the Devious Licks Challenge, including the initial one to vandalize the school property.

Through the bad TikTok clips document, the firm was pushing stories about the Devious Licks Challenge in local media across Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesotanesota rhode island and washington dc i do find it interesting that they have a lot of these ones closer to washington dc to specifically affect politicians like they're doing stuff to amplify stuff to convince politicians specifically to start making political changes um and this actually led uh senator richard blumenthal uh a Democrat from Connecticut, to write a letter in September calling on TikTok executives to testify in front of a Senate committee saying that the app's been repeatedly misused and abused to promote behavior and actions that encourage harmful and destructive acts. worked like they're specifically targeting the type of news that politicians will see in areas that politicians live to get them to start trying to affect change around social media specifically the social media that kids use and amplifying the social media that boomers use facebook which is

already is like a cesspool of spreading conservative disinformation that's like the entire that's the entire bit that they're trying to do here um and so they were working on the original september challenge also in october uh targeted victory was working to spread the rumors of the slap a teacher tiktok challenge which as we know was not actually a tiktok challenge um but they they were doing uh they were also contributing to inflating this this um this trend which is funny because obviously they were being paid by Facebook. They were being paid by the GOP.

And Facebook is the place where this actually started. Yeah. So, you know, but like, again, if you can tie anything to like a little bit of truth, it makes whatever story you're trying to make so much more impactful, right?

The firm was careful to use both like genuine concerns and then just amplify them or exaggerate them into like unfounded anxieties uh to to you know get people to start questioning the safety of these uh of these applications so it's uh it's a it's actually it's actually it's like a it's a pretty clever setup they have they have going here and they've been really successful. The October devious licks trend with Slap Teacher was extremely, extremely, extremely successful in terms of how they affect what is seen as truth and how much news coverage was just kind of unconsciously and just mindlessly repeating the stuff that they've heard the other funny thing that that targeted victory does is uh they they help write letters that are from concerned parents quote unquote that gets

sent out to newspapers to be published in their like letters to the editor section yeah there we go yeah so they they specifically try to write op-eds targeting tiktok and then place them around the country especially in key congressional districts on march 12th a letter to the editor that targeted victory officials helped write ran in the in the denver post um the letter said it was from a concerned new parent and it claimed that tiktok was harmful to children's mental health raising concerns over it's like you know data privacy and that many people suspect that china is deliberately collecting behavioral data on our kids oh god they're trying to hack our children's brains the letter also issued support for colorado attorney general phil uh weiser's wise wait weasers i'm gonna say weasel yep yep yep yep phil weasel's choice famed fan founder of the band weasel

they were yeah but they the letter issued support for him uh including his choice to join a coalition of of attorney general investigating tiktok's impact on american youths so yeah there was a very similar letter uh drafted by targeted victory again that ran in in other other kind of smaller local papers throughout the country trying to link negative news stories about TikTok that targeted Victory had specifically sought to amplify. Some of the letters that were getting circulated were signed by members of the

Democratic Party. They were signed by various politicians in terms of trying to create this thing that looks grassroots to spread it around and be like, hey, we have these concerns. Do you endorse our concerns? So then they can then make it seem way more legit than just like a concerned parent. It's pretty good. An email sent a few weeks ago,

Targeted Victory asked their teams to be prepared to share the op-eds that you're working on right now. Colorado and Iowa, can you talk about the TikTok op-eds you both got? So they're specifically targeting districts where the Senate challenges are actually more of a toss-up. So specifically trying to do this whole TikTok is dangerous to the kids thing in these places. in these places. It's, yeah, it's pretty fun because none of these letters, none of these op-eds, if you read them, there's no indication that Facebook is funding them. There's no indication that the GOP is funding them, right? It is the whole like AstroTurf thing, right? That is the entire idea is that they look totally legit. So anyway was that was my my those those were my notes in terms of the what the db slicks and slap a teacher thing actually was and then how there was all this

behind the scenes fuckery trying to inflate it and how it's specifically getting inflated to tie into like local elections that are happening in the midterms um yeah what what thoughts what thoughts do y'all have on on these on these fun fun little uh disinformation uh rackets they have they have going on we might do like another full episode of this at some point but there's there's an interesting angle here where facebook's been sort of taking the china angle on this a lot and it's like yeah it comes up less than this but yeah you in in this they they founded this uh they founded this advocacy group called i think it's american edge where they have all these things that are like uh uh that was like them and a bunch of weapons manufacturers like founded this lobbying group and they keep saying things like oh

uh china is threatening our competitive edge so we can't do antitrust uh legislation if we do antitrust legislation the russia china alliance will like defeat the u.s and so it's interesting it's like they're i know facebook seems to have like well okay so so they have this problem where like the the metaverse stuff just flops and they're like oh no oh no we need to make money and it's like well okay so you know there's the the the the two need to make money. And it's like, well, okay. So the two ways to make money are you create something that people want to use. That's hard. They did that once

and then they accidentally turned it into an engine that breaks democracy and accelerates ethnic cleansings. So you don't want them trying to make another new thing. The other thing Target targeted victory was doing was specifically amplifying pro facebook content yeah about like how facebook is supporting local black owned businesses and like all all that sort of thing yeah yeah so you know you have that on the one hand it's like yeah they're not they're not doing anything else and the second way they you that you do this stuff is by strategic sabotage of your competition. And this is what Facebook is doing right now. They've launched basically full on a strategic sabotage angle.

They've launched into this sort of like preemptive defense stuff about antitrust being like, ah, hey, look at China. If we yeah, if we don't have tech monopolies that doing genocides uh china will have tech monopolies doing genocides and it's like that's the other funny thing is that whenever zuckerberg gets accused of trying to create monopolies around social media he's always like but tiktok tiktok exists but no it's great because they like they like they like specifically say this they like their quote is we need to get the message out that while facebook is the current punching bag tiktok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app like that that is that is the actual quote that looks like yeah they're specifically doing that exact thing yeah they're leaning into xenophobia angle essentially because you can watch them sort of pushing all of the like

the the political buttons of the last few years it's like they're they're they're basically replaying like the trump like the trump right stuff right it's like they figure out that rhetoric works so they're doing okay they're doing the sort of like uh like they're doing sort of anti-china xenophobia they're doing save the children yep they're doing like they're doing all of this like your kids are unsafe stuff and yeah it's it's working great for them so this is this is fun uh yeah yeah no this is they're they're definitely trying yep i mean and the specific things that targeted victory tries to do the the place that's funded by both facebook and the gop is that they they specialize in uh well they they say they do they do crisis practice and corporate

affairs offerings for their clients growing need for the issues of management and executive positioning saying that it wants to focus on efforts to move toward authentic storytelling with a hyper local approach

so that is that's all the words they use to talk about how they do grassroots disinformation yeah authentic storytelling with a hyper local approach yeah faking letters from parents to local news sites who are hungry for content in order to cause a moral panic about tiktok yeah i mean on average people trust their local news way more than they trust their national news so if they shouldn't because they should they should not because it's all read by like two companies yeah uh so yeah i mean but like they have they have a lot of money they've they've a lot of money

it's they're it's they're they're one of the biggest um recipients of republican campaigns uh spending now they're receiving money from facebook they have been for a while but they're spending they're spending more money now uh yeah and i think this is it's really important to be skeptical of uh online trends because turns out online trends can be pretty astroturfed i mean we can look right now at all of like all of like the groomer stuff right online trends do not need to be organic uh it's like i always say the next time you feel like you see something on facebook or twitter and you feel like you want to share it because it's outrageous instead just go set off a bomb at a power substation okay just simple ethical behavior that'll that that won't play into these people's hands and in terms of all

the stuff that like with facebook trying to specifically demonize kids demonize tiktok to influence elections like if you're interested in what trends kids are actually into just just like ask them like you could talk to them like with like words and like with your mouth and use your like human ears uh because it turns out they will actually explain it because yeah if just if anyone asked a kid about this list of challenges in like october they would say no that's that's not a thing that's that's not that seems something like adults are really interested in but nope that's not actually a thing just assume they're basically the same that kids always are but with different like technology and shit like when i was a kid

in our senior class a bunch of kids conspired to crash a car into the little pond that was on campus because it was destructive and funny kids like to do destructive funny things kids don't like to do whatever april egg bullshit or grab a teacher's tit. That's weird. All of the challenges that are just like sexual assault. You're like, that's actually not something that a lot of kids are into. It turns out. Just try to think back to being in like 10th grade and would you have giggled at this?

If so, it's probably a thing some kids have done. Like, it's as simple as that. So anyway, with this is an episode we wanted to do specifically on how just like social media disinformation is trying to affect elections leading to leading, leading into the midterms. And then tomorrow we will discuss more midterm related stuff with all of this kind of stuff with,

with all of this like disinformation stuff, Tik TOK and Facebook stuff, all kind of just like floating in the back of our minds um as we move on to talking about the midterms and why and and how they might you know affect uh politics going forward and you know how they might affect you know stuff around climate change stuff around different you know mini collapses all of that all that good stuff so but i think as it looks like we have we have reached the time that we need to do today so uh i believe that does it for us this week if you want to if you want to do the social medias because hey after we talked about social media for like 50 minutes yeah let's let's let's let's plug our social media uh twitter and

instagram instagram owned by facebook at cool Zone Media and Happen Here Pod yeah anyway listen to the kids and don't believe trends bye welcome I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

or wherever you get your podcasts. What's the horror of dead generations hanging off the backs of my modern everyone society? What are we doing? Did I start the podcast? Are we done? Great job, Robert. All right, I'm going to go take five.

This is your favorite electoralism podcast. It could happen here. The podcast that says, just vote about it. Come on. Have you voted yet? Can you vote a little harder? You know, if I could vote right now, I would. That is how dedicated I am.

I know. Everyone says that about you, Garrison, that you're always ready to vote. Oh, we have an update on the TikTok thing. This just dropped. TikTok, there is now a new TikTok account launched to boost Biden with young voters. It already has 100 fans. This isn't a joke.

This is actually an actual... Is that real, Garrison? Because that sounds like a bad... Like a Jimmy Fallon Saturday Night Live weekend update type joke. No, this is actually completely real. Oh, no. We're going to go to the polls again.

A government-funded pro-Biden TikTok account has launched, and it has 100 followers guys it would be funny if like you know like the gravel institute but good they just steered it in really radical direction so it did start like tweeting about zirzan and and the importance of destroying time the biden tiktok account embraces ecological sabotage i would i would take it i would take i would take government money if they paid me to do that i'll say it i'll take government money for a lot of reasons if they paid me to make an unhinged tiktok account about how the scientists are the police then yes i would i would do that that's a fun joke for four people listening to

this podcast we're going to talk about the midterms. Yeah. So we're going to count. Look, official stance of the mostly anarchists who make this podcast. Voting is dumb, but it's also bad when certain things happen electorally, like a bunch of insane fascists winning elected office. Yeah. Things can be true. Especially when people are really set on killing trans people right now. Yeah, that's real problematic.

Hashtag problematic. Problematic things could happen as a result of the midterms. I think the by far predominant media narrative is that the Democrats are heading for a shellacking. Now, is that actually going to happen? The short answer is nobody knows because polling, we should all be accepting at this point that polling is not good at its job, generally. So heads up, no one's really sure. There are certainly, number one,

if this is a normal midterm election after a presidential election, Democrats should lose a not insubstantial amount of seats because that's just usually what happens. The only time it didn't was the midterm election right after 9-11. And everyone was out of their minds at that point. So you can't really factor that one into the averages. And nothing like 9-11 has really happened. Like the war in Ukraine is a whole thing, but it's also not, I'm not seeing any evidence that it's causing any kind of like political realignment or affecting support for Joe Biden in any meaningful way.

Everyone's still pretty economy based in terms of what they claim to be their biggest factors for voting. The war in Ukraine is a huge deal, obviously. We've talked about it a lot on our shows. But also, it's foreigners and Americans don't care about foreigners when it comes to voting. So, look, that's just reality. As a guy who's repeatedly tried to get Americans to care about things happening in other countries, we don't. So in the absence of anything that could cause some sort of massive political realignment, the most likely thing historically is that the Democrats are going to lose control of one, maybe both, houses of Congress in a modest amount of seats. and a modest amount of seats. So if that happens, if it's kind of within historical dimensions,

then that won't be all that weird at all. If it's a huge blowout, then that's a big deal. And if the Democrats don't lose or kind of barely lose ground, then those would both be big deals for different reasons. And again, no one knows what's going to happen and no one on this podcast is going to make a prediction. We're just going to kind of try to talk about what is sort of evident right now. Well, you're not allowed to legally make predictions, Robert. I'm not allowed to legally make predictions, although I will make one prediction, which is that at some point, at some point, we're going to see Joe Biden's whole ass. You heard it here first. And 50% odds, if we see the ass, 50% odds that you can see some balls. 50%.

That is, I've gone back and forth with my polling experts on this, and we're firm on that 50. Coin flip. Coin flip for the coin purse. Toss up. know toss up toss up toss up for the tossing of his salad which might be why we see his butt anyway you heard here first on it could happen here it could it could happen here that could happen here it's not impossible someone has a Biden's butt, right? It's out there. So, yeah. So, for every midterms, the House has all their seats go up for every two years. The Senate gets one third of seats up because they serve six-year terms because we like having fun here. Yeah. it's it's gonna be it's it's gonna be interesting both because yeah i mean obviously it's most likely that definitely

republicans will be will win back a decent a number of seats inside the inside the house and probably um make make the divide there less extreme um if not actually just like take the house also the senate's obviously more more of a more of a toss-up because we're only at a 50 50 stance on the senate at the moment um so that is definitely way more of a thing that they could totally seize but even if they do seize it that's not actually changing much because uh they're not we're not we're not able to pass anything through the senate anyway uh we sure aren't. So it doesn't matter. Because, yeah, I mean, like,

it would only really suck if Republicans get extreme control of both the House and the Senate. But I think that's kind of unlikely in terms of getting, like, total control. And then we still have executives. So, yeah. And it does,

part of why it doesn't seem super likely is that, like, in the last sets, in particularly 2016 midterms, the Democrats lost basically all of their most vulnerable seats. And so a lot of the seats that we're seeing uh pretty predicted potentially like pretty fashy political realignment uh in the united states it's it again there's not like evidence that makes me think that's particularly likely um that's just what it would mean if that were to happen and and i think probably the number one thing i would expect if there were some sort of gigantic apocryphal shift where the Republicans wind up with like 60 percent of the seats in Congress or something like that, is they're going to try to impeach. But like they would have to. Right. If they wound up in control of both. Like they would have to try and impeach Biden. They got it because of the rhetoric.

It's the bit, you know, which, again, I know I'm not saying I don't think that is particularly likely based on what we're seeing. But like, if that happens, they're going to do that. So, yeah, I mean, it's not even a prediction. That's just like, well, they've been talking about it because like because like on average, the president's party has lost about 30 30 House seats. Yeah. During midterms over the course of like the last century. And Republicans only need to gain five seats to win the chamber but uh now now gaining five seats is not the same as winning five seats obviously yeah it's a net thing it's a net thing yeah so like the party needs to needs at least 218

seats to win control of the house so republicans are actually they have to flip they have they have to do the flipping um and they have to flip actually a good number of them because, again, the seats that they do – the seats that Democrats currently have are all pretty firmly Democrat. So there is less toss-ups. And the other thing that's kind of interesting is that the redistricting process that has been going on the past bit has seemed to kind of favor uh favor democrats so that will be interesting if you want to have a good time uh go go look at what go look at what the democrats did to the illinois map it is hilarious like there is a district that is like it starts in the like in the north in the south side of like the south side of chic. And the district ends like literally like nine-tenths of the way down the state in like a tiny town

in Southern Illinois. And it's like, and it's really funny because like 80% of what was going on there was like, Southern Illinois like elected a Nazi to the house. The Democrats were like, how can we, well, it's funny because also they didn't even do the optimal gerrymander because they're cowards and fools but yeah like this you know okay like the the maps are always constantly gerrymandered and part of the reason the democrats have been just

like getting smashed for the last decade is that when they lost 2010 election they lost control of uh like the the gerrymandering yeah and so that like fucked them for like a decade and they've gotten to a a position that is slightly better for them but you know again like the important thing to actually take away here is that like basically every year like every election that happens in the u.s on on like for the house is rigged like before it starts like at least partially because gerrymandering is just legal and you can do it. I mean,

it's amazing to me that they're, they're connecting these little rural areas to the South side of Chicago because, and I'm sure you're aware of this, Christopher, it's the baddest part of town. And if you go there, you just better beware of a man named Leroy Brown.

Now, you know, Leroy Brown is stood about six foot four. All those downtown ladies called him treetop lover. All the men just called him, sir. You know, bad, bad Leroy Brown. Baddest man in the whole day. Baddest man in the whole day.

This is important electoral stuff, Sophie. He could win. He's better than old King Kong and meaner than a junkyard dog. So, so about 61 house races are seen to be uh viewed as competitive out of 435 um but out of those again amazing democracy yeah so and and out of those 61 only about 16 are actually kind of viewed as toss-ups at the moment uh with seven of those seats currently held by republicans eight of them being held by democrats and one new seat in the in the state of colorado um so yeah like it does seem like in order for republicans to really uh get more control of

the house they have to actually flip more traditionally democratic uh territories so like they're kind of they have to do most of the actual like work here um to actually get those things flipped but again i i don't i don't trust democrats ability to be able to hold on to what they have anyway so who knows yeah i mean it it's it's one of those things there's a lot of talk about like how incompetent the democrats are and there's a pretty interesting article that dropped oh gosh where was it about how millennial support for democrats is like at its lowest point in recent memory oh i wonder why yeah yeah millennial here it's because they don't do anything it's because

they say they're going to do a number of very popular things and then do not do them but also again the people who gerrymandered all these districts, and as a general rule, the data we have on how midterms seem to go, all factors in the fact that young people don't vote. So the fact that the Democrats are worse than normal with youth may not actually have a huge impact on the midterms at this state, especially again, there's not as many, at least based on the polling we have, which is, again, imperfect, doesn't seem like there's a tremendous amount of super competitive districts.

No, and it does seem to be the the group of people that will be the most interesting deciding factor right now is boomer women seems to be the ones that are actually going after. I don't like that, Garrison. I don't like that boomers are allowed to vote. Get them out of there. Get them out of there. On that note, should we take a quick little Addy break? You know who else doesn't want you to vote?

That is true, Garrison. It's the Washington State Patrol. The oligarchs who support this podcast. Oh, God. We're back, and we're again talking about the elections in the south side of Chicago, and there's a lot of reasons to wonder how this is going to go, and I just want to point out

that Leroy Brown keeps a.32 gun in his pocket for fun and a razor in his shoe, which should be factored in when you're thinking about how things might go down on election day. Thank you for that for that critical analysis from Robert Evans. Yeah, really, really on the cusp there. Thank you.

Yeah, it's we are we are we are lucky to have such an academic mind on the pod. I say that a lot, but I'm glad someone else is finally. mind on the pod i say that a lot but i'm glad someone else is finally uh should we talk uh senate senate seats that are potentially going to flip even though garrison doesn't want to yeah i read the article and i didn't i found it kind of boring and i didn't find them to say anything super interesting um but yes we can uh so one of the one of the ones we got here is in Pennsylvania. Is that the one that's open? It is the one that is open. So yeah, this is the seat

opened up when the Republican Senator Pat Toominy, good for him for having a funny name, announced that he would not be having he would not be running for re-election. So yeah yeah there's the lieutenant governor is is is running in the democratic primary and raising a good good deal of money um that's cool yeah it's uh it's uh yeah it's uh uh trump has uh trump has uh has uh has

has stepped in uh to to fight fight between the two candidates, which we have David McCormick, which is a former hedge fund manager, and his Republican opposer is a friend of the pod, Dr. Mehmet Oz. Oh, good! Oh, yeah! I love that I have

to care about a fight between Dr. Oz and a hedge fund manager. American Democracy Group. Awesome. Cool. and do you want to guess who trump endorsed between the hedge fund minister and the and the good doctor it's gotta be dr oz yes of course it is they let dr oz speak at cpac yeah yes so immediate immediate endorsement because the hedge fund guy specifically went to Mar-a-Lago to help get Trump's support. And then Trump endorsed her good doctor. Was he like, hey, what's your TV ratings? I don't know.

You don't have a TV, like you were not. Oh, no, no, no. Donald Trump is not a dumb man. He's just a very focused one. And the only thing he is focused on is the same thing that Dr. Oz is good at, which is getting attention. Yeah. So, yeah, it's seemed to be kind of a toss up between these two Republican candidates. Both are both are pretty wealthy.

Both are spending millions and millions and millions of dollars. Um, and it's, it's, it is, it is expected to be the most expensive, uh, race in the whole country because of the hedge fund guy,

because of Dr. Oz. And then the, the, then the, the one Democrat Lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, um,

who seems to, who is raising a lot of money for, uh, on, on, on the, for the, from the Democratic establishment.

So yeah. That's the metalhead, right? I don't know. I don't know. I want to talk about Ohio for a second because there's been some stuff out of there that sucks. Because it is also open. Yeah, so it's open. And the guy who's running on the Democratic side is Tim Ryan,

who's like a weirdo and has sort of been on the right wing of the Democratic Party for a long time. So Tim Ryan's doing this, it's being called economic populism thing. Oh, boy. Okay, yeah, it's fun. So let's read a quote.

Let's get my Huey Long shirt out of the... So let's read some Ryan quotes. China, it's definitely China. One word, China. It's us versus China. So this is... His campaign basically is... What a lyrical genius. What are you talking about? I mean, I

gotta say, it seems very hinged for one thing super hinged it's an interesting thing because it's like okay so he's trying to do the like ah we're gonna we're gonna do economic populism we're talking about how china is like uh taking jobs away from the rust belt but it's also funny because like he's against medicare for all like so am i so like he's like he's like not like a he's not actually like like like on the left in any serious way. There's this whole thing like he's running against NAFTA, which is interesting because in terms of economic populism, Obama did run on that. Obama ran on being against NAFTA, and this is part of how he just absolutely clobbered John McCain.

But the Democrats will literally never do anything about that. But there's this whole there's there's there's this whole sort of factor here where ryan's big thing is he's anti-china he's and he's anti-china he he he tried to be the house speaker multiple times yeah yeah and there's just you know the thing that's interesting about it is is it so he's getting a lot of support for the like so asian american groups in ohio were like hey what the fuck are you doing and he was just like i yeah i don't care um and just kept doing it and and it's interesting because there's this sort of like he's getting a lot of support from like republicans for this like you'll you'll there's been a lot of columns from sort of like republican columnists who are like well i'm pro free trade but also like this whole opposing china thing is good and i think it's there's

an interesting dynamic going on here where you have this like this is a very very old tradition in in american i guess you could call it american labor of there being this kind of like well okay so the solution to all of our economic problems is that China is taking our jobs away. I mean, like you can see this like literally in the 1800s, this was happening. And you know, what happened in the 1800s was that I,

they ethnically cleansed the entire West coast. And like most of the, the Sunbelt States. Yeah. So like that, yeah. You know, a lot of states are just mining going on.

Yeah. This is like, they just like ethnically cleanse all the Asian people out. And you know, this is, I think worrying in a lot of ways. The Democrats so far haven't really gone as hard on this as they were going in 2020. But this kind of stuff gets really, really bad really quickly.

And the worst of the anti-asian violence has been largely coronavirus stuff but like if you go back to the 80s when this exact same thing was happening with japan that got really really bad very quickly people got murdered um yeah a lot of michael crichton books were written with plots that are very racist now in retrospect. Yep, yep. And, you know, and I think it's important to remind people that, like, you know, like, yeah, there were a lot of jobs that got moved from the US to China, and that happened because corporations were trying to find a, you know, like, this is the thing that corporations did,

not, like, the Chinese people. And the other part of the reason it happened was that the Chinese government fucking murdered, like, literally like literally like just machine guns a bunch of trade unionists outside of tiananmen and you know that like that that had the effect of shattering whatever was sort of left of the chinese work of organization the chinese working class and so the factory worker in china who is making like if they're lucky maybe like sixteen thousand dollars a year is not your enemy uh despite what fucking tim ryan and all these assholes are are trying to tell you it's that's just it's it's it's not true and the reason they're doing this is because they're

trying to get you to not look at the people who are actually fucking stealing all of your money. He also seems pretty pro-cop. Yeah, he sucks. Oh, the Democrats are all pro-cop now. We have completely turned around on that one. They were only anti-cop for 11 minutes in 2020, when everyone was scared that things were going to go Minneapolis in a lot more places. Yeah, and that 11 minutes was when Nancy Pelosi was kneeling.

That 11 minutes ruled, though. Not that part of it, but a lot of parts of it. That part keeps me up at night. You guys remember when the CEO of Target had to come out and be like, it's cool if people leave Target?

Yes, I love that. That was maybe the peak. I will say this. If you want that back you can do it again you just have to burn a bunch of police stations and riot and loot things so yeah

we can go back to Molotovs that's a thing that could happen it could happen here that is the bit I hope that Georgia doesn't flip yeah let's talk about's let's talk about let's talk about let's talk about georgia um let's talk about georgia because yeah we got uh rafael uh

that's what i said yeah is running for his first full term after winning the special election uh last year um so yeah he's obviously trying to trying to like since since Biden barely, barely won Georgia in the in the last election, trying to kind of ride off of that that energy. But Biden's approval, like everywhere nationally, but in Georgia, his approval has taken quite the nosedive with like only like 33 percent, they approve of Biden's performance on the job. Um, and then on the, uh, on the Republican side, we got the guy leading the race is a formal,

uh, former NFL running back, uh, Herschel Walker. Um, so he, he has, he has,

he has Trump's endorsement. Um, so he's trying to, trying to run off that, but he's, he's pretty new. So it's kind of, to run off that. But he's he's pretty new. So it's kind of he's on. He's more he's more. He's it's unclear because he doesn't have a lot of political background.

So who knows what's going to what's going to what's going to happen there? Well, and it's also one of the reasons why Warnock won in 2020 is that while, as has been shown, people in his district aren't big fans of Biden, they just really were tired of Donald Trump. So it is kind of a question as to like, well, what is the degree to which a Trump endorsement is going to matter a ton in this? Because the fact that they're now don't like Biden very much does not necessarily mean they're less exhausted at the thought of a Trump type guy coming in again. So another another another race that's open is actually North Carolina, which is which which is intriguing. So that's why? Well, North Carolina has always had a pretty reasonably prominent left. Like it gets kind of like lumped in by Democrats as like a right wing state, but it's not. I mean, there's certainly strong elements of that.

There's a lot going on in North Carolina. Yeah. I mean, the person that they're trying to run is Cherry Beasley, which is the first black woman to serve as a chief justice on the state Supreme Court. black woman to serve as a chief justice on the state supreme court um so she will probably win the primary republicans are still uh flip-flopping between their trump backed candidate um and the former governor uh pat mccrory um so it's that's that's still that's still kind of retiring is it is it uh burr uh yeah richard burr is retiring by republican richard burr so yeah it seems like republicans don't really think uh cherry beasley is going to be much of a threat um and again biden's approving is also nose diving at around 40 percent um so it's it's the democrats they can just hopefully

hopefully wish that there's because of the vote is so split on the on the republican side if they can stoke stoke stoke divisions there and just coast by but they don't seem to be doing much much work in north carolina actually in terms of trying to like gain ground so yeah yeah yeah it's because again like the primary is going to be in may so it's there's there's enough time to get support behind one republican candidate so yeah let's see i don't i think that's all of the ones that are open races uh but we also got more more stuff like in like a nevada wisconsin arizona florida fucking florida but i oh yeah flow rider won a 22nd in the eurovision awards representing san moreno back in 2021 it's rubio seat that it is rubio yes oh that would be so that would be so fun i would

like i do enjoy the thought of bad things happening tomorrow oh that would be so fun yeah currently rubio is leading in the polls but it's not it's not uh it isn't above 50 it is so it is it's it's pretty it's still it's close but i i've i'm not gonna get let down by Florida. I refuse. You can't. You can't. Never expect good things from Florida or Texas. Or Texas. Yeah. That is the general rule.

And never count out North Carolina. Yeah, sure. But as a Texan, do count out Texas. Look, if it happens and it's good, that'll be lovely. But don't hinge your mental health on it. Well, do you know what you should hinge your mental health on? The products and services that support this podcast? That is right, Robert.

You got it. That is a little bit too literal to our major advertiser, Garrison. That's why I did it. I also hope Rubio gets kicked,ie oh welcome back we're talking about uh the thing i was just gonna make threats of violence against a sitting representative but that is one of our favorite things isn't that is one of our favorite things that's why we're launching a new podcast the actionable threats against congressmen cast do we know anything about the person who is running against rubio do they have a chance do they have a chance that is a good question so probably not

but because you can't rely on florida as we previously discussed but val val uh val demings is is uh is is waging the fight against Rubio. And it looks like the funding is actually pretty similar in terms of both having around $20 million in funding. But there is a lot of other Democratic challengers. But De Devings is the one that's going to do it. But there's a shocking amount of others. There's still other millions of dollars getting spent on other challengers,

which are not going to succeed. Again, great, great, great way to do democracy. Yeah, we really have it locked down. It is cool that Santa Claus is running for governor of Alaska. And they have a first-past-the-post system. I think he's running for governor, yeah. Santa Claus is.

Yeah, there's a guy who's the mayor of the North Pole, which is a town in Alaska, who legally changed his name to Santa Claus. That's funny. He's a big Bernie supporter. Okay, that's pretty rad. It is pretty dope. Because I know Santa Claus has been doing more acting recently,

so it's good to see him. Yes. I mean, I can't wait to see the new crash more film i mean i'm pretty excited about that as well vote for santa vote for dunleavy vote for santa yeah so what do we what do we what do we other thing i wanted to mention is that um is that in terms of like you know the other recurring bit we've been having is people thinking that elections aren't actually real. A fun bit. So we have only 47% of Republicans are confident that the midterms will be conducted fairly and accurately. So that's less than half.

You know what that is, is a recipe for stability. That's less than half compared to 76% of Democrats who think they'll be fair and accurate. Um, yeah, but also it's not going to be a problem. Also, uh, Republicans are more sure that everyone who wants to vote will be able to, they just don't think the votes will be counted. But they think everyone who has access to voting is can do it easily whereas democrats say that voting access is more of an issue that actually could impact elections um which is you know if you actually

look at stuff is actually true um well yes yeah it's uh we have one of the like the fact that our elections are ran by volunteers is like one of the most absolutely batshit things on earth yeah it's it's low-key and existential threat to everybody listening to this yeah and i mean it's you know and this is one of the things i would say about sort of electoralism is like every single okay you probably won't hear about it that much this year because it's not a presidential election but every single single time. There's an actual presidential election. There's a bunch of stories. About how a bunch of people waited in lines.

For fucking seven hours. Because there weren't enough stations. They didn't set them up in the right places. And nothing ever. Literally will ever be done about this. This has been like. I remember stories about this. When I was like 10.

And it will never change. Nothing will ever be done about it. Every single time it it happens people say that they're going to do stuff about it and they don't and uh yeah so that's that's fun uh the elections are kind of pre-rigged already for other fun kind of statty things to help with to help with like trying to you know get the temperature of the room so about uh half of white voters, 51%, say that they would vote for a Republican candidate. 37% say that they would vote Democrat. I know I mentioned this briefly, but 52% of women aged 15 and up say that the economy is not working well, and that's going to strongly impact their electoral choices.

And this is what a lot of people are kind of looking towards in terms of indications of how they're going to vote and how results could be in in the end is like uh you know older older women who are gen x and uh and um and boomer women are seem to be kind of the people to go after at the moment um so yeah 50 52 say that they don't like the economy and it's not working well that's up from 70 sorry that's up from 37 in 2019 um and it's most of it's around like a day most of it's around like day-to-day budgets uh so that's that's that's good that's uh that's an interesting thing in terms of how propaganda can be shifted around that.

We know we've even seen that around the war in Ukraine with gas prices and stuff. We have, in terms of back to how kind of looking at people, what race is generally trending towards what thing. Yeah, so over half say they do Republicans, about a third say they vote for Democrats if they are white. On contrast, we got like a larger majority of black voters, 72% saying that they prefer the Democratic candidates, 7% prefer Republican. Asian voters prefer Democrat over Republican from about like a two to one ratio, which a seven sixty percent to thirty percent and hispanic voters also favored democrats at about fifty fifty percent while republicans have about twenty eight percent um and the other interesting another interesting stat pulled from uh pew research center is that uh seventy percent of republicans agree that party control of of of the house and senate

is the important factor but only 60 of democrats believe that so that means 40 of democrats don't think that the house and senate's important um which is a little wacky which is also uh down from seven points because uh uh in 2018 during in the same in this under the same question 67 of democrats said that they valued uh house uh house and senate control so that is so that that is down by almost 10 uh meanwhile the republican percentage points of that question have has turned it upwards which makes sense because of you know whoever's affecting who's ever in the uh executive branch will will say oh yeah it's less important for the house and senate right so yeah what also trump say it's it's less important for the house and senate right so

say it's it's less important now to them it's more important you know and i also think with the democrats there's an angle of this which is like okay so we gave them power for two years and they did kind of nothing yeah like boy it feels like nothing like Well, actually, that's not true. They gave police more money. They gave the Pentagon lots and lots more money. The most amount of money ever. Largest ice budget ever. Largest ice budget. With global warming, we're going to need more ice, y'all.

Like, come on. Come on. Uh-huh. I'm sure. That was it. That was the joke. That's the joke. Temperature joke. Yes, I understand. That's the joke. Temperature joke.

Yes, I understand. It's also a climate refugee joke, though. Oh, double. Double meanings. That's what we call a double entendre. Yeah, that's how you pronounce the French, Garrison. But yeah, it's only 17% of female voters age 15 and older have decided who they're going to vote for in November. So that is wacky.

Well, with so many good choices, how could they not know? So yeah, they're really trying to pull from there. And where do women over 50 spend a lot of time on, typically? Facebook.com. So yeah, Facebook and the GOP are really trying to do a lot of stuff to influence elections right now, as we detailed in our last episode around Facebook and the GOP funding all of the anti-TikTok stuff and funding all the pro-Facebook stuff. They really want people to be on Facebook because it turns out that's how they spread their propaganda the best. Um, and yeah, specifically with women age over 50, that's like the prime demographic for Facebook. So neat. Uh, yeah. Anyway, that is a, that is a lot of the,

uh, a lot of the election notes that I had because again, I keep up with all of the electoralisms basically every day. I wake up every morning. I go to that one polling website and I You text me just the word vote every single morning.

Tell the truth, you're secretly a pollster. Here's what's weird, always using a different phone. Tell the truth, you're secretly a pollster. Never the same, always using a different phone. Tell the truth. You're secretly a pollster. Never the same number twice. Tell us. Tell us the truth. Well, it's not that they're a pollster.

It's that one day Nate Silver woke up with a splitting headache and Garrison leapt fully formed out of a hole in the side of his skull. But yeah, I mean, in terms of all of like the anti-trans stuff, that it's actually worth focusing on. Obviously, the ICE stuff is really, really depressing in terms of Biden getting in office and giving ICE millions and millions of more dollars. You're like, great. But, you know, it seems like if more Democrats are in office right now, it seems like that will make life slightly easier for trans people. So that's cool. That will make life slightly easier for trans people.

So that's cool. It's the thing you always have to accept with our democracy, which is that it's foolish to say that the elections don't matter because they do. Because, for example, price caps on insulin or not passing more laws to make life a nightmare for trans people really does matter. But certain horrible things like the continued dominance of extractive industries that are pushing us towards climate disaster or the expansion of the carceral state and militarized policing in many different forms and the militarization of the border, that's going to keep right on trucking no matter who's in charge. And the elections don't matter for that. So far. Maybe someday they will, but I'd have to see it happen you know i do it's possible i do got good news for you though is that the white house is launching a new tiktok campaign and it already has a hundred followers after like why don't you why don't you refresh that tiktok airs and let's see how much they've gained since

we started this episode i want to see what they're up to give me give me a second because i'm curious if i've gained more followers on twitter than they have on tiktok at this period of time i'm checking i'm checking i'm checking all right here we go i'm gonna do it um the the account is called building back together so already pretty catchy um how do they keep making these phrases worse i know they cannot oh they are actually up since so the the last news article i looked at they had 94 followers now they're up to a thousand and eight hundred oh okay so no the things are going better garrison i you owe Joe Biden an apology. I think we got this. I think we got it.

This is a good sign. Anyway. I mean, there's a good, there's an article about the millennial whisperer or something like, oh wait, no, sorry. It's Dim's turn to Gen Z whisperer to show her up support. An article from a day ago from real clear politics um that that's that's that's that's fun you know what you know what biden has to do biden has to get mr beast on the job and start making those videos politico and then i think i think i think i think we'll have this one in the bag

um yeah i mean garrison just based on my knowledge of you, the main thing that Joseph Biden could do to prop up Gen Z support is to just start airdropping hormones to whoever wants them. I think airdropped hormones and airdropped money would be the way to go. You could appeal to the right by giving them HGH. There's a lot of options here. Like it doesn't have to be just one. Everybody likes some kind of hormone,

you know, hormones for all hormones for all steroids and estrogen for everybody. Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like in terms of things that Biden could do to actually gain, to actually get stuff to do,

get to like get enough support is that he can start doing executive orders that actually do are, that actually are helpful. Um, he could, we could, we could, they could really start rallying around the marijuana legalization bill.

Um, like they like, Hey, if you vote for, uh, Democrats in the Senate, we can pass this thing, but we need to have more Democrats in the Senate.

Like they could do that. They could campaign. They could actually do things, but they're not he could he could he could order the dea to reschedule cannabis that is a thing that the president can do um he can do more stimulus checks he can do a whole bunch of stuff he could forgive a bunch of student loan that just honestly making tangible progress on federal decriminalization of marijuana and forgiving a bunch of student debt uh in the time left before the midterms would be enough that it would be a lot harder for people to say joe biden didn't do

anything yep there is ways to counter the arguments people are going to make so and they're they're showing and by god some of them are easy. Pot is a real free space. Most of my family are like super right wing, and absolutely none of them support marijuana being illegal anymore. Most of them now smoke pot. Like, you can make this happen, Joe. Unfortunately, the president of the United States is the man who wrote Plan Colombia. Oopsie doopsie. Oh, just parts of it come on he claimed responsibility for all of it he sure did

he really did no one talked about it it's super funny um so not about all the deaths because a lot of people died but so that is our that's our little rundown on the midterms as it stands in this moment there still is primaries happening um obviously stuff's gonna keep going but yeah if if if if if if the democrats actually want to stay in office which i'm not sure if they actually do but if but if they do they could actually just start doing things um things that are not hard that would that would uh that would you know, if you want young people to vote for you, maybe you could give them drugs, whether that be estrogen or weed.

That might make them excited. Joe Biden's famous saying, vote out with your scrotes out. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast do the thing the thing it could happen here a podcast i know it's it's sure it's sure trying to happen isn't it they're really it's doing its best you know they're really going for it uh what is you know that that thing by yates some great beasts slouching to be born time of monsters all that good stuff that's what's going on here with it could happen here it's a podcast garrison hi how are we doing so we're talking about uh the still ongoing and probably, well, seemingly never ending, hopefully it'll end eventually. Maybe hold up on that one, Garrison. The escalating war on trans people. Yeah. And we've brought on some people who have been working to organize against the kind of wave of bills and rhetoric and legislation targeting trans healthcare, targeting the existence of trans people in general.

We're talking to Kat and Ada Rhodes from Tear It Up, a newer organization dedicated to specifically fighting against these new bills. Hello! Hey, friends! I'm glad to be here. Yes, thank you so much. We've been

talking for a bit because of how these bills have been also a thing for a bit. We initially met up for Trans Day of Visibility. I tagged along to go to a protest in Idaho. And then we got on Trans Day of Visibility, we cooked up plans to sit down and have this chat. So it is a little bit late but

hey it's it doesn't it maybe we can have more than one day maybe that's a good idea well we've got day remembrance too so yeah well hopefully we can have more than two days and one of them not be just sad um yeah timely too because you know they're still attacking Oh did they not Did they not stop Nope nope our visibility did not in fact scare them back Into their caves I think this is why we need a trans day of one free murder I love this plan

Yeah Really solve a few problems Well That's a great note to I mean mean look caitlin jenner already used hers jesus christ all right that's gonna be my contribution for the day wow this is uh this is gonna really really convince all of the all of the on the edge libs who are somehow listening to this yeah they stumbled upon it trying to find a recipe they thought it was tear like a scale and they were like i was trying to work my baking scale

what if i stumbled upon measure 100 grams of lentils and then arm all your local trans women i would like to make a very very trans cooking video in the style of david lynch's uh keen my video of but that is that is a deep cut for all of the lynch heads out there as uh lynch fans call themselves anyway we're talking about all of all of uh all the bills talking talking about all of the rhetoric that we've seen been specifically increasing the past week as of recording, probably past maybe a week or two as of time of release. They're really going for it, for trying to get people to do just violence against people who don't look like how they want them to look. And that's basically what they're trying to do just violence against people who don't look like how they want them to look.

And that's basically what they're trying to do. And we're going to talk on a variety of topics. We're going to unfortunately discuss the groomer thing. We'll talk about all the bills that have and haven't passed and different ways that we can kind of stand up against this thing that's really trying to take a hold. I guess I would like to start by discussing the origin of Tear It Up and what happened to...

I mean, obviously, we know what happened to cause this thing to be prompted. But yeah, what was the specific process of being like, okay, all these things are happening. Let's actually get a group of people together to organize this thing across the country. Yeah. Um, I guess I can talk about that. Uh, so tear it up actually grew pretty directly out of a previous group called trot in Texas, which is the trans resistance of Texas, which started last year during their legislative session, and then really started to grow during the special sessions in response to this constant

line of attack, and realizing that the techniques and the strategies being employed by a lot of the existing more liberal-leaning groups were really focused on like backroom conversations and deals and using like procedure to defeat things instead of actually like mobilizing people against anti-trans state violence um and uh from there we started to adopt things like louder more obnoxious protests a lot of stickering firing posters um and then this year uh i so i originally started trot but i moved across the country and i was like well shit things are just getting worse everywhere um and i have a lot of friends all over the country from living in portland New York and Texas and Colorado and now the Midwest and reached out to sort of pull together a bunch of humans that I knew would be willing to fight back and to try and experiment with methods that we can pick up from our predecessors like ACT UP and bring more attention and mobilize people more towards taking

direct action instead of relying on these backroom lobbying groups. I don't think really give a fuck about trans people, but love to use a tax on us to raise money. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a number of number of examples we could point to, but I think we could be more productive and just talk about uh you guys

instead um yeah so yeah i really the the the transnational thing is really a interesting point how it's like i know for trans day visibility there was organ there was a organized kind of die-ins and protests all across the country to happen at the same day. Obviously, there was one in Idaho, which I was lucky enough to join in on. And yeah, but there was a lot of them. And I guess, yeah, on the lead up to, as all of these bills are escalating, As all of these bills are escalating, and then there was the whole wave of organizing against trans people for the so-called detransition day, which is really unfortunate because there actually would be a great discussion to be had there on people who choose to not continue on with transition. But it's been so used by TERFs and the gender critical movement that it's now just like, it's just, it's just another day for more transphobia, which is really unfortunate. But we had that happening at the same time as all of,

of all of these bills. And then we're like, okay, so what, what, what was, what was kind of the stuff that prompted all of the, the die-ins and how are you like talking with people in all the,

in all the different States to kind of organize this thing together, but still also like separately for each location. One of the points that I'd like to come back to, like, we're going to talk a little bit more about the details of the, you know, some of the specific legislation that has passed successfully into law and some of the other legislation that has not been able to pass into law. And, you know, we're drawing a contrast between ourselves and some of, Tear It Up is drawing a contrast between itself and some of these more, you know, we're drawing a contrast between ourselves and some of, tear it up is drawing a contrast between itself and some of these more, you know, institutionalist liberal organizations. Not because that they, not because they can't succeed in their stated goals sometimes, right? Like the ACLU will sue on some of these

things. And the result of those lawsuits may be something worth celebrating. What's happening in Texas right now is a great example of that. But that said, we can acknowledge that these more institutionalized tactics can lead to, it's a better outcome that these laws do not succeed, obviously. But there's the impacts of this legislation and the discussion around this legislation is so much bigger and so much more profound than any of these individual laws, you know, specifically looking at them in terms of their like material impact on

people's lives, which are already abysmally fucking awful. But like the, what the, the place that teared up is looking to kind of champion is the kind of hell raising that like enables us to empower each other, that enables us to be visible in a way that shows people on the ground all across the country that like, that we are not just a minority to be destroyed and ignored, that we're going to fight for ourselves, we're going to fight for each other, we're going to fight for our kids, we're going to fight for our families, and we're going to fight for our rights. And we're going to do it loud and as

ugly as we need to in order to make sure that trans pain is visible. Yeah, and building on that, when we look at the start of last month, March, or I guess late February, I think Texas was really kind of the flashpoint in a lot of the country on this, where we had a lot of these bills sort of boiling. where we had a lot of these bills sort of boiling. I believe there were around 70 active at that point. We're now down to like the high 60s. So that's better. But that was really where stuff started to boil over on this. And we looked around and saw that the fight needed to focus on trans survival more than just the bills. saw that the fight needed to focus on trans survival more than just the bills.

And the bills are important to defeat because they're things trying to exterminate us. There's things that are trying to take families apart to take away the things that are helping people stay alive and to remove trans people from accessing public life. And that's going to really ruin a lot of humans but we need to not just look at that individual fight and remember we're fighting for survival and we're fighting for each other and trans people as a community we've always had to kind of rely on each other via various means be it like Susan's Place or like go back to like transvestite even and like these systems that weren't necessarily always and these forms of communication that weren't always focused on um necessarily legal wins in the more traditional sense and more just like forming community even if those communities weren't necessarily great in the case of like transvestite and like some of those much more respectable leaning groups.

Could you talk a little bit about what transvestite and Susan's Place work? Because I'm going to guess a lot of people listening are not going to be super familiar with that history. I kind of am only casually heard anything about it. Yeah. So I'm a bit of a uh queer history nerd um and you can learn a lot about this actually i have um can i plug my podcast oh please absolutely what we would like to do is provide people with an ability to learn more about this kind of stuff so yeah please yeah so i'm part of the um totally trans podcast network um it's you can find us on twitter at

like totally trans pod um but we talk a lot about trans and queer history through the lens of like looking at it through pop culture and reading stuff into like the little mermaid and things um so we go in a lot about virginia prince and transvestite in there because i'm kind of obsessed with this human from the 1960s who is like the first twitter trans girl um she was very problematic super racist and classist and her argument was um she led to a lot of 20th century confusion by saying uh that there's like heterosexual transvestites which are what we would now just call like trans lesbians and then like the homosexual transsexual which is now what we would call straight uh trans folks and that uh the homosexual transsexuals are bad and should be shunned but the heterosexual transvestite should maintain all of her previous

privileges uh and she put out this magazine called transvestia she famously also got in trouble for sending nudes in the mail to another trans girl across the country wow um yeah fascinating historical figure who kind of i mean ahead of the curve historically in terms of sending nudes that's that's groundbreaking groundbreaking with stuff but um transvestia though uh did have this big cultural impact on sort of being an early trans zine. Shortly after it, we started to see drag, which, um, was much more focused on like the homosexual, transsexual and, um, more like sexually liberated takes through like the

seventies. And then later, um, my favorite zine, like gender trashash from Hell, which was out of Toronto in like the 90s and was very confrontational about trans rights. So we sort of exist in this larger history where we're looking at how trans community has survived and formed and learning from things like STAR, which was the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries out of New York with Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, as well as ACT UP and HIV activism. And we're trying to take what we can learn from our ancestors and apply it to our current survival and play with it a little bit and update some of their tactics because I don't think traditional

non-violent protests the way it existed in the past gets attention anymore. I think we need to figure out ways to be louder about it. And I'm personally a devout pacifist. Other people aren't, and that's a-okay. I'm a good Quaker girl. But we need to be seen. We need our lives to be seen. And we need our value as humans to be seen. So that we can love ourselves and each other enough to survive this horrible shit that's going to continue happening to us over the next couple years. Yeah. I want to piggyback on that with one thought.

You were talking about this history of trans people drawing together to take care of each other. terrifying, awful, and occasionally super funny in its incredible stupidity, um, things that she's claiming in this video are that like trans people are basically like the, you know, the barbarian hordes that have come to destroy Western civilization. And she's, you know, she says with a straight face, like, you know, the, the late Rome and modern America are very similar. The late Rome and modern America are very similar. Yes. Both of us rely heavily on Varangian mercenaries in order to maintain the sanctity of our borders. I always wanted to be a wizard, but I guess I'm a barbarian.

But I bring that up because there is this impression of trans power that like trans people, that is a result of our increased visibility you know like what the media called 2014 the transgender tipping point because suddenly people were like oh i guess laverne cox gets to exist but like uh with this increased visibility is this impression that we have this like incredible magical cosmic powers to seduce your people and ruin your civilization or whatever. And like, actually, like when I, so I came out in 2004, I'm 35. And like, I never imagined a world where we could even get healthcare covered. When I was like, I was like a kid organizing with Camp Trans out in the woods of Michigan.

And like, I knew people who got orchiectomies in barns. I, every single trans woman I knew, everything that they knew about how to get hormones and manage their own transition and endocrine system, they learned from message boards.

It was the only collective knowledge and existence that was accessible to people. Because if you went to your doctor, unless you lived in San Francisco or New York and were particularly well- particularly well connected the response you were going to get is i don't know are you a demon right yeah no absolutely that's the one thing i found it um really insightful talking to the older trans people that i know because i'm like you know i'm a gen z gender queer person on hormones and it's very different because when i've been talking to

the my my transgender uh friends who are older it's like yeah all of these bills are just are a reaction to the increased visibility and increased well-being of trans people right it's putting it's putting things that used to be kind of just like unspoken or like obvious bigotry it's putting now that that's actually progressing, it's now putting that old bigotry into actual law because they're like, oh no, we don't want things to progress further. So it's a purposeful sliding back. So it's just like, for a lot of people who are older,

it doesn't even seem that new. It's resurfacing the things that were used to be normalized are now becoming more obviously bigoted, but they're putting that bigotry into actual law um and that's the yeah that's the kind of interesting point is because for there's a whole bunch of people who believe that like the transgenderisms and the gender ideology is like a point of power it's like because it's affiliated with the left um and the left is seen as like the power it's it's then like it therefore you're actually punching up on it which is of course entirely backward it's like that none of that if you have any political analysis you'll

know like oh that's not how anything works but yeah these people in in their minds they think they're actually pushing up against like the like the powerful forces of transgenderism and you're like no we're just like punks who are poor who are trying to who are trying to get our home on injections like leave us alone i can't remember if it was like tom cotton or matt gates yeah yeah yeah one of one of those guys one of the like pentagon guys right being like uh yelling at him because you know our military is being destroyed because somebody took a class about like respecting someone's pronouns and the guy's response is like we can obliterate any target on the entire planet with no effort like what the fuck are you talking about uh-huh there's there's that great there's that horrible great

tweet about the person that runs that um 4chan account who is this trans person who is a war criminal because they sell weapons. Yes, yeah. It was a wonderful tweet from a few days ago. Famously, a lot of companies in the arms industry like Raytheon have a great reputation for hiring trans people because all Raytheon cares about is you can code a missile guidance chip. That's all that matters to Raytheon. They're very woke. Yeah, but it is intriguing to watch these people really justify their transphobia as a form of fighting against the system because they've somehow affiliated being trans with the Democratic Party, therefore it's affiliated with the establishment,

therefore it's actually this force of power, which none of that's true, but that propaganda is shown to be very effective. The people seem really convinced by that. It's a story that's easy to glom onto, and as long as we have a story that we can glom onto, then it doesn't matter what's true or not it's it's all of the stories are what's actually true

um so yeah that is an intriguing an intriguing point in terms of how yeah how how it's how stuff has changed from like transphobia 10 years ago versus transphobia now how that's resurfacing some things that used to be

they used to just take shape in a slightly different form well and so Kat's experiences in 2004 if you fast forward a decade because I'm a little younger than Kat not a lot younger than Kat around like 2014-2015 when I was trying to get on hormones we also had like rle the kiddos these days know what that was the real so it's real life experience yeah um which is uh

basically having to socially transition and come out and uh do all of this under the care of a therapist and a physician for between six months and a couple of years before they'll allow you to access hormones. Okay. And that was kind of like the stepping stone between the previous experiments where it was just like DIY or nothing. Yeah. Or impossible gatekeeping.

And then now where there's like more informed consent consent model, which is what I, which is what I do now. Yeah. Or impossible gatekeeping. And then now where there's like more informed consent, consent model, which is what I, which is what I do now. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of these laws are just kind of reiterating that weight that comes from a really like flawed place.

Like that weight didn't in any way benefit anyone. It's really, place like that we didn't in any way benefit anyone it's really it's just torturing people and trying to kind of like um like beat the tranny out of you uh make you go to the mall presenting as a woman while you feel incredibly awkward and get yelled at by some guy for like trying to buy shoes and he's like yeah right yeah like if if you're a nine-year-old who is experiencing precocious puberty it is completely acceptable and no one is going to question whether or not um you know prescribing puberty blockers to just make make like to make it so that you can experience puberty at what feels like a more appropriate developmental age uh cis people politicians

the right wing generally people agree that that is an acceptable practice but to use that same practice in order to help a trans child not die uh that is a sin against god and uh leading to the decline of western civilization yeah we wish. Whatever people are like, yeah, like trans people are leading in this degeneracy that's going to bring down Western civilization. You're like, oh, wow,

that sure does sound cool. For me, hormones worked so quickly. And I would admit having to live through like a year of trying to present in specific ways while not on hormones sounds like complete hell because it it is i was very surprised at how fast even like mindset things changed um how it is like they're very like hormones are very useful and very interesting and

how they and how they affect changes and being forced to i guess as the the term now is like boy moding or girl moding this girl-moding. This is what the Zoomer kids call whenever they have to almost like code switch gender. Having to present in the way that you want to without these systems of hormones for a while to even be allowed to have hormones, as me, a Zoomer zoomer now sounds like horrible it's literally dangerous like it's actually an incredibly dangerous thing to put people like experience to put people into and i think that like the that kind of gatekeeping uh you start looking at it through a more intersectional lens and like who is it hurting the most it's hurting people who don't have a

shit ton of money to like re get an entirely new wardrobe that people who um you know people of color who are more likely to be targets of violence if they're more obviously visible and red is trans yep well and it really artificially diminished the number of trans people and just gender variance in general um something that's been really interesting to watch is someone who kind of went into the pandemic as like a trans elder doing a lot of community work is uh the core in trans as a thing and how much yeah you we give everyone an opportunity to like explore themselves and be introspective for a year and how many people people are like, fuck, I'm a girl. Or like, I'm no gender or I'm every gender. And all of these incredibly beautiful forms of exploration

that couldn't have happened if they had to go through that in like their normal social situations. If you just gave them an excuse to like do their own thing for six months. And yeah, RLE was a good way to keep people from being able to explore. And it's just one way that trans people's bodily autonomy is attacked.

And that's what a lot of these bills come down to as well, is it's the same thing as like anti-abortion or anti-birth control stuff. It's all just about reducing people's bodily autonomy. I mean, yeah, because like if I had to quote unquote live as a girl for a year, I would have just never gotten hormones because I don't want to live as a girl. That's not what I want to even do. And yeah, having all of that gatekeeping, which is part of what they're trying to do, because as much as they hate people who find more comfort inside the gen inside the more like typical gender

roles they also really don't like the people who enjoy being more like overt gender freaks um and like like outside of that it's like so of course they're going to try to clamp down on any anything it's worth noting too just the like there's there are a few different camps um in in in the sort of right-wing response to trans people. One of the things that I've learned over the years, kind of looking at, looking at what the alt-right is up to, you know, what I originally, I really like thought of the whole Republican party, the whole right-wing as like a single cohesive ideological unit. You know, it seemed like they were just able to like get everyone on the same page and then go at

something. And if you look closely, you realize actually it's this huge, ever-evolving coalition of people who mostly hate each other. And if you're clever, you can break people off and disrupt things. There's different movements, different thoughts inside of the way that people are approaching this. And you have a lot of politicians who, they probably never met a trans person. They certainly probably don't have any gay friends. They're just some random suburbanite motherfuckers who know that sacrificing trans kids on the altar of political convenience

will score them points with a radicalized base of bigots. So those people are just cynically hurting trans people because it will score them some you know pretend points uh that will lead to real structural power yes but there is also the evangelical community and a huge amount of the the deepest and scariest fervor against trans people comes out of the evangelical community i was raised vaguely evangelical as as was i, yeah. Yeah. And like when I came out, I was definitely told I was going to hell. Like if you look at the, you look at the, where this, a lot of the incredibly, incredibly like eliminationist

rhetoric is coming from. And that's coming from the evangelical community who are like, it's not just that I think that from a policy perspective, this is like, we need to like retool how we're doing trans healthcare or something. Cause if people wanted to have conversations about how to make the best possible systems, like we want to have that conversation. We can, we can agree to, we can disagree about policy, but their policy is literally trans people are an army of demons who have come to win souls for Satan. And i'm like i'm just trying to refill my prescription on like leave me the fuck alone and it also creates this really interesting looping effect of of politicians who get into anti-trans and like in like all of this kind of like anti-gay

stuff to specifically win elections right we even saw this for like greg abbott doing his um like letters about investigating parents of trans kids, specifically around his primary election. So people definitely do, are still very much getting into this specifically to win elections because they know it's a point that riles up the base. But then you also have people, because that's been going on for so long, you have people who are maybe not necessarily super evangelical, but who grew up around this kind of culture of politicians needing to say these things, who are now, again, even if politicians

didn't really fully agree with it, they needed to do it to get support, but you have people who grew up around that and went into politics around that, who now just do that sincerely, because it was what they were exposed to previously. Now Now we have people like that who are trying to run for office for the first time who are just that extreme. I think

that's even a bit of what the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing is, is like someone who was exposed to extremist stuff online who is now running for office herself and is completely sincere about all the stuff she's doing. Like she is a true believer in the way that some other people like Matt Gates may not even be a true believer. He might just be doing it because it's popular, but you also have the people who are just like fully, fully believe it because it's, it's,

it's influenced culture long enough that it's now a full loop of sincerity. Well, and then specifically the perception of trans people within the religious right specifically has actually shifted so much in the last decade, I guess now. I'm trying to think how old I am. Because I was a student at Baylor University. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Okay, cool, cool. Yeah. I have some family who used to work at Baylor. Oh, boy. I spent a lot of time in and around there. Yeah. Top part of the world. Um,

uh, yeah. Sick. Um, for all of the, the queer ass Baylor bears out there, but, uh,

I became a student in 2010 and I graduated 2014. And, um, being queer was against the rules the whole time I was there. Yeah. Uh, despite me, we came out and started a student group my freshman year.

But I had to face this really weird decision because in high school, I had a lot of gender stuff going on, a lot of sexuality stuff going on. And I described myself as like a queerosexual because I'm like, I'm still figuring it out. Sometimes I'm a girl. Sometimes I'm a boy. I don't know. I'll sort this out in my 20s and then I go to college where I thought I'd sort it out and I was faced with this thing of like you can either be out as queer and but you have to like present as like a cis gay man or uh you can

transition which will be totally acceptable within this culture but you have to go deep stealth and you'll just show up next year as a girl and everyone will be fine with that. And we'll all pretend it didn't happen and that you've always been a girl. And that was like the standard and a lot of the Baylor's very upper crust religious, right? Like very privileged group of people. But was you just kind of go away and we can just for a few months and we just pretend this is how it always was. And now it's much more inquisitional is the wrong word, but it's like hunting trans people down in a much more aggressive way where they can't just kind of

be like, well, God doesn't make trash. Instead. They're like, Oh, God condemns you to hell just very directly. And it's getting worse. And that's why. Tear it up is really important that we like start.

Now, instead of like next fall. Absolutely. Because it's going to be horrible next fall and the spring after that could be disastrous. 2024 is going to be real grim. I would love to talk more about like Tear It Up and how you approach organizing

and what you're kind of hoping to both expand into and the various actions that you have done in the past few weeks. So the first Tear It Up action officially was the 313 rally in Austin, Texas. That was the trans kids cry for help rally where we had a bunch of people on the steps of the governor's mansion speaking and getting loud. And we had a few hundred people show up and that really mobilized a lot of folks in Texas that I know got activated from that and are still going. But while I was running and organizing that with Trot and actually flew down to Texas from Nebraska to do that, the various humans I'd reached out to and I was just like, I don't have time to explain directions right now. We need to organize a die-in by the end of the month.

Here's what I have. I just kind of threw it at them. And they all ran with it. And I think that's the way that we need to approach this right now, because we need to build this big machine, because they've been building the machine against us for years. And to build a machine that can rival that, we kind of need to be much more decentralized and much more agile about how we grow and how we do these actions. Kat, you were one of the first humans I reached out to and I was like yes I would like to make a big trouble what was that like from your side of

things yeah so I keep thinking about this from the perspective of kind of my own political motivation so I've done various kinds of like lefty whatever organizing for for most of my adult life and um in the last like last I guess February end of February or whatever um I think like probably a lot of people especially a lot of trans people I had like a a couple week period of just like totally depressed doom scrolling and then the invasion of Ukraine was happening and it's just like everything was bad all the time um it still feels still feels like everything's bad all the time but um I have stuff to do thanks to Itterodes over here. So like I said, I grew up, I was a child of the 90s. I grew up in a world that I knew was

utterly hostile to my existence. I knew that trans people were like, that to be trans was something deeply shameful and a secret that I either needed to die with or that if I came out, it would like ruin the life of all of my family. Until I eventually, you know, I managed to not die all the way until 18, came out and then found a bunch of incredible queer people and have been alive since then. But I was shaped by that experience, by the experience of needing to survive, knowing that I had this secret all, you know, I knew when I knew in kindergarten, I like, just just knew, with total certainty. And I also knew that it was evil and bad, and that I should be ashamed. And there is a whole couple, there's a generation, there's like a whole generation of kids right now growing up who have you know come out who have been born since 2014 and come out as tiny holy smokes

that is kind of mind-blowing right so there's like a whole and then never mind like kids who weren't born before that but who are in high school now who are coming out and like they have existed in a world where pop culture and the sort of mass culture more generally speaking has like there are trans people on tv and they're not just serial killers or the murder victims in an svu story there's legitimate representation there is you know you have like the you have people in national government and in state government explicitly defending trans people like they have been enculturated to this idea that they have some semblance of rights and that civilization that the civilization they live in doesn't want to smite them out of existence. and those kids are watching this conversation shift, and I don't know what that's like, but I can tell you that I've been motivated by anger to do a lot of things, and I don't know that I've ever been quite as furious in my life as I have been the last couple of months, and so

being drawn towards Tear It Up, to me, is this opportunity to like you know uh i i love the trevor project i'm really glad that they exist i'm really glad that they do the work that they do you know like that there's all these different orgs absolutely who are putting out positive messaging but it's all pretty milk toast you know it's like trans people are cool maybe we should maybe we should give all the we should give all the tender queers a baseball bat. Maybe that would be a more useful thing to do. There needs to be space for like, they're fucking trying to kill you. Hey, 13-year-old, they are coming for you. This world is unsafe.

And I need you to know that you have somewhere to run to. That there are adults in the world who will keep you safe, who will show up for you, who are going to go and raise a bunch of hell, make a bunch of noise, do a graffiti, put up some posters, go and get ourselves in trouble on the steps of the capitals all across the country. So that those kids in high school right now who are feeling like the entire fucking universe is dissolving around them into a bottomless sea of fear and hatred that like there's other people out there if you're in idaho if you're if you were a kid who's growing up in northern idaho like there is other people out there yeah you just have to get free and we're

specifically so our first actions we specifically targeted these states that tend to be ignored by um sort of like the the mainstream liberal media i'm trying to say that without sounding like a wackadoodle but it's fine we're fully past that point great cool uh i have to like be professorial or some shit i don't know we opened this show with a joke about caitlyn chen or kit like somebody that's true we're fine It is true that that happened. Oh, I know. But yeah, the mainstream liberal media doesn't give a fuck about Iowa or Idaho. And frankly, since I've lived all over the country

and been involved in queer activism for over a decade, I have friends all over and a lot of the more higher up folks and established orgs on the coasts and in big cities look at what happens in like iowa and idaho and texas and florida and they're like oh no this is a sign of what's to come and not this affects a quarter of the country it's already happening yeah it's happened

yeah it's not it could happen here it's happened already and we need to fight for these kids desperately because their lives are at risk in so many ways right now. They're legally imperiled. The things that were giving them hope for life are being taken away. And a lot of these laws most affect the kids that have supportive families. But we need to fight for the kids that don't too and make sure that they know that like, we see you in Iowa and we're gonna go do something melodramatic and cover ourselves in fake blood and lay on the steps of the Capitol in the in the state that you live in so you can see that like your feelings are being externalized and hopefully that'll move you to knowing that like other people are going through this too

and hopefully other people will see what's happening and it'll move them to action to protect those kids. And it'll give you a space to start building community and building connections for other trans people and other people in your area who want to help keep you alive. Exactly. And that's really the next step in tear it up is this next month. I want to have us focus a bit more on a little community building and community events, which has always been a big part of my strategy with previous organizing is big loud protests followed by a pizza party.

Or we did a great picnic in Austin after the legislative sessions last year where we had a bunch of people show up and made a lot of good connections. sessions last year where we had a bunch of people show up and made a lot of good connections um we had a lot of the little trans kiddos there and um some photos that were taken there were then used as like the headline like the the cover photos for like all these articles about the kids being attacked uh yeah yeah i think that the we we pulled off our sort of first coordinated national set of actions. The model that we're looking at is groups like ACT UP. So more of a sort of decentralized and national network of folks who are all working together to be sort of power amplifiers, to like share resources, share tools, make sure that, you know, everyone has what they need and has backup in case anything

gets out of hand, wherever they're, whatever state they're in, whatever city they're in. And that coalition building or like the community building part is such a, is such an incredibly important factor. Like I, so I was coordinating, I was working on the event to have happen in Boise. And, you know, one of the major things that I, that I ran into reaching out to all these different organizations is like, I mean, they've been at war for a long time. And they have like, there are literally militia groups hunting anyone who shows up at a BLM rally in Boise. Yep. When I talked to, you know, some of the like executive directors of like,

Yep. When I talked to, you know, some of the like executive directors of like LGBTQ oriented nonprofit in Boise, they were like, hey, I'm really it's really cool that you're doing this. But I we cannot send our kids. We can't participate in this because we don't know you and we don't know what's going to happen. And this is like this. You need to understand that this scene is like not safe. Totally fair. Yeah. So totally fair. And so I think a big part of this next step is, is, is deepening those connections, you know, showing people that like, we will show up. We are accountable. We are looking to be partners for long-term action for long-term struggle.

And one of the things that is really cool about Tear It Up that I didn't expect because I am old. So my networking has always been phone trees and literally just like calling people out and being like, you call these three people and getting people out for actions. For Tear It Up, we have these amazing humans at building like online communities on Discord, which makes me feel simultaneously like 20,000 years old and also like the kids, they're all right. They know how to do the trouble. And we're trying to not just build, do this traditional coalition building that I've been doing for a long time and making all these connections, but trying to build not just like a physical community, but an online community to

stitch these physical communities together. Because if you're in like middle of nowhere, Texas, you can see what's happening in Austin, but you can't always like physically make it there. So it's good to know that like, these are my humans and they're fighting for me and I can be in the loop and get involved. Um, and our long-term strategy with that is to connect people like, um, the Trevor project. We, I love a lot of the humans there actually. And like trans lifeline in these groups, cause they, um, and all these other like national groups that raise a lot of money, but they're actually not allowed to raise a lot of money but they're actually not allowed to raise a lot of trouble because of like their tax status and all these things is like uh the HRC like can't do a trouble because it'll look bad for them and they care about

those sorts of things but we can connect those people with these young activists that want to like go stir up shit and cause trouble and need to like let out that scream. And even if we can't defeat the laws in the moment, letting out that scream is a communal good. It lets people feel seen and it lets people know I need help right now and shouting and crying and a gnashing of teeth and rending of hair and clothes is objectively good actually we need people to come together and we need people to see our suffering and we need people to be moved to loving each other and

helping each other and that's um how that's how we'll survive right if we achieve nothing beyond catharsis then we've achieved something yeah um i loved your point about the online community component of things because i feel like so much of trans focused online community is like uh you know do i look okay in this outfit or like hey we're all fans of the same like anime or something right like if they're all these very specific kind of projects and there there's not i don't feel like there's a lot of spaces that are like hey this is like the war room like we i mean not that we can't talk about bullshit but like the entire focus of this space is to connect as many trans people as possible so we can amplify our power together um and you know begin to even remotely approximate the boogeyman that fucking marjorie taylor green imagines us to be right

well and we need to become like the trans and sexual menace which is um another protest group that i love from the 90s where they created this iconography around like oh we are the transsexual menace and then it's a bunch of like very nice people like yes like very like normal looking folks yeah but I think we need to reclaim that and take it in another direction and we need to not

be menacing and you know like we need to be a good menace we need to be a bit of an anti-hero for the trans community and we need to be a good menace. We need to be a bit of an antihero for the trans community. And we need to do fucking trouble. And we need to cause problems for people. And frankly, I think too many politicians get to go to bed at night not listening to people call them motherfuckers on a megaphone. And too many people get to have a nice lunch at their favorite restaurant without that being disrupted and having uh things

shouted at them i think we need to become the menace that we need to be to survive in this moment i concur with this project and uh yes uh i i concur with this and um enjoy enjoy uh participating in things that lead to those outcomes. Uh, because it is, it's a, because they want us dead anyway. Like that's, that's, that is, that is what they're doing. That's what they're complacent with. Um, I think it is also just an important thing to note that, um, in terms of like good news, like not all of these bills are passing.

Like on this show, we've talked a lot about the bills that have passed. We have talked about all the stuff that has been going on. But not all of them are going through. And that is an important thing to talk about. It doesn't mean the fight's over, because they're going to try again. worth mentioning and states from you know florida to idaho to washington utah virginia like at least there is not there is stuff that is getting blocked um or at least not going through and yeah there's a lesson that needs to be learned from how the right operates in this because what they did for years was oppose equal rights, was oppose things in a variety of ways, socially and through legislation that failed. And it was fail, fail, fail, fail, fail for a long time until they started to succeed. And part of why they succeeded is because they were continuously building a wide ranging and powerful machine

to push this stuff through learning from their failures grabbing more power getting better at messaging and like that it ultimately the same attitude needs to be had like when when one of these laws get struck down it's not a sign that the fight's been won it's a sign um to keep pushing like it's this kind of thing where you have to you have to pay attention to the way they built this over the course of really 30 or 40 years because it has to be done something, a counterweight, a machine capable of applying

equal pressure in the opposite direction has to be built and it has to be built very quickly. Well, nine out of 10 of these bills die. So nearly 270, I think it's 264 is the actual count of how many anti-trans bills have been proposed in the last two years since the last election. And only 27 have become law. So they're really just playing a numbers game,

right? They're just forcing it through. And they're not going to stop. And we, in Texas, it was so hard last year. Because I remember the last day of the legislative session. We were all there until midnight and cheered so hard when it was done. And we're like, this bill can't come back. And then we faced special session followed by special sessions followed by special session where they're like, we are pushing through this trans legislation and the war is not

going to stop. We, we, we're maybe going to, we're going to win a lot of battles. We're going to win the majority of battles, but they're not playing it to win those individual fights. They're playing to eventually exterminate us. And they're really gaining a lot of ground and we're way behind on building our machine to fight it. And this is all happening in the context of, you know, a, a very, very explicit mask off movements to essentially destroy American democracy and replace it with Christian fascism, right? And we are the scapegoat, we are the enemy that they are currently identifying for elimination, right? So like, it's, you know, for them, they're like, I can score some points if I

encourage this trans kid to kill themselves, right? And for for us it's like an existential threat that we may be watching the united states descend into you know an irreversible chasm of authoritarianism and violence uh and you know that's going to be bad for trans people too yeah yeah uh very i love very understated um how can how can uh if people are interested in uh tear it up and what they're doing how can people find out more info online about how to keep up with stuff and um and what what y'all do so i think uh the the best place to, I guess, get little updates is the Twitter, which is at tear it up org on Twitter. And then additionally, we have our website, which is www.tearitup.org. And yes, good. up.org.

And yes, good. And then if you come and get involved and you can get invited to our Discord, we're trying to grow that out a little slowly and stick with folks that we know are getting involved in the fight while we sort of build the initial foundation of this.

But that's the place to find us right now. Twitter, Instagram as well. We're also teared up.org on Instagram. We technically have a Facebook page, but who the fuck uses Facebook? I mean, actually, so our Facebook, we won't be posting a lot of stuff, but a lot of our events will go through Facebook

because in a lot of the Midwest and the South, a lot of people still use Facebook, which is probably bad. Turns out that's not helping, I think. Not a good look. But those are the places. Go find us.

And then come get involved. We're going to be doing a lot more. We've sort of been on a break for a week because we did a shit ton of events last month all at once and kind of needed a week off. But starting next week, we're going to be posting a lot and organizing and pulling together some community and social events and some more protests. Show up. And even if you don't want to,

even if you don't want to join, join the organization specifically, if you're a cis ally who's listening to this and you're like, this sucks, I hate it. I'd like to do something. We'll, we're going to have things like, you know, postering, like postering resources and stickers and all kinds of stuff

that you can grab and just go paint the town let it be known that trans people won't be erased, that we are fighting back we're a very pro-graffiti organization, please bully your local politicians and

sticker every surface you can get, get some paint pens. I think, I think I'll do an upcoming episode on how to make a, or how to do wheat pasting as, as, as,

as, as, as some fun content for you, for you fans of content out there. But yes, follow, follow the tear it up account on the twitters that's how I've been mostly keeping up with it besides just asking

people because I know who they are but the twitter is definitely a good resource yeah I guess any kind of any other thoughts or notes that you would like to add before we wrap up here

can I say fuck Greg abbott can we all just say fuck greg abbott or um also actually k ivy uh also um yeah fuck fuck lots of governors fuck a lot of the governors not most most of them uh i think the the vast majority of governors should go fuck themselves. Yeah. And I'll see them in hell. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good plug.

Your plug, your history podcast, because queer history sounds like a great thing that people should learn more about. Yeah. Well, so it's the, the totally trans podcast network. We might also come up as totally Trans Searching for the Trans Canon.

We were originally just the one show where we talked about pop culture and history. It was me and writer Henry Jardina. And now we have a slate of shows that we do all on the same feed. One that talks about comics, one that talks about history that i love uh that the playwright katie coleman does um uh called our sacred history and then we have we just started the newest season of totally trans searching for the trans canon where we're talking about finding lessons from history and queer culture and pop culture love find. Find it. Yeah. All right.

Yeah. Buy some paint pens. Show up to actions if you can. And learn to make some trouble. Yeah. Also, megaphones are only $40 from Harbor Freight. Just saying. You can get really loud, really cheap.

And it's generally legal to shout at people from outside their homes. Although not always. That can get you in some trouble, but not bad trouble necessarily. Check your local sound ordinances and bring a volume meter and really just amplify yourself just to that level and learn how to edit audio. Yeah. So you can really just dial it in. Find a good lawyer and consult with them first. Yes. So you can really just dial it in.

Find a good lawyer and consult with them first. Yes. Also, personally, I would like to say force femme all anti-trans politicians who say that you can be peer pressured into transitioning. I am personally trying to force femme Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. It hasn't worked yet, but he's very insistent. It will work eventually. I do feel like the right way to pursue that is just by deregulation and then poisoning the water supply. Well, that does it for us today.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media, visit our website, cool zone media.com or check us out on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here.

Updated monthly at cool zone media.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.