It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 39

Episode Date: June 18, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 actually gay, you've just groomed them. You're a groomer. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today we are talking about something that did happen just a few days ago, and we'll be discussing its possible ramifications going forward, and similar subsequent attacks that are most likely going to take place throughout this next month. I'm Garrison Davis. With me is Chris. Hello. Hello.

Ready to hear about a lot of threats of genocide and a whole bunch of audio clips of fascists. a whole bunch of audio clips of fascists you know okay i got i got one episode where there was like a pretty clean win and like a good thing happened and so now i'm i'm ready to go back to that's getting exterminated that's fine this is so this episode is going to be kind of i don't speak german style i guess if if we were to compare it to another one of our competitors in the field. Yeah, so, I mean, there's been a lot of threats against Pride events over the course of the past month. We've pointed towards some in Idaho. There has been some in Arizona. There has been lots in Texas.

By the time this episode has dropped, the Gondolin event in Idaho would have already taken place. We are recording that just before on June 10th. So I'm unsure of how that's gone at this point. Hopefully nothing horrible happened. Yeah, but if everyone dies, that's why we're not talking about it. Because it hasn't happened yet. Oh, but yeah, we're going to be talking about an attack on a pride event in Dallas, Texas that happened on June 4th. So starting starting kind of closer to the lead up to this on May 30th, the conservative

trendsetting libs of TikTok, who now has over 1.2 million followers on their Twitter account, ran by Chaya Raichek, they started a thread titled, quote, Mega Drag Thread. They say it's innocent. They say it's about inclusion and acceptance. They say no one is trying to confuse, corrupt, or sexualize kids. They lie.

Increasingly, many on the far right are targeting family-friendly drag events, including drag time story events at libraries across the country. The Gondolain event in Idaho was precursored by a whole bunch of attacks on drag story events at the libraries inside Idaho and the very church gathering that they announced the event to oppose the Pride on June 11th. That whole gathering at the church was about removing LGBTQ materials from libraries and targeting any drag queens who do any types of story times. who do any types of story times. So this over 30 tweet-long thread by Libs of TikTok contained a list of drag queen story hour flyers with dates and locations and family-friendly or all-ages drag events that had recently took place or were upcoming for Pride Month. One such event Rychek posted about was a Pride-themed family-friendly drag event that was to take place on Saturday, June 4th, hosted at a gay venue in a progressive neighborhood of Dallas, Texas.

In their post, Libs of TikTok included the date and location for the upcoming event, as well as an unrelated picture of one of the drag performers wearing a skimpy outfit. I think Rychek just searched the internet for a picture of this one person wearing as revealing clothing as possible based on their entire internet presence. And like, it's still not a nude photo. It's just like someone like, like a skimpy outfit. But anyway, you know, you're trying to be like, this is what your kids are going to see, which means it's not. But, you know, you know the thing they're trying to do. The tweet was shared by a new far-right group called Protect Texas Kids, who had also declared that they were organizing a protest to oppose what they called a, quote, child grooming event.

They tweeted out the address of the venue and called on people to join in on opposition to the family-friendly drag show. The initial Libs of TikTok tweet about the Dallas All Ages drag event raked up over a thousand retweets and thousands and thousands of likes. Less than a week later, the anti-queer attacks moved from the online sphere to the outside physical world. I wonder if the mama bear instinct is going to come out in three years when the mainstream Democrat party platformers, they want to rape your kids. And they're all going to think

it's one big smug little joke, these people, by the way. Understand that there is a bigger difference between 10 years ago and now than there would be between now and in five years when they're openly advocating for pedophilia like they've already started doing. You people are the symptom of a dying society and you know it. You're scaring children! Shut the fuck up! We're scaring children? Shut the fuck up! But not you! That's John Doyle, a self-described Christian fascist, standing outside the family-friendly drag event at 9am in the morning, yelling through a megaphone at the families with kids lined up to get inside the brunch event. A crowd mostly in khaki shorts and button-ups

surrounded the venue and chanted, Groomer! Groomer! As the group of men kept screaming at the families stuck outside waiting in line, kids just a few feet away covered their ears amidst the screams and megaphones. One person waved a Christian demoninist flag. A man holding a rosary shrieked verbal abuse at the children and parents. The fist of Christ will come down on you very soon. The fist of Christ.

We're done with this. Is that your fist? You're done with this. Grimmer! Grimmer! Is your fist the fist of Christ? You disgust me! The fist of Christ is your fist? What was described as a, quote, protest immediately materialized as a group of men and self-described Christian fascists who came to attack families at Pride, just yelling abuse at the event's attendees and staff, threatening people as they arrived and left, and creating an actually unsafe environment for children.

unsafe environment for children, along with a gaggle of far-right grifting videographers who, quote, infiltrated the event to film kids without their consent to create viral propaganda. There was a very good article by Melissa Gira Grant, published a few days after the incident, titled A Pizzagate in Every City, with the subheading, quote, these conspiracy theories were once fringe. Now they're being fueled by Republicans and driving far right anti-LGBTQ violence. Now, I'm going to read a few quotes from this piece throughout our episode today, because the writer does a very good job tying the current grooming rhetoric to the pattern of escalating violence and conspiracism embraced by the right over the

past few years. So to quote the article, quote, from the idea that children inside this venue were being abused, and that such abuse was a plot by Democrats, to the call to internet provocateurs to record their own evidence, as well as the false claims of child rescues made by those promoting these conspiracy theories, the attack on Mr. Mister, which was the venue that the strike event took place at, called to mind the same fears, if not the same threat of gun violence, as the assault on Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. in 2016. A man motivated by the Pizzagate conspiracy theory arrived at the restaurant with a rifle to, quote, rescue children from the non-existent sex trafficking ring supposedly orchestrated by prominent Democrats. Now,

a little more than five years later, 25% of Republicans identify as believers of the Pizza Gate successor QAnon, and the far-right's capacity for street violence has grown. At the same time, where once most elected Republican officials would at least nominally distance themselves from pizza gate pushers out on the fringe, that wall has largely eroded. Across the country, GOP lawmakers have waged a legislative crusade targeting queer and trans kids, smearing opponents as groomers, language that rhymes with the pedophile claims that inspired the attack on Comet Ping Pong. And where once the targets of these conspiracy theories were largely confined to a select group of Democrat lawmakers and their allies, the fear-mongering, amplified by Fox News and

prominent conservative social media accounts, is now targeting all LGBTQ people, from national figures to members of your local community. The stage is set for a Pizzagate in any city. And just like Pizzagate, where cases of threats of violence escalated to the point of an attempted arson and a young white man storming the establishment firing a rifle inside, the homophobic and transphobic violence that is advocated or physically committed is truly seen as, like, righteously justified by those who do it. And even if those who promote it don't sincerely hold those, like, illogical beliefs, successful propagandists know how to effectively frame bigoted violence as a moral imperative,

simply as a way to encourage attacks on their own ideological enemies. Gruber! Gruber! Gruber! You guys are disgusting! on their own ideological enemies. The far-right conservatives and fascists who made explicit threats of genocidal violence were not met unopposed. There was, what seems to me, a mix of more official security from the gay venue that usually functions as a bar, as well as community defense volunteers and anti-fascists who put their body in between the fascists and the families with children. Community members wore low-key, pride-infected block attire, black masks, and rainbow bandanas, with some holding trans and queer pride flags, which can come in handy for blocking off unwanted persons. Not only did the community defense protect families and attendees, but also worked to

protect the performers who are being followed after the event was over by fascists. The Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club did a stand-up job documenting the event as it happened, and also doing work after the fact to ID the people who are leading the homophobic attacks. I truly believe if there was less of a community defense effort, the day could have gone much, much uglier. And I think that's a part that's worth emphasizing. Everyone who showed up to oppose the fascists did an amazing job. I mean, like, it honestly, I've looked at so much footage of this day, from the footage the fascists were filming

to the footage that the John Brown Gun Club was putting out. And there were so many times where people with rainbow masks were physically preventing fascists from chasing down kids. There was barely enough of them, right? You would always want more community defenders there, but the ones who did show up deserve much gratitude for putting their bodies on the line. Eventually, police did show up and tried to keep some of the conservative protesters who were screaming groomer at children on one side of the street across from the venue.

But even with the cops there, self-described fascists continued to chase families as they walk with their kids to their car, and anti-fascists and counter-demonstrators were the ones to block the homophobes' path to prevent them from further harassing kids and families, while the counter-demonstrators were yelling at the fascists to leave the kids alone. counter demonstrators were yelling at the fascists to leave the kids alone. After the police did arrive, Christian fascist leader John Doyle talked about how police should, quote, go in there and put bullets in their heads. They should be rewarded for it. That's what the badge is for. And now I'm going to play a clip of him saying that. It's a little bit hard to hear,

but here's my due diligence. Holy Mary, Mother of God, I hate how bureaucratized everything is now. The sheriffs in Texas and Dan have to go out and pull their heads. What's in our town, my woman? That's what the bad guys are trying to do. So yeah, that is hearkening back to the very real history of police's willingness to enforce homophobic laws, something that these Christian conservatives and fascists want to bring back. And if you think some police wouldn't enforce such laws, then, oh boy, I don't know what to tell you. That's their entire job is to enforce whatever the laws are. And lots of those cops, I'm sure, don't have great opinions on uh gay people so yeah i i know

there were like like i i've had conversations with people who are like i don't know like 16 17 18 who like you know like who i don't want to be too hard on them but it's like people who got their sort of education of queer history on tumblr and they'll say things like well like a cis white gay men were like never oppressed in the u.s that it's like no oh boy like oh boy like you you yeah you you you could be just a cis white gay dude and like like really like not even really like 15 years ago it was pretty common for people to just like get the shit beaten out of them on the street for being gay yeah and cop cops participate in this like regular people participate in this and this looks like what we're heading back to but possibly even worse so if you if you look around the social media feed of many many cops as i do for fun sometimes yeah um just like you know like cops and they're like personal feeds and if you look

at like who they follow what right-wing influencers they follow, what churches they attend, you can... Don't be fooled into thinking that cops will not enforce homophobic laws. Yeah, they love this shit. Anyway. One of their stated goals

is to regress on gay rights and to have their version of a Christian hegemonic order enforced by the violence of law. And here is Doyle again saying as such at the event. I'm going to read what he actually says there in case you could not hear it. Quote, it's going to be so fun when we take away all of your rights, every single one of them. Let's now talk about some of the people and groups who organized this confrontation and the resulting propaganda piece put together by the right. So one of the main people was Kelly Neudert. Neudert? I think... Who cares?

They suck. Yes. One of the people was Kelly Neudert, one of the Christian fascist organizers responsible for setting up the Facebook group for the attack on the Pride event this past weekend. She's worked with

Groypers and Proud Boys in the past for her Young Conservative of Texas events at University of North Texas, and is a self-described, quote, based Christian fascist. Her words, not mine. She's also hosted a campus event with Jeff Younger, an anti-trans Republican candidate for the Texas House of Representatives who came to prominence on the right

for attempting to block his daughter's access to gender-affirming healthcare and who ultimately failed on both accounts. Good for her. Yeah. Kelly's current project is a new anti-trans hate group called Protect Texas

Kids. She calls herself the executive director of, but she's basically the main driving force behind. It was under the Protect Texas Kids banner that she organized the harassment attack on the All Ages Drag Show. Quoting from Pizzagate in Every City again, quote, with her new group, Niedert says that, quote, we will host protests of clinics

that do gender-affirming care for minors and school districts slash teachers who teach LGBTQ propaganda and critical race theory. Protect Texas Kids is a friendly-sounding vehicle

with which self-avowed Christian fascists in Texas can go into LGBTQ community spaces armed with video and claims to be there to investigate. All of this expands on a now common playbook. Produce local events antagonizing queer and trans people, then go on Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing media outlets to put the videos in front of an even broader audience. Unquote. The other major figure is obviously John Doyle, the guy we've talked about a lot this episode so far, and we've included many audio clips of him

screaming horrible things at kids. He is the Christian fascist leader, heard saying things like every single one of gay rights should be taken away, and encouraging police to go in there and put a bullet in their heads. I guess the parents are drag performers. He has a large YouTube channel with over 300,000 subscribers. Don't worry, Chris. It's going to get worse. Christian fascists led by both Kelly Newdirt and John Doyle have been terrorizing the University

of North Texas campus for months. On one occasion, they brought Proud Boys, armed security, and a technical pickup truck. Now, when I say technical, I mean like the military style vehicle, like it was a technical built onto a pickup truck. So basically a massive truck armed with a pretty, pretty intense intense gun that seems not legal somehow but it's texas oh it's oh okay it is absolutely legal i'm gonna play some audio from a university of north texas campus event that took place last october featuring doyle and his crew of fascists. What is wrong with Christian fascism?

Go ahead and get my face. I have a YouTube channel with 300,000 subscribers. I am radicalizing the youth and you can do nothing about it. You guys better prove your power because when we know my friends take power, bad things are going to happen to you. I would play more audio, but a high-pitched

whistle drowns out the rest of what he says, and I will not subject you to the audio of the whistle because it does a fantastic job making the audio completely unlistenable um so much so that very soon doyle just like gave up talking uh because the whistle did a really good job trying to come out um but for more background on doyle i'll quote from a pizza gate in every city again quote john doyle who yelled about rape at children through a megaphone has organized a stop the rally with nick fuentes was a special guest at the white nationalist america first pack conference

in 2022 and is the leader of a group titled the american populist. He was in audience at a 2021 event billed as Hitler Youth Without the Hitler. Wait, so can I ask a question about this? So I've heard about this event. Did they literally write that? Yes, it was called that by one of the organizers, Ariel Early, an 18-year-old white nationalist social media influencer

billed as a special guest at the camping retreat saying i always say these events are hitler youth without the hitler and what do i mean by that you have to get to the youth they claim gen z might be the most conservative generation but honestly i'm not seeing it i mean i guess that's good news but also if you ignore that if you ignore the hitler part then yes that's yeah well maybe they'll follow their leader also uh kyle rittenhouse says that he's a john doyle fan so oh great and we are back i'm gonna continue to quote from the uh piece again every city article again quote given many existing media connections quote from the Pizzagate in Every City article again, quote, given many existing

media connections, videos from the event made by far-right content creators, some confronting attendees and performers, were widely picked up across right-wing social media by people including Andy Ngo, Benny Johnson, and Pizzagate promoter Jack Sobiak, who shared a video of one drag performer and instructed his followers to contact the state's Department of Family and Protective Services. When some of these same videos made it to Tucker Carlson's show on Monday night, he introduced the segment by saying, Just another weekend in Weimar. Selectively airing moments when adults yelled back at people like Doyle, accusing them of abuse,

or when other adults used their bodies to block men from forcing their way into the event. So yeah, less than 48 hours after the all-ages drag event had began, it was headlining on Tucker Carlson. Just another weekend in Weimar. On Saturday, a nightclub in Dallas held an event called Drag Your Kids to Pride. At the event, little kids dance with drag queens and tip them with dollar bills. This is grotesque. Sexualizing children always is. So there were a small number of brave protesters outside. One of them was our friend Alex Stein. He tried to get into the event because it was a public event. And so he was assaulted. Watch. The event on June 4th also attracted an assorted collection of far-right media personalities,

or those who aspire to be. They themselves referred to their group of far-right videographers as the, quote, Avengers of homophobes. Among which, as mentioned by Tucker, was aspiring comedian and small far-right commentator Alex Stein, who was prevented entry to the venue by event security and community defenders, or as Tucker would say, was assaulted. Here's audio of that interaction. Also, I want to note that in the video, Alex Stein has a big old smirk on his face the entire time. And I think you can actually hear that through the way he talks. I just want to listen. We're denying the entry. We're asking to leave.

Oh my God. I don't deny the entry. They're being bigoted. They're bigoted. They're not letting me in here. I can't believe they're not letting me in a game. I thought you guys were inclusives, right? Look, I'm not allowed in here, but they not letting me in here. I can't believe they're not letting me in a game. I thought you guys were inclusive, Trey. Hey. Look, I'm not allowed in here, but they let children in here dance. You guys don't think that's weird, Trey?

You're dancing with a bunch of children. Isn't that grooming? Look, this is what a child-prover looks like. This is what a child-prover looks like. Hey, all right, all right. We're going to go. We're going to lock this door. We're going to lock this door.

We're going to lock this door. Some of these videographers did make it inside with their cameras, shooting videos that misrepresented the drag performances as threatening to children or acting in an inappropriate sexual manner, all while making threatening comments of their own online or outside in person. One who interrogated a drag performer captioned his video, quote, these groomers need to be exposed for what they are. A woman who shot some video from inside of the venue later tweeted, quote, this summer is slaying groomers summer. Two far-right members

of the self-described homophobic Avengers who made it inside the event to film kids were Taylor Hansen, who got a lot of notoriety after filming the Ashley Babbitt shooting as he was participating in the storming of the Capitol. Similar to how Elijah Schaefer was making the event seem like it was this big heroic thing, and then getting a lot of press coverage off of his footage. Someone else who was going inside the event to film kids was Aldo Bazziani. After the event, the little collection of self-described Christian fascists and their propagandists got together on Elijah Schaefer's Blaze Media podcast to do a sort of roundtable report back. Now, Elijah Schaefer was not actually on that episode. John Doyle was filling in as the host, self-described Christian fascist John Doyle. But Schaefer brands himself as a classic, I'm going to say Christian fascist, because that's

what his rhetoric means. Now, Schaefer himself doesn't use the word fascist, but he does share Sonnenrab memes on Twitter, and his rhetoric is indistinguishable from Doyle's, who of course Doyle does use the word fascist. And of course, Schaefer is totally fine with having Doyle fill in as him for host on his own show. Anyway, here is Doyle introducing people on that episode, including Turning Point USA representative, Elizabeth Riley. We also have fellow e-girl representative, Elizabeth Riley. We also have fellow e-girl, Isabella Riley. Wannabe, and I want white confetti, please.

Yeah, white confetti. She likes her confetti how she likes her country. So, anyway, tell me what you saw, Aldo, because you got there a little bit before I did. Now, we all had this sort of like, you know, homophobic Avengers assemble kind of thing, where everyone did their part. I knew that I probably couldn't get in, so I just thought that I would assemble my army of young men to go and confront these people. But Aldo and Isabella actually infiltrated the event and got the viral footage that you've probably seen if you've been watching literally any news coverage of this event. So that podcast can be found on YouTube and Apple podcasts, just openly hosting content that's

that's hosted by a Christian fascist saying shit about wanting a white America, a half a million subscribers on YouTube. Just. Yep. So this ecosystem of aspiring right-wing content creators is part of this wave of like 20 something conservative influencers, like 20 something, I said like age, like they're all in like their mid-20s or something.

But these conservative influencers that are trying to market like old school right-wing evangelical bigotry to young people as like a cool trad counterculture using meme aesthetics. Fundamentally, these people are attention hounds. As they cover events like these on the ground, you can see them smirking the entire time, even when people are acting hostile to them. The spectacle is the point. If they're not posing an actual active threat,

what these far-right videographers hate the most is non-engagement. If there's the ability to do non-engagement, that's what they don't like. The most annoyed these people get is when they're met with cold, still silence, like in this case with Taylor Hansen. Can you guys, can either of you guys give me any information on, I mean, how you feel about what took place in here today and about these counter-protesters? what do you guys think why do you hide your face is it because you're committing crimes maybe crimes against children? So they hide their face because they're too scared of being identified as pedophiles and groomers. So I mean, you see this, this is a constant reoccurrence with Antifa and with left-wing anarchist groups is they'll hide their face

because they think they're all tough and hard in big groups. But the minute that they're soloed out and are actually asked questions, they have nothing to say about their ideology, their beliefs, or about the fact that they are actually the fascists here in this situation. So, I mean, I'd really like to just get one word out of you, ma'am, because, I mean, you just want to be so silent, but you're so vehemently defending this. I mean, do you have anything to say? One more chance. They know they are saying ridiculous things, like, none of which reads as genuine. They know the absurdity of their own replies. In their podcasts, they talk about how disgusted they were watching people dance together.

But in their own videos, they're smiling, relaxed, excited about what's going on and how they'll spin whatever's happening to boost their career. what's going on and how they'll spin whatever's happening to boost their career. If they were actually concerned about children, they wouldn't be having little giggle fests while inside events like these, right? They call it a child grooming event and they're not acting like there's anything bad happening. Like you can say like, oh, they're trying to play it cool because they're doing infiltration. Like, no, they're just being chill. Like they're giggling and laughing and looking like, look at the silly gay people doing these things.

I can't wait to use footage of this to boost my career and misrepresent it to a wider audience. We're in this, like, post-irony world. In many aspects, the level of sincerity does not actually matter, right? All that's necessary is saying the lines from the script that the audience wants to hear. It's like algorithmically generated politics. You can talk about how victims of sexual abuse should themselves be locked up so they won't go on to abuse other people in the future. And even though you look at the camera at the end and give a

knowing smirk, it doesn't matter because you're just saying the things that are going to get traction. And you're saying the things that your misogynist audience wants to hear here's the turning point usa representative isabel riley on the blaze media podcast who at the end of the clip does indeed give a very knowing look to camera and a little smirk it's a total code should we lock up people that have had sexual trauma in their childhood because they tend to become abusers in the future also just a few other notes on this on this uh blaze media podcast so i i listened to this whole podcast like twice to get to get clips for my coverage here and just to kind of get a sense of what they were doing um what one of the speakers on the on the podcast blamed like the recent mass shootings on the presence of nearby sex shops.

Some of the videographers who were on the show went on to Alex Jones' show the next day. You know, it was full of pretty, I mean, it was pretty bad homophobic rhetoric. But, I mean, it's just so ever-present that it's hard to even selectively get certain clips of it. They were doing a lot of work to tie mental illness to gayness, saying that these two things are intrinsically linked, and that if we just locked up more mentally ill people in institutions, we wouldn't

have as many gay people. I think the other interesting thing that I found to be really funny in the podcast is that for their first ad break, they were selling testosterone boosting supplements. So in this, in this very like anti-trans like podcast, the first product they were selling was supplements to boost your natural

male testosterone. And it's just very funny because like they're, you know, they're talking about how evil HRT is and how evil and irreversible it is. And then they're also selling things that are supposed to boost testosterone levels. Right? Like we are in a post-irony world. It doesn't like this. Anyway, here's one more clip from the podcast

talking about how the bigoted community is so diverse. And you'll notice too, our group was very diverse, which I think we made this point yesterday as well. The bigoted community is so accepting. All you have to be is also bigoted and you're allowed to hang out with us. And so we had this nice mob of well-dressed, handsome young guys to go confront these people

because no one else would. All right, that is enough of that. On to our final section of the day so texas-based journalist steven monicelli reported that later that same night of the drag event incidents that police categorized as terroristic threats of an anti-homosexual nature were reported by bar owners in the same neighborhood. After the event, the venue and gay bar released a media statement saying that its weekly drag brunches are normally for guests who are 21 and over, but decided to host a special pride drag brunch for all guests, including those who can't attend other drag shows because of the drinking age

restrictions and as a part to raise money for a local LGBTQ youth organization. Adding that it was, quote, more than happy to open our doors to celebrate Pride in a family-friendly, safe environment because we believe that everyone should have a space to be able to celebrate who who they are, unquote. I'm gonna read another quote from, I think this is our last quote from Pizzagate in Every City. Quote, the street confrontation to video, to Fox News, to Republican Party pipeline took only a little more than two days to complete. By the next Monday, Texas Republican State Representative Brian Slayton cited the Protect Texas Kids attack on the Dallas event in his announcement to introduce, quote, a bill to ban drag shows in the presence of minors in Texas, unquote. A Florida state representative pledged to follow suit. U.S. Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Bobbert voiced their support.

U.S. Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Bobbert voiced their support. By then, Protect Texas Kids had already moved on to a new target, an LGBTQ-affirming church that was having a service next Sunday. And the group had already announced several more plans to protest LGBTQ spaces this month. What we are already seeing this Pride season is alarming, but it did not come out of nowhere. It is a continuation of campaigns targeting drag queen story hours. It was fed by Republican attacks on queer and trans kids and state legislators across the country. And it is coordinated by people on the far right who have names and very specific movement affiliations. As these threats continue, as they generate yet more videos of confrontations,

they may also give heft to the lie that supporting LGBTQ youth is grooming and that queer community spaces are commercial settings for child abuse. No Republican would say the Pizzagate shooter had a point, but now, simply based on videos of deliberate confrontations with kids at Pride events, they're happy to co-sign. Unquote. Lawmakers won't be able to consider Slanton's proposal on a statewide ban of kids being around drag performances until the 10th of January in 2023, which is when the next Texas legislative session kicks off. which is when the next Texas legislative session kicks off. But if the no-drag-around-minors law gets enacted, that could have many, many ramifications, depending on enforcement. One possible scenario is not being allowed to have drag at Pride, or people under the age of 18 just not being allowed to attend Pride, right? Because if you're having a Pride parade and there's drag

performers and there's kids there, now it's a crime. You're all going to jail. You could also just see this as an attempt by Texas to recriminalize cross-dressing. Because by and large, drag shows and events are usually taking place at 21 and up bars, right? Generally, unless it's the drag time, story time stuff, like, drag's not around kids super often, right? Including, like, very, like, non-sexual drag. It's just that just because of how laws work around bars, usually those things don't have much crossover. But that's not what they're targeting, though, right?

They just don't want gay people or men in dresses to be around kids, right? If you're seen cross-dressing while a child is nearby, now that's a drag show. You're going to jail. And if you think a ban on, quote, drag in front of children won't be applied to just trans people existing in public, then again, I don't know what to tell you. Because depending on how they define what drag is, like, they're not limiting this to like drag shows. They're talking about men in dresses. Like that's what it's going to be

because they're targeting library events. They're targeting events in public. It's not about like drag shows with tickets and stuff. It's about men wearing dresses or, you know, in the case of trans people, just existing. Here's the case of trans people just existing here here's the helmet public avengers uh talking about the introduced legislation after their little propaganda campaign but wow the guys we really did and i'm not trying to pat ourselves on the back but what's brian slayton with the legislation he's trying to put through exposing these people

we really did take a w in the culture battle we didn't win the culture war yet sure i don't think i've ever seen such enough i mean an after effect of an event i mean in positivity for us i mean i don't think i've ever seen you know a bunch of journalists go and expose an event like this and then have actual legislation drafted almost immediately after i think this is a a new sphere that we're entering in and i I think, I mean, we got to freaking roll with it. Yeah, I really hope that the momentum is maintained. To close off, I'm going to riff off a point made by Steven Monticelli. At what point will become clear to those in media who run quotes or use selective footage from these people that intentionally obscure the extreme nature of their beliefs, right? These are not like simple economic conservatives.

However, if contemporary mainstream conservatives are willing to accept this sort of politics in their movement, then it's the case that mainstream conservatism in America has become almost indistinguishable from fascism. Much of the coverage of the protest of this pride event gives credibility to the fascist side, basically endorsing their homophobic framing, positioning the drag performers as somehow inherently sexual for wearing femme outfits and doing dances that are, in reality, more conservative than your basic high school cheerleading team. basic high school cheerleading team. Mainstream media and pundits, and even some leftist ones, like quote-unquote leftist pundits, fell for the bait and treated kids playing musical chairs with people in drag and giving the performers cash from their parents as more inappropriate than the mob of open fascists hurling verbal abuse at kids and chasing them down as they head to their cars. So that is my little write-up on what has happened in Dallas last week.

They are, the Protect Texas Kids group is planning more and more events in Texas for Pride Month. It's, they're targeting not just events with kids. They're also targeting 21 and up, drag brunches. They're targeting churches. They're doing the bit, right? They're doing the thing. And people really fell for the bait on this one. People really did. I've seen all of the videos from the events. there's nothing inherently sexual about these people's style of dancing. There's nothing inherently sexual about their outfits, right? Playing with gender isn't inherently sexual. It's playing with gender. Those are two different things. But yeah, a lot of people fell for the bit um a lot of people took the bait we're sharing photos and being like look at this how can you defend this and like defend what it's

people dancing you would you would see it's it's the dances are not like they're not about sex they're not imitating sex acts it's's just, it's fun and chill. People got really mad that there was a sign at the venue that was an innuendo. And there's an ice cream shop like a block away from the venue with the very same sign. They're not actually mad about that. That's not what they're actually mad about. Because you can walk down the street and look at so many things that are innuendos

if you watch a Pixar movie there will be innuendos that's not what they're talking about they're talking about gay people being around kids and I would like for people to stop falling for the bait anyway we're going to be doing another episode on the city of hate on the homophobic stuff in Dallas

later this week we're going to be talking about Steadfast Church I'm still writing that episode on the city of hate on the homophobic stuff in dallas later later this week and we're gonna be talking about steadfast church i'm still writing that episode at the moment but i'm planning to put that out later this week as well and depending how the gundalain event went in idaho and the various other things i'm sure we'll be talking more about this type of stuff as as pride goes on so yeah uh chris any thoughts on the word vomit i just gave for the past 40 minutes you know i mostly just like i don't know it's it's we've somehow managed to create a version of like the like worst at parts of like the the queer bashing 2000s but like even worse because now there's there's an even larger media cycle around it yeah and like i i think it's worth mentioning that like one of the ways that stuff ended

was that like a lot of people most of whom were like like cis and straight right like people a bunch of people who weren't queer were just like literally fuck this and started attacking people back and you know you see this in working-class neighborhoods, right? Like, there'd be a period of time where you have these evangelical churches who are just, you know, like, openly inciting attacks on people until they got the shit beat out of them by a bunch of working-class kids.

And that's when that shit stopped, and unless we fucking fight these people, they're gonna keep doing this until people start getting murdered. And I guess a more positive thing to end on would be saying big thank you to everyone who showed up to physically oppose this. When I was listening to the Homophobic Avengers podcast, John Doyle said that there was a few points

where he was scared. There were some people who, some people wearing like pride bandanas and stuff who had handguns. And John Doyle did not like that. At one point, he talked about how he was heading to his car, and the counter demonstrators were following him to make sure he was actually going to leave. And he saw that some of the people were carrying um and he freaked out he he

he screamed for police and he said that these people were threatening to shoot him um which is mean just an attempt to get police to shoot the counter demonstrators right like it's it's it's just it's john doyle screaming these people have, they're trying to shoot me, right? Even though they weren't even holding their guns. They were just having guns. But these people can't be scared. And again, no one was even violent against John Doyle. That was just people who were standing near him. And I just big thank you to everybody who showed up

to try to prevent these fascists from chasing down these kids, from hurling abuse at these kids. I would recommend you follow the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club on Twitter. They did a really good job documenting this. And then for the stuff in Idaho, you can follow read out anti-fascists um those those would be the two the two people i say to follow on twitter right now um for tracking these attacks on pride in texas and inside idaho um i guess i think yeah yeah i guess the last thing i would say is like it's important to remember that unlike a lot of the periods in queer history, these people are actually a minority.

And they're trying to regress. We've already got to this point. They're trying to pull it back. This is kind of a new thing. Yeah, but it's like unlike the fucking 70s, we are actually the silent majority here, and if enough people

fucking show up and just like... These people need to be framed as... Excuse my, I guess, semi-ableist language here, but I deal with mental health issues of my own. But these people need to be framed as wackos, right? These people need to be framed as fringe. These people need to be framed as crazy extremists. They need to be belittled. They need to be put down. They need to be viewed as pathetic,

as scared, right? Like, that's the way to do successful propaganda framing. Because they need to be, they need to stay outside the majority, right? Like, they need to be othered. That's the way to win this, right? That's the thing they always try to do, right? That's why they always try to frame gay people as being severely mentally ill all the time, right? Like, that's all what they try to do. And because enough of progress has happened,

we just need to defend the line that is already drawn. Because, like I said before, right? Like these people are not regular economic conservatives, right? But if mainstream conservatism is going to continue to accept this politics in their movement, then mainstream conservatism will be the same as fascism, right? So you need to point at the people like John Doyle, point at the people who call themselves Christian fascists and be so demeaning to them and so making them feel so separate from every part of regular social life. And because their whole goal is to integrate themselves

into the larger conservative movement, integrate themselves into larger American politics, and that can't happen. 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. 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 Duda Podcast Network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where you all keep telling me that we keep doing depressing episodes and we never do any episodes that aren't doomerism. So today, this is a podcast about how you can find the people who are making your life really bad and make bad things happen to them instead. And with me to talk about how this has been done and also can be done is Janet Yu, who is a tenant organizer with the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development in LA, and Ana Yi, who's a tenant organizer with the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development in LA, and Anayi, who's another tenant organizer and leader at Northside Villa. Anayi, Janice, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Yeah, and it's Hillside Via, not Hillside.

Sorry. No worries. This is what happens when I have MRI brain. I guess. Okay. So the, the, the, the first thing I want to sort of walk through is basically can, can, can you two describe the win you all had a couple of weeks ago? Yeah, I can go ahead and start. And then I know if you want to fill in at all. So a couple weeks ago, we were able to successfully push our city council to approve a loan to acquire Hillside Via from slumlord Tom Botts. And so just to make it clear, this isn't the end of the fight. We have not fully expropriated Tom Botts at the moment, but this is a huge victory and commitment from the city to take the building from him. So it was really, really exciting for all of us. You know, I guess one thing I want to clarify from the outset is that a lot of the reporting

about it seemed like a lot of the reporting about it was saying that the city had voted to use eminent domain and they have not done that, which is my understanding. Yeah, yeah. So to clarify that part two, the motion that was passed it does include that eminent domain will be used if the landlord does not willingly sell which he most likely will not of course he's a landlord yeah exactly so he's not going to willingly sell his building it does include that it will be used and as part of the pathway um but it does not specifically pass the eminent domain piece. So that will be something that we will probably have to organize around. Yeah. And if I'm understanding correctly, that requires a second vote, right? Yeah. Yeah. But I guess, okay, first off, also,

congratulations, this rules. This is really exciting. Thank you. Yeah, and I guess the second thing I wanted to ask about was how this organizing process started and how you were able to do this, because this is a rare massive W. Yeah. Yeah, so this has been a three-year struggle um and i can give a little bit of context around how how it got started and then maybe anna you can take it from there um so basically hillside via is part of a massive amount of buildings that were built in the 80s um using different kinds of federal and state subsidies. And basically, yeah, it was subsidies that were used to fund private developers to keep buildings affordable for a temporary period of time. So using affordable housing covenants. And so Hillside's covenant expired in 2019 after 30 years of being kept affordable for

the tenants. And as soon as that happened, the landlord, of course, tried to increase the rent to market rate. So folks were receiving up to 200% rent increases. Yeah. So, you know, to actually like talk about what those numbers are, people who are paying $800 for rent are now being asked to pay like $2,500. So that's a de facto eviction. Right. And as soon as that happened, there's actually this like origin story that I really love is that one of our tenant leaders, Leslie, who's a bilingual Spanish and English speaker, she came up to a tenant who is a monolingual Cantonese speaker, held up one of the rent increases, ripped it to shreds. And Benson, our Cantonese tenant leader, just said, Cantonese tenant leader just said, okay.

And that's like one of the origin stories that really just shows like how, yeah, like oppositional our tenants were from the beginning. And then what happened was that another tenant leader, Louisa who actually has since passed away due to COVID, she actually called like all the news stations in LA just blew this the fuck up. And yeah and then that's how organizers kind of got involved and maybe Ana you can share your personal experience of going through all of this yeah for sure um so about right a little before the association was started at Hillside Villa um we had been living here for about seven years. And

at that time, so I was working with my mom at the time, and we went out in the morning for work. We came back around the afternoon to find that we couldn't get into our apartment. to find that we couldn't get into our apartment um our keys were actually um they weren't going into the lock so we went to the manager's office and asked them like why our key wasn't working so they sent management up to our our floor and um they told us that we had been evicted and that we couldn't like go back in and that we couldn't go back into our apartment. Jesus. Just within that one morning, pretty much our whole life was flipped upside down. They told us that they actually worked uh unfortunately with them and i think this is a

very common um thing is that um landlords um work directly with the sheriff's department so the sheriff department came and switched out our lock um so we were pretty much uprooted that day. We had to figure out like what to do. We were all separated like that day. We all, you know, my sister went to her friend's house. My mom had to go rent a hotel to stay with her husband. And then I went to my partner's house. So that lasted about two to three days. And in those two to three days, we were personally, I started looking up tenant laws, tenant rights, and we found,

thanks to a friend, she recommended the Eviction Defense Network who provides um free lawyers for um tenants facing um eviction in la so they um paired us up with a lawyer and um they found that um the eviction had actually been an illegal eviction and then we all we also had like the paperwork to show that that it was an illegal eviction so um we threatened to sue the landlord. And because of that, he dropped the case and let us back in to our apartment after like three or four days or something like that, from what I can remember. But in those days, it was really enraging, obviously. Like, who wouldn't be, like, super pissed off at this?

Like, it would boil your blood, you know? And it did. kind of made me um or very much so more involved in like tenant rights and and um organizing um and then also like just to throw this in a little more detail um when we were locked out um they actually locked our animals in into the apartment so we couldn't even get our dogs right away oh my god did they like were they okay like did you were you able to like was anyone feeding them like they weren't there all three days i think we were we had to like really like push for them to open up the apartment so that we can get them like the day of um but then like we couldn't just like grab all our things um including like medication that was

like needed for for my um mom's husband who um has uh diabetes and whatnot so i think that was like the first time we acted as a family to like not let um someone pretty much bully and harass us into a forced eviction that was completely illegal um and that's within that time it was also happening to all the tenants around us i mean there was the word was going all over the apartment. I mean, you could see management was doing cash for keys, which is also an illegal tactic for landlords to do. Can you explain what that is? Sorry. Yeah. So cash for keys, it's probably going to be like a rough definition of what it is but it's when um when a landlord offers a certain amount of money in order for you to give up your apartment

um and this could be a couple thousand um ten thousand twenty thousand sometimes way less than that um so that was a tactic that he was trying to use to evict people from our apartment so that he could remodel and then um move it up to like market rate and get pretty much all of our community out of this apartment which was an affordable apartment um it worked for a lot of some tenants did end up doing that a lot of people didn't want to fight back um but the ones that did um started the association um and there's also a lot of like language barriers with the tenants um some that only spoke spanish and didn't understand what was happening they were trying to get people to sign contracts for the increase of the rent.

Yeah, so that was my experience here to begin with. And why we decided to fight back and not allow this to to happen to our family but also like our community here who are also experiencing the same thing you know it wasn't just an ice i say this all the time it felt like an isolated situation at the time but it on the like broader perspective it was not an isolated thing and that's what brought our community together that is a really powerful be incredibly enraging and yeah there's a lot of really interesting things there like i mean one obviously the cops doing like the the sheriffs like helping them do the illegal eviction is just incredibly on the nose and one other thing i think is really

interesting about yeah the way that like i mean okay the the the way the law only exists for rich people if you can like throw it into their faces and make it embarrassing enough that like the state has to enforce it oh but so i read a lot of media coverage of this and not a single person who who covered this story that, that, that I saw from these articles mentioned that, uh, the,

the, the cash for keys is illegal. A lot of, a lot of the articles mentioned it, but they, they don't, they don't, they don't mention that like you legally can't do this.

And so, yeah, I think that's a, that, that that's, I don't know. I guess, I guess it goes to show that like you,

even among the press, like whose job it is to do this there's there's such like there's such little knowledge of what what what practices aren't and aren't allowed and that yeah i mean i think as you're talking about like that that's one of the they're they're relying like in order to do this if landlords are like yeah they're relying on people not knowing their rights they're relying on being able to trick people they're relying on just straight up handing people stuff they can't read and forcing them to sign it which i don't know that my brain's weird but like the thing that reminds me of is like the spanish conquistadors showing up and then

read like ask asking people to convert to christianity in spanish language they didn't speak and then shooting them when they didn't do it it's like yeah that's a fitting analogy honestly yeah it's a new form of colonization yeah and what one that we're you know resisting yeah yeah that was one of the other things I wanted to talk about in terms of resisting this kind of stuff is, yeah, what was it like dealing with the kind of language barriers that you get here? I mean, you've mentioned at least three languages that people are speaking. There's probably more because that's how working class communities work. Mm hmm. Yeah, I feel like that's been such a central part of our fight is language justice and the tenant meetings that we've had every single week for the past three years. So that's like about 150 meetings. Every single one of them has included some form of translation. translation. So yeah, we've had a lot of support from folks from Union de Vecinos. Organizers there have gear where we can do like simultaneous translation. Yeah. So if you go to one of our meetings, it's folks who, if they're monolingual Spanish or English speakers, they're having a headset on where we then have someone who's

offering simultaneous translation. And then since we have fewer Cantonese or Mandarin speakers, we'll also have organizers on the side doing consecutive translation for them. So our meetings are run in like usually three, if not more languages. That's awesome. if not more languages that's awesome and i guess i guess it leads into another question that i had which was so how how did i i i think from my understanding this one of the parts of the story is like uh is people people who people who'd been doing established tenant organizing i like getting getting involved with this struggle and i wanted to i guess talk about how that happens and yeah yeah yeah so i think because um that original tenant luisa like really blew this story up um different orgs heard about it and eventually um latu so the la tenants Union and then CCED, the org that I'm in, we heard about it and got involved long term. And even with that, like I'm a relatively new organizer.

I only started volunteering with CCED a couple of years ago. So it's really been like one of my first site fights, we like to call them. But there are other folks who have had more a bit more experience with different buildings um in la as well but i think what's important to emphasize is that this fight has really been tenant led um and even though we have like these kind of yeah outside organizers it's always been um the's demands and the tenant's interests first. Yeah. It seems, I mean, you know, from, from your descriptions of like people showing up with translation equipment. Yeah. It seems like a really good way to do this kind of stuff,

which is you show up and you give help to people, but it's, it's, you know, it's, it's them doing the organizing, which I don't know. It reminds me a lot of like, I mean, of my experience, you need organizing stuff, which is like, yeah, no, it's, it reminds me a lot of like, I mean, of my experience in union organizing stuff, which is like, yeah, no, it's,

it's some, yeah. Like you have people who have experience with stuff and they come in and their job is to like help the people who are actually trying to organize the place. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

The people who are like actually directly impacted. Yeah. I feel like our role has really just been facilitating offering like the technical support um more of that stuff but anai i think you can really talk about how so much of this fight has really been building the tenants power and becoming more and more like militant um and radical and just the tenants like yeah really just definitely feeling their own fire hell yeah so we are like super duper grateful for the um organizers that have come out for the last three years or however long um they've decided to or have joined the association to help um and a lot of the tenants always always

like give thanks and they're super appreciative of the organizers but sometimes they don't give themselves the credit either they think it's only like they they think the organizers, which is obviously like super important and we're super grateful, but they don't realize that they're a huge part of the fight. For example, actually, my mom has been a part of the association for longer than I have. I've only been organizing for about, well, not only, a year and a half, but she's actually been in the organization for three years, because not only because she needed the support and the organizers really helped to guide her to learn to use her voice for the outcome that we all want to see. And a lot of the tenants are women. They're elders, third generation elders so um they're very strong people

they um a lot of like the elder like um like i guess latina like i don't know how I feel about that term but um you know women um are are natural leaders and with the help of the organizers um they really just help to to help them to you know use their voice and to empower them to to do what they can naturally, which is speak up and ask for what they want. So yeah, my mom has learned over the last three years how to talk in front of politicians, how to communicate the process and the struggle that we've all been enduring, and the struggle that we've all been enduring, but to also demand what we rightfully deserve, which is housing, safe housing, and for politicians to do their job,

which is to represent, as they should be, the community that they are working for and not to beg them to do things, but to demand that um they take action in the way that we have taken action um much more than than any politician has in the last three years um it was up to the tenants and it still is and thanks to, we have gotten as far as we have. That was, yeah, really well said. And I want to, I guess, shift a little bit into talking about, like, what specifically y'all were doing.

Because I guess both that is, like, how did you actually do this? And then how can other people sort of, like, how can other people replicate it? Yeah. I don't know that we necessarily have like a model, um, that other people can apply because I think reflecting about this whole fight, it was such a like just dynamic campaign where at first when it started, um, folks were kind of using more you know like legal tactics just like looking for errors in um the rent increases that bots would hand out and this would you know lead to um being able to stall the rent hikes for months at a time um but then that

obviously wasn't enough so then people started escalating and um eventually like putting pressure to get this on the radar of um our districts like city council person gil cdo and eventually through that um they were able to get cdo to make a deal with the landlord to extend the covenant um and have his like loans be his debt be forgiven. But the landlord just like reneged on that deal. Right. So classic landlord behavior. Yeah. Yeah. So then I think it's through those experiences that the tenants really learned like, okay, it's like the, this politician's not going to save us. Um, so then I think our fight became like more and more militant. So just directly going to the landlord's Malibu villa and shouting

like, fuck you. And, you know, just like, yeah, just like those direct confrontations. And then even Sadio himself, um, it has not been, you know, this friendly relationship where we're thanking him for putting our story into city council. It's been extremely confrontational and oppositional the entire time. win. It was, as it has been this whole fight, direct action, because we ended up the first day that city council opened up to the public again, a group of us went in, kind of like slid our way through security and went to his office. And surprisingly, he opened the door and it was him and not a staffer. And of course, he saw it was us he hates us so he he immediately tried to close the door and one of our amazing tenant leaders rosario um who's yeah this elder latina woman she stuck her foot in the door and refused to let him close it yeah and because of

that we were able to just like directly confront him. Like, where the fuck have you been? It's been three years. And you haven't seen this through. Like you said, you are going to. And we got all that, you know, recorded video evidence of him just, yeah, fumbling around. And he sent the cops on us, of course. Yeah.

Yeah, fumbling around. And he sent the cops on us, of course. And yeah, I think that was such a great action because all of the we call them like the mujeres. So the Latino women who have been leading the fight, they were just so defiant towards the cops, not scared at all. And just, you know, standing their ground and that they're just defending, you know, their human right to housing. and that they're just defending, you know, their human right to housing. And a week after that confrontational action, we got this city council motion passed. So, you know, I think from our experience, trying to go through the nice way and like, you know, doing traditional lobbying, trying to schedule meetings and like texting, calling, all of that. Things didn't happen for years. And then once we did more and more militant actions, things happened really quickly.

was something that not a lot of other associations that are fighting for their housing do often was to bring the community together. And like, I mean, really coming together. I mean, we're meeting every week for the last three years. And even during the pandemic, we weren't in person. We actually were on Zoom for a really long time. And that's one of the biggest things was the consistency that we all pushed through, even during the pandemic. From the beginning was meeting every single week. And some other organizers also meet more than once a week you know we're meeting multiple times a week to kind of talk over like the fine detail of of you know the next steps um but definitely consistency has been one of the biggest things in the last three years that has gotten us where we are today. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

I know I keep going back to this because this is the sort of, I mean, I guess I did some tenant organizing, but this is the thing that I know now. It was like, yeah, it reminds me a lot of just like the way that union campaigns that work run of just, you have to keep, you have to keep getting people together to do the thing yeah most definitely yeah i don't know have you all seen like like how did that change

like your relationship with just like the other people in the building i'll give you an example from like my mom i think for her it's been changed a little more drastically than it has for me because a lot of the tenants here are a little older um so before the association was started she she's kind of like a person that keeps to herself a lot you know um but since that um since the association she's actually made like so many friends here now like and she's actually made like a best friend here um one of our neighbors and they like yes and they've become like really good friends um they even go you know have breakfast together um like almost multiple times a week um the other day i saw them like i saw um my mom's best friend adelita or adela um giving her some sugar and i was like oh i should have gotten a picture of that like that's you know that's so cute. Like posted it on like Instagram so that, you know, like everyone knows like what it looks like when community comes together.

It's it's the small things like that. you know, made us gain, like, trust with the neighbors that have been consistent and see the same kind of vision that we, like, have to keep this building affordable. And yeah, not everyone, not all the tenants here have been supportive of our fight. Some, you know, participated for a few months and then immediately gave up. But one of the things that my family has done is to keep fighting, even for the ones that don't want to show up or don't want to do the work, which is hard work, that we're not just doing it for ourselves, but we're doing it for everyone, whether they're supportive or not, you know, this is going to benefit them and it's going to benefit the whole community and hopefully the city the whole city in the future yeah i don't know it's something i've definitely seen with organizing is that like yeah like just living in this world can

be really isolating and i don't know like i've lived in a lot of places where it's just like yeah like i i have no idea who any like literally who anyone who lives around me is like no like there's still they'll be like the one person you see at three in the morning coming back to their apartment and it's like oh i vaguely remember this person but like yeah like i think i don't know just this this being something that just on a broad level not just about like i mean you know is it like this is something that's a solution to both like an immediate fight and then also this sort of like broader just i don't know like nightmarish isolation that everyone's not everyone but like is is a huge part of a lot of our lives now i don't know that just struck me i guess yeah yeah i feel like this just makes me think of um

to celebrate the recent win we had this party at hillside um just last week and you know it was like potluck style. Everyone brought their own food. Someone had a connection with like a mariachi band. So we had mariachi playing. One of the tenants owns a food truck and just wanted to cook for the community. So she was whipping up these like amazing tacos and bacon wrapped hot dogs.

And then someone had brought this pinata of the landlord and people were just like fucking destroying it like one of the tenants was just like fist fighting it and cracking it open the kids were just like grabbing as much candy as they could from this broken tom potts pinata and and like i felt like that was just like exemplifies the sense of community that there is now at Hillside. And I think as Anai was talking about those personal connections have been so key to keeping this fight going for three years because it's hard. It's so hard to keep showing up and it's those personal connections that

keep you coming. Yeah, most definitely. It's almost like a support system that my mom and some of the neighbors have created, like Adelita or one of our second generation tenants, Leslie. They can confide with one another they can vent with one another and um yeah yeah so um they've definitely like created strong bonds and i think that's one of the reasons why they keep showing up, you know, it's women supporting women. And, you know, they're the protectors of the family. They're the nurturers.

And that's what my mom taught me. So it's definitely one of the reasons why I continue to fight for Hillside to keep the housing, not only for my mom, because I'm like her protector and she's mine, but we're also like here to protect the community from harassment or from literal bullying. Yeah, that is really powerful. So I guess looking forward, I think at the beginning of the interview you said yeah it looks like there's going to be another fight over sort of forcing that forcing the city to actually use eminent domain um yeah do you have well okay i don't know if you can talk about your plans for that. Yeah, I guess two things. One, if people want to support what y'all are doing and put pressure on the fight and any action items that we put out is a great way to support and just amplifying the struggle.

Yeah, in terms of our specific strategy for holding the city accountable, we actually haven't gotten super into the weeds of it yet because we are just taking a break for a while to, you know, to celebrate, celebrate this win and, um, yeah, kind of have folks get perspective. I think our, um, our view is that because the city has now approved the funds to make this happen, that there shouldn't be any barriers to them seeing it completely through. Yeah, I think we can maybe apprehend some ideological barriers because actually using eminent domain to expropriate a landlord is not something that's been done before um but yeah we'll see what happens yeah i mean like if if if they can displace tenants with eminent domain they can they can they can use it to keep tenants in their homes like exactly i guess the other question i have with that is, what is, okay, so like, say like, I don't know, a miracle occurs and like, your landlord is visited by like three ghosts at night who like show him increasingly horrible features and he decides to sell it to the city. What is the, like, what is the city owning the building look like? what is the city owning the building look like?

Yeah, I can start with that and then Anaid can chime in. But I think the vision of the tenants has always been collective stewardship and tenant ownership of the building. So the fight definitely does not stop at the city taking the building, but there will also be a push for actual tenant stewardship of the building too. Yeah, and I think the exact structures of that aren't so clear yet. There's still a lot of like discussions

and work to be done around that. But yeah, in the conversations that we've had with folks from the housing authority, which is gonna be the agency that's actually purchasing the building, they have expressed openness to us actually having another nonprofit takeover and eventually building towards a co-op kind of structure. That'd be really cool. Yeah, I know. That'd be really cool. Yeah, I know I've heard a lot of talk among, well, I think some people have done it in Detroit about things like community land trusts as a way to have tenants actually control their buildings. Yeah, that's definitely been part of the discussion.

Yeah, that's awesome because this is a much better solution than the state is now your landlord exactly yeah yeah yeah so that's uh yeah that's that's the what we hope for in the future um like janice said we still have a lot to work through and this isn't um done obviously uh we wouldn't, like you said, want the state to be landlords here. They wouldn't be the best landlords. But yeah, we are, like Jenna said, taking a pause. And we will reconvene to plan out future steps to to take but this was a really really great win um it was such a relief off of so many people's um back and um something we've been fighting for over three, three and a half years now. So it's good to finally get somewhat of positive news.

And it's been such an emotional journey for the last three years. I mean, that doesn't even justify how much of an emotional roller coaster it has been for a lot of these tenants or for a lot of our families here. When we got the news, everyone broke out in tears and joy and and everyone was so surprised. I mean, I couldn't help myself but to like cry and smile and ugly cry some more for like the whole day just yeah so um yeah we're hoping for um for the process to be um somewhat smoother um now that that we've done a a large portion of the fight um but yeah we saw we're still at the tail end yeah things yeah so uh where where can people find find y'all's organizations and groups and stuff to go follow them or yeah help them them in places. For CCD, which does post a lot of Hillside content. I think all of our socials are just at CCD LA. And then for Hillside,

I think there's different handles for all the different, different platforms, unfortunately, but if folks just look up hillside via or hillside tenants they should be able to find it and if you just uh send me the social media handles we can put them in the description yeah yeah for sure yeah well thank thank you both so much for so much for talking to us this was this was awesome i'm so happy for y'all. This is great. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for listening. Yeah, this has been huge.

Yeah, and I guess for everyone out there, you too can start taking back your cities and yeah, with any luck and with a lot of struggle, this is going to be the first of many. And yeah, fuck landlords. We can beat them.

Hell yeah. Fuck them. Yeah, we got this. Hell yeah. Communities first. Yep. Landlording is not a job. No.

We're here to take it back. Hell yeah. 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.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, boy. It could happen here. The podcast about it and happening and could. Chris, take us away.

I'm taking it away. Oh boy. I think I promised to. So this has been a fun week so far. We're all kind of sitting through that in that awkward period where we know the Supreme Court is about to

do some shit with Roe v. Wade and that that's gonna light a whole bunch of stuff on fire um and so we're all waiting for that and we're all waiting for uh the big pride month demonstrations in the wake of a shitload of uh um threats from the right uh and kind of in that awkward interstitial period, we got this little burst this weekend of happiness, of just pure joy. So obviously we had covered a little earlier the Gundaline rally in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which was a right-wing kind of counter rally to Coeur d'Alene's regular local pride, um, rally. Uh, and you know, it was a, an event that the, the, the, the, the PR for ahead of time was deeply unsettling. There were a lot of like threats and talk about, you know, let the fight start here and all that stuff. A lot of people were worried about a massacre, including us, because when you have a bunch of

right-wingers saying that anyone queer is grooming kids and it's time to shoot them, it's reasonable to be worried about a massacre. Now, what we did see on the day, and this is something you'll note a lot of times when you get the events where there's a lot of threats around them. That's what kind of provokes enough attention and enough of a state response that that it's not where people try to shit. You know, it's often kind of at the edges of events or the events that people don't take seriously enough ahead of time that like things go to shit. You know, Charlottesville would be a great example because prior to Charlottesville,

there was a lot of like discussion about how big it was going to be in the city, you know, did not really take it seriously. There were a number of and this is one of the things that's frustrating. The fucking mayor of Charlottesville is after what happened in Coeur d'Alene and stuff has been like on the news talking to people about how to how to avoid demonstrations going badly and shit, which like, you know, he received a lot of warnings from anti-fascists about how many people with, you know, pending violent charges were going to be at Unite the Right in Charlottesville and how many threats were going on. It was kind of ignored. And as a result, it got really fucking ugly because, you know, you had smaller numbers on the first night, you know, when people got surrounded by that torch lit mob, you had smaller numbers of anti-fascists outnumbered by fascists and no real counter to them until, you know, the next day. And obviously, that's the day that James Alex Fields drove a car into a crowd.

starts our story today because the thing that was the bright ray of sunlight in in the midst of what has been a pretty rough couple of weeks news-wise was 31 members of the hate group patriot front getting arrested in quarter lane idaho jammed into the back of a u-haul um the story of patriot front and the story of how that that beautiful moment happened um starts in uh charlottesville in 2017 actually it starts significantly before that in texas but uh the group that becomes patriot front starts as a group called vanguard america um and vanguard america is one of the groups that is responsible for kind of carrying out the the unite the right rally in charlott this is this is a different group than american vanguard right uh wait let me double check here uh because sorry they all use such similar names yeah um i if i'm not mistaken there is an american vanguard um there's also the american vanguard corporation uh no no no i think it's American Guard. American Guard is the group that is kind of more coming out of the KKK's sphere of orbit

because some of them are former Klansmen. That's another story for another day. So you've got Vanguard America. They're one of the groups kind of behind bringing a lot of people, a lot of fascists, shouldn't call them people to um charlottesville in 2017 james alex field is marching with them and carrying one of their shields earlier in the day before he carries out his car attack and as a result of the bad press that him murdering a woman and and maiming a bunch of people with his car in a terrorist attack brings down um the leader of vanguard america

thomas rousseau uh splits off like kind of ends vanguard america and spins it off into patriot front which is less explicitly just as fascist but less branded as fascist more kind of branded in americana they all of their pr and all of their like images look like rejected stills from a bioshock game yeah it's it's it's pretty amazing i i'm pretty sure yeah these are the guys who like there's a video of them like talking like like on like they're literally they go like on camera it's like oh yeah we're doing america stuff we're not hitler people and then like the moment the camera turns off they're like oh good the camera's off we can say sick hail now yeah yeah it's it's great i mean vanguard america's logo was literally

like an eagle carrying a bundle of fascists yeah they're not not subtle um and i should say vanguard america i think was actually founded by another guy in in california but um thomas rousseau was was pretty quickly prominent in there and he splinters off into into patriot front i need to be specific because there's people listening who will yell at me for getting that wrong yeah um so for the purpose of of what we're talking about today we should chat about thomas rousseau um before we get into some of the funnier stuff because he's got a really interesting background for a fascist so in the last couple of years since patriot front became a thing rousseau has held a

number of kind of like flash demonstrations where they'll get a few dozen patriot front guys together and they'll march around in their fucking gators and their their little fascist uniforms that are like um i don't know they look like country club nazis is like the way they they prefer to dress um and they'll carry their shields and they'll you know film propaganda videos most of what they do is hand out like put out stickers put out other kinds of propaganda to the extent that like they are probably the primary national purveyors of of nazi propaganda um in like the real world like in terms of stuff that actually gets put out where people can see it um there i've like i've

found like stickers from them it's just places in Chicago. Yeah, yeah. I've seen a couple of them. Like 2019, Patriot Front was, and this is the ADL's estimate, so they're not the most accurate they could be, but also no one else is really keeping track of this, so I'll say they're probably broadly correct. In 2019, the ADL listed Patriot Front as responsible for 80% of all propaganda incidents nationally of Nazi Nazi type groups.

And then in 2020, that number doubled and they were responsible for like 90 plus, I think sometimes you'll hear 92% of like the Nazi propaganda distributed nationwide. Their propaganda efforts are most active in Texas, Washington, California, Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia. And it's one of those things, this is not – the goal with the propaganda is for them to be seen as very large and influential. The way that they manage to do it is that Patriot Front is effectively like a key parasocial relationship for most of the people in it, right? It's a series of like chats and discords and whatnot. And these people like come to feel like it's their community. And one of the things Rousseau did that was very smart is if you want to stay a member of Patriot Front, you will get banned and purged from the organization if you are not regularly posting proof that you're active in the real world. And the easiest way to do that is by putting up stickers, right?

So that's not only how they fund some of their operations because, you know, their guys are buying stickers, but that's how you keep people engaged. If you want to like stay in the clubhouse with your friends, you have to go put up stickers every couple of weeks or every so often. And, you know, when you have a couple of hundred people doing that, stickers are not that expensive. You can get a lot of propaganda out that way. And so Rousseau has been very successful in that end of things. So let's chat about him a little bit. He is, was born in 1998. So he's what, 24-ish right now? He grew up where I did. He comes from the suburbs of Dallas, the Metroplex, specifically Coppell. And if you're not, if you don't know much about the DFW suburbs, so Dallas, sizable city, like it's this massive sprawling city larger than several states

in its geographical area. At some point in the future, assuming growth continues, you're going to see like all of the big cities in Texas merge when their metroplexes start to mingle. But these Texas suburbs are all laid out very orderly in grids. They're all like planned communities. And in the area around, like this particular chunk around Dallas, they're all pretty wealthy. And of these wealthy suburbs, Coppell is like where the money money is. Like coming up in Plano, which was a fairly well-off suburb, we would – like the Coppell kids were like the rich kids, right? Like when we would compete against them in football and speech debate, like you'd feel like, yeah, we're like fucking with the rich kids. Let's get them.

So this is like Dallas-Fort Worth's like Evanston. I assume so, yes. So, yes. And when we would like, obviously, like, yeah, they were the rich kids. They were also like the kids I would often get drugs from when I was like 19 because they had like they had they had good drugs, you know. So the other thing you should know about and Coppell is where, you know, our boy Thomas Rousseau grows up in the early 2000s. And in fact, his senior year is the year of the 2016 election. And another thing you should know about Coppell is that like all the Dallas Metroplex, it's incredibly diverse. And it's also, I should note, incredibly diverse in a specific way. It's not hugely economically diverse, but it has a massive population of people from Southeast Asia, from India, from Vietnam, from China,

and from Japan. And you can kind of see that if you look at, so Thomas Rousseau, as a kid, works for the Coppell High School newspaper, The Sidekick. And if you go to The Sidekick's website today, and if you look at its writers and its editorial staff, it is a bunch of kids from Southeast Asia. Now, Thomas Rousseau is extremely white. And he has, you know, his big thing is like replacement theory. He's been yelling about this for a very long time. And so one kind of assumes this is probably where he started feeling that. kind of assumes this is probably where he started feeling that.

Although it's interesting, if you look up like one of the earliest articles, the SPLC has a pretty good profile on him. And back kind of at the start of 2016, in February, he writes this article about the school's diversity club, which is just a pretty normal, you would not, there's no signs in there, not that I saw, that like he's going to be a Nazi in about a year like it's just, it's how like basically anybody who is writing a straight piece of reporting on a diversity club would write it, you know

it's not like, there's no signs in that article. Yeah, which is interesting because like the next article he writes is like completely off the rails. Yeah, like it's, Trump has at that point because you know february 2016 trump is still like i don't know he's definitely becoming the front runner but it's not clear what's going to happen yet and by the time he writes his next article a couple in

like october it's a full-on trumpy yeah he's like i mean he he's like by that point like he started his great replacement stuff he started like i mean he's doing that kind of like uh the the white working class has been like oppressed for too long and uh people keep calling them racist and so they're voting for trump now because they're simultaneously poor but also like but but you know i think it's interesting it's like you know it's it's an interesting sign of that kind of like what actually generates that kind of right-wing populism because it's like so you have you have someone who's like going fascist really quickly writing this and it's like oh where is he from oh wait he's like just from like the incredible rich kid place it's like it's it's it's it's it's fun he's doing yeah he's he's doing the sort of fascist version of the like working class

whispering that yeah of like rich pundits doing and it's i one of the things the kind of black box mysteries with rousseau that i haven't seen a great is like when does the actual switch flip in his head? Like when he writes that article about the school diversity club, is he already a fascist? Or is he one of these people who like is kind of conservative and gets super radicalized by Trump? had you see throughout kind of 2016 because i i get the feeling from him that he was always kind of like the conservative kid in his school paper and school media and like you get you see like he's writing like the month after that diversity club article he writes uh an article about campus carry and is like supporting concealed carry on college campuses and is is pretty like uh but it's also these are also

like, it's also kind of a milquetoast conservative take, like it's not, he's not like making an explicitly fascist argument. He's making the kind of arguments that like I would have made in speech and debate class as a conservative kid in North Texas, when I was a senior, you see, like in May, he's writing an article about like bathroom bills and stuff that's getting closer to kind of modern American fascist rhetoric. The silent majority where he says, quote, the truth is white voters, especially the working class, have had more than enough of being called racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, and the rest of the usual trite buzzwords. The forgotten majority of the American electorate has shown that much to the dismay of the globalist agenda that they have not yet been replaced by tens of millions of blue voting immigrants from abroad. And it's, again, you can kind of, there's a debate as to whether you can, I guess, argue as to whether or not he had always been sort of a fascist and just felt like more comfortable as the year went on being open about it, or if he's getting radicalized. I feel like he's kind of getting radical. I can see in him like shades of everyone that I knew back then at that point in time in my life, including me. Well, and this reminds me, so I'm like a year older than he is right so i i i was out of high school by 2016

but like i you know i'd like i just graduated right like go to graduate like 2015 yeah and i remember this with like people with people that i knew who were like because i mean like okay like there were always people who were like really really like like we had a lot of like fox news pilled like kill all the muslims kids but there are also people who like weren't like that who were just like conservatives and over the course of 2016 like they went really really like they radicalized really quickly so it it wouldn't surprise me if he's doing the same thing because i think that was a lot of like like i i i watched a lot of sort of like like, moral majority people get, like, who were kind of, like, on, who weren't on the, like, absolute, like, right-wing, like, I don't know how to say it.

Like, who weren't on, like, the absolute, like, hard right of that thing, who were kind of, like, conservative, but, you know, like, weren't actively invested in murdering every gay person yeah those people just like a switch flipped and they like they just kind of went sicko mode yeah and that's that's where he goes he goes like full-on and i don't know you can it's interesting because like his his primary job for the thekick, the Coppell High School student newspaper is as like their their political cartoonist. And he's he's mostly doing like really basic like clip art shit, which is what you see him doing for like Patriot Front. It's kind of the thing that distinguishes them is his like art style and the propaganda he makes. So, you know, he's there at Unite the Right in 2017. One of the guys he's there with

commits a terrorist attack. They spin off Patriot Front. And for the next few years, most of what they'll do is these events where they'll like show up and they'll march. It's worth noting that while they bring different kinds of weapons to these events, mainly like, you know, bludgeoning weapons, the kind of things you'd have for like a street fight, and shields. These are not primarily violent events in that like their goal is not to get into a fight. I think mainly not because they're not violent people because they're scared of getting into a fight. And Rousseau's probably scared of getting in trouble for having a bunch of people show up to riot. So most of what they do is they'll do these flash mobs. Well, they'll get like a bunch of people together in the middle of the night or like on a day when nobody expects it.

And they'll march around D.C. or something. And then they'll get footage of themselves doing this march where, you know, they can kind of take care to make sure the angles make them look as impressive as possible and then they'll put that up to try and get more members um so they can put up more propaganda right uh they've had a couple of well-publicized failures they showed up in philadelphia so i think this was last year right yeah and they again there's like 30 to 50 of them they all like pile out of a u-haul they're marching is like in their fascist uniforms and like three dudes confront them and wreck it. Like three Philly guys just wreck their shit. I remember seeing a video.

It's so funny. I remember seeing a video. I think it was from that. We're just like, there's like, there's a video. It's just them running away. And there's like, there's like objects flying through the air. Yeah. No, like their fascist the air yeah no like the their

little army confronts like three random philly yeah we're just like oh this isn't any good i don't know who these guys are but there's no way this is good let's fuck them up it's great um it's a it's a perfect philly moment um so yeah and like that is their MO. Um, and in part because one thing you'll have to, and I, people can misinterpret what I'm saying here. They're probably the most disciplined of the fascist groups that do regular in-person events. Um, because there's a lot of discipline required in getting several dozen people together, getting them all to the, the area in the exact same mode of transport together. That's why they all pile into U-Hauls, right?

Rousseau doesn't want to coordinate a big caravan. That would be messy. People would be arriving at different times. People would get lost or get stuck in traffic. He wants everyone together because, again, he's a fascist. They're really – and they are pretty consistent and pretty good at getting everyone together and marching at the same time. So like on a logistic end, there's some things they do that are competent, you know, generally speaking. Now, the downside of this plan, I've just talked about like why getting everyone in a U-Haul can work

and how it has worked for them in the past. The downside of this is that everyone is in a u-haul together yeah well i mean i i think i think for them there's there i think there's some upside like for them doing this which is that like i think on a sort of like on like a discipline level on the level of like building this like like built building this sort of like culture of like like community and like solidarity but like the fascist version of it it's like yeah you have everyone suffering together in the back of a u-haul which is hot as shit and like has to smell like like like like death like you cannot imagine like

yeah it's like like imagine the worst locker room you've ever been in but then it's it's everyone has been trapped in there for a week. It's like, yeah, it's it's a hot air balloon powered by Nazi farts. Like that's that's what's going on there. And they're all just like and it's it's very funny because like when they had done their last event or two and like this is like in the dead of winter in the East Coast that they do a couple of events and they have people like nearly passing out from heat stroke in the back of the van yeah um or in the back of the u-haul because like it's not great to be crammed to the back of the 30 something people it's like um it sucks but also like that that suffering sort of like brings them together and makes them sort of like sure

like yeah yeah in a lot of ways which sucks but also yeah the second logistical problem with this i think you're about to get to yeah so they they they try to rousseau actually puts out specific like information about like hey here's how we need to prep for being crammed into a u-haul together and like advises that his dudes start spending time in saunas and shit in order to toughen themselves up to avoid getting heat syncope. Anyway, there's a couple other things that are happening. One of the things that we know, because one of the funny things about Patriot Front,

so they claim to have an intense vetting process. You're supposed to message them with an application, and then they'll vet you before they let you into the chat rooms. They have been compromised since the day there started being a Patriot. logs of every conversation happening. Like they're so infiltrated. It is extreme. Like, it's like, it's like the training wheels of anti-fascist research. Just like get into Patriot Front's chat rooms. There's always multiple people in there documenting their shit. It's extremely funny. And so because of that, we know a number of their tactics. One of the things that Rousseau has admitted to doing in the past is that like, well, when we start like heading towards wherever we're going to, you know, pile out of the thing in March, we'll call the cops and we'll inform them that we've seen a group of people with shields getting ready to March and that they don't seem

to have weapons, but they're about to be in X area. And they do this so that there will be cops on scene who will provide like an escort for them, right? So that they won't get beaten up. Like they want the cops to be there to protect them, you know? So Rousseau is like specifically bragged about doing this in the past. There's also like, as I stated,

like as an organization, their events are not geared towards like killing people, right? Like they're not, they're doing these marches to get videos. They're not like, they're not even like the Proud Boys where they're specifically showing up to get into a brawl, right? And every time they do get into brawls, they look very uncomfortable and frightened in them, which is why he like calls for police escorts and shit. That said, there are like, again, they're a Nazi organization. They specifically preach replacement theory and yell that their ancestors conquered America and so they deserve to own and all this shit. So a bunch of them have been arrested for like gun stuff.

There's been a number of like people of Patriot Front members arrested for like illegal machine guns and shit like that. That absolutely happens. People post about their illegal guns and stuff. But as an organization, they're mainly geared towards providing like propaganda that Thomas Rousseau likes. So they all gather together and are heading into Coeur d'Alene, Idaho to confront this. And I suspect their goal, I suspect their Rousseau's hope for how this was going to go was they were going to pile out of their U-Haul, going to get their 30-ish guys all in lines together in their uniforms with their shields and with their fucking fascist

sticks or whatever. And they were going to march through the middle of the pride gathering and get video of people like scattering or backing away from in front of them, not wanting to confront them because, you know, there was a big group of them. I think that was the hope. I'm sure Rousseau was like, hey, and maybe some Antifa will try to fight and we'll get some videos of us like fighting them with shields and that'll be good for recruitment. But I think the main goal was to get a video of them scaring gay kids and looking like a big scary Nazi phalanx that they could use as propaganda. Now, this goes to shit before they even get out of the U-Haul,

because somebody calls the police and reports what looks like a little army of guys with weapons and shields piling into a U-Haul. And again, the police are saying that this was a concerned citizen. And based on the kind of most recent reporting, it may just be a random citizen of Coeur d'Alene who actually like was for understandable reasons, right? If you like see this happening, you're like, yeah, maybe I should, I might need to call somebody about this. I wouldn't call the cops necessarily. But, you know, in this case, it seems to have worked out. That said, knowing their background, you have to acknowledge the possibility that it was one of them who called the police on themselves. Like, that is not impossible. Now, there's initially reports that it was the feds, reports, I should say, from the cops on the scene. And again, it's reasonable

that journalists overhearing that, recording it, would report on it. That said, cops on the scene. And again, it's reasonable that journalists overhearing that recording it would report on it. That said, cops on the scene are no more accurate about what actually has happened than like random passersby. So and they're more likely to just openly lie. Yeah. And you know, I would not I'm certain there's a Fed or or or for inside Patriot Front. That said, certain there's a Fed or four inside Patriot Front. That said, it doesn't seem like this was a Fed bust. Although, you know, it's not impossible that it was because if you were the Feds and you had a guy in here and you decided you want to arrest these people to avoid a potential Charlottesville kind of situation happening again, maybe you would want to just say it was like a random person who called i don't know

this does not i there's no reason that this needed to be a fed bust they were not like this did not require the fbi's infiltration capability to deal with like it was a bunch of nazis piling into a u-haul i don't have trouble believing that some dude was just like hey yeah hey cops and it's there's been a lot of like surprise online that like the cops did their job, that they went after these people. I think the surprise there is kind of based on some misconceptions. fascist groups rally in places like Portland or like Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally, the cops tend to be on their side and tend to protect them. But what you're looking at are two different things in a lot of ways, because the cops in a place like Portland, and I assume in a place like Charlottesville, I'm not as familiar with their police demographics, but I know this is the case in Portland, don't live in Portland. They live in places like Battleground, Washington. They live in these surrounding,

more rural and suburban communities, and they don't like the city that they police, and they kind of see them as an enemy. So when other people, generally from similar suburbs and rural communities as the cops, show up to fight the kids that Portland cops don't like, the Portland cops are going to be on the side of that. And this is, again, you see versions of this occur around the country. In Coeur d'Alene, this was not, like, Coeur d'Alene cops live in Coeur d'Alene, you know? Yeah, I was like, there's nowhere else to live. Like, it's like- They're from that community. And even if I'm sure a number of them, if not many or most of them have like attitudes towards, you know, have said some negative things about gay people. These are also like they're probably some of them are probably related to people with that pride rally. I think about pride, these are people who live in Coeur d'Alene and a bunch of folks from outside of the state are driving in to fuck with them. They're not generally going to be on board with

that. And as a general rule, also, cops don't like people coming in to their town, like home, to cause trouble. And these are people from like 11 different states entering Idaho to like fuck with people who live in Idaho, I'm not surprised that the police actually did something here. It doesn't, like, mean that these are the good cops that we're mythically all looking for. It just means that, like, nobody wants this happening in their hometown. Like, nobody wants these assholes running into town dressed as, like, little Hitler youth guys and marching around. Like, that's, like, of course they don't want that. who would um so the cops pull over this fucking u-haul um there's the footage of it

is some of the funniest shit on the face of the earth it's so good because they just roll up the back of this thing there's like some fucking courtesene cop with an AR like pointed in there and there's just all these fucking goober Nazis and their their fucking polos and khakis and their fascist gators um god it's good all right look up this footage if you can find it you owe it to yourself to do this it's amazing we should state we're not really we'll be getting more coverage to what happens and what happened elsewhere on this day you had a lot of ugly shit happen this day in Coeur d'Alene because there are a lot of heavily armed fascists rallying who are, in many cases, locals or from nearby places like Spokane. Matt Shea, who is a former state legislator from Washington who lives nearby, who is a accused domestic terrorist, leads a march through Coeur d'Alene. These guys are not stopped by the cops, right?

In part because like they're not a bunch of dudes from out of state showing up to march around in ridiculous Nazi uniforms, right? The police are notably less concerned about the guys in AR-15s and plate carriers than they are about Patriot Front, which is again, it's because of like what's actually going on here, you know? front, which is, again, it's because of like what's actually going on here, you know. But there are like armed people fright like threatening and and trying to confront or at least standing around outside of a pride march in a way that, you know, if you're doing that with a bunch of guns, that's concerning.

Anti-fascists show up to protest them and very successfully kind of keep a wall between the folks showing up for pride and the folks rallying with guns um so that that is a thing that is happening i don't want to this has been the thing that has kind of like gotten the most attention from quarterly and i don't think that's bad like from a standpoint of like what is useful seeing a bunch of nazis get their shit like wrecked is is definitely an ideal takeaway from the Coeur d'Alene event, because especially considering the amount of violence, I think we were all worried might occur there. I'm very happy that the primary takeaway is

Patriot Frontal got arrested. But the things that we were concerned about there, again, there's a bunch of dudes show up with guns to stare at a pride rally that's not a not a positive development but this group of nazis all get arrested and that is positive because it's extremely funny and sometimes it's nice for things to just be funny um so the next kind of thing you see from patriot front is them all pulled out of a u-haul on their knees handcuffed getting arrested one by one, and taken to a jail in Coeur d'Alene. There's some very funny quotes where the police are being asked, do you even have room for all these people? And they're like, oh, we'll figure it out.

Don't worry. Rousseau and a bunch of guys are getting criminal conspiracy charges. So Rousseau and a bunch of guys are in getting criminal conspiracy charges. They're all getting conspiracy to riot, which is a misdemeanor. There's some rumors that a journalist posted that a number of them have illegal had illegal guns and are getting illegal gun charges. I haven't seen confirmation about that. I'd be shocked if some of them were not carrying guns. Yeah. In the state of Idaho, anybody can.

Right. I do think they were specifically violating the law by having firearms while sitting in the back of a box truck because i think for like reasons of accidents that have happened hunting you're not supposed to do that in idaho um but i haven't seen charges as a result of that um it's debatable as to what's going to stick however there's reasons to kind of suspect that something will because they had like seven or whatever page plan for how to handle it. They had their little riot notes. Oh, God.

They had like sticks and a smoke bomb and stuff. So it's not like an impossible case to convict them on conspiracy to riot, I will say. case to convict them on conspiracy to riot i will say you know like you're not you're not asking like the moon of the police in this instance to like or of the prosecutors or whatever to be able to actually convict um so we'll see what happens um what's definitely happening is that this is very funny um patriot front is extremely incompetent i would not take this as a broader sign that like number one one, the police are taking threats against pride rallies more seriously. Oh God, no. No. I would not take this as a broader sign that like, fascists are getting heavily stopped. I also wouldn't,

there's also been people saying that like, and again, this is coming from that journalist who claimed that like, there's a bunch of gun charges pending and maybe there are. But like I think the comment she made was like a massacre was averted. I do not believe Patriot Front was planning to massacre anybody. That's just – that's not their MO. That's not like – again, not that they're not Nazis, not that they don't want people dead. But like they're like – these guys are like the milquetoastest, babiest Nazis, right? They show up and they march around in their fucking, like, Tommy Hilfiger Nazi uniforms, you know? Like, they're not, these are not folks planning in an organized capacity

to commit acts of mass violence, because that would be scary to them, because they're mostly like suburban middle class kids. One of the funniest things that has come out of this is like one of the Nazis who got arrested in Idaho's mom has started doing interviews because she's like, I kicked him out of the house. I keep trying to get him to, I don't know what to do to get him out of this group. So I've told him he can't live with me anymore because after his divorce, he's been living

with me. group. So I've told him he can't live with me anymore because after his divorce, he's been living with me. And I'm going to talk to the media about the fact that my son is a stupid Nazi until he stops being one. I don't know what else to do. And it does sound like she's really legitimately like trying to grapple with like, I don't know why he's doing this. I don't know how to stop it. But like, it seems like the best thing I can do is embarrass him um which is i i think probably a good move on her part yeah um there's a fun daily beast article about that you could really hear her frustration which is like i don't know why he's doing this like it all started around 2016 it's very frustrating you feel for her so i don't know chris you got anything else to say about patriot front i i do

think it's extremely funny that like well i i don't know in some sense it's funny in some sense it's kind of disturbing which is that like the right's reaction to this was immediately to uh accuse all of them of being feds yeah i mean which like it's interesting to me that like that's just like anytime something happens in the u.s now like and this is this is across almost the entire political spectrum everyone immediately goes this was the feds or so sometimes sometimes you get it was russia because sometimes yeah yeah yeah because it's like if you're someone who like the feds are the good guys it's like well you need another person who did all this yeah so like that's disturbing and kind of grim to me that it's literally everyone with everything has just turned into Alex Jones.

And it's like – Yeah. I think the motivation for that on all the sides, there's definitely like a core of legitimate belief that because the feds infiltrate – the feds have infiltrated a lot of fascist groups and the feds have had a history of infiltrating left-wing groups and whatnot. Like the feds have done a lot of this stuff. and the feds have you know had a history of infiltrating left-wing groups and whatnot like the feds have done a lot of this stuff so that makes some people paranoid but also i think if you are on the grifter end of things right and you want to talk about this stuff but you don't actually want uh to put yourself at risk um that's an easy way to kind of divorce your listeners and supporters and stuff from uh the stuff that's potentially illegal is by saying well that's all the feds um yeah and i think also especially like i think people are i don't know it's more frustrating on

the left because people do it with stuff that like the pr is actually pretty good but like with people on the right there's a lot of like this has become one of their sort of like pr management things of like anytime something looks bad for them yeah no it was the feds and it's like no and i i don't think that's on the right at least i think it's there i think there's more legitimate belief that it's the feds on folks in the left who do this yeah um i think on the right it is nearly always just like this is how you do damage control. This is how we distract from the fact that our guys keep carrying out attacks or whatever. Or in this case, that our dudes are profoundly embarrassing.

Yeah. Is you're like, no, that was the FBI packing 30 federal agents into the back of a U-Haul and getting arrested by the Coeur d'Alene police. A classic FBI caper, if I've ever seen one. My favorite one of those is the people who are like, you're never going to see the names of any of these people. Like literally two hours later, every single person got booked and all of their names, like a list of all of their names showed up in every newspaper. of all of their names showed up in every newspaper and it is again this does show you how the courteline police don't want people coming in from out of town to fuck with people who live in courteline that's not a them being woke they like nobody no cops like that sort of shit yeah yeah like these yeah yeah these guys aren't these guys aren't the hometown fascists right like they're

they're fine with like shea yeah they're fine with exactly yes biblical basis of war dude it's like yeah but these are like these are weird out of town fascists and it's like yeah cops i don't know they're yeah and it's they're very territorial one of the one of the ways you can see the territoriality is like the first thing the cordeur d'Alene police do is be like, oh, we're going to give everyone's name and where they live. We're doing that immediately. And of course, the backlash to that from the fascists has been that now a bunch of fascists are doxing and calling in death threats to Coeur d'Alene cops, which again, there's this open question of like, are any of these charges going to stick for Patriot Front? The fact that an organized flood of death threats is going in for the police charging them is not good for their

cases oh no like they're just they're just pissing the cops off it's like guys guys some free cop advice from me cops don't like getting death threats so that that really makes them angry yeah um so that's funny i don't know what else to say about it uh it is pretty funny um there's aspect again the broader problem of there were a bunch of dudes with ars yeah showing up to to threaten um a pride gathering was not fun although also a lot of folks showed up to defend and support those people um and i think i think also like uh from what i remember from the reporting this was like one of the largest pride events i've ever had so like i think it brought out people yeah yeah people people aren't being like as an intimidation tactic it's not working it does not seem to have worked yeah it's it's it's

it's it's it's it's working insofar as it's it's you know it's further radicalizing the right but like it's not it it hasn't gotten to the point where like i don't know people like it hasn't gotten to the point where like these things just are or like pride events just aren't happening because they're, because the threat is great enough. So, yeah. And I, I would say broadly speaking, if you kind of look at all of the things that we saw in the

quarterly event, it's a more, more positive signs than negative ones. The negative stuff is stuff that we have seen a lot before the militia shit um the folks rallying to defend those people the people turning up for the pride event um that's all positive and of course the most prominent fascists at the event embarrassing themselves like that's positive so i am yeah i feel i i i do feel like we were all worried over here about how the event in

Coeur d'Alene was going to go. I feel really good about how it, it went, which is not to, especially, I know that there's folks from Coeur d'Alene there, not to minimize the problems and the threats faced, especially from people in Idaho,

because boy, that is rough territory to be organizing in defense of lgbt people um but i i think broadly speaking more good news than bad news from from cordoline so uh i want to give our appreciation and thanks to the folks who showed up in cordoline um to support this event to confront the fascists um y'all are awesome and doing something difficult in a place that uh needs you to be doing that so thank you welcome i'm daniel would you join me at the fire and dare enter 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. 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 podcasts. Ah, here we go it could happen here it's a podcast where our intros get increasingly more segmented as you realize we have no idea who was going to do the intro yeah we've never at no point during the existence of this show or its growth have we have we planned a single thing or talked about how to do our jobs. I've never I don't even know who who we who we are. We are all meeting for the first time. I have that disease that Adam Sandler has or what's her name

has in that Adam Sandler movie where he forgets she forgets everything every day That's me drew Barrymore. That's right. That's right. Shireen drew Barrymore I forgot it, but I I can just is the same thing as in memento because that's all I can think of Yes Yes, Adam Sandler's memento Well, we should probably introduce the episode today yeah so uh it's me it's Christopher Wong and today we're doing an episode that is uh you know okay we we've we've we've been force-feeding you really grim stuff for a long time so today we're gonna do an episode

about uh settler colonialism and politics and board games because that's also extremely cool and it does not i mean it is kind of depressing but it involves less doom than normal and yeah and and with me to talk about this uh it is is shereen our our wonderful producer who also writes for us and is great and we love oh thanks i'm here yeah and robert who we we tolerate uh oh that's nice of you you shouldn't a bit we we do kyle it's nice to meet you yeah also we have kyle from strange matters yes yes i i'm kyle flannery i'm a editor and co-owner of uh strange matters magazine a uh i guess we technically have now, even if the print issues are not in people's hands, a new leftist culture and politics magazine, here to be the consulting super nerd. Awesome.

Yeah, I am very excited. I mean, I, well, okay. I feel like, weirdly, for a group of people that I'm in, I have probably played the least board games of anyone here, which is, I'm excited for this episode. Yeah. So when, when I was a kid, my, my board game was risk. Yeah. I did a bunch of others.

I played like hero quest and obviously access. And I will, I'll say this. I say I played access and allies. I set up access and allies boards many a time and then gave up after like 15 minutes of playing the actual game. I mean, that's how I played HeroQuest. Yeah. Because I was like, I tried to read the HeroQuest rulebook and I was like, I have no idea what's going on here. I was into Hero.

Because I was like 10. But no, specifically my fucking thing, we would, speech and debate tournaments, you know, because when you do it, you're basically out for a whole weekend, sometimes three days, sometimes like four. Um, and you're basically living in this school, but, but you have like maybe one or two hours of stuff per day. And the rest of the time you're just hanging around hearing how your friends are doing is like the competition goes on and we would play epic specifically Lord of the Rings risk. We would have these massive Risk games. Oh, I have, yeah, I have very good memories of playing Lord of the Rings Risk with my friends.

Yeah. I just had the normal vanilla Risk. Wow. I was really missing out. I distinctly remember being at a bachelor party where after we finished all the normal bachelor party stuff, we crawled back to the place where everybody's going to camp out for the night. And so we managed to convince

one of the other groomsmen that a game of Risk only takes about an hour. And he did this at like, it was like three in the morning. Yeah. Was the wedding that day? Yeah, it was like 3 a.m. the day after the wedding. It was an act of extraordinary cruelty.

Anyway, he didn't get married, but he did take Kamchatka, which was really key to his plans to assault North America. We shockingly did all make it to the wedding, which was very much a risk. Very much a risk. Yeah, very much a risk.

That's why it's called that. I was smart enough to just go, no, I'm going to bed. I'm not doing 3 a.m. risk. That's not happening. But, yeah, I guess to kind of back up and provide a little bit of context about why I kind of thought this was so worth talking about. Because I'm guessing that there's some readers at home who are having a very common thought, which is, why are you talking about board games? Who cares?

And I'm reminded a little bit of the little tweet joke from a while ago, a couple years ago, why am I talking about it a little while ago? On Star Trek, they have their, what do they call that? The holodeck. They've got the holodeck, but for some reason, every week, everybody's into some weird new board game. What the hell's going on with that? And for the people who aren't aware of this kind of sector of nerddom, board games are actually

massively more popular than they were when I was a child, when us millennials were young, and a large part of that push has actually been from game developers themselves. The people who make your video games absolutely fucking love board games. And it's for a pretty simple reason, which is that you know all of the rules to the game. Board games are naked before your eyes.

You have stripped them down to their atomic components before you have done anything. And that means that if you are interested in the art of how a game works, there are actually wonderful case studies. Because you can see very quickly the way that you move from what the mechanic is doing to what it means. Whereas in a video game, it can be a lot more obscure. It can be a lot more complicated. And it can require a lot of digging. You don't have to...

I am enough of a turbo nerd that I have broken into the games files for various video games I've played, and ripped out the code, and looked at it, and been like, ah, so that's the drop rate. Because again, I am a consulting turbo nerd here. But with a board game, you don't have to do that. You just know all of the rules up front. And so that can reveal, if you're so that

that can reveal a lot about what the designer's intentions are, what they're communicating, and how that communication all works. So that was kind of my start point here. Should I just keep on going and explain what the hell's going on with this article that I'm about to talk about? Yeah, I mean, I was going to note that the primary board game played in Star Trek TNG

was Stratagema in the classic episode in which Data has to get really good at what is basically holographic chess. Absolutely, yeah. Yes, anyway, you talked about Star Trek The Next Generation, so now that's all I'm going to be able to think about for a while. It's good that we didn't get into the awful board games from DS9. Oh, God, yeah. I mean real i mean stratagem is pretty ridiculous and the episode is very silly um yeah but it's it's one of the more fun data episodes uh whereas the board game

episode from ds9 i think is generally considered the worst episode in all of ds9 yeah yeah i mean there's i think the worst episode of star trek the next generation is not the board game but it's the one where reicher and his dad fight in what's basically american gladiator judo where they have the bandit sticks that they have to fight yeah the ultimate martial art anyway please continue yeah uh so so to talk so i wrote this article that has is upcoming in publication it's going to be in our first issue. And it's about a particular trend that I noticed in board games. There were a lot of board games that were, in terms of what was actually going on on the board,

they were incredibly violent, but they managed to make it look like there was no violence going on. And so I actually am grateful for Robert for talking about the games he talked about, you know, Axis and Allies and Risk, even like Monopoly. These are games that are in, was generally known as the American tradition, where the goal is to eliminate all the opposing players. Yeah.

To be the last one standing. Yes, like everything in American, it is like one person wins by using either violence or capitalism on the other. Yeah, you out-survive all of your opponents. Because that is what we do in America. We just survive. We just pray to God that there is somehow a tomorrow.

And by God, we're going to take Kamchatka. That's my only political stance as an American, is that we will take the Kamchatka Peninsula. And we're going to take Australia for those three extra armies. That Australia strategy is... I feel like half the risk strategy, half the risk variants I saw were just ways to nerf the Australia strategy. But in any event, there's a European tradition. And one of the things... And that has been a lot...

That has been very popular. It's made an absolute shitload of money over the last several years. Shitload being very relative, because again, board games are a pretty small field compared to video games or gambling or booze or something like that. But they've been kind of the dominant name in the game. And one of the kind of major conceits of this style of game is you don't eliminate other players. All players, any player who starts the game at the table is going to end the game at the table.

You never eliminate anybody. And this is, I think, an admirable enough goal. Yeah, that's one of the things that's annoying about a lot of games is like if you're trying to do a party thing and people are getting eliminated. Although it can be fun if everyone is drinking at the same time. And while you play the game, people get eliminated

and then get drunker and heckle everyone else at the table. That's actually not bad. That's actually not bad. That's actually not bad. I more remember it being like middle school and high school where you just have somebody sitting there bitterly for four hours while you try to clean up a risk game. Anyway, the one that most people are probably, the one that is the most famous, infamous is Settlers of Catan. And that's kind of what was my start point Settlers of Catan is a board game where you play as European colonizers to a almost

uninhabited island an almost uninhabited island and you cannot damage the other players directly there is no mechanism for doing this you can block them off from building things but you can never send your army to conquer their territory I always go hard on the roads I'm a bad bitch you can block them off from building things but you can never send hell yeah to conquer they're always go hard on the roads yeah yeah yeah you can block people with roads it's a very like it's kind of

like thinking about like a rivalry between developers almost uh but one of the things that is kind of outstanding about this is that uh it's not a technically uninhabited island there is a quote robber that starts out on the island. And the robber is capable of inflicting violence on the players and can be sort of controlled by the players. And so the part that was, again, striking to me about this is you can't directly, you know, this would actually be the right number of players. If me, Chris, Shireen, and Robert were all sitting at a table

playing Settlers of Catan, I could not eliminate any of them. None of them could eliminate me. We could not harm each other directly. We can just negotiate with each other. We can trade with each other. But there is still ultimately a winner. And this is, if you are willing to make some kind of specific historical amnesia about how colonialism actually operated where wars of colonial aggression also included wars in Germany, like the Seven Years' War or the wars of Spanish succession were all happening at the same time. But it can be viewed as similar to that.

And again, it has this explicit theming. And that is, I do think that those things are dovetailing together. That the only people who are real people are the colonizers. The colonized are non-agentic. They're just set. They're setting. And the more you think about it, it's just kind of messed up. It's just kind of messed up.

And I do think it's kind of interesting that the game doesn't really say this very explicitly, right? And I know there's going to be somebody who's going to say, oh, you know, the game says Rob or it doesn't say Native American. How can you know? It's like, come on, man. If you watched a movie where there was a group of people in the movie who were portrayed as violent and incapable of acting on their own. And all of these racist tropes, even if they were not played by a Native American actor, even if they didn't use any explicit Native American references,

if all of the good guys are people who dispossess this person, you know what's going on. People don't look at The Tempest and see Caliban and go, this person has nothing to do with the Americans. They're making him uncivilized. Civility or civilians in general,

they come from somewhere else and they inhabit the place. But yeah, you're right. Just like Columbus discovered America, the natives are erased. It's a blank slate as far as white settlers are concerned. Yeah, it's a blank slate. The positionality of like,

the game is very explicit about who is a settler and who is not, right? The settlers of Catan are you and everyone else playing the game and then you have the other person who's on the island who got here before you and it's like, hmm. I mean, the name is pretty blunt. you are like you know there's no i don't know it's very it's very hard to evade and you know like you can see the art from the game like it's all white people uh and it's it's

kind of interesting because in the first edition printing they're all kind of medieval but in later editions they're like colonial america like it's. I don't think it's like, it requires some very deliberate obtuseness to miss that this is what is going on. So anyway, that was released like 20-something years ago. I find it very funny that Settlers of Catan managed to win Game of the Year awards in both 1995 and 2005.

Wow. It hasn't changed much. Settlers of Catan managed to win Game of the Year awards in both 1995 and 2005. Wow. Like. It hasn't changed much. I don't know. Yeah. Those are different years. Like, what's going on?

I mean, Oats is definitely, yeah. They did add boats. They did add boats. That's true. You're not wrong about the boats. Chris, you don't have boats. Come on. That's true. I actually don't have two.

It's funny. My neighbors have a boat. I do not have a boat because I'm a regular person who doesn't live next to a lake. Oh, yeah. I also do not have a boat. So, yeah.

I briefly had a commute to work that I could have kayaked, but I don't own a kayak. That's New York, baby. I developed a desire to have a boat last year. I was in Spain and I met a Spanish guy with a boat

and that does seem like the life, but that's neither here nor there. You're a horrible descent into turning into some sort of Hemingway adjacent character. Yeah, just, I mean, it is nice to be drunk on a boat. It's also very expensive to have a boat, so maybe I'll get drunk on an inflatable

raft instead. Yeah, I'd just get a sunfish and just flip it over every 30 seconds. Yeah, there you go. The working man's boat. Yeah, the working man's boat. So from there, I kind of, what has happened is, unsurprisingly, that, you know, board games board games are actually a somewhat demographic art form

compared to video games because all you really need is some paper. Really, that's all you need. You need some paper, and you can make a board game. If you have Tabletop Simulator, you just need Tabletop Simulator. You're already done. And then you just need to be able to bully people into playtesting your game. And that's really the hard part. So this means that people will iterate on things pretty quickly.

It's a very fan fiction environment. People will iterate rather quickly on your ideas and develop them further. And so I looked through some of the other games that I've played and liked. And I actually tend to like pretty much all the games that I studied. Splendor is one that is very fun, very casual, very easy, and it just has this art that bugs me. This art that really bugs me where it's about being a gem trader. And it very much seems to be based on like renaissance Italy or like renaissance Antwerp uh you know this and for some reason like you don't see people in mines it's very weird all of the there will be pictures of mines like okay you bought this emerald mine and there's like nobody there which is very weird

because I have seen pictures of pre-industrial, I've seen pictures of mines from the 1980s, which is firmly industrial, where there are thousands of people. You can barely see the ground. You know, thousands of people everywhere. You know, mining is very labor intensive. You only start seeing mining become kind of like capital intensive, like very recently, and even then only really in the United States and a couple of other countries.

Germany, obviously, uses very capital-intensive mining. Everywhere else, it's very, very labor-intensive. But Splendor, they won't show you the people doing the mining, but they will show you the people sorting the gems. So they're skipping the slavery part? Yeah, exactly. Exactly the part they are skipping. Yeah, they're skipping it.

Even today, you ignore ignore what you're, how your cell phone is made, right? You're just like, you're glossing over the unflattering parts and going straight to making a gym. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're going straight to, you know, I've, you know, I've got my, my pretty purple cell phone, you know, and the, the, the part where, you know, there was, you know, pretty much a war in the Congo fought over it,

and then they had to install suicide nets in China gets completely glossed over. And all that stuff goes into this phone, but to me it's just kind of a necessary hunk of plastic and metal for surviving in America. And I'm not entirely... I don't want to be too hard on the designers here. It's very easy. Like, there's a part of me that wants to be, and there's a part of me that wants to be kind of forgiving

and being like, do you really want to be playing this, like, fun, casual game and, like, be confronted with slavery? Mm-hmm. But at the same time, like... But make the game about something else. Yeah, you really tried to have it both ways here like this is like i don't make the game about something actually fun not yeah not something that involves slavery well i mean there are and there are people who do that you know it's like not that

hard to find people like making games about like uh theme parks or like haunted houses haunted houses uh or utopia or like weird like utopian arcologies and stuff like that. Like people make these things, but like this, this colonialism keeps on like coming back. Right. And part of that, you know, part of that is, I guess, like all sci-fi is kind of colonialist. But wait, before we go, do you know what else keeps coming back? You know what? Tell me what, Shereen.

Capitalism. It's time for an ad break. And there's still more capitalism. But there's always more capitalism. That's true. That's true. Different capitalism. Yeah, right now we're in more early capitalism.

So the game that really stuck in my crawl the weirdest, and I might end up reading a quote out from here. I'm sorry for being an incredibly irritating person and doing that. It's a game called Mombasa. And Mombasa is so aggressive about how colonialist it is. It's so, so aggressive. The premise of the game is that you are adventurers in the scramble for Africa

and the goal is to be the player who retires the richest and the ways in which the mechanics of this game are messed up the part of the mechanics that I will say is genuinely clever and if they hadn't made it about the scramble for Africa, I would just be like, yeah, cool. So I still have to admit that this is cool, is that you start out working for a different joint stock company, but anybody can buy shares in anybody else's joint stock company. So the best strategy is to buy somebody else's company, and then they make the company valuable. And you contribute as little as possible. Free rider problem.

You know, the classic of game theory that liberal economists fucking love talking about. Great thing to do with a game. But the way you make your company valuable is, like, it's pillaging Africa. Like, it's pillaging Africa. And it's very, very weird. Like, you have this map of Africa in front of you and the map of Africa has valuable things in it has you know diamonds that you can pick up uh it has like there are books which it's unclear if that represents like you write an adventure novel like

King Solomon's Mines or you write a naturalist guide or you write an ethnography, but you're writing some sort of book that is based on how you despoiled the African continent. And what always struck me as so weird is that the territory is just, when you enter the territory, you just take everything. You just pillage it. It's not like territory that you hold and really make more productive. You don't develop it. At least it's honest about that. To a certain extent, at least it's honest that Europeans were lying about any of that development, civilizing mission shit. They were there to steal.

But what is so, so weird to me about it is that there's no resistance. There's no risk to expanding across the continent there's no negotiation the only other characters at all are the other players the other europeans uh you know this continent that at the time had hundreds of millions of people uh many of whom had legitimate kingdoms that in some parts of africa were you know had full gunpowder militaries just totally glossed over. Just totally not mechanically represented at all.

Well, it's like they're portraying the only future that is possible. This is how you become a civilization. There's no other... There's one path. I mean... civilization there's no other that there's one path um well i mean it's that is there is one path to being a civilization and it does involve a lot of taking other people shit to be fair no i i i said that ironically robert i know i said in their mind there is one

path uh yes but i i do feel like i've got to read this out from the rulebook because it was so eye-popping to me. This is from the rulebook. This is the start of the rulebook, the opening. Quote, In Mombasa, players acquire shares of chartered companies based in Mombasa, Cape Town, St. Louis, and Cairo and spread their trading paths throughout the African continent

in order to earn the most money. Chartered companies were associations formed for the purpose of exploration, trade, and colonization, which links them inextricably to a very dark chapter in human history, global colonialism. This period lasted roughly from the 15th century to the middle of the 20th century and is associated with exploitation and slavery. Although Mombasa is loosely set within this time frame, it is not a historical simulation. It is a strategy game with an economic focus that roughly refers to historical categories

and places them in a fictional setting. The exploitation of the African continent and its people is not explicitly depicted within the gameplay. If you want to learn more about the underlying history, we recommend the following read. History of Modern Africa, 1800 to present by Richard J. Reed. End quote.

So they fucking knew. They fucking knew that this was some evil evil shit that they have made into a game and they want you to know that they knew that you that you were going to call them out it's like making like a candy land version set in the Congo where you have to collect

hands or rubber and being like yeah yeah by the way you can read a book about this if you want yeah this is like it's such a cop-out it's like yeah it's just it's so bizarre like it's so bizarre and how many people even read this stuff like like generously one person out of every four reads the rule book when you learn a board game like like very generously like i'm just a huge nerd who likes reading this stuff and i just like

read this and my jaw was just like holy shit i think there's a i think you could try it might even be wisdom in trying to like make a board game about the scramble for africa uh that's like framed in like a kid-friendly way but is also like very blatantly horrific. It's just like the kind of thing that if you think about it 10 seconds, you realize like, oh, we're just like subjugating and massacring people. But it's also like the art style is like themed off of Candyland or some sort of shit. Like maybe. But even then, you're probably more likely to just get people enjoying it unironically than you are to actually convince anybody to read about the scramble for africa well yeah yeah i mean and well it's actually

kind of interesting because there is a there's like a good tradition of like making like kid-friendly appearing things that are actually quite horrifying if you think about them for more than two seconds and monopoly yeah well monopoly for example and i mean i was going to take a slight turn away from board games uh i grew up with uh red the red wall books oh gosh yes yeah the red wall books like even though like stoats are not a race of people in real life they are a type of weasel uh holy shit those books managed to be incredibly racist um it really is racist against like different types of weasel, but you know, they, they portray this,

it's this very cutesy world of, you know, animals, you know, mice and badgers and stuff. And they're just committing genocide left and right. And it's just portrayed as like totally. Okay.

It's just like. Someone who has no idea what you're talking about. This is crazy. Yeah. These are popular children's series in like the eighties and nineties. Yeah. No, I read these books. It was like, yeah yeah it's like you flip back and forth between like yeah here is martin the mouse and he's a hero and also he's eating all of this really nice food and then also we must

exterminate like entire species it's buck wild it is insane uh the the redwall feast spot by the way is like a really good Twitter follow. Where it just posts excerpts from the food descriptions. Those are incredible. But the reason why I kind of made that turn is that one of the games I considered that I actually really liked is something of an anti-colonial game called Root. And this was part of what I was kind of witnessing

as I was studying these, is that there is a bit of a discourse, a bit of a development over time. And two of the games that I highlighted, Root and Spirit Island, are fairly anti-colonial. And Root is a kind of horrifying game, but with very cutesy appearances. You know, you play as like mice and cats and, and birds. Uh, and the, the birds are like, like horrifying aristocrats. Uh, like, like you're like a feudal militaristic dictatorship. Uh, the cats are like trying to turn the entire forest into like a giant wood cutting factory and like subjugate everybody else under the boot heel of like industrial capitalism. And you can play as just

the concept of revolution? There's a woodland alliance who win the game by provoking revolts of the civilian population to overthrow the other two. It's very weird. It's a very violent game by comparison. It's very hard. It's a very violent game by comparison. It's very hard to eliminate a player in it, but it was kind of interesting to me to see that you can do... It's kind of almost the exact opposite,

where it's just like... A lot of... It doesn't have... It has this very obviously horrifying and graphically violent mechanics. You know, revolutions and subjugation. But with, like, the characters look cute. Like, all the character art is very cute.

You know, you got, like, little mice, like, making punji traps and stuff in the artwork. It's very odd. Yeah, I kind of jumped a little bit ahead here. But I don't know that we need to go through everything I did in this paper. That's a little bit boring. And also, we need to leave things for the readers. And actually, Root is a little bit based on a game series that I think would be particularly appealing to Robert

and possibly the listeners. There's a company called GMT Games. Has anybody else heard of them? These guys are interesting. Continue. No, I haven't heard of these guys. GMT Games make games like Cuba Libre, a four-player asymmetric

warfare about the Cuban Revolution. Oh boy, that could go a couple of ways. Yes, yes. I won once as the Mafia, which could go a couple of ways. Yes, yes. I won once as the Mafia, which was an interesting side to play. Oh, nice. An interesting series of interests to have.

I could not build an army for shit. I just had to count on the fact that other people didn't think it was worth destroying casinos, because they were too busy trying to stamp out revolutionaries. Or they were revolutionaries trying to stamp out fascists. The reason why I think they're a very weird company is that they have games like Cuba Libre, Twilight Struggle, A Distant Plane, which is about the war in Afghanistan.

But they also are... These guys are like Quantico psychos. afghanistan but they also are like these guys are like quantico psychos uh they actually they are the guys who make the actual for real uh war games that the pentagon uses yeah yeah quantico if you're not up on things is like the part of the virginia area kind of a suburb of dc where all of the all of like the fed feds live like I'm not talking about like border patrol feds or shit I'm talking like fucking CIA motherfuckers

like the capital F feds yeah isn't the CIA's like training facility there yes they have and I think the FBI also has a facility FBI's also got a facility there capital F feds yeah yeah agents all the agents are there yeah yeah don't think of like like your osha inspectors

here yeah yeah i mean look and well and also just like we're not primarily talking about like the door kickers we're talking about the people who are like the doing the really scary shit you know yeah i will say though if if we gave OSHA, like, CIA powers, the world would be in an enormously better place. I think we hand them the nukes. I think we hand them the nukes and a mandate to use them if security procedures aren't followed. Not cleaning your counter after using chicken?

That's the end of Detroit, you know? There goes San Francisco. You didn't clean your food cart well enough. Pretty soon. Collective punishment, but just for workplace violations. Yeah. Collective punishment for basic sanitation violations. I mean, in a way, not following sanitation does lead to collective punishment, whether or not you have a federal enforcement force or not.

That's right. Hence the deployment of our nation's nuclear assets. Do you know what else is collective punishment capitalism yes listening to ads yeah so let's all endure it together oh we've been collectively punished uh solidarity to all all of us who must endure advertising. Yes. But yes, I have been rambling a lot. And yeah, like I said, I find this question of who gets to be an agent to be very important. Who gets to be a player?

Who is even given the choice of winning? You know, if you're not a player, you're completely ridden off from the possibility of ever winning. And this is something that in video games we've seen recurring debates around this. Civilization is an infamous one for this. Who even gets to be a civilization? Why are some civilizations civilizations and some city-states and some barbarians. And, you know, it does, you know, it does shape your thinking, you know, and there's, you know, games are very valuable for how they create empathy. You know, a game that can really immerse you, can really teach you a lot of very creative and powerful empathy for groups of people that you might never have the chance to interact with.

And then when you keep on creating games that ask you to empathize with the colonizers... Yeah. You think it's just the normal way of things. This is what happens. This is a succession of events that leads to humans. Yeah, this is a succession of events that leads to humans. Those who do not participate simply die out. This is adaptation low-key brainwashing. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

it is. It is. And I mean, it's, you know, the same could be said of all culture. But, you know, I think it's worth being informed and critical consumers. And I mean, I actually do, you know, I actually, you know, I know you want this to be an uplifting episode and I'm going to be optimistic here. It's not just that we're talking about stuff where the stakes are not literal deaths, the stakes are getting mad at your friends over a board game. But also, I do think that we have seen positive development of people looking at these games. There's a game developer who said about some of the games he was playing, what do the locals think about these colonizers? It's pretty rude that nobody's asking them.

And tried to design starting from there. And I have some criticisms of how he executed that. How well he executed on that vision. But the fact of the matter is that even just through the sheer iteration of somebody looking at a game like Settlers of Catan and going, well, how can I do this differently? I can't just release the same game every single year. I need to do something new.

And even just the simple one of just reversing who is the players. Simple enough. Even that has been creating some iteration and some additional complexity, which has caused people, I have seen people

go back and re-examine, even if they're not people who have any sort of education, any sort of formal education in anthropology or post-colonial theory. They'll look at like, oh yeah,

I was playing this game where you're the colonized and I played this other game where they reversed the roles and i was like i was the bad guys earlier yeah i mean i i think portraying the other side and maybe winning means you kick them out or or destroy them i would like to see that play out versus the alternative. That is Spirit Island. That is what Spirit Island is. The players cooperate to destroy the

colonizers. Or to terrorize them into abandoning the island. Weird game. Weird game. I think there's some good execution in there, and I've got some criticisms of it. It is my favorite, but it does do some things a little bit patronizing.

But yeah, that's something I think is worth seeing. do some things a little bit a little bit patronizing but yeah that's something I think is worth seeing and I think it's something that admittedly maybe I just really enjoy this space of the world because if you look at very mainstream video games for example

you get kind of bored of the same five games get released every year give me some texture, give me new but um also i think that uh i think that the the i think there's some cost for optimism for people like critically examining the art that they're building the art that they're consuming in the art that they're creating and uh i don't know that counting on that kind of stochastic bouncy ball randomness of people just kind of spontaneously going, what if we reversed the roles in Call of Duty? What if we played the people living in the favela while Call of Duty is happening on in the background?

Just counting on the randomness of that happening. Might not be as fast as people want. I wish. I wish. Oh, yeah. There was a game called... I think it was called... This is War? Oh, it was called This War of Mine.

That's what it was. That's a good game. That's a really well done game. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and there's... I don't know. I'm excited to see the future of all this stuff

and excited to see where people go with this. Well, Chris, I have a question. Why did you decide to even bring on Kyle? Like, what do you, what is it about this topic that you think is prevalent today? What can we take away from this well i think i don't know i i think one of the things that i got was reading the article is about like one of the ways like one of the things you see in how settler colonialism gets perpetuated and i think um why am i now forgetting the name of the yeah decolonization is not a metaphor it talks about this a lot which yeah i'll talk about that another time someday but like one of the things that you get like immediately is the sort of is the settler move to innocence and that strikes me as like the sort of it's the kind of like it's it's the kind of perspective that you see i think running across all of these board games and i think it is actually really helpful to sort

of you know like the the way you break that and then the way you start to get actually that actually looks like decolonization it has to start with people like actually like realizing what they're doing and not being able to sort of like retreat to this position of innocence and being sort of confronted by it and i think that like that that is a place where media can actually like be very helpful because you know like most and most mostly like it's it's it's almost always working in the opposite direction right but it's something where you can actually have this sort of right but it's something where you can actually have this sort of i don't know it's it's a part of the cultural sphere where you can like very like very easily put someone into a role that

is not the one that they're normally doing and get them to like realize that like what they're doing is like fucked so yeah yeah yeah i mean i could say the first when i was in high school and played playing sailors of katana for the first time i didn't realize the like it took me a while to understand that like oh i'm a colonial list yeah yeah territory uh and well because they yeah they present it as default innocence and also just like exciting to there's no there's no backstory to how you get the wood or the ore or anything else. You just like somehow build a road. You somehow have a town. There is no backstory as to who you're destroying in the process.

And I think it infiltrates in your mind to the point where you subconsciously just deem that as normal. And it's definitely not unique, you know, it's definitely like, it's only just another tendril of reinforcing stuff that we hear from the rest of our culture so broadly, you know, that it's just, this is just one aspect, one expression, I should say, of how many millions of different ways we get colonialism reinforced to us as a normal, natural part of the world. And, you know, from, you know, cowboy movies to just like the way the New York Times will write about who owns land and who has a viable claim on owning a piece of land. And all of that, you know, we get reinforced to us in our fiction, our nonfiction every day. and who has a viable claim on owning a piece of land. All of that, we get reinforced in our fiction and our nonfiction every day.

And I guess, again, that's part of why I was drawn to board games in particular for this, because it's so transparent. It's so transparent how all the propaganda works. There's no movie magic. Yeah. Yeah. The rules are all there. It's pretty much,. Yeah. Yeah. The rules are all there. It's,

it's pretty much, I don't know. But yeah, but you, you sympathized with, I did as well. You empathized with the colonizer because they're who you, who you are.

Yeah. You want to win. You want to win. You want to win. I'm very competitive. You want to win. And, and, and, you know, and they get to, and the people who made it get to have this kind of, like, discourse, this kind of badge of, like, oh, yeah, we made, like, the friendly board game. You know, they're comparing themselves to, you know, making Monopoly where, like, there's, like, a 50-50 chance of a divorce happening every time somebody finishes a game of Monopoly. And, you know, they get to portray themselves as the nice ones.

somebody finishes a game of Monopoly. And they get to portray themselves as the nice ones. And it's like, yeah, we're the nice ones because all the people who we're being mean to don't get a voice at all. I just can't believe we made a game about paying rent.

Like, I really cannot believe that. Do you know the history of it? Because it's very funny. I skimmed in your article about it a little bit, but it was called something that was much more to the point. What was it called? The Landlord's Game.

Excuse me? Yeah, The Landlord's Game by Elizabeth Maggie. She was a Georgist activist in the early 20th century. It blows my mind. Fucking Georgism.

Monopoly being the most relevant contribution of Georgism to world history is somehow incredibly fitting yeah that's all I took away from it brutal, the number one selling economics book of American history

because it's reduced to a very bad board game I can't because it's reduced to a very bad board game. I can't say it's unfair. I guess that's really what I've got. I think it's very valuable to be a critical consumer. Mombasa maybe went over the line, but for the most part, these games haven't

ruined my ability to enjoy them. If my friends want to play a game of Settlers of Catan, they might just get an annoying lecture from me. But they're going to get an annoying lecture from me anyway. It just would be about something else. I mean, it's like any media. It's like film, TV, or whatever. You're going to realize eventually that you should be conscious of what you're consuming.

So, yeah, I'll still get into arguments about all of those things. Now, except for podcasts, people should blindly consume our podcast. Oh, I mean, yes, podcasts are the only true proletarian art form. That's right. That's right. As Karl Marx said, listen to this podcast, like and subscribe, share us on Facebook.

And then eventually one day podcasts will wither away and abolish itself. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. Classic Marxist podcast theory. That's right. That's right. Is that the episode?

Well, Kyle, where do people find you? Yes. I personally am notoriously hard to find on the internet, being a person who doesn't have any social media whatsoever. Good on you. Absolutely the right call. I have been off of Twitter for a couple of days. I'm taking a break. Best decision you could make. Get away from all of it. Our publication is at strangematters.coop. We worked hard to get that.coop registration.

We just published on Thursday, a couple of days ago, love as a verb, an article reviewing and expanding the possibilities of bell hooks, all about love, 2000 book, all about love, which is worth reading both the,

both the review and the book. Yeah. I actually just finished it um four hours ago oh yeah i read it for the first time during the pandemic it was uh yeah yeah it's an enlightening read it's an enlightening read uh we we tend to have a lot of uh really insane economic stuff if you want to like read some truly insane shit about money about where money comes from and what money is and what we can do about money. We've, oh boy, we've got you covered.

We have a profile of Robert where we have rendered him as Baron Munchausen, very flatteringly. Oh, yes. A really wonderful review of three different cyberpunk works by the wonderful anti-fascist

author Elizabeth Sandifer. Yeah, so please come check us out at strangematters.coop. We are taking new writers all the time, and we've got submission guidelines on there. And if you want to personally send me hate mail for besmirching the good honor of Settlers of Catan, I can be reached at kyle at strangematters.coop. Yeah. Oh, and we do have a Twitter for the company. Yeah. What's the Twitter for the company? It is strange underscore matters.

Perfect. Thanks, Kyle. Check out Strange Matters. Contribute to their fundraiser. I can't recommend doing anything on Twitter, so I simply should. And thank you for having me on again. It was a lovely time.

Thank you for coming. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Again, as with every episode, go with Christ. 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. 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 podcasts. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is part two of a, I guess, two-part series about Dallas, Texas. Finally, we're getting in a Dallas, Texas resident to refute some of this slander. Sure.

Against my flawless hometown. I've spent a few summers in Dallas. Formerly briefly host to Bernie Sanders when he had to take care of something. I've spent a few summers in Dallas I've been around I've been around the DFW area I wouldn't recommend spending summers in Dallas

I wouldn't recommend spending winters in Dallas either there's a couple of weeks in spring that it's tolerable to be in Dallas try to make it then it occurs to me that we should ask garrison where were you when they killed jfk i was i i'm yeah garrison i was i was born in the 21st century what have you ever mail ordered a man liquor carcano rifle in the back of american rifleman magazine okay let's let's open by by first briefly talking about the 31 dorky-ass

neo-Nazis who got arrested in Idaho who are planning to confront riot attendees in Coeur d'Alene. You just said because you missed that episode and you want to talk about it. That's right. That is exactly why. We've already done the episode, but I'm always down to talk about this. I know we just did an episode talking about it, but i wasn't on that one so i i have a few paragraphs on how it relates to today's topic of christian fascist violence i just want to state that you and i were both hanging out at a party when we got the news about that and it is the hardest i have ever seen you laugh for like four hours so and hey like patriot front's based out of texas so that yes there is a degree of relevance here

yes to the bulk of our of our topic today so yeah i think it's pretty funny because a group all dressed in the same outfit it's almost incomprehensibly funny trade in saunas so they wouldn't pass out while crammed into a hot sweaty u-haul truck driving from all around the country to cordelaine idaho so that they could march around with flags and shields to yell at gay and trans kids and you know what they did instead they got pulled over and sat in a ditch while getting their little clan hood masks taken off and spent the rest of a day in an idaho jail and all got doxxed it's really funny it's really especially since again their best case scenario was spending a day free in cordelaine idaho i know and instead they didn't do that so yeah yeah yeah i'll be like

you can be against cops in the carceral system while still recognizing how innately absurd and hilarious this scenario is. Yeah, it's fine. When cops in groups like Patriot Front Beef, that's generally a win-win for me. I'm not cheering on police tactics. It's just recognizing that one of my enemies temporarily making another one of my enemies' lives harder is pretty funny. It's just recognizing that one of my enemies temporarily making another one of my enemies' lives harder is pretty funny. It's really funny. It's the same reason that we don't condemn police violence when a cop shoots another cop.

Exactly. It's blue on blue violence. It's just funny. And based on these charges, I doubt any of these guys in particular will go to prison for long enough to form any dangerous connections with other incarcerated people. will go to prison for long enough to form any like dangerous connections with other incarcerated people well i'm sure there's a couple of dudes in there that if you know they were to go to a serious prison could make meaningful inroads with the nazis there but man most of those dudes aryan nations guys are just gonna like they're not going to consider comrades like the the yeah it's yeah yeah i i think i think the patriot front idaho situation seems like it'll mostly just be an inconvenience a national embarrassment for them

yeah and i think and i think we can we can let this one just be as funny as it is considering there was 30 less nazis there to intimidate and attack people at pride um and patriot front may be now less willing to pull stunts like this in the future yeah i've thought about this a lot and i just can't see any ways in which what has happened could really be a problem um it seems to just purely be funny so just enjoy it yeah look look this this is what happens when you appropriate lesbian culture you get arrested actually that's not all that different from what Garrison was saying immediately after the arrest. That is true. I made a lot of jokes about how Patriot Front looks pretty gay while getting handcuffed.

Wow. Get the, shine the cancel radar. Get the cancelometer out. We're canceling Garrison. Anyway, let's continue with this episode so here is some other fun facts about about the whole idaho thing so two of the patriot front members who were crammed into that u-haul last weekend were connected to a church helmed by former washington state representative matt shea who's also associated with the bundys the oath keepers and leads the church at planned parenthood uh he has advocated like civil war if abortion and

same-sex marriage aren't stopped kill all the men in left-wing cities all that good stuff yeah yeah yeah and he was also present at the protest in cordelaine at the pride event this past weekend and we can we can draw like this direct line from the surge of groomer and anti-drag propaganda to neo-Nazis deciding to organize and travel across straight lines to threaten people at a Pride event. In the days leading up to the event, Chaya Rychek, the woman behind the Libs of TikTok account, repeatedly highlighted it, weaponizing pearl clutching satanic panic. In Rychek's first post about the Pride event, it was about how the satanic temple was promoting the event in an out-deleted tweet by someone

claiming to represent local satanists. On June 7th, Libs of TikTok posted, quote, family-friendly drag dance party being promoted by the satanic temple in Idaho. We are living in hell, which is a nice little pun there that I can't quite tell if that was intentional or unintentional about Satanic Temple and living in hell. Anyway, I thought that was funny. Dave Riley, a white supremacist who attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, who also organized with Identity Europa a few years back, he actively solicited Libs of TikTok to draw attention to the Pride event and sought her help in trying to, like, get publicity for the protests against it.

Quoting the SPLC hate watch, quote, the Idaho Tribune also drew attention to it. Idaho Tribune, far from a real newspaper, is an obscure junk news publication that on multiple occasions has promoted Riley's political activism. Anti-racist activists also tipped Hate Watch off to infrastructural overlap between a website that promotes Riley by name and Idaho Tribune. Haywatch reviewed the source code for Dave Riley's website and the Idaho Tribune site and confirmed that the two sites share graphics from the same web hosting account, meaning that they are likely controlled by the same person, unquote. And then on June 9th, Libs of TikTok posted screenshots taken from the Idaho Tribune about the Satanic Temple and the Coeur d'Alene Pride event, boosting content from that

white supremacist-linked website to her 1.2 million followers. Every single one of these figures using fascist rhetoric and utilizing stochastic methods, including Chaya Raichek, her financial backer, Seth Dillon, and people like Tucker Carlson are all responsible for inciting events like this. Tucker led his show last week by using a Nazi reference when referring to a pride event in Dallas. In terms of stuff that's like outside of, you know, conservative states like Idaho or Texas, late last month, Rycheck, as lips of TikTok, targeted a Bay Area drag queen storytime event, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's drag queens reading children's books to kids in a public library. And then on

June 12th, it was stormed by a group of around 10 men dressed in Proud Boy attire and shirts that read, kill your local pedophile. They threatened attendees while shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs, terrifying a bunch of kids who would come to hear Queens read stories. So how did this kind of stuff and like, how did this rhetoric spread so quickly? Like how did this groomer stuff get so volatile so quickly just in these past few months? In our War on Trans People episodes and my Operation Prideful episodes, we discussed the history of this sort of save the children and pedophile rhetoric.

And in my City of Hate episode earlier this week, we talked about how this wave of homophobia was able to write off the conspiracism of Pizzagate and QAnon. And then in this episode, we're going to talk about the types of places that this extreme bigotry was able to fester this past decade, and how it relates to evangelical Christianity and Christian fascism. I'm going to play an audio clip from a city council meeting in Arlington, Texas that happened on May 25th. Take a listen.

My name is Jonathan Shelley. I'm the pastor of Steadfast Baptist Church, and I'm here today because I have church members that live in Arlington. I live only a few miles away from here, and I do business in Arlington on a weekly basis. I'm horrified and ashamed that this city has decided to promote and solicit pride in this city. Pride is nothing to be celebrated. In fact, it's an abomination.

The Bible says in Proverbs chapter 8, the fear of the Lord is to hate pride, hate evil, pride and arrogancy, and the evil way and the froward mouth do I hate. According to God, we should hate pride, not celebrate it. We should humble ourselves as virtually the whole room said that we were a nation under God, according to the American flag.

And we were a state under God, according to the Texas flag. We should humble ourselves to what the Bible says and not what the small minority here that is bullied would say. In June of 2020, Mayor Jeff Williams officially announced that he sets a pride month in June for the city of Arlington. But I don't understand why we'd celebrate what used to be a crime not long ago. In fact, according to the Texas Penal Code and section 21.0, homosexual conduct, a person commits an offense if he engages in deviant sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex. In fact, that is still on the books today, even though Lawrence v. Texas overruled that in 2003. But God has already ruled that murder, adultery, witchcraft, rape, bestiality, and homosexuality are crimes worthy of capital punishment.

Arlington, just for context, is one of many towns in North Dallas that if you happen to have weed on you, you're going to want to tape it to the bottom of your balls before driving through Arlington. Thanks for that great, great weed tip from Robert Evans. You're welcome. You're welcome, Garrison. So, that is Pastor Jonathan Shelley, who lives in Grand Prairie. He was there at an Arlington, Texas City Council meeting, casually advocating killing gay people while citing Texas's laws against homosexuality. Their church and this connected branch of Baptists that we'll learn more about later have an intense record of preaching genocide against gay and trans people and also a fair amount of antisemitism. Big, big shocker there. The previous pastor at this church, which was called Steadfast Baptist Church, but the previous pastor, who resigned in 2019 due to allegations that he paid for sex workers, was involved in gambling, and had smoked marijuana, I guess he should have taped more of it to his balls.

He garnered national attention for celebrating the Orlando Pulse gay nightclub massacre, which killed 49 people. From the pulpit, the pastor said that God should finish the job and referred to the murdered patrons as sodomites, perverts, and pedophiles. The new pastor, John Shelley, continues this same strain of preaching violence against gay people. This next clip is from June 2021, right after someone died after getting hit by a truck at a pride parade in Florida, which we later found out was a complete accident. But I don't, don't think the public knew that at the time. No. And obviously people, I mean, I think all of our assumptions was, Oh God, you know, this is the thing. Yeah. Well, here's the clip.

It's going beyond just saying you do all this wicked stuff. It's saying you enjoy it. all this wicked stuff? It's saying you enjoy it. You enjoy murder. You enjoy malignity. You enjoy hating God. Look, there's only one group that enjoys that. It's the pride parades going up and down the street. And you know, it's great when trucks accidentally go through those, you know, parades. I think only one person died. So hopefully we can hope for more in the future. You say, well, that's mean. Yeah, but the Bible says that they're worthy of death. You say, are you sad when fags die? No, I think it's great.

I hope they all die. I would love it if every fag would die right now. And you say, well, I don't think that's what you really mean. That's exactly what I mean. I really mean it. So yeah, it's important to remember, like that's June, 2021. So even a year before the big wave of groomer stuff

got pushed this past spring with the help of lives of TikTok. And that kind of shows how susceptible modern conservatism was to this resurgence of in your face homophobia. There's been people to working to like, keep it here the whole time just bubbling beneath the surface and now it's just completely boiled over um and i'm gonna say like the rest of

the episode's gonna get into some pretty dark stuff uh there's gonna be a few more clips that are pretty are pretty gross uh if you want to if you want to check out that's totally fine after this episode i myself i'm gonna take a little bit of a break from covering this sort of thing because it's taking a little bit too much of a mental toll uh because it's a lot of genocide it's it is it's it is it's pretty intense uh if you do feel the need to leave before you go just remember this simple phrase for keeping safe in the dfw area tape it to your balls and your happiness won't be smalls. So here's another clip from June 2021 of Shelley reiterating his call for the government to execute gay people after he received some public backlash for his the previous clip that we that we used. that we used. And I personally believe that all of these sodomites, you know, people that are men with men are pedophile because that means that they just simply are attracted to children. They're

attracted to these people that are the ages of 17, 16, 15, 14, 13. Even though they're a grown adult, they're going after children and very young children often cases and molesting them and hurting them. And, you know, anybody that loves children, loves their family, would want this person to be executed through the proper channels. That's what I believe. That's what I teach.

I'm not a violent person. So my kind of fear is that Shelley or someone like, you know, John Doyle that we talked about in our last City of Hate episode is not that they themselves will bring a weapon to some future pride parade or go on a rampage and assault or kill gay people, right? It's that one of their followers or one of their fans will. And these types of pastors and far-right media figures are intentionally leading people on to that outcome. To quote Haymuth Mehta, who's been tracking Steadfast for years,

quote, because while Shelley is celebrating murder, he's also handing his congregation a metaphorical loaded gun. And if somebody eventually uses a literal one to follow through on what they believe to be God's orders, they know that Shelley will be proud of them. Even as he tells the world he has absolutely nothing to do with it. Unquote. So under the pressure of activists, steadfast actually got evicted from their old building in Hearst, Texas,

this past March for spreading their extreme anti LGBT hate and calls for violence, which was in violation of the terms of its lease, which prohibited violence and threats. The church has an active Gab page, which kind of tells you a little bit about the people running this sort of operation. Insteadfast publicly organized and live streamed their sermons on a very active Facebook page, which is no longer active for reasons that we will later discuss. And then

during these past few months, they've relocated their church from Hearst to a building that's part of a strip mall in Watauga, Texas. Is that how I'm saying it, Robert? The thing about any town in Texas is it doesn't matter how you pronounce it because they're Texans. Watauga. Do whatever you want. Fuck them. Anyway, they're now a strip mall church which i think is a good look for them i mean that you're okay i will correct you here you're saying that like

it's it's funny as opposed to just the way everything is in texas because texas is a giant strip mall like yeah i guess so and while john shelley is pretty bad right we've heard a lot of bad clips of him talking about how gay people are pedophiles and how they should all be killed by the government. He's not the only guy at Steadfast preaching violent and genocidal rhetoric. Enter Dylan Oz, formerly based out of Boise, Idaho, now preaching at Steadfast Baptist Church in Watuga, Texas. On Sunday, June 4th, Dylan oz while preaching from the pulpit said that the quote solution for the homosexual is for the government to execute every single gay person uh here's here is a clip by that i here's a clip of him saying that what does god say is the answer, is the solution for the homosexual in 2022,

here in the New Testament, here in the book of Romans, that they are worthy of death. These people should be put to death. Every single homosexual in our country should be charged with the crime, the abomination of homosexuality that they have. They should be convicted in a lawful trial. They should be sentenced with death. They should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head. That's what God teaches. That's what the Bible says. You don't like it, you don't like God's work, because that is what God says. I don't think that the Bible says anything about guns, actually. It's been a while since I read the King James Version that CEDFAST exclusively uses. So maybe it's been a while since I read the King James Version that St. Fast exclusively uses,

so maybe it's like a translation thing, but I don't remember anything about shooting or bullets or guns inside my Bible. But speaking of translation things, I'm going to go on a little theology rant here about quote-unquote lying with man or lying with men, and how scholars actually believe if you look at the original biblical texts, not the crap like the King James Version and the nonsense based off that horrible translation. But the chapter is where people pull stuff, supposedly condemning men for laying with men and quote-unquote homosexuality, which is obviously like a very modern word, does not belong in a text as old as the Bible. That word didn't exist yet.

But those passages would probably more accurately translate to condemning adult men who rape young boys. And even if they didn't, even if it was about adult men with other adult men, I don't fucking care, and neither should most Christians, because Christians are not following all of the laws of Leviticus, nor should they. That shit was for Israelites thousands of years ago to make their culture distinct from other surrounding nations. Like, Christians aren't railing against the use of mixed fabric, for Christ's sake.

Are you not supposed to eat shrimp, too? There's a lot of stuff. I believe in eating shrimp, but I think if you use mixed fabrics, you should be executed. You should be lying against a wall and shot in the back of the head absolutely that's the only thing but anyone using mixed fabrics death penalty instantly yeah it's like obviously there's not these churches preaching against mixed fabric here is here's christian preacher dylan oz again justifying his calls for the execution of gay people by falsely claiming, obviously, that all homosexuals are pedophiles.

Here's the thing. Here's why reprobates, here's why homosexuals are so dangerous to society. They're not like other sinners in the sense that every single day that they are alive, they're being filled with more and more and more unrighteousness that is a scary thing you want to know why we say that all homosexuals are pedophiles let me make that very clear all homosexuals are pedophiles and people say well what about all the straight people that molest children they're f**ks I don't care what you call them if a person is with a child they're f**ks. I don't care what you call them.

If a person is with a child, you're f**ked, you're a reprobate, you're a sodomite. I don't care what kind of classifications our government wants to give them. All homosexuals are pedophiles. Now here's the thing, here's what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that every single homosexual that's alive right now has committed that act with a child already. Because it could be that they haven't had the opportunity yet, and they will at some point later in their life.

This is why we need to put these people to death through the proper channels of the government, because the Bible says that they are being filled. So here's the thing. Yes, maybe not every single homosexual has been with a child yet, but what about tomorrow when they're filled with a little more unrighteousness? What about in a week from now when they're filled with a little more unrighteousness? What about 20 years from now? What are they going to be like? If you look up the statistics on these sodomites that abuse children, they're with so many

children it will make you throw up. Disgusting. These people are not normal. They're not your average everyday sinners. They're what the Bible calls reprobates. They're are not normal. They're not your average everyday sinners. They're what the Bible calls reprobates. They're rejected by God. They have no hope of salvation. So in 2021, John Shelley with Steadfast Baptist Church, with the help of a network of aggressively homophobic churches, made a two-hour, quote-unquote, documentary about how to, quote,

quote unquote documentary about how to quote, Jesus protect your children called. And it's the, the title is called the sodomite deception. Oh, no. See, all right.

Look, if we're going to look, if we're going to do this thing where there's licenses for people to buy guns, can we have there be a license to make a documentary? Can we manage that too? So the quote unquote sodomite deception claims to expose how the LGBTQ community is contributing to the collapse of modern society, which I mean,

based, um, the trailer opens with a real banger. Most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality. The CBS News survey shows that two out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear. One out of ten says hatred. The documentary celebrates historical laws that criminalized homosexuality and criticizes more recent laws that expand LGBTQ rights. In the film, Shelley advocates for the death penalty to

be used on the LGBTQ community and uses, you know, many, many slurs across this whole thing. All of them use all kinds of slurs, as I'm sure we've heard this past episode. The pastors of other churches, part of the new independent fundamental Baptist movement, also featured in the documentary. Here's a collection of said pastors screaming in the trailer for The Sodomite Deception. Oh, thank you, Garrison. Thank you for playing us a trailer of people screaming.

That's going to be fun. Starting off with Shelley saying, quote, why aren't all these Baptists standing up and saying these freaks should go back to hell, should go back in the closet, put a bullet in your head.

Why aren't they saying it? Because some of some of what he says is hard to hear so i'm just saying that for you guys so you know what he's saying anyway here's some here's some of the trailer it's pretty funny why aren't all these bad guys standing up and saying these freaks should go back to hell go back to the closet put a bullet in your head why aren't they saying it it's time to call a faggot a faggot, a transvestite, a disgusting dog. No homos will ever be allowed on this church as long as I'm the pastor here. Never!

Is the law of the Lord perfect or is it not? It's perfect. And what did he say? Put them to death. You know, people say like, well aren't you sad that 50 sodomites died? Here's the problem with that. It's like the equivalent of asking me, you know, what if you asked me, hey, are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today? No, I think that's great. I think that helps society. You know, I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight.

Now that 50, you know, the tragedy is that more of them didn't die. I mean, the tragedy is I'm kind of upset that he didn't finish the job. Because these people are predators. So yeah, that sucks. But man, there is just a lot of

men in their 40s screaming about gay people. They seem really concerned. Yes. Yeah. Someone in that clip is noted homophobe and Holocaust denier Stephen Anderson, of faithful word Baptist Church. He's the guy shrieking, never, never.

Anyway, steadfast church members and pastors have continued to show up at city council meetings in multiple cities throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area. This past Monday, people associated with the church, as well as residents opposing Steadfast's bigotry, spoke at a

city council meeting in Watuga, Texas. I'm here today to let the council know of the hate group that has entered their city. This hate group is called Steadfast Baptist Church. It was in June of 2021 that I first came across the offensive defamation against women and the LGBTQ community. The hate statements, videos, and social media posts

prompted me to join the protest that started in Hearst and now has moved to your city. And I apologize for this, but this is quoting him. They are all dirty, disgusting, skank whores. In another video, he also states that women in positions of leadership and authority are actually a curse upon our nation. Council members, at the very least, you should encourage the strip mall owner cider property of Dallas to revoke this church's lease. So yeah, there was kind of like this back and forth at this city council meeting. Multiple people from Steadfast responded by screaming into the mic and continuing to advocate the execution of gay people.

One guy that I'll quickly play a clip of is Philip Milstred of Steadfast. He went further and made a veiled threat of violence. The city of Otaga and its police officers are allowing this community, this sodomite community, to intimidate church members from worshipping God the way he should be worshipped in truth.

And if you don't do something, something will happen bad. So, that's fun. It's also a strong, strong definition of the word veiled well i mean like in terms like obviously they're talking about execution and genocide he's talking about like actually doing physical like like actually like as vigilantes doing physical violence which is different because steadfast usually tries to frame their violence within like it's okay because it's a part of the government, right? So when they're like talking about just doing like vigilantism or like saying

like, we're going to take this into our own hands, right? It's a little bit different. Huachuga Mayor Arthur Minor this past Tuesday said that he is discussing the status of steadfast Baptist church with the city attorney while also stating that the attorney has told him that it's a first amendment issue so that there's quote nothing that the city can do at this time but we are looking at other avenues unquote and i mean that's to be that's probably probably fair yeah it's hard to make a church leave a place yeah so he did not he did not elaborate further than that but he did encourage people to bring up the issue with uh the uh the person holding steadfast's lease at this

strip mall in watuga uh let is let us go on another uh ad break do you know who won't shriek at gay people and call on the government to kill them? Hopefully these ads, hopefully. I mean, not for another couple of years. Yeah, well, that's why I said hopefully. Okay, so let's talk a bit more about this church's ideology and this network that it's associated with, because it is actually kind of interesting. and this network that it's associated with, because it is actually kind of interesting.

So, Steadfast Baptist Church is part of Stephen Anderson's church network called the New Independent Fundamental Baptist Movement, which I'm just going to call the New IFB, because those are way too many words. And they claim it's not like a denomination, but rather a revival of what the old independent fundamentalist Baptist movement once represented, unquote. The new IFB churches, just like the old IFB churches, use the King James Bible exclusively. And the old IFB movement was founded in the 40s and was trying to reclaim the fundamentalism of the 1920s and so we're just we're going back from the 2020s to the 1920s uh in terms of their social views times the flat circle uh so i'm gonna i'm gonna quit a little bit from the adl which of course is very hit and miss as an organization but they did but they they did an organization, but they do have a decent

article on the new IFB churches, because this is like specifically the thing they focus on is this sort of antisemitism. So, anyway, quote, the new IFB ideology promotes the antisemitic notion that Jews today are imposters who are not the true Jews described in the Bible, which by the way, is awfully close to Christian identity. I mean, that is essentially just Christian identity. It's very, very similar. I think the new IFB stuff is slightly different. It comes at it from a slightly different direction.

It's like the difference between Episcopals and Catholics. But they reach a very similar conclusion. Like, I don't think they believe that Christians are like the true Jews and they don't talk about like Aryans and stuff. They're not doing British Israelism, but they think that Judaism is the synagogue of Satan. But it's like, well, some of them do use the term the synagogue of Satan. Yeah, I'm aware of. the synagogue of satan yeah i'm aware but like you know they hate judaism because as a religion it's made up of jews who do not recognize jesus as the messiah so therefore they are not truly descendants of israel right it's it's they come at it from more of that direction but it is still

extremely close to christian identity like it is it is it is just a tiny hop of a pond. They kiss in cousins, for sure. They are absolutely in the same networks, because they are preaching very similar ideology. Back to the ADL quote, they often claim that Jews today worship Satan,

and that the Star of David represents the devil. The new IFB doctrine promotes the notion of an antichrist whom they claim will be Jewish. In their sermons, various new IFB pastors often openly state that they hate Judaism as a religion. And in addition to criticizing Judaism, many new IFB pastors also promote anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish power and control over sectors like finance, news, media, and journalism. New IFB pastors have also promoted Holocaust denial. In 2015, Pastor Steven Anderson presented a number of false claims in a video specifically addressing the so-called, quote, Holocaust hoax, unquote, saying, the numbers don't add up, the facts don't add up.

unquote saying the numbers don't add up the facts don't add up um anderson alleged that quote some jews were among the many quote casualties on both sides well all lives did matter but he blamed those deaths on starvation and poor conditions claiming that quote just because people were rounded up and put in forced labor camps does not mean that they were systemically exterminated or cremated to the tune of six million, unquote. Unlike many in the evangelical movement, the new IFB churches are staunchly anti-Zionist and anti-Israel. They decry Zionism as, quote, Jew worship, unquote, and view the traditional support for Israel among evangelical Christians as a result of Jewish deception in support of the Antichrist. Oh, but they have a ton of opinions about the sinking of the USS Liberty. In line with their broader anti-Semitic views of Judaism as a false and evil religion, the modern nation of Israel is regularly characterized as wicked and a fraud, unquote.

And they do not dislike Israelrael because israel commits genocide against palestinian people because as we've stated they're very pro-genocide as a concept yeah and to be honest probably pretty pro-genocide of the palestinian people yeah they they just not that way yeah so that's a little little write-up on what this network of churches believes. Like everyone you heard talk inside the sodomite deception trailer is part of this network of churches. They're all across the South.

Some of them are in California, Arizona, Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, lots of other Southern states. And if you want to carry out a sodomite deception, tape your drugs to your junk when you drive through Texas. So thankfully churches like these are not standing unopposed, specifically in the Dallas Fort Worth area. There has been a number of protests at the church's old location, which resulted in them getting evicted, and protests at their new location.

I'm going to play some audio from protests that have taken place over the course of the past few weeks. We're here to protest Dead Fast Baptist Church, which is a registered hate group here in Texas, on splcenter.org. We protested them in Hearst for nine months. We found them here and so we are back every Wednesday and every Sunday. I am a mom of a kid from the LGBTQ community and I am not going to stand for you wishing death upon my kid just because of who he is and who he loves. It's extremely exhausting, but at the same time it's very reassuring because we get nothing but

support from the people on the street that drive by and give us plenty of honks and waves and it's just so much love and support from the people that live in the community here as well as first that's my city so it's very personal and i've noticed that we've gotten a lot of new people come out here because this is their city and it's personal so that's that's pretty good to hear that there's actually people standing up to to say hey these guys suck in person uh there probably should be more people going in person because once you like the church is obviously facing a lot of a lot of confrontations like online and stuff right they're facing a lot of online pushback. But once you bring that into the real world, it definitely

it's a totally different thing in terms of how they're being viewed. I mean, in some ways they enjoy being persecuted, right? They enjoy the notion of Christian persecution, but also it's great to have people waving pride flags outside their little church every Sunday.

The church still has an active Instagram page, and it still has a Twitter account, but their actual tweets do keep getting taken down for hate speech. A week ago, YouTube striked Steadfast's main channel where they post videos and sermons. As they weren't able to use their main channel, on Facebook, they began promoting their second YouTube channel as a platform to stream their murderous anti-gay hate sermons during Pride Month. And a few days after I posted about that on Twitter, their secondary YouTube got completely banned. And then after a few days, their Facebook page was also taken down. So they do have a shrinking online presence.

There's this other clip from the sodomite deception trailer that I think really gives you a peek into the minds of these folks who are pushing this sort of stuff. And you can even see this same sentiment in the rise of white nationalism and white supremacy this past decade. And my question is, why are we embracing all this change as Christians? Did the Bible change? rationalism and white supremacy this past decade. changing. It's not from God, that's for sure. You know it's coming from the working of Satan. He's deceiving people, thinking all of it's normal now. So our challenge as people who are, you know, anti-fascists, people who stand against, you know, are anti-racist, push back against this type of anti-queer organizing, our challenge is to keep the change coming

and to push back against these freaks trying to hold on to the 20th century, right? The fear of change and the fear of the future is driving their, you know, desire to return to the past. The train of like social progress was moving forward over the course of the past 20 years. And they're scared and they're trying to stop it and move it backwards. And it's up to us to make that as hard as possible.

But yeah, that is my stuff on Steadfast Church. I'm now going to open up the floor to anyone. Robert, Chris, what do you guys think of all of the stuff we just heard about the past 30 minutes well one of the keys is you want to use tape that has a good level of adhesion but isn't going to actually damage your skin really yeah like scotch tape what are we what are we doing here scotch tape will do okay you really want to avoid duct tape but something like painter's tape generally isn't going to have the adhesion that you need

it's going to be a little bit unpleasant anytime you're taking tape off of it I do recommend actually putting it more in the taint area or the inner thigh you're going to have a better experience you might want to shave that inner thigh if you're not somebody who does normally just so that you have a better time getting your drugs free

but you know, crotchet that's always been my motto. Just crotchet. Again, great, great, great, great Texas insight coming, coming out of Robert Evans here.

No, I mean like, okay. So seriously, the, the fact that there's been resistance to these folks in the street and that it's been significant that they've like, not just people showing up to yell at them and protest them in the moment, and that it's been significant that they've like not just people

showing up to yell at them and protest them in the moment but people you know working to get them kicked out of their locations and stuff um that's really good um and that's that's honestly more the texas that i have known than or at least it's as much of the texas that i've known as like the shitty things that this says about Texas. Yeah. Um, first protest I ever went to was against a church like this, who you've probably heard of the Westboro Baptist church when they showed up

to protest at the Holocaust museum. Um, um, and it was like, like a whole hundreds of people showed up to like, and there were like six of those fuckers. So, I mean, the problem with Texas has never been that there aren't a lot of awesome people in Texas. It's that folks like this, these who really want to use the mechanisms of the state to carry out a genocide, have a lot of friends in high places. to carry out a genocide, have a lot of friends in high places. And many of those folks spent decades ensuring that it's basically impossible for anybody else to win election. Outside of like, you know, local elections and cities and stuff, which often city governments in Texas, again,

if you look at a lot of the reaction to Abbott's anti-trans bills and where we'll be sort of the actual resistance as Texas' anti-gay legislation gets more extreme is in cities like Dallas and Austin and Houston. And it's like local laws and local elected leaders, as well as local activists who represent an awful lot of Texas, but, and, you know, don't have any real power in the levers of the state, but do tend to stand up in a lot of cases like people did for some of these events in Dallas recently put their bodies, you know, in between fascists and the people they're threatening. And I mean, the new IFB churches are definitely probably more extreme or explicit than most of your average Christian churches. But it is not uncommon to preach this general strain of homophobia, maybe turn down like one notch of the dial from the pulpit in the majority of churches, specifically in the South.

Yeah, you don't say we should be lining these people against a wall and killing them. But you say that, you know, this is not biblical. You know, we're supposed to live in a biblical society and you, you say everything,

but that lasts like 10 or 15%. Yeah. It's that it is, it is not like this strain of homophobia is, has been there this, this entire time. Um, and people have feel like they have permission to say things now that they

honestly wouldn't probably wouldn't have said as explicitly like five years ago. Um, but there was, there's always been people working to keep this thing within the culture as, as stuff was progressing socially, there was people working to keep this type of bigotry still alive in large sectors of the American public. And a lot of those sectors are related to evangelical Christianity, and a lot of those sectors are related to the communities around church building. building so that's like a big part in how christian fascism has been so effective the past the you know like the basically the past decade starting starting with the tea party

is that they've had people with vested interests like keeping this stuff afloat i mean uh lips of tiktok it receives her funding from seth dylan the guy who runs the Babylon Bee, which started as a Christian satire site. There's now Elon Musk's favorite place on the internet. Which is wild. I remember reading the Babylon Bee when I was fucking 12 years old, when I was

a Christian kid. It used to be just a small niche Christian site, and now it grew into this, you know, big powerful force in modern conservatism. It is directly funding Lips of TikTok, which is basically now just a gun that gets pointed at whatever, you know, targeted event that they want.

So now it's like this completely like astroturf thing with all of this funding and people choosing what events to target. So like, it all goes back to this. It all goes back to these types of churches and this type of rhetoric coming out of, you know, these few misinterpreted biblical passages. It is weird how like, I mean, when I was, you know, a teenager, when you talked about like Christian entertainment, Christian comedy, Christian music,

Christian media, you meant like the most boring milquetoast shit on the planet. Like, not that there wasn't toxic and hateful shit within being preached in churches, but like Christian media was like, it was pretty hard to be offended at most of it. And now when you say that,

like you immediately go to like oh yeah somebody's trying to get gay people murdered um yeah it's something else yeah there's been a large increase in the militancy of christian propaganda and posing you know stuff that used to be just very like very boring milk like milk toast and like still very like, you know, patriarchal heteronormative, you know, probably low key white supremacist, um, is now, yeah,

now lots of the propaganda is way more focused in this type of like militant Christianity, um, and focused on, you know, all, all of like the end times stuff's gotten so much more, more of a thing.

Um, and just how it relates to like physical violence against currently living people anyway yeah that's the that's the steadfast baptist church and the sodomite deception um brought to you by people out of dallas so yeah those are my those are my two episodes i mean we started first episode this week was part one. Last episode this week is part two. So they're spread out, but sandwiched it. Those are my

two episodes on the city of homophobia and Christian fascism inside the city of hate. Look, if you want to help out, find the addresses of one of these churches. Now, the next thing you're going to do is you're going to find a good torrent client,

and you're going to download a DVD rip of Morbius. There's a lot of them out there. Then you're going to burn that. You may need to buy a burner. A lot of people aren't going to have this equipment, but you're going to burn that onto a DVD. You can also put it on a flash drive if you really wanted. Then you're just going to start mailing those in mass to the church. If we get them enough copies of Morbius, I think we might be able to turn them around. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app,

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