It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 49

Episode Date: September 3, 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Hi, everyone. This is Shereen, and you're listening to It Can Happen Here. It could. I always mess up the name of this podcast, and it's really embarrassing because I work on it. It could happen here. Not the same words to me in my head, though. Anyway, we're joined today by a guest that I previously had on the podcast that I co-host, Ethnically Ambiguous, and she has a podcast coming out that is super important, and I'm excited to talk about what it's about as itself. Joining me today are Garrison and Chris, and our guest, Neha Aziz. Hi.

Hello. Neha, hello. Welcome. Thank you. Welcome to the show. So you have a new podcast called Partition. Explain what that's about. Yes. So Partition tells the story of the separation of India and the formation of Pakistan that took place in 1947. On Monday, well, Sunday, Monday, because it happened at midnight, celebrated its 75th anniversary this year. So it's quite a large event that most people don't really know about. I myself didn't really know the specifics. I first went back to Pakistan where I was born in Karachi.

But basically, Britain was like, hey, we're out of money. We can't control India anymore. We're going to leave. And in that process, they were going to transfer the power to India and they were going to have independence. And then all these other politicians kind of came in the picture and wanted their own personal agendas. And Pakistan dominion, while India would be the Hindu Sikh dominion. And basically within this process, it was such a rushed job that 14 million people were uprooted, one to two million people died. The boundary line actually was a few days after independence happened. So no one knew where they were in what country. So it was just a lot of confusion, a lot of violence, just a lot of mess a lot of just a lot of mess that happened.

And a lot of the survivors are quite old now. My grandfather's a survivor. He was 14 when it happened. So he's 89 now. And so the only way we can really get these stories are through oral histories. And I never really learned about it in school. And because my parents, again, like I said, I didn't really know about it in school and because my parents again like i said i didn't really know about it for a long time so if i don't know about it um and this is like my history and my family

um i'm sure there are many other people who don't know about it well i definitely was very uninformed before you came on to uh the other podcast ethnically ambiguous yeah because it sounds like i'm plugging it, but I'm not. But also go listen to it. I'm going to play it. Square Shireen. Thanks. I appreciate that.

But no, I do think it's really important because it's absurd the huge kept out of what we were taught in history class, if you can even call it that. kept out of what we were taught in history class, if you can even call it that. But yeah, I think it's really important to know about this huge thing that happened in our recent history that created these two. Can you tell us what the process was making this podcast for you and like what research you did and wait like just the steps leading up to it yeah so I originally wanted to make this um story into a limited narrative series but I didn't really know how that would happen um and I could agent or anything like that but it was just a project I wanted to work on but it's such a vast event I was like I don't know like where I would even start and then a couple of months later I saw

that iHeartRadio was creating a program called NextUp and that's when the idea for the podcast came along and I was like you know podcasts are a really good way for people to digest information. It's a lot more accessible, I think, than other forms of media. It doesn't cost any money. You can listen to it in a number of ways. So I thought that might be a good place to start. And I ended up getting accepted into the program and it's it's still like a lot of work and it's a lot of just a lot of draining work um because you have all these like horrible facts written in like one google doc that you're saying to people because I outline them and then I write a script um because it's mostly a lot of my narration with it but the first thing I did is I talked to

family I talked to my grandpa I talked to my great aunt who was actually born the day of independence yeah so she said Sunday Monday but just in case the date is not was it you meant yes so I'll get 15th 15th so this year it happened to be a Sunday and a Monday. And, you know, so I asked her what stories people told her. I asked my mom. We went to an exhibit in Pakistan. That's kind of what spurred everything for partition for me. And we talked about there. I had like my dad do some voiceover for my grandpa because the our connection wasn't the best.

He's in Pakistan. We recorded it via WhatsApp on a PodTrak recorder. And it's very loud over there. There's, you know, constantly. It was just like a, it was a situation. But I just started reading books. And then I started talking to a lot of people. And I ended up talking to an author named Nisid Hajari,

whose book I referenced quite a bit in the second episode, which drops 22. And, you know, the first thing he told me was, you can't cover everything. So once you understand that that's going to be the case, and it's going to be a lot easier, and it's true, like you can't cover everything. And I kind of struggled with the narrative I wanted to tell because so many of the stories out there are very biased. There's a lot of, you know, like the great men in history stories, which I don't care about. And I just wanted to tell the facts. But I quickly discovered that's really hard. My history, this is my story this is something that impacts my family for um future generations

and my identity uh without a doubt so I was like let me kind of do it with the lens of discussion um and I wanted to tell the stories that people don't really hear about so I didn't want to talk about like meetings that happened in libraries and whatever between like all these politicians i literally don't care about that but about um the way women were treated it is thought that 70 000 to 100 000 women were raped abducted murdered i wanted to talk about i wanted to talk to artists and creatives who had kind of like a reckoning with it and then use their work to teach people about it. So an artist who reframes the narrative with her pieces and talks about the actual people it affected, a filmmaker, oral historians, survivors that i wanted to tell i didn't want it to be um something you would get like on the history channel which is totally fine that's great there's an audience for that but that

just isn't something that i wanted to do you're not doing a whole bunch of no i did watch an episode of doctor who that talks about partition and i think there were like aliens or something in there fascinating there is something thrown in there about uh some sci-fi stuff though they need to see how doctor who handles partition yeah it was actually done really well oh really yeah it was written by a south asian person that's great and so that was like the first uh thing that i saw in my research that really case like the emotion and and the things that people went through and i didn't see any british people besides like the people that originally came on the mission or whatever so that was nice um but yeah like there there was

a sci-fi element i can't tell you what what that side it was actually something that um that people told me about when i mentioned partition they're like oh there's this episode of doctor who so i've only seen that that one episode but it i think it in the in my research it was the first thing where i was like this actually tells a perspective from the people of south asia that's good to know it was written by a south asian person at first i was like i'm not even gonna touch that um yeah up next stephen Moffat writes about apartheid. So I'm curious, not including, like including some things, but not other things. What, what, like, how did you decide what to include and what not to include?

Yeah, so no way you can say like the actual history is maybe the least important part, I think, of the podcast. Like I talk about like events, like there's something called Direct Action Day that happened about a year before the boundary line was announced. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the future founder of Pakistan, kind of called on Muslims to be to, to kind of have demonstrations, but it was kind of unclear what exactly that meant and massive looting carnage took place and how that was like a big catalyst for partition but I didn't want to like get into like this treaty and this event and like this meeting and and whatever because that information is out there. If people want to know, mentioned, that's not really the aspects that I took particular interest in. I wanted to talk

about women and survivors and just, you know, I felt I found it to be very common people who are my age, and I just turned, I I guess millennials, you could say, their parents and family don't talk to them about it. So it's been really interesting to talk to people who are my age, who are older than me, who are younger than me, have very similar experiences and how they found out about this information. So those are the kind of things I wanted to focus on because, you know, a lot of our stories from minority communities that are out there in like mainstream media are rarely told from our perspectives.

And so I wanted, I wanted this story to come from me and from other people who have just different experiences with partition, whether they live through it, whether they're an oral historian, they write a fictional novel about it to cope with their trauma, which I interviewed a woman who did do that. She was four years old when it happened. And she disassociated herself a lot with partition until she wrote about it in this fictionalized novel. And I wanted to talk about what forms of media were also out there, which is why I watched that Doctor Who episode. I also watched Gandhi, three hours of my life, I'm never going to get back.

Terrible. So not great. You know, I love Richard Attenborough, like Jurassic Park is great, but this wasn't it um so i wanted to i wanted to point people in a direction where if you actually wanted to dig deeper into this information like here's where you should go like don't be um like don't watch i The Crown, but I mean, like, let's be real. Like, you know, like they mentioned, I think India once in the pilot episode where, and it took place about three months after partition happened. Philip is getting married to Queen Elizabeth and what's his name?

Winston Churchill is walking and he sees Lord Mountbatten who is tasked with the separation of India, who is also Prince Philip's uncle. And Churchill goes, oh, that's the man who gave India away. And I'm like, that's not really what happened. But OK. And that's the only thing that they say. But I do love period dramas and I do love corgis, which is one of the main reasons I watch The Crown. But yeah. Wait, sorry.

Mompatten's the guy who got whacked by the IRA in the 70s, right? Yes. The same guy? Jesus. Yes. Yeah. I actually didn't know that until I watched The Crown. So, you know, because again, that was into him and his history.

I don't care. I ended up seeing it in the crowd. Yeah. So I just I really wanted to focus on South Asians and like our story and working through how trauma is and kind of reclaiming our narrative with just kind of the truth. And, you know, something that popped up when I was creating, kind of getting deeper into the podcast was Ms. Marvel. I knew it was going to follow almost great, but I didn't know that they would talk about partition

and how that was like a major plot point. And so people are starting to learn about the history because of that show, which is amazing. So if I can kind of add on to that and expand people's education. Something else I also wanted to do was I want people to have empathy and sympathy for immigrants and refugees, especially ones that don't look like them. Because we come in all colors and sizes. because we come in all colors and sizes. And, you know, I think their response to Ukraine,

Ukrainian refugees in the UK was great, but I don't really think that same courtesy was extended to refugees from Syria. And I think that's really important because I'm an immigrant. It took quite a long time for me to become a citizen. So, and it's very hard and it's something that people don't know about. And so I just kind of want,

I want people to care about things that don't directly affect them, which I think is a very much like an American rooted thing. So I really, I mean, I don't think my podcast is going to change that, but if I can, but if people can like look outside themselves with with this i think that would be really great yeah i was wondering what do you actually think about the way that uh miss marvel like did like talked about partition because i saw a lot of i don't know i saw a lot of conflicting sort of

arguments yeah so i liked it um but i'm also i think when you're already and you see something that has affected you and your family or has oppressed you, you expect this art form to talk about every single thing, you know, that we bear as creative artists of color, that if we don't talk about every single thing that's oppressed a community, then it's not worth our time is kind of like the mantra that we have. And for me, I'm like, this show is six episodes. You need to understand that that is not something that they can encapsulate in there while talking about all these other things. So I think it does a really good job capturing emotion.

I feel a lot of times you get the partition story from people who are currently in India. So it was nice to see people from Pakistan, like, and they're from Karachi, just like I am. And I found it, you know, like every episode just made me just cry more. I'm also very sensitive. And so I would just, you know, there was a There was a particular scene where Kamala is talking to her nani, which means grandmother. And her grandmother is like, my passport says Pakistan, but my roots are in India. And I really felt that because I was, my parents were born in Pakistan, but all other generations were born in India. And that is a place because of how tense the borders are between these countries, I will

not get to visit for the foreseeable future. If you are born in Pakistan, you are not allowed to go to India. You are not allowed to go to Pakistan. And it's just crazy because I'm like, well, that's where I came from, in a sense, you know. where came from, in a sense, you know. So for me, just because like I said, I am a sensitive person, like the emotion, you know, the people going on trains that, you know, that is something that I talk about a lot in my podcast, a lot of people experienced or read about, a lot of people were hoping to get on trains. And when they tried, those trains came in and were filled with dead bodies and not people

who were alive. And so I think it did a good job capturing the emotion. But it's like there's just no way you can capture the complexity of that event. Even with my podcast, it's 10 episodes. And like Nisid, you just can't cover everything. So you have to pick and choose what you want. And also, like, it's as an artist, like, for me, for me, specifically, it's like, I want to give you like the crumbs of something, and then I want you to look into it more, right? Like, I shouldn't

have to force feed you information, I should keep you intrigued enough for you to want to look at this information on your own. You know, so like that's how I how I see it. But I am in a little bit of a different position because. I'm in TV like I program several film festivals and things like that. So I'm also looking through that with that kind of eye. But like I can understand people like, oh, I wish they talked about this oh I wish they talked about this I wish they talked about this but you know you you know I'm just like well it's six episodes they have to do all this exposition they have to do this that's just impossible but people aren't thinking that way

but I think it really captured the emotion and the trauma of that event and how how sad it is of that event and how how um sad it is um because it is sad to be like I'll never get to see where my great-grandparents lived or my grandparents because they were children you know at least until they decide that's not the case anymore um but yeah I can understand people's but I think for me personally I thought it did a really good job and actually uh the woman who created the exhibit that i saw in pakistan that really spearheaded this whole thing for me actually directed episodes four and five of miss marvel so which is really cool there that was another thing i guess i sort of wanted to ask about was like what was the process of doing this like emotionally i know i did a

i wound up doing somewhat similar things for a couple of episodes about two and like talking to my family about what it was like in china was just like and like just doing the sort of archival research which is like brutal and yeah i want to know like what that was like for you and what that was like for like your family having to talk about it and yeah it was really draining because you're just reading so many awful things. Like I read a number of different books and, you know, talking to all these people.

And I think for my grandfather, I think like, I don't, I don't, he's not a very emotional person and physically there with him when he was talking to me. And I think it's like something that's for sure, like in the past for him. And he was fortunate in the way that he came from an

area that did have violence, but it wasn't to the extent that you have other people's account. And but talking to survivors was really hard. I actually went to San Francisco to talk to someone specifically, because they're very hard of hearing. And so doing it virtually would have been very impossible and hard because he was saying all these things and then he would tear up. And it's like, where do you just listen to this person? And then where do you comfort them is really hard because I don't want to interrupt, but I don't want them to be like, I don't care about what you're saying. Like it's a thing. And that person spoke to me for two and a half hours and I have yet to really

listen to his audio. I've just like listened to bits and pieces just for like clarity purposes. So that's going to be rough when that happens and it's going to come up soon. It was just really draining draining and it's just like like highlighting it's like you know when you're reading i've read all these books and you're highlighting things but it's like you're going to highlight the whole book because it's just there's just so many crazy things and yeah it's just really sad it's really draining like i'd mentioned writing the script and i'm like here's just like 20 minutes of terror and like an eight page Google doc

that you have to say. And that also brings up another point where even though this podcast is sad and it's not particularly in ways I did want to be myself. And so I try to add a little bit of levity in there. Like there was an artist who um that i mentioned her work her name is pratika choudhury she had these really beautiful installations um of like female body parts but they ended up getting ruined in transportation and so she digitized them and is and made nfts and so me trying to explain what an nft is is just the most ridiculous thing in the

world so i was like i'm not going to talk about it but it's like levity in there that we're talking and made NFTs. And so me trying to explain what an NFT is, is just the most ridiculous thing in the world. So I was like, I'm not going to talk about it, but it's like, lovely in there that we're talking about NFTs in this podcast, you know? But yeah, it was,

it's still like a really draining process because I say this a lot and people I've interviewed say this, that partition isn't something that's in the past. It's been breathing. And, you know, I've interviewed say this, that partition isn't something that's in the past. It's in breathing. And Prithika said it in a really succinct way where she's like, it lives in families and it really does. So every day I feel like I just kind of, it's hard for me not to get bogged down with all this information. I am a sensitive person, so I tend to hold things and carry things with me. But yeah, it's been a really rough process. But I think what kind of makes it a little easier is like, well, these people's stories are getting out there.

People are going to learn about it now. And maybe that inspires them to learn about other events that they didn't learn in school. All of my education was done in Texas. And that can be another podcast within itself because our education is something to say the least. So that's kind of the way I try to look at it. It's really rough. And then I also, I love reading and everything. So I'm just like, well, I'm going to read this thirsty rom-com to get me away from the horribleness of the work I'm doing every day.

Definitely a little bit of balance, too. I do think to hear you say that you're I'm very sensitive as well and how you hold stuff in. I do think as people of color, our families, especially like immigrant families or people that have been through trauma. color are families especially like immigrant families or people that have been through trauma that's that's why that's why i know about this because this intergenerational trauma is something that they've kept and barely talked about if at all um so i'm really glad that like you went to san francisco and that person was able to like release all of this and that they were holding probably for their whole life so so yeah i do i i think um there are many reasons why your podcast is important but i think even the chance that someone can like that uh not trauma sounds a little bit more dramatic

than i want it to but like the feelings behind what that means and their family history or even if you're not south asian it's important to know again something that doesn't affect you yeah whole world really yeah just like understanding your history and like where you come from is chinese and she texted me she was just like now I kind of want to look into like my history and I'm like that's great like that's what I you know I I wanted if I wanted any kind of like actionable thing to happen it's like that exact thing history looking into other people's histories yeah totally wow um i for we confirmed you as a guest that you're good at talking and this confirmed that thank you so much you were oh i babble a lot so i was like i'm sorry

my opinion no you're the perfect podcast guest like just period um but i really i appreciate the both effort and like emotional energy that goes into making a show like this because i can kind of relate when i talk about the middle east stuff like it's really really hard so uh i appreciate your time and i'm to learn more about the partition and what that means um can you tell the audience where they can find you and the podcast obviously is everywhere you can find it, but let's, I'm going to hand it over to you. Here you go. So partition podcast on August 15th, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts, especially the iHeartRadio app. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter, Instagram at Neha Aziz,

Twitter at NehaAziz13, and you can find Partition on Twitter at 1947 Partition Podcast on Instagram. Nice. On EA, you mentioned an upcoming project

you want to do that's also about like a similar topic. Yeah. What that is? Yeah. Something that I really wanted to do, and this is another thing that we were kind of talking about of like people not talking about like everything, like encompassing everything in like one story. So something very happened in 1971 when East Pakistan became Bangladesh. And a lot of my mom's family is from there, my grandma, and a lot of her family currently live there. And it's, again, very similar to partition, a lot of violence. And that story to me deserves its own time and respect. And I remember when I first talked about partition, they're like, oh, you're going to talk about this?

And I'm like, I'm going to mention it, but it is too just kind of throw into what I'm doing because it deserves way more than that. So that is another story that I want to tell and it actually celebrated its 50th anniversary last year in 2021. And from my understanding, it's all memorials in either India or Pakistan that commemorates, not commemorates, but showcases like how partition was like we don't, you know, there isn't like, like, here are all the people who died or here's this or here's like this statue of a bird or that um that you know that people there's no like communal place of grief and it is my understanding that Bangladesh really does have these things I believe there's a liberation museum and statues and there is a partition museum in 2017 but it is not a government sanctioned thing it's privately owned and again it with it being in India um

there's also a lot of barriers like it's not a place I can visit um and so um that is something I'm actually trying to go to Bangladesh this year. And it's been a little bit difficult, I think, trying to obtain her visa. But I hope she gets to go soon. I hope I get to go with her. But yeah, that's other stories that I want to tell because I feel like it's starting to kind of people are starting to understand that. But I feel like 1971 is just not there at all um it's i think something that people seem to just forget about and it's just crazy to think i'm like it's that's

not that long for no oh it's like 75 years like 50 years that's not a long time um so it's just like really insane when you think about it that way. And especially when you think of how ancient these and just how new these places are. So, yeah, that's something I would definitely love to tell. I would love for my next project to be on that. But that decision is not up to me. So hopefully, hopefully it'll work out. Yeah, I really hope so too.

I do really appreciate, and I'm sure everyone else does too, the fact that you're talking about things that are just glossed over or not even mentioned usually. I hate that it's usually our job to educate people, but in the meantime, you're doing a fantastic job. And I can't wait to see the other projects you do. But obviously, listen to Partition, everybody, first. Yeah.

That's the show. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

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

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want

them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our

stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. video app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, this is It Could Happen Here, and today it's me, James, and I'm joined by San Diego,

and we are talking about San Diego's lying mayor and how he likes to punch down on poor people even though he promised he wouldn't. So joining me today I'm going to ask you guys to all introduce yourselves explain a little bit about the background you have in the area and then we'll get into it because there's a lot to talk about. So Mandy would you like to go first? Hi I'm Mandy I'm a homeless advocate. I mostly do on the ground work with mutual aid. And then I advocate for them as much as I can, almost city municipalities, and just organize that way. Great. And Colleen, youack. I'm a criminal defense attorney and I represent approximately 50 homeless persons pro bono right now who are cited with the crimes of survival, such as encroachment and over-enclosure. So I can challenge the laws and have them declared unconstitutional. I'm McConnell. I'm an advocate for people who are living unsheltered or homeless. And I've been working on this for about 13 years. First part, working within the system as a philanthropist, advocate, volunteer, former vice chair of the Regional Task Force on the homeless. I'm a founding, was a founding member of a local philanthropy group called funders together to end homelessness, San Diego.

I, uh, participated on quite a few initiatives. Let's week where we housed about a hundred people in three days, 25 cities initiative, where we worked on ending veteran and chronic homelessness created, uh, the region's first by Nameless for veterans,

worked on a lot of COC, Continuum of Care initiatives, such as how we score projects to get homelessness funding, long communicated with our endless elected, who's now mayor, who's made so many promises over the years and so many claims on homelessness. People just doubt almost everything he says about homelessness at this point. Rightfully so. Probably most of my on the ground advocacy now where I do a lot of encampment support, work with, of course, unsheltered people, film the police around encampment sweeps and enforcement of laws that target and continue that till this day. Nice.

Yeah. You're doing a lot of work on this. And then Levi, last but not least hi you guys i'm levi gf leone with home full solutions um i have uh lived experience in being homeless um i also work with a group of advocates called lived experience advisors here in San Diego. We try to hold them accountable. And we're also able to advocate for a lot of what these people need in the recovery process, just beyond like housing, which is the main thing. We know that the real estate crisis. And then I also work as a housing navigator downtown. So I work with a caseload of about 200 clients, about 60 or 70 of them, I would say have SMIs.

Really in like, kind of one of the main areas of town that, you know, we have a lot of these people living outdoors. So I'm at kind of the front lines of it every day when it comes to people needing to get a shelter, one that they cry to, you know, when they think that it's a, you know, when they don't understand that it's the system that's broken, you know, I'm the one that they get yelled at, that gets yelled at, you know, they think I'm not doing enough, you know, and be able to see all sides of it and see the promises that get made. And I literally have clients come in and say, Oh, hey, look, everything's gonna be fine. Because the mayor just said this week, he's opening a new shelter. And I'm like, All right, let's do the math. That's a right. And there's 8,000 homeless people in the County. So, you know, and so yeah, I, I have to kind of break down that.

It's a good responsibility, I guess, to break down the system to my clients so that they can understand how broken is a, you know, me being able to teach some patients to get them through the process too. So, and yeah, that's me. Yeah, that's good thank you um so yeah i want to get into how because it consistently i think like i every time like i like to ride my bike around a lot i'm always riding around town often i'll run into people who are in distress right especially when we ride past the hospital which is something we can get into and they'll be like oh just just call up what you sort them out with a shelter like and then

they'll have this horrible moment of realization when they're like oh shit like there's nowhere for this person to go so let's talk a little bit about Todd Gloria right Todd Gloria's our mayor he's a democrat he ran on a very progressive uh and what he's done has been extremely reactionary um so i wanted to start just by reading some todd tweets uh todd's a poster um perhaps not not as much of a poster as rachel uh rachel laying his i guess missions manager i think uh she has the soul of a poster and will uh attack people working like michael uh to help people which is distressing to see uh but i wanted to uh i wanted to talk so i've got a few quotes here june 22nd 2019 yes i will be the first to enforce the law against

those sheltered or unsheltered, who break any law. But I will not use our codes to harass and criminalize sick and poor people. That's number one. August 2019. What if we chose to take the resources we used to criminalize the homeless and redirect them to building housing instead? What if, Todd? January 24th, 2019. And he's tagged Michael in this one. one maybe right but the sad fact is that this

before the p-i-t-c that's the point in time count of unhoused people it happens all the time it's unfair to the unsheltered and to sgpd my goal is to end chronic homelessness the only way to do this is with permanent supportive housing not criminalization uh right but that's not what you did uh californians of all political views know our homelessness crisis is a serious problem more housing and services not criminalization it's past time to tackle this problem i could keep going with these things uh but i won't get the picture so todd's talked a lot about how we don't need to criminalize poverty how we don't need to criminalize living on the street uh and then has proceeded to criminalize living on the street right um so maybe we can just start with these happened pretty much consistently I think

since Todd took office and uh people might be familiar with a little bit like they may have seen some of the bikes being thrown away that that was like michael had a video of that which which had how many oh gosh i don't yeah a lot of people have seen that but perhaps one of you would like to describe like exactly like how a sweep goes down right like like there's there's a process of posting sometimes a process of posting notices but you don't this is because people are encroaching like what's the sort of uh justification for it and then what does that look like uh for people on the ground february 14th of this year god glorious started his uh sweep enforcement um it was unspoken but during covid uh they were just killing people with covid instead of uh by police although the police were doing so the

this what the police do at the sweeps is they use a series of unconstitutional ordinances, city ordinances only existing in the city of San Diego. And these unconstitutional ordinances taken together are illegal for anybody to exist in public space. So you, me, our mothers, our children, anybody in public space can be ticketed for these violations because they're so overbroad for example standing on a sidewalk just being there on a sidewalk um will be enough to to get you a citation issued if you can't prove you have a house to live in um these laws like i said they're written over broad they apply to everyone use their discretion to only use them against poor persons the vehicle habitation ordinance lists a series of items that if

they're found in your car police could use those to arrest you and those items in it's like food, water, trash. So everybody with food, water, or trash, it doesn't have to be all three, just one of them, could be subjected to being arrested, have their company taken to shelter, having their children taken to CPS. And all because the city wants to come after poor people with ordinances. So here's the fun. These ordinances can be charged either as misdemeanors or infractions.

Mayor Gloria announced a progressive ordinance scheme, which means on day one, say Monday of the week, the individual is on day two, the individual is issued a infraction citation. That infraction citation gives them a date to appear months down the road to contest the case. But the very next day, they can be issued a misdemeanor. That misdemeanor citation also has a date months down the road for resolution. And then day four, they can be arrested and taken into custody, all without ever having a day in prison. The citations, if they're issued to people in Midway or downtown San Diego, direct them to appear in Claremont Mesa, about 12 miles away. These are individuals that have mobility issues. They can't get to and from court. They can't really get to and from the end of the street very well without police threatening to take away their property. Court won't allow them to bring their property in with them. The buses won't allow them to bring their property in with them the buses won't allow them to to bring um their property on the buses so they have to make a choice do they

all the remaining property that they have in the world to go to court to defend against the charge that they're uh really don't have the the police can cite either as a misdemeanor infraction but when they cite as an infraction individual doesn't get um an appointed attorney and um nor a jury trial and so um the punishment the issuance of the citation becomes the punishment process where just to get to court and take care of your responsibilities becomes a chore even if later it's dismissed. We found out through public records requests that 100% of the misdemeanors that are being cited are 100% of them. So people aren't getting

their attempt their their opportunity to defend themselves in court. They're all being dismissed. And so if the city was was serious about believing that these individuals were committing criminal offenses, then they wouldn't be dismissing them after one of them after they were were issued. the laws or the codes that are used to use during enforcement sweeps of people out here on the street. So the police go out and use codes and municipal codes to write people tickets and eventually take them to jail. That's just one kind of sweep. That's the enforcement sweeps. There's also sweeps or abatement sweeps. We call them homeless encampment sweeps or homeless community sweeps,

where per settlement with past lawsuits, the city has to post three-hour, 72 hour notices in areas, then police and environmental services and cleanup crews, and they'll throw away all your belongings if you're not there. So that's another kind of sweep. So there's actually two kinds of sweeps. There's these cleanup sweeps where they throw away your belongings. And then there's the enforcement sweeps where they just go out with sometimes oh gosh colleen we've probably seen as many as 15 maybe 15 plus police go out to ticket people in a particular homeless community so and just the ringer with all these citations that colleen went through yeah um and then uh perhaps levi you're familiar with the system right i think uh maybe the the idea here is that the police are supposed to offer them shelter right

uh if they ask for shelter they're supposed to offer it to them can you just explain that shelter can be extremely difficult or impossible for people to access yeah absolutely and then i'll tell you kind of some of the consequences that um people face even uh or as a result of this but um so uh basically like let me paint the picture for you so um our location is uh having housing here on site um and uh so the clients will typically there's a line out the gate when we get here at eight o'clock in the morning and eight o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock. All I do is shelter refer. That's everybody that's coming in the door that wants to get a shelter bed for that night,

that night, right? We're doing this at eight o'clock in the morning. And, um, oftentimes I will get one or two some days i don't get anyone into shelter um clock all of those beds are full and that's what they report back to me as the service provider right is is at nine o'clock in the morning there's no more shelter beds um and uh on top of that third thing to to mention too is like, you know, the police are supposed to offer them shelter, but we have like some kind of like conglomerates as far as organizations go

in the shelter space. So if a client is for some reason not allowed to go back, that's one pretty much forever. And B, it could be something like behavior, like they got anxiety and yelled at somebody, right? Or it could be someone who can't complete their ADLs, as they call it, or like an incontinence issue. So there's times, yes, it is sanitary and medically necessary for you to use this little bottle or whatever. But then the shelter will then kick them out and not let them return for that kind of thing.

So by nine o'clock, the shelter beds are full. In the beginning, when they were playing, they were doing their sweeps real early. Now they're doing their sweeps after the time that I'm being told as a service provider that the shelters are already full. And on top of that, our shelter system, you're there during the day, right?

So some of these people that they're taking their stuff and throwing it away are actually in shelter. You know, they just had to take their belongings with them back to the streets where everyone can see them every day. And recently I had a client who we had spent like a month and a half trying to get him in the shelter every single day. And it wasn't going through. Finally, we got him in the shelter and a ticket for encroachment that, you know, was not paid and he didn't go to court so even though he was in shelter in the middle of the day the police officers stopped him they arrested him for his warrant he was in there all weekend and he lost his shelter bed jesus yeah so let's um perhaps you or mandy could explain

then like some of the things because yeah under the guise of, I guess, a cleanup or a base, often they're actively stripping people of the things that they need to access shelter, to access housing, to transport themselves around, right? So just one of you want to take on what this means. Well, they'll, you know, they do it under the guise of we're going to, you know, we're cleaning up the area. But they will drag entire tent people's belongings and put them in the compactor they won't go through them they never look oftentimes there's medication in their ids paperwork things that you know people have to have

to survive um you know people can't have identification. It's really difficult for them to get identification. Living on the streets, you know, it's, it's a process and that process sets outreach workers back. So, you know, you've got an outreach worker who may have gotten them an ID and, you know, they've taken their, it's called a BSBDAT, where they're entered into the housing system, and they're waiting a housing match, and then their ID and everything gets thrown away. So, then the outreach worker has to take time to go back to their ID when they could be helping, you know, someone else get set up to maybe get into housing. You know, they don't look through the things. This causes so much trauma for these folks.

I've seen, so a lot of times with sweeps, sometimes I say they'll allow people to gather their things and move them and then they'll sweep the area. I've seen times when they have had things they moved their things and then the police surround their things while people are standing there and they place their things in front of them while they are begging for their things and they and they will put them in the trash compactor in front of

them and it's i mean the only way that you can view that is it's just punishment like you're not you know you're out here you're poor we don't have any options for you but we're going to do this to deter you because we just don't want to see you here yeah i like i remember i was talking to someone downtown a couple of weeks ago uh when i stopped to give some folks some water and like uh this is the shit i chose to bring with me like i i didn't you know it's not like i could take everything and these are the things that i wanted to keep because they were special to me and yet now now they're being trashed indeed in 2018 i think In 2018, I think, a person was thrown in a room, right? Yeah, like inside their tent.

Just fucking unbelievable. So, yeah, we've established that these sweeps are cruel. We've established that there's not really anywhere for people to go. They don't provide a lasting solution to homelessness. They just move people around and make it harder for them. go um they don't they don't provide a lasting solution to homelessness they just they just move people around and make it harder for them um so one of the things that we do in san diego is that we we have this thing called a point in time count right and i think there have been suggestions that the sweeps were increased in certain areas around the point in time count

so what if you want to explain what that count like is and does yeah um so the point in time count. So is what if you want to explain what that count like is and does? Yeah. So the point in time count really only captures like one night out of the year, people experiencing homelessness. There was a couple of obstacles that process this year, it was particularly really cold that night. There were some tech glitches that should have been worked out way more in advance. But that really only pictures like takes capture of one night. The data I like to often refer to because it just feels more realistic to me is RTFH states that in any given year,'s 30 000 people seeking assistance for homelessness so this our point in time count you know shows one night um there is data being

collected all year round uh so at the point in time count you have a lot of volunteers um go out very early in the morning um they have them count the population do some interviews with them real quick um the interviews are very personal um you know it's a it's it's not necessarily something somebody wants to wake up and answer at 5 a.m but we found some people that were uh you know um but that's that's the point in time count in a nutshell okay and then like what's uh i know that downtown i think the downtown partnership collects their own data right because the data we have is very unreliable what's our best guess at people like maybe in the city sheltered at at this time over 1500 unsheltered homelessness meaning that they're not in a

shelter or you know some kind of program okay and just and that's just in downtown san diego not the whole county okay yeah yeah so downtown san diego for people not familiar is a pretty small part of a very large county right and with i think san diego has the highest like ratio of average income to property prices anywhere in the country now correctly it's incredibly unaffordable um so this has led uh unfortunately but probably pretty predict, to a number of deaths on our streets, right? And for last week, if we're in a seven-day period, this August, it's hot for San Diego right now. And despite this, we've seen this just, like, incredibly callous response from the city, I guess.

We've seen Todd, for instance, Todd Gloria, who's our mayor, giving a speech in front of a shelter where somebody's remains were taken away a few hours before and not mentioning that someone had just passed away in that place. I want to talk about the gap between rhetoric and reality because if you were only learning about this from the city and todd's twitter account you'd think that it was fine right because he's posting about these new shelter beds but perhaps you can explain how at best that's a distraction from

the problems getting worse i i think that um there's the reality that they want the public to see and then there's the reality that's happening and I think that they're failing so badly at getting people into services because many of the services just don't fit people. So they want to paint this picture that all the unsheltered people that are out in their tents living on the street or living in their vehicles are service resistant. And I hear that all the time. You know, we ask them, they don't want services. It's not that people don't want services. Many of these people have tried some of the service centers in San Diego, and the barriers are extremely high. You know, the check-in time and check-out time can be difficult for people. They'll separate families. So, you know, sometimes they'll tell you, oh,

you can go in together if you're husband and wife or if you're partners. And then you get to the shelters and they say, I'm sorry, you can't be together because so you have to go to a men's shelter and you'd have to go to a women's shelter. They'll also do that with, say, a mother has a 16-year-old son and she needs to go into a shelter and there's not a family shelter. She cannot take a women's shelter with her. He has to go into a men's shelter. So, you know, then, you know, people with their pets, their only source of like love and acceptance. You know, a lot of places won't take pets. A lot of places, they're using substances.

So we've got all these boundaries that are keeping people on the streets. And no one's talking about that. And no one's talking about the fact that some of, not all of them, but some of the service providers are profiting off of these poor people because they represent state and federal dollars. So you've got shelters that are run horribly and you know the more people that come in they just want to cycle them through because that gives them money ceo and all of their family members that are

you know working for the non-profit um and and these people because they're unsheltered they don't feel they have a voice they don't feel they can speak up because of retaliation. So they're just constantly. And then you've got the city who's saying, look at all these fantastic things we're doing, which is, is couldn't be farther from the truth. And then they constantly use the narrative that folks are service resistant. Services that are out there are too few and um too difficult and just they're not meeting people where they're at and they're just setting people up to fail every time another thing i want to get into with the shelter specifically is these congregate shelters right and what in the in the context of an ongoing pandemic that maybe is transitioning into another pandemic, can you explain what's a congregate shelter?

Right. It's a long word, but what does it mean and how are those dangerous, especially for medically compromised or older people living on the street? in the city of San Diego is congregate shelter, meaning people are just placed in one big room or in some cases, big circus type tents. We have a few of those where people are sleeping in cobbled, three feet apart. So you can imagine how horrible that is for the spread of disease. That's why we've had some very large outbreaks of COVID

in our shelter system and they're frequently closed to new intakes. I think it's really important that folks know that, like you said, if you look at Mayor Gloria's Twitter or social media feed, you think they're doing everything they can, and there's all these resources. But on any given day, there may be a few dozen shelter beds, literally thousands and thousands of people that are sleeping on our streets at night. And the only reason there's a few dozen shelter beds is because they've kicked some people out that day for breaking some minor rules. Most people who leave shelter are on the street.

people who leave shelter street. So shelter is not a very good pathway to anything. Roughly one in seven people who leaves a city of San Diego shelter go to a permanent housing solution. That's a very, very low. In fact, under Mayor Gloria, I've seen some of the lowest success rates of our system than I've ever seen in my 13 years of working on this our our system has actually is Is actually working worse For Todd Gloria took over So he has done very very little and it most of what he's done has been mostly performative Adding some shelter beds here and there, very little on the house.

In fact, he's left tens of millions of dollars on the table that he hasn't applied for. He did not utilize a California funding stream called Project Roomkey that would have allowed him to rent hotel rooms. room key that would have allowed him to rent hotel rooms, most of them spent a dime on our taxpayer dime to get people off the street. He actually refused to do that. He has refused to open safe camp areas where people could go and camp and get off of the sidewalk. Many of us and others in the community have pushed for real solutions and for him to utilize these funding sources, and he's absolutely refused to do it. Meanwhile, like we stated earlier,

he has deployed these garbage trucks and everybody else to go out there and make people's lives miserable. So he's just been an absolute failure on this issue. And at the same time, he's been the one who's given the most to solutions for this. It is absolutely incredible. What a disaster he has been for, not only for the unsheltered community, but for San Diego. I've begun that he is San Diego's worst enemy. And I just can't believe as somebody who supported him, supported him in his election, supported him in his election, urged people to vote for him.

How hoodwinked I was. I just can't believe that this guy has been so horrible for our city. And every indication is that he's going to continue being, he's going to continue running the idiot into the ground. People die on our streets at record numbers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't, when he came out of the gate, didn't Gloria know how many people he was going to house under his term? And didn't he lowball it? Didn't he lower the number than in previous years?

Oh, yeah, that was some kind of a state or a federal government goal that he set. And he actually set a goal of housing people that was less than we had done in the previous year. So his big stretch was to actually house fewer people. I don't even know if he's even getting there right i mean this guy this this guy is unbelievable the kind of nonsense that he is pulling on the citizens of our city it is unbelievable has invested so much in pr and he's got these folks who who are just good at at spinning this nonsense to make it sound good. And because he gets a lot of media, obviously a big pulpit to spew this nonsense from, he's able to get a lot of people to believe it. Now, on homelessness, anybody who has a decent set of eyes is basically calling bullshit i don't know i don't know a whole lot of people anymore who think we're doing very

well on this issue and so i i think he's going to have a harder and harder time convincing people that he's worthy of worthy of re-election of a higher office at some point which is all he seems to care about yeah and can i add some more so so he's personally to blame he has personal involvement of getting rid of 10 000 sros single rental units that that if we had minus our 8 000 homeless people we would not have homelessness yes so units that he was required to replace and never replaced them that's his fault um i call him a monster i i was uh gonna criminalize but he was a republican we expected it of him and he didn't tell a promise last he was going to end criminalization to get our vote um one of the reasons that are probably the only the main reason that that glory didn't

put funding into project room key um was because the city is in this unique position of owning and operating the non-profit that runs the convention center so when covid hit they were looking at non-profit going belly up events in there and having to lay off all their staff so instead of putting people in hotels where they'd be safe they put them in a convention center where they'd be exposed to covid and would die but the city funded convent um non-profit would be funded so um that's just and 132 million dollars is what todd gloria got the city to to pay out on a settlement on ash street ash is his boondoggle he cost us that he could city council to invest all this money to slide donor money to slide city money to his donors what is that street for the listeners

who aren't familiar with our real estate griff scene? So James, if you were going to go buy a house right now, you would think it is important a property inspection, correct? Yes, yeah, yeah. Would you think it would be important to Google or seek out documents that may inform you of asbestos prior to your

purchase yeah i'd want to know that yeah so these are two of the opportunities that they missed when they entered this deal with um uh with the 101 ash street um so they basically had a uh middleman sestera uh come in and purchase the property and then lease to own it back to the city. At no time was an inspection done. The asbestos was, people were aware of it, but there was no studies done on what the impact was going to be and all that. So now we've got ourselves sunk into this deal that is taxpayers $202 million, right? So I punched some of the maths, okay? And if you assume that one year's rent is $24,000, right?

$202 million divided by $24,000 is more more than 8 000 people that this taxpayer money you know and it's always it's just and it's in a cycle and it's it's not only the cycle there but it's we don't have enough police so they're bringing in more police when we don't have the housing and then the police that we do have are working overtime to pick up shopping carts and throw away tents you know so um so the ash street deal there's plenty to go it is uh like historically going to go down in san diego's screw-ups for sure yeah it's a giant monumental grift go ahead colleen but we don't have any police is also more gaslighting we have started practicing law 30 years ago two police officers would show up at the scene now at least six police officers show up every single time we have an over blight of of police and uh we could afford to lay off

two-thirds agreed yeah yeah uh but instead we we just built a childcare center for them. Right. Yeah. Let's piggyback on that real quick about the police. One thing I think they also push the narrative that, you know, there's this hot team, the homeless outreach team, that the police, they never take water. They never really take anything. And they search for unsheltered people. And they rarely get any traffic to these things. And people often wonder why.

We cannot expect unsheltered people to trust and accept help from people that criminalize them, terrorize them, harass them, and throw their things away. So, you know, adding more police to deal with homelessness is just also a waste of money. It causes more trauma to the unsheltered people. It's unnecessary. So we're talking about this duality between like what's said and what exists on the street, right? And it's very apparent. People on the internet love to be wrong about George Orwell. But the one time recently where I felt that like Orwell would be a useful thing to deploy is the idea of a care court, like, which is the thing that Todd's been very strong on the gavin newsom's first right uh courts in my opinion don't care about people uh so can someone explain what a care court is

and why it's relevant in this setting so framework of this is you have a bunch of um liberals in Gloria and Gavin Newsom's ear saying, we have to end homelessness. And the politicians are saying, oh, well, we can't end homelessness because they're all mentally ill drug users. So that's the first premise that we're working with, and they're not. 10% use drugs and have mental illness to a debilitating to an debilitating extent in the homeless population um this uh is parallels the the rate of drug use in the house community we don't take houses away from drug users who are housed and make them get sober before we return

their houses to them so requiring that they be sober before they return to the house is asked backwards. We have to get them into housing first. Now, the care court is set up just to pass more money to their donors. That's all it's set up to do. It's not going to ease anything. It's going to set up a situation where where a person is considered gravely disabled, then they can be put into a conservatorship. And gravely disabled is defined as unable to provide shelter for oneself.

So essentially, everybody who is poor, gravely disabled, and the rich who got them in this position can make all the decisions for them. I'm very passionate about this because it's it's cruel and it's it's it's it's essentially the return of all the and that was set set turned off the whole reason that you know reagan got every get everybody released from the prisons because of the mental illness but he never paid there was never any payment into community mental health services so um now they want to return them to the institutionalization after never providing any street a sufficient street um services for them and that's that's just uh cruel yeah and so with um the whole care court plan there there's like a few principles in it. One is that it does not mention that there is any housing stipulation at all.

So it does not say that the conservator must provide them shelter. The check-in guidelines are once every 30 days, which is about the time period that we have them check in with their case managers. It's at least once every 30 days. time period that we have them check in with their case managers is at least once every 30 days. And they also try to tell it like, well, it could be temporary, right? Like once they get better, then they'll be off the concern. To me, it's like, okay, you force them into treatment. And then once they get kicked out of treatment, you say, okay, they're healed. And then, you know, they're back away from their services. And I've had clients who thought maybe a conservatorship is right for me, begging where they're like, I just can't do stuff right. Like, you know, and I had one client specifically asked me to be her conservator. And I care about her so much. And if I thought that her having a conservator would really benefit her.

But as of right now, there's no difference in whether a conserv population has a drug in San Diego County as a whole 15% of San Diegans have a substance use issue, right? My 10% was debilitating, a debilitating. Okay, good to clarify. Instead, 15% is way more than our homeless population. Those aren't the only ones with substance use. But if you are on Medi-Cal, right, if you're low income, and low income in San Diego is anyone making less than $76,000 per year, which is a lot more people than they realize. If you are low income. Can I skip up on that? Just because you said if you're low income, but I have some memes here.

I want to point some facts on the care court. Care court to address houselessness. Five million dollar budget. Zero will go to housing and zero will go to mental health services. That's shocking. Zero to mental health services or housing. Care court will weaponize its unchecked power and worsen the historical violence

against communities. And care court claims to address mental health disabilities, but allows a judge to rob anyone they find unfit of autonomy over their health, home, and life. Yeah. And I did remember my thoughts. So, like the people on Medi-Cal, they're as far as like, we already know fentanyl is in everything now, even if somebody thinks they're getting coke or, or whatever they think it is, typically there is fentanyl in it. So anyone who does wish to go through a detox, it's impossible to get them beds. I have clients who come and they're like,

please, I know, I know I got to get work this out of my life and I'm going to try. Can you get me into detox? And we'll spend the whole day, you know, and, and, and there's one and like all these people are competing for the detox facility. So it was like we had the infrastructure set up and we had this awesome mental health care and we had these awesome like street medics and street therapy and we had okay and everyone in the conservatorship is gonna uh be housed at this place like maybe but like this whole thing is just it's it's a load of crap. So. Levi, if we had all those things, if we had a good system that had good substance use treatment, good mental health care and housing, we wouldn't have all these folks on the street. Amen. And so it's kind of interesting that they're creating

something to solve an issue that they don't have the infrastructure to solve. But I think it's important to note that care court is a conservatorship, but we already have conservatorship laws. Conservatorship laws, they're very strict. It's a very high threshold to get somebody conserved currently for good reason. You're taking away somebody's civil, you're taking away somebody's rights to make their own decisions is what a conservator. But for some folks that are gravely disabled and impaired,

it is the best thing to do. It's for, you know, for very few people, but, but the, the city attorneys and the people in the hospital, the workers, they don't want to go through it because it is very difficult and challenging. And oftentimes, the judge will deny it because that's how important it is for people to have these civil rights. So sometimes you even have to do it multiple times with somebody who may actually need it. And I speak from firsthand experience of helping people go through this process and try to conservatorship on somebody who just really, really needs it.

Care court would lower that threshold so much. I doubt it's legal. I'm sure it's going to get challenged in court. It is such a dangerous leap against our civil liberties, our civil rights, that I just am going to find it incredible if judges allow this to move forward when it's challenged. But the point is that people need help. They need care, not court. And if we would provide the care, which our elected officials don't want to do, which our elected officials don't want to do, I think this is just a cop-out on their part. I think this is the elected official saying, we have failed, so we'll just punt it to the courts and let them take ownership and control of this, which in effect, the courts are just kicking it to the county is our behavioral health provider who's going to have toal that they would even be trying to do this. I think it's basically an indictment system.

But care court's not going to fix anything. And I think it's setting people up for failure. thing. That's, and I think it's setting people up for failure. I've talked to some families who are, who are really, now these are silver bullet to get their loved ones. And maybe it works better for that segment of the population because they have somebody. They have a loved one as an advocate to make sure that the care is the focus. But for unsheltered folks, they're going to be abused and used by this system. Maybe warehoused. Who knows?

They're going to be a travesty uh that i i just can't imagine can't imagine this so-called liberal state uh would try to trample the rights of people like this. And, oh boy, I tell you, there is so much dangerous about this that, I mean, we could have a whole lot of talk about this and maybe, and I'm sure there will be a lot of talk about this down the road. Yeah, yeah.

All right, so what I want to do is focus a little bit to finish up here on some solutions. So the things that a lot of you guys are doing right now to provide people with help, to provide people with the basic thing, a dignified existence and like how the state could do better. Right. Like what what housing first solutions look like, what solutions are informed by by evidence rather just informed by sort of cruelty and the desire to brush the problem aside what are those well i think you have to you know you can't expect people to get well on the street so you've you've got to get them inside um and congregate shelters we've already talked about why those are so problematic on so many levels.

There is a model in San Diego that's being used by a nonprofit. Right now, it's only for elderly individuals. It's called Housing for the Homeless. And they put unsheltered elderly folks in hotel rooms. And it's had tremendous success. For some reason, it cannot get funding or county funding um but getting these people off the street and out of survival mode is first and foremost and then you've got them in a stable place so that services can find them when they need them they can get the mental health services um You know, we need to bolster our

rehab and addiction services. We also need more harm reduction. You know, it can take you one to three days to detox at McAllister, which is the only detox center in San Diego, south of Encinitas. And detox is separate from sober living. So you may detox and then it may be another one to three week wait to get into sober living, which is just enough time to get turned back out on the streets and relax again. And after that, even there's no housing at the end of the tunnel. So, you know, really the biggest thing that we there's no housing at the end of the tunnel so you know really the the biggest thing that we're missing is housing and then everything else trickles down from there um you

know just building these relationships with people so that they can can trust that you're on their side and you're not going to lie to them give them empty promises or or use them in some way to monetize them is one of the biggest things that I've found of importance for me as an on-the-ground outreach worker and doing mutual aid. Most of the time, these people just don't have water. They're thirsty. They're hungry. That's what poverty looks like.

hungry, what poverty looks like. So I think we've, you know, we've got to get these people inside immediately. And then we start deploying the resources to them to help them recover from the trauma or, you know, whatever trauma led them to be in that situation. I think people often forget that a lot of folks on the street, you know, there's the foster to the streets pipeline, there's the jail to the streets pipeline. So, you know, many people don't end up on the streets because they have family to help them. And a lot of these folks on the streets, they don't have any family members. So, you know, as a community, we need to step up and be their family. So that's great. And I think, I think we have to understand that the homeless service system, and I'm going to talk about some of the good things that are,

it's important for people to know there's a ton of stuff happening, both grassroots all the way up. But it's important for people to know there's a ton of stuff happening, both grassroots all the way up. But it's important to understand that the homeless service system can only do so much. As Mandy was talking about, these pipelines that feed homelessness, people are becoming homelessness. I've never seen so many new people out here on the street in my work. I'm on the street some part, well, a lot of the every day. And I'm seeing more new people than I've ever seen in my last 13 years. And there's all these feeder systems. It's child welfare, it's foster care,

it's the education system. You can name it. It's the healthcare system. All these things are feeding homelessness. It's how we've commoditized housing. I mean, I can go on and on talking about what's feeding homelessness. It's safety nets. It's the lack of good mental health care and substance use care. So homeless services cannot control these things up above these systems, these billion-dollar systems that are failing people and feeding homelessness. systems that are failing people in feeding homelessness. What this system is, and I like to say they've got a lot of mission creep going on here because ideally they really should be focused on getting people into housing and out of homelessness, but they've become this big system that is really getting very costly, inefficient, and ineffective. But we know what solves homelessness. Housing and services solve

homelessness, period. And it works. We see when these new quality projects like Zephyr or Trinity Place, they're not projects, they're housing. They're housing with services. So we call them projects, but they're just like any other apartment building, really, except they have supportive services for folks. And they work extremely well. They have a 95% plus rate of keeping folks housed, even folks who are disabled and have some significant issues. And it helps provide that self-sufficiency by providing a deep rental subsidy and supportive services for folks who aren't taking care of their own rent totally themselves. There is no free housing. Everybody who gets these units pays 30% of their income, whether it's disability income, Social Security, retirement, whatever. They're paying some free housing. People are helping themselves. And that's really important to say. And they're participating in services. But once you're in housing, your participation in services rates go up because people want to

going better and stay in the housing. These are being built they're being built as we speak but at a snail's pace and that's the things that i fault our elected leadership for is they're nibbling around the edges so todd has todd gloria done some a few but they're so small and he blows them up to like he's solving something and he's not has the county done some good things yeah they've county done some good things? Yeah, they've actually done more good things than I've ever seen them do, but it's still not anywhere close to the pace that we need. They've opened up some mental health crisis centers

that are actually walk-in centers. They've put together some mental health crisis teams that respond to a small percentage of cases of when you call 911. But it is helping. All of these, what really needs to be done is the things that we know work need to be taken to scale. But we have to also understand the challenges of that. We can't just fault the elected officials for some things they don't have control over. As we all know, it's a hard time hiring people. So we need a lot more staff that are providing mental health services and substance use services.

But we won't get there. And this is where officials have a lot of fault is they've really not put a priority in on this issue and this is where there's the biggest disconnect on one hand you have todd gloria constantly saying how this is his number one issue on the other hand his know that i'm a big believer in in bicycle safety and safe roads and things like that but he seems to put more importance on a bike lane than he does solving homelessness. And they're both important, but 500 people dying on our streets because they're homeless,

that's, you know, he needs to put, he needs to back up his talk with action. Just like, you know, they're, they're expanding some bike lanes. And I think, uh, I think they need to do it a lot smarter because some of them don't seem to be that safe to me, but, uh, that's a whole nother show too. Yeah. That's a, yeah.

I shouldn't be involved in, but, but, uh, they don't seem to be very strategic to me and they be very, they don't seem to be very strategic to me. And they be very, they don't seem to care. They seem to be more interested in hoodwinking the public so they can get their next job. We need people who care mostly that care about people, but also care any efficiently and effectively, but some of the grassroots stuff,

like I say, getting people into hotel rooms and then getting into housing is a good pathway. The county opened a small shelter. I think it's 44 beds or so. It's the first they opened that's really more tailored toward people with substance use and mental health needs. It has a great uptake rate. And the feedback from people on the streets is good. So here we have something that the county did that was good. We need a lot more of them. They're opening another jumbo tent. So these things are very frustrating to folks like myself and Mandy, Colleen, the different people, the people who are actually on the ground working that are trying to get people into. We know what we know, the things that people will

go into, including substance use help. But whenever you try to get somebody in it and you're told there's a three week waiting list, you lose that person. They want to go. Now, you got to be responsive to the person's motivation in that moment to get the help. And it's heartbreaking for people like Mandy and me who are out there on the street and people are crying out for this help. Bullshit. When these folks, whether it's the police or the mayor, say that there's the people don't want help. It's really disgusting because when you're on the street like we are and people are pleading for this help and we can't help them because it's not available. And we call bullshit. We call bullshit on the rhetoric that comes out of these people's mouths.

shit on on the rhetoric that comes out of these people's mouths we know the people we see their faces those tears are real that pleading for help is real and help them if we do what's right and so uh we could talk all day about some of the good things too that the grassroots people like mandy are out there um just on the ground doing this none of us here on this call except for levi levi works within the system and thank goodness for him and i the last thing i want to say and i i'm always remiss if i don't remind remember to say this but i always want to send a shout out. It's not the fault of the hardworking people on the street, whether you're paid or not. I just want to say thanks to all of the folks who take on this job, paid or not, to go out and help people firsthand do the best with this shitty system that they're given. So there's a lot of people who take very little pay they do this because they care or the volunteers who do it because they care

to help people and there's a lot of folks out and hard to help folks and they are helping people one by one by one and we need the support need, we have to have the support of the Todd Glorias and the Nathan Fletchers of the world and the Gavin Newsoms to do the right thing and to keep funding what works and to quit doing what doesn't. And so I think it's just important to round out by saying that. I think it's just important to round out by saying that. Yeah, I think that's very good. All of you are out helping people.

I see it all the time on your social media. Where can people find you? And how can they support what you're doing? If it's getting people tents, getting people water, that kind of thing. Should we start with... Let's just go down the list. I'll start with Mandy. Should we start with, let's just go down the list. I'll start with Mandy. I usually kind of bum off on Michael for funding.

Because most of everything I do, I pay for myself. So he has, he does a GoFundMe and then, you know, he'll be like, Hey, I got GoFundMe money. And, you know, I meet him and he like loads up my car and off I go. Um, you know, people can, can find me on Twitter. Um, Cooper too. Um, I'm, I'm very passionate. So, know it's like be careful what you look at on my feed um you know I just I love these people and um I I want to see them because they're I want to see them get the help and one thing that Michael taught me in the very beginning of this because you know I started this um about two, three years ago. One thing that Michael said to me that resonated with me, because, you know, he's, you know, like, I call them parades now, which are like liberal marches, you know, yelling at buildings where no

one's in and, you know, then going home and feeling good about what I did. And he said, you know, Mandy, he said, social justice issue that everyone fights for, Black Lives Matter, immigration, disability, you know, all of these things come together, LGBTQIA plus, all of those people are overrepresented in the homeless population. And so it shakes down to that. And so I thought, you know, my mind was like blown and I was like, oh my God, you know, I'm out here marching for people. Most marginalized of them are living on the street.

of them are living on the street. And there's very little help for those people because unfortunately, whatever marginalized group you come from, when you become homeless, that overtakes all of them. And there is a huge public hatred for unsheltered people. And it is bipartisan across the board. So we all just need to realize that this is you know this is a societal failure and a social justice um and i i hope that you know more people would will get up and and get go to the ground and start talking to your unsheltered neighbors try to build a relationship with them, reach out to their humanity. And one person, if each of us just did it with one person, it would make such a difference. Even if you can't get them in housing or you don't have a lot of money, literally just treating them like a human being means so much to these folks.

Yeah, that's very important. Khalid, what would you like to say? can people find you how can they help that was just like how to find us right um i know i thought it was great welcome it i uh i my name is colleen cusack c-u-s-a-c-k you can google me and find me i am in searchable in the attorney directory my number is 619-823-46 and my email address is c another c u s a c k dot policy at gmail.com um and i'm on uh twitter uh at symbol which stands for objection great thank you all right michael so i like mand, I've just funded my work myself also, except for about, oh, two ago, I was out on the street filming some sweeps, watching the police and the environmental service workers throw away people's tents. And I said, well, I'm going to go get those people some new tents. Officer told me, go ahead. We can throw them out faster than you can give them out.

And I tweeted about that. And, you know, I think it really, you know, struck a chord with people. So I've had people offer, but I've just had this real outpouring of offerings to help lately. So for the first time ever, I set up a GoFundMe. And in the first day, I just said, you know, this is just to help support encampments that are impacted by the sweeps or whatever, or to other grassroots people like Mandy who are out there. And I think I raised about $3,000 in the first day. And I was like, wow, it really was touching because

you know i didn't even hardly i just put it out on twitter i think and i haven't promoted it much since but i think we're up to six or seven thousand dollars why aren't we shopping i use that every day i don't worry you the um uh i'm retired so i get to do this all day long people like mandy they have a job they're doing this as a second job that's unpaid so um so what i do is is is is help uh is to buy stuff i i help other other organizations. I also promote vetted GoFundMes of other people on my social media sites. So I really would appreciate you following me on Twitter. It's at HomelessnessSD.

On Facebook, it's Homelessness News San Diego. On Instagram, it's homelessness new San Diego on on Instagram it's the same and on YouTube it's I think it's homelessness new San Diego on YouTube I just started a YouTube page well I know but I just started posting stuff on there so I have a lot of followers it's a pretty active conversation especially on Twitter yeah I get the mayor's people lashing out at me attacking me because they don't like me calling them out um i get i i get haters on there too i let them voice their opinion uh i let the conversation flow um but what i do is you're what and i i do warn you that especially on twitter it's heart-wrenching stuff on the ground i'm seeing people die i'm seeing horrible stuff and i'm sharing it with you because i think people

deserve to know the truth the elected officials like mayor todd gloria they don't want you to know the truth but i'm going to bring it to you i've worked to bring you the truth that's going on out here on the street. And it's ugly. It's, but it's also, I also see some amazing stuff. I also see some amazing heartwarming stuff, people helping people. So it's everything. Rollercoaster ride folks. So, you know, just be prepared. And from there you can find my GoFundMe. Um, but most of all, you can get educated on the issue, make up your own mind, uh, the bullshit that spewed out of city hall, uh, see it on the ground for yourself. Uh, I take people out with me. Uh, I do a lot of work with the media, but, but just, just,

just join the conversation conversation, learn, donate if you want to learn where you can donate your time to other people. Yeah. Message me. You can come with me. Yeah. Yeah. We're just real people out there doing you know doing and i worked within the system trying to i went to all these meetings i i spent a whole ton of money within the within the mainstream system which i'll never do again because it's a black hole so i mostly promote grassroots stuff and um we're just out there doing it and, and doing what we can in a very difficult situation,

but join the conversation and see what's going on. And thanks James. I just, I appreciate all your support over the years, both amplifying our messages, getting messages out on social media and just for everything that you do on social justice issues and, and, and safety issues. Um,

so, and hold them accountable on the bike stuff. Yeah, absolutely. We'll do. That's another episode. I will plug Levi on Levi's behalf because Levi had to jump off to sort out an emergency,

but it's, which on Twitter is at the solution 619. You can find them there and leave. I can help folks if they are in San Diego access services. So, yeah, that's been us today. Please do follow these people and be a good neighbor to the unhoused community wherever you are. Feel free to reach out to any of us if you need some help or advice on how to do that or want to come out here in San Diego.

All right. Thank you very much, everyone. Appreciate you taking some of your afternoon. Thank you. 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.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

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

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

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

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.

Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how the world is falling apart and sometimes about how to put it together. Today, mostly about the people who are accelerating the falling apart. Garrison's with me. Shireen's with me. We are talking today about the merchant of death, the lord of war, Victor Boot. So we should probably start off by talking about Victor Boot.

Victor Boot's always an interesting topic of conversation, but he's come up recently because he's one of the people who has been proposed to be exchanged for two u.s citizens held by russia uh one being britney griner and one being paul whelan so i'm guessing folks are pretty familiar with the britney griner situation if if not what's the what's the uh tldr on that yeah tldr is britney griner is a two-time olympic gold medalist uh she's a basketball player and she often plays off-season basketball in russia which tells you a lot about in wages between men and women in professional sport and unfortunately when she was traveling to Russia, I guess she had a weed vape cartridge in her bag.

And so she was arrested and accused of drug smuggling. And my God. Yeah. Which is yeah. Like it's as you as as we go through this, it will become very clear that I don't think it's controversial to say that the russian state engages in hostage taking right oh for sure yeah i i don't think that's like a controversial statement this lady is not drug smuggling yeah i too would probably want to take drugs if i had to spend my off seasons in russia but like it's so transparent what they're doing

it's like they don't even attempt to not it's just yeah it's they're not being sneaky about it they're very clearly being like we're taking this person hostage yeah and we will hold this person hostage until you give us the person that we want back right like and even uh so there was a um he was a marine held by russia so there's paul wheeler that's the other guy right uh paul wheelan was a marine he had a he didn't have a dishonorable discharge uh he had what's called uh i think an other than honorable he was doing a couple of things he was embezzling shit from the united states government uh which is pretty based uh yeah yeah we should all be so lucky um and he was also writing bad checks his checks were bouncing uh so he booted from the marine corps for that and was doing some kind of

private security work it seemed like so he was arrested in russia in 2019 another former marine uh called trevor reed was arrested and his case is just like well it's not coming but the guy was driving with his girlfriend at the time they've been on a big night out they're in a car he got drunk got belligerent started getting fighty uh and they pulled over and some of his mates were like look if you don't calm down so you keep fighting with us they called the police the police were like right we'll take you in you'll sleep it off deal with you in the mornings kick you out and then at some point the next morning the fsb turned up uh which is like the inheritor of the legacy of the kgb like oh trevor why did you

attack the cops last night why why did you do that why would you assault the police the russian police and he was like what are you talking about bro and uh they were like yeah you're going to jail you're a spy uh government biden under biden swapped him out uh and the two who are left well there are other people left obviously but uh who was swapped out for for the other guy trevor reed uh i'm not sure who was traded uh for trevor reed it's the most like weird i mean nothing is too strange at this point but like when you really countries like trading people yes so strange to me yeah he was uh he was uh he was uh one who was in here on drug crafting charges i guess um so they they switch out reed right but reed and wheelan have become close in their captivity

and reed's been a big advocate for having Whelan released. Whelan's kind of... You're taking the piss if you think Brittany Griner's a drug trafficker, but Whelan does have five different nationalities. I think he's got American, he's got Canadian, he might only have four. I think he's got British and Irish. So he's a former service member in the United States.

And like this guy was broke, right? He was bouncing checks. As we'll learn in this episode, one of the things intelligence agencies tend to like is people who are bouncing checks. Those people are easy to recruit, right? Like if you're trying to buy shit that you can't afford uh you might be easier to recruit if you uh if they offer you money right

so uh it's i'm not saying no idea whatsoever i got no unique insight into that but uh i am saying that like his case is a little bit more interesting. So the United States has proposed trading Victor Boot for both Greiner and Whelan. That was kind of doing the rumor. Russian source confirmed it last weekend. So that's why we want to talk about Victor Boot today. It's spelled B-O-U-T, by the way, if anyone's looking it up. If people are familiar with uh Victor Boot at all it was probably from the Nicolas Cage film Lord of War uh have you seen that either of you

no I subjected Chris to it uh now Chris can't make the podcast so uh that's good we'll be Nicolas Cage free in this uh it is a pretty epic film it's a good film nicholas cage play boot yeah oh fuck yeah yeah in a like i need to see that i need to see that ah i wish yeah i wish i could share with you just the scene where like it's he just turns to the camera like there's uh there's 550 million guns in the world that's one for every 12 people and my only question is how do we arm the other 11 uh but at some point he like just puffs on a fat cigar in the middle of that does he have an accent no he doesn't do a russian look disappointing uh allegedly that's a real quote uh from from victor boot by the way. You can find a clip. We can slice it in.

Yeah, I can find a clip. I got one lined up on my computer. I will... Send it to our fair editors. There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every 12 people on the planet.

The only question is... How do we arm the other 11 it's great it's classic nicholas cage he can't do anything wrong so true yeah yeah ghost ghost writer never happened i don't know what you're talking about I don't know what you're talking about nope it's been erased from my memory so aside from Nicolas Cage's excellent betrayal

the film isn't that accurate notably he didn't actually grow up in Brighton Beach, old Victor he grew up in Dushanbe it was in the Tajik province of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, right? Now it's in Tajikistan.

And we know, well, there's a lot of stories about this guy. It's very hard to confirm which of them is true. He's clearly told as many background stories as he's met new groups of people when he's moved around as his mom is on the scene uh so we do know that his mother is still alive i think she's 85 she will occasionally pop up in the russian press uh and ask joe biden to let her poor innocent son go which is very amusing he was a car mechanic so he's not like a child of privilege particularly but at some point he seems to have joined the soviet military probably the air force and he trained at their military academy of languages and guy's capacity for language is insane

like he can go down the shops in like 15 different languages. He can speak fluently in half a dozen. He can order a sandwich in like 20 languages. I want that power. Yeah. Don't we all? It seems to be

like these people who thrive in non-state activities in crime and stuff like do seem to like having a capacity for language benefit in that world and you hear about quite a lot um later on when he's in prison in thailand he learned sanskrit um he doesn't bother to learn thai like he doesn't want people to think they can understand what he's saying but uh fuck it i'll learn sanskrit while i'm here like i'm running out of options uh so yeah he's got this amazing capacity for language which probably ends up with him being a spook uh it's not we like it's not for the kg, but it seems that way.

We know that he was bouncing around in Angola as part of the civil war there. So it's unlikely that he was a pay clerk or like the guy who changed the tires on the airplanes. And when the Soviet Union collapses, Victor is in Angola, right? Or at least he gets to Angola pretty quickly. Not, I think, because it's the place he wanted to be, but because places that had the least regulations on civilian use of military aircraft. So this is where he goes from KGB dude who speaks a lot of languages to beginning to be this international arms sort of uh god uh and he does that by buying these antonov planes a people might not be familiar with antonov it's just a giant plane it's a huge cargo plane uh obviously

a little bit outdated now but you'll still see them but um it's like the russian big hauler right it carries a lot of stuff to a lot of places and by getting those and having absolutely zero morals he launches his career and like he's not just selling weapons he's um american people don't get this like we have this british stereotype of like the wheeler dealer um as epitomized by like delboy in the tv series called only fools and horses but he's like a market trader he'll buy whatever he thinks he can score wherever he thinks he can sell expensive right so he's moving like frozen chicken at one point he's moving flowers from

South Africa and like throughout his career is this massive international arms dealer he'll just be like oh

chicken over right let's move that chicken over here we can make a killing like he doesn't I think like we should stress

he's not like a guy who's obsessed with with like guns and weapons and killing people I don't think I think he like a guy who's obsessed with uh with like guns and weapons and killing people i don't think i think he's a guy who has absolutely zero and it's just like well there's a high profit margin on guns so that's what i'll move but i don't think it's like there's there seems to be no moral angle to his his existence um like very quickly after doing that he's democratic republic of congo

he's selling into liberia in the conflict there sierra leone uh rwanda after the genocide he's there right um but he's also like transporting french troops to rwanda will be doing contracts for united states government for the brit States government, for the British government, for most of the Western governments that participate in the forever war. It's very funny actually, during the phase when the United States is doing things for him, which is a bit later when he becomes a wanted man, he keeps doing these different shell companies right to avoid things like sanctions and the way that he

the way that the United States Department of Justice publishes their list there'll be every year right no one can do business with these

companies they're bad they're connected to arms dealing and then the United States Department of Defense will go down

its list of people it does business with and be like oh shit there's like six of them who we're like integrally relying on and then and so it's fine because they change the name and then there's like there it's like tom and jerry or whack-a-mole you know he keeps popping up with these new companies so he sort of really gets this massive boost around 2001

with 9-11. So 9-11's a big win for him. Well, that's the episode, everybody. That's the soundbite. So he's super tight with Ahmed Shah Massoud. People are familiar with

what we call the Northern Alliance, right? The people in afghanistan who the united states backed to fight the taliban uh he'd been selling weapons to masood for a while uh and he he seems to actually like with masood like he talks about him and we'll get on to how we know him talking about him in a little bit but he talks about him very fondly. He's a big Massoud guy. So he claims he doesn't trade with the Taliban and he holds for a long ass time until his plane and crew are held by the Taliban at an airport in Afghanistan,

which like, how did they get there, Victor? There's two really, like, how they escape. The one story is that, like, the Taliban require them to maintain this plane every so often because they want to be able to use the plane, right? So these Russian guys or these contractors for Victor are doing the plane and then they like in

sort of like a Michael Caine movie style like cosh their guards over their head jump start the plane and just pin it to the end of the runway take off and fly to freedom and that's the narrative popular until Victor Boot was like nah like I know all those people i just

called and was like do you want to do business with victor boot or do you want to hold this plane hostage because it's one or the other and you're fucked without me and seem yeah it's a shame i like i like story i like story too story too is objectively in my opinion a little bit more badass on his part you You know what I mean? Yeah, that's true. That's the power he has. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I think when this guy clicks his fingers, the world listens. Like he did until he was in prison learning Sanskrit. Right. Yeah, if you're the pilot. There was an interview I found on YouTube with one of his pilots as well. He's like, yeah, man, you can't do that for very long he's like we're constantly landing like we're being shot at when we're landing we're being shot at when we we get on the ground and just like yeet everything out the back and then just

take off again and like we make a ton of money because no one else is prepared to do that but probably isn't great for your long-term well-being and so he's by the peak of his career in the early 2000 he's got hundreds of employees he's got 60 aircraft um and he's moved his operation to shaja um which is a very sort of conservative emirate uh it's a twisted all right right uh but it has what's called a free trade zone uh so on top of all his other shit he's also not paying uh import export taxes and so he's based there which seems to allow him to operate pretty much without him he's moving a ton of small arms from ukraine so at the end of the Soviet Union,

Ukraine makes a big thing of being like, we're returning our nuclear weapons, right? People will be familiar with this. They don't want their nukes anymore. But they also amassed just an incredible amount of small arms, right? So that's like guns, bombs, grenades, things like that, right?

Machine guns. And because a bunch of the small arms are stored in Ukraine, that becomes like the nexus for the black market. We think that Boot is ethnically Ukrainian, and he certainly seems to have just been shoveling weapons out of Ukraine to conflicts largely. There's a civil war that you know about in africa or one that you don't know about probably both sides were using his weapons like that that's a that's a fair assumption to make and by the late 90s early 2000s he's selling everywhere and

business to launder money for other illegal activities and he was he was linked to the qaddafi regime he was also selling to rebels in libya um so it's a huge operation he's the go-to guy for uh weapons right and he sort of comes they they interpol go after him in 2002 uh like there's a belgian warrant for him but Belgium ends up having to drop their case because it's unclear where he lives they can't be like yeah he's a resident here he's a Belgian resident because like now

this guy keeps moving around it's not clear if you have jurisdiction Central African Republic also I think had a warrant out for him but they haven't I guess been successful in serving that warrant and public also i think had a warrant out for him but um they haven't i guess been successful uh in serving that warrant um in the belgian when they dropped their case they noted that it would be impossible and very time consuming to prosecute him uh which is kind of funny given that he's

doing a lot of crimes but despite this in 2003 he does this incredible new york times like this thousands of words profile interview of the world's largest arms dealer uh it's like a relic of another era of journalism like they send this writer to like look for victor boo to try and find victor wow what year was this 2003 um that was a different era that was completely different yeah yeah that is uh yeah it's a shame you look at i look i looked at it and i just couldn't help this but they just let this person expense a shit ton of flights wow like this this doesn't happen anymore um such a shame i would love to go to a russian nightclub and drink carrot juice with arms dealers uh on the job yeah yeah and then that to the new york times and yeah in the piece he drinks carrot

juice he uh he's vegetarian uh he calls himself a scapegoat and a family man. He's what a hero. Every day, Joe, trying to sell some Kalashnikovs to people who are doing genocide. He is. Go ahead. Is this interview how we know a lot about him? Yes, that and his. This man loves a hand the home video right

international crime spray is the best idea we ever had yeah quirky little dude but he's not doing crimes in his videos he just looks like uh like ah i from the office who is just like the most mundane dude in ill-fitting suit. He just looks like a salaryman who drives like a regular car and on the weekends likes to like go to Buffalo Wild Wings and watch sports events. Like he used to slide with his like white ass body and pot belly at one point in one of these home videos. white ass body and pot belly at one point in one of these home videos and like he just yeah he just strikes you as the most boring family

guy like he's not he seems to be like drugs at one point like it's fascinating and bizarre and I'm assuming he has children if he's a family man I think he does have children.

He certainly has a wife. His wife is out there. His wife is pretty vocal about let my man go. Right, right, right. Yeah. I'm pretty sure he does have children, yeah. Probably more than we know about. But maybe not.

Maybe he's a wife guy. Well, I just think it's funny in these home videos. Like he's, you know what I mean? But like no one else, no family members. It's just him on a slide or something. well i just think it's funny in these home videos like he's you know what i mean but like no one else no family members it's just him on a slide yeah yeah yeah that would be pretty uh yeah that would be pretty uh pretty entertaining so 2003 it's the uh the article clearly has these 2000s like it's named after a george bernard shaw play called arms and the man uh and it's just like epic and meandering and very long uh and he talks about in the article he's like look they're using me as like this is a thing that like the reason they

that it's very hard to prosecute Victor Boot is because there are not that many laws against arms dealing and the reason there are not that many laws against arms dealing is integral to how we do foreign policy like we are hosed without

people like Victor Boot and that's like the other side of this coin that yeah yeah, we need a Nicolas Cage bad guy to pin this stuff on. And yeah, he pretty horrific things or sold weapons to people who did horrific things. But he, what he's doing is not that like abnormal and it's not that always illegal. As we'll see, we're into like gross entrapment to arrest this guy uh and he is right that like is he really the biggest arms dealer in the world or is that like dick cheney or you know lockheed martin or uh that'sathion. Like, is he really

any more evil than, like, I live in San Diego, right? Most of the companies I just mentioned have offices here. I rode past one of them today, you know, and those people also go on the water slide with their kids. He does have a kid. He has a daughter, one daughter, or

child, I don't know, born in the Emiratesates and they're 28 so oh i bet he knows where they are now yeah i bet he's a great dad uh well he's been in jail uh that's sad yeah he has a wife too uh ala is his wife uh uh just she was she's a fair bit younger than him um so also he's really lost weight in jail and he's looking pretty good uh and picture of him but with a mustache and stuff uh he's really he's having a glow up uh i think in jail are you thirsty on an international arms dealer pretty thirsty for victor here yeah look at that mustache tell me you could say no

and one of the things he says in his interview which is interesting is if i told you everything i know i'd get the red hole right here and then points to the middle of his forehead so i wonder what he meant by that yeah this guy's a poet yeah he has a way with words yeah and yeah he's got some of these great one-liners um which it's people have recently like reinterpreted that to be like does he know some shit about uh putin which uh is to exchange him uh or is he just saying that like like he might possibly have something like signed by someone who's today a Senator, right?

Like engaging in business with one of his companies or something like that, because that's how this works. Yeah. I don't know. He's rich and powerful. People have probably done business with him, whether they knew it or not. And he's aware of this.

So that article really bounces him up in the sort of world bad guys list, which is when Nick Cage steps in, makes a whole, just does a whole vibe about it, but moves the person to Brighton beach. Because I guess American audiences don't know where Tajikistan is. Yeah. Tajikistan,

no less. If you're looking for a film, The Notorious Mr. Boot, 2014, that's the home videos. Sundance Film Festival Award winner just depicting his dad-bod adventures. I think it's worth it. Wait, are you serious?

Was that Sundance? Yeah. It's classic. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I can't tell if you're fucking with me. No. I remember this all the time. And I will believe anything at this point.

So, crazy to me. 14 film. Yep, screened at Sundance Film Festival. Holy shit. Yep, it's a classic. It's got some real scenes i seriously like 80 percent on rotten tomatoes yep and then if you watch actually you get it there's like some pictures of him like dad dancing with his his partner at the time it's just yeah it's good

stuff um i would recommend it uh and there's pictures of him around lots of weapons obviously your bout boot yep yep yeah it's a goodie it's very very this guy is just a quirky little dude like what is what a little dork

does war crimes is a quirky little dude yeah there's a picture of him returning to throat you know what I mean? It's not like he's just, I don't know. Uh huh. Do you expect him to be like evil and I don't know,

smoking in a dark room all the time? No, this is how they get away with it. Yep. Yeah. Like you would see this guy, right? Like you go to the lounge,

uh, like my life at lounge is in like small air parts in, in like, would see this guy, right? Like you go to the lounge, like my life at lounges in like small air parts in like Middle East, Africa, whatever, trying to fly cheap. You would see this dude in the lounge and you wouldn't be like, oh, there goes an international arms dealer. It'd be like, that man is in conductors or, you know, he sells tires. Yeah, that works in his favor yeah yeah like he's not he's not the joker um and no he he is a joker though you can see him having some good old japes in this film so okay highly when nicholas cage plays him he doesn't even have a mustache

i know that's disappointing isn't? Because that is his trademark feature. Well, OK, OK. So technically, the character Nicolas Cage plays is a fictional illegal arms dealer. Yeah, that's correct. Based on the stories of Victor about and other real life arms dealers and smugglers. They want to play it both ways. Yeah. So I've just got to bit in a trailer where he's just like eye contact with the camera, hip thrusting, and it's...

Wow. Okay. Well, thank you for that description, James. That's all right. That's all right, guys. Cutting edge of journalism here. Yes, that's right. All right.

So we should return to the narrative and not my description of Victor B. Dancing. So his arrest is kind of fascinating and again like his arrest is one of those things where you're like oh this is terrible and then you realize that again we do this shit all the time right um so to understand his arrest you've got to first understand this guy andrew smoolean uh former he's british he's born in britain but he's a south african air force officer uh then he goes into commercial flying but at some point he's turned by their intelligence delivering shipments of stuff and then doing a little bit spying on the side spying on the side yeah yeah it's who's among us hasn't found themselves doing a little everyone has their side hustles better side spying for the doing in the apartheid era but probably

we're certainly in their military in the apartheid era yikes yeah smooly is not not a man with morals i don't think uh as we'll find out. So Smolian has fallen on hard times by 2000 and is working in a hypodermic syringe factory in Tanzania. And that's just a fact that I found without context and I haven't felt any need to research further. And at that point, Smolian is contacted by FARC generals, right? Um, revolutionary armed forces, Columbia FARC, right? A left wing Marxist guerrilla group that have been fighting in the jungles for, I

think they have one of the world's longest insurgencies for decades. Um, these FARC generals are like, Hey Smuley, come and meet us in a tiki bar in curacao and we will have a chat uh smoolyan right he wants to get out the syringe factory so he's all about it he hops on the plane and uh they meet in a tiki bar right which is obviously a good place to do an arms deal um very i mean movies are right about that stuff going down a tiki bar, right, which is obviously a good place to do an arms deal. Barry, I mean, movies are right about that. Stuff going down in tiki bars. Yep, that's the one thing that was a fact. Cinematic universe of Victor Boot.

So they're in the tiki bar, right? Now, it should be noted that these two FARC generals, shockingly, are not really FARC generals. They are DEA assets. In fact, they have been in the Colombian Armed Forces, but they've decided to pivot to a career in selling cocaine. And in that career pivot,

they've unfortunately come into contact with the DEA, which is generally not good. Yeah, right. They're just trying to sell cocaine and do the other thing yeah yep they're just vibing and killing indigenous people probably they they have a pretty rough record in the colombian military it's fair to say yikes uh so dac salmon is like yep those are our people uh

and gives them a ton of money citizenship families i believe and turns them right asked him to pretend to be fark generals which they're like yep can you can you spell the word you're saying what is the fuck yeah f-a-r-c fuerzas armadas okay thank you yeah like sorry f yeah f-a-r-c fuck I might have got the action. I am someone that does not know what that is. So I'm honest about that. Sorry. Yeah, no. There's no reason to unless you're a global conflict understander slash dork.

They're very nice people, some of them, actually. They've started a microbrewery now. Yeah, they have a microbre micro brewery i don't believe anything you say don't fucking i will send you a story brewery i'm like scarred by robert he just tells me all these crazy things that are not true and i believe i'm not like robert i'm a man of the truth i'm gonna i will drop it in the chat like um yeah they definitely have started a microbrewery. These are such weird little doofs. That's what I'm saying! Okay.

Actually, the person who runs a microbrewery is a woman. Oh, good for her. Feminism. We love a girl boss on the show. Girl boss. Fuck, we're very committed to gender equality. They had women in in their uh in their military uh yeah we'll do an episode of robert and i want to go to their microbrewery it's it's

one of our goals why not sure yeah we've we've got this far no one's called us out yeah so anyway interestingly the u.s government had just done exactly the same thing to monza al-qasa who's a syrian arms dealer uh they've done the same we're monza al-qasa who's a syrian arms dealer they've done the same we're two fuck generals we would like to buy these weapons and in the discussion the quote fuck generals are like we would like to buy these weapons to kill yankees we want to kill americans it would be great to have this gun with a sniper scope so we could see if they're american before we shoot them uh just like this is where this is where we get to like the entrapment right and smoolyan's like yeah whatever bro like you want guns i know a guy uh and they're like to

kill the american so and he's like yeah dude whatever you need okay it's getting weird um but then smooly and that he is goes okay so my guy is victor boot v-i-k-t-o-r-b-o-u-t oh my god which that is uh that is a poor move on smooly's part um so smooly drops him in organize a meeting right the two generals quote-unquote generals and victor in a hotel in bangkok and that is where uh the the victor boot story sort of ends at least the free victor boot so they go through the deal and again he's being like i can't believe he conducted his whole life like this because his his degree of concern with security is minimal that he'll be like i can't believe he conducted his whole life like this because his his degree of concern with security is minimal that he'll be like you guys are getting like 5 000 aka also some surface to air missiles and like writing it on the hotel notepad

amazing yeah like normally this isn't like the dea rolled a uh a yakuza arms dealer recently and they had to explain he was talking about cake and ice cream he meant like surface to wear missiles wow same for me actually yeah yeah i'm just gonna head down to the uh to the cake shop uh that guy fucked up by sending a selfie of him weapon to the jesus christ yeah yeah uh it's good it's a good picture this i'll send you that picture because he does look like an international super villain okay yes he has blue aviators i think like oh my god some people know they're playing the part you know what i I mean? Yeah, you've got to lean in. He leans in. But, so,

Bout is in this room, right? He's negotiating with his two Colombian friends. And in come the Thai police, right? The way the DEA say it, they're like, he put his hands in a bag and we all pointed our guns at him and we're like, Victor, no!

It's over! And they thought he was going to pull a gun on them but like in the video he kind of is just like oh and then i think he says the game is up he has some like bond villain like line wow of course he's a poet what did i say yeah that's true yeah yeah that's why they're letting him out for his contribution to art i do what if there's ever like you know he was a poet shereen just hey i i yes quote acclaimed podcaster who says red dot to describe a gunshot come on on his gravestone he was the poet nothing else yeah just a poet had no other gigs i was aware of water slide enthusiast

um so they arrest him right uh they hold him in time fights the extradition he's like i'm just a businessman i don't know what you're talking about i just want to sell you cake and ice cream or whatever uh and eventually they bring him back to the united states they try him in this federal jurisdiction in new york where they try nearly every terrorism case like this right like um the recent 09a case was in the same uh jurisdiction so like that makes sense yeah they always do it new york uh i think that his trial was like september or october uh in the uh like you know you're trying someone like seven years after 9-11 six years after 9-11 in new york around the anniversary of what happened of 9-11 right so people are pretty uh and then you're

like and this dude sold weapons to the town he moved gold out of afghanistan for al-qaeda and so he's pretty screwed cancel cancel culture strikes again yeah the work mob came for victor and his wife says outside the court which i thought was interesting they're trying nicholas cage not my husband oh shit that's that's actually a really interesting statement in terms of like media perceptions of people no yeah yeah they do not go after this guy until they and then vict and then uh what's it called the nicholas cage movie lord of war yeah and then you can't separate i don't think the like look he's a piece of shit but i mean like he did make a movie about himself though well he didn't else got that they already said 2014 like seven years

after he'd gone down oh okay i didn't look at the date the yeah oh no sorry i was like that's why i'm completely different up until just this second oh yes no my mistake no that's that big the sundance film seven years later yeah victor boot it would have been amazing if he'd made it tomatoes yeah get that up with our listenership we could get it up to the 90s i reckon and give it the thumbs up uh so i think they probably did right like in in organizations like the dea and these big federal uh law enforcement agencies there are a lot of people who want top jobs and i think one of the ways to advance is getting one of these right I have a little federal law enforcement understanding but it strikes me that they kind of they had the DEA agent in charge of

his arrest on uh ABC I think or on 60 minutes or something uh the guy talks about himself in point on there it's a bit weird ugh one of those it's clearly like a career defining thing right and I really don't think it would have been if like no one made a film about Montero Casa right he was selling a lot of weapons to you know they did entrap him in the same way actually but it's

not such a big thing so Boot goes to jail he's been in jail about 12 years now and now the biden administration seems to or at least know that he's like worth offering and they offered him in trade for snowden apparently uh yeah and russia didn't take that um i think it's probably uh they see more value in snowden but the yeah they seem to have offered him again in the in this uh grinder wheel and trade uh it's still unclear if russia will accept him or not like we said before it's a very weird practice to be like like pokemon cards cards. Yeah, or like literally

like the NBA, like the thing that Yeah. Pretty Grider works for. It's like you're literally creating like a fantasy team or whatever the shit of,

of prisoners and or people that you want, like hostages. Yeah. It's interesting to see like Russia kind of just,

like, I don't know if they sort of want to be like look how much we owned you like we made you trade the world's most notorious arms dealer for a basketball player like if they kind of uh i don't know the ridiculousness of what they've done is somehow a win for them uh or if russia wants him back because he has some kind of intel that they're afraid of i'm not sure if that's the case he lived in moscow for a while i don't know how close he was to the russian state i'm sure he knows some stuff it's almost there's not much of a state in the world that he doesn't have something on right so it's possible and i guess he's kind of served his purpose which was this like you know we can find you anywhere we can

come after you anywhere um we can arrest you uh and i don't want to be like like pro arms dealer uh on on the podcast but like on the the podcast. James is completely different. But on mic, James is going to say that we're not technically pro-arm stealing. Yeah, this is not a pro-arm stealing podcast. Technically. Yeah, that would be a good place for an ad pivot, wouldn't it? But do you know who is pro-arm stealing?

Yeah, yeah. Based on, I don't know how long we have left so an ad may not make sense here but we can leave the joke in to prove that we're funny yeah exactly that we sometimes think about we have to know it's yeah yeah yeah we're considerate and funny yeah yeah and kind and uh i'm not pro arms dealer and most importantly. Yeah. So Victor is in prison. He's been in prison for about 12 years. He's got, he got 25 years.

The judge, you've not proved he was going to do any crimes other than the ones you kind of talked him into. Like. A fair. Yeah. Yeah. Woke judge.

So, because again, when they're meeting him,'re like we want to kill america so the scopes are high enough magnification so we can see they're american there's some specific dialogue about the sniper scopes to like to to ensure and they're trying to get surface to our missiles as well right and surface to our missiles are one of the harder things to acquire in the international arms market and so he's gonna supply those and they claim they're gonna shoot down american airliners and do a terrorism yeah that'll definitely get them mad yeah that'll get well but he only says that because the two dea plants ask him for them yeah yeah yeah i don't think the dude would have battened eyelid either way i mean typical fed behavior right like yeah they walked in there in their cool uh flannel shirts and he did hey who's

a crime let me escalate the level of crime so he's in prison they've offered to trade him it remains to be seen. I don't know how relevant he will be if he comes out. It's interesting. The area I'm most familiar with, the books, firearms transactions, is in Myanmar, right? Robert and I have spent some time writing about that.

And the price of weapons going, small arms going to rebels in Myanmaranmar is insane right now like it and uh so maybe taking him out has changed that market a bit i don't know you'd think someone would have stepped in to fill that gap in the time that he'd been out of the game uh you'd think especially after the giant clusterfuck of leaving afghanistan by the we'd have dumped a lot more weapons onto the market and so what you're saying is there's yeah yeah yeah get your resume ready listeners uh yeah you know learn those languages that's what i'm saying go to these

yeah yeah learn sanskrit put on your resume no one will call you on it it'll be fine it's okay to lie about sanskrit unless you're i guess going to theological college and but yeah he's learned sanskrit he's learned a bunch of other languages in prison he's probably writing poems in there right oh 100 yeah he's probably dropping a book is what he'll do he'll come out he'll drop a book honestly i'm not i wouldn't be surprised by that if that was true i would read a book written by one of the world's most famous international arms dealers yeah and poets and that's right and poets yeah hey based on what the quotes are that he's given so far i'm sure he has really good writing so yep who knows no one knows we don't know how much money he has no one seems

he's done a good job of hiding it uh we don't know what the state of his business is it seems like he has just kind of peaced out hang out in jail and maybe now we'll be going back to Russia to live in his dacha and just write slides all day. We can dream. We sure can. Yeah, if they offered him for Snowden already and now they're offering him again, is he either the only quote-unquote good Russian hostage, like worthy Russian hostage? Or they... In my head, I feel like they're trying to make a big statement like britney griner is so important to us keep this man does that make sense yeah it

does yeah i hope i mean look what's happening to her is disgusting right and every day she spends yeah fucking abhorrent uh and so like yeah you hope that that they i think yeah i think he's there's no real i don't know it doesn't really serve the interest of the state to keep him in prison right like the big win was getting him there and that i think showed people doing what he does that like the u.s will come after you um and so like that it really i think 12 years is it's a long enough time you know like so i i don't know i i don't understand the motivations of world leaders but hopefully uh we get some updates i don't know hopefully britley grinder doesn't have to longer in what i'm sure is a pretty terrible Russian prison for having a vape pen, because that is bollocks.

And I just want to say, before we finish up here, that we are indebted to our friend Matt, who is at, I think, Black Flag Enjoyer on Twitter, or Raccoon Liberation Front. Black Flag Enjoyer is Matt's handle. Matt actually came on

to help us do an interview with this. Matt has worked in a lot of these places, as an arms dealer I should add uh but doing some like uh civil engineering and even thinks that uh he ran into Victor Boot in a bar in Somaliland once and because of we discussed you would not know that this dude was an arms dealer uh unfortunately Matt's audio was unrecoverable uh and um much debt for his help and you should follow him on twitter if you want to uh anything else we should plug shireen garrison no i think i think that does it for us today so just google victor boot yeah enjoy your weekend welcome i'm dan thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro.

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Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, hi, this is It Could Happen Here. This isn't my episode. This is actually Chris. But I guess we're starting. Chris, how are you doing today? You know, I'm running on very little sleep and a lot of bubble tea. And by bubble tea, I mean canned bubble tea.

This is the good shit. Really? Yeah. In terms of it being bubble tea, it's kind of okay. In terms of it being a thing that has more sugar than like any human should ever consume and functions as an energy drink while tasting good

it's good shit that's why I live that bang life baby we would not get any of my scripted episodes done without bang yeah I drink rip it it really is so speaking of colonialism

actually i don't have a colonialism tie into this but what i do have is a bunch of people attacking a children's hospital so on august 30th 2022 police in boston were called to investigate a bomb threat against hospital as parents waited outside in abject terror for their children's who were still trapped in the building police bomb squad swept the building for hours this time there was no bomb next time we might not be so lucky welcome to the next day trans people so okay how did we get to

right-wingers calling in bomb threats to a children's hospital a thing that i feel like i need to make a carve out at the beginning of this episode to talk about how absolutely absurd it is that people are sending death threats to a children's hospital it's a children's hospital they take care they do health care for children like what so the answer to why this is happening is basically the rights to new media strategy the answer of it all once again is

Chaya Raychik who is better known as Libs of TikTok and yeah Libs of TikTok yeah enemy of the pod recurring character on the pod Chaya Raychik, who is better known as Libs of TikTok. And yeah, Libs of TikTok. Yeah, enemy of the pod. Recurring character on the pod. Yeah, yeah. She's kind of displaced. She's kind of displaced.

Done that much lately. As like the recurring pod-like person. Her and Matt. Oh, don't worry. He's coming. Bigger character. Yeah, he's the Walsh. The Walsh will appear. Her and Matt wanting to become bigger characters. Yeah, the Walsh will appear. And the Washington Post editorial

page, that one always. Oh, God. I could write all of my episodes about the Washington Post editorial page, so I don't do it. And I instead talk about this fucking twitter account which was and you know okay last scene sicking rabid moms with reactionaries on teachers schools drag

queens and random children on the internet for the crime of being queer or supporting queer kids in any way yeah um not the last time we're going to talk about her unless like miraculously she's destroyed in the next like three days but what we're going to do here is sort of take a deep dive into how our media strategy works and how sort of like the broader right-wing media sphere uses and launders raycheck's talking point pseudo pseudo-intellectual babble stuff to sell to a wider audience and the strategy like functionally is not is like it's literally the same thing alex jones does it's like okay so you you misread a headline right or someone puts a video in front of you that you haven't watched you lie about what

it says and then you you like invent basically some incredibly dramatic story about what it says and then you get a bunch of other people the right wing media sphere to like back you up for it. And then when inevitably someone's like, Hey, you're wrong. You claim you're being censored. Yeah. But,

but I don't, I don't mischaracterize anything. I just post people's own videos that, that they, that they themselves post. And then also, then also just call them a pedophile for saying that they wear pronoun pins.

Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. So, so on, on August 11th, lives a TikTok posted a tweet that said, quote, Boston Children's Hospital at Boston Children's is now offering, quote, gender affirming hysterectomies for young girls. And so there's a video attached to this, right? The video does not say anything about this, right?

The video is literally just an explanation of what a hysterectomy is. And, you know, but this like goes viral. Like literally three hours later, Matt Walsh, a man who once said on video, and I hate my kids' consent all the time. I tweeted, quote, he said that. That's on video i i am not selectively editing this he just said that um so yeah he uh he tweeted a nice effort to fight back against the drugging and mutilation of children there should be rallies outside of the hospitals that butcher children there should be marches on washington with hundreds of thousands of people i will try to get this ball rolling yeah he's he's been increasingly trying to do

like this moral like superiority war and be like of course we should hate i'm not a morally compromised degenerate and that's kind of the style of talking points that he's trying to mainstream he's a popular guest on Fox News. He made the infamous anti-trans documentary, What Is A Woman, earlier this year. We'll talk about it at some point. Yeah, it sucks. But he's trying to present himself as an authority figure in the war against trans people. His work's been boosted by J.K. Rowling.

He describes himself as a theocratic fascist kind of jokingly just completely accurate there's no substantive difference between what he believes and like what the fucking people believe so like no or the or like he's wanting to organize rallies outside of like trans health clinics to like destroy trans research what does huh i yeah where have we never happened never happened in human history anyway yeah uh continue yeah so walsh walsh i i also want to mention this okay so as bad as was a woman is he made an even he's actually created something even worse than this which is like maybe history's most dog shit children's book. Oh, yes. Johnny the Walrus.

Ah, ah. It's just an unbelievably transphobic piece of shit thing that he made that I don't think a single child has ever read willingly. The Daily Wire's kind of push to children's media creation has been kind of wacky. It's awful. Like, it's, i don't know these people like they just they they're all hacks but the problem is if you want to make a children's book thing like you actually have so easy like make something but you have to make something that like a child will oh literally just like you don't you don't need to you have to sell it to parents well yeah sure thing right it's not about the actual kid it's about

the parents like the actual children will be extremely unhappy about this but like you know okay yeah you can you can sell pictures of a walrus to like 40 year old mothers who are scared that their kid is wearing dresses

or you know whatever so alright so so Matt Walsh the kid's consent man is on by August 15th Matt Walsh is on a show which is called the Matt Walsh show

which is a thing all of these people all of these people the name of their show is just their name and it's like that's why this show is called the Robert Evans show. One in which Robert Evans occasionally appears on. It's true. You gotta hand it to Tim Pool. He made the Timcast.

He showed some real initiative there. Look, this is the kind of innovation that only the only the right and only entrepreneurship can bring us they change the market has delivered by three words no i mean i still remember like a decade ago when matt walsh was like a niche but growing figure in like the evangelical influencer community it's like a younger evangelical kid kind of interested in what matt walsh was doing because he was like kind of like a hipster and tried like doing like more like modern spins on some on some more kind of classic evangelical evangelical topics and then as i was getting evangelical christianity walsh was like was getting way more radical in kind of in line with like,

you know, the lead up to Trump. Um, and then he just went fully off the deep end. And even, even as like in my, in me, ages of being Christian, we're like,

Oh, this Walsh guy is like kind of nuts. He's like, he is like going in some weird directions. He used to be kind of more like a moderate evangelical still very conservative but like he used to kind of be the cool kid on the block in sphere and then we're like oh no he is like he's doing some weird shit yeah and and that weird shit so like okay so he goes on his show and he starts screaming about how uh puberty blockers

are chemical trend uh castration yes which is like this is objectively not true like people like matt richard will argue that like it's the same drug and like yeah you can use fertilizer to make a car bomb that doesn't mean that gardening is terrorism yes as as you if if as long as you are taking it make you not able to reproduce as you are taking it then when you stop taking it you can you can reproduce again also it's kind of concerning how much they're they're worried about 12 year olds not being able to reproduce uh temporarily matt walsh repeat matt walsh i i violate let me go back let me go back and read this exact quote. I don't want this to be taken.

I don't want him to argue that I'm quoting him. I violate my kid's consent all the time. Oh, man, no. He claims that he's forcing his kids to clean their room, but that is some interesting word choices. You know, okay. And obviously for the puberty blocker thing, we've talked about this on the show before, they're trying to frame this as like,

if your kid gets on puberty blocker, permanently sterile, which just isn't true. That's just false. That's not how these drugs work. They also claim that these drugs are fatal. They're like, look, with people who took this drug,

this massive percentage of them and um as they were on it and this is because the drugs also used to treat terminal illnesses so the it's like for like a specific like heart condition or like or i think i think it's i think it's some of the heart condition thing um so people like old people who are on the drug will because of their because of their like condition that drug is treating them for so they try to use that false statistic to then make it be like kids are dying on this puberty blocker which is again is not true it's all blatantly false things yeah we're gonna get into more of the bullshit they get into in a second great yeah it's a it's a it's a time

he's doing they've really they've really started leaning into this one is screaming about like hospitals mutilating children because you know this is it's an incredibly sort of lurid image and it's like okay so he's just like literally what he's describing is just a hysterectomy right which is like a thing that is just a regular that also and i cannot emphasize this enough no one under 18 is getting a hysterectomy. Not really. I mean, there is, again, I think a few places have specific conditions for people who are over the age of medical state that they're in. Like, for instance, Oregon's medical consent for most things is a 16 years old. There's certain conditions for like 17 year olds usually to start the process if they want that down the line you can get consult like yeah yeah the thing about the children's hospital they're they're all screaming about is there's a thing that says 17 on a document talking about this and what they mean is that you can start

consultations when you're 17 but in boston like this hospital has never they've never done this this isn't a thing that happens to a 17 year old they're not doing top surgery on like 15 year olds that that just like that just yeah that happens um there's possibly been like uh like like literally a couple like literally like through pause like one to three extremely rare incidents that uh patients doctors uh therapists medical professionals have have done things to to help treat very severe gender dysphoria but that is only extremely few instances because all of these surgeries and all these treatments are so medically gate like gatecapped like i've been trying to get top surgery and they are an adult and they've been doing this process and it like it takes years

like yeah it is there is so it's so challenging yeah like there there is an entire system of gender bureaucrats whose like entire job is you have to like like you have to convince these people that your gender is real and it yeah yeah the gender you're allowed to do things you're allowed to sign off on things happening to your body yeah yeah like i okay you know okay the product of all of this bullshit is like you know all the sort of dramatic they're coming for your kids shit succession this like absolute obsession with making sure that people with uteruses can like you can force them to have kids later down the line yeah the product of this is matt matt starts yelling about how this needs to be stopped and then like coyly suggests maybe we should start

with boston children's hospital um like that same day boston children's hospital is deluged with death threats now media matters goes after him and matt walsh makes a bunch of tweets about how he's been taking context and the death threats aren't his fault but like you know okay the context is him yelling will somebody rid us of this imbeddlesome children's hospital over and over again so i think matt walsh doth protest too much and you know even as the sort of like the threats mount right like this fake story all over the conservative like ecosystem like wildfire like brett burt has an article up about it like on day one like within a few hours of like uh

right check making this like fake tweet um within within a week it's on gateway daily callers on the blazes on daily wires on fox news it's you know it's hit the entire ecosystem um the problem okay like try to write check like very quickly realize this is going viral she just keeps tweeting about it keeps keeps tweeting about it, keeps tweeting about it. But she has this problem, which is that everything she's saying is an incredibly easily demonstrable lie. And so she keeps having to, like, try to yell at, like, fact checkers and, like, regular people who are going, like, this is just bullshit. And, like, the hospital itself has to issue a statement being, like, hey, we don't actually do this. We had to change their website to make it clear that 17 year olds don't actually get the surgeries you can just get the nobody ever has like they've never done this like this well you know this

is this is kind of a problem for the propaganda wing because like try a right check is like a fucking hack isn't going to convince anyone who like isn't already convinced that like trans people are evil and that like you know okay at this point i think in earlier in 2021 and 2022 i think she may have been able to craft propaganda which convinces people at this point it's gone so much further her radius is gonna is gonna is gonna severely grow in terms of people who are like you know if someone's fine with trans people i don't think they're gonna look at her page and suddenly be like oh these trans people seem like they're bad actually no she doesn't have she doesn't have like that she doesn't have the sort of like advertising ability to do this but do you know who does have the advertising ability to sell you things is it our lovely

our our lovely and very very fans friendly sponsors every single one of them chevron uh uh uh what what other sponsors do we have i have no idea uh washington state patrol i washington state that's right highway patrol blue ape well we can well we can't say that of a fatherly archetypal deity that's right all of these people will love and accept you for being trans and then offer you a job

at a defense contractor anyway here's some ads post about it alright so we're we're back uh we we reveal the problem try to write check is that she's a hack and she can't convince anyone who doesn't convince and this is where a bunch of people who are not actually any smarter than try to write check but like can write more fancy swinging the gear yeah um and i'm i'm gonna walk through some of

the arguments they're using so you can like even the quote-unquote more research shit is once you actually look at the stuff they're citing in these like very official looking threads so for example on august 17th wesley yang who is a hack pundit who i admittedly i must applaud him for doing more in his lifetime to combat the stereotype that any other person ever born has um did a did a threat attempting to defend lives of tiktoks like you know thing about boston children's hospital giving a hysterectomies and okay so it starts with him going all right all right so we're gonna work through this right he's like okay gender surgery uh-huh i wonder what that means why it means they gave like three people mastectomies, right? And then he's done to who? Under

what conditions? Like apparently apparently they may actually have given like three people who were like 17 mastectomies, which is again not a hysterectomy. This is a different thing. Okay. And then he goes, well, okay, so hospital,

there's hospital doc showing it they that they do do genitals or he admits that uh they don't it's never happened yeah also the document says they could do it but they never have a document but i've misread and don't understand the difference between a consultation and getting a surgery. A clown and a hack who destroyed his entire brain for money in like 2015. I would be interested in seeing, you know, if

they're arguing that 17-year-olds cannot medically consent to surgeries, I would be interested to see what 17-year-olds can consent to in other situations. Well, I mean, there's two angles for that right there is the uh uh there is i what what percentage of these people like

fucking tucker carlson have gone on a show and defended child marriage and then there's the second question which is okay so if these people aren't okay so if if a teen year old is too young to quote unquote mutilate their bodies uh why are you allowing these people to be in the lead-up to joining the army, a place where you will, in fact, get actually mutilated? Also, ignore the concept of circumcision. Anyway, let's continue. Yeah, it's great. So, okay. So, the last thing that he does is he starts ranting about other clinics who've done mastectomies.

So let's take this piece by piece. So first of all, again, no trans dude under 18 is getting mastectomy at this hospital. It has never happened. It will never happen. There's anecdotal evidence that suggests that trans women have been able to get bottom surgeries like elsewhere when they were at age 17. But if you chase down the citation, the evidence for this is purely anecdotal.

So there's no actual evidence that this happened. It's just they found several studies, all of which are siding with each other, and the beginning one starts with, I heard some stories about this. This is going great. I love this. On the mastectomy front, like, like, okay.

So like the, like the, some, there are some trans men who have got mastectomies, like when they were technically a minor. Right. But like, okay. Again, depending on the age of medical consent in the state and depending on what other and other treatment options were available after years of therapy and consultations and and also we should mention this like the mastectomy cis cis girls get mastectomies like all the fucking time this is like this is a regular procedure

that like get we should explain what mastectomies and hysterectomies are for people and just in case they're not familiar i think yeah so okay so hysterectomy basically is the the okay what was the simplest way to explain it like surgical removal of the uterus right yeah well yeah yeah it's mostly the so it's the removal of the uterus there are like some versions of it where you get your ovaries taken out too um yeah yeah mastectomy is like you getting your breast removed or sometimes it's like size reduction stuff yeah um it's a it's a fairly common procedure this happens like all the time and okay if you look at what's happening here right so there's no evidence that the kids are getting hysterectomies so what what resley yang

and like who is redirect focus on gender affirming mastectomies, because again, they don't have any evidence of first things happening. And then because they don't have any evidence, uh, they have to start using conspiracy logic and going like, well, this other thing happens. And other people also did a completely other unrelated. And this is evidence that this hospital has secretly been giving these things out. Even though you just said like three treats before they've never done one they've never actually done a hysterectomy it's incredible stuff right like this i need to point this out like wesley ying like there was a period of you get an understanding of like people people who weren't

around in 2010s to understand like how bad the intellectual scene was like there was a time where this guy was like the like the rising asian american intellectual like star who was like supposed to be like this is this sort of like like great revolutionary like thinker of the new 21st century and here he is doing this bullshit because the absolute goddamn clown i hate him yeah okay so moving on to other stuff like but the thing is like, this doesn't matter. Like the fact that everything they're saying is a lie and is bullshit, like doesn't matter to the trans community. It's like, they need this sort of like visceral emotional pull of the sort of like they're mutilating children's shit. And then the other thing they need is like threads that make it look like what they're saying is true. And this is enough to get a huge part of the sort of conservative base on board. And, you know, it starts to move, right?

The story spreads to the Donald, which is like the re-hosting of the old r slash the Donald subreddit that was banned for being like an absolute cesspool of abuse. And they start organizing campaigns to harass people who work at this hospital. And this just gets worse. People like Steve Deist, like start targeting specific doctors and calling them demonic and screaming about butchers. And so, okay, so by the 18th, we're on day six or day seven of people doing this. Day five of people sending death threats to a children's hospital. And finally, a platform does something. So Facebook bans lives of TikTok forok for one day and then they're back the next day it worked we don't know you know okay but they use that time

to reflect right and to think about what they've done yeah yeah their change was we need to post more about this and so you know we should like like the social media companies are never actually going to talk because loser tiktok especially with twitter loser tiktok is good for twitter in the same way that trump was like you know yeah like its presence it brings traffic they generate they generate conflict which is the entire purpose of the twitter algorithm they drive avid like advertiser revenue they get a lot of engagement there's no reason to ban them yeah and like and with twitter especially like they like with trump gone right they had to they had to ban trump for political reasons because he you know tried to

overthrow the government but like you know with trump gone like twitter twitter is like a just a declining like social media it sure is and you know man so i i watched i watched the donald trump pizza hut commercial yesterday and i forgot how funny donald trump was like he's as long as he's playing the character of donald trump he's actually really funny uh that i that i remembered all the fascism parts and then anything else anyway yeah but like you know okay so yeah okay so like the way this sort of thing works right is that they get all these users in engagement from the right starting like a campaign

against the children's hospital then they get engagement from the left going after them they make money no matter who wins and like you know sometimes they'll ban like Trump right because you know or they'll do temporary of right wing people because that that gives you good liberal media attention. And then that gives time for a cycle to sort of build up for the conservatives to all talk about how they're being censored. And then when they return to the platform, they do their whole Iowa censored arc.

We've seen this with Jordan Peele 15 times. 15 times so with lives of tiktok on the 25th they on august 25th they start targeting another children's hospital and this this time it was a children's national hospital in washington dc which is like dc's by far largest and most important children's hospital and they bring they bring their website down like the same stuff is happening, and Twitter finally locks Loops of TikTok off of their account for a week. Partially what's happening here was there's pressure by a friend of the guest, Alejandro Carballo,

who's been doing a lot of great work documenting what Loops of TikTok have been doing and sparring with them. Chaya Rychek keeps misgendering her because chaya is a fucking enormous piece of shit who should be flushed down the ship belongs um unfortunately like uh well okay so so some of the some of the like dozens of tweets that that i uh live to talk

made about children's hospitals and take it down a lot of them are still up and you know probably what's gonna right right still banned off twitter but know, probably what's going to right now is still banned off Twitter. But like, you know, what's going to happen is there's going to be like a wave of like good liberal media press. And then there's going to be the next wave of the conservative outrage over censorship and cancel culture stuff. And then she'll be back. In a Substack post, Wrightshik said, quote, Now more than ever, I need your support. Consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can continue this important work. When I get banned

permanently it's only a matter of time i'll need your help to keep the lights on so i can continue telling the truth they can't cancel me if you don't let them because uh there it is yeah begins yeah i mean like i kind of says enough like this has all always been a grift like this is like her fourth attempt like She's been trying to become a viral Twitter personality for years. She just found the one, she

finally found something that worked, and that's baiting conservatives into being mad at trans people. Giving them some kind of excuse for being mad at trans people right like yeah it's like a self self-validation thing yeah yeah they want targets like specific specific they want specific targets too and like yeah i mentioned this like okay like right check like

is an actual human piece of shit like her ideology is bad but like it is the stuff that she's doing is mostly about money and this is true of like the entire ecosystem right like all of the conservative outlets this is why like matt walsh and his like dimensions like all of these people spend all of their time staring at metrics and looking at their fucking viewer data looking at the anti-trans data the anti-trans documentary is paywalled behind plus the hit new streaming service. It's funny because all of these people rant

constantly and there's increasingly anti-Semitic versions of it about how the trans activists, the trans lobby are funded by billionaires, like every single one of these people paid by fucking...orge soros presumably well i all supposedly we're all getting paid by by george soros uh in reality it's it's the

rights all getting paid by uh what am i blanking on the guy's name the the fucking fox guy teal no they are they are now getting paid why they by Peter Thiel. But why am I blanking on the guy from Fox News? No. Murdoch. They're also all getting paid by their rabid base of dealerships who think they're working class because they have a Ford F-150.

And like, yeah. It sucks. So true. There are about 900,000 subscribers to this daily wire to daily wire plus the hit new streaming service that's correct yeah that's why it's a hit uh then they give it such a catchy name um but yeah that's a shit ton of money for someone right pumping out hate uh getting gina caruso to make crappy films that's right yeah that's an amazing career arc uh and yeah she she went from bedpool to star wars to ben shapiro she was gonna have her own

star wars show terror on the prairie it's amazing fucking hunter biden like that that's the oh god like oh the hunter biden trailer yeah yes there's this trailer for a a film that i forget who's i forget who's who's um making this one um but it's it's a film about all of hunter biden's scandals and gina gina is in it. And man, it looks like if this was directed by a smart person, this could be an amazing comedy. Oh yeah. Everything about it is so innately comedic, yet they're playing it

as a political scandal. But no, it's just a comedy film. And if it was directed by somebody with any competency, they would have recognized it's a comedy film, and it would be hilarious to watch. But instead, it's going to be boring. Look, conservatives are getting good at comedy. The left is worried.

The left is getting very scared. Greenwald had like, like he wasn't just purely grifting, had like actually fallen down the rabbit hole was what he spent like fucking like two years pretending that literally anyone on earth gave a shit about Hunter Biden. Also, he's been simping for lips of TikTok. Oh yeah, yeah.

Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah. This is all leading up to his incredibly hardball interview with Alex Jones. Great, great stuff. Oh, I forgot about that. Incredible journalism. Just, oh God.

I love it here. Yeah, so it all sucks. And the other, like the other big problem here, right, is like, okay, on the one hand, like all these people are just doing this to make money. But the problem is that, and I cannot emphasize this enough, it is easier to get the material bomb than it is to get gender affirming surgery. And this is a real fucking issue because it turns out when you convince a bunch of people

that children's hospitals are mutilating children, what happens? Oh, wait, hold on. I don't even need to go back to the anti-abortion terrorism, the people burning down abortion clinics and murdering healthcare workers. I could just talk about the reaction to COVID-19. Like almost immediately after the lockdown started, a guy tried to buy a bomb to blow up a children's hospital and was killed in the shootout with the fbi uh he was killed like a week maybe like a week and a half before another guy tried to derail a train to ram a navy medical ship

there was also the stabby lady the lady who tried to take all the knives on board the hospital ship yeah like it's just like, okay, if they're allowed to keep doing this shit, people are going to die. And this isn't to say they can't be beat, especially IRL where the numbers of these people in total are actually pretty small because

the number of people who actually rabidly care about this stuff is a vanishingly small minority of the US. And IRL, that works for us because these people suck everyone hates them communities will come out to like to try the communities will come out to confront and defeat them but this is you know this is the this is the ecosystem the media ecosystem of the modern right it works for spreading conspiracy theories inciting mobs and then claiming they're being censored when everyone

tries to stop them like in two to three weeks when they found another one of these things i don't know it'll be like fucking like transgender clowns are working at make a wish foundation or something like we're gonna be talking about another instant another instance like this uh in tomorrow's episode um it's great it's it's good It's not good at all It's in fact very bad If you do want to be mad about forced hysterectomy Our immigration services has forced hysterectomies on people

in their custody It's a good thing to be mad about It's a good time that we have here on this earth Don't go in hospital It's a good time that we have here on this earth. Yeah. Don't go in hospital. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. 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.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be

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

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

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

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.

Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Warning for some pretty intense transphobia and misgendering. 80-year-old Julie Jumon was permanently banned from her local YMCA after demanding that a transgender worker leave the women's locker room. Jumon said that she was trying to protect little girls from a biological man in a women's swimsuit who was watching them undress. So this week a few dozen people joined Jumon to protest the YMCA. in a women's swimsuit who was watching them undress. So this week, a few dozen people joined Jumaane to protest the YMCA. Some of the protesters, including her,

were assaulted by lunatics men dressed as women. Okay, first of all, that granny rocks. But when pressed, Port Townsend Washington police said that Mrs. Jumaane had an emotional response to a strange male being in the bathroom and helping a young girl take off her bathing suit. Well, I should hope the response to that would be emotional. Yeah, because you can just picture this kind of situation

where they're grooming little kids completely inappropriately, and you're doing the thing that a lot of people want you to do, thing that a lot of people want you to do and that a lot of people watching would but I hope everybody is aware that this from what I understand is pretty wonderful profit for big pharma and medical systems it's and what's happening to children becomes even more disastrous and you were protecting the kids you were protecting the kids. You were protecting the kids.

I mean, they should have a responsibility to do that. The Young Men's Christians Association should be doing that themselves if they are playing any role in this whatsoever. It's pretty frightening. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison, and today we're talking about a recent flare-up of anti-trans hate and the anti-trans protests and campaigning that's engulfed a small town in northern Washington

in what conservatives describe as the culture war front. Conservatives describe as the culture war front. The past month, far-right media personalities and anti-trans so-called feminists have partnered together to create an international nexus point for the increasing attacks on trans and queer people, resulting in a wave of harassment, death threats, and rallies. harassment, death threats, and rallies, including an upcoming anti-trans rally in association with the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, slated for Saturday, September 3rd. Port Townsend is a small city of just around 10,000 people, located on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, just north of Seattle. The city has a geographic footprint of just under 10 square miles. Over the course of the past month, the quaint beachside city has become the focus of a disinformation campaign against trans people and transgender inclusivity.

But unless you frequent right-wing news outlets, you probably haven't heard anything about this story, let alone are aware of the massive amount of harassment and death threats being targeted at trans people and their allies. Anti-trans and far-right activists have already descended on this small city from all around the country and plan to do so again on September 3rd, with Proud Boys and Three Percenters promising to show up. So what actually happened that escalated things to this point? On July 26th, an 80-year-old woman named Julie Jammin was in a pool locker room and began

verbally harassing a trans woman who was on the job as an employee of the Olympic Peninsula YMCA. Julie Jammin asked invasive questions about her genitals, and later accused her of engaging in inappropriate conduct, while continuously misgendering this employee. Both the employee and YMCA officials, and like everyone else present in the locker room, have disputed Julie's highly publicized version of events, which we'll get into in a bit. But first, we're going to hear from the original target of the harassment. A few days ago, I was able to talk with Clementine, a young trans woman,

about what happened to her near the end of July while working at the YMCA. It was a pretty normal day. That week we were doing swimming with the kids, and me and the other child care workers, you know, use the locker rooms kind of as expected. And I was using the woman's locker room just because, you know, that works for me. And that lines up with how I feel. We went through all of that. No problems. The kids got changed in their stalls.

And then once we were out in the pool, one of the kids needed to use the locker room bathroom. So I took that kid and another kid into the locker room in accordance with the Y's rule of three system. To clarify, at the YMCA, there is a quote, rule of three, where staff always accompany children in a group of three so that a staff person is never alone with a child and children are never alone with each other. As Clementine was standing with a kid outside the restroom stall, waiting on the other kid who was using the bathroom, Julie Jamond was showering nearby in a curtained-off stall across the locker room. I was waiting outside of the bathroom stall with the kid being the buddy, making small talk, when Julie Jamond initiated the dialogue by asking if I was a member of the LGBTQ plus community.

the LGBTQ plus community. Uh, I responded, uh, yes, I'm trans. And she asked me if I had a penis and it kind of caught me off guard. Um, and I, and I told her that, you know, that's none of your business. Um, Julie asserted that I needed to leave and that I can't be there. And then in response to her assertion, I just shook my head no. I couldn't really leave or I'd be leaving the kids unattended. And, you know, I was backed into a corner. and you know i was backed into a corner the kid at some point um the kid using the bathroom uh exited the stall and had her swimming uh her bathing suit like wasn't fully pulled up and she asked me for help and so i assisted her by pulling it up by its straps and you know there were other patrons present in the locker room at this time and at some point around the girl coming out and needing

her straps pulled up uh Julie was back in her uh shower stall and then around this time, two more kids entered the locker room. It might be good to mention, I've prescribed glasses. I wasn't wearing my glasses and I couldn't see anything, which was kind of terrifying because it was like a shot in the dark. I just heard a voice and I had to search around before I figured out who was talking to me. But anyways, the kids, two more kids came in to the locker room and they overheard Julie shouting at me and asked me what was going on. And like they had this concerned look on their face and I just kind of told them to leave because I didn't want them to get involved. The kids went to the pool manager, Rowan, and asked for help with the escalating situation.

They went straight to her and asked her to come help and told her that someone was yelling at me. And moments later, Rowan entered. And as she she walked by I got her attention and I told her you know there's an older lady yelling at me to leave right now and I pointed at the shower stall that Julie was using Rowan kind of like posted up and Rowan stood in between me, the kids, and Julie and waited for her to come out. And then Julie poked her head back out and said, get out. You're a man. And Rowan intervened when she sort of popped back out and said, no, actually, you need to leave. Because right now you're discriminating

and kind of being a bigot so it's actually that you need uh it's actually you that needs to leave right now and julie told rowan she was confused about gender and then julie pointed at me and said he has a fucking penis he has no business being around little girls he has a penis and he could rape someone and after that rowan uh sort of ushered me and the girls out of the locker room uh told me to go to her office and then the other staff members found me and helped me um and rowan stood outside the lobby side of the office when i was in there and um i guess like yeah after the police had been called julie came out and engaged with her uh and they were yelling but uh i couldn't hear what was going on. And I mean, that's kind of the end of it. I know that Julie

left after that. And I just kind of checked out for an hour or two. It shocked me. I haven't had someone do that to me before. I've never been talked to in a bathroom or locker room before, talked to in a bathroom or locker room before, especially in that way. The YMCA pool manager told Julie Jamin that she needed to leave and suspended her membership for violating the Y's code of conduct, which prohibits, quote, discrimination, hatred, derogatory or unwelcome comments, intimidation, conduct or actions based on an individual's sex, race, ethnicity, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected status, unquote, as well as having no tolerance for disrespectful words or gestures towards YMCA staff or others. Part of an official statement released by the Olympic Peninsula YMCA, published as the incident in question was growing into a much broader anti-trans spectacle, clarified that Julie has had, quote, several incidents where she has repeatedly violated the Y's code of conduct, specifically using disrespectful words or gestures towards YMCA staff or others, and abusive, harassing, and Mountain View Pool and all Olympic Peninsula YMCA facilities, unquote. MCA facilities, unquote. After Julie was banned from the pool on Monday, August 1st, she started showing up outside the facility with anti-trans signs and led a small group of people into a city

council meeting, resulting in an hour of public comment logged about the incident. Here is some of the statement Julie read in the city council meeting, which also gives a look at her version of events at this time. experience that you need to know. I have sent it to you all in detail. In an effort by the city and the YMCA to apply the neocultural gender rules at Mountain View Pool dressing shower room facilities, women and children are being put at risk. My experience while showering after my swim was hearing a man's voice in the women's dressing area and seeing a man in a women's swimsuit watching little girls pull down their bathing suits in order to use the toilets in the dressing room. I reacted by telling him to leave,

and the consequence is that I have been banned from the pool. There is no signage informing women the shower room is now all gender and what that means, nor have parents been informed of what they can expect with these new policies. The Y has not provided any dressing shower room options for women who do not want to be exposed to men who identify as women. The YMCA, the city, the police and sheriffs, the parents, the professionals who assist victims of voyeurism, peeping toms, pedophilia and assault need to come together to

figure out how to make the new policies work for all pool patrons, not just one group. How to keep children who are less able to discriminate safe. It is ironic that women who discriminate when a situation threatens their safety or their children, a message from our ancestors, are now accused of discrimination as if they have made someone else a victim. We need to do much more intelligent and wise about applying the rules and developing policies that are respectful and inclusive. Thank you. So just a few notes about that.

Trans inclusivity at the Y is not some new policy. For years, it's been literally Washington state law that people have the right to access the locker rooms, changing rooms, and bathrooms that align with their gender identity. This has been the case since 2016. The law states, quote, entities shall allow individuals to use the gender-segregated facilities, such as restrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, and homeless or emergency shelters that are consistent with that individual's gender expression or gender identity, unquote. And regarding Julie's account of the incident, there have been no complaints from children or parents who are using the pool, and multiple accounts conflict with Julie's telling of the story, as the employee never did help anyone undress nor was watching anyone change. watching anyone change. Throughout this city council meeting, there were several public comments in support of trans rights that pushed back on Julie's outrageous claims and called out

the overall trend of misgendering and the groomer-style transphobia. At the end of the meeting, city officials themselves took a stand against the transphobic rhetoric that was present throughout the hour of public comments. Oddly enough for this show, one of the people I interviewed for this episode serves as a Port Townsend City Councilwoman. Right. My name's Libby Wenstrom. I'm an elected city councillor for the city of Port Townsend. And I'm speaking today as myself rather than as a representative of the city or a representative of the city council as a whole. When did you first kind of hear about this thing that's now ballooned into this larger issue with people coming in from out of state to do protests and all this kind of stuff? I think I first heard about it on Sunday night, which would have been, I guess, the 31st of July. And I heard about it from the YMCA aquatics director, Rowan Matkins. And it was

more in the tone of kind of a heads up that this was a thing that was going on. And then I heard a lot more about it the next day, which was Monday, the 1st of August, when Julie Jumon showed up at the pool with a whole group of people doing a protest that they were picketing at the pool. And she also submitted a public comment to the city council meeting that night. And at that point, I realized that a group of people,

including Julie, was probably going to plan on attending the city council meeting that night. And at that point, I realized that a group of people, including Julie, was probably going to plan on attending the city council meeting and reached out to some friends and acquaintances in the trans and allies community, Olympic Pride, the social justice group, and at the Unitarian Church here in town and various other people who had been kind of resourced and say, hey, this is going on. You need to be aware of it. And in fact, that night, there was over an hour of public comment. There wasn't anything on this council agenda. There wasn't anything we were discussing. It wasn't really a matter. It wasn't really, I think, even on the city's radar, but 30-ish people showed up at the city council meeting. And normally when there's a public comment about an item that's not on the agenda, they cut off public comment at half an hour, but for whatever reason, let it run that night. So it was well over an hour of public comment.

And some of the things said were pretty shocking. were pretty shocking and um you know to the to the tune of that you know all transgender people were pedophiles or that you know this was a rape happening and some some statements that were just not true and then based on what i heard that night i was really concerned and felt that this was both you know this was ballooning out of proportion which now seems kind of funny given how much more balloon it's out of proportion it's gotten. There's not really any action here for the city or for the pool. I mean, one of the things that Julie Jumon has retained legal counsel and sent a demand letter to the city, but her demands were like, well, you should fire people. Well, they don't work for the city. They're YMCA employees. Well, you should change your policy. Well, the policy is literally

state law. And a bunch of things that just, you can't do this. So it's not really clear why this is all focusing on the city, because the city doesn't really have, there's not really any action that the city could take here. On top of the dozens of people Julie led in giving public testimony, which largely consisted of transphobia, misgendering, and baseless accusations that trans people are pedophilic inherently. But that same day, August 1st, she also led a protest outside of the YMCA. led a protest outside of the YMCA. To learn more about this, I talked with Cass and Raven, who are both part of a local affinity group. The first protest was August 1st, and they announced that they'd be back the same time on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. So the 2nd drew a much larger counter protest. And then a lot of the same people who were there on the second came back the third and fourth,

but there was nobody to counter protest against because the protesters gave up and went home after one day when they saw the kind of backlash they were facing. And most people I think thought that was the end of backlash they were facing. And most people, I think, thought that was the end of it. But people who do this kind of thing more often realized that this was more likely the vibe of the beginning stages of something bigger. A lot of red flags went off when we found out they were protesting at a city council meeting, planning to come back the following week. Oh, oh that's right that was the other thing was the council meeting on the first where there was a lot of public comment logged it seemed to us like this was going to escalate further but other people um tended to feel that it was going to be a quick, you know, one and done type thing with how fast the news cycle picks up a new issue.

And I think it was probably about a week later on the council meeting on the eighth, because by that point we knew about the planned turf action on the 15th. That's when it started to click for a lot of people that this was going to become a bigger thing. But I don't think anybody, including us, thought it was going to become an ongoing issue. When I searched Port Townsend on Twitter and saw trending hashtags on a wall of anti-trans rhetoric, a lot of red flags went off. hashtags on a wall of anti-trans rhetoric, a lot of red flags went off. Since the city council public comments, the YMCA had started receiving threatening phone calls and Jammin had been

returning to facility nearly daily with some friends to protest, approaching everybody coming in and out of the pool and talking about how men are allowed in the locker room and bearing signs that misgendered the employee. Julie's group had said they were going to be picketing every day at the pool that week. They showed up and there were about a hundred counter... Counter-prochesters isn't even really the right word. There was sort of like a little pride parade there. And people that were, there was sort of like a little pride parade there. And Olympic Pride had a kind of a booth table set up and were handing out pride flags. And the social justice group from the QUF had a, you know, standing on the side of love banner. And there were kids blowing bubbles.

And it was just, it was much more of a just kind of a lot of people here. As these initial picket style protests were happening in front of the Y, the head of the Jefferson County Transgender Support Group called some friends and assembled this sort of counter protest to voice their support for the trans employee and the YMCA, which resulted in this gay ass trans rights party massively overshadowing Julie Jammin and her friend's little protest. As she was getting outnumbered in person, Julie took to alternative tactics by getting in touch with media outlets that'll give her a soapbox, resulting in a new wave of harassment targeted at the Y.

There were about 100 people, and was, I think it was Julie and one or two other people. And people had some conversations with Julie and it sort of seemed like that was going to be the end of it. And the next day the pool was closed and about 50 trans rights supporters showed up and nobody showed up to pick it. And the pool was closed because pool employees were receiving death threats and just so much harassment. They basically couldn't use their phones because the phone lines were jammed and voicemails were filling up in 15 minutes, things like that. And then the pool ended up staying closed, I think from the third, which was a Wednesday, all the way through that week and the following week.

And it was just kind of a safety issue of far right blog site called the Port Townsend Free Press that isn't really a newspaper or a news source at all. It's kind of this one guy, James Garantino's blog. And she reached out to that and he did an article. That first Port Townsend Free Press quote unquote article came out August 2nd and served as a mouthpiece for Julie's inflammatory version of events coupled with some conservative transphobia. More reputable news outlets and local press didn't really cover the story until it had already turned into a viral topic on the right, which means there was over a week where the only documented write-up of the incident was the Port Townsend Free Press blog post. Two days after that piece was published, Andy Nose,

the Post Millennial, posted an article largely pulling directly from the Port Townsend Free Press write-up, and that was just the start. The next day, August 5th, Ben Shapiro's The Daily Wire did an article about Julie Jamond and the danger of men watching little girls undress in the locker room. Later that night, the story was on Laura Ingram's Fox News show, citing reporting from the Post Millennial, which of course cited their reporting from the Port Townsend Free Press. And across the country in Washington state, we found perhaps the most maddening story of the week. An 80-year-old grandmother was banned there from her YMCA after demanding that a biological male leave the woman's locker room where little girls were undressing. male leave the woman's locker room where little girls were undressing. They then went to play clips of Julie's public comment at the city council meeting, amplifying Julie's ever-changing

altered version of events now on the national stage. I think the mainstream actual, you know, real local newspapers didn't pick it up until the 7th or the 10th, respectively, for the Peninsula Daily News and the Leader. And that gap, when they amplified it out to the larger right-wing press, this got picked up by Breitbart, it got picked up by the Daily Mail, they kept quoting that original Portens of Free Press article, which was very inaccurate in terms of what it described as having happened. And I mean, it was both outright wrong and it also left a bunch of things out, like that the transgender person was a YMCA employee, for instance, or that they were in the locker room because they were supervising children. And I think where it really hit a crescendo on Thursday the 19th, no, earlier, whatever, not Thursday this past week, but the previous Thursday, it was on Tucker Carlson.

And that's where I really saw the email volume explode for people from outside the area where it was like, you know, you're getting 30 emails in five minutes. And they're from, you know, they're from Texas, they're from Tennessee, they're from New Jersey, they're from Australia, they're from the UK, etc. That when it got picked up by Fox News, the reach really got broad. The first time the story was covered on Tucker Carlson Tonight took place on August 11th in an episode guest hosted by Brian Klamid. August 11th, in an episode guest hosted by Brian Klamid. YMCA has changed a lot over the years. Now women and young girls at the Y are finding themselves in lock rooms and showers with men who identify as women, but they still have all their genitalia with them. And if you complain to the YMCA about their genitalia and what they're dressed like,

you might get yourself banned. It's what exactly happened to an 80-year-old woman in Washington state. Here to explain, but not actually make excuses for, but explain, is our West Coast correspondent, Seattle-based radio host, Jason Ranz. Jason, set the scene. Yeah, so, I mean, here's the scene. Democrats used to stand up for women, but now they can't even define one. And as a result, you have 80-year-old Julie Jumon, who said she was banned from a pool and locker room facility that was managed by the Olympic Peninsula YMCA out in Port Townsend, Washington. Now she says she was headed into the locker room to shower and she saw something pretty alarming.

She explained what happened at this council meeting. Then a clip from the public comments plays, and I will not subject you to that again, but here is a little bit more of that clip. So a number of residents showed up to support her at this council meeting, but the mayor, his name is David Faber, he was not pleased accusing them of transphobia. Townsend is a welcoming community, and hate and discrimination has no place in this community. I listen to you quietly, I'd like you

to listen to me quietly now. Given the rise in harassment and bigotry that trans persons have experienced recently, it's essential that we all speak up. The cisgendered people like me speak up in support of our trans community.

Now, Juman says the staff accused her of being discriminatory. The YMCA put out a statement basically saying we're not going to tolerate the bias, discrimination or hatred. And of course, in Washington state, the law allows anyone to use a locker room, changing room or bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. So they're basically saying we're doing what we have to do, except of course, protect women who don't want to see this. Unbelievable. That guy should be ashamed of himself behind the mask. In the immediate aftermath of this, did you see it ballooning to this scale? Or did you think this was just like a one and done traumatic incident? incident? Absolutely not. I really just thought, you know, oh, my day's come. I finally had the bad bathroom experience. And I know a lot of people do have that bad experience. Nobody

is ready for it to be, you know, to have this much attention called to just such a small thing um no because i wasn't ready for it to be like this because yeah it's escalated to the point where you're like on international news for these like right-wing grifters who are trying to basically get trans people killed um yeah and you're i don't know it's really it's really upsetting to have my face and and name you know sort of be pushed out like that and it it's crazy how that feeling the the sinking feeling when i saw my my name and face, I don't even think it was my face at the time when I saw my name appear on that local PT Free Press article. And, you know, at the time, it was still a pretty big impact. And then to have that just keep happening and it gets like kind of depressingly numbing

yeah just have it keep intensifying I mean yeah I've been on hormones for almost a year now and I've avoided that for kind of reasons like this that it sucks because I just feel like I feel like this is a very common experience with trans people who are like starting out like you just can't really go anywhere because you look too weird to go in the men's room and you're not quite like you don't feel comfortable the women's room because of stuff like this and you know if you're non-binary that is just a whole other issue of like where the fuck do i go like there's there's there's not a lot of options sometimes but then to have something that's already very stressful we turned into like a fucking like daily wire

new york post info wars shit is like like what like like it's i mean like tucker carlson like all of it it's really it's disappointing that there's this idea that I you know am actively trying to violate people's space and and it's really frustrating because of how uncomfortable I feel putting myself in that position, being in that room. And I don't want to have something like this happen. And I don't, you know, I don't abuse that space because I'm not some guy trying to prey on people. I'm just trying to use the bathroom and get changed.

And they talk about like oh you know walking in penis hanging out and and all of these things but i don't change in in the public space i go into a changing room and you know i i understand you know that confusion and i try to that confusion and I try to subtract myself from the space as much as possible and make it more comfortable. When I'm in a position like that where I'm trying to entertain a kid who's not happy to be a bathroom buddy and I'm put in that position where I have to talk, And I'm kind of put in that position where I have to talk. It's super vulnerable. And I just remember feeling small.

And I just shrunk when she talked to me like that. And I don't even, the space just got so small. Piggybacking off the groomer and growing anti-trans attacks we've seen this year, off the groomer and growing anti-trans attacks we've seen this year, a large swath of right-wing influencers and media personalities jumped on this story to drive outrage and push their rhetoric. Here is a brief clip from Newsmax. They're more than willing to just ignore possible pedophilia happening at the YMCA in a locker room. Well, from my point of view, it seems more like some sort of hypnotism. I know the word woke has been put to it, but I have to tell you that all public agencies I'm connected to as a citizen in a very small town, they are all operating with this gender identity.

operating with this gender identity. And you've got to wonder what is happening in those most private places that people, particularly women, need to have. We've had you on the show a couple times now, and you seem very level-headed. Yes, very, very level-headed indeed. By now, the story has been headlined in an obviously very mischaracterized and transphobic fashion, but still headlined by the Post Millennial, the Daily Wire, Fox News, Daily Mail, Breitbart, Newsmax, Infowars, New York Post, The Federalist, and the quote-unquote feminist news site Redux. As false retellings about what happened in the Olympic Peninsula YMCA went viral on the right, threatening emails and phone calls started pouring into the YMCA, prompting them to shut down the entire facility for over a week, leaving many local families without child care services. Intense harassment and death threats were sent to city officials

who voiced support of trans rights and also to the pool manager. In my conversation with Libby Wenstrom from last week, she detailed some of the threats and the impact the harassment has had on the community. A lot more of the ire is now kind of directed at the city and the mayor and just at the pool director and less at employees. The transgender employee who was, you know, attacked in the locker room by Julie Drummond is actually no longer why. Other people have left another undisclosed location just out of concern of trying to get the kids as far away from this

whole process as possible. And so that took a little bit of time and juggling to set up. And they were so short staffed, they were actually calling for volunteers in order to try to keep the child care open this week just because they were already somewhat short-staffed. And with people leaving, it had just been even harder. The Y has been open, I think, all week this week. I think it was open Monday, Tuesday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So it has been able to reopen. They've changed the schedule around. It's now not open Saturdays again and shuffled in. I think some staff are working seven days

a week in order to try to keep it open. People are still getting threats. I got a terrible email last night. I haven't been getting death threats. I've been getting things like, you know, you're a disgusting fat pig, bitch. Why don't you go back to the buffet? And, you know, things like that. It hasn't, for me, been death threats. The pool director was receiving photographs of her children saying they're next. And some pretty explicit threatening messages like, I'm coming for you. I know where you are. And Mayor Faber has been getting similar things. He got one where somebody was threatening to come to his home and rape his wife.

So these have been pretty horrifying messages. For the most part, most of the email and the voicemails have been coming from out of the area. They're not local. So it's a little hard to gauge whether these are serious threats, but some of you feel like you have to take it somewhat seriously. And that, I think, has been pretty disruptive, both for the Y employees and for the city. been pretty disruptive, both for the Y employees and for the city. As Julie's retelling of the story was going viral across right-wing and turf media, resulting in the pool having to temporarily shut down, a so-called press conference was scheduled outside of another city council meeting

for August 15th by Julie and her allies. There's a local, she bills herself as a sort of radical feminist named Amy Sousa, who has a sort of anti-trans blog site. And she has really taken this and run with it. Sorry, I plugged in, but not well. She's really taken this and run with it group of, I don't know, probably 25 or 30 supporters. And there were estimates are between 350 and 400 trans rights folks from town. trans rights folks from town. I mean, there were local who had just showed up and most of them were waiting in line to go into the council meeting and, you know, flying flags and raising banners and stuff. But there was some heated shouting and one person got arrested for shoving.

There weren't any charges filed. I did confirm that with the sheriff's office, with the courts, that no charges got filed out of that, which is contrary to the story they've been putting out that there were assault charges filed. That's not true. I believe there were about 300 people that came out to confront less than 20 people coming to try and bring hate into our community. And it feels like that really inspired a lot of the different networks to get connected. Our personal little networks are incredibly white. Most of us are trans of some regard. And we were reached out to by a local BIPOC community that we've had some crossover with, but not a lot. But since this happened, just the interconnectivity

with that group has just exploded. After the press conference protest, footage of the event went viral, spawning another new wave of right-wing media outrage. Clips from the quote-unquote feminist Redux Magazine Twitter account show Julie trying to give a speech while being drowned out by chants in support of trans people, and at one point someone running behind Julie to rip down a suffragette flag put up by one of the TERFs. And side note, in some much less viral footage, we can see TERFs trying to rip pride flags out of the hands of people who are counter-protesting. So, eh. Conservative coverage of the protest painted a pearl-clutching picture of scary trans people assaulting women. A few days after the press conference, Julie Jamon herself made an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Julie Jamon is one of them. She's 80 years old. She's now been banned from stepping inside a YMCA. Why? Because she dared to object when a male employee was assigned to watch little girls remove their bathing suits in the bathroom in a women's locker room. So this week, a few dozen people joined Juman to protest the YMCA. Some of the protesters, including her, were assaulted by lunatics, men dressed as women. Here's some of the footage from that on Monday. You may have read some version of my personal experience, a naked old lady in the women's shower room, and what I saw that day.

Women's rights are human rights! Are we going to get rid of that? Women's rights are human rights! Women's rights are human rights! Can you hear me at the police, please? Trans women are women! You can see why it's so necessary to have safe spaces for women. Trans women are women! You can see why it's so necessary to have trans women. Trans women are women!

Trans women are women! Screaming at her. Julie Germain is the woman, the brave woman, just on that video. She joins us tonight. Julie, thanks so much. We are grateful that you are joining us. Why, at this stage in your life,

are you taking it upon yourself to speak up against this in the face of what we just saw? I was in the shower and I saw that man in that women's suit and I saw him watching little girls. You can't not act when you see that going on. You must do something. And bless you for doing that. That's exactly right. Your, your moral sense is just, is clear. I, I, I have no idea what your background is, but you have a very clear sense of right and wrong, and I wish more people had it. So you tried to explain that in the video we just played, and rather than listen to you,

people screamed at you and then appeared to come at you. Have you noticed there's no conversation about this? It was a mob of hundreds of people that came streaming into this permitted gathering, and they kettled us. I think that's what you'd call it. They pushed, shoved, they knocked women to the ground. They pushed, shoved, they knocked women to the ground. These are the men and the supporters of men that apparently the YMCA and the city want to allow into the women's dressing and shower area. I object.

And you at the age of 80 were banned by the YMCA. It's hard even to believe this is real because you were taking a shower and there was a man in there and they banned you, not him. What could tell us if that's true? A and B, what YMCA is this? Yes, that's correct. I told that guy to get out of the shower and then a staff member came around the corner and I said to her, get him out of here. And she said, that's discrimination. You're out of here for life. And I'm calling the corner and I said to her, get them out of here. And she said, that's discrimination.

You're out of here for life and I'm calling the cops. Can you tell us what YMCA, where did this happen? This happens in port Townsend that's on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state. It's just, I hope they are

punished for the way that they treated you. And I appreciate your bravery and your forthrightness. I do too. We did try and get the police to come help us. They were standing across the street and they were told by a directive to stand down. They did not come to help us. I hope they rot. Julie Juman, thank you for all you've done. I appreciate it. Good to see you tonight. Throughout all the media spectacle,

I feel like the actual original victim of this harassment has kind of been forgotten, despite them being the current face of the transgender menace. In my conversation with Clementine, we talked about what it's like to be turned into this sort of outrage symbol. Like I've, I watched the three hours of public testimony a few nights ago, which was, I was on, I was on so much caffeine.

Is that the meeting that happened right after the incident or the Monday meeting from the 15th? Both. I did both in one night. That's a lot of footage. Yeah. And one of the more shocking things was just one, how mischaracterized the incident was. And two, just like how much blatant misgendering there was. And like talking about you, not as like an actual person, but as almost this like evil archetype in people's minds.

evil archetype in people's minds like it's so dehumanizing in a really bad way um let alone all of like the like misgendering stuff like it's it was it was wild watching this person after person completely mindlessly create this villain in their own heads um and then just attached it onto an actual human being who's like you like your privacy has actually been violated like you're like like you're like like private information your pictures names is going all over these like like neo-fascist news sites and like with some things you know people are framing this as safety and privacy. If you want to look at what's actually going on, it's so different. There's such a disconnect between watching all of that public testimony

and looking at all of the right-wing press of this incident. It's very depressive framing. It's really clear and disappointing when you're the subject of it, because I know what happened in that space. And there were people to witness what happened, and we worked to get our reports out quickly, but it just didn't matter because of how dedicated this woman was to getting her side or whatever. I mean, in reality, it just feels like she was dedicated to hurting.

I don't know what her motivation was, but it's the blatantly false side of the story that really hurts because accusations that i was standing there watching i think they they go anywhere from like two to five kids is their number um i was watching the tucker carlson and i think i saw that number five, watching five kids undress when that's just not what happened. I was standing there with one kid who was fully clothed chatting while we waited for another kid to come out of the bathroom. And it's just wrong. It's misinformation. And it's not about, you know, it's not even about pushing an agenda. It's about people's livelihood and it's really damaging to have my privacy

violated like that, you know, straight up. That's what it is. It almost feels like you're just like this sacrificial archetype that they're boogeyman. Yeah. It's like, they're not even, uh,

but they're not even like interested in you as a person. Really. They're interested in you on this, this, this, this, this, this like idea and put to project you onto this whole other idea,

which is so fucked up because you're an actual person like yeah well and and you can see in the comments and stuff on some of these that it's pretty you know i won't try to dig into like the ugly the ugly and the bad of twitter but like i've seen people say that i'm like a fully bearded man or like i'll be paralleled as a lumberjack. And it's like, I mean, and not that, you know, your appearances matter. It's about how you feel. But it's kind of interesting to see how I'm painted in such a weird and twisted light. Despite going viral in the right-wing and turf news sphere, local sentiment in the Port Townsend area has been widely in support of trans rights and not

very pleased that their town has been upended for over a month due to one woman's personal prejudice and discomfort. I've lived in Port Townsend for 24 and a half years. And in talking to people over the last couple of weeks, I would say nearly universally, the local sentiment is, why is this such a big deal? Like, this basically, somebody got startled in a locker room, made kind of a jerk of herself, and is now trying to blow this into some kind of international incident. And here's this little tiny town at the edge of the continent. And we're like, why? Why is this the most important thing?

Why did dozens of families not have childcare for 10 days? Why did the YMCA employees have to not get paid? The impact of this has been so outsized relative to what actually happened. The person who started the initial incident with the trans employee, it's kind of funny in a way that, yes, she's gotten out her message to the whole community, but it's spread as a result of the organizing against her and against the group of people that she's bringing into the area. And it's gotten to a point where just random community members that we don't have any direct connection to are recognizing her and knowing why she's a known person and are just kicking her out of their businesses on site. It's like the backlash against that incident is really spreading really well.

And we're getting this really good organic network building throughout the community. Earlier in August, before the big press conference thing, various BIPOC and queer collectives and affinity groups started networking and a solidarity meeting was set up to figure out how to take care of each other as the far-right's spotlight on the town grows. Myself and one other person went, and maybe a couple others who I didn't know, but the two of us were the main ones who were more directly involved with the queer community side of responding to what was going on. And it was really great. They just were like, we want to support you.

We want to, you know, help take care of you. What can we do? And then for the action on the 15th, when we were talking about, you know, like, here's, here's the kind of response that we're wanting from the whole community, but here's some of these background needs. Cause none of them were experienced enough with protesting to feel comfortable going out on the front lines and doing stuff. They went about a quarter mile away and set up a community picnic. And I don't think people took nearly enough advantage of it because the planning happened so last minute. But they did a great job of setting up in solidarity in solidarity and in support and we're really looking forward to working with them more we spent the last few years

running small group basic medical classes and workshops and really making connections within our community, and having this come about and having everyone come up to one place and see each other and going, oh, we know you and I know you. And from different communities coming together, we've really been able to enable those folks to come together to start building more of a unified front. I want to reiterate that with all the media spectacle, it's important to not lose sight of the original target of all of this hate and transphobia.

The physical and mental effect of such a massive wave of bigoted harassment and doxing can take a substantial toll. I had to stop going into work at a certain point because I couldn't do it. I woke up in the morning and I looked in the mirror and I just broke down because it was too much to keep going and to keep trying to bring that bright energy to work and a lot of doubt is that's what I've been experiencing is a lot of you see so many people trying to divulge your character in a negative way and it's you know it's toxic and it can kind of seep through and make your life toxic and that's why i just had to stop looking because it hurt too much and it's putting me in this limbo i don't feel like i've gotten a break for a month. I feel like I've just been tired.

It's like a purgatory. I can't rest. I feel like I'm in purgatory. Has there been any kind of support on the community level that has been helpful? Yeah, yeah. I've been definitely grateful and blessed to have the community response be really astounding and

supportive yeah uh i've been given the opportunity to be so much more connected with my local queer community as well as my local community period um there were a lot of supportive voices uh that made it a little bit easier to ignore the darker side of this. rigid and like a rock to lean on like the GoFundMe to be able to have something hopeful to look forward to and think that I can you know be me and that I can afford being me uh I don't know how I would navigate the storm without something like that in the distance. It's been overwhelming and I've just been waiting for it to end and it looks like it's finally slowing down, but the support makes it easier

and the support is a kind of attention that really helps right now because it's strikingly easy to feel bad to feel just dissociated when your life is kind of thrust into a different lens and what felt like a day what kind of was just a day or a week this month has felt like a day, what kind of was just a day or a week. This month has felt like longer than my entire summer break. The situation in Port Townsend is not over yet. In a bit, we'll talk about the upcoming anti-trans rally on September 3rd. And there is this kind of absurd irony that's not uncommon when digging into these types of issues that the types

of talking points common among reactionaries and all the complaints around violations of privacy just end up actually being enacted by the people who push these moral panics so things have just continued to kind of escalate and escalate my My understanding, and I wasn't there for this, is that yesterday, which was the 24th, Amy Sousa, I'm not sure if Julie Jumon was there or not, because of course Julie Jumon's been banned from the pool, showed up at the pool with a film crew and was trying to push their way into the locker room when patrons were there using the locker room, trying to film inside the locker room and got asked to leave um so it's it's still continuing to escalate one of the things that i've been noticing a lot and it's something that for those of us who are more involved this is kind of a you don't say moment and it's the people who are coming in and making accusations and making attacks against the community are very much doing the exact thing that they're making accusations of. and hosted the protest at the council meeting, going into the Y with a camera crew and demanding to film the locker rooms while people were using them.

There's lots of accusations that have been thrown that we bust in people from Portland and in reality, the main aggressors who were there on the 15th in their group did come from Vancouver area. Or were flown in from Texas. Or were flown in from Texas, yeah. Like this was 300 people who live within 20 minutes of Port Townsend showed up because they care.

And they had to fly people from as far as Pennsylvania to host an hour-long press conference with 20 people. And so we're seeing that a lot recurring. The person organizing this upcoming action also lives in Vancouver area and is inviting people from all over to come up and start fights here and try to get video of confrontations going. And everybody up here wants to just be left alone and live in peace, but they also want to show up. And they're kind of getting an opportunity to show up in the most low effort way.

It's in your own town. You might as well show up. I remember a few weeks ago, there was this headline from a federalist think piece that went a bit viral for being a big yikes, almost mirroring the fascist framing of blood libel. If you replace, quote, the transgenders with, quote, the Jews, you'll see what I mean. The headline reads, quote, the transgender movement is not just intolerant, it's barbaric and violent, and it's coming for your children, unquote. Almost exclusively, its sources are Twitter

accounts like Libs of TikTok and a few random TERFs. And this is what we mean when we talk about how things that seem like they should just be insignificant Twitter bullshit actually do affect the world off of social media. This is how entire conversations on the validity of people's existence get formed and directed now. The last section of the Federalist story is about the Boston Children's Hospital, and if you listened to yesterday's episode of It Could Happen Here, you can guess the kind of disinformation the article peddles. And many readers, many of whom are not on Twitter, will take whatever it says at face value. Same thing for Libs of TikTok stuff being boosted on Fox News. The majority of the Federalist think piece, though, is about Port Townsend

and everything stemming out of the YMCA incident. And the whole article is as terrifying and fascistic as its headline. I remember seeing the Federalist article headline and just being like, oh, here's another piece doing the same thing. And I didn't realize it was about this specific incident until much later. And though, yeah, it kind of does play into the idea that we know these things happen, you just don't expect them to happen right where you are until it's going on. Yeah, I've spent years screaming at a wall telling people that this is coming and really hope that all of my preparation had been for nothing and it's happening in my hometown now

and getting national media attention, everything from, youiro to InfoWars to interviews on Tucker. Back during the Trump presidency, we were pretty much just gun nerds and had started a small little gun club and were inviting our friends and our local queer community out to learn about that. And it went really quickly from that to people having more of an interest

in the medical stuff we were teaching specifically, stop the bleed. And so after the Trump presidency was over, a lot of people dropped off and just the majority of the people that stuck around happened to be trans. But we continued offering these classes. We were hosting ones out here about de-escalation, about stop the bleed. We're hosting naloxone stuff. I think with there being such limited options for direct actions in the area a lot of people were

kind of naturally tending towards how can we better support our friends who live in areas that are doing direct actions and we started getting a lot more interest in those kinds of support roles the medical training the de-escalation uh even things like emergency preparedness and food security. Yeah. But because of that, we've just spent the last few years running these just a small group, like one to four people, basically workshops on all these different subjects and built somewhat of a connection with the community and a bit of respect. So when this happened, we actually had that to draw on and we could really help enable people to organize themselves and create some form of unity. So it's not small groups of people coming in without a plan, but a large group of people showing up all at once that we're not directly involved in any sort of leadership of

it's just naturally organically happened but have really spent the last few years just feeling like screaming at a wall until this happened in our small town and completely unexpectedly and now we're actually somewhat useful. Before we close out, we do need to talk about the upcoming anti-trans rally planned for the afternoon of Saturday, September 3rd at Pope Marine Park. Organizers are explicitly tied to the Proud Boys. And this rally is one of the most clear examples of how TERFs, self-described feminists, or people just up against men in women's public pool locker rooms, and tell the city of Port Townsend to let Julie swim, unquote. Yeah, the guy who runs Common Sense Court Conservatives, a man named Robert,

I always mess up his name, Zerfling, I think it is Zerfling, Z-E-R-F-I-N-G, who's associated in some way with the Proud Boys and is associated with Roger Stone. He runs this blog called Common Sense Conservative. He is organizing something that's being billed as, quote, rally for decency, unquote, to be here in Port Townsend on the Labor Day weekend Saturday, which is the third. here in Port Townsend on the Labor Day weekend Saturday, which is the third. And it's unclear whether this is going to be a large event or a small one. They have not, as of yesterday, pulled a permit for that. And there's some questions about, you know, if you're planning a large event, what's that going to unfold like? Port Towns towns is a tourist community and at this time of year we've got a lot of people in town over labor day weekend um so a large proud boy rally is kind of you know

it doesn't feel very comfortable is this kind of the first kind of big incident where you've had these types of like you know more kind of experienced uh activists on like the anti-trans side or on you know affiliated with proud boys or whatever kind of come in activists on like the anti-trans side or on you know affiliated with proud boys or whatever kind of come in and try to make this problem inside the town we've had little bits and pieces of stuff um the proud boys or something kind of connected had a kind of truck drive-through parade rally in 2020 sort of just prior to the election um that kind of drove through town and, you know, with a bunch of big trucks, and I think some people were open carrying, and it was,

it was mostly a bunch of noise, but it hasn't, this is a very liberal community, and it hasn't really hit us. This is also, just for context, this is a town of 10,000 people. And it's the biggest town for, you know, 50 miles in any direction. So it's not, you know, it isn't like 10,000 people, that's a suburb. This is the big town. This is the county seat. So it's, we've been kind of insulated from a lot of things. You know, we had, you know, we definitely had some Black Lives Matter protests. We definitely had, you know, we had a big Women's March in 2017 and 2018. But we haven't seen the kind of explosive clashing protests that, you know, Seattle or Portland have. The far right is planning to mobilize people from around the Pacific Northwest, pulling from folks in Oregon and Idaho, and are expecting anywhere

between 50 to 100 people to show up on the anti-trans side, especially people from Proud Boy and 3 Percenter affiliated networks. One of the leaders of the Washington State 3 Percenter militia, Eric Rode, has stated that he will be present and is encouraging his followers to join him, saying on Telegram, I don't care if five of you show up or 50 of you show up. I will always march against men staring at girls as young as 11 pulling off their swim trunks. It would be pretty cool if people could cancel their plans and show up to stand against child molesters. God said if you even look back, I'll turn you into a pillar of salt.

I wouldn't have looked back, but I never fail to answer the call to something so simple as don't stare at little girls when they take off their clothes, unquote. they take off their clothes, unquote. He then goes on to do some unhinged rambling about federal observation and his commitment to God and country, but he ends that post by saying, quote, when I get threatened by Antifa, I'll match to Antifa, unquote, which I don't even know what that means. The grammar on that is very confusing. Another telegram post from a 3%-er account reads, quote, calling all patriots, all proud boys, all 3%-ers, all lone wolves. We roll out to Port Townsend on September 3rd. Hope to see you there. We got proud boys and 3-pers rolling in from all over, See you there. We got Proud Boys and Threepers rolling in from all over, unquote. The Three Percenter crew is also planning a pre- and post-rally barbecue party on Friday and Saturday night at Whidbey Island, which sounds like an awful time. That sounds like a horrible party. Our major concerns going forward is if protesters

keep coming out here, that the right wing will get more footage that they can spin, bringing more attention on this, bringing more harm to the trans community across the country, that the right wing will attack someone locally around here or that all of this spun footage will inspire someone from outside of the area or someone just sitting in the woods who will come and cause serious harm to a large group of our local trans community. And our intent is to be there to have some sort of response, be it medical or otherwise. Trying to think of how to say this. I've lived here on and off most of my life and had started working towards transitioning. towards transitioning, but due to the national political situation, specifically when the former president temporarily got rid of trans protections and medical, cancelled all that, changed my medical records back, and have been presenting as a cis white dude since then, specifically because of the amount of

privilege that gives me. And having a trans partner who is working on their transition in this town while this is happening is hitting home to a level that I was completely unprepared for and the emotional impact that all of this has been having on me and the fact that it's not just here, but that this is getting national attention is something I'm still trying to wrap my head around. And I'm just really thankful for all of the networks that we've built and all of the community, the local community, the broader Washington community, all the people who have just shown so much support for us. And it makes me feel like there is a future where we can just be left in peace. And that is the story of what's been happening

in Port Townsend over the course of the past month and what could happen in the next few days. I'm going to close this episode with Clementine discussing the details of her GoFundMe. The GoFundMe is sort of a general transition fund for me. I originally made it specifically for two surgeries. I lowballed the amount greatly because I felt like if I asked for too much, I wouldn't get anything and I still got nothing for a long time. time at some point when the articles were coming out uh one of the nationals used uh one of the national articles used my gofundme as a source um to find out more about me but that got my gofundme out there um and a lot of different people started picking up on it and spreading it i actually didn't do much at all to to help that i it was never something on my mind the gofundme it it just happened and i looked at it one day and i thought that's strange i have more donations than last time i checked and it was pretty empowering to see that or or more hopeful um but now now so i talked about uh the gofundme was

originally for two specific surgeries and i lowballed the amount um i later revised uh actually it took me a couple times and a lot of consideration because I didn't want to feel like I was cheating the people that were being gracious to me, which I'm not trying to be. But yeah, finding out that things cost more than I thought, but it's way better than it was before. And to find it, I mean, I'm pretty sure it's the first thing that comes up when you look up my name now, which is better than Fox News's video or Daily Wire article or whatever the big thing that would pop up otherwise is. But yeah, it's called Clementine's Transition Fund. It's on GoFundMe. You can find the Transition GoFundMe at gofundme.com slash SRS for Clem.

And that link will be in the description, or you can just search Clementine's Transition Fund on your search engine of choice. See you on the other side. 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 Trails, and step into the flames of right. the flames of right an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of latin america listen to nocturnal on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast hi i'm ed zitron host of the better offline podcast and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

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