It Could Happen Here - The Atlanta Shooting Part 1: Purity and Violence

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

In part 1 of our analysis of the 2021 Atlanta shooting we look at the history of Christian whorephobic violence against Asian women and how purity culture and imperialism led Robert Aaron Long to murder spa workersSee 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is today about something that did happen here and absolutely sucked. And with me to talk about the Atlantis shooting is Garrison. Hello.

Hi, not happy to be here. Yeah, yeah. No, this is not a, we're not talking about a current event. This happened like, what was it, last year? Yeah. So yeah, in case someone's listening and wondering if there was another one. No, we're specifically talking about... Actually, there have been a couple of shootings in atlanta since then yeah obviously there yes but we're talking like the specific thing we're talking about is is uh is uh from

from last year and it ties into many of the topics we discuss on the show yeah yeah on march 16th 2021 robert aaron long a regular at young's asian massage refused to tip after getting a massage xiao jietan the spa's owner confronted him about the tip long simply walked away he got dressed went to the bathroom pulled out his gun and started shooting leaving xiao jiet Tan dying on the floor. Driving from spa to spa, Long shot nine people and killed eight. The lone wounded survivor, Alicia Hernandez-Ortiz, got on his knees and begged Long not to shoot. Long shot him anyways.

There's a tendency when confronted with true horror to retreat into abstraction, as if the abstract is shelter from the violence of the storm. I intend, if briefly, to do it myself. But there is no safety there. Only the same violence repeated again and again and again, in a thousand ways, with a thousand names, wearing a thousand faces. Because this is hell, and we live in it so on onto the abstract there there's a concept in marxism called traeger um it's a german word it's usually translated as bearer in the sense of an individual capitalist being the bearer of capitalist social relations they enact this relation by you know turning capital into more, which is what makes them a capitalist.

There is literally endless debate over what this actually means. Most of it is pointless, and the meeting is contestant enough that I'm going to abuse it a bit further and argue that a person can become a bearer of historical forces larger than themselves. Robert Aaron Long was the bearer of a greater of historical forces larger than themselves. Robert Aaron Long was the bearer of a great number of historical forces. He bore the violence of capitalism, of misogyny, of racism, of horophobia, of whiteness, of Christianity itself. And he unleashed it into the world. That's just like the idea of like invoking, right? Drawing on these external ideas into yourself and then becoming them for like a brief period of time yeah i mean i think it's slightly different in that with bearing it's it's not so much that

that you're briefly invoking them it's that you're you're constantly a part of the relation so the relation defines you and it it and you you sort of you constantly enact it by the things that you do it and in doing so you make the relation real. It's more of like an ever present thing that is. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's, yeah, it's something that just sort of structures how society works, right? Like we're all sort of like enacting the wage relation, right? Every time we like do it, like, you know, like doing this right now.

By doing our jobs. Yeah, we are enacting the wage relation. Okay, got it. Yeah, and, you know, I think a lot of people after the shooting were left asking, you know, why? And, you know, we can name social and historical forces. We can talk about sort of anti-Asian violence and racism and horophobia, but what does it actually mean? And, you know, what are the forces that Long unleashed into this world?

What do they look like? And I think we have a good example of this from right after Long was arrested. Police Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee Sheriff's Department said this to reporters at a press conference.

This is about Long and the shooting. He was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did. He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and he sees these locations as something that allow him to go to these places, and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate. places and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate now yeah there there was a lot going on in in in in those like two sentences um also you know cherokee sheriff's department oh yeah there is there is so much going like right there's just so many so many so many layers to this yeah it's incredible one of the things that we're gonna go more into next episode is that like this this is where uh uh what's his name this is where the guy who just

like drew a random line on a map that he found from like that he pulled out of his like national geographic thing who divided korea in half like this is where he's from okay uh there's this is yeah there is a there is a lot of historical violence in this very specific part of georgia that is all coming together here and oh yeah uh his school was also super racist like there's they had a mascot that was like doing all the racist stuff yeah i'm sure yeah and you know and before we go any further it it's worth mentioning that almost immediately after the honorable police captain gave that press conference, a bunch of people on the internet found out that Baker had posted a shirt that said, COVID-19 imported virus from China. I remember this. Yeah, yeah.

I remember this. Yeah. Yeah. The sheriff was pretty, pretty racist himself. Yeah. A part of many, many anti-Asian tropes relating to conspiracy theories. Yeah. This is, you know, this is, this is classic 2020s like anti-Asian rhetoric. It's, you know, it's stuff that's led directly to hundreds of attacks on Asian Americans

since the start of the pandemic. And, you know, the racist onslaught driven by every sector of American society. and you know the racist onslaught driven by every sector of american society now people immediately start speculating that uh jay baker had collaborated with long to cover up the racial like motivation for his violence and okay i think there's some truth to this uh the cops have been collaborating with long and his family in various ways i'm going to read a part of an article in vanity fair written by the journalist may jong called how the atlanta spa shooting the victims with Long and his family in various ways. I'm going to read a part of an article in Vanity Fair written by the journalist Mei Zhong called How the Atlanta Spa Shooting, the Victims, the Survivors,

Tell a Story of America, which is, this is one of the best things that anyone's written about the shooting so far. I'm going to read a little bit of it because it's, oh boy. I rang the bell at the family home. No one answered. Before I could decide what to do, a police cruiser showed up. An officer who introduced himself as Sergeant Clement explained

that the neighbors, multiple people, had called to report suspicious activity. The one good thing about Cherokee County, he told me, is that we look out for each other. It's like how it used to be in the 70s. I asked Clement what specifically the neighbors were worried about. To be honest, he said, what they are worried about is they are afraid of revenge what is the context for the like revenge line yeah i mean it was basically just they were released like they were terrified that like asian people were going to show up like to this community and take revenge for the shooting thought they were going to attack the church or something?

They thought they were going to show up to the family's house and attack the neighborhood. Ah. When has that ever happened? Yeah. Yeah. You know, what this demonstrates,

A, is just the kind of community you're dealing with here and b also like you just you have very obvious close connection between the cops and like long's family at this point yeah and i mean in terms of like the covering up the the covering up of like the anti-h violence part of it honestly i don't even know how intentional that would be because I don't think he even recognizes that as racism I'm not sure how much the cops recognize that as a super big part since that they are already uh pretty pretty racist I guess against Asian people okay like I don't even know how much they recognize that as being like a thing that isn't normal yeah but but i think also like i don't know it the the the explicitness to which particularly baker is being racist

like makes me suspect that he does that he he would have been able to figure it out because he's like like you have to go out of your way to like have a shirt that says like covid imported from china like yeah but i don't think that he would consider that racist right like it's so it's so racist that but but he can't even consider that he just think it's just like normal right like that's possible yeah i can see that so like in terms of like them trying to cover up any kind of anti-asian um stuff leading towards the shooting they may not see that as anything to be covered up

because they think that's just normal. So they're not going to even focus on it because they're like, yeah, obviously. Yeah, I can buy that. We're so far down the rabbit hole that it's hard to even recognize it. I don't know. I'm just...

No, it makes sense consciousness and i think also the other thing that's going on here that that's i think the other part of why they wouldn't have recognized it if they didn't is that like okay so like most people see this and they're you know they kind of like analytically they kind of throw up their hands they're like well this is anti-asian violence they talk about like the stuff that particular dangers faced by like asian women and sex workers and they just sort of call it a day their analysis sort of like stops there and like they're right like this is anti-asian violence the violence is primarily inflicted on women and it particularly on sex workers or and i mean this

is also very important uh people who are perceived as sex workers no matter what they actually do yep and yeah like it's gotten worse since the pandemic but there's a very very specific kind of violence that long is doing here it is it's not it's related to but not identical to the the sort of post-coVID stuff. And I think people really did a disservice to what happened and did a disservice to how many people understand it by not actually poking at it. Because this shooting is at its core an evangelical shooting. This is

evangelical violence, this is Christian violence, and this is purity culture. And if you want to understand what actually happened here you have to actually you have to go back you have to understand the christianity angle because it is critical now east asia's contact with christianity in the last 200 years has been broadly speaking extremely bleak uh the conclusion of the first opium war in 1842 which brit Britain forced China to buy opium to cover Britain's trade deficit with the country, and then Britain also stole Hong Kong and then allowed – yeah, it also had the effect of allowing Christian missionaries into the country. the product of the christian missionaries work was the taiping rebellion in which the self-proclaimed brother of jesus christ waged a failed war against the ruling qing dynasty that like even if even if you use like the lower estimates of the body count that war makes world war one look like a minor

border skirmish it is a just incredibly devastating war and you know the product of this is there's there's famines. There's also just a bunch of floods that happen at the same time. And this sends an enormous number of immigrants and refugees fleeing from their homes looking for any way to survive. And a lot of those people find their way to the U.S. And they get imported by American capitalists who are looking for a new labor force to serve. It's like a racial buffer between white and black workers after the Civil War. And the other thing is like it's

really hard to get to the west coast in the 1800s like they don't have a panama canal you have to go over land and it sucks and it's hard so they need a labor force that they can just get to the west coast and it's literally easier for people to come from china and you know and so they do it is a it is a brutal existence chinese workers are worked to death building the railroads and they you know they struggle to carve out a life for themselves and they do haltingly into leaps and spurts but they create communities they build towns and temples and cultures in the beginning of a new society and that's when the white working class decides they want to exterminate them because this is this is a great country uh yeah, white workers immediately start blaming Chinese workers for their low wages, and they use their workers' organizations

to ethnically cleanse the West. The result of this is a series of massacres that goes on literally for decades, stretching into the... These things start in the 1870s, and they're still going in the early 1900s. And it's at this point where christianity gets involved um i think like most people who are listening to the show have probably heard at least in passing of the chinese exclusion act which is the sort of like the great triumph of like the dark alliance of racists and the white working class but what i think is less known about

is the page act of 1875 which banned quote lewd and immoral women from entering the united states and this is this is like this is directly targeted at asian and chinese women um who were seen as a threat to the sort of racial and moral character of like the white christian american nation because of like their supposed like inherent immorality demonstrated by the popular excuse me demonstrated by the popular image of all chinese women as sex workers and you know i i think like looking back on this this is extremely recognizable this is literally just an anti-trafficking panic like this whole thing it's just it's like this this this is like this is like proto this is like proto q shit um

and you know and like you know, there is legitimately sex trafficking going on, but the existence of, like, the fact that there is sex trafficking gets used as this sort of political and racial image. It gets projected onto just, like, all Asian women who get portrayed as trafficking victims, and you

simultaneously be, like, saved but then also expelled from the U. to preserve both there in the U S is purity. And you know, like the, this image of Asian women has literally never changed. You will find it today. Like to this day,

people find people using like the exact same racist projections, like consciously or unconsciously to talk about Asian immigrants and like particularly spa workers. It's, it's this like, it's, it's this like it's this like incredibly toxic mix of like christian moralism sexism horophobia and racism

and the racism element is really important because like okay well this is going on like prostitution is legal in california like you could just do this like there's no law against it um you know and so you'd think that like oh hey they're you know the sort of like christian panic would just be targeted against brothels like no it's like very specifically against asian women and it's you know this is because all of the sort of like the christian fears about sex work is you know and their horophobia is and still is today incredibly deeply fused with this sort of like that this is this like incredibly racist like concern over the purity of the race uh-huh yeah and yeah you know this this will sound familiar to anyone who's been like paying attention at all to any of the trafficking panics and if the anti-trans stuff any of just i mean interracial dating was only extremely recently allowed at all of the biggest Christian universities. Yep.

Like, they have, like, they, yeah, not a, it is, it's a thing. It's a. Yeah. And like, the thing about it, it's really, it's really close to the surface, right? Even when they're not explicitly just saying it like if you look you spend about two seconds looking it's like oh this is what's going on here huh yeah yeah and you know so so that that's sort of that's sort of one side of of this uh whole thing right is you have this sort of like you have this sort of like christian

like anti-trafficking panic that that creates that like you know it creates this sort of like you have this sort of like christian like anti-trafficking panic that that creates that like you know it creates this sort of image of what asian women are it has a lot of effects but the other side of this coin is that there is a just incredible amount of sexual violence that america has inflicted on asian women like particularly through its war successive invasions of the philippines china Korea, and Vietnam saw American soldiers committing just untold and horrific sexual violence on Asian women. To the extent that the US essentially just inherits Japan's mass military rape system in Korea and just runs it for itself. There's this... runs it for itself like there's this all of all of those things came home so massively all the things that were normalized overseas just came right back when all the soldiers came back yep

yep you know yeah i think i was gonna say next year like the and this this has a like the i don't know i i think people get the relationship between pop culture depictions and of you know racist depictions of people in pop culture and the actual culture backwards like they don't help and they spread it but like you know the the like me love you long time shit from like kubrick like that doesn't come out of nowhere that's not just kubrick like that's that is that's something that was brought home by the American racists. And you know, like when, when they got back and that stuff,

like it's, it's not just that like the stuff's being spread by media. It's that the media is being influenced by the people who did this stuff and then came home. It is the full circle thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, even still now there's such a, such a degree of like Asian women women being an object to possess, even more so than regular women, which obviously under a lot of patriarchal stuff in the States and overseas, everywhere, women are seen as objects to possess. But specifically, that is so much heightened for women of color and specifically Asian women, that idea. I mean, you see that everywhere for the libertarian Asian girlfriend trope. You see this in media all the time that the Asian wife is something you own.

And it's extremely pervasive. it's it's a it's extremely pervasive yeah and i think the reason why is that like this image gets refreshed every time a generation comes home from a war in asia and you know that that's why because the u.s has been fighting wars in asia like forever i mean basically since like we've been fighting wars in asia since the late 1800s and you know like the violence of each subsequent generation just sort of refreshes this image of like asian women as prostitutes bodies are supposed to just be like accessible to white men at all times but this has a sort of there's a kind of clash that happens here too because like on the one hand you have this sort of like racial and sexual fetishization and on the other hand you have christian horophobia and this gives you this culture where like asian women are at once seen as

like hyper desirable and hyper available but are also just like utterly despised for both and this sort of like racist pathology this this like this this sexual desire mixed with loathing is at just the absolute core of the Atlantis shooting. And as if to remind us of its origin, Long carries out his massacre on the 53rd anniversary of My Lie. 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. And we're back so i i think we now have enough context to like go back to long's initial description of why he carries out the attack which is to self-describe sex addiction and his desire to quote eliminate temptation yeah because i mean we cannot overstate the degree to which both the police, the church, and the shooter himself framed this not as an anti-Asian thing, but as something addressing his sex addiction. That was the angle they talked about it. Now, there's all of the anti-Asian stuff that is, like, right under the surface, which is, like, propping up so much of what's going on. But the thing that they were publicly talking about was this uh so-called sex addiction yeah and and i think this is this is you know the this is this is a very important angle of this is we should actually talk about what that is and because and to understand

because he just it's not like okay so like the sex addiction is i think like actually sort of a thing but that is a hotly debated yeah i i don't know i look i'm not a psychiatrist don't take advice to me uh i think it's the slightly more legit of the two things that of the two like fake syndrome things we're going to talk about here but uh this is not what's going on with him and if you want to understand yes yeah yeah what's going on with this uh we need to go back to enemy of the show purity culture um friend of friend of friend of the pod yeah i'm gonna say no i i refuse i had i had friends in there a couple of times and i was like i refuse to call this friend of the show damn it like i can't bring myself to do it all right joshua harris just unsubscribed so long like by all accounts is extremely religious he's

heavily involved in both his church and his high school like his high school he goes to public high school but his public high school has like christian athletic groups yeah which is a fun thing that they let you do in public schools um yeah it's great uh so you know to get it to get an understanding of like the kind of baptism we're dealing with here uh here's a line from the church's bylaws quote we believe that any form of sexual immorality such as adultery fornication homosexuality bisexual conduct bestiality incest polygamy pedophilia pornography or any attempt to change one's sex or disagreement with one's biological sex is sinful and offensive to god yep you know and all of that's in the bible yeah they have you you can tell because they cite three passages not if we do say that well okay i know there is there

is bestiality stuff yeah bestiality is yeah and i think i think incest is in there well sort of i mean they there's some incest stuff. Parts of the Bible are pro-incest, parts of the Bible are anti-incest. Yeah. The Bible has a real sticky relationship with the topic of incest. But yes, I'm sure they thoroughly cite

all of their passages for... Yeah, that's great. When they talk about bisexual conduct. Yeah. It's. Well I mean you know. The one that's great is the. Attempting to change one's sex or disagreement.

With one's biological sex. A thing that I. I'm guessing they're citing. God created males and females. And males and females he created them. I don't actually think so. Because they're not. They didn't. Okay. this this is me being a coward and a fool i didn't i'm just i'm just speculating based on my experience in these in these uh types of types of groups yeah so so

speaking of these types of groups so long is like okay so long's church church expels him after the shooting. After he does the murders. Yeah. Okay, it's interesting because I'm 99% sure they violated their own bylaws because there's no way they could have done their actual expulsion protocol in that amount of time because they would have had to send people to visit him in jail. See, I think you're overestimating the degree to which churches care about what their bylaws actually say. Well, I mean, it's the... Why am I blanking on the name? What's the thing?

Matt 18? There's like the thing that churches have that's like their expulsion protocol. They like send someone to... Okay, this is a thing I've run into. I think you're slightly overestimating how much people actually care about that. Yeah. And how much it's all just a racket used to prop up the authority of the leaders and push people towards whatever political gains that the movement has yeah pretty much yeah speaking of getting people to submit to authority and political against the movement uh yeah so

we've talked about purity culture on this show we have like we had dosium um so we're not going to go into an enormous amount of detail about it here. But we should at least describe what it is. So the very, very, very short version is it's an incredibly patriarchal, evangelical Christian religious system in which sex before marriage is seen as an incredible sin. And there's this focus on the purity of the wife. And a woman is essentially the property of her husband. And the entire goal of her existence is to bear and raise children. Yeah, so it was invented – the modern version of it was invented in the 90s, strongly influenced by a book written by someone named Joshua Harris.

It was called I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The book promotes a pro-courtship-to-marriage pipeline instead of dating. I think dating will probably encourage you to have sex before marriage, which is, of course, bad. And under all of this, under the actual... If you start digging into this, all the stuff it talks about in terms of sexual

purity is about women are responsible for men's sexual sins. If a man lusts for a woman, that's the woman's fault, not the man's fault, right? It's because the women must be presenting in a way that causes that to happen. Um, right. So women's, women's bodies and clothes should be designed in a way so that it will not cause men to stumble. Um, and by stumble, they mean get

horny and you know it's something that you know your body's both this thing that should be pure but also you should be ashamed of it right because it causes this sin women can't really have any sexual desire on their own women aren't going to really enjoy sex it's specifically for men

and it's for procreation it's an intense value tied to your idea of like virginity and virginity extending out to like personal purity and spiritual purity like if you have sex before marriage you are like like unclean it's it's like it's like you're it's like you're chewed up gum like you like you would not pick up someone's like if you found some chewed up gum on the street you wouldn't put it back in your mouth right so that's the idea like if you if if you're not a virgin you are you are

like chewed up gum like you are already used you're spent um so you have so you save save for marriage so that only your husband can chew up your gum and then after your marriage you're just stuck there forever right it's also like very very very anti-divorce yeah um and there's really no difference and like there's they they don't really there's not much discussion around consent uh oddly enough you know as you know that may surprise you based on what i all just said like obviously they don't care about consent um there's like they they view any they view sexual assault just as bad as consensual sex before marriage they see them as the same thing yeah um it's it's basically this it's the same structures

they're both an equal sin uh and i mean that is that is purity culture 101 we could we could just do an entire episode on purity culture and we probably will we could do a series on it like yeah like yeah yeah i mean the yeah i think the other important thing about it is like this is basically like in terms of their sort of being like uh like i don't know if you call it a counterculture but they're sort of being like a an evangelical cultural machine like it's this like this is this is what they're pushing as like as like their mass movement for for youth especially especially in the 90s and 2000s. We have stuff like purity rings, which is when you're a teen,

you'll get these objects or jewelry which are almost like magical items you put on to show that I am going to keep myself pure. By doing this action, it's symbolizing that and therefore internalizing it. There's also

purity balls, which is not what you'll so when you use the word purity ball certain things will come to mind right um unfortunately they're not as fun as what it's what you are thinking um a purity ball is just like a formal dance event you know like a ball that you put on um which is meant to it's a it's meant to... Usually, fathers take their daughters there, and then their daughters swear to make a virginity pledge

to protect their purity of mind, body, and spirit so that they will not infect boys and cause them to stumble and commit the sin of lust. Which, again, is an incredibly weird thing to do at a ball.

Yes. It's so weird. Well, also, yeah, it's... Yeah. Most, yeah, it's... I think we've gone into enough about this specific sort of thing. I think the last thing i will walk

in there there's one more thing that we're gonna talk about a bit at length but i so before that i do want to point out that joshua harris who like is is in a lot of ways responsible like single handedly responsible for an enormous amount of this uh she is japanese and uh yeah fucking thanks for that one buddy great job good shit man like also good job in 2019 he announced that uh he and his wife were divorcing yeah so you know and and now and now no longer considers himself like the type of christian he was before i'm unclear what his actual spiritual beliefs are at the moment but he did he did try to distance himself from his uh from From what I've read, it's unclear that he knows. Oh, he knows.

He definitely knows. I can guarantee that. He seems to be running... He doesn't do grift now. It sucks. They always get new grifts. We will get into the new grift industry in a second. always get new grifts but yeah actually when we will yeah we will get into the new grift industry in a second um but yeah what one of the other things that's that's a big part of this is a like

a deep and abiding hatred of porn like oh yeah all of this is yeah i mean like as you said like in the list of bylaws watching porn again is the same as sexual assault yeah like this is a huge it's morally the same level of sin yeah and and like you know i mean and you can read that both ways as how seriously they take watching porn and how not seriously i take sexual assault because it does go it does go both ways yeah um and this this thing the fact that this is this is like considered a sin is the apotheosis like well the apotheosis that this is is porn addiction which again like not really real dubious existence this is this is this is even more dubious than sex addiction like there's no

there this is this is like this is just fake um but there's an entire culture that's that's like developed around stopping men from seeing porn these like there's like these incredibly elaborate accountability setups where like there's like apps you install on your stuff. Like there's ways to alter your IP address to block certain sites. Yeah. Robert Aaron Long, the shooter, like he,

he uses a flip phone instead of a smartphone because he thinks having a phone will like lead into temptation. Now long. Yeah. And the product of this, there's like, there's like this entire industry that is built up around quote-unquote treating the porn addiction. Yeah.

And it's all bullshit, but Long had spent, had twice been in one of these facilities called HopeQuest. the family but uh that's not actually the part i want to talk about because what's more interesting about hope quest is that it's founded by roy a blankenship a former ex-gay who left both hope quest and the ex-gay community to live with his husband now what now this what uh what uh what what uh what a funny pattern we keep finding oh yeah yeah now i think my dear listeners if you were if you were not as as cursed as as as we are as as we are, you don't know what an ex gay is. Um, ex gays were, there were this movement of like evangelical gays who claimed that like, this is the thing that starts in like the nineties, two thousands. They claimed that like they'd gone to conversion therapy and it made them not gay.

And it works. Yeah. Yeah. And, and this, and, you know, and impartial part of partial was going on here is they claimed that it's that like they, they they they did it voluntarily because like involuntarily doing conversion therapy had gotten to a point where it was like bad pr wise because jesus christ you were like torturing children and they're still torturing children but but this time they're like no it's voluntary this is like a big this is the right big cultural campaign against the gay rights

movement in the 90s and 2000s and uh like i i would say this like it's it's not exactly the same thing as the way they use detransitioners but like there's a lot of it's very similar and of course obviously that we now have the xx gay movement yeah yeah and and you know and and two two like so okay so like the the xk movement falls apart at in in like the late 2000s early 2010s because like it doesn't work like they're still gay all the leaders were initially gay said they were ex-gay and then kept having gay sex because that rules yeah um yeah and they all kind of realized maybe we should stop doing this thing that keeps killing kids yeah and blake and blankenship to his credit like he'd been a big person doing this

and then he was just like like one of his friends like commit suicide and he's like oh shit and so like he stops and he like he's announced his conversion therapy and he's now pro-queer so many of the focus on the family people who were involved in like love one out all of these ex-gay programs so many of them then renounced it accepted their their gayness and then moved to portland fucking oregon yeah so many of them did this now there are exceptions to this though like this this is what's interesting about this so okay so so uh while he was sort of figuring this out blankenship had founded hope quest right and so he leaves with the people who are running it now like our ex-gays who they're like the only ex-gays left who didn't renounce it and who like still claim to be ex i

mean they they've taken their stuff about how like homosexuality should be like dealt with by same by having by marrying a woman and just not acting on it or whatever like they they they took that stuff out of their bios but they apparently they still believe it like like they've never these people have never probably come out against it and you know but what essentially happened was that like enough of enough of the ex-gays like the thing collapsed enough that like they had to find a new they had to find a new thing to do and the new thing that they found to do was they went and they went into the porn addiction uh treatment industry yeah yeah and i mean also if you want more background on like the ex-gay thing you can listen to my two-parter on focus focus on the family and James Dobson for behind the

bastards. Also for our week on the war on trans people, we discussed some of the same stuff for the first episode, which is the evangelical gay marriage, like thing that, so we, we, we have,

we, we, we do have, we do have some like produced scripted stuff on these topics if you want more background on them. Yeah. Unfortunately, this is a story where there's like every single thread you've ever done suddenly is coming together in one moment of horrific violence. 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. This is where long like winds up for his treatments for like porn and sex addiction

addictions which i cannot emphasize enough this is literally what he's talking about is literally that he watches porn like like that that's what porn and sex addiction like means and because none of this is real the treatments like don't work because again it's all fake i do it also say uh hope quest is uh operates out of georgia yeah yeah yeah yeah but you know so so so he so he goes into treatment twice and he says it like maverick which is just like recovery center um it doesn't work and he goes home and his parents kick him out of his house for watching porn and you know and i think this is something that like is important to understand which is that the people inside of this world really deeply believe this stuff right and and

like watching porn has real social consequences for them and it has you know and this this has this has as it has a like a profound effect on how these people think um i'm going to read a quote from a washington post article bayless who was long's roommate at maverick recovery a sober living facility in roswell georgia in 2019 and 2020 in the months between his stay at hope stays at hope quest said long felt his very salvation was at stake as he told his roommate that he was quote living in sin and not walking in the light he was walking in darkness so this this is how these people like see this stuff right like this is this is literally about whether you're like it's very intense soul yeah yeah this is about whether you go to heaven or hell they're talking about like something extremely existential.

Like it, like it is, this all seems very silly to people who are not inside it because it is, it is, it is absurd. But if the people involved in it, it is like the totality of the universe. Like it is,

it is so big. It's like the biggest thing. It's so important because you're, you're determining what your what you will what your conscious being will exist for for thousands and thousands of years like like this is what they actually believe so it's super important like it's it is it is worth killing for because yeah that's that's how important this is like it like i think i think there's an it is more important than life or death because you dying like okay you die once you go to your physical death doesn't matter it doesn't

matter your spiritual death is so much more important yeah and and this you know and you know we've talked about this like it's there's those things there's there's the social consequences you can get kicked out of your house you can kick out of your church if you keep doing this like like these churches will kick you out. And this makes the ideology at work here incredibly powerful and provides a mixture of this really incredible self-hatred for falling into sin and giving in to temptation. And it also creates a hatred of the temptation itself. And this brings us all the way up to the shooting. Purity culture is the key that unlocks you know the meaning of long's words we can understand the explanation that the police gave

which again like he apparently has an issue what he considers a sex addiction and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate you know and there there was a uh at the memorial for for the shooting last year um sex worker organizer kylan jong said this they hate us so they can hate themselves less and i think that's that's a really great uh yeah that is a really good analysis yes yeah it's perfect calculation of like what's happening here but this is the part of the story where the media just violently and spectacularly fucks up to enact they uh they uh dropped the purity ball you might say yeah i mean it's it's it's really horrible they're like what they've essentially done is enact 200 years

of racist violence against people who had either literally just survived a mass shooting or who are literally dead and the way they do this the press reads long talking about sex addiction addiction and they immediately assume that the women in these massage parlors have been having sex with them and they start there's like this whole hunt that they do to like search for evidence that massage workers were doing like full-service sex based off of, again, the words of a literal racist mass murderer and their own racist preconception that like all Asian women, especially spa workers, are also sex workers. Yep. And like, you know, on the one hand, yeah, it's true that this stuff is fueled by horophobia and also like morally who gives a shit what they were doing. But the immediate problem here is that by doing this witch hunt you are sicking the police on the survivors yep you're putting you're

putting survivors in immense legal and physical danger yeah and and we will talk about this more next episode but like these women have already seen more police violence and police raids than all of the journalists writing about this combined i seen in their entire lives. And if any of these people had bothered to spend five seconds thinking about what purity culture is, they would have realized that Long is from a fanatically puritanical culture. A culture where, for example,

a massage given by a woman where the man is, like, almost entirely naked is something that would absolutely have been considered a sexual service. And like, you know, and if you think about this again for like five seconds,

right. When he's talking about removing temptation, he, he already thinks of all of these women as sex workers. Yes. Because that's, that's what he thinks a massage is. He thinks like that, that, that's, that's how he thinks about massages it's yeah it is it women are the like

women do this and they cause men to sin right it's not it has nothing to do with what's going on with the man it is specifically what the woman's doing yeah well and even then like it doesn't actually like i think i think the the important distinction here is that it does not matter when long talks about how this is a place that was giving him temptation and also like he was giving him temptation and he was like he was going there for his sex addiction like it doesn't actually matter to him whether or not any of these women have ever like no exchange money for sex at all it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't need to be sexual at all absolutely not no yeah because these people are fucking like just engulfed in like so totally engulfed in this incredibly like violent and racist and misogynist and horophobic ideology that it just sort of you know like that that's just how they think

and i i think this is where we're going to return one final time in this episode to race. Because there's a mistake that people make thinking about this analytically that prevents them from understanding both what's happening in Atlanta and how sort of capitalist and racist violence happens everywhere. Which is that, like, okay, so right when this happened, like, when the press conference dropped you got there were a lot of people like i think glenn greenwald did this like lee fang like there was a whole crew of people who were like this isn't about asian racism at all this is about him like hating sex workers and okay it is true that human labor has been transformed into a commodity that can be bought and sold at will now on on a more theoretical level right you you will see sort of incredibly theory brain people who will talk about how you know in in march's critique of political economy right all labor is abstract interchangeable

each unit of labor time is equivalent identical and exchangeable but here in the massage parlor this is a deadly simplification. This labor, the labor that is going on here is Asian. It is indelibly stamped with race and ethnicity and nationality and hundreds of years of violence and perception. Ruma S. Pacha, an assistant professor at the Institute of Women's Studies

at the University of Georgia, wrote a piece last year called White Supremacy in the Wellness Industry, or Why It Matters That This Happened at a Spa. I'm going to read a passage from it because it's very good. Massage spas, also called salons or parlors, like the one where these crimes took place, are part of a broader industrial complex that capitalizes on the racist belief that Asian people, and Asian women in particular, possess magical, spiritual, and sexual healing abilities. These attitudes belong to an entrenched Orientalist infrastructure in the United States

that connects yoga, meditation, and massage to tourism, pleasure, and escape, signaled by the exotic tropical flower in the photo above. There's a photo of a flower at a parlor. Yeah. photo above and there's a photo of flower at a parlor yeah you know and and this this labor the the labor of of of the massage that's happening here is it depends almost entirely on a very specific performance of a specific kind of asian femininity and you know when this sort of gendered and racialized violence when this gender and racialized labor comes into contact with Long and all of the sort of historical forces that he's bearing, he murders the workers.

And yeah, I think – yeah, this is the part of the story of the Atlanta shooting that I think if people know about the Atlanta shooting at all, like this is the part they know about, right? They know the story of Robert Aaron Long, but there are other stories here, stories that are stories that in large part are just not about the U.S. at all. There are the stories of the victims, the survivors and the absolute hell that brought them into the massage parlor in the first place on the horrific night. And those are the stories that we're going to tell in part two. Yeah. Well, that does it for us today. I do want to say, I know Chris was planning these for the anniversary of the shooting,

but they proved to be quite the daunting task to to put together so i had to get had to get pushed back for a while so but uh but big thanks to you for doing the work to uh read through all of the horrible things yeah and uh oh boy if in like the other thing i said about this like yeah if you think this is bad wait till part two which is uh even more wide-spanning and uh has uh horrific and disturbing violence in a way that will i don't know reduce media tears multiple times and yeah will leave you an existential dread of the condition of this world yeah and i guess again there there is there there is ways to combat it right because all of these a lot of these things are problems with viewpoint and ideas in terms of how we view sex, how we view women, how we view race.

And there are things that when you see, you can interrogate people. Especially if you're a Christian, if you're going to church, these are things to watch out for and you can push back on. Because it's, and doing so can maybe save people's lives because these ideas have a death count. Yeah. And I think, I think there's another part of this too, which is that, you know, I mean, the reason we talk about purity culture stuff so much, the reason we talk about the mobilizations

of the evangelical right so much is that they keep producing these movements that put our lives in danger. And the only way that we can stop this – and this is a thing that we can do – is you have to actually destroy their movement. You have to actually break their power. You have to find various ways to break the power break the power of these churches and you have to find ways to break the power of their political movements and that is not an easy task but if if we want to live in a world well i mean just point blank if if we want to live in a world and not in you know like four degrees Fahrenheit like unlivable death scape like we have to deal with

these people because they are the source of almost every right-wing movement that we're facing and they have to be crushed before they do this again yeah and they're gonna try I mean yeah the biggest thing would say is like reaching out to people who you know are in this or if you if you go to church, I think it's your duty as a Christian to push back on these things. one specifically for whatever religion they have. I understand why people have this. I can see how

they work. I was raised in something very similar. But you can still push back on the type of rhetoric that leads to these things and the type of objectification and racism that necessitates violence and gets people to be okay with violence. And pushing back against like Christian apocalyptic worldviews and like the idea of your actions will determine your, you know, how the spiritual quality of your soul and where it's going to reside for all of eternity, right? All these things are ideas that are pretty pretty like innately dangerous um and there's ways to do religion that don't have that yeah but i think i think that is a good enough place to leave it for today because i know uh part two we're gonna to have some more widespread problems.

Yeah. All right. Well, this has been It Could Happen Here. You can find us in the social media places at Happen Here Pods. You can also flee into the woods. Flee into the woods. But before you flee into the woods, subscribe to the pod and leave a five-star review. Bye.

Bye, everybody. Bye. See you tomorrow. 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 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.