TRASHFUTURE - School’s Out For Rapture ft. Josh Boerman

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Josh Boerman from The Worst of All Possible Worlds joins the entire gang to discuss the Christian Dominionist designs on American society through the lens of the "school choice" campaign led by, among others, West Michigan's very own Betsy DeVos. We look at parallels between similar movements here, and how they link to other demands made by the same people.   The Worst of All Possible Worlds (@TWOAPW) is a weekly podcast of case studies in the pop culture of a dying empire. Co-hosts Josh (@boshj) and Brian (@spocks_brian) grew up evangelical in Michigan and New Mexico, while A.J. (@thefuzzymask) grew up Catholic in California. Together, we deconstruct how narrative and artistic choices in popular media reflect or subvert the ongoing reactionary project in contemporary America and the world at large. TWOAPW official website: https://www.worstpossible.world TWOAPW on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/WorstOfAll Link to the article Josh wrote about Betsy DeVos for an an alumni literary journal: https://thepostcalvin.com/betsy-devos-wants-students-to-compete-for-academic-opportunity-and-thats-a-problem-heres-why/

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to this vintage T.F. recording. It's the vintage one. We found this cassette in a bin round the back of the studio. Sam is that podcast. Due to the fact that I don't know what's happened with Nate's computer, I assume is he's gotten out his old steam powered computer that doesn't work with Zencaster, which we usually use. We are having a conversation on Skype today.

So shine up your penny farthing, put a coal in the coal drop and toss a hey penny to the nearest orphan because we are engaging in some antiquated technology. This is Steampunk T.F. on Skype. I'm actually calling in from a phone box in the rain. I'm wearing a big trench coat and a Trilby hat. I'm going, we're going to have a problem. See, I'm just putting some like lyrics that really speak to me in my MSN messenger status and I'm ready to record a podcast.

You're nudging all of us. It's funny you should mention that because I had a job years ago that they used AOL instant messenger as like an in-house thing for communication because it was like super surveillable or not encrypted or whatever. And I was able, I don't know how, but I remembered my password to my old AIM account from college and logged into it. And I did actually manage to get in and see my saved buddy list from like 2002. And everyone's just absolutely awful fucking names.

And it was really like this amazing blast from the past. I had a guy who's named my buddy Sam. His username was Poo St. James. There was there were there were some serious goth ones. My my girlfriend from high school's screen name was Anjda Tenebra. Like everything was fucking terrible, just absolutely the worst shit. And it's like, you know what, though, AIM, AIM had some benefits. And speaking of penny farthing ass technology, I the reason I'm not in the

studio today was I was actually doing yet another driving lesson to get my stupid British driver's license. And what the fuck is up with these like sluice gate road things? So they're like, oh, we'll never need a car wider than this. And it's like 1970 when they're building it like this is the stupidest country I've ever fucking lived in in my life. A lot a lot of like British roads are like this also because cars, I think, have gotten bigger as well.

So because, you know, you have those like types of roads where the roads are already like too narrow, but they're also filled with like massive fucking cars that take up too late. Um, yeah, it's great when there should be more of that. I passed my theory test all of two days ago. So this is now the driving podcast. We're going to talk about how cool it is to drive your car around. I saw your score, Alice.

You did way better than me on the, uh, the hazard perception. So, so maybe, uh, actually, I don't think it's the joke I was going to make is, is my, uh, my joke to make. So I just won't make it, but you can probably intuit what I was going to say. Yeah, there was going to be some slurs. There was going to be some ableism. See, I got the like male socialization hazard perception score. So before we carry on with our, our pre-show nattering any further,

I would love to introduce our guest. Uh, we, uh, all five, uh, of the TF, uh, membership, uh, we've, we've come together in a conclave family at Vatican to where TF to, um, and we are to be joined by Josh Borman from the worst of all possible worlds podcast. And, uh, we are going to talk a little bit about, uh, the evangelical right in America, school choice and how that relates to the bigger Christian dominionist project. Josh, how's it going?

Hell yes. Uh, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be on. I figure now that you are officially a car podcast and a motorist podcast, makes sense to have somebody on here who grew up in Michigan. So like I, it's very serendipitous. It feels great. Hmm.

That's right. Uh, well, I mean, I think that the descent into car talk really started with Milo. And all the rest of you degenerates have followed him. Yeah. I don't know. You love, you love talking about cars rather than you just love talking about them in the abstract. Yeah.

Cars. Like thinking about Ferrari. Milo likes talking about driving and Riley likes talking about a weird car that he saw. Yeah, very different approach to these things. Yeah. I get furious about, you know, the M11 was closed today. Had to go around the M25 through Romford.

It was a nightmare. Oh, don't make me go through Romford. Okay. All right. Before we get into our, our, our sort of topics of, um, I'd say quite, uh, you know, to be perfectly honest, relatively grim, uh, subject matter of the, you might say, uh, yes, Romford. No, of the, um, you might say, uh, currently, uh, uh, winning battle of the Christian

Dominionist movement to seize control of, uh, America, uh, it's, uh, connections as well to like movements that let's say have a lot of things in common with it in the UK. Um, I wanted to talk very quickly about some news. I've been passed, uh, a, a notice from the news desk, um, it's from our other news desk, uh, the Vatican news desk. Uh, it's a pretty slow day there. Most days.

Well, the Vatican is creating an NFT gallery to democratize. Oh yeah. Hell yeah, dude. Let's fucking go. The Vatican's secret ape cives. Yeah, that's right. Uh, no, that's, um, interestingly enough, do the apes get baptized in the slap juice or.

Well, no, actually most of the apes, they don't get given so a, uh, slurp juice so much as they get given a, um, cash of weapons. Oh, I was, I was thinking it would be really amazing if they could trans substantiate the vape juice that sold in Vatican city. So you actually vape the blood of Christ. That could be a mechanism by which Catholicism can attract more non insane. Well, a different kind of insane person to Catholicism, as opposed to people who were attracted to it now, AKA like, uh, I want to live in a 1950s dishware

advertisement trads. Blood of Christ recalled after 14 confirmed cases of popcorn lung. I just really want to see all of that, uh, Pope stuff get sort of collateralized so that I can put my entire 401k savings into fucking Pope coin. Well, well, you know what this, you know what this is? All my books gone. This is like all we're doing is we're seeing the Pope transform back into like a secular prince who you can like, you can now, you know, collateralize

a bunch of shit that he does or whatever. So that, but I'm interested in getting like a modern Pope, uh, to march at the head of a condituary army, like, you know, out from the Romania or whatever to like war against, again, again, a Florence that is perfectly modern, has a modern mayor and then just has to deal with you. An armed Pope knocking on the door is the official position of trash future. Trad future is bring back the papal states. Yeah.

I also find it very funny that the Pope recently made comments in an interview where he basically said that in his opinion, uh, some of the cause for the war in Ukraine was NATO barking at Russia's door, which I imagine was taking out of context, but it's one of those things where it's just like, Pope, the Pope could become a streamer. He's going to get kicked out of the labor party. He's already got an NFT minted. Like he's lined up to be a breadtuber, like no one's fucking business.

Well, he said, he said all of that about NATO, but unfortunately he was being interviewed by Hadley Freeman. So she mostly just kept asking him about Woody Allen. I mean, I feel like, I feel like there's a world in which, uh, you could basically see the Vatican become sort of like a Hong Kong like free market area and they just go all in on cryptocurrency. Yeah. Oh God.

Something that's also really funny is the Vatican's Vatican doesn't have a Vatican city doesn't have its own legal system. It just basically copped the Italian legal system from the 19th century and never changed it. So they'll like all of their laws about like, let's say property and interpersonal relations have stayed the same to include an age of consent of 12. So needless to say, it could become a libertarian paradise for many other reasons besides the ones you just named.

Yeah. Well, like when, when the crypto experiment like fails in the Bahamas, which is where I think that's where the latest version of the experiment is. They can just go like Logan Paul and Mark Andreessen and all of the rest of them. They can just go to the Vatican. Logan Paul wearing a papal tiara. I want to read a little bit about this before we get into our main subject matter. The project is a collaboration between Censorium, a VR company and a

Vatican led non-profit called Humanity 2.0. Yes. They call it Humanity 2. Some kind of a propaganda duo there. Sounds like an organization from the Deus Ex games. Yeah. Well, because it basically is by this point, I just feel like Humanity 2.0 sounds like the direct of video.

Evangelion rip off like humanity 2.0 actually includes some bug fixes from humanity 1.0 humanity 2.0. You will not slap. Yeah. You can't bite the inside of your mouth anymore. We have we look forward to working with Censorium to explore ways to democratize art, something that Vatican has always been interested. That's the VR company that they're working with.

Oh, OK, cool. That also sounds like some Deus Ex shit. We look for humanity to look forward to working with Censorium to explore ways to democratize art, making it more widely available to people around the world, regardless of their socioeconomic and geographical limitations. Unless, of course, they're not really rich in which case. I want to come back to again, the thing where like of just imagining the Pope as a Renaissance prince.

But like because we are now in a much stupider era, instead of commissioning to like to have his greatness remembered by, you know, commissioning like the Sistine Chapel ceiling or whatever, he's like, what if we what if we took this ape and put the papal tiara? What if we had an enunciation, an NFT of the enunciation, but it's all apes? How about this? How about this? Every saint becomes an NFT and then you can take these NFTs and you can

place them into a gaming environment online. You can all interact with this video game. And then if you can't actually afford to purchase the NFTs, you can become a Pope scholar and as a Pope scholar, you will be provided access to one of the saints on a temporary recurring basis so long as you pay your rent. Also, if you're a Pope scholar, you will not get, you will get abstinence based sex education. That's it. Yeah, yeah, I'm just imagining extremely unchaste behavior

when I'm gaming as Saint Sebastian in the fucking second life of the Catholicism. The last thing before we move on, the Vatican's press representative claimed that NFTs won't be used to sell products or objects and therefore it's unclear why they're using NFTs. No, we're only going to sell you absolvance for your sins. Yeah, I've uploaded a number of theses to the Solana blockchain. Yeah, I will just say this one last thing before you move on, Riley, is that I remember years ago, I can't remember what game it was where there

were like in-game podcasts playing on the radio. If you drove a car, watch Dogs Legion. Yeah, that they sounded a lot like us. And this, this previous discussion we have just had has been the most of that sort of thing I think we have ever done, but we are actually reporting on the news. Yes, absolutely. So I'd like to I'd like to move on. I wanted to talk a little bit about what has goings on in in America over here

and sort of why we're we're talking to Josh. Why about this? Why all of the fascism, isn't it? Yes, indeed. I hate having to talk about this, but not as much as I hate that there is it. Shall we go back to the Vatican stuff? Can we do more of like Pope NFTs? Yeah, no. So to be honest, my relationship with the fascism and the Pope NFTs

is basically the same. It's just a greater degree. I hate talking about it. I hate that it exists. So no, so look, essentially what has happened is what a lot of people said would happen as soon as, you know, basically through procedural tricks, bullying and Democratic Party's own fecklessness and love of losing. The when the Supreme Court was stacked with a number of Catholic sociopaths and Christian and evangelical Christian dominionist sociopaths. People, I think from that's bipartisanship right there.

People from across the people, anyone who was paying attention would understand that this was going to bring the multi-decade project of the evangelical right once it had lost the battle on segregation to a close. But they said they wouldn't. They said they wouldn't overturn Roe. They said it was sassled Lord, all of their confirmation hearings. That's right. We had entire hearings about this. I for one was shocked, just shocked.

And so essentially, right, where but we're not actually I'd like to focus rather on on sort of on thinking about this, because quite frankly, there are a lot of better sources you could go to to hear about the specifics of this than us. What I wanted to talk about was the larger Christian dominionist movement through Josh, your your particular sort of point of knowledge of school choice and to talk about specifically how these things are deeply related to one another and part of a large paranoiac multi-decade conspiracist Christian fascist plot to essentially sweep through sweep all of the people

friendly to them into the institutions of the US while maintaining essentially a cuddly liberal veneer through use of terms like school choice, which sounds, hey, you should be more free, but it's actually something quite different for that matter. Yeah, yeah, or fairness in women's sports. You know, Matt. Yeah. No, I'm anti-life ethics in gaming journalism. Yeah, I love the goth party. So like, you know, and also just before we go into that, you know, I want to say

this is not limited to the US as in the UK already. The Times has come out basically in support of this ruling. Hadley Freeman has already written an article in Unheard suggesting that it was that dang gender ideology that got everyone distracted. Sorry, guys. I listen, I'm the reason you can't get an abortion now. I'm sorry. I thought I was doing it as a joke. Yeah. But, you know, I guess I took it slightly too far and I accidentally overturned Roe v. Wade.

Yeah, so but like that all of the in the in the UK, right? This is you can see this kind of being whether a lot of it is being filtered through the prism of transphobia, whether it is someone saying this is because feminism got distracted since 2015 and they haven't been making huge strides in this movement since before 2015, like they weren't going to win, et cetera, et cetera. You know, moronic or at the times is sort of parroting the again, the cuddly liberal version of this, which is what are you talking about?

We just want to give states the right to choose. It's more democratic and also finally to remind you that the same woman who wrote an angry open letter to Marx and Spencers denouncing their gender neutral changing rooms, a thing that is common at basically every clothing store also co-sponsored or was an important supporter of a piece of legislation to reduce the amount of time that a woman would have access to an abortion in the UK. So these are not purely American trends.

They have a different shape over here. They're associated with different allies. The Anglo-Brain covers lots of areas. So let's let's refocus back to America. And first, starting with thinking about this larger project and then thinking about its other project that has gone sort of so well for it in terms of school choice. So before we go into that, Josh, could you talk a little bit about

what Christian dominionism is? Yeah, for sure. So first of all, I should just note that, like, what a big part of what we do on our show is talking about some of this kind of stuff. Because one of my co-hosts and I, we both come from an evangelical perspective and I actually grew up in this world as well. You know, I grew up in West Michigan. So I was sort of like emissorated in this world.

And I didn't even really realize that it was what it was for quite a while. Because when you're when you're in something, you don't really realize that there's anything else out there until you see what something else looks like. So I saw a lot of aspects of the Christian dominionist project is being just the normal background noise, right? It's like how British people relate to Mr. Blobby. It seems so normal.

I don't like that. Yeah, I mean, having myself seen the fucking Mr. Blobby video for the first time, the original one where they were singing and dancing around him, the amount of sheer horror and revulsion I experienced is probably not dissimilar from the reaction you had to reading about Christian dominionism. But the the thing about Christian dominionism and the whole reason for the project comes back to a Protestant sense of what is essentially the need to redeem the world on behalf of God.

And there's a few different forms that this takes. And it comes down to like denominationally where you land. But the world that I grew up in is the world of so-called Reformed Christianity falling down from like John Calvin. And in that tradition, the guy who, of course, famously took over Geneva and burned guys at the stake who disagreed with him, really cool, casual guy. And that that the actual story of John Calvin in the way that he operated sees its sees a lot of parallels in the way that things work in America

under Christian dominionism as well. The idea is that God is in command of the world, but that ultimately the world is a fallen place. We are all fallen people followed by by our original sinful nature or whatever. And so it is our role, then, in the world to redeem it on his behalf. So it's tied up in the American settler settler colonialist project. It's tied up in globally evangelism. All of these things come together in this place because, again,

the Christian dominionist believes that until he or she or they have, you know, gone forward and want to make these changes, they them Christian. Yeah, I identify as a they them Christian dominionist. Like it just it's like you can't take the world just for what it is. You have to take the world and you have to be constantly reshaping it and redeeming it for God. And of course, the God that you believe in is invariably the God that solidifies the prior beliefs that you came to everything with.

And because a lot of these people came over from the United Kingdom mostly and from the Netherlands, in the case of, you know, that's a cursed combination right there. I know you're telling me, dude, for a stand on the fallen home. All the the fundamental project is to subvert any and all political governance and really the entire liberal project to the whims of theocrats. That's a Christian dominionist and as I understand it as well, right? Like I also it's also I think this is worth mentioning, right? I've seen sort of I don't want to devote too much time to this

because I don't think this is an opinion with much sort of truck in most places, but sort of trying to relate this back to a materialist perspective. It's that the function of this is not to distract people from the real issues. The function of this is to provide a hierarchized social order where the hierarchies themselves are sort of sacred and enshrined against a belief in sort of general godliness where God is kind of whatever America was like back when we imagined it was good. Yeah, exactly.

Because there's this sort of idea in Thomas Frank really popularized it with this like what's the matter with Kansas idea, which was like, well, these Republicans are just cravenly using the Bible and stuff like that to distract from economical issues. Whereas in reality, all of this is part of one unified project. You cannot have one without the other. And the objective here is to redefine what society ought to be under an order that is again out of religious priors, basically, where things are a matter

of private personal choice rather than any sort of collective good. And the private personal choice then is what we're trying to do by doing things like school choice. This is sort of how we get into this from a theoretical perspective is we're trying to create the environment where those private personal choices get sort of made in a sort of loose sense, but in fact are guided towards a, as you might say, godly end. And where godliness is defined as anything that's not secular and anything

that is secular is defined as like, well, gays are secular. It's secular and women should have short hair. It's secular. Some women wear pants. It was secular when schools desegregated because God wanted us to be separate. Right. It's this valorization in religious belief of whatever America was like in the fifties, or you imagined it was like in the fifties.

Exactly. And I was just going to throw something in there too, because I know we're going to talk about Betsy DeVos and the DeVos family. And I feel like the fact that Betsy DeVos's brother is Eric Prince, the guy who founded Blackwater, who is a Christian dominionist psycho, who basically coal on me, believes fully believes that the role of not just the US military or the United States government, but of all Christians, is to destroy Islam. And Betsy DeVos's whole thing is charter schools and school choice and basically

diverting money out of the federal budget into Christian dominionist sort of inspired education. Like that's hand and glove. Like it's not like Eric isn't like the fallen son of the family. Like they're working right for the same project. And I've told the story on your show, Josh, but to give an example of this mentality, you'd think that when it confronts a logical contradiction that it would have an aha moment and it never does.

And the example that I gave you guys on your show was meeting a woman that I was friends with when I was doing this training exercise in the army, who was a second lieutenant, who was Christian dominionist, who very, very adamantly told me that the reason America's economy was bad was because of feminism and women not staying at home and women having jobs and taking jobs that men could have. And I'm like, the thought crossed my mind, like you're a woman army officer in a role that it wasn't until the 70s was even allowed to exist. Like, do you not realize the insane shit you're saying?

But that doesn't matter. Yeah, well, and that's the other thing that's kind of interesting about the way that this project has permutated over the decades, right? Is that it's not as if the logic of, let's say, what is sacred versus what is secular, what is good versus what is bad. It's not as if those things remain constant, right? A lot of it adapts based on what some people consider to be socially acceptable. And additionally, a lot of it comes down to, well, it's OK for me to

do because I am one of the good guys. I am one of God's elect. My enemies are ontologically evil. And therefore, not only am I right in anything that I do, but anything that they do is wrong. It's like an extreme. Is it like an extreme like main character syndrome? I would say so.

It really is. And like you can see this as well in the way that people like Betsy DeVos talk and the things that they actually say. Because, I mean, we'll go into some examples of this in a little bit, but like she talks in a way that makes it very, very clear that she doesn't think that she will ever suffer any sort of reprisal for her actions whatsoever. She just goes out there and says whatever. I'm going to stand right over here, right next to my own petards.

And I think you'll find. Yeah, I mean, I'm just imagining Betsy DeVos. It's like Betsy DeVos, as long as she acknowledges the Holy Spirit at the eyes wide shut party at her mansion that looks like you built a fucking like. The best way I could describe it is it looks like you built the cheapest clapboard house you could, but never stopped building it in Fortnite. Yeah. Are you talking about her fucking house on Lake Macintosh?

Yeah, that huge ugly. Yeah. Oh my God. Like there is no logical inconsistency there. So Riley. So I think let's get into this, right? Let's talk about Betsy DeVos, her family, and how they get from Amway and other businesses into this whole new model of education.

And let's just sort this in really quickly just so people, because American listeners will know this probably, but British listeners might not. Betsy DeVos, bear in mind this entire time when we talk about all the stuff as regards the American education system and her insane background, she was Trump's education secretary. And they absolutely rammed that through the Senate. And it was interesting because that got probably more pushback than any of his nominees besides maybe besides, and I'm not joking, his secretary of labor was

the former CEO of Hardee's, the fast food chain who then had to withdraw his nomination because it was proven that he had like, I think he had been convicted or he had been accused of abusing his ex-wife. But DeVos, that was massively controversial. And it was really amazing because it didn't matter how many people in Oklahoma called their insane scout master, Senator Jim Lankford. It was like, please don't do this. We care about our kids' education.

He basically said, sorry, fuck you. And she basically was the highest echelon of powers as regards education in America. Well, in her appointment got slammed through on a party line vote. In fact, Vice President Pence had to cast the breaking tie to confirm her. Part of the reason that her hearing and her appointment were so controversial. And I'm curious if you guys heard about this or not. During her hearing, they asked her what her stance was on gun control in schools. And she said that she would not support gun control in schools because in states like Wyoming,

you might need to keep a shotgun around to defend kids from bear attacks. And she's right. And Senator Vos speaks for the people of Wyoming, all 12 of them. So I think, bearing all that in mind, let's go through this story. Who she is, how did she get here? And how do we get from Amway multi-level marketing money into school choice, quote unquote? Wait, I've just realized that Betsy DeVos is literally, it's the bit for mean girls where it's like,

on the seventh day, God invented the Remington Bol action rifle. Yeah, that's not exaggeration. These people exist. So yeah, I mean, brief, like Cliff's notes background, Betsy DeVos is from West Michigan, which is also where I grew up. Her mother is a woman named Elsa Prince. Elsa and also then her dad, whose name escapes me at the moment. But anyway, point is Edgar, that's his name.

So her parents are Elsa and Edgar Prince. They are both major bank rollers of the conservative movement, both locally and nationally. They made their family fortune because Edgar invented that thing where, you know, when you flip down back to car track, you know, when you flip down that little thing on your sun visor, the sun visor, you know how the little light turns on when you do that? Yeah, he invented that little switch.

Well, he should have a shit ton of money for that forever. That is the light of the Lord coming at you. It's sort of like local warlords. Yeah, well, because he invented that, then his, his awful children should get to decide what you learn in math. I think it was like a kind of, there's a guy, I went to school with a guy who like had a very similar origin story. His dad was like sort of involved in like the development of a kind of Teflon,

which meant that he was just like, really rich, but he was the biggest prick in like, I've never met. And now like, nothing stuck to him though. Does he run an academy? He ran like a nightclub in Maidstone. Yes, yes, yes, type of guy discovered. And like the mate, this one was so bad that it's sort of like, and he got a reputation for just being like the place where like,

all the local gangsters met up and it got shut down because like, feel lounge. Oh, I can't remember what it's called, but like, it got, but he got shut down because like, some guys were trying to like sell that like, the sort of synthetic molly out of it. It was a very fun story, but yeah. I just, I'm just laughing because like,

I realized this would never enter into their minds, but there's a part of me that wonders if like, if the DeVos family or the Prince family ever sweated deep down, because they're like, if the true Calvinism came out, they're like, well, we gave people mirrors in their cars and that means vanity. That means women be putting on makeup. So we've contributed to sin in our own right.

Well, and to that point too, in terms of like the stuff that the Prince family tends to fund, they've endowed a shitload of stuff at Calvin College, which is the school that Betsy graduated from. They are major backers to a lot of different conservative movements. So like, Elsa Prince gave a large donation, I want to say like a million dollars or so,

to Proposition 8 in California, which banned gay marriage for a little while. You know, they're in it and it really is like, back to the mean girls thing. This is Gretchen Wieners, right? This is like my dad invented toaster strudel, but instead he invented the little fucking mirror that flips down.

So, you know, that's Betsy. She grew up sort of in that like, first generation, upper middle class, eventually above upper middle class kind of wealth. And she married into the DeVos family. Now, the DeVos family, that's Rich DeVos. He is one of the wealthiest people, or was one of the wealthiest people in the state of Michigan

before he fucking died. And he is the co-founder of Amway. And how well known is Amway in the UK? Do they have- No, we have a lot of sort of like multi-level marketing scams, but not this one. All the ones that I've seen tend to be more like executive coaching, so they don't even have a product.

Yeah, I grew up for a period of time in New Mexico before my family moved to Indiana, and all of my neighbors were Mormons, and they all bought Amway. And the best way I could describe Amway is it's wish.com everything, but like 30 years before. Like imagine wish.com breakfast cereals, like counterfeit fruity pebbles, counterfeit honey nut cheerios,

like that kind of a thing, but for everything. Being an Amway Mormon is so funny. You want to double down on your cults. I mean, there's a fuckload of Amway Mormons out there, and I think the one thing that like people really swear by in terms of their products is the soap, actually. Like their soap products are apparently pretty good. Like, can you have a downline we can get into?

No, but I'm sure I could find you a guy. So anyway, when Betsy DeVos married Dick DeVos, this was basically like a fucking- Dick DeVos can't be a real guy. This guy, Dick DeVos. This was like an old school royal wedding, right? This is like a Habsburg fucking connecting to another royal family kind of deal.

A head full of water, one black testicle, let's go. Absolutely. And this then resulted in sort of a core family that largely runs conservative politics in West Michigan with a family net worth somewhere north of $5 billion. We don't know how much money they actually have because Amway is a privately held company. So all you can really do is speculate,

but they have a fucking- It's not counting that much money. I mean, it would take so much time. Exactly, exactly. If only it were invested in like Popecoin or something like that, we might be able to know, but it's not on the blockchain. So we have no idea. It's completely fungible.

We have these rich West Michiganders, and where does their interest in education come from? Sure. So for Betsy DeVos specifically, and a lot of the people like her, a lot of it has to do with investments that they actually have in education. Now, part of this is an ideological project. So they make a lot of contributions to Christian schools

and things of that nature because they want everybody to grow up loving the Lord. And a big part of this Dominionist project is that the fucking public schools are indoctrinating kids in the ways of the world rather than the ways of the Lord, which we can't do, that's not allowed. And so they are doing what they can to shape the minds of this next generation

through private education. And a good way to bolster private education is to get the government involved so that private schools and semi-private schools can be the beneficiaries of government. This is, we have basically exactly the same thing in the UK, but instead of generally being Christian schools, they tend to be schools run by spiked columnists. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's a simple, it's a similar model where it's a private school you don't pay to go to. Instead, the state pays for you to go to it. So you don't pay with money. Exactly, yeah. I mean, I dug up because I was researching what sort of equivalents are to this policy on the UK side of the pond.

And I found like fucking Toby Young. Yeah, exactly. Academy for the divorced youth. Yeah. I love that he got fired from being ahead of his school because he got too horny for booths. It's the only way you get horny in Britain, or the only way you get fired in Britain.

You can get horny in many ways in Britain, some of which are illegal, but there's only one way you get fired is by being too horny. Yeah. So yeah, this is a familiar model, I think, to most British people, but I think the important thing in America is the difference is it's not part of the Spiked Magazine project.

Even though the Spiked Magazine project and the Christian Dominionist project are the same project. Well, I said the Spiked Magazine want you to leave school loving a different lord, the landlord. But it genuinely is part of the same. It's all funded by the same people. It's just that it takes on different flavors in different places. I would say that something about the American side of things

is just as Toby Young being fired for being too horny for boobs as a school guy is such a British way to lose your job that it barely even registers to us as an event. In the same vein, I would say that a guy in America or someone like the DeVos family being invested in the private education or the textbooks or whatever the kind of thing that they're doing, and the whole thing comes along to like,

we want to make them buy our shitty textbooks. That's such an American way to go about business that it barely even registers to us. So I think then I want to just pause here, where we've come to the core elements of the project, which is set up a school, get the state to pay for it, but because it's not a state school, you can do religious teaching. And I want to go back to thinking about the nature

of the Christian Dominionist movement, where it was part of this, initially, this form of American Christianity was very connected to Manifest Destiny. And I see kind of the Christian Dominionist movement, especially in the way that it exists now, is highly minoritarian. It's fighting what is essentially

a very successful rearguard action, because it's deeply, deeply unpopular. Like the thing that you mentioned with the Supreme Court, like they basically did Tradcath to Kia when they were getting fucking confirmed in order to just be like, nah, we'd never rule against Roe v. Wade, and then they did.

But like you said, it's insanely unpopular. It's very unpopular. And so I think in doing this to try to achieve their broad goals, which include a society in which men are subservient to women, black people are subservient to white people. Men are not subservient to women. Sorry, I'll take that again.

I'll take that again. No, leave it in. No, no, no, no, no. I did too much feminism, and now we're fucking covered by motorcycle gangs swinging chains and they're all lesbians. Yeah, right. Probably such a feminist, you can't even say it.

I think maybe we should hear these guys out, you know? Don't frighten me if a good time. That they envision this world where all of these traditional hierarchies are enforced, and a big part of that is, say, taking away women's reproductive rights, right? And so, but in order to do that, you need to fight the fact that a lot of the culture

being made by the Christian Dominionist movement kind of sucks is very difficult to get people to come over to you unless you have this hermetically sealed world in which they will have to live. And my understanding is that school is a big part of that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, so to your point about how unpopular this stuff actually is with the voting public,

in the state of Michigan in the year 2000, and by the way, Michigan as a state is really the prize that Betsy has been going for for a very, very long time because it's where she's from. And so she wants to bear her project out in that state. And so in the year 2000, there was a ballot amendment called the Michigan vouchers and teacher testing amendment. And basically what it would have done

is it would have allowed people, just anybody who was sending their kid to any school anywhere, to get what's called the tuition voucher. The idea of a tuition voucher is that you have a certain amount of money that is blocked out to you by the state. And rather than that money going into your local state school or public schools, we call them,

but not public school in the way that I know you guys have public school. Instead of doing that, you would then take that voucher value and you would apply it to tuition at any school that you wanted. And that could very easily be a private religious school. Now, this was a ballot proposal again in the year 2000 that would have amended the state constitution. It went up for votes from the Michigan voting populace

and it fucking went down in flames. It went down by a 70-30 margin. So like 70% of voters said, absolutely not because these are not policies that anybody actually wants. There is a strong, dedicated minority that is very passionate about it. But the broader voting populace, even in America, which is a fucked up country, does not want that.

Well, that's what I mean is that this appears to be the sort of the maneuver of a culture, a subculture that knows it can't really grow, but has basically just fossilized its hands onto the levers of power and is essentially now barricading itself in the control room. We also got to realize too that in America's history and the way the Constitution was written,

it was envisaged that only white men who owned property could vote. And so basically it's like the problem, their problem with democracy and with voting is not necessarily that this is unpopular, it's that the wrong people are voting, that fallen people are voting. And so they envision a world in which that is no longer a problem

and they're becoming a little more open about that. But it had to be dressed up in this language of this being a sort of popular choice that was, you know, we don't want big government, we want school choice when actually what they in truth want would only be able to come about if the people who would object to it, who would suffer it the most and would object to it,

are denied any input whatsoever. And let's of course not forget the racism angle here, which is about, you know, 100% of it, depending on how you look at it. Like the point at which private religious schools really exploded in the US was about the time when public schools started to get desegregated, especially in the South.

And then- And that's another thing that I wanted to point out specifically with regard to, you know, the way things have always been in West Michigan, just to back to the point about, you know, Manifest Destiny, Settler Colonialism, that whole project, you know, the people who originally settled,

who came over from Europe and settled in West Michigan were Dutch immigrants who were concerned that the Reform Church of the Netherlands had become too secular. They tried to bed blue polish. And so the entire project there, additionally, it was the same thing. It was all about what can we do to hold on to this power

as long as we possibly can. And that was, again, reified traditionally along male-dominated lines, including, like, for a very long time, men were the only one who were allowed to vote in the church. And the church basically ran West Michigan for an extended period of time. And so, I mean, I think it's important to, you know,

see this as something that reaches sort of far back into history. And if you look on the long term, it's an ideology of losing. It's consistently lost all of its big battles, such as, say, desegregation and ostensibly, certain elements of ostensible secularism. Well, as you say, with desegregation,

it's been a very successful rearguard action. It's been a fighting retreat, whether that's been through busing, whether that's been through exactly how you draw where a school district is, and then how the funding for those gets allocated. And now, of course, we get school vouchers, which is just we can rob a school district

in order to give that money directly to, you know, whatever psycho is, like, running a school now. Yeah, and, Alice, I wanted to note to that point as well that, like, just to use my personal experience as an example here, I actually did go to the high school. That was, like, Betsy DeVos's family school of choice. I went to high school with her son and her niece. Her niece is nice. Her son is a piece of shit,

but that's neither here nor there. The whole thing about that is... And I wrote an article about this, actually, that I'll send along so that you can link in the show notes if you want. There is a public school, a state school, literally around the corner from the Christian school where, like, just over half of students

graduate from that high school at all, where, and that is, as you might expect, overwhelmingly a population of students who are, you know, high level of free school lunch, poverty, it's predominantly black, whereas the school that I went to was predominantly white, predominantly upper middle class. There were some non-white students in who were in on, like, assistance, tuition assistance, but the idea is, preferably,

all of that would be done through school vouchers and we'd be able to get rid of the public education system entirely. Something I'd point out, too, is that, like, this is the thing that exists throughout the United States in different forms, but particularly in the South, it's primarily Baptist, evangelical, and it's very, very much a segregation thing. The segregation aspect is huge, obviously, in the Midwest as well. I think the Midwest is the most segregated

in terms of housing and education in the United States, but even in places like New York City, for example, there's a kind of, like, a SOP to conservative Jewish voters. They passed a law that basically allows them to do school vouchers for Yeshivas and you have situations in which some of these Yeshivas, like, they don't meet any educational requirements for the United States, for the state of New York. Like, kids don't even speak English.

They don't learn English. There will be kids who are, you know, their families have lived in the United States eight, 10 generations where they go to Yeshivas, where they only speak Yiddish in Hebrew and they don't speak English at all. They don't get any testing and that kind of thing, but because it's kind of a settled thing at this point,

it's not really politically touchable. And so, like, the point I would make is that this is absolutely a thing that despite the United States is sort of notional, like, hey, we have a separation of church and state, the idea that you can basically dump public education funding into private religious schools is a trend that you're seeing throughout different religious communities. And the thing that I would say overwhelmingly

is that they're always right-wing. That, to me, I feel like there's no way you can get around it. Like, whether it's, like I said, ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools, whether it's evangelical Baptist schools, whether it's like sort of non-denominational Christian schools in the Midwest, it's always right-wing. I'm envisioning someone trying to start up a sort of like left-wing indoctrinating private school in the United States.

And I think the Department of Education would repel through your fucking window. Yeah, well, yeah, they'd send fucking Eric Prince in to bust down your door. We talked about, we talked about Scott, oh, go ahead, he was saying, sorry. What I was going to say is it's called euphoria high school, right? It's one of the things that I've sort of seen in this space

that certain conservative commentators are like freaking out about. Like, someone's like, oh, you know, the woke teachers and the woke, you know, all that stuff, they want to create euphoria high school where, like, they have sex and the lunch hall. All the kids are in their 20s. That's right. That's too old to fuck.

I don't want to fuck younger kids. I mean, I was just laughing about the idea about Spikes because you were talking about Toby Young and Spikes and the fact that they're all offshoots of the Revolutionary Communist Party. And that's one thing where Britain and America is different is that, like, even if they were like, no, we were just doing right-wing taquilla,

it doesn't matter. The fact that they were part of something called the Revolutionary Communist Party, they could never get into power in America. Like, that would just mark them too much. I think we talk about, like, how these various sort of, a very reactionary school. I mean, how this whole free school movement

is sort of riven with reactionaries top to bottom, regardless of denomination. I think that's also largely because much of, I see much of the sort of the modern right-wing movement as a combination of, especially in the U.S., as engaging in sort of two things at the same time, as fortifying themselves against interaction with communities outside of that,

whether that's like through school choice, heavily segregated neighborhoods, or gated communities like the villages or whatever, and then basically setting up artillery to completely devastate the landscape outside of their communities. And I see sort of school choice as a perfect example of this,

because you're saying we are going to gather all of the saved, we're going to gather all the people that we think are worthwhile, who just so happen to be on top of these sort of godly hierarchies, we are going to insulate them from the state, and we're going to, you know, do this by causing-

That was a biblical metaphor for what you're describing here. Some kind of boat. Noah's boat. Noah's boat, yeah. But what, but then what they do, right, is in so doing, they at the same time, completely devastate everything around them,

whether that is like the effect of these like big gated retirement communities on the areas around them in Florida, or how like out doing school choice like this, not only defunds public schools, but it also dramatically hurts. All this CRT panic, when we had that like two months ago,

I don't know, the groomer panic. Now, all of this is to the same end, is undermine public education, undermine teachers unions, some of the most successful labor unions in America, large-scale unions in America, and then to create a world where that doesn't, where you can feel safe,

and then just fire round after round out of your walls. Yeah, and I think to that point as well, one thing that I wanted to talk about was this idea that is core to Reformed Christian theology, which is this idea of the elect. Again, this is something that is Calvinist in nature, comes straight down from John Calvin himself. The idea being that if you don't really have

any say in whether or not you're going to be one of the guys who God chooses, it's all preordained ahead of time. And so if you are one of the elect, if you are one of the people who he has chosen or elected, to be his guys, congratulations. And if you're not, sorry, you're fucked. And so it creates this very binary way of seeing the world,

where you either are on, like you said, on the inside, you are one of the ones who is protected by God, you are one of his chosen elect, or you can be one of the ones on the outside. And sorry, but you're a bit fucked. There's not a whole lot that can be done for you beyond maybe throwing you some fucking slop every once in a while, because you are not one of the ones

who God has chosen to have a good life, sorry. And you certainly aren't going to have a good afterlife, you're going to hell. And I would also throw this into, just for this context, is that the thing to understand is that there's a huge overlap, obviously because of charter schools and school choice and school vouchers, but charter schools are by and large a bipartisan project

to destroy teachers' unions and to shore up privatized education in places where teachers' unions and public sector unions are illegal, which has many states in the South, in Connecticut, not a red state, not a Republican state, probably the most segregated state in New England, rather the most segregated school state in New England, a state with basically, that they let them draw infinite numbers of school districts

and wouldn't you know it, most of them are either all white or all black. In Connecticut, you basically, there's no limit on the tax deductions that you can get for donations to charter schools. So like hedge funds dump hundreds and hundreds of thousands, millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars into these, even individual donations,

because they get endless tax write-offs for them because even in blue states, even in fully Democrat, like bath party fucking percentages on the votes they get every year, they are trying to undermine teachers' unions. I mean, yeah, and that is in effect, really no different from a tuition voucher. It's just a tuition voucher through different mechanics.

And just to clear like what the charter school idea is for people who might not be aware of it, the idea is that rather than your local education authority, being the one that like establishes where schools are, draws borders, gets funding, et cetera, instead the school receives an operating agreement from a charter, such as a university or something like that, the school is chartered for that operator.

Many of these operators are for-profit entities, and as a result, they are basically able to skim public dollars off the top, provide education to students. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. They generally are subject to much lower or maybe even no actual academic standards relative to their public competition.

But again, the point here is not really to provide competition where the tide raises all boats. The point is to get rid of as many regulations as possible so that you have a completely unregulated school market. That's the project. That's the project whether you're talking about education or something else. It's what reactionaries want most.

So basically charter schools are a tech startup. Yeah. Something that I'd also throw into, because Josh, you live in New York and I used to live in New York. One of the things that can be really eye-opening when you encounter charter schools in America is, for example, where I used to live in New York City in Crown Heights, there were lots of charter schools running,

and they would often be running in the same building as public schools. And basically on one floor, you'd have the school the kids they had picked to be in the charter school. And the bottom floor, the other floor, was just sort of like the you're going to prison school. And the level of deprivation,

like there was this huge disparity between the two, most of the public schools in our neighborhood were massively under-enrolled because all of the kids had basically been funneled off into charter schools. And let me tell you this from a perspective, I mean, and this is once again totally bipartisan, Democratic fucking favorites Teach for America

is absolutely hand-in-glove with charter schools. They love, they fucking love authoritarian discipline in these schools. And just punishing the shit out of kids, especially if they're black and Hispanic, like first graders not being allowed to use the bathroom all day. Like charter school fucking, you know,

Rashi charter school. Charter school, charter school icon, Michelle Rhee, famously, like when she was trying to teach in public schools, like got in trouble for taping her second graders mouth shut to the point when she took the tape off it ripped the skin off their lips. Like these people hate black people.

She was trying to make him into a right-wing comedian. Fuck, they hate black people. They hate black children. They absolutely believe in absolute authoritarianism and discipline. And that ethos is throughout the entirety of the charter school movement. Like whether or not it's,

the hammer comes down that hard is whether or not people have any empathy whatsoever for the kids. But like that worldview of like, these kids are going to go to prison anyway. So it doesn't matter how much we fuck it up to like, we're trying to destroy teachers unions and make, you know, good Christian soldiers. Like they're all more or less compatible.

And that's the thing that's really horrifying. Well, it's great because you can have these sort of these material conditions that do kind of create an elect and then you can feel very good about yourself because you don't have to think about any of the sort of people that you're disadvantageing to make yourself elected.

It's all by faith alone. We worked out like a slight kind of difference between the American and the British like free schools. So in terms of like both their weird obsessions and their kind of like fixation of kids but in different ways. So in America, so it's the similarities

that are both in both Britain and America, they don't give a shit about the kids at all and they have like active disdain for them. But in America, table sticks, right? But in America, the kids are sort of like essential to like the bigger evangelical project, right? So like it's not necessarily that you want to kind of create like a certain type of educational system

that's functional and like helps these kids in whatever way, even if it's like a way that, you know, ideologically, like most of us would disagree with, it's like they're sort of like one of the means to an end. Where is like a project where the education is useful for? Yes, whereas in Britain, they don't really believe, like the free school guys, I don't really believe in that. They just kind of want to create a system

to just like actively, I guess, be paid to be disdainful towards the kids. I feel like in the British system, they're just trying to make a point and win an argument. Right, yeah. Whereas that they seem to actually care about the... I mean, it's a bad outcome, but the outcome seems important to the American one.

Well, because I remember when the whole like free schools thing where like the debate was kind of happening or whatever you want to call it. I don't really think it was a debate, but like when Toby Young was sort of like kind of championed by David Cameron's government for like being someone who was like an innovative free thinker who was just trying to like do the best for children and so on.

And like the other teacher, what's her name? Catherine Burblesing was also like within that cohort too. And for them, it was very... And again, it was like very much like the free school system was designed as a way of expressing disdain towards teachers unions in terms of like public schools and just like the kind of real undermining of public schools

from a government that was like actively kind of cutting funding from them on the basis that they weren't efficient. So I think you're right. Like yeah, the like the whole free school system and the whole debate around that in the UK was to like prove a point and to sort of like own people that like you have, you had like these, not even like minor grievances,

but just grievances on the basis that like they had some sort of status that you didn't have. There wasn't any kind of like evangelical project around that. I would also say Catherine Burblesing would fit in perfectly in America, even if she's so weirdly British, but like there's an analogy. Weirdly British. Maybe she can be like Piers Morgan. Maybe she can cross the pond and become a smash hit.

British people hate kids. They hate children. And in America, you have to sort of pretend, yeah, we love you doing this for the children's zone. Good word. And Britain is like, no, we want to hurt you because we hate children until they like them a bit too much. You know, that's kind of the...

I think like just to sort of bring it all back around, right? Just to think about sort of to connect this up and to not forget, right? As different as these movements are, like when Britain and the US for school choice, we've talked about sort of the various academies and stuff in the UK before, is that these are all... These movements are funded by literally the same small group of people.

It is the identical people and they all have the same goals and their goals are not about educational reform. And they're all peripherally into some weird dark shit, like being at one remove from Blackwater. But ultimately, it is, I think, about understanding... It is a concerted effort at basically all levels to capture a bunch of, you know, liberal institutions that are defended by people who are too gormless

to understand that they're under attack. It also doesn't help that the Democrats hate teachers unions just as much as Republicans do. Josh, I wanted to see if there was some stuff you wanted to cover before we moved on because we're getting close towards the end here, like about the sort of larger implications of this sort of thing and like as the political landscape shifts towards total apocalypse in America, like what you see as the sort of next steps.

Yeah, I mean, there's a few things, right? One thing is that... Part of the reason that I wanted to come specifically on this show to talk about it is that more often than not, the United States serves as a laboratory for policies that end up crossing the pond. Good. Because our populace... Because our populace...

I mean, I don't know what it is about Americans that makes us more... I don't know if it's like reflexive subservience or fear of upsetting power structures or what, but like it's exactly right that the liberal and conservative project in the United States, they may not be aligned on the idea of tuition vouchers for religious schooling, but when it comes to charter schools, it's a pretty bipartisan project. A lot of the Obama people are connected to this through organizations like Teach for America

and that sort of thing. The idea, the fundamental idea that school choice and school competition is a positive thing where the tide will raise all boats is pretty much considered common knowledge at this point, even though I would argue that it is not the case. What the project has managed to successfully do is drive a wedge between the perception of something as a common good versus a private commodity. And I think that's what this whole project is fundamentally about,

that you are treating something that ought to be considered by all of us to be something that we should have a stake in through our funds, through our efforts, through our time. Rather than it being that way, it is something where I can choose. I can consume as a consumer the product that I want. I want to quote here real quick from the Acton Institute. The Acton Institute is basically the think tank of the DeVos family. And it says, and I quote,

education, they call it the last utility to be deregulated. It works so well with all the others. And it states in this policy thing, I know, right? Like the fucking national rail, when you deregulate it, it gets better. We know this. A prescription for education reform is a competitive system of choice that would offer a variety of school options from which families can choose. Schools currently run under the new government monopoly,

have little accountability to the public since they are assured funding regardless of performance. And the thing that's so ironic about that is that the charter schools that the DeVos family and others back are in fact assured funding regardless of performance. It's what they want, but they just want it for them. They don't want it for everybody else. The story again and again and again, right?

And we can see this even with what we talked about, about stuff like Greensill or stuff like the, like that, like the sort of all the various PPE procurement issues, right? It's that the overarching sort of business goal at this point of any sort of, of anyone looking to create any organization like this is just to hook yourself up to the big money printer. That's it. Awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say also that I just, this is a week to reflect on the sort of political ratchet effect of the Democrats versus the Republicans. And I think that just as regards abortion rights in America, schools, charter schools, teachers unions, I mean, I genuinely, there are not a ton of things where if you did a Venn diagram,

there'd be a complete overlap for Mike Bloomberg and Barack Obama and the Clintons and Betsy DeVos. But it's, it's hating teachers unions for sure. And maybe a couple of flight manifest and no one can be completely sure. Yes, very true. All right. So I think that's going to be about, about time for us today here on the school choice extravaganza. Here at TF presents Vatican II.

I for one feel much better. Yeah. I feel great. I feel amazing. Josh, I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking to us today. Thank you. I also want to thank you for preparing the notes on the second section. It has really taken a, it has improved my day, no end.

Oh, good. And finally to ask, where can people find you and your charming co-hosts in the various wherever fine podcasts are found? Sweet. So yeah, I co-host a show called the worst of all possible worlds. If you've been interested in the kind of analysis that we've been doing here today, you'll find a lot more like it on our show. Basically what we do is case studies in the pop culture of a dying empire.

We take a look at a piece of media, we unpack it, we interrogate for the narratives within. We see whether those narrative trends either reinforce or subvert broader reactionary trends in the political landscape. If you go, we have a Patreon. It's patreon.com slash worst of all. Or you can go to our website, which is worstpossible.world. We've got some cool premium content behind the paywall. We actually reviewed this absolutely fucking bat shit propaganda documentary

called Whose Children Are They? And it's about Boris Johnson. And that was actually a movie that was made fairly recently to agitate against teachers unions and things of that nature, including some guest hits in there from members of nonprofit organizations that Petsy DeVos has a financial stake in. How about that? So yeah, check this out. I would also say I've been on Worst of All Possible Worlds,

I think three times now, two times, three times. I can't remember. You've been on our show two times and we've gone on your show one time. Correct. Yeah. But we've talked about this deranged evangelical radio play. Focus on the family that's been airing since the late 80s. And it is some of the most insane shit I've ever heard.

So if you want to hear me completely ridden with COVID reacting to one of the most deranged pieces of media I have ever encountered, which two of the three co-hosts grew up listening to unironically, I strongly would recommend listening to that. If you want to learn about when confronted with the idea of you finally have the chance to present what prejudice looks like. And instead of making a case for how Christians are the most persecuted of all, they didn't want to acknowledge racism ever. So they invented a fake town that's racist towards people from cities.

Like genuinely some of the best shit I've ever encountered in my life. And I think slur as well to refer to those people. Yes, exactly. What is the slur? Sitters. Sitters. Sitters. Yes, word.

Yeah, you can't say that. Whoa, whoa. We're going to have to like that. Just one long beep. We've been canceled. We're posting apology letters. All of our profile pictures on Twitter are just black now. People of city, please.

All right. All right. Well, Milo, do you have plugs? Oh, I have yee plugs. Well, I am doing a show in Brighton on the 17th of May. Oh, wait, wait. So you can check that out. We're doing a show.

All of this together. We're going to be at Bristol transformed on this. Oh, yeah. Shit. Yeah, we're going to be transforming Bristol. Yeah. Which I believe this is the 13th or the 14th. Are we Friday or Saturday?

It's the 13th or Friday. Oh, the good day. Friday to the 13th. Yeah, we are. We're Friday the 13th. Everything's going to go great. We're going to be in ski masks. Yeah.

I'm going to be dressing up as Morbius. Wait, ski masks. You mean hockey masks. Hockey masks. Yeah, we can ski masks whenever we get around the place. Yeah, we're doing noodles and all that. Also going to ski masks. Yeah.

Hey, your hair wants to get transformed. Get your knees out. Milo, do you have a pay-in slab on your head? We're going to put a ticket link to a ticket link to Bristol transformed in the episode description. Milo. I'm very into Freddy Krueger. All right.

You know what? Why don't you do your plugs as IRA Freddy Krueger? If you want to come and see me in Brighton, I was going to say Bristol, but that's a different date. It's the 17th of May. And also, I think on the 1st or the 2nd of June, I'll be in Tallinn in Estonia if they let me across the border. On the 1st or 2nd of June, I will be on a holiday.

Do not attempt to contact me. Yeah, in Tallinn. Yeah, that's right. I'll be on quote unquote holiday in Tallinn. There's a man I have to meet over there. Tallinn's a beautiful place. It was a place where the opera scene was filmed in Tannit. Oh, yeah.

There he is. Go see that. Hossain's plugging Tannit. Yeah. I'm moving forward in time through Estonia. And Riley's moving backwards in time. No, I'm not going to Tallinn. I'm going to Spain.

You're not going to Tannit with me. It's backwards. Okay. All right. All right. Josh, thank you very much again for coming on. All of you, thank you for listening. Don't forget, we have a Patreon five bucks a month,

second episode every week. You know the deal. And if you subscribe to our Patreon, you can get a listenership voucher, which you can use to go and listen to worst of all possible worlds if you wish. That's right. That's right, transferable.

Yeah, that's right. So somebody is going to come up with the idea of like creating a voucher where like you can kind of listen to any podcast you want. Cut his mic. Cut his mic.