TRASHFUTURE - Trans-Atlanticism feat. Abigail Thorn

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

This week, friend of the show Abigail Thorn (@PhilosophyTube) joins us to discuss the EHRC’s turn towards belligerent transphobia. One might go so far as to say that they’ve violated Riley’s Law, but there’s an American dimension: British transphobia is beginning to appear in American legal statutes, cited approvingly. Seems bad! We also discuss an app to buy your way into government? And some admittedly out-of-date reactions to the Russian invasion of Ukraine (we recorded this on the day it started). If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We will be doing a live show in London on Wednesday, March 2. Get your tickets here! https://www.designmynight.com/london/whats-on/comedy/trashfuture-live-pre-election-christmas-spectacular *MILO ALERT* Milo has a bunch of live shows this month in both London and Prague. Check them out here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-show *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, Trash Future listeners. Just a quick heads up, we have a live show at Voxel Comedy Club in London on Wednesday, March 2nd at 8pm. That is, tomorrow night. There's a link in the show notes to get tickets. Thank you, hope to see you there, and please enjoy this episode. Hello all you cool cats in Radio Land. Thank you very much for tuning in. That was Shade's smooth operator, and we now go to drive time morning radio host Milo, who's going to tell us exactly what the hell is going on and which episode this is. Milo? Smooth spet snaz operator. Thank you. It is, it's the free one.

It's the free one. There we go. There we go. In light of intelligence assessed, we have upgraded the likelihood of it being the free one from probable to certain. The International Committee of Atomic Scientists has created the free one clock to the free one. Yeah, it is now zero minutes to the free one. Trucks have advanced through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone into the free one. No. Boy, boy, is it, is it. Current events are happening.

Have you heard of these current events? I have. Current, baby. So it's, it's, it's TF. Another day, another version of me, not version of me, I guess another prestige clone of Riley. Another clone of me tries to mess with Milo when he does the radio voice intro because I still find it annoying. Once again, he gets drowned in the vat again and replaced with another one.

After every podcast, Riley is killed, replaced by another one. Once again, we are forced to try and do a comedy politics and tech podcast in a world that is not very comedic. In a world. It gets a little more difficult sometimes, and this is one of those times. Although I do think right, like, you know, okay, I, I want to, we're going to talk a little bit about current. No. Number one, if you haven't heard her, it's Abby.

Hi, Abby. Hello. It's nice to be here. It's nice to be back on TF, returning champion, getting access to various lounges. Oh yeah, absolutely. Fresh from filming in the Donbass. Absolutely. Why, what, what is a fake country? Why, what does that mean? Would you say that Ukraine is a lacuna, like politically, geographically, spiritually? Intellectually.

So look, we're going to talk a little bit about, about sort of the various goings on. I think mostly, if not entirely focused on how that, on something that at least I feel much more comfortable commenting on, which is how this is being used domestically in the UK to advance sort of political goals here. And then we're going to do a startup. And then we're going to talk about an episode we've actually been planning for a while and we're not letting fucking events overtake us. No, because I mean, events only really began at time of recording this morning. So yeah,

they're fair enough to like let them play out a little bit before you get the official TF. Exactly. Which I know, you know, everyone's waiting for. Although all, all the, all the red phones have been replaced by smartphones and they're all on their podcast apps. A donation link for the Russian army is going to be in the show notes if you want to support. I mean, the thing is, I can, we can't give you the official TF take yet, but you can get the official Alice Gordwell Kelly take, which is I was right. I have always been right. I've never been wrong about anything ever. History has vindicated me once again and

handed all of the worst people on Twitter a huge L. So Why, why love about this, Alice, is that the reason why you got this right is for an incredibly Alice like nerd reason. The parachutes on Russian BCR. If you're not aware that basically I thought that Russia would occupy the other bit of Ukraine when no one else did pretty much. And the reason why is because this was politically implausible to absolutely everyone. Everyone has been shocked by it because it seemed unthinkable.

He has enough autism apart from me because although it was politically impossible, it was the only thing militarily that made sense. And the tipping point for me was when I saw a video of like a convoy of BMDs like light armored vehicles with parachutes on them so they could airdrop them. And I thought, okay, well, if you send everybody out to dig trenches and then you just bring them home, fine, that's like a waste of time, but that's an average one. Those have got to be a real pain in the arse to like rig to the thing. So you really only want to do those if you're like going, going.

Alice is now an appointed military advisor to the British government. So congratulations on your new visit now. Changing my act to Alice analysis, becoming an oscent guy now. Yeah, absolutely. I want to mention this for a while. And I actually want to mention it in the context of Ben Wallace, our defense, a defense secretary, getting, so I don't know if he was expecting to be sort of recorded when he was saying this, but he said that he said, oh, fuck. No, quite the opposite. He said, we kicked the backside of the Tsar in Crimea and we can always do it again. And just take that comment, right? And compare it to like the

increasingly unhinged shit that like Putin is saying about like, oh, the West is going to sneak nukes into Ukraine or whatever. And what you can see, right, is two countries that have both just like had the copper wire stripped out of the walls like quite a while ago being run by like an immovable clique of just like people who believe that there in their society's best days are behind them and whose grip on reality is, I don't know, I guess, at least because we mostly talk about the UK, we can say confidently about the UK fucking slipping. Then I mean, it almost makes sense that in the in the Cold War, when everyone was like ready for it, when these were the states and societies for better or for worse, the pinnacle of their

abilities that they didn't slip into doing what's happening now. And yet I think it makes a weird sort of cosmic sense that while all of these places are in terminal decline, that's when the confrontation happens. Putin has just been watching Octopussy too much. And now he's now he's convinced that someone's going to be smuggling a nuclear bomb across the border. And the only hope is an elderly Roger Moore and elderly Roger Moore and General Gogo. Yeah, I mean, it's it's like, I'm genuinely fascinated by like the kind of like the huge army of libs online who are saying that like the West should bring in these like devastating sanctions against Russia, quote unquote, to collapse

the Russian economy as though the Russian economy isn't already collapsed. Yeah. The thing is, you want to know who fucking collapsed it is his mother fuckers like Browder and the Chicago boys who went in and like did the shock therapy. If you want to know why the society's terminal decline. Yeah, ask them by the by the same token, by the same token, I am like, I've been just getting incredibly mad at everyone online today because there's just so stupid takes in both directions. Like this is like such an unprecedented act of Russian foreign policy aggression. Like the fact that most people didn't predict it doesn't make them stupid. It means that they're like, they just didn't think Putin was this insane, because it makes it makes

no geopolitical sense. It is the it's like, it's like wildly lashing out. It's it's a fucking it's a crazy action. And like, anyone who's saying that like, this is the result of like NATO fucking provocation like needs to give their fucking head a wobble, right? Because like NATO does lots of bad shit. It has done bad shit. There's lots of elements of politics in Eastern Europe, which are NATO's fault. This is like Putin is fucking on one for no reason. This is insane. I don't welcome what President Putin has done. And I would not call on him to go any further. In fact, I would kind of call him to retreat somewhat. Well, like the other thing is right that like, this is this is like

talking about this in like, primarily a domestic political lens, right? Is I think important because the the West NATO as much as like, people like to talk about NATO as like provocateurs here, NATO is utterly powerless here and has has has been forced to like, drop off a bunch of admittedly very nice missiles to the Ukrainians and then just go, well, good luck, have fun. I'm not getting involved. I am I am simply leaving ahead of this so as not to start a nuclear war. And so everything that you see anyone post about what NATO should be doing, should NATO be stationing troops in Ukraine, anything like this, it's not possible. It's fantasy. And it's just this sort of like, attempt to cope with this horrible thing that is happening

before our eyes, where for like, the first time in a long while, people who are not used to being powerless, people who like to make policy and who are like, quite blasé about it now themselves do feel powerless. What if we painted some of the crossings on the road with the Ukrainian flag? Would that help? It's an option, I wouldn't lie. Well, we can add Ukraine months to the roster of months that we have. This is this stuff that's being done definitely by by a nation in society that's still definitely on the up and up and a going concern. It's over for Vladimir Putin. He's pissed off led by donkeys now. They're going to pop a very satirical billboard of him. I didn't I didn't want to do this. And I say this knowing that it may well start World War Three,

but Vladimir Putin. Oh, my God. Oh, no. But the other there's going to be a gaffer endom, which is that's Russian for work. Just replying to Putin online, just calling him bald. Yeah, yeah, perfect. I mean, you're fucking you might as well. I can't. His Twitter account's gone. Oh, shit. Yeah, they suspended him merely. I mean, what? You tell me for what? For merely for invading Ukraine again? Sorry, is that not on the terms of service? Typical biased moderation. I also want to point out, right, that the other, as with most things, right, most sort of big events in the world, the British sort of press

government, you might say, sort of all of these institutions that we talk about have once again used this as like, again, bearing in mind what you said about NATO is absolutely true, Alice, right? Like, love them or hate them. They can't fucking do much. And also like, I think, and like, you know, this is that what they're saying is, I imagine if fucking Corbin was in charge, he'd probably be like, Hey, Putin, why don't you invade like just these people just off in their own like, you know, worlds of fantasy, right? Take their own like Jeremy Corbin slash fiction. Like, yeah, if Jeremy Corbin was in charge, you'd probably go right up to Putin and like grab him by the tie and be like, Hey, you want me

to suck you off, big boy? And then he probably start undoing his trousers and I need to go to the bathroom. You forgot that was a real thing. Do you remember Jeremy Corbin and the 100 days that broke Britain, which was like a complete fictional account of Corbin's prime ministership that was published in the British newspapers, which included Putin, I think it ended with Putin invading or like buying large sections of the British state. That's a real thing that happened. And like, I think, you know, a conservative party would never sell off large sections of the British state to a foreign interest. That would never happen. I think that's another thing to point out, right? A lot of people like, ah, it's like people in the Labour Party, like Chris Bryant as

well, are being like, ah, that's because the Conservatives took money from Russians. And I think again, that sort of misses the point. The Russian, the Russians, they don't, the Russian oligarchs don't stash money here for Russian reasons and launder it, which they called it Britain, the laundry. They don't launder it for Russian reasons. They launder it for rich people reasons. Yeah. And I presume that the systems that allow them to do that are the same systems that allow like Saudi Billionaires to do that and like British Billionaires to do that, who like donate to the Conservative Party, I'm guessing. And also Ukrainian Billionaires who also quite like sashing their money in London. These are just rich people doing rich people shit.

Also true. But like this kind of like globalization, which we are now finding out, like fatally hinders our attempt to wage economic warfare against Russian Billionaires, like 70 years of peace in Europe, it's going to continue whether we want it to or not. I'm so old that I remember that that was a selling point of globalization, that like, we won't be able to make war on each other because all of our economies will be so tied together. And now that's sort of now sort of that's gone from being like, oh, we're all in a flat share to one of us has a bomb vest on. Like, you know, there was a famous economics paper that said, well, war between great powers is entirely impossible because of the economic interlinking

is between them. That if Germany were to invade the UK and steal all the gold and the vault, that they would actually bankrupt themselves because of credit interlinking. And this paper was written in 1913. Awesome. Well, like, yeah, absolutely. Germany had invaded Britain. That might have happened. Like, you know, to sort of refocus it right on on the UK, right, is that I think the UK's rhetoric, which is of a combination of extremely bellicose, if not from like, Boris Johnson, who I think is has basically, I don't know, been told in no uncertain terms, make it very clear we're not sending anybody there. But from people who maybe haven't got that

same very stern briefing, right, that from Chris Bryant again, but I think the rhetoric from them, I think, as you've said, Alice, right, you said to me, this is a function of the British States, like huge commitment to like neoliberalism and globalization of the flavor that we've had so much that like, whether on a moral level, whether or not they want to do it, they've been rendered incapable. And you had a very good metaphor for this. And it's, I, we didn't have time to write notes and it's gone. Oh, I wrote it. Tell me what I said. Tell me what I said. I'm excited to hear how it's going.

We've been the opposite of silencing women, actually telling them what they said earlier. Oh, I forgot. I actually, we can cut this. I did write all the notes. I just forgot to share them because I was so distracted. It's, it's okay. It's no, what you said was we've been coming to terms that our own relevance for 70 years, but we're just Wiley Coyote and we're further and further over the edge of the cliff and we were, we're almost about to fall, but we haven't looked down yet. Yeah, we're just Wiley Coyote, except we just kept going. We're like two thirds of the way into a marathon and we still haven't started falling. And like the whole job of the financial

industry is to make sure we never look back at the sign that says, you know, look down and then we start falling. Yeah. We, we inadvertently built our economy on like, say, you know, seven, you know, some hundred number of weird billionaires. Well, sorry, the bit that's not Raytheon. Yeah, exactly. Of building missiles, which is a fucking growth industry for us right now, I'll say that much. And sort of like crime, just money laundering for, for billionaires. And it turns out that once you try to select which of those billionaires you want based on nationality, it gets quite difficult to disentangle them.

Look, I think that's, I don't want to dwell on this, you know, too much. I mean, it's going to be something that certainly is, you know, weighing on my mind. Nobody knows anything yet. It's impossible to verify anything other than that this is the most dangerous moment in European foreign policy in all of our lifetimes so far. By Unipolar World later. An immense, an immense human tragedy. Probably something that like a lot of Russians are also baffled by. Oh, a hundred percent.

Prevent. Something that Alice and I can definitively say though is this is probably going to have a massive impact on the future of the James Bond franchise. That's right. That's right. We are going to, we are going to make more James Bond movies by creating conditions where they are still relevant. Yes. Yeah. Thankfully.

Russian bad guys from now on, baby. Absolutely. What if, what if Vladimir Putin had a facial disfigurement so you knew he was even? Well, it's, it's, it is, you know, Russian bad guys from now on and I can't wait to see someone act out the Bond theme song in front of a fire on a brick wall. It's going to be great. This year, I was in Prague at the weekend, hanging out more or less exclusively with Russians and Kazakhs. And like, first of all, everyone was like, what the fuck is all this Ukrainian shit? Like no one could make a head nor tail of it. And then second of all, everyone was like, why do not go back to Russia for six months to work on stand up special? And like,

well, definitely won't be doing that now. Also, before I go on to the startup, because I, God love me, I did get one. I also want to say what I say by unipolar world, it's not like the multipolar world that like to be honest, we've been in for a while. It's just there's no denying it now, you know, the wily coyote of the unipolar world has now looked down, right? Like he's been off the cliff for, I don't know, a fucking while, like maybe since like 2010. But, but I don't mean like goodbye, unipolar world, I will miss you because like, you know, it's on a sort of on a bigger level, right? The Pax Americana was like a slow news day, but it certainly wasn't much of a Pax for a

lot of people. Yeah, it was, it was safer for us and people like us, but it made a lot of other people considerably less safe in its time. It's not to say even that now is safer, it's just a different kind of unsafe. And it's not an unsafe that it says easy to, I don't know, like hide from at the Ikea, basically. So are you saying that some some some contradictions are being heightened? Once again, I think the contradiction heightener, Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Putin went into his office and he has like turned the big dial that says contradictions upwards. Look, okay, I'm done. I'm done talking about this because I want to stop thinking about it for I want to stop thinking about it for 40 minutes and then for another hour when we read the

terrible book that I read, I want you all to join the movement. It's called Lobby 3. It's a Web 3 project. Lobby 3. Now, who's got an idea? Is this lobbying? Is this lobbying in the sense of like political lobbying? Or is it in the sense of like a foyer? It's gonna allow me to buy governance tokens in government. Yeah, exactly. 100%. Oh my god, fucking nailed it in one. Yes. Awesome. Yes, you are invited to join the movement. You can mint your membership token. It just costs you, well, honestly, like all cryptocurrencies have been shown to be a risk on asset because Bitcoin, quote unquote, digital gold has fucking cratered with the rest of the stock market. So I'm not going to say how much money it costs in American dollars or British

pounds, but it costs 0.07 Ethereum just to join at a level one, which is like quite much more expensive than membership in a political party. But where is the power and what does it do? What am I actually buying? Well, thank you very much for asking, Abby. Lobby 3 is a new Web 3 community designed to give the people a stronger voice in Washington, DC, so we can build a prosperous economic future together. We are looking to decentralize economic opportunity, eliminate barriers to financial inclusion. It's going to be some fake going on the computer bullshit again, isn't it? Oh, so it's a lobbying company, but exactly what they lobby about is up to the people who buy governance tokens in it. And the more governance

tokens you buy, the more you get to influence what the lobby company looks like. Do they actually have like, because to be a lobbying company, you need more than just money, right? You need to actually like have contacts. You need to know people. You know what you're doing? You're taking what I wanted to reveal at the very end of the segment and putting it up front. I'm too good. You're too good. So what do you think? Do you want the Gamerhorns considering you're ghosting all the snakes right now? Give her the Gamerhorns. Thank you. Because we all guessed it so, so quickly, I'm going to ask another question. Who is behind Lobby 3, noting that they were in American politics and they wanted to get a big

job in 2020? Surely not. No, no, not Trump. They wanted to get a big job on the other team, but they James Carville. They didn't. Let's say this. James Corden. I don't know. All of what I said earlier, maybe I'll reconsider if James Corden's involved. I'm not sure I've got a Corden in the locker. I'm trying to thank you. They auditioned for the big job in 2020 and they weren't chosen by their party to run. Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down? A failed Democratic. Is the billionaire Starbucks guy close? Not him. Bloomberg. Bloomberg would never get...

It was actually me, Vladimir Putin. It was a billionaire who ran for president and did not win the Democratic Prize. Again, that's like 50 dudes, all of whom have the least memorable name in the world. He was much beloved by some of the biggest idiots out there, but much beloved. Tom Steyer, Jay Inslee. James Corden. You're missing the most obvious U.S. Democratic nominee for... Yang? There it is. Is he a billionaire? He's like a rich guy. Oh, no. Yeah, it was Yang. Yang. You could have given us like attempted mayor of New York City.

Yeah, yeah. I would have made it too easy. Who knows billionaire? So, maybe not a billionaire, but he is a very rich man. Attempted mayor of New York City is a very funny name for a crime. So, we are building... So, Web3 basically, by building on the unique voice and influence of Andrew Yang and the Yang gang. Oh, Jesus Christ. Do they ever read this back to themselves? Is Yang corporate social responsibility backlight matter, or is that Buttigieg? No, that's Buttigieg. Yang's thing was being like a libertarian tech outsider, which is not something you would typically... He was like a UVI guy.

All right. So, this kind of like... Yeah, this face. But he's decentralizing lobbying, quote-unquote. Usually, lobbying is just whoever can pay the most money, right? They get to influence the policy. But the yet has to be done through a relationship, a briefcase, maybe meeting in a smoky bar. Now, you can just buy a governance token, and we've taken another cool thing out of the world, which is clandestine lobbying and bribing. And it's things like that. That's gone now. You used to have to go to the Washington Monument at 3 a.m. and hand over a briefcase. And now, you just fucking send a guy a text message. Just bullshit.

Yeah. We put lobbying on the damn phone. Well, I can understand the desire to say, okay, let's make lobbying more transparent, like more obvious, and not give people more of a say in it. But you could do the same thing by just publishing it on a website. Well, no, no. We want to... Because we like how much people can use their money to get their voices heard more. We just want that to be also a heavily financialized process. But what I'm saying is you don't need to do that with a blockchain. Well, he does. Because the other... So, why shouldn't you? Of course. Of course, yeah.

People behind this want to do it, as per usual, with any Web 3 thing. When I say, oh, that's gone. No, that lobbying is still going to be mainly briefcase. This is just a way to get the person in charge of it the briefcase. And when all you have is a scam, everything looks like London Bridge, I guess. I mean, well, it certainly did to Fergie, who put Tower Bridge on the album cover for London Bridge. So, this is... That's a like laser grudge to still be annoyed by. I'm not even annoyed by it. I just think it's such a fun little piece of music trivia that they went and looked at London Bridge and they were like, oh, we thought it was the other one. Oh, well.

For you, it's a real, I'd say, idetic memory of stuff that happened in the early to mid 2000s. That's right. And that's the only thing I'll ever remember. I've got that kind of dementia where you don't form new memories. Yeah, you've got... I'm like the memento guy. You're the memento guy, but you're still like, you know, wearing skinny low-rise jeans. You have like a pulmonary of Fergie with do not listen to her lies. Okay, I can't form new memories. I'm trying to find out who told Fergie that was London Bridge. Welcome to memento 2, boring and out of date.

It's not boring. So basically, they think like, look, we're going to have this token. It's going to be heavily financialized. We think it's worth 0.07 Ethereum. Or if you want to be an advocate, you can spend either some thousands, or depending on when this comes out, some tens, hundreds, possibly tens of thousands, who can say of... Oh, nothing. Or nothing on a full Ethereum, making you an advocate. Or you can spend like 40 Ethereum, however much that's worth in a few days, on being a founder.

What do you get? I think, right, we should get in on this because we know that the crypto market is like extremely volatile and stupid. All we have to do is time it right. And then for a brief shining moment until this collapses too, we could have a lobbyist, and we could get past all of the like various bullshit laws that each of us want. Which, I mean, that's first old territory right there. Transition becomes compulsory. Absolutely.

It's a legal to carry around like 18 different canisters of pepper spray at the same time. Civics class includes identifying when your military vehicle is about to be used for realsies. Yeah. I like the idea of making transition compulsory for everyone. Like you're not trying to make more people be of one gender or another, you're just trying to swap everyone. Whatever you're currently not, you're now that. Should be last and the last should be first. Exactly. It's like changing ends.

What the funny thing is, right, that all of these DAOs, these Web3 foundations or whatever you want to call them, like they all end up selling the same thing. It's just like a reskin of the theme. So this one's lobbying themed, other ones will be music themed or whatever. But all you ever really get is like an ask me anything with the founder, the opportunity to buy merch and the ability to vote on whatever they let you vote on and to getting into a discord. That's what you get. Awesome.

If you'd like to join the trash teacher discord, you can subscribe to our Patreon for five dollars a month. If you'd like to get into like an extremely niche argument with Andrew Yang about like what the mods did three weeks ago and whether or not minor attracted persons should be allowed in this particular fucking room of the discord. Why not spend several thousand dollars doing that? Or 10s or not. One of Andrew Yang's moderators has turned out to like have hijacked his discord for their own ends.

That's why I'm doing it mine. That's discord is bad. This is investment advice. Never go on discord. You also get a level. Yeah, go on ours. Ours is quite chill. Ours is very nice. Level two. Level two. Is that a threat? That's what happens. That's what always happens with discord.

It always becomes drama. A BTG is parked outside our discord. It does look like the parachutes are rigged up to it. So you also get as an advocate for a full Ethereum, you get VIP event access. You get to go hang out with Andrew Yang at an event at Bitcoincon 22. That sounds like the most rancid event you could possibly be at. I mean, how do they call it Bitcoincon when Bitcoin was right there?

It's just called Bitcoin 2022, but I wanted to make it clear that's what I was saying. Also, you get there's like a line to get dapped up by the president of El Salvador. Oh, I really hate that. This is the Swinzone for Libertarians. It fucking sucks. Why can't those have invaded there? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Mr. Putin, our country, the owns for freedom. I fully support deploying the VDV into like fucking geothermal volcano Bitcoin plant that they have in El Salvador, because I think they should. They should just make it like VDV day in El Salvador and just the guys all get so drunk and they're telling yashkas and just like be everyone up, drink loads, like piss on all the Bitcoin mining rigs

and then destroy the infrastructure. Trying to get James A. Casto to persuade them to go in. Yeah, come on. Tell us, let's crack on. Come on, guys, I hate Bitcoin. Some people like Bitcoin. I'm not in their number. So they're for like a huge amount of money

or depending on how things go, a small amount of money, a 40 Ethereum or a medium amount of money. Maybe it's just like a hundred pounds. Yeah, which is like a large amount of money on a daily basis, but like considering what they're asking for right now. It's at time of recording. It's about two grand, which is not a lot of money to get a lobbyist as far as I'm concerned.

That's like a little share in a lobbyist. Because they can just mint more tokens. Time share lobbying. They can mint more tokens, then inflation takes away your real lobbying power. Hang on a minute. What happens if people buy tokens in the lobbyist, but they want contradictory things?

Well, they vote off. The lobbyist has to become a dialecticist and resolve them, resolve those himself. I mean, it's the one-way choice, the United States government. One group that wants to trans everyone one way and one group that wants to trans everyone the other way. Because everyone becomes non-binary. Luckily, this is all a moot point because this is all crypto guys.

There's only one lobbying position that crypto guys want, which is to lower the age of consent. Also, the other thing that crypto guys want is they either want to be able to use crypto to buy a Denny's grand slam or alternatively, a special bracelet that unlocks your supercar remotely. So I really stupid switch flipped in my brain and now I think crypto guy is a gender. Yeah, the crypto guy flag.

So what do you get? God, don't believe, don't believe! I'm a top secret dude. I was buying a governance token in someone else's gender and be like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Black ops guy. For 40,000 American dollars or etc. Four.

Or four or four hundred. One nine. Yeah, but for 40,000 as of recording, you can get one-on-one access to Andrew Yang. Which is- Why is that phrase like it makes it easy to kill him? Like- What the fuck?

Yeah. It's like a movie hero. But no kissing. Agent 47 access to Andrew Yang. He's going to turn his back to you while looking over a balcony with a really steep drop beneath it. No, no, it's like in hero. You can approach 10 paces closer to Andrew Yang.

No, so you also can go to like- If you have an event, you can bring Andrew Yang as a keynote speaker. It seems more like just a way to meet Andrew Yang. What's the funniest event to bring Andrew Yang to? What do you say? Oh, Warhammer tournament. Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

Yeah, absolutely. It's like a cheat code. You can be like, yes, we're getting Andrew Yang using the irrefutable blockchain. We're actually going to have him speak at a quote-unquote conference on the road from Chernobyl. Grainy footage of Andrew Yang flying above Hark if stiff-bodied like Superman.

You know, if you're an LGBT person, you can take an advocate with you and you go to the doctor. I would make Andrew Yang do that. Andrew Yang has to like go to the GIC with you. Yeah, and explain why you need the hormones. He's giving you a very wiggish view of your transition. Here's another interesting one. VIP intimate access group meetings.

So you all fuck each other or what? It's off the record. Sorry, is this just a sex cult that Andrew Yang is starting? Well, the only it is, it sounds like Bohemian Grove, but where they don't do, but like where they don't do any of the Bohemian Grove stuff. It's just like it's Bohemian Grove for people that really want to talk about crypto policy.

Bohemian Grove, but instead of an owl, it's an ape. That's right. Yeah, it says there's a tier where Andrew Yang offers you 200 euros on the streets of Prague and ask if you want to come back to his place and whether you like dick. So where the money goes basically is direct advocacy efforts and infrastructure building, community engagements,

operations and artists and some technical work. And mostly where I think it does is just goes to again, associate a famous person with a web three token and then allow that token to pump, pump, pump, baby. Yeah, we're doing Yang coin. It's just disguised as lobbying or whatever. Yeah. The part of Matt Damon will now be played by Andrew Yang.

Yeah, that's right. So anyway, that's a lobby three. I always like to do a startup occasionally when I'm feeling a little out of sorts. So now I want to talk about- We should get back in the swing of things. I want to talk about, of course, to get back out of the swing of things

before we get back into the swing of things and get everything in a terrible book. Now I know the thing about how everything is terrible. Yeah. One of the reasons that we wanted to get together today, this episode we've been planning for a while, is I'd like to talk about the EHRC, what the concepts it promulgates actually mean

and how these are vulnerable to political capture. Right. We're finally taking down the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. The answers to your questions are bad, nothing and very. So, Abby, let's talk about this a little bit, right? The EHRC has, it has, of course, a statutory duty to protect the interests of trans and non-binary people.

And it has, let's say, I understand, it has a mixed record of doing that, but let's say very recently, the record has become more mixed to the worse. Yeah, I'd say it's a bad mix. So recently, like a number of things have happened. A lot of this has been broken by Ben Hunt over advice for my LGBT correspondent for the BBC.

And but recently, like a number of things have happened. First of all, the EHRC U-turned on conversion therapy and GRE reform and wrote to the Scottish government and been like, don't reform GRE, conversion therapy is good, actually. And everyone was like, fuck, fuck off, no. So credit to the Scottish government for giving them the thing on that. And the Scottish Human Rights Commission. So like the analogous body, just for Hollywood,

also told them to get fucked. So yeah. You can force the Scottish government to do something good just by the English government doing something bad. Yes, yes, absolutely. But then a number of like disturbing reports came out of the EHRC. One is that a bunch of staff have like resigned or faced disciplinary action for criticising

the body's increasing transphobia. One is that they've been holding secret meetings with transphobes. One is that the chair of the EHRC, Baroness Faulkner, has been using her parliamentary email address to secretly correspond with transphobic hate groups and change the wording on official documents per their request. And the most recent one, and apparently not the last, if rumor is to be believed, is that number 10 Downing Street,

even though it's supposed to be independent from the EHRC, has actually been directly editing documents to make them more transphobic and indeed blocking pro-trans documents from being released. So it's not good. And I think it's, in the context of this, I think it's good to remember, okay, well, what was the EHRC, how does it work, right?

Much like many of the things we were talking about, like the way the Home Office works, for example, the EHRC was a new labour organ of quite fine-grained governmental control, where the theory of its creation was, again, whether or not it was created cynically, right? The theory of its creation was, we say, well, we new labour are going to build these instruments

to interfere with people's lives to make them, as far as we're concerned, better. Yeah, so the idea is that the EHRC can't pass laws, right? But there's supposed to be an independent body from all governments that issues interpretations of the laws and makes recommendations, and in particular, holds the government to account on its promises to do with human rights law.

Yeah, it's sort of like a regulatory body, but not really. It's a bit like off-gem, or like off-com, it's off-gender. And the thing is, right? Kind of like the BBC, in a way. And much like the sort of directors of the BBC, the commissioners at the EHRC are political appointees, so they would be appointed by, yes, exactly, in the case of the current director, Lord Faulkner,

she was appointed by Liz Truss when she was Women's Inequalities Minister. And the king is, of course, this depends, and I think it depends on a very strange article of new labor faith, the kind of almost prefigured the Obama-style faith of, well, we don't have to worry because demography means that we can build all of these fine-grained instruments of government control,

and we can be pretty sure that we or someone similar to us is always going to be in charge of that. Yeah, politics is over, and it's always going to be good, and so therefore, we can just, you know, make the Making Things Good department and assume that it's going to use its power wisely because everything's going to be fine. My copy of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History

and Going Time to Design an Institution. Well, I mean, on paper, it sounds like a good idea, right? It's like, well, we'll have an independent body who hold the government to account because of human rights. Like, I can understand how someone would think that's a good idea. I mean, trans people are not the first people that it's just decided to fucking shaft.

I think the GRT community has been feeling their wrath for a while as have disabled people, and like fucking everybody, to be honest. Also, it's not to say either that when New Labour created this, that they were great and they were going to do good things with it. It's just, I think, they didn't anticipate that because it is... So, because all of the things that New Labour built with a view to sort of technocratic manage, fine-grained management of society are,

which is, again, a kind of political management, right? Are easily taken over by non-technocratic political managers. Oh, no. But that's the thing we didn't want to happen. Yeah. It's where basically what's happened is, you know, this government has allowed... As basically, well, look, we're going to allow the edit... We think it's good that like all sort of, not just cultural policy, but like, say, health policy and stuff,

because we have this one particular view of the world, we are going to allow more or less spiked to run it all. Yeah. I mean, also, something that's been not surprising, but certainly disheartening to see, is the degree to which the government have just gone, yeah, and it's good, actually. I mean, I don't want to use the word gaslighting, but that kind of is what Kenny Badenock did

when she got up in the comments and was just like, yeah, it's been disgusting to see all these like false and divisive claims made by vice. And it's like, which claims exactly are false here? Because like, okay, I guess you could claim, actually, the staff who resigned, that never happened. It's not true. Vice just made it up. Okay, yeah. But we've fucking seen the screenshots of the Baroness's emails to transphobic hate groups.

Like, we know that she's been using her parliamentary email address to do this. Have you considered that you're insane? Quite insane. Oh, we're all insane. More than most people, actually. I checked. I fucking checked. I paid to check. That's where you could ask. And that's like where I think it's, you can ask like, okay, well, what does, what do these, right, these, these concepts that were originally conceived of as,

as non political equality, human rights, these concepts that are being trotted out as non political, but are nakedly political, like causing division. I think it's, it's a way that once you sort of strip back the, all of the ideological sort of window dressing surrounding it, it's basically just a way of saying, ah, the, the, that new labor created the good things for being good commission. And then, uh, Kemi Badenok says,

you were saying the good things for being good commission is bad because divisions is just things that are not supportive of us, not with us. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like, and, and, yeah. In the same way that you would use like reopening old wounds for like a historical sex, or opening up new pork markets. Very, very bad. I mean, this is a classic move that's, that's been done for like,

probably like almost half a century. People did it to Kwame Turei when they were just like, oh, you're causing division. And he was like, I'm not, I'm drawing attention to divisions that already exist. In this case, like Kemi Badenok's just been like, ah, fuck the haters. You guys are all just haters.

You're being abusive online. When actually what people are doing is drawing attention to very obvious corruption in an equality in human rights body. And there's now calls for the EHRC to, to be downgraded, uh, at the UN. And, and that submission has been made. So we'll see whether that goes anywhere. But Abby, it's only naked corruption if you can remember things, or if you have object permanence.

Whereas everyone in the British establishment and media has been hit on the head with a big hammer repeatedly every day since birth. Yeah. And, and that hammer was originally designed by new labor to hit eight instead. Now it's just a dream of no ape going unconcussed, but he didn't imagine this hammer falling into the wrong and I mean, I think also on a more serious note, like I think there is a very real degree in this country to which harm to trans people is not seen as real. It's like, no, it doesn't, it doesn't matter.

Like it doesn't matter if you take trans people's rights away because I'm like, fuck him. And something that's like obvious, but perhaps worth drawing attention to is that, uh, every MP, every member of the House of Lords, every board member of the EHRC and every judge in this country ever is cisgender. There has never been a trans person in any of these positions of power. We've never been allowed to write or interpret any of these laws. And so this is what happens.

And even then, right, if the, if, if let's say, right, the submission to the UN goes ahead, the EHRC is stripped of its recognition, say, as a equality in human rights, divining body, then we know the playbook of the sort of British establishment, which is to say, they're anti-British. Yeah, exactly. Of course they were. Exactly. And more and more, this is happening that like people outside Britain and noticing

how shit we are and like all of the fucking awful things that we're doing, and even just observing it to themselves or each other, like the New York Times has done a couple of times, is enough to like inspire this like a bit of wagon circling of like, no, actually, everything we've ever done is correct. And, uh, we, we refuse to be lectured about this by people who, uh, you know, have any perspective of this other than eating a lot of beef. And this incredible denial because, um, the Baroness wrote an article, I think it was in possibly the Guardian or the Observer, defending herself and saying, oh, there have been like

a minority of critics who've been very abusive towards me online because sticking up for trans people online is just equated with abuse now. But it's not a minority of people. It's every single major LGBT organization in the country and several human rights groups have absolutely condemned pretty much every decision she's made in the last like two months. There's like huge calls for her to resign now. And she's like, oh, it's just a minority of trolls online. It's not actually fucking everyone hates you.

The majority of trolls online are actually more concerned with bridge maintenance issues. And the Billy Goats gruff. Yeah. This is where we live and you are not ensuring the structural integrity. Billy Goats are trip, trap, trip trapping across my bridge and I need them to stop. Coming over here under bridges where we, the troll, now I've got nothing against Billy Goats in and of themselves, but why is it that we can't look after our own British trolls? What live under these British bridges? And we've got to have these Billy Goats coming over here where there is long.

That's right. This is another thing, right? Like just before we, I want, because I want to move over as well, like to think of, to think of like the actual character of Baroness Faulkner herself, right? Where she is someone who I think has posted about, posted a thought about transphobia once. And now like, cannot, while getting involved in the EHRC, cannot stop breaking the, like, she's already won. Riley's law.

There's one law that she's not broken. Strikes again. There is, like, the one, the guiding principle. She also did an interview which said, I don't know what transphobia is. I don't even know what that means. And it's like, do you not think you should? Did you find out? Do you think maybe you should?

Like, could you not work out based on the word? Could you guess? Actually, I can't. Oh, sorry. I thought everyone was talking about transphobia. I thought it was weird. I wasn't in DFT, to be honest. Yeah, no.

So, but that basically like Faulkner, while she was in charge of the EHRC, would like break the rules of the EHRC to be extra transphobic, thereby jeopardizing elements of the transphobia mission. I mean, that's, that's a classic of the genre. Yeah, that's like, being, being too spiteful for your own, like, a program of spite is not just in relation to transphobia, but any number of things. It's like a classic British government mode. Shaking hands, me, between Baroness Faulkner and JK Rowling, and Graham Minahan.

Being so transphobic that you tank your career. Well, she's not tanked her career. She's still in post. She is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in a tactical sense. My wife. Yes, that was exactly what I had. My wife. That's right.

And so, like, all of these leaks, it's like, look, if you're the government, right, putting unburnt witch 1963 XX in charge of the EHRC, right, that would be enough to, like, carry out what is essentially, as we talked about before, an elite driven mission of demonizing trans people denying them access to all of this. Again, it's worth drawing attention about the EHRC cannot change the law. They can issue interpretations of the law. But as we've seen with Texas only a few days ago, that's enough to, like, really cause a major pain in the arse and, like, not just pain in the arse.

That's potentially enough to cost some people their life. Yeah. And again, it's to do with another one of those words that seems neutral or positive, safeguarding. Yeah. Right. They're really doing a stochastic terrorism is the technical term. And as was the Trojan horse thing was about safeguarding.

Again, a perennial sort of concern, a perennial stalking horse. It's one of the... Stalking Trojan horse. One of the things that actually, like, these very, and I want to shift over to the US now, right, but even in the UK to a slightly lesser extent, but in the US to a much greater extent, it doesn't remind me of essentially, again, a ruling class movement that is that is a very sort of small and elite and concerned with things like propriety or whatever, which it sort of seems to be in the UK.

But in the US, it seems to be much closer to a satanic panic. Yeah. Well, this is the thing, right? We've talked before about, in particular with Patrick Wyman about, like, local elites in relation to US politics. And just by virtue of geography, the US has a lot more scope to be a local elite than the UK does. We don't have, you know, like 50 states worth of, like, legislators to fill. And I mean, I think that's the perfect position.

If you want to be a crank, if you want to be a transo, if you want to engage in any of these other sort of, like, flights of whimsy, being a local elite is a fantastic position because you'd have to do less work than if you're in central government. You have more time and you have more need to, like, put your stamp on things and be remembered. And so, consequently, like, that's why I think you see a lot of, like, local councillors in the UK do it. But we don't have 100,000 local councillors, whereas the US kind of does. And they also have an existing base for them to play to of the evangelical right.

And that's very useful. That's not underestimate their influence in this as well. Well, I think it's because this is where I see kind of the two different, the two different motive powers behind it. We're in the UK. It's an elite who have no allegiance to any particular political party who would just have a sense of sort of cultural solidarity with one another. But, like, Faulkner was a Lib Dem here, for example.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, basically, British elite transphobia is, like, a lot of people who all went to school together and who all go to dinner parties together and are across, you know, all three major parties, just essentially looking at what they imagine a trans person to be and just going, like, ugh, and then just legislating off of that. Well, I mean, there is a class in their minds. There is a class of people that they are defending on a basis for solidarity. In their minds, it's the defense of cisgender women, or as they call them, women.

Women and girls. Many of whom are... Women and girls. Many of whom are... Women and girls. Many of whom are themselves. Evening women and girls. But many of whom are, like, themselves or their peers.

We're in the US. It takes on a much more... And again, I think it's what I find very sort of notable about it, right? Is that it's the same political constituency that's pushing transphobia that was also... It's the same people who were against, like, ending segregation in the 1960s. And it's the... Sure. What I find sort of...

So I take the argument that what the evangelical right in the US hates is secularism. Like, no, that's not true. It's actually... They were driven crazy by sort of segregation ending. And everything is sort of an outpouring of expressing... Of wanting to sort of damage the society that ended segregation. Yeah, sort of reflected white supremacy, sure. Yeah, I mean, that's probably like another topic for another time,

to go into depth on the evangelical right. Certainly not my area of expertise. But I agree with you, Alice, that a lot of the UK-based transphobia is just people going, which is also why there's nothing that infuriates them more than like being hot. They hate that. They hate that. It's an act of resistance. It is.

It is. Many of them are doing acts of resistance by not themselves being hot. And so one of the other things I sort of wanted to draw the comparison between, right, is we've talked about... That's secret. That's just for us. No, you don't get to know what that is. We've talked about understanding sort of these sort of political parties,

these political movements as all part of the same ruling class movement, right? And understanding sort of how... And that when I look in the States, right, one of the things I see, like it's coming from a different kind of ruling class movement to a Christian nationalism, is in fact that the mechanisms by which sort of the new transphobic orders in the States are to be enforced functions quite a bit like Prevent did here, where if you work in any kind of... Basically, where in the UK, Prevent turned everybody who worked in a public institution into an Islam police officer, more or less.

Sir, where were you going, sir and madam? You got a license for that problem. Yeah, that's right. Oh, I only see on this license, you only license for four pillars. Wait, three pillars, however... Minus one. Just forget how many pillars there are in the five pillars of Islam. B-boying, MCing.

Fundamentals. You psyched me out so badly that much like the island flag and the Côte d'Ivoire flag, despite being a Muslim, I'm still going to have to check. Yes, it is the thank God I'm not... I don't have a brain disease. I do remember the number five, correct? But the... Right, but that you turned into a cop there.

What we've done essentially in the US is what the transphobic movement in the UK has been dreaming of for a while. They've turned every public employee into a bathroom cop and have created a snitching. Well, like there's this provision of mandatory reporting, which is pretty common internationally, where if you're in a position where you deal with vulnerable people, typically children, not exclusively, and you become aware of something which the government deems to be suspicious or dangerous or like threatening, you have a legal obligation to report that to the proper authorities.

And what this is doing is what we're talking about specifically is the governor of Texas writing a letter to the attorney general of Texas. This is not binding, but it does sort of make policy in terms of the enforcement of it, saying, okay, we will now add any form of like gender transition in children to this list of things which you are obligated to report to Child Protective Services. Which is so wild to me because like, there are some people out there who will be like, oh, like children shouldn't transition, there's no such thing as a trans child. My counter-argument to that is two words. And those two words are Kim, motherfucking Petrus.

Like the fact that we don't have proper trans healthcare for trans kids in this country, like we're never going to win Eurovision if we don't catch up, like Germany has humiliated us with Kim Petrus. And now like, we could have, if we did this right, we could have thousands of Kim Petrus, tens of Kim Petrus in every house in this country. We cannot allow a Kim Petrus cap. We will, by law, have a Kim Petrus in every house. God, I hope so. As I understand it, they cited Tavistock, correct?

Well, they cited Tavistock version one, which was since like retracted. Which you're not supposed to do, you can't really do that. I think it's sort of, it's one of these things. That's my like most, my most lib thing is like, oh, in law school, you'd get marked down for that because that's not a valid source. Listeners, we are referring to Bellevue Tavistock version one, the legal case that was overturned, not Tavistock with clinic. And I mean, I think it's partly, it shows that, yeah, the people in power are going to do what

they want, but also that these ruling class movements, well, I think what I was talking about earlier, right, they draw from different sources of political power. They do talk to one another and influence one another. Yeah. And there have been decisions in the U.S. that have cited J.K. Rowling. People versus Harry Potter. They love that book. There's a flying car that got stuck in a tree. And that's why you can't fly a car into a tree in America.

She does, evidently, she writes compelling fiction. I actually identify as a flying car stuck in a tree. Oh my goodness. Welcome to Trigonometry. Oh, well, the Trigonometry boys were on it today, baby. No, right. But I mean, I think like, no, we're not discussing. I wanted to, the last thing I want to talk about, right, is I want to sort of bring this together sort of philosophically, right, thinking about ideas and words, what they mean, how we use them. And these, we can sort of add, I think, safeguarding equality, human rights,

division, these kinds of things, right? It is, I think it's worth, well, it may seem obvious. I think it's worth remembering and thinking about the fact that they are fundamentally normative, right? They all refer to some ideal, some ideal state inside the person's head. You'll never get away from, you'll never techn, you'll never technocracy yourself away from the fundamentally politically charged nature of like something that as what is supposed to seem, that's made to seem as innocuous as the concept of safeguarding. Well, I'm not going to nail myself down to a particular theory of linguistic meaning on my surprise on this. Now, I have this beetle in this box.

Fuck to you. But yeah, you know, we're all wearing our berries. We're chain smoking our cigarettes. We're signing letters to the government saying that you should be allowed to have sex with children. We are not doing that. We are not doing that. We are not doing that. Well, leave us, leave us who you are doing that. We're signing the letters, but only as a joke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The meaning of the words is defined by, you know, power and etc, etc, etc. And like power is a technology of subjection, Foucault and so on and so on. A man who really thought it was a good idea to have sex with children, but that's another matter. So I think it's... Maybe you should be putting the panopticon, bitch.

Why does everything resemble the prisoner? I don't know, maybe because she should be in one. You mean to tell me there's a little boy looking at me from... Are you suggesting that like most of Foucault's like writing was a kind of Havana syndrome of philosophy? Yeah, sort of like internalized guilt and cope, maybe. It is worth bearing in mind that like, still trans people, we haven't been allowed to set any of these laws. And we don't even get invited to speak to people about them. Like more... Because we're extremists and trolls. Yeah, you've had more trans people in this studio than there have been in the House of Commons.

And Alice still hasn't even been. Yeah. That's right, that's right. Alice is just like a face on the screen. More trans people in the studio right now. Yeah, than have been in the House of Commons. And so you can see them playing with their words, right? But what this all masks is, I think, fundamentally, whether it's the kind of nice genteel murderousness or the sort of roll-cold murderousness of the US, it masks a fundamental murderousness. Yeah. And I think also returning to your theme of this season, which is that Britain is not a real country, I think that it belies this tendency in both transphobia and conservativism,

which is why they go so well together, to just be deliberately ignorant of things, to refuse to know things. And in particular, there's a YouTuber called Ian Danskin, who runs innuendo studios, who's also hit upon this very good bit of political theory, where he says that conservativism is essentially about denying the contents of your own beliefs. And I think I see a lot of that reflected in British transphobia, in particular, like, no, we don't hate trans people. Obviously, the EHRC is here to protect everyone's interest, including other trans people. We just think that you should like, fuck off and go away. And we don't see any problem in the fact that none of you have

ever been allowed to write any of these rules that we're using against you. I think that is a good place as any to take the parachute attachments off of our BTGs and roll back into the grud. God damn it. Adam and Putin is dropping the ver-de-ver into the Equality Human Rights Commission. There's nothing further to say except President Putin, my gender yearns for freedom. Yeah, leave the Ukrainians alone. Liberate us. All right, all right. Thank you very much for listening. And there's going to be a part two

of this episode coming out in a couple of days where I read a little book. No one else has read. And no one else has ever read. I've finished kumad. And we may bring in, let's just say, the full cast of a little podcast about what to do with James Bond to finish that with us. So don't forget to check that out on the Patreon for James A.Casters. $5 a month. Maybe that'll be a lot. Maybe it'll be a little.

Find out next week. We've read a book. Let's crack on. All right, bye. Bye.