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got obsessed with it. So I'm going to talk about that and just the history of April Fool's Day and how it became April Fool's Day, in particular because originally, as I said, it started as the Syrian New Year, and many researchers consider it the oldest recorded holiday in the history of the Near East. The Syrian calendar is also considered one of the last remaining ancient calendars that

is still celebrated. Up until now, he had uns no relation, but he's a doctor in archaeology in Ancient Languages at the University of Damascus. He said that the celebrations of the New year coincided with the celebrations of the arrival of spring, and they began the day of the vernal equinox, and they continued until the first of April, a Syrian

New Year's day. This day is associated with the celebration of the end of the reigning season and the start of fertility and the growth of crops and fruits, as the celebrations were accompanied with religious rituals in which offerings were made. Unis also noted that the Syrian calendar is related to Ishtad, who is the first mother goddess, the goddess of life, the morning and evening star. At the same time, the ancient texts describe Ashtar as in her

mouth lies the secrets of life. The word astar comes from the Akkadian language. She is known as Anana or Nana in Sumerian. And she was the first deity for which we have written evidence of, as well as the world's first goddess of love and war. And she had a lover named Tammuz in ancient Mesopotamia, which roughly corresponds to modern Iraq parts of Iran, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkey.

Love was a powerful force capable of upending earthly order and producing sharp changes in status and Ashtar definitely deserves an episode all for herself. She's completely fascinating and needs more than just a blurb. But I had to at least mention her, and maybe one day I'll do an episode about her. But that's a Shtar for you for now. There are other researchers, though, that have criticized the validity

of April first as the Syrian New Year. Because of this, the origin of the Syrian New Year's a key to celebration aki Tu. It has sparked some controversy, with debates fueled by history and religion. The validity of the ritual is disputed because it is not widely celebrated locally and its relevance is not generally accepted by academia. Some would argue that the celebration of Syrian New Year is useless.

Among them is Bashar Khalif, who is a history researcher specializing in the Mashrich Calif says the celebrating a key to quote stems from nostalgia and an attempt to escape the present. So what are the origins of a key to A key to marks the Assyrian and Babylonian New Year, and it is observed the first of April and last twelve days. The Akkadians and Chaldeans also have celebrated the holiday. Doctor Joseph is a tune fun fact. Zetun means olive,

what a cute name. Doctor Joseph Zetun is an expert in Syrian history, and he is one of the historians who considers ake to quote the oldest recorded holiday in the history of the Near East. The earliest reference to this holiday dates back to twenty five hundred BC in er U are Er was an important Sumerian city state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern Tel l Moreyed and South Irax dir Klar Governorate. According to Syrian researchers, the Akitu holiday was quote held for the

Sumerian moon god Nana. For the Babylonians, it chronicled the god Marduk's victory over the goddess Timayat. During the Babylonian era. The first four days were traditionally reserved for religious rituals. Babylonians used to offer prayers and sacrifices and recite the anuma Alish, which is the Babylonian epic of creation. The

remaining days would include social and political rituals. According to the researcher Hazad and Majidi, the Sumerians observed this holiday on March twenty first of every year, and this marked the start of the Sumerian New Year. On the other hand, Semitic peoples like the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, they celebrate a key to on April first. What is this word a key to? I asked the same thing. I asked the mom the same thing, because I'm still a child who

thinks my mom knows everything, but she doesn't. She doesn't know what that means. She's ever even heard the word, and she didn't know the origin of a ke to. And apparently there's no consensus among historians on the exact meaning of this word. However, researcher On Majdi details his theory in the books Summer Corpus and Prehistoric Religions and Beliefs. According to m. Majidi, the word a key to is the name of the feast and the place where celebrations

were held. The word appeared in late Sumerian texts as a key t. The word is then believed to be of Sumerian origin. The sign ah means rain, Ki means earth, and t is a verb meaning to draw near. Thus it roughly translates to drawing water closer to the earth. Very poetic, according to jam M Shahin, numerous ancient scriptures mentioned the same aki t. For instance, the holiday bears the name Akitu in Aramaic, Akiti sunonym in Sumerian, Visha,

Deshata in Akkadian, and Rabi Nissan in Assyrian. Nissan, by the way, is April in Arabic. The shah Deshaeta and Krabi Nissan are often used in the Levante to mean head of the year and first of April, respectively. On the other hand, doctor Mahmud Hossein and Amen wrote that the celebrations were held at a specific location known as the House of Celebrations or Akitu, which was outside the city, so this makes a k to a location as well well a sacred location. In ancient beliefs, the Akitu house

refers to the gods dwelling on earth. The purpose of having a celebratory feast is to celebrate the gods choosing to temporarily reside in this city, and the purpose of this house is to guard and cherish that moment forever. And Even though now the name Nissan is used for what we know as the month of April, the month of Nissan used to be around the time of the vernal equinox, which starts around March twenty first. The vernal equinox is still celebrated throughout Greater Iran as Nurus, which

means new Day on March twenty first. However, in ancient Assyrian, Akkadian and Babylonian traditions, the spring festival was celebrated in the first days of the month known as Nissan, and the calendar adopted by ancient Assyrians had the month Nissan at the beginning of the calendar year, which lends to the term Kabi Nissan or the first of Nissan. So let's talk about the Syrian calendar and April Fool's Day

what we all came here for. By the fact, about me, my birthday is today, April fools Day.

There is one particularly traumatic memory I have from middle school where I was given a box of chocolates and the joke was that the chocolates tasted like shit. And I know this because I tasted a chocolate and then I immediately spit it out. And to this day, I don't know what that chocolate was made out of, and I hope I never find out, But anyway, it's just a weird ass birthday to have you know what else is weird? Weird ass ads, listen and we are back. Okay.

Doctor ze Tune believes it is more accurate to call the calendar that starts at April first as a Syrian calendar rather than Assyrian, since all in Syria and Mesopotamia adopted it. He also thinks that the ancient Syrian calendar begins on the first of April, and that quote This calendar was present and endured in multiple Syrian civilizations, including the kingdoms of Ugadit, Elba, Mari, Palmyra, and Damascus until

the early twentieth century. Syrians traditionally began their year in April first, but transitioned to the Western calendar during the period of the French mandate, so it actually wasn't even that long ago that April first marked the beginning of the new year in Syria. The rituals of Assyrian New Year are linked to April Fools. There are rituals aimed at quote humbling the king, which would start from the

fifth day of the celebrations. Lying was also a big part of the celebrations, as the king would abdicate his throne in favor of a criminal sentenced to death. That part is crazy to me. Enslaved people also became masters, and people disguise themselves in costumes and masks to hide their identities until they awoke from the lie the next morning. So the whole day would be a farce essentially, and you would all knowingly live a lie until the next

day everything is suddenly backed normal again. Hannasumi, head of the Syriac Cultural Association in Syria, said, after the common folk occupies the king's throne, he blends in with the people incognito. Chaos ensues in Babylon and on the first of April, the king is found and joy prevails, and that is the origin of April Fool's Day. The king did not truly disappear, It was but a charade. There's also another reason the first of April is associated with

an April fool, doctor Shaheen writes. Until fifteen sixty four AD, the Syrian calendar was adopted in most countries. In France, celebrations started on March twenty first and ended on April first, just as the Assyrians and Babylonians did thousands of years ago. After King Charles the ninth adopted the new Gregorian calendar, celebrations began on December twenty fifth and ended January first, which we now all know is the beginning of the

new year. However, some of the publics still continued to celebrate on April first, and the people who still held onto this tradition became the target of mockery by the nobility for still believing in April Fool's Day. Other historians speculate that April fools Day dates back to fifteen eighty two, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in fifteen six.

In the Julian calendar, as well as the Syrian calendar and also the Hindu calendar, the new year began with the Spring equinox on April first, but people were slow to get the news or they failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January first. Those who continue to celebrate the new year during the last week of March through April first became the butt

of jokes and hoaxes, and were called April Fools. These pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as april fish in French, which is possan di'avril. I can't say that correctly, and I can't even attempt to do a French accent. But it's the april fish you refer to as an april fish and symbolizing a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person. So it's kind of like an elevated kick me sign

on your back. Interestingly enough, fish are also considered a lucky symbol in many areas of the world, and are also important to many New Year's traditions. There was an opinion piece for a few years ago about the marginalization of the holiday of Akitu as part of a quote systemic battle against ancient civilizations. Doctor Shaheen noted that this

prohibition has continued until recently. Different regimes and religious figures prohibited it because it is a pagan feast and has rituals, prayers, and texts that offend the followers of the monotheistic religions. He added that ak To is witnessing a renaissance among the Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac communities abroad, particularly as a result of religious freedom. He asks will Akitu return or is it merely a trend that will fade away once again.

Many cultures still recognize the significance of April first, including the Assyrians. Despite being scattered across the world, Assyrians preserve their history and heritage through holidays like Assyrian New Year on April first, Assyrian New Year is the spring festival among the indigenous Assyrians of non northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran. Celebrations involve parades and parties, food, music,

and dancing. Some Assyrians wear traditional costumes, are dressed like Assyrian royalty, and dance for hours. Celebrations take place throughout Assyria and other areas in the Middle East, along with some in the United States, Europe, and Australia among the Assyrian diaspora communities. The modern observance of aki To began

in the nineteen sixties during the Assyrian intellectual Renaissance. However, due to political oppression, the celebrations were largely private until the nineteen nineties, but the event is still largely celebrated by Assyrians residing in Syria. Although the Syrian government does not acknowledge the festival at all, Assyrians still continue with the celebration. In two thousand and two, Assyrians and Syria celebrated the event with a mass wedding of sixteen couples

and over twenty five thousand attendees. After the formation of Turkey, Kabi Nissan, along with no Ruz, were banned from public celebration. Assyrians and Turkey were first allowed to publicly celebrate Kabi Nissan in two thousand and five after organizers received permission from the government to stage the event and light of

democratic reforms adopted in support of Turkey's EU membership. Bid Around five thousand people, including large groups of visiting ethnic Assyrians from Europe, Syria and Iraq took part in the Kabi Nissan celebrations in Turkey. One of the largest Assyrian New Year celebrations took place in Iraq in two thousand and eight. Public celebrations were not allowed by Saddam Hussein's

regime prior to the start of the Iraq War. The event was organized by the Assyrian Democratic Movement ZOA and between forty five thousand and sixty five thousand people took part in the parade. In two thousand and four, George Ridanovich of the California State Assembly recognized the Assyrian New Year in a extended his wishes to the Assyrian community in California. This was later followed by a letter from our old California governor, Terminator Arnold to the Assyrian community

in California, congratulating them on the annual celebration. I just thought that was pretty interesting because it is a very modern resurgence and like renaissance of this day. So fun facts and in the United States, almost four million Americans can trace their roots back to an Arab country located in the Middle East or North Africa. And this is according to the Arab American Institute. Each year, many school districts, cities,

and states observe Arab American Heritage Month in April. It's meant to honor the historic achievements and cultural contributions of Arab Americans throughout the nation. On April first, twenty twenty two, April was officially designated as National Arab American Heritage Month

by the federal government. The movement for this recognition was first started in nineteen teen eighty nine, when Congress declared October twenty fifth as a day to honor Arab American Heritage and called it National Arab American Day, but the Arab American community pushed for further recognition. In twenty seventeen, a media outlet called Arab America, as well as a nonprofit Arab America Foundation, launched an initiative that called all

lawmakers to make April National Arab American Heritage Month. Arab America said that April was chosen because it did not conflict with other observances that highlight marginalized communities, and that the month symbolizes hope, growth and new beginnings. And yeah, sure that can be true with spring starting and flowers blooming and so on, but I think there might be

a little more symbolism there as well. Personally, I think all national holidays are kind of useless unless you get like a day off from work, and giving a marginalized community a day or a month is a rather shallow

and also useless acknowledgement of that community. I mean, Columbus also has a day himself, and even though many states now observe it as Indigenous People's Day, sixteen states as well as the territory of American Samoa still observe the second Monday in October as the official public holiday exclusively called Columbus Day. All this is to say that I would rather lawmakers actually advocate for marginalized communities instead of just tossing them a day or a few weeks where

suddenly they exist. It is still kind of cute to me that Arab American Heritage Month is starting today in April because of all the symbolism. Let's take our second break. I don't have a clever segue. Oh well, and we are back.

of the cult of Sabelle. It involved people dressing up in disguises and mocking fellow citizens and even magistrates, and it was said to be inspired by the Egyptian legend of Isis, Osiris and Seth. There's also speculation that April Fool's Day was tied directly to the vernal equinox or the first day of spring in the Northern hemisphere, and this is where Mother Nature fooled people with changing, unpredictable weather.

complete with military strategy and historical lore. Then there's the Els and Fernat's tradition, which is reportedly more than two hundred years old and involves a mock military style takeover of the town where the new rulers get to make up strange laws that others have to abide by, and if they don't, they get fined and the money goes

to charity. When I was reading this earlier, I was like, oh, this is the purge, but then it ends up money goes to charity and it's like, oh, it's nice, but so for those cultures, the day to watch out for is December twenty eighth. In Brazil, however, April first is still the prank day of choice, and they cut straight to the chase by congate Dia das Mantidas, or the Day of Lies. Similarly to Syria, Iran has one of the oldest April Fool's traditions with the observance of Sista Badud,

which also has a prank playing element. It is celebrated on the thirteenth day of the Persian New Year, on April first or April second. SiZ Da Badad, which is also said to have been celebrated as far back as the fifth century BC, is translated as quote getting rid of thirteen, so it has an appropriately superstitious air. It's also considered a spring festival, which ties into other April Fool's predecessors, like the ancient Roman celebration of Hilaria. April

Fool's Day spread throughout Britain during the eighteenth century. In Scotland, the tradition became a two day event, starting with quote hunting the gouk that's a word gowk gouk is a term for a type of bird, but it's also slang for a fool on this day pranking. Scot's send unsuspecting Gouq's the people, not the birds on fool's errands just to waste their time, And if you don't get gouchd, there's always an opportunity for humiliation the very next day,

which is Tallly Day. Tallly Day is for largely harmless Darriere related pranks aka pranks involving your butt, such as pinning fake tales on someone or sticking Kickney signs on them. April first in Poland goes about it the same as any other pro April Fool's place. It's called Prima aprilis. There is a funny parting phrase for prankers, though that I thought was worth mentioning, which is Prima aprilis April Fool's Day, be careful, you can be wrong, which is

truly like advice to take throughout the entire year. But what about what we've come to know as the typical April Fool's Day pranks. It's not especially surprising that capitalism took like a fun little day like April Fool's Day and ran with it because, as we know, we live in hell. But in modern times, people have gone to

great lengths to create elaborate April fools Day hoaxes. Newspapers, radio and TV stations, and websites have participated in the April First tradition of reporting outrageous fictional claims that have fooled their audiences. A few examples. In nineteen fifty seven, the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees.

In nineteen eighty five, Sports Illustrated writer George Plimpton tricked many readers when he ran a made up article about a rookie picture named Sid Finch who could throw a fastball over one hundred and sixty eight miles per hour. In nineteen ninety two, National Public Radio ran a spot with former President Richard Nixon saying that he was running for president again, Only it was an actor, not Nixon, and this segment was all in April Fool's Day prank

that caught the country by surprise. In nineteen ninety six, Taco Bell duped people when it announced that it agreed to purchase Philadelphia's Liberty Bell and intended to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. In nineteen ninety eight, after Burger King advertised a quote left handed whopper, scores of clueless customers requested this fake sandwich and then Google also notoriously hosts an annual April fools Day prank that has included everything from a telepathic search to the ability to play

pac Man on Google Maps. This is a sentence that made me laugh from History dot Com. For the average trickster, there is always the classic April fools Day prank of covering the toilet seat with plastic wrap or swapping the contents of sugar and salt containers. I'm sorry I had to mention that, because like the sugar and salt is very innocent, But I for one have never heard of covering the toilet and plastic wrap. That seems cruel and crazy in History dot com.

I'm doing something now for you. Anyway, that's it.

head before we started this. But yeah, I'm here today with John Jahad and Rosa to talk about Yeah, there's slate movement thing I don't know called shift Change and why they're running, how they met, et cetera, et cetera, and yeah, some other stuff about the union. So all three of you, welcome to the show.

And then we also have Michigan Nurses Association and the DC Nurses Association and our group shift Change is like a caucus, which is like whenever workers instead of a union get together because they want to change how the

union works. And we're running what's something called a slate where we have to have groups of people running together for specific union offices, and so we have a lot of people running not just US three or US four for the Council presidents, but we also have Canadas running for the Board of Vice presidents and also delegates for our convention. And hopefully that's a good basis for this starting off the conversation.

especially when it came to organizing for Palestine. So I joined Resita and John and others and Nurses for Palestine chat group and that group is active in highlighting the suffering of the Palestinian people and the politics behind it and how nurses can be in the front lines not only to take care of patients, but also for other

healthcare workers around the world. And that's a huge part of this because this genocide that's going on has claimed the lives of so many innocent civilians as well as physicians and nurses and other healthcare workers, medics, etc. From that big group, or almost you can call it national. There are smaller chapters now in different cities. There's healthcare Workers for Palestine twin cities where I am from, and Chicago and San Francisco, and there's in Seattle and Boston.

There's a lot of movement among healthcare workers where they focus their attention that hospitals, health care facilities, healthcare professionals are not a target during a military conflict and all the war crimes that have been committed need to be

answered for. So from that we kind of sprouted a smaller group, and with the election coming up for the National Nurses United, we thought we could take that more of a like a grassroots movement to make a bigger change, because we believe, you know, all these smaller changes in the base should lead to a bigger change at the top, and unions are the perfect example where we can affect change and you know, have the politicians and all the people up in the highest echelon powers if you will

listen and do what actually the base needs. And you know, there's no better way of doing it but having your own union representing what the nurses in the union want and their policies and statements should reflect what the nurses need, and that's what we're here, and that's why we call ourselves Shift Change.

know what's going on in Palestine in particular. And our union just adopted BDS language within the last year, the California nurs Association National Nurses Organizing Committee, and that took an extraordinary amount of pressure from rank and file nurses to get the leadership to agree that this was an important stance. We noticed that unions had just gone through democratic reform processes who have been taken over by rank

and file workers. UA with Sean Fayn had adopted much more like much quickly, much more quickly resolutions in favor of peace and ceasefire. And you know, as workers were

like against war of all kinds. And but in particular this is like a particularly egregious situation where nurses have borne the brunts of like all the healthcare workers who are being targeted specifically, and palisfied in Gaza, the majority of those of those healthcare workers are nurses, so we believe there's a direct connection between you know, our work here and the support of those nurses over there. And I guess then going from that to leaning towards how

our building a democratic rank and file union. Not only will it enact these be a way for us to enact the kind of positive policy changes we want, but it'll build a stronger union for everybody that we can fight the bosses at the bedside making sure that our patients are taking care of our communities. So I'll let it.

and I thought it was pretty interesting. I thought, you know, here are some very motivated union members who see that there's something that needs to change within our union, which is part of what we do as organizers. We see that there may be something that needs to change even within our own union, and we as rank and file, or we as union members should be able to have that voice to change it. And what I was seeing

was that their voice was being really suppressed. Instead of saying, hey, how can we move towards what you're asking and really come to a place where we can understand where you're coming from. Instead it was no We're not going to listen to their voices. We're not going to you know, even engage with this group. They're this rogue group out there that's like, you know, causing all this ruckus, which makes me, you know, I'm somebody who loves and gravitates towards ruckus.

an election. And even though I'm a member, an active member, I serve on some committees with M and A, and recently I joined the Government Affairs Committee. You know, having been really engaged in the politics of the union until a new slate another troublemakers, if you will, another group of troublemakers, you know, who call themselves Nurse Nurses Forward. They ran against the current board and actually they won. They won a landslide last November, and that was a

huge change and an inspiration for me. Really rank and file nurses and they're all, you know, nurses working the on the floors, and I know some of them personally, and I trusted these guys knew what they're talking about, and they they were running on a platform that made sense where all the rank and file nurses have a say and they are well informed because there's a lot of stuff that goes behind doors that nurses are not brevy to and that, you know, makes things sound a

little shady sometimes where you know, unions are, say, endorsing a politician and this politician kind of drops the ball or does something that's not in the interest of the union, and yet they're still supporting them. We need to know why and how that came to be. So that kind of gave me an inspiration and the moment John came and recruited me, if you will, and I thought, sure, you know, if we if we can do affects some change in the local level, I think it's time to

change at the national level. So we're hoping for the best here and we're trying to do our best to get a good result.

members were just like finding out about afterwards. Yeah, and you know, I don't know, I think like that's on a kind of basic I mean, there's obviously a political level to it, but on just the sort of basic what is a union level, you would think that the union wouldn't be doing that, and yet Comma, I was just.

Right it's the big Boss, as we call it. You know, we march on the Boss, or you know, we have you know, rallies around it, or we do petitions, and you know, we're constantly fighting this big entity of the hospital industry, which oftentimes keeps us in the dark about policies or about changes that they're making or you know, various things, and I can't help but to see the parallels between our fight with the hospital industry and then comes our.

I know, it's hard, Like it's a shocking idea that nurses might know a thing or two and the idea that we that they have to come up and focus group amongst themselves to tell us what our values are.

core thing. And I think this is what's so important about union organizing in particular, is that you can set aside disagreements on one thing and you focus on the thing that's the that's your can your shared material interest regardless because we all do the same kind of work. It's really important.

a nurse, and so that infuriated me. I felt really really betrayed by my union that we had just signed all these resolutions specifically talking about aggression, talking about aparthei, and yet I was being told that I could not speak up and then I was ghosted on a few times. I would start sending emails. I was like, hey, what's you know going on? How come I can't do this? And there would be no answer. Or I would say, hey, I want to do a vigil. Nope, you can't do

a vigil. Nope, there's no signs that you can use. Nope, nope, no. And so I just kept getting all these no answers, and a few of us got together, we got a petition going, and we sent it in. We're like, hey, look, these are all the reasons why we as nurses feel that we should be speaking out against what's happening right now.

my resignation to the Racial Social Justice Committee. I felt that it was an absolute dishonor for me to sit in that position and to be the face of a committee that says it stands for social justice and yet was putting up barriers for us to speak out as nurses.

the bedside bill. It was. It was adopted, was passed the House. Now in Minnesota we have all three branches basically in the hands of Democrats. It passed the House and the Senate, and yet the governor vetoed it. Why because there was pressure from corporate you know, the big wigs told him, if you do it, we're gonna pull some investment or something, or I don't know, maybe we won't have you on the board after you retire, something like that. So I don't know, but that kind of

triggered us. It was really stabbing the back, if you will. But it's still you know, the union itself could do better. It can be more sensitive to its members' needs and their demands. For example, we were trying to get a resolution or a statement it was back in October about a ceasefire here through the union, even though it's I would say, inconsequential for them to say, but they even refused to hear the suggestion or the movement to issue

a statement that was the old board. Towards the end of the of the reign of the old board, there was more effort. I think it was mid December and a week really watered down resolution was adopted calling few seas fire the new board team and the first or second meeting in January. In February there was a much more robust resolution that was adapted at a much higher you know, NAIs against versus yes versus names in that

there was no needs. Actually there were some abstentions like three out of fourteen, so you know there is a movement. There's a grassroots rank and file nurses who are pushing towards change the same thing. I'm also not only a nurse, but also a nursing faculty at Minnesota State University in Makato, and I belong to another union, the faculty Union. In the very beginning, there was just kind of deafening silence. Nobody wants to hear anything. It reminded me of the

period after nine to eleven. If you speak anything against the government or anything real critique what the government did or didn't do, you are on the other side. You know, remember that if you're not with us, you are against us argument, and it's the same thing.

different point of view. So, you know, from that sprouted this huge movement among nurses and healthcare professionals that we want this to go wider, even at the national level during the primaries, where a lot of organizing was happening for you know, uncommitted votes for the primaries for Joe Biden, and that made them feel uh, you know, the pressure and as you can see, the US vetoed a ceasefire resolution I think three times before, and yet this week

they allowed one to pass because there is a lot of political pressure because they are they are doing their own calculation, I understand, but it's still there is a grassroot movement that affects this change.

that they're not going to pass it. You know, our union, like my part of the union, California Association National Nurses Organizing Committee, this is redda's Part two was at one point powerful, like was so organized and so powerful that they forced the state of California, which is one of the largest economies in the world, to pass a ratio bill that was you know that the Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor, after what was passed that you know, those little nurses.

I can't believe we're letting them do this. You know, our union at one point was powerful enough to help end Arnold Schwarzenegger's political career. And so when we talk about getting things passed, it requires a lot of power, and a lot of people don't understand the power means

getting people together to commit to take collective action. That might mean occupying a capital, that might mean doing things that are a little bit outside the law right, but we understand that if we don't have the power, then none of these you know, ideal, idealistic things that we want to have see change in the world or happened in the world can happen. And we've seen when we're

talking about this idea. If you're either with it's against us or against us people who are advocating for building that power, and that power comes through defending our contracts, defending our coworkers to grieve inspits, making sure that we are taking aggressive like action when it comes to strikes, and getting a strong contract language. In the first place. People who are advocating for that are being labeled like

the enemy inside a union. It's very difficult when you put so much of your time and energy into union work, which anyone who's a committed unionist can tell you of all the countless amounts of their free time that they spend away from their family, away from their friends, away from their kids, doing the work of making sure that the union is strong. To be kind of accused of being not on the team right, or not being for everyone else, not being a team player, when you're always committed,

you know, to building the power of the team. I mean, this is why we're running is because those of us who are making the case that we need to be an organized union. We need a union full of people who know how to how to fight, how to push back, how to stand up for those of us who might

be weaker than others. To be labeled troublemakers or pains in the ads, or they even call us anti union or union busting, which is really just it hurts, right, It's very stressful, but it's worth it to us because our principles and our commitment to our coworkers and building a workplace that's a just place, a place that takes care of all the people in our communities, people who

would otherwise be denied the care that they deserve. We know that we can only do that by being organized, building relationships and taking action together as a union to fight. And we know what that looks like. We have members of Shift Change who have been there when they've been occupying capital buildings, running politicians out of office. I want our union to be I tell everybody this. I want our union to be strong and powerful, and I want it to be frightening to people who stand in the

way of nurses and our patients. And this is all connected. You know what we see, you know our government willing to let happen to people halfway across the world. I always tell people my coworkers, you know what we let our bosses get away with the least of us, it'll do to any of us if they had the chance. And so all of us come from the point of view that we have to build our power. That power has to be you know, honed through our fights at our work, making sure.

you know, an indigenous woman. Her family's from refugees from American foreign policy broad she had learned to be a nurse in Gaza. Zenia's family it's from the Dominican Republic. Her family like fled like a US back dictator there, Trahiro, And I don't think that there's any to me, there's no, it's not a coincidence that we're all here doing this work of building the kind of powerful union that we know that all of our coworkers deserve, that our communities deserve, the whole world deserves.

with your coworkers sometimes. I think anyone will tell you that as long as that we all know people who are friends with the boss, because that's an easy thing to be. It's hard to stick up for people who otherwise can't stick up for themselves.

What does it even mean to be a delegate? We are often spoon fed the delegate position, just be a delegate and then not told exactly what that means. What does that mean for us? What does that mean in our resolutions? What does that mean when we go to convention? Those things should not be a mystery to us. We shouldn't have to poke in prod to get that information about elections, and so that's also one of the things that we're trying to highlight as well. We should be

very informed. And I think that's also another parallel between our US government who chooses you know, they kind of sometimes expect us not to go to the polls because it works in their favor, to not be informed voters because it works in their favor. So we can kind of see that same parallel, and that's one of the things that you know, I think John has made a great way of highlighting that and has really essentially, you know, paved the way for making that information known as well

as Zenya Zenia is. Can I say this, she's a full badass because she she her and John, like I have to say, like, they are so on it of getting that information out, and it's extremely important because we want our nurses to be informed, we want all of us to be informed.

in particularly our VA nurses. VA nurses are telling us that they have not been getting bad they didn't get ballots last election, and so we're encouraging everyone to send emails to the election officers to get a ballot if you haven't gotten one, to make sure that those lists. There's a list of people paying dues and they faithfully take your dues out of your out of your check, and then there's a list of people who receive ballots.

You know, definitely very normal and cool, the sort of thing that we expect from any sort of union, that is, you know, buying for the nurses. And so we have an election email. Can I does anyone have that off top of their heads? I will pull it up real quick as we were talking.

Margaret Gildoy. Today it's one of those things falling apart episodes. Today we're going to be talking about the Kinsey Institute for Research and Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, a research institute in Bloomington, Indiana. Its mission is to quote foster and promote a greater understanding of human sexuality and relationships to research, outreach, education, and historical preservation. The Kinsey Institute in many ways is just a sexual research center. It's the sexual research Center.

We're going to be talking to Dev Montonez, who last week gave me a tour of the center. But first being me, I want to give you all context. I'm going to talk about history. I'm going to talk about a different institute for sexual research called well, the Institute for Sexual Research, except it was in Berlin from nineteen nineteen to nineteen thirty three, so they called it the Institute for Sexual Wiston Shaft History sometimes remembers it as

Hirschfeld's Institute after Magnus Hirschfeld, the director of it. For fourteen years, the institute researched human sexuality. They offered consulting on matters of sex to straight and gay people. They pioneered a ton of transsexual medical practices, including pushing for the shocking at the time idea that trans people are happier if we're just allowed to socially transition and live as our preferred gender, which they observed led to a

dramatic drop in suicide rates. This is medical practice that has continued, and we have more and more research about that to this day. The institute coined the terms transvestite and transsexual. They performed the first gender confirmation surgery in known history on a woman named Dora Richter in nineteen thirty. They worked alongside pro homosexual advocacy groups. Germany led the Western world in acceptance of LGBT folks in the nineteen

twenties and early nineteen thirties. It was founded by three Jewish researchers, the most famous of whom is the director, Magnus Hirschfeld. The institute itself, however, is famous today for one thing. Imagine a picture of a book burning. The first picture that comes to your mind is probably black and white, and it's of Nazis. This photo is used any time someone wants to say something like the are

bad they burned books. What usually goes on said when this photo is reproduced is what books those Nazis were burning. They were burning the institute on May sixth, nineteen thirty three, Nazis burned around twenty thousand books, destroying endless amounts of research into homosexuality, transsexuality, and cross dressing. Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist of the Nazis, was present. He gave a speech to forty thousand people during that book burning, so

ended the Institute for Sexual Research. The first trans woman to undergo gender confirmation surgery, Dora Richter. She was either killed in this attack or she was arrested and died in prison shortly thereafter. Her exact fate is unknown. Magnus himself was out of the country at the time, and

he never returned. He died in exile in France. This, I believe, is the context we need to hold onto when we talk about the Kinsey Institute, when we talk about what they're facing today, as we watch people running for office in this country. Wielding flamethrowers to burn books and campaign ads, while librarians face criminal penalties for making

books available to students. Eventually, the Nazis were defeated, of course, they were defeated through force of arms, after great loss of life and a coming together of ideological enemies like capitalists and authoritarian communists. Shortly thereafter, in nineteen forty seven, a bisexual, polyamorous sexologist named Alfred Charles Kinsey founded his own Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, seventy seven years ago for those keeping track. Thereafter, he

produced work that's foundational to modern sexology. Most famous today is the Kinsey Scale, which broke homosexuality and heterosexuality out

of a binary. Maybe the most famous at the time of his work, though, was his nineteen forty eight book Sexual Behavior and the Human in his later book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which are often called the Kinsey Reports, which offered groundbreaking analysis like it turns out women and joy sex also, and also that thirty seven percent of men had had quote overt homosexual experience to orgasm, which shocked the hell out of the world. Well, it

probably shocked about sixty seven percent of the world. Since then, the Kinsey Institute has been one of the premier sexology research institutes and archives in the world, and now in the twenty twenties, it finds itself at the center of a culture war and conservative backlash. For decades, the right wing has tried and failed to find evidence that Kinsey himself was a pedophile. Last February, the Republican government of Indiana voted for House Bill one thousand and one, which

bars state money from funding the institute. To tell us what's happened with that, what the future of the institute it is likely to be, and how all this ties into the culture wars that we're living through Right now, we have Dev Montanez, the ADMIN coordinator of the institute and a student at Indiana University. Hi, Dev, Hey, thanks for listening to my long intro.

this has helped me. You know, running shows has really helped me run research projects.

where I am back in school and working full time. Yeah, mainly just to get it over.

being really mad at it. Like it's it's hard for me to imagine that it's in trouble and it seems too big to fail. But like not too big, but too institutional, too important, Like I can't imagine someone saying, oh, we want to get rid of this incredibly important historical thing. I guess that's what a lot of the culture wars actually are about. So what's going on.

So it's not quite like your tax dollars are paying for us to exist. We are able to utilize the services of the university, which is very helpful in the case of being If we were like a nonprofit, we'd probably have to do a lot of that work, like legwork in terms of like up keep of a building, like we'd have to do that on our own right. But the university, the state government, does not fund us.

We're funded by donors. We're funded by grants that we receive and endowments that exist that other people have given us because they believe in the worst that we do and they want to see it continue.

I was five. And as a child, you know that you play around with your body because you're learning it right, because you've never used most of these things before. It's brand new. And so he had years in their ag in there that were younger than anyone that is conservative would want to believe that you would be sexually.

he was kinky. It seemed like right, he like filmed himself fucking, and he filmed his wife fucking and he a bunch of consenting adults had some sex that he was around for, and that's like meant to mean that he is a horrible, weird monster.

lot of stuff over the years like an archive. What do they when they try to pull state funding from you? How does that impact you? You're saying that that's like not you know, does it primarily impact you because everyone's suddenly aware of and mad at you again, or does it actually also like is it going to cut your funding? Like what's happening.

good standing. It's it's more so at least now the Border Trustie's voted on Friday and they basically brought in the President's recommendation of do not separate us from the from the university, and so that happened on Friday, March first was the day that that went through. So we

are all feeling pretty good. We all kind of had a little bit of a not so much a victory lap, but like a we've been hearing this for the last six months of worrying about what's going to happen to this place that we all love and that carries so many things because of the librarians who are around in the artifice, who are around, aren't the people handling the collection, And the legislature later decides, I you in a universe can't hold anything that is obscene, and obscene is you know,

I have the beholder. It could easily mean that this, like six hundred thousand artifacts that we hold in our collections are gone, and we have stuff that spans two thousand years. It's not just items that are around today. And everything that we get is donated. We don't buy any of the items. Per second. People just mail them to us.

and all of these things. And he went around and stopped people. He got all these laws passed that he can't pass pornographic materials through the US male That was like his big contribution to society, besides ruining an awful lot of people's lives. And that's coming up again, like the ghost of the Comstock Laws. Do you want to talk about that?

illegal in the past, so to speak. Like if any book mentions sex of any kind, right, it can't be around. If anyone is homosexual in any of the books, it's banned in their eyes. Yeah, and you know a majority of our books are a lot of those things.

talking about like bombing the statue. I calls about you know, being a sexual predator, a debiant, or you know, you guys should all die, and it's very directed at us, right, It's it's less of being directed at like a random abstract thing.

like faberge eggs. Right, So it gives people a chance to see that like academic freedom and like freedom to research what you want is possible, and not just possible, but like encouraged. Right, Like, as an R one university, we should be doing should be researching things that aren't or taboo at times, yeah, and are actually trying to help the world rather than making money for some investor somewhere.

information and things. But yet as we enter this sort of anti intellectual time that is absolutely a right wing culture war thing is to be anti intellectual and in this case specifically shut down the academy's ability to preserve and transfer knowledge.

red as people really think it is. Right, It's that like it just came out today that we're like the fiftieth in voter turnout.

I think my my personal representative, he was elected by like eleven votes and he is a horrible, horrible man.

which is still to me a lot of people. Yeah, but it is small comparatively to anywhere on the East Coast, right, But everyone I've met here, I will say, there's great organizers that live here. There's a great amount of community and just like building of coalitions between people that I

haven't really seen elsewhere, Okay, which is really important. And it's not just through the university, which I think is most people think it's all here, But there's so many people outside of the university that do amazing work that maybe came here to go to school but ended up staying or just came here because this used to be like the folk punk capital.

is kind of where you can see everything. You can support us by coming and learning more about sexual research and your history, because it's all of our history in terms of learning about how people lived and how we have like the most mundane things. Yeah, you're talking about Hirschfeld earlier. We have a scrap book of his and that is like the oldest thing of his that it is like his personal item that we have, Yeah, along with like published items, but that's like the big thing.

and the use of loaded language. If you want the details and all that, you can check out the first episode in the Political Cult series, or you can check out my video on the topic, or you can pick up the book on Political Cults yourself. As I said, on the Edge Political Cults left and Right previously, I've touched on the Laruche movement and the United Red Army

of Japan. Today we'll be looking at another case study, this time of the various groups associated with Fred Neumann refused politics seamlessly with psychotherapy.

political action. So that era, both the new psychotherapies cateringto a mass market that sought both happiness and social justice. Psychotherapy became something like a secular religion, which of course opened it up to Charlatan's who would propagate their innovative therapies and gain a following without actually testing or thought any scrutiny of the effectiveness of the ideas. Ieteen seventy, Newman assembled a small collective in Manhattan, sharing an apartment

on the Upper West Side. By this time post By this time, post the collapse to the Students for a Democratic Society in the broader New Left, and coinciding with the fervor of the Cultural Revolution, people were looking for a new direction in a time when the psychotherapy bubble was growing. Newman, as another of those charismatic therapists, would attract a group of individuals who were yearning for hope.

New One's collective was first named if dot dot dot then, and it was indeed a fusion of radical sixties politics and the New Age therapy of the seventies. Newman's concept of social therapy or crisis normalization, blurred the lines between therapy and political activities, and the group would give rise to the Centers for Change the CFC. By nineteen seventy three, which proudly identified itself as a Marx Leninist Maoist organization.

mind you. He links up with Laruche just after Laruche had completed Operation mop Up, so he was just attacking his enemies on the left and started shifting right wood if they use those terms, and Newman is like, yeah, this is my guy. This who I want to link

up with. So their collaboration formed the United Front, comprising of Laruche's National Caucus of Labor Committees, the NCLC at Newman's Center for Change, and a third group led by Eugenio Parenti Ramos, which later transformed into the Communist Party USA Provisional, which I have to note, I have to know it is distinct from the Communist Party USA that most people know about.

to inevitable clashes. While within the NCLC, the Newman group continued its operation, and tensions eventually reached a breaking point later.

and the principles of free society. Yet despite dismissing most left movements and saying that liberalism is fascism, Newman would occasionally dip his toes into democratic primaries infortiate existing leftist organizations, and utilized prominent black leaders to advance his own objectives. But I realize I haven't fully explained the focus of

Newman's ideology. In most cases, cult leaders' ideologies ultimately hinge on follow me and the best, But you know they have their unique quirks here on there as well.

the bourgeoisie ego inside people's minds. So in a sense we cook in, you know, because you do have to sort of undo that brainwashing and you get.

stayed with us away. So basically never Newman's doctrines worked for his purposes, though his followers were stuck in this loop of dependency for over twenty five years. He had an additional component his control mechanisms, though. He developed a concept called friend or sexuality. So in his organizations, casual sexual relationships were arranged where a designated friend that you also had sex with monitored and critiqued individuals to maintain control.

If pregnancies ever arose, they were usually told to get abortions. And as for new And himself, his inner circle was referred to as his haram or his wives, and they served as both trusted lieutenants in the administration and trusted lieutenants in the bedroom.

with him. But you see, the child's mother and Green who stayed in the cult, and she wanted her child back. So Newman recruited two cult members that were also lawyers to get the FBI involved in fire and then Rutherford and the child. So they dialogued the FBI, set up a meet in between Green and the agents, and then Green spilled the tea that Rutherford used to roll with the Weather Underground and also had connection to the fugitive

named Jane Albert. Fast forward to nineteen seventy six and Newman's IWP gets exposed by a splinter group for working with the FBI. But instead of denying it, Newman pins the blame on Anne Green and the two lawyers and basically pretends that they acted on their own without his direction, because obviously the mansoni looking off himself. So that was a fun of the side, right, well, collaboration with the FBI.

cult schools without too much heat on himself personally. Newman was actually able to get one of his cult members elected on the local school board, and that led to some liberals digging into Newman's background and group dynamics, where they found that indeed he was running a therapy cult where they relinquished jobs, severed political ties, and strendered all property and savings.

one million dollars in federal match funds. She ran again in nineteen ninety two and again qualified for ballot status in all fifty states, this time receiving two million dollars in federal matching funds, and she secured a whop in seventy three thousand, seven hundred and eight votes.

excited to help a black woman run for president. She even found a lover while working on the campaign in Indiana, but quote, when it came time for NAP to leave Indiana, she I'm assuming the lover asked me to go with them, and I did. I was given forty eight hours to prepare. I quit my job, left my home, my friends put my belongings in storage, found a home for my pet, and gave the use of my car to NAP for in exchange for their take and over the pay months

as a working class lesbian. I thought I had finally found a political movement which included me. What I found instead was an oppressive, disempowered, and misogynistic organization. All my decisions were made for me by someone else. I was told where to go and who to go with. I worked seven days a week, sixteen to twenty hours a day. I had two days off in two and a half months. There was an incredible urgency which overrode any personal needs

or considerations, an urgency that meant complete self sacrifice. I felt totally powerless over my life, forced into a very submissive role where all control of my life belonged to someone else. I had given up everything for the campaign, my job, my home, and my support system. I felt desperate, and later in the letter she said that I was completely exhausted, so tired, I was unable to work well. Being unable to work, I had no income as I was expected to raise my salary myself in addition to

raising money for the campaign. And she also spoke about losing herself and this social therapy thing that Newman was doing as a lot of independent thought was discouraged. This was Newman's whole emo, you know, manipulating individual distress to transform members into political activists under total control, replacing the traditional support structures that people would have been coming from

with the cult as a new family. And despite some claims of dissolution, the evidence suggested that the International Workers' Party continued to exist even as the NAP was in existence, as members divested assets and funding towards the ideo BE the whole time. Now, it's quite interesting to learn the justification for why Newman picked Leonora Fulani in particular, and then would also link up later with some of the people that I'm about to talk about. So you're familiar

with Antonio Gramsci right, Yeah. He introduced the concept of the organic intellectual, suggesting that each social class naturally produces a stratum capable of projecting its historic mission and a Germany on the flip side, Lenin in his What Is to Be Done Manifesto, envisioned a vanguard of professional revolutionaries from the intellectual elite to bring socialism to the working class.

Newman was influenced by both concepts and considered his core group to be a vanguard mainly composed of white, middle class traditional intellectuals, often working as therapists for Newmanite fronts. But here's the twist. He borrowed gram Shee's organic leader's term and connected with people of color that had organic basis of support in their communities and would use them to advance the interests of his secretive white.

presidential campaign. So, in addition to his political activity, is Fred Newman wore many hats. He considered himself a playwright and staled as the artistic director of the Castillo Theater. He also directed train in at the east Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy, authored books featured at the Castillo Bookstore, and operated social therapy centers in various cities, describing them

as a unique development community. Despite the deprivations imposed on his followers, as they can imagine, Newman lived quite comfortably. In nineteen ninety three, he bought a substantial Greenwich Village brownstone for nearly a million dollars. I mean, who says a cult of revolution and therapy kabi profits, right?

the black community. The internal structure was of course hierarchical, as Newman lived luxuriously while the rank and file members worked to long hours and even faced mandatory taxes to support new One's seaside mansion.

the organization. They had to go through mandatory psychotherapy sessions, which served as a method to recruit vulnerable individuals, exploit their weaknesses, and control their behavior.

of her full dedication to the cause. So she revealed the NAP did not live up to claims of promoting democracy obviously, and would use manipulative tactics and obstruct minority empowerment, and had a long history of attacking progressives and embracing Pero's nineteen ninety two presidential bid and the harsh streatment

dissent in voices. In the end, in the book On the Edge, Denis Tursi and Tim Wreforth end up termining Newman's work new age Leninism, which I think is a really good phrase to use to describe what he was doing. He had a strong knack for manipulating politics.

m scrutinize it a little bit, you know. Look, it's like at the structure, that's like what they're asking you to do, especially if the leadership considers themselves a vanguard despite having like.

of power. It's like, we also have a s Sure a Council, except instead of protecting the Islamic Revolution, it's designed to protect like the ideology of a bunch of right wingers from Harvard And it's.

to be thrown out the window immediately and it hasn't been. Yeah, So all right, let's just start with Texas Bill four, a very basically just like a turbo fascism bill that lets Texas police racially profile someone and go, I think this person's here legally and immediately arrest them.

get a felony. But mostly what it does is it less a judge immediately just support them.

What the fuck are you guys talking about? And like this this bill the legal justification for this, he's batshit. It's so okay. They're trying to invoke the state war clause, which is this is this really like old timey law? Okay. So the thing the thing about like the seventeen hundreds, in the eighteen hundreds is that it takes a significant amount of time to get people from I don't know, You're you're you're drawing your like border militia from Kentucky and you're you're moving it to Texas.

federal troops got there. Abbott is arguing that people crossing the border from Mexico is an invasion and that this allows him to like legally allows him to start doing

this stuff. And this is like, it's it's funny because you can even see that the Biden administration people being like, you've got to be fucking kidding me, because like obviously, like I mean, it's not like Biden doesn't want to murder people coming over the border, but you know, Biden's people are like, well, okay, like no, obviously this is not a war, right, I mean just a no in fact that war we're talking about.

this is nothing. This is literally nonsense. Like it is. They are pointing at the sky and going the sky is orange, and the press is going, well, if you like, if you stare directly into the sun and then blink, it looks like maybe this sky is a little bit or just like what the fuck are you people doing?

It's it's it's genuay at least it's some of the worst shertalistic about practice I've ever seen you see this like every single time they're trying to do this sort of like ah balance, It's like, no, there's no actual sort of balance here. But on the other hand, this doesn't matter because the Supreme Court was just like, yeah, this can go into effect, right, And like.

can we just wrap this up? Seth Aberton would write seventy five thousand tweets about how like it was going to result, and people began to have this belief that like the fucking Supreme Court was made up of like magical rainbow unicorns who were gonna sweep in and save us all from fascistm Like these are the same people hanging out with the guys who had the like fascist statues and yeah, taking massive kickbags. Like it's just none of this legality stuff. I guess, No, it doesn't matter.

the cops to do whatever the fuck you want. One of the strategies they've been using has like if specifically, to get this bill through, is by just having judges issue like temporary injunctions and other injunctions to like allow them to go into effect, but then you know, with

the intention of just never letting them expire. Right, So what you're getting basically is just judges implementing policy by fiat by continuously going, oh, well, this can go, this can go because we're giving like a where we're you know, we're on like our thirty eighth one month injunction and right, you know, and this is the thing that like the Biden administration's plan to deal with this is to be like, well, you shouldn't be able to do that, but like, how

are you going to stop them? Right? The court system is set up in such a way that these people are just feudal lords. They're almost completely autonomous. The only people who can overrule them are the people above them. But the problem there too, and this is what the Republicans have been using very effectively, is that it takes time for a court above it to you know, just to overrule the like insane thing the court below them

is doing. And if the court below them is just constantly churning out just nonsense over and over again, then they can just do whatever the fuck they want. Because even even if the court above them actually did want to do something about this, which in a very rare cases sometimes happens, they literally can't because they've just been you know, because they're just sort of swamped by all of this just absolute bullshit that's being thrown out.

might take. For instance, California's gun laws, right, California passes so many fucking gun laws so often that the time that it takes for even if they are like contravening something like the Brewin decision, right or the spirit of the Brewing decision, it takes so long for them to pass all the way up and maybe eventually go to Supreme Court, maybe not right, that that in effect, California can do things which seem like the Supreme Court would

say they were unconstitutional. It doesn't really matter because they can still do them right. And with the go go to the Night Circuit in California, you can make decisions that affirm those and like it doesn't matter, It doesn't matter what's constitutional or more importantly, like what's just.

ain't fucking stupid. They have access to all the same news and information that you do. They have smartphones that might be a little bit older, but they can still read shit and that they know that the ninth Circuit is kinder. So if they have the money, they will come to California. It's for some people end up in

California without very much money. We've seen that lot with African migrants in Tichuina, But like a lot of the people going to Texas, it's because that's the land route walking north and they don't have the finances to go

anywhere else. And those people are extremely like they're like there are any number of reasons why they they have legitimate right to asylum or just a right not to be fucking profiled, or like any other person of kind of living in Texas has a basic right note to be profiled, and demonizing those people is being used as a like a trojan horse just to do straight up racism law.

process for the lawsuit. There's also a case about methic pristone, which is an aborder factor, which is, you know, one of the ways that if you are if you're in a place where it is illegal for you to normally get an abortion, this is a way you can do it.

So okay. The basis of this case is that in twenty sixteen twenty twenty one, the FDA did one of the few good things it's ever done, and there were some sort of changes to legal classifications around for pristone that allowed you to get it, not allowed you to get it without having to get it directly prescribed by a doctor. So you know, you could have nurs practitioners do it. And also it was a thing that didn't work like you can get it over the counter like

it was. It was not a thing that suddenly that requires an enormous amount of sort of doctor bullshit. And it also used to require physical visits, so you'd have to go find a doctor in another state and get into private to you. And so that all went away.

You're able to get it through telemedicine. And immediately basically after I get I guess probably the peak of the Republican counter revolution in the last four years, where they destroyed the National well, they destroyed the tatted remains of ROW, A bunch of like deranged right wing groups set about to get messapristomee bands and so basically what they're trying to do is overturn. They're trying to get its approval by the FDA overturn, and also the approval for the

generic version of it overturned. Right, And this is the whole strategy here is very weird because okay, so this is one of the things about the US and part of the reason all of this court stuff is so weird because of the structure of the sort of regional autonomy of the courts. You can basically just do court shopping. You can go find some like guy who's basically a feudal baron in Texas and be like, hey, you hate abortion, Like here, write some piece of paper that says this

is legal now. So there have been a series of sort of battles over different levels of courts, you know, like approving or disapproving some things. This is actually this is one of these cases that's actually so obviously it's the the immediate consequence here is if the Supreme Court decides that you can ban this, it's going to get really,

really fucking bad for a lot of people. But this is also a case that feeds into another trend that's been happening, which is the Republicans attempting to use the court system to just completely annihilate the federal bureaucracy. Because the other thing that's at stake here and this is, you know, obviously the people's access to getting abortions is the most important part of it. The subsequent less important part of it is that right now there is a

eight there are national standards for for prescriptions. Right there's unified nationals like the ADA is unified national standards for sort of food safety and like and if this gets knocked out, that's like gone. Yeah, and so suddenly large massive parts I mean like courts having the ability to just sort of go in and nuke FDA approvals for stuff, right states being able to like this is going to rip like tear, like like tearing the fucking guts out

of the entire American sort of like legal bureaucracy. It's it's coming apart, Yeah, it's yeah.

cases like this too. One of the one of the things that looks like they're trying to do is get we're gonna I'm gonna do a full upside about this at some point when I can get a good labor lawyer to talk about it. But they're trying to overturn the National Labor Relations Act, which is the act that basically sets up the right to unionization and the whole

the whole process of how how labor mediation works. And I mean then there's other ones where I mean, like really substantively enormous parts of the American sort of the American state are just being torn apart in ways that are specifically designed to just allow corporations and these like fiefdom judges to have effectively unlimited political power.

getting back to sort of the civil rights era. And that's it's you can't do this anymore because it doesn't It doesn't even like whether or not you are correct, like like legally correct about a thing right which used to be what this was just sort of hinged on and whether you could convince justice to this, like this

doesn't matter anymore. Like they've you know, like if if you if you read the ruling on on like if you actually go through and read the ruling that overturned Rode Wade right, like the league, the legal logic in there is deranged. It's just like, yeah, we didn't have this X number of years ago, so fuck it, Like

you can't do this now. It's like this is this is nonsense, but it doesn't matter because the the the actual weight of the law is not is not you know, a sort of like series of debates about like logic or about the efficacy or the meeting of text. It's just about who has the power to point guns at people? And the answer is you don't have that you, you, dear listener, do not have that power. Okay, do you know who else is going to destroy the American federal bureaucracy? Oh?

is about. It's a city of Grant's past, which I guess is a place in Oregon, and it's whether they can criminalize sleeping on the street if there are no safe shelter beds available. So that the idea here being that like again, like this is one has to understand that I'm speaking from the logic of the state when I try and explain this, like that, if there is a shelter bed to go to, they can compel you to go to it with threat of prosecution, right or criminalization.

But if there is not a shelter bed to go to, then like you're not somehow your culpability changes, right, Like you're not refusing to take shelter there is no shelter few to take. And so Grant's past is obviously trying to criminalize people even when there are shelter beeds available. Now, what's interesting about Grant's pass is that not the place to the court case. What's interesting about the court case is that you'll see these big liberal cities filing amicus

briefs amicus. It literally means it's from amicus curii friend of the court, right, which they can do in favor of either side. San Diego, Los Angeles, other large democratic cities, I'm sure all filing briefs in favor of criminalizing living on the street even when there are not shelter beds available. Now, if we look at the San Diego context specifically, one of the questions which will come up in this case

is what is a shafe shelter bed? So what San Diego likes to do currently is put people into tents in parking lots where they often flood because because San Diego is not designed to deal with rain, and because our city has completely failed to clear out storm drains, resulting in people losing their homes in this winter, right, and so some of these parking lots flood where people have lived are forced to live. These tents are not like, they're not even good tents. Actually they managed to buy

this is remarkable. Actually, if you were buying a tent there, can you think of any well, there's no way for me to phrase this. They bought fucking tents with slurs on the side. I don't know how you managed to do. Yeah, it's like the tents are quote Esquimo brand Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's it's it's it's incredible stuff. Like it's see, there was no way to be like, what would you be concerned about when buying a tent because a slur on the side would not have come up.

More than one person every single day already dies on our streets here in an extremely wealthy and prosperous area of the world. This will make it worse because they will get that nod to continue criminalizing people rather than trying.

criminalize being in house in this fashion. But it it does, it represents like a nod from the top down right to go even harder after people who are too poor to make rent at a time when rent is less affordable than it has been in generations. And so like it's one to watch. It's one where like yet again you find like the Democrats, I guess, lining up on the right hand side of the issue, the right wing

side of the issue, the state violence side of the issue. Right, and it will I'm sure open up the door to more what they call camping bands, which is the euphemism again they are bands on being un housed within city limits, right, And I think it's one to keep an eye on.

But again, like I don't it's Clarence Thomas the guy who goes to the billionaire's house with the racist statues and the Nazi statues, Like, he's not the guy who's going to come in swinging for the person who has to sleep under the underpass because they can't make rent, you know, like.

It should have been a very very basic you are guaranteed due process thing right under the Fourth Amendments and this, and in a nine to o decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the cops are allowed to violate people's due process because if they didn't do this, there couldn't be a functional police force in this country because this is

how the police were doing all their fucking work. So if you think those people right, that was nine oh nine zero decision, that was that was a fucking Ruth Bader Ginsburg special, Right, those people are going to be like, oh hey, damn, maybe people who don't own property, have rights? Like how no?

your unhoused neighbor dying is you. It's not an NGO, it's not the city, it's not the county, it's not the feds. Those people fundamentally that they're the incentive is not for them to care. Like your incentive, as a person who shares humanity with that person is to care and to do something. And like, yeah, I guess, like, don't wait, take the time you would have spent reading about a fucking Supreme Court case and make sandwiches and go hand them out, because that is the only way we solve this.