It Could Happen Here Weekly 140

you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast that basically all of last week is about the twenty twenty four Republican National Convention, a four day period of time that I'm not sure

ever ended or ever really had a beginning. As of right now, we are stuck in the hotel because what we initially thought was a hack and may just have been a fuck up pushing an update by cloud strike, but by any measure of the word is like the greatest computer disaster of mine modern times has stranded every Republican in the country in the city of Milwaukee.

some outside of the event. Different groups and organizations will rent out hotel, ballrooms, conference rooms, they'll give speeches, they'll do panels, there's workshops, and obviously inside the wire, so to speak, you have different dignitaries, politicians, you know, Ted Kruz will come by and I'll sit down to be interviewed by a podcaster, a radio host. Rudy Giuliani's doing

the same thing. You've got all these people who do their shows live from the event and then in the evenings usually starting around like five to seven and something like that. Yeah, you start having speeches, and part of what you know, speeches at the RNC are it's obviously it's a way to hype up the base. This is

the base. And one of the things I try to get across to people I posted on day one while there were some very dystopian shit coming out Marjorie Taylor Green speech and whatnot, how empty you know the stadium was to be, like, look, there's not that many people here, And someone was like, well, it's kind of dishonest to say that, because this is an invite on the event

that you need credentials for. And well, that's my point though, is like as crazy as a lot of this stuff is, and we're going to get into a lot of the crazy, you don't also you don't want to discount it because these people are very powerful and they can do a lot of damage, and they there's a very good chance they're going to wind up with very close to total power. But they're also not representative of like a massive chunk of this country. Like these are the weirdest of the weird.

These are the high freaks of Republican party politics. These are the nabobs and priests and shamans of their political class. And so you shouldn't over extend the craziness to think that, like, well, every one of my neighbors who is a conservative is this kind of person. Now, some of you do have neighbors who are this kind of person.

give you a speech at the RNC. You can lead, and you can get on right before Tucker, you know, or you can come on right after Tucker or whatever like that, you know, And it's kind of how you it's one way to dole out favors, right, because it's good for people's you know, if you're head up an organization, it might get you some fundraising at any rate. It makes you look more connected at something you brag about

to your friends. You get to go backstage and be around the VIPs and whatnot, be a VIP yourself.

hyped up and see a show. People were static. There was actually music acts like, not just the band that plays in between speeches, but Kid Rock came out and did a set.

So like this, this was all on purpose and kind of using that more sympathetic unity messaging to squeeze in all of his same extremely far right talking points, just slipping in between calls for like unity and ending division and all of that.

you have not been to one of these rallies. And even this is different because I've been to a you know, a regular Trump rally. This was different than that because this is again like the most dedicated chunk of the base. It's the very much a religious experience for these people.

kind of just like confused. You know, he has that like resting confused look on his face. He was a very good live performer. Yeah, this he gave a stronger live performance than I think what a lot of his televised performances come off at. He was.

to that. He made a comment about like you know, Trump talked to me and he was like, you know, when I got shot, I expected to see the crowd running, screaming, stampeding, panicking, and no one did. And Tucker was like, that's because you're the leader, and the leader the people follow the leader, and they you know, you didn't panic, so they won't panic. Yeah, it's the most direct old style. This is nineteen twenties

Nazism stuff that Tucker is throwing out. And he he discussed it in a way that was very smooth and very palatable to American ears. And that was the most chilling part of the night for me, because Trump's speech was not a particularly I think back to twenty sixteen and I was I was at the R and C in twenty sixteen. Trump's speech on the last night of the R and C was his blood in the Street speech.

It was a he was angry, it was aggressive. It was a violent speech, right, and there were there were moments, certainly silence in his speech, but not much that was not the overall vibe. That was not what he built towards. It wasn't the thing he ended on, and it was

never really a focus. But what Tucker was focusing on was getting people on board the concept that they are bonded to Trump in a spiritual sense and that the nation is and that Trump is the leader, not by dint of having been elected, but by dint of some sort of psycha like psycho religious mystic bond.

years ago, and this week, it was just completely absent. Obviously, it has been replaced by some of this like gender ideology, groomer, kind of transpanic type stuff, but it is a noticeable absence in the current talking points of the Republican Party save for this one mentioned by Tucker.

the shooter and said he tried to stop our movement. Yeah, greatest movement in the history of the country. And yeah, that was interesting to me. I think that he was kind of playing easing off the gas on that one, because there's still so much that's uncertain about the shooter and his motives. I went to work out today because the morning after convention, that's kind of how I purged

the hangover from my body. And I was watching Fox News on the TV in the gym, And I don't watch television news much because I'm a person who has to do things, but it is useful sometimes because it connects you with how an unfortunate number of people in this country do and take their news. And this morning, one of the reports was about the shooter and how the FBI had found that he had three encrypted accounts

offshore overseas that they're trying to break into. They are referring to I think discord kind of accounts and stuff like that, like he might have like an.

in Switzerland and like these are not. It's not that it's overseas. Does not mean there's any tie to anything other than this kid, like a lot of people had, was used in encrypted messaging platforms. Obviously, I'm interested, you know, if the FBI, if or when they get into that stuff, what they find. But I don't think they're going to find that. The fucking Ayatola gave this guy a five hundred dollars AR fifteen and fifty rounds of ammunition.

working in schools. And the thing that shocked me is our schools are so much more of our schools are like prisons, which I was like, well, actually, there's a lot to be said about the way in with some of the same technology, right, yes, no, this is there's a lot to do. And then she was like, because children are much more violent than convicted felons, and like, oh, a lot of what she was saying is that, like,

schools are completely out of control. And obviously, in the wake of the height of the COVID pandemic and the lockdown, school violence did soar. It's been coming back down. Overall, schools have been getting less violent in every single way but shootings for twenty straight years. And that is that is the case now, like under in Joe Biden's America, schools, like violence that is not related to shootings is going down.

But what she was saying is that we need to be able to expel and suspend kids, particularly, suspend kids more often for bad behavior. There is actually quite a bit of data that shows that when you suspend children, it makes them more likely to offend and disrupt class in the future, Like it increases the problems that you are supposed to be stopping. Like most conservative measures that are kind of like punitive in nature, it doesn't actually

do the trick. I don't know why I'm arguing with this lady, but it is important that that's a big part of how they're pitching what ultimately is a plan to win the Department of Education to parents is like, your schools are so dangerous for your kid, you need to be able to have a voucher to send them

to a private school. And we need to be able to kick these underperforming black students out of schools in order to make them safer for everybody, right, and shuffle them off into the car serial system.

are freaks. These people are weird. These people are off putting, These people are scary, and you don't want to be around them, and by god, you don't want them with their finger on the button, Like I do think that consistently.

criminals and drug dealers. And no, it was It was a in a week full of kind of surreal moments where you're seeing these people that you only interact with on a screen. H you just see them walk past you, like all the time every day. This was certainly one of the most surreal men.

off on stage too. Now let's bow our heads and thank God.

could barely get laughs, he could barely get cheers. Like even when he did the anti trans stuff, it didn't get it got a muted reaction, not because people aren't bicketed, because they loved it when Marjorie Taylor Green did the say they loved it when Trump did. Eric Trump just sucks yeah at speaking, probably at everything, but he did not get a reaction. I cannot overemphasize to you how little this crowd wanted to listen to Eric.

don't know. If I were if I had been setting this up, I would have done Franklin Graham, school Lady, Eric Trump, all the weak ones up first, and then probably Tucker the Hulkster, Kid Rock, you know.

But he has changed in the way that like you would be if you were shot in the head and survived, you know, like anyone is go like, he's not a robot, right, Like anyone is going to be affected by that. And he might not have been lying. He might just have been like, look, I have to talk about this once. I really don't want to keep talking about this because it's fucked up.

unify this country is just to stop stopping bad. Yeah, stop saying orange man bad. That's really what he was, That's what he was getting at.

it might have been in Trump's speech. It was even framed as like more people have died from fentanyl than died in World War Two, and like, well, no, no, no, lot, a lot of people died in World War two, just not that many Americans. Really.

know how well he thought through that. I don't believe that was this was like an intentional code admits it didn't.

fucks everybody over. But it was interesting to me how much talk there was of him showing up and absolutely no eel on And in fact, there was a moment where Trump was like, hey, electric cars are fine for some things, but like we got to subsidize gas cars.

ten fifteen minutes. Like there's a lot of balloons and it's rigged so that they're and you know, some of them are red, white and blue. A lot of them are like gold.

lot out of his death. He got this massive state funeral, They had a very popular song about him. He was kind of he was kind of the individual chosen to embody all of the guys who died in the street fights prior to the right of the party. And people have been comparing Corey to Horst. I get why, because this is we are watching a fascist party near power here, and there's clearly some desire in that for Corey to

be that. Horst was the focus of almost I'm not almost a cult And what I saw here was a perfunctory, Well, we got to mention this guy. Uh, we got to like, you know, make a reference to him. But let's let's get in and out of that. We got to move on to the meat and potatoes. That's not gonna win us. And I think what is like the the swing voters and shit don't care about Corey contemporary right, that's not gonna that's our base is going to expect us to

say something. It's also just like the thing you do. This guy got killed at your rally with a bulletmint for you, you got to bring up something. But then let's move on. Let's get him out of there, Let's shove his fucking uniform into the fucking back closet, and uh,

get back to the party, you know. And that is different from how the Nazis handled horsed And I think that difference maybe it signals a real difference in the structure of American fascism, you know, and how it inhabits a party, or maybe it's just a measure of we're not all fully bought in on this to the extent in the same way that the Nazis were, right like, we really are trying to just get a lot of people on board to vote for us, and we don't

want to get too weird with it. We don't want to have a big cult for Corey at the RNC, the big religious state. That's got to be off putting to Americans. So let's we'll kiss the hat people like firefighters, shove it back. That's how I took that.

we would think. And it has a line about like getting out of Iraq.

just like we need to put America first. And yeah, specifically in this song, you know, it has it has this kind of populist bent that then veers very hard nationalists, which I'm sure we're all familiar with as a political tendency. But I've just thought I found that to be the most interesting part is because for like the majority of that song, I'm like, yes, absolutely, I agree. And then and and then they say the America first line, and it's like, oh, that is not that is not what

we're talking about. It's yeah, and I just know it's it's it's been something I've been thinking about and I'm sure we'll want I'm sure we'll do some more deep dives on Vance in the coming weeks, since he's a little bit, you know, less well known to many of you,

I assume. And the the last thing I kind of want to mention is that yesterday, right before Trump's speech, I was getting some work done and I happened to be sitting about ten feet away from Ted Cruz, who was who is talking on air about his thoughts on like both this this convention and this election in general. And he said a few interesting things that I half heard that I that I quickly just scribbled down on

a notebook. He said that, you know this, this convention already feels like a celebration, right, this already feels like like we've kind of won. But he warned Republicans to be scared of over confidence. He said that we're kind of acting like how the Democrats were acting in twenty sixteen.

good about. What I felt best about is as you and I were walking to the stadium to see the speech, we see a forklift driving down the street in the middle of this one of the crowded streets. Yeah, which is kind of crazy. It's weird. I've never actually seen a construction vehicle driving around inside the during like the convention hours, so that was weird. And as we're like watching this thing, like I honestly wondered, like, should I like get a footage of this? That's kind of wild looking?

As were as we see it like kind of coming up next to us, the driver leans out of the side of the vehicle and he is a beautiful man covered in tattoos, huge nos ring and he's like.

called grass and not asparagus. Right, Where's I'll get into that? Yeah, good, good, excited to Then it's so do you know how many how many spears are in a round?

crowns which are the buds, and then the roots. All three of these parts are vital to a productive asparagus plant. The fern is known as the factory, which through photosynthesis, produces food sorted in the crown and their roots below ground. The number of vigorous spears in the spring depends on the amount of food produced and stored in the crown during the preceding summer and fall. Producing a good crop of fern is necessary for ensuring a good crop of

spears the following spring. It's important not to cut the old fern at the end of the season until it is completely dead, and the best time to remove old fern is in the spring, since valuable food and nutrients move during the autumn months from the dying fern to the crown. Fascinating, Yeah, maybe you're wondering is there a nutritional value? Yes, of course it's a vegetable, But one cup of asparagus has no fat and only two grays

of sugar and three milligrams of salt. Apparently, it's known as one of the most nutritionally balanced vegetables ever, a lot of fiber, and it contains no cholesterol, very low in sodium, as I said, a good source of folic acid, potassium, as well as vitamin's A A six and vitamin C. Wowie, Yeah, only the young shoots of asparagus are eaten. Fun fact. There's also an amino acid called asparagene, and this gets its name from asparagus because the asparagus plant is rich

in this compound. Asparagene is also commonly found fun fact in French fries and potatoes, which are potatoes and fries are the same. There are over three hundred known varieties of asparagus, and the varieties most widely seen in the United States include the white variety, which is preferred in Europe. I'll get into this later, but apparently chefs in Europe only usually use white James.

is relative, depending on how big your thumb is. And then there's also wild asparagus, and these asparagus grow in wild areas. It's mostly found in Europe or like on the coastline somewhere, and you'll most likely have to hunt down your own because it's rarely available fresh in markets except for in Italy and the south of France.

And since asparagus is a long lived perennial plant. It should not be planted where trees or tall shrubs might eventually shade the plants or compete for nutrients and water. When it comes to the soil, the crown and root system can grow to a large size, which can be roughly five to six feet in diameter and ten to fifteen feet deep. Therefore, when possible, you should select a

soil that is loose, deep, well drained, and fertile. On sites with poor soil, incorporate manure and compost into the soil and plant until under two successive cover crops the season before you plant your asparagus, and you should be just fine. Asparagus is planted in the spring. The simplest method is to plant one year old crowns and you lay down the ground soil prior to growing asparagus for

the first time. And even though the young crown will appear to be a lifeless mass of roots, it will begin to send up small green shoots shortly after planting, so as I mentioned, asparagus is planted in the spring, but it's also one of the very first crops harvested during the spring season, and that means metaphorically, It represents the transition from the frozen winter months and its emphasis on root vegetables to the abundance and newness of spring. Yeah,

asparagus for farmers can mean even more. Farmer Lee Jones from The Chef's Garden says quote, the farmer is an eternal optimist, always hoping that next year will be the year, the year when rain falls and exactly the right amounts at exactly the right times, that it's never too hot and never too cold, and the weather is exactly what

we might wish. No season is ever perfect, of course, but try telling that to a farmer as he or she sits in front of a cozy fireplace in the wintertime, feet propped up, looking through seed catalogs and dreaming of spring. Winter refreshes us, and asparagus represents the hope of renewal and the optimism of what spring might bring. When it's time to begin harvesting asparagus, farmers smell the earth again, see the earthworms, and listen once again to the kill

deer in the blackbirds. This portent of spring is a welcome celebration. Asparagus is a recurrent affirmation that winter is over and delicious treasures from the field are eminent. This man loves asparagus.

fun facts. That's that's all for that. Asparagus can grow quite fast too. You can cut asparagus in the morning and it just keeps growing. And here's a fun fact for you. In ideal conditions, asparagus can grow ten inches in a twenty four hour period.

And this is how gentle you need to be. First, you plant the three year old roots, and if the asparagus root is in its first year in growth, which is really then it's fourth, you should only pick it for one week because you don't want to zap the root strength. Then after two years, which would be really

its fifth, you pick it only for two weeks. By the time it's four years old, which yes means that's a seven year total, then you can harvest it for longer amounts of time a good plant though, after all, this process can last up to twenty years, so it's important to let the young ones build up strength for the future. We mentioned this before James gave it away.

But in Europe chefs almost always use the white asparagus, rarely the green ones, and this is because the white asparagus beautifully offers up the luscious notes apparently of corn and sweet cabbage, but European farmers. The reason why this is is that they mound and pack soil over the asparagus plants to blow the chlorophyll process, and this is the process that ends up creating the white color when

you block it. And these plants need to push hard through the soil and because of that, they end up with tough outer skins that need to be peeled off, which is not the case with the green variety. And then this adds labor like expenses and time into the mix of harvesting it. And a lot of people think that this results in the most nutritional part of the vegetable being thrown away.

to the eastern Mediterranean and parts of Asia. Asparagus can be found naturalized in many parts of the world today, and it is unclear exactly when it was naturalized how long the plant has been used as a medicinal vegetable is also uncertain, but it was known and highly prized by the Romans since at least two hundred BC. The Romans were apparently very knowledgeable about the difference in quality and the difference in varieties that they experimented with, and

they knew the best places to grow the crop. The most popular way that the Romans enjoyed to prepare their asparagus was to pick it, let it dry, and then when they wanted to eat it, they would simply cook it for a few minutes. Ancient royalty seemed fascinated with asparagus. Roman emperor Caesar Augustus was said to have organized elite military units to search out this vegetable. He would then locate the fastest runners to take the fresh asparagus spears

into the frozen alps for storage purposes. Ancient Greeks meanwhile harvested wild asparagus and connected this vegetable to their goddess of life of Aphrodite. Numerous other cultures have also considered this freshly sprouted asparagus a symbol of fertility, and so the history of asparagus goes back a very long long way, and speaking of the Greeks. The derivation of the word asparagus also gives us some idea of its early history.

So asparagus was first cultivated some people think around twenty five hundred years ago in Greece, and this is significant because the word asparagus is a Greek word which means stock or shoot, and so it makes sense that the word is rooted in ancient Greek. But that word in ancient Greek is actually aspharagos, and it can be identified in various literature with two meanings. The first is found in Homer's Iliad, and it is used in this context

to mean throat or gullet. The second place it's found, it's referred to as the edible shoots of stone or spirite. The Greeks believed asparagus was an herbal medicine, which, among other things, would cure toothaches and prevent beastings. We have seen reference to the fact that at one point this Greek word refer to the young edible shoots of any plant that shoots up from the earth, but we cannot verify this fact. So maybe in the area of ancient

Greece known as Biotia, historians say that quote. After veiling the bride, they would put on her head a chaplet of asparagus. For this plant yields the finest flavored fruit from the roughest thorns. So the bride will provide him who does not run away or feel annoyed at her first display of peevishness or unpleasantness, a docile and sweet life together.

figs and melons. Apparently, in the Egyptian culture, this vegtiable was considered sacred and use in religious ceremonies, and then in ancient China, honored guests were treated upon their arrivals with an asparagus foot bath.

bird's tongue, and dove blood. He was accused of using magic charms to win her heart, and even though he successfully defended himself against his accusations, through this story we can clearly see there is certainly something magical about asparagus.

and offered the emperor three exquisite wines. He was said to praise the delicacies, and he was offered for years to come. And so for centuries people have talked about asparagus, and they've also included asparagus in their Eastern dinners because of its fast growth in the spring and how this

can symbolize resurrection. The book quote a Curious History of Vegetables by Wolf D. Storl has numerous asparagus anecdotes to enjoy if you're into that sort of thing, and also contains this quote by modern day plant experts Fritz Martin Engel. And this quote effectively sums up the types of people

who have appreciated asparagus over the centuries. Quote pharaohs, emperors, kings, generals and great spiritual leaders, princely poets like Gota and gormands like Brelant severan, all of them ate and eat asparagus with great enthusiasm. Let's get into the word. As I mentioned earlier, it comes from the Greek word asparagos. Gos is the end of that. So the word asparagus was eventually developed into the word asparagus in classical Latin, but then it was shortened to sparagus without the A

in medieval Latin. According to the World of Wide Words, it first appeared in English around one thousand a d. And then by the sixteenth century it was commonly referred

to an English as sperrich or sparage. At this point in time, similar to other English language developments, there was a reversion back to classical Latin roots that was encouraged by academics and herbalists, so asparagus came back into use with the A, but when it came to common use, the A was still dropped, and people called it asparagus, sparrograss, sparrowgrass, and then also just grass, which was another shortening that

people still use today. After the demise of the Roman Empire, little is heard of regarding the history of asparagus for a while, but evidence suggests that asparagus was being grown in French monasteries in fourteen fifty nine, but then it's unheard of in England or Germany until the mid fifteen hundreds. By the sixteenth century, asparagus starts to appear in history books again, where a gained popularity in France and England.

From there, the early colonists brought it to America. The French were the main exports of the crop at the time, and if you wanted to please the Son King aka King Louis the fourteenth of France, you can bring his second wife, Madame de Matin sorry a new asparagus recipe, and apparently that was very pleasing to him. She gathered them into a book and asparagus soup a la matinan

is still prized today. Asparagus is also because of this called food of the Kings, and kinglu With the fourteenth was so fond of asparagus that he ordered special greenhouses built so we can enjoy asparagus all year round.

valued medicines. It was believed that if a person anointed himself with a liniment or liquid medicine made of asparagus and oil, that bees would not approach or sting him. I mentioned this kind of briefly earlier, but that's.

with other vegetables at the time. It's believed that in the seventeen hundreds it was planted initially in New England, and then by the eighteen fifties it had found its way to North California. There is early evidence, based on seed catalogs, of the crop being sold on a commercial level in the early eighteenth century in eastern parts of

the country. While asparagus, as we mentioned earlier is a thing and it's seen as early as the nineteenth century, it can be growing along the East Coast in scattered locations and across temperate North America, and apparently thirty six states have reported to have wild asparagus. Another kingly reference of asparagus is apparently in Germany. Asparagus was called Spargl.

Spargol took cold in Germany around Stuttgart in the sixteenth century, and around the same time it was already being taking off from the UK. Initially, it was grown exclusively for the royal court, earning its nickname connexumus muse. Connexum muse it basically means royal vegetable. And there are two primary

growing regions in Germany where asparagus is in abundance. One of them is Schwitzwingen and it's where Karl Theodore, Prince elector, started a green asparagus growing competition among the princes in the seventeenth century, and then the other region, Schrobenhausen. It's also steeped in asparagus history and houses the European Asparagus Museum. That's a thing, an asparagus museum. You know what else

might have a museum. All of these ads one day probably not buy what's in city, dads, and we're back, Okay, James.

unless from Elvisham. I've just learned that the little purple tips on the spears, that's not normal. Apparently that's just an evel Aviv Sham.

by someone. People buy hundreds of pounds for it. Wow, and then they rush it off to their restaurant in London, right, and they make it for their fancy people to pay fancy money for this fancy vegetable. Famously, Famously, I perhaps overstated that Gus the Asparagus Man was refused entry to the Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom maybe maybe ten fifteen years ago now because it's costume primented a security risk. Wow.

and then you just cut across the base. So some of them are going to have more of the woody white bass than others. The parts the green part has been above. The toy on in the white puts below right right. So you're doing them. You get you're around or you get your have many sparagus, you're getting right. You get it very fresh. Often when at least when we were buy it, we would just buy it like from farm shops or by the side of the road.

We never grew it because it was just like a lot You could get a lot more from just doing other vegetables. But you'd buy it the day it was harvested, and then you drive it home immediately put it into boiling water just briefly, right, and then you pop it out and you don't need to cook it for very long if it's good, if you don't want to cook it for very long rate, just just softening it a little bit. And then if you have it with there's

original way to have it. It's with butter, which kind of you know, does away with the cereal cholesterol benefit. Nice to dip in a in a soft.

snowy kind of winters. We just get like right around freezing and raining a lot of the time, which is the worst weather that is possible to have. And it's just fucking miserable. So like when you're having the asparagus, it's like a nice sign days. Our summer days are really long as well, so you're getting these nice long

summer days. You're like starting to get like it comes after what they call the hungry gap, right that time in like February March where you're not getting as many of your fresh vegetables sort of the time when you're not really harvesting very much, so you've only got like your storage stuff, right, your apples and potatoes, and so after that you get your asparagus. It's the start of your spring vege. So it's a nice little, nice little celebration of springtime.

Governor James Henry Hammond. He implied that the European industry depended heavily on Southern cotton. He owned the Redcliffe Plantation in Beach Island, Aikin County. Enslaved people obviously provided the labor for cotton cultivation, and so him, along with scores

of other plantation owners. He hoped that buyers of Southern cotton would fight against the blockade enacted by Lincoln's federal forces, and Southerners, because of this, were certain that their cotton exports were so crucial that Europeans would surely back the South in the event of a Civil war. Spoiler alert that did not happen, and then by eighteen sixty five, the outcome of the Civil War had planters looking at

their commercial ventures in a new way. Farmers broke their dependence on cotton, and they desperately tried to find and locate another king crop. A variety of crops could thrive in the warm, sandy soil of Achen. The first reference to asparagus being grown as a commercial crop in South Carolina can be found in a nineteen oh three pamphlet called Asparagus Its Culture for Home and for Market. According to the pamphlet, the crop was first grown commercially in Charleston,

where farmers produced a specific variety called palmetto. It was cultivated especially to flourish in the southern climate, and soon this specialized variety spread into a Bacon, Williston, and Bamberg counties. By nineteen eighteen, the Clemson University Department of Agricultural Economics reported that the state had about eleven hundred acres of asparagus under cultivation. Fast forward to nineteen thirty seven, this

number increased to eighty seven hundred acres. So area residents enjoyed their share of fresh asparagus, but most of it was sent to New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, d c. From the nineteen twenties through the mid nineteen fifties, asparagus was gathered daily and shipped by train to its northern destinations. Shippers often wrapped the delicate spears and Spanish moss gathered

from the live oak trees that abounded the city. The crop flourished commercially for almost thirty years until production slowed down in nineteen fifty three. World War II may have lessened the workforce available to farm the crop, or perhaps the marketing success from the California competitors was more effective

than South Carolina's. It is also possible let the varieties grow an Achen and the surrounding areas were more susceptible to diseases that weakened the crops, and so although several farms near Achen still grow asparagus, according to aichinregional dot com, the reign of King Asparagus is over.

a rise out of people. They were calling themselves the City Council Death Squad, and they've disrupted hundreds of virtual public meetings from coast to coast over the last year, everything from zoning boards in New Jersey to city council meetings in California, even dipping their toe into messing with online meetings of alcoholics anonymous. They mostly seem motivated by their insatiable need to force strangers to hear them say the N word. But I do think they understand that

their behavior limits people's access to local government. Many of the cities they targeted responded by ending virtual participation in government meetings. That means fewer people participate. It's harder to engage with local government, and people just generally feel less safe and less motivated to pursue the kinds of redress available to them through local democracy. And I'm glad we

did the episode. I heard from people in maybe a dozen cities all over the country who found the episode online when they were trying to figure out what the hell happened at their own meeting and the guy's doing it. Liked the episode so much that now they use my name when they call into meetings to scream slurs, which is a less positive outcome, But what can you do. I assume if the mayor of Redlands, California googles me, he'll figure out I wasn't the one doing Holocaust denial

at his meeting. But overall, this seems like the kind of thing that will be prosecute able, especially considering we know the real names of many of the group's ringleaders. Well, someone has finally been indicted for orchestrating hateful zoom bombing and virtual city council meetings. But it isn't them, It's something much, much weirder. Last month, FEDS unsealed an indictment

against a man named Mohammad al Hashemi. He's a Syrian national from Albania currently living in England, and according to the federal prosecutor, he was the mastermind behind a zoom bombing ring that targeted the Fresno City Council in the summer of twenty twenty. He's been charged with one count of engaging in repeated harassing communication, one count of engaging in anonymous telecommunications harassment, three counts of a classic eighteen USC.

Eight seventy five C transmitting threatening communications, and one count of conspiracy for doing all of the above. Right, So there's a conspiracy, and then those other charges represent the over acts of that conspiracy. Now, again, I'm not a lawyer. I'll tell you that every time. I don't know all the laws, and so this is the first time I'm realizing that harassing someone by phone is a federal crime. I mean, it makes sense, right, of course, that's illegal

at the federal level too. I just didn't think about that the last time we were talking about zoom bombing. I mean, the obvious charge is interstate threats. If you make a threat using a phone, the internet, or the mail, that's federal territory. But prosecutors are sometimes a little gun shy about threats. They want a slam dunk case. They want a true threat, right, something that is undeniably an

actual threat, before they'll bring a case like that. So I thought they'd have to get a little creative if they wanted to indict zoom bombers. But if you're just talking about harassing phone calls, it's actually pretty straightforward to bring a federal case against the guys doing this. So two of the charges of the indictment are for different subsections of forty seven USC. Two twenty three Obscene or

harassing phone calls. Subsection A one C is making a telephone call or utilizing a telecommunications device, right, So that means it doesn't have to be a literal telephone. It can be a zoom call. It can be in any kind of telecommunications device like text message, et cetera. Whether or not conversation or communication ensues, which means you know, repeated harassing hang up calls.

communication ensues solely to harass any specific person. Both of those counts carry a maximum sentence of two years, and they're usually just punished with a fine, not that serious. The other counts are a little more serious. Interstate threatening communications can get you up to five years per count, and some of these calls had some pretty violent language.

I'm interested to see how they move forward with the threats, though the actual intent or ability to carry out a threat doesn't necessarily matter if the person the threat was made to was in reasonable fear from it, but I'm sure we'll see It argued that he was in Albania he never planned to go to Fresno to hurt people. The obvious counter to that, though, is that he did literally say he was in Fresno, and there was no obvious indication to the victims that that wasn't true, and

he's also charged with conspiracy. The indictment refers multiple times to unnamed co conspirators, so this isn't just one guy making racist, praying phone calls. This is an organized and intentional conspiracy to engage in harassment and threats.

Albanian Nazi they'd been chatting with on roadblocks. Okay, not exactly roadblocks, that's a little hyperbolic, but the raids were coordinated on a platform called Gilded, which is kind of like Discord and is owned by the same company as Roadblocks, so it's mostly used by gamers to talk about gaming, but also apparently for doing federal crimes. But the kids all said the group's leaders were users named Encino. That's i ns e E n O, not in Sino like Incino.

Man the poly Shore movie and Sapper. Many of the kids correctly ascertained that Encino, the user FEDS have identified as Al Hashemi, was older than they were and European, but spoke English very well. I went back and pulled the public access TV recordings of some of those meetings and listened to the calls attributed to Alhachemi, and he really doesn't have an accent that I could hear. You know, you don't got a hand it to him or anything.

But he does say the N word like a red blooded American racist, so I guess he had some practice. The kid, interviewed by the Metropolitan Police Service at his parents' house in London, said that Sapper was a college student in the United Arab Emirates, although in the footnotes the FBI agent indicates that actually Sapper is in Jordan, but

you know, close enough for a teenager. I can't find any information about whether or not charges are being pursued against that user, either in the US or in Jordan. He isn't identified by name at all, but he does appear to be the only other adult discussed in that document. The English teenager said Sapper loves spamming, the calls they

raid with isis gore videos. The criminal complaint details seven incidents of zoom raids in June and July of twenty twenty five of which were meetings of the Presno City Council. One was a Jewish religious service conducted by Zoom in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the other was some random couple's wedding in upstate New York. But the incidents described in detail in the complaint are clearly not the only ones that happened,

just the only ones being charged at this time. When FBI agents interviewed a thirteen year old boy in Oregon, he told them the group's leader also enjoyed zoom bombing parent teacher conferences, specifically at schools that had had past active shooter events. The boy said, Encino again, that's al Hachemi, according to the complaint, loves to offend people and talks about racist things more than anyone else. But you know who doesn't love to offend people. The sponsors of this show.

first few threats were made. They were sitting at the dining room table talking to a kid identified as RB by August twenty seventh, barely two months after the call started. RB is described as a juvenile with a history of making threats who lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Obviously, it's impossible to identify this minor, and probably not a good idea to do even if I could, But I am dying to know what exactly that history of threats looks like.

I found a couple of news stories in the year or two before this about teens in the Spartanburg area who'd been arrested for making threats. Now, Obviously, again, even in those news stories, if a miner is arrested and are identified, so there's no way to sort of connect these two unnamed teens. But I did find a story about a ninth grader who posted a snapchat on the day of the Parkland school shooting in twenty eighteen, I was a photo of the teenager holding a realistic fake

gun with the caption round two of Florida tomorrow. Again, it's impossible to say if there's any connection, but the general age, location, and interest in school shootings definitely caught

my eye. Another member of the group, identified as a miner named CG in North Caldwell, New Jersey, sometimes used the name Adam Lanza during the zoom raids, an homage to the Sandy Hook school shooter, and when the FBI was chatting with RB on August twenty seventh, he told him about another user in the discord who posted often about his desire to carry out a school shooting and wanting to kill a Few days after that, the FBI agents were sitting down with that thirteen year old boy

and his parents in Oregon. That boy, identified as PM, told the agents that Encino wasn't just interested in zoom bombing, but the group also dosed people, naming a bizarre list of targets ranging from Jewish leaders to yoga teachers and cooking classes. PM also told the agents that Encino had docksed a former member of the group, a girl identified in a footnote as LT, after a disagreement over whether or not they should be using so many racial slurs

in the prank phone calls. Now I know, I said it wasn't possible or even advisable to try to identify these miners, but it turns out it is possible, and she's not a miner anymore.

why she left the group. Maybe it is possible that she disagreed with the racial slur heavy call scripts, but I don't think that's because she's not a huge fan of racism. She shows up that same year in leaked discord chats from the servers Groper Haven and Nick Fuentes Unofficial, both servers for fans of Nick Quente's She identifies herself as a paleo conservative, Christian monarchist and claims to know Nick Quentez. Then another user asked her if she likes Nick.

communists should be jailed appears over her head. You know, kids will be kids, right, Just classic kids stuff, wanting to imprison your political enemies and being really opposed to race mixing.

of the other kids. PM that's thirteen year old in Oregon told agents he was worried the group would dox him if he tried to leave BO. A minor in North Carolina told agents he believed in Sino had access to his computer by a spyware. AM, a seventeen year old in Maryland, provided agents with screenshots showing in Sino had posted his address and discussed having him swatted. And this is such a messy, ugly thing, right, So first

of all, the are kids. They're kids, right, One of them is as young as thirteen, and that has to be front of mind in all of this. But even if they lack the frontal lobe capacity to really understand the consequences of saying you're going to kill someone, this isn't just normal kid acting out behavior, right. PM told other users he wanted to shoot up his school. AM posted often about wanting to build bombs and blow things

up and expressed a lot of interest in isis. They were all calling into these meetings and saying the most shocking, upsetting things they could think of, and it's not one hundred percent clear why right, Like they didn't all necessarily have the same motivations or understandings. A teenager identified as kh told agents the goal is to create such a disturbance that the hosts have no choice but determinate the meeting.

Hurting people's feelings along the way is completely in bounds, and the slurs were just a means to that end. He said they would quote just have fun in there. Am told agents he was just posting quote random things, but he also admitted he hates Jews, and so maybe it's a meaningless exercise to try to nail down exactly how ideologically committed these teens were to this project of

racial and religious harassment. But Ala Sheemi is also not the first Nazi to see the value in recruiting teens online. They may just be kids talking shit right now, but if you hear a kid talking this type of shit, don't brush it off right This starts somewhere, This edgy, shocking, un serious sort of four chan style racism crystallizes into

serious ideological commitment for some of them. And I hope these kids' parents were able to provide some meaningful intervention after they found out what their kids were up to online. And back to that timeline, right, So the indictment only lists the June twenty twenty calls as the overt acts of the conspiracy, but the date range for the charge conduct is actually May twenty twenty to February twenty twenty two, and maybe that means they plan to introduce additional evidence

of other calls to support the conspiracy claim. It's hard to say. They're being pretty tight lipped about it. Reporting by Jason Koebler for four or four Media says the Department of Justice declined to comment on the possibility of anyone else being charged, and the criminal complaint goes into some detail by interviewing multiple cooperative miners, But it is possible the records they got back from these various platforms led them to other co conspirators who are old enough

to catch a federal charge. There are a lot of details missing here that we'll just have to wait for. The docket shows that Alihemi has retained an attorney. I assume they wouldn't have unsealed the indictment if they didn't have him in custody, but there's no information available at when or where he was arrested, and how that extradition is coming along. And it's interesting to me how incredibly similar the mo is in this case to the ring led by the Gham Defense League.

you know, I agree with the previous speaker. He's sort of indicating that he's interested in and engaged in the topic of the meeting. He expresses an opinion about the topic at hand, which happened to be police funding, and then suddenly he pivots to a violent call for murder of black residence and repeatedly uses the N word. And so after that call ends, the council's on high alert for disruptive callers, so subsequent members of the group don't

bother with a script or a backstory. They just start shouting slurs the second they connect until they're booted from the call.

I guess that's just classic crank call procedure, right. You start off with the reasonable ruse, You get the person you've called to believe this is a real normal phone call, and then you shock and upset them by making a hard right turn into the I guess you can't really call it a punchline if it's not funny, but you know what I mean. But if you took the names out of this indictment, you could mistake these descriptions of

calls for city Council death squad scripts. But they didn't start doing their zoom bombing until the summer of twenty twenty three, and according to this indictment, the FBI agents were having uncomfortable conversations with teenage boys all the way back in twenty twenty. So I think if there was any overlap between these two zoom bomb rings, we'd know by now. I think this is just unrelated racists reaching the same horrible conclusion. But if those guys are listening,

I hope they hear the significance of that timeline. Within weeks of that first zoom bomb. In this indictment, they had search warrants for the homes of two of the miners on those calls. I think a lot of people assume that if they don't get caught, they aren't going to get caught. You see that a lot on tax evasion cases. Right after you do it a few years in a row, you figure they're never going to get you,

so you keep doing it. You get a little bolder, But they're just taking their time and building their case. Just because you haven't been caught yet, does it mean they don't know you're doing it?

This is one of those times. The last week has brought about ten years worth of news, and we are all processing the seemingly inevitable coronation of a dictator and the sudden hope and possibility inspired by Joe Biden's stepping down from the nomination Welcome to It could happen here. I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes about how to put them back together.

The last time I sat down to talk with all of you like this was in the immediate aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt just before the Republican National Convention. I told you not to panic. That's still good advice. I also told you that no matter how bad or good things may look, literally anything can happen in US politics, and by god, it has. I felt it was necessary to deliver that message because I saw an awful lot

of people declaring We're doomed. Fascism is inevitable, and quite frankly, I think shit like that only helps the fascists. Well, it turned out I was right. A lot has happened over the last two weeks, and the situation now is very different than it was the day the former president took that grazing blow from a sniper's bullet. As is usually the case and instances like this, I've had a lot of people reach out to me since that episode,

saying versions of how did you know? And as good as it might be for my career to lean into that side of my reputation, the truth is that I am white knuckling it through every twist and turn like everyone else. I spent the RNC wondering if I'd been foolish telling people not to panic, and yes, I feel a hell of a lot better right now. Of course, I don't know what comes next. I just know that we're done with the portion of this mess where we spiral in a hopeless mire That was last week. This week,

the outlook is a lot better. And not because Kamala Harris is our savior or because Nancy Pelosi is a three D chess master, but because men age and die. This is a fact I tried to remind myself of as I'd grown through that disastrous debate with the rest of the country. On one hand, I felt like we were all about to watch one ailing, power hungry man hand the keys to the kingdom over to a cadre of bloodthirsty fascists. But on the other hand, there's always

something inherently optimistic in this simple reality. The people who would be our rulers will all die someday, and so long as men die, liberty will never perish. So long as men die, we have hope. I stole that line from Charlie Chaplin. He put it in the mouth of his character from The Great Dictator, a movie he produced at great personal cost in nineteen forty riot. As Hitler

and the Nazis reached the apex of their power. A rational analyst staring out at the playing field after the fall of France, could be forgiven for having seen the outcome as certain Great Britain stood alone, Hitler's armies victorious on every theater, and the future of democracy and human liberty gasping for breath. One such rational analyst was Joseph Kennedy, US ambassador to Great Britain and patriarch of the Kennedy family.

Joseph was a man of wealth and power, whose sober judgment and cunning had seen him short the entire US stock market, and the kind of fortune that let him buy his way into the ranks of global royalty. He was a man who had predicted the future once one big, and he let that convince him that he had the

second sight. And so in November nineteen forty, less than a month after the release of the Great Dictator, Kennedy found himself in an interview with the Boston Globe, looking out at the ruin of Europe and the bombs falling on London. He told a reporter, democracy is finished in England. It may be here here, of course, being the United States. Now. The resulting blowback to all of this saw Kennedy force

to resign his ambassadorship. The very next year, Hitler invaded the the Soviet Union, and for several brutal months it looked like Joe had been right. Not only might democracy be finished, but every system besides fascism might be hurtling towards annihilation and bondage under the Swastika, depending on how you count it. The Third Reich and fascism as a whole, reached its greatest extent of territorial power in either mid

August or September nineteen forty one. By November of nineteen forty one, a year after Joe Kennedy's remarks to the Globe, Operation Barbarossa had been wrenched to a bloody halt, and the long battle to push the fascists back and drown them in the waters of their birth had begun. And so in the end it was Charlie Chaplin, not Joe Kennedy, who had the proper measure of things. Liberty survived because men died, many millions of them, from Kiev to Canterbury.

We live in very different times now. The armies of fascism are not primarily conquering land under arms. The primary terrain of our present conflict exists within the hearts and souls of men and women. And while populism is still a favorite mechanism of action among the fascists, they have in this country at least given up on victory by sheer weight of numbers. It's true what they say, war never changes. Weapons do, But the core of all human

conflict revolves around the capture and denial of territory. If you can't occupy ground yourself, you must at least deny it to the enemy. In infantry combat, this is the primary use of a machine gun, not to kill people, but to blanket an area in bullets and stop the enemy from moving through it. In our modern war of thoughts and feelings, the machine gun has yielded to the

fire hose of propaganda and disinformation. These have always been parts of the fascist arsenal, but the Internet has allowed an increase in the scale and speed of their deployment that is very much comparable to the replacement of bolt

action rifles with automatic ones. The forces of basic human decency have a natural advantage in terms of human terrain that should be impossible for the fascists to counter, no matter what the bastards say, most people want to be left alone with the people they love to live their lives. The forces of hate, the people who want to throw trans kids in their parents in gas chambers and drown migrants in the Rio Grande tap out at a little

over a third of the population max. If you want to return to World War II metaphors, and why wouldn't you? The monsters are stuck in tiny, landlocked Germany without any gas or steel. The only way for them to access the resources in territory they need to maneuver themselves into a victory is by cutting us off from each other and keeping us too confused and divided to surround the bastards and smother them all for good. They do this by convincing you that you are isolated, alone and surrounded

by them. Our hopelessness is their force multiplier. When leftists in the US look out at Ukrainians struggling for survival and write them off as Nazis, as diluted tools of imperialism, When liberals in blue cities to cry college students protesting on behalf of dying Palestinian children as agents of Hamas, the lines of solidarity between a snap rather than wrapping

like a garret around the throats of our opponents. This is why you've seen so much allegiance and sympathy between the cruelest and most deluded segments of the Western left. The people who laughed at Syrian civilians sheltering from Bushah al Assad's bombs and called them the CIA and the agents of Putin's Russia and Peter Teal's neo monarchist right. The Teals, Bannons, Putin's Airdoins, Trumps and Modis of the world know how lonely they are. The only way they

can win is to convince you that you're alone. Then they have you at a disadvantage. Then they can kill us one by one. You know, there's no smooth way to transition to an ad and a piece like this, But here it is. We're back now. I'm not a young man, but I do sometimes the think of humanity as a single, vast, gestalt organism groping for survival and comfort in a world that mostly exists beyond what we can see. Majority of people are happy existing as part

of that vast whole. We take comfort and safety in our communion with the rest of the species. But there are a few diseased minds out there that don't believe in the rest of us. These sollipsists see themselves as the only minds, and the perpetuation of their own power and will as the only real good. That's why men like Peter Teel seek physical immortality, and it's why men like Vladimir Putin or Hitler seek the kind of immortality that comes from welding the edifice of a nation state

to themselves. Hitler is Germany, and Germany will last forever. Elon Musk sees his children as an extension of himself, and his fantasies of space colonization are really just a fantasy that he will remain central to humanity's future down through eternity. Musk has repeatedly identified himself as a pro natalist, and he believes his responsibilities to have as many children

as possible to secure a pro human future. The term pro human might confuse you, given the lack of concern he has for the children being bombed in Gaza or who will surely die in the mass deportation camps through a publican party is currently salivating to open. But the only real human Elon sees is himself, which is why he equates the survival of the species with his own ability to breed. As I type, this video has begun circulating around the Internet from an interview Musk conducted with

Jordan Peterson for The Daily Wire. In it, Musk explains why he has now fully embraced politics, endorsing Donald Trump and declaring himself at war with wokeism, which he describes as an existential threat to the species. He claims that what cinched this for him was his daughter deciding to transition.

the most radical acts of love imaginable. To do this means that you've accepted, on a fundamental level that your children are autonomous beings, not an extension of you, but something new, wonderful, and unique. The essence of parental love is to give your children to the world. This means accepting that you are finite that the world goes on without you. If you see all humanity as an extension

of your own ego, nothing could be more frightening. The people who feel this way, people like Elon, are mutations, a glitch in the human system that starts as a glitch within the heart of an individual. It comes as a byproduct of success in the very visible, spectacular ways that feed narcissism. When I think about stuff like this, I refer often back to a great art by the

anthropologist Richard Lee, eating Christmas in the Kalahari. Lee spent years living among the Ikung Bushmen, a Bantu speaking hunter gatherer group who were seen by anthropologists as some of the people still living in a manner most similar to our ancient ancestors. One Christmas, as a show of gratitude to his hosts, Lee purchased a massive ox for the

holiday feast. He was excited to show this great gift off to his new friends, and he was proud of himself for having gotten it, and he was utterly shocked when they responded to his pride with mockery of him and his ox, insulting it as scrawny, tiny, hardly fit

to eat now. This shockedly because the ox he had purchased was of course quite large, and it was eventually explained to him that his friends were reacting with mockery not to his gift, but to the evident pride he had shown in it, bringing in a great beast worth of meat. Either as a hunter, or from buying it as Burton did, is the kind of thing that can

go to a young man's head. If you are the one with the poet book or the one who fires the arrow, you can forget that the meat before you, the meat that you've brought into the community, is not the product purely of your own genius, but is a product of all of the time and resources invested in you by the community. The shaming of the meat, as this tactic was called, is a time honored way of correcting the glitch in young men of the Ukun before

it can turn terminal. As one elder in the tribe eventually explained to Lee, when a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle. And speaking of cooling your heart, why

don't you cool your heart with some ads? And then we'll come back to conclude this in a little bit, We're back. It has been theorized that the shaming of the meat is a social construct that may help to explain one of the evolutionary values of satire, perhaps even why humanity keeps producing comedians. They act as a part

of our species immune system. When this glitch in the hearts of young men isn't punctured, when it's allowed to take off and dominate them, then it changes them on a fundamental level, and the being that it leaves in its wake seems to understand instinctively that laughter is a danger to it. This ultimately explains why Musk purchase Twitter and why Barack Obama's mockery of Donald Trump during that White House Correspondence Center set us all down the dark

path that we currently are walking. So clearly, humor alone doesn't always save us from these kinds of people either. What Will I Have several times and my various shows identified myself as an anarchist, and I tend to do that even though I don't feel fully comfortable with the title, because brevity matters. I'm speaking to a mass audience and using that word gets as close enough for the sake of a podcast. But I'm not an anarchist in the sense that I have some sort of clear vision for

how to build a utopia. Obviously, I do think anarchism has some answers for how human beings might build a better world. That's why I went through a Java, It's why we cover a lot of the things that we cover on these series. But I am primarily an anarchist because I understand that hierarchy kills. Because I understand that hierarchy separates us from each other and acts as a

petri dish within which this glitch can propagate. I'm an anarchist because I love the people around me, because I understand that I am human, and because I see that my role in the human immune system is to remind other people of that fact and to point a finger at the people who have forgotten that they're human. I promised in the title of this little piece that I would tell you how we can win, and I can do that in a few words. We have to remember

that we are humans. Amala Harris is an authoritarian. The fact that she wants to be president at all should make you leery of her. But she's not a Trump or a Musk. She has not separated herself entirely from humanity, if you'll forgive the reference. She understands that she exists in the context of all that came before her. Joe Biden has been hungry for power all his life. The glitch is in him. It has consumed most of him, but as we all learned recently, not all of him.

He too understands that he is a part of humanity, indivisible from it. Now you can and should still view the man with disgust, even hatred. He ought to be in the Hague, but he also stepped down and gave up the thing that a week ago I'd have said probably mattered most to him in the world. This was not a purely selfless gesture. I'm sure he acted in a large part to try and salvage his own legacy. But it is also not a thing thing Donald Trump

could ever do. You certainly wouldn't see a man like Vladimir Putin make a similar choice, and we've all seen the kind of slaughter bb net Yahoo is willing to back to hold on to power. None of this redeems Biden or makes him a good person or any less complicit in genocide than he was a week ago. I think it does put us in a better position when it comes to fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza. Everyone in US politics knows that Biden's political end started with

the surge of uncommitted voters in Michigan. The loss of a second term is not a sufficient punishment for Biden's actions, but it is a punishment that has the ability to reshape the kind of risks US presidents will and won't take for Israel from now on. It has also helped me make sense of something that happened in twenty twenty.

You all remember the moment during the one presidential debate that year, President Trump attacked Biden over the numerous scandals of his son, Hunter, a troubled drug addict who tried and largely failed to use his father's named secure wealth and standing for himself. Hunter's troubles have been tremendously embarrassing to his father, but up in front of the country and world, Biden refused to throw his son under the bus. He embraced him and expressed the kind of unconditional love

that is utterly alien to men like Trump and Musk. Biden, for all the evil that he has done in the raw selfishness that allowed him to reach the presidency in the first place. Is a man who loves his son. Most importantly, he loves Hunter as Hunter and not purely as an extension of Joe Biden. There's an excellent series of articles out in The Atlantic right now by Tim Alberta,

who might be the finest political journalist writing today. Tim had the good instincts to look behind the scenes at the team Trump picked to orchestrate his twenty twenty four campaign, and he's delivered deep reporting about why they've made some of the baffling decisions that they've made. Chief among bafflements was the selection of j. D. Vance as Vice President. Vance barely won his seat in Congress with the help

of tens of millions of teal dollars. He is a liar without principle who has repeatedly expressed his desire to tear up the Constitution and usher in a new red caesar to bring this nation to heal under men like him. I watched Vance's speech at the RNC live at a Heritage Foundation party, surrounded by the rightest of the right, not one of them offered a single word of praise.

But Poles don't say everything. The panic of their responses to Biden's stepping down, the chaotic spree of hate, to a single truth. They don't know what to do.

we get more room to move and maneuver. The fascists may well regain their footing and time to crush us But something else has happened in the last few days as well. People, we humans, as a vast, blurry mob, have started to remember how many of us there are, and how much potential the weight of our numbers gives us. We have started to reconnect with each other, and that has also opened up possibilities that did not exist before.

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party aren't going to bring an end to global capitalism or drive a stake into the heart of the oil and gas industry. There remains so much else to do, so many other fights ahead

of us. But if we can crush the Republicplicans here, it will be the fourth election cycle in a row where the right made a war on trans people, on the concept of diversity, on any kind of open, secular society the core of their electoral efforts, and it will be the fourth time that they have done that and lost. If we break their lines and send them fleeing into the hills, we have an opportunity to shatter their power and use the momentum of that victory to start building

something better. There's no cleaner, easy route to a better future, but our chances are a hell of a lot better. The more of us that stay alive, and the more scattered and frightened that we can make our enemies. Our strength has always come from solidarity, from the understanding that we need each other and that we are part of each other. The Putins and Trumps and Musks and Teals of the world are of course a part of humanity as well, but they are incapable of seeing or accepting that.

And so long as that is the case, we outnumber them. So long as that is the case, we can win.

this episode. But we are once again turning away from their republic, from the sort of chaos and despair of the Republican Party to turn towards the chaos and despair of the Democratic Party. Yeah, we're gonna specifically be talking about a series of what I think we're kind of high profile fights in trans circles over sort of the administration very publicly starting to write off trans kids. I don't think it got that much news attention because, as you may have noticed, it is, Yeah, a lot of

this is by very specifically Biden administration stuff. We are recording the Sunday Warning the morning of the twenty first. There is a real chance that by the end of the day Biden is no longer the nominee. So we'll get into that a little bit, but as of right now, he's still the guy, and he is fucking us. So, yeah, with you to talk about this is Karin Green, who we have had on the show before. Is a trans policy expert of many organizations and much experience, and yeah,

welcome back on this. Welcome back to the show.

lot gone on the record against trans kits. So I guess I want to start there. Can can you sort of explain what happened with this New York Times story that kind of kicked this whole saga off.

But so he's been putting out the regulations that the Biden administration has been putting out are not good regulations for trans people, right, But it's hard to help people understand that they're transphobic because it's a five hundred page regulation and so you know, it's kind of wonky and a little weird, and if there is comms like the Biden administration and the orgs have been putting out calling

him pro trans and all this stuff. There's a big barrier to overcome there with a wonky stuff like that. But what happened a couple of days after the debate, which I'm sure everyone saw, or if you didn't didn't watch it live, you realized in a horror that you now had to watch it to understand what this country is going through. They there was some initial reporting around how the WPATH Standards of Care Version eight came out. So WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transfer or Health.

It is either last year or the year before they updated the Standards of Care seven to Standards of Care eight. This is a little background, sorry, And at the time there was discussion among WPATH members, doctors and kind of policy people to some degree about whether mentioning kind of rough ages for what time, what age people tend to start certain treatments like period blockers, hormones, that kind of thing,

what kind of normal age ranges those things happening. We know from years years of advocacy and work and activism is that if somebody writes something like those things down, even if they present it as a kind of loose guideline or this is where things typically fall. Policymakers will write that stuff into law and rig and take what is supposed to give doctors and patients, you know, room to figure out what works best for them, and make

it a very strict regime. And so transactivists did not want ages in the wpath Sock eight for that reason. And in the one and only instance of pro trans advocacy that I'm aware of her ever engaging in Rachel Levine in AHHS kind of advocated with wpath not to include those age ranges in it.

the New York Times was reporting. They somebody had gotten, like some bad guys had gotten some of the emails between Levin and w Path and were like trying to make it into a scandal, right, And they and the bad guys misrepresented kind of what the issue and discussion was about, right, So we discussed what it was, but the way that they would present it as, oh, you know, w Path was trying to limit treatments to kids being you know, old enough of a certain age, which is

not what they were doing. And they were trying to present Levine as trying to get rid of those so that five year olds could have surgery or whatever. It's so, you know, just very very insincere. But so the media was kind of reporting just on that because they love muck breaking.

absolute fucking clouds. These people have no idea what the fuck they're talking about, and so you know, when they're trying to write a story that's about like leaked technical policy documents, they have no fucking idea what they're doing, and the reporting is gibberish. It's like I was trying

to understand it. And this is a real issue because the only the source we had was this document of this New York Times writer who like couldn't like the New York Times writer who like couldn't find the back of their hand with the map right trying to like write out these skinned emails.

for transgender youth. And then obviously that is, at least publicly, that is a new position for the President who has has been called not by me but by other people, you know, one hundred percent pro trans super great ally his entire administration. I disagree with that, but other people have been saying that for a long time. And so that took a lot of people by surprise and was a big kind of kurf lefvel. And so that's kind of the jumping off point for where we're going here.

contributes to PBS News Hour Right. And so none of these three people that we pay to advocate for us or this journalist brought up this very fresh, very pertinent, very relevant, new White House position. They just talked about how important it is to vote and how much fun they had at Pride parades instead garbage, right, And so it was very weird to me that these three people who represent lgbt obviously organizations would not immediately vocally condemned

that kind of anti transtance. And it also blew my mind that this journalist must be like allergic to scoops or something like why yeah, why wouldn't you like that's your chance right there?

ago now. And so for me, it was a very kind of complicated feeling of Okay, Now, at least other people don't have to take my word about the rags. There's something they can look at and see it themselves. But I was also, you know, completely threw off my sleep schedule. I was bouncing off the walls, going and seing and trying to you know, or organize responses. And so the first org actually I think I believe it was HRC, issued a statement Monday night and it was

a decent statement. I might have critiques of them whatever, And then the rest of the orgs kind of didn't issue statements until Tuesday evening, and so so that Tuesday also the White House issued a statement that to clarify their position, and the statement actually made it worse. So what the statement said was that they do oppose surgery

for transgender youth. So they reiterated that, and then it went on to say, however, we continue to support gender affirming care for youth, such as mental health care.

I'm very concerned, right, because if you're pro trans and you support transaccess to healthcare, it is not complicated or hard or controversial for you to say, yeah, you know, I support trans people and their access to health care. They should have access to therapy, hormones, pubity blockers, surgery,

whatever they need. Like, it's not complex there, right, But they didn't do that, and so to me that felt even worse than kind of the initial position because it signaled to me that there's likely we're likely kind of losing them on not just surgery, it's all this other stuff. And so two hours later that statement was updated, revised and it took out saying they support mental health care and was changed to say we support gender affirming care like a continuum of care and used the words continuum

of care instead of mental health care. Now that doesn't that feels like tripling down to me, because the problem was that it was very overt what you left out, and you had the opportunity to go back and fix it, and then you continued. You just made new words that very overtly leave out the kind of things that we would need reassurance about, right, And so that's kind of where things were at at that point.

me impaled across there? Militantly transphobic piece of shit. I think it's like their health secretary now, yes, yeah, the masters over there don't forget Yeah, yeah, they're ministers came out and said we're going to ban all children from getting puberty blockers, not.

lot of people. So I want to sort of like, yeah, we got to get that sort of context in which is we're in this position not.

night and day. It is the difference between being alive and not being alive, Like it is the difference between having sort of like a stable like stable interiority and feeling like you don't exist every fucking day.

it like exploratory care. This is conversion therapy. Yeah, that's what they are talking about. And you know, seeing the White House suddenly pivot to this language that is effectively identical to again the UK thing where they're like, we're going to give these consciversion therapy was terrifying.

statement on Tuesday. And so that coincided, unfortunately with a couple other anti transdevelopments in the Democratic Party in a way that I find very worrying, especially when taken kind of as a constellation. Right, So, that same week, the

Senate Armed Services Committee. So the NDAA is a large military funding bill, the National Events Authorization Act, and the House has been passing versions with lots of transphobic riders in them, and then for the last couple of years, the Senate has been taking those out and passing a clean version, and then ultimately it's a clean version of that gets an active Last year, I was very, very worried that we would lose on that and that it

would go through with the writers and the implications here. So the DoD Department of Events funds healthcare for the VA and Trycare. I think there's one other smaller program kind of similar that's a different name and effort, but largely VA and tringcare so for active service members and their families and veterans, which is I think I last

read like ten million people or something. And so if they cut off public funding for trans healthcare through those programs, a whole lot of people are going to lose it, and we're going to very quickly wind up in a situation like abortion is with the High Amendment, where no

public money can be used on our healthcare. And so that week, the same time, the Senate Armed Services Committee had their version of the NDAA, and Committee Joe Manchin voted with Republicans to attach to these transphobic riders to it, and then it was everyone in the committee except for three people. I believe it was Warren, one other Democrat, and I think possibly one Republican who voted against it.

But all the other Democrats on the committee voted to pass it out of committee with those transphobic riders, which is terrifying. Yeah, and Senator Kelly has introduced a floor amendment to take those out, but whether his mimit even makes it to the floor, I don't know. And what the vote looks like that like on that, I don't know. So I'm really worried that the NDA will pass with these riders in it, and then subsequent spending bills for

other departments will as well. And then simultaneously there's the third thing. Over Biden's term, there have been over he's had over two hundred of his judicial nominees that he's offered up and over his whole term, not a single time has a Democrat opposed one of his judicial nominees. But that week us Off actually opposed one of his judicial nominees over the fact that she had sent a trans woman to women's prison, so specifically a transphobic reason

for objecting, and so she didn't denominated. And that's the first time that has happened over Biden's term from what I read, And so there are just lots of these signals that kind of back me up in my feeling that the support that you know, everyone has been pretending that the Democratic Party has for trans people. I mean, I read their eggs, so I know better, but it

is not. It is an illusion, right, and when it shatters, it's going to come apart really fast, and people are going to be really surprised by it because our organizations have not been kind of educating people along the way.

that after these ads. Yeah, so we're back. Yeah. So I wanted to specifically highlight the prisons thing in the context of you know, Okay, so there's a chance by the time this comes out that Biten is no longer than m me your lips to God tears.

We won, she lost, But so she is not someone that I can ever trust with trans lives, right, especially because there have been other issues, I think marijuana most recently, where she has tried to kind of trumpet that she

has used her discretion and not prosecuted certain things or whatever. Right, And that doesn't help me at all, right, because it shows you know, you have prosecutor, you know you have discretion in what cases you take and what you defend and all this stuff, and you used it to prevent trans people.

for everyone, it is even worse for us. And the fact that Democrats are like, you know, it looks like we're seeing the sort of tide break on this and especially specifically on this issue where the consequences are so dire it is, it is extremely bad.

would be in the news from the NBA passing, that they could start kind of preparing people for that by kind of making a public and kind of moving to the right word there.

up in executive branch policy. And this is why I have been very convinced ever since kind of I read the policy Tea Leaves and the Executive orders and rags and kind of identified that we were dealing with the functionally a hostile executive branch.

not advocating for trans people appropriately. And I think that if this is demonstrating that they're not don't have leverage or they're not willing to bring a leverage to bear on whoever the nominee is when it's not Biden, right, Like, they're not setting the movement up to have strong footing to hold people accountable to trans equality kind of on the campaign trail, and that's really scary looking at labor, especially as kind of a blueprint.

doesn't have to happen. And the way that it gets this gets stopped from happening is by US organizing, in US fighting and US putting pressure on these people to fucking do this because you know, and like this, this is this, this has always been the thing. Like these people unfortunately they do need us, right, they hate it, but you know, these like the Democratic Party needs us.

try to defend us. And the only way that's going to happen is if we we actually start mobilizing it, we start putting pressure on these people to like not fucking back down and write us off for dead.

It wasn't the you know, the full compliment because it was over a weekend, really scrambly, but just like the Title nine one, Dana Carome and Sarah McBride did not sign it.

Biden's home state of Delaware. And the mc brides are actually family friends with the Bidens, and Joe Biden actually wrote the forward to Sarah McBride's memoirs, autobiography whatever you call it, right, But she's also a Zionist, and she is a kind of centrist, center right Democrat who you know, as I've talked to people, my understanding is that she didn't sign on to the title nine letter because she has you know, rising Star and the Democratic Party aspirations.

She's probably going to be the first trans congress person soon. I hate it, and so I was extremely concerned that Sarah McBride, who you know, because of those ties and because she's probably going to be in Congress soon, is the most kind of politically powerful trans person in the country. I was extremely worried that she was going to join the Biden administration on this. So I agro posted the ship posts that are for several days, and thankfully she she did condemn it and kind.

matter who they are about it, where they come from, you have to you have to keep pressuring them, because I.

politicians who don't fully support us. Right, but we need at least one organization representing trans people to lay out the full case to present kind of our actual policy needs and be the rubric by which everyone else can

be measured. And also just for community education, so we know, so the community knows without you know, people like organizers, people like me trying to overcome these huge, these huge walls to get people to understand what's going on, can see what's being done to us, know what we deserve in terms of policy, and then measure what is actually being done for us against that bar.

friends at other organizations. And I know that I have a lot of privileges that that a lot of people don't, so I can kind of get fired or I could. I do not maybe couldn't afford it anymore. I get fired for my principles, and I don't, you know, I don't, I don't judge, you know, my my comrades and colleagues horstal kind of doing the best they can. But I'm really really scared with with leadership and the way that they have not recognized kind of the situation they've gotten a.

before calling him on hundred percent protrans on healthcare.

trans people in Red states. Campaign for southerner Quality just expanded their their practical support program to be not just a subset of of Red states that they will help trans youth in families in, but all Red states that are that are facing healthcare bands and similar anti trans measures. Support that fund right, go look at and if you don't know of a of a local trans group or a state transgroup near you doing good work, you can

go to transjustice funding projects kind of grantee map. They're really low barrier only grant to translated groups and you can see what those groups are doing and you can hook up with them or donate to them. But I think that the biggest thing is not I mean, we Lord knows, we need money, we're all poor as shit, yeah, But mainly, but mostly honestly, what I think we need

is we need vocal, visible support. We need assist people not to remain silent or passive when they hear or see transphobia, or when they hear or see someone equivocating on well maybe you know, maybe kids aren't old enough

to know their trands. Like if you're that just sounds insane actual trans people, right, but you know it can take this people, right, And so if you are a SIS ally, being an ally is an action, right, And we need that now more than ever as the stakes of the risks of being attached to us supporting us grow higher, right, Like, we need principal allies to stand with us. And so if you can do that in your daily life, you can be a trans advocate in your kind of routine.

You know, we have an outsized impact of paul But for one percent of the population, we can't fight nine percent of the population, right, So we need we need your help, and we need you know, we need not just sort of milk toast lip service.