Al Zone Media.
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
It could happen here.
It's the podcast where things happen and you do something about it. I'm your host, Via Wong, and we have done you know, okay, over the course of this we have done so many Union episodes that I lost count a year ago, two years ago, I don't even know.
I lost count at the dawn of time of how many of these we've done.
But something I think some of you probably know this, but a lot of you don't, is that many unions have their own unions for the people who to do staff work, to do sort of a number of other things, and sometimes unions us their own unions, and this unbelievably sucks. And to talk about an instance of this happening that is happening right now, I am talking with Alex Chan, who is an organizer for the UAW, who is I don't know what.
Technical term is.
I'm going to describe it non legally bindingly as being purged.
For doing organizing. But yeah, Alex, welcome to the show.
Hi, it's nice to be here. I think being purged is a great way to describe it.
Yeah, the tentative title for this is the UAW Staff Purge, So it's not great.
So why don't we start off.
I've given a very very brief sort of description of what a staff union is, but can you talk a bit more broadly about what a staff union is, what it does, and why you all are sort of trying to organize one.
Of course, So in terms of staff unions, yeah, it's definitely an interesting phenomenon for people who are less familiar with the labor movement. But when unions have a lot of staff, sometimes those also need a union to make sure that they are treated fairly in the workplace. Coincidentally, this year, there have been a lot of incidents that have shown why staff unions are happening in the first place. And so with my union, we are called UAW Staff United. We are part of Region nine A of the UAW.
UAW is split into a lot of geographic regions, and nine A covers New York and New England, including Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, not New York State. New York State
is covered by Region nine. So we are a bunch of temporary organizers and local staff that are organizing for a lot of things, among them wages, workload, job security, healthcare, and so on so forth, very normal things that you would actually see in a lot of the contracts that we help fight for, in the shops that we work for and organize, and the units that we help support. So UAW Staff United otherwise known as.
Yuzu like the fruit. Oh that's fun, No, it's cute, right.
We really love the user imagery a lot. We were formed in twenty twenty three, first went public in the spring. I joined the unit in the summer, but I was just kind of peripherally around and organizing with a lot of these folks before they went public in the spring. Got recognized slowly and then slowly came to the bargaining table in August, and so at this point we have been at the bargaining table for over a year and
we still do not have a contract. Normally, in most shops that you would see organizing, that would be cause for escalation, and so that is actually part of what we are doing here. After hitting one full year bargaining, we are still very stuck on items such as wages, job security, yep, all the very normal things that we can see in units that we help support and bargain for.
And so the situation that we're facing is slightly more complicated because of many other internal things that For example, UAW has another staff union it is called Staff Council, and that covers more regions of UAW rather than nine A. It also includes people who are our direct supervisors. On paper, those people are called lead organizers and they do make low six figures and yes they are our direct supervisors.
So they are a managerial union and they are what some people may call a business union, you know, works closely with management to secure a good deal, that kind of thing. It's never really been known to agitate in a contract, and that is partially one reason why UZU was formed, because we knew that some agitation needed to happen in order to secure actually good treatment for people in our position, our position meaning temp and local staff.
Now I keep saying temp staff, right, is that the next question?
Yeah?
Yeah, I am so good, I'm one step ahead.
Yeah, I want to talk about both a the way your contracts work, and be what the thing you're actually doing is, because I'm not sure, I'm not sure people are one hundred percent familiar with what specifically you do and what a what a sort of like staff you need organizer does and the difference between you and the people that are sort of the organizer layer above you is Yeah.
Absolutely, So that has to go a little bit into how we are hired. And that's why I kept saying temp staff and local staff. Yeah, our unit is formed somewhat on our pay structure, and so temp organizers are hired by the international or the region, and local staff are hired by the locals, which is kind of a sub unit of the regions and how different unions are organized.
There could be multiple units in one local, a local may hire a staffer, but that staffer could be subsidized by the international, and that is kind of what our uniformation is like, where funding comes from the international and this layer of people does the most. In New organizing, so supporting new shops that form, new campaigns, that are organizing new unions that are just forming and need to
secure an election or a first contract. Some of our colleagues go a little bit further into the stage because of their local staff status where they're supporting contract renewals or bargaining around the second stage. But a lot of these has to do with on the ground, worker to worker, peer to peer organizing, supporting them and many different ways, including data work, including just resources. Think of how the
parent union might be supporting a new shop. We are kind of the resources that are supporting the new shop that can help direct institutional knowledge, that can help direct logistical or legal information like how or what is necessary for an election or a petition, that kind of stuff. And yeah, it's a lot of different tasks and that's why for a lot of us, our job description is I'm doing air quotes here a flexible forty.
Hour work week, Jess Christ.
And of course that usually means a lot more than that when campaigns ramp up, and so you know, there are a lot of different models on how to combat that, but I'll get into that a bit later. So going back to the difference between us and perhaps our direct supervisors. Our direct supervisors may be tasked with monitoring the status of a lot of different campaigns at the same time, and we might be assigned to one or two or three at a time to work very very directly with
the organizers and the new workers. Of course, this looks slightly different across different locals or different campaigns can be adjusted depending on the shop's needs. But our supervisors, who are the leads, will be handling a lot of different campaigns at the same time and just like kind of overseeing that progress and giving the okay for the next stage or or whatsoever. So I wanted to go back a little bit to why we are called temp organizers.
Yeah, this is nuts. Well, I'm so angry that I forgat about this.
So do you know what a temp organizer is?
Yeah, this is actually weird. So I have friends who are staff organizers for other unions that it doesn't work like this. So yeah, I'm going to let you explain it, because I.
Mean, do let me know about those in another Yeah, but for temp organizers in UAW, this is a holdover from the kind of older model of organizing where theoretically a worker might come off the shop floor for six months nine months to do union work and then go back to the shop floor when that concludes, so that the job would remain open for them. So temporary, like
the nature is temporary. Someone is coming off to do union work, and then you know, sometimes it's even part time, right, sometimes it's even part time, and the worker never stops working at their original job. But nowadays the model doesn't look like that anymore, right because, especially in say higher ed shops, people graduate out of their graduate union jobs. People may not have their reappointment if they are an
adjunct or contract faculty. And then a lot of our unit members u zoom meaning a lot of our yu zoo members come out of a shop that is UAW whether that means they're legal services or museum workers or higher ed, but it is less common nowadays to have a job to return to. However, the model remains the same in that the temporary organizer job has three month renewals and a three year cap. Every three months our contract is renewed, and if we hit three years on
this job, we are no longer hired. Theoretically, you could be hired to another job internally, but there's no pipeline, there is no internal movement that way, you would have to apply to the job like a regular other job that is a more full term job, or you just kind of like quote unquote like age out the system and you're just no longer an organizer. You no longer
have a job. And so this has manifested in a lot of different ways that a lot of my colleagues that have gotten tired or burnt out and have decided to leave before they're three years or leave at their three years of their own will. There are folks that have left way earlier than their three years as well to pursue other opportunities. YUZU at any given time has about forty to fifty members and that is our nine
a unit. Again, one thing that we have come to find out is that in the last five years of this temp organizer model, only three people who have hit their three year cap have managed to attain full term jobs in the UAW afterward Cheese. And then there is me, who, again within the last five years, is the only person to have been not renewed before their three year term, very unceremoniously as well as in the middle of very
active campaigns. That brings us to another piece of context, and the reason why I keep saying five years is because in twenty eighteen there was a first iteration of the Yuzu. There was a first attempt to forming this staff union of temp and local staff. Of course it was created by different people. But what happened then, especially under the Administrative Caucus when it was before the reform leadership septed in, is that everyone was just fired Jesus, Yeah,
everyone was just let go. And there are people still around organizing these days in other positions or in other workplaces that you have talked to us about it, and there are people that are working in user now that
had friends or were peripheral to that happening. So we are all very familiar with how non renewal is a very retaliatory practice used in UAW in the past, or we thought was in the past, because we were so excited to have this reform leadership come in and now we are finding out that it is still a tool
that is consistent. And so when we are excited that there is democratic reform, especially with one member, one vote, which was extremely extremely exciting to see, we also need to point out that there are a lot of different places here that still need to change, especially in how the union treats its own staff.
Yeah, and unfortunately we need to go to ads. We'll come back. I want to circle back around and talk a bit more about the ways of the UAW is acting like a fairly conventional boss trying to break a union.
And we are back. So there's something really interesting. I mean I say interesting, it's something sort of terrible about the way that the UAW is relying on effectively a casualized workforce because because you're dealing with these constant renewals, which are an incredible sort of pressure leverage because it
means you don't have job security. It feels like the way Amazon works where they're just like trying intentionally instead of trying to retain people, they're just trying to churn through as many organizers as possible because like the more seniority people have and the more experience they have, the harder it is to like just completely underpay them.
Yeah.
The keyword in here is flexibility.
Yeah, and it seems like, also on an institutional level, a terrible idea because you know, you're training a bunch of organizers and then the moment that they're you know, the moment they have a bunch of experience, you're just casting them into the wind and then hiring the less experienced person.
It's like you bring up a great point. Actually, something that I want to touch on is end bargaining. We have asked for training and we have not been met with a satisfactory answer. People are not trained. Oh my god before they take on this position. But yes, you're
absolutely correct with the institutional knowledge aspect. The campaigns that I'm working on, the organizing committees are real pissed that I have been suddenly disappeared, And I want to highlight something that one organizer brought up is that for all the talk of us being one big union, how we are the union, how we have a democratic saying in this process, it's very weird that someone higher up in the union can just make one of our members disappear.
And that is in reference to my unceremonious departure, of course, and the points that we, as you you really want to highlight and emphasize is that we really want to just hold UAW to the values that it has espoused, ending tiers, job security for workers, fair wages, like I said in bargaining, we had asked for training and that
has not gone very well. UW is refusing to bargain over free speech and continuity representation, which refers to the hypothetical scenario if Region nine A were to be absorbed somewhere else the right for user to still exist, and they refuse to bargain over that we are stuck in wages at somewhere around three percent per year of four years. Yeah, it's not great, and there's been a lot of chaos behind the scenes that it is implied to be a bad thing to let the members know about the members
that we work with and organize with. But to a certain point things boil over, and especially in the case where I am suddenly not renewed, it is really important in our view that our members know what is happening. Yeah, that the members know what this is about, because they get the news landed on them after our social media posts come out. Because I am told not to inform the organizers myself, and so the organizers had to hear about it from my supervisors about a week later with
no details. My non renewal was without cause, without justification, without reason. They did not give me an answer to my face. And then as Yuzu kept pushing higher ups kept flip flopping on who to blame and what the actual cause was. And what I'm getting is a sense of surprise that people are angry about this in.
The first place.
Yeah, as if this was a normal situation, that people were just getting fired any other day with a month's notice, And they're like, we gave her a month's notice.
Which also like I feel like, like, what was the last a bit of these people were on a shop floor?
Like do you know how disruptive it is?
Like if someone had pulled like so we had when we were organizing our union, we had we've had a number of like great writer, skilled staffers, and if like, if someone had just pulled our staffer out in the middle of the drive, like all of us would have been unbelievably pissed, and it would have done incredible about the damage to the organizing because like union organizing, as you are well aware, and I think as the audience
should be increasingly aware, it's built on personal relations. You can't just yank someone out and then not allow them to even know what's happening. Like that's that's incredibly disruptive. It pisses people off.
Yeah, it's been very enraging for a lot of our members, and so I've been extremely grateful for the support that I received, whether it be on social media or by our email campaign to management. And what I've seen from this is that management was really taken by surprise that there was a reaction at all, kind of unfortunately for them.
There are a lot of shops and a lot of units that I have supported and organized with and have relationships with, and even for the shops that I don't have relationships with, Yuzu members are working in those shops, and there is a common understanding that it'd be really weird for a stafford to be randomly pulled out during
a very active campaign. I've had a rough couple months of going at it because I think there have been some really unhealthy dynamics in the workplace with supervision that was unjust and punishment that was unjust for my attempt to advocate for different units and attempt to advocate for organizing. And I think that is why we have reached the conclusion that retaliation retribution must be involved somehow. On paper,
this was a very oddly handled situation. I was notified by email on three thirty pm on a Friday before Labor Day weekend, Jesus Christ. I was not informed by a meeting, not informed by a call. My supervisor didn't pick up my calls until two and a half hours later.
Oh my god, in the meantime.
Where they were actually informing my co workers that I had been terminated, and then came back to me saying that they were busy Jesus, which no firing happens like that. I'm sorry, but there was no conceivable way where the HR email happens. And then my supervisor is busy telling my co workers that I've been let go, which you know, we are interpreting as intimidation because why else would this be happening.
Yeah, but even corporate best layoffs don't work like that, Like you at least get a meeting.
No, I didn't get a meeting until the Tuesday after to talk about transitioning my work, and they had no plan to transition my work. So currently no one is handling the work that I was responsible for, which is so we.
Just screw your units.
That's quite dangerous for campaign and higher ED as the semester ramps up.
Yeah, yeah, oh god, oh yeah.
And of course the hr email was signed in solidarity and had no name. I didn't want to bring up that point. There is evidence. Yes, it's extraordinarily funny if you actually look at it. But yeah, just even if we didn't have the context of what has happened to me in the workplace in the last six months, even just on paper, looking at how this non renewal was handled,
it was handled atrociously. Yeah, and so there is not much else we can draw from it other than the fact that I was someone they wanted to get rid of expeditiously, but just didn't anticipate that people would be mad about it, which is, you know, to me a sense that people up there handling it are a little out of touch, Like, yeah, they haven't experience what it's like to have this happen, to have a staff a randomly yanked out during the middle of a really active campaign.
Yeah, we need to go to ads again, but we will. We will be back soon. And what are our product services? We're about to have unionize them and then also ugnize your staff.
We are back.
So it's something we've been talking about in terms of sort of your specific situation and how it's the terrible impact and it's had on both you personally and the organizing that's going on. And I wanted to come around to talking a bit about the impact that this structure and the impact that getting denied benefits and stuff like that, the impact that this has in general on the way that organizing new shops works.
Yeah, I think that the impact this has very concretely is that it does not let us do good work. It makes us as organizers scared every three months that we have to have another plan. It makes us have to prepare a plan every time that rolls around, and then you know that takes our focus off of the
organizing that we could be doing. I mentioned earlier about workload organizers get burnt out extremely easily because there are no guardrails in place, and then there are plenty plenty of other circumstances that make it very difficult within this workplace too. For example, we don't have just cause we
don't have grievance procedures Jesus Christ. And it makes a very damaging environment, especially when you consider that the members have to bargain for their own contracts, and then they look at us and they're like, wait a minute, why
are your contracts that bad? It doesn't inspire trust. It doesn't inspire faith in how this union would organize for its workers if the staff are insecure constantly, And we're not asking for the moon and the stars in Mars, which is unfortunately what the UW lawyer accused us of doing so in a bargaining session. We are asking for very simple guardrails on job security, on workload, on healthcare that could help cover our dependence on wages that are
not stagnant. You know, they're not even giving us COLA, which is the phrase for cost of living adjustment, and christ a lot of us live in New York City and then there's folks in Boston and hell, even the transport costs have been a bit of a sticking point where we're like, can we please just get an MTA card or the equivalent. But overall, the structure does not inspire faith in terms of how our contracts are actually
negotiated and who is responsible for these contracts. It is very difficult to hear from the UAW lawyer that we are reaching for Mars when we are asking for things that are very present in our standard contracts that our members receive. You know, we have taken language from the contracts that our members have and tried to apply them for our own situation, and we've been told that they're too extra. And then, you know, this has been kind of an odd year for union staff. I wanted to
highlight that. Anya Earlier this year in National Education Association, their staff were locked out during bargaining eleven ninety nine. SCIU also just formed their staff union, and during the drive they had one of the organizers fired. Thirty two BJSCIU just announced their union and again during their drive, one of their organizers. They've posted this on social media. One of the organizers had a miscarriage and then asked for help, was put on a performance improvement plan, and
then fired after a month. And you know, there are these really uncomfortable trends of this mistreatment happening because priorities might be elsewhere, or there is an assumption that we are more expendable, that maybe we are kennon fodder, But that really really is not what is supposed to happen in places that are advocating for fair labor standards. And I am glad that we're hearing more stories about this.
I'm horrified at the stories that are coming out about this, but you know, I hope there are more that are formed because a lot of these things are very extreme.
Yeah, and it's and it's you know, it's impacting not just the organizers. I think one of the reasons why unionisation ratesil declining is like, well, yeah, okay, you guys can firing all of your organizers, Like yeah, of course, we're not getting shops for it. And I want to say what I think about just specifically, like the mood
and the Stars thing is it's like, okay. This is not to say that this kind of stuff will be okay at a smaller union, but like, this is not Like we've had a lot of independent unions on this show, and those are people, you know, who have formed their own using completely independently. In the money they've collected is stuff that's come from them, like putting out their hat on the street, right. I mean, you know some of these unions have like a thousand dollars of assets. This
is the UAW. The UAW has hundreds of millions of dollars. They have unbelievable amounts of money.
And earlier this year, they were just bragging about how they are putting so many more millions into new organizing.
Yeah, and it's like, well, okay, if you're gonna put if you're gonna put all this money into organizing, and again they probably should they should be doing more, because
what is the point of sitting on this much money? Right, It's like you're behaving like a financial institution and not a and not a union, but like you have the money to actually like cultivate and develop effective union organizers, and you have the money to meet like pretty mild contract contracts that are like I think your contract is probably significantly cheaper than like the contract that they're negotiating, right, Like this is just this is nonsense, Like we know
you have this kind of money also because you're paying your like managerial staff for six figures, So clearly you can do this and you're simply not. And I think that should outrage everyone.
I think that's exactly the response of a lot of our members because knowing that a lot of our temp organizers and staff organizers are people that are most passionately devoting themselves to the labor movement, and you know, are met with such unstable job conditions is truly horrifying because this is not this is not a path to careerism like as a temp organizer, there is not much upward mobility here. Let me be very clear, there is not much upward mobility. It's not like this is a cushy job.
There is no real way for me to just like sit back and relax on piles of bureaucratic money or something like that. And that reminds me of how I shout out to our Korean comrades that I've met at labor notes, where I explained to them what a temporary organizer's job is like and how many people we handle
and how temporary our status is. I was talking to some of our equivalents in the auto industry as well, the union workers there, and they were pretty horrified at the workload, at the insecurity, at the just again lack of EQUIVALENCYE. And again I'm not trying to claim that Korea's labor organizing world is perfect, like absolutely nobody is. But the chakra to them is like, well, why are you doing this? Why are you working in this job? They have asked me this to my face, why are
you working in this job? What is possibly good enough for that for you, And unfortunately a lot of it is optimism of the will, and I think that's a lot of what's keeping us going. And so my last day is supposedly September twenty eighth, but hopefully this month there have been fantastic outpourings of support and we are also picketing the political Leadership conference on the Friday the thirteenth, scary, and I think that is going to really align with
how YUSUS needed to escalate. I think this is again just a boiling point, and it has shown how all of this culminates in a very unfair labor standard and practice of which we have filed a few charges. But there's a lot more that needs to be done. And even if I don't get reinstated, I think that USU is a great example of how there's still more change that needs to happen within UAW.
Yeah, hundred percent.
I want to close by talking about through line through a lot of these episodes that we've We've talked with a lot of people who work for Planned Parenthood, We've talked for a lot of people who work for NGOs, and this is the same behavior that they do where you know, quite frankly, what they are doing is exploiting, exploiting the labor of people who believe in the cause, and because people are willing to, you know, because because people believe in what they're doing, because the work that
they're doing is vital and necessary, These NGOs and these unions think that they can just continuously exploit the people who work for them, and this damages the workers, This damages the people who they're nominally trying to help, and this damages the entire left because when you're sort of charting through organizers and when you're sort of fundamentally betraying the missions that you're supposed to be doing in order to just do more exploitation, this significantly damages literally the
entire organizing project that we're all fighting for. So Alex, thank you so much for coming and talking and talking to us about this and I where can people go to support you and support you? Zoo?
Our accounts are UAW staff United on Instagram and Twitter. Please follow for more. Check out the adorable Yuzu Lemon logos that we have everywhere. If you're in New York or Boston, those are our major hubs. We keep an eye off for future actions.
Awesome, thank you again for coming on the show. And yeah, if you are a union staffer, because I know I know a number of you are listening to this.
If you're in the UAW, raise hell.
And if you're not in the UAW and you don't have your own staff union, consider it.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, thank you, Robert Evans. Here, this is It could happen here a podcast about things falling apart, and today I wanted to take some time to talk about Ukraine, in particularly to talk about the sort of cultural place that the Ukrainian resistance against Russia expanded invasion by Russia has taken in American politics and in American kind of
political culture. Obviously, I am recording this within a few hours of another attempted assassination on former President Trump, this one by a guy who, among a confusing milange of other things, claimed to be a major advocate of Ukrainian sovereignty and that that was a major reason why he was angry at the Republicans and angry at former President Trump, and kind of that at least failed assassination attempt is sort of in line with a lot of derangement around Ukraine,
and you can find this on the left and the right in the center. I've come to think that if you're trying to evaluate sort of how credible someone is as a geopolitical expert today, one of the best things you can do is kind of look back to early February twenty twenty two and see what sort of claims they were making about what is going to happen, whether or not Russia was actually going to go into Ukraine
and expand their invasion. And that's obviously, you know, a bigger topic than I think we're going to get into today. One of the things that I find really interesting when I kind of analyze how particularly conservatives have turned on the Ukrainian cause, is how kind of incomprehensible that seems, just based on the way in which I was raised by the conservatives in my life to think about Russia
and to think about like Russian military aggression. You know, I grew up largely in the post Cold War era, but my parents were both like raised by Cold warriors. They mostly grew up on military basis, and I still grew up with an awful lot of the kind of Cold War shrapnel, and my sort of ideological training. You know, the movie Read Dawn was a big part of my childhood. You know, some of those early James Bond movies where the Soviet Unions are still the bad guy. You know,
this was all major stuff for me. So it's it's been particularly disorienting kind of watching Philo Russian attitudes infiltrate the right and us move from this idea of like these people are one way or the other kind of a geopolitical opponent of the United States towards these people are almost existing in an idealized version of the society we bring around. It's been a cause of some whiplash for me and for I think a lot of people who were raised in that environment and then kind of
came out of those ideological beliefs. And when we look at the kind of turnaround on the right about this stuff. One of the people who's been on the bleeding edge of this has been Vice presidential candidate JD.
Vance.
And in fact, Ukraine might mark the first place where Vance really came in ahead of the rest of his party on an issue they would all ultimately move in behind him on back in early twenty twenty two, in the immediate wake of Russia's expanded invasion, Vance told Steve Bannon in one of his many ill advised podcast interviews, quote, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other. Now is This paragraph from an article by Ed Kilgore and New York Magazine makes clear Vance
was swiftly followed by others. Quote Then Congressman Madison Cawthorn paroted Russian propaganda by saying the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies, and his colleague Marjorie Taylor Green called the Ukrainians neo Nazis. Fox News's Tucker Carlson was a constant font of bitter hostility towards USAID for Ukraine. Now Cawthorne was and remains
now a stooge. But I think it really is kind of drilling into the precise wording of his claim here, the fact that he's so focused on wokeness within the context of a conflict that seems much more serious than kind of the standard American culture war bullshit. A lot of why we're seeing this has to do with the fallout over the Russia Gate culture war that consumed the
Democrats during the first half of the Trump administration. This led to the enemy of the enemy is my friend's sort of thinking among the right, and this was stoked consciously by Russian propaganda efforts. After Trump left office, these efforts were redoubled, especially after the war in Ukraine became an existential issue for Putin's regime. A good example of the more obvious sort of messaging is this Moscow Times article from May of twenty twenty three, with the title
Russia to build migrant village for conservative American expats. Quote Timor Beslangarov, a migration lawyer at Moscow's Vista Foreign Business Support, claimed that around two hundred families wish to immigrate to Russia for ideological reasons. The reason is propaganda of radical values. Today they have seventy genders and who knows what will
come next. Ria Novosti quoted Bessangarov as saying, echoing President Vladimir Putin's frequently deployed grievances against Western countries comparative gender freedom, and here we see it again. The focus on hatred of woke as a j justification for solidarity with Russia.
A sizeable plurality of Americans still support the US sending aid to Ukraine, and the reality of Russia's invasion is hideous enough that the bulk of modern Russian propaganda in this country today seems to focus on the woke issue
more than anything directly relevant to the war. As I write this, one of the top stories in the country is how a Tennessee based media network, Tenant Media, hired a bunch of American influencers like Tim Poole and Dave Rubin and paid them north of one hundred grand of video to make Russian propaganda. Now, pool and Ruben and their fellows claim to be shocked, shocked that a foreign government was involved in all and deny acting as unregistered
foreign agents or breaking the law in any way. We'll see how those claims look in a few months. For now, I think it's illustrative to turn towards a Wired analysis of the content of dozens of Tenant Media videos written by Tim Marshman and Drove Merota. It shows us the kind of propaganda that Russia found fruit full inceding to an American audience quote. This analysis does not show that in these videos the influencers were particularly fixated on the
Ukraine War. The word Ukraine appears in the transcript sixty seven times, about as often as misinformation, Christianity, and Clinton. It does show the influencers stressing highly divisive culture war topics in the videos, which carried titles like trans widows are a thing, and it's getting all caps out of hand, and race is biological, but gender isn't question mark, question
mark question mark. The word trans appears one hundred and fifty two times and transgender ninety eight, So sixty seven times we see Ukraine appear in these transcripts, as opposed to well over two hundred times for trans and transgender together. Now, if you want a snapshot of just how absurd and divorced from reality the culture wars have gotten, the Russian government funding a clandestine influence operation considered stoking fears about trans people to have a higher rate of return than
actually propag ggandizing directly about the war in Ukraine. As absurd as this sounds, these tactics have borne fruit, and I think the reason why is simple. By building a sense of solidarity between bigoted American conservatives and what they see as a similarly conservative Russia. Now Obviously, the reality of the situation is that Russia is not exactly the
country these people think it is. While it is true that the number of Russian adults who consider themselves at least somewhat religious skyrocketed after the fall of the USSR from eleven percent or so to over fifty percent today, much of that is likely just explained by the change away from an expressly atheistic government. Even today, Pew Research notes quote for most Russians, the return to religion did
not correspond with a return to church. Across all three waves of ISSPD data, no more than about one in ten Russians said they attend religious services at least once a month. The share of regular attenders monthly or more often was two percent to nineteen ninety one, nine percent to nineteen ninety eight, and seven percent in two thousand and eight. For reference, about thirty two percent of Americans currently attend church, synagogue, mosque, et cetera on a weekly basis.
Now.
This is down significantly from forty nine percent in nineteen fifty eight and does represent a low for church attendance in US history. But you can see we still beat the Russians in at least active religiosity by a factor of like five. Now, one of the modern bugbears of the right wing in the US is no fault divorce, which often gets wrapped up in conversations about wokeness. Here, Russia is also not a bastion of good old fashioned values. I'm going to quote from an article in Russia Beyond
by Nikolay Schefchenko in twenty sixteen. The ratio in Russian of divorces to new marriages that year was one to one point six, meaning that Russians divorce more often than they marry. In recent decades, over sixty percent of marriages in Russia ended an official separation. Now, there is precisely one issue where Russian culture is in reality more in line with the kind of culture American conservatives claim to desire, and that is in its treatment of LGBT people and
ethnic minorities. The last years in Putin's Russia have seen a surge in hate crimes against queer Russians, as LGBT advocacy organizations have been declared illegal and punished by the government. This is the Russia our American right wing finds solidarity with, and we shouldn't forget that right when we're looking at to what extent do these people see Russia as kind of embodying the values they would like to bring to
the United States. It has a lot less to do with actual religiosity, with good old fashioned family values, and a lot more to do with hate for specific groups of people. And we're going to talk about what that means within the context of US politics in a little bit.
But first here's some ads. So earlier this year, I headed to the Republican National Convention, and I had a lot on my mind there, But one of the things I was kind of interested in is hearing the way in which conservatives talked about Ukraine when they felt like they were among friends. It was not uncommon to hear Ukraine referenced in conversations as a geopolitical enemy of the
United States. And you know, this is something I encountered a number of times, and I wanted to make sure it wasn't just a fluke of my own experiences there. And I assure you it was not. Michael Witely, who Donald Trump picked to chair the RNC, appeared on Fox News in April and lumped Ukraine in with China and
Iran as aggressive adversaries. Of the United States. Now, you know, we can quibble on that list for a number of reasons, but Ukraine, a country we are currently arming and training to fight in our stead, is just kind of absurd to describe as an aggressive adversary of the United States.
Now.
That very month, Congress voted on a foreign aid package, which caused a massive split in the Republican Party. The anti Ukraine side was led by voices like Marjorie Taylor Green, who told Steve Bannon, the Ukrainian government is attacking Christians. The Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that. They're not attacking Christianity. Now, like most things, Green says, this is not quite accurate. The Guardian noted at the
time quote. In fact, according to figures from the Institute for Religious Freedom, a Ukrainian group, at least six hundred and thirty religious sites had been damaged or looted in Russia's invasion by December last year. Green received a speaking slot at the RNC, as did tech investor David Sachs, who spent some of his time on stage arguing that Joe Biden somehow provoked the Russians to invade Ukraine by
talking about NATO expansion. Now, this is a claim you'll hear on some segments of the left too, and it tends to ignore that Russia invaded back in twenty fourteen after a revolution against a Krimlin back to President Yenikovich, threw their own plans in the region into disarray. Ukraine to this day, despite the expanded invasion, is not a part of NATO, and Biden's administration has been leery not only of pushing for this, but of supplying Ukraine with
long range weapons to strike inside Russian territory. The fact that Ukrainians and others did start discussing Ukrainian membership in NATO after almost a decade of war is certainly not among the things that we can blame the Biden administration for starting. As I trolled the RNC talking to attendees about their feelings on the war, I got a variety of responses. The most positive believe that Ukraine had been wronged, but that the war was unwinnable, so the US had
to negotiate some kind of peace. Moore argued that the Ukrainians were somehow stealing usaid, which they imagined would be put to better use helping Americans. I found this an illogical position personally, given that our aid Ukraine has primarily taken the form of old weapons systems no longer in use by USA troops unless you want to house homeless veterans in Bradley fighting vehicles. I don't really see how what we've sent Zelensky is much used to the kind
of Americans who are actually suffering today. The most enlightening conversation that I had while I was at the Republican Convention about their sentiments on Ukraine came when Garrison and I stumbled upon Rudy Giuliani, seated at the booth for some streaming network or another, exiled from the main stage of the event. I introduced myself to Rudy and we started off just talking about how surreal the mood was given the recent attempted assassination of the former president.
He's a conquering hero in history. We would have been even without a Saturday. It's Saturday. It's surreal.
I think people feel they're living through history.
That image of him in Rallying America has to be one of our ten historical great interest now.
I included that because it's a fun snapshot of just how elated Republicans were that week, right before Biden dropped out and the whole election changed yet again on a dime. From here, Rudy and I moved to talking a bit about how badly the Secret Service had fucked up in protecting Trump, which is not really something I had a particular disagreement with, although I think Juliani was coming at it from more of a conspiratorial standpoint than I would.
I think simple incompetence more or less explains everything that happened that day pretty well. This morphed in fairly short order into him ranting about how all of this was Biden's fault and how no one ever gets fired for incompetence in the Biden administration. He brought up Afghanistan and that is what led us finally to Ukraine.
Ukraine would not have happened if he hadn't been a complete power at over Afghanis. Now, Yeah, what proof is very simple. Pudin invaded three times under the last four presidents, because only one president he was scared of.
It was Trump.
He invaded under Bush, he invaded under Obama, he invaded under Biden. He didn't invade under Trump. So don't tell me he would have invaded on the Trump you had a chance.
To what he did now, I responded by pointing out that Juliani's time frame was a little off. Well, but I mean I was there in twenty fifteen, and my friends who were in the Ukrainian military were still fighting under Trump. You know, the invasion, Yeah, was still happening. It was just not at the current level that it's at. Rudy went on to blame Obama for not having given weapons to Ukraine in a timely fashion.
The fact of Koroshenko, who is a corrupt pal of Biden's, told me that, yeah, they were my friends, but I didn't get any guns until Trump came in. They wanted me to win with t shootings and stuff.
He said.
I didn't have a new what side they were on. Obama never gave them alls. He gave them money.
Now, this is again not accurate. By December of twenty nineteen, the US had provided Ukraine with about one point five billion dollars in aid since the twenty fourteen invasion. This did include weapons including javel in, anti tank missiles and armored vehicles, which is why they had some of these weapons win the expanded Russian invasion occurred. Rather than loosening
the purse strings. As Russian aggression continued, President Trump withheld three hundred and ninety one million dollars in aid to try and get a political favor from Zelenski. We're going to continue with Rudy Giuliani and my conversation, but first here's a little bit more ads and we're back. So, after Juliani made his claim that the United States didn't send any weapons over to Ukraine until Trump was president, he said this, he.
Let Biden handle the money, the last guy in the world that should be only money to Ukraine now and Ukraine's gotten two hundred billion and nobody let us order it. This is the acknowledge to be the seconds most corrupt country in the world. The fact that they were invaded by Russia doesn't make them honest. It makes him the victim, doesn't make them honest. And you care a couple hundred billion in there without controls? What am I a jackass? I can't figure out what's happening, and you don't win
now much more do you have? You can let's hunch a billion company.
Now, Rudy like most Republicans on this issue always describes the aid we've sent to Ukraine as it's cash. I find it interesting that he claims Ukrainian corruption is also somehow to blame for US not auditing the aid we sent. Now, there are issues with how the US Defense Department has audited some of the aid going to Ukraine, but those
are issues with the Defense Department. In fact, it came out in January of twenty twenty four that the United States failed to audit about a billion dollars worth of military aid to Ukraine. Now, first off, this is not cash, as Juliani repeatedly insinuates. It's all weapons, and there's no evidence that any of these weapons were ever sold to
another kind of or used outside of Ukraine. They simply weren't audited the way that they ought to have been because the Pentagon fired all of the people who should have been auditing this aid. Right, this is a pretty common issue with the Pentagon. You can look back to Iraq and the sheer amount of aid that was sent to Iraq and then kind of disappeared in the ether because they just didn't have anyone paying attention to it. Obviously,
because that happened under Republican administration. Juliani isn't concerned at all about it, but he is deeply concerned about this kind of fantastical two hundred billion dollars that he believes has been shotgunned out to Ukrainian mobsters. And here's Rudy again. As our conversation continued.
Biden has us consigned to a war without animate in Ukraine. He doesn't even dare to suggest an end because he's afraid of confrontation with Russia.
So he's just going to get more people killed.
I mean, there probably isn't an American president that's that more people killed other than an a war than Biden.
It's interesting you describe it as them not winning, because I do have trouble. I know. In the lead up to the expanded invasion of February twenty twenty two, the expectation from most of the people in our military and most people internationally was that the Ukrainian military was going
to fold in a manner of days. And they're now back to about seventeen percent of the country under Russian occupation, which isn't a massive escalation over where it was previously because they pushed well because they pushed the Russians out of Kiev.
Well, will that end the war?
Russia can keep seven pay percent.
I don't think the Ukrainians are willing to send the war that woman.
The war is one when you achieve the objective that has you stopped conducting war. They're not even close to them. The only way Ukraine says it will stop fighting is if Russia is pushed out of Ukraine. They haven't been able to do that. So they're not winning the war. I mean, nor are they presenting a plan that we're funding to do that. We're not planning, we're not funding. We're just endlessly giving them money to keep the status quoth. We do not have a plan to win them or end it.
So I mean when I.
Tom Towell used to say, the worst thing about American foreign policy under unrealistic, somewhat left leaning liberals is war without end. When you go into a war, you've got to be willing to commit yourself. You've got to be willing to win it quick, otherwise you're gonna lose. You know, when we started, when we started losing wars, got this policy, we fall.
But if you if you compare where Ukraine is at right now to the wars in the United States has gotten involved in in this century. Iraq, you know, around a decade or so close to twenty years for Afghanistan. Ukraine is two years since the expanded invasion and kind of you know war. It's a it's a massive international conflict between a much smaller nation and a larger one. When I talk to Ukrainians and they I asked them, what do you think you need to actually win this?
One of the things they repeatedly say is the ability to strike Russian assets inside Russia.
Who doesn't give him? Who does? Who? Prem Yeah, I'm just one more minutes, we got to go.
Who prevents that person? Definitely?
The Biden administration hasn't allowed that.
He tells us he wants them to win.
Do you do you think why.
Would you be supportive under a new Republican administration of allowing Ukraine to strike inside Russia?
I would be supportive of sitting down and having a realistic conversation about a plan. First thing I do is all that the money we gave.
Now, of course, Rudy can't support that, so he pivoted back to arguing that we need to audit Ukraine to quote find out what happened to the money we gave him him being Zelensky again, I pointed out that we aren't giving him money directly, we're sending over weapons. Nevertheless,
our conversation continued. Now, the vast majority of the two hundred billion that's been sent over, though, is in munitions, Like we're not talking about have you have you found it in the American industry, but there has been American in the American industry.
You want to defend the American military industrial bumble what I want to think there is a lot.
Of weeks of money in the American It.
Was very much Well, I'm not concerned about money though, because what.
We have, the money doesn't get to that.
There's no javelins winding up outside of Ukraine, there's no agtms winding up out money. They're they're mostly getting weaponry though, they're getting Bradley's, they're getting Abrams tanks, they're.
Getting been on the market selling those things.
Where have they sold them?
They've been caught three times selling selling where selling weapons where I'd have to go back and look, they've been caught three times selling plus.
They have Now this was just a lie Ukraine has not been caught selling US weapons. Rudy only claims they have been because he's consumed a huge amount of Krimlin funded media that has been arguing since twenty twenty two that US weapons sent to Ukraine will end up on the black market. There's no outside evidence that shows that
this has happened, and in fact is yusuf. A research analyst for the security think tank the Stimson Center recently told Business Insider, I don't think we've seen any real diversion, particularly outside the country of weapons. That article continues. Pro Russian media has aired similar claims of a massed diversion of arms meant for the front line, some citing a retracted CBS report that included a source claiming only thirty percent of weapons sent to Ukraine made it to the battlefield.
One conspiracy Inclined website, purportedly citing anonymous Ukrainians, claimed the weapons are stolen to such a degree that Ukraine as of August had already lost the war because of the black market diversion. Now, in the months since that claim was made that Ukraine had lost the war because they
had given up all of their weapons. They took a bunch of those weapons and invaded Russia, punching a hole through their lines and taking a considerable amount of territory in the Kursk region, which they occupy to an extent today. As is always the case with guys like Julian, reality doesn't matter here. It's about repeating the same talking points until you get a journalist ignorant enough to take them
as true. And it's the kind of thing where if you're not up on all of the different claims being made on the right and all of the claims about corruption and money being siphoned off and taken by mobsters, then you're not going to be able to properly argue with them, right Like, if you don't really know what you're talking about, you might seed the point to Juliani that there have been at least three cases of the
Ukrainians caught selling American weapons overseas. Now, when you look into what you see that this is primarily a claim that spreads on right wing Facebook pages and there's not really any evidence of a sizable diversion. But that doesn't really matter. What matters is in the moment, being able to kind of spread a point out to the extent that nobody really questions you want it.
And I don't know.
It's the kind of thing that happens a lot in politics, and it's the kind of thing that is probably pointless to really address, right Like me arguing with Rudy Giuliani got him hot and flustered and kind of pissed off, and certainly me frustrated. But I don't think it accomplished much.
And I really I think kind of the thing that you have to accept when you're looking at sort of right wing lies about what's happening in Ukraine or the lies being told right now about you know, Springfield, Ohio and the Haitian migrant population over there, there's really a very little point in actually confronting these people directly about the disinformation that they put out, because it's not really a case where they care about the truth one way
or the other. It's a matter of you've kind of lost the fight if you care at all about trying to prove reality to them, you know. And that's kind of a bummer note to end this on. But I guess I don't really have anything optimistic to say. I just thought you'd be interested in my little conversation with Rudy Giuliani and some of the talking points that are
continuing to spread up along the right. So you know, at the very least, maybe the next time you wind up in an argument this Thanksgiving with your uncle Ukraine, you'll be kind of wary for some of the arguments he's going to bring out, you know, to the extent that that does anybody any good until next time. I'm
Robert Evans and this is It Could Happen Here. If you want to see these sources for this episode and do some reading yourself, they're in the show notes, so just check them out there and we will be back tomorrow.
Welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Garrison Davis. I am joined by James Stout and Nia Wong to talk about some of our favorite people to hate, the Heritage Foundation.
Hello everybody, Hi Garrison.
Hello, Oh god, I got brought in talked with the Heritage Foundation.
Oh no, what a week? What a week?
So I mean, people have been talking a lot about the Heritage Foundations Project twenty twenty five because it is a massive, massive document that is honestly too long to actually read, but it does it does focus on LGBTQ issues for a decent a decent chunk of the book, mainly finding different ways to both legalize and protect discrimination against LGBTQ people and like banning the public presence of LGBTQ materials deemed deemed pornographic in public life, especially schools, libraries,
all that.
Kind of stuff.
Right, It's kind of this this nationwide don't say gay bill type thing, along with legalizing and protecting people's people's right to discriminate against for people. So that's kind of the bulk of the of the of the tactics that are laid out in the Heritage Foundation's Project twenty twenty five. But Trump and a whole bunch of Republicans have been doing a lot of work to distance themselves from this document.
At the RNC, I was kind of surprised that, like, I did not hear a single, a single mention of Project twenty twenty five unless I was the one to bring it up when talking with people.
They didn't.
They didn't like talking about it because they know it's kind of just like this toxic thing now. They kind they kind of showed their power level to use to use an ancient phrase.
Yeah, who could possibly have guessed for the document where they talk about bringing back the gold standard was going to be unpopular with literally everyone, including their own base.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's the reason why it's unpopular. I think it's all of like the dictator fascism stuff. But the gold standard bit's pretty funny. Even at the Heritage Foundation booth, not a peep about Project twenty twenty five. It's like the biggest thing they've done in like the in the last decade, arguably not a single peep. But they did have a whole bunch of other like merch, a whole bunch of little pamphlets, papers.
I love papers. I love little documents, some little ephemera to de femera. Yeah, I love collecting all this little stuff. And it just sits on a pile on my desk for like, way too long. And in this case, it's set on a pile on my desk for about two months and the pile became too big and too unruly. And now we're going to actually go through the pile of stuff, right and talk about the types of things that the Heritage Foundation actually did have out on their table,
specifically relating to gender identity. Oh good, which is their term of choice for these issues. Now, like gender identity quote unquote transgenderism were frequent talking points at the Republican National Convention, way more so than the Democratic National Convention, in which they were kind of just brushed aside as a political inconvenience. But at the R and C these
things were front and center. Almost every single person giving a speech on the main stage at least name dropped gender ideology in some way to receive thunderous applause from the crowd. So it certainly was a very common topic brought up. And here's what the actual literature that was proliferating at the event had to say about it.
So let's let's start.
Let's start penphlet number one, how to speak up about gender identity, questions and answers driving the debate, So it's a debate, is the first thing we want we need to know about gender identity? Again, I'm not just reading out all of their propaganda. I think there is some use in actually learning what they're saying in like their biggest convention and then actually not like debunking, because like,
come on, I know who our audience is. But at least actually laying out what they're saying and how it relates to like the actual information I think does does have sub use. So I will I will be quoting from the Heritage Foundation saying some pretty stupid things, but then we will kind of springboard discussion, and I do have some some little fact checks on some of the like these very common lies that you're now seeing like get repeated so often you may be trying to be
tricked into thinking that they are real. So we're going to tackle the quote unquote the big questions. What are sex, gender and gender identity. I'm sure this five page pamphlet will tell me all I need to know about the topics of what our sex, gender, gender identity.
Yeah, I can't wait to learn they figured it out, They figured it out.
There's this centuries long discussions have been haven't resolved. What do gender dysporia and transgender mean? And how do gender identity policies affect me and my community? I think this is largely targeted towards like I mean, it's turned towards people at the RNC, so like people in like their sixties, like like grandparents.
Yeah, is this so how to talk to your friend about the transgenders.
But kind of kind of it's more so like, oh no, your grandkids are maybe a little gay with it, grandchild? Exactly what does that mean? What is that about? I think that's kind of what the main the main demographic is. Okay, anyway, here we go. The common understanding that there are only two sexes and human beings male and female, determined by each person's biology, has been the cultural norm and the basis for our laws since our nation's founding it, though, has it that's a good question.
I'm not going to do this because I go fund will take fucking an hour, but this isn't true.
It will and obviously they're not going to mention intersex people. They're not going to mention any any of that stuff.
Yeah, or that like every indigenous culture has multiple gender words.
Yeah no, no, no, no, we'll just leave that out.
Because only recently have we seen a shift away from this objective and scientific no citation understanding towards an ideology that says a person's gender is determined by what they believe they are parenthesis gender identity rather than their biological sex, and should be legally recognized. The transgender movement has rapidly advanced laws and policies that give special rights and protections
to some people while infringing on the rights of others. Now, this is this is a talking point that was brought up a lot when I was a kid around trans people. How they have special laws that give them more rights than your average person. And that's why, like a good like conservative basis should be opposed to them, even if you're like, you know, an accepting you may not like agree with them, but you're not going to kill them,
but they shouldn't have like extra rights. That was that was a big thing, is framing things that either protect trans people from discrimination or framing things that ensure their healthcare as like special extra rights not provided to like regular regular Americans.
Yeah, this is like a huge thing with just the basis of all political conservatism is they all believe that, like like they all believe that immigrants have like a secret healthcare system that they have access to, and that like black people have like welfare, and that like indigenous people get into schools for free.
And it's just like yep, no, it's all based on never talking to anyone who isn't like you.
Yeah.
In addressing the conflicts that emerge. In addressing the conflicts that.
Emerge, what are you talking about?
The government must protect everyone's rights and fundamental freedoms. The introduction of the concept of gender identity into recent legislation raises concerns about privacy, safety, fairness, liberty, and its impact on children. It threatens the freedom of religion and conscience.
What the freedom of conscience? What does that mean?
Because it's not just a religious objection. My conscience tells me that trans people are icky, tells me I should have this person's house. Does that let me have it?
I mean it should yeah.
Yeah, yeah, My conscience tells me a whole lot of shit. It means you can't not like trans people. The government's going to come for you if you don't like trans people. Is that what they mean?
I think they are legitimately scared of that. Yeah. But it also threatens freedom of speech, equal protection, and parental rights. This radical redefinition of sex could dramatically alter our society, creating significant disadvantages for some, particularly women and girls. Okay, all right, so there we go. That's that's that is. That is the introduction. Now onto page two. All individuals have human dignity and should be treated with respect citation needed,
including those who identify as transgender and knowe. They're very careful to never actually say trans people are transgender people. There's people who identify transgender, and there's there's transgender activists and gender ideology activists. They take great care to never actually say trans people are doing this. They say transactivists are doing this increases degree of separation. That that's one kind of a little rhetorical tactic that I noticed when first looking through this.
Yeah, I think there's this also kind of a lake see of this sort of trans tipping point and how accepted things had gotten. We're like, I remember this with like Alex Jones in like like even like twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three would say, like the most transphobic thing you've ever heard, but it would be prefaced with some trans people or fine people.
I don't mean this.
Toage people then say like, yeah, coming to rape your dog or something.
Yeah, yeah, anyway.
But by labeling realistic concerns and scientific objections as oppressive, transgender activists have shut down open, robust dialogue over the consequences of gender ideology and gender identity policies. The serious real world effects of gender identity policies on individuals and communities must be taken into consideration. Many treatments promoted by transgender activists are untested, can cause serious side effects and
come with irreversible developmental consequences when performed on children. So this is my first kind of pause, because this is a claim that we've been seeing, i would say, at an increasing rate ever since Matt Walsh's documentary. This was like one thing that he really tried to like invent specifically that like quote unquote like puberty blockers cause like sterilization. I'm like, yeah, you can't reproduce when you're on them, obviously, but you can when you go off them. But that's
something that like they never talk about. They frame it as like this permanent thing. Samantha Rosenthal has an opendent piece in the La Times that talks about like the very long history of trans healthcare in the United States. Modern trans healthcare goes back to the nineteen sixties, and hormone therapy has been used to assist cisgender children in
puberty since at least the nineteen forties. These these things are not untested, These are medical practices with a long history and saying that there's there's irreversible developmental consequences when performed on children, Like the FDA approved hormone blockers for children back in nineteen ninety three. We have been using these for for quite a long time, and these false claims are actually seeing some like significant harm. I'm gonna quote from ABC News here.
Quote.
England's National Health Service has banned the use of puberty blockers for the treatment of gendernus for you, or gender incongruence in transgender minors. The NHS has not stated it will restrict puberty blockers for non transgender children and young people. An NHS spokesperson told ABC News the agency hopes to have a study into the use of puberty blockers in place by December of this year, with eligibility criteria yet
to be decided unquote. So they are just like starting to ban these, and of course we've seen this in the United States as well, but this is like the National Health Service, this is like a really a really big organization that's only banning it for trans people, not versus gender children.
Yep.
So like it's really devastating.
I think it's important to note too, that this is the exact one of the exact same lines that anti vaxxers use, and you know that's anti vax campaigns have been a lot of those sort of model for how how attax and transalth care works. But like, yeah, this is this is literally the lie that these same people we'll say about vaccines. It's like, oh, the RNA vaccine is like an untested Yeah, yeah.
We tested it a motion of the population and everyone's fine.
So you know, I did a clinical trial for COVID vaccines before they were really suited thousands of other people.
Yeah no.
And in terms of puberty blockers, these have been used and tested for decades. Like these are not a new technology.
It's even funnier because again it's like, well, well, okay, so like we will give them to CIS children.
End with this stuff.
It shows I think it is I'm I read one other quote from a SABC article quote The Endocrine Society and a national organization of more than eighteen thousand endercronologists, calls the medication quote unquote fully reversible. Once blockers are stopped, puberty continues with little to no proven side effects. According
to health professionals, unquote. And there was a recent study in twenty twenty two in the journal Jama which found the use of puberty blocking drugs did not lead to an increased chance of receiving gender affirmat therapy in the future, and actually we're slightly less likely to given the extra time to explore gender in the body without the onset of irreversible effects of puberty. Possible bone density losses largely remediated upon the presence of sex hormones, whether from either
just ceasing the blockers or starting HRT. And this study also says at the end that perhaps we should just stop using the term puberty blocker, because it makes it sound like it just completely blocks puberty, like from ever happening, Like it just is like now you don't go through puberty. Yeah, And instead opts to say, like, maybe we should just describe what the drug does mechanistically and clinically, because maybe maybe puberty blockers is just a it implies something more
than what the drug actually like does temporarily. Yeah. So I found that to be an interesting note. And the whole point of and this something we'll probably talk about later. The whole point of this drug is so that you can have more time to actually decide what you want to do with your body and your gender. And most people that do go on on blockers, with whether SIS or not, are doing it to prevent irreversible changes from huberty, and most people opt to not actually go on cross
sex hormones. And that's like a successful treatment like that is that that is what the drug is supposed to do. But there's definitely this idea among these like anti transactivists that like, if you go on blockers, that means you're more likely to become quote unquote like fully trends in the future, which also just like isn't true.
But do you know what is reversible?
Not liking their products and services and support this podcast.
You can you can reverse that and make it so you really like them, which helps us a little bit. Probably I assume I don't know. I think so, I don't. I don't I don't do the business thing.
Anyway. Here are the ads. Okay, we are back.
Let let's continue this fine literature from our good enemies at the Heritage Foundation.
Yeah, great art and layout. As what I'm noticing it it is it is very well designed.
Yeah, there's these there are some children, these poor kids, these poor stock photos of children.
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure they gave the heartfelt consent to being used in it hate propaganda.
The next section is called what are sex, gender, and gender identity? The best biology, psychology, and philosophy. All support and understanding that sex is of bodily reality and that gender is a social manifestation of bodily sex.
The best biology.
That's simply the best philosophy.
Yeah, oh my god.
Now this claim actually does have a citation, so it's true. Now, let me check the citation. The citation is oh oh oh wait, wait wait oh, the citation is when Harry became Sally responding to the transgender movement the Anti trans Book of two eighteen by Ryan T.
Anderson.
Oh god, that's not a real philosophy, biology, or psychology book.
Oh okay, well he won best Philosopher anyway, I don't know what you're talking about.
The best all agree, that's so good now. Sex sex is a biological reality referring to an organism's overall organization towards sexual reproduction in human beings, just like every other species that sexually reproduces. This organism includes the chromosomes we inherit from our parents and the reproductive organs systems natalia and hormones that developed as a consequence. As there are two reproductive systems, there are two sexes, just like every
other species that sexually reproduces. This is completely consistent. I get no citation because that's not That is not how biology actually works. No, nor is your Italian necessarily determined by your chromosomes. Nope, but sure, why not? The best biology all support this understanding? Yeah, yeah, the.
Best biology from a first grade textbook.
Actually, that's unfair to first grade textbooks, which are largely blameless in this matter.
It is. It is unfair.
Yeah, No, one's sticking genitalia in a first grade textbook.
This organization isn't just the best way to figure out which sex you are, it's the only way to make sense of the concepts of male and female.
Really really yeah, the only way. Yeah.
What an interesting sociological statement made by the Heritage Foundation. Yeah, that the only differences are purely mechanistical and there really is no social basis that determines what the concepts in male and female relate to. What an interesting opinion that I'm sure is consistent across all of the heritage foundations.
And yeah, it's going to say, you can pull out another booklet and call them on their ship with their words.
Gender, by contrast, is the way one expresses their biological sex. We shouldn't pretend that there are no differences between male and female, because biological reality is that there are. We also shouldn't be trapped in rigid gender stereotypes. Transgender activists deny that sex is a bodily reality. They argue one it's perceived gender identity represents to a person really is,
even if it goes against their biological sex. They deny their biological reality by suggesting that biological sex is merely assigned at birth. A little known fun fact, you actually can like scientifically change your biological sex. Yeah, rules, it takes a little bit of time, it takes a little bit of effort, but your biological sex can actually just be like completely changed. This is something that is not like set.
Also, there is literally there is literally physically a document where your doctor assigns.
You a sex at birth. I come on, yeah, no, it is a box that they must take.
It's not even like not a line that they get to write in whatever they want, you know, like.
But the cool thing is is that when you change with sex hormones your body is dominant in it actually changes the sex and the functions of your body. Pretty interesting stuff. Actually, I don't care about my chromosomes, but as soon as we want to do more gene tampering, I guess that that could be fun, but I don't really care. You can also change body parts, so that's cool. I know they're working on those womb transplants, but I'm
not into that freaky stuff anyway. According to the American Psychological Association, gender identity refers to a person's internal sense of being male, female, or something else. Hey, something else nice. It is distinct from either sex or gender activists claim it is a person's internal sense of gender activists claim. They also assert that it's more than just male or female.
It's fluid and there's a spectrum of various options beyond man and woman, like gender fluid, intern gender, or non binary.
I've never heard the term intergender before. That's yeah, that's it's a new one.
Well, I guess if thatnoledge the existence of intersex people, that kind of fucks up the premise of the whole thing.
No, this is intergen Maybe.
That's what Yeah, but again, maybe maybe that's what it is. They can't say intersect. Yeah, it destroys their whole ship. So they've transposed intersex.
Is it like an identity, it's like an actual, like completely like medical thing.
I don't think that they fully understand this shit, Garrison.
I think it's it's you're right, You're sorry. Sorry, I forgot. I'm reading from a heritage, but.
Maybe coming from a place of hate.
All right, let's let's talk about gender dysphoria now. Let's Dysphoria refers to the distress someone experiences when they have a disconnection between their bodily, sex, and internal sense of gender. The diagnostic label gender entity disorder was used by the DSM until it's reclassification as a gender dysphoria in twenty thirteen with the release of the DSM five. They really want that old DSM back. They want it back before
the DSM went woke. They really want DSM four. Transgender can refer to a man who identifies as a woman or a woman who identifies as man some activists.
Some activists go so far as.
To say that a trans woman is a woman crazy. Not all people who suffer from gender and dysphoria identify as transgender, and not everyone who dentifies the transgender sefer from gender dysphoria. Surprisingly woke statement. It's a surprisingly controversial and woke statement from Heritage Foundation here, anti transmend anti truthcum Air foundation. What the fuck base, it's the seven people who get that, you're welcome for everyone else.
I swear to God, that's very funny. It's it's a little funny. Oh the funny.
I was workshopping some kind of like Tumblr post style joke. But this I still have like two pages of this pamphlet. So now, how do gender identity policies affect me and my community? The question on every Republican grandparents' mind. The first area of concern privacy. Privacy concerns arise when a men who identify you as women can enter female only spaces, for example, changing rooms, gym class. They're doing bathroom stuff,
that's what they're doing. The reason we have separate facilities in the first place is not because of a gender identity, but because of the bodily difference between males and females.
That's interesting.
I wonder what happens when some of those bodily differences start to change, or your social rules of male and female also change, like a young trans girl going into the men's bathroom that could maybe be a little bit uncomfortable anyway.
Preventing sexual assault is another.
Major area of concern when gender identity determines who may enter a women only space. Public safety X efforts such as Kenneth V. Lanning, former FBI Supervisory Special Agent assigned to the Behavioral Science Unit.
They're doing the Buffalo Bill.
At the National Center for the Analysis Violent Crime at the FBI Academy for over twenty years. It is just the Buffalo bill. Guy explains that predators abuse gender and the policies to gain access to victims, while victims law enforcement become less likely to report incidents for fear of
having misunderstood and being accused of discrimination. The primary concern is not that people who identify as transgender will victimize women, but that predators will exploit gender identity policies to do so. So this is interesting. They're actually not doing all trans women are secretly rapists. They are doing what is actually more like more legit is that no like men will be fucked up and men will like do fucked up shit. The thing is, they don't need those policies to do
fucked up shit. Men will do it regardless.
Wait, you are the Herod Foundation, Your your base, your entire base are chuck is composed of churches who do this literally every day, Like, come on, what are we doing here?
But you find it interesting that they take this line of approach.
I will say, this pamphlet feels like a much more sort of moderate So this feels like a gateway thing versus like the stuff that they're stuff that they actually believe, or like the sort of like more hardcore stuff that they they distribute.
Well, I'm not sure how to how to segue to an ad break from this one. I'll be honest.
You know what else the Heritage Foundation supports?
Oh well that only is true capitalism and these ads that help fuel the turning machine of death and suffering. Hah Okay, we are back. Let's talk about fairness. Gender identity creates an unfairness when biological males biological males compete against females in sports and other activities. It also reduces girl chances of winning athletic scholarships.
Yeah, the other fucking title nine defense every.
Time scholar I'm sure all those trends girls are taken of all the scholarships.
Yeah.
Just let's just see where the Heritage Foundation stood on fucking Title nine, shall we when that came in. I'm sure they were totally supportive.
Already, several high school girls have lost state championships is to quote unquote boys who were allowed to compete against them. These two boys have won fifteen girls state championships that were held up by ten females in the previous year. I tried to search some of these keywords to find exactly what they were talking about. The first result was from the reputable news publication, the Daily Signal, which is
a Heritage Foundation puppet site. The article is just listing like a handful of like trans girls across the country who participated in school sports.
And that's like, that's like all it is.
And then of particular interest to James this next sentence, Oh, god, man who entifies some transgender Well, that's that's an interesting one. A man whoifies as a transgender has also won the women's cycling World's title.
I know who they're talking about here. This is someone called for Runica Ivy. She was formerly known as Rachel McKinnon when she won the world title. Okay, she won
a UCI Women's Master's Track World Championship. If you want to find an event where gender affirming hormones are used on a regular basis, I suggest you check out the Men's Masters World Track Championship because every fucking year one of those dudes gets popped for using testosterone, and like, I don't see that in the Heritage Foundation's complaints, Like this is just asshole, really, they've she has been a
particular target for these people. Cycling has been a particular target for these people for a very long time, and it's very funny that they continue to like put out this propaganda which completely misunderstands, like the things that let you win the Master's Track World Championship are having money and having time. Like it is inherently unfair. It's it's a hobby sport right thirty five to forty four. There are not professional athletes in that age group like the
people doing this. So the people who have the time and the money, they buy the fancy bikes, they travel to the race. It's if you care, if you care about fairness in masters cycling, there are a million other places to go after it.
This is bullshit.
Well it's so, it's so transparent because now the biggest trans sports controversy has been over a cisgender woman who just is appearing too masculine, right, Like, like the biggest, the biggest controversy in this whole trans women and sports thing at the Olympics ear earlier this year is just actually assis gender woman.
Yeah, but that's the whole thing, right, Like policing the way people present their gender is what this is about for them.
Yeah, and they're willing to throw anyone under the bus as long as it like puts forward like whatever disinformation they want, with the sole purpose of just changing public opinion, not actually like caring about any of the people involved.
Here, Yeah, but like a return to like I don't even think traditional gender roles, but like, let's just say nineteen thirties gender roles, not even nineteen thirties, right, there were women fighting in the Spanishil War in the nineteen thirties.
Victorian England gender roles.
Yeah, totally, like it is what they want, and like they're not throwing emonically funded a bus so much she is part of a target because she's not a girly enough girl. Right, she's a woman who punches other people in the face, and like that's not collateral damage to me. Like that is part of their thing, right, it's not coincidental that it was a box set.
It's part of their larger political project.
Yeah.
Yeah, And obviously it's also their conception of womanhood is also highly racialized. Yes, obvious reasons.
Yeah, it's not coincidental there's an African woman, right.
No, many of the transgirls who are listed in the Daily Signal article, or transgirls of color. Yeah, that is who they're going after. They're going after like the most oppressed person and you can be in the country.
Yeah.
Now on onto one of our final chapters, How transgenderism affects your personal liberty.
Transgenderism, that's the good to one.
Transgender policies also violate our freedom speech and freedom of conscience by forcing people to speak or act in ways contrary to their personal judgment and deeply held beliefs. In New York City, you can be fined up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for misgendering.
What's the citation that they do have a citation? Okay, hit me.
They do go to the NYC Commission, and this isn't true. Despite the citation, they're trying to take like a city ordinance and twist it to make it sound like you will be fined a quarter of a million dollars for calling some of the wrong pronouns. And that's not where the audience is. Yeah, it's employment law, right, correct. It was first written in the early two thousands. It was
then revised in twenty fifteen. I'm going to quote from Snopes quote discrimination it gets a transgender individual could resultant finds to up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, But these fines won't be handed out for acidentally misusing pronouns.
According to the new guidelines, the Commission can impose civil penalties up to one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars for violations of the law, and, in extreme circumstances, two hundred and fifty thousand for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, and malicious conduct. Yeah, this is for like employment discrimination.
Yeah, employment discrimination happens literally all the time, and it never there's almost ever.
Consequences for it. Yeah, but that's where this number comes from.
Right, And it's completely misleading to suggest it like the work police to get to find you.
Correct, And it's not for misusing pronouns. It's for like extreme cases of like continuous harassment or like like like legal discrimination. The next sentence is, quote, both a high school teacher and a college professor have been sanctioned by their employers for using biologically correct terms with their students.
Did Jordan Peterson?
Now, obviously those terms are not biologically correct because you can scientifically change your biological sex. And what they're talking about here is no just teachers who are just like harassing their students, who are like calling them by like the wrong name, calling them by the wrong pronouns. Like if you did that like assist person over time, Yeah, you would also get in trouble because that's just like harassment.
Yeah yeah, And like you're just a shit teacher. If you're fucking going after your students for who they are, then yeah, you probably shouldn't be a teacher.
They then talk about how transactivists are trying to get medical providers to provide like gender affirming healthcare. They're complaining how how Catholic hospitals are getting in trouble for not wanting to do gender firming health care. They talk about like an Obama mandate that forces health care plans to cover gender firming health care and making sure that physicians actually have to do it even if they personally don't want to be like, no, this is like your job,
you have to provide health care. So they complain about all that kind of stuff, and then the last section of the pamphlet is on child development. Transmitter ideology is now promoted in schools for children are taught that gender is fluid, falls long a spectrum, and is detached from bodily sex. In addition, activists seek to punish anyone who expresses any reservations about radical treatment plans for gender dysphoric children.
These plans can include socially transitioning children as young as four, administering puberty blocking drugs as young as nine, cross sex hormones is eng as fourteen, and surgery as young as eighteen. This ideology threatens parental rights. In Ohio, a Catholic family lost custody of their daughter when they oppose treatment of
gender dysphoria with cross sex hormones. So, actually this is actually a pretty good breakdown of like how gender like affirming healthcare could work, because yeah, if a kid wants to like socially start transitioning very young and they want to, yes, that's great, there's no harm in that. If getting on puberty blockers at around nine, that makes sense, hormones as a teenager, yeah, and surgery maybe a little bit later. Yeah,
that all seems quite quite reasonable. And in terms of this Catholic family, So a transfer of parents lost custody of their seventeen year old trans son in twenty eighteen after inducing suicidal ideation for refusing to let their child receive hormone therapy prescribed by a medical team who had been treating the child for two years. Custody was transferred to his grandparents. So this wasn't the state just like stealing this child away. It's like, no, you're like basically
abusing this kid. So we're going to move custody over to the grandparents. Also, like you're opposing this for a seventeen year old, this is almost like a full legal adult. I'm going to quote from CNN here quote. The parents' attorney had argued that the child was no not even quote close to being able to make such a life altering decision at this time. Unquote, The county prosecuting attorney argued that the parents wanted to stop the treatment because
it violated their religious beliefs unquote. So yeah, you're so scared that this seventeen year old is going to make a choice that you personally find a little bit icky, like cob on.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can legally imantipate yourself at seventeen, right.
Yeah, and usually you have like medical freedom, at least in Oregon, you have medical freedom at sixteen. I don't know what the case by case basis is in a lot of states. Yeah, but that's that's pretty fucked up.
Now.
There is nothing in the coverage about the family being Catholic. Heritage might be conflating this other story from Indiana where Catholic family lost custody of their trans kid in twenty twenty one for alleged child abuse, and then earlier this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear the parents' case.
So, so there you go, big a health for them.
They then talk about quote unquote research, what the research says about transition, The view that social medical transition is the appropriate treatment for people, including children who feel at odds with their biological sex is becoming more widely accepted. However, transitioning treatment, including puberty blocking hormones for children and sex
change surgeries for teens and adults, come with serious consequences. Today, parents are told that puberty blockers and cross sex hormones may be the only way to prevent their child from committing suicide. However, according to the DSM five, as many as ninety eight percent of gender confused boys and eighty eight percent of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty. Okay, let's go over this because there's some weird phrasing here.
Because no, that's not it.
That's all with the DSM actually, says a writer named Micah b broke down this claim in a medium post from twenty eighteen. This exact sentence has been reused a lot of like writing publications over time. So accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty is a very
loaded raise. Like a child who suffers from genitisphoria may receive treatment, whether that's through like like speech therapy, like talking about it with a therapist, or hormone blockers, and they may then choose to cease treatment and go through their natural puberty, right like that is, but yeah, that's not them like like one unquote like naturally passing through puberty.
Like no, that that also involves a degree of treatment. Now, the reason why these numbers might be a little bit kind of odd, and also they're just false like the way that they're like being framed here, but in particular for kids, like the criteria for children having genitusphoria is different from the criteria for teens and adults, right, does mean different things. They also say as many as ninety
eight percent. Many reason I say because the DSM five actually says that quote in natal males, persistence has ranged from two point two percent to thirty percent. In natal female else, persistance has ranged from twelve percent to fifty percent. So they took the lowest possible number and switched the stat around by saying that as many as ninety eight percent eventually accept their quote unquote biological sex. So that's
that's a cute little little flip around. And then also, according to the DSM, a majority of boys sixty three to one hundred percent who quote unquote grow out of gender dysphoria just later turn out to be gay. Right, there is a difference between like gender dysphoria versus like
gender deviance. That's why you, Yeah, you should like work with an actual medical team if you have like a kid who's like pre puberty, who has a degree of gender variance, because yeah, that could result in a whole bunch of a whole bunch of things, and the fact that some of them just grew up to be like gay kids is like the result of like successful medical treatment, and like it's like like a loving family. Like that
is a good outcome. Similarly, the DSM says that thirty two to fifty percent of girls whose gender dysphoria does not persist later identify as gay.
So there we go.
That's pretty pretty pretty average stuff. They then go onto list all of the quote unquote side effects of gender affirming treatment, saying, quote meanwhile, radical gender affirming therapies post serious medical risks, including disfiguring acne, high blood pressure, weight gain, abnormal glucose tolerance, breast cancer, liver disease, thermioprosis, and cardiovascular disease. These are all the consequences of just puberty. Yeah, Like,
depending on what puberty you go through. Yeah, it's gonna have different effects. That's just how puberty worries. Yeah, they also include uh and of course sterility, and this is still a hotly debated topic. There's some recent studies that show that there's actually a pretty good chance of people who go on estrogen being able to regain fertility after
after like six months of ceasing treatment. It's not consistent, right, everyone who everyone who go on like HRT has an understanding that it can affect how they reproduce in the future. You're definitely encouraged to, like if you want to have kids or think you might want to have kids in the future, Like you can save your sperms, you can save your eggs, you can you can get that stuff
ahead of time. Yeah, but this is also something that people are like working on of being able to like maintain the ability to have kids even like during or like after gender affirming health care treatment has like commenced, So that's cool. Finally, quote, puberty blocking therapies and cross sex hormones are non reversible, largely untested, and highly dangerous, especially for children. We've already we've already talked about how all of that is not true. We've already gone through
all of that. Sex assignment surgeries have not been shown to reduce the extraordinarily high rate of suicide attempts among people who identify as transgender forty one percent compared to the general population's four point six percent. So this is also just like not true, Like everything, it's just not true. Also, there's no there's no citation here. A fear of you studying the Journal of Adlast and Health found that hormone therapy for trans youth reduced the rate of depression and
suicide by forty percent. It also found that having like parental support during this process also heavily impacts the effectiveness of this treatment, specifically on depression and suicide. Like, if you're going through this treatment and your parents still hate you, yeah, that's going to actually, it's going to hurt the ability
of this healthcare to actually be effective mentally. An investigation by doctors of the University of Washington found that trans youth who received gender affirming health care reduced their risk of suicide by seventy three percent compared to those who do not receive care, and a policy brief in the VA wrote quote, since nineteen seventy five, more than two thousand scientific studies have examined gender affirming care, supported by
over thirty leading medical associations, including the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association, gender affirming care is deemed evidence based and effective at reducing suicide rates. This is all widely understood. This is such like an objectionable stance that even famous woke institution the VA, is like, yeah, no,
it's actually really effective. Okay, And now actually, finally for this pamphletic quote, the most helpful therapies for children experiencing gender dysphoria do not try to remake the body to conform with thoughts and feelings, which is impossible, not impossible, but rather but rather to help people find healthy ways to manage their tension and move towards accepting the reality
of their bodies. Unfortunately, fifteen states have passed laws of banning talk therapy for miners who struggle with gender dysphoria, and there's a bill in Congress which would do the same. There's no bill banning talk therapy. This is a conversion therapy ban. This isn't This isn't like actual talk therapy, which is a part of like actual healthcare treatment. This is against like conversion therapy. That is what they're actually
talking about. So that is the bulk of the pan I also got given this other kind of I think it's called a fact sheet, which is ironic by the Heritage Action Group, which is the kind of lobbying activist arm branch of Heritage. It goes over a whole bunch of like the same stuff. They particularly don't like that the Department of Education released a report banning the use of offensive and inappropriate terms like mother and father in school.
This isn't true.
What they're talking about is that there's been a push to include just more gender neutral language, like instead of saying your mom and dad, just say parents. Like yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's that's specifically what they're complaining about. They complain about like books and schools. They call the Gender Queer Graphic Novel a book riddled with pornographic and pedophilic content.
Not true. It's just simply isn't true.
All these kind of old lies that we have talked about on the show like many times before. And then they also just rehash a whole bunch of of the claims from the other pamphlet They talk about the claim that in Virginia a girl was actually assaulted by a teen boy pretending to be a girl. And this is not an isolated incident. We've talked about that claim before. This was a fake story invented by the Daily Wire.
This person was not trans. This was someone who was in a relationship with this girl who's actually assaulted her in a bathroom. Not a transperson, just a regular cysgender male. And then they talk about sports. They talk about how men have more upper body mass, and that puberty blockers do not change height, organ size, skeletal structure, muscle mass, or any of the biological characteristics that make men unequal
opponents as hormones. Literally, they just list all the things that hormones actually change, like they actually famously do change all of those things. Height, skeletal structure, organ size, and muscle mass. Those are the main things.
Yeah.
I mean, if that wasn't the case, you could just take testosterone and you it wouldn't affect you.
Apparently, Yeah, famously, testosterone never changes your muscle mass.
Yeah, just just and soundstronger man who never benefit.
They also complain about how the Biden administration is wanted people to use preferred pronouns if you work in government, which is again is just trying to stop people from like harassing by using the wrong pronouns. It's it's all just ways to prevent harassment. And they complain about all that kind of stuff as well. So it's a lot of the same stuff from the pamphlets. A it's a pretty fun little fact sheet. Those are the two main pamphlets that were going around the RNC about gender ideology.
That was kind of the most in depth it ever got. Most of the speeches did not even get into any specifics. They just like threw out keywords fractual like discussion, this is, this is this is the most in depth stuff they had. So this is largely like the bulk of like the
average RNC attendees knowledge. This is actually probably more in depth than most average RNC attendees, at least in terms of what Heritage is putting out publicly, that is, their talking points, any any kind of closing thoughts here.
Just dog shit. I didn't know what to say. Yeah, it's really quite bad.
It's not my favorite, but honestly, I think it's just so poorly written and I don't know how effective this is it could be a lot more transphobic. Oddly enough, they have a lot of like the same lies that the right has been like workshopping around certain claims around like trans healthcare and specifically how it relates to like kids. But I honestly don't see this as a very effective messaging for heritage.
Yeah, I think it is that, like.
It's that pathway to hate thing, you know that, like your grandchild has a nose pacing? How do you deal with this? Yes, that like it. It's it's not if you come at it too hard, people are going to be like what the fuck?
But it gets people there.
Yeah.
I also want to go over this because like we're gonna be entering the holiday season pretty soon, so whatever whatever Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners you're forced to attend. Yeah, you know, if if people start talking with that kind of stuff, it's probably gonna be claims that are similar to some of the stuff in here. And these things are like very easy to like research, especially all of
the like puberty blocking stuff like that. There's the it's so easy to be like this just isn't true, And most of them just have no idea because if the information they're getting is in line with this kind of thing. It is just an alternate reality that that they are living in. Yeah, and some of them are fueled by like actual ideological hatred, and some of them are just actually legitimately just like misinformed.
And that's something.
I can't tell you how your family thinks, because I don't know your family, but it is it is a good thing to to like keep in mind that there is ways to talk about some of the sort of things. There's also if you just want to avoid it, avoid it all together and play Nintendo in the basement during Thanksgiving dinner with your cousins.
That's also.
Yeah, sometimes the move yeap support that. Well, this has been exciting. We will see you again probably tomorrow for more breaking news.
And it is news that breaks you slowly of time. That is that is our demo, News that breaks you.
Yeah, Hi everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. I'm James and today I am joined by Billy Ford from the United States Institute Piece.
Third time podcast guest Billy, how many.
Think it's my second?
Thanks for second?
Okay, Yeah, well I'll give you a bonus one. Yeah, and we're here to discuss the revolution in me Emma and bring you up to date on conflict stuff and natural disasters stuff and answer some questions people have asked me by emailing me. So, yeah, thanks for joining us, Biddy. We're at another crossroads in the conflicts we talked about before we started recording. Can you preaps explain to folks like, what has happened since ten twenty seven Part two?
Sure?
Yeah, I mean, I think last time we talked, we were just kind of in the throes of the initial ten twenty seven phase. I mean, I think zooming out for a second, the you know, February twenty twenty one coup, September seventh, twenty twenty one, defensive wars announced and armed resistance really kicks off. And then twenty twenty three October
things really escalate. After a few years of steady gains by the resistance, then there was a major level change and the trajectory of the war favoring the resistance forces.
Yeah.
I think, as you mentioned, there was a second phase of ten twenty seven in July in early August that.
Took took things kind of to another level.
Although it is kind of just a continuation of a sustained push by the resistance. I think some have perceived these moments of October twenty twenty three, inly August two
point four adds real watershed moments. But I think we can see how these are illustrative or broader trends, trends in which the m R military is losing its capability to defend strategic positions, it's inability to counter attack on the resistance side, much greater coordination among resistance armed stakeholders, growing fighting capability, better weapons access, all these sorts of factors that have swung the balance of military power further
in the favor of resistance forces. But essentially what happened in July and August was building off of the October advances, the resistance in northern Shan State, not far from the Chinese border, pushed further into central Miandmar in collaboration. This was essentially ethnic based armed organizations collaborating with Bamar People's Defense Forces under the command structure of the National Unity Government, and they have started making advances into sent to Burma.
So whereas the initial phase of the war and the enug strategy was to focus on building relationships between the People's Defense forces under their command with ethnic based armed organizations and focusing strategically on the peripheries to build those relationships, to build ethnic buy into the broader revolution, to get access to weapons, and to make SEADI advances. Now we're at a phase where the resistance is pushing into central Meanmar.
Now the focus is on the city of Mandalay and central Burma, which is the biggest commercial center of the country. So yeah, I mean this has sparked another phase of I think pressure and anxiety within Napida and the capital among the state Administrative council hunta leadership and more energy on the resistance side, And it's kind of it's it's
occurred alongside advances on multiple other fronts. I mean in the very north of the country state, starting in March, the Kachin for has pushed the Memoral military out of it. It was two hundred posts within four months. Similarly in Rakhine State, which I think, well maybe we'll touch on more. Yeah, they are account army has made steady advances. So it's not just in these subregions. It's happening virtually all over the country at this point.
Yeah, it does seem and like clearly the essays the Hunter is kind of on the back foot, like it started to forcibly conscript people, which in turn kind of get people a choice between the resistance or the military, and seems like more of them a choosing their resistance. Some of the conscriptions, you know, people can buy out of them, which obviously causes not great for the morale of the population. And that's combined with shortages and inflation.
Pretty shit situation for folks living under Hunter.
Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean, I think the memor of military. I mean there's a big question here about like the resilience of this mea or military. I mean, frankly in militaries in other countries have collapsed in are much less pressure. So there's a question here about like what is holding this all together, particularly given that its primary resilience factors are heavily degraded. I mean things like it's ideological value.
I mean, it's historically been about but we hold the country together, we manage the diversity of this complex country, we defend the Bamar and the Buddhist populations. These factors are no longer credible. I think it's more than one hundred thousand homes in central Burma have been burned to the grounds. Most of those are Bamar Buddhists, and you know someone in the Sanga have risen up. The Buddhist Songa have risen up in protests, including a recent killing
of a senior monk. So I think that ideological foundation is totally degraded. The other factors, which are economic, the economic benefits of being in this institution are also withering, as like the entire economy is collapsing as your reference. And then the third component is like the social status that want to cheese through. Being a member of this institution used to be a place where you could get economic benefits and social benefits, and now it's really neither.
I mean, you're reviled or a target for resistance assassination if you're affiliated with the institution. So I think the question remains as so like what are the key factors keeping it in place given all of these pressures that
it's facing. And happy to go into that, but I think there it's an interesting case study in institutional resilience and the challenges faced by a resistance movement that has major resource constraints and you're fighting up against a military institution that has learned how to orchestrate and sustain authoritarian governance structures for decades.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we can maybe circle back to that. One thing I did want to talk about before we move on to talking about what's happening in recind State, is I wanted to talk about the recent flooding that people will have probably seen if they have these friends on social media or keep it keep an eye on publications in a region. Can you explain a little bit of about like the scale of the flooding and it absolutely bungled, if any response from NAPE door Sure.
Yeah, I think the latest figures that I've seen were one hundred and sixty thousand displaced, six hundred and thirty affected by the floods, two one hundred.
And thirty dead, and seventy missing. I think that's what I saw this morning.
But yeah, I mean I think that gives you a sense that this is another humanitarian catastrophe on top of a I think what is now rated the second most intent violent conflict in the world by Accolade.
So this is just one crisis on top of another.
And yeah, as you kind of alluded to, the Memora military is incapable and in unwilling to kind of address the needs here of the population.
I mean, the one factor is that they.
Don't have territorial control to move resources if they had the political will to provide assistance.
But of course they're doing the exact opposite.
In some of the most flood affected parts of the country, they are continuing to conduct.
Air strikes on civilian populations.
Yeah, I mean it's it's just kind of a level of brutality that's kind of hard to have them. But yeah, I mean there's all these other kind of ancillary effects of this. I think there's signs of a cholera outbreak and young gone. The economic conditions, as you mentioned a little bit earlier, are horrendous. I mean, like the economy is a lost thirty percent of its value, and it's
not a rich country to begin with. Inflation is I think thirty two percent year on year, with the memoar Chat having lost two hundred percent of its value, I mean, yeah, it's two.
Hundred percent less value than it was. Yeah, So this is like, you know, it's.
Just one catastrophe on top of another, and it's really testing the memur public's capacity to kind of support one another, which is that's really been the incredible story here, and it's not the first time that the Memmour military, the governing stakeholder, has failed to meet the needs, and that
moment of crisis. Of course, Psycho Nargis, one of the worst natural disasters in the region's history, was another instance in which the memor military refused international assistance and kind of instrumentalized humanitarian catastrophe for political aims.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think people it's worth reading up on that if you're interested in like the sort of longer term history of the conflict and of sort of the military and Memma. Maybe now it's a good time to take a break and we'll come back and discuss a little bit about Rakine State.
And we're back, okay.
So I think if people follow the conflict, they will have probably seen like a series of conflicting and confusing articles and messages about what's going on.
In Rakind today.
And some of that is because there's not a great deal of reporting in the English language, deal of sources in the English language, and even if there is, that none of us can really make it to Rakine State
right now. Going through Bangladesh would be quite quite a challenging thing to do at this time, and so I guess we should start breaking down if people aren't aware the people who live and have lived for a long time in Racine State and the conflicts have fixed it between them and the Burmese state.
Sure yeah, I.
Mean ro Kinda State borders Bangladesh on the western side of your marts along coastal border as well, and the site of some of the largest extractive oil and gas projects, including the terminal for a major gas pipeline that feeds fourteen percent of u Non Province's GP, So it has huge strategic value.
It's also China's aiming.
To kind of access the Indian Ocean and circumvent the Strait of Malacca by going directly to this kind of regional the country, so it's highly strategically important. But it's also I think it's the second poorest state in the entire country and arguably the most conflict affected.
At least since twenty twelve ish.
So the population of rakind State is highly diverse, kind of the last year to have the broader countries demographics. It includes a Bamar population, which is the dominant ethnic group at the national level. The ethnic majority is kind there's I mean, historically a very large Muslim population of Rawhinjo Muslims primarily, but also other Muslim minority groups including Kaman Muslims, and then a number of other smaller ethnic minority groups Mramaji, Kami and others, as well as a
small Hindu population. So you can kind of get the sense that this is a highly diverse space. I mean, many of the listeners will have heard twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, Go was the site of a massive clearance operation and the genocide of Rhinja Muslims, about seven hundred and fifty thousand of whom were pushed into Bangladesh, and all of them are still there.
Inhabiting the largest refugee camp in the world.
Yeah, I mean overall conditions for the Hinja, It's hard to imagine a more difficult set of conditions. The Bangladesh government is quite impatient, having hosted many hundreds of thousands of Arhinja, some for seven years but others for actually for much longer than that. As twenty sixteen twenty seventeen was a moment in a genocide, but there have been instances of memoir military atrocities against the Hindu population dating
back to the nineteen seventies as well. So this is a long term kind of situation in which the Bangladesh have been hosting Rehinja And yeah, I mean I think conditions in those camps are really really challenging. The major issue now is the arising and security in the camps, as some Rhinja militia groups have gained ascendency in the camps, most of which have very little public support.
Population should be noted.
The major dynamic that that's happened recently, I mean the Arakan Army, which is almost entirely of Kine ethnic groups and has broad public support among the Rakaine population of Rikine State, has made massive advances across Rakine State and now controls virtually all of northern Rakine State and is pushing south. It took the city of Tondue and the airport, which is the first time a resistance group had taken
an airport. It recently took a naval base, the first time that has ever happened in the history of the Memory military. And now it's pushing as far south as Guas, potentially threatening to control the entire state.
So as this has.
Occurred, the MIMR military is in a state of complete panic, and as it is losing forces on this front but also on numerous other fronts, it has attempted to kind of buttress its forces through force conscription and in the most potentially the most horrifying move, it is forcibly conscripted the Rowhinja into the MR military. They conducted genocide against the Rhinda population and now they are forcing them to wear the uniform of their genocider. It's kind of a
level of horror that's hard to understand. And one way in which they've undertaken this effort is by collaborating with Rehindra militia forces including ARSA, the Salvation Army and the Rhindra Saldarity Organization ARSO, which have presence in the camps
and have been facilitating recruitment from the camps. So the primary aim here as a military one, but a secondary aim, which is really critical it is undermining inter cohesion in kind state because ultimately, like the MR military operates through coercion, force and violence, but also through fragmentation so that it doesn't face a unified resistance, and in this case they want to incite instability by creating hatred between the Rhindra and in population and building off of the vitriol that
had built over decades. So this is kind of a new paradigm that everyone is trying to better understand.
But yeah, it's it's kind of a new level of horror.
Yeah, and it's particularly horrific. As you say, I think sometimes there's a tendency, especially with people who perhaps are not as familiar with the situation and history there, to lump ethnic groups in as sort of monolithic actors, right or homogeneous to be like, Okay, so they're a hinja as represented by Arsa and the rso have joined the Hunter, which is not the case. Like every Rhina person I speak to, everyone I speak to in Cox's Bizarre shares
a loathing for those organizations. They're forced conscription of young people, and yeah, their solidarity with the Hunter that committed the genocide against and it continues to commit a genocide against these people. And I think the first thing we need to do is move away from that kind of homogeneous perspective. But maybe we could explain there have been a few accusations of the arkon Omy making attacks against a range of people, right range of specifically Raine of people who
are not armed, who are not part of ours are. Yeah, can you explain what we know and what we don't know there?
Sure?
Yeah, I think there's just to start.
There is a massive fog of war in Rekind state, may be worse than any other part of the country, so it is really difficult to disentangle fact from fiction here. But I think there's pretty credible evidence that the army
have committed atrosities against Rahinda civilian populations. In early August, there was a specific incident in which hundreds of Rahina were killed in a drone strike, and Fortified Rights, which is a human rights organization, conducted investigation to the incident and asserts that the Arkon Army was responsible for that.
Of course, the AA disputes these claims. And I think there's a few recent interviews with the commander in chief of the army to nine where you know, he articulates the side of the story, which you can find on Irwadi dot com and I think in a few other news outlets.
Yeah, the diplomat did one as well. He's been on a publicity tour, I guess recently.
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't know if you've seen this, but like his his tendency to cool hinder people bangladeshis it is unfortunate given that that's a language that was used to justify the genocide.
Right, absolutely, Yeah, it reflects kind of the language that the Memora military used.
Well, Bengali's he'll call them exactly. Yeah, it's very reflective of that.
Yeah.
So this is really challenging, and part because I think that there is kind of an important distinction between the Metamora military and the ark Army in this case, in part because the ar Army has like raw public support among the kind public, and so it has a more of a legitimate stake to governance than the Memora military,
which has none. And so this is it's kind of an issue that requires a tension and an honest accounting of the facts and a long process of reconciliation or because of the ark On Army is likely there to stay as a governing stakeholder. So that is a really tricky kind of set of conditions.
And the other side of this is that the rekined public.
I think there is a deep sense of a grievance among the rekind public, and this is a population that has also faced years of intense political alienation and persecution.
Not to mention war and violence.
You know, last year when Cyclo and Moca hit the Kind State, the Memora military did virtually nothing to help them. So it's a population with legitimate agrievances and they and their perception is that the international community only focuses on the revent of public's well being.
And I think the international community can.
Do a better job of showing sympathy for the rekined public's interests. I think sympathy is not like zero sum in that sense, and that needs to be done better. But honestly, like the equating a grievances is also really kind of unfair and dishonest. And you know, this Hindu population is marginalized to just such an extreme degree.
And so those are a really interesting report by Doctors Without Borders not.
Too long ago it that showed that only like six hundred thousand of the two point eight million Rahinja in the world within MR, fifty seven percent are living in camps and Bangladesh or in IDP camps in Memr. So it's like there's just like a highly vulnerable population that has experienced genocide.
You know, it's like there are there's a power imbalance, you.
Know, So it's like, I think it's not the same.
I don't know.
The whole process of kind Rhinda reconciliation is one that deserves immediate and urgent attention, but there's also a long term process of constructing, you know, a governance structure that is acceptable and that's not a highly exclusionary of Rhinda and these sorts of things. So it's a it's a highly and beyond the fact that like we need more a deliberate investigation these incidents, I think a broader conversational reconciliation and justice needs to needs to take place.
Yeah, and it's definitely one at least, you know, I speak to people who are probably on the more progressive side of the resistance, and it's one that they've acknowledged, like it's something that they need to address and kind of the litmus test for like a post hunter me and Mars, like are there places for these people who
they weren't places for in this state before? But yeah, how we get there is it's difficult, and I don't think that's not that's not a clear pathway that anyone's kind of pointed to this yet Yeah.
The one thing I would add is like this is sort of emblematic of broader perceptions of MEMR and approaches to peace building a MEMR is that there's there's often a horizontal approach that like we need to work on the intercommunal level, individual level trust building that sort of thing, And I think there is a place for that for sure. But we've done a couple of pieces of research with an academic at ug Austin who has found some really interesting stuff about like the nature of conflict in the
country and nature of cohesion in the country. And she's found including through some experimental research studies and designs which are quite revealing. I think that national identity is often more important to respondence in her surveys than ethnic identity, which is which kind of cuts against like the traditional perceptions of how MEMRA is, like, oh, it's this irreconcilable, fractious place and it's so hard to build trust between communities.
And that sort of thing.
But her research kind of points to the vertical dimension where it's the nature of memorpolitics and the nature of governance structures that highly exclusionary, discriminatory governance structures have sustained conflict for so long in the country, and this is
kind of like the main argument for the resistance. You know, it's like a lot of the safeholders, at least a critical mass within this resistance movement, they're trying to assert a new political paradigm in the country, you know, a more state about political paradigm in which the mem R military is not a dominant stakeholder, in which violence is not your source of power, yeah, and which that's not built on exclusionary norms of belonging.
So it's like it is generally a revolution.
In this sense, and that is why they're they're kind of pushing against the international pressures to enter into a power sharing your dream with the MR military, because there's a perception that if the MEMR military remains in a position of political power, they will interrupt this reform process and then violence will persist.
In the country.
Yeah.
Yeah, And I think that's probably a reasonable assumption to make. Like, again, this is like one of those things that I see a lot in different places in the world where I go, right, that's this tendency to see things, I think from sort of colonial perspective and just be like, oh, these ethnicities will squabble and fight, and like that's not necessarily the case at all, and like if you look even to the PDFs, like I was speaking to someone the other
day who was saying, like, there're a job Mostlim women fighting with the Koren right now, which is something that doesn't align up with this idea of like ethnicities which are clashing and can't combine.
And we saw like.
A statement of solidarity from the Kareni to the Kurdish people, which doesn't line up with this idea of an inherently Islamophobic like it you know, sort of massive of Buddhist people in the Amma, which I think, yeah, it's a little oversimplified to say that stuff, and I think sometimes reductive, And it's the analysis of mean Mar like as a place where colonialism is still occurring, and the methods of colonialism, like lots of the things you describe right, like promoting fractures,
promoting these different ethnic identities which are seen as kind of zero sum and mutually exclusive. These are things that the United Kingdom did or Britain did all around the world for centuries. And it's not rocket science to see how that jumps to another group which especially in some it is was trained by the British or had relations with the British, and you know, to see how we got there.
But I think we'll take a little break here.
We'll come back and I want to discuss the resilience of the Hunter and how it's hanging on.
All right, we're back.
So for the last little segment of this podcast, I would like to discuss how the Burmese military is holding onto power. When I speak to soldiers who have defected, I speak, I've spoken to about half a dozen I
guess soldiers who have defected over time. It's almost comic how disorganized and chaotic things are, and at the same time it's terrible the way, like every single one of them has described to me that their families are essentially held as collateral to stop them deserting, right, and so they had to work with the civil disobedience movement to first extract their families before they themselves took their weapons in most cases because they get a bounty for their
weapons and went to join their resistance or in some cases went into exile. So like, maybe that gives us a good view on how the Hunter is. It's continuing to force people to fight in this war that it's losing. Can you explain a little bit of how they've held onto power?
Sure, yeah, I guess the first thing to note is that rates of defection are totally historic.
I mean, yeah, there's by.
Our account, about fifteen thousand deserters, which is actually not radically.
Different than historical norms.
The mem or military has comparatively high rates of desertion even before the coup, so that's not far outside of the norm. But the defection, I think there's about fifty eight hundred defectors by our account since the coup, which is unprecedented. There's never never really been defection to resistance in memr's history. The other factor is the number of individuals who are surrendering without a fight with you know,
with with putting up little resistance. That number is hard to count, but it's by our by our raid, it seems to be quite high. There's forms of acts of disloyalty occurring that are not you know, spurring institutional collapse, but are that are degrading the memoir of military's fighting capabilities, which is.
A really important dynamic. So say that at the outset outset.
The other thing i'd say is that, like I think we need to sort of think about this at three levels. So, like the rank and file soldiers, they are significantly demoralized. Most did not join the military to fight. They joined the military for economic stability and for social status, and neither of those are available to them under this military's leadership. They certainly did not join to commit atrocities against the Bamar Buddhist population, which is now what they're enforced to.
So I think that population, the large number of rank and file soldiers, is highly demoralized, and that's where you have seen lots of desertion defection, often from the front lines. Though that population's defection desertion is not going to trigger institutional collapse.
At the second level, you have like a commander, Core, Major, Major and above.
And these I think since Operation ten twenty seven you've seen their morale to drop. And I mean there's been the fall of Last Show and the loss of the Northeast Regional Command, the first time in the Manor's history that a regional command's been taken. That has sent shockways through the commander level. The other thing is that min Onlign, the Commander in chief in his attempt to consolidate power and protect himself from from internal fragmentation.
He's rotating commanders.
Based on loyalty, not based on effectiveness, which is also degrading the Memora military's fighting capability. But it's also that's maybe one reason why you have seen less acts of
disloyalty within that layer at the senior level. I mean most most of those senior Memorr military officials who are based in Apida, I think they until the fall of Latio and the resistance moving into Mandalay, there was relatively high levels of sense of security and morale was okay, I suppose, But the fall of Las SiO and the ensuing events has really inflamed internal frustration from what we understand. So this has also triggered some shifts in the way
in which the MEMR military operates its patronage structures. So traditionally the patriot in structure is essentially like a feudal state. I mean, you have like a commander in chief that is extremely powerful, has authority to rotate or fire or arrest virtually anyone.
I mean, just huge amounts of powers centralized there.
The deputy commander in chief has little capability to challenge the commander in chief's authority. But then you have these regional commanders that operate as feudal lords.
At the regional level.
They're able to extract huge amount ounts of value or wealth through attractive industries, illegal industries.
All with total impunity.
But often you know, with the approval of nepidal, and that approval was often just given. Now it's less it's less easily given. I mean, you've seen ninety senior officers shuffled changed positions since the coup, and fifty have been removed or arrested by our tracking, and you've also seen individuals detained and arrested because I think there's fifteen kernels or above, mostly brigadier generals and major generals who have been arrested for business related activities.
Which I think is emblematic of like the.
Restructuring of the patrinage network and centralizing the patronage network with men online himself. If you do not have his personal approval, you cannot conduct business activities, including these highly lucrative scam operations that are generating billions in value, but
also really frustrating that I need. So this whole patient is structure which is critical to sustaining the Memora military is being reoriented, and we'll see whether or not that helps sustain the institution or introduces more instability.
But ultimately, the forms.
Of resilience I guess you would call it are the ones maybe you pointed to.
I mean they're structure. I mean it's like rotating officer.
Commanders and senior officers regularly holding families hostage. Essentially, you know, a soldier sent to the front lines, its family remains in the barracks. Payment is often made to the families, not to the front line's soldier, and there's retribution if the frontline soldier defects or deserts.
This is also where the fifty eight.
Hundred number I mentioned earlier is likely I radical undercounting because and also the fifteen thousand desertions because a lot of people are recorded as KIA when they're.
Actually they've deserted or defected.
So anyways, I'm not sure if that answers your question, which some thoughts relatively usually Yeah.
No, I think it does. Yeah.
One of the guys I met with described basically his entire I guess squad went out on a patrol and defected. I guess the PDF have been I had to describe it really, but it's basically shit talking them in their barracks or like in their position for months. Right, They're like, you see this a lot. It's a kind of unique feature of the of the conflict in the MMR, like guys with megaphones just being like, you can surrender if you want. You know, your life is miserable. And I
guess in this case it worked. And yeah, they they will be read to as kia they went out in a patrol and never came back.
But yeah, I guess the other dynamic is that, like you need to align motivation and opportunity for defection desertion, and the motivation is there in a lot of cases, but opportunity is not. You know. The resistance is committing some resources to this these efforts, but it's really limited
given the scale of the challenge. Yeah, there's a lot of factors that need to kind of come together, like the ability to see communicate with resistance, the ability to move into resistance, all the areas of the perception that we were accepted and not phase retribution, the perception that
living conditions are acceptable to them. You know, So there's all these conditions and given the costs of defection desertion which could be like major attribution against your family, and deep uncertainty about leaving this institution that is kind of a state within a state. That's why we're not seeing the kind of large scale, commander level defection desertion I think.
Right.
So, one last thing I wanted to talk about before we finish up. If people, I guess keep tabs on the conflict, they would have seen recently a video. I'm sure you've seen the Kachin Independence Army shooting down in aircraft with an FN six Chinese man portaal air defense system. It's what they sort of called manpads. I'm sure women can carry them to just fine or anyone else for that matter. But I think it happened in January and the video has just come out. Can you explain this
to nificance of that within the conflict landscape? And we am A yeah.
I guess there's a couple of points.
One is about China's posture and the other is about the military balance. I think the Minomour military's air power is its primary comparative advantage. I think at this point it has fewer blight infagery forces than the resistance, but that it's.
Heavy artillery and especially it's air power. You know, that's how it terrorizes the population.
Yeah, but it's also been a source of it's been a very powerful mobilizing force. I mean, I think after Phase one of ten twenty seven, the MMDAA Ko Kong armed group essentially it took back territory that it proceeds to be their own and took the town of lau Kai, which was really surprising.
But a major advance.
And then everyone kind of perceived, Okay, they'll just stay in the quote Unquoteqo Kong areas, They'll stay where they are.
But I think there's a deep perception.
Among the MDAA but also broader ethnic minority groups that as long as the mr military is in power and has air capability, it will terrorize the public.
Even if it cannot reach or.
Ever take back Laukai, it will vomit. And that's exactly what we saw after ten twenty seven. You saw air strikes and Laukai, you saw air strikes and lights of the.
Headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army.
You see air strikes in parts of her kind state that the mem R military has no chance of recapturing.
You know, it's a terrorizing the public thing.
Yeah, it's a punitive thing.
Yeah, it's punitive thing. So and it also is powerfully motivating.
It's like, Okay, now you see the MNDA pushing all the way to Lascio, and a lot of people didn't think they would do that. But it's like, if you have a perception that this MR Military can hurt me from a distance, they may need to eliminate them altogether in order to achieve the level of stability and safety that they pursue. So like it's the double edged sword
in that regard. But going back to your question, I mean think like if the resistance is capable of constraining the MR military's air capable, it radically changes the balance of power. I mean, I think there are some elements of this that are been a primary focus of some of the international human rights community, for example, constraining access to jet fuel and these sorts of things, trying to push for an arms embargo, none of which I've succeeded,
but there's been kind of progress on the margins. Although I think we just saw Russia delivered jet fuel and the maritime routes in southern Mars.
So yeah, in exchange for the artillery shows that the Mamma has sent to Russia.
Right, Oh, okay, realize, Okay, yeah, So I mean they're continued, they're able to sustain that, and you know, and the Chinese has sold i think six aircrafts last year, so they still have this fighting capability, and they're still able to extract foreign exchange essentially by stealing from exporters. But that's a whole different conversation. But anyway, like I think, yeah, this is a key dynamic if they're able to affect their their air power. The other thing is that like
China is attempted to play both sides. I mean historically that's sort of their approach. I mean, they have deep connections with armed organizations along its border, maybe closer even than that with the Memware military, but they also provide political legitimacy and material assistance to the Menware military. They just actually signed an MU on law enforcement and security
or some sort with the military. That's a deep and abiding relationship, in part because the Chinese don't see an alternative.
I mean, I don't think they have much trust for dan U G or.
Other resistance groups, and despite the fact that they don't, they also don't really trust the memorare military or perceive them to be competent. They see them kind of as their only potential partner in IPIDOT. But it's kind of a question as to whether this strategy is still working for them. I think we've seen lots of acts of defiance from both sides, the mean or military and resistance groups visa be China.
I mean, they are military.
They've been pressuring them to hold elections for since the coup, essentially yea, and they're really no closer yeah to that happening. I mean, I think they dissolve the NLD, something the
Chinese said not to do. And more recently, they've designated a number of resistance groups as terrorist organizations, which essentially obviates political negotiations, which I think would certainly frustrate the Chinese, given that they hope to achieve stability through political ingratiations between a subset of resistance groups and then aneral military. So there are these kind of acts of defiance also
on the resistance side. I mean, the Chinese are pushing for ceasefires, and yet the resistance continues to push into the country, and they're sort of a perception that like, as the resistance groups aligned with China quote.
Unquote aligned with China, maybe they aren't.
A gain ascendency on the battlefield in particular, then China's influenced gains.
But I'm not sure whether that's the case.
It might actually be in verse, like, as these groups push to Memmre and have more charge oryal control, maybe they have more options and they're less dependent on the Chinese. So that relationship in the north along the Chinese border is also very much in flux.
I don't think it's clear exactly how that will play out.
Yeah, no, it's not, And I think that's sort of a big question that's overhanging. Obviously, you have actives that are more close your line with China, like the United worst Date Army, who have sort of largely remained aloof from the conflict or a loof maybe it's her own word, but are not like directly committing most of their forces to the Conflict's pretty a better way of saying it, right.
Yeah, I think so.
And now that there's a ton of pressure on them to stop selling arms to other groups, so we'll see whether that happens.
Yeah, which is probably where the Kaschin Independence Army was able to get the surface where missiles from, which brings us back to that. Yeah, it's it's never not complicated, but it's always very sad that, like the folks quit in the middle of this are suffering horrendously and sometimes suffering kind of out of sight and out of mind for so many people. As you know, a news cycle continues to kind of either trivialize or completely ignore what's
happening in Memma, which is pretty sad. People often ask me, like where they can find reliable news sources and where they can send their money if they want to help people in Mema. Do you have any good suggestions for that?
Sure?
Yeah, I mean I think for news, I guess for like day to day news like Fronter Memr is a fantastic source, as is meanmore Now and the Airwadi. These are they have English language content that would be really interesting and accessible. My organization US Institute Piece. You can check out our website. We publish a lot of analytical work on there related to the conflict. You're welcome to
check there. I think there's a really good another podcast, it's really good Insight MEMR that is worth checking out. Started as like a Buddhism oriented podcast talking about in Pasana. Now its branched into a much broader range of issues.
Some of the best stuff I've.
Heard and actually affiliated with inside mem R is an organization called Better Burma that provides entering assistance.
And one you could contribute to.
There's an organization called Skills for Humanity that provides a lot of humanitarian assistance on the ground.
Yeah, and you mentioned.
Liberate the MMR before we started recording. That can also be a good support.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think Skills to Humanity also accept maybe they accept direct I was speaking to them about like medical equipment that they needed. Yeah, they they accept direct donations or not. But people who want to volunteer medically let's want to look out for Yeah, that was fantastic.
Billy.
Is there any way anythink else you'd like to plug? Like why people can follow you or us i P online.
Us i P dot org. Most of my writing is on there. I'm on Twitter, Twitter at b I L L E E, the number four, the letter D. But yeah, I mean I checked those sources I mentioned. It's there's not more kind of content in the mainstream media, but there's there's a lot of really incredible reporting coming from the ground, from people taking incredible risks to share information. So encourage you to support some of those local outlets.
Yeah, definitely, including financially if you can. It's like doing the work that really needs to be done. Thank you so much for your time than we appreciate you being a host.
Jeez, welcome to It could happen here a podcast that is reported. But I'm very tired. But you know who's not tired? Garrison Davis, our host for today.
No, I'm probably more tired than you.
I was up to I don't know about that.
No, I was up till nine am. Eest writing desks.
Oh geez. Yeah, I went to bed by like five or six.
I except for three hours. I'm going right back to bed after this.
Excellent as is the grind, you know, riseing grind, that's my motto.
Yeah, I'm going to do the same things. All right, Well, Garrison, what are we What are we talking about today? What's our episode about? What's this sewed on?
So it's it's been a while since we've done like an update on what meme politics are up to. I think that the last deep dive we did was, like I wouldn't say, like a year ago when Ron DeSantis, then presidential.
Hopeful meatball Rod Garrison, meatball rock me.
Sorry, sorry, my polity is putting.
Ron just embraced the fast wave like meme asthetic for his then failing and dying campaign. And that was kind of the last that we did one of these big deep dives into like how meme politics currently operate.
And it's been a long year.
It's felt in some ways much longer than a year since then, and the meme landscape has changed significantly, And that's kind of what I want to discuss today. Just go over the current state of meme politics in September twenty twenty two.
Great, it's like the State of the Union, but slightly dumber.
But for us, yeah, just for all, for the completely brain rods, yeah space of online politics, people.
Who have destroyed their minds by spending too much time on the internet.
Yes, exactly so now that most of these like jokes and references will be talking about are actually really old and not actually relevant anymore and are no longer trending. Now we can talk about how they worked, if they worked, and what they can tell us about the changing landscape of meme politics in the Year of Our Lord twenty twenty four and beyond. So let's start by going all the way back to July fifteenth, which was just a lifetime ago.
Yeah, that was a thousand years ago. Yes, this was.
This was the first day of the RNC. Vance Is announced as Trump's running mate. This was before Biden dropped out of the race, but when we were pretty sure that he was probably going to hopefully.
That's interesting that you were pretty shit because I I kind of thought he was going to like make us like fucking hoist his corpse back into the white asse.
I mean, we got a really good indication about five days later that his dropout was like imminent. Yeah, yeah, you're right, and it happened. It happened less than a week later, So it was it was really on the line. But anyway, it was. It was a it was a
very different world, very different time. Meanwhile, on the first day of the RNC, after vance Is announced as the Republican VP candidate, the Twitter user Rick Rud's Calves posted this tweet quote, I can't say for sure, but he might be the first VP pick to have admitted in a New York Times bestseller to fucking and insight out Latex Glove shoved in between two couch cushions Vance Hillbilly Elogy, pages one seventy nine to one eighty one. So this
is this is the start of the couch meme. Sure the next few days, the memes spread online with the help of liberals who were unable to detect the fictitious nature of the claim. Now, unronic spread is crucial to the success of mimetic attacks like this, and the couch fucking claims gained such widespread prominence on Twitter that on July twenty fifth, the AP decided to do an official fact check of the claim, running the headline no, JD. Vans did not have sex with a couch. Now this
had two problems. By platforming this story in the AP, the image of JD's couch coitus was propelled outside the confines of overly online and Twitter shit posters into the popular discourse. Now the topic was welcome on news shows, talk shows, and other respectable publications. The other problem is that you can't defit say JD Vance has never had sex with a couch.
No, no, I say I would never say that. You can say it's untrue.
He wrote about sofa sex in his memoir, right, but not that he's one hundred percent never made love to a love seat.
Yeah, so making matters worse.
Hours later, the AP removed their fact check, leaving a web page that just read quote, this story did not go through our standard editing processes and has been removed.
I gotta know, I do desperately want to know what actually happened in the background there.
It's it's quite funny. It's it's quite a big fuck up. Now.
This led people to reasonably conclude that if the fact check was taken down, that really only leads us to believe one thing is that this is a true claim, which at this point many people knew that it's not. I think interestingly, jd Vance has refused to comment on this claim, which is probably smart, but his continued refusal to even deny the claim adds a bit to the
humorous nature. So the retraction of this fact check became a news story itself and gave a whole new life to a meme that had kind of been reaching the end of its cycle. People created doctored pages of Vance's book Hill Billy Elegy, where he reflected on tales of his youth in Ohio, where it was commonplace for young boys rejected by girls to turn to couch cushions for
sexual pleasure. The fake pages were framed as a limited first edition of the book before per Teal found it and revised the book for a secondary, wide released copy the next week. The meme continued to proliferate, having completely broken out of the Twitter ship posting bubble it was birthed in, but the peak of the meme was still to come. On August sixth, Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walls as her running mate, and the two appeared
together at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During Walls's first speech, he made a very safe kind of dead Oak style reference to his vice presidential opponent's viral sticky sofa situation.
Like all regular people I grew up with in the Heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a best seller trashing that community. Come on, that's not what Middle America is. And I gotta tell you I can't wait to debate the guy, that is, if he's willing to get off the couch and show up, you'll see what.
I did there.
So, due to the references kind of like explicit sexual context, this was a bit of an unexpected move.
Yeah, you could say that.
But for those already familiar with the meme, the bit served as a humorous yet tame in joke, and for those unfamiliar, the huge crowd reactions and prompted others to inquire about the context for the whole jd vance couch thing,
once again boosting its popularity as a trend. Now, I think this was a bit of a gamble from Walls definitely, as acknowledging a viral meme often leads to its impending death, where recognition and participation of viral trends from the mainstream establishment signal that something is no longer cool and is now instead cringe Now. Part of the long lasting presence of the coconut tree meme is the Harris campaign's wise unwillingness to make continuing coconut tree references or capitalize on
its imagery. The White House going all in on Dark Brandon using the imagery for merch and Biden increasingly making references to the meme and interviews and.
Speeches, Oh, I've just killed a dead nuked.
It exactly ultimately led to this meme's death long before the death of the Biden campaign itself. But this could be like a delicate balance. Before Biden made a dark Brandon one of the early chrostic images associated with his twenty twenty five for re election campaign, the first few dark branded references from the White House actually increased the memes spread, and I think this is where Walls's joke
was able to succeed. The couch reference was vague enough and disconnected from the more explicit aspects of the meme, and paired with Walls's goofy facial expressions and his kind of dad joke refrain of see what I did there, it made what could have been a cringe and or
crude moment into a charismatic and endearing one. I think the other thing that makes me lean towards Walls's invocation of the couch helping more than herting, is that the meme had already begun to be legitimized by the establishment when it's the subject of an article in every major publication and Stephen Colbert is making couch jokes on TV, then it is already broken containment and hit the mainstream.
Yeah.
I would also add, I think there's a degree to which, like the dark Brandon stuff was cringey so fast, because it was very clearly the Biden campaign jumping on to a meme that Biden himself certainly didn't understand absolutely not, Whereas I think Walls got a little bit of the kind of energy Trump used to get in part because it was it was like such a I can't believe this is happening in American politics. The VP candidate for the DIMS just accused the Republican VP candidate having sex
with the couch like it was such a wow. This is like the breaking of a seal kind of moment which normally the Republicans have kind of had to themselves these like yes, line crossing moments, And I think that does get attention and energy.
To you.
It was interesting to see them do it and have it actually work.
Yeah, well, we'll talk about that a little bit later. How this sort of tactic has been almost entirely monopolized by the right to the past decade and just now we're starting to see someone that's change. I think Tim Wall's making a single Couched reference I believe did very little to hurt the inevitable trajectory of the JD Vance Couch meme. In the days after the speech, searches for JD Vance Couch reached an all time high, and as is the nature for peaks, was followed by a gradual
fall off during the month of August. But crucially, the spirit of the meme never really fully went away. I think one aspect that separates the couch meme from Dark Branded and even Coconut Tree to some degree is that it's not based on trying to prop up a political figure like Positively, but is instead attacking a widely disliked figure with slanderous disinformation. And though the couch meme is well past its peak, there's been no shortage of ways to make fun of JD.
Vance.
The overall momentum against him specifically has continued on utilizing memes with a true, untrue, and semi true basis, whether that be his inability to order donuts or his legitimately possible interest in dolphin sex as evidenced by his Twitter searches. Do you know who also likes dolphin sex.
Robert.
I mean, I could be convinced, but I guess let's check out these ads anyway.
All right, we are so back.
So the right did not take kindly to Walls's acknowledgment of the whole sofa spectacle.
We were so pissed. They were really pissed. And it's funny.
It's like as if their main guy has not spent the last ten years making up wild and spewing all sorts of like offensive lies about his opponents.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's why they're pissed. Yeah, we're supposed to be the ones doing this.
So in response, the online right's finest posters cooked up a memetic counter attack against Tim Walls. And what they decided on is that Tim Walls once had to get his stomach pumped from drinking a gallon of horse seamen with this meme originating from a fake screenshot of an AP fact check posted by the Twitter account National Conservatism.
See, uh, I'm sure you're going to get into it. But there's so many reasons why this was always destined not to work.
Yeah.
Absolutely, Almost immediately this was seen as like a massive misfire.
Yeah yeah, it made it immediately clear, Oh, you guys don't understand why what you used to do, like what you were doing was working. Yeah, like you never actually understood the principles behind what you were playing around with.
And I think crucially, most of the attacks from these like weird online figures never actually caught that much traction. The only ones that succeeded were ones that were just pairting stuff that Trump was talking about, because I think Trump actually understands this line of attack much better than most of these like right wing posters do. But yeah,
it was very clear that this was a failure. Some of the first horse Seamen posts got immediately ratioed by replies and quote tweets, deeming the meme a manufactured and desperate attempt to respond to the natural growth of the couch hooks from a random Twitter shit post to the Democratic vice presidential candidate's opening speech with.
A guy like Walls, you don't go with horse com you do something like you you start spreading a rumor that like he uh cooked a bunch of well done t bone steaks at a barbecue or totally like that, totally like something that really hits to the center of his dad core thing it has. It has to line up with his vibe right right, right, and his vibe is like you know that nice Midwestern dad who's a dog shit cook, right like.
Yeah, which is some thing that Walls has actually been able to like utilize himself with his like white guy tacos and stuff right like.
Right right exactly. He's leaded into it very smartly.
He lead into it, and then it becomes a strength that then the right also gets upset about accusing him of quote unquote anti white racism.
That was quite a moment for American political history.
The other thing with like this horse semen thing is like you simply just can't force these things to happen. Like a crucial part of the success of a political meme like this is that it must have a degree of unirnic spread by people who genuinely believe it to be true. Now, the horse semen meme was also intended to counter the Republican or weird talking point that picked up steam this summer, and for some reason, they chose to go about this by making an escalatory and just
grossly bizarre claim about Tim Wall's guzzling animal semen. Masterful gambitzer not a weird thing to say at all. No, in doing this, the right displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of why the Jdvan's couch story was successful. The reason why it caught on despite the easily verifiable fact that Jadvance did not write about pleasuring himself with a couch as a teenager, is that Jadvance seems like the kind of guy to have used a couch to masturbate as a teenager in rural Ohio.
Yeah, you know that adolescence was awkward as.
Shit, absolutely, Like it wasn't successful just because it was like a weird sex story. It evoked a genuine and feeling of something a sort of like white trash young guy might do. On the other hand, swallowing a gallon of horse seamen, it's such an outlandish jump into fantasy by comparison.
Yeah, nobody has done that, right. Well, well, Tim Walls is no mister hands. The vibes simply do not match. And to be clear, Garre said, mister Hans wasn't swallowing it. That was part of the problem.
That is true, And like, meanwhile, Vance has the exact vibe of like a gross little teen gremlin who fucked it inside out. Rubber gloves shoved between two couch cushions. So the horse even meme failed to reach outside the confines of niche right wing Twitter, but conservatives had another
meme up their sleeve. Chronically online far right influencers Cat Turre a CHAIAI Check aka Lips of TikTok and Ian Miles Chung led the charge in branding Tim Walls as tampon Tim in reference to a bill Walls assigned requiring menstrual products be provided in schools. Oh the horror, The Babylon b wrote JD. Vans is weird. It says guy who signed bill to put tampons in boys' school bathroom unquote.
So similar to the horse thing, this attempt to frame Tim Walls is weird just didn't work that the meme never caught on beyond its initial posts. I think part of the reason why the overly online right is so focused on painting Walls is weird is not just revenge for the couch joke, but because Tim Walls is often credited with popularizing the quote Republicans are just plain weird
line of attack, something that's really caught on this past summer. Now, the oldest clip I can find of Tim Walls positing. This message comes from December of twenty twenty three. I'll include that clip here.
And you said, basically, there's no such thing as a generic Republican.
These guys are weird.
Once they start running, their weirdness shows up.
What do you mean, well, you have weird?
Stand by that?
Well, well, look just the strange things they become obsessed with, demonizing our children, becoming obsessed with people's personal lives in their bedrooms, restricting freedoms. I'm surrounded by states who are spending their time figuring out how to ban Charlotte's Web in their schools. Why we're banishing hunger from ours with free breakfast and launch. That's what the public's looking for,
That's what they're trying to get to. And they will weirdly obsess with everything to be mean and cruel and small in their ideas. And I didn't hear anything last night that did anything different to that, so I'll stand by that. I just think Americans know this is just weird stuff to be focused on.
Now we on nickod happen here and behind the Bastards have similarly been advocating for this type of framing for the New Right for quite a long while, Like Robert, I know you've been like really pushing for this as a tactic for years now.
Yeah.
Yeah, if they'd made me the vice presidential candidate three years ago, I really could have made some progress on this, but had to see what they've got up.
Like, we decided on the name from Alli's new show, like very early this year, Like this was way way before like the Weird Attacks went viral.
It's really the only name we ever considered was weird Little Guys.
Yeah, because that's how we like internally refer to these freaks. Because these are all unhinged, anti social freaks, and many of them revel in being this antagonistic force. I think part of their self image is the idea that liberals find them dangerous, and the Weird Attack is very disempowering for these people. It reframes them from this like scary existential threat to being more akin to your just off putting,
creepy uncle. Here's a clip of Wals himself kind of explaining the methodology behind this attack.
You've gotten some attention this week for calling Trump Advance and Republicans in general weird, and I think that You're the one that set this tone, and there's this shift. The Harris campaign seems to be following your lead, echoing this language. Why do you think weird a more effective attack line against Trump and what Democrats have been done previously, which is argue that he's an existential threat to democracy.
Yeah, and it's an observation on this, and you know, being a school teacher, I see a lot of things. But my point on this was is people kept talking about, look, Donald Trump is going to put women's lives at risk. That's one hundred percent true. Donald Trump is potentially going to end constitutional liberties that we have, end voting. I do believe all those things are a real possibility, but it gives him way too much power.
Listen to the guy.
He's talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought, we just give him way too much credit. And I think one of the things is is when you just ratchet down some of the you know, the scariness or whatever, and just name it what it is. I got to tell you my observation on this is, have you ever seen the guy laugh?
That seems very weird?
To me that an adult can go through six and a half years of being in the public eye if he has left it's at someone, not with someone. That is weird behavior. And I don't think you call it anything else. It is simply what we're observing.
Now.
An interesting side effect of the weird framing is that it's left these ultra conservatives utterly incapable of effectively combating this line of attack. They've been so used to being on the offense that they never really prepared for the position that they're now stuck in. Over a decade of they go low, we go high, conditioned the rights to be completely unable to cope with being put on mimetic defense.
Now.
My favorite retort of the weird claim is from conservative pundent Helen Andrew, who wrote, quote, calling people weird is such feminine behavior. Textbook sex difference. Men engage in open conflict, women police conformity. It's honestly disorienting to hear male politicians use the line.
I love too that we're talking about how men are naturally drawn to open, honorable conflict when talking about a bunch of people who never log off, like everything you.
Do is find the keyboard motherfucker.
It's amazing that they're combating this by saying the weirdest things imaginable.
Yeah.
Now, I think this one's only one uped by a reply to this very post by the author of the self published Kingmaker trilogy named Airy Mendelssohn Christ who posted a meme featuring a crowd of NPC wojacks all saying the word weird, which which I find actually be a very powerful image depicting all the masses having agreed upon that Republicans are weird. But Mendelssohn wrote quote, it's both feminine behavior and heard behavior. They all started calling them
weird at once. It was obviously planned, cooked up by a sophisticated wordsmith, and then distributed by their network.
Yes, only the most sophisticated of wordsmiths knows the word weird.
It's amazing.
You've got to dig deep into the dictionary to hit that one.
Truly, truly, truly, this must be the work of a sophisticated word smith.
It's it's phenomenal, that's fucking funny.
So in trying to combat the weird accusation, the right has mostly opted for either responding with escalation, like in the case of the horse seamen meme, which only makes them seem kind of more off putting, or just going for the classic Uno reverso right, I'm not weird, you're weird. This is the ultimate sign of desperation and impending defeat. I am rubber, you are glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. On top of being
a strategy that often signals one has already lost. By employing this tactic, you make the very basic error of repeating the enemy's claim against you, thus continuing to amplify and spread the original attack.
Here's a clip from Trump.
There's something weird with that guy. He's a weird guy. JD is not weird. He's a solid rock. I happen to be a very solid rock. We're not weird. We're other things, perhaps, but we're not weird. But he is a weird guy. He walks on the stage. Is something wrong with that guy? And he called me weird? And then the frank news media picks it up. That was the word of the day, weird, weird, weird. They're all go on now.
Similarly, I found a Megan Kelly video titled Tucker Carlson explains why JD Vance is actually normal?
Great should Tucker notes the most normal man alive.
And Trump supporters have brought signs to his rallies that read Donald Trump is not weird. My I Am not weird shirt has people asking a lot of questions are already answered by my shirt. It's it's a very a
very basic mistake. Now, there has been some pushback among certain swasp people on the left who have historically associated themselves as like societal outcasts and have found comfort in embracing words like weird and freak, and on a certain level, I understand this, but I think this point of view is making the same fundamental error as the conservative right when they try to flip around the weird accusation onto Democrats, progressives,
and people on the left by primarily using homophobia and transphobia. We're using the same word to refer to two very different things. Do they call drag Queen's weird for being transgressive? Meanwhile, Trump, Advance and the far right are weird because they are oddly reactionary. They're trying to resurrect a long dead world by forming an authoritary movement behind a reality TV star
who sounds like you're rambling conspiracy theorist uncle. It's a battle over the terrain of normalcy as a shifting category. And while I sympathize with some hostility to the hegemony of normalcy, how I often follow outside that category. I believe it's also paramount that we sabotage reactionary efforts to gain any territory. So that's kind of the cycle of weird And we will be back to talk about this kind of final new stage of meme politics after this break. Okay,
we are once again, so back now. I believe this election will truly be characterized by the complete perliferation of meme style politics. Now, even without like the use of a meme image, I think politics, especially this year, has itself functioned and spread like a meme.
Now.
This is something that's been happening for the past like eight years, certainly, but the way it's happened this summer, I think has been slightly unique. The Weird attack is, you know, the ideal example of this. But even if you just look back a few months ago, we were in a very different position. It was a very different story, and I'll let Stephen Colbert demonstrate that.
So the Biden campaign wants to build on the new viral trend of handground Pa the phone because reportedly they're looking for.
A meme page manager.
So look forward to some hot new Biden's social content like Irmagird, Trumper's hurdler I can't has youth votes, and of course for the very online skibbitty Biden Biden.
Gwity Biden t dog.
Okay, I I really want to play more of that cliff, but I'm afraid I already included a little too much.
What a dire situation that is?
That is that that is the peak of the liberals, mimetic attacks, just truly episcopal. Oh my god, I've become obsessed with skibbitty Biden just because it demonstrates such like an inevitable like self defeat that that was like the best thing these people had, like cooking. As it's kind of obvious by the clip. This led towards the death of the Biden campaign. They really had nothing in the tank.
Biden was a shambling old man. And then like two months later, Kamala kicked off her campaign by embracing the Kamala is Brat Summer, which yes to may have killed Bratt Summer but it did help secure the vibe shift, skyrocketing her popularity.
Quite frankly, I was ready for bratt summer today.
Yes, sure, but I think her weaponization of that term, endorsed by Charlie XCX, I think did help skyrocket her early popularity and showed an early embrace of online culture. And I believe the Harris campaign actually owes a lot more to memes. In a ironic twist of fate, there is a compelling argument to be made that Kamala Harris's rise to the top of the presidential ticket can at least be in part tracked back to Republican attacks which
spawned memes. Last year. The account RNC Research, ran by the GOP posted multiple clips and edits attacking Kamala Harris for what they saw as odd phrases and awkward moments. Earlier this year, some of those videos from RNC research went viral outside of right wing Twitter, which led to an ironic or post ironic embrace of Kamala Harris among liberal and leftist posters. Now the biggest one was the Coconut Tree video, which spawned memes that started to pick
up steam in January and didn't peak until July. Another one of RNZ Research's videos, a four minute compilation of Kamala Harris saying what can be unburdened by what has been provided the inspiration for the title of a document that spread around political circles postulating Kamala Harris as the best successor to Biden if you were to drop out of the race instead of a messy last minute primary
or an open convention. And I think these memes did a lot to increase Kamala's favorability in the first half of this year. Kamala prior to this was a relatively kind of disliked figure nationally. She was one of the first drop out of the twenty twenty presidential race.
Yeah, she wasn't I wouldn't even say disliked as much as like not figure like the big The number one thing people said about her is that she's been a non entity as a vice president.
Yeah yeah, And she certainly wasn't popular. Yes, definitely not popular.
So although the GP may have inadvertently helped to improve the public profile of Kamala Harris and have failed to effectively combat the weird attacks, they have not totally failed on the me medic warfare front. The past two months, the right has landed on a somewhat effective memes style politics by utilizing a combination of disinformation and AI images to create fake news stories that rile up their base on certain key issues so far, mainly trans people and immigration.
Now.
A few months ago I did an episode on how the Right's been using memes to create this fake epidemic of transgender mass shooters, and then in July, a new anti trans syop went super viral. False claims that the Algerian Olympic boxer Iman Khleif is transgender or in some kind of unverified way quote unquote biologically male spread around online with the help of British newspapers and went just completely viral for a whole week, with the disinformation subsequently
becoming a news story itself. This fake story caught traction after an Italian boxer quit a match forty five seconds into a fight after receiving a single hard blow to
the face. Anti trans memes are a well worn part of this type of disinfo ecosystem, and there was no shortage of trans sports memes now using Khalif, I'm going to quote from Ruby Hammad in Al Jazeera quote Khalif's subsequent match was against Hungarian Anna Hamari, who in the lead up posted and deleted an image that I believe to be among the most significant of the entire affair
because of how it lays the subtext bear. In this AI generated image that Hamari sourced from Instagram, Khalif was not merely represented as a man towering over a dainty, vulnerable white woman, but was denied humanity altogether and drawn as a super natural, mythical beast unquote. Many other AI images of Khalif spread throughout this viral trend, some with just Khalif having like a stereotypical like male body that were AA generated, and others with this like similar like
like kind of like monster ish look. And I think beyond the actual use of these like AI memes and kind of anti trans memes using Khalif, I think the way the actual story spread was like a meme. I think that's how I was able to gain such like a viral traction in just like a few days.
I think.
The next version of this is the Eating Cat's story, which started with a post to a Springfield crime watch Facebook group from someone who shared a fourth hand account based on a rumor from a neighbor who claims to have heard the story from a friend who heard the
story from an unnamed source. Now NewsGuard attracted down the woman who told the Facebook poster about the story, and she told them, quote, I'm not sure I'm the most credible source because I don't actually know the person who lost the cat.
I don't have any proof.
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating they're eating the pets of.
The people that live there.
I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.
All I'll seeing people on Tellivien.
Let me just say this is the people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that, and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.
I'm not taking this from television people on television to say.
Man dog was eaten by the people that went there.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Division of Wildlife told TMZ that the main photo of an alleged Haitian immigrant carrying a debt goose, presumably on the way to eat it, was in fact a random black man removing roadkill from a street in Columbus, Ohio, with no evidence to suggest he is from Haiti, he is an immigrant, or was intending to eat said goose. Still jd Vance particularly spent a lot of work boosting this fake news story.
Also, if he was, what's wrong with eating a goose?
Yes, exactly, Like there's there's so many, so many problems with the Haitians are eating at pets and wildlife meme, and we don't we don't have time to like fully get into it. It's just kind of one anecdote in this kind of series of mimetic attacks. And I think one of the guys who was spearheading this was jd Vance, who spent a lot of effort trying to push the story into the national spotlight, either the day of or
before the postential debate of Vans tweeted quote. In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who have said their neighbor's pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It's possible, of course, that all these rumors will turn out to
be false. Do you know what's confirmed that a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here unquote, And now I think the last thing that he's referring to was an unfortunate car accident, and the Haitian man was a legal immigrant, not an illegal immigrant. And the father of the child who died has been advocating that people stop using his child's death as this like racist ammunition in this weird culture war debate.
God, it's bleak, which is.
Really hard to see of man pleading that these like unhinged racists stop using the death of his son. Yeah, to further like they're just extremely gross and like transparent agenda.
Yeah, it's one of the more disgusting things that's happened.
Part of the spread of the eating a pets story has been the use of AI images, particularly of black men kidnapping and eating pets, as well as images of Trump rescuing cats from what I would describe as a horde of immigrants, which is what I would assume the
AA prompt would be. Now, these images aren't necessarily meant to be passed off as real, but in the absence of actual evidence, they serve an important purpose of providing a visual justice stick in people's minds, and I think that that's crucially what's going on with all of these AI images, whether they be of Trump, like saving cats or holding cats, or they just be like very racist depictions of like black men trying to like eat or
kidnap people's pets. Earlier this year at the RNC, I know me and Robert went to this panel produced in part by Microsoft talking about the use of like AI images in politics and how they're advocating to like, yeah, not be using AI AI depictions of candidates, which is something that Trump has consistently been doing, posting or retruthing AI videos of Kamala Harris of people like Taylor Swift endorsing him, which then led to Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala Harris,
which seemingly upset Trump greatly. Now to me, if you look at the trans Olympics debacle as well as the Springfield incident, it feels like this like endless series of new dis info trends is designed so that individual confrontations just don't matter that much. Like, yeah, pointing out the whole trans Olympics thing is fake just doesn't matter, because then they're going to move on to Haitian immigrants or
killing people's pets. Each individual lie is so flimsy, but the constant sequence of them built a structure that has a degree of stability for conservatives, And this is a project that they've been like working towards for a long long time. I know, Robert, we've talked about this.
Yeah, this, I mean I saw the start of this as like a kid, right, like this is kind of what what guys like Limbaugh were always doing on sort of the ground floor level, you know, you could you can look at I think one of the first big like cleavage points in our realities was the whole Clinton death count thing, which, if you're unaware, is this list Conservative started spreading in like nineteen ninety three or four of all of the people that Bill and Hillary had
supposedly had murdered, right, And it was like guys like Vince Foster who'd killed himself, who worked for them, and whatnot, Like it was all bullshit, but it was kind of the start of this, Like, when you get enough of these things, it doesn't matter that each of them takes seconds to debunk. They form a sort of like I a cushion. If you exist within that reality, you can kind of slide along without touching the ground.
And definitely now, yeah, it forms like a mesh like net structure that where each individual piece is very weak, but together it provides an actually like pretty pretty resilient like resting place for these people's alternate version of reality.
Yeah.
Now, Vance is kind of somewhat admitted in some ways to having manufactured this media.
Story was interesting to me.
Yeah, And I'm going to put that clip here, and I'm going to include a bit of a longer clip than what's usually used in soundbites, just because during this interview, just Vance's behavior and his like pauses are very odd. So there's gonna be a few seconds of like dead space. But that is like in the actual interview.
American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I start talking.
About cat memes.
If I have to mean create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then.
That's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you just said that you're creating a public policy. Sorry, you just said that you're creating the story.
Is that, Dana.
You just said that this is a story that you created.
So so then the eating dog are not.
We are creating we are, Dana.
It comes from first hand accounts from my constituents. I say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it.
Now.
Vance has subsequently you know, said that no, no, no, I'm getting this information from first hand accounts from my constituents. When I say that I'm creating stories, I'm creating a media story. But it's hard not to see this as a little bit of like a tactical slip on his part. Right now, this has all created a very odd situation for the Republican Party, as we've kind of talked about
the past few months. Journalists and researcher Jared Holt wrote, quote, the Trump campaign seems to be doing the same failed dance as the Dessantus one at the moment, pander heavily to terminally online weirdos and get mad when the general public goes, uh, what the fuck?
Unquote Yeah, and this is the thing.
When you have someone on stage talking about eating pets, that is a turn off for many normal people because they immediately clock this as being.
Probably complete bullshit.
Yeah, and we're in a very interesting moment in the Republican Party considering the right wings electoral losses in twenty eighteen, twenty twenty, twenty twenty two, and possibly going into twenty twenty four. This kind of weird culture war grievance, anti will strategy just might not be electorally viable when matched against a more normal alternative, and I think making matters worse.
The Trump team and the Republican National Committee have spent the past four years handing over a lot of their calms and outreach to just certifiable freaks like Laura lumer Ian, Miles Chung, and limbs of TikTok, people who are very disconnected from what regular people care about, people that are only liked by other really online freaks, and.
People who have no crossover appeal.
Right.
Joe Rogan is such a powerful card in their hand because he has a lot of normal dude appeal, right, and so when he starts parroting a talking point, he can actually push it to people Laura Lumer does not write like if you show a normal person Laura Lumer, they're like, what the fuck is wrong with that lady's face?
And they're a very double edged sword because although they are very off putting and that in some ways can like damaged, can damage Trump, they also carry a degree of like very real harm. Oh yeah, Whenever all these people hop onto a trend, a very consistent thing that has followed is bomb threats being called into whatever their
target is. I love doing that, whether that be hospitals providing trans healthcare, abortion clinics, or in this case, just schools in Springfield, Ohio, which have now received multiple bomb threats. And again, like it is a very double edged sword
because obviously that's like very real harm being done. And you could argue that, you know, that makes the situation worse for the Trump campaign, that the fact that their attacks that they're spreading are resulting in like bomb threats being called into schools, but it also creates a degree of actual harm for like kids and many of the legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield that are now seeing a very unprecedented as of recent wave of like extremely racist attacks.
There's a good article by Jared Holt in MSNBC that kind of goes into this topic specifically that I'll link in the sources below. So yeah, that kind of rounds up my update on the current state of meme politics, all of its various forms that's taken these past few months, from couch fucking jokes to bomb threats in Springfield, and it's a very dominant form. Like I don't remember memes being this front and center at least in the twenty twenty election.
Yeah, and I mean they twenty sixteen they kind of were, but it was like a much rougher and ruder attempt. There's like so much more buy in by like large organizations.
And Democrats have finally jumped on board to this. Yes, yes, absolutely.
They have long rejected this line of attack as an illegitimate form of politics, and they are not taking that stance anymore.
Yeah, they picked the gun up off the table, fucking finally.
Well, that at least doesn't for me. Yeah here, it could happen here. I will leave us with one closing soundbit from JD.
Vans something that Governor Walls has called you and Donald Trump, and that is weird, sure, and it is taken off the New York Times reports. Then when Donald Trump was asked about it, he said, not me. They're talking about JD.
Well.
Certainly they've levied that charge against me more than anybody else.
Hey, we'll be.
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