It Could Happen Here Weekly 30

some other stuff from time to time. I'm Robert Evans UM, and today we are going to chat once again with Romeo Kokyatski. UM. Romeo, you are a Ukrainian journalist and an anarchist. We chatted with you right before the Russian expanded invasion of Ukraine, UM, and now we're we're talking with you again now that the war has entered. UM certainly a different phase as as Russia and troops pull out of the north of the country, pull out from around Kiev and focus their remaining on blowed up forces

to the fight around the dawn boss. Um, how are you doing, Romeo? Yeah, thanks for having me on UM. It's been it's been tough. We'll get into this a little later on, but obviously learning that um, a town not far from your own as undergone a genocide is not the easiest thing to live through. Yeah, and knowing that that is not even the worst of the atrocities that we're going to discover in the coming weeks and months is is put the put the mental strain. Let

me tell you, Yeah, I don't think. I think, thankfully, very few people understand the experience of learning that a genocide has occurred next door essentially, um. And Yeah, what you wanted to talk about specifically, obviously, when when we talk about the actor genocide, we're talking about the mass occur in Buka. Um An exact count Bucha, sorry, an exact death count is not available right now, but I think at least two civilians killed is the last number

I've gotten. Yeah, that's the last, like confirmed number. But obviously a lot of these people um have been tossed into mass graves, They're lying around in various residences. It's it's gonna it's gonna be a long time before um, yeah, able to to come to any kind of accurate count

of how many residents were killed. Yeah, and for a brief overview of just kind of like what has been seen in the executions there, we have civilians often hands tied behind their backs, so they were clearly restrained, executed after having been restrained. Some of them were just left

in the streets, some of them dumped into mass graves. UH. Satellite imagery from before the town was liberated by Ukrainian forces shows corpses lying in the street in the same position they were discovered in when the Ukrainian military moved in, which is as solid open source confirmation of the genocide as you're going to get with any kind of genocide. UM.

So that's that's the situation. Obviously, the usual crew of bad actors and UM Russia defenders have kind of slid into the most common allegation I'm seeing at least online as people saying it must have been as Off battalion that did it, even though they're four dred and forty miles away, um encircled by the Russian army. UM. Yeah. Yeah, but you know it's the it's the you're seeing like a lot of kind of bad open source responses to

with people being like, well, why would the bodies. If you look at the satellite imagery whire the body so evenly spaced, which is just like they're not. It's it's it's just like people people recognizing that if you like circle ship on a grainy image and and tweet about how it's suspicious, you'll provide enough plausible deniability for other people to to doubt a genocide. You know, it's it's

it's the same ship we saw with Syria. There was some disgusting denial where someone was claiming that they could see bodies being carted away um by the Ukrainians for you know, investigation and reburial, um, that the corpses were quote unquote moving. You can see you can see this guy's hand moved. Yeah, you're looking at dead bodies by there. And by the way, when you move dead bodies, they move like pieces of the shock. It's and you're driving over a street that has been churned over by tank

treads and you're you're transporting human corpses. Those corpses are gonna get jostled around. Yeah, it's uh, definitely. I don't know, you know, I don't want to be labor on this too much because I think we've talked a lot about how this this disanfoe works. I think what you came on specifically to talk about and what's really worth getting into in some detail is um, this manifesto that was published on r i A, which is a large Russian

government controlled uh news agency. Um, it's this. I don't know how. It's fascist manifest You can find it if you if you just google uh r i A publishes Russian fascist manifesto. The New Voice of Ukraine has a translation of it. Up um if you want to read this thing, but it's it's pretty pretty striking um and UM. The kind of focus of this is on justifying the Denazification campaign. Um. And it opens. One of the opening lines is when the theory that people are good the

government is bad no longer holds true. Admitting this fact is the basis of the Denazification party, all of its associated measures, and the fact itself is the subject matter of the policy at This came out out within a day or two of the discovering of the elements of genocide and and um, which is yeah, is pretty predominant. I I would say, like, pretty noteworthy. Yeah. So I had to translate this and let me tell you it took UM a pretty big, pretty big tone in my

sanity for a couple of days here. Um, And I'm gonna be honest as Ukrainian reading this, this was If you have ever I don't know if some of your listeners will may have like been at protests UM counter protests against UM fascist or far right demonstrators where they're chanting that they will murder you. This is exactly how I felt. This is this is nothing less than someone reaching through the screen and telling me that they want to kill me and everyone I love personally, UM, because

I am, because I want their independence. So there's this the kind of theme of this article. The term that they use most often is de nassification, and I think it really UM, it is incredibly vital to explain just what this denotification means because normally, like you and I, Robert, I think we both call ourselves anti fascists and we are pretty anti Nazi. Um that I think that's a that's a pretty mainstream position to do not like Nazis

and be anti Nazi. So the Russians used this term denotification to someone that has no context, no idea of what it refers to. Beyond the obvious meaning. Get rid of Nazis sounds like something even laudable. The problem is what the Russians mean by Nazis is not what you and I, or any other normal stay in rational human being would consider a Nazi. This article does not justify uh it's it's thesis that Ukrainians are Nazis at all.

In fact, um there are. There is a whole series of paragraphs um that states that Ukraine does not meet like any criteria of being Nazi. UM too. To quote a bit from this um, as horrible as it is, um it reads, there isn't, after all, a single important Nazi party, no fewer, no fully racist laws, only their curl tailed variants in the form of oppressions against the mere language. As a result, there is no opposition in

resistance to the regime. A particular feature of Nazified Ukraine is it's a morphosis eminent and ambivalentness, which allows for the masking of Nazism as a desire to move towards a quote unquote independent and quote unquote European, uh Western and pro American path of development, in reality towards degradation, while insisting that quote unquote Ukraine doesn't have any Nazism, only private and singular excesses. So the like itself, it's that Ukraine is not Nazi in any way that we

would recognize the term. Yeah, and it's it's basically saying that like it's Nazi, it's not. There's no fewer and there's no race like racialist laws. Um. But the thing that makes it a Nazi is want and closer union with Europe as opposed to Russia. Um. And of course it it notes like the so called laws against the Russian language, which I'm not aware of anything happening. I think what they're referring to is like attempts to encourage the Ukrainian language in Ukraine. Yea, there are no laws

or sanctions the Russian language in Ukraine. There never have been. And in fact, when I was there, one of the difficulties I had with my interpreter is he he only spoke Ukrainian. And so you can, obviously you can speak with people who speak Russian if you speak Ukrainian, but it's a little bit like confusing, and most people we were talking to spoke Shian natively. Like it's the the idea that it's somehow like been that the Russian language

has been somehow like attacked in the Ukraine. UM feels very silly as someone who like repeatedly encountered the Russian language while in Ukraine. Yeah, it's it's it's simply propaganda. Um. And the fact is that the Russians define Ukrainian Nazism not as having Nazi values or a Nazi party or anything that we would associate with Nazism, but in fact simply the simply that Ukraine wants to be independent of Russia. That in itself is proof positive to the Russians of

our Nazism and nothing else. So when when people hear this word denotification, what they don't mean getting rid of like far right elements in Ukraine. No, they mean being anti Russian or being were simply wanting to be separate from Russia. Is itself a far right position in Russia's eyes, and that is enough to call for our, um pretty

much complete extermination. Yeah. And you know, to kind of go into this article a little more, one of the things that I find interesting about it is this line here. The fact that the Ukrainian electorate shows Poroshenko's piece Porschenko is the president before Zelinski, and Zelinski's piece should not

be misled. Um, I think they probably meant misread. Maybe Ukrainians are quite satisfied with the shortest path to piece through blitzkrieg, which the last two Ukrainian presidents transparently hinted at when they were elected. I how I don't understand how anything Ukraine has done could be considered a blitzkrieg. Um since they never invaded Russian territory and in fact lost territory to Russia in two thousand fourteen. Um, that's

a weird definition of a blitzkrieg. I'm wondering if you can shed some light on what they might even in on that, or is it just just complete fallacy. What they mean is basically that Ukraine in so within Russian probably and you have to understand, we're talking about a completely separate universe, a different reality. So the way every every single aspect of what you and I know does does not apply, Like they don't live in our consensus whatsoever.

So what they mean is that Ukraine blitz creaged the elimination of Russian speakers and um, pro Russian culture and pro Russian sentiments in Ukraine during the year of my don Um in Russia's In Russia's reality, Ukraine carried out a genocide against these people in Ukraine, in everywhere except the puppet authorities of the Luhanskan Danetsk People's Republics. So basically,

Ukraine carried out this books creed. The reason Ukraine is so quote unquote Nazified is because in the this Russian alternative reality, UH, Ukraine genocide and all of the Russians, all the ethnic Russians, the writing speakers, and even with

pro Russian sentiments. And this is what they mean when they refer to this UH, this blitz creed that they that well um Ukraine went through they quickly killed everyone who was pro Us and now UH and now everyone else, everyone who has left is a Nazi um like the The latter part of this paragraph really makes that clear.

They say it was this method of quote unquote appeasement of internal anti fascists through total terror that was used in Odessa, hark evening for tost Mariable and other Russian cities. So not only are are these Ukrainian cities Russian, this quote unquote appeasement that they're referring to is a sarcastic way of referring to their um supposed genocide of these people,

of of Russian speakers, of um ethnic Russians and Ukraine. Again, that is not only untrue, it's also ludicrous because everyone in Ukraine is has some Russian ancestry, because it's a mixed country. Everyone is everything, Like the entire Eastern European region is not some ethnic enclave. It is in fact a melting pot um which so Union worked very hard

to change. One of the things I kept encountering in f Difka, which was is still under fire today and was under fire in two thousand fourteen, for an idea of like how long chunks of the country have been in Like now it's spread all over Ukraine, but parts of Ukraine have been under continuous artillery fire for nearly a decade. Um. But I kept encountering these old ladies who had grown up in the Soviet Union, and we're saying, like, um,

I don't understand why they're doing this. They they like, I've always considered myself Russian and and now this is happening, like I don't understand it. I don't understand it. It It doesn't make any sense. And in terms of like the denialism that we've been seeing lately. UM. One of the reasons I argued for because we had a debate in the UM in the editor's room at Envy when we were UM, when we were looking at this piece, we had a debate over where whether we're going to translate

end UM publish it. And I pushed really hard UM to do so because I think there is no greater way to push back these UM claims of genocide denial that we we are seeing popping up UM across various parts of UM of the Western laughter and the anti imperialist left or whatever you call it UM. And I think there's no better way to push back against the

arguments than to present the Russians own words to them. Yeah, like this is such an openly genocidal fascist piece UM using PU the pure logic of of quite like of just fascism. That is impossible I think to really UM say that this is like a fabrication or the like the Russians aren't like this, Well, they're telling you in

their own words, this is what they're like. Yeah, And I think the like putting focus on this isn't this wasn't written by you know, some um like far right extremists for some minor like online site that has like an audience of two thousand, like Russian Fascist whatever. Now, this was a major article published in one of the

Russian main media outlets by a respected political scientist within Russia. Yeah, and that's that's the thing that I think really needs to be gotten across is the degree to which I think there's a desire to believe that the Putin regime is like on its last legs, and that most people recognize how fucked up the political status quo is there, and that support for the regime is like pretty minimal as a result. Um. And I I'm not I'm not

seeing the evidence of that. And when I talked to I just we just did an interview with the Russian anarchist who his attitude was very much that like, Yeah, most people broadly by the propaganda. Um, it is not like the it's possible that's going to change over time, because again, the severe casualties Russia has taken have not really had a chance to totally filter out socially into Russia. I think people are still becoming aware of the scale of losses, and it's going to take some time for

that knowledge to to release circulate. UM. But I think this article represents how a very large chunk of the Russian populace are are seeing what's going on in Ukraine. UM. And that's problematic for a number of reasons. For one thing, with this kind of logic that we see in this article, there's not much you can't justify, right, Like, there's very little that uh if you if people believe what's being said in this article, there's very little you couldn't do.

There's very few weapons you couldn't deploy, right. That's one of the arguments this is making is that you have to exact soldiers who have been notified, um have to be wiped out completely. Um. There's there's no soldiers who have been notified. Anyone who has ever taken arms against Russia, and anyone who has ever supported anyone who has taken arms against Russia, which at the current moment is over of the Ukrainian population must and I quote from this

must be liquidated. Yeah, not not um. It makes an argument a little higher up that these people can't be re educated, so they can't even be sent to camps. Two goologs. UM. They can't be made to do forced labor. They must be liquidated, eliminated. Uh. And this is nothing less than simply saying, well, we are going to have

to kill the grand majority of Ukrainians. Yeah, And I don't I don't know what more like you can for the folks who are kind of on the because there's there's this tendency I think within the chunks of the left that are not they haven't lost their minds, they're not.

They don't buy the Russian propaganda. They do see what's happening in Ukraine is terrible, they see the war is terrible, but they still have this attitude of well, the best thing is to end it quickly, and like, you know, we should, we should push for some sort of negotiation. And first off, I'm saying, like, whatever the Ukraine as a country decides is acceptable to them in terms of peace. I'm not going to argue against one way or the

other because that's not my place. But um, I don't I don't see how you can negotiate with people who have this attitude towards you, um and and towards the existence of your people. Like I really don't see long term where there's kind of an option for peace for Ukraine with this kind of rhetoric existing in Russia outside of smashing the Russian military to the greatest extent possible. Yeah, I mean I feel the same way, and that is very terrifying thoughts. It's not crazy, like, yeah, because my

general attitude towards wars is that it's best when they're over. Yeah, exactly right. I have no I have no strong desire to see to like bomb Russian cities. Well, I mean, okay, that's that's that's a little bit of lie. But no one, no one, no one can blame someone living in Ukraine right now for feeling a bit of a desire for for vengeance, even though I don't think that's particularly likely to help matters. Yeah, probably not. And I generally don't want to, um see like a world war in Europe

or anything like that. But I I really when I rack my brains of what can be done, like how you can live with like the these people aren't you know, thousands of climbers away or on the other side of the continent. They're literally the neighboring state. Um And I I just I don't have any answers of how Ukraine is supposed to move forward while Russia remains in its current configuration. Like, I don't see a future, um, a coexistence of any kind that's possible when they are literal

calling for our extermination. I I think that's also kind of the question of how do we have There's this this phrase that you heard a lot, particularly kind of in the in the post World War two period of like the need for rules based international order, and the United States was as much apart as anyone of making sure that that was never anything more than a than

a friendly lie. Right. You had a couple of brief moments here and there where it was attempted to be imposed, um Yugoslavia or well, you know, Bosnia being kind of a clear example, but it was always you know, in between a bunch of illegal wars on behalf of a bunch of different states, and illegal fundings of of insurgent groups and all sorts of sketchy stuff and kind of culminated. And I think you can we keep going back to Syria, which is an important part of like what allowed what's

happening in Ukraine to happen. But the invasion of Iraq by the United States was another one. Right, this idea that like and and the things that like torture and stuff by US force. Is this this the fact? I mean, that's what the Russian diplomats. Yeah, that's what Russian diplomats always bring up in UM, in the U N and in other like international bodies. Whenever they're pressed on this question human rights, they always invariably pointed the US and say, well,

the US did this, this, and this and the rock. Um, how come the US gets to do whatever it wants with no pushback? And the implication being that Russia also believes it should be able to do whatever it wants with no pushback. And obviously like the fact that the United States committed war crimes does not mean that Russia

should get to commit war crimes. But from like a point of view of like, if we're looking at things from an international perspective, Yeah, if the United States is going to do ship like that, well other countries are going to do ship like that and see it as like well there there isn't like why why are we bound by an international order but not you and I. One of the things that's so frightening about the kind

of rhetoric coming out of Russia. Is that it it shows those kind of dreams that people had in the wake of World War Two, which again there was no like Golden Age after World War Two. The United States went right to regime change in Africa and Latin America, all sorts of fucked up ship. But it shows that, like any kind of international hope of something like that ever existing has has fallen apart. We are we are

if people want something like that. And I do believe that some sort of rules based international order, and I'm not talking about like you and global government. I'm talking about broad ranging international agreements that for example, you don't get to fire chemical weapons at civilians, you know, Like, um, I think that would be nice, a nice thing to exist. And I think part of what we're seeing here is that any chance of having that has kind of been

reset to zero. Um. Not that it was ever a reality, but I think the kind of I think the rhetoric around the fact that ever existed has completely dissolved now. Um. And maybe that's not like particularly bad, because it's bad for people to believe something exists when it doesn't, because that that international order never did really exist, But um, I I think what we're seeing here is kind of the final collapse of any belief that, uh, there's an

inner there are international standards of morality and behavior for states. Yeah, absolutely, I mean there's a lot of reasons why UM. Ukraine's president Lanski gets a lot of props from from a lot of people right now. But one of the things that has absolutely I personally rate as absolutely as the kids say based in recent days was the Lensky's addressed um in from the u N where he called basically cowards.

If they don't kick Russia out and they can't even enforce their main um, their main goal, which is peace, um, then they should dissolve. And honestly, I don't see any any issues with that argument. That seemed yeah, completely rational. What what is the point of this organization if it cannot even do something as simple or not simple, but if it cannot do something as straightforward as punish the perpetrators of John side, Yeah, what what exactly is the

point of it? That's exactly kind of where I am, which is like, why are we like right now we have this issue where like after Russian evidence of Russian genocide was uncovered, Russia is set to the the un the Human rights uh what you call it? Um that they are, Yeah, herman rights canceled that they're a permanent member of and like like basically filed a complaint against Ukraine for doing the genocide that they did. Um. And uh, you know there's talk about what we could dissolve and

reform the Council without Russia, we could kick it. Like there's there's options, I guess in a parliamentary sense, but broadly speaking, when one of the people sitting on that council has is in the process of carrying out a genocide which they are justifying in this way through their through their media organs, what is the fucking point of

having that? It's just like it was like the night of the invasion, I sat and I watched everything happening in the U n UM and my my thought the whole time, as like every all of these international representatives were like, you can't do this, right, you have to stop, you have to stop like try like begging for there to be some sort of peace in Russia. Just going

ahead and doing it. It was like you know what we what we saw, UM it not dissimilar to some of the ship that happened and then lead it to the Iraq War, where it was like, okay, well a lot of people agree this is fucked up. I guess that doesn't mean anything. Um, And it didn't mean anything. Uh, and uh that's why have it? Like why why pretend that it means anything? UM? I guess that's where I am. I mean, it's it's the same um to draw parallel to to US politics. It's it's the same as UM.

Like the Democratic Party during the Trump era saying, oh, Mr President, you can't do all of these obviously legal things you're doing. That's bad. You should stop. Like here's here investigations that prove that you're doing the bad things. Please stop, Mr President, with all violated the moluments clause, okay, Like, okay, are you gonna enforce it? Are enforce any of this? Like without enforcement, all of this condemnation is literally just noise.

It doesn't react. It doesn't result in anything in the material world that will have an effect in curtailing or risk ree this behavior now or in the future. And if you cannot do that, then what I like to call it, what you have the job program for yuppies? Yeah? Yes, in international rules based order, I when I was in Iraq during the war against Ices and hanging out primarily with not just Kurds, but like Kurds who were natives of mosle Um when we were kind of back in

her bill away from the front. The number one organization, the number one group that they complained about, was not the United States, nor was said isis. It was the United Nations, who were generally viewed to be a bunch of you like, they saw them the way like people see like trust fund kids. They were a bunch of rich assholes tooling around in land rovers, staying in nice hotels and burning money on fucking bullshit. Um. And and

that's I don't know. It's so the idea of the United Nations as what it was supposed to be, which is like, yeah, we should things like what the Nazis did shouldn't be allowed to get nearly as far as they did. And perhaps if all of the Nations were sitting together and saying, well, that's bad, right, we don't want people doing that, um, maybe some of these bad things would stop happening. Um. And what it has turned into is, yeah, it's a jobs program for fucking yuppies.

It's it's not that there aren't individual things within the U N I've certainly been to a lot of places, particularly refugee camps, that had infrastructure because of u n h c R, even though that's a very flawed organization. UM. I can't deny that a lot of people got access to basic survival gear that was necessary because of u n h c R UM United Nations Humanitarian Crisis Relief UM.

But overall it's just it's nothing, you know, there was There's a really I think my favorite piece of graffiti ever UM, which was spotted in UM Sarajevo during the Serbian encirclement and and shelley of that city. UM. And it's uh spray painting of you in in the style of the UN's logo, and then underneath it United Nothing UM.

And And that was the attitude of a lot of people in the city as they like watched the UN bicker over what was to be done about the fact that an army had surrounded a city full of civilians and was pounding the high rise apartment buildings with artillery and tank cannons all day long. Man, that sure sounds real familiar. It's a good thing that never happened again.

I don't know what that sounds, um, but I mean, yeah, it's it's anyway, Um, Romeo said anything else you wanted to get through today as we stare at this thing, this bad thing. Honestly, I just as much as normally I would encourage people to not pollute their brains with with thatcher stage prop in this case, I would recommend people read through um my translation at the New Voice.

If you don't trust me for whatever reason, you can pull up the original and Google translated, machine translate it yourself. It'll be a serviceable translation, and just read it for yourself. Um. Because I want to make it very clear that Russia is no longer simply like some hyper capitalist, kleptocratic oligarch state. It is literally fascist. It is using fascist rhetoric and fascist techniques to eliminate an ethnic group it considers to be inferior to its own um in order to take

its land and resources for itself. It is. There is no greater distillation of fascism on this planet right now than the Russian Federation. Yeah, they're doing and I really would like people to understand, especially if you consider yourself anti imperialist or anti fascist or anything. The Russian Federation is a fascist government, um, on the level of Nazi Germany. And it is attempting to uh to literally this article is called is called what shall we do with the Ukrainians? Yeah, Um,

the Ukrainian the Ukrainian question, you know. UM. And this article is proposing a solution to the Ukrainian question. So again UM. Mostly that's what I would like to leave your listeners, Robert with an understanding. UM. And again you don't have to trust me, you can go and read

this for yourself. UM. That the the greatest fascist threat on this planet right now is not the United States of America, as shocking as that may sound, UM, and as hard as that maybe to buy, it is the Russian Federation, and it is right now trying to genocide the country and the people that I belong to. Yeah. UM, So I don't know, Maybe make a note of that, folks, put that in here in your mental rolodex. Um. It's uh, I don't know. I I I hope you continue to

stay safe. I'm glad your area of Ukraine is at least less under under the gun than it was earlier in this war. UM. I'm glad broadly speaking that the Russian Federation has bitten off a hell of a lot more than they were able to chew um, and now are doing their chewing without nearly as many teeth. Um And yeah, I hope that process continues, and I hope the siege of Mariopol is lifted. Yeah, thanks a lot.

I really appreciate um letting letting me make an appearance, and um going through this with me, and uh yeah, I think we share the same hopes here. Yeah, all right, everybody, that's the episode. Go go away. That's a horrible way to begin. It could happen here. That's how we start a podcast. I'm Robert Evans podcast, Things falling apart, put them back together, all that good stuff. Co hosts here today Garrison Davis, our our our buddy, Chris and of

course the great Saint Andrew Andrews. Take it away. Good morning, and in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night. Speaking of the Truman Show, solid reference, well done, Thank you. I wanted to spend today's episode discussing a concept that has been brought up in the

work of James C. Scott and Christopher Ryan. That's the idea of human domestication, and before people start clicking off, I'm not going to go out and prim or anything, you know, It's just I think it's an interesting thing to think about. I think that Scott explores it in a very interesting way in chapter two of Against the Green and so relating as I guess to the Truman

Show because something, why did I bring it up? Truman lives in a suburban picket fans American dream dome ove, a world that's meant to keep him, you know, contined and content and ignorant about the fact that he's on a TV show. Truman has trapped in this wound that he kind of conformed too, but he kind of escape at least initially, and so you could tell that, you know, there's something wrong, and he probably felt that way for

a long time. It's only over the course of the movie that he develops a sufficient awareness of his condition to leave home and become a true man, Thank you very much. Alright, alright, good episode. Um, and humans like Truman have been stewards and cultivators of the natural environment for a long time, right, one of the only creatures

who do that. By the way, I see other people who see who kind of like adopt this assumption that he wants just like imposing our will on the environment that is otherwise unscathed by our presence and all that. And I mean, yeah, we do a lot of very very terrible stuff the environment, but a lot of our actions are also beneficial. And we have the only creatures to shape and sometimes harm and sometimes benefit the natural environment.

I mean beavers, elephants, prairie dogs, bees, and to mine, not to mention the networks of trees and other plants that all manipulate the environments to soothe them and there comfort and their survival. You know, but there's no nature as we know it, as we see it um that sort of untouched wild idea without the activities of humans.

You know, humans when planting seeds and tubers, shaping the evolution of many plants species, burning and desirable flora, weeding, our competition, pruning, thinning, trimming, transplanting, mulching, relocating, bark, ringing, compassing,

watering and frutilizing. And for animals, you know, we have hunted even selectively, you know, spared females or reproductive age, or hunted based on life cycles or fish selectively managed streams to promote spawning and shellfish beds, you know, transplanted the eggs and young of birds and fish, and even raised juveniles in some cases. That's kind of how we ended up domesticating a lot of animals. And I'm gonna

get into that. So through fire, through plow, through hunting, through a whole array of different activities, humans have domesticated whole environments, you know, well before you know the full the full society is based on, you know, fully domesticated

wheat and barley and goats and sheep. The spectrum of subsistence moods that we have utilized, whether we're hunting, foraging, pastoralism, or farming, have existed and complemented each other, you know, sort of harmony millennia and I mean those of you who have read Don't Have Everything. You kind of see that picture coming into shape as it progressed through the book.

But of course James C. Scott also discussed it years before in Against the Green so as he says, Enter the Domas, just as we transformed our landscapes, we transformed ourselves. The Domas was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and green stores, people and domestigated animals and hangers on like mice and rats and covids, all co evolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen. You know,

dogs and pigs and cats, all of them. Their entire evolution was shaped by their relation to this dom and humans are not the exception. Of course, there's some animals that easier to domesticate than others, which is why you don't see people commonly riding or hooding zebras and gazelle um.

They will make the best cattle or ride um and probably knock your brains out if you tried, So it's probably best to stick to the ones that we have sort of who evolved with, like you know, llamas and goats and sheep and pigs and over generations, you see the domesticated creatures, unlike their wild counterparts, develop a level

of submissiveness and a decreased awareness of their surroundings. Right, So that emotional dampening is basically a condition of life because when you're in that domas, you know, you're on the human supervision that instant reaction to predator and you know, pray they no longer the most powerful pressures because you're in this sort of cultivated environment, your physical protection and nutrition is more secure than it would be in a

more wild environment. So domesticated animal is less allude to its surroundings, less away of its surroundings than its cousins in the wild. UM and we could see as well, you know, with human sidentism, there's also been you know, a reduction mobility UM and and of course at consequences for health. To be very honest with you, I was actually kind of consumed about covering this and I was trying to figure out a way to cover this UM in a way that doesn't make me look like I'm

trying to like retire into the deeps of Amazonia or something. Yeah, but I just I find it interesting to think about her environments shape us. Yeah, absolutely, I mean you can think about these things without becoming a hermit and hiding in the woods. As as as attractive as an idea as that may, well, yeah for sure, for sure. I mean, like I have this like kind of conn in my head,

you know, like the whole idea of multi verses. I figured somewhere in the multiverses a version of myself we have retired into the forest and gone through this whole kind of like anime training arc and emerged as this like one punchman beast of a human. I would I would. I would also like to be that typeline. I think that would be very interesting. Like a train so hard that all my hair falls out. Able to snap trees with just a breath is like, yeah, the the the

the quintessential wild man. That's yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's also multiverse version of me where I'm president or something. It would be pretty interesting to see, Like I should be kind of cool. I just had an idea of like this, um this team of versions of oneself that team up to like fight the evil versions of the cells across the multi Boose. It's kind of like kind of the Conqueror, except I think in most fusions of

the multi Boose, he is evil. Yes, I have, I've definitely, I've definitely read that comic before, of the Good Ones Fight the Bad Ones. I mean, the Injustice comics video games are pretty pretty pretty big, pretty big staples of that genre. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course an Injustice it's different characters, whereas it will be interesting to see like a cast that's all just one person, just like the same dude. The exact same pluson, but they all

grew up in such different environments. Even though they share the exact same DNA, they're like different people. It could be an interesting commentary on society because we do live in one, after all, we do live in a society for better for worse. Yeah. But anyway, like I'm saying,

you know, environments shape us. We shape environments, and to me, we need to start shaping our environments again, so we could either shape up or chip out of existence as a species, right, um, you know, because the way the

trajectory were on is not sustainable. Um. So we can see of course, in this transition to the domas um, the sedentary, green growing sort of community that you know, in archaeological studies of the bones of the inhabitants, you could see like repetitive stress injuries shaping their bodies, you know, like the skeletal signatures of like grinding grain and you know, like ah, cutting and sewing and kneeling and bending and

moving in you know, very repetitive ways, you know. And of course with these concentrations of people we also see like epidemics and stuff and parasites starting to fester, not just within humans, or just not just within species, but

also like cross species pathogens and stuff. Yeah, you know, and so as we all on this kind of same arc, sharing this micro environment, sharing out germs and parasites, you end ups getting more and more brutal versions of like wild diseases, you know, because they basically go through the the iron gauntlet of you know, like that the disease

thunder doom. We're only one could come out as victorious, and so they battled out and became these more refined and more severe forms, which is why you see in Europe where they had this high population densities, say, the diseases that developed there when they were introduced to the coote and quote New World. You know, the really ravaged population that didn't really live on that level of density.

Not to say they didn't have cities, because they did their cities and villages and collaborations and such as people spanning across like large areas, but it wasn't organized in quite the same way. It wasn't generalizing quite fairly. But you know, it's two whole continents. Um. We also see that like nutritional stress starts to develop in the bones

and teeth of um more quote domiciled humans um. You see, like I and deficiency anemia in people whose diets were consisting increasingly of grains, and you know, as I said told you know, their diets became narrower, you know, less variety UM in both plants and proteins. And so that ended up leading to you know, like declining tooth size

and reduction in statue and skeletal austiness. And of course this change and like our physiology and dimorphism as a history such as like a lot food the fact in justest in Neolithic but sidentis um and crowding definitely left an immediate and legible mark on the archaeological record. I do find it interesting. Um. I read this book I think last year called Botany of Desire, and in it the guy um what's his name, And in it Michael Poland talks about all the plans we thought we were domestigating.

Domesticated us too, you know, because if you think about it, you know, you up in the garden on your hands and knees, day after day, sun and rain, reading and fertilizing and untangling and protecting and reshaping an environment. Justice suits you little to me to plants, you'll potato plant, and I mean the plant kind of hasn't made you know, um, they don't have to worry about the sort of things they would usually have to worry about outside of the domas you know, you are there to make sure that

their competitors are weeded out. You are there to make sure they get all the nutrients they need. You're there to make sure that do insects and stuff come and like ravage them, and you even help to fertilize them as well. And so you know, it's kind of like I want to say, uh, mutual relationship because as you know, these domesticated plants have continued long this path of domestication. A lot of them can no longer thrive without our help. And in the same way, you know, we can't just

not go on without them. You know, we also are dependent on a handful of domesticated cultivars. Like we can't just certainly switch and just be like, oh, we're not gonna grow wheat and corn and potatoes anymore. But I mean that's been the foundation of all diets for too

long now. That's what you know, most of our food production, I don't have percentages, I wouldn't say most or just see, a lot of our food production is like centered around that and so um, you know we can't just jump out to that, especially with the population increases, so you just have grown increasingly reliant on a few like grains and cereals, um and starches. So yeah, we do we need them more than they need said a lot of senses. Yeah, yeah,

exactly exactly, because I mean a lot of them. They do still have like wild counterparts that can always you know, take over. It's just a wild counterparts generally less appetizing than the ones who have gotten used to. I'm sure a lot of people have seen that picture of the different types of bananas out there, um, or you know, the different types of corn out there. Um. Of course there a lot of corn species that are edible because

you know they were cultivated in massive America. UM. I would like to try them, because the corn that I've grown up with gotten used too much of what it's called. But I don't like it. UM. I find the texture and taste of it to be kind of lack of a vetter would revolting. So I mean, like, and I've been this way for like a long long time, right, Like I growing up used to be refusing to eat like an entire plate of food because it had corn

in it. I didn't like one. And if people used to point out the irony and the fact that I would readily eat like corn pie, I would eat popcorn or would eat like corn bread. Yeah, but to me, it's it's not the same, you know, like corn on the cob and and stuff is it's not the same. So, like I've tried some some different types of corn. Like I've tried it was kind of like soft baby cornes that you get in like soups and stuff, and those

are delicious. You know. I wouldn't set your sights too much on those various corn varieties because one of the oldest ways of eating corn before we had really nice soft kernels, one of one of the oldest ways is we would we would take we would take the heart that the hard corn kernels, um pop them inside a it's not like a frying pan to make this tart expand then crush that up and mix it with like

a liquid to have a very disgusting, starchy gruel. And that was the way that we ate corn for a long time, and eventually that was eventually we were able to to like like tortillas and stuff, but for a long time it was just kind of corn. Yeah, this was this was amazing problem. This was a major problem during the Irish potato famine because in short, the potato crops failed um and so the British government imported a bunch of what they called Indian corn at the time,

which was corn grown in the United States UM. And this was even though Irish people were growing plenty of corn to feed themselves, but that corn was being exported UM and the Indian corn was seen that it was harder, so it was seen as of lower quality. So they had to develop a bunch of methods of grinding it down, and eventually the government was just like, hey, just soak it for like several days and then boil it in water for hours and add some milk or some grease

if you have it. And some of the problems that costs that, like the Irish people were starving to death, and because when you're starving to death, your your stomach is not as hardy as it is when you're not starving to death, and so the corn, even after being boiled old, would cut their stomachs and there is some deal lining and cause like in some cases people might die. Um, so yeah, corn, see I could I could add that to my reasons to despise corn, like anti Irish violence.

I'm gonna I will briefly rant about corn subsidies, because I don't think I've actually done that on this show yet. We could talk there's there, there's there's a there's a

thing about that'll be high traffic domass. That's like like in terms of domestication, in terms of human domestication, you know, and in terms of the the extent to which we're being shaped, you have to be I think, very careful to make sure that you're attributing agency to the thing that actually has agency, because there's there's a tendency to sort of attribute stuff too, you know. Okay, well, this

is just the way the technical process works. And because this is the way they hadical process works, here are the social structure is that inevitably results out of it. And that's true to some extent. But you know, for example, like if if we're talking about like whose domestic and whom we look at corn, it's like, well, yeah, because we grow and grow an enormous amount of corn, but it's not because of sort of like like that that's the reason we have so much corn is entirely political.

It's entirely about the fact that, like there's a corn lobby in the US that is enormously powerful, and because of the way the Senate works and because of the way sort of like the primaries work, you have to be pro corn. And this means that the American corn industry has billions and billions of dollars and subsidies that like this is this is like the only thing every

economist across the entire political specium agrees on. Like you will you will get like the Heritage Foundation agreeing with like Marxists who are agreeing with like like that the standard LiPo comes. Everyone agrees this is awful to free trade people agree with this, The anti free trade people agree with this. And it just sticks there because of, you know, because because because of a very sort of

a very contingent set of political processes. And I think that that's something that's important to keep in mind when you're thinking about stuff like domestication, which is that like, yes, on the one hand, that it is true that you are being shaped by the production process, but it's also true. For example, you know, if you go back to the women in the story, who you know, you can see in in their bones right that they've been sort of

like bending over like husking crops and stuff. Wells, like well that that it's true to some exact that that's that's because of the production process. But the production process works like that because of social reasons, like okay, like

why is it women doing this work? Right? Like there's there's always simultaneously sort of human and constructive social systems operating at the same time as you have these mechanical systems, and people love to attribute all of it to the mechanical systems in a way that loses you know it it naturalizes things that are bad and could actually be changed, and loses the capacity for sort of well I mean yeah, I mean our sort of culpability and both the fact

that it could be different than the fact that we

do it this way. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's still I think it's still important because to like think about like how reliant we still are on it as a resource in terms of like maze and like you know, corn syrup and like getting like glucose get like, like it's so we rely on it for so many facets beyond just eating like a corn on the cob, and like, yeah, it's kind of it's like it's like a it's like a it's like a figure right infinity loop here that we've kind of we've we've kind of like tied ourselves

into a knot. Um. Yeah, I want to say, like a lot of this stuff also has to do with the fact, like you know, part of the reason that there's we use corn syrup is they were like taxes on sugar and you could get you can ye around and has all there's all these like yeah, there's all these sort of feedback cycles of like we become dependent on something because of a social process, but now we're

dependent on the physical process. And it's yeah, I mean, so you can you can like tie this into the idea of like once you switched over to large scale agriculture, we need to kind of have somebody that that governs how it works, because now we're no longer reliant on smaller more like individualized farms or forest farming. We're instead reliant on a bigger you know, like a bigger stake in the land. So if that fails, we're all more

in trouble. Now, agriculture does not equal sieve. That's not that's not an actually sound um and the like like anthropology. Like if if you look at the anthropology, that's actually not a super stand argument. I think you can you can read the the the not of everything that makes

they make that point pretty clear. But still when you do have when you do have a large population relying on very few like um, very large crop like like like of only a small diversity of large crops, and there's a lot there's a lot, there's a lot more

stakes on it. So you're gonna you know, there's gonna be processes that are going to have like authority, authoritative hierarchical elements to help organize those crops so that they we don't get you know, famines, which of course if you look at Maos China you can see that worked

out very well. Yeah, and I should note for the record, when we're talking about the Irish potato fam and that a lot of people didn't die because the government imported corn, which they stopped doing after the first year of the famine because of travalie. Anyway, what we're doing, we'll be doing an episode on the potato famine. I didn't want to completely shift on the corn that was imported by

the government because it was critical. It's just also eating corn doesn't historically, as as was brought up earlier, eating corn historically does not mean what you you think about now. Yeah, well, and and you know what, we will also do things on on the Mao famines. And part of that also was that the centralization of agriculture was a like epocle disaster in a lot of ways that took like decades

to recover from, which, yeah, is a is a fun time. Yes, and when Chris says a fun time here, he is not the true But those new ideas who were wondering, thank you, thank you, I Drew for that clarification. I was, I was slightly I was slightly confused. Yes he is. He is slash G. He is not slash SR. Yeah. I mean it occurs to me that I'm not sure I've ever gone back into the records to see if anyone in my family died from the famines. I know people died later, I don't know if people died specifically

from that. Which is a good time. Again, but when Chris has a good time, what they actually made. Is not a good time. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, back to against the grain, back to against the green. So I was talking about, you know, this reliance on this one steep will whether it be corn or green or any cereal. Really it kind of brings to mind. Um. And also we're going to talk about the centralization of farming. I know, um, you know we've grown to be so reliant and these

single things. And not only that, but less people know about the processes that go into our food than ever before. Um. We see kind of like as time progresses, um. And as James Scott points out, and to gatherers, you know, they had this post of natural rhythms that they had to observe. You know, they had like the movement of hoods, to see some migrations of boods, you know, the resting and nesting places of fish, cycles of who will hold

the different fruits and nuts. Um. And if you in the Caribbean, you would know about things like you know, mango season and plum season and chant season, all these different seasons at different times of year. Um. And to keep track of all those plus several more because they had such diverse diets, I mean, the way to track the appearance of you know, different mushrooms, Um, the locations,

different types of game. You know, it's it's all these activities that require tool kits, writing, different techniques that have to be mastered. Have we understood have to be shared from generations generation. You know. They also in addition to that, you know, these forts, they had the ability to cultivate, you know, a lots of different stands of you know, cereal. Um,

they had the different tools. They hadn't have to make sickles and you know, um what you call those against sling shots and blue dots and all these different tools. Wort have used spears, arrows. And they also would have had to recognize the seasonality of sometimes different ecosystems. You know, they might have been crossing for white lands and forests

and savannahs and arid environments. And so as they understand they had to understand these, um, these rhythms, and they had to be generalists and opportunity that could take advantage of these different rhythms, all the different episodic bounties that nature may provide or rather that provide, but you know, bring their way that they would have to kind of fight. Four in some cases, but they have this sort of metronome. Right.

Farmers on the other hand, you know, as we sort of moved to that sort of farming dominant, sedentary sort of way of life, you know, you lost you can find to this one single food web. Right, your two routine has a particular tempo you s left abso observe you know, different seasonalities and different movements. But it's a bit more limited. You know, you have a handful of crops that you have to bring successfully to harvest every yale,

and I mean it's complex. A lot of things have to look out for, whether it be you know, diseases and pathogens and you know, different insects and and pests at me um come at to your crops. You know, you have to look out full of different things, but it's usually uh closer, less expansive range of activities, at

least in comparison to hunt gatherer. On the other hand, farming and the nuances of cereal grain farming um far more complex, require far more skill and much wider range of knowledges than you know working on an assembly line. You know, um, as believe Adam Smith points on wealthy nations, you know you have all these people on this assembly line making pins, but Alexis they took a ville asks what can be expected of a man who has spent

twenty years of his life putting heads on thins? You know, just sort of a restriction in terms of a contraction in terms of the range of knowledges and expertise is that you know one can be expected to take on UM. And so I guess that kind of links into my

whole idea of anti work. It's this idea of moving outside and beyond this kind of restriction to like one or two or a few rigorous activities that you expected to do for the rest of your life, and also opening people up to exploring a wider range of knowledges and expertises and experiences and practices that you know they can weave into their everyday life rather than you know,

just one minutely choreographed routine of dance steps. You know, there's a bit more expression, a bit more freedom in terms of you know, how we live, in terms of how we work, in terms of how we educate, in terms of how we build, UM, how we socialize UM. Being able to sort of much just marsh to one beat,

but sort of generating a company of music. Absolutely, absolutely, because I think no matter whether or not you own a share in the pinmaking factory, I think you're still gonna face alienation from your environment by just doing the same repetitive taskt hours a day. Like I don't. I don't think that's actually much better. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly,

And it requires transmission. And so for those who haven't seen, you know, I did a video on anti work sort of discussing it, so we could check that out when this comes out, I suppose. I just want to point out that right now we live in a society that um that is governed by institutions that often demand behavior

that conflicts with our innate capacities and predilections. You know, the millions of years of us living in these you know, cooperative social sharing environments, you know, where community, communal and individual um rights and and stuff and such were valued and respected. I mean to sort of draw back to the Truman Show analogy. It's almost as if, you know, we went from living in the world to living in a zoom of our own making. They were just being well,

I guess we're watching ourselves in this suit. Yeah, It's it's like the zoo keeper who lives inside the zoo and is also the attraction exactly. And and so I think that while obviously we can't switch back to like foraging, you know, that's not necessarily desirable. I do think that we need to we consider our approaches to you know, health and security and work and leisure and the way we relate to the natural world. You have to sort of change the story and changed how we organize. It's

going to take Charlione Ore of course. Um. Anyone who's organized can tell you that it is far from easy, um, and is replete with setback and failure. But I think we have a responsibility too remique this. It's not as cool to write the wrongs of yesterday to the end tomorrow, nows it? Whoa throwing a couple of air horns here, Dad, make sure they're pitched lower so that it's not horrible to listen to. No, never do that. Oh yeah, it

could happen here. The only podcast that is on right now in your ears where you can listen to us talk about things falling apart and occasionally more optimistic stuff. Garrison, is this one of the more optimistic stuff days? Not really, it's things, it's things falling apart, but in a slightly amusing way. Yeah, it's it's it's gonna be fine. Um, So have is any is any of y'all's familiar with

the Devious Licks? Vaguely? Yeah, so all of all of I'm sure all of the I'm sure all of the lick fans are gonna be really excited about today's episode because the first half will be we'll be talking about

all of the all of the licks. So for for those unfamiliar, the Devious Licks meme challenge thing started with this video by a kid who had stolen quote unquote stolen a bunch of like COVID masks from his school and then was showing off his his his harvest on TikTok played over you know, played over a song or something as as you do on the TikTok's. So they posted the video with this caption a month into school,

absolutely devious slick um I and lick. I think lick just means like stealing, like like you like stole something and like that's like that is a lick um. I was so sad when I first heard about this. I I heard I heard someone say devious licks and I was like, they're like, oh, the TikTok challenge. And I was like, oh, ship, people are like walking up to like like they're gonna like lick the other side of a bridge or something. And then it was not that

unfortunately unfortunately not. Yeah it is, it is. It is a real loss. Um. So this this video went very very viral on TikTok very very quickly, um, mostly among kids whom's like their in person school had just had just started. This was this thing in like late August early September of last year, uh, you know first with

you know. The initial video then subsequently inspired a bunch of copycat school related heists that then posted into TikTok's first People just stealing like small, mostly low stakes things, usually inside the bathrooms, you know, stuff like toilet paper rolls, paper tower rolls, soap from soap dispensers, light bulbs, you know, like floor tiles, just like just like small things. Um. But after a while the smoke fry wasn't was not enough anymore. People started to get more um brazen, more

more more devious, you might say, yeah they were. They moved on to like full on toilet heists. Um. And uh, you know electric hand dryers. They stole a teacher's entire desk, um, and a whole bathroom sink. So yeah, and eventually they kind of dropped all pretense of this being hoisting and just sort of just like destroying the bathrooms, um, not

even stealing things anymore. Yeah, Garrison, you and I have a friend who works at a school where this has been We got accused of like pushing disinformation when we talked about this on Worst Year. It's like, no, we know people who work at a school that has not had functional students happened, and it's it's very funny, as just just just to clarify my opinion on it, very funny, Yes, it's um, yes, they but yeah, just just it started. It started with stealing and then just Scott turned into

let's just destroy the batchards, which is pretty funny. Kids rock, Kids rock. So obviously schools, teachers and principles were scrambling. Um. Their confusion only upseeded uh by their being upset because they shouldn't have allowed children to be born into a

world where TikTok could exist. Really is on them, and you know, all of the upsetted nous by teachers and schools only like contributed to the meme with like kids posting their principles reactions to it, you know, like like people like like announcing over the intercom, like like new rules about how to prevent the bastard destruction of schools are having to like station staff members outside of bathrooms to like like check and hopefully like ward off any

possible destructive shenanigans. Um. It was it was this, It was it was this entire thing. Uh, And it got to the point where TikTok actually had to step into kind of curb this meme. They banned the hashtag devious slick, they took down any content that had anything to do with the trend, and this seemed to work. Um. After a few weeks, the meme kind of reached the end of its virility cycle. Teachers got to breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe there would be no more smashed bathrooms

or stolen desks fools um. But their calumn did not last long. By the end of September, there were rumors perculating around that devious Yeah, I got perculating percolating, Come on, I don't know. It was it was it was it was. It was said that the davious Licks may not have a wooden stick through its heart, and we may have only witnessed the first wave. With something much darker lurking

around the corner. On Facebook, various parent, teacher and law enforcement groups started circulating some per purported sorry started circulating some purported Shenanigan plans from the kids. On TikTok, there was this month by month calendar detailing two kids what sick pranks they should play on their school for the for the entire rest of the year. Uh and a few versions of this calendar were spread around, but they all shared the same basic overall structure and prank ideas,

just some like wording and phrasing changed. And the first upcoming challenge for the month of October was slap a teacher Sorry. This spread beyond Facebook and including to local news. Well. Now another TikTok challenge getting a lot of attention tonight, and it's a violent one, targeting teachers that if had a joint union superintendent. Asking parents now to tell their kids not to participate in this challenge. It encourages students

to actually slap their teachers. So although the smack of teacher line was what really got this thing to go viral on Facebook. Uh. The main screenshot at calendar that was being circulated. Uh, the actual October challenge was listed as a smack of staff member on the back side. That was that was the actual phrasing. Um, which is a little a little bizarre smack of staff member on the back side. Uh. November is kiss your friend's girlfriend

at school, so again we're weird. Phrasing. December is deck the halls and show your balls in school halls, which that one was probably written by a child. But then we get other stuff like January is jab of breath. Uh so more more sexual as salt jokes. Um, February we have a mess up school signs. March is make a mess in the courtyarder cafeteria. April this one's weird. April is grab some eggs, but eggs is in quotation marks and with a z at the end. Um. May

is ditch day, that's fine. June is flip off the front office, okay, who cares? And July is spraying April's fence. Wow graffiti scary. Um, So yeah, that is that is that is the calendar of challenges. Uh. Some of these seem more. I mean, we talked about this a couple of months ago, and my feeling was that this started as something real, just like yeah, and and this this ship was where it was. It became nonsense, which just like people sharing things that we're going to anger boomers

this and we will we will get into this. Um So. Yeah. As as news about the TikTok challenges spread on Facebook, media, orgs picked up on the trend and started showting out headlines like TikTok's shocking school challenges liste revealed and devious licks asks students via TikTok to smack a staff member. The nation's teachers are feeling burnt out. So great, great headlines there. Um So all of that sounds so obviously

very scary. Um if if if if teens around the country are all united in this, in this, in in this planned destruction of our entire civilization, that that you know, we could all be brought onto the brink of UH via teens destroying their schools. Was so that would be

that would be kind of fun. Um. But if you stop and think about the wording of that list for a second, you might notice some things that just seem off, like no Gen Z kids are saying, uh, smack a staff member on the backside, Like you are the first member of Generation Z to say backside, backside, And like the challenge for April is grab some eggs and eggs in quotation arcs with a Z at the end, because yeah, all of all of the cool kids today uses Z at the end of words to make Again, it's some

like fucking gen X or maybe elder millennial piece of ship trying to make people angry on the internet, and he's just like April, what goes with April? April eggs? Eggs? Yeah, I don't know something, but like all of the language feels like what what what someone would write if they were trying to imitate what a cool nineties kid would talk like on TV. Yeah, it's a lot of people trying to write John Hughes movies. Yeah, but so, but all all this was very vitral for like it was

the end of September. This was this was all massive and we we will don't worry. I will explain why we're talking about this now because this does this, this will circle back to actually current events. Um, I'm not not just talking about a September trend. This, this does, this does relate to stuff happening currently. Um but yeah, like suspicious language aside the idea that the youths are purposely plotting on the TikTok's to assault teachers andreek havoc

all year long. Uh. Frightened many an adult, especially those that work in the education sector, who who might have to face the possibility of a coordinated zoom or wrath. And you know the past two years had already been kind of a ship show for schools, with switching to remote learning then back to in person. There's all all debate, all the debate around masks and vaccinations and the risk of being inside around densely packed you know, groups of filthy,

germ written children. Um. Plus there's all these kids that got used to being home alone for so long learning half to like like having to learn now how to like socialize in the class environment. Um, all while dealing with the same mental trauma that we've all been dealing

with around around the plague. So so, just having faced the actual very real September devious licks, the problems of a year lowing TikTok with of destruction obviously frightened many parents and teachers, with educators on Facebook, you know, starting to take this list as a very real threat, with school districts, you know, issuing warnings and parents where you know, informed, like in mass about this very very real, very real threat.

Educators be aware. That's the warning from the California Teachers Association. The group sent this message to educators letting them know about a potential TikTok trend calling for students to slap a staff member. Seminole County Schools just sent this letter to principles warning them of TikTok's October challenge, saying, quote, in the latest TikTok trend, students are asked to calmly walk up to their teachers, slap them, and then run off,

making sure they capture the whole thing on camera. Okay, and we are back. So yeah, sure enough. News of teachers getting slapped began to circulate from local media into the nationals, far alongside headlines like TikTok inspired slap a teacher challenge assault reported at Braintrees East Middle School and Covington police say disabled teacher injured and suspected TikTok challenge

assaulted by student. Uh yeah, so there was there was there was a There was a few slapping incidents reported onto mainstream on on onto mainstream news, all all tied to the to the TikTok assaulted teacher thing um As, a student in Louisiana was arrested and faced felony charges, with police saying the assault was prompted by a quote prompted by a viral social media application known as TikTok s. We've done to notorious hacker again and I think circles

back application known as TikTok Um. So yeah, in October, there were definitely incidents of students, city teachers, um. But so that that in and of itself is not up

for debate. This there, yes, uh, but the actual scale of content spreading this list and the subsequent slapping videos on the TikTok platform is something to question because writing writing off of the September Davious like STrenD, almost all media, police, parents, educators were super quick to link this list and these few teachers whackings to the social media platform used by gen Z, the application known as TikTok Um. And so we we have we have all this talk on the

news and on Facebook. But the thing is, if you check TikTok or at like if if if, if you're actually on TikTok around this time, you wouldn't find any viral videos of teachers getting slapped um or anything about this TikTok list of challenges at all. It wasn't actually there, like, it wasn't actually on TikTok. This this wasn't actually a thing. Uh So, you know, then you know you might be thinking, well, maybe TikTok is doing what they did previously just to

shut down the original organic previously challenge. What if they're just doing this like preemptively to taking down any content related to the list, any like corresponding hashtags, etcetera, etcetera. But when journalists asked TikTok if this was the case, they denied this, saying that we have not seen anything of this nature on our app um. Then they said the first time they TikTok said, the first time they saw the list was of screenshots of it on other websites.

It was it was not it was not from TikTok. It wasn't actually there. Uh So, As as more and more news circulated and blame was continuing to be put on TikTok for propagating this list of challenges and you know, encouraging teacher assaults. Uh. The social media platform made a public statement addressing the issue, saying, quote, the rumored slap a teacher dare is an insult to educators everywhere. And while this is not a trend on TikTok, if at

any point it shows up, content will be removed. So as as much as you would search online on TikTok or you know wherever, you wouldn't find any of into this list actually being spread through TikTok at all. The only thing that you would find about this on TikTok is either kids reacting to news clips talking about this, or teachers on TikTok complain any of this as well.

It wasn't actually a trend. Uh. The list was being shared online a lot like it was very viral, but almost exclusively in Facebook groups for boomers or adults or teachers or police. But people seemed real scared of those groups. Boomers Garrison, okay, that no died. Um it's it's it's it's like a mental ethnicity now, um. People people seem really scared. You know, schools were scared. News media loves turning this list into like a looming, looming boogeyman. But

it wasn't. It wasn't kids actually spreading it or turning into a challenge, which leaves you to wonder where did this even come from and how did it actually get so viral. So multiple and multiple fully separate investigative kind of ordeals into the alleged TikTok list of challenges placed its original point of virility in the hands of of wait,

wait for it, wait for it, a police officer. So Officer David go Metz, a school resource cop who runs a popular Facebook page under the banner of quote the truth about youths, which is pretty cool. So Gobez works at a school in Idaho, Big shocker Um, and back in September, his Facebook page head over thirty three thousand followers. Now it has over um and he uses it as a sort of information hub for parents, educators, and concerned citizens to talk about the dangers of kids on the

Internet and all of that jazz um. You know. Gomez basically tries to be like a kind of like influencer for this whole like a concerned adult corner of the Internet. He writes, these long, long posts about like school life and digital safety, touching on many topics from like how your kids are secretly buying weed and vape pens or like how to tell if your kid is looking at pornographic materials, you know, stuff, stuff of this nature. Um like here, here's, here's here's a few posts from him

from from just from just a few days ago. Um. Lots of inappropriate behaviors pushed on Snapchat desensitized kids to reality. Nude photos, drugs, parties, crimes, et cetera. Kids can order almost any illegal drug and have it delivered to them on most any place on Snapchat if only so so he's like, he's like one of these types of guy, like you know you know who? Yeah, yeah, God, if we only lived in that world, I would be on

Snapchat so hard. I would be Uh. I love. I love the idea that Snapchat desensitizes kids to reality by telling them about parties and well, I mean any time I look, I have a profound negative mental health reaction whenever someone tells me about a party. So why wouldn't children so so? As the original Devious Licks challenge was dying down near the end of September, On September two, Officer Gomez posted this list of challenges to his thousands

of followers. In the next few days, the challenge list from his page circulated around the web, prompting many nervous school emails, terrified newscasts, and ending up actually making the list of challenges go completely viral. UM. When asked about the origin of the list, he said the first place that he had seen it is in a smaller private Facebook group for people working in drug and alcohol enforced

and education. He called it a drug recognition group. It's like a group of like cops and stuff, where like, I found this bag of leaves, what what is it? Can can I can I arrest this person? It's like it's it's it's it's it's these people who like, yeah, post random stuff to figure out what drugs are looking at. UM. So, he claims he first saw it in this Facebook group UM, but admitted that he was unsure if it had actually alternated from kids or not let let alone on TikTok.

He just posted it because he thought, you know, better safe than sorry. UM. But you know, it's it's funny. Because Officer Gomez's intention may just have been to spread the word about this because he thought it was an actual threat, But it turns out that he was just the one that gave it online life in the first place. So so yeah. But for like the actual origin of it, like like for it actually came up, as best as we can tell, um it seems to It seems to

have stem from a school in California. A principle claims that a student sent them this list I'll be I'll be at a slightly more a vulglar version more in line with how kids kind of talk now. The teacher

then uploaded it to a teacher Facebook group. It was then shared to this drug recognition group of Officer Gomez, and then Gomez or someone along this process rewrote it to add the weird like boomer Jen's like like like a nineties cool kid language, and then Gomez posted it and then that results in like the cool kid's attitude, and then he posted it goes viral. But there's no evidence that it was ever on TikTok like at all, like this we this No, I think it's not actually

on TikTok until the cop posts it. So the other funny thing is that all of these slapping incidents reported on the news, including the one that resulted in an arrest, also turns out to have nothing to do with the challenge list or TikTok. It was just a regular like interpersonal conflict between a student and a teacher, because like that happens, like that happens just like every once in a while like that. But it had nothing to do with TikTok. According to the school and according to the police,

we had an investigation. A substitute teacher choke slam one of the kids in my class, and we didn't even have a TikTok. We barely had the internet back then. It was a pretty good day at school. The principle had to come in and apologize. It was very fun. That's that sounds great. It was great. Yeah, so uh so yeah, like in the end, we're gonna the full arc of this right starts in September with the actual real devious licks that that that that did had, that

did exist. It was on TikTok, but it was just you know, stealing stuff from bathrooms, uh it, and and and then eventually kind of just like making bathrooms into a mess. Um So, but this this this takes off, it's it goes, it goes, it goes pretty pretty viral. Then TikTok starts to crack down on it, and after like three to four weeks the memes eyes it's it's you know, people, people are bored. There's too much enforcement.

It's not fun. It's not fun anymore. And then we have this calendar list of challenges, right, but possibly trying to spin off of like the Dvius licks thing and glaman from the previous trend, or it was perhaps just written as like, uh, like a non serious joke. But the thing is that like it's not actually found on TikTok. Right, So even if this list was originally made by a kid, uh, it's it was not known by other kids, uh on

a national level, either online or in person. But where it does get a visibility is through adults, and not on TikTok, but on Facebook, initially being passed around by teachers and school administrators and other adults run on the Facebook platform and really accelerating from there, right, we have we have we we have Gomez and then it's all over Facebook, it's all over Instagram, it's all over news articles, TV stations and eventually does go eventually does get to TikTok,

but not with kids talking about it instead of with teachers talking about it. But at this point, the story of the TikTok slap a teacher challenge was just too like enticing, right. It had like enough of a grain of truth by piggybacking off of the real devious licks, but it was able to grow into this entire false reality because there were enough ingredients for a good story. And that's where you like perceptions of truth really flourishing

is good stories. Um. And then we found out a few weeks ago, Um, there was there was this article by Taylor Lawrence Uh in the Washington Post that there actually may have been some kind of behind the scenes factory making this trend to go as viral as it did. Um. And we will we will get into that after after this, after the sad break. So have fun listening to these ads and then we will talk about the behind the seams of making these these false online trends. Hello, we

are back. So it turns out lots of lots of there's lots of lots of facury happening, uh, to to make, to make, to make, to make narratives, to make stories, right, it's a all you know, turns out that not everything you read on the internet is true. Uh, pretty pretty

shocking revelation here. So it came out a few weeks ago that um, Facebook was actually paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a national campaign to turn the public opinion uh negatively towards TikTok.

The campaign was it was placing it include placing like op eds and letters, two editors of like, you know, major major news outlets, promoting of false false stories about about like the growth of alleged TikTok trends that actually had started on Facebook, and then you know, trying to push reporters and politicians into helping them, you know, damage the perception of TikTok on like a nationwide level. Eventually. You know, Facebook was obviously funding this because you know,

TikTok is their biggest competitor at the moment. So it's a it's actually pretty interesting. It's so it's it's it's it's with this Republican digital uh consulting firm called Targeted Victory. So this was the thing that Facebook was actually paying for to to to prompt these false stories. Uh. Targeted

Victory has been routinely working for Facebook for over the years. Um, you know, they were they were involved in the sixteen congressional hearings UM around Facebook doing stuff like with like election medal e stuff, you know, all the stuff related to like Cambridge Analytica. They were, they were had a small part to play in that kind of thing as well.

So they also received a lot of Republican funding. Um, they got a thing over over two d and thirty seven million dollars according to data compiled by open Secrets, which is ah, it's uh that biggest biggest payments came from a national GOP congressional committee uh in America First Action, which is of a super pac ran by pro Trump folks.

So that this is this is the group that was that was doing a lot of the behind the scenes stuff to specifically tai TikTok onto onto onto making it look bad, to specifically make Facebook look good and push

people more onto Facebook. When this article first dropped, I know, Robert you said that, hey, this is a interesting, interesting little thing that it's probably worth talking about in terms of how it affects politics and social media and like the intersection thereof yeah, maybe a little bit, so a lot of a lot of the news dropped about this because of employees with the firm were tasked to undermine TikTok through nationwide media and while being campaign and then

lots of their internal emails for this effort were shared with Washington Post. So this is this is how we kind of fed out about this more recently, their task was to quote get the message out that well, meta Facebook is the current punching bag. TikTok is the real threat, especially as a fourign non app that is number one and sharing data that young teens are using, according to

the director of the firm. So this is that's the type of stuff they're talking about behind the scenes in terms of how they're trying to push push stuff to get people stopped talking about how bad Facebook is. Because this is also right after all of like the Facebook Bright part stuff was happening in terms of how much Facebook pushes extremist content um to you know, boomers and

stuff um. And then the other thing that they were doing was specifically trying to craft messaging to get bills past and try to get attorneys general to to focus on to focus on this too, launch investigations into how

like TikTok harms children and teens. Um and that protactually was successful, so you can you can look at the emails talking about this plan, and then soon after there was actually a coalition of a state attorney general to launch a probe into whether TikTok is harmful to children and teens, So you can actually look at the behind the scenes stuff that they were trying to do and then see how fast they were successful in doing this stuff.

And all. This also comes at the point that Facebook was for the first time actually losing users, and as soon as TikTok was launched and got so so much more popular and also took down a whole bunch of users from from Instagram, which was also owned by Facebook obviously, so there's there's a Facebook. Researchers said that teens were

spending about three times it's more time on TikTok than Instagram. Um. And this is this is all part of the same kind of overall effort to both like do stuff to influence elections in politics, but also just do stuff to make kids think Facebook is cool, which good good luck with that one. Um. Then in terms of like the

devious licks stuff. Uh. In in other emails that that were that that were leaked, Uh, we got we got a targetedctory people urging their partners to push false stories to look or you know, stories that are sometimes tied in truth but amplifying them, um, tying TikTok to various like dangerous, dangerous trends, you know, in terms of like save the children rhetoric. Right, this idea that faced that that TikTok is harmful to the well being of kids.

One of the emails has has a line here saying that the dream would be to get stories with headlines like from dances to danger how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids. So that's the type of headlines they're like trying to push. Yeah, it's one of the things that they do is trying to

amplify negative TikTok coverage. They have the schoogle document titled bad TikTok Clips, which was shared internally and included links to dubious news stories sending TikTok as the original point of various like dangerous teen trends. Um. And they were they were trying to like take these stories and push them out through other means, you know, so on Facebook and stuff. Right to take any instance of this and boost it like inorganically. Right. It's people's jobs to use

social media to affect public opinion. So one trend that targeted Victory specifically was enhancing was the devious licks challenge UH, including the initial one to vandalize the school property UM.

Through the bad TikTok Clips document, the firm was pushing stories about the devious les challenge across in in local media across Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Washington d C. I do find it interesting that they have a lot of these ones closer to Washington, d C. To specifically affect politicians, like they're doing stuff to amplify stuff to

convince politicians specifically to start making political changes. UM. And this actually led Senator Richard Bluementhal, a Democrat from Connecticut, to write a letter in September calling on TikTok executives to testify in front of US Senate Committee UM, saying that the app has been repeatedly misused and abused to promote behavior and actions that encourage harmful and destructive acts.

So yeah, like it worked. Like they're specifically targeting the type of news that politicians will see in areas that politicians live to get them to start trying to affect change around social media, specifically the social media that kids use and amplifying the social media that boomers use. Facebook, which is already is like a sesspool of spreading conservative disinformation. That's like the entire that's the entire bit that they're trying to do here. Um. And so they were working

on the original September challenge. Also in October, Targeted Victory was working to spread the rumors of the slap a Teacher TikTok challenge, which as we know, was not actually a TikTok challenge. Um, but they were doing Uh. They were also contributing to inflating this this um this trend, which is funny because obviously they were being paid by Facebook. Uh, they were being paid by the gop um and you know,

Facebook is the place where this actually started. Uh yeah, so you know, but like again with every if if you can tie anything to like a little bit of truth, it makes whatever story you're trying to make so much more impactful. Right, The firm was was careful to use both like genuine concerns and then just amplify them or exaggerate them into like unfounded anxieties, uh to to you know, get people to start questioning the safety of these of

these applications. So it's a it's a it's actually it's actually it's like a it's a pretty clever setup that they have. They have going here, and they've been really successful.

Like it's it's like, you know, the the the October devious lex trend uh with like this with slap teacher was extremely extremely, extremely successful in terms of how they affect what is seen as truth and how and how how much news story and how much news coverage was just kind of unconsciously and just mindlessly repeating the stuff

that they've heard. The other funny thing that that target Targeted Victory does is, uh, they they help write letters that are from concerned parents quote unquote that gets sent out to newspapers to be published in their like letters to the editors. Yeah, so they specifically try to write op eds targeting TikTok and then place them around the country, especially in key congressional districts. UM On March twelve, a letter to the editor that Targeted Victory officials helped write

ran in the in the Denver post Um. The letter said it was from a concerned new parent and it claimed that TikTok was harmful to children's mental health, raising concerns over it's like, you know, data privacy, and that many people suspect that China is deliberately collecting behavioral data on our kids. They're trying to hack our children's brains. The letter also issued support for Colorado Attorney General Phil Wiser wise weight Weezers. I'm gonna say Weezer yep, yep, yep, yep,

Phil Weezers, famed founder of the band Weezer. They were Yeah, But the letter issued support for him, uh, including his choice to join a coalition of of attorney general investigating TikTok's impact on American youths. So yeah. There was a very similar letter UH, drafted by Targeted Victory again that ran in in other other kind of smaller local papers throughout the country trying to link negative news stories about

TikTok that Targeted Victory had specifically sought to amplify. Some of the letters that were getting circulated were signed by like members at the Democratic Party. They were, they were, they were signed by various politicians in terms of like, no, trying to create this thing that looks grassroots to the spread out and be like, hey, we have these concerns. Do you want to do you endorse our concerns so then they can then make it seem way more legit

than just like a concerned parent. Uh it it's pretty good. Um. You know an email sent a few weeks ago, uh, targeted Victory asked their teams to be prepared to share the opense that you're working on right now. Uh, Colorado and Iowa, can you talk? Can you talk about the TikTok opeds? You got? You? You you both you, you both got. So they're specifically targeting districts where the Senate um Senate like challenges are actually more of a more

more of a toss up. So specifically trying to do this whole TikTok is dangerous to the kids thing in these in these places. It's ah, yeah, it's a it's it's it's pretty it's pretty fun. Because none of these letters, none of these op eds, if you read them, there's no indication that Facebook is funding them. There's no indication that the GOP is funding them. Um right, it's that is the it is the whole like astro AstroTurf thing, right, that is, that is the entire idea is that they

look they look totally legit. So anyway, that was that was my, my, my, Those those are right notes in terms of the what the dv slick and the SABA teacher thing actually was, and then how there was all this behind the scenes fac are you trying to inflate it and how it's specifically getting inflated to tie into like local elections that are happening in the mid terms. Um, yeah, what what thoughts? What thoughts do y'all have on on these on these fun, fun little disinformation rackets they have

they have going on. We might do like another full episode this at some point. But there's there's an interesting angle here where Facebook was sort of taking the China angle on this a lot, and it's like, yeah, it comes with less than this, but yeah you in this.

They they founded this, uh, they founded this advocacy group called I think it's American Edge, where they have all these things that are like, uh that was like them in a bunch of weapons manufacturers like found in this lobbying group, and they keep saying things like, oh, China is threatening our competitive edge, so we can't do antitrust legislation. If we do anti trust legislation, the Russia China alliance

will like defeat the US. And so it's interesting. That's like there don't know if Facebook seems to have like well okay, so so they have this problem where like the metaverse stuff just flops and they're like, oh no, we need to make money. And it's like, well, okay, so you know there's the the the two ways to make money, or you create something that people want to use, and that's hard. That's hard. They did that once and then they accidentally turned it into an engine that breaks

democracy and accelerates ethnic cleansings. So you don't want them. You don't want them trying to make another new thing. Yeah. Well, the other thing Target Victory was doing was specifically amplifying pro Facebook content. Yeah, but like how Facebook is supporting local black owned businesses and like all all all that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah, so you know, you you have that on the one hand, it's like, yeah, they're

not they're not doing anything else. And the second way they you that you do this stuff by strategic sabotage of your competition. And this is what Facebook is doing right now is that they've launched basically full on in strategic sabotage angle. They've launched into this sort of like preemptive defense stuff about anti trust being like a, hey, look at China. If we uh, yeah, if we don't have tech monopolies doing genocides, China will have tech monopolies

doing genocides. And it's like that's the other funny thing is that whenever Zuckerberg gets accused of trying to create monopolies around social media, he's always like, but TikTok exists, But no, It's it's great because like they they like specifically say this. They their quote is, we need to get the message out that while Facebook is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a

foreign owned app like that. That is that is the actual quote that looks like, yeah, they're specifically doing that exact thing. Yeah, they're the winning ars. That's n phobia angle initially because you can watch them sort of pushing all of the like the political buttons of the last few years. It's like they're they're they're they're they're basically replaying like the Trump like the Trump right stuff, right,

so they figure out that rhetoric works. So they're doing Okay, they're doing this sort of like like they're doing sort of anti China's and a phobia. They're doing save the children, they're doing like they're doing all of this like your kids are unsafe stuff and yeah, it's it's working great for them, So this is this is fun. Uh yeah, yeah, no, that's they're they're they're definitely trying yep. I mean, and

the specific things that targeted Victory tries to do. The place that's funded by both Facebook and the GOP is that they specialize in Uh. Well, they they say they do.

They do crisis practice and corporate affairs offerings uh for for their clients growing need for the issues of management and and executive positioning, saying that it wants to focus on efforts to move towards authentic storytelling with a hyper local approach, so that that is that's all the words they used to talk about how they do grassroots disinformation authentic storytelling with a hyperlocal roach. Yeah, faking letters from parents to local news sites who are hungry for content

in order to cause a moral panic about TikTok. Yeah, I mean, on average, people trust their local news way more than they trust their national news. So because they should not, because it's all read by like two companies. Yeah uh so yeah, I mean, but like they have, they have a lot of money. They have, they have a lot of money. It's there, it's they're they're they're one of the biggest recipients of Republican campaigns spending now,

they're receiving money from Facebook. They happen for a while, but they're spending. They're spending more money now. Uh yeah, And I think this is a it's really important to be skeptical of online trends because turns out online trends can be pretty astroturfed. I mean, we can look right now at all of the all of like the Groomer stuff. Right.

Online trends do not need to be organic. Uh they're like I always say, the next time you feel like you see something on Facebook or Twitter and you feel like you want to share it because it's outrageous, instead just go set off a bomb at a power substation. Okay, just simple ethical behavior that will that that won't play

into these people's hands. And in terms of all of the stuff that like with Facebook trying to specifically demonize kids, demonized TikTok um to influence elections, Like, if you're interested in what trends kids are actually into, just just like ask them, like you could talk to them like with like words and like with your mouth and use your like human ears. Uh, because it turns out they will

actually explain it. Because yeah, and if just if anyone asked a kid about this list of challenges in like October, they would say, no, that's that's not a thing. That's that's not that seems something like adults are really interested in. But nope, that's not actually a thing. Just assume they're basically the same that kids always are, but with different

like technology and ship. Like when I was a kid and our senior class, a bunch of kids conspired to crash a car into the little pond that was on campus because it was destructive and funny. Kids like to do destructive, funny things. Kids don't like to do whatever. April egg bullshit or that's all all of the challenges that are just like sexual assaults. You're like, that's actually not something that a lot of kids are into. It turns out, like think back to being in like like

tenth grade, and would you have giggled at this? If so, it's probably a thing some kids have done. Like it's as simple as that. So anyway, with this is the episode we wanted to do specifically on how just like social media disinformation is trying to affect elections, leading to

leading to leading into the mid terms. And then tomorrow we will discuss more midterm related stuff with all of this kind of stuff with with all of this like disafmation stuff, TikTok and Facebook stuff all kind of like floating in the back of our minds um as we move on to talking about the midterms and why and how they might you know, affect politics going forward, and you know how they might affect you know, stuff a run, climate change, stuff around different you know, mini collapses, all

of that, all that good stuff. So but I think as it looks like we have we have reached the time that we need to do today, So I believe that doesn't for us this week if you want to if you want to do the social media is because hey, after we talked about social media for like fifty minutes. Yeah, let's let's let's let's plug our social media. Uh Twitter and Instagram, Instagram and by Facebook at a cool zone media and happened here pod. Um Yeah anyway, Uh, listen

to the kids and don't believe trends. Bye. What it's the horror of dead generations hanging off the backs of my modern everyone society? What do we? What are we doing that? I started a podcast? Are we do your job? Robert? I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go take five. This is your favorite electoralism podcast. It could happen here. Um, the podcast that says, just vote about it? Come on? You know you voted? Can you vote a little harder? You know if if I could vote right right now, I would.

That is how dedicated I am. I know that's everyone says that about you, Garrison, that you're always ready to vote. Oh, we have, we have, we have, we have. We have an update on the TikTok thing, um which we just this this just dropped, um TikTok. Uh. There is now a new I need a new technock account launched to boost Biden with young voters. Um. It already has one

hundred fans. Um. This This isn't a joke. This is actually because that sounds like like a b had like a like a Jimmy fallon Saturday Night Live Weekend Update. This is actually completely real. We have we have a government funded, Biden provided TikTok account as lunched, and it has a hundred followers. Guys, it would be funny if like, you know, like the Gravel Institute. But good, they just

steered it in really radical directions. So it did start like tweeting about Zerzon and the importance of destroying time. The Biden TikTok account embraces ecological sabotage. I would I would take, I would take I would take government money if they paid me to do that, I'll say it. I'll take government money for a lot of reasons. If they paid me to make an unhinged TikTok account about how the scientists of the police, then yes, I would. I would do that. That's a fun joke for four

people listening to this podcast. We're gonna talk about the mid terms. Yeah, we're account Look, the official stance of the mostly anarchists who make this podcast voting is dumb, but uh, it's also bad when certain things happen electorally, like a bunch of insane fascists winning elected office. U. Two things can be true, especially when people are really set on killing transpeople right now, Yeah, that's real problematic hashtag problematic things are gonna have It could happen as

a result of the mid terms. I think the by by far predominant media narrative is that the Democrats are heading for a shellacking. Um now, is that actually going to happen? The short answer is, nobody knows, because polling we should all be we should all be accepting at this point that polling is not good at its job generally.

So heads up, No one's really sure. Uh, there are certainly Number one, if this is a normal mid term election after a presidential election, Democrat rats should lose a not insubstantial amount of seats because that's just usually what happens. The only time it didn't was the midterm election right after nine eleven, and everyone was out of their minds at that point, so you can't really factor that one into the averages, and nothing like nine eleven has really happened.

Like the war in Ukraine is a is a whole thing, but it's also not I'm not I'm saying any evidence that it's causing any kind of like political realignment or affecting support for Joe Biden and any meaning everyone's still pretty economy based in terms of what they're what they claimed to be their biggest factors for voting. The war in Ukraine is a huge deal obviously. Um, We've talked about it a lot on on our shows. But also it's it's foreigners, and Americans don't care about foreigners when

it comes to voting. So look, that's just a reality. As a guy who's repeatedly trying to get Americans to care about things happening in other countries, we we don't. UM. So in the absence of anything that has caused that could cause some sort of massive political realignment, the most likely thing historically is that the Democrats are gonna lose control of one, maybe both houses of Congress UM and

a modest amount of seats UM. So if that happens, if it's kind of within historical dimensions, UM, then that won't be all that weird at all. Um. If it's a huge blowout, then that's a big deal. And if the Democrats don't lose or kind of barely lose ground. Then those would both be big deals for different reasons. Um and again, no one knows what's going to happen, and no one on this podcast is going to make a prediction. We're just going to kind of try to

talk about what what is sort of evident right now. Well, you're not allowed to legally make predictions, Robert, I'm I'm not allowed to legally make tradictions, although I will make one prediction, which is that at some point, at some point, we're gonna see Joe Biden's whole ass, and odds if we see the ass, odds that you can see some balls.

That is. I've gone back and forth with my polling experts on this, and we're we're firm on that fifty coin flip, coin flip for the coin purse, toss up, toss up, toss up for the tossing of his salad, which might be why we see his butt. Anyway, here's here first on ticket happen here. It could it could happen here, That could happen here. It's not impossible. Someone has a picture of Joe Biden's butt, right It's out there.

So yeah, So for every min terms of the House has h has has all their seats go up for every two years. Uh, the Senate gets gets gets one third of seats up because they serve six year terms

because we like having fun here. Um. Yeah, so it's it's gonna be it's it's gonna be interesting both because yeah, I mean obvious obviously it's mostly that definitely Republicans will will win back a decent number of seats inside the inside the House and probably um make make the divide they're less extreme, um, if not actually just like take

the House. Also, the Senate's obviously more more of a more of a toss up because of we're only on the Senate at the moment um, so that is definitely way more of a thing that they can totally cease. But even if they do, season that's not actually changing much because they're not we're not we're not able to pass anything through the Senate anyway. Uh they are, So it doesn't matter because yeah, I mean, like it would only really suck if m Republicans get extreme control both

the House and the Senate. Um, but I think that's kind of unlikely in terms of getting like total control,

and then we still have executives. So it is. Part of why it doesn't seem super likely is that, like in the last UM a couple of sets in particularly mid terms, the Democrats lost basically all of their most vulnerable seats, and so a lot of the seats that are coming up are less vulnerable and so and that does mean that, like, if the Democrats lose a bunch more than again, it's a much more significant sign that we're seeing uh, pretty predicted potentially like pretty fashy political

realignment in the United States. It's it again, there's not like evidence that makes me think that's particularly likely. Um, that's just what it would mean if that were to happen.

And I think probably the number one thing I would expect if there were some sort of gigantic apocle shift where the Republicans wind up with like sixty percent of the seats in Congress or something like that, UM, is they're going to try to Impeachy like they would have to write if they in control of both how like they would have to try and impeach Biden because of

the rhetoric. It's the bit, you know, which again I don't I'm not saying I don't think that is particularly likely based on what we're seeing, but like if that happens, they're going to do that at yeah, I mean it's not even a prediction. That's just like, well they've been talking about it because like because like on average, the president's party has lost about thirty thirty House seats during

mid terms over the course of the last century. UM, and Republicans only need to gain five seats to win the Chamber. But now now gaining five seats is not the same as winning five seats obviously, Yes, like the party needs to needs at least two eighteen seats to win control of the House. So Republicans are actually they

have to flip. They have to they have to do the flipping um, and they have to flip actually a good number of them because again the seats that they do, the seats that that Democrats currently have are all like pretty firmly democrat UM. So there's there is there is less toss ups. And the other thing that's kind of interesting is that the redistricting process that has been going on in the past bit has seemed to kind of favor,

uh favor democrats. So interesting, if you want to have a good time, go go look at what go look at what the Democrats did to the Illinois map. It is hilarious between like there is a district that is like it starts in the like in the north in the south side of the south side of Chicago, and the district ends like literally like like nine tenths of the way down the state, like a tiny town in

seven Illinois. And it's like, it's really funny because like like eighty percent of what was going on there was like Solenodonois like elected a Nazi to the house. Amocrats were like, how how can we well if funny thing is also said they didn't even do the optimal jerrymander because their cowards and fools. But yeah, like this, you know, okay,

like the maps are always constantly jerrymandered. And part of the reason the Democrats have been just like getting smashed for the last decade is that when they lost a dozen ten election, they lost control of like the gerrymandering, and so that like fucked them for like a decade and they've gotten to a session that is slightly better

for them. But you know, again, like the important thing to actually take away here is it like basically every like every every election that happens in the US on like for the house is rigged like before it starts like at least partially because jay mandering is just legal and you could do it. I mean, it's amazing to me that they're they're connecting these little rural areas to the south side of Chicago because and I'm sure you're aware of this, Christopher, it's the baddest part of town.

And and if you go there, you just better be aware of a man named Lee Roy Brown. Now you know Lee Roy Brown. It stood about six ft four um. All those downtown ladies called him tree top Lever. All the men just called him, sir, you know, bad badly Roy Brown, baddest man in the whole, baddest man in the whole. Damn. This is important electoral stuff, Sophie. He could win. He's badder than old King Kong and meaner

than a junkyard dog. So all of so, um, about sixty one house races are seen to be viewed as competitive out of four hundred thirty five um. But out of those amazing democracy yeah so and and and out of those sixty one, only about sixteen are actually kind of viewed as toss ups. At the moment, with seven of those seats currently helped by Republicans, eight of them being helped with Democrats, and one new seat in the

in the state of Colorado. UM. So yeah, like it does seem like in order for Republicans to really get more controlled the House, they have to actually flip more traditionally democratic uh territories, So like they're kind of they have to do most of that the actual like work here, um to actually get those things flipped. But again, I don't I don't trust democrats ability to be able to hold on to what they have anyway, So who knows. Yeah,

I mean, it's it's one of those things. There's a lot of talk about like how incompetent the Democrats are, And there's a pretty interesting article that dropped, oh gosh, where was it about how millennial support for Democrats is, like it its lowest point in recent memory. Under why yea millennial here, it's because they don't do anything. It's because they say they're going to do a number of

very popular things and then do not do them. Again, the people who gerrymanded all these districts, and as a general rule, just the data we have on how midterms seem to go all factors in the fact that that young people don't vote. You know, um, so the fact that the Democrats are worse than normal with youth may not actually have a huge impact on the mid terms at this state, especially again there's not as many at least based on the polling we have, which is again imperfect,

doesn't seem like there's a tremendous amount of super competitive districts. No, and it does seem to be the group of people that will be the most interesting deciding factor right now is boomer women seems to be the one are actually they're going. I don't like that boomers are allowed to vote. Get him out of there. Get him out of there. On on that note, should we take a quick little addie break. You know who else doesn't want you to vote?

It's it's the Washington State Patrol, the oligarchs who support this podcast. Uh, we're back and we're again talking about the elections in the South side of Chicago. And there's a lot of reasons to wonder how this is going to go. And I just want to point out that Leroy Brown keeps a thirty two guns in his pocket for fun and a razoring issue, which should be factored in when you're thinking about, you know, how things might go down on election day. Thank you, thank you for that,

for that critical analysis from Robert Evans. Um. Yeah really really on the cusp of there, thank you. Yeah, it's uh, we are we are, We are lucky to have such an academic mind on the pod. I say that a lot, but I'm glad someone else's finally, Uh, should we talk uh Senate? Senate seats that are potentially going to flip? Even the Garrison doesn't want to. Yeah. I read the article and I didn't. I found it kind of boring and I didn't find them to say anything super interesting. Um,

but yes we can. So one of the one of the ones we got here is in Pennsylvania. Is that the one that's open? It is the one that is open? Um? So yeah, this is uh the seat the scene. The scene opened up when the Republican Senator Pat too Many good for him for having a funny name, announced that he would not be announced, that he would not be having he would not be running for re election. So so yeah, there's the lieutenant governor is running in the

Democratic primary and raising a good good deal of money. Um, that's cool. Yeah, it's a it's a yeah, it's a Trump has a Trump has a has has has stepped in, uh to fight between between the two the two uh, the two candidates which we have David David McCormick, which is a former hedge fund manager, and his Republican opposer is a friend of the pod dcor Memas. Oh yeah, I love that. I love that. I have to care about a fight between doctor Oz and a hedge fund manager. Awesome.

And do you want to guess who Trump endorsed between the hedge fund manister and the and the good doctor. It's got to be doctor Oz. Yes, of course it is. They let Doctor Oz speak at Sea Pack. Yeah, so immediate, which is funny because the hedge fund guy specifically went to Marlago to to like help get Trump's support, um, and then Trump endorsed doctor was he was he like? Was he like, hey, like, what's your TV ratings? I don't know if you you don't have a t like

you were not? Oh no, no, no. Trump is not a dumb man. He's just a very focused one. And the only thing he is focused on is the same thing that Dr Oz is good at. Yes, getting um so yeah, it's. It's seemed to be kind of a toss up between these two Republican candidates. Both both are both are pretty wealthy, both are spending millions and millions and millions of dollars um and it's it's it is.

It is expected to be the most expensive race in the whole country because of the hedge fund guy, because of Dr Oz and then then the one Democrat, Lieutenant Governor John fetterman Um, who seems to who is racing a lot of money for on on on the the from the Democratic establishment. So yeah, um, that's that's the metal head, right. I don't know, I don't know. I want to talk about Ohio for a second, because there's been some stuff out of there. That is it is

because it is also open. Yeah, so it's open. And the guy he's running on the Democratic side is Tim Ryan, who's like a weirdo and like it's sort of been a like on the right, we need Democratic party for a long time. But like so Tim Brian's doing this like it's being called economic populism. Oh where Okay, Yeah, so let's let's cut out of the Yeah, so so let's let's let's let's let's let's read some Ryan quotes. China.

It's definitely China. One word China. It's us versus China. This, this is this is his His campaign basically is lyrical, genius. What are you talking about? I mean, I gotta say it seems very hinged. For one, Yeah, super hinged. It's an interesting thing because it's like, Okay, so he's trying to do the like we're gonna we're gonna do that kind of populism. We're talking about how China is like

taking jobs away from the rest belt. It's also funny because like he's against Medicare for all like so like he's like he's like not like he's not actually like like like on the left inning seriously, but you know, and there's there's this whole thing like he's he's running as a NAFTA, which is interesting because like you know, if in terms of populism, like Obama did run on that, like Obama ran on get on on being against NAFTA. This is part of how we just like absolutely claw birds,

uh John McCain. But like you know, the Democrats ever will literally never do anything about that. But like yeah, you know, but there's there's the there's this whole sort of factor here where Bryan's big thing as he's anti China, and he's anti China. He he tried to be the House speaker multiple times. Yeah, and and there's just you know, the thing that's interesting about it is is so he's getting a lot of support for the like he looks so Asian American groups in Ohio, We're like, hey, what

the funk are you doing? And he was just like, yeah, I don't care um and just kept doing it. And and it's interesting because there's this sort of like he's getting a lot of support from like Republicans for this, Like you, there's there's been a lot of columnis from sort of Republican columnists who are like, wow, I'm pro free trade, but also like this whole opposing China thing

is good. And I think it's there is an interesting dynamic going on here where you have this like that this is a very very old tradition in American American I guess you could call it American labor of there being this kind of like, well, okay, so the solution twelve Recono problems is that China's taking our jobs away. I mean, like you can see this like literally in

the eight hundreds, this was happening. And you know what happened in the eight hundred was that they ethnically cleansed the entire West Coast and like most of the the sun Bolt States, yeah south like that. Yeah, you know a lot of the stats mining going on this. Yeah, this is they just like ethnically cleansed all of the Asian people out. And you know, this is I think worrying in a lot of ways. It's the Democrats so far haven't really gone as hard on this as they

were going in. But this kind of stuff gets really really bad really quickly. And you know, okay, like the worst the anti Asian violence has been largely colonivirus stuff. But like if you go back to the eighties when this exact same thing was happening with Japan, that got

really really bad very quickly. People got murdered, um, a lot of psychocrip and books were written with bots that are very racist now in retrospective, and you know, and I think I think it's important to remind people that, like, you know, like, yeah, they're like there there were a lot of jobs that got moved from the US to China and that happened because corporations were trying to find a where we're where we're you know, like this this

is the thing that corporations did not like the Chinese people. And the other part of the reason it happened was that the Chinese government fucking murdered, like literally, like just machine guns a bunch of trade unionists outside of Tieneman and you know that, like that that had the effectors like shattering whatever was sort of left of the Chinese

work organization of Chinese working class. And so the factory worker in China who is making like if they're lucky, maybe like sixteen dollars a year is not your enemy, despite what fucking Tim Bryan and all these assholes are are trying to tell you. It's that's it's just it's just it's it's not true. And the reason they're doing this is because they're trying to get you to not look at the people who are actually stealing all your money. So he also seems pretty pro cop. Yeah, he sucks. Oh,

the Democrats are all pro cop. Now we have completely turned turned around on that one. They were only anti cop for eleven minutes in when everyone was was scared that things were going to go Minneapolis in a lot more places. The in that eleven minutes was when Nancy Polis that eleven minutes ruled though not that part of it, but a lot of parts of that part. That part when when when the CEO of Target had to come out and be like, it's cool if people, Yeah, that

was maybe the peak. You know well, and I will say this if if you if you want that back, you can do it again. You just have to you just have to burn a bunch of police stations and riot and lute thing. So, yeah, someone that that's a thing that could happen and if it were could happen here has I hope that Georgia doesn't flip? Yeah, let's

let's talk about let's talk about let's talk about Georgia. Um, talk about Georgia because yeah, we got Raphael Uh that's what Yeah, is it running for his first full term after winning the special election last year. Um, so yeah, he's obviously trying to trying to, like since since Biden barely barely won Georgia in the in the last election, trying to kind of ride off of that that energy.

But Biden's approval like everywhere nationally, but in Georgia, his approval is taken quite the nose dive um with like only like saying they approve of Biden's performance on the job, um. And then on the on the Republican side, we got the guy leading the race is a formal former NFL running back Herschel Walker. Um. So he he has he has, he has Trump's endorsement. Um. So he's trying to trying

to run off that. But he's he's pretty new, so it's kind of he's on, he's more, he's more, he's it's it's unclear because he doesn't have a lot of political background, so who knows what's gonna what's gonna, what's gonna happen there? Um Well, And it's also one of the reasons why we're not one is that while as has been shown, people in his district aren't big fans of Biden, they just really were tired of Donald Trump.

So it is kind of a question is to like, well, what is the degree to which trump endorsement's gotta matter a ton in this because the fact that they're now don't like Biden very much does not necessarily mean they're less exhausted at the thought of a Trump type guy coming in again, So another and another rise. It's so been is actually North Carolina? Um, which is which which

is intriguing. Um. So that's huh why, Well, North Carolina has always had a pretty a reasonably prominent left like it gets kind of like loved in by Democrats, is like a right wing state, but it's not. I mean, there's certainly strong elements of that. There's a lot going on in North Carolina. Yeah, I mean the person that they're they're trying to run is uh is uh Cherry Beastley, which is the first black woman to serve as a

chief justice on the state Supreme Court. Um, so she will probably when the primary Republicans are still flip flopping between their Trump back to candidate UM and the former governor Pat McCrary. UM. So it's that's that's still still kind of retiring, is it is it? Uh? Yeah, Richard Burr is retiring Republican Richard. So yeah, it seems like Republicans don't really think Cherry Viasley is going to be much of a threat. Um. And again, Biden's appropriating is

also nose diving at around UM. So it's it's the Democrats they can just hopefully, hopefully wish that there's because of the vote is so split on the on the Republican side, if they can stoke stoke, stoke divisions there and just go spy. But they don't seem to be doing much much of work in North Carolina actually in terms of trying to like a gain ground. So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's because again, like the primary is going to be in May, so it's there's there's enough time to get

support behind one Republican candidate. So let's see. I don't I think that's all of the ones that are open races. But we also got more more stuff like in like a Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Florida. But I oh yeah, flow ride at one two in the Eurovision Awards representing San Marino. Back in it's Rubio seat that it is Rubio. Yes, that would be so fun. I would like I do enjoy the thought of bad things happening tomorrow. That would

be so fun. Yeah. Currently Rubio is leading in the polls, but it's not it's not uh, it isn't above it is so it is, it's it's pretty it's still it's it's close, but I'm not gonna get let down by Florida. I refuse. You can't never expect good things from Florida or Texas. Yeah that is. That is the general rule. And never count out North Carolina. Yeah sure that is as a Texan, do count out Texas. Look if it happens, if and it's good, that that will be lovely, but

don't don't hinge your mental health on it. Well, um, do you know what you should your mental health on the products and services that support this podcast? That is right, Robert, You guys a little bit too literal to our major advertiser, Garrison. That's why I didn't. I also hope Rubio gets kicked. Sophie, Oh, welcome back. We're talking about the thing I was just gonna make threats of violence against an last sitting representative. But that is one of our favorite things, isn't It

is one of our favorite things. That's why we're launching a new podcast, the Actionable Threats against Congressman Cast. Do we know anything about the person who is running against Rubio? Do they have a chance? Do they have a chance? That is a good question to so probably not. But because you can't rely on Florida. As we discussed Vale

Vowel Val Dennings is waging the fight against against Rubio. Um, and uh, it looks like the funding is actually pretty pretty pretty alert in terms of both having around twenty million dollars in funding. Um. But there is a lot of other democratic challengers. Uh, there's but I mean the Devils is the one that's going to do it, but there's a shocking amount of others. Like there's still like other millions of dollars getting spent on other challengers which

are not going to succeed. Again, great, great, great way to do democracy. Yeah, we really have it locked down. Um. It is cool that Santa Claus is running for governor of Alaska and see they have a first past the post system. I think he's running for governor. Yeah, Santa Claus is. Yeah, there's a guy who's the mayor of the North Pole, which is a town in Alaska, who legally changed his name to Santa Claus. That's funny. You know, he's a big Bernie supporter. That is that. Okay, that's

pretty rad. It is pretty too, because I know Santa Claus has been doing more more acting recently. So yes, I mean I can't wait to see the new crash More film. I'm pretty excited about as well. For Santa. Vote for done Leavy, vote for Santa. Yeah. So what do we? What do we do? We? The other thing I wanted to mention is that, um, is that in terms of like, you know, the other recurring bit we've been having is uh, people thinking that elections aren't actually real. Um,

a fun bit. So we have only scented Republicans are confident that that the midterms will be conducted fairly and accurately. Um. So that's less than half that you know, what that is is a recipe for stability. That's less than half compared to seventies six percent of Democrats who think they will be fair and accurate. Um. Yeah. But also it's

not going to be a problem. Also, Republicans are more sure that everyone who wants to vote will be able to They just don't think the votes will be counted verse, but they think everyone who has access to voting is can do it easily, when as Democrats say that voting access is more of an issue that actually could impact elections. Um, which is you know, if you actually look at stuff

is actually true? Um? Yes, yeah, it's we have we have one of the like, the fact that our elections are ran by volunteers is like one of the most

absolutely badshit things on earth. It's it's low key and existential threat to everybody listening to this yeeah, And I mean it's and you know, and this is one of the things I would say about sort of electoralisms, like every every single you probably won't hear about it that much this year because it's not a presidential election, but every single time there's there's a there's a natural presidential election, there's a bunch of stories about how a bunch of

people waited in lines for fucking seven hours because there weren't enough stations, they didn't set them up in the right places, and nothing ever will literally will ever be done about this. This has been like I remember, I remember stories about this when I was like ten, and it is. It will never change, nothing will ever be done about It's every single time that happens, people say that they're going to do stuff about it, and they don't. And yet so that's that's fun. The elections are kind

of pre rigged already. Further fun kind of staddy things to help with to help with trying to you know, get the temperature of the room. So about half of white voters say that they would vote for a Republican candidate say that they will vote Democrat. Uh, I know, I talked I mentioned this briefly of women aged fifteen up say that the economy is not working well. Um, and that's going to strongly impact their their electoral choices.

And this is what a lot of people are kind of looking towards in terms of indications of how they're going to vote and how results could be in the end. Is like you know, older, older women who are Gen X and UM and UM and boomer women are seemed to be kind of the people to go after at the moment um. So, yeah, say that they don't like the economy and it's not working well. That's up from seventy sorry, that's up from in twenty nine in teen um, and it's most of it's around like day most of

it's around like day to day budgets. Uh. So that's that's that's good. That's uh. That's an interesting thing in terms of how how propaganda can be shifted around that we know we've even seen that around like the war in Ukraine with like with like gas prices and stuff. We have in terms of back to how kind of looking at looking at people of what race is generally turning towards what what thing? Yeah, so over half say they do Republicans. About a third say they vote for

Democrats if if if they are white. On contrast, we got like a larger majority of black voters saying that they prefer the Democratic candidates seven percent for Republican. Asian voters prefer Democrat over Republican uh from about like a two to one ratio, which is a seven. And Hispanic voters also favored Democrats at about Republicans have about twenty

eight percent UM. And the other interesting and other interesting stat pulled from a Pure research center is that seventy percent of Republicans agree that party control of of of the House and Senate is an important factor, but only six of Democrats believe that, So that means of Democrats don't think that the House and Senate's important um which is a little wacky, which is also a down from seven points because uh in in the same in this under the same question, sixty seven percent of of of

Democrats said that they valued House, House and Senate control. So that is so that that is down by almost ten percent. Meanwhile, the Republican percentage points of that question have has turned it upwards, which makes sense because of you know, whoever's affecting, who's ever in the executive branch. Well, we'll say, oh yeah, it's less important for the House and Senate, right, so Trump say it's it's less important

now to them, it's more import rent, you know. And I also think with the Democrats, there's an angle of this which is like, okay, so we gave them power for two years and they did kind of nothing. Yeah, like it feels like nothing like they Actually that's that's not true. They gave they gave police more money. They gave they gave the Pentagon lots of lots of more money, the most about of money ever, largest budget ever, largest

ice budget. With global warming, we're gonna need more ice, y'all, Like, come on, come on, uh huh. I'm sure that was it. That was the joke. That's the joke. Temperature joke. Yes, I understand. It's also a climate refugee joke though. Oh double double meanings, so we call it double on tombre. That's how you pronounced the French garrison. But yeah, it's only se of a female voters age have decided who

they're going to vote for in November. Um, so that is wacky that with so many good choices, how could they not know? So yeah, they're really they're really really trying to pull from there. And where do women over fifty spend a lot of time on? Typically face? Facebook dot com? Um? So yeah, Facebook is Facebook and the GOP are really trying to do a lot of stuff

to influence elections right now. As we detailed in our last episode around around Facebook and the GOP funding all of the anti TikTok stuff and funding all the pro Facebook stuff. They really want people to be on Facebook because it turns out that's how they spread their propaganda the best. Um. And yeah, specifically with women age over fifty, that's like the prime demographic for Facebook. So neat Uh yeah, anyway,

that is uh. That is a lot of the uh, a lot of the election notes that I had because again I am as I keep up with all of the electoralisms. Basically every day I wake up, every morning, I go to I go to that one polling website. Um, and I fine, you text the word vote every single morning, always always here's what's weird, always using a different phone, tell us, tell us the truth. But that it's not

that they're a pholster. It's that one day Nate Silver woke up with a splitting headache and Garrison leapt fully formed out of a hole in the side of his skull. But yeah, I mean, in terms of all of the

anti trans stuff that it's actually worth focusing on. Obviously, the ices really really depressing in terms of by the getting an office and giving Ice millions and millions of more dollars, You're like, great, um, but you know, it seems like if more Democrats are in office right now, it seems like that will make life slightly easier for

trans people. So that is it's, you know, it's the thing you always have to accept with our democracy, which is that it's foolish to say that the elections don't matter, because they do, because, for example, price caps on insulin or not passing more laws to make life a nightmare

for trans people really does matter. But certain horrible things like the continued dominance of extractive industries that are pushing us towards climate disaster or uh, the expansion of the car Serile state and militarized policing in many different forms, in the militarization of the border. That's gonna keep right on trucking no matter who's in charge, and the elections don't matter for that so far. Maybe someday they will, but I'd have to see it happen, you know, I do.

It's I do. Got good news for you, though, is that the White House is launching a new TikTok campaign and it already has a hundred followers. After like, what, why don't you? Why don't you refresh that TikTok air so, and let's see how much they've gained since we started this episode. I want to see what they're up to, because I'm curious if I've gained more followers on Twitter on TikTok a period of time. I'm checking, I'm checking, I'm checking. All right, here we go, I'm going to

do it. Um. The the account is called building Back Together, so already pretty catchy. Um. How do they keep making these phrases worse? I know they cannot. Oh, they are actually up since so the the last news article I looked at, they had ninety four followers now they're up to a thousand and eight hundred. Okay, so no, thanks for going better. I think I think we got this. I think we got it. This is a good side anyway.

I mean, there's a good there's an article about the uh, the millennial whisper or something like, oh wait no, sorry, it's DIM's turned to gen Z whisperer to show her up support. An article from a day ago from Real Clear Politics. Um, that's that's that's that's fun. You know what. You know what Biden has to do. Biden has to get Mr Beast on the job and start making those and then I think, I think, I think, I think

we'll have this one in the bag. Um yeah, I mean, Garrison, just based on my knowledge of you, the main thing that Joseph Biden could do to prop up gen Z support is to just start air dropping hormones uh to whoever wants them. I think air dropped hormones and air dropped money. It would be the way to go, because could you could appeal to the right by giving them h g H. There's a lot of options here, Like, it doesn't have to be just one. Everybody likes some

kind of hormone. You know, hormones for all hormones for all steroids and estrogen for everybody. Well yeah, I mean like in terms of things that that Biden could do to actually gains to actually get stuff to do, get to like get enough support, is that he can start doing executive orders that actually do are that actually are helpful. Um, he could, we could, we could. They can really start

rallying around the marijuana legalization bill. Um, Like they're like, hey, if you vote for Democrats in the Senate, we can pass this thing. But we need to have more Democrats in the side. Like they could do that, they could campaign, they could actually do things, but they're not that he could. He could. He could order the d e A to reschedule cannabis. That is a thing that the president can do. Um. He can do more stimulus checks, He can do a

whole bunch of stuff. He could forgive a bunch of student loan that just honestly, making tangible progress on federal decriminalization of marijuana and forgiving a bunch of student debt uh in the time left before the midterms would be enough that it would be a lot harder for people to say Joe Biden didn't do anything. There is ways to counter the arguments. People are going to make the show, and by god, some of them are easy. Pot is

a real, real free, free space. I most of my family are like super right wing and absolutely none of them support marijuana being illegal anymore. Most of them now smoke pot. Like It's like, you can make this happen, Joe. Unfortunately, the presidents of the United States is the man who wrote who wrote Planned Colombia, so oh just parts of it? Come on. He claimed responsibility for all of it. He did, he shure it really did. Know we're talking about it's

super funny. Um, so not about all the deaths, because a lot of people died. But so that is our that's our little rundown on the terms as it stands at this moment. There still is primaries happening. Obviously that's gonna keep going. But yeah, if if if if, if, if the Democrats actually want to stay in office, which I'm not sure if they actually do, but but if they do, they could actually just start doing things, um,

things that are not hard. That would that would that would that would actually you know, if you want young people to vote for you, maybe you could give them drugs, whether that be estrogen or weed and that right, I'm excited. Joe Biden's famous saying vote out with your scrots out do the thing, the thing, it's could happen here a podcast. Nope, it's it's it's start trying to happen, isn't it. They're really it's doing its best. You know, they're really going

for us. What is you know that that thing by Yates, some great beasts slouching to be born, Time of Monsters, all that good stuff. That's what's going on here with it could happen here? It's the podcast. Garrison. Hi, how are we doing? So? We're talking about the still ongoing and probably well seemingly never ending. Hopefully it'll end eventually.

Uh the hold up on that one here? The escalating more on trans people of yeah, and uh, we've we've brought on some some people who have been working to organize against the the kind of wave of bills and rhetoric and legislation targeting trans healthcare, targeting the just existence of trans people in general. We're talking to cat and Ada Roads from Tear it Up, a new newer organization, uh, dedicated to specifically specifically fighting against these these new bills. Hello,

hey friends, Yes, thank you so much. Um, we've been, We've we've been. We've been talking for a bit because of how these bills have been also a thing for a bit. And uh we initially met up for trans day visibility. Uh I tagged a longing to go to a protest in Idaho. Um, and then we we got on on trans day visibility. We we we we cooked up, cooked up plans to sit down and have this chat. So it is. It is a little bit late, but hey, it's it doesn't Maybe we can have more than one day.

Maybe that's a good idea. Well, we're not getting remembrance too, so yeah, well hopefully we can have more than two days and one of them not be just sad. Um. Yeah, probably too, because you know they're still attacking. Oh did they not? Did they not stop? No? No, our visibility did not, in fact scare them back into their cave. All right, this is why we need a trans day of one free murder. I love this plan. YEA currently a problems. Well that's a that's a great note to h.

I mean, look, Caitlin Jinner already used hers. Jesus Christ, it's going to be my contribution for the Wow this is this is gonna really really convince all of the all of the on the edge libs who are somehow listening to this. They stumble upon it trying to find a recipe. They thought it was tear like a scale and they were like, I was trying to work my baking scale. What if I coul measure of lentils and

then arm all your local trans women. I would like to make a very very trans cooking video in the style of David Lynch's keen my video of her. But that is that is a deep cut for all of the lynch heads out there, as Lynch fans called themselves. Anyway, we're talking about all of all of all the bills talking about um, all of the rhetoric that we've seen been specifically increasing the past, like the past week as of recording broad past, you know, maybe a week or

two as of time of release. For they're like, they're they're really going for it for trying to get people to do like just violence against people who don't look like how they want them to look. And that's that's basically what they're trying to do. And we we're gonna We're not talking on and we're talking a variety of topics between we're gonna talk. We're gonna unfortunately discuss like

the groomer thing. We'll talk about all the bills that haven't haven't passed in different ways that we can kind of stand up against this this this thing that's really

trying to take take a hold. UM. I guess I would like to start by discussing the origin of of of Tear it Up and like, how you know what what happened to I mean, obviously we know what happened to cause this distuct to have to cause this thing to be prompted, but yeah, what was what was like the specific process of being like, okay, it's it's all these things are happening. Let's actually get a group of people together to organize this thing across the country. Yeah,

I guess I can talk about that. So Tear it Up actually grew pretty directly out of a previous group called TROT and Texas, which is the trans Resistance of Texas, which started last year during their legislative session UM, and then really started to grow during the special sessions in response to this constant line of attack and realizing that the techniques and the strategy is being employed by a lot of the existing more liberal leaning groups were really

focused on like back room conversations and deals and using like procedure to defeat things instead of actually like mobilizing people against anti trans state violence. UM and uh. From there we started to adopt things like louder, more obnoxious protests, a lot of stickering, firing posters. Um. And then this year, I so I originally started TROT, but I moved across the country and I was like, wow, ship, things are

just getting worse everywhere. Um and I have a lot of friends all over the country from living in Portland and New York and Texas and Colorado and now the Midwest, and reached out to sort of pull together a bunch of humans that I knew would be willing to fight back and to try and experiment with methods that we can pick up from our predecessors, like act up and bring more attention and mobilize people more towards taking direct action instead of relying on these back room lobbing groups

I don't think really give a funk about trans people, but love to use attacks on us to raise money. Yeah, yeah, I mean there's a number of number of examples we could point to do, but I think we could be more productive and just talk about you guys instead of yeah. So yeah, I really the transnational thing is really interesting point how it's like, I know, for for trans Day visibility, there was there was an organized kind of die ins and protests all across the country to happen at the

same day. Obviously, Um, there was one in Idaho, which I was lucky enough to join in on. Um. And yeah, but there was there was, there was a lot of them, and I guess, yeah, it's on on the lead up

to like as as all of these bills are escalating. Um. And then there was the whole there was the whole um wave of organizing against trans people for the so called like the Transition Day, which is really unfortunate because there actually it would be a great discussion to be had there on people who choose to not continue on with transition, but it's been so used by turfs and the gender critical movement that it's now just like it's

just it's just another day for more transphobia. Just really unfortunate, Um, but we have that happening at the same time, was all of all of these bills and then we're like, okay, so what what what was what was kind of the stuff that prompted all of the guy ins And how are you like, um, talking with people in all the in all the different states to kind of organize this thing together but still also like separately for each location.

One of the points that I'd like to come back to, like we're going to talk a little bit more about the details of the you know, some some of the specific legislation that has that has astolained a law and some of the other legislation that has not been able to pass into law. Um. And you know, we're we're drawing a contrast between ourselves and some of Tear it Up is drawing a contrast between itself and some of these more you know, institutionalist liberal organizations. UM. Not because

that they not because they can't succeed in their stated goals. Sometimes, right like the A C. L you will sue on some of these things of those lawsuits. Maybe maybe something worth celebrating. What's happening in Texas right now is a

great example of that. But that said, right, so, like we we can acknowledge that the that these more institutionalist tactics can can lead to you know, like it's a better outcome that these laws do not succeed obviously, Um, But there's the impacts of this legislation, and the discussion around this legislation is so much bigger and so much

more profound than any of these individual laws. You know, is specifically looking at them, um in terms of their like material impact in people's lives, which are already abysmally fucking awful. But like the what the place that teared up is looking to kind of champion is but kind of hell raising that like enables us to empower each other, that enables us to be visible in a way that shows people on the ground all across the country that like that we are not just a a minority to

be destroyed and ignored. That we're going to fight for ourselves. We're going to fight for each other. We're gonna fight for our kids, we're gonna fight for our families, and we're gonna fight for our rights, and we're gonna do it loud and as ugly as we need to in order to make sure that trans pain is visible. Yeah, And building on that, um that when we look at

the start of last month March or I guess late February. Um, I think Texas was really kind of the flash point and a lot of the country on this where we had a lot of these bills sort of boiling. UM. I believe they are around seven D active at that point. Um. We're now down to like the high sixties, so that's better. But that was really where stuff started to boil over on this and we looked around and saw that the fight needed to focus on trans survival more than just

the bills. And the bills are important to defeat because they're things trying to exterminate us. There's things that are trying to take families apart, to take away the things that are helping people stay alive, and to remove trans people from accessing public life, and that's going to really ruin a lot of humans. But we need to not just look at that individual fight and remember we're fighting for survival and we're fighting for each other and trans

people as a community. We've always had to kind of rely on each other via various means, be at like Susan's place, or like go back to like Transvestia even and like these systems that weren't necessarily always and these forms of communication that weren't always focused on um necessarily legal winds in the more traditional sense and more just like forming community, even if those communities weren't necessarily great.

In the case of like Transvestia and like some of those much more um respectable leaning groups, could you try a little talk a little bit about what Transvestia and Susan's place work, because I'm gonna guess a lot of people listening are not going to be super familiar with that history. I kind of am only casually heard anything about it. Yeah, so I'm a bit of a queer history nerd um, and you can learn a lot about this. Actually,

I have a can I plug my podcast? What we would like to do is provide people with an ability to learn more about this kind of stuff. So yeah, please Yeah. So I'm part of the totally trans podcast network. Um you can pronounce some parrot twitter at like totally TransPod um. But we talked a lot about trans and queer history through the lens of like looking at it through pop culture and reading stuff into like The Little

Mermaid and things. Um. So we go in a lot about Virginia Prince and transvestia in there, because I'm kind of obsessed with this human from the nineteen sixties who

was like the first Twitter trans girl. Um, she was very problematic, super racist and classist, and her argument was she led to a lot of twentieth century confusion by saying, uh, that there's like heterosexual transvestites, which are what we would now just call like trans lesbians, and then like the homosexual transsexual, which is now what we would call straight trans folks, and that the homosexual transsexuals are bad and

should be shunned, but the heterosexual transvestite should maintain all of her previous privileges. Uh. And she put out this magazine called Transvestia. She famously also got in trouble for sending nudes in the mail to another trans girl across the country. Um. Yeah, fascinating historical figure who kind of the curve historically in terms of sending nudes. That's that's groundbreaking with stuff. But Transvestia, though I did have this big cultural impact on sort of being an early trans zine.

Shortly after it we start to see drag, which it was much more focused on like the homosexual trans sexual and more like sexually liberated takes through like the seventies and then later, UM, my favorite scene like gender Trash from how which uh was out of Toronto and like

the nineties and was very confrontational about trans rights. So we sort of exist in this larger history where we're looking at how trans community has survived and formed and learning from things like star UM, which was the street Transvestitate Action Revolutionaries UM out of New York with Marcia P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, as well as UM act up and HIV activism, And we're trying to take what we can learn from our ancestors and apply it to our

current survival and play you with it a little bit and update some of their tactics because I don't think traditional non violent protests the way it existed in the past gets attention anymore. UM, I think when you figure out ways to be louder about it. And I'm a I'm personally a devout pacivest other people aren't, and that's a okay. UM, I'm a good Quaker girl. But um,

we need to be seen. We need our lives to be seen, and we need our value as humans to be seen so that we can love ourselves and each other enough to survive this horrible ship that's going to

continue happening to us over the next couple of years. Yeah, I'm wanna be back on that with with one thought that, um, we're talking about this sort of like that, this history of trans people drawing together to take care of each other, and you know, I'm just thinking about how today, Uh, Marjorie Taylor Green releases a video that, amongst a bunch of other just like terrifying, awful, and occasionally super funny

and it's incredible stupidity. Um, things that she's claiming in this video or that, like trans p bowl are basically like the you know, the barbarian hordes that have come to destroy Western civilization. And she's you know, she says with a straight face, like, you know, the late Rome and modern America are very similar. Of us rely heavily on Verrangian mercenaries in order to maintain the sanctity of our borders. I always wanted to be a wizard, but

I guess I'm a barbarian. But I bring that up because there is this impression of transpower that like trans people, that is a result of our increased visibility, you know, like what the media called the transgender tipping point because suddenly people were like, oh, I guess liver and Cox gets to exist. But like, uh, with this increased visibility, is this impression that we have this like incredible magical cosmic powers to seduce your people and ruin your civilization

or whatever. And like actually, like when I so I canut four three five, and like I never imagined old where we could even get healthcare covered when I was like I was like a kid organizing with Camp trans out in the woods of Michigan, and like I knew people who got orchie actomys in Barns. I every single trans woman. I knew everything that they knew about how to like get hormones and like manage their own transition and like endercan system. Uh they learned from message boards.

It was the only collective knowledge in existence that was like accessible to people. Because if you went to your doctor, unless you lived in San Francisco or New York and we're particularly well connected, the response you were going to get is, I don't know, are you a demon? Right? Yeah? No, absolutely. That That's the one thing I found it, um really insightful talking to the older trans people that I know, because I'm like you know, a gym gen Z gender

queer person on hormones. And it's very different because when when when I've been talking to the my my transgender friends who are older, it's like, yeah, all of these bills are just are a reaction to the increased visibility and increased well being of transpeople. Right. It's putting, it's putting things that used to be kind of just like unspoken or like obvious bigotry, it's putting now that that's

actually progressing. It's now putting that that old bigotry into actual law because they're like, oh no, we don't want things to progress further. So it's a it's a purposeful sliding back. Um. So it's just like for a lot of people who are older, it doesn't even seem that new. It's just seemed to be. It's it's resurfacing. The things that were used to be normalized are now becoming you know, are becoming more obviously bigoted. But they're putting that bigotry

into actual law. Um. And that's the Yeah, that's the kind of interesting point is because for there's a whole bunch of people who believe that like the transgenderisms and the gender ideology is like a point of power. It's like because it's affiliated with the left um and the left is seen as like the power it's it's then like therefore you're actually punching up on it, which is

of course entirely backwards. Like that, none of that. If you have any political analysis, you'll you'll know like, oh, that's not how anything works. But yeah, these people in their minds, they think they're actually pushing up against like the like the powerful forces of transgenderism. You're like, no, we're just like pugs who are poor, who are trying to who are trying to get our homeown injections like leave us aloud. I can't remember. It was like Tom

Cotton or Matt Gates. Yeah, one of those guys, one of the Pentagone guys, right, being like yelling at him because you know, our military is being destroyed because somebody put the class about like respecting someone's pronouns and the guy's responses like we can obliterate any target on the entire planet with no effort, Like what the are you talking about? There's there's that great there's that horrible, great tweet about the person that runs that four Chune trans account,

who's who is who is like this? This trends person was like a war criminal because they sell weapons. It was, it was, it was so wonderful sweet for a few days ago, I mean one of I mean famously, a lot of companies in the arms industry, like Raytheon, have a great reputation for hiring trans people because all Raytheon cares about is you can go to missile guidance chip. That's all that matters to Raytheon. They're they're they're very woke. Yeah,

but it is, it is. It is intriguing to watch these people really justify their transphobia as a form of fighting against the system because they have somehow affiliated of being trans with the Democratic Party. Therefore it's affiliated with the establishment. Therefore it's actually this force of power, which none none of that's, none of that's true, but that propaganda is shown to be very effective. Um, the people seem really convinced by that because it's it's it's a

story that's easy to glom onto. And as long as we have a story that we can glom onto, then it doesn't matter what's true or not. It's it's all of the stories are what's actually true. Um, So, yeah, that is an an intriguing an intriguing point in terms of how yeah, how how it's how stuff has changed from like transphobia ten years ago for the transphobia now how that was resurfacing some things that used to be

used to just take shape in a slightly different form. Yeah. Well, and so Cat's experiences in two thousand and four, if you pass forward a decade, because I'm a little younger than Cat, but not a lot younger than Cat. Um

around like I was trying to get on hormones. We also had like r l E. Big kiddos these days know what that was the real so it's real life experience, yeah, um, which is basically having to socially transition and come out and do all of this under the care of a therapist and a physician for between six months and a couple of years before they'll allow you to access hormones. Um.

And uh. That was kind of like the stepping stone between the previous experiments where it was just like d I Y or nothing um what it was or impossible gatekeeping, and then now where there's like more informed concent model which is what I which is what I do now yeah, yeah, um, and a lot of these laws are just kind of reiterating that weight that comes from a really like flawed place,

like that weight didn't in any way benefit anyone. Is really it's just torturing people and trying to kind of like,

um like beat the traine out of you. Uh, make you go to the mall presenting as a woman while you feel incredibly awkward and get yelled at by some guy for like trying to buy shoes and he's like right, yeah, Like if if you're a nine year old who is experiencing precocious puberty, it is completely acceptable and no and is going to question whether or not um, you know, prescribing puberty blockers to just make make make like to make it so that you can experience puberty at it

what feels like a more appropriate developmental age. Uh. Sis People, politicians, the right wing generally people agree that that is an acceptable practice. But to use that same practice in order to help a trans child not die, that is a sin against God and leading to the decline of Western civilization. We wish whatever whatever people are like, yeah, like trans people are are leading into this degeneracy that's going to bring down Western civilization. You're like, oh, wow, that's sure.

It does sound cool For me, hormones worked so quickly, and I would having to live through like a year of trying to present in specific ways well not on hormones sounds like complete hell because it is. I was

very surprise at how fast even like mindset things changed. Um, how it is like they're very like hormones are very useful and very interesting and how they and how they affect changes and being forced to I guess as the term now is like boy moting or girl moting, this is this is this is this is what the zoomer the Zoomer kids call whenever they have to like like almost like code switch gender. Um. Having having to like present in the way that you want to without these

systems of hormones for a while. To even be allowed to have hormones as me a zoomer now sounds like horrible because it's literally dangerous, Like yeah, an incredibly dangerous thing to put people, like experience, to put people into. And I think that like that kind of gate keeping. Uh, you'll start looking at it through a more intersectional lens

and like who is it hurting the most? It's hurting people who don't have a ship ton of money to like read get an entirely new wardrobe that people who, um, you know, people of color who are more likely to be targets of violence if they're more obviously visible and read as transp well, and it really artificially diminished the

number of trans people and just gender variants in general. Um. Something that's been really interesting to watch us someone who kind of went into the pandemic as like a trans

elder doing a lot of community work. Is the core in trans as a thing and how much we give everyone an opportunity to like explore themselves and be introspective for a year, and how many people are like, fuck, I'm a girl, um, or like I'm no gender, or I'm every gender and all of these incredibly beautiful forms of exploration that couldn't have happened if they had to go through that in like their normal source situations, if you just gave them an excuse to like do their

own thing for six months. And um yeah, r l E was a good way to keep people from being able to explore. And it's just one way that trans people's bodily autonomy is attacked. And that's what a lot of these bills come down to as well. Is it's the same thing as like anti abortion or anti birth control staff. It's all just about reducing people's bodily autonomy.

I mean yeah, because like if I had to quote unquote live as a girl for a year, I would have just never gotten hormones because I don't want to live as a girl. Like that's not that's not what

that's not what I want to even do. And yeah, having having all of that gate keeping, which is part part of part of part of what they're trying to do, because I mean as much as as much as they hate people who like are you know, are find more comfort inside the inside the more like typical gender rules, they also really don't like the people who enjoy being more like over gender freaks, um and like like outside of that, it's like so of course they're going to

try to climp down on any anything it's worth noting to just the like, there's there are a few different camps um in in in the sort of right wing response to trans people. Um. One of the things that I've learned over the years kind of looking at looking at what the alt right is up to. Um, uh, you know what. Originally I really like thought of the whole Republican Party, the whole right wing is like a

single cohesive ideological unit. It seemed like they were disabled to get everyone on the same page and then go at something. And if you look closely, you realize actually it's this huge, ever evolving coalition of people who mostly hate each other and if you're if you're clever, you can break people off and disrupt things. Um, there's different there's different movements, different thoughts inside of the way that

people are approaching this. And you have a lot of politicians who they probably never met a trans person, They certainly probably don't have any gay friends. They're just some random suburbanite motherfucker's who know that sacrificing trans kids on the altar of political convenience will score them points with a radicalized base of bigots. Um, so those people are just cynically hurting trans people because it will score them some you know, pretend points that will lead to real

structural power. But there is also the evangelical community, and a huge amount of the the deepest and scariest fervor against trans people comes out of the evangelical community. I was raised vaguely evangelical and yeah, and like when I came out, I was definitely told I was going to hell. Like if you look at the you look at the where this a lot of the incredibly incredibly like eliminationist

rhetoric is coming from. And that's coming from the evangelical community who are like, it's not just that I think that from a policy perspective, this is like we need to like retool how we're doing trans healthcare something, because if people wanted to have conversations about how to make the best possible systems, like we want to have that conversation, we can we can agree to, we can disagree about policy.

But their policy is literally trans people are an army of demons who have come to win souls for Satan, And I'm like, I'm just trying to refill my prescription and like we need the funk alone. And it also creates this really interesting looping effect of of politicians who get into anti trans and like like all of this kind of like anti gay stuff to specifically win elections. Right.

We even saw this like Greg Abbett doing his um like letters about about investigating parents of trans kids specifically around his primary election like, so people definitely do are still very much getting into this specifically to win elections because they know it's a point that riles up the base.

But then you also have people, because that's been going on for so long, you have people who are maybe not necessarily super evangelical, um, but who grew up around this kind of culture of politicians need to say these things, who are now getting again even if paulicians didn't really fully agree with it, they they needed to do it to get support. But you have people who grew up around that and went into politics around that who are now just do that sincerely because because it was what

they were exposed to previously. Now we have people like that who are trying to run for office with the first time who are just that extreme. Um. I think that's even a bit of what the Marjorie Taylor Green thing is is, like someone who was exposed to extremist stuff online who is now running for office herself and is completely sincere about all the stuff she's doing, Like she she is a true believer in the way that some other people like Matt Gates may not even be

a true believer. He might just be doing it because it's popular. But you also have the people who are just like fully fully believe it because it's it's it's influenced culture long enough that it's now a full loop of sincerity. Well, and then specifically, the perception of trans people within the religious rights specifically is actually shifted so much and last decade. I guess now I'm trying to think how old I am, Um, because I was a

student at Baylor University. Oh okay, yeah, okay, cool, cool, Yeah, I have I have I have some family who used to work at Baylor. Oh. I have spent a lot of time in and around there, the top part of the world. Um uh yeah, sick um for all of the queer asked Baylor bears out there. But I became a student and I graduated, and being queer was against the rules the whole time I was there. Despite me,

we came out and started a student group my freshman year. Um. But I had to face this really weird decision because in high school I had a lot of gender stuff going on, a lot of sexuality stuff going on, and I described myself as like a queer sexual because I'm like, I'm still figuring it out. Sometimes I'm a girl. Sometimes I'm a boy. I don't know. I'll sort this out

in my twenties. And then I go to college where I thought I'd sorted out, and I was faced with this thing like you can either be out as queer and but you have to like present as like as sis gay man. Or you can transition, which will be totally acceptable within this culture, but you have to go deep stealth and um, you'll just show up next year as a girl and everyone will be fine with that and we'll all pretend it didn't happen and that you've

always been a girl. Um. I and that was like the standard and a lot of the Baylor's very upper Crest religious right, like very privileged group of people. But was you just kind of go away and we can just for a few months and we just pretend this is how it always was. And now it's much more

um inquisitional is the wrong word. But they it's like hunting trans people down, uh, in a much more aggressive way where they can't just kind of be like, well, God doesn't make trash, and instead they're like, oh, God connects you to Hell, just very directly, and it's getting worse, and um, that's why tear it up. Is really important that we like start now instead of like next fall, because it's gonna be horrible next fall and the spring

after that could be it's gonna be real grim. I love to talk more about like a tear it up and how you approach organizing UM and what you're kind of hoping to both expand into and the various actions that you have done in the past few weeks. So the first tear it up action officially was the three thirteen rally in Austin, Texas. That was the Transcrids Cry for Help rally UM, where we had a bunch of people and the steps of the Governor's mansion, UM speaking

and getting loud and UM. We had a few hundred people show up and not really mobilized. A lot of folks in Texas that I know got activated from that and are still going. But while I was running and organizing that with trot Um and actually flew down to Texas from Nebraska to do that, UM, the various humans I'd reached out to and I was just like, I don't have time to explain directions right now. We need to organize the Diane by the end of the month.

Here's here's what I have. I just kind of through it at them, and um, they all ran with it. And I think that's, um the way that we need to approach this right now, because we need to build this big machine, because they've been building the machine against us for years, UM, and to build a machine that can rival that, we kind of need to be much more decentralized and much more agile about how we grow

and how we do these actions. Um. Cat, you are one of the first humans I reached out to and I was like, yes, I would like to make a big trouble. What was that like from your side of things? Yeah, So I keep thinking about this from the perspective of kind of my own political motivation. So I've done various kinds of like lefty whatever organizing for for most of my adult life. And um, in the last like last

I guess February and February or whatever. UM, I think, like probably a lot of people, especially a lot of trance people, I had like a couple of weak period of just like totally depressed, doom scrolling, and then the invastion of Ukraine was happening, and it's just like everything was bad all the time. Um, it's still feel still feels like everything is bad all the time. But um, I have stuff to do thanks to uh it a roads that were here. UM. So what it I so like?

I said, I grew up. Um, I was a child of the nineties. I grew up in a world that I knew was utterly hostile to my existence. I knew that trans people were like that to be trans was something deeply shameful and a secret that I either needed to die with or that if I came out it would like ruin my life of all of my family. UM until I eventually, you know, I managed to not die all the way until eighteen came out, and then I found a bunch of incredible queer people, and uh

have it's been alive since then. But I I was shaped by that experience, by the experience of meaning to survive knowing that I had this secret all, you know, I knew when I knew in kindergart, I like just just new with total certainty. And I also knew that

it was evil and bad and that I should be ashamed. Um. And there is a whole couple there's like generation there's like a whole generation of kids right now growing up, who have you know, come out who have been born since two thousand fourteen and come out as tiny, right, so there's like a whole and then never mind like kids who weren't born before that, but who are in high school now who are coming out and like they have existed in a world where pop culture and the

sort of mass culture more generally speaking, has like there are trans people on TV and they're not just serial killers or the murder victims in an SPU story. There's legitimate representation, there is, you know, you have like the you have people in national government and in state government explicitly defending trans people like they they have in enculturated to this idea that they have some semblance of rights and that civilization, that the civilization they live in doesn't

want to smite them out of existence. Um, and those kids are watching this conversation shift and I don't know what that's like, but I can tell you that I've been motivated by anger to do a lot of things. And um, I don't know that I've ever been quite as furious in my life as I have been the last the last couple of months, and so being drawn towards tear it up to me, is this opportunity to like, you know, uh, I I love the Trevor Project. I'm really glad that they exist. I'm really glad that they

do the work that they do. You know, like that there's all these different organs who are putting out positive messaging, but it's all pretty milk toast. You know, it's like trans people are cool. Maybe we should maybe we should give all we should give all the tender cursive baseball bat. Maybe that would be a more useful for Like, they're fucking trying to kill you, thirteen year old. They are

coming for you. This world is unsafe, and I need you to know that you have somewhere to run to, that there are adults in the world who will keep you safe, who will show up for you, who are going to go and raise a bunch of hell, make a bunch of noise, do a graffiti, put up some posters, go and you know, get ourselves in trouble on the steps of the capitals all across the country, so that those kids in high school right now who are feeling

like the entire fucking universe is dissolving around them into a bottomless sea of fear and hatred, but like, there's other people out there. If you're in Idaho, if you're if you were a kid who's growing up in northern Idaho, like, there's other people out there. You just have to get free. And we're specifically so our first actions we specifically target at these states that tend to be ignored by um

so like the mainstream liberal media. I'm trying to say that without sounding like a whack of doodle, but we're fully past that foot great cool, I have feel like a profit. Storial re opened this show with a joke about that's true. We're fine that happened. I don't know, yeah, um but yeah, like the mainstream liberal media doesn't give a funk about Iowa or Idaho. And frankly, I've since I've lived all over the country and been involved in

queer activism for like over a decade. I have friends all over and a lot of the um more higher up folks and established organs on the coasts and in big cities look at what happens in like Iowa and Idaho, in Texas and Florida, and they're like, oh no, this is a sign of what's to come, and not this affects a quarter of the country. It's already happening. Yeah, it's happens. Yeah it's not it could happen here, It's

happened already. And fight for these kids desperately because their lives are at risk in so many ways right now. They're legally imperiled. The things that we're giving them hope

for life are being taken away. And a lot of these laws most affect the kids that have support of families, But we need a fight for the kids that don't do and make sure that they know that, like we see you in Iowa, and we're gonna go do something melodramatic and cover ourselves in fake blood and lay on the steps of the capital in the in the state that you live in so you can see that, like your feelings are being externalized, and hopefully that'll move you

to knowing that like other people are going through this too, and hopefully other people will see what's happening and it will move them to action to protect those kids. Um. And it'll give you a space to start building community and building connections for other transpeople and other people in

the area who want to help keep you alive exactly. UM. And that's really the next step and tear it up is this next month, I want to have us focus a bit more on a little community building and community events, which has always been a big are My strategy with previous organizing as big lab protests followed by a pizza party UM or we did a great technic in Austin after the legislative sessions last year where we had a bunch of people show up and made a lot of

good connections. UM We had a lot of the little trans kidos there and some photos that were taken there were then used as like the headline, like the the cover photos for like all these articles about the kids

being attacked. Yeah. Yeah, I think that the we we pulled off our sort of first coordinated national set of actions, that the model that we're that we're looking at is groups like act up, so more of a sort of decentralized national network of UM folks who are all working together to be sort of power amplifiers to like share resources, share share tools, make sure that you know everyone has what they need and has backup in case anything gets

out of hand wherever they're whatever states they're in, whatever city they're in. UM and that coalition building or like the community building part is such a such an incredibly

important factor. Like I so I was coordinating, I was working on the event to have happened in Boise And you know, one of the major things that I that I ran into reaching out to all these different organizations is like, I mean, they've been at war for a long time and they have like there are literally militia groups hunting anyone who shows up at a BLM rally

in Boise. Um. When I talked to, you know, some of the like executive directors of like LGBTQ oriented nonprofits in Boise, they were like, Hey, I'm really it's really cool that you're doing this, but I we cannot send our kids. Were like, we can't participate in this because we don't know you and we don't know what's going to happen. And this is like this you need to

understand that this scene is like not safe. Totally fair. Yeah, so totally fair, and so like, I think a big part of this next step is deepening those connections, you know, showing people that like, we will show up, we are accountable, we are looking to be partners for long term action,

for long term struggle. And one of the things that is really cool about Tear it Up that I didn't expect because I am old, so my networking has always been phone trees, UM and literally just like calling people out and being like you call these three people UM and getting people out for actions, uh, for tear it Up. We have these amazing humans at building like online communities on Discord, which makes me feel simultaneously like years old and also like the kids. They're all right, they know

that how to do the trouble UM. And we're trying to not just build do this traditional coalition building that I've been doing for a long time and making all these connections, but trying to build not just like a physical community, but an online community to stitch these physical communities together because if you're in like middle of nowhere, Texas, you can see what's happening in Austin, but you can't

always like physically make it there. So it's good to know that, like, these are my humans and they're fighting for me, and I can be in the loop and get involved UM. And our long term strategy with that

is to connect people like UM the Trevor Project. I love a lot of the humans they're actually and like trans Lifeline in these groups because they UM and all these other like national groups that raise a lot of money, but they're actually not allowed to raise a lot of trouble because of like their tax status and all these things. Is like, uh, the HRC like can't do a trouble because it'll look bad for them, and they care about

those sorts of things. But we can connect those people with these young activists that want to go stirrup ship and cause trouble and need to like let out that screaming um. And even if we can't defeat the laws in the moment, letting out that scream is a communal good. It lets people feel seen, and it lets people know I need help right now, And shouting and crying and a gnashing of teeth and rending of hair and clothes

is objectively good. Actually, we need people to come together, and we need people to see our suffering, and we need people to be moved to loving each other and helping each other. And that's um how, that's how will survive. Right if we achieve nothing beyond Catharsis and we've achieved something. I loved your point about the online community component of things, because I feel like so much of trans focused online community is like, uh, you know, do I look okay

in this outfit? Or like, hey, we're all fans of the same like the anime or right, like they're all they're the very specific kind of projects, and there there's not I don't feel like there's a lot of races that are like, hey, this is like the war room. Well, I mean not that we can't talk about bullshit, but like the entire focus of this space is to connect as many trans people as possible so we can amplify

our power together. Um, and you know, begin to even remotely approximate the boogeyman that Marjorie Taylor Green imagines us to be. Right well, and we need to become like the trans and Sexual Menace, which is another protest group that I love from the nineties where they create this iconography around like oh, we are the trans sexual Menace and then it's a bunch of like very nice like

like like very like normal looking folks. Yeah. But I think we need to reclaim that and taking in another direction, and we need to not be menacing in you know, like we need to be a good menace. We need to be a bit of an anti hero for the trans community, and we need to do fucking trouble and

we need to cause problems for people. And frankly, I think, UM, too many politicians get to go to bed at night not listening to people call them motherfucker's on a megaphone, And too many people get to have a nice lunch at their favorite restaurant without that being disrupted and having things shouted at them. I think we need to become the menace that we need to be to survive in

this moment. I concur with this project, and yes, I concur with this and UM enjoy enjoy participating in things that lead to those outcomes because it is it's a because they want us dead anyway, Like that's that's that is, that is what they're doing, that's what they're complacent with. UM. I think it is also an important thing to note that UM in terms of like good news, like not all of these bills are passing Like on on this show, we've talked a lot about the bills that have passed.

We have talked about all the stuff that has been going on, but there is not not not all of them, not all of them are going through And that is an important thing to talk about it doesn't mean the fight's over because they're gonna try again. Um. But that is the other thing I think is worth is worth mentioning and states from you know, Florida to Idaho to Washington, Utah, Virginia, like at least there is not there is stuff that is getting blocked um or at least not going through.

And there's a lesson that needs to be learned from how the right operates in this because what they did for years was opposed equal rights, was opposed things in a variety of ways socially and through legislation that failed, and it was fail fail, fail, fail fail for a

long time until they started to succeed. And part of why they succeeded is because they were continuously building a wide ranging and powerful machine to push this stuff through, learning from their failures, grabbing more power, getting better at messaging and like that. Ultimately, the same attitude needs to be had, like when when one of these laws gets struck down, it's not a sign that the fight's been one,

it's a sign um to keep pushing. Like it's this kind of thing where you have to you have to pay attention to the way they built this over the course of really thirty or forty years UM, because it has to be done something a counter a counterweight, a machine capable of applying equal pressure in the opposite direction has to be built, and it has to be built

very quickly. Well. And nine out of the nine out of ten of these bills die and so nearly two and seventy I think it's two and sixty four is the actual account of how many anti trans bills have been proposed in the last two years since the last selection UH, and only have become law. So they're really just playing a numbers game, right, They're just forcing it through UM and they're not going to stop. And we in Texas it was so hard last year because I

remember the last day of the legislative session. We were all there until midnight and cheered so hard when it was done, and we're like this BILK can't come back. And then we faced special session followed by special sessions followed by special session where they're like, we are pushing through this trans legislation and the war is not gonna stop. We we we're maybe gonna We're gonna win a lot of battles. We're gonna win the majority of battles, but

they're not playing it to win those individual fights. They're playing to eventually exterminate us. And they're really gaining a lot of ground and we're way behind on building our machine to fight it. And this is all happening in the context of, you know, a a very very explicit mask off movement to essentially destroy American democracy and replace it with Christian fascism, right, And we are the scapeboat, We are the enemy that they are currently identifying for elimination. Right.

So like it's you know, for them, they're like, I can score some points if I encourage this trans kid to kill themselves, right, Um. And for us, it's like an existential threat that we maybe watching the United States descend into, you know, an irreversible chasm of authoritarianism and violence. Uh. And you know that's going to be bad for trans

people too. Yeah, yeah, very very understated. How can how can if people are interested in tear it up and what they're doing, how can people find out more info online about how to keep up with stuff and um and what what y'all do? So I think the best place to I guess get little updates. Um, it's the Twitter, which is at Tear it Up or Twitter, um. And then additionally we have our website, uh, which is www dot tear it Up dot org and yes good um. And then if you come and get involved and uh,

you can get invite to our discord. We're trying to grow that out a little slowly and stick with folks that we know are getting involved in the fight while we sort of build the initial foundation of this. But that's the place to find us right now. Twitter, Instagram as well. We're also Teared Up Teared Up ord on Instagram and have a Facebook page. But who the fuck

uses Facebook? I mean, actually, so our Facebook. We won't be posting a lot of stuff, but a lot of our events will go through Facebook because in a lot of the Midwest and the South, a lot of people still use Facebook, which is probably bad. Turns out that's not helping I think, um, But those are the places go find us, um and then come get involved. We're gonna be doing a lot more. We've sort of been on a break for a week because we did of ship ton of events last month all at once and

kind of needed a week off. But staring next week we're going to be posting a lot and organizing and pulling together some community and social events and some more protests. And even if you don't want to, even if you don't want to join, join the organization. Specifically, if you're a sist ally who's listening to this and you're like

this sucks, I hate it, I'd like to do something. Um, we'll we're gonna have things like you know, postering, like postering resources and stickers and all kinds of stuff that you can that you can grab and like just go paint the town. Yeah, let it. Let it be known that trans people won't be a race, but we are fighting back. We're a very pro graffiti organization. Um, please bully your local politicians and uh sticker every service surface

you can get, get some paint pens. I think I think I'll do an upcoming episode on how to make or how to do wheat pasting. Yeah, as as a fun as as some fun uh content for you for you fans of content out there. But yes, follow follow the tear it Up account on the twitters. That's how I've been mostly keeping up with it, besides just asking people because I know who they are of. But the

Twitter Twitter is definitely a good a good resource. Um, yeah, I guess any any kind of any other any other thoughts or notes that she would like to to add before we before we wrap up here, can I say fun, grag abbitt? Can we all just say actually k ivy? Uh? Also, um yeah, fun, lots of governors, a lot of the governor's not most most stuff. I think the vast majority of governors should go funk themselves. And um, I'll see

them in how Yeah. Yeah, Um, that's a good at all plug your plug your history podcast because queer history sounds like a great thing that people should learn more about. Yeah. Well, so it's the Totally trans podcast network. We might also come up as Totally trans Searching for the trans Cannon. Uh. We were originally just the one show where we talked about pop culture and history. It was me and writer Henry Jardina. And now we have a slate of shows

that we do all on the same feed. Um. One that talks about comics, one that talks about history that I love that the playwright Katie Coleman does, um called Our Sacred History. And then we have we just started the newest season of Totally Trans Searching for the trans Cannon, where we're talking about finding lessons from history and queer culture and pop culture love. Yeah, all right, yeah, buy some paint pens, uh, show up to actions if you can, um,

and learn to make some trouble. Yeah. Also, megaphones are only forty dollars from Harbor Freight, just saying you can get really loud, really cheap. And it's generally legal to shout at people from outside their homes, although not not always. That can get you in some trouble, but not necessary. Check your local sound ordinances and bring a volume meter and really just amplify yourself just to that level, and learn how to add an audio so you can really

just dial it in. Find the lawyer and consult with them first. Yes. Also, personally, I would like to say forced from all anti trans politicians who say that you can be peer pressured into transitioning. Um. I am personally trying to force from Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. It hasn't worked yet, but he's very insistent it will work eventually. So I do feel like the right way to pursue that is just by deregulation and then poisoning the water supply. Well,

well that doesn't for us today. Hey, we'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.