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about it recently. Yeah, I don't believe any claims that he was not interested in this for a long time. He has definitely tried to cast himself this summer as the sort of leader of the resistance type figure. Yeah, he hasn't done that by, for instance, ordering the California National Guard to go home, protecting people from the massmen with guns snatching them in the street, or even standing

up for trans kids. Instead, he has focused on I guess what you could generously call Twitter trolling, like it's well, we're going.

seeing it. We're not talking about a guy who has shown evidence that he is capable of on his own, generating like a super loyal fan base or continued interest in his personality. Now, I'm not saying that's that on its own isn't a bad thing. A lot of politicians who are very competent at certain things are not competent at that, and in fact, most of the worst politicians we have are also the people who are the best at that and building a fan base, so to speak.

But what I'm saying is that Gavin Newsom is obsessed with doing something, being this Trumpian populist figure that he has not exhibited faculty for. Right, Yes, that's what I'm saying.

And obviously you've got a chunk of like a decent chunk of like centrist dim types who like Newsom, and I guess maybe it's working for some of them, But I don't think it's broadening his support. I think there's a single voter, especially in a fucking swing state, who is like, I wasn't going to vote for Gavin Newsom until I saw him mimicking Donald Trump's tweets.

this is legit, and I did this podcast with Charlie Kirk. Unsurprisingly, he brought it up and he said, tell me that's not fair. I said, it's not fair. You're right. My party was pissed. Lgbtqcucus furious with me because I don't think it's fair.

to help. He believes it's a religion. Effectively among a lot of establishment dims that there's a whole huge chunk of voters who are just itching to vote for a Democrat if they weren't in favor of all of these icky cultural issues that are hard to touch that the right is, it spends so much time harping on, and I think part of what they're seeing and where a lot of the logical disconnect comes into effect, is that they see how much money conservatives and time and discourse

conservatives spend talking about this and obsessing over it, and they believe, well, oh, if we just kind of fold on these people, then we've taken this great weapon out of their arsenal, and they'll be helpless because they're stupid. And I don't think these are fundamentally very smart people in the political sense of the world. I think they

bad politicians. I think they're bad. I think they were good politicians in terms of a competency sense at a prior age to get to where they were, But the ground has changed and intelligence is largely a product of adaptability,

and they have not proven adaptable. And I think what's actually going to happen, because we've seen that, is if they throw trans people under the bus as they're actively talking about doing the right will grab another chunk of their coalition and start ruthlessly trying to destroy that group of people, and these people's suggestion will once again be Okay, well we gotta, you know, throw those people under the bus, because then we'll deny them that weapon, and eventually you

won't have any Democrats left.

as an athlete for much of my life. This is bullshit, and it's fundamentally disrespectful to women athletes to continue to suggest it they're biologically inferior. But I do want to talk more about Gavin you some slide into mean politics. His press office claimed that after the fires in LA claim this in New York Times in a piece of our link, he was troubled by the misinformation that came out. Apparently was his first fucking time in encountering misinformation on

the internet. Like oh wow, Yeah, Well, when you think about the ease with which he lies, right, yeah, absolute comfort he has, bullshitting it sort of makes sense until it hits him. He doesn't care because he's too So they decided to take the fight to the internet. I

guess they began with Star Wars memes. And then when the redistricting debate in Texas, so we've covered extensively on executive disorder was kind of reaching its peak, Newsom sort of begun this sign I know you are, you said, you are, But what am I kind of tendency In his posting, he posted in all block capitals, I'm not going to shout Donald Trump. If you do not stand down, we will be forced to leave an effort to redraw the maps in CAA to offset the rigging of maps.

Then he moved on to AI generated images and signed his post with initials like Trump does, claiming Kid Rock had endorsed him, which isn't true. Incidentally, they did this exactly a year after Donald Trump posted an AI generated image of Taylor Swift with the Swifties for Trump montage, which shows how much time they spend looking at Trump's

post rather than doing anything fucking useful. Then they moved on to mocking Greg Abbott for using a wheelchair, saying he rolled over for Trump again, like, you do not build a political coalition by mocking people with disabilities. There are a million things to fucking hate Greg Abbott for. I could spend an hour talking about the loathsome shit he has done, but using a wheelchair is not one

of those things. If you cannot find anything else, that really shows a paucity of democratic politics right now, let's take a break and we'll come back.

Trump's absolutely insane, all caps off to nonsensical posts. Probably, while all the people in my life who aren't political junkies keep reaching out to say they don't know much about Newsom but think the tweets are hilarious, humor and mockery can be quite effective, neither of them say what they are effective for. Right, No one seems concerned that these make no material difference, and he is doing them

instead of doing things that make material difference. Right, I'm going to play another clip from Chris Hayes here before you.

Many are saying, we can't even do the big stairs on Air Force one anymore, uses the little baby stairs now sad as all the Trump trademarks, all capital letters, random quotation marks, little parentheticals, complete unhinged absurdity.

for your attention to this matter. Beyond the mockery of Trump's text post, Newsom has also been posting Trump style AI generated images of himself, including this I think absolute masterpiece of Newsom deep in a moment of reflection or prayer link by three Maga icons and the laying of hands Kid Rock who he hates, Tucker Carlson, and the angelic spirit of the recently departed Hulk Holgan again a spot on mockery Trump, who.

future of this country is tremendous and escalating. And the fact that like this is the best a major a major contender for the Democratic presidential candidate in twenty twenty eight has been able to pull out so far is like terrifying.

groups and of individuals within groups to be resilient. But none of that is going to stop the fucking DHS from turning into the SS right Yeah, and the Democratic Party clearly fucking isn't either. But the fact that this is what they're doing instead of effective resistance is I mean, it's important. I wish there was more to say than we should know how badly they're failing us. Right, Yeah, Like.

Senate and Maine to defeat Susan Collins. A decade of military service, going overseas, farming oysters to feed my community, diving to lend a hand to other fishermen, trying to start a family. But everywhere I've gone, it seems like the fabric of what holds us together is being ripped apart by billionaires and corrupt politicians profiting off of destroying our environment, driving our families in the pop and crushing the middle class. I did four infantry tours in the

Marine corps in the army. I'm not afraid to name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy. It's the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out. And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins. I'm not fooled by this fake charade of Collins deliberations and moderation. The difference between Susan Collins and Ted Cruz is at least Ted Cruz is honest about selling us out and not giving a damn. People know that the system is screwing them. They know it in their bones.

Nobody I know around here can afford a house. Healthcare is a disaster. Hospitals are closing. We have watched all of that get ripped away from us, and everyone just trying to keep it all together. Why can't we have universal health care like every other first world country. Why can't we take care of our veterans when they come home. Why are we funding endless wars and bombing children? Why

are CEO is more powerful than unions? We fought three different wars since the last time we raised the minimum wage. I'm not pretending to have all the answers, but I know that I'm asking the ray questions. When I tell people around here that I'm running for Senate, sometimes the

initial reaction is what. But when I tell them why, I'm doing it because I truly do believe that we can build a system that is going to represent working people, the number one response has been, well, thank god, somebody's going to do it. You're supposed to fight for the things you love. This is our home, and I will fight tirelessly for it for you. It's maner's first in Maine always.

issue in ordering the guard to go home. He's pursuing a court case yet, but leg forced the crisis because we're.

felonies have been committed in the last fifteen years. The San Diego Sheriff has been accused of violating this are linked to a KPBS article on that where they transferred to someone who, according to claims in the article, had a twenty one year old conviction. Where As I said before the cutoff fifteen years, Newsom could do something about

the surveillance which is being installed all over California. These license plates readers at the ones at San Diego has spent thousands, if not billions of dollars on these license plate readers have had their information shared with federal agencies more than one hundred times in May alone.

the charge against Todd. Glory is seemingly intent on driving our city into debt to pursue Castrow approach against thee unhoused Newsome posed for a photo shoot destroying unhoused people's property. He hasn't done a single thing that puts him at any risk. Right. He's presenting himself in this Sean ram podcast the big risk taker because he spoke out about fucking teenage girls running, right, But he hasn't put his neck on the line once for marginalized people in california're anywhere.

their telephones. So seeing something funny on their telephone seems like an antidote because it's not their community, it's not their people, and it's not people they fundamentally give a shit about either. That I think is why to them this seems effective and hopefully to you, as it does to me, it seems completely ineffective.

But that doesn't translate electorally. What we do have electorally is that polls in Maine show that the Democratic Party is historically unpopular, including with Democrats. This is from a July survey. There's a good article in PBS that's just they roll right over. Many Democrats think their party is weak. Ap n O RC whole finds. Oh sorry, this is actually no, sorry, this is overall across US adults. Sorry. The initial article I had seemed to be saying that

this was just in May. No, this is this is nationwide, right, So I mean, I think that what Platner has seen, the opportunity he's seen is real that there are a lot of people who are not at all interested in voting for a Republican who have not been swayed to the right, who identify as Democrats but hate the party and think it is weak. Right, Like about two inten Democrats, according to this poll, described their party positively. One intent

said it was empathetic and inclusive. That's terrible, right, and that is that I mean, that shows that just what we were saying kind of based on our gut, which is it's a bad idea to hang people out to dry because you don't think you can defend them. You think that it'll be beneficial politically to make the choice to you know, let them die basically. Yeah, And it's it seems like Democrats largely are responding by saying, well, this party doesn't give a shit about us, and they

are ineffective. They can't do fuck all, right, Yeah, and that's definitely what's happening. So, yeah, I don't know if Platner is gonna win, but I'm growing more convinced every day that there is opportunity for people who are actually willing to fight these bastards. Yeah, and you understanding that fighting these bastards isn't just like, well, let's give them almost everything they want and hope that somehow lets us win.

It's not the best response, it's not the worst one either, Like, and I think he is right. For most of these conservative people, they don't care about women's sports, right, They're not there when women are getting shit priced, women are getting shit TV time.

people right. Just to be super clear, Yeah, but like it's so easy, and yet it seems to be evading, Like you say, the presumptive nominee, that this guy who for for nearly a decade we have assumed we'll run in twenty twenty eight. And I guess I know, fuck Gavin Newsom. I hope that he does not succeed with his presidential campaign missions.

on what's being done to stop it. So you may or may not have heard about the attacks on universities in academia, but given the general onslaught of disastrous news, even for those of you who have noted something is happening in higher education may not be keeping up with the details. So let me give you a brief summary.

A number of universities, including Harvard, Brown, Columbia, and UCLA, have been investigated for campus anti semitism related to pro Palestine protests on those campuses over the past two years. From there, the Trump administration has escalated by slashing federal funding that those universities receive and forcing those universities to settle with the administration not only monetarily, but also by

implementing changes to how their universities are run. So, for example, Columbia University agreed to pay the Trump administration two hundred and twenty million dollars punish seventy students involved in the protests in a variety of ways, including by expelling them, and they agreed to monitor and report their programs for

unlawful dea goals, that's a quote. One of the ways Columbia has agreed to monitor, as the Intercept reported in April, is by appointing a vice provost in charge of monitoring the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department, in

particular for quote balanced curricula. The faculty in that department will no longer run that department, and as the Middle East Studies Association, in a statement back in March noted, this, placing the department under administrative receivership is a quote fundamental abrogation of the autonomy of university governance. This comes at a time when the Trump administration has also attacked the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the

National Institutes of Health. All of these are federal funding sources for the majority of research that happens at universities across disciplines the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities. The Trumpet administration has also attacked foreign students and the processes by which they are able to get visa study in the United States, which is just another way to get at a major revenue source for many universities. But why is

the Trump administration doing all this. Here is Vice President JD. Vance speaking to the National Conservatism Conference back in twenty twenty one.

Number One, as Vance themselves identifies, universities produce knowledge, and that knowledge produce that universities drives innovation in the private sector, in tech, in health, and weapons, manufacturing, universities are a main engine of economic growth. In fact, universities are part

and parcel of American global power. They are a major source of that power for the United States, whether in the students and scholars they attract, whether for their research that they produce that various arms of the American government can use, or whether for the legitimization that universities provide for certain frameworks like the frame market liberalism, etc.

power too. That sometimes occasional knowledge production is too much for the jd vances of today's politics, though, so they're cracking down. The number two reason why universities are sites of power is because they offer a promise of social mobility.

And that's generally true too, even the most modest regional public school in America still offer some of the highest quality of education you can get around the world, but that shot at upward social mobility that you can get with the university of education is definitely getting harder and costlier and less accessible. There's this book by Mark Busque

I highly recommend reading, titled How the University Works. In it, the author details how as universities became more corporatized, tuition increased, university workers were disempowered, and the value of a degree plummeted. And this process started way before Trump. Clifford Ando, professor of Classics and History at the University of Chicago, wrote for Compact magazine recently on what's happening at the University of Chicago right now for those who may be unaware.

At the University of Chicago, the university is stopping PhD emissions, it's increasing enrollment numbers, it's slashing budgets, it's even proposing to teach some courses using chat GPT. Ando argues that this current dismantling of University of Chicago that we're witnessing is again not Trump related, but can be traced to this corporatization of the university where universities prioritized money making, technology and investments, and as he writes, quote fundamentally corroded

policymaking at universities. So to get a high quality education today, at a university that isn't trying to trap you as cheap labor or doesn't just use overworked adjuncts to teach courses to avoid paying faculty their worth, you need to either come from money, or you need to be highly highly exceptional, or you need to accrue exorbitant amounts of debt. And yet, and yet, marginalized people still made advances in

this system. We saw, for example, more African American presidents of universities, more women, We saw diversifying scholarship courses, pathways for students as universities became more inclusive. That's what diversity, equity and inclusion efforts did. Imperfect as they were, and even though the university as an institution continues to exploit labor, continues to exploit their own students, often doesn't deliver enough on the promise of social mobility. Even delivering a little

was too much for the Jdvanss of the world. They don't want upward social mobility for some Americans, and they don't want those challenges to power, even at the margins, so they're cracking down. The attacks on Harvard, Brown, George Washington, UCLA, the list goes on, is predicated on attacking DEI Diversity, equity and inclusion. Conservatives alleged that universities taking a person's background into consideration and admissions or in hiring or in scholarships, etc.

All of that violates anti discrimination laws. And our conservative Supreme Court, in its recent ruling in the cases of Students for Fair Admissions versus University of North Carolina and Students for Vera Admissions versus Harvard, agreed they overturned the two thousand and three Grotta versus Bollinger case that had allowed higher education institutions to consider race and admissions. And all of this comes at a time after decades of

the university an institution eroded itself. But I would say attacking DEI wasn't effective enough, especially after the Black Lives Matter movement. Saying DEI is bad is a harder sell for an American public fifty one percent of which say they support Black Lives Matter. And this was according to a twenty twenty three study by the Pere Research Center. Now, fifty one percent isn't overwhelming, but it's not nothing either. So conservatives to attack the university have had to exploit

the weaknesses that already exist within the academy. That has meant exploiting the way the university's institution has become sensitive to money and endowments and donors, and that has meant exploiting the way the university has not actually been a site of free inquiry or expression for particular people and particular topics. And by exploiting and expanding that gap, they are now trying to take those freedoms away from everybody.

This is where Palestine comes in. The truth is attacks on student protesters for Palestine, attacks on scholars who work on Palestine or speak on Palestine. That all started before Trump, and that has become the blueprint for attacking universities and academic freedom. Generally, they're using the pro Palestine protests, pro Palestine programming, or just any knowledge production about Palestine as an excuse to allege anti Semitism. Enter into these investigations

and demand the universities do what they want. After the Hamas October seventh attacks, we saw student protesters detained like Mahmud Kriil Columbia and remaisa ouster Get Tufts and many more. We have seen diplomas withheld, like what Virginia Commonwealth University attempted to do to many students, including students sitting in Hadad. We have seen professors put on leave or fired like what Muhlenberg College did to Mora Finkelstein. The list goes on and on, but again, a lot of this pattern

started before Trump. In a November twenty twenty three poll conducted by political scientists Mark Lynch and Shibley Telheme called the Middle East Scholar Barometer, the results show that sixty six percent of faculty members who study the Middle East quote self censor when speaking about the Middle East in an academic or professional setting, and that number goes up to seventy seven point four percent when talking about Israel Palestine.

On the Israel Palstonin issue in particular, almost fifty two percent of scholars have concerns about pressure from external advocacy groups, and of those who said they self censor, a full eighty three percent said the issue they most feel the need to censor themselves about is anything related to criticism

of Israel. This is a crazy number if you consider that of the same group, only one point six percent of respondents said they censored criticism of US policy, and a full ninety eight percent of assistant professors untenured professors who work on the Middle East quote feel the need to self censor when speaking about the Palestinian Israeli issue in an academic or professional capacity. Part of this story, the censorship story, is the large scale adoption of the

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti Semitism. Back during his first term, President Trump's Executive Order on Combating Anti Semitism directed government bodies to take the IRA definition into consideration when enforcing Title six, which is a part of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four that prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. The Biden administration didn't overturn any of that either. They

implemented that executive Order themselves throughout their tenure. And this definition is one definition of anti semitism that critics say conflates criticism of Israel with anti semitism. In fact, the main drafter of the IRA definition, ken Stearn, has expressed concerns that this definition is being used as a quote blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemit, and it's for that reason that Human Rights Watch and one hundred and four other organizations signed a letter urging the UN not

to use this IRA definition. As a result, there are, of course, a number of competing definitions of antisemitism, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, that has a more nuanced understanding of one criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism. As their website notes, the Jerusalem Declaration is a product of an initiative that originated in Jerusalem and includes in their numbers international scholars working in anti Semitism studies and related

fields including Jewish Holocaust, Israel, Palestine, and Middle East. But of course the IRA definition is the one that the Trump administration wants to follow and the one that universities are adopting. Maybe it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. It's not because this administration that engages with the far right and propagates conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement, It's not like they actually care about anti Semitism. It's

just a tool. As Jewish organizations working to combat anti Semitism, such as the Nexus Project explicitly point out it's a way to quote weaponize anti semitism by attacking free speech DEI foreign students, and in this environment we can understand why there's so much fear to speak up and so much self censorship. You can be falsely accused of anti semitism for bringing up Palestine as a topic of discussion, for trying to study what's happening, for trying to produce

any sort of knowledge on what's going on. I also really want to score that this self censorship and fear that already existed in a space in academia is a worsening trend today, but it definitely existed before October seventh too. Take it from me as someone who studies Palestine in American academia. Palestinian scholars have long been under attack in the American academy. But after October seventh and before Trump, this of course got worse. External actors and donors got

involved in campus governance. As we saw in Harvard and many other places, University administrations cracked down on students, professors, everyone, often preemptively doing the work of the right wing because they thought that taking away freedoms from some groups wouldn't come back to bite them. And this is how Palestine is now one of the cudgels that Trump is using

to attack universities and the academy. And it's an effective cudgel because some liberals in universities and outside universities can also be persuaded to attack scholarship on Palestine and students who speak on Palestine. But those exceptions to academic freedom that have long existed in the academy are now being used to attack everyone. A quick note here to outline

what academic freedom for a faculty member actually means. As the American Association of University Professors the AAUP notes on their website, academic freedom has these main elements. Number one, the freedom to discuss relevant matters in the classroom. Number two, the freedom to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and creative expression, and to publish the results of such work. Number three intramural speech freedom from institutional censorship or discipline

when addressing matters of institutional policy or action. And number four extramural speech freedom from institutional censorship or discipline when speaking or writing. As citizens. So faculty members are allowed to speak on matters as citizens. Being a faculty member and being a member of the university community does not take away their right to be citizens. That last one

is worth emphasizing. To maintain universities as sites of free inquiry and knowledge production, there has to be academic freedom, and that freedom includes teaching, research, intramulo speech, and extramural speech. You can't censor people you don't like or don't agree with and think your institution and your university will continue to function. You certainly can't do that and think the right wing won't sniff it out and use it against you.

So what's to be done? Things are happening, People are fighting back, and just like Palestine has been the Canarian the coal mine for so many things, including the assault on American academia, Palestine may be one of those crucial issues that helps academics and students and faculty to organize

in this moment. For example, because of the arrests of pro Palestine students and their attempted deportation, the American Association of University Professors, alongside the Middle Ease Studies Association and the Night First Amendment Institute, sued the Trump administration over this policy of arresting and threatening deportation for a lawful

speech on Palestine. The AAUP is also now ap plaintive in a number of cases challenging the Trump administration on a tax on DEI, attempting to abolish the Department of Education, cuts and federal funding of research, etc. An attacks on students and faculty after October seventh, which set off this whole barrage of attacks on university since then, have galvanized

people to demand their university administrations uphold academic freedom. In twenty twenty four, nearly forty chapters of the AAUP were founded or re established across the US. Even professors who don't teach or study the Middle East or Palestine are starting to speak out about the dangers of these moments and these trends. I think people are starting to realize that American universities will have to uphold their ideals of faculty governance, free inquiry, free thought for everyone, or they

really will cease to exist. That's all I have for you today. I'll be back soon to talk more about the latest developments in Palestine. Stay strong, everybody, Thanks for listening.

Asheville Blade. David, welcome to the show.

where it takes some digging. And here I'm really thankful that TNN's policy analyst, who I think you y'all have had on your ftim's Kareem Green into the show, was actually there to yes, was a huge help in reviewing this bill. I've been covering with North Carolina politics and it's various horrors for a long time. But even still, it's good to have like legislative expertise on that. And SA four forty two changes the definition of child abuse

to not include transphobic child abuse. Essentially, it was written against the very fictional specter of like, oh, if you have questions about this trans stuff and you get your kids pronouns wrong. DSS could come like snatch them overnight, which is not a thing that has ever happened, no, including them, especially North Carolina, like yeah, yeah, so, but what it does is just bluntly open the way, especially in the state foster care system, for just anti trans

bigotry across the board. You know, at this point it's like, okay, well, placement can't be NYE based on someone's religion or their race and being a transfer, you know, it's like that's that's being added those predicted identities. It's also essentially letting the ground work for just even more legal sanctioning of

conversion therapy, which is of course torture and abuse. I think cream summed up as that if you if you don't have a trans can do abuse, foster care will provide one for yeah, which is it's really bleakah we chuckle, but it's we chuckle and like gallows humor because he's

that absurd. So SB four forty two was the one that kind of went through the whole legislative process first, and in some ways it had less of a party line treatment than HB eighth five eventually did so you know, say credit where do but NC Senate Democrats, of whom there aren't terribly many, but there are some did universally vote against this bill. They were like, no, we're not approving it. However, the GOP has a two thirds majority

in there, so it's really not as necessary. They can put in sially over right a vito and there where things really came down to as North Carona House, and they are nine Democrats joined with the Republicans to pass this, and then it got to the desk of Governor Josh Stein, who won in a landslide last year like North Fromine Democrats. Despite how Jerry mayor of the state is, which we'll talk about more in a little bit, actually did pretty well.

The GOP no longer had a supermajority in the House, and the Democratic candid for governor, former Attorney General Josh Stein, won in a route. So essentially that was supposed to prevent bills like this from becoming law, because okay, if the Dems held the line in the North Carolina House, the Republicans on the supermajority, then the governor vetos it, then they can varide of the video that didn't happen so not only did non Democrats side with Republicans Stein sign.

of insult to injury sort of situation. Interestingly, North Carolina's gay inc organizations, you're kind of like the mainline nonprofits and in North find there's like a quality and see there's a campaignsion the quality, which is regional is based

in the state here in Aashville. They actually had been very strongly against this bill, despite some Democrats supporting it, but they stopped short as will become a theme with condemning or attacking any of the Democrats who did, which was a giant signal that this is not an issue you're really going to fight Democrats on. So the governor then thinks, well, there's no political capital be lost signing

this thing. On the same day, he did veto HBATO five, along with a bunch of other bills targeting, you know, in quote marks dei measures, which are basically attempts to smash out anything that's not far right and further research shape the state, and he did veto those. The language you use, though, was definitely what a lot of us

become used to. It's the oh, this was divisive. No trans people mentioned, no trans healthcare mention, no trans rights mentioned, just vaguely, well, this is divisive and it's a distraction. So HBAO five does actually go back to the legislature, and one Democrat had voted for HBAO five, so there was a tension turning of Okay, is this guy gonna still vote for a veto override Representative Dante Pittman, because it's a big deal, supposedly anyway, for a Democrat to

defy their own governor. It's one thing when it's like you're just okay, you know the bill's going to pass. It's still horrible, but it's supposedly a harder bar to reach or at least that's what there is. You know, ostensibly pro Queer Democrats are telling us for them to go on the record and be like, no, I'm joining with the other party to override your veto and like give you the middle finger, essentially. But what happened when he got to the House, he actually did did vote

to hold with the veto. But another representative we've been out on a pretty dubious excused absence when HBOO five was originally their Democratic rep Nasif Maajid, voted in favor and that was enough to make it law. So the one thing that among Queer and transcing with Carolina, who liked a lot of other places, voted very heavily against the Republicans, you know, for the Democratic candidates and all. That's one reason they did fairly well last year to

stop exactly the sort of legislation becoming law. It just became law, and it did so thanks to members of the Democratic Party and in one bill, the Democratic governor.

kids to know who they are. It's not quite as a race as it was back in the nineties. Yeah, get health care. A trans adult who's a teacher can't have their health care covered anymore.

on every single front. It is a catastrophe. It is draconian all that. It didn't stop being so when Democrats started supporting it. Yeah, the kids hurt by this family's hurt by this aren't going to be any less hurt because a Democrat signed on to it.

to get their Republican budget through right. Yes, the stuff the Republicans are doing, a lot of it can't be implemented without the support of the Democrats. And the Democrats have been willing to support the fascist governments implementing this stuff, and that makes them a collaborationist party, yes, in a lot of extremely important cases. And when that happens. In North Carolina is one of the places at the forefront. And it has been at the forefront for like a decade,

for nearly a decade. Yeah, for nearly a decade. It's like eight years, seven seven, eight years nine nine. As of this year, it's nine years since HB two. Good lore along in the spring of twenty sixteen, sixteen, Yeah, oh that is yeah. This is do not do not go to sleep at five in the morning and then try to do math live on the area. It will come for you too, really truly. It was China subtract sixteenth of twenty Okay, this is this, this, this, this is this is your one moment of levity and a

bunch of extremely bleak shit. Isn'ta be a trying and failing to do math on air? Look, I can drive that's I'm thinking to it. But what we were seeing here is the way in which like resistance to the GUOPN this is a place like North Carolina is a state where in the midst of a just unbelievable national

right wing turn right queer people turned out to stop this. Yeah, and their reward for their resistance was the people that they had put in charge of defending them, and in as staggering of an example of the banality of evil as I've ever seen, just signed this horrific piece of anti trans legislation that couldn't have been passed without them into effect in the same thing as like fucking as a bunch of regulatory bullshit.

many many things I've done. We're gonna go back and talk about this in the context of North Carolina because I think there's a really very a very important thread that David you have been pulling on in this piece and in general that is really not well understood anywhere. That is about the structure and function of the Democratic Party in the South and the way that North Carolina has functioned is it's sort of like the moderate human

face of like the Greensboro massacre. Oh my, yeah, And this is one of those where to start thing.

wall of coercion. Yeah, and that is one of the better summaries, and it applies other circumstances too, but it is it just perfectly sums up kind of the historical real the North kind of Democratic party. And when Tyson was doing that, he was tracing this whole history from the eighteen ninety eight Wilmington Cudaeta and massacre, which is one of the most decisive events in American history. And I'd even say in like the history of the rise

of fascism too, to the current day. He was writing the late nineties, and it is part of a project of history. And one of the terms they were using was has this progressive mystique while you were having governors on their southern states during the Civil Rights era, where you know, giving angry speeches from courthouses and things like that, and North Carolina was trying to be the moderate example

of the South. Oh, you know, we put money into look at all these schools and roads were building this college system. We're building. We just built Research Triangle Park. You know, we're attracting. You know, it's the too busy to hate kind of myth. And on that note, they generally were more careful about repression, but it still happened.

You know, North caronin doesn't make the headlines and something of the like Selma did, for example, But there was a history of riots and a brutal attempts of repression from the forties all the way to the seventies in North Carolina, and they happened like in almost every city, major city there is here, you know, and some that weren't so major.

like it's one of the critical sights of this. Yeah, Durham was rioting in the forties. Yeah, like that, that's how far back it goes.

them from doing that. But a lot of the rights activist end up dead, yeah, you know, or there's still like violent crackdowns, you know, the Greensboro if he was a side at both of some really well organized like civil rights efforts and sit ins and more radical action too, but also have a lot of repression. You know, by nineteen seventy nine, when the States boosters are portraying, you know,

all that upheaval is a thing of the past. This anti racist marched or anti clan Mark, specifically organized by this communist group in Greensboro, was massacred. The clan and Neo Nazis came in. They just opened fire on people.

Largely they were acquitted later and in ensuing years, a lot of investigation has been done into this and various levels of local and state and aft the fact federal law enforcement were very complicit and things ranging from just kind of trying to sweep it under the rug to outright especially the local level like cooperating with the clan. A lot of them were either aware this is going on and did nothing to stop it, or even actively

fed the clan information. There's a book recently called Morningside that goes into a lot of a lot of this detail that courage folks take a look at. But like, that's the reality of North Carolina, and that's the reality beneath the progressive mystique. And one of the historians quote the piece mentioned that this is an exquisite instrument of social control because you've kind of already framed the discussion as, oh, it's just this genteel civil thing. We'll hear you out.

Just be a little more patient. But if stuff ever really escalates, there is the option of just flat out smears violence and massacre, and knowing the history of North Carolina, you know a lot of this was directed at black North Carolinians, but also it was used to crush labor stuff. A lot of the people killed in the Greensboro massacre

were also organizing in the textile mills. And North Carolina under the Democrats under their moderate period, had and continues to have some of the most draconian anti labor laws in the country, which takes some work. So that's kind of the reality in North Carolina and of the Democratic Party here, and they lean on that mystique heavily, and honestly, I think a lot of it is they evoke because you know, we're we're the defenders of the sane, sensible

civil status quo. Even sat Mustein's statements about Hbao five when he did veto it, it's like, well, this is divisive, it's making too many ways. We need to get back to business, which they mean not as the business garnment. They literally mean business. We're marketing the state and making more money, and everything means making more money for the gentry.

So that's kind of the reality North Carolina beneath this kind of you know how, how things supposedly are better and more progressive here in the end of the day, you can still get massacred.

more legally and violently marginalized, are wildly undercounted. But it maps to about the same numbers I think of trans people in the country. The ESME population is about thirty three to thirty six percent live in the South, and in the twenty twenty three one the next highest amount live in the Midwest, which is kind of different from how you see things portrayed that you know, we're just this, ye, this coastal you know, elite bohemians on a few coastal cities.

As a matter of fact, there are a lot of trains people in the South and the Midwest. Yeah, we've been here for ages, We're still here. Yeah, Yeah, it's it's it's it's North Carolina, it's Texas, it's fucking New Orleans, West Virginia, Florida, you know.

each other. And b you can look at what happened in North Carolina, and it was deliberately This is the place where the right wing's anti trans strategy was born, and it was exported from the success that they had in North Carolina to the entire rest of the fucking country, Yes, right, with the bathroom bills. And this is something we're going to get into a second with the way the Democratic

Party like didn't react to those bathroom bills. The last point that I want to make here is that this strategy of control is also very similar to the one that the Democrats use in places like San Francisco, where you have this sort of progressive veneer over. You know that the consolation well, I guess, I guess the constellation of class forces is getting more similar as as big

tech moves into like that part of the South. But you know, it's this constellation of like, oh, hey, we are the queer rights Party, but our actual interests are this combination of housing developers' landlords and tech giants, and so as a method of social control, we're going to do this like, hey, we're extremely pro trends stuff, and then we're going to throw a whole bunch of fucking

trends homeless people into concentration camps. Yeah, and that's the thing that like, you know, we're going to I'm going to talk more about this on the show another time. With the ways that Trump's anti homeless executive orders, some of the models for it are the way that sweeps have been working in places like Oakland's. We've talked about this on the show before, but yeah, this mechanism of

social control is one that's really really widespread. And the South operates as a laboratory for that too, in the same way that it operates as the laboratory for the right.

you have to fucking fight in the South. Yes, that's all we've got time for for today, but tomorrow we will be back talk about the long and sordid history of the Democratic Party's progressive venear in North Carolina and what truly lies beneath it, and we will look how the original response to the twenty sixteen bathroom bills set the stage for both Democratic Party in North Carolina's passing of anti trans laws today and the future of the

rest of the country. Welcome Dick, It Appened Here a podcast about things falling apart and also sometimes about how claiming that you were going to put things back together and then not doing it makes things fall apart even worse.

I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we're going to be continuing with part two of my interview with David Forbes, an editor and journalist for the Trans News Network in the Asheville Blade, about the history of the North Carolina Democratic Parties progressive veneer over their agreement with Republican policy, and importantly, how the Democratic Party's original response to the anti trans bathroom bills from twenty sixteen paved

the way for where we are today. So enjoy, let's talk about the original bathroom bills, because I think there's some knowledge well okay, I don't know. It's been almost a decade. Yeah, so I think people may have forgotten how this all start. Is let's talk about the first bathroom bills, what happened, and then how the Democrats kind of ensured that they would stay in place.

in last minute. It clearly drew from the larger anti trans far right policy circles which North Caroin Republicans are highly connected to. Those kind of Dems often kind of view themselves their own little like institution, like where the Democratic moderate it's like North North carnd Democrats have always been at their best. People of that tuation we talked about the Republicans here were like, okay, we're now in power, which they were starting in twenty eleven. Let's try out

this stuff from ALEC. Let's try out this stuff from some obscure right wing think tank. And that meant they were plugged in when in the wake of Obergefell, and also in North Carolina as well, the year before you'd had equal marriage for that whole swath of the South was kind of imposed by a federal court order or recognized by federal court order. So they were like, Okay, this isn't working. There is not just more d there is more de facto on the ground popular acceptance of

equal marriage. Now that's not the wedge was previously. So what do we shift to wile we shift to trans people, And so North Caron legislators very eager to try out far right policies. The North Caron GOP is far right even by Southern standards, which is interesting because the state's very split as far as like votes and demographics go. So twenty sixteens rolled around four years earlier, the Dems had done the usual thing they'd run a super conservative,

super pro business, white guy Democrat. He got trounced by Pat McCrory, who was the former mayor of Charlotte, and Rain is like, Oh, I'm a moderate, sensible Republican. I'm going to bounce out the legislature a little bit. But unlike too many outside the region and the state who kind of wrote oka in North Carolina just becoming this red state now like other Southern states have, they knew their hole was actually really precarious. Now they jerrymandered extensively,

so extensively that like North Carolina. The same year as HP two pass stopped being recognized as a democracy by the the policiers a study a matter of fact, the district Carolina they did a whole commentary later that year that these were the most rigged districts, the most area districts they'd seen, not just in the US but anywhere in the world. So that is where we live, That's

where we lived for some time. But the governor's like the statewide, so he's in a more precarious position, and they wanted a wedge issue in their view to drive out conservative votes. They also hate trans people and want to hurt us. So this HB two said that trans people can't go into bathrooms unless they use the one matching their birth certificate in any state building in North Carolina.

And this technically also includes like local government buildings, includes like social services, it includes like any educational setting pretty much. So this was clearly a slab dash affair. They didn't even have like an enforcement mechanism in there. But I did a few other things too, I think people forget about, which is it also stripped the ability of localities to make their own minimal wage rules, So it was also an attack on labor because those always go together and

not unrelated. Trans and quick people are only working class demographics, which I don't think gets set enough, and also essentially users. On reaction to Charlotte adding gender identity to its existing non discrimination ordinance, there's was a local one, but in reality, you know, if Chartte had never done that, they would have done a bill like this pretty shortly. Anyway, it was kind of just the excuse. And they also struck down all non discrimination ordinances across the state, like local

non discrimination ordinances. So this is a broad attack with trans people as kind of the point of the spear as it were, like the ones most in the front lines. It's a familiar pattern. You go after trans rights, you're also going after broad rights for any marginalized group because non disformation stuff is being struck down left and right. And also you're attacking labor yep. So you know, it really kind of set the model for things to come.

HB two sparks a massive international backlash. I think the indestment was four hundred million. The state lost four hundred million as companies pulled out, events pulled out. There was a boycott, a fairly effective one, honestly, that was started as grassroots though gay inc groups and even like just random nonprofits and some Democratic Party officials later joined in on it. So the money's being hemorrhage left and right. McCrory's being turned into a national laughing stock, if anything,

is proving a rallying point for the other side. Because twenty sixteen rolls around and in a year where Trump takes North Carolina and generally the Republicans do fairly well throughout the South, even in a swing states like NC, McCrory loses. He loses to the Attorney General Roy Cooper as a Democrat. Now, I would never say his pro

trains are about again some major betrayals he did. He was more willing to say, at least perfunctory statements about trains rights than any northbound Democratic politician as a statewide level before and honestly since, including the current governor. And yeah, he proceeded to win, so he gets in office. North Carolina gentry are historically plenty fine with big a treat, but the Republicans had by this point broken one of

their cardinal rules, which is they fucked with the money. Yeah, because like the state was losing money, They were losing business deals, corporate headquarters and stuff. And this is a lot of what the status quo, very antire labor says. Quote that North kid Democrats and Republicans had generally both supported in varying ways was in danger and you know, some of them persons were losing money. So they basically tell the Republicans in early twenty seventeen to knock it off, like, Okay,

you've gone far enough. It didn't work, you lost the election. They still do the Jerry manner had a lot of power in the state legislature, but they didn't have the governor's office anymore, so you know, repeal this, like we're getting too much bad to see. And what really escalated it was basketball is kind of a religion in North Carolina, especially college basketball, and the NCAA said, look, we'll pull the tournament out of HB two is still in the books.

And at that point there became like these back and forth sessions. Earlier in December, there was this compromise effort where supposedly Charlotte would strike its non discrimination stuff on its end. It was currently like the source of legal challenge. They'd gone to court to fight to uphold it. And

this should have been a warning sign. The governor, ELEC. Cooper, at that point brokeer kind of this deal where okay, Charlotte, you take trains people out of your non screaming short and insa of your own accord and the state will repeal HB two. Well that didn't happen. They did the first part, and then the least legislators were like, okay,

well that's nice, we're not doing anything about this. That should have been a lesson about complying in advance, but it didn't really seem to take Sadly, so HB two wastll in the books. By March, you know, March Madness is coming up and all that, And so they finally do a repealed and this is still hailed as oh, look like back in the day, like even Republicans, some Republicans would like repeal a trans bill when it got this big backlash. Their federal funding was being threatened as

well for the state. It's not like federal education funding and all. That's not what happened though, And what happened I think is actually was a lot more ominous and a lot more revealing. What passed instead was honestly a second bathroom bill called HB one four to two or HB two point zero, as a lot of activists and queer folks in the ground Transfer the Ground dubbed it.

And what this bill did was it technically took out the bathroom ban, but it's put in a bunch of byzantine provisions about who could use the bathroom wins, so it would still take a court case for a trans

woman to go use the women's bathroom. It kept all the anti labor stuff, and it kept all the non discrimination stuff struck down for years, like you couldn't pass local manscration protections for years, and at this point the pressure is mounting the Democratic Party for the first time most of a decade, their votes in the legislature actually matter because the Republicans they're split between kind of the capitalists who are hate trains that were using this as

a wedge issue and now the money's being fucked with they're ready to repeal it, and some of the others who are like, no, no, we really are dedicated to hating trans people. The state can burn as long as trans people's lives are made more miserable. So they have the votes in their own caucus to pass this. So for once DEM's had a lot of power and they could have easily been like no floor or peel or nothing, and they probably would have gotten it through. They did not.

They sided with the Republicans. They passed this mess that essentially kept the status quo. It was just barely enough for the NCAA, who even noted they even know their corporation. Basically they know it was reluctant that they were, you know, putting the tournament back in NC, but they did. The governor knew. Governor Democratic governor signed it. I probably forget as mentioned earlier. HB two passed with two Democratic votes. In the first place, this is like not a new

trend of this happening. Heck, anti queer stuff even well before that would often pass with democratic support as well as Republican support, often be signed by democratic governors, So this is not an entirely new thing. And this is also a point where you can see gay Ink splitting a bit because gay Ink did actually had actually condemned h two point zero, but once it became passed, they either offered tempted statements or they backed down, and so

the lesson from HB two wasn't okay. Back in the day, you know, nine years ago, trans rights used to be more of a consensus, even among moderate conservatives, at least basic protections for it. And a good example was how unpopular hbtw was it was repealed under all this backlash. It did get a backlash, but it wasn't really repealed.

And as a matter of fact, what the far right learned was that when it comes down to it, the Democrats North Carolina, it turned out, elsewhere will fold if trans rights has made an issue.

has does played out across the country. Like there have been a lot of states where Democratic governors have signed anti trans bills, yes.

very good for trans people. Because of the weird Pritzker corruption, his sister is trans. And also the moment the government was like, oh, hey, we're gonna like sort of make a big show of threatening like healthcare funding, Pritsker just folded and let all these hospitals stop providing transcrir to youth, even though it is literally a violation of Illinois like of Illinois discrimination legislation. Yeah, they just back down and refuse to do it.

hideously hated. The only way it can happen is if the Democrats go collaborationists inside with the Republicans, and that's what they're doing.

After HB two point zero they put out some prefernatory statements, but then they turn to gatekeeping and the ensuing years they very consistently tried to stifle any activism that was more radical or more principled to try to get this stuff off the books, and especially if it came to

holding Democratic officials feet the fire. I literally have an example in the article that I was physically therefore and witnessed, where a director of the canvass and Equality sees the mic as it was being passed some candidates to answer a stronger question from some transactivists and change the question to something that didn't actually put any pressure on them at all, like just kind of absurd, petty stuff like that.

But the coom of effect has been that, you know, they turned to thinking about their political careers and their fundraising, and when push comes to shove again and again, they've shown they won't hold Democrats' feet to the fire. If anything, they will tell the trains people trying to hold their

feet the fire to shut up. So if you know that the lobby, the official lobby that's supposed to, you know, ostensibly on some level stand up for some mild version of trains and queer rights, will never give someone any shit for breaking ranks, not even like we can dem officials so and so and they're bigotry or whatever more we are sorely disappointed in or anyone of the boiler play things. They won't even go that far. That's too

far for them. So you have Democrats collaborating and a gay ink structure that has taken the energy and funding out of lat of other queer activism, but will absolutely will not fight when Democrats are involved. So if you're fascist, all you have to do is get some Democrats involved.

support your enemies? Yeah, what's the point of people that you elect, maybe even like get out you know and dock doors or whatever to get elected, who then don't do the one thing they're elected to do? And God asked too for some of the folks who support some of these gay ink ords, I was like, if they won't fight, now, what is the point of them, Why do they deserve any support from US as a community, or is it far past time to look to other alternatives.

There was only lesson hbto taught as well, which is if you want even the most die hard bigot to start losing their nerve to attack their money and their power, and then you don't stop if say, oh you have to compromise with a pragmatic solution, you ignore them, laugh in their faces, do whatever, but you keep pressing them because that was their thing. HQ too, there was a really effective campaign to boycott and it did have a

substantial effect. You know, the lovely weapon of vicious mockery really came in handy, and even the Hulgans didn't like becoming a national laughing stock. So there were less about how stuff could be fought as well. And the more radical history in North Carolina, you know, there are there are quier radicals here. You know, my city was hit by a massive hurricane last year, and honestly was a lot of US radicals getting out in the ground that

kept things from getting even worse. And you know, and just folks on the ground pitching in outside of government structures, not waiting for the official nonprofits who were either devastated or had not planned for this. So there are other alternatives, you know, and or heck that the hell I have to remember I could curse here that the fact that civil rights the low Attenson has gone to sitidence, and there was a lot of organizing in those movements. It's

a lot more Miltonant than folks. Remember that also went along three decades of riots and cities throughout the state before the old order even began to budge a little bite. And the lesson from that Democrats and North kind of status quo. And I see throughout the South and throughout the country it only budgets even starts to move when the cost of continuing the way it is become far too high.

always inflict a cost. Yeah, and I think a little more like thinking outside of elections, a little more bloody minded determination can really come in hand of the sense of like, if our enemies are like, okay, court rules against us, we're still pressing the attack. Okay, election goes against us, We're still pressing the attack. I think we can do way meaner and way better than they than they do on that front. Yep, something goes against us,

that's nice, We're still pressing the attack. You know, there's nothing in this healthscape of an empire we have to abide by, especially not in the South.

So I'm just gonna look around until I see one of these that feels like it's got culture war potential, and cracker Barrel is an obvious one, like if I'm looking, if I was looking out there, that's when I would pick right, Like.

It's funny though I have seen like I don't I don't know if it's from Chris Rufo, but you know, people similar in that orbit talking about how this thing actually is wokeism because minimalism is based on brutalism, which was invented by communists. So actually turning everything into this minimalist design is actually a plot from the Frankfurt School, the Communists taking over.

that they're very good at manipulating for political purposes. And I'm not going to sit here and lecture you and say, like stop commenting on this, stop talking about this stuff, but we do need to understand that this is the olds in the audience will remember the old Simpsons Halloween episode where the different like mascots from different companies like

come alive and start murdering people in town. And the solution that's an old ad man gives everyone is like, well, if you want to stop the monsters, just look away. Advertising feeds on attention, you know, and as every once everyone ignores the monsters, they go away. And unfortunately that's not how things actually work, because there's three hundred and fifty million people in the country and so whatever you choose to do about this isn't going to matter. But

the feedback loop is going to continue unabated. That much I can.

What's different is one of the things that's different is that the shooter basically followed in Brenton Terrant the christ shooters footsteps by covering their firearms and the gear that they were wearing and draw like I guess drew or painted on. I'm not sure. It looks like with like a white paint pat like whiteout or something like that,

a white paint pin and covered it. In the names of other mass shooters, references to racial annihilation memes like the Removed Kabab meme, which is in short, a memes celebrating the Bosnian genocide, and it was a meme that was specifically Brenton Tarrant had signaled in his like manifesto and I think on his gun he had a remove Kebob reference. But it's something he signaled and it was

on the shooter's firearm. As well as the names, I mean Tarrant, there's references to tarrent On there, Timothy mc McVeigh tem mcvay's name, just the word McVeigh is painted on there. Ted Kazenski, the Unibomber.

It started in like the early two thousands. It might have gotten started in the late nineties, and it was part of like this, there's this boom in webcomics in the late nineties when suddenly the people are able to make their own comics online and make livings off of them.

A whole bunch of guys made gaming comics after Penny Arcade, which is like the big one that blew up, And one of them was Tim Buckley, who did a comic called Control All Delete that was not good and he tried to have a serious storyline where his character's girlfriend has a miscarriage, and the strip in which he finds her having a miscarriage is called loss. And it's gotten to the point where people are abstracting the four panels into like a minimalist line representation of how the blocking

look like. It's a bit people have done everything like put loss memes on everything, like that's the joke at this point, more than a reference to the show is like,

look at this new crazy place. Somebody put a loss meme, and so yeah, it's a game, and a lot of what we're seeing with the shooter is like, oh, this is the natural extent of a bunch of things, and a fucking mass shooter putting a loss meme on the bear or on the side of their gun before shooting up a school is the natural furthest craziest extent of the loss meme. Right.

mass shootings. It is like it's a perfunctory use of slurs and of messaging that just kind of wraps around this whole like nihilistic fandom culture around other mass shooters,

and like that is that's what this shooting is. I've watched now like seventeen minutes a video of the shooter like showing off their weapons, going through their like diaries and journals, inspired by a whole bunch of like Eastern European mass shooters as well, and this shooter reminds me of participants of what's called the true crime community or TCC.

Not as in like the genre of true crime podcasts or documentaries, but it's more of an online fandom based on a personal obsession with mass killers themselves and specifically school shooters. And this community encourages reenactments and tries to get some people to do their own mass shootings. Yeah, and this is not the first one of these we've had in this past year. Now, the shooting in Wisconsin

last December. I spent the repnow, which we reported on on Nikodeppen here was also in this variant of like Columbiner True Crime Community Shootings. Repnow's name is on one of this shooter's rifles. Yes, there was a shooting in Tennessee a few months later which also referenced Repnow, done by a black white supremacist in cel whose manifesto was

full of like plagiarized memes and other manifestos. It's about this, like yeah, this complete lack of meaning, Like they they scattershot all of these memes and references and like bits of manifestos and images to just to make this whole mess of stuff to look at. But none of it actually means anything.

Buckley's dumbass cartoon. Like once you get someone in a mind state where they accept that they're willing to accept a lot of terrible things, right, And the goal here is creating content in the form of mass shootings, right, Like that that is the goal, and that is also what people are consciously. A lot of people want to

be a part of themselves. You mentioned the last year's shooting that committed by Samantha Rupp now, but there's also I found a December thirtieth, twenty twenty four article in Wisconsin Public radiowpr dot org their website. It talks about retnow, but it also gives the story of thirteen year old Jamie Sitz, who killed herself in twenty twenty four and

was a member of the true crime community. The police went through her phone and they found a bunch of memes and reference and like her contributing to online discussions and telegrams and stuff for PCC. She was obsessed with the Columbine Kids, right, She like engaged in a lot of those conversations, and she was posting about her plan to kill herself, but she was not interested in carrying

out like a mass shooting or killing other people. And that fit in fine within the discourse like people encourage presents basically, right, Like, yeah, I think part of the thriller hitary is just wanting to feel like you sitting on your ass on the computer, you are impacting the world in part because like you feel like that's the only chunk of the world that you've got right like, and that's you know, tied into like the hopelessness and

the nihilism of all of this. I found a random poster on Reddit in a discussion of the TCC community. I actually really liked this person's summary of it. And this is like seven years old. Interestingly enough, it's not a new phenomenon. It dates back to inter war period Germany. There were many Germans at the time who were fascinated with the topic of extremely grisly murder and torture, especially

such instances where sexual arousal was involved. The German language even has a word for it, lust mort or lust murder. Serial killers were on the rise at the time, and many of them claimed to get extreme amounts of carnal pleasure from the act of killing or maiming. And there is this weird vein. I found another study as I was looking into this that uses the true crime community term.

It's from twenty fifteen by Naomi Barnes of Utah State university, and it was like looking into fandoms that had grown up around serial killers and around spree killers online. And Naomi is using the word true crime community for just the general term of people who are interested in true crime, not in the way that you and I have been using it.

social media accounts. Right, it's based around like specifically like like an obsession over actually doing these acts and like and and like they like cause play as these people. This isn't like your you know, average white woman who likes listening to true crime podcasts. This is this is something very different.

the like. And she gives this mix of people being like, oh, like the first person he quotes who went to lands of houses, like, I was actually just really sad and I just wish none of it had ever taken place, Like it was all really horrible and it made me feel bad. But then a bit later she gives you responses from people who have the opposite reaction, Like there's this fella Paul, who does not specify which murder site they visited, but specified that it was a place where

a murder victim's body was found. And Paul responded, Honestly, I felt a static, like, Wow, I'm going to a place someone was killed. What if there are ghosts the murderer him or herself? I was absolutely off. My kid. We dug up some dirt and we keep it in a little glass bottle.

of cancer due to vaping. I've not been able to look at their Internet presence or activities in the intervening years since changing their name, and their current gender identity is still not very clear. In a translation of their cyrillic journal, they discuss detransition quote, I don't want to dress girly all the time, but I guess sometimes I really like it. I know I am not a woman, but I definitely don't feel like a man. I regret

being trans. I wish I was a girl. I just know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we have today. I also can't afford that I only keep my long hair because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I'm tired of being trans. I wish I never brainwashed myself. I can't cut my hair now, as it would be an embarrassing defeat and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported. It just always gets in my way. I will probably chop it on the day of the attack.

one of their magazines. They wrote, I am the wokeler, why so queerious? Right on the other side of the magazine had an antiqueer slur. So I view this type of stuff in the same way I view the inclusion of like the Lost Meme or like Ted Kaczinski or all this other stuff. This this like memafied version of trying to throw everything at the wall just to make everything mean nothing right. And it's it's extremely like obnoxious and annoying.

to use this and are trying to use this. One thing that I would point out, and I don't know if this is certainly not an on balance optimistic thing, but making Americans focus on a mass shooting for more than a day or two not as easy as it used to be.

doesn't need an excuse to go after queer people. I don't think an event like this will make the hammer come down much harder. This could be a boy who cried wolf situation for the anti trans right, since their base already thinks that every mass shooter from the past three years is trans. I did a whole episode on this last year, called fake trans Terrorists. The Gun Violence Archive says that there have been two hundred and eighty six mass shootings in the United States so far in

twenty twenty five. If one or two trans people do a mass shooting, that would still mean trans people, at one percent of the population, are less likely to do a shooting compared to CIS people. There was like one legitimate trans mass shooting targeting a school a few years ago in Nashville, and if this happens to be the second, I don't think that this new brain Rod Columbine true crime community shooting will make much of an impact on

trans people nationwide. Think of how quick conservatives moved on from the Zizians, and certainly being trans is not a motivating factor of this shooting. If you look at their writing and videos posted on YouTube before they did this, this nihilistic meme maximalism has no trans causation. It has nothing to do with being trans. There's no coherent or

ideological leftist screed, there's no pronoun pins. Their journal talk both about quote unquote hating fascism and inequality, while also hating Jews, Arabs, Mexicans, Indians, calling Somali's subhuman and criminal, writing that quote white people should rule the world unquote, but that minorities should quoe unquote have rights. While talking about ideological Nazi killers, they remarked, quote, I don't often find myself aligning with these killers specific ideologies unquote. They

said that they disliked racism but also were racist. They wrote about killing quote unquote fags while also calling themself one on one of their weapons. This shooter and all the memes and rhetoric they use is most similar to the Repnow shooting last December in Wisconsin in terms of the neo Columbiner school shooter obsession, as well as the white supremacist mimetic black in cell shooting in Anoc, Tennessee, last January. All these shootings are heavily referential, contradictory, and

intentionally incoherent. Right, every single extremist political faction is represented there because that that is the point, is combining all of these references to previous mass shooting. So they're incorporating everything they can and things that they just think are funny, like just a whole bunch of like meaningless memes.

Trump has been cooking a very weird thing, accusing her of mortgage fraud as a as a way to remove her from the Federal Reserve Board. But Trump does not have the power to do this. So we are in the midst effectively of a confrontation over this, where Lisa Cook has continued to just not actually leave her position at the Federal Reserve and is going to court. This is an extremely significant escalation of what up until this point had largely been a series of attacks on the

Federal Reserve's governor, Jerom Powell. There are a few factors here that one of the most important things is Trump's anger over continuing high interest rates or sort of high interest rates. Trump wants to slash interest rates because he thinks it will make the economy grow more. Now, when I said this was the crossing of the rubicon, what this is is this is the beginning of the fight over whether the Federal Reserve is going to be an

independent density right. Trump has been attempting to, as we've talked about in the show, appoints Stephan Miran as another one of the governors on the Federal Reserve's board. Miran very explicitly wants to eliminate the independence of the Federal Reserve for what to talk about exactly what that means in a second, But I want to read this quote from Fortune magazine interport on it describing a JP Morgan analysis of the situation, because this has really spooked a

bunch of major financial institutions for very obvious reasons. Quote in a note on Friday, JP Morgan analysts, led by chief economists Bruce Cassman highlighted key proposals such as giving atwill power to the President to fire FED board members and fedbank presidents, giving Congress control of the Fed's operating budget, and shifting the Fed's regulatory responsibility over banks and markets to the Treasury. So this is what Stefan Mihern has been proposing. This is what looks to be the long

term plan of Trump and the people around him. Eliminating the Federal Reserve is a long, long time goal of the far right for an extremely convoluted variety of reasons. The FED in and of itself is an extremely confusing entity. Its creation has spawns a full century of academic arguments about what the States even is, and it's complicated to describe. Also because most of the information will not most, but a significant portion of the information about it is just

anti Semitic conspiracy. Because this is eliminating the Federal Reserve. In the return to quote unquote sound money is one of the key elements of a massive network of sort of right wing, very old right wing conspiracy theories. But I think that the thing that's best understood by people kind of is just about the Federal Reserve is the FED printer meme. And the Federal Reserve is the body that creates money like that is, that is authorized to create the US dollar. That is why it's a Federal

Reserve bank. It is critical on a level that is difficult to express to the entire functioning of the world economy. Now, the Federal Reserve Board is technically a government entity, but it is it was set up explicitly to be quote

unquote non political. Now the extent to which that's true is fuzzy, obviously, But the point of it was so that there would be a large scale financial institution that controls like the money supply effectively, that that controls enormous portions of US sort of macroeconomics policy through its due is control of interest rates would not be able to be like directly interfered with by the President or Congress. That is that it's the whole point of this, you know.

It is effectively a measure to instill confidence that the US isn't going to just like turn the printers on and print a bunch of money from every other capitalist in the world.

worried about inflation. But I actually think that focusing just on that part of the Federal Reserve is significantly underestimating how important the Federal Reserve is to the entire structure of the economy. There are so many just sort of random things that it does that are not particularly well understood. I was talking about this earlier in a meeting, but nificant portion of the gold held by countries around the world is literally just kept in a vault under the

New York Federal Reserve building. And that's just the sort of seemingly random thing that it does. I was reading about its payment system for reasons that I'll talk about in the episode to do about this next week. It just in a footnote about the payment system, there is a part where it says that the Federal Reserve runs the payment system for the World Bank. So this is something that is a critical, critical, an extremely complicated center of the entire capitalist world.

overnight repo agreements, like inject liquidity into the market. There's all of these massive we are talking billions and billions of dollars of financial interventions that you basically never even hear about that have been stabilizing the economy since two

thousand and eight. And this apparatus, if it is dismantled, if it has directly seized control of by Trump, and and part of what's going on with this board is that Trump is trying to get a majority of the people on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve to be his appointment so that he can control it directly, and so they can start bringing it under directly under

the control of I mean the president effectively. Right, this is something where if you unleash the doge people on the Federal Reserve and the payment systems, the settlements and clearance systems stop working. We are talking about a catastrophe that it's unclear to me whether it's even been modeled.

There are so many different complicated things that this institution does that these people do not understand particularly well at all and think that they can use to just sort of permanently create a bubble economy that they can ride. And this is the first sort of shot over the battle. Isn't even the right where this is the first engagement

over the fight for that. There's also been a lot of sort of taco analysis of this, arguing that this is actually Trump backing down from trying to fire Jerom Powell to just try to fire one of the Reserve board members that's not backing down. There's also a chance to heal that if this works, he's going to try to fire Powell too. So we're going to We're gonna keep watching a situation. I'm going to talk more about it next week when we know more, and also talk

about what the Federal Reserve is as an institution. And we're going to continue monitoring the situation because it is extremely important and handing the keys over to these people is something that is dangerous enough that it is creating significant pushback among the actual people in finance and in the banking system who matter.

these terriffts. We've talked about this situation with Brazil fairly extensively on this show. The thing about imposing tariffs on a country to get them to fall in line with the American policy is that it pisses off everyone in the country, regardless of whether or not they would traditionally be US allies. And so there's you know, it creates a massive countervailing pressure against the financial incentive to fall

in line and stop buying Russian oil. I also, very briefly want to talk about something that I think is a sort of part and parcel of the tariff policy that Garson you mentually want to talk about, which is like the US purchasing ten percent of Intel.

how a lot of the bailout worked. But the thing about if you look at the bailouts from two thousand and eight and you look at the US like purchasing the automakers, the US got these really weird specific shares that don't give any kind of controlling interest and are the direct rationale for this that the US should just own part of the chip manufacturers because they're effectively like

domestic national security resources. Significant portions of the market think that this is going to be a continuing tread and the US is going to continue buying stakes in these companies. There is a sort of symbiotic relationship here in the sense that, like, on the one hand, it's obviously not great to have sort of stakes in you bought by the US governments and have US government federal policy directly

dictating what these companies do. But on the other hand, it creates for these actual companies themselves, It creates a sort of symbiosis right where these people now have effectively guaranteed state backing that can bail them out of all of their unbelievably terrible business decisions around basing all of their production around AI. So yeah, and this is all sort of part of the same hypernationalists direct national socialism, if you will. Yes, kind of natural sentence, but.

new redistricting map. A GOP house probe has begun to investigate if the DC crime stats have been faked this whole time, making it look like crime is low even though it's obviously super high as we all know. Yeah, as Mia said, we have socialism now with ten percent of intel and Trump and Hague says announced that they want to change the name of the Department of Defense back to the Department of War because it quote unquote sounds stronger.

gentleman in all respects unquote. She also denied allegations that Prince Andrew ever had sex with a minor in her home, saying that a substantiating photograph is quote unquote fake.

pressure DC to change its cash less bail policies. The other executive order targets cashless bail nation Why, and asks the Attorney General to make a list of quote states and local jurisdictions that have, in the Attorney General's opinion, substantially eliminated cash bail as a potential condition of pre tray release from custody for crimes that pose a clear threat to public safety and order, including offenses involving violent,

sexual or indecent acts, or burglary, looting, or vandalism. The Attorney General shall update this list as necessary.

Second Executive Order from August twenty fifth, titled Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag. Let's start with a clip from Trump. I don't want to just place super long Trump clips because they know that can be annoying. But the way that he talks about disorder is kind of more interesting than the way the order is written. But we will talk about some of those smaller details included in the actual text. But here's a clip from c SPAN.

and it's when you burn the American flag. It incites riots at levels that we've never seen before. People go crazy in a way. Both ways. There's some that are going crazy for doing it. There are others that are angry angry about them doing it. Do you want to discuss that?

is constitutionally protected see taxes fee Johnson unquote. The order directs Theatory in General to enforce criminal and civil laws against acts of American flight discration that cause harm unrelated to First amendment expression, which could include charging people with violent crimes, hate crimes, a legal discrimination against American citizens, what violations of American civil rights, crimes against property and peace, as well as conspiracies and attempts to violate in aiding

and abetting others to violate such laws, so it's like an anti rioting thing. The dj will also look for cases where American flag discretion could violate applicable state or local laws, such as open burning restrictions, disorderly conduct laws, or destruction of property laws, and will refer such matters

to state and local authorities for potential action. Finally, the Secretary of State shall deny, prohibit, terminate, or revoke visas residents, permitsture realization proceedings and other immigration benefits, or seek to deport any foreign national that has engaged in American flag to secretion activity. So that's how they're going to go after it. Rob, Are do you anything to say on this flag burning thing?

DC Safe and Beautiful Order from a few weeks ago. Right, the Secretary of Defense is instructed to create and begin manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit within the District of Columbia National Guard who will be deputized to enforce federal law.

To quote the order quote, the Secretary Defense shall immediately begin ensuring that each state's National Army Guard and Air National Guard are resource trained, organized, an available to assist federal, state and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate,

as appropriate under law. In coordination with respective Adjuncts General, the Secretary Defense style designate an appropriate number of each state's trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes. In addition, the Secretary Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resource trained and available for

rapid nationwide deployment. National Guard walking streets of DC are now carrying firearms after first being deployed without their service weapon, and since the operation in DC he began on August seventh, or now been over a thousand arrests, including dozens of undocumented immigrants. Currently, the Pentagon is planning to deploy thousands of National Guard to Chicago to continue Trump's alleged crime crackdown.

The Guard will be activated in states like Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming, with effective status ranging from August through mid November, and operations expected to start in early September. Importantly, as we saw in DC, national guard from other states might

deploy two other states. Specifically, in the case where Trump doesn't get cooperation from the governor who is in control of the national Guard of each state, he can deploy national Guard from somewhere else, like what he did in DC, pulling national Guard from other Red states being deployed to d C but mobilized in those Red states. So national guards from all of these states could be deployed in

a town near you, no matter where you live. And this operation specifically with these like seventeen hundred National Guard troops is specifically to assist ice. His plan to do this, like anti crime deployment in Chicago, is a separate yet similar plan. It's also pulling from national Guard. But these things are two separate operations according to White House officials.

to expand the number of people on ICE. This is why they're pulling National Guard out to do this kind of stuff, which that like they don't actually have the repressive capacity to just occupy cities and they're trying to find the manpower to be able.

alleged belonged to the school shooter. This account used in nine A symbol, and an affiliated Twitter account made other nine A references. These claims gained a lot of traction from leftist accounts and armchair experts on Twitter and Blue

sky Lots. People were very eager to talk about something else besides that this shooter was trans and many pinned the blame on seven sixty four, the child exploitation group that operates on discord and telegram that Blackmaile's children and encourages some to commit acts of violence like school shootings. I talked about seven sixty four on my Nihilist Violent

Extremism episode from earlier this year. As these claims spread online, I remained skeptical because this shooter did not seem to really fit the profile of a nine A or seven six y four grooming victim. This shooter did not really seem like an O Nina acolyte. They more closely resembled

the True Crime Community fandom. And while sometimes True Crime Community or TCC may use O Nina references because other mass shooters have or because previous mass shooters have been affiliated with Nina and really groups, I did not see much evidence linking this shooter to nine A based on the videos they posted to YouTube, And while some Nazi Satanist types have helped facilitate the Columbiner or TCC fandom, there was no solid evidence linking a group like seven

to six' four to this latest. Shooting the shooter was in their mid. Twenties they weren't a fourteen year old being groomed into doing a mass, shooting and then On thursday, morning the forum account alleged to be The minneapolis shooter and the source of claims calling them a NINE a or sen six four grimmy victim started posting again on the. Forum it wasn't the shooter's. Account the shooter did not

fit that. Profile they weren't in a Cult Nazi. Satanist they were obsessed with mass, killers and translations of their cerecict journal have helped to substantiate. THIS a journal entry discussed taking pleasure in dressing up as a school. Shooter quote TODAY i assembled a school shoot cosplay. Quote and in translations of their, journal they made explicit references To True Crime COMMUNITY, tcc saying that they might cringe if they joined an ONLINE tcc community and it could make

them not want to follow through on doing an. Attack doing ONLINE tcc fandom as mostly full of. Posers, QUOTE i think joining a community would alienate my future, unquote and QUOTE i feel a very small portion OF tcc feels AS i. Do harbor's admiration of intent. Unquote one more update BEFORE i closed the episode earlier, today On, THURSDAY Rfk junior was asked if he would now be

looking into if gender transition drugs cause. Violence he responded by saying that they were already doing studies looking into, that and then quickly pivoted to talking about quote launching studies on the potential contribution of some of THE ssri drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence. Unquote this lines up WITH Rfk junior's general focus on psychiatric DRUGS SSRIs depression, medication as

he has previously. Stated that's all for us today On It Could Happen.