The Atlanta Shooting Part 1: Purity and Violence

couple of shootings in Atlanta since then, obviously there. Yes, we're talking we're talking about is is from from last year and it ties into many of the topics we discussed something the show Yeah A. March sixteenth, two one, Robert Aaron Long, a regular at Young's Asian Massage, refused to tip after getting a massage shouty a Ton, the SPA's owner, confronted him about the tip. Long simply walked away.

He got dressed, went to the bathroom, pulled out his gun and started shooting, leaving shout yit Ton dying on the floor. Driving from spa to spa, Long shot nine people and killed eight. The loan wounded survivor Alicia Fernandez Ortiz got on his knees and begged Long not to shoot. Long shot him anyways. There's a there's a there's a tendency, when confronted with true horror, to retreat into abstraction, as if the abstract is sheltered from the violence of the storm.

I intend, if briefly, to do it myself. But there is no safety there, only the same violence, repeated again and again and again in a thousand ways, with a thousand names, wearing a thousand faces. Because this is hell and we live in it, so on onto the abstract. There's a concept in Marxism called trigger um. It's a German word. It's usually translated as bearer, in the sense of an individual capitalist being the bearer of capitalist social relations.

They enact this relation by, you know, turning capital into more capital, which is what makes a capitalists. Uh. There is you know, literally endless debate over what this actually means. Most of it is pointless, and the meeting is contested enough that I'm going to abuse it a bit further and argue that a person can become a bearer of historical forces larger than themselves. Robert Aaron Long was the

bearer of a great number of historical forces. He bore the violence of capitalism, of misogyny, of racism, of horror, phobia, of whiteness, of Christianity itself, and he unleashed it into the world. It's just like the idea of like invoking, right, drawing on these external ideas into yourself, and then becoming them for like a brief period of time. Yeah, I mean, I think it's slightly different in that with bearing. It's it's not so much that that you're briefly invoking them.

It's that you're you're constantly a part of the relation. So the relation defines you and it and you you sort of you constantly enacted by the things that you do and doing, like the relation reel. It's more of like an ever present thing that is Yeah, Yeah, it's it's it's yeah. It's something that's just sort of structures how the society works. Right, Like we're all sort of like enacting the wage relation, right every time we like, do you know like doing this right now? Jobs? Yeah,

we are, we are enacting the wage relation. Yeah. And you know, I think I think a lot of people after the shooting were left asking, you know why and you know, we can name social and historical forces, we can talk about sort of antiation, violence and racism and horophobia, but what does it actually mean? And you know what, what are the forces that long and least in this world? What do they look like? And I think I think we have we have a good example of this from

right after Long was arrested. Police Captain J. Baker the Cherokee Sheriff's Department UH said this to reporters at a press conference. This is about Long in the shooting. He was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope, and yesterday it was a really bad day for him. And this is what he did. He apparently has an issue what he considers a sex addiction, and he sees these locations as something that allow him to go to these places and it's a temptation for him

that he wanted to eliminate. Now, Yeah, that there there was a lot going on in in in in those like two sentences, Um, so you know Cherokee Sheriff's Department, Oh yeah, there is there is so much going like there's somebody somebody somebody later. Yeah, it's incredible. One of the things that we're going to go more into the next episode. Is it like this, this is where I

what's his name? This is where the guy who just like drew a random line on a map that he found from like that he pulled out of his like national geographic thing who divided Korea and half like this is where he's from. There's this is yeah, there is a there's a lot of historical violence in this very specific part of Georgia that is all coming together here. And oh yeah, his school was also super racist, Like there's they had a mascot that was like doing all

the racist stuff. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, And you know, before we go any further, it's worth mentioning that, like almost immediately after the Honorable Police Captain gave that press conference, a bunch of people on the internet found out that Baker had posted like a shirt that said uh COVID nineteen and imported virus from China. I remember this? Yeah, Yeah, Sheriff was pretty pretty racist himself. Yeah, a part of

many many anti Asian tropes relating to conspiracy theories. Yeah, this is you know this, this this is classic twenties like anti Asian rhetoric. It's you know, it's stuff that's led directly to hundreds of attacks nation Americans since the start of the pandemic. And you know, the race is on slat, driven by every sector of American society. Now people immediately start speculating that Jay Baker had collaborated with Long to cover up the racial like motivation for his violence.

And okay, I think there's some truth to this. The cops have been collaborating with Long and his family in various ways. I'm going to read a part of an article in Vanity Fair written by the journalist Made Jong called how the Atlantispas shooting the victims the survivors tell a story of America, which is it's this is one of the best things that anyone's written about the shooting so far. I'm going to read a little bit of it because it's Oh boy. I ring the bell at

the family home, no one answered. Before I could decide what to do, a police cruiser showed up. An officer who introduced himself as Sergeant Clement, explained that the neighbors multiple people had called to report suspicious activity. The one good thing about Cherokee County, he told me, is that we look out for each other. It's like how it

used to be in the seventies. I asked Clement what specifically the neighbors were worried about, to be honest, he said, what they are worried about is they are afraid of revenge. What is the context for the like revenge line? Yeah, I mean it was basically just they were released, like they were terrified that like Asian people were going to show up, like to this community and take revenge for the shooting. Thought they were like attack like the church

or something. Well, no, like they thought they were gonna show up to like the family's house and like attack the neighborhood. Ah, when is when is that ever happened? Yeah? Yeah, you know, and and and you know, and you can like what what this demonstrates a is just the kind of community you're dealing with here. And be also, like you just you have very obvious close connection between the cops and like Long's family at this point. Yeah, And I mean in terms of like the covering up, the

covering up of like the anti h violence part of it. Honestly, I don't even know how intentional that would be, because I don't think he even recognizes that as racism. And I'm not sure how much the cops recognize that as a super big part, since that they are already uh, pretty pretty racist. I guess most Asian people, Okay, Like I I don't even know how much they recognize that

as being like a thing that isn't normal. Yeah, but but I think also, like I don't know it the the the explicitness to which particularly Baker is being racist like makes me suspect that he does that he would have been able to figure it out because he's like, like you have to go out of your way to like have a shirt that says like COVID imported from China, Like yeah, but I don't think that he would consider that racist, right, Like it's so so racist that, but

but he can't even consider that. He just think it's just like normal, right, Like he's yeah, I can see it's like in terms of like them trying to cover up any kind of anti Asian um stuff leading towards the shooting, they may not see that as like as anything to be covered up because they think that's just normal. So they're not going to like even focus on it because they're like, yeah, I mean obviously right, Like yeah, it's just we're so far down the rabbit hole that

it's hard to even like recognize it. I don't know, I'm just I'm just I'm just it makes it makes sense consciousness. And I think also the other thing that's going on here that that's I think the other part of why they wouldn't have recognized it if they didn't use that. Like okay, so like like most people see this and they're you know, they kind of like analytically, they kind of throw up their hands and they're like, wow,

this is anti agent violence. They talk about like the stuff the particular dangerous face by like Asian women and sex workers, and they sort of call it a day, and the analysis sort of like stops there, and like they're right, like that this is anti Asian violence. The violence is primarily inflicted on women, and it particularly on sex workers or and this is also very important people who are perceived as sex workers no matter what they

actually do. And yeah, like it's got worse than the pandemic. But there's a very very specific kind of violence that Long is doing here. It is and it's not it's related to, but not identical to the sort of post COVID stuff. And I think people really like did a disservice to what happened and did it diservice to help the people understand it by not actually poking at it, because this shooting is at its core and evangelical shooting like this is this is this is evangelical violences, is

Christian violence, and this is this is purity culture. And you know, if if you want to understand what actually happens here, you have to actually you have to go back and you have to understand the Christianity angle be because it is critical. Now. East Asia's contact with Christianity in the last two hundred years has been broadly speaking,

extremely bleak. Uh the conclusion of the First Opium War in eighteen forty two, which Britain forced China to buy opium to cover Britain's trade deficit with the country, and then the Britain also stole Hong Kong and then allowed Yeah, it all also had the effect of allowing Christian missionaries into the country, and it is genuinely unclear which one

of those acts has the highest body counts. The product of the Christian missionaries work was the Typing Rebellion, in which the self proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ waged a failed war against the ruling Ching dynasty. That like, even if even if you use like the lower estimates of the body count, that war makes World War One with like a minor border skirmish. It is a just incredibly devastating war. And you know that the product of this

is there's there's famines. There's a such a bunch of floods that happened at the same time, and this sends an enormous number of immigrants and refugees fling from their homes looking for any way to survive. And a lot of those people find their way to the US and they get imported by American capitalists who are, you know, looking for a new labor force to serve as like a racial racial buffer between right black workers after the

Civil War. And the other thing is like it's really hard to get to the West coast in there, Like they don't the Panama Canal. You have to go over land and it sucks and it's hard, and so they need a labor force that they can just get to

the West coast. And it's literally easier for people to come from China, and you know, and so they do, and it is a it is a brutal existence Chinese workers are worked at death building the railroads, and they you know, they struggled to carve out a life for themselves, and they do halting lead and certain leaps and spurts, but they create communities, they build towns and temples and

cultures in the beginning of a new society. And that's when the white working class decides they want to exterminate them because this is this is a great country. Uh yeah. White workers, you know, immediately start blaming Chinese workers for the low wages, and they use their workers organizations to

ethnically climb as the West. The results of this is a series of masscres that goes on literally for decades, stretching like into the ninth like this, this, this, these things starting like the eighteen seventies and they're still going in like the nineteen like like in the in the like the early nineteen hundreds. Um. And it's at this

point where Christianity gets involved. Um. I think like most people who are listening to the show have probably heard at least in passing with the Chinese Exclusion Act, just this sort of like the great triumph of like the dark alliance of racist and the white working class but what I think is less known about is the page Act of eight, which band quote lewd and immoral women

from entering the United States. And this is this is like, this is directly targeted at Asian and Chinese women, um, who were seen as a threat to the sort of racial and moral character of the white Christian American nation because of like they're supposed to like inheritent immorality demonstrated by the popular US demonstrated by the popular image of

all Chinese women as sex workers. And you know, I think, like looking back on this, this is extremely recognizable that this is literally just an anti trafficking panic, like this whole thing. It's just it's like this this this, this is like this is like proto this is like proto q shit um. And you know, and like like there is there is legitimately like sex trafficking going on, but the existence of like like the fact that there is sex trafficking gets used as this sort of like political

and racial image. It gets projected onto just like all Asian women who get portrayed as trafficking victims and you simultaneously be like saved but then also expelled from the US to preserve both there in the U s's purity and you know, like this image of Asian women is literally never changed. You will find it today, like to this day, people find people using like the exact same racist projections like consciously or unconsciously to talk about Asian

immigrants and like particularly SPA workers. It's it's this like it's it's this like incredibly toxic mix of like Christian moralism, sexism, horo phobia, and racism. And the racism element is really important because like, okay, well this is going on, Like prostitution is legal in California, Like you could just do this like there, there's there's no law against it. Um,

you know. It's it's so you think that like oh hey there, you know that this sort of like Christian panic would just be targeted against brothels, Like no, it's it's like very specifically against Asian women. And it's you know, this is because all of this sort of like the Christian fears about sex work is you know, and and their horror phobia is and and still is today incredibly deeply fused with this sort of like that this is this is like incredibly racist like concern over the purity

of the race. Yea, and yeah, you know this this will sound familiar to anyone who has been like paying attention at all to any of the trafficking panics, and if the anti trans stuff, any of just interracial dating was only extremely recently allowed at all of like the biggest Christian universities, like like they have like they yeah,

not a it is it's a it's a thing. It's a yeah, and it's and and that's and like the thing about it it's it's really it's it's really close to the surface, right, even even when they're not explicitly just saying it, Like if you look, it's been about two seconds looking, it's like, oh, this is what's going

on here? Huh yeah, yeah, And you know, so so that that that's sort of that's sort of one side of this whole thing, right, is you have this sort of like you have this sort of like Christian like anti trafficking panic that that creates that that like you know, it creates the sort of image of way age women are and has a lot of effects. But the other side of this coin is that there is a just incredible amount of sexual violence that America has inflicted on

Asian women, like particularly through its war. Successive invasions of the Philippines, China, Korea, and Vietnam saw American soldiers committing just untold and horrific sexual of violence and Asian women like to to the extent that like the US essentially just inherit Japan's like mass military rape system in Korea and just runs it for itself. Like there's this all of all of those things came home so massively. All the things that were normalized to oversee is just came

right back when all the souldiers came back. Yep, yep, yes, I think I canna stay next year like the and this this has a like the I don't know, I think people get the relationship between pop culture depictions and of you know, racist despictions of people in pop culture and the actual culture backwards. Like they don't help and they spread it. But like you know, the the like me love you long time ship from like Kubrick like

that that doesn't come out of nowhere. That's not just Kubrick like that's that is that's something that was brought home by the American racists and you know, like when when they got back and that stuff like it's it's not just that like the stuff is being spread by media, it's that the media is being influenced by the people who did this stuff and then came home. It is

the full circle thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I mean even still now, there's such a such a degree of like Asian women being like an object to possess, even more so than like it's like even more so than like regular women, which obviously under under like a lot of like Pachechal stuff in the States and you know overseas everywhere, you know, women are seen as objects to possess, but specifically there's that is so much heightened for uh

women of color and specifically like Asian women. Um that that idea, I mean you see it everywhere, for like the libertarian Asian girlfriend trope. You like, you see this in media all the time. Um that, like the Asian wife is something you own and it's it's a it's very extremely pervasive. Yeah. And I think the reason why is that, like this image gets refreshed every time of

generation comes from from a war in Asia. And you know that that's what because because the US has been fighting wars in Asia like forever, I mean basically since like they've been fighting wars of Asians late Agian hundreds, and you know, like the violence of each subsect generation just sort of refreshes this image of like Asian women as prostitutes bodies are supposed to just be like accessible

to white men at all times. But this has a sort of there's a kind of clash that happens here too, because like on the one hand, you have this sort of like racial and sexual feticization, and on the other hand you of Christian horror phobia, and this gives you this culture where like Asian women are at once seen as like hyperdesirable and hyper available, but are also just

like utterly despised for both. And this sort of like racist pathology, this like this, like this, like this, this sexual desire bixed with loathing is at just the absolute core of of the Atlantic shooting. And as if remind us if its origin, Long carries out as massacre on the fifty three anniversary of My lie and We're bad. So I think we now have enough context to like go back to long S initial description of why he carries out the attack, which to self describe sex addiction

is desire to quote eliminate temptation. Yeah, because I mean, you cannot overstate the degree in which both the police, uh, the church, and the shooter himself framed this not as an antigation thing, but as like as a as a as something addressing his sex addiction. Um, that was the angle he talked about it. Now, there's all of the antiation stuff that is like right under the surface, but it's like probably up so much of what's going on. But the thing that they were publicly talking about was

this so called sex addiction. Yeah, and and I think this is this is you know, this is this is a very important angle of this is we should actually talk about what that is and because and to understand because he just not like okay, so like the six edition is I think like actually sort of a thing that is a hotly debated Yeah, I don't know. I'm

not a psychiatrist, don't take advice to be. I think it's the slightly more legit of the two things that the of the two like fake syndrome things we're gonna talk about here, but this is not what's going on with him and you want to understand, Yeah, yeah, what's going on with this? We need to go back to enemy of the show. Purity culture. Um, friend friend of a friend of the pod. Yeah, I'm gonna say no. I I refused, I had I had friends, And there are a couple of times and I was like, I

refused to call this friend of the show. Dem it like I can't pay myself to do it, right. Joshua Harris just unsubscribed so long. Like by all accounts, is extremely religious. He's heavily involved both his church and his high school. Like his high school. Here's a public high school, but the public high school has like Christian athletic groups, which is a fun thing that they let you do in public schools. Um, yeah, it's great. H So you know, to get it, to get it an understanding of like

the kind of baptism we're dealing with here. Here's a line from the church's by laws. Quote. We believe that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, beast reality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography, or any attempt to change one's sex or disagreement with one's biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God. Yep, you know, and all of that's in the Bible. Yeah, they have you can tell because they cite three passages not if we

say that. Well, okay, I know there is there is beast reality, stuffy city is I think any incest is in there. Well, I mean they keep doing this stuff. But parts of the Bible are pro incests, parts of Bible are Antians. Yeah, it's um. The Bible has a real sticky relationship with the topic of incest um. But yes, I'm sure they thoroughly slite all of their passages for

they talked about when they talk about bisexual conduct. Yeah, it's well, I mean, you know, the one that's great is the attempting to change one's sex or disagreement with one's biological sex, a thing that I I'm guessing they're citing God created males and females and males and females. He created them, and I don't actually think so because they're not. They didn't. Okay, Yeah, this this is me. I'm just I'm just speculating based on my experience in

these in these types of types of groups. Yeah. So so speaking of these types of groups, so Long is like, Okay, so Long's church like expels him after the the shooting the murders. Yeah, but Okay. It's interesting because, like I'm they violated their own by laws because there's no way they could have done their expulsion through actual explosion protocol and that amount of time, because they would have acted

like send people to visit him in jail. See, I think you're overestimating the degree to which churches care about what their by laws actually say. Well, I mean it's the blanking on it. What's the thing, Matt Matt eighteen. There's like the thing that churches have that's like their

explosion protocol and they like send someone to this. This is I think you're I think you're slightly overestimating how much people actually care about that which it's all just a racket used to prop up the authority of the leaders and push people towards whatever political gains that the movement has. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, see speaking of getting people to submit to the authority and polue against the movements. Yeah. So we've talked about purity culture on this show, like

we had um. So we're not going to go into an enormous amount of detail about it here. The very should at least describe what it is. So the very very very short version is it's like it's an incredibly patriarchal, like Evangelical Christian religious system in which like sex before marriage is seen as like an incredible sin, and there's just like like focused on like the purity of the wife, and like like a woman is essentially the property of her husband, and the entire goal of for existence just

to like bare and raised children. So it was it was invented, but it was the modern version. It was invented in the nineties, strongly influenced by a book written by someone named Joshua Harris. It was called I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The book promotes a pro courtship to marriage pipeline instead of dating sitting dating will probably encourage you to have sex before marriage, which is of course bad um.

And under under all of this, under like the actual like you know, if you if you if you started digging into this, all the stuff it talks about in terms of like sexual purity um is about you know, women are responsible for men's sexual like um sins, right, Like if if a man lasts for a woman, that's the woman's fault, not the man's fault. Right, It's because women must be presenting in a way that causes that

to happen. Um. Right, So women's women's bodies and clothes should be designed in a way so that it will not cause men to stumble. Um. And by stumble they mean get horny. Um. And you know it's something that you know, your your body is both this thing that should be pure, but also you should be ashamed of it, right because it causes the sin Uh, women can't really have any sexual desire on their own. Women are going to really enjoy sex. Um. It's it's specifically for men,

and it's for procreation. Um. It's in in in intense value tied to your idea of like virginity and virginity extending out to like personal purity and spiritual purity. Like if you have sex before marriage, you are like like unclean. It's it's like it's like your it's like your chewed up gum, Like you like you would not pick up someone's Like if you found some chewed up gum on

the street, you wouldn't put it back in your mouth. Right, So that's the idea, like if you if if you're not a virgin, you are you are like chewed up gum, like you are already used your spent um. So you have, so you save save for marriage so that only your husband can chew up your gum, and then after your marriage you're just stuck there forever. Right. It's also like

very very very anti divorce. Um. And there's really no difference, like there's they don't really there's not much discussion around consent. Oddly enough, you know, as you know that they surprise you based on what I all just said, like obviously they don't care about consent. Um. There's like they view any they view a sexual assault just as bad as

consensual sex before marriage. They see them as the same thing. Um. It's it's basically the it's the same structures that they're both in equal sin uh And I mean that is that is purity culture one oh one. We could we could just do an entire episode on purity culture and

we probably would do. We could do like yeah, like yeah, yeah, I think the really important thing about it is like this is basically like in terms of they're sort of being like like I don't know what if you call it a counterculture, but they're sort of being like an evangelical cultural machine, Like it's this like this is this

is what they're pushing. Is like as like their mass movement for for youth expect especially in the nineties and two thousand's, we have we have stuff like purity rings, which is like you know, when you when you're a teen, you'll get like objects or jewelry which are like like almost like magical items you put on to like show that I am going to keep myself pure and by doing this, by doing this action, it's symbolizing that and

therefore internalizing it. There's also um purity balls, which is not what you'll so when when you use the word purity ball, certain things will come to mind, right UM. Unfortunately they're not as fun as what's what you are thinking. UM. A purity ball is just like a formal dance event, you know, like a ball that you put on um, which is meant to. It's a it's a meant to.

Usually it's like fathers take their daughters there and then their daughters swear to make a ginity pledge um to protect their purity of mind, body and spirit UM, so that they will not then infect you know boys, uh and cause them to stumble and and commit the sin of lust, which again is an incredibly weird thing to do at a ball like it. It's so weird. We also yeah, it's ye most most Yeah, it's well, I

think I think we've got into enough of that. Yeah, but the specific sort of thing, I think the last thing I will look at. There there there is one more thing were But so before that, I do want to point out that Joshua Harris, who like is in a lot of ways responsible, like single handedly responsible for an enormous amount of this, she is Japanese. And uh, yeah, fucking thanks for that one, buddy, great job, good ship man.

In he announced that he and his wife were divorcing. Yeah, so you and and and now and now no longer considers himself like the type of Christian he was before. I'm I'm unclear what his actual spiritual beliefs at the moment, but he did he did try to distance himself from his from from what I've read, like, it's unclear that he knows. So oh he he knows. He definitely knows. I can, I can, I can. I can guarantee that he's he's used to be running. He has a new grift.

Now it sucks, they always get new grifts. But actually when we will, yeah, we will get into the new grift industry in the seconds. Um. But yeah, one of the other things that's that's a big part of this is like a deep and abiding hatred of porn. Like all of this is yeah, like as you said, like in the list of by laws watching porn again, it's the same as sexual assaults. Yeah, it's it's morally the

same level of sin. Yeah. And and like you know, I mean and and you can read that both ways as how seriously they take watching porn and how seriously I take sexual assault because it does go it does go both ways. Yeah. Um. And this this thing, the fact that that this is this is like considered a sin is the apotheosis like the apothiosis that this is is poor an addiction, which again like not really dubious existence. This is this is this is even more dubious and

sex than sex addiction. Like there's no there, this is this is like this is just fake. Um. But there's an entire culture that's that's a like developed around stopping manifest seeing poor and these like there's like these incredibly elaborate accountability setups where like there's like apps you install on your stuff, like the ways to alter your IP

addressed to certain sites. Yeah, Robert Aaron Long the shooter, like he he uses a flip phone instead of a smartphone because he thinks having a phone will like lead in presentation. Um now Long. Yeah. And it's the product of this is that there's like, there's like this entire industry that is built up around quote unquote treating the porn addiction. Yeah. Um, and it's it's all bullshit. But Long had spent at twice been in one of these

facilities called hope Quest. Now, hope Quest is an affiliated for old friends that focus in the family. But that that's not actually the part I want to talk about, because what's more interesting about hope Quest is that it's founded by roy A. Blankenship, a former ex gay who left both hope Quests and the X gay community to live with his husbands. Now fun Now this what a what a what what what a what a funny pattern

we keep finding out? Yeah? No, Now, I think I think my two listeners, if you were, if you were not as cursed as as as we are as we are and you don't know what it ex gay is, um, X gays were. There are this movements of like Evangelical Gaze, who claimed that like this, this is the thing that starts in like the ninetcent two thousands, they claimed that like they've gone to conversion therapy and it made them

not gay. Yeah yeah, and and this and you know, and in partial part of partial was going on here is they claim that that like they did it voluntarily because like involuntarily doing conversion therapy had gotten to a point where it was like bad pr wise, because Jesus Christ, you were like nturing children and they're still torturing children, but but this time they're like, no, it's voluntary, and that this is like the big this is the rights

big cultural campaign against the gay right foods in two thousands, and uh, like I I would say this, like it's it's not exactly the same thing as the way they use detensitioners, but like there's a lot of it's very similar. And of course obviously that we now have the x X gay movement yeah yeah, and and you know, and and and to to like so okay, so like the X gay movement falls apart in like the late two thousands and nearly dozen tents because like it doesn't work.

The leaders, all the leaders were initially gay. He said they were X gay and then kept having gay sex because that rules. Yeah, and they all kind of realized, maybe we should stop doing this thing that keeps killing kids. Yeah, and Blaken Blankenship to his credit, like he'd been a big person doing this and then he was just like like one of his friends like suicide and he's like, oh shit, and so like he stops and he like

he's announce in version therapy and he's now appropriate. So many of the focus on the family people who were involved in like love one out all of these escay programs. So many of them then renounced it, accepted their their gayness, and then moved to Portland's fucking Oregon. So many of them didn't though like this, this is what's interesting about this,

so okay. So so while he was sort of figuring this out, blankets Ship had a founded hope quest, right, And so he leaves with the people who are running it now like our X gays, who they're like the only X gays left who didn't renounce it and who like still claimed to be X. I mean, they they've taken their stuff about how like homosexuality should be like dealt with by saying by having by marrying women and just not acting on it or whatever, like they they

took thatself out of their bios, but they apparently they still believe it, like like they they've never they've never these people have never probably come out against it. And you know what essentially happened was that like enough of enough of the ex gays like that, the collapse enough that like they had to find and they had to find a new thing to do. And the new thing they found to do was they went and they went

into the porn addiction treatment industry. Yeah, and also if if if you want more background like the X gay thing, you can listen to the my my two part are on Focus on the Family and James Dobson for Behind the Bastards. Also for our week on the War on transpeople, we discussed some of the same stuff for the first episode, which is the evangelical gay marriage um like thing that so yeah, we we we have we do we we do have we do have something like produced scripted stuff

on these topics if you want more background on them. Yeah, Unfortunately, this is a this is a story where there's like every single thread you've ever done suddenly is coming together in one moment of horrific violence. This is where Long like winds up for treatments for like or and sex addiction addictions, which I kind of emphasize enough. This is literally what he's talking about is literally that he watches porn like like that that's what porn sex addiction like means.

And because none of this is real, the treatments like don't work because again it's all fake. And I do would also say hope quest Is operates out of Georgia. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know, so so so. So he goes into treatment twice and he's he's he says it like Maverick, which is dislike recovery center. Um, it doesn't work. And he goes home and his parents

kick him out of his house for watching porn. And you know, and I think this is something that like is important to understand, which is that the people inside of this world really deeply believe this stuff, right and and like watching porn has real social consequences for them, and it has you know, and this, this has, this has has has like a profound affect on how these

people think. I'm going to read a quote from watching post article Bayliss, who was Long's roommate at Maverick Recovery, a sober living facility in Roswell, Georgia, in two thousand, nineteen and two, and the months between his stay at Hope stays at Hope, Quest said Long felt his very salvation was at stake, as he told his roommate that he was quote living in sin and not walking in

the light. He was walking in darkness. So this this is how these people like see this stuff right, like like this is this is literally about whether you're you're like yeah, they're they're talking about like something extremely existential like it like it is. This all seems very silly to people who are not inside it because it is it's it is. It is absurd. But if the people involved in it, it is like the totality of the universe, like it is, it is so big. It's like the

biggest thing. It's so important because you're you're determining what you're, what you will, what's your conscious being will exist for if for thou the thousands of ears like that, like this is what they actually believe, So it's super important, Like it's it is it is worth killing before because

that's that's how important this is. Like like I think, I think there's no sense to which it is more important than life or death because you dying, like, okay, you die, once you go to physical death doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah, and and this, you know, and you know, we talked about this, like it's there. There's those things. There's there's a social consequences. You can get kicked out of your house. You can kicked out of your church if you keep doing this, like like these

churches will kick you out. Um and and this, you know, this makes the ideology at work here incredibly powerful, and it provides a mixture of this like this, this really incredible self hatred for like falling into sin and giving him too temptation, and it also creates a hat of the temptation itself. And this brings us all the way

up to the shooting. Purity culture. Purity culture is the key that onlocks, you know, the meeting of Long's words, we can under stand the explanation that the police gave, which again, like he apparently has an issue what he considers a sex addiction and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places, and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate, you know, And there there was a at the memorial for for

the shooting last year. UM sex worker organizer Kail and Jong said this, they hate us so they can hate themselves less. And I think that's that's a really great Yeah, that is a really good analysis. Yes, yeah, it's a perfect calculation of like what's happening here. But this is the part of the story with the media just violently and spectacularly fox up to adapt. They they dropped the

purity ball. You might say, yeah, I mean it's it's it's really horrible there, Like, what they've essentially done is an act two years of racist violence against people who had either literally just survived a mass shooting or who

are literally dead. And the way they do this is the press reads long talking about sex edition addiction, and they immediately assumed that the women in these massage parlors have been having sex with them, and they start there's like this whole hunt that they do to like search for evidence that massage workers were doing like full service sex work, based off of again the words of a literal racist mass murderer and their own racist preconception that

like all Asian women especially SPA workers are also sex workers. And like, you know, on the one hand, yeah, it's true that this stuff is fueled by horror phobia, and also like morally, who gives a ship what they were doing. But the immediate problem here is that by doing this witch hunt, you were seeking the police on the survivor you're putting you're putting a survivors in immense legal and physical danger. Yeah, and and we we will talk about

this more next episode. But like, these women have already seen more police violence and police raids than all of the journalists writing about this combined I've seen in their

entire lives. And if any of these people had bothered to spend five seconds thinking about what purity culture is, they would have realized it long is from a fanatically puritanical culture, a culture where, for example, in massage given by a woman where the man is like almost entirely naked, uh is something that would absolutely have been considered a

sexual service. And like you know, and and if you think about this again for like five seconds, right when he's talking about removing temptation, he already thinks of all of these women as sex workers, because that's that's what he thinks the massage is he thinks like that that that that's that's how he thinks about massages. It's yeah, it is it women are the like women do this, then they caused men to sin, right, it's not it has nothing to do with what's going on with the man.

It is specifically what the woman is doing. Yeah. Well, and and and even then like it doesn't actually like I think I think that the important distinction here is that it does not matter when Long talks about how this is a place that was giving into station and also like like he was giving inemptation and he was like he was going there for his sex addition, Like it doesn't actually matter to him whether or not any of these women have ever like exchange money exact at all.

It doesn't. It doesn't it doesn't need to be, Yeah, because these people are fucking like it just engulfed in like it's so totally engulfed in this incredibly like violence and racist and misogynists homophobic ideology that it just sort of you know, like that that's just how they think.

And I think that this is where we're going to return one final time in this episode to race, because there's a mistake that people make thinking about this analytically that prevents him from understanding both what's happening in Atlanta and how sort of capitalists and racist violence happens everywhere.

Which is that like, okay, so right when this happened, um, like when when the when the press conference dropped, you got all that there are a lot of people like I think Glenn Greenwalld did this thing leef fang, Like there's a whole crew of people who were like, this isn't about Asian racism at all. This is about him like hating sex workers. And okay, it is true that human labor has been transformed into a commodity that can

be bought and sold at will. Now on on a on a more theoretical level, right, you will see sort of incredibly theory brain people who will talk about how you know, in in March's Critique of Political economy, right, all labor is astracting, interchangeable. Each unit of labor time is equivalent, identical, and exchangeable. But here in the massage parlor, this is a deadly simplification this labor. That the labor

that is going on here is Asian. It is indelibly stamped with race and ethnicity and nationality and hundreds of years of violence and perception. Um Rumors Paca, a assistant professor at the Institute of Women's Studies at the University of Georgia. Rohod a piece last year called white supremacy in the wellness industry or why it matters that that this happened at a spa um and I'm going to

read a passage moment because it's very good. Massage spas, also called salons or parlors like the one where these crimes took place, are part of a broader industrial complex that capitalizes on the racist belief that Asian people and Asian woman in particular, possess magical, spiritual, and sexual healing abilities. These attitudes belong to an entrenched Orientalist infrastructure in the United States that connects yoga and meditation and massage to tourism, pleasure,

and escape. Signaled by the exotic tropical flower and the photo above and there's a photo of flower at a parlor. Yeah, you know. And and this this labor, the labor of of of the massage that's happening here is it depends almost entirely on a very specific performance of a specific

kind of Asian femininity. And you know when this sort of gender and racialized violence, but when when this gender and racialized labor comes into contact with Long and all of the sort of historical forces that he's bearing, Humbird is the workers, And yeah, I think, yeah, this is the part of the story of the Lanta shooting that I think if people know about Atlanta shooting at all, like, this is the part they know about, right, they know

the story of Robert Aaron Long. But there are other stories here, stories that aren't stories that in large part are just not about the US at all. Um. There are the stories of the victims, the survivors, and the absolute hell that brought them into the massage parlor in the first place on the horrific night. And those are the stories that we're gonna tell in part two. Yeah,

well that doesn't for us today. I do want to say, I know, uh, I know Christmas planning these for the anniversary of the shooting, but they proved to be quite the daunting task to put together. I had to get I had to get pushed back for a while. So but but big thanks to you are doing the work too.

Read through all of the horrible things, and if, like the other thing I said about this, like if if you think this is bad, wait till part two, which is even more wide spanning and has horrific and disturbing violence in a way that will I don't know, reduced media tears multiple times. And yeah, we'll leave you an

existential dread of the condition of this world. Yeah, And I guess again there there is there There is ways to combat it, right, because all of these a lot of these things, all right, you know, problems with like viewpoint and ideas in terms of how we view sex, how we view women, how we view race, um. And there are things that when you see you can interrogate in people, um, especially if you're especially if you're a Christian,

if you're if you're going to church. These there are things to watch out for and you can push back on because it's and doing so can maybe save people's lives, because these ideas have a death count. Yeah, and I think I think there's another part of this too, which is that you know, I mean, the reason we talk about purity culture stuff so much, the reason we talk about the mobilizations of the evangelical rights so much, is that they keep producing these movements that you know, that

that put that put our lives in danger. And the only way that we can stop this, and this is a thing that we can do, is you have to actually destroy their movement, right you have you have to you have to actually break their power. You have to you know, you have to find various ways to break the power, break the power of these churches, and you have to find ways to break the power of their

political movements. And that is not an easy task. But if if we want to live in a world well, I mean, just point blank, if if we want to live in a world and not in you know, like four degrees fahrenheit, like unlivable death scape, like, we have to deal with these people because they are the source of almost every right wing movement that that we're facing, and they have to be crushed before they do this again. Yeah, and they're they're going to try. I mean, there's yeah.

Because the biggest thing would would say is like reaching out to people who you know are indus or if you if you go to church, I think it's your duty as a Christian to push back on these things because I'm not gonna bash anyone specifically for whatever religion they have I understand why people have this. I I can see how they work. Um. You know, I was

raised in something very similar. Um. But you can you can still push back on the type of rhetoric that leads to these things, in the type of like like objectification and racism that necessitates violence and gets people to be okay with violence, um, and pushing back against like a Christian apocalyptic worldviews, and like the idea your your actions will determine your you know how, the spiritual quality of your soul and where it's going to reside for

all of eternity. Right. All these things are our ideas that are pretty pretty like innately dangerous. Um. And there's ways to do religion that don't have that. Yeah. But I think I think that is a good enough place to leave it for today, because I know part two we're going to have some more more fire. Why why widespread problems? Yeah, alright, well this has when make it happen here. You can find us in the social media places that happened here pods. You can also flee into

the woods to the woods. But but but before you flee into the woods, subscribe to the pod and leave a five star review. Bye bye. Bye free Buddy, I see you tomorrow. It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone

Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.