It Could Happen Here Weekly 197

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Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

All right.

It's it could happen here.

It's me, it's Robert, and we are gathered here today to talk about one of the most annoying things that can happen on your telephone, which is that you can be sent a tweet from Gavin Newsom.

Which is, I just, no one needed that.

Yeah, it's already really bad.

I see really bad things on my telephone every day.

I don't need to see a tweet from Gavin Newsome.

If you're not familiar with this, you're living a better life than me, and I'm proud of you.

But I'm going to give you some context here.

For those of you who are not familiar, Gavin Newsom is the governor of California.

He's also kind of been the presumptive 2028 Democratic candidate for quite a while.

He's term limited out of running for California governor again, so he won't be doing that.

And his term will end in January of 2027.

He had for a while tried to dismiss claims that he was interested in the presidency, but he's been a lot more overt 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 a 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 masked men 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 to get into it.

It's extremely annoying.

So, about a week ago now, I think the 11th of August was when he began, Newsom began his social media rebrand.

He did this by posting about himself in all caps as America's favorite governor.

His posts since then have mimicked this.

Donald Trump has a pretty distinctive posting style, right?

Yeah.

Newsoms are written in all caps, which Trump doesn't tend to do.

Trump tends to capitalize sporadically, and as far as I can tell, entirely randomly.

But Newsom's doing it in all caps.

He uses, overuses exclamation marks, I should say.

This beef between the two of them is not new, right?

Trump has called him new scum on True Social.

I don't think Trump can claim the intellectual property to new scum.

I've seen that one.

Yeah, yeah.

Like

it's up there with like Herdiel Hitler and Mussolini.

Like, yeah.

Anyway, if you're buying a firearm in California, you will hear someone say one of these things almost without fail.

Yeah.

The claim that Newsom's team is making is that he's like holding up a mirror to Trump's bigotry by doing this Trump-style posting.

But I think in doing so, he's really illustrated that the difference between them is not as profound as you'd think or hope.

He, in one example, called Scott Pressler Nancy Mace.

Scott Pressler, gay, conservative, right-wing figure.

And then he was called out for misgendering Pressler by, this will shock and amaze you, Tommy Lauren.

Wow.

Yeah.

Which, yeah, no one.

Okay.

Yeah.

He responded, quote, you sound woke.

This really isn't funny.

It's just bigotry.

Like, comparing gay men to women is an old, worn-out, and lazy jab.

Yeah.

So when you combine this with him having right-wing figures like like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon on his podcast.

And just for reference, folks, I don't know how much detail we can get into legally here, but this being our business, we are aware of the numbers different podcasts do.

And Gavin Newsom's podcast is not like...

It does okay,

but there's certain podcasts about, for example, bad people in history that lap it several times.

So like the star power that Gavin Newsom has, I'm not 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, at 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.

Yeah.

No.

And that's what I'm saying too, is that he's confusing engagement with actual political action.

Right.

And he's confusing the kind of engagement that you get on social media when it's someone else's algorithm.

And a lot of the engagement is like not people who are going to vote for you or support you, but people who the algorithm is pushing your content to because it knows they'll get pissed off by it, right?

Yes, exactly that.

I'm not against pissing off conservatives, but that doesn't help you necessarily, right?

Like

there's not a clear benefit to us in this.

Yeah, like good things piss off conservatives, but pissing off conservatives is not inherently a good or useful thing.

It's just a thing.

It's not enough, right?

Like, again, it can be, I'm not, sometimes that's that's necessary just for morale purposes alone.

Sure.

But again, I don't really think Gavin Newsom is making the right scared.

I don't think he's breaking their morale.

I think he's just kind of creating content that people on the left are sharing because it pisses them off.

People on the right are sharing because it makes them laugh.

I think they think it's sad more than anything else.

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 don't 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.

Yeah, exactly.

Like he is doing, in a sense, what Harris did, which is this consistently failed Democrat political strategy that they seem so addicted to that no amount of losing will break them of it, which is moving to the right to try and capture moderate Republicans, right?

They've done this ever since Trump took the the Republican Party closer and closer to fascism.

Right.

Like, I want to give an example of this.

Here's Gavin Yousome talking to Sean Ryan about transgender athletes.

I'll be candid with you.

I looked at that issue and I said, boy, they're just exploiting this.

It's a handful of people.

What the hell is this?

It's being weaponized.

It was just another cultural issue.

Until two years ago, there was a state track championship.

We had a trans athlete that was successful and there was a video of the girl that lost and she was devastated that video went around everywhere and it was very emotional it was very real i remember calling my team and i said 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 lgbt q caucus furious with me because i don't think it's fair it's not but because you oppose sports doesn't make you homophobic and my party needs to stop saying that yeah again

i i know with who he thinks this is going 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, you know, 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're 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 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 this, 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 got to, 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 like yeah right they'll come after same-sex marriage they'll come after interracial marriage and newson will try and find the middle yeah like where he has received praise for this is in the legacy media i want to quote here from a calms op-ed which suggests that newsom was quote someone trying to hold space for a hard conversation in his podcast he's not you don't have conversations with charlie kirk he's never had a real one in his life.

Yeah, the conversation is not hard to have, right?

Trans people deserve the same fucking rights as everyone else.

It's very easy to have.

Also, he's having this conversation with someone who agrees with him.

Like, I would love to see him tell a young trans woman that she can't play on the fucking third-string high school volleyball team.

Because then he's going to see a kid cry, too.

I don't want to go over that trans people can compete in sports.

Like, I've made my living as an athlete for much of my life.

This is bullshit.

And it's fundamentally disrespectful to women athletes to continue to suggest that they're biologically inferior.

But I do want to talk more about Gavin Newsome's slide into mean politics.

His press office claimed that after the fires in LA, I claimed this in the New York Times in a piece that I'll link, he was troubled by the misinformation that came out.

This apparently was his first fucking time in encountering misinformation on the internet.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Well, when you think about the ease with which he lies, right yeah yeah absolute comfort he has bullshitting it sort of makes sense until it hits him he doesn't care because he's lying too so they decided to like take the fight to the internet i guess they began with star wars memes and then when the redistricting debate in texas we've covered extensively on executive disorder was kind of reaching its peak newsom sort of began this 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 lead an effort to redraw the maps in CA to offset the rigging of maps in red states.

But if the other states call off their redistricting efforts, we will do the same.

Thank you for your attention on this matter.

Sorry, it's hard to read because it's entirely unpunctuated apart from at the end there.

These tweets aren't on his personal account or the official like governor of California one.

They're on an account called Governor Newsome Press Office, but that account does have the little grey tick mark that you can get in Twitter now for like government accounts.

Then he moved on to AI-generated images and signing 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 a 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 that he has done.

But using a wheelchair is not one of those things.

If you cannot find anything else, that really shows the paucity of democratic politics right now.

Let's take a a break and we'll come back.

Awesome.

All right, we're back.

Unfortunately, and probably predictably, Newsome has received praise from all over the legacy media for these posts.

The NYT quoted, it's actually unclear if they quoted.

I don't know if this was just a mistake that they haven't corrected, but it was phrased like she said it directly, directly, but it wasn't in quotation marks, so I'm a little unclear.

I'm just going to assume they quoted this lady, Sarah Roberts, a director for the Center of Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA, said, quote, Mr.

Newsom's posts are perhaps grabbing so much attention because they stand out from the rest of Democratic Party's ineffective approach of playing it safe and proceeding as if it's business as usual.

And then, just to double down on this, useful podcast idiot Jon Favreau tweeted, quote, I mean, it's pretty clearly a parody of Trump's absolutely insane, all caps, often nonsensical posts.

Probably why 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.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and his team have figured out a very entertaining way to deal with Donald Trump at his own rhetorical level.

They've got a new social media strategy that is both, I gotta say, pretty damn funny and I think extremely effective, mocking the president with a spot-on impression of his very weird communication style.

Since Newsom jumped into the ongoing redistricting fight, his official Twitter account has been posting Trump style.

Donald is finished.

He is no longer hot.

First the ham, so tiny.

And now me, Gavin C.

Newsom, have taken away his step.

Many are saying we can't even do the big stairs on Air Force One anymore.

Uses the little little baby stairs now.

Sad.

Has all the Trump trademarks, all capital letters, random quotation marks, little parentheticals, complete unhinged absurdity.

I thought that's a good one.

I hate Kid Rock.

GCN.

Reference to Trump's infamous, I hate Taylor Swift.

Another drags the vice president into it.

Not even JD Just Dance Vans can save Trump from the disastrous maps war he has started.

Not even his eyeliner lines look as pretty as California map lines.

He will fail as he always does, sad.

And I, the peacetime governor, our nation's favorite, will save America once again.

Many are now calling me Gavin Christopher Columbus Newsom because of the maps.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Beyond the mockery of Trump's text posts, 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, flanked 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 Hulgan.

Again, a spot-on mockery of Trump, who isn't doing any of this satirically.

What has been equally hilarious has been to watch the joke just go soaring over the heads of Trump's sycophants in the media.

For the last week, Gavin Newsom, and why am I giving him advice?

You have to stop it with the Twitter thing.

I don't know where his wife is.

If I were his wife, I would say, you are making a fool of yourself.

Stop it.

Do not let your staff tweet.

And if you're doing it yourself, put the phone away and start over.

And if you want, he's got a big job as governor of California, but if if he wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little bit more serious.

Yes, right.

Be more serious.

Stop posting exactly like the president of the United States does.

Newsome's account responded to that advice: quote: Dana Ding Dong Perino, never heard of her until today, is melting down because of me, Gavin C.

Newsom.

Fox hate that I am America's most favorite governor, ratings king, saving America.

Trump has lost his step, and Fox is losing it because when I type, America now wins.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Again, it is just, it is a stark reminder with someone else doing it of how truly, utterly deranged our current president sounds whenever he communicates.

And also how accustomed we've all become to this very, very weird behavior.

I know, we wouldn't be talking about this because it was just bad tweets, right?

We're talking about it because I think it shows a fundamental inability of the DNC to meet the moment right now.

Yeah, we're talking about it because people are dying and more people will die as a result of this administration's policies.

Other people are being imprisoned.

And like,

you know, the damage damage being done, you know, to medical science, to the future of humanity, to the 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 2028 has been able to pull out so far is like terrifying.

Like, and again, obviously, no one should be reliant upon the Dims, but unfortunately, also like, what are you going to do?

What am I going to do?

Right.

I don't have the resources of the Democratic Party.

I don't have a bunch of elected leaders listening to me.

Like, because of the status of our situation, individual people and small groups and towns, and you know, we talk about mutual aid on this show.

We talk about unions.

All of these increase personal resiliency.

They increase the ability of 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 a world where a Democrat gets elected in 2028, it's getting less awful less quickly, and we should want this.

Yes.

Right.

Like, I'm not one of these like

accelerationists.

No, I just, I don't think that's going to help either.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look right now, it is accelerating and it is bad.

There are so many obvious challenges that Democrats can make, and I want to play.

Robert, have you seen this Graham Planter for Senate campaign ad?

Uh, no, Mayna.

All right, I'm gonna play this for you.

Like, uh, okay, I think it's uh it's good as a contrast, right?

What I love most about Man of the People, I have never met people who are more hard scrabble.

Even in a place that requires you to work like two or three different jobs, we have watched this state become essentially unlivable for working class people, and it makes me deeply angry.

My name is Graham Plattner, and I'm running for U.S.

Senate in 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 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 into poverty, and crushing the middle class.

I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps and the Army.

I'm not afraid to name an enemy.

And the enemy is the oligarchy.

It's the billionaires who pay for it, 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's 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 CEOs 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 right questions.

When I tell people around here that I'm running for Senate, sometimes the initial reaction is, what the f ⁇ ?

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 Maynard's first, and Maine always.

I mean, that doesn't seem bad.

No, it's good.

That's a solid ad.

Yeah.

Yeah, like the bar is reasonably low.

But like that dude hit it, I think.

I mean, yeah, yeah.

Like I would say that's just outright good.

Like if I were, if I were crafting an ad to run from other than the fact that he's lived a different life, but like how he's talking about the oligarchy, how he's talking about the lack of progress on things like minimum wage and how unacceptable it is and like how the difference between Susan Collins and Ted Cruz is that at least Ted Cruz is honest.

Like, yeah, I'm on board.

This guy, this guy seems like he rips.

I would vote for that dude.

Like, yeah, sure.

He might turn into a fucking Fetterman.

Yeah, I mean, they can all get milkshake ducked, but he's saying the right things at this point.

Yeah,

it's remarkably straightforward, right?

Like,

and yet that seems to evade most Democrats.

He's got the audio of a car ad, but I guess if it works, it works.

That's the thing.

I don't know.

I'm not familiar with the platinum race, so I'm not sure where the polling's showing.

This video is like two days old.

Like, he's extremely fresh.

So, yeah.

I will say that visually it hangs together.

Dude uses the same open sale wetsuit I do.

Like, he didn't just buy all this shit.

Like, didn't buy an axe and chop wood for the first time in his video.

Right, right, right.

He didn't do the normal weird Democrat trying to reach out to a rural thing of like posing awkwardly with a shotgun.

Yeah, yeah.

Like this is a dude.

And just like physically, he appears to have done some work with his hands.

Yeah, he looks like a working class guy.

Yeah.

Let's compare this to like...

Newsom has not done the material things that he could be doing instead of tweeting, right?

Trump didn't call up the California National Guidelines of the Insurrection Act.

He used Title 10, Section 12406 of the U.S.

Code.

That section states orders for these purposes should be issued through the governors of the states.

It also outlines procedures for DC, which we don't care about here.

I don't see why he couldn't at least try to force the issue in ordering the guard to go home.

He's pursuing a court case, yeah, but like force the crisis because we're already in one.

He has not taken a single meaningful action to stop ICE snatching people from our communities in California, nor has his attorney general taken a single meaningful action to stop individual sheriff's departments from violating SB 54.

SB 54, if you're not familiar, is a California Values Act, which limits which inmates can be transferred to ICE custody and when.

It doesn't oblige anyone to transfer them, but it does allow them to transfer them if certain felonies have been committed in the last 15 years.

The San Diego sheriff has been accused of violating this.

I'll link to a KPBS article on that, where they transferred someone who, according to the claims in the article, had a 21-year-old conviction, where, as I said before, the cutoff is 15 years.

Newsom could do something about the surveillance, which is being installed all over California.

These license plates readers, like the ones that 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 100 times in May alone, according to Carl Matters.

That is a violation of California law, specifically it's Senate Bill 34, which limits the sharing of license plate data.

Rob Bonto issued an advisory, but again, this

is resulting in our communities being harassed, right?

Californians being snatched.

Newsom has done nothing about that.

He could stand up for unhoused people, but instead, alongside Todd Gloria, he has led the charge against them.

Todd Gloria is seemingly intent on driving our city into debt to pursue caste rail approach against the unhoused.

Newsom 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 Ryan podcast as 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 or anywhere else.

Absolutely not.

I think where I want to end is I don't want you to engage with Newsom's tweets.

Like that doesn't help.

He's going to mistake that for making a difference, right?

Because I think for a lot of people in the legacy media and probably Newsome and his friends, the real tragedy of what's happened in the last eight months is that they have to see scary, nasty stuff on 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.

Yeah, I don't know how much else to say.

It's nice to see guys like Plattner at least seem to be figuring it out.

There's not, I've been looking into it, and

there's not much polling.

There's not really any polling because of how recently he announced his bid to show how well he's doing.

Other than that, the video has gotten like two and a half million views, something like that, which is good and seems to be spreading well online.

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 titled, They Roll Right Over.

Many Democrats Think Their Party is Weak.

APNORC poll fines.

Oh, sorry.

This is actually, no, sorry, this is overall across U.S.

adults.

Sorry, the initial article I had seemed to be saying that

this was just in Maine.

No, this is, this is nationwide, right?

So, I mean, I think that what Plattner 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 in 10 Democrats, according to this poll, described their party positively.

One in 10 said it was empathetic and inclusive.

That's terrible, right?

And that is, 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 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 Platin's going to win, but I'm growing more convinced every day that there is opportunity for people who are actually willing to fight these bastards and who 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.

Yeah, yeah.

Talking of like not leaving people out to dry, for instance, talking about trans women in sports, he says it's a distraction from the things that impact Americans materially every single day.

Then he said, I'm dedicated to equality and justice for all in this country.

And I think this specific topic has become such a touchstone of the media discussion because it pulls away from the conversation that needs to be happening, which is getting every American affordable healthcare.

It's It's not the best response.

It's not the worst one either.

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 prize money when women are getting shit TV time.

This for them is just a culture war issue.

He also called the genocide in Gaza a genocide, which is something that

it's like.

Yeah, I enjoyed the line about we're just killing kids with bombs.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, I like that he didn't mince his words about it when asked by ABC.

He said he's following the lead of Israeli scholars on genocide on this issue.

So, yeah, like it's remarkably easy, right, to build a coalition right now of people who are fucking mad.

And a lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they were sick of this same Smarmi bullshit.

Some of them also voted for Donald Trump because they're hateful, terrible fucking 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, this guy who for nearly a decade we have assumed will run in 2028.

And I guess, I know, fuck Gavin Newsom.

I hope that he does not succeed with his presidential campaign ambitions.

Yep.

All right.

Well, that's, yeah, most of what I got to say about that son of a bitch.

Yep, me too.

Let's roll out.

Bye.

Bye.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Can Happen Here.

My name is Danel Kurd, and I'm a writer, analyst, and researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics.

I'm an associate professor of political science and a senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington.

I'm also occasional co-host of The Fire of These Times.

Today I want to talk about the attacks on American universities and American academia and what role Palestine plays in all of this, and maybe end on what's being done to stop it.

So you may or may not have heard about the attacks on universities and 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 $220 million,

punish 70 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 DEI 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 Trump administration has also attacked foreign students and the processes by which they are able to get visas to study in the United States, which is just another way to get out a major revenue source for many universities.

But why is the Trump administration doing all this?

Here is Vice President J.D.

Vance speaking to the National Conservatism Conference back in 2021.

We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

Ladies and gentlemen, the universities do not pursue knowledge and truth.

They pursue deceit and lies, and it's time to be honest about that fact.

And we subsidize, we support, and in our own ways, all of us

reinforce the power of universities to control our lives and control how we live them.

So much of what drives truth and knowledge as we understand it in this country is fundamentally determined by, supported by, and reinforced by the universities in this country.

So that's Fance before him and Trump won the election, identifying that universities are sites of power.

Therefore, he argues very explicitly that conservatives must destroy these sites of power or submit them to their will.

Are universities truly sites of power?

The short answer is yes, for two reasons.

Number one, as Vance himself identifies, Universities produce knowledge, and that knowledge produced at universities drives innovation in the private sector, in tech, in health, in 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 the 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 free market, liberalism, et cetera, et cetera.

So really, universities largely generate power for the powers that be.

But sometimes, universities are also sites of power that can challenge orthodoxies.

With greater inclusion of scholars and students from a variety of backgrounds, we get a diversity of thought.

And because of how universities are supposed to run, in theory, as governed by faculty and as sites of free inquiry, that means sometimes, occasionally, knowledge is produced that can challenge power too.

That sometimes occasional knowledge production is too much for the J.D.

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 offers 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 a university education is definitely getting harder and costlier and less accessible.

There's this book by Mark Bousquet 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 admissions.

It's increasing enrollment numbers.

It's slashing budgets.

It's even proposing to teach some courses using ChatGPT.

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 technologies 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 J.D.

Vances 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 allege that universities taking a person's background into consideration in 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 Fair Admissions versus Harvard, agreed.

They overturned the 2003 Grutter v.

Bollinger case that had allowed higher education institutions to consider race in admissions.

And all of this comes at a time after decades of the university as 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, 51% of which say they support Black Lives Matter.

And this was according to a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center.

Now, 51% 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 as an 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 7th attacks, we saw student protesters detained, like Mahmoud Kharil at at Columbia and Rumaisa Osturk at Tufts, and many more.

We have seen diplomas withheld, like what Virginia Commonwealth University attempted to do to many students, including students Sirin Haddad.

We have seen professors put on leave or fired, like what Mohlenberg College did to Maura Finkelstein.

The list goes on and on.

But again, a lot of this pattern started before Trump.

In a November 2023 poll conducted by political scientists Mark Lynch and Shibli Telhami, called the Middle East Scholar Barometer, the results show that 66% 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 77.4% when talking about Israel-Palestine.

On the Israeli-Palestinian issue in particular, Almost 52% of scholars have concerns about pressure from external advocacy groups.

And of those who said they self-censor, a full 83%

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 1.6% of respondents said they censored criticism of U.S.

policy.

And a full 98% of assistant professors, untenured professors, who work on the Middle East, quote, feel the need to self-censor when 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 antisemitism directed government bodies to take the IRA definition into consideration when enforcing Title VI, which is a part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 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 Stern, has expressed concerns that this definition is being used as a, quote, blunt instrument to label anyone an anti-Semite.

And it's for that reason that Human Rights Watch and 104 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 anti-Semitism, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism.

that has a more nuanced understanding of when criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitism.

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 studies.

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 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 underscore 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 7th 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 7th, 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, intramural 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 canary in 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 East Studies Association and the Knight First Amendment Institute, sued the Trump administration over this policy of arresting and threatening deportation for lawful speech on Palestine.

The AAUP is also now a plaintiff in a number of cases, challenging the Trump administration on attacks on DEI, attempting to abolish the Department of Education, cuts in federal funding of research, etc.

And attacks on students and faculty after October 7th, which set off this whole barrage of attacks on universities since then, have galvanized people to demand their university administrations uphold academic freedom.

In 2024, nearly 40 chapters of the AAUP were founded or re-established across the U.S.

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.

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Welcome to Ichadap Here, a podcast about things falling apart and also sometimes about how not to put them back together and how to fail to put them back together.

I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are going to be talking about the place where the anti-trans crusade began, North Carolina.

and about the recent spade of anti-trans bills that have been passed there.

And with me to talk about this is David Forbes, an editor and journalist with Trans News Network and the Asheville Blade.

David, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

So I think some people, if you're listening to this show, you may remember that North Carolina is the state that passed the first bathroom bills.

But what has gotten significantly less attention is A, everything that happened after that, and B, a series of two

really sweeping and hideous anti-trans bills that have been passed in the last like month or so.

And David wrote a really, really good piece for Trans News Network about both these bills and also how Democrats in the state helped pass them.

So I want to talk about that.

And I guess the place to start is, can you talk about what these two bills, HB 805 and SB 442 got started?

Sure.

So of the two, HB 805 is the more sweeping, broadly, at least.

They're both terrible.

Anti-trans bill.

It affects everything from changing your birth certificate to state health plans not covering trans health care

to really ominously, like what jail or prison you get put into if you're a trans person and you're arrested.

Yeah.

That one,

it's kind of a laundry list of, you know, far-right anti-trans ideas.

The other SB 442 is one of those where it takes some digging.

And here I'm really thankful that TNN's policy analyst, who I think y'all have had on here a few times, Corrine Green,

was actually there to, yes, was a huge help in reviewing this bill.

I've been covering North Carolina politics and its various horrors for a long time, but even still, it's good to have like legislative expertise on that.

And SC 442 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 in, especially in 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 denied based on someone's religion or their race and being a trans folk.

Yeah.

You know, it's like that's being added to the list of protected identities.

It's us also essentially laying the groundwork for just even more legal sanctioning of conversion therapy, which is, of course, torture and abuse.

Yeah.

I think Corrine summed up as that if you, if you don't have a trans kid to abuse, foster care will provide one for you.

Yeah.

Which is, it's really bleak.

Yeah.

We chuckle, but it's, we chuckle on the like gallows humor because it's that absurd.

Yeah.

So SB 442 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 805 eventually did.

So, you know, I won't say credit where due, 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 potentially override a veto in there.

Where things really came down to was North Carolina House.

And there, 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 Carolina Democrats, despite how jerry mayor the state is, which we'll talk about more in a little bit, actually did pretty well.

The GOP no longer had a super majority in the House and the Democratic candidate for governor, former Attorney General Josh Stein, won in a route.

So ostensibly, 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 no longer have supermajority, then the governor vetoes it, then they can't override the veto.

That didn't happen.

So not only did non-Democrats side with Republicans, Stein signed the bill.

Yeah, which is hideous.

Yeah.

And it was.

It was bleakly insulting the way he did it too, because it was just like, he didn't even issue a statement or, oh, like, well, we still believe in trans rights.

This is a bureaucratic thing or even bother to make an excuse.

It was just tucked in a list of bills that he signed that day, alongside like some other bureaucratic stuff involving like retirement communities and recognizing driver's licenses.

So it's, it's definitely kind of insult to injury sort of situation.

Interestingly, North Carolina's gay ink organizations are kind of like the mainline nonprofits.

And in North Carolina, there's like Equality NC.

There's the Campaign for Son of Equality, which is regional, but is is based in the state here in Asheville.

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 to be lost signing this thing.

On the same day, he did veto HB 805, along with a bunch of other bills targeting, you know, in quote marks, DEI measures, which are basically just attempts to smash out anything that's not far right and further research the state.

And he did veto those.

The language he used, though, was definitely what a lot of us have become used to.

It's the, oh, this was divisive.

No trans people mentioned, no trans healthcare mentioned, no trans rights mentioned, just vaguely, well, this is divisive and it's a distraction.

So HB 805 does actually go back to the legislature.

And one Democrat had voted for HB 805.

So there was attention turning of, okay, is this guy going to 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 various, 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 the house, he actually did vote to hold with the veto, but another representative who'd been out on a pretty dubious excused absence when HB 805 was originally there, Democratic rep, Nassif Majid, voted in favor.

And that was enough to make it law.

So the one thing that among queer and trans North Carolina, who like a lot of their places, voted very heavily against the Republicans, you know, for the Democratic candidates and all, it's one reason they did fairly well last year.

To stop exactly this 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.

Both of these bills are unbelievably draconian.

Like, these are things that, even like two years ago,

like banning state funding for like all trans health care.

For the state health plan, we should specify.

Yeah, yeah, sorry.

It is like the state health care, but comma, and this is at least my understanding of it is that this is a ban on all ages.

Yes, for anyone on the state health care plan.

So, if someone is a state employee or a teacher, yeah, or like your kids are exactly.

And this guy actually, it's close to home for me because I grew up poor in North Carolina.

And one of the only reasons we had health care growing up was because my mom, as poorly paid as she was, was a public school teacher.

So, you know, it's a trans kid in where I was now, where we know, you know, it's easier for trans kids to know who they are.

It's not quite as erased as it was back in the 90s.

Yeah.

Can't get health care.

A trans adult who's a teacher can't have their health care covered anymore.

And that's a thing that like two years ago, Ron DeSantis wasn't calling for this.

No.

Right.

The Daily Wire at that point, like two years ago, is explicitly calling for trans exterminations things, but they're not specifically proposing adults can't use trans health care.

That's not a thing like that was that was even on the table.

And now you have like, you have a Democrat overriding their own governor's veto to get this through.

Yes.

A Democrat in a solidly blue district, Majid's district is in the middle of Charlotte, which for folks who may not be as familiar with the state, like Charlotte's the largest city here, and it is not known for being like, at least on voting wise, it doesn't go for the GOP generally.

Yeah.

And then this is the same point that I want to make about this bill, like redefining what child abuse is.

Like, even by the standards of sort of like far-right anti-trans bills, those are really weird and radical.

Corrine said it was one of the worst that she'd seen in the country as far as like on the child care front.

From my covering of this, too.

Yeah, this is one of the worst things I've ever seen.

And the Democratic Party passed it.

Passed with nine Democrats in favor and the governor signed it.

Yeah.

That's unbelievably horrifying.

Yeah.

And the fact that the queer wars in the state were unwilling to condemn the Democrats who passed this is just horrifying.

It is.

And it actually goes one further than that because afterwards, they didn't even bother to put out a perfunctory, oh, we're disappointing Governor Stein.

You know, we'll, we will continue to try to fight this legislation in court or something like that.

They did nothing.

Yeah.

They just, they went silent.

So, and, you know, their condemnations of SB 442, especially before this bill passed, they were all correct.

It is horrible.

It does sanction child abuse.

It is horrific on every single front.

It is a catastrophe.

It is draconian, all that.

It didn't stop being so when Democrats started supporting it.

The kids hurt by this, families hurt by this, aren't going to be any less hurt because a Democrat signed on to it.

Yeah.

And before we go to break, the thing I want to sort of close this section with is that like,

you know, I think it's a very, very common thing to focus on like, okay, why why are you focusing on the Democrats right now when the Republicans are doing all of this stuff?

And

this is a case where, very explicitly, and this is the dynamic I think you've seen across the board with, for example, like Chuck Schumer, like helping to get the 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

in a lot of extremely important cases.

And when that happens, and 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 HB2

in the spring of 2016.

2016.

Oh, that is.

Yeah.

See, this is,

do not go to sleep at five in the morning and then try to do math live on air.

It will come for you too.

Really, truly, I was trying to subtract 16 from 20.

Okay.

This is, this, this, this, this is, this is your one moment of levity and a bunch of extremely bleak shit is me trying and failing to do math on air.

Look, I can drive.

That's my, that's my name.

I'm sticking to it.

But What we are seeing here is the way in which like resistance to the GOP, and 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.

Yeah.

And then gaying did nothing.

Yeah.

The groups they're supposed to lobby at the public club, this is the point of their existence,

did nothing.

Yeah.

At that point, they just

let it go, you know, on to the next fundraising cycle, on to the next AI meme to on your page to boost, you know, content generation or whatever.

And here we are.

And we are back.

Now, for the brevity of this show, I am not going to go into my giant rant about how this is what happened with Mitterrand and the French socialists and how Mitterrand and the Socialist Party instituted neoliberalism in France.

But,

we are,

instead of doing that, or me going on another rant about the absorption of social movements by the NIS in Bolivia, or another rant about

the 17 different iterations of this that we've seen over the years.

See my episodes on Lula, see many, many, many, many, many things I've done.

We're going to 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 the moderate human face of like the Greensboro massacre.

Oh my.

Yeah.

And this is one of those where to start thing.

There's a quote that I have in the piece by civil rights historian Timothy Tyson that since I read it, I think over a decade ago,

really just kind of hit me like a hammer and is kind of simple out of the experience I've seen as a, you know, impoverished trans woman living in North Carolina and covering, you know, local state government and how federal government works on the ground here, too.

Like beneath the green ivy of civility, but a stone wall of coercion.

Yeah.

And that is one of the better summaries.

And it applies to other circumstances too, but it is, it just perfectly sums up kind of the historical reality of the North Carolina Democratic Party.

And when Tyson was doing that, he was tracing this whole history from the 1898 Wilmington coup d'état 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 90s.

And it's part of a project of historians.

And one of the terms they were using was North Carolina has this progressive mystique.

Well, you were having governors in other 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 we're building, this college system we're building, we just built Research Triangle Park, you know, we're, we're attracting, you know, it was 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 Carolina doesn't make the headlines in some way like Selma did, for example.

But there was a history of riots and a brutal attempts at repression from the 40s all the way to the 70s

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.

That's the thing that we've, I've talked about a little bit on the show with the Holo Beek uprising and the sort of the whole wave of riots kind of culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King.

But like, yeah, like

statistically, most of the riots that happened in that entire period happened in these small and mid-sized cities that have just like the historical memory of which has been completely fucking buried.

And North Carolina, as you're saying, like, it's one of the the critical sites of this.

Yeah.

Durham was rioting in the 40s.

Yeah.

Like that, that's how far back it goes.

And I think a lot of the time people think, oh, well, not much happened in this era.

And I think it's just a lack of knowledge of history, especially radical history.

Did it not happen or was it suppressed and then erased?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that happened with a lot of this.

So you had, you know, and figures like Governor Terry Sam for the time, who was, you know, famous North Carolina Democrat.

And yeah, if the Klan was like openly marching to murder people, he might say like, okay, look, a massacre is bad news.

We are going to like put the state troopers out to deter them from doing that.

But a lot of civil rights activists end up dead.

Yeah.

You know, or there still is like violent crackdowns, you know, during the Greensboro if it was a site both of some really well-organized like civil rights efforts and sit-ins and more radical action too, but also of a lot of repression.

You know, by 1979, when the state's boosters are portraying, you know, all that upheaval is a thing of the past, this anti-racist march or anti-Klan march specifically organized by this communist group in Greensboro was massacred.

The Klan 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 after-the-fact federal law enforcement were very complicit in things ranging from just kind of trying to sweep it under the rug to outright, especially the local level, like cooperating with the Klan.

A lot of them were either aware this is going on and did nothing to stop it or even actively fed the Klan information.

There's a book recently called Morningside that goes into

a lot of this detail that I'd encourage folks to 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, I quote in 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 of 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 of North Carolina and of the Democratic Party here.

And they lean on that mystique heavily.

And honestly, I think a lot of it is what they evoke as, you know, we're the defenders of the sane, sensible civil status quo.

You even saw it in some of Stein's statements about HB 805 when he did veto it.

It's like, well, this is divisive.

It's making too many waves.

We need to get back to business, which they mean not just the business government.

They literally mean business.

Marketing the state and making more money and inevitably means making more money for the gentry.

So that's kind of the reality of North Carolina beneath this kind of, you know, how things supposedly are better and more progressive here.

In the end of the day, you can still get massacred.

Yeah.

And I think on a sort of structural level, right, I think there's going to be people who are being like, well, okay, why the fuck do I give a shit about North Carolina?

And one, and this is something that you point out in the piece, something that's really obvious if you spend literally any time in the south is that what i think it's 36 of the south is like what's what's the actual number i should have looked this up before

so of the national population of queer and trans people 36 live in the south which is far more than any other region like by a wide margin yeah i i think under that same uh 2023 calculation and there was another reason sort of that came out specifically about trans people all these have faults yeah it is a general rule that trans people especially in areas where they are more illegally and violently marginalized, are wildly undercounted.

But it maps to about the same numbers.

I think of trans people in the country, the estimated population, about 33 to 36% live in the South.

And in the 2023 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 coastal, like these, you know, elite bohemians on a few coastal cities.

As a matter of fact, there are a lot of trans 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?

Yeah.

And, and again, like, in terms of like, okay, so I'm not in those places, like A, like we all have a responsibility to all queer people, like as queer people, right?

Like we have, we have, we have a responsibility to each other and we should fucking fight for each other.

And B, you can look at what happened in North Carolina.

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 in a second with the way the Democratic Party 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 constellation, well, 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-trans stuff.

And then we're going to throw a whole bunch of fucking trans 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 oaklands uh 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 a laboratory for the right yeah and i think that's really important because since this is a point i can't i can't hone this point enough and make it sharp enough frankly folks need to take it really seriously yeah whether you call the south or not fascists do the far right does and they have for a long long time viewed it not as a place to ignore but as a place to consolidate power and try out their tactics.

Too often the left, even the queer left, has not.

We have all suffered for it.

Yeah.

And

this is the whole thing for the historical left, right?

Like one of the things that broke the American labor movement was the defeat of the CIO in the South.

I mean, all the way back to, I mean, events, you were literally talking about like the defeat of Reconstruction.

Like this is, this is why this country is like this.

And if you don't want the country to be like this, 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 to talk about the long and sordid history of the Democratic Party's progressive veneer in North Carolina and what truly lies beneath it.

And we will look at how the original response to the 2016 bathroom bills set the stage for both the Democratic Party in North Carolina's passing of anti-trans laws today and the future of the rest of the country.

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Welcome to If It Happens 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 are going to be continuing with part two of my interview with David Forbes, an editor and journalist for the Trans News Network and the Asheville Blade about the history of the North Carolina Democratic Party's progressive veneer over their agreement with Republican policies and importantly how the Democratic Party's original response to the anti-trans bathroom bills from 2016 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.

So I think people may have forgotten how this all started.

So let's talk about the first bathroom bills, what happened, and then how the Democrats kind of ensured that they would stay in place.

Sure.

So there is the big one everyone knows about is HB2 because it became kind of internationally famous as the North Carolina bathroom bill.

And even I think for folks who memories may have faded, it has come up recently as kind of a benchmark and often a misinterpreted one as we're about to get into for how far things have shifted because on paper it looks like this really horribly backfired and in some ways it did initially hb2

was a bill that was kind of slapped in last minute it clearly drew from the larger anti-trans far-right policy circles, which North Carolina Republicans are highly connected to.

North Carolina Dems often kind of view themselves their own little like institution, like we're the democratic moderates like north car democrats have always been at their best people have that situation we just talked about the republicans here were like okay we're now in power which they were starting in 2011.

let's try out this stuff from alec let's try out this stuff from some secure right-wing think tank and that meant they were plugged in when in the wake of obergefell and also north carolina as well the year before you'd had uh equal marriage for that whole swath of the south was uh was kind of imposed by a federal court order or recognized by a federal court order.

So they were like, okay, this isn't working.

There is not just more du ju.

There is more de facto on the ground popular acceptance of equal marriage now.

That's not the wedge it was previously.

So what do we shift to?

Well, we shift to trans people.

And so North Carolina legislators, very eager to try out far-right policies.

The North Carolina 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 2016 has 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, okay, well, North Carolina's just becoming this red state now, like other southern states have, they knew their hold was actually really precarious.

Now, Now, they gerrymandered extensively.

Yeah.

So extensively that, like, North Carolina, the same year as HB2 passed, stopped being recognized as a democracy by the like policy or study.

As a matter of fact, the district of Carolina, they did a whole commentary later that year that these were the most rigged districts, the most gerrymandered districts they'd seen, not just in the U.S., but anywhere in the world.

So that is, that is where we live.

That's where we've lived for some time.

And

but the governor's like it 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 HB2 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 slapdash affair.

They didn't even have like an enforcement mechanism in there, but it did a few other things too, I think people forget about, which is it also stripped the ability of localities to make their own minimum wage rules.

So it was also an attack on labor because those always go together and not unrelated, trans and queer people are of only working class demographics, which I don't think gets said enough.

And also, essentially, this was in reaction to Charlotte adding gender identity to its existing non-discrimination non-discrimination ordinance.

There was a local one.

But in reality, if Charlotte 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.

Go after trans rights.

You're also going after broad rights for any marginalized group because non-discrimination stuff is being struck down left and right.

And also, you're attacking labor.

So, you know, it really kind of set the model for things to come.

HB2 sparks a massive international backlash.

I think the end estimate was 400 million.

The state lost 400 million as companies pulled out, events pulled out.

There was a boycott, a fairly effective one, honestly, that was started as grassroots, though, gay ink groups and even like just random nonprofits and some Democratic Party officials later joined in on it.

So the money is being hammered left and right.

Mercury is being turned into a national laughingstock.

If anything, it's proving a rallying point for the other side because 2016 rolls around.

And in a year where Trump takes North Carolina, and generally the Republicans do fairly well throughout the South, even in swing states like NC, McCrory loses.

He loses to the Attorney General, Roy Cooper, as a Democrat.

Now, I would never say he's pro-trans.

We're about to get into some major betrayals he did.

He was more willing to say at least perfunctory statements about trans rights than any North Carolina Democratic politician at 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 bigotry, 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 anti-labor status quo, that North Carolina Democrats and Republicans had generally both supported in varying ways was in danger.

And, you know, some of them personally were losing money.

So they basically tell the Republicans in early 2017 to knock it off.

Like, okay, you've gone far enough.

It didn't work.

You lost the election.

They still do the Jerry Mannering 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 publicity.

And what really escalated it was basketball was kind of a religion in North Carolina, especially college basketball.

And the NCAA said, look, we'll pull the tournament out of HB2.

It's still in the books.

And at that point, there became like these back and forth sessions.

Earlier in December, there was this compromise effort 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, Governor Elect Cooper at that point, brokered kind of this deal where, okay, Charlotte, you take trans people out of your non-discrimination ordinance of your own accord, and the state will repeal HB2.

Well, that didn't happen.

They did the first part, and then the legislators were like, okay, well, that's nice.

We're not doing anything about this.

that should have been a lesson yeah um about complying in advance but uh it didn't really seem to take sadly so hb2 was still in the books by march you know march madness is coming up and all that and so they finally do a repeal and this is still hailed as oh look like uh 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 using 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 142 or HB 2.0, as a lot of activists and queer folks in the ground, trans with the ground dubbed it.

And what this bill did was it technically took out the bathroom ban, but it put in a bunch of Byzantine provisions about who could use the bathroom when, so it would still take a court case for a trans woman to go use the woman'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 non-discrimination protections for years.

And at this point, the pressure is mounting.

The Democratic Party, for the first time in most of a decade, their votes in the legislature actually matter because the Republicans are split between kind of the capitalists who were hate trans people.

We're 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, 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 didn't have the votes in their own caucus to pass this.

So for once, Dems had a lot of power and they could have easily been like, no, full repeal 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 noted their corporation, basically, they noted was reluctant that they were, you know, putting the tournament back in NC, but they did.

The governor, new governor, Democratic governor signed it.

I probably forgot to mention it earlier.

HB2 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 Inc.

splitting a bit because Gay Inc.

did actually, had actually condemned HB 2.0.

But once it became passed, they either offered tepid statements or they backed down.

And so the lesson from HB2 wasn't, okay, back in the day, you know, nine years ago, trans rights used to be more of a consensus, even among like moderate conservatives, at least basic protections for it.

And a good example was how unpopular HB2 was, and 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 is made an issue.

Yeah.

And, you know, and you can watch everything that has happened since with trans rights has just been the Democrats folding over and over and over again, getting weaker and weaker language until we're in this place now.

You know, like, and I think the thing that is a little bit different is that like, you used to have to like claim you had done something

about the anti-trans bill.

And now you can just sign it

and it becomes law.

And this is something that has played out across the country.

Like there have been a lot of states where Democratic governors have signed anti-trans bills.

Yes.

Or vetoed pro-trans bills, like in California.

Yeah.

And, you know, even in states where like Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, has been being held up as like the big pro-trans people.

And I've seen, I see like even trans leftists doing this.

And, you know, like there are a lot of things in Illinois that are 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 going to like sort of make a big show of threatening like healthcare funding, Pritzker just folded and let all these hospitals stop providing trans care to youth, even though it is literally a violation of Illinois, like of Illinois anti-discrimination legislation.

Yeah.

They just backed down and refused to do it.

Yeah.

And the way that this starts is that there is a gap between the rhetoric of someone like Pritzker being like, oh, no, like we support trans rights.

Trans rights are an important civil rights issue.

And then you watch them like allow a bunch of hospitals in Illinois to stop providing care to trans kids.

And the place where that ends is more and more Democrats just straight up voting for this stuff.

Yeah.

And it's, and the Democrats, you know, as you're talking about with, with HB2 is like, you know, there were, there were Democratic votes on that one.

Yeah, HB142, especially, yeah, the, the compromise bill.

But even HB2 itself, yeah, there were, there were Democrats who supported that too.

Yeah.

And so this is, this is, I think, the critical part of this is that like this stuff only can happen with the support of the Democrats.

And that's why it's happening.

It's because

like, and this is something that's incredibly important right now, where like all of the shit that is happening, all the things the Republicans are doing are hideously unpopular.

Like 30% approval ratings across the board for like all of this.

Just hideously, hideously hated.

The only way it can happen.

is if the Democrats go collaborationists and side with the Republicans.

And that's what they're doing.

Nazis always need quizzlings.

Yeah, and they're relying on the image of resistance to distract everyone from the fact that they're helping these policies go through.

And if you want to stop them, you have to stop them from collaborating.

I think that also brings up kind of the third element in this.

You've got the are always fascist, increasingly fascist Republican Party.

You've got the increasing collaborationist Democratic Party.

And especially on queer and trans rights, you have gay Inc., which, and I go into some examples in the piece, after HB 2.0, they put out some prefrunctory statements, but then they turned 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 in the fire, I literally have an example in the article that I was physically there for and witnessed where a director of the Canvas Inequality seized the mic as it was being passed to some candidates to answer a stronger question from some trans activists and changed 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 Kumbh of Effect has been that You know, they turn 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 trans people trying to hold their feet to 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 trans and queer rights, will never give someone any shit for breaking ranks, not even like we condemn official so-and-so and their bigotry or whatever, or we are sorely disappointed in, or any one of the boilerplate 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 a lot 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.

Yeah.

And that's, that's how you give Vichy France.

Like that's.

Yeah.

And honestly, this is, it's a question I put to folks because, you know, look, I'm.

Honestly, dealing with North Carolina Democrats is one of the things that made me an anarchist.

So

it's, you know, I've not had any faith in them them for a very, very long time.

But for folks that, you know, kind of do put a little more energy into electoral processes, I just, you know, some questions of the piece that I think are worth asking them, like, what's the point of people who are just going to support your enemies?

Yeah.

What's the point of people that you elect, maybe even like get out, you know, and knock doors or whatever to get elected, who then don't do the one thing they're elected to do.

And I'd ask too for some of the folks who support some of these gay ink orgs.

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 wasn't a lesson HB2 taught as well, which is if you want even the most die-hard bigot to start losing their nerve, you attack their money and their power.

And then you don't stop.

If folks say, oh, you have to compromise of a pragmatic solution, you ignore them, laugh in their faces, do whatever, but but you keep pressing them because that was the other thing, HU2.

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 Rogers didn't like becoming a national laughingstock.

So there were less about how stuff could be fought as well.

And the more radical history in North Carolina, you know, there are

queer 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 were that a lot of tension has gone to citadens.

And there was a lot of organizing in those movements.

It's a lot more militant than folks remember.

That also went along three decades of riots in cities throughout the state before the old order even began to budge a little bit.

And the lesson from that, North Carolina Democrats and North Carolina status quo, and I'd say throughout the South and throughout the country, it only budges or even starts to move when the cost of continuing the way it is become far too high.

Yeah.

And our job is to impose that cost.

Yes.

Because if we don't impose that cost, they're going to keep pushing and they're going to continue to write us out of existence until they have the guns to do it.

Yeah.

And honestly,

that is a mentality I think a lot more people need to need to absorb.

And I think one of the lessons from

fighting the far right at some points for my entire adult life, basically, and even a little bit before then in North Carolina is that.

the more you fight them, the weaker they are.

But also, and this is something one of the more experienced Transformers South I've known has emphasized, you won't always win.

You can always inflict a cost.

And I think a little more like thinking outside of elections, a little more bloody-minded determination can really come in handy 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 do on that front.

Something goes against us.

That's nice.

We're still pressing the attack.

You know,

there's nothing in this hellscape of an empire we have to abide by, especially not in the south.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if something doesn't go our way once, okay, learn, regroup, redouble, make sure you inflicted some costs, go out and inflict more of them.

They're not invincible, trust me.

Yeah.

Another gender is possible.

You just have to go out and fight for them.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So I think on that note, David, where can people find your work?

You can can find my stuff for TransNews Network at transnews.network, including this most recent piece.

And you can find some of my local reporting as part of the Asheful Blade co-op at ashefulblade.com.

Awesome.

And y'all at both the Trans News Network and the Asheville Blade have been doing a bunch of absolutely incredible work.

Thank you.

And I encourage everyone to support both, because ideally the function of journalism is to be the targeting mechanism of the class.

And

these are two groups of working class trans journalists who do it.

And both organizations are worker-run, I should add.

Yep.

This has been it could happen here.

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This is it could happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you.

I'm Garrison Davis.

This episode, I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans.

We're covering the week of August 21st and August 27th.

Yeah,

we sure are.

I can't believe Cracker Barrel would do that.

It's outrageous.

Yeah, that's clearly the biggest news.

Thankfully, they switched it back.

They took the cracker out of the barrel.

And thankfully, though, they reversed course.

Put the cracker back in.

I really don't understand how it's woke.

I mean, I do understand because I understand how this messaging works.

It doesn't matter.

Anytime anything happens and they can see a backlash forming, you after the fact, because people were starting to get pissed off about...

the fucking cracker barrel thing in the same way like that happened with fucking games workshop earlier this year like they redid their logo in a shitty way and it's the same like minimalist bullshit yeah everyone's doing it's it's it's not It's not woke.

It's just incentivizing like capitalist conformity.

This is why they've changed all of the buildings of like, you know, McDonald's a pizza hut to the same structure so you can use the property and resell it over and over and over again without having to do big renovations.

It's just all about capitalist efficiency.

It's not, it's not about woke.

It's got nothing to do with woke, but there's people whose whole like Chris Ruffo, whose whole job is sitting around.

And as soon as you started to see the backlash forming and realize like, oh, there's probably going to be a spree of these companies coming coming in with these new minimalist logos because it's clearly a trend in like consultancies, right?

Like, it's happened, it started happening.

This is not the first one.

So, I'm just going to 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 one I would pick, right?

Like, I think they're also responding to, like, you know, the past few years where you've been removing racist caricatures from logos, right?

With like Aunt Jemima's and like Lando Lakes and using this in a similar way, except they took away the white guy leaning against the barrel.

Yeah.

So it's part part of that whole backlash as well.

It's funny, though.

I have seen, like,

I don't know if it's from Chris Ruffo, 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 are taking over.

I mean, look, it doesn't matter

outside of the fact that people, whenever you buy into it, like you're helping to feed, like if you, like, even dunking on them, that's part of like the problem is that, like, just talking about this shit at all fuels the feedback loop, right?

And that's, that's what this is, is a feedback loop 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, 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

once everyone ignores the monsters, they go away.

And unfortunately, that's not how things actually work because there's 350 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 say.

Cracker Barrel has fallen and like Christ after three days has rose again.

Yeah, great.

Anyway, speaking of memes.

Unfortunately, we should talk about this horrible mass shooting.

That is probably going to be the big story this week.

I mean, I hate to reduce it to that, but yeah.

We're recording this on Wednesday, a few hours after the shooting.

Yeah.

This is in Minneapolis.

Yes, there was a mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school,

Annunciation Catholic School.

This happened earlier the day that we're recording this.

So that's going to be Wednesday, August 27th.

As of right now, at about 2.11 p.m.

PST, two children are dead.

17 people, mostly children, are wounded.

The The shooter is also dead.

And the shooter has been identified as Robin Westman, who graduated from the school in 2017.

Their mom also worked at the school until very recently.

Yep.

And that's not at all an unusual kind of situation.

Mass shooters at schools often are either attending the school or recently graduated.

There's been a couple of cases where a family member worked at the school.

Like this stuff is all pretty standard for somebody shooting up a school.

What's different is one of the things that's different is that the shooter basically followed in Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter's footsteps, by covering their firearms and the gear that they were wearing in,

like, I guess drew or painted on.

I'm not sure.

It looks like with like a white paint pen.

Like white out or something like that, a white paint pen,

and covered it in the names of other mass shooters, references to racial annihilation memes like the remove kebab meme, which is in short, a meme celebrating the Bosnian genocide.

And it was a meme that was specifically Brenton Tarrant had signaled in his manifesto, and I think on his gun he had a removed kebab 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 Tarrant on there.

Timothy McVeigh, Tim McVeigh's name, just the word McVeigh is painted on there.

Ted Kaczynski.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unobomber.

A whole bunch of other more recent mass shooters,

people who are in the mass shooter fandom.

Yeah.

As well as just a collection of memes from like old memes, too.

Utterly unrelated to shooting.

Like there's a loss meme on there.

And if you're a lot of people are going, wait, what the fuck, really?

And if you're too young for loss, there used to be a web, well, I think there still is, a webcomic called Control-Alt-Delete that started in like...

The early 2000s.

It might have gotten started in the late 90s.

And it was part of like this, there's this boom in web comics in the late 90s when suddenly 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-Alt-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 looked like it's a bit people have done everything like lost 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 barrel or on the side of their gun before shooting up a school is the natural, furthest, craziest extent of the loss meme, right?

If this is anything, it is like a memetic shooting.

It is based on a whole bunch of memes about other mass shootings as well, specifically in the way that it engages in like anti-Semitism and racism and includes slurs and catchphrases.

It's not in the way that the shooter actually believes these things ideologically.

It is just to gesture to them as they exist in the lineage of other 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 17 minutes of 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.

No.

The shooting in Wisconsin last December by Samantha Rupnow, which we reported on on It Could Happen Here, was also in this variant of Columbiner true crime community shootings.

Rupnau's name is on one of this shooter's rifles.

Yes.

There was a shooting in Tennessee a few months later, which also referenced Rupnau, done by a black white supremacist incel whose manifesto was full of like plagiarized memes and other manifestos.

It's about this like,

this complete lack of meaning.

Like

they scattershot all of these memes and references and like bits of manifestos and like images to just to make this whole like mess of stuff to look at, but none of it actually means anything.

Well, and the draining of meaning, the flattening of meaning is part of the point.

That's the point.

It's taking a man who shot fucking 50 people to death and turning that into the same thing as a 20-year-old joke about a comic strip in terms of its impact and severity.

Because if that's no more serious or meaningful or painful than fucking a joke about Tim Buckley's dumbass cartoon,

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?

Yeah.

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 shooting that committed by Samantha Rupnow, but there's also, I found a December 30th, 2024 article in Wisconsin Public Radio, WPR.org, their website.

It talks about Rupnow, but it also gives the story of 13-year-old Jamie Seitz, who killed herself in 2024 and was a member of the true crime community.

The police went through her phone and they they found a bunch of memes and references, 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

basically, right?

Like, I think part of the thrill here 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.

Yeah.

Right.

Like,

and that's, you know, tied into like the hopelessness and the nihilism of all of this.

I found a just random poster on Reddit in a discussion of the TCC community.

Like, I actually really like 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 interwar 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, lustmord 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 2015 by Naomi Barnes of Utah State University.

And it was like looking into fandoms that had grown up around serial killers and around around spree killers online.

And Naomi is using the word true crime community for just a general term of people who are interested in true crime, not in the way that you and I have been using it.

Yeah, because we're using this term to refer to like a specific fandom around

these shootings, not the general milieu of like true crime podcasts and like documentaries and people who are into that sort of content.

We're referring to a much more niche group of people online who operate on like Telegram, Discord, Tumblr, and other social media accounts right it's based around like specifically like like an obsession over actually doing these acts and like and and and like they like cosplay 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 no and that's that's important but it's also important to note that like what you've been talking about this uh this need to recreate and not just prior to actually carrying out a shooting because most of them don't ever do that there's this need this obsession with the aesthetics to want to own clothing clothing and objects and whatnot that like look like eric or dylan or whatever right the columbine band shirt yeah right that that

and um this does extend to the shootings like there's a number of shooters who have like worn that km fdm shirt because one of the columnbine guys wore it cement they're up now and uh i believe this recent shooter also had had a kmdf shirt picked out And what's interesting about that 2015 study is that it is looking at the true crime community because Columbiners were already a thing.

There had been a number of copycat copycat attacks, but the kind of social fandom around like that aspect of it had not really taken hold at a mass level in a way that the internet and virality could really make use of.

It evolved on Tumblr in like in that era.

Yes.

It's more like an infant compared to like the fully grown version that it is now.

Yeah.

And what's interesting to me is this, this paper kind of catches the communities that's starting to calve off.

And so there's a chunk of the paper where she's quoting from a couple of different people who went and visited.

In one case, they visited like Adam Lanza's house and the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

And it's people visiting places like that, sites associated with like mass shootings and the like.

And she gives this mix of people being like, oh, like the first person she quotes who went to Lanza's house is 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 ecstatic.

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.

It's like a religious pilgrimage.

Right, right.

And that's the ecstatic.

And that's what this starts to document.

And that's where I'm like, oh, this is, this study is mostly about an unrelated, just a normal fandom.

But you can see the bits like already popping up in 2015, these people who are having these ecstatic,

again, like almost like psychosexual experiences being at the site of a mass shooting.

Yeah.

And the further extent then is then doing one yourself.

And obviously, this also is like a part of like a suicidal drive, a suicidal intention.

A lot of these people kill themselves in the course of the act.

Right.

It's a way of making your suicide not just be about yourself.

Right.

And there's more to say about like the culture culture of fame in this country and like how

virality and whatnot has made it so that like these people tend to get what they want, or at least they know they've got a good chance of getting what they want, right?

They're obviously not around to experience it, but like as long as you do something sufficiently like weird and bloody, you're likely to get a good amount of attention for a while.

So that's the actual like background of what this shooting was.

I think now we should probably mention how the shooting's being talked about more broadly.

Yeah.

Because it takes a very different angle from the actual like nihilistic

TCC fandom aspect.

It is making this

more about like woke contemporary politics, I suppose.

Yeah.

Cash Patel has announced that he's investigating this as an anti-Catholic hate crime,

which is just not true.

I mean, it's almost certainly by a Catholic or somebody who was raised Catholic.

Yeah, all the people who hate Catholics most are often lapsed Catholics.

Very early on, people started claiming that this shooter was trans.

Now, a few years ago, they did change their name to Robin, and the name change petition stated that at the time, they identified as female.

At this point, we still know very little about the actual shooter beyond like the videos they posted on YouTube of their weapons and a journal written in Cyrillic and a note that they left to their parents discussing discussing their fear of dying 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 discussed 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 it on the day of the attack.

Unquote.

Now, discussion of gender takes up a very small percentage of the journal.

Most of their writing is about admiration for previous mass shooters and fantasizing about killing children from a very young age.

On the cover of their journal, alongside a bunch of other gun stickers, they do have a Defend Equality Progress flag sticker with an AK-47.

Yep.

From my perspective, this is just another one of those memes that they're wrapping into everything.

On one of their magazines, they wrote, I am the wokler, why so queerious?

Right.

And the other side of the magazine had an anti-queer slur.

So

I view this type of stuff in the same way I view the inclusion of like the loss meme or like Ted Kaczynski or all this other stuff, this like memeified version of trying to throw everything at the wall.

just to make everything mean nothing.

And it's it's extremely like obnoxious and annoying.

But it it works but yeah it it works and and i don't know what else i want to say on this on like the the trans angle we don't want to deny that like this is going to cause a problem uh that this is going to be used by the right like there will be there will certainly be rhetoric and i've already seen rhetoric from you know jack pesobic and that crowd around it about trans people targeting catholics well this is why these people shouldn't have weapons or whatever like this is why we should put them all in and i i don't i'm not going to minimize that that didn't start with this that that kind of rhetoric, that conversation, and this is useful to that crowd.

And

that is bad.

We don't know what's going to happen or to what extent this is like, we're talking right now that they clearly would like 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.

No, yeah, which which is really devastating.

It's not good that we're there, but like two people dead.

I'm just saying, like Americans ignore way bigger numbers all the time.

Now the right, you know, there's not always a media campaign like there's going to be with this beyond trying to make this huge, but also they've done that before, right?

They did that with the Rupnow shooting, right?

Like there were attempts to make that and it didn't.

Every mass shooting they have tried to paint it's being done by a trans person.

And I think in some ways that has depowered this rhetoric as a tactic by claiming every shooter is trans.

Most Republicans already believe that to be the case.

So whether this person either was trans or used to be trans, it may not matter that much to the right because they already think every shooter is trans.

Like Trump's already targeting queer people.

The right 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 286 mass shootings in the United States so far in 2025.

If one or two trans people do a mass shooting, that would still mean trans people at 1% 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 rot, 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 talks both about quote-unquote hating fascism and inequality, while also hating Jews, Arabs, Mexicans, Indians, calling Somalis subhuman and criminal, writing that, quote, white people should rule the world, unquote, but that minorities should quote 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 themselves one on one of their weapons.

This shooter and all the memes and rhetoric they use is most similar to the Rupnow shooting last December in Wisconsin in terms of the neo-Columbiner school shooter obsession, as well as the white supremacist mimetic black incel shooting in Anoch, Tennessee last January.

All these shootings are heavily referential, contradictory, and intentionally incoherent.

Right.

Every single extremist political faction is represented there because that is the point is combining all of these references to two previous mass shootings.

So they're incorporating everything they can and things that they just think are funny, like just

a whole bunch of like meaningless memes.

Yep.

And that's vastly more important than whatever gender identity the shooter happens to have right now at this point in 2025.

All right.

Well, anyway, folks, there's going to be a lot of people going the sky is falling over what this is going to mean for people and how this is going to be used.

And obviously, This is terrible.

I'm not telling you not to feel terrible about a mass shooting.

You should feel bad about the actual mass shooting.

You should feel bad about the mass shooting.

The sky,

I mean, the sky's been falling, right?

Yeah.

Let's give this one a little bit to see if it makes the sky fall any faster, or if in a week we're like, no, this guy's still falling at about the same rate, which isn't good.

It's just what happens.

It's where we are.

All right, ads.

And we're back.

We can safely leave the brain rot in the previous section

and now talk about something totally real: the economy.

Yes, the economy which never kills people.

Okay, so speaking of things that have never killed anyone,

that's so not true.

The Volcker shot killed so many people.

But a very, very critical Rubicon was crossed on Monday of this week when Trump attempted to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board, Lisa Cook.

Now, Lisa Cook is refusing to step down under the fairly obvious justification that the president does not have the power to do this.

Trump has been cooking a very weird thing, accusing her of mortgage fraud

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, Jerome Powell.

There are a few factors here.

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 this 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 entity, right?

Trump has been attempting to, as we've talked about on the show, appoint Stefan Mirin as another one of the governors on the Federal Reserve's board.

Mirren very explicitly wants to eliminate the independence of the Federal Reserve.

We're going to talk about exactly what that means in a second, but I want to read this quote from Fortune magazine's report 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, J.P.

Morgan analysts led by chief economist Bruce Kasman highlighted key proposals such as giving at-will power to the president to fire Fed board members and Fed bank 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 Mirren 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 a extremely convoluted variety of reasons.

The Fed, in and of itself, is an extremely confusing entity.

Its creation has spawned a full century of academic arguments about what the state even is.

And it's complicated to describe also because most of the information, well, not most, but a significant portion of the information about it is just anti-Semitic conspiracy.

because this is eliminating the Federal Reserve and 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 the 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 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 the money supply, effectively, that controls enormous portions of U.S.

sort of macroeconomics policy through its U.S.

control of interest rates would not be

able to be like directly interfered with by the president or Congress.

That is the whole point of this.

You know, it is effectively a measure to instill confidence that the U.S.

isn't going to just like turn the printers on and print a bunch of money from every other capitalist in the world.

Yeah.

And like so much when that promise goes away, what happens?

I don't know.

Yeah.

Well, and this is, this is something that

I think is not understood very well.

The current conflict is largely over Trump wanting to be able to control the Federal Reserve's interest rates, right?

So he wants to lower federal interest rates to make it cheaper to borrow money because he thinks this will pump more money back into the economy and this will make the economy grow.

And he thinks that he's being like sabotaged by the Fed.

The Fed's

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 strictly well understood.

I was talking about this earlier in a meeting, but a significant 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 due 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, right?

Its payment infrastructure has trillions of dollars a year moving through it.

If this infrastructure stops working or breaks a little bit, a lot of the very subtle management of the economy that the Federal Reserve does can stop working.

And, you know, again, we've been talking mostly about interest rates and its ability to sort of print money, which is oversimplification.

But, you know, for example, the Fed also does these things like carries out these like massive 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 2008.

And this apparatus, if it is dismantled, if it is directly seized control of by Trump, 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 on the Federal Reserve and the payment systems, the settlement 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 word.

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 Jerome Powell.

If you just tried to fire one of the reserve board members, that's not backing down.

There's also a chance that if this works, he's going to try to fire Powell too.

So we're going to keep watching the 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.

Great.

Well, it's so good.

I mean, we'll see if this means anything other than more suffering for, you know, people.

I guess.

That's where I am is like, is there even a level of fucking with the money that Trump can do that that's enough to seriously cause consequences for him?

And there must be, but it's just hard to imagine.

If there was, it's this.

Yeah.

We'll see.

I mean,

that's the fun thing with the big stories we've got this week is they're all like, well, could get a lot worse, could just stay as bad as it is right now.

Well, we'll continue to wait to see what's going to happen with all of that.

Speaking of something that we don't have to just wait and wonder what's going to go on because the news changes every single week.

Here's the tariff song.

Oh boy, so in yet another instance of the whole Trump backing down thing not happening, the tariffs on India that Trump had been threatening for the purchases of Russian oil have in in fact taken effect.

The tariff rate on India is now 50%.

This is a significant barrier to any trade between India and the U.S.

It is, again, sort of unclear whether India is going to bow to the political pressure here because as with many of these tariffs, we've talked about the situation with Brazil fairly extensively on this show.

The thing about imposing tariffs on a country to

get them to fall in line with 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 sort of part and parcel of the tariff policy that Garrison you have mentioned want to talk about, which is like the U.S.

purchasing 10% of Intel.

Yes, socialism's been achieved.

We did it.

Uh-huh.

Now you can finally call Trump a national socialist.

That's right.

Yeah.

And this is sort of a intensification, I guess, of a degree we talked about a while back, where Intel was talking about giving part of its profits to the U.S.

This is just the U.S.

government is just buying a stake in these companies.

And this is actually a very, very weird maneuver by the U.S.

because the US has obviously bought companies before, right?

This is how a lot of the bailout worked.

But the thing about, if you look at the bailout from 2008 and you look at the U.S.

like purchasing the automakers, the U.S.

got these really weird specific shares that don't give any kind of controlling interest.

And here, the direct rationale for this is that the U.S.

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 trend.

The U.S.

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 U-bots 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 this is all sort of part of the same hyper nationalist direct national socialism if you will yes

a kind of national socialism

but the most stupid form we've ever seen yeah yeah i don't know there's going to be a lot of hype about this being like american state capitalism or something and just ignore that it just just ignore it.

It's bad.

I think it's in the same category as a lot of the things here, which is the Trump administration is trying to consolidate as much power over the economy as they can, both the Federal Reserve and through just straight up taking controlling parts of companies.

This is a trend that's going to continue, and it's not good.

Do you know what is good, though?

You beat me to that exact pivot.

That's right.

The fact that we get a nice 90 to, I don't know, 120-second break to listen to these ads.

All right, we are back.

There has just been so much news this week.

It's kind of outrageous.

Trump is continuing his attacks against the Smithsonian for going woke.

He's promised a Department of Justice lawsuit against California for their 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.

As Mia said, we have socialism now with 10% of Intel.

And Trump and Hague Seth 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.

All right, guys.

This is...

This is the only one of those that I actually agree with.

They should do this.

Calling it anything other than the Department of War is incredibly dishonest.

Yeah, I wonder if that'll make it harder to get people on board increasing funding.

So it used to be called the Department of War, and it had a stronger sound.

And as you know, we won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything.

Now we have a Department of Defense with defenders.

I don't know.

If you people want to, standing behind me, if you take a little vote, if you want to change it back to what it was when we used to win wars all the time, that's okay with me.

All right?

That's coming.

You let me know if you want to do it.

I think Department of War.

It just sounded bad.

He said, sir, on behalf of the Department of Defense, Defense.

I don't want to be defense only.

We want defense, but we want offense too, if that's okay.

So you'll make a decision.

But, you know, as Department of War, we won

everything.

We won everything.

And I think we're going to have to go back to that.

All right, man.

Cool stuff happening in the Oval Office.

I mean, I do like that when he starts that speech, he has to go like, we won World War I?

Like, he's like, there's a question at the end there where he's like,

he's almost, he's like, he's like, giving it a battle look at it.

Double check that one for me.

Just make sure.

I don't really remember if we won that one or not, but we definitely won the second one and others.

When asked to how he would go about changing the name as it requires an act of Congress, Trump replied, quote, we're just going to do it.

I'm sure Congress would go along if we need that.

I don't think we even need that.

But if we need that, I'm sure Congress will go along.

I don't know that we...

Do we need?

I don't know what you need to change the name of the Department of Defense.

You do.

Yeah.

You do need to do that makes you

need to do that.

On a macro sense, right?

What Trump is suggesting here is, wouldn't it simply be more efficient if there were simply a fearer, a single person to make all the decisions?

He said a lot of things in that vein recently is like congress being a more of a symbolic symbolic branch of government that if if we need them they'll probably just agree with me but like we don't really that's your standard dictator stuff that's how he's been talking about it recently uh yeah now earlier this week a redacted transcript of ghillaine maxwell challenges lane maxwell's meeting with trump's doj has been released where she denied that she ever witnessed president trump engage in inappropriate behavior saying quote i actually never saw the president in any type type of massage setting.

The president was never inappropriate with anybody.

And at the times that I was with him, he was a 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.

Wow, I can't imagine why she'd lie.

And also claimed that there is no Epstein, quote-unquote, client-less.

So, yeah, that all about wraps that up.

I think we got to the bottom of the whole Epstein case.

We don't need to worry about this anymore.

I would say, of all of those, the one of those that I might have believed before she denied it was that there wasn't an additional client list outside of what we've already seen, like his black meeting.

Oh, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't keep all of that many notes on a criminal conspiracy.

Yeah, I don't think he has a list of being like, here's all of my pedophile friends in one place.

Here's what does make me wonder now, and this really is the first time I am, which is that they clearly came to her with a list of, here is all of the things you need to say you didn't see.

Like, maybe, or she's just savvy enough to know what to say.

Like, I don't even think

we don't even need to allege a larger conspiracy here.

I think everyone involved in this is quite savvy and knows what they should say and shouldn't say.

Yeah, I mean, I think the conspiracy is obvious.

Like, that's, that's all there is.

There doesn't need to be an explicit quid pro-crow here.

Yeah, I don't know.

It's interesting to me that she brings up Prince Andrew.

If nobody brought that up to her.

No, she was asked about it.

That's what I'm saying.

I believe there's a conversation we're not privy here to where she got marching orders in exchange for getting, you know, now she's basically out on work release, right?

I don't need to jump to such outrageous conspiratorial beliefs such as that.

I'm okay with it at this point.

Yeah.

I don't know what,

to what extent it was, but yeah, I don't know.

This is, this is pointless.

Like,

I don't know if this helps with his base.

I don't know that his base is going to be like, well, if Gillen Maxwell says it.

Nope.

Yeah.

I mean, people have responded positively.

Like Marjorie Taylor Green, who was previously going on a slight offensive on the Epstein thing, has now fully come around, being like, well, there you go.

It turns out Trump isn't a pedophile after all.

Thank goodness.

That was a close call there.

I know this is being disseminated to his influencer network, right?

And to the network of people that he uses for stuff like this.

I'm wondering about the actual

voter base, fan base.

Time will tell.

And the folks who are a step or two further than Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The people who are more on the Rogan side of things, does this really move the needle for them?

Sure.

I hate having to cares, like, is Joe Rogan going to buy this schlot?

But this does seem like

shameful even for him.

I mean, I think a lot of people can see that there is an incentive

for Ghalene to say certain things.

And I think

people are smart enough to understand that I don't think she's going to tell the Trump's own DOJ about

a smoking gun involving Trump.

Why would that help her try to get a pardon pardon from the president?

Yeah.

I think the important thing for this is that like

the people who are going to believe this are the people who just don't want to believe that Trump did this.

And this is a reinforcing thing that you can feed them.

But the question is, what happens with everyone else?

And it's not particularly compelling for them.

All right.

We have four executive orders to get through before we close this episode, starting off with cashless bail.

On Monday, Trump signed two executive orders targeting cashless bail, one specific to Washington, D.C., which directs law enforcement to charge people federally and hold them in federal custody, and to use federal funding and services as leverage to pressure D.C.

to change its cashless bail policies.

The other executive order targets cashless bail nationwide 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 pretrial 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.

Unquote.

So using that list, Trump's cabinet will then, quote, identify federal funds, including grants and contracts currently provided to cashless bail jurisdictions that may be suspended or terminated.

Unquote.

So it's trying to bribe states and local municipalities to cease cashless bail policies using federal funds, the same way that they've tried to do for a whole bunch of other like anti-woke policies Trump has tried to force onto unwilling states.

Second executive order from August 25th, titled Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag.

Let's start with a clip from Trump.

I don't want to just play super long Trump clips because I know that can be annoying, but the way that he talks about this order 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:

Flag burning.

All over the country, they're burning flags.

All over the world, they burn the American flag.

And as you know, through a very sad court, I guess it was a five to four decision, they called it freedom of speech.

But there's another reason which is perhaps much more important.

It's called death.

Because what happens when you burn a flag is the area goes crazy.

If you have hundreds of people, they go crazy.

You can do other things.

You can burn this piece of paper.

But 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 are 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?

Sure.

What the executive order does, sir, it charges your Department of Justice with investigating instances of flag burning.

And then where there's evidence of criminal activity, where prosecution wouldn't fall afoul afoul of the First Amendment and instructs the Department of Justice to prosecute those who are engaged in these instances of flag burden.

And what the penalty is going to be, if you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, no early exits, no nothing.

You get one year in jail.

If you burn a flag, you get...

And what it does is incite to riot.

I hope they use that language, by the way, did they?

Incitement is it.

Incite to riot.

I love that he has to check.

Yeah.

Because God forbid him actually read what he's citing.

Trump, Trump, Auto Pen.

That's right.

So included in the order, it says, quote, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's ruling on First Amendment protections, the court has never held that American flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to quote-unquote fighting words is constitutionally protected.

See Texas v.

Johnson.

unquote.

The order directs the Attorney General to enforce criminal and civil laws against acts of American flag disecration that cause harm unrelated to First Amendment expression, which could include charging people with violent crimes, hate crimes, illegal discrimination against American citizens,

violations of American civil rights, crimes against property and peace, as well as conspiracies and attempts to violate and aiding and abetting others to violate such laws.

So it's like an anti-rioting thing.

The DOJ will also look for cases where American flag dissecret could violate applicable state or local laws, such as open burning burning restrictions, disorderly conduct laws, or destruction of property laws, and will refer such matters to state and local authorities for potential action.

And finally, the Secretary of State shall deny, prohibit, terminate, or revoke visas, residence permits, naturalization proceedings, and other immigration benefits, or seek to deport any foreign national that has engaged in American flag dissecration activity.

So that's how they're going to go after it.

Robert, do you have anything to say on this flag burning thing?

I mean, they're waiting.

I mean, and they didn't wind up waiting long.

Someone did it immediately as they knew they would so that they can get a case that they can take up to the Supreme Court.

So we'll see.

We'll see what happens.

We'll see.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They want to prosecute one of these things and appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court to maybe change that ruling so they can apply it more broadly.

Right.

So it's part of the same test that they've done with a number of other things that seems unconstitutional.

It seems to violate Supreme Court rulings.

But the point is to test that and see if they can change it, just like they did with abortion.

Yeah.

Can we go further?

And if this works, if we feel like we made progress on this, can we start pushing and saying other things are incitement to riot?

You know, can we start going after people who aren't even present who write something that is like, well, this was incitement to riot because they wrote about the police murdering this guy, right?

Like, you know, party of free speech strikes again.

This is the kind of thing where, can I war game out?

Would they try this if they can get?

that far?

Yeah, they will if they can get that far.

Will they get that far?

You know, is the Supreme Court going to give them everything they want on this?

I i don't actually know like i really don't know so i'm gonna try not to doom spiral too much just you know let's see none of us have any choice in the matter at this stage finally let's address the quote additional measures to address the crime emergency in the district of columbia so this is another executive order from august 25th

Trump wants to establish an online portal for Americans with law enforcement experience, quote, or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join federal law enforcement entities to support the policy goals described in Executive Order 1433.

That's the making a D.C.

safe and beautiful order from a few weeks ago.

Right.

The Secretary of Defense is instructed to create and begin training, 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 of Defense shall immediately begin ensuring that each state's National Army Guard and Air National Guard Guard are resource-trained, organized, and 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 of Defense shall 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 of Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resource, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.

Unquote.

National Guard walking the streets of D.C.

are now carrying firearms after first being deployed without their service weapon.

And since the operation in D.C.

began on August 7th, there have now been over 1,000 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.

I would have much more respect for Pritzker Pritzker if he'd call me up and say, I have a problem.

Can you help me fix it?

I would be so happy to do it.

I don't love,

not that I don't have

the right to do anything I want to do.

I'm the president of the United States.

If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it.

No problem going in and solving

his difficulties.

But it would be nice if they'd call and they'd say, would you do it?

He's hurt.

Poor guy.

They want to ask him for help.

His widow feelings.

He's going to have to deploy the National Guard without Pritzkill's approval.

You know, gang, in all of this focus on the people being killed and persecuted by the government, I don't think any of us has stopped and spent enough time thinking, how does Donald Trump feel?

And shame on us, you know?

Shame on us.

But it's not just Chicago.

On Friday, the Pentagon told Fox News that upwards of 1,700 National Guard troops will be mobilized in 19 states to be deployed across the country to assist ICE in the nationwide hunt for undocumented immigrants.

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 to 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 D.C., pulling National Guard from other red states being deployed to D.C., but mobilized

in those red states.

So, National Guard 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 1700 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, which also pulling from National Guard.

But these things are two separate operations, according to White House officials.

And I think one of the important things about this is that, you know, obviously there's the part of this where it's like, yeah, they want to, at the very least, look like they're just occupying cities and they are arresting huge numbers of people, but they also just don't have

the manpower to do this kind of stuff, which is why they're pulling the National Guards, why they're trying to expand the number of people at ICE.

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

So we will keep an eye out in September for these possible military deployments around the country.

Yep.

Hey everyone, this is Garrison recording a short update on Thursday since we have a little bit more information about the Minneapolis, Minnesota school shooting.

So right after we recorded, rumors started circulating that this shooter was linked to neo-Nazi satanic pedophile groups 09A and 764.

Someone on Twitter found a neo-Nazi forum account that they alleged belonged to the school shooter.

This account used an O9A symbol, and an affiliated Twitter account made other 09A references.

These claims gained a lot of traction from leftist accounts and armchair experts on Twitter and Blue Sky.

Lots of people were very eager to talk about something else besides that this shooter was trans, and many pinned the blame on 764, the child exploitation group that operates on Discord and Telegram that blackmails children and encourages some to commit acts of violence like school shootings.

I talked about 764 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 09A or 764 grooming victim.

This shooter did not really seem like an 09A acolyte.

They more closely resembled the true crime community fandom.

And while sometimes true crime community or TCC may use O9A references, because other mass shooters have, or because previous mass shooters have been affiliated with O9A and related groups, I do not see much evidence linking this shooter to O9A 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 764 to this latest shooting.

The shooter was in their mid-20s.

They weren't a 14-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 09A or 764 grooming victim started posting again on the forum.

It wasn't the shooter's account.

The shooter did not fit that profile.

They weren't an occult Nazi Satanist.

They were obsessed with mass killers.

And translations of their Cyrillic 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 shooter cosplay, unquote.

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, viewing 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, harbors admiration of intent, unquote.

One more update before I close the episode.

Earlier today on Thursday, RFK Jr.

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 Jr.'s general focus on psychiatric drugs, SSRIs, depression medication, as he has previously stated.

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We reported the news.

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