A Geek History of Time - Episode 161 - Brynn Tannehill Interview part II

Episode Date: June 4, 2022

Wow, you're gonna like this. Oh, no, I'm not because there is no god damn middle. This is not unlike ancient Rome by the way Not so much the family circus Yeah A lot of you want to create self-sustaining farms and you got into crystals. I know. Okay. I understand that and you got into crystals. I know! Okay, I understand that. But yeah, I'm reading Livy, who is a shitty historian. Because Irrigan is.

Others say that because Laurentia's body was common to all the shepherds around, she was called a she-wolf, which is a Latin term for horror. You were audible, lassies. It was just most of it, where you slamming the table. As the Romanists at the table, well, duh. Yeah. Obviously, it's so fucked up. Right. You know, it's your original form.

It's a fuck of a lot. You have a sword rat. This is a geek history of time. Where we connect, an artery to the real world. My name is Ed Blalock. I'm a world history. And English teacher here in Northern California. And the news here is that it's the middle of allergy season.

And so I want to apologize to our listeners. If I sound congested or if in the middle of saying something, I suddenly go silent, I'm sparing you because right before I came in here to record, I was out on my back patio and the trees are all in a free love mood. They've decided that it's time to get down and boogie and they're playing Barry White out there and I did not consent to be part of it, but they're kind of indiscriminate with how they spread the love around. So that's what I'm living with and dealing through and dealing with right now. How about you, sir?

Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a Latin teacher and a drama teacher, and I found out just recently, sure enough to be a US history teacher next year, which means I'm returning to my roots in some weird ways. It's been a long and arduous road that I will detail probably piece by piece later on, but suffice it to say, knowing that I started diving into creating curriculum. And I am up to my eyeballs in the three fifths compromise,

having just finished King Philip's War and reading a whole bunch of stuff by increase and codn, matter. Wow. Yeah, yeah. So I'm having fun actually, despite how depressing all of that stuff is. But what I'm having a lot of fun doing actually

is making sure that my language is more reflective of the way that I think history should be taught. So instead of saying slave owners, I'm saying people who held other people in captivity. And so I'm having to type that out a whole bunch of times. But it's helpful. Yeah. I asked in slave. I asked out.

Yeah. Okay. So. Pwh O P I C I I I S in slave. I instead. Yeah. Okay. So, but I mean, yeah, if you were if you're teaching in Alabama, you know, you couldn't use that you'd have to refer to slaves as prisoners with jobs. So, you know, right. Well, and just, you know, these are, you know, I'm speaking of my principles relatives instead. So by the way, that was an odd voice that I heard. Do we have another person in the party tonight? There's a sapper inside the wire.

Oh, well, look at that. Hey, we are joined once again by Brent Hannahhill. And she's back again. Once again, she wrote a really cool book. And we want her on to talk about that. I'll plug it at the end. Don't worry and feel free to plug it yourself. But I have down here my notes.

It doesn't work for a living. Does Jenzen Dragons has a dog and has read a lot of books, which is different than having a lot of books because I once read the great Gatsby at least the first page. There you go. Yeah, tons of books back there. I assume you've read. So tell me about your dog. Oh my God. Well, tons of books back there. I assume you read. So tell me about your dog. Oh my god. Well, there's three of them. And all rescue huskies. There, it's like having a pack

of mildly brain damaged wolves as roommates. Mildly? Yeah, two remarks. Number one, mildly. And two, based on what I know about huskies, how do you ever sleep? Like, garlic. It's loud as you think, but this morning was the example of why I don't get as much sleep as I should because I heard one of them at 5.50 this morning. We have a doggy door, they can come and go as they please, big backyard, And I hear the

bark that tells me, oh, crap, something's going down. And it's very specific. It's a long bark followed by a series of descending barks that get shorter and shorter and shorter. Doppler barks. Yeah. Yeah. Doppler barks, but that bark is, is I have found something small and furry and I am in the process of attempting to kill it. In this case, in the first, we learned that one from an apossum which did not make it. This morning it was a raccoon which did make it. So that was me dealing with, with huskies. And they're all rescues because huskies are not beginner dogs.

They're what do you call it? Expert friendly at best. And. So is that because of their is that is that strictly because of their high energy level or is are they particularly like needy, emotionally, or what is it about their personality? No, it's actually opposites. They're feeling attacked.

Remely independent. They're extremely independent. They don't tend to be as people centric as like a golden retriever lives to make you happy, right? Huskies are like, dude, when are you gonna to feed me? Food? Yeah. Yeah. I got running to do. Yeah. Um, they're high energy. You need to run them. You need a big back yard. They shed all the time. Um, they have high prey drive. Many of them are very, very vocal. Many of them are escape artists. Um, they're difficult to train not because they're dumb, but just because they aren't, like I mentioned,

they're not people, pleasers, like they don't live to please you. It's like, okay, you know, if you want me to do that, you're gonna have to offer me something better. What's my incentive? Hey, what's it in for me here? Hey, hey, what about this deal? Like, come on. Making you happy is not all that big of an incentive what what else you got?

So there's the opposite of pugs Yeah, yeah, like and basically every conceivable way he my pug was wonderfully easy to train because He was dumb and he was a people pleaser. It was fantastic. Like it was, man. So. I've had at least two business meetings on teams since the pandemic started that finished with me, crawling into the dog great

and fighting with them to retrieve half a squirrel. So, you know. Okay, yeah, my dog just... Not the front half, the back half. Right. So, you know. Okay, yeah, my dog. Not the drug app, the back half. Yeah, my dog he would just, you know, like eat lettuce if you gave it to him. Like that was. But he would give you knuckles. It was cool. So, yeah. Okay, so for you, it's a three dog night. Time check.

I'll be here, I'll be here, I'll be here, I'll be here. I'll be here, I'll be here, I'll be here. I'll be here, I'll be here, I'll be here. I'll be here, I'll be here, I'll be here. I'll be here, I'll be here, I'll be here. I'll be here, I'll be here, I'll be here. I'll be here, I'll be here. I'll be here, I'll be here.

I'll be here, I'll be here. I'll be here, I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. I'll be here. veil a little bit. Last time we spoke was late April.

It is now, no, last time we spoke, I'm sorry, it was early March. It is now late April. Now late April. I don't understand time. And so it is now late April. So a lot of things have changed. And in many ways, a lot of things have simply deepened.

So I think the best way to kind of get back at what we are going to is asking you about your D&D game. Actually, I think it would be just kind of a dip our toe in and whatnot. Yeah, I don't know if you know, but Brynn is playing a very human rogue. Okay. Rogue bar. A rogue bar. Okay. Rogue bar.

A rogue bar. Okay. All right. Cool. Rogue one, barred for. Yeah. It's fun character concept. I wanted to try rather than make something that was OP.

I wanted to try and make something that was much more. You'll go boy. Our role playing focus, skill, monkey focused. Sure. You know, and the concept was a character that started out as a rogue, as a street urchin, got caught stealing books from a great library, and it turns out that rather that they'd actually been reading them and had a near aditic memory and rather than the wizards and bards just turning them into a frog and keeping them in a terrarium, they decided that

she was better inside the fold. And now she's a traveling scholar and not particularly useful in a fight, fairly sneaky, lot of fun to play in an RP way, kind of a little bit of an absent-minded professor kind of vibe to her, very adorable, very kind of got a willow from Buffy the Vampire, kind of vibe going. I kinda like the gal in real genius.

Yeah, yeah. It's like you can't pick because I'm here, huh? Right. Weird. Okay. Yeah, very much so. Oh, I should go off on tangent. There's a little bit of ADD going on there.

Very fun character to play and absolutely useless in combat. And we were talking about how home brew rules or optional rules can end up taking, end up having unintended consequences. Okay. Definitely. Like what? Well, we were talking about it beforehand. One of which was I played one campaign

where the DM instituted the critical wounds rule where you take a critical hit, you lose an arm, you know, you're right. And what that ended up happening was players recognized that you really don't want to have random encounters, you really don't want minor fights because some random goblin, you know, can put your eye out and now all your tax or disadvantage

as a ranged fighter. Well, crap, you know. So avoid fights unless they're really, really important. But the DM was like, why are you guys avoiding all my encounters? It's like, well, because any random, you know, co-bold with a thrown any random, you know, co-bold with a thrown rock can, you know, put me out of the fight for the rest of the night. So why? You know, and in this case, my, the DM's running something where anytime you go down, it gives you a level

of exhaustion, right? So anytime my character gets caught in aE, which this is, this DMS has been throwing AOE's at us for two weeks straight, not letting us rest. I picked up three levels of exhaustion and my characters completely useless. So I ducked out of it because my characters basically another fight broke out and they're like, okay, invisibility. I'm going to hide in the corner. I'll talk to you when it's over. And that was an hour and a half ago. So that works. It does, but it sounds dull. Yeah, I'm not a little bit of fun. Yeah.

So yeah. So does your DM just hate Chumbo Wamba? Like I'm trying to figure out why they want you. Nice reference. Thank you. Definitely a Gen X podcast. Oh boy. Yeah. Very, very well, especially now that Ed has his own grill because yeah, he's got a Barbie grill in his Barbie world. Oh, it's fantastic. And that would be Aqua. Yes. Yes.

And Ed is now rubbing his eyes. I win. So, well, cool. We are actually between games over here, both with my children and with the group that I normally game with. But my children and I also just finished Avatar the Last Airbender.

So we are actually Julia, my daughter and I also just finished Avatar the last airbender. So we are actually Julia, my daughter, and I, she's nine and loves coming up with character concepts. So we basically came up with four subclasses, earth, wind, water, and fire, as subclasses of monk to make benders, essentially. So we we have subclassed benders instead of looking up UA type stuff because I like the idea of her having some ownership in it. So we might be moving toward a game of that. So that could be a hoot. Sounds cool. Yeah, what about you Ed? I know you're doing a first-dead game or something. Well, second edition, because I Ryan my DM is Very old school would be would be the way to save it. There you go wouldn't lead to me suffering critical hits

losing an eye next time we played the game But yeah, he he is very much I Wouldn't put him in the OSR camp the old school role playing camp. So he's not a guard guard. He's not well. I mean, he is a grog nerd, but he's not, he's not quite that hardcore. As a lot of the OSR types are. But so yeah, we're doing in seconded and I'm playing a cleric. Why are you stepping outside of your normal thing there? That's good. Yeah, we're doing in seconded and I'm playing a cleric. Why are you stepping outside of your normal thing there? That's good.

Yeah, stepping outside of my comfort zone, mostly because by the time I, you know, by the time I had the chance to get in touch with them about so like, you know, who all is in the party, we already had like three fighters in a palette and already selected and I was like, well, okay. And then we have a second edition bard who has an identity crisis and thinks she's a thief. Not a thief, sorry, I think she's a fighter or a barbarian.

And several wizards. Would you say that her wit is scalding? Nice. Oh, that one oddly doesn't bother me. No, I didn't think of it. So, um, but, uh, you know, well, she's in a scoppest. So that's, uh, the reason she's reason she's she's doing that, which is really obscure, and I don't know if anybody, but me is going to get that particular pun. But anyway,

and so basically the party still needed a cleric, and I was like, okay, I'll play the cleric, but I'm not going to just play an ordinary cleric because I'm too extra. No, I'm going to play a cleric using the archetype of a Japanese so-hey. Japanese warrior mask. Are you getting ory-adventuals? Are you using the old Oriental Adventures second edition book? Yes, the the the the the brown cover the the brown cover the black books for second edition. Yeah, I'm using one of the archetypes out of that. So yeah, and also because you know, I can't just, you know, be ordinary. It was like, and by the way, I'm not taking, you know, I'm not gonna be, you know, a priest of Kwan Yin or like a healing god or anything like that. No, no, I'm a fire priest and it's a spell jammer game. And

so the background I came up with was he got kicked out of the monastery because he's chaotic good and he doesn't do very well in a strict hierarchical kind of environment. And so he works as a ship board firefighter. Okay. And so took a couple of kind of sailor-ish spell jammer sailor-ish skills for his proficiencies. And the bit I'm having the most fun with with him is, my wife is playing in the campaign. And she is playing a fighter.

And my character is absolutely madly in love with her. Like, like the first time. And you're like, oh hey, Mama said the way you move. Thank you, Twett. Gonna make you groove. Darn right. Adley. Thank you, Mama said the way you move. Can make you sweat, gonna make you groove darn right. We don't want to get the BMG license coming down on us. It's okay because I put it through and that's right. But if we sing it, we're in trouble.

But so my character is absolutely madly in love with her. Basically from the first moment he saw her in a fight. It was like, yeah, yeah, okay, whatever, you know, you have a charisma of 15. Yeah, you're hot. Okay, cool. Whatever. And then they got into their first fight and she wheels it to her character wheels a two handed sword. And he's, he's a so hey. So personality-wise he's more warrior than cleric. So he's up to a quarter staff immediately? Well you're not a gnawda but oh yeah nice nice. I showed you a real strike honey. And so yeah watched your dispatch a couple of enemies very quickly. It was like, she's a goddess of war. I've never seen anything so amazing in all my life.

And her character is utterly nonplust and totally clueless about how utterly doled he is at her. Nice. So yeah, everybody at the table has a lot of people. I'm not going to be a lot of people. I'm not going to be a lot of people. I'm not going to be a lot of people. I'm not going to be a lot of people. I'm not going to be a lot of people. I'm not going to be a lot of people.

I'm not going to be a lot of people. I'm not going to be a lot of people. I'm not going to be a lot of people. I'm not going to be a lot of people. I'm not going to be a lot of people. I'm a veteran of two marriages. That's how I recall. So cool. Well, that was, that was fun. It's certainly a good divergence away from the health scape that's happening in the world at present.

I think, OK, so when last we spoke, Putin had already invaded Ukraine, right? Yes. Yes. Yeah, that was. was the sanctions worked. He went home. Democracy is now raining over there. It's no. I really hate how you always do that. So it's complicated. Since since we last spoke,

the Russian offensive Peter Dout they attacked, they attacked along four or three. The Russian offensive petered out. They attacked along four axes. It was not very great. And they ended up withdrawing from most of northern Ukraine to refocus on eastern Ukraine, the Donbass, and where we're at right now is they've gone from 130 the time tactical groups down to maybe 92. The they're making slow limited gains in Eastern Ukraine while the Ukrainians are engaging in defense of maneuver warfare. The US has continued to up and up and up. The kinds of munitions it's providing.

So as Europe, you've even got the Germans who are reluctant. Now they're handing over mobile anti aircraft guns. They're handing over leopard one tanks. The US has given Ukraine so much stuff. We've given away a third of all of our javelin missile stocks and anti-aircraft missile stocks. And it's going to take us years to rebuild them, those stocks. We have given an absolute flood of small munitions to Ukraine.

This offensive by the Russians is the last that they're going to be able to mount for a while. They within a couple months here, the battalion tactical groups that they have in the field are going to be exhausted, maybe even as little as a month or two. But there's rumors going around. May interrupt there for real quick. So exhausted, but holding that territory, or is that then we're going to see the push back out? That's that's where we don't know. That's where we're really. Ukrainians have been fighting as much as they can on their terms, fighting a

defensive war, fighting in a mobile defensive style. Right. Not sticking to fixed positions and letting the Russians bring their artillery to bear. Right. Which they have an overwhelming advantage in not for long. The US is providing massive amounts of artillery, even guided munitions. There's rumors that the US has provided M270 high mars and guided, which are rocket artillery. Oh, thank you. That so there's rumors that the Russians are going to on May day, on May 9th,

that they're going to declare war and go to mass mobilization. Because the consensus is that the Russian military as it stands now is incapable of executing the Kremlin-stated goals. Now this could lead to further escalation, it could lead to like throwing haymakers kind of thing. It's, well, what happens after that is if the Russians just start throwing 800,000 conscripts that are handed a rifle and a pot helmet and told, you know, the Ukrainians are that way, kill something. Right. You know, yeah, they'll probably make advances, but it will lead to a slaughter, given that the Ukrainians are better armed, better equipped, that they have already undergone their own mass mobilization,

and that their mass mobilized troops will have had two, three, four, five, six months of combat experience versus the Russian conscript who got, you know, or reservists who got, you know, three months of training, you know, two years ago. Six years ago, and they basically handed them a rifle pot helmet in a backpack and said, go, that's because, honestly, it's going to take months for Russia to mobilize and during that time. So we don't know how this is going to turn out. take months for Russia to mobilize and during that time. So we don't know how this is gonna turn out. It sounds to me like they expected a quick strike, quick victory knockout in the first round.

And the other person is clearly playing for points. And now they're starting to think about like, well, do we throw haymakers? So I guess my question would be. Well, actually none of the haymakers at this point. So what Russia expected that they would come in, sweep in capture keave in two, three days, decapitate the government, put it a puppet,

they had a puppet standing by, right, a pro-Russian political leader in Ukraine, and that they then would have half the country themselves that Ukraine would collapse, that there would be international fracturing over which government to recognize. Right. And none of that happened.

And none of that happened. We've seen photographic evidence suggesting that they thought they were going to have that Russian troops going after Kiev packed their parade uniforms. They thought that they were going to be marching in a parade in Kiev a week after the invasion started. That didn't happen. Yeah. I've seen pictures of dress uniforms being pulled out of captured Russian, armed personnel carriers and stuff. Okay, so I've got a question and this is going to be you having some experience in analyzing this stuff. Based on that, I'm curious about the psychology involved in making that set of assumptions, because the

other thing that we've all kind of seen, I mean, like I'm one of those people who's like on Reddit watching Ukrainian war video stuff and looking at stuff on the ground of what's video of what's happening over there. And one of the things that has come out to us in the Western world is, you know, we all thought the Russian army was this highly technologically advanced, you know, you know, highly competent, you know, scary behemoth of, you know, the world's second army. And what we found out is, you know, the tanks they're driving are beat up. The vehicles, all the trucks, you know,

or a great many of the trucks that we're seeing are, you know, secondhand civilian vehicles that they've, you know, commandeered and maybe tried to militarize. And just it's kind of a shit show, frankly. And what I don't understand is if you were one of the soldiers in that army, like if you were one of those tank crewmen, you know that the tank you're driving is running on its fifth set of spares

and you're only operating one radio of the three you're supposed to have for proper communication. And so how did they gaslight themselves so effectively into thinking that it was gonna be that easy? So that's a really long and complicated question. There's a lot of I could talk for an hour on that.

So I'll try and give a short synopsis. So the Russian invasion of Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in 2014. The Russians kind of steamrolled them. The Ukrainian military did not cover itself in glory. Their military equipment was a bunch of beat up, poorly maintained Soviet cast-offs from the 70s and 80s, which when they tried to dig it out from storage was in no condition to fight. Troop training was terrible, troop tactics were terrible. They got steamrolled by a bunch of your regulars

or Russian special forces pretending to be Russian-speaking Ukrainians, right? The little green man, the hybrid warfare. You know, Ukraine fought back a couple of times, but eventually, the Russians got most of what they wanted with very limited amounts of military pushback. The Ukrainian military did terribly, right? In all aspects, they were a mess, right? So the Russians kind of expected when they went in this time that the Ukrainian military, yeah, they're going to be a little bit better, but given how bad they were last time, they can't be that much

better, right? There was an expectation, there was, there's also some cultural chauvinism. You know, we're Russia. We are with the Russian Empire. The Ukrainians are Russians. They will welcome us with open arms because Russian culture is superior because they were always part of Russia. So there's this, there's this bias towards believing that they would be welcomed with open arms, and that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would flock to the Russian banner. And that didn't happen. And in part of it is a certain amount of Russian egotism about them being culturally superior and you know mother Russia and before you look down on the Russians too much, the US is you know in our manifest destiny is pretty bad at this ourselves.

Yeah, I'm gonna say seventh Calvary much. Well, seventh Calvary and you know the attempts to suppress the Philippines did not. Yeah. go, no, no, bad. So, you know, West Morgland, then you've also got corruption in Russia. People are stealing diesel, jet fuel, explosives, spare parts, right? The system hemorrhages money and parts and fuel, right? And every, the military's ridiculously underpaid. It doesn't garner a lot of respect within the public and within the, within the, within the, within the, uh, within the Kremlin, the military is deliberately kept down, so it won't pose a threat to Putin, right? All of this has historical antecedents so far

that I'm hearing. It's like a mix between the Egyptian government of the 1970s and Stalin's purging of all of his generals and colonels, and then throw in some... I'm not gonna purge this. purging of all of his generals and colonels. And then throwing some. It was, but there's definitely. The corruption has made his cause material problems, right? And readiness problems.

The culture of making sure the military doesn't push Putin out has kept the military weaker than it could be. There's also the, and we saw this in the US run up to the Iraq war, which was, don't bring the boss bad news. Don't tell them we can't do something. Tell the boss, only the good things make the best assumptions possible because you are part of this machine, right, this political machine. And when the boss says, Hey, can your guys do this? The answer is, of course,

yes, we can do this. Because I, you know, I'm the best at my job, right? You know, and I want give me more stuff and more money and more opportunities to be a kleptocrat because I'm, you know, I'm better than the other guy that I'm competing with in this little, you know, internal political struggle. So it's a school district. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I was, I was, I was going to point out the political similarity or the historical similarity there. Actually, I was. I was the DOD under Johnson. I was going to go with the Polionic hubris. Yeah. I was going to actually the closest precedent but unbiased because I'm as this is the military. I study a lot is there's definitely some analogies between Russia now and how Germany and World War II work that you had, Gering and Guderian and, you know, you know, Rommel, and I'm trying to remember some of the others, Kessler,

and all the other, you know, Nazi functionaries trying to position themselves as the best for the fear so that they get more they Increase their fiefdom, right? Guring is probably the worst best example. Yeah, right? Yeah, most potent example I have died bombers. We have bomber fighters. I don't see the problem. And it's like well, they don't work at either Um, but I was a pilot. I know what I'm talking about The loose vaffafa had its own infantry divisions. They had, they got put in charge of all air defense artillery. So you had a Wommel and the other grounds generals fighting

with gering for control of the 88 millimeter fixed guns which were also remarkably good as anti-tank weapons. So yeah. Yeah. And, and one of the things that that has come up in, in analyses that I've read is, folks keep mentioning that there really isn't a non-commissioned officer corps to speak of in the Russian military. And like having, having spent a couple of years, I didn't actually manage to get a commission in the US military,

but one of the things in ROTC that we got taught basically from day one was to wipe out those middlemen and so that it's a much clearer, J.M. command from the lieutenant to the private, right? Yeah, actually quite the opposite. Oh, no, no. Okay, I'll give you, you'll immediately understand. When you start, when you start at a new school site, who is the very first person in the front

office that you want to make sure likes you? Oh, you want the office manager to like you. Yes, straight off and then the controller, the secretary. Yeah. And yeah, because they're the ones that actually make shit work. Yes. They will help you fix the Xerox machine whenever they inevitably breaks down the first three times you use it. Yeah. Yes. So it's essentially the same thing.

You need to have sergeants to act as the professional, essentially, the spinal column of your military, because they're the ones who are closer to events on the ground and so they are the ones who are going to be in a position to have to make decisions and they're going to have to be the ones to make judgment calls and give you as a commissioned officer a veteran sober analysis of what's going on so that you can make a command decision based on good facts.

And so the Russian Army apparently basically does not have a professional NCO core. It is apparently the same kind of sort of kleptocracy that you see at the very top of the organization. And so you can see this playing out very specifically with the number of generals that Russia has lost in this fight. They've lost, they have 20 generals in theater had, of which 10 are now dead, which is amazing. And basically what was happening is because of very rigid command structures, lack of NCOs, lack of initiative, bad communications, poor communications, you had

communication, pushing themselves to the front to try and take command near the front. But because of poor comms discipline, Ukrainians were figuring out where these guys were implanting artillery rounds on top of them. Put the missile there. Yeah, is the cell phone stuff, right? Some of it's the cell phone stuff. Yeah, yeah, so I mean the the Russians have taken appalling losses among the generals now They have 2,300 generals which is kind of the bloated kleptocratic structure of the Russian military, right? I think the US military is a significant we larger and only has about

1400 flag officers, which is still huge, but it's not nearly as bloated. Well, one of the things about Russian doctrine, though, has always been that the difference between Russian doctrine and American doctrine in particular, is that as a junior commander of a unit at the front line, you have to be in contact with everybody back behind the lines to get new orders. Whereas our training here in the United States was if you manage to find a weakness in the enemy line,

you exploit it and then let us know you've done it the enemy line, you exploit it. And then let us know you've done it so we can follow up on it. You know, and you say the Russian doctrine is supposed to look like that, except they're supposed to find the weakness, get permission to exploit the weakness, then exploit the weakness, but it's still the same general concept. Yeah, this really is like a goddamn school district. I found a thing that works for students. I have to inform my associate superintendent. Mother May I. Right. And then

like those students graduated two years ago. Like it feels like standardized testing. You're really all right. So it's going to look like it goes well. So, all right. So forecast, if you don't mind, forecast for us out a couple of months. What are the possible, because last we spoke, like it was, they had their finger hovering on the button. We didn't know if he was going to go nuclear option, because he was getting, kind of froggy about that, which made sense at the time because that was in some ways part of the bluster of y'all stay out of this running off them out. What about now? Like has has a rational mind taken over, has it gotten worse and he's

bunkered in, but now he's even more impotent when it comes to that kind of stuff, what's up? So my prediction is that in about two months, we're going to see the Russian offensive in the Donbass have come grinding to a halt. And now the Ukrainians are forced to go on the offensive if they want to change things on the ground. This is gonna be much harder for them, fighting on the offensive if they want to change things on the ground. This is going to be much harder for them fighting on the defense. Fighting defensively is the less easier. Russia will have started begun mass mobilization, but it's going to take at least three or four

months to start getting anything useful to the field out of mass mobilization. Because if you just start grabbing people, telling them to show up in your uniform, you're leaving, you know, and a week you're leaving to the front. Yeah, okay. It's a meat grinder though. It's gonna be a meat grinder. Yeah.

So my guess is that this goes one of two ways is that either they rush a successfully turns into a meat grinder and that they manage to build up their army by throwing people at the front until they figured out and eventually they wear down Ukraine is what Russia's hope is going to end up being and that they get the Ukrainians to sue for peace after a long brutal period or if the Ukrainians are good enough and fast enough that they beat the surge of mobilization that after two months, the Russian army is just so exhausted and that the Ukraine, Ukraine has brought in so much a manpower and better weapon systems from the West that

they're able to roll up, start rolling up the Russian army in about two to three months while the Russians aren't able to flow people there quick enough. No that sounds much more preferred which means I know it's probably not going to happen but let's say that it does. What does that do to? Well, there's a third option. There is. There is. Oh, God.

Well, I'm kidding. You can go ahead and tell us the third option. The third option is it just kind of the Ukrainians aren't able to exploit the exhausted Russian BTGs. And it just turns into a bloody series of skirmishes up and down a line in Eastern Ukraine, and then the Russians end up getting what they want, which is a multi-year war where they throw bodies at it until something good happens. The Russians, one thing to keep in mind, is Russians are not in a position to replenish their stocks of precision guided munitions.

They're not in position to get what they're they don't have any good stuff left. Whatever stuff they're handing to troops that they send there now is whatever stuff that they drag out of a warehouse or a bunker that's been sitting there since 1992, right? That they're not going to be sending T90s and upgraded T80s to the front. They're going to be sending T72 Bs that were manufactured in 1982 and then got put in warehouse and left there for a long time. You know. All right, so back to Madison, Carlsson and Tucker Carlson, the real question. Well, nothing's gonna happen to Tucker Carlson. Madison, Carlsson,

Teddy. The fact that he got caught doing something gay after having embarrassed Republican leadership and made some accusations, they're gonna let him twist in the wind. And what the Republican base and made some accusations, they're going to let him twist in the wind. And what the Republican base having done something gay or seemingly gay is inexcusable. And by the way, this is not, before anybody thinks that this is me being anti-gay. No, this is, I'm lesbian, but this is saying that there is a homophobia within the GOP base that

we drive them to turn on anybody perceived as being gay, especially now, which there would probably be a good segue to where we are now politically in the US. Perfect. You see how I did that? Very nice. Very clever. Very clever. Yeah. Very nice. Very clever. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, so where are we right now? Because it's where we are. It's trying to count the years. We're about two years from an election, two and a half years from a presidential election. We've got midterms coming up. You know, it's it's usually midterms are historically bad for the sitting president's party, which that's worrisome.

And yet there's, you know, possible rumbles of actually following through on some of his promises that Biden got elected to commit to, I've heard rumbles about a student loan debt. rumbles about student loan debt. But we were looking at midterms and we're looking at Hartree Taylor Green possibly being not allowed to run. Madison boy don't we hope. Madison cost aren't. I don't think it's gonna happen. I'm reading the Teeleys with the judge in that case. I think she's with us and I think she's probably gonna end up being she's probably going to end up being the Kingmaker in the US House of Representatives. Good board. She is going to she and the House Freedom Caucus are going to act like the Tea Party Caucus did to de mint and Cantor and the Freedom Caucus did to Bnor, which is there's gonna be just enough of them to scuttle

any kind of legislation that Republicans want to run through the house. Cause looking at the midterms, all signs indicate that this is gonna be a blood bath for Democrats, this is not gonna be good. This is, we are effectively seven months from the end of the Biden administration or any hopes the Biden administration has of doing anything legislatively. There's really no hope, according to most statistical modelers of Democrats reclaiming both the House and Senate for a decade at this point. No, why is that?

At least if you don't mind. It has to do with combinations of demographic shifts. It has to do with gerrymandering. It has to do with voter ID. It has to do with built in biases within the Senate that low population red states have more representation and there's lots of low population red states. You know so it all adds up to most forecasters really don't see Democrats as having a chance to

reclaim the Senate until probably about 2026 or 2028. It's not good. In 2028, it's probably the earliest. And I've, earliest and I've seen others that are saying, yeah, they don't think that population shifts will be enough to swing it back into 2032. So to the point where it's just so overwhelming that no amount of gerrymandering would be able to have that. That for Democrats to control the Senate, they would have to win the popular vote by six or seven points.

Right. Yeah. I remember in your book, you talked a lot about that, about that, that handicap essentially like a golf handstand. Right. So, you know, the, and that that's the most concerning thing. Going into the midterms, I'm seeing a developing political trend that I wrote about for Day Magazine, and that is the thing that is absolutely terrifying as an LGBT person, is that the Republican party has gone all in on accusing all LGBT people who support trans youth of being pedophiles or groomers, right? People who are trying to trick young people into having gay sex or be trans or something, right? And this is complete bullshit. And this is, I mean,

I can point at you to German propaganda called the Poison Mushroom, right? Which was a particularly vicious piece of anti-Semitic propaganda from 1936. If I'm trying to remember, I... I'm trying to remember it, but the way that they went after Jews in the Poison mushroom was that they were all Kitty diddlers. And that they were, they were children and promises of candy, and oh, don't tell anyone. So the fact that we have a party that is authoritarian fascist, and now that they have seemed to settle in on, okay, what group of people are we going to demonize into the ground?

As the group of people that we blame for everything wrong with America that we build anger and use agit prop on, that we direct the entire fascist movements hate and, right? And it's fallen on trans people first with lesbians and gays now a close second. And for a couple of years, there was much more on trans people. And trans people are still the most hated group,

but now that they've moved on, you can see them, they're starting to go after the Trevor Project, which if you're not familiar with the Trevor project, it's essentially a suicide hotline for LGBT teens. Right. And they're now, the Trevor project has things on its website and has mechanisms and recommendations that if you're, if you're an LGBT kid who have parents that you think you're going to kill you if you get outed like my parents literally told me I'd rather you're dead than gay right and being in the Mormon church they had you know troubled teen camps where they shipped you know LGBT kids to go live in prison camp like conditions.

Like the wilderness camps where they sign over custody to somebody else. So the pipeline, the pipeline is you get central wilderness camp and then two months in a wilderness camp and then you go to a prison camp in the Utah desert where you're subjected to conversion therapy and prison conditions. And if you don't renounce your LGBT identity, they deny food, they deny privileges. They basically, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's basically a reeducation camp. Yeah, I was going to say it's brainwashing. Mm-hmm. It is. And I've interviewed survivors.

So, but, you know, I've gone off course a little bit, but what was the direction we're seeing that the GOP has now decided to make LGTBT people being number one scapegoat prompted me to write something which was like, okay, if they claim power the way I expect them to in 2024, I can, I'm now at a point where I can't say genocide is impossible in the United States anymore. I just, it is a non-trivial possibility. And that's terrifying. I wouldn't say it's the most likely outcome,

but I can't I can't rule it out. It's upsetting that it's even on the table. The fact that I have to consider is like, okay, what would stop them from going to genocide if they really wanted to? And the answer is is, well, maybe the Supreme Court had hold up. But what I do see is us going back to, and I'm also seeing some of the bills that are coming out anti-LGBT bills. And they are aggressively taking us down a road that

should be terrifying. My last article for the Los Angeles Blade talked about how we're kind of heading towards some court decisions that are going to look like Dred Scott, right? And I'll give examples, right? We already know that abortion is going to become illegal in the US, Roe vs. Wade ways almost certainly going down. And we know that other states would like to make abortion illegal nationally.

Well, how would you do that, especially if the courts uphold states rights, or if you don't have 60 votes in the Senate to pass a law banning abortion and all. Well, you know, one, you could just get rid of the filibuster in 2025 and ban it nationally. But other things that you could do is you could have states trying criminalize doctors that perform abortions out of state on, you know, a resident of Texas who goes to California. You could start applying the felony murder rules.

So if a woman gets pregnant and Texas flies to California, you could start prosecuting the airliners, the travel agency, kayak.com, the guy that drove her to the airport, you know, and then start extra-diting them all back to Texas, right? Same thing with parents of trans youth. They're banning healthcare for trans youth. So what if a family in Texas leaves Texas

and goes to California and stays in California to get medical treatment? Well, we could see Texas trying to start extra-diting them, right? Arguing that there's still residents of Texas or that they got medical care while they before they had changed it, but they will find a way to drag them back, right? And same thing, we could see the same thing with, we're going to see homosexuality recriminalized again. We're going to see

Lawrence versus Texas overturned because we're Lawrence versus Texas relies heavily on Roe versus Wade, Griswold versus Connecticut. So we're going to see we're going to see marriage equality overturned. We're going to see Lawrence re-Texas overturned. So what happens when you see states like Texas, which regard anything LGBT is obscene, right? And pornographic. So what happens when Texas says, hey, any child that's living in a family

with married, same sex parents has been exposed to obscenity and pornography, and we're going to pull them. The same way they want to pull trans kids out of families. And this family, please to California. And Texas says, nope, bring it back. We want the kid. We got the parents. Parents are on charges of indecency with a minor.

And the child needs to be put up good Christian home, right? And all these cases remind me a little bit of Dred Scott, which is basically, are you free when you get to a free state? Right. And can the free state protect you. And can you prosecute everybody in their dog who might have helped us slave escape? And can you ever stop being property?

Or can you ever stop being a slave or and property of a slave state, right? And the answer in Dred Scott was no. Yeah, it reaffirmed the fugitive slave act. I mean, it did. Yeah, both of those 1793 and 1850. Right. And it went even a step further. And what we're going to see with the six three Supreme Court and possibly seven two, sort of my or has health issues, is we will see and given what the Republican party wants to do in places like Texas and Alabama, to reach out and drag people back and ensure

that nobody can get an abortion, no gay people can adopt kids or have kids. We are in a position where we could see states trying to drag people back and we could see a dreads got decision because how is California? How's Washington? How's Oregon going to react when you're rip when Texas is dragging people back, you know, to put them in prison and give their kids away. What's what's the reaction? There's going to be a huge segment in all three of the states that you just mentioned that are all for it because as blue as these states are, that's because of the urban centers. If you go 15 minutes away from any of them, you find

Confederate flags. You find a very deeply red state. It just you know that that deeply red state is 1500 people in that county. And there are millions of people in the blue county, but there are 57 counties in California. So start any any Democrat, but California is still ultimately controlled by Democrats and any Democrat that doesn't fight back against that sort of thing. Yeah, is not going to survive the next primary. True. Well, I'd like that to be true. What I found out here in California, and again, my bias, I'm a teacher who just got off the eight-day strike. There were...

So there might be some John's colored glasses being worn here. But I mean, I was literally sitting next to one of the City Council members and one of the I mean, I was literally sitting next to one of the city council members and one of the county supervisors where I'm at, both of whom are Democrats. Like you said, it's a Democrat state. Now having said that, the Democrat party here in our state's capital, as well as several other places, their party platform is what are you you going to do vote for the other guy? Shut up and get in line. Like, and that's it.

And so there's not much room for like leftists have not been able to primary these people. Now, if they fall down more on their job, then just screwing over labor and minorities, we'll see. Send and gave people back to Texas. I would like to hope that that we would actually hold their feet to the fire. But random arrests of taxi drivers who drive someone in the airport to a hotel. You know, just.

You know, we also have been fine with killing black citizens in our city. So. killing black citizens in our city. So it's painfully deficient in a lot of ways that have really mattered. And so I worry that, you know, it's also the standard Democrat thing to do is we'd much rather lose to the Nazi than we would to somebody on the left of us. So let's de-legitimize. Like I know people who are currently running for city councils. Not just in my home city, but in others, who all of them report the same thing. That the older Democrats that are already on setting city councils and maybe trying to leave absolutely keep tabs on what they do on social media. And they try like hell to control younger progressive, more progressive potential candidates, like really, really nepotistic and insidious type stuff.

My guess is that as these tactics come about and as younger people don't see anything changing, I think we're gonna go one of two ways, which is either rage or despair and hopelessness. The despair and hopelessness is the Russian solution, which is, a truth, knowing the truth is impossible, changing anything is impossible. So this is just the way it is. So what are you going to do? Right. But that's, it's been pointed out many times and I tend to agree there are cultural differences

between Russia and the US. US tends to be very fiercely independent and very, very, you know, and very, very, you know, screw you when it comes to the government. I have to wonder what the revolt at the base level would look like. And I can't answer that. Is there a breaking point for people who are left, not just center left, like democratic leadership? who are left and not just center left like democratic leadership. Eventually, is there a breaking point for them? Is there a breaking point for the center left? I think there is. There is in certain spots, for instance, Portland and Seattle. Very clearly, you saw a very strong leftist movement and ongoing fights with the authorities

in somewhat democratic cities. But I wonder, it's this weird thing, like in certain places where you have flashpoints like that, yes, but when you have just a slow boil kind of turning up, you know, it's like you said in your book, we, we, we go out, we protest, we, we get real out for a while, and they know that they can just wait us out. And those are our allies. Those are our alleged allies that are waiting us out. Well, and the Republicans know they can wait it out too. Yes, everybody knows they can wait it out. And if you look going back towards Ukraine again, Lukashenko won a rig

election that was free but completely unfair. And he had six weeks of massive protests and riots. And he's still there. He's still secure. Now, it limited how much he could participate in the war in Ukraine, because he was scared to death that if he sent his army into Ukraine, that he wouldn't be able to put down a rebellion. But he's still there. And mass protests and strikes did not turn out the dictator. Yeah, I see, when I think of what we've got coming up, and I think of your analysis and having read your book. I think that in many ways we're looking at the US as like another Hungary, where there was a brief break from the fascist in charge,

and then they came back and were like, right, we got our first draft out of the way, and now we know exactly what to target and fix. And it feels very similar to that mixed with a tinge of like the 2010 midterms where they got control of the house right at the time where really good computer modeling came in. And that's what enabled gerrymandering to a much more precise extent. And now you combine both of those things. And it's, you know, again, we haven't seen the guy from Hungary step down anytime soon,

no matter what happens. Yeah, if you want to read a really great book on the subject of 2010 and gerrymandering, rat fucked, why your vote doesn't count by David Daley is absolutely fantastic. So yeah, I think I've heard him interview it a few times. So, um, Damien, I had a thought and it slipped away. Oh, um, I read, I, I had, uh, talking

about, you know, what's, what's happening in, in, you know, we've, we've been talking a lot about you guys have been talking, I've been listening, because you're way smarter than I am about it. But, you know, we've been talking a lot about you guys have been talking, I've been listening, because you're way smarter than I am about it. But, you know, talking about what's, what's kind of, you know, happening on, on the left. I read a really interesting analysis, and I'm trying to remember who it, who it was, who wrote it, about what's happening in the Republican party right now, that there is a desantis authoritarian movement and there is a Abbott, I think was the other one that was mentioned, authoritarian movement.

Yeah, like there's the Florida branch and there's the Florida branch and there's the Texas branch that are triangulating toward a form of authoritarianism that's going to be more palatable. Part of the analysis was talking about Liz Cheney and whoever else it is who's on the January 6th committee. In Congress, it's like they would have been totally okay with 90% of the stuff that the Trump administration was doing, but they, but they, balked at direct attacks on the institution of our democracy. But what DeSantis and Abbott are doing don't rise to that level of sedition.

And so we need to worry about those two. I'm going to disagree. DeSantis would happily overturn the election if he could. Abbott would happily overturn the election if he could, if he needed to. I don't think they're going to need to. I think the voter suppression and the rightward leans and Texas and Florida are going to be enough to keep it safe for Trump or the Republicans in 2024. But I had the conversation yesterday with someone else in a different interview. It was some British, with some British podcasters.

And they're like, well, okay, suppose Trump eats one big Mac too many and, right, you know, has a heart attack and kill so. And it's like, well, would this get better? Would this break the fever? Would this, would the Republican Party come back to us? And would there be a restoration of some sort of political normalcy? And my answer was no.

Actually, Trump is slowing down. Right. He dissent into fascism because he's an idiot. He's venal. He's incompetent. He's ADHD. He's obviously a buffoon, right? He keeps tripping over his own feet as he tries to incorporate fascism because he's neither particularly tactical nor strategic about it. He doesn't listen to anyone. He doesn't understand the system. He's ignorant. He doesn't, and he's not just ignorant, but he's happily ignorant because he believes

that whatever he has in his brain already is better than anything he might read on a piece of paper, right? So he is, he is what everybody hoped Hitler was. Like what, the way if you watch the great dictator, the way that Charlie Chaplin portrayed Hitler was. Like, the way if you watch the great dictator, the way that Charlie Chaplin portrayed Hitler was indicative of the hopes that everybody had, because everybody was like, oh, it's clearly Gervals, who's the power behind the throne.

He is that buffoon that Hinkle was. We should be so lucky, which is the worry. But I'm sorry, Anne and Rob did you? Yeah, so, you know, of them, DeSantz, I believe, is a Harvard, is a Ivy League educated lawyer. He knows he understands exactly how to destroy the system and he also understands exactly what buttons to push to get the fascist base highly motivated and going after LGBT people as pedophiles and groomers. I think he made a strategic error going after Disney, but it's still it was waging culture war for the sake of culture war. He's also using it to distract from the

fact he's been disenfranchising black people in Florida and that there's been some shenanigans, electoral shenanigans going on down there. But in the end, he's also a true believer. And Abbott is a true believer. And when I say true believer, I mean, these are people who believe that the United States would much be much better off if there were no visible LGBT people and they will use every mechanism and lever of power that they have available to make that happen and that they will create new ones. By whatever means necessary.

They have an agenda, whereas Trump's agenda is himself by whatever means necessary. Yeah, he's more interested in the kleptocracy. He's more interested in, oh look, I feel great. I've got my own personal Marine Corps helicopter. Aren't I wonderful? Right? I want to make myself richer. I want to feel powerful.

I love having people kiss my ass. Right. And stage Mabuto. It's the narcissism. Yeah. Yeah. He was narcissistic personality disorder. I'm, I'm, I'm, okay, I can do this because I don't have the the gold water rule. I'm not part of the APA or anything. But yes, absolutely. I believe Trump has narcissistic personality disorder.

Oh, yeah. But in the end, he could not give less of a rat took us about LGBT issues or LGBT policy. It was somebody from the religious right, your millers, your penses, your Ryan Anderson, your Vicky Heartsellers, getting in Pence's ear, getting in his ear, getting in the ear of Franklin Graham, who calls him or when Trump called them, it's like, hey, we need you, you have to ban trans people from the military. And here's the series of tweets that we want you to send out, or we need you to tweet this, or you need to use your, your power to ban trans people. Do this, do that. Trump doesn't understand, oh, hey, we're going to put in a new, you know,

something into the US code that's going to do have this effect on LGBT people. He's, that he doesn't care about that. It's somebody doing it for him. Abbott and DeSantis being lawyers, DeSantis in particular being an Ivy League educated lawyer. Yes, absolutely. They're down in the weeds details. They want that this is what they want. This is what they believe.

This is where they want to go. And they will pursue it more aggressively and more effectively than Trump ever did. And they can stay on message. And they can deliver the message they want in some ways even more effectively. I personally believe that the Sanctus is going to challenge Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024 and I think he's going to give Trump a run for his money, which brings me to the one scenario where the U.S. survives that I can come up with. Only one I got.

Which is DeSantis beats Trump in the vote. And it's all conservative voters and Biden wins in a landslide the way, almost exactly the same way Clinton beat Bush. I was going to say, yeah, that sounds very Ross Perot, like down to the tee in a lot of ways. Oh, intensely. Yeah, in a lot of ways, yeah. Yeah. So Ed, I know that. I don't think that's very likely. I think the Trump, if you did, if you had the primaries now,

Trump would still beat DeSantis. Okay. Ed, you had a question that you were gonna ask, Eric. Well, yeah, I'm curious when you're talking about DeSantis and Abbott being true believers about their outlook on, you know, the believing that the US would truly be better off without non-white, non-straight, you know, heteronormative, et cetera, you know, with only heteronormative white people in charge. Do you think, and this is, I know gonna be kind of purely conjecture,

but I'm curious about your take and your read on them. Do you think there is any level on which they understand that they are destroying? Democrat, they are in fact destroying democratic norms, or do you think that they are such true believers that they actually believe they are somehow saving or protecting them? believe they are somehow saving or protecting them. So it's an apocryphal statement and it turns out it was probably made up by the reporter. But do you remember we had to burn the village to save it?

Yeah. There's a, there's kind of a Republican mindset that because liberals and the locusts and the gays and the transes, you know, and and and and Tifa and BLM have taken us so far off the rails that the country must be saved Whatever it takes sort of that means just if that means Season control for two or three generations, which is the exact work for a generation or two for two or three generations, which is the exact, for a generation or two, which is the exact wording,

the pro-Trump Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank used, if we have to seize power for a generation or two, so be it, because that's what it's gonna take to save the nation. They don't quite get that the culture has drifted far enough away from them, and that we are so polarized,

that American cities will burn, and you will probably touch off a left wing insurgency if you take us that route. If you create a white Christian nationalist nation that decides that it is going to impose its values beliefs Via any means necessary upon the rest of the population so everybody better be fucking praying in school in the morning There better be no freaking no sign of queerness anywhere That there's no abortions for no one. There's no birth control for no one. And the only escape from the federal government, you know, putting you in prison because your

gay or your gay person with kids is to flee to Canada. Yeah, okay, we just reached 1861 again. I'm saying, it sounds like you're predicting the best version of serenity. You know, like maybe that's the insurrection we wish that the brown coats had done. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just saying that we are going, people, there's a lot of folks that I talk to,

who are veterans and media who have been to Kosovo and Yugoslavia and other interesting places that have had revolutions. It's their opinion that yes, the US is headed to a blow-up because you have two groups of people. You have a minority group that wants to instruct a very strict white Christian nationalist vision of what America will be and should be and can be, and you have the rest of the majority of the population that doesn't want that, and then you have the 10% of the population that's going to be utterly screwed if that happens. Right? That they cannot continue their lives as they cannot continue their lives in the United States. And that's, you know, do you like the TV show Archer?

Yeah, oh yeah, big thing. You know, do you want a revolution? Because this is how you get a revolution. Right. Or do you want actually more effective or more succinctly? Do you want an insurgency? Because this is how you get a revolution. Right. Or do you want actually more effective, or more succinctly? Do you want an insurgency? Because this is how you get an insurgency? Sure.

I like it. So let me close with this question. And then your subsequent answer, and then we'll get into the plugging. Elon Musk, short, for Elon, a long gated musket. I heard that the the other day and I was like, oh, it's beautiful. He, instead of getting... I'm pretty sure it's false though, his musket is not elongated. Why?

He does not behave. He does not behave. Anyway. I always thought of his more as a muskrat with a lawn, but you know. So a former apartheid child, Elon Musk, white supremacist who, in his factories, black people are actively moved to the back of the factory floor when he comes by. Yeah, that's a thing. There's a class action lawsuit.

There's a lot of shit going on right now. Oh, yeah. I heard about that on Twitter. Yeah. So, speaking of Twitter, he bought it or he's in the process of like signing the final paper. It occurs to me the timing is quite something. So you have a man who grew up in a par thai state, buying essentially a public utility for communication upon which the former president made his bones and frankly activated a whole bunch of

deficient personalities as Ed would put it. Um, was kicked off of and banned for life because of he his fermentation of a insurrection. Elon Musk is buying that platform. Um, and it's 2022. platform. And it's 2022. What impact do you think that will have on the upcoming elections? On both the I don't know that he'll be able to do too terribly much between now and midterms, but certainly by 2024. What's what's that going to do? Because we're talking about it's not even in the top 10 of social media platforms, but it is like one of those, like Jerome Cursey was not an all-star all the time, but he was a key player of the Portland Trailblazers.

So same thing here, it is a pivotal, if not hyper important, social media platforms. So what's that going to do to the 2024 election? Because that's a big thing. So my next article that's waiting to come out, it's embargoed at the moment, is talking about just exactly the subject. And what there's some funniness to it. I don't know if you knew, but Elon Musk got divorced, I believe, from Grimes or was he dating Grimes? They divorced. I just think they, yeah.

They divorced. Yeah, I believe so. So I might be mixing them up with Bezos. I don't know. Both did defrockets, so. They split up. Yeah. Whether or not there was a divorce involved and apparently trans woman

and secret spill or Chelsea Manning is apparently stuffing his ex. So he's apparently really upset about that. And he's also apparently really upset that Twitter gave a ban to the Babylon B for deliberately misgendering surgeon, assistant surgeon general Rachel Levine. And he considers this, you know, in a front to free speech and wokeness and and and and a, and, and, and a sign of wokeness. And, um, you know, part of there's, there is a rumor, belief among some that, in part, he's buying Twitter because he's pissed at trans people, uh, for stopping his ex. Um, I mean, Trump ran for president because a black guy said mean things to him once.

So that fits. Or you go back further, he ran for president because dad didn't love him. Yeah, just to just to jump in here, Elon Musk and Grimes were not actually married. Okay. Okay. They broke up. Okay. So they weren't married.

We were thinking of Bezos, but still the point about Chelsea Manning and Grimes being an item, they are apparently are an item. So what makes Twitter a little bit unusual is there's only a small number of decently moderated and I say decently meaning minimum level of moderation of how much awful stuff can you say. And you wouldn't believe the amount I get. Twitter's more or less okay with me being called a groomer in a pedophile constantly. So it's still not a great place,

but it still has some enforcement mechanisms, right? Of course, he's attacking one of the black women who is a part of that apparatus. He's specifically attacking her and harassing her and directing harassment at her. Facebook is terrible at this. It's a right wing hellhole. If you look at the other sites that went for free speech,

like Musk is promising he'll do. What's you know, parlor, getter, gab, truth, they're all basically, you know, right wing hellholes that are absolutely overrun with bots and Nazis. You know, I have people that are, that friends of mine who study the far right, and we're not just talking you know, you know, Pesobiac and Cernovich and Annie, you know, people, I mean, people who have, you know, freaking swastikas tattooed on their foreheads and wander around, you know, neighborhoods wearing, you know, should stuffle, you know, uniforms, right? You know, you know, you know,

the litter, legitimate neo-nazis, you know, on telegrams, celebrating Elon Musk buying Twitter, because I think that they're coming back soon, right? And my point is, is that if Musk does what he intends to do to Twitter, it will turn into just another parlor getter a gab. And the awful people will chase off the non-awful people. There's only so much abuse you can take, be free like, this is not worth it.

I'm leaving by. abuse you can take before you like this is not worth it I'm leaving by. You know, so yeah do you remember the story about in the early 2010s like 2012 2013 time frame Microsoft attempted to create a chatbot that was supposed to learn by interacting on Twitter. Yes. Yeah. And it took it. It became a racist. It turned it not just racist. I mean, we're talking, you know, full. Yeah. They the 14 words for a tea, you know, Zee guy, I'll write a level of, oh my God, Nazi, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's a. That little paper. That pops up. Hey, you're looking to create a reeducation camp. Would you like some help with that?

There's only one true font. So there are some rumors that the sales not going to go through Mm-hmm because investors are going to get real nervous because what happens if Twitter goes down the parlor getter gab route? Well, you're going to have Amazon and Google drop them from its authorized Apps list, which means no more Twitter on phones unless you're willing to root-kit your phones. Can you imagine that Amazon and Google are the good guys in this? Like, it's kind of like DeSantis. I even put it on Twitter. How fucking evil do you have to be for Disney to are the good guys in this. Like it's kind of like DeSantis. I even put it on Twitter. How fucking evil do you have to be for Disney to be the good guy?

Yeah. What was it? What was it? There was this. This is. There was this. Do you remember Night of the Mariket Commandos by Berkeley Brithet in Bloom County?

No, he's the one who reads things. So there's there was a punch line from 1988 where there was this like what was it? Save from fascist by was rescued rescued from fascist by a bunch of terrorists a dream come true. And you know your comments about Google and Amazon saving us from from something worse which would be really funny because Musk is leveraging the hell out of this buyout. Lots of loans loans that that at a 4% rate would mean Twitter needs to bring in a billion dollars a year just to pay the interest right? Pay the interest from the loans.

Oh yeah. And it's a vanity project. What happens if Twitter's base collapses as it turns into a, you know, all, you know, all fascist all the time, you know, well, the hellscape, the, but the big problem is, the big problem is that if Twitter goes down and turns into that. There's nothing that's going to emerge rapidly or quickly to replace it that would provide a similar level of news information discourse. Activism capability. Yeah, right. And it's worth mentioning that, you know, the way hungry collapsed its its media is that the state bought up everything and what wasn't bought up by

the state was bought up by cronies of the Hungarian dictator or bond or authoritarian or bond. dictator or bond or authoritarian or bond and that anybody in Russia or Hungary that is gets goes cross twice with the government as a businessman. Yeah, you might have a billion dollars now, but we can ensure you got nothing in very very short order and we saw Trump try and do that with Amazon with the cloud contract with the DOD. As time goes by and the guardrails of democracy erode, we'll see the government doing more and more stuff like what DeSantis is trying to do to Disney, that we can see the US government running independent media

sources out of business to create a media ecosystem monoculture, which my last article for Day Magazine pointed out that just how effective a government's monoculture can be in convincing people of absurdities in order to commit atrocities. And the example I would use was look at the overwhelming support within Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, even though it's completely unjustified, brutal, and they're raping, killing, and murdering everything.

You can convince people to support a Holocaust, a genocide, by feeding them nothing but lies, right? And giving them access to nothing but lies and telling them nothing but things they want to hear. Do Americans really want to hear? Hey, we sent, you know, US troops who invade Canada and they've been instructed to, you know, bayonet babies. Well, that might be true because, you know, we've faced it. We had Candace Owens demanding that the US invade Canada and liberate it from Justin Trudeau back in February. But the scariest part is, is if you created a media monoculture, Russia has demonstrated it would be entirely

possible to make the majority of US citizens believe that if they got cut off from all the media sources that were telling the truth. I mean, in many ways we have a light, a diet version, a splendid version of that with Fox and OAN. Like, you already kind of see that monoculture kind of thing happening. Yeah, they do. So we've already got the groundwork laid. The very fact that you're talking about O.A. and a serious tone scares me and ways to can't even like use Max.

Oh, my God. Yeah. The millennial post. Epoch times. Epoch times. I somehow got on their mailing list and I cannot. Okay. I like I don't I've told them stop setting me this shit. I've got the same shit with my email with Trump. I I even asked an ex-wife. I said, Hey, not mad if it was you, but did you as a prank put me on a Trump mailing list? Because

I'll be impressed. I won't be mad and well done, but was it you? And she's like, no, I'm like, I kind of wish it was because and we both had a laugh over it. It was nice. But, uh, you've been a lesbian, your friends with all your exes. Uh, well, no, I'm not, uh, but I have children, uh, that we both love, uh love and she's a lesbian and I'm queer. So, you know, the ecosystem is there, but for the personalities involved. But unfortunately, see, if she had done that, I think that could have been a bridge back. But sadly, no, I might be editing this part out. Okay. So, back to the monoculture ecosystem. So we're seeing a weird reverse status corporatist thing where the state devours the corporation and then Columbus is it.

This is mine now. Well, more along the lines of decides which corporations succeed and which ones fail. Oh so it is just. Which ones are most label, which ones are most friendly to the brand. Was friendly to the ruling party, you know, and I'm literally in my book and the section on the relationship between business and the government, which is, which is the, the quote I use is the message of fascist regimes to business. Big business is do not cross DeFierre and everything will be fine. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's probably a good place to end it. So I got to come back though to the Twitter thing. I'm sorry. Okay. Now I'm talking to the book. Also, well, we're definitely going to do that in a second. But so if Musk manages to pull the buyout off and you're essentially saying that he, in so doing, if he gets his way, it will become an interrelevency and it will no longer be a platform that they can jump off of politically as far as those who are actually empowered. It's just going to be another. There's going to be a weird competition, right?

What I'm seeing in some of the literature is that you're going to have lenders that are going, that are fully capable of going, okay, well, what happens when you turn a site into a free speech site? Well, it turns into pure not-a-spe to be built. Yeah. And the user-based shrinks down to just Nazis, right? Far right, nut jobs and conspiracy theorists, right? You're not going to be able to pay those loans back. You're not even going to be able to cover the interest those loans back, you're not even going to be able to cover the interest if you do that. So you're going to have the blenders going to musk and saying, yeah, don't do that. If you do this, we're going to call it do now, right? We're going to call it in now and collapse is empire, whereas musk is going to try and

push back against that. There's some speculation at this point that the deal is going to fall through because Lenders are already getting antsy about it. Sure. So and Tesla Tesla investors are getting getting worried Because he's he's looking at selling a bunch of his shares in that company. Yeah, yeah, and and that's and that's gonna hurt their their valuation in Tesla So like he's he's gambling literally his entire financial empire on this and it's it's pretty clear There's signs signs everywhere. There's signs Yeah, so I mean, you know Elon Musk

He did that Elon Musk tweeted that he wants the maximum amount of free speech possible, that anything that is legal to say should be sayable on Twitter. Well, let's just point out the case of Brandon Berg versus Ohio in 1968, where if listeners who aren't familiar with that, the head of a local clan group outside of Cincinnati, held a clan rally, you know, hoods and burning crosses and all the, you know, clan and coach months and they caught him on a recording,

urging the other members of the clan that we need to take revenge and sick on N word and Jews, right? And the police got a hold of this and they're like, okay, yeah, that was a call for violence. Drag a man. Drag a man, because the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says, well, because it wasn't directed anybody, you know, specific, and because it wasn't an imminent call for action, it didn't say go do it now. It's just like, well, it should be done and it didn't specify the specific person or group or church or whatever that it should be done against. That's free speech, right? And covered by the Constitution. So going on Twitter and saying that we need to, you know, we need to take revenge on LGBT people

and eliminate them, right? Legal, right? Calling for genocide perfectly legal, right? So is doxing. Doxing is perfectly legal, right? Doxing and implying, hey, Brynn Tanahill lives at such and such address, and she is a groomer and a peto, and somebody should do something about that, right? Legal, right? Yeah. You know, so you see, now here's the problem. That's legal in the United States, not legal in the EU. The EU is not to say, no, y'all can't come over here because that violates the dignity clause of most of the constitutions over there. Yep. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, my point being is that Elon is that Musk wants a free speech site. But if he gets that, he's going to destroy it. The investors are going to either call it do or he's not going to be able to make it

or he's going to make the interest payments or he's going to try and institute a pay to play like, you know, a penny per letter and, you know, 25 cents to attach an image or something, right? Which, that would just collapse the user base even further. So he's either gonna kill the goose that laid the golden egg or he's gonna be, or he, or he's gonna back out or he's gonna be forced by reality to leave things kind of the way they are.

Given that he's a billionaire, apartheid dumbass who doesn't think beyond a surface level and isn't used to being told to no by anyone and gets angry when anyone tells him no. I'm voting. It's probably going to be the first. He's probably going to commit economic carry carry or he's going to back out. I don't think so either he's going to be permanently aggrieved, which was Trump's plan when he ran. You know, which is true. I don't think he's gonna, I don't think he's the kind of person who's gonna buy it and let it stay the way it is. Right.

So that only he didn't do that with Tesla. So no, he didn't. And, and by the way, I just, I want to, I want to thank you, Bren, so much for that full body beating of Elon Musk as an intellectual and anything because I just, yeah, thank you so much because I'm so tired of, you know, the hero worship he gets from certain courses in the internet for being such a genius. And it's like, no, he bought a bunch of shit like, yeah, he has done some notable things, but he bought a bunch of shit and hired or kept on a bunch of people who did amazing things. Why does he keep getting the credit?

He did the Tesla. What Edison did. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, that's, that's, yeah, SpaceX. SpaceX is an amazing company, doing absolutely amazing shit. None of it is Tesla's work. He didn't come up, but not Tesla. None of it is, it musks. Also true.

Yeah, well, true. But none of it is, is, is musks work. He didn't do any of the engineering. Right. He's not do any of the engineering. He's not, you know, but like, you know, he's the guy in the CEO chair. So all these tech bros want to, you know, jack off to him. And it's no, not get the hell off. Thank you.

We're going to leave people that visual. Thank you for knocking him down a pack. I appreciate that. Oh, don't ask me for the visual on describing what's going on with Putin and Russia. But we've already got tech bros jacking off and and Tesla or Elon Musk pegging. So I think this is good. So all right, well, why don't we go around the horn and plug stuff? Actually, I'm pretty sure all of us are going to plug the same book. So, uh, Brynn, given that you wrote it, why don't you plug your book for us? So, Brynn, given that you wrote it, why don't you plug your book for us? So, I spent four years researching and writing American fascism, how the GOP is converting democracy.

It's kind of unique in its field in that it takes a holistic look at the decline of American democracy, not just from the perspective of religion or history or economics or media, it looks at it from all these different angles and it takes a look at parallels that we're seeing across the world in terms of democratic decline and where we're going and what we should have been doing to try and avoid this. Well that's my book too so. Yeah and mine pretty much because it is it is a remarkably a remarkably thorough and and I think a very clear eyed analysis and I spent an awful lot of time while I was reading it thinking why the fuck didn't I notice that on my own? Like it was full of moments, it was like, wow, that's really obvious. Why didn't I pick up on that? But it's all stuff that so many of us overlooked. And I think that's critically important that we all

as many of us as can stomach it have that moment of realization. So yeah, no, thank you for the work you put in. And it's a great, great book. I can actually comment on what you just observed. You wondered is basically I spent two and a half years every time I had a thought inspired by something on the internet, it would go in a file that was categorized like, oh wow, that's a thought. I would write a thought I would give the the hyperlink to it so I could find it again and then I'd move it to a doc award document for

For later use Yeah, I write puns sometimes Really? I'll I'll work my way back. I'll be like hey, here's a word that has five different things that rhyme with it. What can I do for this? And then so I'll write aunt boutique boutique boutique boutique boutique. And then I'll work my way all the way back. So yeah, yeah, that's that's the magic. The master sharing of secrets there. Yeah, well, you know, good luck duplicating it. So Ed, where can we find you on the social medias? I can be found on the social media. I'm not going to mention where I can be found on Twitter because I'm ambivalent about whether I want to stay on there right now. So on the TikTok,

I can be found at Mr. Underscore Blalock. And right now that's mostly me ranting about Star Wars. And right now that's mostly me ranting about Star Wars, but if Twitter implodes, that'll probably change. And then we collectively can be found at Geek History Time on Twitter, because collectively, I don't know how imbivolent we are. And our website can be found at www.GeekHistoryTime.com. And of course, you're listening to us right now, whoever you are out there in internet land.

So you've already found us someplace, but if you haven't already gone there, we can be found at Stitcher or on the Apple Podcast app. And we ask that wherever you have found us, you please subscribe and give us the five stars. You know we've earned in a review. And Mr. Harmony, where can you be found? You can find me at Doha Harmony on Twinsta for right now and you can also find me at Doha Harmony one on the TikTok, although I've been

bereft of content lately on a kind of the strike. Hopefully that'll start coming back. of content lately on a kind of the strike. Hopefully that'll start coming back. I have a wonderful, wonderful pun about a Roman short sword. So that's, I'm looking forward to making that one. But that's mostly where you can find me. Also, if you happen to be in Sacramento area on the first Friday of any month,

you can find me at Luna's, slinging puns with my pun crew, capital punishment, capital with an O. You can find us if you got 10 bucks, you can come on down to Luna's and you got proof of vaccination. We'll let you in and you can see us live and that's you know you've been warned. So and Brynn, where can people find you? So, primarily you can find me at Brynn Tanahill, a B-R-Y-N-N-T-A-N-N-E-H-I-L-L. At Twitter, that's where you get all my political thoughts. You can also find me at Instagram, same name. There, you can get mostly D&D memes and videos of Huskies, destroying things, showing

things, biting things, howling, and generally making our lives a fur-covered mess. Very nice. Cool. Sounds like a nice escape from all the political stuff. The Instagram is non-political, but the Twitter is my political and Ukrainian analysis. I love it. Outlet.

Cool, cool. And working people by your excellent book. So, you can buy it at transgress press. Let me see if it's or transgress transgress transgress press.org forward slash American dash fascism.html or just transgress press.org. You can also find it on Amazon.com. You can get it as a hard copy or as a Kindle or as an ebook. And right now we are just sending the contract to have it turned into an audio book. And that is this. Are you going to be reading it yourself or? No, I'm hiring a non-binary voice actor who I think comes close to my voice and has experience as an invoice acting or at least professional experience. Very nice. My only suggestion would be that if you do find any quotes of Jeff Sessions to use your

excellent column voice. Yes. So. I was gonna say foghorn leghorn. Far East. Ooh, yeah. That's a little on the beat, but that'll work. Yeah.

Cool. Well, for a geek history of time, I wanna thank you once again, Brent, for being with us. I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock, and until next time, keep rolling 20s. I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock, and until next time, keep rolling 20s.