Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 140

Episode Date: July 27, 2024

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Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets. Imagine this, your parents sign away your childhood to an academic psychological study. And what about if your sister is very publicly tried, convicted and sent to prison, when really she was just telling her long buried truths? These tough questions are just a few

that we'll be grappling with on our upcoming 10th season of Family Secrets. Listen to season 10 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. 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 every day this week, there's going to be nothing

new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that basically all of last week was about the 2024 Republican National Convention, a four-day period of time that I'm not sure ever ended or ever really had a beginning. As of right now, we are stuck in the hotel because what we initially thought was a hack and may just have been a fuck-up pushing an update by cloud strike but by any measure of The of the word is like the greatest computer disaster of modern times Has stranded every Republican in the country in the city of Milwaukee with yeah

We are trapped with every single Republican in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as we wait for airports and flights. It's like a Stephen King story. It's feeling quite dystopian. We've already been dealing with a great deal of like time dilation just this past week. This week has felt, it first just felt like a month, then it just felt like an eternity. Like we were just always reporting on the RNC. is this is all we have ever done every single day of this was longer than my childhood yeah no I feel like all I've ever done as a person is be someone who reports on the RNC this is just the entirety of my existence and life purpose it's like that Star Trek episode where they have

like the fake casino because they found a straight these aliens found a stranded astronaut and to try to make him comfortable, like recreated a dime store novel. And all of these fake people have only ever lived in the casino experiencing the same day forever. That's us. That's us at the RNC. I was only created to report on the RNC. Did I have a before? Did I have an after? Absolutely not. Yeah. Anyway, so we're doing well is the short of that. Yeah, we're mentally healthy and well suited to handle this political task.

I guess the big story, the one that's really worth us talking about right now is that last night, you and I went to see the Trump speech spectacular. Now, every day of the convention, during the early part of the day, you'll have some speeches and you'll have even every day of the convention during the early part of the day you'll have some speeches and you'll have even some outside of the event. Different groups and organizations will you know rent out hotel ballrooms, conference rooms, they'll give speeches, they'll do panels, there's workshops and obviously inside the wire so to speak you have different dignitaries, politicians, you know Ted Cruz will come by and he'll sit down to be interviewed by a podcaster or a radio host. Rudy Giuliani is doing the same thing. You've got all these people who do their shows live from the event.

And then in the evenings, usually starting around like five to seven, something like that, you start having speeches. And part of what, you know, speeches at the RNC are, it's obviously it's a way to hype up the base. This is the base. And one of things I I try to get across to people I posted on day one While there were some very dystopian shit coming out Marjorie Taylor Green speech and whatnot how empty you know the the stadium was To be like look, there's not that many people here And someone was like well, it's kind of dishonest to say that because this is an invite only event that you need credentials for and I'll go that's my point though is like as crazy as a lot of this stuff is

And we're going to get into a lot of the crazy You don't also you don't want to discount it because these people are very powerful and they can do a lot of damage And they there's a very good chance. They're going to wind up with very close to total power But they're also not representative of like a massive chunk of this country. Like these are the weirdest of the weird. These are the high freaks of Republican party politics. These are the nabobs and priests and shamans of their political class. And so you, you shouldn't overextend the craziness to think that like, well, every one of my neighbors who is a conservative is this kind of person.

Now, some of you do have a conservative is this kind of person. Now, some of you do have neighbors who are this kind of person, so. And Trump's speech was certainly much more well attended than any other. Yes, and it was also a very different vibe because all of those other nights, all of the speeches, you know, a big part of what this is for the people who get speeches is like,

we wanna give you a reward for being a good party soldier, but no one wants to promise you a cabinet position right a good party soldier, but no one wants to promise you a cabinet position right now. You know, we can't get like, so we'll give you a speech at the RNC. You can lead and you can get them right before Tucker, you know, or you can come on right after Tucker or whatever like that, you know, and it's kind of how you. It's one way to dole out favors, right? Because it's good for people's, you know, if you, if you're head up an

organization, it might get you some fundraising, um, at any rate, it makes you look more connected to something you brag about to your friends, you know, if you if you head up an organization, it might get you some fundraising. At any rate, it makes you look more connected to something you brag about to your friends, you get to go backstage and be around the VIPs and whatnot, be a VIP yourself. I mean, and that's certainly is the case for someone like Vivek, right? Someone who doesn't hold elected office never has. Yeah, but is trying to position himself as being, you know, an active part of this political project. Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's kid came out and gave a speech. That's not a guy who's an elected leader, but he's a guy you want on your side. You're like, let's give him a nice position. We'll put him right after Hulk Hogan. Oh my God.

Which I guess is, you know, that kind of gets at why Thursday was so different from the other nights. Because while the other nights felt like a political convention, because the dims do the same thing, right? Like their speeches occupy roughly the same role in their party. Last night felt like a concert. Last night was the vibes of like a show.

You are going to get hyped up and see a show. People were ecstatic. There was actually music acts, like not just the band that plays in between speeches, but kid rock came out and did a set It was all a big put on performance. Yes, it was in many cases well put on. Yeah. Yeah, it was very competently stage managed There's no no denying that we can talk about the content of the speech and I've seen a lot of It you know the same c of it, you know, same cedar who I, you know, I like, I'm not trying to shit. I'm not going to shit on Sam or anything, but I saw his take being like, I felt like this was kind of, this seems like it's a weak

speech. It's not very coherent. You know, people in the audience looked sleepy. That was not the vibe during Trump's speech. I see where he's coming from, because this was one of the quieter Trump speeches. Trump is quieter, sure. But I think this was an intentional effort to blend some of his more classic talking points with this elder statesman kind of vibe, and selectively utilizing the assassination attempt to talk about both yourself as this like broader political figure that that people should unite behind because this incident really shows how divided we are and what we really need to do to unite the country is stop attacking Trump. And that's the only way to do it. So like this this was all on purpose and kind of using that more sympathetic unity messaging to squeeze in all of his same extremely far right talking points, just slipping in between, you know, calls for like unity and ending division and all of that. And also the fucking the boys are playing in women's sports and Hannibal Lector, the late great he had a Hannibal.

But we should we're getting ahead of ourselves. But I do want to just kind of say up front, my take differs from what I've seen from Sam Cedar and what I've seen from a number of folks who watched, you know, the closed circuit version of this. The audience loved it. Yeah. Like they loved it and you can, you can taste in the air the degree to which they love Trump. This is like not, if you have not been to one of these rallies and even this is different

because I've been to a regular Trump rally, this was different than that, because this is, again, like the most dedicated chunk of the base. It's very much a religious experience for these people. Yeah, no, it definitely had that spiritual vibe. So the first speaker we wanted to really get to in person to hear talk was Tucker.

And Tucker gave a very efficient speech. He did not read off a teleprompter. He was ad-libbing the whole time. Best speech at the convention, technically. to hear talk was Tucker. resting confused look on his face. He was a very good live performer. Yeah, this he he gave a stronger live performance than I think would have a lot of his televised performances come off as he was he gave an erudite and smooth summary of fascist ideology of specifically what used to be called the Fuhrer principle or Fuhrer principle, which is this idea that came out of the Nazi movement of a nation being embodied by a man and the man is accountable to the people, not in a sense that we would

consider like checks and balances, but in some deep spiritual connection that they have. And Tucker very directly like, like harken to that. He made a comment about like, you know, Trump talked to me and he was like you know when I got shot I expected to see the crowd running screaming stampeding panicking and no one did and Tucker was like that's because you're the leader and the leader the people follow the leader and they you know you didn't panic so they won't panic yeah it's the most direct old style this is 1920s Nazism stuff that Tucker is throwing out. And he discussed it in a way that was very smooth

and very palatable to American ears. And that was the most chilling part of the night for me. Cause Trump's speech was not a particularly, I think back to 2016, and I was at the RNC in 2016, Trump's speech on the last night of the RNC was his blood in the street speech. It was a, he was angry, it was aggressive, it was a violent speech, right?

And there were moments, certainly, of violence in his speech, but not much. That was not the overall vibe. That was not what he built towards. It wasn't the thing he ended on, and it was never really a focus. And, but what Tucker was focusing on was getting people on board the concept that they are bonded to Trump in a spiritual sense and that the nation is and that Trump is the leader,

not by dent of having been elected, but by dent of some sort of psycho like psycho religious mystic bond. Tucker was also the first guy I heard at the convention to mention Antifa at all. Mm-hmm, first and only. Saying Antifa's the Democrats' own militia, which is something that you would hear four years ago. And right before Tucker's speech,

I actually was talking with Robert being like, hey, I've not heard anyone mention Antifa this entire week And like this was used to be such a big thing and in in their political messaging both like four years ago two years ago And this week it was just completely absent You know, obviously it has been replaced by some of this like gender ideology groomer kind of trans panic type stuff But it is a noticeable absence in the current talking points of the Republican Party, save for this one mentioned by Tucker. Yeah, and during Trump's speech, I don't even recall him bringing up the radical left. He didn't even, he made a couple of jokes, and those two of the jokes that got the best crowd response from him is,

he would bring up Biden, but he'd say, I'm not going to mention his name, I promise I won't talk about him. And that got a laugh every time that he did it, which I counted twice. He did make one reference to the shooter and said, he tried to stop our movement. Greatest movement in the history of the country. And, you know, that was interesting to me. I think that he was kind of playing,

easing off the gas on that one because there's still so much that's uncertain about the shooter and his motives. I went to work out today because the morning after convention, that's kind of how I purged the hangover from my body. And I was watching Fox news on the TV in the gym and I don't watch television news much because I'm a person who has to do things, but it is useful sometimes because it connects you with how a, an unfortunate number of people in this

country do intake their news. And this morning, one of the reports was about the shooter and how the FBI had found that he had three encrypted accounts offshore overseas that they're trying to break into. They are referring to, I think, Discord kind of accounts and stuff like that. Like he might have like an- He might have like a WhatsApp. He might have like a Telegram account. Yeah, an encrypted email possibly.

The stuff that like I have, most people have, but they were like, so this makes it even more likely that Iran is involved. There's some sort of a rate, because like overseas that means Iran. It's like, oh man, there's lots of companies that have encrypted apps that aren't based in the, I used to shill for a VPN that was based,

I think Nord is based in Switzerland. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but like some of the VPNs are based in Switzerland and like, these are not, it's not, the fact that it's overseas does not mean there's any tie to anything other than this kid. Like a lot of people had, was used encrypted messaging platforms. Obviously I'm interested, you know, if the FBI,

when it, if or when they get into that stuff, what they find, but I don't think they're going to find that the fucking Ayatollah gave this guy a $500 AR-15 and 50 rounds of ammunition. That is certainly doubtful. I mean, yeah, I think Tucker had some of the best audience reactions since Marjorie Taylor Greene's speech. He called JD Vance a friend, said that Vance's politics are closer to the average Trump voter than anyone else in Washington and Yeah, just an overall very very polished speech

Yeah, we should probably do an ad break now, huh? We should We're back. So after Tucker, we had a couple other people come on. There was a woman who worked for a conservative education political activist group who her whole thing was, you know, I worked in prisons for a while. And then I switched over to working in schools. And the thing that shocked me is our schools are so much more of our schools are like prisons, which I was like, well, actually there's a lot to be said about the way

in which some of the same. Yeah, right. Yes. No, this is, there's a lot to do. And then she was like, because children are much more violent than convicted felons. And you're like, oh, okay. A lot of what she was saying is that like schools are completely out of control.

And obviously in the wake of the height of the COVID pandemic and the lockdown, school violence did soar. It's been coming back down. Overall, schools have been getting less violent in every single way, but shootings for 20 straight years. And that is the case now, like in Joe Biden's America schools, like violence that is not related to shootings is going down. But what she was saying is that like, we need to be able to expel and suspend kids, particularly suspend kids more often for bad behavior. There is actually quite a bit of data that shows that when you suspend children,

it makes them more likely to offend and disrupt class in the future. Like it increases the problems that you are supposed to be stopping. Um, like most conservative measures, uh, that are kind of like punitive in nature, it doesn't actually do the trick. Uh, I don't know why I'm arguing with this lady, but it, but it is important that like, that's a big part of how they're pitching what, what ultimately is a plan to win the department of education. The student to parents is like, your schools are so dangerous for your kid.

You need to be able to have a voucher to send them to a private school. And we need to be able to kick these underperforming black students out of schools in order to make them safer for everybody, right? Like, and shuffle them off into the carceral system, right? This whole speech was kind of a coded way of talking about like urban crime. She blamed this problem on an Obama-Biden policy to limit suspension rates, which Trump undid. And yeah, said that the solution is both more suspensions and more school resource officers, which the Cato Institute says actually increases the number of violent incidents in schools. So, but again, of course, they're going to, but like, our audience knows the lady that gets up to talk about school policy at the RNC is not going to be bringing out good policy.

But this is just how everything works. Like, this just kind of underlines the alternate world that is formed in places like this. Yeah, and you can't fight these people with facts. That is the mistake liberals always make. It's like, well, if we can just out-argue them, if we can get fight these people with facts. That is the mistake liberals always make, is like, well, if we can just out argue them, if we can get them in front of the American people and see how bankrupt their ideas are. And that's not how you do it.

Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't get out and engage with them, because what does work is showing the American people, reminding them these are freaks. These people are weird. These people are off-putting. These people are scary and you don't want to be around them. And by God, you don't want them with their finger on the button.

Like, I do think that consistently works. And unfortunately, that freakish nature can sometimes help them. Like when you pull out Hulk Hogan onto stage, waving an American flag, calling Trump his hero and his gladiator. And talking about how, yeah, all of America are going to be the Trumpites. That's what they're going to call them. Trump mania. Which apparently he used to do with NWO back in the day, back in his glory day.

He got he couldn't stop himself from talking about beating Andre the Giant at WrestleMania. I think it was like 1983. He made two different Andre the Giant references, both of which were very mean to Andre the Giant, who I wish. Oh, Andre, the wrong one died. Hulk Hogan compared the energy of the RNC to a WWE match which he is not wrong about. He's not wrong.

He's not wrong. It is very similar. Look, I'm not going to like Hulk Hogan understands this crowd. Oh, more than almost, more than maybe any other actual speaker. Yeah. Like Tucker kind of understands them, but Hulk Hogan even more so. They loved him. Yeah. When he ripped his shirt off.

Oh, yeah. To reveal the Trump advance tank top underneath. That was the best moment of the RNC. That was the moment where I was like, all right, fuck it. No, he said that he usually stays out of politics. But after what happened on Saturday, he could no longer stay silent and then spent, you know, the rest of the speech just praising Trump, saying how tough he is, saying that he's survived all these court cases, these investigations,

impeachments, and we need a tough man to take on politicians, criminals, and drug dealers. And no, it was in a week full of kind of surreal moments where you're seeing these people that you only interact with on a screen, you just see them moments where you're seeing these people that you only interact with on a screen. Yeah. You just see them walk past you like all the time every day. This was certainly one of the most surreal. Madison Cawthorne nearly hit me with his wheelchair and I'm not the only one I talked to with

that story. He's a little reckless. I'm going to be honest. Maybe he thought you were a tree. Maybe he thought I were a tree. Maybe he thought I was a tree. I love that we saw two people, two Republicans at this convention, both of whom have a tragic tree story. I'm talking about Greg Abbott.

They made the kind of baffling decision on the schedule to put Franklin Graham after Hulk Hogan. Not nice to Franklin Graham, to be honest. No. Yeah, cause he's, he did the thing that like, usually gets a good reaction, which is the prayer, right? He's there to do the prayer. And this is a good crowd for a prayer, right?

Like that's not a, that's not like a lame thing to these people. They love doing that. But no one's heart was fully into the prayer after Hulk. Like you can't, you can't get people- It's a tough come down. It's a tough come down from Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off on stage to now let's bow our heads and thank God. But if you didn't grow up in evangelical circles, Franklin Graham is the son of Billy Graham,

possibly the most famous pastor in American history, at least in the past hundred years. Since sinners in the hands of an angry God, like the most popular man of faith in the country. And he closed his prayer by saying, all authority comes from you, speaking of God, and we ask if it be thy will that you will make America great once again. Just a wonderful, a wonderful Christian message. Uh-huh. Grand. So that was nice. Eric Trump gave a very, he tried his best, which is basically what Trump said. Again, you Hulk Hogan has just been on Trump is about to be on.

It is the last night of the RNC and everyone is absolutely certain of victory. So as a speaker tonight, you couldn't be more teed up for a good reaction. And he could barely get laughs. He could barely get cheers. Like even when he did the anti-trans stuff, it didn't get, it got a muted reaction, not because people aren't bigoted, because they loved it when Marjorie Taylor Greene

did the say they loved it when Trump did. Eric Trump just sucks at speaking, probably at everything, but he did not get a reaction. I cannot overemphasize to you how little this crowd wanted to listen to Eric. Yeah, no, I mean, he shouted out monster liberty, said that the Trump admin will fight against brainwashing in schools, will fight against homeless people, specifically taking resources from veterans, and of course, trans people in sports. He kept bringing up Ukraine too, stealing resources from Americans.

He was like the most brought up Ukraine in a derogatory sense more than I think any other single speaker at the convention, which is interesting because his dad took even a bit of a different tact with that. So yeah, I found that interesting, but I did not find his speech interesting because he is a bad speaker. Now, the only line I found interesting was when he was talking about how all of Donald Trump's political enemies aren't just happy going after him, they're also going to be going after every Republican.

And he said, the greatest retribution will be our success. Yeah. And they've been using that word a lot this year, retribution. Retribution. And, you know, he did kind of in the end get a little bit of applause. It was like the fifth or sixth best standing ovation of the night. So again, he at his best was never able to really rile them up. Especially when he's talking about the assassination attempt.

I mean, the crowd chanting fight. Yeah, that's what got them back on board. And interestingly, they loved to talk about that. I think in part because it had been so absent earlier Yeah, it was talking about way more today than All basically all the other days of the week combined. Yeah. Yeah, and that makes I mean It was the day that Trump came out to speak. Yeah, and you know what we're gonna talk about now or not talk about Assassinating your thirst with hopefully a soda company advertising on the podcast.

Otherwise this ad segues not going to make much sense. All right. Time for Donald Trump himself. He's coming out. They, they, they set this stage. They got everything ready to be an American this stage, they got everything ready. And I'm proud to be an American. And then they announced Kid Rock.

Ha ha ha ha! Oh my God, and he comes out, and the whole stage is wreathed in massive screens, like dozens of feet tall, and they all are portraying fire and American flags. American flags that look kind of like they're on fire. Yeah, kid rock comes out and does a rap set to burning American flags surrounding him. It was kind of just a fascinating image for the RNC.

The refrain is they call me cowboy. He said that like 40 times and he just kept going Trump, Trump, Trump, fight, fight, fight. They loved it. They loved it. They loved, it was very high energy. It was a concert. Everyone had a great time. Yeah, yeah. It got a good reaction.

People were hyped up. It is the loudest, stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life. But it got a really good reaction. People loved Kid Rock coming out. It's interesting to me that they chose to have Kid Rock basically lead directly to the president rather than the Hulkster.

But I don't know, if I had been setting this up, I would have done Franklin Graham, School Lady, Eric Trump, all the weak ones up first, and then probably Tucker the Hulkster Kid Rock, you know? Yeah, the RNC should really hire you to man their schedule. Yeah, I'm available, guys. So after we all Kid Rocked out, technically Dana White gave the introduction or Dana White.

Yeah, they bring in Dana White, who has the... UFC CEO. Yeah, who is also on video hitting his wife in the face. This is not a debatable. He said she said he is on video. You can watch it. Yeah. And he gave a very, very typical strength and security speech. Yes. Introduced Trump.

Who emerged from behind one of the big the big screens. Well, proud to Be an American plays, and like the entire crowd stands up, and they're all singing along to Proud to Be an American. They love that song. He'd started his speech, and one of the interesting things is that he said that he's gonna tell the story of what happened

at the assassination attempt here right now, but won't tell it ever again because it's too painful to tell the story of what happened at the assassination attempt here right now, but won't tell it ever again because it's too painful to tell. Yeah. I'll be interested to see how often he does. If that is true. Yeah, it is like just based on his body language, because he's been out every night but not saying anything. And he does has looked a bit different. Not and I'm not going to do the whole thing. Some of the fucking you had some like Politico being like it's a new Trump. he's become a statesman.

They definitely, that's what the RNC is trying to sell you on. Exactly. That's nonsense. But he is changed in the way that like you would be if you were shot in the head and survived. Yeah. You know?

Like anyone is, like he's not a robot, right? Like anyone is going to be affected by that. And he might not have been lying. He might just have been like, look, I have to talk about this once. I really don't want to keep talking about this because it's fucked up. One of the parts actually felt genuine were certain sections of this where he was like saying like, I'm I was not supposed to be here tonight. And the crowd was like, yes, you are. Yeah, he was like, no, no, that was really close.

You know, he was thanking God. I don't know how genuine that is for him and how much that's political posture. Yeah, that I don't necessarily believe that. That's just kind of what you have to do. He certainly knows that he barely made it out of that fucking speech. Yeah. And he pointed to the assassination attempt as a as a sign of how divided this country has been. A very world trying to find the guy who did this moment.

And he called the Democrats to stop the witch hunts if they want to unify the country, saying, We must not demonize political disagreement. And the Democrats should, Stop weaponizing the Justice Department against Trump and labeling him an enemy of democracy. So he's saying the way to actually unify this country is just to stop. Stop being mean to me. Bad. Yeah. Stop saying orange man bad. That's really what he was. That's what he was getting at. Well, and I, you know, you get, if you want to see the things that you can gain from this that are useful in how to fight these people, they are scared of the attacks that portray Trump as an enemy of democracy.

The Project 2025 focus was hurting Republicans and polling. And the fact that the Dems have pulled back, maybe that- We're not mentioning a single speech this week. Yeah, nobody talked up 2025. Even the Heritage Foundation people were notably cagier about it than you might expect in their interviews with the press, because they do know that it's not a good it's not great for them to bring up now it's not popular.

And you know slowly Trump's speech got more and more Trumpian right saying that Democrats are destroying our country talking about the you know immigrants invading our country as he said he said there were an invasion many, many times. Yeah. Saying that illegal immigrants are killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. Yeah. It's the fentanyl thing. Even though 90% of fentanyl is brought into US ports of entry by US citizens. Yeah, that line actually was one of the through lines that was almost every day of this. I heard someone mention that we've lost

as many or more Americans to fentanyl as we did in World War II. At one point, it might've been in Trump's speech, it was even framed as like, more people have died from fentanyl than died in World War II. And like, well, no, no, no. A lot of people died in World War II,

just not that many Americans, really. Yeah. Speaking in World War II, just not that many Americans really. Yeah. Speaking of World War II era Germany, in Trump's little section about- We sure did get a mention there. In Trump's little section about inflation, he gave a fascinating comment saying, quote, you can go back to Germany 100 years ago, unquote, to see the negative effects of inflation inflation pointing to like Weimar era Germany. Yeah, yeah. You're talking about Weimar. You're talking about like what immediately preceded the Nazis coming to power. Yeah. And but like also framing it as like I'll be the one to

get us out of inflation, which is very similar messaging as the fascist movements did saying to Germany that was in you know in a real economic issue that we will be the ones to fix this through through nationalism closing our borders through putting Germany first like that is it's it was it was a very a very odd comparison for Trump to make I don't know how well he thought through that I don't believe that was this was like an intentional coded message it didn't seem like I don't think Trump works that way. Yeah. He definitely does have teleprompters sometimes but he also he is like a good public speaker. He doesn't just stick religiously

to it. Yeah. And that did strike me as a line that may have just come right out of the heart. Now he had a few other interesting things in the economy. He was talking a lot about increasing car manufacturing jobs, including saying the leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired and promising to put tariffs of 100 to 200 percent on all foreign-made cars, which would, I'm sure, do some real... Stuck up on your Toyotas now, folks. Well, they make a lot of them in the US. I'm sure that would really help the economy.

Yeah, yeah, which is like, I mean, part of the, there's a lot to say about that. One thing that's interesting, someone had told you, because you were the first person to bring this up to me, there were strong rumors that really midday before the speech started percolating that Elon Musk was going to show up and introduce, or either introduce or endorse.

From two well-connected people, I heard this from like Thursday morning. Which may mean that they were just getting some bullshit. It may mean that there were actually talks, right? I'm sure. Because Musk has been, like Musk has been trying to get Trump's attention. Yeah.

That's beyond debate. He wants Trump on Twitter. And he wants Trump, you know, he's been making all these statements about how much money he's going to donate to Trump, and now he's endorsing him. Now, do I know, he's, he's been making all these statements about how much money he's going to donate to Trump and now he's endorsing him. Now do I actually think he's going to give the RNC $45 million a month? No, he's going to find some bullshit way.

He's going to give him something, but he's going to fight. Like he's, he's, he never spins, gives like that's too much money for him to want to spend on them. Right? Like I think he's going to fuck them the way he fucks everybody over but It was interesting to me how much talk there was of him showing up and absolutely no Elon And in fact, there was a moment where Trump was like, hey electric cars are fine for some things But like we got to subsidize gas cars. Yeah He talked about you know increasing drilling in the United States and kind of the last big topic that he went to was the border. He pointed to the to the little border patrol chart that he looked at

the split second before those shots fired which saved his life so can thank the border patrol chart for that. He said that Mexico and South American countries are sending murderers and people from a sane asylums into the United States. It was interesting because Naib Bukele of El Salvador keeps getting brought up as like a Trumpian figure, is like, this is the kind of leader Trump wants to be, look at how good he's done at stopping violent crime in El Salvador.

Trump shat on him, Trump accused him of sending all of El Salvador's violent criminals and psychopaths to the United States, which I thought was interesting, actually. Was it El Salvador or Venezuela? Both. He brought up both because he also brought up Venezuela and accused them of doing he said El Salvador, but he also brought up Venezuela and said, maybe next election will hold the RNC in Venezuela because it's so peaceful now because they sent all their rapists here. Exactly. And then he had the late great Hannibal Lecter line.

And then immediately afterwards, he said that he will enact the largest deportation program in American history. And that's just a very beautiful snapshot of the current American politic. And it got a great reaction. And I would say that by far the most aggressive, because he really didn't play much of the,

if any, radical left stuff. He really even didn't. Other than to say that Joe was like a bad president, the country was in bad shape. He didn't like yell at Democrats much. The hate was mostly reserved for migrants and immigrants. Yes, he closed by saying that we're going to be building an iron dome in the United States. Oh, yeah, that was a curveball. Yeah. And then he pivoted to saying that we will not have men playing in women's sports, which is the first trans reference in his whole speech.

And he just kind of dropped it and then changed. And then he immediately continued to something else. And the crowd did not react to that nearly as much as they reacted to any of the other mentions of like trans people. I think because it just kind of he just kind of threw it out there. But then we're right back to it was almost like mentions of like trans people. I think because it just kind of, he just kind of threw it out there, but then we're right back to- It was almost like a perfunctory line, like he knew he had to put it in.

Oh shit, I gotta drop a line about, I think it is perfunctory, because again, Trump doesn't really care all that much about the culture, like the social stuff. Yeah, and that's pretty much what they closed his speech on, mostly on this migrant stuff, this Iron Dome thing, and increasing the manufacturing jobs in the United States, which is a lot of what Trump's messaging was back in 2016 as well.

So I mean, in a way, it was mostly him playing the hits. He did bring out Corey Contempori's firefighter's uniform. It was on stage behind him the whole time. He kissed it at one point. Walked up to it and I thought he was gonna go in for a hug and I was like, ooh, that's gonna be weird. And instead he went up behind and kissed it, which was also weird.

He kinda did a Joe Biden to the dead man's firefighter hat. It wasn't very Joe Biden. And he brought up Corey, he brought also up the other people who were wounded. He named them all, which, you know, it makes sense, you have to do it. He didn't really talk much about Corey beyond that. Like Corey was there as a prop, he kissed it,

and then he moved on. They gave about a five second moment of silence, a very brief moment of silence. And then they moved on. And when his speech ended for the night, Garrison and I both saw, this was a beautiful moment to share with you, Gare. You and I have shared some moments, but this was, this is right up at the top of the list. As all of the, the whole convention,

the whole ceiling is balloons, right? They've got them up there. They have some sort of system by which like at the end they trigger it and they all start falling down and they'll fall for 10, 15 minutes. Like there's a lot of balloons and it's rigged so that they're... And you know some of them are red, white and blue. A lot of them are like gold. Huge gold balloons. It's gold balloons mixed in, yeah. And the last sight we get, you know, as Trump is on stage with his family, balloons are showering the crowd. Gold balloons everywhere. Everyone's cheering, screaming. They're celebrating what they see as an inevitable victory.

Yeah, two stage crew guys take Cory's uniform and wheel it unceremoniously off stage into darkness as quietly as balloons pour down and everyone dances and cheers. No one notices. We're done. It's like Frank Grimes casket sinking into the dirt and the Simpsons like no one sees no one sees very unceremoniously Very quietly very quickly just wield off we have what we needed from him Celebration continues and also they spelled his name wrong on the firefighting uniform To be fair it was previously spelled wrong. Yeah. Yeah, that's I think it was an issue of when he was a firefighter

They just could only have so many letters on the jackets But it you know there was some talk about that. I have seen a lot of folks making the comparison to Horst Wessel, who was a German member of the Brown Shirts. He was also a pimp who gets got murdered by some communists in retaliation for acts of violence he had carried out right before the Third Reich took power. And they really made a lot out of his death. He got this massive state funeral. They had a very popular song about him. He was kind of the individual chosen to embody all of the guys who died in the street fights prior to the rise of the party. And people have been comparing Corey to Horst. I get why, because we are watching a fascist party

near power here, and there's clearly some desire in that for Corey to be that. Horst was the focus of almost, not almost, of a cult. And what I saw here was a perfunctory, well, we gotta mention this guy. We gotta make a reference to him, but let's get in and out of that. We gotta move on to the meat and potatoes.

That's not gonna win us. And I think what it is like, the swing voters and shit don't care about Corey Contempori, right? That's not gonna, our base is going to expect us to say something. It's also just like the thing you do, this guy got killed at your rally

with a bullet meant for you, you gotta bring up something. But then let's move on. Let's get him out of there. Let's shove his fucking uniform into the back closet and get back to the party. And that is different from how the Nazis handled Horst. And I think that difference, maybe it signals a real difference in the structure of American fascism and how it inhabits a party. Or maybe it's just a measure of, we're not all fully bought in on this to the extent, in the same way that the Nazis were, right?

Like we really are trying to just get a lot of people on board to vote for us. And we don't wanna get too weird with it. We don't wanna have a big cult for Corey at the RNC, the big religious state. That's got to be off putting to Americans. So let's we'll kiss the hat. People like firefighters. Shove it back. That's how I took that. There's two other things I want to mention. I've had JD Vance's hype song stuck in my head. Boy, yes. Because they just kept playing it at that convention. song stuck in my head boy because they just kept playing it at that convention.

And it's an interesting song. It has it has a good beat. It for most of the song, it's talking about how, you know, we spent all this time trying to like liberate other countries, right? And maybe actually we're the ones that need to be liberated. Maybe maybe America actually needs to be saved. Maybe we aren't as free as what we would think. And it has a line about, you a line about getting out of Iraq. We got to get out of Iraq, take our country back, and put America first. That is the point where they lose me, obviously.

It still is interesting for the vice president's song at the RNC to be anti-Iraq. I'm like, hey, there were people telling you back then not to do Iraq and you really wanted to. We heard of the first time on Monday when Vance got officially announced as the nominee and I kind of wondered then if like, is this a fuck up? It was like somebody, they were like, oh there's a Merle Haggard song about America first, let's throw that in there and then realized, oh no, there's, we can't have that, we're the party who did the Iraq stuff. But it kept coming up, it kept being played. So it's very intentional, clearly.

And we were talking last night about this and how this is how these sort of nationalist projects always work and we've seen more America first, like that exact phrase used at this convention way more than any previous one. Trump said it a few times, a lot of speakers have been saying it, just like we need to put America first.

That's what people are saying, yeah. And specifically in this song, it has this kind of populist bent that then veers very hard nationalist, which we're all familiar with as a political tendency. Yeah. But I've just found that to be the most interesting part is because for like the majority of that

song I'm like, yes, absolutely. I agree. And then and then they say the America first line and it's like, oh, that is not that is not what we're talking about. It's yeah. And I just know it's something I've been thinking about. And I'm sure we'll I'm sure we'll do some more deep dives on Vance in the coming weeks and sees a little bit, you know, less well known to many of you, I assume. about and I'm sure we'll do some more deep dives on Vance in the coming weeks since he's

a little bit less well known to many of you, I assume. And the last thing I kind of want to mention is that yesterday, right before Trump's speech, I was getting some work done and I happened to be sitting about 10 feet away from Ted Cruz who was talking on air about his thoughts like both this convention and this election in general. And he said a few interesting things that I half heard, that I quickly scribbled down on a notebook. He said that this convention already feels like a celebration, right? This already feels like we've kind of won. But he warned Republicans to be scared of overconfidence.

He said that we're kind of acting like how the Democrats were acting in 2016. I have been saying that all week, yeah. And that's what Ted Cruz was saying. Yeah. And he thinks that Biden is not gonna be the candidate, that someone else is gonna come into place. Now, he believes that that's gonna be Michelle Obama,

which is an unhinged opinion. Unbelievable. Cause like, do I think Michelle Obama would have a decent shot at winning the presidency in this election? Sure. Do I think Michelle Obama wants to go anywhere near the White House again in her life?

No. Absolutely not. It's like a nightmare. She's making movies. They're produced, they're in Hollywood. They're doing the thing people- They're doing what Ted Cruz wants to do when people are allowed to make big Hollywood movies They don't want to get into politics for a long time That's how we avoided having a fascist in power in this country and like do like direct power Like like Trump type kind of fascists

We're very lucky that Clint Eastwood just makes movies and doesn't do politics. The people who would be the best, we have, you know, you have fascists like stuck inside of the bureaucracy, but the people who could really have the potential charisma to be populist leaders wind up becoming movie stars. Tom Cruise could have been a president. Oh yeah. He's got what it takes, but he decided to devote

all of that manic kind of charisma energy into climbing the Burj Khalifa. And that's part of the genius of the American system. And I guess lastly, Milwaukee was lovely. All the food service workers were lovely. Milwaukee's great. Even the poor people who were forced to work at the convention center. Insistently nice.

Did a great job. And there's there's one one anecdote that Robert should mention just regarding my favorite part of the convention, some of the very fine people here in Milwaukee. I've gotten shouted at. My my occasional enemy. Well, always enemy. But occasionally I remember that he exists. Andy, no, made a series of posts about how there was a dangerous well, always enemy, but occasionally, I remember that he exists, Andy No,

made a series of posts about how there was a dangerous Antifa terrorist at the convention and like clipped a couple of posts of mine out of context like he always does. And was like, you know, people in his mentions were tagging the secret service and the FBI. FBI secret service, Laura Loomer. I continued to repeatedly enter the RNC.

I went through God, I lost count of how many times I went through Secret Service checkpoints. We snuck into the Heritage Foundation party. None of it mattered. The only people at the show who recognized me were like technical folks for the different radio. I had a couple of different people who were carrying booms, carrying cameras who like referenced,

like recognized me and shouted me out, which I felt good about. What I felt best about is as you and I were walking to the stadium to see the speech, we see a forklift driving down the street. In the middle of the security perimeter. Like one of the crowded streets. Which is kind of crazy.

It's weird, I've never actually seen a construction vehicle driving around inside the, during like the security perimeter. Like one of the crowded streets. Yeah, which is kind of crazy. It's weird. I've never actually seen a construction vehicle driving around inside the, during like the convention hours. So that was weird. And as we're like watching this thing, like I honestly wondered like, should I like get a footage of this? That's kind of wild looking.

As we see it like kind of coming up next to us, the driver leans out of the side of the vehicle and he is a beautiful man covered in tattoos, huge nose ring and he's like, hey Robert! We have the forklift demographic. Nothing has ever made me so certain that we're doing the right thing with our lives. We're reaching the people we need to be reaching.

The forklift certified soldiers out there. So Forklift Nation, thank you for listening to It Could Happen here. We do this for you. We do this for you. We know you have our backs and we have your back. Stay safe everybody. Yeah, God bless. happening now. And what's happening now is our podcast, Two Guys, Five Rings is a phenomenon. And while real medals are being handed out in Paris, we're giving out our fake medals

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Get tickets to our 2024 iHeart Radio Music Festival, presented by Capital One, right now, before they sell out. At AXS.com. Welcome to Cheaters and Backstabbers. I'm Shadi Diaz. And I'm Kate Robarts. And we are New York City stand-up comedians and best friends. And we love a good cheating and backstabbing story.

So this is a series where our guests reveal their most shocking cheating stories. Join us as we learn how to avoid getting our hearts broken or our backs slashed. Listen to Cheaters and Backstabbers on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, welcome to Eat Could Happen Here, another food episode. How did we get here? Today, we're talking about asparagus. Why, you might ask?

Once again, you can blame James Stout. Hi, James. Hi, Shireen. I'm happy to be blamed. I take responsibility for asparagus. Why did you want me to talk about asparagus? It's because, Shireen, I grew up in the Vale of Evesham. The Vale of Evesham, if people aren't familiar, is an area in the middle of England where

asparagus is grown heavily. In fact, there's a protected origin, so you can only call it Vale of Evesham asparagus if it comes. Wow. There was a big asparagus auction that used to happen. The first round, it's called grass and not asparagus, right? I'll go into that, yeah. Oh, good, good, excited to learn.

So, do you know how many spears are in a round, Shereen? No, let's say no. Okay, it's a gross, a gross of spears. So, a gross, do you know how many is in a gross? No, James, just tell me, stop quizzing me. It is 144, it's 12 times 12. Wow. So there's a pub called the Round of Grass. We used to go there a lot when I was younger.

I used to work. If anyone knows it, hi. Maybe you probably know me. It's a small town. Shout out to my mom, who is probably the only person. I used to work just down the road from there at a tomato, like a big tomato greenhouse. You used to work at a tomato greenhouse? Yep. Yep. Pack up the tomatoes, slap a label on that bad boy. That's just Sainsbury's or Tesco.

It's such a crap job. Like, I mean, it doesn't sound great. No disrespect. If you work in a tomato greenhouse and that's what you enjoy, like that's great. Like I love to grow a tomato. That job was just not, I didn't like doing the same thing every day. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Well, today is not a tomato episode.

Today is an asparagus episode. Let's just get into it. I want you to talk more about your hometown, but I'm gonna sprinkle it in here and there just to make things more interesting. Let's just get into the nitty-gritty of what asparagus is. Apparently, the asparagus is a member of the lily family. The plant is made up of the top, which is the fern, the crowns, which are the buds, and then the roots. All three of these parts are vital to a productive asparagus

plant. The fern is known as the factory, which through photosynthesis produces food stored in the crown and their roots below ground. The number of vigorous spears in the spring depends on the amount of food produced and stored in the crown during the preceding summer and fall. Producing a good crop of fern is necessary for ensuring a good crop of spears the following spring. It's important not to cut the old fern at the end of the season until it is completely dead. And the best time to remove old fern is in the spring, since valuable food and nutrients move during the autumn months from the dying fern to the crown. Fascinating. Yeah. Maybe you're wondering, is there a nutritional value? Yes, of course

there is. It's a vegetable. But one cup of asparagus has no fat and only two grams of sugar and three milligrams of salt. Apparently it's known as one of the most nutritionally balanced vegetables ever. A lot of fiber and it contains no cholesterol, very low in sodium, as I said, a good source of folic acid, potassium, as well as vitamins A, A6, and vitamin C. Wowee. Only the young shoots of asparagus are eaten, fun fact. There's also an amino acid called asparagine, and this gets its name from asparagus because the asparagus plant is rich in this compound.

Asparagine is also commonly found, fun fact, in French fries and potatoes, which are potatoes. And fries are the same. There are over 300 known varieties of asparagus. And the varieties most widely seen in the United States include the white variety, which is preferred in Europe. I'll get into this later. But apparently chefs in Europe only usually use white, James. Yeah, no, that's mainland Europe, maybe. But now that we've Brexited, obviously we can

be proud of our green asparagus. I've not enjoyed white asparagus. I think it lacks the fresh flavor. There's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. Yeah, they pile up the soil, right? So it doesn't photosynthesize. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, spoiler alert. There's a reason for that. Yeah, they pile up the soil, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, spoiler alert, I was going to say that I'll skip that part now. Don't call me out, my asparagus knowledge.

It is very fascinating that they prefer to do that though. But regardless, the three varieties in the United States include the white one, and these sunlight deprived stocks are a little milder and more delicate. It's difficult to find these fresh in the US, but they're widely available canned or in jars. You don't want to be eating asparagus in a can or a jar though. I mean, you don't want to be eating most things in a can or a jar, but desperate times. It's true.

It's just a sardine, if you're a person who eats sardines, they're good in a can. I'm not going to do a sardine episode ever. Oh, sure, actually that could be a really interesting episode. I used to live in a place where they had a protected origin for those as well. You know, after doing sea urchins, I was glad to do asparagus because asparaguses are not little living things. I'm not trying to be annoying, but I think it's hard for me to talk about things that can be eaten.

Yeah, yeah. You know, the asparagus is hard for me to talk about things that can be eaten. The living things that people eat. Yeah, yeah. The asparagus is alive. I will talk about them because they are food, but they're not my first choice. So I'm glad to be talking about a plant today. I don't find asparagus cute, so maybe it's easier for me to eat them. That's just my own bias. Yeah, and I'm going to derail your episode.

I've been reminded that I had my 21st birthday party at one of the pubs that auctions the asparagus. Wow. There's a little tidbit. I love some James Stout lore. I forget, in the barn at the Fleece at Brefferton. The other one, of course, is Surround a Grassland Fancy. Wow.

Fascinating. Your life continues to be fascinating. Anyway. That's not fascinating. That's extremely fucking mundane. It's fucking weird in a good way, but sure. There are other variety. The violet or purple kind of asparagus. This one is commonly found in England and Italy and it has a very thick substantial stock. And then is the green asparagus, which is the most widely known kind of asparagus, because most American asparagus is of this variety. And it ranges from pencil thin to very thick. They described it as the size of your thumb, but I think this is relative depending on how big your

thumb is. And then there's also wild asparagus. And these asparagus grow in wild areas. It's mostly found in Europe or like on the coastline somewhere. And you'll most likely have to hunt down your own because it's rarely available fresh in markets except for in Italy and the south of France. No, wild asparagus is great. It's going to be a... You do have to be as with anything that you're taking out of the wild areas. You do want to be careful that you're getting wild asparagus.

There are a couple of things. Because if you do want to be careful that you're getting wild asparagus. There are a couple of things. Because if you confuse it with something else. Oh, I mean, yeah, you can, that can not be great. You can get yourself, I'm trying to remember. Yeah, don't be like into the wild out here. Like be smart. Yeah, don't enter the world yourself

with the wild asparagus. Sampher is another delicious vegetable. It's a bit like, I think it's a relative of asparagus. It's like sea asparagus, S-A-M-P-H-I-R-E. Wow, sea asparagus. Yeah, so many little, yeah. Fascinating. I think it's a, maybe it's not a relative,

maybe it's just a, like a seaweed, but it's pretty good. If you ever get it, that's one you can forage pretty easily. Nearly all seaweeds are edible, so you know. Nice. If you're out and about. Good source of iodine, I'm sure you can forage pretty easily. Nearly all seaweeds are edible, so you know. Nice. If you're out and about. Good source of iodine, I'm sure. Yeah, well, yeah. But as with any plant, James, asparagus has its own ideal-

It's called sea beans! What, sorry, I've just, sorry, Serene, I've ruined your episode. Sea beans? Yeah, no, yes, what fucking Americans call it. What a stupid name. I mean, we do ruin most things. Yeah, like, I don't know. It's a little too straightforward.

It's literally mentioned in King Lear. Like, why do you have to change it? Shakespearean vegetable. Wow. Mm-hmm. Well, today's about asparagus. Today we're talking about asparagus, not a sea bean. Maybe next time.

But James, as with any plant, the asparagus has its own ideal growing condition. So let's get into that. Where is an ideal growing condition for an asparagus? A good amount of sun is ideal. Asparagus needs at least eight hours of sun per day. And since asparagus is a long lived perennial plant, it should not be planted where trees or tall shrubs

might eventually shade the plants or compete for nutrients and water. When it comes to the soil, the crown and root system can grow to a large size, which can be roughly 5-6 feet in diameter and 10-15 feet deep. Therefore, when possible, you should select a soil that is loose, deep, well-drained, and fertile. On sites with poor soil, incorporate manure and compost into the soil, and plant and till under two successive cover crops the season before you plant your asparagus,

and you should be just fine. Asparagus is planted in the spring. The simplest method is to plant one-year-old crowns, and you lay down the ground soil prior to growing asparagus for the first time, and even though the young crown will appear to be a lifeless mass of roots, it will begin to send up small green shoots shortly after planting. So as I mentioned, asparagus is planted in the spring, but it's also one of the very first crops harvested during the spring season, and that means, metaphorically, it represents the transition from the frozen winter months and its emphasis

on root vegetables to the abundance and newness of spring. Asparagus for farmers can mean even more. Farmer Lee Jones from The Chef's Garden says, quote, The farmer is an eternal optimist, always hoping that next year will be the year, the year when rain falls in exactly the right amounts at exactly the right times, that it's never too hot and never too cold, and the weather is exactly what we might wish. No season is ever perfect, of course, but try telling that to a farmer, as he or she sits in front of a cozy fireplace in the wintertime, feet propped up, looking through seed catalogs

and dreaming of spring. Winter refreshes us, and asparagus represents the hope of renewal and the optimism of what spring might bring. When it's time to begin harvesting asparagus, farmers smell the earth again, see the earthworms, and listen, once again, to the killworms and listen once again to the kill deer and the blackbirds. This portent of spring is a welcome celebration. Asparagus is a recurrent affirmation that winter is over and delicious treasures from the field are eminent." This man loves asparagus. Yeah, that is a man who, yeah, and farmers apparently. That's not my recollection of winter, this man has never been very wet, very cold.

I suppose not, yeah. Yeah, doing a Christmas lambing. I suppose you can think of asparagus as a very patient vegetable. It rests quietly underground, absorbing nutrients from the soil, and remaining underground during the freezing winter months before it begins to push through the soil when it's warm in the springtime. And this again signals the start of the spring season. In 1956, the New York Times published an article calling asparagus the healthy quote spring tonic for weary appetites. Just thought that was a fun fact. That's all for that. Asparagus

can grow quite fast, too. You can cut asparagus in the morning and it just keeps growing. And here's a fun fact for you. In ideal conditions, asparagus can grow 10 inches in a 24-hour period. Yeah, it's crazy. That's fast. It takes a long time to get ready, right? It takes like three years and then it just... Yeah, I mean, look, it's definitely an investment of time for it to grow that way, but it sounds

like it's worth it if you love asparagus like Farmer Lee Jones up there. Yeah, he does. Do you want another little veil of evesham factoid? Please. The church in Brexton has a stained glass window which is a glass of asparagus. No, it doesn't. It's a depiction of asparagus. I will find it for you, Shireen.

Like asparagus has Jesus? No, it's just as It's a depiction of asparagus. I will find it for you, Shireen. Like asparagus as Jesus? No, it's just asparagus in the window. Oh. Like, it's not how asparagus is. How is that less weird? I don't know if that's less weird or not, but. I'm just going to find it for you here. Well, it says grass underneath.

I'll just drop it in the chat. Get a live react. No. Yeah. It has a little twine wrapped around it too. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, that's how you do a round of grass. Yeah. You do them in dozens, right? And then a dozen, dozen, you wrap around that. That is, that's a stained glass depiction of asparagus. Okay.

Yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool. Asparagus is next to godliness, as they say. Oh, I'm getting into why that might be the case. Oh, I'm getting into why that might be the case. So just to reiterate how much patience and time you yourself need if you do want to plant asparagus. Because although green asparagus is typically what's seen in grocery stores, it comes in all the colors that we said, but no matter what color it is, it's important to protect the strength of the root or else it won't succeed in growing.

And this is how gentle you need to be. First, you plant the three-year-old roots, and if the asparagus root is in its first year in growth, which is really then its fourth, you should only pick it for one week, because you don't want to zap the root strength. Then after two years, which would be really its fifth, you pick it only for two weeks. By the time it's four years old, which yes means that's a seven year total, then you can harvest it for longer amounts of time. A good plant though, after all this process, can last up to 20 years, so it's important to let the young ones build up

strength for the future. We mentioned this before, James gave it away, but in Europe chefs almost always use the white asparagus, rarely the green ones, and this is because the white asparagus beautifully offers up the luscious notes apparently of corn and sweet cabbage. But European farmers, the reason why this is, is that they mound and pack soil over the asparagus plants to block the chlorophyll process, and this is the process that ends up creating the white color when you block it. And these plants need to push hard through the soil and because of that they end up with tough outer skins that need to be peeled off which is not the case with the green variety. And then this adds labor like expenses and time into the mix of harvesting it and a lot of people think that this results in the most nutritional part of the vegetable being thrown away.

So, why? Yeah, why you didn't get it? It's one of the things I wrong about. Here are some more fun facts. Chefs say that to enjoy the bright green flavor of asparagus, you salt your water before blanching. And then, since the ends of asparagus are extremely tough, the best way to prepare the asparagus is to snap the ends off, which you probably already know. But you usually can find a slight bend where it can be broken off, and this will preserve the most asparagus possible.

You want it to have a good snap, though. It is fun when that happens. I like a good, satisfying snap sound. Yeah, that's when you know it's a fresh one. If it's got a squeeze, if it's floppy, then it's probably been out for too long. You have to eat it very fresh. It's very important.

They would drive up to London, get me in there really early morning, drive up to London and sell it to London people, of which I'm not one, and then they would have their, it's a very luxury vegetable. Wow. Yeah. It is. Not a cheap vegetable. I'm gonna get into's a very luxury vegetable. Wow. Yeah. It is.

It's not a cheap vegetable. I'm going to get into the royalty of this vegetable that has been called the king of vegetables. But first we're going to take a break. So go grab some asparagus and we'll be right back. Let's talk about some history of asparagus. The exact origins of asparagus are hard to pinpoint, although it is known to the eastern Mediterranean and parts of Asia. Asparagus can be found naturalized in many parts of the world today, and it is unclear

exactly when it was naturalized. How long the plant has been used as a medicinal vegetable is also uncertain, but it was known and highly prized by the Romans since at least 200 BC. The Romans were apparently very knowledgeable about the difference in quality and the difference in varieties that they experimented with, and they knew the best places to grow the crop. The most popular way that the Romans enjoyed to prepare their asparagus was to pick it, let it dry, and then when they wanted to eat it, they would simply cook it for a few minutes. Ancient royalty seemed fascinated with asparagus.

Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus was said to have organized elite military units to search out this vegetable. He would then locate the fastest runners to take the fresh asparagus spears into the frozen Alps for storage purposes. Ancient Greeks, meanwhile, harvested wild asparagus and connected this vegetable to their goddess of love, Aphrodite. Numerous other cultures have also considered this freshly sprouted asparagus a symbol of fertility. And so the history of asparagus goes back a very long, long way. And speaking of the Greeks, the derivation of the word asparagus also gives us some idea of its early history.

So asparagus was first cultivated, some people think, around 2500 years ago in Greece. And this is significant because the word asparagus is a Greek word, which means stock or shoot. And so it makes sense that the word is rooted in ancient Greek, but that word in ancient Greek is actually aspharagos, and it can be identified in various literature with two meanings. The first is found in Homer's Iliad, and it is used in this context to mean throat or gullet.

The second place it's found, it's referred toad and it is used in this context to mean throat or gullet. The second place it's found it's referred to as the edible shoots of stone or spirit. The Greeks believed asparagus was an herbal medicine which among other things would cure toothaches and prevent bee stings. We have seen reference to the fact that at one point this Greek word referred to the young edible shoots of any plant that shoots up from the earth, but we cannot verify this fact. So maybe. In the area of ancient Greece known as Boeotia, historians say that quote,

after veiling the bride, they would put on her head a chaplet of asparagus, for this plant yields the finest flavored fruit from the roughest thorns. So the bride will provide him who does not run away or feel annoyed at her first display of peevishness or unpleasantness, a docile and sweet life together." Oh good. Yeah. Feminism alive and well. Yeah.

I didn't know I was going to be suggesting an anti-woke vegetable. I mean, it is a little bit, uh, uh, returny. You don't have to be anti-woke to eat asparagus. No, you don't, you don't. Now it's come a long way. It's come a long way. Reclaim it. Yeah, we'll bring it back. Let's take back asparagus.

We'll start there. It's like, you know bring it back. Yeah, let's take back asparagus. Yeah, we'll start there. It's like, you know, small steps. Other ancient cultures that apparently were obsessed with asparagus. The asparagus plant appeared in an Egyptian frieze about 5,000 years ago with Queen Nefertiti allegedly an asparagus fan. Archaeologists found traces of asparagus on dishware when they were excavating the pyramid of Saqqara along with other coveted foods like figs and melons. Apparently in the Egyptian culture this vegetable was considered sacred and used in religious ceremonies. And then in ancient China, honored guests were treated

upon their arrivals with an asparagus footbath. Wow. Is he not coming? Wow. I know, either. Its uses are renowned and wide. About 2,000 years ago, a poet and Latin language prose writer and Platonist philosopher named Apuleius fell in love with a wealthy widow named Pundentilla. Knowing he needed to pull out all the stops to get her, he wooed her with a special dish that contained asparagus, along with crab tails, fish eggs, bird's tongue, and dove blood. He was accused of using magic charms to win her heart, and even though he successfully defended himself against his accusations, through this story, we can clearly

see there is certainly something magical about Asparagus. Yeah, I'm concerned about a crab tail. Yeah, as I read that I was like, that's not a thing, but maybe it used to be, you know? Maybe, maybe they, yeah. Maybe that'll be my next episode. Yeah, that had the crab lobster tail. Maybe something about maybe talking about lobsters. Yeah, maybe that. Maybe that's the case. Basically a seafood little guy with fish, eggs and crab.

Also bird's tongue and dove blood. Yeah, that's a bit weird. He lost me on that, to be honest. Yeah, romantic. Yeah, I assume we're coming to the asparagus recipes section. Not yet. Later in the podcast. I will let you proceed.

Let me just zoom through the rest of this really quick. When Emperor Charles V of the powerful Habsburg Empire decided to visit Rome, and he was alive between 1500 and 1558, he visited Rome without warning anyone of his arrival. A sense of panic ensued because the emperor had arrived during a time of fasting. One clever cardinal sent cooks to work and creating three different asparagus recipes. They set the plates on perfumed cloths and offered the emperor three exquisite wines. He was said to praise the delicacies and he was offered for years to come." And so for centuries people have talked about

asparagus and they've also included asparagus in their Easter dinners because of its fast growth in the spring and how this can symbolize resurrection. The book quote a curious history of vegetables by Wolf D. Storl has numerous asparagus anecdotes to enjoy if you're into that sort of thing and also contains this quote by modern day plant experts Fritz Martin Engel, and this quote effectively sums up the types of people who have appreciated asparagus over the centuries. Quote, pharaohs, emperors, kings, generals, and great spiritual leaders, princely poets like Goethe and gourmands like Berlant Severin, all of them ate and eat asparagus with great enthusiasm.

Let's get into the word as I mentioned earlier. It comes from the Greek word asparagus. G-O-S is the end of that. So the word asparagus was eventually developed into the word asparagus in classical Latin, but then it was shortened to asparagus without the a in medieval Latin. According to the world of wide words, it first appeared in English around 1000 AD, and then by the 16th century it was commonly referred to in English as sparich or sparage. At this point in time, similar to other English language developments, there was a reversion back to classical Latin

roots that was encouraged by academics and herbalists, so asparagus came back into use with the A. But when it came to common use, the A was still dropped, and people called it asparagus, spirogras, sparogras, and then also just grass, which was another shortening that people still use today. After the demise of the Roman Empire, little is heard of regarding the history of asparagus for a while. But evidence suggests that asparagus was being grown in French monasteries in 1459, but then it's unheard of in England or Germany until the mid-1500s. By the 16th century, asparagus starts to appear in history books again,

where it gained popularity in France and England. From there, the early colonists brought it to America. The French were the main exporters of the crop at the time. And if you wanted to please the Sun King, aka King Louis XIV of France, you can bring his second wife, Madame de Matinon, sorry, a new asparagus recipe. And apparently that was very pleasing to him. She gathered them into a book and asparagus soup a la Matanan is still prized today. Asparagus is also because of this called food of the Kings and King Louis XIV was so fond of asparagus that he ordered special greenhouses built so he can enjoy asparagus all year round. Me and Louis XIV. Just commenting on how me and Louis XIV.

Yeah. Same dude, in many ways. Love a good asparagus recipe. Oh, you were like handshaking yourself. Yeah, I was doing that. Yeah, yeah. I did not catch that. Yeah. Got it.

The medicinal virtues that are attributed to asparagus are a wide range. The roots, sprouts and seeds were used as medicine. The fresh roots are a diuretic The roots, sprouts, and seeds were used as medicine. The fresh roots are a diuretic. A syrup made from the young shoots and an extract of the roots has been recommended as a sedative in heart issues. Among Greeks and Romans, it is one of the oldest and most valued medicines. It was believed that if a person anointed himself with a liniment or liquid medicine made of asparagus and oil, that bees would not approach or sting him.

I mentioned this kind of briefly earlier, but that's how you do it. Don't get stung by a bee. Coat yourself with asparagus juice. It was also believed that if the root is put on a tooth that aches violently, it causes it to fall out without any pain. If you want that to happen. But how did the asparagus cross the Atlantic? There is little evidence of when exactly asparagus migrated over to the Americas, and again it's assumed that

settlers brought it over along with other vegetables at the time. It's believed that in the 1700s it was planted initially in New England and then by the 1850s it had found its way to North California. There is early evidence based on seed catalogs of the crop being sold on a commercial level in the early 18th century in eastern parts of the country. Wild asparagus, as we mentioned earlier, is a thing and it's seen as early as the 19th century. It can be growing along the east coast in scattered locations and across temperate North America and apparently 36 states have reported to have wild asparagus.

Another kingly reference of asparagus is apparently in Germany. Asparagus was called Spargel. Spargel took hold in Germany around Stuttgart in the 16th century and around the same time it was already being taken off in the UK. Initially it was grown exclusively for the royal court, earning its nickname Koneximus. It basically means royal vegetable. And then there are two primary growing regions in Germany where asparagus is in abundance. One of them is Svitsvingen, and it's where Karl Theodor, Prince Elector, started a green asparagus growing competition among the princes in the 17th century, and then the other region, Schrobenhausen. It's also steeped in asparagus history,

and it houses the European Asparagus Museum. That's a thing. An asparagus museum. You know what else might have a museum? All of these ads one day. Probably not. Bye! Listen to these ads. And we're back. Okay. James, I do think it's fairly interesting that there's an asparagus museum in Europe, but I also think it's interesting that you literally grew up in a town that had an asparagus mascot. Can you please explain this to me as someone who does not know what that means? I can. I can explain a little bit of the asparagus mascot. So I lived in Evesham when I grew up. Evesham of course gave its name to the Vale of Evesham, which is the area where asparagus

was. It was actually the last British product to get a protected origin status from the European Union before Britain terminally fucked its economy by leaving the European Union. And so it's this area around the Velavivshim, you can't call it Velavivshim asparagus unless you're in Velavivshim. I've just learned that the little purple tips on the spears, that's not normal apparently, that's just in the Velavivshim. So I would not be...

Sounds like a made up place, but I understand it's British and that's why. Yeah, it's in Worcestershire. So not made up, it's just, you know, just it's Worcestershire by the way is how you pronounce it. Worcestershire? No, people fucking, but it's one of those words like it is. I didn't actually think that was what it was called, but I would actually maybe mispronounce that probably. Yeah, it seems like one of those words that really flummoxes the American mind. So yeah, I grew up in Nevada, and in Nevada, it seems like one of those words that really flummoxes the American mind. Yeah.

So yeah, I grew up in Nevada, in Yvesham and in Nevada, Yvesham, we grow a lot of asparagus and very proud of it. So we have an asparagus festival. If you want to get really like hokey and English, which people in England do be loving to do, there's especially people of a certain ethnicity that like, you generally pick asparagus from St George's Day to Midsummer's Day, right? St George is the patron saint of England and Catalonia. So if you want to get really sort of parochial about it, you can get a little

nationalistic on the asparagus. I think most people don't, but we started in Evesham. Evesham used to have an asparagus festival. We had a little mascot, right? Dressed as an asparagus, as you do. Like literally a man in an asparagus outfit, like walking around. Yeah, so there have been two generations. The first one, I think we've mentioned the purple tips and that it just looks like a dick.

He looked a lot like a dick. He looked like a ganker in his penis. I mean, fertility was known for that. Yeah, this one didn't look fertile. This one looked best avoided, if I'm honest. It looks like they retired him in 2008 and replaced him with a gusty asparagus man, who if I'm honest doesn't look as asparagus-y, because they've given him sort of a flower tip. Like a broccoli looking thing. Yeah, he looks a bit like a wheat, kind of weedy, kind of maple-y. It's not full asparagus.

There's also an asparagus fairy I've seen, I've not personally come across the asparagus fairy, but I've seen that in some images. Asparagus fairy? Yeah, you want to let me just drop this in the... I don't think you told me about the fucking fairy. It's just a non-stop learning journey for Shireen. This is insane. First the stained glass, but I still can't believe that's a thing.

Wow. Yeah. Y'all, what? Yeah, maybe we'll make this the... The image for the episode. This is a good image. This is a great image. Yeah, it's a classic image. Yes, you've got a man dressed as King George, Saint George.

You know, not King George, different George's. Maybe we can Photoshop our faces onto that. Yeah, that would be great. Let's do it. Let's do it. It'll be highly entertaining. So yeah, you can go now. I think it's in Bratfordton.

Yeah, it is in Bratfordton where you can have the Asparagus Festival. What the festival is, is like the first auction of asparagus, right? And then they'll auction that off for a local cause, normally the first, you know, the first full bundle of asparagus, first round as it's called, and that will immediately get bought up by someone, people pay hundreds of pounds for it. Wow. And then they rush it off to a restaurant in London, right? And they make it for their fancy, fancy people to pay fancy money for this fancy vegetable.

Famously, famously, I perhaps overstated that Gus, the asparagus man, was refused entry to the houses of parliament in the United Kingdom, maybe, maybe 10, 15 years ago now, because his costume presented as a security risk. Wow. ago now because his costume presented a security risk. Wow. Wait, okay. As someone who's had asparagus in an asparagus town and also here, is there a difference

in taste? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Fresh asparagus is a lot better. When you get it in American shops, it's very woody. It doesn't have that kind of... I would describe raw asparagus when it's fresh. You know when you get peas and you've grown peas and you're just having the peas. Yeah, so it has that.

Love peas. Yeah, love a fresh pea. So it's got that kind of... You can take that however you want. It's got that kind of pea freshness and sweetness to it. That sounds really good. It is really good, Shereen. That's why we have a whole thing about it.

I don't think I've ever had good asparagus, I'm not going to lie. I'm going to grow some. I don't seek it out. Yeah, we'll go on a world tour. We'll do sea urchin soup. That'd be a nice combination, actually, to get a sea urchin asparagus. So what you're doing with the asparagus, right, you cut it, and it's hand cut, right? You're not going through like a combine harvester to do this.

You're going through with a little knife, serrated knife, sharp on the backside. You're just cutting the stalks, and you immediately, you level them off right at the base. So you sort of, so that the point, the tips are level and then you just cut across the base. So some of them are going to have more of the woody white base than others. The green part has been above the soil and the white part is below. So you're doing them, you get your round or you get your however many asparagus you're getting, right? You get it very fresh.

Often when, at least when we would buy it, we would just buy it like from farm shops or by the side of the road. We never grew it because it was just like a lot, you could get a lot more from just doing other vegetables. But you'd buy it the day it was harvested and then you drive it home and you immediately put it into boiling water just briefly, right? And then you drive it home and you immediately put it into boiling water, just briefly, right? And then you pop it out. You don't need to cook it for very long.

If it's good as you don't want to cook it for very long, right? Just softening it a little bit. And then if you have it with a traditional way to have it is with butter, which kind of, you know, does away with the serocalastral benefit. Nice to dip in a soft boiled egg. I mean, I'm curious about, I mean, the health stuff was just like a fun tidbit. Yeah. Yeah, it's a luxury bit.

Eat it how you want. Yeah, have it however you want. Dip it in a soft boiled egg where you boil the egg but the yolk is still running and you dip the asparagus in. I've never even thought of that combo. Yeah, it's a good one. Lots of good childhood memories of your asparagus and egg. Interesting. Yeah, lots of fun ways to eat it. Other things about the Vale of Yves from Nesparegas. He Gus the Asparagus Man, he visited the...

I want to repeat that he's called Gus, sorry, Gus the Asparagus Man. Sorry, I can't tell you. He visited the European Parliament where he read and there is, Shireen, we don't see a video of this actually, Shireen, I think this would be good for you. Oh gosh So here's a video of Gusty asparagus man in the European Parliament reading a poem England is crazy Wait, one of the more like pro Oh my god, yeah, no, you'll want to listen to it as well The great ennobler asparagus. Okay. Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. She's doing it again

He's reading a poem About asparagus. Okay, sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. She's doing it again. He's reading a poem. About asparagus, that's correct. Yeah. And then he's making a joke about cider, another great, more of a Hereford product, but another great local product. Yeah, yeah, I come from the home of Gus, the asparagus man. I've enjoyed many, many asparagus.

It's nice when we have really miserable like January, February, even into March in the UK is miserable. Like we get much shorter days, right? Because of being further north, it rains a lot. Like we don't get winters like the American cold places where you get like dry or like snowy kind of winters. We just get like right around freezing and raining a lot of the time, which is the worst weather that is possible to have. And it's just fucking miserable. So like when you're having the asparagus, it's like a nice sign that the days are summer days are really long as well. So you're getting these nice long summer days. You're like starting to get like, it comes after what they call the

hungry gap, right? That time in like February, March, where you're not to get, it comes after what they call the hungry gap, right? That time in February and March where you're not getting as many of your fresh vegetables, it's sort of the time when you're not really harvesting very much. So you only got your storage stuff, right, your apples and potatoes. And so after that you get your asparagus and it's the start of your spring veg. So it's a nice little celebration of springtime. Yeah. I mean, I didn't know anything about asparagus other than it made your pee smell until this

episode. So I learned a lot. Why does it make your pee smell? Is that the asparagine? Well, okay. Asparagus makes your pee smell because when asparagus is digested, asparagustic acid gets broken down into sulfur-containing byproducts and sulfur smells like eggs and also apparently can smell like pee. Because sulfur in general is not pleasant to the smell, then when you pee these byproducts evaporate almost immediately and this is what causes you to smell that very unpleasant scent.

Yeah, you can tell if someone's been at the asparagus. I think the answer is usually sulfur when it comes to food and smells. Yeah, it is. Yeah, bad eggs too. Yeah. I want to end this episode with just a tale of a town in the US where it had the reign of King Asparagus. I want to just- Wow, okay. I want to talk about this for a moment. It was once the biggest US producers of asparagus. Less than a century ago, the town of Aiken, South Carolina was known as one of the asparagus capitals of the US.

From the mid-18th through the mid-20th centuries, cotton was the South's predominant crop, and Aiken was no exception to this. Just before the Civil War, cotton comprised nearly 60% of all American exports. The phrase King Cotton, which was made famous by then Senator and then future Governor, James Henry Hammond, he implied that the European industry depended heavily on Southern cotton. He owned the Redcliffe Plantation in Beech Island, Aiken County. Enslaved people obviously provided the labor for cotton cultivation, and so him, along with scores of other plantation owners, he hoped that buyers of southern cotton would fight against the blockade enacted by Lincoln's federal forces. And Southerners, because of

this, were certain that their cotton exports were so crucial that Europeans would surely back the South in the event of a civil war. Spoiler alert, that did not happen. And then by 1865, the outcome of the Civil War had planters looking at their commercial ventures in a new way. Farmers broke their dependence on cotton and they desperately tried to find and locate another king crop. A variety of crops could thrive in the warm, sandy soil of Aiken. The first reference to asparagus being grown as a commercial crop in South Carolina can

be found in a 1903 pamphlet called Asparagus, Its Culture for home and for market. According to the pamphlet, the crop was first grown commercially in Charleston, where farmers produced a specific variety called palmetto. It was cultivated especially to flourish in the southern climate, and soon this specialized variety spread into Aiken, Williston, and Bamberg counties. By 1918, the Clemson University Department of Agricultural Economics reported that the state had about 1,100 acres of asparagus under cultivation. Fast forward to 1937, this number increased to 8,700 acres. So area residents enjoyed their share of fresh asparagus,

but most of it was sent to New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. From the 1920s through the mid-1950s, asparagus was gathered daily and shipped by train to its northern destinations. Shippers often wrapped the delicate spears and Spanish moss gathered from the live oak trees that abounded the city. The crop flourished commercially for almost 30 years until production slowed down in 1953. World War II may have lessened the workforce available to farm the crop or perhaps the marketing success from the California competitors was more effective than South Carolina's. It is also possible that the varieties grow in Aiken and the surrounding areas were

more susceptible to diseases that weakened the crops. And so, although several farms near Aiken still grow asparagus, according to Aiken Regional dot com, the reign of King Asparagus is over. Sad. Yeah, not here. Still king in my heart. I just thought that was a funny little tale. But yeah, that's asparagus for you. Thank you, James, for motivating this knowledge that I now have. That's okay. Carry that with you for the rest of your life. Use it wisely.

Thank you. And yeah, that's this episode of Eat Could Happen here. Until next time, I don't know. Just go to sleep. Bye! Olympics are underway. It's useless to talk about it as a thing that's happening in the future when it's happening in the present. It's happening now. And what's happening now is our podcast, Two Guys, Five Rings, is a phenomenon. And while real medals are being handed out in Paris, we're giving out our fake medals here. Two Guys, Five Rings, Matt Bowen, and the Olympics. Who are we watching in this Olympic Games? I mean, I'm watching Simone Biles. I'm watching her go higher and higher and higher with every bounce.

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Welcome to Cheaters and Backstabbers. I'm Shadi Diaz. And I'm Kate Robarts. And we are New York City stand-up comedians and best friends. And we love a good cheating and backstabbing story. So this is a series where our guests reveal their most shocking cheating stories. Join us as we learn how to avoid getting our hearts broken

or our backs slashed. Listen to Cheaters and Backstabbers on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and it's just me today, but I've got a weird one for you. Now, I don't know if you remember, but a few months ago,

I did an episode about a ring of Hitler-loving Zoom bombers running a national campaign to disrupt public meetings. Those guys were mostly members of the Goi'im Defense League, an anti-Semitic group of freaks who just love getting a rise out of people. They were calling themselves the City Council Death Squad, and they've disrupted hundreds of virtual public meetings from coast to coast over the last year. Everything from zoning boards in New Jersey to city council meetings in California, even dipping their toe into messing with online meetings of alcoholics anonymous.

They mostly seem motivated by their insatiable need to force strangers to hear them say the n-word, but I do think they understand that their behavior limits people's access to local government. Many of the cities they targeted responded by ending virtual participation in government meetings. That means fewer people participate, it's harder to engage with local government, and people just generally feel less safe and less motivated to pursue the kinds of redress

available to them through local democracy. And I'm glad we did the episode. I heard from people in maybe a dozen cities all over the country who found the episode online when they were trying to figure out what the hell happened at their own meeting. And the guys doing it liked the episode so much that now they use my name when they call into meetings to scream slurs, which is a less positive outcome, but what can you do?

I assume if the mayor of Redlands, California Googles me, he'll figure out I wasn't the one doing Holocaust denial at his meeting. But overall, this seems like the kind of thing that would be prosecutable, especially considering we know the real names of many of the group's ringleaders. Well, someone has finally been indicted for orchestrating hateful Zoom bombing in virtual city council meetings. But it isn't them. It's something much, much weirder.

Last month, Feds unsealed an indictment against a man named Mohammed al-Hashemi. He's a Syrian national from Albania currently living in England. And according to the federal prosecutor, he was the mastermind behind a Zoom bombing ring that targeted the Fresno City Council in the summer of 2020. He's been charged with one count of engaging in repeated harassing communication, one count of engaging in anonymous telecommunications harassment, three counts of a classic 18 USC 875 C transmitting threatening communications, and one count of conspiracy for doing all of the above.

Right? So there's a conspiracy and then those other charges represent the overt acts of that conspiracy. Now, again, I'm not a lawyer. I'll tell you that every time. I don't know all the laws. And so this is the first time I'm realizing that harassing someone by phone is a federal crime. I mean, it makes sense, right? Of course that's illegal at the federal level too.

I just didn't think about that the last time we were talking about Zoom bombing. I mean, the obvious charge is interstate threats. If you make a threat using a phone, the internet, or the mail, that's federal territory. But prosecutors are sometimes a little gun shy about threats. They want a slam dunk case. They want a true threat, right? Something that is undeniably an actual threat before they'll bring a case like that. So I thought they'd have to get a little creative if they wanted to indict Zoom bombers. But if you're just talking about harassing phone calls, it's actually pretty straightforward to bring a federal case against the guys doing this. So two of the charges in the indictment are for different subsections of 47 USC 223, obscene

or harassing phone calls. Subsection A1C is making a telephone call or utilizing a telecommunications device, right? So that means it doesn't have to be a literal telephone. It can be a Zoom call. It can be any kind of telecommunications device, like text message, et cetera. Whether or not conversation or communication ensues, which means repeated harassing hangup calls count too.

You don't even have to say anything, without disclosing his identity and with the intent to abuse, threaten or harass a specific person. So this subsection is specific to the fact that they were using fake names. Then subsection A1E is making repeated telephone calls or repeatedly initiating communication with a telecommunications device during which conversation or communication ensues, solely to harass any specific person. Both of those counts carry a maximum sentence of two years, and they're usually just punished with a fine.

Not that serious. The other counts are a little more serious. Interstate threatening communications can get you up to five years per count. And some of these calls have some pretty violent language. I'm interested to see how they move forward with the threats though. The actual intent or ability to carry out a threat doesn't necessarily matter if the person the threat was made to was in reasonable fear from it.

But I'm sure we'll see it argued that, you know, he was in Albania. He never planned to go to Fresno to hurt people. The obvious counter to that though is that he did literally say he was in Fresno and there was no obvious indication to the victims that that wasn't true. And he's also charged with conspiracy. The indictment refers multiple times to unnamed co-conspirators. So this isn't just one guy making racist prank phone calls. This is an organized and intentional conspiracy to engage in harassment and threats. That conspiracy is a little grim. The FBI and the UK's Metropolitan Police Force

did find and interview at least nine members of the group they're saying Al-Hashemi was leading. And the reason they aren't named is because they are children. The children interviewed by the FBI had pretty consistent accounts once there was a federal agent in their living room telling their mom about the Albanian Nazi they'd been chatting with on Roblox. Okay, not exactly Roblox, that's a little hyperbolic, but the raids were coordinated on a platform called Gilded, which is kind of like Discord and is owned by the same company as Roblox. So it's mostly used by gamers to talk about gaming, but also apparently for doing federal crimes. But the kids all said the group's leaders were users named InSino,

that's I-N-S-E-E-N-O, not InSino like InSino Man, the Pauly Shore movie, and Sapper. Many of the kids correctly ascertained that InSino, the user feds have identified as Al Hashemi, was older than they were and European, but spoke English very well. I went back and pulled the public access TV recordings of some of those meetings and listened to the calls attributed to al-Hashemi, and he really doesn't have an accent that I could hear. You don't gotta hand it to him or anything, but he does say the N-word like a red-blooded

American racist, so I guess he had some practice. The kid interviewed by the Metropolitan Police Service at his parents' house in London said that Sapper was a college student in the United Arab Emirates. Although in the footnotes, the FBI agent indicates that actually Sapper is in Jordan, but close enough for a teenager. I can't find any information about whether or not charges are being pursued against that user either in the US or in Jordan. He isn't identified by name at all, but he does appear to be the only other adult discussed in that document.

The English teenager said Sapper loves spamming the calls they raid with ISIS gore videos. The criminal complaint details seven incidents of Zoom raids in June and July of 2020, five of which were meetings of the Fresno City Council. One was a Jewish religious service conducted by Zoom in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the other was some random couple's wedding in upstate New York. But the incidents described in detail in the complaint are clearly not the only ones that happened, just the only ones being charged at this time. When FBI agents interviewed a 13-year-old boy in Oregon, he told them the group's leader also enjoyed Zoom bombing parent-teacher conferences,

specifically at schools that had had past active shooter events. The boy said Encino, again, that's Al Hashemi, according to the complaint, loves to offend people and talks about racist things more than anyone else. But you know who doesn't love to offend people? The sponsors of this show.

And we are back. I hope you enjoyed those products and services. Hopefully none of them were for online chat platforms where European neo-Nazis are recruiting your kids. All right. So all these criminal charges here are related to conduct that occurred in the span of less than five weeks, four full years ago.

But for as long as it took to actually indict al-Hashemi, it looks like the feds acted pretty quickly after the first few threats were made. They were sitting at the dining room table talking to a kid identified as RB by August 27th, barely two months after the call started. RB is described as a juvenile with a history of making threats who lives in Spartanburg,

South Carolina. Now obviously it's impossible to identify this minor and probably not a good idea to do even if I could, but I am dying to know what exactly that history of threats looks like. I found a couple of news stories in the year or two before this about teens in the Spartanburg area who'd been arrested for making threats. Now obviously again even in those news stories if a minor is arrested they're identified so there's no way to sort of connect these two unnamed teens. But I did find a story about a ninth grader who posted a snapchat on the day of the Parkland school shooting in 2018. That was a photo of the teenager holding a realistic fake gun with the caption,

Round 2 of Florida tomorrow. Again, it's impossible to say if there's any connection, but the general age, location, and interest in school shootings definitely caught my eye. Another member of the group, identified as a minor named CG in North Caldwell, New Jersey, sometimes used the name Adam Lanza during the Zoom raids, an homage to the Sandy Hook school shooter. And when the FBI was chatting with RB on August 27th, he told him about another user in the Discord who posted often about his desire to carry out a school shooting and wanting to kill. A few days after that, the FBI agents were sitting down with that 13-year-old boy and his parents in Oregon.

That boy, identified as PM, told the agents that Encino wasn't just interested in Zoom bombing, but the group also doxed people, naming a bizarre list of targets ranging from Jewish leaders to yoga teachers and cooking classes. PM also told the agents that Encino had doxed a former member of the group, a girl identified in a footnote as LT, after a disagreement over whether or not they should be using so many racial slurs in the prank phone calls.

Now, I know I said it wasn't possible or even advisable to try to identify these minors, but it turns out it is possible and she's not a minor anymore. I don't know maybe the rule is if you're old enough to drive drunk you're old enough to get talked about on a podcast. She's got a court date coming up for a DUI arrest in April. The girl identified as LT was doxxed by the group's leader in July 2020 when she was just 16 and we only have that 13 year old aspiring

school shooters word for it as to why she left the group. Maybe it is possible that she disagreed with the racial slur-heavy call scripts, but I don't think that's because she's not a huge fan of racism. She shows up that same year in leaked Discord chats from the servers GROIPERHAVEN and NickFuentes Unofficial, both servers for fans of Nick Fuentes unofficial, both servers for fans of Nick Fuentes. She identifies herself as a paleoconservative Christian monarchist and claims to know Nick Fuentes. When another user asked her if she likes Nick, she says, yeah, he's cool. But she takes issue with the fact that he wants to marry a white woman because he is,

in her eyes, not white, and says whites are better than any other race and we need to stay inside of our own race. A few sort of vestigial stitches of videos with her now banned TikTok account show her in a Trump shirt and MAGA hat giving the camera this weird Kubrick stare as the text, girls that think communists should be jailed, appears over her head. as the text, Girls That Think Communists Should Be Jailed, appears over her head. You know, kids will be kids, right? Just classic kid stuff, wanting to imprison your political enemies

and being really opposed to race mixing. Well, last summer, she gave a speech about cancel culture to the Berks County Patriots, an anti-government extremist group that sent charter buses to the insurrection. And public records show she received a stipend as a legislative intern at the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

The teenage griper to legislative aid pipeline is something that should concern us all a little bit more. But doxing LT seems to have frightened some of the other kids. PM, that's 13-year-old in Oregon, told agents he was worried the group would dox him if he tried to leave. BO, a minor in North Carolina, told agents he believed Encino had access to his computer by a spyware. A.M., a 17 year old in Maryland, provided agents with screenshots showing Encino

had posted his address and discussed having him swatted. And this is such a messy, ugly thing, right? So first of all, these are kids. They're kids, right? One of them is as young as 13. And that has to be front of mind in all of this. But even if they lack the frontal lobe capacity to really understand the consequences of saying you're going to kill someone,

this isn't just normal kid acting out behavior, right? PM told other users he wanted to shoot up his school. AM posted often about wanting to build bombs and blow things up and expressed a lot of interest in ISIS. They were all calling into these meetings and saying the most shocking, upsetting things they could think of. And it's not 100% clear why Like they didn't all necessarily have the same motivations or understandings. A teenager identified as KH told agents, the goal is to create such a disturbance

that the hosts have no choice but to terminate the meeting. Hurting people's feelings along the way is completely in bounds. And the slurs were just a means to that end. He said they would quote, just have fun in there. A.M. told agents he was just posting, quote, random things. But he also admitted he hates Jews. And so maybe it's a meaningless exercise to try to nail down exactly how ideologically committed these teens were to this project of racial and religious harassment.

But al-Hashemi is also not the first Nazi to see the value in recruiting teens online. They may just be kids talking shit right now, but if you hear a kid talking this type of shit, don't brush it off. This starts somewhere. This edgy, shocking, unserious, 4chanchan style racism crystallizes into serious ideological commitment for some of them. And I hope these kids' parents were able to provide some meaningful intervention

after they found out what their kids were up to online. And back to that timeline, right? So the indictment only lists the June 2020 calls as the overt acts of the conspiracy. But the date range for the charge conduct is actually May 2020 to February 2022. And maybe that means they plan to introduce additional evidence of other calls to support the conspiracy claim. It's hard to say. They're being pretty tight-lipped about it. Reporting by Jason Kobler for 404 Media says the Department of Justice declined

to comment on the possibility of anyone else being charged. And the criminal complaint goes into some detail about interviewing multiple cooperative minors, but it is possible the records they got back from these various platforms led them to other co-conspirators who are old enough to catch a federal charge. There are a lot of details missing here

that we'll just have to wait for. The docket shows that Al-Hashemi has retained an attorney. I assume they wouldn't have unsealed the indictment if they didn't have him in custody, but there's no information available about when or where he was arrested and how that extradition is coming along. And it's interesting to me how incredibly similar the MO is in this case to the ring led by the Goi'im Defense League guys. I mean, it's not exactly a complicated plan. It's not hard to believe that racists who never met each other would independently arrive at the same gross way of bothering people.

But take for example one of the incidents in the indictment. A man that they alleged was Al Hashemi called into the Fresno City Council meeting on June 11th, 2020 during public comment. He pretended to be a local resident named Brian, and he started off pretty normal saying, you know, I agree with the previous speaker. He's sort of indicating that he's interested in and engaged in the topic of the meeting. He expresses an opinion about the topic at hand, which happened to be police funding. And then suddenly he pivots to a violent call for murder of black residents and repeatedly uses the n-word. And so after that call ends, the council's on high alert for disruptive callers, so subsequent members of the group don't bother with a script or a backstory. They just start shouting slurs the second they connect until they're booted from the call.

Right? So in this case, the caller after fake Brian was that miner from South Carolina, and when his call connects, you can hear him laughing and he just says the N-word and they hang up on him. I don't know, maybe I'm too hung up on the structural similarities here. I guess that's just classic crank call procedure, right? You start off with a reasonable ruse, you get the person you've called to believe this is a real normal phone call, and then you shock and upset them by making a hard right turn into the... I guess you can't really call it a punchline if it's not funny, but you know what I mean.

But if you took the names out of this indictment, you could mistake these descriptions of calls for City Council Death Squad scripts. But they didn't start doing their Zoom bombing until the summer of 2023. And according to this indictment, the FBI agents were having uncomfortable conversations with teenage boys all the way back in 2020. So I think if there was any overlap between these two Zoom bomb rings, we'd know by now. I think this is just unrelated racists reaching the same horrible conclusion. But if those guys are listening, I hope they hear the significance of that timeline. Within weeks of that first Zoom bomb in this indictment, they had search warrants for the

homes of two of the miners on those calls. I think a lot of people assumed that if they don't get caught, they aren't going to get caught. You see that a lot in tax evasion cases, right? After you do it a few years in a row, you figure they're never gonna get you, so you keep doing it, you get a little bolder. But they're just taking their time and building their case.

Just because you haven't been caught yet, does it mean they don't know you're doing it? So who knows? Maybe we'll see a similar indictment against the GDL guys a few years after they started doing it. There's not really a button to put on this one. We'll have to wait for more filings in Al Hashemi's case to learn anything more there.

But if you know any teenagers, check in with them. Make sure they're actually playing Roblox and not being coaxed into doing federal crime by a Nazi in Albania. You know what, better yet? Go outside. Unplug your router. Be free.

Well, now when the Olympics are underway, it's useless to talk about it as a thing that's happening in the future when it's happening in the present. It's happening now. And what's happening now is our podcast, Two Guys, Five Rings, is a phenomenon. And while real medals are being handed out in Paris, we're giving out our fake medals here. Two Guys, Five Rings, Matt Bowen, and the Olympics. Who are we watching this Olympic Games? I mean, I'm watching Simone Biles. I'm watching her go higher and higher and higher with every bounce. Sha'Carri's about to run faster than you or I or anyone has ever seen. I'm ready for the girls and the boys and everybody under the Seine River. Under the Seine, over the Seine, within the waters of the

Seine, all of them. Follow the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or your favorite podcast platform and watch and listen to every moment of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games now through August 11th on NBC and Peacock and for the first time ever on the iHeartRadio Music Festival, presented by Capital One right now, before they sell out at AXS.com. I'm Angie Martinez. Check out my podcast where I talk to some of the biggest athletes, musicians, actors in the world.

We go beyond the headlines and the sound bites that have real conversations about real life, death, love, and everything in between. This life right here, just finding myself, just relaxation, just not feeling stressed, just not feeling pressed. This is what I'm most proud of. I'm proud of Mary because I've been through hell and some horrible things. That feeling that I had of inadequacy is gone. You're gonna die being you. So you gotta constantly work on who you are to make sure that the stars align correctly.

Life ain't easy and it's getting harder and harder. So if you have a story to tell, if you've come through some trials and troubles, you need to share it, because you're gonna inspire someone. You're gonna give somebody the motivation to not give up, to not quit. Listen to Angie Martinez IRL on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. First, no matter what happens, remember to breathe. It's always good advice to breathe,

but taking good advice is easier said than done. Sometimes the world is so overwhelming that any added weight, even the weight of oxygen in your lungs, feels like it might be enough to drag you down. This is one of those times. The last week has brought about 10 years worth of news, and we are all processing the seemingly inevitable coronation of a dictator and the sudden hope and possibility inspired by Joe Biden stepping down from the nomination. Welcome to It Could Happen Here.

I'm Robert Evans and this is a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes about how to put them back together. The last time I sat down to talk with all of you like this was in the immediate aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt, just before the Republican National Convention. I told you not to panic. That's still good advice. I also told you that no matter how bad or good things may look, literally anything can happen in US politics, and by god it has. I felt it was necessary to deliver that message, because I saw an awful lot of people declaring we're doomed, fascism is inevitable, and quite frankly, I think shit like that only helps the fascists. Well, it turned out I was right.

A lot has happened over the last two weeks, and the situation now is very different than it was the day the former president took that grazing blow from a sniper's bullet. As is usually the case in instances like this, I've had a lot of people reach out to me since that episode saying versions of, how did you know? And as good as it might be for my career to lean into that side of my reputation, the truth is that I am white-knuckling it through every twist and turn like everyone else. I spent the RNC wondering if I'd been foolish telling people not to panic. And yes, I feel a hell of a lot better right now. Of course, I don't know what comes next. I just know that we're done with the portion

of this mess where we spiral in a hopeless mire. That was last week. This week, the outlook is a lot better. And not because Kamala Harris is our savior, or because Nancy Pelosi is a 3D chess master. But because men age and die. This is a fact I tried to remind myself of as I groaned through that disastrous debate with the rest of the country. On one hand, I felt like we were all about to watch one ailing, power-hungry man hand the keys to the kingdom over to a cadre of bloodthirsty fascists. But on the other hand, there's always something inherently optimistic in this simple reality.

The people who would be our rulers will all die someday. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. So long as men die, we have hope. I stole that line from Charlie Chaplin. He put it in the mouth of his character from The Great Dictator, a movie he produced at great personal cost in 1940, right as Hitler and the Nazis reached the apex of their power. A rational analyst staring out at the playing field after the fall of France could be forgiven for having seen the outcome as certain.

Great Britain stood alone, Hitler's armies victorious in every theater, and the future of democracy and human liberty gasping for breath. One such rational analyst was Joseph Kennedy, US ambassador to Great Britain and patriarch of the Kennedy family. Joseph was a man of wealth and power, whose sober judgment and cunning had seen him short the entire US stock market and the kind of fortune that let him buy his way into the ranks of global royalty. He was a man who had predicted the future once, one big, and he let that convince him that he had the second sight. And so in November 1940, less than a month after the release of The Great Dictator, Kennedy

found himself in an interview with the Boston Globe. Looking out at the ruin of Europe and the bombs falling on London, he told a reporter, democracy is finished in England. It may be here. Here, of course, being the United States. Now, the resulting blowback to all of this saw Kennedy forced to resign his ambassadorship. The very next year, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and for several brutal months it looked like Joe had been right. Not only might democracy be finished, but every system besides fascism might be hurtling towards annihilation and bondage under the swastika. Depending on how you count it, the Third Reich, and fascism as a whole, reached its greatest extent of territorial power in either mid-August or September 1941. By November of 1941, a year

after Joe Kennedy's remarks to the globe, Operation Barbarossa had been wrenched to a bloody halt, and the long battle to push the fascists back and drown them in the waters of their birth had begun. And so, in the end, it was Charlie Chaplin, not Joe Kennedy, who had the proper measure of things. Liberty survived because men died, many millions of them, from Keefe to Canterbury. We live in very different times now. The armies of fascism are not primarily conquering land under arms. The primary terrain of our present conflict exists

within the hearts and souls of men and women. And while populism is still a favorite mechanism of action among the fascists, they have, in this country at least, given up on victory by sheer weight of numbers. It's true what they say, war never changes. Weapons do, but the core of all human conflict revolves around the capture and denial of territory. If you can't occupy ground yourself, you must at least deny it to the enemy. In infantry combat, this is the primary use of a machine gun, not to kill people, but to blanket

an area in bullets and stop the enemy from moving through it. In our modern war of thoughts and feelings, the machine gun has yielded to the firehose of propaganda and disinformation. These have always been parts of the fascist arsenal, but the internet has allowed an increase in the scale and speed of their deployment that is very much comparable to the replacement of bolt-action rifles with automatic ones. The forces of basic human decency have a natural advantage in terms of human terrain that should be impossible for the fascists to counter. No matter what the bastards say, most people want to be left alone with the people they

love to live their lives. The forces of hate, the people who want to throw trans kids and their parents in gas chambers and drown migrants in the Rio Grande, tap out at a little over a third of the population. Max. If you want to return to World War II metaphors, and why wouldn't you, the monsters are stuck in tiny landlocked Germany without any gas or steel. The only way for them to access the resources and territory they need to maneuver themselves

into a victory is by cutting us off from each other and keeping us too confused and divided to surround the bastards and smother them all for good. They do this by convincing you that you are isolated, alone, and surrounded by them. Our hopelessness is their force multiplier. When leftists in the US look out at Ukrainians struggling for survival and write them off as Nazis, as deluded tools of imperialism, when liberals in blue cities decry college students protesting on behalf of dying Palestinian children as agents of Hamas, the lines of solidarity between a snap rather than rapping like a garret around the throats of our opponents. This is why you've seen so much allegiance and sympathy between the cruelest and most

deluded segments of the Western Left, the people who laughed at Syrian civilians sheltering from Bashar al-Assad's bombs and called them the CIA, and the agents of Putin's Russia and Peter Thiel's neo-monarchist right. The Thiels, Bannons, Putins, Erdoans, Trumps, and Modi's of the world know how lonely they are. The only way they can win is to convince you that you're alone. Then they have you at a disadvantage. Then they can kill us, one by one.

You know, there's no smooth way to transition to an ad in a piece like this, but here it is. We're back. Now, I'm not a young in, but I do sometimes tend to think of humanity as a single vast gestalt organism, groping for survival and comfort in a world that mostly exists beyond what we can see. The majority of people are happy existing as part of that vast whole. We take comfort and safety in our communion with the rest of the species.

But there are a few diseased minds out there that don't believe in the rest of us. These solipsists see themselves as the only minds, and the perpetuation of their own power and will as the only real good. That's why men like Peter Thiel seek physical immortality. And it's why men like Vladimir Putin or Hitler seek the kind of immortality that comes from welding the edifice of a nation-state to themselves. Hitler is Germany, and Germany will last forever. Elon Musk sees his children as an extension of himself, and his fantasies of space colonization

are really just a fantasy that he will remain central to humanity's future down through eternity. Musk has repeatedly identified himself as a pro-natalist, and he believes his responsibility is to have as many children as possible to secure a pro-natalist, and he believes his responsibility is to have as many children as possible to secure a pro-human future. The term pro-human might confuse you, given the lack of concern he has for the children being bombed in Gaza or who will surely die in the mass deportation camps the Republican Party is currently salivating to open.

But the only real human Elon sees is himself, which is why he equates the survival of the species with his own ability to breed. As I type this, video has begun circulating around the internet from an interview Musk conducted with Jordan Peterson for the Daily Wire. In it, Musk explains why he has now fully embraced politics, endorsing Donald Trump and declaring himself at war with wokeism, which he describes as an existential threat to the species. He claims that what cinched this for him was his daughter deciding I was seeing documents for one of my older boys. There was a lot of confusion.

And I was told, oh, he might commit suicide. It's incredibly evil. And I agree with you that people that have been promoting this should go to prison. So I was straight into doing this. It wasn't explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs. Musk's child is not, in fact, dead. But they have expressed an identity utterly separate from Elon.

An identity he cannot understand. Because Musk can only see his children as an extension of himself and his ego. This is, in fact, worse than death. It is a threat to Musk's own life. This incidentally, is why Musk and his fellow travelers see transgender kids as such a threat. Accepting a trans child, even if you don't fully understand how and why they feel the way they do, is one of the most radical acts of love imaginable. To do this means that you have accepted, on a fundamental level, that your children are

autonomous beings, not an extension of you, but something new, wonderful, and unique. The essence of parental love is to give your children to the world. This means accepting that you are finite, that the world goes on without you. If you see all humanity as an extension of your own ego, nothing could be more frightening. The people who feel this way, people like Elon, are mutations, a glitch in the human system that starts as a glitch within the heart of an individual. It comes as a byproduct of success in the very visible, spectacular ways that feed narcissism.

When I think about stuff like this, I refer often back to a great article by the anthropologist Richard Lee, Eating Christmas in the Kalahari. Lee spent years living among the Ikung Bushmen, a Bantu-speaking hunter-gatherer group who were seen by anthropologists as some of the people still living in a manner most similar to our ancient ancestors. One Christmas, as a show of gratitude to his hosts, Lee purchased a massive ox for the holiday feast. He was excited to show this great gift off to his

new friends, and he was proud of himself for having gotten it. And he was utterly shocked when they responded to his pride, with mockery of him and his ox, insulting it as scrawny, tiny, hardly fit to eat. Now this shocked Lee because the ox he had purchased was of course quite large, and it was eventually explained to him that his friends were reacting with mockery, not to his gift, but to the evident pride he had shown in it. Bringing in a great beast's worth of meat, either as a hunter or from buying it, as Burton did, is the kind of thing that can go to a young man's head. If you are the one with the pocketbook, or the one who fires the arrow, you can forget

that the meat before you, the meat that you broughtbook or the one who fires the arrow, you can forget that the meat before you, the meat that you brought into the community, is not the product purely of your own genius, but is a product of all of the time and resources invested in you by the community. The shaming of the meat, as this tactic was called, is a time-honored way of correcting the glitch in young men of the Ikung before it can turn terminal. As one elder

in the tribe eventually explained to Lee, when a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle." And speaking of cooling your heart, why don't you cool your heart with some ads and then we'll come back to conclude this in a little bit. We're back.

It has been theorized that the shaming of the meat is a social construct that may help to explain one of the evolutionary values of satire, perhaps even why humanity keeps producing comedians. They act as a part of our species' immune system. When this glitch in the hearts of young men isn't punctured when it's allowed to take off and dominate them, then it changes them on a fundamental level and the being that it leaves in its wake seems to understand instinctively that laughter is a danger to it.

This ultimately explains why Musk purchased Twitter and why Barack Obama's mockery of Donald Trump during that White House Correspondents' Dinner set us all down the dark path that we currently are walking. So clearly, humor alone doesn't always save us from these kinds of people, either. What will? I have several times in my various shows identified myself as an anarchist, and I tend to do that even though I don't feel fully comfortable with the title because brevity matters. I'm speaking to a mass audience, and using that word gets us close enough for the sake

of a podcast. But I'm not an anarchist in the sense that I have some sort of clear vision for how to build a utopia. Obviously, I do think anarchism has some answers for how human beings might build a better world. That's why I went to Rojava. It's why we cover a lot of the things that we cover on the series. But I am primarily an anarchist because I understand that hierarchy kills, because I understand that hierarchy separates us from each other and acts as a petri dish within

which this glitch can propagate. I'm an anarchist because I love the people around me, because I understand that I am human and because I see that my role in the human immune system is to remind other people of that fact and to point a finger at the people who have forgotten that they're human. I promised in the title of this little piece that I would tell you how we can win and I can do that in a few words. We have to remember that we are humans. Hamala Harris is an authoritarian.

The fact that she wants to be president at all should make you leery of her. But she's not a Trump or a Musk. She has not separated herself entirely from humanity. If you'll forgive the reference, she understands that she exists in the context of all that came before her. Joe Biden has been hungry for power all his life.

The glitch is in him. It has consumed most of him. But as we all learned recently, not all of him. He too understands that he is a part of humanity, indivisible from it. Now you can and should still view the man with disgust, even hatred. He ought to be in the Hague. But he also stepped down, and gave up the thing that, a week ago, I'd have said probably mattered most to him in the world.

This was not a purely selfless gesture. I'm sure he acted in large part to try and salvage his own legacy. But it is also not a thing Donald Trump could ever do. You certainly wouldn't see a man like Vladimir Putin make a similar choice, and we've all seen the kind of slaughter Bibi Netanyahu is willing to back to hold on to power. None of this redeems Biden or makes him a good person or any less complicit in genocide than he was a week ago. I think it does put us in a better position when it comes to fighting for a ceasefire

in Gaza. Everyone in US politics knows that Biden's political end started with the surge of uncommitted voters in Michigan. The loss of a second term is not a sufficient punishment for Biden's actions, but it is a punishment that has the ability to reshape the kind of risks US presidents will and won't take for Israel from now on. It has also helped me make sense of something that happened in 2020. You all remember the moment.

During the one presidential debate that year, President Trump attacked Biden over the numerous scandals of his son Hunter, a troubled drug addict who tried and largely failed to use his father's named secure wealth and standing for himself. Hunter's troubles have been tremendously embarrassing use his father's name to secure wealth and standing for himself. Hunter's troubles have been tremendously embarrassing to his father. But up in front of the country and world, Biden refused to throw his son under the bus. He embraced him and expressed the kind of unconditional love that is utterly alien to men like Trump and Musk. Biden, for all the evil that he has done and the raw selfishness that allowed him to reach

the presidency in the first place, is a man who loves his son. Most importantly, he loves Hunter as Hunter, and not purely as an extension of Joe Biden. There's an excellent series of articles out in the Atlantic right now by Tim Alberta, who might be the finest political journalist writing today. Tim had the good instincts to look behind the scenes at the team Trump picked to orchestrate his 2024 campaign. And he's delivered deep reporting about why they've made some of the baffling decisions that they've made. Chief among bafflements was the selection of J.D. Vance

as vice president. Vance barely won his seat in Congress with the help of tens of millions of teal dollars. He is a liar without principle who has repeatedly expressed his desire to tear up the Constitution and usher in a new Red Caesar to bring this nation to heel under men like him. I watched Vance's speech at the RNC live at a Heritage Foundation party surrounded by the rightest of the right. Not one of them offered a single word of praise.

Vance was that bad. JD is the sort of pick Trump's handlers were sure that they could afford to make. Vance would bring the Silicon Valley billionaire set to the table, open up their purse strings, convince them they were welcome in the new ruling class. Sure, he wouldn't bring any votes, but a week ago, running against Sleepy Joe, the sick man of US politics, Trump's team felt they had votes to spare. Well, now the worm has turned. The polls still point to an election that is deeply in doubt. But polls don't say everything.

The panic of their responses to Biden stepping down, the chaotic spree of hate, points to a single truth. They don't know what to do now. The monsters are off balance, stumbling, unable to find the ground. We can see some evidence of this in the fact that Musk just came out and canceled his promised $45 million monthly donations to the Trump campaign. This is the first chain of solidarity between our enemies to crumble, and it won't be the last.

Every time that happens, we get more room to move and maneuver. The fascists may well regain their footing in time to crush us. But something else has happened in the last few days as well. People, we humans as a vast, blurry mob, have started to remember how many of us there are, and how much potential the weight of our numbers gives us. We have started to reconnect with each other, and that has also opened up possibilities that did not exist before. Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party aren't going to bring an end to global capitalism or drive a stake into the heart of the oil and gas industry. There remains so much else to do, so many other fights ahead of us.

But if we can crush the Republicans here, it will be the fourth election cycle in a row, where the right made a war on trans people, on the concept of diversity, on any kind of open secular society, the core of their electoral efforts, and it will be the fourth time that they have done that and lost. If we break their lines and send them fleeing into the hills, we have an opportunity to shatter their power and use the momentum of that victory to start building something better. There's no clean or easy route to a better future, but our chances are a hell of a lot better the more of us that stay alive and the more scattered and frightened that we can make our enemies. Our strength has always come from solidarity, from the understanding that we need each other and that we are part of each other. The Putin's and Trump's and Musk's and Teal's of the world

are of course a part of humanity as well, but they are incapable of seeing or accepting that. And so long as that is the case, we outnumber them. So long as that is the case, we can win. Well, no one, the Olympics are underway. It's useless to talk about it as a thing that's happening in the future when it's happening in the present. It's happening now. And what's happening now is our podcast, Two Guys, Five Rings is a phenomenon.

And while real medals are being handed out in Paris, we're giving out our fake medals here. Two Guys Five Rings, Matt Bowen and the Olympics. Who are we watching in this Olympic Games? I mean, I'm watching Simone Biles. I'm watching her go higher and higher and higher with every bounce. Sha'Carri's about to run faster than you or I or anyone has ever seen. I'm ready for the girls and the boys and everybody under the Seine River. Under the Seine, over the Seine,

within the waters of the Seine, all of them. Follow the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform and watch and listen to every moment of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games now through August 11th on NBC and Peacock and for the first time ever on the iHeartRadio app. Our iHeartRadio Music Festival

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iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here. It could happen here. The podcast that is about, I don't know how everyone hates trans people and how this has become a sort of cross-partisan thing. I'm your host, Bia Wong. We are we have we have been doing. Oh, God, I don't even know what sort of number

of R&C episodes are going to come out before you hear this episode, but we are once again turning away from the sort of chaos and despair of the Republican Party to turn towards the chaos and despair of the Democratic Party. Yeah, we're going to specifically be talking about a series of what I think were kind of high profile fights in trans circles over sort of the administration very publicly starting to write off trans kids. I don't think it got that much news attention because as you as you may have noticed, it is a lot of this is by very specifically Biden administration stuff. We are recording this Sunday morning, the morning of the 21st.

There is a real chance that by the end of the day, Biden is no longer the nominee. So we'll get into that a little bit. But as of right now, he's still the guy and he is fucking us. So, yeah, with you to talk about this is Corrine Green, who we have we have had on the show before, is a trans policy expert of many organizations and much experience. And yeah, welcome back to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me, Mia. Yeah, it's kind of fun to come back on to talk more about this, because the timing of when you had me on last time was pretty much just before a month before he went public with this new stuff we're going to talk about. Yeah, so the last time we were talking about this, it was largely about stuff that was kind of like plausibly

deniable for the administration. It was a lot of sort of stuff buried in bureaucratic minutiae. Whether or not any of that stuff even exists anymore, given recent Supreme Court rulings that have effectively annihilated the administrative state, who knows? But now, having had the Supreme Court gut their ability to do this sort of non plausibly, they have full on gone on the record against trans kids. So I guess we want to I want to start there. Can you sort of explain what happened with this New York Times story that kind of kicked

this whole saga off? Yeah, so kind of the context is I'm a trans policy analyst. It's what I do. There aren't that, unfortunately unfortunately are not that many of us in the country. And all those of us, many of us are still employed in the movement organizations, so they can't talk about this stuff publicly. But so he's been putting out the regulations that the Biden administration has been putting out are not good regulations for trans people, right? But it's hard to help people understand that they're transphobic because

it's a to help people understand that they're transphobic because it's a 500 page regulation. And so, you know, it's, it's kind of wonky and a little weird. And if there is comes like the Biden administration and the orgs have been putting out calling him pro trans and all this stuff, there's a big barrier to overcome there with the wonky stuff like that. But what happened a couple of days after the debate, which I'm sure everyone saw, or if you didn't watch it live, you realized in horror that you now had to watch it to understand

what this country is going through. There was some initial reporting around how the WPATH Standards of Care version 8 came out. So WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. It was either last year or the year before they updated the standards of care seven to standards of care eight. This is a little background, sorry. And at the time there was discussion among WPATH members, doctors and kind of policy people to some degree

about whether mentioning kind of rough ages for what time, what age people tend to start certain treatments like period blockers, hormones, that kind of thing. What kind of normal age ranges those things happen in? We know from years and years of advocacy and work and activism is that if somebody writes something like those things down, even if they present it as a kind of loose guideline or this is where things typically fall, policymakers will write that stuff into law and reg and take what is supposed to give doctors and patients room to figure out what works best for them and make it a very strict regime. And so trans activists did not want ages in the W path socket for that reason.

And in the one and only instance of pro trans advocacy that I'm aware of her ever engaging in, uh, Rachel Levine, uh, in HHS kind of advocated with W path, not to include those age ranges in it. Yeah. Levine, by the way, is is like the only deputy health secretary. I think. Yeah, she's like the only trans like she's the highest ranked trans like, you know, White House official ever by like an order of magnitude. She's like she's like the only trans person like overly trans person possibly

in history to ever like get to a position where she has some authority and she's doesn't use it ever except this one time. It's a big disappointment to people. I was I was her biggest fan in the world because she passed. She wrote Pennsylvania's Narcan standing order and I based my law in Louisiana legalizing Narcan and our subsequent standing order on hers. So I thought it was really cool that transforms had done this in both places.

And I really, really was a big, and then she just crickets, nothing is all the terrible stuff happens. So that's the context in which the New York times was reporting. They, somebody had gotten like some bad guys had gotten some of the emails between Levine and W pathATH and were like trying to make it into a scandal right and they and the bad guys misrepresented kind of what the the issue and discussion was about right so we discussed what it was but the way that they would present it as oh you know WPATH was trying to limit treatments to kids being you know, W path was trying to limit treatments to kids being

you know, old enough of a certain age, which is not what they were doing. And they were trying to present Levine as trying to get rid of those so that five year olds could have surgery or whatever. And so you know, just very, very insincere. But so the media was kind of reporting just on that because they love muckraking. And partially, the other thing we should mention is it was really it was extremely hard to figure out what was going on for the issue reporting

because the New York Times, instead of employing trans journalists, they employ transphobic journalists. And the thing about transphobic journalists, they don't fucking understand policy at all, but if they're like they're absolute fucking clouds, these people have no idea what the fuck they're talking about. And so, you know, when they're trying to write a story that's about like leaked technical policy documents, they have no fucking idea what they're doing.

And the reporting is gibberish. It's like I was trying to understand it. And this is a real issue because the only source we had was this document of this New York Times writer who like couldn't like the New York Times writer who like couldn't find the back of their hand with a map, right? Trying to like write out these emails. I'm convinced cis people don't even understand that they don't know what they're talking about because I think they just inherently feel like, oh, I have a gender.

Therefore I know everything about gender. I guess it's like, you know, and like I and it's this is like mostly kind of like fine ish. But the problem is, would you have, you know, would you have CIS journalists who don't know anything about trans like people at all who in long faces don't think trans people exist trying trying to write these policy things, it's they have nothing. And yeah, so it wasn't presented super clearly. And so other people had questions, some justified, some based on that misunderstanding, some not. But anyway, there was additional kind of back and forth between the media and the White House, they were asking about it. And in that, the White House at one point told them

that they opposed surgery for transgender youth. And then obviously that is, at least publicly, that is a new position for the president who has been called, not by me, but by other people, 100% pro-trans, super great me, but by other people, you know, a hundred percent pro-trans, super great ally, his entire administration. I disagree with that, but other people have been saying that for a long time.

And so that took a lot of people by surprise and was a big kind of kerfuffle. And so that's kind of the jumping off point for where we're going here. And so that happened, that came out on a Friday in the New York Times that the White House opposed surgery for trans minors. And nobody talked to, they're like, there were no responses from the orgs.

Um, there was no additional reporting, no followup from the White House that Friday, not that Saturday, not that Sunday. Although, that Sunday, Sunday evening, the heads of three national, large national LGBTQ advocacy orgs, HRC, Family Equality Council, and National LGBTQ Task Force, went on, all three together, and National LGBTQ Task Force went on all three together, an MSNBC show. The host, I don't remember his name, but he has an MSNBC show, writes for Washington Post, and then also contributes to PBS NewsHour, right?

And so none of these three people that we pay to advocate for us, or this journalist brought up this very fresh, very pertinent, very relevant new White House position. They just talked about how important it is to vote and how much fun they had at pride parades instead of garbage. Right? And so it was very weird to me that these three people

who represent LGBT advocacy organizations would not immediately vocally condemn that kind of anti-trans stance. And it also blew my mind that this journalist must be like allergic to scoops or something like why. Yeah. Why wouldn't you have this? Like, that's your chance right there. I mean, I genuinely think the journalists didn't know because like this stuff didn't break out of

like a very small sort of like trans sphere by this point. Right. I mean, it's in the New York Times. You're giving a little bit. Yeah, but like, like, like nobody cares about like people. People don't care about us. Like you would think that these people would know. But like I genuinely don't even know if this person had any idea what was happening, because I trust journalists to write about trans people about as much as I trust myself to be able to bench press a car.

So, you know. Yeah. So that came and went Sunday evening. No, I was going insane the whole time. Right. Because for me, as a trans policy analyst, you know, I have, I've been, I've noticed and been, and been calling Biden's transphobic regs and executive wars and stuff problematic and transphobic. Since I first noticed it and picked up on it, which was, you know, two or three years ago now. And so for, for me, it was a very kind of complicated feeling of, okay, now at least other people don't have to take my word about the regs.

They there, there's something they can look at and see it for themselves. But I was also, you know, completely threw off my sleep schedule. I was bouncing off the walls, going insane, trying to, you know, organize responses. And so the first org actually, I think, I believe it was HRC, issued a statement Monday night. And it was a decent statement. I have critiques of them, whatever. And then the rest of the orgs kind of didn't issue statements until Tuesday evening. And so that Tuesday also the White House issued a statement that to clarify their position and the statement actually

made it worse. So what the statement said was that they do oppose surgery for transgender youth. So they reiterated that. And then it went on to say, however, we continue to support gender affirming care for youth such as mental health care. Period. continue to support gender affirming care for youth, such as mental health care, period. I mean, it wasn't, it was a comment that they said, but they didn't list other things that they supported, right?

It's like the only thing they put in the list that they supported was mental health care, which to a policy person, again, you're not sneaking those things past me. If you're talking about trans health care and the only thing that you say that you support is mental health care. I care, I'm very worried. I'm very concerned, right? Because if you're pro-trans and you support trans access to health care, it is not complicated or hard or controversial for you to say, yeah, you know, I support trans people in their access to health care. They should have access to therapy, hormones, purity blockers, surgery, whatever they need.

Like it's not complex there, right. But they didn't do that. And so to me, that felt even worse than kind of the initial position, because it signaled to me that there's likely, um, we're likely kind of losing them on not just surgery, but some of this other stuff. And so two hours later, that statement was updated, revised, and it took out saying they support mental health care, and was changed to say, we support gender affirming care, like a continuum of care, use the words continuum of care instead of mental health care.

Now that doesn't, that feels like tripling down to me because the problem was that it was very overt what you left out and you had the opportunity to go back and fix it. And then you continued, you just made new words that very overtly leave out the kind of things that we would need reassurance about, right? And so that's kind of where things were at, at that point. And yeah, we're gonna let's, let's leave it there for a second to turn to the people who are funding

us talking about this, which is the, I was going to say the noble product products and services, I cannot promise their nobility at all, but the products and services that support this podcast, here they are. Yeah, and we are back. And there's one other thing I want to mention before we sort of get into where this went, which is part of the fear that was going on is that at the same time as this is all happening, labor has taken power in the UK and the labor government, they're fucking... Okay, what can I say about West Streeting that won't get me impaled across their militantly transphobic piece of shit. I think it's like their health secretary now.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I just heard their minister is over there. Don't forget. Yeah. Yeah. Their ministers came out and said, we're going to ban all children from getting puberty blockers. Not just on the NHS, but also everyone. All private health care. Everyone. Yeah. And this is a this is an absolutely sort of terrifying step. It is going to get a lot of kids killed. I want to reiterate. Yeah, already already has.

There's a whole scandal over there about like about the number of the good law project has done the research into like NHS minutes and all this stuff and as thinks that there have been 16 suicides since this. Yeah. And I also want to there's like a sort of debunking thing that's going on that was from data that like that the party released I was like, Oh, there weren't actually that many suicides. And the thing you have to understand about those numbers is that those numbers don't count people on wait lists. And the wait lists are not the only place that people die but they kill a lot of people. So I want to sort of like, yeah, we got to get that sort of context in, which is we're in this position. It's not just reading, right?

There are it's armor and then there are a whole lot of very vocally transphobic labor empties. Yeah. And that, you know, that's there's a lot of fear that the Democratic Party can sort of take this even more extreme path than the sort of stuff we've been saying. And also, you know, I'm going to include the standard thing about puberty blockers, which is we give these we give puberty blockers to like, literal, like five year old cis children, they're fine. It's completely like they're completely safe. There's no there's no downside. Apparently, people blockers only have dangerous, terrifying side effects used in they can tell when they're in a trans body and it's this body.

Yeah, it's like only do the bad things. They're in trance bodies. We've created the trend specific bio weapon. You know, so like this, all of this stuff is safe and it's not only safe. It saves lives like the difference between, you know, like any trans person can tell you the difference between being on your hormones and being off your hormones is night and day. It is the difference between being alive and not being alive. Like it is the difference between having sort of like a stable

like stable interiority and feeling like you don't exist every fucking day. So we're not just talking about being on your right hormones. But in this case, we're also talking about preventing being on the wrong hormones, right, which can, we're also talking about preventing being on the wrong hormones, right, which can be even more excruciating. Yeah, it's terrible. Like, yeah. And so there's this real fear that what we're seeing here is a pivot to UK style stuff. And one of the things I do in the UK that was specifically worrying about that language about mental health care is one of the big turf tactics is pushing this thing where we go, oh, well, we're going to have this like, you know, we're going to give you mental health care.

We're going to like help you figure out what your gender is. Is it, I call it like exploratory care. This is conversion therapy. That's what they're talking about. And, you know, seeing the White House suddenly pivot to this language that is effectively identical to, again, the UK thing where they're like, we're gonna give these kids conversion therapy was terrifying. Yeah. And then so the, I think that the space between that Friday with the New York Times article

and then the Tuesday with that clarification, I think the fact that the orgs were so quiet and didn't offer any pushback and didn't organize community to demand better, to ban their retracted. Like I think that that's what gave them the room to essentially double and triple down in that statement on Tuesday. unfortunately, with a couple other anti-trans developments in the Democratic Party in a way that I find very worrying, especially when taken kind of as a constellation, right? So that same week, the Senate Armed Services Committee, so the NDAA is a large military funding bill. It's the National

Defense Authorization Act. And the the House has been passing versions with lots of transphobic riders in them. And then for the last couple of years, the Senate has been taking those out and passing a clean version. And then ultimately it's a clean version of the gets enacted. Last year, I was very, very worried that we would lose on that and that it would go through with the riders. And the implications here, so the DOD Department of defense funds healthcare for the VA and TriCare. I think there's one other smaller program kind of similar. That's a different name than I've heard, but largely VA and TriCare.

So for active service members and their families and veterans, which is, I think I last read like 10 million people or something. And so if they cut off public funding for trans health care through those programs, a whole lot of people are going to lose it. And we're going to very quickly wind up in a situation like abortion is with the Hyde Amendment where no public money can be used on our health care. And so that week, at the same time, the Senate Armed Services Committee had their version of the NDAA in committee.

Joe Manchin voted with Republicans to attach to these transphobic writers to it. And then it was everyone in the committee, except for three people. It was, I believe it was Warren, one other Democrat, and then I think possibly one Republican who voted against it. But all the other Democrats on the committee voted to pass it out of committee with those transphobic writers, which is terrifying. Yeah. And Senator Kelly has introduced a floor amendment to take those out. But whether his amendment even makes it to the floor, I don't know.

And what the vote looks like that like on that, I don't know. So I'm really worried that the NDA will pass with these writers in it. And then subsequent spending bills for other departments will as well. And then simultaneously there's the third thing over Biden's term. There have been over, he's had over 200 of his judicial nominees that he's offered up. And over his whole term, not a single time has a Democrat opposed one of his judicial nominees. But that week, Asaf actually opposed

one of his judicial nominees over the fact that she had sent a trans woman to women's prison. So specifically a transphobic reason for objecting. And so she didn't get nominated. And that was the first time that has happened over Biden's term from what I read. And so there are just lots of these signals that kind of. Back me up in my feeling that the support that everyone has been pretending that the Democratic Party has for trans people, I mean, I read their eggs,

so I know better, but it is not it is an illusion, right? And when it shatters, it's going to come apart really fast. And people are going to be really surprised by it. Because our organizations have not been kind of educating people along the way. talk more about this and we're also going to come back very specifically to the trans women in women's prisons thing because I really truly do not think since people understand how fucking bad that is. Yeah, we're going to come back to that after these ads. Yeah, so we're back. Yeah, so I wanted to specifically highlight the prisons thing in the context of, you know, okay, so there's a chance by the time this comes out that Biden is no longer the nominee. Your lips to God's ears. Yeah. The issue with this is that the strongest possibility for replacing him is Kamala Harris.

And you know, I'm going to ask you to explain Kamala Harris's record on trans women in fucking prisons because it is appalling. Because I can never escape these shit libs. I actually worked at TLC while we were suing the state of California. TLC. Yeah, transgender law center. TLC while we were suing the state of California. TLC. Yeah, transgender law center. TLC. We had to, to sue the state of California for incarcerated

trans people to be able to access healthcare that they deserved and Kamala Harris as the AG of the state of California, defended the state's position that they did not. They did have a right to healthcare. We won, she lost, but so she is, she is not someone that the state's position that they did not, they did have a right to healthcare. We won, she lost. But so she is not someone that I can ever trust with trans lives, right?

Especially because there have been other issues, I think marijuana most recently, where she has tried to kind of trumpet that she has used her discretion and not prosecuted certain things or whatever, right? And that doesn't help me at all, right? Because it shows you know you have prosecutor, you know, you have discretion in what cases you take and what you defend and all that stuff. And you used it to prevent trans people from getting

health care. Yeah. And I want to also specifically talk about the part about this judge sending a trans woman to a women's prison, which is the thing that you should do, because this is the kind of thing that has to be opposed at all costs because, you know, prison is violent enough for everyone. It is even worse for us. And the fact that Democrats are like, you know, it looks like we're seeing the sort of tide break on this, and especially specifically on this issue where the consequences are so dire, it is it is extremely bad. Yeah. I kind of had the suspicion that there was a deal struck on the NDAA that Democrats, and this is solely me speculating, right? I have no insider information about this, speculating that the Democrats kind of accepted

a deal on the NDAA that there would be some level of anti-trans writers that they would accept and into the enacted law. And that after making that deal, the White House felt they could kind of move to the right publicly on trans people because, you know, it would be in the news from the NDA passing that they could start kind of preparing people for that by kind of making it public and kind of moving the right word there. Right. So that's kind of what I suspect maybe happened. I don't know, but it is, it doesn't bode well for us, especially because, you know, so the, the white house's position has already been cited in at least one judicial opinion and then was also recently cited yesterday, the day before yesterday or not now. Yeah. Friday. Yeah. I think it was Friday in New Hampshire as justification from governor Sununu for signing their surgery ban there. And so these things have immediate consequences even before they show up in executive branch policy. And this is why I have been very convinced

ever since kind of I read the policy tea leaves and the executive orders and regs and kind of identified that we were dealing with a functionally a hostile executive branch. I've been trying, I tried as hard as I could to get movement leadership to switch from a kiss ass framework to a take names framework. Right.

Yeah. But, uh, but they just, they haven't done it. So the community just doesn't, it's going to feel like whiplash, I think for a lot of folks, um, who aren't kind of deep into this stuff and then don't follow me on Twitter, um, to see me yelling about 500 page regulations. But it makes me worried that the leadership is not advocating for trans people appropriately. And I think that this is demonstrating that they're not, they don't have leverage or they're not willing to bring leverage to bear on whoever the nominee is when it's not Biden, right? Like,

they're not setting the movement up to have strong footing to hold people accountable to trans equality kind of on the campaign trail. And that's really scary looking at labor, especially as kind of a blueprint. Yeah, we're going to be talking. Oh, God. Yeah, we're going to be talking about Sean O'Brien's king dog shit weird fascist turn later with some teamsters. Well, hopefully. Well, we'll see. We'll see. I was the episode. But yeah, I yeah, it's very bad. But also it's not we're not in a position yet where this is inevitable. Right. Right. Like it doesn't have to happen. And the way that it gets this gets stopped from happening is by us organizing and us fighting and us putting pressure on these people to fucking do this.

Right. Because, you know, and like this is this is this is always been the thing. Like these people, unfortunately, they do need us. Right. They hate it. But, you know, these like the Democratic Party needs us. Yeah, we got to see last month during Pride Month. They all show up at pride parades. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And it's like, you actually don't belong here. Why? Why are you?

Oh, yeah. It's like, you know, they like they they they have been successfully sort of like feasting off of the movement that we built for decades now. Yeah. And it is, you know, if they're going to fucking if they're going to fucking eat our corpses, it is it is it is it is absolutely time for them to fucking try to defend us. And the only way that's going to happen is if we we actually start mobilizing and we start putting pressure on these people to like not fucking back down and write us off for dead. But the way that the national organizations have been moving, right?

Like the positive press and the praise that they have given to even Biden's shittiest actions and inactions on trans people actively stymies community organizing, right? Yeah. Because if I have to explain a 500 page regulation to show people that Biden is transphobic, and they're just like, no, but look, this HRC statement says it's actually great policy. It's a big barrier to overcome for community organizing there, right? Yeah. And the other sort of issue here, right, is that the Republican Party is, I mean, I

don't know if hurling towards even the right word, but they are, they are very, very, very close to what is effectively like banning Transview from public life and their eventual goal of wiping us out. Right. Yeah. And, you know, if if if there's no actual force to oppose that, because all of these sort of national organizations are busy sort of kissing ass instead of actually fighting, we are in deep trouble. Yeah. And I think we are. I think we are in deep trouble. But like you said, it is not a done deal yet.

Right. I was actually heartened. I was very I was terrified. So Zoe, Zoe Zephyr, the trans representative, state representative from Montana, um, after the draft bad title nine regulation came out, she organized an open letter from 14 out of 16, uh, out trans and non-binary state electeds against it. They released it a couple of days after all of the orgs put out their praise word that they're praising, and they looked really dumb.

So she actually organized another open letter of out-trans and non-binary state legislators against this. It wasn't the full compliment because it was over a weekend really scrambly, but just like the Title IX one, Dana Carome and Sarah McBride did not sign it. Can you explain who that is, by the way, for the audience? Yeah. So Danica Rome is a trans state representative from Virginia. And then Sarah McBride is an out trans legislator from Biden's home state of Delaware. And the McBrides are actually family friends with the Bidens. And Joe Biden actually wrote the foreword to Sarah McBride's memoirs,

autobiography, whatever you call it. Right. But she's also a Zionist and she is a kind of centrist center, right. Democrat who, you know, as I've, I've talked to people, my understanding is that she didn't sign on to the Title IX letter because she has, you know, rising star in the Democratic Party aspirations. She's probably going to be the first trans congressperson soon. I hate it.

And so I was extremely concerned that Sarah McBride, who, you know, because of those ties and because she's probably going to be in Congress soon, is the most kind of politically powerful trans person in the country. I was extremely worried that she was going to join the Biden administration on this. Uh, so I, I Agro posted the shit posted that for several days and thankfully, uh, she, she did, um, condemn it and kind of the bullying works. Bullying your legislators. Go after them.

I was seriously concerned about that because, you know, just these, the forces, this anti-transit dehumanization campaign is so powerful and so strong at this point that a lot of people are making the calculation that if they want to advance in politics, they got to mulch us, you know, and I don't think highly, I don't think highly enough of Sarah to have been confident that she wouldn't do that. parts about this is like, you I don't know, as much as there is sort of inter community solidarity among trans people, you can't even trust your own people when they take power, right? And you know, this isn't to say like, this is one of the rare times where like, I think there are like, there's some legislators who do good stuff, like Zoe Zephyr has been doing great. But you have to keep the pressure on everyone, no matter who they are, no matter where they come from. You have to, you have to keep pressuring

them because I mean, that's my experience as an activist. Yeah. If you don't, we're going to get, we're going to get left behind and left to die. Yeah. And so like one of the, one of the, the ways that this has been so dismaying for me is that trans people don't have any national organization that advocates for them full-throatedly, principally, in a transmaximalist kind of unapologetic way. It's always all of the orgs, all the LGBTQ orgs and the Trans-Pacific orgs, which is kind of what I'm getting to, all kind of take this very centrist tack or they have over the last several years with Biden.

They were all kind of a lot happier to be radical when Trump was president, but no longer. Right? And my main issue is, even if you are, you know, a rich DC strategist who leads, who runs these movement orgs, like they are, and you believe even, you believe that the balance between kind of strident principled advocacy and lobbying blazer, tightened up moderated advocacy is way further in the moderated direction than I do.

Even if you believe that, you still understand the need for some group with a voice to articulate the trans maximalist position, to articulate the standards by which politicians are going to be measured if they're going to be considered pro trans. And what we have not seen is the trans specific organizations. So specifically National Center for Transgender Equality, NCT and Transgender Legal Education Defense Fund till death, they recently merged into Advocates for Trans Equality, which is abbreviated A4TE. Don't ask. Don't ask. But like, why let the LGB, let, let HRC do this interest bullshit.

Let them put out milk toast statements. Let them praise politicians who don't fully support us. Right. let them praise politicians who don't fully support us, right? But we need at least one organization representing trans people to lay out the full case to present kind of our actual policy needs and be the rubric by which everyone else can be measured. And also just for community education. So we know, so the community knows without, you know, people like organizers, people like me trying to overcome these huge, these huge walls to, to give people to understand what's going on, can see what's being done to us, know what we

deserve in terms of policy and then measure what is actually being done for us against that bar. Yeah. And I think that one of the other frustrating aspects of this, and this is something that you talk about a lot, is that the people who do the work in these organizations, right, you're sort of like, you know, you're sort of staffers and researchers to people on the on the sort of bottom of the pyramid to make all this stuff function. They don't get a say in how these, you know, and how how these fucking orgs put these things

out. No, most of them are radical anarchists and communists like I am, right? They, they really, really want to do what we need to be done. And it's just, you know, comes down from on high that that's not what they're doing. Um, and I, and I know that I am not the only, uh, trans national org staffer, uh, who has been silenced by the White House or the White House reached out directly to my bosses. I think I mentioned it the last time I was on. But I know that's happened to my colleagues, friends at other organizations. And I know that I have a lot of privileges that a lot of people don't. So I can kind of get fired or I could, maybe

couldn't afford it anymore, get fired from my principles and I don't, you know, I don't judge my comrades and colleagues who are still kind of doing the best they can, but I'm really, really scared with leadership and the way that they have not. Recognize kind of the situation they've gotten us into. Yeah, I think the thing I want to close on is what do you think are effective things that people can do sort of now, right? And people who aren't in the top of these power structures, although if you're for some reason, you're the head of one of these orgs and you're listening to this, what the fuck are you doing? Please do better. But yeah, what kinds of things

can people do on top of sort of just like community education and yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I think the real thing that I mean, I've encouraged people to do this on Twitter as well is if you see one of these national organizations fall short of a hundred percent and advocating for trans people, if you see them equivocate about, you know, maybe banning surgeries isn't that bad because it's not super common or maybe it's okay not to demand that Biden, you know, explicitly say that he supports, you know, these, these parts of these components of our healthcare before calling him 100% pro-trans on healthcare. That kind of stuff. If you see them fall short of that, don't trust them anymore. Don't donate to them anymore. Take that money, attention, time, and energy and turn it to mutual aid efforts, to local organizing efforts, to supporting trans people in red states campaign for Southern equality just expanded their, their practical support program to be not just a subset of red states that they will help trans youth and families in. But all red states that are facing healthcare bans

and similar anti-trans measures support that fund, right? Go look at, and if you don't know of a local trans group or a state trans group near you doing good work, you can go to trans justice funding projects kind of grantee map. They're really low barrier only grant to trans led groups. And you can see what those groups are doing. And you can hook up with them or donate to them. But I think that the biggest thing is not, I mean, we Lord knows we need money. We're all poor

as shit. Yeah. But mainly, but mostly honestly, what I think we need is we need vocal visible support. We need cis people not to remain silent or passive when they hear or see transphobia or when they hear or see someone equivocating on, well, maybe, you know, maybe kids aren't old enough to be know they're trans. Like if you're, that sounds insane to actual trans people, right? But, you know, can take cis people, right? And so if you are a cis ally, being an ally is an action, right? And we need that now more than ever as the stakes of the risks of being attached to us, supporting us grow higher, right? Like we need principle allies to stand with us. And so if you can do that in your daily life, you can be a trans advocate in your kind of routine. We desperately

need that. Yeah. And I think that's a good, I know that that that's a good sort of rallying cry. It's like all, you know, and this is, this has always substantively been one of the big issues with being trans is that we are 1 one of the big issues with being trans is that we are 1% of the population right now, right? That's probably going to rise in the future. But right now, our sort of distributed poll is like our distributed impacts on politics. You know, we have an outsized impact on politics, but we're 1% of the population. We can't fight 90% of 99% of the population, right? So we 90%, 99% of the population. Right?

Yeah. So we need, we need your help and we need, you know, we need not just sort of milk toast lip service. We need to actually fight. Yeah. We need people in your life to know, you know, that you are fully pro trans and that means that you kind of learn maybe how to talk about trans health care to educate other folks who don't know as much or you are able to develop and kind of share a personal story about how

you learned about trans people and became an ally, right? So learning how to do that work, I think is super important. So this is the spinning catapult here, Corinne. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Like I said, that timing of the last show. Yeah, very, very smart. It's yeah, we I have I have I have a weird knack for timing

this stuff correctly for mostly for worse, but you know, it's yeah, this has been a can happen here. You can find us in the places and yeah, go go support the trans people in your life because Lord knows they need it. Yeah, and you can follow me. Yeah, so I'm Kren Green, I share their pronouns and I'm at gay Narcan on Twitter. You can find me there for hot trans policy takes that are not moderated by centrist comm stuff.

Yeah, and don't find me on Twitter. Absolutely not. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Well, now when the Olympics are underway, it's useless to talk about it as a thing that's happening in the future when it's happening in the present.

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