TRASHFUTURE - Steubmageddon feat. Sasha Baker and Valeria Rocca

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

For this week’s free one, we discuss the weird shadowbanning fixation of miserable American conservatives like J.D. Vance and the fact that the entire line of argument stands on the shoulders of one particular giant: Gregg Steube. However, we also discuss the anti-trans Discord server of a particularly cruel and disturbing organisation, the Bayswater Support Group, which is the subject of a great story in the Bureau of Investigative Journalism—and the story’s authors, Sasha Baker (@sashabaker98) and Valeria Rocca, join us in the second half to discuss! Read the article here! https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2024-07-02/one-day-they-may-thank-us-for-that-abuse-inside-the-bayswater-support-group/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture KJB LIVE ALERT Kill James Bond are doing three nights at Conway Hall in Central London on 9th, 10th, and 11th August, and there’s also livestream tickets available if you can’t make it! Details are available here: https://www.killjamesbond.com/live MILO ALERT  Milo’s special ‘Voicemail’ is premiering on YouTube on July 10th - check it out here: https://youtu.be/x4oTP3M6ppo Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everybody and welcome to this, it's the free one. Free episode of TF. It is the first one that we have recorded since the dawn of the new Emceerium. How are we all feeling now that England has won the Euros? Now, before we go further though, I'm going to talk, just quickly mention, in the second half of this episode, we talked to two journalists from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Those are Valeria Rocha and Sasha Baker about their recent article about, let's say, some... Sinister group, about a sinister group. And it was a really good interview, actually.

It will be a really good interview when it happens in the future. Now, I have to say, right, the new Imkirium has been marred. There has been something is wrong in the new Imkirium. I thought Andrew Marr did something. Yeah. Andrew Marr has finally done something. With his catchphrase, you've just been Ma'd. We are the foremost propaganda magazine of the New Imkerium. We are der Stammer.

We are Starmfront. So, no, I have to say that's not all as well in the New Imkerium. Oh no. We must have failed it. I'm afraid that political violence has caused everybody to be assassinated. They've all been assassinated. Oh yeah, because apart from Trump, he's the only one left. Because a guy took a shot at Trump, missed.

But what he did instead was he hit every politician in the world. They were all stood in a line right behind Trump's right. It was very unfortunate. It was very unfortunate. It was crazy. What are the odds? I saw a tweet right after it happened where someone was like, it's going to take until Monday morning for this to be about MPs safety and how it should be illegal to like at your

MP on Twitter. And that tweet was wrong. It only took 20 minutes for that. Yes, that's right. So there was this, this consent of quote unquote concerns had been bubbling away since the election. Well, they put John, fuck me running. Penis, penis, penis.

Penis, penis, penis. Well, they put John Woodcock on it, right? Like he was going to be their point man on making it illegal to at MPs. He was doing this like review of like online threats, whatever the fuck it was. Mm-hmm. It's gonna have to become John Kevlar cock. Just the cock only is protected. You go to constituency surgery, you can talk to the cock which is poking up from behind the desk. The rest of it is behind like a bulletproof...

Constituency surgery glory hole. Yeah, but for safety. We're making all the constituency surgeries glory holes for MPs sake. Could you say that directly into the penis? I said the bins, the bins are being taken. All right, well we got Milo early. Yeah, this is all going so, so well. It's the first free one that I've been recorded with all together of the new Imperial.

You're back. I'm back. And I'm sure normalcy is going to rain and we're not going to do any like strange bits. Yeah, right. He's back from his trip to Pennsylvania. Yes. Now, so like we said, right, this is that John Woodcock has taken his Kevlar penis from out of the constituency.

Well, he doesn't have a constituency anymore. He's a member. He was made a lord by Boris Johnson. And now all the stuff he says is just uncritically accepted by the Starmor government. Oh, sure. I love that we have the House of Lords as a kind of like uncriticizable overflowed dipshit repository, right? Like you fuck up enough, they just put you in there. And for the rest of your life, you get to like a pine on stuff.

That's right. Well, oh, and so essentially what's happened life you get to like a pine on stuff. That's right. Well, and so essentially what's happened right is a number of pro-Gaza independents, included among them Jeremy Corbyn, but there are others, from around the country have either unseated MPs in their seats or beaten Labour MPs who are quote unquote supposed to get those seats. Or in one case kept Ian Duncan Smith in the seat, which I actually prefer to letting fucking labor take it. But nevertheless, because he wrote that great book. Yeah. He wrote that awesome book about the uncle. Yeah. He represents the arts.

But we're now right. You know, wall like Lord Walney, John Woodcock is taking a look at all of this. He's taking a look as well as like former Birmingham Perry Barr MP Khalid Mahmood saying there should be a police investigation into the election in his old seat, alleging intimidation and violations of electoral law. This is the same Khalid Mahmood who went after having won to his local mosque to just kind of like yell at people. I'm not even joking. He just went... Boomsd among us. He just went there and he's like, you're all fucking idiots for not having voted for me. And I've won anyway. So, and it's like...

Yeah, he was going on his tour of haters, which I don't... I'm not fully against that. The sort of like post-victory haters tour, to really rub their noses in it. Yeah. Why does this feel like a Tom Skinner video? Sometimes after a frustrating day at work, I'll just go down a mosh to yell at people. Nothing against him, it's just a great place to yell. Have a good one.

Abash. He should be an MP next time we have an election. He alleges that there were violations of electoral law, intimidation, etc. Reported to the West Midlands police, but was ignored. Mm hmm. Well, because they're woke. Too bad. Too bad.

Now, nevertheless, this is connected to, as always, right, anytime anyone uses quote, extreme language, and the example given in the sort of press about this is calling Labour MPs supporters of genocide, the comparison is then inevitably drawn to Joe Cox. Extreme language is you can search for Diane Abbott's mentions and you can see some extreme language like every minute of every day. But they don't, that's not what they care about. What they care about is there should be no ability to like shame me for any of the shameful things that I've done. It's kind of like my sort of thinking, partly the frustration is like, because this has

happened, they've sort of still had to continue talking about Gaza, right? And they still have to continue talking about it as if, no, it has this sort of material effect on our sort of coalition. Because during the election, the story was always just, there are lots of sort of disaffected Tory voters and they're going to vote Labour, and we've sort of coalition, because during the election, the story was always just, you know, there are lots of sort of disaffected Tory voters and they're going to vote Labour and we've sort of won trust of the British people and all that stuff. That was the story. And the problem is that the challenges to Labour MPs was a lot more significant than they expected. And so they actually do have to address this. But the weird reaction to it seems to be in part to do with the fact that they, because they have to address this. But the weird reaction to it seems to be in part to do with the fact that they, because they have to address this, but they don't really want

to. So rather than addressing the concerns that the voters had, which is, hey, why is there still support for the IDF's bombardment of Gaza? Why is this still happening? Why are there still horror stories that are coming out every single day that seem to get worse and worse? And why is it that no British politician seems to sort of be like, no sort of like, you know, labor or conservative politicians seems to sort of be actively sort of like advocating against it in like a meaningful way. So instead, like the narrative that they seem to be chose choosing instead is either a mix of like Muslim infiltration, which is just like a very, like a nice rehash of like the mid 2000s.

If it isn't broken, right? Like, you know, why not? Everyone, you got to play, you got to continue playing the hit. If the fifth column ain't broke, don't fix it. But the other part is just this sort of frustration about like, they just disrupted the narrative, right? Because like the post-election kind of like victory that the Labour Party wanted, they got most of it.

And I think it's like a really good insight. It's a really good insight into like what this administration is going to be, what this government is going to be like. It's like they got most of it, but because they didn't get all of it, like they're pissed about that. And they seem to be more pissed about that than anything else. The two forces in this country that have disrupted Labour's coronation are, respectively, anyone who thinks that Palestinians are human beings and Gareth Southgate. And also, right, the... And those are two separate groups.

Gareth Southgate's views are... Legally speaking, we do not understand any of Gareth Southgate's views. It's a weird coda on the end of Dear England, yeah. Yeah. No, it's, um, that, of course, it's this very managerial language of, no, we have to control all of it. We can't, we can't lose anything. Um, and, you know, going back to Woodcock, what he says is, it is very clear from MPs returning that there's a great deal more that hasn't been reported or investigated.

My sense is that there were significant- They're by you. Yeah. that hasn't been reported or investigated. My sense is that there were a significant number of MPs who experienced really grim conditions in this campaign, as well as candidates who lost, stating that there is a need to look into whether candidate intimidation was organized across constituencies at a coordinated level. This is heavily implied to be about pro-Gaza independence, if not just explicitly stated. For the record, I know that Labour kind of helped to make sure that there weren't any

trans candidates for MPs, but is it organized harassment of elected officials when JK Rowling singles out and misgenders a Labour councillor because she's trans in Bristol? Or does that not enter into civility in the discourse? Oh no, that's free speech. Gotcha, gotcha. Pointing, but then some Labour candidates, this was in the FT, some labor candidates said they were accused during the election of being complicit in genocide. And that is an example of the threat, right?

So it says you are complicit in genocide. The labor, the labor candidate says I have been killed now. Yeah. And the thing is, like, there have been actual political assassinations, like murders of MPs. But we're not going to dig into any of the things that motivated either of them, because they're too specific, right? We can't talk about Joe Cox and anything but the most abstract terms, because then we have

to talk about how the guy who murdered her got politically pretty much everything he wanted. We can't even talk about, like,os getting murdered because then we have to talk about how the guy who murdered him had specific, albeit like extremist grievances about British foreign policy. Right? We can't do that. So it just has to be, uh, well in general, people are angry.

It's like more people are angry about specific things, rightly or wrongly. And we should maybe engage with the substance of those a little bit and like think about the ramifications those have on our politics as a treat. No, no, no. Politics just needs to be less bad. The trouble is if you look at a graph, the amount of bad stuff has gone up in the last 10 years and people are mad about the bad stuff and it makes politicians scared. So what we need to do is go, Keir Starmer needs to go up to the big bad dial in Downing Street and he needs to turn it down a bit.

Not too far. Let's not go crazy. In a responsible way. In a reasonable way. We'll turn it down from 11 to maybe an 8 or a 7 and a half. And also you'll be talking about like, what are you allowed to address the specifics of? You're allowed to address the specifics of moral panics that are cultivated by the newspaper. Hey, I'm one of those.

You can address those specifically. Everything else has to be nebulous. It has to be vibes. It has to be people are mean. It has to be. I got a sense from MPs. I know, no, no, no one said anything that happened, but I got to say you could see it in their eyes that they were harassed by pro Gaza.

You know, like, like voters, you could see they were harassed by pro-Gaza, you know, like voters. They were harassed by being taken, they were fired by coordinated effort for people to vote them out of office. I mean, you can see this too, this video of, was it John Ashworth? Who was like, recording like people confronting him about Gaza and being like, I am being murdered by you right now. Oh, it was the one where he talks about how he took his like, 10 year old child out canvassing with him

and people were yelling at him about Gaza and he was like, in front of my 10 year old child. It's like, well you chose to take your 10 year old child to your own political rally or canvassing or whatever. Like you can't be mad, oh, I brought my child, like a human shield. This guy's really Mad about Gaza protests and he seems to fucking love taking a human shield around with him very interesting But also, you know you wonder if these same histrionics are gonna be applied to MPs who voted to like keep the two child

Benefit cap for example, it's like hey, you know Angela Rayner with hilarious that she's carrying water for this thing now It's like, hey, you know, Angela Rayner with hilarious that she's carrying water for this thing now. Yeah. Yeah. You're saying, oh, that we have to keep the two child benefit cap until so we can get go for growth. By the way, love a change of government. Awesome.

What people say, hey, you're directly implicated in the deaths of children. Is that going to be considered escalatory and unacceptable language? Must be. Surely. Yeah. Well, yeah, because it was sort of was right? Like when, like one of the sort of early complaints, like, and it was not sort of to the level it is now, but when conservative politicians were sort of blamed for like austerity dafts, like there were definitely times when people like were just like, oh, that's like a preposterous

thing to say. And like, you know, you should really be careful about all of that. But it's like, no, you, you, you imposed a policy and it had effects and those effects are like down to you. There's not really any other way to sort of get about it, but it is, it's just, I don't know, it's just like another very interesting sort of attempt to sort of obfuscate like the obvious, but also really, you know, I think the third thing I forgot to mention in terms of like why this is, why this feels different, but it feels like the cardinal rule of remembering things in Britain is sort of being broken. And so it's like, oh no, you remember that like we voted against a ceasefire.

And so you're actually the one who deserves to be in jail for remembering things rather than me, who actively decided not to vote for a ceasefire. Yeah. Can't we all just draw a line under this and get back to being nice to me? But also you should be in jail. Yeah, the British media is a dementia role play. It's like those homes they have for all people in the Netherlands where it's like a fake town. But fake bust off outside parliament with the 100 MPs.

They should invent a fake town and John Ashworth can be an MP of that town. That seems to be the solution. He can be the mayor. He can be the mayor of busy town. No one there even knows what Gaza is. Lisa, so Lisa Nandy then bringing this to the Trump thing, right? Because of course the Donald Trump's flubbed ear piercing has to obviously be a British political phenomenon has to be absorbed into the West. That guy was radicalized by Owen Jones. Yeah. Well, it's the they did it to me right here in front

of my nine foot tall son. Do they not have any shame? Look, and also in front of my other two weird sons, they stand very weird. It's true. You couldn't hit him with a gun. They stand too wonky. You shot me in front of my good son. My sexy daughter, she wasn't there, but, you know.

So regarding regarding the Trump shooting, right? Lisa Nandy has admitted that political leaders have done the public quote a real disservice by deploying extreme language about opponents such as the Trump shooting, basically being like all this extreme language about Trump being a fascist and stuff at contributed to the shooting. But he is a fascist. But also also that the liberals were the a lot of liberals were the ones who were saying,

oh, you have to vote for Joe Biden or else there will be a fascist in the white house. Liberals on both sides, on both sides of the Atlantic were saying David Lammy said, um, that David Lammy basically said Donald Trump is a serial liar and a cheat, deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic, and no friend to Britain, a profound threat to the international order, a woman hating neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath. That's like, that's right. That's like, we didn't start the fire. Yeah.

So past David Lammy is right. He was cooking. And it's like, yeah, you believed all of that. But then the guy gets shot and all of a sudden it's like, we deplore political violence of all kinds, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. When Klaus von Stauffenberg failed to kill Hitler, do you think FDR was deplore political violence of all kinds, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. When Klaus von Stauffenberg failed to kill Hitler, do you think FDR was deploring political violence of all kinds? Either he's a fascist or he's

a normal politician. He can't be both. Well, this is the thing. Like the history of liberalism is like by and large in the aggregate one long compromise with fascism, right? And so we get to this point where you expose this kind of position of, well, Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or whoever else might be a fascist who poses an existential threat to our way of life, but the only acceptable way of confronting that is to write a letter to your MP and don't use any mean words in that letter either. My favorite thing that I've noticed, a few people saying this, and even people in the UK have been like, well, obviously it's Joe Biden's rhetoric that is to blame for the attempt on Trump. It's Joe Biden's rhetoric?

Yeah, well, this might mean it gives Joe Biden so much credit to him to suggest that he has some kind of discernible rhetoric. Joe Biden's rhetoric such as, Oh, my opponent, anyway. when he dead named him by calling him President Tantik. Yeah. I mean, look, if they'd have been following Joe Biden's rhetoric that have tried to assassinate Kamala Harris, I don't know what Donald Trump looks like. Fortunately, Joe Biden pointed him out to me.

I've been brought over from the other side to do this job. So right. So now we have the, again, we have, we have to imagine that fucking crooks, the guy who like shot the Trumps here. What was he radicalized by David Lammy's comments about Trump in 20 years? Yeah, he's a Lammy ultra. He's a huge Lammy head. Was Owen Jones like would...

I don't know if there's like any motive that has sort of been like figured out just yet, but from what I read, like also the most, like the whole like shooting thing, there wasn't really sort of like an overt political motive. It was like the best story that I can come up with was like the guys on the kids shooting team wouldn't let him join because he was really bad at like shooting things. So he was trying to like make a point, but he did it in like, but in trying to make a point, he somehow like made it worse. So like maybe he was like, he wasn't trying to kill Trump. He was trying to like wanted

style curve the bullet, right? To really like stick it to them. It was very curb your enthusiasm. This kid is just trying to prove a point to like some guy who called him gay or whatever. Yeah, David Lammy. David Lammy bullied the Trump shooter at school. Didn't he, like, went to school in Pennsylvania? What was it that Huey Long said about Lee Harvey Oswald? He's like, he's got bomb draws. It means he's no good.

That's why David Lammy and Netanyahu were getting on so well at that press conference. They both went to school in Pennsylvania. So, to take this like, to look at something that happened that just like all of these other political assassinations was or were like instances of like political violence perpetrated by a member of the public that was so specific and particular and bizarre and random or in the case of Joe Cox, not random at all, but sort of active stochastic terrorism to then say, well, we're going to connect that to like the tone more broadly. I think that raises the question. What is non-extreme

language? What is an example of non-extreme language? How do you... Well, Keir Starmer. He's the only man and he's just... I welcome. You have to welcome. You must always welcome. And you must always go further. It's improv rules. Yes, and.

It's a very clear example of what classifies as non-violent protesting. May I take you back to an event called the wooferendum? But you have to use non-threatening dogs. You can't take an XL bully to the woofer end of, you know, just sign the EA or else I'm going to let an XL bully loose in the IEA. Sign the EA or else Kimbo slice the dog is going to take your jugular out. Kimbo slice the dog on the Trump thing, right? There's another sort of person we talked about on the show quite a bit before, not for a while, especially because he is, if you like the the Peter Thiel senator, JD Vance, who

has now been named as Trump's running mate and who this platform to be, the voice of like the Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, like the tech elite right wing... Yeah, he's VC Hitler, sure. And of course... Yeah, yeah, there we go. Thank you for summarizing it more quickly than I could. Hitler. Of course, the correct response to VC Hitler is to write a kind of like reasonably

worded letter expressing your dismay. But the other thing that's funny about JD Vance is that as much as he is VC Hitler, all of the Hitler Hitler guys like Nick Fuentes, the guys who sort of identify first as white supremacists and then as all the other fascist stuff, are all on suicide watch because he's married to an Indian American woman. And so they're like, this guy can't be our Hitler. He's not racist enough. Yeah, yeah. It's like it's you might want is like if Nick Fuentes is going to like do the full

R.Budd Dwyer on Rumble to a dozen viewers. You know, what would save Nick Fuentes his his life though, is if you just get him a copy of like a book about early Indo-European migrations that shows like Indo-Iranians came from the same people. Yeah. Like doing Indiana Jones on and on the shit to like justify JD Vance's wife to him. Well, actually, didn't the Nazis actually think that though? Yeah.

They believe that like Indians were like high in their like racial hierarchy. That is because of that. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I guess he's not a very good... Yeah, he doesn't. It's a shame they're disconnected. They don't, you know, they're fake.

They're plastic fans because they don't understand the day one Nazi ideology. You know, they're just like vague. They've like, they've read a summary of Mein Kampf and they think that's enough to call themselves a neo-Nazi. They have no understanding of the deep lore. The Third Reich, a lot like Manchester United and a lot of the support base is from out of town, you know. That's right, yeah, they're plastic man. None of them are making a one pot stew on a Sunday, you know.

None of them are doing marches and white tunics with big horns and stuff. They're not doing any of that shit. They're not interested. What I think is very funny though is that David Lammy, who we have recently discussed, as recently as May of this year, describes JD Vance as a friend who then gets up on stage to the RNC. Wait, wait. But like, so a couple of months after that,

after hearing that JD Vance is offhandedly just like, oh, the Labour policy, they're all like Islamists or whatever. Correct. What did David Lammy say to him? My God. Salam alaikum. Probably the Shahada, unhesitatingly. So JD Vance says,

the UK is the first Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon since Labour took over. And again, everyone has... They forgot about Pakistan! Like apart from anything else... I mean, to be fair, I mean, yeah, look, I mean, to be fair, lots of, lots of Hindu nationalists would rather not think about Pakistan either. So...

Yeah. Sound the forgot about Pakistan buzzer. Kind of a glib of a nashid here. To the tune of forgot about Drey, forgot about Pakistan buzzer. Kind of a glib of a Nishid hit. To the tune of forgot about Dre, forgot about Pakistan. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we need. I love the idea of Islamist Keir Starmer.

That's great. That's almost as good as VC Hitler. The Labour Party is kind of servile enough to the Americans that it is plausible that they'd try. You know, Vance calls him an Islamist one more time. Starmer comes out with like the like beard and shaved mustache combo. He does the one finger up, will tell. I welcome the decadent West.

I would encourage them to go further. By learning the lessons, as they surely will. That there is only one God. Here's Starmer being driven into Downing Street by the Prime Ministerial Toyota Hilux. Yeah, the Prime Ministerial technical. Angela Rayner on the back manning the 50 cal. So Rayner of course replies, says, responds to this by saying... With a burst of 50 cal.

Rayner, Angela Rayner responded to this by saying, Vance has said a lot of fruity things in the past. I don't have a lot of time for the like Angela Rainer Queen of the Gays thing. Right. Like I don't because not least because she's still in government with West Riesing. She hasn't said shit about him, but I do appreciate her response to this is just a fully call him the F slow. Like she's cooking. She's cooking. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. Not always, but in that case, but also, and before we sort of get into the subs, because

I want to talk a little bit about what he represents for especially the tech industry. We're going to talk about him more fully as a phenomenon as the, like the political representative of the teal dark enlightenment ideology. Shitty beard and a couple of senses. Yeah. But I want to talk a little bit just about what he said about the tech industry, the economy and so on. But before that, the last little bit of sort of upfront matter to discuss about him is

of course his Twitter follows. You can replicate JD Vance's information diet by following all the same people he follows on Twitter and you can get an understanding. Yeah, which includes an account of like, women, but like depicted as historical male children who they find attractive. Well, it'd be like, oh, this would have been this Swedish Instagram model, or more likely now this like AI generated woman, would have been an amazing towel boy for like a Varangian adventurer. This is almost verbatim, the kind of shit that...

Yeah, I'm fascinated by this. Angela Rayner looking at his Twitter followers and just like flat out calling him a gay pedophile. My first and immediate issue with this obsession with like the towel boys, the beautiful towel boys that you would have 3000 years ago or the towel boys that you could fuck or whatever is like, no one had a towel boy. They didn't have towels. What scenario are they imagining a towel boy in? Like what, are you at a tennis match in ancient Sumeria? Like where is this happening? Well, it's all Viking stuff. It's because. It's because he's like he's senator VARG

But but no, so I want to talk about what he actually is going to be Some of the policies that he has represented that are relate to things we've talked about right, you know And what that means as well for like conservative parties that get beaten, that sort of get beaten and then lose their charismatic leader and have to figure out a way back after everyone's abandoned them. Don't worry, guys, I'm still here. LAUGHS Because I think it's worth... Can't assassinate him. The elevation you'd need would be crazy

just to get the down angle. LAUGHS It's worth comparing, right? Because what happened... You have to remember what happened in 2020. It was like, oh yeah, the Republicans lost Trump. They're a busted flush, right? They're going to be pretty much shut out of power. And so, because all of the people, like the fucking Pence's and that political tendency of like the neoliberal managers from that consensus. Yeah. The Reince Priebus's, they all got Lincoln projected out of there.

The Lincoln project existing as a kind of Fulton recovery system for Republican wonks. And the guy who takes their place is like a 20 year old who thinks exclusively about like gay pedophilia. Yeah. Could you please say that directly into the Reince Priebus? And, right, and you can see the same thing at the, at its larval stages happening over here where our conservative party gets shut out, basically shut out of power after fucking up super badly and losing its charismatic leader.

Like that'll never come back. There's not going to be what four or five years of mismanagement under a government everyone hates that will inevitably sweep the next best thing back to power. And what's going to happen is it's going to either it's going to get replaced by reform or it's going to just fill up with the only people who will stay there. The people who didn't just defect to labor. Insane 20 year old gropers who like have opinions about like obscure Spanish fascists or whatever. Yeah.

Brit gropers. It's going to be horrible. I mean, it's the sort of like political extremophiles and also other files Yeah, so it's I don't mean to call them all nonsense so often but it keeps happening like the fucking Tao boy shit is genuinely like insane and the fact that this guy is gonna be like Like probably vice president of the United States and no one has asked him a single question about like hey Why are you in a discord group with a bunch of teenagers who exclusively think about like Julius Eveler? Why are you like why why do all of your stuff is like smoke pipes or whatever the fuck?

Why is why are you weird? Why is everything about you so weird? Yeah replace those with crack pipes I mean, they're a lot cooler What about JD Vance on meth? Mmm. What, like some kind of Panzerschokolade? Yeah, yeah. That's right. Now we're back to VC Hitler.

I think VC Third Reich is like an underexplored, like, yeah, welcome to the Führerbunker. We have a breakout area, some beanbags, ping pong table. Welcome to the Führerbunker. There's the climbing wall. We had it put in the first. Steiner will break out from the cold jam to reinforce us. Yeah, if you're going to.

I can't believe Rudolph has left for his shares vested. Yeah. So but what what are some of the things that like that Vance represents? Right. Well, he's he's big in with Balaji, right. And the whole like gray San Francisco shit, right? And this is one of the things I want to discuss on an upcoming episode where we talk about this conservative desire in America for an American Caesar who will essentially end the late republic.

Mm-hmm. Right? And because that is what guys like Bellagio and Teal and Mark Andreessen, all these people, that's what they want. Because what they their desire as like CEOs, as basically like the new partner of petro capital of like a sort of physical provincial capital that like a lot of the conservative movement was like embedded in that also a lot of like the early intelligence community was embedded in and so on. These guys have signed a Silicon Valley as and as we know, as we talked about before

in this show, as implicated in the military industrial complex as any like, you know, offshore oil drilling platform, right? They are eagerly lining up as the sort of corporate partners on you might even say an equal level is what they're looking for as like the fucking Koch brothers who represent physical provincial embodied capital. Me seeing any two politicians whatsoever. Well, well, well, if it isn't the Koch. But right. And so this is what we always talked about this like the whole breakdown of our politics after the financial crisis was the was that particular brand of neoliberalism that was embodied by like JPMorgan Pride float like office office everywhere China and the WTO.

Right. That that that set of concerns of like we must trade everything with everyone and have completely free trade all the time. We must trade everything with everyone and have completely free trade all the time. There's no such thing as a strategic industry, privatize everything, etc, etc. That has actually lost. That is that it has been taken over and everybody is doing secure enomics now. The EU is doing it. The US is doing it like this election economically is an argument largely about how to do it. Are you going to do it woke with solar panels? Are you going to do it awesome by like by like giving a bunch of money to like VCs and oil and oil companies? Basically, this and that's and you know, to talk a little bit more about

like about this like split in capital, right? It's it's a lot of the finance guys as well. Like it's not universal. Like Bill Ackman, Ken Griffin, they've understood that they have to just turn themselves into Heritage Foundation, physical capital culture warriors, just like the tech guys did the moment they saw homeless person in San Francisco, or as soon as they googled China, or as soon as they saw that there was a vacuum of non physical capital rich elites at the top of the GOP and just came in to fill the gap. And I mean, this this moment, the appointment of JD Vance as Trump's running mate, I mean, as far as we know, because we actually look at the world, this moment came long ago, but to anybody who doesn't pay close attention,

this should be the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the technology industry is somehow one of squishy liberals. Mm. Right? Because the gray movement, the gray movement wants an enlightened despot. They want an emperor. They want because they want to, as I mentioned earlier, the problem that Pelagi or Peter Teal or Marc Andreessen or JD Vance actually only sat on the board of one company.

It was called App Harvest and we talked about it. It went out of business, which is very fun. Well, you know, if we talk about a company, it does tend to go out of business. Yeah. What they want is they want to expand the number of people they have power over and expand the amount of power that they have over them. And things like the administrative state get in the way. I'm waiting for the thousand year Reich of Microsoft Clippy.

He's the only man we can trust. Kind of what they want. And again, the only thing that you can do about it is write a nice letter. It looks like you're trying to do fascism. Would you like some help with it? They changed my voice to Australian. They said people liked it more. This November's Bluetooth speaker everybody.

Oh, you're trying to take over the country? Why does my Bluetooth speaker have such a sexy voice? Maybe Jay, this is woke. This is woke technology companies are making the Bluetooth a sexy voice. Maybe Jay, this is woke. This is woke. Technology companies are making the Bluetooth speakers sexy Australian. Yeah. The new, the new Caesar has arrived and she says, power on Bluetooth mode. So like, for example, we'll do tech in a sec, but like with the economy, like Vance's answer

to the like inflation reduction act, the Vance's answer is like unilateral dollar devaluation, which is like a much more combative approach because it's like, well, we are, we are going to essentially manipulate, you're all manipulating your currencies. We're going to manipulate ours down as well unilaterally. So that our exports become more competitive. And again, this is, you want to talk about bungs to physical capital at the expense of like, I don't know, finance of kind of like de-physicalized capital.

Yeah. Yeah. There you go. And again, like I mentioned, right, there are lots of finance guys lining up for this. I mean, I think they want to get, they make Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, the Treasury secretary. These people will line up behind it because they will still make money. Right.

But, you know, this is like, is the we've seen now right wing secure. We've seen liberal secure economics. This is right wing secure economics. But also the other section I have here as well is just titled total Stubi victory. Yeah, he should have been Trump's running mate. That would be awesome. He's so big. Look at this guy's huge. Put him in charge of the FCC. Yeah. Greg Stubi is so much bigger and stronger than J.D. Vance. Look at him. He could snap Buttigieg in half. Little Pete.

I told him go over there. Lift him up. Lift him up by the waist. So, right, is that Vance signed a letter with two Republican colleagues asking Google CEO Sundar Pichai why the company's Gemini AI model only generated images of quote diverse people when they asked to produce images of the American founding fathers of the post. We talked about right? Like this is what the founding fathers would look like if they were black or Chinese. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was, it was based on Hamilton. Yeah. So Vance took a step further in an interview with Fox Business calling Google quote, one of the most dangerous companies in the world in demanding that the company be broken up.

And again, it's like, yeah, there's an aggressive one of the few good things about the Biden administration from a tech industry examiner point of view is Lena Conn actually as it was pursuing breakups and preventing mergers. And, you know, Vance wants to do the same thing, but on the basis that it's depicting the founding fathers as they were in Hamilton, rather than, you know, as they were with its AI. Yeah, he wants to do anti-woke, anti-trust. Yeah, very good. There's going to be a real challenge because like, they seem to be sort of animated by the idea that you shouldn't be able to sort of like, generate a prompt along the lines

of like, what if Abraham Lincoln was Jamaican? But, like their followers and like, you know, their sort of ardent supporters love doing... They love doing that shit. They love race swapping. And so how are they going to like... Abraham's Lincoln. How are they going to like reconcile the two things? I don't understand. I don't think he's thought about it that far. So what he has thought, what he says.

Google actively solicits and forces left-wing biots down the throats of the American nation, saying... This is kind of horny. Yeah. But also it's again like, what you want, is really what you want is you have noticed as JD Vance, as someone who represents a That kind of Silicon Valley dark enlightenment right as tealism you whatever you want to call it. You've noticed that

We that that's at the top of the pile when really it should be truth social and rumble and all these things that are actively Conservative, I mean, it's I can't remember who said this But it's that any conservative this was advice to conservatives. It was in Liz Truss's book, she was quoting someone else, as anything that is not actively conservative must be considered liberal, right? So of course Google is, again, it works with the fucking military, like it's not conservative enough because it's not hitting all my culture war points. Yeah, what if Google, instead of wasting a bunch of time on like stupid AI bullshit, wasted a bunch of time on stupid racist bullshit?

Yeah. Well, this is the thing because less people are Googling the M word than ever before. A lot of those people have moved on to Googling Frank Sinatra and that just can't be allowed to happen. And because he said the problem is the power of big tech means that if Google whether a man can become pregnant, it will respond. Yes, it was one with a correct answer backed up by the sources. They are trying to change that by by using more AI to give you a sort of less certain

answer. Yeah. Well, that's because it's seen that movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. That's what the AI is basing its response on. Can a man get pregnant? Yes, but you should only if he eats a pizza with glue on it. Now we can joke about about that and say it's absurd. But what happens when our 12 year old children are going and doing that Google

search? Think about the effect this has in our presidential election when unbiased non-committed voters voters are searching things about Donald Trump and also Joe Biden right before they cast their ballots. Can Donald Trump get pregnant? I'm Googling this every day of the campaign. It will decide my vote. Also, that's such a funny concern because like if a 12 year old is Googling like can a boy get pregnant, it's because they wanked off one of their male friends on a dare and

now they're worried that they're pregnant. It will not be for some like nefarious reason. It will be because of the dumbest shit you can think of. We cannot allow a company that is in bed with some of the worst people in the world to control the flow of information. Where's Google based again? Can anyone remind me? Don't worry about it. No, it's based in the People's Republic of California.

It's based in a blue state. Yeah. It's in bed with Gavin. Well, yeah, they sleep in a big bed with all the worst people in the world. It's like them, Kim Jong-un. They're all pregnant. Van said, I think you'll hear growing calls from across the political spectrum recognizing that Google is too big and too powerful and using their market power.

Again, crucially, not to make outsized profits, not to, again, from the point of view of an anti-monopolist, not to crush competition, not to stop innovation even from the point of like a sort of shuntarian creative destructive capitalist, but rather to control American politics because it's too woke. So that's right. It is a total Stubi victory. The cons the the like just sideshow laugh out loud concerns of Greg Stubbe in over his head at a hearing of tech leaders where the eye rolling was audible from them. And he was like, why is my campaign literature going into junk? Why are you censoring me? Is it cause you're woke? JD Vance is like,

we will take presidential act day one. There will be an executive order against shadow banning. Yeah. Great amazing. Yeah, I think yeah I'm in great great news for some of our colleagues. Mm-hmm I just I just need to see him debate Kamala right uppers versus downers the final answer Yeah, it's it's so weird to see these concerns that we've talked about we can trace their movement from fringe to mainstream and I mean, all that's standing between sort of all that's standing between, I don't know, I guess like J.D. Vance and being one heartbeat from the presidency is, I don't know,

the weather or not, Joe Biden in the world. Yeah. Whether or not he sticks around and we've we've talked so much about the sort of dennationalized politics of technology and the technology industry that Vance represents and you know the fact that he has openly said yeah we we and I think and everyone who finances me thinks that we just need to have a king. It'll be the only um what the only absolute tech monarchy in the world with nuclear weapons. I'll be honest. I don't think we should do that personally.

If they do that, I'm kind of all in on China at that point, you know? I actually love social credit scores or whatever. Cool. Way better than these stupid normal non-social credit scores that we have. That's right, yeah. What if the Chinese had a really old man as their president? Well, imagine how good they'd be then. Anyway.

Xi Jinping's also pretty old. He just does a better job of hiding it, you know? Yeah. The running mate could be that monkey with one arm. But from the news video? Yeah, like the rural Chinese monkey. You know the one. The one that lives from the video from the news video. Yeah. They're like the rural Chinese monkey. You know the one one that lives with like the nun or whatever.

Yeah. Anyway anyway I think it's probably time to take it. Unity. It's time for us to go into our second half. We talked to Sasha and Valeria and Nova and I will see you there in just a few moments. Bye everybody. Hello and welcome to the second half.

And yes, that sound you heard was the jarring change in tone most probably. Yeah. We're going to do a segment about how everything's really good actually. Perfect. That my favorite type of segment. No, we really cheer us all up. We are here talking to you after that first segment with Valeria Roca and Sasha Baker, who together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, one of the actual genuine journalistic

outlets in the UK, you'll have heard from Gareth Davies and Emiliano Molino on previous episodes we've done with people from this outlet. They have done what you might call a big investigative research project on an organization called the Bayes Water Group. And before I throw to them, I'm going to just tell you now, this is going to be a pretty legaled episode. So we're going to be reading some direct quotes from the article here, and we are not going to be alleging anything really more than is known. Yeah. I love to not make any allegations and I love to leave you, the listener, to draw your own conclusions and make implications from them.

So Valyria, Sasha, welcome both to the podcast. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. So I'll just sort of, just for a bit of table setting, right? If you don't know what the Bayes Water Group is, it sounds non-arminous. Yeah, it's it's it sounds like a front for like Spectre, but I will read your direct quote. This is while Bayes Water present themselves as a support group for parents,

the findings here show that they operate as a conversion therapy activist organization with direct links to political campaigning against the rights of trans children and young people. Can you please expand on this? Yeah. So yeah, the base water support group is this parents organization was created by parents, for parents of trans and non-binary people, and it amounts around 650 members. And what we found with our investigation is that basically the group has influenced policies that have rolled back trans rights in the UK, thanks to their connections to conservative MPs,

such as former conservative MP Miriam Cates. And also that in their private discourse server, the parents discuss attempts at stopping their children from being trans, which comes in the- It's weird. So usually the opposite direction to Discord servers go. Exactly. And this attempts come in the form of destroying possessions and possessions related to the child's gender identity, preventing them from accessing the internet, isolating them from support and preventing them from accessing healthcare.

It's really horrible stuff because the image that I had in my head when Riley first described this to me before I read your article is that I had in my head a kind of like evil mermaids, right? Like we live in a society that doesn't care very much about young people, cis or trans. And so like if you want to lobby on that, it's much more effective sometimes to be like, well, there's a parent, right? And so like, mermaids, you know, for parents of trans kids, sort of like advocates for them. What I had in my head was the kind of like mirror version of this where it's like, no, I want to make my child's life worse. And

that's part of it, but it's not all of it, right? Yeah, it's not just about their kids. They are very invested in broader societal changes. So some of it is definitely relating to things that they have experienced difficulty when they've tried to, for example, get the school to misgender their child every day. And the school has said, we don't want to do that. And they've raised a lot of complaints about it.

Or when a lot of them have been reported to social services. So, you know, they've like lobbied the CPS to kind of ensure that that is less likely to happen or if it does happen that they're less likely to be prosecuted for child abuse. But they are very much invested in preventing youth transition across the board, not just for their own children. You can sort of see that, right? In some of the messages that are shared on the server, there is... Insane that this is happening on Discord, by the way. As a sort of demographic thing, I don't think about Discord as being a particularly

like, your mum on a Discord server is deep in the arc of radicalization there, you know? We didn't think about grandma's getting on 4chan either, until it happened. Yeah, well exactly. But I think the other thing you can see here is what the parents talk about doing in the messages that are quoted in your article seems to be very connected to this social contagion model of gender that is so prevalent in a lot of what you might say are. My kid came home from school with gender.

Well, essentially, yeah. If you've had gender as a child, then you're actually, you don't need to worry about getting it later in life. Actually what happens is when you're sort of four to six, you go to a gender party and then you all get gender. And yeah, you got to put a lot of calamine lotion on, but you come out and then you're Kim Petras. But, but right is that essentially where they that is by isolating them that they will turn

their child back to normal. That seems to be like the theory of change here, right? Well, they got the phone and now they have gender. They went to school and now they have gender. They had friends and now they have gender. And it's like, well, there must be... It seems that there's this sense of like, my kid quote unquote, must still be in there somewhere. And so I'm just going to have to like cut them off from whatever is damaging them. That seems to me to be the sort of psychology of the parents in the Bayes Water Groups discord from reading the messages that you have shared. Yeah, I would say that is accurate.

And I mean, obviously, it's sort of interesting that, like, they think that, you know, they they are able to capture a more authentic sense of who their child might be by isolating them from almost all other humans, which is clearly not how most people live. Most people have friends and phones and somehow managed to not get gender. So I think, yeah, that is accurate and speaks to how much the social contagion theory kind of plays into this. And Adam Jowett, one of the people we interviewed for the piece actually, sort of talked about how having even one supportive adult can be extremely important for LGBT youth. So I think there is quite a concerted effort on the part of a lot of these parents to make sure that there isn't an authority figure who is supportive of their children present in their lives.

Yeah, because being trans or having any kind of LGBT identity comes from outside, right? It's something that is done to you by the nefarious like George Soros or whatever, it's let kids be kids basically means protect children from the outside influence of gender. That's what I think that's what they're often saying. We go to Rosie Duffield says let kids be kids and J.K. Rowling says let kids be kids. But they're actually meaning is saying is cut them off from these sort of quote unquote malign influences. And like I was just going back to here is, you could see that so running through the psychology

of many of the messages. I mean, many of the messages as you say, as you sort of report as well, are people talking about destroying possessions, destroying phones, destroying articles of clothing, destroying medications in some senses, right? Yeah. And actually under the Crown Prosecution Service has guidelines regarding domestic abuse and in particular they have a section about the unique ways in which trans and non-binary people can be affected by domestic abuse.

One of the points in the guidelines is that destroying somebody's possessions that the person associates with, their gender identity, could be classed as domestic abuse. And in terms of the medications, actually there was an update in the guidelines. So before on the CPS guidelines, there was this point of destroying medication, which in May, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, it was updated to destroy UK regulated medication. Yeah. So it was originally when they put the guidelines out for consultation, destroying hormonal trans-related medications of any kind really was considered a potential example of abuse. These are a list of examples. It's not an exhaustive list, but obviously it's guidance

that is likely to be influential in how the CPS would prosecute these kinds of things. And they, at the advice of Bayswater, who explicitly asked for this, changed medication relating to a trans identity to UK regulated medication relating to a trans identity. Obviously, a lot of trans people in the UK self-medicate because it's very hard to access trans healthcare in the UK. And that is a way of legitimizing abuse against trans people who are sourcing their medication from overseas providers, which is quite a lot of trans people. So this is I think this sort of links in as well to saying, okay, how does this organization right? What is not just what is it, but what does it do? What does it do for its members? What does it do in terms of advocacy? And

you've indicated one way in which they link into the British state, which is one way to be honest, any organization could link into the British state, which is providing feedback to consultations. They just happen to be providing feedback to consultations that aligns with a popular political project among weirdo elites, essentially. So they are going to get listened to. So we also talk about what else can we know about what people use Bayes water for? It's as you say, sharing tips and tricks for parents. Yeah, it's interesting that sort of relatedly and you might say like consequentially from the how do I make my child's life worse channel in the Discord, there is also my child has

like gone non-contact and cut me off from their life channel in the Discord, right? So to speak. Yeah, the children of these people, yeah, they can be of course children, but there's also young adults that are affected by their parents' behavior. And once they manage to get out of the house or go to university, very often they go no contact. And then there's many parents in this group that discuss how their children have stopped answering their messages and they try to... You won't answer my Discord messages about your transition.

I see you gaming. I see you playing Hearts of Iron 4. One of the worst things I can imagine after having a bunch of your hormones destroyed is you're trying to play like Bellatra or whatever and your insane turf parents keep messaging you on Discord. Yeah. I'm trying to, I'm trying to create communist Mongolia and hearts of iron for our fondest dream.

We're finally, we're finally taking it to the Dutch as, as Australia and hearts of iron for, and you refuse. I'm sorry. So this is, but there is, there does seem to be a lot of, as you say, advice, people alienating their children and surprised that their children then alienate them right back as soon as they have the power to, right? Yes. Yes. There seems to be a confusion as to why or sort of accusing external influences for having pushed their kids away from them, rather than recognizing that it was maybe their behavior that pushed the kids away. So let's talk as well about the other way that they might link in with the British state, which is they seem to use, again, this is going to be very carefully worded.

Users seem to be able to talk to Miriam Cates and Miriam Cates, when she wanted parent testimony. There's a special Miriam Cates role on Discord server. Legally, we can't say that might belong to her. It's above admin. So I'll just read what you wrote. They say, posts on Bayswater's forum on discord suggest Kate's had developed a relationship with the parents group while she receives members stories to use as case studies to argue a point. Members hear their concerns voiced in parliament on the 21st of May, 2022, a member posted about a school

where a child had allegedly been bullied for expressing gender critical beliefs. I spoke with Miriam Kate's another user wrote about the coolest child in history. She's keen to get parents testimony of the goings on within the school for Nadine Zahawi to instigate an investigation. In April this year, Cates named the group of during a parliamentary debate about the cast review report condition commissioned by NHS England into healthcare for trans children in England. We've talked about in this podcast before saying, I pay tribute to the brave parents, including those in the Bayes water support group who have been raising concerns for years with the ethics and safety of putting vulnerable children on irreversible and unevidence medical pathways. She said, obviously we know that's

bullshit, but this is also as important to say here, which I'm sure you'll probably repeat. They have no official links to any political party. They have spoken with an MP and an MP has spoken to them. Is it fair to call it an alarming level of access to a now ex-MP? I would say so because there is certainly evidence of several parents, not just leaders of the group, having direct communication with Cates. The most carefully worded sentence I've ever said. It would be logical to conclude that this is like a kind of a personal interest of hers or was when she was an MP, right?

Yeah. And I think obviously it's important to, you know, highlight that Miriam Cates has also been linked to a church that has now been found to have practiced conversion therapy on gay people, which she denies any knowledge of, but obviously, you know the connection between her relationship with this church and Her relationship with Bayes water is a thing People should think about and I can't say anything about And I mean we also we the thing about Miriam Cates that Miriam Cates now is officially just some lady, essentially.

True. Yeah. But- Yeah, we kind of like reset with this election. And so now instead we have, you know, things can only get better, sunlit uplands, Labour government and of course, you know, all of this sort of like structural prejudice against trans people and trans rights is like out the window because now thankfully we have, you know, West Streeting as Health Minister.

So it's interesting. We have a conversion therapy. We have something called a conversion therapy ban in the King's speech. Let's see what actually it is, right? But we also have West Streeting in the, as Health Minister minister who is going who is very eagerly saying You know any transphobic shit you ask him to say and again not least banning puberty block indeed Not just say but also do And so again, we can we we cannot say that this group is forging links at the Labour Party We don't we literally we don't know that but it it would be logical to suspect that a group in their position might, right? Or might try to.

Sure. And, you know, and also that it's one of the things as well, right, is that when you make gains, like changing the CPS definition of or changing a guideline around like how you're defining medications, right? That's that takes political capital to change back and is, I would say would be unlikely to be changed back by the incoming Labour administration. Yeah, I think a thing I can actually say that was not included in the article, because it is public domain, is that Miriam Cates, on a podcast a few weeks before the election, I think, when all the conservatives were talking like they knew they were going to lose, because they did

know they were going to lose, said that she had hope for how the trans issue would be handled under a Labour government, which I think speaks volumes as to where the Labour Party has gone on this issue. It's interesting to note that it's a very dubious source for this, right? But we read as a kind of penance, Liz Truss's memoir. And we also read Nadine Doris's memoir. And one thing that emerged from both of those is that there is, not just organizations like this, but individuals, individual lobbyists, individual political operators, both within the conservative party, the Labour party, and moving between, for whom this is a real personal interest. And it's

something that's very uncomfortable to think about, to realize that, oh, this is just a lobby, it's a constituency in British politics invested in making trans people, and particularly trans children's lives, much more miserable. Yeah. And often that doesn't even... I'm'm not saying there isn't money in it because obviously there's a lot of like funding from hard right American groups for like anti LGBT stuff. Generally, I'm not talking about Bayswater or Cates here. I'm speaking broadly. But in a lot of the kind of cases of individual UK politicians who are very invested in this,

you can't necessarily find that much money backing it, which suggests that it's maybe... It's just for the love of the game. They just like it. Yeah. Remember when transphobia used to be a kind of like purist, but I just, it's so grim that this is happening on any number of levels, but like, especially that once you get down to it, the sort of animating principle is just kind of

just nakedly prejudiced. It's just like, ugh. And it's like, that's it. That's your reason for reconfiguring everything from like, CPS charging guidelines to the National Health Service. It's just like, disgust. You know? Well, I think also one of the reasons I was thinking about this right is that one

of the reasons why it's politically so useful is it allows you to it to be seen to be doing something but without really having to expend any resources that matter. You know, like you're you are you have a constituency can largely created by like a moral panning driven in newspapers that you're then able to satisfy the demands of relatively cheaply. Yeah, I mean, banning puberty blockers doesn't cost anything except lives, you know, so. Yeah, it's it's you don't have to do that difficult treasury mathematics to deliver to quote unquote deliver for people. mathematics to deliver to quote unquote deliver for people it's just that the thing you're delivering is government bank balance sitting at zero pounds and you're just like what can we do? Transphobia? I mean effectively it's I mean this this base water group right there sort of like primed to kind of

offer solutions in that regard right you can you can take a meeting with them and it looks quite serious because it's a parents group. We all care about children and parents. And presumably they have the things that they want already laid out, which are going to be things like, I should be able to get rid of all of my kids hormones or whatever. Yeah, they have very specific proposals about the exactly what they would want school policy to look like, exactly what they want healthcare policy to look like as well. So it does kind of do the work of policy formulation for you in a way, because they're exactly

like, this is mechanistically what is going to allow us to achieve our goals best. And so if you're a politician who would be inclined to be like, I want to help you guys do whatever you want. Um, they do definitely make it easy for you and none of that proposals really cost money, which is probably also a thing. They seem to be in the process of workshopping the ideas that are lying around. Right. They've done the thinking about the thing. Right. They've done the thinking about what what do we want. And they are they're able to represent that to people to politicians who ask them.

And so it is it's like I'm not saying it is this. But one of the effects of it is we have a kind of ideas factory for any politician who wants to say, I am responding to the concerns of the parents of trans identified children. That's the function, right? When we talk about what is this thing on the one sense, the parent support group, but also what is it what is its function what part part lobbying group part think tank in that way yeah not that it is those things but it seems to have the effect of them when asked by politicians trans identified as I think actually now considered to affirming they've they've made it um what's it gender questioning oh my god I personally I think I'm gender answered, but no November.

We have to keep the debate going. Uh huh. Yeah. Endlessly. Oh no, it can never end. Um, but, but I think then what we can say, we know sort of what they, how the people involved are talking because we've seen those Discord messages, we know how they have interacted with the British state, because we have the example of the CPS, the example of Miriam Cates. We can logically assume that an organization with similar goals would probably try to keep that going, but nothing is known of that. The CPS isn't going to stop existing tomorrow, neither is transphobic. Right. So like it seems likely that like any number of groups do want to make things more miserable for trans people would lobby the CBS or whoever

else you know. And so it might be difficult to say with confidence what they what what their influence if any will continue to be. But what, so I'll ask you two, what can we say about what this says, maybe more broadly, not about them specifically, about the kind of, what you might call, the movement of anti-trans people? Yeah, the ecosystem, if you will.

I would say that all of this is much bigger than them because they are just echoing these sentiments that are going on in society at large, this moral panic about trans people and about what is gonna happen to the children. So there's anxieties about child abuse and what is gonna be of the children and how that can be stopped. So I think so there are these ideas that circulate in the base water support group, but they are much bigger than them.

They come from this general, can I call it a moral panic in society? Yeah, you can actually call it a moral panic. in society. Yeah, you can actually call it a moral panic. I think it also connects to broader parents' rights discourses that are a very prevalent feature of our politics at the moment. I think Keir Starmer maybe got in hot water for saying this a little while ago about parents know what's best for their children. And their sort of advocacy around relationships and sex education really does have like broad implications beyond the trans community because obviously all

children need relationships and sex education. And not only are they lobbying for content about trans lives to be excluded from that, but also successfully for parents to be able to remove their children from sex education and for the question of age appropriateness to be at the forefront of conversations that people are having about that. So the impact of that is obviously that parents' rights over their children are given primacy over children's rights to have the information to prevent themselves from enduring sexual abuse, for example. And I think it also connects to the panic about teenagers and their phones, which is a kind of major current in our politics at the moment and seems to be only getting worse.

Well, good news. We're simply going to make the phones illegal and hope for the best. No kids are ever going to express anything that troubles us ever again. That's right. We're going to use the law to make it leave it to beaver. Basically. Anyway, look, I think that's probably all we have time for for this segment. But Sasha, Valeria, do you want to leave the listeners with anything before we sign off? What can we do about these horrible people? I mean, if you're a GP, you can prescribe children cross-sex hormones if they want them and you think that they are medically competent.

And you should do that. That is legal, even if they'll tell you it isn't. It is. That is legal. I understand you could get it hot water, but it's legal and you should do that. That is legal, even if they'll tell you it isn't. It is, that is legal. I understand you could get it hot water, but it's legal and you should do it. If you're not a GP... Jason Vale Become a GP. Angella I don't know, write to your politicians, say how bad this is. Send them an article, maybe. I feel like my goal in publishing this, at least in part, was like, what do British people care about? Child abuse. This has to be the way to get them to listen. Turned

out no, but maybe one day. I would say if you're a parent of a trans or non-binary child, I guess it is understandably confusing and possibly scary if your child comes to you and says, I might be trans, I might be non-binary. There are so many support groups that are affirming and are going to welcome you and help you to try and navigate this time and it is possible to embrace your child's gender identity and raise a happy child and heal your relationship with your child. There is a way to have a good relationship with your trans and binary child and yeah,

there are many resources out there. You just have to get out of this like particular sort of very radicalizing milieu like this. It is still on discord but you're playing hearts of iron with them. Alright, alright. So Sasha Valeria, thank you very much. We're going to link to the articles in the description of this episode and to you the listener thank you very much. We're going to link to the articles in the description of this episode. And to you, the listener, thank you very much for listening. This was a free episode of TF, but there are bonus ones so you can check out the bonus ones on Patreon for five bucks a month. So thank you to the listeners. Thank you to my co-hosts and thank you again to

Valeria and Sasha. Bye everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye.