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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Yay!

It could happen here. It's the podcast where things happen and you do something about it. I'm your host, Mia Wong. And we have done, you know, OK, over the course of this, we have done so many Union episodes that I lost count a year ago, two years ago. I don't even I lost count at the dawn of time of how many of these we've done. But I think some of you probably know this.

but a lot of you don't, is that many unions have their own unions for the people who do staff work and who do sort of a number of other things. And sometimes unions bust their own unions. And this unbelievably sucks. And to talk about an instance of this happening that is happening right now, I am talking with Alex Chan, who is an organizer for the UAW, who is...

I don't know what the technical term is. I'm going to describe it non-legally, bindingly as being purged for doing organizing. But yeah, Alex, welcome to the show. Hi, it's nice to be here. I think being purged is a great way to describe it.

Yeah, the tentative title for this is the UAW staff purge. So it's not great. So why don't we start off? I've given a very, very brief sort of description of what a staff union is. But can you talk a bit more broadly about what a staff union is, what it does and why you all are sort of trying to organize one? Of course.

Of course. So in terms of staff unions, yeah, it's definitely an interesting phenomenon for people who are less familiar with the labor movement. But when unions have a lot of staff, sometimes those staff also need a union to make sure that they are treated fairly in the workplace. Coincidentally, this year, there have been a lot of incidents that have shown why staff unions are happening in the first place.

And so with my union, we are called UAW Staff United. We are part of Region 9A of the UAW. UAW is split into a lot of geographic regions and 9A covers New York and New England, including Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, not New York State. New York State is covered by Region 9A.

So we are a bunch of temporary organizers and local staff that are organizing for a lot of things, among them wages, workload, job security, healthcare, and so on and so forth. Very normal things that you would actually see in a lot of the contracts that we help fight for in the shops that we work for and organize and the units that we help support.

So UAW Staff United, otherwise known as Yuzu, like the fruit. Oh, that's fun. No, it's cute, right? We really love the Yuzu imagery a lot. We were formed in 2023, first went public in the spring. I joined the unit in the summer, but I was just kind of peripherally around and organizing with a lot of these folks before that.

They went public in the spring, got recognized slowly, and then slowly came to the bargaining table in August. And so at this point, we have been at the bargaining table for over a year and we still do not have a contract. Normally in most shops that you would see organizing, that would be cause for escalation. And so that is actually part of what we are doing here.

after hitting one full year of bargaining, we are still very stuck on items such as wages, job security, all the very normal things that we can see in units that we help support and bargain for.

And so the situation that we're facing is slightly more complicated because of many other internal things. Like for example, UAW has another staff union. It is called Staff Council and that covers more regions of UAW rather than 9A. It also includes people who are our direct supervisors. On paper, those people are called

lead organizers and they do make low six figures. And yes, they are our direct supervisors. So they are a managerial union and they are what some people may call a business union, you know, works closely with management to secure a good deal, that kind of thing. It's never really been known to agitate in a contract. And that is partially one reason why Yuzu was formed because

We knew that some agitation needed to happen in order to secure actually good treatment for people in our position. Our position meaning temp and local staff.

No, I keep saying temp staff, right? Is that the next question? Yeah, yeah. I am so good. I'm one step ahead. Yeah, I want to talk about both A, the way your contracts work and B, what the thing you're actually doing is because I'm not sure people are 100% familiar with what specifically you do and what a sort of like staff union organizer does and the difference between you and the people that are sort of the organizer layer above you is.

Yeah, absolutely. So that has to go a little bit into how we are hired. And that's why I kept saying temp staff and local staff. Our unit is formed somewhat on our pay structure. And so temp organizers are hired by the international or the region.

And local staff are hired by the locals, which is kind of a subunit of the regions and how different unions are organized. There could be multiple units in one local. A local may hire a staffer, but that staffer could be subsidized by the international. And that is kind of what our unit formation is like, where funding comes from the international organization.

And this layer of people does the most in new organizing. So supporting new shops that form, new campaigns that are organizing, new unions that are just forming and need to secure an election or a first contract.

Some of our colleagues go a little bit further into the stage because of their local staff status where they're supporting contract renewals or bargaining around the second stage. But a lot of these has to do with on the ground, worker to worker, peer to peer organizing, supporting them in many different ways, including data work, including just resources. Like when you think of how the

parent union might be supporting a new shop, we are kind of the resources that are supporting the new shop that can help direct institutional knowledge, that can help direct logistical or legal information like how or what is necessary for an election or a petition, that kind of stuff. And yeah, it's a lot of different tasks and that's why for a lot of us our job description is, I'm doing air quotes here, a flexible 40-hour work week. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

And of course, that usually means a lot more than that when campaigns ramp up. And so, you know, there are a lot of different models on how to combat that, but I'll get into that a bit later. So going back to the difference between us and perhaps our direct supervisors, our direct supervisors may be tasked with monitoring the status of a lot of different campaigns at the same time. And we might be assigned to monitoring

one or two or three at a time to work very, very directly with the organizers and the new workers.

Of course, this looks slightly different across different locals. Our different campaigns can be adjusted depending on the shop's needs. But our supervisors who are the leads will be handling a lot of different campaigns at the same time and just like kind of overseeing that progress and giving the okay for the next stage or whatsoever.

So I wanted to go back a little bit to why we are called temp organizers. Yeah, this is nuts. I was so angry when I first read about this. So do you know what a temp organizer is? Yeah, this is actually weird. So I have friends who are staff organizers for other unions and it doesn't work like this.

So, yeah, I'm going to let you explain it because I... I mean, do let me know about those in another segment. But for temp organizers in UAW, this is a holdover from the kind of older model of organizing where...

theoretically, a worker might come off the shop floor for six months, nine months to do union work and then go back to the shop floor when that concludes so that the job would remain open for them. So temporary, like the nature is temporary. Someone is coming off to do union work and then, you know, sometimes it's even part time, right? Sometimes it's even part time and the worker never stops working at their original job.

But nowadays, the model doesn't look like that anymore, right? Because especially in, say, higher ed shops, people graduate out of their graduate union jobs. People may not have their reappointment if they are an adjunct or contract faculty. And then a lot of our unit members, Yuzu meaning, a lot of our Yuzu members come out of a shop that is UAW, whether that means they're legal services or museum workers or higher ed,

But it is less common nowadays to have a job to return to. However, the motto remains the same in that the temporary organizer job has three month renewals and a three year cap. Every three months, our contract is renewed. And if we hit three years on this job, we are no longer hired.

theoretically you could be hired to another job internally but there is no pipeline there is no internal movement that way you would have to apply to the job like a regular other job that is a more full-term job

Or you just kind of like, quote unquote, like age out the system and you're just no longer an organizer. You no longer have a job. And so this has manifested in a lot of different ways that a lot of my colleagues that have gotten tired or burnt out and have decided to leave before their three years or leave at their three years of their own will. There are folks that have left way earlier than their three years as well to pursue other opportunities.

Yuzu, at any given time, has about 40 to 50 members. And that is our 9A unit again. One thing that we have come to find out is that in the last five years of this temp organizer model, only three people who have hit their three-year cap have managed to attain full-term jobs in the UAW afterward. Jeez.

And then there is me, who, again, within the last five years is the only person to have been not renewed before their three-year term, very unceremoniously, as well as in the middle of very active campaigns. That brings us to another piece of context. And the reason why I keep saying five years is because in 2018, there was a first iteration of the Yuzu movement.

There was a first attempt to forming this staff union of temp and local staff. Of course, it was created by different people, but what happened then, especially under the administrative caucus when it was before the reform leadership stepped in, is that everyone was just fired.

Jesus. Yeah. Everyone was just let go. And there are people still around organizing these days in other positions or in other workplaces that have talked to us about it. And there are people that are working in Yuzu now that had friends or were peripheral to that happening. So we are all very familiar with how non-renewal is a very retaliatory practice used in UAW in the past. Right.

or we thought was in the past because we were so excited to have this reform leadership come in. And now we are finding out that it is still a tool that is consistent. And so when we are excited that there is democratic reform, especially with one member, one vote, which was extremely, extremely exciting to see. We also need to point out that there are a lot of different places here that

that still need to change, especially in how the union treats its own staff. Yeah, and unfortunately, we need to go to ads, but when we come back, I want to circle back around and talk a bit more about the ways that the UAW is acting like a fairly conventional boss trying to break a union. And we are back. So...

There's something really interesting. I mean, I say interesting. There's something sort of terrible about the way that the UAW is relying on effectively a casualized workforce where because because you're dealing with these constant renewals, which are an incredible sort of pressure leverage because it means you don't have job security.

It honestly feels like the way Amazon works, where they're just intentionally, instead of trying to retain people, they're just trying to churn through as many organizers as possible. Because the more seniority people have and the more experience they have, the harder it is to just completely underpay them. Yeah, the key word in here is flexibility. Yeah, and it seems like also on an institutional level, a terrible idea. Because you're trading a bunch of organizers, right?

And then the moment that they're, you know, the moment they have a bunch of experience, you're just casting them into the wind and then hiring the less experienced person. That's like, you bring up a great point. Actually, something that I want to touch on is in bargaining. We have asked for training.

And we have not been met with a satisfactory answer. People are not trained before they take on this position. But yes, you're absolutely correct with the institutional knowledge aspect. The campaigns that I'm working on, the organizing committees are real pissed that I have been suddenly disappeared. And I want to highlight something that one organizer brought up is that

For all the talk of us being one big union, how we are the union, how we have a democratic stainless process, it's very weird that someone higher up in the union can just make one of our members disappear. Yeah. And that is in reference to my unceremonious departure, of course. And the points that we, as Yuzu, really want to highlight and emphasize is that we really want to just hold UAW to the values that it has espoused.

ending tiers, job security for workers, fair wages. Like I said, in bargaining, we had asked for training and that has not gone very well. UAW is refusing to bargain over free speech and continuity of representation, which refers to the hypothetical scenario if Region 9A were to be absorbed somewhere else, the right for a user to still exist, and they refuse to bargain over that.

We are stuck in wages at somewhere around 3% per year of four years. Yeah, it's not great. And there's been a lot of chaos behind the scenes that it is implied to be a bad thing to let the members know about the members that we work with and organize with.

But to a certain point, things boil over. Yeah. And especially in the case where I am suddenly not renewed, it is really important in our view that our members know what is happening. Yeah. That the members know what this is about because they get the news landed on them after our social media posts come out because I am told not to inform the organizers myself.

and so the organizers had to hear about it from my supervisors about a week later with no details. My non-renewal was without cause, without justification, without reason. They did not give me an answer to my face and then as Yuzu kept pushing, higher-ups kept flip-flopping on who to blame and what the actual cause was and what I'm getting is a sense of

surprised that people are angry about this in the first place. Yeah. As if this was a normal situation that people would just get fired any other day with a month's notice. And they're like, we gave her a month's notice. Which also, like, I feel like, what was the last time any of these people were on a shop floor? Like, do you know how disruptive it is? Like, if someone had pulled...

Like, so we had when we were organizing our union, we had we've had a number of like great writers guild staffers. And it's like if someone had just pulled our staffer out in the middle of the drive, like all of us would have been unbelievably pissed and it would have done incredible amounts of damage to the organizing because like union organizing, as you are well aware, and I think as the audience should be increasingly aware, is built on personal relations. You can't just yank someone out and then not allow them to even know what's happening. Like that's that's incredibly disruptive. It pisses people off.

Yeah, it's been very enraging for a lot of our members. And so I've been extremely grateful for the support that I received, whether it be on social media or by our email campaign to management. And what I've seen from this is that management was really taken by surprise that there was a reaction at all. Kind of, unfortunately for them, there are a lot of shops and a lot of units that I have supported and organized with and have relationships with. And

Even for the shops that I don't have relationships with, Yuzu members are working in those shops. And there is a common understanding that it'd be really weird for a staffer to be randomly pulled out during a very active campaign. I've had a rough couple of months of going at it because I think there have been some really unhealthy dynamics in the workplace with supervision that was unjust and bad.

punishment that was unjust for my attempt to advocate for different units and attempt to advocate for organizing. And I think that is why we have reached the conclusion that retaliation, retribution must be involved somehow. On paper, this was a very oddly handled situation. I was notified by email on 3.30 p.m. on a Friday before Labor Day weekend. Jesus Christ.

I was not informed by a meeting, not informed by a call. My supervisor didn't pick up my calls until two and a half hours later. Oh my God. In the meantime, where they were actually informing my coworkers that I had been terminated and then came back to me saying that they were busy. Jesus. Which no firing happens like that. I'm sorry. But there's no conceivable way where the HR email happens and then my supervisor is busy telling my coworkers

coworkers that I've been let go, which, you know, we are interpreting as intimidation because why else would this be happening? Yeah. Like even corporate best layoffs don't work like that. Like you at least get a meeting. Like what?

No, I didn't. I didn't get a meeting until the Tuesday after to talk about transitioning my work and they had no plan to transition my work. So currently no one is handling the work that I was responsible for, which is... So they just screwed your units. That's quite dangerous for a campaign in higher ed as the semester ramps up. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, God. Oh, yeah. And of course, the HR email was signed in solidarity and had no name. I didn't want to bring up that point. There is evidence, yes. Oh, no.

It's extraordinarily funny if you actually look at it. But yeah, just even if we didn't have the context of what has happened to me in the workplace in the last six months, even just on paper, looking at how this non-renewal was handled, it was handled atrociously. And so there is not much else we can draw from it other than the fact that I was someone they wanted to get rid of expeditiously, but just didn't anticipate that people would be mad about it.

Which is, you know, to me, a sense that people up there handling it are a little out of touch. Like, they haven't experienced what it's like to have this happen, to have a staffer randomly yanked out during the middle of a really active campaign. Yeah, we need to go to ads again, but we will be back soon. And whatever fun services we're about to have, unionize them and then also unionize your staff. Yeah.

We are back. So this is something we've been talking about in terms of sort of your specific situation and how it's the terrible impact it's had on both you personally and the organizing that's going on. And I wanted to come around to talking a bit about the impact that this structure and the impact that getting denied benefits and stuff like that, the impact that this has in general on the way that organizing new shops works.

Yeah, I think that the impact this has very concretely is that it does not let us do good work. It makes us as organizers scared every three months that we have to have another plan. It makes us have to prepare a plan every time that rolls around. And then, you know, that takes our focus off of the organizing that we could be doing

I mentioned earlier about workload. Organizers get burnt out extremely easily because there are no guardrails in place. And then there are plenty, plenty of other circumstances that make it very difficult within this workplace to, for example, we don't have just cause, we don't have grievance procedures. Jesus Christ. And it makes a very damaging environment, especially when you consider that the members have to

bargain for their own contracts and then they look at us and they're like, wait a minute, why are your contracts that bad? Yeah. It doesn't inspire trust. It doesn't inspire faith in how this union would organize for its workers if the staff are insecure constantly. And we're not asking for...

the moon and the stars and Mars, which is unfortunately what the UW lawyer accused us of doing. So in a bargaining session, we are asking for very simple guardrails on job security, on workload, on healthcare that could help cover our dependence on wages that are not stagnant. You know, they're not even giving us COLA.

which is the phrase for cost of living adjustment. Jesus Christ. A lot of us live in New York City and then there's folks in Boston. And hell, even the transport costs have been a bit of a sticking point. Yeah. Where we're like, can we please just get an MTA card? Yeah. Or the equivalent. But...

Overall, this structure does not inspire faith in terms of how our contracts are actually negotiated and who is responsible for these contracts. It is very difficult to hear from the UAW lawyer that we are reaching for Mars when we are asking for things that are very present in our standard contracts that our members receive. You know, we have taken language from the contracts that our members have and

and try to apply them for our own situation. And we've been told that they're too extra. And then, you know, this has been kind of an odd year for union staff. I wanted to highlight that NEA earlier this year, National Education Association, their staff were locked out during bargaining. 1199 SEIU also just formed their staff union. And during the drive, they had one of the organizers fired.

Yep. 32BJ at CIU just announced their union. And again, during their drive, one of their organizers, they've posted this on social media. One of the organizers had a miscarriage and then asked for help, was put on a performance improvement plan and then fired after a month. And, you know, there are these really uncomfortable trends of this mistreatment happening because, you

priorities might be elsewhere, or there is an assumption that we are more expendable, that maybe we are cannon fodder, but that really, really is not what is supposed to happen in places that are advocating for fair labor standards. And

I am glad that we're hearing more stories about this. I'm horrified at the stories that are coming out about this. But, you know, I hope there are more that are formed because a lot of these things are very extreme. Yeah, and it's, you know, it is impacting not just the organizers. I think one of the reasons why unionization rates are declining is like, well, yeah, okay, you guys keep firing all of your organizers. Like, yeah, of course, we're not getting shops formed. And I want to say one other thing about just like specifically like the mood and the stars thing is it's like,

okay, this is not to say that this kind of stuff will be okay at a smaller union, but like, this is not, like, we've had a lot of independent unions on this show, and those are people, you know, who have formed their own union completely independently, and the money they've collected is stuff that's come from them, like, putting out their head on the street, right? I mean, you know, some of these unions have like $1,000 of assets. This is the UAW. The UAW has hundreds of millions of dollars. They

They have unbelievable amounts of money. And earlier this year, they were just bragging about how they are putting so many more millions into new organizing. Yeah, and it's like, well, okay, if you're going to put all this money into organizing, and again, they probably should be doing more because what is the point of sitting on this much money, right? It's like you're behaving like a financial institution and not a union. But you have the money to actually...

cultivate and develop effective union organizers. You have the money to meet like pretty mild contracts that are like

Your contract is probably significantly cheaper than the contract that they're negotiating, right? This is nonsense. We know you have this kind of money also because you're paying your managerial staff for six figures. So clearly you can do this and you're simply not. And I think that should outrage everyone. I think that's exactly the response of a lot of our members because knowing that a lot of our temp organizers and staff organizers are people that are most...

passionately devoting themselves to the labor movement and, you know, are met with such

unstable job conditions is truly horrifying because this is not a path to careerism. As a temp organizer, there's not much upward mobility here. Let me be very clear. There's not much upward mobility. It's not like this is a cushy job. There is no real way for me to just sit back and relax on piles of bureaucratic money or something like that. And that reminds me of how I

Shout out to our Korean comrades that I've met at Labor Notes, where I explained to them what a temporary organizer's job is like and how many people we handle and how temporary our status is. I was talking to some of our equivalents in the auto industry as well, the union workers there.

And they were pretty horrified at the workload, at the insecurity, at the just, again, lack of equivalency. And again, I'm not trying to claim that Korea's labor organizing world is perfect. Like absolutely nobody is. But the shocker to them is like, well, why are you doing this?

Why are you working in this job? They have asked me this to my face. Why are you working in this job? What is possibly good enough for that for you? And unfortunately, a lot of it is optimism of the will. And I think that's a lot of what's keeping us going. And so my last day is supposedly September 28th, but hopefully this month there have been fantastic outpourings of support and we are...

also picketing the political leadership conference on the Friday the 13th. Ooh, scary. And I think that is going to really align with how Yuzu has needed to escalate. I think this is, again, just a boiling point. And it has shown how all of this culminates in a very unfair labor standard and practice, of which we have filed a few charges. But there's a lot more that needs to be done. And even if I don't get reinstated, I think that

Yuzu is a great example of how there is still more change that needs to happen within UAW. Yeah, 100%. I want to close by talking about through line through a lot of these episodes that we've done. We've talked with a lot of people who work for Planned Parenthood. We've talked for a lot of people who work for NGOs. And this is the same behavior that they do where, you know, quite frankly, what they are doing is exploiting the labor of people who believe in the cause. And

And because people are willing to, you know, because because people believe in what they're doing, because the work that they're doing is vital and necessary. These NGOs and these unions think that they can just continuously exploit the people who work for them. And this damages the workers. This damages the people who they're nominally trying to help. And this damages the entire left.

Because when you're sort of churning through organizers and when you're sort of fundamentally betraying the missions that you're supposed to be doing in order to just do more exploitation, this significantly damages organization.

Literally the entire organizing project that we're all fighting for. So Alex, thank you so much for coming and talking to us about this. And where can people go to support you and support Yuzu? Our accounts are UAW Staff United on Instagram and Twitter. Please follow for more. Check out the adorable Yuzu lemon logos that we have everywhere. If you're in New York or Boston, those are our major hubs. So keep an eye out for future actions.

Awesome. Thank you again for coming on the show. And yeah, if you are a union staffer, because I know a number of you are listening to this. If you're in the UAW, raise hell. And if you're not in the UAW and you don't have your own staff union, consider it. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you. How do you stay ahead when you're building AI applications? Start with a head start.

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Robert Evans here. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And today I wanted to take some time to talk about Ukraine and particularly to talk about the sort of cultural place Ukraine

that the Ukrainian resistance against Russia, the expanded invasion by Russia, has taken in American politics and in American kind of political culture. Obviously, I am recording this within a few hours of another attempted assassination on former President Trump. This one by a guy who, among a confusing melange of other things,

claimed to be a major advocate of Ukrainian sovereignty and that that was a major reason why he was angry at the Republicans and angry at former President Trump. And kind of that at least failed assassination attempt is sort of in line with a lot of derangement around Ukraine. And you can find this on the left and the right and the center. I've come to think that if you're trying to evaluate sort of how criminal

credible someone is as a geopolitical expert today, one of the best things you can do is kind of look back to early February 2022 and see what sort of claims they were making about what was going to happen, whether or not Russia was actually going to go into Ukraine and expand their invasion.

And that's obviously, you know, a bigger topic than I think we're going to get into today. One of the things that I find really interesting when I kind of analyze how particularly conservatives have turned on the Ukrainian cause is how kind of incomprehensible that seems just based on the way in which I was raised by the conservatives in my life to think about Russia and to think about like Russian military aggression.

You know, I grew up largely in the post-Cold War era, but my parents were both like raised by Cold Warriors. They mostly grew up on military bases. And I still grew up with an awful lot of the kind of Cold War shrapnel in my sort of

ideological training. You know, the movie Red Dawn was a big part of my childhood. You know, some of those early James Bond movies where the Soviet unions are still the bad guy. You know, this was all major stuff for me. So it's been particularly disorienting kind of watching philo-Russian attitudes infiltrate the right and us move from this idea of like,

These people are one way or the other kind of a geopolitical opponent of the United States towards these people are almost existing in an idealized version of the society we bring around. It's been a cause of some whiplash for me and for I think a lot of people who were raised in that environment and then kind of came out of those ideological beliefs.

And when we look at the kind of turnaround on the right about this stuff, one of the people who's been on the bleeding edge of this has been vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. And in fact, Ukraine might mark the first place where Vance really came in ahead of the rest of his party on an issue they would all ultimately move in behind him on.

Back in early 2022, in the immediate wake of Russia's expanded invasion, Vance told Steve Bannon in one of his many ill-advised podcast interviews, quote, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.

Now, as this paragraph from an article by Ed Kilgore in New York Magazine makes clear, Vance was swiftly followed by others. Quote, then-Congressman Madison Cawthorn parroted Russian propaganda by saying, the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies. And his colleague, Marjorie Taylor Greene, called the Ukrainians neo-Nazis. Fox News' Tucker Carlson was a constant font of bitter hostility towards U.S. aid for Ukraine.

Now, Cawthorn was and remains now a stooge, but I think it really is kind of drilling into the precise wording of his claim here. The fact that he's so focused on wokeness, you know, within the context of a conflict that seems much more serious than kind of the standard American culture war bullshit.

A lot of why we're seeing this has to do with the fallout over the Russiagate culture war that consumed the Democrats during the first half of the Trump administration. This led to a the enemy of the enemy is my friend sort of thinking among the right, and this was stoked consciously by Russian propaganda efforts. After Trump left office, these efforts were redoubled, especially after the war in Ukraine became an existential issue for Putin's regime.

A good example of the more obvious sort of messaging is this Moscow Times article from May of 2023 with the title, Russia to Build Migrant Village for Conservative American Expats. Quote,

Timur Beslangarov, a migration lawyer at Moscow's Vista Foreign Business Support, claimed that around 200 families wish to immigrate to Russia for ideological reasons. The reason is propaganda of radical values. Today they have 70 genders, and who knows what will come next? RIA Novosti quoted Beslangarov as saying, echoing President Vladimir Putin's frequently deployed grievances against Western countries' comparative gender freedom.

And here we see it again, the focus on hatred of woke as a justification for solidarity with Russia. A sizable plurality of Americans still support the U.S. sending aid to Ukraine. And the reality of Russia's invasion is hideous enough that the bulk of modern Russian propaganda in this country today seems to focus on the woke issue more than anything directly relevant to the war.

As I write this, one of the top stories in the country is how a Tennessee-based media network, Tenant Media, hired a bunch of American influencers like Tim Poole and Dave Rubin and paid them north of $100,000 a video to make Russian propaganda. Now, Poole and Rubin and their fellows claim to be shocked, shocked, that a foreign government was involved in all, and deny acting as unregistered foreign agents or breaking the law in any way. We'll see how those claims look in a few months.

For now, I think it's illustrative to turn towards a wired analysis of the content of dozens of Tenet Media videos written by Tim Marchman and Drov Mirota. It shows us the kind of propaganda that Russia found fruitful in ceding to an American audience. Quote, This analysis does not show that in these videos the influencers were particularly fixated on the Ukraine war. The word Ukraine appears in the transcript 67 times, about as often as misinformation, Christianity, and Clinton.

It does show the influencers stressing highly divisive culture war topics in the videos, which carried titles like trans widows are a thing and it's getting all caps out of hand and race is biological, but gender isn't question mark, question mark, question mark.

The word trans appears 152 times and transgender 98. So 67 times we see Ukraine appear in these transcripts as opposed to well over 200 times for trans and transgender together.

Now, if you want a snapshot of just how absurd and divorced from reality the culture wars have gotten, the Russian government, funding a clandestine influence operation, considered stoking fears about trans people to have a higher rate of return than actually propagandizing directly about the war in Ukraine.

As absurd as this sounds, these tactics have borne fruit. And I think the reason why is simple. By building a sense of solidarity between bigoted American conservatives and what they see as a similarly conservative Russia.

Now, obviously, the reality of the situation is that Russia is not exactly the country these people think it is. While it is true that the number of Russian adults who consider themselves at least somewhat religious skyrocketed after the fall of the USSR, from 11% or so to over 50% today, much of that is likely just explained by the change away from an expressly atheistic government.

Even today, Pew Research notes, quote, For most Russians, the return to religion did not correspond with a return to church. Across all three waves of ISSP data, no more than about 1 in 10 Russians said they attend religious services at least once a month. The share of regular attenders, monthly or more often, was 2% in 1991, 9% in 1998, and 7% in 2008.

For reference, about 32% of Americans currently attend church, synagogue, mosque, etc. on a weekly basis. Now this is down significantly from 49% in 1958 and does represent a low for church attendance in U.S. history. But you can see we still beat the Russians in at least active religiosity by a factor of like 5%.

Now, one of the modern bugbears of the right wing in the U.S. is no-fault divorce, which often gets wrapped up in conversations about wokeness. Here, Russia is also not a bastion of good old-fashioned values. I'm going to quote from an article in Russia Beyond by Nikolai Shevchenko.

In 2016, the ratio in Russian of divorces to new marriages that year was 1 to 1.6, meaning that Russians divorce more often than they marry. In recent decades, over 60% of marriages in Russia ended in official separation.

Now, there is precisely one issue where Russian culture is in reality more in line with the kind of culture American conservatives claim to desire, and that is in its treatment of LGBT people and ethnic minorities. The last years in Putin's Russia have seen a surge in hate crimes against queer Russians, as LGBT advocacy organizations have been declared illegal and punished by the government.

This is the Russia our American right wing finds solidarity with, and we shouldn't forget that, right? When we're looking at to what extent do these people see Russia as kind of embodying the values they would like to bring to the United States, it has a lot less to do with actual religiosity, with good old-fashioned family values, and a lot more to do with hate for specific groups of people. And we're going to talk about what that means within the context of U.S. politics in a

Here's some ads. So earlier this year, I headed to the Republican National Convention and I had a lot on my mind there. But one of the things I was kind of interested in is hearing the way in which conservatives talked about Ukraine when they felt like they were among friends.

It was not uncommon to hear Ukraine referenced in conversations as a geopolitical enemy of the United States. And, you know, this is something I encountered a number of times, and I wanted to make sure it wasn't just a fluke of my own experiences there. And I assure you, it

It was not. Michael Waitley, who Donald Trump picked to chair the RNC, appeared on Fox News in April and lumped Ukraine in with China and Iran as aggressive adversaries of the United States. Now, you know, we can quibble on that list for a number of reasons, but Ukraine, a country we are currently arming and training to fight in our stead, is just kind of absurd to describe as an aggressive adversary of the United States.

Now, that very month, Congress voted on a foreign aid package, which caused a massive split in the Republican Party. The anti-Ukraine side was led by voices like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told Steve Bannon, the Ukrainian government is attacking Christians. The Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that. They're not attacking Christianity.

Now, like most things, Green says, this is not quite accurate. The Guardian noted at the time, quote, in fact, according to figures from the Institute for Religious Freedom, a Ukrainian group, at least 630 religious sites had been damaged or looted in Russia's invasion by December last year.

Greene received a speaking slot at the RNC, as did tech investor David Sachs, who spent some of his time on stage arguing that Joe Biden somehow provoked the Russians to invade Ukraine by talking about NATO expansion.

Now, this is a claim you'll hear on some segments of The Left, too, and it tends to ignore that Russia invaded back in 2014 after a revolution against a Kremlin-backed President Yanukovych threw their own plans in the region into disarray. Ukraine, to this day, despite the expanded invasion, is not a part of NATO, and Biden's administration has been leery not only of pushing for this, but of supplying Ukraine with long-range weapons to strike inside Russian territory.

The fact that Ukrainians and others did start discussing Ukrainian membership in NATO after almost a decade of war is certainly not among the things that we can blame the Biden administration for starting.

As I trawled the RNC, talking to attendees about their feelings on the war, I got a variety of responses. The most positive believed that Ukraine had been wronged, but that the war was unwinnable, so the U.S. had to negotiate some kind of peace. More argued that the Ukrainians were somehow stealing U.S. aid, which, they imagined, would be put to better use helping Americans.

I found this an illogical position, personally, given that our aid to Ukraine has primarily taken the form of old weapons systems no longer in use by U.S. troops. Unless you want to house homeless veterans in Bradley fighting vehicles, I don't really see how what we've sent Zelensky is much use to the kind of Americans who are actually suffering today.

The most enlightening conversation that I had while I was at the Republican convention about their sentiments on Ukraine came when Garrison and I stumbled upon Rudy Giuliani, seated at the booth for some streaming network or another, exiled from the main stage of the event. I introduced myself to Rudy, and we started off just talking about how surreal the mood was given the recent attempted assassination of the former president. He's a conquering hero. He's a bot.

It would have been even without Saturday. With Saturday, it's surreal. I think people feel they're living through history. That image of him rallying America has to be one of our 10 historical great images. Now, I included that because it's a fun snapshot of just how elated Republicans were that week, right before Biden dropped out and the whole election changed yet again on a dime.

From here, Rudy and I moved to talking a bit about how badly the Secret Service had fucked up in protecting Trump, which is not really something I had a particular disagreement with, although I think Giuliani was coming at it from more of a conspiratorial standpoint than I would. I think simple incompetence more or less explains everything that happened that day.

pretty well. This morphed in fairly short order into him ranting about how all of this was Biden's fault and how no one ever gets fired for incompetence in the Biden administration. He brought up Afghanistan, and that is what led us finally to Ukraine. Ukraine would not have happened if he hadn't been a complete coward over Afghanistan. The proof is very simple.

Putin invaded three times under the last four presidents. There's only one president he was scared of. It was Trump. He invaded under Bush. He invaded under Obama. He invaded under Biden. He didn't invade under Trump. So don't tell me he would have invaded under Trump. He had a chance to, but he didn't. Now, I responded by pointing out that Giuliani's time frame was a little off. Well, but I mean, I was there in 2015 and...

My friends who were in the Ukrainian military were still fighting under Trump. You know, the invasion was still happening. It was just not at the current level that it's at. Rudy went on to blame Obama for not having given weapons to Ukraine in a timely fashion. In fact, Poroshenko, who is a corrupt pal of Biden's, told me,

Yeah, they were my friends, but I didn't get any guns until Trump came in. They wanted me to win with pea-shooters. He said I never knew what side they were on. Obama never gave them arms. He gave them money.

Now, this is, again, not accurate. By December of 2019, the U.S. had provided Ukraine with about $1.5 billion in aid since the 2014 invasion. This did include weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles and armored vehicles, which is why they had some of these weapons when the expanded Russian invasion occurred.

Rather than loosening the purse strings as Russian aggression continued, President Trump withheld $391 million in aid to try and get a political favor from Zelensky. We're going to continue with Rudy Giuliani and my conversation, but first, here's a little bit more ads. And we're back. So, after Giuliani made his claim that the United States didn't send any weapons over to Ukraine until Trump was president, he said this.

You let Biden handle the money, the last guy in the world that should be handling money to Ukraine. And Ukraine's gotten $200 billion and nobody let us audit it. This is the acknowledged to be the most corrupt, second most corrupt, third most corrupt country in the world. The fact that they were invaded by Russia doesn't make them honest. It makes them the victim, doesn't make them honest. And you pour a couple hundred billion in there without controls. What am I, a jackass? I can't figure out what's happening. And you don't win?

Now, Rudy, like most Republicans on this issue, always describes the aid we've sent to Ukraine as if it's cash. I find it interesting that he claims Ukrainian corruption is also somehow to blame for us not auditing the aid we sent. Now, there are issues with how the U.S. Defense Department has audited some of the aid going to Ukraine, but those are issues with the Defense Department. In fact,

It came out in January of 2024 that the United States failed to audit about a billion dollars worth of military aid to Ukraine. Now, first off, this is not cash, as Giuliani repeatedly insinuates. It's all weapons. And there's no evidence that any of these weapons were ever sold to another country or used outside of Ukraine. They simply weren't audited the way that they ought to have been because the Pentagon fired all of the people who should have been auditing this aid, right? This is...

a pretty common issue with the Pentagon. You can look back to Iraq and the sheer amount of aid that was sent to Iraq and then kind of disappeared in the ether because they just didn't have anyone paying attention to it. Obviously, because that happened under a Republican administration, Giuliani isn't concerned at all about it. But he is deeply concerned about this kind of fantastical $200 billion that he believes has been shotgunned out to Ukrainian mobsters. And here's Rudy again as our conversation continued.

Biden has us consigned to a war without end in Ukraine. He doesn't even dare to suggest an end because he's afraid of confrontation with Russia. So he's just going to get more people killed. I mean, there probably isn't an American president that's had more people killed other than in a war than Biden.

It's interesting you describe it as them not winning, because I do have trouble. I know in the lead up to the expanded invasion in February 2022, the expectation from most of the people in our military and most people internationally was that the Ukrainian military was going to fold in a matter of days. And they're now back to about 17 percent of the country under Russian occupation, which is a massive escalation over time.

where it was previously because they pushed the Russians out of Kiev. Well, would that end the war? Russia can keep 17%? I don't think the Ukrainians are willing to end the war. The war is won when you achieve the objective that has you stop conducting war. They're not even close to war.

The only way Ukraine says it will stop fighting is if Russia is pushed out of Ukraine. They haven't been able to do that, so they're not winning the war. I mean, nor are they presenting a plan that we're funding to do that. We're not planning, we're not funding, we're just endlessly giving them money to keep the status quo. We do not have a plan to win them or end it.

So, I mean, when I talk to...

Otherwise, you're going to lose. And, you know, when we started losing wars, that's the policy we followed. But if you compare where Ukraine is at right now to the wars the United States has gotten involved in in this century, Iraq...

you know, around a decade or so, close to 20 years for Afghanistan. Ukraine is two years since the expanded invasion. And, you know, war, it's a massive international conflict between a much smaller nation and a larger one. When I talk to Ukrainians and they, I ask them, what do you think you need to actually win this? One of the things they repeatedly say is the ability to strike Russian assets inside Russia. Who does it give them the

Who prevents them from doing that? Yeah, I'm just wondering. Four minutes and we got to go. Who prevents them from doing that? Name the person. Give them the name of the person. Definitely. The Biden administration hasn't allowed that. He tells us he wants them to win. Do you think... Is he lying? Would you be supportive under a new Republican administration of allowing Ukraine to strike inside Russian territory? I would be supportive of sitting down and having a realistic conversation about a plan. First thing I do is audit the money we gave. Now,

Now, of course, Rudy can't support that. So he pivoted back to arguing that we need to audit Ukraine to, quote, find out what happened to the money we gave him, him being Zelensky. Again, I pointed out that we aren't giving him money directly. We're sending over weapons. Nevertheless, our conversation continued. Now, the vast majority of the 200 billion that's been sent over, though, is in munitions. Like, we're not talking about cash primarily. And that's an honest question.

Have you found any? It's an American industry. It's an American industry. So you want to defend the American military industrial complex? And you don't think there's a lot of leaks of money in the American industrial complex? I'm not concerned about money, though, because what we haven't seen, there's no javelins winding up outside of Ukraine. There's no AGTMs winding up outside of Ukraine. But they're getting plenty of money.

Now, this was just a lie.

Ukraine has not been caught selling U.S. weapons. Rudy only claims they have been because he's consumed a huge amount of Kremlin-funded media that has been arguing since 2022 that U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine will end up on the black market.

There's no outside evidence that shows that this has happened. And in fact, Elias Youssef, a research analyst for the security think tank, the Stimson Center, recently told Business Insider, I don't think we've seen any real diversion, particularly outside the country, of weapons.

That article continues, Pro-Russian media has aired similar claims of a mass diversion of arms meant for the front line, some citing a retracted CBS report that included a source claiming only 30% of weapons sent to Ukraine made it to the battlefield. One conspiracy-inclined website purportedly citing anonymous Ukrainians claimed the weapons are stolen to such a degree that Ukraine, as of August, had already lost the war because of the black market diversion.

Now, in the months since that claim was made, that Ukraine had lost the war because they had given up all of their weapons, they took a bunch of those weapons and invaded Russia, punching a hole through their lines and taking a considerable amount of territory in the Kursk region, which they occupy to an extent today, as is always the case with guys like Julian.

Reality doesn't matter here. It's about repeating the same talking points until you get a journalist ignorant enough to take them as true. And it's the kind of thing where if you're not up on all of the different claims being made on the right and all of the claims about corruption and money being siphoned off and taken by mobsters,

then you're not going to be able to properly argue with them, right? Like if you don't really know what you're talking about, you might cede the point to Giuliani that there have been at least three cases of the Ukrainians caught selling American weapons overseas. Now, when you look into it, you see that this is primarily a claim that spreads on right-wing Facebook pages, and there's not really any evidence of a sizable diversion, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is in the moment, being able to kind of spread a point out to the extent that nobody really questions you on it.

And I don't know. It's the kind of thing that happens a lot in politics. And it's the kind of thing that is probably pointless to really address, right? Like me arguing with Rudy Giuliani got him hot and flustered and kind of pissed off and certainly got me frustrated.

But I don't think it accomplished much. And I really, I think kind of the thing that you have to accept when you're looking at sort of right wing lies about what's happening in Ukraine or the lies being told right now about, you know, Springfield, Ohio and the Haitian migrant population over there. There's really very little point in actually confronting these people directly about the disinformation that they put out because they're

It's not really a case where they care about the truth one way or the other. It's a matter of you've kind of lost the fight if you care at all about trying to prove reality to them, you know? And that's kind of a bummer note to end this on, but I guess I don't really have anything optimistic to say. I just thought you'd be interested in my little conversation with Rudy Giuliani.

and some of the talking points that are continuing to spread along the right. So, you know, at the very least, maybe the next time you wind up in an argument this Thanksgiving with your uncle about Ukraine, you'll be kind of wary for some of the arguments he's going to bring out, you know, to the extent that that does anybody any good. Until next time, I'm Robert Evans, and this is It Could Happen Here.

If you want to see these sources for this episode and do some reading yourself, they're in the show notes. So just check them out there and we will be back tomorrow. Your business deploys AI pilots everywhere, but are they going anywhere or are they stuck in silos, exhausting resources, unable to scale? Maybe you don't need hundreds of AI pilots. You need a holistic strategy.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Garrison Davis. I am joined by James Stout and Mia Wong to talk about some of our favorite people to hate, the Heritage Foundation. Hello, everybody. Hi, Garrison. Hello. Oh, God. I got brought in to talk to the Heritage Foundation. Oh, no. What a week. What a week.

So people have been talking a lot about the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 because it is a massive document that is honestly too long to actually read. But it does focus on LGBTQ issues for a decent chunk of the book, mainly finding different ways to both legalize and protect discrimination issues.

against lgbtq people and like banning the public presence of lgbtq materials deemed deemed pornographic uh in public life especially schools libraries all that kind of stuff right it's kind of a this this nationwide don't say gay bill type thing um along with legalizing and protecting people's people's right to discriminate against for people so that's kind of

the bulk of the of the of the tactics that are laid out in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. But Trump and a whole bunch of Republicans have been doing a lot of work to distance themselves from this document. At the RNC, I was kind of surprised that like I did not hear a single a single mention of Project 2025 unless I was the one to bring it up when talking with people. They didn't they didn't like talking about it because they know it's kind of just like

this toxic thing. Now they kind of, they kind of showed their power level to use a, to use an ancient phrase. Yeah. Who could possibly have guessed for the document where they talk about bringing back the gold standard was going to be unpopular with literally everyone, including their own base. Yeah. I mean, I don't think that's the reason why it's unpopular. I think it's all of like the dictator fascism stuff, but the gold standard bits pretty funny.

even at the Heritage Foundation booth, not a peep about Project 2025. It's like the biggest thing they've done in the last decade, arguably. Not a single peep. But...

They did have a whole bunch of other like merch, a whole bunch of little like pamphlets, papers. I love papers. I love little documents. A little ephemera, printed ephemera. Yeah, I love collecting all this little stuff and it just sits on a pile on my desk for like way too long. And in this case, it sat on a pile on my desk for about two months.

And the pile became too big and too unruly. And now we're going to actually go through the pile of stuff and talk about the types of things that the Heritage Foundation actually did have out on their table, specifically relating to gender identity, which is their term of choice for these issues.

Now, like gender identity, quote unquote, transgenderism were frequent talking points at the Republican National Convention, way more so than the Democratic National Convention, in which they were kind of just brushed aside as a political inconvenience. But at the RNC, these things were front and center. Almost every single person giving a speech on the main stage and

at least name-dropped gender ideology in some way to receive thunderous applause from the crowd. So it certainly was a very common topic brought up. And here's what the actual literature that was proliferating at the event had to say about it. So let's start. Let's start. Pamphlet number one, how to speak up about gender identity, questions and answers driving the debate.

So it's a debate is the first thing we need to know about gender identity. Again, I'm not just reading out all of their propaganda. I think there is some use in actually learning what they're saying in like their biggest convention. Yeah. And then actually not like debunking because like, come on.

come on, I know who our audience is, but at least actually laying out what they're saying and how it relates to the actual information, I think does have some use. So I will be quoting from the Heritage Foundation saying some pretty stupid things, but then we will kind of springboard a discussion, and I do have some little fact checks on some of these very common lies that you're now seeing get repeated so often. You may be trying to be tricked into thinking that they are real. So,

We're going to tackle the quote unquote, the big questions. What are sex, gender and gender identity? I'm sure this five page pamphlet will tell me all I need to know about the topics of what are sex, gender and gender identity. Yeah, I can't wait to learn. They figured it out. They figured it out. There's this centuries long discussions have been resolved. What do gender dysphoria and transgender mean? And how do gender identity policies affect me and my community?

I think this is largely targeted towards like, I mean, it's targeted towards people at the RNC. So like people in their 60s, like grandparents. Yeah. Is this a how to talk to your friend about the transgenders booklet? Kind of. Kind of. It's more so like, oh, no, your grandkids are maybe a little gay with it. Your blue haired grandchild. Exactly. What does that mean? What is that about? I think that's kind of what the main demographic is. OK. Anyway, here we go.

The common understanding that there are only two sexes in human beings, male and female, determined by each person's biology, has been the cultural norm and the basis for our laws since our nation's founding.

Has it, though? Has it? That's a good question. I'm not going to do this because we'll take fucking an hour, but this isn't true. It will. And obviously, they're not going to mention intersex people. They're not going to mention any of that stuff. Yeah. Or that, like, every indigenous culture has multiple gender words. No, no, no, no. We'll just leave that out. Because...

Only recently have we seen a shift away from this objective and scientific, no citation, understanding towards an ideology that says a person's gender is determined by what they believe they are, parenthesis, gender identity, rather than their biological sex and should be legally recognized.

The transgender movement has rapidly advanced laws and policies that give special rights and protections to some people while infringing on the rights of others.

This is a talking point that was brought up a lot when I was a kid around trans people, how they have special laws that give them more rights than your average person. And that's why a good conservative basis should be opposed to them. Even if you're accepting, you may not agree with them, but you're not going to kill them. But they shouldn't have access.

extra rights that was that was a big thing is framing framing uh things that either protect trans people from discrimination or framing things that ensure their health care as like special extra rights not provided to like regular regular americans yeah this is like a huge thing with just the basis of all political conservatism is they all believe that like

Like they all believe that immigrants have like a secret healthcare system that they have access to and that like black people have like welfare and they're like indigenous people get into schools for free. And it's just like, yep, no, it's all based on never talking to anyone who isn't like you. Yeah. In addressing the conflicts that emerge.

In addressing the conflicts that emerge, what are you talking about? The government must protect everyone's rights and fundamental freedoms. The introduction of the concept of gender identity into recent legislation raises concerns about privacy, safety, fairness, liberty, and its impact on children. It threatens the freedom of religion and conscience.

What? Freedom of conscience. What does that mean? Because it's not just a religious objection. My conscience tells me that trans people are icky. Your conscience tells me I should have this person's house. Does that let me have it?

I mean, it should. Yeah, my conscience tells me a whole lot of shit. It means you can't not like trans people. The government's going to come for you if you don't like trans people. Is that what they mean? I think they are legitimately scared of that, yeah. Okay. But it also threatens freedom of speech, equal protection, and parental rights. This radical redefinition of sex could dramatically alter our society, creating significant disadvantages for some people.

particularly women and girls. Okay. All right. So there we go. That's, that's, that is, that is the introduction now onto page two.

All individuals have human dignity and should be treated with respect. Citation needed. Including those who identify as transgender. And note, they're very careful to never actually say trans people or transgender people. There's people who identify as transgender and there's transgender activists and gender ideology activists.

They take great care to never actually say trans people are doing this. They say trans activists are doing this. It creates this degree of separation. That's one kind of little rhetorical tactic that I noticed when first looking through this. Yeah, I think this is also kind of a legacy of the sort of trans tipping point and how accepted things had gotten. We're like, I remember this with like,

Like, Alex Jones in, like, even, like, 2022, 2023 would say, like, the most transphobic thing you've ever heard. But it would be prefaced with, there's some trans people are fine people. I don't mean this to hate trans people. And then say, like... Don't come in to rape your dog or something. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway.

But by labeling realistic concerns and scientific objections as oppressive, transgender activists have shut down open, robust dialogue over the consequences of gender ideology and gender identity policies. The serious real-world effects of gender identity policies on individuals and communities must be taken into consideration. Many treatments promoted by transgender activists are

are untested, can cause serious side effects, and come with irreversible developmental consequences when performed on children. So this is my first kind of pause, because this is a claim that we've been seeing, I would say, at an increasing rate ever since Matt Walsh's documentary. This was one thing that he really tried to invent

specifically that like quote unquote like puberty blockers cause like sterilization yeah like yeah you can't reproduce when you're on them obviously but you can when you go off of them but that's something that like they never talk about they frame it as like this permanent thing

Samantha Rosenthal has an opinion piece in the LA Times that talks about the very long history of trans healthcare in the United States. Modern trans healthcare goes back to the 1960s and hormone therapy has been used to assist cisgender children in puberty since at least the 1940s.

These things are not untested. These are medical practices with a long history. And saying that there's irreversible developmental consequences when performed on children, like the FDA approved hormone blockers for children back in 1993. We have been using these for quite a long time. And these false claims are actually causing some significant harm. I'm going to quote from ABC News here, quote,

Unquote.

So they are just like starting to ban these. And of course, we've seen this in the United States as well. But this is like the National Health Service. This is like a really, a really big organization that's only banning it for trans people, not for cisgender children. So like, it's really devastating. I think it's important to note too that this is the exact, one of the exact same lines that anti-vaxxers use. And you know, that's anti-vax campaigns have been a lot of those sort of model for anti-vaxxers.

how a tax on trans healthcare works. But like, yeah, this is literally the line that these same people will say about vaccines. It's like, oh, the RNA vaccine is like an untested vaccine. We tested it on most of the population and everyone's fine. So, you know. And I did a clinical trial for COVID vaccines before they were released. So did thousands of other people. Yeah.

And in terms of puberty blockers, these have been used and tested for decades. These are not a new technology. It's even funnier because, again, it's like, well, okay, so we will give them to cis children. Right.

It shows how fake it is. I'm going to read one other quote from this ABC article. Quote, unquote.

And there was a recent study in 2022 in the journal JAMA, which found the use of puberty blocking drugs did not lead to an increased chance of receiving gender-affirming therapy in the future, and actually were slightly less likely to, given the extra time to explore gender in the body without the onset of irreversible effects of puberty. Possible bone density loss is largely remediated upon the presence of sex hormones, whether from either just ceasing the blockers or starting HRT.

And this study also says at the end that perhaps we should just stop using the term puberty blocker because it makes it sound like it just completely blocks puberty, like from ever happening. Like it just is like, you know, now you don't go through puberty. Yeah. And instead opts to say like, maybe we should just describe what the drug does mechanistically and clinically because maybe, maybe puberty blocker is just a, is just a, it implies something more than what the drug actually like does temporarily. Yeah. So I, I, I found that to be an interesting note because,

And the whole point of, and this is something we'll probably talk about later, the whole point of this drug is so that you can have more time to actually decide what you want to do with your body and your gender. And most people that do go on blockers, whether cis or not, are doing it to prevent irreversible changes from puberty and pregnancy.

Most people opt to not actually go on cross-sex hormones. And that's like a successful treatment. Like that is what the drug is supposed to do. But there's definitely this idea among these like anti-trans activists that like if you go on blockers, that means you're more likely to become quote-unquote like fully trans in the future, which also just like isn't true. But do you know what is...

Reversible? Not liking their products and services that support this podcast? You can reverse that and make it so you really like them, which helps us a little bit, probably, I assume. I don't know. I don't think so. I don't do the business thing. Anyway, here are the ads. Okay, we are back.

Let's continue with this fine literature from our good enemies at the Heritage Foundation. Yeah, great art and layout as well, I'm noticing. It is very well designed, yeah. Oh wow, there are some children. These poor kids, these poor stock photos of children. Yeah, I'm sure they gave their heartfelt consent to being used in hate propaganda. Yeah.

The next section is called, What are sex, gender, and gender identity? The best biology, psychology, and philosophy all support an understanding that sex is a bodily reality and that gender is a social manifestation of bodily sex. The best biology. That's simply not true. The best philosophy. Oh my god.

Oh my god! Now, this claim actually does have a citation. So, it's true. Now, let me check the citation. The citation is... Oh, oh, oh, wait, wait, wait. Oh, the citation is When Harry Became Sally, Responding to the Transgender Movement, the anti-trans book from 2018 by Ryan T. Anderson. Oh, god.

That's not a real philosophy, biology, or psychology book. Oh, okay. He won best philosopher. Anyway. I don't know what you're talking about.

The best all agree. It's so good. Now, sex. Sex is a biological reality referring to an organism's overall organization towards sexual reproduction. In human beings, just like every other species that sexually reproduces, this organism includes the chromosomes we inherit from our parents and the reproductive organs, systems, genitalia, and hormones that develop as a consequence.

As there are two reproductive systems, there are two sexes. Just like every other species that sexually reproduces. This is completely consistent. I get no citation because that's not how biology actually works. No! Nor is your genitalia necessarily determined by your chromosomes. Nope. But sure, why not? The best biology all support this understanding. Yeah, yeah. So,

The best biology from a first grade textbook. Actually, that's unfair to first grade textbooks, which are largely blameless in this matter. It is. It is unfair. Yeah, no one's sticking genitalia in a first grade textbook. This organization isn't just the best way to figure out which sex you are.

It's the only way to make sense of the concepts of male and female. Really? Really? Yeah, the only way. What an interesting sociological statement made by the Heritage Foundation that the only differences are purely mechanistical and there really is no social basis that determines what the concepts of male and female relate to. What an interesting opinion that I'm sure is consistent across all of the Heritage Foundation's advocacy. Yeah, I was going to say, you can pull out another book

and call them on their ship with their own words. Gender, by contrast, is the way one expresses their biological sex. We shouldn't pretend that there are no differences between male and female because the biological reality is that there are. We also shouldn't be trapped in rigid gender stereotypes. Transgender activists deny that sex is a bodily reality. They argue that what's perceived gender identity represents who a person really is, even if it goes against their biological sex.

They deny their biological reality by suggesting that biological sex is merely assigned at birth. A little known fun fact, you actually can like scientifically change your biological sex. Yeah, rules. It takes a little bit of time. It takes a little bit of effort, but your biological sex can actually just be like completely changed. This is something that is not like set.

Also, there is literally physically a document where your doctor assigns you a sex at birth. Come on! It is a box that they must tick. It's not even like a line that they get to write in whatever they want. But the cool thing is that when you change which sex hormones your body is dominant in,

it actually changes the sex and the functions of your body. Pretty interesting stuff, actually. I don't care about my chromosomes, but as soon as we want to do more gene tampering, I guess that could be fun. Get your crisper in there. I don't really care. You can also change body parts out, so that's cool. I know they're working on those womb transplants, but I'm not into that freaky stuff. Anyway...

According to the American Psychological Association, gender identity refers to a person's internal sense of being male, female, or something else. Hey, something else. Nice. It is distinct from either sex or gender. Activists claim it is a person's internal sense of gender. Activists claim. Wow.

They also assert that it's more than just male or female. It's fluid and there's a spectrum of various options beyond man and woman like gender fluid, intergender or non-binary. I've never heard the term intergender before. That's cool. Yeah, that's a new one.

But I guess if they acknowledge the existence of intersex people, that kind of fucks up the premise of that whole thing. No, this is intergender. Oh, maybe that's what it is. Yeah, but maybe that's what it is. They can't say intersex because it destroys their argument. So they've transposed.

Intersex isn't like an identity. It's like an actual, like, completely, like, medical thing. I don't think they fully understand this shit, Garrison. I think it's possible. Oh, you're right. Sorry, I forgot I'm reading from a Heritage Foundation pamphlet. They may be coming from a place of hate. All right, let's talk about gender dysphoria now. Let's. Gender dysphoria refers to the distress someone experiences when they have a disconnection between their bodily sex and internal sense of gender.

The diagnostic label gender identity disorder was used by the DSM until its reclassification as gender dysphoria in 2013 with the release of the DSM-5. They really want that old DSM back. They want it so bad. Before the DSM went woke. They really want DSM-4. Transgender can refer to a man who identifies as a woman or a woman who identifies as a man. Some activists go so far as to say that a trans woman is a woman. Correct.

Crazy.

Not all people who suffer from gender dysphoria identify as transgender. Not everyone who identifies as transgender suffers from gender dysphoria. Surprisingly woke statement. It's a surprisingly controversial and woke statement from Heritage Foundation here. Anti-trans men, anti-true scum. Heritage Foundation. What the fuck, Baze? The seven people who get that, you're welcome. For everyone else, I swear to God, that's very funny. It's a little funny.

Oh, Gary Sutherland. LAUGHTER

I was workshopping some kind of like Tumblr post style joke, but I still have like two pages of this pamphlet. So now how do gender identity policies affect me and my community? The question on every Republican grandparents mind. The first area of concern, privacy. Privacy concerns arise when a man who identify as women can enter female only spaces. For example, changing rooms, gym class, gym.

They're doing bathroom stuff. Yeah, that's what they're doing The reason we have separate facilities in the first place is not because of a gender identity But because of the bodily difference between males and females that's interesting I wonder what happens when some of those bodily differences start to change or your social roles in male and female also change Like a young trans girl going into the men's bathroom that could maybe be a little bit uncomfortable anyway

Preventing sexual assault is another major area of concern when gender identity determines who may enter a women-only space. Public safety experts such as Kenneth V. Lanning, former FBI supervisory special agent assigned to the behavioral science unit. They're doing the Buffalo Bill.

at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy for over 20 years, it is just the Buffalo Bill guy, explains that predators abuse gender identity policies to gain access to victims.

While victims of law enforcement become less likely to report incidents for fear of having misunderstood and being accused of discrimination, the primary concern is not that people who identify as transgender will victimize women, but that predators will exploit gender identity policies to do so. So this is interesting. They're actually not doing all trans women are secretly rapists.

they're doing the what is actually more like more legit is that no like men will be fucked up and men will like do fucked up shit the thing is they don't need those policies to do fucked up shit men will do it regardless you are the heritage foundation your your base your entire base are chukkas composed of churches who do this literally every day like come on what are we doing here but i know i find it interesting that they take this line of approach i

I will say this pamphlet feels like a much more sort of moderate. This feels like a gateway thing versus like the stuff that they're, stuff that they actually believe or like the sort of like more hardcore stuff that they distribute. Yeah.

Well, I'm not sure how to segue to an ad break from this one, I'll be honest. You know what else the Heritage Foundation supports? Oh, well, that probably is true. Capitalism and these ads that help fuel the churning machine of death and suffering. Ha ha! Okay, we are back. Let's talk about fairness.

Gender identity creates an unfairness when biological males, biological males, compete against females in sports and other activities. It also reduces girls' chances of winning athletic scholarships. Yeah, they are the fucking Title IX defense.

Every time. Scholar. I'm sure all those trans girls are taking up all the scholarships. Yeah. Let's just see where the Heritage Foundation stood on fucking Title IX, shall we, when that came in. I'm sure they were totally supportive. Already, several high school girls have lost state championships. Oh, woe is me. To quote, unquote, boys who are allowed to compete against them. Yeah.

These two boys have won 15 girls state championships that were held by 10 females in the previous year. I tried to search some of these keywords to find exactly what they were talking about. The first result was from the reputable news publication, The Daily Signal, which is a Heritage Foundation puppet site. Oh, good.

And the article was just listing like a handful of like trans girls across the country who participated in school sports. And that's like, that's like all it is. Um, and then of particular interest to James, this next sentence, um, Oh God, a man who identifies as a transgender. Whoa, that's, that's an interesting one. Uh, a man who identifies as a transgender has also won the women's cycling world's title. Uh,

I know who they're talking about here. This is someone called Veronica Ivy. She was formerly known as Rachel McKinnon when she won the world title. Okay. She won a UCI women's master's track world championship. If you want to find an event where gender affirming hormones are used on a regular basis, I suggest you check out the men's master's world track championship because it's

Every fucking year, one of those dudes gets popped for using testosterone. And like, I don't see that in the Heritage Foundation's complaints. Like,

This is just asshole. They've, she has been a particular target for these people. Cycling has been a particular target for these people for a very long time. And it's very funny that they continue to like put out this propaganda, which completely misunderstands, like the things that let you win the master track world championship are having money and having time. Like it is inherently unfair. It's, it's, it's,

It's a hobby sport, right? 35 to 44, there are not professional athletes in that age group. The people doing this are the people who have the time and the money. They buy the fancy bikes. They travel to the race. If you care about fairness in master cycling, there are a million other places to go after it. This is bullshit. It's so transparent because now the biggest...

trans sports controversy has been over a cisgender woman who just is appearing too masculine right like the the biggest thing the biggest controversy in this whole trans women in sports thing at the olympics earlier earlier this year is just actually a cisgender woman yeah but that's the whole thing right like policing the way people present their gender is what this is about for them

Yeah, and they're willing to throw anyone under the bus as long as it puts forward whatever disinformation they want, with the sole purpose of just changing public opinion, not actually caring about any of the people involved here. Yeah, but a return to... I don't even think traditional gender roles, but let's just say 1930s gender roles. Not even 1930s, right? There were women fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The Victorian England gender roles. Yeah, totally. Like...

It is what they want. And like, they're not throwing Iman Khalifa under the bus so much. She is part of a target because she's not a girly enough girl, right? She's a woman who punches other people in the face. And like, that's not collateral damage to me. Like that is part of their thing, right? It's not coincidental that it was a boxer. It's part of their larger political project. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously it's also their conception of womanhood is also,

highly racialized. Yes. Obvious reasons. Yeah. It's not coincidental there's an African woman, right? No. Many of the trans girls who were listed in the Daily Signal article were trans girls of color. Yeah. That is who they're going after. They're going after like the most oppressed person you can be in the country. Yeah. Now on to one of our final chapters, how transgenderism affects your personal liberty. Transgenderism. That's a good one.

Transgender policies also violate our freedom of speech and freedom of conscience by forcing people to speak or act in ways contrary to their personal judgment and deeply held beliefs. In New York City, you can be fined up to $250,000 for misgendering. What's the citation there? They do have a citation. Okay.

Hit me. They do go to the NYC commission. And this isn't true, despite the citation. They're trying to take like a city ordinance and twist it to make it sound like you will be fined a quarter of a million dollars for calling someone the wrong pronouns. And that's not what the audience says. Yeah, it's employment law, right?

Correct. It was first written in the early 2000s. It was then revised in 2015. I'm going to quote from Snopes, quote, discrimination against transgender individual could result in fines up to $250,000, but these fines won't be handed out for accidentally misusing pronouns. According to the new guidelines, the commission can impose civil penalties of up to $125,000 for violations of the law and in extreme circumstances, $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, and

and malicious conduct. Yeah, this is for like... employment discrimination. Yeah, employment discrimination... happens...

literally all the time and it never there's almost never consequences for it yeah but that's where this number comes from right and it's completely misleading to suggest that like the woke police are gonna find you correct and it's not for misusing pronouns it's for like extreme cases of like continuous harassment or like like like legal discrimination the next sentence is quote

both a high school teacher and a college professor have been sanctioned by their employers for using biologically correct terms with their students. Is it Jordan Peterson? Now, obviously, those terms are not biologically correct because you can scientifically change your biological sex. Yep.

And what they're talking about here is, no, just teachers who are just harassing their students. Who are calling them by the wrong name, calling them by the wrong pronouns. If you did that to a cis person over time, yeah, you would also get in trouble because that's just harassment. Yeah, and you're just a shit teacher. If you're fucking going after your students for who they are, then yeah, you probably shouldn't be a teacher.

They then talk about how trans activists are trying to get medical providers to provide gender-affirming health care. They're complaining how Catholic hospitals are getting in trouble for not wanting to do gender-affirming health care. They talk about an Obama mandate that forces health care plans to cover gender-affirming health care and making sure that physicians actually have to do it, even if they personally don't want to. Be like, no, this is your job. You have to provide health care.

So they complain about all that kind of stuff. And then the last section of the pamphlet is on child development.

Transgender ideology is now promoted in schools where children are taught that gender is fluid, falls along a spectrum, and is detached from bodily sex. In addition, activists seek to punish anyone who expresses any reservations about radical treatment plans for gender dysphoric children. These plans can include socially transitioning children as young as four, administering puberty-blocking drugs as young as nine, cross-sex hormones as young as 14, and surgery as young as 18.

This ideology threatens parental rights. In Ohio, a Catholic family lost custody of their daughter when they opposed treatment of gender dysphoria with cross-sex hormones. Ha!

So actually, this is actually a pretty good breakdown of how gender-affirming healthcare could work. Because yeah, if a kid wants to socially start transitioning very young and they want to, yes, that's great. There's no harm in that. If getting on puberty blockers at around nine, that makes sense. Hormones as a teenager, yeah. And surgery maybe a little bit later. Yeah, that all seems quite reasonable. And in terms of this Catholic family, so...

Transphobic parents lost custody of their 17-year-old trans son in 2018 after inducing suicidal ideation for refusing to let their child receive hormone therapy prescribed by a medical team who had been treating the child for two years. Custody was transferred to his grandparents. So this wasn't the state just like stealing this child away. It's like, no, you're like basically abusing this kid. So we're going to move custody over to the grandparents. Also, like you're opposing this for a 17-year-old. This is almost like a full legal adult. I'm going to quote from CNN here, quote,

The parents' attorney had argued that the child was not even, quote, close to being able to make such a life-altering decision at this time, unquote. The county prosecuting attorney argued that the parents wanted to stop the treatment because it violated their religious beliefs, unquote. So yeah, you're so scared that this 17-year-old is going to make a choice that you personally find a little bit icky?

Like, come on. I'm pretty sure you can legally emancipate yourself at 17, right? Yeah, and usually you have medical freedom, at least in Oregon, you have medical freedom at 16. I don't know what the case-by-case basis is in a lot of states, but that's pretty fucked up. Now, there is nothing in the coverage about this family being Catholic. Heritage might be conflating this other story from Indiana, where a Catholic family lost custody of their trans kid in 2021 for alleged child abuse.

And then earlier this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear the parents case. So there you go. Big alpha then. They then talk about, quote unquote, research, what the research says about transition.

The view that social medical transition is the appropriate treatment for people, including children, who feel at odds with their biological sex is becoming more widely accepted. However, transitioning treatment, including puberty-blocking hormones for children and sex change surgeries for teens and adults, come with serious consequences. Today, parents are told that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones may be the only way to prevent their child from committing suicide.

However, according to the DSM-5, as many as 98% of gender-confused boys and 88% of gender-confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty. Okay, let's go over this, because there's some weird phrasing here. Because, no, that's not what the DSM actually says. A writer named Micah B. broke down this claim in a Medium post from 2018. This exact sentence has been reused in a lot of right-wing publications over time.

So, accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty. It's a very loaded phrase. Yeah. Like, a child who suffers from genitourian euphoria may receive treatment, whether that's through speech therapy, like talking about it with a therapist, or hormone blockers. And they may then choose to cease treatment and go through their natural puberty. Right? Like, that is...

But that's not them, like, quote-unquote, like, naturally passing through puberty. Like, no, that also involves a degree of treatment. Now, the reason why these numbers might be a little bit kind of odd, and also they're also just false, like, the way that they're, like, being framed here. But in particular for kids, like...

the criteria for children having genital dysphoria is different from the criteria for teens and adults, right? Those mean different things. They also say, as many as 98%. Interesting phrasing. As many as 98%. I'm sure there's no reason they're saying that. Because the DSM-5 actually says that, quote, in natal males, persistence has ranged

from 2.2% to 30%. In natal females, persistence has ranged from 12% to 50%. So they took the lowest possible number and switched the stat around by saying that as many as 98% eventually accept their quote-unquote biological sex.

So that's a cute little flip around. And then also, according to the DSM, a majority of boys, 63 to 100 percent, who quote unquote grow out of gender dysphoria, just later turn out to be gay, right? There is a difference between like gender dysphoria versus like gender deviance.

That's why you, yeah, you should like work with an actual medical team if you have like a kid who's like pre-puberty who has a degree of gender variance. Because yeah, that could result in a whole bunch of things. And the fact that some of them just grew up to be like gay kids is like the result of like

successful medical treatment and like a loving family. Like that is a good outcome. Similarly, the ESM says that 32 to 50% of girls whose gender dysphoria does not persist later identify as gay. So there we go. That's pretty average stuff.

They then go on to list all of the quote unquote side effects of gender affirming treatment saying, quote, Meanwhile, radical gender affirming therapies pose serious medical risks, including disfiguring acne, high blood pressure, weight gain, abnormal glucose tolerance, breast cancer, liver disease, thermoprosis and cardiovascular disease.

These are all the consequences of just puberty. Yeah. Like depending on what puberty you go through. Yeah. It's going to have different effects. That's just how puberty works. Yeah. They also include, uh, and of course sterility. And this is, this is still a, a hotly debated topic.

There are some recent studies that show that there's actually a pretty good chance of people who go on estrogen being able to regain fertility after six months of ceasing treatment. It's not consistent, right? Everyone who goes on HRT has...

an understanding that it can affect how they reproduce in the future. You're definitely encouraged to, like, if you want to have kids or think you might want to have kids in the future, like, you can save your sperms, you can save your eggs, you can get that stuff ahead of time. But this is also something that people are, like, working on of being able to, like, maintain the ability to have kids even, like, during or, like, after gender-affirming healthcare treatment has, like, commenced. So that's cool.

Finally, quote, puberty blocking therapies and cross-sex hormones are non-reversible, largely untested, and highly dangerous, especially for children. We've already talked about how all of that is not true. We've already gone through all of that. Sex reassignment surgeries have not been shown to reduce the extraordinarily high rate of suicide attempts among people who identify as transgender, 41%, compared to the general population's 4.6%.

So this is also just like not true. Like everything, it's just not true. Also, there's no, there's no citation here. A peer reviewed study in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that hormone therapy for trans youth, uh,

reduce the rate of depression and suicide by 40%. It also found that having like parental support during this process also like heavily impacts the effectiveness of this treatment specifically on depression and suicide. Like if you're going through this treatment and your parents still hate you, yeah, that's going to actually, it's going to hurt the ability of this healthcare to actually be effective mentally.

An investigation by doctors at the University of Washington found that trans youth who received gender-affirming health care reduced their risk of suicide by 73% compared to those who did not receive care. And a policy brief in the VA wrote, quote, Since 1975, more than 2,000 scientific studies have examined gender-affirming care. Supported by over 30 leading medical associations, including the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association, gender-affirming care is deemed evidence-based and effective at reducing suicide rates.

This is all widely understood. This is such a non-objectionable stance that even famous woke institution, the VA, is like, yeah, no, it's actually really effective. Yeah.

Okay, and now actually finally for this pamphlet, quote, the most helpful therapies for children experiencing gender dysphoria do not try to remake the body to conform with thoughts and feelings, which is impossible. Not impossible. But rather, but rather to help people find healthy ways to manage their tension.

and move towards accepting the reality of their bodies. Unfortunately, 15 states have passed laws banning talk therapy for minors who struggle with gender dysphoria. And there's a bill in Congress which would do the same. There's no bill banning talk therapy. This is a conversion therapy ban. This isn't like actual talk therapy, which is a part of like actual healthcare treatment. This is against like conversion therapy. That is what they're actually talking about.

So that is the bulk of the pamphlet. I also got given this other kind of...

I think it's called a fact sheet, which is ironic, by the Heritage Action Group, which is the kind of lobbying activist arm branch of Heritage. It goes over a whole bunch of the same stuff. They particularly don't like that the Department of Education released a report banning the use of offensive and inappropriate terms like mother and father in school. This isn't true. What they're talking about is that there's been a push to include just more gender neutral language. Like instead of saying your mom and dad, just say

parents like yeah that that makes sense yeah that's that's specifically what they're complaining about um they complain about like books in schools they they call uh the gender queer a graphic novel a book riddled with pornographic and pedophilic content not true uh it's just simply isn't true all these kind of old lies that we have talked about on the show like many times before and then they also just rehash a whole bunch of the claims from the other pamphlet um

They talk about the claim that in Virginia, a girl was sexually assaulted by a teen boy pretending to be a girl. And this is not an isolated incident. We've talked about that claim before. This was a fake story invented by the Daily Wire. This person was not trans. This was someone who was in a relationship with this girl who sexually assaulted her in a bathroom. Not a trans person, just a regular cisgender male. And then they talk about sports. They talk about how men have more upper body mass.

and that puberty blockers do not change height, organ size, skeletal structure, muscle mass, or any of the biological characteristics that make men unequal opponents. They absolutely do. Hormones literally, they just list all the things that hormones actually change. Like they actually famously do change all of those things. Height, skeletal structure, organ size, and muscle mass. Those are the main things. Yeah, I mean, if that wasn't the case, you could just take testosterone and...

It wouldn't affect you, apparently. Yeah, famously, testosterone never changes your muscle mass. Yeah, just as our slime sounds stronger, man, who never benefited. They also complain about how the Biden administration has wanted people to use preferred pronouns if you work in government, which is, again, it's just trying to stop people from like,

by using the wrong pronouns. It's all just ways to prevent harassment. And they complain about all that kind of stuff as well. So it's a lot of the same stuff from the pamphlet. It's a pretty fun little fact sheet. Those are the two main pamphlets that were going around the RNC about gender ideology. That was kind of the most in-depth it ever got. Most of the speeches did not even get into any specifics. They just threw out keywords,

For actual discussion, this is the most in-depth stuff they had. So this is largely the bulk of the average RNC attendees' knowledge. This is actually probably more in-depth than most average RNC attendees, at least in terms of what Heritage is putting out publicly. That is their talking points. Any kind of closing thoughts here? Just dog shit. I don't know what to say.

Yeah, it's really quite bad. It's not my favorite, but honestly, I think it's just so poorly written. And I don't know how effective this is. It could be a lot more transphobic, oddly enough. They have a lot of like the same lies that the right has been like workshopping around certain claims around like trans health care and specifically how it relates to like kids. But I honestly don't see this as a very effective messaging for heritage. Yeah, I think it is that like,

it's that pathway to hate thing, you know, that like your grandchild has a nose piercing. How do you deal with this? Yes. That like it, it's, it's not, if you come at it too hard, people are going to be like, what the fuck? But it, it gets people there. Yeah. I mostly want to go over this because like we're going to be entering the holiday season pretty soon. So whatever, whatever Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners you're forced to attend. Yeah.

You know, if people start talking about that kind of stuff, it's probably going to be claims that are similar to some of the stuff in here. And these things are like very easy to like research, especially all of the like puberty blocking stuff like that. It's so easy to be like, this just isn't true. And most of them just have no idea because if the information they're getting is in line with this kind of thing, it is just an alternate reality that they are living in. Yeah.

And some of them are fueled by actual ideological hatred, and some of them are just legitimately misinformed. And that's something I can't tell you how your family thinks, because I don't know your family. But it is a good thing to keep in mind that there is ways to talk about some of the sort of things. There's also, if you just want to avoid it altogether and play Nintendo in the basement during Thanksgiving dinner with your cousins, that's also sometimes the move. Yep.

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Hi everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm James and today I am joined by Billy Ford from the United States Institute of Peace. Third time podcast guest, Billy? I think it's just my second, but thanks for... Second, okay. Oh well, we'll give you a bonus one. Yeah, thanks for the rain bite. Yeah, yeah. And we're here to discuss the revolution in Myanmar,

and bring you up to date on conflict stuff and natural disaster stuff and answer some questions people have asked me by emailing me. So, yeah, thanks for joining us, Billy. We're at another crossroads in the conflicts we talked about before we started recording. Can you perhaps explain to folks, like,

what has happened since 1027 part two? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think last time we talked, um, we were just kind of in the throes of the initial 1027 phase. I mean, I think zooming out for a second, the, you know, February, 2021 coup, um, September 7th, 2021 defensive wars announced and armed resistance really kicks off. And then 2023, October, um,

things really escalate after a few years of steady gains by the resistance then there was a major level change and the trajectory of the war favoring the resistance forces yeah i think as you mentioned uh there was a second phase of 1027 in july um in early august that took took things kind of to another level although it is kind of just a continuation of

of a sustained push by the resistance. I think some have perceived these moments of October 2023 and July, August 2024 as real watershed moments, but I think we can see how these are illustrative of broader trends, trends in which the Myanmar military is losing its capability to defend strategic positions, its inability to counterattack

On the resistance side, much greater coordination among resistance armed stakeholders, growing fighting capability, better weapons access, all these sorts of factors that have swung the balance of military power further in the favor of resistance forces. But essentially what happened in July and August was, building off of the October advances, the resistance in northern Shan state, not far from the Chinese border,

pushed further into central Myanmar in collaboration. This was essentially ethnic-based armed organizations collaborating with Bumar, People's Defense Forces under the command structure of the National Unity Government.

and they started making advances into central Burma. So whereas the initial phase of the war and the NUG strategy was to focus on building relationships between the people's defense forces under their command with ethnic-based armed organizations and focusing strategically on the peripheries to build those relationships, to build ethnic buy-in to the broader revolution, to get access to weapons and to make steady advances, now

We're at a phase where the resistance is pushing into central Myanmar. Now the focus is on the city of Mandalay and central Burma, which is the biggest commercial center of the country. So, yeah, I mean, this has sparked another phase of, I think, pressure and anxiety within Naypyidaw and the capital among the state administrative council junta leadership and, yeah, more energy on the resistance side. And it's kind of...

It's occurred alongside advances on multiple other fronts. I mean, in the very north of the country, in Kachin State, starting in March, the Kachin forces pushed the Myanmar military out of, I think it was 200 posts within four months. And similarly in Rakhine State, which I think maybe we'll touch on more, the Arakan army has made steady advances. So it's not just in these sub-regions, it's happening virtually all over the country at this point.

Yeah, it does seem. And like, clearly the SAC, the Junta, is kind of on the back foot. Like it started to forcibly conscript people, which in turn kind of gave people a choice between the resistance or the military and seems like more of them are choosing the resistance. Some of the conscriptions, you know, people can buy out of them, which obviously causes conflict.

Not great for the morale of the population. And that's combined with shortages and inflation. Pretty shit situation for folks living under the Honda. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the Myanmar military... I mean, there's a big question here about the resilience of this Myanmar military. I mean, frankly, militaries in other countries have collapsed under much less pressure. So there's a question here about what is holding this all together, particularly given that

Its primary resilience factors are heavily degraded. I mean, things like its ideological value. I mean, it's historically been about, oh, we hold the country together. We manage the diversity of this complex country. We defend the Bhamar and the Buddhist populations. These factors are no longer credible. I think it's more than 100,000 homes in central Burma have been burned to the ground. Most of those are Bhamar Buddhists homes.

And, you know, some in the Sangha have risen up, the Buddha Sangha have risen up in protest, including a recent killing of a senior monk. So I think that ideological foundation is totally degraded. The other factors, which are economic, the economic benefits of being in this institution are also withering as like the entire economy is collapsing, as you referenced.

And then the third component is like the social status that one achieves through being a member of this institution. It used to be a place where you could get economic benefits and social benefits, and now it's really neither. I mean, you're reviled or a target for resistance assassination if you're affiliated with this institution. So I think the question remains as to like, what are the key factors keeping it in place given all of these pressures that it's facing? And, you know, happy to go into that. But I think there's...

It's an interesting case study in institutional resilience and the challenges faced by a resistance movement that has major resource constraints. And you're fighting up against a military institution that has learned how to orchestrate and sustain authoritarian governance structures for decades. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I think we can maybe circle back to that. One thing I did want to talk about before we move on to talking about what's happening in Rakhine State is I wanted to talk about the recent flooding that people will have probably seen if they have Burmese friends on social media or keep an eye on publications in the region.

Can you explain a little bit about the scale of the flooding and the absolutely bungled, if any, response from NAPIDOR? Sure. Yeah, I think the latest figures that I've seen were 160,000 displaced, 630 affected by the floods, 230 dead, and 70 missing, I think was what I saw this morning. But yeah, I mean, I think that gives you a sense that this is another humanitarian catastrophe on top of a...

I think what is now rated the second most intense violent conflict in the world by Ackland. So this is just one crisis on top of another. And yeah, as you kind of alluded to, the Myanmar military is

incapable and unwilling to kind of address the needs here of the population. I mean, the one factor is that they don't have territorial control to move resources if they had the political will to provide assistance. But of course, they're doing the exact opposite. In some of the most flood-affected parts of the country, they are continuing to kind

conduct airstrikes on civilian populations yeah i mean it's it's just kind of a level of brutality that's kind of hard to fathom but yeah i mean there's all these other kind of ancillary effects of this i think there's there's signs of a cholera outbreak in yangon um the economic conditions as you mentioned a little bit earlier are horrendous i mean like

the economy has lost 30% of its value and it's not a rich country to begin with. Inflation is, I think, 32% year on year with the Myanmar chat having lost 200% of its value. I mean, yeah, it's 200% less value than it was. So this is like, uh,

It's just one catastrophe on top of another, and it's really testing the Myanmar public's capacity to support one another. That's really been the incredible story here, and it's not the first time that the Myanmar military...

the governing stakeholder has failed to meet the needs in that moment of crisis. Of course, Cyclone Nargis, one of the worst natural disasters in the region's history, was another instance in which the Myanmar military refused international assistance and kind of

instrumentalized uh humanitarian catastrophe for political aims yeah yeah and i think people it's worth reading up on that if you're interested in like the sort of longer term history of the conflict and of sort of the military in myanmar maybe now's a good time to take a break and we'll come back and discuss a little bit about uh rakhine state and we're back okay so

I think if people follow the conflict, they will have probably seen like a series of conflicting and confusing articles and messages about what's going on in Rakhine State. And some of that is because there's not a great deal of reporting in the English language, a great deal of sources in the English language. And even if there is, none of us can really make it to Rakhine State right now. Going through Bangladesh would be quite a challenging thing to do at this time. And

So I guess we should start breaking down, if people aren't aware, the people who live and have lived for a long time in Rakhine State and the conflicts that have existed between them and the Burmese state. Sure. Yeah, I mean, Rakhine State borders Bangladesh on the western side of Myanmar. It's along a long coastal border as well. And the site of some of the largest extractive oil and gas projects, including the terminal for a major gas pipeline that feeds 14% of Yunnan province's GDP, is

So it has huge strategic value. It's also China's aiming to kind of access the Indian Ocean and circumvent the Strait of Malacca by going directly to this kind of regional country. So it's highly strategically important. But it's also, I think it's the second poorest state in the entire country and arguably the most conflict affected, at least since 2012-ish.

So the population of Rakhine state is highly diverse, kind of illustrative of the broader country's demographics. It includes a Bamar population, which is the dominant ethnic group at the national level. The ethnic majority is Rakhine. There's, I mean, historically a very large Muslim population, Rohingya Muslims primarily, but also other Muslim minority groups including Kaman Muslims. And then

a number of other smaller ethnic minority groups, Marama Ji, Kami, and others, as well as a small Hindu population. So you can kind of get the sense that this is a highly diverse space. I mean, many of the listeners will have heard 2016, 2017, there was the site of a massive clearance operation and the genocide of

Rohingya Muslims, about 750,000 of whom were pushed into Bangladesh, and almost all of them are still there, inhabiting the largest refugee camp in the world. Yeah, I mean, overall conditions for the Rohingya, it's hard to imagine a more difficult set of conditions. The Bangladesh government is quite impatient, having hosted many hundreds of thousands of Rohingya

some for seven years, but others for actually for much longer than that, as 2016 and 2017 was a moment in a genocide, but there have been instances of more military atrocities against the Rohingya population dating back to the 1970s as well. So this is a long-term kind of

situation in which the Bangladesh have been hosting Rohingya. And yeah, I mean, I think conditions in those camps are really, really challenging. The major issue now is the arising insecurity in the camps as some Rohingya militia groups have gained ascendancy in the camps, most of which have very little public support among the Rohingya population, should be noted. The major dynamic that's happened recently, I mean, the Arakan army, which is

almost entirely of Rakhine ethnic groups and has broad public support among the Rakhine population of Rakhine State, has made massive advances across Rakhine State and now controls virtually all of northern Rakhine State and is pushing south.

It took the city of Tondue and the airport, which is the first time a resistance group had taken an airport. It recently took a naval base, the first time that has ever happened in the history of the Myanmar military. And now it's pushing as far south as Gua, potentially threatening to control the entire state. So as this has occurred, the Myanmar military is in a state of complete...

complete panic, and as it is losing forces on this front, but also on numerous other fronts, it has attempted to kind of buttress its forces through forced conscription. And in the most, potentially the most horrifying move imaginable, it has forcibly conscripted the Rohingya into the Myanmar military. They conducted genocide against the Rohingya population, and now they are forcing them to wear the uniform of their genocider.

It's kind of a level of horror that's hard to understand. And one way in which they've undertaken this effort is by collaborating with Rohingya militia forces, including ARSA, the American Rohingya Salvation Army, and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization, ARSA, which have presence in the camps and have been facilitating recruitment from the camps.

So the primary aim here is a military one, but a secondary aim, which is really critical, is undermining intercommunal cohesion in Rakhine State. Yeah.

Because ultimately, the Myanmar military operates through coercion, force, and violence, but also through fragmentation so that it doesn't face a unified resistance. And in this case, they want to incite instability by creating hatred between the Rohingya and Rakhine population and building off of the vitriol that had built over decades. So this is kind of a new paradigm that everyone is trying to better understand. But yeah, it's kind of a new level of horror.

Yeah, and it's particularly horrific, as you say. I think sometimes there's a tendency, especially with people who perhaps are not as familiar with the situation in history there, to lump ethnic groups in as sort of monolithic actors, right? Or homogenous to be like, okay, so the Rohingya, as represented by ASA and the RSO, have joined the junta, which is not the case. Like,

every Rohingya person I speak to everyone I speak to in Cox's Bazaar shares a loathing for those organizations their forced conscription of young people and yeah their solidarity with the junta that committed genocide against and it continues to commit a genocide against these people and I think the first thing we need to do is move away from that kind of homogenous perspective but

Maybe we could explain, there have been a few accusations of the Arakan army making attacks against the

a range of people, right? Specifically, Rohingya people who are not armed, who are not part of RSO or RSA. Yeah. Can you explain what we know and what we don't know there? Sure. Yeah, I think there's, just to start, there is a massive fog of war in Rakhine State, maybe worse than any other part of the country. So it is really difficult to disentangle fact from fiction here. But I think there's

pretty credible evidence that the Arkhan army have committed atrocities against Rohingya civilian populations. In early August there was a specific incident in which hundreds of Rohingya were killed in a drone strike and Fortify Rights, which is a human rights organization, conducted an investigation into the incident and asserts that the Arkhan army was responsible for that.

Of course, the AA disputes these claims. And I think there's a few recent interviews with the commander-in-chief of the Argonne Army, Jim Rutt-Nine, where he articulates his side of the story, which you can find on irrawaddy.com and I think in a few other news outlets. Yeah, the diplomat did one as well. He's been on a publicity tour, I guess, recently. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if you've seen this, but his tendency to call

Rohingya people, Bangladeshis, it is unfortunate given that that's a language that was used to justify the genocide. Right, absolutely. Yeah, it reflects kind of the language that the Myanmar military used. Or Bengalis, he'll call them. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, it was very reflective of that. Yeah, so this is really challenging in part because I

I think that there is kind of an important distinction between the Myanmar military and the Arkan army in this case, in part because the Arkan army has like broad public support among the Rakhine public. And so it has a more of a legitimate stake to governance than the Myanmar military, which has none. And so this is, it's kind of an issue that, that requires attention and an

an honest accounting of the facts and a long process of reconciliation, in part because the Arkan army is likely there to stay as a governing stakeholder. So that is a really tricky kind of set of conditions. And the other side of this is that the Rakhine public, I think,

There's a deep sense of grievance among the Rakhine public, and this is a population that has also faced years of intense political alienation and persecution, not to mention war and violence. You know, last year when Saipan Moka hit Rakhine State, the Myanmar military did virtually nothing to help them. So it's a population with legitimate grievances, and their perception is that the

the Rohingya public's well-being. I think the international community can do a better job of showing sympathy for the Rohingya public's interests. I think sympathy is not like zero-sum in that sense, and that needs to be done better. But honestly, equating grievances is also...

really kind of unfair and dishonest you know this rohingya population is marginalized to just such an extreme degree and so those are a really interesting report by doctors without borders not too long ago that showed that only like 600 000 of the 2.8 million rohingya in the world live in myanmar 57 are living in camps in bangladesh or in idp camps in myanmar so it's like

there's just like a highly vulnerable population that has experienced genocide. You know, it's like there are, there's a power imbalance, you know? So it's like, it's not the same. I don't know. The whole process of repression,

Rakhine-Rohingya reconciliation is one that deserves immediate and urgent attention, but is also a long-term process of constructing a governance structure that is acceptable and that's not highly exclusionary of Rohingya and these sorts of things. So it's a highly... Beyond the fact that we need...

more deliberate investigation in some of these incidents, I think a broader conversation about reconciliation and justice needs to take place. Yeah, and it's definitely one at least, you know, I speak to people who are probably on the more progressive side of the resistance, and it's one that they've acknowledged like is something that they need to address and kind of the litmus test for like a post-Hunter Myanmar is like, are there places for these people who there weren't places for in the state before?

But yeah, how we get there is difficult and I don't think... There's not a clear pathway that anyone's kind of pointed to just yet. Yeah, the one thing I would add is like...

This is sort of emblematic of broader perceptions of Myanmar and approaches to peacebuilding in Myanmar is that there's often a horizontal approach that we need to work on the intercommunal level, individual level, trust building, that sort of thing. I think there is a place for that, for sure. But we've done a couple pieces of research where...

with an academic at UT Austin who has found some really interesting stuff about like the nature of conflict in the country and nature of cohesion in the country. And she's found, including through some experimental research studies and designs, which are quite revealing, I think

that national identity is often more important to respondents in her surveys than ethnic identity, which kind of cuts against the traditional perceptions of how Myanmar is. Like, oh, it's this irreconcilably fractious place, and it's so hard to build trust between communities and that sort of thing. But her research kind of points to the vertical dimension, where it's the nature of Myanmar politics and the nature of

governance structures, that highly exclusionary discriminatory governance structures have sustained conflict for so long in the country. And this is kind of like the main argument for the resistance. You know, it's like a lot of the stakeholders, at least a critical mass within this resistance movement, they're

trying to assert a new political paradigm in the country, you know, a more stable political paradigm in which the Myanmar military is not a dominant stakeholder, in which violence is not your source of power. Yeah. And in which that's not, you know, built on exclusionary norms of belonging. So it's like, it is genuinely a revolution in this sense. And, and that is why they're, they're kind of pushing against, uh,

the international pressures to enter into a power-sharing agreement with the Myanmar military. Because there's a perception that if the Myanmar military remains in a position of political power, they will interrupt this reform process and then violence will persist in the country. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's probably a reasonable assumption to make. Again, this is one of those things that I see a lot in different...

places in the world where I go, right. There's this tendency to, to see things, I think from sort of colonial perspective and just be like, Oh, these ethnicities will squabble and fight. And like, that's not necessarily the case at all. And like, if you look even to the PDFs, like I was speaking to someone the other day who was saying like, there are hijabi Muslim women fighting with the Karen right now, which is something that doesn't align up with this idea of like ethnicities, which are clashing and can't combine. And, uh,

we saw like a statement of solidarity from the Karenny to the Kurdish people, which doesn't line up with this idea of an inherently Islamophobic, like, you know, sort of massive of Buddhist people in Myanmar, which I think, yeah, it's a little oversimplified to say that stuff. And I think sometimes reductive and it's,

The analysis of Myanmar as a place where colonialism is still occurring and the method to colonialism, lots of the things you describe, like promoting fractures,

promoting these different ethnic identities, which is seen as kind of zero sum and mutually exclusive. These are things that the United Kingdom did or Britain did all around the world for centuries. And it's not rocket science to see how that jumps to another group, which especially in some cases was trained by the British or had relations with the British and, you know, to see how we got there. But I think...

We'll take another little break here. We'll come back and I want to discuss the resilience of the Hunter and how it's hanging on. All right, we're back. So for the last little segment of this podcast, I would like to discuss how the Burmese military is holding on to power. When I speak to soldiers who have defected, I've spoken to about half a dozen, I guess, soldiers who have defected over time. It's almost comic-ish.

how disorganized and chaotic things are. And at the same time, it's terrible the way like every single one of them has described to me that their families were essentially held as collateral to stop them deserting. Right. And so they had to work with the civil disobedience movement to first extract their families before they themselves took their weapons in most cases, because they got a bounty for their weapons and went to join the resistance or, or in some cases went into exile. So like this,

Maybe that gives us a good view on how the Hunter is continuing to force people to fight in this war that it's losing. But can you explain a little bit of how they've held on to power? Sure.

Sure. Yeah. I guess the first thing to note is that rates of defection are totally historic. I mean, there's, by our count, about 15,000 deserters, which is actually not radically different than historical norms. The Myanmar military has comparatively high rates of desertion even before the coup. So that's not far outside of

of the norm, but the defection, I think there's about 5,800 defectors by our count since the coup, which is unprecedented. There's never really been defection to resistance in the MR's history. The other factor is the number of individuals who are surrendering

without a fight, with putting up little resistance. That number is hard to count, but it's by our read, it seems to be quite high. There's forms of acts of disloyalty occurring that are not spurring institutional collapse, but are degrading the memory of militaries

fighting capabilities, which is a really important dynamic. So say that at the outset. The other thing I'd say is that I think we need to sort of think about this at three levels. So the rank and file soldiers are

They are significantly demoralized. Most did not join the military to fight. They joined the military for economic stability and for social status. And neither of those are available to them under this military's leadership. They certainly did not join to commit atrocities against the Bhamar Buddhist population, which is now what they're in.

So I think that population, the large number of rank and file soldiers, is highly demoralized. And that's where you have seen lots of desertion, defection, often from the front lines, though. That population's defection, desertion is not going to trigger institutional collapse.

At the second level, you have like a commander corps major and above. And these, I think since Operation 1027, you've seen their morale to drop. And I mean, there's been the fall of Lashio and the loss of the Northeast Regional Command, the first time in the universe history that a regional command has been taken. That has sent shockwaves through Lashio.

through the commander level. The other thing is that middle line, the commander in chief

in his attempt to consolidate power and protect himself from internal fragmentation, he's rotating commanders based on loyalty, not based on effectiveness, which is also degrading the Myanmar military's fighting capability. But it's also, that's maybe one reason why you have seen less acts of disloyalty within that layer. At the senior level, I mean, mostly, most of those senior Myanmar military officials who are based in Naypyidaw, I think they

the fall of Lazio and the resistance moving into Mandalay, there was relatively high levels of sense of security and morale was okay, I suppose. But the fall of Lazio and the ensuing events has really inflamed internal frustration from what we understand. So,

this, and this has also triggered some shifts in the way in which the Myanmar military operates its patronage structures. So, traditionally, the patronage structure is essentially like a feudal state. I mean, you have, like, a commander-in-chief that is extremely powerful, has authority to rotate or fire or arrest virtually anyone. I mean, just huge amounts of power centralized there. The day

The deputy commander-in-chief has little capability to challenge the commander-in-chief's authority. But then you have these regional commanders that operate as feudal lords at the regional level. They're able to extract huge amounts of value or wealth through extractive industries, illegal industries, all with total impunity, but often with the approval of Napier. And that approval was often just given. Now it's...

It's less easily given. I mean, you've seen 90 senior officers shuffled, changed positions since the coup, and 50 have been removed or arrested by our tracking. And you've also seen individuals detained and arrested because I think there's 15 colonels or above, mostly brigadier generals and major generals who have been arrested for business-related activities.

which I think is emblematic of the restructuring of the patronage network and centralizing the patronage network with MinOnline himself. If you do not have his personal approval, you cannot conduct business activities, including these highly lucrative scam operations that are generating billions in value, but also really frustrating the Chinese. So this whole patronage structure, which is crazy,

critical to sustaining the member military is being reoriented. And we'll see whether or not that helps sustain the institution or introduces more instability. But ultimately, the forms of resilience, I guess you would call it, are the ones maybe you pointed to. I mean, their structure. I mean, it's like rotating office commanders and senior officers regularly.

holding families hostage. Essentially, you know, a soldier is sent to the front lines, its family remains in the barracks. Payment is often made to the families, not to the front lines soldier. And there's retribution if the front line soldier defects or deserts. This is also where the 5800 number I mentioned earlier is likely a radical undercounting because

And also the 15,000 desertion, because a lot of people are recorded as KIA when they're actually deserted or defected. So anyways, I'm not sure if that answers your question, but some thoughts around the resilience, yeah. No, I think it does. Yeah, one of the guys I met with described basically his entire, I guess, squad went out on a patrol and defected. I guess the PDF had been... I don't know how to describe it, really.

it's basically shit talking them in their barracks or like in their position for months, right? They're like, you see this a lot. It's a kind of unique feature of the, uh, of the conflict in Myanmar, like guys with megaphones just being like, you can surrender if you want, you know, your life is miserable. And I guess in this case it worked and yeah, they, uh, they will be registered as KIA. They went out on a patrol and never came back.

Yeah, I guess the other dynamic is that you need to align motivation and opportunity for defection and desertion. And the motivation is there in a lot of cases, but opportunity is not. The resistance is...

committing some resources to these efforts, but it's really limited given the scale of the challenge. There's a lot of factors that need to kind of come together, like the ability to safely communicate with resistance, the ability to move into resistance-held areas, the perception that we were accepted and not faced retribution, the perception that living conditions are acceptable to them. So there's all these conditions and

given the costs of defection desertion, which could be like major retribution against your family and deep uncertainty about leaving this institution that is kind of a state within a state. That's why we're not seeing the kind of large scale commander level defection desertion, I think. Right. So one last thing I wanted to talk about before we finish up, if people, I guess, keep tabs on the conflict, they would have seen,

Recently, a video, I'm sure you've seen it, the Kachin Independence Army shooting down an aircraft with an FN-6 Chinese manned portable air defense system. It's what they sort of called manpads. I'm sure women can carry them too just fine, or anyone else for that matter. But I think it happened in January and the video has just come out. Can you explain the significance of that within the conflict landscape in Myanmar? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I guess there's a couple of points. One is about China's posture and the other is about the military balance. I think the Myanmar military's air power is its primary comparative advantage. I think at this point it has fewer light infantry forces than the resistance, but that it's heavy artillery and artillery.

especially its air power. That's how it terrorizes the population. But it's also been a source of... It's been a very powerful mobilizing force. I mean, I think...

After phase one of 1027, the MNDAA Kokong armed group essentially took back territory that it perceived to be their own and took the town of Laukai, which was really surprising, but a major advance. And then everyone kind of perceived, okay, they'll just stay in the quote unquote Kokong areas. They'll stay where they are. But I think there's a deep perception that

among the MNDAA, but also broader ethnic minority groups, that as long as the Myanmar military is in power and has air capability, it will terrorize...

the public. Even if it cannot reach or ever take back Lao Kai, it will bomb it. And that's exactly what we saw after 1027. You saw airstrikes in Lao Kai. You saw airstrikes in Lai Tsang, the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army. You see airstrikes in parts of Rakhine State that the Myanmar military has no chance of recapturing. You know, it's a terrorizing the public thing. Yeah, it's a punitive thing. Yeah, it's a punitive thing. So, and also...

powerfully motivating it's like okay now you see the mndaa pushing all the way to lascio and a lot of people didn't think they would do that but it's like if you have a perception that this myanmar military can hurt me from a distance they may need to eliminate them altogether in order to achieve the level of stability and safety that they pursue so like it's a double-edged sword in that regard but going back to your question i mean i think like if the resistance is capable

of constraining the Myanmar military's air capability. It radically changes the balance of power. I mean, I think there are some elements of this that have been a primary focus of some of the international communities.

human rights community, for example, constraining access to jet fuel and these sorts of things, trying to push for an arms embargo, none of which have succeeded. But there's been kind of progress on the margins. Although I think we just saw Russia delivered jet fuel via maritime routes in southern Mars. Yeah, in exchange for the...

shells that Myanmar has sent to Russia, right? Okay, I didn't realize. Okay, yeah. So, I mean, they're able to sustain that. And, you know, the Chinese have sold, I think, six aircraft last year. So, they still have this fighting capability and they're still able to extract foreign exchange, essentially, by stealing from exporters. But that's a whole different conversation.

But anyway, I think this is a key dynamic if they're able to affect their air power. The other thing is that...

China has attempted to play both sides. I mean, historically, that's sort of their approach. I mean, they have deep connections with armed organizations along its border, maybe closer even than with the Myanmar military, but they also provide political legitimacy and material assistance to the Myanmar military. They just actually signed an MOU on law enforcement and security or some sort with the Myanmar military. That's a deep and abiding relationship, in part because

The Chinese don't see an alternative. I mean, I don't think they have much trust for the NUG or other resistance groups. And despite the fact that they don't, they also don't really trust the Myanmar military or perceive them to be competent, they see them kind of as their only ally.

potential partner in Ipidop. But it's kind of a question as to whether this strategy is still working for them. I think we've seen lots of acts of defiance from both sides, the Myanmar military and resistance groups vis-a-vis China. I mean, the Myanmar military, they've been pressuring them to hold elections since the coup, essentially. And

And they're really no closer to that happening. I mean, I think they dissolved the NLD, something the Chinese said not to do. And more recently, they've designated a number of resistance groups as terrorist organizations, which essentially...

obviates political negotiations, which I think would certainly frustrate the Chinese, given that they hope to achieve stability through political negotiations between a subset of resistance groups and the Myanmar military. So there are these kind of acts of defiance also on the resistance side. I mean, the Chinese are pushing for ceasefires, and yet the resistance continues to push into the country. And there's sort of a perception that like,

as the resistance groups aligned with China, quote-unquote aligned with China, maybe they aren't, gain ascendancy on the battlefield in particular, that China's influence gains. But I'm not sure whether that's the case. It might actually be inverse, like as these groups...

push into Myanmar and have more territorial control, maybe they have more options and they're less dependent on the Chinese. So that relationship in the north along the Chinese border is also very much in flux. I don't think it's clear exactly how that'll play out. Yeah, no, it's not. And I think that's sort of the big question that's overhanging. Obviously, you have actors that are more closely aligned with China, like the United Wastate Army, who have sort of

largely remained aloof from the conflict or aloof maybe is the wrong word but are not like directly committing most of their forces to the conflict it's probably a better way of saying it right yeah i think so and now there's a ton of pressure on them to stop selling arms to other groups so we'll see whether that happens yeah which is probably where the kachin independence army was able to get the surface to where missiles from which brings us back to that but yeah it's um

It's never not complicated, but it's always very sad that the folks caught in the middle of this are suffering horrendously and sometimes suffering kind of out of sight and out of mind for so many people. Our news cycle continues to kind of either trivialize or completely ignore what's happening in Myanmar, which is really sad.

People often ask me where they can find reliable news sources and where they can send their money if they want to help people in Myanmar. Do you have any good suggestions for that?

Sure, yeah. I mean, I think for news, I guess for like day-to-day news, like Frontier Myanmar is a fantastic source, as is Myanmar Now and the Irrawaddy. They have English language content that would be really interesting and accessible. My organization, the U.S. Institute of Peace, you can check out our website. We publish a lot of analytical work on there related to the conflict. You're welcome to check there. I think there's a really good, another podcast that's really good, Insight Myanmar. Mm-hmm.

that is worth checking out. It started as like a Buddhism-oriented podcast talking about Vipassana. Now it is branched into a much broader range of issues. Some of the best stuff I've heard. And actually affiliated with Insight Myanmar is an organization called Better Burma that

humanitarian assistance and one you could contribute to. There's an organization called Skills for Humanity that provides a lot of humanitarian assistance on the ground. Yep. And you mentioned Liberate Myanmar before we started recording that could also be a good group to support. Yeah, yeah.

I think Schools for Humanity also accepts... Maybe they accept direct... I was speaking to them about medical equipment that they needed. I don't know if they accept direct donations or not, but people who want to volunteer medically, that's one to look out for. Yeah, that was...

Fantastic, Billy. Is there any way, anything else you'd like to plug, like why people can follow you or USIP online? USIP.org. Most of my writing is on there. I'm on Twitter at B-I-L-L-E-E, the number four, the letter D.

But yeah, I mean, I checked those sources I mentioned. It's too bad there's not more kind of content in the mainstream media, but there's a lot of really incredible reporting coming from the ground from people taking incredible risks to share information. So I encourage you to support some of those local outlets. Yeah, definitely. Including financially, if you can. It's like they're doing the work that really needs to be done. Absolutely.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is recorded live.

When I'm very tired. But you know who's not tired? Garrison Davis, our host for today. No, I'm probably more tired than you. I was up till... Oh, I don't know about that. No, I was up till 9 a.m. EST writing this. Oh, geez. I went to bed by like 5 or 6. I slept for 3 hours. I'm going right back to bed after this. Excellent. As is the grind, you know, rise and grind. That's my motto. Yeah, I'm going to do the same thing. So...

All right. Well, Garrison, what are we talking about today? What's our episode about? What's this sewed on? So it's been a while since we've done an update on what meme politics are up to. I think that the last deep dive we did was like, I want to say like a year ago, when Ron DeSantis, then a presidential hopeful... Meatball Ron, Garrison. Meatball Ron. Sorry. Sorry. My apologies. Putting Ron just...

embraced the fast-wave meme aesthetic for his then-failing-and-dying campaign. And that was kind of the last that we did one of these big deep dives into how meme politics currently operate. And it's been a long year. It's felt, in some ways, much longer than a year since then. And the meme landscape has changed significantly.

And that's kind of what I want to discuss today. Just go over the current state of meme politics in September of 2022. Great. It's like the State of the Union, but slightly dumber. But for us, yeah, just for all of us. For the completely brain-wrought space of online politics. People who have destroyed their minds by spending too much time on the internet. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

So, now that most of these jokes and references we'll be talking about are actually really old and not actually relevant anymore and are no longer trending, now we can talk about how they worked, if they worked, and what they can tell us about the changing landscape of meme politics in the year of our lord 2024 and beyond.

So let's start by going all the way back to July 15th, which was just a lifetime ago. Yeah, that was a thousand years ago. This was the first day of the RNC. Vance is announced as Trump's running mate. This was before Biden dropped out of the race.

But when we were pretty sure that that he was probably going to hopefully. That's interesting that you were pretty sure because I kind of thought he was going to like make us like fucking hoist his corpse back into the White House. I mean, we got a really good indication about five days later that his dropout was like imminent. Yeah, yeah, you're right. And it happened. It happened less than a week later. So it was it was really on the line. But anyway, it was it was a very different world, very different time.

Meanwhile, on the first day of the RNC, after Vance is announced as the Republican VP candidate, the Twitter user Rick Rudes Calves posted this tweet. Quote, I can't say for sure, but he might be the first VP pick to have admitted in a New York Times bestseller to fucking an inside out latex glove shoved in between two couch cushions. Vance Hillbilly Elegy pages 179 to 181.

So this is the start of the couch meme. Sure. The next few days, the meme spread online with the help of liberals who were unable to detect the fictitious nature of the claim. Now, unironic spread is crucial to the success of memetic attacks like this. And the couch fucking claims gained such widespread prominence on Twitter that on July 25th, the AP decided to do an official fact check of the claim, running the headline, No, JD Vans did not have sex with a couch.

Now, this had two problems. By platforming this story in the AP, the image of JD's couch coitus was propelled outside the confines of overly online Twitter shit posters into the popular discourse. Now the topic was welcome on news shows, talk shows, and other respectable publications.

The other problem is that you can't definitively say J.D. Vance has never had sex with a couch. No, no, sir, I would never say that. You can say it's untrue he wrote about sofa sex in his memoir. Right. But not that he's 100% never made love to a love seat. Yeah. So making matters worse, hours later, the AP removed their fact check. What?

leaving a webpage that just read, quote, this story did not go through our standard editing processes and has been removed. I gotta know. I do desperately want to know what actually happened in the background there.

It's it's quite funny. It's it's it's it's quite a big fuck up. Now, this led people to reasonably conclude that if the fact check was taken down, that really only leads us to believe one thing is that this is a true claim, which at this point, many people knew that it's not.

I think, interestingly, J.D. Vance has refused to comment on this claim, which is probably smart, but his continued refusal to even deny the claim adds a bit to the humorous nature.

So, the retraction of this fact check became a news story itself and gave a whole new life to a meme that had kind of been reaching the end of its cycle. The people created doctored pages of Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy, where he reflected on tales of his youth in Ohio, where it was commonplace for young boys, rejected by girls, to turn to couch cushions for sexual pleasure.

The fake pages were framed as a limited first edition of the book before Peter Thiel found it and revised the book for a secondary wide-released copy. The next week, the meme continued to proliferate, having completely broken out of the Twitter shitposting bubble it was birthed in. But the peak of the meme was still to come. On August 6th, Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, and the two appeared together at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

During Walz's first speech, he made a very safe kind of dad joke style reference to his vice presidential opponent's viral sticky sofa situation. Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, J.D. studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on! That's not what middle America is. And I gotta tell you, I can't wait to debate the guy.

That is if he's willing to get off the couch and show up. So you see what I did there?

So due to the references kind of like explicit sexual context, this was this was a bit of an unexpected move. Yeah, you could say that. But for those already familiar with the meme, the bit served as a humorous yet tame in joke. And for those unfamiliar, the huge crowd reaction prompted others to inquire about the context for the whole J.D. Vance couch thing, once again boosting its popularity as a trend.

Now, I think this was a bit of a gamble from Walls. Definitely. As acknowledging a viral meme often leads to its impending death, where recognition and participation of viral trends from the mainstream establishment signal that something is no longer cool and is now instead cringe.

Now, part of the long lasting presence of the coconut tree meme is the Harris campaign's wise unwillingness to make continuing coconut tree references or capitalize on its imagery. The White House going all in on dark Brandon using the imagery for merch and Biden increasingly making references to the meme in interviews and speeches. Oh, just killed a dead, nuked it. Exactly. Ultimately led to this meme's death long before the death of the Biden campaign itself. But this could be like a delicate balance between

Before Biden made a dark Brandon, one of the early core aesthetic images associated with his 2024 reelection campaign, the first few dark Brandon references from the White House actually increased the memes spread. And I think this is where Walls' joke was able to succeed.

The couch reference was vague enough and disconnected from the more explicit aspects of the meme. And paired with Walls' goofy facial expressions and his kind of dad joke refrain of, see what I did there, it made what could have been a cringe and or crude moment into a charismatic and endearing one. I think the other thing that makes me lean towards Walls' invocation of the couch has

helping more than hurting, is that the meme had already begun to be legitimized by the establishment. When it's the subject of an article in every major publication and Stephen Colbert is making couch jokes on TV, then it is already broken containment and hit the mainstream. Yeah, I would also add, I think there's a degree to which like the dark Brandon stuff was cringy so fast because it was very clearly the Biden campaign jumping onto a meme that

Biden himself certainly didn't understand. Absolutely not. Whereas I think Wall's got a little bit of the kind of energy Trump used to get, in part because it was like such a, I can't believe this is happening in American politics. The VP candidate for the Dems just accused

the Republican VP candidate having sex with the couch. Like it was such a, wow, this is like the breaking of a seal kind of moment, which normally the Republicans have kind of had to themselves, these like line crossing moments. And I think that does get attention and energy. Yeah.

It was interesting to see them do it and have it actually work. Yeah, well, we'll talk about that a little bit later, how this sort of tactic has been almost entirely monopolized by the right to the past decade. And just now we're starting to see some of that change. I think Tim Walls making a single couched reference, I believe, did very little to hurt the inevitable trajectory of the J.D. Vance couch meme.

In the days after the speech, searches for J.D. Vance Couch reached an all-time high, and as is the nature for Peaks, was followed by a gradual fall-off during the month of August.

But crucially, the spirit of the meme never really fully went away. I think one aspect that separates the couch meme from Dark Brandon and even Coconut Tree to some degree is that it's not based on trying to prop up a political figure positively, but is instead attacking a widely disliked figure with slanderous disinformation. And though the couch meme is well past its peak, there's been no shortage of ways to make fun of J.D. Vance.

the overall momentum against him specifically has continued on utilizing memes with a true, untrue and semi-true basis, whether that be his inability to order donuts or his legitimately possible interest in dolphin sex as evidenced by his Twitter searches. Do you know who also likes dolphin sex, Robert? I mean, I could be convinced, but I guess let's check out these ads anyway. All right, we are so back.

So, the right did not take kindly to Wells' acknowledgement of the whole sofa spectacle. They were so pissed. They were really pissed. And it's funny, it's like as if their main guy has not spent the last 10 years making up wild and spewing all sorts of offensive lies about his opponents. Yeah, yeah. That's why they're pissed. Yeah. We're supposed to be the ones doing this. So...

In response, the online rights finest posters cooked up a memetic counterattack against Tim Walls. And what they decided on is that Tim Walls once had to get his stomach pumped from drinking a gallon of horse semen with this meme originating from a fake screenshot of an AP fact check posted by the Twitter account National Conservatism. See...

Uh-huh. I'm sure you're going to get into it, but there's so many reasons why this was always destined not to work. Yeah, absolutely. Almost immediately, this was seen as like a massive misfire. Yeah, yeah. It made it immediately clear, oh, you guys don't understand why what you used to do, like what you were doing, was working. Yeah. Like you never actually understood the principles of this.

behind what you were playing around with. And I think, crucially, most of the attacks from these weird online figures never actually caught that much traction. The only ones that succeeded were ones that were just paradoxical.

parroting stuff that Trump was talking about. Because I think Trump actually understands this line of attack much better than most of these right-wing posters do. But yeah, it was very clear that this was a failure. Some of the first horse semen posts got immediately ratioed by replies and quote tweets deeming the meme a manufactured and desperate attempt to respond to the natural growth of the couch hoax from a random

Twitter shitpost to the Democratic vice presidential candidates opening speech with a guy like Walls. You don't go with horse come. You do something like you. You start spreading a rumor that like he cooked a bunch of well-done T-bone steaks at a barbecue or something like that. Totally like something that really hits to the center of his dad core thing. It has to it has to line up with his vibe.

Right, right, right. And his vibe is like, you know, that nice Midwestern dad who's a dog shit cook, right? Yeah. Which is something that Walt has actually been able to utilize himself with his white guy tacos and stuff, right? Right, right. Exactly. He's leaned into it. Very smartly, he leaned into it, and then it becomes a strength that then the right also gets upset about, accusing him of, quote unquote, anti-white racism. That's true.

That was quite a moment for American political history. The other thing with like this horse semen thing is like you simply just can't force these things to happen. Like a crucial part of the success of a political meme like this is that it must have a degree of unironic spread by people who genuinely believe it to be true. Now, the horse semen meme was also intended to counter the Republicans are weird talking point that picked up steam this summer.

And for some reason, they chose to go about this by making an escalatory and just grossly bizarre claim about Tim Wall's guzzling animal semen. Masterful gambit, sir. Not a weird thing to say at all. No. In doing this, the right displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of why the J.D. Vance couch story was successful.

The reason why it caught on, despite the easily verifiable fact that J.D. Vance did not write about pleasuring himself with a couch as a teenager, is that J.D. Vance seems like the kind of guy to have used a couch to masturbate as a teenager in rural Ohio. Yeah, you know that adolescence was awkward as shit. Absolutely. Like, it wasn't successful just because it was like a weird sex story. It evoked a genuine feeling of something a sort of like white trash young guy might do.

on the other hand, swallowing a gallon of horse semen is such an outlandish jump into fantasy by comparison. Yeah. Nobody has done that, right? Well, well, Tim Walls is no Mr. Hands. The vibes simply do not match. And to be, to be clear, Gareth said Mr. Hands wasn't swallowing it. That was part of the problem. That is true. And like,

Meanwhile, Vance has the exact vibe of like a gross little teen gremlin who fucked it inside out rubber gloves shoved between two couch cushions.

So the horse demon meme failed to reach outside the confines of niche right-wing Twitter. But conservatives had another meme up their sleeve. Chronically online far-right influencers Kat Turd, Chaya Raichek, aka Libs of TikTok, and Ian Miles Chung led the charge in branding Tim Walls as Tampon Tim in reference to a bill Walls signed requiring menstrual products be provided in schools. Oh, the horror.

The Babylon Bee wrote, J.D. Vance is weird, says guy who signed Bill to put tampons in boys' school bathroom, unquote. So similar to the horse thing,

This attempt to frame Tim Walz as weird just didn't work. The meme never caught on beyond its initial posts. I think part of the reason why the overly online right is so focused on painting Walz as weird is not just revenge for the couch joke, but because Tim Walz is often credited with popularizing the quote, Republicans are just plain weird line of attack.

something that's really caught on this past summer. Now, the oldest clip I can find of Tim Walz positing this message comes from December of 2023. I'll include that clip here. And you said, basically, there's no such thing as a generic Republican. These guys are weird. Once they start running, their weirdness shows up. What did you mean? We're all stand by that.

Well, look, just the strange things they become obsessed with, demonizing our children, becoming obsessed with people's personal lives in their bedrooms, restricting freedoms. I'm surrounded by states who are spending their time figuring out how to ban Charlotte's Web in their schools while we're banishing hunger from ours with free breakfast and lunch. That's what the public's looking for. That's what they're trying to get to. And they will weirdly obsess with everything to be me.

Now, we on It Could Happen Here and Behind the Bastards have similarly been advocating for this type of framing for the new right to vote.

for quite a long while. Like, Robert, I know you've been, like, really pushing for this as a tactic, like, for years now. Yeah, yeah. If they'd made me the vice presidential candidate three years ago, I really could have made some progress on this. But I'm glad to see they've caught up. Like, we decided on the name for Molly's new show,

like very early this year. Like this was way, way before like the weird attacks went viral. It's really the only name we ever considered was weird little guys. Yeah. Cause that's how we like internally refer to these freaks because these are all unhinged antisocial freaks. And many of them revel in being this antagonistic force and,

I think part of their self-image is the idea that liberals find them dangerous. And the weird attack is very disempowering for these people. It reframes them from this like scary existential threat to being more akin to you're just off putting a creepy uncle. Here's a clip of Wallace himself kind of explaining the methodology behind this attack. You've gotten some attention this week for calling Trump racist.

and Vance and Republicans in general weird. And I think that you're the one that set this tone. And there's this shift. The Harris campaign seems to be following your lead, echoing this language. Why do you think weird is a more effective attack line against Trump than what Democrats have been done previously, which is argue that he's he's an existential threat to democracy?

Yeah, and it's an observation on this. And, you know, being a schoolteacher, I see a lot of things. But my point on this was is people kept talking about, look, Donald Trump is going to put women's lives at risk. That's 100 percent true. Donald Trump is potentially

potentially going to end constitutional liberties that we have in voting. I do believe all those things are a real possibility, but it gives him way too much power. Listen to the guy. He's talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought we just gave him way too much credit. And I think one of the things is, is when you just ratchet down some of the scariness or whatever and just name it what it is,

I gotta tell you, Jake, my observation on this is, have you ever seen the guy laugh? That seems very weird to me that an adult can go through six and a half years of being in the public eye. If he has laughed, it's at someone, not with someone. That is weird behavior. And I don't think you call it anything else. It is simply what we're observing. Now, an interesting side effect of the weird framing is that it's left these ultra conservatives utterly incapable of effectively combating this line of attack.

They've been so used to being on the offense that they never really prepared for the position that they're now stuck in. Over a decade of they go low, we go high conditioned the rights to be completely unable to cope with being put on memetic defense. Now, my my favorite retort of the of the weird claim is from conservative pundit Helen Andrew, who wrote, quote, Conflict.

Calling people weird is such feminine behavior. Textbook sex difference. Men engage in open conflict. Women police conformity. It's honestly disorienting to hear male politicians use the line. I love, too, that we're talking about how men are naturally drawn to open, honorable conflict when talking about a bunch of people who never log off. Like everything you do is behind the keyboard, motherfucker.

It's amazing that they're combating this by saying the weirdest things imaginable. Yeah. Now, I think this one's only one-upped by a reply to this very post by the author of the self-published Kingmaker trilogy named Ari Mendelsohn. Christ. Who posted a meme featuring a crowd of NPC Wojaks all saying the word weird.

Which I find to actually be a very powerful image depicting all the masses having agreed upon that Republicans are weird. But Mendelsohn wrote, quote, it's both feminine behavior and herd behavior. They all started calling them weird at once. It was obviously planned, cooked up by a sophisticated wordsmith and then distributed by their network.

Yes, only the most sophisticated of wordsmiths knows the word weird. It's amazing. You've got to dig deep into the dictionary to hit that one. Truly, truly, truly, this must be the work of a sophisticated wordsmith. It's phenomenal. That's fucking funny.

So in trying to combat the weird accusation, the right has mostly opted for either responding with escalation, like in the case of the horse semen meme, which only makes them seem kind of more off-putting, or just going for the classic uno reverso, right? I'm not weird, you're weird. This is the ultimate sign of desperation and impending defeat. I am rubber, you are glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.

On top of being a strategy that often signals one has already lost by employing this tactic, you make the very basic error of repeating the enemy's claim against you, thus continuing to amplify and spread the original attack. Here's a clip from Trump. There's something weird with that guy. He's a weird guy. J.D. is not weird. He's a solid rock.

happened to be a very solid rock. We're not weird. We're other things, perhaps, but we're not weird. But he is a weird guy. He walks on the stage. There's something wrong with that guy. And he called me weird. And then the fake news media picks it up. That was the word of the day. Weird, weird, weird. They're all gone. Now, similarly, I found a Megyn Kelly video titled Tucker Carlson explains why J.D. Vance is actually normal. Well,

Great. I'm sure Tucker knows. The most normal man alive. And Trump supporters have brought signs to his rallies that read, Donald Trump is not weird. My I am not weird shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. It's a very basic mistake.

Now, there has been some pushback among certain swaths of people on the left who have historically associated themselves as like societal outcasts and have found comfort in embracing words like weird and freak. And on a certain level, I understand this. But I think this point of view is making the same fundamental error as the conservative right when they try to flip around the weird accusation onto Democrats, progressives and people on the left by primarily using homophobia and transphobia. We're using the same word to refer to two very different things.

They call drag queens weird for being transgressive. Meanwhile, Trump, Vance and the far right are weird because they are oddly reactionary. They're trying to resurrect a long dead world by forming an authoritarian movement behind a reality TV star who sounds like you're rambling conspiracy theorist uncle.

It's a battle over the terrain of normalcy as a shifting category. And while I sympathize with some hostility to the hegemony of normalcy, how I often fall outside that category, I believe it's also paramount that we sabotage reactionary efforts to gain any territory. So that's kind of the cycle of weird. And we will we will be back to talk about this kind of final new stage of meme politics after this break.

Okay, we are once again so back. Now, I believe this election will truly be characterized by the complete proliferation of meme-style politics. Now, even without the use of a meme image, I think politics, especially this year, has itself functioned and spread like a meme. Now, this is something that's been happening for the past eight years, certainly, but the way it's happened this summer, I think, has been slightly unique. The

The weird attack is, you know, the ideal example of this. But even if you just look back a few months ago, we were in a very different position. It was a very different story. And I'll let Stephen Colbert demonstrate that. So the Biden campaign wants to build on the new viral trend of hand grandpa the phone because reportedly they're looking for a meme page manager. So look forward to some hot new Biden social content like Irma Gerd, Trumpers, Hitler.

I can't has youth votes. And of course, for the very online skibbity Biden. OK, I I really want to play more of that cliff, but I'm afraid I already included a little too much. What a dire situation that is. That is that that is the peak of the liberals. Mimetic attacks just truly abysmal.

Oh my God. I become obsessed with Skibbity Biden just because it demonstrates such like an inevitable like self-defeat that that was like the best thing these people had like cooking.

As it's kind of obvious by the clip, this led towards the death of the Biden campaign. They really had nothing in the tank. Biden was a shambling old man. And then like two months later, Kamala kicked off her campaign by embracing the Kamala is Brat Summer, which yes, may have killed Brat Summer, but it did help secure the vibe shift between

skyrocketing her popularity. Quite frankly, I was ready for Bratz Summer to die. Yes, sure. But I think her weaponization of that term endorsed by CharlieXDX, I think did help skyrocket her early popularity and showed an early embrace of online culture.

And I believe the Harris campaign actually owes a lot more to memes. In a ironic twist of fate, there is a compelling argument to be made that Kamala Harris's rise to the top of the presidential ticket can at least be, in part, tracked back to Republican attacks which spawned memes.

Last year, the account RNCResearch, ran by the GOP, posted multiple clips and edits attacking Kamala Harris for what they saw as odd phrases and awkward moments. Earlier this year,

Earlier this year, some of those videos from RNC Research went viral outside of right-wing Twitter, which led to an ironic or post-ironic embrace of Kamala Harris among liberal and leftist posters. Now, the biggest one was the coconut tree video, which spawned memes that started to pick up steam in January and didn't peak until July.

Another one of RNC researchers videos, a four minute compilation of Kamala Harris saying what can be unburdened by what has been provided the inspiration for the title of a document that spread around political circles, postulating Kamala Harris as the best successor to Biden. If you were to drop out of the race instead of a messy last minute primary or an open convention.

And I think these memes did a lot to increase Kamala's favorability in the first half of this year. Kamala prior to this was a relatively kind of disliked figure nationally. She was one of the first to drop out of the 2020 presidential race. Yeah, she wasn't. I wouldn't even say disliked as much as like not a figure like the big. The number one thing people said about her is that like she's been a non-entity as a vice president. Yeah, yeah. And she certainly wasn't popular.

Yes, definitely not popular. So although the GOP may have inadvertently helped to improve the public profile of Kamala Harris and have failed to effectively combat the weird attacks, they have not totally failed on the memetic warfare front.

The past two months, the right has landed on a somewhat effective meme-style politics by utilizing a combination of disinformation and AI images to create fake news stories that rile up their base on certain key issues. So far, mainly trans people and immigration. Now, a few months ago, I did an episode on how the right's been using memes to create this fake epidemic of transgender mass shooters. And then in July, a new anti-trans psyop went super viral.

False claims that the Algerian Olympic boxer, Iman Khalif, is transgender or in some kind of unverified way, quote unquote, biologically male, spread around online with the help of British newspapers and went just completely viral for a whole week. With the disinformation subsequently becoming a news story itself. This fake story caught traction after an Italian boxer quit a match 45 seconds into a fight after receiving a single hard blow to the face.

Anti-trans memes are a well-worn part of this type of disinfo ecosystem, and there was no shortage of trans sports memes now using Khalif. I'm going to quote from Ruby Hamad in Al Jazeera, quote,

Khalif's subsequent match was against Hungarian Anna Hamari, who in the lead up posted and deleted an image that I believe to be among the most significant of the entire affair because of how it lays the subtext bare. In this AI generated image that Hamari sourced from Instagram, Khalif was not merely represented as a man towering over a dainty vulnerable white woman, but was denied humanity altogether and drawn as a supernatural mythical beast, unquote.

Many other AI images of Kalief spread throughout this viral trend, some with just Kalief having a stereotypical male body that were AI-generated, and others with this similar monster-ish look.

And I think beyond the actual use of these like AI memes and kind of anti-trans memes using Khalif, I think the way the actual story spread was like a meme. I think that's how it was able to gain such like a viral traction in just like a few days.

I think the next version of this is the eating cats story, which started with a post to a Springfield Crime Watch Facebook group from someone who shared a fourth-hand account based on a rumor from a neighbor who claims to have heard the story from a friend who heard the story from an unnamed source. Now, NewsGuard tracked down the woman who told the Facebook poster about the story, and she told them, quote, I'm not sure I'm the most credible source because I don't actually know the person who lost the cat. I don't have any proof, unquote.

In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating...

They're eating the pets of the people that live there. I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community. Well, I've seen people on television. Let me just say here, this is the people on television say my dog was taken and

Meanwhile, the Ohio Division of Wildlife told TMZ that the main photo of an alleged Haitian immigrant carrying a dead goose, presumably on the way to eat it,

was in fact a random black man removing roadkill from a street in Columbus, Ohio, with no evidence to suggest he is from Haiti, he is an immigrant, or was intending to eat said goose.

Still, J.D. Vance particularly spent a lot of work boosting this fake news story. Also, if he was, what's wrong with eating a goose? Yes, exactly. Like there's there's so many so many problems with the Haitians are eating pets and wildlife meme. And we don't we don't have time to like fully get into it. So just kind of one anecdote in this kind of series of memetic attacks.

And I think one of the guys who was spearheading this was J.D. Vance, who spent a lot of effort trying to push the story into the national spotlight.

Either the day of or before the presidential debate, Vance tweeted, quote, In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who have said their neighbor's pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It's possible, of course, that all these rumors will turn out to be false. Do you know what's confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here, unquote.

And now I think the last thing that he's referring to was an unfortunate car accident and

And the Haitian man was a legal immigrant, not an illegal immigrant. And the father of the child who died has been advocating that people stop using his child's death as this like racist ammunition in this weird culture war debate. God, it's bleak. Which is really hard to see a man pleading that these like unhinged racists stop using the death of his son to further like they're just extremely gross and like transparent agenda.

Yeah, it's one of the more disgusting things that's happened. Part of the spread of the eating pets story has been the use of AI images, particularly of black men kidnapping and eating pets, as well as images of Trump rescuing cats from what I would describe as a horde of immigrants, which is what I would assume the AI prompt would be. Now, these images aren't necessarily meant to be passed off as real.

But in the absence of actual evidence, they serve an important purpose of providing a visual just to stick in people's minds. And I think that that's crucially what's going on with all of these images, whether they be of of Trump, like saving cats or holding cats, or they just be like very racist depictions of like black men trying to like eat or kidnap people's pets.

Earlier this year at the RNC, I know me and Robert went to this panel produced in part by Microsoft talking about the use of like AI images in politics and how they're advocating to like not be using AI depictions of candidates, which is something that Trump has consistently been doing, posting or retruthing AI videos online.

of Kamala Harris, of people like Taylor Swift endorsing him, which then led to Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala Harris, which seemingly upset Trump greatly. Now, to me, if you look at the trans Olympics debacle, as well as the Springfield incident,

It feels like this endless series of new disinfo trends is designed so that individual confrontations just don't matter that much. Like pointing out the whole trans Olympics thing is fake is

just doesn't matter because then they're going to move on to Haitian immigrants are killing people's pets. Each individual lie is so flimsy, but the constant sequence of them builds a structure that has a degree of stability for conservatives. And this is a project that they've been like working towards for a long, long time. I know, Robert, we've talked about this. Yeah, this, I mean,

I saw the start of this as like a kid, right? Like this is kind of what guys like Limbaugh were always doing on sort of the ground floor level. You know, you could look at, I think one of the first big like cleavage points in our realities was the whole Clinton death count thing, which if you're unaware is this list conservative started spreading in like 1993 or four of all of the people that Bill and Hillary had supposedly had murdered, right?

And it was guys like Vince Foster who'd killed himself, who worked for them and whatnot. It was all bullshit. But it was kind of the start of this... When you get enough of these things, it doesn't matter that each of them takes seconds to debunk. They form a sort of like...

Like a cushion. If you exist within that reality, you can kind of slide along without touching the ground indefinitely now. Yeah. It forms like a mesh-like net structure where each individual piece is very weak, but together it provides an actually pretty resilient resting place for these people's alternate version of reality. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, Vance is kind of somewhat admitted in some ways to having manufactured this media story. This was interesting to me. Yeah. And I'm going to put that clip here and I'm going to include a bit of a longer clip than what's usually used in soundbites.

Just because during this interview, just Vance's behavior and his pauses are very odd. So there's going to be a few seconds of dead space, but that is in the actual interview. American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do, Dana. You just said that you're creating a story. We ought to be talking about public policy.

Sir, you just said that you're creating the story. What's that, Dana? You just said that this is a story that you created. So the eating dogs and cats thing is not... We are creating...

Dana, it comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it. Now, Vance has subsequently said that, no, no, no, I'm getting this information from firsthand accounts from my constituents. When I say that I'm creating stories, I'm creating a media story. But it's hard not to see this as a little bit of like a tactical slip on his part. Right. Yeah.

Now, this has all created a very odd situation for the Republican Party. As we've kind of talked about the past few months, journalist and researcher Jared Holt wrote, quote, the Trump campaign seems to be doing the same failed dance as the DeSantis one at the moment. Pander heavily to terminally online weirdos and get mad when the general public goes, what the fuck?

unquote. Yeah. And this is the thing. When you have someone on stage talking about eating pets, that is a turnoff for many normal people because they immediately clock this as being probably complete bullshit. Yeah. And we're in a very interesting moment in the Republican Party, considering the right wing's electoral losses in twenty eighteen, twenty twenty, twenty twenty two and possibly going into twenty twenty four.

This kind of weird culture war grievance anti-woke strategy just might not be electorally viable when matched against a more normal alternative. And I think making matters worse, the Trump team and the Republican National Committee have spent the past four years handing over a lot of their comms and outreach to just certifiable freaks like Laura Loomer, Ian Miles Chung, and Libs of TikTok. People who are very disconnected from what regular people care about.

people that are only liked by other really online freaks. And people who have no crossover appeal, right? Joe Rogan is such a powerful card in their hand because he has a lot of like normal dude appeal, right? And so when he starts parodying a talking point, he can actually push it to people. Laura Loomer does not, right? Like if you show a normal person, Laura Loomer, they're like, what the fuck is wrong with that lady's face? Right.

And they're a very double-edged sword because...

Although they are very off-putting, and that in some ways can damage Trump, they also carry a degree of very real harm. Oh, yeah. Whenever all these people hop onto a trend, a very consistent thing that has followed is bomb threats being called into whatever their target is. They love doing that. Whether that be hospitals providing trans healthcare, abortion clinics, or in this case, just schools in Springfield, Ohio, which have now received multiple bomb threats.

And again, like it is a very double edged sword because obviously that's like very real harm being done. And you could argue that, you know, that makes the situation worse for the Trump campaign, that the fact that their attacks that they're spreading are resulting in like bomb threats being called into schools. But it also creates a degree of actual harm for like kids and young

many of the legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield that are now seeing a very unprecedented, as of recent, wave of extremely racist attacks.

There's a good article by Jared Holt in MSNBC that kind of goes into this topic specifically that I'll link in the sources below. So, yeah, that kind of rounds up my my update on the current state of meme politics, all of its various forms it's taken these past few months from couch fucking jokes to bomb threats in Springfield.

And it's it's a very dominant form. Like, I don't remember memes being this front and center, at least in the 2020 election. Yeah. And I mean, they in 2016, they kind of were. But it was it was like a much rougher and ruder attempt. This there's like so much more buy in by like large organizations. And Democrats have like finally jumped on board to this.

Yes, yes, absolutely. They have long rejected this line of attack as an illegitimate form of politics, and they are not taking that stance anymore.

Yeah, they picked the gun up off the table fucking finally. Well, that at least does it for me. Yeah. It could happen here. I will leave us with one closing sound bit from J.D. Vance. Something that Governor Walz has called you and Donald Trump, and that is weird. Sure. And it is taken off. The New York Times reports that when Donald Trump was asked about it, he said, not me, they're talking about J.D.,

Well, certainly they've levied that charge against me more than anybody else. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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