It Could Happen Here Weekly 31

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compiletion 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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. And then the welcome to

(00:27):
it could happen here A podcast that is today about
something that did happen here and absolutely sucked. And with
me to talk about the Atlanta shooting is Scarrison. Hello, Hi,
not happy to be here? Yeah, yeah, no, this is
this is not a we're not talking about a current event.

(00:47):
This happened like what was it last year? So yeah,
in case someone's listening, I'm wondering if there was another one. No,
this is specifically talking about Actually there have been a
couple of shootings in Atlanta since then, obviously there. Yes,
we're talking about is from from last year and the

(01:08):
ties into many of the topics we discussed at the show. Yeah,
a March sixteenth, two thowy one, Robert Aaron Long, a
regular at Young's Asian massage, refused to tip after getting
a massage shout you a ton. The SPA's owner confronted
him about the tip. Long simply walked away. He got dressed,

(01:31):
went to the bathroom, pulled out his gun and started shooting,
leaving shout you ton dying on the floor. Driving from
spot to spa, Long shot nine people and killed eight.
The loan wounded survivor, Alicia Fernandez Ortiz, got on his
knees and begged Long not to shoot. Long shot him anyways.

(01:52):
There's a there's a there's a tendency, when confronted with
true horror, to retreat into abstraction, as if the abstract
is sheltered from the violence of the storm. I intend,
if briefly, to do it myself. But there is no
safety there, only the same violence, repeated again and again
and again in a thousand ways, with a thousand names,
wearing a thousand faces. Because this is hell and we

(02:16):
live in it, So on onto the abstract. There's a
concept in Marxism called trigger um. It's a German word.
It's usually translated as bearer, in the sense of an
individual capitalist being the bearer of capitalist social relations. They
enact this relation by you know, turning capital into more capital,
which is what makes a capitalists. Uh. There is you know,

(02:41):
literally endless debate over what this actually means. Most of
it is pointless, and the meeting is contested enough that
I'm going to abuse it a bit further and argue
that a person can become a bearer of historical forces
larger than themselves. Robert Aaron Long was the bearer of
a great number of historical forces. He bore the violent
of capitalism, of misogyny, of racism, of horror, phobia, of whiteness,

(03:04):
of Christianity itself, and he unleash it into the world.
It's just like the idea of like invoking, right drawing
on these external ideas into yourself and then becoming them
for like a brief period of time. Yeah, I mean,
I think it's slightly different in that with bearing, it's
it's not so much that that you're briefly invoking them,

(03:24):
it's that you're you're constantly a part of the relation.
So theclation defines you and it and you you sort
of you constantly enacted by the things that you do,
and in doing like the relation reel. It's more of
like an ever present thing that is Yeah, Yeah, it's
it's it's yeah. It's something that's just sort of structures

(03:46):
how the society works. Right, Like, we're all sort of
like enacting the wage relation, right every time we like
do like, you know, like doing this right now by
doing our jobs. Yeah, we are re enacting the wage relation. Yeah.
And you know, I think I think a lot of
people after the shooting were left asking, you know why,

(04:06):
And you know, we can name social and historical forces,
we can talk about sort of antiation, violence and racism
and horophobia, but what does it actually mean? And you
know what, what are the forces that Long unleashed in
this world? What do they look like? And I think
I think we have we have a good example of
this from right after Long was arrested. Police Captain J.

(04:30):
Baker the Cherokee Sheriff's Department said this to reporters at
a press conference. This is about Long and the shooting.
He was pretty much fed up and at the end
of his rope, and yesterday it was a really bad
day for him, and this is what he did. He
apparently has an issue what he considers a sex addiction
and he sees these locations as something that allow him

(04:51):
to go to these places, and it's a temptation for
him that he wanted to eliminate. Now, yeah, that there
there was a lot going on in in in in
the is like two sentences, Um, so you know Cherokee
Sheriff's Department. Oh yeah, there is. There is so much
like there's somebody, somebody somebody later. Yeah, it's incredible. One

(05:14):
of the things that we're going to go more into
the next episode is it like this, this is where
I what's his name? This is where the guy who
just like drew a random line on a map that
he found from like that he pulled out of his
like national geographic thing who divided Korea and half like
this is where he's from. There's this is Yeah, there

(05:34):
is a there's a lot of historical violence in this
very specific part of Georgia that is all coming together here.
And oh yeah, his school was also super racist, Like
there's they had a mascot that was like doing all
the racist stuff. Yeah. Yeah, And you know, before we
go any further, it's worth mentioning that, like almost immediately

(05:56):
after the honorable Police Captain gave that press conference, a
bunch of people on the Internet found out that Baker
had posted like a shirt that said uh COVID nineteen
and imported virus from China. I remember this. Yeah, Yeah,
sheriff was pretty pretty racist himself. Yeah, a part of

(06:18):
many many anti Asian tropes relating to conspiracy theories. Yeah,
this is you know this, this this is classic twenties
like anti Asian rhetoric. It's you know, it's stuff that's
led directly to hundreds of attacks nation Americans since it
started the pandemic. And you know, the race is on
slot driven by every sector of American society. Now people
immediately start speculating that Jay Baker had collaborated with Long

(06:42):
to cover up the racial like motivation for his violence.
And okay, I think there's some truth to this. The
cops have been collaborating with Long and his family in
various ways. I'm going to read a part of an
article in Vanity Fair written by the journalist May Jong
called how the Atlantis Boss shooting the victims the survivors
tell a story of America? Which is it? This is

(07:04):
one of the best things that anyone's written about shooting
so far. I'm going to read a little bit offit
because it's oh boy. I ring the bell at the
family home. No one answered. Before I could decide what
to do, a police cruiser showed up. An officer who
introduced himself as Sergeant Clement, explained that the neighbors multiple
people had called to report suspicious activity. The one good

(07:27):
thing about Cherokee County, he told me, is that we
look out for each other. It's like how it used
to be in the seventies. I asked Clement what specifically
the neighbors were worried about. To be honest, he said,
what they are worried about is they are afraid of revenge.
What is the context for the like revenge line? Yeah,
it was basically just they were released like they were

(07:48):
terrified that like Asian people were going to show up,
like to this community and take revenge for the shooting.
Thought they were like attack like the church or something. Well, no,
like they thought they were gonna show up to like
the family's house and like attack the neighborhood. Ah, when
is when? When is that ever happened? Yeah? Yeah, you

(08:10):
know and and and you know and you can like
what what this demonstrates a is just the kind of
community you're dealing with here and be also like you
just you have very obvious close connection between the cops
and like Long's family at this point. Yeah, and I
mean in terms of like the covering up, the covering

(08:31):
up of like the anti h violence part of it. Honestly,
I don't even know how intentional that would be, because
I don't think he even recognizes that as racism. And
I'm not sure how much the cops recognize that as
a super big part, since that they are already uh,
pretty pretty racist. I guess that Asian people, Okay, Like
I I don't even know how much they recognize that

(08:52):
as being like a thing that isn't normal. Yeah, but
but I think also like I don't know the the
the explicitness to which particularly Baker is being racist like
makes me suspect that he does. That he would have
been able to figure it out, because he's like, like
you have to go out of your way to like

(09:13):
have a shirt that says like COVID imported from China,
Like yeah, but I don't think that he would consider
that racist, right, Like it's so it's so racist that
but but he can't even consider that. He just think
it's just like normal, right, Like he's yeah. It's like
in terms of like them trying to cover up any
kind of anti Asian um stuff leading towards the shooting,

(09:36):
they may not see that as like as anything to
be covered up because they think that's just normal. So
they're not going to like even focus on it because
they're like, yeah, I mean obviously right, Like it's just
we're so far down the rabbit hole that it's hard
to even like recognize it. I don't know, I'm just
I'm just I'm just it it makes it makes sensesciousness.

(09:59):
And I think also the other thing that's going on
here that that's I think the other part of why
they wouldn't have recognized it if they didn't, is that like, okay,
so like like most people see this and they're you know,
they kind of like analytically, they kind of throw up
their hands. They're like, wow, this is anti Asian violence.
They talk about like the stuff that particular dangerous faced

(10:21):
by like Asian women and sex workers, and they sort
of call it a day, and the nowsis sort of
like stops there, and like they're right, like that this
is anti Asian violence. The violence is primarily inflicted on women,
and it particularly on sex workers or and I mean
this is also very important people who are perceived as
sex workers no matter what they actually do. And yeah,
like it's got worse than the pandemic. But there's a

(10:41):
very very specific kind of violence that long is doing here.
It is and it's not it's related to, but not
identical to the sort of post COVID stuff. And I
think people really like did a disservice to what happened,

(11:02):
and did a diservice to help the people understand it
by not actually poking at it, because this shooting is
at its core and evangelical shooting like this is this
is this is evangelical violences, is Christian violence, and this
is this is purity culture. And you know, if if
you want to understand what actually happens here, you have
to actually you have to go back and you have
to understand the Christianity angle because it is critical. Now.

(11:25):
East Asia's contact with Christianity in the last two hundred
years has been broadly speaking, extremely bleak. Uh the conclusion
of the First Opium War in eighteen forty two, which
Britain forced China to buy opium to cover Britain's trade
deficit with the country, and then the Britain also stole
Hong Kong and then allowed critics. Yeah, it all also
had the effect of allowing Christian missionaries into the country.

(11:46):
And it is genuinely unclear which one of those acts
has the highest body counts. The product of the Christian
missionaries work was the Typing Rebellion, in which the self
proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ waged a failed war against
the ruling Ching dynasty. That like, even if even if
you use like the lower estimates of the body count,
that war makes World War One with like a minor
border skirmish. It is a just incredibly devastating war. And

(12:12):
you know that the product of this is there's there's famines.
There's also just a bunch of floods that happened at
the same time, and this sends an enormous number of
immigrants and refugees fling from their homes looking for any
way to survive. And a lot of those people find
their way to the US and they get imported by
American capitalists, where you know, looking for a new labor
force to serve. It's like a racial racial buffer between

(12:33):
right black workers after the Civil War. And the other
thing is like it's really hard to get to the
west coast in the like they know, in the Panama Canal.
You have to go over land and it sucks and
it's hard, and so they need a labor force that
they can just get to the west coast. And it's
literally easier for people to come from China, and you know,
and so they do, and it is a it is
a brutal existence. Chinese workers are worked at death building

(12:55):
the railroads, and they you know, they struggled to carve
out of life for themselves and they do halting lead
and leaps and spurts, but they create communities, they build
towns and temples and cultures in the beginning of a
new society. And that's when the white working class decides
they want to exterminate them because this is this is
a great country. Uh yeah. White workers, you know immediately

(13:16):
start blaming Chinese workers for the low wages, and they
use their workers organizations to ethnically climbs the west. The
result of this is a series of massacres that goes
on literally for decades, stretching like into the ninth like
this this these things starting like the eighteen seventies and
they're still going in like the nineteen like like in
the in then like the early ninteen hundreds. Um. And

(13:36):
and it's at this point where Christianity gets involved. Um.
I think like most people who are listening to the
show have probably heard at least in passing of the
Chinese Exclusion Act just this sort of like the great
triumph of like the dark alliance of racists and the
white working class. But what I think is less known
about is the Page Act, of which banned quote lud

(13:56):
and immoral women from entering the United States. And this,
this is like this is directly targeted at Asian and
Chinese women, um, who were seen as a threat to
the sort of racial and moral character of like the
white Christian American nation because of like they're supposed to
like inheritent immorality demonstrated by the popular usical demonstrated by
the popular image of all Chinese women as sex workers.

(14:19):
And you know, I think, like looking back on this,
this is extremely recognizable that this is literally just an
anti trafficking panic, like this whole thing, it's just it's
like this this this this is like this is like
proto this is like proto q shiit um and you know,
and like like there is there is legitimately like sex

(14:39):
trafficking going on, but the existence of like like the
fact that there is sex trafficking gets used as this
sort of like political and racial image. It gets projected
onto just like all Asian women who get portrayed as
a trafficking victims and you simultaneously be like saved but
then also expelled from the US to preserve both there
in the U s's purity. And you know, like this

(15:02):
image of Asian women has literally never changed. You will
find it today like to this day, people find people
using like the exact same racist projections like consciously you're
unconsciously to talk about Asian immigrants and like particularly SPA workers.
It's it's this like it's it's just like incredibly toxic
mix of like Christian moralism, sexism, horror phobia, and racism.
And the racism element is really important because like, okay,

(15:24):
well this is going on, Like prostitution is legal in California,
Like you can just do this, like there there's there's
no law against it um, you know, and so and
so you think that like oh hey, there, you know
that the sort of like Christian panic would just be
targeted against brothels, like no, it's it's like very specifically
against Asian women. And it's you know, this is because
all of this sort of like the Christian fears about

(15:46):
sex work is you know, and and their horror phobia
is and and still is today incredibly deeply fused with
this sort of like that this is this is like
incredibly racist like concern over the purity of the race yea.
And yeah, you know this this will sound familiar to
anyone who's been like paying attention at all to any

(16:09):
of the trafficking panics and if the anti trans stuff,
any of just interracial dating was only extremely recently allowed
at all of like the biggest Christian universities, like like
they have like they yeah, not a it is it's
a it's a thing. It's a yeah, it's and that's

(16:30):
and like the thing about it, it's it's really it's
it's really close to the surface, right, even even when
they're not explicitly just saying it, like if you look,
it's been about two seconds looking, it's like, oh, this
is what's going on here? Huh yeah? Yeah, And you know,
so so that that that's sort of that's sort of
one side of this whole thing, right, is you have

(16:52):
this sort of like you have this sort of like
Christian like anti trafficking panic that that creates that that like,
you know, it creates the sort of image of way
age women are and has a lot of effects. But
the other side of this coin is that there is
a just incredible amount of sexual violence that America has
inflicted on Asian women, like particularly through its war. Successive
invasions of the Philippines, China, Korea, and Vietnam saw American

(17:16):
soldiers committing just untold and horrific sexual violence on Asian women,
like to to the extent that like the US essentially
just inherits Japan's like mass military rape system in Korea
and just runs it for itself. Like there's this all
of all of those things came home so massively, all

(17:39):
the things that were normalized to oversee is just came
right back when all the soldiers came back. Yep, yep. Yes,
I think it's gonna say next year, like the and
this this has a like the I don't know, I
think people get the relationship between pop culture depictions and
of you know, racist despictions of people in pop culture

(18:01):
and the actual culture backwards, like they don't help and
they spread it. But like you know, the the like
me love you long time ship from like Kubrick like
that that doesn't come out of nowhere. That's not just
Kubrick like that's that is that's something that was brought
home by the American racists and you know, like when
when they got back and that stuff. Like it's it's
not just that like the stuff is being spread by media.

(18:23):
It's that the media is being influenced by the people
who did this stuff and then came home. It is
the full circle thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I mean
even still now there's such a such a degree of
like Asian women being like an object to possess, even
more so than right, like like it's like even more
so than like regular women, which obviously under under like

(18:44):
a lot of like patriarchal stuff in the States and
you know overseas everywhere, you know, women are seen as
objects to possess, but specifically there's that is so much
heightened for uh women of color and specifically like Asian women.
Um that that idea, I mean you see that everywhere
for the libertarian Asian girlfriend. You like you see this

(19:04):
in media all the time. Um that like the Asian
wife is something you own, and it's it's a very
extremely pervasive Yeah, And I think the reason why is that,
like this image gets refreshed every time of generation comes
from from a war in Asia. And you know that

(19:25):
that's what because because the US has been fighting wars
in Asia like forever, I mean basically since like it
we've been fighting wars and Asians late Asian hundreds, and
you know, like the violence of each subject generation just
sort of refreshes this image of like Asian women as
prostitutes bodies are supposed to just be like accessible to
white men at all times. But this has a sort

(19:48):
of there's a kind of clash that happens here too,
because like on the one hand you have this sort
of like racial and sexual feticization, and on the other
hand you of Christian horror phobia. And this gives you
this culture where like Asian women are at once seen
as like hyperdesirable and hyper available, but are also just
like utterly despised for both and this sort of like

(20:10):
racist pathology, this like this like this like this this
sexual desire bixed with loathing. He's at just the absolute
core of of the Atlantic shooting, and as if to
remind us if its origin, Long carries out as massacre
on the fifty three anniversary of my lie and we're bad.

(20:31):
So I think we now have enough context to like
go back to Long's initial description of why he carries
out the attack, which to self describe sex addiction. Is
desired to quote eliminate temptation. Yeah, Because I mean we
cannot overstate the degree to which both the police, the church,
and the shooter himself framed this not as an anti
astion thing, but as like as a as a as

(20:52):
something addressing his sex addiction. Um, that was the angle
it talked about it. Now, there's all of the anti
ation stuff that is like right under the surface, but
it's like probably up so much of what's going on.
But the thing that they were publicly talking about was
this uh so called sex addiction. Yeah. And and I
think this is this is you know, this is this
is a very important angle of this is we should

(21:14):
actually talk about what that is and because and to
understand because he just not like okay, so like the
sex edition is I think like actually sort of a thing,
but people that is a hotly debated Yeah. I don't know.
I'm not a psychiatrist. Don't take advice to me. I
think it's the slightly more legit of the two. Things
that the of the two like fake syndrome things we're

(21:36):
gonna talk about here, but this is not what's going
on with him, and you want to understand it. Yeah, yeah,
what's going on with this? We need to go back
to enemy of the show, purity culture. Um friend friend
of a friend of the pod. Yeah, I'm gonna say no.
I I refused, I had I had friends, and there
are a couple of times and I was like, I

(21:56):
refused to call this friend of the show. Damn it.
Like I can't do myself to do it right. Joshua
Harris just unsubscribed so long, like by all accounts, is
extremely religious. He's heavily involved both his church and his
high school. Like his high school he's a public high school.
But the public high school has like Christian athletic groups,

(22:18):
which is a fun thing that they let you do
in public schools. Um, yeah, it's great. H So you know,
to get it, to get it an understanding of like
the kind of baptism we're dealing with here. Here's a
line from the church's by laws. Quote. We believe that
any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality,

(22:38):
bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography, or any attempt
to change one's sex or disagreement with one's biological sex,
is sinful and offensive to God. Yep, you know, and
all of that's in the Bible. Yeah, they have you
you can tell because they cite three passages. Not if
we say that, Well, okay, I know there is there

(23:00):
is beast reality stuff. Bit is I think that the
incess is in there. Well, I mean there's doing this stuff.
But parts of the Bible are pro incests. Parts the
Bible are Antians. Yeah, it's um. The Bible has a
real sticky relationship with the topic of incest um. But yes,
I'm sure they thoroughly slight all of their passages for

(23:23):
they talk about when they talk about bisexual conduct. Yeah,
it's well, I mean, you know, the one that's great
is the attempting to change one's sex or disagreement with
one's biological sex. A thing that I I'm guessing they're
citing God created males and females, and males and females,

(23:44):
He created them. And I don't actually think so because
they're not they didn't. Okay, yeah, this this is me.
I'm just I'm just speculating based on experience in these
in these types of types of groups. Yeah. So so
speaking of these types of groups, so Long is like, Okay,
so Long's church like expels him after the the shooting murder. Yeah, because,

(24:10):
like I'm they violated their own by laws because there's
no way they could have done their expulsion their actual
explosion protocol and that amount of time, because they would
have acted like send people to visit him in jail. See,
I think you're overestimating the degree to which churches care
about what their by laws actually say. Well, I mean
it's the blanking on it. What's the thing Matt Matt eighteen.

(24:30):
There's like the thing that churches have that's like their
explosion protocol and they like send someone to this this
is the thing into I think you're I think you're
slightly overestimating how much people actually care about that, which
it's all just a racket used to prop up the
authority of the leaders and push people towards whatever political
gains that the movement has. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, speaking

(24:52):
of getting people to submit to the authority and polluting
instant movements. Yeah, So we talked about purity culture on
this show, like we had dausium um. So we're not
gonna go into an enormous amount of detail about it here.
The very should at least describe what it is. So
the very very very short version is, it's like it's
an incredibly patriarchal, like evangelical Christian religious system in which

(25:16):
like sex before marriage is seen as like an incredible sin,
and there's just like like focused on the purity of
the wife and like like a woman is essentially the
property of her husband, and the entire goal of existence
just to like bare and raised children. So it was
it was invented, but it was the modern version that
was invented in the nineties, strongly influenced by a book
written by someone named Joshua Harris. It was called I

(25:38):
Kissed a Dating Goodbye. The book promotes a pro courtship
to marriage pipeline instead of dating. I think dating will
probably encourage you to have sex before marriage, which is
of course bad um. And under under all of this
under like the actual like you know, if you if
you if you started digging into this all the stuff
it talks about in terms of like sexual purity um

(25:59):
is a about you know, women are responsible for men's
sexual like um sins right, Like if if a man
lusts for a woman, that's the woman's fault, not the
man's fault. Right. It's because women must be presenting in
a way that causes that to happen. Um. Right, So
women's women's bodies and clothes should be designed in a
way so that it will not cause men to stumble um.

(26:23):
And by stumble they mean get horny um. And you
know it's something that you know, your your body is
both this thing that should be pure, but also you
should be ashamed of it, right because it causes the sin. Uh.
Women can't really have any sexual desire on their own.
Women are going to really enjoy sex. Um. It's it's
specifically for men, and it's for procreation. Um. It's in

(26:44):
in in intense value tied to your idea of like
virginity and virginity extending out to like personal purity and
spiritual purity, Like if you have sex before marriage, you
are like like unclean. It's it's like it's like your
it's like you're chewed up gum, Like you like you
would not pick up someone's Like if you found some

(27:04):
chewed up gum on the street, you wouldn't put it
back in your mouth. Right, So that's the idea, Like
if you if you're not a virgin, you are you
were like chewed up gum, Like you are already used,
you're spent um. So you have so you save safer
marriage so that only your husband can chew up your gum,
and then after your marriage you're just stuck there forever. Right.
It's also like very very very anti divorce um. And

(27:26):
there's really no difference, Like there's they don't really there's
not much discussion around consent. Oddly enough, you know as
you know that they surprise you based on what I
all just said, like obviously they don't care about consent. Um.
There's like they they view any they view a sexual
assault just as bad as consensual sex before marriage. They

(27:47):
see them as the same thing. Um. It's it's basically this,
it's the same structure as that they're both in equal
sin ah And I mean that is that is purity
culture one oh one. We could we could just do
an entire episode on pure any culture, and we probably
would do. We can do series on it, like yeah,
like yeah, yeah, I think the really important thing about

(28:07):
it is like this is basically like in terms of
they're sort of being like like I don't know what
if you call it a counterculture, but they're sort of
being like an evangelical cultural machine, like it's this like
this is this is what they're pushing as like as
like their mass movement for for youth expect especially in
the nineties and two thousand's, we have we have stuff
like purity rings, which is like you know, when you

(28:28):
when you're a teen, you'll get like objects or jewelry
which are like like almost like magical items do you
put on to like show that I am going to
keep myself pure and by doing this, by doing this action,
it's symbolizing that and therefore internalizing it. There's also um
purity balls, which is not what you'll so when would

(28:49):
use the word purity ball, certain things will come to mind, right, Um,
Unfortunately they're not as fun as what that's what you
are thinking. Um, A purity ball is just like a
formal dance event, you know, like a ball that you
put on um, which is meant to it's a it's
a meant to. Usually it's like fathers take their daughters
there and then their daughters swear to make a virginity

(29:12):
pledge um to protect their purity of mind, body, and
spirit um so that they will not then infect you know, boys,
uh and cause them to stumble and and commit the
sin of lust, which again is an incredibly weird thing
to do at a ball, Like, yes, it's so weird.

(29:33):
Well also, yeah, it's most most Yeah, it's well, I
think I think we've got into enough event. Yeah, but
the specific sort of thing, I think the last thing
I will look at. There, there is one more thing
we're gonna so before that, I do want to point
out that Joshua Harris, who like is in a lot

(29:54):
of ways responsible, like single handedly responsible for an enormous
amount of this, she is Japanese. Yeah, fucking thanks for
that one, buddy, Great job, good ship man. In ten,
he announced that he and his wife were divorcing. Yeah,
so you know, and and and now and now no

(30:14):
longer considers himself like the type of Christian he was
before I'm unclear what his actual spiritual beliefs at the moment,
but he did he did try to distance himself from
his from from what I've read, like it's unclear that
he knows. So oh, he he knows. He definitely knows.
I can, I can, I can. I can guarantee that

(30:37):
he's he used to be running. He has a new
grift now. It sucks they always get new grips. But
actually we will, yeah, we will get into the new
grift industry in a second. Um. But Yeah, one of
the other things that's that's a big part of this
is like a deep and abiding hatred of porn. Like
all of this is yeah, like as you said, like

(30:57):
in the list of by laws watching porn again, it's
the same as sexual assaults. Yeah, it's a huge it's
morally the same level of sin. Yeah. And and like
you know, I mean, and and you can read that
both ways as how seriously they take watching porn and
how not seriously it takes sexual assault because it does
go it does go both ways. Yeah. Um. And this
this thing, the fact that that this is this is

(31:19):
like considered a sin, is the apotheosis, Like the apotheosis
that this is is porn addiction, which again like not
really dubious existence. This is this is even more dubious
sex than sex addiction, Like there's no there, this is
this is like this is just fake. Um. But there's
an entire culture that's that's a like developed around stopping

(31:40):
manifest seeing poor and these like there's like these incredibly
elaborate accountability setups where like there's like apps you install
on your stuff, Like there's ways to alter your IP
addressed to watch certain sites. Yeah, Robert Aaron Long the shooter,
like he he uses a flip phone instead of a
smart phone because he thinks having a phone will like
lead int senation. Um. Now Long. Yeah. And the product

(32:03):
of this is that there's like there's like this entire
industry that is built up around quote unquote treating the
porn addiction. Yeah. Um, and it's it's all bullshit. But
Long had spent at twice been in one of these
facilities called hope Quest. Now, hope Quest is an affiliateive
for old friends that focus in the family. But that's

(32:23):
not actually the part I want to talk about, because
what's more interesting about hope Quest is that it's founded
by roy A Blankenship, a former ex gay who left
both hope quests and the X gay community to live
with his husband. Now, now this what a what a
what what what a what a funny pattern we keep
finding out? Yeah? No, now I think I think my
two listeners, if you were, if you were not as

(32:45):
cursed as as as we are as we are, and
you don't know what an ex gay is, um X
gays were there were this movement of like evangelical gaze
who claimed that like this this is the thing that
starts in like the nineties and twos. They claimed that
like they've gone to conversion therapy and it made them
not gat yeah yeah, and and this and you know,
and in partial part of partial was going on here

(33:05):
is they claimed that that like they did it voluntarily
because like involuntarily doing conversion therapy had gotten to a
point where it was like bad pr wise, because Jesus Christ,
you were like torturing children and they're still torturing children,
but but this time they're like, no, it's voluntary, and
that this is like they're big, this is the rights,
big cultural campaign against the gay right through nineties in
two thousands and uh, like I I would say this

(33:27):
like it's it's not exactly the same thing as the
way they use detansitioners, but like there's a lot of
it's very similar. And of course obviously that we now
have the x X gay movement. Yeah yeah, and and
you know and and and to to like so okay,
So like the X game movement falls apart in like
the late two thousands and early doesn't tends because like
it doesn't work. The leaders personal all the leaders were

(33:48):
initially gay, said they were X gay and then kept
having gay sex because that rules. Yeah, and they all
kind of realized maybe we should stop doing this thing
that keeps killing kids. Yeah, And Blaken Blankenship too is
credit like he'd been a big person doing this and
then he was just like like one of his friends
like commit suicide and he's like, oh shit, and so
like he stops, like he's announced this in version therapy

(34:10):
and he's now appropriar so many of the focus on
the family. People who were involved in like Love One
out all of these escape programs. So many of them
then renounced it, accepted their their gayness, and then moved
to Portland's fucking Oregon. So many of them didn't this though,
like this this is what's interesting about this. So okay, So,

(34:32):
so while he was sort of figuring this out, Blancolin
ship had a founded hope quest, right, and so he
leaves with the people who are running it now, like
our X gays who they're like the only X gays
left who didn't renounce it and who like still claimed
to be ex I mean, they they've taken their stuff
about how like homosexuality should be like dealt with by

(34:53):
saying by having by marrying women and just not acting
on it or whatever. Like they they took that stulf
out of their bios, but they apparently they still believe it,
like like they've they these people have never probably come
out against it. And you know what essentially happened was
that like enough of enough of the X gays, like
but the thing collapsed enough that like they had to
find and they had to find a new thing to do.

(35:14):
And the new thing they found to do was they
went and they went into the porn addiction treatment industry. Yeah,
and we also if if if you want more background
like the X gay thing, you can listen to my
my two part are on focus on the family and
James Dobson for Behind the Bastards. Also for our week
on the War on Transpeople, we discussed some of the
same stuff for the first episode, which is the evangelical

(35:38):
gay marriage, um like thing that. So yeah, we we
we have we we we do, we do have something
like produced scripted stuff on these topics if you want
more background on them. Yeah. Unfortunately, this is a this
is a story where there's like every single thread you've
ever done suddenly is coming together in one moment of
horrific violence. This is where long like winds up for

(36:00):
is like treatments for like poor and sex addiction addictions,
which I kindot emphasize enough. This is literally what he's
talking about is literally that he watches porn like like
that that's what porn sex addiction like means. And because
none of this is real, the treatments like don't work
because again it's all fake. And I do would also say,
hope quest Is operates out of Georgia. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,

(36:25):
but you know so so so. So he goes into
treatment twice and he's he's he says it like Maverick,
which is this like recovery center. Um, it doesn't work,
and he goes home and his parents kick him out
of his house for watching porn. And you know, I
think this is something that like is important to understand,
which is that the people inside of this world really

(36:47):
deeply believe this stuff, right and and like watching porn
has real social consequences for them, and it has you know,
and this, this has, this has has has like a
profound fact on how these people think. I'm going to
read a quote from a Washington Post article. Bayless, who
was Long's roommate at Maverick Recovery, a sober living facility

(37:08):
in Roswell, Georgia, in two thousand nineteen and two twenty
and the months between his stay at Hope stays at
Hope Quest, said Long felt his very salvation was at
stake as he told his roommate that he was quote
living in sin and not walking in the light. He
was walking in darkness. So this this is how these
people like see this stuff right, like like this is

(37:30):
this is literally about whether you're you're like yeah, they're
talking about like something extremely existential like it like it
is this all seems very silly to people who are
not inside it, because it is it is. It is absurd.
But if the people involved in it it is like
the totality of the universe, like it is, it is

(37:51):
so big, it's like the biggest thing. It's so important
because you're you're determining what you're, what you will, what's
your conscious being will exist for for thousands and thousands
of years like that, Like this is what they actually believe.
So it's super important, like it's it is it is
worth killing before because it's that's that's how important this is.

(38:12):
Like like I think, I think there's no sense to
which it is more important than life or death because
you dying, Like okay, you die, once you go to
your physical death doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah, and
and this, you know, and you know, we talked about this,
like it's there. There's those things. There's there's a social consequences.
You can get kicked out of your house, you can
kick out of your church if you keep doing this,

(38:33):
like like these churches will kick you out. Um, and
and this, you know, this makes the ideology at work
here incredibly powerful. And it provides a mixture of this
like this this really incredible self hatred for like falling
into sin and giving him too temptation. And it also
creates a hatred of the temptation itself. And this brings

(38:54):
us all the way up to the shooting. UM purity culture.
Purity culture is the key that unlocks, you know, the
meeting of Long's words. We can understand the explanation that
the police gave, which again like he apparently has an
issue what he considers a sex addiction and sees these
locations as something that allows him to go to these places,
and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate,

(39:14):
you know. And there was a at the memorial for
for the shooting last year, UM Sex Work or organizer
kail and Jong said this, they hate us so they
can hate themselves less. And I think that's that's a
really great that is a really good analysis. Yes, yeah,

(39:35):
it's a perfect calculation of like what's happening here. But
this is the part of the story with the media
just violently and spectacularly fox up to endaupt. They they
dropped the purity ball. You might say, yeah, I mean
it's it's it's really horrible there, Like what they've essentially

(39:56):
done is an act two years of racist violence against
people who had either literally just survived a mass shooting,
or who are literally dead. And the way they do this,
the press reads long talking about sex edition addiction, and
they immediately assumed that the women in these massage parlors
have been having sex with him, and they start, there's
like this whole hunt that they do to like search
for evidence that massage workers were doing like full service

(40:17):
sex work, based off of again the words of a
literal racist mass murderer and their own racist preconception that
like all Asian women, especially SPA workers, are also sex workers. Yep.
And like you know, on the one hand, yeah, it's
true that this stuff is fueled by horr phobia and
also like morally, who gives a ship what they were doing.
But the immediate problem here is that by doing this
witch hunt, you were sicking the police on the survivors

(40:40):
you're putting you're putting a survivors in immense legal and
physical danger. Yeah, and and we we will talk about
this more next episode. But like, these women have already
seen more police violence and police raids than all of
the journalists writing about this combined I've seen in their
entire lives. And if any of these people had bothered
to spend five sec thinking about what purity culture is

(41:03):
they would have realized it. Long is from a fanatically
puritanical culture, a culture where, for example, in massage given
by a woman where the man is like almost entirely naked,
uh is something that would absolutely have been considered a
sexual service. And like you know, and and if you
think about this again for like five seconds, right when

(41:26):
he's talking about removing temptation, he already thinks of all
of these women as sex workers, because that's that's what
he thinks the massage is. He thinks like that that
that that's that's how he thinks about massages. It's yeah,
it is it women are the like women do this
then they cause men to sin, right, it's not it's

(41:48):
nothing to do with what's going on with the man.
It is specifically what the woman is doing. Yeah. Well,
and and and even then like it doesn't actually like
I think I think that the important distinction here is
that it does not matter when Long talks about how
this is a place that was giving intemptation and also
like like he was giving intemptation and he was like
he was going there for his sex edition. Like it

(42:08):
doesn't actually matter to him whether or not any of
these women have ever like exchange money set at all.
It doesn't, It doesn't, it doesn't need to be, yeah,
because these people are fucking like it just engulfed in
Like it's so totally engulfed in this incredibly like violence
and racist and misogynists be homophobic ideology that it just

(42:30):
sort of you know, like that that's just how they think.
And I think that this is where we're going to
return one final time this episode to race, because there's
a mistake that people make thinking about this analytically that
prevents him from understanding both what's happening in Atlanta and
how sort of capitalist and racist violence happens everywhere. Which
is that like, okay, so right when this happened, um,

(42:54):
like when when when the press conference dropped, you got
all that there are a lot of people like I
think Glenn Greenwald did this like a leaf sing like
there's a whole crew of people who were like this
isn't about Asian racism, but all this is about him
like hating sex workers, and okay, it is true that
human labor has been transformed into a commodity that can
be bought and sold at will. Now on on a

(43:17):
on a more theoretical level. Right, you will see sort
of incredibly theory brain people who will talk about how
you know in in March's Critique of Political Economy, right,
all labor is astracting, interchangeable, each each unit of labor
time is equivalent, identical, and exchangeable. But here in the
massage parlor, this is a deadly simplification this labor. That

(43:39):
the labor that is going on here is Asian. It
is indelibly stamped with race and ethnicity and nationality and
hundreds of years of violence and perception. Um Rumors Paca,
a assistant professor at the Institute of Women's Studies at
the University of Georgia, roode a piece last year called
white supremacy in the Wellness Industry, or why it matters
that that this happened at a spot ah Um, And

(44:01):
I'm going to read a passage on it because it's
very good. Massage spas, also called salons or parlors, like
the one where these crimes took place, are part of
a broader industrial complex that capitalizes on the racist belief
that Asian people and Asian woman in particular, possess magical, spiritual,
and sexual healing abilities. These attitudes belong to an entrenched

(44:22):
Orientalist infrastructure in the United States that connects yoga and
meditation and massage to tourism, pleasure, and escape, signaled by
the exotic tropical flower and the photo above, if there's
a photo of flower at a parlor. Yeah, you know.
And and this this labor, the labor of of of
the massage that is happening here is it depends almost

(44:48):
entirely on a very specific performance of a specific kind
of Asian femininity. And you know, when this sort of
gender and racialized violence. But when when this gender and
racialized labor comes into contact with Long and all of
this historical forces that he's bearing, he murders the workers.
And yeah, I think, yeah, this is the part of

(45:12):
the story of the Atlanta shooting that I think if
people know about Atlanta shooting at all, like, this is
the part they know about, right, they know the story
of Robert Darren Long. But there are other stories here,
stories that aren't stories that in large parts are just
not about the US at all. Um. There are the
stories of the victims, the survivors, and the absolute hell

(45:34):
that brought them into the massage parlor in the first place.
On the horrific night, and those are the stories that
we're going to tell him part two. Yeah, well that
doesn't for us today. I do want to say, I know, uh,
I know Christmas planning these for the annivers three of
the shooting, but they proved to be quite the daunting

(45:56):
task to put together. I had to get had to
get pushed back for a while. So but but big
thanks to you for doing the work too. Read through
all of the horrible things and if like the other
thing I said about this, like if you if you
think this is bad, wait till part two, which is
even more wide spanning, and it has horrific and disturbing

(46:18):
violence in a way that will I don't know, reduced
media tears multiple times. And yeah, we'll leave you an
existential dread of the condition of this world. Yeah, and
I guess again there there is there, There is ways
to combat it, right, because all of these a lot
a lot of these things, all right, you know, problems
with like viewpoint and ideas in terms of how we

(46:41):
view sex, how we view women, how we view race, um.
And there are things that when you see you can
interrogate in people, um, especially if you're especially if you're
a Christian, if you're if you're going to church, these
there are things to watch out for and you can
push back on because and doing so can maybe save

(47:02):
people's lives, because these ideas have a death count. Yeah,
and I think I think there's another part of this too,
which is that you know, I mean, the reason we
talk about purity culture stuff so much, the reason we
talk about the mobilizations of the evangelical rights so much,
is that they keep producing these movements that you know,

(47:22):
that that put that put our lives in danger. And
the only way that we can stop this, and this
is a thing that we can do, is you have
to actually destroy their movement, right, you have you have
to you have to actually break their power. You have
to you know, you have to find various ways to
break the power, break the power of these churches, and

(47:42):
you have to find ways to break the power of
their political movements. And that is not an easy task.
But if if we want to live in a world well,
I mean, just quite blank, if if we want to
live in a world and not in you know, like
four degrees fahrenheit, like unlivable death escape, like, we have
to deal with these people because they are the source

(48:05):
of almost every right wing movement that that we're facing,
and they have to be crushed before they do this again. Yeah,
and they're they're going to try. I mean there's yeah,
because the biggest thing would would say is like reaching
out to people who you know are in us or
if you if you go to church. I think it's

(48:25):
your duty as a Christian to push back on these
things because I'm not gonna bash anyone specifically for whatever
religion they have. I understand why people have this. I
I can see how they work. Um. You know, I
was raised in something very similar. Um. But you can
you can still push back on the type of rhetoric

(48:48):
that leads to these things in the type of like
like objectification and racism that necessitates violence and gets people
to be okay with violence, um, and pushing back against
like a Christian apocalypse to worldviews and like the idea
your your actions will determine your you know how, the

(49:08):
spiritual quality of your soul and where it's going to
reside for all of eternity. Right, All these things are
our ideas that are pretty pretty like innately dangerous. Um.
And there's ways to do religion that don't have that. Yeah,
but I think I think that is a good enough

(49:30):
place till even for today, because I know part two
we're gonna have some more more fire. Why why widespread problems? Yeah, alright,
well this has been make it happen here. You can
find us in the social media places that happened here pods.

(49:51):
You can also flee into the woods. Flee into the woods.
But but but before you flee into the woods, subscribe
to the pod and leave a five star review. Bye
bye bye everybody. I see you tomorrow. Yep, it's it

(50:23):
could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and
some other stuff occasionally. I'm Robert Evans. Welcome to the
show today, our guests fresh off their new hit movie
by paramount Garrison Davis. Uh and and yeah, what what

(50:46):
what I'm doing? Like a like a thing, Chris Garrison.
Garrison's lost the thread? Why don't you pick it up?
I also have lost the thread. So here's the one.
This has been very confusing for of an episode, absolutely baffling. Look,
you want things to not be confusing, you have somebody
else introduce your podcast. That's just the way it goes noted. Yeah,

(51:13):
so what welcome to part two of the Atlantis shooting. Um,
we are back with actually less Atlanta this time, but
more shooting. Oh good, sorry, this is a very absurd
Really we found ourselves, dear God, just a normal day

(51:38):
at work. Oh take it away, Chris, you got this,
You got this. We believe in you. There's there's a
tendency I think among Asian American writers where when we
get confronted with what are you know, considered quote unquote
Asian American stories, there's almost inevitably an autobiographical pivot that happens.

(52:01):
Like at some points in the piece Um made Jong,
the author of the Vanity Fair piece I mentioned last episodes,
that's been a major source for both these episodes. It
doesn't her piece, So do I mean? Like dozens and
dozens and dozens of as American writers who are you know,
much more accomplished and talented than I am, And like,
I get it. I I don't blame them for it.

(52:22):
I think it's a powerful way to anchor a story
and understand the story. And I also think that it's
why we miss like half of the story that we
when we talk about things, because you know, the the
the audio autobiographical focus has this tendency to narrow the
scope into looking at just sort of the US. And

(52:46):
this story and the story of Asian Americans in general,
isn't just a story about sort of a minority in
the US or about American imperialism. It's about Asia itself,
and here especially it's about China and Korea to lesser
cent Japan. And you know, the histories of these places
have as much to do with why the people who

(53:08):
died in Atlanta were in those rooms on that day
as Christian purity culture does. And you know, by by
bym actually looking at this, we we got to introduce
another key player in this horror show who only sort
of appeared change intily in part one, which is capitalism.
Because capitalism is about to show up and make just
all of this monumentally worse. Yeah. It's kind of like

(53:30):
Steven Seagal in that way. Yeah, I think more much
more active than Steven Seagal, but by capitalism, unfortunately, moves
at an incredibly relentless pace. Yeah. Capitalism's knees are an
incredible shape. Yeah. So, and and this, this, this brings
us back to Atlanta itself. Now, Yo Fong died a

(53:54):
hero in the final moments of her life. As shots
rang across Young Zation missaw she motioned for Marcus Leone,
still half naked on the massage table, to stay still
and wait for her to walk in front of him
before he died behind the massage table by covering Leon's
movement as she opened the door. She sacrificed her life
to save the life of a man she'd met just

(54:15):
minutes before. Her award, in typical American fashion, was a
bullet in the head. It took six days for her
family in China to realize that she had been killed.
By village custom, the remains of an unmarried woman who
left the village could not re enter it to be buried.
Her body thus lay unclaimed in a morgue for nineteen
days before she was buried in the land of her

(54:36):
killer at a funerals attended entirely by strangers. Marcus Leone,
the man Fong sacrificed her life to save, was forced
to return to work at FedEx just three days after
surviving the massacre. The sound of the packages he dropped
on his delivery runs sounded like gunshots. He quit soon after.

(54:57):
There is no justice in this world. Only an unending
parade of or the details of which are somehow each
worse than the last. And it is. Yeah, this is
I think what I wanted to sort of what I
wanted to talk about this episode, which is that, like,
it's not just that there was a shooting, it's that

(55:18):
each element of why everyone is there is its own
successive horror story, and the conditions that produced this horror
or not. You know, they're not just two conditions that
produce Probader and Long. They're not just the conditions that
produced to shoot her. They are the conditions that produced

(55:39):
sail Fung. She spent almost her entire life as a
miket workers, supporting a family whose most pressing concern was
attempting to marry her off. And and I think it's
worth tracing out these conditions and how they developed. Because
a twelve year old girl drops out of middle school
to work at a factory fifty miles away and that
eventually is gunned down by an American racist is not

(56:00):
how the future of Asia was supposed to go. Like,
you know, I I don't have much love and imagine that. Yeah,
it's like I don't have much loved for now, but
I don't think if you showed mouth this he would
be like, oh my god, this is the future that
I wanted for my people. Like this, things have gone
very badly wrong, and I think to understand how we

(56:21):
got to this hell, we need to go back to
another hell, which is the beginning of the Korean War.
And you know, we've talked about the effects that the
Korean War had on Korean women in the last episode,
but I think there's a few other things that are
worth emphasizing here, one of which is that the absolute
devastation that the war rought on North and South Korea

(56:43):
is incalculable. I mean, the effects of this I still
felt to this day. It was a utterly devastating war. Um.
But it also has sort of more subtle effects on
the sort of politics and economics of of the region

(57:04):
because what one of the you know, one of the
very important things about this war is that the US
is fighting in East Asia, and this means that the
US is going to leave an enormous army in South Korea,
which has its own military and sort of political and
economic consequences. And you know, those troops are still there
to this day, like technically fighting a war which has

(57:26):
never formally ended. And you know, we'll come back a
bit to this later. But this has a enormous application
for the entire region. Um. I've I've talked on bastards
before about like you know, about so many effects this has.
But you know, Korea and later Vietnam are a major
like the wars, the US fights there are a major

(57:47):
factor behind the industrialization of Japan, which sees you know,
enormous U S investment as part of this attempt to
like shorten American supply lines by exporting their military industrial
complex to East Asia. You know, we talked about the
Japanese ankle this, but sell Korea is likewise industrialized, so
American capital for you know, pretty much the same reason. Um,
you know, and and and this goes on to the
extent that like Korean troops like fight on the side

(58:11):
of the US in Vietnam, and you know, so in
South Korea's production base proves a sort of a pivotal
military asset for the US war machine in the East. Now,
the thing I think, and I think I think that
part of it like is understood decently well because you know,
if you if you if if you do if you
like you know literally anything about this region. You've you've
seen the effects of this stuff. But the part of

(58:34):
it I think is less understood is that in China,
this the war has a similar effect, which is that
communist leadership fights this war right and it immediately becomes
clear to them that there is a looping possibility they're
gonna have to fight the US again. And if they're
gonna have to fight the US again, they need an
actual sort of modern industrial base to fight a war

(58:55):
against the US. And this, you know, this eas to
sort of militarization, industrization, and you you get a look
at two very different kinds of state led developments, uh,
which I'm going to call state led development corruption and
state state led development socialism question mark, which sort of

(59:16):
which sort of a play out in China and Korea. UM.
And you know, I think it's it's it's worth actually
talking about this because both of these systems are essentially
going to collapse, and when they do, they are going
to send an enormous number of people, both in China
and Korea, you know, spreading, spreading across the world seeking

(59:36):
like any kind of sort of economic salvation. And a
lot of the people who are killed in Atlanta are
in Atlanta because of these because of these crises. Yes,
so so. The first of these is the chapel system
in Korea, which is sort of informally established by the
dictator Park junk Key is like the core of his

(59:56):
plan for economic development, and it generates a number of
extremely powerful family owned megan conglomerates with intimate ties to
the state and these sort of various political factions, and
these conglomerates which control just vast sections of the Korean economy.
I like, like, like to this day, Samsung, which is
the largest the remaining chabels, Like I think I think

(01:00:19):
they're they're total percentage of the GDP of Korea's like
seventeen percent or something. It's like, it's it's absolutely absurd. Jesus, Yeah,
like and and and and like and the thing is
that you know, and it's sort of it's basically about
this is that like the chabels are much weaker than
the ust to be um for reasons that we will
get to in a bit. And you know, when when

(01:00:43):
when they're found and when they're sort of at the
height of their powers they have, you know, they're they're
they're established with three goals. Um, there's an attempt to
develop the economy. I you know, there's an attempt to
sort of the fuel. There's attempt to sort of fuel
the Abaric in South Korean war machines. And the third
thing I'm trying to do is to make a lot

(01:01:04):
of people in the government and their allies indescribably rich.
And it works sort of amazingly, which is a weird
thing to say about development regime started by military edcatorship,
but they have they have an enormous amount of mill
of American capital military aids, and like they do successfully develop,

(01:01:26):
they kill in enormous sumber of people in the process,
but you know, they do it. On on the other side,
you have Chinese datelight developments, and this is also about
economic development and fueling the military. But you know, the
goal here is to create an economic base for socialism
and this does not work. Um. There there there's number

(01:01:48):
of complicated reasons for this. The simplest one is that
China just doesn't get the kind of investment technology transfer
south Korea gets until like way later. Um. But the
other really important element of this for this story is
about the urban world divide, and this is another thing
I've talked about Bastards like on I've talked about on
Bastards a bit, but I think it's worth going into

(01:02:10):
the details a little bit because otherwise a lot of
the stuff that's going to happen that is, you know,
the the part of the story that is directly sending
twelve year olds off to a factory and Shenzen like
don't make any sense without it. So to make a

(01:02:31):
very complicated and shifting set of economic programs like as
simple as possible. UM. Chinese industrial policy dread what's sort
of called the socialist period is about extracting grain from
the countryside and fuelly and funneling get into urban industrial
developments and you know, to get it, to get it
like understanding of what we're talking about here. So the

(01:02:52):
CCP is essentially deliberately under developing the countryside in favor
of developing cities. And this is this is the supposed
to state policy. UM from three in nine of the
Chinese population is doing agricultural labor, but agriculture receives less
than ten percent of state investments over the same period,
so they are like really really really incredibly not funneling

(01:03:14):
any resources back into into rural areas. Yeah, I mean
is there a degree to that? Is there a degree
of that that is maybe related to like I know
in the USS are a lot of the early left
wing resistance to the Soviet regime came from rural areas. Um,

(01:03:34):
is there anything to do with that? Like, is it
kind of a desire to avoid developing these places that
are less controllable? No? And this is this is the
sort of interesting thing about China is that I mean, Okay,
so the CCP originally has an urban base, but they
managed to get their retire urban base killed. So this

(01:03:55):
is this is this is the cause of like like this,
this is this is one of the reasons for the
center Soviet split. Like this is basically like salon in
Trotsky or bickering, and their bickering gets like a million
Chinese communist killed, and that means that you know, this
this this is this is where the sort of rise
of Mao comes in, because Mao is a mau as
a peasant organizer, and once the entire World Party is dead,

(01:04:17):
it's like, well, okay, so now we have a peasant
base and they have they actually have a really they
have they have like a basically unprecedented level of of
sort of buy in from the countryside. But the problem
is that the party just isn't interested in world development
because the thing that they want is they want to
be able to develop military power and they want to
be able to develop like heavy industry, and those aren't

(01:04:39):
things that they think you can do in the countryside.
And so their strategy is just to just I mean
just literally it's just pure grain extraction from the countryside
and then using that to feel industrial development, which they're
doing for i mean largely ideological reasons, but it also
does have to do with the fact that China, like
like people people talk a lot about how like, you know,

(01:05:01):
the communist revolution in Russia happens and like the least
developed country in Europe, and it's like, yeah, but like
Russia had like several times more industrial capacity in Russian
Revolution than China does after the war. So this is
a country that is like a complete economic backwater. And
so you know, this, this is this is part of
what they're doing. I thought it doesn't it doesn't work.

(01:05:23):
And you know, I actually mentioned that there's one other
thing that they're doing here, which is that so they're
based in the peasantry is fairly solid. But the other
thing they have to use this grain budget for is
to buy off this like incredibly bilitant working class that
they've inherited, because these people are on strike like constantly,

(01:05:46):
and this is this is this is a really serious
problem for the CCP, and so they you know, they
have all these welfare programs, they have all of this
sort of these resources that they're they're paying they're putting
into sort of buying off this class. And the result
of this is you have just incredible rural poverty because
like one of one of the things that happens here
is I guess, I guess you called the benefits, but

(01:06:06):
things like there's like housing, education, like medical care, this
stuff is all distributed like through your work and through
your household registration. And so you know, if if if
you're someone who has a job in the countryside, you're
the resources that you're getting are are also from the countryside,
and that means that you have just these like awful

(01:06:26):
underfooted services, Your benefits are terrible. And even if you
can somehow get a job in the city, which is
really hard because China also has these like really intense
internal like immigration restrictions. So like if if you're like
in another province that you're not supposed to be, like you,
you will get deported back to your home province. There's
all these are these really tight controls, and this means

(01:06:47):
that like if you're in a rural area, like your
livelihood is tied to your family unit in a way
that's like not happening anywhere near as intensely in the cities.
And when I say your livelihood is tied to your
emily unit, what I mean is that like other than
this like brief like token attempt they make to socialize,

(01:07:08):
like housework reproductive labor in the greatly forward men in
the state are just like entirely dependent on uncompensated housework
and production by women, which yeah, it's not just a
China thing. Yeah, I mean yeah, it's like okay, it's like, oh, hey,
this sounds like your modern system and like yes, this
is true. Um. But on the other hand, the socialists

(01:07:30):
like ideologically are claiming to be better than this, So
I'm holding them through their own standards and giving them
just like d on this because this is like yeah,
I mean, like I think this is really one of like,
you know, Okay, so they failed to end capitalism. But
I think if if you look at, like, what is
the other great failure of the Chinese Revolution, it's that

(01:07:50):
they never dealt with the patriarchy. And this means, like,
you know what, when when Mao is saying stuff about
like women hold up half the sky, like, what what
he actually means is that like women's labor is holding
up like seventy percent of the budget and they're getting
like twenty of the pay. And this this is extremely
important for reasons that we will get to in a second,

(01:08:12):
because it turns out if your entire economy is based
on patriarchy, really bad things start happening in terms of
your gender politics, which is a thing that has never
has literally never happened in any other regime. But we
should not at all take any lessons from this about
how our own economy works. It's great, It's completely fine.
The other thing that we need to talk about is

(01:08:35):
the CCPs just utter full scale war against urban workers.
And this is not the kind of like abstract class
war that you hear Left is talking about all the time,
that's you know about like wages, unionization and so forth.
Like this is an actual war that is resolved by
the by just the p l A, the Chinese army

(01:08:55):
just butchering the Chinese working class. And this comes to
a head and the Cultural Revolution ends. You know. I
have I have a whole rant about the Culture Revolution
that I will do sometime that's not now. But the
short version of it is that one of the things
that happens in the Culture Revolution is that the CCP
crushes these sort of rebel worker factions and they kill

(01:09:17):
a million people, like from from from from Yeah, I
mean it's like it's really it's really slick. Comparing it,
like to the scale of like the great anti communist purges,
like this is I think it. I think it's actually more.
I think it's a million people. I think it's more
people than than Sue Hardo killed. It's like there you go,

(01:09:40):
see there's some left right unity. Yeah, it's well, I
mean Mount MoU undisputed greatest anti communists, has the highest
number of Communism kills. Well, I don't know, let's let's
I mean, Joseph Stalin's in that running. That's true. You've
got to You've got to. You've got a couple of
Titans battling it out here. Yeah, it's it's it's definitely,
it's it's it's a difficult choice. But yeah, I mean

(01:10:02):
like they are like like this CCP is literally fighting
a war against against cerverin workers, and like this is
even by like the mid seventies, there are there are
moments where the army is sending like tens of thousands
of work since the thousands of troops like in the
cities to break up strike waves. And this is this
is an enormous problem for CCP, you know, Okay, Like
it's an aorways problem for them politically because it turns

(01:10:24):
out that being a communist party and then the thing
that you're doing all of the time is sending soldiers
to shoot workers is really bad for your political system ideologically.
Well okay, that's your opinion. Yeah it does. It doesn't
go great for them. And and the the other problem
they have is, uh, you know, this this creates this

(01:10:47):
like this incredible militarization of society, and this leads a
stagnation and there's all this corruption that's happening. But the
other problem is like, okay, so if you're like a
cadre like Planner, right, and there's always people on strike.
You need to not be strike because you needed to
produce stuff for your like central planning production schedules, and
so all of these like cadre planners start being like, okay,

(01:11:09):
these workers keep going on strike, like where where can
we get labor that won't do this? And they start
looking at the countryside and they start going like beard stroke,
can we send this over here? And meanwhile, like the
actual world, like real lights are fed up with just
being treated like shit, and they start decollectivizing their farms

(01:11:31):
because okay, there's a lot of reasons why they're doing this,
but they essentially start forming these things that become called
town and village enterprises, which are these like the civil
sixplination of it is that they basically start for forming
capitalist companies and trying to make money. But the ownership
structures are a bit different because they're like, you know,
it'll be like a village, right, and like the village

(01:11:51):
like technically collectively owns this like company that makes tires
or something, right, And this is where you start getting
markets coming China. And the CCP looks at this, it
goes like yeah, sure this is fine, Uh that this
this won't stop our communism thing because we're having budget
shortfalls right now, and if we let someone else do
this work, we don't have to pay for it. And

(01:12:14):
these so these town of village enterprises are called tv s.
Like mostly what they're doing is they're like selling parts
and stuff to like these giants. State own enterprises, which
are you know, your state own enterprises are things that
are building like bikes, like tractors and refrigerators, so they're
like you know, they're selling them like wheels or like
refrigerator parts. And this is this is the thing that

(01:12:37):
becomes the core of the Chinese economy, particularly in Dario
Fung's home province of Guandong, because Gando is really unique,
well okay, really unique province. Like this is the thing
you can say about literally every province, but Gwendong is
particularly unique in this period because it's right next to
Hong Kong. And this means that, I mean, there's always

(01:13:01):
been sort of like capital kind of through really shady
black markets and like people passing each other like notes
under dinner tables and extra like all all of the
weird like diplomacy stuff that like like Kissinger and Dixon
get up to is happening through these like weird back
channels that a lot of which are running through Hong Kong.
There's a lot of stuff that's been sort of running

(01:13:22):
through there. And when this stuff starts to happen, um
you uh Gwendong gets these special economic zones and this
becomes sort of the prototype for China's like eventual sort
of capitalist centric like export development model. Um Gwendong is
like they're they're literally there, They're they're they're they're taking

(01:13:44):
like form capital from Hong Kong and they're using it
to produce good for the market. And this is the
world that Dano Fong and shout Jitan grow up in. Um.
It's a world where on the one hand, there's enormous
economic growth. On the other hand, like all of the
safety nets that Chinese socialism have put in place are
just like being completely destroyed and everyone is once again

(01:14:07):
dependent on wages to survive. And it's also an incredibly
deeply patriarchal world. You know, and we've seen this already
right with Diane Fung's village, just like refusing to bury
her body because she's not married, and you know, this
is this is something that's only gotten worse as the

(01:14:28):
sort of as the eighties where we're on, you get
into their form period. You have simultaneous you have the
one child policy, which is this incredibly draconian state and
forced destruction of bodily autonomy, and it also serves this
really horrific role and devalue in girls because girls are
as having less economic value than boys. And so you

(01:14:50):
get all these things where like you get these you
get targeted like gender targeted abortions. They're these masterializations that happen,
and yeah, it's this just enormous patriarchal engine and it sucks.
And there's also there's a return to Confucianism as well,
because like, and this is one of the things is
like the most infuriating about this because like like of

(01:15:11):
like what the original Chinese Revolution was about was like, hey,
Confucianism sucks. Like this incredible like reactionary patriarchal ideology is
in fact bad. And then like forty years in there,
like hold on, wait, what if we bring this ship back?
And it is it is it is extremely bad, and

(01:15:35):
you know, and it serves as a sort of like
like this pacifying picture archical ideology that they're using to
sort of hold the family unit together because the family
unit are so there's a lot of the firms in
this period they're just like owned by families, right, and
you know, you can there's there's a lot of sort
of similarities here between if you look at your like,
you know, you're you're sort of like right wing, like

(01:15:57):
culturally Christian like small business owner families, and you look
at this and it's like, uh, we've we've we've redeveloped
the wheel here. We we have once again created the
patriarchal death engine. Good who it's it's great, it's yeah.
And this this is basically this is the world that

(01:16:23):
Dayo fang like grows up in. And this is the
period where the old urban working class is just hammered
to pieces so that the state and capital just gorge
itself as well for benefits, and the new Chinese working
class is born, and this migrant working class, it's vanguard

(01:16:44):
are these women who are given to imperatives by their families.
And these these these imperatives are given I mean literally
Dayong fang like Dayo fang Like directly and I think
indirectly to um shout git on well because it like
with with Daya Fong, like we literally have the quotes
of this right, like she she is told by her

(01:17:04):
family get married and find a job and shout Shitan
gets married off at twenty but a middle school day
Fog like drops out of school and just goes to
work in a factory in Shenzen, and this like these
are the women who built modern China, like these are

(01:17:25):
these are literally these are the people who turned shens
In from a tiny rural town into a world class
manufacturing caub that is literally larger than any city in
North America. And I mean this happens in the span
of like a couple of decades, and they get jack
shipped for it, like the wages they are working for.
Like Dayan Fong's brother is working on rubber plantation. He's

(01:17:48):
making five dollars a month. And you know, in Dion
Fong's case, like the other thing she's dealing with is
literally these constant demands for a family to get married,
and Fong just refuses. They try to was a young adult,
she just goes no, and they try to try to
to get like when she's like thirty eight, they like
they bring her back to her village and her like
pick a husband, she just goes no, and she just

(01:18:09):
like they keep showing your guys gypsy come like no.
And you know what she does instead is charter her
own path by managing to secure a visa to the
US where and this this, this is so Diao pongs
like he's a margant worker for ages and eventually I think,
like she wasn't sixteen, she moves to the US to

(01:18:31):
support her family. Again from afar, there's there's only there's
one more piece of macroeconomics. I mean you talk about
before we can follow Dio Pong to the massage parlor,
and this one is going to get like everyone else,
to the scene of this massacre. So what when we
last left our Korean corruption chapels, business business is booming,

(01:18:53):
and in the early nineties business is like even more booming.
It is this is this is the best I've ever
done economically. And the reason is the best I've ever
done economically is because is by in large part because
of the thing that I am just perpetually cursed by
when I do research for this show, which is the
Plaza chords. Um. I've talked about this before, but I

(01:19:14):
will once again, do a brief summary of this, which
is that so in the nineties, as people probably are
aware of the U s the US manufacturing economy is dying.
And this is a real problem for Reagan because everyone's
like Reagan, why does the economy suck? And his solution
to this is just basically, at gunpoint, forcing Japan and
West Germany to like let the U s D value

(01:19:37):
its currency relative to the end of the Deutsche Mark.
And it's like, Okay, this is a this is a boring,
tetocratic thing. But the thing it actually does is if
if your currency is weaker than another currency, it's easier
for you to like sell them to have an export
economy and sell them stuff. And this sets off just
like an incredibly catastrophic chain of events where the US

(01:19:58):
manufacturing actually comes back because you know, hey, hey, look
the dollars the dollars week and now we can produce
it again. But it just, you know it, it combines
with this like structural weakness, Japan's economy, Japan's economies dimplodes,
and Japan goes, okay, funk it. How do we keep
the economy going without manufacturing sector? And their solution is

(01:20:20):
invest in other countries and do real estate speculation, and
you know, okay, so obviously nothing bad ever happens happens
when you do real estate speculation. And the Japanese economy
was completely fine until it collapsed like five years later. Um,
but this this is a series of effects. One of
them is that the Korean shables, you know, those those

(01:20:41):
companies that are doing like literally the best business I've
ever done. The reason they're doing this is because of
Japanese credit and the fact that like there's there's more
complicated currency bullshit going on. But basically, like the value
the value of the Korean currency was pegged to the dollar,
and so when the dollars value decreased, uh, the wand

(01:21:02):
also decreased, and so you know this, this this gives
Korea like a big manufacturing competitive manufacturing edge. But then
you know, Japan goes under and they start to lose credit,
and then the US does the reverse Plaza Chords where
they just reverse the thing that they did before, and
so now the dollar is incredibly strong again. Every other
currency is really weak well due to it. And this

(01:21:24):
just like this just obliterates like every economy in East Asia,
like they all just implode, Thailand goes under, and most
of these countries that have never recovered, like Thailand trickler,
like the I mean, South Korea kind of does, but
it's basically the only one. All the rest of the
economies are just obliterated. And you know, this, this is

(01:21:45):
this is the Asian economic crisis, and you know, saddle
with like enormous debts and declining profits like these tables
started collapsing left and right, and South Korea just is
just on the edge of bankruptcy and right on Q
the I m F shows up and makes everything worse
because yeah, it's great, it's the I m F. They yeah,

(01:22:05):
they do, they do normal I m F stuff, and
they you know, they impose a bunch of austerity measures,
and this just this annihilates the Korean middle class. Like
it's just it just gets obliterated. This is this, this
is just a death knell. And it it also has
you know, it has a lot of effects. But one
of the other ones is the Korean labor movements is
really severely damaged by just all the economic devastates that's

(01:22:27):
happening around them. And the product of this is just
as sort of rural poverty drives Dayong Fong and Jan
from their villages. The economic collapse drives Kian Jung Kim grants,
who's one of the other people who died in this shooting,
from Korea to the US. And this is something that

(01:22:50):
this is there's there's something about the U S here. Well, okay,
something about the US is that it's economy is incredibly strong,
and the dollar is incredibly strong. And even in people
who come to the US for other reasons that the
two of the women who went up here, like are
here basically because they buried someone. And but even that,

(01:23:10):
you know, they like there's a couple of people like
they marry someone and they break up, divorces the but
they stay in the U s. And they stay in
the US because like the median American income is like
three times the median American income in China, and that's
like now, and so you know, and the combination of
that and the strength of the American the American dollars
sort of it brings it brings the brave, the desperate,

(01:23:35):
and just the love struck to our shores. Um. Now,
if you remember lcs Hernande's Ortiz, Who's who's the man
that long like shot while he was on his knees
begging for his life. Um Hernanda's Ortiz was in that

(01:23:55):
mall because he was wiring money home to his family
in Guatemala. And you know, we could do another entire
story here about Guatemala and the United Fruit Company and
these the u S baccus and genocides. But I think
the thing about this story is that every atrocity is

(01:24:16):
tied to every other atrocity, you know, and it creates
this web of death that we sort of you know,
we we euphemistically call it capitalism or society or reality.
And the survivors of this are just flung from meat
grinder to meet grinder, desperately looking for a new life
in new country, and you know they get there, in
the country just buries them instead. Yongfang was also you know,

(01:24:39):
constantly sending money home to her family. When she arrives
in the US. She and she's supporting like ten members
of her family off of a salary. That is, like
I mean, like she supporting to members her family off
of the salary that you get from massage work. Right, Yeah,
I think that this is like like again, I think
something like people don't understand about the US is that like, yeah,

(01:25:01):
American wages are low, but the dollar is so strong
that even like like like small amounts of money that
you can send, like small amounts of money in dollars
you can send back home have this enormous economic impact.
And there is there is an enormous like an absolutely
enormous sort of network of of immigrants in the US

(01:25:22):
who are here basically to work in the center business
is back home. And this is I mean, this is
like this is an enormous part of just how the
economy the Philippines works because of yeah, a bunch of
the just incredibly fucked up stuff that the marcos Is did. Um. Yeah.
And you know, for for Asian women in particular, once

(01:25:45):
they get here, they're often drawn to spot work because
and there's there's a lot of reasons we'll get into
in a second, but these spas, the spas are some
such just like a microcosm of the US, Like the
pay is good, and the people doing the work often
like for it to other jobs that are accessible to immigrants. Well, okay,
they're accessible to immgrants with their levels of political and

(01:26:07):
economic capital and social connections, which is usually really not
that large. But the problem is, you know, as as
with everything in the US, it's also often dangerous, like
the particular kind of sort of exposure and performance of
femininity that you need to do. This leaves these workers
incredibly vulnerable to stockers, and you know, they face sort

(01:26:27):
of constant like racial massages abuse. UM Butterfly, which is
a Toronto based sex worker group, released a report that
said that half of all massage parlor workers reported some
kind of threat to their safety at work. Jesus, Yeah,
it's it's workplace is both incredibly dangerous. And then you know,
and when when when when we're saying like threat to

(01:26:47):
their workplace, that doesn't that's not even like that's not
even counting the police. And if you've read anything about this,
you'll read people saying things like massage parlors face constant
police raids and this is true. But if anything, it
understands how bad it actually is because like Asian massage
parlers are subjected to two different kinds of police rates

(01:27:08):
that just happened constantly. Um, I'm going to read a
thing from BuzzFeed. Yeah, it's it's great, it's it's really fun.
Fro from three thousand six of people arrested for unauthorized
practice of a profession for any job requiring a license
in New York. We're Asian and nine percent were women,
according to data from the New York Division of Criminal

(01:27:29):
Justice Services, and our prostitution is a misdemetor defense. Unauthorized
practice of a profession, which is the charge that covers
unlicensed massage along with roles like veterinary medicine, engineering is
a felony that carries higher penalty, including up to four
years of jail time. Now I'm no expert, but that's
sure does sound like racism of that misogyny, because like, yeah,

(01:27:50):
there's an argument to me, like if you're if you're
moonlighting as a bridge engineer and you're not qualified, Yes,
that's it really just calling me on on the pod,
just right right in the garrison. We've agreed not to
talk about all of those people who died when that
bridge collapse that you built in Florida, on that university campus.

(01:28:12):
The thing of value was lost. No, it was Florida.
Like that's why that's why the d A is not
coming after you. Yeah, US government not pressing charges. It's Florida.
Mm hmm. So okay, back to back to back to
the racism. It's like, okay, so, so you you have

(01:28:36):
these raids that are like literally only like targeted against
Asian massage workers and then on top and so that
that's type one. And the second type of raid is
that the other thing that happens at these places constantly
are I are these anti prostitution and anti trafficking raids
And I'm putting both of those in enormous quotations. You

(01:28:57):
know this, Okay, I'm gonna gonna go on a side
tangent rant here, which is that Like okay, so, like
every single person who does reporting on this, and I
don't know if this is like a journalistic standards thing,
but like even the good reporting on this, they like
almost always have like a section that says, I, oh,
the the Georgia, like Georgia's like resources on sex Trafficking

(01:29:21):
says that, uh salon Asian salons are a place where
there's a bunch of sex trafficking. And it's like mm hm,
really like this this, this is what you're putting in
your article about a bunch of people getting murdered by
a racist dude, Like this is the thing that that
you're gonna put in here, and you know, and like

(01:29:42):
this this is sort of like all of that stuff
that I talked about, like last episode about Robert Aaron Long,
like all of your gratification and the racism and the
horror phobia and that like mixture of like desire and loathing.
Like the cops have this, Like also the journalists who
are think about this have this stuff, and the the

(01:30:02):
people who don't are sort of like picking up on
on the sort of like abbeyant racism. So you get
all this coverage that's just focused on like trying to
figure out if there was sex work going on here.
And you know, and like I talked about the last episode,
like this is really dangerous because exposing people, exposing these
sites the police investigation means you get more of these stings.

(01:30:23):
And you know, like we we we mentioned at the
beginning that uh Dayong Fong like no no no one
she knew showed up to her funeral. And the reason
that no one she knew showed up to her funeral
is that no one wanted to be at a place
where they could potentially be cops, so they wouldn't be deported, right,
How could anyone who knew her come to her funeral

(01:30:44):
because that would be well and her her brother wanted
to come, but the like travel to the US was
expensive enough that he was just like, yeah, we can't
do this, and you know, and like and I that

(01:31:04):
these these anti trafficking, anti prostitution raids are so common
that two of the Atlanta victims have been arrested as
part of raids like before this, and even though both
of them are innocent. Uh Sum Chung Park was convicted
of criminal trust passing anyways, again, which is like one
of the most insane things I've ever heard in my life,

(01:31:25):
because she was arrested at the place where she worked
and they convicted her of criminal trust passing. Because this
entire system is made up of just like Robert are
and long levels of of racism, but they have they
have a legal outlet to do it so they don't
have to just go murder people and and sometimes they
still do. Yeah, definitely, yeah, I mean we talked about

(01:31:49):
very generous with that sometimes, Garrison. Yeah, I mean there
there there, there's a really horrific story of that. There
was there was a Chinese sex worker who the NYPD
like repeatedly attempted to force her at gunpoint to have
sex with them, and she refused and they so and
you know, because because she refused, the NYPD kept doing

(01:32:10):
raids on her, and eventually she died because she jumped
out a window trying to escape one of the raids. God.
Because these people are just literal monsters. Um. Yeah. And
you know Sun Chun Park, like, she's convicted of criminal
trust passing and she gets, you know, the sort of
particular American humiliation of being forced to wear an ankle

(01:32:31):
monitor that you have to pay for around your house
while being under house arrest. And I've I've talked about
this with the journalists, but again, like there, this is
an entire system full of robber aeron lungs. It's the judges,
is the prosecutors, it's the social workers, is the journalists,

(01:32:53):
it's the cops. And this is this is an incredible
level of systemic state violence that makes these already tenuous
migrant working communities even more vulnerable because you know, if
someone's harassing them, they can't call the cops because if
the cops show up, it's like, oh hey good, this
is this is even worse than the harassments and that's

(01:33:14):
I think where I want to want to end here
today on with things that can actually be concretely done
about this to help spot workers and sex workers. Um,
there's two proposals that spot and sex workers have been backing,
one of which is just ending the licensing licensing requirement
from massages because it's it's literally only ever used to
target Asian massage workers. Yeah, that seems that seems like

(01:33:36):
a good call. Yeah, it's definitely not the law, but
oh yeah, yeah, getting rid of its, getting rid of
it clarify there. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's you know,
like this, this is my this is my my, my
most libertarian position is just being against like a lot
of these licensing things, because what's next to license to

(01:33:56):
make their own toaster. If it's a thing that people
just do all the time, uh, and in fact cannot
be stopped from doing under any circumstances, then it shouldn't
require a license to do, like flying exact Garriet, like
flying a plane, like performing surgery, you know, um, like

(01:34:18):
being a police officer. Just make everybody everything all licenses. Sorry,
I've lost the thread. It's okay, I mean, well I
think that the actual thread here though, is that like
you know, okay, so like yeah, on the one hand,
in theory, it is good to have licenses that that
you know, like have a way to tell who knows

(01:34:39):
how to do something and who doesn't, Right, But the
thing is that's that's not what does Yeah, yeah, it's
and like and the thing that the state actually does
even with licenses, like and they do this driver's licenses,
Like even even with driver's licenses, which is the thing
that like, yeah, like people should know how to drive
before you put them behind like the four wheel death machine.

(01:34:59):
Like what do they do with it? It's like, oh,
they used to go after a documented immigrants because the
state is just incredibly racist and that this is the
thing that's happening with with these licenses is yeah, they
just they just do racism with it. Well, it's it's
why you can't have like the common sense. I would
be like, okay, well we're gonna have sex workers, so
there should be some sort of system to make sure
that people are getting tested for things and that basically

(01:35:21):
you know, certain safety procedures or that at least people
know what safety procedures are being you know, used at
the place or whatever. Um, But what It always boils
down to, is uh, this is an excuse for police
to funk with vulnerable people. Yeah. The thing that this
brings us to is the second proposal, which is just
decriminalizing sex work, Like, don't prosecute people for this, don't

(01:35:46):
send the cops after them, just don't do it. Like
it it only ever causes violence against people who are
already the most marginalized people. It doesn't actually help against
traficking either, in makes it makes pend against trafficking actually harder.
People feel not able to talk about things when they

(01:36:07):
see stuff that's questionable. It's it's I'm sure we can
do more content content. Um, I'm sure we could do
more stuff about sex work in the future. Um. But yeah,
it really should be uh not a crime. Yeah. And
I think this is something like you know, it's it.

(01:36:28):
It reminds me a lot of like of of the
anti trends stuff where it's like, okay, so you should
care about the stuff because you should care about trends people.
You should also care about the stuff because it affects
people who are not trans and this this is this
is this thing where these massage workers are like most
of them are not sex workers. And it doesn't matter
at all, and it's the splash over effects are hitting

(01:36:49):
them too. And yeah, the consequence of that is eight
people are dead. Yep. Yeah, go hope your local sex
work or organization and go hope you help your local
spot workers associations like get rid of this licensing stuff
and fire for decriminalization because this, this this kind of

(01:37:10):
ship doesn't have to happen, and we can. This is
something that we actually can concretely do and when that
will make an enormous number of people whose lives are
incredibly precarious enormously better. Yep. Okay, so we have already
seen before our eyes that you can do. You can

(01:37:31):
do things that involves safety where the police are just useless.
We we have seen we we we have seen. We
have seen Zach. But what is his name, Zack? Yeah,
Zack is his name. Yeah. Yeah, but look we we
we we we have we have yeah, he rules. We
have seen Bodega Zach outwit like outdo the entire police force,
even after literally the guy called them the churn himself

(01:37:53):
in and Bodega Zach still got there before they did
the entire New York Police Department. This isn't himself in
and left his wallet and good at the scene. Yeah,
then again, this is this is this is this is
this is a ten billion dollar police force. The thing
that the thing that they mostly do is harass homeless

(01:38:14):
people and sex workers. For the love of God, we
don't need them. We could, like literally one man could
do their job for them. H yeah, get get rid
of them. Okay, yeah that sounds nice. Okay, well there
we go. We did it. Happy episode. Everybody's an introduction.

(01:38:57):
Good for you, we did it. Yeah, I love what
what show is this? Uh? This is? This is it
could happen here a show that is also currently in
the middle of about seventeen thousand personnel disasters. But it's fine.
Uh yeah, I am I am Christopher Wong and with
me is Garrison. Hello, Hi, good morning or afternoon or evening,

(01:39:21):
depending on when you're listening. And also Sophie, Hello, Hi.
So we are we're going to talk about something that
is I guess technically over. But it was extremely weird
and did a lot of harm. And that is the
very weird stuff that Texas General General Jesus hopefully not

(01:39:44):
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who had General the General of Texas.
Greg at I mean, like you're kind of not wrong,
but I he wished like that, he wishes, he wishes
he was the general of Texas. I mean, I feel
like that's me one of those things words like that.
That's when we know the coup started, is when he
promotes himself to general takes over Texas. So Greg Abbott

(01:40:09):
is extremely mad, and he's actually mad because Biden finally
decided to end one of like the absolute worst Trump
era border policies, just called Title forty two, and it's
for it was like nominally an anti pandemic measures, like
the CDC. That's so I don't know why it took
me like five seconds to remember the name of the CDC,

(01:40:29):
the Central Defense Agency. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one. Yeah.
So it's normally supposed to be a thing where it's like, okay,
you can you you cut off migrants from coming into
the country because there's a risk of a pandemic. Now, okay,
if if if you have lived the last two years,
you know that the US just literally does not give
a single ship about the pandemic at all, like ending yeah. Yeah,

(01:40:50):
and so this this whole thing really has just been
a justification to just boot out. This prevents every like
asylum seeker, in refugee, an immigrant for getting into the country.
And you know that you can tell this because the
title forty two when it was originally invoked, didn't cover
people who were like driving trucks across the border. Like
he didn't cover economic activity of course not. Yeah, so

(01:41:13):
it's it's it's just a way for the US to
like not have asylum seekers. And Biden let this go
for like another fucking year while he was in office,
and so like it's like like late last monthy like
he finally got rid of it. And you know, this
means that like immigrants and refugees now once again have
their legal right under both American and international law to

(01:41:36):
a petition for asylum, which again the US doesn't give
a shit about because you know you doesn't care about
laws unless they do bad things. But this finally happens.
And Greg Abbott, who is once again we must remind
of you one the great habit, is running for election
in November, and she's it's thus just literally running through

(01:41:57):
the entire right wing like every single right wing scare
we can possibly think of. Don't worry, Chris, don't worry
Chris Beto will get him. I believe, I believe, I
believe in Beto this time lose by like slide. You know. Well, Okay,
so the thing that could stop him from this is
Greg Abbott decided to do like two PR stunts, and

(01:42:17):
one of them is he's taking busses of of immigris
than asylum seekers and just busting them the d C
and I want to talk about this for a little
like a second, because like this is really shitty and
that shouldn't be legal. It shouldn't be allowed to really traffick.
You're trafficking people across the country for a political stunt.
That's like that that should be allowed. Yeah, Like and

(01:42:40):
like I think like everyone's like this book is like
it is, but like the thing with American political sence
is that real people get hurt constantly. Yeah, And we're
gonna come back to that theme more in a second.
As we talked about the second stunt that he did,
which was so essentially what Abbott did. Is there are,
in a norm just a number of trucks that cross

(01:43:02):
the US Mexican border into Texas like every day, right,
I mean, there's like there are individual bridges that are
moving SI seventy billion dollars of just produce like every day,
and so that produced when it when it comes into
the US, it goes to a bunch of checks by
the border patrol and stuff, and there's all these checks
and this is this whole thing. But uh Abbott went

(01:43:23):
on this incredibly bizarre rants about well, I mean it's
not bizarre. I guess if you're right when we went
on this rant about like the cartels and there's immigrants
we need to stop them, and so he very scary. Yeah,
it's really weird. Okay, So he's he's doing all these
bird fairymongering and he's like, Okay, we need to stop
the people from getting across the border. So we're gonna

(01:43:43):
inspect all of these trucks, which again like they're already
being inspected by the FEDS. Like this this is this
is you know, this is where like the horrible ice
budget is going. Right. So he he does this and
he he calls in a bunch of just like the
border patrol to just literally do all of the same
checks again. And this has an enormous economic impact. Um,

(01:44:04):
I'm going to read a quote from the American Statesman
The delays have resulted in a six drop in commercial
traffic at the border, according to ums U S Customs
and Border Protections. The agency said the delays are a
direct results of quote additional and unnecessary inspections being conducted
at Abbott's request. I I do like that the same
people who were shooting moms in Portland now inspecting produce

(01:44:28):
at the Texas. It's it's pretty well. I mean, I
think I think that there there there's an important thing
to note here, writes like, so, why why are these
the people who are like doing both these things? And
the answer is that, like those organizations like that, the
thing that they're designed to do is to protect the
interests of American capital. And you know, so the interests

(01:44:49):
of American capital are we need to move capital across that,
we need to move goods across the border, and we
need to just like absolutely obliterate like a bunch of
teenagers who don't like us. That is pretty much their
bit um. I mean, yeah, I know we've talked in
the past about us like customers and worter and water
protections and the weird the weird like agencies and weird

(01:45:12):
kind of almost militias that they operate, and how they
get deployed into certain areas if there you know, x
x miles away from the border. Um, it would be
worth talking about more in depth in the future, because
I know Robert has done some historical background on them
for Bastards. UM. But I think, yeah, that is something
I would I would be down to talk more about. Yeah.
I think they are a very bizarre agency. Yeah, they're

(01:45:33):
very weird. They're also really not like in this story.
They're basically really just sitting there being mad because it's
taking longer at what they do. Yeah. And and you
know because because again like these these actual these inspections
are being run by like state troopers, and because because
because Abbott has more direct control over stage. Yeah, because yeah,

(01:45:55):
Abot direct power for them. And this means that like, okay,
so you have your truck right, your rock has a
bunch of produce in it, you would be it across
the border. Um. This usually takes about two hours of
you know, being like sitting there in a truck while
you're stop your every once cargo gets inspected and stuff,
which I will say the truckers don't even get paid
for that. When they're waiting two hours. Yeah, and and

(01:46:16):
and you know what would make that worse. Oh yeah,
now it takes between ten and thirty hours. Because intentionally,
on purpose, was like, okay, we're just we're gonna put
six thousand like people total to do this whole thing.
And so, you know, like hundreds of millions of dollars
of produce like sins like onions and tomatoes and avocados
are just sitting in these trucks, rotting in the Texas heat. Yep.

(01:46:39):
Hopefully the trucks are refrigerated, but still, well, the trucks
are refrigerated, but like the people in them, I'm sure
the cabins are not. Yeah, I'm sure it gets mighty well.
You know, I I do have some family who would truckers,
and some of the cabins can't be nice. But still
that's sitting for thirty hours without getting paid because you
only get paid when you are moving um to oh

(01:47:01):
uh not a great way to you know, run our
entire economy. Yeah, I'm going to read a quote. I'm
gonna read a suction from the paragraph of the Texas Tribune. Felix,
a sixty year old Mexican trucker who was transporting tomatoes, onions,
and avocados, waited about thirteen hours in line at the bridge.
He has to be identified only by his first name
for fear of retribution and targeted inspections from CPB officials.

(01:47:23):
Hearing of the delays at the border, he packed water
and food for a few days, but other truckers didn't
come as prepared, and we're sitting in stand still traffic
without anything to eat or drink. Felix said he was
told by a CPB official that the agency would be
putting portable bathrooms along the bridge for the gridlocked truckers,
but he never saw them. Once Felix made it to
the state troopers inspection point around nine pm, he said

(01:47:43):
they didn't even peer into his truck, which had been
sealed since Mexican authorities inspected about six hundred miles away
in the state of Sinaloa. There's no possibility of bringing
legal immigrants in the merchandise or in the cabin, he said,
referencing one of Abbott's explanations for the inspections. I can't
bring any illegal immigrants here from money because I know
inspectors are going to discover them. It's not a thing here.
I don't know what the politicians ideas are. I don't

(01:48:05):
know what they're talking about. So that seems not good.
It's it's really bad. And like again, like this is
this whole thing is nonsense, Like that I didn't even
I didn't even think about having to, you know, use
the bathroom for hours. Yeah, and like do you think
the thing with this is like this the backups are
eight miles long, so like if you want to go

(01:48:26):
to the bathroom, you have to walk for like miles
depending depending on where you are in this backup. And
you know, this is having like these just enormous horrifying
because there's like these normous horrifying knock on effects. Um.
Because you know, it's not that the truckers are really
affected by this. There's a bunch of workers whose job
it is, you know, it's to process these goods, right,

(01:48:47):
take them out of trucks, put them into American trucks
to like sort through the vegetables and figure out like
which ones are good and which ones are not. And again,
like just enormous amounts of just produce that is like
fresh and good to eat. It's just being intentionally destroyed
because it's being forced to sit at the border for
this long. Uh, there's a bunch of these people whose
whose job like who who are contract workers whose job

(01:49:09):
it is to like go through this stuff, and they're
all getting fired because they're like there's no work for
them to do. Um. There's all of these people who
like their their jobs and they run bodegoes and they
run like like they were in restaurants. Did they run
a buch of stuff on the border for these truckers
and they also don't have any work and those people
have to on a day by date like it's like
I think it's per day to rent a terminal in

(01:49:33):
like yeah, and they're making nothing, and it's it's it's horrified.
There's all there's this's just enormous economic devastation that that
that's been sort of like you know that that that
that's been happening because of this and well, you know,
you know what else reminds me of economic devastation, Ah,

(01:49:59):
the fact that the fact that our paychecks are solely
reliant on the products and services that support this podcast.
It's true. Yeah, Well, we'll talk about the problems they're
having in a second after this break. Yep, one second. Wow,
that was that was a fast second that just that

(01:50:20):
flew right by time is not real? Destroy the clocks
the scientists sart the police, all right, if you press,
if you press the if you press the thirty second
button four times? Yes, yeah, real speedy. Now this is
having other problems because, as you talked about the show,
literally ad nausea, our supply chains are really bad. And

(01:50:43):
it turns out, yeah that that does seem to be
a recurring character on the pod. Is that supply chains uh,
not the most stable thing we've invented. Yeah, and especially
with especially with with with fruit and vegetables. Well, I mean,
well we will be getting some of the other supply
chains that are like fun because of this. But like
Prudent VEGTA was in particular, like the way that we
do them, they're they're designed to be in motion for

(01:51:06):
like a very specific amount of time so that when
they show up to you, they're right, yeah, yeah, you know,
you add a few hours onto that everything falls apart.
And this like I'm not sure if it happens because
I'm not in Texas, but there was there were a
bunch of articles are talking about like yeah, like avocados
and Texas are gonna cost five more dollars, Like like
a single avocados price is gonna increase by like five
dollars over the weekend because like because it was just

(01:51:27):
the enormous amount of produces that that's being destroyed here,
and you know there there's there's a lot of other
stuff going on here because American and Mexican supply chains
are enormously integrated from now. I mean they've always been
into good to some extent, but like particularly post NAFTA,
there's a lot of like auto supply chains in particular
that are that are tied to two plants in Mexico,

(01:51:48):
and you actually this occasionally has like interesting effects, like
Mexico's has a lot of auto strikes, and you get
like you get these things where like people will like
tuck messages into like auto parts and like send them
to the US. People will open these messages from like
a worker in Mexico too, Yeah you need And it's
it's cool that there's lots of there's interesting stuff there,

(01:52:09):
but this also means that like, yeah, so if those
parts are moving across the border, those just in time
production schedules are even more omega screwed than they've been
already and so yeah, there's been a lot of sort
of economics stuff that's been happening here. And you know,
the other people who are getting just completely screwed by

(01:52:31):
this are the are the Mexican truckers and so yeah
and so so so this this this starts on April six,
on Monday, April eleven, I the truckers are just like
fun this and they start just completely blockading the largest
border crossing between like this, it's on the Giant Bridge.
They started they literally just blockade the bridge and but

(01:52:52):
prevent any goods from from getting in. And this this
has an enormous impact because again, like you know it
it was going like yeah it was production was down
by sixty percent, but that means still means are getting
through and now you know, and bye bye bye. By
the eleven it's just nothing. Um I do I do

(01:53:12):
hope the one the one good thing that can come
out of the whole Canada COVID isn't real protests, um,
is that people have learned that blocking off supply chains
it's a really effective way to do protest because you
can stop the import of thousands and millions and billions
of dollars of trade um pretty easily actually, and it

(01:53:33):
would be cool if more people realize, Hey, obviously the
COVID stuff they were talking about in the whole overthrowing
the government part um to install a right wing dictator,
that part's obviously bad, but some of their tactics were
actually pretty interesting. Yeah, we're we're going to get more
into that, uh like later, Yeah, I mean I will say, like,

(01:53:53):
I think that the thing with the U S is that,
like I think there's been a lot of focus on
the American left on ports because yeah, there's a lot
of reasons for that, but like, yeah, you can do
the border crossings too, and the the Mexican rucker is
really effective. I mean, okay, so that's this has been
a thing where it's it's it's kind of hard to
get information from. I saw a few like newspapers talking

(01:54:16):
about um like cartel people like like attacking the blockaded,
lighting trucks on fire to try to force goods to
go through again, which it's possible. I I don't know, um,
but this you know, once once there are like once
the block like the border is completely block headed, this

(01:54:37):
completely changes like the entire political situation because now, like
you know, ab Abbot's been running this thing sort of
as a political stunt and as this game he's playing
with you know, I suppose he's trying to play a
game with Biden, right, and he's like, Okay, well, yeah,
you gotta decently about the border or whatever, like you
know's he's been challenging Biden over like immigration bullshit. But

(01:54:58):
you know, now now they're there's a third party involved,
and that third party is Mexican truckers. And now and
now Abbots not just in the it's like abbotts in
a confrontation with the people that he needs to make
the entire Texan economy run yep, And this starts going
very badly for him. And the other thing that starts
going very badly for him is that I it turns

(01:55:19):
out if you shut down cross border trade, you really
really piss off the bourgeoisie. Turns out, it turns out
that will happen if you ain't careful. Yeah. Yeah, it's
really interesting and you know, and and I think I
should mention like stressed this, like they're piste off on
both sides of the border, and like obviously you can
talk about the ecents, which like, yeah, they're the same class.

(01:55:41):
But like capitalists on both sides of the border start
exerting their political pressure because they're I mean, they're losing
enormous amounts of money off of this. That's what they do. Yeah,
and you know, the way their ability to do capitalism
as capitalists, they're going to be mad. Yeah, which again,
you think you would think that the abbot would like
get this, but he just he it seems to have

(01:56:04):
not occurred to him that he was gonna piss off
like either or like he he thinks he didn't care
enough and thought it wouldn't matter, but like, no, it
turns out like you know, one of the things that happens. Yeah,
it's it's amazing, Like he's you know, like I mean,
I think this is this is you know, I think
this is this is sort of a symptom of like
people lose like right wing politicians losing sight of what

(01:56:24):
their actual basis because like this is all this is
all supposed to be like campaign trail feeding the anti
immigrant base. But like, you know, you you are a
politician in the US, Your actual constituency is the capitalists,
and like do you have an actual job? And let's
make the economy keep going and keeping people in power
to have all the power, like you're not just like that.

(01:56:47):
That's one interesting thing that Trump was kind of one
of the first big um indicators for which is like
a politician now is just the endless cycle of campaigning
and they don't actually have a job. It's just always
campaigning and that it's always campaigning. Uh, and they're like, oh,
I guess I should do my actual job that I
was elected for or I could just do more rallies
and that seems like it would be less work. Yeah. Well,

(01:57:10):
and I think I think what Trump was like there
was those things out to which the bureaucracy kept functioning,
and you know, like like he like Trump got Trump
got the tax cut right, and like he didn't really
start getting in trouble with them until he started doing
the anti China stuff, which was sort of a disaster
because there was a lot of people who turned out
like need those trade connections to make money. And you
saw like and like it was weird. It was a
very weird thing. Like you started to see even some

(01:57:30):
of his like like domestic like small business base. I
started to get really mad at him because he's putting
all these sanctions up and it's like, oh, hey, look,
all these sanctions mean that all these people who are
reliant on Chinese supply chains have to pay this stuff.
And an Abbott Abbott has like done this in microcosm,
and like these these people like the star, they start
going to the press. Um, I'm going to read a

(01:57:51):
quote from Bloomberg. Uh. Some retailers, particularly those in the
grocery industry, have experienced supply chain delays resulting from the
extended wait times a lot Texas Mexico border. John McCord,
the executive director of Texas Retailers Association, wrote in an email, so, like,
you know these are like like the Texas Retail Association

(01:58:11):
is like this is like the most republican solidly institution
in the country and and you can watch them over time,
like these people are getting really mad. Like one of
I I was like, like what if Abbot's like I
get the exact title, like what one of abbots like secretaries,

(01:58:33):
like they're look at the secretary or something. One of
the like economic bureaus was like, yeah, man, Alvaca is
gonna cost five more dollars, And you know, you know
this really hits me hard. Because everyone knows it's about me.
I care a lot about retail. UM. Retails like my
one of my big core of personality traits UM. And

(01:58:54):
you know who else wants you to care about retail?
Oh my goodness is that the wash Upton State of
That is right, Sophie, it's the Washington State Patrol. Are
are are good friends? Um? So here here is some
here's some messages about about how you can improve your
retail decisions. Okay, I I can't find this George Bush

(01:59:15):
quote that I was going to use as a bit,
so instead of that, we will return to this. And
you know, and one one thing I think we should
also mention is if you ran into this on Twitter, um,
you will see a lot of videos of people like
Democrats like standing at the border and pointing at the
trucks and going, uh, this is this. This is abbot

(01:59:38):
attempting to like make inflation to get worse by sabotaging
the economy. Cringe and like cringe cringe moments. Yeah, Like okay,
Like I cannot rule out that this was like a
part of what he wanted to do, but that's not

(01:59:58):
really why he's doing this. Like this, this is this
is like mostly and I some people talking about like, oh,
this is like the trucker's buckage and Chile, and I'm like, no, no,
it's not at all, like like yeah, yeah, yeah, like yes,
Chile has a bunch of right had I had a
bunch of right wing anti communist truckers unions that tried
to shut down the government. But like, that's not what's
happening here. This is the state and Abbott trying to

(02:00:22):
do this is like an immigration pr thing like this
isn't like he's not actually he's not actually trying to
destroy the government, because the the only way you can
get stuff like that is if like is is it
the capitalist classes like genuinely afraid that they're about to
get like like wiped out by communists And it turns
out that is not about to unize the entire US.

(02:00:46):
I don't think that's actually a looming threat at the moment. No,
So yeah, it's like no, it's like it's it's not
it's not really about that, like it's it's it's it's
mostly about this sort of this sort of like border
game that the Communis are coming free of off Picados. Well,
this is sort of this is the interesting thing here,
because it's like you have this really weird scenario where

(02:01:08):
like it's it's it's the right wing governor like shutting
down the flow of commodities, and like the liberals are like,
we must restore the flow of commodities, and the like,
we must restore the flow of commodities, and like even
the cartels or something extential, like come on, like we
all we all need the border open. Uh. It really,

(02:01:28):
it really does just showcase the entire bit. Yeah, you know,
but I mean, like we've been talking a lot about
the human cost of this, and the reason this stuff
works is because American politics is literally just a machine
that turns human suffering into stories and then turns those
stories into percentage points at the polls. And that's Abbot's

(02:01:49):
entire weight. Am I getting him confused with no Greg
Abbots the governor? I momentarily got him confused with the
UK guy Tony Emmett ris so bad in very similar ways. Yeah,
but I think I think we're allowed to have two
bad Abbots. Yeah. I thought there's kind of Australia too,
But well, the bad applets are multiplied. To get on this.

(02:02:14):
We need we need to deal with the anglos theory
before they produce the fourth produced the fourth one when
we get the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That would
be funny if you just have four Abbots bringing the apocalypse. Yeah,
But I think I think that the thing that's important
to understand about like about Abbott is like that that
everything that Abbott does is just about inflicting suffering on

(02:02:35):
people and trying to use that to do polls. Right,
Like he he has genuine right wing beliefs, but like
the timing of everything that he does, that's what all
of his that's that's that's what all has had anti
trans stuff is is that he couldn't beat his primary challenger,
who was trying to campaign a little bit fur them
to write than Abbott was. Yeah, and this is the
thing where like politicians are allowed to play games with

(02:02:58):
all people's lives, that that's their job. But they're allowed
to do this up until the exact moment at which
those real people are the bourgeoisie and the moment this
is this the thing that Abbott is learning is that
you can do this kind of stunts all you want,
Like you can you can like you can shoot every
trans kid, you can like I don't know, like you

(02:03:19):
can you can ban like every school from like saying
the word race, but you can't funk with the bourgeoisie.
And you know this, this is this, this is the
problem that he has is bye by like by like
the middle of last week. He has the like the
ruling classes turning on him. The truckers are blockading the
bridges that preventing all travel, and Abbott is like basically

(02:03:43):
scrambling to find a way out. And the thing that
he does to do this is he like he goes
to a bunch of Mexican governors who who are like
that the governors of border states. And these governors had
like sent him letters being like hey, like what are
you doing, Like we need like we we we need
our economies to function. Can can you can you actually

(02:04:04):
do this? And you know, so he starts doing these
negotiations with him where he's like, well, okay, if you
guys like inspect all of these trucks or whatever before
and you ensure that there's no immigrants and then where
whatever before they get here, like we'll reopen the borders.
And you know, so they do this, and I think
there's a couple of interesting things about this one is

(02:04:25):
that most of these I think there's one guy who's
from the p r I, but like almost all of
these governors are from the p A N, which is
Mexico's like far right wing party, and like these guys,
these guys are also like hard right, like we're on
drug hard liners, you hate immigrants and and this this
has been another big part of how the sort of
border machine works, which is that like, yeah, on the

(02:04:47):
one hand, you have you have Abbo and you have
like Texas, so you have just the US government like
projecting its power like into Mexico, which is you know,
another big part of what this is. But the other
part of it is has been the US essentially outsourcing
it's it's border regime and border policy just in like
to Mexico. And so you get a lot of there.
There's been a lot in the last especially to dn
Trump administration. Uh, I mean it goes back much further

(02:05:10):
than that, but like in in the last like five
years have been a lot of really egregious examples of
just like border patrol ship but by the Mexican police,
because it turns out there's also a bunch of people
in Mexico who fucking hates Central American refugees and be
uh the police or the police literally everywhere. And yeah,
and this this also for example, like this this is
how this is how a lot of the border regime

(02:05:31):
stuff works in um, in Europe, front ACKs of the
European border like thing makes you to do like makes
like basically just negotiates with like literally every like I
don't even know what you call them, like border state,
I guess in Africa to ensure that like refugees coming
up to North Africa like don't ever get to Europe.

(02:05:54):
And like this is that they make deals with Gadaffi,
they made deals with the people who came after Gadaffi. Um, yeah,
there's the border system is horrible and this is sort
of the border system like working as intended. Now, the
other thing that we should mention is that like, okay,
so they're they're stopping and like supposedly searching all of

(02:06:16):
these trucks and they find literally nothing the entire time,
because like there's there's you know, there's ever anything there.
But you get all these press conferences they were like, well, yeah,
of course there is nothing. It's because the cartels were
tipped off. Of the raid because we did Presston conferences
about it, and that's why they announced. We announced the
thing that we were gonna do. So it gave him

(02:06:36):
a chance to smartest Wow whoa. Yeah, So that that
that that's been fun um And the last thing I
wanna talk about, Yeah, this was part of what we
were talking about earlier, which is that like, yeah, this
is the second time this year that we've seen right
wingers like block off a border for political reasons. And
I think there's a few interesting things here. Um. One

(02:06:58):
is that this is the kind of stuff that from
like basically from the start of occupy and even before
then until like the Bernie campaign. This is like the
core of like what Marxists we're thinking about in the US,
and also anarchists or something sent like if if you
go and read anything from that period, like it's all
about logistics and kinter logistics and how you can like
disrupt them and whether or not we should try to
take control of logistics. And you know, and I think

(02:07:18):
you see here like like attacking logistics is a very
powerful political tool, but it's tool that has like limited um,
like it it has limited utility for the right because
you know, the right depends on the backing of capitalists
for the politics to work. They really really need buy
it capitalists, and those capitalists need cross border trade and

(02:07:41):
you know, and the other thing like they also need
they also need migrant workers to make their money. And
if you cut that stuff off, your political base starts
to collapse. And the second part of it that's interesting
is you get to see how powerful this is as
a weapon for you know, like the working class because
of just like how instant enviously Abbott back down when

(02:08:03):
the trucking blockhead starts because this this is all over.
Um last Friday, I think the what date is that?
That was good Friday, I mean the goodest, the goodest Friday. Yeah,
Abbott was like, oh, oh, it's all over. We secured

(02:08:26):
the border. Yeah everything border, sure, buddy, Okay, yeah, but
you know, and you but like that's the thing, like
you can see like, yeah, you gotta see you gotta
see a rare moment of like Mexican workers and also
like the the sort of international capital class working on
the same side. And you've got to see how fast
they just like collaborate their politicians because yeah, like yeah,

(02:08:47):
like that the state is that the state is the
powerful force, but it turns out it's it's class politics
all the way down. And I think I don't know
this in Canada. I think there's a couple of interesting things.
One is which, Okay, yeah, you're like if you're on
the left, like already automatically you're going to be fighting
the capital business ois just always mad at you. So

(02:09:07):
that's concern. You will face more suppression immediately obviously. This
this is this is how the game is played. Yeah,
your face one suppresion deedily. But it's also like that
that's not like a your base turning on you, Like
that problem doesn't stem from capital is not making money.
The problem you have with your base turning on you
is about being being able to provision supplies to people.

(02:09:30):
And I think this is you know, against even you
know more about this than I do, but I will
finish the sentence and then stop talking. Which is that
like like, yeah, if you look at Canada, it was
like part of the reason their occupations failed was that
like yeah, like just like a bunch of ordinary people
got really really mad at them because their whole their
cities were being locked down. Yeah, yeah, they started impacting
not just the economic drivers, but the people who live

(02:09:53):
in those areas regularly and need them to operate. And
that gave politicians enough enough of the incentive to be like, see,
actually hurting real people. It's not just hurting the economy,
but it's hurting you know, your grandma who could be
living in like Ottawa or something. Right, So when you
when you use these tactics, it's about balancing the propaganda
of like not severely impacting the people who actually live

(02:10:15):
in these places very much, but but targeting the economics,
policies and the you know, you know, the corporate elite
or whatever kind of framing you want to use. Because
as as soon as you start doing tactics that just
hurt you know, regular people, that is such an immediate
like propaganda l as the kids would say, um, because yeah,

(02:10:39):
you're but you're just giving them the tools to easily
fight you back. And yes, they're gonna they're gonna try
to invent tools to to to stop you no matter what.
Like they're they're gonna, they're gonna they're gonna try to
do something the via propaganda lens. But there's some propaganda
is way easier and uh much harder than others. So
I think a big part of these types of things
when you're starting to like block off you know, roots

(02:11:01):
to cities, block off supply chains as you need to
be cognizant of making sure that the people who are
like immediately next to kind of things that you're also cool,
because that can give you so much more legs. I mean,
we saw this in the Red House in Portland. There
was a there was a lot of effort, um to
make the immediate neighbors not hate the occupation there, to

(02:11:23):
to stop the family from being evicted, um, And there
was a lot of debate around like how much graffiti
should be allowed in the surrounding area because you know,
you don't want to piss off the neighbors too much.
Now that this can obviously stem in bad directions in
terms of like there was then like self self appointed
security guards like beating up and shooting people with paintballs
who were doing graffiti, which is obviously like not not

(02:11:46):
not how you do good anarchism um. But then there's
other stuff being like no, we should just trash this
area anyway. It's all in the process of being gentrified,
which mean it is, but you're like, yes, I understand
that emotional impulse. Um, and you may be right in
a lot of senses, like like more like more correct morally,
but to play the propaganda game to actually stop a
black family from being evicted, maybe we can actually to

(02:12:08):
look at this at a more tactical level. Yeah, And
I think that there's a lot of examples things we
can learn from strikes that do is very efficiently. Like
one of the things one of the reasons the wildcats
in West the wildcat teacher strikes West Virginia and he
doesn't seventeen worked was that the striking teachers in West
Virginia were very very careful about making sure that they
did things like you know, like making making sure that

(02:12:29):
kids got like the meals that that the school would
have been like providing like like you know, like this
is why this is why mutual aid is extremely important
because it lets you It lets you provision services, not
just when they collapse because of like you know, oh,
hey the government's doing weird stuff or like there's a plague.

(02:12:51):
It lets you do it, lets you shut down logistics
slnes yourself and still have community support and still be
able to provide people. To think that provide people things
that they need, and it's just like, you know, if
if you carry this all the way to like the
macro macro level, it's like yeah, okay, So like why
did why did the Russian Revolution not work? And you know,
like like why did the Pairs Commune fail? And it's like, well, yeah,
it's because instead of like giving peasants things, they went

(02:13:14):
into the countryside and shot them into actepting to get
those things. And it's like, yeah, like you have to
what what what what whatever. The thing that you're doing
is in in in your sort of like base area,
right whatever. You're like, hey, you're you're doing a strike,
You're shutting down a bridge. You're like, you know, you're
blocking up border, you're trying down a port, right you

(02:13:35):
you have to make sure you're constantly expanding and building
out support outside outside of that, outside of that action,
and making sure you're you're you're able to provision the
people who are affected by it. And if you don't
do this, you end up like Abbott. And it's like yeah,
you know he Abbott had like the entire power of
the American state behind him, and he was able to
keep this up for like less than two weeks before

(02:13:58):
he had to just pull out. So, yeah, we can
do this better and for things that are good and
in ways that don't hurt people or at least hurt
people significantly less or you know, don't not hurt the
wrong people instead try to try to hurt the right people.
Just like an incredible lack of like thinking. That's my
that's my summaries. Yeah, better do you think? Like? Yeah?

(02:14:23):
And I think also like again like Abbott, Abbott's politics
like is entirely about like infricting cruelty on people, right,
and ours like shouldn't be and shouldn't Yeah, And the
fact that we actually care about people makes our politics
were effective and sho in theory. In theory they should
um and any time when we take a misstep from that,

(02:14:43):
I think is of it is a big loss. Yeah.
There's there's one more strike thing that I just remembered
that I was going to talk about, which is I
So these also trains a lot. There's there's a type
of striker's name I'm forgetting because I'm a hack and
a fraud where like the people, the people, the people
just like take over a train and they'll run it,
but they just won't take fars. That is incredibly bit Yeah,

(02:15:05):
and you know, so that's that's that's like level one
of it. And then level two of the strike is
insteade of just we're on strike, but we're running the
service and not taking any money. It's we now control
this train and that that has happened on several occasions,
and well, yeah, you do that. It's cool. You heard
it here. First take over your local train. Um, it
could happen here. We could, we we can do it.

(02:15:27):
Anarchism can make the trains run on time. Oh I'm
not sure about that. Pug punk time it is as
an unstoppable Okay. Here, here's the thing. Here's the thing,
right like punk time. Like okay, so you don't have
the punks running the trains. You have the train nerds
running the train, people who should spend all of their
time playing train simulator running the trains. Okay, that the

(02:15:50):
trains will run great? Alright, that is that is completely fair. Um.
Where can people find you and or the show on
the internet. You can find me at three on Twitter
if you want to do that for some reason. You
can find us that happened here pod on Twitter, Instagram. Uh,

(02:16:12):
there's also the Cool Zone. We have Zone Media. Yeah,
we have a we have a new podcast that is
coming so if you do want to want to go,
we actually got we got two new ones for you
coming soon. We have a Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus.
Episode one is out April, and then we have Cool
People Who Did Cool Stuff hosted by Margaret Killjoy. Trailer

(02:16:35):
is out next week and episode one is out on
May second. Check both of them out. So many, so
many pods in the pipe, as you say, that is
the technical term, pods in the pipe. These these are genuinely,
legitimately very good shows and you should listen to them.

(02:16:55):
And I'm really excited. So alright, well, thank for listening,
and uh go go take over a train. Greetings listeners

(02:17:20):
in the podcast verse, this is it could happen here,
the podcast about things falling apart and sometimes how we
can put stuff back together. I'm Garrison Davis are Resident
Gender mess. In the past few weeks, we've been talking
a lot here on the show about the escalating war

(02:17:40):
on trans people and queer folks in general. There's been
a wave of bills making any gender affirming healthcare of
felony for people under the age of eighteen, which forcibly
detransitions teenagers and multiple states, and we've had a lot
of banning trans people from participating in sports and trying
to ban books and discussion in schools about the just

(02:18:01):
the existence of queer people at all. But today we're
not really going to be talking about that. We've talked
about that plenty for the past few weeks. It's good
to have a little little bit of a break, but
we'll still be talking about stuff around trans people. Because
with all the discussion around gender affirming healthcare, I thought
it would be a good idea to put something together
talking about what HRT or hormone replacement therapy actually is,

(02:18:25):
as since it's the most common form of trans healthcare,
and since many states are trying to or already have
criminalized it, perhaps I can use the pod to point
people towards alternative means of receiving care, you know, in
the vein of the putting stuff back together side of
the show. Now, I want to clarify upfront that we're

(02:18:47):
not giving anyone medical advice, obviously, I'm just making observations
and talking about things as they exist, um and talking
about things that many trans people have been doing for
a long time, and that includes d y h RT.
My doctorate program is in parapsychology, not medical science, so
just keep that in mind. First, I will quickly clarify

(02:19:08):
what HRT or hormone replacement therapy actually is for specifically
non CIS gender individuals because HRT as a term is
also used for SIS women to describe similar but different treatment.
So HRT as a form of gender affirming treatment is
when someone receives sex hormone medication that produces a number

(02:19:31):
of desired secondary sex characteristics. There are two broad types
of hormone therapy that one would receive, depending on what
direction you want to go in gender of wise, there's
feminizing hormones and masculinizing hormones. Feminizing hormones produce more typically
feminine traits, right, big big shocker there. Uh. It usually

(02:19:54):
consists of a form of estrogen, usually called estradial. There's
different types of estradial and also it can include anti
androgen's aka a testosterone blockers. Masculinization therapy consists of taking
to sosterone or androgen's and then also less commonly anti estrogen's,
but usually just taking testosterone will suffice now I'm no

(02:20:19):
expert in hormones despite my weekly shot, but lucky enough
I was able to sit down with an actual expert
on hormones and talk over zoom. So what follows is
segments from our conversation. I guess first, do you want
to introduce yourself? Sure? I am the Reverend Dr Victoria
Luna B. Grieve. I am an assistant professor at the

(02:20:42):
University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. My primary clinical focuses
on gender affirming hormone therapy, other kind of advocacy work
in queer healthcare, and I do a lot of other
stuff on the side, heatago g LUDC, instructional design, game design,
just anything that strikes my fancy. Really found fun stuff

(02:21:02):
in with within kind of our our coverage of trends
stuff the past few weeks and months, it's been mostly
on like the bills and like the politics side of things.
I definitely had some people like reach out and be like, okay,
but how like why why trands? Gender? Why why hormones?
Like why are hormones actually important? Like could you actually
explain like why, like you know, with all of these

(02:21:24):
all these states banding hormones, let's I would like to
kind of explain why it's such a big deal and
like how much these things actually are like life saving
medication for so many people. Yeah, so why hormones? I
love it because it's a question that as like a species,
we've been we we have known the answer to for

(02:21:46):
like five thousand years. It's it's very funny, but um,
hormones are Okay. A big part of this requires to
like acknowledge something that is very wrong in in like
the medical literature. There's a lot of elements of healthcare
that are coordinated between like male and female, and there's

(02:22:07):
a kind of like obviously is a little so there's
a lot of mean I mean like from like from
people's I know, when trans people talk about interacting with
the medical system, it's always like, oh, yes, we're gonna
be doing this bullshit, yes of course. Yeah. Well but
it even goes to it like a really deep level,
like if you're in the hospital and you get a
CBC count, there's a male profile and a female profile

(02:22:30):
of what your hematocrit should be on, like what the
level of red blood cells are and and the general
understanding and like the health industry is that there's a
biological anatomical difference between them, and for the longest time,
certainly in this country, trans women would have would be
compared against the male profiles. But but it's nonsense. It's
actually should be thought of in form of hormone dominance,

(02:22:52):
because the vast majority of medical differences are not anatomical.
They're hormonal, and and that right there should should give
the game away, which is really funny, which is why
I why I kind of hate the term biological woman
whenever people start using that, because that's not really how
biology works. Yeah, I mean the joke is my my

(02:23:14):
nesting partner, my fiance, wishes that she could be a robot,
and then if she were to do that and upload
her brain into an immortal robot body, she would no
longer be a biological woman, but she would still be
a woman. It's just cybernetic um. I hate that. It's
like organic. Organic just means it has carbon in it. Like,
give me a break. So yeah, hormones, what's what's what's

(02:23:38):
the deal do they? Because I know all of people
will be like, well, all of these treads people sure
do seem sad. I want that's how how how can
we make things better? Does this thing actually work well,
So it's somewhat multifactorial. I have a friend who does
um sell imaging and her like working theory, which I'm

(02:23:58):
a little dubious of. Is it like the brains of
trans people like have receptors for hormones that the body
doesn't make, and we should think of being transgender is
having like a form of hypogonadism. Yeah, there's there's a
lot of different trains of thought there in terms of
the different theories of why trans people exist and how
it's like, you know, the girl's brain, boys body, blah

(02:24:18):
blah blah blah blah, which all, if you dig deep enough,
goes back to eugenic so it's all. Yeah, I've always
not liked that model. I've always it's always I've always
found it to be a little bit uncomfortable because I
take hormones because I want to, and I don't think
it's because my my my brain is like secretly looking
for girl receptors or something like, right, I totally agree,

(02:24:43):
Like it also requires a certain like extremely binary understanding
of gender, which I also do not ascribe to. So
it's a very like odd thought. But putting aside all
of that if you just wanted to look at the
like why people want hormones, Because when a person who
wants hormone gets the hormones they want, their suicidality goes down,

(02:25:03):
their anxiety, depression goes down, gender dysphoria, if we wanted to,
you know, talk about the problems with that, essentially like
goes away. Uh, and they get they start to get
treated like the way they want to be treated in society.
So from the if if you want to look at it,
not from like the causes, but from the results. Giving
gender affirming hormone therapy to a person who is requesting

(02:25:26):
gender affirming hormone therapy has a success rate. The rate
of regret from starting hormones is one percent or less,
which is unbelievable in the health care field, like like
having a child, like biologically giving birth has a seven
percent regret rate, Like the idea of any therapy having

(02:25:49):
that high of a rate of preventing death, anxiety, depression, bullying,
like all of the different effects. Being that successful should
be like a miracle. It should be looked at as
the thing we in healthcare are like should do absolutely ethically. Uh.
And it is. It is so much more complicated than that.

(02:26:12):
So like hormones from the results obviously makes sense. It
aligns your body's shape and like fat fat deposits and
the way that you feel, the way that you relate
to your emotions, it all goes back to the way
that hormones work on your body. And there's there's like
the old saying that like assis person would never want

(02:26:32):
to try gender forming hormerone therapy, so like if you
have the in if you want to try it, you
should be allowed to try it. I mean, like you're
you're kind of a good example right here, Like yeah,
but I'm sitting Yeah, if you're sitting around a bar
with a bunch of like ciss guys and you're like, hey,
who wants some estrogen, they would all like shrink away
from it, Like no, absolutely, because yeah it's definitely a thing.

(02:26:56):
Like I'm not the most dysphoric person, but like sure,
I'll take estrogen. That sounds fun. That's like it's like
that that sounds like a thing that I could enjoy
watching my body change. And I'm you know, it's it's
I'm happy that we're moving more towards that and not
having to deal with Oh, I'm so dysphoric. I want
to die, which is obviously a big thing for a

(02:27:18):
lot of people. I'm not I'm not minimizing that right um.
But also a lot of trans people have had more
kind of complicated feelings on gender, whether they're like gender queer,
non binary. Having the past had made it more difficult
to get gender firm in care because they don't fit
into those specific like male female boxes as easily. Well,
and what you're talking about is really something that's relatively recent,

(02:27:41):
the idea of gender euphoria, like the idea that people
want to take und because it gives them joy to
like dress or act or feel a certain way, and that,
I mean, health care is all about, at least up
until well, the reality of health care is that it
is all about finding problem to solve and not really

(02:28:01):
looking at like your life just better in general. Yeah, exactly.
So you know, I know plenty of people who started
hormones of any type just because they felt it would
make them happier, and they were correct, And that gender
euphoria is just as good of a reason to take
it as the dysphoria. The problem ends up in how
the medical industry treats it because dysphoria quote unquote is

(02:28:24):
something as long. Oh my gosh, I could go into
the whole history of that if you wanted, but I'm
sure we could talk about the ds M four and
five for a long time. Oh it's so frustrating. I
spend I spend a two hour session in my queer
healthcare class specifically just dunking on the d s M
five definition of gender dysphoria. Um. But the real problem
is like this focus on this negative quality and how

(02:28:46):
that actually damages a lot of the conversations around uh,
gender firming hormone therapy and trans people in general, Like
instead of seeing it as like this manifestation of people
like truly taking control roll of their lives to become
authentic in like the truest way, Like you have never
met a more truly well self made man than a

(02:29:09):
transman who gets hormones. Like it's I mean, it's and
it's still something we're even we're not quite at the
at the gender utopia, I mean obviously because of all
of the anti tran stuff, but even even on like
just purely purely the medical side, like I even for
for informed consent um I still needed to get diagnosed

(02:29:30):
with gender dysphoria at the Informed Consent clinic in order
to get hormones, which is in part like an insurance thing,
and you know it has has all of these all
of these bullshit reasons. Um, but that is that is
something we're still we're still definitely dealing with. Oh my goodness. Yeah.
And the better informed care clinics are the ones that
they realize it's just like an effort in box ticking.

(02:29:50):
So they're just like, Yep, sounds good. You came here
to this clinic and you asked about hormones. Sounds like
gender dysphoria to me, Like, we'll say your insurance whatever,
we gotta say, yes, event we will go into like
hormone blockers as well. Um, but I want to talk
about there's a lot of this, there's a lot of
rhetoric that's been we're growing for a long long time
about the extremely damaging, irreversible effects of of hormone replacement therapy, um,

(02:30:16):
and how they're gonna permanently alter your biology. If you
give these two children and there's five year olds taking
testosterone and it's gonna like you're like, you're like really
that sounds very scary. Um, So that's something I would
like to discuss. It's like because a lot of people
when we when we do we talk talk about hormones,
they think of it as this like big, extremely life

(02:30:37):
altering thing, um that has like these you know, irreversible
effects on your your your bones are gonna get weak
and trivel to never and never get big again, and
all of all of this very scary stuff. Um. What's
up with that? I think a lot of it goes
back to the biological essentialism, because hormones, even for the

(02:30:59):
people who give them, are considered partially like reversible because
the majority of the things that happen one take a
long ass time, like you will know whether or not.
This is a good idea for the majority of people
well before the physical manifestations occur. Uh. And and considering
like one of the biggest problems we have with certain formulations,

(02:31:22):
like in the once a week or once every other
week injectable version of estrogen, by the time you get
to right before your next dose, your estrogen is so
low you're feeling it and it's starting to like reverse
some of those So like if you're feeling it after
two weeks. How irreversible could it be? Uh? And some
of it depends on like eight timing, because if we're

(02:31:45):
talking about a person who has say, already gone through
a testosterone mediated puberty, then some of the things are
just not going to be affected. You can't change like
bone size, height or anything like that. There's some interesting
things about like hip uh, like flexation and and and
and pivoting and actually yeah, yeah, and and and even

(02:32:05):
like shoe sizes can can change because of the way
the ligaments work on hormones, but like the bones aren't
going to change once they're done growing. But that's sort
of where the puberty blockers come in that we can
we'll talk about later. Um. But for the for the
majority of people, if you are going through if you
have gone through a puberty that you did not want,
you can take hormones to go through puberty you do

(02:32:26):
want and get the effects that you do want. And
some of the elements sure, like you know, growing breasts
uh guna coomastia as we would call it, an assist man,
which is another whole nonsense, UM, is not irreversible, Like
you can have them removed if you decided that you
needed to like de transition, which is a whole another story,

(02:32:49):
but even then, it takes like five years to see
your final breast size. Like if you if you're on
hormones for five years and you're worried about the ir
rever posable quote unquote effects, like what are we doing here?
I mean, and even I've heard from a lot of
my elder trans friends that whenever they go off hormones
sometimes their breasts just kind of go away because they're

(02:33:10):
not massive to begin with. Like if it's generally generally
generally you don't get the massive, massive honkers immediately. Um
working on it. I know, I know we're trying, um,
but a lot of a lot, a lot of even
the you know, that was one of the big things
that informed consent thing was like, you know, a lot
of these changes are reversible except for breasts. These are

(02:33:33):
these are these are these are permanent change. Be careful
and all my transferends are like a little bit but
I mean, like your nipples won't shrink, Like your nipples
will definitely be bigger, and that that won't change, but
a lot of like the size actually does fluctuate, and
I can't even tell that on like depending on if
I like missidos or something, being like oh yeah, like

(02:33:55):
there is a lot of a lot of fluctuation, even
like on like you know, like temperature and stuf how
cold it will determine how how how how how my
chest looks it is. It is, Uh, it's pretty fun.
I mean, I am I just like the bio hacking
thing in general. It is like the cyberpunk and me um.
But yeah, I guess I guess we could talk about

(02:34:17):
hormone hormone blockers as well, because this is the other
kind of thing you hear a lot about when conservatives
are very scared about transpeople. The idea of hormone blockers
like making people infertile or making permanent changes to children's
health or something blah blah blah blah blah. Gosh, that's
the thing that is like really really frustrating for me,

(02:34:41):
specifically because puberty blockers, the Ganada troupe in the g
n R H antagonists and agonists which have been around
for like long time, like ever for for I want
to say it was like a hundred years, but I
might be misquoting something that I'm half remembering, but they've
been a down for like a really long time to
the point where we have generics and in the in

(02:35:03):
the pharmaceutical industry, that means that it's been like decades
at the very least, something that had rigorous testing that
has an indication with the FDA for precocious puberty, which
just means a person who is usually SIS who for
whatever reason has puberty at a very young age. With
some of the some of the specific cases that I've

(02:35:24):
seen that that I've that I've looked into, um involved
giving puberty blockers to like a three or four year
old because their body is trying to undergo puberty. So
even the idea of like, oh, well, I don't know
this twelve year old being on a puberty blocker for
three years, that sounds very dangerous when we have a
person over here who was on it for fifteen years

(02:35:44):
with no ill effects, like like no long lasting ill effects. Um,
that the idea of anybody describing it as like experimental
is absolutely a historic outside of the realm of reality. Yeah,
there's it's it's basic anti anti intellectualism, because yeah, we've
been giving six children hormone blockers for a long time
for early onset puberty, and it turns out they work

(02:36:08):
and they're pretty safe. So yeah, maybe we should give
those two trans kids too if they want them. Uh,
it seems like something we could at least try and
see if it improves mental health. And then it's it's
not even a matter that we have to try it.
We've been doing it for like almost ten years, like
the it was first and think it was like two
thousand thirteen. There's a there's a ted talk I use

(02:36:28):
in my class of a of a physician who like
pioneered the use of puberty blockers in trans kids and
showed that any trans kid who got puberty blockers and
then was allowed to undergo the puberty that they desired
at an appropriate age, which is actually like fourteen fifteen,
at the same time as their peers um. But even
if they had to wait till eighteen, the psychological effects

(02:36:49):
of having in appropriate puberty are essentially nullified. They are
otherwise psychologically and physically like identical to their their CIS
gender peers. So it's like we have actual evidence that
it is extremely beneficial and extremely worthwhile, and like the
one kind of long term side effect is you might

(02:37:11):
be up to an inch shorter than you otherwise be
which is a wildly like problematic like study that was
done because like we don't have time machines to know
whether or not that work, Like what would your control
group be? Um, And it's just wild. It's very bothersome
to me because a lot of the gender affirming hormone therapy,
the evidence is all over the place for a variety

(02:37:32):
of political reasons and historical reasons. But for hormone blockers
or for puberty blockers specifically, the evidence is like really solid,
really strong, and it's, ah, this is the question I
actually have because I'm actually unfamiliar with this specific thing.
But yeah, if you give like, um, hormone blockers to

(02:37:54):
like a kid who's tend they still kind of like
grow at the same rate as a lot of as
a lot of their peers, and that is it just
it's it's this specifically like the secondary sex characteristic changes
that get put on pause. UM. But there's just so
much Yeah, there's just so much fear around the even

(02:38:17):
even just the hormone blocker thing. Right when we're getting
you know, just like prescribing hormone blockers being like a
felony offense, and multiple states now you're like, it's like
it's it is just an extreme degree of anti anti
intellectualism just like just like purposeful like ignorance, um and

(02:38:38):
just extreme hatred and uh bigotry, and it's it is uh,
I mean yeah, it's a I'm kind of speaking to
the choir here. But but but but that's the trick.
And and even like the purity blocker thing, like you
were saying, your body will still make human growth hormone,
You will still grow, it's just that the modulation of

(02:38:59):
that with testosterone, which would increase the overall growth like
just doesn't there. And people say make a lot of
you know, talk a lot about the idea of um
bone mineral density because you don't have testosterone estrogen, which
are both necessary one or the other necessary for your
like bone mineral density to not like have like easily

(02:39:22):
fractured bones. But like you don't even have that until
you go through puberty. If you're just like preventing one puberty,
the endogenous puberty, and then providing the hormones for an
exogenous puberty, they're fine, Like they have the hormones they need,
their bones are happy. Uh So yeah, I'd like to
talk about I guess kind of access to hormones and

(02:39:44):
in like the like the different models of of obviously
we're not giving up medical advice, but like access to
hormones and the different ways that people can go about
that now through doctors, through in form of consent um
and all of all and all of that jazz. Yeah,
So the informed consent model is a much more recent option,

(02:40:08):
and it's not available everywhere. I have a friend in
Texas we had to find a clinic that was like
two hours away to get her hormones. But here where
I live, we actually have too informed consent clinics, So
it's pretty convenient, but it varies wildly by by region. Uh.
And the informed care clinics are great. It means you
come in, they say this is what's going to happen.
Do you still want to do it? You say yes,

(02:40:28):
They take some blood, they run some tests, you come
back in two weeks, and they go here. You go
like that's They work really well depending on the clinic,
I guess and uh, but the more traditional quote unquote
standard model would be going to your pc P or
or whoever and saying that you want to do this,
which makes most of them very concerned because most physicians, pharmacist, nurses,

(02:40:51):
they don't get taught anything about trans people, are caring
for trans people or gender affirming hormone therapy in their
school like, so they have nothing to fall back back on. Uh.
So that makes them very nervous to do it. And
then UH, if you if you look at gosh, I
really want to tell you about the guideline stuff at
some point here because it is buck wild um as

(02:41:14):
to why that would be a concern. But another part
of it is is also the insurance you know, America's
original sin in our healthcare dystopia, if you will. Uh,
the insurances historically have required and part of this is
also from antiquated guidelines that has been somewhat like just
grandfathered into excuse the term, uh, this idea of like

(02:41:34):
we you have to go to a therapist, if you
go to a psychologist, and they have to say that
you have gendered dystoria, that's why it's in the d
s M. And then after you do that, some places
require you to socially transition before getting hormones or anything,
which can be extremely problematic for some individuals. That just
increases like visibility and bullying and and such in a

(02:41:54):
way that it may drive people. It's it's sort of
was intentionally required back in the day to drive people
to not want hormones anymore. And it's all of these
gate keeping steps. And it's even worse if you wanted
to get a surgery later on, where you have to
have been on hormones for a certain length of time,
you have to have two different generally like susgender right.

(02:42:17):
Healthcare practitioners who don't necessarily understand like the full like
everything that's going on, write you letters before. The most
insurances up until recently wouldn't even cover it. So it's
just gate keeping step after gate keeping step. Because even
the big guidelines, which is w PATH, which is about
to put out their so gate guidelines. Um, there's a
guidelines out of San Francisco, and the Endocrine Society has

(02:42:40):
guidelines from two seventeen that are but all of those
are made by cisgender people, usually with the intent to
gate keep this care because it's either they're uncomfortable with it,
because they're unfamiliar with it, they have some kind of
ideological reason to be against it, or whatever whatever else.
There's a survey that I often quote to my students

(02:43:01):
in class that, Um, they surveyed a whole bunch of
trans individuals trying to get care from their physicians, and
it was nearly a quarter of them said that they
avoided healthcare because of discrimination, and half of them reported
having to teach their health care practitioner how to care
for them, which is wild. Like imagine going to the

(02:43:26):
hospital with like heart failure and having to like talk
your physician through how to care for you. Can you
can you live for two years with heart failure first?
Before we go, Oh my gosh, could you imagine if
we treated other things this way? I'd be like, well,
are you sure that you have diabetes? Are you sure
that you're? Like, well, we can't treat your diabetes you're

(02:43:47):
too fat, Well, your b m I is too high,
so we can't give you the insulin. Like, give me
a break. What is happening? Uh? It seems like, uh, basically,
what you're is that we got a good system. We
gotta oh, we gotta figure it out. Absolutely no notes
perfect and every well that does it for us today? Here? Uh? Well,

(02:44:13):
specifically if I could, Um, it's really interesting from like
the healthcare perspective because from you know, the practitioners perspective,
because there's essentially two kinds of like treatment. There's guideline
based medicine and evidence based medicine. And a lot of schools,
like my school teaches a lot of guideline based medicine,
which is for something like hypertension or diabetes, is put

(02:44:33):
out by like large organizations with a ton of evidence.
It is actually like pretty reasonable. But that means that
if you're going along with what they say, that means
that you believe that they read those studies correctly and
that their interpretation is in no way compromised by like
sources of their income, say, and that those guidelines actually

(02:44:56):
match your patients. So it's a lot of assumptions that
you're making, which can be extremely pro ablematic an evidence
based is where you dive into literature and you figure
it out yourself, which is very time consuming and requires
an awful lot of like professional uh, like you know,
criticism in a way. Uh, but when you look at
it for for trans care, for for gender affirming hormone therapy,

(02:45:17):
those guidelines are unbelievably compromised. To give you an example,
a hotly contested issue in feminizing therapy is the use
of micronized progesterone in feminizing care. Uh, it's kind of
like all over the place. There's a long history of
it of this controversy. In the upcoming w path socate

(02:45:38):
guidelines that I had like a preliminary copy to to
provide notes on there, there's a single statement that just
says that there's a controversy that exists and you should
not use micronized progesterone and transfiminine care. And they list
a study. Okay, if you pull up that study, the
title of it is progesterone is important for transgender Women's therapy.

(02:46:03):
Applying evidence for the benefits of progesterone insists women. And
it is like a pretty long document that concludes that
it is like an ethical imperative to offer it. So
the idea that the people who are writing the w
PATH guidelines read this article, read this this like meta
analysis and went, yeah, I don't really agree with any

(02:46:23):
of that. I'm just gonna say no, is just so infuriating. Again,
that seems like we've got a good system going here. Yeah, no, notes,
I guess on that note, let's do what did discuss
some of the some of the things that an't talking
about as much as like um antiandrogen's, uh, progesterone spiro
and what all kind of those do and how they

(02:46:44):
can kind of supplement a regular estradial regimen regiment regiment. Yes,
that sounds that sounds fancy. Sure, sure, So generally speaking,
if you're maybe you give a baseline for for folks
who are unaware. The way that we do feminizing arapy
is we offer estra dial, which is a bioequivalent version

(02:47:04):
of E two, because there's like three different versions of
estro of estrogen UM and an antiandrogen because testosterone tends
to be somewhat of an overriding hormone. The presence of
testosterone will override the effects of estrogen to a certain
extent depending on doses and stuff like that, which is
for the transmasculine individuals, why we just give testosterone. It
just does the job. You don't need to block the estrogen. Uh.

(02:47:27):
So there's a you know, there's a lot of history
and just those hormones as well that we could talk about,
like conjugated estrogens versus estra dial and and all the
different other stuff. But for the antiandrogens that we give
Historically in this country we give spironal lactone, which is
a mineral corticoid. It's a potassium sparing diuretic, and it's

(02:47:47):
just really good at higher levels. We usually use it
in like cardio issues, like it can be used for
like hypertensions and other things. Um, I believe it makes
you pee a lot, So it's a diuretic, meaning that
it makes you urinate an awful lot. And it's a
potassium sparing because it prevents your body from eliminating potassium.

(02:48:08):
So uh well, so that is that's the thing that
I think is really really wild because you're using these
high levels of it. It is preventing your production of
your endogenous production of testosterone and making you pee all
of the time, which spoilers estradial also makes you pay
more often. So like that's a real fun combination. But

(02:48:31):
then physicians, if they don't know what the heck they're doing,
they might say something like, well, you can't eat any bananas,
and like, historically the people who are on feminizing therapy
are healthy enough that their body just accommodates for it.
And if you have hyper kelmia, which is like too
much potassium, you're gonna know, like your muscles are gonna ache,
and there's gonna be a lot of like tell teal

(02:48:52):
side effects. Usually it's only a problem if you are
like only consuming a like salt alternative that has potassium
instead of sodium, which is not super common, not super common,
or if you have some other reason why your body
is like holding onto potassium. Um, So it's not usually

(02:49:13):
an issue. Uh, it's an inspiral actone isn't sufficient for everyone.
There's plenty of people who have like refractory testosterone after
some time, and there's some other options. Uh. There's kind
of a weird controversy about it that is sort of
heralded by the San Francisco guidelines. I mentioned earlier that
spironal actone uh leads to Okay, well, I want to
make sure I get the wording right. It's leads to

(02:49:35):
premature fusing of the breast bud uh and overall smaller
breast size, which the document that they cite for that
is a real weird retrospective study from like a bunch
of years ago on the rate of trans women getting
breast augmentation, and it found that the vast majority of
trans women who were on spirontal actone got breast dogment great,

(02:49:58):
but the problem is like of their sample group of
like two people, almost all of them were on spur
on elactone, Like there's like a sampling error, Like it's
not it's very silly. Um And also even like that
premature fusing in the breastbed. I have never been able
to find anything that suggests that that's a thing or

(02:50:20):
even like a way to explain what that statement even means.
But the San Francisco guidelines, to go back to the
my guideline thing actually says, has some like maybe don't
use spur on a lactone, even though it's something we've
been using since literally like the fifties or sixties for
this purpose. In other countries, you'll use what's called cyprotorone,

(02:50:41):
which is a synthetic progesterone, but it's not actually approved
in the States because it has a like there is
actually some evidence that it causes increase in certain specific cancers,
but it's like a pretty limited overall risk, Like it's
not like something like you know, going outside increases your
risk of cancer. It's it's not like a huge deal,
but it was enough that they don't it's not approved

(02:51:01):
in the States, but in a lot of other countries
you might get cyprotarone, which there's a lot of you know,
controversy around that too for those reasons. UM. Here, the
other option that we usually see is finasteride, which is
a five alpha reductation inhibitor that essentially is preventing testosterone
from being turned into dihydro testosterone, which we use normally

(02:51:23):
for UM to prevent quote unquote male pattern baldness and
in higher doses for prostate cancer because it's real good
at because it like reverses some of the feedback loops
just reducing product testosterone production. UM. So it's just fine
like that one has like very limited side effects, but
it might not have as substantial of a UM reduction

(02:51:48):
of testosterone that spiral lactone does. UH. And then the
kind of third one that we really we don't see
very often but there's a lot of interesting evidence about
is called bicaludamide. It's also a UH prostate cancer medication.
It actually blocks all of the receptors of testosterone in
your body while not reducing the production of it. So
you'll see a person who has like you know, they

(02:52:11):
have like seven hundred there their testosterone comes back is
like seven six whatever, But they're entirely feminized because none
of it has anywhere to work. Um. But the problem
with that is by plutamide being an anti cancer med uh,
primarily is ridiculously expensive. I think it's like fifty bucks
a dose or something like here, it's so great, uh,

(02:52:33):
I will say, and and for my gender queers out
there or any anyone else. So you can also just
take estrogen without any without any blockers UM and you
still get results as I can, as I can confirm
UM and for a subset of the population, just taking
estrogen A sufficient dosages will also reduce your levels of
progester of testosterone. Like it's your body knows what it's doing.

(02:52:58):
Is it is? It is? It is pretty cool. How
but you can just change things up in your body
is like, oh, we're doing this now, Okay, got it? Great?
I have all these mechanisms. It's wonderful. It was that
That wraps up part one of our little two part
series of episodes talking about hormone replacement therapy. Tomorrow, I'll

(02:53:20):
talk more about access to gender affirming treatment and touch
on d I y h R T special thanks to
Dr Victoria Luna Brennan Grieve for chatting with me about
gender affirming hormonal treatment. You'll get to hear more of
my discussion with her tomorrow as well, including a brief
tangent about the Scythian priestesses, which I was it was very,

(02:53:42):
very very excited to talk about, but that doesn't for
us today. You can follow this show at Happen to
Hear pod and Cool Zone Media on Twitter and Instagram,
and you can look at my late night gender tweets
at Hungry about Tie on Twitter dot com. So see
you all on the other side. Welcome back to It

(02:54:16):
Could Happen here, the podcast about things falling apart and
sometimes how we can put things back together. I'm Garrison Davis,
Aspiring Rebus, and this is part two of my little
two part series talking about trans hormone replacement therapy. Last episode,
we discussed what HRT is, it's various benefits as gender
affirming treatment, and the informed consent model of receiving hormones.

(02:54:41):
Before we continue on with my discussion with Dr Grieve,
I would like to talk a bit more about informed consent.
So the informed consent option can be great for many
many people as an attempts to bypass some of the
red tape around receiving gender reforming healthcare. For its form
of consent, all you gotta do is set u an appointment,
signed the forms, maybe get some blood work done, and

(02:55:03):
then pick up your hormones. Right. You don't need to
live as trans for like two years or have letters
and therapists. It's it is. It is just up to you,
so it is. It is really convenient if you can
get that option. Some places even let you do it
via telemedicine appointments, so you can just sit at home
holding your little I keya shark and then get your hormones,

(02:55:24):
which does sound very very nice. Planned Parenthood offers informed
consent trans health care in many states, and in the
show notes I will link a Google map of the
informed consent clinics from across the country. Depending on your insurance,
you can get hormones for a little to no extra cost.
This way it can be really convenient. The biggest asterisk

(02:55:44):
for informed consent is that since it's based on you know,
informed consent, it often is just for humans age eight
teen and older, or sometimes teens a few years younger,
but only if their parents or guardians signed the forms. Obviously,
this is not ideal for a sixteen year old with

(02:56:04):
transphobic parents, who would really be helped by receiving like
hormone blockers or something, right. Another potential drawback is that
the clinics can sometimes have quite the wait list. I
started off with the informed consent model because it was
the easiest, but by the time I needed more blood
work done and my prescription refilled, setting up more appointments

(02:56:25):
that planned parenthood became kind of a nightmare. I was
continuously having appointments being canceled on me last minute and
just getting pushed back months and months into the future. Eventually,
I just resorted to getting hormones through my regular doctor
instead of just continuing on within formed consent. Now, this
is obviously a regional issue, right. I don't know what
it's like in Florida, for example, but the COVID andeen

(02:56:48):
pandemic has stressed a lot of the medical infrastructure here
in the States, and scheduling some appointments in these clinics
can be still quite challenging. And as you know, a
big theme of this show is that maybe we shouldn't
assume the structures that hold up our society are concrete,
permanent fixtures. The term the crumbles that we used to

(02:57:09):
describe the slow deterioration of the systems that we rely on,
was initially coined in reference to our medical system by
a friend of the show who works in the medical field.
Listen to the first five episodes of The Daily Show
talking about climate change for more on that. But a
part of the criminal's idea is trying to learn how
to become less reliant on the systems that we take

(02:57:32):
for granted, right, trying to solve for the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness before it's too late. On that note, back
to my discussion with Dr Victoria Luna Brendan Grieve, Assistant
professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. For
places that are getting, uh, you know, all of these
anti trends bills criminalizing all of this stuff for miners,

(02:57:54):
and then you know, eventually maybe even you know, my
big fear is that, you know, first off, they're gonna
criminalizing it for minors, and they're gonna say the brain's
not fully developed, your twenty five, and they're gonna criminalize
it until you're twenty five and they're just gonna criminalize
it for everyone after that. Um So for all of
these places that are making access to healthcare is so
much harder, What what is what is one to do?

(02:58:16):
Like if these if there's these kids and then even
adults who are like just find it so much harder
to get stuff. Like I know there's the informed consent clinics,
but there's there's like there's like a few in Texas,
but I don't even know what they can even offer anymore, right,
Like it's really unclear. Yeah, well, I'll tell you some
of that fear is already becoming reality here in Pennsylvania.
Just two days ago HP. I think it was HBO

(02:58:40):
passed by the House in don in Harrisburg that prevents
it's a ban on trans people playing sports up through
the college level, not just high school and grade school,
it's all the way up through you know, secondary education. Uh.
And even though our governor like has valve de Vito,

(02:59:01):
it like who even knows what's going to happen. But
they're already taking taking aim at this higher level kind
of thing. And there's a lot of pressdent for that.
But my goodness, if there's a long and storied history
of d I Y hormone therapy, and it's easier for
the trans feminine individuals because testosterone is actually a scheduled

(02:59:23):
to control I think it it might be a three
I think it's scheduled three steroid. I'll write a little
thing about it, and I'll say in the episode. And
it's such a funny reason too, because it's just you
can use it to dope for endurance based like like
cycling and running, because it will increase your red blood

(02:59:44):
cell account that's a like. And so it's a controlled
substance because people can use it to dope for for exit,
for for sports. So it's that's a little bit harder
to get ahold of in like a meaningful way. But
there are a lot of different allegedly, there are a
lot of different place is online that you can acquire
estrogen or estra dial relatively easily. Now I'm gonna actually

(03:00:06):
pause the discussion with me and Dr Grieve to talk
a little bit about d I Y h R T
or for those anti acronym people out there, do it
yourself hormone replacement therapy. Again, I'm not a medical doctor.
Unless you have a problem regarding parapsychology, I cannot offer
you any expertise, but I can talk about d I

(03:00:28):
Y h R T as it's existed for trans people
for the past two decades. Because an unfortunate truth is,
although it's gotten much easier to get gender affirm and
care and hormones the past few years, even in states
that aren't facing this wave of anti trans healthcare bills,
the medical establishment hasn't been the most trans friendly place

(03:00:48):
in general. A recent Center for American Progress report found
that nearly half of transgender people and sixty of transgender
people of color reported having experienced to mistreatment at the
hands of a medical provider, including refusal of care and
verbal or physical abuse, just in the year before the survey,

(03:01:09):
which took place in June, so this is this is
still very much an ongoing issue. One in two trans
people reported that their access to gender affirming healthcare was
curtailed significantly during the pandemic, and nearly one in two
transgender adults have had insurance providers denying them coverage for
gender affirming care, and very often doctors don't even know

(03:01:30):
how to properly treat transgender patients, and often it's up
to the patients to educate the doctors on trans health
care issues. The Center for American Progress survey from last
year found that one in three trans people report having
to teach their doctors about trans people to get them
appropriate care, and reported having been asked innovasive or unnecessary

(03:01:53):
questions about being trans which were not related to the
reasons for them visiting the doctor. The report cited a
twenty eight team brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation that
found that more than half of medical school curriculums lack
information about unique health issues the LGBTQ community faces, and
doesn't cover treatment beyond HIV prevention and care. So obviously,

(03:02:14):
that leaves a lot to be desired for people wanting
to receive transgender health care. Between medical mistreatment, insurance complications,
and doctor ignorance, many trans folks have taken it upon
themselves to get the drug necessary for hormone replacement therapy
because the alternative is often just having to face not
being able to receive the health care that in many
cases makes it possible to live. The Center for American

(03:02:38):
Progress survey found that twenty eight percent of trans folks
report having postponed or not gotten necessary medical care for
fear of discrimination. Taking your endochronology and hormone treatment into
your own hands has a lengthy history and used to
be much more common in the days before informed consent.

(03:02:59):
In a survey of trans people in Washington, d c.
Circus two thousand, over half of the respondents so that
they had used non prescribed hormones also known as d
I y h RT. So information on how to go
about d I yng your HRT spread via online forums
and websites in the early two thousand's, and after some

(03:03:20):
trial and error, the information is kind of consolidated into
a few main information hubs, that being the d I
y h r T Wiki, HRT dot Cafe, and d
I y HRT dot get hub dot io. Now, obviously,
when you're getting into taking drugs from online sources, you
need to be extremely careful and cautious about what foreign

(03:03:41):
chemicals you're putting into your body, including and trying to
only acquire drugs from trustworthy sources, doing drug testing if
you can, and doing your own blood testing before and
after to keep an eye on your testosterone and estrogen levels.
It is possible to order blood tests via online and
send it through a lab that you have to ship
your blood too, but often it's just easier to do

(03:04:04):
it by going through the medical system. Now, one massive
caveat with d y h r T is although it's
more straightforward to acquire extra dial and antiandrogen's like spiro
from online sources, getting too stosterone for masculinization therapy is
much more tricky because in most places it's a restricted drug.
Here in the States it is a Schedule three substance,

(03:04:25):
so technically buying it without a prescription would be a
felony um. So for this reason, most d I y
h r T stuff focuses on feminizing hormones since that
is less legally complicated. Now, obviously you know steroids exist,
so it is possible to get them, but I will
not be giving out guides on how to do that
here on the pod, but you know you can. You

(03:04:47):
can look into it if you so desire for feminizing hormones.
The main way of going about it requires obtaining bioidentical
extra dial. It can come in a few forms pills,
which are not difficult to acquire, and assuming you get
the dose right, it's pretty easy because it's just a
process of dissolving the little pill tablets under your tongue,
and that's kind of it, right. Dosage is its own thing,

(03:05:10):
which you can figure out if you do reading, but
the actual taking of it is pretty straightforward. Transdermal estrogen
or transdermal estra dial is kind of the new hot thing. Uh.
Usually this has you taking weakly estra dial patches which
you just switch out every week um or you can
also do daily gels, which you just rub out your body,

(03:05:31):
although unfortunately for dosing gels it can be more tricky
if you go d I Y because it's hard to
know what concentration just the jela is if you're just
rubbing a sav on yourself. It's not already prepackaged, but
the patches are pretty good. And lastly, the classic method
is injectable estradial at various concentrations in the form of
some oil solution. This can usually be the cheapest option

(03:05:56):
if you can figure out how to buy estra dial
and needles. Syringes can be bought at any pharmacy just
over the counter in most countries without a prescription. For
ferminizing hormones. Some people also take antiandrogen's a k A.
Testosterone blockers like spiral lactone, which can be acquired online
and are almost always taken orally in the form of

(03:06:16):
a pill. Now, when getting these drugs online, there are
two main categories of purchase. There's pharmaceutical grade and home brewed.
Pharmaceutical grade refers to HRT produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies
that are licensed and subject to regulation. They should be
of the same quality as those found in your local pharmacy,
and they can be ordered without a prescription from websites

(03:06:39):
based in countries that allow for the legal exportation of
certain medications. These will almost always carry less inherent risk
versus receiving and taking home brewed hormones, which leads us
to the second version that you can buy, which is
home brewed. This refers to HRT produced by individuals by
sourcing raw extrodial or whatever other chemical you're taking in

(03:07:01):
the form of a powder, and then compounding the medication themselves.
They do not synthesize or from scratch these hormones, but
they do use the powdered versions of them, and they
get them from sources from drug manufacturing companies to synthesize
it into their own estradial or whatever other drug you're taking,
you know, in the antiandrogen list, there's there's too many,

(03:07:22):
too many to name. Now. While this this concept does
sound scary and it can obviously go wrong if someone's
not synthesizing it correctly. Uh, there are a couple of
well respected members of the community that have been known
to produce high quality and safe HRT medications. But before
anyone decides to take drugs that you get on the internet, please, please,
please please do lots of reading beforehand on on dosage effects,

(03:07:46):
side effects, and be very cautious with your drug sourcing,
right you should know who you're buying it from. You
don't want to just buy from whatever it's catchy website.
You should make sure that what you're doing is other
people are backing up on this decision. Make sure that's there.
You can cross reference information here, because there's a lot
of information out there online and not all of it
is good information, obviously, but really try to cross reference

(03:08:10):
information on any drug sources, on hormone dosage, on any
possible drug interactions. If you're taking multiple drugs or you
already have prescriptions, now I should I should note that
supply chain issues that affect the medical system can even
extend out to d y A h r T. There's
no true escape. There's no true other. One of the
main pharmaceutical grade online sites to source HRT from is

(03:08:33):
currently out of estradial pills, so there there is there
is no true escape sometimes, but to learn more about
d I Y HRT, you should check out d I
O Y HRT dot get hub dot io or HRT
dot cafe and the d I y trans dot wiki.
And keep in mind not everything you read on those

(03:08:53):
sources is necessarily good advice or up to date with
the current information on how these drugs work. Recently, I
would reading a guide I found via one of those
sites on how to homebrew my own estrogen by buying
the powdered version of it that synthesizing it myself to
level up my alchemy stat um, and I found the
guy that I was reading contained quite a bit of

(03:09:16):
outdated misinformation about progester around, So don't take everything you
read as gospel, but those resources are at least a
good place to start anyway. Now back to the interview,
the problem that you might run into with the I
y ng it is you might not be able to
get the bioequivalent estradial in some form, you might have
to settle for conjugated estrogens or even something like an

(03:09:40):
ethaniol estradiale, which is like hormonal birth control, which because
they are synthetics, they actually have a much rougher time
on your body. And that's where a lot of the
side effects quote unquote like come from. Like all of
the worry about like blood clots and things from taking
estrogens comes from conjugated estrogen sethanio estrodi. Yeah. The actual study,

(03:10:05):
uh that a lot of that is citing goes all
the way back and it was studying the rate of
plotting in cis gender women taking hormonal and it's just like, okay,
so this is the wrong population with the wrong medication. Yeah,
that seems like not a great scientific study, Right, what
do we do? I mean, it might be great to

(03:10:25):
talk about for the rate of yeah, right, or doesn't
really right, it doesn't it doesn't really help so much.
Um And what I think is also pretty wild too.
I mentioned the progesteran thing earlier. A lot of that
controversy comes from the fact that the original studies on

(03:10:45):
whether or not it could be beneficial. We're done with
medroxy progesterone, a synthetic progesterone that has a really nasty
side effect profile in a lot of different ways. And
now that we have micronized progesterone where the evidence suggested
not only is it safe, actually makes estrogen safer, and
now they're like, no, we can't give that, that's just
that's just crazy talk. I will say, I have heard

(03:11:08):
from people with more experience taking hormones than me that
progesterone does make you way too hoarny um heads up
for for side effects, TAG can confirm, but um, well,
but but progesterone can have a lot of other really
beneficial side effects. It can really increase the fat deposition

(03:11:28):
to various places. It can help with your mood, it
can help with your sleep. It actually reduced the period
symptoms that I was having because I because there's surprise,
people on estrogen can also have periods. Uh And because
your body again knows what it's doing, it's gonna modulate
it through the E one, E two, E three pathway
like throughout the month in a sixal fashion, and you
can get bloating and cramps. And I had really bad

(03:11:51):
morning sickness like for for three days every twenty eight
days for months until eventually I started micronized progesterone and
those some them's alleviated, Which makes a kind of sense
if you know that progesterone only birth control reduces periods.
So like there's a there's there's a lot of precedent,
a lot. It makes a lot of like sense that
it would work. God, I it's I need to tell

(03:12:15):
you have have you ever heard of the Powers method
of of Oh Garrison, I am so excited to introduce
you to this person. Like doctor Powers is a fascinating
grifter in the trans health care space because he is

(03:12:36):
a He's a physician who like has has made it
his duty to to to make sure that trans people,
especially trans women. He actually doesn't like really have anything
to say about trans men because the the therapy is
so like easy to to to do that. He has
a wild postulation as to like better ways to give hormones,

(03:13:00):
and he he has things where it's like, we don't
need antiandrogens, you just give really high levels of injectable estrogen,
which like I mean that will probably work because for
some people, but yeah yeah, but but also estrogens like
really safe and so like you can give it to
an unbelievably high level. It's not really going to speed
things up exactly like it will maybe a little bit,

(03:13:22):
but not that much. And any of the side effects
you might experience, which could also come from the the excipients,
the non active elements of it, like you can be
allergic to those if you ever really high dose, if
you're real problem. Um. But the big thing for him
is he pushes that micronized progesterone is not only necessary
and good, especially for breast size, you should also stick

(03:13:45):
the oral capsules in your butt. Oh we're we are,
we are officially boofing estrogen now yes, yes, okay, well
I'm I'm switching back to pills. This sounds very exciting.
Well so well, oh my gosh. So the the idea
is his line is, um that you know that the

(03:14:06):
oral capsules you only get a tiny fraction of the
total progesterone, and you get a lot more if you
stick it up you get the whole dose if you
stick it up your butt, which, like if you know
literally anything about pharmacology is both right and entirely insane
because anything that you take orally, there's a bioavailable like
level of it like so oral. Uh, micronized progesterone has

(03:14:30):
a bioequivalence of I think like two or three percent,
which is why when you take like a hundred milligram capsule,
you get like a certain blood level. If you take
it rectally, it's like a twelve. It's still not the
whole thing, which is why the the micronized progesterone rectal
suppositories or twenty five milligrams to give you the same exposure,

(03:14:51):
so it's four times the systemic absorption, which means that
if you are boofing a micronized progesterone capsule, you getting
three to four times the dose that you should be getting.
And uh, the I pulled because I get into fights
with people all the time about this. I pulled the

(03:15:12):
original FDA filing for micro and I progesterone, and they
suggested that three hundred milligrams is basically getting to what
like a cis gender person's maximum progesterone levels would be,
meaning that if you're boofing one or two, as some
of his regimens suggests, like, you might be essentially overdosing
on progesterone for no reason, like there's no real reason

(03:15:35):
to do that and it is just crazy. When when
I started this call today, I did I did not
think we would get to boofing progesterone. It is a weird,
like a weirdly large part of my Twitter interactions have
been fighting people to stop boofing progesterone. UM, so I
needed to say unfortunately, just exposed this idea. Two millions

(03:15:58):
of more people know well, no, I'm saying, don't do
it well and so but you know, you know, you
know that's not how that works. I do know that's
not how that works. But I mean, I I tell you,
if if your your friend Robert Evans were here, I
could pitch a hole behind the bastards on this Dr
powers guy um sounds, he sounds fascinating. He has a subreddit,

(03:16:20):
like all good physicians do. I love the doctor has
a subreddit and my my favorite post other than recently,
he's been pushing this like miracle hair tonic that he made,
which is like come on, buddy, like like now it's
just obvious. He calls it to yep, yep, the verbon.
He might call it. He might even call it an elixir,

(03:16:41):
which is very funny, but from a magical hand, tonic exactly.
It's so funny because one of the components of it,
I think is finasteride. Like I I looked at the
and I'm like, yes, that is something for bald for
male pattern baldness. It will probably work. Congratulations, you just
remade rogaine. Uh. But the single post that I feel

(03:17:02):
like perfectly encapsulates this guy's mentality. Um is, there's this
big post that went around through like cis gender like
kind of like centrist spaces that every trans person I
saw was just like, excuse me, what the fuck? Where
this guy was secretly micro dosing injectable estrogen that he

(03:17:22):
prescribed himself, which sounds kind of illegal. Not gonna lie. Uh,
and messed up the dose by a thousand percent by
a thought, by a times thousand Yeah yeah yeah. And
um like, I can give you the link. I I can.
I know exactly where it is. I can give you
the link if you wanted to read this. It is
buck Wild. But the thing is, he goes on to
describe this like acute dysphoric episode that he had from

(03:17:46):
one high dose of subcutaneous estrogen, a thing that is
not physiologically possible and completely insane. That and he but
he was like, but I understand the pain the trans
women go through because I fucked up a dose where
I was secretly taking estrogen to make my face look younger.

(03:18:08):
So I understand your pain and have so much empathy
for for the trans women's that I am trying to save.
And it is so frustrating to me how many people
give him like credence, give him credit um because he
he has He has claims like apply progesterone cream to
the the the smaller breast to even them out, and

(03:18:29):
it's like, okay, my dude, have you ever met like
people with breasts one is larger than the other. That's
how breasts work. It's like, well, what's your evidence for that? Well,
I had two people who did it and they said
it worked. Okay, cool. Do you have those those reports? No? No, no,
they got burned up in a house fire. It's very sad,
and I can't give you that act. Yes. So, so

(03:18:51):
he worked in a clinic that a friend of mine
actually moved to after they got rid of him because
he made all these wildly and total claims and whenever
anybody challenged, and then his house burned out, which is
actually very sad because his cats died in it, and
he didn't deserve his cats because cats are perfect creatures
and this man is insane and cats never do anything wrong.

(03:19:14):
Cats are perfect, magical beings. I love yours so much
as they keep crossing in front of the screen. They're perfect. Um.
But so whenever anybody challenges him on literally any of
his claims, he goes, well, I had all of that data,
but it burned up in my house, and then he
like makes it a sob story about like how like

(03:19:36):
like horrible this was, which like I'm sure it was
really bad, Like I'm sure it was like really really bad.
But even his um like power point presentations that he
has that he like goes through to like really like
talk about the powers method and make it sound like
really really good, has a like fire safety section specifically
so he can garner this like sympathy so people will

(03:19:59):
not question his claims that have no evidence behind them.
And so it's just such a fantastic examinated to me.
I like, it's just so weird seeing like a space
that has historically been denigrated in the evidence. You know,
you had that whole episode on like the Hirshfeld Institute,
and you know, we see all this like anti anti

(03:20:20):
trans uh like propaganda and legislation going on right now
that there's a lot of like empty space in the
medical record and in the evidence record for what to
do in these situations. There's a lot of confusion from
the guidelines in these other societies, like I was talking about,
and in steps this guy who sees an opportunity to

(03:20:42):
be like, uh like popular, like powerful individual in this
space to give people hope that he can cash in
on uh And since the medications and since the hormone
therapy is so safe, he doesn't actually hurt that many people.
And it's it is so wild seeing this juxtaposition of
individuals being like, well, this is unsafe experimental nonsense, and

(03:21:05):
seeing this guy flagrantly overdosing people on hormones with no
ill effects because they're that safe. Uh. That is that
is pretty funny. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's funny in
that like laughing until you're crying kind of way. What

(03:21:25):
is the way that people can try to combat all
the medical disinformation around HRT specifically because we do this specifically,
let you see this a lot and to save the
children rhetoric, we see this a lot for just anti
TRN stuff in general of and like, yeah, just in
terms of someone who has to deal with this stuff

(03:21:45):
on a professional level, like when when we're just faced
with all of this just complatantly, just like wrong stuff
being treated as absolute fact when your experience, what's kind
of the best ways to go about that in people?
Oh my goodness, UM, it kind of depends on the audience.
When I'm talking to other other healthcare practitioners, I, UM,

(03:22:09):
I can. I I have historically because I do a
lot of like teaching and advocacy in this area to
other health care practitioners and UM holding sessions like volunteering
for to hold sessions of like to educate on this
and say like these are the kind of regimens that
are commonly used in clinics. This is why these are
things to look out for and to stress the importance

(03:22:32):
of believing the patient and um, the importance of you
don't want to gate key because if if which they're
not that dangerous, but if there is to be a problem,
you would rather have that patient want to work with
you to solve it. Is like such a big part
of it, Like even just understanding that from that level

(03:22:54):
that you're not like delivering this kind of like life
saving medication to them as this like Lord on High.
It's this idea that like, no, you should be working
with this person and if you're not familiar with it,
you need to do your fucking research. Uh. And I
will give you the resources for that. I will. I
will walk you through those resources. And that's that's awfully

(03:23:14):
convincing for the majority of healthcare individuals at any level,
because I've done I've done talks for students and nursing
programs and physical therapy programs all the way up to
like actively practicing physicians, nurses and pharmacists, and it's basically
the same. You just you make the argument, you show
the evidence, You give them the evidence, and you walk
them through uh like kind of and and then and

(03:23:36):
then have a robust question and answer period where they
will ask you those questions and you can explain why
they are wrong. Having that kind of dedicated space can
be really beneficial, but not scalable in a way that's
necessarily helpful, Like I've made a positive impact on my city,
but that doesn't really necessarily help if you yourself are

(03:23:57):
not a health care practitioner and want to like explain
this kind of stuff. And I mentioned earlier that on Twitter,
I've spent a lot of time like arguing that people
shouldn't be boofing their progesterone. But I've had to stop
because it's exhausting every single person like coming back. It's
like the same conversations over and over again, and there's

(03:24:17):
no good way to like have a central location that
just has all that information that anybody is gonna believe
because of the way the internetworks. Um So, I guess
my answer is I'm not sure, Like there's so much
misinformation out there, and so much of it is so

(03:24:38):
wrong and not in alignment with reality that looking at
it at all, it falls to pieces and and the
idea of the majority of people to I guess I
could say, if a person is coming to you and
asking legitimate questions and they don't really know, like they're
just like parroting stuff that they heard, they they're much

(03:25:00):
easier to convince because you can show like, oh, like
we have a long history of doing this, like look
at you know. I tell my students about how like
nineteen fifty two was the first like recognized hormonal mediated
transition in the United states like she was like a
movie star. Um and and you know, I talked about

(03:25:20):
a lot of the history to be like this isn't new,
this is something like we have been here forever. Um
my my favorite story. Do you know about the story
about the Scythian priestesses? Yes, I actually do, but I
would love for you to explain it. But oh my god,
I found out about that a few months ago and
I was like, oh my god, it makes me so happy.
So so to to explain very briefly, I think it's

(03:25:41):
it's an old um. I think it was like Herodotus.
It's like an old like Crestian like author that we
have information, author, philosopher, whatever, historian. But they talk about
in one of the texts the Scythian priestesses who essentially
distill the poison of woman. They call it in one
of the text which I think is just such a
great term from um uh, pregnant mayor urine, which interestingly enough,

(03:26:06):
we actually still make today conjugated estrogens. The brand name
is Premarin because it comes from pregnant mayor urine, Like
are you serious? Yeahah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's literally
a thing that we still do today. That is hilarious.
It's beautiful, it's so good. Um. And so they were priestesses.
They were like, you know, people would come to them

(03:26:28):
to seek out their wisdom and they're like the spiritual thing.
And it was a it was like a bunch of
trans women who like got high, told stories and probably
sucked each other. And that sounds like a policule to me.
But like the silly the Sithians were like a nomadic
group of people who would travel all around kind of
what is now the Middle East. Um. And yeah, it's

(03:26:49):
I mean, I do love the idea of trans people
having like specific like more esoteric insight almost naturally because
they've had to deal with ideas of ontology and ideas
as ontology is just like the nature of being um
and so having to people with that, having to deal
with like the nature of reality from a much a
younger age because their whole perception of reality and self

(03:27:12):
is obviously so different because of their experience of being
what is now called trans um. So it makes a
lot of sense that a lot of these people would
have been like basically different forms of Shabin's mediums. We'll
just have like esoteric insite because they've been thinking about
these types of like reality altering topics for so much
longer because it's so much more personally affecting to them. Um.

(03:27:35):
But yes, what I specifically read about the cythy and
priestesses and like, oh my, they're just like doing the thing,
just doing the thing. It turns out we've been doing
this forever. My favorite account is one of the reasons
they commanded respect of the like masculine leaders that would
come to get information was because they were all terrified
that they would inflict the poison of women, which of

(03:27:56):
them it does spread by the way it is, it's
highly contagious, contagious. But it's just the idea that like
there was like some of the respect was from like
this fear of being force femed is hilarious, from like
this early BC, the primordial fear of the primordial fear.
I was gonna say, Garrison, you mentioning like ontology. My

(03:28:16):
original degree was in psychology and philosophy, So like, let's go, baby,
we can go deep on some of this stuff. Sure,
I'm sure, I'm sure we couldn't talk to the mysticism
and magic and gender for a long long time. Oh
my god, that would be a whole another podcast are
big areas of interest. But I but I, but I
super agree with you because I've been thinking about this
and I've ended up having conversations with a lot of

(03:28:38):
my peers in pharmacy and in the university. Because people
might not recognize this, but pharmacy is actually one of
the more conservative spaces in healthcare. Uh. Like my my
school had a dress code for the students until two
years ago when I fought hard enough to get it removed.
Like it was wild. Um, Like the code of Conduct
committee tried to get me, tried to prevent me from

(03:28:59):
getting my ears pierced. Like, yeah, it's a wild space
for me to exist in. Um, it's extremely conservative, extremely traditional,
like the some Like yeah, I got stories that I'd
love to tell if you wanted to hear them. But
the thing that I think is really interesting is when

(03:29:20):
you look at me in comparison to my my colleagues
who are predominantly like Christian, predominantly like traditionalist, predominantly capitalist,
and I roll in as this like anti capitalist, like anarchists,
trans woman, who's Polly, who's pan sexual, who's a pagan?
All the p's and it's like, well, once I question gender,

(03:29:40):
I started realizing all of culture and society is bullshit,
and now I can tell you the truth. Come to
me for the truth of reality. No, it even makes
sense in terms of like you know, why why did
two trans women make the matrix? You're like, yeah, no,
it's like it's it is. It is the same thing
as your Your entire nature and basis of reality was

(03:30:02):
severely questioned. So so you're trying to trying to understand
these feelings. And for you know, mid modern days we
have like stuff like simulation theory, we have the matrix, um,
and then you know, but before before then, you know,
it would have been taken out in like spiritualism and
religion and you know, the different levels of reality on
like the whole like mystic side of things as opposed

(03:30:23):
to like the more sci fi side of things. Um.
But yeah, like it's it's all the same stuff. Like
you're you're, you're, you're playing with the same things. Um, yeah,
it is. It is just a funny a funny trend
that once you once you notice it, you'll you'll start
seeing it in in like different places. Yeah, so we
are still mystics who understand the true reality of the

(03:30:44):
world and will force them you if you don't give
us respect. I just don't see what the problem. I
believe that That was my takeaway from Matrix Resurrections. Oh yeah, well,
of is there is there anything else you would want
to you would want to add? Oh my goodness, Um,

(03:31:05):
I don't know fight for trans people. One of the
things that I end up always having to talk to
my students about in colleagues and things is what ally means,
because I've literally gotten into arguments with people who are like, oh, yeah,
it's l g B t Q I A because A
stands for ally, and I'm like, oh, I will knife you,
like like, it doesn't stand for ally, it stands for

(03:31:28):
a sexual or romantic of all of all of the
other a's yes. But it's the it's this thing where
people think being an ally is just being like like
okay with a person existing the kind of like, well
if it makes you happy, which is like okay, motherfucker,
that's not like. That is so belittling of the experience. Um,

(03:31:52):
that's not ally. Ship. To be an ally, you have
to leverage your privilege by not being a member of
that community to protect people in that community. You can
be tolerant, but not an ally. And that's sort of
where the old saying comes from that if that's what
being an ally is to you, we don't need allies,
we need accomplices. And um. With the current legislative push

(03:32:14):
against trans people, I mean, like literally what I do
is like a felony in three states now, are almost
a felony in three states, and it's going to be
a growing number of states. Yeah, and and and it's
just so unbelievably depressing. And there aren't enough. I mean,
there's a lot of trans and non binary and and
every kind of expression you could want people in this country,

(03:32:36):
way more than than a lot of surveys suspected. Um,
but we're not enough to necessarily fight this in a
way that isn't going to end up with increasing violence.
I mean, the the FBI statistics of random violence against
into like hate crime specifically has been rising against LGBT people,

(03:32:57):
especially trans people, in the last couple of years, and
I'm sure it's only going to get more in the
next few years. Still with all of the with the
wave of stuff happening in the past few months. Yeah,
So if you're if you're not. If you're assist person
and you want to be an ally, you gotta fight
for us. And if you're a trans person, if you
don't have other reasons why you can't maybe arm yourself

(03:33:20):
in some way at this point, if you if you
feel mentally capable, it's not a bad idea to learn
how to do things. It's not a not a bad
idea to get stop the bleed training, not a bad
idea to get you know, emergency first aid training, right
all of all of all of the things. Because things

(03:33:41):
are things are happening and they're going to keep happening.
One might say it could happen here. Wow, I know,
we really we really put this together, just pulled it back,
just just really encapsulated it. So yeah, I think that
does it for us today. Um, do do you have
do have any of plugables that you would like to

(03:34:02):
uh plug? Yeah? Sure, So if you wanted to talk
to me more, you can. I'm on Twitter for now,
assuming that elon must doesn't make it entirely unlivable at Vixen,
which but the w S two vs. I don't post
a hole up, but you can you can find me there.
You can also just straight up email me if you
had questions. My like work email for that purpose is

(03:34:24):
just Victoria dot grieve at pit dot e d U
I'd have I'd be happy to answer any questions that
people have. UH. And it's a robust university firewall, so
if I get hey that, that's fine, it won't get through. UM.
The and then outside of like my classes and stuff.
The only other thing I wanted to plug because you
brought it up. I am a frequent guest on a

(03:34:46):
podcast that a friend of mine hosts called School of Movies,
and we actually did Matrix two, three and four UM
and I was on those episodes and talked a lot
about the trans narrative there in UH. We also did
an episode on Priscilla, Queen of the because that's great.
I was always lucky enough to watch for Siliquin of
the Desert a few a few months ago UM with

(03:35:07):
some queer friends of mine with Hugo Weaving, and in
both of those he is he is. It is pretty
It is pretty fun watching Hugo Weaving go from agents
Smith to his character and Prisili Queen of the Desert,
it's beautiful. It's a beautiful metamorphosis. It is it is
very good, But yeah, thank you so much for coming
on to talk anytime. Thank you for listening to my

(03:35:32):
little two parter on hormone replacement therapy. If you want
to start reading more on the d I Y and
mutual aid side of things, check out d I Y
HRT dot, get hub dot, io HRT dot Cafe and
d I Y trans dot Luckie as a jumping off point.
But obviously you don't take everything to read on the
internet as gospel. I do think it's worth learning how

(03:35:54):
to make your own drugs possibly and learning how to
source your own estrogen from play says that are not
just a doctor, because who knows what other states will
start criminalizing getting drugs for doctor right, it's it is.
There seems to be a trend of making HRT illegal
via the medical system, So if this is something definitely

(03:36:15):
to look into, because it seems more and more people
will face restrictions in this vein. So yeah, that's kind
of a big reason for why I wanted to talk
about this today on the pod. Big Extra special thanks
to Dr Victoria Luna Brennan Grieve for coming on to
talk with me about gender affirming hormonal treatment. You can
check her out or ask her questions on her Twitter,

(03:36:37):
which can be found at vixen which with a two
vs for the w in which or you can email
her queries at Victoria dot grieve at pit dot e
d U and that doesn't for us today, everybody. You
can follow the show at Happened Here pod and cools
one Media on Twitter and Instagram, and you can look

(03:36:57):
at my late night gender style tweets at Hungry bow Tie.
See you on the other side. 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

(03:37:18):
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot
com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.