It Could Happen Here Weekly 158

Summary

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 158
Release Date: November 30, 2024
Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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1. Introduction and Host’s Return

[00:58] Garrison Davis:
Garrison Davis welcomes listeners back to the "It Could Happen Here" podcast, expressing gratitude for being allowed to return after a lengthy court battle. He introduces his guests, John and Haval, highlighting their extensive volunteer work in Nkumba to support migrants.

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2. Migrant Aid Efforts in Nkumba

[01:25] John:
John shares his involuntary involvement in migrant aid, describing himself as one of the main boots on the ground.

[02:00] Haval:
Haval explains their roles in organizing direct action, mutual aid, and assisting with shelters alongside John.

[03:17] Garrison Davis:
Garrison provides an update on the migrant situation, referencing past episodes about Title 42 and the establishment of migrant camps near border gaps. He inquires about recent developments over the past six weeks.

[04:57] John:
John details the changes since September, including increased migrant influx due to the Mexican National Guard’s presence, which has redirected migrants to new, less-served areas like Sliders. This shift has strained their resources as they now have to travel further to assist up to 200 migrants nightly.

[06:05] Haval:
Haval recounts an encounter with migrants from Egypt, illustrating the lack of communication from Border Patrol and the necessity of grassroots efforts to aid migrants.

[07:29] Garrison Davis:
Garrison emphasizes the harsh conditions migrants face, including extreme cold and inadequate shelter, highlighting the urgent need for community support.

Notable Quote:
[09:52] John: “Permission is never sought. We don’t get asked by Border Patrol to help. We just have to find and assist them ourselves.”

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3. Challenges in Providing Aid

[10:24] Haval:
Haval describes the rudimentary shelters migrants build by tearing down vegetation, damaging local ecosystems. He explains their strategy to convince property owners to allow official shelters to prevent environmental destruction.

[12:45] Garrison Davis:
Garrison discusses the community’s mixed reactions to migrant aid efforts and the infiltration of right-wing YouTubers spreading anti-migrant sentiment.

[14:59] Garrison Davis:
Garrison highlights the aggressive fundraising efforts by right-wing media personalities, mocking their constant donation requests.

Notable Quote:
[18:02] John: “They just kind of sat on the side of the road and were out of breath, just basically asking us to help them.”

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4. Call for Volunteer Support

[22:57] Garrison Davis:
Garrison urges listeners to support their efforts through donations, volunteering, or contributing resources like firewood and off-road vehicles. He underscores the efficiency and impact of their horizontal organizational structure.

[23:37] John:
John emphasizes the importance of community and collective action, sharing personal fulfillment derived from helping migrants.

[24:33] Haval:
Haval mentions their GoFundMe campaign, "Hakumba Migrant Aid," and encourages listeners to contribute to sustain their operations.

Notable Quote:
[25:45] Haval: “Having someone on camping, making sure that people's needs are met... it makes a huge difference.”

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5. Destruction and Rebuilding of Shelters

[30:03] John:
John narrates instances where Border Patrol and contractors demolished their built shelters using bulldozers and hammers. Despite setbacks, they persistently rebuild, viewing it as a defiant stance against obstructive authorities.

[32:02] John:
John recounts the repeated destruction of shelters and the ongoing struggle to maintain support for migrants amidst administrative and environmental challenges.

Notable Quote:
[31:15] Garrison Davis: “Every time we build up enough stuff, we have to like, we're always running uphill because the stuff just gets destroyed.”

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6. Segment Transition: Agenda 47 and Education Reform

[44:14] Talia Levin:
Talia Levin introduces the topic of "Agenda 47," a critical analysis of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and former President Trump's proposed education reforms. She outlines the episode's focus on how a Republican president might overhaul the American education system.

[47:08] Garrison Davis:
Dr. James Stout joins the discussion, expressing skepticism about Trump's education proposals and emphasizing the importance of professional expertise in education.

[48:14] Garrison Davis:
Garrison criticizes Trump's use of inflammatory language, mocking his assertions that public schools are dominated by "radical left" ideologies.

Notable Quote:
[51:23] Garrison Davis: “It’s like a library. What he’s describing is a library.”

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7. Critical Analysis of Trump’s Education Proposals

[55:03] Talia Levin:
Talia dissects Trump's plans to seize university endowments, establish the "American Academy," and eliminate political influences in education. She highlights the absurdity and potential ineffectiveness of these proposals.

[58:28] Dr. James Stout:
Dr. Stout provides a scholarly critique of misgendering and cissexism, linking these concepts to transmisogyny. He argues that Trump’s proposals misunderstand the complexity of gender dynamics and the rooted issues in educational institutions.

Notable Quote:
[61:04] Garrison Davis: “No, yeah, yeah, I genuinely don't. I can’t fathom what I think he means. It could go in so many directions.”

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8. The Impact of Parental Bill of Rights

[67:00] Dr. Stout:
Dr. Stout elaborates on the "Parental Bill of Rights," criticizing its potential to enable parental abuse and control over children's lives, including the forced outing of LGBTQ youth.

[73:04] Garrison Davis:
Garrison underscores the dangers of allowing parents unchecked control, highlighting how this could lead to severe disciplinary practices and hinder children's access to necessary support.

Notable Quote:
[75:03] Talia Levin: “We will get back to teaching reading, writing and math called arithmetic. And we will give our kids the high quality pro American education they deserve.”

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9. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

[80:37] Talia Levin:
Talia wraps up the education segment, reiterating the flaws in Trump's vision and the ongoing battle over educational policies.

[85:03] Talia Levin:
Talia introduces an upcoming discussion on Trump's border policies, teasing further critical analysis.

[88:28] Sam (Julia Serrano):
Sam discusses the traumatic experience of writing about child abuse within evangelical communities, emphasizing the lasting impact of harmful educational practices.

Notable Quote:
[110:37] Robert Evans: “I think it's fundamentally incompatible with multiracial democracy.”

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10. Final Advertisements and Sign-Off

The episode concludes with advertisements and promotional segments for related podcasts and initiatives, encouraging listeners to engage further with their content and support their efforts.

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Key Takeaways:

• Migrant Aid Challenges: Increased migrant influx due to fortified border security has stretched volunteer resources, necessitating community support and donations.
• Trump’s Education Reforms Critique: The proposed "Agenda 47" is heavily criticized for its unrealistic and superficial solutions to education issues, misunderstanding gender dynamics, and promoting authoritarian control under the guise of parental rights.
• Misgendering and Transmisogyny: An in-depth analysis of how societal perceptions and gender assumptions contribute to the marginalization of transgender individuals, highlighting the need for nuanced understanding beyond simplistic labels.
• Parental Bill of Rights: Proposed educational reforms could lead to increased parental control over children's lives, posing significant risks to LGBTQ youth and reinforcing harmful disciplinary practices.

Notable Quotes:

• John (04:57): “Permission is never sought. We don’t get asked by Border Patrol to help. We just have to find and assist them ourselves.”
• Garrison Davis (10:24): “These are things that cost money and resources that we don’t have, but we’re running uphill because our stuff just gets destroyed.”
• Talia Levin (67:00): “We will get back to teaching reading, writing and math called arithmetic. And we will give our kids the high quality pro American education they deserve.”

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Note: This summary excludes advertisements, intros, outros, and non-content segments to focus solely on the substantive discussions and insights shared during the episode.

Transcript

[Danny Trejo]

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Drehove and step into the flames of Fright, an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media.

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

Hello and welcome to It Can Happen Here podcast about things falling apart and people putting them back together. I am back. After a lengthy court battle, I've been allowed to return to the podcast, which I'm very grateful for. And I'm joined today by John and Haval, two friends of mine who volunteer right here in Nkumba a lot, a lot more than I do. And we're going to explain some developments that have happened, give you all an update on the situation here and let you know how you could help. So welcome to the show, both of you.

[John]

Hello.

[Haval]

Thank you. Good to be back.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, welcome back. If you'd like to just introduce yourselves, like your name, like whatever role you play out here, pronouns and any affiliation with any organization you feel is relevant.

[John]

So my name is John. I'm someone that lives in the area. This situation just kind of showed up in my backyard. I was kind of forced into it rather than volunteered into it. And I've been dealing with it nonstop since the beginning. One of the main sets of boots on the ground, I'm Haval.

[Haval]

I use they, them, pronouns. And I organize with direct action, drumline and zine distro, doing a lot of mutual aid, which is how I got involved in all this. And also with Elocho Lotto, helping out on the ground since the beginning with John, pretty much just a little after John started.

[Garrison Davis]

So yeah, so that's what, nearly six months if you're not counting May.

[Sam]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

[John]

So, yeah, it started in May and then it stopped during the summertime. It picked up again in September and we've been dealing with it nonstop since then.

[Garrison Davis]

People will have heard briefly from John's father Sam in our May episodes about Title 42, which we did. Yeah, it seems like forever ago. It also doesn't seem like, very long ago. It's just one big weird collapsing of time. So last time we spoke, last time I spoke with Haval, we had this situation where we had three distinct concrete camps adjacent to gaps in the wall, which volunteers were servicing with food, water, warm blankets. We were building shelters. And we've heard a lot about those camps. Does one of you guys want to explain how things have changed since then? And really particularly in the last six weeks?

[John]

So, yeah, it's changed quite radically, actually. So between the months of September and December, we were servicing these three camps kind of more or less in our immediate area. It was pretty straightforward. Our routine would consist of stopping to each camp two times a day and feeding people, providing them with all of the different things that the US Government was not. And I kind of wish things were simpler like they were back then. Yeah. So at the end of the month of December, Secretary Blinken made a visit to Mexico, and I suspect that he pressured the Mexican government to police our border for us. One of the immediate changes that we saw as a result of that was the foundation of two Mexican National Guard camps at two of the gaps that feed into those camps in our area. And that has basically stopped any people coming through those areas. This has not made any less people come into the country. Actually. The numbers have been fairly consistent. It's just that people have been forced to go in through other areas. So there have been many, many new oads that have popped up west of us. We have to drive quite a bit further towards San Diego to go and service those areas. The main one being Sliders, which we're seeing about 200 people come in sometimes in a night. It's. It's not a good scene. Whereas those three ones that we were originally servicing had dumpsters and porta potties at the very least.

[Haval]

Yeah, they still do.

[John]

They still.

[Haval]

No one coming in.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Still there.

[John]

Exactly.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Moving at the speed of government.

[John]

The new ones don't have that, and people are having to spend. How long were the people there most during that crazy, crazy time? Just like a few days ago, I think they were up. They were there for up to like, 19 hours.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Going on a day. Right? Yeah. Because we first. So to backtrack to people, like, we. We heard from a member of the community that there have been people seen held there right. At Sliders. And then we went out there and we kept finding, like, warm fires, like, where people had clearly been there and built fires. We could see where people had scavenged to brush.

[Haval]

And a lot of Documents ripped up around there too.

[John]

The telltale signs.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, all these signs. And so we were able to use that to suppose that that was a place where people were. And then I guess was it eventually someone stayed the night there and that was what allowed us. Or we bumped into people there. Someone bumped into people there.

[John]

Well, we have an acquaintance that's been very helpful towards the cause that lives just close by to there and he's kind of the one that sounded the alarm.

[Garrison Davis]

And from there, like you said, it's a lot more difficult. Right. Like it's probably a 30 minute drive. It's a steep off road. So like when it rains it's hard to get to. So that makes it more difficult for us to provide stuff for people there. And like, I guess people should realize that we didn't find out about this because Border patrol called us and said like, hey, there are people here without food, water or shelter.

[John]

They don't do that.

[Garrison Davis]

But yeah, that's not a thing that they do.

[Haval]

We actually did another volunteer, Brendan and I were driving out and we stopped on the road. I don't think you were with us, John, but we started talking to one of the agents because there was two or a group of people from I think Egypt that were. It was the day everyone did the mass exodus from 177. So we stopped and we're talking to one of the agents and he did slip that there was another camp. He didn't name it, he didn't say where it was, he just said it was that way. And that was around the same time that Morgan had mentioned it to us. So it's, you know, we kind of pulled it out of this agent because we were talking very nonchalantly with him and he was being generally nice. But yeah, they don't tell us about this stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And we have to find them. Myself and what I think that brings up is that there are potentially more. Right?

[John]

We know for a fact there are.

[Garrison Davis]

We know that there are more. And like, I think it's obviously people, people think of California and they think of LA and they think of San Diego and they think of the beach and like pleasant weather. But can you explain, like, it's been really cold out here and pretty miserable, right, with the wet weather we've been having.

[John]

This is a pretty unknown part of Southern California. You know, we're a mountainous region Just, just east of San Diego, within San Diego County. It's, I mean it's not, it's not crazy high. It's, you know, it's about an average of 3,000 to 4,000ft above sea level. But, yeah, it gets very windy over here, gets very unpleasant. It often drops down to freezing.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And that's if you're out there all night and you have any shelter and any. Any way to get warm and you're potentially wet from crossing a river or crossing a stream that often pops up in the desert can be a really miserable situation. So it's important that these people receive help. And right now, it's just through word of mouth and the local community that we're able to find them and give them that help. Yeah. So going forward, we've seen this movement of migration west. What does that mean for the ability of volunteers to provide services to migrants? And what does it mean for the safety? Like you said, the push factors haven't changed. Right. So people are still coming here, they still have things to get away from that lead them to come here, but they're not coming the same way where we could so easily help them in these three concrete sites. So what does that mean?

[John]

Well, it takes a lot more time out of our day just to drive there for one. The main one, Sliders, is up a very shitty road.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Haval]

So I think they call it Sliders because it's so muddy and slidy over there when you're driving.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. I put someone's head into the roof of my truck driving up there not so long ago.

[John]

Yeah. And, you know, we're not the only ones that are displeased with this. It's more. It makes the life for the Border patrol more difficult, makes life for the emergency medical services more difficult. And of course, it makes life for the migrants more miserable.

[Haval]

And the owner of the property.

[John]

And the owners of the property in which they're hosting these, you know, detaining these migrants.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, we. I think they have. Every single one has been on private property so far. Right. And I don't think. I think we spoke to most of the property owners at this point, and it just seems to come out of the blue at them. Like it's. It's a very strange.

[John]

Permission is never sought.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And I think. I know one of them is suing the border patrol for it, but I'm sure that would take months. But obviously it does have an impact on the landscape as well. People understand the be coals, so they're cutting down whatever they can to burn to make shelter, to make our experience a little bit less miserable.

[John]

So that's. That. Yeah, that's kind of a bargaining tool that we Try and use. When trying to convince the property owners to allow us to build shelters over there, it's just to try and convince them that it'll be good for them to have migrants not be in a position to be forced to have to cut down the vegetation on their land and trash their land. And, you know, by allowing us to build shelters on their property and give firewood to the, to their. To the migrants that are being held on their property, it's better for them in the long run.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Haval]

And the first time we went out there, they had created these shelters by just ripping brush and creating these like, semicircles that were maybe about a foot.

[John]

Or some of them were very impressive.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Haval]

Very like 2, 3ft high. And it was nice, you know, and enclosed. So they had some sort of shelter. But yeah, they had to rip all that from the vegetation around the area, which just ruins the ecosystem there, I'm sure.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And it must tear up your hands as well, like lots of thorny bushes and stuff. Yeah. It's not desirable for anyone. Talking of things that aren't desirable, we unfortunately have to take an advertising break. So we will do that. Here's some stuff that you don't need. All right, we're back. Those are some products and services. Now we're going to talk about the way, John, being very local to Hakumba, how it is organizing in a rural community, and the way that obviously you have people of very disparate political leanings in the area and how you've managed to phrase what we're doing and to organize in such a way that at the very least, people aren't actively pissed off at you.

[John]

Yeah. So first of all, I'm a Quaker, come from a Quaker family, and first and foremost, I am doing this for religious reasons and I like to try and remind people of that. So when people try and come at me with anti immigrant sentiment, I just try and remind them that, you know, this is. This is basically what you're supposed to do according to the Bible. And, you know, to hate on any of these people is very unchristian. And when I do so, it's very hard for them to come at me with any of that stuff. But still, yes, for the most part, the community over here have not been very helpful towards this. They have not been very enthused with all these migrants coming in. And, you know, they've been very regrettably misinformed about it all. They're still looking at various crazy sources for their news, like YouTube channels and stuff like that and it's kind of, kind of hard to believe. It's like you guys live in the area. You can just drive straight out there. You can talk to me, a person that you guys know. Yet you still choose to look up all these various whack jobs on YouTube.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, we've had something of a problem with the YouTube people. Right. There's a whole info, a whole ecosystem of right wing YouTubers that I think probably most folks don't know about. Even if you take an interest in other right wing conspiracy stuff, there's a whole ecosystem of right wing border YouTubers who have been, I mean, describe what you've seen. Right.

[Haval]

We've had like a new right wing fascist out every day, it seems. There's Oreo Express, Anthony Oguero has been out here.

[John]

JLR investigation.

[Haval]

Jlr. Roger Ogden was out here the other day. Classic.

[John]

It's kind of calmed down though in the last last couple of days. But there was a period in late February where it seemed like they were coming out every single day.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, just a different guy in a different lifted jeep.

[John]

Yeah, exactly.

[Haval]

Just after that whole border, what was.

[Garrison Davis]

It that Take back our border convoy.

[Haval]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got them all riled up to come out.

[John]

Actually what really set them off to be aware of all this is when Fox did their big piece out here and they were out here for multiple days. Yeah, that's what kind of like turned on the tap.

[Haval]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And that's very common anywhere you go on the border. Right. Like Fox has a border reporter, Bill Molugin. People will be familiar with Bill Mulugin from publishing a story in 2020 which suggested the police officer had a tampon, used tampon, put in his Starbucks coffee, which was demonstrably false and didn't really very much look like a tampon. You can Google more about that if that's interesting to you. But someone who perhaps should have lost their journalistic credibility at that point is now doing border reporting for Fox. And this is when I speak to people all along the border right here, Arizona, Texas. The stuff that FOX puts out very strongly correlates with anti migrant sentiment both locally and with these folks coming in and streaming. And they're always asking for donations, right? Like it's not a. Then they're not like advert funded or like publicly funded. Like they're funded by donations for what?

[Haval]

Yeah, well, I forget the channel that Aguero was on, but he's constantly asking for donations and like, oh, thank you, you just dropped $10.

[Talia Levin]

Or you thank you.

[Haval]

For the five spot, blah, blah.

[John]

Like, they all are sitting in his car, they're hustling. That's what they're grifters. That's what they're out there for. Every. It seems like a third of their broadcast time is spent asking for donations.

[Garrison Davis]

Right? Yeah, yeah, it's like a. Like a charity stream. Except it did say it's the opposite of charity, I guess.

[John]

Exactly.

[Garrison Davis]

So pay me to do hateful things streams. Yeah. And I think, like, that as we go, as we look between now and November, I think it's really important that, like, the border will be a topic that people who never come to the border will argue about constantly between now and November. Right. Fox News will have reporting on it. NBC will have reporting on it, like, and both of them will have reporting that isn't anchored on what we see every single day out here, which is a wide variety of people from all over the world who are having a very difficult time right here and need our help. Right. And we're doing what we can to help them. So I guess what, like, people who are listening to this will, in the next. I don't know how long it is till November, what, six months, seven, eight months, they'll have conversations with their family members, with their friends, with people in bars, whatever. Regarding the border. What do you think they should know about, like, what we're seeing and like, what the. Because there's this whole border invasion narrative. Right. And like, this is not an invasion. We were just out joking with some people and helping them get their firewood prepped. Like, these people are not a threat.

[John]

I think people often make the mistake of considering this issue to be a political issue. It really is just a humanitarian issue. Vast majority of the people that I've talked to have very legitimate reasons for needing to come into this country, whether they're from Ecuador, you know, you know, the situation over there. Recently there were gangsters that took over a TV station.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[John]

Or in Guatemala, where I spoke to a man who told me that his children with college degrees can make enough family money to feed their families. Or even in Afghanistan, where people have literally had the Taliban threaten their family's lives.

[Haval]

Same with Iran and the Ayatollah escaping all of that.

[John]

Kurdish people in Turkey. I mean, the list goes on. Or, you know, climate refugees, like the Mauritanians that we just spoke with earlier. Yes, they're. They're coming and they have really reasonable grounds for asylum over here.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Haval]

And it wouldn't be such an quote, unquote, invasion if they Were just allowed to walk through the port of entry. This, it's. This process is so silly because they cross. They could just do this all at the port of entry. They really could. But the policies just choose not to do this.

[John]

Yeah, that's the part that really doesn't make sense. It's like we're letting them in anyways. Why do we need to make their lives so uncomfortable?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. You know, and dangerous. Right, Dangerous. I mean, John, you and I were on a water drop maybe two months ago now, six weeks ago in slightly west of here, right? Yeah. Do you remember we were driving down to where we were going to get off and we met that family from Guinea. There was a. Like. Do you want to just describe what you saw? Because I think it was like. At least for me, that was like. I've seen it a lot, but it still emotionally affected me.

[John]

So. Yeah, there was a. There was a Guinean woman and her kid. I think he might have been like, what, four or something?

[Garrison Davis]

Three.

[John]

Three.

[Talia Levin]

Yeah.

[John]

And there was also a Nigerian woman. And you know, Nigerians speak English and Ghanaians speak French. They weren't really able to communicate with one another and yet they were still traveling side by side because they, they just teamed up because they were in a desperate situation together. One of them was. Was she in sandals?

[Garrison Davis]

One of them didn't have shoes at all.

[John]

Didn't have shoes at all. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[John]

It's six weeks is a long time, you know, when you're doing this.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Well, you see horrible things every day.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[John]

It's been a very eventful time. Every day feels like a new story. Yeah, yeah. And they just kind of sat on the side of the road and were out of breath and they were just basically asking us to help them.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. I remember the little girl because we were obviously concerned with this lady who didn't have shoes and trying to help bandage her feet and stuff. But then I remember the little girl just wasn't saying anything and I suddenly realized, oh, this little girl is probably very cold. She was early, mildly hypothermic.

[Talia Levin]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So I had her wrapped up in a little mylar blanket with me to warm her up. And it's just. I don't know, it just for one reason or another, that was a moment where I was like, why on earth are we doing this to a 3 year old? Like, what, what possible reason could there be, this three year old girl to have hypothermia here in like the richest country in the world?

[John]

Who, who could possibly agree that this is A good thing.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes. Yeah.

[John]

Or another experience I had in the beginning of February where there was this Colombian man who was in tears who approached me and told me that his daughter was very, very ill. And he dragged me over to a porta potty and she was there bundled up with like nine blankets or something, not really responding to my questions. He was trying to contact 911- but-REQUER-ON-911 or the dispatcher didn't speak Spanish. So I had to communicate with them and navigate the whole situation. Turns out she did have hypothermia.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[John]

And. But the ambulance would not take him along with the mother and the child to the hospital. So again, it's another case of family separation. Who knows what might have happened. They would have gotten processed separately. He could have ended up in Louisiana and she could have ended up in Riverside or somewhere else.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And at that point, once again, it's not the government or your taxes that were paid for those people to be reunified. Right. Like that's work that's done by NGOs and voluntary organizations.

[John]

Exactly.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Despite the massive amount of money we spend on. And we were just talking the other day about how the architectural marvel of sections of the border wall. Right. Where they've poured concrete at like a 45 plus degree angle and spent millions of dollars for every yard of that and we don't have enough money to give this three year old girl a blanket or to get that family back together.

[John]

It's pathetic. Yeah. It's mind boggling.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Haval]

Even today with that dude from Brazil. He came up to me when we first got here. They were starving, wanted food, water, and he was like, I'm sick. Fever. So I hooked him up with some cold medicine that we had in our med kit. And then later when we went back to do the second round of feeding, he got more food and he was like, thank you so much, we're starving. We were told to when we were dropped off to wait in the mountains at 6pm to 6am so they were just hadn't really. I don't know if they were on the American side yet or how that worked. Didn't really describe it, but had to wait in the mountains before crossing. And so people are getting sick out there. We ran into that dude with the dog bite on at 177. He was just. We, we always go check this one camp because there hasn't been. Since Guadala Nacional had put their camp on the other side, there hadn't been a whole lot of people Crossing in this area, but we go check it periodically. And one morning, yeah, we saw this man hobbling towards us as we're driving down the road with a stick. And we're like, why is he walking like this? Pulled over and he was bitten by a dog. He said he went to take a drink of water and some dogs attacked him. Two dogs, I think.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. He describes it as a wolf.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Like he used the word wolf. Yeah, yeah.

[Haval]

So we called EMS and they picked him up and took him to the hospital.

[Garrison Davis]

Right. But if you hadn't been there, that's a long way to walk with a dog bite in your leg.

[Haval]

Yeah. And who knows? Border Patrol might not even even have EMS them out. They might have just tried to process him with the dog bite.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Haval]

Could get. Could have gotten infected or infected.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah.

[John]

But just to go back on the mutual aid question that you had earlier, it hasn't all been negative. It's actually been a really great experience in which I've met really great people from all kinds of walks of life who have just joined together because they see a problem and know that they're the only ones that can make a difference. And it is a sure, easy way to be really important and make a difference in other people's lives. You don't really need to have much more than a good heart and a willingness to work.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I think we should talk about that more because some of us had some prior life experience working with refugees or migration, but I think most of us just were people who were like, yeah, this isn't right. And I am able to help, and so I'm going to help. So can you talk about how people can help? And then, like you said, I think I've actually got a lot out of this in that I feel more affirmed in my belief that we can look out after each other without the need to control each other. And we don't necessarily need people with guns and badges to create a society that cares for people who need taken care of. And so perhaps you could describe how people can help and then what it is that you've got out of this that keeps you wanting to do this.

[John]

Well, first of all, yeah, we don't have a clear structure of authoritative structure over here. We take ideas as a collective. Different people have contributed different things. There's a woman that really nailed down the PB and J making system, and we've all just been following her lead there. Some people came up with the idea of having a cell phone charging station that was you and it's just the list goes on. And if you wanted to help, you could just come by to the border, come to one of these sites and just start distributing food or teaming, teaming up with us somehow, or by donating to the GoFundMe.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. What's the GoFundMe, John?

[John]

So it's a gofundme that was set up by my. By my dad. I don't actually know what it's titled.

[Haval]

Hakumba Migrant Aid.

[Garrison Davis]

I think if you search GoFundMe, Hakumba Migrant Aid, it comes up Samuel Schultz.

[Haval]

I think is by Samuel Schultz.

[Garrison Davis]

You'll know because it has like $50,000 on it and maybe seven words as a description. Google, because not much else is going down here, I guess. But, yeah, people can help that way. And we've had people come who listened. We had two people this morning who had heard about it on the podcast and had come and helped.

[Haval]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And it made a really, really great difference.

[Haval]

Yeah, they camped out at the Sliders and really held it down, which is really important. I mean, for some of us. We, you know, like John and I, we kind of do like a morning shift where we get up really early and make sure to do everything that we need to do. Prepping sandwiches, checking on all the camps. But a lot of people come in in the middle of the night. Sliders had people come in, what, at.

[John]

Midnight or 1:00am oh, yeah, all throughout. A group came at midnight. A group came at like 1:00am and then there were also more that came at 4:00am yeah.

[Haval]

So, like, having someone on camping, you know, making sure that people's needs are met and that if any emergencies take place, that they're taken care of. And it's just that smiling face when they get here. It makes a huge difference. Like that dude from Brazil, like, earlier, he was saying to me, he was like, thank you so much. Like, this is, like, this is humanity right here. Like, I'm a human. And I'm like, yes, we will treat you like humans here.

[John]

Like, at the end of the day, you know, these people coming through Central America and Mexico, they go through so much, you know, extortion, people ripping them off. Just feeling unwelcome throughout that whole voyage.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[John]

Just having a group of people welcome them into the country and treat them with dignity is worth more than any bottle of water or sandwich that we can give them. And, you know, that's. That's the main thing that we're doing, I would say.

[Garrison Davis]

I want to emphasize that people can help in so many ways. That you can send us stuff, you can send us money, or you can just show up. If you just have a weekend, that's totally fine, or a day, that's totally fine, or if you just want to come and make sandwiches, that's totally fine. We're a very diverse group of people and some people have had more time than others. But everyone, I think is valued. And like you said, I think we're. The way that we organize without anyone, like we organize horizontally has allowed us to be so much better. Like, do you remember the day there was a day when we ran out of plates and we were like down in Willow and it was just, it was like chaos. And then someone who just arrived that day was like, oh, what if we put the beans in a sandwich bag and give people.

[Haval]

That was actually Peter. He was the brain sliders right now.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, he's back now after going on Rumspringer for a while. But yeah, if we had been like, no, I'm in charge, we've been doing this for longer, then those people wouldn't have got fed. Right. But because we were willing to listen, then the people got fed and we were all happier because the people got fed. Right. It worked better that way. So as things change, because border patrol have said explicitly that they're trying to push people west. Right. What do you think? What do we need going forward? What do you see, like, the situation being. And like, it would be good to explain the context of like the changing seasons here as well.

[John]

Yes. So I think what we're going to see more of is people that are crossing in unorthodox areas, more people that are hopping the fence, more people that are cutting holes in the walls, just popping up all over the place. So, yeah, it would be great to have eyes along the border, people that are willing to travel up and down along the bor to find out where these people are coming through. Because for the most part we don't know oftentimes where these people are coming through. There are a couple of new oads open air detention sites that are relatively close to us that we can't find even.

[Garrison Davis]

Right. Yeah. Like maybe if we had a super fancy drone we could find them or just boots on the ground.

[Haval]

A nice off road vehicle that handle those things.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Then these are all things that cost money that we don't have. But we've all put lots of miles on our trucks and lots of miles on our boots trying to, trying to help out.

[John]

Yeah.

[Haval]

My exhaust is falling off from all these bumps.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. My transfer case Took a beating. But if we had more people, some of us could focus on feeding people here because there was. How many people were there when we just left now? 120, something like that?

[John]

Yeah. Oh, no, actually probably more if you count the new group. I think a conservative estimate would have been maybe 140.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. So that's. We'd made 140 sandwiches to feed them today. And we'd chop firewood and taken that out. And we'd given all that out.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

That was after the same thing at breakfast time. That doesn't leave much time to go meander along the border and look for another site. So if we had more people, we could do that. And that would be really valuable also.

[Haval]

If you have connection to firewood.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're a person who can bring us a lot of firewood.

[Haval]

We have one homie right now and he's breaking his back cutting wood for us.

[John]

So.

[Haval]

Yeah, that's a definite big need out here.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Is there other stuff like that that people who maybe aren't here but have connections to or they could, they could send.

[Haval]

That's particularly needed a nice off road vehicle if they got one lying around.

[John]

Firewood is definitely a big thing. That's. That's a huge need.

[Haval]

Yeah. See it's getting really cold up here and especially in like sliders too. I think it's higher in elevation, so.

[Garrison Davis]

So exposed too. There's nothing between you and the wind. Yeah, it's very cold out there.

[John]

Yeah. And just other things that are easier for us to get, but we just constantly need, such as jackets, blankets, bread.

[Haval]

We make a lot of PBGs.

[Garrison Davis]

Tents. Yeah, tents. All these things. The wind and the sun destroys everything that we've stockpiled after a while. And we have to keep reinventing the wheel. And then sometimes border patrol destroys our stuff as well. Or sometimes some chuds come and destroy our stuff, which.

[Haval]

Oh, the chuds destroying our stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. We should talk about the destruction of the shelters before we finish, I guess just to end on a sad note. Well, it's a happy note because we built them again and they're fine. So there were some shelters. I think mostly they were ones that had been built. Well, they were ones that had been built. Volunteers. Yeah. John, you saw what happened to the shelters, right?

[John]

Yeah. So we built some shelters at one of the sites. At one of the main sites. You know, it was very simple. Just by having a plywood as the frame holding it up, and then nailing down some tarps on it with Battens. It was, it was a nice thing. It stood up to the heavy winds that we have here very well.

[Garrison Davis]

Incomparably better to not having a shelter out there.

[John]

Yeah, it's a, it's a completely different.

[Haval]

Yeah, they're instantly used once people cross and it's awesome to see like adults that are alone will get out and force families.

[Garrison Davis]

Like.

[Haval]

Yeah, you get it first for sure.

[John]

Yeah. And yeah, we built those. It was working out good. Then one day the border patrol showed up or a company that was subcontracted by them and demolished them all using skip loaders and bulldozers and such. We showed up the following day. We rebuilt all the shelters and we were really happy about it. You know, it was kind of a big fuck you to them. You can tear down our stuff, but we'll just come back and build more. Yeah, but then what was it like a three, four days later or the.

[Haval]

Next day maybe, I'm not sure. The next day, two days, it was close. Yeah.

[John]

Some guys just showed up and they tore it all up with hammers.

[Haval]

They finishing a tiny little finishing.

[Garrison Davis]

Luckily they didn't really come equipped maybe with the tools they didn't really know.

[John]

What they were doing.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I think it's fair to say that. But still it's annoying when you put the time into building it. Right. Border patrol didn't destroy. Contractors didn't destroy the shelters. At first we were like, oh, maybe they're not using this, but there are 140 people there right now in the shelters that got rebuilt for a third time. So I guess we do appreciate people donating and we understand that people's resources are scarce and the economy is bad and the rent is too damn high, et cetera. But like every time we build up enough stuff, we have to like, we're always running uphill because like the stuff just gets destroyed either by the, by the weather or by the border patrol or by volunteer border patrol judge. So like we could, I guess, desperately need your help and like at some point the news cycle will move on from the border. And that doesn't mean that we will be able to move on from having people to help here. Right. Because like John said, there were people and people always deserve to be treated with dignity. Is there anything else that you guys think that people should know about the situation here before we wrap up? Johnson? Deeply curious.

[Haval]

It's kind of chill.

[Garrison Davis]

It is really nice. Like, I like being here. I come here because it makes me happy. And my friends are here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Haval]

And like the sliders location Is located in a really awesome. Like, you can see down just past the border wall, there's, like, a nice little train track that used to go from us into Mexico, I guess. And just beyond that, there's, like, sheep on a farm that you can see in the distance, like rolling hills. The clouds come through and, like, say it's a really beautiful place to be and to hang out. And a lot of the locals that don't hate what we're doing are very nice. The people at the hotel are very supportive.

[John]

And, yeah, we're. We're a great group. Really good people. It's always really fun to do anything like this. People are generally enamored by our project and want to be involved and come back a second time. I mean, we're kind of like cowboys. I mean, we're doing this all on our own. We're driving up and down, looking at the sights, looking around, and that whole responsibility is on our shoulders.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, it feels good to take responsibility for something.

[John]

It definitely does.

[Garrison Davis]

We're doing this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Haval]

It's like no one else will.

[Robert Evans]

So we got it.

[Garrison Davis]

We'll just do it. That's fine. It's very, like. It reminds me of the punk scene growing up, but it's a big, important thing. Like you said, Fox, every national news network has been down here, Every grifting streamer has been down here. But at the end of the day, it's a few dozen random people who are actually the ones making sure that people don't die here. For all the government attention, for all the millions of dollars spent, it's just us. Yeah.

[John]

Working on a fraction of the. But, I mean, it costs them more to fly a helicopter for a few.

[Garrison Davis]

Hours than it does ever spent in our entire GoFundMe. Yeah. And, yeah, like, we get it done. We are. We're very efficient, I guess, in that sense. But, yeah, we would love more people. People have come because I listen to podcasts, and that also, just for me personally, means the world to me. Most of the time, we just talk into a microphone, and you can't really see who you're talking to unless you go on social media. And that's not always the best reflection of humanity. So it really means the world to me that someone listens to this when they're driving to work or going on a jog or whatever they're doing. And it's like, no, I will. I will go and I will help. Because I think that is how we solve so many of our problems. Like, there is a massive problem with People not being able to afford rent, living on the street in this country. And we solve it in the same way by just showing up for each other.

[Haval]

And there's also different ways to get plugged in. Like if the desert's not your thing, it doesn't. I mean, this is like where the process starts as far as like the spectrum of the whole border crisis or not crisis, but the whole border humanitarian situation we have going on here. So this is what we're doing out here. But there's also airport runs. A lot get ditched in the airport. So I think we all. We got SD and maybe mdef, Immigration Defense Law center kind of hold down. They do airport runs, border patrol just, I guess at night they don't drop them off, like after 10 or something, they don't drop them off at the Iris station. They'll just drop them straight off at the airport. So they need help being fed. A lot of them don't have plane tickets. They need to kind of. Some, you know, people need blankets because they have to sleep there. So we all, I mean, wheel we got is great for that. You can plug in with them. And I think alocholado and who else is it MDEF as well? Well, that's doing the Iris street releases. So when the border patrol just releases them on the street, like a lot of people just get in a cab and go. They have the resources. They can do that. They're already planned. But some people don't have any money or they got robbed on the way here, so they have nothing. They need a lot of help. They need to figure out where to go. They need a place to stay. So there's the street releases, there's the airport. There's. I think that's kind of.

[Robert Evans]

Or.

[John]

Or by just helping with shelters and organizations in whatever city you happen to be living in. You know, the. The majority of the migrant. Well, not the majority, but a very typical answer Migra give me when I ask them where in the United States they're going to is New York City or Chicago or any of these major cities.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Lincoln, Nebraska, the other day.

[John]

You do get some weird ones like that.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. It's going to be Idaho.

[Haval]

Have fun.

[John]

Idaho is beautiful.

[Haval]

It is.

[John]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. There was a guy Haval and I met from a minority ethnic group in Russia. We met in September. Like, I remember one of those first really cold nights and I was talking to this person and they were in Pennsylvania. And I checked in with them a few weeks ago and they're like happily living in Pennsylvania can't understand a word anyone else is saying. It's nice to see. And yeah, you can help those people in whatever community you're in. And if you're further along the border, there's Baja Samaritans, there's no Mas Huertes, there's Humane Borders, Tucson Samaritans as well. Right? Yeah. All along the border there are lots of good people. In Texas, it's a sidewalk school. In Matamoros, there are people at the National Butterfly center who are very nice people who we've heard from before. All along the border and all around this country, there are things you can do to help. And I want to reinforce that it's not this penurious thing we do that's miserable and we all get together and cry every night. We do have a nice time, even though we have seen some really stressful things. We all look after one another and hold space when people do need help or extra time to process something. But it's a very supportive community and we support each other through lots of other things, like aside from this. And I think a lot of people in general in 21st century America Struggle with isolation. And that's a thing that capitalism does to people. Right. It isolates us from each other. And so hopefully, I think this is a solution. For me, this has been a really positive thing for generally my sense of hope. Yeah.

[Haval]

And what we're doing, this kind of disaster humanitarian relief effort, it's kind of with the way the climate is going in the world and climate.

[Garrison Davis]

Climate less common. Yeah.

[Haval]

This will just be getting more common and like this kind of like preparing and building community and this disaster scenario is going to definitely be more in common.

[John]

And it's not that easy to do. I mean, it's not that hard to do. You know, you just got to have the intention and then you just got to get together and do it. That's all you really need to do.

[Garrison Davis]

Don't think that if someone had said to us what plus or minus 50,000 people probably have come through. I have no idea on the numbers, but somewhere around there.

[John]

Yeah, probably more than that.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. If we, like. I remember in May when we cleaned up the first O ads, when we were like, when I first met your mum and dad, Jon, we were cleaning up the first O ads and we were like, wow, that was a horrible thing that happened. That was really fucked. If someone had said, right, well, between now and next March, 50,000 people will come through here and it's mostly going to be you guys who are Here picking up trash. And that's all it's going to be. It's on you. It would have seemed overwhelming. Right. But I don't think people should feel afraid to confront these big problems because between the group of people who we've assembled here, we've been able to confront this problem and make it survivable and treat people with dignity and bring some dignity and humanity into a situation where there wasn't any.

[Talia Levin]

Right.

[John]

Yep.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Haval]

And there's a role for everybody. No matter what you do, you can find your niche of what you know, you makes you feel good or something that you're good at. You know, it's finding the little fascists that destroyed our things online and doing all that online footwork. Or it's building shelters or it's making PBJs or our friends made a website.

[Garrison Davis]

They made a really good website.

[Haval]

Website.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Haval]

Or even. Yeah. Just being someone that speaks multiple languages is a huge need out here. Especially I mean Spanish is pretty comm. But the harder languages, like, I mean.

[John]

Mandarin is a huge.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. If you speak Mandarin and you reach out to us and we can call you, then that would be huge. Right. That could make real in a medical emergency. That could be a life or death thing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So there, there are a ton of ways to help and I really encourage people to get involved if they can. Where can people follow along with you too? Do you have like social media or anything that you want to plug?

[John]

Yeah, I don't. I'm going to keep mine private.

[Garrison Davis]

You're depriving the world of such a beautiful thing.

[Haval]

Yeah. How I got involved in this is through members of a drum line that I am part of. So we show up for protest, have been since 2020. Direct action drumline on Instagram. We post a lot of different stuff from organizing for Palestine to we were doing a lot of Black Lives Matter stuff early in 2020 and now it's kind of cross mixed with border raids since I've been out here. So we occasionally will make posts so you can follow along there a lot. Gelato is a good one to follow on social media. Inca Paw Wellness on Instagram, Borderlands Relief Collective. I'm sure a lot of the people listening already follow a lot of these people. But yeah, there's a network through all of that. And so once you start following one or the other, we all tag each other and reshare each other's stuff so you can get involved that way and figure out what's going on.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Haval]

And what's the website for that's a great resource.

[Garrison Davis]

BorderAid GitHub IO I think if you give it a Google somewhere, somewhere around that you'll find it. It is a good website and like, if you are facing similar issues in your community, wherever you are, whatever it is, like, we've definitely made a lot of mistakes and we've learned a lot. And so we've tried to document the things that we've learned so that you guys don't have to reinvent the wheel somewhere else. Right? Like, you know, you can be an efficient PB&J maker just like us.

[Haval]

Learn Shirley's technique.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, thank you so much, guys. I really appreciate your time.

[John]

Likewise.

[Mia Wong]

Sure.

[John]

Thank you.

[Garrison Davis]

Cheers.

[Danny Trejo]

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum. Tales from the Shadows presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Tuda Podcast Network, available on the I Heart Radio Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

[Talia Levin]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the show about how a small group of people are trying to keep making bad things happen. And we're going to tell you what they are. I'm Garrison Davis and joined with me is Dr. James Stout. Hello, Doctor.

[Garrison Davis]

Hi, Garrison. Thank you for having me. Put some respect on my name. Appreciate it.

[Talia Levin]

So today we're going to be talking about something called Agenda 47. And actually we're going to be talking about this whole week. We've gotten a lot of requests to talk about the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which is a kind of a roadmap for how a Republican president could change the country if they get elected next year. And although this proposal is scary and quite big, it's a massive, massive book. Yeah, Trump certainly listens to these types of guys, but he doesn't always, like, really like them.

[Garrison Davis]

He does what the fuck he wants. Like, ain't no one controlling Trump.

[Talia Levin]

He kind of does whatever he wants. Right? And I mean, there certainly are other people, like in Congress, including the speaker, who are definitely pushing this project 2025. And I think we'll probably talk about this on the show at some other point, but Trump actually has his own plans for if he's going to be elected president again. And we're going to be talking about that and that is called Agenda 47, which I believe is a subtle reference to the 47th president, which will be him if he gets elected.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Also the 45th president. So, yeah, sell more merch that way.

[Talia Levin]

So the next.

[Garrison Davis]

The next.

[Talia Levin]

The next few episodes, we're going to be diving into Trump's plans for if he becomes the 47th President of the United States, called Agenda 47. He has all of these listed on his website. And one of my favorite parts is that to accompany each one of these, like, policy proposals, he has a video of him, like, reading out something on a teleprompter. And he very often will go off script just completely and just start talking, which. Which they include the entire transcript for underneath each video, which is just fascinating to read. Totally divorced of, like, how he talks. It's just amazing. Also, all of the videos are embedded on his website via Rumble, which is just amazing. Amazing stuff happening.

[Garrison Davis]

It's perfect.

[Talia Levin]

So that's kind of the overview of what we're going to be doing this next week and why and the reason why. I have James here. James, you work in education, right?

[Garrison Davis]

I do. I do some educating, yeah.

[Talia Levin]

So you have opinions on education, I would assume.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, strong ones.

[Talia Levin]

As a doctor.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. A doctor of modern European history. Just to be clear, before anyone sends me pictures of their illnesses. Please don't.

[Talia Levin]

So I'm going to be talking about Trump's plan for education, and by the end, we can see if it gets the James Stout approval as someone who works in education.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. I'm, you know, I'm open minded. Let's see what he's got.

[Talia Levin]

So Trump. Now, the problem with us doing these episodes is that all of these are like, videos.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Talia Levin]

For his policy proposals. And I don't want to subject you, the listener, to just videos of Trump talking. I don't. You don't need to hear that. But there's a part of me, just deep down, a shameful part of me that when I'm reading these quotes, I really want to, like, slip in to, like a. To like, a bad, transgender Trump impression, which I've tried to suppress. I've tried to suppress this urge, but every once in a while, it just sneaks out. So as I'm going through these quotes, I cannot promise that certain things might start happening, and it's just a part of the deal.

[Garrison Davis]

You've been possessed by the spirit of Donald Trump.

[Talia Levin]

Oh, God. So on this note, Trump opens his education proposal with this line, quote, our public schools have been taken over by the radical left. Maniacs, which really sets the tone for the rest of what we're gonna be talking about today.

[Garrison Davis]

I do want to highlight that I've been trying for more than a decade, but obviously some other people have been more successful than me in that regard.

[Talia Levin]

But so over these next, like, 25 minutes, I'm going to try to explain what he calls his, quote, plan to save American education and give power back to American parents. And the American parents line is going to be a reoccurring trend here. So in kind of a broad overview, Trump believes that regular public schools, as well as colleges and universities are just so far gone to not only require, like, massive, massive regressive changes, but also, frankly, whole new alternatives are needed, which leads us to our first policy proposal. So Trump says that Americans are horrified that, quote, once respected universities express support for the savages and jihadists who attacked Israel, unquote. So that's obviously not great.

[Garrison Davis]

There it is.

[Talia Levin]

Savages. Very, very quick, just immediate, immediately getting into this sort of stuff. Despite spending more money on higher education than any other country, schools are, quote, turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions, unquote.

[Garrison Davis]

What does that even mean?

[Talia Levin]

They're sympathizing with the alternate dimensions. You know, the.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, I see.

[Talia Levin]

Yeah, the mirror universe version. They're gaining too much sympathy.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Talia Levin]

As well as turning into communists and terrorists.

[Garrison Davis]

To be fair, he is right that, like, one of the areas where you will find, like, the few Hold. No, actually, Twitter is the other area. Unreconstructed Marxist Leninists is in the academy. It's there and on x.com formerly known as Twitter.

[Talia Levin]

So to combat this communist and savage and jihadist incursion into universities, Trump is proposing something, quote, unquote, dramatically different. His plan is to seize, quote, billions and billions of dollars through taxes, fines and lawsuits against, quote, excessively large private university endowments, unquote, and use that money to, quote, endow a new institution called the American Academy, unquote.

[Garrison Davis]

That's already a thing. The American Academy is already. But is he spelling it with an E or. It's. Why, like.

[Talia Levin]

No, it's with a. Yeah, okay, so.

[Garrison Davis]

It'S a place, not like the institution.

[Talia Levin]

So the American Academy will seek to, quote, make a truly world class education available to every American free of charge, without adding a single dime to the federal debt. And then to do this, quote, the institution will gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content, unquote. And I love the phrase educational content.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. This is. This Sounds a lot like the short Prageru videos that.

[Talia Levin]

Yeah. What are you, like, you're starting to. You're starting to suspect certain things, right? Like.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Talia Levin]

What do you think the American Academy is going to be here based on the limited information you have?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. It doesn't seem like a credible university, does it? It seemed a lot like if Jordan world class education. Maybe it's what Bari Weiss is doing in Texas, you know, maybe she's going to be helming the American Academy. It sounds like Jordan Peterson's grift University is what it sounds like.

[Talia Levin]

It's a world class education. After you gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content. So this content, Trump claims will, quote, cover the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills and make that material available to every American citizen online for free, unquote.

[Garrison Davis]

That's just a library. What he's describing is a library. We already have those.

[Talia Levin]

Not quite the content. Not quite. It's not just a library because, quote, the Academy will utilize the latest breakthrough in computing, unquote, as well as study groups, mentors and industry partners to provide a truly, quote, top tier education option for the people. For this next part, I have to do it in the Trump voice because otherwise the grammar won't make any sense. Whether you want lectures or an ancient history, or an introduction to financial accounting or a trading at a skilled trade, the goal will be to deliver it and get it done properly. I love the phrase whether you want lectures or an ancient history.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. Like you could give yourself a history. Like you could go back to Sumeria and insert yourself.

[Talia Levin]

Whether you want lectures or an ancient history or an introduction to financial accounting or training in a skilled trade. So you will be able to learn all of this online for free. Getting a truly top tier education, which sounds like, okay, but Trump specified that your American Academy education will be, quote, unquote, strictly non political, unquote Good. I'm really excited to learn an ancient history from a strictly non political standpoint. That's. That's great.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. We can't discuss the formation of the state. There would be a political stance.

[Talia Levin]

Furthermore, Donald Trump promised that at American Academy, quote, there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed. None of that's going to be allowed.

[Garrison Davis]

How will I teach without jihadism? My personal jihad is to educate the youth of America, but now I can't partake in it.

[Talia Levin]

Sorry, not allowed. Not allowed. According to Trump.

[Garrison Davis]

Very sad.

[Talia Levin]

Very sad. So this plan also seeks to help the 40 million Americans who have some college education, but no Complete degree by granting credit for past coursework at quote, unquote, legacy institutions and giving Americans, quote, the chance to complete your education at the American Academy for free and much more quickly than is now possible or available. Unquote. So now, if there weren't red flags going off already, there certainly should be now with that last line, more quickly than is now possible or available, which is a classic tell of an online university scam. Now, the exact details of how the American Academy is supposed to work are kind of unclear. Probably because it hasn't been figured out yet.

[Garrison Davis]

Because it's bullshit, Gary.

[Talia Levin]

And quite possibly never will get figured out.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes, yeah, many such cases in Agenda 47, as it turns out.

[Talia Levin]

But Trump University founder Donald Trump did say that his American Academy proposal does plan to, quote, compete directly with existing and very costly four year university systems by granting students degree credentials that the US Government and all federal contractors will henceforth recognize.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, they'll recognize them as fucking useless.

[Talia Levin]

Not degrees. Degree credentials.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, degree credentials.

[Garrison Davis]

Gonna put my degree credential up on my wall.

[Talia Levin]

This is just another Trump University, an uncredited scam that Trump is hoping to prop up with the federal government this time instead of his business empire. It's not.

[Garrison Davis]

That's his entire thing, isn't it? Like that is the whole thing with Donald Trump.

[Talia Levin]

It's not real. It's not real. He's framing this plan as a quote, unquote, revolution in higher education that will provide life changing opportunities by awarding American citizens with, quote, the full and complete equivalent of a bachelor's degree.

[Garrison Davis]

I love it when he just fucking sends it on. There's gonna be one in my, in my episode, which you'll hear later this week when he just cannot say the word film. And I love that he doesn't fucking try. He just, he disowns it.

[Talia Levin]

The full and complete equivalent. That's not neither. That's neither full nor complete if it's an equivalent. Anyway, Trump. Trump ends this video with an eloquent quote. Enjoy it, learn from it and thank you. Which is just.

[Garrison Davis]

I'm gonna finish all my lectures that way and then I'll do like a smoke puff and just disappear.

[Talia Levin]

So, yeah, this is, this is the first plan to save American education. That sounds great. I cannot wait to get a fully complete equivalent.

[Garrison Davis]

I hope they have a medical of.

[Talia Levin]

A bachelor's degree credential. Very, very cool.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, wonderful stuff.

[Talia Levin]

But do you know what isn't a scam, James?

[Garrison Davis]

Can we say that like we might be in water for you? Sure.

[Talia Levin]

I trust my life on every single product and or service that follows this musical sting. We are back. Do not, I repeat, do not send me any of the advertisers that just aired. I don't care what they are. My life is indebted. I don't care. I don't care.

[Garrison Davis]

You can send them to. You can send them to Sophie. Her Twitter is iriteokay.

[Talia Levin]

Iwriteokay. Send it to Sophie. All right, so while this Trump University, too, will remain uncredited Donald Trump, creator of the Donald Trump board game that did not sell very well in 1980.

[Robert Evans]

The what?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Talia Levin]

Didn't you? Yeah. Creator of the Donald Trump board game.

[Garrison Davis]

No. Wow. Okay. Is it like Monopoly, but you just, like, lie and generate?

[Talia Levin]

I didn't. I didn't look too far into it for the bit. I'm gonna be honest here.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay. Disappointed. I was ready to go in a deep dive.

[Talia Levin]

But Donald Trump also plans to attack the current accreditation system from being run by a communist scourge. Which leads us to our second Agenda 47 topic titled, quote, protecting students from the radical left and Marxist maniacs infecting educational institutions, which I believe he's talking about you, James.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, which is ironic because I'm an anarchist. I'm not a Marxist.

[Talia Levin]

You're not a Marxist maniac?

[Garrison Davis]

No, no. Sadly, not many such cases, but I do make them read the Communist manifesto in my 101 class.

[Talia Levin]

It's okay. It's okay.

[Garrison Davis]

You got to read it. You got to. It's something you should emerge from history education having read.

[Talia Levin]

So Trump starts by talking about how, quote, unquote, academics are, quote, obsessed with indoctrinating America's youth at colleges and universities while charging a ballooning tuition fee. Trump claims to have a, quote, unquote, secret weapon that he will use to, quote, reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left. The college accreditation system. It's called accreditation for a reason. It's called accreditation for a reason. He never extrapolates on that sentence.

[Garrison Davis]

No, yeah, yeah. I genuinely don't. I can't fathom what I think he means. It could go in so many directions.

[Talia Levin]

There's no way to know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, there's no way to know.

[Garrison Davis]

Just leaves are hanging.

[Talia Levin]

So Trump explains that, quote, accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally unquote, which is not really what college accreditors do. Both government run and private accreditation organizations exist to develop criteria and conduct evaluations to ensure educational quality and authorize if a school qualifies for student Aid programs from the Department of Education. That's generally what accreditation institutions do. They don't, they don't look out for if students are being ripped off, like, that's not really their role, but whatever. So upon returning to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. donald Trump promised that he will, quote, fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics. So he believes that there's, like, communists that are running the accreditation system and that's what's currently ruining colleges. That is, that is his belief.

[Garrison Davis]

They come in, they sit at the back, the little book happens to be read and they just, and then we have a criticism circle afterwards where they, they check how many Marx references you've made in your lecture.

[Talia Levin]

So after sending all these communists to the Gulag, Trump will then begin to, quote, accept applications for new accreditors. Now, it's unclear if he's talking about just like the public or private sector here, but these newer creditors will, quote, impose real standards in colleges once again and once and for all. Now, what such standards, you ask? Thank you, James.

[Garrison Davis]

You're welcome, Garrison.

[Talia Levin]

Trump gave us a handy little list which includes, like, some of the more average conservative to libertarian esque positions like protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs, offering options for accelerated and low cost degrees, providing meaningful job placement and career services, and implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning or getting their money's worth. Right, which, all that sounds like kind of standard politician talk, right? It's like, okay, sure. But Trump did mention a few other standards that will be imposed once again by this new generation of accreditors, which will also include, quote, defending the American tradition and Western civilization and removing all Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion beyond regrets, unquote. So dei. Dei, the right's new favorite boogeyman that's responsible from everything from rising university costs to botched surgeries, aviation incidents and boats malfunctioning and cladding with bridges. It is, it is the villain of the, of the conservative right at the moment. And so because this has been a trending topic among conservatives, Trump's trying to jump on this DEI train, which sounds incredibly dangerous just from their perspective, because this term he probably never even heard of before, like a year ago. Like, come on.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I don't think he, I don't think he implemented DEI in his business institutions. I think this is. Yeah, it's a word they say when they can't say slurs they think they found a funny workaround to saying slurs.

[Talia Levin]

I mean, that's this thing. Every time someone says, like, critical race theory, woke or dei, they're really just trying to say a slur. And if, and if you repeat, if you replace those three terms with just a slur, their sentences make a lot more sense because the way they use the word woke does not mean anything in a lot of cases. But if you just replace it for a racial slur, you're like, oh, now I can understand what they're saying. It's a handy trick that really is not fun to think about.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Or subtle.

[Talia Levin]

As a part of this DEI frenzy, Trump has promised to, quote, direct the Department of Education to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination, unquote, which also kind of calls upon, like, older, like, affirmative action complaints that conservatives have been talking about for years now.

[Garrison Davis]

That's what I wondered if he was going after.

[Talia Levin]

Yeah, it kind of, it ties into that as well. And Trump added that this race based discrimination, quote, includes discrimination against Asian Americans, unquote, which is definitely invoking that style of affirmative action conservative rhetoric from, like, 10, five years ago.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Even more recent. When was that Supreme Court case?

[Talia Levin]

Oh, yeah, that was, that was, that.

[Garrison Davis]

Was just like last year, Becky, with the bad grades. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Talia Levin]

So beyond just threatening to sic the DOJ on woke schools, Trump also made the more specific promise that if schools, quote, persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity, unquote, he will not only make sure that their endowments be taxed, but also, quote, through budget reconciliation, I will advance to measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment, unquote.

[Garrison Davis]

Does he realize that not all schools have endowments? Like, I teach at the community college, we ain't got an endowment.

[Talia Levin]

No. I'm sure that he's going to go after, like, the Harvard endowment. Yeah, that's going to track. Yeah. Have fun fining $50 billion from Harvard. That's totally going to happen. But his plan, after he seizes these endowments, quote, a portion of the seized funds will then be used as restitution for victims of these illegal and unjust policies, policies that hurt our country so badly, colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers, and now we're going to get this anti American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. So that's cool. Like, okay, sure. You're going to use this to pay back white people who've been declared, who've been denied college admission. Okay, cool. That sounds Like a winning electoral stretch.

[Garrison Davis]

You have finally the reparations people.

[Talia Levin]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know who's had it too hard for too long? James?

[Garrison Davis]

It's white people who didn't make it through college. Garrison.

[Talia Levin]

It's because they didn't get. It's because they didn't go to Yale. Now they have to go to Princeton and. Embarrassing.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, embarrassing. Terrible, right? Why would you even bother?

[Talia Levin]

So it's. But it's not just colleges. Trump also threatened to, quote, cut federal funding for any school or program publishing critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto our children. We're not going to allow it to happen, folks. Very cool.

[Garrison Davis]

Great. Yeah, I used to teach a gender sociology course, so I look forward to Defund. Defund. Yeah, yeah. Know we're going down fight together. We're going to that shit. They will have to fight their way in, let me tell you.

[Talia Levin]

Don't say that on air. You can't say that. You're going to turn your community college into a. You can't say that. So, yeah, he's going to go after school. Regular schools, both colleges, universities, regular schools. If there's doing any, any crt. Gender ideology, you can tell that some of this was written like a year and a half ago because. No, no one's talking about critical race theory anymore.

[Garrison Davis]

But, yeah, yeah, he missed it. But, but like, can you imagine teaching a sociology course and just being like, yeah, we're gonna skip past race and gender politics.

[Talia Levin]

We're gonna skip past politics.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, this is, this is a man who himself went to, like, did he go to Harvard or Yale?

[Talia Levin]

No, he did not go to either. He was sent to a military school by his father when he was 13 for being annoying. Then he think he went to a school in Pennsylvania. And then what other school did he go to?

[Garrison Davis]

Critical respect to his dad.

[Talia Levin]

Yeah, he went to the New York Military Academy, Then he went to Fordham University and then the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, yeah, Wharton Business School. Yeah. Not a real graduate degree.

[Talia Levin]

So the reason why this is all so evil is because Trump thinks that a lot of this stuff is basically forming a new religion. All this woke stuff, the Marxism being preached in our schools is totally hostile to Judeo Christian teachings. And in many ways it resembles establishing a new religion. Can't let that happen. Can't let that happen.

[Garrison Davis]

One thing we take a big swing at is Judeo Christian institutions to combat.

[Talia Levin]

This growing threat of religious Marxism. His administration.

[Garrison Davis]

I'm sorry, I can't, I cannot like.

[Talia Levin]

Oh, his administration will, quote, aggressively pursue potential violations of the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution. That's very simple.

[Garrison Davis]

I think he quite understands the full remit of that there. Luckily, we do Russian Orthodox Marxism at my university, so we should be safe.

[Talia Levin]

Oh, God.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Talia Levin]

Well, a lot of beards, so. And then in kind of like a laundry list of policies and talking points, Trump pledged to, quote, veto the sinister effort to weaponize civics education. We will keep men out of women's sports and will create a new credentialing body that'll be the gold standard anywhere in the world to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but very simply to educate them.

[Garrison Davis]

No one's ever done. No one has ever created a credentialing body for patriotic teachers who embrace our way of life before. It's never been done.

[Talia Levin]

Not in the 1950s effort to weaponize civics.

[Garrison Davis]

Just imagine him looking for. Looking for the civics bill.

[Talia Levin]

Yeah, very funny.

[Garrison Davis]

Probably distract him for a while. Stop him doing some actual terrible shit.

[Talia Levin]

A little bit with that last part with indoctrinating children. And this next little bit will kind of demonstrate how stuff like QAnon didn't simply go away like some have postulated. Instead, it's just been absorbed into the fabric of American politics. No longer does the boogeyman have to be a DNC pedophilic elite. Now it's been deterritorialized and destroyed, mutated into just being any school teacher and. Or like every trans person, right? Or, God forbid, a transgender school teacher, which is, like, the prime evil of the current conservative society. And Trump promises on day one of his new presidency, he will, quote, begin to find and remove the radicals, zealots, and Marxists who've infiltrated the Department of Education. And that also includes others. And you know who you are, because we are not going to allow anyone to hurt our children.

[Garrison Davis]

You know who you are.

[Talia Levin]

You know who you are. So this is the weaponization of nearly eight years of QAnon rhetoric, right? That is. That has grown past the need to actually invoke QAnon. Plus the two years of the Republican Party, the Daily Wire, and Libs of TikTok working to shift QAnon's kind of disgraced and unfocused momentum towards a manufactured continuation in the form of this transgender groomer craze that's taking over American schools. Quote, joe Biden has given these lunatics unchecked power. I will have them fired and escorted from the building. And I will tell Congress that any appropriations bill I sign must reaffirm the President's ability to remove defiant employees from the job. It's all about our children, unquote.

[Garrison Davis]

I'm just imagining an executive audit. Remove someone from their lecture hall.

[Talia Levin]

I am going to be signing an executive order on this podcast to go to another ad break. We are back. And thank you, James, for reaffirming my ability to remove defiant ass ads.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, well, while you were all away that several federal agents came in and inserted an ad break.

[Talia Levin]

In this last section here, we're going to return to Trump's conception that entire alternatives are needed to America's broken woke school system, now focusing on the grade school side rather than just the post secondary. So in this vein, Trump is courting the growing number of homeschooling families. Though according to a Washington Post poll from last year, Republican homeschoolers outnumber Democrat ones 2 to 1. So he kind of, he kind of already has the majority of that vote. But still, it's something he is going after. According to Trump, ever since, quote, the China virus, America has seen an estimated 30% increase in homeschool enrollment, unquote. Just, just a funny term is homeschool enrollment.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. Just going to the home school to enroll.

[Talia Levin]

I'm going to be enrolling at home school. Very funny. And if elected president for a second time, he will do everything to support, quote, parents who make the courageous choice of homeschool. Unquote. Again, he, the way he uses the word homeschool is unlike anyone else I've ever heard talk. It is, it is a very odd use of the English language.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, he doesn't seem to understand parts of speech. Like he just does what he wants.

[Talia Levin]

No. And Trump said he'll work to ensure that homeschoolers will be entitled to all the benefits available to non homeschool students. Students like being able to participate in athletic programs, clubs, after school activities, educational trips, and more. He pledged that in his next term, he will allow 529 education savings accounts to be used for, quote, costs associated with homeschool education. Current 5 to 9 savings accounts allow families to withdraw up to $10,000 a year to spend tax free on tuition for private schools, which Trump called a, quote, tremendous win for school choice. Very important school choice. Remember that term, unquote. That term never comes up again in this video.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, great.

[Talia Levin]

So Trump is planning to expand this tuition savings program to include homeschooling families as well, with a very unknown system of checks and balances to determine what exactly qualifies as costs related to homeschooling. And often homeschooling is used by abusive parents to just have kids do free labor around the house and they try to make it count as education. And like, if you're now allowing parents to put money into a savings account to remove 10,000 a year tax free to spend on education, like, what does, what does that mean? Does that mean just curriculum? Does that mean like household supplies? Because that's being put towards their home school because they're schooling at home? Like, very, very unclear. And it's kind of refers back to some of the general problems homeschooling, especially in like conservative homeschooling, where just is a large way to abuse children, not in like the groomer way that right wing people talk about. It's like, no, you're just literally like limiting your kids access to the outside world because you think if they go outside they're going to turn gay. So but even if. Oh, sorry, there's, there's one, one final quote from this homeschooling video which are just fucking phenomenal to every homeschool family. I will be your champion. Do not vote Democrat. They're looking to destroy you, if you don't mind me saying that. Joe Biden can't put two sentences together and yet he's looking to destroy you. Do not vote Democrats. Do not vote for Crooked Joe. Vote for Honest Donald. Thank you very much. It's funny because in the video when he says vote for Honest Donald, he also starts to crack up because he knows how ridiculous this is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

God.

[Talia Levin]

Do not vote for Crooked Joe. Vote for Honest Donald. Thank you very much. Very, very cool. They're looking to destroy you, if you don't mind me saying.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, if you don't mind me saying. A man who rarely asks permission to say the most insane shit.

[Talia Levin]

So even if parents are not choosing to homeschool, Trump wants to let voters know that he will fight for parents rights. Which isn't quite a dog whistle, but it does refer to a very specific style of patriarchal rhetoric popularized by hyper religious conservative think tank banks that propose a extremely narrow version of how the American family should operate within society. More on this later. But so what can Trump do to let right wing religious parents know that he will be their champion, even in like blue states or big cities? As much as Trump might want to be a dictator, he doesn't have unlimited power to impose his war on wokeness in liberal cities. Yeah, But Donald Trump, who was impeached for trying to blackmail the President of Ukraine in summer of 2019, does have a plan. He wants to, quote, implement massive funding preferences and favorable treatment, unquote, for states and school districts that make four specific, quote, historic reforms in education that Trump has decreed. These four specific reforms include abolishing tenure for K through 12 teachers so that we can, quote, remove bad teachers and adopt merit pay to reward good teachers. The second is to, quote, drastically cut the bloated number of school administrators, including the costly and divisive and unnecessary DEI bureaucracy. Third, to adopt a Parental Bill of Rights that includes complete curriculum transparency in the form of universal school choice. And lastly, quote, implement the direct election of school principals by the parents. Trump calls this last bit the ultimate form of local control, something our country has never had, or at least has, has not had for the last 50 years. So those are his four reform plans, which is like, yeah, you know who's had it too easy for too long? Teachers. Let's abolish tenure, adopt merit pay, a disaster of a system, Cut administrative roles, put more work on teachers, have parents be able to fire, fire principals by voting and a vote to elect their own principal. And universal school choice is actually more of a dog whistle that it just refers to a series of, like, very racist, like, urban planning policies to direct rich white people's funding into a very few selected number of schools instead of where they actually, like, live and instead of the actual district they live in. So there's all of that. And, like, what Trump keeps coming back to among all these quote, unquote reforms, it all kind of relates to complete parental dominance. And part of this was the Parental Bill of Rights, which you use. You've probably seen some conservatives talking about more these past few years. And this is another quote from Trump here. It's all about the parents for their children more than anyone else. Parents know what their children need. And if you haven't heard of a Parental Bill of Rights directly, you most certainly have heard of one by another name, the don't say Gay Bill. That was a parental rights bill ostensibly targeting education. But these bills often end up giving parents just complete control over every aspect of the child's life. They dictate how children are allowed to express themselves, themselves, and allow parents to impose nearly any discipline or punishment they desire, total control over what the child eats, what they wear, what they read, what they watch, what they see online, and what they're allowed to learn in school, who they're allowed to socialize with. Some of these bills that I read through for this also bar mandatory masking policies in schools back when that was a thing and then are often full of anti vax talking points and attempts to ban sex ed and quote unquote gender politics. As a part of these bills, teachers in school administration are legally required to act as parental surveillance tools to report how a child behaves, how they socialize, how they dress, how they like to be referred to and who they are friends with. This includes outing children as gay or trans to parents if anyone in the school suspects that the student has a non heterosexual sexual orientation or is acting in any way inconsistent with their assigned gender at birth. These types of bills often have other consequences as well. In states where some of these bills have passed, like North Carolina, due to legal risks, some elementary schools have been unable to talk about or give out educational materials on consent or how to identify when child sexual abuse is taking place. As a part of the Safe touch programs, these programs are basically unable to happen because teachers will now be held personally legally liable if any parent objects to this material. So parental rights bills have been signed into law in six states over the past two legislative years, famously Florida, as well as Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Iowa and North Carolina. Since then, similar bills have been introduced in more than 25 states, many of which have passed through at least one chamber. Some of them are still in the process of either passing through a second chamber or being signed by the governor. I'm going to end with two quotes here from Trump that kind of reiterate this parental dominance thing that he's really pushing for. And also people like Ron DeSantis have been pushing for Ted Cruz, a lot of right wing politics. Quote, as the saying goes, personnel is policy. And at the end of the day, if we have pink haired communists teaching our kids, we have a major problem. When I'm president, we will put parents back in charge and give them the final say. We will get back to teaching reading, writing and math called arithmetic. And we will give our kids the high quality pro American education they deserve. They're going to teach you math called arithmetic.

[Garrison Davis]

Magnificent.

[Talia Levin]

It's amazing. We may spend the most, but we're going to be tops in education. No matter, no matter where you go, anywhere in the world, we're going to be tops in education.

[Garrison Davis]

There will be no bottoms in the American education system going forward.

[Talia Levin]

So this is, this is Donald Trump, the second host of the TV show the Apprentice, who has run for public opinion office. This is his plan for education. Dr. James Stout, how do you feel about about these education reform proposals.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't seem like a great idea if I'm being honest. Having, having listened to it, I think perhaps he hasn't got the, the sharpest grasp on what's going on in the education system. The reason we have education is because your parents don't necessarily know what's best for you. Right.

[Talia Levin]

Like, like your parents can't be an expert in everything.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes. So some of us go and get PhDs so we can, and then we teach your people how the important things about that, like by definition your parents cannot fulfill all the roles that an education system fulfills.

[Talia Levin]

And like, unlike pink haired communists who have complete, who have complete total control over every aspect of what a child should learn.

[Garrison Davis]

It's one of the things when you enter the university, you know, like they did a tuberculosis test and then they pass you a pink hair dye and you get a nose piercing as well.

[Talia Levin]

A lot of this is very much reminiscent of the fears of communist education that you see in the 1930s, how there's a lot of political tension trying to be raised over the fear that there's communists teaching you in universities and schools.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, it's interesting because at the same.

[Talia Levin]

Time, Frankfurt school style stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. I've written a lot about like anarchist ideals, educational ideals. Right. So at the same time there were anarchists in Spain being like, you know, we should do, we should do all our classes in the forest, let's just go out into the forest or.

[Talia Levin]

Absolutely.

[Garrison Davis]

There was a school by the sea where they taught kids like they were just having this incredible utopian education dream which in many ways, like we still haven't adapted to some of the things that that really could offer. And instead, yeah, we're having this McCarthyism part two.

[Talia Levin]

Well, that is, that is Trump's plan for education in case, in case you didn't know. So watch out for those pink haired communists. Keep an eye out for any parental bill of rights being proposed in your state. And it probably has little, little to do with actually protecting children and more to do with making parents just a complete dominating force and controlling every aspect of their child's life. And I mean the other sinister thing about this is like it removes access to, for kids to talk about things that they may be upset about and.

[Garrison Davis]

Access to mandated reporters. Like I'm a mandated reporter. Like this seems exactly from that.

[Talia Levin]

Exactly. And I mean the idea that schools are going to be legally required to out a child if they're acting like, perceived to be deviant in some like, like gender sexual way. Like all of these things are just ways to enable parental abuse in a variety of like ways that are explicit and non explicit. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's quite, it's quite upsetting. And that's the, that's the thing that conservatives are currently, are currently trying to push for. This is a big topic. This stuff was talked about in the Republican primaries that were completely useless constantly. Stuff like this is stuff like this is referred to while invoking this fear of like this pink haired transgender communist teacher which is currently like the biggest threat to America according to most conservatives.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, they can take us down from the inside.

[Talia Levin]

That and jihadism, which are probably linked somehow.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, I think. Well that's the pink haired jihadist. The famous.

[Talia Levin]

Well, that is it for us today. What are we going to be learning about Next for Agenda 47, James?

[Garrison Davis]

Well, we're going to be learning next about immigration, Donald Trump's border policies. Many of you will be shocked to hear that they're not very good. And yeah, we're gonna, I have two classes this summer. If you're, if you're in San Diego and you want to get in before they take the Marxism out of the education system, you can but strike now.

[Talia Levin]

I do love how, I do love how much of this is like, you know, who's had it easy for too long? Transgender teachers. They're having a point.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The people who are so fucking broke they have to have like gofundmes up for their.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Gender reassignment surgery. Great.

[Talia Levin]

Wonderful stuff.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Talia Levin]

All right. We will be back tomorrow to talk about Trump's border policies. Things that will probably be totally normal, totally chill.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, just very, very similar to fucking sadly they are similar to Biden's, but that's a whole other dystopia.

[Talia Levin]

That's a whole other discussion. All right, see you on the other side by.

[Danny Trejo]

Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tale from the Shadows presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and it experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Tuda Podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

[Molly Conger]

Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. Your daily dose of the horrors that are in fact already happening all around us. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and I am delighted to be joined today by the critically acclaimed author of Culture Warlords, journalist, researcher, sword enthusiast, sandwich expert, and my friend, Talia Levin.

[Talia Levin]

Hello.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I once introduced myself at an event as a sandwich historian, which I think was the pinnacle of my public speaking career. But this is the second pinnacle. Hey, Molly, what's up?

[Molly Conger]

Thank you so much for coming on today to talk with me about your new book. Book? Wild Faith is coming out in just a few weeks. October 15th, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Wild Faith. How the Christian right is taking over America. Not the terrible B movie entitled Wild Faith.

[Molly Conger]

Yeah, the SEO is scrambled on that one. But the book, however, is very good. I mean, first of all, I just want to say, like, so I've been reading the galley copy that you sent me, which I honestly made me feel very fancy. I've never received a galley copy of a book that's not out yet before. So I felt, you know, kind of a. Kind of a broadcasting professional with my special book.

[Robert Evans]

It's an exclusive club. You're one of like five people that's read it. Oh, my God.

[Molly Conger]

That is. That is very exclusive.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, it's about to become a lot less exclusive, so feel special while you can.

[Molly Conger]

That's right. But I realized while I was reading it, you know, I have my little sticky tabs because I'm reading a lot more books lately. Regrettably, not. Not. Not a big time book guy. Always reading. I read a lot of court documents, but I'm reading a lot of books right now for research for my show. And it's like on my little sticky tabs. And as I'm reading it, I realize I'm not marking passages that I think would be useful for us to talk about in this interview. I'm just putting my little tabs on passages that just like punched me in the gut, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Sorry for punching you. No, but I mean, I mean, with.

[Molly Conger]

The power of your words. Because, like a lot of what I'm reading sucks.

[Robert Evans]

It's just right.

[Molly Conger]

Like I spent all day Yesterday reading like 25 year old issues of Resistance, which was the quarterly magazine for a white power music label. So this, I mean, it's a real departure. So, you know, really just reveling in the richness of the prose and the fact that it, you know, didn't want to kill me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no. I also have experienced neo Nazi research fatigue and also just like the. The sort of relentless grimness of Plowing through these like fundamentally hostile texts and also like academic texts, which are difficult in their own way. I try to write excessively or just like excitingly. I find that a lot of especially non fiction sort of journalism y books tend to be a little dry. And I'm like, let's not be dry. Let's be like spicy and you know, like form and function. Like you're more likely to be moved by a message if you find the writing compelling. You know, it's just you have such.

[Molly Conger]

A way with words. I mean, you know this. You're a professional writer. I don't want to embarrass you on the show.

[Robert Evans]

So I feel like twirling my hair like. Yes. But I do write for a living.

[Molly Conger]

If you'll indulge me. If it's legal, if the publisher will allow this. I just want to read this passage from the introduction that I think is a good jumping off point. And it was one of the first things I marked because I was just like, oh, hell yeah, we're getting into this.

[Robert Evans]

There's.

[Molly Conger]

There's good words in here. Okay. The Christian right is a force in American politics and has been for decades, half a century to be precise, during which it has steadily gained power. It started in school rooms, continued in courtrooms, and perseveres with the aid of people who are perfectly willing to call in bomb threats to hospitals and attempt to overturn elections. It features self proclaimed prophets with a distinct interest in politics, newly minted apostles with very definite ideas about spiritual battle and its earthly components, and pastors eager to usher in the end of the world. Its adherents have hymns and devotionals and speak in tongues on occasion. And the showiest among them are known to march through cities blowing ram's horns in an effort to topple, as Joshua once did, the wicked cities of the world. They have their own insular world, their own media apparatus. They have legislators who give fire and brimstone speeches from the badly carpeted rooms where laws are made. They have lawyers too. And in case the lawyers fail, there's always the promise of congregations that might coalesce into mobs or arsonists whose burning holy zeal coalesces into the tiny pinpoint of a Molotov cocktail. And I knew from the intro that we were in for a ride.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's like cast of characters, the worst people ever. But like, let's read about it in an exciting way. I think that one of the themes of the book is really how these extra legal extremist movements like the anti abortion Terror movement and the legal framework of a movement work together. I actually initially heard about this from a friend who was talking about how, like, during the gay rights movement, you had sort of the ACT UP quilt demonstrations, the die ins, and then you had the sort of like, more respectably coded, like, gay people who were talking to the government and trying to get elected and really trying to influence research. And that every movement needs sort of a radical outside and then a respectable inside. And I'm like, oh, this works in, like, theocratic movements too, where you have like this fringe that's burning down clinics and then people steadily working for 50 years to like, ban abortion. And they have the same DNA and they have the same goals. They just go about it differently, but complement each other. And I think that's like a running theme in the book is that, like, you have lawyers and you have legislators and then you have mobs, and they're sort of all working towards the same goals. And that's really what we're seeing, I think, on the Christian right after decades of building power.

[Molly Conger]

Yeah. One of the notes that I wrote down in that vein while I was reading was that, you know, the Christian right drives its power across a spectrum, Right. From the clinic bomber to the senator. But it's not, you know, you might say it's two sides of the same coin. But to me, it looks like this isn't two different spheres of power or two sort of separate but coexisting or comorbid ideologies. They're just different numbers on the same dialogue. Right. It's turning up and turning down.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's like the hand that lights the torch and the hand that puts it to the, you know, pyre, they perform different functions, but they have really the same goals. And if, like me, you view stripping half the populace of its bodily autonomy, imposing a theocracy, hounding queer people out of public life, slash into death as fundamentally violent goals. Yeah. I don't think there's like a respectable iteration necessarily. There's just cosplaying, respectability. Right.

[Molly Conger]

You can say it with a tie on, on the Senate floor, but it's, it's the same message.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And I think so much of our media apparatus and governmental apparatus is really sort of of views like, again, this, like, form and function. Right. Like, if you are, if you say something politely, it doesn't really matter what you're saying. Like if you say something with a suit on, in the register of like, you know, in a calm sort of Mike Pension Rush Limbaugh on Decaf. As he called himself Voice Jesus?

[Molly Conger]

Did he say that?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's what he called himself when he did a, like, evangelical radio show. Yeah. No, no matter what you say, as long as you are, like, white and you say it politely, like, this is fundamentally sort of fine. And then if you look at it from, you know, a step or two back and you're like, no, actually, no matter how politely you say it, this is like a violent, deeply unpopular theocratic agenda that, like, fundamentally is incompatible with multiracial democracy. I also think, and I keep running into this, like, well meaning liberals being like, but isn't there a separation of church and state? And I'm like, I don't know. Do you fucking think there is in Alabama? Do you think there is in Arkansas? And all of these, you know, in Texas, like, ev. All of these figures are like, we're Christians, we're making laws for Jesus and.

[Molly Conger]

We have covenant marriages and we want you to, too.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like, we're gonna outlaw divorce because of God. And like, you know, women dying of sepsis in hospital parking lots is what Jesus wants. And like, and I experienced this. I think you probably have too, when you, like, report on, you know, zealots and extremists and people inevitably wind up, like, measuring other people's wheat by their own bushel. In other words, they're like, they can't really believe this stuff. And it's like, no, they really do. They can't really have these goals.

[Molly Conger]

First of all, they do. But also, does it matter?

[Robert Evans]

Right? I mean, the question of, like, impact versus intent. First of all, it's. I think it's perfectly possible to be both a grifter and a true believer at the same time.

[Molly Conger]

That's just synergy, baby.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And also, fundamentally, this is a world premised on grievance, where it's this idea that, like, the world has got one over on you. And so in a sense, grift is just like, well, you know, the world's corrupt and I'm fighting a righteous cause, so what does it matter? The ethics that I sort of skimp on along the way?

[Molly Conger]

I mean, once you've amped the stakes up too, you're fighting the literal devil, and everyone who's getting in my way is animated by actual demons from hell. I mean, the stakes couldn't be higher. So you do what you have to do.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. And it's this theory of power. And so then people sort of standing outside of that paradigm who are not keyed into this idea of, like, we're in an epical spiritual battle, like, and we must create, like a kingdom of Christ on earth in America to win against the devil. And then people outside being like, you're hypocrites. And it's like, it's not a valid criticism to them because they're like, first of all, you're not like a Christian if you're a liberal, but also, like, you're not on our level. Like, we're fighting Lucifer and you're probably a st. Like on his team if you oppose us. So, you know, a multitude of apparent hypocrisies can be excused by the idea that, like, this is a holy war. And in, in war, there's like, all kinds of apparent behavior that's okay.

[Molly Conger]

Yeah, they're doing holy war crimes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is why, for example, you see a lot of, like, prominent female figures from Phyllis Schlafly, you know, in the 70s and 80s, to like, the Tradwives now. And it's like, how does this fit in with your. Your overall sort of idea that women should be chaste and submissive and meek and silent? I mean, first of all, trad wife stuff is often fetish content. That's fetish.

[Molly Conger]

That's fetish content. But, yeah, I mean, Phyllis. Phyllis Schlafly made a living professionally saying that women shouldn't make a living professionally, but that contradiction doesn't matter.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, I think I. I call them Valkyries for feminine submission in the book. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, like, if you believe that this is your calling, your mission, you know, your mission field in the service of the Lord to undo the demonic sort of influence of feminism, like, of course you're going to speak.

[Molly Conger]

You've been moved by God to do so.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And of course, like, female leaders within the evangelical community, like, sort of minority Republicans can be like, knocked off their pedestal quicker and easier, but like, they, they still can come out and exist and testify. And Schlafly, throughout her very long, prolific and lucrative career, you know, was like, I'm a housewife with six kids. Kids. And that was her. That was how she defined herself, even while being this incredibly prominent figure and one of the sort of key architects of the current Christian right coalition of, like, right wing Catholics. She and Paul Weyrich and Leonard Leo and some other right wing Catholics brought these Catholic values of being all about abortion to the evangelical right, which prior to the 70s was like, that's a weird Catholic thing. Thing. We don't really care.

[Molly Conger]

I wanted to talk about that. So I, I'm not sure how sort of common knowledge this is, but the, the Protestant Christian community in the United States did not care about abortion until the 70s. It was not an issue in their communities. They were generally pro abortion. They were, you know, in the. But the Baptists were in favor of Roe v. Wade.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, the, the fucking Southern Baptist Convention came out in like 74, I think it was, and was like, yeah, we approve of Roe v. Wade.

[Molly Conger]

So it's not like, you know, opposition to abortion is baked into Christianity. It is baked into the American evangelical Christianity of post 1975 or so because of this sort of conscious, cynical political decision. And that I think is so interesting because, you know, we get into this conversation of, well, what are their deeply held beliefs and do they really believe it and does that matter? But we can, can pin down the moment they started believing this and we know why. And it's segregation.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I would say, like, people can still, like this is like several generations later of like constant barrages of extremely violent propaganda against abortion. So. Right.

[Molly Conger]

So the belief is sincere today, but you could look at it where it was born.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. You can.

[Molly Conger]

It should have been aborted, you're right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no, it definitely should not have been carried to term. But like, like, it's, it's crazy. And in addition to moi's book, Randall Ballmer does some really good coverage of this. So the sort of general arc is like pre, sort of 1970s, you had this like generally conservative population of Southern Baptists who were like on board with McCarthyism, hated the godless reds, but kind of viewed politics as like, like worldly and not really their sphere. And we're not particularly politically engaged. And then Brown versus a board of education passes immediately the white Christian populace just disinvests whe from the public schools, leaving multiple counties in the south without functionally any public education at all. And this mushroom after rain, kind of like patch of patches of parochial schools with church or Christian in the name start popping up. And they're all white schools. They're segregation academies is the sort of term of art for these. And they're explicitly under a Christian aegis. They're religious schools. They're tax exempt as a result. And then in like the late 60s and 70s, the government was like, you can't be tax exempt and like considered a charitable organization if you are segregated and don't have any black students or minority students. And that is what woke the sleeping dragon of the Christian right, really. Like, you know, get your filthy Government hands off our tax exemptions. Like, they just went, you know, nuts. They were really mobilized. You know, like, these are the people who are, like, throwing tomatoes at Ruby Bridges. Like, you know, they're really politically motivated for the first time because they're experiencing, like, a consequence for segregation. And so this is when, like, Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed and, you know, James Dobson start sort of coming forward and being more prominent. And then by the sort of mid-70s to 80s, you had these, like, savvier political operators coming out and saying, hey, guys, segregation now, segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever. Is like, it's great that it really fired y'all up, but it has sort of a limited appeal.

[Molly Conger]

And they shot George Wallace. It's over.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, like, there's going to be a ceiling on that. And a lot of people think you suck. So why don't you get in on the ground on this new civil rights struggle, Abortion, where you can fight for the unborn who conveniently will never disagree with you.

[Molly Conger]

Right. Their voices don't have to be centered here. We can speak for them.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, they're the most convenient political constituency in history. Right.

[Molly Conger]

Because they're so innocent. And you can't milkshake duck a fetus. He's not even here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he can't talk like he's not gonna say shit it. So, I mean, that's like the very capsule history. And then, of course, it becomes this idea of, like, the Moral Majority and we're the guardians of America's soul, and we're going to get really weird about sex also.

[Molly Conger]

It's just like, if you strip it all the way down to the studs, like, the core of this is women are bleeding to death in hospital parking lots because Jerry Falwell didn't want to pay his taxes or stop being racist.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

Like, I mean, that's not fair.

[Robert Evans]

No. People sometimes, like, are a little skeptical when I'm like, all of the hatreds are interconnected. But then you look at, like, concrete historical examples of, like, this world historical wave of misogyny. I mean, it's not that this population wasn't, like, weird about sex or weird about women, like, to start with.

[Molly Conger]

I mean, maybe they would have gotten here a different way. But that's how we got here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we got here by just like, no, we will pay taxes on our segregation academies. Bob Jones University's interracial dating ban is perfectly great, and we're going to mobilize about it. And so what you have then now is just like, 50 years of political lockstep because. And, and you see this in, like, other religious communities. I mean, like, I know, like, it's sort of notorious how much corruption slides by in New York because, like, the Hasidic communities vote as a bloc. Like, it is very useful to have a congregation that all votes the same way. It's politically useful.

[Molly Conger]

I mean, what other populations can you get together once a week as a captive audience and speak to with authority if you can mobilize those people? And that's what Jerry Falwell saw. Right. Like, this is a great way to get a lot of people to vote the way I want them to vote.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And, you know, the church has always been like a really prominent institution in American civil society, especially as the rest of sort of civil society has fallen away and degraded. Like, churches are some of the only social outlets that Americans have. And what's interesting when you talk to evangelicals and ex evangelicals is just like being a Republican is like part of their religious identity in a major way. It's like, this is how you vote and this is, you know, how you dress and this is how you go to church and so on. But, like, the idea of being a Democrat is like, not only, you know, a little bit out of step with your community, it's heretical.

[Molly Conger]

I mean, that's how the demons get in.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Demon crats. I mean, and like, yeah, it's stupid, but it's also like, like half of the people saying demoncrats, like, literally mean Democrats, are aligned with Lucifer.

[Molly Conger]

And I think that's a point that I don't want to get lost on the listener. This, you know, this idea that people literally have demons in them, that demons are active in the world, that demons are motivating the actions of their enemies is real for them. And I'm not saying that to be derisive or, you know, it's real. It's real. It is, it is an animating factor for a lot of these people. And that's hard to wrap your mind around. I mean, I, I struggle with the idea that that is real for them. But, like, that's how you get things like satanic panic. And we see echoes of satanic panic in this idea of, you know, groomers in kids schools. They really have this fundamental, like, foundational belief in this, you know, whether or not they're calling it demons, that the existence of some sort of ontological evil that is coming for their children and like, once you arrive at the place where, like, where you understand that that's real for them, their actions make more sense. Like, they're not behaving irrationally. If you. If you truly believe that these things were happening, you'd act crazy, too.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, it's really hard to get people to step outside their own worldviews and in both directions. Right. Like, I don't believe that demons are, you know, abroad in the world and motivating, like, every element of political action to someone who.

[Molly Conger]

I'm starting to see them some places.

[Robert Evans]

But generally, no, to someone who does. My viewpoint is incomprehensible and vice versa. So I think part of. I mean, not that I'm like, one of those people that's like, polarization is the big problem. Like, you know, as opposed to anything with, like, concrete policy. Like, you know, where it's like, the big problem is we all don't like each other enough. And I'm like, no, the big problem is like. Like, people are espousing policies that will cause deaths. And, like, also that people, like, believe their political enemies are, like, literally agents of Satan, I would say, is, like, a bigger problem than polarization in the abstract. But, yeah. I mean, this doctrine of sort of spiritual warfare, which, if you, like, Google it, it's just like, oh, this is the mindset. And it's like you, the listener to. It could happen here. Like, you've been drafted into the spirit war from, like, birds.

[Molly Conger]

Congratulations, Private.

[Robert Evans]

You're probably on the side of the devil, so good job. I mean, I don't know, like, a lot of Americans believe in angels and demons, and that's fine, but it's like, when that starts impinging on the political sphere in a very serious way. It's like, how far would you go if you believed your opponent was under the thrall of, like, Satan? You would go pretty damn far. That's.

[Molly Conger]

I mean, that's why, you know, clinic bombings were, and I guess are on the rise again.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

Like, these arsons of clinics. It's not like other kinds of crime in my mind.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

It's not a crime of passion or an interpersonal dispute. It is people who have been motivated by this belief that this is a place where a genocide is happening, that there's a holocaust going on in there, that people are ripping, you know, actual living babies limb from limb. And if you really did believe that, that their actions make sense, and that's why it happens so often.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

Because these people are motivated by this belief that God commands them to take this action.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, there's sort of dual elements to that. I mean, first of all, absolutely, yes. Like, I've read some anti abortion terror manuals, speaking of extremely unpleasant research. And it's just really like these people are murderers. It's mass murderers. Like, you're like killing Hitler, right?

[Molly Conger]

And wouldn't you, wouldn't you kill baby Hitler?

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. It's hypothetical. About, about BB Hitler in like a country wide scale. And when specific abortion doctors have been mentioned in right wing media, those guys end up dead. And that's not a coincidence. So there's, there's that element of it which is the majority of it. It's huge. But there's also this idea of demonic geography where like demons can possess sort of places like abortion clinics or institutions like Planned Parenthood or even the Democratic Party, which, you know, I read a lot of demonology books and like taxonomies of demons. Pigs in the Parlor was this really big hit in like the 70s, and it's been like reissued and reissued and millions of copies. And it's just like on one level it's really compelling because it's like, are you tired? Are you sad? Are you feeling clumsy? Do you have like persistent stomach aches? It's demons. And here's how you deal with that. And like, in a country with shitty health care, I can totally see why someone who's like, really depressed might go to like an exorcist or a deliverance minister, which is the Protestant.

[Molly Conger]

If you'll try anything and this guy's gonna do it for free.

[Robert Evans]

I watched so many videos of deliverance ministers doing their thing, and it's like crazy. It's like, like people, you know, are just like sitting there and they're like people praying over them and screaming in their face, like, and. And they wind up vomiting and crying and it's all very like, intense. And you know, if you think about it from a placebo effect perspective for like one second, you're like, obviously this person would feel a weight lifted from them. They've had this ecstatic experience. And this isn't. The majority of. This is. About 14% of America identifies this as white evangelical.

[Molly Conger]

So many Protestants.

[Robert Evans]

It's still so many people. Because people keep asking me, like, how many people really believe shit like this? And I'm like, well, about 80 to 90% of like, people who identify as white evangelical Protestants espouse most of these beliefs. So that's, that's like third.

[Molly Conger]

That's like 30 million people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And then you add in the Catholic.

[Molly Conger]

Right, which is getting weirder every day.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Gdv. I hate women. Women Exist to reproduce. Breed, you filthy sow. But like, even beyond the adult Catholic convert style weirdness, like, right wing Catholics are an integral part of the Christian right, like Amy Coney Barrett, you know, Antonin Scalia, that kind of thing. That's another bunch of millions. So this reactionary force has, like, numerically significant constituency. On the other hand, it definitely punches way above its weight in terms of.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

They have an outsized influence of both, you know, on the legislative floor and when it comes to, you know, who's racking up the most bodies.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And also even like the culture wars, Right. Like, the sort of loudest culture warriors tend to at least come from like a background of I'm speaking for God or Christ is king or whatever it is. Like, how many times have you and I encountered that in extremist context? But also like the sort of more mainstream me. What the fuck the mainstream is? I don't know, it's full of piss. But like, the more mainstreamy, like, Christian grifter, right, they come from this. I'm speaking from my faith. These are my religious principles. But like, it is worth noting, again, just to. Just to rewind in our conversation, but like, like whole concept of religious liberty and religious freedom. Absolutely was like an ad slogan coined in the 70s around segregation. Right.

[Molly Conger]

Religious freedom to do what? I mean, it's like states rights. States rights to do what?

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

Yeah, answer the question.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's religious freedom to have segregated schools is the answer to that.

[Molly Conger]

And you still see echoes of that with either still religious schools that can't accept federal grant money because they don't let students be gay.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

Like, it's not racial segregation anymore, but they are, you know, refusing to admit gay students. And that is a violation of. Of federal civil rights law.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, but that's where. I mean, that's where that slogan started. And then it's blossomed to include basically like a gay person came into my shop, except they didn't.

[Molly Conger]

Like, Right.

[Robert Evans]

I know there's no standing. Right.

[Molly Conger]

Like, that whole case was built on a lie. Whatever. That's.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's like. And the standing in the Supreme Court is so ridiculous. This. I mean, in many ways this Supreme Court is the culmination and embodiment and apotheosis of like, Christian right theocracy. Because you have these like, absolutely batshit religious zealots. I mean, Amy Coney Barrett is like, from a cult. And in this unaccountable body, they're passing unpopular theocratic principles that the majority of the American public disagrees with, but, like, specifically what they are trying to enact and what they are, what they are enacting is this theocratic agenda where, like, the government is in your bedroom, the government is in your doctor's office. Like, the government is sniffing your panties. And it's, it's gross and it's upsetting. And fundamentally, like, theocracies are just very famously all up in your junk. Like, they're obsessed with like, controlling and censoring sexuality of all kinds, but particularly female sexuality and queer sexuality. Like, snuff those out. And so that's part of the reason why so many abortion arguments. Like, first of all, you have the, like the. You're murdering this cluster of cells which is a full human baby. Like, do you remember that article in the Guardian a couple of years ago that like, showed the actual size of like, fetuses at various stages of development and it was like they were just.

[Molly Conger]

Like so little, like these little, like little fingernails.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

And it doesn't look like a tiny baby doll. That's just very small.

[Robert Evans]

Y. Yeah, exactly. It's not like a mini baby, like in like tides of gore. It's like literally like a tiny cluster of cells. So anti abortion propaganda, like, you are not immune to propaganda. It has like wormed its way into the popular consciousness just by virtue of its ubiquity and constant repetition being the key to successful propaganda. But so many of these arguments, in addition to this this abortion is murdered stuff is also just like, you should have kept your legs closed.

[Molly Conger]

Right. This is a, this is a consequence. God did this to you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like sex, a mortal sin and sex should be punished and they must be doing it wrong. Like, I'm like, why do you want sex to have consequences and be punished? The like, intensity of the misogyny around purity culture was so intense.

[Molly Conger]

I wanted to ask you, you know, about the experience of writing the book. Right. So, you know, your first book, Culture Warlords was traumatizing for you to craft, Right. Because you had to spend so much time in these digital spaces, in some, in some cases physical spaces with, you know, Neo Nazis 4chan guys, you know, aspiring terrorists. And so that's traumatic to experience, you know, but largely that experience was alone, like at your computer screen, sort of consuming this content that was eroding your soul. But the second half of this book is about child abuse. Right. And that you interviewed people who grew up in this movement about their lives, about their husbands raping them and their parents beating them as children. And like, how do those experiences compare? And like, what Was that. I mean, how did you prepare to do that? I don't even know how I would begin to do that with care.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, I think my goal going in is like, I am not going to betray you. That was my guiding ethos of just like, I view like, your trust in me as a sacred thing. Not like, like sacred in any formal religious sense, but just like, you know, I view your trust in me as something that I hold very dearly. It's very important. I'm going to treat your pain with as much gentleness and respect as I can. And like, I interviewed over a hundred people largely about their experiences with experiencing child abuse in an evangelical milieu, as is laid out with painstaking instructions and like, all of these parenting manuals. Actually, like, I think reading the parenting manuals was even more disturbing than talking to people. Because, like, people were like, this fucked me up and it was wrong. And then these books are like, no, you must beat your toddler, because Jesus says so. And like, here's exactly how to beat your toddler and here's what you should use to beat your toddler. And here's the like, supremely fucked up, like, weird ritual that we prescribe. And then like, reading those in tandem with like, the accounts of people who are like, this specific thing, like, fucked me up for life and really messed up my ability to have like, intimacy or self confidence or whatever, all of that stuff. I mean, it was tough. I definitely took more time. Like, I wrote Culture warlords in nine months, so I was like, totally immersed constantly.

[Molly Conger]

You just like, didn't come up for air.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. At all. And this one I was like, I need a little more time, guys. Like, I wrote it over, you know, almost three years. I also pretentiously started calling this philosophy guarding your heart because I really got lost in the sauce with culture Warlords. I was in a dark place while I was writing it. And afterwards I was also. It came out in mid Covid, so that didn't help either. But it was a really rough experience with this. I was like, I'm going to keep writing. I'm going to write about sandwiches all the way through. I'm going to make sure I have friendships, stuff that's grounding me. I think consciously having that at the forefront of my mind really helped. That being said, like, what was really encouraging was all of these people who had experienced this sort of child abuse industrial complex in the evangelical community where, like, we really value that someone wants to hear what we have to say, and also that it's Someone from outside the community is like, paying attention and thinks this is important. Which is not to denigrate like, ex vangelical voices, but more to say that, like, I guess there's a certain validation when someone who's like, not didn't grow up in your corner of religiosity. Dark corner.

[Molly Conger]

And sort of bringing it to an outside audience too. Because I think a lot of ex vangelicals, their. Their audience is largely their fellow ex vangelicals.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. And I'm someone who, like, I grew up as a Jew and I'm like, yeah, this sucked. This, this is terrible. I'm like, appalled, reading, like, to train up a Child by the Pearls or the Strong Willed Child by James Dobson, which, like, to be clear, the strong willed child is a bad thing. It's a bad thing to have a child with us.

[Molly Conger]

You have to beat it out of them. Sure.

[Robert Evans]

Literally.

[Molly Conger]

And I ran, I ran into this in the wild recently. I don't know if you have come across this guy online. Do you know the 90s movie the Little Rascals?

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God. Alf from the Little Rascals turns out to be Alfalfa.

[Molly Conger]

The guy who played Alfalfa, his name is Bug Hall. He, like, really, like, I don't know, got into a sort of main character situation over some posts about how he beats his infants. He beats infants because that's, I guess, a good way to raise a baby.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Also, I think he's homeless.

[Molly Conger]

No, he's a serf. Oh, he's in a voluntary serfdom arrangement.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God. Okay, well. Well, he sounds like a big rascal.

[Molly Conger]

Yeah, he's a big rascal.

[Robert Evans]

He's continued that trajectory of rascal them, but don't beat your kids. I mean, I will also say the reason why this book focuses so much on child abuse, which, like, I encountered some haters and losers and doubters along the way who were like, why are you focused so much on child abuse? And I was like, there are a lot of different theories about, like, how authoritarianism developed, but one of the big ones is focusing on the pedagogy in authoritarian societies, like societies that become authoritarian, you know, evolve from democracy to authoritarianism and beating the shit out of people from when they're in infancy and particularly when they display disobedience or ask why or, you know, just deviate from expectation.

[Molly Conger]

That's a great way to make an obedient brown shirt.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. Like this is a recipe for future authoritarians. Like, the people I spoke to had sort of broken away largely from this culture. But many of the sort of most obedient soldiers in the army's army of God, like, are that way. Because, again, I can't overemphasize how much these parenting manuals, which spanned from, like, 1970 to 2015, these texts, you know, the dates that they were published, emphasize having an obedient child. What you want is not, like, a child who's kind or curious or thoughtful or smart. It's obedient. Instantly obedient. Don't make me count to three is the title of one of the books. And, like, what you're creating is a culture of people who a, like, empathize with the aggressor at all times. So hence this admiration for strength and even admiration for cruelty. People who are trained to obey and obey without question and people who are very acclimated to the use of violence.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

I mean, you're doing fascism in the home.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So the. The author, like Alice Miller, the author of the book for your own good, lays out a pretty. She was also a Holocaust survivor. She lays out a pretty strong case for, like, you know, early 20th century Germany having this poisonous pedagogy that also involved beating the shit out of your k. Kids until.

[Molly Conger]

Yeah, it was, like, illegal to love your children.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. To obey you. And how, basically this is how you make a torture. And the book is called for your own good. And Yeah, I mean, I. I really think it is, like, undervalued in politics, like, how much this culture of corporal punishment, which is. Yeah. Americans have, like, moved away from universal approval of corporal punishment. We're still, like, a lot higher than other Western democracies in that regard. And, like, on a national level, we're the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the UN Conventions on the rights of a child, which include, like, having a name and, like, not being beaten and not being thrown into, like, juvie solitary.

[Molly Conger]

Oh, well, that's why America can't touch that. That we need to incarcerate the children.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, the children yearn for the cells. But it's also just like, a lot of it actually was, like, worries that, like, evangelicals, like, would sort of object to the. The.

[Mia Wong]

In.

[Robert Evans]

The interference in their.

[Molly Conger]

It's an infringement on their religious freedom to beat the shit out of babies.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And. And their parental rights, which is another buzzword of this. This movement.

[Molly Conger]

Parental. Parental rights is a red flag for me.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah, No, I hear parental rights, and I think you want to beat the shit out of your kids.

[Molly Conger]

You don't want your children to learn science.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You want to homeschool and under educate your kids or miseducate.

[Molly Conger]

You want to cause a measles outbreak.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. But that's, like, for us, because we're weirdos. We're, like, obsessively clued into this stuff. If you're not, like, parental rights is like, religious freedom is like, it sounds good. Yeah. It's a effective marketing slogan, but, like, what it means is, like, we're going to show up at the school board and yell about how. I mean, and Trump has, like, bought into this, obviously, because he knows where his bread is buttered. He has savvy. Like, he's like, you guys do the policy. But, like, his current parental rights based. His biggest, like, policy that he's advocating is like, denying federal funding to any school with any vaccine mandate, which is basically just like, make measles great again, like, bring back diphtheria. I think, like, yes, the, the MAGA movement is sort of the, the efflorescence, the apotheosis of this steadily building power, but, like, there's also just like 50 years of, of, of power building behind it. And, like, even if Trump is defeated at the federal level, which, like, I profoundly hope he is, sorry to come out as like a, you know, partisan. A voter, Like a hashtag. A voter. But, like, I think it would be just a. Nauseatingly. It's a horrifying thought that he. I mean, first of all, he would absolutely enact every item in this theocratic agenda, starting with a national abortion ban. Like, that would happen in the first hundred days, I think, which would just functionally plunge American women into like, a very, very dark, dark septicemic nightmare.

[Molly Conger]

Yeah, the dark place that we're going is a coffin.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even should he lose, which, you know, hope, there's still 22 states where abortion is outlawed or severely restricted, and these places are becoming care deserts, like medical residents. My extremely sexy partner is a medical resident, so I know more about the state of medicine than I otherwise would. But, like, residents don't want to do their residencies in states with abortion restrictions.

[Molly Conger]

They're like, right. Even a choice gynecological providers just aren't practicing there anymore. Like, even if, you know, even if your primary focus is not abortions, or even if your primary focus is not, you know, pregnancy care, they just don't want. They just don't want to work there.

[Robert Evans]

Well, it's also, first of all, that. But second of all, it's like, if you're in the er, you're going to experience pregnancy loss because it happens in one in five pregnancy.

[Mia Wong]

Right.

[Molly Conger]

So there. Choosing to work in states where they're not going to go to jail for doing medicine.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like they don't want to incur the moral injury of not being able to apply the standard of care to patients in extremely common situations such as incomplete miscarriage and you know, pregnancy loss, whether, you know, self induced or just like miscarriage is super common and nobody talks about it.

[Molly Conger]

It's more common than we. An ectopic pregnancy is so much more common than people realize. Like there are so many things that your body could do to betray you.

[Robert Evans]

That you need a doctor's help with just ordinary pregnancy.

[Molly Conger]

When then after the, after the baby's born, then your lustrous hair all falls out.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like ordinary pregnancy is so fraught with like weird body horror. Like, but anyway, that's besides the point. Whatever. The point is someone presents with abdominal pain in the ER and it turns out to be an ectopic pregnancy. And like you can't do standard of care like dilation and curettage procedures without checking with the hospital lawyer. Like that is a really bad position for a care provider to be in. So when you have these fundamentally unscientific laws, Right. That are produced by people who don't know anything about pregnancy and are like very intentionally ambiguous so that cautious institutions will sort of interpret them, maximally interpret them them like the life of the mother.

[Molly Conger]

How dead does she have to be first?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, she has to be almost dead. Right. And then sometimes she winds up dying because almost dead is tough to judge. Like it's just winds up this grotesque sort of farce of medicine. And very directly like residents don't want to train, doctors don't want to practice in these places. And so, you know. Right.

[Molly Conger]

So this ends up killing more people than just just the ones hemorrhaging in the parking lot. There are people who have completely unrelated problems who are now unable to access unrelated kinds of care because the doctors just aren't there.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Or people who have ordinary wanted pregnancies who can't access neonatal care, who have to drive hours and hours and hours to like get checkups. Like, you know, I mean, human reproduction is like a pretty major part of like life and a lot of people are doing it. Yeah. Like it's sort of how, you know, it just people do it all the time and like not being able to access medical care around like the entire spectrum of like reproduction is pretty catastrophic. But yeah. It also impacts all the people not engaging in reproduction at this moment in time. Like, doctors who are just like, fuck this, I'm not working at an ER in Tennessee, you know, because I want to be able to treat patients without.

[Molly Conger]

A lawyer in the room.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, and then there are doctors who are bigots and doctors who are happily on board with abortion bans. But do you want that to be the only doctor in your county? I don't think so. It's a really grim situation, and I'm such an absolutist about bodily autonomy. It's like, if you don't own your body, you are not a full citizen, period. End of story. If a major organ in your body is treated as a controlled substance, you are not a full and equal citizen with rights, which I would like to be.

[Molly Conger]

I aspire to it.

[Talia Levin]

Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

So I wanted to ask you one. One more question about your book, and I will let you go. I told you that I wouldn't keep you very long, and I lied.

[Robert Evans]

But it's like, it's just because I like talking to you. So it's. I think I've done the majority of the talk, so you can't. You can't be like, oh, it's about.

[Molly Conger]

Your book.

[Robert Evans]

Which you should buy listeners.

[Molly Conger]

You pre order it now, wherever you buy your books.

[Robert Evans]

And if you like the dulcet tones of my voice, which are. I should have gotten you to narrate my audiobooks. You crushed that passage.

[Molly Conger]

I'm a professional talker now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I narrated the audiobook and then was like, why did I write such complicated sentences afterwards?

[Molly Conger]

So now that I read my own writing, like, on a regular basis, out loud, which is new for me, right? So I, you know, have my podcast and I'm writing my little scripts and then I'm reading them into a little microphone. Now that I struggle with that. I noticed while I was reading your book that, oh, I wouldn't be able to read this out loud. I mean, where would I breathe?

[Robert Evans]

I know it was because I write.

[Molly Conger]

Like that, too, and it's something I'm, like, really grappling with right now.

[Robert Evans]

Call me 10 Claus Talia.

[Talia Levin]

I'm like, oh, fuck.

[Robert Evans]

This sentence is. This paragraph. This sentence is a paragraph. Stop it.

[Molly Conger]

Like, I really, really lost. Really lost momentum on that one.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I know. But, like, I managed to get through it. And if you. If you enjoy the dul sounds of my voice, you can hear it for, like, I don't know, eight hours or whatever, I feel weird being like, listen to my voice, but, you know, invite.

[Molly Conger]

Me into your mind.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, But I do think it's nice as an author to read your audiobook because I can, like, get mad and, like, you know, emphasize stuff that I think is important. And also, I'm a theater kid. Like, I don't have many opportunities to perform, and it is a performance and it's fun, but. Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

And that comes out the same time as the physical book.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, it comes out audio, ebook, physical book with a cool snake on it.

[Molly Conger]

Oh, yeah. Oh, I guess this is an audio medium. The listener can't see that I'm showing the cool cover.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's got a cool snake. A red and black snake on the COVID I've named him Rocco. He has a cross for a tongue. If you're looking for a book to give to the metalhead in your life.

[Molly Conger]

Oh, yeah, it's pretty metal.

[Robert Evans]

Metalheads, atheists, degenerates. Everyone is going to love this book.

[Molly Conger]

It's perfect for everyone.

[Robert Evans]

And if you're light on cashflow, one tip for supporting indie authors is ask your library to stock it or your local bookstore, because library orders are really important. And you can just like, put in a request in your library system, and that is super helpful.

[Molly Conger]

Oh, yeah. Everybody go to your library's website right now and request that they purchase a copy of Wild Faith by Talia Laven. Yeah, Talia. Where else can people find you online?

[Robert Evans]

So I have a newsletter. It's on button down. I left substack because they were like, we're never going to censor Nazis, but we will censor porn. And I was like, I don't like your priorities. So I left for button down. So it's buttondown.com, the sword and the sandwich, or if you just Google the sword and the sandwich comes up. Most Tuesdays I read about, like, the horrific state of politics, et cetera. And then Fridays I write an essay about a different sandwich on Wikipedia's list of notable sandwiches. And so far I'm. I've written 111 sandwiches.

[Molly Conger]

The sandwich content alone is worth the price of admission. You need to find out about these sandwiches.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, it just. And I get really deep into, like, the history and the provenance and like, like, ah, the shifting of peoples led to this sandwich. But so I get really deep into it. And then you can also find me on Blue sky, where I most of the time now, because Twitter is just like robots and Nazis and Nazi robots where I'm at Swords, Jew. I'm still on Vichy. Twitter as Moby Dick energy. And you know, if you want to say hi or invite me to speak at your synagogue or bookstore, I'[e-mail] or church. If you're like, cool. Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

If it's like a cool church.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Molly Conger]

You show up and they. They pass you a snake.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. Oh God, I didn't do enough speaking in tongues for this book.

[Molly Conger]

Well, Talia, thank you so much for coming on today. Again, the book is Wild Faith by Talia Laven and you can pre order it now wherever books are sol and you should request it from your library.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we stan civic services and I'm a huge fan of public libraries and also of Molly Conger. So thanks for having me on and take care.

[Molly Conger]

Bye.

[Robert Evans]

Bye.

[Danny Trejo]

Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of my modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

[Garrison Davis]

I know you.

[Danny Trejo]

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Tuda Podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

[Mia Wong]

Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and our special two part series Irregular Naval Warfare and you where James and I teach you how you too can challenge the US Navy's dominance of the seas or at least the coasts for fun and profit. Actually, today, last episode we talked about people challenging the US Navy's coastal dominance. Today we're talking about doing the same thing for the Russian Navy. So that's going to be fun. And of course the Navy of Myanmar, which is a bit of a different class from the US and Russian Navy, but. But no less interesting.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, still fun. Love to see a boat lose.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I just like boats going down, you know, I just hate a boat.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. Us, the orcas. Many, you know, many such cases. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

I'm going to start with Ukraine and then we're going to throw to James to talk about our friends in Myanmar and how they have repurposed civilian technology and stolen weapons to counter a navy without really having one of their own. But First, Ukraine. In 2014, when the Russian army invaded eastern Ukraine and took Crimea, Ukraine lost a significant portion of its already not that impressive navy. Most of their boats were just taken by Russia along with a number of sailors who defected. A lot of other sailors fled the region, leaving behind their homes in cities like Sebastopol to continue serving their country. And a war that a decade later is still ongoing. One of these sailors who was a Sebastopol native and had to flee his home, possibly forever, in order to continue serving his country, is the current commander of Ukraine's navy, Admiral Nezpapa. He leads a navy that is almost without manned ships, and on paper, it is utterly incapable of challenging Russia's legendary Black Sea fleet. Since the age of the czars, the Black Sea Fleet has been infamous as a pillar of Russian military power. However, also since the age of the czars, it's had a nasty tendency to get utterly housed by enemies that should have been able to beat it, right?

[Talia Levin]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Yeah. Not the first time he's taken it unexpectedly.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. It has a legendary history that doesn't mean good. There's bad legends out there, you know.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. It's well known.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Today that enemy is Ukraine. Since the expanded Russian invasion in 2022, just two years, Ukraine has destroyed or badly damaged more than a third of the Black Sea fleet. Despite having no battleships or destroyers in the sea to counter Russian naval power, they have done enough damage to reopen and Odessa and at least one other port on the Black Sea to international commerce, which has provided Ukraine with a crucial economic and strategic lifeline. And that's a remarkable achievement. Sinking a third of the Black Sea fleet and re. Basically, when you reopen a port, that means that you have taken away naval dominance from a country that has a navy and you don't. That's pretty good. Pretty good stuff. Over the last two years, Ukraine had damaged irreparably or sunk seven active landing ships and one to seven active landing ships and one landing vessel. I know the difference. They've. They fucked up a lot of boats. They have destroyed a submarine with sea to ground capability that was docked for repairs. They have sunk a cruiser, the capital ship of the entire Black Sea fleet, the Moskva. They've also sunk a supply vessel and a handful of patrol boats and missile boats and a number of other boats have been damaged. That's a significant rate of casualties, especially when you consider that every actually destroyed vessel, we're looking at a year's multiple years lead time to report. You cannot make naval vessels very quickly anymore. Back during the big dub dub dose, the US did, but nobody really does that anymore. Not with the big ones at least.

[Garrison Davis]

You just roll through that.

[Mia Wong]

We were just yeeting aircraft carriers into.

[Garrison Davis]

The sea back then. Yeah, it's true. It's just fighting them out. Yeah, it'll take about a week. Yeah. It's because Rosie the Riveteau was really riveting at a high speed.

[Mia Wong]

She was quite a riveter. So at the start of hostilities, Turkey, which controls access to the Black Sea, forbade any additional military vessels, or at least military vessels of significant size, from entering the area. What this means, this has a significant impact on how well Ukraine strikes work, because even if Russia can replace the losses physically, they can't actually get replacements into the Black Sea easily. They can't sail new shit past the Turks. The Turks are not allowing that right now. So again, this is a situation that has kind of favored the way in which Ukraine has adapted to countering Russian naval dominance. It is possible that at the present rate of attrition, the Black Sea Fleet could be rendered inoperable in less than two years. Like, if they keep going at this rate, it's like 18 months or something before there's not really much of a fleet anymore. Now, if Ukraine had accomplished this task with a traditional navy using standard naval tactics, this would have been an impressive victory. Victory given the disparity in resources between the two nations. But they have done all this with a mix of cruise missiles, many of which are produced in country aerial drones and new bespoke locally produced suicide drone boats. This irregular naval warfare has been successful enough that one RAND Corporation engineer and analyst Scott Savitz, described the Black Sea fleet as a fleet in it represents a potential threat that needs to be vigilantly guarded against, but one that remains in check for now. And I'm going to quote from a New York Times article on the topic to provide a little more context. Ukraine has effectively turned around 10,000 square miles in the western Black Sea off its southern coast into what the military calls a gray zone where neither side can sail without the threat of attack. James Heapy, Britain's Armed Forces Minister, told a recent security conference in Warsaw that Russia's Black Sea fleet had suffered a functional defeat and contended that the liberation of Ukraine's coastal waters in the Black Sea was every bit as important as the successful counteroffensives on land in Kherson and Kharkiv last year. The classical approach that we studied at military maritime academies does not work now, Admiral Nespa said. Therefore, we have to be as flexible as possible and change approaches to planning and implementing work as much as possible. That article is about a year old or so, so the Neptune anti ship missile is one of the prides of Ukraine's nascent Arms industry. Neptune missiles are credited with destroying the Moskva in April of 2020. Ukraine also has access to several Western anti ship missiles, including the Storm Shadow and Scalp missiles. I believe the Storm Shadow comes from your, your folks, right James?

[Garrison Davis]

It does, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And these seem to be pretty effective missiles. These obviously much more advanced. And these, these are modern naval weapons, right? These are much more advanced than for example the weapons the Houthis have. These are the kind of things that can counter to some extent modern anti missile technology. For an example of kind of how that tends to work, they used a barrage of, I believe it was mostly storm shaped shadows terrain death on the Crimean port of Sebastopol recently, 7 out of 18 of the missiles fired made it through Russian air defenses. And these damaged or destroyed four landing ships in a single strike. And these are sizable naval vessels. This is the most recent attack, although as after I wrote this there was another attack on the Kerch bridge. I'm not really sure how that took place yet. That seems to have shut it down again. But that gives you an idea of like what you actually have to do, how much of these missiles you have to put in the air to get some through. And that's not too bad, right? 18 missiles, 7 get through, 4 ships down, down. That's a really good rate of return.

[Garrison Davis]

Especially when you consider that like, you know, we were talking in our first episode about how the US is spending significant resources on maintaining its defending its carriers. Right. Russia does not have the same ability to keep losing munitions.

[Mia Wong]

No.

[Garrison Davis]

And so like that's a finite resource. Right. Their means of defining their defending their ships and defending really anything against missiles are a finite resource. So any time you can, even if the ship doesn't get sunk, if the ship has to deploy one of these missiles, which it doesn't, which the whole country doesn't have very many of that, that's still a win.

[Mia Wong]

Now this is, we are talking about irregular naval warfare. And then this is not, this is not what most people would have considered a traditional naval conflict prior to the expansion of hostilities in Ukraine. However we are talking, this is very different than the case of the Houthis. Ukraine is a state, it doesn't have a massive arms industry, but it has one and it has the support of nations with sizable arms industries. Right. So we are not talking about this part. We are going to talk about the aspects of Ukrainian irregular naval warfare. There are some guys that are hobbyists building shit. Yeah, this is not that part yet. But I think this, this information is kind of significant and that it shows the tactical use of anti ship cruise missiles and their ability to significantly shape an operational environment, even when the country using them has minimal conventional naval assets of their own. It is largely through the use of these missiles that Ukraine has been able to reopen their Black Sea ports. That matters to people seeking to understand both this conflict and the future of unconventional naval warfare. I mean, I guess you could say this is the future of conventional naval warfare, but I think we're still leaning on the unconventional side at the moment, at least in terms of how doctrine is changing as a result of this. So maybe I should update how we're defining this, but for our purposes as people unlikely to have access to cruise missiles. But significantly likelier to find ourselves waging an unconventional war than having cruise missiles, it's more relevant to look at the new weapons systems Ukraine has developed that have helped them lock down the Black Sea fleet using civilian hobbyists. And this is where we get to drones. Ukraine's conventional aerial drones are a mix of actual military hardware. I'm talking about stuff like the, the Bay Raktar, the Turkish drone, which is like, kind of like the Predator, all right, it's like an actual military product. But the majority in terms of numbers of drones that Ukraine is fielding are civilian drones, or at least drones. Drones that started out as civilian technology. A lot of these are now built to be military, but they're still based on these designs that started with people hacking and cobbling together civilian drones. And yeah, outside of naval stuff, prior to the war, there had been a lot of veterans and hobbyists who were veterans trying to convince the Ukrainian military that it needed to adopt drone warfare on a large scale. The kind of drone warfare that you can do with these, these less expensive drones. And they received a lot of pushback until the war started. And these guys just took to the field and started fucking murking Russian army armed units and infantry and killing generals and shit. And now Ukraine has integrated in a way that everyone is going to follow. Ukrainian battalions have companies now that are drone assault companies and line battalions.

[Garrison Davis]

And within infantry you have people used or artillery using drones, forward observers all over.

[Mia Wong]

They have set a goal for this year producing at least a million and ideally more like 2 million drones. And at least from what I read, that looks, looks like very plausible. And most of these are quite small. Right. But that doesn't mean obviously ineffective.

[Garrison Davis]

I know they buy a lot of their drones in the UK because the UK has consistently kicked itself in the nuts when it comes to brexit and so the pound is significantly weaker. And so they're able to get the drones at a cheaper price and then drive them all the way across. I know people who have done that. I was going to go join them, but never worked it out.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And there are a number of different drones. Earlier in the war had an easier time being effective and causing casualties on the Russians than later. This is something that, you know, kind of the hoopla and support which I think is necessary that Ukraine gets lead some people to discount the degree to which Russian forces have adapted and gotten smarter. And one of the ways in which they've adapted and gotten smarter is in blocking drones and using drones of their own. You know, one of the stories of the last couple of weeks is that Russia has succeeded in carrying out strikes on advanced weapon systems like SAM sites deep in Ukrainian terror territory. They've extended their kill chain beyond what they used to be capable of. And that's because they've adapted. They're also adapted with less efficacy at blocking drones in attacks on naval vessels. Some of this has been kind of funny. I want to read a quote from a Business Insider article here. Russia is painting silhouettes on naval vessels on land to try and trick Ukraine, which keeps destroying its warships. In an intelligence update on Wednesday, the UK Ministry of Defense said that silhouettes of vessels have also been painted on the side of ks, probably to confuse the Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle operators. There's some images of this. They don't seem convincing to me. I don't know if I think this is working.

[Garrison Davis]

This is great. I love this. They have a cardboard navy next.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it's very Bugs Bunny, but not working as well as bugs would.

[Garrison Davis]

They've painted a hole in the side of the cliff face and drones keep crashing into it.

[Mia Wong]

Ukraine keeps throwing drones at it. It's very funny. I mean, obviously they just. Ukraine just sank like. Or did. Or damaged. Badly damaged four boats. So I don't think this is. I haven't seen evidence that this is working. Well, their actual like jamming efforts have been much more successful. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, they always will be. On civilian. One of the things that's really interesting compared to Myanmar is that Ukraine tends to rely on modified off the shelf civilian drones. Right. Your DJI is that kind of thing thing in Myanmar because of where a lot of the PDFs are because. Well, they increasingly do control the borders, but they haven't always. They have been making their own drones. It's a group called Federal Wings. You can find them on Telegram who make their own drones. And I think those seem to be less the jammers that the SAC that the TMADOR has are Chinese made. They're like jammer rifles. You see them all the time in captured weapon caches. But they don't seem to be having as much impact on these homemade drones, which is really interesting.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, I've mentioned a couple of times we're doing this in part because the odds that people listening might be involved in an irregular conflict are not zero. You know what I think about when I say that is not that there's high odds for any individual person finding themselves in that situation, but there is, given the number of people who listen to this podcast, probably someone who is not currently involved in a conflict that will find themselves that way in the future. And I base that in part on the fact that all of our friends in Myanmar who are currently fighting a war were a couple of years ago, delivery drivers and playing PUBG online and not really thinking they would wind up as insurgents.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I've spoken to a number of people who are currently fighting not in Myanmar who have listened to our Myanmar podcast and realize the capacity of 3D printing to, to be very useful. And so like, even in that sense, it's already happening. But yeah, no one in Myanmar, like many of them said their entire combat experience was playing pubg.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And now they are merking ships.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So anyway, it bears thinking about this stuff and this brings me back to Ukraine's irregular drone warfare units, which again, a lot of these guys started out as civilian enthusiasts who expand, responded to the outbreak or at least expansion of hostility by expanding their hobby into a real world military effort that had a real world effect. Civilian drones were crucial in the battle of Kiev, allowing Ukraine to do severe damage to that massive Russian armored column heading towards the city and providing intel that led to the assassination of multiple general level officers. So it is perhaps not surprising that Ukraine looked to the same group of volunteer hobbyists when it came time to expand their naval arsenal. And there's a really good article I found in CNN by Sebastian S.H. shukla, Alex Marcotte and Darya Tarasova. And I actually want to give you the title of this article. Yeah, I'll try to throw this in. The show notes is exclusive rare access to Ukraine's sea drones, part of Ukraine's fight back in the Black Sea. Haven't really seen the word fight back used that way, but there you go. So I'm going to read a quote from that article. A government Linked Ukrainian fundraising organization called United 24 has sourced money from companies and individuals all around the world, pooling funds to disperse it to a variety of developers and initiatives from defense to soccer matches. The entire outfit is very security conscious, insisting on strict guidelines on filming and revealing identities. Those who seen and met with decline to give their full names or even their ranks within Ukraine's armed forces. On a creaky wooden jetty, a camouflaged Seadrone pilot says he wants to go by Shark. In front of him is a long black hardshell briefcase. He unveils a bespoke multi screened mission control, essentially an elaborate gaming center complete with levers, joysticks, a monitor and buttons that have covers over switches that shouldn't accidentally be knocked with labels like blast. The developer of the drone, who asked to remain anonymous, said their work on sea drones only began once the war started. It was very important because we did not have many forces to resist the maritime state Russia, and we needed to develop something of our own because we didn't have the existing capabilities. So again, these are hobbyist design and this guy's not really a hobbyist anymore, but that's how he started. He's only not a hobbyist because the military recognized the value of what he was doing. In the current iterations of this sea drone weigh a little over 2,000 pounds with an explosive 661 pound payload, a 500 mile range and a max speed of 50 miles per hour. That is a significant weapon system.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Multiple sea drones have been used to strike Russian assets in the Black Sea. And drones were involved in a successful attack that severely damaged the Kerch Bridge last July, rendering it impassable since until September. So these have had a real battlefield effect and they probably will continue to do so. The developer of these drones told CNN these drones are a completely Ukrainian production. They are designed, drawn and tested here. It's our own production of holes, electronics and Software. More than 50% of the production of equipment is here in Ukraine. And that's really significant because, you know, I think we're all aware of the difficulty Ukraine has had getting weaponry lately from the west as there is result of fucking around in Congress. And so it is a necessity for them to be able to develop weapons systems like this that can interdict and counteract more advanced and expensive weapon systems and can be produced indigenously. You know, I don't think we have seen a mass suicide boat attack. I'm interested in what happens when we do like, like with, with more significant numbers than we've seen Deployed. I kind of wonder the degree to which the Russians have gotten good at spotting this stuff. I've, I've come across at least a couple of stories of these boats likely destroyed on approach. So they certainly don't always work or even a majority of the time. But given the cost of these things, they don't have to get through the majority of the time. Very much worth it right now. In, you know, that interview with the New York Times, Admiral Nepapa cautioned that Ukraine is still outgunned in the Black Sea. Even though the Russians no longer have supremacy, they still have air superiority, they are still able to launch from the sea long range missiles at Ukrainian targets, including civilian targets. So this is not, again, a situation that should be portrayed as them having their own way. Their ability to kind of interdict the sea has been. The primary effects of it have been, number one, the reopening of trade in the Black Sea. And earlier in the war, by locking down the ability of these landing ships to put more troops on ground and by doing damage to the Kerch Bridge, they were able to slow Russian reinforcements and Russian materiel from entering the war zone in order to. And this aided in some of the advances, particularly in areas like Kherson on. At this moment, the situation has changed because again, the Russians aren't just kind of like sitting around doing the same thing over and over again, or at least not always. And we don't tend to talk as much about successes on the Russian side of things. But that is an important part of the story. And one of the things the Russians have done is kind of acknowledge that the Black Sea fleet may not be a fleet in being forever and certainly cannot be relied upon to handle everything they initially thought it would handle. And so Russian engineers spend a significant period of time building a sizable new railroad that connects Rostov and southern Russia to Mariupol in occupied southern Ukraine. This has allowed them to get high volume shipments into the area and supply troops to the area along Ukraine's southern front without relying on that bridge or relying on naval landings. Right. So the fact that Ukraine has been able to take, take out four landing ships recently is good. That's a win for Ukraine. It reduces Russian capability, but it does not have the same effect that it would have had, for example, two years earlier. Right, yeah. Because Russia has also evolved. And among other things, railroads are a lot easier, are a lot harder to destroy, to like take out. Right. It's easy to damage a railroad, but they're easy to fix. It's not, it doesn't take a lot to get some guys over to fix a damaged sunk of railroad. Fixing a bridge that's been blown up or a sunk boat is a lot harder.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and there are people within Russia even who are sabotaging railroads. But as you say, it's like it's very high stakes for them and it's relatively low cost for the Russian state to fix that stuff. So like it's not as effective.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, but, but I think this gives you an idea of kind of like what we're, what we're looking at when we look at this kind of ongoing irregular conflict is the side that does not have access to a functional navy, not able to interdict or destroy fleets, but able to stop them from dominating the coast. And when you can stop them from dominating the coast, you have effectively denied them terrain that they can act in without being countered. And you have also denied them from stopping you from acting in that same terrain, even if you don't have total safety in that area. That opens up the operational possibilities substantially. And this is something that I kind of don't think is going to get put back in the bag. Even if some of these Star wars ass weapons systems do come out in the near future, maybe that'll have an impact in the immediate term on people like the Houthis, but I don't think that it really will on for example, what Ukraine's doing. Right? Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Russia can't keep up with getting decent small arms, body armor, grenades and shit. There's no way it's going to implement some kind of massive Star wars system over its navy. Not right now, not in the middle of a conflict that it's struggling to supply.

[Mia Wong]

Yep. You know what, here's an ad break.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, we're back and we are traveling around the world. Spin your little globe in your head and look for Myanmar, which is of course in Asia. Now I'm talking about two different, I guess anti ship sabotage or attack or two different ways that ships have been sunk in Myanmar. I'll start with the first one which is undoubtedly the flashiest just because it's fun. So a ship in the port of Yangon about a month ago. So we're recording on the 20. It was about the 1st of March. It was in the river, in the river in Yangon and it was allegedly carrying jet fuel. Now if you follow Burmese activists, people in the Burmese freedom movement, they will. One of their demands for a long time has been to stop supplying the junta with jet fuel, which would in turn stop it being able to bomb villages, schools, civilians, PDF formations just about anyone in the country. It's bombed at some point in the last couple of years. And they haven't been successful. Right. They haven't been able to stop the supply of jet fuel coming to the junta. So they've taken it into their own hands. And what they did on the 1st of March was that they snuck onto a boat. So 2. This is the story from the Burmese National Unity Government's Ministry of Defense. Anyway, combat divers snuck onto this boat, planted a kilogram of tnt, or a charge equivalent to a kilogram of tnt. Robert and I have both spoken to people who make explosives in Myanmar. We definitely know the PDF has access to a range of explosives. They set it on a five hour fuse and it blew up in the middle of the night. And there's definitely footage of a ship on fire having blown up. Now this is pretty remarkable for another reason. This is why the United States has units like the Navy SEALs, right? Like the higher speed guys, because it is not easy to scuba dive across a harbor, climb onto a ship, ship, send an explosive charge without being detected and then leave that ship and have the charge go off and sink the ship without you being compromised, without the charge itself being compromised and the ship being saved. Right. This is some classic. This is why there are special units within the US military. Now the PDF very obviously did not have combat divers. Two years ago I was looking into hobby scuba diving in Yankees on the rivers in that area are extremely muddy and visibility is very lows. So the people who you find diving in that area are not so much like hobby scuba divers or free divers, but they're salvage divers. And there's a whole little industry of people and these people are diving in equipment that I would not consider safe or reliable. It's clamping an air hose in between your teeth and diving down and trying to find. There's a large deposit of coal in one of the rivers in Yangon because of a ship that sunk. There's of course copper, which everyone all around the world, including the Vietcong in Santee, are stealing copper. There's iron, right? So these people are diving down and trying to collect scrap and sell that for whatever minimal amount they can. It's an extremely dangerous and extremely low income. It's one of the sort of really high risk, low reward jobs that you get in economies where people are really struggling to make ends meet. Right. So those are the only divers I can find evidence of in Yangon. I don't think it was them who did this. Because you have to have a boat above you with a pump if you're diving with a rubber hose in your teeth. Right. So it seems like somebody in. Within the. They said it was a Yangon PDF. That's who they attribute it to. So that would be one of the. It would likely be an underground group within the PDF. Right. Some people living in the city who were able to sneak onto this boat, set a charge and blow it up. And they would also have to have intelligence at the boat, where it was, what it was carrying, et cetera. So it's a pretty. Pretty daring mission that. This is the first one like this we've seen and we haven't seen anything since. But it's of course possible that this is a story that we're being told. In fact, they had someone undercover on the ship, right? Or they had some other means of getting this charge onto the ship. But one way or another, they managed to blow up the ship carrying fuel, which is a significant detriment to the junta. Right. That's how they get most of their shit. It's not over land, especially with more.

[Mia Wong]

The terrain there is just absolutely, even with modern technology, difficult to get significant amounts of shit through.

[Garrison Davis]

They're resupplying some of their outposts that are 10 miles from a town with helicopters. Right. Right now, like A, the terrain is burly and B, they don't have. The PDF has denied them access that anytime they send out a convoy, it gets attacked. So sending out. Plus their land border crossings are increasingly falling into the hands of the PDFs and the EROs. So getting stuff through the ocean is one of the ways that they can still get stuff. And if this keeps happening, then they will make that more expensive for them. And that they're not exactly a wealthy like hunter. Even though I guess Minh just made himself an Air Force one recently. I was looking at it today.

[Mia Wong]

He's good.

[Garrison Davis]

He's going for himself too. Luxury. Yeah, they called it dictator class. Like he's upgraded from president class to dictator class. Yes, he has in many ways. So, yeah, that's one way that the PDF has been blowing up ships in the Yangon River. Robert, do you know who else has been blowing up ships in Yangon?

[Mia Wong]

Well, we are sponsored entirely by the British Navy circa the mid-1800s, so I would guess them.

[Garrison Davis]

That's right.

[Mia Wong]

Yep, yep.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yep, yep. Lots of repressed, repressed feelings and a.

[Mia Wong]

Lot of cabin boys with deep trauma. Anyway, here's hats.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, we're back we hope you enjoyed that ad pivot. One of our best ones yet. And we're talking about the Arakan army now. So the Arakan army, not to be confused with the Arakan Rohingya Salvation army, different group. Arakan is the name of what is now Rakhine State before it was colonized by the Burmese. I think Arakan was a king before it was colonized by the Burmese. So that's where that refers to. It's a geographical appellation rather than necessarily an ethnic one. The Rakhine would be the ethnic group. So what the AA have done is sunk, I think at least four junta ships now. And most of these ships are kind of. They look like big Higgins boats. They're like landing craft or car ferries, like flat bottom with a bow that goes down. Right. I rode around a lot in the Marshall Islands in little landing craft like that because they can get them in. They don't have docks, so they can just ride that right up to the beach and then drop the front and off you go. And they use them a lot. The hunter doesn't have, per se Marines. They don't have maritime infantry, but they use them to transport their regular army around, and they use them to transport them upriver. They also use them a lot in Rakhine Interstate to shell AA positions and any townships that they've decided they want to wipe off the map and kill all the people in. Right. So these boats have been a real thorn in the side of the Arakan army after Operation 1027, when they joined with two other groups to form the Three Brotherhood alliance and launch attacks on the junta all over Myanmar. And so what they've been doing, it appears, is using. Using underwater mines to sink these ships, which is interesting. Right. Like, I guess the mines are like a very old technology. Right. Like, it's probably 100 years plus underwater mines have existed. It seems the way that, like, the reason they're able to get away with using what is a relatively dated technology is because the hunter just doesn't expect to encounter anything. Right. And so has not equipped its ships as such. They do have stuff like submarines, but that's not what's getting sunk. What's getting sunk are these big kind of landing craft, riverboats. And it seems that they're using mines, and then once they disable the ship, they're then attacking it with small boats, small arms, like indirect fire, mortars and stuff. Yeah, I saw one post that suggested they'd use, which is pretty cool if they did. The Burmese military has these Tank destroyers, self propelled guns. It's a tank. It's a tank is what it is. And they've captured. The aa, has captured a number of these. And I've seen suggestions that they're using some of these on like they just set up an ambush along the banks of the river, right? And as the ship comes in, they can maybe disable it with a mine and then attack it with those. But there are videos online, you can find them of the AA sinking these ships. And then they've done some amazing drone photography of like they obviously they then like staged their units on the ships, like all saluting the drone and they had the Aragon army flags and they're actually really cool photos of them taking these ships. But again, like, I think this might be the first sinking of a Burmese naval ship since independence from Britain. Like, I can't think that they would. They really haven't played much of a role at all in its conflicts with the Eros, aside as from like basically kind of just shelling places when they want to do that. But there's never really been any significant opposition to them. And that's changed now. They have to obviously, just like everywhere else, watch out for drones, right? Drones have been used to a massive extent in Myanmar. And like the AA doesn't have as many like associated PDFs. I haven't seen them doing as much of the drone stuff as the PDFs. The PDFs tend to be like the more urban folks, right? The younger folks, the Gen Z folks that we've spoken about before. And a lot of them have been very savvy with their use of drones. Like I said, you can look up federal wings and you can see them dropping bombs with drones on all kinds of stuff with their heavy metal soundtracks that they like. But it wasn't even drones here, it's pretty simple. It was just mines. So they do love mines, and I have a lot of mines all over that country. But in this case these, I guess, massive mines in the rivers. Given that the junta is the only entity sending big boats up and down, you could set them at a certain depth where these small boats wouldn't hit them and eventually one of the hunter boats is going to hit them, I guess. And so it's pretty basic technology, but it's still a massive step forward in terms of like a place where the state had complete impunity. It now doesn't. Right. They can't just cruise up and down these rivers shelling people. They were actually using some of the ships to evacuate Soldiers and their families from a position the soldiers, they were trying to like rendering. They were trying to evacuate them and move them to somewhere else. The AA asked them to surrender and they didn't. They tried to evacuate them. So then they mined the ships and took those out. I think the hunter has tried to spin this. It's like the AA is attacking civilians. But I think a Burmese navy ship with a Burmese navy flag when those ships have just been shelling you, seems like a legitimate target to me. I think it's very hard. It's a hunter who put children on one of their naval ships other than the AA who attacked the ship because it had children. You can hear in one of the things you can hear the AA are like attacking the ship in small boats and they're shouting like there are children on board. And you could hear them acknowledging it. And there are videos of the AA rescuing people who jumped overboard, rescuing them from the river. And then like, I guess they just held as POWs. Cool. Yeah, it's cool. It's interesting. Obviously not many of us have access to underwater mines, but maybe in a fictional future we might.

[Haval]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Well, there you go, folks. This has been irregular naval warfare. And you. A podcast about irregular naval warfare. And you.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Send us your videos of yourselves engaging in irregular naval warfare.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, absolutely. Go out there, look, how about this? Every listener, go out and sink one naval vessel. You know, doesn't matter who's. Just dip any boat. Any. Go sink a boat. Any boat.

[Garrison Davis]

Go take out a fucking superyacht.

[Mia Wong]

Knock it out. You see a dinghy, take that fucker out. People kayaking, Fuck em up.

[Garrison Davis]

Banana boat.

[Mia Wong]

Absolutely. A banana boat for sure. One of those weird duck boat car things that they have in some cities. Actually, you know what? You don't need to do anything with that. That'll kill everybody on board.

[Garrison Davis]

On its own, those things are death traps. Just pray for those people. Yeah, but any, any other boat. Yeah. You see a donut, you know, behind being behind a speedboat.

[Mia Wong]

Oh yeah. Merk it. Anyway, everybody go.

[Danny Trejo]

Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

[Robert Evans]

I know.

[Danny Trejo]

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Tuda Podcast Network, available on the I Heart Radio, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Julia Serrano]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and putting it back together again. I'm Mia Wong. I'm with Garrison, and it is my singular honor and pleasure to introduce our guest, Dr. Julia Serrano. She is the author of many books, including Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, Sexed Up, How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back, Outspoken, A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism, and most famously, Whipping Girl, a new edition of which is coming out in March. Dr. Serrano, welcome to the show Show.

[Robert Evans]

Hi.

[Sam]

Thanks for having me.

[Julia Serrano]

I'm really, really, really happy you can join us. So, okay. Whipping Girl, I think, is really one of the. One of quietly the most influential books of the 21st century. To the extent that, in kind of classic trans woman fashion, I don't think. I don't think people realize that the ideas that it introduced have an origin.

[Talia Levin]

So for.

[Julia Serrano]

For people who haven't read the book, and you should, this book is great.

[Talia Levin]

You.

[Julia Serrano]

I guarantee you have seen its influence. If you. If you've ever heard someone, like, who's not trans referred to as cis, like, that's. That's from this book. The concept of misgendering is also from this book. The word transmisogyny, like, also from this book. And this, I think, gets at something from the 2015 second edition preface that you wrote, which is something I've been wondering about, is what is it like to sort of experience writing a book and have it just, like, ripple across society like this?

[Sam]

Yeah, I was very much hoping, and as I was writing it, I was hoping that. I thought that it would resonate with a lot of trans female and trans feminine people, and I hope trans communities more generally. And the book, this is something that a lot of times people who pick up the book now in, like, the 2000s don't necessarily realize is that nobody was reading anything about trans people outside of feminists and LGBTQ communities. And so I was basically just speaking to those groups and I thought it would resonate with some people. But, yeah, definitely, it kind of went out into the world and did a bunch of stuff that I wasn't necessarily expecting. And I'm very glad that the book has kind of touched a lot of people's lives and changed, know, kind of societal understanding and quote unquote discourses about trans people.

[Talia Levin]

So, yeah, it must be kind of bizarre, like being 20 years ago writing about, you know, a niche term like cis, and now the richest man in the world thinks it's like the most evil word.

[Sam]

Yeah, it's quite bizarre. And I do want to definitely kind of clear this up. And I kind of make this clear in the preface. So I didn't invent like CIS versus trans, like a. That's like a prefix that has existed a long time.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Sam]

And I've since seen other people, like point out, oh, this person was using it in 1990 something or some German writer, like coined cis vestism or something like back a million years ago. So what I will say is that when I, when I put out the book, I was inspired by Emi Koyama, who was and is an awesome activist, intersex activist, who's written a lot of really influential trans related essays over the years. And it was from her blog post that was the first time I saw CIS and trans and the idea of cissexism. And at the time, it was while I was writing the book and it really, I was like, oh my God, this is kind of the overall idea. I was talking about all these different facets of basically double standards between trans and non trans people. And so I kind of grabbed onto it and I was really worried about it, actually, because almost nobody was using those terms. It was very niche at the time. And so the book popularized that language. And so now it is kind of funny every once in a while seeing, yes, overreactions by CIS people to the idea of CIS being a slur or whatever. And so, yeah, so that's definitely something that is kind of bizarre. One thing I did coin in the book that has kind of also taken a life on its own is transmisogyny. So that is something that kind of originated with this book and particularly a chapbook that I wrote in 2005 that some of those essays became chapters for the book. And yeah, and so there are other ideas that kind of are out there. Like I, I think it was one of the first. I think it was the first book to talk about, like, the idea of CIS privilege, misgendering as an idea was out there, but I kind of dove into it a little bit deeper. So, yeah, so there are definitely things I was doing at the time that I didn't know whether they'd be too abstract or how they'd be taken up. And so, yes, it's been very interesting.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Julia Serrano]

And I wanted to talk about misgendering a bit because I think it's become this word that just means not saying someone's pronouns correct correctly. And I think that's at the very best, like an incredibly reductionist and simplified version of the analysis that you were presenting. So I guess I have two questions here. One, can you briefly sort of talk about what you were trying to get at when you sort of did your analysis of the process of gendering? And two, what do you think about the way that it's kind of become flattened into this, I don't know, kind of weirdly narrow thing in modern discourse?

[Sam]

Sure. And a lot of the misgendering definitely dovetails with the idea of passing. And a lot of my kind of diving into it in a particular way came from critiques that I had and other trans people had as well. But I kind of, you know, put them together in a. Particularly in the dismantling. I think it's dismantling cissexual privilege chapter, where I kind of go through all these steps that lead to misgendering, because I think people talk about trans people passing, and also the people talk about other marginalized groups passing as whatever dominant majority group. The term obviously had long been used with regards to people of color passing as white and in kind of white racist US and other societies. So it's an old term. And a big problem with it is that it makes it sound like we're doing something active, that trans people are actively trying to deceive other people with huge scare quotes around the word deceive. And I really wanted to highlight to people that actually all of us very unconsciously and very compulsively gender every single person we meet, or at least that's how we're socialized to be. And you can work towards overcoming that. But I wanted to really highlight the fact that we see people, we automatically gender them. And that puts people who do not quite who your presumptions are wrong about. It puts us in difficult situations. It's a double bind. Where do you reveal what you supposedly really are, or do you just allow people to read you that way? And it works out very differently, for instance, between trans and, say, CIS gay people, because when CIS gay people talk about passing as straight, their passing as something that they know that they are not. Whereas for a lot of trans people, if people read me as a woman and I understand myself to be a woman, there's. It's. It's a very different dynamic because it's not like I'm not hiding anything, but people are presuming what I'm really passing as is I'm passing a cisgender and people are assuming I'm cisgender when the trans is the thing that I might need to. Or feel like I need to clear up, or other people might put pressure on me to either tell them that I'm trans or be accused of deceiving them. So that's a little bit of. Kind of how I was approaching it when I started working on that idea. And really stressing the idea of, you can't understand misgendering unless you understand that we make assumptions all the time. We gender people very actively. And so trans people are often just reacting to that and dealing with that double bind.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Julia Serrano]

And this is something that I think is interestingly discussed in the book about this issue with some. With some of the sort of prevailing gender theories which think about sort of like femininity and gender as pure performance. But. And this is, I think, like, the argument that you were making that I think is really interesting is that something that I think is very obvious to trans people is that so much of gender is how people perceive you and how, you know and stuff that, like, you don't have any control over. It's how people sort of gender you. It's how. How people construct a gender around you in ways that you don't really have control over.

[Sam]

Yeah. And that was a big thing. So in kind of. I was writing the book in the mid-2000s, and so the 1990s is when Judith Butler publishes Gender Trouble, which Butler never said all genders performance or all genders drag. Yeah, but that is. But those are like slogans or sou. Soundbites that other people took from their book. Right. And they were very popular at the time. There's also. There's a famous sociological article about doing gender. And so people were very focused on the way in which we create gender by doing it particular ways. And a lot of the slogans within trans communities were sort of like, oh, well, well, you know, I just have to do my gender differently, like more transgressively. And that will, like, tear down all of gender. And I felt that there was, you know, that is an aspect of things. And. And most of us, whether trans or cis, most of us have had the experience of maybe trying to perform our genders in a particular way in order to, like, you know, not, you know, in order. In order. Order to get by in the world, in order to not be harassed by other people. So we've all had that experience. So while that's true, there's the other partner of that dance, and that's perception, and we're all perceiving people very actively, and we're projecting our ideas and meanings Onto them. And I felt like that was being under discussed at the time. And that was not only a huge part of. Of Whipping Girl, but that's become a part of a lot of my other books, like, including my most recent book, Sexed Up. How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back. One way that I would describe that book is it's talking about sex and sexuality not from what people do, but from how we perceive and interpret sex and sexuality. Because there are a lot of unconscious ideas, as often really horrible ideas, really hierarchical ideas that are kind of built into the way we view the world and interrogating that. And so, yeah, that was a very big part of both Whipping Girl and then my writings since then.

[Julia Serrano]

Yeah, I think that is something where things have gotten better in terms of how we think about gender, which, I don't know. Things aren't perfect, but it definitely. It definitely improved things a lot.

[Sam]

Agreed.

[Julia Serrano]

We're gonna take an ad break, and when we come back, we're talking transmisogyny.

[Mia Wong]

We're back.

[Julia Serrano]

Yeah. So another thing I wanted to sort of talk about was, I think in exactly the opposite process that happened to misgendering, transmisogyny has become a lot more expansive than your original kind of narrow conception of it. And I think this has been changing a lot, especially in the last about half decade or so. I was wondering what you think about the way that this concept has taken on a life of its own in recent years and what it's been doing. Sense.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sam]

So I feel like transmisogyny, that there are a lot of different dialogues and discourses about it coming, like people coming from different perspectives with it, and some people feeling like the word is doing things that I never suggested it was doing. It's kind of hard to know, like, where to actually come in on this, but for me, when I was first writing about it, I was first just noticing that a lot of the quote, unquote, transphobia that I was facing when people knew I was a trans woman was actually a lot of it was just misogyny. And a lot of it targeted.

[Talia Levin]

My.

[Sam]

Femininity rather than my transness. And so I wanted to write about that. And kind of the way that I framed it in. In the book, which I think is a really useful kind of model for thinking about it, is that most of the types of sexism that feminists have described over the many years fall into two sort of camps, one of them being oppositional sexism, which is the idea that men and women are kind of perfectly Opposite, mutually exclusive sexes that have different interests and attributes and desires. And so a lot of transphobia and homophobia are kind of like built into this idea that men and women are completely distinct. And then the other one is traditional sexism, which is the idea that femaleness and femininity are less legitimate than maleness and masculinity. And a lot of CIS feminists have kind of viewed all of that as just sexism, Right? But when you break it down like that, that it makes it clear that the double bind that a lot of feminists have talked about is actually kind of these two different forms of sexism. So if a CIS woman acts appropriately femininely, so appropriate with scare quotes, if a CIS woman acts femininely, she'll be seen as appropriate, but she'll be dismissed because femininity is dismissed in our culture. So that's the way that she'll be delegitimized. Whereas if she acts in ways that are coded as masculine, if she acts assertive or aggressive, then people will malign her for being kind of aberrant or deviant. Right? And so oppositional sexism helps keep traditional sexism in place because you can say that maleness and masculinity are superior, but that only works if you can also make a clear distinction between those people and people who are female feminine. And so I think this plays out differently, and I want to be really clear about this because some people have interpreted transmisogyny to mean that trans male and transmasculine people don't experience misogyny, which is something I have never said. And obviously the fact that oppositional sexism is a form of sexism, and obviously trans male and transmasculine people experience that. But also depending upon how you're viewed by other people, I feel like the same double pind that affects CIS women affects trans male and transmasculine people differently. Where there's this tendency, like in a lot of anti trans discourses, to dismiss transmasculine, especially transmasculine youth, as being merely girls, quote unquote, who are like, you know, misled or seduced by gender ideology, right? And there's a lot of real anti feminine and anti misogynistic ideas in there, in addition to the fact that it, it misgenders trans male and transmasculine people. And then if trans male and transmasculine people, when, when they experience transphobia, there's often, you know, like they're seen as deviant for kind of breaking that rule. But often the maleness or their masculinity themselves are not, you know, denigrated in the same way because being male and being masculine are seen as good in our culture. It's just that if you trans male transmasculine, it's like, well, you're quote unquote just a woman, so you can't do it. So I think it plays out in this very, you know, complex way for a lot of trans male and transmasculine people. I think for trans female and trans feminine people, because. Because our crossing of oppositional sexism also involves us kind of moving towards the female, towards the feminine. That there's kind of those two forces intersect in a way so that it's like exacerbated. And some of the ways I talk about this in Whipping Girl is that, well, we live in a world where masculinity is seen as natural and femininity is seen as artificial. And since trans people are also seen as artificial compared to cisgender people, a lot of times, times we're viewed as doubly artificial. Furthermore, the idea that women are seen as sex objects, whereas men aren't seen as sex objects, often our transitions or gender transgressions towards a female, towards a feminine are presumed to be driven by sexual motives that can play out in all sorts of ways. Whether this is the idea that we're hypersexual or promiscuous or that we want to be sexualized by other people, or you can see it a lot with the kind of. The transgender predator is often coded as a man who either has some kind of fetish or perversion or is just literally deceiving people to get into women's restrooms to do something horrific. So those are some of the ways that it plays out. I feel that sometimes, sometimes people view it in a cut or dried way. They either they'll assume that transmisogyny means that trans male transmasculine people don't experience misogyny, which again is not what that's about. Or sometimes people will try to make really clear distinctions. There's kind of language like transmisogyny affected versus transmisogyny exempt. Are the terms. Yeah, TME and tms, which are not terms I've used or that I didn't coin them, they're not in the book. And I think that when I first saw that language, and I've seen people use it in a way that appreciates the fact that some people are non binary. So it's a non identity based way, sometimes this can play out in a really cut or Dried sort of manner that, you know, sometimes, you know, whether it's intended this way or not, it can make it seem that, like, you know, just boiling down a really complex experience, people's complex experiences with different types of sexism into some people are privileged and some people are marginalized, which I think is a more general problem that happens kind of throughout all social justice movements.

[Talia Levin]

So, yeah, and trans people are not alien to having complex experiences be boiled down to three and four letter acronyms.

[Sam]

So, yeah, I mean, I did this in Twitter form, so it was like a thread. So, like, now people can't access threads unless you have an account with Twitter. And it's from a couple years ago. But one of the things, things that I talked about was I wrote this essay about 10 years ago about how cis and trans is kind of a useful. Those are useful terms, but sometimes people fall in between CIS and trans, and sometimes they can be used in a way to talk about different double standards. Like, CIS people are treated one way, trans people are treated another. But sometimes it can be used in a sort of reverse discourse way where it's like CIS people have all the privileged trans people of none of the privilege, and it can be used to kind of create this strict dichotomy that ends up excluding and invisibilizing some people's experiences. And I feel the same thing is happening with TME and tma. So I don't think that those terms need to necessarily be like. I don't think there's anything bad about those terms per se, in and of themselves, but I think sometimes they can be used in ways. And part of why I referenced this, the CIS and trans essay that I wrote many years ago, it appears in my book Outspoken. I forget the complete title right now, which is. But the reason why I bring that up is so sometimes what happens is that when people learn about cissexism, or CIS people might be like, oh, I face cissexism, right? If I, I. If I'm a woman and I don't shave my legs, I'm facing cissexism. And so then trans people say, yeah, but it kind of plays out differently for us. And so sometimes in order to stop people from kind of making those claims, which I think it is true that, you know, a woman not shaving their legs or if a man decides to put on a dress one day, regardless of whether they're CIS or trans, they could experience cissexism or transphobia. But it plays out differently for people who are actually members of that marginalized group. And so then the marginalized group makes the distinction even sharper and it just kind of becomes this escalating situation where the language and kind of battles over it become even more intense. In a recent piece, one of the most recent pieces, if you go to my medium site, where my essays usually are now, is it talks about the trans masc versus trans femme discourse in terms of what I call the cultural feminist doom loop, where the doom loop refers to kind of these ideas where everyone, both sides are trying to talk about the reason why their experiences are legitimate, and then that seems as though the other sides are not legitimate. And then that kind of cascades in a way that ends up not being very productive, but takes up a lot of energy on places like Twitter.

[Julia Serrano]

Yeah, I think that's something we've all seen about 1 trillion times. Variety of toxic ways but what isn't toxic is the new third edition of Whipping Girl, coming out in March, which you can ask your local bookstore to pre order now. And yeah, join us tomorrow for our discussion with Dr. Serrano of the Anatomy of Moral Panics. This has been It Could Happen Here. Trans people are great.

[Mia Wong]

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

[Robert Evans]

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.

[Danny Trejo]

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trail and step into the Flames of Fright, an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Notor no on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.