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A
The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Oh hey. Welcome to gift wrapping.
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B
Whoa.
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A
So is Saldana.
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C
Hey, can you wrap these please?
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D
Wow. IPhone 17s.
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C
You splurged at T Mobile. You can get four iPhone 17s on them. The new the new center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. It's the perfect gift for everyone.
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A
I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe.
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C
Well, it's better than socks.
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A
So I have to trade in my old phone, right?
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C
No AT T mobile. There's no trade ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift.
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A
Incredible.
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C
In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my aunt Rosa.
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D
Forget that.
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C
Aunt Liz will be jealous.
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A
Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it.
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C
I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with. Hey, where are you going?
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A
To T mobile.
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E
The holidays are better. AT T Mobile get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you swift plus four lines for just 25 bucks a line. And now T mobile is available in U S cellular stores with 24 month legal credits and 4 eligible board ins on essentials for well qualified customers. Photo Pay + taxes, fees and $35 device connection charge credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel Contact Us Finance Agreement 256Gigabytes $830 required Visit T mobile.com.
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It's Tuesday, December 2, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca and what is Donald Trump doing is a sentence we could have said just about any time during this past administration and his first. But this one's doozy. This one's hard to explain or maybe really easy to explain. He was bribed, but he also pardoned the former president of Honduras. By the way, weighing in on Honduras, his current election, he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez.
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B
The people of Honduras really thought he was set up and it was a terrible thing. He was the president of the country and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country and they said it was a Biden administration set up. And I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.
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A
Here is a description of what landed Juan Orlando Hernandez in jail. Hernandez partnered with some of the largest cocaine traffickers in the world to transport tons of cocaine through Honduras to the United States. If this was done by boat, Honduras would be blown up. And if he wasn't killed the first time, I suppose he would be shot out of the water again. But because Hernandez is by now a very rich man, I think we can only presume Donald Trump gave him a pardon in contradiction to all of his tough talk and admittedly extremely tough, bordering on war criminal actions against other drug purveyors.
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B
Well, I don't think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay. We're going to kill them. You know, they're going to be like dead.
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A
I will also read what I just read to you was from the Department of Justice's 2022 indictment. Here's more. As a congressman, the President of the Honduran National Congress and finally the two term president of Honduras. Hernandez was, it says allegedly they proved in court, now paid millions of dollars in cocaine proce which he used to enrich himself, finance his political campaigns and commit voter fraud while the people of Honduras endured conditions of poverty and rampant violence. Exactly the charge against Nicolas Maduro today. I don't have any idea if this will stick, if this will resonate. I can't accurately predict that. I know it is unbelievably outrageous and also baffling. We understand that Trump is motivated to be a kleptocrat. In fact, that might even be the Occam's razor, the entire raisin date draw. The Occam's raisin of his entire being. And he's making a lot of money on crypto and a lot of money, apparently now with the pardons, you got to say it. But how does this not register except among his most faithful slash enthralled followers? One last component of this, Emil Bove. Sometimes I hear it pronounced. Bove, who is now a judge on an appellate court, a powerful judge who was the third in charge of Trump's Justice Department at one point was the prosecutor for Juan Orlando Hernandez, his brother and the brother and the president. This is all detailed in a long series of articles or very detailed, good, excellent series of articles that I found from a few years ago in Inside Crime. I put that in today's gist list. But there is Bove calling the president of Honduras a state sponsor of drug trafficking, arguing in court, not just under oath, but arguing for the successful conviction, guilty of getting the conviction spinning that into a claim success. A private client named Donald Trump, eventual appointment to positions within the Trump Cabinet and now sitting in one of the more powerful courts in the land. I wonder what he thinks about it. I wonder what all of Trump's supporters think about it. I wonder how anyone could back tough talk on Maduro or or whatever shipping vessels are off the coast of Venezuela, hit and then hit again. I wonder. I don't predict. I just wonder. I know how I think about it. Maybe you could tell by my tone. It's an unbelievable but also extremely perplexing outrage on the show today spiel about Marjorie Taylor Greene and actually about her district, what they think about mtg and what such districts that are represented by such congresspeople. They're different from districts with normal folk like you and I. But first, Daniel Brooke and Brandy Scalachi are the authors of two books about the same historical figure. He is called in the subtitle of one the Einstein of Sex. The name of Scholarchi's book is the Intermediaries and the figure is Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Brooke and Scalache up next, Quince. Ah, Quince. The mornings get cold. The holidays come around. You have to worry about what you wear to work. You also have to worry about what you give to those you love so that they're warm and cozy and maybe ensconced in cashmere or an Italian wool coat. Quince Quince pieces are crafted from premium material and built to hold up without all the folderol of the luxury market and the markups that they instill. It makes the essentials every guy needs a Mongolian sweater for. I don't even want to say it. You're not going to play $50 Italian wool coats that look great and feel designer denim chinos that fit just right. Yes, they cut out the middleman, and that's a bit of a cliche, but did I mention the $50 Mongolian cashmere sweater? It really works. There aren't sophisticated, unknown, heretofore unknown methods to take excellent clothing and give it to you at a cheap price, an affordable price. The answer is that middleman must go. But while he goes, maybe he will go down the street in a down jacket or a wool twist top coat because he too can avail himself of quints. Having been cut out, he might need the savings. The down jacket I picked up from Quince is getting me through this cold weather. It is warm. It is structured. Get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with Quince. Don't wait. Go to quince.com/the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com/the gist free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com the gist my mom and dad live close to me and they have a nice counter. But you know what would improve it? A Cove Pure. You don't need to hook it up through the plumbing and the taps. You just pour the water into the COVID Pure and it makes the water pure. It lets you choose the temperature of your water, hot, cold or warm. It has size presets 6 ounce 8 ounce 16 ounce. Walk away and you know it'll hit that mark. And here's the most important thing for mom and dad. The water tastes very very good. Guess what? Cove Pure tastes? Pure clean, no aftertaste. Why they filter out those little TDSs. The total dissolved solids. Do they even dissolve all the way? It doesn't matter because when Cove Purpose Pure purifies your water, they go from hundreds. Says it right there on screen. To 500 something TDSS to 9 11. It's pretty amazing. I find it a lot of fun to fill the COVID Pure and this is why. Oh don't tell them, but I might be giving a Cove Pure to mom and dad for the holidays. Cove Pure is lab certified to remove up to 99.9% of contaminants from your water. Which contaminants? PFAs, pharmaceuticals, fluoride, lead, arsenic. The purest water you can get. So if you're looking for a gift that's good for you and your loved ones, the one that they'll actually use, I highly recommend Cove Pure and because I have partnered with them, they're giving you a special $250 holiday discount with my link covpure.com the gist that c o v e p u r e.com/the gist to get $250 off covpure.com/the gist hurry before the sale ends. Magnus Hirschfeld was once a very, very famous. Well, we could call him a lot of things. He was a researcher. He operated between the wars, the Weimar Republic. Unbelievably famous on the topic of sex. And then his fame receded a bit, but it was since rediscovered, especially by people in the gay community. Now there are a few new books out, or really that I'm going to talk about with each of the authors. Looking at Hirschfeld and also some of his patients and some of his insights and some of his legacy. We're joined by Daniel Brooke, who is the author of the Einstein of sex, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the visionary of Weimar Berlin. Hello, Daniel. Thank you for joining us here on the gist.
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D
Hello. Thank you for having me.
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A
And Brandi Scalache, a medical historian and author who wrote the intermediaries of Weimar story about Hirschfeld and like I said, some of his books. Patience. Hello, Brandy.
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F
Hello.
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A
So when you're giving a talk. And I'll start with you, Daniel, when you're giving a talk and you have to situate this person who, like I said, was once very famous and now has not been lost to history, but isn't known to. Isn't known as much as Einstein. Otherwise books on Einstein would be called the Hirschfeld of the universe. What do you say? Yes, what do you say? What are his major accomplishments? How do you situate the man?
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D
Well, I always begin with the infamous 1933 book burning that we all know so well we can almost run the newsreel footage in our mind's eye where we see the, you know, the Nazi, the Hitler youth, throwing the volumes into the fire. And then I ask, do you know whose books are being burned? I didn't know till I started. So I went down this research rabbit hole. They're Hirschfeld's books, literally books he wrote. And the rest of them are books he collected and housed at his Institute for Sexual science, which was surgical clinic, psychological clinic, think tank, essentially queer community center in the heart of Berlin from 1919 to 1933 until the Nazis closed it down. And then I show this amazing photograph that I came across, which is Hirschfeld's head being paraded around on a pike at the book burning. I grew up a Jewish kid on Long Island. I had probably more Holocaust education than was psychologically healthy at a young age. But we were never told whose books were being burned. And I think some kind of well meaning but misguided educator maybe in the 60s or 70s, decided, sure, you can tell 10 year olds about mass murder, but don't tell them about queerness. That might really affect their development.
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A
Yeah. And so, Brandy, I know, I've read interviews with you. This too was a jumping off point or certainly a totem, the book burning, right?
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F
It was though, since my book is my book actually looks further back in history than Hirschfeld and covers a lot of his patients. So often when I, when I answer the same question, when I'm trying to situate things for people, I will start in the 19th century and talk about how, you know, Carl Ulrichs who was a precursor, who really influenced Hirschfeld in a lot of ways set the ball rolling as, as kind of one of the first, I suppose, coming out stories in that he outed him in public at a forum of law in law and the backlash that followed that. And also how he began a crusade against people villainizing homosexuality. So I often start there and then talk about Hirschfeld's patient, Hirschfeld's patient who committed suicide and on the eve of his wedding and sent Hirschfeld a letter saying, you know, I. I'm committing suicide because I am homosexual. My family doesn't know. I can't marry this woman. I'm going everyone to shame because I'm not accepted. And it's a really heart wrenching letter. And what he ends that letter saying, like, can't you do anything about it to Hirschfeld personally? And Hirschfeld took that as a mandate in a way. So I often, I often position things that way to say, look, this was ongoing already. Hatred doesn't just spring fully formed in the 1930s. Right. It's a snowball rolling downhill. And so I go all the way back to the 19th century and then walk our way forward to the moment at which Hirschfeld decides to pick up this crusade. And then I move on to talking about people like Dora Richter and his patients. Yeah.
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D
And I think that the Ulrichs story is really useful and important. I mean, Ulrichs is advocating before Hirschfeld's birth. He's advocating in the 1850s and 1860s. He's very famous. But he's suppressed. He's so suppressed that actually Hirschfeld doesn't hear about him about Ulrichs until Hirschfeld becomes a public advocate for gay rights and actually republishes some of Ulrichs works that have been out of print. Then Hirschfeld is suppressed. Kinsey takes steals some of his research, publishes it as the Kinsey scale. Now again, we're kind of rediscovering what had been suppressed in Hirschfeld. Similarly, with gender affirming surgery, these surgeries are being performed in Berlin in the 1920s. They're suppressed, they're stopped now. We began sort of revolution, retracing the scientific path and figuring out how to do these surgeries. Again and again there's this backlash that's gonna try to stop and suppress them.
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A
Yeah. And so what, what we know of Weimar is, well, mostly the musical cabaret, but it was much more. It was a dislocated time. And the challenges of the Weimar period certainly led to a backlash. And the people of Germany felt oppressed. The economy Was terrible, maybe during openness, for a number of reasons, rushed in. But how libertine was it? And was that maybe just confined to. I know you have a map on your website, certain precincts of Berlin, but it didn't really filter out to the rest of Germany, I guess. Daniel, you could take that one.
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D
Yeah. I would say, you know, it was a. It was largely a metropolitan phenomenon. It was in Berlin especially, but not only in Berlin. There were other progressive cities like Cologne in that era. And it was a time of tremendous economic instability and hyperinflation. And the far right, then as now, strategy was to kind of turn these very real class tensions and economic tensions into a kind of majoritarian, anti minority, anti Semitic, anti queer movement where as Hirschfeld explains, I mean, there's a literal. He calls out the literal Nazi slogan, Rasen Kampf, Stadt Klassenkampf, race war instead of class war. How they're conjuring these kind of majoritarian us. A majoritarian us to stand against the minoritarian them.
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F
Yes, yes. And I think it's interesting too, because it wasn't. So much of this comes down to gender in a way that we might not expect. And that there was a huge. There's quite a lot of, you know, masculinist rhetoric and anti feminine, anti woman, lots of misogyny that came out of that shift in the 19th century into industrialization and sort of everybody's roles were changing and women wanting to go to the workforce, women wanting to vote, women wanting to have, you know, control of their reproductive destinies. These things were going on. And there, there was already anti Semitism in the air. And so what. Some of the things that happened was this eliding. So they took, they said, okay, women, women bad. We don't want any of this femininity. Oh, no, it's going to ruin German men. We can't have that. And then they said, okay, homosexual men, they're also ruining Germany by becoming, by being too feminine. And they accused Jews of the same thing. They said, Jewish men are too feminine. See, it's all this. And they're going to turn, you know, they're going to turn people gay and they're going to steal our boys. And so you had this anti. This is why I said, it's like a snowball rolling downhill. You had this misogy that was ripe in the 19th century and it's rolling and it's picking up all of these other things. So hate tends to grow. It was. One of the questions in my book is how do we first begin to hate. I mean, here we are in another period of instability economically. We just came out of a pandemic. They had just had the 1918 flu, you know, and, and you have all of similar kinds of things happening and the right attempting to gain control by replicating this us, them terminology.
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A
What about other political parties? The Communists were really prominent. They were one of the reasons the Nazis became so prominent as a reaction amongst them. Then there were Nazis being the National Socialists, but they were just the nationalists. How were other. How did other parties deal with, or other parts of German life deal with Hirschfeld and his findings?
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D
Sure. Well, there's a, there's a powerful Social Democratic party that Hirschfeld is part of and intimately related to. He's tight with August Bebel, who's the founder of it, who's actually publishes a book, Woman and Socialism, about how gender and social democracy can go together. Then of course, there are these far right parties that are trying to tear down the democracy. There's also a super far left Communist Party that wants to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. And then there's actually the sort of linchpin party is a Catholic party called the Center Party that kind of supports democracy but is socially conservative. And a lot of the Nazi reactionary policies on gender are actually a cynical bid to kind of win over Catholic social conservatives, to convince them that the only way to preserve the gender roles they might believe in is to tear down democracy itself.
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A
Right. And that was run by a press magnate named Alfred Hugenberg, right?
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D
I believe so, yeah.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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D
The center. It's called the Center Party, often called the Catholic Center Party because it's affiliated with the Church.
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F
Yeah, but the, the fact that the, the media was deeply involved in all of this is important because going backward in time, before the Weimar, where you have the Eulenberg Roundtable that gets torn down, Eulenberg was a friend of the Kaiser, but also was accused of being homosexual and, and, and being involved with Moltke, who was the General. And you had this scandal that takes place that is largely a scandal in the papers. Basically, a newspaperman is the one who says, okay, I'm going to bring down the Eulenberg Roundtable, this group of people that he again says are homosexuals and therefore weakly moral. They're weak moral agents and they're, they're going to spill our secrets to the French and various other places. And so he decides to take them on. And, and it's what he publishes in print, even though he himself is, he's Actually not aligned with. He's, he's more of a social Democrat. I mean, it's, it's odd. There's a lot of people. It's a very complex time in terms of people aren't. You can't quite just draw a line and go, this person's always going to do these kinds of things and that person's always going to do that. So the press runs with these stories. And as a result of this time period there, because there had been homosexuality that people were kind of winking at, right? They weren't really. It's like it existed on the margins and people kind of knew, but they didn't say much about it. Now it's an open secret and the Kaiser runs through Germany kind of expunging it was casting every homosexual person out that he can find. People start saying people are homosexual just to get them in trouble. I mean, it's so, you know, and it's odd that Hirschfeld's part of that trial and maybe Daniel wants to say a little bit about that, but he kind of gets trapped. He gets trapped into accidentally making it.
- [22:28]
A
So the trial was a liable and a prominent general.
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D
The trial hinges on whether a man had sex with a man, which at the time is a crime in Germany and is punishable by imprisonment. And Hirschfeld kind of takes the stand and says, you know, you can be. Just because whether or not they actually had sex doesn't mean the individual is gay or straight. You can be gay or straight with that and celibate and not act on it. And actually he kind of shoots himself in the foot in the trial. But ironically enough, in the early 1930s, while the democracy is still in place, the Nazis have a gay sex scandal. And it's exposed that Ernst, who's kind of Hitler's right hand man, is gay, which Hitler has known all along and hasn't really much cared about till later. He wants to get rid of Ernst Roman, makes it a big deal and has him executed. But the irony of that is that the scandal doesn't really diminish the vote for the Nazis. Essentially, Hirschfeld has made Germany so tolerant of queerness that this, this gay scandal that every, all the people on the left and supporters of democracy think will tear down the Nazi party has almost no effect.
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A
Oh, he did such a good job. He softened the ground for the Nazis. Interesting. Well, how much? Really unusual.
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F
Sorry. Oh, I was going to just go back to what you were saying about it being a libel trial and the Eulenberg scandal being a libel trial. Back under the Kaiser is essentially people were claiming that Eulenberg had sex with a man named Moltke. He was a general, and that they had too much power influencing the Kaiser. And this was really because Germany was in a precarious position. They, they had done really not very well on the sort of making friends abroad stage. And this is a time when we're all on tenterhooks before the First World War. Nations are making contracts and packs with other nations. And, you know, it's, it's. I have a chapter called Powder Keg and Plucked String, because that's, that's what it'. Like, it's like a spider web. And if you pull here, you're going to get three countries in into war. And so the Kaiser is already kind of on the back foot, right? He's in trouble already. This is the last thing that he needs. And as a result, he ends up actually really further weakening Germany rather than strengthening it with his. His sudden lockdown against homosexuality. And in a lot of ways, the trial was never really about sexuality at all. It was about people not liking certain people in political power. And that's kind of what Daniel's saying, too. It's about Ernst Rohm's homosexuality in the Nazi Party. In fact, Hirschfeld, his. One of his surgeons, Levi Lenz, talks about how many Nazis they treated for, you know, who were homosexual and who talked, you know, basically told tales out of school about Rome and about Hitler. And so, you know, it wasn't really about the homosexuality, but people thought if we position it that way, we can attack and the general public will go, oh, yeah, that's weird. You know, that's fringe. We will get behind that. So it's really a tool of manipulation more than it was about sex.
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A
By the way, what did they tell him about Hitler? I've heard a lot of things about him, including the shape of his genitalia. But was there plausible rumors that he was homosexual?
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F
Well, it's funny, I write what Levi Lenz, the surgeon says about Hitler rather than what I actually think either way, because we can't prove it. Right? But what. Levi Lenz, who had performed early surgeries, had, had done some surgeries on Dora Richter and Lily Elba. He said, look, we had these people come in and they would talk about Rome and they, they had like little girly nicknames for Hitler and they said, oh, he's the worst one. Oh, he's. They. He never comes out and says Hitler's homosexual. But Levi Lenz does say he was clearly a very Abnormal person in terms of sexuality. That was Levi's term, backward in various other ways. And so it was really interesting. Levi just skims, actually calling him a homosexual, but he gets. He kind of, like, runs along. And I think partly it's because Levi doesn't want to bring that aspersion against homosexuals. Right. I think, honestly, it's partly that he's like, oh, we don't want him in our camp.
- [26:46]
A
Right, right. But, you know, I've heard the. Sorry, go ahead, Daniel.
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D
The Nazis are incredibly exercised about gender nonconformity ideologically, that men are not behaving like men and women are not behaving like women. Overall, they're sort of less concerned about who's sleeping with who. And to the extent they are, it's instrumental.
- [27:07]
A
Okay. To interrupt that is because it's the public expression that bothers them, as opposed to if a hypocritical stance is being privately held. They didn't have that actual firmly held ideology. That. That was wrong.
- [27:22]
F
They wanted. They wanted the appearance of masculinity, partly because they had equated masculinity with strength on the world stage. And so. And. And this is way before this is back in the Kaiser's day, too, and they had this masculinist rhetoric. They were. Even. Some of Hirschfeld's biggest critics were masculinist gay men who thought that he wasn't being masculine enough. And the argument was real. Gay men, you know, are very masculine, and they're so masculine that they don't like women. So they were very misogynistic. So this concept that Nick Fuente says. Right. Yes, indeed.
- [27:55]
D
Yeah. No, there's a. There's a whole. Yeah. In Silicon Valley. There's like a whole ideological circle that subscribes to this at this point.
- [28:03]
F
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's odd because they even. They set up these in. One of their ideas is that we want to get men to be very manly men and we want to get them away from women. And so we're going to create these boys clubs and we're going to take these pubescent boys and send them off into the woods together for camping trips unsupervised. And that will fix the gay problem. And that's a really interesting mistaken idea about how to. How to fix that. But. But yeah, that was just. You need to be this. I mean, the word Ubermensch comes about at this time period for those. For those very reasons. This idea of the Superman masculinity is how they. They even said. And this is this is horrific because of the out. But people said before the First World War they were saying things like we need a good war to remasculinize our boys. And then the war happens and it basically eliminates an entire generation of men because the losses are so high.
- [28:55]
D
None of this should be taken to impute it at all that or suggest at all that once the Nazis took power, they weren't fanatically homophobic, were locking up homosexuals, making them wear pink triangles, putting them in camps. A lot of that is attributable to Himmler, who is among the Nazi elite, is like a sincere homophobe and a fanatical homophobe. And once Rome, who is gay, has been executed and rubbed out, Himmler is empowered to put in these draconian punishments against gay men and to some degree lesbians as well.
- [29:32]
A
Daniel Brook is the author of the Einstein of sex, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, visionary of Weimar Berlin, and Brandy Scalache is the author of another book about Dr. Hirschfeld, the Intermediaries. Thank you so much.
- [29:46]
F
Thank you so much for having us. It's been a real pleasure.
- [29:49]
D
Thank you, Mike.
- [29:58]
A
When you give to a nonprofit, how do you measure success? You hear a lot of things like, oh, low overhead costs or the efficiency of fundraising as defined by how much money actually doesn't go to administration. All right, let's talk about GiveWell. This episode sponsor focuses on the actual impact on people's lives. They've spent more than 70,000 hours on research to help donors fund highly cost effective programs that save or improve lives the most per dollar by putting money in on the front end and knowing how things best work. That's how things work best. GiveWell has spent 18 years researching global health poverty alleviation and the only direct funds to the highest impact opportunities. 150,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to direct more than two and a half billion dollars. Rigorous evidence, which is the name of the game, suggests that these donations will say save 300,000 lives. Two lives per donor. You can be one such donor and you can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. If this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the gist. There are a few to choose from. Please enter the gist at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about givewell from the Gist to get your donation matched again givewell.org code the Gist to find out more. And to make a tax deductible donation Today, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the gist at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from the gist. Again, that's givewell.org to donate or find out more.
- [31:54]
G
So when I ask, what is Odoo, what comes to mind? Well, Odoo is a bit of everything. Odoo is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth. But you know, some people also say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable. But then again, you could look at Odoo in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks. I mean, whatever your business needs, manufacturing, accounting, HR programs, you can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company. So what is Odoo? Well, I guess Odoo is a bit of everything. Odoo is a fertilizer, magic beanstalk Building blocks for business. Yeah, that's it. Which means that Odoo is exactly what every business needs. Learn more and sign up now@odoo.com that's o d o o.com.
- [32:56]
A
Marjorie Taylor Greene has resigned and the question is what her constituents actually think about it. The New York Times sacks Rome, Georgia. They don't sack anything. They interview. A bunch of people on the street just had to say it. And they emerge with the headline and the conclusion. Standing by Green after rift with Trump ends in resignation. CNN sends their top political reporter Jeff Zeleny to do the same. He comes away with a couple of men on the street interviews. Literally. There are two guys he walks alongside of while holding a cup of coffee. Him, not them. One gets the impression I'm the one because I've done a thousand of these interviews that the guy said, well, I got to get somewhere. But if you want to talk, walk while we walk, I could do it. Fine. Here's what they say. Well, I think she represented the people, what they felt. Not everybody felt that way. Obviously, I wouldn't have called her a traitor.
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H
That's Trump, you know. But he hits back if you hit him.
- [33:51]
A
So they're both described as Green supporters. They're clearly a little bit Trump supporters. They seem determined to support both, and that's not surprising. The CNN headline on this piece is Marjorie Taylor Greene's district is in disbelief at her resignation announcement. Yes, true. But of the people interviewed turned especially against her after what happened. Except maybe one woman who you get the impression might have been against her from the start.
- [34:16]
H
We, this district really just want someone who represents us instead of thinks of themselves and tries to promote a political point of view.
- [34:26]
A
Are you sorry to see her go?
- [34:29]
H
Not really. I think we've probably seen more of her as a real person in the past three days than we have ever.
- [34:35]
A
The Atlanta Journal Constitution, the closest major paper to Rome, Georgia, reports the same thing. If anyone expresses an opinion, it's mostly positive. Quote, I'm very close to people in the faith community, one person is quoted as saying, and they very much appreciate her softening her tone. I should note that that was done before the resignation, when she said, I want to stop fighting. Another headline frames it as Greene wanting to leave toxic politics behind and the AJC does a great job by adding dose of reality. It in fact begins with that very term. The reality is that Georgia voters have shown they can support Trump and Republicans he targets simultaneously, which doesn't shock me. This is what you get with a cult of personality dynamic. And I don't mean that to insult people who like Trump or like Greene for what they view as their moral stands or their policy stands. These are conservative people. Those are especially green, more or less conservatives, not as we defined it post Cold War, but as we've come to define it in the last couple decades. And when personalities are so big, loyalty is bendable. It's flexible. There are very few hard lines. If Epstein became one, then the same guy who says, oh, Trump's a counterpuncher will say, what are you going to do? It's Trump. For every person the Times quotes saying, we're going to miss Marjorie, there's someone like Brooke Bearden, a bar manager, saying, we can have a good conversation about things and not turn it into a fight. That's nice. I don't see them showing up and demanding that that in local elections. But zoom up to, I don't know, 30. What did they say, 30,000, 40,000? 50,000ft? Enough height so you could see both the Tennessee foothills and the far flung Atlanta suburbs that the 14th district serves. That's how they write these things when they write up man in the street people on Georgia's 14th congressional district. Here's the truth. Our elected representatives are only lightly reflective of the people who send them to Congress. I don't mean that in places that are are plus 15 Republican or overwhelmingly Democrat. You're going to get someone of the differing political ideology I just mean temperament, the type of people that you get. I so often hear that when there is a wild card in Congress that that person is representative of the anger of the district. And yet that proves not to be the case so much more often than not.
- [37:03]
D
Not.
- [37:03]
A
And you could know this because districts don't change on a dime. But when they swap out representatives so often the personalities of those representatives are quite different. Districts are conservative or are liberal and some are very conservative or very liberal. But even those very liberal districts don't send the wildest members to Washington D.C. take New York's 3rd congressional district. They sent to Congress George Santos, fabulous, maximalist, trump, diehard, one man wild card was somehow the third. A collection of 760,000Americans who just wanted to go nuts for a little while? I don't think so. Before and after Santos they put into power Tom Suozzi. Sensible Tom, Sensible Suozzi. Quite the opposite of the crazy making Santos. Let's take another. Another Democrat who was just a wild man, a woolly man, a self consciously outlandish man. James Trafficant served, if you want to use that term, Ohio's Mahonig Valley. Was he elected because the scrappy constituents of the Reason wanted a wild man swinging wildly on their behalf to express their wildness? I heard that at the time. But then Trafficant shuffled off the stage helped by investigators and subpoenas and he was succeeded by Tim Ryan, a sane everyman Democrat. The district didn't want a character. The system simply permitted one. So once a Green, a Lauren Boebert, a Paul Gosar leaves the stage, their replacement is likely to be not another Bobaert, Greene or Gosar, but more likely a perfectly standard run of the mill Republican or maybe even a Democrat. Boebert didn't win by that much. The will of the people, when the people equals three quarters of a million, individ individuals cannot be finely tuned to any one personality. Almost every district in America is exploitable under our political system. Almost any of them can produce what we might boldly call a true nut job. And there are no districts where the default representative trends towards normal. This is not a dynamic that the people produce. These are the consequences and incentive structures of our political system. The Gist is produced by Cory Wara. We had help today from Leah Yan. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the Gist list. Jeff Craig does so much with the video and the socials and the visual. He's a master of the visual in this a primarily audio form. Michelle Pesca also works with the visuals but is mostly the visionary Peru Do Peru and thanks for listening.
- [40:01]
I
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