Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 125
Episode Date: April 6, 2024All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available ...exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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In the shadows of the afterlife the ferryman of souls guides America's most influential spirits to their eternal rest Where are you taking me? Are you death? This?
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Hello, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Cherene. And today is a very
special day. It is the first of April, aka April Fool's Day. Someone may or may not have been
born on this day, but little known fact that I didn't know about until I was an adult was that
the first of April is historically Syrian New Year. That's right. I learned about this as a Syrian in
my mid-20s, so it's not exactly very well known, but when I learned about it, I got obsessed with
it. So I'm going to talk about that today and just the history of April Fool's Day and how it became
April Fool's Day in particular. Because originally, as I said, it started as the Syrian New Year,
and many researchers consider it the oldest recorded holiday in the history of the Near East.
The Syrian calendar is also considered one of the last remaining ancient calendars that
is still celebrated up until now.
Ead Yunus, no relation, but he's a doctor in archaeology and ancient languages at the
University of Damascus.
He said that the celebrations of the New Year coincided with the celebrations of the arrival
of spring, and they began the day of
the vernal equinox and they continued until the first of April, aka Syrian New Year's
Day.
This day is associated with the celebration of the end of the raining season and the start
of fertility and the growth of crops and fruits as the celebrations were accompanied with
religious rituals in which offerings were made.
Eunice also noted that the Syrian calendar is related to Ishtar, who is the first mother goddess, the goddess of life,
the morning and evening star at the same time.
The ancient texts describe Ishtar as, in her mouth lies the secrets of life.
The word Ishtar comes from the Akkadian language.
the secrets of life. The word Ishtar comes from the Akkadian language. She is known as Ananna or Nana in Sumerian, and she was the first deity for which we
have written evidence of, as well as the world's first goddess of love and war,
and she had a lover named Tammuz. In ancient Mesopotamia, which roughly
corresponds to modern Iraq, parts of Iran, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkey, love was
a powerful force, capable of upending earthly order and producing sharp changes in status."
And Ishtar definitely deserves an episode all for herself. She's completely fascinating
and needs more than just a blurb, but I had to at least mention her, and maybe one day
I'll do an episode about her, but that's a shhtar for you for now.
There are other researchers though that have criticized the validity of April 1st as the
Syrian New Year. Because of this, the origin of the Syrian New Year's Aqitu celebration, A-K-I-T-U,
it has sparked some controversy, with debates fueled by history and religion.
The validity of the ritual is disputed because it is
not widely celebrated locally and its relevance is not generally accepted by academia. Some would
argue that the celebration of Syrian New Year is useless. Among them is Bashar Khalif, who was a
history researcher specializing in the Meshriq. Khalif says that celebrating Akitu, quote,
stems from nostalgia and an attempt to escape the present.
So what are the origins of Akitu? Akitu marks the Assyrian and Babylonian New Year, and
it is observed the 1st of April and lasts 12 days. The Akkadians and Chaldeans also
have celebrated the holiday. Dr. Joseph Zaytoun,
fun fact, Zaytoun means olive, what a cute name. Dr. Joseph Zaytoun is an expert in Syrian history,
and he is one of the historians who considers Akitu, quote, the oldest recorded holiday in the
history of the Near East. The earliest reference to this holiday dates back to 2500 BC in Ur, U-R. Ur was an important
Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern Tel al-Muqayyir
and South Iraq's Dirqar Governorate.
According to Syrian researchers, the Akitu holiday was, quote, held for the Sumerian
moon god, Nanna. For the Babylonians, it chronicled the god Marduk's victory over the goddess Timaeat.
During the Babylonian era, the first four days were traditionally reserved for religious
rituals.
Babylonians used to offer prayers and sacrifices and recite the Anuma Elish, which is the Babylonian
epic of creation.
The remaining days would include social and political rituals.
According to the researcher Hazal al-Majidi, the Sumerians observed this holiday on March 21st of
every year, and this marked the start of the Sumerian New Year. On the other hand, Semitic
peoples like the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, they celebrate Akitu on
April 1st. What is this word? Akitu. I asked the same thing. I asked my mom the same thing because
I'm still a child who thinks my mom knows everything, but she doesn't. She doesn't know
what that means, and she's never even heard the word. And she didn't know the origin of Akitu.
And apparently there's no consensus among historians on the exact meaning
of this word. However, researcher El-Majidi details his theory in the books Summer Corpus
and Prehistoric Religions and Beliefs. According to El-Majidi, the word Akitu is the name of the
feast and the place where celebrations were held. The word appeared in late Sumerian texts as a-ki-ti.
The word is then believed to be of Sumerian origin. The sign a means rain, ki means earth,
and ti is a verb meaning to draw near. Thus, it roughly translates to drawing water closer
to the earth. Very poetic. According to Jamil M. Shaheen, numerous
ancient scriptures mention the same Akiti. For instance, the holiday bears the name Akitu
in Aramaic, Akiti Sunanam in Sumerian, Risha Deshata in Akkadian, and Khabi Nisan in Assyrian.
Nisan, by the way, is April in Arabic. The Shahr al-Dashita and Khabi
Nisan are often used in the Levant to mean Head of the Year and 1st of April, respectively.
On the other hand, Dr. Mahmoud Hussain Al-Amin wrote that the celebrations were held at a specific
location known as the House of Celebrations or Akitu, which was outside the city.
So this makes Akitu a location as well, a sacred location.
In ancient beliefs, the quote Akitu house refers to the gods dwelling on earth.
The purpose of having a celebratory feast is to celebrate the gods choosing to temporarily reside in this city,
and the purpose of this house is to guard and cherish
that moment forever. And even though now the name Nisan is used for what we know as the month of April,
the month of Nisan used to be around the time of the vernal equinox, which starts around March 21st.
The vernal equinox is still celebrated throughout greater Iran as Nuruz, which means new day on March 21st. However,
in ancient Assyrian, Akkadian, and Babylonian traditions, the spring festival was celebrated
in the first days of the month known as Nisan, and the calendar adopted by ancient Assyrians had the
month Nisan at the beginning of the calendar year, which lends to the term Chabi Nisan, or the first
of Nisan. So let's talk about the Syrian calendar and April Fool's Day,
what we all came here for.
Fun fact about me, my birthday is today, April Fool's Day.
Wow.
And I didn't even know about this history, as I said,
until I was an adult person in my mid-20s.
But once I learned about this history,
especially as a Syrian person who is really proud
to be Syrian, it really made me appreciate my
birthday and my ancestry a lot more. Because growing up, not gonna lie, it's honestly a pain
in the ass birthday. Lots of empty gift boxes and people saying happy birthday, April Fools,
and just me like rolling my eyes and grimacing throughout the entire day.
There is one particularly traumatic memory I have from middle school where I
was given a box of chocolates and the joke was that the chocolates tasted like
shit and I know this because I tasted a chocolate and then I immediately spit it
out and to this day I don't know what that chocolate was made out of and I
hope I never find out. But anyway it it's just a weird ass birthday to have.
You know what else is weird? Weird ass ads. Listen.
And we are back. Okay, Dr. Zaytoon believes it is more accurate to call the calendar that starts on April 1st as a Syrian calendar, rather than Assyrian, since all in Syria and Mesopotamia adopted
it.
He also thinks that the ancient Syrian calendar begins on the 1st of April and that, quote,
this calendar was present and endured in multiple Syrian civilizations, including the
kingdoms of Ugarit, Elba, Mari, Palmyra, and Damascus. Until the early 20th century, Syrians
traditionally began their year on April 1st, but transitioned to the Western calendar during the
period of the French Mandate. So it actually wasn't even that long ago that April 1st marked the
beginning of a new year in Syria.
The rituals of the Syrian New Year are linked to April Fools.
There are rituals aimed at quote, humbling the king, which would start from the fifth day of the celebrations.
Lying was also a big part of the celebrations, as the king would abdicate his throne in favor of a criminal sentenced to death.
That part is crazy to me.
Enslaved people also became masters and people disguised themselves in costumes and masks
to hide their identities until they awoke from the lie the next morning.
So the whole day would be a farce, essentially, and you would all knowingly live a lie until
the next day everything is suddenly back to normal again. Hannah Sumi, head of the Syriac Cultural Association in Syria, said,
After the common folk occupies the king's throne, he blends in with the people incognito. Chaos
ensues in Babylon, and on the first of April the king is found, and joy prevails. And that
is the origin of April Fool's Day. The king did not truly disappear, it was but a charade."
There's also another reason the first of April is associated with an April Fool. Dr. Shaheen
writes, until 1564 AD, the Syrian calendar was adopted in most countries. In France,
celebrations started on March 21st
and ended on April 1st, just as the Assyrians and Babylonians did thousands of years ago.
After King Charles IX adopted the new Gregorian calendar, celebrations began on December 25th
and ended January 1st, which we now all know is the beginning of the new year. However, some of the public still continued to celebrate on April 1st,
and the people who still held on to this tradition became the target of mockery
by the nobility for still believing in April Fool's Day.
Other historians speculate that April Fool's Day dates back to 1582
when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar,
as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. In the Julian calendar as well as the Syrian calendar and also the Hindu calendar, the New Year began with the
spring equinox on April 1st. But people were slow to get the news or they failed
to recognize that the start of the New Year had moved to January 1st. Those who continued to celebrate the new year during the last week of March through April 1st
became the butt of jokes and hoaxes and were called April fools. These pranks included having
paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as April fish in French which is
poissons d'avril. I can't say that correctly and I can't even attempt to do
a French accent, but it's the April fish. You refer to as an April fish and it's symbolizing a young
easily caught fish and a gullible person. So it's kind of like an elevated kick me sign on your back.
Interestingly enough fish are also considered a lucky symbol in many areas of the world and are
also important to many New Year's traditions.
There was an opinion piece written a few years ago about the marginalization of the holiday of Akitu
as part of a quote, systemic battle against ancient civilizations.
Dr. Shaheen noted that this prohibition has continued until recently.
Different regimes and religious figures prohibited it because it is a pagan feast and has rituals, prayers, and texts that offend the followers of the monotheistic
religions. He added that Akitu is witnessing a renaissance among the Assyrian, Chaldean,
and Syriac communities abroad, particularly as a result of religious freedom. He asks,
will Akitu return or is it merely a trend that will fade away
once again? Many cultures still recognize the significance of April 1st, including the Assyrians.
Despite being scattered across the world, Assyrians preserve their history and heritage
through holidays like Assyrian New Year on April 1st. Assyrian New Year is the spring festival among
the indigenous Assyrians of Northern Iraq, Northeastern Syria, Southeastern Turkey,
and Northwestern Iran. Celebrations involve parades and parties, food, music, and dancing.
Some Assyrians wear traditional costumes, are dressed like Assyrian royalty, and dance for hours.
Celebrations take place throughout Assyrian royalty, and dance for hours.
Celebrations take place throughout Assyria and other areas in the Middle East, along
with some in the United States, Europe, and Australia among the Assyrian diaspora communities.
The modern observance of Akitu began in the 1960s during the Assyrian intellectual renaissance.
However, due to political oppression, the celebrations were largely private until the
1990s, but the event is still largely celebrated by Assyrians residing in Syria.
Although the Syrian government does not acknowledge the festival at all, Assyrians still continue
with the celebration.
In 2002, Assyrians in Syria celebrated the event with a mass wedding of 16 couples and
over 25,000 attendees.
After the formation of Turkey, Khabi Nisan, along with Nauruz, were banned from public
celebration.
Assyrians in Turkey were first allowed to publicly celebrate Khabi Nisan in 2005, after
organizers received permission from the government to stage the event, in
light of democratic reforms adopted in support of Turkey's EU membership bid.
Around 5,000 people, including large groups of visiting ethnic Assyrians from Europe,
Syria, and Iraq, took part in the Khabi Nisan celebrations in Turkey.
One of the largest Assyrian New Year celebrations took place in Iraq in 2008.
Public celebrations were not allowed by Saddam Hussein's regime prior to the start of the Iraq
War. The event was organized by the Assyrian Democratic Movement, or ZOA, and between 45,000
and 65,000 people took part in the parade. In 2004, George Radonovich of the California
State Assembly recognized the Assyrian
New Year and extended his wishes to the Assyrian community in California. This was later followed
by a letter from our old California governor, Terminator Arnold, to the Assyrian community in
California, congratulating them on the annual celebration. I just thought that was pretty interesting because it is a very modern
resurgence and like renaissance of this day. So just fun facts. And in the United States,
almost four million Americans can trace their roots back to an Arab country located in the Middle East
or North Africa. And this is according to the Arab American Institute. Each year, many school districts, cities, and states observe Arab American Heritage
Month in April.
It's meant to honor the historic achievements and cultural contributions of Arab Americans
throughout the nation.
On April 1, 2022, April was officially designated as National Arab American Heritage Month by
the federal government.
The movement for this recognition was first started in 1989, when Congress declared October
25th as a day to honor Arab American heritage, and called it National Arab American Day.
But the Arab American community pushed for further recognition.
In 2017, a media outlet called Arab America, as well as the nonprofit Arab America Foundation,
launched an initiative that called on lawmakers to make April National Arab American Heritage
Month.
Arab America said that April was chosen because it did not conflict with other observances
that highlight marginalized communities and that the month symbolizes hope, growth, and
new beginnings.
And yeah, sure, that can be true, with spring starting and flowers blooming and so on, but
I think there might be a little more symbolism there as well. Personally, I think all national
holidays are kind of useless unless you get like a day off from work and giving a marginalized
community a day or a month is a rather shallow and also useless acknowledgement
of that community. I mean Columbus also has a day himself and even though many states now observe it
as Indigenous Peoples Day, 16 states as well as the territory of American Samoa still observe the
second Monday in October as the official public holiday, exclusively called Columbus Day. All of
this is to say that I would rather lawmakers actually
advocate for marginalized communities instead of just tossing them a day or a few weeks where
suddenly they exist. It is still kind of cute to me that Arab American Heritage Month is starting
today in April because of all the symbolism. Let's take our second break. I don't have a clever segue.
Oh well.
["Spring Day in the World"]
And we are back.
Okay, where else have we seen April Fool's Day in the world?
April Fool's Day has a shockingly global history for a
holiday devoted to lies and deception. Historians have also linked April Fool's Day to festivals
such as Hilaria in ancient Rome. Hilaria is Latin for joyful, and this day was celebrated in ancient
Rome at the end of March by followers of the cult of Sabeel. It involved people dressing
up in disguises and mocking fellow citizens and even magistrates, and it was said to be inspired
by the Egyptian legend of Isis, Osiris, and Seth. There's also speculation that April Fool's Day
was tied directly to the vernal equinox, or the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere,
and this is where Mother Nature fooled people with changing unpredictable weather.
I like that one.
In Latin America, you have few chances to be pranked.
Much of Latin America celebrates El Dia de los Inocentes, or Day of the Innocents, which is a late December Catholic feast
with an extremely un-silly origin that has now somehow become a day of jokes and pranks.
In Ebi Alicante, Spain, they mark this day, aka their April Fool's Day in December, by having a town-wide food fight,
complete with military strategy and historical lore.
Then there's the Els and Ferenats tradition, which is reportedly more than 200 years old and involves a mock
military-style takeover of the town, where the new rulers get to make up
strange laws that others have to abide by, and if they don't they get fined and
the money goes to charity. When I was reading this earlier I was like, oh this
is the purge, but then it ends up money goes to charity and it's like, oh it's
nice. But so for those cultures the day to watch out for is December 28th.
In Brazil, however, April 1st is still the prank day of choice,
and they cut straight to the chase by calling it Dia das Mentiras,
or the day of lies.
Similarly to Syria, Iran has one of the oldest April Fool's traditions
with the observance of Sista Badad, which also has a prank playing
element. It is celebrated on the 13th day of the Persian New Year, on April 1st or April
2nd. Sizdab-e-Dad, which is also said to have been celebrated as far back as the 5th century
BC, is translated as quote, getting rid of 13. So it has an appropriately superstitious air. It's
also considered a spring festival which ties into other April Fool's predecessors
like the ancient Roman celebration of Hilaria. April Fool's Day spread
throughout Britain during the 18th century. In Scotland the tradition became
a two-day event starting with quote, hunting the gawk.
That's a word, G-O-W-K.
Gawk is a term for a type of bird,
but it's also slang for a fool.
On this day, pranking Scots send unsuspecting gawks,
the people, not the birds, on fool's errands
just to waste their time.
And if you don't get gawked, there's always an opportunity for humiliation
the very next day, which is tally day.
Tally day is for largely harmless derriere related pranks,
AKA pranks involving your butt,
such as pinning fake tails on someone
or sticking kick me signs on them.
April 1st in Poland goes about it the same as any other pro April Fools place. It's
called Prima Aprilis. There is a funny parting phrase for prankers though that I thought
was worth mentioning, which is, Prima Aprilis, April Fool's Day, be careful, you can be wrong!
Which is truly like advice to take throughout the entire year.
But what about what we've come to know as the typical April Fool's Day pranks?
It's not especially surprising that capitalism took like a fun little day like April Fool's Day and ran with it because as we know we live in hell.
But in modern times, people have gone to great lengths to create elaborate April Fool's Day hoaxes. Newspapers, radio, and TV stations and websites have participated in the April 1st tradition
of reporting outrageous fictional claims that have fooled their audiences.
A few examples.
In 1957, the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop
and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees. In 1985, Sports
Illustrated writer George Plimpton tricked many readers when he ran a made-up article
about a rookie pitcher named Sid Finch, who could throw a fastball over 168 miles per hour.
In 1992, National Public Radio ran a spot with former president Richard Nixon, saying
that he was running for president again.
Only it was an actor, not Nixon, and the segment was all an April Fool's Day prank that caught
the country by surprise.
In 1996, Taco Bell duped people when it announced that it agreed to purchase Philadelphia's
Liberty Bell and intended to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell.
In 1998, after Burger King advertised a quote, left-handed whopper,
scores of clueless customers requested this fake sandwich.
And then Google also notoriously hosts an annual April Fool's Day prank
that has included everything from a telepathic search
to the ability to
play Pac-Man on Google Maps.
This is a sentence that made me laugh from history.com.
For the average trickster, there is always the classic April Fool's Day prank of covering
the toilet seat with plastic wrap or swapping the contents of sugar and salt containers.
I'm sorry, I had to mention that because like the sugar and salt is very innocent.
But I, for one, have never heard of covering the toilet in plastic wrap.
That seems cruel and crazy.
And history.com. Wow.
Anyway, impressively, the joke of April Fool's Day has endured for centuries.
And at this point, to have my life contribute any part to this joke
is an honor, actually. I live for bits. And April Fool's Day is basically the
longest running bit of all time. So it was only right that I was born today.
And that, my friends, is our episode today. I hope you had fun. I'm gonna go do something for my birthday,
even though this is the past, but today is my birthday
and I'm doing something now for you.
Anyway, that's it.
Bye.
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I don't understand what the big fat ones are. You don't put those inside of you, do you? I mean,
you do? Yes.
This is a show about women.
Okay, so I just reapplied my lip gloss after eating a delicious lunch. We are headed back
now to the European Political Systems class at Baruch College. Woo!
Finally, a show about women that isn't just
a thinly veiled aspirational nightmare.
That's it, that's actually the name of the show.
It's not hosted, not narrated,
we're just dropping into a woman's world.
It's like reality TV, on the radio.
I found out when my dad was gay when I was 10,
we were in a convertible on the 405 freeway,
listening to the B-52s.
Looking back, I should have said,
this is gay, this is already all gay.
Listen to Finally a Show on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Imagine you ask two people the same exact set of seven questions. I'm Minnie Driver
and this was the idea I set out to explore in my podcast, Minnie Questions. This year
we bring a whole new group of guests to answer the same seven questions, including actress
and star of a mega hit sitcom, Friends, Courtney Cox.
You can't go around it. so you just go through it.
This is a roadblock.
It's gonna catch you down the road.
Go through it, deal with it.
Comedian, writer, and star of the series,
Catastrophe, Rob Delaney.
I shouldn't feel guilty about my son's death.
He died of a brain tumor.
It's part of what happens when your kid dies.
Intellectually, you'll understand that it's not your fault,
but you'll still feel guilty.
Alt-rock icon, Liz Fair.
That personal disaster wrote Guyville. So everything comes out of a dead end.
And many, many more. Join me on season three of Many Questions on the iHeart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Seven questions, limitless answers.
Welcome to get out and hear a podcast about things falling apart
and putting it back together again.
We'll go and fasten this intro because we have a lot of stuff to get to.
And the thing that we have a lot of stuff to get to about is
the election for candidates for the Council of Presidents
for National Nurses United.
And in order to talk about that,
I guess the reason we're talking about that, I you know, OK,
I should have I should have ran this one through my head
before we started this. But.
Yeah, I'm here today with John Jahed and Rosa
to talk about.
Yeah, there's slate movement thing.
I don't know, called shift change and why they're running, how they met, et cetera, et cetera.
And yeah, some other stuff about the union.
So all three of you, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you for having us.
Yeah, so I guess the place we should start for this for.
So we talked to.
Shift change last year, but I think for people who don't remember that
or, you know, I mean, it's been God, I don't know.
I don't know how long I've lost track of time.
Can you explain a bit about what you're running for?
And specifically what it is, sort of how it works?
I'll just start real quick, like in case it's not clear, we're all members of a large national
nurses union called National Nurses United. And so we're from individual parts of that union,
which is kind of an umbrella over California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing
Committee, which I'm a part of, Rosita is a part of, Minnesota Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee, which I'm a part of,
Rosita's a part of,
Minnesota Nurses Association,
which Jehed is a part of,
NAISNA, which is New York State Nurses Association,
which Zinnia Green is a part of,
and then we also have Michigan Nurses Association
and the DC Nurses Association.
And our group, Shift Change, is like a caucus,
which is like whenever workers
instead of a union get together
because they want to change how the union works.
And we're running what's something called a slate
where we have to have groups of people running together
for specific union offices.
And so we have a lot of people running,
not just us three or us four for the council presidents,
but we also have candidates running
for the board of vice presidents
and also delegates for our convention.
And hopefully that's a good like basis for this starting out the conversation.
Yeah.
So I guess the the the first question I wanted to ask,
because I think this is an interesting story, is how did how did you three meet?
Because this is a mostly a very different group of people from last time.
How did we meet? Oh, my.
That is a good story.
So if you're not aware or if you've been living under a rock,
you know, there's there's a lot of
violence that's happening in the world, and specifically,
there's violence that's happening in Palestine., and specifically there's violence that's happening in Palestine.
And John, I, and Jahad all met as nurses
who were looking to really be involved
in Palestine solidarity work.
And so we met on a space.
We connected there and our politics pretty much aligned
that we believe that oppressed people should be liberated and that was one of the
largest ways that we met each other and we became I mean I feel like Jahad and
John are part of my family definitely we have really connected on the
solidarity front for that but also as nurses organizing and really seeing
where the fault lines are within our own union.
We haven't talked about specifically the nurses organizing that's been going on for Palestine
solidarity stuff on the show before.
It's really interesting.
Even though we haven't met in person yet, we're looking forward to meeting in April
at the Labor Notes Conference. But despite the fact that we haven't met in person,
there is a lot of chemistry among the group. And we have a lot of similar visions, especially when
it came to organizing for Palestine. So I joined Rosita and John and others in Nurses for Palestine
chat group and that group is active in highlighting the suffering of the Palestinian people and
the politics behind it and how nurses can be in the front lines not only to take care
of patients but also for other health care workers
around the world. And that's a huge part of this because this genocide that's going on
has claimed the lives of so many innocent civilians as well as physicians and nurses
and other health care workers, medics, etc. From that big group or almost, you can call it national, there
are smaller chapters now in different cities. There's healthcare workers for Palestine twin
cities where I am from, and Chicago and San Francisco, and there's in Seattle and Boston.
There's a lot of movement among healthcare workers where they focus
their attention that hospitals, healthcare facilities, healthcare professionals are not
a target during a military conflict and all the war crimes that have been committed need
to be answered for.
So from that, we kind of sprouted a smaller group and with the election coming
up for the National Nurses United, we thought we could take that more of a grassroots movement
to make a bigger change because we believe all these smaller changes in the base should
lead to a bigger change at the top. And unions are the perfect example
where we can affect change and have the politicians
and all the people up in the highest echelon of powers,
if you will, listen and do what actually the base needs.
And there's no better way of doing it
actually the base needs. And there's no better way of doing it
but having your own union representing
what the nurses in the union want.
And their policies and statements
should reflect what the nurses need.
And that's what we hear.
And that's why we call ourselves Shift Change.
One thing I wanted to add on to that is that like, when we first
all came together, there was a call from Palestinian trade
unions to push our own trade unions here in the US, which
have historically not really taken strong positions on things
like international conflicts or, you know, what's going on in
Palestine in particular, and our union just adopted BDS language
within the last year,
the California Nurses Association,
National Nurses Organizing Committee.
And that took an extraordinary amount of pressure
from rank and file nurses to get the leadership
to agree that this was an important stance.
We noticed that unions had just gone through
democratic reform processes who had been taken over by rank and file workers. The UAW with Sean Fain
had adopted much more, like much quickly, much more quickly resolutions in favor of
peace and ceasefire. And, you know, as workers, we're like against war
of all kinds.
And, but in particular, this is like a particularly
egregious situation where nurses have borne the brunt
of like all the healthcare workers who are being targeted
specifically in Palestine, in Gaza.
The majority of those healthcare workers are nurses.
So we believe there's a direct connection between,
you know, our work here and the support
of those nurses over there.
And I guess then going from that to leading towards how
our building a democratic rank and file union,
not only will it enact these via a way for us to enact
the kind of positive policy changes we want, but it'll
build a stronger union for everybody, so that we can fight
the bosses at the bedside, making sure that our patients are
taking care of our communities. So I'll let it go.
You know, so that that that's a bit of a segue into the next thing I wanted to ask about, which was, okay, so
you've talked about sort of, you've talked about how you all met through like,
Palestinian Solidarity organizing, how that's one of the important things for why you all
are doing this.
But I wanted to, yeah, so if you can go into more detail about the specific things that
brought you to running for this.
Rosita, why don't you give a little bit of an account of your story of how you first about the specific things that brought you to running for this?
Rosita, why don't you give a little bit of an account of your story of how you first heard about Shift Change is like a thing, because I think that's kind of that. I think that would be fun.
So I first heard of Shift Change last year, and, you know, I was very apprehensive. I was like,
oh, wow, who's this new group that's coming in? And, you know, I was very apprehensive. I was like, oh, wow, who's this new group that's coming in?
And, you know, I kept I was hearing from my very own union
that, you know, there was a group out there that was challenging
and that maybe had gotten some things wrong.
And, you know, they they just, you know, needed to kind of be put aside.
And so I did join one of the calls.
There was an outreach call to kind of figure out whose
shift change is. And I thought it was pretty interesting. I thought, you know, here are some
very motivated union members who see that there's something that needs to change within our union,
which is part of what we do as organizers. We see that there may be something that needs to change,
even within our own union
and we as rank and file or we as union members should be able to have that voice to change it. And what I was seeing was that their voice was being really suppressed instead of saying, hey,
how can we move towards what you're asking and really come to a place where we can understand
where you're coming from? Instead it was, no, we're not going to listen to their voices.
We're not going to even engage with this group.
There's this rogue group out there that's causing all this ruckus, which makes me, I'm
somebody who loves and gravitates towards ruckus.
That's just my personality.
So it just made me more curious. And then, you know, when we started organizing for, you know, the Palestine Solidarity, John
came in and I was like, oh, wait, I think I know this guy.
Like, you know, he's one of those shift change guys.
And it just made me more curious.
And, you know, we've had great conversations.
And I really, really understand, you know, we've had great conversations and I really, really understand, you know,
the motivation and because of some things that have happened to me within our union
that has made me really recognize there are ways that we can make positive changes for
our union.
And as organizers, as nurses, we have to strive for those and we have to have the ability
to have our voices heard and to motivate each other
to make those changes because if we are the union,
then we should be able to change our union
towards what we want to see out of our union.
And that's probably the most important thing.
I was gonna say, Jahed, do you wanna talk a little bit
about your experience with the Minnesota Nurse Association strike in 2022
and then watching the nurses forward people?
Because I think that kind of ties in well.
Sorry, before we do that, we have to we have to do an ad break before
or I'm also going to get yelled at by bosses.
Ad break.
Hey, ads.
All right, we're back. We're back from ads. Hell, yeah. Let's do this. I thought my my two cents would be a good fit after what Rosita just said.
Everybody has their own unique experience and how they
became interested. I'm a member of Minnesota Nurses Association and we went on strike two
years ago to request and demand better contract with the Fairview system here in the Twin Cities area.
Eventually there was a contract and it was ratified.
After that there was a
election and even though I'm a member, I'm an active member, I serve on some committees with M&A
and recently I joined the Government Affairs Committee. You know, I haven't been really
engaged in the politics of the Union until a new slate, another troublemakers,
if you will, another group of troublemakers, you know, who called
themselves nurses forward, they ran against the current board and
actually they won. They won in a landslide last November and that was a huge change
and an inspiration for me really that rank and file nurses and they're all you know nurses working
the on the floors and I know some of them personally and I trusted these these guys knew what
they're talking about and they they were running on a platform that made sense
where all the rank-and-file nurses have a say and they are well-informed because there's a lot of
stuff that goes behind doors that nurses are not brevity to and that makes things
sound a little shady sometimes where unions are endorsing a politician and this politician kind
of drops the ball or does something that's not in the interest of the union and yet they're still
supporting them. We need to know why and how that came to be. So that kind of gave me an inspiration. And the moment John came and recruited me, if you will,
and I thought, sure, you know, if we can do,
affect some change in the local level,
I think it's time to change at the national level.
So we're hoping for the best here
and we're trying to do our best to get a good result.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
And I mean, that was something I remember from last time is
this this issue of transparency and this issue of the union acting.
I don't know if autonomously is the right word, but the union acting
just sort of doing stuff that
members were just like finding out about afterwards.
Yeah. And I, you know, I don't know.
I think like that's.
On a kind of basic
there's obviously a political level to it, but on just a sort of basic,
what is a union level?
You would think that your union wouldn't be doing that and yet, comma.
I was just going to comment on that.
I think one of the biggest parallels that I've been able to see is, you know, we spend
a lot of time as nurses fighting against the hospital industry, right?
It's the big boss, as we call it.
You know, we march on the boss or we, you know, we have, you know, rallies around it
or we do petitions and, you know, we're constantly fighting this big entity of the hospital industry,
which oftentimes keeps us in the dark about policies or about changes that they're making
or various things.
And I can't help but to see the parallels between our fight with the hospital industry
and then comes our fight with our own union. So how can we within our union change that so that we're not seeing both entities as
the same?
I don't want to be in a union that I also am feeling is the same entity that we are
fighting a bedside.
So that transparency for us is extremely important.
That autonomy, that accountability is extremely important because
why should we be having two parallel fights with our own union and with the hospital industry?
I was gonna say like that the um, that's what the what inspired us the first time around was that it felt like we were struggling both
against like
You you've got to fight against management. Why do I
have to also at the same time turn around and fight like with
union staff about basic stuff? That's like all they have to do
is like nurses are really smart. I know it's hard. Like it's a
shocking idea that nurses might know a thing or two. And the
idea that we that they have to come up in focus group
amongst themselves to tell us what our values are right like I think I can walk
around my unit and I can tell I can find out what nurses values are real fast I
mean we may not all agree on every single thing right there's a there's a
pretty wide amount of ideological alignment in our union.
We're not all in lockstep about everything,
except for how important it is that nurses
are actually leading and driving how the union works.
And so we have the main core thing
and I think this is what's so important
about union organizing in particular
is that you can set aside
disagreements on one thing and you focus on the thing that's the that's your can your shared material interest
Regardless because we all do the same kind of work. It's really important
Yeah, and that's and that yeah, but that also makes it doubly important that
the institution that you're using to do this is actually doing the things you want it to do and not fighting you at every step.
One of the things that you mentioned
while we were talking about this was how this kind of stuff in the union
was impacting Palestinian solidarity organizing.
I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that.
Oh, I can I can take that. Yeah, I can, I can take that. And then, and
Jihad can actually add into it. But so I was part of Social
Justice Committee. I was actually the chair for the
entire California for NNU. And one of the biggest things is,
you know, of course, we're speaking out for our
communities. We're speaking out for oppression, against oppression, and specifically for marginalized
communities.
So I thought it would be pretty easy for us to align ourselves with our resolutions that
we had just passed in actually October the 8th of 2020.
And I ran across a lot of barriers. I wanted our union, my union, to put out a
statement about a ceasefire and to put out a statement about how bombing hospitals and
killing our healthcare worker colleagues was wrong. And I was constantly, you know, barriers were put up.
I was told I could not do a vigil.
I could not initiate that.
I could not speak on behalf of me being a nurse.
And so that infuriated me.
I felt really, really betrayed by my union
that we had just signed all these resolutions
specifically talking about aggression,
talking about apartheid, and yet I was being told that I could not speak up.
And then I was ghosted on a few times.
I would start sending emails.
I was like, hey, what's going on?
How come I can't do this?
And there would be no answer.
Or I would say, hey, I want to do a vigil.
Nope, you can't do a vigil.
Nope, there's no signs that you can use.
Nope, nope, nope.
And so I just kept getting all these no answers. And a few of us got
together, we got a petition going, and we sent it in. We're like, hey look, these
are all the reasons why we as nurses feel that we should be speaking out
against what's happening right now. And this is even in the early times, even, you
know, really in, you know, the end of October, beginning of the next month.
And, you know, it took them a long time to get it out.
And it was a very middle of the road statement.
At that time, I had asked the union to sign on and endorse one of the largest
and one of the first union rallies in support of Palestine that had been
called by the Palestinian trade unions specifically for us to rally
around and they refused.
And on that morning, I submitted publicly my resignation to the racial social justice
committee.
I felt that it was an absolute dishonor for me to sit in that position and to be the face
of a committee that says it stands for social justice and
yet was putting up barriers for us to speak out as nurses.
And that really was a huge deal for me.
It was a huge deal for many other people that saw that as a gesture of solidarity.
But it was more.
It was about my ethics and it was about my moral standing. I could not legitimately sit in that position while my union was stifling and censoring
my voice.
It's a brief thing that you take a stab like that.
It's also it's the right thing to do.
And you should never have had to do this in the first place.
Like, Jesus Christ.
Oh, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know.
It's just deeply and incredibly frustrating, like just hearing.
Hearing that and watching them just like ignore
ignore the things that they ignore the resolution that they just passed.
And I don't know, that's absolutely terrible.
I hope they lose hypocrisy much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, if I may add to what you just said,, first of all, I have to say Rosita is the
bravest person I know and what her positions and her ethics are of the highest caliber.
So I'm honored to be running with her during this time.
From example here in Minnesota, nurses know, nurses, as part of the Government Affairs Committee,
I was involved in, I came kind of toward the end, so I can't take credit for it, but it
was the Keeping Nurses at the Bedside bill.
It was adopted, it passed the House.
Now in Minnesota, we have all three branches basically in the hands of Democrats.
It passed the House and the Senate, and yet the governor vetoed it.
Why?
Because there was pressure from corporate, you know, the big wigs told him, if you do
it, we're going to pull some investment or something, or I don't know, maybe we won't
have you on the board after you retire, something like that. So I don't know. maybe we won't have you on the board after you retire, something
like that.
So I don't know.
But that kind of triggered us.
It was really a stab in the back, if you will.
But it's still, you know, the union itself could do better.
It can be more sensitive to its members' needs and their demands.
For example, we were trying to get a resolution or a
statement that was back in October about a ceasefire here through the Union, even
though it's, I would say, inconsequential for them to say, but they even refused to
hear the suggestion or the movement to issue a statement. That was the old board. Toward the end of the reign
of the old board, there was more effort. I think it was mid-December and a weak, really
watered down resolution was adopted calling for ceasefire. The new board came and the first or second meeting in January, in February,
there was a much more robust resolution that was adapted at a much higher, you know, nays against
versus, yeas versus nays in that. There was no nays actually, there were some abstentions like three
that. There was no needs actually, there was some abstentions like three out of 14. So,
there is a movement, there's a grassroots rank-and-file nurses who are pushing toward change. The same thing, I'm also not only a nurse, but also a nursing faculty at Minnesota State University
in Mankato, and I belong to another union, the faculty union. In the very
beginning, there was just kind of deafening silence. Nobody wants to hear anything. It reminded me of
the period after 9-11. If you speak anything against the government or anything, you critique
what the government did or didn't do you are on the other side
You know remember that if you're not with us you are against us
Argument and it's the same thing was the same thing here
I know people who lost their jobs because they were speaking out for Palestine or against the
atrocities that these rays were committing and that's from within unions and healthcare organizations,
people who lost their livelihoods because of it,
and they are labeled as anti-Semitic or anything like that.
So they were trying to kind of silence people,
scare them with all these labels
and illegitimate ways of really conducting a civil discourse
or having someone hear a different point of view.
So, from that sprouted this huge movement
among nurses and healthcare professionals
that we want this to go wider,
even at the national level during the primaries,
where a lot of organizing was happening
for uncommitted votes for the primaries where a lot of organizing was happening for uncommitted votes for the primaries
for Joe Biden.
That made them feel the pressure.
As you can see, the US vetoed a ceasefire resolution, I think, three times before, and
yet this week they allowed one to pass because there is a lot of political pressure because
they are doing their own calculation, I understand, but it's still there is a grassroots movement
that affects this change.
I just want to tie in like to everything that we're saying around organizing, because I
think so much, a lot of people come to unions with the idea that this is how they, you know, you get a
chance to build a platform to make a case for the right policies, right?
And we, you know, we push things through legislation and lobbying.
And then for some reason, like the governor decides that they're not going to pass it.
You know, our union, like my part of the Union California Association National Nurses
Organizing Committee, this is Rosita's part two
Was at one point powerful like was so organized and so powerful that they forced the state of California
Which is one of the largest economies in the world
to pass a ratio bill that was you know that the
Arnold Schwarzenegger the the governor, after it was
passed that, you know, those little nurses, I can't believe we were letting them do this.
You know, our union at one point was powerful enough to help end Arnold Schwarzenegger's
political career.
And so when we talk about getting things passed, it requires a lot of power.
And a lot of people don't understand that power means
getting people together to commit to take collective action.
And that might mean occupying a capital.
That might mean doing things that are a little bit
outside the law, right?
But we understand that if we don't have the power,
then none of these idealistic things that we wanna have
see change in the world or happen in the world can happen.
And we've seen, we're talking about this idea of you're either with us against us or against us,
people who are advocating for building that power and that power comes through defending our contracts,
defending our coworkers through grievance fights, making sure that we are taking aggressive action
when it comes to strikes
and getting a strong contract language in the first place.
People who are advocating for that are being labeled
the enemy inside the union.
It's very difficult when you put so much of your time
and energy into union work,
which anyone who's a committed unionist can tell you
of all the countless amounts of their free time that they spend away from their family, away from
their friends, away from their kids, doing the work of making sure that the union is strong,
to be kind of accused of being not on the team, right? Or not being for everyone else,
not being a team player when you're always committed to building the
power of the team.
I mean, this is why we're running is because those of us who are making the case that we
need to be an organized union, we need a union full of people who know how to fight, how
to push back, how to stand up for those of us who might be weaker than others to be
labeled troublemakers or pains in the ass or they can call us anti-union or union busting,
which is really just hurts, right?
It's very stressful, but it's worth it to us because our principles and our commitment
to our coworkers and building a workplace that's a just place,
a place that takes care of all the people in our communities,
people who would otherwise be denied
the care that they deserve.
We know that we can only do that by being organized,
building relationships, and taking action together
as a union to fight.
And we know what that looks like.
We have members of Shift Change who
have been there when they've been occupying capital buildings, running politicians out
of office. I want our union to be, I tell everybody this, I want our union to be strong
and powerful. And I want it to be frightening to people who stand in the way of nurses and
our patients. And this is all connected. You know, what we see, you know, our government
willing to let happen to people halfway across the world. I always tell people, my coworkers,
you know, what we let our bosses get away with the least of us, they'll do to any of
us if they have the chance. And so all of us come from the point of view that we have
to build our power.
That power has to be honed through our fights at our work,
making sure that our working conditions are good
because we know when nurses have good working conditions,
patients get the care they need.
And when we're powerful and strong at the bedside,
we can be powerful and strong out in the community
where we need to take our fights
and we wanna make the world a better place for everybody.
You know, there, I don't think there's any coincidence that, you know, Rosita is, you
know, an indigenous woman.
Her family's from refugees, from American foreign policy abroad.
She had learned to be a nurse in Gaza.
Um, Sanyo's family is from the Dominican Republic.
Her family like fled, like a US backed dictator there, Trujillo.
And I don't think that there's any, to me, there's no, it's not a coincidence
that we're all here doing this work of building the kind of powerful union that
we know that all of our coworkers deserve, that our communities deserve,
the whole world deserves.
For troublemakers.
Hell yeah.
Someone smarter than me once said good trouble.
Didn't someone say once that they've been called MAGA supporters or something?
They were telling everybody that we were, you know, weird right wing Trumpy people. And I think
that anyone who knows any of us would know that that is absolutely the furthest from the truth.
But it is what it is. You know, people will say whatever they have to say to scare people away from us. Because that's easier than doing the right thing, which is to make sure that our union
is a bottom up movement led by nurses. They're very afraid of us doing getting our stuff
together because there's you know, there's always it's easier to get along with the boss
and it is to get along with your co-workers sometime.
I think anyone will tell you that as long as we all know people who are friends with the
boss because that's an easy thing to be.
It's hard to stick up for people who otherwise can't stick up for themselves.
Just in the, you know, for our elections.
So the fact that we're even running our union doesn't want everyone to know
about elections and the way that it's kind of we just give you the list that we're going to endorse
just vote for them and no questions asked that that's just how it should be. So the fact that
you know there's not a lot of information about the elections that go on in the NNU. What does
it mean? What does it mean to be in a council of presidents?
What does it even mean to be a delegate?
We are often spoon-fed the delegate position.
Just be a delegate and then not told exactly what that means.
What does that mean for us?
What does that mean in our resolutions?
What does that mean when we go to convention?
Those things should not be a mystery to us.
We shouldn't have to poke and prod to get that information about elections. And so that's also one of
the things that we're trying to highlight as well. We should be very informed. And I
think that's also another parallel between our US government who chooses, you know, they
kind of sometimes expect us not to go to the polls because it works in their favor, to not be informed voters because it works in their favor. So we can kind of see that same
parallel. And that's one of the things that, you know, I think John has made a great way of
highlighting that and has, has really essentially, you know, paved the way for making that information
known as well as Zinnia. Zinnia is, can I say this?
She's a full badass because she, she, her and John, like I have to say, like they are
so on it of getting that information out. And it's extremely important because we want
our nurses to be informed. We want all of us to be informed.
Yeah. So on that note, when is the election and if you're in the union, how do you vote?
Ballots go out on April 5th. We have to have you have to have your ballot in Oakland in the office
By May we're telling people May 17th because they're gonna be counted
The morning of May 18th. You will get if you are a member a dues paying member in good standing, you will get a ballot in the mail. But we are also telling people, because we are finding that there's kind of like
two lists of people, you know, in particularly our VA nurses, VA nurses are telling us that they have
not been getting ballots, they didn't get ballots last election. And so we're encouraging everyone to send emails to the election officers to get a ballot
if you haven't gotten one, to make sure that those lists, there's a list of people paying
dues, and they faithfully take your dues out of your check.
And then there's a list of people who receive ballots.
You know, definitely very normal and cool,
the sort of thing that we expect from any sort of union
that is, you know, buying for the nurses.
And so we have an election email.
Can I, does anyone have that off the top of their heads?
I will pull it up real quick as we were talking.
That's fine. We'll just, we'll just show notes.
Yes. Yeah, it we'll just show notes. Yes
Yeah, it will be in the description and in the meantime
You know people can go to our website. We have a website where you can read about our story our philosophy our
Platform, you know all the things that people should know and how to request a ballot and how to email the union and everything. The address is shift change nnu one word.org.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you three so much for coming on the show and hope you beat them.
I'm looking forward to us having a victory call where we can.
Yeah, I'm excited.
Thank you.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you.
We appreciate it.
Yeah.
And the, this has been a good out here.
Uh, you too also listen to your listener can go make trouble for your bosses,
your political leaders and people in your union, if they're not doing
what you want them to do.
Oh yeah.
Absolutely.
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It's up to us to collectively solve our own problems. I'm your guest host with all the dramatic metaphors Margaret Giljoy.
Today it's one of those things falling apart episodes. Today we're going to be
talking about the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction,
a research institute in Bloomington, Indiana. Its mission is to quote,
foster and promote a greater understanding of human sexuality
and relationships through research, outreach,
education, and historical preservation.
The Kinsey Institute in many ways
isn't just a sexual research center,
it's the sexual research center.
We're going to be talking to Dev Montanez
who last week gave me a tour of the center.
But first, being me, I want to give you all context. I'm going to talk about history.
I'm going to talk about a different Institute for Sexual Research called,
well, the Institute for Sexual Research. Except it was in Berlin from 1919 to
1933. So they called it the Institute for Sexual Wisdom Shaft.
History sometimes remembers it as Hirschfeld's Institute after Magnus
Hirschfeld, the director of it. For 14 years, the Institute researched human
sexuality. They offered consulting on matters of sex to straight and gay people.
They pioneered a ton of transsexual medical practices, including pushing for the shocking
at the time idea that trans people are happier if we're just allowed to socially transition
and live as our preferred gender, which they observed led to a dramatic drop in suicide
rates.
This is medical practice that has continued, and we have more and more research about that
to this day.
The Institute coined the terms transvestite and transsexual.
They performed the first gender confirmation surgery
in known history on a woman named Dora Richter in 1930.
They worked alongside pro-homosexual advocacy groups.
Germany led the Western world in acceptance of LGBT folks in the 1920s and early 1930s.
It was founded by three Jewish researchers, the most famous of whom is the director, Magnus Hirschfeld.
The Institute itself, however, is famous today for one thing.
Imagine a picture of a book burning.
The first picture that comes to your mind
is probably black and white, and it's of Nazis.
This photo is used anytime someone wants to say
something like, the Nazis are bad, they burned books.
What usually goes unsaid when this photo is reproduced
is what books those Nazis were burning.
They were burning the
Institute. On May 6th, 1933, Nazis burned around 20,000 books, destroying endless
amounts of research into homosexuality, transsexuality, and cross-dressing.
Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist of the Nazis, was present. He gave a
speech to 40,000 people during that book burning.
So ended the Institute for Sexual Research.
The first trans woman to undergo
gender confirmation surgery, Dora Richter.
She was either killed in this attack
or she was arrested and died in prison shortly thereafter.
Her exact fate is unknown.
Magnus himself was out of the country at
the time and he never returned. He died in exile in France. This, I believe, is the
context we need to hold on to when we talk about the Kinsey Institute, when we
talk about what they're facing today. As we watch people running for office in
this country wielding flamethrowers to burn books and campaign ads, while librarians
face criminal penalties for making books available to students.
Eventually, the Nazis were defeated, of course.
They were defeated through force of arms, after great loss of life, and a coming together
of ideological enemies like capitalists and authoritarian communists. Shortly thereafter, in 1947, a bisexual polyamorous sexologist named
Alfred Charles Kinsey founded his own Institute for Sex Research at Indiana
University in Bloomington, Indiana, 77 years ago for those keeping track.
Thereafter, he produced work that's foundational to modern sexology. Most
famous today is the Kinsey Scale, which broke homosexuality and heterosexuality
out of a binary.
Maybe the most famous at the time of his work though,
was his 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,
and his later book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,
which are often called the Kinsey Reports,
which offered groundbreaking analysis like,
it turns out women enjoy sex also.
And also that 37% of men had had quote, overt homosexual experience to orgasm,
which shocked the hell out of the world.
Well, it probably shocked about 67% of the world.
Since then, the Kinsey Institute has been one of the premier sexology research institutes and archives in the world. Since then, the Kinsey Institute has been one of the premier sexology research institutes
and archives in the world.
And now, in the 2020s, it finds itself at the center of a culture war and conservative
backlash.
For decades, the right wing has tried and failed to find evidence that Kinsey himself
was a pedophile.
Last February, the Republican government of Indiana voted for House Bill 1001, which
bars state money from funding the Institute. To tell us what's happened with that, what
the future of the Institute is likely to be, and how all this ties into the culture wars
that we're living through right now, we have Dev Montanez, the admin coordinator of the
Institute and a student
at Indiana University.
Hi Dev.
Hey.
Thanks for listening to my long intro.
It's good for me to, you know, know some of the history behind the place that I'm at
40 hours a week.
So could you introduce yourself about a little bit about the work that you do at the Institute
and I don't know maybe what brought you there but just you know.
So I started back in early 2022 as kind of the person who was spearheading the 75th anniversary celebrations that we were going to have.
Mm-hmm.
And I am lucky enough that I have a background in DIY punk.
And so my organization skills are largely from that and not from any type of institution.
Somehow those skills go over really well in academia.
Okay.
A few of my friends that are like post-docs and stuff that are now in academic worlds
are like, oh yeah, this has helped me.
Running shows has really helped me run research projects.
Oh yeah, because it's all about having your own initiative and working with people.
Yeah, exactly.
How interesting.
Yeah, it's been great to see and kind of be in the middle of it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was originally at Rutgers and then I finished my degree there,
dropped out because of financial issues, of course,
as that's what happens when you're in college.
And I was in Bloomington for a long time,
almost seven years, I want to say, before I started working here.
And I started working here and I was like, well, I get like a little bit of tuition reimbursement for working here.
I might as well finish it.
So now I'm at the purpose of or at the at the standstill of my life where I am back in school and working
full time.
Yeah.
Mainly just to get it over with.
Get working full time over with?
Uh, no, well, I wish.
Get the degree over with so that if I have the debt, I might as well have it.
Yeah.
So, okay, so you work for the Kinsey Institute and the Kinsey Institute is totally
fine and on solid footing and is completely, okay, so this is the thing that surprised
me. You know, when I came and visited the Kinsey Institute and thank you for the tour
of the Institute, I, the Kinsey Institute is such a institute, such a monolith, such a thing that has existed for so long.
It's hard for me to imagine people being really mad at it.
It's hard for me to imagine that it's in trouble.
And it seems too big to fail, but not too big, but too institutional, too important.
I can't imagine someone saying, oh we want to get
rid of this incredibly important historical thing. I guess that's what a lot of the culture
wars actually are about. So what's going on?
Okay, so last summer, it was like the budget vote, I think, for Indiana government, state government, and they,
someone, Larissa Sweet is her name, the representative who proposed this, basically
decided to say, Kinsey Institute is perverts, and you, we shouldn't fund them with state money.
perverts and you, we shouldn't fund them with state money, which would, you know, under, I guess understandable, but we're not funded by state money.
Okay.
Only like a small percentage of the university as a whole is funded by state government money.
So it's not quite like your tax dollars are paying for us to exist.
We are able to utilize the services of the university, which is very helpful in the case
of being, if we were like a nonprofit, we'd probably have to do a lot of that work, like
legwork in terms of like, upkeep of a building.
Like, we'd have to do that on our own.
But the university, the state government does not fund us.
We're funded by donors, we're funded by grants that we receive
and endowments that exist that other people have given us
because they believe in the work that we do
and they want to see it continue.
So why are they trying to go after the wrong source of your funding and how does it end
up impacting you?
Like, that they've passed this, you know, essentially law to take money away from you
that you weren't using.
Yeah. So the big thing is that there is a lot of misinformation about Alfred Kinsey
and his first book, the human behavior of those, sorry, the sexual behavior of the human
male. And there is a table within it of Dr. Kinsey. When he did his research, he interviewed people specifically to ask them,
when were you first realizing your sexual arousal?
And some people said, I was this age, I was 12, I was five.
And as a child, you know that you play around with your body
cause you're learning it.
Right.
Because you've never used most of these things before. It's brand new.
And so he had years in there, or ages in there that were younger than anyone that is conservative would want to believe that you would be sexually aroused.
Right. Unless you were going to marry a heterosexually into a pastor.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Child marriage is coming back.
So there's that too.
Yeah.
So there's that that exists.
It's a lot of people who don't understand the research that he does, period.
There was a lot of backlash when he did his work
because people didn't want
to believe that anyone was having premarital sex, that anyone was homosexual and it was
normal or that anyone, any woman enjoys sex because it's for one thing only.
Right.
So, they looked at this chart that said five-year-olds experience sexual attraction and said he's
interviewing five-year-olds.
Is that...
Basically, or rather that he was doing experiments on five-year-olds.
They think that his work is like physical because he is a zoologist, and a biologist by nature.
And I'm gonna guess they think that any research that you do
has to be with a person in one room
and not, you know, social interviews or oral historiography
is like, they don't put those two things together.
Right.
And I was reading that they have a lot of,
I was expecting when I looked at this,
I was expecting to find like op-eds from the 50s or something,
but I'm finding things from 2023 of people throwing a fit about the fact that he, during some of this, he did like,
I mean he was kinky it seemed like, right? He like filmed himself fucking and he filmed his wife fucking and he a bunch of consenting adults had
some sex that he was around for and that's like meant to mean that he is a
horrible weird monster. Yeah and truly none of my work has anything to do with
or literally anyone's work has anything to do with what Kinsey might have done
when he was here because he died.
So like within eight years of the Institute even being a thing.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
He just it's not important to the work that we do now.
Even if he was a kinky person, like people that get into sex research are interested in sex.
So he wanted to try stuff out, I guess.
Yeah.
But like, who doesn't?
That's like the point of being alive.
No, no, actually the point of being alive
is buying goods and services from our advertisers.
I don't know if you knew this.
I think you thought it was about seeking joy,
but it's actually about filling the gaping mall at the center of your life with products
like these ones.
And we're back.
Okay, so obviously people have a problem with this man who's been dead since the 50s and
therefore are mad at this institute that keeps track of a lot of stuff over the years like
an archive.
What are they, when they try to pull state funding from you, how does that impact you?
You were saying that that's like not, you know, is it, does it primarily impact you
because everyone's suddenly aware of and mad at you again?
Or does it actually also like, is it going to cut your funding?
Like what's happening?
So what's happening is there's now a, I want to say like a disagreement, but there's, there's
a, there's people trying to figure out how to be compliant with this law, which means that they need to go into certain administrative burdens to prove that we don't get these funds.
Okay.
That's really all that it is. Otherwise, we are pretty good standing. It's more's more so at least now. The Board of
Trustees voted on Friday. And they basically brought in the
president's recommendation of do not separate us from the from
the university. And so that happened on Friday. March 1. Okay,
was the day that that went through. So we are all feeling pretty good. We all kind of had a
little bit of a, not so much a victory lap, but like a... we've been carrying this for the last
six months of worrying about what's going to happen to this place that we all love and that
carries so many things because the librarians who are around in
the archivists who are around aren't the people handling the collection and the legislature
later decides IU and university can't hold anything that is obscene and obscene is you
know eye of the beholder. Yeah. It could easily mean that this like 600,000 artifacts that we hold in our collections
are gone and we have stuff that spans 2,000 years.
It's not just items that are around today and everything that we get is donated.
We don't buy any of the items per se. People just mail them to us.
The kind of things that normally if you mail to someone you might get in trouble.
Yes, exactly. And that was kind of the people still think they're going to get in trouble.
Yeah.
Kind of the point. Like I've heard that people have like shipped porn in cereal boxes as a way to like hide them
because they're still worried that the Comstock law is around in a way that will
make these items be destroyed.
Yeah. Well, okay.
Oh, there's so many parts of this that I want to talk about.
I actually thought about this because I mailed a book from the Kinsey Institute to someone last week and as I was
packaging it up I was thinking to myself this used to be a crime. The
Comstock laws for anyone who's curious there was this historical pervert named
Comstock and I by that I mean he was the largest collector of porn of his era who
was on a wild crusade against perversion
and birth control and all of these things.
And he went around and stopped people.
He got all these laws passed that you can't pass pornographic materials through the U.S.
mail.
That was like his big contribution to society besides ruining an awful lot of people's lives. And that's coming up again,
like the ghost of the Comstock laws.
Do you wanna talk about that?
Yeah, so we have book bands happening within libraries.
I honestly am not positive what is happening
within Indiana libraries, but there is a group of, let's say, parent groups,
but I don't even know that they're actually still parents of children. It's usually like women in
their mid-50s and later who are running for superintendent or the school board, whatever.
And now coming up with these ways that children can't interact with
items that maybe have never been illegal in the past, so to speak. Like, if any book mentions
sex of any kind, it can't be around. If anyone is a homosexual in any of the books,
it's banned in their eyes.
Yeah.
And, you know, a majority of our books
are a lot of those things.
I'm sure there's some straight stuff in there
if you look really hard.
Well, today I was in the reading room that we have
and we had out the,
it was called the like wild edibles
of the Eastern North America.
And it was a book written by Alfred Kinsey
because he was like an Eagle Scout.
Yeah.
Like loved nature.
He was one of the first Eagle Scouts actually.
Yeah.
You know more about him than I do.
I just read about him in order to prepare this introduction.
But a lot of those groups like Moms for Liberty, they're the ones who are like a big crusade
right now.
When I first started, we just got a statue installed behind our building of Alfred Kinsey.
And that is kind of when the majority of the threats
that we would get started.
When they started talking about this statue,
I have talked to people that have worked here
for like 20 years and they have said they've never seen
threats come in like this ever before.
Yeah.
So it's people talking about like bombing the statue.
I get calls about, you know, being a sexual predator or a deviant or, you know,
you guys should all die and it's very directed at us.
Right.
It's less of being directed at like a random abstract thing.
Right.
We have gotten a lot of harassment in terms of like people who because they think, oh,
you do sex research so you want a picture of my dick.
So interesting.
Yeah.
So that will happen at times.
You all should do an exhibit of the dick pics that have been donated so kindly to your institution and the individuals
who work for it.
It's like a rating system underneath.
I'm sure our curator Rebecca Passman will love that.
We actually just got in, donated to us was the Cynthia Plastercasters, her dick molds that she did of the, in the 80s,
she's like a famous groupie of like rock stars. So we have like Jimi Hendrix penis, you know,
bronze mold. And that's the next big exhibition that's supposed to happen. But we also have like
Jello Bayafra, which is hilarious. Would you would you all get never mind I was thinking about how you all can make some money
Lots of people are thinking yeah, okay
Huh well
No, it's okay. So it's so interesting to me right because it seems like their attempt to shut you down
Legislatively was a swing and a miss right? interesting to me, right, because it seems like their attempt to shut you down legislatively
was a swing and a miss, right? It was this thing that they thought that they had this
thing that they're like, ha ha, we're going to get those perverts by cutting off their
funding. And then everyone was like, well, that's not where the funding comes from. And
the university was like, we kind of like this place. It's been around for 77 years. It's
literally the only reason anyone outside of Indiana has ever heard of us.
Yeah. Is that kind of a... That's definitely the vibe. We had like a series of listening sessions
with the higher administration of like the public, well the university public coming in.
And just basically a lot of them saying, the Kinsey Institute is the only reason why I came to IU.
of them saying the Kinsey Institute is the only reason why I came to IU. The fact that this is here
allows me to do my research, even if their research is in like Eastern European, you know, like Fabergé eggs. Right. So it gives people a chance to see that like academic freedom and like
freedom to research what you want is possible and not just possible
but encouraged.
As an R1 university, we should be doing, we should be researching things that aren't or
taboo at times and are actually trying to help the world rather than making money for
some investor somewhere.
Right.
No, because that seems like the entire point of academia, right? Academia...
Okay, this is really interesting to me because I have kind of a bit of a love-hate relationship with academia,
and you know, there's a lot of critiques that can be laid at sort of ivory tower and locking away information and things.
But yet, as we enter this sort of anti-intellectual time, that is absolutely a right-wing culture
war thing is to be anti-intellectual and in this case specifically shut down the academy's
ability to preserve and transfer knowledge.
The problem from my point of view is when there are limits to how well the information can be transferred,
rather than the right-wing anti-intellectualism, well, anti-intellectualism broadly, I'm not trying to make a case for any other kind of it,
is a problem with the actual existence of this knowledge, right? It's this like forbidden knowledge that no one should know that 37%
of men in the 1940s like got it handy, you know?
Exactly. The weird thing is that our collections are literally open to anyone who wants to
come. We don't mean to test it in any way. Well, yeah, that happens often.
Which to me is great and is hard to come across in any archive.
Usually, if you have an archive,
you need to have an affiliation with
a university or a company in order to come and look at some of these things.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
That's not to say that like anyone comes in
and they are doing lewd things.
Like we talk with everyone that comes in.
Right.
There's no mystery happening really.
Okay.
There's no sex dungeon
that people always think.
I was a little disappointed.
Yeah, it's really boring.
It's just a beige hallway for the most part.
But you know what isn't boring that I have to interject quickly is supporting, like I'm
never bored while I'm in the process of exchanging little pictures of dead people
for products and services like the ones that support this podcast.
And we're back.
And I feel really guilty for literally cutting you off mid-sentence in order to do that. I'm so sorry.
It's okay. It's weird to be on the other side of this to actually see you do that.
One of the big things that happened when I first started was Bloomington has a big pride.
Bloomington as a whole is what they call like a blue pocket
in the rest of the red, the sea of red of Indiana. But I've also heard people say like, you know, like, Indiana went to Obama in 2008. Like the it's not as red as people really think
it is. Right. It's that like it just came out today that we're like the 50th in voter turnout.
Whoa.
That's bad.
That's really bad.
That's impressive.
But yeah.
Yeah.
But people are so disheartened.
Like it feels, it's really hard when these people are yelling about how conservative
Indiana is constantly that it gets in everyone's head that oh
it doesn't matter that what I do which I love hate yeah I love hate relationship
voting but right I also understand that like I kind of need to in this capacity
of where I am right because it really can change on a dime. Right. I think my personal representative, he was elected by like 11 votes.
And he is a horrible, horrible man.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I can't stop when I get his fucking mailers that just say some dumb shit about
trans laws and I just go, I can't with this.
Yeah. I get pissed.
Yeah.
Because everyone that I'm-
Does he wear a cowboy hat in his mailers?
No, but he looks like he should.
All of my mailers get those.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, that makes sense.
There's no cowboys where I live.
It's the mountains.
Take off the cowboy hat and put on a Realtree baseball cap like everyone else in this town.
Poser.
Okay, sorry.
Anyway, uh. Anyway.
So a lot of what's going on is that people think
that Indiana is super right-wing.
And as someone who came here from the East coast,
like I love it here.
Like it's really beautiful in Indiana.
Yeah.
I like not being around a lot of people.
Bloomington says that it's a really small town, but it really is like 80,000 people
when the students aren't here, which is still to me a lot of people.
Yeah.
But it is small comparatively to anywhere on the East Coast.
Right.
But everyone I've met here, I will say there's great organizers that live here. There's a great amount of community and just like building of coalitions between
people that I haven't really seen elsewhere.
Okay.
Which is really important.
And it's not just through the university, which I think is most people think it's
all here, but there's so many people
outside of the university that do amazing work that maybe came here to go to school, but ended
up staying or just came here because this used to be like the folk punk capital. That's true.
That is whatever. When I was going to Bloomington, that is what everyone asked. No one asked me about the Kinsey Institute.
Everyone asked me about folk punk.
Yeah.
My interests align more to the Kinsey Institute person.
No one get mad at me.
Well, okay.
So what's interesting here is so in my mind, you're like, Oh, okay.
The right wing came for the Kinsey Institute and they just failed.
Right.
And is that missing the fact that you had a lot of organizers and a lot of people working
to defend the Kinsley Institute? I think so. I wouldn't even say that it was a
failure. It was more of they really don't understand what we do and even how these
institutions work. I think is the real thing is that they they are so
caught up in how things should work. They don't actually look into how like neoliberalism is
everywhere. And it is I don't think they understand what that is, and how much it's infected, how bureaucratic everything is
and how everything is interconnected constantly.
So that's why they thought tax money would be the thing,
but it's actually this complicated capitalist system.
Yes.
Okay.
I mean, maybe if they listened to some other people
and they're talking about capitalism,
they would probably get more, you know,
more people to come behind them.
But for the most part,
the folks who are loud and proud about that,
they don't know what we do.
They don't know who we are either.
They think they do.
Good, since they're trying to murder you.
Yeah, the director got doxed the first year I was here. That was fun.
Yeah, that's fun.
And there was a protest with some three percenters on campus.
And we work very closely with Bloomington Pride a lot of the time.
And so there's always the worry of people showing up there.
Yeah.
But again, like I said, like everyone here is,
there's so many good organizers
that they've kept this town safe for so long.
And I think they'll continue to do that.
That's cool. I like when we learn
and when we reinforce the fact that
the thing that keeps us safe is organizing
and is like community organizing
and getting people together to keep track
of what's going on and counter it.
Yeah.
One of the big things that we focus on
in terms of like our research goals is wellbeing.
And that's always something that like has stuck with me
because to me the wellbeing is us keeping each other safe.
And I remember when this all first happened,
I remember talking to the director and just being like,
those people aren't gonna help us,
we are gonna help each other.
And I was like, oh yeah, you're right, we are.
It's like, yeah, we're not,
like we kind of can't count on everyone else sometimes.
These big institutions, because we know what we're doing, but they maybe don't know what we're doing but they maybe
don't know what we're doing and maybe it's time that we just tell more people
about it. I like that I also like that it specifically points out that they did
write by hiring a DIY punk into their institution you know. I yeah I get a lot
of weird flack for not being an academic. Right.
But then it comes to things like this and it's like,
oh, I always hear like, well, we made the right choice.
Yeah.
Which is nice to feel, unfortunately, in a job.
Yeah, no, that makes some sense.
If people want to support you all as individuals who are facing this trouble or
the Kinsey Institute in general, or even just like if you have advice for people who are
stuck engaging in the culture war more directly because they don't live on the coasts, what
would you say?
How can people support?
To support each other, we have a nice queer sports league here, and I suggest playing
kickball with your friends.
It's been really good.
And also doing a honky tonk night.
That's our big thing.
I'm really proud of everyone that has put that stuff together because it has created
a world that brings people from all different parts
together of the town. For the Institute, if you want to go to KinseyInstitute.org,
that is kind of where you can see everything. You can support us by coming and learning more about
sexual research and your history, because it's all of our history in terms of learning about
how people lived and how,
we have like the most mundane things.
Yeah.
We talked about Hirschfeld earlier,
we have a scrapbook of his,
and that is like the oldest thing of his,
that is like his personal item that we have.
Yeah.
Along with like published items, but that's like the big thing.
Yeah.
He was almost 50 when he started the Institute, I think.
I'm like kind of doing the math in my head really quickly because he was born in the
19th century.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking about this stuff.
I'm so glad that this didn't,
when we first talked about this,
we didn't know which way the vote was gonna go.
I'm glad to do a little bit of a celebratory talk
about this important institution.
And yeah, thank you so much.
Thank you.
And if you wanna hear me more, I have a different podcast.
It's Cool People Did Cool Stuff.
And it's also on Cool Zone Media, which is the thing you're listening to right now.
I hope you all are doing as well as you can with everything that's going on and putting
each other back together again because we're all...
No, I'm not even going to close with a Humpty Dumpty metaphor.
I'm not even going to close with a Humpty Dumpty metaphor. I'm just done. Humpty Dumpty Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
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I found out when my dad was gay when I was 10,
we were in a convertible on the 405 freeway,
listening to the B-52s.
And looking back, I should have said, this is gay.
This is already all gay.
Listen to Finally a Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Imagine you ask two people the same exact set of seven questions. I'm Minnie Driver,
and this was the idea I set out to explore in my podcast, Minnie Questions. This year
we bring a whole new group of guests to answer the same seven questions, including actress and star of the mega hit sitcom Friends,
Courtney Cox.
You can't go around it, so you just go through it. This is a roadblock. It's going to catch
you down the road. Go through it. Deal with it.
Comedian, writer and star of the series, Catastrophe, Rob Delaney.
I shouldn't feel guilty about my son's death.
He died of a brain tumor.
It's part of what happens when your kid dies.
Intellectually, you'll understand that it's not your fault,
but you'll still feel guilty.
Old rock icon, Liz Fair.
That personal disaster wrote Guyville.
So everything comes out of a dead end.
And many, many more.
Join me on season three of Mini Questions
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Seven questions, limitless answers.
Welcome to Good Appen here.
I'm Andrew Sage of the YouTube channel Andrewism.
I have been digging into political cults lately, drawn from the work of Dennis Turish and Tim
Walforth in their book On the Edge, Political Cults Left and Right.
I've spoken before about the cult recruitment process, the contradictory positions held
by cult members, ideological totalism, and the commonalities of political cults, including
rigid belief systems, immunity to falsification, authoritarianism, arbitrary leadership, deification
of leaders, intense activism, and the use of loaded language.
If you want the details on all that, you can check out the first episode in the Political
Cult series, or you can check out my video on the topic, or you can pick
up the book on Political Cult yourself, as I said, on the edge, Political Cult's left
and right.
Previously, I've touched on the LaRouche Movement and the United Red Army of Japan.
Today we'll be looking at another case study, this time of the various groups associated
with Fred Newman, who fused politics seamlessly
with psychotherapy. Today I'm joined by...
Oh, this is my cue. Oh no, I've been waiting for my cue and I missed it. It's Mia Wong,
Mr. Of Cues, sometimes host of this podcast. I don't... This guy's name sounds really familiar,
but I cannot remember what he was up to, so
I'm very excited.
Yeah, he has some interesting connections.
Very interesting connections.
If people want to learn more about him, they can of course pick up the book, or they can
check out Terror, Love, and Brainwashing, Attachment and Cult in Totalitarian Systems
by Alexandra Stein.
But anyway, let's get into it.
Fred Newman was a Korean War veteran who earned a PhD in the philosophy of science from Stanford
University.
With no formal training in psychology, Newman took a turn towards Maoism in the mid-1960s,
as one is apt to do in the mid-1960s, as one is apt to do in the mid-1960s.
In a time when the mantra, the personal is political, was coming into prominence, there
was a greater interest in fusing personal development and political action.
So that era birthed new psychotherapies catering to a mass market that sought both happiness
and social justice.
Psychotherapy became something like a secular religion, which of course opened it up to
charlatans who would propagate their innovative therapies and gain a following without actually
testing or without any scrutiny of the effectiveness of their ideas.
By 1970, Newman assembled a small collective in Manhattan, sharing an apartment on the
Upper West Side.
By this time, post the collapse of the Students for a Democratic Society in the broader New Left,
and coinciding with the fervor of the Cultural Revolution, people were looking for a new
direction. In a time when the psychotherapy bubble was growing, Newman, as another of those charismatic therapists,
would attract a group of individuals who were yearning for hope.
Newman's collective was first named IF...then, and it was indeed a fusion of radical 60s politics
and the new age therapy of the 70s. Newman's concept of social therapy, or crisis normalization, blurred the lines between therapy
and political activities, and the group would give rise to the Centers for Change, the CFC,
by 1973, which proudly identified itself as a Marxist-Leninist Maoist organization.
The communal roots of Newman's group cast a cult-like aura from its inception.
Core members were expected to leave their jobs, sell their possessions, and sustain
themselves through activities like fundraising on street corners while embracing shared living
spaces within the group.
Now buckle up for a bit of a crossover episode here because from 1973 to 1974, Newman crossed
paths with Lyndon LaRouche.
Oh God, of course.
Of course he did.
Mind you, he links up with LaRouche just after LaRouche had completed Operation Mop-Up.
So he was just attacking his enemies on the left and started shifting rightward, if
you use those terms, and Newman is like, yeah, this is my guy, this is who I wanna link up
with. So their collaboration formed the United Front, comprising of LaRouche's National
Caucus of Labour Committees, the NCLC, Newman's Centre for Change, and a third group led by Eugenio Parenti Ramos, which
later transformed into the Communist Party USA Provisional.
Which, I have to note, is distinct from the Communist Party USA that most people know
about.
Yeah, I think, I'm pretty sure there's another, I'm pretty sure it's also distinct from
the Communist Party USA Revolutionary Committee
and also the Communist Party USA Provisional Committee.
I think those are, if I'm remembering correctly, those are all separate organizations.
Yes, yes they are.
Yeah, Perente's group is actually connected with the National Labor Federation.
So anyway, these joint forums were established and activities were coordinated
among these groups. By 1974, in fact, the Centre for Change disbanded and Newman and his followers
merged into the NCLC. There was a convergence between LaRouche and Newman and their perspectives
of leadership, cadre formation, and the manipulation of membership,
as LaRouche's apocalypse, Fairmongering, and elitism would merge very well with Newman's
use of psychotherapy.
Of course, and you learn this quickly with cult leaders, they don't get along well
for long with other cult leaders, so the fusion with LaRouche led to inevitable clashes.
While within the NCLC, the Newman Group continued its operation, and tensions eventually reached
a breaking point.
Later, in August 1974, Newman and his 38 followers left the NCLC to establish the International
Workers' Party, or IWP, which he declared was the vanguard of the working class.
Oh, I love the 70s! Indeed. Still, Newman's association with LaRouche had a big impact
on his thinking and future development. He aligned with a lot of LaRouche's ideologies,
and was just as dismissive of various left movements.
Even though they split, they still shared a disdain for common citizens, their group's
members, and the principles of a free society.
Yet despite dismissing most left movements and saying that liberalism is fascism, Newman
would occasionally dip his toes into democratic primaries, infiltrate existing leftist organizations, and utilize
prominent Black leaders to advance his own objectives. But I realize I haven't fully
explained the focus of Newman's ideology. In most cases, cult leaders' ideologies ultimately hinge
on Follow Me and The Best, but they have their unique quirks here and there as well. Lucky for us, Newman published a book on his ideas the same year he parted with LaRouche
in 1974.
So the book was called Power and Authority, and he basically cooked up a theory about
the mind and society that became the gospel for his cult and the ultimate manual for keeping
his followers in check.
According to Newman, revolution wasn't just about overthrowing the bourgeoisie,
you also had to overthrow the bourgeoisie ego inside people's minds.
Oh god!
So in a sense, we cook in, you know, because you do have to sort of undo that brainwashing
that you get in a capitalist society. I mean, there's nothing wrong there necessarily.
But you see, he was taking cues from Marx, Lenin, and LaRouche,
and his solution involved something called the proletarian psychotherapy, where the workers
of the mind took down the rulers of the mind through therapy sessions that would attack
the bourgeois ego. Of course, he would be the one leading the therapy, because he hated
Freudian and other psychotherapies as just boosting
the bourgeois ego, and he especially hated that regular therapy is aimed to cut the emotional
umbilical cord with the therapist and restore a healthy independent ego, when his social
therapy meant to build up a forever dependent proletarian ego that would only wither away
when the proletarian ego that would only wither away when the proletarian state
withers away.
So basically never.
Newman's doctrines worked for his purposes though.
His followers were stuck in this loop of dependency for over 25 years.
He had an additional component to his control mechanisms though.
He developed a concept called friendosexuality.
So in his organizations, casual sexual relationships were arranged, where a designated
friend that you also had sex with monitored and critiqued individuals to maintain control.
If pregnancies ever arose, they were usually told to get abortions.
And as for Nguyen himself, his inner circle was referred to as his harem or his wives.
And they served as both trusted lieutenants in the administration and trusted lieutenants in the bedroom, if you dig. Yeah. So, yeah.
Now let's get into a little segment that we can call
Newman and the FBI sitting in a tree.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
Because after the IWP was formed
and briefly flirted with Marlene Dixon's Democratic Workers
Party, which was another cult, Newman ended up contacting the FBI.
By the way, we are still in 1974.
Very eventful year.
So what happened was, a guy named Jim Rutherford bailed on Newman's cult and took the child
that was probably conceived in the cult with him.
But you see the child's mother, Anne Green, stayed in the cult and she wanted her child
back, so Newman recruited two cult members that were also lawyers to get the FBI involved
in finding Rutherford and the child.
So the dial up of the FBI set up a meeting between Green and the agents and then Green
spilled the tea that Rutherford used to roll with the Weather Underground and also had
connection to the fugitive named Jane Alpert.
Pass forward to 1976, and Newman's IWP gets exposed by a splinter group for working with
the FBI, but instead of denying it, Newman pins the blame on Anne Green and the two lawyers
and basically pretends that they acted on their own without his direction.
Oh my god.
Because obviously the man's only looking out for himself.
So that was a fun little aside, right?
A little collaboration with the FBI.
Yeah, and it's like, if you're going to be a snitch, at least have like, at least have
the basic decency and self-respect to admit that you were the snitch and not blame me
on someone else.
No, but a cult leader wouldn't have to do that you were the snitch and not blame me on someone else?
No, but a cult leader wouldn't have to do that though.
No, ah, terrible stuff.
Carrying on chronologically, in 1977, Fred Newman shifted his focus to the political
scene of New York City's Upper West Side, and basically rebranded his group as the New
York City Unemployed and Welfare Council.
At this point, he abandoned the idea of an open vanguard formation, and instead, while
recruiting through therapy, gained political influence within other groups
and formed broad and ill-defined front organisations that could pursue the cult's goals without
too much heat on himself.
Newman was actually able to get one of his cult members elected on the local school board,
and that led to some liberals digging into Newman's background in group dynamics, where
they found that indeed he was running a therapy cult where they relinquished jobs, severed political
ties, and surrendered all property and savings to the cult.
Cut off from the outside world, busy with group activities, and trapped in endless meetings,
the Newmanites lacked feedback from reality, which kept them in line.
So Newman's electoral victory in the form
of the school board member of his own cult gave him a taste for electoral activism.
So when he crossed paths with black nationalist Lenora Flanney, together they formed the
New Alliance Party or NAP in 1979. I'll just call it the NAP, right?
I feel like we need to start like a party
counter when we're at like four, five already.
Yeah.
Yeah.
IWP, the NAP, yeah.
Communist Party, Provisional, yeah.
Flanney ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1982 and in 1988.
And ran for President, becoming the first black woman to do so, gaining ballot status
in all 50 states and receiving nearly $1 million in federal matching funds.
She ran again in 1992 and again qualified for ballot status in all 50 states, this time receiving
$2 million in federal matching funds. And she secured a whopping 73,708 votes.
That's always the depressing thing with these like the vanity electoral campaigns is seeing
how much money they spent getting like seven votes. Yeah, but I mean, you'll never guess where this money was going.
Oh no.
In the background, Newman's financial maneuvers seem to be funneling a lot of the party's
funds into other organizations affiliated with Newman.
Lauren Redwood, a working class lesbian, actually shared her experiences working under the NAP
in a letter to a gay newspaper in San Francisco.
I won't read the whole thing, but she basically talks about how she was excited to help a
black woman run for president, and she even found a lover while working on the campaign
in Indiana.
But quote, when it came time for NAP to leave Indiana, she,
I'm assuming the lover, asked me to go with them, and I did. I was given 48 hours to prepare.
I quit my job, left my home, my friends, put my belongings in storage, found a home for my pet,
and gave the use of my car to NAP in exchange for their taking over the payments.
As a working class lesbian, I thought I had finally found a political movement which included
me.
What I found instead was an oppressive, disempowering, misogynistic organization.
All my decisions were made for me by someone else.
I was told where to go and who to go with.
I worked 7 days a week, 16-20 hours a day.
I had 2 days off in two and a half months. There was an
incredible urgency which overrode any personal needs or considerations, an urgency that meant
complete self-sacrifice. I felt totally powerless over my life, forced into a very submissive role
where all control of my life belonged to someone else. I had given up everything for the campaign. My job,
my home, and my support system. I felt desperate." And then later in the letter, she said that,
"...I was completely exhausted, so tired I was unable to work well. Being unable to work,
I had no income, as I was expected to raise my salary myself, in addition to raising money
for the campaign." And she also spoke about losing herself in this social therapy thing that Newman was
doing as a lot of independent thought was discouraged.
This was Newman's whole MO.
You know, manipulating individual distress to transform members into political activists
under total control.
Replacing the traditional support structures that people would have been coming from with
the cult as a new family.
And despite some claims of dissolution, the evidence suggested that the International
Workers' Party continued to exist even as the NAP was in existence, as members divested
assets and funding towards the IWB the whole time.
Now it's quite interesting to learn the justification for why Newman picked
Lenora Fulani in particular, and then we'd also link up later with some of the
people that I'm about to talk about.
So you're familiar with Antonio Gramsci, right?
Yeah.
He introduced the concept of the Organic Intellectual, suggesting that each social class naturally
produces a stratum capable of projecting its historic mission and hegemony.
On the flip side, Lenin, in his What Is To Be Done manifesto envisioned a vanguard of
professional revolutionaries from the intellectual elite to bring socialism to the working class.
Newman was influenced by both concepts, and considered his core group to be a vanguard
mainly composed of white, middle-class, traditional intellectuals, often working as therapists
for Numenite fronts.
But here's the twist.
He borrowed Gramsci's Organic Leaders term, and connected it with people of color that
had organic bases of support in their communities, and would use them to advance the interests
of his secretive white vanguard.
Ah, the PSL.
Hahaha, indeed.
So that's why Newman would create his own version of the Rainbow Coalition with his
Rainbow Assembly, and also would engage with people like Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton,
and others.
Oh, yeah. However, and political incoherence goes brrr, he'd also link up with vague populist movements
like Ross Perot's Reform Party, who he'd worked to register voters for, and in an effort
to gain more voters for the right-winger Ross Perot's Reform Party, Newman and Fullani
would encourage the Patriotic Party and the Independent Party of New York
to link up with Peru.
And then in 1999, the Newmanites threw their support behind the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan's
presidential campaign.
So in addition to his political activities, Fred Newman wore many hats.
He considered himself a playwright and served as the artistic director of the Castillo Theatre.
He also directed training at the Eastside Institute for Short-Term Psychotherapy, authored
books featured at the Castillo Bookstore, and operated social therapy centres in various
cities, describing them as a unique development community.
Despite the deprivations imposed on his followers, as you can imagine, Newman lived quite comfortably.
In 1993, he bought a substantial Greenwich Village brownstone for nearly a million dollars.
I mean, who says a cult of revolution and therapy can't be profitable, right? Right. I keep thinking about that.
Oh, God, I forget which of the the Nepali Maoist parties it was.
But one of one of one of the guys who was the head of one of the the Nepalese Maoist parties who'd been like fighting a guerrilla war for a long time.
The end of it was he moved into the house of the guy,
the mansion of the guy who'd been like Nepal's chief security minister.
That's why it's like it's a revolution
because it goes in a circle and you end up right back where you were.
I don't remember that one.
That's a that's a good quote.
Yeah, all these organizations
are like blatantly cults, but of course, Newman, Fulani and others would always deny that they
were in a cult, as cultists always do.
So you look at the evidence and the evidence points to cult.
Yeah, my not a cult t-shirts raising a lot of questions that are answered by the t-shirt.
Yeah, yeah.
I love how when I first introduced my organization, after
applied disclaimers, were actually not a cult, you know? Like that one meme from King of the Hill.
Right? So one critic of Newman wrote an article called Inside the New Alliance Party,
Newman wrote an article called Inside the New Alliance Party, Dennis Surratt. And despite initially thinking that the NAP was a progressive organization, he ended up
detailing psychological control, racism, sexism, and the use of millions of dollars to manipulate
well-meaning individuals, particularly targeting the black community. The internal structure was of course
hierarchical, as Newman lived luxuriously while the rank and file members worked long hours and
even faced mandatory taxes to support Newman's seaside mansion. Newman's political positions
were opportunistic, they changed based on perceived benefits to him, and his attacks on individuals'
organizations were ruthless when they failed to support him.
When members joined, whether through politics or therapy, they were required to reveal all
their resources and turn them over to the organization.
They had to go through mandatory psychotherapy sessions, which served as a method to recruit
vulnerable individuals, exploit their weaknesses, and control their behavior.
Now, in another article, Marina Ortiz, who was a former leader in the New Alliance Party,
explained why she resigned from the NAP. What happened was the leadership told her to put her child in foster care.
I assume because the child and her childcare was getting in the way of her full dedication
to the cause.
So she revealed the NAP did not live up to its claims of promoting democracy, obviously,
and would use manipulative tactics and obstruct minority empowerment,
and had a long history of attacking progressives and embracing Peru's 1992 presidential bid and
the harsh treatment of dissenting voices. In the end, in the book On the Edge,
Dennis Terash and Tim Walforth end up terming Newman's work, New Age Leninism, which
I think is a really good phrase to use to describe what he was doing.
He had a strong knack for manipulating politics, and even with Newman dead and gone, the Newmanites
have already proved themselves skilled political operatives regardless of their actual size. So the potential
for someone to fill his role in the future definitely remains, especially given the state
of US politics. If you want to learn more, like I said, definitely read On The Edge,
and also check out the article How Totalism Works by Alexandra Stein, who is a survivor of a different cult who ended up doing a dissertation
on Newman. As for final words, stay away from cults, please. If it has democratic workers party or
people's party of such and such or popular sports of the blah blah blah blah blah blah,
hmm scrutinize it a little bit.
You know, let's look at the structure,
let's look at what they're asking you to do,
especially if the leadership considers themselves a Vanguard
despite having like 15 members.
Honestly, you probably shouldn't follow a group of any size
that considers itself a Vanguard.
But that's typical for someone like me to put forward.
That's it.
That's all I have to say on Newman.
Check on your friend with sexuals.
They're probably going through it right now.
All power to all the people.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast coming to you from a country ruled by nine
unelected dipshits and hideous costumes who can, at a whim, destroy your life.
I'm your host, be along with me as James Stout.
Hi, I'm excited to hear about the Supreme Council or whatever they call it.
Like the Jedi Council.
It's a problematic comparison in a lot of ways, but the thing I immediately think of is the extent is like.
Like Iran, like I don't like I do not like Iran, right?
But Iran gets so much shit for having the Shura Council, right?
Yeah, like this council, that's like above their parliament,
above their president, and they can make a bunch of decisions as a bunch of power.
That's like we also have a Shura Council, except instead of protecting
the Islamic Revolution, it's designed to protect like the ideology of a bunch of right-wingers from Harvard.
And it's like, well, this is great.
For sure. Like, yes, yeah, we have a group of unelected half-dead people whose entire
thing is to protect like capital and specifically the theft of land from indigenous peoples,
the thing that they love to do.
And again, to defend Iran here, we did this first.
That one won't get ever clipped out and used in other contexts.
We kind of pioneered this, right?
We were trying to give monarchism a soft landing, you know, so we we had some other unelected half dead people.
Yeah, and this has the results of this have been disastrous and are widely regarded by everyone as
a disaster. So we're going to be talking about a few cases that Supreme Court is going to do.
And also, we're going to be talking about the Supreme Court
and how it relates to sort of liberal, what I guess I would call sort of liberal
NGO or sort of progressive NGO political and legal strategy,
because all of that stuff needs to be thrown out the window immediately.
And it hasn't been. Yeah.
So all right.
Well, let's start with Texas Bill for a very
a basically just like a turbo fascism bill
that lets Texas police racially profile someone and go, I think this person's here legally and immediately arrest them. Yeah, crucially, it's I think, right? Like, yeah, so it's like, again,
we are giving the Texas police, like the heroes who ran away from Uvaldi, we are
giving them the power to go.
This person isn't white.
I think they're here legally.
I can arrest them.
And then if they do arrest someone who's undocumented, there's the basically the way it works.
So it sets up a series of like criminal penalties, like prison time.
I think if you repeat offender, you get a felony.
But mostly what it does is it lets the judge immediately just deport them.
Now, yeah, this is to use a technical term, obviously insanely illegal.
Like constitutionally, like it is the constitution is very clear
that immigration is, you know, constitutionally
the purview of the federal government.
It's very funny reading like SCOTUS blog because people have to sort of pretend
that like people are making real legal arguments here.
Yeah.
It's like when, when Donald Trump is ever like, we're looking at Donald Trump's
policies next week, spoiler alert, but like I've been writing about his
proposed immigration policies and you have to be like, no, this shit's just fucking,
it's not legal. It's just not like, yeah, some crackpot old dude who thinks the fringes
on the flag mean that you're under adultery law that he's got a fucking argument, but
he's wrong. Like this is reddit-tier legal shit.
Yeah. And so, so this bill was supposed to go into effect. There's a whole series of very convoluted court battles over it.
And this court was just like, yeah, this can go into effect
until basically until the case goes on.
And then eventually it eventually didn't go into effect because another
another federal court was like, obviously, this is insane.
We can't let this go into effect.
What the fuck are you guys talking about? And like this this bill, the legal justification for this is insane. We can't let this go into effect. What the fuck are you guys talking about?
And like this this bill, the legal
justification for this is bad shit.
It's so OK.
They're trying to invoke
the the the state war clause,
which is this is this really like old timey law.
OK, so the thing the thing about
like the seventeen hundreds in the eighteen hundreds is that
it takes a significant amount of time to get people from I don't know, you're you're you're drawing your like
border militia from Kentucky, and you're you're moving it to Texas, right?
That takes a lot of time.
And so basically, it was like, okay, so if you're Texas, and you're getting attacked
by someone, you're supposed to be able to use your, so if you're Texas and you're getting attacked by someone,
you're supposed to be able to use your own troops to defend it. And you're supposed to be able to
like sort of semi autonomously run your own defense policy. Right. And that was supposed to be a thing
to let to allow states to like, you know, use their militia to do stuff before like federal troops got
there. Um, Abbott is arguing that people crossing the border from Mexico is an invasion
and that this allows him to like legally allows him to start doing this stuff.
And this is like.
It's it's funny, because you can even see that the Biden administration
people being like, you've got to be fucking kidding me, because like,
obviously, like, I mean, it's not like Biden doesn't want to murder people coming over the border but you know by his people are like well okay like no
obviously this is not a war right I mean just yeah yeah we are not in fact what are you talking
about yeah like no yeah I mean that that was kind of always the obvious endpoint with this
of invasion military age males rhetoric, right?
It was like, okay, well, we'd better shoot them all.
Like that was clearly what they were shooting for.
Yeah, and it's really, it's gotten really, it's gotten really, really grim.
And it's gotten, you know, again, it's literally getting to the point
where they're trying to argue that there is a physical war going on.
And you read these articles about it and the press will be like,
well, they're saying this because like people are crossing the border
and like there's cartels.
It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
This is nothing like this is nothing.
This is literally nonsense.
Like is they are pointing at the sky and going the sky is orange
and the press is going, well, if you like,
if you stare directly into the sun and then blink,
it looks like maybe the sky is a little bit or just like,
what the fuck are you people doing? It's
it's genuine.
At least it's some of the worst
journalistic malpractice I've ever seen.
You see this like every single time they're trying to do this
sort of like balance.
It's like, no, there's no actual sort of balance here.
But on the other hand, this doesn't matter
because the Supreme Court was just like, yeah, this can go into effect.
Right. And like, the other thing you'll see, I guess this was more in the Trump era, right?
Where it's like, yeah, you'd see someone, Trump would do a thing and everyone, rather than just being like,
this one's fucking illegal, everyone, can we just wrap this up? Seth A.amson would write 75,000 tweets about how it was
going to result. And people began to have this belief that the fucking Supreme Court
was made up of magical rainbow unicorns who were going to sweep in and save us all from
fascism. These are the same people who are hanging out with the guys who had the fascist statues and taking massive kickbacks.
Like it's just, none of this legality stuff, I guess.
No, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
That's the problem.
Yeah.
And like, I think this is something that you were hinting at earlier,
but like it shouldn't factor in our organizing.
Like I see so many people pin so much hope on X court case or Y court case.
Like institutions created
by people who owned other human beings are not going to fucking save us.
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, this is something that the right has actually, I think, understood
this very well, partially in the way that they've they've been able to sort of institutionally
capture huge portions of the court system. And because they understand that the law is
fucking meaningless and you know, it's you can you can just tell the cops to do whatever the fuck you want.
One of the strategies they've been using has like specifically to get this bill through is by just having judges issue like temporary injunctions and other injunctions to like allow something to go into effect.
But then, you know, with the intention of just never letting them expire.
So like allow something to go into effect. But then, you know, with the intention of just never letting them expire.
Right. So what you're getting basically is just judges implementing policy by fiat,
but continuously going, oh, well, this can go, this can go because we're giving like,
you know, we're on like our 38th one month injunction.
And, you know, and this is the thing that like the Biden administration's
plan to deal with this is to be like, well, you shouldn't be able to do that. But like,
how are you going to stop them? Right?
The court system is set up in such a way that these people are just feudal lords.
They're almost completely autonomous.
The only people who can overrule them are the people above them.
But the problem there, too, and this is something the Republicans have been using
very effectively, is that it takes time for a court above it
to, you know, just to overrule the like insane thing the court below them is doing. And if the court below them is just constantly churning out just nonsense over and over again, then they can just do whatever the fuck they want.
Because even even if the court above them actually did want to do something about this, which in very rare cases sometimes happens, they literally can't because they've just been, you know, because they're just sort of swamped by all
of this just absolute bullshit that's being thrown out.
Yeah. If you take a case which just to not make this like a partisan thing, if you take
a case in which like the Supreme Court might line up with the, I guess a lot of Republican
positions, also position that many people listening to this podcast might take, for instance, California's gun laws, right?
California passes so many fucking gun laws so often that the time that it takes for,
even if they are like contravening something like the Bruin decision, right?
Or the spirit of the Bruin decision, it takes so long for them to pass all the way up and
maybe eventually
go to the Supreme Court, maybe not, right?
In effect, California can do things which seem like the Supreme Court would say they
were unconstitutional.
It doesn't really matter because they can still do them, right?
And with the go-go through the Ninth Circuit in California, you can make decisions that
affirm those.
And like, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what's constitutional or more importantly, like what's just.
If you're looking for the justices for justice, you're looking in the wrong place.
Yeah, exactly.
And when it comes to border stuff, like as before, that Mia's talking about,
that kills people. And some of the most desperate people on Earth, like I've been to that border in Texas, you're not swimming across that river because you think you might get a PlayStation 5
when you get to the other side. It's fucking dangerous. And the journey to get there,
people who tend to come across the land border to Texas sort of wants you,
like migrants aren't fucking stupid.
They have access to all the same news and information that you do.
They have smartphones. It might be a little bit older, but it can still read shit and, uh, that they
know that the ninth circuit is kinder.
So if they have the money, they will come to California.
Uh, it, it, it, for some people end up in California without very much money.
We've seen that a lot with African migrants in Tijuana, but like a lot of the people going
to Texas is because that's the land route walking north and they don't have the finances
to go anywhere else.
And those people are extremely, like there are any number of reasons why they have a
legitimate right to asylum or just a right not to be
fucking profiled or like any other person of color living in Texas has a basic right
not to be profiled and demonizing those people is being used as a Trojan horse just to do
straight up racism law.
Yeah, and meanwhile, you have fucking Clarence Thomas who is sitting there who has gotten
more kickbacks than every single one of these people who's crossed the border, their total
wealth combined, is sitting there being like, nah, fuck you, it's legal to throw these people
into the chainsaw, it's fine.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't really know how people maintain their faith in a system which holds this dude completely
unaccountable for very obviously being bent.
Like, bent isn't corrupt, no, I'm not using a homophobic slur.
No, this is the- wait, what?
That's a homophobic-
Yeah, I think it's really British-
British English is wild.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've never heard either of those.
Oh, really?
Okay.
No.
Yeah, welcome to the podcast where I say British things and Ian bleeps some of them out.
Do you know what else says British things and occasionally has some of them bleed it out? It's Chumba Casino presented by wankers
And we're back from whatever insane gap we should at some point do an episode about the
gambling law changes.
I'm sure that'll be fine with you.
Yeah, go down well.
That would be great.
Oh boy.
So there are some others.
So okay, so the Texas Senate Bill 4 case is coming in sort of like mid late April, which is now this month, by the way,
which is nuts. I create this type. There were a couple of other cases coming down the pipeline
that we wanted to talk about because so obviously the Supreme Court, you know, has directly already
done stuff with SB four, but the loss, they're still still in the process of hearing the lawsuit.
There's also a case about Meffett-Prestone, which is an aborted fact, which is, you know,
one of the ways that if you are, you're in a place where it is illegal for you to normally
get an abortion, this is a way you can do it.
So okay, the basis of this case is that in 2016 and 2021, the FDA did one of the few good things it's ever done.
And there were some sort of changes to legal classifications around aphopristone that allowed
you to get it, not not allowed you to get it without having to get it directly prescribed
by a doctor. So, you know, you could have nurse practitioners do it. And also, it was
a thing that didn't work like you can get it over the counter. Like it was it was not a thing that suddenly that requires an enormous amount of sort of
doctor bullshit. And it also used to require physical visits. You'd have to go find a doctor
in another state and get into private to you. And so that all went away. You're able to get
through telemedicine and immediately basically after I guess, I guess probably the peak of the
Republican counterrevolution in the last four years where they destroyed the national.
Well, they destroyed the tatted remains of Roe,
a bunch of like deranged right wing groups set about to get Mesa
Pristone banned.
And so basically what they're trying to do is overturn.
They're trying to get its approval by the FDA overturned
and also the approval for the generic version of it overturned.
Right. And this is the whole strategy here is very weird because.
OK, so this is one of one of the things about the U.S.
and part of the reason all of this court stuff is so weird,
because of the structure of the sort of regional autonomy of the courts,
you can basically just do court shopping. You can go find some like guy who's
basically a feudal baron in Texas and be like, hey, you hate abortion, like here, write some
piece of paper that says this is illegal now. So there have been a series of sort of battles
over different levels of courts. Yeah, you know, like approving or disapproving
some things. This is one of these cases that's actually, so obviously it's the immediate
consequence here is if there's a Supreme Court decides that you can ban this, it's going
to get really, really fucking bad for a lot of people. But this is also a case that feeds
into another trend that's been happening, which is the Republicans attempting
to use the court system to just completely annihilate the federal bureaucracy.
Because the other thing that's at stake here, and this is, you know, the obviously the people's
access to getting abortion is the most important part of it. The subsequent, less important
part of it is that right now there is a there are national standards for for prescriptions,
right? There's unified national like the FDA has unified national standards
for food safety and like and if this gets knocked out.
That's like gone.
Yeah. And so suddenly, large massive parts, I mean, like courts
having the ability to just sort of go in and nuke like FDA approvals for stuff.
Right. Right. States being able to like this is going to rip like tear
like tearing the fucking guts out of the entire American sort of
like legal bureaucracy.
It's it's coming apart.
Yeah, it's yeah.
And and the like the medical
your access to medicines that someone else doesn't want you to have.
Yeah, this is one of these cases that has, you know, there's sort of two elements at work here,
right? There's the immediate, like Republicans are trying to ban every single way you can
possibly get an abortion to force people to have kids because this is, you know, this is part of
their sort of reactionary ideology. And then there's the other part of it where there's been a few other cases like this too.
One of the things it looks like they're trying to do is get, I'm going to do a full episode
about this at some point when I can get a good labor lawyer to talk about it, but they're
trying to overturn the National Labor Relations Act, which is the act that basically sets up the right to unionization and the whole, the whole process
of how, how labor mediation works. And I mean, there's, there's other ones where, I mean,
like really substantively enormous parts of the American sort of the American state are
just being torn apart in ways that are specifically designed to
just allow corporations and these like fiefdom judges to have effectively unlimited political power.
Yeah, yeah. I know it's so fucking bleak. I like it. I mean,
it's also predictable, right? Like it's kind of the nature of of the state and it's the nature of these people to want to constantly
take away.
The state ultimately is not there to protect you.
It's there to protect capital.
It's a failure of our organizing when we keep going back to the state and asking it to do
something it fundamentally has no interest in doing.
Yeah.
And this is really a substantive issue with, you know, I remember this, this was
the ACLU strategy under Trump, and I've talked about this on the show before, the ACLU strategy
under Trump was to go to the courts and win there. And I mean, this is, this has been
the sort of what the political strategy dating back to sort of the civil rights era. And
that's, it's, you can't do this anymore because it doesn't it doesn't even like
what whether or not you are correct like eat like legally correct about a thing, right,
which used to be what this was just sort of hinged on and whether you could convince justice
to this like this doesn't matter anymore.
Like Dave, you know, like if you if you read the ruling on on, like if you actually go through
and read the ruling that overturned Roe v Wade, right, like the legal, the legal logic
in there is deranged.
It's just like, yeah, we didn't have this X number of years ago.
So fuck it.
Like you can't do this now.
It's like this is this is nonsense.
But it doesn't matter because the the actual of the law is not, is not, you
know, a sort of like series of debates about like logic or about the efficacy or the meaning
of text.
It's just about who has the power to point guns at people.
And the answer is you don't have that.
You dear listener do not have that power.
Okay.
Do you know who else is going to destroy the American federal bureaucracy? Oh, yes, yes, I do. It's a it's a products and services that's supposed to
be spoke as
we are back from war. So we're going to talk about one more case, which is Grant Pass versus Johnson, which
is a case to decide whether or not you can make it illegal to be homeless.
Yeah, yeah, talking pointing guns at people.
This one's about pointing guns at homeless people, which is great, great and good.
So this is one I've been following a little bit, just because one thing that
Todd Gloria loves to do is criminalize poverty and I happen to unfortunately
live in a city of which he is mayor.
In San Diego, we have seen like, it's all the things they told you Republicans
would do are Democrat mayors doing.
And what the Grants Pass versus Johnson case is about is the city of Grants Pass,
which I guess is a place in Oregon, and it's whether they can criminalize sleeping
on the street if there are no safe shelter beds available.
So the idea here being that like, again, like this is, one has to understand that I'm speaking from the logic
of the state when I try and explain this, that if there is a shelter bed to go to, they
can compel you to go to it with threat of prosecution or criminalization.
But if there is not a shelter bed to go to, then your culpability changes, right?
Like you're not refusing to take shelter,
there is no shelter for you to take.
And so Grant's Pass is obviously trying to criminalize people
even when there are shelter beds available.
Now, what's interesting about Grant's Pass is that,
not the place, the court case,
what's interesting about the court case is that
you'll see these big liberal cities filing amicus briefs. Amicus literally means it's from amicus curiae, friend of the
court, right? Which they can do in favor of either side. San Diego, Los Angeles, other
large democratic cities, I'm sure, are all filing briefs in favor of criminalizing living
on the street, even when there are not shelter beds available.
Now, if we look at the San Diego context specifically,
one of the questions which will come up in this case
is what is a safe shelter bed?
So what San Diego likes to do currently
is put people in tents, in parking lots,
where they often flood,
because San Diego is not designed to deal with rain
and because our city has completely failed to clear out storm drains, resulting in people
losing their homes this winter.
And so some of these parking lots flood where people are forced to live.
These tents are not like, they're not even good tents actually.
They managed to buy, this is remarkable, actually.
If you were buying a tent, Leah, can you think of any...
There's no way for me to phrase this.
They bought fucking tents with slurs on the side.
I don't know how you managed to do...
What?!
Yeah, it's like the tent are, quote, Eskimo brand.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it's incredible stuff.
Like, it's...
See, there was no way to be like, what would you be concerned about when buying a tent
because slur on the side would not have come out.
I would not think about that.
Why would there be slurs on the side of your tent?
What were you doing here?
How could you, given the purchasing power of the third largest city in California, somehow
elect to purchase a tent which is racist?
I don't know, but that's why I am not a member of the San Diego Democrat Party.
So one of the things that will come up is what constitutes a safe shelter.
In practice, again, this doesn't matter hugely other than it's a Supreme Court giving a nod to local
governments to further criminalize being unhoused, to drive unhoused people further from services,
further from sight.
In San Diego's case, that means into canyons, into rivers, rivers flood, canyons get extremely
hot in the summer.
More than one person every single day already dies on our streets here in an extremely wealthy and prosperous area of the world. This will make it worse
because they will get that nod to continue criminalizing people rather than trying to
help them. In practice, what cities will do, including San Diego, is just hold back a few
shelter beds to allow them to cite anyone. In practice, they're still going to site people even if the demand
for beds is much higher than the provision of beds. So in that case, they will still
continue to find it's not a workaround, but they think it is, right? That they can just
criminalize being unhoused in this fashion. But it does, it represents like a nod from
the top down, right? To go even harder after people who are too poor to make rent at a time when rent is less
affordable than it has been in generations.
And so like, it's one to watch.
It's one where like, yet again, you find like the Democrats, I guess, lining up on the right-hand
side of the issue, the right wing side of the issue, the state violence side of the
issue, the right wing side of the issue, the state violence side of the issue.
Right.
And it will, I'm sure, open up the door to more what they call camping bans, which is
a euphemism again, they are bans on being unhoused within city limits.
And I think it's one to keep an eye on.
But again, like I don't, it's Clarence Thomas, the guy who goes to the billionaire's house with the racist
statues and the Nazi statues like he's not the guy who's going to come in swinging for
the person who has to sleep under the underpass because they can't make rent, you know, like
and like, and like if you think the fucking liberal justices are going to give a shit
either like these are the people whose fundamental political principles that the police have
the right to like, okay, there is a decision that I can't remember the fucking name of that was a it was it was it
was it was it should have been a very, very basic, you are guaranteed due process thing,
right under the Fourth Amendment. And this and in a nine no decision, the Supreme Court ruled that
the cops are allowed to violate people's due process. Because if they didn't do this,
there couldn't be a functional police force in this country, because this is how the police were doing all their fucking work.
So if you think those people, right? That was, oh hey, damn, maybe people who don't
own property have rights?
Like, no.
No.
Like...
Yeah, no.
Look, when faced with a choice between like liberty and the necessity of maintaining a
state's capacity to do violence to anyone at any time, they chose the latter, right?
And I guess, like, if I can get on my soapbox for a minute, like you need to stop expecting these people to come and save you.
Like specifically with reference to the fucking Grant's Pass case, like the person who is going to stop your unhoused neighbor dying is you.
It's not an NGO. It's not the city. It's not the county. It's not the feds.
Those people fundamentally, the incentive is not for them to care. Like your incentive as a person who shares humanity with that person is to care and to do something.
And like, yeah, I guess like, don't wait.
Take the time you would have spent reading about a fucking Supreme Court case and make sandwiches and go hand them out,
because that is the only way we solve this.
And I think that's as good a place as any to stop.
Yeah, this has been a knap of fear. way we sold this. Visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for it could happen here,
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