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No Happy Ending · Political Junkie Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: Good morning.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: Last night,
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: I signed an executive order appointing Attorney General Letitia James
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: as special prosecutor in a sexual assault case at Cornell University.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: I want New Yorkers to understand what prompted that decision.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Earlier this week,
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: I called on Cornell to conduct an independent investigation led by outside counsel.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: I spoke directly to the university president who agreed to take those steps,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: but we learned yesterday Raise even more troubling questions about what was done
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: and not done.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: After this young woman came forward.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Remembering me
• 1:08
  [music]
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_03: We began this segment with an October 1st press conference in
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_03: which New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: that she has asked Attorney General Letitia James to intervene in a case
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_03: of alleged sexual assault on the campus of Cornell University in 2024.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: This is the no happy ending edition of the Political Junkie podcast.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Claire Potter.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Neil Young.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_03: And Neil, you're just back from Tuscany.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_03: Is Italy lovely?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was an absolutely incredible week in Tuscany.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure where my,
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: which time zone my body is in, but I know my spirit is still in the Tuscan Hills.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and it was a big birthday for you and your friends, right?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, are we going to tell people?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, mine was almost, yeah.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're all turning 50 in the past year.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, I'm, Getting closer to my 51st, so it doesn't even seem like my birthday anymore.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But yes,
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: we were all I was there with a bunch of college friends
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: to celebrate our big our big moment.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it must have been lovely.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: I look forward to it as I am only 35.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, when I'm 50 like you, I'm hoping to do that, too.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: So my big news this week, Neil, is I got $90 from Donald Trump because I'm on Medicare.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: I just saw you post something about this on Facebook, which I didn't know anything about this.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me more.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: So Donald Trump decided to give everyone on Medicare $90 as a sort of refund
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: from our October Medicare bill.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, it's a bribe.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's his way of sort of showing, I want to do something for Americans I care about.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: But $90, I mean, $90 are going to help a lot of people, most of whom are not on Medicare.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's not going to help me.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: It feels like just an insult.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_03: So I decided to give the money away to political candidates who need it.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: So I gave $30 to Sherrod Brown, $30 to Josh Turek, and $30 to Mary Peltola.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: And listeners,
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_03: if you want to know who the Senate candidates are that are on the bubble,
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: you can go to my Facebook page, Claire Potter.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: You can just go right on.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I have posted the Cook Political Report's ratings.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: So that's what I did with the money.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_03: What would you do with $90?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like such a,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'd probably just like let it sit in my bank account and not do anything about it.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: For your next trip to Tuscany.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: It could give me a lot of pasta.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, I have to say the prices in Italy were great.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, this was obviously not authorized by Congress.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't need permission to do this.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: He just, like, stroke of a pen and here we are.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: What a clear, I mean, he's just pulling out all the stunts, isn't he, for...
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: For the election.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's just crazy.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: And it also just sort of feels like the kind of thing,
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: an uncle you didn't know very well would do at a family reunion when you're a kid,
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_03: you know, like here's a silver dollar or something like that.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's so condescending.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, he's walking away with billions.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, $90.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: Why $90?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: I haven't figured out the number either.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's a good point.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_03: I'll work on that.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: So, Neil, let's talk about what happened this week.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: A New York Times team continues to dig into the grifting at the Department
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_03: of Homeland Security under former Secretary Kristi Noem.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_03: We now know that when Noem was on her way out the door,
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: she authorized payment to a campaign donor for hundreds of millions of dollars
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: to purchase planes the department never needed and has not used.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: Who are these people, Neil?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's this group called Daedalus Aviation.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so they flip planes to the government at markups of at least $20 million.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I just think this highlights what a boondoggle
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: the Trump administration's anti-immigrant campaign has been.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And there's lots of other examples of that, right?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So DHS has spent almost $3 million for a tent city at Guantanamo that has never once been used.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: This one I think is even more just unbelievable.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: They spent $4.8 billion,
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: that's billion with a B,
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: almost $5 billion for warehouses in Chicago,
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: which they intended to be converted into detention facilities,
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: and that has never happened.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: $5 billion.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: And that's only in Chicago.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_03: They purchased other warehouses in New Jersey, in Texas, and so on.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_03: And I actually remember when they announced they were going to buy these warehouses
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: and convert them into detention centers.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_03: And two things struck me at the time.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_03: One is the roundups of Japanese Americans in 1942.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_03: And the fact that the government had no place to put all of these people
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_03: that they were unconstitutionally detaining.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: So they put them in like racetracks and rodeo sheds and fairgrounds.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it was just brutal and awful.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_03: But the government said, well, of course they were going to convert these warehouses.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_03: But a lot of people said at the time, Well, warehouses aren't built to house people.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_03: And when you're building something to house people, you have to run all these pipes.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: There's all this infrastructure that you need to put in when
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: the building is actually being built in order to have things like plumbing, say.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_03: So even if they had used these warehouses,
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_03: the cost of converting them to prisons would have been astronomical.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: Neil, Does it strike you as an interesting parallel that what Trump has accused
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: the Democrats of,
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_03: indeed what Republicans have accused Democrats of for decades,
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: which is giving money to people in exchange for their votes,
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: this sort of wash of money that they say is fraudulent and so on,
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: that actually this is in fact what has been going on at Homeland Security?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: As you started this particular segment, I thought that was the thought that occurred to me.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, this is not one example of it.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's an ongoing set of examples of,
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: what is the saying about Trump that every accusation is actually a confession?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that could not be clearer when it comes to financial dealings and the sort
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: of grift and corruption that is Part and parcel of this administration
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: and what he's done with the presidency.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, every sort of,
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: accusation about Democrats being,
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: using money to influence political outcomes,
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: which, you know, there's a history of that, we should say.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's a long history of that, right?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: But the abundance of it and the sort of Like in clear daylight operations of this
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: and the Trump administration is on another level.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: the other point that we make over and over again is there's just
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: so much happening here that all becomes normalized and,
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: you know, no scandal means anything because it's just day after day of scandal.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that's right.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: Now, you know,
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: the other thing I was thinking about is We keep sort of thinking,
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_03: all of us, about what is the day after going to look like?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: Not just the day after assuming the Democrats win the House,
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: assuming perhaps they win the Senate, the day after when Trump is finally gone.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_03: And part of that day after,
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_03: I think, has got to be figuring out where all this money has gone, right?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I just cannot imagine the Senate hearings and investigations that are going
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: to be had once that's a possibility.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we'll get to the bottom of all this,
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: but that has to be a sort of reckoning that happens eventually.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: And the $90 payments to Medicare recipients, that was $2 billion.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: And $2 billion for what?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_03: For nothing.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, I mean,
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_03: if they want me to give it back,
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_03: I'll give it back and I will never regret the money I've given
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_03: to these Senate candidates.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that really has to be a day one priority.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: And I actually think Democrats should talk about that.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: I think they should not talk about prosecuting Trump, which is probably a loser's game.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_03: And they should talk about going after the money.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with you,
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: and I think that they should take some Republican discourse and use it,
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: which is stealing money from taxpayers.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's the terms they should put this in,
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: not about transparency and accountability and all that.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: They're stealing this money from taxpayers.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: when Republicans say that,
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: they so often mean, oh,
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: they're stealing money from you to,
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: pay for things like Medicare and, you know, things that most American voters want.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: In this case,
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: it's to line their own pockets and to do these blatantly political,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know, sort of strategies to, like, turn out the vote and all that.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, take on some Republican language to talk about this.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and they're also stealing money so that various cronies of Trump in
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_03: the government can live like billionaires.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, one of the purchases or one of the aspects of the purchase of all
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_03: of these airplanes is that they weren't airplanes for actually flying people.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_03: They were airplanes for flying celebrities.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they were private planes.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_03: They were kitted out as planes for the wealthy.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_03: And so one of them, I suppose, was supposed to be for Kristi Noem.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: Two of them have been leased to the FBI.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_03: And so Kash Patel flies around in them to go
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: to his girlfriend's various concerts around the country.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_03: OK, so since we're speaking about money,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: let's talk about the kind of money that Republicans are burning in the front yard in
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: the Texas Senate race as James Tallarico pulls ahead of Ken Paxton.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: What are the polls saying about that race, Neil?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, New York Times Siena poll shows Tallarico is ahead by six points.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is two weeks before early voting begins in the state.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Trump has been busy a little bit down there campaigning three times in Texas over
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: the last month.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's also been leaked audio where Paxton has admitted
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: that he's no longer controlling the strategy of his own campaign.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Paxton is a very odd political candidate.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: You know what that probably means?
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: It means they put a post-it on his shaving mirror that says,
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: don't go to Iceland with your girlfriend.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: On July 4th, right?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_03: On July 4th, right.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_03: All right, continue.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: So what else have we learned about this strange race?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, just to make it even more bizarre,
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Paxton's estranged wife, Angela,
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: which is,
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that they were not even speaking to each other for quite a while.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: She's now campaigning for him.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Why is she doing that, Claire?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's a good question.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: And you could have knocked me over with a feather.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_03: I was sitting with my mother.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_03: We were watching the Philadelphia Eagles football game on Sunday,
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: which was a travesty that we're just not going to speak about.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_03: And we got one ad after another.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: One of them was the Trump ad that says paid for by the United States government.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: We got that one.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: We got another one.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_03: I can't remember for who.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_03: And then we got Angela Paxton.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: Speaking on behalf of her wonderful, wonderful, wonderful ex-husband, Ken Paxton.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, seriously, I almost fell off my chair.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_03: I have heard that she herself wants a political career and
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_03: that she has been promised support from the party if she steps up and supports Ken.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_03: Even though she is suing him for divorce because of, what did they call it?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: Biblical reasons?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Biblical.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: In their marriage?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was really good.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was some really good wording.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, he cheated on her.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: He cheated on her.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: But somehow, I mean, it is a level of deal-making situation.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_03: That I just find so atrocious.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: I do actually think in many ways
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_03: that other people's adultery is other people's adultery and it's none
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_03: of my business.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_03: And I have certainly, I voted for Bill Clinton twice.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, all right, my hands are not clean here.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: But I honestly cannot imagine why Angela Paxton would humiliate herself like this
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: and what would cause her to think that any kind of a future
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: in politics was worth supporting this man.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, there has to be a quid pro quo going on here, right?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: This is not from the bottom of her heart.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, maybe this is just how much she believes Tallarico is a threat to Texas.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly the folks against Tallarico in Texas are talking about him in apocalyptic terms.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: You would think that at least she could stay out of it, just for her own self-esteem.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Image and reputation and pride.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I've heard that if Tallarico wins,
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: everybody in the United States will be required to change genders.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_03: Even people who have already changed their genders will have to change their genders again.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's something you could use your $90 for.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: Changing my gender.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_03: I actually bought a T-shirt that says,
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a, I'm a Tallafrico that the, that the campaign is selling.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, but why is the Texas race so important?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's some practical reasons that we should talk about in a minute,
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_03: but is the Texas race symbolically more important to Trump, do you think?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think so,
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: because, I mean,
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: first of all,
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: just for Republicans in general,
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Texas is symbolic, and think of how symbolic it would be for Democrats.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, to make such a big deal about winning a statewide election there
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: for I think Texas obviously looms large in the American imagination to begin with,
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: to say nothing about what it's meant as sort of a red rock conservative place for
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: so long.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it would be a sort of...
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: It would be an enormous breakthrough.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still actually not that confident that Tallarica is going to win,
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: which is a different issue.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I think whether or not he does, it looks like it's going to be a close race.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: that's not something that Republicans ever really imagined themselves having in
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: the Lone Star State.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and of course, they've abandoned North Carolina and they've abandoned Georgia.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_03: And actually,
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: you want to know the fun fact I learned about Roy Cooper as I'm researching for
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_03: a piece that I'm writing for The Nation?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: He was the attorney general who exonerated the Duke lacrosse players.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I knew that at one point in my life, yeah.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_03: I knew that at one point in my life either, but I had completely forgotten.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought, oh, you know, here's an interesting twist.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: So anyway, back to Texas.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: one of the things I have thought is because Texas and Florida have been so out front
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: on implementing the culture war stuff as law, that they have also...
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: Loomed large in the sort of MAGA dominance of the country because of their particular position.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, both Texas and Florida are nationally influential.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: Texas, both because of economics,
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: because of oil,
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: because it is Sort of promoted as this quintessentially American place,
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: like the Dallas Cowboys as the America's team,
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders as America's sweethearts,
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: which, by the way, I am watching that reality show on your suggestion.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_03: And then Florida, because, you know, Disneyland, America's vacation land.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: Oh.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: Land is out in California, right?
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the Orlando native who lives in Los Angeles now.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Land, world, yeah.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: But they're both sort of culturally symbolic in the nation and that they sort of use
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_03: that, governors use that kind of cultural symbolism to drive a MAGA agenda.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: Across the nation that I think other states would not have been able to.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: What do you think about that?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, I think like California for much of the 20th century had that position, right?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: As California goes, so goes the nation.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's the case anymore.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's especially when you're talking about what happens within
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: the Republican universe, it's like.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: California,
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: excuse me,
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: Texas and Florida set the standard and create the model that's
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: then replicated elsewhere.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see that with like the example of the no gay,
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: don't say gay bill that happened in Florida, right?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: For it to have that sort of breakthrough,
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: If that's the way we want to put it,
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: in Florida then became replicated over and over again in red states
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: where it probably would have been easier to be done with in the first place.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact that Florida had done it like just sort of blew open the door
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: and created both sort of the model to be replicated and the precedent for doing so.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: And similarly, Texas really drove the
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it was Texas's law that set the whole thing into motion.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_03: And Texas remains,
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: even though other states actually have worse outcomes for maternal health,
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: it is Texas that remains the sort of North Star of the anti-abortion movement.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: Well, let's talk about the other reasons the Texas race is so important.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: Trump's endorsement of Ken Paxton over John Cornyn,
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: I think will be the thing everybody remembers if Tallarico wins, don't you?
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I would assume that if Trump had stayed out of this and Cornyn had won,
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: this would probably be an easy, right?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, Paxton doesn't.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: So Texas is also important because as it turns out,
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: the Senate map, the possibilities in the Senate map for Democrats have expanded.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_03: I have re-subscribed to the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: because I just couldn't resist because they have really some of the best data.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_03: And they are now predicting
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_03: that Democratic candidates will ultimately pick up anywhere from two to six seats.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_03: But there's something like 12 seats in play now.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: OK, so we know that Ossoff will hold his seat in Georgia and
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: that North Carolina is solidly in the blue column.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: We've got Texas,
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_03: we've got Kansas, we've got Alaska, we've got Maine, and we've got Ohio as toss ups.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_03: I think Kansas has become a toss up now as well.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_03: So Texas could really break the Republicans back in the Senate.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think, you know, there's the numbers story of it all.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: So Democrats need four to regain the majority.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: But again,
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: something like Texas,
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: the sort of,
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: as we've been talking about,
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: the symbolic meaning of that,
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: whether or not, you know, numbers aside, I think would be really big.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: But if Democrats do regain a majority and part of why they do so is Texas.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, from our lips, right, Claire?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, the other one I really want is Ohio because of J.D.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: Vance.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I really I want to crush him.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_03: I want I want voters to say J.D.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: Vance failed to bring in his own state.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: I would also,
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: for the same reason,
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_03: love it if Byron Donalds loses in Florida, even though I'm not sure I expect him to.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: But it looks like it's a really close race.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_03: We talked about it in the last episode.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_03: I think he's pretty vulnerable.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think he's pretty vulnerable too.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know,
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: if Trump and Vance cannot bring in their own states,
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: that is a kind of weakness that I don't think they can recover from in
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_03: the next presidential cycle.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so now we have something that is,
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_03: in a sad way,
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_03: fun to talk about,
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: which is that pioneering televangelist Jim Baker has died at 86,
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: leaving five children And a second wife, Lori Baker.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: Tell us a little bit about Jim Baker.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think he's probably most famous for having been, you know, husband of Tammy Faye Baker.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, the two of them, you know, were the geniuses behind the empire that they built.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: The PTL Praise the Lord Empire,
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: which was a,
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: Conservative evangelical media
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: powerhouse with television shows and theme parks.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, that's where they preach their prosperity gospel.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: He had a background in the assemblies of God.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: At one point,
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: there was, again,
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: that very,
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: very popular television show,
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: the theme park, private satellite broadcasting network.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was making like $129 million a year at its high point.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, it all came crashing down.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: There was lots of financial misdoings going on.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: But really the thing that sort of brought him to his knees was when he had
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: to admit he had had an affair with this 21-year-old secretary and everything sort
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: of came crumbling down after that.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, her name was Jessica Hahn.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: I just remembered that.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: She did a Playboy spread.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Remember that?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and she did a Playboy spread.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: As church secretaries often do.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_03: How did we miss doing the Playboy spread?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody ever called.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_03: The phone lines were open.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_03: We never got there.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_03: I guess Jessica Hahn just like shouldered us out of the way,
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: although you would have been like six at the time.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so,
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: but there was another assertion,
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: Jerry Falwell, and didn't they begin working for Jerry Falwell?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_03: Didn't they begin on the 700 Club?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: Was that Falwell or somebody else?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: No, if I'm remembering,
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: and I used to know this history a lot better,
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: if I'm remembering correctly,
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: Falwell came in and sort of rescued PTL post the scandal.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, rescued or took it as the opportunity to, like, take it over.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: I believe that that was the chain of events.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then Tammy Faye Baker actually moved to Orlando where I grew up and sort
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: of tried to rehabilitate herself.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: There was a small sort of evangelical television network in Orlando.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: And one day my mom and I were at the mall and Tammy Faye Baker went walking by.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was very exciting.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it must have been thrilling.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: I wish I had been there.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_03: Well,
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_03: Falwell also claimed that he had proof that Jim Baker had had erotic relationships
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: with men as well.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: What do we think about that?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_03: Do we think that was true?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think, well, I'm not sure that Baker ever denied that.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that he had,
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: and again,
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: not totally up on my Jim Baker history in the way that I once was,
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: but I thought that he had never denied it.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if he admitted to it, but it seems very believable to me.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: There was lots going on there, and...
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and, you know, Baker's been interesting.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, I mean,
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: that's an interesting thing because Tammy Faye Baker,
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: in her own sort of post scandal rehabilitation,
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: one of the things she did was sort of become,
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you would say like an outspoken advocate for gay folks,
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: but certainly an ally.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: That was sort of part of her rebranding in the post scandal years.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_03: That doesn't surprise me at all, including, wasn't she sort of like a popular drag persona?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, very much so, yes.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, because she was,
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: there is a kind of woman who's also sort of a drag queen,
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_03: and Tammy Faye Baker would be in that category.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing I learned,
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: and I have to recommend to everyone what Neil recommended to me,
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_03: which is get a subscription to Christianity Today,
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_03: which Because when something like this happens,
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_03: really the best material,
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_03: and I thought the obituary,
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_03: the long essay about Jim Baker in Christianity Today was fantastic.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: And we're linking to it on the newsletter, everyone.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_03: So you can go and click on it.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_03: But I learned two interesting things.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_03: One is that the 700 Club, I never knew why it was called the 700 Club.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_03: Do you remember?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: It has something to do with,
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: doesn't it have something to do with like a number that's related to heaven?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: I should know this myself.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it should be related to heaven.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_03: My guess is it probably is,
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_03: but the practical reason to name it the 700 Club was that every time they went
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_03: on television, their goal was to raise $700.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_03: Isn't that cool?
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: We should call this the 700 Club.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_03: That would be really important.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_03: But the other thing I learned is that the PTL empire was...
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_03: Often called by other evangelists who knew what was going on.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_03: Pass the loot.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: Pass the loot.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: Isn't that great?
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up hearing that.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know,
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: like I grew up in sort of,
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: main sort of,
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to say mainstream Southern Baptist, but you know what I mean?
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Where like folks like the bakers were really,
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: really looked down on as, you know, as frauds, as, as hoaxsters.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: And, and it's not really being Christians.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: So there was lots of sort of theological judgments there.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I remember past the loot being what people said.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't read the piece.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: Who wrote the Christianity Today piece?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I would have to
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_03: click on.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: No, I don't.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: I would have to have to click on it to find out.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_03: But I will click on it to find out.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_03: That's my L.A. Times piece.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_03: Here we go.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_03: Christianity Today.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_03: It is John Wigger.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know him?
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: I do not.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, it's a great piece.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: Listeners,
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_03: you should definitely click on it and read it,
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: and you can probably get to it because not everything is behind the paywall.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_03: What else was I going to say?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, how much Jim and Tammy Faye remind me of Amy Semple McPherson.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm, yeah.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's sort of like the same thing when they get together,
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_03: they're poor and they do this sort of going around in their automobile preaching
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_03: and, you know, and they're finally sort of picked up by the 700 Club.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: But then when they become a thing.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_03: Part of how they explain their wealth and say that the spending that they're doing
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: on themselves is so necessary is that their people want to see them as prosperous.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: And Amy Semple McPherson said the same thing.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_03: my parishioners,
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_03: the people who come to the temple want to see that I'm doing well and they want me
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: to inspire them.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_03: And who does that remind you of more than Donald Trump?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there is like a theme here of,
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: you know, that is one of the things people said about Trump was he was so rich.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_03: He was such a good businessman.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, he would be a good president.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_03: Why do religion and money often not go well together, Neil?
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think a lot of folks,
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: believe that those things are not really supposed to mix and that,
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: sort of,
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: again, Christian teaching warns against the love of money and money in its excess.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: It also, in the form of the church, has often, you know, been one of the levers of power.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so that lever has also led to lots of corruption and Wrongdoing
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: and the abuse
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: of parishioners.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Especially in the example of some of the people you talked about that a lot
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: of this wealth was built on people of not much means giving everything they had over
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: to these folks who were living the high lifestyle and that they were told to do
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: so again through the sort of Framework or the theology of the prosperity gospel
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: that like God loves a cheerful giver and that in order to be blessed,
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: you have to make this financial donation to me.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a recipe right for exploitation and a lot of abuse.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I hope somebody is out there writing a biography of Jim Baker Neal.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_03: Let's pivot to today's news focus.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Can I add one more thing to the news docket,
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: which is the president of the United States calling for the extermination
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: of Southern California?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, that seemed wrong to me.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't seem like the thing that a president should do.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: In fact,
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to say,
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: as a person with a PhD in history,
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: that no American president has ever advocated That Americans be destroyed by
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: an enemy state.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: I landed at LAX on Tuesday evening after almost 24 hours of traveling back
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: from Europe and literally opened my phone and at the top
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: of my news feed was this news that he had just Joked at a rally
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: about Iran taking out Los Angeles and San Diego.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: A joke that was greeted by the folks in the crowd cheering as,
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: you know, that's what he's normalized in this country.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we should also say that he has not only doubled down on this, he's tripled down on it.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's moved from the sort of jokey way he delivered it at the beginning,
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: which of course every joke he tells he means, Right.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: To like in press conferences saying quite forcefully, like, yeah, that's what I meant.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Claire, thoughts?
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: Should I be worried about?
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think he has dementia.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_03: I really do.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_03: and I've learned about,
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_03: I've been studying dementia lately,
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_03: and I learned about a phenomenon that is called masking.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: And you may know about this, Neil,
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_03: but apparently what masking is,
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: is when you are listening to An older person who may have dementia
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_03: and what they're saying is so bizarre and awful.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_03: It is often that they are introducing topics that they are comfortable with so
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_03: that people don't ask them about other things.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_03: So that one of the things that occurred to me is that Trump's capacity
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_03: to answer questions from the press is Has degraded so completely
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_03: that these little scandal bombs that he drops all over the place may
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_03: in fact be intended to keep people from asking him questions about real things like
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_03: the war.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean,
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think that makes a ton of sense and that's fascinating because yeah,
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: he can riff on his little controversies and scandals constantly and the press loves
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: to do it.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, that's putting aside his own internal reasons for this.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the bigger point is that American president has said this.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: we have a party that is either explaining it away,
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: saying it didn't mean it,
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: or once he's tripled down on it,
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: they'll say, yeah, maybe Iran should take Los Angeles out.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's astonishing to me.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_03: I would say the other thing it causes me to think about is
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_03: that Trump's early success as a politician was through saying
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_03: and doing outrageous things.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_03: Even when he didn't mean to say or do something outrageous,
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_03: like the Access Hollywood tape,
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: which actually it's like the 10 year anniversary of
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_03: the Access Hollywood tape this week.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_03: That was not something he wanted.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: But what it did is it actually turned people into Trump voters.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_03: They heard it.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_03: They said, you know, why are they attacking this man?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_03: Why has this, you know, and they actually, the Trump vote solidified that.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_03: After the Access Hollywood tape.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_03: So I think Trump knows he's in trouble.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_03: He knows he's going to lose this election.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_03: The question is, how badly is he going to lose it?
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_03: And what he may also be doing is throwing Hail Marys,
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_03: saying and doing outrageous things in hopes that the people who were with him at
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: the beginning will come back.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: Mm hmm.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_03: But, you know, he's never been a good politician.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_03: He's an instinctive politician, but he's not a strategic politician.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I think he has moved almost completely into the instinctive category.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, Neil, I hope Los Angeles isn't destroyed.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's one of my favorite cities.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_03: And you live there, of course.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_03: But if it is, you and Nate can come and live in Northampton with me.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: If we survive the...
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: If you survive, if you survive, just get in the car, put the dog in the car and start driving.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_03: So I want to turn to our news focus today.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_03: I also want to say listeners,
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_03: this is the point in the podcast that if it would be triggering for you to hear
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_03: about sexual violence,
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_03: you should probably just politely turn it off and fast forward.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_03: To our Going Viral segment.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_03: But Neil and I thought it was really important to talk about
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_03: the revived investigation of gang rape at Cornell,
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_03: what happened,
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_03: what it means,
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: and why many feminists are saying this could have happened decades ago,
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_03: nothing has changed.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_03: And I think Neil and I are particularly well positioned to speak about this
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_03: because we have both been college professors.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_03: We have both taught on elite campuses where such things happen with troubling frequency.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: But we're also both historians, and we know that things aren't the same 30 or 40 years later.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_03: So, Neil, let's begin with why we are talking about Cornell now and what we are talking about.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_03: Can you talk to our listeners?
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean,
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: the moment that began all this was the Cornell Daily Sun running an editorial
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: on September 21st.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: The headline of it was Cornell Won't We Will.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: And what they were willing to do was they named seven men who had been disciplined.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: By the university for participating in what this former Cornell student,
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: Jane Doe, asserts was a gang rape in 2024 at the, is it Chi-Fi?
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: Chi-Fi?
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: Chi-Fi, Chi-Fi Fraternity House.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's pronounced Chi-Fi, yes.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's what began this.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's been like pretty, one of the biggest stories we have right now.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_03: So, so this Alleged sexual assault occurred almost two years ago,
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_03: a little less than two years ago.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_03: And our listeners may be wondering how it is that
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_03: a civil suit can be filed two years after the fact.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_03: What does the lag time look there?
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_03: Were you able to figure that out, Neal?
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't really been able to figure that out in terms of what the specifics
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: of this were, but that's not uncommon, right?
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: For most civil suits that there is a lag time between the criminal case or
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: in this case,
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: like the lack of a criminal case and then what sort of ultimately happens in terms
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: of a civil suit being pursued.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I want to talk a little bit about what we think happened.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_03: And since we've both read the same stuff, please fact check me if I get something wrong.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_03: But before I do,
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_03: I want to ask the question,
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_03: why are these things adjudicated internally at universities and not investigated by
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_03: the police or the DA normally?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's one of the biggest and most important questions to take out of this.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I actually hope it will lead to some changes.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: But this is not uncommon that universities exercise enormous power and discretion
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: when it comes to handling events or incidents that happen on their campus.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so I don't think this is unusual at all.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: But in the case of this one, I mean, the DA decided not to do anything with it, right?
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they looked,
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: even though, I mean,
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: there's lots of what it seems like mishandling of this case,
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: including that,
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: the DA's report didn't include the fact that Jane Doe had told in her statement to
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: the police that she had been raped.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, yes, that was her statement, I think, to the Title IX officer.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_03: So I want to sort of create a timeline here for listeners so they have an idea
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_03: of what was going on, although we do link to a timeline in the Substack.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_03: So in November 2024, Jane Doe goes to a party at the Ki-Fi house.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_03: She meets up with a boy that she likes, and the boy says, let's go upstairs.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_03: And then when they get upstairs, and as it turns out, they were not in this boy's room.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_03: They were in some other fraternity brother's room.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_03: The boy says, my friend would like to join us.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_03: Is that okay?
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_03: Jane Doe says that's okay.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_03: Jane Doe and these two men are drinking.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_03: They're also taking ketamine.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_03: And we're going to want to talk about ketamine a little bit later.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_03: But ketamine is a party drug, listeners, if you don't know about it.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's an animal tranquilizer.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: And the typical effect of ketamine is to make you high, supposedly in a nice way.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_03: At least this is what my younger relatives tell me.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_03: But that if you take too much ketamine,
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_03: you become very passive,
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_03: very unable to make decisions,
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_03: very unable to act, and actually often for men, unable to perform sexually.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_03: And alcohol accelerates the effects of ketamine.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_03: So what happens to Jane Doe is there she is with these two guys,
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_03: which I have read some things that said the guys were really into each other.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_03: And she was sort of an adjunct, but I don't actually know whether that's true or not.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_03: I asked my nephew, who is 30, what he thought about that.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_03: He's a performer in Brooklyn.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_03: And he sort of rolled his eyes and he said, Claire, all men are into each other.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_03: But anyway, these guys may have been into each other, but they were unable to perform.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_03: The whole thing is like losing steam.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then a third man walks in,
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_03: the man whose room it is, and says some version of, well, look what we have here.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_03: And the whole thing begins again.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_03: And then somebody,
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not quite sure,
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_03: sends a text to 56 members of the fraternity or a Snapchat,
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_03: I guess,
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_03: who are around the university that said,
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not going to say the words,
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_03: but, you know, that they should come and have sex too.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_03: And there are some responses to that.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_03: And the whole thing gets going again.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_03: More ketamine is taken.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_03: Don't have to talk about the details.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_03: But finally, around five o'clock in the morning, Jane Doe says, I'd like to leave now.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_03: And by her account, she occasionally said, you know, I don't want to do this anymore.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_03: But then she did.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: And that's where I think the ketamine really comes in.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_03: I mean,
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_03: my nephew persuaded me that it was actually possible that she wasn't able to make
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_03: the decision to leave, like very early on in the evening.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_03: So then she leaves, she goes home, she thinks it's all over.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_03: She's very hazy about what has happened.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_03: And then,
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_03: and this is the role of social media and we historians,
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_03: you know, let's put a pin in this.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_03: This is why we Study history.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_03: Something changed.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_03: And what changed is she becomes privy to gossip about her around the university
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_03: that she is alternatively a slut or that she had been sexually assaulted.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_03: Like people are putting up on message boards.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_03: I heard they sexually assaulted a sophomore at Chi-Fi last weekend.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_03: So she then becomes vividly aware of what has happened from other people
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: And pulls herself together three weeks later,
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_03: which as you said, trauma is like this.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_03: Very often women and men,
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_03: I think,
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_03: who are sexually assaulted have a difficult time putting together the events.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_03: And when they do, a difficult time coming forward with them.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_03: She then goes to the Title IX office.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: The Title IX office runs...
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_03: What is essentially the kind of kangaroo court that they always run.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_03: Two men are expelled.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_03: Three men are suspended.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I think two men have to write essays or maybe two men are suspended
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_03: and three men have to write essays about why this was wrong.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so this is why Cornell's campus is exploding.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_03: This is why outsiders to Cornell and outsiders to higher education are sort
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_03: of looking at this and saying, what?
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_03: They were involved in a sexual assault and they had to write essays in order to stay?
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_03: But Cornell students are also enraged,
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_03: and then I'll shut up,
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_03: um, Because Cornell has been disciplining people for political protest.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: Four students were expelled from the university for protesting outside a Board
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_03: of Trustees meeting.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_03: And students are saying,
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_03: wait, you get expelled for politics and you don't get expelled for rape?
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_03: So what have people outside the university been doing to address this, Neil?
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think...
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's an enormous public conversation, which a lot of people are weighing in on.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think some of that has been really good and really important.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: Especially hearing from sort of feminist legal theorists and social commentators.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's been really good.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's also a really ugly dimension to this as well on social media that we'll talk about.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: Do you mean in terms of pressures on the university?
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think lots of folks have You know,
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: been just inundating the Cornell president's office and the administration
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: in general with messages of opposition and protest and outrage
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: about Really what I think everyone sees as a terrible mishandling on the part of
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: the Cornell administration around this.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then again, also,
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: calling attention to what you just mentioned,
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: the heavy hand with which Cornell brought brought the heavy hand with
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: which Cornell treated those student protesters.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's been a really effective social media Strategy to point out
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: that Cornell punished a handful of students who said free Palestine
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: and didn't do anything about these men who wrote about another free thing,
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: as I think we've all heard.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: What else?
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I would say there is a bigger context too,
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_03: which is the Trump administration having used anti-Semitism as a vehicle
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_03: to bring colleges and universities to heal.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_03: Not that actually the Trump administration cares about Jewish people,
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_03: but anti-Semitism was the lever.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_03: And at the same time, the Trump administration has been Undermining women's rights.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_03: And that's a very mild way of putting it.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_03: But, you know,
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_03: I haven't heard anything from the Department of Justice or the Trump administration
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_03: about this,
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_03: because,
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_03: of course,
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_03: we have somebody who was convicted of sexual assault in civil court
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_03: who is actually sitting in the West Wing as we speak,
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_03: unless he's like flying down to Florida or flying to another campaign rally.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_03: So so we have the sexual assaulter in chief.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_03: In the White House.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's another sort of dissonant thing here,
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_03: that there's a lot of feminist rage that is emerging
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_03: because this has become symbolic of how badly women have been treated since the fall
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_03: of Roe v. Wade.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_03: And certainly in the Trump administration, in the Department of Defense and so on.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's also important to note that late last week,
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_03: New York Governor Kathy Hochul directed Attorney General Letitia James to reopen
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_03: the case as a special prosecutor,
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: that Letitia James herself will be the special prosecutor on this.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_03: And that strikes me as important on another number of levels,
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_03: one being that Kathy Hochul is up for reelection.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_03: The fact that this case came out the way it did at the moment it did,
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_03: Has really forced her out of her normal comfort zone
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_03: of being your moderate New York governor who doesn't really do anything in relation
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_03: to women, to identity politics.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, I think Hochul also told Cornell that they had to retain a special investigator.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_03: They have retained Justice Department official Sally Yates.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: Remember Sally Yates?
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_03: So she's going to be working for them.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_03: Neil,
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_03: let's talk a little bit about how much a case like this revolves around the idea
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_03: of consent.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_03: And that is really something that has become embedded in Title IX offices is
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_03: whether someone has consented, whether someone can consent.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's really rule of thumb in Title IX offices that the reason...
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_03: Faculty should not have sexual relationships with students is
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_03: that students are unable to consent meaningfully,
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_03: even if they're adults, because the faculty member holds power over them.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_03: But what would consent mean in a case like Jane Doe's?
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that's a big question for investigators because,
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: one of the things that,
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: it's so weird to even say this,
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: like defenders of the Cornell 7 are saying is like, well, she consented to this.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like she,
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: and we have texts and her own testimony that demonstrate that,
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: that like she,
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: and of course she consented to,
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: as you outlined, some of the initial points of this encounter.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: The question is like, What is consent?
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: What does consent mean?
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a one-time thing?
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is it an ongoing aspect of a sexual experience?
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: In the case of most campus activists around sex and sexuality,
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think the dominant teaching or guideline is that one has to give consent over and
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_00: over again along the way.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: So that's in question in this particular incident.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's only magnified,
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: by the element of alcohol and drugs that are part of this particular incident.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's real questions also,
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_00: just back to the ketamine part of it all,
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: what her level of consent or even awareness was about the use of ketamine.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: But that obviously throws into The picture are some really,
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think, challenging circumstances to wade through.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_03: And let me just say,
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_03: listeners, there are some really dangerous drugs roaming around college campuses.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's not just ketamine.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_03: It's molly.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, I remember a Wesleyan student died from a bad dose of molly four or five years ago.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_03: There's something called, I think, GBH.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_03: Which has to be given in such strictly titrated doses that the amount
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_03: that makes you high is only slightly less than the amount
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_03: that will actually kill you.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_03: But so these drugs are all sort of drifting around college campuses.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's not your, you know, do you want another hit from my bong situation anymore?
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_03: Not that that was particularly safe,
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_03: but Jane Doe has said that she was being coerced with alcohol and drugs,
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_03: that these were sort of being constantly fed to her,
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_03: and that she only gradually understood what was going on.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_03: And let me just say,
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_03: listeners,
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_03: that an encounter can begin as consensual,
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_03: but as Neil is saying,
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_03: it can turn non-consensual,
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_03: and at a point at which Someone says no, that's when you're supposed to stop.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_03: There was a great piece in the New Yorker,
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_03: which I don't think I've linked to,
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_03: and I'll see if I can find it,
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_03: in which the author says apparently it's not just that you have to say yes over and
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_03: over again,
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_03: you have to say no over and over again because people keep doing what they're doing.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_03: But I think One of the reasons that I'm beginning to be very suspicious
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_03: about turning our judgments of these issues on the idea of consent is as
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_03: a college teacher,
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_03: I had any number of women come to me and say, yeah, I didn't want to do it.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I said no.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_03: And he kept pushing and I decided I would just get it over with so I could leave.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_03: So there are moments in which women,
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_03: and I'm sure some men, consent because they don't know what else to do.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_03: They don't know how to escape from the situation.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_03: So there's that.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_03: But then there's the question of the fact that in ensuing week,
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_03: she also exchanged friendly texts with some of these guys,
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_03: including one who wrote to her and said, are you okay?
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_03: And she texted back, yeah, I'm okay.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's fine.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_03: That was fun.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_03: So these are sort of being held against her.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_03: Is that atypical behavior, Neil?
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think we have lots and lots and lots of evidence and examples of women or people
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: in these experiences operating in very similar ways.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of confusion here,
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: given the intoxicants that were used, of just recalling what actually had happened.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_00: I also think that lots of folks...
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_00: Experience and process and come to terms with experiences like this over time, right?
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that it leads to a lot of behaviors that seem conflicting or even contradictory,
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: but are in fact, I think, evidence of the complicated nature of this.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's so interesting because of course, again,
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: defenders of the Cornell Seven are making big, big decisions So that to me is just
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's just obvious what's being done there is you're not really weighing all this evidence.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: You're just cherry picking something and saying that because she did this,
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: then that means nothing else about this could be considered an assault.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: I also think, and we see this every single time, questioning the timeline itself.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: Why did it take so long?
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_00: The immediate response of a person who's been sexually violated is to,
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: you know, within hours or by the next day, go and speak to the police.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that is such a horrific and stupid idea,
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_00: but it's one that is trotted out every single time this happens.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: Megyn Kelly is making a big deal of that.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: And Megyn Kelly is a person who took 10 years to talk about Roger,
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_00: was it Roger Ailes at Fox News making sexual advances against her.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: So of all people to do that,
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: and for a woman in general to do it,
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_00: let alone someone who waited 10 years to come out with her own story,
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_00: we see this time and time again.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know, let's just pause on Megyn Kelly since you invoked her.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_03: I also want to throw Caitlin Flanagan into the mix.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_03: Caitlin Flanagan wrote this horrendous piece for the Free Press.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I just want to say or confess that I have from time to time been a Caitlin Flanagan fan.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_03: I thought the piece she wrote about the death of Quintana Rue,
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_03: Joan Didion's daughter, was absolutely astonishing.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_03: She also wrote a great piece about going on vacation with small children
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_03: and how much mothers hate it.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_03: So she can be a really good writer, I think, with the right editors.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_03: But she wrote this piece for the Free Press in which she said,
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_03: why did Jane Doe go to the fraternity in the first place?
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_03: Didn't she know that there was a high likelihood she would be raped there?
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_03: Which sets me back on my heels for any number of reasons.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_03: One being that,
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_03: first of all,
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_03: if in fact you are saying that as a defender of men,
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_03: it is no way to defend men to say,
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_03: when gathered in large groups, they're likely to rape you.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_03: But what Flanagan also talks about is being at college,
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_03: breaking up with her boyfriend,
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_03: and in his last act before leaving her,
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_03: he grabs her hand and says, don't ever go upstairs in a fraternity house.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_03: And it reminded me of a lot of sexual harassment stuff that I have seen in
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_03: the university where someone who is a known sexual harasser, no one talks about it.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_03: So if you know, you know.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_03: And there was a sexual harasser in the department I got my PhD in at NYU.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_03: And we all knew he was a creep.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_03: We all knew he had made passes at everybody.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_03: We were all lesbians.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_03: So we sort of said, oh, no big deal.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_03: What a silly man, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then when we were all gone, there was a woman who he really did assault in his office.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_03: And...
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_03: She hadn't gotten the memo and it made me realize I felt horribly guilty at
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_03: a certain point that I had never said anything to anybody because staying out
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_03: of this man's clutches required a certain panache and it required
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_03: a certain knowledge beforehand.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_03: And if that knowledge was not passed on, you know, you didn't know.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_03: And You know, what's interesting to me about Jane Doe is that she was a sophomore.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_03: Usually by the time you're a sophomore, you're kind of savvy.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, the red zone for campus sexual assault is first semester freshman year.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_03: That's your highest risk.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_03: And then after that,
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_03: you start meeting other girls who say,
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_03: yeah, you know, don't go to parties at that house.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_03: Or if you do take a friend, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_03: So it shocked me that Caitlin Flanagan was sort of promoting this idea that to go to
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_03: a frat house was to agree to be in danger.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_03: Neil, you went to a university, you went to Duke, had a lot of frats.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_03: What was the nature of frat culture at Duke when you were there?
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I wasn't in a frat.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not a frat person at all.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, frats,
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think as often as the case in small elite schools,
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: frats can sort of loom large, but also be inconsequential at the same time.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's sort of how I felt about them.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: they had a particular camp,
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: they certainly influenced campus culture in general, but it was like really sort of,
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was really big at the beginning of the fall semester and then everyone joked how
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: by the third weekend parties were over because we were a serious school
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: and students were about the business of classwork and stuff like that.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's not necessarily the case at state universities
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: where they loom large all year and they really control the social scene
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: and dominate it.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: But also I think at big universities they can sometimes exist
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: a little bit more Separate from the rest of the institution because the schools are
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: so big and they are sort of just a portion of a really large student body.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_00: When you have like a residential university like Cornell or like Duke
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: Or like other Ivy Leagues or select liberal arts universities where everyone lives
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: on campus all four years.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: They can feel in a way a little bit inescapable,
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_00: even if they're not necessarily the same thing as like Greek Row at University
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: of Alabama.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like I was someone who...
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like at Duke, all fraternity parties had to be open.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: That was part of the rule, like every party.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so I could go and this is what I would do with my friends.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: We would go and we would dance at fraternity parties because that's where the music was playing.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it was like our dance club essentially.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that also helps sort of mitigate or, you know, work against them.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, existing in this sort of separate realm that was impenetrable.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was sort of in a way they were sort of made to be almost like a public good.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, I just always sort of rolled my eyes at that stuff.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was not someone who was going to be part of a fraternity in any way or measure,
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_00: but certainly didn't mind going with all my friends and dancing to music in
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: a common room for a couple of hours.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff had said,
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_03: and Kotlikoff is in all kinds of trouble.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_03: There was a no-confidence vote by the faculty.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_03: The students actually, I think, today had a boycott of everything university.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe it was yesterday.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_03: But, you know, spend no money at the university.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_03: Don't go to classes.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_03: You know, spend the day talking about violence against women, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_03: Kotlikoff,
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_03: I think,
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_03: is in trouble and he's been at the center of a number of controversies,
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_03: things that he's handled very badly.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_03: There's campus vandalism and so on.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_03: But I think this question that it's the fraternities that are the problem.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_03: I also just sort of want to dig into that a little bit,
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_03: because as you're saying,
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_03: fraternities can play a role and they certainly potentially can play a role
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_03: for keeping Young men connected.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_03: Scott Galloway,
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_03: the podcaster,
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_03: has talked a lot about his fraternity at UCLA and the number of friends that he has
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_03: from that time and how they acculturated him.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_03: No one in his family had ever gone to college and they taught him how to study
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_03: and they taught him how to dress and they said,
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_03: you should go out for a sport and he You know,
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_03: that for him,
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_03: it was a way of actually learning how to become part of an elite institution.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's really interesting.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't seen that.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my husband, Nate, was in a fraternity at his university.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_00: He went to American University in Washington,
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_00: D.C. And Nate grew up in a pretty modest, you know, circumstances in rural Ohio.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_00: And here he He was at,
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_00: a sort of fancy university in Washington,
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_00: D.C. with a lot of kids from the Northeast.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he happened to get into like one of the really quote unquote good fraternities.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_00: And like he's talked a lot about how much he learned through,
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: you know, guys who'd grown And so I think that there's an element of that.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: And of course,
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: if we're thinking about the history of fraternities,
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: a lot of what the origins of these organizations were and a lot of the history
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: of what they served to do was to provide that sort
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: Social acculturation and the social education to become a certain type
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_00: of professional man, especially I think in like mid 20th century America.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I want to emphasize listeners, we don't know what happened to Jane Doe.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_03: We only know like the rest of you what we have read.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_03: We're still processing it.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_03: We're still waiting for new facts to come out.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_03: But one of the things we know is what didn't happen.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_03: Which is no one stopped it.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody saw this scene unfolding.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody received that text and said, oh, this is not a good thing.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_03: And went in and took her away and so on.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_03: What is it about youth culture?
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_03: Let's just say youth culture because plenty of young women defend the men
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_03: in fraternities and will sort of turn on the woman who has been raped.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_03: So there are lots of Megyn Kellys and Caitlin Flanagans on college campuses.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_03: But what prevents young men from saying, I need to protect her rather than let this happen?
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think that's a big question.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of factors at work here.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can assume there's a lot of folks who just didn't want it, wanted to ignore it.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think, you know, there's a lot of I don't know.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know how to answer this because I think it's like
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_00: the thing everyone is grappling with.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_00: And like one of the things I actually have found so insufficient about this moment,
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're already seeing a lot of pushback to it is the sort of.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_00: The rise of the consent conversation again,
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_00: where there's this like,
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_00: oh, we have got to teach our daughters and our sons about consent.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like,
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think that,
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_00: just grows out of this,
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_00: what I see is like a liberal pipe dream that,
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_00: like, we can educate our way out of every sort of moral and cultural thing.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_00: Quandary and or let alone crisis.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think like you're seeing some really interesting pushback to
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_00: the consent conversation, especially how gendered the consent conversation is.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like mother,
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_00: sit your daughters down and let them know,
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_00: that they should never do these things and that they have to get consent and all
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_00: that.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean,
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_00: that doesn't really answer your question about why young men would receive
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: a text like this and do nothing.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_03: Well, my nephew said they were probably out raping somebody else and they didn't have time.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_03: But I think he was joking.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_03: But I would also say,
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_03: as somebody has pointed out,
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_03: you know, on Saturday night, you're going to get lots of texts.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_03: You know, hopefully you're not looking at your phone.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_03: Hopefully you're dancing.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_03: Hopefully you're You know, playing cards or at the movies or on a date or something like that.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_03: And you're not staring at your phone.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_03: Nevertheless, enough people knew about it, including the men in that room to make it stop.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_03: And they didn't.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and I think that this actually...
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_00: Is important because there are both the aggressors,
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_00: there are both the people who do these things and there's the larger culture
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_00: of silence that surrounds it.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know,
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of folks have said like, okay,
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_00: there's,
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: the Cornell seven, but we really need to know the Cornell 56 because Right.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_00: the the silence and is a sort of permission structure in which like
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_00: the worst offenders, you know, carry out their their deeds.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_00: one thing we haven't talked I don't think we've talked about at all is porn and
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_00: the influence of porn on this generation.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_00: we're not going to go into the we didn't go into the details of like
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_00: which folks can read about of what's been reported as like the chain,
• 1:10:24
  SPEAKER_00: you know, chain of events.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_00: But It just,
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_00: that's something that really struck me is just like,
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_00: and I don't think one has to be like a puritanical prude to like hear what happened
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_00: and to,
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: to be concerned about the decisions and the sort of the ideas of sex and sexuality
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_00: that these folks were activating.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_03: I put in the search line, women like to be raped.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I got a whole feed full of porn in which women are asking to be raped,
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_03: are not asking to be raped, but getting pleasure from it.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_03: And mixed in, sprinkled into this feed were men being raped.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_03: And this kind of horrible homophobic porn in which some guy is being penetrated
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_03: and being called homophobic slurs and,
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_03: by someone like in a baseball cap and jeans and,
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_03: you know, it's like a frat boy raping the
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_03: And so this is available to anybody at a moment in
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_03: which we have practically no sexual education whatsoever.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_03: So kids are actually going to porn to find out what exactly they're supposed to do
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_03: if they want to have sex.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that is a huge problem.
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know how we address it.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I mean,
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_00: there's been a long anti-pornography movement in this country that,
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_00: you know, comes from sort of the far right that's sought to eliminate it.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I think, like,
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_00: those are just a particular,
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_00: you know, set of voices in a conversation that needs to include a lot more people.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_00: it needs to be led by other people,
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: folks that are more concerned with like what you're describing,
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_00: just being awash in the digital aid and it being this almost unavoidable aspect of,
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_00: having any presence on social media in a way that wasn't true at all for,
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know, the longer history of pornography in this country.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I think,
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing I would like to say is I think there are a great many more rapes
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_03: that happen not in fraternities on campus.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know,
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_03: we hear about these because they happened at fraternities,
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_03: often because they involve multiple people or drugs or an organization
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_03: that has been troubled for some time.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_03: But actually most people are raped by someone they know.
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_03: They are,
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_03: it's often,
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_03: that person is often a family member or a friend or a date or someone they trust.
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_03: And that usually doesn't happen in public the way this event at Chi-Fi happened.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_03: I also wanted to just sort of bring up some of the comparisons
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_03: that people are bringing in with this case.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm thinking the Duke Lacrosse Case, and I believe that was 2006.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_03: 2006.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and then a much older one.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_03: Were you at Duke then?
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, I graduated before that.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_03: And then the Alpha Tau Omega case in 1983 that Peggy Reeves Sandé wrote a book
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_03: about fraternity gang rape.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_03: What's different now?
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_03: And let me just say about the Duke Lacrosse case, because I don't want to get sued.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_03: Roy Cooper, in fact, overturned that investigation and exonerated the men involved.
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_03: And the stripper who claimed that she had been raped by these men later,
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_03: like in 2024, said that she had lied.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_03: Nevertheless,
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_03: we had a situation in which it was a group of men who were renowned
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_03: for bad behavior,
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_03: who were drunk, who clearly did something to this stripper that she didn't like.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_03: Like maybe they didn't pay her or something happened to that woman.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know what it was.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_03: And yet when we get so highly focused on was it a rape,
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_03: was it not a rape, the bigger picture to me is as troubling, right?
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'll say that,
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_00: you know, I graduated like eight years before this happened or it became public.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember where I was when this news broke.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember getting out my phone and texting my college friends and all
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_00: of us were like, of course they did it because that was the reputation that.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_00: That particular sports team had on campus.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was completely believable.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_00: It turned out it wasn't the case in terms of what the actual, you know, allegation was.
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_00: They also settled for lots and lots of money with the university.
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so anyway,
• 1:16:11
  SPEAKER_00: but I think like you're asking about the bigger culture that surrounds these events
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_00: and that like a lot of times we get sort of stuck in the like the particulars
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_00: of like the case itself and maybe miss the forest for the trees of like
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_00: a larger phenomenon.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think your point about fraternities is really important because I'm seeing
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_00: so many folks and we're going to see a lot of think pieces that are like It's time
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_00: to abolish fraternities.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_00: And without weighing in on that question or not,
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_00: because I really don't have a strong view of it,
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_00: I do think that as historians,
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_00: we could say, well,
• 1:16:44
  SPEAKER_00: you get rid of this thing,
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_00: that doesn't eliminate the behavior or the way in
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_00: which certain folks will organize themselves through other structures.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that those structures in part exist to perpetuate Systems like this,
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_00: systems of power and of dominance and of abuse.
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there's probably lots of college campuses where there is no Greek life.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if there's been research I think it's safe for us to imagine
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_00: that even on campuses that don't have fraternities and sororities,
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_00: that sexual violence takes place.
• 1:17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's often fueled through some of the similar context and scenarios
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_00: that play out within a Greek system.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_03: it's interesting because at Wesleyan,
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_03: there was one actually horrendous sexual assault.
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_03: And it was sort of the reason I left the university because
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_03: the university handled it so badly and treated this young woman so badly.
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I got involved because her mother called me because nobody at
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_03: the university would return their phone calls.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_03: And they were calling and saying, you know, our daughter has been harmed.
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody needs to talk to us about it.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess they were advised by counsel Not to speak to her,
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_03: but it was exactly the wrong thing to do because then they came to me and
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_03: then I raised hell.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_03: But actually other bad things happened at Wesleyan fraternities.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_03: I remember one year where somebody fired a gun through the ceiling of a fraternity
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_03: in the middle of a party.
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_03: I remember two students who fell out a window.
• 1:18:30
  SPEAKER_03: They were making out and they were too drunk.
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_03: They leaned against the window.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_03: They fell out the window and had to be taken to the hospital.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, so.
• 1:18:37
  SPEAKER_03: So this kind of partying led to a variety of extremely dangerous behaviors.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess what I'd sort of like to close on is whether we have any solution
• 1:18:54
  SPEAKER_03: to this as two people who have been embedded in universities for most of our lives.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_03: What would you do if you were the president of a university and you really wanted
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_03: to address this kind of ill treatment of students by each other?
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that, you know, first of all, just to try and host conversations around this.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's what a university campus in large and in many ways should exist
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_00: to do is to make this a public conversation.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_00: through forums,
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_00: through, I mean,
• 1:19:33
  SPEAKER_00: if you can like somehow thread this through curriculum,
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_00: that it needs to become much more It needs to be exposed to daylight, right?
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and much more discussed.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think so often this is really dealt with through the sort of lens or through
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_00: the framework of retribution, right?
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Of like regulations of punishment.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think those have a place.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly this university and others need to think a lot about the sort
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_00: of rules they have in place.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it needs to be a larger cultural impact.
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Conversation that's not just in a three-day orientation at the beginning of
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_00: the school year,
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_00: which is often how it's treated,
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_00: but is an ongoing feature of the university experience.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think universities are up against a lot these days,
• 1:20:25
  SPEAKER_00: and especially the sort of behemoth of social media and how
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_00: that shapes students' lives way more than I think the classroom does.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think universities cannot ignore this or pretend like it's not happening everywhere.
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully this is a wake up call to every university around the country
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_00: that they've got to start doing things proactively and not wait
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_00: for some similar event on their campus.
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and it does suggest to me that mostly shutting it down through
• 1:20:57
  SPEAKER_03: the Title IX process works for universities
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_03: because otherwise they'd be getting sued all the time for this stuff.
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_03: So I agree with you.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing that I agree with very strongly is
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_03: that universities should not take any actions that drive students underground.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_03: And that is what happens.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_03: If you ban a fraternity and throw it off campus,
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_03: they just reestablish themselves off campus and you have absolutely no jurisdiction
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_03: over what goes on there.
• 1:21:29
  SPEAKER_03: At Wesleyan, at one point, they...
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_03: Declared a very strict alcohol policy, no alcohol policy.
• 1:21:37
  SPEAKER_03: And the result of that was kids getting just ragingly drunk before they went
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_03: to parties where they were not allowed to be served alcohol,
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_03: more kids in the emergency room.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_03: And what was worse is that because students knew that you could be suspended
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_03: or expelled for alcohol,
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_03: When one of their friends got dangerously drunk,
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_03: they would do nothing because being kids,
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_03: they thought, well,
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_03: it would be worse to be expelled than it would be to like die of alcohol poisoning.
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_03: So punishment and criminalization, A, it's always after the fact.
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_03: B, it is not exemplary for young people.
• 1:22:18
  SPEAKER_03: And C, it creates more dangerous behaviors.
• 1:22:21
  SPEAKER_03: All right, so here's what I would do if I were president of a university.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_03: I would say,
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_03: That like they did back in the 1960s and early 1970s and in the decades before that,
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_03: every fraternity and every dormitory should have an adult living there.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_03: All of these spaces are run by students.
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_03: And that was a really big push in the 60s and 70s is to give students autonomy.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_03: And some of that was really good.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_03: Being able to get women birth control, getting rid of parietals, a variety of things.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_03: But actually,
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think 18 and 19 and 20 years old people are by and large able
• 1:23:07
  SPEAKER_03: to govern themselves collectively.
• 1:23:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so, you know, it used to be every fraternity had a house mother.
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_03: And the house mother made sure that things were orderly.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_03: They made sure that things were clean.
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_03: If you're going to have sex, you had to have sex in your car or, you know, whatever.
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's not that it prevented sexual assault,
• 1:23:27
  SPEAKER_03: but it did prevent the kind of hothouse atmosphere
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_03: that these fraternities have now become.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_03: And also just to say a lot of them are really dirty.
• 1:23:39
  SPEAKER_03: And there was one fraternity on campus at Wesleyan that actually
• 1:23:43
  SPEAKER_03: the fire marshal came and shut it down because it was so dirty and unsafe
• 1:23:47
  SPEAKER_03: and dilapidated.
• 1:23:49
  SPEAKER_03: So I think actually universities need to get more people involved,
• 1:23:53
  SPEAKER_03: which in a day and age of AI and putting everything online and so
• 1:23:56
  SPEAKER_03: on is not something they're going to like.
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_03: But I think that's the only thing that's going to be effective.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_03: So listeners, thanks for listening to us.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_03: We went way over time in our news focus.
• 1:24:08
  SPEAKER_03: And we're going to wrap up on what we want to go viral this week.
• 1:24:12
  SPEAKER_03: I hope it'll cheer you up a little bit.
• 1:24:13
  SPEAKER_03: Neil, what do you want to go viral this week?
• 1:24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, maybe there's some subconscious reasons I've chosen this piece.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_00: It came out in the New York Times a couple of days ago.
• 1:24:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's titled, Why My Gen Z Students Are Fascinated by the King James Bible.
• 1:24:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's written by Pasquale Toscano,
• 1:24:34
  SPEAKER_00: who's an assistant professor of English at Vassar College, and he...
• 1:24:38
  SPEAKER_00: He talks about how last spring he taught a course on Renaissance literature
• 1:24:44
  SPEAKER_00: and he had assigned portions of the King James Bible and he said
• 1:24:49
  SPEAKER_00: that his students were just fascinated by it.
• 1:24:51
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:24:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I was really excited to start reading this piece for all sorts of reasons,
• 1:25:01
  SPEAKER_00: including because it reminded me of my freshman year at Duke when I took
• 1:25:06
  SPEAKER_00: a Shakespeare course and my Shakespeare professor lamenting at some point in
• 1:25:13
  SPEAKER_00: the semester,
• 1:25:13
  SPEAKER_00: and this would have been in the mid-90s,
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_00: that one of the challenges of teaching Shakespeare And I
• 1:25:28
  SPEAKER_00: remember sort
• 1:25:29
  SPEAKER_00: of being like, oh,
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_00: that's not me because I grew up on the King James Bible and feeling like, okay,
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_00: maybe this can be like a little bit of an advantage for me here in this course,
• 1:25:39
  SPEAKER_00: which it wasn't.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, back to this piece.
• 1:25:43
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that this piece,
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_00: as it starts out,
• 1:25:46
  SPEAKER_00: was gonna be about like,
• 1:25:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was sort of going to be like similar to what my Shakespeare professor
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_00: at Duke had said all those years ago.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was like,
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_00: what a shame it was the kids weren't familiar with this text and they really need it
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_00: in order to understand, you know, great literature and history.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_00: And all the rest.
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not what this piece is at all.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_00: It goes in a totally different direction than I expected,
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_00: which is by really via the history of the creation of the King James Bible,
• 1:26:15
  SPEAKER_00: which happened in the early 1600s when King James brought this committee together of
• 1:26:20
  SPEAKER_00: about 50 scholars who spent a decade working.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Translating the Bible into what we know as the King James Version.
• 1:26:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it becomes this long essay about the strength of collaborative work and of expertise.
• 1:26:40
  SPEAKER_00: That happens within a shared network and how like it draws out,
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_00: collaboration and innovation that happens through this sort of cross pollination
• 1:26:52
  SPEAKER_00: of ideas and how this is the antidote.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_00: To our AI moment where individuals,
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_00: especially college students,
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_00: isolate themselves and interact only with this machine as sort of their sole source
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_00: of learning and instruction and what we need to do.
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_00: What I want to do is really look at the history of the King James Bible
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_00: and this sort of creation by committee as a model for
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_00: the collaborative learning environment that universities should have.
• 1:27:25
  SPEAKER_00: I just loved it because I loved reading the history that this piece covers,
• 1:27:30
  SPEAKER_00: but especially the way that this writer took it to just
• 1:27:34
  SPEAKER_00: a totally different direction that seems so urgent and meaningful
• 1:27:38
  SPEAKER_00: for our moment right now.
• 1:27:39
  SPEAKER_00: So check out the piece.
• 1:27:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's wonderful.
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_03: Listeners, we're going to link to it.
• 1:27:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I was just sitting here thinking about my own first year in college where I had
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_03: to take English 125,
• 1:27:52
  SPEAKER_03: which you had to take as an English major,
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_03: and you could Basically test into it from your AP English score.
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_03: And we read, the first two authors we read were Chaucer and Spencer.
• 1:28:05
  SPEAKER_03: And I remember this tremendous feeling of accomplishment when I actually learned
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_03: to read Chaucer and Spencer because it wasn't English as I knew it.
• 1:28:17
  SPEAKER_03: And it was such a beautiful way of writing and it made me feel so accomplished.
• 1:28:23
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it also makes me think, Neil, what you're saying.
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_03: Students are really into old things.
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_03: Like they love to be able to access things that you can't necessarily just find on the Internet.
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_03: You know, my guess is they like to hold a Bible in their hands, you know, which many of us do.
• 1:28:46
  SPEAKER_03: So it's really sort of a nice segue to Some people on campus
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_03: who are actually thinking hard about what does it mean to engage students to
• 1:29:01
  SPEAKER_03: the tasks that they're actually on campus to do,
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_03: which is to learn and to transform and to become accomplished people.
• 1:29:10
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you for that.
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_03: All right,
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_03: so my contribution this week is for you to read or listen to,
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_03: and I listen to it,
• 1:29:18
  SPEAKER_03: Evan Gershkovitz's This Cursed Beautiful Land,
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_03: A Russian-American Story, which just came out like 10 days ago.
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's about the Wall Street Journal reporter who was imprisoned in Russia for almost 16 months.
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_03: He was arrested on trumped-up and espionage charges in March 2023
• 1:29:37
  SPEAKER_03: and knew almost immediately that he had been taken for the purposes of
• 1:29:41
  SPEAKER_03: an international prisoner swap.
• 1:29:44
  SPEAKER_03: Paul Whalen, the former Marine who was accused of being a spy, was still in prison.
• 1:29:48
  SPEAKER_03: Brittany Griner had already been imprisoned and gotten out.
• 1:29:52
  SPEAKER_03: So Gershkovits knew this was happening and he knew that the FSB was beginning
• 1:29:58
  SPEAKER_03: to tighten the screws,
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_03: not only on the media,
• 1:30:03
  SPEAKER_03: but On Americans because there were a lot of people Putin wanted to get out
• 1:30:09
  SPEAKER_03: of prisons in Europe and in North America.
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_03: And so he was basically just taking people as trading cards.
• 1:30:19
  SPEAKER_03: I was very involved with Evan Gershkovits and to this day,
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_03: I cannot exactly tell you why his story affected me so much.
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_03: But it is also the case that I used to teach a class on captivity narratives.
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_03: And were I still teaching today,
• 1:30:36
  SPEAKER_03: I would teach this one because the prison becomes a place where Gershkovits,
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_03: whose parents were Russian emigres,
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_03: they came to the United States during the period when Jews were really under threat
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_03: in the Soviet Union, which was like the 1960s, 70s.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_03: They come and he grows up in New Jersey in this sort of funny hybrid life
• 1:30:59
  SPEAKER_03: where his parents speak Russian to each other.
• 1:31:02
  SPEAKER_03: He speaks a little Russian.
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_03: He goes and hangs out in Brighton Beach.
• 1:31:05
  SPEAKER_03: He eats the kinds of Russian food that his mother makes.
• 1:31:09
  SPEAKER_03: But when he becomes a journalist and and by the way,
• 1:31:13
  SPEAKER_03: young people,
• 1:31:13
  SPEAKER_03: if you're looking for a career,
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_03: the first three chapters of this book is like how to become a journalist,
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_03: which is basically volunteer to do anything for anybody and go somewhere.
• 1:31:24
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, when he gets to Russia, he has to learn Russianness.
• 1:31:30
  SPEAKER_03: And he is sort of superficially Russian because of his parents, but he's not deeply Russian.
• 1:31:36
  SPEAKER_03: He makes Russian friends.
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_03: He gets involved with all of the beautiful cities in Russia.
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_03: And then when he's imprisoned,
• 1:31:45
  SPEAKER_03: he really learns what it means to be Russian,
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_03: not just from the people he meets there,
• 1:31:51
  SPEAKER_03: but from the prison guards,
• 1:31:54
  SPEAKER_03: from the people who have put him there in the first place,
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_03: from his Russian lawyers, from eating the food.
• 1:32:03
  SPEAKER_03: And at a moment of great crisis, he falls deeper and deeper in love with Russia as a country.
• 1:32:12
  SPEAKER_03: And becomes more and more committed to the people who are trying to win it back
• 1:32:19
  SPEAKER_03: from Putin and authoritarianism.
• 1:32:22
  SPEAKER_03: It is a deeply moving story.
• 1:32:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's the kind of story about Russia that I think everyone should read now
• 1:32:29
  SPEAKER_03: because Russia is such a pariah and the government is responsible
• 1:32:33
  SPEAKER_03: for such terrible things.
• 1:32:35
  SPEAKER_03: But there are still millions and millions and millions of Russian people
• 1:32:39
  SPEAKER_03: who We hope one day we'll be our friends.
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_03: So cannot recommend it more.
• 1:32:48
  SPEAKER_03: Evan Gershkovits, This Cursed Beautiful Land, A Russian-American Story.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_03: And as I say, I listened to it and listening to Evan read his own story was really moving.
• 1:32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds amazing.
• 1:33:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it really is.
• 1:33:02
  SPEAKER_03: I know you're a listener, Neil, so I would definitely recommend it to you.
• 1:33:09
  SPEAKER_03: And with that,
• 1:33:09
  SPEAKER_03: listeners,
• 1:33:10
  SPEAKER_03: we have kept you way too long this week,
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_03: but I think for good purposes and good intentions.
• 1:33:17
  SPEAKER_03: And, Neil, I'll see you next week.
• 1:33:20
  SPEAKER_00: See you then.
• 1:33:22
  SPEAKER_01: Remembering me those
• 1:33:35
  SPEAKER_03: who are To leave a comment or question,
• 1:33:38
  SPEAKER_03: to subscribe for free, or to support our work for as little as $5 a month.
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_03: That's all for now.
• 1:34:05
  SPEAKER_03: See you next week.
• 1:34:06
  [music]
• 1:34:30
  [music]
• 1:35:25
  SPEAKER_01: Do you believe it?
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Can you receive it?
• 1:35:30
  SPEAKER_03: Do you believe it?
• 1:35:31
  [music]