Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Will Trump Be Arrested?" with James Kirchick

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"Will Trump Be Arrested?" with James Kirchick · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Do you know what's going to happen?
• 0:07
  Is it going to happen? Is it going to happen this week? I have papers here, let's say. It's going to happen this week.
• 0:13
  Donald Trump. He's going to get arrested or indicted. Are they the same thing? What's being indicted and what's being arrested?
• 0:20
  It's about to happen. It's imminent now. We've heard about it for years and now Donald J. Trump, former president of the United States.
• 0:31
  You're going to be thrown in the slamer in the clinker. He's going to be in the orange jumpsuit.
• 0:37
  I don't know if that's true or not, but I wanted to talk to somebody. Well, here's the real truth. I already had scheduled today's guest to talk about a number of other issues on which he's absolutely fascinating.
• 0:56
  It just so happens that he's also a Washington insider, which means that he can give us the lowdown, the costs, the dirt on what's about to happen to Mr. Donald J. Trump.
• 1:06
  But that doesn't even form the bulk of what I'm interested in talking about to Jamie Kerchick. Jamie, I'm not going to preface this terribly much except to tell you who he is. He's a journalist.
• 1:15
  He's been published everywhere at New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, New York Reviewer Books, at New York Magazine, Rolling Stone Magazine, the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement, Frankfurt, Algemeinen, Zeitung, Die Welt.
• 1:30
  Do you want me to go on? He's something of a Europe specialist and a sort of history of American politics in the 20th century specialist. If that's fair to say, he wrote a book six years ago called the end of Europe, dictators, demagogues, and becoming dark age.
• 1:48
  And he's held a lot of positions at think tanks. He's a young guy. He's even younger than me, even younger than me. I'm a spring chicken. Look how pretty I look. Go on, go on my face.
• 1:58
  He's held a lot of positions at important sounding think tanks like the Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution and the Foreign Policy Initiative and so on.
• 2:08
  But his latest book is super interesting. It's called Secret City, the Hidden History of Gay Washington. And imagine if you will what it must have been like in the 1950s to be a spy at the height of the Cold War and be a closeted gay.
• 2:27
  There were a lot of them. There were an unusually large number of them. And many of them ended up hanging themselves, being found in vehicles, shot in the head.
• 2:37
  Secret City is quite a salacious book and Jamie talks us through it after having spoken to us about Donald J. Trump. And then also telling us why he recently wrote about the attack on the New York Times by LGBTQI A plus organizations and how he sees parallels between the New York Times.
• 2:56
  He sees parallels between the chilling of speech and cultural circles and cultural elites today and the kind of chilling speech we saw during the Cold War.
• 3:04
  So this is a fantastic, scintillating, gripping chat with a very clever guy. Please enjoy the one and only Jamie kitchen.
• 3:11
  The headline on ABC.net.au, the public road pastor, is are we expecting Trump to be arrested this week?
• 3:31
  Oh God, I've stopped making predictions about American politics a long time ago. I think there's a good chance he'll be indicted. Yes.
• 3:43
  Is that the same thing? Well, he would be indicted.
• 3:49
  I guess it's a technical question. He might turn himself in to avoid an actual, you know, what we call a perp walk, which is when the police, you know, come to your home and put you up and hang up.
• 4:00
  So yeah, if he was indicted, he would have to appear and he would have to appear in court. So I think it's, it's very much possible.
• 4:08
  The case upon the fact that, you know, it sounds as if the DA, the district attorney in Manhattan has informed Trump's lawyers that they wanted him to testify in this case involving stormy Daniels and they don't usually do that unless they're preparing an indictment, you know, they they make an offer to the potential defendant only in cases where they're preparing an indictment.
• 4:31
  I think it is somewhat likely. Yes. Wow. And I think it's a really bad, I think it's a really bad decision. Both, both, both. I mean, look, this all boils down to these hush money payments that he made to stormy Daniels in 2016.
• 4:49
  And the contention is that this constituted a campaign finance violation. Now just take this back as a reminder to stormy Daniels was stormy Daniels was a porn star who claimed that Trump in her that she slept with Donald Trump many years ago.
• 5:06
  She signed an NDA, she signed a non disclosure agreement, which she claimed she was paid for. And part of that NDA, of course, is that you don't disclose anything she then apparently violated that in order to publicize this.
• 5:24
  The argument is that by paying her off in the fall of 2016, this was done to help his campaign to stave off, you know, an embarrassing publicity incident.
• 5:37
  And that by not reporting it as a campaign expense, this constituted a violation of campaign finance laws. And I just, I'm not a lawyer, but you know, it's, is it imaginable that he might have paid her off, even if he wasn't running for president, just because he's a public figure and didn't want.
• 5:56
  And that's, by the way, that's legal. I mean, these are these happen all the time, by the way, I'm sure they happen in Australia too, where there are claims of sexual harassment are made privately.
• 6:07
  And this person, the person who's accused does not want it to become public. And maybe they're innocent, you know, maybe I mean, I'm, I'm aware of cases where there.
• 6:15
  Men have been accused of things that they did not do.
• 6:20
  But because they have, yeah, this may have happened, but regardless, it's legal, and it happens, right? So the issue, the issue isn't, you know, did he pay off a woman is that illegal? No, that's not illegal. The issue is that he did it while he was running for president.
• 6:35
  And therefore, and therefore, because this would have conceivably helped his campaign, he had to have reported it as a campaign finance expense, and he didn't, and therefore it's, it's a campaign finance violation. I think that's a very tenuous argument.
• 6:48
  I mean, I'm glad that yours confused as I am by this because I thought it was because I'm not an American that I don't understand how this is a campaign.
• 6:55
  And lots of, yeah, and lots of legal experts say that it's a very complex case.
• 7:00
  And I just think it's a shame because, you know, in the entire history of the American Republic, we have never seen a former president indicted, which is not to say that Trump shouldn't be indicted.
• 7:10
  He did lots of things that I think are inditable, but it shouldn't be this.
• 7:14
  You know, if he's going to be indicted for, if he's going to be indicted for something and charged, the standard has to be extremely high, and it also has to be an airtight case.
• 7:23
  So there are two other cases going, so there are two other investigations going on one concerning January six, and they're both federal investigations.
• 7:32
  This is a federal investigation, and then there's another investigation going on in Georgia, where there's audio of him trying to tell the secretary of state to basically doctor the vote for him.
• 7:43
  We have won this election in Georgia based on all of this, and there's nothing wrong with saying that, Brad.
• 7:51
  You know, I mean, having the people of Georgia are angry, and these numbers are going to be repeated on Monday night, along with others that we're going to have by that time, which are much more substantially.
• 8:04
  And the people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry, and there's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you've recalculated.
• 8:15
  Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong.
• 8:20
  Do you think it's possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County, because that's what the rumor is, and also that Dominion took out machines, that Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their machinery.
• 8:37
  Do you know anything about that?
• 8:41
  No, Ryan, Germany. No, Dominion has not moved in a machinery out of Fulton County.
• 8:47
  But if they move, have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts?
• 8:56
  No.
• 8:58
  He's your Ryan?
• 9:00
  I'm sure.
• 9:01
  You should want to have an accurate election, and you're a Republican.
• 9:06
  We believe that we do have an accurate election.
• 9:09
  No, I know you don't. No, no, you don't have. You don't have not even gloves.
• 9:14
  You got, you're off by hundreds of thousands of votes.
• 9:18
  You know what they did, and you're not reporting it. That's a, you know, that's a criminal, that's a criminal offense.
• 9:24
  And, you know, you can't let that happen. That's, that's a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.
• 9:30
  That's a big risk.
• 9:32
  But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I've heard.
• 9:37
  And they are removing machinery, and they're moving it as fast as they can.
• 9:43
  Both of which are criminal fines, and you can't let it happen, and you are letting it happen.
• 9:48
  You know, I mean, I'm notifying you that you're letting it happen.
• 9:51
  So, look, all I want to do is this, I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have,
• 10:05
  because we want to say, so, so, tell me, Brent, what are we going to do?
• 10:11
  We want the election, and it's not fair to take it away from us like this, and it's going to be very costly in many ways.
• 10:20
  And I think you have to say that you're going to re-examine it, and you can re-examine it, but re-examine it with people that want to find answers, not people that don't want to find answers.
• 10:33
  For instance, I'm hearing Ryan, and he's probably, I'm sure a great lawyer and everything, but he's making statements about those ballots that he doesn't know.
• 10:43
  But he's making it with such, he did make him with security, but now I think he's less sure, because the answer is they all went to Biden.
• 10:51
  And that alone wins us the election, by a lot.
• 10:59
  You have people that submit information, and we have our people that submit information, and then it comes before the court, and the court then has to make a determination.
• 11:10
  We have to stand by our numbers, we believe our numbers are right.
• 11:14
  Under law, you're not allowed to give faulty election results, okay? You're not allowed to do that, and that's what you've done.
• 11:21
  This is a faulty election result, and honestly, this should go very fast. You should meet tomorrow, because you have a big election coming up, and because of what you've done to the president, you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam, and because of what you've done to the president, a lot of people aren't going out to vote.
• 11:40
  And a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative, because they hate what you did to the president, okay? They hate him, and they're going to vote.
• 11:48
  And if you would be respected, if really respected, if this thing could be straightened out before the election, you have a big election coming up on Tuesday.
• 11:58
  I would rather see, if he's going to be indicted for something, I would rather be one of those two cases, where he was actively trying to overturn a democratic election, rather than this convoluted case involving a woman that he slept with.
• 12:13
  Are there not, I mean, in his long history of tax shenanigans and dodgy business dealings from Trump stakes to Trump University to inflating the value of his company when he's trying to borrow money and then deflating the value of his company when he's declaring his taxes.
• 12:31
  None of, none of the fact that he's been essentially an open and proud con man for the past 50 years, that isn't, that I don't find anything that's technically illegal in that.
• 12:42
  Yeah, well, you know, he's been able to get away with that. I mean, for one, when you're the president, there's a Justice Department code or something where they don't bring charges against a sitting president.
• 12:53
  So while he was president, he was basically, that's a norm, that's not sure what code written down in it.
• 12:59
  Yeah, right. It's a norm. Right. So now that he's left, there are all these investigations going on. And, you know, the Democrats are very, or many of them are very keen on nabbing him on something.
• 13:08
  But no, you're right. They haven't, you know, all these many years that he's been a public figure. He is not, I mean, he's not lost, many lawsuits and he's lost many of them, but they haven't been criminal charges of that mistake.
• 13:19
  And just to reiterate for people to stormy Daniel thing, so it was 2000, you said, you said many years ago, 2006 was when he was married to Melania.
• 13:29
  Yeah, he allegedly cheated on Melania with this porn star. And there was another woman too. There was a former playmate, a former playboy playmate as well.
• 13:38
  Right. Now, this is not something that will, will shock people enormously since he has bragged in the past about sleeping with people and being able to, you know, grab them wherever he wants to. And he's not the most
• 13:50
  fidelity is not the word that comes to mind. Maybe when you think about young.
• 13:56
  And their timelines did overlap. She was at the same place. They were at some golf tournament, I think, they were at the same hotel, whatever she says that she went up to his room that they had a very quick minute, a half of terrible sex.
• 14:09
  And that was that. And then, and then he in 2016, I guess that I guess the thing that makes it a little bit fishy about it being an election related donation is that it happens 10 years after the fact.
• 14:23
  Is that, is that right? The, the allegation is that he did her while he was running for president. So if it was unrelated to the election, one might say, well, why didn't you pay her back in 2007? But then I guess the retort could be she wasn't going to break the NDA until I believe that's what I believe once he started running for president.
• 14:43
  He was about to win. She decided to break the NDA. But he did was they did it. They did it through the national inquirer, the tabloid publication whose owner was friends was Trump. And they basically purchased her story.
• 14:57
  And so the money was funneled through them. I believe that's what happens. It's a story in order to not publish it. Yeah, as I said, it's quite convoluted. And you know what, if you're going to indict a former president who has extremely devoted followers.
• 15:10
  There's this concept of prosecutorial discretion, and I'm sure you have it in Australia, not not every crime is prosecuted.
• 15:18
  And the irony here, of course, is that this district attorney in New York is one of these progressive prosecutors who came, you know, who campaign for office pledging not to prosecute all sorts of low level, you know, lifestyle nonviolent crimes, which, you know, conservatives would argue has led to an increase in violent crime, right?
• 15:37
  Now these sorts of quality of life crimes to go unpunished, it creates a sort of environment where criminals become more brazen and whatnot. So the irony is here is that we have one of these progressive prosecutors who's decided not to prosecute all sorts of other crimes.
• 15:52
  But now he's become very determined to go after Trump for this. And I don't think we can discount the politics behind this. I mean, this is a really important element here. I mean, this is a, this is a district attorney and they are elected in the United States. I don't know what they are.
• 16:09
  No, of course we are, you know, they are elected in the United States and they are political actors, right? And so if you're a democratic official in New York, which is a very blue state, and Donald Trump is a is a hate figure among your constituents, then becoming the first prosecutor to indict the former president is great publicity for you.
• 16:32
  So I know that there are lots of Democrats who are not happy about this because they don't mean that it's your toggling a little bit between the legal and the political critiques of this charge.
• 16:43
  I am less sympathetic to political criticisms of a DA prosecuting a crime because I generally don't share the American infatuation with the office of the president and how important it is and how reverential it is. And I'm not big on pomp and ceremony. And I just think if people break laws, then they should be prosecuted. I mean, I don't think presidents should have the right to pardon people.
• 17:05
  Having having a monarch is your head of state helps that attitude.
• 17:10
  Exactly. I mean, it probably does. Like, you know, that this is it is ridiculous. It's completely royal, but royals are ridiculous. And in Australia, we have a multi decades long movement, which has a majority of the people behind it, but has not managed to figure out how to how to cut the ties to Buckingham Palace.
• 17:33
  So, you know, we are keenly sensitive of any anything that smells monarchical and the office of the US president is a little bit close for my liking.
• 17:43
  The idea that a person should get away with crimes just because it's kind of politically inconvenient for people to prosecute them because they used to be the president and that they can then dodge prosecution by potentially running for president again so that they can frame the prosecution as a political witch hunt.
• 17:57
  All of that just smells to high heaven. And I think the justice system should be separate from politics, but I still don't I don't understand this election.
• 18:07
  I mean, to me, it strikes me that if you if you do something in the conduct of your normal private life, right, that you would plausibly have done if you weren't running for president.
• 18:18
  Yes. Then that is not an election contribution. You're not breaking election law for doing that. Otherwise, we're saying that anyone who runs for president is giving up the right to protect their reputation in a way that they would if they weren't running for president simply because they're running for president. And that doesn't seem like the correct precedent.
• 18:36
  Yeah, I agree. And I think that's why legally it's not it's far from being an airtight case. And it's just a very risky strategy. It would only require one juror on a jury of 12 to agree with you or me. And that would be it. And that case would be in Trump would be found not guilty.
• 18:54
  Yeah, yeah, right. And then of course he is I he and his supporters are able to say we're actually we're actually innocent of everything and the whole the whole 2020 the whole claims that we were trying to throw the election in in 2020 are also unfounded.
• 19:09
  I mean, what do you think about the odds of the prosecution on the Georgia thing because that audio of him literally saying if you could just find another thousand odd votes that a big race.
• 19:21
  How is that not a breach of the electoral law?
• 19:26
  Again, I'm not a lawyer, but I would imagine he and his team would make the case that you know it was his freedom of speech perhaps or he was making suggestions he wasn't.
• 19:41
  You know, he didn't have any powers as the president over a Georgia state election official. He couldn't fire him. He, you know, there was no kind of chain of command.
• 19:49
  If I was his lawyer, I guess that would be the case I would make. I mean, I agree with you. It's totally distributable in disgusting what he did.
• 19:57
  I think probably the strongest case would be perhaps the speech that he gave on the ellipse.
• 20:02
  Though even there, you know, we have a very robust. That was the speech before before January before the riot before the insurrection.
• 20:11
  There's the claim that he was inciting people to violence, right?
• 20:14
  What do you make that claim? I'm not even sure I buy that.
• 20:17
  I'm not sure I was going to say you know, we have a very robust first amendment and what you want in the United States.
• 20:24
  In the legal concept is you have to be in terms to consider speech criminal. You'd have to be encouraging.
• 20:34
  I believe it is direct imminent action direct imminent violence, right?
• 20:39
  So, you know, if you're standing outside someone's house,
• 20:44
  and telling a mob of people to go in and kill this person, that would probably not be held to be constitutionally protected speech.
• 20:52
  And so I'm not sure of what Trump said in the hours in the hours before the attack, you know, rises to that to that.
• 21:00
  I mean, I get the impression that you're allowed to whip up people's passions in the first amendment.
• 21:06
  What I don't get them, what seems to me to be clearly off is if you're the head of state to be calling secretaries of state.
• 21:18
  I mean, I guess they're not technically under your chain of command.
• 21:21
  So you don't have any authority to fire them.
• 21:24
  To make them to make what seem like implicit threats to people if they can't fudge electoral election results.
• 21:34
  That they have to be something that's criminal about that.
• 21:37
  I mean, I don't know.
• 21:38
  I mean, I guess my attitude on this whole years long attempts by Democrats to basically, you know, use the legal system to get rid of Trump is that it would really be best for the country if he were repudiated at the ballot box.
• 21:52
  And we did that in 2020.
• 21:55
  I wish we had, I wish we had done it.
• 21:58
  Sorry, go ahead.
• 22:01
  I was just saying the consensus about whether or not we did in fact do that is important to establish.
• 22:06
  Of course, well, half the country will not have the country about a third of the country believes that the election wasn't fair, right?
• 22:12
  But he's running again, right?
• 22:14
  And he has very committed passionate supporters.
• 22:17
  I would prefer to see him defeated electorally than, you know, taken out by some sort of legal strategy.
• 22:26
  Yeah, I've heard that argument.
• 22:28
  But I mean, why it comes back to my point about who is above the law and why?
• 22:33
  I mean, how far does that argument go?
• 22:35
  If, as he said, he could, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York and get away with it.
• 22:40
  Would you still be saying, well, this should be repudiated ballot box.
• 22:43
  Well, if there is a, if there is a crime that he's guilty of having committed and it's something more important than this kind of phony or really insignificant potential campaign.
• 22:55
  Finance violation, then yes.
• 22:57
  And that would be, I think, appropriate, right?
• 22:59
  But it has to be a really serious crime.
• 23:01
  And you have to have an airtight case.
• 23:03
  I mean, how much more serious does a crime have to be than trying to throw an election?
• 23:08
  The George, well, you're talking about the Georgia case in particular.
• 23:10
  I don't know.
• 23:11
  Like I said, I don't know if what he did was technically illegal.
• 23:14
  There's an ongoing investigation.
• 23:16
  And, you know, I await the results of the investigation.
• 23:20
  A lot of, you know, punditry in my country of people just kind of opining without having all the evidence in, in, in evidence.
• 23:28
  And I think we saw that a lot throughout the Russia gate years where, you know, every day Adam Schiff, the head of the intelligence committee, would go on television and tell the country that he was in possession of, you know, top secret information that was going to definitively prove that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians and he went on and on for years telling us that.
• 23:45
  And it turned out that there wasn't evidence of that, right?
• 23:48
  So I wish that our public officials and commentators had a little more humility.
• 23:56
  I mean, you know, I agree with that wholeheartedly.
• 24:00
  However, if that Georgia phone call is not illegal, then American election law needs updating.
• 24:05
  Sure. Maybe it does.
• 24:08
  I'm not sure if it will be election law, it might be some other statute or area of the law.
• 24:15
  It might have been.
• 24:16
  Yeah.
• 24:17
  Yeah.
• 24:18
  I mean, how do you feel about this?
• 24:19
  This kind of bubbling along in the background of the conversation on the democratic side of politics amongst kind of big-brained galaxy-brained types like Andrew Yang.
• 24:30
  And others is this call for an overhaul of American democratic democratic, like just laws around democracy, both in terms of equal in franchisement of excuse me, different racial groups.
• 24:45
  You know, making rendering more robust the laws that discuss this kind of stuff and reconsidering gerrymandering and reconsidering how districts are drawn and the electoral college, like this fundamental sense that something's broken at the core of American politics in a way that you can't just blame on social media and cultural factors.
• 25:10
  Yeah, I definitely, I'm not, I don't think the, I don't think the electoral college should be replaced.
• 25:18
  That probably sounds crazy to your listeners.
• 25:21
  I know it's a very seemingly strange system we have.
• 25:25
  But I do think it is an important check on the tyranny of the majority.
• 25:33
  I think the real problem is in the gerrymandering of congressional districts.
• 25:36
  And we've gotten to the point now where we're losing moderates, you know, the Republican moderates are pretty much gone.
• 25:45
  Even increasingly on the democratic side, you see the rising left.
• 25:50
  And the reason for this is because these districts are so heavily gerrymandered that it's in the, in the primaries and the party primaries, it's becoming increasingly easier for the most right wing if you're in a red state or a red district or if you're in a, or in a blue one for the most left wing candidate to win.
• 26:10
  Right. And so it makes it difficult for moderates on either side of the aisle to win elections.
• 26:15
  And it's a really hard problem to solve, right, because both sides want to gerrymander.
• 26:21
  They want to make the safest districts possible so that there isn't much of a challenge to their, to their power.
• 26:28
  But the result of gerrymandering, we hear about gerrymandering, but just from, remind us how it works.
• 26:34
  So there are two electorate side by side.
• 26:38
  Well, it's the same in any, it's the same in any, it's the same in any parliamentary democracy, right. So how you draw, how you draw a district.
• 26:45
  They call them writings in, in Canada. I'm not sure what you call them in Australia.
• 26:52
  Yeah. And you draw them, you draw the boundaries of it in such a way that you include.
• 27:00
  You try to make it as favorable to your side as possible, right.
• 27:04
  So let's say, let's say, yeah, let's say there's a district that's 50, 50 Republican Democrats, very competitive.
• 27:10
  Whoever's going to win that congressional race is probably going to end up being a moderate, right, because they have to appeal to people across the political spectrum.
• 27:19
  They're tinker with the boundaries. And if you look at some of these congressional districts in the United States, they're, I mean, they, I don't even know how to describe them.
• 27:27
  They look like, you know, constellations in the sky.
• 27:30
  Like an element is, which is where that's where Amanda comes from.
• 27:33
  Well, it comes from Elbridge, Jerry, I think was his name, who was a senator of congressman or whatever, who kind of came up with this.
• 27:40
  Yeah. And so you draw the, yeah, it's because he drew one that looked like a salamander.
• 27:45
  Okay, it was a Jerry, Jerry Mander. There you go. Right. So you draw the district in such a way that you favor your party.
• 27:53
  And so it makes sense from a pure, you know, if you're a Republican and you want to win, it would make sense in that kind of initial reasoning.
• 28:02
  But the long term result of these policies is that you've made it very difficult for moderates to win elections.
• 28:09
  And so just to give a concrete example, I'm just sort of playing with numbers in my head.
• 28:13
  If there's a, if there were, I imagine, imagine an area in which two districts or two electorates lie, and it's 60% one party and 40% the other, then you could have two electorates that are 60, you could have an electorate of 60, 40.
• 28:29
  But if you, if you split it in such a way that it was 55 to 50, then so in other words, make the margin less in each of them so that one party wins both rather than clustering them all, all of your votes together.
• 28:44
  In other words, anything, any vote that you get that's above 51% is essentially a wasted vote.
• 28:49
  So if those voters into the neighboring electorate and then get yourself up to 51% in both electorates, rather than having 90% in a single electorate, do I mangle that?
• 29:00
  No, I think that's right. And one solution to this is that some states and that California, maybe one of them have created.
• 29:08
  They've created non-partisan bodies.
• 29:11
  I mean, if you were, Jamie, the US political system is so crazy, because if you were the genius of the founding fathers and the brilliance of the American political system with its checks and balances, how about these Americans don't have partisan political elected figures being the ones who figure out where the boundaries of the electorates are in every other democracy.
• 29:30
  This is drawn by, you know, it's never going to be perfect, but they are bureaucrats, they're demographers who look at population, you know, and have movements and are a duty bound to be a political in the way that they draw election boundaries.
• 29:47
  There's a competing, there's a competing school of, there's a competing school on the left, and it's been quite legitimate, which is that, you know, black voters in certain states were disenfranchised, right, for many, many years.
• 30:00
  And so part of the reason why some Democrats opposed these sorts of non-partisan, supposed non-partisan bodies is because they want to increase black representation in Congress.
• 30:14
  They want black elected officials, right, and so they want majority black districts where a black candidate or Latino candidate is more likely to win.
• 30:25
  And so that's, that's the sort of competing arguments, I think, on the left.
• 30:29
  I mean, the demographer would take that into consideration, presumably, if there was a black community that constitutes itself as a community, then you would assume that there should be some white given to that.
• 30:40
  I assume that demographers give such white, you know, you've got a Korean Australian neighborhood that's going to, it's unlikely to get split into two electorates, I think.
• 30:49
  Well, it depends, or it could be grouped in with another larger neighborhood, right, I mean, this is also talks.
• 30:57
  There's also a whole body of, I think, Supreme Court decisions and sort of legal, you know, jurisprudence on redistricting and there, and there are civil rights, you know, precedence in some of these cases where there are attempts, there have been attempts by certain states.
• 31:15
  And this, this is not about, you know, voting day, this is about the kind of, this is about how districts are shaped, because certainly in southern states, they would attempt ways of drawing districts in order to dilute the power of certain ethnic voting blocks.
• 31:31
  Right, right. And by the way, just before we leave this and get on to Gays in Washington, the, the electoral college thing, a lot of non-Americans really beat up on the electoral colleges being insanely undemocratic.
• 31:44
  But of course, in the House, which is in a parliamentary democracy where you form government from anyway, this same phenomenon happens because electorates precisely because of the kind of gerry, the natural gerrymandering that happens even without gerrymandering.
• 32:01
  So in 1998 in Australia, the person who won the largest number of votes in Australia did not become the prime minister. It happens rarely, but not infrequently that the person who gets the largest number of votes doesn't get to form government, because all of those votes might be concentrated in particular areas.
• 32:19
  You might have a left-winger has happened in 1998, who was very, very popular in the bigger urban centers with your latte sipping shardonnay swelling progressives.
• 32:31
  But, you know, all of those votes are 90% clustered in electorates that he was already going to win. And then the conservative who has a more broad base support that less popularity nationwide who gets fewer votes wins more seats and is able to form government.
• 32:47
  So my criticism of the electoral college is that the demography of America is changing so much that what originally seemed just viable is becoming ridiculously skewed and probably needs tweaking.
• 33:01
  But I don't think there's any fundamentally undemocratic about the idea of clustering groups together and not necessarily having a perfect one person one vote outcome.
• 33:13
  Let's talk about your book because the first stop, why, why this, why, why the secret history of guys in in Washington, what picked your interest initially?
• 33:27
  Well, Washington is a city, I think like most large national capitals of big important countries, you know, maybe Canberra is the same, I can't speak to it.
• 33:39
  Yeah, they're secret secrets are a form of power right and particularly during the Cold War, which is when my book takes place.
• 33:50
  Secretcy is a part of everyday life and the more acts, the access to secrets, the more secrets you can accumulate, the more powerful you are.
• 33:59
  And there was no greater or more dangerous secret during this era of American history than being a homosexual or a sexual deviant as gays were called.
• 34:11
  And this just seemed like a fascinating rich topic to explore, you know, beginning with FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which is when the national security state really begins is in the years leading up to world war two.
• 34:25
  You know, the United States did not have a national security bureaucracy prior to that there's a famous quote by Herbert Hoover Secretary of State, who said that gentlemen don't read each other's mail.
• 34:37
  It sounds like a preposterous notion today, but that's that was sort of the attitude. I mean, it was, it was a kind of a low and dirty business espionage, but then it becomes very important.
• 34:48
  And so during the Cold War, it became this, it became the worst possible, the most dangerous possible thing to be to be a homosexual not only as an elected official and politics, but also in the federal government as a government worker.
• 35:03
  And the more I read the more I thought about it, the more I realized that you can really draw a straight line from FDR all the way through every president until the end of the century.
• 35:13
  And you can look at these fascinating ways in which homosexuality impacted American politics from the rise of the FBI and the CIA to McCarthyism to the African American civil rights movement to water gates.
• 35:30
  To even the Iran contrast scandal the Reagan administration every president had some sort of, you know, interaction with either a gay aid or advisor or someone in their retinue.
• 35:43
  They all had to confront this issue and it says it says a lot about the individual presidents about their character. And I think it says a lot about American history to kind of re kind of reevaluate American political history through this lens of the fear and the fascination that our country had with homosexuality.
• 36:05
  I mean, there are two kind of revelations that struck me, Jamie, one is that we always think of the 20th century when we think of the Cold War, I think of McCarthyism and I think of of which hunts and I think of how taboo it was to even flirt with communism or socialism at a time when the USSR represented such an existential threat.
• 36:29
  And you basically make the point that it was it was worse actually to be gay than it was to be a communist in most circles in most political circles during that time.
• 36:39
  So there are these two things going on. One is don't let anybody think that you might be a communist, but secondly, if you're gay, I mean, definitely don't let anybody know that you're gay.
• 36:51
  And then this other thing that struck me was that there could be characteristics of gay people that actually suit them to being spooks and spies because they used to hiding things in such an environment.
• 37:02
  So you actually do get a kind of a clustering effect to people in important positions and high power positions surrounding presidents and national security staff who are themselves closeted gays and who are themselves the worst thing you can be even worse than a communist.
• 37:19
  Well, I say that Washington was simultaneously the gayest and the most anti gay city in America, which is appropriate, which is appropriate because Washington is also the capital of hypocrisy.
• 37:30
  And, you know, the reason for this is if you think if you're a gay man, let's say, because most of the important jobs in Washington were men, almost all of them.
• 37:40
  You had very few women in any positions of seniority, which is not to say that there weren't many women in Washington, but they were doing secretarial administrative work.
• 37:47
  Well, let's say you're a gay or lesbian person in the 1930s, right? And you're living in some small town because America was a much more rural place back then.
• 37:55
  You want to get out of that small town. And I think that applies to gay people all around the world, you know, at least in this era, gay people are attracted to cities.
• 38:04
  And that's a big part of the gay story in the 20th century is of urbanization, because you can move to a city you can lead a more anonymous life, you can kind of escape the small town prejudices and the kind of prying eyes of your neighbors.
• 38:17
  And that's why gay subcultures started to develop in cities around this time.
• 38:23
  And Washington was no exception. And in the 1930s, Washington is being transformed from this sleepy southern swamp into really the capital of the free world.
• 38:35
  You have the new deal is being instituted. All these federal agencies are being built. The population is doubling over just a couple of years in the 1930s.
• 38:46
  So Washington becomes a very attractive place. I also think government work in particular was was suitable to gay people for some of the reasons you say, just think about a job in the state department, right, you get to travel overseas.
• 39:01
  And every couple of years, you're being sent to a different post. So being a bachelor, which, you know, and at least in America at this time, once you get into your 30s or 40s, people are going to start asking questions if you're a bachelor.
• 39:14
  But if you're in the state department and you have this excuse, oh, I don't have time for a family, I have to move, you know, I have to move from city to city every four or five years.
• 39:22
  Then that becomes a kind of good cover. And so you did see a number of gay men in the state department and the state department would develop in the early years of the Cold War.
• 39:31
  This kind of reputation as being this haven of what they used to call cookie pushers, right, these sort of men who would sit at these diplomats who would just, you know, give you cookies in the embassy and they, and they were the very affeminate. That was kind of the stereotype of the American diplomat in the early years of the Cold War when America was losing.
• 39:51
  I love this. I'm going to start calling on my friend's cookie pushers. It sounds strangely dirty. Sounds like you're talking about something that's that's unsimly, but you're actually talking about literal cookies.
• 40:04
  Yes, right. Yes, I'm just offering you a tray of Oreos.
• 40:10
  And so in the early years of the Cold War, America is not doing well, right. We lost China. That was the cry of the McCarthyites that, you know, Mao defeated Chen Kai-shek.
• 40:22
  We lost China. The Soviet Union was making inroads across Eastern Europe. And this plays into McCarthy's accusation that, you know, it wasn't just the fact that say, you know, Mao had more vigorous troops or better strategy or Stalin was, you know, geographically closer to Eastern Europe and he had the forces and he had the ability to, you know, run riot over Eastern Europe.
• 40:47
  McCarthy makes the allegation that it was actually Americans, you know, within our own country, within the State Department, within the Roosevelt and the Truman administrations who were allowing this to happen. They wanted this to happen.
• 41:00
  And he said that it was communists and queers were behind these losses. And the two became very intertwined in the American imagination, because if you think about it, you know, communists are subversives, they are opposed to, you know, motherhood and apple pie in the American system.
• 41:18
  Well, homosexuals are also subversives. They're sexually subversive. Both, both communists and homosexuals, they live in the shadows. They live secret lives. And so it became quite easy for Americans to, to kind of make this connection that that communists were homosexuals and homosexuals were communists, even though there was, you know, no real evidence of this. But it became a very potent symbol in the early years of the Cold War.
• 41:48
  Is there any, I mean, just not to give credit to all credence to someone as violers, Joe McCarthy, but is there any way in which there was a line that can be drawn between someone who is forced to reconsider all of the givens that are, you know, a culturally conservative society is handing to them and their propensity to to stray from the flock.
• 42:14
  I mean, I do think gay people have a history of being creative and subversive in ways that are not just sexual and maybe their sexuality pushes them to ask questions about the things that they're being told. I mean, in that respect, is it conceivable that there's a line to be drawn between not being 100% on board with apple pie.
• 42:39
  Well, there are certainly there were certainly gays who believe that way. And in fact, in 1951 early into this era, there's the very famous case of Guy Burgess, who was a British diplomat and spy who turned out to be a Russian spy and he had been working in Washington in the embassy and he defected in 1951. He was also a homosexual.
• 43:02
  And he's this kind of legendary figure. I mean, books have been written about him. He was a real colorful character. And you in his case, you could make that connection that he was sort of a rebel against society.
• 43:16
  But I could also I could also point you to another character in my book Roy Cohn, right, who was a rabid who was Joe McCarthy's lawyer and later would serve a man we spoke.
• 43:27
  We opened this podcast with would become Donald Trump's lawyer in the 1980s and Roy Cohn was a notorious figure in American politics. He was a real right winger.
• 43:37
  But he was gay as well. He was a closet at homosexual, right. So I could point to homosexuals on on either side of the political spectrum.
• 43:46
  But certainly yes. And the 1950s in America homosexuality was a very underground secret existence and that I think that also played into the conception that that homosexuals were more likely or more prone to be communist, although I should say there's an entire chapter of my book that during World War two.
• 44:08
  But the United States, many people, the United States, including leaders of our intelligence services in our in our political parties, associated Nazism with homosexuality.
• 44:18
  Right. And this goes all the way back to Ernst Rome, who was the leader of the S.A. and the sternum of Thailand, who were the brown shirts.
• 44:25
  I mean, let's face the Nazis are much guy. If you've got your boss uniforms, yeah, I mean, I look at the yes exactly. And there's a lot of like, you know,
• 44:36
  there's a difference for the outdoorsy natural physique of the beautiful Aryan flesh.
• 44:41
  It's a cult of masculinity. Right. And so again, there was a kernel of truth to this in the sense that yes, the head of the S.A. was a gay man.
• 44:49
  He may have had a few gay men around him. Of course, Hitler liquidated him very early on in his rule in the night of the long knives.
• 44:56
  And this sort of led to this myth. And in fact, the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the predecessor to the CIA.
• 45:03
  It was founded by FDR during World War two. I came across multiple reports that they, they, they asked these psychiatrists at Harvard to do these psychological studies of Hitler and the Nazi movement hundreds of pages.
• 45:19
  And they elaborated length on this theory that homosexuals were attracted to Nazism. And they gave various reasons for it because, you know, they have nothing left to lose. They're more willing to take risks.
• 45:32
  They want to change society. But again, these are the same rationales that would be given for gays being communist.
• 45:40
  And so I think what we learned from this is that, and we see this even to this day in American politics. And I think it's probably true in many societies that we, we like to attribute sexual depravity to our political enemies.
• 45:54
  And that's basically what QAnon is, right? What is the, what is the claims that QAnon makes that our nation's elites or really are global, the global elites are a bunch of pedophile sickos.
• 46:06
  Which, to me, is not that different of a kind of conspiratorial mindset and think, oh, well, when we were fighting Nazism in America, we associated Hitler and the Nazis with homosexuals.
• 46:17
  And then just a few years later, that was all forgotten. We had a new enemy, communism. And then we're, we're associating communists with homelessness.
• 46:28
  Right. Right. So it's a very kind of versatile prejudice. Yeah. And I mean, you don't have to just stop at QAnon today. Look at the history around groomers and about, you know, young people being led into a gay or trans gender lifestyle.
• 46:42
  I mean, then I suppose on the left, it's not quite analogous, but certainly the, the accusations of irredeemable political, sorry, sexual dysfunction within religious institutions, you know, much of that is, is true, but some of it also be exaggerated.
• 46:57
  And just for people who don't know Roy Cohen, but I mean, the other, the where my mind always goes is to Al Pacino in Angel's America, which is that he plays Roy Cohen by another name.
• 47:08
  Yeah, that's, okay, that's interesting. So at what point do, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of debt. I mean, there's a lot of murder and suicides of this cohort of gay people in high input power throughout the 20th century. Is that, I mean, I guess the suicides are understandable if they find themselves in precarious situations, but also one of the reasons why there was such hysteria against guys in the national security state was because they could be a liability because they could be grived.
• 47:35
  So that was the rationale. So if the beyond this sort of cultural fear that gays would be subversive, you could say there was a more pragmatic argument, which was well, whether we like it or not, America is an extremely homophobic society. This is a total taboo.
• 47:51
  Most of the newspapers at the time wouldn't even print the word homosexual. They would come up with all these euphemisms to describe it. That's how bad it was.
• 47:58
  And so if that's what you are, and that's what you're hiding, then you will go to any lengths to protect your secret, including up to and including being a trader, accepting payments or, or, or, it makes you more susceptible or liable to be blackmailed.
• 48:14
  If a foreign power gets evidence of this, and they say that they'll publicize it, then that is a reason to keep gay people out of government jobs.
• 48:25
  Now interestingly, in 1991, the US Defense Department did a study of 120 cases of Americans who had committed treason.
• 48:35
  And only six were gay and of those, not a single one of them had been induced to treason via blackmail. They had done it for money or they had done it for ideological reasons unrelated to their homosexuality.
• 48:46
  So there was actually no factual evidence. There wasn't a single case of a gay person who had been blackmailed.
• 48:53
  The only case that was ever cited in America was one involving the chief of counterintelligence and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
• 49:04
  He was a man named Colonel Alfred Raidel. And in 1913, it was discovered by the Austro-Hungarian government that he was selling secrets to the Russians.
• 49:16
  And this became this major story because it was revealed that he was gay.
• 49:23
  And the two became conflated and the regime was extremely embarrassed by this because he was the head of their counterintelligence.
• 49:30
  He was the guy who was supposed to be finding moles within their service. It turned out he was himself a mole.
• 49:35
  And so they encouraged this story that he was gay and he had been blackmailed by the Russians.
• 49:39
  And it became very widely known in sort of Western intelligence circles. And in fact, when the head of the CIA was testifying in 1950,
• 49:48
  when McCarthy is launching this lavender scare of the purge of gay people alongside the red scare, the only case that he could cite as evidence of a gay person being blackmailed was the Raidel case.
• 50:00
  And Alan Dulles, who would go on to become the leader of the CIA under Eisenhower and Kennedy.
• 50:06
  He wrote several books about espionage and he also cited the Raidel case. It became his kind of foundational myth.
• 50:12
  And it wasn't until after the Cold War ended and the Russian archives were opened that it was discovered that the Russians did not even know that Raidel was gay.
• 50:20
  He was in fact referred to as a lover of women by his handler.
• 50:25
  And the reason that he had become a spy was because he wanted money. He had very expensive tastes.
• 50:31
  He liked fine wines. He had a wine seller with thousands of bottles of very rare wines in them. He had multiple cars.
• 50:39
  So he was doing it for money, right? And so, yes, there is this when you think about it at first thought or sort of first consideration.
• 50:49
  Even a liberal-minded person in the 1950s might think, well, we might not like that this atmosphere of homophobia exists, but it is what it is when we got to keep these people out.
• 51:00
  But I think the answer to that, which some of the early gay rights activists in the United States made at the time, was, well, if the US government just said, look, if you're a homosexual and the Soviets try to blackmail you, come to us and tell us.
• 51:14
  And we will maintain you in your job. And I actually tell the story of one case.
• 51:19
  It doesn't involve a government employee, but it involves a very prominent newspaper journalist at the time, whose name was Joe Alsop.
• 51:26
  And he was a virulent anti-communist. And in 1957, he was visiting the Soviet Union. And he interviewed a cruise chef. I mean, that's how important he was.
• 51:35
  And one night he was seduced by a young man at dinner went, took him back to his hotel room. They did the deed. And then seconds later, in burst a bunch of KGB agents, and they slapped down some photographs on the table.
• 51:51
  And they say to him, basically, we want you to become a source for us when you return to Washington.
• 51:58
  And what Alsop did was he actually wrote it. He told his friend to happen to be the ambassador, the American ambassador to Moscow. He told his friend what happened.
• 52:07
  The ambassador got him on the next flight out to Paris. He met with some CIA men in Paris. And he wrote out a nine page confession of everything that had happened going back to boyhood.
• 52:16
  He said, I've been an incurable homosexual since boyhood. But I figured if I never hurt anyone, then, you know, I would sort of deal with it myself.
• 52:25
  And he went through all the details, all the details of how the young man approached him, kind of the intelligence trade craft that was used.
• 52:34
  So he did exactly what a gay person in such a situation, you know, ought to have done.
• 52:41
  And what the national security state, you know, would have wanted him to have done.
• 52:46
  And what's interesting is that he went, he continued his journalism career in full knowledge that the Soviets and the US government knew this about him.
• 52:55
  And it didn't stop him from criticizing various American government officials, administrations.
• 53:02
  He was one of the most, as I said, virulent anti-communist. He was, he was the most pro-Vietnam war American journalist. He was really a dead enemy.
• 53:12
  And at any moment, right, someone could have released this information. And what's interesting is that the Soviets did try to do this in 1971.
• 53:22
  So 14 years after this incident in Moscow, a bunch of people in Washington started receiving Manila envelopes that had no return address on them.
• 53:32
  And they contained photographs of a young Joe Alsop having sex with the man in a hotel room.
• 53:38
  Now what's interesting about this is that this is 1971. No one. And by the way, these envelopes were sent to journalists, to his enemies in Washington, right.
• 53:49
  People who did not like him, he was very controversial. No one did anything with those photographs. They put them in the garbage. They put them in the trash.
• 53:56
  And so, you know, Washington was a different place back then. If you were a certain, if you were a kind of influential, powerful person, like Joe Alsop, I can't imagine today, you know, if like, if, if, if Rachel Maddow received a Manila envelope with compromising photographs of Tucker Carlson, I don't think she would throw them in the trash.
• 54:17
  Right.
• 54:19
  You know, the kind of rules have changed in that sense.
• 54:24
  So yeah, so the entire pretext of the lavender scare was really kind of, there was no actual factual basis for it.
• 54:32
  And Jamie went clearly someone like Alsop thinks of themselves as a homosexual knows that they are a homosexual, but you know, is capable has the self reflection of being able to write a nine page confession saying since my earliest years have been an irredeemable homosexual.
• 54:47
  But there must be, there must have been a lot of kind of fooling around in a slightly ambiguous kind of, you know, like one character in your book is Galvidal who shows up quite a lot.
• 54:59
  Who represented not an irredeemable vision of homosexuality as like a broken condition, but a kind of playful sort of bisexual like devil make care attitude towards sexuality.
• 55:14
  Were all of the people who were implicated in this tale, homosexual self conceived of homosexuals or how much kind of fucking around on the sidelines was there.
• 55:26
  That's a good question, you know, I do believe that there was more bisexual activity in these years, particularly after World War II, in the immediate years after World War II, because you know wars, particularly big wars, they tend to kind of loosen sexual morals in a way and sort of sexual traditions.
• 55:50
  But again, the attitude towards it was similar to what you find in some Latin American countries, right, where, you know, the active partner would not consider himself gay, the top, if you will, right.
• 56:03
  Just getting a blowjob from a dude, as long as you close your eyes and think of England, right. So that would not necessarily be considered homosexual activity, but that's not, but you know what, during the lavender scare, that would have been enough to get you kicked out.
• 56:19
  Right, sort of a one time experience, if you admit it to it or they found evidence of it, that would be enough to do you in.
• 56:27
  I mean, it's still enough in most people's eyes.
• 56:30
  To death, yes.
• 56:31
  Good eyes, that's still enough to register.
• 56:34
  But it's funny, you talk to older gay men, and I'm talking at this point, people like in their 80s, and they sometimes speak fondly of a time, you know, before gay liberation.
• 56:45
  When they say that, you know, the notion of a homosexual identity was not as, was not as firm, right, that in that there were more opportunities for kind of rough trade, right.
• 56:57
  There were more opportunities to sleep with men who would otherwise be straight, because they, because the culture didn't necessarily define that as homosexual.
• 57:06
  Yeah, so they kind of speak fondly of this era before liberation as one in which there were actually more opportunities to sleep with people, because people were more, I don't know if open minded is the word, but maybe they were more willing to experiment with sex of people of the same gender.
• 57:22
  That they are today, where you feel kind of locked into one identity, although I look, I'm 39, and I look now at Generation Z, I don't know what's going on with their sexual identity.
• 57:34
  It's going in the same direction, isn't it?
• 57:36
  I mean, what do you, how do you feel about that trajectory?
• 57:42
  I mean, I always feel like people will hear me as saying something that I'm not when I say that it was more open minded back then, because that seems to contain a criticism of supposed closed mindedness of any dude who doesn't want to get a blowjob from a guy, which seems cruel and unfair to people who just genuinely don't want to.
• 58:08
  But when you look at the grand sweep of human history and the number of cultures that there have been and the number of times and places where there's been a more fluid set of behaviors around sex, especially in the more furious hormonal periods of life, like in your teens and 20s.
• 58:26
  You look at the situational homosexuality of all male environments like prisons and private halls and so on.
• 58:33
  It's hard for me not to think that homosexuality as a, as a subset of the human species that has a clear boundary around it was a necessary fiction for us to create in order to liberate ourselves sometime between World War II and the 1990s.
• 58:55
  I guess if you want to put the end of it with marriage equality in the Western world, I do think that although there is still homophobia, there's still fat phobia, there's still big issues of all kind in terms of what you can say in polite society and what we have all gotten on board with now and what we have got corporations on board with and the rainbow flags and the pride and everything we've basically achieved a level of equality that is comparable to other minorities.
• 59:21
  And is it is it now time for the for Gen Z to take up the mantle of doing away with gayness and heterosexuality well altogether.
• 59:30
  First of all, I would separate situational homosexuality, which refer to as all male environments, the military prison, all boys schools, I would separate that out from the kind of homosexual identity of a well functioning healthy adult.
• 59:47
  If you're in prison or the military or in all boys school, is that really the same as being is being kind of an acknowledged gay person who understands himself as a gay person is making that decision to pursue that sort of life.
• 1:00:00
  I'm not saying it's a choice, right.
• 1:00:02
  In those all male environments that's it's almost I don't want to say forced, but it's it's the only outlet, right. And so if you're going to have a bunch of hormonal people in a kind of closed environment.
• 1:00:15
  And that's the only the only out there for sexual release, I would just distinguish that.
• 1:00:19
  Yeah, of course, of course, of course, they're different, but but the question is, are they different for inherent biological reasons or are they different because of the cultural story.
• 1:00:28
  So what's interesting now is we see this spike in LGBT self identification among Gen Z.
• 1:00:34
  But what's interesting is that there's been this there's been the spike in the identification. There has not been a concomitant spike in same sexual activity.
• 1:00:43
  So what we have, frankly, are a lot of people claiming an LGBT or I should say queer identity because that word, I don't know about Australia, but in the US, the word queer over the past couple of years has really taken off.
• 1:00:55
  And that word does a lot of work because queer can encompass basically someone who's straight.
• 1:01:01
  Okay, and it was never had sex with someone of the same sex. It might not even desire to, but they want to kind of have this sort of, you know, outtray, outtray sort of, again, subversive personality.
• 1:01:13
  Basically, if you're like a boring white cisgender straight person, you can call yourself queer.
• 1:01:19
  Yeah, you may be a gender non binary or maybe you're a demisexual, which means they physically attracted to people here emotionally attracted to.
• 1:01:27
  So I don't think I don't think that the number of same sex attracted people changes. I think it's, it's, we're basically two to five percent of the human race.
• 1:01:39
  And we always have been and always will, you know, barring some kind of, I don't know, you know, exogenous, maybe they'll put something in the water that will change that right.
• 1:01:48
  So I don't really think that that's changed. I don't see how it would.
• 1:01:52
  What do you mean by people who are attracted to the same sex? Because again, just to come back to the situational homosexuality argument of the prison or the boys school, the claim of the sexuality binary,
• 1:02:06
  that there is such a thing as a straight person and a gay person per se. The claim would be that in any and all circumstances,
• 1:02:16
  for a straight person to be attracted to another, to a member of the same sex is a meaning is ontologically impossible.
• 1:02:26
  Like that is not something that they are capable of feeling. That's like them being attracted to a cat or I'm not, I'm, I'm allowing for bisexuality. I believe bisexuality exists.
• 1:02:36
  Right. I don't, I don't see why the number of bisexuals would suddenly sharply increase among Gen Z. You know, if you look at the numbers, something like 25% of Gen Z is now identifying.
• 1:02:48
  And some, some polls put it at 40% in the United States. I don't believe that. Okay, I think it is, it is a political identity at this point. That's what, that's what we are.
• 1:02:58
  Yeah, I mean, I completely concede your point that there's a lot of inflation of numbers by people trying to sound cool.
• 1:03:06
  And, you know, it's questionable whether or not a 15 year old who just wants to seem hip is actually a member of a sexual minority because they've declared themselves to, to be one of the labels that they found online.
• 1:03:19
  I also don't think that, that you can easily explain away societies like ancient Greece or ancient Rome or Paris in the 19th century or some, or a lot of like some old islands and places like that where there is rampant and vice and widespread bisexuality.
• 1:03:37
  But giving some credence to what, I don't know if you know the Canadian cultural theorist, but Archer who has a great book called the end of gay and the death of heterosexuality, but I recommend it if it's in print.
• 1:03:49
  But it says, I think it's, but who said that bisexuality is a condition that looms so large is it bisexuality looms so large on the human condition that it's invisible or something like that, like that you almost can't see it.
• 1:04:03
  So if it were the case that, that some significant minority or even majority of people given the correct circumstances and given the correct software running in their brain about what such behaviors imply about them, namely maybe it implies nothing about my identity to take this blowjob from this guy.
• 1:04:24
  If that cohort of people is very large, then you can accordion in and out a very flexible categorization when you're doing your ontology of human sexuality from 2% only 2% are so irredeemably gay that they can never get a heart on for the opposite sex and you know they're writing nine page confessions to I don't know.
• 1:04:46
  40% 50% 70% of the population could conceivably are like a hard white in such a way that given the right cultural makeup in the right situation and the right whatever could become aroused by some kind of activity with the same sex.
• 1:05:04
  I mean, maybe, but again, looking at Gen Z, this is the most liberal progressive generation, you would if that were the case, you would expect to see a similar rise and actual same sex activity, but again, we're not.
• 1:05:18
  Well, because the polls ask them, they ask them, you know, how do you identify, but they also ask them, have you actually had a same sex sexual experience as part of the polling right, so you have you have these people who will identify as gay or by.
• 1:05:32
  But then on the questionnaire, the only sexual acts that they've engaged and have been with members of the opposite sex, I mean, that may be because we're asking the wrong cohorts of people.
• 1:05:42
  And that's the youngest, but that's the youngest most progressive in generation to you.
• 1:05:47
  They're also the ones who've had the least experience sexually, I mean, if you ask people who are 30 or 35, whether or not they've ever had a same sex experience, then the numbers are reasonably high, even if they're not.
• 1:06:02
  Well, if I don't identify as a but there, but they're the gap between identification and activity is much, much smaller, right, so you actually have people at that age 35, 40 and older, who I would say they're telling the truth, right, like if they're they're saying their gay almost exclusively or most of their sexual activity is with people of the same sex, it's only among Gen Z that we see this massive gap.
• 1:06:30
  Well, I think there's a gap in the other direction among 35 year olds that people who say that they're straight when you really dig and then do surveys, like, you know, and they can't have their name on the survey, but when you do things like, I don't know, people have found, you know, people who are posting on Craigslist for went for girls and they've done.
• 1:06:47
  If you talk about sexually active cohort of people so that you're excluding people who might have religious hang up, so who might be in long term monogamous relationships amongst sexually active people, there's there is, you know, surprisingly high numbers of people who of guys who will confess to well shot went on to 17, I mean, yeah, you know, that was just one time or whatever.
• 1:07:09
  Yeah, well, look, the definition of a gay person, I guess, would be someone who is whose attraction is exclusively or predominantly toward a member of the same sex and the opposite would be true for heterosexuals, right, that they are exclusively or predominantly.
• 1:07:25
  Yeah, and obviously that word predominantly can be doing a lot of work there, right, I mean, if 20 if 20% of your sexual activities is with someone of the same sex, does that make you buy or could you or are you straight at that point, you know, I don't know, maybe that's for the.
• 1:07:39
  Yeah, really entirely on on culture and as you said, that is rewriting the rules on that and so this thing you're definitely something in that case.
• 1:07:48
  I don't want to leave the question of the Soviet Union and communism without teasing out your thoughts about group think and political group think and free speech and cancel culture and so on because you recently made an analogy about this letter that's been written and the campaign that's been launched against the New York Times for its coverage of transgender issues with the kind of collective letters of denunciation.
• 1:08:18
  That used to exist during the Cold War without, you know, with people will always accuse me of making a mountain out of a mole hill whenever we touch the cancel culture because hey, the New York Times still exists and it's still allowed to do whatever it wants to but what motivated this comparison.
• 1:08:37
  Well, I think this is actually an important example and yes, the New York Times still exists, but I mean to give some background, the New York Times published a series of articles over the past year that have challenged, I would say, some of the kind of radical transgender theories or claims, particularly having to do with the administration of puberty blockers to young people.
• 1:08:57
  The trans women in women's sports and also the practice of some public schools hiding gender transitions of students from their parents.
• 1:09:12
  And again, this is the New York Times, this is not some right-wing rag, but merely for publishing articles that questioned some of the prevailing, I would say, progressive chivalrous.
• 1:09:24
  The one of the leading gay activist groups in this country are, I should say, LGBTQIA plus groups, organized a public campaign.
• 1:09:33
  They organized an open letter that was signed by several prominent celebrities in this country, Jedapital, Hannah Gadsby, the purported comedian from your country.
• 1:09:47
  Yeah, as well as another, it's okay.
• 1:09:52
  I've never even, I don't even know where the jumps are, I don't know why this got me started.
• 1:09:59
  Then there was another, but then they coordinated it with another letter that was signed by thousands of American journalists attacking the New York Times.
• 1:10:09
  And they were, and they named the reporters and the writers who wrote these articles is basically saying that they are responsible for denying the existence of transgender people using this very emotive language, simply for reporting facts.
• 1:10:24
  And I think what's important here is that yes, the New York Times stood up to the bullies and said, look, this isn't appropriate.
• 1:10:30
  We are a news reporting organization. We're not an activist group. You're welcome to criticize us.
• 1:10:36
  But the point is that they sent a message, you know, they sent a message to other journalists and other writers, which is that don't question us.
• 1:10:47
  And if you want to, if you want to tread on this issue of transgenderism, you better be careful and look over your back.
• 1:10:54
  Because if you question, you know, whether or not it's appropriate to give puberty blockers or whether or not it's appropriate for young girls to be getting mastectomies, any of these very contentious and serious questions that surround the whole transgender debate, transgender debate.
• 1:11:09
  If you dane to challenge us and what we consider to be the truth, because according to them, the science is settled, which it's absolutely not, right? But according to them, it is this sense of this sense of message.
• 1:11:22
  And so in that sense, yes, the New York Times is still standing and the New York Times hasn't been canceled.
• 1:11:28
  But there's a real fear around these issues and they cast a pall over this entire question.
• 1:11:35
  I mean, I would say that, you know, even more than race, and it's, it sounds crazy to say this. I would say even more than race in America, I think the transgender issue has become the one about which people are most afraid to speak their mind.
• 1:11:49
  And it's crazy because, I mean, for my entire life, it had always been race. That was the most contentious issue. And that would, that would always been the most controversial one, the most heated one for understandable and obvious reasons.
• 1:12:04
  But now it's become the transgender issue. And it's because of incidents like this. And, you know, signing.
• 1:12:12
  Just to try to articulate the counterpoint here, like I heard Cara Swisher, who I normally respect as a journalist, you know, she wrote a long Twitter thread against the time saying that there's, there's a claim of a claim that people who, who oppose coverage of a certain kind are doing activism.
• 1:12:35
  Whereas the paper of record is just doing journalism, but that inherent in the editorial choices that a paper makes about what to cover and what not to cover is an implicit.
• 1:12:47
  Judgment and that judgment can sometimes tip into activism. And if you, if you chose to report constantly on what great things, I don't know, Dow chemicals is doing for the environment.
• 1:12:59
  They would come a point at which that would no longer be reporting. And that would now be activism. And similarly, if in your coverage of trans issues, you are regularly giving voice to people who are skeptical about, about transition, about, you know, I don't know, pediatric transition, for example, then that becomes a way of doing activism from the other side. And I guess the, you know, I always, yeah, anyway, take that.
• 1:13:27
  But I mean, you can look at the times coverage of transgender issues in general. And there have been plenty of articles that presents.
• 1:13:34
  I mean, for instance, they published an article just a couple weeks ago about the violence that transgender people experience. There've been endless coverage of these bills in very sympathetic to the trans community of these bills at state at state level to ban, you know, various forms of transgender related health care for miners and whatnot.
• 1:13:53
  So again, we're talking about literally four or five articles at the times published in the course of a year that, you know, dared to question the progressive view on this and try to, I mean, what also amazed me, I haven't read all of those articles.
• 1:14:11
  I certainly read the main feature piece that got people in a half in the first place, which was by Emily Bazelon, who I have a lot of time for.
• 1:14:18
  And Emily is a terrific journalist in a, you know, a card carrying progressive. And all she was doing was reporting on the existence of a dispute within the medical establishments.
• 1:14:29
  But looking forward at any point of use, she was saying, he is a, he is a conversation that is ruffling a lot of feathers within amongst doctors themselves.
• 1:14:37
  Precisely. And hey, the reason for this outburst from the radical transgender activists is that they see what's going on in Europe. Okay.
• 1:14:45
  Where the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, countries that that had engaged in pediatric transgender treatments long before the United States, they're now dialing it back.
• 1:14:57
  Okay. And they're now making it, and they're now raising the threshold for administering puberty blockers and what they euphemistically refer to as gender affirming care. I mean, I find that term to be propping a district and activity.
• 1:15:13
  Right. But they, they, but all those countries, which again, Sweden is Sweden, some kind of right wing health. No.
• 1:15:20
  Those countries and their medical establishments are dialing it back, because for too long, they were way far out.
• 1:15:27
  There's the cloak, you know, this horrible story about this clinic in London, the Tavistok clinic, that was basically treating young people like lab rats. And by the way, a lot, if not most of these kids, I think are gay, right?
• 1:15:40
  Because if you're a gender nonconforming 12 year old or younger, there's a good chance you're going to go up to be gay. Okay. But instead, because of this transgender moment we're having, a lot of young people are now confused, and they're being told that if you are gender nonconforming, if you look at the, if you look at the definition of what transgender is that these activist groups give out, they basically describe gay people.
• 1:16:03
  The definition is someone who's gender identity does not match their birth sex. Well, that applies to some transgender people, but it applies to a lot of gay people, there are a lot of gay people who do not conform with their sex.
• 1:16:18
  That's kind of what the definition of being gay is, right? If you are a same sex attracted person, you are not conforming with the traditional notion of what a man or a woman is, right? If you're a man attracted to other men, just by dint of that, you are not conforming to gender stereotypes.
• 1:16:37
  No, but I think they understand that difference. I think that's a distinction. I think a lot of these kids don't. Okay. I think a lot of them are confused. Well, I think it would depend on whether or not their gayness is pegged to behavioral characteristics that contravene our cliches about what that what that sex is, you know, the gender characteristics of that sex, right?
• 1:16:55
  I mean, in other words, just to be blunt, if they're queer, if they're campy, if they're a feminine, or if as females, they are butch-dike type lesbians, then I think that's going to play into perhaps a rise in diagnoses of gender dysphoria, right?
• 1:17:13
  In a way that if you're a masculine, if you're a masculine acting homosexual, they want. Sure, but I mean, we have the studies. The studies show that a vast majority of young people who are gender dysphoric eventually do grow out of it and a majority of that majority turn out to be gay adults.
• 1:17:32
  So I'm very concerned that we have a young generation, a rising generation of gay and lesbian people, young people who are being led astray by this very fatish ideology.
• 1:17:43
  But anyway, this is this should be covered, okay, by the New York Times. These sorts of stories should be covered. That's all that the times was doing.
• 1:17:52
  And merely for reporting on ongoing debates within the medical community, among parents at schools, for failing to tow the line, which I should say the times did tow this line for years.
• 1:18:06
  And I could point to many articles that, you know, we're on the opposite side of this that the times used to publish.
• 1:18:13
  And merely for now backtracking a slight bit in publishing the other perspective, they were, you know, swarmed by this very aggressive PR campaign, which, yeah, reminded me of the open letters of public denunciation.
• 1:18:28
  That would be written in the Soviet Union when Andre Sakharov, want a Nobel Peace Prize, right, or Soltz and Eastern won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What were they accused of? They were accused of, you know, their their writings about Soviet human rights abuses were exploited by fascists and imperialists in the West in the West.
• 1:18:48
  The same argument was leveled against the New York Times because a handful of right wing American politicians cited Emily Bazelon's article in their attempts to, you know, limit or make illegal certain transgender health provisions.
• 1:19:06
  Yeah, it's not Emily, it's not Emily Bazelon or the New York Times job, how politicians use their reporting, it is their job to report what's going on, how anyone uses that reporting is not their responsibility.
• 1:19:20
  I mean, it's well, I, I mean, this is one of those issues where I don't mind both sides in it, and I just have to say a box on both your houses, because the, the right has been so cruel.
• 1:19:34
  And I mean, if you believe that if you believe, so I was having a text message conversation with a very prominent Australian gay person who was listening to a podcast to a rant that I had done about JK Rowling, in which I was basically saying that I don't see her as a transphobic bigger.
• 1:19:53
  I'm not sure what she's done to lead people to that conclusion, and I read out the essay that she wrote in 2020 about trans people and about her position on trans people, and I don't find anything in anything that she's said to be, to be hate speech.
• 1:20:09
  And this, of course, now, even my husband is receiving messages on his socials saying why you're married to a fucking turf and, you know, this person was texting me saying, you're infuriating like I'm outraged.
• 1:20:24
  And in a, in a teasing way, I'm outraged by your outrage at the response to the Harry Potter video game.
• 1:20:31
  And so, you know, all I was saying was that I don't think that you have the blood of trans children on your hands, if you play the Harry Potter video game.
• 1:20:39
  And this gay person was saying the only time I hear anyone saying such a thing is when it's people like you claiming that people are saying that I don't hear anyone actually hear these people actually saying that I just hear people talking about how killed the conversation is around.
• 1:20:53
  Trans Jews, but like just look at Fox News, look at Sky News after dark in Australia, which is our equivalent, look at the what you see in the Australian newspaper, Rupert Murdoch's broadsheet here.
• 1:21:04
  Look at, like there is, look at what Tucker Carlson says all the time, there is so much anti trans stuff, look at the anti trans bills, listen to how the governor of Florida talks about trans people, like how can you say that the problem is that there's not enough anti trans rhetoric.
• 1:21:19
  To which I say, yeah, all of that stuff is not just shit and I'm not calling for more of that.
• 1:21:25
  I'm praying for us to be able to inhabit a middle ground for where it's possible to not be accused of hate speech when you say trans people exist, they deserve exactly the same rights as everybody else, they deserve health care, they deserve not to be discriminated against in the workplace, they deserve equal access to housing, they deserve everything everybody else has.
• 1:21:49
  And is it okay to ask whether or not cisgender women have a right to conceive of themselves as an intellectually coherent cohort, like does it make any sense to say that there's something special about growing up as a girl in a patriarchal society that's fundamental to womanhood, like is that what is that the transphobia that we're talking about simply making.
• 1:22:13
  Yeah, I think you see this on both sides of the political discussion, which is that the heretic is hated more than the heathen right and so on the left on the left you're going to see progressives get much angrier about a fellow person on the left who descents from the orthodoxy.
• 1:22:31
  And then they will the conservative because they know that yelling and screaming about rubert murdoch he doesn't care what they have to say he's not going to change Fox News is programming because someone you know at the nation magazine is calling him a fascist.
• 1:22:46
  And if you go after JK Rowling, you know that she's going to it's going to hurt her and she's going to respond and she's going to feel it right and it also it it offends them more that someone would leave the fold a little bit and it's the same on the right, I mean, you see the vituperation among Trump supporters and the mega types for Republicans, you know, who stand up to Trump is almost more intense than their hatred of the left.
• 1:23:12
  Because I think it's easier right because you know that you're going to get a response from that person and you know that they're they're going to listen to you.
• 1:23:20
  I think that's what explains it yeah.
• 1:23:23
  Okay, well Jamie it's great to talk to you. I want to ask you some first eight questions before you go, which I always like to end with just some Rocha questions that reveal the depths of your of your true soul.
• 1:23:35
  What's your favorite smell?
• 1:23:38
  My favorite smell. Lavender.
• 1:23:43
  What skill have you always wanted to learn?
• 1:23:46
  Guitar.
• 1:23:48
  Why don't you?
• 1:23:50
  I'm so busy, but it's on my list and actually I literally have a list of things I want to do before I die my bucket list.
• 1:23:57
  And learning to play guitar is up there along with learning Spanish and several other things.
• 1:24:04
  Driving across the United States, I still haven't done that.
• 1:24:08
  All, all, all eminently achievable things.
• 1:24:11
  Yeah, I think so.
• 1:24:12
  None of these are like, you know, go to the deepest canyon and the undersea canyon.
• 1:24:16
  I've noticed, I've no desire to do that.
• 1:24:18
  Okay, Mr. James Cameron.
• 1:24:20
  What was your favorite place to go?
• 1:24:23
  That was just a little taste of our first eight questions, which you'll be able to hear all of if you subscribe to uncomfortable conversations.
• 1:24:30
  Not just the questions, but of course all of our banter around them, which become a subsequent little episode of themselves.
• 1:24:36
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• 1:24:42
  And you'll get additional content, including opportunities to connect directly with me.
• 1:24:47
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• 1:24:54
  Otherwise, I'll see you next time on uncomfortable conversations.