Latest / Autocratic Despair: The Podcast / The Bay Area AI Orgy Scene as Scouted by Dr. Craig

Transcript

The Bay Area AI Orgy Scene as Scouted by Dr. Craig · Autocratic Despair: The Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: Fine, y'all can have half my tet length worth of cleavage in not a centimeter more.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_03: What?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: And y'all gotta show my cross where it's just about dangling in there.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_03: It ain't quite in, but almost real sexy-like.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't wanna have to say his name.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this runs nationally.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_03: This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Nick Mortensen, a comedian and father of three from Green Bay, Wisconsin.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: Craig Johnson, PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_03: Dr.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: Craig, on a scale of one to ten, where would you rate your Autocratic Despair this week?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_07: Well, I'm gonna say.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_07: Oh, that count-off really messed me up.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_04: I want to see how long I can hold this week.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_07: Thanks for bringing me into it with a laugh because honestly, I'm at a seven.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_07: This is some of the worst I've ever felt.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_07: The weekend, the first weekend of October 2026, Brazil had its federal elections.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_07: In Brazil, like any civilized country, the United States intentionally accepted, has multiple rounds, at least for the presidential election.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_07: And in the Brazilian presidential election, the incumbent, Lula de Silva, got about 45% of the vote.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_07: And his opponent, Flavio Bolsonaro, who is the son of jailed Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, he got 47%.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_04: I love it, man! I fucking love this is like Trump going to jail and the country turning to Don Jr.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_07: As longtime listeners will know, Nick has a fandom around Don Jr., and Flavio is not not Don Jr.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_07: He's not quite as much of a fail son.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_07: Flavio and his brother, the two Bolsonaro brothers, they've been in Congress for years.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_07: They also probably orchestrated the murder of one of the first queer out major politicians in Brazil, a woman named Mariele Franco.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_07: When?
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_07: This was about five years ago.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_07: She was murdered by some off-duty police officers who were directly connected to the Bolsonaro's because this was in Rio de Janeiro, which is where the Bolsonaro is from.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_07: Flavio fucking sucks.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_07: He's a nightmare candidate.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_07: If he is elected.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, so this is the complicated thing.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_07: Speaking to Americans or anybody in a parliamentary system, this two-round thing might be confusing to you.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_07: Basically, how it works is if nobody gets a majority the first round, which is what happened this weekend, then there's a second round in a couple weeks.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_07: So it's gonna happen later on in October.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_07: There's only gonna be two candidates, the incumbent, Lula and Flavio.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_07: At no time since the return of democracy to Brazil has a candidate gotten the lesser of the two amounts in the first round and then gone on to win the second round.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_07: No candidate in Lula's position since the return of democracy to Brazil about 30 years ago, no candidate has ever been in Lula's position and then gone on to win the presidency.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_07: So it's not literally done.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_07: Oh, it's done.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's a fate accompli at this point.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's pretty done.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_03: More or less.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: What does it mean?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah if Bolsonaro gets in there.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: What does it mean?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_07: It means Brazil going back on the progressive bent that Lula has put the country on since Jair Bolsonaro went to jail approximately four years ago.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_07: Rolling back environmental protections, rolling back protections for indigenous people, protections for queer people, rolling back racial justice progress, gender justice progress.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_07: It also probably means that Jair Bolsonaro is gonna get out of jail, and also that they're probably gonna put Lula back in jail, and Lula is 80 years old.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_07: It means that he might die in jail unless he escapes.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_07: But then the question becomes: escapes to where?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_07: Because in Latin America, every single other major country is run by the right wing at this point.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_07: He could go to Mexico, or maybe Spain or Portugal?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_07: So this is happening in Brazil.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_07: We're looking ahead later on this year, there's an election in France.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_07: Even if the Democrats win in November, we're looking at a situation where essentially every single other developed country in the world is run by the right wing or by a left wing so ineffective that they are about to be beaten by the extreme right wing.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_07: It's dire, it's bad, it's bad.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_07: Anyway, I'm at a seven.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_07: But what does it look like?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_07: You mean like literally what happens when Flavio becomes the president?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: Economic collapse, putting Lula into prison.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_07: What does that accomplish?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_07: That's a good question.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_07: But under Jayel Bolsonaro's presidency, Lula was in jail for corruption, and Lula's guilty of that.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_07: He did a shit set of corruption.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_07: In fact, Lava Giato, the car wash, one of the biggest corruption scandals in all of human history, literally rivaling Roman levels of corruption.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_07: It was crazy.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_07: Lula did some shit, and he went to jail for it, and then he was released and he was allowed to run again against Jair Bolsonaro, despite the fact that he'd been president for a couple of years before.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_07: It's not really good.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_07: One of the things that this is showing is the limits of organizing your entire progressive and leftist movement around the personality of a single extremely popular individual.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_07: Lula gave an interview last week that actually brought me to tears a little bit because it was so hopeful.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_07: Also, I could feel the fear behind it, because, you know, he's been looking at the polls.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_07: And what he said was, in Brazilian Portuguese, it's very normal to call somebody cara, which literally means face, but means something more like beloved or friend or buddy.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_07: What he said was, the honest politician you want is you, my friend, cara.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_07: I was you yesterday, be me tomorrow.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_07: And that's the terrifying thing to hear coming from this man because Lula is not a rich he's rich now, but he does not come from wealth.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_07: Lula's family was capital P poor.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_07: Lula did not learn how to read until he was 12.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_07: He taught himself because he had to leave school to go work at a machine factory.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_07: He only has nine fingers because he lost them in a machine press.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_07: Lula spent his entire first several decades of life organizing a machine workers' union under a military dictatorship.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_07: The man is the real deal, and he's gonna die in jail.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_07: That's why the Bolsonaro's want to do it, because it means that they're killing the legacy of the return of democracy in Brazil.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_07: Literally, that's what it means.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_07: That's why they want to do it.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_07: So moral contamination.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_07: Literally, yeah.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_07: The goal is to demoralize everybody.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_07: The goal is to end the dream of the left that grew during the dictatorship.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_07: The Bolsonaro also grew during the dictatorship.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_07: Jair, the dad, the one who's in jail, he was in the army.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_07: He joined the fucking artillery during the military dictatorship.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_07: Where's your autocratic despair this week, Nick?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_03: I'm bumping it up to six and a half.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_03: It looks to me like the regime is soft-launching their next ethnic cleansing.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_03: In order to explain what I mean by that, I need to introduce two people.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: One of them is the most effective activists on the American right in the last half decade.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_03: The other is a guy that I nearly introduced in the episode where we discussed the True Texas Project.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_03: I cut that part because I thought if I described him accurately, people would think I was making him up.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: He's a wild character.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_03: Let's start with the most effective activists in the American Right over the last half decade.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: Christopher Rufo does a weekly podcast for Blaze TV, the outfit owned by Glenn Beck called Rufo and Lomez.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: We'll get back to that.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: Rufo is most well known for being a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a prominent free market conservative public policy think tank.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: They were the ones promoting the Broken Windows policy in the 90s that Rudolph Giuliani went for.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: Rufo was brought in as a senior fellow to shake things up at the Manhattan Institute in 2021, specifically to direct their initiative on critical race theory.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: In September of 2020, Rufo made quite a name for himself going on Tucker Carlson's Nightly Fox show with a story about critical race theory in federal diversity trainings.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_03: Here's what's strange about Rufo, and I can't honestly tell if it's a flaw or a flex.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_03: He's so confident in his ability to drive the conversation that he calls his shots and he dares people to stop him.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_03: Just as critical race theory conversation had taken over the media in 2021, he tweets this out quote, We have successfully frozen their brand, critical race theory, into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_03: The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_03: We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_03: That's what he does.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_03: Takes a term not widely used or well understood, redefines it, associates it with everything people already don't like, and then weaponizes it as shorthand for things that he doesn't want you to like.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_03: And then he does it again.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: Nothing that can be done to stop him.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_03: And he has done it again with the word woke and the term DEI.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_03: Dr.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_03: Craig, what is he doing here when he does this with language?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_07: So there's a lot of ways we could describe this.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_07: We could think about this as advertising.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_07: We can think about it in advertising terms.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_07: One of the many backgrounds that Nick brings to this show is thinking about advertising, thinking about marketing.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_07: That's what Rufo is doing.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_07: He's saying that we are taking an opponent's brand and getting the audience, the consumers, to think about certain things when they think about that brand.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_07: Democrats and Republicans have been talking about political advertising this way since the 60s and 70s, since the rise of modern advertising and marketing culture.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_07: The other thing that we can think about him doing is related to something called the overton window.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_07: If the audience isn't familiar with the term the overturn window, it's a social science term.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_07: The premise is that there are certain ideas that are conceivable, reasonable, measured, policies that the government might institute, and then there are certain ones that are totally impossible, socially unimaginable.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_07: Socialism is socially unimaginable.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_07: Cutting welfare for everybody is socially imaginable.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_07: What's inside the overton window is what is reasonable, what's possible, what you can say on TV, basically.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_07: What Rufo does is he shifts the Overton window.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_07: His job is to make even moderately progressive leftist positions, even things that like the Reagan administration did, make them seem so completely inconceivable, bat wing crazy that no reasonable person would ever support them, to totally redefine them.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_07: That's what Rufo is doing.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_07: And just like Nick has been saying, he is one of the best there's ever been at it.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_03: Christopher Rufo is a player that you should know.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: He's a very influential thought leader for the right wing.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_03: He drives the conversations on Fox, OANN, right side broadcasting.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: And during the last week of September, on the Rufo and Lomez podcast, a show he does with another right wing thought leader named Jonathan Kieperman, who posted for years anonymously as Lomez, is a discussion between two hosts.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: And the title of the show is The Indian Question.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: And they're not talking about Native Americans, they're talking about Indian Americans.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_03: The Indian Question.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_03: The reason it comes up at all is because a Republican candidate for railroad commissioner in Texas, a guy named Bo French, a guy from Fort Worth who previously was the Tarrant County Republican chair and who works closely with the True Texas Project, brought it up.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_03: When he posted a picture of the student section at a University of Texas football game, all the students were wearing Texas Longhorn merchandise.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_03: They were all ecstatic about the Longhorns having just scored a touchdown, but they didn't seem like it had any white students.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: They all appeared to be of South Asian or Indian descent.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: Bo French puts out a photo of that with this comment quote, I heard UT graduation this year looked like this.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't believe it.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: The problem is obviously far worse than anyone imagined.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: A particularly racist tweet.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: Bo French, Republican Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate, is no stranger to performative public racism.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's kind of his thing.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: I actually had an aside written about him for the true Texas Project episode that I scrapped because he is cartoonishly racist, and I felt he would strain credulity, which is pretty racist.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_07: If you hear about a guy saying some racist shit and you're like, man, I don't know if the audience is gonna believe that.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's especially for 2026.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_03: You decide if these seem believable for a Republican candidate for a statewide position in Texas in the year of our Lord, 2026.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: Bo French posted a poll on Twitter asking his followers whether Jews or Muslims were a bigger threat to America.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: Oh no.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_03: Oh no, Nick.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: He got some heat for that from the Republican upper brass.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_03: And Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick asked him to resign as Tarrant County Republican Party chair was so awful.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: Bo French did not resign.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: He took the poll down from his Twitter feed and said he regretted it.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: Had no idea it would get him in trouble with anyone in the Republican Party.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_03: Jesus.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_07: Listen, I thought you guys were racist enough that you'd be fine with this.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_03: Guys, are we not that racist?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_07: Egg on my face.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_07: Fuck.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: Guys, guys, guys.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_03: We've been talking about this for years.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: We can't say it publicly?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_03: Ah, come on.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_07: I thought this was the WhatsApp group.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_03: Shit.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: In addition, he has said that Native Americans are third world savages and should be deported.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_07: What?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_07: That's some 19th century shit.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_07: And also dumb.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: We should round up all those Native Americans and send them back home.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_03: To where?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: So stupid that it should be a tip-off that he's a parody, but he's not.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: Fuck.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: Doesn't matter if you're Beau French.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: Bo French is a real human man with political connections and money.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_03: And he looks like he's out of central casting.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_03: So believe me when I tell you, this will not be the last you hear about Bo French.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's highly likely that he'll be elected the railroad commissioner in Texas, which is a statewide election.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_03: Because no Democrat has won statewide in Texas since 1994.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_03: Railroad Commissioner is a big job in Texas.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: Oddly, it doesn't regulate the railroad.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_03: The position is to regulate all oil and gas, which is kind of a bigger deal in Texas.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_03: That would be a bigger deal, yeah.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_03: Beau French is gonna have to work really hard to lose this race.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: And he's trying, but that picture may have been too subtle.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: This tweet that was plainly racist towards South Asian and Indian Americans, it may not be his political undoing.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_03: He has said worst thing.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: The extreme racism of the Beau French tweet gave Chris Rufo and his buddy Lomez cause to discuss the Indian question, so they were only too happy to bring it up.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_03: And to their credit, Rufo called French's tweet awful.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: Said the rhetoric was bad.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_03: Technique is all wrong, very sloppy.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: If you're gonna be publicly racist, you gotta do it the way that I do it.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_07: Before we go further into this topic, I want to highlight something here.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_07: You're saying that Rufo framed this as the Indian question.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_07: The Indian question.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_07: For the non-fascists in the room, that is one of the loudest possible dog whistles that you could ever set off in public communication.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_07: Back in the 19th century, when European proto-fascists in fucking Prussia or the Austro-Hungarian Empire were debating about what they wanted to do with the fact that Jewish minorities in their countries were alive and doing relatively well economically, they called these debates, quote, the Jewish question.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_07: The Nazi murder regime that killed six million Jewish people was intentionally framed as the quote final solution to the Jewish question.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_07: So, like, that is not a dog whistle at all.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_07: That is an alarm bell.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_07: That is a klaxon.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_03: Whatever else it is, it's some amazing sleight of hand.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: It is.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_07: Nobody's gonna know what that means, but everybody listening knows what it means.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_03: To use the extreme racist Bo French tweet to criticize him and then be like, well, since we're on the topic, Bo French is wrong.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: He's a very racist man.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_03: We can't have that network.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_03: But he did mention the Indian question, which I think is a good one to raise.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: Christopher Rufo, you've done it again.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_07: That is some astonishing spin.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: Seems like it was specifically to antagonize you.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_07: That is how I generally feel about these guys.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_07: I'm like, are you just trying to piss me off and make me scared?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: Rufo and Lomez spent the next hour talking about how they would talk about the Indian question.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: A little rhetorical device there.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: And here's what they landed on.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_03: Indian immigration is, quote, a unique case.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_03: In Rufo's words, the black population has been here for hundreds of years.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's part of the American story.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: Indians, on the other hand, are quote, totally new.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: They both decided that the H1B visa program is radically unfair because it shrinks wages for the native born.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my God.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_03: You're at Berkeley, Craig.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_03: What do you know about the H1B visa program?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_07: H1B visas are a special type of visa granted by the United States federal government if a person is deemed to be irreplaceable in the U.S.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_07: population, if the job skills that you have are irreplaceable in the U.S.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_07: population.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_07: As originally intended, this was like a research scientist or a specialized medical professional.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_07: You know, like that the United States would grant a special visa to the best cardiologist in Kazakhstan, and you could come and just be the best cardiologist in the United States.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_07: Or if you are a physics professor, or if you are some economic genius or some computer genius.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_07: In the last couple decades, H1B visas have come to be the primary way that white-collar workers come to the United States to stay for relatively long periods of time.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_07: And in the Bay Area, yeah, it's a very common way for people who aren't U.S.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_07: citizens to come and work for US companies or at big universities like Berkeley or Stanford or any university in the US.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_07: What H1 BVs also do is they make it so that if you lose your job, you have to leave the country.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_07: For a lot of people, these are a variant of the proverbial golden handcuff.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_07: You can't complain about your work, you can't resign and get a better job, you can't hunt around for a promotion at some other company like any other worker can.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_07: You're sort of indentured to the company that you work for.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_07: This also means that with big tech layoffs, which have been happening rolling for the last year and a half in the tech industry, as AI and LLMs are eating everybody's lunch, it's meant that a lot of people have been left with no options other than to go, quote, back to a country that for many of them they have never been to for like possibly 10 years.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_07: Or especially people who have come to the United States and have since come out as queer or had some sort of gender transition.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_07: I know people who have lost their visas and now they have to go back to Egypt and they're trans.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_07: What the fuck are they supposed to do?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_07: It's awful.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_07: It's awful.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_07: But of course, for the racists, like the Rufos around, H1B visas are taking jobs out of American hands.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_07: Fuck off.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_03: The solution that Rufo and Lomez got to was one, forced deportation of Indian immigrants who haven't assimilated.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_03: Those words.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_03: Haven't assimilated.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: What the fuck?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't expand on what they meant by haven't assimilated.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: But you've heard those words before, Craig, haven't you?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, but the other thing is usually when racists talk about, quote, haven't assimilated, they might be able to say that these people didn't grow up in some sort of Anglo-defined civilization or that they don't speak English.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_07: But every single fucking immigrant in the United States from Pakistan and India speaks English because those are official languages in those countries.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but are they cool?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_03: They've come to America.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: Have they assimilated?
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_03: You mean like do they like rap?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, they do.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_03: Are they still wearing too much cologne?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: Are they into house music?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_03: In terms of the solution that Rufo and Lomez got to, number two was a complete ban on all future immigration for Indian.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: Indians and other people, of course.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_03: The number three thing that they came up with was that Indian Americans that would be allowed to stay, Lomez proposed what he called an assimilation hazing process with, quote, vulgar defamatory racism until they've left enough of their identity behind to qualify.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: What?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: No bad ideas in a brainstorm, Dr.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_03: Craig.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_07: So he's like, he's like, what we need is a concentration camp where we throw bad comics at them?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna give them a very hard time for a very long time.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_03: And when they've had enough of it to fight back, then they're American.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe that's what it means.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: Fuck.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_03: What?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: Guys, with all the Mexicans and Venezuelans gone, we're gonna have to focus our racism at somebody.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_03: How about the Indians?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: Has anybody thought about the Indians?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_07: Another aspect of this here, aside from the horrific racism and evil that's a part of this, we can't set that aside, but let's not talk about it for at least like a minute.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_07: Does this mean that Rufo is betting on it not being Vance in 2028?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_07: Because J.D.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_07: Vance's wife is an Indian American.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_07: His children are mixed race.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_07: Is that Rufo saying, like, I'm Rubio all the way?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_03: Is that what he means?
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: I think he means uh in order to be here, you need to denounce your lessers in the Indian community as people that should go.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's gonna require a certain amount of racism against Indians by Indian in order to prove that they're properly American.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_03: That might be what he means.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: That might really.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Be it.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Rufo asked about the Indian Americans in the MAGA coalition, the ones who voted for this, who might feel a little frustrated hearing that proposal.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: And Lomez dismissed that.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: He said it's incumbent upon them to prove their Americanness.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 22:14
  unknown: Yeah, yeah.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, so that is another one of these racist tropes, again, associated with Judaism.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_07: Jewish people have historically only had what's called provisional whiteness in most Western societies, especially in Europe and in the United States.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_07: They're white so long as they play along.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_07: They're white until they aren't.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_07: They're white until there's a reason to jettison them from the coalition.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_07: People from South Asia, primarily people from India, but also Pakistan and Bangladesh, although they seem to be pretty clearly talking about Indians as opposed to Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, because in that case they probably just call them Muslims.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_07: These people can't be white in the same way that Jewish people can be white simply because of the color of their skin.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_07: But they can be part of the racial ruling class in the United States, you know, in that US racial politics is organized around oppressing people of African descent, black people, and people who have ancestry in Latin America, so Mexican Americans, Central Americans.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_07: Indian people, Indian Americans, Chinese people, Japanese people, have not exactly the same kind of provisional whiteness, but something like that.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_07: They're part of the group until you don't need them anymore, seems to be pretty clearly what Rufo is saying.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_07: I guess it's possible that they're saying, okay, well, yeah, we're gonna have lighter-skinned Latinos in our racial coalition.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_07: They seem to still want Jewish people, but that's one of the breaks that's happening in the right wing, whether or not they want Jewish people or not.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_07: But if they're thinking, okay, well, we can tweak the numbers a little bit by kicking Indian Americans out, then again, maybe they're not running the numbers here.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_07: Maybe they're just fucking racist.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: Rufo and Lomez weren't talking about people of Indian descent who weren't in the USA legally.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: They were talking about a group whose paperwork is perfect, it's stamped, double checked.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: They were talking about citizens, college kids cheering for the longhorns as they play American football.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: They'd prefer if those kids did something or other to prove their Americanness.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: A vibe.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: Something that would indicate that they've been properly assimilated.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: Something they can't quite put their finger on, but they'll know it when they see it.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: And it's probably gonna involve a period of time where they have to endure vulgar, defamatory racism until they've left enough of their identity behind to be an American.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: Status is documentable.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_03: Americanist is a judgment.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody or some body of people have to set up a standard.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_03: So I want to ask this carefully, Dr.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: Craig.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_03: Is this a soft launch?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: Is this the next phase of ice getting floated on a podcast before it gets floated as policy?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_03: Is it a window into our future?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_03: Am I connecting dots that aren't there?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_07: I don't think that you're fucking around on this one.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_07: I think that this might very well be floating a trial balloon, trying to see if they can get enough people in the right-wing coalition excited about this as a uniting rallying cry.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_07: The fact is that there aren't a lot of Indian Americans in the United States, and there aren't a lot of people with H1PV systems, not an enormous amount of people, as a minority to rally racists around hating.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_07: It's a complicated choice, right?
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_07: They're not common enough for every person in the United States to have people like that in their community, especially a lot of the people in the Republican coalition who end up being relatively rural or from relatively small towns.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_07: But because of the appearance of their bodies and their religious practices, and the fact that culturally people from India have very many differences from people who are Anglo-Saxon white Protestant people from the United States, they're a visible minority.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_07: That is one of the things that racists look for when they're trying to find a scapegoat.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_07: I think that this might be them trying to see, like, okay, maybe we're toning down, openly talking about anti-Muslim shit because we want them to be part of the MAGA coalition.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_07: And like, Mexican Americans are relatively socially conservative compared to their US population.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_07: Maybe we can get them on board.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_07: But we need somebody to hate.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_07: The fascists want it to be Jewish people.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_07: Nick Fuentes wants that.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_07: Rufo doesn't want that because he thinks that that's the third rail.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_07: He doesn't want to touch the third rail.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_07: But maybe this is just, you know, just a little electricity.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_07: Maybe just a little bit enough of a spark to get the base going, get people excited, and keep the engine running.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_03: As long as it's a clear indication that you're one of the good ones.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_07: Yes, exactly.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_07: That's the other thing about it.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_07: And this is something that the racists say in their own group chats, that your willingness to transgress certain norms proves that you are one of us.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_07: That might be part of what Rufo is doing is signaling to the fascists, hey, I'm a racist too.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_07: I'm just racist against different people.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_07: And here's my take on who you should be racist against.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_07: Not those guys, but these other guys.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_07: There's something there too.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_07: They're wrangling for the fascist vote.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_07: Who are they gonna care about?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_07: Who are they gonna hate?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_07: If that's what he's going for, I don't think it's gonna work because fascism in the sort of European-American tradition has been about Judaism since the beginning.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_07: I don't know if finding another scapegoat is gonna work.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_07: But then again, he's the best there's ever been at this kind of shit.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_03: So it would be his magnum opus, because it seems pretty clear we're gonna get angry at Muslims again.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's the next level.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_03: 100% with the don't sharia law, my Texas, and that kind of thing.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: We've got Absolutely.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_03: Mamdani is a perfect lightning rod for this, for them.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_03: Al-Sayed certainly is as well.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_03: Seems like that's the direction that this country's gonna go.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe people are just like, that's over.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_03: That's so 2000 and late.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_03: We gotta get racist against new people.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_03: What about Indians?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe I don't know what's hot in the streets.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think the kids are gonna get on board?
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: They've got the classic pooping in the streets thing.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_03: What do they got beyond that?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_03: What's bad about them?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_07: I have no idea what they're gonna do or how this is gonna work, especially with the United States trying to triangulate with the government of India against China.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_07: India's an extremely important ally against China in geopolitics.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_07: I don't know what the fuck they're gonna do with that.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_07: Also, India is currently ruled by a quasi-fascist government, which is a natural ally of the right wing in the US.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_07: Maybe it's a poison pill?
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_07: I don't know.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_07: Maybe they're just throwing straws.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_07: Or, and this is one of the terrifying things that you gotta do when you're paying attention to these people, maybe they just have hatred in their hearts.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_07: Maybe they're just not savvy political manipulators about this.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_07: Maybe there's just some deep, dark evil inside their soul.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_07: I don't fucking know about this particular case.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_03: I could see it as Rufo pulling someone's chain to let them know that he could if he wanted to.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, yeah.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_03: Hey, I can get this far down the road, Bar He, Srinivasanin, or whoever.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: Could be that.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_03: It could be lots of people.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_03: Internal sword fighting.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: Or is rent seeking, saying, I'm gonna set the agenda for the next wave of racism in this country.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: What are you willing to give me in order to make it not be Muslims?
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_07: Could just be like, now you have to put energy into fighting this, and I'll use my bigger resources to do some other thing that I actually want to do.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: Fucked up that we gotta be worried about these guys and what they're doing and what they're saying and interpreting their shit down the line, trying to play four D cast against them.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_07: I had a colleague at Berkeley whose project was about studying Whigs and Whig culture.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_07: Not WHIG, WI-G, hair on your head.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_07: That's a great thing to have a history PhD about.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_07: When you tell people that that's what you study in your history PhD, the reaction is usually, uh-huh.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_07: That's interesting.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_07: Well, cool.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_07: I want I want people to react to me saying that I study fascism like that.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_07: I wanted them to be able to be like, good for you.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_07: I can see why you might want to study that.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_07: Because if somebody were like, I study ginkgo trees, that they'd be like, good, somebody's gotta.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: There's no practical application to your skill, but that's what college is all about.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_07: Just being like, okay, well, yeah, you know, you're adding to the breadth of human knowledge.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_07: Great.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_07: When I tell people that I study fascism, they're always like, what the fuck is going on?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_07: Help me, please.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yesterday I was watching the Packers play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers noon kickoff on Fox.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_03: And there were three spots that I counted about the Texas Senate race between James Tallerico and Ken Paxton.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_03: What?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_03: The Packers Buccaneers game was not the national game.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_03: So the only way you'd see it in Texas is if you had the Sunday ticket package.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: And even if you did have the Sunday ticket package, if you lived in Texas, you weren't watching the Packers and the Buccaneers play.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_03: In that same window, both of the NFL teams from Texas, the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Texans, were playing one another.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: And that game doesn't happen every season, but when it does, it's bragging rights until the Cowboys and the Texans play again.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_07: Were they thinking that they're getting like expats from Wisconsin who are watching the Green Bay game who live in Texas?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_03: You could have aired those same commercials in the local market and covered just about all of the voters in Texas.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, I guess that's like evidence of the extent to which this is all national news.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, like, it's not just a state race.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_07: Both parties think about it as like the future of the party, you know?
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_07: I guess that's what's up.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_07: Seems like that money could be better spent on like local AM stations or something.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there was one spot that was pro-Paxton.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_03: There was one spot that was pro-Talarico.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_03: And there was one spot, ostensibly for Paxton, starring, I shit you not, his ex-wife, Angela Paxton.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my god.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_03: Who, after a messy cheating scandal that stemmed from an even messier impeachment scandal where Ken Paxton was the villain, divorced him on biblical grounds in 2025.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_07: Last year.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_07: Uh this is a weird thing to say, but that's some Hillary Clinton type shit.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Texas Senator Angela Paxton.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: People have asked my thoughts about this election, and turns out I have some.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about the elephant in the room.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: In a general election, it's not as much about the individual players on the team, it's about getting the whole team across the finish line.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Either we hold every Republican seat or we hand the future of Texas to the other team.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I'm voting for the Republican ticket on November 3rd.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let's hold the line together.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_07: Texas Pack is responsible for the content of his advertising.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_03: That's bizarre.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_03: Dr.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_03: Craig, I know you'd never dare notice such things.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I didn't notice it the first time I saw this spot.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: But now that I'm seeing it for the second time, I can say it's surprisingly juggy commercial.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_03: I mean Angela Paxton's giving just enough cleavage to let us know she is definitely publicly degrading herself without inviting us to get off on it.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_03: I'm weirded out by that.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_03: Walks an amazingly fine line.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: Angela Paxton is a Texas state level politician as well with national ambition, so it was probably transactional.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, to have been a party to that tense negotiation.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_06: Mm-hmm.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_06: Mm-hmm.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_03: Fine, y'all can have half my tit length worth of cleavage in not a centimeter more.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_03: And y'all gotta show my cross where it's just about dangling in there.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_03: Almost real sexy like.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't want to have to say his name.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: And this runs nationally.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: To her credit, Angela Paxton did not say Ken Paxton's name at all in her national spot.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: Still had to hold on to that one teeny tiny shred of dignity.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_03: Worth it.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_03: Good for you, sweetie pie.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: Ladies, some of these candidates are absolute duds.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_03: Don't I know it?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_05: Mm-hmm.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: I sure do.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_03: But ladies, sometimes you gotta grin and bear it.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_03: Because even though these men are literal piles of human garbage that we would never leave alone in a room with our daughter, these men are Republicans.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: And Republican men know what's best.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_03: You know how I told you how much I've been really enjoying listening to the True Texas at Home podcast?
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: With those two conservative women that are just being dumb at each other.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: In a game of constant mutual pretense and one-upsmanship that I find to be exhilarating at times.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, kinda.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_07: This is one of the weird things about studying the fascists, is sometimes you develop the kind of parasocial relationship that people develop towards like celebrities that they're into.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_07: This is another one of those situations where pro-wrestling is a helpful metaphor here because you can like a heel.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_07: You can be a fan of a villain.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_07: They're just so committed to the bit.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_03: Zach Paxton one is making me feel weird, Craig.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_03: I'll tell you why.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_03: I'm worried about the visceral feelings that I have when I think of these women because they're the only women that I can be like, ah, fuck these bitches, and get away with.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_03: I told you that I very nearly came close to majoring in feminist history, right?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, that's right.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_03: That's true.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_03: I really do care about that kind of stuff.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_03: The national conversation for the last week or two had been about public degradation of women and the men who get off on it.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_03: I've shied away from any of those discussions because I am extremely uncomfortable with it.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_03: But I do have certain opinions.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_03: You know, when people talk about that, I'm I'm like, that's not for me.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I just think that's a type of sexuality that's just not for me.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's the sexuality I hate the most of all the sexualities, the sexualities where you get off on watching women be degraded.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_03: I know there are none are any worse than any others.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, probably.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_03: But uh, if I had to rank them, I think that's a bad one.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_03: Those feminist studies classes taught me one thing.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_03: That shit is lurking just beneath the surface in every man, no matter how fucking evolved that they say they are or think they are or try to be.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's lurking just below the surface.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know how much of my hatred for these women is that they're the only ones that I can just be okay with embracing my hatred for a woman.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_03: Do you understand?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_06: Mm-hmm.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_07: It's one of the problems of how we think about sexuality and sex that it's like, you know, people just end up with the one that they got, you know, and there might be stuff going on.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_07: But at the same time, it's like, I know that there are people whose kink is racism.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_07: It seems like it is an indication of something that is not good in our society, basically.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_03: I'm always on the lookout for my inner piece of shit.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_07: I know exactly what you mean.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_07: We've talked about this before when we talked about Lauren Boebert, right?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_07: The way that people talk about Marjorie Taylor Green, same thing.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_07: We talk about them like characters because they're media personalities.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_07: These are characters that play into tropes about foolish women or women who can only get ahead because of their appearance, all that sort of shit.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_07: This is it's just one of the very serious problems with talking about these people because they intentionally play into those tropes.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_07: Like that's part of their persona.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_07: And when it comes to things like the True Texas Project or similar groups, like in Southern California, there are a lot of women who are involved in anti-trans activism, you know, at a local school board level.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_07: They are playing at being a reality show mom with shock blonde hair screaming about suburban values and blah blah blah.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_07: It's like both the character that they're inhabiting and it is who they actually are.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_07: It's an extremely tough thing.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_07: When you're coming at it from the outside, evaluating it or critiquing it, it's really hard to get at it without engaging in those tropes.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_03: Of all the books that really affected me when I did my feminist history reading, the one that I'm embarrassed to say affected me the most because of what she's subsequently become is Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_03: At this point, I have to think that somebody else wrote that book for her.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: Ghostwriting is real.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_03: I have no comment about this.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_03: I can't believe that that's the same girl who had all that insight at such a young age about shit that was just staggering to me.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_03: This is why I was thinking about this.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: There's a part of that book that's always affected me, and it was about the punk rock aesthetic, the ripped clothes and the makeup schemes were to make them look like they had just been raped.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_03: That was the aesthetic.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_03: I never thought that in a million years, but then I started seeing it every time.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, that is the aesthetic that they're going for with that.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, it's a weird thing.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_07: People own their own appearance, they own their own sexuality, they own their own bodies.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_07: And at the same time, you know, it's reasonable to be like, okay, well, what is this about our culture?
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_07: Why is our culture like this?
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_07: How do we think about people?
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_07: You're talking about sexism and gender prejudice living inside you and like being things that we have to acknowledge are aspects of how we've been raised and socialized.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_07: I talk to students about this all the time when it comes to race.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_07: We can't pretend that evil doesn't live inside us.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_07: It does.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_07: This is what activists mean when they say that racism is socially constructed.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_07: They don't mean that it's made up, they mean that it lives inside you.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_07: This is something I think about a lot.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_07: When it comes to thinking about the better world to come, what kind of world are we trying to build?
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_07: And my answer is usually I want to build a world that I can't live in because my mind is poisoned by sexism, by racism, by gender biases.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_07: As much as I can try in my life to push against that and to change that world, my mind is poisoned.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_07: It has been.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_07: As a scholar of religion, there's a part of me that's like, yeah, you know, fuck an original sin, dude.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_03: We were born in sin, and we're trying to build the world to come.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_03: Just by virtue of having a penis, I could never be a true feminist.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_03: I can only be as close as you can get with a penis to being a true feminist.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_03: Because I've had the penis.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_03: I've enjoyed all the luxuries it's afforded me.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_03: From standing up to pee anywhere you want to getting paid a little more on a per hour basis.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_07: Camping is certainly different with a penis.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_07: There are definitely some benefits to being able to just go over and pee somewhere.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_07: It's pretty clutch.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's why I wish I knew more trans men.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_03: Because I'd be like, yeah, man, you get it.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_07: That's something that feminist spaces do talk about.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_07: It's like, okay, well, trans women are women, and most of them experience some form of socialization as men, and there's debates about that.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_07: About like, well, does that affect their experience in some way?
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_07: This is the origin of some of those shitty, like, female-only space debates.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_07: Should there be, quote, female-only spaces that don't have trans women in them?
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_07: But then you end up in these uncomfortable scenarios where it's like, okay, well, are we talking about spaces for people who were raised as women?
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, well, but then does that count trans men?
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_07: This is one of those things where I mean it.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_07: Our brains are poisoned.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_07: We cannot live in the good world.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_07: It is locked off from us.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_07: All that we can do is try our best to build a better world for the people whose brains and hearts and souls are not diseased in the ways that ours are.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_03: I wish I could be one of those guys that just didn't ever have the thought.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not 100% certain I'm not getting off on watching Karen Paxton and Julie McCarty publicly degrade themselves.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not sexually getting off on it.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_03: I can assure you of that.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_04: Well, yeah, I think I can reasonably I didn't get a boner from the Paxton commercial.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_04: I can assure you of that.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm taking a little self-inventory right now, Dr.
• 41:21
  unknown: Craig.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_07: It's a good thing to inquire with oneself about these things.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_04: I could have had a boner.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_04: I was the only person in the room.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_04: There was no reason to not have a boner.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_07: Oh my god.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_04: It wasn't one of the rare times at 48 I've had to stifle a boner.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_04: That was my whole job when I was 13 years old, stifling boner.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_04: I never tucked in a shirt until I was 27 years old, Dr.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_04: Too risky.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_04: I can't tuck in this shirt.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_04: What if I get a boner and I have to pull it out?
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_04: People will know I have a boner.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_07: That's a full-time job.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_07: That's some risky business, very much.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_04: My dad told me that would go away at one point in my life.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_04: It lasted a lot longer than I thought it would.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_04: I thought that'd be gone by the time I was 23.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_03: When I was like 12, I was getting a I was getting my first physical, and I was worried that I was gonna have a boner when the doctor checked my nuts or whatever and made me drop my trousers.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_03: Because, you know, I was getting a lot of boners.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: And my dad was like, that happened to a friend of mine when I was a kid.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_03: Doctor just slaps it and it goes away.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_04: What?
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_03: I thought that's where the insult dick smack came in.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_03: Seemed like a doctor was too important to be doing things like smacking boners down.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_03: But you couldn't leave it to a nurse either, unless it was nurse boner killer, you know, for obvious reasons.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_03: It was probably just my dad fucking with me, but it worked.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_03: What?
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, you'd smacked yourself in the dick at that point and was sort of trading one problem for another.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_03: You can't do that.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_03: Lateral move at best, if you ask me.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_03: But as a method of last resort, 100% effective.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_07: Terrible physical pain.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, I think that that would probably do it.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, you know.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_07: But that's what some people are into.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_07: Getting your dick smacked.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_03: Or smacking other dicks.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of ways that could break, I suppose.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_03: Ah you've interacted with that Cornell thing on some level, right?
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_03: Mm-hmm.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_03: Where you just peered in and then like looked away.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like, oh God.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_07: Oh no.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I confess I had exactly the same interaction with it.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_07: I was just like, well, this is fucking awful.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_07: And I have enough other fucking awful things that I'm paying attention to this week.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_07: I'm not staring farther into this one.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_03: I thought fraternities have learned, and then like more stuff comes out.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oh no.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_03: It was okay for a little while, and then it was like midway through that got dangerous.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_03: And she was on drugs, and it was like, oh fuck man.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, we should all be raising our kids well enough to know that if somebody texts you free pussy, that you don't go.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_03: That's a trap that you're being lured into.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_07: This is exactly the thing, is so much of the discourse is about her and what she did, as opposed to what these other boys did, in some capacity to each other, enabling each other and encouraging each other.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure there was a lot of egging on and trying to show off.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: Fucking these little sexually repressed demons that have just grown up on porn.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_03: Everything's all fucked up there.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_03: I want to take a position and be like, oh man, those guys should know better than that.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: You know, somebody's on drugs.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_03: They can't give you real consent.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's impossible.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_03: Call time out.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_07: This is something that people talk about a lot in the Bay Area.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_07: The Bay Area has a big kink scene and a big group sex scene and all sorts of stuff like that.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_07: It's pretty normal here.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_07: It's even intersected with the AI universe.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_07: People go into these things.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, Christ.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_07: And it's just bizarre seeing these institutions, these new ones with the AI people, wrangling with questions that other sexuality subcultures have handled over the last several decades.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_07: Not perfectly, but significantly better.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, I guess it's not bizarre.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_07: The fact is that fraternities, big companies, and especially big huge ones like AI or tech companies, they're founded on the premise that men should get what they want and they should be able to take things and that they should be able to take what they want.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_07: And so the idea that your bro, a person who is not actually your friend, because he has texted you, hey, we are raping this person.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_07: Oh.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_07: Come and do it too.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_07: Because I thought it just said free pussy.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_07: That's the actual text.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_07: But the subtext is a person is here and will not stop you.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_07: You guys, I know you're frat brothers and stuff, but come on, man.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_07: The fraternity thing never made any sense to me.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_07: Let's go fishing or play Super Smash Brothers melee.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_07: I never got it.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_03: At the end of the day, you've all got boners in a room together.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_03: Hey, here's a question.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_03: What did you get to with your Beehive piece this week?
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: I saw what you were writing about, and I'd spent a long time reading this Ellie Zier Yudowski thing two weeks ago, and I was like, oh the fuck this is talking about.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_03: This is way over my head.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_03: I can't stick with whoever did this and that.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_03: This is interesting.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_03: These guys are all fucking each other.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_03: That's cool.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_03: But this is one of the fucking weird things about it.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's like they're hoping for our certain death.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_07: They're banking on it.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_07: The AI universe is divided into two camps right now.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_07: There are the ones who think essentially it's a religious argument about millenarianism, the coming of the new age.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_07: There are some, like Yudowski, who originally got famous because he wrote a very popular Harry Potter fanfic.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_07: That's literally the case.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_03: How is he different from Destiny?
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's what I want to know.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_03: Because I know that there's a couple people that are thought leaders that are bearded, and that's it.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_07: He's supposed to be one of the reasonable ones, but he also openly is like, Hey, maybe you should tell your daughter to not go to college and instead enhance her body to be a sex worker to the coming elite and that's just something that he'll say.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_07: And people are like, hmm, yes, mm-hmm.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_07: Interesting point, Mr.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yudowski.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_03: That's very fascinating.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_03: That's a level of power.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_03: So that's why he's got people fucking other people.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody's telling him he can't.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_07: Yes, that's the thing about these guys is that there aren't people telling them no, and they're not used to being told no.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_07: A lot of them are Nepo babies to some extent.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_07: I don't actually know about Yudoski's family.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_07: He is one of the apocalypticists.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_07: He is worried that AI will come and question mark, question mark, kill all humans.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_07: He's like, oh, you know, it'll release some sort of super virus or it'll make kill bots and take them over and kill us all or whatever.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_07: He believes that it'll do that, then it'll go out and colonize space without us or whatever, like sure.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_07: He believes that.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_07: Then there are the sort of techno-utopianists who believe that AI will totally rewrite everything about human civilization, and that in five to ten years we're all going to be immortal, living on our butts, doing nothing, I guess, because it's gonna do everything.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_07: Then we're also gonna colonize space, but it'll be nice, sort of like Star Trek except with a computer.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_07: Those Star Trek episodes where there's a computer in the forest and it tells you what to do except good, and they're all fucking each other, is the other aspect of this.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_07: Not just in the fantasy, in the actual human, physical real world, all these people are having sex with each other.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_07: The orgies are a big part of it.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_07: So my perspective is we're going to think about this as a religious argument.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_07: We have to think about it as an argument about heresy.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_07: These people are arguing about sacred texts, which are essentially each other's blogs.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_07: The fucking blogosphere is part of this.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_07: It's so dumb.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_07: It's so stupid.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_07: None of these people have philosophy degrees, none of these people have politics degrees, all of these people read graphs and program computers.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_07: They believe that that is how reality works.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_07: Period, the end.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_07: And they are in control of trillions of dollars.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_03: So is the AI orgy scene like every other orgy scene in the world, where it's full of a bunch of dungeons and dragons guys and way too many dudes wearing ankle socks?
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_03: Or are there like genuinely attractive people involved in this AI orgy scene?
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_03: Have you gotten a look at the people?
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_03: Is it worth getting into?
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_07: I personally have not attended any of these.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_07: I'm gonna go on record as saying that.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_07: A lot of the dudes who are involved in this are not my type when it comes to dudes.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_07: None of them are these people.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_07: Some of them might be attractive to other people.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_03: Are these guys like guys that exclusively date Wiccans?
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_03: Ha! Fuck.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_03: Talking about people that have ferrets and a lot of ferret tools.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's not their first ferret.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: That's perfect.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_03: Is that what's happening?
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_07: Nick, I know that you don't live in the Bay Area, but you this is a certain type of guy, and you've hit the nail right on the head.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_07: There might not be an actual ferret involved, but I swear to God, there are definitely Wiccans involved 100%.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_03: People casting spells for good parking.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_03: Totally.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_03: Those people are in charge of the next 40 years of humans' existence, and they're like, it's gonna get fucked up.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_03: Here's what you should do.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_03: Just conform to it.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_03: You'll be better off.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_03: You get in early with the rest of us.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_07: Basically, yeah, it's a burning man tent that has consumed the entire US economy, ready to pray to the sun.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_03: Alright, anything else interesting?
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_03: Do you gotta go?
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I try to.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I should probably go.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_03: Alright, man.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_03: Felt like a good conversation to me.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know what parts of it we can use and not use, but I think we can use a lot of it.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_03: Especially that part about Ken Paxton and stuff.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_03: I think we can use it.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's some groundbreaking shit in the city.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: I agree.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_03: Who else is asking that kind of a question in this space?
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_03: There's an extended part where we talk about boners.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_03: And it's mostly me driving the boner's cars.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_03: That's why you gotta come to this show.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_03: You never hear Jared Yates Sexton talking boners on the muck rate.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_07: Have a boner bonus.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, I'll see you.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_04: I'll see you later.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_03: Stare into the abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair Podcast with Nick Mortensen and Dr.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: Craig Johnson.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_03: And don't forget Dr.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_03: Craig's other podcast, 15 Minutes of Fascism, available wherever you get your podcast.