Will Social Media Kill Elections?
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bit.ly slash book club IRL for tickets. Grab yours before they sell out. Rise and shine, fever dreamers. Look alive, my friends. I'm Bea Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream presented by Betches News, where we explore the absurdities and oddities of our uniquely American experience and what an experience it is.

Today we are bringing you another series of stories that we need to check the temperature on, followed by a little chat about the newly convicted felon Donald Trump and all of the fallout from his conviction. Then we are in our down ballot era and we have an Americant rant on Texas professors who are failing students who seek abortions.

But first, happy Pride, V. Thank you, Sammy. This whole month, I will be intolerable. Intolerable. It's our month. You have not been intolerable yet. So I think you've been great. Well, that's because you're not homophobic. That's because you're a real ally. So all the gay stuff that I want to talk about and do, you know, you're like, good, let's do it. Let's live. And that's what we need this Pride season as people.

So many people abandon us. Yeah. I mean, just everyone needs to like back off, just get familiar with new, with new types of living and new people and like, just get curious about it. Like why? I mean, obviously the listeners of this show aren't, you know, homophobic, but everyone else just,

Can't you just leave it alone? Well, I was on Libs of TikTok again because, you know, this weekend I handed out 3,000 banned books to children that were brought by their parents, some of them gay people, to the Gay Pride Parade in Buffalo. And I was like, the last thing I'm going to – I posted a picture of myself and on the T-shirt it says, be gay and organized. And I'm like holding all these books. And she posted it being like, way to indoctrinate the children. And like, honestly, Chai Rachik, I am not taking Libs.

from an unwed, childless, horrible person. You are the last person to talk about love or what's good for children. Stop putting me on your app. Come up with your own creative content. But even in this picture, you could not stop me from the joy that I had this past weekend. We handed out 3,000 books along a two and a half mile parade route, which I did not stretch or prepare for. With the Buffalo Bills, the actual Buffalo Bills team gave us two big trucks, a DJ, a float with

bubbles, wagons to put the books in. They also gave us like all these rainbow bracelets and sunglasses and flags and swag. And they had a ton of volunteers who work in the stadium, like in the ticket office, they showed up and then they put it right on their Instagram, on the, on the bills Instagram. They did a big splashy piece about it.

proudly. There's comments under there being like, I'm not going to be a Bills fan. And other people responding, what are you going to do from August to February, bro? Of course, you're going to be a Bills fan. Shut up because the Bills don't mess around. You're a fake fan. You're a fake fan. If you could take one day that the Buffalo Bills took a kid whose number one favorite team is the Buffalo Bills, and he wanted to raise these books and he's got gay dads, and they made this kid feel included and special. And he will remember that and pass that feeling on forever.

We also had GLAAD do a little write-up about the book drive, which I thought was really nice too. But the Bills are a great team and they do these little things. And I think that's what makes the Bills fan culture so great because it's not just that they did Pride. They also do a ton for veterans. They have a whole cancer thing that they do. They find niche parts of the community and they give them their day to make them feel special and seen. And that's what makes her a great fandom.

Love that. We should chat with the Buffalo Bills about their team social responsibility. And you know what? Maybe they got a little crap for like a day. The girls that answer the phone probably at the Bills office were probably like fielding some phone calls from hateful folks. But it's one day and it meant the absolute world to not just everybody on that parade route, but to the Bills fans who come from queer families or queer folks themselves and just love the Buffalo Bills and want to have a good time and feel included.

Yeah, I'll be honest. Like, it's pretty hard to watch the, like, minimization of pride this year because people are basically afraid, like, of the reactions that they'll get. And I don't know. I feel like especially with something so personal where it's, like, in people's homes, it's not –

remote at all. Like, you know, people who are maybe they're not out, you know, people, you know, even if you think you don't know. Exactly. Everybody loves a gay person or has been helped by a gay person, whether they knew it or not. Right. Exactly. So it's like all the vitriol that they get for speaking out. And I definitely feel for the people who have to feel that directly. Oh, yeah. Ultimately, those are just people are just very loud. And all of the

The way that it actually makes the individuals who are in the fandom who are out or especially those who are not. That does so much more. So even if they're not all being extremely vocal, I don't know. I just wish that like people would think more about all the people they are affecting positively who aren't yelling about it.

Here's the thing I want just folks to think about, right? When we're gay kids, we never get to grow up as ourself. We grow up as a version of ourself that keeps us safe, right? We minimize our authenticity to maximize our security and safety. And that's hard. So once you turn 18 or 19 and you get out on your own, it's almost like you have a second childhood trying to figure out who you are and making mistakes the way that you should have been able to do as a teenager or young person.

Some of the things you do when you don't feel included in the family because you may be the only gay person or trans person or you're not out, there's something different about you is you try to assimilate to the things that the family does like.

So I'm telling you that if there was some little gay kid watching the Buffalo Bills game and saw this little thing happen, right? So he follows it because he likes to watch that game with his dad because this is the time that they spend together where the world kind of disappears. It's game time and we're all liking the same thing. And we're not talking about anything other than if Josh Allen is throwing right today, right? So those moments matter.

to making people feel included into breaking down some of these places of conversation that we need to have. Also to that dad or whoever it is, seeing the bills embrace queer folks

Maybe that'll make him want to embrace his queer son too. I'm not going to say it's going to happen every time, but it makes you feel like you're still included in the community. And a lot of these folks who leave these shitty comments online, I think oftentimes they're just probably sad people who don't feel seen in their regular life. So then some other marginalized person that they think they're better than gets a little recognition and then they want to like shit on that because then their hierarchy, well, at least they're not gay, even though they're not X, Y thing they wish that they were. But stuff like this matters and yay to the Buffalo Bills for like

Just sticking by it. And they were completely unfazed. I mean, these people are from Buffalo, right? We see snow like you ain't never seen in your life. You could go ahead and leave those snowflakey comments. We will be shoveling those right into the lake. On that note, listen to the Kathy Hochul interview. She talks about being from upstate, dealing with snow and how...

She bravely faced a blizzard to save jobs for New Yorkers, which was a very interesting story. But love that for the Bills. Could make me a football fan. You never know. Also, all those trolls online, a lot of them, as we will discuss later in this episode, they aren't even real people. Oh, spooky. That's a teaser. Okay, should we move on to TempCheck? TempCheck.

We're going to do the same thing as we did last week, where we're going to go through a bunch of stories and tell us if it's, you know, raising the temperature or lowering it. I think we should call it fever or freeze. Yes, fever or freeze. Okay. We still don't know which direction is good yet, but. Fight or flight. I don't know. We're figuring the show out. We're like doing it by the seat of our pants as we're recording. You're a part of this. And that is the fun part.

Story number one, I've got a temp check on my old employer, The Washington Post. Just this week, the editor, Sally Busby, who one has the best name for news, Sally Busby, the editor of The Washington Post, love her. She abruptly left her job and it has really shaken all the journalists there. I got a bunch of texts saying, you know, what's happening? It looks like Washington Post might be taking a turn for the right. Now, the reason why people were so shooketh that she left wasn't that there's any scandal with her, but

Sally Busby came to The Washington Post from the Associated Press, which is, you know, the industry standard for hard news. It's very both sides. It's incredibly respected. And yesterday, the publisher of The Post, Will Lewis, who only came in a couple of months ago himself, hired Matt Murray, the former Wall Street Journal editor, to replace Sally Busby.

So we're looking at going from the Associated Press to somebody who came up at the Wall Street Journal.

Under Rupert Murdoch. Under Rupert Murdoch. And the thing is, this guy, Will Lewis, who became the new post publisher, he only came in a couple months ago as well. And he was from right wing publications like Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. So he promised when he came in, he wasn't going to move all his buddies from News Corp over. But he's already made like four or five hires all from the right wing. And this is going to be a big one with the editor. So I'm not saying, you know, we have to give everybody a chance. But

But Will held this meeting yesterday with the reporters at The Washington Post. And the reporters asked, are we moving more right wing here or what? Like, because you need to tell us that. Are we moving away from the core mission of The Washington Post? And he said, quote, we are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can't sugarcoat it anymore. So I've had to take divisive, urgent action to set us on a different path. Sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best. But like,

Okay, interjecting again here. Sally Busby was the best of the best. The paper won a Pulitzer last month for national reporting and two Webby's for digital excellence. And that's just in the last couple of weeks here. So let's not say that like what Sally was doing wasn't excellent. The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch and they gather their stories and opinions from Fox News. So this is very concerning. This is just such bullshit, his justification. Yeah.

About the losing the money and the audience. I mean, losing the money is a legitimate business concern, but about the audience and people not reading your stuff, I can't sugarcoat it anymore. That is happening in a media ecosystem where all journalism is sort of gated by social media. People are less...

engaged in necessarily being subscribers or people who are going direct to journalistic websites because they're getting all of they think they're getting all their news from social media because it's being algorithmically fed to them which has its own issues and people are just less engaged because you're in a down year 2023 is not like a prime you know political year and

I get that they want to like turn it around from a business standpoint, which every media business is dealing with. But this is owned by Jeff Bezos and the losses are like a rounding error slash tax reduction. It feels like when they say to us, oh, food prices had to go up because of COVID and inflation. That's just fucking not true. We know that corporate profits are up four times.

They're using this idea that nobody reads the Washington Post because it's too liberal. The same way they said it about the L.A. Times when that got disseminated just a couple months ago. These publications are owned by billionaires who benefit from the right wing. They purchased these outlets and they are systemically breaking them the same way that like Elon Musk broke X in many ways.

This isn't the gaslighting to say that the Washington Post isn't like a pillar of truth with a legacy of incredible investigative reporting. I mean, like Bob Woodward.

And the Watergate stuff is like, you know, one of the bigger legacies. And there are many. Ben Bradley and Spotlight and all of that. So to me, it feels like gaslighting to say, oh, left wing talking points and investigative stories just don't make enough money. We're going to try to...

go super right wing and see if we can make a bunch of money that way. One, the right wing audience can only take in so many sites and I fucking promise you they are not going to the Washington Post ever. So if your idea is that you'll be able to recruit right wing subscribers away from

the temple that is Fox News, you are sorely mistaken. I think it's an attempt to break it and to maybe, I don't know, I'm sure that real estate they sit that huge Washington Post office on K Street on is worth a lot more than Jeff Bezos thinks the newspaper is worth. I see it as an attempt to break it because the value of the news is not like

I mean, we can talk about this bigger picture, but the real value of something like the Washington Post is that they will, quote, go there. They will do what investigative journalists are tasked with doing, which is

Finding the story that really fucks up someone in power. And though that's what the missed opportunity is going to be. It's not like every article is going to be like, yay, Trump. It's about what you don't see that could have been that continues to accrue advantages to people in power rather than people not in power.

We just saw this with the Trump trial, right? The ability to catch and kill. And will that be different with a more right-leaning editor? Will they be less likely to publish accountability pieces? I think we'll have to see. I'm personally devastated. Going to the Washington Post was Disneyland for me when it comes to working at a newspaper. They are incredible.

incredible people there. The leadership was wonderful while I was there. They have mentorship like no one else there, especially compared to my experience even at LA Times. It's just outstanding. And I'm just so heartbroken while also remaining, of course, as I always do, like Pollyanna optimistic that the people I really care about will be able to continue to do the work that they do there that is so important to our democracy.

So if we're checking the temperature, I'm giving this a freeze, which is what it's doing to journalism. We will know it's really over if they change their slogan from democracy dies in darkness. Yep. So you've probably seen this. I know you've seen it. A lot of people are very excited because Mexico has elected its first woman and Jewish person as president, Claudia Scheinbaum of the Morena party. Naturally, I was seeing a lot of celebration over the federalism.

feminism of it all. But when you actually like look into her, I have some questions. So yeah, so disappointing, right? So I saw some basic headlines about her. Oh, she's a climate scientist. You know, she was the mayor of Mexico City.

I saw these headlines about her lauding her before I had a chance to actually read into her and do the morning announcements last night. And then I saw that I had gotten a DM from a listener who shared a different take on the situation from the celebratory news. I love when the fever dreamers write in. We need you to be our eyes, ears and conscience and tell us what's going on.

Right, especially when you're, like, on the ground and she was from Mexico. So, Scheinbaum, yes, was the former mayor of Mexico City. She comes from the Morena Party, which is the same party as the former president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. It's a mouthful. That's why they call him AMLO. So, she is widely regarded as his, like, second-in-command protege. And, you know, she's very much towing the party line. And that is not a compliment because...

Lopez Obrador was not the biggest fan of democracy, let's just say. We'll get to that in a second. She is about to start a six-year term. There are no second terms under Mexican law, so it's kind of like you get your one shot, which is why Lopez Obrador is so Lopez Obrador. Do you hear how I butcher the pronunciation? Was set on...

securing someone who a successor who's going to basically follow in his footsteps, especially because while he was president, he created a referendum that in three years, everyone would have to vote again about the government. And so it sort of like leaves a little bit of an opening for him to make maneuvers. You know, I don't know exactly what he is planning, but it seems that he is not necessarily like totally a fan of giving up power.

You hear a lot of news about how the Mexican government is sort of losing control of the cartels. That happened while he was president. And the last six years of his presidency have been the most violent in Mexico's modern history. More than 30 people were assassinated running against Claudia Scheinbaum for president. I'm sorry, what? Wait, Sammy, hold on.

So in this election season, how many can't they had more than 30 candidates? So let's say they had 40 people running for president and 37, I think it is of them are were killed, were assassinated within this election cycle. That's nuts. And it wasn't just like her opponents. It was also people who were who run for elected office period are frequently threatened, kidnapped, like hundreds of people.

And it's on both sides. It's not just the side that's in power or the opposition because there's this cartel problem, which is sort of what you're dealing with, like an extra governmental force that wants power, wants to basically get the state, whichever party is in power.

It's going to let them do their thing. Yeah. And then so there's this like other factor. So it's deeply corrupt. I'll add that Lopez Obrador is a fan of Donald Trump. He took a few weeks to congratulate Biden on winning the election in 2020. So that's really not great because Scheinbaum is a follower of his. She is in lockstep with him. So we can assume that she feels the same way.

This is that thing they do here, right? This is that thing they do here where the male right wingers get too far. And so then they throw women out there to like try and soften the fascism. It's like fascism and lipstick and heels. Exactly. And this guy, you know, I don't want to throw around fascism, but he is part of a democratic backslide.

That's happening globally. He has attacked journalists, gutted government watchdogs and civil society movements that investigate corruption, of which it sounds like there's quite a bit. And, you know, he wants to gut organizations that support women's rights, human rights. He had made a campaign promise that he would demilitarize. And instead of doing that, he just kind of ended up criminalizing poor people with the new policies. And there were more homicides than ever.

Under his presidency in 2022, there were 34,000 homicides reported, which is double what it was in 2015. And as you know, we're not really dealing with the most reliable government agencies necessarily. So that's happening on our southern border.

Well, he didn't like Trump enough to pay for that wall. So maybe we have that going for us. There's some separation there. I'm going to say that this is this is raising my fever. I think this is like it gives me the vapors for sure.

I have a dumb piece of news, but that I've been obsessed with. So you have to deal with it now. It's your problem now. Okay. So I read about, I have like, I am like forever a person who's on the web MD, like trying to diagnose what I have going on. You know, it could be anything. I had a headache the other day and I was like, so sure that I was having some sort of like brain worm RFK junior thing. So I saw this, this lady in Canada, uh,

Got something called auto brewery syndrome. It is apparently very rare. There's only ever been 20 cases ever. And it's where your gut bacteria can ferment carbs into alcohol in your body. Like how much alcohol? Enough that you're like spontaneously drunk. So you have to avoid carbs?

I guess so. So this lady just kept getting spontaneously drunk and she and her husband was like, she does not drink. We don't know what's going on. And they're like, okay, but did you have a loaded baked potato? Tell us about your diet. What is going on here? And they ended up diagnosing her with this thing called auto brewery syndrome. And this is my new fear of becoming a home brewery. It is plaguing my waking hours. Yes.

Because I have, like, such, you know, I'm like a bad gut girly. So I'm, like, constantly worried that, like, my acid reflux now will turn into, like, home brewery.

How many cases of this are there? Do you know? 20 in the history of the world. It's not going to happen, but it could. This could happen. This sort of reminds me of like when you were little, did people tell you like not to have Pop Rocks and Diet Coke because like it would explode your stomach? This is giving that situation. Or like don't swallow your gum. I'm still worried about that. We should do an episode on urban legends and lies our parents told us.

There are so many lies my parents told us that lead me to this moment now where I think that my body could become a home brewery. Like my dad telling me that you weren't allowed to drive while barefoot sticks with me to this very day. This is raising my fever, but one more thing. Auto brewery syndrome sounds like a cool name for a brewery. It does. That's our new band name. Yeah, like that sounds like a great name.

I hope that she's okay and can find a way to still consume carbs without getting drunk. I know. I'll keep up on the story. I'm going to see. Maybe we could call her and ask her what it feels like. I am very curious.

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We have another interesting story. Speaking of Rupert Murdoch, all of our stories are kind of tying in together today, which I love. It's like a beautiful tapestry of messed up things. Okay, of awful. Well, we don't want to give it away. Okay, so we have the ultimate affront on Pride Month. 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch just married his fifth wife. I can't. The sanctity of marriage. And on the first day of June, no less.

Fifth wife. Tell me about her. Tell me about her. What kind of asset is she? Because the people with this kind of money don't marry for love, especially at 93 years old. And he was engaged to a different lady last year and he called it off. Before we shit talk this 93 year old man, it is because he owns a majority of the media.

in this country, right? So this is like a person who has huge influence over the American narrative. Yeah, the family's worth $20 billion. So the new Mrs. Murdoch is 67-year-old Elena Zhukova. They got married at Rupert's Tuscan-style vineyard in Bel Air on June 1st. Elena Zhukova is a retired molecular biologist who taught at Baylor and UCLA after she immigrated from Moscow in 1991 right before the Soviet Union collapsed.

She was previously married to someone who she met when they were in the Soviet Union when they were students. That is Alexander Zhukov, the billionaire Russian energy investor, i.e. oligarch. So they met back when they were in the USSR. She then left with their daughter, Dasha Zhukova, after only being married for three years. And then later, he left, became a British citizen. So...

Dasha is an art collector. She is an investor in Artsy along with Wendy Dang. Their whole circle is very interesting and I want to kind of draw a mental map of these people and how they're connected. Their daughter Dasha was actually sort of the link for how her mother met Rupert because Dasha was friends with Wendy Dang. They're both invested in this art company and running in the same circle. So Dasha is an art collector.

And she's now married to Greek shipping air, Sabros Niarchos, who once dated our fave Paris Hilton. But her first husband is Roman Abramovich, Putin's friend. Dun, dun, dun!

Yeah, so, okay, so let's, wait, let me just get this straight, right? Because history always repeats itself, right? So we have these people who were oligarchs and big shit in the Soviet Union before it fell, who moved, they got to move to Britain, to America, to wherever. Sounds a little bit to me like those Germans who got to move to Argentina after some of the stuff that they did. This is spooky to me. Yeah, I mean, the UK is a hotbed of

laundering. Oh, sure. For sketchy, you know, for sketchy global plans. But I'll tell you about Alexander Zhukov. He formed an energy company during the Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev relaxed trading laws, you know, as it was sort of winding down. That's the kind of thing where you don't really get to be rich unless they give you permission. So you then owe whoever gave you permission. He apparently went to London after Elena and Dasha went to the U.S.,

And in, you know, in the 90s. But then in 2001, he was arrested and spent six months in Italian jail after he was accused of supplying arms to Bosnian militants.

Eventually he was released without charges. So like this guy's not living your average life. Okay. Now let's go back to Elena and Rupert. It's not totally clear how they met though. They do say it is through his third wife, Wendy Dang. It seems like they were first linked in August, 2023 when they were spotted vacationing on a yacht in the Mediterranean. They kind of rushed into it because they got engaged in March, like a few months ago. And then they got married on Sunday.

Well, he's 93, Sammy. He's on a time crunch here. I'm surprised he married a woman who has a daughter, though, because the last woman he was engaged with, the deal he had with his children was he could marry this other woman because she didn't have children. Because Rupert Murdoch's children are very worried about their inheritance. Yes. They had already had a dispute over Wendy Dang's daughters with Rupert over whether they could be shareholders in the company. And she really fought for them to get it. So...

Just a little bit about this woman to give you a sense of what she's like. Her daughter told the Financial Times in 2012. This is how she described her. My mother is quite a serious person who is more interested in substance than aesthetics. We always had very serious scientists hanging out at our house. She also mentioned that her mother didn't plan to remain in the U.S. until communism collapsed, until the Soviet Union collapsed. And they had actually planned to return to Russia. So we're really talking about a very interesting story.

group of people and the broken engagement that you mentioned. There also aren't many details about Rupert's courtship with his, the woman who he just broke off this engagement with, but he got divorced from his fourth wife, Jerry Hall in late 2022. Then he started dating this woman, Ann Leslie Smith. She is a retired dental hygienist and a conservative radio host.

A source told Vanity Fair, and it seems like this is sort of the consensus, that they called off the engagement after less than a month because he was increasingly uncomfortable with her outspoken evangelical views. Specifically, they went to a party in Barbados over Christmas, and I think she kind of like embarrassed him in front of

Mm-hmm. But it's unclear whether they... Some people say that he met her before he was divorced from his last wife, Jerry Hall. Others say after. There's a lot here in his love life from the past. Like, Wendy Dang has been accused of being a Chinese spy by the Wall Street Journal, no less, which is...

is one of Rupert Murdoch's. How did that get published? Or was it because he was trying to, he's probably trying to like, you know, look like, Oh yeah, well I'm not interfering. I let them publish the story about my ex-wife being a Chinese spy. I mean like maybe it was after it was in 2018 that came out. So that was after they were divorced. So maybe he was just going for her throat at that time. Um,

There was some rumor about Wendy Dang having an affair with the prime minister, Tony Blair. Like what is wild is like we watch these shows on Ian Bravo about the real housewives of here or there. This ain't got nothing on the real arranged marriages for oligarchy and authoritarianism of the UK. And Rupert Murdoch, if this were the L word, Rupert Murdoch would be Alice. He would be the center of the chart. There's also a rumor that she had an affair with Putin.

So gross. That's interesting. It's so it really is. I'm hopeful that the new generation isn't like this. I don't think that we are. Of course we're not. No one's rich enough. No one's got the money to do this kind of thing. Exactly. But it's just like, God, oh, man.

What this feels like to me, and like I'm getting a vision of it, is like this consolidation of wealth and power, this like will to power that is grasping its last chance because they know that all of us are not into that, whatever they're doing. But they need to hold it because that's the only way they get to keep it. And they have to keep it normalized that these are all the things that people do that's like part of the problem.

So my fever's going up. This is a high fever. After all of the visuals that we just put in your head, here's two goofy news just to palate cleanse before we get into our main news. Cyndi Lauper's going on a farewell tour and I, for one, am very excited. It is perhaps the last chance for girls who just want to have fun. And I think we should all go and dress up and support Cyndi Lauper. And also, as you're making your summer salads, girly pops, cucumbers have been recalled for

pretty much all cucumbers. So if you have a cucumber in your fridge right now, go ahead and compost that or do whatever you do with it and eat a mozzarella stick instead. There is a salmonella outbreak in the cucumbers. You heard it here first. We are now going to get into our main news section. And if I could just get a little background music for the kickoff. ♪

Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony convictions. He still has 54 pending criminal charges. His campaign chairman is a felon. His deputy campaign manager is a felon. His personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security advisor, his trade advisor, his foreign policy advisor, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO are all

And just today, three Trump loyalists were indicted on felony forgery charges for their scheme to send a fake slate of electors to certify the 2020 election in Wisconsin. He's been impeached twice. He's lost the popular vote twice. He owes E. Jean Carroll $88 million. He owes the state of New York $450 million. He added $8 trillion to the national debt during his term. And rumor has it that he shits himself.

To quote native New Yorkers, this fucking guy, all right?

Wait, wait, wait. We got to go back to the shitting himself. Do you mean literally like with feces or do you mean? Yeah. So here's the thing. Michael Cohen calls him Von Schitzenpantz. Yes, I know. He clarified that this is like a thing that he claims that he has witnessed that Trump has like an incontinence issue. I can't obviously confirm that, but it's been pretty out there.

It's also, I don't know if you followed Noel Casler. He was one of the former producers on The Apprentice. And he said it's always spilling tea. He's been talking about that for years. So I believe it. I mean, imagine if he did it during the debate. I mean, he might. I don't know. Biden can shoot you a glance. It might make you shit your pants. But at this point,

I'm so sick of talking about Trump and how deeply corrupt he is as a person. As a former Republican myself, I think we just have to stop. We have to stop putting this person up there and pretending that this is normal. Because it's not just him and his lawyers and all the people that I just named off. Of the 1,265 individuals that have been charged since January 6th,

Department prosecutors have secured more than 718 guilty pleas, including 213 people who pled guilty to felonies that include assault on federal officers, obstructing law enforcement and seditious conspiracy. 213 Trump loyalists that pled guilty to those charges. Several of his lawyers remain unpaid for services rendered. A lot of them have been disbarred. And don't forget,

Of the 237 grants of clemency that Trump did while he was in office, only 25 of those were people he didn't know personally. Only 25 of the clemency requests that he gave were people who had filed paperwork and gone through the office of pardon attorneys personally.

Wow. That's fucked.

I don't know where we reach like enough for people, but it has to be enough. And that's why I don't even like debate people who are still on the Trump train anymore, because I'm like, you are so willfully ignorant to so much evidence that like we don't even exist in the same America anymore. And that like breaks my heart. I just have to wait for you to like get out of this trance before we can be real. I hate to break it to you. It's never going to be enough.

I know. Well, and then on top of that, if that's not enough, yesterday ProPublica published a story saying that multiple Trump witnesses have received significant financial benefits from his businesses for testifying favorably in his trials. People who got like their salary doubled, big jobs that they wanted. And while you can't put a button on it and say it's definitely connected, it's oddly suspicious when it's nine different people. The nine people who testified got all these benefits. Come on.

Yeah. And like the, what autocracy and aspiring autocrats try to do is make you do not deny reality. They make, it makes you question that what's actually happening is happening. And this is who this person is.

This is who everything he touches dies. He and people will just keep going on the train. They'll keep doing it until the whole Republican Party is dead. As Lindsey Graham famously tweeted, if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed and we will deserve it. That is who this man is. And yet the Republicans are still falling in lockstep behind him. Not only that, but they are threatening Republicans who will not openly support him. The government, the Republican candidate for Senate in Maryland, Larry Hogan, is

tweeted before the verdict was out that he was like, we're upholding the rule of law. This is like, you know, a great day for justice before there was even a verdict. And because he posted that, Lara Trump, who is now the co-chair of the RNC, says that they are going to divert funds away from his race. So it's like they are being strong armed into supporting the president.

The only person who isn't is Lisa Murkowski, who called for a new candidate. That's because she is a write-in candidate. Like, she doesn't need their money. No. And Alaska's its own thing. So...

Yeah, it's wild to me that they are going to punish Larry Hogan when they really have a chance at winning that seat. Now, I lived in Maryland when Larry Hogan was the governor. He's pretty centrist when it comes to right wing. He's definitely like a not a Trumper type Republican. I don't agree with a lot of that he says, but he's a reasonable, very kind man. He's done good work. He has a good chance at winning, especially with moderates and people who are sort of disillusioned to the Democratic Party and the folks who

don't want to vote for a Trump person, that he had a good chance at winning. And for them to cut their nose off to spite their face here, that's just indicative of what a revenge campaign this will be. And y'all know that I know people who were in Trump's cabinet previously, and they have said that they hope he doesn't get reelected because we could not possibly understand the scope of revenge and his energy and appetite for revenge.

And so they hope that this doesn't happen because these are people who saw him firsthand, you know, try to do it the first time. And now they know the roads. This isn't his first wouldn't be his first term where he's sort of like figuring things out. He knows what he got across. He knows what he didn't get across. And they've had four years to scheme and and try to fix it. So it's it's very scary.

Yeah, and he has a plan, Project 2025, as we've discussed, and he has marginalized all the people who will not – already marginalized all the people who will not carry out his plan. He also has RFK, who is calling the trial undemocratic while also saying that he's very upset about the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. What?

This man is straight up getting talking points from the Kremlin. And because people know how transactional Trump is, you now have all of these billionaires who are lining back up to support him. And you have him telling the oil lobby that if they give him a billion dollars in donations, he will do whatever they want in terms of regulation. So that's the end of your planet. He just went to lunch with Elon Musk.

And told Elon that he'll find a place for him in the cabinet if he supports him. He already supports him. He wants more. What does he want?

He wants Elon to like campaign for him basically. Yeah. But he's talking about like, oh, we'll give you, you know, can you imagine if Elon Musk was the secretary of education or the treasury? I mean, it's not a joke. You know what I mean? They put Betsy DeVos and as the head of a department of education, she won't do it again because she almost went to jail for the shit she pulled. But it's like the second wave of his cabinet will be worse because they are lower on the totem pole. People, they are more desperate. They are more loyal and they are less, uh,

Qualified. They're less qualified and they have less to lose. As much as Betsy DeVos and folks like her were nightmares, they did have something to lose if their reputation or their funding or if they got put in jail. That mattered to someone like her. That won't matter to who the next round of loyalists is. And the bastard joined TikTok. And this is something I'm very concerned about. I don't know that the Trump campaign knows how to use TikTok the way that they should or if they're even serious about putting content on TikTok.

Because I thought I had read that there was a deal with Truth Social that he would be exclusive to Truth Social. Otherwise, there's not enough value in Truth Social to keep it afloat. If he starts posting everywhere, then what's the point in having a Truth Social account? Because the Truth Social thing is also like a meme stock. Oh, it's a scam. That applied when they were trying to make it a real thing. But who cares? No one's using it. And it's a financial joke. Yeah. Yeah.

So I, the thing I worry about with Trump being on TikTok is the power of the duet and stitch feature, which makes it very easy to spread his message at a rate that no other platform could do. Because if you, if he posts something on truth, social or Facebook or wherever, and a user, a follower of his likes it and they share it, well, that goes to that person's page and it is seen by their friends and family. When you do it or stitch on TikTok, it has another chance to get on the for you page.

And if we're doing if you extrapolate out how many people would do that would just do it or stitch his video. Now we're looking at millions and millions and millions of chances for him to get on the for you page, which is billions of eyeballs. So that is the thing that I think is very concerning when it comes to Trump on TikTok. I don't know that he's actually going to use it, but we have seen.

You know, very obvious attempts to discredit news sources and creators that have been on that app, myself included. And it's just it's getting a little bit ugly over there with him. I think it's getting very ugly over there. It really, really scares me that he's going to be able to go so viral.

He'll go so viral. I also do worry about like I said, I wasn't worried about a ban because I thought that this app would ruin itself like the app would wouldn't wouldn't be fun anymore before they ever got a ban through. And I think that we'll see the inshittification, if you will, of TikTok over the next three months.

Just by the sheer volume of news, fake news, politics, fake politicians, every single pundit having their own TikTok channel, every news show having a TikTok plus the news major platform. It's already quite a bit. Researchers, poll watchers, tech journalists, Internet admirers of all kinds are very concerned about how social media has the potential to totally upend the election.

Thanks to some capitalistic new policies when it comes to collecting data from social media companies. Researchers are being left in the dark about the data sets that they need to investigate fraudulent activity or predict trends and really get a pulse on the nation's feelings about the election and about candidates.

I was reading an article from Tech Policy that was written by Josephine Lukito and Megan Brown, who are the authors of the State of Digital Media Data Research 2024. I want to read just a little bit from their findings here. They said, from 2023 to 2024, one of the biggest changes in the research landscape has been data access. While researchers in the past decade have benefited from relatively open access through social media APIs, data access to multiple platforms has diminished over the last year.

Researchers have been priced out of data access from the X, formerly Twitter, API, which had been commonly used in academic research. And PushShift, an archive of Reddit data, went private to comply with Reddit's API policies. In particular, Meta's recent announcement of the imminent sunsetting of CrowdTangle on August 14th, 2024, crowdfired.

Crowd Tangle, which is a transparency tool popular amongst researchers and journalists, will greatly reduce researchers' ability to understand how major platforms such as Facebook and Instagram will be leveraged during the election. And this has resulted in several calls to reinstate Crowd Tangle until at least after the election, maybe to January 2025 so they can get those data sets. But in light of these recent data access changes, researchers in both academia and civil society are being left in the dark on key transparency efforts investigating CrowdTangle.

the impact of social media platforms on social and civic life. So it's,

It's just not good because if we don't have access to the API and the data to track what's going on, then they can't track fraud. And we haven't even talked about AI, but AI's explosion has affected both elections and election studies. And these two journalists were saying that they had seen the use of generative AI to produce deep fakes and other forms of misinformation in the already happened Indonesian and Indian elections.

In the U.S., most Americans expect AI deception, abuse, or misinformation will affect the 2024 presidential election. I'm already seeing AI stuff. And the thing is, people don't care. People love that AI picture of Donald Trump laughing with a group of Black people, pretending like it was from his Bronx rally. They don't care. They like it. Right. They see it as like art.

They see it as art, but they see it as real. They see it as real. There is no line between what that picture made them feel and how it endeared them to him. And if it was true, it doesn't matter if it was true. It matters how it made them feel.

Max Bankman, I'm the new doctor. Welcome aboard the Odyssey. ABC Thursdays. This ship is heaven. We're tending to our past bitter streams. I'm in. From 911 executive producer Ryan Murphy comes a splashy new drama on a luxury cruise ship with Joshua Jackson and Don Johnson. It's your job to keep everyone alive. She's in V-Fib. One, two, three. Clear. Clear.

I have a pulse. You're going to be okay. Dr. Odyssey, Thursdays, 9, 8 central on ABC and stream on Hulu. This is such a deep problem. I do not even know how we could possibly get our minds around it. Just one thing to speak to like a super savvy media consumer who can parse those things, but the majority of people can't. And also even once something has been corrected, studies have shown that your brain still sort of believes it. What we have going on right now is people,

an active attempt by foreign adversaries to flood the zone with these fake images, fake information, and the algorithms incentivize it because Facebook, a public company wants higher daily active users. So they don't care if it's like bots, they care that there's a higher number. I want to point out also, it's not just, uh,

seeing AI about the politicians or the elections. It's seeing manipulations of trusted figures in your life. I saw an AI voice generated clip of Caitlin Clark. It's the basketball player. She's sitting there, she's at the table and they're asking her, hey, Caitlin Clark, what do you think about these other players being rough with you? And she answers and she's like, I don't know, I guess they're going to be rough with me. I mean, I'm the richest woman in the league. Half of these women are working part-time jobs.

at Foot Locker and they're going to rough me up because they, you know, they don't want it to be true that a white woman has brought respect to this league. It sounds like her. It looks like her. It's a believable thing that somebody might say, but it wasn't her. She never said that. Wow.

It's shit like that where you're watching it for three seconds on your phone. Anybody else would have just scrolled that and been like, but what does that do? That starts to create divisiveness between races. You're going to see stuff like that. That's what this is about. So some of these things, and we'll keep bringing you these examples, but stuff like that is something that seems innocuous. You're just scrolling your phone. Here's Caitlin Clark talking about whatever. She is the richest woman in the league. These women do work part-time jobs because the WNBA didn't pay them enough. But Caitlin Clark never said that.

Like we've been saying for a long time, it's about creating cultural rifts between groups to create. Because again, it's about breaking down America, breaking down this idea that we can all coexist and live together. There are people on the internet right now with millions of manufactured views who took a picture of me and Alex Perlman at an event that Sammy was at with us. Sammy was at this dinner with us. What?

me and Alex posted a picture of ourselves saying we're not at the White House Correspondents Dinner. We're literally eating like spaghetti across the street. We didn't get invited. People take that picture. At PJ Clark's with the dogs. People take that picture and are like V and Alex lying about their lives. We're actually at the White House. I want to know

the fucking White House. I was at PJ Clark's with Sammy's dogs, but they will take things. And then the thing that I'm seeing happen is there are trusted figures like myself. I understand the responsibility of how trusted I am. I've spent years and years building that trust and being a part of that community.

People have an inherent fear that they've trusted the wrong person. So when this guy from Missouri who's like, who is this guy, uses his Ben Shapiro voice and pretends like he's got some inside information on me and the comedian Alex Perlman who were having dinner with Sammy and your dogs, like that kind of shit is similarly knocking the trust that we have in our institutions.

And like Olivia Juliana said, too, once these people with no talent get attention for creating a conspiracy theory or doing a call out of a creator with information or a politician or whoever it is, once they get attention for it, they are incentivized to keep doing it because to them, they're just trying to make some money to make their ends meet. They don't care about the broader democracy at stake or the systems of trust or anything else. These are people who are making short term decisions and they don't care.

Right. I do. I'll just also just want to point out that it speaks to these people's psyches and misunderstanding of how civics and politics works, that if you go to the White House, it means you are like a shill for the president when, in fact, you have a chance to speak to lobby for what you want. You don't. It's actually better if you don't totally agree, because then you can.

Tell them what you want. That's what politicians are there for. They are employed by you. And I think that it, it reveals something about the way they think about politicians that it's like, if you're in their presence, it means that you are, you are endorsing them and everything they do when it's actually our role to talk back to them and be in a dialogue.

No.

No, I had to post a picture of me with Betsy DeVos at Trump's White House to prove that journalists go to the White House. Right, exactly. So let's, you know, we're talking about this online environment. It's very dangerous. And now we have an official report by Microsoft saying,

I guess they could afford the API. That the Russians are a meddling. Russia has implemented an online disinformation campaign aimed at destabilizing the Paris Olympics. Not the Olympics. The Olympics. This speaks to how this is not just about like

Make being obvious Trump propaganda or obvious Biden propaganda. It's about taking these other touch points and making them political, scary, dangerous, corrupt, conspiratorial. Yes, because the Olympics is like the one time a year that we're proud to be an American. Don't take this from me. That's why they're doing it. They want to break it down. They want to break it. Look, not they don't they don't get to be the team that won in Miracle. So this is what they have to do.

So what they've done is that they have created approximately 15 fake French news websites and a full length propaganda documentary called Olympics has fallen. You know, they so original. Yeah. And what they, the goal of the documentary is to basically make people afraid that the games are going to be like impacted by extremist violence that ties back to the Gaza conflict and,

And they want to paint the IOC, the International Olympics Committee, as corrupt because Russia is kicked out of the games because so many of their athletes have tested positive for doping, which is grounds to be kicked out. So basically, Microsoft says that these disinformation campaigns are being carried out by two Kremlin-backed entities known as doppelganger companies.

The movie that they created, they reportedly, if you want to talk about AI voices, it's narrated by an AI-generated impersonator of Tom Cruise. And they also use the app Cameo to get celebrities to trick them into supporting the movie. Wait, that's crazy. They just did that North Carolina... See, this is the fucking Russians in the right wing, okay? Let me put on my tinfoil hat first. Hold on. A North Carolina far-right GOP person just...

hired Dylan Mulvaney to attack his opponent in a cameo. He hired her off cameo to say, oh, I know that you've been working in North Carolina politics for so long and I'm so excited to hear about your new job at the Washington Zoo. You're going to be taking care of rhinos. I'm so proud of you.

And Dylan did it because, you know, when you do cameos, you're just read. I don't do them because it's too dangerous and weird to me and overly personal, but they you're just reading through 25, 30 scripts of like this person wants you to say happy birthday. Congratulate him on a job. So he got her to read this whole thing and used it as a campaign ad. And the Russians are doing this, too.

I guess they are. I mean, it's interesting timing considering Rupert Murdoch's new marriage. And there's also this, there's also this big Atlantic piece that came out and I'm going to just kind of give a, give a quick summary of it, but it ties back to this as well, because ultimately this is about Russian aggression to expand into Europe. They want to capture what used to be part of the former Soviet Union and

So that they can, you know, bring back Mother Russia in all its glory. So McKay Coffins of the Atlantic did a very, very deep dive into what European security officials are feeling about the 2024 election. And apparently they are obsessed with us. They are just literally there is a quote. They describe this as a pathologically intense obsession with the American election.

and says that they can explain the electoral college in granular detail, as well as polling data from battleground states. This quote really... So they're ultimately... The concern is that they pretty much all think Trump is going to win, and they're really worried because they are so dependent on U.S. security.

Like in this article, they talk about how they were running a war game to practice for NATO was NATO countries were running a war game to practice for a potential crisis scenario where Russia would attack a particular region of Polish farmland. We're like, nobody lives called the Swalky gap, but it's strategically important because if Russia could take that area, then it would seal off Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are obviously States that they would like to reunite with the former Soviet union. So,

they would be isolated from the rest of NATO. Part, they were running that war game and they realized like we, all of our security measures are relying on American soldiers, American vehicles with US made ammunition to mobilize the fastest.

That's where like the real military might comes from. So all that were taken off the table by Donald Trump, which now he knows how to do because he's been president before that would really help Russia. So that's what this they're really concerned about. And there was one quote that was really salient is that they're, they're trying to pursue like security independence from the U S and a member of France's national assembly had this quote that was really,

We can't just flip a coin every four years and hope that Michigan voters will vote in the right direction. Such a, such a read that, Oh, that is shade. It's true though. I mean, where's the law? So that they're freaking out. And you know, this whole episode has been about anti-democratic forces taking, you know, really trying to make a grab at power globally. Yeah.

I know NATO's freaking out. They've been doing commercials about like 75 years of NATO and we're so happy and like NATO is so important because Trump has said, you know, he'd pull them out if Europe doesn't quote like pay their fair share or whatever that means. The thing that folks don't think about, even if you're listening and you're like, oh man, no, I really would love to see NATO go away. It's like the American economy is really delicately balanced by our weapons manufacturing and security. And the fact that

the military is like our number one employer and so many people are employed by the military. And that our dollar is the standard. That's based on us being a superpower. That's based on the military. I'm not a huge fan of the amount of spending that goes to the military compared to domestic social services. But this all comes down to GDP. Like,

When Trump says NATO doesn't – the NATO countries don't pay enough, Poland doubled its defense spending as a percentage of its GDP because of this. The fact is we have the weapons to sell. We have the weapons to sell. A lot of people think it's just like us throwing tax dollars out there. No, they buy from us, quite a bit from us. So –

And the way that we will romanticize the militaries of the past, like the Roman Empire, Alexander the Great, the Battle of Troy, and everyone's like all thinks that's amazing and understands that's why that empire had power. But when it comes to our own military, they're like, the military industrial complex is the worst. I'm like, it is. We should tighten up on the way that we do things. But the military...

has socialism. It has great healthcare. It employs an astronomical amount of people. I don't know if we're going to do an episode on it or not, but there was this guy that me and Sammy were talking about who was talking about what do we do with boys who don't have anywhere to go? And it used to be the military took them, but now they're not enlisting. And the problem of people who don't have anywhere to go and the military being this catch-all to give people purpose and jobs and discipline and homes. And like,

I don't know. The idea that he wants to weaken the dollar, weaken the military, pull out of NATO, affect our allies all so that Russia can have power. Like, what do you think is going to happen to you? You want to go spend a summer in Moscow? Like, that's not going to work. Have you seen how people in Russia live? It's not happy. Trump.

Trump wants to be Putin. He sees this as the embodiment of male power. Why do dictators dictator? Like, I don't know. Why do some people care that gay people are reading books? Like they just fucking care because they're losers who are obsessed with power. You know, like Jerry Seinfeld said, it's time to bring back dominant masculinity and no one will do that. Like Trump's crush on Putin. All right, friends, we are back with one of our favorite segments of the week. And that is our down ballot era. Yeah.

Today's down ballot girly of the week is Kathy Manning. She's a Democrat from North Carolina's 6th District, and she's the author of the Right to Contraception Act, which will be voted on in the Senate tomorrow. As an undergraduate, Kathy was an acapella singer at Harvard. We love that. And she went on to be a lawyer and the first woman to serve as board chair of the Jewish Federations of North America.

Last year, Kathy got this bill through the House of Representatives, and she's working with Senator Ed Markey to hopefully see this passed into the Senate tomorrow. Because yes, Americans have the right to contraception. Would you like to vote for Kathy Manning?

Well, you can't because she was gerrymandered out of her district by the new maps that the Republicans of North Carolina drew. And she is going to sit this session out to regroup, but she still deserves her flowers for this bill. And there are 203 reps that support the bill alongside her who are almost all running for reelection. You can find out if your congressperson supports the Right to Contraception Act at the link in our show notes, and that will send you all updates.

of the bill's sponsors. So a little homework. Go check and see if your rep is on there. I can tell you that Mark Pocan is on there. I love him. He's a legislator out of Wisconsin. He is gay, and he is a professional magician. Love this bill that's getting voted on in the Senate. It probably won't pass the House, but now we will have everyone on the record.

whether they support your right to contraception or not. Speaking of cock blocks, a philosophy professor and finance professor from the University of Austin, Texas are suing to win the right to fail students for having an abortion. They also want the right to refuse to employ a teaching assistant if they find out that that person has had an abortion. And ideally, they'd also like the right to refuse to teach or employ homosexuals and quote, crossdressers, but they realize that that just might not be possible yet.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So how do they they they check your medical records? I don't know. You have to self-select into telling these men that you have had an abortion. This guy created a scenario in which he wants the right to not have to give a student the day off from class to get an abortion.

And they were like, did a student ask you for the day off from class to have an abortion? He's like, no, but they could. And I shouldn't have to give it to them. And I want that right now. This is another case where they're doing this shit, where they are ruling on hypotheticals. They are finding courts that will take a hypothetical. And that is not usually the way that we do things. But here we are. So one of the professors is Daniel Bonavak, who wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post entitled What It's Like to Be a College Professor Who Supports Donald Trump.

I can't. I feel so bad for you. I know. And in this article, he said, progressivism sacrifices the future for the present. That is why economies stall and birth rates collapse in countries where progressive policies hold sway. He also said that pregnancy is not a disease and elective abortions are not health care. Going on to call women who get abortions killers and criminals.

Uh, like what the fuck? So how is it that these I mean, we know how, you know, these are being brought in Texas, we know that some of these cases are being brought in front of Matthew Kuzmarek, because they are manipulating that to be the case. That's like why he's there. This just what does this have to do with schools?

It doesn't. So what's crazy is I was like, how did these two professors even get a lawyer or a judge or anybody to file this nonsense complaint? And the fact is that they couldn't. So they added themselves to a pending lawsuit.

So this new little lawsuit about wanting the right to fail women who get abortions is in addition to an existing lawsuit brought by the state of Texas versus the Department of Education because Texas doesn't want the new Title IX standards that protect LGBTQ kids from discrimination to go into effect this summer. Now,

Now, despite all of this happening in Austin, a super liberal city, the group filed the lawsuit 486 miles away in Amarillo, Texas. And the reason for that is not mysterious. The Donald Trump appointed judge, Matthew Kaczmarek, who hates the girls, the gays and the days, oversees that court.

Earlier this year, Kazmarek vacated guidance on gender affirming care for children and pronouns, dress and bathroom protections for LGBTQ workers. He's also the judge who tried to revoke FDA approval of Mifeprestone, a case that has now made its way to the Supreme Court. And now he's going to oversee this thing that could potentially give professors the right to like, oh, it won't just be professors. It's.

anybody the right to terminate somebody because they had an abortion. It's just an attack on women. I'm still can't get past the like, how are they going to know? Nobody's going to know. You know, I, I don't know. I mean, will, will there be some sort of like, you know, forced medical access that you have to give up as a term of your acceptance to that job or to that? Well,

This gets a little bit spookier, but, and this is the thing, like it's important for us to know these things. Sometimes I read something and then I just like go cry for a while. And you have to do that because we got to stay on top of it. But if it makes you feel ugly and sad, cry in your car with us. We're here on your radio, listening to you. This Matthew Kazmarek,

Has said some really horrible things about sex. And you know me, I always like to try and find where their brain broke. Like with RFK Jr., I was like in 2012, he started getting weird. It was after the suicide of his wife that he started to abandon all his principles. Well, something similar might be going on with Kaz Marik.

So he has deemed premarital sex revolutionary, and he does not mean that as a compliment. He ruled that underage girls need the approval of their fathers to get birth control. And on a personal note said that using contraception within marriage makes one a quote, irredeemable pervert. In his legal writings, Kazmarek is very clear that sex is only for procreation within the marriage and anything outside of that should draw legal sanction. And here's the Harrison butt curve of it all. His,

His mother was a microbiologist and the breadwinner of their family. And these boys are so butthurt over having successful moms that they want to control women's bodies. But just like Nikki embryos our babies, Haley, Kazmarek has a history of difficulty and trauma with childbirth that seems to have radicalized his professional views on reproductive health and just made it everyone else's problem.

He has five children now, but his very first child he had with his wife was stillborn, an experience he told the New York Times took the idea of life from academics to reality. Now, I don't know if he's in reality, but the trauma of having a stillborn child is not something

that you will be a forever changed person. And I could understand, are you making bargains with God? I promise if you allow me to have another child, I'll never use contraception again. I'll do whatever you think it is that's going to make this never happen to you again. We all do that. We're not all judges trying to do it to everyone else, but this seems to be the moment where Matthew Kaczmarek's heart broke toward this extremely radical thinking towards childbirth.

It's very strange how people react to trauma. And everyone is, you know, I don't, I can't hate a person for having that reaction, but I can hate them for being in a position and thinking that they have any right to adjudicate literally how other people deal with those situations. And it's un-American to force your religious beliefs on other Americans.

Right. Well, and to have your trauma informed the way that every other person has to handle a situation like that, because abortion is not stillbirth. And I don't think that Matthew Kazmarek sees them as different. So the trauma that he went through with the stillborn child is something that he's putting on somebody who's getting an abortion at 10, 20, 24 weeks, and he's making it the same thing. So now he's making it this criminal, horrible thing. He's seeing the images of what he saw when he went through stillborn, which is not abortion.

But he's not he's not he doesn't have the emotional intelligence to step outside of that experience. But it's not just him and it's not just the judges that are doing this horrible thing. There is a lawyer in Texas that is actively recruiting abusive ex-boyfriends to harass their former partners. This guy, Jonathan Mitchell, is the former Texas solicitor general. And he's representing this dude, Marcus Silva, who is a man with recorded history of domestic violence in a case where Silva's ex-wife had an abortion.

He threatened to sue her and her friends who, quote, aided and abetted the abortion if she didn't continue to do his laundry and provide him with sex. Those are his words. Now, she did refuse this. She got the abortion. Her friends helped get her out. And he did. He sued her. This villainous lawyer, John Mitchell, is representing Marcus Silva in a lawsuit against his ex-wife's friends for aiding and abetting an abortion that made it easier for her to leave him. And this is just, you know,

What's going on in Texas? These people are quite literally sick. I don't know how you get in front of a judge or a jury and have the confidence to say, to like reveal the details of this last case and represent Marcus. I don't understand how you think that's okay. But these people are living in very clearly a different culture. They're living in Harrison Bucker world. They are.

We got to kick them out of here. I know. So anyway, that's what's going on in Texas now. We'll see with Matthew Kaczmarek's court. A lot of his decisions do end up getting kicked up to the Supreme Court. And quite honestly, it feels planned to me that they make these stops where a judge is going to make a really outrageous thing. They know it'll go to appeal, but it gives it the opportunity and a path to the Supreme Court for the Supreme Court to break down the federal precedents and to make it national. So I think it's something we got to keep an eye on. Right. It's not about what they decide.

Overall, it's about what they open up in their opinions, their concurring opinions, even if the ultimate decision doesn't appear necessarily to be the end of the world. Well, and they're coming for contraceptive. They're coming for contraceptives. Absolutely. And we see it because like tomorrow, the Senate's going to try and do the right to contraceptives, the right to contraceptives act. It's probably going to fail the Senate.

At the same time, you've got this other case coming up talking about should Mifeprestone be banned. They want to make Matthew Kazmarek's idea is that birth control is some sort of controlled substance that's very dangerous. It's revolutionary. It's untested. They made it one in Louisiana. It's ungodly.

Yeah, they did it in Louisiana. Um, the Supreme court has said that they believe that Griswold v. Connecticut is, is, uh, just about as sound as Roe v. Wade was, which they were able to overturn, which is the same thing they want to do with Obergefell, where they say these are all based on perceived 14th amendment rights to privacy. And you don't have that. Uh,

And Kaczmarek was successful in saying in the state of Texas, girls under 18 need parental consent to get birth control, which is difficult because if you have a radical dad or a dad who doesn't understand how women's bodies works and your mom luckily takes you because you have some issue with your period that birth control can help regulate and your mom comes home and says, oh, we had to put Sammy on birth control to regulate her regular period or whatever for her health. Your dad could say, no, you can't, which means not only

Is it going to make you suffer with the way that your reproductive organs are working? But birth control is not just, it's a hormone. It's not just used to prevent birth. It's used for a lot of different things. And that's where this

It's unhelpful that men don't seem to really understand this and that there's this is so under research that contraception, the birth control pill and abortion medication, those are forms of health care that have nothing to do with preventing birth. Often they have to do with trying to cause birth.

Sometimes they have to do with rheumatoid arthritis. They don't even have anything to do with anything. You know what I mean? Where it would actually be very dangerous for that person to give birth or whatever. It's exactly like you said earlier, though. The point of autocracy is to try and break down what is normal. It is trying to get you to believe things that aren't true are true. Trying to get you to believe that 10-year-olds can get pregnant and it be safe. It can't. But they'll put out an example of one time that it was. But it's just not the standard. Yeah.

Anyway, this was a sad episode. Do we have anything to look forward to, Sammy? What do we got coming up in June? We're going to VidCon. We are. We're going to VidCon, California. Come see us if you're going to be there. Our panel, our show, we're doing a live American Fever Dream. We will try to post it here on June 27th, 5 to 6 p.m.

We are, and we'll be interviewing Kendall Landreth, the comedian, and Sarah Shower, also a comedian. They're awesome people. VidCon is a great experience if you're going to be in Anaheim. I think I have, like, if you go to my Instagram, there might be, like, a link for tickets, maybe even a discount. I'm not sure because we're featured creators, which is a very high honor and very exciting. And also it's Pride. So, you know, we'll talk about gay stuff a little bit, but I'm proud every single day to be gay, of you, Sammy, of the listeners, and

And I really look forward to your letters. So please keep sending us emails. I'm especially proud of the people who send us emails or DMs and say, I've never reached out to a creator or a podcast host before, but I really wanted to tell you this thing. Even if we don't read them on the air, we do read pretty much every single email and talk amongst ourselves if we don't get to read them on here. We're going to work on how we can include them a little bit more. We love them. We are so grateful. Sometimes we just simply don't. We'll have them in the outline and then we will run out of time.

And we love when you email us. It really makes us so happy. We love doing the show for you. And we're all love here. We'll see you next week. Until next time, I'm Vita Spear. Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream.

American Fever Dream is hosted by Vitus Spear and Sammy Sage. The show is produced by Rebecca Sous-McCatt, Jorge Morales-Picot, and Rebecca Steinberg. Editing by Rebecca Sous-McCatt. Social media by Bridget Schwartz. And be sure to follow Betches News on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Betches.