Speaker 1: M. What's flourishtion? Mr? Abortion? Shit? God damn it. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: You better than the boy that was. I don't even
Speaker 1: know Afortune. I don't even know what I was. I
Speaker 1: just was trying to rhyme something with abortion. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm doing anymore, Sophie, what do
Speaker 1: what do we? What do we? What are we all
Speaker 1: here for? We're here for part two of your podcast
Speaker 1: behind that. You're the host. Your name is Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: and your guest today is the magnificent, wonderful, fantastic, incredibly
Speaker 1: talented Theresa Lee. Rhyme, what would you rhyme with abortion?
Speaker 1: Let me see open abortion? It's time for abortion of abortion?
Speaker 1: Oh that yeah, it was so much better. Um, all right,
Speaker 1: well we're still talking about Philish Laughley, who was not
Speaker 1: a fan of abortion and would not have enjoyed our
Speaker 1: ore are having yucks about the name abortion. Um, not
Speaker 1: the concept, just the word and trying to rhyme it
Speaker 1: with things. You have to use a lot of contortions
Speaker 1: to rhyme with abort. As a fan of poetry, I'm
Speaker 1: sucking on books. I would think she would love rhymes,
Speaker 1: but I guess you could listen to the first episode
Speaker 1: to that. Yeah, so yeah, we're talking about Goldwater and
Speaker 1: Rockefeller going against each other in the sixty four Republican primaries, right,
Speaker 1: and how like this is a battle for the soul
Speaker 1: of the Republican Party because LBJ is obviously going to
Speaker 1: win the election. Um Phillis could see that, like something
Speaker 1: was Robert to say that there was a soul. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everything has a Hitler had a soul, Sophie. Um, oh,
Speaker 1: he definitely had a soul. If you'd seen him dance,
Speaker 1: you'd know that. Oh gosh, for some reason, I have
Speaker 1: pictured him break dancing and it was an evable. Now
Speaker 1: that's the only kind of dancing Hitler got up to.
Speaker 1: It was just like he actually invented breakdancing, like he
Speaker 1: actually he had a couple of years on the streets
Speaker 1: in Harlem teaching. I don't know what where I'm going
Speaker 1: with any of this. I feel maybe dance more, he
Speaker 1: would have been happier from the start. I don't like
Speaker 1: most people people are not dancing as much. I do
Speaker 1: think that dancing is broadly good for you, but I
Speaker 1: also think that hateful people get really into like hateful dances,
Speaker 1: like where everybody's like all tints and like right up
Speaker 1: against each other, like skinhead punky music scene. No no, no,
Speaker 1: like the fucking like the like gone with the Wind dances,
Speaker 1: like the kind of dances rich old Southern people. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And just for the record, Hitler actually hated dancing and
Speaker 1: refused to dance because it made him he felt awkward
Speaker 1: about his body. So you're right about that. I was
Speaker 1: just being an asshole for no reason. Let's talk about Goldwater.
Speaker 1: Speaking of Hitler, let's talk about very Goldwater. Um. So
Speaker 1: Goldwater and Rockefel there's primary battles like neck and neck
Speaker 1: right up to the California primaries, and that was kind
Speaker 1: of the thing that was going to determine who won
Speaker 1: this battle. Um. And so this is kind of where
Speaker 1: Philish laughly uh comes in with a ground bait breaking
Speaker 1: piece of propaganda. She writes a book called a Choice
Speaker 1: Not an Echo, And this was like a pro Goldwater argument,
Speaker 1: but more than that, it was it was essentially a
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory about how the Republican primary was being stolen
Speaker 1: by kingmakers within the party who were Eastern elites. Um.
Speaker 1: And that yeah, yeah, this is you know, you know
Speaker 1: how like in two and sixteen, like the Trump supporters
Speaker 1: talking about Republicans in name only the rhinos right now, Like,
Speaker 1: you've got this the real party who supports Trump, and
Speaker 1: then you've got these Republicans in name only who were
Speaker 1: trying to force their own like corporatist candidates on us.
Speaker 1: This is the first time anyone starts talking about that.
Speaker 1: Philish laughly starts that are that line of like propaganda
Speaker 1: back in nineteen sixty four, the idea that there's these
Speaker 1: Eastern elites in the party that are fighting against the
Speaker 1: real Republican Party. Whenever someone comes up with a conspiracy theory,
Speaker 1: they're usually the like the ones doing the conspiring, Like
Speaker 1: it sounds like these are because it's like the idea
Speaker 1: that anybody wants to win, that's not a conspiracy, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's an election people want to win. That's
Speaker 1: people made that clear. But then when you're secretly adding
Speaker 1: weird facts that aren't true, that's a conspiracy. And you're
Speaker 1: doing that phyllis Yeah, and it's I mean yeah, because
Speaker 1: she's literally a part of this conspiracy to to take
Speaker 1: over the Republican Party in the government. Yeah. So she
Speaker 1: writes this book about how Goldwater is not just a
Speaker 1: great candidate, but that there's this like conspiracy within the
Speaker 1: Republican Party to stop him from becoming the candidate. Um
Speaker 1: and it it is extremely successful, A choice not an echo,
Speaker 1: sells nearly three million copies and went on to hugely
Speaker 1: influence the California primary and the election um it delivered.
Speaker 1: It's generally seen as being a big part of what
Speaker 1: the lived. Goldwater a surprise victory over Rockefeller, and Phillis
Speaker 1: for the rest of her life will brag that she
Speaker 1: self publishes this book out of her garage and that
Speaker 1: it just becomes this massive hit that she she just
Speaker 1: does all by her little old self. Um. And she
Speaker 1: was adamant that her whole operation was just the result
Speaker 1: of one mother who cared um, you know, writing as
Speaker 1: a side project while she raised her kids. Because again
Speaker 1: this whole period, well, she is a full time, hard
Speaker 1: nosed political operative. She has to lie to everybody on
Speaker 1: her side and claim that like it's just sort of
Speaker 1: a thing she does after tucking the kids in at night,
Speaker 1: because you can't have a woman that actually have her
Speaker 1: career be the center of her life, which it is
Speaker 1: for Phillis, but she has to lie about it. She's
Speaker 1: like the first y'all, James, isn't she the woman who
Speaker 1: wrote um say the gray out of her like girl,
Speaker 1: I mean, not garage out of her room or selfish? Yeah,
Speaker 1: except for I think actually did self publish her terrible book.
Speaker 1: Um and Philish Lapley's lying about self publishing her book.
Speaker 1: So and she later told The New York Times quote,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four was the most productive year of my life.
Speaker 1: I was running the Illinois Federation of Republican Women. I
Speaker 1: wrote a Choice not an Echo. I self published it.
Speaker 1: I went to the Republican Convention, wrote a second book,
Speaker 1: The Grave Diggers. Now we're in September. I was giving
Speaker 1: speeches for Barry Goldwater and a November I had a baby.
Speaker 1: So she like, this is how she frames her year. Um,
Speaker 1: and she's she's sort of again this weird kind of
Speaker 1: thing in Phillis where she's clearly very proud about how
Speaker 1: much she does, but she also has to emphasize, as
Speaker 1: she does in a little bit here, like how she
Speaker 1: was this was all sort of secondary to her job
Speaker 1: as a as a as a mother, like she wasn't
Speaker 1: she wasn't a mother with a career or she wasn't
Speaker 1: like she didn't. She doesn't want to be seen as
Speaker 1: a working mom because she thinks that's evil, even though
Speaker 1: that's exactly what she is. Um. I'm gonna quote now
Speaker 1: from a Town and Country magazine right up. That summarizes
Speaker 1: kind of like how Phyllis frames her career during this period.
Speaker 1: Even as she was traveling across the country to lobby leaders,
Speaker 1: organized her coalition, gives speeches, and at one point simultaneously
Speaker 1: pursue a law degree, Slaftly dismissed her political career as
Speaker 1: a hobby, a secondary pursuit to her obligations at home
Speaker 1: with her six children. I was never gone overnight, she
Speaker 1: later told The Times, reiterating that line of defense. I'd
Speaker 1: drive out to give a speech, and sometimes I'd bring
Speaker 1: a nursing baby with me. There was always someone outside
Speaker 1: willing to take care of a baby rather than listen
Speaker 1: to a long lecture. So this was a savvy way
Speaker 1: for Slaughtly to frame her activism. Like the moral conservatives
Speaker 1: that she was courting, what didn't like the idea of
Speaker 1: women usurping traditional male role models, but they did like
Speaker 1: the idea of like a young mother's self publishing a
Speaker 1: political treatise about conservatism and how good it was for moms,
Speaker 1: you know, to be women to be homemakers instead of
Speaker 1: have careers. They like that idea of her, like doing
Speaker 1: that in between breastfeedings, um, and like that she was
Speaker 1: able to it sounds like a bad like her saying
Speaker 1: that she gave her baby to someone standing outside. That's
Speaker 1: that's like what happens at auditions when you see like people,
Speaker 1: um bring the baby, which is fine because it's like
Speaker 1: you've got to go in for like ten minutes or whatever.
Speaker 1: But I'm like that you're describing exactly what being a
Speaker 1: working mother is like, like if you if you really weren't,
Speaker 1: then you'd just be at home. So she's advocating that
Speaker 1: women shouldn't do this while doing it, and she has
Speaker 1: to kind of lie about the extent to which she
Speaker 1: She has to frame it as like a hobby, even
Speaker 1: though like, no, philis, this was your full time fucking job,
Speaker 1: Like you had a full time job and kids and
Speaker 1: that's fine, but you hate that for everyone else because
Speaker 1: you're a giant hypocrite. But so the only kind of
Speaker 1: way to sell this to Republicans without her being sort
Speaker 1: of suspect and a liberated woman is to kind of
Speaker 1: make it look like she was just kind of this
Speaker 1: homespun mom who's writing this book, write write this book
Speaker 1: on her free time, and you know, oh, surprisingly it
Speaker 1: sells huge and she does an out out of her
Speaker 1: garage and it's kind of evidence of how like the
Speaker 1: little guy, these like little conservatives, we don't need the
Speaker 1: big corrupt publishing industry. And of course, again this is
Speaker 1: all a lie. The reality of the situation is that
Speaker 1: the John Birch Society bought like three million copies of
Speaker 1: this book to distribute it for free, and they handled
Speaker 1: the publication. The publishing house that Philish laughly claims she
Speaker 1: created to publish it was just a front company. Like
Speaker 1: there were real publishers that the John Birch Society went to.
Speaker 1: When contracted with they would sometimes order five thousand copies
Speaker 1: at a time of its propaganda, right, because it's just
Speaker 1: a bit different. It's not best selling. Yes, it was
Speaker 1: number one. All of the sales pretty much came from
Speaker 1: the John Birch Society buying them to hand these out
Speaker 1: for free. Sounds like a Communism hand out, kind of
Speaker 1: giving money to then give it to other people for free. Communism.
Speaker 1: She has to frame this as like I was just this,
Speaker 1: this this plucky little outsider, like in my free time
Speaker 1: putting the other of this book about the things I believed,
Speaker 1: and so many other people believe it that it took
Speaker 1: off in the realities. Like no, no, no, you were
Speaker 1: part of a multi she was part of She was
Speaker 1: the head of a multimillion dollar propaganda campaign by the
Speaker 1: John Birch Society, UM, and they're the reason this book
Speaker 1: sold three million copies because they bought like three million copies.
Speaker 1: This is what Hillsdale does. Yeah, it's what they all do.
Speaker 1: They literally send out so many fundraising emails. I signed up,
Speaker 1: like with a fake email to get them, and then
Speaker 1: they send you free news letters for the rest of
Speaker 1: your life. I mean I didn't get the news letters,
Speaker 1: but the whole idea is that if you donate, we'll
Speaker 1: give out free news letters to everyone. So you're basically
Speaker 1: paying for propaganda, which is communism. It's just within their
Speaker 1: own ranks of communism. Yeah, it's it's it's very silly. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean it's not silly. It's like this horrible, dangerous
Speaker 1: UM propaganda network that's just getting started at this point.
Speaker 1: This is like the birth of that this massive right
Speaker 1: wing propaganda, like the thing that like Ben Shapiro and
Speaker 1: the fucking Turning Point USA kids, and like all of
Speaker 1: these different so like bright Bart News, all these different
Speaker 1: kind of like right wing news and media organizations are
Speaker 1: part of today. Um, this massive like dark funding network
Speaker 1: of right wing propaganda is getting off the ground now
Speaker 1: and Philish Laughley is like its first big success. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Now these books obviously again we're not being bought by
Speaker 1: curious readers like they were being bought in mass to
Speaker 1: be handed out. Um, and she was. You know, Slaughlee's
Speaker 1: book was just kind of the most successful part of
Speaker 1: this wave of hard right propaganda that starts being distributed
Speaker 1: by the John Birch Society at this point. Some of
Speaker 1: it attacked lb J. There were other books that obsessed
Speaker 1: over Communist infiltration, but Slaughley's work would go on to
Speaker 1: have the longest influence because Goldwater secured the nomination. At
Speaker 1: the party's national convention in July near San Francisco, Goldwater
Speaker 1: delegates booed Nelson Rockefeller so loudly that he could barely
Speaker 1: give his concession speech. The same delegates who had screamed.
Speaker 1: Moments earlier, cheered when Goldwater gave his speech, which included
Speaker 1: the famous declaration that extremism in defensive liberty is no vice.
Speaker 1: This is, like goldwater speech at the nineteen sixty four
Speaker 1: San Francisco Convention, is like a straight up fascist rally um.
Speaker 1: And one of the reporters who was actually there to
Speaker 1: hear it live was a young Hunter S. Thompson, and
Speaker 1: he wrote my favorite description of this. I remember feeling
Speaker 1: genuinely frightened at the violent reaction to that line that
Speaker 1: Goldwater said. As the human thunder kept building, they mounted
Speaker 1: their metal chairs and began howling, shaking their fists at
Speaker 1: Huntley and Brinkley up in the NBC booth, And finally
Speaker 1: they began picking up those chairs with both hands and
Speaker 1: bashing them against chairs other delegates were still standing on.
Speaker 1: It's this like unhinged hatred of the media, um, hatred
Speaker 1: of you know, the party elites. This like the thing
Speaker 1: that's been at the core of the Republican Party ever
Speaker 1: since that like Trump kind of let loose again that
Speaker 1: the respectable people in the party have always tried to
Speaker 1: keep locked up. It starts to break out for the
Speaker 1: first time under Goldwater, and of course Goldwater was electorally doomed.
Speaker 1: There were not enough people who believe this and who
Speaker 1: were willing to admit to being this kind of person.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty four, LBJ actually delivered what's probably the
Speaker 1: greatest pantsing in the history of national politics. Like no
Speaker 1: one since has ever lost as badly as Goldwater lost.
Speaker 1: Um like it is he they he is torn apart
Speaker 1: in this election, um, and the Republican Party just is
Speaker 1: beaten into the ground. At least that's how it looks
Speaker 1: from the outside. The reality is that this kind of
Speaker 1: had more to do with LBJs strength than a weakness
Speaker 1: in goldwater strategy. And I think that becomes clear like
Speaker 1: later on. But at the time people like assume, oh,
Speaker 1: this is there's a lot of assumptions on the left
Speaker 1: that like, oh, like the frothing anti communist wing of
Speaker 1: the of the Republican Party lost like this will they're
Speaker 1: going to turn to more reasonable politics now. And that's
Speaker 1: not what happens. As Politico or as a write up
Speaker 1: I found in political Notes quote from Goldwater's insurgency on
Speaker 1: where the die was cast and the GOP has never
Speaker 1: returned to a moderate platform Goldwater's base was in the
Speaker 1: South and West, where his vote against the Civil Rights
Speaker 1: Act and in favor of States rights and deared him
Speaker 1: to a white electorate, And on the whole, Goldwater's geographic
Speaker 1: and demographic coalition has endured within the GOP. Democrats ow
Speaker 1: a debt of gratitude to Goldwater for creating a near
Speaker 1: consensus among African Americans for their party. Until nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: presidential Party nominees from the Party of Lincoln would often
Speaker 1: receive up to a third of the black vote. Goldwater
Speaker 1: dipped to an estimated four percent of Black supporters, and
Speaker 1: in the fifty years since, the most GOP nominee could
Speaker 1: hope for was about ten percent of African American votes.
Speaker 1: So that's that's where this all starts with Goldwater. He builds,
Speaker 1: like he launches, the GOP. His candidacy does on the
Speaker 1: path that it's still on today and on the electoral
Speaker 1: path that it's still on today. And a number of
Speaker 1: Republican voices at the time thought that Goldwater's defeat was
Speaker 1: proof that Nixon and Rockefeller had been right to try
Speaker 1: to open the party up, but Philish Laughley was not
Speaker 1: convinced of this. And neither were a whole lot of
Speaker 1: other anti communist Christian extremists who felt the increasingly liberal
Speaker 1: culture of the United States was stealing their children and
Speaker 1: country from them. The Goldwater campaign was the activation point
Speaker 1: for a lot of folks who become major figures and
Speaker 1: what people eventually called the New Right. Paul way Rich
Speaker 1: worked on the campaign along with Howard Phillips and Richard Vigory,
Speaker 1: three of the men who later joined with Jerry Fallwall
Speaker 1: to start the Moral Majority. Fallwell and his crew get
Speaker 1: a lot of credit for birthing the religious right and
Speaker 1: launching the culture ward that's currently you know, our entire
Speaker 1: lives uh and and it's true that they were like
Speaker 1: kind of the the faces of this and the people
Speaker 1: who you know, created the term moral Majority, but they
Speaker 1: were really just cribbing from Philish Laughley's Moral Conservatives in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty, which was the first organized gasp of this
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Now, after Goldwater's defeat, men like way
Speaker 1: Rich and fall Well, it kind of like the faceman
Speaker 1: of the of the New Republican Party. Uh tended to
Speaker 1: ignore Philish Laughly. They saw her as a once useful
Speaker 1: propaganda tool that was like consigned to the past now
Speaker 1: and for a while, sh Laughlely herself seemed to even
Speaker 1: believe this, And as the story goes, it was her
Speaker 1: husband Fred who first suggested what would become her next
Speaker 1: crusade after Goldwater's failure stopping the Equal Rights Amendment. Now,
Speaker 1: if you happen to be a reasonable person and not
Speaker 1: like a screeching demon, the e r A is pretty
Speaker 1: much the least offensive amendment you can imagine. It just states, quote,
Speaker 1: equality of rights under the law shall not be denied
Speaker 1: it or abridged by the United States or any by
Speaker 1: any state on account of sex right. Hard to hard
Speaker 1: to argue with that, and nobody seemed to want to
Speaker 1: argue it. When it was first proposed in March of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, it was very broadly popular. A lot
Speaker 1: of Republicans liked it. Uh it was it was just
Speaker 1: kind of like, oh, we're saying this like and it
Speaker 1: was seen as kind of more of like a symbolic vote.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, we should announce openly that, like we
Speaker 1: as the United States don't like gender discrimination. That's all
Speaker 1: that was going on in the r A. Now, because
Speaker 1: it was an amendment, though it needed to be approved
Speaker 1: by both the House and the Senate, which it was
Speaker 1: in March of nineteen seventy two, so very bipartisan gets
Speaker 1: through the House and Senate, and then it needs needed
Speaker 1: to be sent to the states for ratification. Thirty eight
Speaker 1: states would have had to ratify the e r A
Speaker 1: for it to become law, and this seemed easy to
Speaker 1: do it first. Thirty state legislators legislatures ratified the e
Speaker 1: r A during nineteen seventy two alone, so they get
Speaker 1: almost to the finish line in the first year that
Speaker 1: this thing is on the voting docket. President's Nixon, Ford,
Speaker 1: and Carter all supported it. It should have been like
Speaker 1: a moment of bimartists and achievement. But Philish Laughley decided
Speaker 1: to declare war on the Equal Rights Amendment. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote now from a right up on her in
Speaker 1: Town and Country magazine quote. When she first heard that
Speaker 1: the Equal Rights Amendment was being debated in Congress, she
Speaker 1: told her biographer Carol Pheasanthal chiefly thought of it as
Speaker 1: something between innocuus and mildly helpful, but after a friend
Speaker 1: asked her to debate a feminist on the e r A,
Speaker 1: at the end of nineteen seventy one, she changed her mind.
Speaker 1: In October of nineteen seventy two, she founded stop e R,
Speaker 1: a an acronym for and this is a terrible acronym
Speaker 1: stop taking our privileges. Wait stop yeah, yeah yeah, the
Speaker 1: words stops in the acronym. It's terrible. The acronym, which
Speaker 1: the whole thing is, like, I mean, there's so many layers,
Speaker 1: like the fact that she's debating a feminist and there's
Speaker 1: two women debating like that by itself as pretty feminist,
Speaker 1: and then also just like her, um, Like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm also sensing I think it's I'm getting a different
Speaker 1: read because I heard of our trauma talking in that
Speaker 1: last episode that I'm feeling like she's still evil, But
Speaker 1: I also sense she's doing this out of survival, Like
Speaker 1: when she was getting kicked out of this, you know,
Speaker 1: like losing relevancely, she was like, well, they'll need a
Speaker 1: woman at the front of this because a man can't
Speaker 1: say this because it's more weaponized if a woman is
Speaker 1: anti feminist. Yet she's hurting herself because if you just
Speaker 1: got on board, she could just have everything with feminism.
Speaker 1: I don't know, which is very similar to the character
Speaker 1: Robert was talking about in Handmaid's Tale. Actually with what
Speaker 1: you just said, mm hmmm, well what even what Robert
Speaker 1: said about the bipartisanship of the r A reminds me
Speaker 1: so much of coronavirus, Like when it came out, it's like,
Speaker 1: this is not an partisan issue. We're all just going
Speaker 1: to handle this like people who want to live. And
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden, it was like, do you
Speaker 1: scratch now it's partisan? You're like, what since when living
Speaker 1: become parts? Ye too, sad it's a bummer. She becomes
Speaker 1: the chairwoman of stop E r a uh, and she
Speaker 1: taps into this network of women she's like so it's
Speaker 1: like in creating this um, like she has this network
Speaker 1: of women she's built, so she like, first off, she
Speaker 1: distributed this book to a bunch of people that like
Speaker 1: that like builds her a fan base, and she started
Speaker 1: a new letter after that, which is kind of the
Speaker 1: way as a conservative at this point that you like,
Speaker 1: you build a political um coalition because all these you
Speaker 1: get all these hundreds of thousands of people in your newsletter,
Speaker 1: and then you can you can get them to buy books,
Speaker 1: you can get them to vote on Like you can
Speaker 1: get them, you can organize them as like a donate
Speaker 1: mainly you can get them to donate money. UM. So
Speaker 1: like this is kind of how she starts this coalition,
Speaker 1: and she she founds a group. First she found Stop
Speaker 1: the r A. And then she founds a group called
Speaker 1: the Eagle Forum UM, which is like this right wing
Speaker 1: think t or this right wing like advocacy organization UM
Speaker 1: that is formed around Philish Laughy basically coaching stay at
Speaker 1: home moms to become activists to stop the e r A.
Speaker 1: So she's trying to organize all of these like conservative
Speaker 1: religious housewives UM into a political coalition. She described her
Speaker 1: recruits in the Atlantic as quote housewives who didn't even
Speaker 1: know where their state capital was uh and Slaughly instructed
Speaker 1: them and everything from how to speak to the president,
Speaker 1: run phone banks, to how to dress and smile for
Speaker 1: the camera. Um. In nineteen seventy three, the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: ruled on Roe versus Wade, which made reproductive healthcare safer
Speaker 1: for a lot of Americans and also gave all of these,
Speaker 1: like gave Philish Laughly basically a dosa fucking rocket fuel.
Speaker 1: Because now the religious rights starts getting like really like
Speaker 1: she so there's a lot going on here at once,
Speaker 1: which is that you have this Equal Rights Amendment, which
Speaker 1: doesn't start out as being controversial but laughly is able
Speaker 1: to convince a bunch of um like Christian housewives, this
Speaker 1: is going to um, this is going to destroy like
Speaker 1: the traditional family and take your privileges. Uh. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, like abortion becomes legal. So she weaves
Speaker 1: it into like that the this e r A is
Speaker 1: part of this like push um and like it's going
Speaker 1: to make you know, abortion more common too, and so
Speaker 1: like she kind of she kind of keeps grabbing these
Speaker 1: different scale things that are too religious conservatives scary about
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies UM and weaving them all together into
Speaker 1: this like one gigantic um fight UM. And it's this
Speaker 1: thing where like she kind of backsides the traditional Republican
Speaker 1: Party at this point. So like in nineteen seventies seven,
Speaker 1: gerald Ford's wife backs the r A at the National
Speaker 1: Women's Conference UM and the National Women Conference of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies seven, like one of the conference's goals was taxpayer
Speaker 1: funded day care for all children, which gerald Ford's wife,
Speaker 1: like the president's wife, is a big supporter of so
Speaker 1: like the tradic like the Republican party structure is like
Speaker 1: willing to talk about these things that, like our ore
Speaker 1: are kind are very socialist policies at this point. And
Speaker 1: Shlafley is the person who like calls that straight up communism.
Speaker 1: And she starts she organizes these all these hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of like conservative homemakers to to make this their war,
Speaker 1: to make like stopping any uh any of this stuff,
Speaker 1: like the crusade that they that they embark upon. Um.
Speaker 1: We talked in the Fallwell episodes about how like once
Speaker 1: upon a time, abortion was a non issue for American evangelicals,
Speaker 1: Like a lot of American right wingers and evangelicals used
Speaker 1: to be pro abortion back and like the seventh the
Speaker 1: sixties and early seventies, and Slatly gets a lot of
Speaker 1: credit for making it into a political like culture war issue,
Speaker 1: And that's kind of like what she's doing in this period.
Speaker 1: She's taking all of these things that were kind of
Speaker 1: bipartisan that are now even today, like the idea of like, oh,
Speaker 1: we should have a national daycare program that used to
Speaker 1: not be a partisan issue. A lot of conservatives used
Speaker 1: to support that issue. Slaughly turns it into like if
Speaker 1: you support that, you support communism. Abortion used to not
Speaker 1: be a big political issue. Slaughly starts organizing and propagandizing
Speaker 1: to make it into one. She's just creating culture wars.
Speaker 1: That's Philish Laughlely in the nineteen seventies. She's she's helping
Speaker 1: to be the midwife to all of these culture wars
Speaker 1: that are still with us today. Well, she's kind of
Speaker 1: pushing people into this corner. Yeah, we hadn't been divided
Speaker 1: about this stuff. Yeah, you're right there. She's pushing people
Speaker 1: into this corner to where like, you can't debate about this,
Speaker 1: you can't come to an agreement about this, you can't
Speaker 1: meet each other in the middle. This is something that
Speaker 1: we fight over forever now, right because there's people whom
Speaker 1: for religious the reasons will always be on one side.
Speaker 1: And she forces that an entire party to only represent
Speaker 1: that side and then forcing the other party to take
Speaker 1: the other side, which means that if you fall anywhere
Speaker 1: in the middle on any other issues, but that's the
Speaker 1: one thing you won't budge on, you have to join
Speaker 1: that party, whether or not economically or anything else. Uh
Speaker 1: makes sense for you. Yes, And also she convinces in
Speaker 1: her propaganda pushes a lot of uh, pushes a lot
Speaker 1: of people to who pushes a lot of religious conservatives
Speaker 1: who hadn't been against abortion to consider that like a
Speaker 1: key issue for them. Like again, there's been a lot
Speaker 1: of like a decent amount of like evangelicals who had
Speaker 1: been okay with with at least some abortions prior to this,
Speaker 1: and she shuts that ship down. She's a huge part
Speaker 1: of this becoming a black and white, no compromise, We're
Speaker 1: just going to fight about this till the heat death
Speaker 1: of the universe issue. And that's her goal is to
Speaker 1: make as many of those issues as possible because they
Speaker 1: create a durable coalition. You can't have coalition switch like
Speaker 1: they did with the Republican and Democratic Party. They switched
Speaker 1: in like the early around like civil rights and stuff.
Speaker 1: You cannot have your coalition switch. You can't. People will
Speaker 1: not leave your coalition if you convince them that the
Speaker 1: only thing on the other side is the devil. And
Speaker 1: like that's Philish Laughley's goal is to create culture wars
Speaker 1: that cannot be resolved because it means that the Republican
Speaker 1: Party has a durable electorate to to represent it um
Speaker 1: and I want to quote, there's a woman named Tanya
Speaker 1: Melick um And and melick is generally considered to be
Speaker 1: one of the founders of like the modern women's political movement.
Speaker 1: She was one of the first like women in like
Speaker 1: mainstream American politics in a big way. She helped organize
Speaker 1: a bunch of like, uh different kind of grassroots things.
Speaker 1: She and she was she was a conservative activist for
Speaker 1: most of her career who kind of turned around at
Speaker 1: a later date and came to regret some of what
Speaker 1: she'd done. And she was a contemporary of Phyllis Is
Speaker 1: and she watched all of this happen, and so she
Speaker 1: kind of she's a good she's a good person to
Speaker 1: go to for like a description of like what Philish
Speaker 1: Laughly is building during this period of the early nineteen seventies. Quote.
Speaker 1: It was Slaughly, with her authoritarian leadership and expert grassroots organizing,
Speaker 1: who made the religious right a political player. It was Slaughly,
Speaker 1: first of the Goldwater and then of the New Right
Speaker 1: team who on earth the political gold of misogyny. It
Speaker 1: was Slaughly who translated fear of women's liberation into a
Speaker 1: political force in the Republican Party and thereby stinted the
Speaker 1: foundation of the Republicans Southern strategy. Now, not only did
Speaker 1: the strategy flourish on the backlash of the civil rights movement,
Speaker 1: but it was broadened to include a backlash against the
Speaker 1: Women's movement. To Mellet claims that Shlafley's tactics were consciously
Speaker 1: modeled on the moral panic and the fearmongering that right
Speaker 1: wingers had tried to ignite during the battle over desegregation UM.
Speaker 1: A number of the evangelical leaders who made up the
Speaker 1: Moral Majority had wound up in expensive battles with the
Speaker 1: I R S over whether or not they had to
Speaker 1: disegregate their whites only religious schools. We talk about this
Speaker 1: in the Jerry Folwell episodes, and that's what Fallwell and
Speaker 1: way Rich had launched the Moral Majority to fight against
Speaker 1: school integration, and they'd had some success in like getting
Speaker 1: a dedicated base of evangelical extremists together, but segregation was
Speaker 1: actually really unpopular. So this the the their initial plan
Speaker 1: for the Moral Majority doesn't work out, and by the
Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies it becomes clear to them to fall
Speaker 1: Well into way Rich that they were backing the wrong horse,
Speaker 1: and they start looking for new ideas as part of
Speaker 1: their plan to build a new political coalition that, in
Speaker 1: way Rich's words, would be defined by US conservatives in
Speaker 1: moral terms, packaged in non religious language, and propagated throughout
Speaker 1: the country by our new coalition. So he's trying to
Speaker 1: basically take religious conservatism, package it and non religious language
Speaker 1: and and push it on the entire country. And he's
Speaker 1: looking for a way to do that Um, and he
Speaker 1: realizes that while he in Um Fallwell have been fucking
Speaker 1: around with anti segregation, Philish Slofly has figured out how
Speaker 1: to build this coalition on her own. In the stop
Speaker 1: e r A fight like, She's she's put together the
Speaker 1: thing that Fallwell wanted to make in the first place.
Speaker 1: And so like, while Fallwell is the guy and and
Speaker 1: way Ri's getting like the credit for starting the moral majority,
Speaker 1: Phyllis is the one who makes figures out how to
Speaker 1: make it work as an electoral coal coalition. She she
Speaker 1: figures out how to actually find people for this ship Um,
Speaker 1: and she does it in a variety of ways, not
Speaker 1: just by stoking like she stokes fears about how you know,
Speaker 1: the the the r A is going to like change
Speaker 1: the nature of her aationships between women and men and
Speaker 1: destroy housewives. She also brings up fears about gay people.
Speaker 1: She starts to play that claim that since religious schools
Speaker 1: have been forced to desegregate, the e r A would
Speaker 1: mean forced gay marriage. So she's again forced gay marriage.
Speaker 1: She's the first person in an organized way to try
Speaker 1: to build a coalition around the fear that religious like
Speaker 1: churches will be forced to marry gay people if gay
Speaker 1: people get civil rights. Like that's that's Philish Laughley's invention too.
Speaker 1: That ship was with us in the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: Like I grew up in that ship. I've heard of
Speaker 1: partial birth abortion was a term coined by this group.
Speaker 1: Was she part of that. I'm sure she had a
Speaker 1: role in it. I don't know about that specifically. Like
Speaker 1: the reframe things that sounds so much like forced any marriage,
Speaker 1: forced marriage by itself sounds bad, you know, Like like
Speaker 1: then you're adding all these fears that people have, Like
Speaker 1: forced by itself sounds bad, forced anything, forced lunch. I'm like,
Speaker 1: but it's interesting and like normally when people talk about
Speaker 1: forced marriage, they're talking about like people being forced into marriages.
Speaker 1: She's talking about that Christians will be forced to recognize
Speaker 1: gay marriages. UM, don't force you into marriage. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, there are our products and services pick
Speaker 1: uh a a romantic partner for life for every single
Speaker 1: one of our listeners. My dad will be thrilled for me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you refuse um, then they will they will destroy
Speaker 1: you because this is this is the totalitarianism. Um that
Speaker 1: that I want to support with this podcast is forced
Speaker 1: marriages for everybody. UM yeah yeah, so uh, grab whatever
Speaker 1: partner has been picked by a machine for you and
Speaker 1: listen to these other ads. So yeah, we're back. So
Speaker 1: Slatley is the first person in like a really organized
Speaker 1: way to kind of to to to start propagandizing over
Speaker 1: the fear of like that churches are going to be
Speaker 1: forced to conduct gay marriages. Like she brings that into
Speaker 1: the public. These are all things that are still with us.
Speaker 1: She's also one of the first people in the first person,
Speaker 1: I think, in like an organized way to raise an
Speaker 1: alarm about unisex bathrooms. Uh and how like and this idea,
Speaker 1: like she starts trying to freak conservatives out with this
Speaker 1: idea that like men are going to be using women's
Speaker 1: rooms and women are gonna be using men's rooms and like,
Speaker 1: think of what that will do to your kids. Like, again,
Speaker 1: the ship that's with us today in slaugh Ley is
Speaker 1: the person who ignites this fucking culture war. Consciously, I
Speaker 1: have a dumb theory that because it's a lot of
Speaker 1: these rich, rich, out of touch people that um, because
Speaker 1: every most bathrooms in pretty middle class homes are unisex.
Speaker 1: But I feel like because she grew up in a mansion,
Speaker 1: it's like maybe she just doesn't like sharing bathrooms at all.
Speaker 1: Like maybe her whole thing is like I cannot believe
Speaker 1: that someone else, a person, another person, man or woman
Speaker 1: will be in my bathroom because it's like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know, most of the family bathrooms are unit sex.
Speaker 1: Like I've never been in a home. Actually, I've never
Speaker 1: been in a home that separates men and women's time. Yes,
Speaker 1: but you know, you know all of your family members,
Speaker 1: and clearly we're all at more threat from like random strangers,
Speaker 1: even though usually when people are sexually assaulted. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's dumb. Um. She's she again all she does in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies and like early eighties, she's just starting
Speaker 1: culture wars left and right. She's a fucking culture arsonist.
Speaker 1: So she gets everybody like freaking out about bathrooms and
Speaker 1: women using men's rooms and men using women's rooms. She
Speaker 1: also gets uh, people lathered up over the possibility that
Speaker 1: the e r A would lead to women getting sent
Speaker 1: into combat. So this is like one of her like
Speaker 1: propaganda lions, is that like, if we passed the Equal
Speaker 1: Rights Amendment, women will be draftable and then suddenly you'll
Speaker 1: have women fighting in battle. And thankfully, like most of
Speaker 1: the culture wars that she started, we're still fighting today.
Speaker 1: You'll still you'll hear bits about this here and there,
Speaker 1: but like, for the most part, nobody winds about this
Speaker 1: one anymore because I guess we've all gotten okay with
Speaker 1: women getting shot to death. Yeah, it's gonna say that.
Speaker 1: That one's one I would say. Sometimes you get lost
Speaker 1: in the binary of these arguments, because if I were
Speaker 1: to break down her emotions and just look at facts,
Speaker 1: I'm like, Oh, in a real debate, that's actually a
Speaker 1: valid point to bring up. We can explore because that
Speaker 1: could be a real fear. And if we're moving towards
Speaker 1: a place where women and men are you know, considered equal,
Speaker 1: wishing should be and you're afraid to get drafted. Well,
Speaker 1: then that there is something to explore there. But really
Speaker 1: the problem is maybe more with a draft in general
Speaker 1: of you know, it's not really this idea that men
Speaker 1: and women are equal as this idea that you're afraid
Speaker 1: of the draft and you thought you were safe, so
Speaker 1: maybe you don't like the draft. Yeah, it's it's she's
Speaker 1: she's finding as many ways as possible, like she again,
Speaker 1: she's building a coalition, and so like it's this mix
Speaker 1: of like stoking fear and stoking anger um and schlaf
Speaker 1: Lee's work. What makes it so groundbreaking is that she
Speaker 1: found a way to get a whole ship little white
Speaker 1: ladies to fight actively against their own interests in political
Speaker 1: rights rather than like, you know, this was an amendment
Speaker 1: that would have given them legal equality, and she convinced
Speaker 1: them that instead it was going to take away their
Speaker 1: right to be supported and protected by men. She even
Speaker 1: created a political lobbying group like the Eagle Forum, she
Speaker 1: described as the alternative to Women's lib And she told
Speaker 1: her followers, I think the main goal of the feminist
Speaker 1: movement was the status degradation of the full time homemaker.
Speaker 1: So she takes what's actually going on here is that
Speaker 1: people are trying to guarantee and enshrine and law the
Speaker 1: equality of women, and she convinces them, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: If you're a homemaker and a wife, these people hate
Speaker 1: you and they're trying to destroy your ability, like your existence,
Speaker 1: that's what's happening here. They want to take this away
Speaker 1: from you, They want to take your family from you.
Speaker 1: That's the argument she's able to convince these people of.
Speaker 1: She's she's not afraid of shit. She is doing all
Speaker 1: of this because she she's an anti communist like extremist
Speaker 1: and once the Republican Party to be in power so
Speaker 1: that it can build all of the nukes in the world.
Speaker 1: And she recognizes that the best way to get and
Speaker 1: keep power in the party is to unite all these people.
Speaker 1: And that's why she's doing all this propagandizing. More than anything,
Speaker 1: she wants to to unite these because like her whole
Speaker 1: life is um is an argument against everything that she
Speaker 1: actually rallies for, right, Like she's an extremely liberated woman. Well,
Speaker 1: that's why I felt like she's trying to she's actually
Speaker 1: trying to keep people down. I agree with her wanting
Speaker 1: power and uniting people, but it's like a false flag.
Speaker 1: It feels like she wants to keep like take power
Speaker 1: away from the people who have to follow her, because
Speaker 1: if any of these if any of these women actually
Speaker 1: get powerful, then they may they may change their mind
Speaker 1: or like you know, fight against her or take her place.
Speaker 1: And I think she wants to keep them down while
Speaker 1: making them feel protected. Yeah, and and gathering, and like
Speaker 1: that's the thing that she's able to do that's so impressive,
Speaker 1: is like, so she's both convinces these women that like
Speaker 1: feminist and whatnot are to take their ability, their right
Speaker 1: to be protected by their husband, and she's able to
Speaker 1: garner the support of religious, you know men by appealing
Speaker 1: to their sense of Christian chivalry. Um schlaf Lee's Eagle
Speaker 1: Forums sent out letters to legislators which complained that women lawyers,
Speaker 1: women legislators, and women executives feminists were all trying to
Speaker 1: oppress simple homemakers and housewives. And the letter ended with
Speaker 1: a note, we the wives and working women need you,
Speaker 1: dear senators and representatives, to protect us. So she's she's
Speaker 1: both able to kind of like find and like pull
Speaker 1: on this fear that these conservative homemakers have. These women
Speaker 1: have over like their place being usurped um and kind
Speaker 1: of the you know, the history moving beyond them, and
Speaker 1: she's able to, uh like tug at the sense in
Speaker 1: these like very conservative men that like, you need to
Speaker 1: protect these women from this, this evil feminist conspiracy. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's one of the most brilliant pieces of political maneuvering
Speaker 1: in history. Schlaf Lely, acting more or less on her
Speaker 1: own intuition, is responsible for holding much of what became
Speaker 1: the religious right with her bare hands. Like all of
Speaker 1: these groups, this hadn't been a coalition before, and she's
Speaker 1: one of the she's one of the ground level workers
Speaker 1: who's kind of putting it together. Um ilsa Hog who's
Speaker 1: the former president of NARROW, which is like our big
Speaker 1: pro choice organization in the United States and a lifelong
Speaker 1: opponent of Shlaughley wrote a book called The Live at
Speaker 1: Minds that includes really trenchant analysis of the voting block
Speaker 1: that Phillis helped to create. It was kind of like
Speaker 1: the key figure in creating quote. The women involved were
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly white, church going and from the rural and suburban
Speaker 1: middle and upper class. By definition, they had privileges to lose,
Speaker 1: benefiting by association with the white male Christian power structure.
Speaker 1: These women quickly embraced Shlaughlee's core message that the push
Speaker 1: for equality would erase legal differences between men and women.
Speaker 1: They even bought her more tenuous message that the e
Speaker 1: r A would lead to supported horrors like homosexual marriage,
Speaker 1: unisex bathrooms, or women in combat. Soon she had activated
Speaker 1: a grassroots army to zealously fight to maintain their privilege
Speaker 1: at the expense of other women's political, social, and economic equity.
Speaker 1: They cast these other women, often unmarried, single moms, gay women,
Speaker 1: and women of color, as deserving of shame because of
Speaker 1: their life choices. That all sounds familiar, because it's where
Speaker 1: we are today. We never move on from Philish laugh
Speaker 1: leg Where can I sign up? I want to join
Speaker 1: this party? Sounds relatedly way rich and fallwell of the
Speaker 1: moral majority realized that like Phillis has done what they
Speaker 1: were trying and kind of like failing to do uh,
Speaker 1: And they quickly moved to rebrand the religious right and
Speaker 1: do it in the image of the coalition that Phillis
Speaker 1: had built. Also, Hoe continues in her book quote, they
Speaker 1: didn't dwell on the differences between her public facing messages
Speaker 1: about gender equality, and their own still centered on religious
Speaker 1: freedom and school segregation. They saw the harmony in their
Speaker 1: ideology and narratives both factions. After all, we're warning their
Speaker 1: audiences that the new buzzwords of equality, whether they were
Speaker 1: applied to black people, gay people, or women, were tantamount
Speaker 1: to attacking your family, your way of life, your privileged status.
Speaker 1: The movement architects had a clear target for this message.
Speaker 1: They had no viable path to gain political dominance with
Speaker 1: zero support from women, given the racist underpinnings of the movement.
Speaker 1: That needed. That meant they needed a good portion of
Speaker 1: white women. Evangelical white women were already primed, since many
Speaker 1: of them had been involved in the fight against desegregation.
Speaker 1: White women had always been critical and driving a lot
Speaker 1: of the behind the scenes organizing of the white supremacist movement.
Speaker 1: A political platform of family autonomy and parental rights, a
Speaker 1: kind of white supremacist maternalism is how Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Speaker 1: described this grassroots movement in her book Mothers of Massive Resistance.
Speaker 1: White Women in the Politics of white supremacy. And that's
Speaker 1: an important term, white supremacist maternalism, which is like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's Karenism, right, It's like it's it's white suburban
Speaker 1: moms and their hatred of everything that isn't white suburb
Speaker 1: their hatred and fear of everything that isn't white suburban moms.
Speaker 1: That's white supremacist maternalism. That is what Philish laughly welds
Speaker 1: into an electoral coalition that she makes the core of
Speaker 1: the Republican Party. And to this day that's who. That's
Speaker 1: who fucking wins like that. That's a major factor in
Speaker 1: their ability to win election. Um is white, white middle
Speaker 1: class ladies. It's this idea of motherhood, but you're attaching
Speaker 1: it to it's very specific, almost like kind of folky
Speaker 1: old school memory of childhood. Like and they all similarly,
Speaker 1: a lot of them grow up similarly, so they can
Speaker 1: just kind of use some buzzwords to like kind of
Speaker 1: trigger that. A lot of it is also co opting
Speaker 1: the fear a lot of these these mothers have over
Speaker 1: like what's going to happen like the world their kids
Speaker 1: are growing up in because they don't understand it, and
Speaker 1: making that fear law. So you get you know, in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, laugh Ley and this this white supremacist
Speaker 1: maternalist coalition are a big part of what launches Reagan
Speaker 1: into the White House. And obviously, like one of the
Speaker 1: things Reagan does is put his wife Nancy up to
Speaker 1: like be the one of the faces of the war
Speaker 1: on drugs and just say no. And that's like, that's
Speaker 1: the that that is white supremacist maternalism in a nutshell,
Speaker 1: is on the surface, you have all of these you
Speaker 1: have these like white moms scared about their kids and
Speaker 1: just wanting to protect their children, and like that's what
Speaker 1: we're doing. We're strong moms who want to protect our kids.
Speaker 1: And what actually happens is you have this right wing
Speaker 1: government put a car Serrale state into place that arrests
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic people, um and
Speaker 1: then monetizes their bodies through forced labor, and like that's
Speaker 1: what happens in the background of this where you've got this.
Speaker 1: But but a big part of why they're able to
Speaker 1: sell it is this like we have to protect the
Speaker 1: children's sort of thing like Philish last well they're doing
Speaker 1: with Q and on now they're the pedophile ring. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's always about protecting the kids. It's always about white
Speaker 1: kids because it's I mean, like, I like this idea
Speaker 1: that white children are so innocent, but then a black
Speaker 1: teen is dangerous and you're like, wait a minute there,
Speaker 1: you're not really using motherhood in the right way if
Speaker 1: you're really about protecting people. But I think they're stoking
Speaker 1: this idea because they want to keep Americans, or the
Speaker 1: white Americans, in a constant of state of almost like adolescents.
Speaker 1: Like because even though they say they don't want welfare state,
Speaker 1: if you feel like you're a child and you need
Speaker 1: protection from your mom, you're gonna rely on your government
Speaker 1: and listen to them as if they're your parents. You're
Speaker 1: not gonna think for yourself. And I think they this
Speaker 1: like is a part of this power struggle, is like
Speaker 1: creating this parental dynamic between the government and its constituents,
Speaker 1: and it's stoked by this maternal sort of like imagery. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a lot of what's going on here. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to continue quoting from il Zaho because I
Speaker 1: think what she says about Slaughly and what she does
Speaker 1: is really interesting here. Quote laugh Ly definitely steered these
Speaker 1: white women towards more public acceptance and folded them into
Speaker 1: the effort to fight gender parody measures. She never asked
Speaker 1: them to check their racism at the door. If anything,
Speaker 1: she told adherents who balked at the racist tendencies of
Speaker 1: their fellow warriors to swallow their displeasure for the sake
Speaker 1: of the cause. For her, these issues were two sides
Speaker 1: of the same coin, as stop e r A and
Speaker 1: the Eagle Forms cemented themselves as the new Rights Ladies Auxiliary.
Speaker 1: They found a sphere where they could raise their voices
Speaker 1: and flex some power without threatening the men in their lives.
Speaker 1: They used their collective weight to throw women's issues, to
Speaker 1: whitewash the racist underbelly of the movement and show up
Speaker 1: traditional power systems. Stop e r A was extremely brand conscious.
Speaker 1: They knew their value was in the perfect combination of
Speaker 1: fierce advocacy wrapped an unapologetic traditional femininity. They were known
Speaker 1: for baking pies and breads to hand out to lawmakers
Speaker 1: with the slogan from the Breadmakers to the Breadwinners. They
Speaker 1: shamelessly flattered male lawmakers, is a core part of the
Speaker 1: lobbying strategy. So this is a This is like gut
Speaker 1: wrench ng and horrible, but it's also brilliant, like Shlafley
Speaker 1: is an incredibly intelligent and effective political operator. Um, she
Speaker 1: was a master using identity politics. Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: like that. Like it makes me annoyed that they took
Speaker 1: this idea of nurturing and gave it to the right,
Speaker 1: because I'm like, I'm very much a die hard left ist,
Speaker 1: Like I'm very radical in existence, but I'm like, I
Speaker 1: like to nurture. I like to bake pies. Now, I now,
Speaker 1: you guys took that and made an extreme conservative than Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's this is really what keeps the Republican Party,
Speaker 1: what brings it back to life right after like and
Speaker 1: this is what brings Ronald Reagan into office. And again,
Speaker 1: once you've got Reagan, you've got because because Reagan was
Speaker 1: like one of the big guys who rose in defensive
Speaker 1: Barry Goldwater. So like Nixon, with Nixon kind of this
Speaker 1: this sort of corporatist and and you know we're going
Speaker 1: to be, you know, a bigger tent party. Like this
Speaker 1: idea of what the Republican Party could be collapses because
Speaker 1: Nixon was a criminal. Um, and but what what replaces
Speaker 1: it is Reagan and this like religious uh fundamentalist, um,
Speaker 1: white supremacist sort of view of what the party should
Speaker 1: fundamentally be. Like that's that that really really takes a
Speaker 1: hold under Reagan. Like obviously Nixon had engaged in a
Speaker 1: bunch of white supremacists ship, but like under under Reagan
Speaker 1: and thanks to kind of the coalition, Slaughley builds this
Speaker 1: like they figure out a way to make it work, right,
Speaker 1: and it becomes like the Republican Party has never stepped
Speaker 1: away from this ship. Like the thing they embraced with
Speaker 1: Laughley is the cult of Southern white womanhood and like
Speaker 1: like you know, this this opposition, this violent opposition to
Speaker 1: feminism and the idea that like, um, there should be
Speaker 1: any sort of like move for a quality between the
Speaker 1: genders and stuff, like they this the Schlafley's that Shlaughley
Speaker 1: in a nutshell um And yeah it's it's a real bummer.
Speaker 1: You know what's not a real bummer, Robbert the products
Speaker 1: and services that support this podcast. Yeah. Yeah, So the
Speaker 1: coalition that she creates, it comes along at this time
Speaker 1: when like Fallwell and and way Rich and these these
Speaker 1: kind of far right religious conservative crusaders were like trying
Speaker 1: to grapple with the fact that white supremacy was not
Speaker 1: as easy away too, Like open white supremacy didn't get
Speaker 1: them votes, is easily a more um and like they
Speaker 1: were seeing these civil rights leaders making advances in society
Speaker 1: and like open racist appeals losing like their power to
Speaker 1: convince people and having to like soft pedal their racism,
Speaker 1: and Philish Laughly provides them away to like, you don't
Speaker 1: have to soft pedal your racism, you just have to
Speaker 1: wrap it differently, like you can you can justify the
Speaker 1: naked imprisonment of tens of thousands of young black men
Speaker 1: if you just have a concerned mom get on screen
Speaker 1: and talk about how scary drugs are, Like that's that's
Speaker 1: that can work for you, Like, so that's yeah. The
Speaker 1: GOP has been kind of playing this balancing act ever since.
Speaker 1: Philish Laughley, probably more than any other similar single person,
Speaker 1: crafted the political strategies and laid the propaganda foundation for
Speaker 1: the electoral strategy that's brought Republicans to power again and
Speaker 1: again during our lifetimes. She is maybe these the main
Speaker 1: architect of the right wings half century of steady political victories.
Speaker 1: She's full of contradictions just to begin with, which then
Speaker 1: just lee into more like even the I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: everyone knows how contradictory they war on drugs is, but
Speaker 1: just on a very basic level, on a class level,
Speaker 1: like people say, like, oh, that's a drug neighborhood. You
Speaker 1: to imply it's like a poor neighborhood, But every single
Speaker 1: fucking like rich like Beverly Hill, those are all drug neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Like a mansion. Literally, you read one mansion, you can
Speaker 1: find probably like so much cocaine, more than you would
Speaker 1: find in a whole block in like you know, lower
Speaker 1: those economic area. But that's not what people care about
Speaker 1: because they're rich people. They just yeah, well, but because
Speaker 1: it's about white supremacy and like that's what they're really
Speaker 1: trying to do, and they yeah laugh Lely like Schlafly
Speaker 1: isn't the one who has the idea to do that,
Speaker 1: but she's the one who figures out how to actually
Speaker 1: sell it, Like right, they've been wanting to do They
Speaker 1: had been wanting it, attempting and doing that, like the
Speaker 1: law had been weaponized and drug policy had been weaponized
Speaker 1: and stuff before that. And like Phyllis isn't even like
Speaker 1: a huge part of the anti drug crusade. She just
Speaker 1: puts together this coalition and figures out this way of
Speaker 1: marketing conservatism that lets them do that, that let's Reagan
Speaker 1: get into office, that lets them justify all of this
Speaker 1: this like it's it's her. She teaches the Republican Party
Speaker 1: that the path to their success is to just endlessly
Speaker 1: create a series of unsolvable culture wars. That that's how
Speaker 1: you that's how you gain and keep power. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: By nineteen eighty five, the e r A was still
Speaker 1: three states short of ratification, and it it dies on
Speaker 1: the fine right like it's a long fight starts in
Speaker 1: seventy two and eighty five, but the e r A
Speaker 1: is never ratified. It's still not an amendment. Phyllis killed it, basically,
Speaker 1: and by the mid nineteen eighties she was killing more
Speaker 1: than amendments. Starting in the late nineteen seventies, she'd pushed
Speaker 1: to make hating gay people a major plank of the
Speaker 1: Republican Party she was helping to build. Her Eagle Forum
Speaker 1: newsletter published bigoted cartoons that insulted gay in particularly trans people.
Speaker 1: As the AIDS crisis began to tear through the gay community,
Speaker 1: she lastly became one of the loudest voices against doing
Speaker 1: a single goddamn thing to help. In nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: when surgeon in Normal see Everett Coup, who we did
Speaker 1: an episode about because he was actually a pretty good guy,
Speaker 1: but we were talking about how shitty the Reagans were
Speaker 1: on Age but see Everett Coop starts like this age
Speaker 1: education program to try to get people basic information about
Speaker 1: safe sex to try and reduce how many people are
Speaker 1: dying of AIDS, and Slaughly calls it the teaching of
Speaker 1: safe sodomy, and like basically goes toward counter messaging against
Speaker 1: this very basic education program that the government's really good
Speaker 1: at twisting words, uh, really quickly in a way that
Speaker 1: like like sounds bad even to some Like I am
Speaker 1: pro education, but like the way that those words hit
Speaker 1: you feel the emotion, like you feel a negative connotation immediately, yep. So,
Speaker 1: adding anti gay rhetoric to her e er A campaign
Speaker 1: had allowed Slaughly to unite a number of conservative religious
Speaker 1: groups behind her banner. Evangelical and Catholic bigots might not
Speaker 1: have much in common aside from their hatred of gay people,
Speaker 1: but Slaughly could use that to bring them together. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from Slate here Rwing from long standing opposition
Speaker 1: to racial integration, interracial marriage, and mixed raced families, her
Speaker 1: pamphlets and articles transposed racial rhetoric onto fears of homosexuality.
Speaker 1: She frequently associated the e r A with the dangers
Speaker 1: of sex mixing, homosexual marriage, and the threat of homosexual
Speaker 1: school teachers. As early as nineteen seventy three, she warned
Speaker 1: that the e r A would legalize homosexual marriages and
Speaker 1: open the door to the adoption of children by legally
Speaker 1: married homosexual couples. The e r A would enable these
Speaker 1: gay rights, she said, because any law that defines a
Speaker 1: marriage as a union of a man and a woman
Speaker 1: would have to be amended to replace those words with person.
Speaker 1: So Schlaughley's newsletters, like The Physical, The Phillish Slaughly Report
Speaker 1: in The Eagle Form, regularly published cartoons depicting gay and
Speaker 1: lesbian marriages, images that showed men dressed as women or
Speaker 1: women dressed as men. Gender anarchy and sexual anarchy went
Speaker 1: hand in hand for Slaughlely. Her nineteen seventy seven book
Speaker 1: The Power of Positive Woman of the Positive Woman compiled
Speaker 1: these anti gay ideas and exclaimed that firemen who constantly
Speaker 1: risked their lives in our behalf should have the right
Speaker 1: to make a judgment that they're close. Living and working
Speaker 1: conditions make a homosexual coworker intolerable. So so they're not
Speaker 1: afraid of going into a burning building, but they can't
Speaker 1: share an office space with the gay person. But they're
Speaker 1: scared of gay people. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah. As the
Speaker 1: eighties turned to the nineties, increasing right wing I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: she sure did well, Radcliffe. As the nineteen eighties turned
Speaker 1: to the nineties, increasing numbers of right wing activists began
Speaker 1: to imitate Slaughley's use of anti gay bigotry. The campaign
Speaker 1: against same sex marriage that coalesced in this period and
Speaker 1: nearly succeeded in making it illegal to be gay and married,
Speaker 1: was based in large part on the work of Philish Laughly.
Speaker 1: Like she's she's the underpinning ideologically of a lot of this,
Speaker 1: Like she gets started the propaganda campaign that turns into
Speaker 1: you know, the attempts to make the defensive Marriage Act
Speaker 1: and stuff. I'm just going to start up counter campaign
Speaker 1: and just make all marriages illegal. And that's what that's
Speaker 1: what they do. They move the things so far, they
Speaker 1: moved the line so far that in order to be
Speaker 1: against them, you have to be extreme. But if I
Speaker 1: do that, then it's like I was just fighting for marriage.
Speaker 1: You're not fighting for gay marriages, raight marriages. Like marriage
Speaker 1: is all illegal. Now if you're Republican, you just gotta
Speaker 1: fight for gay marriage because marriage falls into that. I
Speaker 1: think we ought to. I think we had to do
Speaker 1: away with with gender entirely and just have you know, people,
Speaker 1: people who have people who produce sperm can just generate
Speaker 1: a bunch of that will throw it in like a
Speaker 1: wave pool, and people who want to have kids going there,
Speaker 1: and that's that's it. No more, no more. That's the
Speaker 1: future that liberals want is just a bunch of cum
Speaker 1: filled wave pools and and no more gender. That's the dream.
Speaker 1: Wave pools are probably unfilled. Yeah, they are all cum filled. Yes,
Speaker 1: that that is That's what Slaughley was trying to to
Speaker 1: to prevent. She knew that our secret goal was just
Speaker 1: a bunch of semen encrusted water parks, and she was
Speaker 1: she was fighting to stop our secret schemes. So I
Speaker 1: don't know, like she's just she's just a piece of ship.
Speaker 1: She's a real bad fucking person. So all of this,
Speaker 1: you know, she she helps ignite sort of like the
Speaker 1: anti gay movement of the nineties and early two thousands,
Speaker 1: and really, like, obviously homosexuality had been something that people
Speaker 1: were like murdering folks over in the United States for
Speaker 1: a long time before Slaughly she figures out the language
Speaker 1: of how to sell that politically right, Like, that's the
Speaker 1: thing that she does. She doesn't create anti gay bigotry.
Speaker 1: She figures out how to sell it and keep it
Speaker 1: as keep it politically relevant in the modern age when
Speaker 1: you have to be less openly hateful. That's her talent.
Speaker 1: So when it came to h anti Jewish bigotry, s
Speaker 1: Laughly in her organizations were a little bit more cunning.
Speaker 1: They they had to be careful about their opposition to
Speaker 1: the Jews. Um. The Eagle Forums newsletters never said the Jews,
Speaker 1: but they talked constantly about well financed minorities who were
Speaker 1: responsible for supporting liberal causes and pushing social change. And
Speaker 1: obviously who's the well finance manorities they're talking about, like
Speaker 1: rich Jewish people. Uh. In the nineteen book about Kissinger,
Speaker 1: s Laughly and her partner Admiral Ward included the line
Speaker 1: Henry says, some who know him has no God, does
Speaker 1: he have a country? So they're asked basically like is
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger loyal to the United States or is he
Speaker 1: like a a wandering Jew without a country, which is
Speaker 1: like an ancient stereotype, right, this idea that like the
Speaker 1: jew Jewish people are not members of the societies, they
Speaker 1: live in their their members of the tribe, and like
Speaker 1: they're they're always working towards other ends. So again they
Speaker 1: don't shlaughly knows that you can't print the Jews in
Speaker 1: a bunch of propaganda, but you can get everybody convinced
Speaker 1: that there's well financed minorities and when you name them,
Speaker 1: they're always Jewish who were supporting these social programs you
Speaker 1: think are evil. And it gets the point across to
Speaker 1: your followers, how is she um? Like I just nobody's
Speaker 1: pointing holes in the logic that she's saying. She's like
Speaker 1: for her country and she's claiming Kissingers anti his country.
Speaker 1: But then she's literally coming for her fellow countrymen, like
Speaker 1: I'm assuming these gay people protected under the Equal rights
Speaker 1: would be citizens, So she's literally doing that, She's coming
Speaker 1: for her countrymen. Yeah, but the people who like Philish
Speaker 1: Laughly doesn't think those are her countrymen, you know, that's
Speaker 1: why that's factually they are. They always focus about wanting
Speaker 1: to murder us, wanting to murder every like, yeah, definition
Speaker 1: is that those are her fellow I mean maybe she
Speaker 1: doesn't like her country. It sounds like she doesn't like
Speaker 1: a country. There's about half the country that she wanted purged, right,
Speaker 1: That's like that's Slaughley. That's most hardcore conservatives these days
Speaker 1: is like that. And that's what she helps to build.
Speaker 1: Is this this right wing coalition where she gets a
Speaker 1: lot of people on board. Like there's this core, this
Speaker 1: hard evil core of the of the new right. That's
Speaker 1: like the John Birch society, people who want everybody they
Speaker 1: disagree with murdered, and they're able to Slaughly helps them
Speaker 1: build this shield of folks who are very culturally conservative
Speaker 1: don't necessarily want that, but she's able to weld them
Speaker 1: into an electoral coalition and then radicalize them to make
Speaker 1: them more and more hateful. Like that's the process that
Speaker 1: starts with Slaughley and ends with fucking Q and on.
Speaker 1: But they just project a lot because it's like they
Speaker 1: all say things like if you don't like it leave,
Speaker 1: but it sounds like they don't like it. It sounds
Speaker 1: like they're like they're literally projecting what they they are doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that doesn't matter. It's just like they they
Speaker 1: they're they're trying to destroy, uh, they're trying to destroy
Speaker 1: the idea of like progressivism, Like that's all they care
Speaker 1: about at the core. Um, that's what people like Slaughley,
Speaker 1: These secret the the secret John Birch agents you know
Speaker 1: are are are are all about. And Shlaughley's probably the
Speaker 1: best of them at doing her job. So Phillis never
Speaker 1: earned mainstream Republican political acknowledgment, and like the way that
Speaker 1: she wanted, she kind of wanted to be involved in
Speaker 1: defense policy. The Reagan administration never had a place for her.
Speaker 1: Nobody ever really did. She never got the job of
Speaker 1: overseeing the creation of a nuclear arsenal even more gigantic
Speaker 1: than our current one. But she got to see Reagan
Speaker 1: pushed for the star Wars missile defense system, and you
Speaker 1: know that had been based a lot on the fears
Speaker 1: that she helps stoke. And eventually, I think she seems
Speaker 1: to have accepted that she would be the architect of
Speaker 1: the Republican Party's future, but she was never going to
Speaker 1: hold like an office. She grew into an elder stateswoman
Speaker 1: of the radical right, never changing, never relenting, and always
Speaker 1: certain that her hatred of black people, gay people, Jewish people,
Speaker 1: and every non Christian, nonconservative would eventually bear electoral fruit.
Speaker 1: She passed her time by arguing with feminists, who hated
Speaker 1: her for many things, but partly for the fact that
Speaker 1: she clearly spent her whole life taking advantage of the
Speaker 1: wonderful things the women's rights movement had fought so hard
Speaker 1: to earn for every woman. And despite the fact that
Speaker 1: she was very clearly a liberated career women and valued
Speaker 1: the progressive achievements that allowed her to do what she'd done,
Speaker 1: she laughtly spent every day of her working life fighting
Speaker 1: to roll those achievements back. In one famous debate, feminist
Speaker 1: mystique author Betty Friedan told slafely, I'd like to burn
Speaker 1: you at the stake. I consider you a traitor to
Speaker 1: your sex. I consider you an aunt Tom years later,
Speaker 1: she laughly told an interviewer that freedom had been very
Speaker 1: ugly to encounter. I reject all her ideology, most of
Speaker 1: it based on the absurd notion that the home is
Speaker 1: a comfortable concentration camp, and the suburban housewife is oppressed
Speaker 1: by her husband. In society. Laughley continued to fight against
Speaker 1: women's rights and gay rights her whole life. In nineteen
Speaker 1: six she made a deal with Pat Buchanan, whose campaign
Speaker 1: she co chaired to work against, to work together to
Speaker 1: write to write her crusade against legal abortion into the
Speaker 1: firmament of the Republican Party. Bob Dole, the party's official
Speaker 1: candidate in that election, wanted to change the GOP stance
Speaker 1: on abortion to something more tolerant. S Laughlely threatened to
Speaker 1: a floor fight against his nomination during the convention if
Speaker 1: Dole even allowed exceptions for raper incest, and she got
Speaker 1: her wish. The GOP's abortion plank has never since relented.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eleven, six hundred pieces of anti choice
Speaker 1: legislation were introduced in legislative bodies across the United States.
Speaker 1: These are one way or the other parts of Philish
Speaker 1: Laughly's legacy. That year, when questioned about her legacy, s
Speaker 1: Laughlely herself responded, we are winning the abortion fight. Really,
Speaker 1: all the Republicans who are elected in two thousand ten
Speaker 1: or pro life, including all the women, and we're winning
Speaker 1: that fight, especially with young people. This was true in
Speaker 1: the era when that article I found that quoting was written.
Speaker 1: It cites a two thousand nine Gallop study that found
Speaker 1: a nine point increase since the nineteen nineties among respondents
Speaker 1: eighteen to twenty nine years of age who said that
Speaker 1: abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. And if I
Speaker 1: can end this whole terrible story on a semi positive note,
Speaker 1: it would be that things aren't continuing in that direction.
Speaker 1: While the legal assault on reproductive health has only gotten
Speaker 1: worse over the last nine years, young people are actually
Speaker 1: more likely to support abortion now than ever and then
Speaker 1: they were in two thousand nine when that article was written.
Speaker 1: I found a really fascinating pr r I study that
Speaker 1: includes something very inspiring quote. Over the past five years,
Speaker 1: young people are more likely to have changed their opinion
Speaker 1: on abortion than any other group. Twenty nine percent reported
Speaker 1: a change, ten percent higher than any other age group.
Speaker 1: Young adults have changed their opinion to be more supportive
Speaker 1: nineteen percent rather than opposed ten percent to abortion, by
Speaker 1: a margin of almost two to one. So that's good. Well,
Speaker 1: I think um a lot of it is like the framing,
Speaker 1: like there's just so good at framing it. Like when
Speaker 1: I say I'm like, I'll say I'm pro choice, but
Speaker 1: I we shorthanded almost say like I'm for abortion, but
Speaker 1: I'm not like four, I'm not like, hey, everyone, let's
Speaker 1: go get an abortion. I think pro choice is this
Speaker 1: idea that you should have a choice, but they've kind
Speaker 1: of pushed it into the corner where we are screaming
Speaker 1: about like our abortions. But the point is we want
Speaker 1: a choice, not that we all want to go and
Speaker 1: get an abortion. Like it's still like the thing can
Speaker 1: still be painful, but this idea that you don't have
Speaker 1: a choice is even worse. Yeah, And it seems like
Speaker 1: like Slaughley, the way that she framed it succeeded in
Speaker 1: reversing the gains of like the reproductive health movement of
Speaker 1: the wins rights movement for decades. It does seem like
Speaker 1: that's I mean, they have more political power than ever,
Speaker 1: but in terms of how many people agree with the
Speaker 1: ship she's saying, that seems to be less than there
Speaker 1: have been in decades, Like it seems like the wave
Speaker 1: might be turning back, like the propaganda doesn't work anymore. Finally,
Speaker 1: but she got decades out of that. Well, I think
Speaker 1: stuff like your podcast help, like literally information I think
Speaker 1: is the only thing that really illuminates um all these inconsistencies.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I don't know. My theory about her
Speaker 1: is still she sucks. But I'm just hearing so much
Speaker 1: unresolved trauma, like her spoken up childhood and this rug
Speaker 1: being pulled out from her when her dad lost her job.
Speaker 1: I feel like she's forever distrusting of power structures, even
Speaker 1: though she is she becomes the power structure. She's afraid
Speaker 1: of these conspiracies because she thinks at any moment the
Speaker 1: things she puts her faith in will be taken away,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know, it needs to go to a
Speaker 1: lot of trauma therapy. I think I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's trauma or like, I think that might be less
Speaker 1: likely in my reading of her life than that UM.
Speaker 1: Like she saw this UM, I think it was very
Speaker 1: like like an opportunity, but it hurt herself. So then
Speaker 1: that's why I feel like she didn't have all the information.
Speaker 1: I think you were closest to write about her when
Speaker 1: you said like she wants to be on top, she
Speaker 1: wants to be as high as a woman can go
Speaker 1: and maybe part like she she doesn't. She doesn't like
Speaker 1: the idea of other women doing what she's doing, and
Speaker 1: she actively works to stop it. But she wants she
Speaker 1: herself wants to be liberated. I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: I don't have a great handle. I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe maybe I'm reading it wrong. But I feel
Speaker 1: like all of her, her biographies, everything you find about
Speaker 1: her is so like written by people who are on
Speaker 1: the same side of the aisle as her, that it
Speaker 1: is hard for me to get a real like I
Speaker 1: I want to know more about how she actually felt
Speaker 1: as a kid when her dad, you know, her family's
Speaker 1: financial situation collapse and her mom had to take Like
Speaker 1: is that what is like seeing her dad, you know,
Speaker 1: depressed and out of work and her mom leaving the house?
Speaker 1: Like did that? Did that really put a lot of
Speaker 1: anger in her? I don't know, But I don't think
Speaker 1: she actually knows. I think she wouldn't. I don't think
Speaker 1: she reads to me as someone who has not actually
Speaker 1: processed it. But of course, like you explained earlier, like
Speaker 1: it would have enough fact, but I don't think she's
Speaker 1: aware of it, and it actually comes out in this
Speaker 1: bigger way where she feels she needs to control everything
Speaker 1: around her and be on top and always know what's
Speaker 1: going on. Yeah. I mean I can say like from
Speaker 1: a personal level as as the kind of person I am,
Speaker 1: Like my dad having to like move away from the
Speaker 1: family and stuff when I was a kid, um to
Speaker 1: get work, like had an impact on me and kind
Speaker 1: of made had had a big lasting impact on Like
Speaker 1: why I hate some of the things I hate, like capitalism, um,
Speaker 1: kind of today. Uh. And I don't know, Maybe I'm
Speaker 1: reading too much into her. I think maybe she went
Speaker 1: I don't know. I just don't know with Phillis, But
Speaker 1: I feel like that there's a key to whatever the
Speaker 1: person she turned into in that aspect of her life.
Speaker 1: I just don't really understand what it is. Philish laughly
Speaker 1: though died in the summer. She lived way too fucking long.
Speaker 1: She was ninety two. She died. Did she die in
Speaker 1: a peaceful way? Like? Probably? Yeah? She died surrounded by
Speaker 1: her family and bullshit. Um, it's a shame. I wish
Speaker 1: she'd gotten hit the face by an eagle. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: before she died, she got to do one last terrible thing. Uh.
Speaker 1: A St. Louis Trump rally, she endorsed Donald Trump to
Speaker 1: be the next president of the United States, saying, I
Speaker 1: think he has the courage in the industry, the energy.
Speaker 1: You know, you have to have energy for that job
Speaker 1: in order to bring some changes, to do what the
Speaker 1: grassroots want him to do, because this is a grassroots uprising.
Speaker 1: We've been following the losers for so long. Now we've
Speaker 1: got a guy who's going to lead us to victory.
Speaker 1: And then her spirit just like she croaked and then
Speaker 1: her spirit just inhabited his body and became a horcrux.
Speaker 1: I hate Phyllis uh and everything that she stands for.
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it's a real bummer. She engineered
Speaker 1: Donald Trump being able to gain political power, and he
Speaker 1: was very much the guy she was waiting for her
Speaker 1: whole because he's a straight up fascist strong man and
Speaker 1: that's what she's always wanted. And like all of these
Speaker 1: other Republicans she supported, like wound up short to her
Speaker 1: in some way. And I you know, she knew that
Speaker 1: Trump would would do the things she wanted, which is
Speaker 1: violently suppressed the people she disagreed with politically. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the life of Philish laughly. Uh. A woman who spent
Speaker 1: her whole existence crusading against abortion, uh, and a woman
Speaker 1: whose whole life was a minument to the sad truth
Speaker 1: that like a lot of there's there's some babies out
Speaker 1: there that maybe oughtn't have stopped being you know, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, like, Yeah, a real, a real
Speaker 1: nasty woman, as some way would say. I just want
Speaker 1: to clarify I don't I'm not apologizing for her, and
Speaker 1: I definitely also hate her. But when I when I
Speaker 1: talk about the childhood stuff, because it's it's more me
Speaker 1: trying to understand, like how do people get so far
Speaker 1: to the point where they're was like working against their
Speaker 1: own interests and their own communities. And I truly don't,
Speaker 1: uh don't mean that in a like a apologist way
Speaker 1: at all, Like I know, like I feel like sometimes
Speaker 1: I come off centrist, but I don't like her, Let's
Speaker 1: be clear. Yeah, they're just trying to figure out, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're trying to figure out, like how did this happen?
Speaker 1: How did she become such a nasty batch? Is what
Speaker 1: we're all trying to figure out. But there's one positive
Speaker 1: thing that I kind of here and and kind of
Speaker 1: applies to everything going on now is like whenever aside,
Speaker 1: like the extreme radical right tries this hard like and
Speaker 1: throws this much money, because it sounds like they had
Speaker 1: money their whole life to oppress or change reality, it
Speaker 1: means the other side is actually more powerful than they think,
Speaker 1: because they wouldn't be spending all this time and money
Speaker 1: to oppress to control if we were actually weak, Like
Speaker 1: it's just not it wouldn't be this hard for them
Speaker 1: to win. And they are having a hard time, so
Speaker 1: it feels scary. But I think whenever they hear about
Speaker 1: all this power like, it means you're actually powerful. Yep, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it means they're scared of what will happen
Speaker 1: if they don't violently suppress all resistance because they know
Speaker 1: that not a lot of people agree with them, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's the whole Like, that's why you that's why
Speaker 1: you do this culture warship is because your opponent, like
Speaker 1: the people who don't like the things you believe, are
Speaker 1: much more numerous than you, but they all believe different
Speaker 1: things of their own and they're willing to coexist with
Speaker 1: other people who believe different things. Uh, and you are not.
Speaker 1: And your coalition has been built by all of these
Speaker 1: people who believe that there's nothing but a series of
Speaker 1: black and white choices in politics, um and never can be.
Speaker 1: And if you can get enough people you know, wrapped
Speaker 1: around a bunch of issues that are they see as
Speaker 1: life and death forever um than evenually like you'll you
Speaker 1: won't lose those people, right like you, They will always
Speaker 1: vote for your thing, even if they don't like you
Speaker 1: or you're the people that you're you know, the candidate
Speaker 1: you put up. Because abortion is the big issue, right
Speaker 1: like it's the thing. The left is always trying to
Speaker 1: do this with health care, but for whatever reason, it
Speaker 1: just hasn't worked, um. You and I think it's because
Speaker 1: in part maybe like no one actually believes that the
Speaker 1: Republican Party or the Democratic Party is going to do
Speaker 1: anything about health care anymore, like Obama had that chance
Speaker 1: kind of um, but we never built anything that really
Speaker 1: helped people enough. So you don't have this. You have
Speaker 1: a lot of people who support single payer healthcare, but
Speaker 1: you don't have it's not the same kind of electoral
Speaker 1: coalition as you have with like we want to make
Speaker 1: abortion illegal um and hurt gay people and stuff like.
Speaker 1: That's a much more durable coalition because for one thing,
Speaker 1: they know that the Republican Party will continue to do
Speaker 1: it every time they're in office. They will hurt the
Speaker 1: people I hate, Whereas most of the people who for
Speaker 1: whom single payer health care is a voting issue, don't
Speaker 1: trust any of the candidates who you know, run on
Speaker 1: variants of it to actually do anything. It's a very
Speaker 1: frustrating and bad situation and it's going to kill us
Speaker 1: all or not, that's not really my place to determine. Uh, Teresa,
Speaker 1: you want to plug your pluggable. Sure, you can follow
Speaker 1: my podcast it's called you Can't Tell Me Anything. If
Speaker 1: you haven't heard Evan's episode yet, um, you gotta go back.
Speaker 1: It's one of my earlier guests, but you definitely pick
Speaker 1: it up. And I think I'm gonna I already said
Speaker 1: this in the last one, but I'm selling hat to
Speaker 1: say I can't tell me Daddy. So follow me at
Speaker 1: Larissachi on Twitter and Instagram for those links.