WTW5: Houston Won't Admit There's A Problem

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:41 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke. This is episode 5. I'm Thomas Smith, and here we are, the fourth and final installment on the James Webb Space Telescope naming controversy, the absolutely terrible, dishonest coverage by Michael Powell of New York Times, the incredibly frustrating and cowardly response by NASA to hide behind a one-sentence statement, and all that stuff. We're finally getting to the history, and you may notice this episode is out way later than I thought, and that's because I accidentally did a hardcore history. A hardcore history happened to me. I didn't mean for it, but it happened. Here's thing. I have so many things to tell you about why this episode is late and kind of what it means for the show going forward, since I'm still feeling it out here, you know, figuring this out, but I don't want to bog down this episode. So I'm going to release a sort of bonus fireside chat, as it were, to patrons.

0:01:31 Thomas: That'll be all levels on patreon.com/wherethereswoke. So I'll just save it all for that. I don't want to bug down the episode because we have so much to talk about. I have saved some great stuff. There's some real smoking guns, more of them. I mean, there's whole firing squad of smoking guns by the time we're done with this whole thing. And the thing they killed was the New York Times Integrity. There's Some Really Astonishing Stuff. And there's just some fascinating history. Now, obviously, it's dark period of history. It sucks. It's depressing. But it's also interesting. And I learned so much. And I love learning. Even when it's the bad stuff, we're at least learning more about our real history because we weren't taught it. I shouldn't speak for you. I was not taught our real story. And it is good to learn it. But before we get to all that, just want to give a quick plug for the Patreon. Patreon.com/wherethereswoke.

0:02:17 Thomas: Lydia and I just released a bonus episode. This one is for the second tier of patrons and up. And it is about the amazing atheist, TJ Kirk, based on the Elevator Gate episode. That was episode one of this show. We had some people claim, I had some listeners claim here and there that TJ Kirk has changed. He regrets what he did, et cetera, et cetera. To varying degrees, the claims were made. Some were pretty strong. Some were like, oh, I think he maybe changed a little bit. And so I wanted to see, you know, I wanted to see if that was true. And we watched some videos, some newer videos, and Lydia and I had a great time breaking that down. And that is on the Patreon feed, patreon.com/wherethereswoke. Hope you enjoyed it. If you are a patron, if not get on that, it's great. And of course you enjoy ad free episodes, each and every episode, at least one bonus thing a month, possibly more.

0:03:03 Thomas: All right. Well, with that out of the way, I think we should start real quick by reestablishing the burden here, the burden of proof. What are we even talking about here? The key question, which is, does he really deserve to be the name of this very, very important telescope, this massive $10 billion, decades-long scientific project, the results of which are going to be used worldwide? His name will be all over everything. Is he worthy of that honor? And I'm pretty sure that probably most of you are on my side that we don't even need to do this episode to evaluate that. This is the history episode. We're really going to dig into like some of the case for and against it just historically, but I think already it shouldn't be named after him. Let me refresh you on some facts. No other telescope in history, in NASA history, has been named for an administrator.

0:03:52 Thomas: Very important job, don't get me wrong, but not a scientist, not a discoverer of some great thing, some effect, some dark matter, nothing. Not like Hubble discovering the acceleration of the universe expanding and all that. Just an administrator. Second, the decision went against NASA policy at the time. The NASA policy for naming things was not followed in 2002 when this telescope was named. So in my opinion, in my moral philosophical opinion, the burden of proof for should this guy's name be taken off, get your James Webb name out the telescope's damn mouth. I think the burden of proof for that should be pretty low. Honestly, I think that you're naming a one thing, a thing of one of thing. This is a singular, unbelievable accomplishment.

0:04:38 Thomas: You have, let me check billions of possible humans now and through history to choose from, by the way, you even have like some other nouns to choose from, you know, like discovery. I don't know. That's a bad, I'm sure there's other ones. They've, they've started to name stuff after those kinds of things, not even names of people. So in terms of your choices, you've got billions of people and that's being a little facetious. You've got definitely thousands, tens of thousands of significant people, people of historical importance who may be a better fit here. So that's where I'm coming from. You may not necessarily be coming from that same angle. That's fine. But I think even meeting a higher burden, I think we will be able to do that. Meeting my lower burden, easy. There's almost no upside here, so just change the name. But I think we could even meet a bit of a higher burden as we continue on this episode.

0:05:25 Thomas: So that having been established, I think we should reset what you've been told by the paper of record and the podcast of record, as I've said. Broadly speaking, the daily episode goes through this narrative of how at first it's these two articles in 2015 and they say, yeah, James Webb was responsible for firing these gay men. And also here's this horrible quote that he definitely said about gay people. Bam, case closed. And then the The podcast takes you through the narrative of Hakeem Oluseyi, not a historian, doing, for some reason, historical research almost on behalf of NASA. And in the last episode, we unraveled that web of how bullshit that was. But anyway, set that aside. So the way the Daily presented it to you, the first kind of charge was this homophobic quote, horrible quote, that was attributed to James Webb.

0:06:14 Thomas: And Oluseyi did some research, and lo and behold, actually it was Humelsine who said it. We're to leave that particular point be for now. The Hey, bad quote about really old-timey, terrible talk about homosexuals. By the way, content note, we are going to get some of that in this episode. The one redeeming factor of this old-imey homophobia is it's just fucking hilarious. I got to say, obviously, it's horrible. It's evil. But there's like old ladies born in 1890 trying to like express what the homosexuals do. And it's just so funny how little these people understand gay people at all. But as a content note, there will be some things like that and some things said that obviously are horrible, very terrible sentiments expressed. So the second claim is where we pick up here in the podcast. Okay,

0:06:57 Clip: Hmm. What about the second accusation that Webb fired gay employees? It wasn't James Webb. Put simply, he didn't do that. So it was a case of mistaken identity. That appeared to be the case to me. Everything was done by John Purifoyle and Carlisle Humelsine. Who were two other employees at the State Department. That's right. It was done other officials at the state department who were essentially in charge of working with the United States Senate in prosecuting both this Red Scare and the Lavender Scare, the Lavendar Purge. So in other words, getting rid of people, both because they might be communist sympathizers and because they're gay. You

0:07:29 Thomas: That sounds pretty convincing. It was these two other people at State. They did it. Well, now's where I am going to remind you. In the last episode, NASA's Damned Emails, I told you about, it's an amazing email. This person to me is up there with any hero of this story. This person is an intern or was an intern, sorry, under the NASA historian Brian Odom, is my understanding. It's not entirely clear because we don't know who it is publicly. It's still anonymous. But this person, you'll recall, typed up just page, I mean, at least four or five pages, like full single spacey pages of research, just like extracurricular research. This wasn't anything this intern was tasked with. This was something this intern cared deeply about this issue just as a person.

0:08:15 Thomas: They want to do this work kind of extraccurricularly on their own and just send it to their boss. It's an amount of extracurricular work that I'll just say I've never done in my life, except for this podcast, actually. Maybe this podcast where I have so much stuff that I just hits the cutting room floor. This is the one time. But anyway, this person is great. If this person ever hears this, this NASA intern, or if anybody who knows this NASA internship ever hears this, please put me in touch or get in touch. I would love to interview you. I just am so impressed by this particular component of the story. I would almost just read this entire email. We'll see. But I'm going to read a particular particular part in response to this. So you just heard, hey, it wasn't James Webb. This is the other two guys. It was the one-armed man, Carlisle Humelsine, or John Purifoy.

0:09:00 Thomas: Delightfully old-timey names. So now to a very relevant passage of the intern's amazing email here. Quote, it is also worth considering the chain of command at the State Department at that time. There was only one undersecretary of state, and that was Webb. Deputy Undersecretary Purifoy, and later Deputy Undersecretary Humelsine, who replaced Purifoy, reported to only one direct supervisor during that time, Webb. Webb had one direct supervisor, and that was Secretary of State Dean Acheson, end quote. It wasn't James Webb at all. It was some other guys at the state. That strikes me as a little misleading. Yeah, no, it was literally his direct report. James Webb was the number two guy. Number one at the Department of State, of course, is the Secretary of state.

0:09:47 Thomas: That's number one. And number two, James Webb. And the two people who held the position one after the other that are being kind of blamed or given, oh no, it was them. It was all those two guys. They are number three. This is suggesting that, oh, we don't have to worry about it. The people responsible were Chex Notes. The first rung down from James Webb, the direct report to James Webb was the one responsible. Pretty misleading. Gosh, I don't know how many of you have tangible experience with this. Again, I worked at the state of California. I'm not saying it's identical. I didn't work in, you know, national security kind of stuff, whatever, the Department of State. But, like, there are a lot of similarities, basically. Working in government is its own distinct thing. And let me just tell you, I would be pretty skeptical of anyone that high.

0:10:34 Thomas: We're talking an undersecretary, so the number two in a big agency, taking no responsibility for what their direct report was doing. That's all them. You know, they go and they persecute gay people kind of on their own time. I don't really have anything to do with that. That is bananas. I'm sorry. That is not at all how anything works. Maybe you can imagine some extreme circumstances that might mitigate James Webb's culpability. Maybe. But I would certainly think that a rational person would put the burden on that. I would need a lot of evidence to prove that you weren't culpable. And that's important because we're dealing with history. We're dealing with 60, 50, no, gosh, math. We're doing with math years ago, 73 years ago. And we don't have all the documents.

0:11:20 Thomas: I'm gonna bring up an example where you would really think we would have documents and we don't. We have very few documents. It's very difficult to ever say with any certainty that you've even searched all the document we do have for some of this stuff, let alone that if you've done that, which maybe you have, maybe you've been able to locate everything, that that means you've seen everything there would have been to know. No, so many documents would not exist still, would have been destroyed. Maybe stuff wasn't written down. You know, there's so many reasons. So my point is, if the person directly under you did a really bad thing, I'm going to need some pretty hardcore proof that you aren't responsible for that. My default would be, yeah, that's you directed them to do that probably. Or at the very least, as is the case here, they may have been doing this before you came to the department, but you got to point it in as their boss.

0:12:09 Thomas: And so, okay, I won't blame you for anything that happened before you were there. But like, if someone puts you in charge and then gives you a report, "Oh, here's what we're doing, uh, we got this massive program of firing gay people horribly and ruining their lives." Yeah, no, now that's your responsibility. You are the decision maker, and you can make decisions is what you could do. So you are then responsible for that. There's, "Thomas, however, isn't that unfair because there was that executive order? So James Webb had no choice, really." And this is where I'm going to say something that might blow your mind. It blew my mind when I first read it. And that is this. The executive order allegedly banning gay people, we'll talk more about that in specifics later, that executive order was not in place until 1953. And if you'll recall, James Webb left the State Department in 1952.

0:12:57 Thomas: So therefore, anything that James Webb and Purifoy, Humelsine, all those folks, anything they did was before there was any quote-unquote law of the land about it. I was astonished to learn this. And when I did, I went back to look like, did Michael Powell explicitly tell me that or did I just get that impression? And Powell was very careful not to specifically make an inaccurate statement about the timeline. However, for a lot of the discussion, the two time periods are kind of blurred a little bit. There's like a general defense of Webb that I couldn't have known and it was the law of the land. And while technically speaking, Powell was careful not to explicitly say that that applied during the State Department years. I'll be honest, I just assumed it did based on that coverage. And I know others were under that impression as well.

0:13:42 Thomas: And that seems very calculated to me. I think it would have been good journalism to just go ahead and explicitly say, "Oh, by the way, that executive order, it came after the State Department years for James Webb." This may not have been sinister. I guess if I were to Michael Powell's advocate, I would say that because they so easily dismissed, missed the State Department years as, "Oh, it's not James Webb's fault, it was Purifoy." Maybe in their minds it's like, "Well, I don't even need, that's the end of story, not his fault at all, it was somebody else done, bam, don't you need to think about the law of the land stuff." I'll tell you though, there was a lot of blending in that episode, that daily episode. It gave me the impression, I don't know, I can't say it was intentional, but I certainly, this was news to me that this executive order did not exist when James Webb was at the State Department.

0:14:31 Thomas: But let's reset and actually get to what did happen at the state department. We're gonna spend some time there. These are the years 1949 to 1952, James Webb's tenure there. Let's get into some depth on this. A lot of interesting history here I'm not the historian I am reading other historians, I'm relaying some stuff, but it's fascinating. I'm not going to draw broad conclusions. As I've said, you can draw your conclusions. You can read other historians. You can figure out what you want to believe, but holy shit, there's some fascinating stuff here. And it paints a much different picture than you've been told. So I'm going to get into a little more detail about the Lavender Scare. Again, I'm so hesitant to do anything like this because history is specifically not my strong suit at all. But fortunately, there is a very good source for me on this from the actual archives from NARA, the NARA website, the National Archives and Records Administration.

0:15:20 Thomas: And this is written by Judith Adkins, an archivist at the Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. This is someone who I've seen referred to as quite an authority on this, someone with a lot of knowledge. This is a great source, as far as I can tell, from everything I can tell. And his write-up is very good. Now, here's the other thing that what I also think makes this a very good source. This was not written as a part of this controversy. Not that it would be disqualified if it were, but I think just lends a little more credibility. This was written about the Lavender Scare in general in 2016, and it has some really good storytelling. It's obviously horrible history, but it is fascinating. It also got some of the delightful old-timey homophobia, which, look, we're here, we're dealing with homophobia. We might as well enjoy ourselves. Like, we might as well enjoy it. Now, I just told you there was no law of the land back then that didn't exist.

0:16:07 Thomas: There was no law saying we had to fire gay people. Did not exist. There was no executive order, didn't exist. There wasn't even a directive to do this in place. There were political reasons people were doing this, that the Department of State was doing this, that senators were kind of looking into this McCarthyism, all that stuff. There are political reasons and bigotry reasons. And it's a complicated thing that I am not qualified to tell you about, but let it suffice to say people weredoing this as a combination. People were firing gay people already before there was any directive to here as a result of a lot of things brewing from what I can tell. Obviously, the Cold War and Red Scare. From what I can understand, it seems as though it was a problem that they weren't finding any actual communists because, you know, McCarthy would just make up, I've got a list of 799.

0:16:55 Thomas: I don't know if you know this. He just made up that number. Did you know that? McCarthy's famous Red Scape thingy where he's like, I have in my hands a list. He didn't just do that one time. Like he would do that speech all the time and it would be a different number every time. Fucking crazy. I cannot believe. Anyway, that's another story. But they weren't finding many communists, if any, from what I can tell, but they were finding gay people or people participating in homosexual behavior, I guess is kind of what you would say. And actually it is kind of important to look at it that way for our purposes because they didn't understand these things that well back then, obviously. Nowadays, if I offhandedly refer to one of my gay friends, pretty straightforward. Like, oh, yeah, OK, that person, it's a man. They're interested in men. Back then it was a little different because, for one, everyone was in such denial about this.

0:17:42 Thomas: And there was also pathologized. You know, there were cases of people who were, quote unquote, known homosexuals. Some people were bold enough to kind of be out like that. But for a lot of just the cis, white, or honestly, sometimes closeted people, but ostensibly the normies in control of everything, it wasn't really looked at as like, oh, that's a gay person. Oh, that's straight person. It might've been looked at almost more like a porn addiction or something, you know? Like, I'm not saying it's exactly the same, but like often you see this language where it's like, okay, we caught him with a man, but you know, they just, whatever. People do that sometimes. And like, I don't think we need to make a big deal about this. That's important because within that, there was a lot of room for interpretation, a lot of room for interpretation. And if you were any kind of decision maker in any given case of a gay employee being uncovered, you always had the option of saying, I think, look, they were a little drunk.

0:18:39 Thomas: They probably, you know, who hasn't been a little weird when they're drunk? For any of these cases, if James Webb was anywhere in the decision making process, which which I think it's pretty clear he was, even though we don't have direct evidence of him deciding, like literally giving a yay or nay on someone's fate, but he was in authority, high, high up in authority at places where this happened. You always had the option of saying, I don't think he's, it's fine.

Like probably made a mistake, no big deal. And my point is the podcast tries to set this up as though you would have had to be this great moral crusader ahead of your time. You would have had to be Martin Luther King, but for gay people, stand up to the president, march in his office and say, I'm not doing it. That's a false dichotomy. You absolutely could have directed to your direct report, or by the way, you probably could have replaced them.

I'm pretty sure he could have fired whoever you wanted, uh, if you needed to. And you could have said, hey, I just kind of lay off on the look, I, I don't, yeah.

0:19:38 Thomas: Okay, it's 1949. We all agree gay people, you know, they have problems. We We all agree, but like, look, I know a guy, he did a thing, he blew a guy thing, whatever. You have that option as an authority to say, let's back off on that. Let's, this case, for example, this person here, they were found in a car with a dude, whatever, maybe they're just talking. We don't need to fire all these people. You always have that options. You can decide for yourself how realistic you think that is, but is not correct to set this up as a dichotomy between obeying orders, which by the way, did not exist at that time when he was at the State Department, obeying orders that you could not possibly go against, or you'd have to be a truth teller, freedom fighter, march in that president's office and punch him in face and say, I'm not doing, you know, that's a false dichotomy.

0:20:26 Thomas: There's massive, massive room to fudge this if you want, if you're in a place of decision making power. And you know what? I'll back that up. All that is an introduction to this very brilliant piece that I'm going to read you some of by Judith Atkins called These People Are Frightened to Death, Congressional Investigations in the lavender scare. This piece is excellent, and it disproves the thesis that it was the time, no one knew any better, there's nothing you could do. Well, no, actually. One thing that's very interesting about this history and about this specific piece is we actually see a range of responses to what's happening. Now, it's not as though everybody at that time had the same identical view, even in government, about this. Let's go through it. Let's talk about some of these different examples. So whereas before going into this research, I was kind of given the impression that the Lavender Purge was a thing that came from, I don't know, McCarthyism, maybe the president or something as a result of McCarthy.

0:21:21 Thomas: And it was kind of a top-down thing. I don't think this is unreasonable to have thought this based on the Daily episode, and that there's a decent argument that James Webb was just following orders, even though that's not really, not again, it's not a reason why you should name a telescope after him, but OK, that's, there's at least an argument there for whatever it's worth that like, yeah, I mean, there's not much you could do about it at that time.

That just, he's going along with it. Top down, had to do it. Well, as it turns out, it is not so much the case that the Lavender Purge was a thing that was the top down and the State Department was like, oh, I don't have any choice. I guess it was actually caused almost by the State. Based on this article, it's pretty powerful evidence because as McCarthy was doing his thing, his famous speech which I just referenced, when he has here a list of 205 known communists working in the State Department was in 1950, and only a week later who should be testifying before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Appropriations other than our friend John Purifoy, who again was the number, I guess, three in the entire State Department, directly under James Webb. And apropos of, I won't say apropo of nothing, but not directly caused by anybody, that from what I'm reading, this seems to be due to political reasons, maybe public pressure.

I think McCarthy's big speech about communists at the State Department certainly would have caused some pressure there for people to say, hey, no, we don't, you know, here's what we've done about it or whatever. That's my understanding. And it makes sense. I mean, obviously, as much as McCarthy was was completely full of shit.

0:22:57 Thomas: I think his fear-mongering worked, as far as I know. And so Purifoy is testifying, and he reveals that the department had ousted 91 homosexual employees as security risks. But think about how that happened there. And encourage you to read this if you'd like to get the full picture. There's a lot here. It's really fascinating. But again, the Judith Atkins piece, just Google Judith Atkins, these people are frightened to death. Consider what what that meant. Testifying publicly that the State Department had ousted 91 homosexual employees was not a thing anyone forced anyone to do. Purifoy did that. Now, here's something that I just, I am as sure about this as basically anything. If you work in the government and Purifroy, James Webb's direct report testifies before the Senate publicly, you're going to know what he's say you're going to be involved in.

0:23:51 Thomas: I would be amazed. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong. I am utilizing, again, my experience with the state. People I worked with testified before the state Senate, the California State Senate. It's kind of similar, honestly. It is just not as important, I guess. I never did. But when you testify to the Senate, for example, you're not just going in there like, hey, yeah, I'll just wing it. I'm going to do what feels feels right for me, boss. You know, don't even worry about it. I got this. You don't need to know. That's not happening. I guarantee you both the Secretary of State and the Undersecretary of State, the number one and the number two, were very well aware of this testimony. And in case this wasn't entirely clear, this revelation was not the result of like some proceeding in which which Purifoy had to tell them about this and then someone, you know, publicly released that information and it was, oh man, this exploded.

0:24:46 Thomas: No, no. This was very deliberately timed from what I can tell from this article. For example, here's sentence, quote, however, Purify's statement about the 91 coming as it did right after McCarthy's two speeches sparked a press frenzy and public outcry, end quote. This wasn't optional thing. This Was not the law. This This was not even an executive order at this time. This was something that the direct report under James Webb did, and it stoked the flames. It actually, from what I am seeing here, again, if this article is correct and if this article is comprehensive, I'm not a historian, I don't know, but I'm led to believe that this is pretty thorough in terms of what it's covering. It looks like this was almost the inciting incident of the scare itself, because imagine a world in which Purifoy did not do this. So McCarthy is going off about the Red Scare and, oh, I have a list of communists.

0:25:33 Thomas: These counterfactuals are very difficult. But when I look at that and I see that McCarthy is doing his McCarthy-ing, and then a week later, this deputy undersecretary testifies publicly, oh yeah, we got rid of 91 homosexuals. And then as a result of that, there's a public outcry and a Senate committee is formed. And this committee is the first of two. So this is the First One. This is like a smaller one. The Wherry Hill Investigation. It's just two senators, Kenneth Wherry, a Republican, and Senator Jay Lister Hill, a Democrat. They took on the first thing. Just to kind of finish the point I was making, this leads to more action, and then that leads to a bigger committee, and then that leads to the actual writing of the executive order. Doesn't that seem like a pretty strong causal chain? I'm led to believe it is. So it's the tail wagging the dog or the dog wagging, I don't know, one of the, it's whichever one you don't think it should be.

0:26:24 Thomas: This wasn't a top-down thing that Webb and Purifoy and anybody was just responding to. They proactively started this. They proactively put the focus on gay people, publicly created outcry. This outcry led directly to a Senate investigation. That Senate investigation led directly to a second, larger Senate investigation, and that led directly to the Lavender Purge and the executive order. I mean, that's pretty fucking crazy. Again, it's conceivable that Purifoy somehow just did this on his own. I guess it's conceivable, but I don't know, man. You do not let an underling testify willy-nilly to the Senate creating a public outcry without leadership knowing. That doesn't exist. I'm sorry. Someone could tell me if I'm getting something wrong, but it would be impossible for me to believe that.

0:27:13 Thomas: Meaning that I think there's pretty solid evidence that James Webb not only participated, but took like a pretty causal role in the entire thing existing to begin with. It is not inconceivable to me that had James Webb been a different person or had different values, even within the times, even within reasonable expectations of the times. Who knows what could have been avoided? Maybe that the first Senate investigation wouldn't have happened. I don't know. Maybe it would have happened some other way, maybe. But I don't know. The State Department was pretty instrumental. And Purifoy's testimony, I'm led to believe, caused this outcry. I mean, I think it's realistic. Logistic, again, I'm not drawing any broad conclusions. It seems to me to be plausible that had James Webb had different values, he could have disrupted this in ways that are completely consistent with the times and don't require you to be a soothsayer from the future who knows what, that's nonsense.

0:28:03 Thomas: That's a false dichotomy. Historians, correct me if I'm getting something wrong, but there's more. I have a lot more here. So then we get to this first committee, as I said, the Wherry Hill investigation. I think the important thing that happens here is they want to know more about, like, okay, OK, so this guy Purifoy just said there's been 92 firing. So what happened to them? You know, like, where are they? Because where there's H and W H E R R Y, where maybe back then they probably would have said that, where he wanted to know, well, wait a minute, you fired those 91 moral weaklings in quotes. Did any of them make their way back into government service? The senator wanted to know and the relevant investigators to the Senate here determined that like actually 13 had been rehired and it outlined steps to remove them again, which is so fucking depressing.

0:28:48 Thomas: And so the main result I'm seeing of this Senate committee, the small committee, is, well, shit, there's no system to make sure that when we get rid of these people for the crime of being gay again, not actually by law, but anyway when we can rid of them, that they're flagged so that they can't just return to some other branch of the government. And this gets actually pretty dastardly. It actually involves quite a lot. That's not just a casual, like a Senator being like, "Oh man, we should have some system for this." Like, this was systematic. This took doing. What they did involved many things, but one of them was coordinating with the judges and the kind of the police in DC to make sure that when they used to catch, maybe, I don't know, two guys doing something in a car or whatever, DC police and the judges and all that, my understanding is from this article, they would charge them a fine, you know, and be like, "All right, you rascals."

0:29:39 Thomas: I don't know, something like that. Like, it was the point was it didn't really stain their permanent record in an easily findable way. And so now enter these fucking assholes who want to make sure that no gay person can ever work again for the government, and they're saying, well, shit, that's not okay, they get fined, they get cited, and then they're on their merry way, we have no way of finding what happened to them.

So they say and this is actually more of a result of the second committee, which I'll get to, the Hoey Committee what eventually happens is they influence the District of Columbia court process. Quote, "This meeting sparked a conference of all the city judges later in the month, resulting in a new judicial order," which, by the way, I didn't know that that's how that worked, but OK, back into it.

"That order prohibited forfeiture in disorderly conduct cases of a sexual nature and required that $300 cash or $500 bond be posted." It. So by that procedure, Quinn observed, we will force these individuals to come into court and they will either have to stand trial or enter a plea. These changes ratcheted up the financial penalty as well as the public shaming, end quote. So they were avoiding greater humiliation and a permanent stain and losing their job, all this, all these consequences. They're sort of avoiding that by just kind of paying the fine and just like, okay, quiet.

And then apparently these judges, I'm not exactly sure the nature of how this works, but one way or the other, by requiring that bond, that required people to actually have to like put their name to what they're doing by pleading or standing trial. And now it's all public. It's not every single time anyone was caught doing anything like this. Now it's a public thing that stains the record forever. God, this was horrible. This is really fucking horrible, you know?

0:31:18 Thomas: But I got ahead of us a little bit because now we're going back to the Wherry Hill investigation. Quick note, earlier I said, you know, I was talking about how we don't have all the records for anything. Here's one example. I just find this interesting. Quote, no records from this investigation survive beyond press coverage and two published reports, one from Hill and a longer one from Wherry, end quote. Now, I know this is the Senate, so it's not exactly identical to the State Department or NASA or whatever. But like, just as an example, we know this investigation happened. We have press coverage. We have two published reports, but there's nothing else. Like we don't have any other records from it of the kind of the process, the thinking that went into it, behind the scenes stuff. We don't know any of that. I don't Know why, but it's just an example of like, you absolutely cannot expect that if you don't find something, it doesn't exist or never existed in, as far as I can tell in history research, that's, you just cannot assume that.

0:32:11 Thomas: I mean, it's almost like the fossil record or something like you can't, can't be like, ah, we're missing a transitional fossil. Well, I guess the whole theory is done. No, it's like, okay, we don't have that fossil for some reason. And you also can't assume it does exist, of course, in the case of records. But like you really, really, really cannot say with authority that something does not exist just because you looked for it. And if you'll recall, there were a lot of very certain statements made on that podcast. I'm going to maybe make a little super cut of them. Maybe I'll play it for you. And so as a result of this smaller investigation, then they're like, all right, now let's do a bigger subcommittee. And now this is the Hoey Committee investigation. So now we've gone to three Democrats and three Republicans. There's a woman mentioned Margaret Chase Smith.

0:32:56 Thomas: It's always fascinating to see because back then, I believe almost exclusively if a woman was in Congress, that meant she had a husband who like died or something and then got the seat that way in some way. And when it comes to Margaret Chase Smith, obviously no time for a whole story, but her husband was in the house and when he was seriously ill, he told people, hey, I'm not going to run. Instead, my wife's going to run. She's the best person to continue what I want to do. And she won and then she won a Senate election. But I only mention her because there's some really funny old timey stuff. Oh, this is so good. Good. And by the way, Smith was the only woman in the Senate at this time. Here's quote just again, we're here.

0:33:42 Thomas: We have to emotionally deal with all the horrendous crap here. We might as well get to, you know, have a laugh here and there. This is delightful. Quote, Ruth Young, the committee's chief clerk, suggested in an oral history years later that the presence of Senator Smith, the only woman in the Senate, constrained discussion. Quote. You could have been talking about the weather. Young recollected. You never heard a bunch of hearings with so little sex. End internal quote, I suppose. Indeed, Flanagan later recalled Senator Hoey asking him to advise Smith to skip the hearings. She insisted on attending. Hoey complained that he had wanted to ask more questions, but could not do so with her there. End quote. I just love the idea that, I don't know, for all we know, Maybe different some old-timey homophobia was actually prevented by old- timey sexism?

0:34:32 Thomas: I would like to inquire what the gentleman did next with his throbbing member, but there is a lady present, so you may go. I'd time. And now we're getting to, I think, a really, really important part of this article. One of the main reasons I've been reading stuff from it to you goes to the question of, did people just have to follow orders? Was this the kind of thing where, yeah, it was the times you had to comply? Good counter evidence against that would be, well, did everyone just comply? Did everyone respond the same way to this kind of pressure, to this type of thing? Well, let's see. As this committee was trying to ascertain the number of suspected homosexuals investigated or removed from employment and all that, They sent out a questionnaire to all branches of the military, plus 53 civilian departments and agencies ranging from the large and prominent like State Treasury and Justice to the small and obscure like the American Battle Monument Commission and the Philippine War Damage Commission.

0:35:26 Thomas: Committee investigators then interviewed agency officials and summarized these conversations in memoranda, end quote. So in this, we can look at a range of responses. It is definitely true that most agencies came out strongly against the idea of having gay employees. That wasn't very cool with most people, but not everybody. For example, Howard Colvin, acting director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, asserted that homosexuals could make good employees. Quote, Since it is possible, according to our understanding of medical and psychiatric opinion on the subject, for a homosexual to lead a normal, well-adjusted life, we do not consider that such a person necessarily constitutes a bad security risk. We believe that each case would have to be decided on its own merits. End quote. Quote, certain agencies may have been more concerned about homosexuality and others more inclined to turn a blind eye.

0:36:16 Thomas: It is impossible to know whether the subtle distinctions in these letters reflect the particular agency's culture, the attitude of the individual writing the response, or some combination of factors. But there is at least evidence here for a range of opinion, end quote. There's more though, because we also got someone, John Shover, or Shover but it's like Shover like somebody shoves someone. That's a cool name. John Shover, director of personnel at the National Labor Relations Board. About him, investigator James Thomas said, quote, his attitude at the time did not appear to be too cooperative, end quote. When Thomas proposed an in-person meeting to discuss two cases of homosexuality in the department, Shover balked. According to Thomas, quote. He more or less refused to receive me for this purpose and said rather bluntly, I am not going to let you see any of our files, end unquote.

0:37:03 Thomas: This occasional resistance and the subtle variations in opinion evident in the committee's records suggest that at least at the start of the scare, each agency may have had its own nuanced stance toward homosexuality, end quote. So there's always option, it's fucking government, there's all these options, you could have always downplayed, you could always, how do they know, they don't fucking know.

It's just a Senate picture, that, today, picture the Senate committee for investigating Hunter Biden's dick, and then they ask every department, hey, everybody, buddy, do you, all the federal agencies get, do you have any information on Hunter Biden's laptop or whatever? There's always room to be like, no, man, we don't care, whatever. What are they gonna do? Theoretically, they could do subpoenas and then there could be penalties if they don't, but we've seen that doesn't turn into anything.

There is so much latitude to provide not much help while not even looking like you're not cooperating. There is such a lot of latitude for that, I swear. So this, this idea that your hands were tied, you had to fire all the gay people and give this committee, the Senate committee, all your information. No, it's not true. It's not truth. Now, I will be fair and say, I think there are political reasons why the State Department likely, you know, there's pressure. There's obviously political pressure. I don't think that justifies much or excuses much. They started this whole thing to begin with, as I explained a moment ago.

Like, yes, there is political pressure, but it seems pretty avoidable to have given a speech causing public outcry about gay employees and announcing that you fired 92 of them or whatever. Like, I don't think that was inevitable. It seems like there's a lot of discretion involved there. Further, more discretion involved here. You know, political pressure is what it is, but I don't think you can just absolve everyone of their responsibility because politics.

0:38:48 Thomas: I think you're still responsible for how you respond to that pressure. I gotta read this. This is in the category of fucking hilariously stupid propaganda about gay people. Here's one here, quote, This clandestine camaraderie they establish, meaning obviously gay people, necessitously brings to government people of homosexual tendencies. Even though you hire him as a janitor, he tends to bring in a fellow who might become the chief of the division. End quote. Because they always come in packs, you know, or something. I don't know. It's just so fucking, yes, those gays, you think you can hire one as a janitor, but his friend, all of a sudden they'll be president because they had the connection to the janitor. It's so fucking stupid.

0:39:34 Thomas: Oh, it's so good. They even took measures so that if someone was arrested, say in California, for being gay or whatever, doing sex acts, then it would get back to, somehow, you know, they didn't have the internet, I don't know how, but it would get back to DC and they could lose their job in DC. I mean, it is just hell. I mean, imagine the hell this would be for anyone with any queer identity at this time. The stress, I mean, it's just horrible.

Back to the kind of funny stuff, there's also some stuff that spirals out to where, like, a staffer in Congress is on the list of known homosexuals, and then there's like, oh, wait a minute, who discriminates against the discriminators? And they realize, oh boy, the hole in this whole system is there might be homosexuals in Congress and we wouldn't even know, and so it kind of spins out into, like, making sure they're covering all their bases. There, all right. And so, coming to the end of what I wanted to talk about in this article, I just want to cover this part because I know I vacillate between, like, holy shit, this is depressing, and also, honestly, it's ridiculous. I mean, we saw that a lot with Trump too.

It's like things he would do would be, oh my god, this is ridiculous, but also, look at how much, much harm it's causing. And it's this weird Schrodinger's depression or something, I know. It's like, it's horrible, but also it's just absurd, you know.

And I apologize if that's jarring to you, but I, I genuinely vacillate between those two things just reading this, where I'm like, oh my god, this is so funny, that they had a woman on the committee so they're afraid about asking about sex stuff, and then, from that, back to, like, the horrifying reality of, like, these poor queer, queer people just feeling like they're being hunted.

0:41:11 Thomas: The net tightening and tightening as they think of all these new measures, these new ways to sort of document everything and make sure they're getting that scarlet letter, so to speak. It's horrible. I mean, it's absolutely horrible. And the article tries to drill that home. So I just wanted to read a little bit of this here. Quote, unlike the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare featured no public naming of names and no dramatic spectacles in which the accused testified. That relative anonymity saved lives. Public exposure almost certainly would have led to more suicides. Yet this feature of the scare also meant that gay men and women remained vague specters, not real people. Moreover, that anonymity tends to skew perception of the scare even today by making it seem abstract. If you read only the Hoey Committee's published generalities and statistics, it's easy to see those caught up in the purge as numbers on a page rather than a particular human being.

0:42:03 Thomas: In, in the unpublished committee records, however, the individuals emerge just a bit in passing references and fleeting anecdotes. One man who lost his job had married, fathered a child, and tried his best to be exclusively heterosexual before slipping up. Quote, we would have never caught this fellow except for this one time, end quote. Another fired employee worried about his dependence. Quote, he cares for sick parents and now has no source of income, end unquote. Another, quote, committed suicide by leaping from a bridge, end quote. These kind of fragments scattered in the committee's transcripts, memoranda, correspondence and other unpublished records suggest the fuller truth and tragedy, end quote. Yeah, that's why, you know, this isn't something, I don't think you can mess around with any tolerance of this of any kind and any honoring of this at any kind.

0:42:52 Thomas: I mean, this is this is horrible. This is absolutely horrific. I think that that blind spot and that bias is exactly what's often at play with a lot of this. Oh, what are you making a big deal for? Or so we have a statue of the thing. Yeah, well, let's actually read about the harms the person you're honoring caused and what really happened. And I think when you dig into it, it's hard not to be moved by it if you are empathetic. If you are someone who it's part of your history already, I imagine, as we've seen, that people like that are already very sensitive to this. But it's often the privileged people making the decisions or the people on the sidelines who don't care or probably share some privilege. You're saying, yeah, what's the big deal? Why is this a big deal about this? Why, why is this a bit, come on, whatever, six, 70 years ago, who cares?

0:43:38 Thomas: Why does it big deal. Well, it is a big, it was a big. And I think we have to be very careful about what our blind spots are just in life. And this actually brings to mind another, God, just a random thing. I actually found this start to give you a sense of, you know, all the research spirals that happen.

I found this person because they were mentioned in one of the NASA emails as someone who had, you know, like reached out to try to get comment. And so I kind of followed up on those just to see. And most of them I already knew, but this was one I didn't. And somebody named Jason Wright, and it's just a blog, but I thought it was brilliant. I thought there's lot of really good reasoning in here.

And of course, because it's the fucking internet, it's got 10 comments and they're all shit. I don't know how those people even find it because it just seems to be some obscure blog. Blog. But anyway, I think it's really good. And wanted to read a small section of it that came to mind after what I just said. It's in the form of sort of like a Q&A.

You get the sense that he doesn't have much of a like personal dog in this fight, but is somebody who is doing a pretty good job, I Think of taking an objective stance and you know how I feel about objectivity, but if it's done in good faith, then objectivity involves actually valuing, listening to and valuing the pain of marginalized people. That's part of that. Being objective doesn't mean no emotions and not caring. It's actually, that's not objective at all.

To me, it just means trying to be fair, trying to take into account everything. And so here's a couple of the sort of Q's and A's, the FAQ format he did. One of them, for example, wasn't Webb just a man of his time? Why should we judge people in the past by the standards of today?

0:45:11 Thomas: To which he responds, "This argument all but concedes he was a bigot, which is enough to rename the telescope. But entertaining it: first of all, plenty of people at the time understood that sexual orientation had no bearing on one's ability to work at NASA. Most LGBT people understood that, for starters. Second, the argument that it made them susceptible to blackmail to foreign adversaries, and so it was objectively reasonable to fire them, is not as strong as it looks. After all, one way to fix that problem is to make it absolutely clear to employees that if they're outed, they won't lose their livelihood. Every fired gay employee is a gift to potential blackmailers, handing them leverage over other closeted employees on a silver platter. But even granting he was a man of his time, this argument completely fails. Of course, we are judging the namesake of the telescope by today's standards. Why would we choose any other?

0:45:58 Thomas: We are here today with the telescope of today. Its name should reflect today's standard. Why wouldn't it?" End quote. I just found that interesting. It's good place to put it in. Like to take you through some of the publicly available historical documents we do have about Webb and this time period and the alleged homosexual people that were fired, many of whose lives were completely ruined, and we don't have a ton by quantity, but what we do have, if you analyze it properly, if read into it properly, it tells us quite a lot. So the first major thing is June 22nd, a meeting that James Webb had with President Truman, and it seems as though this is possibly because Dean Atkinson was occupied out of the country on vacation.

0:46:43 Thomas: I don't know. For whatever reason, Webb had this meeting with the president, and it was about the Hoey Committee and what they were going to do. Now, there's some complicated stuff here that I don't know if I want to get into, but essentially there's this give and take here because Truman has already resisted many times efforts of Congress to get access to personnel files of different things. All through the late 40s, Truman wrote executive orders that he could kind of point to to say, "Hey, no, we're not turning stuff over for these reasons." That was an option. But when this happened, here's the memo. Here's Webb's memo about this meeting. Meeting with the president, Thursday, June 22nd, 1950. Homosexual investigation. That's the heading. I informed the president that Senator Hoey had wished me to find out how his committee and the executive branch could work together on the homosexual investigation.

0:47:30 Thomas: So that's what Hoey is telling Webb. And he advised me, meaning the president now, and the president advised me to say to the senator that he was sure we could find a proper basis for cooperation. He approved a suggestion, meaning Webb made the suggestion to Truman. He improved a suggestion that Mr. Murphy, Mr. Spignarn, and I see Senator Hoey on Saturday to discuss the necessary problems involving this cooperation. So June 22nd, president says, hey, tell the senator that he was sure we could find a proper basis for cooperation. I don't know exactly what is meant by those words. So we got that on June 22nd. Then Webb has Hummelstein draw up all the background info on June 24th.

0:48:16 Thomas: And that's where we get this horrible homophobic stuff about how bad homosexuality is. And Hummelsein is just giving the full breakdown and briefing of Webb of what's gone on. This is where a lot of these awful homophobic quotes come from. Here's a paragraph: "Our investigations and studies of the subject revealed that homosexuals are generally speaking undesirable as employees for a number of reasons. One, they create moral problems, I e most men who are considered by the majority of us to be normal desire not to work or associate with homosexuals. To, they are emotionally unstable, i.e. many of them have told our investigators of the inexorable pain and humiliation they would suffer if exposed to family and friends, and some have even threatened and suicide. Three, usually they live in a world all to themselves, associating and consorting with other homosexuals."

0:49:04 Thomas: Why is that a bad? Okay. "Four, they indulge in acts of perversion, which are legion and which are abhorrent and repugnant to the folk ways and mores of our American society. Five, they are immoral in their sexual behavior, seeking sexual gratification from one person one night and from another person the next, in a paltry and endless gesture at a happiness they never realized."

0:49:30 Thomas: Sorry, that got very like real all of a sudden. Oh man. You know, so many of these people, honest to God, so Many of them were closet gay people. I have no reason to suspect that Humilsign was, but I'm just imagining like that's coming from, you know, that's going from a deep place in a paltry and endless gesture at a happiness they never realize. Okay. So where we are in the timeline again, Webb knows he's going to meet. He's been directed by Truman to find a basis for cooperation. He goes, he's gonna meet with the Senate committee. He tells Humilsign, hey, type up all this stuff for me, essentially. And HumilsIGN does. It contains a lot of the most homophobic garbage you ever heard. And then he meets with them. And now we have a memorandum from that meeting.

0:50:17 Thomas: It's not written by Webb, but it says, "Yesterday afternoon, Jim Webb of State, Charlie Murphy, and I went up to see Senator Hoey about this matter at his request." So, just process of elimination, I guess this is Mr. Spingarn, or Spin-Garn. I don't know. Spinger? That seems to be who's writing this. Because Webb suggested that the three of them go meet with the committee. So, seems like that happened. "We spent over an hour discussing the whole situation, and a most useful interchange of views took place. Mr. Webb gave the senator some material on the subject which humil sign of State had prepared." Well, there you go, right there. That's already smoking gun. What are we even still doing here? So Webb asked humil signed to type up a bunch of stuff. That stuff is homophobic garbage, to a monstrous degree. That contains tons of justifications for treating gay people horribly, for firing them, for ruining their lives.

0:51:10 Thomas: And Webb takes that, reads it and says, yep, let's give this to the committee on ruining people's lives. That was optional. That was not inevitable. James Webb could have told Humilsign, again, someone he has full authority over, this is pretty extreme, man. Like let's dial this down a notch. I don't think this is as bad as you're making it out to be. I think that gay people have worked here. It's been fine. Sign, as I keep saying, plenty of room for different actions, even by the standards of the time. But no, Webb gave that. This was optional. This Was not mandatory. Webb could have taken that memo from Humolstein and been like, oh boy. All right. This is, this is some homophobic shit. Okay. Thanks Humolsein. Have a good weekend. Say hi to the wife for me.

0:51:55 Thomas: And then just not used it. Just been like full of fucking, I'm throwing that away. Jeez. That's some hateful garbage right there. I know it's the, I know It's 1950, but whoo. And Then he could have presented a different narrative or different materials to Senator Hoey, but no, he gave that to Senator Hoey. That's huge. That added more fuel to the fire. Perhaps you could argue ignorance or a lack of understanding of the significance of that, maybe, but Webb contributed to this. He contributed in a meaningful way, in a very meaningful way to this entire effort by sharing this homophobic garbage with the Senate committee. I'll continue. I also gave the Senator some background material on the subject and a list of qualified medical witnesses, which I had prepared on the basis of advice from Surgeon General Scheel and others.

0:52:40 Thomas: We suggested that the hearings begin with testimony by competent medical authorities on the nature and scope of the problem, this testimony being designed to put the problem in proper perspective. After that could come testimony from senior government officials, officers, about the security problems involved. We noted in this connection that homosexuals were one category of security risks, and we discussed some of the other categories. The senators seemed to be very receptive to the ideas advanced about the hearings. The question came up about the subcommittee requesting government agencies for names and files of suspected or actual homosexual employees. Senator Hoey said that he had talked to Peyton Ford about the matter in terms of getting the statistics on the situation rather than the names and the files. Peyton Ford had said that justice would collect this information for the sub committee.

0:53:25 Thomas: Senator hoey thought it would be best if the sub committee collected it directly or or possibly through the Civil Service Commission. Mr. Murphy agreed with this viewpoint. Mr. Murphy expressed the hope that the subcommittee would not find it necessary to call on the agencies for names and files. He said that on the basis of the 1948 presidential directives, the agencies would have to decline and refer the matter to the White House, which would put it right in the president's lap. Mr. Murray hoped this could be avoided. The senator indicated that he shared that hope, though he could not, of course, be certain what his subcommittee could do. Do. He indicated that it was a dirty job, which he had not wanted, but that he was going to do his best to do it right and in a quiet and unspectacular way. I was impressed by his straightforwardness and sincerity about the whole matter.

0:54:10 Thomas: Stopping there, reminder, Hoey is a Democrat and he's expressing like, yeah, am I even, I don't really want to be in this position. I don't want to have to do it. Well, shoot, that sounds like a person who you could very easily convince to temper the efforts a little bit, if not even explicitly. That sounds like someone, someone who is not like a McCarthy himself, is not a bulldog just going to come in and make sure every outhouse and henhouse and whatever is cleared of homosexuals. That sounds like someone who's there kind of regretfully, but is going to do what they came to do. This seems like Webb had an active hand and could have done differently. So back to it. The senator asked our opinion as to whether any part of the hearing should be public. He apparently wants to state in advance how the hearings will be conducted, and not wobble back and forth between public hearings and executive sessions according to the pressure of the moment, as the Tidings subcommittee has done.

0:55:03 Thomas: He thought that the medical testimony at the beginning might be public and the rest in executive session. We were of two minds about it. Mr. Murphy's reaction was that it would be best to have the whole hearing in executive session. Jim Webb was not certain, and I was inclined to believe that the clinical testimony should be public. And the rest, in executive session. The senator asked us to think about it some more and get in touch with him. It was agreed that I would act as liaison man with him." I talked to Peyton Ford today and told him of our visit with Senator Hoey and also asked his views about the public hearing question. Peyton was rather strongly inclined to the view that the medical testimony should be public. That's the end of the memo. This group has the ear of Senator Hoewy and is invited to help in the decision-making process. Once again, suggesting that there was room to easily make a difference here, to be less evil.

0:55:51 Thomas: But if we fast forward, we've already kind of covered what eventually happens is the Hoey committee does their stuff. Webb has actively contributed to the homophobia by relaying this disgusting garbage that Humilsign prepared, by giving it, voluntarily giving it and handing it over to Hoey. And eventually what happens is this leads to, under Eisenhower, the executive executive order that essentially codifies this discrimination, this disgusting, horrible life ruining into law. To talk about that, I'm going to go back to the intern's email. I'm skipping over some, it's all good. I'M SKIPPING OVER SOME OF IT THOUGH FOR TIME. And I'll come in here. They've already talked about some of the books they read about this and why the books are good sources. Again, there's so much work done in this. I just love this intern. I hope they'll someday hear this.

0:56:36 Thomas: If you ever want to come on the show, please let me know. So after establishing a lot lot of that, they say, quote, "These archival records, as shown in the passage above, position James Webb as a decision maker during the period in which the anti-LGBTQ architecture of the Lavender Scare was established. Specifically, this passage confirms that Webb met with President Truman on June 22nd, 1950, in order to establish how the White House, the State Department, and the Hoey Committee might, quote, 'work together on the homosexual sexual investigation,' end quote. These records also show that Truman agreed to send two White House aides with Webb to meet with the Hoey Committee. This is to say, in mid-1950, Webb was meeting with figures outside of his own department to set the agenda and broker alliances for what ultimately became further anti-LGBTQ actions that took part in the State Department during his time there."

0:57:28 Thomas: Further establishing Webb's leadership role in the Lavender Scare is a memo drafted to Webb by a subordinate dated June 23, 1950. This memo, notable for its disturbing homophobic language, confirms that by 1950, Webb was aware of the full extent of the harassing investigations and surveillance being conducted against LGBTQ employees in the State Department. And along with the meeting record cited by Dr. Johnson, this memo positions Webb as a decision maker within the context of the anti-LGBTQ activities in the State Department that occurred from 1950 to 1952. I also want to note, whoever this is, I wonder if they have ADHD like I do, because there are a lot of words left out, and I do that constantly. I always leave out a word here and there because my brain is just like thinking, I don't know, thinking faster than I could type or something.

0:58:15 Thomas: So maybe that'll be another thing we have in common if this person, you know, ever hears this and wants to come on the show. Just saying, just saying. So here and there, I'm having to like fill in words. So hopefully I'm doing that correctly. But here we go back to the email. This picks up with some stuff I already said, but gives you a little more info. In early 1950, Webb's subordinate Purifoy made a series of statements to the press and various committees revealing that the State Department had fired 91 LGBTQ employees, while these firings are believed to have begun quietly as early as 1947. See memo he almost signed to Webb, which was two years before Webb's time there. These firings continued under his watch. And folks, this part is huge. This part is HUGE. Listen up. Alert! Alert! If you've tuned out, this is a big one. Okay, back to it. Likewise, the extra-legal firings that occurred under Webb's watch were heavily publicized and politicized and were likewise tied to homophobic rhetoric composed in the State Department that Webb personally delivered to members of Congress.

0:59:10 Thomas: Additionally, two more rounds of extra-judicial homophobic firings occurred after Purifoy left, and after Webb can be established as playing a leadership role in the matter. These firings were conducted by Webb's subordinate Hummelstein. Fifty-four LGBTQ firings occurred in 1950-1951, and 119 in 1951-1952, see Shibusaka 2012. Webb resigned from his position in 1952, and conspicuously, the extra-legal, highly publicized firings of LGBTQ workers ended when Webb left. Webb's immediate subordinate and supervisor were still there for another year. Yet, in 1952 to 1953, these types of highly publicized extra-legal firings were suspiciously absent.

1:00:01 Thomas: Whatever we might make of this, the dates in which the LGBTQ firings were publicized and politicized very cleanly line up with the time that Webb was there. And this is where this person blew my mind by saying, continuing, "It is also worth considering that these discriminatory actions predated the legal" And so this person comes to sort of the same conclusion I was coming to earlier, which is there's a bit more of possibly a causal role going on than you might have first thought. Because, quote, "Following this line of reasoning, we might return to the above memo and notice its date, June 23rd, 1950, the day after Webb met with President Truman," and Webb soon shared this memo brimming with homophobic rhetoric in his meeting with the committee. As this homophopic memo passed from the hands of Webb to the senators in the Hoey Committee, it became a rhetorical tool used to spread anti-LGBTQ discrimination beyond the State Department. As the rhetoric was repeated by senators and the press, it was a tool for ushering in a new accelerated era of homophobia nationwide.

1:01:13 Thomas: This all occurred prior to the 1953 signing into law of Executive Order 10450, meaning there were no legal justifications for these discriminatory actions at the time. These were simply vigilante acts of anti-LGBTQ discrimination, acts that formed the basis of future, more institutionalized forms of anti-LGBTQ discrimination. That Webb played a leadership position in the Lavender Scare is undeniable. The only thing left up to historical debate in this matter is whether or not his heart was in it. Was Webb emotionally invested in the persecution of LGBTQ people, or was he simply trying to save face by spreading homophobia and doubling down on the firings following the public revelation of the firings that had happened without probable cause?

1:01:59 Thomas: Either way, one thing is clear, he still did those things, and those things served a key role in a bigger thing, a thing that, as NARA archivist Judith Atkins has pointed out, led many to suicide. And that's quoting the thing I've already read you. Then the intern goes on to talk about an interesting thing in Webb's own words.

He talked about avoiding keeping a daily time diary, and not like, so like there's an interesting theory here about how he might've explicitly not kept some records during this time out of some sort of perhaps paranoia about it. This seems speculative, but worth mentioning. Like, for example, indeed, it shows that there are no daily diaries or events calendars for for the years 1942 to 1952, even though Webb kept these things in other years.

We might then conclude that Webb conducted himself with an uncharacteristic level of secrecy during his time at the State Department, and because of this, it is unlikely that we will find any statements in Webb's own words pertaining to his rationale for directing harm towards so many LGBTQ people. His actions, then, must speak for themselves. End quote. That seems a little speculative to me. I'm not the historian, so I don't know, but it doesn't really matter because it's just establishing a point that I think we already have pretty well established, that you cannot expect to find records of everything.

And possibly there are reasons that you would expect not to find reports of stuff, according to that speculation. So now, I think in full fairness and in the interest of fully exploring the issue with with intellectual honesty and so forth, we should look at the counter-arguments for this time period, the defenses of James Webb's character here. And we can look at Brian Odom's report.

1:03:35 Thomas: Can't go through all of it, but we'll look at a few things. But first I want to play for you, from the daily, the one and only time this is addressed on the podcast.

1:03:44 Clip: Telescope. But has NASA itself ever officially weighed in on this entire saga and debate about Webb and about his past? Yes, they have. Their in-house historian did a quite complete report that essentially ratified everything Hakeem had found. Now, the report's very careful. History is complicated, complicated, right? We can't know with 100% certainty what James Webb really believed in his heart, but the report goes through every accusation against him, and the historical record just doesn't back those up.

1:04:15 Thomas: Okay, so if you've been listening this whole time, and you heard last week's episode, imagine Michael Barbaro asking you, So has NASA ever officially commented on this? And you skip the entire part where they issued a one-sentence decision to six journalists in the middle of night. Skip over that. Don't mind that. And just talk about the report from the NASA historian, Brian Odom, and completely neglect to tell us that this report came out 13 months after they had already made the fucking decision. It is so dishonest. And obviously, he also vastly overstates what the report does actually say. The report looks at two very specific questions, and wouldn't you know it, doesn't find any bad things about Webb, because obviously it needed not to, since the decision was already fucking made by the head guy of NASA 13 months prior to its release.

1:05:09 Thomas: It's hard to take at face value this report. It's hard to look at the situation Brian Odom was in, look at how it all unfolded with the FOIA emails and how he had to write a report after Bill Nelson had already decided on the issue. That feels like an impossible position to be put in. And given how interpretive history is, especially in a case where you don't have a bunch of documents, I mean, you have a few, but there's not much. And then you're extrapolating, doing conjecture. I mean—and it's admitted in the report. I mean, one of the sentences is like, well, we think it's sound conjecture that Webb didn't have a direct role in such and such, you know, and it's hard for me to read that report and be confident that these conclusions aren't just being come to because they needed to be. But that's up to you.

1:05:55 Thomas: If you want to read, that's up to maybe historians to evaluate that better than I can. And I will say that it comes across as a lot of explaining why somebody in a key decision-making role actually can't be blamed for something that someone they supervise did, which already seems suspect to me. I mean, you are responsible for what your direct reports do. That's true in government. It's true in any company, really, it never is a good look to blame the people under you. And so many of the defenses in Brian Odom's report involve, okay, we don't see any direct role. Role. We don't have documentation that Webb was driving this. Odom tries to make the case that the job of the undersecretary of state, of Webb's role as the number two, was to be the secretary of state for the 50% of the time, roughly, that the secretary of state Dean Atkinson is out of the country.

1:06:46 Thomas: So his case is actually dealing with personnel and that kind of thing. And these investigations isn't something that was Webb's job. That Webb's work was to make sure that the the foreign policy of the president and so forth, so that he could be ready to step into the secretary of state role while Dean Atkinson was out of the country. And I think this is like technically correct, but the worst kind of correct, because I think that's just ignoring how decision-making works. It's inarguable that Webb is aware directly of all this crap. And we know how zealous Purifoy and Humalsign are in this. And so presenting it as, well, yeah, that that was Purifoy and Humilsign, you know, that's them, wasn't Webb's job, blah, blah. But we also know that Purifroy and Humilisign directly reported to Webb and are often in some of these documents, some of these memos, they are writing to Webb as if he's a decision maker.

1:07:41 Thomas: For example, here is Humilisin's memo to James Webb, June 24th, 1950, says, I'm attaching here to several memoranda. These are, one, a background paper on the problem of of homosexuals and sex perverts in the Department of State to a report of a meeting between Mr. Flanagan, Senate investigation staff, and Mr. Arch Jean, chief of department personnel. Three, a memorandum suggesting a basis for discussion and briefing for your meeting with Senator Hoey on the objectives and methods of operation of the Senate committee established to look into the problem of homosexuales and moral perverts within the federal government. Listen to that. If you a boss and they ask you to do a task, you know, hey, draw me up a memo, give me the background on this and suggest courses of action.

1:08:30 Thomas: That happens a ton when you're high up in an organization. It's one thing I kind of didn't like about when I got promoted into like a supervisory role at the state. I kind OF missed doing the actual work. It really is a thing a lot of people go through where instead of doing the work, which I found interesting, it was data work, it's programming, it was all that kind of stuff. It was numbers. I like numbers and Excel and programming. Anyway, instead of doing that, I'm now having to direct other people to do it, which is just not as fun to me, but that's a very low level picture. High, high, high up in the federal government, you're given a problem, you're giving a task, which if you're James Webb, you'll meet with Hoey, one of the senators on this committee, to deal with this quote-unquote problem of of homosexuals and moral perverts. And so you say to Carlisle Humilsine, your direct report, you say, hey, I have to meet with Hoey.

1:09:19 Thomas: Why don't you type me up a memo on the background in this, get me informed on it, get me up to date and suggest what I should do. And Humilsign does that and submits the memoranda to you. So it strikes me as a little weak to say, yeah, see, Humilsigne is the one writing these horrible homophobic things and driving this effort, and it's all his fault. But like Humilsign is doing that again under the full authority of James Webb. So looking at it another way, James Webb was the one with all the power. Just speaking in general terms, if there's a agency or a company even, whatever, whatever entity we wanna talk about and they're doing a bad thing and you get hired in in a decision-making role, you get fired in as the number two and the number three is doing horrible things. You are in a full position of authority over them.

1:10:06 Thomas: The minute you're in that position and you're not stopping it, you are complicit. I don't know why that is controversial. It strikes me as a little bit misleading to instead present that as, oh no, look, it was this other guy. It was someone completely different at state. But no, once you are getting reports, you are in control, you're above that person, they are under your authority, that becomes your wrongdoing as well. It just does.

Because think about how many meetings there would be that we don't know about. How many times there'd be updates, hey, uh, how's the effort to be fucking horrible and rid the government of gay people going?

Oh, going pretty well, so we got, we fired another, ruined a few more people's lives today, we, you know, like, how many status meetings are there and every time that you are given the status of something, you're briefed on the statusof something and you are the supervisor and you don't say, oh holy shit, really, one of them jumped off a bridge, oh my god, should we, let's ease up, that that's sad, let's ease up, and again, I'm allowed, I'm fully allowing for the politics of the time, there's plenty of room to act still, there was, I also want to note that based on the way leadership works, that doesn't even necessarily mean that this is humil sign telling Webb stuff he doesn't know, not at all, I mean, it could be that this ist something Webb has been fully involved in at least to any degree, but then you've got a big meeting coming up with the Senate committee and you tell your underling, hey, type up a full briefing of what everyone, everything we've done.

Like all the stuff. Remember how we've been horrible to gay people for a few years here, at least? Why don't you type up a full summary of that so I have that on hand.

1:11:38 Thomas: I think some people are maybe trying to interpret this as, oh, well, this means Webb didn't know and Humolstein was telling him all this. I don't think it's at all clear that that's what it would be. I would put the odds at better than 50-50 that there would be plenty in here. I would say it's almost certain that this could include plenty of stuff that Webb already knew.

But you're having a big meeting with the Senate committee and you want to have somebody who is a little more knowledgeable, perhaps, or at least maybe is just somebody who does your work for you because that's the nature of authority and power structures. You have someone else draw that up so for you.

Now that you know a lot more about this, I'm going to play you a clip from that original The Daily, and you may have a brain hemorrhage, so make sure you're in a safe place you're Not driving. All right, just kidding. But just in speaking about defenses of James Webb, if you recall, one of the main defenses in that episode was, oh, this quote, that's this homophobic garbage, it was misattributed to James Webb, and it actually was Carlisle Humasign, which fair enough, factually speaking, right? I get it. And I want to say, too, there's nothing wrong with the fact that Oluseyi uncovered that. That's useful. I mean, the quote was misattributed to Webb, and he corrected that. Nothing wrong with that. Anyway, here's how that got characterized. Listen to this.

1:13:01 Clip: Eventually he does And this exact quote that was horrible that was put in his name appeared in a Senate report, not in James Webb's words. Webb didn't write it. It's actually from a report issued by the Senate that Webb had absolutely nothing to do with. What

1:13:15 Thomas: Nothing to do with, folks, just some Senate report. What does that have to do with James Webb? Nothing. So you've heard why this is complete bullshit. James Webb not only directed Hemosign to draw up that memo, he then found it to be compelling enough and useful enough and agreed with it enough to pass it to a senator. So, far from Webb having nothing to do with this, he actually had fucking everything to do that quote being in the Senate report. Now, in that recording, this may have been Michael Powell just going too far. I don't know if this came from Ola Shady, but certainly the sentiment of, oh, technically speaking, these words didn't emanate from James Webb himself, therefore he's in the clear, that sentiment definitely comes from Oluseyi and is endorsed and then taken even further by Michael Powell.

1:14:03 Thomas: And it's bullshit on every count. Webb had everything to do with this quote. And one thing we can absolutely say for certain is that his handing it over to Senator Hoey can only be read as a complete endorsement of everything in it. And once again, with what I just said earlier about the fact that, like, just because Humilsign was drawing this up, it doesn't mean this was the first time Webb was hearing it. Who knows how much of that sentiment and how much of that philosophy might have, I don't know, originated with Webb? Who knows? There's another little clip I need to play you that I've really only just recently, at, you know, hour 11,574, come to another nuance on this that I think is interesting. I really want to share with you, so listen to this clip.

1:14:44 Clip: In 1949, 1950, to have expected essentially someone to intuit that there would be a gay rights movement that would arise in in the next two, three, and four decade and come to flower is reasonable.

1:14:57 Thomas: So. It was upon reading the Humilsign memo in full that I really kind of just had one of those things click in my brain where I, I understood kind of how to articulate why what you just heard is just bullshit in service of defending homophobia in a way that it just was not obvious to me at first. But it is this.

The logic behind what you just heard, and this will sound obvious, the default at that moment and prior to that moment was, yeah, we all agree to be, society as a whole agrees to be shitty to gay people, and then you would need something to happen or a series of things to happen to bring a consensus to society that, oh no, we shouldn't do that. And then, and only then, can you hold James Webb accountable, or anyone accountable, for kind of like not subscribing to that morality of the day. But let me read you some of this Humosign memo, and I think it'll make clear why that logic just really doesn't work. There's, uh, paragraph three, quote: until very recent years, the Department of State, as well as several agencies of the federal government, tolerated homosexuals in its employment solely because not much was known about them, or who they were.

Occasionally, when one was found, he was dismissed or reassigned, depending upon the circumstances surrounding the individual case. It was the type of problem that most officers of the Federal Government, not conversant in the subject, would rather not consider. It, therefore, was allowed to exist and grow. It was not until until January '47, when Mr. Purifoy became Assistant Secretary for Administration, that the problem of homosexuality in the Department of State was dealt with in a direct and forthright manner.

1:16:34 Thomas: It came about through the investigation of a homosexual, which led our investigators to other homosexuals in the department, which in turn enabled investigators to discover still others on the department roles. With this knowledge, it was determined that there probably were a number of such people on the roles. I'll end the quote there, but it goes on to detail a lot of the just horrendous investigative techniques and stuff, and that makes very clear, look, you will not catch me arguing that James Webb is the number one person responsible for the Lavender Purge. Not at all. I hope I haven't been misunderstood, and I hope the anti-"James Webb being the name of the telescope" side hasn't been perceived as saying James Webb is the number one person responsible for this. It seems like, from what I know, if I were to assign a number one person responsible to this, yeah, it's Purifoy.

1:17:25 Thomas: No question. And Purifroy started that process two years before Webb got there. Fair enough, I don't hold Webb accountable for those two years. But if you listen to the language there, "until very recently" sure, people didn't love gay people and allow them to work openly or something, but there's a pretty big difference between sort of a don't ask don't tell, or like, yes, a lot of people didn't want to think about it and maybe, maybe a gay person was like caught occasionally and they might have been fired, but there wasn't this like systematic process or whatever. Contrasting that with essentially a fucking manhunt, and then honestly a campaign of terrorizing the entire closeted gay population of the whole federal government, those are two very different things. And so therefore, saying, "oh, well, see, the The march of history was this thing, and you would need the gay rights movement and a bunch of stuff" to not be convinced of that.

1:18:19 Thomas: It's more like, no, we can't hold Webb accountable for being part of the process of starting a systematic purge and terrorization of a population, because in order to know better, he would have had to anticipate that eventually people would hate that he did that. Being a key figure in the very early days of the Lavender Purge and playing a causal role in that, when the reality before that happened, before Purefoy and then Webb and Humosign, everybody just before that was gay people, while, you know, they pretty much had to be closeted, were at least not hunted down and terrorized in that way. To put it another way, Webb was a key part of changing what the status quo was to be way more horrible, and so I feel like just logically speaking, the excuse of "he would have needed access to future information to know not to do that" falls a bit flat. I think that it might sound plausible if you're under the impression, or you're led to believe, that oh, that was just the mores of the time, they were doing what, you know, people did at that time.

I think that's a qualitatively different thing than, oh no, he was part of a big change in the status quo for the worse, he was a part of commencing a campaign of terror against gay people. I hope that made sense.

Alright, so continuing to dismantle the defenses of James Webb in the State Department era, so Brian Odom tries to make the case that, oh, actually what Webb's role in all this was, was to kind of go along with it, but just make sure he limited access that the Senate committee had to personnel files,

1:19:59 Thomas: Which I don't know, man, like that sounds a lot like you're in the bathroom with people smoking pot and you get caught and you're like, no, I just came in here to like, make sure they didn't smoke too much pot. I didn't, wasn't doing it. I was just here. I'm keeping an eye on them. That's right. All right, you're all in trouble, you guys. It strikes me a little bit as that. I mean, they got plenty of access to information about this. I don't know if they had access to like full personnel files or anything, but once again, keeping in mind that Webb is in a leadership role and a decision-making role, I just don't see how that absolves him of any responsibility for this whole thing. Now let's turn our attention to the NASA part of this. James Webb left the State Department February 29, 1952, worked in the private sector for that time, all the way until February 14, 1961, when he was appointed the second administrator of of NASA in its history by JFK.

1:20:55 Thomas: He served from 1961 to 1968. The main event in question though happened in 1963, the firing of a gay employee while James Webb was administrator. On this topic, the intern's email doesn't have as much, but fortunately, there's another smoking gun in the emails, the FOIA emails that I didn't fully read to you last time. I was saving it for this. And this one very helpfully gives us some critical information about the highest profile case, Clifford Norton, someone who was dismissed for being gay. And this is an email sent to Eric Smith, who then forwarded it to Brian Odom. And this just an absolute smoking gun. And I believe this is from the contract historian.

1:21:41 Thomas: It's hard because it's redacted, but that's who it seems to be from. Very early in this process, by the way, April 11th. So quite a while before the further plans to visit the archives and all that. So, hi, Eric. I thought you might want some extra background information that I found yesterday while doing some research on, and that's actually redactED. That's interesting. Anyway, as you know from Johnson's book, Clifford Norton was fired from NASA in 1963 for, quote, immoral, indecent, and disgraceful conduct, end quote. In other words, he was suspected of being gay. There is more to this story than is in the Johnson book. Clifford Norton sued, and Norton v. Macy was the first win for a dismissed homosexual in the court system. In 1969, the appeals court of D.C. sided with Norton that he was wrongfully terminated.

1:22:27 Thomas: As you know from the book, this did not stop the government from firing other gay employees. What is not in the book is some of the direct language from the legal briefs. I think you will find this paragraph to be troubling. Quote, a custom within the agency sounds pretty bad. And here it is. So this is quoting the decision. The peculiar feature of Appellant's dismissal, however, is that it rests on none of these possible effects on the service. The NASA official who fired him, Mr. Garbarini, testified that Appellent was a, quote, competent employee doing very good work. In fact, Garbarani was not worried about any possible effect on Appellants' performance. Listen in, folks. This is big. Big, and went so far as to inquire of personnel officers, quote, if there was any way around this kind of problem for the man, end quote.

1:23:16 Thomas: He considered whether or not we had real security problems to worry about and concluded, quote. There was not enough of that to influence me, end quote, appellant's duties apparently did not bring him into contact with the public and his fellow employees were unaware of his, quote immorality. Nonetheless, Garbarini's advisors told him that dismissal for any homosexual conduct was a, quote, custom within the agency, end quote. And he decided to follow the custom because continued employment of appellant might, quote, turn out to be embarrassing to the agency in that if an incident like this occurred again, it could become a public scandal on the agency. Now, not quoting from that same decision, but still quoting from the email. In the dissent to the case, Judge Tam refers to earlier precedent that allows agencies to use their own discretion in removing employees.

1:24:07 Thomas: Quote, "This court plainly held in the case of Hargett v. Summerfield that employee removal and discipline are almost entirely matters of executive agency discretion, and that so long as there is substantial compliance with applicable procedures, the administrative determination is not reviewable as to the wisdom or good judgment of the department exercising its discretion." E-mailer writing again, not quoting the decision. NASA, under the direction of Webb, was able to set its own rules for whom should be removed and for what reasons. I cannot say for 100% certain at this point, but I believe, redacted. God, I wish we had that. It certainly appears that, redacted. If you would like me to further elaborate on this before your next meeting, let me know.

1:24:52 Thomas: I don't really see, redacted. I don't even really see redacted. Take care, redacted. So, details, all those redactions I believe are due to deliberative privilege, and that sucks for us. Now I get why that exists. I think it makes sense, actually. You do want people who work for the government to be be able to throw out ideas and deliberate and all that and not worry about all of it coming out when maybe they had some bad ideas and realize, oh, shoot, never mind, don't do that.

You want to protect that ability, otherwise no one will be ableto feel free to say ideas. It will really hinder the process of deliberation. I get it, I think it makes sense. It just sucks for us here, because I think what happened is since they eventually just came out and said, ah, Webb's fine, we found he's all great and it's amazing, and they did that bullshit report, I think that counts as like the final stance, because, you know, in the Emails episode there were times where they were working on the statement, and every single draft until the final thing is redacted, and then we're allowed to see the final think.

So I would not at all be surprised if these redactions were, every time anyone said, yeah, it looks like Red kind of might have been a piece of shit, every time he said anything to that effect of like, yeah, I think Red is guilty, I think he was likely complicit at the very least, but because eventually they went the other way, I think they're redacting that as deliberation. And And I can't argue with it, but it does suck for us.

But everything I just read you in that email, we know that email went to Brian Odom. We know. We saw it. So, the next question I asked was, okay, did that make it into his report? Because that feels pretty important.

1:26:23 Thomas: You would hope that an honest actor would include that kind of bad evidence if he's going to look at the full picture. And to Brian Adam's half credit, he half did that. So, he did include the language you heard of custom within the agency. He did include that.

However, he did not include all the stuff before that, when Garbarini was asking, like, hey, can't we keep this guy, isn't there any way to keep this guys, like, he's fine, he does his job, he doesn't even interact with citizens, and his co-workers don't even know he's gay, can't just keep him? And then they eventually decide, no, that is not included. Make of that what you will. More on that later.

For now, I want to give you some more detail a of what's going on here under Webb's watch. Again, you can say, oh, but he didn't do that part, he wasn't in charge of personnel, he was just the head of the whole fucking thing, okay? Yeah, uh, but he didn't not do it, he didn't fix it. Anyway, here's from the case. That court case. Appellant's dismissal grew out of his arrest for a traffic violation in the early morning of October 22nd, 1963. He was driving his car in the vicinity of Lafayette Square. He pulled over to the curb, picked up one Madison Monroe Proctor, drove him once around the square and dropped him off at the starting point.

The two men then drove off in separate cars. Two Morals Squad officers, having observed this sequence of events, gave chase, traveling at speeds of up to 45 miles per hour. In the parking lot of Appellant's Southwest Washington apartment building, Proctor told the police that Appellent had felt his leg during their brief circuit of Lafayette Square and then had invited him to to Appellant's apartment for a drink.

1:27:59 Thomas: The officers arrested both men and took them to the Morals' office to issue a traffic violation notice. Pending issuance of the traffic summons, the police interrogated Appellent and Proctor for two hours concerning their activities that evening and their sexual histories. Meanwhile, pursuant to an arrangement, the head of the Moral Squad telephoned NASA Security Chief Fugler, who arrived on the scene at 3 a.m., in time to hear the last of the interrogation. Fuglar was then shown the officer's confidential arrest record and was permitted to monitor incognito a 20-minute interrogation of Appellant, held especially for his benefit. Throughout, Appellate steadfastly denied that he had made a homosexual advance to Proctor. At last, Appelling was given his traffic summons. Fugler then identified himself to Appellent and invited him down to NASA for a talk.

1:28:47 Thomas: There, in a second-floor office of the deserted Tempo L building, Fuglar and a colleague interrogated him until after 6 a.m. During this interrogation, Appellant allegedly conceded that he had engaged in mutual masturbation with other males in high school and college, and that he sometimes experienced homosexual desires while drinking, that on rare occasions he had undergone a temporary blackout after drinking, and then on two such occasions he suspected he might have engaged in some sort of homosexual activity. He also said that he experienced a blackout when he met Proctor, recalling only that he he had invited the man up for a drink. Subsequently, in his formal reply to a notice of proposed dismissal, appellant specifically denied that he was a homosexual, that he had made an indecent advance to Proctor, and that he has committed knowingly engaged in any homosexual activity during his adult life.

1:29:42 Thomas: Proctor however, confirmed in a written statement the story he gave to the police at the time of his arrest and stated that, quote, it would take an idiot not to be able to figure out that he wanted to have sex act on me. End quote. Proctor said he had never seen Appellant before that night. So Proctor is the other man, and Proctor confirmed to police that it would take an idiot to not be able to figure out that Clifford Norton wanted to do something sexual with him. Nassau concluded that Appellant did, in fact, make a homosexual advance on October 22nd and that this act amounted to immoral, indecent, and disgraceful conduct. It also determined that, on the basis of his own admission to Fugler, even as subsequently clarified, Appellate possesses traits of character and personality which render him unsuitable for further government employment.

1:30:32 Thomas: A civil service appeals examiner and the Board of Appeals and Review upheld these conclusions. Conclusions. In appellant's action for reinstatement, the district court granted appellee's motion for summary judgment. So those are some of the facts of Clifford Norton's case. So now let's go back to what you were told by The Daily on this subject. The

1:30:49 Clip: The accusation was that Webb should have known about this, could have known about this and should have stopped it. Because he ran. Because he run NASA. And what does Hakeem say about that? Hakeim points out several things. One is there's no particular reason to think that Webb would have known about this. This was not a top employee at NASA. NASA is a very large federal agency. But even more to the point, The head of federal agencies take directions from above. There was an executive order signed by President Eisenhower and that was enforced for the next 20 years, saying that openly gay Americans could not work for the federal government.

1:31:23 Thomas: Couple problems with that, a couple hundred problems with first off. No, the executive order did not say that openly gay people couldn't work for the federal government. That's actually not what it said. And secondly, even if it did say that, Clifford Norton was not openly gay. I read you the case, I wrote you the facts. He was not overly gay. He is not even gay as far as the government knew. We're talking about a hiring decision.

Clifford was not proven in a court of law to be secretly gay or anything like that. He interviewed by police and by the NASA security chief guy, and he denied it, he said he didn't do anything, he, was black guy, didn't do anything with the guy. Now, you and I know that's kind of bullshit, like, obviously he's probably a closeted gay man doing his absolute best in the worst of conditions, and he's saying what he needs to say to survive. You and I know that, but as a matter of law, that's not established. That is a judgment call, at this point, by whoever his employer is, whoever has that decision, that's a a judgment call. They very easily could have just believed him. They're like, I don't know, he says his name is just his friend, he's just driving around cruising.

All they had was the other guy, the other man, saying, yeah, you'd be an idiot if you didn't realize that Clifford Norton wanted to do the sex with me. Okay, that's one guy's word. So it is such a fucking stretch and a half to say that you are bound by law or some direction from above to fire this guy. Absolute bullshit. And it gets so much worse. So let's take a look at the defenses marshaled in favor of James Webb for this particular episode. You just

1:32:59 Thomas: Basically heard him there, but also we'll go into Brian Odom's report. And there are two main threads here. The first is, well, no evidence Webb had anything to do with this or knew about it. And two, even if he did, hands were tied, they take direction from above, it was the law of the land, nothing he could do. Let's take those one at a time. First one.

It appears to be true, I'll take Brian Odom at his word, I guess, that he didn't find a smoking gun document that linked James Webb specifically to this firing and that decision. Seems like that was not found. Well, okay, first off, once again, we are talking about naming a fucking telescope after a guy, not killing him and his family or some shit. The burden of proof should should be quite low. And for me, being in charge, being the literal number one, the administrator of the entire agency at a time when we have here in court fucking records that it was a quote "custom within the agency" end quote to just fire gay people, that already to me, bullseye, done, end of story, disqualifying. It's so simple, so simple.

But we can even look more into it, because because I think this argument that, well, we didn't find any reason that he had anything to do with it, it's a big agency, you know, he's the top guy, top brass, you know, he's not going to be bothering with the underlings and the hiring decisions. Well, okay, yeah, that's possible. But I'd like to remind you how firm the statements of fact have been in this podcast, in The Daily. It's been, he had nothing to do with it. The evidence shows. Actually,

1:34:30 Thomas: Why don't I put a couple of those here, just for fun, to remind you of how certain they are that Webb did nothing wrong. I'm

1:34:37 Clip: Mind, But what I can say conclusively is that there is zero evidence that Webb is guilty of the allegations against him. Because from everything you've said, his research is pretty clear-cut and it's pretty compelling. Webb, that those central allegations are basically not accurate. That's correct. Right thing. So according to Hakeem's research, not only is Webb not a bigot, he is actively working to make the United States government more inclusive. Yes. That whether or not Webb himself in...

Did any of the things he'd been accused of doing, which Hakeem has found he didn, the moved. First, the accusation was that he did something very wrong. That was disproven. And rest. So sometimes the truth of the data is so obvious, but because of politics or some other reason, people will claim that they don't see what is obvious. Heart, but the report goes through every accusation against him, and the historical record just doesn't back those up. That he did what he felt he had an intellectual obligation to do, which was to look at these charges as clearly as he could and come to some conclusions. That turned out to be right. That turned out to be right, yes. I But once I found out the truth, I was now bound to reveal that truth. It's my duty. It'S my responsibility. My honor could have it no other way.

1:35:44 Thomas: Gonna try so hard not to repeat myself. I know it's so hard because it's just so frustrating. I can't stop marveling at how frustrating and dishonest this is. But two quick things. Their version of completely disproving all the accusations against Webb is that, a, he didn't write the homophobic crap, that was just, you know, his direct report writing that at his direction, and he voluntarily shared it with the committee on ruining gay people's lives.

So, and the second thing is that, oh no, it wasn't James Webb who did all these bad things, it was the person directly below him, under his full authority. So just reminding you, I'll try not to repeat myself too much, but holy shit, it really sounds bad being that fucking absolutist. In here, there's no evidence, absolutely no evidence any of the charges against are true. It's like, really, that level of certainty is bananas to me. And all I need to do is throw a little doubt on that level certainty, and I've made my case quite well, I think. But while there might not be any direct textual record that James Webb was involved in the Clifford Norton decision, okay, first counterpoint, Clifford Morton is just the one we know about because he won his court case, but he was like literally one of the first handful of gay Americans to fight back against this.

So many of them just couldn't or didn't or didn't want to or, by the way, jumped off a fucking bridge. So, it is pretty galling to have people doing a victory lap over James Webb's lack of complicity in this one fucking case when we have absolutely no idea how many others there are out there.

1:37:23 Thomas: That's point one. Point two, when I read you those details of the case and you see a NASA NASA security chief taking Clifford Norton essentially into custody in NASA. Yeah, he was voluntold that he needed to be in custody all night until 6 a.m. And I'm to believe that there's absolutely zero chance James Webb knew about that? Look, we're talking about a textual record from 60 years ago.

We got to be pretty modest in what we say about that, especially knowing that James Webb had been around the block quite a few times. He may have known better than to put into writing oh well you know we fired that gay slur guy the other day glad we did that put that in my official calendar for the day and also well it's highly Unlikely James Webb was involved in the, you know, everyday hirings and firings, I get that, but this was not really an everyday hiring and firing, this ultimately was decided on, like, PR grounds I read of the language. Ultimately, they decided, ah, it might be a scandal if we don't fire him and, you know, if it happens again. That sounds like, I don't know, that's not impossible that someone ran that decision up the flagpole. Not in writing that survived to this day, 60 years later. That's possible.

Again, I'm not saying this definitely happened. I would never say that. I'm saying it's pretty fucking arrogant to suggest that it definitely didn't happen. It feels like a pretty big spectacle that a NASA employee was interviewed all night, essentially in custody, like he's under arrest at NASA, and nobody would have, I don't know, tipped off the big boss?

1:39:03 Thomas: And by the way, that's another point. The only reason we know these details at all is because of Clifford Norton's court case. Now, I'm not privy to all of the historical records, because I'm not a historian, I haven't had access to that, but in all the research I've done, I've not come across any, then I won't fall into the trap, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but I have not come across any NASA internal documents that told us about this case. The only point I'm making is we know about the details only because people had to testify and stuff, for all we knew stuff like this could have been handled pretty off the record, I mean yes, you'd have the firing paperwork and all that, that would happen, sure, but I don't know that we would expect, like, minutes of the firing the gay guy meeting, for any reason. And in the record, the court record, we see that Garbarini, the guy who didn't want to fire him really, came to his conclusion after talking with quote-unquote advisors in the role of NASA personnel officers.

1:39:59 Thomas: Okay, are you telling me that it's 100% certain that those personnel officers, let's say, didn't get together off the record without somebody writing down what they're fucking saying? Because there's no email, by the way.

They didn't get together and say, man, this could have big implications, I feel like this is the kind of thing we gotta run up the chain, maybe they were able to knock on the big boss's door and ask, like, hey, um, got a sensitive situation that we could use some guidance on, shall we say, here's the facts, here's what happened, this is why the office has been abuzz, considering that we, you know, kept a guy in custody all fucking night.

Yeah, you notice the murderings, I don't have to say this 100% unhappened, I just think, are you, how much are you willing to bet that that's not even possible, that that happened? I would put that as somewhat likely.

I don't know the inner workings of NASA in 1963, sure, I don't, whatever, but like, I know something about how organizations work and pretty big decision, especially going against what Garberini wanted, he's essentially getting overruled, sure, that could be a unnamed NASA personnel officer who did that all by himself or herself without out taking any input, and yeah, it could have been, maybe input from some level higher up that didn't reach James Webb, yeah, not saying that's not possible, it's certainly possible, but once again reminding you that this is for sure not the only fucking time this happened, how certain are you that in all those times this never happened, maybe the first time it happened, maybe they ran it up the flagpole, uh, yeah, we got another, you know, gay man's life we want to ruin, maybe we should check with the new boss though, like, I don't know, JFK is president now, it's the fucking 60s, like, do we still want to do this, I don't know, maybe write it up to firepost see

1:41:41 Thomas: What the big boss says, maybe he doesn't want to be that anymore, and then maybe big boss is, oh no, no, for sure still fire gay people, like, oh okay, from then on they did it themselves. I don't know, these are all, I think, pretty reasonable possibilities that make it pretty inappropriate, in my opinion, to do a fucking victory lap.

Now if you want to say no evidence for sure establishes that he was involved, yeah, okay, and that is the words that people have sometimes used, Brian Odom is pretty careful because he's an actual historian, even though he's put in an impossible situation, he's coming to a conclusion that was predetermined, he's careful, he says no evidence firmly places Web in that decision, but the people on the fucking podcast aren't that careful, the people in the podcast are halfway through psychologizing on why the opposition is so fucking stupid they can't even grapple with basic facts, that's how far on the other side of this they are, that is not even close to justify. All right, so those are my main points on was James Webb involved.

I think, okay, you could say at best inconclusive for the other site, but once again, he was the number one guy in charge, so already shouldn't have a telescope named after him if, when he was in charge, this awful horrendous should happen, and two, every possibility that he was involved and there's just no paper record of it. Every possibility of that. Again, sorry, I know I was going to move on, but like, specifically people get pissed when they get fired. This is specifically an event that someone like James Webb would know, hey, don't write down, we're firing the gay guy because he's gay.

1:43:16 Thomas: Don't write that down. Let's just have a discussion and we'll talk about it, People suing their employer for getting fired is not new, and discovery revealing any written documents about that firing is not new. That's gone on for, at the very least, a century, I would firmly say. I'm not a historian, but I'm pretty sure, given that I've seen these cases referenced in this very research I've done, this kind of thing happened all the time. Someone as savvy as James Webb would know, don't fucking write that down. Stop your typewriters let's just talk about this orally and not produce a bunch of discoverable bad documents that are going to embarrass us later or by the way give the gay guy any chance of coming back because maybe we're homophobic bigots Here, entirely possible, and I would say even plausible. So the second defense is the "couldn't have done anything about it, hands were tied." The heads of federal agencies take orders from above, as Hakeem al-Ashay says. In fact, it gets worse. I'm gonna play another way that Michael Powell put it right here.

1:44:20 Clip: Of the land. Yes, he would have literally had to disobey a executive order by the president of the United States.

1:44:25 Thomas: So we're taking a look at this idea that this was the law of the land, quote unquote, and there's absolutely nothing to be done. You'd have to disobey an executive order by the president of the United States. Sounds very serious. That sounds like hands were tied. So if you're a very keen listener, you already know that Clifford Norton won his case in 1969. And I seem to remember Michael Powell saying the executive order was enforced for the next two decades. Well, let me do some math. The executive order was in 1953. 1973 would be two decades, 1973 is greater than 1969. So that would tell you the DC Circuit Court of Appeals that, you know, decided the case in favor of Clifford Norton, while that executive order was still firmly on the books, said, what the fuck?

1:45:13 Thomas: You can't do this. You can fire this guy like this. What are you talking about? That's curious, isn't it? If I I fire you and I say, "Oh, my hands were tied, nothing you can do about law of the land," and then the D.C. Circuit Court is like, "No, you can't fire that guy, what are you talking about?" While that quote unquote law of land is still in effect. Well, maybe you're fucking wrong about what the law of a land was. Maybe you're wrong about that.

I'm sorry, it's hard not to be angry. This defense of "nothing you can doing, hands were tired. This was the policy, rules are rules," is it frustrates me to no end because it is simplifying and reducing a complicated thing into a very simple thing in the service of horrific discrimination against gay people. This is the thing that added another, I don't know, 10 hours to my published date, because something occurred to me sort of late and I couldn't stop trying to find a perfect answer to it and read about it and write about it. Problem is, I'm not a lawyer, so it's a little challenging, but this whole "law of the land" thing, it occurred to me, like, wait a minute, that's not really what executive orders are. I mean, yes, they have the effect of law, but why do they have the effect?

Executive orders are not in the Constitution. Executive orders are the president telling an executive agency what to do in certain circumstances, and he's able to do that because the original power has to be delegated by Congress. And so an executive order telling a federal agency to do certain things, that's just like the federal branch talking

1:46:45 Thomas: To itself. And as I started to think about that, it made more and more sense, and I did some research, and it's even more true than I thought. I mean, the only recourse for quote-unquote breaking this law, if you're James Webb, would be the president firing you. This is not something you go to jail for. If we were to believe that it was firmly in effect in the year 1963, that Eisenhower's executive order from 10 years prior would be in full force in the JFK presidency, which is kind of silly to me, but if we took that all on board, the worst thing that could happen would be somehow it getting to the president that this wasn't followed and the president firing James Webb for it. Think about it. When Nixon kept firing the attorney general until the attorney general did what he wanted, those attorneys general didn't go to prison.

1:47:34 Thomas: They just were fired. That's what happened. The president told them to do something and they didn't do it, so he fired them. And not only that, think about the way this would even work. As I already told you, the language of this fucking executive order is not, "The minute there's a person who has maybe done a gay thing, and you don't fire them, death by firing squad." No, it gives the justification of the interest of national security. Depending on their relation to national security, this employee, you can investigate them for criminal, infamous, dishonest, blah blah blah, comma, sexual perversion. So think about how this would work. So Rob, or whoever, I guess, decides Clifford Norton, eh, we don't have any direct proof that he did anything, so all right, he doesn't really qualify.

1:48:20 Thomas: I don't see any sexual perversion, really. He just, you know, got in the car with a guy. The guy said they were going to do something, but we don'T have any evidence that they did, so So, all right, he's free to go. And then someone involved, and by the way, we already know that his co-workers didn't know, and Garbarini, who was investigating him, was like, can we let him stay? Someone involved would have to be so mad about that, that they would complain to John F. Kennedy and say like, well, there's a guy we're pretty sure might have done some same sex stuff, and your boy, James Webb, didn't fire him. And then John F. fucking Kennedy would have to be like, oh my fucking, get James Webb in here. Fire him right now.

1:49:06 Thomas: This is not an exaggeration. That is the recourse. When it goes the other way, when you fire somebody wrongfully, yeah, they have standing to sue you for it, and that could happen, yeah, sure. When you don't fire somebody, who's suing whom? Is it going to be, like, that girl from Texas who said she would have gotten into university if it weren't for affirmative action?

Maybe some other employee, damn, I would have had his job if you properly fired him for this thing that I somehow know about, even though it was clandestine operation.

Like, it's just not realistic at all to suggest that this was some mandatory scenario, and you'd have to disobey an executive order by the way of a president of the other party from 10 years ago, as if JFK wouldn't have just been like, "I don't fucking give a fuck, who cares, I gotta, I'm late for a drive through Texas." He's not gonna give a shit. It's just absurd. And if you noticed, the only justification, and by the way, the reason this was overturned by the court was that they just said, like, "It would be embarrassing if we get caught." Well, that's not national security.

The law is you gotta protect national security, that's the law, not "do it because it might be embarrassing." There's one more sentence I have to read that really put me on a research spiral, and this is something that I think is quite egregious, but I would not have noticed it in several tens of hundreds of hours of research until, like, our, you know, I hit my 10,000 hours on this fucking episode, and I got to this from Brian Odom's report, quote: "It is worth noting that Norton's suit was not against NASA, but John W. Macy,

1:50:43 Thomas: Jr., executive director of the Civil Service Commission from 1953 to 1958, and chairman of the Civil Service Commission from 1961 to 1969." End quote. That's because that's who you would sue.

This is something that, again, because I'm not a lawyer, this took a long time, and I don't know that I have this 100% correct, but I searched about a zillion cases to try to find if I was wrong about this, and that you'd actually sue James Webb or any other head of an administration for your wrongful termination. But the way the law worked, I believe it's slightly different now, from what I can tell.

This is not my area of expertise, I'm pretty certain of the broad strokes here, though. Every case I look up, every wrongful termination case, they sue the Civil Service Commission, and usually the director of the Civil Service Commission at that time, because the way it worked is the law said this Civil Service Commission will be in charge of investigating any appeals. So when Norton appeals and says, "Hey, I was wrongfully terminated." Remember, the government can only be sued if it agrees to be sued. I know that sounds insane, but it's true. The government doesn't have to be sued if it doesn't want to.

It has sovereign immunity, or whatever that's called. And the only way you can sue the government in this instance is to first exhaust all your other options. And speaking very broadly there, it's much different now, by the way, in the wake of a lot of employment law that's gotten better, but back then especially, you had to exhaust your

1:52:15 Thomas: Appeal option. So first you have to go to the Civil Service Commission. And now in this case, the Civil Services Commission okayed the firing, and so legally speaking, the buck stops at the Office of Personnel Management. It's actually spelled out in the executive order somewhat. I'm amazed that Brian Odom would have made this mistake, but I really do think he was looking for every effort to pass on the responsibility to someone other than James Webb. It is actually, not worth noting that Norton's suit was not against NASA, because that's how those work.

I searched, and I searched, I searched different agencies, IRS, Treasurer, all these other ones, to just see if I was wrong about this. Every other wrongful termination suit that I found, and I found 100, Maybe from this era, by the way, has to be from this era because this changed from this area. They all named the Civil Service Commission and or the director of the Civil Service Commission, because that's sort of where the buck stopped. That's who ends up with responsibility for the decision, because they were responsible for doing the investigation and revealing it and approving, putting their stamp of approval on the firing.

And that's why, yeah, it wasn't against James Webb, but it also wasn't, again, you know, the security guy that like grilled him, or Garberini, who actually kind of seems like made the decision even though he didn't want to. Yeah, it wasn't against any of those people, even though we know they were responsible. It's against the Civil Service Commission.

That's not, I think it's a little bit misleading, to say the least, for Brian Odom to try to use that as evidence that, oh no, this reflects well on NASA.

1:53:50 Thomas: He didn't sue NASA, he sued the Civil Services Commission. Yeah well, that's how it worked. And to bolster that, by the way, Odom throws in this quote by John Macy from 1966. John Macy said, persons about whom there's evidence that they have engaged in or solicited others to engage in homosexual or sexually perverted acts with them, without evidence of rehabilitation, are not suitable for federal employment, alright, so yeah, that was an asshole homophobe, but he even threw in there that without evidence rehabilitation, and we already know that Clifford Norton was like, I didn't even do this, so that could be evidence of rehabilitation if you didn't even do it. Again, this was not inevitable.

His hands were not tied. This wasn't some force of law, gonna get arrested on the spot if you don't fire someone, that's just not how this works. It was a custom within the agency. And by the way, this executive order did not get officially repealed until Obama did so in 2017, his last executive order, and it didn't even get really modified until the 70s. But we already know that gay people were being hired and were not being fired in that time because that's just how this shit works, man. It's more about politics. It's more about like power as well.

The law isn't this black and white thing that they're like, well, yeah, the answer is yes, you must be fired. No, it's, this was a shitty justification that Eisenhower put into writing to give bigots an excuse to proactively fire gay people if they wanted to. That door doesn't swing the other way, though. It doesn't make someone who doesn't want to fire someone fire someone in 1963 if they don't want, is that's just not how things worked, I've case form.

1:55:29 Thomas: His hands were tied seems extremely weak to me, to say that you are bound to the degree that would completely absolve you of responsibility in this case. It just seems pathetic to me, that's a pathetic excuse. This got one more doozy of a clip to play you, and hopefully we're almost done, but you gotta hear this. I

1:55:47 Clip: Well, the problem is that if you talk to historians, including some very prominent gay historians who've studied this period, I mean, there was not a gay rights movement at that time.

1:55:57 Thomas: Mean, like, yeah, there was, man. There was Kinsey's work, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, that first proposed the zero to six Kinsey scale, was published in 1940, fucking eight, man, that got pretty widely covered. People knew about it. Veterans Benevolent Association was the first organization for LGBT veterans of the armed forces, founded in 1945 by four homosexual veterans who had been honorably discharged. I've also got like seven tabs open of other gay rights organizations that were started before this 1963 firing at the very least.

The Mattachine Society, One Inc. And there's also the fact that there's pretty prominent Supreme Court case ruling that this kind of like gay magazine that was censored because people said it was, you know, I was horrible smut, perverted, whatever, it was rude, that was, uh, unconstitutional, that they had the right to, but I mean, this stuff existed, man, there was no gay rights movement, you gotta be kidding me. So then I'm left wondering, uh, who are these prominent gay historians who might have said something so fucking stupid. Oh, is referenced in the podcast but not made explicit. So I'm going to read it from the article.

Quote, critics say Mr. Webb stood silent. Mr. Odom's report for NASA, however, found no evidence Mr. Web knew of this case in an agency of many thousands. In any event, he would have had no good option, says James Kirchick, author of Secret City, The Hidden History of Gay Washington. It is unimaginable that a high level functionary would have stepped in and blocked a broad federal law that applied to every agency, he said, end quote. Okay, man, so right away with how fucking obviously wrong that is, based on everything you know now, blocked a broad federal law.

1:57:41 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, that's not a false dichotomy. Hmm, do I fire this guy who I have no evidence for is even gay, or do I block a broad federal law? It's just, it's childlike hyperbole. So what prominent gay historian could be that bad? A who's James Kirchick, let me type in J A, oh wouldn't you know it, it's a neocon who has written for Quillette, has worked for the Brookings Institute, and uh, just checking out some recent stuff, this is fantastic, his piece written on June 26th of this year is titled "The Human Rights Campaign Invents an Emergency." What do you think that's about? Well, I'll tell you what it's about. Why don't I read the first paragraph for you? This is James Kirchick, the prominent gay historian that Michael Powell has seen fit to quote in his article.

1:58:29 Thomas: From the Human Rights Campaign Invents an Emergency, quote, the fomenting of hysteria has become such a predictable feature of American public life that it's hard to retain the capacity for shock. Seemingly, not a day goes by without political outrage entrepreneurs warning us that some nefarious group or concept, drag Drag queens, white supremacy, Antifa, disinformation, immigrant rapists, Russian bots. Notice he very strategically tries to list like stuff from left and right there. Constitutes an existential threat to the nation. And yet, even by the already debased standards of our discourse, the declaration earlier this month of a national state of emergency for LGBTQ plus Americans by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ political lobbying organization in the United States, constitutes a new low.

1:59:16 Thomas: So HRC issued this alert for the first time ever since its founding in 1980. Gay and lesbian Americans have endured a lot since that year. A deadly epidemic, the military's don't ask, don't tell policy, and a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, just to name a few. But apparently none of these compares with what HRC calls the unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ plus legislative assaults sweeping state houses. I checked this out just to see because like, yeah, I mean, obviously to me, it seems like a state of emergency for LGBTQ plus people. Seems pretty straightforward. So I'll click on it and see what their reasoning is. This is from the Human Rights Campaign. We have officially declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ people in the United States for the first time, following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ plus legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.

2:00:07 Thomas: More, more than 75 anti-LGBTQ plus bills have been signed into law this year alone, more than doubling last year's number, which was previously the worst year on record. Our community is in danger, but we won't stop fighting back. Not now, not ever. And it has some, a chart listing kind of the different laws. Uh, yeah, that seems pretty fucking reasonable to me. I'm not sure what James Kirchick has a problem with. Here, let's see. Reading a little bit more from the Kirchic article, quote, HRC's characterization of of the over 75 anti-LGBTQ plus bills signed into law this past year obscures how most of them relate not to gay issues, but to transgender ones. Some of these laws, like a Florida provision mandating people use bathrooms that correspond with their natal sex and a Tennessee act limiting drag performances, could indeed be described as authoritarian.

2:00:56 Thomas: And the latter has already been blocked by a conservative federal judge, but many of the rest pertain to subjects about which which reasonable people can and do disagree, end quote. And this sets up the future, which is keeping an eye on Michael Powell forever because what he loves to do is reference a gay historian to justify his homophobic point. And nevermind that the gay historian he's referencing is some fucking right-wing nut job. But that just gets put down in the New York Times as a gay historian, here you go. Oh, weird that it's like referencing again, Clarence Thomas on black issues. And I wish that were a joke, because what we've done as a country for the past several decades is pretty much exclusively go to Clarence Thomas for decisions, the most important decisions on black issues.

2:01:43 Thomas: That's not good journalism. That's like citing climate experts, but only the one person you can find that thinks climate change isn't real. That's not good journalism. All right, it is long past time to try to quickly summarize and put this saga to an end. And I think a good way to do that is maybe to talk about the main argument of the other side, and credit to Lucian Wachowicz, Sarah Tuttle, Brian Nord, Chanda Prescott Weinstein, and so many others. The argument that was completely available, as were the FOIA emails, as was all this stuff, to Michael Powell when he wrote this article. The argument was, if the only pro-James Webb argument is that he oversaw the Apollo program. And we acknowledge that he is not a scientist.

2:02:28 Thomas: He wasn't doing the science. He literally wasn't a rocket scientist making the rockets work. He was an administrator who oversaw the Apollo program. Okay, cool. He didn't do the work of that. Similarly, if your best excuse for why he's not culpable in the lavender scare is that it wasn't actually him. He just oversaw it. Don't you see how that's in conflict? You can't give him credit for a thing he just oversaw as the main accomplishment and reason he's getting this honor to begin with, but then not count the bad things that he just oversaw. And keeping in mind how tenuous this argument is, you're going to argue that, oh, no, he was just there for all this. He was just in a key leadership position, but he didn't direct all this lavender scare stuff. He didn't correct all that. There is no direct textual evidence tying him to these firings.

2:03:16 Thomas: OK, well, he also wasn't a scientist. So he didn't directly do the Apollo program. He oversaw it. He was in the position of leadership as it happened. It seems pretty weak to give him credit for the good and no blame for the bad under his watch. Final thing here that was just too good not to share, and I gotta credit, there's a video on YouTube called "Behind the Name, the James Webb Space Telescope" by the Just Space Alliance, and it's a little documentary on why this name should be changed, it's very good, and also had really good resources linked that was very helpful to me in my research. One thing they did that I never would have done was actually read James Webb's book.

2:03:56 Thomas: From from like, I don't know, right after he retired, I think 1969 or something like that, and it's just this bone dry book on being an administrator. I never would have read it, but someone involved in that project did, and all credit to them because they found these quotes, James Rudd's own words, here we go. Quote, in our pluralistic society, any major public undertaking requires for success a working consensus among diverse individuals, groups, and interests. A decision to do a large complex job cannot be simply reached at the top and then carried through.

2:04:33 Thomas: End quote. Yeah, I know. So maybe like one guy at the top of NASA shouldn't just be like, eh, I think it's going to be the James Webb Space Telescope. And then 20 years later, one guy of the top, of the agency shouldn't be like eh, let's keep it James Webb Space Telescop. Let me read that again. A decision to do a large complex job cannot be simply reached at the top and then carried through. And further, quote, while the voices of dissent against a large and important endeavor are often unreasonable and sometimes irritating, and while they can practically never be effectively answered, much is to be gained by giving them careful attention. They represent an important part of the feedback that the endeavor must take into account, as it sets and refines its goals and measures its accomplishment. They are useful in avoiding potentially serious pitfalls. They often expose faults that need correcting.

2:05:20 Thomas: They sometimes portend a rising popular concern, uh, end quote. I just found that funny, but it's like so spot on, you know. Yes, okay, it says a large complex job, but yeah, I mean, I guess if you wanted to be a pedant you could say well naming the thing is not a large complexity, but the thing in and of itself is a large complex job, absolutely, it's one of the largest and complexest that NASA has ever done, and including the name in that doesn't seem like a stretch. And so I'll be honest, this, reading James Webb's own words, I don't think he would want us to keep the name.

So if he was truly a great administrator worthy of bestowing this insane honor onto, seems like maybe we should listen to his own words on, you know, how to administrate, which very much go against the idea of naming this telescope after him and then steadfastly refusing to listen at at all to any opposition, and one fucking guy at the top just makes a decision, end of story, and then you write a report justifying it 13 months later. I don't think that's uh what his words would lead you to believe he would want.

And you know, Chanda Prescott Weinstein is pretty keen on naming it the Harriet Tubman Space Telescope, and at first I thought like that doesn't make sense, does it, couldn't we find one of the hidden figures ladies or anybody else that he has more more direct, but Chanda Prescott Weinstein makes the case that, you know, Harriet Tubman used the stars to guide her, to navigate when she was liberating enslaved black people, and that makes her an astronomer.

2:06:52 Thomas: And you know what, that's kind of cool actually, I won... me over that argument, that would be a cool name. So maybe the Harriet Tubman Space Telescope. Now, we all know the way uh entrenched power works and status quo warriors work, we're not getting it renamed, at least for the time being, because fucking fuck us, that's why. But if we could, Harriet Tubman, not bad, or just playing Jelloscope, Brailloscope Space Telescope, that one's the most fun to say, but yeah, James Webb's name should not be on this fucking thing, end of case. And now, epilogue, kind of, because I had completely forgotten that I had found a pretty smoky fucking smoking gun when it comes to Michael Powell. This is not related to the telescope, horoscope, space telescope.

2:07:38 Thomas: This was about a different story. This is one I cannot wait to cover because it is so unjust. I'm not going to spoil it now, but it's basically Michael Powell and a bunch of other assholes just punching down as hard as could possibly be on a black female college student and blowing a story out of proportion. And then, because he did that, Michael Powell gets glowing reviews and star treatment from conservatives, Observatives. Surprise, surprise. And I found one such interview and I listened to it and I found something that I really need to share with you. I

2:08:11 Clip: Mean, I get sometimes When I write this stuff, I get conservative readers, you know, writing me and saying, "Oh, well, you know, you're very courageous." It's like, you know, "That's a wonderful boy, you're going to be okay." And actually, I'm fine. I mean, I've got a very supportive editor. The support has gone from the top of the paper on this, the work I'm doing. And there is an awareness that we need to cover, try to cover American, American society in its richness. So that's what I guess what I try to say to conservative readers is like, bear with us. You know, I mean, this is not a, you know, this was a complicated, I mean it's a complicated time in society.

2:08:58 Clip: We are, as you know we're vastly polarized politically, culturally, and it's inevitable that that ends up playing out in, you know, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, I mean, the great papers. And I would just like, there are people who are genuinely committed to trying to get at the complexity of that. So,

2:09:21 Thomas: That's almost a stand back and stand by moment. But so that's Michael Powell saying, yeah, I get comments from conservatives who love my fucking coverage, by the way. And they say, boy, are you OK? Oh, you're at the liberal New York Times. Are you going to get fired, essentially? And Michael Powell says he's OK. He's fine. You know why? Because his editor is super supportive, and his support comes all the way from the top. His support comes from the TOP. Literally, the TOP, and he gives some euphemisms for conservatives, and, oh, we know there's an awareness from the Top that we need to cover America in its richness, aka, we need need to start doing trans panic stuff because conservatives like it or something. I find that alarming. He tells conservative readers to bear with us.

2:10:07 Thomas: Am I reading too much into this? I don't know. What do you think? We got a guy who's just spewing anti-woke propaganda in the New York Times and he's saying, hey, conservatives, bear with us. Don't worry. Hold on. Don't worry. I got support from the top. We're working on this whole New York times thing. Well, that is not the last we'll hear from Michael Powell because as bad as this NASA coverage was, there's a lot more bad coverage that he's done of some other woke controversies. So we'll see him again.

2:10:36 Thomas: Can officially say we're done. We're done with this for now, unless something else happened. But no, no, we're done. We've covered it. I'm going to close 1,700,000 billion trillion browser tabs that I have open on three different computers. That is going to be a ceremony. I maybe I'll crack a champagne and light a candle. This was seriously, this was an undertaking.

I told you I'm not going to bog down this episode with it, but please, patreon.com/wherethereswoke, not only can you find that really fun bonus episode Lydia and I did on The Amazing Atheist and whether or not he's changed, uh, in the last 10 years or whatever, that was a lot of fun, you don't want to miss that. That's for second tier patrons and above. I'm also going to record, after I get a bunch of sleep here, a sort of fireside chat about this, this episode, why it took longer, and it's more interesting than that, don't worry.

I have a lot of observations about the show, where I want to go, my process, what's happening, and, uh, if that's something that might interest you, the sort of behind the scenes of the show, check it out on Patreon. That one will go out to all patrons, and I can't wait to get that out to you. I, so much to say, so many thoughts, but I'll sign off for now. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you for for being patient for this final part, and I hope I made my case. I'll see you next time on Where There's Woke.