WTW9: Powell's Title IX Story, Part 2: IT GETS SO MUCH WORSE

Transcript

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

0:00:42 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Where There's Woke. And Thomas Smith. That's Lydia Smith.

0:00:46 Lydia: I am 81.

0:00:47 Thomas: And we are on Title IX, Part II. So Title XVIII, I think, is how... No, Title XI... X? I don't know. No, it's still Title IX.

0:00:58 Thomas: I just want to make sure you listen into part one, everyone. If you happen to tune into this and you, you missed the, you know, my stupid fucking iPhone does this all the time. It'll mark stuff played that I didn't play. Like just for no, I saw it do it today with GAM. It just marked one plate. I was like, I didn't touch that asshole. So anyway, if you're hearing this and you're like, what are you talking about? We did Title IX part one. Let's see, we can summarize it really quickly. Betsy DeVos under Trump wanted Wanted to make sexual harassment and sexual assault easier to do. And Michael Powell was like, I know it's a good use of fucking New York Times, Inc. me Let write about the idiots or the fake pretend who say that's a good idea. And that'll be my article. Huh? Huh? Huh? Brilliant. Fucking print it. Yeah.

0:01:26 Lydia: Published.

0:01:45 Thomas: Darn.

0:01:43 Lydia: Yeah! No, that's a good summary, and...

0:01:46 Thomas: Yeah. We could have done the episode in like 30 seconds.

0:01:47 Lydia: Yeah um we talked about our our fake feminist Janet Halle last time um this time we're going to dive into our uh one named Nancy Gertner um and so Nancy Gertner comes into this story with this quote I'm a feminist but I'm also a defense attorney who recognizes the importance of due process.

0:02:06 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Are those different things?

0:02:09 Lydia: Yeah. But.

0:02:10 Thomas: Huh? I'm a feminist, but I'm also not a murderer. Like, yeah, man, that did, that's all. Those aren't things you need to set up as opposed that I already see the bias leaking through and you're framing.

0:02:23 Lydia: Yeah. And so Nancy Gertner, she's 76. I just have to throw that out there. Listen, I I don't have a problem with age. I do not have a problem with age, but it is an interesting through line that I'm noticing with some of this stuff.

0:02:28 Thomas: What do you know? Which, well, yeah. Of course. I do have a problem with that. And I just thought of it, uh, following up on a point, from um, the last episode of Michael Powell's whole, like, Ooh, I love finding the people who are, you know, that you wouldn't think they believe this. Well, I don't know, man. I would think that a 76 year old fucking would think this, like it kind of cuts against that a little bit. Doesn't it? A reason this maybe works in print better, because I don't think he lists their fucking age, you know? It's just like, oh, this is a woman. Oh, this ist a feminist woman. It must be somebody, you now, 42 years old or something. It's like, no, it's somebody who's 76 and fucking stopped learning new things about feminism in 1990. They're like, I'm done.

0:03:04 Lydia: No, no. No.

0:03:20 Lydia: And I think this is I mean, you know, everybody knows this, but first wave feminism, second wave feminism. Third wave feminism right. Like every single wave sort of distances.

0:03:30 Thomas: Start sucking eventually.

0:03:32 Lydia: Well, they distance themselves from the previous wave and the previous way is like they don't know what they're talking about. Like this is a tale as old as time. Right.

0:03:35 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. On, but it'll be for really good reasons. Like, it'll be like the last wave is like, oh, but you also want to give black people the vote? No, just women. You know, it would be like, that's like the first, I remember with the yeah, like that, like with a lot OF the suffragettes, that was genuine. It's, it sucks because it's these people who are like, Oh, that's a hero of history.

0:03:41 Lydia: Yeah. Right, right. Right. The intersectionality. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Susan B. Anthony, right?

0:03:57 Thomas: Yeah. And they're like, they're They're like, we shouldn't be teaming up with black people. Like we're different, like women should get the vote, but I don't really care if black, you know what I mean? Like it's a lot of stuff like that where it's like, oh, you were progressive until you weren't anymore. And you know, it is what it is. But Michael Powell, that doesn't mean you can talk to Susan B. Anthony like late in her career and be like, this feminist hero has a certain view on race. And you're like no, man.

0:03:57 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:04:23 Thomas: And no, that's okay.

0:04:26 Lydia: Are we going to end up like this, though? I mean, like when we get old?

0:04:29 Thomas: This happens every time. This happens. Every time this is, again, I've had this conversation with Eli 50 times. We're not doing it. Here's the thing. First. Oh, you heard the episode. Sorry. Listen to Dear Old Dads, everybody, because we had the same conversation. Eli said, first off, Callie Wright has the ability to just assassinate us on. They are going to check every single matron. Oh, that's a pajama party, huh?

0:04:34 Lydia: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah? I know.

0:04:52 Thomas: Huh? Ooh, if this is real, yeah, hopefully we'll see Callie. I doubt it might not be real, but if it is real it's a good policy. You have, you've designated a definitely intelligent and progressive person with ethics to come check each year if we've been like, you know, I think, I think the kids actually, they kind of went too far. Nope, dead. We're just, It's over. Well, that's, that's why it won't happen.

No, I think it won't happen because, and this is not at all anything we plan on talking about, but I do think this, I do think there is an outlier thing happening there because I know, I bet you there are a lot of listeners who are genuinely, I mean, maybe, maybe not, but like, I genuinely worry about that where I'm like, God, am I going to just, will there be something where I am like, no, see, even though I spent, I'll be fucking 70. I'm not like, look, I know I spent 50 fucking years saying they have never gone too far, but they went too far. You know, but I don't think so. I think that you hear from the out, like, maybe outliers isn't the right word, but you hear from the squeaky wheels, you know, you hear from the high profile, you wave feminists, whatever it is, and I don't want to just target feminists. This is every, you know, every group of people.

I mean, even older, elder statesmen, civil rights icons, you know, were the same thing. Like, some of them, some of them stayed amazing forever until they died, and some of them hit a level where, like, yeah, but this is kind of dumb, right?

And then you're you're like, oh, and I think that it's not inevitable, it's just you hear from the complainers, you know, and and some of them are high profile, you know, and specifically tell you what, you also may hear from them disproportionately because of people like fucking Michael Powell,

0:04:52 Lydia: I was going to say, so Callie's coming by. Yeah!

0:05:12 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah

0:06:25 Thomas: Who are like, I'm gonna go find that person who So that gets us back on topic. Sorry.

0:06:27 Lydia: Seek them yeah yeah um so uh Gertner she a federal judge um by Bill Clinton when she retired, she moved to Harvard Law School and started teaching there. Wrote a piece regarding the DeVos standards and the things that were happening there that she felt were good and why. Why. And what I want to highlight here is not her piece, because I feel like we get it, right?

0:06:41 Thomas: Sure.

0:06:58 Lydia: It's kind of same old whatever.

0:06:59 Thomas: Official WTW analysis of that piece. Yeah, we fucking get it. All right, man.

0:07:02 Lydia: Yeah. But what I do want to highlight is the to what she wrote. And it's by a named, yeah, Alexandra Brodsky. Is amazing.

0:07:10 Thomas: Oh, This is the best part of the job, hun. You donno what this instance is, but often there is some fucking saint who nobody knows about who wrote like a like or like a of um peer reviewed paper that five people know about that perfectly breaks down every problem with a thing. And you're like, what? This person is a fucking genius. And no, you get to read them and be like, this is amazing. Or it's somebody everybody knows. But like oftentimes it's, it's who's just like really smart somewhere. Maybe they're an academic, maybe they're whatever, they have some specialty and they're just like so bothered by it that they're like, I'm taking my own fucking personal time and I'm going to write an extremely good rebuttal to everything and

0:07:21 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:07:50 Lydia: Think she was a too well at the time.

0:07:52 Thomas: That's the best I love it. Oh, her and the intern from NASA need to get together Oh, this is an elite club. This is like, this is the okay, we're starting our neither of us is in a fucking comic book son, but we'll just pretend we're startin' our super t- fuck, what are they called? Damn it, I gotta reference the right one. It can't be the Justice League, that's that's the one everyone hates because DC. What's the one, the Avengers. Oh, duh. It's the fucking Avengers. Yeah. That became so commonplace that I was like, it can't be that because that's too obvious. Yeah. My That's our fucking Avengers team. Assemble. This is great.

0:07:53 Lydia: Yeah oh we should get them together. Yeah the Avengers. You forgot that that's what it It was. Yeah, so she's amazing. She went to Yale Law School. Want to highlight while she was at Yale Law, she wrote a term paper about stealthing. Do you know you know what stealthing is. Yeah. And so for listeners, if you don't know.

0:08:26 Thomas: Okay. Hmm. Yes. That was a weird reaction for, sorry. Sorry, that's I need to explain. We were considering talking about that on Dear Old Dads because of a weird like Reddit story we saw that was like we were arguing about in certain ways. So that's sorry. That was just two seconds of someone being like, fucking what was that reaction? Oh, my. Is that like his thing somehow?

0:08:41 Lydia: OK.

0:08:52 Lydia: Thank you for clarifying. Worry not, dear listeners.

0:09:03 Lydia: Yeah! Oh, my God. Yes, so she wrote a term paper about it back in 2017 at Yale Law. And she said a lot of people read it and a person who wrote it was was actually a California assembly member. And when they read it, they were like, oh, wow, this is a problem. And so still thing for those who don't know, it's removing the condom during the act of sex in a way that, you know, you're trying to deceive your partner.

0:09:30 Thomas: I think technically speaking, it could be more things like I think it branched out to like, well, if you're doing any sort of, you know, know, deception about that. Yeah.

0:09:34 Lydia: Yeah. Like messing with the birth control or. Yeah,

0:09:38 Thomas: You're essentially, we consent is given essentially those conditions. And if you're, yeah.

0:09:39 Lydia: Right. Right. And when those conditions are changed. Yeah

0:09:44 Thomas: If you're deceiving them intentionally, it's right

0:09:44 Lydia: Yeah But wasn't illegal. And so when she wrote a term paper about it in a California assembly member read it, they're like, oh, it's a problem that this isn't illegal and they actually sponsored legislation in California. And her term paper helped lead to, you know, hopefully a safer environment or at least a path of, you you know, safety for individuals.

0:09:48 Thomas: Yeah right wow that'S fucking great we We got to get this. My

0:10:07 Lydia: Yeah, I know. She's incredible. She wrote a response to Nancy Gertner. And what's been interesting, you know. I do want to give Nancy Gertner some some credit here. She engaged Alexandra Brodsky and they've had a back and forth. They've written pieces back and fourth. They've had conversations just, Just, you know, on the side, the two of them not in like a public environment where they've, you know, I think ultimately, Nancy Gertner has with her approach to this from my perspective, from Alexander Brodsky's perspective. But she's not unwilling to engage in conversation about it. I And do appreciate that. I don't know that she'll ever have her mind changed. She is not hiding in a corner, right? And only interacting with Michael Powell.

0:10:47 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:10:48 Lydia: Um, I do want to show is kind of some of that back and forth that's happening, um, where they dig into some of these arguments, Alexandra Brodsky and and Nancy Gertner. So if you want to open up the the video I sent you. Yeah. Right. So this is a a panel that was invited through the American Constitution Society in March 2015. she is like by far the youngest person on the panel. And she's engaging a retired federal judge, Harvard law professor, who's 76.

0:10:57 Thomas: Oh, oh, this is the that. Okay, cool.

0:11:14 Thomas: I I love it. I love that. She's like, yeah, and also, let me help you open that fucking PDF. God damn it.

0:11:21 Lydia: Yeah, all yes

0:12:49 Thomas: Is eight years ago.

0:13:07 Thomas: Yeah. Wow.

0:13:19 Thomas: Well, that's fucking great, I,

0:13:20 Lydia: Know she's fantastic and so she mentioned in there um she co-founded at an organization called Know Your Nine. Kind of the creation of this organization was women were getting assaulted, and they did not feel like they They had the support or know where to go to or the schools weren't taking it seriously. And rather than waiting for administrations to come in and change and, you know, the long process there, some students started connecting across campuses and helping each other. And so that kind of was like the start of this idea for this organization that she co-founded called Know Your Nine. And she's since moved on, but she consults with them still and is involved to some degree. But they have an amazing set of resources, try really to help advocate for students, help to connect the appropriate place, define what the policy is at whatever school they go to. Too. Think some of the things that she highlights there are really important. Heard me respond to if, assuming that we have faith in the criminal justice system. And like you said, yeah, this was in 2015. was seeing these things, you not the only person

0:14:31 Lydia: Who saw these things.

0:14:30 Thomas: Oh, I want to clarify because that that made it sound like, I'm not saying that was before someone would have known the justice system sucked. I'm saying, yeah, I just want to make sure no one took it as that. I didn't, I'm say this is, to your point, I think she's really seeing where this is going and perfectly the predicts right wing view on this or just knows it from,

0:14:37 Lydia: No. And And I'm not saying that. Mm hmm. Yeah, I'm talking about the year just right now is bringing this other lens for me, for Nancy Gertner. I just praised her for going back and forth with Alexander Brodsky. But here we are in 2020 and it seems like her views literally.

0:15:02 Thomas: Fuck. It's 2020 right now. Jesus

0:15:03 Lydia: Well, I mean, the the article.

0:15:03 Thomas: Christ. We're back. No.

0:15:07 Lydia: We already did COVID. Don't take me back.

0:15:09 Thomas: Have I been trapped in a podcast this whole time? You have to let me out. The, uh, the Michael Powell article 2020. Yeah.

0:15:13 Lydia: Yeah, but Michael Powell article 2020, I'm just now realizing like, now I'm kind of mad again. I just gave her credit for in these conversations. But five years, you she's saying the same story um won't translate amazingly but I want to see your reaction to to another clip there's... there's two more clips uh I want want to do.

0:15:21 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:15:37 Lydia: This Next one is very short. So to set this up, speaks about misogyny and how it underlies lot reaction to Title IX and issues that people have with pursuing campus sexual assault through that mechanism, the idea that victims lie. And so Nancy Gertner responds to this at 42:40, yeah.

0:15:35 Thomas: Here we go. Live reacts.

0:16:09 Lydia: You see her face.

0:16:09 Thomas: She, yeah. Yeah. So Brodsky, our, our kind of hero in this did like 47 double takes, uh. Silently.

0:16:10 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, so essentially Gertner is saying, like, you can only find one way to get a society on your side.

0:16:23 Thomas: Jesus fucking Christ. These people are so go

0:16:24 Lydia: Um, is a very concerning thing for a retired judge to come out and say, um,

0:16:32 Thomas: Just in a fantasy land. It. You'RE, Cause Because, like, that's one thing that if your only exposure to the outside world is Twitter at this time, because it was still called that, then maybe you might think that and that might make sense to you. But when you do more research about it, and it just is really shocking to see a woman say that. It just sucks. But, you know, that is how it goes. You find is, oh, no, it is exactly the fucking opposite until five seconds ago.

And five seconds ago, it's not as though it switched from, oh, every single thing is painful and horrible and you get harassed and all that when you accuse a man. And then it switched to like, it is all great. It is not that. It is, oh no, it still fucking sucks. But now like there is like ten people who are like, no, good job. And then there is still a mob of people with fucking pitchforks who are Like, how dare you fucking a bunch of slurs against women. And like, truly sad that this person would think that or would say that it's just a joke.

0:16:57 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. You know, she said elsewhere too that, um, lot of her concerns were aligned with the perception of the process and worrying that people will always think that women just lie. But it feels like with that statement, she's perpetuating some of that, um, reacted in the same way that Alexandra reacted. That's all I was like, are you sure you want to say that, um.

0:17:46 Thomas: Yeah, that's just God. Well, let's think of any recent women who accused anyone publicly. I remember Amber Heard and she was the whole world put her on a chair like in a bar Bar Mitzvah, for some reason, is my image that I'm going with. And they lift her up and they're like, you're the best. You're the most beautiful woman in the world. You're not the best, oh no. Or was it that she was fucking harassed nonstop, no matter what, and hyper -scrutinized in every single thing?

0:17:56 Lydia: The

0:18:14 Thomas: It just, it Just, you're not in the world, Nancy Gertner. This is not the world we

0:18:14 Lydia: Tick tocks for the makeup. Yeah, yeah. Um, next thing that kind up that I really want to highlight from this panel discussion, um, was regarding, you know, what happens to men when they're expelled and what is the harm that they experience? And, and I think Alexandra Brodsky had some nice points on this. This is at minute 53.

0:19:04 Thomas: Shifting a priest, yeah.

0:19:06 Lydia: Yep. Yep, yep.

0:19:06 Thomas: Yeah.

0:19:47 Lydia: Yeah. Think I that that of ties into this concern about like, well, what about the accused and the impact that this has on their lives? There's nothing that gets added to a transcript. There's... there's nothing that, you you have to disclose you were expelled for whatever reason. And on the flip side, kind of what you alluded to in your reaction there, there are cases of where a serial predator has been able to matriculate at a variety of campuses and continue that same pattern.

0:20:17 Thomas: If were an illegal immigrant, the right would be like, well, obviously kill that person. But because it's probably you a fucking white dude with a swimming scholarship, they're like, well, this is a saint. Truly, this is our boy. This is our perfect boy. You, you cannot even be mad at them. You can't do anything. You can, you can't keep them away from their victim. Yeah, it's just fucking joke. Sorry.

0:20:21 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. No, no, it's OK. Okay. It is very infuriating. Think it's one of those things where, you it is a complicated issue because you're going to have nuance, right? You're going to have folks that did make a mistake. Title IX investigation is found against them. Maybe they're expelled for that because it was egregious enough, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going do it again. You don't want to prevent them from getting an education, getting, you good job and everything. Maybe they've learned and grown. But then there are people where it is a problem and it is something that that they have a tendency to repeat as a pattern. And how do you differentiate those situations and how do you protect people in other schools without demonizing an entire group? Group. Like, it is complicated. I can appreciate that.

0:20:53 Thomas: Well, yeah, I don't really think it's that honestly. I think Well, I think that it's like anything else. She says it's not a unique challenge. I think this is what happens is some people with an agenda agenda come in and focus and put blinders on and focus on one thing, and they do what I said and I think it was the first episode, they look at the most extreme possible punishment, combine that, sometimes they combine that with the least possible offense, and then they just assert. I'm not saying that Gertner did that necessarily, but that that tends to be the mode of argument. Oh, people are saying hi to a girl on campus, then they're shot, and you're like, no, that's not fucking what's...

And I think it is really important what you just said there, because it even infects, I say infects, like this mode of thinking, I think even, even when you're not trying to do it, but you're engaged with someone else doing it, it does kind of leak into your own psyche where it's like, you got to remember, for one thing, we're talking about kids.

You know, we're talking about young people who make mistakes, and they may be very bad mistakes, and it may be mistakes that should mean they're expelled, of course. But as she says, that's a small group of people, like even within the subset of people who are found guilty by, a, you know, investigation or whatever, it's still a small subset.

You might have people who do something that's not cool, the what you would want, this whole fight, this whole bullshit, basically, I don't know what else to call it but a bullshit, this whole fucking bullshit really does, I think, real harm, because it kind everyone into this extreme thinking, even when you, you don't necessarily want to, like, you got to think about how many things there might be that are genuine, either mistakes, or they're, they're not good, but they're things that someone, as you said, could learn from, it's a, it's someone who might be 18. They

0:21:32 Lydia: You don't think so? Yeah.

0:22:01 Lydia: Mm -hmm. Yeah.

0:23:17 Thomas: Could be fucking 17. I don't know. It's somebody who I would hope this is always going to be my feeling. And people seem to not hold this consistently. You know, in different contexts, people take different attitudes toward perpetrators. You watching a show, a documentary about reformed felons and how they're getting, and you're just like, you're rooting for them all the way. And then you see like someone someone who did a bad, probably like some sort of, you crime when they were 17. And you're like, kill that person.

0:23:17 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, sex crimes are different. Yeah? Yeah?

0:23:47 Thomas: You know, like we just seem to have unequal feelings about different things. And I get it. Like there's a lot of emotions and things are going to also resonate differently depending on your experience and all that. And it's all valid. But I think my consistent try to think of it is especially the younger someone is, the more, you room for growth they might have, you know, that's going to scale a little bit to where it's like, yeah, I hope that, and the way, the less serious the offense is, you Know, it's going to scale as to like what should be done here. And I'm not fucking in charge of any of this. So that's, you Now, it doesn't matter what I think.

0:23:56 Lydia: Mm -hm. Yeah! You're not a Title IX coordinator.

0:24:20 Thomas: Yeah. But like, I I, assume that there's someone trying to do their fucking job and no matter what system you set up, there's going going to be someone trying to do their fucking job. And there's going to be someone doing it badly somewhere. There's going to be some college somewhere in the country where they do a bad job. And then no matter what the system is, that will happen. And then what these people do is they, again, they hyper-focus on like edge case, bad outcomes.

And they use that to, to slam the entire that we're in that just completely ignores all the good it's doing. It ignores the fact that any system is going to have tough edge cases, any system is going to have some bad effects.

And the more we can tone down the conversation, by, I mean that in like in a way that's appropriate, obviously if somebody's of just a violent sex criminal in a college, like, no, I'm not, you know, of course, like, but for the most part, you know, these are kids, there's going to be people like, if we could tone it down and take it away from this culture war lens, I bet you that leaves a lot more room for people to take a very human approach that would be beneficial to not only the victim, but the perpetrator in going forward with the rest of their lives in the best way they can.

0:25:31 Lydia: Yeah. You know, an interesting stat I came across when I was researching for this was, you of people are really concerned about false accusations. And I think it's reasonable to, you hate if my kid was if I felt like they were falsely accused. But statistics show that your, you for example, is more more likely to be a in college sexual assault than they are to be falsely accused of committing sexual assault or, you know, rape or, you know. The Title IX grouping of stuff. And so I think, like, keeping that in perspective, too, you wish it were zero, of course, but that's just not how the world works.

0:25:39 Thomas: Of course. Yeah.

0:25:54 Thomas: Wow. Yeah, and that's also approaching it as though every single time there's a false accusation, someone is just shot by a sniper rifle. It's like, no, they're doing investigations. You would have to further constrain it down to, okay, how many false accusations where somehow the whole, you administration, whoever does this thing doesn't believe them and then they expel them and it's the worst possible outcome. That's just a fractional, you Know, yeah, there's going to be a couple. It'S a big fucking country with 240 million people or whatever. Like, yeah. Okay. Okay, that's always going to be true. There's always gonna be some bad cases. And that's really fascinating, hun, to bring that up that, you even again, of course, there are male victims, of coarse, but like it's a lot fewer just statistically.

And to have that context of, oh no, even if you were just talking about like of our sons or are individually much more likely to be the victim of something. And therefore would, I think, would want to, and we would want them to have all the best tools at their disposal and for the university to have All the Best Tools at Their Disposal, there's way more likelihood that you're in that situation than that you are. Going to go ahead and call bullshit on just saying that you're falsely accused because that's whatever. If you're false accused and it goes to the college and the Title IX administrator and they're like, oh, this is bullshit. That's nothing. I am sorry. Yeah, it sucks, but that's

0:26:19 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah,

0:27:32 Thomas: Just someone did a bad thing to you and you had a bad day or month or whatever, which is not great, but that's life. Like that will happen. Um, that's not going to follow you on your transcript. That's not gonna follow all this other complaints that you're not going to get expelled. You're not, I would say maybe there are some people who get the worst punishment as a result of false accusations.

0:27:51 Thomas: I would think it's pretty fucking rare. And you're further subdividing that group down and down and done to where they've been falsely accused and it's gone as bad as it can possibly go. And by the time you get the number down to that, it's just vanishing. You to be vanishingly small and you're much more likely to be the victim of something. And you would hope that in that case, you have all the resources you need.

0:27:33 Lydia: Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. And If you've truly been falsely accused and you've been expelled, you have a heck of a lot of right -wing lawyers that are like ready to support you

0:28:18 Thomas: Ben Shapiro's podcast. Yeah. People just shoving fistfuls of cash in your face.

0:28:22 Lydia: Yeah, well and you have, you have legal remedies, right? Like, you can sue your university and and after them, there was a case of, of a gay student who ended up being expelled. And we're not going to get into the case, but essentially what happened was they, the lawsuit, after the judge found it in favor for them, that their university had missed the step of, you know, X, Y, and Z. The And student had said, you know, I just wanted recognition that, you know, they messed up the procedure and I don't need anything else. So there there are, you know, remedies for folks. Yeah. It's terrible.

0:28:29 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sucks. Yeah yeah, I'm sure that sucked for that person. Yeah and I can tell people from experience. Anytime you have to use the legal system at all, that sucks. That's a bad day. That's not great. I think it's just, again, the theme of all of this is taking a fully contextualized, nuanced view of things. And nobody is out there, especially not our new hero, Alexandra Brodsky, who we hopefully will someday meet and interview or something.

0:28:58 Lydia: Yeah, yeah.

0:29:24 Thomas: I don't, um, gosh, she seems amazing, um, including her. Thinks that and system we come up with will be perfect. Nobody fucking thinks that. There's no point in arguing that, it's just not true. This is, no, no system is perfect, it's, it's about trade -offs And I could tell you, uh, absolute certainty that the Betsy DeVos system is going to be a fucking disaster, and was a disaster for as long as it was in place.

0:29:24 Lydia: I'm going to try.

0:29:46 Lydia: Yeah. So I think we have one last female law professor that he talks about, and I want to circle back and of dive into some of the claims that he's making in the, the article, and we can debunk those. But closing out our fake feminists is Jeannie Suk Gerson. She's also a Harvard professor. Like I mentioned, these are all Harvard professors.

0:29:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:10 Lydia: Yep. Is not in her 70s, though.

0:30:09 Thomas: All three of them, what this is oh oh, 90s?

0:30:14 Lydia: She's younger. But Janet Halley is a mentor of hers. So you

0:30:15 Thomas: No so you found a club of people, you found. Oh, but this diverse group of, checks notes, people who probably meet in the break room and like, fucking Jesus, dude, it's such bad journalism. I'm sorry, they're all three at the, the same instant, Jesus Christ. Look

0:30:30 Lydia: Yeah, yes. All three at the same institution signed all the same letters alongside Alan Dershowitz.

0:30:40 Thomas: Even if I wanted to do your bullshit journalism for you. Like, even if I was your editor, Michael Powell, and I was like, yeah, look, man, I'm with you, I want to do shit journalism, like, that's what I'm here to do, that's why, that's right. So

0:30:42 Lydia: Yeah that's why I came to the New York Times.

0:30:52 Thomas: I put on my, my pants one leg at a time, just like everybody else, I came in here, I packed my lunchbox, I came here to do shit journalism, that's what I want to do. But like, don't you think we should find like one person from three schools, rather than like clique, or clique, or however you pronounce it, of yeah, I think, yeah, me too, but if you hear people say clique, and it seems more like the word anyway, yeah, then a little club of people who all go to the same fucking place, that's just not good journalism. You're, that's not representative in any fucking way. Hmm.

0:31:04 Lydia: Yeah I say click.

0:31:19 Lydia: Yeah. And I think what I you know, I'm not going to do a deep dive of her necessarily, but I do want to highlight something in particular. 2014, she had major complaints about the that schools were taking in discussing law related to rape. Know, schools were really wanting to issue content warnings or disclose, you know, that they were going to be touching on stuff that might be of a sensitive nature. And she was like, this is ridiculous. Everyone's having to change how they do their curriculum.

0:31:48 Thomas: Forbid. Oh,

0:32:02 Lydia: And, stuff isn't a lot of law.

0:32:04 Thomas: Man, and you know why that's just not okay, is because then you'd have to change how you do your curriculum. That's, okay, just change how, it's like when we found out Pluto's not a planet, just fucking change it. It's, that's fine. What is the, I'm gonna have to like retype Something, god damn it! No, this is very closely just coincidentally, this is us independently doing research that's actually pretty closely related to a current story I'm working on.

0:32:09 Lydia: Yeah, I know. Know. Well, and she was like incensed on the behalf of nobody.

0:32:30 Thomas: Um, So more on that later, but this idea that like, you are going to be a lawyer, you have to be exposed to any possible traumatic thing and have no warning is like, ah, breaks. That's the world. Well, no, actually that's not like you, you don't do like, Hey man, I want to do tax law. And someone's like, you has to do the spread case right now. And you don't get any warning. And I'm going to give you all gory details. Like, no, that's not how life works. Like you, you don'T have to be exposed to that stuff if you don't want to be. And so for know, for students who are prospective, you KNOW, lawyers, them like just a heads up is like the minimal possible fucking thing you could do.

0:32:30 Lydia: Oh, yeah.

0:33:09 Lydia: And so so she has concerns about, you know, content warnings for for potentially traumatic material. And then recently there or I guess recently, two years ago, there was, you push about why they don't want to teach about Dred Scott anymore. Yeah. So she's behind that, too.

0:33:27 Thomas: Do want to, oh my God, that is, that was also, I think, okay. Yeah. Okay. More on this later the third

0:33:33 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, well, we'll do some more Jeannie Sook Gerson in the future, I'm sure. Just wanted to briefly touch on her. She's the third feminist that is spoken of in this article. And so now I want to get into just a couple of the things that Michael Powell.

0:33:50 Thomas: Paragraph of the article no we'll get to it

0:33:50 Lydia: Oh, God. Yeah, I know there's been so much. I think there's some stuff that we can just kind of knock out. Right. Starts talking about what the Obama administration did with their dear colleague letter and some of those things I talked about. Out. But when you get down a little bit later, it says, perhaps most controversially, Obama officials encouraged universities to appoint a single official who acted as detective, prosecutor, judge and jury. Not true.

0:33:53 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:34:16 Thomas: It doesn't really sound right at all.

0:34:17 Lydia: Yeah. If you read the Dear Colleague letter from 2011, it says at least one. So it's going to depend on the resources.

0:34:17 Thomas: Geez. Same year as the Dear Muslima letter. What are the odds? Wasn't- why is it Dear Colleague? It's weird. Thanks.

0:34:25 Lydia: Oh, I know. It is weird. I don't know why they call it that. Oh, my

0:34:31 Thomas: Obama. It's the one time I've ever made that joke. I had to wait until it was like long enough after that it wasn't what everybody was saying. And I would like to announce, this is, I would lack recognition. That's the first time I think I've ever made that jokes. Like that's, it's only acceptable 20 fucking years after the fact.

0:34:39 Lydia: God. I know. Yeah, also just not true at all. And then he talks about, you the bar to determine guilt, changing.

0:34:55 Thomas: Are you going to tell us what is actually true? Because this is important. This is once again, I will not beat it to absolute death, but I'm going to kick it around a little bit. This is the New York Times. This is not an opinion article. This has fucking reporting. And it's a dude just saying like, yeah, they made a guy the high inquisitor of every rape case and they get to do everything. And you're like, no, that's just false. It's just not right. This New York times is just wrong.

0:34:58 Lydia: Yes, yeah.

0:35:20 Lydia: And every school is probably set up differently. I mean, so that's what makes it a little challenging is you have thousands of institutions that all are trying to abide by the same guidance, but it might look look different for them, dependent on their resources and, you know, things that are important to their administration. It not a directive that was coming from the Obama administration. They said there needs to be at least one Title IX coordinator. And from what I was gathering from the letter, the responsibilities how you see fit. So it's not not necessarily that the one individual serves in all of these capacities to close out the entire case. There is a single point of contact overseeing the Title IX initiative.

0:36:06 Thomas: Of course there, I hate these fucking people.

0:36:07 Lydia: Right. Because that's how hierarchy and organizational charts work.

0:36:11 Thomas: Just love that these New York time fucking fucking reporters need, you this is not a put down to you because it's me too. Somebody who in her off time, of which she has none.

0:36:22 Lydia: In my closet with a blanket On the wall.

0:36:23 Thomas: Yeah. It's going to just quickly fact check this asshole. God, what? Oh my God. He's gone. He was gone from the New York Times. He was at the Atlantic. That's not that much different.

0:36:33 Lydia: I know. So then he goes on to say, set a lower bar to determine guilt, changing from clear and convincing to more likely than not known colloquially in legal circles as the 50% plus the feather test, right? That's our preponderance of the evidence. Is something that a of schools were already doing. Yeah. And so when I was looking through the Dear Colleague letter, the Office of Civil Rights says they specifically spell this out in the Dear your Colleague letter. They say why they want to do preponderance of the evidence standard, why they think that that is appropriate. They say SCOTUS, Supreme this in civil litigation involving discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Like Title IX, Title VII prohibits discrimination on basis of sex, right? So those logically then tied together.

They also use that same standard in how they determine if they're going to terminate the funding of a school through their administrative hearings. So it's sort of, you know, setting the standard to be equivalent along the entire process of this journey. Grievance procedures use clear and convincing standards, that means that they are inconsistent with the standard of proof for violations of civil rights laws. So it wouldn't be equitable.

And that's really what OCR is looking to do is, OK, we have anti -discrimination across a variety of protected classes. How are they being handled in these classes? We need to make sure that we're being equitable on this class as well. And so that's why they moved to the preponderance of the evidence standard, because they felt like it, yeah.

0:36:36 Thomas: Okay.

0:36:54 Thomas: It's probably good That's Interesting, so it's more thinking about it from the rights of kind of the victim, I guess, it's like if it to other civil rights things where it's okay if Your civil rights are violated, forget everything else about the conversation, they're saying in other contexts your civil rites are violated, you shouldn't have to prove you be on a reasonable out, or that's, I know that's the highest standard.

0:38:23 Lydia: Yeah.

0:38:34 Thomas: But the second highest standard, or whatever, yeah.

0:38:34 Lydia: Clear And convincing.

0:38:37 Thomas: Which Is probably what, fucking, two-thirds or 75 percent, if you were to think about it as a percentage, that it's, it's sort of a violation of your rights to have to kind that burden, and it's comparing it and saying, you, is this different, like.

0:38:37 Lydia: Yeah, right.

0:38:51 Lydia: Because I mean, at the end of the day, this is not something that, as we've said, it's not going to put somebody in jail. It's It's not going to be reflected on their transcript. What we do need to consider is the purpose of Title IX was that women were not necessarily afforded the same educational opportunities as men. This was trying to right that wrong. And if there are situations in which women feel like they cannot pursue the same opportunities in education as men, then that is a problem. They are being discriminated against. And as the Supreme Court ruled through the 80s and 90s, sexual assault, sexual harassment are forms of sex discrimination. So if that is happening, your civil rights are being infringed upon because you're not able to pursue education as you normally would in a safe environment.

0:39:44 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:45 Lydia: To he bring says, yet some of the strongest female voices in legal circles occupy this hill of dissent. So he brings in RBG and he says that, you know, she said in speeches and interviews that the Obama era regulations deny due process and a fair hearing to the accused. Now, she's not here to have a conversation with.

0:39:55 Thomas: I Noted That Yeah She Was back then, right?

0:40:06 Lydia: Was back then. She she was old. So are we running into that same problem?

0:40:06 Thomas: Right, or- Yeah. Well, I mean, she was like a whole generation older. I feel like But I did, yeah, did you check on that, I mean, is that a

0:40:14 Lydia: Yeah, 90 something. Did say. So she was concerned about due process. But I think, when you, we listen to that conversation from, I guess, panel discussion with Alexander, you, Brodsky, now, it to the criminal law is problematic, problematic, and and I think that's probably what a lot of lawyers, a lot of people who are trained in the legal profession, tend to do when something that is, um, against the law, you know, it's it's in the penal code for states and, you know, it is something that ist a crime to not wear that hat and to put on that disciplinary hearing hat you

0:40:19 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

0:40:54 Thomas: I Don't Know, I'm Not sure, sure about that, who knows. Because I Think that, um, a lot of similarly, I think it, if you have an understanding of the law, you might just as likely say, yeah, man, our fucking legal system has stuff like this all the time, there's different, there's a reason we have a name for these different burdens is because they exist in stuff like, there's Some the less serious a thing or like the less consequences, the less, whatever, the lower the standard, kind of, as usually, broadly speaking. And I think a good lawyer or even a mediocre lawyer would see, oh, okay, well this, I mean, they're not in a court of law and they're not at all as a part of this process, they're not going to be charged criminally.

So why, why would I, would think that like they should be held to criminal standards if they're not in a criminal law thingy? I just think we're looking at a sub, a purposefully selected group of Harvard old ladies who used to be feminists, and I don't know that that means that lawyers disproportionately have this conception, I think they might just as easily be the ones who are like, no, this actually makes sense because this is how this, this works, I

0:40:57 Lydia: Don't Think so. Yeah.

0:41:13 Lydia: Yeah.

0:41:58 Lydia: Yeah. But I guess I'm cluing in on on RBG in particular. And

0:42:02 Thomas: I don't, I don't know what to make of that because I don't, like you said, I mean, who knows, I mean, like, who wouldn't say they have concerns about due process? Like, yeah, no, I have everyone. Everyone has concerns about due process. Don't know the context of that RBG quote, but like, yeah, who knows? You the way, again, they could have been focused on or privy to one of the edge cases and, you, that was fresh on their mind. Who knows?

0:42:04 Lydia: Sure.

0:42:25 Lydia: OK. He also says that per the dear colleague letter, accused the cannot cross examine the accuser. And what it actually says, it discourages from letting either party directly question or cross -examine each other. That's traumatic for everybody.

0:42:34 Thomas: Goddamn right. What fucking good would come from that?

0:42:44 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So is pretty misleading there. The next big thing I want to talk about is further down in the article, and he gets into statistics. And so he talks about the number of women that are assaulted on college campuses and that itself being a subject of debate. Says that advocates say one in five female students have experienced assault while in college. And if you account for a rate of underreporting, which we all know happens, the Federal Clery Act says that there's only 8,500 rapes that happened within a year.

0:43:12 Thomas: Yeah. Obviously.

0:43:22 Lydia: Yes, it says rapes.

0:43:21 Thomas: Rapes. He says that. What the fuck? Are

0:43:25 Lydia: He's conflating rape and assault statistics. And he does it for a third time.

0:43:30 Thomas: You kidding me?

0:43:32 Lydia: No, a separate Justice Department study from 2013 found nearly 28,000 students had reported rapes, attempted rapes and assaults. So these are three different categories of things that he's putting in one paragraph together.

0:43:44 Thomas: Come on, dude.

0:43:46 Lydia: It's very lazy. See. The Federal Clery Act is not meant to be the Title IX reporting arm. It is something distinct. And even so that the Department of Justice issued a side -by -side PDF in 2014 called Intersection of Title IX and the Clery act. And in the purpose of presenting this document, They said, to date, the Department of Education has not identified any specific conflicts between Title IX and the Clery Act. It says that, you know, there were some concerns of inconsistencies, but it identifies the differences between the two. What is reported under each one? Who is reporting under each Under what circumstances are they reporting under each one? It's just this paragraph in particular drove me nuts because it's just it's it's wrong on every account.

0:44:32 Thomas: For fuck's sake. Wow. Right. Look, I know I get yelly, but I think it's, I think It's appropriate here. Like I get, This outrageous. I'm looking at this paragraph and can't help but undersell it because it's that outrageous. Like there's, yeah, I want to read this paragraph.

0:44:47 Lydia: Mm hmm. Go for it.

0:44:58 Thomas: I know you basically did, but just to make sure. Here we go. Here's Michael fucking idiot pal. "The precise number of women assaulted, as you pointed out, assaulted on college campuses is itself a subject of debate. Date. Advocates point to federal surveys suggesting that one in five female students have experienced assault while in college, which amounts to about 400,000 students," even like I'm pulling my fucking phone calculator, how, how many total students and then does them, like, just a fucking multiplication and gets to 400,000 and then says, "well, and even if you account for a high rate of underreporting, the federal Clary Act, which requires colleges colleges and universities to report crimes on campuses, reported far fewer rapes." He says "it rapes" with 8,529 Into this is, this is a handle. This is so fucking bad.

0:45:55 Lydia: Federal Federal Act is like to campus police. It's not Title Nine, like, yeah.

0:46:00 Thomas: This is like, okay. Did a survey of And we asked like, how many of you have ever been slapped or, punched or stabbed or killed? I don't know why we asked him that, but like we asked him all those things and one in five were like, yeah, I've been one of those things. I've Been Slapped, I Been Poked, I 'Ve Been Stabbed, I Veen Shot, I 'vE Been Killed. Then we look at this other report that said, hey, how many fucking murders were there? And it's less. And this fucking great mouse detective, Michael Powell, is like, I This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. I didn't know this. I didn' catch this. This is so fucking... Why do we do anything? I'm quitting my job.

0:46:08 Lydia: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I know.

0:46:42 Thomas: This is... I can't do it. I can' do it, Hunt. This is dumb. If this was a blog or a tweet an asshole, I'd be like, yeah, he's an idiot. This is the New York Times. The hot fact checkers.

0:46:48 Lydia: It's Embarrassing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:46:58 Thomas: Jesus. Unbelievable. I probably woke up the kids. Like, I can't, I can't believe, this is, if they come in here, I'm going to explain this entire thing to them, by the way. I can'T help it.

0:47:03 Lydia: Well, Good, they need, they need to know, hopefully.

0:47:09 Thomas: Yeah, I don't know if they'll understand. Fuck! This Oh, my, okay. All right. I'll see how much of that I kept in.

0:47:17 Lydia: Of it, um, the last major thing I wanted to call out here with how he's presenting this information. We've talked about the kind depiction of what the Obama dear colleague letter was about. We talked, you just, about now the statistics. We talked about who these three liberal feminist law professors are, all from Harvard. Also talks about what's happening with students that are filing against universities if they feel like their due process rights have been violated. And just wanted to call this out really quickly before I get into my last, you know, kind of big piece. Says that, you know, "it's according to Professor Casey Johnson at Brooklyn College, a critic of Title IX regulations who monitors such legal challenges." What I want to call out here is Professor Casey Johnston at Brooklyn College is a history professor. And he got really into the 2006 Duke Lacrosse rape case. And ever since then, he has been very obsessed with this.

0:48:09 Thomas: Uh, Which, I think, wasn't that a genuine false accusation? Case. Yeah, okay, this is, I, I want to be clear, I have not researched this, my, my understanding is that it the did in some way turn out to be some sort of injustice that took place, hmm.

0:48:21 Lydia: Yes. Yeah. I mean, like the way that it turned out, like, the yeah. And I don't know that I would necessarily say that it didn't happen because The woman has been pretty insistent that she was sexually assaulted. But Will

0:48:38 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, no, that fits that was just, I absorbed that from the ether, and obviously it was fucking, we'll see, sure.

0:48:48 Lydia: Say that, like, procedurally and stuff, like, I think their rights were violated because it was Like a criminal case and, um, DA ended up being disbarred.

0:48:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, okay. That's serious, yeah. No, that's that's, yeah, and if it is a criminal case, obviously criminal standards of evidence and proof and all that, yeah, different story, and guess what, that, that translates to, there was, was a miscarriage of justice in the United States of America. And when it's fucking rich white kids, people are like this, we're gonna die. The whole country is going to explode. But when it is, you know, a poor black person every single day, 50 fucking times a day in every single county in the country, might as

0:48:56 Lydia: Um, Yeah. Yeah. Which Happens Every day, yeah. Yeah.

0:49:28 Lydia: Speaking of rich white kids, just an aside, very quickly, um,

0:49:31 Thomas: Well be the name of this podcast, actually.

0:49:33 Lydia: You see, um, Turner is going by his middle name, trying to, like, keep people from Googling him.

0:49:38 Thomas: I know this wasn't the case because this is not your personality, but that was like the setup for like a really hacky joke. And be like, "Yeah, it's it's actually like fucking, you know, Rape Turner." I don't know, it'd be some stupid thing like that, like the combination of words would make it so he's going by, it's something that says he's like a sexual assaulter of people, yeah.

0:49:41 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah I just thought we were talking about sexual assault so and rich white kids so. So, um, uh, no, I

0:50:04 Thomas: Wanted to tell me that someone was going by their middle name, okay, yeah, yeah, would go by double, I would double it, I'd be like, I'm now two, no, like his double, he's not, like, let's say, say his middle name is Anderson.

0:50:10 Lydia: Brock, Brock Turner, Turner. Yeah.

0:50:15 Thomas: I'd be like, my name is now Anderson Anderson. Like I'm not even, don't even keep one of them. It's just fucking Anderson squared.

0:50:18 Lydia: Oh, I see. Uh-huh. Yeah. It's, it's tainted. Yeah. It's just start

0:50:24 Thomas: Just Some people have that weird name. Yeah. Why are you asking? Haven't you heard of somebody else? Uh, the drummer for Jimi Hendrix. Doesn't Mitchell there turner's? If his middle name was Mitch, it'd be like, yeah, I'm now Michell now.

0:50:24 Lydia: Over. Mitch Mitchell. Gotcha.

0:50:37 Thomas: Just an extra throw him off the scent, you

0:50:37 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, all so here's my, you the sexual assault, conflating rape and assault and all that stuff was a big deal.

0:50:43 Thomas: It's gonna be hard to beat that it is going to be hard. That's the high watermark for this episode.

0:50:48 Lydia: Here we go. Okay. Powell does not talk at all about how Betsy DeVos came to deciding what her changes were going to be. Staff with men's rights activist groups. There are hundreds of emails with, yeah, I wasn't able to track down all the emails. I've tracked down coverage regarding the emails, yeah.

0:50:49 Thomas: Oh Oh boy, okay. Oh My God. Really? Ooh, FOIA. Are we getting FOIA? But did somebody do that? I assume. Yeah. Oh

0:51:20 Lydia: Hundreds emails, with three major men's right activist groups, um much so that a major funder of one of them got Betsy DeVos's speech in advance of her sharing that she was going to be making these changes to say would love your thoughts and then he responded with some ideas and the response was you always have great insight yeah

0:51:25 Thomas: My god. Wow. Oh, my God, that, My. God. That's like a punchline I would come up with, or What are you taking notes from the A men's rights activist. What? You are? Oh, you literally.

0:51:46 Lydia: Yeah isn't yeah, no, this is like real

0:51:55 Thomas: Is like your civil rights division being like, hey, David Duke, do you think you have any notes on this on our new policy?

0:51:55 Lydia: It

0:52:03 Thomas: Insane that is really insane

0:52:03 Lydia: I, I just um, when When I stumbled across this, I at my computer screen for a while because I was like, what? And this was something that, you know, had a little bit of press coverage, certainly not enough, in my opinion.

0:52:04 Thomas: No

0:52:16 Lydia: And certainly Michael Powell should have included this in his article if he were an honest actor.

0:52:16 Thomas: Yeah oh you mean Michael Powell, the New York Times journalist, didn't include some not just like important context but like fucking game changing context that goes against his whole fucking asshole shtick, he didn't include that In his article. Unreal.

0:52:33 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I want to warn these, quote unquote, feminist legal scholars and be like, hey, just so you know, like, did you see this and you really Feel like, like you're still on the same side? Yeah.

0:52:42 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that's how bad this is. Going to Christina Hoff Summers and be like, hey, I'm like, I know you fucking suck so bad. God, you suck. But like, do you suck this bad? If I show you this fact, like, do you still suck? And she's like, yeah, probably.

0:52:55 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It was, it's just shocking to me, um,

0:53:06 Thomas: It is. I'm I'm actually mad right now. Like, not just at, well, all of it. I mean, mean, it's all of it. But like, to your point, hon, I've never heard of this. I'm a pretty tuned in, especially around this time, quite tuned into politics person. I have no fucking memory of this to the point where like, I want to do more. Like I want To do a follow up on it. Like, I want to go find the emails. I want find who the fuck she was talking to. And then here's the thing that I've learned. Again, more patterns I'm identifying. We're going to get better and better than this as we go.

One pattern that I'm finding is a good thing to do is, as you already are doing, go every person that she talked to and look up, not just what they say, you know, when they're putting their Sunday best on, when Michael Powell's interviewing them or some shit, you find what they Say any other time because you'll have people, and this is, kind again, of other research I'm doing, but the turf examples is recently what I've been looking into. You have people are like no, no, I'm, I I respect trans people. I just think that sports are a question that we should have. And then a bunch of people are, like, well, yeah, okay.

0:53:08 Lydia: Yeah. Yep. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:54:15 Thomas: Yeah, that seems right. And then they're like, hold on one sec. I'm going to tweet something. Trans people don't exist. You know, like they'll just, any other thing, and I was sparing people, the hatred is way worse than that. Any other place, they'll tweet the worst anti -trans stuff, like truly disgusting anti -tran stuff. Not just like, ideologically, I disagree with trans people, like genuinely disgusting trans insults. Like, because they don't do it literally in the interview where some asshole like Michael Powell wants to give them the shiniest image they can. And that's what we need to also check with all these people, because, you know, that will be the case. There will be somebody who did some major interview or they publicly put forth the idea that like, oh, yeah, I just don't, worried you about male suicide rate. You're like, well, yeah. OK, me too. That's why wouldn't you be worried about that? And then go two feet to your left. And they're like there's a sign that says, like, all women should be killed. You know, it's just the worst shit.

0:54:22 Lydia: Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

0:55:15 Lydia: It's like all super

0:55:16 Thomas: Yeah, it's it's and anyone who's anywhere near this in a reporting sense who report the full thing, like not just the things they say when they want to put on a good face, a good image, but also all the other stuff that they say. That's not hard to find. It's not hard to find. If you don't report all of that, you're a fucking hack and you're doing a bad job, to say the least. At best, you're a fucking hack doing a bad job. At worst, or not even worst, at realistic, you're an ideological hack trying to fucking astroturf some anti -progressive bullshit in the country. I don't know what. You have an agenda, and it's not good.

0:55:16 Lydia: Red pill, yeah. Yep.

0:55:35 Lydia: Yep.

0:55:56 Lydia: So this was, uh, this was his kickoff article with the beat that he had at The New York Times. What a start.

0:56:01 Thomas: What a start. Jesus.

0:56:04 Lydia: Know what's interesting? Close I'll it out by saying this. Think everyone was expecting to get updated Title IX guidance from the Biden administration before the school year started, but they didn't. It was delayed to October 2023.

0:56:16 Thomas: Hmm. Wait, are you saying we're still in the fucking Trump rule? No, they, no, they did. I thought I saw they did some of it, right?

0:56:21 Lydia: Still into the Trump rules. Yeah, they repealed pieces of it, but but not all of it. So they're doing a big revision. That'll come out October 2023. But very recently, California just ruled that fair proceedings do not require the opportunity to cross -examine. So now there's some precedent happening in the legal circles regarding like what a fair proceeding is. So I think there's is probably going to be more to come. I'm going to be watching these feminist legal scholars over the next few months to see their takes as this stuff comes out. And maybe we'll have cause for one. But this is our Michael Powell deep dive anyway.

0:56:25 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Sure.

0:56:59 Thomas: I, I'm just, I's like, I'm fucking blown away. I This know it's the format of the show and people who know me as a person. No, I don't, I can't script anything. I like genuine interaction. I don't like rehearsed stuff. I don'T like scripted stuff, but like, fuck, you could have warned me. No, not really. I'm, I'm totally joking. I, okay.

0:57:15 Lydia: It was so so hard to keep this to myself when I stumbled on it all, like, I wanted to do was tell you.

0:57:22 Thomas: Is unreal. Like, this Is so like, I would expect Phoebe when she's in sixth grade to do better journalism than this, like fifth grade, like, okay, you turned into Michael Powell.

0:57:34 Thomas: Don't worry, kiddo. You're young. Everybody where they're in fifth grade turns in a steaming pile of fucking fucking shit. That's the same as a Michael Powell article. Sixth grade though. We better, you better grow out of that. I'm sorry. You You know, you better be able to actually, I don't know, fucking think critically about fucking anything. This is unbelievable. Sorry. I mean, get mad again. I won't be able TO relax. So we're going to call it here. Um, truly, that was excellent, hon. Seriously, great work. I so mad, it's no, it's, it's, it's it's, and the New York Times, it's not just him, it's I know that asshole is going to exist in the world, that's what bothers me most, is the New Year's Times, they have fact checkers, they have millions of dollars, maybe billions, I don't remember, but they're a giant company, they have resources to dwarf our resources so many times, it's a mathematical, grammatical, negligible, fucking thing, and it, two seconds just reading that paragraph, like, honestly, just reading it once

0:57:58 Lydia: Yeah. I'm sorry I made you mad. Michael Powell made you bad. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:58:35 Thomas: With the stats, would be like, well, this is stupid, like don't you see this going to try to relax. Um, thank you so much for listening, everybody. Uh, please support the show, patreon.com/wherethereswoke. Lydia ought to be making, I don't know, a billion dollars, because that's the level of journalism she's doing apparently here. So please support this show. We really appreciate you and, Lydia, uh, great job. Rob, this was the best.

0:58:36 Lydia: I know. This doesn't make sense. Yeah, Thank you. You. Yeah, I just want to say, you, we're having a great time. I'm really enjoying digging into this stuff and seeing what I can find out and trying to spot bad actors when we can see them. But also, you in it too. You know, we don't want to be sensationalist in our coverage either, so, um, yeah, wherever you guys can support us is great, and, uh, forward to the next one. Yeah.

0:59:11 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. And certainly I latched onto and I have a high emotional response how outrageously stupid stuff is, but it's important to note, I think it's really important to say, this is also a very important human issue for a lot of students, a lot OF kids at universities who, God knows what the what the, bad stories are that we may or may not hear about because of the time that this policy was in effect. You it's a very serious, real human issue. Um, know, it'S, s crazy thing, but it's actually way fucking better when we have Democrats in office than when we have Republicans. It's cra - I know it's crazy.

I know your fucking socialist podcast that makes a billion dollars a month told you otherwise. Uh, But no, it's actually better when Democrats are in power for millions of reasons that you're not able to keep, that I'm not able to keep in my head at all times. And this is one of them. Is massive. This has met. What difference might this make in someone's life who is the victim of something? And unfortunately, they happen to be of the graduating class of fucking, I don't or 2023 2020 or whatever, and they were victimized in the wrong year. And so therefore they got no justice. Who knows what happened to them? Who knows What their mental health outcomes were? These are very real things.

0:59:32 Lydia: Yep. Yep.

1:00:01 Lydia: Or if they, like, dropped out of their program specifically because it was, a you know, another student in the program. Yeah.

1:00:34 Thomas: Yeah, We know that happens. We know That happens. And it sucks. So that's why we're doing You it know, is an older story, but like it's still relevant. Like you said, the new guidelines are not in effect yet. I mean, I do think Biden reversed some of it, but it's just item number seven billion of things that when an Nazi raccoon goes and ruins your government, it takes a while to fucking clean it up a little bit. So,

1:00:38 Lydia: Yep. Yep. Yeah.

1:01:00 Lydia: In the same way that it takes a long time to debunk inaccurate information.

1:01:03 Thomas: Yeah, I know. We've done, I don't know, fucking two, three hours on this and Michael Powell probably wrote this steaming turd in like 15 minutes. It's such an easy formula. Oh, I find some assholes who are not really feminists who call themselves feminists. Check. Done, done, Cash my check, my New York Times journalism check. All right. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks, Lydia. Great job. Fuck Michael Powell. Fuck the the New York Times for this bad oversight, And even we'll we'll see you next time.

1:01:12 Lydia: Meet his deadline.