It's the podcast that it is. This is the podcast that it is, not the one it's not. I'm Robert Evans Behind the Bastards Part two an intro, But are you I'll never do that again? Um, I'm so sorry. I like it. No, I feel like I'm getting all of the treats right now between the appropriate intro and then to see an intro. Would you say you're going to do neither one of these again? No? Never. Next episode I'm going to introduce by just shouting out the name of a famous ethnic cleansing and then uh, yeah, it's gonna be very bad. But this time you've got a song. Of course. Our guest today in part two of our Population Control episode, as in part one, is Samantha McVeigh of stuff your mom never told you, Samantha, mom never told you stuff mom never told you yet? Know you and my mom specifically, Yeah to how are you doing, Samantha? Has has life changed dratically for you since part one? Well? I did go visit my dog, who I do put her away during recordings because she is a very loud barker. But h yeah, so you know that always makes me a little happier. That's good. Yeah, it's always good to see dogs. I don't remove Anderson because I have separation anxiety. Yeah, but I feel like Anderson so much better behaved than Peaches. Peaches is just kind of allowed just wait for somebody to get a package delivered. She hates the package delivery pieces, like she's like, is it for me? No? Fuck you? Right? Anderson has that in common with Jeff Bezos. There you go. Wait, is Anderson making just as much money for every package being delivered to two thousand dollars a second son of a bit? Yeah, and she does not share a dime of it. It's very frustrating, very rudy dog I have. Yeah, she has so many jet skis that she can't even use. Got to make that bank? You you do? You? Anderson speaking of making that bank, not at all, speaking of making that bank, speaking of population control. When we left off our long winding story about the Dalkon Shield and the population control movement, we had gotten to Margaret Sanger. Have you heard Does that name ring a bell to you? Samantha? Yeah, of course we have kind of mentioned her previous previous episodes with previous Yeah, yeah, she's you know again kind of seen as the founder of planned parenthood, at least the organizations that became it, and popularizer of the term birth control. And in many ways, Margaret was a bridge between the eugenics movement, which was fundamentally racist, and the population control movement, which was usually racist but not necessarily racist. It's actually a much more complicated kind of terrible. Um. Margaret was not a eugenicist in the Nazi way. She supported birth control access for everybody, including the kind of white people that you kind of assumed she felt were a superior race. She was comfortable talking to fascists. In her nineteen thirty autobiography, she wrote, always, to me, any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing. So she did talk to the KKK. There are pictures that will claim to be her with the KKK. They're not her. Um. There's no picture of that meeting. But she did give a speech to a women's KKK group. UM. And you can find a lot online about Singer's racism. It's a very frustrating subject to research because she definitely was problematic, but also her her status as founding mother of the safe contraception movement in the US has made her the target of a bunch of disingenuous right wingers who want to paint planned parenthood and birth control as part of a racist plot to wipe out black people. And that is not true. It wasn't true of Margaret Sanger, to be honest. Um, she did embark on something called the Negro Project, and that is a not a great thing to call anything. Yeah, but it was not what you might assume it was. It was an effort to spread education and access to birth control in black communities, particularly throughout the South. The reality of the project is complex. Singer and her colleagues did deliberately appeal to white racists in their attempts to get funding for the project. I'm gonna quote from a right up by New York University here, Sanger, Ryan Art, and Sanger secretary Florence Rose drafted a report on birth control and the Negro skillfully using language that appealed to both eugenicists fearful of unchecked black fertility and progressives committed to shepherding African Americans into middle class culture. The reports stated that Negroes present the great problem of the South, as they are the group with the greatest economic, health and social problems, and outlined a practical birth control program geared toward a population characterized as largely illiterate and that still breed carelessly and disastrously, a line borrowed from a June nineteen thirty two Birth Control Review article by W. E. B. Dubois. So again very problematic, also quoting W. B. D b Uh yeah, and it's it was not. Again this is framed modern and modern times by usually like right wing anti birth control people as like evidence of her racism. The Negro Project was very popular with black community leaders at the time, and it would be unfair to frame it as an act of genocide. Sanger wrote repeatedly of the importance of bringing in black doctors, stating at one point, I do not believe that this project should be directed or run by white medical men, which is good if you're going to do a healthcare project like focused on the black community like that, that that shows like she she was not, like she was capable of understanding like what was necessary in order to actually reach people. Yeah yeah, nine. She argued in a letter that black ministers needed to be heavily involved in the project in order to gain the trust of their communities. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members. Again, it's a problematic language there. But also like, there's no evidence she was actually going in for genocide because she was again doing the same thing with white people. She was a birth control across the board advocate, right, she wanted everyone to have more access to contraceptives. Um, there are people on the right like Denisia Suza who will spread wildly untrue claims about Singer, like that she called black people human weeds and a minis to civilization, and there is no evidence of this. Singer's own legacy contains enough problematic facts without making up lies. She was a eugenicist, and she wrote in nineteen twenty three that birth control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better elements in our society and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extinction of defective stocks, those human weeds who threatened the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization. So she did call people human weeds, but she wasn't referring to black people. She was referring more to mentally challenged people, more to people with like who are prone to diseases. And that's bad, Like, that's really bad. But she was not like a for exterminating everything but white people. She was for exterminating people she considered unhealthy, or at least exterminating them from the gene pool, which is again bad. But let's be accurate about the kind of bad it is, you know. Yeah, we don't need to make it anymore. Yeah, criminal. I don't know what I would say, because it's not flower either. It's bad. It's already bad. She didn't want to make that humanity better by wiping out black people. She wanted to make black people and white people better by wiping out folks who had what she considered to be like bad qualities through selective breeding. And that's really terrible. Also to classify for herself what those bad qualities are like Yeah, that is bad, but like it's not the kind of bad like again, because they tried a friend that Like, no, the progressives always been trying to wipe out black people. Like, that's not what she was doing. Um, information, she was just a bad person. She was she was There's plenty that's bad about her. Yeah, let's be actually honest when we condemn someone. She also stated during another speech, I believe now immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out where the government not feeding them. Um, you know that's bad, But again it's the kind of like. Part of why they like to try to frame her badness as something different is because if you're accurate about it, you can find a funk load of Republicans who say that the poor should starve, right, like the people who can't work on their own in find Jordan Peterson talking about like how terrifying it is that some people aren't intelligent enough to be in the military, and like say, like, because so what do we do with those people? Like that's a really like what Margaret Sanger was saying back then is still common today. Um, people dress it up a little bit more. I mean it kind of relates to the COVID things like that's fine, they're already they're already problems if they die, so's they're unproductive. Yeah, they're unproductive, they're on the government. Actually, Um, yeah, she just she was bad. She just was not the kind of bad people liked SUSA like to paint her as. And in fact, a lot of progressive black leaders at the time liked Margaret Sanger and what she was trying to do. Uh. In one nine letter to Dr C. J. Gamble of Procter and Gamble fame, she urged him to get over his resistance to hiring a full time negro physician, as quote, the colored negroes can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table, which means they're ignorant, superstitions and doubt. Um. And again she's also she's number one saying that black people are ignorant and superstitious, which is bad, but also saying that like, no, you get educated black people to talk to them about birth control. So again, she's a problematic person, but not what do SUSA likes to paint her as. She was very paternalistic in her dealings with black people. Obviously that is extremely clear for reading anything about her um, But her own letters and correspondence don't show she wanted to eliminate groups of people, um other than like she wanted to eliminate groups of people, I guess, but not that the way that is portrayed um. In she wrote that quote, the Negro race has reached a place in history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution to the future of America. Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness, from health, not from despair. See it's complicated here, especially since one of the things historians who are honest will point out is that if you're judging people by the standards of the time, Margaret Sanger was woke for her period of time. Like she she had enlightened views on race relations for the time, right, Yeah, and she got some kind of equality and understanding that the the way to talk to people is not by telling them what to do, but to actually include the I guess, yeah, exactly exactly, to include them and to include their community, and to like yeah, again, everything is bad back there. It's still bad now. It was even worse than I guess in that standard and that time standards, she was seen as progressive, that leer as again like the eighties when they stopped saying yeah things as well. Yeah, she was better on race relations than most white people of her social class in that time. Um, because her actual thing wasn't race as much as it was eliminating people she thought weren't intelligent enough, people who were poor and thus unintelligent, Like that was the kind of people that Margaret Sanger wanted to wipe out. Um, yeah, he just wanted, you know, because to kill all of a certain other groups. It's fine, fine, Yeah, it's it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, so it's yeah. I'm gonna quote now from a write up in the Journal of Past and Present that kind of points out the the actual kind of eugenicist Margaret Singer was. She argued that contraception was not merely a personal choice, but a public good, indeed a pantasa for social problems for the unfit. It was a duty, and Sanger became convinced that states had to intervene when necessary to prevent their propagation. Her movement would thus court government repression to gain visibility and sympathy for the cause of liberating individuals from unwanted birth, while striving to win state support for top down programs to shape populations. Sanger herself felt that she never had a country and instead devoted her life to the movement. For her, birth control was a secular faith that would advance peace between people's by reducing Malthusian pressures and depriving militant nationalists of cannon fodder. So that is interesting to me, um, because that's why she's kind of the founder of the population control movement. And that's where it splits from eugenics, because she's not talking about like, I want the white race to succeed. She's talking about, I want to engineer humanity, and birth control is the way to do that. And I'm you know, she above all else frightened of overpopulation, and particularly overpopulation of poor people, Right, that's kind of her thing. So yeah, in the nineteen thirties and forties, obviously, eugenics was still very big. Various fascist states adopted hardcore racist eugenicist policies. Hitler's policies were based heavily on a different state, and federal policies in the United States that had been named it breeding and immigration restrictions of certain groups of people. Uh Hitler described the invasion of Eastern Europe and its subsequent genocides as the planned control of population movements to restore the numbers and qualities of the Aryan race. Japan's imperial government, on the other hand, set itself to the task of purifying what they called the Yamato race. Now, when all of the dust had settled from World War Two, the horrors of the death camps proved to be the nail in the coffin for eugenics as a worldwide movement. Obviously, remnants of eugenics policies remain in the US for a frightening long time, and one can argue even into today in some ways. But no longer was eugenic thinking something you could advocate openly without drawing nasty comparisons to Nazis. So the Nazis kind of kill eugenics as a respectable movement because of you know, the death caffs. Like people see where that leads. But population control, like this is part of why what's kind of like brilliant about what Sanger and other population control advocates do when they split from the eugenics movement. Population control only gets more popular after World War Two. Margaret Sanger herself even pointed to Nazi extermi nation centers as evidence of the quote widespread devaluation of human lives that was caused when people didn't have birth control. Um like, because basically there were so many useless people that it made everyone's life worth lesson that's what made these these massacres possible. And instead, if we had just sterilized people with quote dysgenic qualities of body and mind, these death camps would never have become a thing. That's the whole reach. Like that's yeahs like you had to play in order to justify why your cause could be better than this bad cause. But because it wasn't happening, it happened. M Yeah, yeah, it's and it's like that's a bad way to explain. It's it's all bad. It's very bad. Um. Yeah. So Sanger and her fellow travelers believed that intelligence was the most important qualities to select forth idiots they felt should be discouraged from breeding. Obviously, there's a lot of problems with this, but the chief one is that dumb and poor were synonyms for people like Margaret Singer, and they always have been. For the population control mo When they talk about wanting to like, you know, stop unintelligent people from breeding, they're talking about poor people, right. What they really mean is uneducated or not educated to my standards. Aldous Huxley cited research that suggested an inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility. Basically, Huxley was pointing out that like intelligent people have less children and he called for a world population policy. And in this Huxley was making the same argument that Mike Judge did in the movie Idiocracy, which is why I find that movie problematic because the whole the fundamental idea like idiocracy is everything Margaret Singer was talking about, if we let dumb people breed, the world will become stupid, which isn't how genetics works. But yeah, it's it's bad. Um, it's frustrated to me, Like the degree to which people like right now is just like idiocracy, and it's like, no, it's not like these people are anyway. Very first, the whole concept of who is an idiot who isn't as a um problematic in itself. Like, yeah, and it's part of you know, honestly, like the fact that there's so many folks who were like you know, quote unquote coastal elites who like to clare folks in the Deep South to be dumb because of like the way they talk or the differences in their education is part of what like has makes those people easier to recruit by folks who are trying to take advantage of them. Um, it's very it's all very frustrating. It's it's very frustrating. But you know what's not frustrating. This is frustrating. It's not time for an ad pivot. I'm just going to keep popping about racism. Yeah, sorry in the late night that that was a little bit of a fake out there and you see that that was good. Okay, what are we doing here? You're like, is there a second part of the segment that I didn't know? Right back into bigot Aldous Huxley. So, in the late nineteen forties and early fifties, thinkers like Huxley began to panic over the thought of a population explosion, which they considered to be an existential threat on the level of a nuclear war because the poorest nations on Earth, the global South, had the highest populations and most rapid rates of population growth. This is where population control advocates focus their efforts. So again, we're not racist. We're not trying to call certain races. But the poor are having the most babies and we want to stop that. And also all of the poor live in these specific countries, and they're not white, right right, It's not about race. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In nineteen fifty eight, Dwight D. Eisenhower called a meeting of his National Security Council to discuss foreign aid. He told them they neglected what he viewed as the biggest threat to their future, even more dire than the Cold War. And I'm gonna quote from historian Matthew Connolly here, who's quoting someone who is in that NSC meeting with Eisenhower. In all our discussions of the problem of underdeveloped countries and the kind of assistance which we could effectively provide them, we had not yet faced up to what was really the most serious problem, namely that of exploding population growths. As far as he could see, continued the President, the only solution to this problem throughout the world was finding an effective two cent contraceptive. Eisenhower thought that something drastic had to be done to solve this problem, though he certainly did not know how to get started on this solution, and he furthermore could not himself get it started. So Eisenhower did form a Presidential Commission on US fourign aid and test them with the goal of finding ways for the US to help poorer nations reduced fertility rates. In an NSC meeting, he confided to his men that overpopulation was quote a constant worry to him and from time to time reduced him to despair. So he is the basics I've been trying to put him in basis for Thanos. Yeah, for this character. Okay, yeah, I'm waving get in now. I will say though, Eisenhower also doesn't think that the president can do anything about this. He thinks that that's like not the job of the federal government to provide contraceptives. Um. So he thinks it's critical and import but he also thinks that like, I can't do this or have the government do this because that would be wrong, which I don't know, it seems weird to me. Um. Yeah. Around the same time, population control advocates had started pushing the u in, which was new at the time, and US government to distribute contraceptives in poor countries as a way to curb birthrates, but Ike refused to consider this, stating I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility. Once he left office, Eisenhower became the honorary co chair of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, right alongside Harry Truman. Yeah, I meant she didn't know that Harry Truman and Eisenhower were like chairman of the Plan Parnet. I'm having so many questions right now, like that Republicans used to be very different. I mean again, we talked about this in episode we just recorded. But like Barry Goldwater, who was like seen as the first Trump like was a pro abortion access advocate at the end of his life. So Republicans have really gone off the deep ense recently. But it is worth pointing out how recent they're like antipathy to birth control and stuff is right, I mean, to be fair, the difference today seems to be that they're more worried about, you know, people being born as to whether or not they die later, They're okay, they're dying later. Part now they have always been because Dwight Eisenhower was a big murdering people advocate. Yeah, I mean, and in fairness to most of the people he murdered were Nazis, so like you got to give him some credit, but he killed a lot of people who weren't Nazis. We can talk about the Congo and ship. Yeah, yeah, I think that was under him, And like, you know Korea, well that was Truman, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of the Cold Wars started. Yeah, I mean Eisenhower's complex Korean was under Truman. Um. Yeah, Eisenhower was complicated because he is one of the only presidents, maybe the only whoever like directly did ounce the military industrial complex, and he did it right when it was like starting off. He was like, this is happening, and it's bad and it's going to destroy our entire country if we let it. But also he's who it got started under Um and he let it happen and then kind of on his way, I was like, oh, by the way, I left you all with a big old problem. So I don't know, complicated figure Eisenhower still is one of the best presidents we ever had. But all of our presidents are criminals, so you know, yeah, quotation marks around best. So um yeah. Once he left office, Ike winds up as the honorary co chair of Planned Parenthood, and in this position he turned his focus to lambasting welfare programs, including federally funded birth control, which it just started to be a thing. His issue was that the United States was spending money with one hand to slow up population growth among responsible families, and with the other providing financial incentives for increasing production by the ignorant, feeble minded or lazy. Oh now that's fun, not racial talk at all. No, No, what's fun about that is like, obviously White was not a Nazi because he helped the story of the Nazis, but also feeble minded is almost directly the translation of one of the terms that the Germans used to justify the eugenics programs that turned into the Holocaust, right, you know, uh, useless eaters was a less polite term the Germans had for Yeah, that was so the Holocaust started not with the extermination of the Jews or of other races, but with the extermination of Again, what we're called useless eaters. And this a lot has its roots a lot in so like a million Germans start to death during World War One because the British blockade them in Germany cannot feed itself um, which is like one of the things that it's why Hitler invaded Eastern Europe, why he wanted to get Ukraine in particular, UM. And so one of the things Hitler wanted to do when the Nazi thinkers wanted to do, was get rid of all these quote unquote useless eaters because they were afraid that when Germany was blockaded again in the inevitable next war, these people would use up like precious food stores that working people could be And so the Holocaust star did with the gassing of um physically handicapped people who were seen as again useless eaters. Like that's where it got started. Before they gass people at a racial level, they were gassing the disabled. So wow, cool stuff. And again Eisenhower's rhetoric directly mirrors what the Nazis were saying in the early period of their time and power, which is cool, very cool and good. Yeah, a delight is a delight, you know what doesn't advocate for the extermination of large segments of the population. Uh, perhaps the products and services that sponsor this very podcast. That's true. They do not, they absolutely don't. Every time we get a new sponsor, we send them an email that says genocide with a question mark, and they always respond to no, and then we're good to go. I felt like, it's like, shrug no, no, we only accept a hard no. We are that's one of our lines. Yeah, that's yeah, that's that's why we are not sponsored by Procter and Gamble, because they gave us the shrug emoji and we were like, that's not enough, that's not enough. I G. Farben had the same response, which you know, shocking from the makers of zion B. Anyway, here's the ads. Oh we're back. So Dwight D. Eisenhower Again, it was not a Nazi, but his rhetoric echoed Nazi rhetoric, which is a recurring problem for what we call population control advocates like Raven Holt, the guy who just say, just because you're not a Nazi doesn't mean you're not a racist, asshole. Yeah, the Nazis were mostly the Nazis were mostly destroyed by other racists, just less racists. Yeah, it was a bunch of the men who landed at Normandy were like, well, I don't like the Jews either, but what you're doing isn't okay like that, Like, let's let's be honest about it, right, Really you read some of the ship George Patton wrote about Jewish people while he was beating the Nazis, and it's like, yeah, he was pretty fucking racist. Um yeah, so uh yeah, Matthew. Anyway, the point I'm getting to here is that population control advocates, while not Nazis, often said ship that sounded like Nazi rhetoric. Matthew Connelly, great historian, writes, quote, all population control movements tended to diagnose social and political problems as pathologies with a biological basis. All shared the idea that society should reproduce themselves by design, even if that meant controlling how people disposed of their own bodies. And all looked at human beings not as individuals, but as populations which could be shaped through a combined force of politics and science. Not great thing to look at human beings as yeah, we're all these things just coming into a combination of pretty much people are not people humanity does not exist, and people are just people aren't people except for me and the people that I and sixty years ago the people like me were white. But now people who aren't white can be people like me as long as they're the kind of smart that I recognize as smart. And also they can acknowledge and all acknowledged that I am the supreme superior form of that human being. If you can acknowledge that, then yes, then we can all be white together. Perfect been waiting for someone to tell me that. Oh my god. Yeah. In the nineteen sixties, population control advocates began to lobby the World Bank of the US Agency for International Development us AID, asking them for birth control programs in the global South. They held out against this at first, largely out of fear of the political consequences, mainly because they were scared they would anger the Catholic Church, which was then is now very against contraception. UM. Now this started a change under LBJ, who complained that he was quote not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refus used to deal with their own population problems. One of the nice things about l b J is he never really pulled us punches. I was gonna say, that's fairly direct. Okay, okay, all right now, near the end of the nineteen sixties, U s A, which made up more than half of all foreign aid from the United States, began providing large scale assistance for birth control around the world in Bolivia, Bangladesh, South Korea, Pakistan, Thailand, and Tunisia. More than two thirds of national family planning budget came from foreign aid, maybe mainly U s A. And again at this point, because you know, South Korea is today one of the wealthier nations on the planet. At this point, it's a war racked country that's like barely getting out of a devastating conflict like they are. It is considered, in the words of the white popol time, third world at that point in time, um, which is why it's it's getting aid in that way. In nineteen sixty five, Reimert Ravenholt took over us AIDS Office of Population. Under his auspices, it would grow from basically nothing to a multibillion dollar international crusade against overpopulation. Raven Holt was a true believer as well as profoundly charming and well connected. Thanks to thanks to this, his office had no oversight whatsoever. He could spend the money allotted to him by Congress. However he saw fit. Yeah, that's not a recipe for disaster at all. No, it's gonna go great. It's gonna be a good story for Matthew Connelly quote. His preferred strategy was national inundation, based on the idea that making contraceptives freely available, ideally at the very doorstep of consumers, could increase usage. Massive purchasing contracts of as many as a hundred million monthly pill cycles also ensured that pharmaceutical companies would join in defending his growing budget and encourage corporate support for his organization. When some of these US back contraceptives were siphoned off and resold, raven Holt was unconcerned. This black market constituted a free distribution network. He also used NGOs to provide training and sterilization and distribute low cost abortion kits even where abortion was illegal. Raven holt strategy, according to a Population Council officer, was to make abortion so easy to perform and so widely used that it would be meaningless. When raven holt superiors tried to remove him, they found it was all but impossible his supporters were too numerous. M hm sucks. M hmm. So he said easy accessible, but not necessarily safe. Would that be exactly? So there's a lot of what he's doing that's mine obviously, Like I think everyone should have access to safe and cheap contraception everywhere in the world. Safe is key and one of the things that raven Holt is able to do in order to get as much Because for raven Holt, it's safe is not as important as numerous. What he wants is to stop as many babies being born as possible. Yeah, I'm just imagining he's just sending out packages of hangars. Yeah he would, Yeah, he would have if he if he thought that that would have done it. But like he would have preferred something that's easier to get people on but may have some of the same consequences as using a hangar um because people are going to use the hangar, but people might take a pill that has also a horrible effect of it. Because again, so yeah, we're gonna get to that. This all brings us back around to the Dalkon Shield because Reynard Ravenholt, ray to his buddies, was the man who approved H Robbins that pharmaceutical company's request for the U. S Government to buy up all of the unsold millions of Dalkon shields and sell them in bulk to the global South. Now, I want you to remember, to save money. Robbins was selling these shields in massive bulk packages of a thousand each, and they were unsterilized, sterilized. My favorite part of the whole thing is, yeah, just basically, yeah, this was very uncommon. Yeah yeah, yeah, crap. And the wire hangar isn't an or isn't a bacterious super highway, so that's good. Yeah. So obviously selling unsterilized i U d s was very odd. I U d s were always sold sterile in the United States. U s A demanded an explanation as to why Robbins was shipping them unsterilized, and an employee for AH Robbins wrote back that the shields were being sold that way for the purpose of reducing price and thereby attaining wider use uh and is intended for restricted sale to family planning support organizations who will limit their distribution to those countries commonly referred to as less developed. So USA, it was like it worries us that these are unsterilized. H Robins says, don't worry. That makes them cheaper and we're only selling them to poor people. And the response, Okay, cool, thanks man. Yeah, that's exactly what they said. Yeah, because again, right, Raven Holts all about national inundation. He just wants as much contraception out there as possible and like consequences be damned. So he's fine with this. He's a good guy. Three five, that's fine. I think it's rid of someone I don't think is smart because they don't read the same books that I read. Then it's all good, great ship right here. So Robbins explained that medical practitioners in those countries were expected to sterilize shields by soaking them and disinfectant. Now, this was again very uncommon. Normally, you just get them sterilized and you wear sterile gloves and you insert them. Having people sterilize them introduces a potential for someone to funk up and not sterilize them properly, which is why it's not the way you do something like an I U. D. In a contemporary write up of this, Mother Jones noted quote in the United States, according to private gynecologists we interviewed. The insertion of an I U D that had merely been soaked into disinfectant before use would possibly be grounds for a malpractice suit. Robbins insists that the sterilization procedure it recommended was effective, but it is highly likely that few people ever read the instructions. The company attached only one set of instructions for each pack of a thousand shields, and those were printed, and only three languages English, French, and Spanish. Although the devices were destined for forty two countries from Ethiopia to Malaysia, we're still only ten inserts were provided per hundred shields, adding a measurably to the problem of infection. Oh well, so, in my mind it really was like an Ikea level of instructions to it, where you get brief stick figures and they're like, good luck. You know, I'll give you. I'll give a keya credit. They generally, wherever they sell i Kea products, print them in the language most common in that country. I'm sure. Yeah, it looks like the foreign language to me, trying to put mostly nonsense, but also very few people put Ikea in Ikea furniture inside their bodies. I mean, I feel like that could be an Ikea furniture like that. Yeah, at least just say yeah, there'd be a bunch of extra eyes and d's and g s to the name. But yeah. So H. Robbins also assured USA that actual medical professionals weren't needed to insert the dalkon s field into patients. A lot of these devices were headed to rural family planning clinics, and the drug company insisted that staff without medical degrees were more than capable of handling the job. USA pushed back in this case, too, noting that in the United States, there's been numerous reports of adverse reactions from patients who had taken that who had had the dalt Un shield inserted by doctors who weren't gynecologists. If m d s had trouble following the instructions, surely random aid workers who weren't even doctors in like the Ethiopian countryside world also make mistakes. So H. Robbins did with pharmaceutical giants do best. They commissioned a study that would show exactly what they needed it to show a study or did they just lie they paid for a study that showed what they needed. Yeah, and the study they paid for showed that paramedics could learn to reliably insert the dalkon shield in a half hour. Oh wait, of course they said they could just insert it, or that they could do it correctly and safely learned they could correctly learn how to do it safely in a half hour, paramedics. Number one, they paid for this study. Number two. Most of these aid workers, and again fucking rural like Ethiopia, are like like aid workers, Like a lot of them aren't paramedics or any other kind of medical professional, but some of them are still putting these things in people as what we would like to talk about the fact that the white girl from America who claimed to be a nurse who killed millions, like many orphans, yea, many orphans. Yeah, but that just happened recently. I'm sure that didn't happen back then. No, no, no, well actually yeah, I mean different things happened back then. It was usually more of a government thing. I don't know that it was anyway, we'll get it. I'm just thinking, like, in general, if you want white people to try to send help, this was one of those send help moments. Oh yeah, a ton of babies get killed by this. It's it's fucking god, I get left with that hurts, keep going yeah, well you know, um so yeah, h Robbins like pays for this study and are like, see, you can teach people to do it in a half hour. We're not actually going to teach the people we sell these two to do it. We're just going to give them instructions they probably can't read. But potentially, if they were paramedics and had a proper instructions, they could learn how to do it. And that's enough for USA to give it and be like hell, yeah, cool, yeah, here's millions of dollars. So Ray Ravenholt gave the Dalkon shield his rubber stamp, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of Dalkon shields, all paid for by the U. S. Treasury, were out on their way to forty two different nations. This happened at the same time that a planned parenthood study revealed pregnancy rates in excess of six percent from Dalkon shield insertion in places like Costa Rica and Yugoslavia, in nearly fifteen percent in one Latin American country. So because they're not being put in right so again, sometimes the amount of unintended pregnancies with dalkon shields in some places like fift because the people putting them in don't know how to do it. And you have to remember that we're not just talking about unintended pregnancies here. Remember the dalkon shield is a bacterial super highway in the best of conditions, and that's in when it's sterile, right, Yeah. And patients in these poorer nations who were receiving unsterile shields and having them inserted with unsterile applicators suffered from infections, miscarriages, and death at vastly higher rates than what was seen in the United States. We do not know and will never know the full toll from this because nobody bothered to take any sort of notes on it, like nobody gave a ship about how many people actually got hurt by this thing in these countries. We do, however, have some specific stories of individual victims to highlight the horror. For Mother Jones quote, when Maria Aguirez woke up on the morning of June ninety seven, she was at first two drenched with sweat to feel the blood. They had warned her at the clinic that there might be some bleeding, but this was more than a period. Her skirt, the worn sheet, the matt were soaked through more than her. After her oldest daughter's birth, when the midwife had at one point simply prayed dimly, Maria must have realized that the baby was already awakened fussing. He was still fussing an hour later when Maria's sister, someone by the older children, came running in. Maria was no longer sweating because she died as a result of, in fact, an infection that her Dalkon shield gave her. Yeah, and I'm wondering if, like some of these numbers that they say, it's effectives because they died, Yeah, they were pregnant. That works for Ray Ravenholtz. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he stops the pregnantcy. That's all that matters to Ray. Population control advocates like Ray Ravenholt had been willing to look the other way at unsterile medical devices implanted by qualified people. They were not particularly concerned by victims like Maria Aguires as events by the fact that neither us AID or any other international organization even tried to track down all the fatalities and injuries caused by the overseas importation of the Dalkon shield. The only thing that actually disturbed them was the evidence that the shield was ineffective as a birth control method, because it was okay to endanger the lives of poor children, but it was not okay to risk them having more kids. We can't have more kids. You didn't do what we wanted. Damn. Now again, we don't have any sort of authoritative numbers on the number of deaths and injuries as a result of the millions of Dalkon shields imported to the global South. Author Morton Mints estimates that quote shield related p I D pelvic inflammatory infection killed hundreds, possibly thousands of women outside the United States. If the shield were in a third world country where there are no doctors, no antibiotics, becomes infected, she's going to die. And again, this is the seventies. Antibiotics are not as common as they are now, especially in places like Ethiopia. You know, still under Raven Holtz guidance. The name of the game for us AID was national inundation and I U D s That worked eight to nine percent of the time. We're better than bringing more poor people into the world. As lawsuits against Age Robin spun up in the United States, the company sent one of their employees on a tour of Asia to sell more shields. In every place he stopped, the employee would be met by the local USA population officer, who would assemble a group of local physicians for the Robin's employee to lecture and sell to. When Robbins was finally forced to discontinue the product in nineteen seventy four, US aid was left, in the words of a Mother Jones reporter, holding the bag, or rather the bulk pack, they had no choice but to issue an international recall. We don't know how many women and isolated mountain villages across India and Guatemala and wherever else actually learned that the thing in their uterus had been recalled for being dangerously unsafe, because again, no one at Age Robbin's for U s A cared to find out. It just was not important to them. The lack of communication, Yeah, already, and then that's how they did the recall. So I can't did we talk about whether or not the lifespan how long that's supposed a shield is supposed to last five years? Which means yeah. And and removal again, because it's spiked removal as a nightmare for people to actual surgical procedure. I'm saying yeah, and people die from that as well. And again the number but probably thousands, probably a death toll of thousands worldwide. The Dalkon Shield was a major national story in the US, where it killed maybe a couple of dozen people, but it's spread overseas, funded by US tax dollars, was not well known. Mother Jones is the only outlet I have found who actually covered that part of the story during that time in any kind of detail, and they deserve a lot of credit for that. It is an excellent article. A nineteen eight five article I found in the Washington Post, for example, didn't even mention that the Dalkon Shield had been sold overseas. Mother Yeah, yeah, why why would you care? Therefore? Come? Yeah, they're poor, they're poor in they're not Ethiopia. Yeah. Mother Jones actually interviewed Ray Ravenholt in nineteen seventy nine to ask why he had given the seal of American goodwill to this whole bloody endeavor, and the picture they paint of him is bizarre and not very positive. And I'm going to read the description that journalist wrote about meeting ray oh No in person. He is a tall, affable Midwesterner with an engaging smile and a marked inability to sit still once he warms up to the subject at hand. No, sooner had we gotten through the introductions than he bounded off to one corner of his spacious office and returned with his latest contraceptive enthusiasm, a plastic guns style laparoscopic device which, when aimed through the vagina, shoots little plastic bands around the fallopian tubes, resulting in permanent sterilization. He demonstrated by placing one foot up on his chair and shooting the bands at his shoelace, only after he completed the simulated sterilization of his left foot, where we able to bring the subject round to the Talcott shield. So he had this in his office as like a toy. Just keeps us little like fucking gun thing for wrapping up collopian tubes sheets it at his foot to impressive journalist for real, he's got to be a serial killer. He's a ten bundy. There's no way we didn't use this on a woman like hey, hey, I got something for you. Yeah, tie your hands behind your back. Let me show you. So you're gonna love this. What's the fucking Ray raven Holt? Uh so uh? Mother Jones continues, and this is Ray raven Holt speaking, and they're quoting him. Robbins. The company didn't know there was any problem with it in nineteen seventy two, he insisted, which is not true. When we countered that Ah Robbins had been deluged with reports of adverse reactions by that time, raven Holt smiled patiently and explained, you don't really know anything until you have a very very large number of people who have used it. You might have one kind of impression from ten thousand people, another from a hundred thousand. You might need a million ten million before you really know. So it's not tell everybody's dead. Then you actually you have to have a dent rating of because you've got wrong. If you've given it to ten thousand women and two thousand of them have horrible, horrible, life altering reactions to it, you gotta give it to another ten million before you can really tell if it's dangerous. I mean again, it's kind of like what we're going through with a pandemic. Yeah that bad. Come on, yeah, come in, Yeah, it's fine. It's only people. That's not a big deal. When pressed, Ravenholt did eventually agree that us AID had heard some of the tens of thousands of stories of septic pregnancies, infections, and miscarriages that had flooded the US media by nineteen seventy three, but he pivoted immediately from that to leaning forward with enthusiasm to tell the Mother Jones reporter his own pet theory about i U D induced pelvic infections. This is ray women who frequently change sexual partners have these intercurrent, low grade infections. The i U D can't cause an infection. The body tolerates anything at sterile. Wait, isn't that the same kind of argument about the rape? You know your body rejects, Oh my god, what is happening? Well, because he knows the Dalkon shields are being sent unsterilized and that obviously not everybody is going to properly sterilize them. Um, and also because the data existed at this point, he knows that the Dalkon shield is a magnet for infections by design. It's awesome stuff, and when Mother Jones This is my favorite part, when Mother Jones pointed out to him that the infections uh that he was blaming on promiscuity might be caused by the non sterile devices being exported by us AID. Raven Holt defended his agency shipping out unsterile Dalcon shields by pointing out that all the other i U d s they shipped out to poor people were supplied unsterile too. Oh great, that's awesome, good job, bro. Uh okay, I love the again, the gymnastics that someone has to go through and be like no, no, no, no, no no, this is cool. And let me tell you it's fine. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine. It's because we're always this year responsible, right, And you know before gotten many people called us out. No one really really talked about like here, why are they talking about it? Why are we talking about it? Yeah? Was the problem? Let me show you my little toy. Yeah, let me show you my you want you wanted to sterilize my foot again one more time? You know who won't sterilize your foot? Samantha? Oh god, products and services that support this podcast. Okay, um, this has gone. Yeah, I don't know what I am anymore. Ah, we are back and just having a good old time. I'm crossing my legs and explictly so as sleazy as the justifications Ray raven Holt gave to Mother Jones were he had to issue them. By nineteen seventy nine, Dalkon shields were still in use around the world, and they were in the bodies of more than four hundred and forty thousand people. Five years after age Robins suspended sales of the device, medical practitioners in Pakistan, India, and South Africa were still inserting Dalkon shields into new patients. It's pretty good stuff, Mother Jones wrote at the time in nineteen seventy nine. It is impossible to know how frequently this is still taking place, but our own sources have told us of at least two cases. In Nairobi, Kenya. On the wall of the Family Planning Association clinic, there is a poster advertising the Dalkon shield. In early May nineteen seventy nine, a young woman patient at this clinic was offered, among other birth control options, at Dalkon shield. In Ottawa, Canada, Pierre Blaize, senior consultant to the Bureau of Medical Devices told us the shield was being inserted as late as nineteen seventy seven, two years after he had been withdrawn to the US market. Finally, Yep, yep, yep. Finally, neither a I D nor even the FDA would have any way of stopping H. Robbins from privately dumping its own unsold stock of dalco on shields if the company was of a mind to do so, and it was. In a recent interview, Robin's attorney, Franklin Tatum, admitted to us that his client was still selling the devices through the first quarter of nineteen seventy five, even as they were being recalled through a I D and allegedly destroyed. So he was personally he was still doing it even though the company was still selling it, even after they like they were not only selling it through a I D. They were selling it directly to other poorer nations while they were fighting court cases in the US and pulling it off of that market. And um, of course nothing really happened to him. No, why wouldn't. I mean, the company got destroyed, But the people responsible to THESEUS are millionaires and their kids are still millionaires and probably funding Ben Shapiro were someone today, um it self great self, very good, um just cool shit. So Ray Ravenholt had the power and influence to put a stop to most, if not all, of this, but he chose not to, And the question why is easy to answer. Ray was a pretty open dude. In nineteen seventy seven, Ravenhold give an interview to the St. Louis Post Dispatch where he insisted that population explosions, unless stopped, would lead to revolutions. Population control, Ray explained, was necessary in order to maintain the normal operation of US commercial interests around the world. Without our trying to help these countries with their economic and social development, the world would rebel against the strong US commercial presence. The self interest thing is the compelling element self interest. That's really fascinating, honest. I mean, like, yeah, ridiculously honest. Um, I just love that it all results in women dying, and we gotta golve the women they're giving they're they're making babies well, and specifically, what he's saying here is we have to sterilize large chunks of the developing world as they call it, the Third World, the Global South. We have to sterilize these poor people because otherwise they're going to destroy capitalism like they are going. Yeah, the world will rebel against us commercial presence if we don't reduce their populations. They're gonna realize that we're sucking the yah. Yeah, that we are really screwing them over. So this is the best way to kill them, kill them all. Yeah. Again, the bad guys generally capitalism in the end. So most population control advocates supported a variety of methods to achieve their raims. Economic development, healthcare, expanded women's rights. All of these can reduce family size. Ray Ravenholt preferred instead to focus on contraceptives, and only contraceptives. Before the Dalkon Shield rose to popularity, he'd done this by trying to flood the global South with hormonal birth control pills. These were sold over the counter in places like Bangladesh, with no doctor consultation required and precious little information about what the health consequences might be. In Bangladesh, this caused what one reporter called a biological disaster. Quote, the average Bangladeshi woman weighs ninety two pounds and suffers from chronic malnutrition. Even in a hundred and already five pound American woman, The pill is known to deplete the body's supply of vitamins A, basics D, and folic acid, hence the special vitamins sold in the US as supplements to the pill. Furthermore, no less than nine of the Bangladeshi women who accepted the pill were breastfeeding. According to a study by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, babies nursed by pill users grew at an average rate that was only two thirds of that of babies nursed by non pill users. Ending world hunger is the most common rationalization for the top down approach to population control, but in Bangladesh, A I D was creating its own kind of chemically induced famine. Motherfucker Jesus Christ, it's pretty bad kidding me. So a big part of what's happening here is that these birth control pills that USA had been handing out in Bangladesh had been judged safe for American women, and American women have were much better fed, had much better nutrition, did not have the same kind of vitamin deficiencies that Bangladeshi women did. They were larger like, so obviously the same pill that works on them is going to be toxic to people who are smaller and who have Yeah, it's just it's horrible. Essentially, they had to have supplements like that because, of course all that mattered was that they weren't having as many babies. That doesn't however, maybe death, sure, let's do this whatever. Yeah, And obviously, data in the US at this time already showed that high estrogen pills had more health consequences than low estrogen pills. Um and so in the US, birth control pills had switched over to low estrogen birth control pills, but that meant there were still millions of high estrogen birth control pills that like nobody in the U s would buy. So obviously Ray Ravenho bought them all and shipped them off to poor people. Of course, we're gonna go. We're gon hand about somewhere. We gotta make fun money somehow. We can't waste this. Come on, come on. Yeah. And one of the most breathtakingly unethical moments in the history of birth control, marketers for us AID even found a way to turn one of the common consequences of high estrogen pills, which was painfully swollen breasts, into a positive. They started promoting the pills in rural Bangladesh with the tagline it makes your breasts more beautiful. It is good for you, including the tailors who have to make bigger brasiers. You want big boobies, try those, baby, I got you. Your boobs are gonna be amazing. You know when you're laying down and people come to see you dead, don't be legit. J christ Uh. Now, we focused rightfully on age Robbins in the horrifying Dalcan Shield, but the terrible reality of Western doctors forcing unsafe i u D s on impoverished women actually goes back even further than that. In the early nineteen sixties, western population control programs in rural India and Pakistan started using experimental spiral and ring shaped i u d s. These specific i u d s had been widely discredited by doctors at the time as causing extremely high rates of infection, pain, and bleeding. I'm gonna quote now from the website Climate and Capitalism. Just at this. J. Robert Wilson, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Temple University, told the nineteen sixty two Population Council conference i u D should be ruled out regardless. We have to stop functioning like doctors he said, In fact, it may well be that the incidence of infection is going to be pretty high in the patients who need the device most. Again, if we look at this from an overall long range view, these are the things I have never said out loud because I don't know how it's going to sound. Perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things, particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilization but not lethal. Expendable, expendable, So yeah, no mask on there, Like, yeah, she's expendable. And honestly, if she gets a horrible infection that renders her sterile, that's a win that if we did what we said that we're going to do right, we can hold that population just right out in the open with it. It's amazing. Yeah, I mean I give that guy on honestly more credit than I give Raven Holt, because he's not Raven Holtz is saying the same thing but dressing that. This guy's just like, yeah, fuck him, like it's about stopping him from giving birth. I don't care how we do it. Don't worry about the doctor's oath. Just go ahead and do your thing. Yeah, we can't act like doctors. These are poor people and they're not white. So it's fine. It's fine about this control, this good ship. Yeah, uh yeah. Wilson's fellow obstetrician, Alan Goodmocker, an influential figure in the Population Council and i PPF extolled the benefits of I U d S in a similar vein, no contraceptive could be cheaper. And also once the damn thing is in, the patient cannot change her mind. In fact, we will hope she will forget it's there, and perhaps in several months wonder why she has not conceived. Oh wait what? Yeah, it's pretty bad, right, It's like roofy. Yeah, hopefully the dumbastards will forget they even have it. You'll never remember and then oh god, yeah it's pretty bad right, I don't like now. A lot of the evidence for this episode comes from a couple of different sources, but most of them written by one man, Matthew Connolly, who has done more to unravel and expose the whole horrific story of the population control movement than probably any other Westerner. His book, Fatal Misconception lays out the whole sordid tale. In it, he concludes the great tragedy of population control. The fatal misconception was to think that one could know other people's interests better than they know it themselves. But if the idea of planning other people's families is now discredited, this very human tendency is still with us. The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the unfit, or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them. It appealed to the rich and powerful, because with the spread of emancipatory movements and the integration of markets, it began to appear easier and more profitable that to control populations than to control territory. That's why opponents were correct in viewing it as another chapter in the unfinished history of imperialism more profitable Holy Fund. Yeah Yeah, And that chapter, Samantha, is in fact not finished. Today. You can still find many of these same attitudes present and well meaning powerful people today. In May two thousand nine, a group of billionaires including Bill Gates, Ted Turner, David Rockefeller, George Soros, and Warren Buffett all met in semi secrecy to discuss what they termed a nightmarish scenario over population. The London Sunday Time said they considered this a potentially disastrous environmental, social, and industrial threat since at present more than projected population growth was expected to occur in the global South. We can assume they were worried about precisely the same nations and sorts of people as Ray Ravenholt. And it's interesting that David Rockefeller attended because in the nineteen sixties his father is one of the major founders of the Population Council, which helped fund and drive through lobbying everything we've talked about today. In nineteen seventy, journalists Steve Weissman termed people like Rockefeller members of the American population elite. In an immortal line for Ramparts magazine. He noted, in the hands of the self, seeking humanitarianism is the most terrifying ism of all. Wow, all right, so caring about people and uh and I'm wanting to help enough? How help people survive? Well, No, it's it's it's when you're it's when you try to cloak your desire to control other people's behavior as wanting to help them, right, It's not wanting to help someone to force a contraceptive on them that they don't know the consequences of and that will harm them, and that you're not going to give them follow up care and provide them with the essential vitamins and stuff. It is. It is helping someone to be like, hey, here's a bunch of free condoms, here's how you use them. Or here's much birth control pills, here's how you use them. Here's what you need to know about how it will affect your body. Here's what you need to take in order for this to be safe. You know. That is helping people. It's helping people to say, you know, here's access to vaccine. You know that will deal with a problem that you have in this region. Um, it's not helping people to, for example, do with the CIA did in Pakistan and secretly give people a fake vaccine in order to get blood samples to track down Osama bin laden, which is the thing that happened. It's not like historic maze and ice at all. Yeah, And the biggest problem here is that, in no way is over population actually a problem. Over Population is not driving climate change. Over Population is not the issue we're dealing with here. It's what all these billionaires are focusing on because in part, if you can get other people to think that overpopulation is the problem, that people won't look at billionaires is maybe part of the problem. Um. But yeah, this is this brings me to the conclusion of this story, um, the because yeah, there are some people who have learned from the past of the population control movement, from this chapter in the history of imperialism, and one of those groups is the Sierra Club. Like most environmental organizations, the Sierra Club bought whole hog into population control throughout the twentieth century. They thought that the best way to protect wild nature was to reduce the human population, and they bought into a lot of the stuff that we've talked about today and helped to fund it and all that horrible shit. But in they published a blog post repudiating that history, titled the Overpopulation Myth and its Dangerous Connotations. Yeah, it took him a while, right. The article is brutal and unsparing. It points out that the Population Bomb in nineteen sixty eight book by Paul Erlick that was probably the single most influential inspiration behind modern fears of overpopulation, was also profoundly racist. It quote opens its fearmongering. With a sensationalized account of traveling through Delhi, India during a taxi ride, author Paul Airlick notes people visiting, arguing and screaming, thrusting their hands through the a taxi window begging. Since that night, I've known the feel of overpopulation. What Erlich fails to mention, however, is that while Delhi's population was just say of three million, both New York and Paris housed about eight million at the time. Air Lick's emphasis on an Indian city as the exemplification of overpopulation was part of a large and continuing pattern of focusing blame on the Global South and mostly the non white people who lived there, as affluent Western Europeans and Americans. And in this article, which is quite good, the Seria Club makes the accurate point that our actual population with overpopulation has nothing to do with the raw number of humans on Earth, and certainly not in the number of people who live in the Global South. It has everything to do with the wildly outsized amount of resources consumed by a privileged few, namely you and me and everybody listening to this podcast. The world's wealthiest half billion people are responsible for fifty percent of the planet's carbon dioxide emissions despite making up six percent of the population. Yep, like it. Yep, there's so many things. I just can't understand the whole overpopulation movement in itself, not seeing that as a travesty to humanity in general. Yeah, and it's it is fundamentally racist while also being a thing that people who would call themselves anti racist buy into because they see, look at all these giants, these all these families that are nine and ten kids, and you know, Mexico and Guatemala, in in in Paraguay or whatever. Uh, Like, that's we gotta that's a problem part of has to be part of the climate change problems. Like, no, dude, it's the fact that your family has three cars for two people, right, Like that is a bigger driver every lion on using all kinds of emissions. Yet But okay, it's absolutely the poor people who's living on and more to the point, it's not even really honestly, if we want to actually get at the core of the problem with climate change, it's not even like the fact that your family has three cars. It's that there is this giant system of mega corporations that profit based off of releasing emissions into the air that also effectively control the levers of government and very effectively market to all of us, and also very effectively stop reforms and things like public transportation that would reduce our need, like our dependence on emissions generating vehicles. Like it's all bad, but it's sure as hell not the pop It's not the fault of somebody in Ethiopia who has eight kids, you know, if that I mean to be fair in general, Like the poverty situation is not because that they are wasting ship. That's not That's not that poor people are the best at not wasting ship. But I remember one time in Mosle in Iraq, we were like hanging out with this this group of like civil defense people, like basically e m t s, like going into collapsed buildings in the day and pulling people out of the rubble. And like they wanted to watch a movie. So they took apart an old refrigerator and an old like giant like not one of the flat screens, one of the big boxy TVs, and they wired the TV through the refrigerator into a generator so that we could watch I think it was Patriot Games on like some fucking local channels. Okay, yeah, yeah, they didn't waste ship. There wasn't things wasted. That's that's the problem. Is the conversation is who's wasting one? And who was actually the problematic issue in this conversation? And what are you really getting at? You just want to be in the hierarchy and make sure you come out on top. Yeah, exactly, Like there's sucking people listening to this, probably including me, who have bought new TVs when old ones were not permanently broken but just became a problem. It just you wanted something nicer. It's it's a bigger screen. I want the big screen with a better Yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah anyway, Well, thank you for the horror nightmare that you just put me through. Robbery once again and then and Sophie, uh, there are a lot of things that I will be horrified of now. I feel like my I U D maybe trying to crawl out of me. Um, thank you for that. I did not use a vaginal death crab yea for mine. And I want to be clear, like I've tried to make a point of this. I'm not saying I d are bad. I hope that's not what anyone takes out of this, like the obviously shield was, and you know, the Marina might wind up being something like that. We don't really know what the whole story is going to be on that, although I know a lot of people who haven't and have had no problem with it. Like the bad guy in this is again imperialism, and also talking about the healthcare in general, who has provided what type of care and what is being who has the privilege of getting the better not whatever whatnot. So that's also the conversation. But yeah, the vaginal death crabs something that I will always remember. Thank you. I love that this was our first meeting. That that's what our conversation talking about vaginal death crabs. And we can hear us play as vaginal death crabs when you know in two were able to finally go on tour. Yeah, I'm so excited for this. I've got my uku lately ready will actually be opening for the Eagles. Oddly enough, it was strange cook, Ye, my dream is coming true. Amazing. Uh Okay, well, you got anything you want to plug before we roll out of here. Samantha again, you can find me on stuff. Mom never told you a podcast with I heart wherever you get your podcast, and you can find me as a McVay Samantha m c v e y. That is the spelling, not the other one. I just want to put that out there on both Instagram or Twitter. Yeah, and I am not available anywhere you cannot find me. Don't try. I will destroy you. Challenge accepted. Yep, You're so weird sometimes, Robert, I don't know. I don't know how do There's so many episodes of this fucking podcast. I can't end all of them like a competent professional. I feel like I got surprised into a two partter. I was like, what more death traps? Yeah, okay, yeah. We said at some point early in the series that we mostly we would only rarely do two parters, and then we seated to pivot to only doing two parters almost in the I don't know how I let that. What if we do in the occasional twice per week? And then it was like I order or just twice per Welcome to the Welcome in my world. Never enough good bad information out there, pieces old