Best of the Program ｜ Guest： Mike Chase ｜ 6⧸13⧸19
Episode Stats
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Summary
Glenn Beck and Stu discuss CNN's massive decline in primetime viewers and total daytime audience. Also, Pat Gray joins the show to talk about the latest danger from Ebola, and Mike Chase talks about how to become a federal criminal.
Transcript
00:00:00.320
Welcome to the podcast. It is the Glenn Beck Program, along with myself, Stu.
00:00:04.740
Today, we talked about CNN and their declining audience that is at this point basically just cratering.
00:00:10.900
Though I will say, not as much as the cratering of conservative personalities on social media,
00:00:17.780
where they're just cutting off access. David J. Harris is the latest example, cutting his traffic by over 97%.
00:00:24.820
Pat Gray comes in to tell us about the latest danger from Ebola, which again has to do and tie into kind of the immigration debate as well.
00:00:34.840
Mike Chase is a great guest today. He wrote a book called How to Become a Federal Criminal
00:00:39.180
and goes through like all the ways that if the federal government wants to put you in jail, they can't
00:00:44.460
because there are so many crazy laws and they can use these things to come after you
00:00:48.220
and have used these things to come after people all over America over the years.
00:00:52.380
Also, we talk about what is the biggest threat to gay rights?
00:01:00.820
Hmm. We'll look at all of that on today's podcast.
00:01:10.380
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:01:14.360
Home buying season is upon us. Real estate conditions are looking excellent for most of the country.
00:01:24.560
Equity is on the rise. Rates are low. Prices are affordable.
00:01:31.080
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00:01:36.920
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00:01:43.100
I've known them for years. I started doing commercials for them after the crash of 2008.
00:01:50.200
They're the only mortgage company that I've ever done or would ever consider because they called me before the crash.
00:01:57.480
And they didn't get their people roped up into crazy loans.
00:02:03.780
So what happens? They find the right loan for you so you're not behind a giant boulder rolling down a hill when the economy changes.
00:02:27.040
CNN continues to lose primetime audience and daytime audience.
00:02:43.280
And CNN completely stands alone in the massive audience implosion.
00:02:51.820
I want to compare to CNN, to MSNBC, and to Fox News.
00:02:58.180
Primetime viewership compared to the same week last year.
00:03:11.760
Total day viewership compared to the same week last year.
00:03:33.660
And what I just gave you was 12-plus, which means, or it's actually 2-plus, which means everybody 2 years old to death.
00:03:47.660
So if you're between the ages of 25 and 54, that's where everybody places their ad dollars.
00:04:05.400
And we went back and checked because we want to make sure that this isn't a typo, right?
00:04:13.860
Primetime demo viewership compared to the same week last year.
00:04:36.520
Now, what you're seeing, Fox News down 25%, MSNBC down 32%.
00:04:40.720
This is just because the younger people are just not tuning into television.
00:04:44.940
So you have the implosion of the network system happening.
00:04:50.640
At the same time, you have CNN just killing itself.
00:04:56.060
I mean, we're watching a suicide every time you turn on CNN, which, well, I mean, if they commit suicide and nobody's watching, does it really happen?
00:05:05.960
CNN is a total outlier now in this audience collapse.
00:05:11.200
The erosion that you're seeing at Fox and MSNBC is just really the end of this network.
00:05:23.700
The cable news average audience, adult 2554, Fox News, came in at 341,000 total day, which means everybody watching during the day, is 213,000.
00:05:39.440
And they're number one, MSNBC prime time is 215,000.
00:05:45.620
So that's almost 100 and well, it's 130,000 lower than Fox total day, 100,000 lower than Fox 113,000.
00:05:56.540
So you think that the media has this big, you know, oh, my gosh, NBC, if they got on NBC, well, then, you know, she, we better pay attention to it.
00:06:05.880
So, you know, I had better ratings than this on CNN headline news, 113,000.
00:06:25.380
I think it was even lower than that when we started.
00:06:30.460
It was just like, there was like nobody watching and everybody knew it.
00:06:34.920
We knew it that nobody was watching and these ratings would come out.
00:06:44.220
That's like, that's like basing our entire life and our entire broadcast day on what happened on the con on the cartoon network at 3 a.m.
00:06:53.960
Yeah, I mean, really, if you think about it, it's like CNN headline news was so desperate with numbers like that.
00:07:01.680
They were actually like, you know, let's just try on going back.
00:07:15.920
CNN prime time is one hundred and seventy eight thousand.
00:07:20.840
Now, every time you pay your cable bill, you're subsidizing CNN.
00:07:29.340
Every time you pay your cable bill, you're giving them a buttload of money.
00:07:36.120
Because they negotiated a really sweet deal when they had ratings and people needed them.
00:07:42.740
And so they get a percentage of everything that you spend on cable.
00:07:57.680
But Fox has Fox at least has a chance of standing on its own.
00:08:05.780
You cut you start cutting cable and you start getting rid of cable in your house, which is happening.
00:08:11.300
They're not going to be able to afford to stay on the air.
00:08:24.780
The problem with it, though, of course, is if you were to leave cable and you didn't have Fox anymore, there'd be no place to be able to get good conservative commentary.
00:08:36.740
You just go to blazetv.com, blazetv.com slash Glenn.
00:08:55.980
So every time I every time I don't talk about it, free speech is available, even though I've been told it wasn't available.
00:09:03.540
Then when I do talk about it, you don't know if it's available.
00:09:06.740
Yesterday was still like I was told it was not going to be available, but then it was still on the Web site.
00:09:19.960
I mean, maybe we were incompetent in, you know, shutting that thing down.
00:09:40.900
The only time that industries ask for more regulation is when there are in a death spiral.
00:09:49.420
The cable news industry is now in a death spiral.
00:09:54.260
So they're going to reach out to the government.
00:09:56.800
And most likely, especially if the Democrats win, they'll get special treatment.
00:10:01.760
They'll get some sort of special breaks or whatever.
00:10:05.400
And you'll notice also that the CNNs of the world are asking for regulation of the Internet.
00:10:14.500
Now it's now it's the cable providers that want protection from the Internet because the Internet is getting too strong.
00:10:25.480
And the Internet is putting all of these these programs out of business and all of these networks out of business because it's the new way.
00:10:36.700
All you're going to do is start adding Soviet style restrictions and you'll end up with a Soviet Union.
00:10:43.340
You'll end up with a broken system to where you go someplace else, some other country.
00:10:55.760
Now, at the same time, Silicon Valley is doing what they're purging the voices of conservatives because they are setting up their empire.
00:11:07.380
They're setting up exactly what they're going to do when they rule the world and they already rule the world.
00:11:15.340
Cable news and the American people are just starting to catch up.
00:11:22.740
So every time you hear somebody talk about what was on CNN last night, you can either enjoy it for the popcorn that it is, or you can say not important.
00:11:33.860
I mean, it could be fun to talk about it, but it's really not important because literally no one is watching anymore.
00:11:44.940
Now, I want to take a break and I want to come back and go back to what the Internet is doing and the world that they're setting up.
00:11:52.740
Right now, what is the world that they're setting up?
00:12:24.920
If you're a subscriber to the podcast, can you do us a favor and rate us on iTunes?
00:12:29.440
If you're not a subscriber, become one today and listen on your own time.
00:12:36.980
Well, so this is an amazing, I mean, development.
00:12:41.080
David J. Harris Jr., who's been on the program before, prominent black conservative, big, you know, big, big social media personality.
00:13:05.240
They've looked at the damage to the community over at Facebook, and they've seen that David apparently has violated this.
00:13:18.420
So he didn't violate any of the standards or the guidelines.
00:13:24.860
And so they've decided to say that he, because he has, he posted some fake news stories, that they've just changed a couple of things about his page.
00:13:36.100
I don't know if it's color scheme, you know, maybe font size.
00:13:44.520
And a couple of other minor things that might be noticeable.
00:13:47.640
For example, they've, you know, demonetized him, so he can't make, you know, any money off of the page, which, you know, is his main source of income, you know.
00:13:57.120
But other than that, the only other thing they've done is drop his traffic by 97%.
00:14:05.680
I mean, if you can't get by with 3% of the traffic that you've built over a long period of creating content for Facebook for free that they've profited off of,
00:14:15.640
I mean, if he can't handle that, what can you handle?
00:14:19.540
Can we find an attorney that can tell me how Facebook isn't being sued for this?
00:14:24.880
They are destroying business after business after business.
00:14:34.880
And I don't think, you know, it's necessarily just, like, David isn't even the perfect candidate for this because David is a guy who built his following completely organically.
00:14:45.520
Like, he never put any money into ads or anything like that.
00:14:48.700
There are companies that paid Facebook millions of dollars to place ads to get an audience.
00:14:54.460
And now Facebook is saying they can't reach the audience.
00:14:57.160
How they're not getting sued over things like this, I cannot understand.
00:15:02.260
We know from our own experience that we've been demonetized.
00:15:14.180
So I build up, what, two and a half million subscribers or followers of Facebook because Facebook invites me to.
00:15:24.360
You know, they bring me into their headquarters.
00:15:29.920
So we invest our time and our money and our talent to be able to grow that audience.
00:15:37.880
So they have the two million people that some of them may not have been using Facebook when they first joined.
00:15:47.460
And now they cut us off of the people who say, I'm here because I want to know this opinion.
00:15:55.160
David posted a video of this, and you can see the traffic numbers.
00:16:00.500
Let's play a little bit of this, and we'll talk you through it as there's some of its visual.
00:16:03.980
But if you happen to be watching, the graph is absolutely amazing.
00:16:11.900
You see, this is 2.5 million, and this is in one day.
00:16:23.920
So you can see it goes up from 1 million to 2 million.
00:16:44.240
It's enough to make – it makes me sick to my stomach.
00:16:56.060
From 2.7 million to about – I think the low was 85,000.
00:17:03.180
And again, so the question would be, okay, well, what is he doing?
00:17:08.520
Would be strange for a black conservative to post KKK material.
00:17:14.220
He got dinged because he was posting fake news.
00:17:18.000
The fake news he posted was a video from CNN where they were interviewing the founder of the Weather Channel who's skeptical of global warming.
00:17:28.840
So because he posted a CNN interview about global warming in a skeptical way, which wasn't – he wasn't even – it wasn't even a video of him.
00:17:39.320
It was a video of another person, an interview on CNN.
00:17:42.500
And he got dinged for fake news and now has lost 97% of his audience basically overnight.
00:17:49.000
So he hasn't – no, he hasn't really done – they haven't done anything wrong.
00:17:55.180
They have moved him to a new village where conservatives have their voices heard and everything is sunshine and lollipops.
00:18:07.240
And it's just in a place that you can't go or find.
00:18:10.760
But they're all just being put onto a train and they're brought to this wonderful little village where they can speak and their people can hear them.
00:18:22.060
It's amazing because, I mean, a lot of times this goes to sort of constitutional grounds and free speech grounds.
00:18:29.480
We have something coming up in the next few weeks on this going on TV.
00:18:32.080
And there are issues there that surround that because of the government protections they get.
00:18:35.640
That being said, though, I think really the more interesting way to go after this is business.
00:18:40.720
I mean, there is no way they should be able to be running a business this way.
00:18:45.060
And we should continue to go back to them and hand over all of our free stuff.
00:18:50.840
And then on a whim with no explanation and no rational reason to do something, they'll just cut an audience by 97%.
00:19:01.820
It's companies that have gone literally out of business because of these changes after they've spent millions of dollars with Facebook to get the audience and expecting to reach it, obviously.
00:19:13.160
And then Facebook just pulls the rug right out from under them.
00:19:20.480
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:19:22.960
So Mike Chase is a white-collar criminal defense lawyer.
00:19:36.820
And by night, he's the legal humorist behind A Crime a Day, the Twitter feed, where he offers a daily dose of extensive research into the curious, intriguing, and crazy, expensive criminal laws here in the United States.
00:19:54.500
Welcome to the program, Mike Chase, author of How to Become a Federal Criminal.
00:20:01.000
Now, Mike, you know, when I first heard, when Stu came to me and said, we have to have Mike on, how to become a federal criminal.
00:20:11.780
And I'm like, no, that's what Antifa, that's what all of these far-left organizations are doing.
00:20:20.920
And then he explained the book, and I looked at the book, and it's fantastic.
00:20:32.080
Some of us are, you know, small little donkey criminals.
00:20:35.580
You know, some of us have whistled on a CB radio.
00:20:38.020
But whatever we've done, the likelihood is that the government could charge us with a federal crime.
00:20:46.900
I have to read this verbatim because I love this.
00:20:48.620
You should never, you should never, and I mean never, underestimate the government's power to put you in prison for something as simple as bringing a theatrical chicken or any performing poultry back from Mexico without an up-to-date health certificate.
00:21:09.100
And this is, we're not just talking about dramatic poultry, right?
00:21:11.860
I mean, poultry that have a great sense of drama.
00:21:14.840
We're talking about professional performing poultry.
00:21:18.540
But if you come back, you know, you have your...
00:21:23.940
You have to define what a theatrical chicken or performing poultry really is.
00:21:33.940
Because we all know that Article I, Section I of the Constitution says that Congress and Congress alone is supposed to make the law.
00:21:40.540
But somewhere along the line, they decided we're better at, you know, bickering and things like that.
00:21:45.120
So they gave that power away to agencies who then, agencies, made rules like the one banning performing poultry from coming back.
00:21:53.980
It would be nice to have a definition of performing poultry.
00:21:56.880
But that's sort of where everybody went home for the day.
00:21:59.420
And they just said, look, if it's performing poultry.
00:22:01.780
So really, it's the government that decides if your chicken is a performing chicken or if he's just an amateur.
00:22:11.200
I will say, your book is scary because I happen to be a man who likes to, you know, when you're going by a bunch of horses, I'm the type of guy who likes to flip off the horses.
00:22:24.420
But it's not, it's not just flipping off the horses, I believe, Stu.
00:22:29.440
It's making an obscene gesture or any objectionable gesture towards a horse.
00:22:36.980
And I will say, as you point out correctly in the book, it is okay to do this to a stationary horse.
00:22:43.920
However, a passing horse, it goes off the rails.
00:22:47.800
What I really find fascinating about this one, because this is a real law that is in effect, and you detail it in the book, is that they actually did revisit it.
00:22:57.200
I feel like a lot of these laws, like, okay, they passed them in, like, 1820, and they're ridiculous, and they just never repealed them.
00:23:02.800
They actually revisited it in the 1980s to try to figure out what type of gesture was allowed.
00:23:09.700
It happens all the time, and because this happens through the regulatory process, we don't always get a lot of this stuff happening in the public debate.
00:23:18.340
There was a time when the National Park Service said, all right, look, no unreasonable gestures to horses, okay?
00:23:28.100
To the insidious practice of unreasonable gestures to passing horses.
00:23:31.940
But then some guy somewhere came to him and said, hey, look, guys, I need a little more definition on that, because I've got to know what kind of gestures I can make to a horse.
00:23:44.920
And he was like, all right, I can work with that.
00:23:47.360
And so anyway, that's where we are with the federal law.
00:24:00.740
In 1985, a horse doesn't care if you flip it off.
00:24:13.240
How did somebody come to the point where, like, no, I need a little bit more definition?
00:24:18.440
Look, Glenn, you say a horse doesn't care if you flip them off.
00:24:22.740
There are sensitive horses out there, so don't step on their feelings, all right?
00:24:26.660
But the truth is that probably what they were going for is don't make a gesture that's going
00:24:33.100
to spook a horse and cause some sort of harm or damage.
00:24:36.840
But our government, which is required to make laws that govern all of us, isn't so good at it.
00:24:42.240
And so they use these broad, generalized terms.
00:24:47.680
They don't say a gesture that can spook a horse.
00:24:51.120
So I think if you flip them off, I think if you do the chin flick, I think if you moon
00:24:56.820
a horse, you're potentially going to find yourself on the other side of an indictment.
00:25:01.260
And so I go through that in illustrated fashion in how to become a federal criminal so that
00:25:07.580
So there are other things, you know, you can't draw the Pentagon.
00:25:15.760
Now, I understand this maybe in the 1940s, you know, before satellites and everything
00:25:27.100
Yeah, and that's the way the regulation says it is that you can't make a sketch, photograph,
00:25:33.660
drawing, or any other depiction of the Pentagon.
00:25:36.260
To me, if you're at home and you're just drawing geometric shapes and you happen to, you know,
00:25:41.400
do a five-sided one, you're potentially running afoul of this law.
00:25:44.940
Now, probably it's for somebody who's on property at the Pentagon, but if the government comes
00:25:51.380
to your house and they're really looking for something to ding you on and they see some
00:25:55.580
Pentagons drawn around, you might be looking at some charges added on to your indictment.
00:26:11.580
Yep, and that speaks to a much bigger problem, which is the fact that, look, back in the
00:26:17.000
80s, the DOJ tried to count every federal crime on the books.
00:26:19.900
They spent two years at it, and when they came back, they said, yeah, we give up.
00:26:25.980
So we, the government, don't know how many there are.
00:26:28.920
Estimates say that there may be as many as 300,000 or more federal crimes on the books.
00:26:34.260
Are there photos of the Pentagon and drawings of the Pentagon out there?
00:26:42.960
But these laws lurk in the background and govern all of us, and you potentially could get charged
00:26:48.520
with one, even if it's been 50, 100 years since the statute's ever been used.
00:26:54.460
So it's not really, Mike, it's not the problem.
00:26:56.780
I mean, because we can laugh at these, and we can understand, you know, maybe the horse,
00:27:01.640
you know, thing and the Pentagon thing, you know, a reasonable person will say, well, they're
00:27:07.040
trying to make sure that nobody in the Pentagon is saying, I'm not taking pictures, but they're
00:27:14.440
Would you agree that that's probably what they were trying to avoid?
00:27:19.420
A lot of these rules have some sort of, you know, meritorious backdrop.
00:27:24.000
Of course, I'm not so sure that the ban on selling Swiss cheese without enough holes makes
00:27:29.900
a whole heck of a lot of sense, or selling a fruit cocktail with less than 2% cherries
00:27:39.380
I mean, a lot of these rules come from a good place, but because Congress has outsourced
00:27:45.420
all of its lawmaking authority, essentially, to agency bureaucrats, they've made these thousands
00:27:51.420
or hundreds of thousands of rules with not enough definition for us to all abide by them
00:28:00.700
So that is the problem, is that as our government has grown, grown more powerful, grown in size,
00:28:06.760
and grown in hostility towards one group or another, whether it, you know, is, you know,
00:28:13.080
the repeat of the 1950s and, you know, Martin Luther King not being able to buy a gun because
00:28:21.700
his local sheriff said, no, it's for your own safety, when we know that wasn't true, they
00:28:26.940
can, a powerful government that wants to put you away for some reason can find something
00:28:36.740
And remember, the place our minds always tend to go on this is, well, how many people are
00:28:41.820
Or come on, some of these laws are plainly unconstitutional.
00:28:44.520
But the thing for everybody to remember, and I go through this in How to Become a Federal
00:28:47.860
Criminal, which is long before you get acquitted at trial, long before the Supreme Court holds
00:28:53.060
that you were unconstitutionally prosecuted for, you know, flipping off a horse on public
00:28:57.800
land, or sorry, a passing horse on public land, long before any of that happens, you know,
00:29:02.620
these countless laws give the government the authority to detain you, to arrest you, to go
00:29:08.360
into your home, seize your property, and put you into the criminal justice system and obligate
00:29:12.920
you to defend yourself before you may wind your way all the way up to the Supreme Court
00:29:19.020
I mean, we heard about the case of this guy, John Yates, a few years back.
00:29:21.940
He got prosecuted for throwing a few undersized red grouper overboard, and he had to go all
00:29:27.640
the way to the Supreme Court to be told that what he did wasn't a federal crime.
00:29:30.860
And by the end of that process, you may have been imprisoned, you may have lost all of
00:29:34.940
your money and gone indigent in the process of defending yourself.
00:29:37.900
It also seems to open you up to, you know, they can use one of these laws to go in, search
00:29:43.080
your home, and find out something else that they want to know that they have no right of
00:29:47.440
I mean, it seems like it would open it up to the, you know, they're going to be able
00:29:50.920
to go and get your access to your data, they're going to be able to go in and search your
00:29:55.260
home, and all of these things that normally they wouldn't be able to do because you're
00:29:59.320
Right, well, let me give you a real life, let me pause for a second, and give you a
00:30:04.460
real life example of this, and I'd love to hear your opinion on this, Mike, because as
00:30:08.980
a businessman, it's why what you've written really concerns me.
00:30:17.220
We are, we're talking about these crazy laws that are currently on the books that you can
00:30:24.920
get nailed for with Mike Chase, and Mike, let's look at things like, for instance, the tea
00:30:35.900
We know that the, we know that the city with the master cake shop, they have, they were,
00:30:45.620
They wanted this guy to have to be forced to make wedding cakes.
00:30:55.740
The Supreme Court basically says, well, if you're going to do it, here's how you do it.
00:31:01.540
And I thought to myself, this is the third time.
00:31:05.140
But if the, if the police or the state wanted to make sure that they taught this guy a lesson,
00:31:13.300
they could go in on some bakery related thing that is really old, that nobody knows, and
00:31:18.900
says, you're in violation of this, and bleed the guy dry.
00:31:26.360
You're, you're, you're exactly right about that.
00:31:28.260
And I have a whole chapter in, in how to become a federal criminal about food.
00:31:34.340
And the truth is that the FDA and the USDA regulate all kinds of food, food crimes, and
00:31:41.280
I mean, in fact, a very similar situation is not that many years ago, there was a bakery
00:31:46.460
up in New England that listed in sort of cute fashion.
00:31:51.040
They listed love as an ingredient in their granola.
00:31:53.960
Well, the FDA sent them a letter and said, hey, your products are misbranded because love
00:32:08.200
So yeah, for, for the master cake shop or for anybody else in that industry, if, if they're
00:32:12.760
a political opponent of somebody, uh, you could go in and you conduct an investigation, you're
00:32:18.960
going to find some violation of something because, because the federal government has so far exceeded
00:32:23.740
its, it's, uh, limited powers set forth in the constitution that there are hundreds of
00:32:28.900
thousands of crimes and potentially thousands of regulations that a person could have violated
00:32:33.940
and they'd be able to find something the harder they look for sure.
00:32:37.320
And tea party members, tea party members know this because the IRS investigated so many
00:32:43.400
leaders of the tea party and they came up with nothing, but they had to go through all
00:32:49.060
this, all this, you know, federal regulation to be able to, um, clear their name.
00:32:58.480
They know because just trying to get a 501 C three or C four, whatever it is, uh, for many
00:33:05.280
tea parties, they couldn't get it done because of the red tape.
00:33:08.560
And it was because they were going against somebody in the government.
00:33:11.960
So we've never faced this as Americans before we've never seen this.
00:33:17.420
The black Americans saw this, uh, in the Jim Crow era, but we haven't faced this as white
00:33:31.500
And last year I wrote an op-ed in the wall street journal called lock her up, lock him up.
00:33:36.320
They could lock you up about that exact point, which is this, this, this picking the unpopular
00:33:41.020
person, the politically unpopular or whoever, and, and using this coercive weight of literally
00:33:47.260
countless federal crimes, federal laws and regulations, um, to, to, to carry out essentially
00:33:57.060
It's, it's not that we're arguing that regulation is inherently good or inherently bad.
00:34:02.180
If you go through the book, you will see that every aspect of modern American life is regulated
00:34:07.480
in such a way that it gives the government immense power, um, for, for politically unpopular
00:34:14.440
I'll give you one example that I go through in the book, which is if you leave the country
00:34:19.320
with more than $25 worth of nickels in your pocket, that's a federal crime.
00:34:26.240
I mean, you're going to need some pants with some good pockets and a nice dirty belt.
00:34:29.660
But the truth is that if you leave the country with more than $25 worth of nickels, you've
00:34:34.480
committed a federal crime and face up to five years in prison.
00:34:37.600
It's just one example of the government requiring all kinds of reporting and all kinds of information
00:34:44.180
from you, not that you've harmed anybody or, or actually created any kind of injury to
00:34:48.220
anybody, but because the government so wants information that if you don't give that information
00:34:52.800
to them, you could find yourself on the other end of an indictment and a potentially
00:34:58.360
And this is made much, much worse because we have, we've disengaged and separated ourselves
00:35:04.500
from the constitution and the idea of, of blind justice, right?
00:35:17.380
The name of the book is how to become a federal criminal.
00:35:20.100
You'll actually laugh really, really hard, uh, all the way through it.
00:35:24.080
Uh, but there's important lessons to be learned in it.
00:35:26.940
How to become a federal criminal, perhaps a book that all of us should have on our shelves.
00:35:32.680
I highly recommend you get it now by Mike chase.
00:35:56.540
And if you like what you hear on the program, you should check out Pat Gray Unleashed.
00:36:00.680
His podcast is available wherever you download your favorite podcast.
00:36:04.280
Well, since it's gay pride month, uh, we thought we would celebrate by talking a little bit
00:36:08.920
about the gay pride that is, is, uh, so prideful and, uh, and, uh, and tell you where we're
00:36:17.700
Yin Q is a former dominatrix and educator and practitioner of bondage, discipline, dominance,
00:36:31.060
BDSM has long been a part of her, her understanding, uh, and experience with sexuality.
00:36:37.200
Uh, initially she explored kink as a cabaret performer in college.
00:36:42.340
Uh, today she's based in Brooklyn and she uses her expertise as a platform, as an activist,
00:36:50.080
uh, visible queer Asian American person in the BDSM community to elevate the experiences
00:36:57.140
of marginalized people and perform BDSM rituals with clients as a form of therapy.
00:37:04.880
She also hosts workshop for members of the LGBTQ community.
00:37:08.940
And she's also the creator of the, uh, web series, mercy mistress, which is, uh, co-produced
00:37:17.220
She, um, she just gave an interview, uh, with the Washington, or I'm sorry, with the Huffington
00:37:23.800
So we could understand, she wanted to highlight the work, uh, in this underserved community
00:37:30.480
and, um, and understand BDSM's role in exploring and furthering queer pride and how they
00:37:43.720
She says, quote, the ritual work uses BDSM activities as well as sadomasochism, whether
00:37:49.780
it's flogging, spanking, caning, fetish worship to be kind of a cathartic release, or I use it
00:37:57.340
as sort of an arena to work on something one might be going through.
00:38:01.000
Uh, the individual I'm working with is not looking to get turned on by me and I'm not
00:38:07.000
looking to dominate somebody in the way that they're handing power over to me and manifesting
00:38:13.780
So her sessions, she says, what I'm actually doing is just offering my skills and services,
00:38:18.540
uh, to be the hand that puts someone into bondage to hold safe space for them, not to prod or
00:38:26.420
It's more than they would take a flogging for themselves.
00:38:29.960
So they're really going to take a really hard whipping so they can manifest something
00:38:35.280
with the intention that they're trying to get through some kind of struggle, whether it be
00:38:41.060
work related or any other part of their lives where they feel they need that physical whipping,
00:38:45.980
that physical push, much in the way someone might say, run a marathon.
00:38:53.640
Now, as you, uh, unfortunately would have to read all the way through this nonsense, um,
00:39:00.600
the question from the Huffington post was, so you believe embracing kink and other marginalized
00:39:04.820
identities has the power to move the conversation and experience of pride beyond the white gay
00:39:10.900
cis male, uh, that has dominated the movement up until now.
00:39:15.400
She says, and I quote, I think the corporations, I think the corporations that are fueling the
00:39:24.500
money that goes into pride and the other people getting paid by those corporations need to turn
00:39:32.160
and understand they got over the fence by so many people giving them a hand over it.
00:39:37.140
They didn't achieve gay marriage inequality of queer people in the workplace on their own.
00:39:42.240
It wasn't just the leadership and the corporations.
00:39:46.580
We need to remember how much privilege we attain.
00:39:49.580
And we always have to look to our neighbors and people outside of our spaces to see who
00:39:56.260
So we can all be at the party as a community organizer holding events.
00:40:01.300
I got some pushback from some marginalized people because they don't want it to be a token within
00:40:08.720
And I understand that being Asian American and a sex worker, but I also believe there's
00:40:13.980
a responsibility to come forward as a role model and say, I don't want to bring you in
00:40:21.720
I feel there is so much money going into pride right now that we must be able to have the
00:40:28.100
time and work available to reach out to those sex workers, to reach out to those people in
00:40:33.420
communities that have long been, uh, have not been uplifted.
00:40:37.220
I was talking to an older gay white man after a pride last year who was really offended and
00:40:44.000
hurt that there were a lot of leather flags with a black stripe showing solidarity with
00:40:51.620
He confided, he confided to me and I listened because he's an ally to black lives matter,
00:40:57.080
but he felt insulted that his own history of what the rainbow flag had meant to him had
00:41:04.280
been changed and mutated in a way that he felt was not giving reference to gay pride.
00:41:15.080
This is a person in this new community that already feels they're being alienated and their
00:41:22.800
history is being erased and they are being mocked because someone put a leather stripe on
00:41:41.940
She said, I told him that things have to change.
00:41:55.780
Remember why she was taken off the, uh, campaign trail the first time around?
00:42:02.200
And Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices.
00:42:05.880
We're going to have to change our conversation.
00:42:08.720
We're going to have to change our traditions, our history.
00:42:11.780
We're going to have to move into a different place.
00:42:14.560
She said, um, uh, that being said, the younger generation is taking up arms to hold up more
00:42:23.700
And there are plenty of rainbow flags out there.
00:42:25.780
So they're not going away, but we have to look to the artists, the writers, the people
00:42:34.040
I look to artists who are bringing their queerness, their blackness, their BDSM kinkiness to their
00:42:39.960
artwork and exploding all over the world with it.
00:42:42.820
I look to Margaret Cho and I'm honored to co-executive produce a series with her.
00:42:48.840
I feel like younger people in the community are doing sex work activism, using social media
00:42:54.180
to put messages out there for decriminalization of sex work.
00:42:57.880
These are the people that we can really learn from.
00:43:04.820
So they are already beginning to eat their own.
00:43:09.580
They're already beginning to mutate into more and more extreme.
00:43:30.520
Now, powwows are traditional social gatherings in many Native American communities that allow
00:43:36.740
people to come together to celebrate age-old traditions.
00:43:42.120
And nothing says powwow like the fancy dance, the ubiquitous staple of these gatherings.
00:43:52.540
There's one version for men and another for women.
00:43:55.600
But Neno, who loved dancing, the gender confinement of powwows was stifling, the expectation that
00:44:04.620
men and women could only perform certain dances and wear certain outfits.
00:44:10.660
Now, she identifies as a two-spirit, which is an umbrella term for indigenous peoples from
00:44:16.320
North America to describe their place on a spectrum of genders and sexualities.
00:44:21.080
So, in a bid to break free from the confines of gender norms and represent their gender
00:44:27.600
fluidity, Neno is wearing both male and female regalia.
00:44:33.180
And after three years of no dancing, she's back and dressed to the nines, ready to dance
00:44:56.520
They are still processing what their complete two-spirit powwow regalia will look like.
00:45:03.560
And until then, Neno is diverting their energies to community organizing and educating others
00:45:12.180
But it's not really educating about her culture, is it?
00:45:16.520
This is unrelenting authenticity that makes Neno such a beacon for others.
00:45:24.380
She might be being authentic to herself, but she's not being authentic to the Native Americans.
00:45:30.980
Whatever responsibility they inhabit, be it at a powwow or a nationwide pride advisory,
00:45:37.860
they will carve out a space for their most authentic self.
00:45:43.960
The Canadian LGBTQ representation has historically and continues to leave out two-spirit contributions.
00:45:54.320
Black, indigenous, Ukrainian, queer, two-spirit, polyamorous, partner, parent, and, I'm not making this up, puppy mom.
00:46:12.480
She is black, indigenous, Ukrainian, queer, two-spirit, polyamorous, partner, parent, and puppy mom.
00:46:21.760
She exists without compromising any of them, which we all love.
00:46:27.500
I could be wrong on this, but I think maybe what they're saying there is she just has a puppy.
00:46:36.240
I think they're just trying to be cute at the end of that.
00:46:42.120
It might be she is indigenous, Ukrainian, queer, two-spirit, polyamorous, partner, parent, and puppy mom.
00:46:51.560
It might be that she believes she's a puppy and a mother of a puppy.
00:47:01.600
What I do know is that if she does believe that she's right, she's in her truth, and you shan't question it.
00:47:08.460
Okay, so I'm going to take a quick break, and I'm going to show you why I just shared all of this.
00:47:14.980
Because the culture of the rainbow flag is now being erased.
00:47:21.340
It's now being changed, and the people behind the rainbow flag aren't happy about it.