Episode Number: 72
Episode Title: Punch More Nazis (listen to this episode)
Transcript by: Susan the Great
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Renay: Hey friends, I’m Renay!
Ana: And I’m Ana!
Renay: And you’re listening to Fangirl Happy Hour: Question Tuesday Edition.
[Music: B-3 by BoxCat Games]
Renay: Today on Question Tuesday we’re going to imagine we have dominated the world, we’re going to rec some media…but not really rec it, and then we’re gonna ask each other some questions. Are you ready? Cause I’m not—I don’t know if I’m ready now. Now I’m nervous.
Ana: I’m ready. I’m ready.
Renay: I’m nervous for the question you’re gonna ask me.
Ana: It’s a simple yes or no question and I know what’s your answer’s gonna be. And it’s gonna be just smooth sailing.
Renay: So this is gonna be a super exciting episode of Question Tuesday! Let’s get with it.
[Music: B-3 by BoxCat Games]
Renay: From Elizabeth on Twitter: “If space bees recognized you as a true owner of Earth, what’s the first rule you would implement?”
Ana: Listen, had this question shown up ten days ago, I would probably have answered something like… “Everybody should have cake every day.” Something stupid like that. But because this question appeared right now, I would implement a “No Trump allowed.”
Renay: [laughter] You would just kick him off the planet?
Ana: I would just kick him and his friends off the planet. Go back in time; elect Hillary Clinton.
Renay: We tried. We tried!
Ana: Not nearly enough.
Renay: Well, you just can blame the Republicans for that, they gerrymandered everything. So we tried really hard, but they gerrymandered everything and gutted the Voting Rights Act. What are we supposed to do?
Ana: Get space bees to recognize you as ruler of the world!
Renay: Well…
Ana: As the rightful ruler of earth.
Renay: We’re just playing pretend right now.
Ana: Yes. So, what would you do?
Renay: If I could implement one rule it would be universal health care.
Ana: Aw, you’re so nice.
Renay: I think that the fact that health care is not a human right in so many places is just a travesty. I got dumped off my mom’s insurance when I was really young. And I spent like five years with no insurance and being told I could get super expensive insurance or being rejected cause I had a pre-existing condition. And I think about how many people out there can’t go to the doctor. I think about the times where I was sick or I was like literally coughing up blood, ill, and I didn’t want to go to the doctor because I couldn’t afford it.
Ana: That’s evil.
Renay: Right? And so if I could implement any rule it would be that health care would be a human right and you couldn’t deny it to people and you couldn’t charge more than people had for it.
Ana: So that means that you win and you should be the true owner of Earth, because you have the best answer.
Renay: I didn’t— I don’t think— I don’t think Elizabeth is judging us.
Ana: I am.
Renay: You have to co-own with me, I’m not owning this, I’m not owning the whole Earth by myself, have you seen it? It’s a mess.
Ana: You can have it!
Renay: The white men—
Ana: I don’t want this fucking thing anymore!
Renay: The white men have fucked it up! I’m not taking all of the responsibility on myself!
Ana: Maybe, maybe we should just implode it. Just kill everybody and reboot.
Renay: This went dark real fast.
Ana: [laughter] These are dark times my friend.
Renay: Elizabeth, I’m so sorry. I’m sure you submitted this question, like, to be light-hearted and fun. If I had to choose like a goofy answer, I would be like… What would I choose if I had to choose a goofy answer to this question?
Ana: It’s not easy to choose a good goofy answer for something like this.
Renay: I would make everybody read five books a year.
Ana: I was gonna go with something like that, too.
Renay: That’s possibly really oppressive and I wouldn’t tell people what they had to read, but I’d be like “Okay, listen, it’s reading time. Five books. You have 365 days to read five books. Go. Get started. Be literate. Read a book. Contribute to society.” I also like your— your suggestion of everybody gets cake. I want some cake.
Ana: I don’t even eat cake.
Renay: This has been the worst question answering for Elizabeth ever. Elizabeth please submit another question and we’ll answer it better, I promise.
[Music: Love of My Life by BoxCat Games]
Renay: Next up, from Charles on Twitter, sending us into, like, panic mode because we don’t know how to answer the question: he wants to know “Do you have a favorite book that you would never recommend to each other?”
Ana: I don’t think so. Most of my favorite books I have recommended to you and you have liked them, thank god.
Renay: [laughter] So far.
Ana: Yes, so far. I went to take a look at my keeper shelf. There’s nothing really there that I wouldn’t recommend to you. Maybe some of my favorite historical novels? Like, I really—I would really like you to read some of the Connie Willis books, the time travel ones, but they are both time travel and historicals. But I would still recommend them to you. However, I do have three TV shows that I love that I am positive you would hate.
Renay: Oh, okay, hit me.
Ana: Walking Dead.
Renay: Oh yeah, oh yeah, definitely not.
Ana: Mad Men.
Renay: Nn-mm. Nope.
Ana: And Game of Thrones.
Renay: [retching]
Ana: [laughter] So there you go. I would do— I un-recommend these these to you Renay.
Renay: Perfect. I came up with two books.
Ana: Ohhh.
Renay: One of them is Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.
Ana: Ugh.
Renay: Which I read in a British Novel class and got to take apart and it was wonderful, and intellectual, and great, and Dickens is—
Ana: Boring.
Renay: No, he’s great! I don’t know what you’re talking about. Oliver Twist is great.
Ana: Boring.
Renay: No, you have to read it in a group setting so you can discuss it.
Ana: But I thought it was something that you would NOT recommend.
Renay: I wouldn’t recommend—I’m not recommending it to you!
Ana: But you were just telling me to read it!
Renay: No, I was telling everybody else to read it.
Ana: Oh, okay.
Renay: And the other one is Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card, which will be the only time I ever mention Orson Scott Card’s name on this podcast. Because I find him to be a vile human being. Speaker for the Dead is the book that got me back into, like, not even got me back into, because I used to read Madeleine L’Engle. But it was like the first like adult-adult science fiction novel that I read. And I really really liked it a whole lot, and it was just doing so many different things and it had these different cultures and I was a rural-raised kid so to read this book that had Portuguese characters in it and I was like “What the hell is Portuguese?”
Ana: Oh wow.
Renay: And I had to go like, look it up in an encyclopedia. I’m telling you guys, rural education here. I wouldn’t recommend it because the language, like, and all the translations are terrible and it probably won’t hold up. If I like, went to re-read it now, I would probably be like “Oh dear.” And I’m not positive that you would hate it, but I would never recommend it because I hate putting people at a place where they’re gonna watch their own culture, like, jacked up by a white dude.
Ana: Ugh, god. Especially when the white dude is Orson Scott Card.
Renay: I don’t know anything about the language, Portuguese, I don’t know anything about Portugal, I don’t know anything about that, so my lack of cultural knowledge means that I don’t see all of the micro-aggressions in this book, but I’m sure that if you read it, you’d be like “Fuck this guy, fuck him.” I mean you should say that anyway because he hates gay people and he has been—not a great dude there. But—And also he wrote some, like, Hamlet fanfic?
Ana: Oh, yeah! I remember that.
Renay: Yeah, you remember—yeah, that happened. So those are the two books that I would not recommend to you.
Ana: So we will continue with not reading and watching these things.
Renay: Yes, now you know what to stay away from.
Ana: Yes, okay.
Renay: Charles: always asking the tough questions.
[Music: Rolling by BoxCat Games]
Renay: All right, Ana, it’s time, and I know we will never top the episode where you admitted to drinking mystery liquid out of a container from a stranger inside a crop circle, but we have to—we have to move onto other pastures. So, what was the best class you ever took in school?
Ana: I would probably say the History of Americas, especially the topic of religion in Latin America, with the missionaries that came with the colonization of Americas. And by missionaries I mean the missions from the Jesuit priests that were Catholic and they basically converted all the Native Americans, or tried to, and baptized them.
Renay: Why was that your favorite?
Ana: First of all, that made me rethink religion. And two, because the class actually was about how Native Americans subverted what they learned, what they were told, and completely reappropriated the Catholic religion and made —made it something their own. That was I think halfway through college, I had this class?
Up until that point I was very unsure what I wanted to major in and what specialization I wanted to do. I started thinking that I wanted to go with Ancient History and then I started, like, working for a Greek teacher, a Greek history teacher and I just like “This is not for me, this is not what I want.”
And then I went into contemporary history and then I started an internship with the contemporary history teacher about oral history and the revolutions in Brazil during the military government. That was really interesting as well, but then I took this lesson, and I completely fell in love with it, and then I started working for this teacher doing research for her, for her PHD, and then that became my thesis. That was what I researched and wrote about at the end of—of university. And that completely—because I was very religious up until that point.
Renay: So this class was the point at which you got religiously woke.
Ana: Yes, absolutely. And it was so fascinating, too. For example, certain tribes in Brazil, for example the Tupi-Guaranis, it’s the name of a tribe. They believed in the—their kind of relationship where you give something to the god and the god gives that back to you. And that’s completely different from the Catholic religion, right? So you are—so they believed that if they were baptized, for example, they would be saved if they were sick. And that was the only reason why, imagine at that point there were so many diseases brought by the Conquistadores that these people were just doing everything that they could. And their last resort was in their death bed to accept the baptism, thinking that they would be saved.
Meanwhile, the missionaries are writing letters back to Portugal saying “all these people really accept our lord savior in their hearts.” And I’m like “No, dude, they are trying to save their own lives.”
Renay: That’s fascinating.
Ana: It is amazing how the misinterpretation/alternate facts in those missionary letters that the missionaries in Brazil wrote to their leaders back in Portugal and Spain. And it’s a good thing too because there are so many of those primary sources, because those letter still exist. But of course the primary sources from the side of the conquerors. There’s nothing written by the Native Americans, the Indians of Brazil, because they didn’t have any written language. But then, by reading what those missionaries wrote and there were so many of them, and you can—and you start seeing patterns and you can make assumptions, and that was my favorite part.
[Music: Meeting MtFox by BoxCat Games]
Ana: I have a doubt; I don’t know how to answer that. Wink, wink, I totally do know how to answer that. But I would like you to tell us. It’s something that everybody’s been talking about and so many people are asking themselves: is it okay to punch a Nazi, yes/no?
Renay: Yes, it’s absolutely okay to punch a Nazi.
Ana: Thank you.
Renay: I don’t know why this is a debate.
Ana: [laughter] Right?!
Renay: Nazism is at the core of the belief that people should be exterminated. It’s violence in and of itself. If somebody’s a Nazi, that means that they want people to die, they wanna kill people. Yes! Punch them in the face!
Ana: There is no dialogue to be held with these people.
Renay: If somebody wants to kill me, we aren’t gonna sit around and have a debate about it. I’m gonna punch him in the face. Inherent to Nazism is violence against a group of people and if you wanna be like “Oh that’s gonna hurt the dialogue—” there is no dialogue to be had! They want people to be exterminated! So as far as I’m concerned, Fangirl Happy Hour is pro-Nazi punching. Punch more Nazis.
Ana: That’s our new slogan.
Renay: I mean, who was the first person to be like “How dare you punch this Nazi?” It was Nick Spencer, right? The person who’s writing Captain America? The person who made Captain America a brain-washed Nazi? Meanwhile, the guy who got punched, Richard Spencer, who absolutely deserved it because he’s a Nazi, was—
Ana: Yeah.
Renay: When somebody shot into the mosque in Canada, he was on Twitter making fun of Muslims, and the people who died.
Ana: Fuck this guy. Punch him in the face.
Renay: If it’s a Nazi, you have my permission to punch it. And if someone tries to make you feel bad about it, they’ve told you who they are. Believe them.
[Music: Happy Summer Love by Chuki Beats]
Renay: Question Tuesday is a wrap! I’m awesome, Ana’s awesome, and everybody who made it through this whole episode is awesome.
Ana: Go punch some Nazis.
Renay: And after you punch some Nazis, you can follow us on twitter @fangirlpodcast for more good times. Email us at fangirlhappyhour at gmail and tell us something surprising, like that you punched a Nazi. You can subscribe to the show via the Amazon of podcasts, a.k.a. iTunes or wherever quality podcasts are acquired. Or, if you’re already in the hive, tell a friend.
Ana: Our music this week is by Boxcat Games and Chuki Beats. Ira made our excellent show art. Links to their work will in our show notes as well as links to some of the media we mentioned. If you want to ask a question because you desperately need our opinion — and why wouldn’t you — you can ping us on social media or use the handy form on fangirlhappyhour.com. Charles has asked us a ton of questions at this point, so the rest of you need to hustle and catch up.
Renay: Thank you for listening to our nerdy podcast, space bees.
Ana: See you next episode.
[Music: Happy Summer Love by Chuki Beats]