Discovering Third Places and Astroturf Right-wing Misinformation

[0:02] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. In this episode, we learn about third places, and they might be as close as your local humanist group. Then I do a deep dive on a recent Moms for Liberty online event attacking the trans community, so you don’t have to do it. They tie themselves in knots and red flags to justify their bigotry and outrage. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

[0:42] Music.

[0:59] I was invited at the end of March to attend a service at the First Unitarian Church of Toledo on Glendale Avenue. They are friends of my group, the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie. And we’ve collaborated before. Reverend T.K. Barger, who is the lead minister there, helped me found Shole, served on our board for a couple of years, and has been very supportive. So I consider him a friend. He’s a former reporter, and he used to write for the Toledo Blade for their religion section. And I’ve given presentations there in the past at least a couple of times. Most recent one, I did a presentation about LifeWise Academy to their adult religious group that meets before the service. And normally I wouldn’t go to a service. I’m not a church person. I don’t go to church.

[2:03] I don’t believe in it, even if it’s a Unitarian church. I don’t believe in it. But because they’re friends of our group and friends of mine, I accepted. And what it was is they were talking, the theme of it was getting through this difficult time that we’re in with the political situation and economic situation with the new administration and things that you can do. And so they had invited me as being a secular humanist in our group. They invited another member, a friend of my group, because they represented the reproductive rights people. And then we had somebody from Toledo Persist, which is the activist group or advocacy group, one of the advocacy groups that are fighting against the fascism that’s creeping into our society currently. And so those three of us were invited, and so they were talking, doing this sermon about getting through what you can do, how to be active.

[3:16] Calling your representatives, et cetera. And then they said, well, then you can also talk to these people, and then they introduced us, and so they wanted me to stay. But what was interesting was about the service, and they were taught about the concept of third spaces, which interested me. And so I did a little bit looking up about it after the service, and I kind of wanted to talk about it here because it’s a very interesting concept. I actually had not heard of it before. I heard about it at the Unitarian place. Yeah. So basically what it is, is third places are informal public gathering spots outside of home and work, like cafes, parks, or community centers, or community groups. So think of it this way. Your first place is your home. Your second place is your work. And so your third place is where you go or who you get active with that’s not at home and it’s not at work.

[4:28] Pretty simple, right? And so the third places are distinct from one’s primary living and working spaces. They are social and informal, so people can relax, socialize, connect with others in a relaxed atmosphere. They’re open to all. Third places are generally welcoming to people of all backgrounds, ages, and interests. Fosters community. They play a vital role in building and maintaining community by providing spaces for people to interact, share experiences, and form connections. And so again, we have these cafes and restaurants, parks and community gardens, libraries and community centers, bars and pubs, religious institutions, believe it or not, clubs and organizations.

[5:18] And so the importance of these third places is that it helps people build and maintain social connections, which can have a positive impact on mental and physical health. They contribute to the overall vitality and well-being of communities by providing spaces for people to interact and share experiences.

[5:38] And they can stimulate local economies by attracting people to businesses and activities. So like if my group has an event at a restaurant, well, we’ve just increased the profit or the income take of that restaurant by having us all there ordering and getting food. Same with a bar or if you go to a park, not necessarily money exchanges hands,

[6:08] but you’re utilizing a public good. And this theory or this talking about this third spaces was brought about by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg, and he called third places that are anchors of community life that facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction. In other words, your third place is where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances. Laughter is frequent. That’s another one. Conversation is the main activity. There are regulars, and it’s unpretentious.

[6:49] And so that got me thinking, that is how I perceive the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, as a third space, where conversation is the main activity. Laughter is frequent. There are regulars. We’re unpretentious. We’re open to all.

[7:08] Of course, we have meetings where we have presentations or lectures or discussions, but we’re also open to social. We have a social activities. We try to have social activities during the month. And so that’s what I’m thinking is that we are part of fostering the community here in the greater Toledo area. And so I think, and I’ve talked about this before in other situations where people see our humanist group, and this was true when I was in the humanist group in Columbus, is that some people consider the group their social time, where they put on their hat, they come, they be a humanist for an hour or two, and they go home and to the rest of their activities.

[8:03] They don’t give us another thought after that. And then there’s other people where we’re the primary means of dealing with the community, either activism or advocacy or speaking out. That can come from our group. That’s what I try to do as president of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, is I try to be an advocate for the non-religious in the greater Toledo area, the humanists, the agnostics, the atheists. I can’t speak for them personally, but as a group, I can speak for them and try to advocate for their worldview. And so I really like it. I mean, I have wished that we’ve had 100, 200 people in our group, because we would be doing so much more than what we’re currently doing. You know, we can only do as much as, as active as people are with our group, you know, and, and don’t get me wrong. If all you want to do is show up once a month and, and partake in a, in a, in a presentation.

[9:19] Or you want to, you know, we, uh, connect people with other groups that maybe can do more activism than what we can do, like the Toledo Troublemakers and Toledo Persist. And, you know, and then we give people resources and tools like Honesty for Ohio Education. You know, that’s what we are. We’re the center of advocacy for the humanist worldview. We are also the third space for people who don’t go to church, who don’t like bars and clubs. I don’t know who that would be, to tell you the truth. I mean, we could do that. We could do a dance club at a meeting one time. I’ll have to talk to the board about that. But I really agree with this notion of third spaces, and I had never thought of it that way before. And that’s one of the questions that we get sometimes from religious believers when they ask us, well, what’s our purpose?

[10:24] What is the purpose of why we exist? And it’s like, you know, you have to, I think, at least personally, I don’t have any evidence to back this up, so I could be wrong. But personally, I think everybody needs to have a third space. Because you have your home life, you have your work life, and if that’s the only two things you have, it can get, you can get into a rut. But I’ve done that. I’ve gotten into a rut, especially if I had a job where I was working a lot and not spending as much time at home and trying to spend as much time as home as I can. And then I don’t go anywhere. I don’t see anybody. I don’t do anything else. But sleep, get up, go to work, work, come home, eat, sleep, go to work. You know, and that just gets you into a rut. To me, that’s the way it seems is it gets you into a rut. But this third space, it gives you an outlet of where you can let off some steam.

[11:34] You can refresh your mind. I like to think of it when I do these humanist events is I’m refreshing my mind. You know, I’ve I’ve thought a lot about things going on, maybe doom scrolling on my phone when I shouldn’t be. I work on genealogy and things like that. But then I want like human contact, human, human talk to humans, talk to other adults, laugh, joke around, you know, may, you know, do all those things. And, you know, people used to do that all the time. Like decades ago, they’d have card games. You know, you’d go over to somebody’s house and play gin, bowling leagues. People would be in bowling leagues all the time. And people have gotten away from that because of the digital revolution and people not having as much free time at the same time. Put it that way. You know, not everybody only works nine to five and has the weekends off. Some people work wild hours. What I’m trying to express in talking about this is I really think that you should find your third space. If you don’t have one or don’t think you have one, consider the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie. We would accept you no matter what. Even if you’re a religious believer.

[12:59] You know, it’s just the only difference between our group and, let’s say, a church is that we’re not going to talk about the Bible. We’re not going to do scriptures. We’re not going to tell you how you live your life or you’re going to go to hell. You can come to our group and be who you are however you want to be love whoever you want to love we don’t care it doesn’t concern us you know but we want to hear from you we want to know what your views are and what you like and what you dislike because i’m telling you just the other day, I was talking to, or I posted something on Facebook about a musical group I liked, and somebody who is not really religious, but a regular churchgoer said, hey, I like that group too. So we had something in common. Even though philosophically we don’t have anything in common, we found something in common in talking about this musical group. I think it was the Pet shop boys. And because they’re a real good group. So that’s, if you’re going to impart anything from what I’m talking about in this segment is, you know, find a third space, get that human contact in. And if you don’t have a third space, consider us, the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie.

[14:25] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[14:38] So the other night I spent two hours of my life, two hours that I’ll never get back. I attended a online or virtual online lecture.

[14:56] From Moms for Liberty. Now, Moms for Liberty claims to be a grassroots organization of moms who are concerned about their children’s education, about schools, and that’s wrong. They are not a grassroots thing made up of moms. They are what’s called an astroturf group that is funded by the largestes of the right wing. They are an astroturf means that they are a fake grassroots. They are very fake. And they get a lot of money from right-wing groups in order to divide and be divisive about the United States politically. Some of the things that they do is they get their members to be elected to school boards, local school boards. Then they ban books. They attack trans kids, LGBT kids. They try to get creation science put in the classroom, all of that. But they don’t say that up front. They’re just a concerned parent running for office. And then once they get into being the school board, then the right-wing stuff starts coming out.

[16:19] The other thing that they’re known for is banning books, particularly in Florida, where it’s very easy to get a book banned.

[16:30] All you have to do is make one complaint about a book, and usually it gets pulled and banned. Very popular about that. Moms for Liberty is also connected with LifeWise Academy. LifeWise Academy actually was a sponsor of the Moms for Liberty National Conference in Philadelphia last year in 2024. And so a lot of the same right-wing groups that support LifeWise, support Moms for Liberty, etc. So it’s all cross-gendered. Oh, imagine that. That’s what we’re going to talk about. So they have this offshoot or this division of their group called M4LU, and it’s Moms for Liberty University. And they do these lectures and resources and things to help Moms for Liberty people, supporters, get the information that they need about these different topics. So basically what it is, is it’s the Fox News of Moms for Liberty, They give the people the information to tell them what to be outraged about. They give them the information and it’s either misleading or just patently false.

[17:52] And, and, and so, but basically what, what it was is this, this event, it was called Gender Ideology 101 and it was a live lecture and it was followed by an audience question and answer and, and it was free and it was, they had it live streamed on YouTube. So I’m not going to link to it because I don’t want to give them any more support than they already get, but I’ll put the link in the show notes. So you can, if you want to watch it, you can. I was thinking when I was going to do this segment that I was going to play some clips, and I’ve elected not to. Because again, I don’t believe in giving these people even a platform to expose their false information. And most of this information is false. You know, they put a lipstick on the pig, but it’s still a pig in my book.

[18:51] So they had this live lecture. It was on Monday, April the 7th. It says, gender ideology, a concept barely known just 20 years ago, has left many reeling from whiplash at the speed it overtook American society. Like all cultural revolutions, it grew underground, creeping into mainstream until suddenly it was everywhere, all at once. In Gender 101, we are joined by top experts who help us unpack the shocking truth behind the ideology.

[19:23] So, who are these top experts? Well, the first speaker was Logan Lanning, and he has a website that’s called It’s Not in Schools, and, I looked for some credentials that he had. The only thing he has in his bio, and this is a bio that I’ve only found everywhere online about him, is it says Logan Lansing is a nationally recognized speaker known for his appearances on American Thought Leaders in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. So there’s a red flag for me right there. Logan prides himself on his ability to distill complex topics into plain language. So basically, he’s done his own research. As far as I can tell, and please, if you know this guy and heard of him, and he’s not an academic, he’s not an educator, he talks a lot about schools and education, but I have not found anything about him being an educator. He’s read books and papers. So he knows how to do research. He knows how to read the papers. It’s his conclusions that we have a problem with.

[20:39] And then the next speaker was Mia Hughes. She is the senior researcher at this place called Genospec or Genespec or something like that in Canada. And she talked about the, quote, science, unquote, of transgenderism. And basically her take on it was that it was made up, it was fake. Well, all three of them basically said that kids transitioning is a social contagion that people should stomp out. And then the third speaker was Colin Wright. Now, he is an academic. He has a Ph.D., supposedly in evolutionary biology. But I also have seen where he was promoting himself as an evolutionary psychiatrist or psychologist. P.Z. Myers, the better-known biologist that is part of the Freethought community, has written about this Colin Wright on several occasions.

[21:57] This is not a good guy. And basically, he came at with the biology part of it. And so I’m not going to get into too much detail because, like I said, I don’t need to help them with their arguments. But what I can tell you is what I found wrong with their arguments. And I’ve already started with Logan Lansing.

[22:20] He went on. They each spoke for 20 minutes and then they had 45 minutes of question and answer from the audience. and Logan Lansing’s 20 Minutes, he went on and on about queer theory. And it’s a term I kind of have heard before, but not really.

[22:41] And his thesis was that queer theory is in the schools and is at the root of this gender ideology stuff that’s been going on for only 20 years. And he’s talking about in the 90s how this queer theory came about and took over the schools, took over the education field, and that teachers are teaching queer theory. He kind of goes into what queer theory is, and according to him, it’s a Marxist, based in Marxism. And it actually isn’t any of that. Anything that he was talking about, it isn’t. And if you’re familiar with critical race theory, queer theory is similar. It’s an academic exercise that what it does is the term queer theory is broadly associated with the study and theorization of gender and sexual practices that exist outside of heterosexuality and which challenged the notion that heterosexuality is what is normal. And that was a big theme that that all three of these people talked about was that gender ideology is not normal. They keep they kept using that word normal.

[24:06] And so Logan Lansing’s talking about queer theory, wanting to, and on his website he talks about it too, says queer activists believe, this is from his website, this is not what he, no, he probably said something similar to that. It says, Queer activists believe that the only reason people believe anything is normal or natural is because those people have been brainwashed to believe so through a half-organic process called socialization. For what it’s worth, the Marxist phrasing for the half-organic process of socialization would be saying something like normalcy is a historical process, which queer theory seeks to identify and transform to its own purposes. In this view, powerful people and cover of science, objectivity, reason, and rationality to mask an unfair social hierarchy that grants privilege to those people considered normal, while marginalizing those considered abnormal or deviant. It is for this reason that queer theory seeks to abolish all norms. Now, he does understand the queer theory because it does seek to take apart this idea that heterosexuality is the default and is normal.

[25:30] And that queers are stigmatized, are marginalized. That’s what queer theory attempts to take away. Now, what Logan Lansing was talking about in his 20-minute speech was that teachers using this queer theory in schools, which he claims he was told wasn’t being used, is trying to turn kids gay. Even though it’s not about being gay, it’s about undoing normalcy. See, there’s that word again, normal. You know, that kids transitioning is not normal. and that the teachers are facilitating this. And he says this has started in the 1990s. So that was his ideas.

[26:23] And it didn’t make any sense. To me, it did not make any sense. And basically, he’s just using a real theory about a social stratus, of defining social stratus and equating that to something nefarious that’s trying to ruin, society. And that’s not the case. It’s trying to make society better by getting rid of this idea that one group of people are normal and the other group of people are stigmatized or marginalized. That’s what queer theory is trying to eradicate.

[27:04] And I don’t see a problem with that. I don’t know what the problem is. But Logan Lansing does. So then we went to the next speaker was Mia Hughes. She is a prominent thinker specializing in pediatric gender medicine, psychiatric epidemic, social contagion, and the intersection of trans rights with women’s rights. She is the author of WPATH Files, an investigative report based on leaked internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Hugh’s insights have made her a sought-after speaker, featured on podcasts such as Heretics, Gender, A Widerland’s Conversation with Peter Burgosian. Oh, there’s another person. She also has delivered a seminar at Stanford University titled From Hysteria to Gender Dysphoria, How Culture and Medicine Shaped Mental Illness. So basically her thrust on her talking about it was that this sudden look at transgender people and kids getting it in their heads is a social contagion.

[28:20] Which we know that that’s incorrect. It’s not a social contagion. That’s what the argument people use to dismiss it. And she did quite a bit of dismissing transgender kids through her whole entire talk. She said it was pseudoscience. It didn’t exist. And it was a social contagion. And she blamed the invention of the cell phone and social media. And so one of her arguments about how to deal with it was to get rid of cell phones. And for those that live in Ohio, there is a proposed law right now in the Ohio House that would ban cell phones at school. Because Mia Hughes believes that kids got these ideas in their heads from social media and played along with it and took it to the next step. Totally dismissing the idea that there are actually kids that were born male or born female and feel like they’re in the wrong body. It’s been proven, it’s scientifically proven, and people like Mia Hughes just dismisses it. The other thing about her talk, too, is she focused on trans women.

[29:44] She didn’t mention trans men at all. And when she was talking about trans women, she said they were either doing fetishes, that they were getting aroused from wearing women’s clothing.

[30:00] Or that they were actually homosexuals and they were trying to get dates. Yeah. Yeah, it’s just like there wasn’t a good reason to want to be a trans woman, that it was either sexual, you wanted to get off on it, or if you wanted a date. And that would just shock me. That just shocked me. And the other funny thing, the ironic thing, is she’s, during the question and answer session, she’s telling the moderator that she doesn’t allow her children to have social media profiles. And I’m thinking to myself, that she knows of.

[30:45] But gender dysphoria is a real condition, and it needs to be treated correctly, and that’s what the science proves. No matter what Mia Hughes says or anything like that. So then the final speaker in this lecture series event was Colin Wright.

[31:09] He claims to be an evolutionary biologist, academic advisor for the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, founding editor of Reality’s Last Stand, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. There’s another red flag. And he writes mainly about science, the biology of sex, sex differences, gender identity, ideology. His writing has been published in major news outlets. And he is also an advisor to Atheists for Liberty, which is a conservative group that claim to be atheists, but they’re transphobes and misogynists and racists and the whole shebang. The only thing that they have that’s even related to me is that supposedly they’re atheists. So that’s Colin Wright. And the big takeaway I got from Colin Wright was that he confused sex and gender. Believe it or not, this is an academic. He kept talking about how sex was immutable. And then he equated gender to also be immutable, which is it is not gender. Gender is a social construct.

[32:24] It’s how people express their sex. And he also complained about it being only in people’s minds that they’re trans. And I’m like, well, that’s the point. That’s the point of being trans is it is in the brain. Because your brain is fighting how your physical body looks. Because your brain is saying that you’re one thing, But your body is saying a completely different thing. That’s why it’s called dysphoria, because you’re trying to to match that stuff up. You know, and then he just dismissed it again. He also said it was pseudoscience that had no basis in science, which it does. And that, oh, and that reminded me too, Mia Hughes also used the argument that kids have this idea that they hate their body so they decide to be trans. And she said, well, if a kid hates their body, it’s just that they’re going through puberty. It will pass.

[33:33] That’s also wrong. The other thing that kept running through my head while I’m listening to these three speakers talk is, you know, the Logan Lanning said that it started in the 90s. And then the whole crux of the discussion was that it’s only been new for the past 20 years, that kids having gender dysphoria didn’t exist before 20 years ago, which is obviously not true.

[34:08] And so it just kept coming into my head. Well, if this is the case, if this is an insidious plot by the education establishment to ruin kids and ruin normalcy, where are the victims?

[34:30] Because you would think, you know, the 90s is what, 30 years ago, 35 years ago? 20 years ago, when supposedly this started happening, where are the victims? And I know that my trans friends don’t want to focus on the low numbers of trans individuals because it doesn’t matter. In the scheme of things, it does not matter. But on a scientific scale, if you’re talking about an insidious plot that’s been going on for at least 30 years, you would expect to find a lot of, quote, victims, unquote. You would have a lot more data points.

[35:24] And there’s been a John Oliver, who does the last week show on HBO, had an excellent episode about trans athletes, where they go through some of the science. And one of the things is that the reason why that there is such a debate about trans athletes in sports is because there are so few actual studies on it. And so if you think that this is an insidious This plot by the education establishment, the deep state, to take over the world with trans kids, where are all the trans kids?

[36:07] And then that means that the arguments don’t hold up. They just don’t. It’s outrage for the sake of outrage. For Moms for Liberty, it’s outrage to raise money, to keep going. And this is the next step. They lost, as somebody mentioned, I think it was John Oliver in his piece, or it might have been somebody else. They lost the culture war. They lost LGBT battle. They lost same-sex marriage. And now they’re going and now they went after critical race theory, queer theory. Now they’re going after trans kids. And and none of these attacks have actual data or basis in fact. And it’s just a witch hunt to coin a term from the current president of the United States. It’s a witch hunt. I’m probably going to do a separate, maybe a video or something with some clips from this to go into more details about why certain things are wrong. But I just kind of wanted to talk about this is this is this passes for arguments that they’re common arguments. I’ve heard these arguments before, but I really wanted to hear them all in one place.

[37:26] And this is what people that oppose trans rights, this is what they’re talking about. And I think it’s important to know what they’re talking about. We don’t have to debate them. This is not a debate.

[37:39] All three of these speakers were wrong in their conclusions. And they were just dressing it up, you know, putting lipstick on a pig. And it was still a pig.

[37:49] Music. For more information about the topics in this episode, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. Glass City Humanist is an outreach of the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie. SHoWLE can be reached at humanistswle.org. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Glass City Jam, composed using the Amplify Studio. See you next time!

[37:51] Thank you for listening.

[38:34] Music.