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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbleached in today's episode of the show, if you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website. This American Life dog.

OK, so here's a weird thing to happen at your temp job, a chunk of the country decides that you personally are trying to steal the election from the president of the United States. This actually happened to a guy. He's in this video that's been circulating online, retweeted by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., viewed over five million times of him. He's a worker in the Georgia vote counting operation and video.

You see him at a desk in short sleeves, people doing their jobs all around him. He picks up one piece of paper after another, puts him in a stack, and then something happens.

He flinches and he slams out a piece of paper kind of angrily. That's how it looks in the video of the sound, on the video of somebody narrating. He's not identified, still has a thing about something, flips off the ballot and then crumples it up. That's more or less true. The guy gives a finger to something and then does crumple up some piece of paper and drops it to the side. The narrator and so many commenters on line for the video assume this is a Trump ballot and this fits the mold of all the things the president has been saying about the election being stolen.

That's not voter fraud. I don't know what is. Fortunately for us at our program, this incident happened at Fulton County in Atlanta. WABE reporter Johnny Kauffman has been embedded in the elections operation for months. He was able to track down the guy in the video.

His name is Lawrence Sloan. He's one of the dozens of people who are hired during the busy time around elections to help out. Has he done it before? No. This is his first time working in the election.

Yeah, like I mean, as soon as they called me about, like, the opportunity, I was like, oh, sweet.

I get paid like democracy. That's the most American thing that's going be awesome.

You know, Lawrence explained to me that the machine he's sitting at in the video, it's it's an envelope opener or the election workers, they call it a cutter. So Fulton County had about 150000 mail in ballots come in. So they're running nonstop. And Lawrence is one of the fastest people on the machines. He can tell just by the sound whether they're working correctly or not.

I know when they're going to be an ear. You hear that's a letter letting in the Jopek. That's where it cuts the longest. If it didn't work here, you didn't you got no cut on both sides. All right.

Lawrence told me that people put all kinds of stuff in the envelopes like weird stuff that they're not supposed to put in there. Like what? Oh, like me. Notes about Trump, someone sending a check. I was just like a mistake. They put it in the wrong envelope. Yeah, just a mistake.

Poems. People write poems and they put them in prayer. What kind of poems? I'm just like, I don't bro.

Just not good ones. So you watch a video with him? Oh, yeah.

He was very happy and excited to explain what actually happened in the video. OK, so. So the machine. Yeah. You see me working the workflow that's really separating from separate. Take that one. Be separate now is really pretty good. They're all Baiame tries to the other hand what's happening there.

Yeah. So what's happening is the machine didn't cut the envelope quite right. And so Lawrence reached in his hand to save the ballot.

When it doesn't cut properly, it starts tearing them, starts tearing the ballots out. So it starts tearing the envelope. And then if it stays in there, it will tear the ballot apart. And we had to eat your ballot. That's why you see me. That's why you see me throw those things.

So that's what the guy saw in the video. And Lawrence flinched. It wasn't him being upset about a Trump vote. It was the machine tweaked him when he was trying to to reach into it and save a ballot. So then he flipped off the machine. He's not flipping off the ballot. It's he's flipping off the machine because it's been giving him problems for hours.

Yeah. Yeah. I've seen him like there used to be cool, man. We used to do good work. Now I'm tired too everybody. And he was tired. But you need to quit with this. You're right. You're the only person here eating fingers.

So then the last thing in the video is Lawrence throwing aside this piece of paper. And Lawrence told me that that is not a ballot. It's one of these things that people put in the envelopes that is not supposed to be in the envelope in this case. It was the instructions, actually, for how to fill out the ballot. When Lawrence was talking about this, he couldn't help himself from giving a little public service announcement.

Stop putting the instructions in. I know it's too late. Now, for future reference, don't include the instructions in your vote moving just more work for us. And it's weird to just stop.

OK, so the video was shot on Wednesday, the day after the election took off online the next morning, that's when Lawrence heard that lots of his fellow Americans thought that he was rigging the election.

Again, here's Johnny Kauffman.

Someone sent it to him on Instagram and he looked at it and he's like, oh, this is going to be a problem. In the comments, people were saying, like, he should be identified and arrested, that he was mentally ill and homeless. Like nasty racist stuff organizers say is black.

Was he at work when he answers? Yeah, he's in the middle of a 22 hour shift. So then he takes a break. He goes outside to get away from the TV cameras and reporters in the room. And at that point, he sees Trump supporters protesting.

I don't know when the protest was about. Even if it's not about me, I'm standing outside and they know what I look like, you know what I'm saying? And like, if any of them have seen this. Every second that this goes by, more people are going to see this, me just being here is automatically just not the best. And how are you feeling in that moment? Scared. It was like a. I'm sure it's like, oh, because fear is a real emotion, you're like, oh, and it doesn't always like heartbeat, but it's like I am in danger.

I should probably get the hell on, said the end of the day. He just sneaks away past the protest. Yeah, he actually ran away like he said, he ran to get away from the protesters and then he hit out with some friends. He cut his beard off and dyed his hair so people wouldn't recognize him.

Oh, wow.

That wasn't too big of a deal in the end because he said he really likes his new look, but he didn't feel safe going home for three nights.

There are so many of these stories of voter fraud on the Internet right now. I talked to this woman who founded a company that tracks disinformation on the Internet, the Aletha, a group. The woman's name is Lisa Kaplan.

And she told me that Election Day was way calmer than they expected for disinformation, a limited number of false stories, most of them about Pennsylvania. But starting the next day, things sped up and they really exploded once the president started spreading these stories in earnest.

Disinformation is continuing to grow exponentially. And the way it is now, it's much more diffuse. So it's not just on ACORN or 4chan anymore. These are narratives that are being talked about on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram.

How often are the stories true of voter fraud?

We have not found any. None of the narratives that we are tracking are backed up by facts. Lots of people now believe these stories of voter fraud. A survey by Politico in the Morning Consult found that 70 percent of Republicans think this year's election was not free and fair, and over half of Republicans think there was widespread voter fraud with mail in ballots driving through Aberdeen, Maryland, the weekend after the election as a few dozen Trump supporters gathering to do an impromptu car caravan supporting the president.

Just the day before that, news organizations had called the election for Joe Biden. When I talked to this chatty, friendly woman named Kim Meulen Unfelt and a friend and his kid, they, like most of this crowd, didn't buy it.

It was obviously the vote was stolen. And we can't let the media say who our president's going to be. We just can't. I mean, where did you hear about a free and fair election at this point? Not even so much, Trump. But you could see I have a video of CNN before when they before the ribbon at the bottom catches up, can point me to a bunch of videos.

She says, prove there's fraud from her perspective. There are so many examples to choose from. Votes turning up unexplained in the middle of the night, four a.m..

No, no votes for Trump at all. Just one hundred thirty two thousand Biden votes. That's it at four p.m.. Kim cycleway misremembering those numbers.

But what she's talking about is a story that the Alethia group says is one of the most circulated bits of disinformation about this election, widely shared on right wing bulletin boards and websites. And one of the many stories that the president has retweeted, he was on Fox News. It was a tweet with side by side maps of Michigan and vote counts showing that early in the morning after Election Day, Michigan updated its election totals, added one hundred thirty eight thousand votes to the vote count.

And all the new votes, all of them went to Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which, you know, does sound very suspicious, but it's not what it seems. The person who made this happen was a Republican, the Republican official responsible for running elections and a Republican county in Michigan.

This woman, Caroline Wilson, she Wannsee county clerk. Feel free not to answer this question because I think it's a private thing. But did you vote for the president?

I did. Both times, yes. I stand by the values that the Republican Party holds, and that's what I support.

Here's what happened with those hundred thirty eight thousand votes, according to Caroline. Morning after the election for 45, she and the elections clerk, Abby Boin, were in her office, just the two of them sending in election results to the state, using the computer that set up with all the security measures on it with Trace.

Abby reads the number to me. I typed the number, repeating the number.

But Caroline says in filling out this form online before she would actually type anything into a box, the number that was sitting there in the box is a placeholder was zero and usually should put the cursor in the box and her new number would replace the zero.

But as she was typing in Biden's number, the cursor landed in the box, but it didn't nuke the zero that was there.

I must have had the cursor to the left of the zero where I didn't even see it. So I typed in 15 three seven one.

That is fifteen thousand three hundred seventy one votes. Joe Biden's total for the county. But because the zero was there at the end of the number, it wasn't 15000 and change the number was 150000 and change.

We moved on to Donald Trump, his number. I would read the number back. I would go to the next person we had submit and we pretty much go home. It's been a long couple of days.

It does not take long for somebody from the Bureau of Elections to notice this error. Caroline and Abbi both get calls in twenty minutes. Caroline's already home. She lives seven minutes from her office. They get rid of one hundred fifty three thousand. The Caroline typed in, replace it with fifteen thousand three hundred. The difference between those two numbers is the mysterious one hundred thirty eight thousand votes, which is pretty interesting. Didn't actually appear for Biden in the vote count.

They disappeared for Biden to make it look like they mysteriously appeared.

Our best guess is somebody must have intentionally switched the before and after pictures of the map with the vote totals, but it was corrected very quickly.

So we just moved on. And lo and behold, our phone is blowing up and emails are blowing up.

And even my family, they didn't know it was me, but they were joking about all these votes in Charlotte County. Yeah, I might know a thing or two about that, but it was clearly a typo. We don't even have that many people in our county. So after I talked to Caroline, I found that woman that I met at the rally, Kim, who'd been so convinced that 130 some thousand votes had appeared in the middle of the night for Biden.

I'm going to tell you, I was curious to find out if she would believe Caroline's story and paper clips from my recording of Caroline explaining point by point how it happened. And then they fixed it and made it the right numbers.

Right. But this has happened all over the country. And the video I sent you yesterday, you can see all the ways that this Dominion software as well as others can be.

What happens is and that Dominion is another one of the stories tweeted by the president and circulating on the Internet. It's one of a bunch of stories about rigged software giving votes to Joe Biden. It has been disproven.

Google Dominion, if you're curious, but you understand in this case, like it's not, you know, Dominion software or the other software is it's just her typing in the nuts. It's just her typing in the number.

Wrong, right? Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's plausible. But she said she must have so she doesn't know for sure for one. But if it was just an isolated case that would be one thing, but it's just too much. And maybe she really didn't make an error. Maybe it just changed it. And they caused the change like they it the 6000 in another state, in another county. So you don't really know what's happening. And it just and just want to be sure.

I just want to be sure. I'm clear, Kim, you're saying that she she thinks that she did it as a typographical error.

But you think maybe this I think when they send off the results, then that's when the percentages are changed. Mm hmm.

But but you're saying, like, it might not even be true that that she made a typographical error, right?

You could not write. It could not. I mean, there's just so many anomalies and. There's no way that. There's no way that Joe Biden got more votes than Donald Trump, no way possible. Kim said a few times that Caroline seems like a credible and honest person, but it's the sheer volume of other examples that's convincing to her that there really could be foul play. And even if this one example in this one, Michigan County, was caught, it doesn't change anything for her because she feels like she's seen so many other examples.

I asked Caroline Wilson, the Shiozaki county clerk, what she thinks of all the Republicans who don't believe the truth of what happened in her county.

Shame on them. Shame on them that they that that attitude jeopardizes everything that we are supposed to stand for. I take an oath. To uphold the Constitution of the United States, the state and my county and my job responsibilities are not partisan. Fact is, there's no convincing people, usually something I read this year that really shaped how I've seen this whole election is Ezra Klein book Why were Polarized. He has this big section where he runs through all these studies that demonstrate how and what kind of facts that don't fit into our worldview that contradict what we believe.

The normal thing, the thing that we all do most of the time is that we disregard those facts or explain them away today on our program and this moment when the president is not backing down from his unproven claim that the election was stolen from him. This moment when I know that when I called the president's tweets disinformation, there are a lot of you out there like him who think that I am part of the problem and not looking at the truth.

We thought it might be nice to hear a few of the rare examples of people actually changing their minds. It doesn't happen often, God knows. But let's enjoy a few cases where it does look at why it does and those special cases from WBC. Chicago, this is American Life. I'm IRA Glass. Stay with us.

One of the signs, they are a changin, so Casey Johnson's grandpa recently surprised everybody in his life by changing his mind about something.

A month ago, I woke up to my cell phone pinging with text alerts. My family group chat was blowing up over a picture. A huge Biden Harris sign staked immigrant Busfield, his 91 and a lifelong Republican. And until this sign, no one in my family knew he'd switched allegiances.

It was shocking. A man doesn't change his mind about anything, but this year he'd sent in his mail in ballot for Biden and for the first time in his life, he'd also voted a straight Democratic ticket.

What had made him change his mind after so long?

So I think we need to wrap up just a couple more minutes.

That's my mom. I sent over my list of questions to him to look at before we talked because he's hard of hearing.

She wrote out all the answers. And I think he's like Dr. Recopying Right now, I'm not ready.

My grandpa is named Lewis Rosemann. He's pretty blustery and known for his quick temper. He lives by himself on his five hundred acre corn and soybean farm in Harlan, Iowa. It's the same farm and grew up on the area's conservative and rural high grandfather.

Hi there. How are you doing? Not to that. I can't work under pressure.

So I heard that you had cut down all the overgrown grass, all the weeds, just so that everyone could see the sign better from the highway, which seems like a little risky due to your neighbors on either side. Do they have signs?

Big signs? I probably got a neighbor on each side. I mean, that would tear down, but I closed the gate up so they can't get in to do it. He's really proud of this sign.

He got it by calling up the leaders of the Democratic Party in his county. Turned out one of them is a distant relative.

I told him they could not find a better display for their sign anywhere. And down here on this highway, it's a busy highway. Remember, you you asked them to bring you the biggest sign. Yeah, I wanted a big one. And they only had a single one. I wanted the second one so they could put it back to back, you know, so you could see it both ways on Highway Highway.

Forty four is a busy two lane route that runs between Portsmouth and Harlen in western Iowa. There had been another Biden Harris sign in town, but a 92 year old man defaced it. He spray painted it with the big red X and then the sign disappeared.

My Grandpa Lewis, his neighbors are mostly farmers who voted for President Trump in 2016, his trade war with China into their profits. But then he bailed them out with subsidies.

He's still popular with farmers back in twenty sixteen. My grandfather voted for him, too, because everybody wanted a change and I just fell into place with them.

I wanted something different. What was it that you wanted to change?

I don't know, I have always voted Republican for the president that probably the biggest reason I didn't know any better, my grandpa was a Republican by upbringing.

His parents were Republican. Like most people, he absorbed his political beliefs by osmosis. Everyone belongs to the same Catholic Church in town, St. Michael's. It's right next door. That other sign was defaced. Church was the only place my grandpa used to talk with his neighbors before the pandemic hit. Now his social life is a lot quieter. The farms are spread so far apart that he doesn't really run into people. The only other person he sees is a friend named Paul, who rents land for my grandpa.

He's a Trump supporter. Has Paul said anything about your sign?

No. He knows it's down here, but Paul naturally would not say anything because I think I can terminate his lease next year.

But do you guys talk about politics? We don't talk about politics. We talk about engines that don't start and stuff like that.

But how how did you find out that Paul was going to vote for Trump? He just mentioned it. He's working on a long war at the time, leaning over it. And he just said something about sleepy Joe. He wouldn't go to sleep the Joe.

He wanted to say something back, but told me he didn't think it was worth ruining his relationship with Paul over Trump. There's a stereotypical thing that happens in the Midwest, an aversion to direct conflict. People are so completely loud and aggressive with their signs.

For example, down the road from my grandpa's house, there's a huge Trump fuck your feeling sign posted in a neighbor's yard, but to each other's faces, everyone keeps it polite.

They let their signs do the talking. I have a theory about why he is going through this very late in life political awakening, he's been able to vote in 18 presidential elections, but this is the first time he's actually been engaged.

Part of it is that as he's gotten older, he hasn't been able to do as much around the farm. He still rides around on his four wheeler and fixes fences, but he's also started spending more time in front of the TV. He watches The View in the morning and Stephen Colbert at night. He also just finished reading a couple books on the Trump's. Two of my grampa's daughters, my mom and my Aunt Margaret, have probably influenced him the most, they're at his house a lot, checking on him, playing cards and dropping off meals.

Over the years, their politics have changed. They went from voting for both Bushes to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And this year, Biden.

How long did it take you to figure out that Trump was not that change that you wanted?

Well, this virus has really convinced me because he totally disregarded it and still does. He acts as if it don't exist. All these people are dying and he still thinks it's all you have to do is just ignore it. And then he said it would be over with by Easter, be over with. But July is always a bunch of damn lies and scares the hell out of me.

I ain't ready to die.

And then the deal, the way they were handling those children down at the border, hurting them around like a prisoner of war Camp 500, some of them are separated from their parents and some of them are six months old. It sounds like thinking about those kids without their parents has really stuck with you. Well, why wouldn't it? With anybody, anybody with feeling. Trump has no feeling. Absolutely none. That's why I like Joe Biden, because he has a soft voice and he doesn't tell lies.

I wanted someone who cares for someone or something besides himself.

Would you have thought I was crazy if in 2016 I told you, hey, you would vote for a Democrat in 2020, straight down the ticket if you were to tell me what was going on now back then, I wouldn't believe it could happen.

Has been so vocal about supporting Biden for any of your relationships with family, because I know that not everyone in our family is Democratic.

Oh, Captain Kirk in town. Kathy's my aunt and Kirks, her husband, the Republican.

She was bringing my groceries out here so that I didn't have to get out next month myself. And somewhere along the line, I asked her point blank, I said, are you wearing a mask? And she said, no, they're no good. They don't do you any good. You get sick wearing them anyway. And I said, well, I will get my groceries myself after this. She said, we can still bring the groceries out of the refrigerator.

And I said, you won't come on the place without on the farm without a mask. And she hung up. And I haven't heard from her since.

My grandpa was ecstatic when he heard the news that Biden won. Some of his neighbors have already taken down their Trump signs, but he has no plans to take his Biden Harry down anytime soon. He wants to make sure all of his neighbors know he was on the winning side. He can see it from his living room window and he checks on it often to make sure nobody has vandalized it or stolen it. He told me is going to decorate it with flowers and horseshoes and then keep it up blaring there in his field until a new crop goes in next spring with He Johnson.

She's a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle at Puppy Love Triangle.

So next, we have a story about somebody very young trying to make up her mind about something about as far from politics as we could think of a crush on a boy. The way she went about it, though, surprised her mom lot. The story actually starts back in. School, was in session last year, previous in-person school. Remember that? The little girl was in the second grade. Her mom, Emily Flake, explains to understand why it was so surprising for me to find my seven year old in a state of romantic equivocation.

I have to explain a bit of her relationship history. First, Augustine, we call her Tugg for short, fell in love for the first time at the age of four, she fell hard for a boy her age.

I'll call R to protect his identity. R was absurdly tall for his age. He had long flaxen hair and looked like a tiny Norse. God used to chase him around the basement of the church where we had a playgroup announcing our You're going to marry me are right now. Now, my husband and I were never the type to use words like boyfriend and girlfriend about little kids. The framing of children's friendships as romantic that I remember from when I was a child in the 80s feels creepy now, but we try to respect that.

Those feelings are very real to her.

Tugg was all our all the time, all through pre-K and kindergarten. Her pre-K teacher remarked often that she had to remind them to play with other kids instead of remaining in their tight little two person club. But then in first grade, completely out of the blue, her ardor shifted. All of a sudden, she was talking about some new boy. This boy, who we'll call B left, cattycorner from us. He was a sweet faced first grader who looked a bit like a Cabbage Patch doll.

I was shocked by this fickle change of heart. So I asked her what happened. She said evenly, I am no longer interested in ah. I'd given Tuck a journal to write her feelings in and B showed up in there. In fact, she produced several reams of bee content. She wrote a poem about him that included lines like I love your hair as brown as a bear. She stayed full steam ahead on the B train until this past Valentine's Day when something happens that surprised and confused us both.

For the first time in her life, my daughter didn't know where her heart wanted to go. The chaos factor was this, this year, a boy liked her first. This boy who will call L made his feelings toward Tognum with a note, we talked about it sitting on the floor in her room one afternoon.

So it was on Valentine's Day. And actually he left a note at my table, but it was made out of the Post-it. So the first time I thought it was just garbage, then I would then I opened it and it was a plus L and. And I think with the heart and then like I was like, does that mean that you want to be like Valentine? And he's like, maybe like sure. Then he runs up to his friend and he's like she said, you should use being the persued instead of the pursuer.

Seemed to throw Tugg for a loop when she talked about it. She seemed fretful and confused and a little embarrassed.

She told me at bedtime several nights in a row that she didn't know what to do.

So before l gave you the note, what did you think of him? I mostly thought of him as like a friend that I've had since pre-K, but like, I didn't think of him like that much.

So you knew him, but you. But you didn't like think of him liking you before?

No, not really. OK.

When he wrote that, no, I started paying more attention to him, kind of and like started to like thought it out and more so if if l had never given you a Valentine note, do you think you would have gotten a crush on him or liked him?

Probably not, because that was like the note was like kind of made everything, like just happen.

She hid her face in the blankets a lot as we talked.

She said now that he brought it up, she guess she could like him as the days went on. When I checked on her journal, I saw she gone full scorched earth on her past.

She'd gone back to the pages about B in her diary and edited them mercilessly next to I Love Me So Much.

She wrote more next to every heart she'd drawn. She wrote the word no.

It was like she was trying to edit her emotions by editing the evidence of them. I tried to explain that she didn't have to erase the past or all the things she wrote and drew to make room for this person in her emotional space. She disregarded my note and went right on striking through. Can you tell me why you felt like you wanted to do that?

I don't really know exactly why. I just did it. So did you feel like you couldn't, like, be any more because like you. I don't really know. And do you feel like you needed to like back because he liked you? Again, I still don't really know, do I have to explain how love works?

Of course, my daughter can't explain how love works, and neither can I. I wanted to talk to her more about this to make sure that her burgeoning feelings for L an abandonment of feelings for B were coming from her own will. But when I wanted to talk to her about her emotions, she kept deflecting to his I don't know how he felt, but I, I now know that he probably felt excited. Well, how did you feel? I remember I felt really happy for him because he was he he seemed like he was super excited.

Hearing her expressed this sense of romantic obligation, felt like somebody had copy pasted my entire adolescence onto my second grader, I knew that feeling very, very well. I was an unlovely and unlikable child by the time I was in sixth grade, I had completely assimilated the idea that I was not allowed to turn down affection from anyone if it ever happened to come my way. I remember being liked by a moody boy when I was 12 and going out on what passed for a double date with him and our respective best friends, we all went for ice cream at the decaying strip mall in town.

My friends and I tried to make conversation while the boy who liked me glowered and muttered under his breath, while the boy who liked my friend got chocolate ice cream all over his face. It was an awkward disaster, but it was also my first official date. The boy's affections made me feel shame and an exciting threat of degradation. But what was I going to do, turn him down?

I knew I was looking down the barrel of a lifetime of making the best of things.

As far as dating was concerned, I thought I had avoided constructing a landscape that would encourage those kinds of feelings to grow. And my daughter had I somehow already infected her with this idea that she'd better find a way to accept anyone that would have her. As Tugg sorted through her feelings, she turned once more to writing, crafting a note she planned to give to Elle at school. So can we talk about the note that you wrote him? What did it say, dear Elle?

I was thrilled when you asked me to be your Valentine. I just want to say you are kind and you are so kind and sweet and nice and you are a great person. I was going to look cute, but I bet. I couldn't tell if she was genuinely seeing L. through new eyes or if she was bending her emotions to fit the situation, but I was interested to see where she was going with this. She held on to the note for a few days, going back and forth and decided at last to seal the deal and deliver the note to him in school.

But she never got the chance. This was last March. Well, she's either the pandemic spread and by the time she's made up her mind, her school closed. Her decision was rendered moot for a few weeks. She talked about him at bedtime. But to a kid her age out of sight is out of mind. Now, her obsession lies where she conducts most of her social life roadblocks and other online platforms in a world where there are flouride albino bats.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of room for crushes. Like so many other things in our lives now. Her heart will have to live in limbo.

Emily Flake, she's a writer and cartoonist for The New Yorker. Coming up, can a macho TV talk show host on daytime TV in Argentina really, really become a feminist? That is in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

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Better help Dotcom LongTail. That's better help a dotcom TALF. This American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Today's program, personal recount. In this tense and exhausted post-election moment, we thought it would be refreshing to have stories of that very rare thing, that very hopeful thing, human beings actually changing their minds. We've arrived at Act three of our program at 3:00, the All Too Real Housewives of Argentina.

So this is a story about people changing their attitude about the world in a very significant way. And they're doing it in a setting where you really don't see that kind of thing very often. Daytime television. Jasmine Ghast grew up in Argentina and has this story about daytime TV there. We first broadcast this story a couple of years ago.

I watched a lot of television when I was a kid. My grandmother, Yaya, would pick me up at school and bring me back to her place. Her apartment was dark and humid. It smelled like French bread and the exhaust from the buses on the avenue down below.

My grandfather was never around. Yaya would make tea and then we would go to her bedroom and turn the TV on and suddenly color, sound and sex would flow into the world.

It was the early afternoon.

It was time for the talk shows in Brazil and Argentine talk shows are extreme even for Latin American television. The women are pumped up with silicone and Botox and sometimes show up wearing almost nothing. The conversation is not just double entendres, but straight up entendres full on vulgar language. When I was growing up, it was a parade of pasty stilettos feather boa. One of the most popular shows back then was hosted by a guy named Horachek Real.

He's still on TV. He's kind of the Argentine everyman, charming and a little bit of a hustler. These days, his TV show is called Intruder's or Intruder's. It takes place on a set that is just seizure inducing neon colors, walls lined with giant video screens. Horia likes to stir up fights among his voluptuous guests. Every time something shocking is said, ominous music rolls out.

Once in a while, a woman is so sexy that her real bites his lower lip and mugs for the camera. This has been real style for years.

Back in the day, Yaya would bring the tea and cookies and lie down next to me in her patent leather platform shoes, which she never took off, not even in bed. My grandmother was the target audience for real show what's commonly known as O'Daniel Rosa, a housewife. She loved to hate the show, to look disapprovingly at the women and comment how much surgery she's had when a prostitute, a prostitute, when Aloka and they give her expensive gifts, cars, vacations.

And I'd look around me at my grandmother's lonely apartment and think to myself, wow, that sounds pretty amazing.

I knew I didn't want to be adornato, so when I grew up.

When I was a teenager, I moved to the U.S. and eventually became a journalist. I've lived here for 15 years.

Sometimes when I get homesick, I streaming through songs on YouTube. I leave it on when I cook and clean when I watch it.

I'm not five thousand miles away. Yaya is alive. Nothing has changed much. Nothing ever changes on Argentine daytime TV.

Until suddenly a few months ago, it did. One night in February, I was at home in New York cleaning my kitchen, introducers was on in the background, and I heard this woman with a raspy Lauren Bacall voice.

I turned around so sponge and hand and squinted at the screen, a tattooed, heavyset woman wearing sneakers. I recognize this woman, comedian named Senhorita Bimbo. The stage name Bimbo is ironic. She's anything but. In fact, the very next thing she did was look directly into the camera and offer a statistic about illegal abortion.

But also looking in the mirror of what I knew in the Army, 500000 women in Argentina have illegal abortions every year.

She said she was wearing a bright green handkerchief around her neck, a provocative symbol. Everyone in Argentina knows a symbol of the fight to legalize abortion.

For years, activists have been pushing to get Congress to vote on it.

When I was growing up. Abortion was something you just didn't talk about in Argentina, a Catholic, a country. It's still not something that comes up on daytime TV, reproductive rights. That's just not true material, though. Here was Hakkari, the host, looking intently at the nearly double. A few hours later, one of my best friends texted me, did you watching Roussos today? I sat down at my laptop and started scrolling through the descriptions of the last few episodes.

The guests were names I knew academics, writers, comedians. What they had in common was they were all feminist's people who have been on the fringes for years criticizing sexism in Argentina and demanding women's rights. I started binge watching in each episode.

There was a nuanced conversation about feminism, really looked kind of meek, but not in his usual.

I've been overpowered by sexy ladies where he kept delivering these really impassioned monologues saying, I don't want to be a misogynist. I'm a cheetah, I'm a recovering machine, my ego.

Too much on it. How you got to think the Argentine everyman now appear to be an earnest feminist.

This was not the real I grew up with. This is not the TV I grew up with. What happened? Could this possibly be sincere? I flew to Argentina to find out.

As soon as I got there, I went to the studios in through sources taped, I met Unallowed Ogiwara, one of the show's executive producers.

We are in a clinical being. Live involves a lot of adrenaline. I really, really love the adrenaline.

I thought about it to be honest. I wasn't expecting an introducers executive producer to be a woman, especially not one like unallowed a self-proclaimed feminist who had a really hard time wrapping my head around the fact that for 18 years she had been behind this totally trashy and objectifying show. And Allora told me it's just the job when she's good at it's intensely competitive.

I thought I would know once she got in the control room, her face shines from the light of the monitor. She's hunched over like in a casino. A monitor that minute by minute tracks the ratings for intrusions and every other show that's on the air.

At the same time, I had no idea this was possible. Right now, unintrusive, there's a fight between a former cabaret dancer and a potential candidate for president.

I that the ratings are going up with this segment. It's like they went from four point eighty four point six. Know this is doing better than the news next segment.

A fashion model from the 80s says she has her suspicions about a designer's recent trip to three point four.

The ratings plummet.

Nobody cares unallowed to order them to end the segment.

Early interest lags for an instant and intruder's moves on.

The story of how the feminists intruded into Roussos is its own soap opera. There are a gazillion gossip shows in Argentina. It's like this whole universe.

Back in January, one of the shows interviewed this famous singer, a lottery guy in a tropical shirt. In the middle of the interview, the singer casually repeats this awful thing I used to hear as a kid.

If someone wants to rape you, relax and enjoy it.

She loves it as soon as you know it thoroughly.

I that day was the first time I heard that was when I was nine years old. I was in the locker room and a girl blurted it out. I thought it was advice a lot of my friends did to.

So the singer says this offensive thing a few days later on another talk show, a soap opera star blows up about it. Her name is Araceli Gonzalez. When I was a kid, her soap opera was huge. She played a mute. A hunk with feathered hair would talk out her while she listened tearfully. But now she wasn't mute.

She said the singers remark made her sick legally to be relevant again. Give it a chance. It was kind of beautiful seeing her get angry after so many years of playing a character literally defined by silence and a louder from Roussos saw the fight happening on TV and she wanted to get a piece of it.

She booked Araceli to come on the show and I said, Oh yeah, it was a typical day on Rosie's got her real talked about how much granny panties used to turn him on as a kid to former Showgirls argued.

And then it was aerosolize turn. And just because Araceli had gotten mad about the rape comment, one of the panelists introduces her as a feminist.

As soon as Araceli got a chance to correct it and it could take it, get so feminist and so feminist that she says, I heard you refer to me as a feminist just now and I am not a feminist. She's vehemently wagging her finger as she says this thing.

Oneko, I don't know most of the memory of braciole, so, you know, I think I know so I have a wonderful husband and a lovely son whom I love very much, and I respect men.

This set off another firestorm.

Here's Enilda, a one López-Istúriz silly woman.

So people started tweeting about it and we saw that feminists started to respond and be on that.

So everything exploded, explode.

All Daymo there were the kinds of tweets you would expect, like, quote, What the fuck does loving your husband and son have to do with being a feminist, you moron?

And here it was, feminists versus the soap opera star, a fight made for daytime television and unallowed. I knew it. And she also knew Horbury and the host of the show.

Something had been changing with him lately, like he'd been saying to anyone who would listen, get on my teeth and recuperation.

I am my sister in recovery. I'm trying to find myself. So she approached him in the dressing room and they started talking. Maybe we should have a feminist on the show to explain what feminism is.

When the circuit attack Lenegan Marine, we hadn't discussed that beforehand. But this day on the dressing room, I think that he was really into it. They decided on a well-known feminist academic, Flora Radio, and even she'll tell you she's a safe bet for a show like Intruder's, she's thin and blonde.

So Fleur gets invited to introduce in. The very first question, Real asks her is, what is feminism? Meaning my feminism going on? I had no idea.

And I didn't prepare anything. I didn't prepare a speech. I didn't have time. So I went open to listen to the questions and explain things just as I do to my students in a class one legal and class set.

Of all the strange things I've seen on Argentine TV, this might be one of the oddest against any of his background. Flora Freeholders of Feminism 101. At the bottom of the screen, a banner in bold letters reads Feminism. It's a movement for women's rights.

Fleur's starts explaining Feminism is a movement for women's rights.

It started in the 19th century.

It has to do with the division of labor, child rearing, really listening, completely mesmerized, his little eyebrows, furrowed, scratching his beard.

And while all this is happening, unallowed is sitting in the control room upstairs watching everything, of course, and also keeping her eye on the ratings monitor.

The control room is usually a chaotic mass of yelling, but now people are speaking.

I sort of became a little more. And when we were watching her talking floor, the control room went quiet. We were all paying attention to what? To what she was saying. But we were all quiet and we weren't really like silently watching and learning from her.

And then the spell is broken because the phone rings in the control room. It's Araceli, the soap opera star, who's the whole reason Flodders here. She wants to talk to Florida live right now. Everyone in the control room is geared up for a good old fashioned Envirosell.

Spatt all over central Florida was kind of shocked.

Yeah, I didn't know that Araceli was going to call. I had no idea of what was going to happen more.

But it wasn't an ambush. Araceli wasn't calling to fight. Instead, she tells Flora, I've been listening really well to what you're saying. And she wanted the audience to know that she didn't know what feminism was until just now when she was watching TV and South Florida. Explain it first.

So she starts telling the story of her life through various generations of women, her own single mother and herself. She talks about how she had been sexually abused as a child and emotionally abused as an adult. And Araceli told flawed. I know what you're talking about and I agree with you. If this means being a feminist, then I'm a feminist.

She is a feminist that insulted fatally flawed naans and gives a thumbs up.

By the way, this is never how intrusive finishes. People don't just listen to each other and change their minds. And the ratings and lotuses, the ratings were great strong enough that she decided, let's do this again tomorrow. And so it began. Over the next few days, some of the most famous feminists in Argentina came on to introduce us comedians, authors, professors, audiences were stunned.

Someone tweeted, My ideology is starting to converge with horror. And that terrifies me. It was pretty strange for everyone.

This very misogynistic show had suddenly become like the public town hall on feminism in Argentina.

And the ratings were not just good and I lotuses, they were higher than normal. She was delighted that she could keep this going. Loosen up again, because there's a journalist, Luciana Berger.

She's also very important in feminism and she's an old friend from college.

And she came to our show. And when we met backstage, we were like not even in our wildest dreams we could have dreamt about this.

You being here in this type of show always come up with any cinematic midway through. All of this is when I tuned in when I started streaming in New York, the show was like going through hundreds of years of feminism. In a couple of days, they passed through topics like LGBT rights, workplace harassment, income inequality, and then the most taboo thing of all, abortions. Carbajal tied the green handkerchief around his wrist, the one activists who want to legalize abortion where.

And then he invited the large woman with the gravelly voice who I saw at home in New York City.

Finally, right off the bat, she said, the fact that there's a fat girl on Argentine TV is already a victory.

And I guess when I was in the business, not Victoria, she told me she was actually pretty nervous.

What do you mean by this is the first thing I thought was what they're all going to say is like, what is this girl doing here, this fat girl, feminazi? But she powered through. She had a mission. It's how I knew I wanted to talk about abortion.

My plan was to at least mention it. And I just sat down and started talking.

I felt like I was going to battle where he had to use words as arrows, because abortion is something that you don't see is something that you talk about in hushed tones.

If you want to silence, you move back toward that the same unintrusive that people talked about how abortion is so taboo. You don't even talk about it in fiction. An Argentine TV and film, unwanted pregnancy, assault by a bill and pushing you down the stairs and causing you to miscarry within an hour. The next thing you know what the new fiction is. And then about 30 seconds before they cut to commercial and move to the next guest, Senorita Bimbo said something about abortion that surprised even her.

It misoprostol, misoprostol.

She says, I want girls to know about misoprostol. This is a really big deal. Officially, misoprostol is a drug used to treat stomach ulcers, but it can also be used to induce labor. So in a continent where abortion is mostly banned, women take it if they want to miscarry. People call it the DIY abortion. She's talking about doing something illegal on one of the most popular daytime talk shows watched by Housewives that same day, misoprostol was one of the most Googled words in the country.

I think you're underestimating your audience, Sonya said on the show The Night Rosa is dead. And Rosa, that's stereotypical Argentine housewife.

You can see the masses of the woman that is in front of the TV who needs her world to be explain to her through daytime TV. She just doesn't exist anymore.

Of course, none of this would have happened on any Roussos if the ratings had been bad and the ratings were great for reasons that Hakkari Island and allow that can claim no credit for it all.

Feminism has been gaining critical mass in Argentina for the last couple of years.

The movement was triggered by these brutal murders of young women, often by boyfriends, husbands and fathers, women started protesting. A whole crusade was born. It was called Nuna Menos, not one less woman until 2015. This has grown to the point where it's impossible to ignore and has expanded to abortion rights, street harassment and equal pay. Its young people on social media, comedians on YouTube, pop stars on Instagram, gigantic demonstrations. It just wasn't a topic for daytime talk shows until Hawkei.

And louder and intrusive. During that week on interest, there was this explosion of tweets from young girls, perplexed but ecstatic to see feminism on daytime TV. This one girl oneto Gumpel tweeted, I showed my dad the Russos episode with Senhorita Bimbo. I dropped by her house and she told me these feminists were explaining to her real all the things she tried to explain but couldn't get her parents to understand. So one night she approached her dad.

I forget hear it was in office was the Karmichael channel programmer.

And she told him, if you watch this episode of Introducers on YouTube with me, I'll massage your feet. She ended up getting the whole family to watch. She showed them senhorita bimbo. She pointed to her real wearing the same green handkerchief she wears and said, Look, it's just like mine.

What are they going to do?

And also address it opened up a conversation which she says they've been having ever since. Anita's mom says she saw her real talk about how he's a recovering chauvinist and she says so as she see.

Incidentally, I don't think that what you see makes it so.

I'm not like 70 percent feminism, she says. I still have 30 percent left to go.

During my week in Argentina, I kept trying to talk to her, her real, and he kept blowing me off. How do you really convert it to feminism? Everyone I asked rolled their eyes and pointed to the last few decades of his career. They pointed to his recent vicious public fight with one of his daughters. They pointed to how late he is to the whole feminism thing. He's a Johnny come lately.

He's only doing this because it will make him more popular. After days of giving me the runaround, he told me to just send my questions. And finally, on my very last night in Argentina, my phone lit up. It was voice memos from real.

OK, real can we possibly trade up what happened to me, Real says what made me bring all these feminists onto introducing the book when I see you, you're trying to channel us more into this understanding that he talks about his 18 year old daughter, Rosie, and how she's a feminist.

We have these very interesting talks over dinner, he says, and she started opening this world up to me. I am 56 years old. I was raised in a completely sexist culture. I didn't get it. And that's why I say I'm a recovering chauvinist. Thanks to my daughter, my daughter made me change all the money. Matters to me is real.

Knows that I think in truth is stupid. He knows most people do.

That's the show's superpower so spectacularly threatening me in the free world or frivolous or frivolous.

With a show about show biz, no one suspected that this is where feminism could win. We eluded the firewalls that kept feminism off of TV. There was this wall. You couldn't talk about these things on TV and suddenly it happened on intruder's. But to be honest, he said, it's all because of feminists. They knew any place is good.

If you have a strong message, a bit of free, absolute I mean, immediately after the week of feminism, intruder's was left with a split personality.

These days, it's a mix of fighting starlets and women's rights activists. Real social media is a mix of World Cup woes, celebrity gossip. And then these really earnest feminist tweets like this one a few weeks ago, they came to make things better for the coming generations, for our daughters and their daughters and also for men.

The men who come after us must be better than us. We did everything wrong. The day after he tweeted that on June 14th, Argentina's lower house of Congress approved a bill to legalize abortion after an all night debate, it barely passed by only four votes, and it yet has to pass the upper house still outside Congress. Thousands of women and activists who gathered to wait for the results celebrated wildly. Every time I spoke to those women about what role television like in Roussos played in all this.

They got uncomfortable. On my last day in Argentina, I grabbed a coffee with an old friend from high school, Jordanna Timberman. She recently wrote an op ed for The New York Times about the push to legalize abortion in Argentina.

And we talked about the role pop culture played in that you need to have people like reality or pop culture, Dona Rosa, understanding that this is a necessary right, because if not, it's not going to happen.

In other words, the message needs to go into homes in the most remote locations of the country. And TV is one of the only ways to do that. Giordano was saying introducers helped. But when I ask her about whether we should then call her real, she just laughs.

I'm going on record with my crazy. I have a name.

I know what she means. After so many years of awful television and this guy's shenanigans, I just don't want to tip my hat to him. And maybe that's part of his penance. He did something good and no one will ever thank him for it. Jasmine Ghast, she's a senior reporter at Marketplace. The story was co-produced with Marianne McCune as part of a collaboration with the NPR podcast Rough Translation, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts.

So we first put the story out in 2018 and the changes in Hauge Real, they didn't exactly stick. We also went back to its original content in the years since, and he recently said he is not a feminist and that, quote, It was all a mistake having this feminists on the show. He does still describe himself as a recovering misogynist. However, as far as the country of Argentina, abortion is still very restricted there. The Senate ended up rejecting the bill mentioned in the story to.

Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame for.

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Troy gave him some proposed language. Here's like, OK, listen, this is what you should say to Joe Biden. Just put it exactly like this.

I just want to say you are kind and you are so kind and sweet and nice and you are a great person.

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