Birthright Israel & The IDF

June Sternbach (0:00)

Through the course of this show, we've profiled plenty of individual super odd natalist figures and groups. Often, their goal is to spread their belief that natalism is the most pressing policy issue of our time, and want the entirety of society to reorient government policy and culture towards those concerns. Today, we're going to be digging into the one country where natalist policy and culture has actually become a main priority, the state of Israel. My name is June Sternbach.

Josh Boerman (0:27)

My name is Josh Boerman.

June Sternbach (0:28)

This is Ill Conceived, a podcast about natalism.

It's that time of the year, everyone's, the leaves are falling, the season's changing, we're all changing. We're becoming older, wiser, soup is being had.

Josh Boerman (0:50)

As I watch the leaves fall, I think of my own autumn, which I now find myself in. I am now in the autumn of my life.

June Sternbach (1:00)

The mortality of this life of this world.

Josh Boerman (1:03)

Are you doing any fun autumnal activities? I just went up for a hike a couple of days ago. That was fun.

June Sternbach (1:09)

I love a fall hike. Honestly, it's sort of the best time of the year to do that because you're not in the beating sun, you're not sweating, you get to be kind of cozy with it. Hikes tend to be pretty dry at this point too, so you don't have to worry about mud.

Josh Boerman (1:24)

That was not the case on the hike that I just went on. It's been raining up here quite a bit the past few days. I went on a hike up in Northern New Jersey, like very close actually to the New York state line, and it was like a small mountain actually. It was a lot of clambering up rocks and shit like that. A fair bit of the trail was actually flooded, which overall this is a much more difficult hike than I had been expecting, but it was also very, very rewarding.

June Sternbach (1:55)

Yeah, that sounds amazing. Back when I was in college, I was a biology major. I took some ecology classes where one of them, we would go to different ecosystems for several weekends and just spend the weekend as a class with my professor at like usually cabins. But one of the longer trips that we did was up to in Wisconsin, Northern Wisconsin, right on Lake Superior. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Northern, we were, I believe, somewhere near or in the Northern Highland State Forest. And it was just so beautiful. It was so gorgeous. There was nothing. And that was like around this time of year too.

So it was like nice and crispy and cold and a cabin in this really beautiful, dense forest. And we saw all sorts of beautiful ecosystems. We saw like bogs, we saw like dry pine forests, red dry pine forests, just so, so beautiful. And I've been hoping to do something like that again. It's been like five years since I've done a trip like that up up northern Wisconsin. If you have never traveled to like the northern northern areas of Wisconsin, it is like magical. It is so beautiful.

Josh Boerman (3:01)

The UP of Michigan is the same way. It's just it's so cool up there.

June Sternbach (3:05)

Yeah, there's nothing quite like it. Highly recommend if you want like a nice naturey, especially this time of year, trip, northern midwest, just so beautiful.

Josh Boerman (3:15)

Absolutely. Well, as we go into the autumnal season, before we dig into the world famous mailbag, I did want to follow up on something from our last main episode about Reform UK.

Did you see that they have been caught up in yet another hidden camera scandal?

June Sternbach (3:32)

No, I didn't.

Josh Boerman (3:33)

That's incredible.

June Sternbach (3:34)

Tell me about it.

Josh Boerman (3:35)

Well, I don't know how many undercover investigators have been in Reform UK at this point. But they got a whole bunch of people on tape saying racist shit about it. I mean, I'm sure it'll come as a shock, just an absolute shock to you that there are a whole bunch of racist people in the Reform Party.

June Sternbach (3:53)

Yeah, like the return everyone, no more immigrants party, racism party. Yeah, no, it's very expected.

Josh Boerman (4:00)

So as per usual, they're trying to do like the, oh, it's just a few bad apples and we've suspended it. It's like, nah, man, this shit's rotten from the head.

But as with everything, and we've said this before, and I think we'll say it again, decorum and like the appearance of impropriety, none of that fucking matters. What matters is power, the conservation of power and how the law is applied. And up until these people are hit with actual legal consequences for their actions, nothing is going to fundamentally change.