When Pretendian investigations go wrong AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Code Switch

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Episode: When Pretendian investigations go wrong

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:27:53

Episode Shownotes

There are wild stories about the fraudsters who pretend to be Indigenous, but sometimes casting doubt on people's indigeneity can cause more harm than good. On this episode we hear from the person behind the "Alleged Pretendians List" and someone whose name appeared on that controversial list. The problem? He's

legitimately Native.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Summary

In this episode of 'Code Switch,' NPR journalists discuss the complexities surrounding individuals falsely claiming Indigenous identity, known as 'Pretendians.' Hosts Robert Jago and Angel Ellis emphasize the potential harms of misidentifying individuals and the emotional fallout in Indigenous communities. Jacqueline Keeler, an activist who created the 'Alleged Pretendians List,' reflects on her investigations into such claims, revealing impacts on legitimate Native identities and the responsibility of the media and tribal authorities to handle these matters with care. The discourse stresses the importance of authenticity and the ethical implications of scrutiny within racial identity discussions in America.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (When Pretendian investigations go wrong) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_05
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Target them by job title, industry, company, and more by launching your next campaign with a free $100 ad credit at LinkedIn.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply.

00:00:18 Speaker_06
You're listening to Code Switch. I'm B.A. Parker. This week, we're bringing you an episode from a podcast called Pretendians, co-hosted by Robert Jago and Angel Ellis.

00:00:32 Speaker_06
Their series looks at indigenous fraud and how it often undermines tribal sovereignty. But there's no single foolproof method of determining whether or not someone is indigenous. You've explored this on Code Switch before.

00:00:47 Speaker_06
On this episode of Pretendians, we hear about different approaches to exposing people as pretendians and how sometimes those investigations cause more harm than good. Here's Angel and Robert.

00:01:03 Speaker_09
Angel, what's the worst thing that could happen with this series?

00:01:08 Speaker_02
The worst thing that could happen is that our information is bad and the person is actually a native.

00:01:13 Speaker_09
Could you imagine?

00:01:14 Speaker_02
I would just be like crawling under a rock and dying is what I would do.

00:01:18 Speaker_09
Worst case scenario is that we get it wrong and then we look like goddamn clowns to hundreds of thousands of people. And also like we've really screwed someone over.

00:01:26 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's the kind of thing that will haunt you forever.

00:01:28 Speaker_09
A mistake like that is our worst nightmare, but it's also someone's reality. Today's episode is about a pretending hunter who may have gone too far. It's about what happens when pretending investigations go wrong.

00:01:43 Speaker_12
They want to calculate their total takings and hang them on the neck of people who are falsely claiming.

00:01:49 Speaker_10
I just find it has just a very rotten heart of hate.

00:01:54 Speaker_08
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00:02:27 Speaker_05
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00:02:34 Speaker_05
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00:02:45 Speaker_08
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00:03:13 Speaker_08
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00:03:24 Speaker_06
Just a heads up, Canada Land opened their episode with a song that was AI generated.

00:03:41 Speaker_03
Gotta find them Indians who ain't who they say With my trusty keyboard under the hot summer sun Gonna chase them imposters until the job is done

00:04:04 Speaker_09
From CanadaLand Podcasts, this is Pretendians, a show where we investigate the impact that fakes, frauds, and phonies have on real Native people. My name is Robert Jago. I'm a freelance writer from the Kwantlen First Nation and Nooksack Indian Tribe.

00:04:15 Speaker_02
And I'm Angel Ellis, a citizen of the Muskogee Creek Nation located in Oltmulgee, Oklahoma. I've been a writer, editor, journalist for about 15 years.

00:04:28 Speaker_09
Angel, I'd like you to meet Jacqueline Keeler.

00:04:31 Speaker_12
My name is Jacqueline Keeler. I am a citizen of the Navajo Nation. My father is Yankton Sioux from South Dakota. I'm a journalist and author, and I have been doing research into allegations of ethnic fraud, commonly called pretendionism.

00:04:48 Speaker_09
Non-native listeners may not be familiar with Jacqueline Keillor, but they're likely familiar with her work.

00:04:53 Speaker_07
Jacqueline Keillor is a Navajo and co-founder of the group Eradicating Offensive Native Masketry.

00:04:59 Speaker_00
They claim the buck-toothed red face image is offensive to Native American culture.

00:05:04 Speaker_03
I love Wahoo! Fuck you! It's a caricature! Get over here! Get away! Yeah! Woo!

00:05:13 Speaker_09
Jacqueline and her team succeeded in getting most of those awful mascots away from major sports, like the Chief Wahoo mascot of the Cleveland Indians, now known as the Cleveland Guardians, as a result of her campaign.

00:05:23 Speaker_11
They promote stereotypes, outdated stereotypes about Native people, and they pigeonhole us so that real Native people aren't seen for who we are, and nobody knows anything about us.

00:05:32 Speaker_02
And she also got the Washington rs to ditch that name. Now they're the Washington Commanders. Can we beep rs? That's like such a, like just go beep.

00:05:43 Speaker_09
Okay. So that's one of her projects. Another has been leading the charge to identify and expose pretendians. She's been quite effective at that too. CBC News gets the credit for exposing Buffy St. Marie and how she misrepresented her Indigenous identity.

00:05:58 Speaker_09
But it was actually Jacqueline Keeler who first discovered and researched this.

00:06:02 Speaker_12
Yeah, I'm the one who found out she wasn't who she was.

00:06:05 Speaker_09
At first, Jacqueline was a Buffy fan, like a lot of Natives. She used to have a radio show and she used a Buffy song in every episode.

00:06:11 Speaker_12
I had as the sort of theme song to my show, a song, I carry it on by Buffy St. Marie, you know, and every morning I have a show I'd like it all worked up listening to it like it all like jazz and stuff and get myself going.

00:06:28 Speaker_12
Someone in the comments basically said, Oh, did you know that she's a fraud?

00:06:33 Speaker_12
I was suddenly having this sinking feeling when I realized that she never was able to really identify her family or any proof at all that she had come from Saskatchewan or even Canada. And I was like, oh my God, this seems like a pretendian.

00:06:48 Speaker_12
And the first thing that popped up was that she had been on the Massachusetts birth index, was being born in Stoneman, Massachusetts. And I was like, whoa, what does this mean?

00:06:59 Speaker_12
And so we were able to really piece together that she was born there and these were her actual relatives, her Italian father and her white pilgrim mother.

00:07:10 Speaker_12
There's an Italian-American community there that felt very rejected by her, that she was ashamed of them. There are stories printed at the time of her driving her Italian uncles away and screaming at them.

00:07:22 Speaker_12
you know, because she was ashamed that people might realize that they were her actual, she looks like them. She looks exactly like them, you know, and, you know, it was all there. It was pretty apparent that she was lying.

00:07:33 Speaker_12
And she's lied about it so much. It's just completely ridiculous to fall back on that at this point. You know, she's never told the truth about it. She was lying. That's the end of the story.

00:07:43 Speaker_09
Angel, how did you feel about the Buffy expose?

00:07:47 Speaker_02
Oh my gosh, the Buffet Exposé kind of rocked my world because like it was like generations of my family who were like hurt.

00:07:55 Speaker_02
You know how when your dad really loves that song and you have great memories of that song in the car and then it turns out that they're not actually like you.

00:08:04 Speaker_09
It was really disappointing because she was always one of those figures that for any sort of Canadian thing, they always dragged her out and propped her up. It was just disappointing because of her status in the community.

00:08:14 Speaker_02
She was on Sesame Street. And you're like a native kid, like watching Sesame Street. And it's like the first time you've ever seen that. It's like a thing. And so it kind of like makes your childhood alive in a way. It's like, what is going on here?

00:08:30 Speaker_09
Buffy is just one of Jacqueline's many subjects. What we're going to focus on today is her main effort to identify pretendants. Pretendants in universities, in the media, all over. And she made a list.

00:08:44 Speaker_12
I created a Google Doc and I put down the names I knew, which was, I don't know, maybe 25 people I knew of. And then I opened the list. Well, it was never open. It was a private list. But if someone asked to have access to it, we would let them.

00:08:58 Speaker_12
But only once they gave their real names, we were able to ascertain that they were actually Native, that they were professional in various fields. So they're talking about colleagues in their fields. And so then we opened the list up to them.

00:09:12 Speaker_12
We stopped at 200 because we needed to finish the investigation. We have since received several hundred more names.

00:09:21 Speaker_09
200 names were added to this Google Doc. All of them were people who were suspected of being pretendians. Now, as you heard, Jacqueline says this was a private list. Then how do you know about it, Robert? Because it wasn't private.

00:09:33 Speaker_09
It may have been private when it was first released. But once it was out in the world, it was everywhere. On Reddit, on Twitter, put up on people's blogs. People made copies and shared them around.

00:09:43 Speaker_09
It was very easy to find, and native social media, as you know, is a pretty tight-knit and small world. Once word of this list got around, everyone was checking to see who was on it.

00:09:54 Speaker_09
I asked Jacqueline if she filtered out any names before adding them to the list.

00:10:01 Speaker_12
We did remove some if we knew off the bat that they were legit. I mean, I don't know. We really were looking for people who were seriously questionable. We wanted to find out the truth. Mostly we just accepted what they wrote.

00:10:11 Speaker_12
I think if someone, we allowed access to the list, you submitted a bunch of claims that were spurious or obviously ridiculous, we just got rid of those. But mostly they were chosen by people who are professionals in those fields, native professionals

00:10:25 Speaker_12
who have suspected fraud in their fields. They were the ones who chose the people on the list. And some of them I put alleged because, you know, we had not confirmed these cases and we needed to do so.

00:10:35 Speaker_09
This was not a list of confirmed pretendants. This was a list of people who are deemed to be likely suspects.

00:10:42 Speaker_12
If we actually can identify that ancestor and they are from the tribe they are claiming, no matter how far back it is, we mark them as verified. We verify that.

00:10:51 Speaker_12
So the problem is very few of these claims pan out and we've only been able to verify like seven people.

00:10:57 Speaker_02
Wait, so there were people on this list of possible pretendians who she later verified as being legit.

00:11:05 Speaker_09
Yes. So, for example, one of the people targeted elsewhere by Jacqueline Keillor was Tara Houska. She's a citizen of the Couchiching First Nation.

00:11:13 Speaker_09
She's a prominent land offender, a lawyer fighting for tribal rights, and she was front and centre at Standing Rock.

00:11:19 Speaker_09
But online, Keillor cast doubts about her ancestry by investigating her mother's ancestry and determining that her connection was too distant to count. But Houska is a registered native through her father's side.

00:11:31 Speaker_09
Jaclyn admits that some of the names on the list were not actually pretendians, but she doesn't see that as a problem.

00:11:36 Speaker_09
She argues that there was actually an upside for people who were called out on the list for maybe being frauds, because it gave them an opportunity to clear their names.

00:11:45 Speaker_12
Verifying facts can actually relieve someone from accusations of fraud, but it can also show that fraud is really rampant. I mean, the initial list that we verified included 200 names and most of them in academia in some form.

00:12:00 Speaker_12
And, you know, out of that 97% of them, we could not verify their tribal claims. You know, why don't they, if they really have an issue, why don't they just present their evidence?

00:12:10 Speaker_02
So it's kind of like if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, I guess.

00:12:15 Speaker_09
Jacqueline says she and her secret group of researchers aren't out to get anybody. She says they actually prefer it when they find out someone isn't a pretendian.

00:12:24 Speaker_12
In fact, we found that CSU San Marcos professor, who was actually being 100% accurate in her description of her descent, we actually threw a little online Zoom party, our researchers, because we were just so happy to find something we could actually confirm.

00:12:38 Speaker_12
It kills us to see that people are lying. It's not something we want to find.

00:12:42 Speaker_09
She says she doesn't want to find pretendians, but when she does find them, she sees it as very important to call them out.

00:12:49 Speaker_12
You know, what we are dealing with is fraud. I'm investigating a huge fraud case. I mean, a case of fraud happening in this country, which is probably stealing billions of dollars away from Native people. And that's not an exaggeration.

00:13:02 Speaker_12
These documents have, like, how much their families own, their land, everything. We know how much they got out of this.

00:13:09 Speaker_12
And so we want to calculate their total takings and hang that on the neck of people who are falsely claiming because these people, as I've been quoted as saying before, their ancestors, their family members were on the white supremacy party bus.

00:13:22 Speaker_12
And these people are driving Native people out of their professional careers. They are impoverishing Native families because many Native families depend on people who can get a Ph.D. to help support everyone on the rez.

00:13:35 Speaker_09
She says if you add up all of the salaries of pretendians in universities that are instead going to imposters, it adds up to an astounding level of fraud.

00:13:43 Speaker_12
Investigating a massive fraud case is what journalists do. And that's what would actually make the world a better place. Honestly?

00:13:52 Speaker_02
I agree with the points she's making about natives losing opportunities. And I agree with the point she's making about investigations and what journalists do and that it's important work. That's what we're trying to do here, right?

00:14:06 Speaker_09
I mean, sure. That's the idea.

00:14:08 Speaker_02
So let me ask you this. What's her criteria? When we started making this series, we set up some rules for ourselves.

00:14:17 Speaker_09
Yeah, it's not enough just to verify that they're not Indigenous. I mean, there are lots and lots of people who are pretendians, and most of them aren't really harming anybody but themselves.

00:14:27 Speaker_09
So to make someone worth investigating, we agreed on a three-part test. Just first off, off the basics, they're not Indigenous. So that means they're not a citizen of a nation. They're not part of that nation. They're not tribally enrolled.

00:14:40 Speaker_09
They're not federally registered. or they have no ability to be any of those. Also, the tribe exists, and it's a legitimate, real tribe. That's number one.

00:14:49 Speaker_09
Number two is that they're prominent enough to have an impact on the interests of actual Native people. So they're not just you know, so-and-so at the gas station who says, oh, you're a native, I'm native too. We don't care about that.

00:15:07 Speaker_09
It's about the ones who are doing things that are changing our politics, changing the culture, who are again, like making money off of this. The key takeaway is that there is some sort of harm. The third criteria is that their community rejects them.

00:15:24 Speaker_02
The tribe they claim doesn't claim them.

00:15:26 Speaker_09
There are people on the ground from that place who say that this person, by our standards, is not one of us. That last part, I think, is really, really important.

00:15:37 Speaker_09
And it's what a lot of Pretendian stories have missed out on, is going into the community and finding out how does citizenship work here? We can't just come in from on high, from a non-Native media organization. We can't go into someone else's nation.

00:15:54 Speaker_09
and say, that person's not a real one of you. I mean, we need to go and talk to them and find out what their standards are and apply those standards. So that's our criteria. And I asked Jacqueline what hers are.

00:16:05 Speaker_12
criteria is in the definition of pretendionism that we use, which is that they are professionals in their field, they are seeking to be our spokespeople, they have monetization schemes going to monetize the claims, that sort of thing.

00:16:18 Speaker_12
So by definition, these people are consequential and these people are gatekeepers, and these people are causing harm and basically trying to salt the ground for actual Native people to participate.

00:16:29 Speaker_09
So it's a pretty similar idea there, too. But Angel, the difference with Jacqueline, I think, is in her methodology.

00:16:36 Speaker_02
Well, yeah, I mean, if you're going to publicly release a list of names and then start investigating, that's kind of ass backwards.

00:16:43 Speaker_09
Well, I mean, as you heard, Jacqueline disputes that the list was truly public. And she disputes the idea that simply being on the list hurt anyone. If anything, she says, it gives them a chance to prove who they are.

00:16:55 Speaker_09
But in a minute, you're going to hear from someone who was put on her list and who feels pretty differently about the whole thing.

00:17:06 Speaker_05
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00:17:21 Speaker_05
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00:17:34 Speaker_08
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00:17:52 Speaker_08
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00:18:11 Speaker_01
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00:18:27 Speaker_01
And thank you.

00:18:34 Speaker_09
My name is Kiros Old, I'm Pamunkey. The Pamunkey Indian Tribe is the only federally recognized tribe in the state of Virginia.

00:18:40 Speaker_10
I served on the board of directors for Native American Lifelines of Baltimore and Boston as the capacity of president, and I'm proud of that service.

00:18:49 Speaker_09
Thank you. Kiros is active online. He's the founder and moderator of Indian Country, which is the biggest Indigenous forum on Reddit. His first encounter with Jacqueline Keeler happened online.

00:19:01 Speaker_10
We disagreed with something on something on Twitter. I think it's that petty. I don't think she ever forgave me for that. After that, his name appeared on Jacqueline's list.

00:19:11 Speaker_02
So I have to ask, if he's on the list, is he a Pretendian?

00:19:14 Speaker_09
Well, we looked into his background and there's enough there to show that he almost certainly is not a Pretendian. His mother and grandmother had tribal membership. He himself has chosen not to pursue a tribal ID.

00:19:26 Speaker_09
but he is an acclaimed and very active member of the Pamunkey community. He's not relying on some distant ancestor or generalized descent. I'm embraced as Pamunkey by other Pamunkey people. Good enough for me.

00:19:36 Speaker_09
So during the pandemic, when Kairos was involved in getting Native people vaccinated, he learned that his name was on Jaclyn's list.

00:19:43 Speaker_10
I came to find that I, along with about 200 other individuals targeted, were part of the alleged pretendions list in the last days of January 2021. It was one year anniversary of the loss of our child. an unsubstantiated allegation.

00:20:07 Speaker_09
Cairo says that even though he was the individual named, his whole family was implicated and not just the living.

00:20:13 Speaker_10
We're talking about our dead, whose legitimacy is questioned by persons who have no relationship to him. And so I saw one day she was making an attack about my mother having financed her home in D.C. from fraudulent Pamunkey claims, fundraising,

00:20:30 Speaker_10
based off of false claims. And I pushed back on that publicly because my parents financed that home through a mortgage, funded through their jobs. They were teachers in D.C. public schools.

00:20:41 Speaker_09
I asked Kairos how Jaclyn Keillor's allegations impacted him.

00:20:44 Speaker_10
I mean, it hasn't impacted me negatively economically because I didn't make money off of indigeneity. It's not my bread and butter. I don't do this stuff for a living.

00:20:52 Speaker_09
But that's not to say he didn't suffer from it. After the list went around, others took it upon themselves to harass people who appeared on it.

00:20:59 Speaker_10
I've unfortunately dealt with the criminal element who she directed at my family. And I had to tighten up security measures.

00:21:07 Speaker_10
I had felt less safe, and it's gotten somewhat better insofar as I've gotten used to looking over my shoulder in this capacity.

00:21:15 Speaker_10
I've been less inclined, and I've seen other people affected by this, being less inclined to share of themselves and other communities and other families, because there are sharks.

00:21:25 Speaker_10
There are monsters in those digital waters, and she's certainly one of them.

00:21:30 Speaker_09
As disturbing as all of this has been to Kairos, he says that it's not really new. He sees Jacqueline Keillor's list as a new digital form of something that's plagued natives for generations.

00:21:40 Speaker_10
So under the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, the legislators in Virginia who were among the first families of Virginia, some of whom have documented ancestry going back to Pocahontas, wanted to carve out an exception to this act that defined in very hard ways race in Virginia, setting up a racial regime in which you could be

00:22:06 Speaker_10
White, if you had distant Indian ancestry, all of the persons were considered colored or black. And then there was this tiny Indian category that eugenists did everything they could to persecute and repress and identify as suspect and fraudulent.

00:22:29 Speaker_10
so they could keep the white race pure, so they could keep, in their language, these Negroes from passing into the white race by calling themselves Indian on documents such as birth certificates.

00:22:43 Speaker_09
It's worth noting here that Kairos is both black and native.

00:22:46 Speaker_10
The regime, the Jim Crow regime, very much wanted to know where people lived, where they worked, who they were married to, who their friends were, where they went to church. A total invasion of the lives of these people and the safety of these people.

00:22:59 Speaker_10
And you have to remember that there were felony penalties for violating the Racial Integrity Act.

00:23:05 Speaker_10
People did, in fact, find themselves imprisoned, so it just strikes us as being Jim Crow rebranded for the digital age, because it's the same information, the same persons, used in the same way.

00:23:18 Speaker_10
Whether you want to call it, use the slur, pretendian, or if you want to use an older slur, like mongrel, which is what they would refer to us as. So yeah, it's old hat, it's bad policy. And I'm used to people demanding what my business is.

00:23:34 Speaker_10
Oh, did you really earn the job that you have? Or are you a diversity hire? Oh, what are you doing here in this neighborhood? That's how it hits me to say that my parents didn't earn their home. We're used to that.

00:23:45 Speaker_10
We're used to the idea that people like us don't belong. where we are. I just find it has just a very rotten heart of hate. She's a direct successor to it in methodology and in rhetoric and in targets. Direct successor.

00:23:59 Speaker_02
So, I mean, Jacqueline said that she's just doing investigative journalism. She says that work should be looked at as reporting on fraud.

00:24:08 Speaker_09
She did say that she's just doing investigative journalism. She also said that she always tries to get the other side of the story, as any journalist would. Cairo says that's not true.

00:24:20 Speaker_10
You never tried talking with me at all. No outreach, no interview.

00:24:23 Speaker_10
It's all been very dehumanizing because it's like we're dealing with some kind of wannabe anthropologist who doesn't talk with their subjects, who just writes about them and places things in the most hostile, antagonistic, derogatory light.

00:24:38 Speaker_10
We're not talking about professionals. We're not talking about critical journalists here. We're talking about agitators and people who are trying to prop themselves up using clout and controversy and inference. What is the term? Speculative journalism.

00:24:55 Speaker_10
She's really stolen our story and created something else.

00:25:00 Speaker_09
Kara says that since the list, some Natives have got really paranoid.

00:25:04 Speaker_10
I've seen people who on social media feel compelled to dox themselves to present their tribal ID and other personally identifiable information that they need to keep secure. because they're afraid of being called frauds.

00:25:16 Speaker_10
It's created an environment of fear. Unfortunately, I'm part of that environment of fear, an unwilling participant in all this.

00:25:23 Speaker_02
I'm just curious though, does Kiro see any kind of value in the intent of this kind of work? I mean, there's widespread understanding that pretendians are a real problem.

00:25:34 Speaker_09
Yeah, he thinks that tribal governments and only tribal governments should be doing these investigations. And given his experience, I don't really blame him.

00:25:44 Speaker_10
I think people need to understand that it's not normal for someone to make a list of 200 enemies, digging down into where they live, who their family is, digging up their family trees, creating, fabricating new family trees, pissing on those family trees.

00:26:01 Speaker_10
degrading those ancestors who can't speak for themselves.

00:26:11 Speaker_09
You know, Kairos was saying that the only people that should be doing these sorts of investigations are tribal governments. And I was actually hired by my First Nation to do one of these sorts of investigations.

00:26:25 Speaker_09
And so I appreciate what he's saying there. And I think that applies when you have an identifiable nation and someone is claiming to be part of that.

00:26:36 Speaker_09
When you've got stories like Guillaume Carle, who we did a while ago, or the Hells Angels one a while ago, where they're making up nations, I think there's a place for external actors to come in and take a look at that. But I don't think he's wrong.

00:26:51 Speaker_02
Yeah, I have real bad issues with Jacqueline's methodology. It seems like she's kind of holding people hostage in a court of public opinion that they have absolutely no way of refuting because a lie can be around the world and

00:27:07 Speaker_02
back again before the truth ever puts its shoes on. And I think that if she had done a few key things differently, I could really support the work that she's doing.

00:27:16 Speaker_02
But it is fucking crazy to just make a list of your 200 enemies and start blasting them on social. That's bullying.

00:27:24 Speaker_09
You're right. It is bullying. There is a problem in Indian country. We all agree that there is a problem. She agrees. We agree. We all agree. that there is an issue with these pretendians taking opportunities, talking over us.

00:27:39 Speaker_09
And it's like an illness in our culture, in our country. And you could take a surgical approach and take it out carefully, being as minimally invasive as possible and making sure you don't hurt anybody. Or you could use a shotgun.

00:27:57 Speaker_09
And some of the pellets will go past and hit bystanders, but a couple will actually hit the thing. And so, well, there we go. Sloppy. For all of the cases where you get it right, it doesn't justify any of the cases where you get it wrong.

00:28:13 Speaker_02
Absolutely not. I hate to think about what Kuros and his mom and his grandmother had to go and do in their own community when these kinds of things started circulating.

00:28:25 Speaker_09
You know, Kairos isn't the only false positive that we talk to. He's the only false positive that would talk on tape because the others were afraid. And they were afraid of the harassment that they've gotten because of the list.

00:28:36 Speaker_09
And it's quieted down for a little bit now. And they were afraid that if they talked to us on tape, that it would come back to them, that it would restart everything all over again.

00:28:45 Speaker_09
And they would have to deal with people harassing them online and possibly in person.

00:28:51 Speaker_02
Hey Robert, I got a question. So like, so if we were to have like a glaring mistake and someone pointed out holes in our methodology, what would your first step be?

00:29:04 Speaker_09
If we're like a huge mistake, I would have to see where my data was bad. Okay, this is the thing with Jacqueline Keeler. It's hard to support her. She makes it very hard. The way she deals with people is just not freaking cool.

00:29:25 Speaker_09
It is just, it's not cool the way she deals with people. It's not professional. It's not humane. When you put that aside, she is doing a job that needs to be done and She is one of the very, very few people who will do that job, and she has been right.

00:29:43 Speaker_09
And I think that if she were to change some of the ways that she deals with things and with people, that her contributions could be much greater than they are now, much greater than they have been so far.

00:30:19 Speaker_02
And that's our show.

00:30:20 Speaker_09
Next time on Pretendians, Angel zooms in on pretendians in Hollywood.

00:30:24 Speaker_01
Johnny Depp is now a member of a Comanche family and has an Indian name that suits him perfectly. It's Shapeshifter.

00:30:32 Speaker_09
Our executive producer and editor is Jesse Brown.

00:30:34 Speaker_02
Additional production from Caleb Thompson.

00:30:36 Speaker_09
Julie Shapiro is our contributing editor.

00:30:39 Speaker_02
Canada Land's Editor-in-Chief is Karen Pulezy. If you like Pretendians and want to hear more of it, it's really important to help us get the word out.

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