Air Date 11/26/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
In a world of infinite information but a finite amount of time to check your facts, we're living in the logical conclusion of an online environment that favors false information over truth. And the most popular online media reflects that reality, perfectly.
For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes All In with Chris Hayes, The Bunker, Why America?, On the Media, The Kavernacle, Breaking the Habit, and a TED Talk.
Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there will be more in four sections: Section A. The Joe Rogan experience and the media;
Section B. Trust and belief;
Section C. Centrism; and
Section D. Roots.
Aaron Rodgers moment perfectly sums up how fake information spreads - All In with Chris Hayes - 11-14-24
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: Offer a little parable for our age, and I'm gonna use sports for a minute here. So indulge me. I promise I'm going somewhere with it. So this week on Sunday night [00:01:00] football, Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff, generally very good quarterback, was having a terrible game against the Houston Texans. Goff threw four interceptions by halftime, meaning he threw the ball, the other team caught it taking possession. That's bad. It's a turnover. You don't want to do it. At halftime, someone posted a surprising statistic to social media. And it started going viral. Here it is. This is now Jared Goff's seventh career game with at least four interceptions. His record in those games? 6 0.
Now, for those of you who don't follow football, that is an extremely shocking, improbable, indeed, it turns out, ridiculous claim. Four interceptions a game is exceedingly rare. Winning six games where you did it? Okay. But it just kept circulating. The original poster even shared what appeared to be a graphic from a well known sports statistic website to back it up.
It looks like stat news. And that was apparently enough for folks to just parrot the claim unchallenged. It went everywhere. Even people who should know better like ESPN host Pat McAfee and Aaron Rodgers, the conspiracy theorist quarterback for the New York Jets, who RFK [00:02:00] Jr. apparently wanted at one point as his running mate.
AARON RODGERS: I love Jared, I'm sure he'll bounce back. Amazing stat though, is this a true stat? That he's done four more picks seven times and he's won every single one of those games?
PAT MCAFEE: Yes, yep, 7 0.
AARON RODGERS: That's wild. I mean that's why stats are for. What did Big Mike used to say, age?
HOST 2: Stats for losers.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: They're for losers. Is this true?
It's true. You can probably tell where I'm going with this. The statistic is not true. It was a total lie. Just take it from the guy who made it up in the first place. Quoting: "If you've ever wondered how easy it is to spread fake information, I made this stat up while laying in my bed at halftime of the game."
And this random Twitter football guy actually makes a pretty great point there. Thankfully, this is a totally harmless prank example of disinformation. It doesn't matter. The only consequence was [00:03:00] McAfee getting embarrassed and having to walk it back on air. But what happened in that exchange, between Pat McAfee and do your own research Aaron Rodgers, is kind of the entire story of our age, of our information environment right now.
These are the guys, those kinds of guys that are doing the vetting of what's true and not in our current information environment. That's it. Those are the guardrails. They are doing their own research, if you will. And it's not just sports. This problem translates across our political culture. I mean, everything.
Lies and misinformation and intentional slander about immigration and immigrants and the economy. They're spreading on this kind of terrain where the anti vax quarterback just parrots an unvetted statistic he saw on Elon Musk's website to millions of people on the ESPN. I saw this stat. Yeah, it's true.
That's it. That's the whole problem in miniature. A miniature version of the [00:04:00] enormous problem that we all face that has gotten us to this point. That the rest of us gotta try to find some way to solve. And I will be the first to say, we do our part here, but I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer, but boy, oh boy, are we gonna have to come up with some.
Why is everyone suddenly an expert? (Even when they’re not) - The Bunker - Air Date 5-20-24
ROS TAYLOR - HOST, THE BUNKER: This is the second edition of this book, I think the first one came out in 2017. In the first, you thought things that might improve if there was a major crisis and Americans had to rally round and understand the importance of expertise. And there was that major crisis, as we all know, in the form of COVID, and they didn't. In fact, they got worse. Why was that?
TOM NICHOLS: Yeah, boy, experts hate being wrong, book authors really hate being wrong. Yes, please buy my book, because I was wrong. But we definitely had three crises. I said in the book and in subsequent lectures about the book, look, a war, an economic crisis or, pandemic [00:05:00] would probably snap people out of this and say, "listen, we need people who know what they're talking about." We had all three of them. War broke out, the largest war since World War II in Europe is raging in the middle of Europe, and yet experts, diplomats, have managed to keep this thing from exploding into World War III. Remember the Russians rolling westward was the thing that kept Cold War strategists, up at night and waking up in a sweaty panic. And somehow we've managed to do this and contain this, and yet that hasn't seemed to dent at anybody's thinking about this very much.
We had an economic downturn that turned into a soft landing. Here in the United States it's been a lot better than you've fared in Britain. And I'll just bring up the experts warned about Brexit, and that was another case of, the ordinary folks listening to yeah, it was I think it was Michael Gove who said, " we're tired of experts!" Now you have, 60/40 split wishing that it hadn't [00:06:00] happened.
But economically here in the United States we have sustained the longest stretch of unemployment under 4 percent since 1953. And yet people, they don't think that matters very much and they don't seem very aware of it. And they don't seem inclined to think that expertise had anything to do with it, political or economic.
And of course, then the pandemic, and why was the pandemic so divisive? I would argue that the one thing I should have known that I didn't was that pandemics are inherently divisive because you don't go into the streets to help your neighbors. It's not like an earthquake or a fire or a natural disaster. Pandemics by their nature, make you shut your door and lock it and treat everyone as a potential threat, and that's inherent in pandemics.
But the other thing that I could not have counted on was that an entire American political party would make opposition to science a fundamental plank of its platform. And that the president of the United States would be [00:07:00] the cheerleader for basically rejecting science and, simply distrusting basic science about everything. That had a toll and we paid the price for that.
ROS TAYLOR - HOST, THE BUNKER: It wasn't just a case of anti vaxxers ignoring experts. You write about how the partisan backlash against those people minimizing COVID also did damage. Tell us about that because it's not a narrative that gets much attention in the UK.
TOM NICHOLS: Absolutely. One of the things I decided to write about in the new edition of the book was to do what experts ought to do, which is to say, look, where did we go wrong? Trump's failures, the craziness of the Republican Party and the right-wing ecosystem, that's been well documented elsewhere. What did doctors do wrong? What did health experts do wrong? And there were a couple of serious mistakes.
One is that health experts tried to step into the vacuum left by the irresponsibility at the top of [00:08:00] the political elected political officials. And so you had health experts, including some that worked for the government, like the Surgeon General, trying to fill the void on should you wear a mask.
Most people wanted to do the right thing. And they said, "okay what should I do?" " Well, don't go buy masks," because of course, now the doctors were worried that there was going to be a run on masks. And so instead of saying, "Hey, we got it wrong, this is an airborne thing, stay away from each other, but don't go buy masks until we tell you to, because the people in hospitals are going to need them first." they just didn't say that they played this game back and forth of buy them, don't buy them, put them on, don't put them on. Would bandana work? "Maybe, we don't know. Go ahead. Try it." now, some of that. Is that the public just doesn't understand how science works. That science is trial and error experimentation, competing hypotheses, but the health experts were not ready to [00:09:00] step in to being political leaders, and they shouldn't have tried. They're not good at it, they didn't communicate well, and they hurt their own cause.
The two other things that happened that I think really damaged expertise in the United States were the debates over school closures. And I supported all these, by the way, I was all about, telling people to mask up and closing down the schools. At the time, I was 60, pre existing health conditions. I didn't want to sit in a 14 person seminar breathing in each other's faces. But when it came time to reopen the schools, a lot of people on the left just dug in because it got to the point where anything people on the right said people on the left at the opposite of. And you did have permanent pandemic people, which wears people out. It makes them not want to listen to expert advice anymore because when everything's a crisis and if I've alarm fire forever, then nothing is.
And the last thing that happened that I think the medical community and a lot of people on the [00:10:00] left don't want to talk about that was really damaging was the George Floyd protests, where doctors who had said, listen, you can't go to church, you can't have weddings, you can't sing in a choir. And then you had 1500 doctors signing a letter saying, but if you want to go march and sing, and be together, in tight, big crowds because of this one political issue, then we think that's important enough to say, go ahead and do it.
You had a lot of people in the country who said, and in other words, this isn't disinterest in science, this is these are regulations that only apply if your cause is not judged good enough by the doctors. And it was a legitimate complaint. And it was not just a complaint among people on the right-wing, you really did have a lot of ordinary Americans saying, I can't hold a funeral, but the doctor say this is okay. And I think that was a massive self inflicted wound.
There were only two [00:11:00] options. The protests were going to happen no matter what. And and public officials were in a jam here because they certainly weren't going to make the protests not happen. The horror of that video meant that, This whole country was going to be convulsed and protests were going to happen. But if the doctors thought that masking up and drinking water and staying far away from each other and all of that stuff during the protests would work for the protests, then they should have told everybody else that it would work for them if they needed to get married. Or if this wasn't really necessary and they said, as many of them did afterwards, there was really no spike in COVID, then they're basically admitting to millions of people. Yeah, we didn't know what we were talking about.
To his credit, Anthony Fauci was the one who said, "I have real concerns about this. I understand it's going to happen, but I just think anything like this is a vector for spreading, COVID. And I just hope people wear masks and, try not to, be too close together." And he shrugged and just said, "but as a doctor, I have real concerns about this," and I think that was the smart [00:12:00] path and there were a lot of doctors who publicly wouldn't go down that road.
How Right Wing Media Took Over America Part 1 - Why America? with Leeja Miller - Air Date 11-18-24
LEEJA MILLER - HOST, WHY AMERICA?: Before we get into who's bankrolling this bullshit, I think it's worth taking a step back to understand what we mean by right-wing media and how it became so powerful in the first place.
Many factors have contributed to the ecosystem we see today, including media fragmentation in the digital age, increasing political polarization, and the massive profitability of rage bait and the culture wars. But what makes the conservative content ecosystem uniquely powerful is that it's simultaneously isolated and unified.
Unified because even though these outlets compete amongst themselves for clicks, when it comes to reinforcing the GOP's narratives, they're marching in lockstep. And isolated because conservative outlets are first and foremost contrarian. They define themselves in opposition to the mainstream press. And that's why it feels so impossible to get through to Trump voters. They exist in a sealed feedback loop and fundamentally distrust the sources the rest of us value. And that's thanks to a decades long [00:13:00] conservative crusade against the media and educated elites. Because you can't go to war without first defining an enemy.
The Republican obsession with liberal media prejudice Dates back to at least the 1950s, but didn't properly boil over until the 1970s. See, ol Ricky Nixon didn't much like the press. Forever a paranoid, from early in his career, Nixon believed reporters were out to get him, and as president, he had a plan to fight back. Aiming to undermine the press's credibility, the Nixon administration started pushing a new name for them, "The Media". Apparently, The Press sounded too dignified and serious for Nixon's liking, as though The Press implied a sacred duty to, I don't know, be a watchdog serving the public's best interests by overseeing government affairs or something. The Media, on the other hand, had the perfect ring to it, calling to mind manipulative, slick and slimy Madison Avenue types.
A popular book also helped push the narrative. In 1971, The News Twister hit shelves, claiming, despite weak at best methodology, to have scientific proof of liberal [00:14:00] media bias. By the time Nixon went to war with the Washington Post over Watergate, many conservatives were primed to see the president's downfall, not as the righteous result of his own crooked actions, but as a coup orchestrated by The Media against a beloved twice elected Republican.
As the 70s gave way to the 80s, this distrust in The Media, as it was now known, began to faster. Americans trust in media peaked in 1976, when 72% of the population said they trusted mass media a great deal or a fair amount. By 1996, that figure had dropped to 53%. So what the fuck happened in the 20 years between 1976 and 1996? Well, at least four major things. CNN, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the rise of Rush Limbaugh, and the birth of Fox News.
In 1980, CNN launched the first 24 hour cable news channel, changing the speed of breaking news forever, and arguably taking reporting outside the realm of the public good and into the realm of rage bait [00:15:00] for profitability. As a cable news station, CNN had far fewer restrictions than broadcasters using the public airwaves. Public broadcasters like CBS, NBC, and ABC were considered public trustees with a duty to serve the people. Part of that responsibility included the Equal Time Rule, also known as the Fairness Doctrine, which required newscasters to air competing views on important issues in approximately equal measure.
The doctrine was written to prevent broadcasters from abusing their power and setting a biased public agenda. Doesn't that sound nice? In the 1970s, the Federal Communications Commission called the Fairness Doctrine "the single most important requirement of operation in the public interest." And then in 1987, Ronald fucking Reagan ruined everything.
In 1987, the FCC voted 4-0 in favor of ending the Fairness Doctrine, claiming that the policy hurt the public interest and violated free speech rights. Broadcasters had complained that the Fairness Doctrine was overly burdensome and actually inhibited their ability to cover issues of public importance, which on a certain level sort of [00:16:00] makes sense. The Fairness Doctrine ultimately required broadcasters to decide which issues were important to the public and then decide which perspectives should be presented in equal measures. But the FCC preferred to instead leave it up to broadcasters to decide what to air based on how the marketplace reacted, because, as we know, the market always knows best.
Furthermore, broadcasters argued that the rise of cable TV made a diversity of viewpoints available that hadn't existed in previous eras, meaning people could seek out sources aligned with their interests rather than expecting the Big Three broadcasters to cover every conceivable viewpoint on the nightly news.
The problem is that this logic eliminates the notion of a single source of truth. If nobody is required to even pretend to be fair and balanced in the public's interest, then the line between news and editorial starts to blur really fast.
Many members of Congress agreed that eliminating the Fairness Doctrine was a slippery slope. They criticized the FCC for trying to flout the will of Congress, and said the decision was "wrongheaded, misguided, and illogical." They even [00:17:00] managed to pass a bill codifying the Fairness Doctrine. But Reagan vetoed it, and they couldn't get enough votes to overturn his veto.
The Manosphere Celebrates a Win. Plus, M. Gessen on How to Survive an Autocracy - On The Media - Air Date 11-8-24
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: How did the former host of the network reality show Fear Factor become a political kingmaker? For one, he was an early podcast adopter. Rogan realized that there was a deep hunger for alternative media that doesn't tell you what to think, or at least presents itself that way. A hunger for discussions that aren't bound by broadcast time constraints, stuffy talk show decorum, and editorial guardrails that favor mainstream experts and centrist politics.
JOE ROGAN: The thing that **** television, the thing that **** entertainment, in general, is money. They were selling advertising, so everybody has to say certain words. Don't say certain words. Don't bring up certain subjects. You can't just express yourself because you're expressing yourself to someone who's selling advertising space.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Joe Rogan as a guest on an internet talk show in 2007, which seems like the [00:18:00] precise moment that he discovered the potential of podcasting.
JOE ROGAN: You just need to keep doing this. We need to figure out how you make money from this.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Definitely figured that out.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Spotify has signed a multi-year, $250,000,000 deal with Joe Rogan.
JUSTIN PETERS: Rogan somehow caught lightning in a bottle.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Justin Peters, a correspondent for Slate, profiled Joe Rogan.
JUSTIN PETERS: His podcast began with him generally just interviewing fellow comics, standups that he'd met on the road. He went into interviewing MMA fighters because he's a big mixed martial arts guy. Then at a certain point, he started bringing on academics, evolutionary biologists, sociologists, people from the tech world. I can't stand the guy, but I also have to acknowledge that his podcast can be incredibly entertaining.
JOE ROGAN: Boom. Thank you. Thanks for doing this, man. Really appreciate it.
ELON MUSK: Hey, welcome.
JOE ROGAN: It's very good to meet you.
ELON MUSK: Nice to meet you, too.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: This is [00:19:00] Rogan's 2018 interview with Elon Musk. That time they smoked a blunt on camera.
ELON MUSK: Is that a joint or is it a cigar?
JOE ROGAN: No.
ELON MUSK: Okay.
JOE ROGAN: It's marijuana inside of tobacco.
ELON MUSK: Okay, so it's like pot tobacco posh?
JOE ROGAN: You never had that?
ELON MUSK: Yes, I think I tried one once.
JOE ROGAN: Come on, man.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: I'd argue this was when Musk's hyper online man of the people shtick took root.
JUSTIN PETERS: I think you're right that this was the moment where Musk started really trying to reach out for the alt-right intellectual, dark web appeal. Smoking weed with Joe Rogan was the turning point. Certainly, I'll buy that.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: For Rogan, politics were a bit more complicated. Even as he hosted buddy-buddy interviews with Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and the like, he was still reaching a politically diverse audience. He was saying stuff like this on his show.
JOE ROGAN: I think I'll [00:20:00] probably vote for Bernie. Him as a human being when I was hanging out with him. I believe in him. I like him.
JIMMY DORE: Look at you progressive.
JOE ROGAN: Yes, I've always been.
JIMMY DORE: What? Everyone says you're a right-winger.
JOE ROGAN: I've never voted right-wing in my life.
JIMMY DORE: Really?
JOE ROGAN: Never. Never. I voted Democrat except for independent. I voted for Gary Johnson because he did my podcast.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Rogan in 2020. Part of a montage of clips that resurfaced on social media this week.
JOE ROGAN: 87% of scientists said that human activity is driving global warming. I'm very pro-choice. I'm very women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, trans rights. I'm even universal health care. Obviously, this protected status is driving me crazy. This thing that Trump's doing with children that were born in other countries and then brought over here as children, and then they're talking about--
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: How did Rogan the liberal end up endorsing Donald Trump? I've heard several explanations. One is that Rogan gave up on the Democrats after they dumped Bernie Sanders in 2020. Another is that he's been slowly [00:21:00] red-pilled by his guests.
JUSTIN PETERS: When someone keeps on saying, I'm a liberal, I'm a liberal, and then people with whom he talks speak incessantly about the evils of cancel culture, who talk about how the mainstream media is suppressive, and so on and so forth, then you're not actually a liberal. You're wearing a costume. I think what's happened over the past five years is Rogan has finally taken off that costume and revealed himself for who he was all along.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Since 2020, Joe Rogan has become a lightning rod for controversy and criticism. The kind of scrutiny that comes with the territory when you're the most popular podcaster in the world. There was that time a couple of years ago when he had to apologize after the Internet discovered that he'd used the N-word repeatedly in old episodes.
JOE ROGAN: Look, I can't go back in time and change what I've said. I wish I could. [00:22:00] Obviously, that's not possible, but I do hope that this can be a teachable moment for anybody that doesn't realize how offensive that word can be coming out of a white person's mouth in context or out of context. My sincere and humble apologies.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: There was his interview with so-called vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone.
DR. ROBERT MALONE: These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg Code. They're explicitly inconsistent with the Belmont Report.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Over a thousand doctors, scientists, and health professionals are calling out Spotify over false claims about COVID aired by its most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Rogan would double down on the vax stuff and even went on to endorse his friend RFK Jr. after he came on the podcast. Then there was this.
JOE ROGAN: Ready for this? My friend, his wife is a schoolteacher [00:23:00] and she works at a school that had to install a litter box in the girls room because there is a girl who's a furry who identifies as an animal.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: He had to walk back this totally bogus story in 2022 saying he must have misunderstood his friend or something. More recently, he told a guest that Joe Biden faked the State of the Union address.
JOE ROGAN: The State of the Union was not live.
JRE GUEST: Yes, it was.
JOE ROGAN: No, no. Did you see that they found out that it wasn't? Someone zoomed in on his watch and his watch was the wrong time.
JRE GUEST: How could that even be? I don't think all the Republicans would agree to it, too. They're all there.
JOE ROGAN: [crosstalk] They knew. They're all there live while he's doing it.
JRE GUEST: Yes.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Rogan had his producer do a mid-interview fact check. They pulled up an article debunking a photoshopped image of Biden's watch.
JOE ROGAN: Yes, there is a fake image. They got me.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: How do you fall for this stuff?
It's been [00:24:00] pointed out by many of his critics that Rogan doesn't seem to prepare enough for his interviews. He exercises poor judgment. Rogan says he's a victim of cancel culture. I think that's a big reason why he likes Trump.
JOE ROGAN: There's probably no one in history that I've ever seen that's been attacked the way you've been attacked and the way they've done it so coordinated and systematically. When you see those--
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: This is how Rogan set up his three-hour interview with Donald Trump last week, by telling their shared story about the media and the political establishment. "They hate us not because of our behavior, but because we threatened them.'
JOE ROGAN: Did you just assume because people loved you on The Apprentice they were going to love you as a president?
DONALD TRUMP: Well I figured it would be so easy. You know it was very interesting.
JOE ROGAN: Well it probably would have been if the media didn't attack you the way they did. If they didn't conflate you with Hitler. Even today, like Kamala was talking about you and Hitler. They're going to take what you said about Robert--
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: We'll never know whether Rogan's endorsement moved the needle on [00:25:00] Tuesday. Whether Kamala Harris's appearance would have made any difference. But all the spilled ink about it this week says a lot about where it feels like political influence is headed.
RYAN GRIM: I hope that this is the last Democratic nominee who says no to Joe Rogan. Like, even if you have to go to the studio.
MEHDI HASAN: I would go further than that, Ryan. You need your own Joe Rogan is the bigger point. That's your bigger problem.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: One of the closest analogs to a left-wing Joe Rogan is 33-year-old Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer and political commentator. He's big and burly, fluent in memes and gaming culture. He gets the Internet. But as a socialist, he's likely seen as too radical to be embraced by mainstream Democrats in the way that Republicans have harnessed their right-wing influencers. I watched Hasan Piker deliver the results on election night with some 200,000 concurrent viewers. As the news began to set in, he started raging against Trump supporters who joined his chat to rub in the loss.
HASAN PIKER: [00:26:00] Donald Trump winning the presidency is not going to improve your life. It's actually going to continue making it worse because there are major material issues that you are experiencing and neither party is actually providing any adequate solutions to that. But owning the libs is not going to improve your life. It is a way for Donald Trump and the Republican Party to distract you away as they pick **** your pockets and rob you blind.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: For years now, he's been sounding the alarm on the rise of the manosphere.
HASAN PIKER: There is a massive amount of right-wing radicalization that has been occurring, especially in younger male spaces.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Here he is speaking on Jon Favreau's podcast Offline.
HASAN PIKER: If you're a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever, whether it's playing video games, whether it's working out, whether it's-- I don't know, listening to like a history podcast or whatever, every single facet of that is just completely dominated by right-wing politics.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: As he watched Dana White shout out the [00:27:00] podcast bros during that victory speech we heard at the beginning of this piece--
DANA WHITE: Adin Ross, Theo Von, and last but not least--
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Hasan Piker reacted on his live stream
DANA WHITE: -the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.
HASAN PIKER: No.
DANA WHITE: Thank you, America. Thank you. Have a good night.
HASAN PIKER: What is this country? We're done.
MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: The news monoculture of old is dead. It seems that, to many, the New York Times, a company that employs 2,700 journalists, is just one source of information and perspective. Joe Rogan, another. The incoming administration has shown us that it will lean on a new generation of personalities and media networks to spread its lies and shape hearts and minds.
We DON'T need a LEFTIST Joe Rogan - The Kavernacle - Air Date 11-14-24
THE KAVERNACLE - HOST, THE KAVERNACLE: Just because Joe Rogan had left wing people on doesn't mean this podcast ever turned people to left wing politics. And also Joe Rogan is just a bit of an idiot, right? He would just agree with anything people said. He had Cornel West on once and agreed with so much of what he said. Joe Rogan does not believe in the same things as Cornel West.
He does [00:28:00] not believe in the same things as Bernie Sanders. And Joe Rogan's podcast always skewed conservative. Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, just every single right-wing person has been a regular on the Joe Rogan podcast, far more than any progressive people. Like, you know, I have a Kyle Kulinski tweet up here.
He used to go on Joe Rogan sometimes. I've seen, like, Cenk on Joe Rogan. I've seen a couple people, but you never get, like, loads of socialists and communists on it. Bernie Sanders is probably, like, the most left wing person who has been on the Joe Rogan podcast. And I don't think Joe Rogan is as influential as people think.
And also a lot of people who now watch Joe Rogan are actually going to him because of his conservative audience and conservative guests, while a lot of people who used to watch him have left. So he is attracting conservatives to watch his podcast more than he's turning an established audience into conservative.
And also, let's remember, it's just one demographic. Which also a lot of them in this demographic don't even vote in the first place. So [00:29:00] blaming Gen Z men for Trump winning is just stupid. It just doesn't work out like that. I know not all of his audience are Gen Z men, but they're saying that Joe Rogan is like a symptom of this.
Gen Z men, Millennial men, Gen X men, they all listen to Joe Rogan and that's where they'll hear conservative politics. Now I do agree there is a problem more broadly, with the conservatives having domination in the media ecosystems. And I would say in the UK it's a bit different, where we have centrists dominating them, you know, they are pretty much conservatives, but they aren't as far right.
Where in the US it's more like, just the far right dominate all these things. And that is important, like, how much does Fox News play a role in helping various Republicans get elected? Including George Bush stealing the 2000 election. Yeah, of course, that is important. But I want to point something out as well. Because I focus on the social element, like let's say you listen to Joe Rogan, you agree with him politically on social things, trans people in sports, I don't know, all the other [00:30:00] bullshitty pedals.
There's something you need to remember is that people mostly vote for their material conditions and this is something that always stuck out of me because it's absolutely fucking insane. But I think it proves everything, right? So there's been a narrative around the election that Latino men don't vote for women because they're misogynistic. But firstly, that's just a huge stereotype which isn't really true considering Latinos and Latino men voted for Clinton more than they voted for Republicans. And also when they're talking about Mexican men, yeah, the two candidates for the Mexican leadership this year, or the presidency, were both women.
So this is a culture that has a problem with women. But there was this article that came out in the 2008 presidential election, I couldn't find the original one now, but it's the Guardian reporting on the article, called Racists for Obama, and I just wanted to read it for you quickly, to just show you how people, even when they're bigoted, and even when they might be watching Fox News all the time, to rot their brain, people fundamentally [00:31:00] care about material conditions more.
This is an extreme example, but I wanted to read it because it's extreme. So, Sean Quinn of the site FiveThirtyEight has been driving around the Middle Atlantic. Yesterday, he was in a town called Washington, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles north of M Town. I know this turf quite well. Obviously, we called Washington Little Washington to distinguish it from Washington, D. C. which was close enough to be a familiar destination. Anyway, Sean heard the following story in this town where Obama just got slaughtered by Hillary Clinton. A canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure.
Has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're voting for the 'racial slur,'" meaning Obama. The woman turns back and says, as a matter of fact, that we're voting for the 'racials' though. I've heard similar stories from West Virginia in which people openly [00:32:00] use the N-word while saying they're voting for Obama.
It's important not to read too much into this, it's mostly a reflection of the economy. McCain's ridiculous response to the crisis, Palin's presence, and clearly part of it must be, Obama has come across to these folks as smart and steady and someone who will use good judgment in office. I still doubt that Obama will carry West Virginia, but he's a lot further along with these voters than I'd thought back in April or May.
So Obama did lose West Virginia in 2008, but I'm highlighting that because fundamentally, the conversation about a left wing Joe Rogan or a liberal Joe Rogan to help the Democrats win another election just completely misses the point, right? It's all about economic issues during an election. And rather than focusing on making some sort of liberal media empire and going to meet the youth in Gen Z, promising people things economically that will impact them the most is the way to go.
And with America, [00:33:00] right? Their social safety nets, their healthcare system, they're so bad there are so many things you could do and campaign big on to win an election. So Obama of course campaigned on a lot of things, which made him a good candidate, and he campaigned on vibes, and he campaigned on policy.
That's how you get people who are actually racist, like insanely racist, voting for Obama. Because they thought he'd be good on economic issues and stuff like that, right? So, in that, if someone like Kamala Harris, or just any Democrat, campaigned on, literally like, I'm gonna give you universal healthcare, it's time.
The UK has had it for, like, 70 something years. Most of the developed world have it. We have to have it too. Too many people die every year from not having health care. We need to modernize and stuff. Or I need to do something economic, right? Some big economic policy to help people's everyday lives, instead of the Democrats pretending, oh, because inflation's not as bad anymore, people love us for the economy.
They don't. [00:34:00] Because everyone's like, gas is going up, everyone's bills are going up, everyone's rent is going up, and you're not doing anything about it. So if they're not going to vote for you, they're just going to blame you. And if they don't think you can handle these economic things, then they're not going to vote for you.
And that's the fundamental point. The conversation completely misses for me. The Democrats and just any, like, liberal left political organization, they don't need a Joe Rogan to target young men. And I would say focusing on loads of people who don't vote is also important, including young people. But, elections are lost on policy, not on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Stop Having an "Open Mind" - Breaking In The Habit - Air Date 5-31-24
CASEY COLE: In our world today, there may not be a more important value than having an open mind, or a more hurtful insult than to be called closed minded. We applaud people that are always asking questions, always seeking, always open to new things, and look down on those who are stuck in their ways, who refuse to change.
Frankly, I think that it might be our most toxic quality, and it's destroying our society. Let me explain. [00:35:00] On the surface, having a so called open mind is not a bad thing. Removing our biases and preconceived notions, looking at the world as it is rather than how we want it to be, taking in new information, and adjusting our opinions, these are all good things.
What I love about the idea of an open mind is the desire to always be seeking and learning. Especially as a Christian, I know that a thousand lifetimes could never exhaust all that there is to learn about the unimaginable mystery that is God and the beauty and wonder of his creation. To sit back, unimpressed, to be content with where we are, seems like a sin against the gift of reason that God has given us.
Seeking is a good thing. Wondering is a virtue. Welcoming new information is essential for all Christians. We must have an open mind to all that is true, beautiful, and good so that we ourselves may be transformed by all that is true, beautiful, and good. I don't have a problem with any of this. No, the problem I have with much of our world is not that it insists on an open mind per se.
It's that it never allows for an open mind to reach a conclusion. Tell someone that you're a seeker, that you're someone who stares out over the [00:36:00] ocean and wonders how it all came to be and where we're all going. And people think that you're deep and interesting. Tell someone that you're a Christian?
That you believe that the ocean and all of creation are the works of God, and that everything should fulfill its purpose in giving God glory? Well, you know the response. How can you know this? What arrogance? Who are you to tell me that my ideas are wrong? As a society, we value minds that question, but belittle minds that claim to have answers to questions.
I think of it a lot like the cliche often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. It's not the destination that matters, but the journey. At first, it seems wise. It reminds us that how we get somewhere matters, that we should care about the process, the ways, and the means. And that's true. We don't want to lie or cheat to get somewhere.
We don't want to get to our destination having lost ourselves along the way, for what good would the destination be at that point? But the opposite is true as well. What good is a journey if we never actually reach a destination? If we never even have a destination in mind? If all we do is wander around forever, never reaching a place better than [00:37:00] where we started?
The journey is not all that matters. That's ridiculous. The destination is the purpose and fulfillment of a journey. While there may obviously be enjoyment along the way and lessons learned on the road, the reason we set out in the first place is not for journeying itself, but to get somewhere. When I look at our world, what I see is a society that is always on the road, but never getting anywhere.
It insists that people head out on a journey, that it asks deep questions, ponder life's mysteries, keep an open mind, but never get anywhere. Those who reach their destination, who stand by an answer, who say that they have found what they are looking for and do not want to journey any longer, are scoffed at and belittled.
While there is always a need for intellectual humility, and we should be cautious of speaking dogmatically about every little thing, the idea of living life without any dogmas, without any moral imperatives, without any belief that is beyond change, is a life that doesn't stand for anything. The dirty truth of the matter, is that nobody actually lives this way.
As much as people demand open minds and decry any sense of dogma, [00:38:00] there isn't a person on earth that doesn't hold some truth beyond questioning. Are we to keep an open mind about genocide, always giving an opportunity for the other side to convince us otherwise? No. Must we stay open to the idea that the Earth may actually be flat? That NASA and every scientist in the world for the past 2, 500 years has been involved in a conspiracy? Please. Should we treat the love we receive from our parents, spouse, siblings, and friends with skepticism, mindful of the fact that we cannot know for sure if they're being honest, and so should protect ourselves in case they're lying? I hope not.
The fact of the matter is that there are certain things in life we have to either accept, or not accept. Some things have a mountain of evidence to support them, making doubt more difficult, while other things must be accepted simply on intuition, but the point remains. Eventually, we have to choose one way or another.
Do we believe, or do we not? To journey our entire lives without reaching a destination, to seek and to ask without ever coming to a conclusion, is a sad, uncourageous life. To remain open to everything is to attain [00:39:00] nothing. At some point, we have to take the risk, even if just temporarily, and make a claim. What a waste to live your entire life as an agnostic.
Sure, you're never going to be outright wrong, but you're never going to have a chance of being right either. You're never going to find fulfillment, purpose, direction, or any sense of meaning if you remain open to everything. What a waste to live your entire life not sure if your partner is "The One." Sure, you're never going to be heartbroken, never have to deal with a messy divorce, but you're also never going to experience the sort of love that comes only with commitment and vulnerability.
We could continue down this line of thinking for everything. A career choice, vocational discernment, political positions, which movie to watch on Netflix. With every decision in life, the end goal must always be to actually make a decision. It begins with an open mind. It starts with seeking, questioning, removing biases, doing everything you can to come to the truth.
But at some point, you must come to the realization that you will never have enough information, that you will never exhaust everything that can be learned, but must make a decision anyway. [00:40:00] Now, I'm not suggesting that we must make a dogmatic decision about everything, or that we should never change our minds once we've decided something.
There is a sense in which an open mind is still a very good thing. What I'm suggesting is simply that an open mind is a means to an end, not the end itself. It is the thing that gets us where we're going, not a quality of a good person. The irony of being open to everything, of never settling on anything in particular, is that you'll never actually know when you found the right or wrong answer.
We must be willing to take risks, to put ourselves out there, to stand for something rather than be open to everything. Maybe we'll come to realize that we were wrong, but at least we'll have found something, and we'll be closer to our ultimate destination than when we started. Commit to something. You may never know the right or wrong answer beyond a shadow of a doubt, but what sort of life is it if you never even try?
Birds Aren’t Real? How a Conspiracy Takes Flight | Peter McIndoe -TED - Air Date 9-13-23
PETER MCINDOE: I grew up in Arkansas, in Little Rock, where I was homeschooled on the outskirts of town. The community that I grew up with was [00:41:00] hyper conservative and religious, and almost everyone that I knew believed in some form of conspiracy theory, whether it was that Obama was the Antichrist, or that there are microchips in the vaccines.
During my entire life, I always felt like I was on the fringes of normal society. So, as you can imagine, when it became time for me to play a character, The Conspiracy Theorist was a pretty easy one for me to tap into. During the years in character, I used the same cadence, logic, and arguments as those I grew up around. Just with a different theory swapped in. I was really dedicated to playing this character as convincingly as I could, as method as possible. So I spent days sometimes in character, a lot of time out in public with the van there, just talking with strangers. It led to hundreds of interactions with strangers who thought that I was a real conspiracy theorist.
I'd often be out there, cowboy hat on, handing out fliers that said things like, [00:42:00] "If it flies, it spies." We had another flier that said, "Birdwatching goes both ways." And during these times, as I'm handing out fliers and talking with people, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of instances over the years where strangers would approach me. You know, they'd see me in public, and I'd see them notice me. They'd walk up to me with complete disdain on their face. They thought that I was a real conspiracy theorist.
And time and time again, they'd come up to me, look me right in the eyes, just as close as I am to you right here, and they would tell me how stupid I am. They'd tell me I was uneducated, that I was crazy, that I was the problem with this country. When this happened, I didn't feel the emotions of the character that I thought I would.
My out of character [00:43:00] self may interpret these interactions as a funny response to someone that fell for the comedy project, but instead, I felt the emotions of the character. I felt emboldened, and I felt sad and angry, like they didn't even take the time to know me. They instantly condemned me, judged me and othered me.
I'd found myself on the opposite side of this equation that I'd grown up around. The normal and the fringe. And in those moments when those people were talking to me, they could not have been more ineffective at what I would assume they really want: less conspiracy theorists in the world. These experiences, hundreds of them over the years, watching how people interact with those on the fringes of our society, gave me an entirely new perspective on our approach to conspiracy theorists.
Whether it's how we frame them in the conventional [00:44:00] media, to how we deal with those in our own lives. If our goal is to live in a shared reality with our neighbors, what if our current approach isn't bringing us any closer to that? What if by talking to conspiracy theorists like they're ignorant and stupid, we're actually pushing them farther away from the truth that we want them to see?
Because what happens when someone tells you that you're stupid, you're all wrong, you're the problem? You'll feel judged and dismissed, and most importantly, you'll feel othered, which may lead you to look for safety in those who are like minded. To do what they have been doing for you. Affirm your selfhood, give you a sense of identity, belonging.
These are some of the most basic human desires. We have to consider that conspiracy theorists are not just joining these groups for no reason. They're getting rewards out of these, things that we are all looking for. A sense of purpose, [00:45:00] community. I grew up with the internet, and during my time with this project, especially out of character, people have talked to me about the misinformation age and this, you know, terrifying problem of online echo chambers and conspiracy theorists, but I want to remind us that there are humans behind a lot of these screens.
It's not just numbers. Everyone's unique experience influences their own narrative about the world, and there's no blueprint for how to deal with this yet. But I do not think that online echo chambers of conspiracy theorists are this inevitable symptom of life online. The internet is about 30 years old, and things are changing quickly, and I think it'll be very important that we develop new solutions for these new problems on a fundamental level.
What if, by addressing belief before belonging, we're starting the conversation at the wrong place? Instead of sitting in collective bewilderment and [00:46:00] frustration about how these people could believe these things, these crazies, what if we first looked under the hood and thought about what made them vulnerable to this information in the first place?
What might they be getting out of this that they're not getting in their everyday lives? How much does it have to do with a different truth? Or how much does it have to do with the community that that truth brings? We need to think about people's circumstances and reference points. To see them as fellow human beings who want to believe in something and want to belong, just like all of us do in this room.
Because if we continue with our current approach of arguing on the level of belief, it's not going to get us anywhere. We're going to end up with more echo chambers, more disinformation and more polarization. Instead, we can do the harder work of looking into what is fueling the need for an alternate truth.
Not only would this lend us more empathy for those who think differently than us. But I really think this might be the only actually [00:47:00] productive means, productive means of moving toward the shared reality that we all want to live in. Let's direct our energy toward the crisis of belonging. And then maybe we will understand the crisis of belief.
Note from the Editor on the nature of skepticism and open-mindedness
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with All In with Chris Hayes looking at just one case of disinformation spread. The Bunker discussed the decline of trust in expertise. Why, America? looked back to the destruction of the fairness doctrine under Reagan. On the Media tracked the evolution of Joe Rogan. The Kavernacle took a deeper dive into Rogan's potential impact. Breaking the Habit discussed the downsides of having an open mind. And finally, a TED Talk about the "birds aren't real" satirical conspiracy theory.
And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section.
But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring their production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often making each other laugh in the process. To support all of our [00:48:00] work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support -- there's a link in the show notes; through our Patreon page; or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but depending on the app you use to listen, you may be able to use the time codes that we put in the show notes to jump around the show, similar to chapter markers. So check that out.
If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
And now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives have to show, this is just a quick share of a realization that I had while prepping this topic. I got thinking about the title of Joe Rogan's show, The Joe Rogan Experience, and it kind of pondered the literal words. It was like the Joe Rogan experience. What is the experience to be Joe Rogan? And I realized that it's [00:49:00] a quite perfectly named show, because Joe Rogan and his audience really do seem to be having a very similar experience, and it goes kind of like this, I realized.
Number one, you start out being genuinely curious, let's say, a commitment to open-mindedness, looking for new information. Great.
Number two, you listen to people, talk for hours and hours and hours. So far so good.
Number three. Remain so open-minded that you effectively learn nothing from what you've heard.
And number four, repeat. Day after day after day.
So if you would like to experience what it's like to be Joe Rogan, you can listen along and have that experience yourself.
On a related topic, I became aware of the skepticism genre many years ago. with shows like The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe and Skepticality, and there might've been more. And I never got into them because I had a gut level aversion to them, but I [00:50:00] couldn't explain why at the time. And to be clear, this isn't an actual critique of the shows. I didn't listen to them. I don't know if they were good or not. I'm just giving a window into how I navigate these sort of judgment calls. Arguably, if I was going to judge them, I should've listened to them. I think maybe I did, dipped in and it was like eh, not for me, or more likely, not a good fit for research for this program in particular.
Anyway, I think I can explain now what my gut was opposed to back when I first came across those kinds of shows that based their whole identity on being skeptical, because the trick of course is that I think being skeptical and critical and questioning are all good things. So why would I feel an aversion to media focused on those positive ideas? The problem isn't about being skeptical. It's basing your identity on being skeptical. That skeeves me out a little bit. Just like [00:51:00] being open-minded is a positive attribute, but defining one's self, identifying as open-minded, can lead to taking those kinds of identities to an extreme in a sort of devil's advocacy feedback loop. Instead of just being thoughtful, you're Skeptical with a capital S. You question everything, trust no one. Taken too far, that kind of thing will drive you into conspiracy world, ironically.
But the same kind of goes in the other direction: open-mindedness, which feels like the opposite of skepticism, being eternally open to the possibility that anything might be right, also basically leads to a sort of unthoughtfulness that opens a person up to conspiracism. And you're like, well, it's an interesting theory and we can never know. So I'll keep an open mind.
Like with so many things, a little bit of a good thing is a good thing, while too much of a good thing stops being so good. Being [00:52:00] open to new ideas is good, as long as one maintains a thoughtfulness that engages skepticism when warranted. Not everything needs to be questioned, nor does every idea deserve credence at all.
And again, I'm not trying to call out those shows I mentioned. Maybe they're all great at drawing that line on what deserves questioning and what deserves trust and, using science and reason to follow it. I'm sure they're fine. I just can't help but get a little bit of the ick whenever a strong identity is formed around a narrow idea, like skepticism. Or atheism is another that sort of comes up in that genre.
And, basically it's just that you don't want to get yourself boxed in with a narrow idea. You need room to pivot when you grow and learn new things and inevitably your perspective shifts.
Now, funnily enough, I've heard stories of people getting the same sort of feeling from the title of [00:53:00] this show. But in my experience, exploring all different parts of the left has given me plenty of latitude to shift my perspective over time. And if you went back and listened from the very beginning, you would think that it is a very different-sounding show then when I started, coming up on, unbelievably I think, 19 years ago.
So I'd say that, if there was someone out there thinking that "the left" is too narrow of an idea to base a show on, then, I'd say they should probably be a bit more open-minded.
SECTION A - THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE AND THE MEDIA
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics. Next up section a the Joe Rogan experience and the media followed by section B trust and belief, section C centrism and section D roots.
How Right Wing Media Took Over America Part 2 - Why America? with Leeja Miller - Air Date 11-18-24
LEEJA MILLER - HOST, WHY AMERICA?: Once tiny blip websites posting fringe conspiracy theories like Breitbart can grow and be used as a tool to shift the overall conservative conversation nationwide. These days, while Fox still reigns supreme on cable, podcasts, YouTube [00:54:00] videos, sub stack newsletters, and boutique platforms like Rumble have become the go to sources for the most extreme right-wing perspectives.
And there's a revolving door between Fox and these more extreme platforms. Many conservative celebrities who rose to fame while working for established media organizations have continued leveraging their profiles after leaving those outfits often in disgrace. Kelly, Bill O'Reilly, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon, whose podcast The War Room was named the top source of misinformation in 2023 by a Brookings Institution study.
The relevance of trusted individual commentators over actual news gathering organizations speaks to a unique moment in American history, at which trust in mass media has reached an all time low. As of this year, only 3. 31 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll said they felt a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.
So instead, Americans are putting their faith in individual content creators who sometimes say things their audiences want to hear. You probably [00:55:00] wouldn't be tuned into this show right now if you didn't understand that impulse. And it never ceases to amaze me how many comments I get from people calling me out to be a for being biased and not presenting fair, equal, and unbiased reporting, despite the fact that I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a fair and balanced source of journalistic reporting.
I'm not a journalist. I care deeply about the factuality of my sources, but this isn't live on the ground reporting. I condense the work of real journalists into easy to digest content and provide additional context that news sources don't, including my legal knowledge as a lawyer. That's the value I provide to you, and I hope to God that in addition to watching my videos, you also read actual news articles from a variety of sources.
But the prevalence of people confusing YouTube commentators for fair, unbiased journalists is indicative of the consequences that happen when you have a deeply divided populace with a poor education system, whose distrust in the news means there's no single source of truth. So they seek the truth out in alternatives.
But the very important difference between me and the right-wing commentators [00:56:00] we're talking about is that not only do I genuinely care about facts, But also that my sponsors don't get to tell me what to say. The same apparently cannot be said for commentators like the Tim Pools of the world. In September 2024, Tim Pool and half a dozen other conservative content creators came under fire after a DOJ indictment alleged that they'd been sponsored by Russian propagandists.
to spew disinformation to their social media audiences. Allegedly, two employees of the state controlled media outlet Russia Today orchestrated a 10 million scheme to distribute English language videos consistent with the Kremlin's goal to weaken U. S. opposition to Russian interests like its war in Ukraine.
Though the DOJ didn't allege any wrongdoing by the influencers and commentators, noting that they were actively deceived about the source of the company's funding, let's not let them off the hook entirely. Because regardless of who was paying, the conservative commentators were still perfectly happy to accept money to spew disinformation.
This wasn't talking points about quality in an ad for a mattress, this was disinformation about current events presented as truths, and [00:57:00] none of these commentators bothered to check the facts or give two shits about what they were actually saying in exchange for money. Allegedly. One of the commentators allegedly created 130 videos for this fake Russian company.
And our collective distrust of news sources that have proven over decades to be credible in exchange for relying on independent, third party, non journalist internet commentators means our media landscape is more vulnerable than ever to the influence of nefarious actors. And the 10 million dollars the Russians stole from us Spent buying out a handful of influencers is small potatoes compared to the kind of funding being pumped through the broader right-wing media ecosystem at any given moment, even with explicit foreign policy goals in mind.
For example, the popular conservative news website, the Epoch times is just one of the U S news outlets aligned with fallen gong, a religious movement that opposes the Chinese state since launching in 2000, its publications, which aim to foment anti CCP sentiment have promoted conspiracies about Democrats, election fraud, and communists.
Though it's ridiculously easy to [00:58:00] make a buck off of right-wing conspiracy peddling and fear mongering, profit isn't always the main driver anyway. It's influence. Because when it comes to controlling the media and the message, Republicans have long understood the importance of having their own media to push their propaganda.
As the conservative movement began to coalesce during the second half of the 20th century, its operatives had a big picture strategy to control the full continuum of information production from universities to think tanks to media outlets. A 1997 report by the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy revealed how conservative organizations had aligned their grant making around a three pronged mission designed to help political conservatives shape public and elite opinion.
Prong one, developing right-wing media outlets. Prong two, developing conservative public affairs programming on public television and radio. And prong three right-wing media critics to exert pressure on the mainstream media into covering the rights political and policy agenda. And it worked. By 1995 before Fox News even entered the [00:59:00] chat media references to conservative think tanks, far outnumbered references to center or left of center research institutions by nearly seven to one.
Even so, Republicans have remained convinced that the liberal media monster poses an urgent, existential threat that must be stopped, and thus continue pumping funding into alternative news organizations. And like political donations, the media money can be difficult to trace. My fantasy of giving you a cute little flowchart, Went out the window when I realized how many non profits, PACs, and donor advised funds are involved in the whole scheme.
That said, some players are significantly more committed to the media influence angle than others, and I think it's worth naming and shaming at least a few. First up is David D. Smith, executive chairman of his daddy's company, Sinclair Broadcast Group. Today, the right-wing media empire is best known for gobbling up local television news outfits and forcing anchors across the country to spew identical Republican talking points.
In 1995, when the company went public, Sinclair had 13 TV stations and 8 markets in its portfolio. Today, it controls 185 [01:00:00] stations in 86 markets. The acceleration point came in 1996, when the Telecommunications Act loosened some restrictions on media ownership, allowing Sinclair to more easily expand into new markets.
Most of Sinclair's holdings are local TV news stations with immense, built in trust with their loyal audiences. And that trust is ripe for abuse. Studies have shown that when Sinclair buys a station, its coverage of national politics increases significantly and the tone of all coverage shifts to the right.
For example, Sinclair stations have followed Trump in characterizing crime as a grave threat, despite violent crime decreasing significantly in recent years. Next up, Philip Anschutz. When he launched the Washington Examiner in 2005, his goal, like Murdoch before him, was to create a conservative alternative, in this case, to the Washington Post.
Anschutz insisted that the Washington Examiner's op ed content was to be produced by conservatives and conservatives only. Today, Anschutz houses the Washington Examiner and his other media properties under Clarity Media Group, a subsidiary of the Anschutz Corporation, which also owns multiple [01:01:00] hotels, oil and gas wells, and, obviously, Coachella.
Yes, the music festival. Next up, Ferris and Dan Wilkes, a pair of evangelical Christian billionaire brothers whose fortunes derive from oil and gas fracking, who have each poured millions of dollars into right-wing media companies that promote climate change denial and push anti LGBTQ dogma. They've given at least 8 million to PragerU alone, the unaccredited edutainment platform with video titles like Prager U was recently approved for use in Florida schools and is angling to appear in more states, including the Wilkes home state of Texas.
In 2015, one of the brothers put up nearly 5 million to help Ben Shapiro launch The Daily Wire. According to scholars who've studied the influence of big oil in the conservative right, the Wilkes brothers have played an outsized role in funding and shaping the conservative and evangelical right in Texas and nationwide.
Because they, like so many Republicans, are keenly aware of how important it is to put your money into your megaphone. And then there's hedge fund billionaire and former computer scientist Robert Mercer, who was [01:02:00] the single biggest donor to Trump's 2016 campaign, throwing 13. 5 million behind him even before it was cool.
Mercer rarely speaks in public and never to journalists. But his spending makes his beliefs clear. He gave 10 million to help Steve Bannon usher in a new era at Breitbart. He's a major donor to the Media Research Group, an organization that calls itself a media watchdog on a mission to correct liberal media bias.
And he has a 10 million stake in Cambridge Analytica, the company famous for collecting personal data from millions of unsuspecting Facebook users to target political ads for Trump's 2016 campaign. Yikes. Next, there's shipping supply magnet Dick Uline. This Tea Party Republican was the top conservative donor for the 2022 election cycle, to the tune of 82 million.
And his foundation supports conservative media outfits including Real Clear Media, which has 14 sub brands, including the polling aggregator Real Clear Polling, and the right-wing news site The Daily Caller. Both of those outlets are also supported by numerous other major conservative donors, but if I kept naming and shaming individual billionaires [01:03:00] funding right-wing media, we'd be here all day.
So instead, let's round this out by looking at a vehicle instead of a person. Donors Trust is a donor advised fund that's been called the dark money ATM of the conservative movement. It's given money to the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and Leonard Leo's 85 Fund, to name just a few. Donor advised funds are basically charitable giving middlemen.
Instead of giving directly to a foundation, rich people put their money into a donor advised fund, which then takes their advice, recommendations, donor advised. about where the funds should go. It's a win win for the rich person who gets to claim the tax deduction immediately, whether or not the money has actually been distributed yet, avoid the administrative aspects of giving, and duck capital gains taxes.
Perhaps most importantly though, it puts a smokescreen between the rich person and their priorities, because donor advised funds aren't required to disclose their donors. In 2021, Donor Trust took in more than 1 million. And most of it came from just two anonymous donors. So though we can name and shame, we don't even know how much some of these people have [01:04:00] actually given.
Jen Senko on The Brainwashing of My Dad - CounterSpin - Air Date 9-20-24
JEN SENKO: My parents, in 2010, they moved to a senior community and somewhere in the, in the move my dad's radio. Broke and he put it in the garage and it just sat there and he didn't fix it.
So immediately he was sans his three hour lunches with Rush Limbaugh. So. He kind of actually mellowed a little bit right away, and we didn't want to remind him, you know, you've got to fix your radio, whatever. So, that was a really, really, really big, big thing. Probably, I'd say that maybe the first biggest thing.
Then the second thing that happened is, I guess it was a few months later. The TV in the kitchen that they watched during lunch, uh, was very old and my mom got a new one and she programmed the remote and they had stickies all over them, you know, do this, do that, do that. So my dad didn't bother. He just.
Left on what she [01:05:00] had on. I think she watched MSNBC or just different, you know, various news shows. They always watch the news and then might have been a year later. I'm not sure. Sometime later, my dad went into the hospital for a kidney stone and he was there for a week. And they had these really old computers, and my mom was afraid that the computers were getting clogged up, and she asked me to delete some of his email.
I said, look, they just, they just keep coming. You have to unsubscribe them. And I don't have time to do that. So she did it, but she added something. She not only unsubscribed him from all this vile email from, I mean, dozens of hard rate Republican organizations. She. Subscribed him to what she was reading, independent, more progressive media emails, [01:06:00] like alternate reader supported news, truth out, that kind of thing.
And when he got back from the hospital, I don't think he noticed they were just political emails, and he was reading them. You know, he had a little bit of both, whatever. And then one day. It was after lunch, I think he had been watching Obama on the news. He said to my mom, I like that guy. You know, he's pretty good.
And lo and behold, he ended up voting for him. Okay. So the point isn't that. His politics became aligned with ours. The point was that my dad was like free and happy and singing and, and not angry and not hateful. And. It was the last few years of his life, and we became really close where it had really kind of [01:07:00] damaged us and damaged relationships before this media is so potent as it's meant to be.
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, longtime FAIR analyst Steve Rendell, who along with FAIR founder Jeff Cohen, Well, here's in this work, Steve is an expert in talk radio, and he would often describe its power as having to do with the way it was consumed, which I think your experience just underscores, you know, um, in the case of your father, he started listening on a long solo commute to work for other folks.
It's going out to the barn with their brother. But. You know, it has to do with the way certain kinds of media, not just the way they talk to you, but the way they talk to you in a sort of isolated format. And, and this is where I think the book helps people see that this isn't accidental, that the messages that we're coming through, uh, It wasn't just your father.
There was a game plan. It wasn't an unintended effect. The effect that it had on your father, making him angry, making him hateful and making him [01:08:00] particularly hateful towards particular groups. All of that was intentional.
JEN SENKO: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Say it or not, Hillary Clinton, she was spot on in 1998 when she said there was a vast right-wing conspiracy.
But, the conspiracy wasn't just against her husband. Basically, far right libertarian Republicans, you know, starting back in the 2000s, 50s, actually, after Brown versus Board of Education figured out that in order to affect the change they wanted, which was basically one party rule by billionaire white men, they would have to create distrust in mainstream media and one.
Major way to do that was they had to label it as liberal, and that changed a lot of things right there. It was a very successful campaign. Mainstream or corporate media fell right into [01:09:00] the trap. They folded, they leaned right, you know, they bent over backwards to not be labeled liberal media, and it's stuck today, and it's like they were like abused spouses, like, uh, I'm sorry, what did we do wrong?
Right. But they didn't know that or understand that there was this plan. So. Control over the media was an easy peasy way to get ordinary citizens into voting against their own interests and in line with billionaires. But eventually, of course, it metastasized to what it is today. Like a weed, it took over the whole garden.
But the plan, if you
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: want me to go into some detail and mention some of the points, pick some highlights, you know, there, the book does go through a number of landmarks in the creation of this right-wing media machine. We're talking about history here and not guesses about things. These are things that are documented, but there are a few things that stand out as, you know, Important and moving us toward the situation [01:10:00] we have now, right?
JEN SENKO: So, in 1969, after Goldwater lost to Johnson read, Irvine started aim, accuracy and media supposed media watchdog group. It was really more of a media tactic. Dog group. They still exist today. They were the ones that first took on, um, this goal to discredit the media as liberal. Interestingly enough, that same year, Roger Ailes, the creator of Fox, he was working with Nixon to improve his television image.
And anyway, the following year, he submitted a memo to the White House, which had a scheme to create a new show that would put the GOP in a good light. Later on, then, that. Came in handy when Rupert Murdoch hired him to create Fox, but then the next year was Lewis Powell memo. This was monumental and it was secret.
At first, until a journalist discovered it, but nobody [01:11:00] paid attention to it because it was just, it was like Gerbil said about the big lie. Like, you can't believe that people would actually do this, but it basically outlined steps to take for the vast right-wing conspiracy. It was designed as a anti New Deal blueprint to undo, like, the New Deal and squelch all the social changes that were going on at the time.
You know, they were going to influence college campuses, the pulpits, the media, corporate influence over scientists, and to create and fund think tanks, basically, to push the free market philosophy. Right. And then there was, in the 80s, the creation of the CNP, which was Christian based, and thus the marriage with evangelicals happened.
So the group got bigger. Then Reagan made Rupert Murdoch a citizen. Then he killed the Fairness Doctrine, and then the next [01:12:00] year after the Fairness Doctrine was killed, we had Rush Limbaugh go national, and he reigned for decades, poisoning the minds of, I think his following was like 20 million people, not to speak of, they caught him in the military, so poisoning Their minds too, but then the final big blow came with Clinton and Gingrich and their telecommunications reform act of 1996, which opened up media ownership and cross ownership.
So all the big media companies got even bigger and squeezed out. Any, like, independent ownership, and then after that, just eight months later, Fox News was hashed. That's it in a nutshell. I do go into a lot more detail in the book.
JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: The book covers a lot of this history, and I just want to underscore the book and the film are not negative, they're colorful and engaging and they're forward looking, you know, which I think is, is maybe [01:13:00] the most important thing.
And, and so maybe to bring us up, you know, to now, I know a lot of listeners will be listening and thinking, Oh, you know, Fox fired Tucker Carlson. And so, you know, maybe that means things are going in a good direction. But you and I know that whatever Carlson was fired for, it wasn't for years of Sewing hatred against black and brown people against, uh, it wasn't years of punching down because that has been his stock in trade for years.
So, you also, and not alone, suggest that what we are learning around Fox's admissions, which are still coming out, around the lawsuit, around Dominion and the voting machines, that that ought to remind us that Fox is not caring about its own viewers in the same way that it didn't care about your dad and that it doesn't care about Lots of other folks.
"Burn The Boats" is a Funeral for Joe Rogan's Comedy Career - The Elephant Graveyard - Air Date 8-11-24
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: I gotta say, this special is terrible and beyond salvaging.
Possibly career ending.
JOE ROGAN: You can't just put lipstick on, now you get shit in the women's room. Like, oh my [01:14:00] god, I'll send it to hate rally.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Yeah, actually, kinda is. Doesn't help that this guy looks exactly like Mussolini.
JOE ROGAN: I'm not prejudiced! I think it's China. I think they got us with TikTok. Craziest thing is they make our phones.
That's supposed to be our enemy, and they make our phones. Do you know how dumb that is? I just want to say, honestly, I admire what they've done.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: A lot of people missed this, but the Joe Rogan Spotify deal was in part financed by the Chinese Communist Party. Spotify is owned in part by Tencent, whose CEO, Pony Ma, has openly vowed to uphold the goals and desires of the CCP.
So it's odd that Joe would complain about this TikTok China stuff because he is most likely, whether he realizes it or not, a weapon of propaganda used by the Chinese government to sow chaos in America. All you gotta do is follow the money. That's the one good thing I learned from Joe's podcast. And now something starts to happen that, and I can't believe I'm even saying this, but Joe actually goes full Brendan Schaub with this wonderful Chinese voice he does here.
Uncle!
BRENDAN SCHAUB: [01:15:00] Look, there's Harry! Mr. Schaub, I have to numb your lip. You need many, many stitches. This'll be worth paying your life. With all his big criticisms about our infrastructure! Well,
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: that is rough. But at least he's not straight up copying Brendan's jokes, right?
BRENDAN SCHAUB: My life would be so much easier if I was just gay as shit.
I wish I was gay. It
JOE ROGAN: looks way easier.
BRENDAN SCHAUB: We'd like play video games all day. We'd work out. At night we'd fuck each other. You're hanging out with only guys? No one can get pregnant?
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: That is a low that is so low where I never expected Joe to go. Stealing from Brendan Schaub. My god, if that is not the death knell of a comedy career, then I don't know what is.
Brendan Schaub quit comedy after releasing that special, and it only stands to reason that if Joe is stealing from it, then he ought to do the same. Ugh, he just won't stop screaming. This joke doesn't need to be yelled. If everything is yelled, then you can't emphasize anything. So this whole thing just kind of becomes white noise.
It all [01:16:00] just flows and blends together meaninglessly. It's stimulating, but meaningless. Which is basically what his podcast is, a screensaver for the brains of failed warehouse forklift operators. Sat at home chewing on oxys and collecting pogey. Alright, what else did Danny Benito say here?
JOE ROGAN: If you're getting your vaccine advice from me
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Oh, great.
JOE ROGAN: Is that really my fault?
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Next he goes into his routine of I'm just a shithead comedian, don't take me seriously.
JOE ROGAN: I'm a professional shit talker, okay? Don't take my advice!
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: This special is just PR now, this is not comedy. He knows nobody normal listens to his show anymore so he can't reach them on his podcast.
But Normie's watched Netflix, and a lot of them are gonna be checking out what that guy who's podcast they can't believe they used to listen to and have to try and remember to whom they admitted listening to it and Cringe with pure embarrassment about that. They yeah, they want to see what that guy is up to. So this is Joe's chance to get some good damage control in
JOE ROGAN: They tried to use that quote as proof that [01:17:00] I'm homophobic
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: He's literally just reenacting one of his many Instagram apology soliloquies.
And, it is just so fucking tedious to listen to. He gets into his famous n word controversy. And sorry to say, he's still doing that propaganda where he tries to convince everyone that he only said it when quoting other people saying it. Which obviously is a lie, here's a clip from the first ever Joe Rogan podcast.
Once, once I get the internet to do it, I'll make it. I'll make it HD so you can see how ugly I am. That n a's ugly. They forgot to delete that one during Spotify's extensive Operation N Word cleanup.
JOE ROGAN: Yeah, nobody gives a fuck about context! So, I'm not racist, but if I was gonna quote Oh,
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Joe, you should have just let this one go.
This PR is embarrassing.
JOE ROGAN: I'm not a racist. That's what's so insane about this. I thought everybody would understand. Here's the thing about these words, you can't say them.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Damn, six years of honing this material and he's gotta pad the back half of the special with PR. Oh, that's bad. But he still [01:18:00] doesn't stray too far from the gay stuff, as that shadow continues to seep out.
I love gay men! Joe's shadow is now in total control, and is just leaking all over the place. And now, with the shadow in control here, he's gonna steal another joke, this time from Bill Burr.
JOE ROGAN: And the light turns green, but the scooters keep coming, and you just want to go to jail! Yeah, I have a lot of fucked up thoughts, man.
I do. You ever drive down the street and see like 30 people up on a sidewalk, and you just think
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Now that's at least two stolen jokes in this special, so that's bad. And this is the guy who got fired. If someone steals a riff from
JOE ROGAN: a song, that shit's in the news constantly. Motherfuckers steal shit and make it on HBO.
Netflix. Put it on television.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Not only did he steal material from Brendan Shaw, but he really just became the new Mencia tonight. I can't believe it. Talk about full circle. The shit hero's journey. So who is going to step up and be the new Joe Rogan to the new Carlos Mencia? I nominate Joe List. [01:19:00] Come on Joe, stand up for comedy.
Go after Joe Rogan aggressively, please.
JOE ROGAN: I send my wife pictures of other dudes dicks.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: This is, uh, please Joe, please, we don't need to know this. And as his deepest secrets are spilling out against his will, Joe is fully lactating now. Leaking both psychically and physically.
JOE ROGAN: San Antonio, I love you to death, very much!
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: And now it's all over. It's finally done. Six years. And they really dipped into the budget for this closing credits music. Which sounds like it's ripped straight from the Ken Griffey Jr. game for Super Nintendo. Well, I guess if I had one sentence that could sum this thing up, it'd be,
JOE ROGAN: I hate dumb people that are confident, you know.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Try again. I
JOE ROGAN: hate dumb people that are wrong and confident.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: And now that that's done, every comic on every podcast is going to spend the next six months raving about how Joe murdered and killed and massacred and chopped up all the bodies into little tiny chunks, threw them in the Austin River, whatever [01:20:00] that's called.
BRENDAN SCHAUB: Laugh out loud. Yeah, dude. I like it because the him saying the N word. So funny. So funny. It said the N word. Oh, it's so good. It was so good, man. That's good. That's good. It's so good. Yeah. Watch. And then he is talking about the word retard.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: They'll kiss the ring for that podcast invite and the cycle of comedy shit will go on and on and on.
But like we've discussed here before, everything has its cycle. Joe has completely run out of ideas. And his mind is ruined by social media. It can happen. It can. Joe has never been very good at comedy, but somehow he gets to be the number one guy, the big gatekeeper. He's our era's Johnny Carson and getting the invite to Joe's podcast is the new bringing you over to the couch or whatever.
This special will go down as Joe's last. He's like 60 or 70 years old and it's clear that his heart isn't in it anymore. This thing was just a greatest hits montage of the worst era of this guy's podcast, condensed into an hour. Every grade [01:21:00] has their final moments, and sometimes we don't even realize it's a final moment until it's already passed us by.
Wayne Gretzky had his final goal, his final shift. Michael Jordan. His final dunk. There
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: he is, back in the back
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: door! Elvis. His final song.
The last time you ever pick up your son. Your final summer sunset. And Joe Rogan. His final stool hump. Gotta go back to 2016. We didn't even realize it at the time, but we were witnessing Joe's final stool fucking. Gotta appreciate every moment like it's the last, guys. He didn't mount that thing once during this special.
So disappointing. You gotta play the hits, Joe, come on. And now he's this sad Charles Foster Kane figure. All the money in the world and never satisfied. All his decent friends scared away. The only friends he has left [01:22:00] just kiss his ass and tell him he's amazing. That's the only explanation for him thinking this was his greatest set of all time, leading up to this live stream.
No real friend would allow Joe to gringo poppy himself. Now this Netflix thing is getting panned by just about everyone. And despite Joe insisting that he doesn't read comments, it's obvious that he does. And the feedback from this thing is going to wound him deeply. And the weird thing is, he didn't even need to do this.
He's got more money than he knows what to do with. He just did this because he still wants people to think he's funny. This guy literally cries when he talks about becoming a stand up and getting passed at the comedy store. He wants to be a comic so bad, and he's just getting torn apart out there.
JOE ROGAN: Who knows what kind of bullshit act I would have had.
If, uh, I didn't run into Mitzi, if I didn't get past this door. One of the reasons why she passed me is a trick that we all used to do. I learned from the Todd. He would sit in the back of the room and he would sat next to Mitzi while Mitzi watched me and he would laugh hard. I [01:23:00] went up there and I did my set and he laughed really hard.
Mitzi just grabbed my arm and she goes, You're really funny.
Wow. Call in for spots. You're paid regularly. Wow. That was more important to me than any TV show. Like, the TV show was just a lot of money. It was like, I couldn't sleep that night. I was like, I'm a paid regular. Like, I'm a real comedian. I'm a real comedian. I'm a real comedian. I'm at the store. I'm a real comedian.
I'm at the comedy store. Dude, I always knew I was going there. It was a religious call. And the comedy store was terrible. And there was all these people that she passed that were like, I'm telling you. Talentless. January 6th, lock em up, lock em all up.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: The sad thing is, despite it being the meaning of life or whatever, Joe's legacy will not be his comedy.
He will be remembered as the stool humper who won the entertainment industry lottery, then voluntarily let the world collectively watch him go insane [01:24:00] on the internet over the course of thousands of hours of podcasting. A cautionary tale of money chasing, Dunning Kruger, and unreconciled childhood trauma.
SECTION B - TRUST AND BELIEF
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B trust and the belief.
Barron Lerner on challenges to physician expertise and restoring trust in the medical profession. - NEJM Interviews - Air Date 8-14-24
STEPHEN MORRISSEY - HOST, NEJM INTERVIEWS: Dr. Lerner, at what point in history and for what reasons did physicians initially begin to benefit from trust in their expertise and authority?
BARRON LERNER: I would say the huge rise in physician authority and trust occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
That's when the germ theory of disease became established and various technological innovations came into medical practice. Things like vaccinations and antibiotics. And all of a sudden doctors could really accomplish a lot for patients who had various diseases. Prior to that, there were some effective treatments, but not a lot, and patients often chose to stay away from doctors and hospitals.
But the big change really comes when you've [01:25:00] got scientifically proven interventions that can truly help patients and get them better.
STEPHEN MORRISSEY - HOST, NEJM INTERVIEWS: And then, as you explain in your article, social movements began confronting the medical field and rejecting medical expertise in the 1970s. So, what were those movements pushing back against, and in what ways did the medical field undermine its own authority?
BARRON LERNER: The social movements I was referring to outside of medicine would be things like the Civil Rights Movement, anti Vietnam War protests, and second wave feminism. And if you think about all those social movements, they all challenged people in positions of authority, whether it was men, whether it was soldiers, whether it was white people and said, you need to do better.
And that is the exact sort of change that happened in medicine. It would make sense that patients, research subjects, and other activists began to look more closely at doctors and the practice of medicine. And what they often found, much to their [01:26:00] dismay, were things that weren't very good. Treatments that were done based on not enough scientific evidence, evidence of coercion to be in research trials, and most ominously, instances where there were with sexism and racism done by the medical profession to its own very own patients and human research subjects.
STEPHEN MORRISSEY - HOST, NEJM INTERVIEWS: And then more recently, what's been the effect of the internet's empowering patients and promoting access to both information and misinformation?
BARRON LERNER: Well, the internet changed pretty much everything. I think any practicing doctor knows that these days for good and for bad. Let's start with the good. The good is I'm all for empowered patients being involved in their medical care.
I think the days of paternalism, when patients went passively into doctor's offices and just took their information and did what they were told is gone, and that's for good reason. It's good to have patients who are engaged, who want patient [01:27:00] autonomy, and one way to do that is to learn about your diseases, and the internet can be a very good way to do that.
So I am glad when patients come in and challenge me and say, I read this on the internet, what do you think about it? And oftentimes there's stuff that I don't even know about that I can look into. That's the good. The bad is the flip side, which is what is on the internet is of unbelievably variable quality.
And so for every good article that's written that suggests something, there might be five or ten even that portray things that are not true or very speculative or downright unfair to doctors and medical practice. So I think most patients know that. But it's hard to sift through it, and certainly patients who are very sick or very desperate will understandably latch on to things they read online, even if they're not true.
STEPHEN MORRISSEY - HOST, NEJM INTERVIEWS: And then, how did challenges to the Medical Professions Authority affect the response to [01:28:00] COVID 19 and the public health measures that were taken at that point?
BARRON LERNER: COVID was really interesting. Even as someone, as a historian who's looked at the doctor patient relationship over time in public health interventions, I was surprised at the degree to which seemingly reasonable measures that, certainly at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, were questioned right away, were rejected.
I think public health officials were surprised. This exact sorts of suggestions that had been made for past epidemics, like masking, and separating people, closing schools, staying home, that there was no grace period, almost, in which all of those things got accepted, at least for a little while. And from the very beginning, People were challenging the authority of doctors to say this and the validity of what they were saying.
And I think that built on what we were talking about before, that there has been this growing suspicion [01:29:00] of things that doctors have done, and the medical profession has sort of fallen off its pedestal. And when COVID came in, that was often the response that occurred, a skepticism, a mistrust. As opposed to saying, Oh my God, there's a terrible pandemic here.
We'll do whatever the public health officials say. So it really turned things on its head.
STEPHEN MORRISSEY - HOST, NEJM INTERVIEWS: So finally COVID taught us that the usual response to a crisis, providing the best scientific information was no longer adequate, what steps can physicians take to better understand their patients values and connect with them in a way that could help restore the trust that we need.
BARRON LERNER: There's a number of types of things I think that doctors can do and I urge people to take a look at my perspective because I'm not an expert on this type of intervention, but people are talking about things like trust. Things like values, things that don't necessarily get talked about in doctor patient interactions.
So, as you alluded to in the old [01:30:00] days, it was, what's the science, tell me doctor, and I'm going to do what you tell me because you're an expert and you're an expert in the science. But now I think we need to talk to patients better. We need to understand what it is that influences their decisions. Whether or not they're decisions that we disagree with or even agree with.
What is it that patients bring to their medical encounters? What are their values? What things are important to them? This means oftentimes asking very broad questions instead of narrow questions. Things like, are there past instances in which you thought doctors may have violated your trust? What are positive things about your life that you value that medicine can participate in?
Do you have particular religious or moral opinions about the type of medical care that you get? Those sort of very broad questions, non judgmental, and I think [01:31:00] that this can open up much better channel of communication between doctors and patients. All the time, but particularly when we're discussing things like the COVID vaccine, other sort of early or experimental interventions that are not proven, that are new, and just step back and try to have a dialogue about what's important.
What are the values? And in that way, I think we can gain back some of the trust that we've lost.
Democracy Dies in Disbelief - Steve Shives - Air Date 11-10-24
STEVE SHIVES - HOST, STEVE SHIVES: Years ago, when I first started doing YouTube videos, I was active in the online atheist community. And if there's one thing the online atheist community taught me, it's that most of the people who got internet famous from it were huge pieces of shit. But if there are two things the online atheist community taught me, it's a fairly decent layman's understanding of logical fallacies.
Atheists, particularly of the Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, New Atheist type, love [01:32:00] logical fallacies, and it's not difficult to see why. Logical fallacies are neat, they're simple, they're basic contradictions in the thinking underlying an argument. What you're saying can't be true because of this. This position is nonsensical.
Because of that, your argument is invalid. Appealing to logical fallacies is like a shortcut to proving someone objectively wrong. They're easy, and that's why so many people in the online atheist community favored them, because the online atheist community was overflowing with smug, stunningly lazy intellects.
But I'm not here to talk about the online atheist community. I'm here to talk about logical fallacies, and one logical fallacy in particular, and how it relates to the presidential election we just had here in the United States. The fallacy I'm talking about is called the argument from incredulity, and it's pretty simple.
When someone commits the argument from Incredulity Fallacy, they're saying that something can't be true [01:33:00] because they can't believe it, or because they can't understand it. This sort of argument pops up a lot in Conspiracy Theorist, thinking, People landed on the moon? I don't believe it. The Twin Towers fell because a couple of planes crashed into them?
How gullible are you? One shooter fired all those shots at JFK? Yeah, right. What makes this a fallacy is the fact that reality is not contingent on our capacity to accept it or to grasp it. What happens, happens. What is true, is true. Whether we can bring ourselves to believe it or not, there's a lot of incredulity flying around in American politics at the moment.
For the past few years, the most obvious examples of it have been coming from the right Donald Trump refusing to accept that he lost the 2020 election. Joe Biden? How could I have lost to this guy? There's no way so many more people voted for him than for me. That's an argument from incredulity. It's fed by toxic ego and [01:34:00] narcissism and entitlement, but ultimately that's what it is, an argument from incredulity.
I didn't lose, because I can't imagine any way I could have lost. But at the same time, there was quite a bit of incredulity on the left, as well. How did this guy get the nomination again? Why are so many people still supporting him? Since Trump won the election last week, that kind of incredulity has only been amplified.
And here are two important points I want to make. First, there's nothing inherently wrong with incredulity itself it's an emotional response to a surprising or overwhelming situation. It's fine to be incredulous at the election of Donald Trump. It's fine to think, how did this happen? How could this have happened again?
I'm right there with you. But here's the second point we need to remember. Our incredulity won't protect us. The incredulity of Democrats and Progressives leading up to the election was not a factor in our favor. [01:35:00] He can't possibly win again, can he? After everything he's done? After all the horrible things he's said?
After the criminal prosecutions? The national disgrace that he's become? The American people can't possibly be this dumb! And yet, the incredulity from our side since the election isn't helping, either. Harris got ten million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020? That can't be right! Someone must have hacked the voter machines to steal the election for Trump.
Okay, Hey, if compelling evidence is uncovered indicating that actually happened, I'll certainly have no trouble believing it. It's not that I think Trump or someone on his side wouldn't do that. But I don't need to believe they did do it in order to account for the election result, and neither should you.
So, what country have you been living in? You know the most dangerous expression of incredulity I've heard in the wake of Trump winning the election this time? [01:36:00] This isn't who we are. And you know what makes that so dangerous? It's the same thing that was said by many of the same people when Trump won in 2016.
Being incredulous in the aftermath of a shocking event is understandable, but when that same event happens over and over again and you still can't believe that it happened, it's time to open your eyes. If we want to turn this around, if we want to win the next election assuming there is one, but that's a whole other problem we need to shake off our incredulity and accept some uncomfortable truths.
One of those truths is that Donald Trump's message our problems are easily solved, immigrants and other outgroups are to blame, I will fix everything is genuinely appealing to a lot of people. You and I may find it pandering and disingenuous and juvenile, not to mention bigoted, but that message is compelling to many people in a nation of easily frightened [01:37:00] fools which is what we are.
The incredulity of Republicans, and others on the right, won't protect us, either. When people on our side express fear and anxiety about what could happen during a second Trump administration, the response we often get from their side is, oh, calm down, he's not even going to do most of that stuff. Yeah, he said he was going to be a dictator on day one.
He said he was going to use the federal government to go after his enemies. He said he was going to deport 20 million people. He's not actually going to do it. That attitude didn't stop him, did it? It didn't stop him from trying to implement a ban on Muslims entering the country? It didn't stop him from appointing Supreme Court justices who ruled to overturn Roe v.
Wade. It didn't stop him from trying to steal the 2020 election after he lost it. If someone voted for Trump because they thought he would lower the price of milk and eggs, and they hand waved all the fascism he has repeatedly promised to do because they don't [01:38:00] believe he's actually going to do it, they're one of those fools I was just referring to.
Speaking of fascism and when we speak of Donald Trump, fascism is always the subject there's another statement of incredulity that if we hope to survive these next four years and come out of them in a position to begin repairing the damage that's about to be done, we absolutely must guard ourselves against.
It can't happen here. I think this might be the most threatening form of American exceptionalism. A lot of people who support Trump argue that he isn't a fascist because, well, he can't be. This is America. We don't do that here. Trump and his incoming administration are going to take advantage of that incredulity and use it as a shield as they attempt to impose fascism, because they know what they are, no matter what they choose to [01:39:00] call it.
Our institutions won't protect us. An institution is a group of people that's all it is, a group of people operating according to rules and norms made by people that can be changed by people or ignored by people. Trump and his people have shown that they are willing, even eager, to light those institutions and their rules and norms on fire.
They're about to get another opportunity to do just that. I don't tell you this to discourage you, or to bum you out. I'm telling you to remind you, whether you need the reminder or not, that you refusing to believe things will get that bad isn't going to stop things from getting that bad. If you care, and you should, if you don't want Trump and his allies to succeed in destroying our democratic institutions and replacing them with autocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, and you shouldn't, then you need to get involved.
Jonathan Rauch: A Defense of Truth Part 1 - The Commonwealth Club of California - Air Date 7-31-21
JONATHAN RAUCH: Humans are bad at sorting out our biases, correcting our errors.
We [01:40:00] believe what makes sense for us to believe in terms of our identity, our social status, what gives us pleasure. We even perceive what helps our status. The result of that is if you just leave it to people in an unmediated marketplace, you get this hate speech, propaganda, ignorance, and so forth. And this is, this is a well known fact.
You need more than just sort of open exchange. You need structure. You need this guy. Of course, this is James Madison, uh, the leading architect of the U. S. Constitution. It turns out that most of the same principles that make the U. S. Constitution work to create a democratic republic that survived, what, 250 years and now has 10 times the population, I'm sorry, 100 times the population of Madison State, you need a lot of structure, you need institutions.
You need norms, you need incentives for people to behave in pro social ways. You know, stuff like if you lose the election, you're willing to live with that. Well, the same thing is true in the realm of knowledge. Around the same [01:41:00] time as Madison, we set up a regime to settle our differences of opinion, figure out what's true.
Um, most of the first half of the book is all about that. This is not just an analogy, not just a metaphor. The Constitution of Knowledge is not written down like the U. S. Constitution. It has rules that do a lot of the same things. Checks and balances, forces compromise, distributes authority, uses impersonal rules instead of personal rulers.
Builds institutions that regulate behavior and prevent chaos. And the result of that's what I call the reality based community. We're part of that today doing the session. Bruce Kane is part of that at Stanford. I'm part of it at Brookings. Reality based community is a global network of people and institutions who use impersonal rules to hunt for error.
We're talking here big for our science and research and academia. That's number one. Number two, journalism. Number three, government. That's everything from statistical agencies to administrative law courts. [01:42:00] And finally, number four, the law itself. The concept of a fact originated in law, and jurisprudence is all about finding facts in adversarial ways, showing where these are the things that keep us as a society anchored to truth, tethered to reality.
They keep us out of constant warfare with each other or going down the route of of Jonestown, uh, where we split off into separate realities. There are a lot of advantages to the constitution of knowledge. Objective knowledge is the result of the constitution of knowledge. It fills our libraries, our databases, if all humans died out. Aliens could come to this planet, reconstitute it all and use all that knowledge.
It exists independently of us. This is a transformative technology for humans because it allows us to make knowledge, build on that knowledge, accumulate it, bequeath it. That's what's made our, our ability to transcend our small tribes. Point number two. So what's going on today? You're being manipulated.
You know, you hear [01:43:00] a lot of people say they talk about polarization and cynicism and hostility toward institutions. And they say, well, is us, where do we go wrong? Is it stagnant working class white wages? Is it the decline of religion? Is it the decline of unions? Is it Vietnam? And. Watergate and inflation and the 2008 crash.
Well, I want to focus on something else. Those are all conversations we have, but I want to focus you on information warfare. That's propaganda and disinformation that organizes and manipulates the social and media environment for political advantage. The goals of doing this to dominate, divide, Disorient and demoralize the target population.
The methods are to weaponize cognitive and social vulnerabilities. For example, our tendency, um, to rise to our defense when we're outraged or insulted, or our tendency to find explanations [01:44:00] when things go against us, even if they're wrong, our tendency to use social coercion, to silence people. We don't like our ability to get confused.
If we're swamped with too much information, all of these can be weaponized.
I'm going to just focus because I think it's the most important one right now on a single aspect of this. There are many more in the book and they're all important to talk about disinformation and a specific type of disinformation or class of disinformation. This is Stephen Bannon. He was an advisor to Trump.
He worked in the administration for a while. His famous quotation here, the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone, flood the zone with. Well, that doesn't sound very sophisticated, but it turns out it's a propaganda technique that was perfected by the Russians.
It's called the fire hose of falsehood. Now, time is precious, but it's still worth spending a minute to listen to a [01:45:00] Soviet KGB, senior defector explain how this works. I think you'll find it chilling.
FORMER (?) RUSSIAN SPY: But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my, uh, opinion and opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85 percent is a slow process, which we call either ideological subversion, or active measures. KGB, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, To such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.
[01:46:00] Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Uh, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures.
JONATHAN RAUCH: It's pretty chilling stuff. It's very psychologically sophisticated.
It works. This is the Russians using it in 2018 when they sent operatives to poison a defector in the UK. Uh, they had explanations for that. In fact, they had a lot of them, Britain poisoned him, Ukraine poisoned him. It was an accident, suicide, revenge, not a nerve agent. Russia didn't produce a nerve agent, a different nerve agent.
They fling up swarms of falsehoods, concocted theories, red herrings intended not so much to persuade people as to bewilder them. This creates cynicism, mistrust. People don't know what to believe. They become open to demagoguery, [01:47:00] cynicism, polarization. It's good stuff or maybe bad stuff. Well, who else does that?
This is 2016 political campaign. The numbers are the same. If you go through the end of the campaign, according to PolitiFact, 26%, about a quarter of what Hillary Clinton said was mostly or entirely false. That's too high. But that meant most of what she said was true. The equivalent figure for Donald Trump, 71%, at least mostly false.
If the man was opening his mouth, he was probably telling you something that was entirely or mostly false. Why would he do that? Some kind of weird psychopathy? Some just sort of craziness? No, I don't think so. This is his presidency. We've never seen anything like this outpouring of false or misleading claims over 30, 000 over the course of his presidency.
And look at the run up. Before November of 2021, that's the Stop the Steal campaign. [01:48:00] That's the unleashing of a misinformation, of a disinformation campaign on a scale we've never imagined before in the United States. It starts in April of 2020 with the attack on mail in voting, which is irrational from the point of view of maximizing Republican votes, since lots of senior Republicans vote by mail.
But very rationally, if your real goal is post election to inflect the media, media environment because you expect to lose. This is Donald Trump's Twitter account. I just picked a random day. This is December 10th. These are seven tweets. Uh, sorry. Uh, yeah, seven tweets. The election is a fraud. Doesn't end with Donald Trump.
This is my hometown of Arizona, the veterans Memorial Coliseum, where I sat and saw many sons games as a kid. That is a so called audit of the vote going on. It's not only unnecessary, it's being done by an unqualified firm called cyber ninjas, which has. Whose president has devoured that the election was stolen using unorthodox methods.
It's pure propaganda [01:49:00] theater. And as you can see from the headline here, the goal here is to spread a conspiracy theory and use this as theater to do that. And it's working Republican officials are making pilgrimage to figure out. How they can replicate this in their own state. This is very sophisticated stuff, right?
And it's never been deployed in America. We are in an epidemiological sense, a naive population, meaning that we don't have any antibodies against this kind of warfare. That's how we get to 75 percent of Republicans believing the election was stolen. And notice in this kind of information warfare, you don't have to convince everybody that something that's false is actually true.
You're happy if you just confuse them. And it turns out that 40 percent of independents also are unsure who won the election. They say, well, we don't really know because they've heard so much of this stuff. The deliverables of this kind of campaign are cynicism. Like the woman who says there's no real news sources anymore.
I don't trust anything. [01:50:00] Demoralization. I guess I would have to say that I'm completely confused as to who is lying and who is telling the truth. I just feel helpless. If you make people feel helpless, if you demoralize them, you demobilize them. They cannot work against you. You can dominate them.
SECTION C - CENTRISM
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next section C centrism.
How "Moderates" Serve The Right - Second Thought - Air Date 12-17-21
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: Over time, movements that start out on the left, like liberalism, republicanism, or even parliamentary monarchy, become solidly right-wing movements without ever changing their ideology because they replace the old right and become contested by the new, more radical left. In such a position, Centrism becomes nothing more than a conservative ideology.
Its prime directive is resistance to change. And as a result, it's not, as they claim, neither left nor right. It's just right-wing. It might have been on the left in yesterday's society, but now that the goals of the old left are the established order and have become the new conservative right, preserving present society with only incremental and [01:51:00] moderate reform, which is what centrists believe in, becomes a profoundly conservative worldview.
And it makes sense that this is where moderacy settles. Because it has to compromise between two completely opposing ideas. Changing society in a new way, or keeping it the same. Think about classic centrist statements like, we just need a mix of socialism and capitalism. An idea that makes absolutely zero sense when you understand the two ideologies and that their base disagreement about the ownership of the means of production makes them fundamentally incompatible.
Okay, this all might seem a little confusing. Let's get away from the the theory for a second and look at something concrete, like the Biden brand of centrism.
JOE BIDEN: I know how to make government work,
because I've done it, across the aisle, to reach consensus, to help make government work in the past. I can do that again with your help. For me, to me, as itself [01:52:00] is not
a dirty word. Consensus is not a weakness. It's the only way our founders down the road there thought it was the only way we could govern. It was necessary. It was designed the way the Constitution says it. It requires consensus. This speech is Biden's free bird. Biden, like pretty much every centrist, is a big fan of compromise.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: Reaching across the aisle to get past political gridlock is the doctrine of American centrism. And when you hear him talk about it, you can kind of get sucked into the idea that this form of compromise is what makes politics, and therefore society, progress. It appeals to our vision of the democratic ideal.
A society in which everyone gathers around the table to discuss an issue, and then comes to a mutual decision that compromises on the various interests represented by the assembly. And, if after all, nobody compromises, we might very well not get anywhere. In American politics, this is anything but democratic, [01:53:00] though.
And far from leading to the progress we're promised, we get a government that stagnates or actively pursues regressive, reactionary politics. Take immigration. For over a year, we heard just about every democrat call out the very real, fundamental far right policies enacted by the Trump admin at the Mexican border.
One of these was the invocation of Title 42, a policy choice that might as well be called oh, it really is just that easy. At the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration used the pretext of national health and COVID 19 To close the southern border pretty much completely. Nobody comes in and a whole lot of people go out.
It was a brilliant success for conservatives and reactionaries and a massive step back in immigration law. And to this day, title 42 still stands, no, sorry. That makes it seem like people aren't paying attention to it. The Biden administration is defending it tooth and nail in the courts. True to the spirit of compromise, Biden changed the [01:54:00] application of the rule so that it would no longer apply to unaccompanied minors.
But on the back end, has used it to expel around 700, 000 migrants, far more than the Trump administration ever achieved with its paltry 450, 000. Simultaneously, Biden has also continued the construction of the border wall, has led the infamous Do Not Come campaign, and left untouched migrant detention facilities.
You'll remember them as concentration camps during the Trump presidency. Now, it's not that Biden has done nothing for progressive immigration politics. He's reinstated DACA and done work to reunite separated families. But the majority of his platform has been tweaking Trump era policies in the spirit of compromise.
rather than reversing them entirely and treating them like the indefensible right-wing policies that they are. Centrism isn't incremental progress in these circumstances. Malcolm X said it best.
MALCOM X: Do you feel, however, that, uh, that we're making progress in, in this country? No, no. No, no. [01:55:00] I'm, I will never say that progress is being made.
If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. You pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow, that the blow made. They won't even admit the knife is there.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: When reactionary and far right politics are so dominant in a society as the U.
S., and so regularly find their way to institutions of power. Or are baked in right from the start. The centrist stance of compromise and incremental retroactive change allows for politics to jump to the right without ever really coming back. How many politicians today pretend that there's a reasonable compromise between the we need healthcare left and the we need an ethnostate right?
Title 42 still stands because the myopic compromise of moderate ideology fails to take into account longer political trends. There are, of course, some exceptions to the rightward shift of American politics. But the attachment to moderation at all costs makes any left wing legislation a blip in [01:56:00] what is otherwise a sea of reactionary bravado.
But most centrists don't like this, and that's not how they think about themselves. They don't like the idea that they're just a mushy average of the left and the right, or a simple tool of conservative politics. Instead, moderates describe their stance something like this. I don't care whether something comes from the left or the right.
I just look at the idea and judge it on its own merit. Here, the tricky centrist thinks he's gotten us. We couldn't possibly disagree with the idea of sensibly considering multiple options and forming an opinion based on rational cost and benefit analyses. And he's right, but at the end of the day, centrism falls right back into the same place whether it sees its role as averaging out the left and the right, or picking and choosing from each side.
And that's because the Overton window is so small and so skewed in the US. The choices centrists make. are limited by the acceptable politics they are contextualized in. And the American political spectrum being so stunted toward the right, with only figures like Bernie [01:57:00] Sanders and his social democratic politics even approaching the left, means that centrism will by default fall into the conservative, liberal, stagnatory, or even regressive role.
There just aren't that many options to choose from, and they're mostly on the same side anyway. Even if the centrist voter is a careful and considerate pragmatist who doesn't blindly follow the party line and thinks entirely for themselves on every topic and political debate, the inevitable fact that they will be picking and choosing policies from the fascistic Trumpism in the Republican party and the neoliberal capitalism of the Democrats, to the extent that they can even be differentiated at times, means they'll never actually consider the full range of political debate because the left isn't prominently represented.
The result is the center conserves far more than it progresses. And when it chooses to conserve something built by the right, it actively engages in regressive, reactionary politics. There's also the issue that politicians who call themselves the center [01:58:00] aren't really doing so in good faith. While they may represent the center between elected officials, the actual center of the American people is far more to the left on many key issues than the center of the American political class.
Just look at this clip featuring celebrity centrist Joe Lieberman.
MEHDI HASAN: Your new book is called The Centrist Solution. Uh, you were a famous quote unquote centrist senator. Uh, and yet my issue with that word is that centrist doesn't necessarily reflect the American people's views. I want to pull up, uh, some polling.
Here are some of the measures in that Build Back Better bill that quote unquote centrist like Manchin and Sinema want to get rid of. Here's how popular they are, hugely popular across the spectrum. 83 percent support, 84 percent support, 73 percent support. And yet you and Joe Sinema oppose many of those measures that the American people overwhelmingly support.
So the question is, how in the world does that make you a centrist? Surely based on that polling, Bernie Sanders is closer to the center of American politics and public opinion than you are or Joe [01:59:00] Manchin is.
JOE LEIBERMAN: Yeah, I don't, I don't think so, but it's a great question. question. That's not happening enough now.
We could probably get some of those good things done on that list if people, instead of trying to push it through, would sit down and talk to each other and agree.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: And here we get back to that MLK quote. It's absurd to think that any moderate Democrat or any Republican would ever agree to any of these policies that have overwhelming support among Americans if the only difference was that they were sat down and talked to as opposed to having things pushed through. There is no way that moderate Democrats like Manchin, Sinema, or Biden are going to be convinced by good argumentation presented politely when that is contending with the massive sums of money changing hands to make sure they remain spoilers.
MLK made it very clear, the moderate's role in politics is to slow things down to a trickle. Justice gets delayed further and further, never actually realized despite decades [02:00:00] of promises, allowing for millions of people to continue suffering injustice and hundreds of thousands more to be brought into the fold.
It's trite, but justice delayed is justice denied. The issue we're going to have to figure out is how we do anything about this.
Aaron Rodgers Slobbers Over Tucker Carlson in Brain-Melting Exchange - TYT Sports - Air Date 5-16-24
AARON RODGERS: What about you though? Cause you, you did one of the most controversial, somehow, not to me, most controversial interviews in the last, I don't know how long, when you went to Russia and did Putin. How did it feel coming back? Cause like anybody who watched the interview was like, number one, it was awesome.
Number two, Putin came off as an interesting, thoughtful, smart individual.
RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: Where to even begin? First off. Tucker Carlson's interview was critiqued rightfully for his softball style. Even local journalists in the country said Tucker's pro Putin accusations were baseless. Tucker even laid off Putin's regime, which has a history of unaliving media members, imprisoning them and censoring them.
Historians say the [02:01:00] litany of claims made by Putin are nonsense, representing nothing more than a selective abuse of history to justify the ongoing war. In Ukraine, Sergei Rodchenko, a historian at the Johns Hopkins school of advanced international studies would go off on Putin saying the leader is trying to construct a narrative that is backwards, where he states Russia as a state began its development in the ninth century.
You could equally say that Ukraine as a state began its development in the ninth century, exactly with the same kind of evidence and documents. He's trying to use certain historical facts to construct a state centered narrative that would favor Russia. as opposed to any alternative agglomerations.
Another falsehood of many that was spewed in this interview between two knuckleheads was this. Putin claimed that Poland, which was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 39, collaborated with Hitler. He said by refusing to cede an area of Poland, calling the Danzig Corridor to [02:02:00] Hitler, Poland went too far, pushing him to start World War II by attacking them.
Anita Prasmowska, a professor emerita, would rebuke this. Saying that there were diplomatic contacts between Poland and the Nazis. The first treaty Hitler signed after coming to power was a non aggression pact with Poland in 34, Putin is conflating diplomatic outreach to a threatening neighbor with collaboration.
The accusation that the Poles were collaborating is nonsense. She would add. I think the question is this, why is Aaron Rogers falling for Vladimir Putin propaganda? Ask yourself that question.
AARON RODGERS: You had the live case numbers. You had, um, just the fear mongering and then anybody that stood up to it was canceled.
You mean all the Twitter files that got released when Elon took over that show the collusion between the alphabet, uh, companies.
RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: First off him saying the alphabet companies is different than what he said [02:03:00] previously, which was the alphabet mob, which had a direct correlation and a Bullhorn of a whistle to say that you are anti gay rights.
I suppose it's somewhat of a positive for splitting hairs here that he corrected himself. However, referencing the Twitter files as a source. I mean, let's revisit. It was promoted by Musk to Bari Weiss, an idiot, and the like, to put out an idea that showed Twitter's bias against conservatives, as well as interference by the U.
S. government to censor certain posts and users. When in reality, the released info showed former Twitter employees engaging in fairly even handed, basic content moderation found on almost any social medium. Nevertheless, Elon curated the narrative. And broke through with conservatives and his fans. There were even congressional hearings held.
Remember those? Reformer employees shared just how much was missing from Musk's chosen [02:04:00] documents. Rogers once again is proving how dense his approach is. When discussing his guy RFK, he said this.
AARON RODGERS: He's spending millions of his own dollars on private security, um, which he has to because. He's a threat because he's not, you know, bought and paid for.
RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: All right, hang on. He's not bought and paid for? Do we understand the legalized bribery that happens in this country in the form of campaign donations? As a matter of fact, RFK's biggest donor is the biggest donor to Donald Trump. Per Newsweek, Timothy Mellon, the heir to the Mellon Banking fortune, gave a Trump aligned Super PAC 5 million, plus the same figure to an RFK aligned Super PAC.
His VP, Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy tech entrepreneur and lawyer, donated 4 million to a pro RFK junior Super PAC in efforts to fund a Super Bowl ad. But hey, keep politics out of sports. The New York Times reported dozens of VCs. Tech execs, real estate builders, investors with [02:05:00] varying political alliances contributed to RFK's PACs.
Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock, and one of the most prominent supporters of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, gave 100, 000 in Bitcoin to Common Sense, another PAC supporting organization. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Abby Rockefeller. I mean, let's continue. Why not? A daughter of the investment banker, David Rockefeller, who runs a cannabis farm in upstate New York, gave 100K to American Values 2024 PAC.
Then there's Gavin DeBecker, who also donated to a pro Kennedy PAC. His security firm has been paid 1. 5 million by Kennedy's campaign. Becker has reportedly provided security for A list celebs like Cher, and Jeff Bezos. One thing Rogers will undoubtedly cling to is, oh, he doesn't need it. He can fund himself.
And that's a great thing because that's the moral way to do it. Hang on a minute. [02:06:00] Saying that there is no corruption because someone can benefit from their own wealth misses the reality that wealthy candidates typically already Represent a special interest the business and industry that got them or their parents rich wrote the Brennan Center more generally studies show that the Affluent have different policy views than most Americans.
For example, they unsurprisingly tend to oppose higher taxes on the wealthy.
AARON RODGERS: But I don't know if you saw this, but Bobby recently came out and said, uh, in the summer months at some point he wants to do a 50 state poll with like 20, 000, I don't know what the exact number is, votes in each of these states and whoever polls lower between him and Joe Biden has to drop out of the race.
Because in his own analytics, he's found out that if the three of them run, uh, Trump is most likely to win. If he goes against Trump, he wins. If he goes against Biden, he wins. If Biden goes against Trump, Trump wins. [02:07:00] So in fact, the F so he said, Hey, listen, I'll drop out if you pull higher than me in these 50 States.
Um, but if I pull higher than you,
RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: you're out. What fantasy land are we living in here for real, for real?
AARON RODGERS: Yeah. Here's more. Bobby's a main player in this.
RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: Let's play this clip one more time. And it's of Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and others. who will dispel this in their own words.
ROGER STONE: So I'm a great admirer of Robert Kennedy.
He's a friend of mine. I am a fan of Bobby Kennedy. So I want people to know that I actually look at him and I think he's one of those like, um, I actually think I have a lot in common with him because I'm a former Democrat. I just changed my party affiliation two years ago. If I were a Democrat, I'd certainly vote for him.
If I had any money, I'd send him a contribution, but I don't.
ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: I think RFK Jr is doing a great service to our country. I am disappointed that his party is so corrupted. I mean, he's the perfect example of [02:08:00] a true American Democrat, a true patriot who loves this country.
ROGER STONE: I think he is potentially an extraordinarily, uh, attractive candidate.
At the end of the day, however, um, I believe that his candidacy. May serve the purpose of softening Joe Biden, or whoever the Democratic nominee is for the candidacy and defeat by the man who will clearly be, no matter what the courts do, the Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump.
RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: Son, your boy is playing, spoiler.
He is the foil. Stop the cap. They are telling you right now that he is. in the race to help Donald Trump win. One of his, one of the members of his campaign staff was seen in an uncovered video that they were indeed playing spoiler to ruin Joe Biden's [02:09:00] chances in order for Donald Trump to take the presidency.
This man is not a big brain thinker. He is a big idiot. I am amazed at the things we have learned about this guy since COVID, because I truly believe he, like many. have had their brains wrecked by falling down a million and one rabbit holes, and it changed them completely, unfortunately. We all have that one person, friend, family, work friend, associate, boss, doesn't matter.
We all have someone in our lives who we have noticed a seismic internal shift after the coronavirus pandemic, where everything they started to believe could be fact checked into oblivion and were blatant lies. Yet Rogers Because of his status, now a Putin apologist, who ran out to start this [02:10:00] NFL season with an American flag, is now telling you, once again, exactly who he is.
Why "Neither Left Nor Right" Just Means Right Wing | Bonapartism - Second Thought - Air Date 3-18-22
ANDREW YANG: I have done the math, it's not left.
It's not right, it's forward, and that is how we're going to beat Donald Trump in 2020.
SIMPSONS: But tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward, not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: Bonapartism works because it's confusing. Bonapartist politicians, both those who actually embrace the label and those who prefer to hide it a bit more, have a pretty specific strategy for muddying the waters on politics.
Pretending like there's no such thing as the left and the right, but only strategically in order to usher in a more reactionary, or at the very least conservative, political program cloaked in the symbols of progressive politics. Let's take a little trip to France to see what we're talking about. Ah, très bien, une baguette.
Ahem. French people love [02:11:00] Napoleon. Here's French President Emmanuel Macron commemorating him on the 200th anniversary of his death. And here's far right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen making him a fan cam for his death day. These very same politicians are the ones who will use the messaging of the neither left nor right slogan for their own political interests. Neither left nor right has been lap pen's strategy since 2015,
and here's a room of Macron supporters chanting at the same time. The president's own quirky, unique way of saying he is at the same time from the left and the right of the political spectrum. Now, it's obvious to most people that Le Pen is a far right candidate, and that Macron's presidency has been one of right-wing liberalism.
What with the cutting taxes on the wealthy, violently beating down protests, and abusing executive powers to force through legislation. Classic right-wing authoritarian stuff. So then, why are they so keen on telling us they're neither left nor right? The obvious answer is, because they're lying and abusing a political system that offers little to no accountability once you're in [02:12:00] power.
But there's more to it than that. The point is that a lot of French politicians really dig Napoleon. But most importantly, they especially like his strategy. Napoleon, and later his nephew Napoleon III, were masters of counter revolutionary and anti democratic reactionary politics, but were also very skillful propagandists.
They were both incredibly capable of When it came to convincing the masses that rallying behind a single leader above the left right, worker owner divide was better than continuing with the messy and difficult exercise of democracy and revolution. This leader could claim to be above the left and the right, but then of course use his power solely for right-wing policies and turning back the gains made by the revolutionaries.
Like universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and the nationalization of labor. In the spirit of, quote, defending the republic, and making that very clear by celebrating it with all of its symbols like the blue, white, and red French flag, and the revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise, [02:13:00] Napoleon cut down the gains made by French revolutionaries over time, and de facto reinstituted the monarchy, overturning the revolution's most central victory.
Basically, left wing symbols, but right-wing politics. Both leaders were able to use the revolution's comparatively more democratic institutions for their own benefit to turn around and tyrannize foreigners and their own people. Specifically, Napoleon I pushed his way into office with a coup, but then leveraged his support from the French people as a famed military general to go from first consul to first consul for life and finally emperor, all with a massive amount of public support.
His nephew did the same thing. First as President of the Second French Republic, then seizing power in a coup d'etat and calling himself Emperor. Both leaders became dictators, all the while constantly evoking the spirit of the Revolution and the defense of the Republic which they had themselves destroyed.
These were men who conquered, who warred, who controlled all organs of the [02:14:00] press, who stripped women of their rights, who reinstated slavery by brutally repressing slave revolts, and who disempowered the parliaments. Generally speaking, Bonapartism takes all the ways in which people previously expressed their political power through local governments, associations, unions, parliaments, revolutions, Basically, any semblance of democracy, and thins out politics until all that's left is the quasi universal support of the great, enlightened leader who unites the nation.
It is a politics of strength, of peace by force, of law and order, and of deeply reactionary logic. Ultimately, it is a politics based on deferring authority and decision to powers above the democratic body. There's the way in which that's literally happening with the nation's single leader with all the power.
But there's also the more metaphorical way this happens behind the scenes. Markets are a great example of this kind of power above democracy. Both Macron and Le Pen, though different in their execution, are both [02:15:00] ultimately allowing markets to decide what the correct way to organize society is. These leaders are more than happy to delegate the power they are granted upwards to let market forces ultimately be the way by which politics are decided.
For Macron, it's the classic neoliberalism of the third way politicians that preceded him, like Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK. Basically letting international markets run loose, deregulating and privatizing all over the place, and fixing things when they inevitably go wrong with austerity politics.
For Le Pen, it's the same thing, but with domestic, not international capital markets. Relying on French capitalists to just treat their employees better, because they're both French, and that's what matters at the end of the day. It shouldn't be surprising to learn that that does not happen. Back when it was the two Napoleons doing this, there was a guy who looked at what was happening and said, But man, this blows.
In his book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx saw all of this unfolding in real time, figured out [02:16:00] what Bonapartism was about, and correctly identified that the French peasantry, disunited and without common interest, happily accepted the all powerful sovereign. But that it was ultimately the French bourgeoisie, divided among itself and unable to rule effectively, that gave up its crown to save its purse.
It gave the powers of the executive to a popular leader that would leave them alone, free to exploit the French working class that had started making too many gains during the first two republics, so that they, the bourgeoisie, The upper class could keep making their profits. That's the purpose of neither left nor right discourse, a way to unite people behind one guy or one idea that'll take politics and democracy out of their hands and into the hands of a few capitalists.
We don't hear about it as much here in the US, but Yang's platform gives us an idea of what it could be like. Andrew Yang's, not some far right authoritarian. Nothing about him really gives us that idea of a vaguely fascistic unifying leader the way a lap pen or a Macron can be [02:17:00] despite whatever this is
DUMB SONG: Yang Gang 2020 Yang Gang.
JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: But Yang is still applying the same principles as the bona artist with roughly similar goals. He's using this idea of unifying the left and the right, getting rid of all the silly polarization and commotion of political life. to give more power to markets and what he calls human centered capitalism.
He's using a universal monthly check as a permission slip for capitalists to do whatever they feel is fair. Workers be damned. Deregulate and privatize everything, including social safety nets. Let the market do it at once. Just toss back enough crumbs that people won't want to change things themselves or have an actual place at the table.
If he can present himself, and his very conventional neoliberalism, as the politics of change, and turn around and cast the quote, extremism, of the left wing of the democratic party as nothing more than political stagnation, that's all the better for him. He's defending democracy while [02:18:00] turning back the clock on its gains.
Not for any personal political power, but for that of capital markets. And if you're thinking I forgot about the guy who I literally cannot make a joke about without sounding like Colbert, Trump's strategy wasn't very different. His was just more personal, more closely related to the imagery of kings and monarchs, based on an appeal to an imaginary nation that never existed except in some racist white guy's fantasies.
That distinction doesn't make him substantially different. It was still just a way to let the wealthy do whatever they want in the background. But it's what prompted a lot of observers to analyze him with the Bonapartist model, though usually stopping short and using the more en vogue populist label.
And here we find part of the reason why some people who talk about populism can get politics so wrong. Equating someone like Sanders to someone like Trump makes a lot less sense than equating a Trump and a Yang. Because even if both Trump and Sanders are both known for bold, loud personalities and a very vocal grassroots support, their [02:19:00] politics are so radically different in the way they treat democracy and what people want, that putting them on the same level misses the point entirely.
Yang isn't a populist, really, but it doesn't necessarily matter. Trump and Yang, like Napoleons I and III, have figured out that people think democracy stops at the ballot box. These people are perfectly happy with a system that gets them public support and lets them use it to act as protectors of the capitalist economy.
An economy that lets the few people who own entire industries decide for the rest of us what's right and what's wrong. That is not what democracy is. Democracy is not just letting your favorite guy do whatever. Especially not if that means giving power to a wealthy group of capitalists to continue exploiting you.
That's not democracy. That's Bonapartism.
SECTION D - ROOTS
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section D routes.
Jonathan Rauch: A Defense of Truth Part 2 - The Commonwealth Club of California - Air Date 7-31-21
JONATHAN RAUCH: If there's one new idea in this book that I'd like to leave people with, apart from the idea of the constitution of knowledge that we have one, it's something that we're not used to really [02:20:00] thinking about, which is what I just described.
Russian style, disinformation and propaganda is very different in terms of its methods and who's using it and what ideologies it's attached to at the moment from what we call cancel culture, a term that didn't exist when I started the book. But they are both in fact, forms of information warfare. That is they attempt to organize and manipulate the social and media environments for political gain.
So cancel culture does it differently. Before that term came along, I called it social coercion or coerced conformity. So here's the idea. You can do an experiment. You put eight people in a room, you give them a simple test that says, it's just, The answer is obvious. You ask them which of three lines on the right matches the same length as the line on the left.
You make it blindingly obvious that it's impossible to get it wrong. Put eight people in that room, but there's a catch. One is the experimental subject. The other seven are actors. The right answer is [02:21:00] B, and it's obvious. And when people are left to their own devices, they always get it right. But in that room at that time, seven of those people will say, see, they create a false consensus in the room.
What is the eighth person? The actual subject to a third of the time, they actually go with. The wrong answer. They go with the group answer, whether because they want to conform socially, whether because they really think they might be wrong. Maybe this is an obstacle optical illusion, and I'm not getting it.
Maybe they have genuine doubt. A third of people, um, a third of participants do that. And, uh, in 75 percent of the time, a person will do it in at least one trial in multiple trials. So now flash forward to the present, suppose you've got a community like a university, suppose a group, a small group of faction, you know, maybe 20 percent of the university or 10 percent or whatever.
Supposedly are very motivated activists [02:22:00] who want to impose a point of view, manipulate the environment for political advantage, intimidate, silence their opponents. Well, you can weaponize social media, you can weaponize course evaluations against professors, you can use rules against harassment to launch investigations.
You can just use denunciations of people as racist, so that people who hold certain points of view or want to ask certain points of questions will feel very reluctant to do that. It becomes very risky to go anywhere near these topics. They become chilled, and indeed, polls now find that two thirds of university students say that they avoid expressing their real political views for fear of social consequences.
I've talked to many professors, they're quoted in the book, including, by the way, many, many progressive professors who say they don't feel safe, um, teaching the way they want to teach. They're worried about social consequences, investigations. So this has two results. One is the obvious result, which is you can shut down the people that you don't want to be heard.[02:23:00]
But the second result is you're actually playing with people's minds, right? Because you're creating a false consensus. It looks like everyone on campus believes, for example, um, well, take your proposition. We won't get into it. Everyone believes that. Anyone who doesn't believe that is isolated, shameful, stigmatized.
That plays with our brains. That makes us think we're in doubt. We're ashamed of ourselves. We must be wrong. So that can go on in a university environment. Then it turns out social media makes that quite easy to organize and do in a public environment. So now we see cases again and again of social media campaigns being used to isolate shame.
People go after their employers. People are now fired if they become controversial on social media, demolish people's reputations if they're called racist, so that's what comes up on Google. Secondary boycotts, big part of that, that's where you go after their friends, their professional associates. They say, Bruce Kane, how can you associate with Jonathan Rauch?
You know he's a racist, right? So now you're going to have to [02:24:00] denounce me. You're going to feel intimidated. You'll be drawn into the same denial of reality. So that worked in the Soviet Union, although they use cruder methods for the most part. They just, you know, sent you to Siberia, but this can allow a minority, meaning a numerical minority to sustain a false consensus and impose its alternative vision on reality on a society really for quite a long time.
We now see that happening nationally, 60 percent of Americans say that they're reluctant to state their true political views. for fear of social consequence. A third of Americans say they're worried if they state their true political views that they will lose a job or job opportunities. And that, by the way, Bruce, this is a new and important development that is now just as true of progressives as it is of conservatives.
So Houston, we have a problem.
BILL KANE: So do you see this as primarily a kind of Problem of a new technology of communication and combined with some sort of culture of going public. It just seems people want to go public with [02:25:00] their views a lot more and in other words, is it possible that there was always this danger, but it's just the fact that a so many people are now easily Part of the public dialogue that they're confronting what normal political figures always had to confront.
Uh, in terms of castigation, et cetera.
JONATHAN RAUCH: Yeah, that's, that's such an important question. There's a bunch of historical material in the book, but it's, it's a perfect storm. It's new technology, um, new ideologies and above all new actors. So we know cancel cultures, ancient, um, we saw it in the Salem witch trials.
We saw it in 1835, Alexis to Tocqueville. That's a name you'll recognize came to America and says the biggest threat. To freedom in America is not from the government. It's from what we now call canceling. If you get on the wrong side of a received opinion, you can lose your livelihood, your friends. So you'll submit, you'll just be quiet.
In 1859, John Stuart Mill says exactly the same thing is the case in, in Victorian [02:26:00] England. Um, the disinformation tactics, the fire hose of falsehood that dates over a century, uh, Hitler. And Goebbels used that, Lennon used that. So why do we have this new problem in America right now? Number one, we have the technology we've talked about, which have made it trivially easy to spread disinformation, to target disinformation, uses, uses bots to do that.
You can test disinformation in seconds. You put it out there. You see what spreads virally. Bots automatically are programmed to amplify that. You can exploit vulnerabilities in social media. You know, it used to be very hard to do this. A KGB agent would have to plant documents on like a shipwreck In order to make them seem authentic.
Well, you know, now you just claim to found stuff on a hundred Biden's hard drive and you send it through social media. So you got technology, you have ideologies, which is for example, emotional safetyism, which is useful for counselors. Cause it says if, um, that emotional damage. AKA offendedness [02:27:00] is equivalent to physical damage and that's a violation of my rights.
So that's useful on college campuses to suppress alternate viewpoints. And then the, I think the most important, I know this sounds partisan. I'm not a partisan person. I'm center right. I've voted for and supported many Republicans. I just think this is the truth. The facts right now, you have new actors, you've got trolls on social media.
That's anti vaxxers. It was gamer gate. Um, new publications. You've got conservative media, which is in many ways in its own epistemic environment. Most important, you have Donald J. Trump. Um, Bruce, we have never seen a situation before when a presidential candidate and then a president with all the, uh, the capabilities Of his office and his genius.
He is a disinformation genius. He's the best since the 1930s plus conservative media plus the Republican Party have all been used as an [02:28:00] institutional organ of disinformation propaganda. We have just simply never had to deal with that in America before it is it is new when you add those three things together.
Yeah, you get it complicated and and worrisome situation.
Obedience and Mass Education - Against the Grain - Air Date 11-18-24
SASHSA LILLY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: I can imagine some listeners might hear your description of the origin of education.
mass primary education and say, well, that sounds so different from education now. Education now isn't about control. It's about giving children the tools to expand their potential in the world or to see the world critically or to become good citizens. When you look at the origins of mass education, primary education and look at the present.
Is there such a stark contrast between the origins and what we see today across schools, especially schools [02:29:00] that primarily serve non elite children?
AGUSTINA PAGLAYAN: I wish there was, Sasha. As you know, I'm, I'm a professor. I teach university, uh, students, and One of the things that I did to examine whether the origins of education look very different from today was I gathered, along with a large team, data on the prevalence of indoctrination efforts and the prevalence of efforts to teach critical thinking skills across 160 countries from 1945 to the present.
And when you analyze the data, what you see is a very high prevalence of efforts to instill a specific set of political values that substantiate or justify a particular type of social and political order, and those efforts being more intense than [02:30:00] efforts to teach critical thinking. And this is important.
Problematically, also true of democracies. Now, of course, I'm sure we have some listeners who think, Well, my education looked quite different. Well, my education also looked quite different. I had the privilege of going to schools that did cultivate my critical thinking skills. Probably wouldn't be where I am today if that hadn't been the case.
But even then, I think it's important to recognize that The opportunities that I had are not the norm, that they are the kinds of opportunities that are available to people who were lucky enough to be, to live in a more affluent community, or Um, how have the ability to access that type of education. But when you look at the norm, the most prevalent type of education and particularly the type of education that a lot of low income Children in the U.
S. And around the world have access to itself. It's an education that focuses very heavily on discipline. You have entire charter [02:31:00] schools, uh, franchises that are Zero tolerance. That's kind of the way they brand themselves, right, as, as strict on enforcement of rules. And I just, I wish, again, that things were different, but the data don't suggest that things are looking that different today.
Um, there has been, according to this data that I'm telling you about, some growth over time, particularly in democracies in the extent to which schools teach critical thinking skills. But again, how much emphasis they put on doing that pales relative to how much emphasis they put on teaching kids to accept the existing status quo and, um, just think of just how many kids, when they're five year olds, pledge allegiance to the U.
S. flag and the republic for which it stands, uh, for even though at five year olds, um, they have no idea what a republic means, right? [02:32:00]
SASHSA LILLY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: Sure, and I wonder if you could talk about that thread of, you know, a word that seems highly charged for us, indoctrination, you know, agenda of indoctrination in schools. And yet, as you point out in your book, Raised to Obey, we actually use a different term to mean the same thing, which is socialization, that making a child ready for society is, you know, one of the values that schools.
But what does that actually mean in terms of this longer history of schools as a vehicle for maintaining the social order?
AGUSTINA PAGLAYAN: The history of the term indoctrination in the United States is quite, um, interesting because Up until World War I, education reformers, Horace Mann, and you name it, um, they talked about education and indoctrination as interchangeable terms.
Again, this goes back [02:33:00] to what we were talking about earlier, that they thought of education as indoctrination. They didn't have the ideas we have in mind today. Now World War I comes in, and the US and Germany are big enemies, and that's when the US wants to differentiate itself from Germany in terms of, Everything that Germany is doing.
And so that's when education reformers start saying, Oh, indoctrination is what Germany does. What we do is socialization. But interestingly, if you look at the term indoctrination on the dictionary, what it means is a process of teaching people to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. And it's not about which specific beliefs you're teaching.
You can teach someone to accept uncritically that the Nazi regime, for example, is a legitimate regime. Or you can teach someone to accept [02:34:00] uncritically that republican institutions are the best, uh, type of institution we should have. Or you can teach them to accept uncritically that, uh, institutions are biased against racial minorities.
Or you can teach them to accept uncritically the opposite, that institutions are not biased against racial minorities. And so there's the point again is that Schools in the United States teach kids a lot of ideas that do not, um, get taught in, um, in a way that enable kids to question what they're being taught.
They're being taught something, they need to memorize it in order to do well in tests, get a strong GPA, be able to go to college. And that's, that's what I see in the classroom as a college professor, that kids come with very strong GPAs. And yet, they, they don't have the capacity yet, because they haven't been trained to do so, [02:35:00] to question the things that they're reading, to question the things that I'm saying.
Because they've been, they've been told that the teacher knows what's right, um, in some ways. And so, um, it's, it's sad, I think there's a lot of room for improvement, and it kind of would require overhauling. education systems, um, to, to depart completely from what they were designed to accomplish and thinking, rethinking dramatically, how would we design schools from scratch if we were to use schools with the goal of promoting critical thinking, promoting creativity, equipping people with the knowledge and the tools to be autonomous individuals who have the capacity to impact society, pursue their dreams, advance their ideas.
It would look like, not like what we have today.
SASHSA LILLY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: And yet there's a whole discourse around schools [02:36:00] that schools are failing, that schools fail to teach children, and this is often in the primary level, basic skills. And yet what it sounds like you're arguing is that that's actually how the system has been structured from the beginning.
teaching children to obey, teaching so called values is actually a higher priority than teaching children at, you know, the very least skills and then even more so critical thinking because that is not what these institutions were set up to do.
AGUSTINA PAGLAYAN: Exactly. So the, the, I think the main argument of the book is that a key reason why Education systems today in the U. S. And around the world are failing to level the playing field are failing to equip children with basic skills of reading and math as well as more advanced [02:37:00] critical thinking skills is because those schools that we have today, were not designed to accomplish these goals. On the contrary, they were designed to teach children to accept the status quo, to accept their place in society, to accept and be satisfied with their material condition.
And so even well intended, um. teachers or education reformers today, they have to operate within the constraints of systems that were not designed to accomplish this. We still have teachers standing in front of the classroom as an authority and kids sitting in rows and having to raise their hand every time they want to speak and so on and so forth.
There's, there's just so many aspects that we take for granted as normal as the usual business that are part and parcel of The design of the systems to infuse obedience on that's kind of the challenge is to move away from that.
Matt Gaetz And The Clown Car Crash Into The Justice Department - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Air Date 11-16-24
DR MARY ANNE FRANKS: If you think free speech meant that we were on the [02:38:00] side of the oppressed or the side of the people advocating for democracy, you need to understand that throughout history, that's never been true, right?
It's something we tell ourselves as kind of a comforting, you know, bedtime story that, oh, yes, and you'll even see civil libertarians doing this now to say, yes, this is free speech or the First Amendment is why the abolitionists were able to advocate against slavery. It's the reason why the suffragists were able to advocate for women's right to vote.
First Amendment didn't show up any of those people, right? It wasn't even on the radar for most judges or litigators to even think that the First Amendment had anything to do with that. And when we finally got at the turn of the 20th century, you finally got some understanding that maybe, yes, that's what the First Amendment should do.
Every one of those dissenters lost. They went to jail, right? And so we've only recently had even a beginning, I think, of a formal review defense of those kinds of radical ideas that are radically democratic that have been defended by the First Amendment. So it's important to understand that our history isn't what we think it is.
But yes, when I try [02:39:00] to get to the, the heart of what we would need as a kind of reorientation for our free speech discourse, isn't so much to say we shouldn't protect free speech and whatever that means. It's oftentimes to ask first, what do we mean by free speech? Because once we realize, That it's about picking winners and losers.
It's not about saying we're going to take all comers that the government is allowed to say things like we're not going to let you say, you know, conspire to commit a murder. We're going to not allow you to engage in defamation full stop all the time, right? It's always a question of what speech is going to be protected in the hierarchy and which one isn't.
And my point is to say that if we're going to have a coherent. Theory of speech, the things that should be at the very top are the things that challenged government, challenged power, challenged the people who have so much more than everybody else. So it's a sliding scale of protections, right? And the way that we need to weight those, because we're weighting them whether we actually acknowledge that we're doing it or not.
And I'm saying let's acknowledge it. And when it comes to conflicts between [02:40:00] people who are trying to advocate for the expansion of democracy, who are. Actually trying to defend equality. That's what belongs at the very top of our free speech protections and the people who are advocating for harm to other people should be quite a bit lower on those protections.
It doesn't mean they need to be put in jail. It doesn't mean that, but What the ancient Greeks talked about in that distinction between parousia and istigoria is the distinction between a kind of conception of free speech where everybody just gets to say whatever they want. And there's a lot of really fascinating ancient Greek theory about how that's actually in many ways kind of counter to democracy.
Because people who don't care about the consequences of their speech are actually going to make it harder for people to coexist. By contrast, the people who are willing to speak fearlessly are the people who are speaking truth to power in a really meaningful sense. And when the French philosopher Michel Foucault gives his gloss on what he thinks this fearless speech concept really entails, [02:41:00] he picks out these characteristics that are, I think, so meaningful for our time.
And the first one is that you have to be candid, as in, You have to be speaking for yourself. You can't be pretending to play a role. You're not a devil's advocate. You're speaking from your own identity. And then what you have to be saying is something critical about someone more powerful than you, or some system or institution more powerful than you.
And the reason why that's important and it's called fearlessness is because, because of that, that power asymmetry. You are taking the risk that you are going to be punished for speaking against power in that way. Everything else, you know, speaking down to someone else or trying to create harm to somebody else, all of that might need to be protected or it might need to be tolerated, maybe, depending on the circumstances.
But it's not fearless. It's not at the core of what we would think we needed to protect as a means of checking power. And so that's the distinction that I think we really have not spent enough time with. And again, it's not as though. The neutrality [02:42:00] doctrine that we've been told has ever been true.
There's always some kind of calculation that the courts are doing to say, we're going to balance the kind of harm from the speech. I mean, think about the 1980s, uh, child pornography case, right? The court is saying, this is free expression of a sort, but we think it's really harmful. And so this is why we're now going to protect it.
That is the kind of calculation we should be doing all the time openly. And again, thinking about the kinds of speech that are actually trying to expand that promise of democracy and the ones that are actually trying to exclude people from it. We can make those distinctions, or another way of putting it is, if we're not making those distinctions, what are we even doing with our legal theory?
What are we even doing with this concept of freedom of expression?
DALIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: That Foucault template is really useful, Marianne, just because, again, you're sitting in Charlottesville as we're talking, and I'm remembering the civil suit that was brought against the Nazis and the white supremacists and the Klan, all of the defenses they tried to mount were sort of efforts to insulate their speech from this construct you just [02:43:00] posited, right?
So, like, we're just joking, right? It's just Pepe the frog. We're punching up. We're We're not punching down even as they're like, literally, you know, carrying flaming torches. It's interesting because in order to kind of create the carve out for free speech and to call yourself the victim, every single one of those tenets of what you're describing as fearless speech has to be deconstructed.
And part of, I think, your critique is that we allowed that deconstruction to happen without even thinking very hard, A, about who was being harmed, but B, about what it means to hide behind, you know, I'm just retweeting this Nazi. I'm not supporting it. Like, we really literally constructed a way to work around every single thing that you're describing as the hallmarks of what should be protected speech.
And I think, As you say, we did that in some ways thinking like, because the end [02:44:00] game here is to protect all speech, as opposed to think about what kind of speech is really speech. I feel like I have to ask you about Elon Musk. Um, it pains me and I feel like I have to ask you about Elon Musk before it becomes illegal to ask you about Elon Musk.
Um, he is the world's richest man. He is a. sent a billionaire. If you look up at night, you will see some of his almost 6500 and counting Starlink satellites. You may own one of his electric cars. He owns one of the biggest social networking sites in the world where he has, as we just said, endorsed anti Semitic conspiracy theories and great replacement theories.
Technology writer Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic wrote last week, quote, X is no longer a social media. a white supremacy problem, but a white supremacist site with a social media problem. Um, in addition to this, we've got Musk pouring, you know, millions and millions of dollars into electing Trump. He joins Trump on [02:45:00] the congratulatory phone call to Vladimir Zelensky.
On Tuesday of this week, Trump announced that Musk would help lead what is going to be a brand new Department of Government efficiency to dismantle bureaucracy. Have we ever in thinking about speech encountered, even in the Gilded Age, have we encountered an oligarch who owns the airwaves, who owns the president, who owns our speech, and who has the power to do all these things under the guise of
DR MARY ANNE FRANKS: freedom?
I don't think we've seen it in the United States. I think maybe other countries have seen something somewhat similar. When you've got someone who's in charge of administering propaganda for the state and has so much control over what everyone thinks, right? Someone who's going to be part and parcel of a movement that's already been in place for many years, to attack educators, to burn books, to move people away from, you know, Places where you might [02:46:00] actually critically reflect upon power and history, I'm afraid we have seen it.
I think Europe has seen it. I think we're about to experience exactly how bad it can get because this is supercharged in the age of social media. But we began by talking about the marketplace of ideas. And when Musk bought Twitter. Well, he was himself saying, well, I'm going to turn this into the public square.
You know, actual free speech is going to exist here. And so many people were praising him for that. And when he started to basically just kick off anybody who might criticize him, a few people who had praised him before were like, well, we're not really sure if that's what is a very free speech protective way.
But what I really think is interesting, and I mentioned this in the book too, is to say He's actually doing exactly what power does when it invokes free speech, that that is not different from what they do. That is, we've been telling ourselves that in this country, in the United States, with the First Amendment, we're protecting, you know, everyone equally or even protecting the powerless more than the powerful.
It's never [02:47:00] been true, right? It's always been the case that our government has managed to preserve a space for itself and the kinds of power and privilege that have been cemented from the beginning. And it's no There's no coincidence here about why it is that this attack on education that we've seen for the last 20 years has been attacking concepts of history of racism of misogyny to tell Americans you can't learn about that, right?
You can't learn how racist and sexist our history is. That's the most dangerous idea out there as a way of trying to re educate the public. What you really see with someone like Elon Musk before he's now I guess going to be officially part of the government was he gave you the trial run. I mean, the marketplace of ideas looks like Twitter.
It's, it's Elon Musk's ex is the marketplace of ideas overrun with white supremacists overrun with misogyny. Yes. Technically can other people speak there sometimes if he doesn't actually eliminate you from the platform, but you're never going to be able to speak in the same amplified way. As the people that Elon Musk [02:48:00] likes, that power likes, literally Elon Musk changed the algorithm so that it would boost his posts more than anybody else's, tweaked it so that it would boost right-wing content far more than other types of content, although that was already happening before Musk, I should say.
That's what free speech looks like. That's what the marketplace of ideas looks like. That's what you get. And now that he's going to be in government, it's literally going to be what we all get.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected].
The additional sections of the show included clips from Why America?, Counterspin, The Elephant Graveyard, NEJM Interviews, Steve Shives, The Commonwealth Club of California, Second Thought, TYT Sports, Against the Grain, and Amicus. Further details are in the show notes.
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