#1422 Teach No Evil, Protest No Evil, Vote Not At All
Air Date: 6–9-2021
Today we take a look at the motivations behind legislation being introduced in statehouses around the country to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory, criminalize the right to protest and limit the right to vote. Now if only there were some theory we could look to to understand the complicated interconnectedness of these subtly racist ideas...
Read more#1500 America, A Beginner's Guide
Air Date: 7–4-2022
Today, for this milestone episode, I attempted to squeeze in as many clever and interesting ideas as I could and ended up writing a starter guide to understand the United States. Plus, there are jingles!
Read more#1493 Marketing, Messaging and Mass Shootings
Air Date: 6–4-2022
Today we take a look at some of the obvious steps we need to take to reduce gun violence in the United States, debunk some of the favored propaganda supporting unfettered gun ownership and explore the origins of how Gun Culture™ was invented by corporations as the frontier era need for guns began to vanish pushing them to convert guns from tools that were needed but not loved into items that were loved though no longer needed.
Read more#1416 The Disneyfication of Our Past, Present and Future
Original Air Date: 5–8-2021
Today we take a look at the culture that Disney has helped create and how they did it, using cuteness as a weapon to push ideas from racist stereotypes and segregation to the masterful use of hollow nods toward progressivism while reinforcing the ethics of individualism in order to give systemic injustice a pass.
Read more#1399 Myths are written by the victors, history by the scholars (1619 vs 1776) (Repost)
Original Air Date: 2–16-2021
Today we take a look at the competing histories fighting for dominance in the minds of Americans; the mythologized and romanticized history as represented by the "patriotic" framing of history from the 1776 Commission report and the much more fact-based approach that doesn't skirt the issue of race from the 1619 Project.
Read more#1470 Distorting History and Banning Books is a Power Play of Exclusion
Air Date: 2–12-2022
Today we take a look at the recent uptick in banning and removing educational subjects and books from school curricula as well as specifically who is being harmed and who is being privileged by these decisions.
Read more#1387 Hyper-Partisanship is Baked Into the System, Not a Result of Bad Actors (Repost)
Air Date: 12–15-2020
Today we take a look at the current state of hyper-partisanship and its origins. The system seems broken because it is broken and it was never designed to work this way in the first place. And what about that bygone era of bipartisanship? It's likely that was a fluke and the result of one-party dominance in the New Deal era, it is not the norm throughout history.
Read more#1390 Tell Stories, Not Myths: Our Second Founding (Reconstruction) (Repost)
Original Air Date: 1–5-2021
Today we take a look at the often-overlooked decade of Reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War. After hundreds of years of slavery, Reconstruction was a brief moment of relative democracy and equality before the white power structure reasserted itself and instated the policies that would be known as "Jim Crow Laws" which would last another 80 years.
Read more#1385 The Lost Causes of the Confederacy and the Forty Fives (Repost)
Original Air Date: 12–9-2020
Today we take a look in real-time at the construction of the world's newest Lost Cause narrative, the failed re-election of Donald Trump. This is not our country's first experience with Lost Causes and it's not, contrary to popular opinion, even our second connection to a Lost Cause narrative because we didn't invent the first one, we borrowed it from somewhere else and I will tell that story today.
Read more#1379 Tell Stories, Not Myths: Democracy in America
Air Date: 11–10-2020
Today we take a look at the long and shifting history of the myth of democracy in America. We've never had it since the beginning but the reasons have shifted, ebbed and flowed over time. Now, in the midst of an attempted slow-motion coup, we look back at this most central American myth.
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