Air Date 9/13/2022

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast, in which we shall take a look at the complex web of colonialism, disaster capitalism, and climate change, and how it's ravaging Native Hawaiian communities. We explore how corporations and privatization, going back to annexation, have exacerbated wildfires Water Scarcity and Housing Issues, and discuss the role of tourism and its impact on local culture and resources.

But we also look at community led mutual aid efforts that are offering a glimmer of hope for the unhoused in Hawaii and those struggling to reclaim their ancestral lands. Sources today include Democracy Now!, Today Explained, Reed Choi on TikTok, Native America Calling. CounterSpin, and This Is Democracy with additional members only clips from The Amanda Seals Show and Bianca Grolo.

Plantation Disaster Capitalism: Native Hawaiians Organize to Stop Land & Water Grabs After Maui Fire - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-18-23 

KAPUAALA SPROAT: Things are pretty brutal right now in Maui Komohana, or in West Maui. People are still trying desperately to find ways [00:01:00] forward from this disaster of untold proportions. And I’m not on Maui; I’m actually on the island of Kauai, so a couple islands over. And I have not been there since the fire, but that’s also absolutely appropriate, because people who don’t need to be there should stay away but send support from afar, regardless of what that looks like, whether that means making and sending poi or writing opinion pieces or sending money. Whatever’s the best way people can support from where they are, I think, is really important. 

But the word from our network of folks on the ground is that people are really struggling. I mean, our community has rallied in amazing ways, and I think that that’s part of the message that we want to get out, you know, that “Lahaina Strong” and “Maui Strong,” that those are more than sayings. Our people are incredibly resilient. People aren’t waiting on FEMA or even on the state or county. Relief organizations are springing up in people’s homes, in their garages, and supplies are coming in by boat, by plane, by vehicle when the roads are open.

But there are also a lot of uncertainties, [00:02:00] and people are concerned, because what’s galling for me is I see in the midst of, you know, all of this attention and focus on resources being streamed towards Maui, that really there’s a naked power grab, and really a land and water grab, that’s also underway. There’s been talk already about folks getting offers on their homes. And I know from friends that that’s happening. But as I mentioned, there’s also water grab in the works. And the discussion around this really makes me fear for the future of Lahaina and whether or not it will be one that includes Native Hawaiians and other local people, or whether the build back will focus on outsiders.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about each issue, first the land grab. What exactly does that mean?

KAPUAALA SPROAT: So, to be clear, again, I am not on the ground on Maui. But what I understand from people who are there is that there are realtors and there are others who are making offers to people in their most desperate time of need, when people are, you know, desperate for [00:03:00] funding and other resources to try to build back their lives. People are getting offers on their ancestral homes, lands that — here in Hawaii, when we talk about ancestral lands and our connection to place, we talk in generations and in hundreds of years. And so, our Native Hawaiian Rights Clinic has been on the ground in Maui Komohana working with community members for several years now, and many of our community members have long-standing relationships to place. And it’s some of these community members who are getting offers on their homes at this most difficult time, which, in my opinion, of course, is completely inappropriate.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about plantation disaster capitalism. Explain.

KAPUAALA SPROAT: Plantation disaster capitalism, I think, is, unfortunately, the perfect term for what’s going on in Maui Komohana, or in West Maui, right now. The plantations, the large landed interests that have had control over not just the land, but really much of Hawaii’s and Maui [00:04:00] Komohana’s resources for the last several centuries, are using this opportunity, are using this time of tremendous trauma for the people of Maui, to swoop in and to get past the law, basically. They’re using the emergency proclamation that the governor put into place the day after the fires, you know, ravaged Lahaina, and they’re using this as an opportunity to try to get their way, especially with respect to water resources, something they could not achieve when the law and Hawaii’s water code, in particular, were in place.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk more about the water grab.

KAPUAALA SPROAT: So, in Hawaii, Ola i ka wai, water is life. It’s one of our most important resources. In fact, there are many people who would say freshwater is our most important resource. And it’s what enabled our people to be able to not just survive, but really thrive in Hawaii for more than a millennia. And in Lahaina, in particular, this area, sure, it’s special for people who come on vacation and [00:05:00] people who know Front Street, but for the people of this community, Lahaina was really the seat of the Hawaiian Kingdom. It was the capital before the island of — before Oahu. And part of the reason that that was so, that Lahaina was such an important place, was because of the abundance of resources, and the abundance of water resources, in particular.

Before the arrival of Europeans in Hawaii, Lahaina was actually known as the Venice of the Pacific, which for folks who have been there recently might seem extraordinary. Right now Lahaina has been desiccated and is almost like a dry desert area. But when it was managed by Kanaka Maoli, by Native Hawaiians, it was abundant with water and other resources. So, what happened was that with the arrival of plantation interests, those water — and especially after the capital was moved to Oahu -- those resources were grabbed up by landed plantation interests, so for sugar plantations and pineapple plantations, and later those [00:06:00] resources were diverted to support other kinds of development, including luxury residential development, and even to support hotels in some instances. And so, what happened is that the wai wai, as we call it, the wealth of Lahaina, was actually taken by these corporations.

And so, what we also know, at least the people from Hawaii, is that part of the reason for this extraordinary tragedy in Maui Komohana, or in West Maui, is also because there has been more than a century of plantation water mismanagement in this area. It’s because of extractive water policies, where water hasn’t remained on the land, invasive grasses have come up. That’s what created the tinderbox and this unfortunate situation of the tragic fire that took place earlier this month.

Why Maui burned - Today, Explained - Air Date 8-15-23 

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Abby, how did the fires in Maui get so bad? 

ABBY FRAZIER: The fires in Maui are due to several different factors. The number one factor that let these fires be so [00:07:00] severe is the presence of large areas of very flammable non-native grasses. That was combined with very high winds due to a hurricane passing to the south, and a high pressure system to the north. So we had very high downslope winds that fueled the fire and caused it to spread quickly. And the other factor here is that they had actually been in drought for the last month or so, and that helped dry out all of those grasses and create the fuels needed for this massive fire that we saw.

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Let's go in reverse order there. So conditions were dry. Is Maui in the middle of a drought?

ABBY FRAZIER: The entire island of Maui is in abnormally dry or worse conditions, and there's a pretty large part of the island that's actually in severe drought. Drought is actually a pretty normal natural phenomenon that occurs in Hawaii. We have a pretty pronounced dry season from about May to October. So having a [00:08:00] drought by itself is not abnormal. But we have found that over the last century, droughts have been getting worse, they've been getting more severe and they've been lasting longer. 

JENN BONEZA REPORTER: Brown mountains, cracked dry land; Hawaii is once again experiencing drought conditions. Portions of each of the Hawaiian Islands are impacted, but Maui's being hit the hardest.

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: And then the next factor you talked about was high winds caused by a hurricane. I think you're saying a hurricane didn't hit Maui, but it what was it, getting the tail end of something? 

ABBY FRAZIER: Hurricane Dora passed well south of the island. So there was no direct hit. But hurricanes are these deep centers of low pressure. And to the north of the islands, we have a pretty pronounced high pressure system. And you get a gradient where the wind is moving from high to low. And a really strong Category 4 hurricane means that you have this very strong gradient. So winds were moving very [00:09:00] quickly and we had pretty incredible wind gusts. 

HAWAII LIEUTENANT GOV. SYLVIA LUKE: Never anticipated in this state that hurricane, which did not make impact on our islands will cause this type of wildfires. 

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: Okay. So the wind blows the fire. And you said the third reason, large areas of non-native grass. What does that mean? How does that contribute to a really bad fire? 

ABBY FRAZIER: About 25% of Hawaii's land area is covered in non-native grasses and shrubs. Many of them are species from African savannas and they are extremely flammable. They have essentially taken over the fallow plantation lands across Maui, and those lands are not being managed the same way as when they were active agricultural plantations. So now you just have these large, large areas of very flammable grasses, and sometimes those areas are very close to [00:10:00] communities. So to have a wildfire you need climate, you need an ignition, and you need fuels. In this case, with the Maui fires, we had the perfect weather conditions to support that fire. Likely it was the strong winds knocking over power lines that may have contributed to the ignition part. And then what you need is fuel. And these grasses supply the fuels for these fires.

NOEL KING - HOST, TODAY, EXPLAINED: So Hawaii presumably is prepared for certain kinds of disasters. Why does it seem that Maui was so unprepared for fires? 

ABBY FRAZIER: Wildfires have been more common in Hawaii in the last few decades, and we've seen some really massive fires that have affected especially Maui, but also the other islands as well. We have some amazing groups on the ground who have been working to try to reduce fire risk across [00:11:00] the landscape. 

 There are groups that are working to build fire fuel breaks to help slow down or stop fires. 

LISA KUBOTA: The nonprofit group Team Rubicon brought in military veteran volunteers and equipment to create a firebreak that's 545 yards long. They're clearing trees, grass and debris that could serve as fuel for a fire.

ABBY FRAZIER: A fuel break is essentially an area where you have essentially a gap in vegetation, let's say, a road, and in theory, the lack of more fuels, more grasses for that fire to continue, it could hopefully stop the fire.

LISA KUBOTA: Last year, volunteers put in a fire break behind the nurseries in the valley. Now a second one is going in behind the homes of Mariner's Cove.

ABBY FRAZIER: You have some folks that are using livestock to help graze and bring down those fire fuels, but it's happening without very many [00:12:00] resources. And one thing that's really changed in recent years is the closure of these plantations.

KHON2 CLIP: It's the end of an era for Hawaii's sugar industry, as the final sugar harvest in our state took place on Maui. 

ABBY FRAZIER: When the plantations were active, if a fire occurred on the landscape, it probably wasn't going to be as bad because you were irrigating a lot of the land, but you also had staff on site who could open the gates and let the firefighters in. They knew where the roads were. Now everything is overgrown and covering just these vast areas. And so it's really, really hard to keep these fires under control. 

We are concerned for you. - Read Choi - Air Date 8-4-23 

ELITE: Oh my God! I heard what happened in Maui! 

NATIVE HAWAIIAN: Yeah, it's really bad. 

ELITE: Is my property okay? 

NATIVE HAWAIIAN: What? I don't know. Let me check. 

ELITE: I'm just so concerned about the island and its people, my employees. 

NATIVE HAWAIIAN: Right. Um, huh. It doesn't look like it was affected at all. 

ELITE: Oh, uh, that's [00:13:00] yay! That's -- what a miracle. 

NATIVE HAWAIIAN: Yeah. Now that you mention it, it doesn't look like any elite houses were affected.

ELITE: Don't worry, I'm still concerned. That's why I started that fund to help allocate your donations for you on your behalf. 

NATIVE HAWAIIAN: Yeah, and you're getting a lot of hate for that. I wond-- Why do you not care? Did you expect this? Careful, once you open the store, you can never close it. What have you done to us? 

ELITE: Done to you? No, no, no, no, no. What have we done for you? We let you keep this land amongst yourselves and you couldn't deal with a fire, when you're surrounded by water? And then you come crying to us, the elites, begging for our resources because deep down inside, you know that we are better than you. You crave a master. Deep down inside, you know this to be true. And this fire, if that has [00:14:00] illuminated anything, it is that we will take this responsibility upon our shoulders. 

NATIVE HAWAIIAN: If fire reduced the property prices, you're gonna buy all our land. Did you... start the fire? 

ELITE: Does it matter? You'll get what you want. Money poured back into the island and you'll be able to live on it again, at a price that we deem... fair on both parties.

Disasters at every turn - Native America Calling - Air Date 8-28-23

SHAWN SPRUCE - HOST, NATIVE AMERICA CALLING: I think a lot of folks are concerned about what's gonna happen to some of these residents who've lost their homes, and will they be able to afford rebuilding their homes or will they have to relocate? What's your thought on that? 'cause that that's a whole 'nother layer to this tragedy. 

KU'UWEHI HIRAISHI: Right, you know, for Native Hawaiians, specifically the threat of outsiders coming in and taking our land and control of our natural resources is nothing new. But in the aftermath of the [00:15:00] wildfires, residents were receiving solicitations from off island real estate investors to kind of scoop up their land. The state has issued two separate warnings about predatory real estate pitches targeting local residents, and there are lawyers, uh, folks from our University of Hawai'i Law School there on the ground helping those who are receiving those pitches. The governor, Josh Green, has also mentioned that the Attorney General's Office is looking into imposing a moratorium on land sales at this time. So we are, I believe, the government, at least, is taking action where it can, hopefully for the people on the ground, you know, the financial, that living in limbo aspect of things. Once that calms down, then they can really clearly think through when they receive these. 

SHAWN SPRUCE - HOST, NATIVE AMERICA CALLING: Ku'uwehi, being from Hawai'i there, and of course you know anybody who's ever been to Hawai'i, I've been there a couple of times, and it's very obvious that there is a gentrification issue [00:16:00] there and there's a lot of money there. There's multimillion dollar homes and that have sprung up in the recent decades. But did you ever anticipate that it would just get to this point that people have lost their homes and there are speculators coming, and just that quickly, I mean, here the fires are still, they're still burning. I mean, there's still a little bit, there's burning, there's still smoke, and if there's already people coming in and trying to take advantage, carpet bag, right?, just buy up property and, uh, with no regard to the people that who've always lived there, did you ever imagine this happening like this?

KU'UWEHI HIRAISHI: No, I honestly did not. But I think, you know, the level of devastation brought to Lahaina at this point is really going to, in the rebuilding process, spark those conversations about, you know, how much dependence do we want to put on the tourism industry. How much protection should we perhaps have for a Native Hawaiians being able to hold on to some of that land? And Maui [00:17:00] County has been a leader in that aspect. In recent years, they've passed legislation to allow folks who have been on the land for upwards, I think it was 80 years back, if you had title to land that far back, you have a sort of a property tax waiver, or you get to pay the minimum property tax. So there is an awareness, especially on Maui, of the need to keep folks, um, allow them to maintain their ancestral land and access to their ancestral lands. But after this devastation, I think those conversations are definitely going to be heightened. 

SHAWN SPRUCE - HOST, NATIVE AMERICA CALLING: And the fire has also created issues around water rights. Can you explain the issue of water in Maui and how the fires drew into that and created more challenges? 

KU'UWEHI HIRAISHI: A great question. Yes. Lahaina, for those who might not know, is formally the Venice of the Pacific. That was an area, you can't tell from it now, but an area [00:18:00] famed for lush environment and it's abundant water resources. So right in downtown, it's been filled in, you know, for the last a 100-120 or so years. But it was once a sprawling sort of, you know, fish ponds and taro patches. And so the idea of maintaining water rights for Native Hawaiians specifically is something that was encoded into the state water code in the late 80s. So there is a precedent there for folks, but, the reality is that once all our sugar and pineapple plantations pulled out in the late 90s, folks had swooped in, same idea, bought up that same land and the control of the irrigation system that actually hauls water from the mountains to the county system to the hotels, and the ownership of that water on that side, at least in Lahaina and West Maui, is about 75% private and 25% government. And [00:19:00] so there is worry, at least in the immediate aftermath of the fire, that in one particular area called Kaua'ula Valley, there is only one stream that feeds about 70 individuals, mostly Native\ Hawaiians and there was a request from a private landowner to divert that water for fire suppression elsewhere outside of Kaua'ula Valley. And so there was this sort of push and pull to make sure that those in the valley have that access to that water for the approaching fire at the time. And this is really, I think, set off a lot of conversations in Hawai'i at the highest levels over what we do in these disaster situations when it comes to those water rights.

“We’re Living the Climate Emergency”: Native Hawaiian Kaniela Ing on Fires, Colonialism & Banyan - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-11-23

KANIELA ING: I think there’s a certain perception of Native Hawaiians who are unsheltered that’s not — that does not fit with reality. Some of the unsheltered Hawaiian communities that continue today were [00:20:00] occupations of land that was getting seized. And they were like, “Look, we don’t want to cooperate with this new extractive economy that y’all created, so we’re going to live on it by ourselves in our own community on this beach. We’re going to govern ourselves.” And they’re quite organized, and they’re living in a way that’s subsistent and in harmony with nature. Now, it’s not to be glamorized. A lot of these folks face some really dire conditions not being a part of this capitalist system. But a lot of them are doing it based on really strong and sensible beliefs.

Now, when a climate crisis hits, when a disaster hits, it’s going to impact these people first and worst, no doubt. And we need to make sure that both relief and recovery efforts, in the longer term, are prioritizing the low-income and Indigenous people that are some — some are still unaccounted for. Some [00:21:00] don’t even have IDs. And, you know, they need to be front of mind with everything we do, from, you know, day zero, when the disaster breaks, to years out, when we’re recovering.

AMY GOODMAN: The wildfires occurred on the same day that President Biden said in an interview that he had “practically” declared a climate emergency, but he has not actually formally done that. What would that mean?

KANIELA ING: Yeah. I’ve just been frantically trying to make sure that my loved ones are OK. But I also work on climate. This is my job. And as soon as I start thinking about that statement from President Biden, I just get so incensed. This is a climate emergency. There’s no practical — [00:22:00] “practically” declared it. You either believe it or not. And I think as bad as Republicans have been by denying climate, Democrats are just as culpable by not doing enough. Scientists say that we need to be investing at least $1 trillion a year in the clean energy transition. We need to end and phase out, deny, all new fossil fuel permits, and really empower the communities that build back ourselves democratically. That’s the solution for it.

And President Biden announced his second term, but he hasn’t told us how he’s going to finish the job. He needs to lay out that vision, what we’ve been demanding from a Green New Deal, if he wants communities that got him elected to come out, that base of climate voters, that happen to be predominantly Black, Indigenous, and low-income people. But we need something [00:23:00] forward-looking to come out, because right now, like, I’m not even thinking about voting, right? Like, nobody in Lahaina is thinking about whether or not they support Biden. Like, give us something. You know, at least let us be seen.

So, you know, I think that sense of urgency, even me, who is in this climate work full time and see these events unfold elsewhere, until it hits you at home and it’s people you know, grocery stores you shop at, schools your kids go to, your church actually being burned down, you’re not going to understand the urgency. Like, it is shocking. And we’re not talking 10 years from now. We’re having — these things are happening right now. It could happen to your home tomorrow. That’s the urgency we’re dealing with, and we need to act accordingly. So, no “practically” speaking. Like, we need to move now and do [00:24:00] everything we can.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you tell us more about the importance of Indigenous wisdom and practices in addressing the climate catastrophe?

KANIELA ING: Sure, yeah. So, going into Lahaina, the people that actually lived there for generations are the keepers of some of the most profound Indigenous knowledge that I have ever met. They understood subsistence fishery, how native plants were buffers against, like, you know, disasters, how to create regenerative agricultural practices. And it’s that view of the world where, you know, our success isn’t determined by how much we hoard, but rather how much we produce for others and share, and where, like, our economy is not based on how well the rich are [00:25:00] doing, but how many people, how many of us, can actually thrive. Like, it’s that — it’s not just Indigenous knowledge, but it’s that value system that really needs to be reestablished.

So, you know, I think over the years, especially in my line of work, there’s been more resources for Indigenous folks to lead frontline fights against bad projects. But the intervention that really needs to happen is Indigenous leaders also need to be resourced to build the good. They need to be the purveyors of and architects of the new green and, like, community-rooted world that’s still possible, even in these dire times.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, would you like to leave us with some images that you have been living through over these last few days, like the banyan tree, where you show us — when you put out on social media the [00:26:00] before and after the wildfires, but other images or stories of people’s bravery in trying to preserve what you have known for so long?

KANIELA ING: Yeah, I mean, as we’re speaking, there’s people that still haven’t found their loved ones. A lot of the friends I grew up with — like, I come from a lower-income neighborhood — they’re firefighters. I ran into one on the way here, and I’m just like, “Hey, y’all are doing a great job.” And he was just sweating and, like, started crying and, you know, barely — looked like he hasn’t slept in days. Hotels are letting residents in, without cost, to sleep. Multiple businesses are just letting people drop off goods, and they’re shipping it three to four times a day. They’re leaving their doors open 24 hours. So, there is that sense of, you know, this is an island; we’re all in this together. [00:27:00] And that sense of mutual aid and solidarity is really carrying us through, and it’s been quite remarkable to witness. But, you know, don’t want to leave you with some toxic positivity either. Like, these are hard times, and unless we take urgent action now, it’ll only get worse.

As Fires Destroy Native Hawaiian Archive in Maui, Mutual Aid Efforts Are Launched to Help Lahaina - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-11-23

NOELANI AHIA: Nā 'Aikāne o Maui Cultural Center was founded about 20 years ago in historic Lahaina Town, and it happens to sit adjacent to a very sacred area of Maui called Mokuʻula and Mokuhinia. And this is a traditional place, what we would call a wahi pana, or a sacred place, dating back to the 1500s, where one of our former kings, who presided over the islands with peace, lived and his sacred family was birthed there. And we have stories that carry us down today that connect us back to that place, [00:28:00] that reroot us.

And this island, Moku’ula, was in the middle of a wetland. It was lush and beautiful and green. Because of settler colonialism and because of the impositions of the settler government, it was covered over a long time ago, and there’s baseball fields now on it and tennis courts. And the Nā 'Aikāne o Maui Cultural Center has been working to get the access in order to restore Moku'ula and to clean it up and make sure it’s a place of reverence again. And the folks at Nā 'Aikāne have been working for decades on all kinds of issues: protecting burials, protecting land right issues, and just generally being there for the community to provide classes and workshops and cultural practice and cultural protocol.

And that building also housed a collection of artifacts, as well as historical documents, [00:29:00] old maps — just priceless things that are all lost in the blink of an eye. It was burned to the ground, and all of those things are lost. It also had a collection from an esteemed kūpuna, esteemed elder, named Sam Ka’ai, whose collection was being housed there. And for this kūpuna, this elder, this was his life’s work. He’s 85 now, and this was 50 years’ worth of carvings that he himself did, of collecting items from all over the South Pacific when he traveled on the Hōkūleʻa, a double-hulled canoe voyaging project back in the '80s. And I had the burden, you could say, of telling him yesterday that his collection was gone. And it was devastating. It was devastating. This is this man's life work. And he created all of these things not for himself, but for future [00:30:00] generations to understand how brilliant our Kānaka Maoli people are and how ingenious we were, because so much of that history and that culture was lost to us after the overthrow and with the new government and the wave of people that came in and took over lands. Particularly, we’re talking about, you know, the plantations and the oligarchy that Kaniela was talking about. So many Hawaiians were dispossessed from their land, and we lost so much of our culture, including our language. And so, when a kūpuna, when an elder, like this dedicates his life to retrieving and retracing and remembering those pieces of ourselves that allowed us to live here on this isolated island — how to make tools, how to make rope, how to make the instruments that feed us — all of these things that allowed us to have life and [00:31:00] survive here, all of those things that he dedicated his life to are now a memory.

But I will say, he told me yesterday morning that he woke up having a dream about seeds. And what he said was he saw us planting seeds back in the ash. He saw us putting back our traditional — our traditional plants, our traditional medicines, our kalo plant, our taro, which is very sacred to us. We’re ancestrally connected to the kalo. He saw us putting those things back in the ground so that new life can come again. And for somebody of his age, who’s closer to moving into the next realm than many of us, for him to still be thinking about the next generation and still be thinking about what the future could be in Lahaina, for me, is the measure of what it means to be [00:32:00] Indigenous and what it means to be genealogically connected to this land.

AMY GOODMAN: Noelani Ahia, it is so painful to talk to you right now at this moment with the destruction that your island has undergone. If you could talk about the mutual aid efforts? You know, first of all, in the rest of the corporate media, we hear almost no Native voices, no Native Hawaiians, and why it’s so important to hear your voices. And then, what is happening on the ground? You know, there’s a big debate now: Like, why weren’t people alerted earlier? Where was the early alert system? Why were people just looking out the window or smelling the smoke and seeing the fire right in front of them? And how important that is. But also, it’s just described, Lahaina, as a great tourist destination. How tourism has affected the [00:33:00] whole environment, if you could speak about that, as well?

NOELANI AHIA: Absolutely. Thank you so much. You know, it’s very disturbing for us, as Kānaka Maoli, to see the headlines and talk about — you know, see Lahaina as this tourist town, as if that’s all it is, because, for us, it’s so much more. And the tourism is part of the commodification of our culture. It’s part of the erasure of our culture. That narrative literally just takes us out of the picture. And, you know, without Hawaiians, there would be no Hawai'i. Everybody loves aloha, but they forget about the people that breathe aloha into the world, the root and the source of aloha, and that’s the Kānaka Maoli people.

The overtourism, the overdevelopment, the dispossession of Kānaka Maoli from our lands, the monocropping, as [00:34:00] Kaniela Ing was talking about, those are all things that contributed to the conditions that created this. And, you know, as we live on an island, there’s only so much space, and there’s only so much room, and there’s only so much resources. And for over 130 years, our water has been diverted to go to those sugar plantations and pineapple fields.

So, what used to be a lush, verdant Lahaina — in fact, I’ll tell you a little something, that the Lahaina is not an old name. One of the older names for Lahaina is Malu’ulu o Lele, and it means “land of the flying breadfruit,” because Lahaina used to be covered in breadfruit, which is a staple for the Hawaiian diet. It’s incredibly nutritious. It’s being studied the world over to help with food sovereignty in underprivileged areas. It’s just an amazing, rich, rich, historical plant for us. And Lahaina was covered with ulu until the sugar plantations came in and chopped it all down. [00:35:00] And they permanently changed our ecosystem, that one act, that on top of the diversion of water for the plantations.

What’s happening now that the plantations have shut down is unscrupulous developers are diverting the water and banking it for real estate. And it’s not real estate for the Kānaka Maoli or the local people. It’s for foreign investors. It’s for gentlemen’s estate farms that have giant swimming pools. It’s for — excuse me — really inappropriate use of one of our most sacred resources. In fact, the name for water in Hawai'i is "wai", and the name for wealth in Hawaii is "wai wai", which means if you have water, you have life. But our water has been taken away from us. And it’s left us in this dry, barren, almost unrecognizable — it would be unrecognizable to our ancestors, this condition that we’re currently living under, the settler [00:36:00] government.

So, you combine the dispossession with the overtourism, with the overdevelopment, and you have this trifecta for disaster. And that’s what we’re seeing today.

Kehsi Iman Wilson on Americans with Disabilities Act - CounterSpin - Air Date 8-25-23 

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: The devastating wildfires that tour across Maui and early August were covered dramatically, especially visually by US. News media. Words like war zone and apocalyptic were used. But as Robin Anderson notes for an upcoming piece for fair.org, less heard were words like climate disruption and even much less.

Fossil fuels instead, reports like one in the Washington Post forthrightly cited risk factors like quote, months of drought, low humidity, and high winds without [00:37:00] pursuing questions about those phenomena to their. Answerable and actionable roots. A New York Times piece stepped on the accountability question telling readers quote, it's difficult to attribute any single hurricane to climate change.

It can be hard to fault corporate media for ignoring the climate crisis. There is after all reporting that says weird, devastating weather is happening. And there's reporting that says continued fossil fuel driven climate disruption is having predicted impacts on global temperatures. There is also even reporting about politicians' reliance on funding from fossil fuel companies.

What there is is a resistance unto refusal to connecting those dots. Right now the levers, Rebecca Burns, is reporting that oil and industry lobbying [00:38:00] groups in California are working fervently but secretly to block important legislation about carbon emissions and, and here's where the reporting would come in.

It's about blocking regulation by blocking public knowledge. The bill is just one of simple transparency, letting the public know what is being done in our name, a phrase that never seems to capture elite media, but also what's being done in our money. Which seems to interest them all the time. The legislation would require thousands of large companies doing business in California to fully disclose their carbon emissions, including all of those companies who have built PR campaigns around the idea of net zero.

So far this year, industry opponents acknowledge spending some $7 million on state lobbying on this climate disclosure bill. And it's not [00:39:00] just the oil and gas companies that you might expect. And then again, here is where informative reporting would come in because it's also cement and asphalt companies whose processes burns reports account for more global emissions than airline travel.

And then it's Blue Diamond Almond Growers and Coca-Cola and Costco and In-N-Out Burger, Pepsi, Rite Aid, and on and on entities that if this bill would go through, would have to actually acknowledge, no matter the aspirations that they put on their PR page, the actual carbon emissions across their whole production chain. 

Wildfires - This is Democracy - Air Date 9-5-23 

RANDY DENZER: When you're responding to these fires is that, you know, we, we have this kind of perception in our mind that it's like it is on TV where you can actually see the fire and the smoke and it, and it's very you know, it's very clear air, what I would call clear air and.[00:40:00] 

And everything. And that's not the way it is. Uh, the, the folks in Maui, you know, uh, rest their souls, you know, and know and, and, uh, hope, hope everybody's, you know, recovering as much as they can. But they didn't have, you know, a clear view of this thing when you're in front of one of these big wildfires. Uh, it's basically like being in a fog with embers flying everywhere.

Uh, it's very different than I think what people perceive. And that sticks, that stuck out with me in a poem. And then, uh, It is, it is very intrusive right now. We've, uh, we've put ourselves in that position. I'll talk about that a little bit later on. But I think we've, we've kind of, uh, expanded ourselves into a situation that, uh, that I hope, you know, that people, you know, can figure out that we really do need to manage. 

JEREMI SURI - HOST, THIS IS DEMOCRACY: And, and, and we have to be preparing well in advance, right?

Because as you say, it's not obvious when, when the wildfire is approaching us. Right? 

RANDY DENZER: Yeah. And, and I've operated in a [00:41:00] whole bunch of different facets and different, uh, uh, things like, uh, aircraft rescue, firefighting and, and operations. Firefighting wildfire by far has the most politics in it I've ever seen.

And the reason, the reason Wildfire has politics in it, 'cause there's so many different people that are involved when you start talking about managing the risk, you know you're gonna have the biologists, you're gonna have different groups of people who, you know, don't want their land clear cut. I don't either, by the way.

You know, they don't wanna build fire brakes for one reason or another. But I think we're getting to the point, you know, all across the United States and, and and Canada where this, we really have to start doing something. And it's a very difficult situ, very difficult topic, cause the answers are all expensive, you know, to undo some of the risk.

But one thing I, I would really like to point out is, you know, Uh, me and Allison have worked [00:42:00] together on a lot of these issues in Austin, um, and I think she heard me years back. I've been saying for a long time in West Austin alone that we have an incredible issue there. We're gonna, we are have an incredible risk and we kind of gotta do something.

Um, the Maui fires, what I found most interesting about him, Over the past, you know, couple weeks since they happened was that I, uh, read a, a, uh, article about a group of people who were warning that this was gonna happen. So the risk was there, it was identified and, uh, I don't know whether it was private or government land ownership, but somebody didn't take care of the issue.

And, uh, there were people who were really trying to, to, to get some stuff done to, to reduce the fuel loading, at least near the city there. And it never happened. So, so I think we recognize there's, there's risk. We recognize there's an issue. We need to start acting on it. And that's, that's the hard part.

That's where the politics comes in. 

ALISON ALTER: So, Randy, you and I have been [00:43:00] working on this for, for quite some time, and I think that here in Austin, we do recognize the risk. I think we have an opportunity now that folks are seeing what these fires. Can do and how they've played out so catastrophically in so many other communities that people are paying attention and people are acting.

The kind of responses we're now getting for education that we've done about being ready, um, to be part of our war in central Texas to. Really focus on hardening your home are important and they are steps forward. The challenge we have is that the risk is enormous. Um, and in any scenario we were never going to be able to a hundred percent mitigate because fire is a natural phenomenon.

JEREMI SURI - HOST, THIS IS DEMOCRACY: Allison, as you look at this as, uh, someone, uh, in the belly of the beast, uh, dealing with these really difficult politics, as Randy said, and it really sticks with me. Randy, you said that these are the most difficult politics you've seen that's saying a lot. How do you, Allison understand and how do you convey to [00:44:00] people.

Why wildfire is more of a risk today than it's been in the past. 

ALISON ALTER: So wildfire is more of a risk today because of climate change and because of how we've chosen to build out our communities. Um, there's a place that we call the wildland urban interface, which is where the wildlands come together with the urban area.

Um, and it's in that interface where you have the most risk from wildfires to life and to structures. Um, and the more you build. In the wildlands, the more wildland urban interface you get, and if you build in those areas and you don't take certain steps, which we now know matter, like hardening your home.

So there's things that you can do when you make choices about your roof, how you deal with your vents, how you build out your vegetation around your home. If you fail to harden your homes in those ways, you're putting more and more people in harm's way. If you do that and you don't have exits and you don't have, um, multiple ways out, you increase the risk of the [00:45:00] impact of the wildfire.

The other thing, which, which Randy alluded to is we have. Forgotten that fire is a natural phenomenon and it is part of the lifecycle. And as we've had more and more people move into these areas, we have, um, prevented that natural phenomenon from playing out. And so I think that's also a problem with climate change.

We have dryer conditions. Um, you have to have the right conditions to have wildfire. Here in Austin, we've been very fortunate because we have had. The dryness and we've had, um, the prolonged heat, um, but we haven't always had the wind conditions, right? One of the things we know is with climate change, our wind conditions are gonna change, and so it's gonna be even that much more likely that we'll have wildfire.

Relationships, Money, and Maui Tourism | EP 172 - The Amanda Seales Show - Air Date 8-18-23 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: Of course we know the wildfires in Maui have been devastating. Mm-hmm. There have been over a hundred deaths. I mean, it really is a tragedy. Yep. But this is not the beginning of the Hawaii conversation. Mm-hmm. Like people have been saying [00:46:00] that the tourism, uh, industry in the, in the island is a problem.

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": Mm-hmm. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: And that, you know, we really, they've been saying like the natives of of Hava Hawaii have been saying like, please don't come here. 

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": Right. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: Now I fell into a trap because I thought I was being helpful. And I was like, y'all, they said don't go there, Don. Don't go there. So instead, go to Puerto Rico or go to the US Virgin Islands and the, then the Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands was like, pop the breaks.

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": Don't come here either. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: Don't come here either. And the reason they were saying don't come either, don't come here either, is because they have been colonized as well by America. 

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: Why is it so hard for people then to respect that these people are saying, do not come to our island. Not because we don't want you here as Americans, but because you are fueling an industry that is eating us alive.

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": I think when it comes to black people specifically, 'cause we are black, she talking to black people, Hey, everybody else. But you know, yeah. We keeping it here. I think this is where we show our Americanism, the intersectionality of being black and American. Because [00:47:00] Americanism is all about being exceptional.

It's about taking, if that makes sense. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: Mm-hmm. 

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": It's very individualistic. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: Yes. 

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": That we can't even conceptualize. Like, what do you mean you don't want, say, kinda spend our money, we helping you out. We doing you a favor. That part right there is, and it like, it's like, it, it's like a conundrum. 'cause in in that, like that American side come out, kicking in the, kicking it up, waving a four fo like I'm trying to, I think especially with black people, I'm trying to help you.

I'm doing something for you. How dare you say you don't want my help? And it's like, well, I don't need your help. Actually, the help thing. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: And expressly saying that the version of help that I need from you is not that. 

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": And, and it is also, we talked about it earlier in the show, especially as black people being a, a community that's often extorted.

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: That's what I was gonna say. My thing was gonna be like, I think a lot of us feel like, well, I thought y'all talking about them. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But we can still come, can we still come because we're us. We didn't, we we definitely didn't colonize y'all. 

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": Right. And we, and the, and what it's what it's worth. We're not profiting either in the same way.

As these larger corporations and entities. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: No, but we are feeding their profits. 

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": Yeah. Well, I think that's our thought. Like, we're not profiting off this. It's the white people profiting off this, so we should still be in the clear. [00:48:00] And it's like, no, you're enabling. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: You're fueling, you're fueling.

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": Because even me as someone, like when I first heard about this, I'm like, what's wrong with the whole thing?

So I did my research, you know? Mm-hmm. To truly just understand like, oh, what's the chasm between the tourism and just the natives I had saw this, um, like mini doc about this and they were talking about how people are getting priced out. Yes. 'cause of the, uh, tourism industry. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: Yes.

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": People living outside.

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: Homelessness is crazy on the islands.

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": Because it's getting so expensive. Um, and there's like, even, there was a, there was a story about a family that they lived on this certain section of, um, the country that was just, um, they dated for like natives.

Okay. But the waiting list was so long that the people are like, I can't even go on the list. I've on the list since I was, since like 1995. And it, this was done like maybe pre pandemic era or like right after the pandemic. So it was let say 2021 Uhhuh. That's a long time. Been a waiting list for housing as a native person.

When they building up these hotels and these motels and these water parks and you're like, I'm homeless. I can't even live on a land that's designated for me [00:49:00] as an indigenous person to this land. But y'all love over there eating, drinking out my eyes. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: Don't do it. Leave it alone. And I think as with the cisgender thing, it's like once you see the facts, that should be enough.

JEREMIAH "LIKE THE BIBLE": Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

AMANDA SEALES - THE AMANDA SEALES SHOW: Stop arguing the facts. Mm-hmm. Stop trying to make it rational. Stop trying to, you know, put the pieces together of the puzzle and be like, oh, you know what, but let me put in my 2 cents. You're not that smart. None of us are. Right. Like, the facts are what they are. You are not gonna come and like philosophize your way out of the reality.

Right. Which is, the tourism industry is a byproduct of the colonization of Hawaii. Mm-hmm. And continues to disenfranchise the native people and indigenous people of Hawaii. If you consider yourself a good person, do not help them in that process. Right.

How Native Hawaiians have been pushed out of Hawai'i - Bianca Graulau - Air Date 2-7-23

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: The beauty of Hawaii's beaches is unreal. I had never seen water that shade of blue. So it makes sense that Oahu alone gets more than 4 million tourists a year. But all those tourists have to do is turn around to see the harsh reality of life in Hawaii. People living on the [00:50:00] street, many of them Kanaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiian.

The irony is that they can't afford to live on the land that was once stolen from their ancestors. 

ABC NEWS CLIP: At the White House yesterday, President Clinton signed a formal letter of apology to the people of Hawaii. 

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: With the Apology Bill of 1993, the United States admitted to illegally overthrowing the government of Hawaii a hundred years earlier.

Because until the end of the 1800s, Hawaii was an independent nation with its own kingdom, led by Queen Liliuokalani. But that was about to change, thanks to missionaries that had come from the United States seven decades earlier to preach about Jesus. By the 1890s, the descendants of those missionaries had become powerful sugar businessmen who wanted to make more money.

They thought they could do so if only they were in charge. So they decided to take down Hawaii's government. And the United States helped them. They sent a military ship, and in 1893, they removed the queen. And made Sanford B. Dole the new leader. Now if the name Dole sounds familiar to you, it's Because you've probably seen the [00:51:00] brand before.

For a few years after the overthrow, the US struggled with what to do with Hawaii. One president called the overthrow an act of war, but then came 1898 and the US won on a power trip with land hungry leaders who were now going for Puerto Rico, ua, Guam, and the Philippines too. That same year, the US annexed Hawaii.

KAMANAMAIKALANI BEAMER: The United States did not bring Hawaii out of poverty. It did not. Bring Hawaii into enlightenment. If anything, it crushed one of the most amazing progressive places and Indigenous led Nations, on the planet.

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: The new government effectively banned Hawaiian language in schools. Students were punished for speaking it.

And they attempted to erase Native Hawaiian culture, turning it into something to be marketed to tourists. 

KAMANAMAIKALANI BEAMER: What we've experienced is... The loss of our land, the decimation of our language and our culture, being [00:52:00] overwhelmed and becoming more and more of a minority in our own ancestral homelands. 

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: By the time Hawai'i voted in favor of statehood in 1959, the Kanaka Maoli were already a minority.

Another thing that changed after the overthrow was the use of the land. The new territorial government had other plans for the places that were being used for agriculture. 

KAMANAMAIKALANI BEAMER: We had fish ponds and these taro patches and our people farmed and I think someone got the idea that they could develop it and create hotels.

And so they actually condemned our lands, they kicked Hawaiian people off the lands and they built up Waikiki and they dredged a huge area called the Alawai Canal.

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: Today Waikiki looks like this. For some, it's an image of progress, but poverty among Native Hawaiians is higher than the state average. 

KAMANAMAIKALANI BEAMER: If I had a time machine, I wouldn't choose statehood for our people. I'll tell you that. [00:53:00] 

MAILA GIBSON: I believe statehood was a good thing. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two parking. It's going for 799,000.

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: Myah Gibson is a realtor in Oh wow. 

MAILA GIBSON: Business is great. I mean, of course it's, it's like a catch 22 for me because I am native Hawaiian, and so on one hand I'm thankful that I get to make a living in the place that I love so much. But at the same time, my heart breaks for people who aren't so lucky. 

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: The median price for a single family home in Oahu is over $1 million.

That's how much this house was selling for in a neighborhood next to Waikiki. It was one of Myla's listings. 

MAILA GIBSON: Gentrification, to me, isn't such a terrible thing. Um, there's a neighborhood here called Kaka'ako, and it was all just warehouse space, and a lot of people sleeping on the street, and a lot of illegal activity.

So now, you've got Howard Hughes that's gentrifying the neighborhood. 

Great amenities, walkable, with easy access to a hundred acre beach park. And of course, you've got [00:54:00] delicious restaurants there, and you've got lifestyle, and you've got community. So to me... That's very positive. What I want to see, though, in addition to the gentrification, is something for Native Hawaiians, something for people that are, you know, of a lower income bracket.

We have to do something. Otherwise, we're going to see more people on the streets.

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: About 30 miles from the luxury high rises, we found a long line of people waiting to get food.

Where's your home? 

CINDY UMIAMAKA: You're looking at it.

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: Cindy Yumiya Maka's husband is Native Hawaiian.

CINDY UMIAMAKA: I never thought I would end up here. We got to the point where we couldn't afford to pay the rent any longer because they kept adding and adding and adding and, and it just, there was no place for us to go. 

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: Hawaii is currently the most expensive state to live in the U.

S. Some Native Hawaiians have opted for moving away in search of a more affordable [00:55:00] life. Today, there are more Native Hawaiians living in the continental U. S. than in Hawaii. 

NATIVE HAWAIIAN 1: I have a lot of my family moved to the mainland already. And I don't want to go there. I want to stay here. This is my home.

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: For some of those who stay, food drives like this one can be life saving.

NATIVE HAWAIIAN 1: It helps a lot. If not, you'll never see vegetables on their table or fruit.

PU'UHOUNA DENNIS "BUMPY": This is the lifeline, and that lifeline was broken, broken in the name of development and all that. 

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: 100 years after taro patches like the ones in Waikiki were destroyed, Hawaii now imports more than 80 percent of its food. That's why those Still fighting for independence or prioritizing farming again.

The nation of Hawaiʻi has its own flag, its own constitution, and rights to this 45 acre piece of land in Waimanalo. We always say that we exit America here and we enter Hawaiʻi there. [00:56:00] The story of this land goes back to the 90s, after the U. S. signed the Apology Bill. 

PU'UHOUNA DENNIS "BUMPY": Wanted independence, yeah, not just soveriegnty but independence. 

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: A group of Kanaka Maoli occupied this beach park, demanding freedom from the U. S. 

PU'UHOUNA DENNIS "BUMPY": They admit. And confess to overthrowing our country, right? You confess to that, and we still gotta go through some process that you think is right for us. 

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: After 15 months, the governor negotiated with them and offered them a lease to this land in exchange for ending the occupation. 

PU'UHOUNA DENNIS "BUMPY": This is the beginning of establishing that it's like a dot in what belongs to us.

Instead of... Expanding the land base. How about bringing all of our people back into this land base and seeing? Oh, here's our country. It's getting bigger. 

BIANCA GRAULAU - HOST, BIANCA GRAULAU: They're growing food, they produce their own energy, and they're creating their own banking system.

NATIVE HAWAIIAN 2: If we break our dependencies and, and we develop independent solutions, we don't need anybody to tell us we're independent. We will be independent.

Final comments on the need for better systems to respond to predictable disasters

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just [00:57:00] heard clips today starting with Democracy Now! explaining the management of water resources. Today, Explained looked at the impact of non-native grasses on the Maui Fire. Read Choi performed the skit of the concerned billionaire. Native America Calling discussed the fear of land grabs and water theft. Democracy Now! looked at local mutual aid programs in the wake of the fire, and in another clip, discussed the fire as just the latest in a long history of Hawaiian cultural destruction. CounterSpin criticized the media for not connecting the dots on climate disasters. And This Is Democracy discussed the politics of managing and mitigating wildfires.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard two additional bonus clips from The Amanda Seales Show explaining the destructive nature of the tourism industry on overstretched islands. And Bianca Graulau's mini-documentary about the legacy of colonialism in Hawaii and the Land Back movement. To hear that, and have [00:58:00] all of our bonus content delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support or 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 additional episodes of Best of the Left you may want to check out to dive deeper on these topics include number 1401, from February 2021, which discussed the climate fueled disaster in Texas, including everything from the strictly scientific to the purely political, and all of the disaster capitalism in between; and 1546, from March 2023, in which I describe the mechanisms of colonialism, dispossession, and cultural renaissance, including in Hawaii, as a lens through which to understand alienation, a primary condition of modernity. Those episodes again were 1401 and 1546. [00:59:00] 

Now to wrap up, just a couple more thoughts on predictable cyclical destruction. That episode I just described, 1546, was a huge undertaking and was the result of years of thought, gaining new insights, connecting more dots, and then finally putting it all together into a coherent narrative. In fact, I got a great compliment about that episode recently when a friend of mine started telling me about an episode of This American Life that he had heard, and then about halfway through the story he was like, oh no, wait, that was your episode, wasn't it? So anyway, you should definitely check that out if you haven't already.

The point of that episode and this story is that by understanding patterns of things like colonial dispossession, disaster capitalism, and climate disasters, we should be able to build better systems to prepare for them. For instance, putting a moratorium on land sales on Maui right now is a great idea the government is trying to stick to; we'll see how [01:00:00] that goes in the long run. But more generally, climate disasters are starting to remind me of the cyclical economic crashes that we're so used to because they are endemic to capitalism. After the recent recessions and during COVID, there were discussions about why government support mechanisms should be put on autopilot for emergency situations so that things like unemployment benefits and other mitigations would kick in automatically rather than depend on the whims of the current Congress to be able to get its act together and pass new measures in the middle of a crisis. Seems like a bad idea to depend on that. 

I have also heard similar discussions around preparing for natural disasters. The way our emergency management agencies and the funding of those are structured are from a bygone era. Emergencies at the time were thought of as rare and totally unpredictable, and so we'll authorize [01:01:00] funding when it's necessary. But, it probably won't be. But in our current age of climate chaos, these kinds of disasters are utterly predictable and terrifyingly frequent, so we need our laws to catch up with the times.

In fact, I just did a quick search, like, right now, as I was writing these notes, and realized that there's a new article in the Washington Post from a day ago making this exact same argument. It's titled "FEMA isn't ready for our new age of climate disasters." And one piece in it that stuck out to me was the fact that FEMA used to be a cabinet-level organization in the Executive Branch, but was shuffled under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of 9/11 in the year 2003.

And I remember that the shameful response to Hurricane Katrina just a couple years later made some people -- I mean at least people like me and the people I was listening to at the time -- [01:02:00] question that move, and recognize that emergency management needs to have a seat at the top table, right? Not just be under someone else's umbrella. And so all these years have gone by and we still haven't corrected that error. But it'd be a good place to start now. But seriously, just a place to start. We need a structural overhaul. 

That is going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave us a voicemail or send us a text message to 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist trio, Ken, Brian and LaWendy for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, webmastering, and [01:03:00] bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships at BestOfTheLeft.com/support. You can join them by signing up today; it would be greatly appreciated. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can continue the discussion. 

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from BestOfTheLeft.com.

Air Date 9/6/2022

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast, in which we shall take a look at the first GOP presidential debate, which happened without the frontrunner, Donald Trump, who instead just hung over the proceedings like a specter. Meanwhile, Trump's legal troubles continue to mount, and we examine what it is that keeps Republican voters and presidential candidates alike, with minor exceptions, firmly defending the former president.

Sources today include In the Thick, Straight White American Jesus, Democracy Now!, Today Explained, the Thom Hartmann Program, and additional members only clips from Democracy Now!

The Party of Authoritarianism - In The Thick - Air Date 8-23-23

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: Mike, you joined us on our show in 2016 and we're gonna actually take a listen to how you framed all of this seven years ago. Let's go to the archive tape.

MIKE GERMAN: There are people who have been white supremacists, publicly acknowledged white [00:01:00] supremacists for 50 years and they haven't changed what they've been saying for those 50 years. And three years ago, they were saying it, and no mainstream media organization put a microphone in front of their face. Nobody put a camera in front of them. Nobody asked them what they thought about mainstream issues and ideas. And yet, somehow over the last six months, it's become prevalent that we put a microphone in front of these people who are exploiting that opportunity. 

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: So, Mike, you were giving us the context of how the media was amplifying these perspectives. I mean, we've gotten to a point where we have a presidential candidate who's been indicted four times, so all of it is strange. I'm gonna ask you, I don't think shocked is the right word, but I don't know if you're shocked about how right the GOP is gone, or were you like, yep, this is exactly the trajectory that I've been talking about?

MIKE GERMAN: It's certainly the trajectory I've been warning about since I left the FBI in 2004. [00:02:00] I don't think most people really understand how authoritarianism works and the elements of fascism that as an undercover agent in white supremacist groups, I really learned a lot about the history of white supremacy in Europe and the United States and how foundational it was to so many of our policies.

We were overtly white supremacist nation for a century, and then through Jim Crow and Black Codes and other hundred years of effective white supremacy, and that didn't just evaporate with the Civil Rights movement, it was pushed to the margins to a certain extent, but was still a feature of our politics and the way that politicians, particularly on the right, but broader than that, would make appeals to racism that were often muted. It was called "dog whistle" politics. The people who like me had been trained to listen to those dog whistles, could hear them [00:03:00] regularly, but the general public might view this language as facially benign. 

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: I like that. Facially benign. Okay. Right. In other words, you were like, it's your just weird uncle who's kind of acting up again and it's like, nope.

MIKE GERMAN: Right. Exactly. And we all understand that there are racists in our society, but we look at them as an aberration. In fact, even the FBI and the Justice Department treat white supremacist violence as a form of extremism, compared to Muslim fundamentalism or Black nationalism. But they don't understand how deeply entwined white supremacy is with government power. And that's where it's more dangerous. It's not just the violence that the so-called extremists are committing, but that they're so tied to people who actually hold the levers of government power, who use state violence in a way to maintain the same racial hierarchy that [00:04:00] they're seeking to influence by their extremist violence.

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: There you go. 

Trickle Down Trumpism -Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 8-26-23

DANIEL MILLER - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: You know, and I'm not the first one to say this, lots of people have said it, they always do the "who won the debate?" kind of thing, as much as debates are debates now, regardless of where they are in the political spectrum, right? It's just people trying to score points on each other. But everybody agrees, and I think they're right too, that the sort of looming presence in the debate was the person who wasn't there, right? It was Trump. I've never seen a presidential primary like this where everybody's afraid to criticize the candidate that they want people to vote against, right? You had Chris Christie, who was the only one who really consciously or vocally said something anti-Trump or was taken as anti-Trump gets booed. Everybody says that they'd support, ongoing support for Trump and so forth. And like a lot of other people have said, Trump was the big winner in this.

In any debate, everybody knows the person who's leading has the least to gain from being in a debate. And Trump's not unique in being in the position of [00:05:00] deciding not to participate or doing that. Most candidates end up doing it because they feel like they have to, of course, that doesn't hold to Trump.

That was the big one is just how present Trump was, despite the fact that he's absent. I still can't fully get my head around why in the world people would vote for you if you won't say that your opponent is somebody that you're gonna do a better job than, or something like, I just don't know. I don't know what they're just running down the clock and hoping that he tanks because of legal stuff or what, but that was a piece. And then I think the other one, I'll throw it over to you to lead on it, is the trickle down Trumpism like you're talking about, again, he was present there because so many of -- I think not just the policies or the positions or the attitudes in the GOP, but the articulation of it and the rhetoric of it and the kind of militaristic, hyper masculine, whatever kind of rhetoric is [00:06:00] so prevalent and so common in the GOP now, and I think that is a Trump effect.

BRADLEY ONISHI - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Yeah, let's talk about that. So we have this situation where Trump doesn't attend and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who wrote Strong Men, many of you will know who Ruth is, had a great tweet and explanation of that. She says, "Trump's not there because dictators don't debate." If you want to be an autocrat, you don't debate. You are just supposed to be the leader. You have authority inherently. It comes from heaven, it comes from the divine. It is whatever. But you don't need to debate because you're not there to show that you're one of the best candidates. You are the candidate, and I think that's something we should take away from Trump not being there.

How can you be a viable presidential candidate if you won't debate the issues? That seems like a fair question. The answer is, I am the candidate who is chosen by God as an inherent right to be the leader, because that's who I am. And he [00:07:00] even said it in his interview with Tucker Carlson, why would I get on stage with a bunch of people who have no business running for president?

And you're like, dude, you've been indicted four times. A judge decided that you sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. You are the only president to be impeached twice and you incited an insurrection. What right do you have to run for president? And yet he's turning it around on everyone else. So I think that's something to keep in mind.

The very fact that Trump would not debate is not normal. Just don't lose sight of that. That's one. Two, As you said, Dan, most of the folks -- Christie and a little bit of Hutchinson aside -- would say nothing negative about him. When asked, would you vote for Donald Trump, even if he's convicted for crimes?, the majority of the stage raised their hand and said yes.

So there was this fealty to Trump, and as you said, Dan, there was this lack of desire to criticize him, and it almost just felt like a group of people [00:08:00] thinking, well, if he gets arrested and put away, or if he just flames out or something happens, and then hopefully they'll pick me, right? It almost felt like there's no way for me to beat him. There's no way for us to actually usurp him. So let's just hope that he's out of the picture. And if he's out of the picture, hopefully I'll be the guy who they pick. 

I'll give you an example of this. I'm a surfer, and when you're out there surfing, there's a very delicate and ritualized order of who gets what wave. And I won't go into it, but if you're surfing and you know the rules, you know that when a good wave comes, you know that somebody in a certain position has the right of way, and you better not take the wave if they're already on it because they're gonna be pretty upset and you're gonna break surfer code and it's a whole thing, right? Fist fights happen, blah, blah, blah. Alright. Why do I say that? I say that because one strategy that you can use as a surfer is sit in a certain position, hope that the person with the right of way wipes out, doesn't [00:09:00] get the wave, messes up, and then you jump on and you take the wave when they are no longer available to get it 'cause they wiped out or messed up or something else.

I felt like that's what was going on at the Republican debate is they're just waiting for Trump to wipe out and then maybe they'll ride the wave of GOP support. 

I'm gonna talk about two more things related to this and I'll throw it back to you. The Trumpism was there not only in their fealty to him, but also in the ways that a lot of the candidates discuss the issue. So I'll just go over a couple so that we don't spend all day on this. 

One is Ron DeSantis says on day one he will use troops in Mexico. Not at the border; in Mexico. If you go back to 2016, Dan, Trump really -- if you go back to that terrible year of 2016 that I know none of you listening wanna do, and I'm not asking you to -- but if you did, you would find that Trump's meteoric rise in the GOP primary [00:10:00] came when he started talking about the border. He said all the time in 2016, you guys weren't even talking about this until I came on. You guys weren't even talking about this until I showed up. What happens years later, two cycles later? His leading rival is talking about invading Mexico in an act of war on the first day of his imagined presidential term. Dan, this is what happens when you platform a radical. It trickles down. Ron DeSantis: I will invade Mexico. That's an act of war. What are you talking about? 

Second, a number of the candidates, including Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis, said they would get rid of the Department of Education. Now, we've heard this before, but I just wanna reiterate, this is an extreme position. So you're telling me you're gonna get rid of the Department of Education, right? We're talking about 200,000 federal employees. Or we're also [00:11:00] just talking about having standards for the ways that our students learn, having an agency that oversees that, and does not allow runaway states or runaway actors to go rogue in the most egregious senses. Dan, it's a radical position to say you want to get rid of the Department of Education, especially in a context where, as we've covered on this show, we have Oklahoma, funding with taxpayer money a Catholic school. We have Texas trying to put the 10 Commandments in schools. We have Idaho saying that coaches, teachers, might be able to pray in front of their students at practice or in the classroom. When we have books being banned, LGBTQ teachers being run out, the teacher of the year in Idaho leaving the state 'cause she feels like she can't teach there anymore.

So the Department of Education, that's a radical position.

An Argument at the Kids' Table John Nichols on First GOP Debate Held Without Trump Part 1 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-24-23

AMY GOODMAN: At last night’s debate in Milwaukee, Republican presidential candidates were also asked about the [00:12:00] climate crisis. This was on a day when the heat in Milwaukee forced the closing of the Milwaukee schools. During the debate, Fox News played a question from Alexander Diaz, a student at Catholic University of America.

ALEXANDER DIAZ: Polls consistently show that young people’s number one issue is climate change. How will you, as both president of the United States and leader of the Republican Party, calm their fears that the Republican Party doesn’t care about climate change?

MARTHA MacCALLUM: So, we want to start on this with a show of hands. Do you believe in human behavior is causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do.

GOV. RON DESANTIS: Look, we’re not schoolchildren. Let’s have the debate. I mean, I’m happy to take it to start, Alexander.

MARTHA MacCALLUM: OK. You know what?

BRET BAIER: So, do you want to raise your hand or not?

GOV. RON DESANTIS: I don’t think that’s the way to do. So, let me just say to Alexander this: First of all, one of the reasons our country’s decline is because of the way the corporate media treats Republicans versus Democrats. Biden was on the beach while those people were suffering. He was asked about it. He [00:13:00] said, “No comment.” Are you kidding me? As somebody that’s handled disasters in Florida, you’ve got to be activated. You’ve got to be there. You’ve got to be present. You’ve got to be helping people who are doing this.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: Can we stop the filibuster and answer the question?

MARTHA MacCALLUM: Yeah.

GOV. RON DESANTIS: And here’s the deal —

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: Let’s just answer the question, actually.

BRET BAIER: Is that a “yes”? Is that a “yes”? Is that a hand raised?

MARTHA MacCALLUM: You do not —

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: I think it was a hand raised for him. And it’s — my hands are in my pockets, because the climate change agenda is a hoax.

GOV. RON DESANTIS: No, I didn’t raise a hand.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: Let us be honest as Republicans. I’m the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for, so I can say this: The climate change agenda is a hoax.

ASA HUTCHINSON: Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s ridiculous.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: The climate change agenda is a hoax, and we have to declare independence from them. And the reality is, the anti-carbon agenda is the wet blanket on our economy. And so, the reality is, more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.

BRET BAIER: Governor, Governor Haley, are you bought and paid for?

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: The death rate is down by 98% over the last century.

BRET BAIER: Hold on. Hold on. Listen. Listen. Listen.

CHRIS CHRISTIE: Look, I’ve had — no, no, no. I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like [00:14:00] ChatGPT standing up here. And the last person in one of these debates, Bret, who stood in the middle of the stage and said, “What’s a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?” was Barack Obama, and I’m afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur standing on stage tonight.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: Well, come over here. Come over and give me a hug. Give me a hug just like you did to Obama.

CHRIS CHRISTIE: The same — the same type of amateur.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: And you’ll help elect me just like you did to Obama, too. Give me that bear hug, brother.

CHRIS CHRISTIE: The same type of amateur.

BRET BAIER: Hold on. Hold on. Governor Haley, would you like to respond? Are you bought and paid for?

NIKKI HALEY: So, Bret, what I would like to say is the fact that I think this is exactly why Margaret Thatcher said, “If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.” First of all, we do care about clean air, clean water. We want to see that taken care of. But there’s a right way to do it. And the right way to do it is, first of all, yes, is [00:15:00] climate change real? Yes, it is. But if you want to go and really change the environment, then we need to start telling China and India that they have to lower their emissions.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who was the South Carolina governor. John Nichols, very quickly, before we move on to foreign policy?

JOHN NICHOLS: Sure. Look, we saw peak climate denial in a Republican debate, and it’s kind of amazing at this late stage in history that it was, A, stated and, B, even on the candidates who weren’t quite as aggressive as Ramaswamy, there was avoidance. And you noticed that in that clip you played, the candidates immediately tried to go off to other topics to talk about whether they were bought and paid for, to talk about China, to talk about Russia, rather than to focus in on the issue that was raised.

And I think this sums up the Republican Party at this point. The moderate [00:16:00] position in the Republican party is avoidance. But I think a very strong position is — you know, a very popular position within the party is one of actual denial. And you saw a candidate on stage go full board on that, which was quite remarkable, especially on a day when, literally, the heat index was 114 degrees in Milwaukee.

Why top Republicans want to bomb Mexico - Today, Explained - Air Date 8-29-23

ALEX: SCORING IN <BUBBLING OVER>

 Let's start with Congress. So you have Congressman Dan Crenshaw.

<CLIP> 

FoxNews Rep. Dan Crenshaw: If we don't accept the fact that we are already at war, then we're going to lose it pretty quick. 

ALEX: Mike Waltz.

<CLIP> 

FOXNEWS Rep. Michael Waltz: Cartels are running our border. The cartels are destabilizing the entire Mexican government. We need to go on offense.

ALEX: Both Republicans. They introduced a bill seeking an authorization for the use of military force to go after cartels, which, broadly speaking, gives the US government broader authorities to use the military to start bombing parts of Mexico where the cartels are, but targeting the cartels specifically.

<CLIP> 

FoxNews Rep. Dan Crenshaw: This has to be a whole of government approach, with CBP leading the charge, but also with the DEA, the [00:17:00] CIA, the FBI, the military. This is a serious problem. This is some of the most well-equipped, well-armed, most dangerous people on Earth just south of our border. 

ALEX: You've got Tom Cotton, who's open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug lords.

<CLIP> 

FOX News TOM COTTON: If al-Qaeda or ISIS set up shop in Juarez or Monterrey or Tijuana and they were killing 100,000 Americans every single year, what would you expect our government to do? Whatever it is, that's exactly what we should do to these cartels. 

ALEX: They're not alone in Congress, but they're sort of more prominent ones. But to be clear, all of that would be happening without Mexico's support. So they're basically saying the U.S. needs to take unilateral action against the cartels, even if the Mexican government doesn't help, even though the U.S. would try to pressure them to do so. Now, this is permeating up to, let's say, the presidential level: 

<CLIP> 

60 Minutes Mark Esper: [on President Trump suggesting missile strikes against drug cartels]

Mark Esper: The president pulls me aside on at least a couple of occasions and suggests that maybe we have the U.S. military shoot missiles into Mexico. 

Norah O'Donnell: [00:18:00] Shoot missiles into Mexico. for what?

Mark Esper: He would say to go after the cartels.

ALEX: So when Trump was president, he considered using military force against drug cartels. He didn’t for myriad reasons, one of which was he was worried about an influx of asylum seekers coming north of the border. That's a border that has been a big issue for him. And he was worried about the optics of that. But it is now a part of the campaign. So not only DeSantis, but Vivek Ramaswamy: 

<CLIP> 

Forbes Vivek Ramaswamy: [Secure The Southern Border] Here's. What we're doing. I'm taking over in January 2025. We take undeployed troops by the hundreds of thousands. We secure the southern border full stop. If we've done it to ISIS in a different part of the world, this should be simple. 

ALEX: You have Trump and his acolytes basically saying that DeSantis is stealing Trump's policy, right? They're basically saying that, Oh, wait, bombing Mexico in parts of Mexico to go after cartels is Trump policy. 

<CLIP> 

KUSI News Trump: [Plan to Destroy the Drug Cartels] The drug cartels are waging war in America, and it's now time for America to wage war on the cartels. 

ALEX: And I should note that pretty much every Republican candidate [00:19:00] supports designating the cartels as terrorist organizations. So, like, that's the minimum bar. But I think the big takeaway here is, from what once was kind of a fringe idea within the Republican Party has made its way through Congress, to a Trump administration, now to this campaign, to the point that you have the three polling Republicans, Trump, DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, all supporting this idea. So you could imagine that a Republican – should a Republican win in 2024 – the 'strike Mexico to go after the drug cartels' idea isn't going to go away. In fact, it will probably be one of the earliest foreign policy commitments that people will see if they fulfill. 

SCORING OUT

SEAN: Is going after the drug cartels in Mexico with forces, with bombs, with a full military engagement, whatever it might end up being, is that going to war with Mexico?

ALEX: It's not really. So let's take a quick step back. So the one thing they all the candidates [00:20:00] pretty much say is they want to work with the Mexican government to rid themselves of the cartels or at least to substantially curb the amount of fentanyl that comes into the United States, which we should foreground, the opioid epidemic has been, you know, killing tons of people in this country. I'm sure this podcast has talked about it quite a bit. 

TAPE SFX IN

<CLIP> 

TODAY EXPLAINED: Addicted and alone [August 2021]

SEAN: More than 90,000 people died of an overdose in 2020 in the United States. That’s a thirty percent jump from the year before. A lot of us didn’t notice, but Rachel Lambert did.

TAPE SFX OUT 

ALEX: The opioid crisis, which includes a lot of fentanyl, is killing more people than the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars combined on a yearly basis. So this is obviously something that's top of mind, not only just for Republicans or for Democrats, but this has sort of been the latest and biggest Republican suggestion. So to the point about war. If the Mexican government doesn't help, then what they're basically saying is we would do special targeted either cyber operations or special forces operations or limited strikes on labs. There [00:21:00] is a call to send troops in, but it wouldn't be like a massive invasion. It would be kind of like anti-terrorist operations in, say, Syria and Iraq or Libya or elsewhere against terrorists like ISIS or al Qaeda or anything like it, right? I mean, if we're going to treat the cartels as terrorist organizations, then we're going to fight them like terrorist organizations. And so we're going to do counterterrorism operations. Now, and in differing cases, you know, you have countries that either sort of tacitly give permission or openly give permission and others that simply don't. Right? I mean, lest we forget that the operation to get bin Laden was in Pakistan and Pakistan did not particularly like that we did that.

SEAN: Are there any Democrats taking this idea seriously or is this strictly a Republican thing? Has the president of the United States, the current one, said anything about this notion? 

ALEX: I mean, Here's what Adrienne Watson, who's the National Security Council spokesperson, told me: You know, the administration is not considering military action in Mexico, and they actually think that designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations would not give them any more [00:22:00] authority than they already have. In fact, this is sort of the administration's argument, is that what you're doing by designating them as terrorists is just opening up military options. All the other options like economic sanctions and more law enforcement authorities have already been granted by this administration. Even Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chair, has said it was a bad idea: 

<CLIP> 

CSPAN Chair Mark Milley: I wouldn't recommend anything be done without Mexico's support and they have to request and so on, so forth. There are capabilities that we in the military have, but these are very, very difficult policy decisions. And having spent a fair amount of time in Latin America, I would argue that the best thing that can be done is by, with, and through the local governments that are friendly to the United States. 

ALEX: Now, I should say it's not solely Republicans that are calling for treating cartels like terrorists. 

<CLIP> 

FoxBusiness Rep. Tony Gonzales: [label cartels terrorists] I think it's time to label cartels what they are. They are terrorists and they're terrorizing not only migrants and people along the border. Now they're terrorizing Americans. 

ALEX: After there were four Americans kidnaped in Mexico, Rep.. Gonzalez, who's a Democrat [00:23:00] from Texas, he said that the U.S. should start treating cartels like terrorists. Now, he didn't say, you know, he would support an authorization for the use of military force, but he has basically said, look, these cartels are terrorist-like organizations.

SEAN: I think we all know how these presidential primary debates work, Alex. You've got, you know, one party's presidential candidates sort of trying to win the votes of one side and then they have to sort of regress to the mean and try and capture both sides. Is this just some of the top Republicans in the field trying to sort of out-extreme each other, or do you think there's a genuine desire here to go to war — war-war — with Mexican drug cartels? 

ALEX: A couple of things here. The first is that I think they are finding it to be lucrative for their campaigns. DeSantis, for example, is fundraising off of the proposal that he said at the debate. [00:24:00] He's selling T-shirts that you can buy for, I believe, like $44 that say that he will leave drug lords, "stone cold dead". And that's in all caps. So clearly, they're finding that this could be a resonating message to his base. And, you know, Desantis had a military career. He was a military lawyer. And so this is a way for him to sort of say, look, I've served. I've got military credentials and here's the things I'm thinking about. I look tough here. And then also to match, I think, Ramaswamy and Trump. But point is that there seems to be an audience. I think that's part of it. The other aspect that I don't really want to miss is that, you know, this really is like the major concern. I've been talking to Republicans for a long time, you know, even before really the primaries got underway in earnest. And when I was saying, what do you think the big foreign policy challenge is going to be or the big foreign policy thing is going to be? Obviously, China is sort of, you know, above all, but second was fentanyl.

SEAN: Hm!

ALEX: And it seems to be that that their constituents are really concerned about what's going on. 

Trickle Down Trumpism Part 2 -Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 8-26-23

DANIEL MILLER - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: So that's a piece of it, but part [00:25:00] of it, if people are like, why the extremes? Just a fact to think about is that since 1988, the GOP has won one popular presidential vote. They won the popular vote for president one time. It was 2004, when George W. Bush won his second term. That's it. It was Bush/Kerry, thank you. And the last GOP president before him was his father after Reagan's two terms. They have to become more and more extreme. And again, I don't see this as Trump invented this. He didn't invent it, but he brought it up from the depths. He brought it out in the open. And this is why for me, things like the election denial and everything else, number one, they make sense. There's a certain logic to this. We can't win an election if we're the GOP on even ground in a presidential election. We'll say that it was fake. We'll say that it was stolen, whatever. But it's also gonna push us to more and more far extremes, and we've talked about this for years too, and you [00:26:00] see the culmination of it now. They're so beholden to the far right and a shrinking electorate, an aging white population. And so they just have to get more and more radical to keep those people on board. They can't lose them because if they lose them, they have really nobody to vote for them. And so you get this kind of cycle where they're caught in these radical positions, even if they didn't believe them.

And people ask you, I know they ask you, they ask me, do they really believe this? Do they just say it? Do they, whatever. We brought this question and posed it to our panelists at our Denver event. And the short answer is, it doesn't matter, 'cause the effects are the same. And why I bring that up, I bring that up because I think Ramaswamy's statements are the same kind of thing. Because people also, and I've seen in the wake of that, lots of people posting things and writing, why are people drawn to believe these conspiracy theories and so forth. And one answer is -- and this is gonna sound weird, we think of conspiracy theories often in terms of belief, people get really wrapped up in the how can they believe these things and the data says [00:27:00] this, and how can they ignore, Brad, all the evidence that you're giving, the hints of changing climate patterns and events all over the US, not to mention the rest of the globe -- and the answer is, it feels good to believe it. It feels good. It feels comforting to believe that not that humans screwed up the planet. It's gonna be really hard to try to fix it. Not we have supported the West, the US, countries like this, for generations. Laissez-faire economic policies that despoil the planet, and not because that stuff also gets us wrapped up in all kinds of stuff that we also don't wanna talk about on the right, about colonialism and race relations. And, arguably, why a response to what's going on in Maui is more muted. And it's far away and people don't even realize it's part of the US or there are lots of non-white people who live in Hawaii, including native Hawaiians, right? All of these kinds of things. It feels so much better to say it's a hoax. And then I can just sleep well at night and I can [00:28:00] feel good about it. And this is what the GOP is pandering to. 

And I think this is part of why people have to recognize how potent this is, because there are a lot of Americans that it just feels better to feel all these things. It feels better to be angry all the time than to be scared. It feels better to know that, if I'm nervous around people of color, they scare me, they make me nervous, my kids are learning stuff in history classes I didn't learn, it's a lot easier to just be angry about that and shut it out than it is to have to look in a mirror and take a look and say, wow God, what if all the stuff my teachers told me wasn't the way it is?

Obviously I can go on about this forever, but I think that's for me, I guess what I'm trying to get at, which is for me, the emotion that I think all of this ties into that's on display in the debate, that's on display in the election, that's on display in this kind of ramping up of rhetoric, which will jump me over ahead and jump to the next topic then, if we're talking about emotion here, which is the role of abortion in the debate I thought was [00:29:00] really significant. CNN, others have had really good summaries and they summed it up well. It would take a while to go through every candidate and try to pin down what they've said, but they're all over the map, right? Some candidates were like, 15-week federal abortion ban is what we should do. Some said they were opposed to a nationwide ban. Some have been in states that have enacted six-week bans, but nobody was really willing to say whether or not they actually support that at a federal level or if they would as president and so forth. 

But I think what it highlights, and this is another piece, is where the GOP is still caught between at least three poles here. One is that same group on the far right who are so adamantly opposed to any form of abortion that they have to take radical positions. As you hammer all the time, a majority, around two-thirds of Americans in general approve, favor some form of abortion access. Then the ones who don't know whether they support a federal ban or whether all that rhetoric they had about state's rights for decades was true, and they don't know [00:30:00] what to do. And I think that was on full display. 

The Party of Authoritarianism Part 2 - In The Thick - Air Date 8-23-23

MIKE GERMAN: ...and it reminded me of a shooting in Detroit of a Black Imam. 

Narrator: The FBI says Abdullah was a highly placed leader of a nationwide Sunni group of African Americans who converted to Islam. However, members of the community shocked by the allegations tell Al Jazeera that he led a relatively small mosque and was known for his charitable work in the Detroit area.

MIKE GERMAN: And the FBI had a sting operation and it just involved stolen television sets. It wasn't a violent crime that he was being set up for, but the FBI went in full guns blazing in a warehouse where he was completely cornered and then set a dog on him knowing that he was armed with a handgun. So, when he shot at the dog, they shot at him and killed him. And I'm not necessarily questioning the people who are in that shooting incident - you know, when somebody fires a weapon, you can't do a deep analysis of where [00:31:00] exactly they were aiming, and, uh, likewise in Utah when somebody points a gun - but there were choices about how to address that crime and it almost seemed like the part of that state violence that it was, Oh, you want to intimidate us? Well, we're gonna show you, and made it more likely that violence was going to occur. 

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: Which is why when you look at what happened on January 6th, for example, and the fact that law enforcement was just, like, Oh wait, what's happening? 

MIKE GERMAN: Right. Law enforcement was the part that was going, Nah, nah. 

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: Exactly!

MIKE GERMAN: The FBI, the Capitol Police. 

JULIO RICARDO VARELA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: Exactly. That's what I'm fascinated by, right? What you just said there, Mike, in the heart of January 6th, like, you were just saying, I don't know what's going on. And then now we're living in a post-January 6th world. So, in a post-January 6th world, where do we stand? Is the FBI defending democracy? Are we dangerously close to this authoritarianism type of mentality? I mean, what are your thoughts?

MIKE GERMAN: Absolutely. And as you mentioned earlier, one [00:32:00] of the elements of a growing authoritarian movement is to challenge government institutions, and so we have Republicans who had been steadfast defenders of the FBI when it was accused of abuses of minority communities and religious communities and leftist political activists, are all of a sudden treating the FBI as the enemy and undermining the FBI at a time when they're involved in the largest investigation ever in their history, the January 6th assault on the Capitol, that I think in many ways is admirable. They've charged over a thousand people. That's a little confusing what their strategy is on how to address the other thousand plus people that may have committed crimes that day with the resources they have. But they still seem very focused on that day as if it appeared out of nowhere and the problem went away afterwards. When groups like The Proud Boys who [00:33:00] the government has successfully charged with sedition for leading the attack on the Capitol, have reconstituted and are still engaging in public violence all across the country with very little police intervention.

And even though they're, uh, interstate organization, you haven't seen the FBI using its tools to address this ongoing violence and it doesn't even seem to register that it's happening. I mean, one of the big problems which we've been trying to address is the FBI can't tell you how many people White supremacists killed last year. Or the year before that. Or the year before that. Because even though they've now said that they have raised domestic terrorism investigations to a top priority, they don't collect domestic terrorism incident data. So they don't know how many attacks are out there.

JULIO RICARDO VARELA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: You know, wait, can I just stop for a second? This is a Mike German moment. 

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I bet if it involves a Muslim person that immediately [00:34:00] categorizes something else. Mike is saying, if you have White men committing crime, murdering people, what will it take for those to be seen within the context of domestic terrorism? 

MIKE GERMAN: Exactly. That's fascinating.

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: 'cause it gets to a very, you know, I mean, Timothy McVey, Oklahoma City bombing, 1997. Yeah. I'm fixated on this because this is what he said in his only interview to Time Magazine. He said, Well, wait, do I look like a terrorist? 

MIKE GERMAN: Right. 

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: It's a central point: because I'm a White guy, so therefore I can't possibly be a terrorist. This is so important because there's that element, right? The Timothy McVay element, like, do I look like a terrorist, or something else? Right? Which is a complicated element to the conversation about White supremacy, but we're not afraid to take on complicated issues when it revolves around White supremacy, which is, there are a lot of POC a lot of people of color, who express White supremacist views. You do not have to be White to believe and support White supremacy. So, most notably, Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud [00:35:00] Boys who is Afro-Cuban, the mass shooter who killed eight people in Allen, Texas back in May, many of them, Asian, including a child, he was a Latino man who expressed neo-Nazi views, he had a patch that he was wearing with the initials RWDS, which stands for right-wing death squad. 

So, we have been talking about and acknowledging Latinos and Latinas who identify with White supremacy. So can you talk a little bit more about why White supremacist groups are actively engaging people of color, to get them to come over to, as it were, their side? And what tools are they using, misinformation, disinformation? 

JULIO RICARDO VARELA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: And Mike, I'm sure from your history, and Maria, too, back in the nineties, like, this is nothing new, right? 

MIKE GERMAN: Right. So it is nothing new. Race is a social construct. It's something that we invented to establish a political-economic-social hierarchy in our [00:36:00] societies. So who is White under the social definition of it is malleable and people are let in and people are pushed out depending on what's going on in a different society's political demographic.

And from the perspective I learned as a White supremacist undercover, they focus on European ancestry. So of course Spain is in Europe, and so anybody with a Spanish surname, as long as they could prove or even just claim ancestry going back to Spain, they were White. And Latino communities aren't exempt from racism. And, you know, Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, and right there have always been considered White Hispanics and Black Hispanics and Asian Hispanics. So you've always had an element of that. And with the growing Latino population in the United States, obviously they're attaining more political [00:37:00] power. So there's a interest in incorporating more of them into the far-right movement. And that is the other part of it, is the far-right politics, the authoritarianism, the fascism, is racially exclusive in context. So of course fascism is also something that has been in South and Central America, in many ways. So, you know, you saw White supremacists wearing t-shirts that said "Pinochet did nothing wrong". 

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: Exactly. 

JULIO RICARDO VARELA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: And you and people bring up Spain and we completely forget if you start looking at the history of Spanish colonialism, there were literal caste systems that based your status in society on the blending of races of how White you were or how Black you were, or how indigenous you were, right?

MARIA HINOJOSA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: And the amount of violence that was learned and is perpetuated by a theory of White supremacy from, you know, colonial times. And then you see that manifested in authoritarian dictatorships in Argentina where they are torturing [00:38:00] people based on political views. 

JULIO RICARDO VARELA - CO-HOST, IN THE THICK: And White supremacy has a Latin American slant as well, Mike. I think that's one thing that people continue to miss. 

Is America Run By A Psychopathic Cult w Seth D. Norrholm - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 8-24-23

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Dr. Norrholm, in this article that you wrote, I read it on Raw Story, I'm not sure where it was first published, you argue that, you're talking about the political parties and how we can't compromise anymore, and that basically the GOP has, you know, morphed into a cult. I'm, you don't literally say that, but I think that there's an element of, it seems to me like you're suggesting that. If that's the case, what do we do about that? How do we interact with family members, friends, who have become cult members, who have come under the sway of Donald Trump? Or of the larger, you know, cult, the White supremacist cult, for example? The White nationalism thing. 

DR. SETH D. NORRHOLM: Yeah. You know, if you think about cults in general, you know, obviously there are lots been written about, and cult psychology has been studied for decades, and that's a lot to discuss, so I'm just gonna boil it down. If you think about [00:39:00] the cult experience, you're talking about a reality that is driven by the leader of the organization or the cult, and that is perpetuated by the followers, and usually there is some central doctrine to the cult theology, which is, you know, we will follow this leader who will take us to greener pastures. And in cult history, those greener pastures have been a heavenly destination, you know, something in the afterlife they've been. You know, riches and prosperity here on the human plane. And so there's been some promise of a happy ever after by the cult leader, and that's gonna depend on what the cult leader is professing and what the members are subscribing to.

So what we're seeing now is really the evolution of a major political party. So as I mentioned in this article, there was a time not too long ago when the two [00:40:00] major political parties had fundamental differences but could meet in the middle. There were differences over how much the government plays a role in your daily lives and how much the government should support individuals who need help financially and in other ways, and how much should be left to the individual to provide for themselves and to be a self-starter in some way.

So there were areas where a compromise could be reached between these two ideas. But what has happened over the last seven years now is this evolution into a cult-type organization where there's no longer anchors and links to what's happening in the real world. And everything is happening within this cult-like bubble where the narrative is written by the leader and sycophantic followers that are in his leadership structure so that there is less and less connection to what is really happening.

And so, I describe this in terms of [00:41:00] when somebody is in a cult, you know, for a long time it was thought that cult membership was somehow robotic or automatic, and people were brainwashed and it became in a zombie-like state, and they were in this cult until they could be broken out somehow. But what more recent research has shown is that there is a volunteer aspect to being in a cult, there is more decision making by the person to engage in the cult situation than was previously thought before. And so what you're seeing, whether it's, you know, members of Congress who are Republican or identify as Republican are skewing more towards cult-like thinking and defending the single person, the leader of this organization, and not the objective evidence, the legal evidence, the evidence that's available on video that's really indisputable, but still adhering to the logic and narrative that exists within the cult bubble. 

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Right. So we just have a minute left. What, how best do we approach friends and family to pop them out of this cult? [00:42:00] 

DR. SETH D. NORRHOLM: I think it really is a matter of driving home the objective facts and showing that the cult narrative is wrong. So I think four indictments back to back to back helps to change that narrative. I think being found civilly liable for rape, you know, these two impeachments. Eventually the evidence becomes so great that the majority of people within the cult have to say, Wait a second, something is not adding up here. So if you can aid in that discussion to help people be more receptive to objective information and to say, I know what you're hearing, but try to listen to it from this perspective. 

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: That's interesting. It seems sometimes that they're impervious to facts, but maybe if we could remind them of what life was like before the cult, too.

 

Trickle Down Trumpism Part 3 - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 8-26-23

DANIEL MILLER - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Just a quick couple. One, I can hear the emails I'll get now being like, what about the Lincoln Project? And my answer would be, what about the Lincoln Project? I think you hit it on the head when you said, not just show me the moderate Republicans, but show me the modern [00:43:00] Republicans who matter at all within contemporary American conservatism. And that's the issue. I guess where I'm going with that is this is not a fringe minor voice. This is the American GOP at this point. 

BRADLEY ONISHI - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: So I understand the Lincoln Project. We've had a lot of success over the last five years battling Trumpism. Now one of us is running for president, and does that person on the debate stage, does someone from the Lincoln Project -- you want to tell who was on the debate stage that represents the moderate Republicans? Chris Christie? Really? Chris Christie, who's really just running for president as revenge? He's not gonna be president and he knows it. He's just out there trying to take shots at Trump. Who is on the debate stage, Dan, that represents the Lincoln Project or any of these other people? No one, no one. Don't talk to me about Nikki Haley. Don't talk to me about Asa Hutchinson or Mike Pence. Anyway, sorry. Go ahead. I apologize. Go ahead. 

DANIEL MILLER - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Nope. That's the point, right? Is that when we talk about this, I guess what drives me crazy is still this knee-jerk response. I think again, it's because it feels good to think it's true [00:44:00] that somehow or another most Republicans are still some sort of reasonable moderates holding on to classical conservative principles and so forth, and there's some minoritarian fringe out there, and I just don't believe it. And I'll point to the same thing you do and say, just show me, show me where that is, if that's how this is. And how it is that events like this don't follow logically from the mainstream discourse of the American right?

Ticking Bomb Inside GOP’s Plan To Defund Trump Prosecution - Thom Hartmann - Air Date 8-31-23

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Republicans in Georgia now are talking about defunding Fannie Willis. 'cause how dare you hold a corrupt Republican to to account well in, in her case, 19 corrupt Republicans. Isn't it fascinating by the way that, uh, Jack Smith has, I believe it's 82, I could be wrong, 80 some odd. Anyway, uh, known listed witnesses in his case against Donald Trump, and every single one of them is a Republican.

Who are [00:45:00] lining up to testify that Donald Trump committed crimes. Everyone is a Republican. All of the witnesses, to the best of my knowledge that Fannie Willis has are Republicans. You would think that if a political party had a corrupt member, And had other corrupt people within the party who were collaborating with that corrupt member to commit a major felony crime against the United States of America, you know, defrauding the government, stealing an election.

You would think that that political party would welcome a prosecutor who wanted to clean up the party for them, but no. Georgia State, Senator Colton Moore was on Steve Bannon's little podcast the other day, and he said, uh, it's just like Nazi Germany. I mean, they wanna call us the Nazis, but their actions are Nazism.

I mean, first they go after your [00:46:00] enemies. Seriously, this guy is gonna quote Pastor Nie Moler, right? Uh, okay. First they go after your enemies and you don't say anything because they're your enemies. And that's exactly where the governor is right now. I. See, he's accusing Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, of being in on this thing because Brian Kemp doesn't like Trump either.

And, and Brian Kemp has been spoken of as a possible candidate to run against Trump in the primaries, although he has not yet stepped up. He says, uh, so you don't say anything 'cause they're your enemies. And that's exactly where the governor is right now. He looks at Donald Trump as an enemy. So he's like, I'm not gonna say anything.

Right. And then they come after your friends. I got a friend who's being indicted. Well, hey, if you've got a friend who's being indicted, you might wanna reconsider your friendship. But then this guy goes completely bat guano crazy. He says, you want a civil war? I don't want a civil war. I don't want to have to draw my rifle.

I wanna make this problem go away with my legislative means of doing [00:47:00] so. And the first step to getting that done is defunding Fannie Willis of any Georgia tax dollars. You see, Brian Kemp signed a law back in May that starting on October 1st, a commission which has five members who then have the power.

To do what I was just talking a minute ago about DeSantis doing down in Florida where he fired two of his prosecutors, two elected state prosecutors. Fannie Willis is also an elected district attorney. DeSantis fired, two elected prosecutors because they were, God forbid Democrats. I. In Georgia, you couldn't do that until the legislature passed this law.

So starting in October, this five person commission can recommend to the governor that any particular district attorney in the state of Georgia be fired. And guess who? The only district attorney in the state of Georgia anybody's talking about firing is right now. You guessed it. [00:48:00] Fannie Wallace. When are the Republicans gonna just clean up their act?

I mean, what, this is a serious question. What do you think it's gonna take for the G O P to say, you know, enough? I, I, I realize probably most people listening to this program are not old enough to remember Dwight Eisenhower. I am, and I do remember Dwight Eisenhower. I remember very well. He was the president throughout most of my childhood.

And he was a good man in many regards. I mean, and you know, obviously he wasn't, you know, Joe Progressive, but can you imagine Dwight Eisenhower saying, yeah, yeah. We we're all in support of a president who tried to overturn an election, who lied to the American people about having lost an election? Who conspired to, to, to flip an election?

I can't imagine it. I can imagine Richard Nixon [00:49:00] going along with it in the background quietly, or Ronald Reagan or even George W. Bush maybe, but I can't imagine My dad's Republican party. My dad called himself an Eisenhower Republican. I can't imagine my dad's Republican party doing that. 

An Argument at the Kids' Table John Nichols on First GOP Debate Held Without Trump Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-24-23

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve written extensively about the 14th Amendment. Again, increasingly, conservative legal scholars are also writing about this. Explain.

JOHN NICHOLS: Sure. The 14th Amendment, Section 3, which is a post-Civil War section, a post-Civil War amendment, deals with people who foment insurrection, people who swear an oath to the United States and then, in a position of power, take actions that might upend the government, might in some way cause a political crisis of the sort that we saw certainly during the Civil War and that [00:50:00] many people believe we saw more recently with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election — certainly different actions, by any measure, but yet, at the end of the day, a failure to abide by an oath to follow the basic strictures of the Constitution.

And the people who have been talking about 14.3 have generally been on the left. People like John Bonifaz and other constitutional lawyers have brought it up many times. But in recent months, you have seen conservative legal scholars, and even some conservative activists, bring this issue up.

And it is a legitimate issue, a complex one, because the Constitution doesn’t really lay out exactly how you enforce this standard. But the standard is that if someone swore an oath to the government, either encouraged or supported insurrection, and then seeks to return to government, that they can’t do so, that they can’t [00:51:00] continue to hold an office. And there’s a lot of interpretation in all sorts of ways on this. But, as Asa Hutchinson pointed out, this is something that has been raised. There’s a genuine concern as regards Trump. If he’s convicted, it could become an even bigger concern, particularly if he’s convicted in the Washington, D.C., case brought at the federal level by Jack Smith or in the Georgia case, both of which talk about attempting to overturn an election.

AMY GOODMAN: And to be clear — 

JOHN NICHOLS: So this is a big deal.

AMY GOODMAN: — it would be individual secretaries of state who could say Trump is not going to be on our state ballot?

JOHN NICHOLS: Theoretically, that’s one way to do it. And certainly, that’s something that several groups, John Bonifaz’s group and others, have raised as a possibility. There is also the possibility that Congress itself could take action and, via a resolution, say that it is the determination of the Congress of the United States that Donald Trump is in violation of 14.3. I mean, there’s several ways to [00:52:00] go at this. No matter what happens, if it does — if it were to occur, if a secretary of state were to bar Donald Trump from the ballot, you’d have a legal fight. There’s very little question of that.

And I think that what’s significant with Asa Hutchinson bringing this up in the debate is that it brought this issue more to the forefront, and, I think, opens up, hopefully, a broader discussion about the clear constitutional concerns as regards someone like Donald Trump seeking to return to the presidency.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, although Donald Trump, of course, who’s the leading candidate, skipped the debate, he appeared instead in a pretaped interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think we’re moving toward civil war?

Donald Trump: There’s tremendous passion, and there’s tremendous love. You know, January 6 was a very interesting day, because they don’t report it properly. [00:53:00] I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken before, and you know some of the crowds I’ve spoken before. And, like, July Fourth on the Mall, I think that had a million people there. But I think that the biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken before was on January 6th.

And people that were in that crowd, a very, very small group of people — and we said “patriotically and peacefully,” “peacefully and patriotically,” right? Nobody ever says that. “Go peacefully and patriotically.” But people that were in that crowd that day, very small group of people, went down there. And then you — there were a lot of — a lot of scenarios that we can talk about. But people in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they’ve ever experienced. There was love in that crowd. There was love and unity. I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love. And I’ve also never seen, simultaneously and from [00:54:00] the same people, such hatred of what they’ve done to our country.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, do you think it’s possible that there’s open conflict? We seem to be moving toward something.

Donald Trump: I don’t know. I don’t know, because I don’t know what it — you know, I can say this: There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen, there’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen, and that’s probably a bad combination.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, John Nichols, your response to Trump’s comments to fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson? Also the fact, what he said, Vivek Ramaswamy mimicked his line, which is, he said America is “in an internal sort of cold cultural civil war,” last night he said.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah. Well, I was in Madison, Wisconsin, on January 6th, and so I can’t attest to what Donald Trump thinks he saw, but my sense of what occurred on that day is [00:55:00] very, very different than his. And I think that the same goes for committees that have investigated it and others. And so, Trump is clearly putting his spin on this.

But the most troubling thing is that he is suggesting that there is a possibility for additional violence. And that is a deeply unsettling statement by a former president, the front-runner in a presidential race. And it also does, as you suggest, parallel what some of the candidates are saying, especially Ramaswamy, who has — you know, did indeed in the debate suggest a very dark vision of America. In fact, he explicitly rejected Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” statement from back in the 1980s, and argued that things are actually pretty awful and potentially could get worse. So, you really do have a split from the Republican Party of the past to a party that is much more, for lack of a [00:56:00] better term, combative.

An Argument at the Kids' Table John Nichols on First GOP Debate Held Without Trump Part 3 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-24-23

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Republican candidates were also asked about the war in Ukraine. This is debate moderator Bret Baier of Fox News.

BRET BAIER: Mr. Ramaswamy, you would not support an increase of funding to Ukraine?

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: I would not. And I think that this is disastrous that we are protecting against an invasion across somebody else’s border, when we should use those same military resources to prevent across the invasion of our own southern border here in the United States. We are driving Russia further into China’s hands. The Russia-China alliance is the single greatest threat we face. And I find it offensive that we have professional politicians on the stage that will make a pilgrimage to Kyiv, to their pope, Zelensky, without doing the same thing for people in Maui or the South Side of Chicago —

MIKE PENCE: OK. All right, Bret, I’m in.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: — or Kensington. I think —

BRET BAIER: Hold on.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: — that we have to put the interests —

MIKE PENCE: I’m in.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: — of Americans first —

CHRIS CHRISTIE: Me, too. He was referring to me.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: — secure our own border instead of somebody else’s. …

NIKKI HALEY: A win for Russia is a win for China. We have to know that. Ukraine is the first line [00:57:00] of defense for us. And the problem that Vivek doesn’t understand is, he wants to hand Ukraine to Russia. He wants to let China eat Taiwan. He wants to go and stop funding Israel. You don’t do —

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: False.

NIKKI HALEY: — that to friends. What you do instead —

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: False.

NIKKI HALEY: — is you have the backs of your friends. Ukraine is the frontline of defense. Putin has said, if Russia — once Russia takes Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next. That’s a world war. We’re trying to prevent war. Look at what Putin did today. He killed Prigozhin. When I was at the U.N., the Russian ambassador suddenly died. This guy is a murderer. And you are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: I have to address that.

BRET BAIER: First of all —

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: First of all —

BRET BAIER: First of all, Mr. Ramaswamy, you have 30 seconds. Mr. DeSantis, Governor DeSantis, you’re next.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: You know, Nikki, I wish you well in your future career on the boards of Lockheed and Raytheon.

NIKKI HALEY: You know, I’m not on the boards of Lockheed and Raytheon.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: But the fact of the matter —

NIKKI HALEY: And, you know, you have put down —

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: Boeing came off of it, but you’ve been pushing this lie.

NIKKI HALEY: — everybody on this stage.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: You’ve been pushing this lie all week, Nikki.

NIKKI HALEY: But do you know what? [00:58:00] You want to go and defund Israel.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: Yes. OK, let me address that.

NIKKI HALEY: You want to give Taiwan to China.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: I’m glad you brought that up.

NIKKI HALEY: You want to go and give Ukraine to Russia.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: I’m going to address each of those right now. This is —

NIKKI HALEY: You will make our —

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: — the false lies of a professional politician.

NIKKI HALEY: He will make America less safe.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: There you have it.

NIKKI HALEY: Under your watch, you will make America less safe.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: So, the reality is — 

NIKKI HALEY: You have no foreign policy —

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: Let me —

NIKKI HALEY: — experience, and it shows. It shows.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY: And you know what? There’s a foreign policy experience that you all have…

BRET BAIER: Governor DeSantis, you were mentioned in the territorial dispute. Not only —

NIKKI HALEY: No, it’s not a territorial dispute, either.

GOV. RON DESANTIS: So, as president of the United States, your first obligation is to defend our country and its people. And that means you’re sending all this money, but you’re not doing what we need to do to secure our own border. We have tens of thousands of people —

NIKKI HALEY: We can do both at the same time.

GOV. RON DESANTIS: — who are being killed because — well, we’re not handling both.

NIKKI HALEY: And we can do both at the same time.

GOV. RON DESANTIS: And so, I am going to declare it a national emergency. I’m not going to send troops to Ukraine, but I am going to send them to our southern border. When these drug pushers are bringing fentanyl across the border, that’s going to be the last thing they do. We’re going to use force, and we’re going to leave them [00:59:00] stone cold dead.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Before that, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and also Vivek Ramaswamy. John Nichols, your response?

JOHN NICHOLS: It was a remarkable exchange. You could write books about that, just those few minutes there, and, in doing so, get a pretty good insight to where the Republican Party is. You clearly saw the “America First” position that Donald Trump obviously articulated in many cases as president, but even taken to greater extremes by Ramaswamy and, to a lesser extent, by DeSantis.

But what was fascinating in that exchange was the extent to which Nikki Haley really emerged as, I think, one of the most effective communicators on the stage, and one of the most aggressive communicators. She is nowhere near the others in the polls. She has got a long way to go. But she’s clearly doing a better job, frankly, than some of the other candidates who are attempting to distinguish themselves, [01:00:00] in putting herself out there. And you saw the crowd’s reaction to her.

But what was fascinating was the extent to which Ramaswamy refused to back down. In fact, he actually, as you noted in that clip, suggested that Haley was really trying out for a place on the board of some defense contractor. It was a very aggressive hit, and one that I think was notable, because it gets to, I think, a lot of the deep divisions within the Republican Party about foreign policy. I wish that the moderators had really played this out a little more and given more time to a deeper investigation of this. And I think it’s especially notable that DeSantis was desperately trying to get into the discussion, but came in not with particularly deep insights, but just a repetition of talking points about the border.

Final comments on the need to ban Trump from office in the right way

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today starting with In The Thick explaining the mechanisms of White supremacy in government power. Straight White American Jesus looked at [01:01:00] the GOP debate without Trump or criticisms of him. Democracy Now! focused on the question about climate change at the debate. Today, Explained looked at the rhetoric around militarizing the US-Mexico border. Straight White American Jesus looked at the factors pushing the GOP towards extremism. In The Thick looked at the GOP pivot against the institution of the FBI as part of their turn towards authoritarianism. Thom Hartmann discussed the GOP through the lens of cult dynamics. Straight White American Jesus looked at how sidelined moderate Republicans like the Lincoln Project have been. And Thom Hartmann discussed the GOP resistance to cleaning up the corruption and criminality in their party.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard two additional bonus clips from Democracy Now! discussing, first, the 14th Amendment option to ban Trump from office, and another diving deeper on the GOP debate discussing the war in Ukraine. To hear that, and have all of our bonus [01:02:00] content delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support, or 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. 

Now, to wrap up... I just have a couple of thoughts on that 14th Amendment option to ban Trump from office. First of all, obviously, I think that restriction should apply to him, and there's not really any question of that to me. Just today, I saw that a lawsuit was filed from CREW - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. I think it's starting in Colorado, and that is absolutely how it should be done. I'd also heard talk about simply pressuring secretaries of state to make the decision, like, individually to remove Trump from ballots in their states, which is a terrible idea.

The only way to approach this is through the legal process and the Supreme Court would [01:03:00] absolutely have to weigh in. Any kind of scattershot disqualification in some states but not others would be political disaster that would bleed over into disaster beyond politics. This idea is already getting enough traction that Trump and his followers are responding to it. There was another story today that was highlighting just, you know, people on social media saying they would write in Trump even if he were taken off the ballot in their state, because of course they would. 

And... I'm not saying that's like a flaw in the plan to ban him. The point is that we're trying to restore the legitimacy of the election process and get the vast majority of people in the country to once again accept the outcome of elections so that we can stave off politically motivated violence.

Partially disqualifying Trump, though maybe technically correct, would work directly at odds with the goal of establishing legitimate elections and saving our democracy. [01:04:00] Maybe if the Supreme Court weighed in, probably only after some of his convictions had come down, and they voted to say that, yes, the 14th Amendment does apply to Trump, and he should be banned from holding office again, then maybe there wouldn't be an immediate, deafening call for civil war from right wing media, followed by waves of terrible violence. Maybe. 

But if Trump loses the election, in part, either actually or just by perception, because he's not on the ballot in some states, and those states are probably going to be run by Democrats, if anyone's just going to unilaterally choose to keep them off the ballot, the reaction would be truly awful, and our goal of re-establishing a functioning democracy would be farther away than before. 

So, as you hear conversations about that option, just stretch beyond the... sheer facts [01:05:00] that obviously, yes, it should apply to him and even the possibility of, you know, Could we make it work? Could we get people to keep him off the ballot? Stretch beyond that and think about the actual ramifications and the actual underpinning of democracy. Like, what actually makes democracy work? It is only through the perceived legitimacy of the government that something like a democratic system held together with the minimum of force is possible. And we're, like, already teetering on the edge of enough people thinking the government and our election systems are illegitimate to be incredibly dangerous. So any actions that push further in that direction should be seen and understood to be incredibly dangerous. So, just something to keep in mind. 

That is going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave us a [01:06:00] voicemail or send us a text to 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Trio, Ken, Brian, and LaWendy for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, webmastering, and bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships at bestoftheleft.com/support. You can join them by signing up today. It would be greatly appreciated. You'll find that link in the show notes, as well as a link to our Discord community, where you can continue the discussion. 

So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay and this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from [01:07:00] bestoftheleft.com.

Air Date 9/3/2022

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] During today's episode, I'm going to be telling you about a show I think you should check out. It's the Talking Politics and Religion Without Killing Each Other podcast. So take a moment to hear what I have to say about them in the middle of the show. And listen wherever you get your podcasts. 

And now, welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, in which we shall take a look at the impact of the rise of highly-addictive smartphone sports gambling, the effects of which are being felt beyond the individual gambler's bank account and anxiety levels. Partnerships between gambling companies and colleges, influencers, and even journalistic institutions like ESPN are changing the fundamentals of the sports themselves and how they're understood by fans, all for the worse. 

Sources today include Wendover Productions, Why Is This Happening?, The Dominique Foxworth Show, TYT Sports, Cara Nicole, the PBS NewsHour, and Edge of Sports, with additional members-only clips from Philion [00:01:00] and Full Story.

How the Sports Betting Industry Quietly Consumed America - Wendover Productions - Air Date 12-13-22

The beginnings were as inadvertent as they come. Hastily drawn up and jammed into the entirely unrelated Safe Port Act, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act passed through Congress in September of 2006, then with President Bush's signature, a month later became law. The unremarkable bit of legislation banned gambling companies from taking payments over the internet made in violation of state or federal law.

The old guard of online gambling -- the likes of Full Tilt Poker, Poker Stars, and Absolute Poker -- the new law would prove an existential threat. For a set of upstarts, though, it functioned as the legal foundation of an as-yet untapped market. In trying to close one loophole, the act opened another with this seemingly innocuous exemption: that betting and wagering did not include participation in fantasy sports, which were deemed as games of skill, not chance. 

At the time, the distinction made sense. Fantasy sports were fundamentally different from any sort of online gambling. People didn't get rich off fantasy sports, nor did they lose [00:02:00] thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in one fell swoop. Fantasy team owners wagered on season-long outcomes with their friends from school or work and poured over stat sheets for bragging rights as much as money. They might have been obsessed, but they were never quite addicted. Then in 2009, a fateful backyard brainstorm at South by Southwest completely altered the trajectory of fantasy sports, and as they would turn out, sports betting.

The company that coalesced under the Austin Sun was called FanDuel, and it was everything that fantasy wasn't. Countering the traditional season-long league, FanDuel offered daily fantasy. Rather than just playing with your buddies, the service provided tournaments and cash games to compete against countless others. Whereas traditional fantasy leagues only saw minimal financial exchanges in league buy-ins and annual draft guides, FanDuel moved to major money. Just one good day they advertised could net a couple thousand dollars. And thanks to the Unlawful Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, it was online [00:03:00] and in your pocket. What had been slow moving and cumbersome was now fast and convenient. Just play from your phone, win, and cash out that very same day.

Young people followed and so too did money. FanDuel's first rounds of funding topped $1 million, then $4 million. Then by 2013, $11 million. As investment climbed, so too did winnings. That same year, the platform crowned its first million-dollar prize winner during its December Fantasy Football championship and dished out more than $150 million in prize money overall. The following year, FanDuel partnered with the NBA, while its rising competitor, DraftKings, nabbed the MLB and NHL. Suddenly, companies that didn't exist just years prior were outspending the entire beer industry, running ads every 90 seconds on national TV. With palm-of-your-hand convenience, cheap buy-ins, mouthwatering prize potential, and unavoidable promotional offers, daily fantasy services had maximized the potential of fantasy sports. Sports fans played, sports leagues and media [00:04:00] invested, while critics and academics began asking exactly to what extent this sped up further gamified version of fantasy sports actually differed from sports betting. Yet, rather than regulators intervening, legislators, league leaders, team owners, and daily fantasy consumers alike began to rethink just how bad sports betting really was. Banned by Congress in every state except Nevada, and opposed by all major leagues, sports betting had long been perceived as the antithesis of fair sports. This wasn't only the position held by league commissioners either, as 56% of Americans polled in 1993 disapproved of its legalization. Through the 2000s, after point-shaving scandals rocked college basketball, then insider betting in the NBA came to light, betting remained a dark, shady sports underworld in the view of most, and to league leaders, a direct threat. Even through 2012, NFL's Roger Goodell, MLB's Bud Selig, NHL's Gary Bettman, and NCAA's Mark Emmert, each came out against the idea of overturning the federal ban. [00:05:00] Or at least that's what they said outwardly.

As teams and leagues entered partnerships with gambling-adjacent fantasy platforms, internal conversations slowly shifted from sports betting as a scourge to sports betting as a potential opportunity. Daily fantasy drove more fan engagement, and so too with sports betting. At the same time, sports fans were voting with their wallets as the American Gaming Association estimated that Americans were spending about $150 billion on wagers annually, with only a small fraction actually going through legal means in Nevada.

Then finally, the head of the NBA came out and said it: If Americans were spending billions on sports bets, American newspapers and media were publishing betting lines, and other countries were finding success in regulating nationwide gambling, then why not just legalize it? 

By and large, the public followed the logic, as 2017 polling showed that 55% of Americans had now come to favor the idea of legalized regulated gambling, while only 33% oppose it.

[00:06:00] Polling, though, doesn't overturn federal bans. But the timing was perfect. While daily fantasy shots skyward, and American opinion came around, the legality of the federal ban was coming under question. New Jersey's effort to legalize sports betting to prop up a faltering Atlantic City had climbed all the way to the Supreme Court. And in 2018, a surprise ruling opened the floodgates as Justice Alito delivered at the seven-to-two opinion, acknowledging that while sports gambling is fraught with controversy, it ultimately wasn't the federal government's constitutional right to ban it; rather, that it was the choice of each individual state.

The race was on. Eight states legalized sports betting in 2018. 10 more joined in 2019. Sports books opened in state and tribal casinos. Sports venues added betting kiosks, while DraftKings and FanDuel, the darlings of daily fantasy, opened up brick and mortar lounges across the US and launched mobile online betting in states that allowed it.

But this race to legalize wasn't between states. This was a time trial to see which [00:07:00] gambling industry representatives could secure legalization as quickly as possible in the friendliest terms possible. The likes of FanDuel and DraftKings, who had previously spent millions ensuring that state legislators saw daily fantasy as a game of skill and not of luck, the strategy was already established, and the team already assembled. From Trenton to Tallahassee to Topeka, lobbyists bought lawmakers gifts and presented the plot points of a new path over expensive glasses of wine. Legalized sports betting, they pitched, would bring tax revenue by the millions, and besides, they argued, people were betting illegally anyway. Why not bring it above board, bring in revenue and create a win-win? Or what about a win-win-win? they'd ask. Where regulations and taxes are slightly less burdensome, so more sports books are incentivized to enter the market, so more users have more outlets to bet, so more volume brings the state more tax revenue.

The pressure was immense, as the deep pockets of the world's most recognizable casinos spared no expense in helping state legislators see the issue from their point of view. 

The Explosion of Online Sports Betting with Eric Lipton - Why Is This Happening? - Air Date 5-9-23

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: There's a history here, right? Maybe [00:08:00] it's worth talking about this for a while. I mean, anyone who's seen Eight Men Out, which is about the Chicago White Sox, the Black Sox scandal of the early 20th century, in which players on the team were betting against themselves, they were throwing games, right? That there's always been this concern if you allow a lot of sports gambling, and if you legalize it and if it's accessible, that the actual competitors and participants themselves will get pulled into it. And of course, to the extent, if they end up owing a ton of money to a bookie, then the bookie says to him, here's how you can pay me back: make sure you don't score 20 points tomorrow night. And then someone can bet the under on their individual performance and hit it big. Am I right that that's the thing that has hung over this entire conversation for a century? 

ERIC LIPTON: Yeah, no question. It was sort of the Black Plague, especially for baseball with the kind of Pete Rose and the fact that Pete Rose had been a coach at the same time that he was betting on his own in games. And it was a practice that, in fact, that professional sports league cited in their lawsuit as at the same [00:09:00] time as they were suing New Jersey, saying that this would compromise the integrity of the game. Behind the scenes after the oral arguments, when it became clear that the court was likely gonna side with New Jersey, they were already negotiating with DraftKings and FanDuel lobbyists to begin an alliance to legalize state by state. So they saw where this was headed. But yes, this was why baseball in particular was so adamantly opposed to embracing legalized betting, was that they saw that it was gonna undermine the integrity of the game. But they changed their tune just before the Supreme Court ruled.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: I have to say that, if you're talking about Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, or Giannis Antetokounmpo, some huge NBA star, or even anyone in the NBA, I don't think it's that likely that these athletes are gonna compromise and risk the millions and millions of dollars they're making for some side bets.

But one thing that's really striking to me is you can bet on anything on those platforms, and I mean, there's some obscure game in a mid-major [00:10:00] Division 1 NCAA basketball team that, I don't know if the lead scorer can tank that game and his friends all put a few thousand on the game, it just seems like once you penetrate down to amateur sports and the kind of sports you could bet on that there's just a ton of opportunities for exactly the kind of corruption and point shaving and thrown games that took down Major League Baseball at one point. 

ERIC LIPTON: Right I mean, the bets are not simply about who wins and loses. There's the prop bets that allow you to bet on individual plays and rushing yards, receiving yards, receptions, touchdowns, interceptions, points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, three-pointers. I mean, there's all kinds of little things you can bet on beyond the winner and loser. The professional leagues do prohibit their players from betting. And for example, recently there were I think five NFL players that were punished, and they're tracking their players because they have the capacity to see who's betting. Every time a bet is made in the United States, there's a company called GeoComply, which gets pinged. And it can tell you who's [00:11:00] betting and the exact location of that person. And their computer authorizes every single bet and all the platforms contract with GeoComply and so they know who's betting and they know where that person is. And it allows a compliance to know, assuming they're not using someone else's phone, to know who's betting. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: Oh, wait a second. Let's stop there. I don't think I quite realized. So there's a monopoly company that has the contracts with everyone, that is the compliance company, such that if I'm the starting shooting guard on Iona, which is a college here in the New York area, that's not like a big, huge NCAA player, but a Division 1 team. And if I'm a good player, if I'm gonna make a few extra thousand with a prop bet against my own points tonight, this GeoComply basically would know it's my phone if I tried to make it myself?

ERIC LIPTON: Assuming it's your phone, yes. Every single bet goes to GeoComply and they have to sign off on that bet based on where you are located, because they have to know, like for example, in Washington, DC, If you're in Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, that's a Federal park. You can't [00:12:00] bet in a Federal park. If you're across the street from a Federal park, you can bet. So your exact location has to be known. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, it's the Uberization of cell phones. It's like that Uber, that technology that Uber developed, the reason we have mobile betting now is that the technology, it's only in the last decade that the technology has existed, the latency, the accuracy, the confirmation ability, all of that, and that's what Daily Fantasy Sports really demonstrated is that these phones were incredible tools for online betting. And it was only once that revolution occurred that the company saw that and they realized, we gotta grab this. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: So after the 2018 Supreme Court ruling, it's a little bit of like, okay, any state that can manage to legalize this, can do this. What happens, what do those state campaigns look like in terms of getting states to legalize it?

ERIC LIPTON: They're really phenomenal in scale lobbying exercises, I mean, dozens of lobbyists. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?: I feel that, I mean everything, that everything on this topic [00:13:00] seems phenomenal in scale. Every time I see anything having to do with sports betting, even just an ad, I'm like, I feel like that ad costs $5 million to make. Where are these people getting all this money? 

ERIC LIPTON: It's actually a billion and a half dollars a year that the gambling companies are now spending on TV and radio advertising. It's an enormous amount of money. But the state campaigns are enormous and elaborate. The thing that I've seen in sports betting is that basically they, for the most part get it passed when the industry decides what it wants collectively. If you have disagreement between the casinos and FanDuel and DraftKings, or disagreement between the video poker player companies and the casinos, or between the Native American tribes and the casinos. If there's any fratricide, for example, in California where you had the Native American tribes and FanDuel and DraftKings going at each other, they spend more than $500 million on competing referendums, and it goes down in ashes. The fratricide is the thing that stops the ball from rolling on the passage of more sports betting the United States. So in Missouri, for example, right [00:14:00] now, it looks like they're past another year even though the Kansas City has had such success with its teams recently, it looks like another year will go by where they will not have sports betting. And that's because the video slots companies desperately want a cut of the bill, they wanna have their piece, they wanna have their 10,000 units of video slots in gas stations. And unless they get that, they keep killing the bill with their patron in the legislature, Danny Hoskins. 

And so what I see in the States is it basically have the professional leagues have their own lobbyists, the casinos have their own lobbyists, the video slots people have their own lobbyists, and the Native American tribes have lobbyists, and you'll get like dozens and dozens of lobbyists and they're all there in the rotunda hanging out as these things are being debated and they're working their friends in the legislature to get the language in a way that meets their interest. 

Gambling controversy continues to hit the NFL, MORE Players suspended - The Domonique Foxworth Show - Air Date 6-29-23

DOMONIQUE FOXWORTH - HOST, THE DOMONIQUE FOXWORTH SHOW: As money gets more important to these sports leagues, as they operate more and more like businesses and less like teams, the customer changes. And while the customer is still partially the fan, it's [00:15:00] also sponsors and it's also these gambling companies. And their revenue is tied to how true they are to the image that they project.

And what I mean by that is, this is an entertainment property, but it's not pure entertainment, like a TV show, a movie or maybe wrestling would be the example, like, WWE professional wrestling-type stuff. Because they are not trying to trick us into believing that pro wrestling is real, and that hurts how valuable media property it is.

The premise, or one of the biggest catalysts to why sports franchise values have jumped so much recently is because it's one of the last places that it's must-see because this stuff is not scripted. It's live, it matters, and there's connection to your... there's civic pride. And I think this kind of dovetails on the conversation I want to have later. 

But the reason why I bring that up is because they've never made a [00:16:00] decision in the past that is this big, that puts that core thing so much at risk, as they have recently. And campaigning and lobbying to legalize gambling is something that all the pro sports leagues were doing because they were running out of ways to maximize the revenue in their current stream, so they were like, You know what, let's open a new stream. And it's something that they always said in the past that they were hugely opposed to, was gambling companies.

And I remember quite clearly when I was, I wasn't president of the union at this point, I was on executive committee of the union and we were talking about moving the Pro Bowl from Hawaii. And they're like, Where should we put the Pro Bowl? Should we go to a bunch of different cities? And I remember saying, it was probably a year after the all NBA All-Star game was in Vegas, I remember saying in a small meeting with Roger Goodell, I told him, I requested, Let's put it in Vegas. I love Vegas. It was fun. I would never go to the Pro Bowl. Not because I was a... I wouldn't go to the Pro Bowl to [00:17:00] visit. Like, you think about NBA All-Star weekend, everybody goes to the All Star Weekend. Players who are not playing in the game go there. It's like a fun thing. The All-Star game in um, or the Pro Bowl in Hawaii, it wasn't the same thing. Nobody going to Hawaii, no people were trying to go all the way to Hawaii to hang out to watch the Pro Bowl. 

So anyway, I bring that up to say at that time, their response to that was like, ridiculous. This is a horrible idea for me to even put on the table. And, in their defense, it came like a year after the NBA was there, and if you remember that NBA All-Star game, there were probably four NFL players, I think, three or four NFL players got arrested or got in some sort of trouble. So they're like, we gotta stay out of Vegas. And also we don't want to be that close to gambling. Fast forward to now, they got a team in Vegas and they are in bed with all the major gambling companies and trying to get more money. 

So back to the original point. This is the first time that they're putting their most important, like, [00:18:00] pillar, which is the integrity of the game. They're putting it in jeopardy by being close to these companies. And the reason why, and the way that they're trying to protect that is by over punishing players and creating really strict rules around what they can and can't do. I think this is, I know this, I know that perception is as important to them as anything from being around this league a long time and working at the union and all that stuff. But if you don't want to believe me, you can read the, like, five guidelines that they released recently and that kind of makes it quite clear what matters. If you look at it, they're like, we don't want you placing bets from the team facility. I think that's all about perception. They don't want guys on Instagram or on TikTok, like, Yeah, I'm making these bets or whatever on, while they're sitting there in front of an NFL logo or at a team facility. You can't do it on the road, 'cause the same reason. And the real kicker is, In the NFL [00:19:00] regular season, you can't even step foot into a sports book, which technically you're able to gamble. You can't gamble on your own games, obviously, or the games in your league, but you can't even step foot in a sports book. It's like if you wanted to bet on some basketball games, you should be able to go into a sports book. But you know what looks bad? A pro football player being photographed standing in a sports book because they're playing against the Raiders in Vegas, they're standing in a sports book the night before their game, and then let's say anything happens. The next day that's a real hard story for them to corral. 

So, I think, I'm sorry I haven't let you say a word, but I think that's a bunch of the stuff that has just been floating around in my mind and is upsetting. But I find myself in a hard place where I want to be defensive of the players because I recognize that they're putting the players in a tough spot. 

ESPN Will NEVER be the Same After This Major Decision - TYT Sports - Air Date 8-12-23

THEO ASH: So ESPN has bought the Barstool Sportsbook and is turning it into its own sportsbook, ESPN BET. And I [00:20:00] think that this is an alarming development just because ESPN is the number one resource for sports news, and now they directly profit off of gambling. Gambling sites and news sites becoming the same thing is terrible. That's a terrible idea. Think back to the NBA draft. The biggest, maybe the second biggest NBA reporter on the planet, Shams, tweeted that Scoot Henderson, "it really is looking like he could go number two to the Hornets". 

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Let's pause here for a second. TheoAshNFL on TikTok is making a fantastic point about how some of the most prominent members of the media, how they could potentially be moving betting lines just from their reporting while having a conflict of interest of working with a sportsbook while trying to maintain a level of efficacy in media.

THEO ASH: This guy works for FanDuel. FanDuel profited immense amounts of money off of this report, and I don't think that this tweet was [00:21:00] meant to mess with the odds, but you gotta bring up the possibility. And I think it's messed up that Shams even works for FanDuel at all. I think it's completely immoral as a journalist, as a reporter, to work for a gambling site.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: That's exactly right. Nobody, anywhere at any point should have this conflict of interest because what you're doing is potentially suppressing truth so you and your company can profit. Not saying Shams did that, but there is that possibility. Here's the question. Why leave open that door?

THEO ASH: And now how many reporters at ESPN now work for essentially a gambling site? We are now in a situation where it is extremely profitable for ESPN to report inaccurate information because if they say something is gonna happen and everybody bets on it, and then it doesn't happen, they just keep all the profit. Right? I mean, maybe I'm being too harsh, but right? That's, that's how it works.

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: No, you are not being harsh at all. If ESPN's [00:22:00] reporters were to say, Hey, you know, there's a really bad injury and Patrick Mahomes is not gonna be playing, and then he suits up last minute, the betting lines would be, and they would potentially profit from false information. 

THEO ASH: So there's that conflict of interest. The other big problem with sports dialogue right now is that regular MFs are getting paid thousands of dollars to spread misinformation on Twitter now. Like, what stage of capitalism are we in where trolling on Twitter and posting fake information on Twitter to get everybody mad and dunking on you is now extremely profitable because you can sell ads under that because people are looking at it. 

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: To pause real quick, it's about keeping people there to react and maintain staying pissed off. Any chance Musk has. That's it. It's the same school thought with the Pearl Davis'. I agree with whoever that was on Piers Morgan that she's going to be irrelevant, but the whole [00:23:00] thing she's selling is reactionary stuff, and that's exactly what Musk is selling now on Twitter.

THEO ASH: Again, like I understand how that can be a business model under capitalism, but it's fucked up. It's good, good work should make a bunch of money, not bullshit. I don't know. I look at this industry now and I'm like, it's pretty much in shambles, right? Like, is that fair to say? 

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Yes. 

THEO ASH: I don't mind the act of gambling itself, like an individual person putting $20 on a game, but I hate the gambling industrial complex. I hate the fantasy industrial complex. I hate the hot take industrial complex. I hate that that is how you're profitable, talking about sports and, I don't know, man. But this page will be talking about personnel at Cardinals training camp and whatnot over the course of the year, I will not bend the knee, and that's my [unintelligible].

RICK STROM - HOST, TYT SPORTS: Alright, I love this guy. So a bit about the news, Penn saw the writing on the wall with [00:24:00] Barstool. Dave Portnoy bought Barstool back the percentage that Penn had from years ago in a deal that was highly criticized. And then ESPN, seeing how they wanna slash $5.5 billion, but also make more money said, Hmm, one space that we're not in, even though it's a complete conflict of interest, is gambling. So they partnered up with Penn. Penn is paying $1.5 billion in cash over 10 years, $500 million in warrants to buy Penn stock. They get exclusive rights to ESPN BET, and it's available in 16 states where it is licensed. The rebrand via espn.com will include a mobile app, website, mobile website, and mutually agreed upon retail locations. 

This is incredible for many reasons. Number one: the betting industry accumulated, uh, roughly about $94 billion in 2022. It's only going to go up. ESPN is [00:25:00] a Goliath in comparison to FanDuel and DraftKings. They are David in this situation, although they have raked in profits. They didn't have the years that ESPN had to build up their own company and their own equity to then go all-in on sports gambling. It seems though, like, this is going to be a humongous problem with reporters trying to do their work, being highly criticized for any reports that they put out that could seem to affect the betting lines and ESPN, essentially it'll be an A to B, they will rake in the profits from misreporting and also the erosion of reporting in journalism that they have put forth over the years. This is a very bad idea. From a business standpoint, I get it. But also remember this: the shams stuff, Adam Schefter bought into a gambling company as well. That's a huge red flag. No one said anything about it, and yet here we are today with the worldwide [00:26:00] leader in sports now getting into gambling.

The Toxic Normalization of Online Gambling - Cara Nicole - Air Date 9-30-22

CARA NICOLE - HOST, CARA NICOLE: So if you're a boomer trapped in a young person's body like me, then you might not be an avid Twitch viewer. But here's the deal. Twitch is a live streaming website where people can live stream themselves playing video games or doing crafts or all these things and build up an audience and interact with fans. And some of these popular Twitch streamers are being paid millions of dollars in sponsorships with online gambling companies to stream themselves playing online gambling games. This has led to some controversy because the majority of Twitch's audience is quite young. They're impressionable and arguably showing them hours and hours of gambling content isn't the best for their growing minds and might get them into gambling at a very young age.

And before I get any further into this, Video. I want to make my stance crystal clear that I think gambling is an objectively and statistically negative thing for individuals and for society. Yes, we can go back to the consumer free will argument and say that people should be able to gamble if they want to, What's the problem, annoying lady on the internet? Well, the problem [00:27:00] is that gambling isn't something that you can always just walk away from. If you become addicted, it can be devastating. And research shows that the earlier you're exposed to gambling, the more likely you're going to become a problem gambler in adulthood or even earlier. 

Many gambling disorders start in adolescence, and this number blew me away, but one out of 25 teens have a gambling problem. This is an issue for several reasons, including that problem gamblers have the highest suicide rates among addicts. The average debt of gambling addicts ranges from $15,000 for female gamblers and $55,000-$90,000 for male gamblers. 

Gambling companies are a business, a business that preys on addiction and makes billions of dollars because you, as the gambler, are always set up to lose. And I know stats can be boring, but I think it's important to illustrate how very destructive gambling can be, especially for young people. Which sadly is probably why these online gambling companies are targeting Twitch streamers and celebrities like Drake. 

DRAKE: Eddie, what did I tell you? It's my night tonight. 

CARA NICOLE - HOST, CARA NICOLE: Oh, [00:28:00] yeah. Drake is in on this crap too. But back to Twitch's online gambling streams, which I think is one of the best representations for how online gambling is trying to position itself right now as digital entertainment. Watching these streams, it feels super dystopian. Like this one with Adin Ross, a 21 year old Twitch streamer who gets paid reportedly $1 million a week to stream this online gambling stuff by State Casino, who is also the sponsor of Drake and many other streamers.

Like, something about the dealer's suit and mask the gold, the comments in the corner, it's giving major Squid Game vibes, which fits because the main character in Squid Games was a gambling addict. So, you know, maybe that's what the aim of this all is for, is just getting a lot of people in debt so that they're forced to play a game of life or death. Is that a joke or is that just a metaphor? You decide. 

But what's crazy to me is how distorted a view of reality these gambling streams create. At one point, Adin Ross is down like a million dollars. A million dollars. [00:29:00] You could live off of that the rest of your life. It makes it so the wins and the losses, they don't feel real. You forget that it's even money in the first place. That makes the wins look enormous too. Here he wins $126,000 in one round. That is multiple amounts of the average salary in the US. That this point, it's just like tokens in a game that feeds into this idea of, like, gambling is just entertainment. It's not real money, and that is a dangerous dissociation to create.

And adding to this idea that these numbers aren't anchored in reality, we have to remember, Adin Ross is being paid $1 million a week for this stuff. And, conspiracy theory hat here, is he getting subsidized to lose and win a little bit? Like is he being given play money by these online gambling companies to make the wins and losses seem huge because that's more entertaining for viewers? And just so that I'm not picking on Adin or Twitch streamers only, like I said, Drake is doing the exact same thing. It's a misrepresentation of reality where the likes of $17 [00:30:00] million can just be tossed around, and highlight videos afterwards don't show the losses. Like, according to the comment on the video, Drake lost most of that money during that same stream. That level of misrepresentation distorts the very realities and dangers of gambling where money is real money. It's money outta your bank account. It is money that could have financed your future and your security and your family and your food and rent and all of these things. You forget that, because it feels like a game. It feels like digital entertainment, and these are just tokens to play the game. 

But that's not true. And all those losses you're likely to have if you follow the footsteps of your favorite streamers and you do this online gambling, well, according to "hasanabi", those streamers might be making bank every single time you lose.

HASSAN PIKER: A lot of these websites, Stake in all of them, if they have a code, if you are offering a code, that means that Stake is tracking all of your losses and you're getting a percentage of your fan base's losses. They let you in on it, dude. They lay you in on the losses of your f***ing fan base.

CARA NICOLE - HOST, CARA NICOLE: Through these online [00:31:00] gambling partnerships, influencers are profiting off of the addictions of their fan base, very well possibly being the reason those fans got an addiction in the first place.

Let me be even clearer with this, if this is true, influencers and celebrities like Drake are monetizing off of the financial and mental suffering of the people who look up to them. It is exploitative and a total abuse of one's position, and unfortunately the problem doesn't stop there. 

Editing-Cara jumping in here to say that weirdly enough, I've been editing this video this week, and then the news came out that Twitch has officially banned gambling content and gambling streams from their website. I think this is awesome news. Hopefully more companies push against this trend of online gambling. Just wanted to give you guys that update, and back to the video.

Gambling has always been around. That's not new. But what is new is the extreme proximity and easy access we have to gambling on a daily basis. Mix in there some mass media, some tribalism, and a new Supreme Court ruling, and you have the perfect recipe for an [00:32:00] American epidemic in the form of sports betting.

College partnerships are bringing sports betting to campus. Are students safe? - PBS NewsHour - Air Date 2-27-23 

SAUL MALEK: I'm winning. Then I feel like an idiot for not betting higher and betting more often.

PAUL SOLOMON: Saul Malek, betting on sports through an online bookie at his Texas college in 2017.

SAUL MALEK: With my strategy, I can make hundreds of dollars in a minute.

PAUL SOLOMON: Once, says Malek:

SAUL MALEK: I was up a few thousand credit that week, and I lost it all betting on someone in an individual tennis game. And I didn't even know if it was a man or a woman.

PAUL SOLOMON: Eventually, he owed nearly 10 different bookies between $15,000 and $20,000. 

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a ban on sports gambling, making it even easier to bet. More than 30 states have legalized sports gambling since, and enticing ads are now everywhere.

KEVIN HART: Two hundred dollars instantly just for betting five bucks.

PAUL SOLOMON: Offering free first bets. 

And now five major colleges, Michigan State, LSU, [00:33:00] Maryland, University of Denver, and the University of Colorado, have announced multiyear partnerships with sports betting companies that include placing ads at games, along with promises to, for example, focus on responsible gaming and education.

Colorado was actually paid for bets made using a university promo code, until that deal became public.

ANDY ZIMBALIST: I think it's very scary.

PAUL SOLOMON: Sports economist Andy Zimbalist.

ANDY ZIMBALIST: There are many colleges now that are jumping into bed with sports book companies. They're allowing the sports book companies to come onto campus and to appeal to the students to get involved in gambling.

PAUL SOLOMON: Hey, I gamble on sports. It can be fun, sometimes lots of fun, but, says Zimbalist:

ANDY ZIMBALIST: Six percent of betters tend to become problem or compulsive gamblers. So, we're talking about tens of thousands of students who are likely to become or if they're not already problem gamblers.

PAUL SOLOMON: Students like these at the University of Maryland.

JOEY HAAVIK: [00:34:00] To introduce something like gambling on campus seems like putting kerosene on a fire.

AYELETTE HALBFINGER: If there is supposed to be some sort of educational aspect about betting cultures, the negative ramifications that betting can have on students, particularly at a young age, why aren't we seeing that side of a program?

PAUL SOLOMON: Now, some Maryland students said they like the partnership, but not social work professor Greg Stewart. 

GREGORY STEWART: I am concerned that certainly the State of Ohio has made this an option.

PAUL SOLOMON: Stewart studies addiction at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, where sports betting became legal last month.

GREGORY STEWART: It's so convenient for people to engage in this experience, the use of my phone, and I don't have to go anywhere. I don't have to talk to anyone.

PAUL SOLOMON: You could do it in class.

GREGORY STEWART: You could.

PAUL SOLOMON: And as MIT finance Professor Andy Lo once told me:

ANDREW LO: Neuroscientists have documented that the [00:35:00] component of the brain that gets stimulated when we engage in financial rewards is really the same component that is stimulated by cocaine. It's the dopamine system.

KEITH WHYTE: We have seen a big spike since 2018 in risk for gambling problems.

PAUL SOLOMON: Keith Whyte is tracking that impact at the National Council on Problem Gambling, supported in part by the gaming industry.

KEITH WHYTE: Our national surveys between 2018 and 2021 show a roughly 30 percent increase in risk for gambling problems nationwide. But the majority of that increase in risk is among those young male online gamblers.

People with gambling problems have much higher rates of substance use and abuse. But what we're really concerned about are things like the very, very high rate of depression amongst people with gambling problems and also a very high rate of suicidal behavior.

PAUL SOLOMON: College kids, especially young men, are more vulnerable than most because they think they know sports, they like risk, and they are comfortable doing everything on their [00:36:00] phones.

FMR. GOVERNOR MITCH DANIELS: Much of the promotion that the gaming companies have sought to bring to college campuses seems pretty clearly aimed at building new customers.

PAUL SOLOMON: And that's the problem, says former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who wouldn't allow any betting on Purdue University sports when he was, up until recently, president there.

FMR. GOVERNOR MITCH DANIELS: Young people are facing more emotional and mental and psychological challenges, it appears, than they have before. At a minimum, schools should be careful not to be facilitating, enabling, and, while they're doing so, profiting off the marketing that might spread this behavior further.

PAUL SOLOMON: So, are they? All five universities declined our requests for interviews.

The University of Colorado sent a statement: "The last two years have demonstrated that the necessary safeguards are in place to ensure this agreement is beneficial and safe".

The betting companies involved just didn't respond. But Martin Lycka [00:37:00] of Europe's Entain did. And his is one of the world's largest gambling companies.

MARTIN LYCKA: I strongly believe that any country, including the United States, is much better off having regulated this space and help drive out the black market, the unlicensed bookmakers that afford their customers absolutely no protection tools, no nothing, than continuing to step in the dark.

PAUL SOLOMON: If you were running a university now, would you invite in your company or another sports betting company, or would you say, No no, too much risk, too many young people?

MARTIN LYCKA: I definitely would, because the young people — now, we are filming this right after the Super Bowl, so all of them arguably would have gotten exposed to gambling-related adverts in the TV coverage.

PAUL SOLOMON: But does your company have any deals with universities to do advertising, sponsorship, and the like?

MARTIN LYCKA: No. That is a categorical no. My company has no [00:38:00] commercial partnerships with universities.

PAUL SOLOMON: And will you never?

MARTIN LYCKA: No, we never will for those reasons that you have just alluded to, because a shattering majority of college students are underage. They're under 21, and they have got nothing to do on the gambling side. So that is not our target audience. That is not the industry's target audience.

PAUL SOLOMON: But how can it not be the target audience of firms that partner up? In which case, why should universities allow it?

Well, says a former congressman:

TOM MCMILLEN: I don't think you can stop sports betting on college campuses.

PAUL SOLOMON: Also a former Maryland basketball star, Tom McMillen winces at the partnerships, like his own alma mater's.

TOM MCMILLEN: But this is unique America. that you're going to have betting on campuses, on events on campuses. And I think there are risks to higher education with that, but it is almost inevitable. You have this huge sports [00:39:00] enterprise on campuses across the country. And so universities are adopting it, much like they adopted beer drinking and liquor at football games.

PAUL SOLOMON: As for Saul Malek, he went into rehab four years ago and is still in recovery, still paying off his debts, and more worried than ever about college kids, like he once was.

SAUL MALEK: It doesn't seem like you could just go off to college and lose your entire livelihood gambling, and you just don't know any better.

PAUL SOLOMON: Until, for an estimated tens of thousands of U.S. undergrads a year, if all colleges were to follow suit, it will be too late.

What Happened to Black Activism in Professional Sports? - Edge of Sports - Air Date 7-26-23

DAVE ZIRIN - HOST, EDGE OF SPORTS: We need to talk about the new national pastime sports betting. I'm old enough to remember low the many years ago when Pete Rose was banned for life from Major League Baseball for placing bets on his own team. I remember when Sports League said they would never put a team in Las Vegas because of the very physical proximity [00:40:00] to legal gambling.

I remember when the official line was that the integrity of the game and placing bets could not even exist in the same zip code. Well, fast forward a few decades, hell, a few years, and it's remarkable how much has changed. Now gambling is as much a part of sports as beer commercials. Smartphones have opened the door to sports betting apps, and the leagues have embraced the lucrative bounty created and generated by smartphone gambling.

They've jumped on this with the wanting shamelessness of a puppy licking its bowl. It's dizzying. How quickly the commissioners have made this turn from gambling is evil. To selling it to fans is all fun in Americana. I won't insult your intelligence by explaining this radical shift. It's money, a ton of it, but it's not just the league owners panting with their puppy bulls out sports media like the trendsetter, ESPN, SportsCenter and its tall, [00:41:00] smoothly bald host, Scott Van Pelt.

Are always ready with a special sports betting segment. Also, the most esteemed commentators in the sports media world, like TNT's Studio Hoops team led by Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith now do their own giggly gambling bits. In other words, a massive portion of the economic lifeblood of pro sports from the leagues to the top of the media food chain is being underwritten by sports gambling.

Actually, that's not quite right. It's being underwritten by fans making bets they overwhelmingly lose. It's a regressive tax on fans, sort of like the lottery, except with one vital difference. It's privatized. So instead of money going to build roads or schools, it goes into the pockets of billionaires.

Now, I know some clearly most will say it's all good, clean fun, but this isn't just about sports betting. It's about access to betting and it's about the apps. Yes [00:42:00] anyone, especially in the digital age can gamble when everyone likes, but there's something called a hassle cost that has been eliminated by the apps.

Now if anyone wants to lay down some money, there is no need to find a bookie or even navigate a casino website. Just swipe your finger and as quickly as checking text messages, you are done. They have taken the most dangerous part of gambling, and I do speak from experience here, and that's that it's addictive and they've combined it with that other great modern addiction, the smartphone. And for the leagues, it's been like cracking open Fort Knox. Now the phone app Giants do have a warning label for gambling addicts, but it's about as sincere as a lung cancer warning on a pack of smokes. The leagues do not care, and as long as the sweet dough trickles down, the players and a now compromised media. No one else is gonna raise a stink about this either.

But as Neil Young wrote, The devil fools with the best laid plans [00:43:00] and wow as old Satan fooled with the plans here because something incredibly predictable has taken place. The players are deciding in every violation of every league rule to place their own bets. As a result, the NFL has just suspended four more players for gambling, and they didn't get any slap on the wrist either.

These players are suspended for the entire 2023 season. It's an incredibly harsh punishment for doing what everyone in the sports world is promoting from the boss to the media, interviewing these players after the game. The sports owners, let's be clear about this, are terrified that if fans think players are operating in a way that compromises the alleged integrity of the games, the financial hit could be catastrophic.

That makes referees as well, who make a fraction of the players' salaries particularly vulnerable to the allure of gambling and players know it. The ugliest [00:44:00] scene from the NBA season on the court was for me when Dallas Maverick Superstar, Luca Doni, late in a close game, started to make dollar signs with his fingers in the ref's face to indicate that he thought the fix was in.

Expect more of that. So it's Vegas for the fans, owners, and media and the Vatican for the players and the refs. And this is a recipe for future disasters. Players will gamble. The commissioner's office will hand out year long suspensions, and the media will get in deeper with gambling companies they should be covering instead of profiting from.

The early sports organizers way back in the late 19th century were terrified of sports betting, fearful that fans would leave in droves if they felt like the outcomes were manipulated. A little more healthy, fear, a little more introspection, a little more critical thinking, and a little less blind devotion to taxing [00:45:00] fans would be a step in the right direction.

But until there is a massive scandal and that day is coming, We can only sit back and watch gambling, swallow the sports world whole. 

The Puppets of Online Gambling - Philion - Air Date 4-7-23

PHILIP RUSNACK - HOST, PHILION: Eddie Craven is a 26-year-old multimillionaire who co-founded Stake.com with 28-year-old Bijan Tehrani. Together, they formed EasyGo Gaming based out of Melbourne, Australia. Not much is known about Bijan Tehrani or how these two came together, but Craven can be seen as the face of Stake. He goes by Stake Eddie on YouTube and you can be the judge if this is real or not.

EDDIE CRAVEN: Oh, this is tough decisions. Do we keep going or what? I don't know. I'm thinking, I'm thinking, can we kick on for a bit and like I'm due for that red crazy time. There's no doubt about it. There's no questioning that spin. Slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down. Holy, holy shit. Holy. This is, get the fucking cameras out. I'm fucking recording this [00:46:00] shit. Oh. Oh. This is 20 x crazy time. This is gonna be fucking crazy. This, this. I tell you what, this is gonna be, this here is gonna be fucking record making. You are about to witness history go down here. Holy fucking jejeebers! 

PHILIP RUSNACK - HOST, PHILION: Yo, this shit goes 20 x crazy time. Can I start saying that and just steal it? 

EasyGo Games is a startup company based out of Australia that builds the games that these casinos use, and right now Stake is valued at over $1 billion. But how is any of this possible if Australia outlawed online casinos 20 years ago? Craven and Terani have figured out a loophole in Australian law and have been exploiting it for years. Online casinos are prohibited in Australia, so long as you don't advertise or serve anyone in Australia. If they're able to outsource the licensing and they don't explicitly advertise in Australia, then technically they're in the clear. 

So how did this website get so big? This is not Craven and Tehrani's first [00:47:00] rodeo. Over eight years ago, they launched PrimeDice and according to Craven himself, PrimeDice was the biggest Bitcoin gambling website at the time. In 2015, Craven posted on the Bitcoin.com forums under the alias Edward Miroslav: "Do you consider offering gambling to be a moral issue? Is your view if we wouldn't offer it, they would gamble on another site? Or do you think that some people may have started gambling by finding PrimeDice and maybe wouldn't have started otherwise? What percentage of PrimeDice players do you think are underage? Do you consider it an issue that players do not have to provide any personal data?" Craven responds by saying, "I don't consider it to be a moral issue. I view it purely as entertainment and enjoy responsible gambling myself. I definitely hit a point where I thought PrimeDice was a net negative for the community, but then I watched site after site scam users out of countless thousands of coins. PrimeDice is a safe haven for people who want to bet, where the user knows the roll will not be manipulated and knows exactly what the odds are. At the end of the day, gambling is the choice of the individual, but what is truly a shame is when casinos fleece [00:48:00] unsuspecting users who think they're getting the advertised odds. Many may disagree, but if PrimeDice and our future offerings can bring provably fair gambling and a lower edge to the masses, we will have definitely impacted this industry in a positive way." The future offerings? Stake.com. 

Crypto casinos have exploded in the last three years, and Stake sits at the top of the food chain. Using cryptocurrency instead of actual dollar amounts makes it universally available and evasive for any central government. 

The amount of money that we're talking about with Stake.com begins to not make sense the longer you think about it. You'll see streamers lose $800,000 in a matter of minutes and then recoup it back with a million dollar jackpot moments later.

STREAMER CLIP: I've been sitting here for eight days, 12-hour streams, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone else is happy on every other machine hitting big. I've shown loyalty to you and you just spit in my face. How can you do that to a degenerate gambling addict that's trying to give you everything just to get back more?

Oh oh [00:49:00] oh hundred BET two. Bet. That's multiple 60,000 back. Shit. 20 K. Oh my God! Oh my! 

PHILIP RUSNACK - HOST, PHILION: You see, gambling is oftentimes compared to other vices like tobacco and alcohol. Although all of them can ruin your life, one of them has mathematical odds stacked against you. It is no secret that the house always has an edge. The game is rigged against you. Yet people still voluntarily partake. Whether it be the rush of neurochemicals firing off making people throw their money away, or an addiction that slowly strangles people, it is glaringly obvious that gambling can ruin lives. And while Craven is correct in stating that gambling is an individual's choice, individual's choices can be influenced. And when you can afford to buy influence, you begin to lose any sort of credibility.

I am about [00:50:00] to explain how the buying power of celebrity advertising through the elaboration likelihood model predicts the persuasive process of Stakes marketing, aka their collaboration with Drake is sinister. According to ELM, people want to hold useful, accurate attitudes. An attitude is defined as an enduring way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, and it has a valence. It's either positive or negative. 

This theory states that, one, messages are persuasive if they produce favorable thoughts. Odds are you are not going to be persuaded if something is very annoying. Number two, people's abilities to process information varies. Elaboration is the extent to which someone thinks about issue-relevant information and elaboration likelihood is the probability that high elaboration will occur. 

This will all start to make sense once we apply it to Stake's advertising campaigns. If we take a look at Drake's collaboration with Stake.com, it's obvious that he's not going to give us the scientific objective data arguing why we should be gambling. If he did, that would be an example of [00:51:00] high elaboration. Instead, we can see a prime example of a message source -- gamble with Stake -- with low elaboration. The parameters that dictate a message source include expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. Expertise only persuades if we know that the message source is an expert going into the message.

It's safe to say that Drake is not an expert. This collaboration came out of nowhere. Trustworthiness can be measured if the message is unbiased and objective. In this case, Drake's collaboration with Stake is biased, because he's being paid millions of dollars, and subjective because he promotes this company with low elaboration.

The attractiveness of a messenger is more persuasive with low elaboration, meaning the more you think about the message, the less important the actual attractiveness of the source is. But remember, celebrity advertising is banking on low elaboration. You're not supposed to be sitting there critically thinking about why he's collaborating with Stake. That's why Drake's attractiveness matters in this context. 

[00:52:00] According to elaboration likelihood model, there are two ways that people digest information. Number one is central route processing. This is when elaboration is high and people can be seen paying attention to every little detail. Number two is peripheral route processing, where elaboration is low and you start to notice the less important things. Celebrity endorsements operate using peripheral route processing. They're banking on the fact that you'll be so enamored or distracted to actually think hard enough to scrutinize the message being delivered. Most people don't just use one route of processing or the other, but actually both interchangeably to varying degrees based on certain personality traits such as relevance.

Most people can't relate to online gambling, but we've been socially conditioned to accept Drake as part of pop culture. Everybody knows Drake. This can be seen when people are fanning money and screaming in excitement whenever Drake gives them money.[00:53:00] 

The other personality characteristic that dictates how you process information is one's need for cognition. Is your brain smoother than a chicken cutlet or are you a wrinkly brain Chad? This really just depends on if you're smart or not. Are you on the edge of your seat thinking that Stake.com is cool because Drake said so? Or do you make a mini documentary about the ins and outs of mass communication and its effects on audiences as a whole? It is obvious that no solid information or arguments can convince people why you should gamble away your money online. The only thing in this advertisement is Drake's name attached to it, and he even said that he's going to give back to the people.

This world is diseased. Stake.com's commercials are designed to appeal to the peripheral processing route. They're literally telling you that you're too stupid and lack the cognitive ability to read deeper. I know this because it's impossible to design a central processing route message when it comes to gambling. It is a degenerative activity, proven time and time again to produce net negative results.

This is [00:54:00] precisely why celebrity advertising is Stake.coms favorite way of marketing. Stake is the master of puppets, pulling the strings of their pawns across the globe. They offer a disgusting amount of money to streamers, celebrities, and organizations in order to inject their brand into pop culture. Drake, the UFC and Twitch streamers are just the start of it.

All of these people in corporations are abusing their parasocial relationships that got them in their position in the first place, while insulting the intelligence of their audience, all while hiding behind weak arguments and coping mechanisms to justify their sponsorship.

How Australian sports make money from gambling - Full Story - Air Date 5-10-23

JANE LEE - HOST, FULL STORY: Henry, I don't watch a lot of footy, but when I do it does seem like there are a lot of ads to sports gambling. 

GAMBLING AD: On top of their already great odds. Ladbrokes now gives you odds boost 

JANE LEE - HOST, FULL STORY: They're on the side of the stadium, um, on the jerseys and also. On many of the ad breaks between plays. 

GAMBLING AD: As the official wagering partner of the AFL Crown Bet's Advanced mobile app.

You just gotta take the money and run. BET 3 6 5, the world's favorite online sports betting company. [00:55:00] 

JANE LEE - HOST, FULL STORY: Is it just me? 

HENRY BELOT: It's not you. I do watch a lot of sport and it's everywhere. 

JANE LEE - HOST, FULL STORY: Henry Bellow is a reporter for Guardian Australia. 

HENRY BELOT: It's not even just on the games you watch, it's in the podcasts you listen to.

If you go online to read about football, oh my God, there's another gambling advertisement. Why won't they go away? We've had several studies that show there's hundreds of gambling ads on Free to Air tele every day. We've got to a point, Jane, where there's evidence that Australian children can recite gambling advertisements.

They identify brand colors, they know the odds of games because they're read out before the games start. Even professional players are worried that kids just. Can't actually divorce the game itself from the gambling odds. We know that fans hate it. There's a study by the A F L Fans Association. They interviewed 3000 people.

They found that the volume of gambling ads was the most common concern. Three quarters of them [00:56:00] said that they would support a ban. It also doesn't matter who you talk to in politics, liberal labor nationals, independent mps, they all think the volume of ads is too much. 

JANE LEE - HOST, FULL STORY: So if everyone hates gambling ads, why are there still so many of them during sports?

HENRY BELOT: Essentially it's because there's a massive amount of money that's being made. And so the outrage from the fans, from players, from some clubs is not enough to actually change what the code is doing. And we've got to the point where the head of a parliamentary inquiry looking into this very topic says that there's overwhelming evidence for change to actually happen here.

But the problem is the gambling companies, the sporting codes, the broadcasters who play the ads, they're all making big money off gambling, and they're all to varying extents trying to push back against change. And that's why we've got this really uncomfortable tension that's going on right now between fans who are watching the games, the players themselves, and the executives who are making money.

And we've gotta remember that [00:57:00] Australians have the highest gambling losses per person in the world. There's a lot of money at stake here and there's also a lot of social harm that's being done right now in our communities. 

JANE LEE - HOST, FULL STORY: Hmm. I mean, it's interesting that despite all of these harms and all these concerns that we've got from the fans and and from government, in fact, Australian sports are not just stopping at making money off the local gambling market.

They're actually moving to the US now that we know that the US is legalizing online gambling. What's that all about? 

HENRY BELOT: Yeah. Well, the N R L is really keen to get into the United States, which a lot of people would think, why on earth are we taking Alco to the other side of the world? But what's really going on here is the N R L have recognized that there is a booming sports betting market in the United States where until very recently, there was a federal ban on this happening that's been repealed.

Now there's states that have legalized sports gambling, and people are spending very big money. The N R L, taking a bit of a gamble [00:58:00] thinking that this is going to develop into a huge industry. We want to get in on the ground floor, get people familiar with our product so that when it is legalized in more states, we're there and we're ready.

We can get a cut of that money. 

PETER V'LANDYS: Sport is better with gambling. Is that, is that truly what you believe? Look, it's entertainment. You, you don't gamble to to win money. You don't do it to, um, be become rich. 

JANE LEE - HOST, FULL STORY: In fact, the head of the rugby league, Peter V'landys said some comments recently that you've reported on that.

Raise some eyebrows. What, what did he say?

PETER V'LANDYS: You do it to entertain yourself. Just like you go to a restaurant and you buy a meal. That's entertainment. As long as you are responsible with what you're spending on. On that entertainment. It's no different than any anything else. 

HENRY BELOT: Yeah. So when he was actually at the airport about to fly to Las Vegas to try and negotiate this expansion into the us he was asked by a reporter from Channel nine about some of the criticism about him sort of bringing the game into closer [00:59:00] contact with the gambling industry.

And he did not take a backward step at all. He actually earned that. That's what was happening. That's what shocked so many people. 

PETER V'LANDYS: Now you'll get blowback from anti-gambling mobs who don't like the idea that, you know, you're encouraging gambling and sport together. No, I'm encouraging entertainment. As I said, if you treat gambling as entertainment and you budget yourself to

have so much on that entertainment, there's no, no problem with it. 

HENRY BELOT: And, and this is the comment that I've spoken to some people who have gambling addictions that they were so upset when they heard, I've spoken to people who have lost their superannuation because they had to pay off their debts to gambling companies because they loved sport and they kept getting hit with these advertisements and they fell into real financial ruin. And for them to hear somebody who's running the organization compare what happened to them to going to a restaurant to buy a meal, it caused a lot of anger for them. But I think if you take a step [01:00:00] back, what it really does is, is just show that the head of the N R L is starting to think of his own sport in the same way that gambling companies think of it, that it's an opportunity.

To make money. Yes. Sport is an entertainment product. That's why we love it. That's why so many people watch it. But many people felt that he didn't really take responsibility and ownership of some of the social harms that happen alongside this, that that was diminished in the pursuit of profit. 

Summary 9-3-23

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today starting with Windover Productions tracing the story from fantasy sports to sports gambling. Why is this happening discussed the threat to the legitimacy of sports and the process by which it was legalized. The Dominique Foxworth Show explained the impact of sports teams getting in bed with gambling companies.

TYT Sports looked at the impact of ESPN purchasing a gambling platform. Cara Nicole described how influencers are being used to market gambling to a young audience. [01:01:00] The PBS NewsHour looked into partnerships between gambling companies and colleges. And Edge of Sports commented on the destructive impacts of gambling swallowing the sports world.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard additional bonus clips. The first from Phyllian looking at a case study of a gambling company using celebrity influencers to target gambling addicts. And, full story, discussed the social harm of gambling on Australian sports. To hear that, and have all of our bonus content delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support, or 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, we'll hear from you. 

Buddhist teachings and A.I. - Craig from Ohio

VOICEMAILER CRAIG FROM OHIO: Hello, Best of the Left, it's Craig from Ohio, and it's been a while since I've called but I thought I wanted to just give you a quick thanks [01:02:00] for playing that dharma talk at the end of the episode on artificial intelligence, because it got at something that I've been thinking about artificial intelligence, but I have not heard anywhere else, so it was really surprising, I guess -- although I guess it shouldn't be because I familiarized myself with the philosophy of Buddhism oh, about 15 years ago, and to me that made a lot of sense.

Basically the idea that the Buddha I do think laid out a pathway for human happiness, 2500 years or so ago, that involved, first, a practice of contemplation and humility, acceptance that would lead the individual to greater happiness and self-satisfaction or satisfaction with their life, the idea was that that would spread to others. So, perfect yourself, or [01:03:00] if not perfect yourself, at least be on that path and that would help other people. 

I, of course, now that we are in the 21st century, we can see two things. One, science has confirmed that a lot of the Buddha's teachings were real, or true. So brain scanning shows that practice of, say, meditation does improve the parts of the mind that help one to be happier, feel more fulfilled, be less stressed, et cetera. And two, we now can see that it has not spread generally to the whole globe. In fact, there is another strain of the human experience that seems to be the poisonous kind which is selfish and it basically sums up by the poisonous ideology of people like Andrew Tate.

So, with artificial intelligence, [01:04:00] as the teacher, the Buddhist -- I think you said is a monk -- said there's a possibility that AI could pick up on what the Buddha counseled that many years ago. But there were a couple problems I saw with that. One is, it's a machine intelligence, and there's no guarantee that a machine will have the same kind of usefulness that humans can put to the practice, the contemplation, et cetera. And the other problem I saw is that there's also just as much likelihood that the bad part of the human experiment will be translated into our machines, the artificial intelligence that we create. 

So, I just wanted to point that out, I thought it was really fascinating, and again, thank you for introducing the ideas to a wider audience [01:05:00] because I certainly don't have a platform that I can share with. So that was it. Have a great one everybody. Talk to you later. Bye.

Final comments on the outsized influence of impetuous billionaires

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Thanks to those who call into the voicemail line or write in their messages to be played as VoicedMails. If you'd like to leave a comment or question of your own to be played on the show, you can record or text us a message at 202 999 3991 or send an email to jay at bestoftheleft. Best to Craig for that call we just heard.

I think he's exactly right to be concerned about the direction AI will go. The monk that he was referring to gave a talk that was a members only clip, so if you missed it, that's probably why. The monk and his talk were both written up in The Atlantic, in an article titled, The Monk Who Thinks The World Is Ending.

So he absolutely shares Craig's concerns. The portion of the talk that we highlighted was his proposed answer to that problem. Find a way to inject the values of Buddhism directly into any [01:06:00] future AI projects as protection against the risk of AI taking the other, more destructive path. On another topic related to tech titans having outsized influence on society, I just read an excerpt of Walter Isaacson's new biography on Elon Musk telling some of the story behind his decision to buy Twitter.

Now, to be clear, I don't think that the ownership and management of Twitter is very comparable to the potential impacts of AI. That is not the point. But the insight that I drew from A piece of that article, I think, can be extrapolated. So while describing the final moments leading up to Musk officially deciding to make an offer to buy Twitter, and using quotes from Musk himself, you know, he's an authorized biographer, he was in contact with Musk, Walter Isaacson includes this sentence, quote, Musk was in a manic mood and he was acting impetuously, [01:07:00] end quote.

And that struck me as something Very human. I know what it's like to be in a bit of a mood and to take action without really thinking it through or taking the time to do it right. And as we've seen, that doesn't seem to be a one off thing for Musk. The way he manages Twitter and, you know, turning it into X and all of that, like a lot of his decisions seem to be made in a bit of a manic state while acting impetuously.

So I got thinking about the political conversations we usually have about the rich. There's the don't punish success argument for letting people accumulate as much money as humanly possible. There's the they should pay their fair share argument for taxing the rich at a higher rate. There's the... Money is speech argument for allowing the rich to wield undue influence and power in our politics.

And there's the no money is obviously not speech argument to try to reign that [01:08:00] in, but we don't talk much about the elements of building a stable and functioning society. As relates to the rich. Now, it's generally a conservative idea to slow down the rate of change in society. They want for government to work slowly and for it to be very difficult to make major changes to society because they supposedly value stability.

You know, things not changing means that they are stable. They might not be good, but they're stable. And there is truth in that, you know? I think it's also true that they don't like a lot of the progress that gets made when policies are changed, and so resisting change also fits their ideological Preferences for how society should work, but it really is true that it could be bad for society if changes could be made too quickly.

Even well meaning people could implement a lot of changes very quickly in the hopes of doing a lot of good, [01:09:00] only to realize later that there were unforeseen consequences. Downsides, and so having institutional mechanisms in place that slow down the process by which change is made can help prevent those unforeseen consequences.

There's just more time to debate, more time to hear out concerns, more time to make adjustments if needed, and avoid mistakes. That's the conservative argument for the benefit of having the wheels of government turn slowly. So then it seems like there should be a natural alliance between the right and left when it comes to billionaires and the role of corporations in society.

Elon Musk being in a manic mood and acting impetuously before buying Twitter to reshape it into his own image because he's gone anti woke and wants to reinstate all the white supremacists and conspiracy theorists to the site is about as far from enforcing slow [01:10:00] change for the sake of societal stability as one could imagine.

And Musk just happens to be so flagrant and so public with his mood swings that we all get to see them. Having mood swings and acting impetuously is a completely normal, human thing for people to do. So this isn't a criticism of him for not being a good enough person to be able to make snap decisions that impact millions or billions of people.

It's a reminder that no one should have enough money, power, or influence. To make snap decisions that influence millions or billions of people. As always, keep the comments coming in. You can leave us a voicemail or send us a text message to 202 999 3991, or keep it old school and email me to jay at bestoftheleft.

com. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus [01:11:00] episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist trio, Ken, Brian, and Lewindy for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, webmastering, and bonus show co hosting, and thanks to those who support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships at bestoftheleft.

com. https: www. bestoftheLeft. com. Through our Patreon page or from right inside the Apple Podcast app membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good bonus episodes. In addition to there being extra content and no ads in all of our regular episodes all through your regular podcast player.

So coming to you from far outside the conventional Wisdom of Washington dc my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly. Thanks entirely to the members and donor to the show from best of the left.com.

Air Date 8/23/2022

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Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] During today's episode, I'm going to be telling you about a show I think you should check out. It's the Straight White American Jesus podcast, so take a moment to hear what I have to say about them in the middle of the show, and listen to it wherever you get your podcasts. And now, welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast in which we shall take a look at the state of patriarchy for the next generation of boys.

For decades, we have been rightly focused on dialing back endemic misogyny and poking holes in the patriarchy, in the hopes of a new normal of gender relations emerging that would be genuinely healthier for everyone, not just women, but. With so much of the focus on the type of masculinity men and boys shouldn't embrace, we may have fallen short on giving positive direction to boys about what they should be and do.

Sources today include The Daily Show, The Gray Area, The On Boys Podcast, [00:01:00] Paging Dr. Nerdlove, and Swolesome, with additional members only clips from The Daily Show and The On Boys Podcast.

Andrew Tate & Re-examining Masculinity - Long Story Short The Daily Show - Air Date 4-21-23

JORDAN KLEPPER - CORRESPONDENT, THE DAILY SHOW: America's in the midst of some long overdue changes around gender and power: reexamining ideas of masculinity, femininity, the spectrum in between, and how fluid it all is. It's a difficult and necessary conversation. But luckily for us, we get to have these nuanced debates on Twitter. 

Now, this cultural change is important and I'm glad it's happening. But when there is a cultural shift, it's easy to get lost within it. And even though it feels strange to say this, a group that is being left out is young boys. And I know, I know, I know. A war on men? I sound like I'm on a network that just got sued out of $780 million. Fine. Mm hmm. I know. Jokes on you. Comedy Central doesn't have that kind of cash.

My point is, we've had a great conversation about what men shouldn't be. Men shouldn't be toxic. [00:02:00] They shouldn't be overly aggressive. They shouldn't pay a porn star to keep quiet about an affair they had right after their son was born. It's a high, high bar.

But we haven't been showing men what they should be. And that matters to young boys who are looking for an identity, for a narrative about what it means to be a man. And that vacuum is being filled by people with the worst possible idea of manhood. 

NARRATOR: Former Kickboxer and Big Brother contestant, Andrew Tate, infamous for being the self-proclaimed king of toxic masculinity. Tate's core message centers around the belief that masculinity is in the crosshairs and he's defending it. His target audience: young men. 

ANDREW TATE: [clip montage] 

This whole idea of being toxically masculine is complete garbage. 

I think the most dangerous men on earth are the weak men. 

Feel, feel, feel, feel, feel. Leave the feelings to the girls, right? That's what they do. We act. We're men of action. 

Empowering females is the easiest way to weaken the will of men. 

Study, study, study, give up your whole life in school. Then you get to be a doctor. You can't even buy a mother fucking sports car. 

The problem [00:03:00] with most of you is that I am sitting here with my sunglasses, bald head, millions of dollars, nearly unmatched fighting skills. I am Morpheus. 

I need action. I need constant chaos in my life to feel content. I need to be driving a supercar and fighting, bunch of champagne and going crazy... 

JORDAN KLEPPER - CORRESPONDENT, THE DAILY SHOW: Okay, okay, okay, we get it. You have a small penis. Even through the video you can tell this guy wears too much cologne. And by the way, not to tarnish his sparkling image, but Andrew Tate is currently under investigation for human trafficking. I know it's always the first one you suspect. 

Now, maybe you don't know Andrew Tate. Maybe you're thinking, who is this porn parody, Vin Diesel. You may not know him, but trust me, your sons do. 

NEWS REPORTER: With over 13 billion views on TikTok, Tate's rhetoric is moving from online to the classroom. 

TEACHER ON TIKTOK: So I'm a teacher and I teach sixth grade. The amount [00:04:00] of young 11 year old boys that have told me that they love Andrew Tate is ridiculous. 

NEWS REPORTER: One teacher says she hears blatant misogyny from the boys in her class, hearing them say that girls belong in the kitchen and only exist for reproduction. And another claiming they talk about alphas in sixth grade. 

NEWS COMMENTATOR: Now, one teacher in South London noticed that his students were parroting Tate's ideology. About a third of the 30 students in the class passionately argued that women were responsible for their own sexual assaults. One of Tate's top lines.

JORDAN KLEPPER - CORRESPONDENT, THE DAILY SHOW: Wow. Times have really changed. When I was in sixth grade, the most toxic role model for boys was Michelangelo. He eats pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That turtle doesn't give a fuck. Seriously, how can you be misogynistic in sixth grade? That's like the one year in life where all the girls are bigger than you. I wouldn't [00:05:00] be running my mouth about Allison if Allison could hang me by my underwear on the flagpole. 

The solution to this problem is not to cancel Andrew Tate. Interpol is probably gonna do that for us. Because even if he disappeared, even if he disappeared someone else would take his place and spew toxic shit at young boys just as well. And social media algorithms would pump it into young boys' eyes and ears just as fast, because that's really all this is about. Andrew Tate is not interested in being a role model. He wants clicks for money. He doesn't want to raise your son. He's taking dad's seat at the table, but he is really the loudmouth uncle.

That uncle who seems cool when you're a kid. But when you grow up, you realize living in a hotel is not a vacation. What we need is an alternative positive narrative for young men to follow. And it's ironic that these guys are talking about taking the red pill and using these matrix metaphors because if you're looking for a complex, emotionally available male role [00:06:00] model to counter their bullshit idea of manhood, just look at the guy who took the red pill. Keanu Reeves. This. This is a man who is wildly considered to be kind and decent. He donates huge sums of money to cancer research. He gives up his seat to, uh, women on the subway. He bought Sandra Bullock champagne and truffles because she had never had them before. He's the perfect man. Yeah. Maybe his movies glorify gun violence, but nobody's perfect and that makes him even more perfect because our children shouldn't strive for perfection. That will only make them sad, and those movies sometimes are pretty cool. The point is, young boys need a cultural role model who is kind and comfortable in his skin, not guys who are so fragile in their masculinity they can't puff a cigar without putting it on every social media platform like they invented fire. [00:07:00] Hell, Keanu Reeves, he isn't even on social media. That's how healthy he is.

So, as a society, we have two options. We can either follow Keanu Reeves around and put everything he does on TikTok, or, probably better, we make sure that the conversation about modern society includes a role for men that young boys can look up to. Because long story short, if we don't talk to our boys, Andrew Tate is gonna talk to them. And that means 10 years from now I'm gonna be talking to 'em.

The new crisis of masculinity - The Gray Area - Air Date 8-7-23

SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: You know, there is a question lurking here about how, you know, this masculinity crisis intersects with class and race and who we're really talking about when we say men are in trouble. I mean, I'm curious what you think of, or when you think of the platonic ideal of the young man in crisis, what does he look like?

Is he poor, middle class, upper class? Is he White? I mean, obviously not all men are experiencing this problem equally. When I think about an incel, you know, for instance, right?, I think of a certain kind of kid: bourgeois, middle/upper class, usually White. But I don't wanna [00:08:00] reduce this entire problem to just that because it isn't reducible to just that. But does it seem to be affecting a particular demographic in a particularly strong way? 

CHRISTINE EMBA: Yeah. Hashtag, not all men. Um [laughing]. Uh, no. I think the class distinctions are actually really important. And there's something that I thought about but didn't have as much space to go into as I wanted to in the piece. The piece, as you have read, is already quite long, but it could have been much longer. And I do think that the crisis of masculinity is kind of cross-class and cross-racial, but maybe presents itself differently in different spaces. I think for sort of bourgeois, fairly well-educated men at the top of the ladder, it presents as kind of a psychic problem, almost. Like it's not necessarily that you don't have resources, it's just you're not really sure of how to be a guy on your Ivy League campus, and so you get really into Nietzsche and, like, intellectualize your problems. 

But I mean, for [00:09:00] working class men, that's where you're seeing, you know, like deaths of despair hitting and like this job loss is really hitting there for Black men. There is, there has long been, I think, a sort of crisis of role models because so many Black father figures have been taken out of the community via mass incarceration and elsewhere.

So it's a little bit more of an ongoing thing and there's been actually more community step-in maybe in those places. But you have also seen, or saw, he is now dead, the rise of, Kevin Samuels was sort of like the Black influencer version of Andrew Tate and really popular in Black communities, and he had all these YouTube videos about being a high value man and like making fun of low value women and defining masculinity in that way. And so the anxiety about men's roles in relation to women is clearly visible there, too.

SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: One of the things I hate about the culture war, at least as it's waged [00:10:00] very often by Republicans in particular, is that it's often used to mobilize resentments in a way that doesn't address any of the underlying causes of that resentment. It is so much easier to say that women, progressives, elites are to blame for your problems than it is to unpack all of these complicated social and economic transformations, some of which we were talking about earlier. And there's a part of me that just has to believe that, maybe not all of these problems, but many of these problems wouldn't be problems if we lived in a more equitable economy, if we lived in richer communities with deeper connections, if precarity and boredom and despair weren't so widespread.

I mean, how do you make sense of the lines here? I mean, maybe the problem is so complicated and diffuse that all you can really say is that there are a thousand overlapping causes and it's hard to tease it all out, but I don't know. I'm just curious how you make sense of that. 

CHRISTINE EMBA: No, I think that's absolutely right and that's a thing that [00:11:00] frustrates me often about the conservative response to this crisis. 

So, I write in the piece about Republican Senator Josh Hawley, whose book entitled Manhood went on sale, and unfortunately the jokes, like, really, really write themselves. 

SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Yes, they do. Yes they do. 

CHRISTINE EMBA: So, right now he's writing a book on manhood, but like the most famous picture of Josh Hawley is him sort of fist pumping outside of the January 6th uprising and then just hightailing it, like heels-to-butt out down the hall when he's confronted by people in the Capitol. So, in his book he blames the crisis of manhood specifically on liberal elites, like that is who he blames. And he basically says it's the elites have ruined manhood and feminists are taking away your manhood and what you really need to do is sort of go back in time almost. And he proposes a vision of manhood that basically is like the life [00:12:00] that your grandfather lived somehow. Like, a man should work a union job and be able to provide for his whole family, and that's the ideal. But Josh Hawley, how are you gonna get there? A) like, what solutions are you offering except this new victim complex where you blame your sadness on women and liberal elites, whoever they are. And then again, Josh Hawley, it was your party who was in favor of NAFTA and, you know, many of these policies that led to the offshoring of these working class union jobs for men. Um, are you going to do anything about that? Like, are you taking responsibility for those economic factors? There are things that we could do in America to make the economy more equitable, to make working life fairer, to make it easier to support a family. But where are the policies? 

SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Yeah. Where indeed. And as you put it in the piece, what this often boils down to is a misplaced desire [00:13:00] to belong. And this is a general problem in this society, and maybe it's especially bad for men, but our social lives in the real physical world are so much poorer than they used to be. And belonging is about anchoring our identities in communities. And unfortunately, the easiest way to do this now is to go online and that's a rather short road to some pretty dark places. And that's kind of what we're talking about with the Tate phenomenon and the rest of it. 

CHRISTINE EMBA: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately yes, that is very true. So, one of the points that I make in the essay that I think is, it felt mildly controversial to be making this point, was the fact that it was notable that there, and this is something that also almost every young guy who I interviewed for this piece told me, that there were just fewer role models around, and especially father figures. You know, many of [00:14:00] the young men I talked to told me about how they didn't have a good relationship with their father, or their father wasn't around. They grew up in a single parent household. Most of their friends maybe didn't have a great relationship with male relatives, so they didn't really have anywhere to go to sort of learn how to be a man. 

And that was part of the reason why they felt kind of lost and were looking for these models online. And I do think that that has been a social shift over the past several decades that has really increased, not in, you know, traditionally marginalized communities, but everywhere. And the young men who seemed to have sort of succeeded in some way or had a better grasp on masculine [unintelligible] told me that they had found a mentor, were guys who had found someone in their community somehow.

One young guy told me about how his father wasn't really part of his life, but he became friends with sort of a priest who was a chaplain at his school who [00:15:00] sort of took him under his wing and, like, taught him how to buy nice shoes and, like, told him to ask women out on dates. And that was what helped him learn how to be a man. And, you know, he went on to talk about this and was sort of like, I think that this is a problem that we don't have these father figures around, but it's hard to imagine a policy solution because you can't mandate community. You know, like you can't just, through fiat, assign of father from the government to every young man who's looking for a model or a mentor. So what are you going to do about it? 

In the past, maybe people would go to church and have intergenerational friendships or be in clubs or lodges, and even if it wasn't a relative, they might find a mentor there. But there's so many fewer male teachers in the school system that you don't see that happening as much anymore, and people just don't join community organizations like they used to.

The New Masculinity - ON BOYS podcast - Air Date 4-27-23

ALEX MANLY: So one of the [00:16:00] chapters, I believe, starts with an anecdote from when I was in high school, in gym class, and another kid who I saw as being more sort of popular than me, saw me sort of wearing a bandaid and asked like, Why are you wearing a bandaid? To him, it just seemed, I guess, superfluous or like kind of a mark of vulnerability or weakness or something. And he kind of made fun of me for it a little bit. And for me it hadn't, you know, like, I was coming from, I don't know, a household where there was nothing, I didn't have to hide, you know, if something was wrong or I didn't have to hide a weakness. So it was confusing to me. But it was one of those things where it's like, Oh yeah, you pick up messaging, you know, outside the home. Like this is what's okay, this is what's not. And then he was sort of telling me like, Man up, be tough. You know, like, pretend that you're not injured or power through your injuries. 

It was just a kind of like a really tiny encapsulation of this overarching theme that that runs through masculinity, which is you cannot show weakness. You [00:17:00] cannot show vulnerability. You have to pretend that you're great, that everything's fine. And in this specific chapter, basically I explore how that is a killer when it comes to men's health because, in very real terms, if you spend your childhood internalizing messages about being tough and playing through the pain and not being willing to admit that anything's wrong, that doesn't just magically go away when, say, you're later in life and your body starts doing things that you don't necessarily know how to respond to. Your body starts showing signs that something's wrong and rather than looking for help, you just go, Okay, well, I'm gonna be tough. Just, the data shows men die a lot younger than women, and one of the culprits is they have a different relationship to getting treatment for stuff.

NIOBE WADE: As we're recording, the Washington Post came out with an article today about the silent crisis in men's health getting worse, and so as we're recording, the most recent data in the US is a [00:18:00] 5.9 year difference in life expectancy for males and females, and it's the largest gap in a quarter century. This gap has been getting larger. As the article points out, and as many of you listeners know, it's kind of ridiculous, especially because for years, so much of the medical research has been on men. So many of the providers are men. So it should be a system that is set up to take care of you guys and: yet. If we start with, Don't put a bandaid on it, it's pretty easy to see how things get ignored, overlooked, not tended to. 

ALEX MANLY: I think it's one of those things that if you think about it for long enough, it starts feeling like, you know, it's a tragedy. We have sent men the wrong messages since they were born, basically. And then there are consequences to that. And there are lots of other factors going into the fact that they die younger, a lot of which I explore in the book. But the relationship to their bodies, to their physical health, [00:19:00] to the concept of weakness or vulnerability is so important. And I'm like, you can't teach someone that weakness and vulnerability are bad and expect it to have no impact when their bodies start to fail as all of our bodies will.

NIOBE WADE: I found myself thinking about this for myself first the other day, but you know, I am traveling through the world in this body. This is my vehicle. This is what I have. I really should be taking good care of it. Like, this is it. And then I thought of that in terms of, I have four sons who are in their teens and early twenties right now. They take care of their cars. They take care of their dirt bikes. Like this is the stereotypically masculine thing. You know, if you've got a cool car, you are out there buffing it, shining it, taking care of it, putting premium gas in it. How can we help make that connection in translation, Alex? 

ALEX MANLY: I mean, you're fighting an uphill battle, as am I with my book. But I do think, yeah, it starts with communicating that yourself and your [00:20:00] body are not, I don't know, like, are not a kind of narrative object as they are in masculinity where it's like, oh, it has to be perfect, it has to be, you know, tough, it has to be strong. And rather just, Yeah, okay, you're a person. There are things that are good, there are things that are bad, there... things will go well and go poorly in your life without the pressure to kind of be like a superhero or whatnot. I think that completely like reinvents, or could in any case, reinvent the relationship that these boys have with their bodies as they become men and, you know, as they start aging.

NIOBE WADE: So much of this seems like we all - guys, we as parents, society - need to make it okay, give permission to boys to be human. And I'm curious. This is a question that I have been pondering myself lately, and I'm not sure I have an answer, so I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Is there a difference between [00:21:00] being a decent human and being a good man?

ALEX MANLY: That's a fascinating question and I think it's one that I've thought about no small amount. I do think what's fascinating, AskMen's slogan, my employer, uh, is "become a better man". And so, just, you know, having that in the background of my professional career for the past decade, my ears perk up a little bit when I hear anyone talking about being a good man or a better man. And you hear it in songs and you see it in movies or whatnot, and you don't really see it for women, they think it's fashion.

NIOBE WADE: No. No. Nobody's telling me to be a better, I mean, there are unspoken messages like being a better woman, you know, take care of your skin and..

ALEX MANLY: Or be a better mom, maybe. The idea that there's a, like a moral component to being a man, I feel like is kind of like, at least from what I've seen, it is much stronger. I think that's fascinating. Generally, what I want is for [00:22:00] more men to kind of be aware that being a good man and being a decent person don't have to be, you know, vastly different concepts. You know, that I think like being good, caring about others and improving the lives of those around you and sticking to what you believe in, that kind of stuff, is both of a piece with personhood and also not incompatible with masculinity. And I get into this a little bit in the conclusion like, this book is not a call for you to be weak or effeminate or whatever. It's a call for you to be, you know, strong enough and confident enough in your masculinity to incorporate aspects of femininity or of, just, you know, human personhood generally. The sort of fragile masculinity that we're familiar with becomes more flexible and becomes more open to possibility.

So yeah, I think like what we need is a masculinity that is not so brittle, I guess, and is not so threatened by like, you know, the concept of doing the [00:23:00] laundry or, you know, like being a really great dad while your wife brings home the paycheck or that kind of stuff. That there are ways to be strong and proud of yourself that don't, you know, that aren't just like, Oh, I'm the Marlboro Man, or like, I work in a mine, or like, you know, I'm the superpowered CEO. Because like, just the spectrum of choices that have been available to men for a long time in our culture has just been so narrow. 

JANET ALLISON - CO-HOST, ON BOYS PODCAST: Yeah, and you talk about women are outpacing men in education. We've talked about that here before. Women now are better, kind of better trained for the jobs that of the future. This book is, um, it's about a roadmap for the 21st Century and that we need men to be nurses. We need men to be caregivers. And these kinds of jobs take a little bit more of the, what has typically been regarded as feminine. I'll say it. You know, it's the vulnerability, it's the care, it's the communication. But we need that. I think ultimately this book is about [00:24:00] being fluid, being flexible, being adaptive, and somewhere in there you said that "acting like a man", I'll put that in quotes, "is a choice". 

Redefining Masculinity and Embracing Vulnerability - Beyond the Scenes - Air Date 3-7-23

ROY WOOD JR - HOST, BEYOND THE SCENES: Because what's interesting about this whole discussion is that men are going through, "Hey, show your emotions. Hey, women can do it too." Meanwhile, women are cooking on the feminism side of the game and going, "We are girls, girls, strong girl power. We gonna march, we can do whatever we want." So it almost seems as if both sides are having two different types of awakenings concurrently that also kind of butt heads.

How much did the lack of women's rights in the thirties and the forties and the fifties? And even if you really want -- 'cause I'm not gonna put this solely on slavery -- but I also wanna put it in the context that for a long time in America, the man had to go do the work and the woman was at the house [00:25:00] and you was in the kitchen, and maybe the man felt that he could never share because no matter what the burden of providing was passed on, he has to do it. And then we got to a time where we didn't have to live like that anymore, but men were maybe subconsciously passing on that rhetoric to their next generation and then their next generation. And by the time we got to the nineties, the idea of what a man should be was molded by what a man had to be at that time.

Someone said to me, something I thought was very profound: "Don't confuse the tactics you use to survive with the tactics you need to go on." How much does the history of gender dynamics play a role in a lot of these bad habits being passed down from generation to generation?

TED BUNCH: Yeah. So in a male dominated society, because that's what it is, and it's a patriarchal society, it's a male dominated society. And then you do have women who are seeking liberation because coming out of all of that in the same [00:26:00] way that in a White supremacist society, you have people of color who are seeking liberation. All of those things. These constructs exist. And there is an antiquated notion of manhood and masculinity that I think is so woven into the fabric of our society that when it's challenged, then sexism rears its ugly head, and seeks to put down what women have achieved or are doing and those kind of things, as if it's taking away from men, but it's not. It's not just this one pie and that everybody's piece is a little smaller; it's an expansion of a pie. It's much bigger than that. 

So this allows men to really look at our authentic selves too, that we don't just have to be this rigid notion of manhood, that there's so much more to you and to me and to the men who are listening. There's so much more to who we are that we can now embrace our full authentic selves also, because there's things that you may have wanted to do or your son may wanna do, that the man box says, oh, no, no, no --you're not supposed to do that, right? I have [00:27:00] flowers in my picture all the time when I'm on Zoom. It took me years to accept that, oh, I can go buy flowers because I like flowers in the house. I don't have to bring them to a woman to have flowers in the house or to my wife to have flowers in the house. That actually, I'm the one who likes the color. I'm the one who likes the smell of the flowers. And it took me a while to really accept that. Now that's my authentic self. I love flowers. So now I'll go to the florist and I pick out what I want. They say, do you want me to put it in a vase for you, Mr. Bunch? No, I wanna take them home and arrange 'em. Because you know what, Roy and Niobi? I like flowers.

So there's so much that we're missing as men that these original notions of manhood, patriarchy, harms all of us. It really does. There's lots of wonderful things about being a man. I don't wanna not be a man. I don't want him not be a father. And this is not an indictment on manhood, actually. It's an invitation to men. It's not about calling men out for wrong behavior. This is about calling men into a healthy, respectful manhood. 

NIOBE WADE: So what boys have taught me is that we've split our culture, our modern culture -- I call it boy culture, but we call it our modern culture -- has split [00:28:00] us into thinking that thinking is masculine and feeling is feminine, hard is masculine and fem, right? You get where I'm going, Roy? You get where I going? 

ROY WOOD JR - HOST, BEYOND THE SCENES: We gotta marinate on that one. 

NIOBE WADE: You get what I'm saying? 

ROY WOOD JR - HOST, BEYOND THE SCENES: So if thinking is masculine, that's good. Feeling is feminine. It's feminine, right? That sounds like every argument I've had with everybody I've dated in my life. Goodness gracious.

NIOBE WADE: If you live in a culture that says basically independence, thinking, the self, stoicism is masculine, and vulnerability, emotions, sensitivity is feminine, you're gonna be messed up because ultimately, you are half hard and half soft as a human. And again, I'm not doing the human thing because it's my own ideology. I'm doing it, really, 'cause that's what the boys are yelling at us about. They're saying exactly what you just said, Ted. They're saying I am actually half what you call feminine. I am vulnerable, I'm sensitive, I'm emotionally intelligent. I like [00:29:00] flowers or I don't like, you know what, whatever it is. But things that have been associated with femininity. And you are trying to push that down at me and that's how I actually build relationships and friendships. So like, what's your problem? I mean, I feel like young people, honestly, Roy, have been yelling at adults for almost a century and saying, what is wrong with you people? That basically we get it. Young people get it, Ted, you know that. Young people get it all the time. 

And so I think when it comes to the women's issues -- this is what I think, Roy -- I think that women, obviously -- and I definitely identify as a feminist and I'm definitely part of the feminist movement -- women are angry because for lots of different justified reasons. So I'm not diminishing that in any way. But the reality is that we keep on seeing the symptom as the problem. So we keep on thinking that it's basically from women's, from a feminist perspective, we keep on thinking, well, it's men's problems, so if you fix men, then the problem should go away. But it's all of our problems, Roy. It's the culture that we have all created with obviously this [00:30:00] hierarchy that some men have been more influential than other men. You talk about white supremacy, et cetera, et cetera. And some women have been more powerful than other women. But basically we have created society that doesn't make any sense, where we've gendered basic human qualities.

So then that means is that women are getting mad at men when really what we should be doing is trying to change the culture. And the more we blame it on men, actually, the more men just feel attacked -- I've heard that a lot, the men just feel attacked -- when we have to see it as a collective problem.

ROY WOOD JR - HOST, BEYOND THE SCENES: Before we go to the break, I want to delve in for a second about your work that you did, where you essentially -- walk me through this -- you had 150 boys, ages 13 to 18. 

NIOBE WADE: Well, I followed them over four years, so I followed -- 

ROY WOOD JR - HOST, BEYOND THE SCENES: You followed them? 

NIOBE WADE: Yeah, I followed from 12 to 13. I followed them over four to five years.

ROY WOOD JR - HOST, BEYOND THE SCENES: Okay. How did you measure intimacy and see it slowly start to dissipate in their relationships with other boys of the same age, because you were essentially looking to see how they related and how they spoke to [00:31:00] other boys, and when did the dissipation of feeling and turning into creatures of action, when that started happening? 

NIOBE WADE: When you listen to 12-year-old boys, they will use the language of love. Given a safe space, right? Not give 'em a safe space, they won't do it. When they talk about their friends, they say, I love him. I can't live without him. Or I want to find a friend that I could really rely on and be myself and be a real self.

So the language, it's right there in the language. It's literally, they're talking love. They're asking questions about love. They're thinking about love. Both heterosexual love, romantic love, platonic love, all sorts of love. They're having questions about it. And if given a safe space, they actually ask it.

Then as they get a older, it's incredible. Because remember, it's the same kids, so it's the same kids over time. You start to hear this, "I don't care." Ted, you know this language, "I don't care. Whatever. It's all good. It's all good," you know, like, "No, I don't connect to someone that much anymore, but it's all good." You know, that whole pressure to [00:32:00] sound like you're totally invulnerable. So you hear it in the language. And then you also hear the anger, you hear the sadness. And then sometimes in the worst-case scenarios you hear the depression, and the sense of feeling totally isolated, and not knowing what to do about it, and a lot of anger at "why is not anybody paying attention? Why is not anybody paying attention to these basic human needs? And everybody's calling me" -- in some cases mass shooters, I've read the mass shooter manifestos, it's the same thing -- they feel like nobody's paying attention to their suffering.

What Does Positive Masculinity Look Like - Paging Dr. NerdLove - Air Date 4-12-18

HARRIS O'MALLEY - HOST, DRNERDLOVE: One of the issues that comes up in almost any discussion around the subject of toxic masculinity, like I've said before, toxic masculinity does not mean that being masculine or being male is inherently bad, toxic, or something to be apologized for, nor does it mean that the way to not be toxic is to be feminine.

Toxic masculinity refers to behaviors and beliefs around masculinity and manhood that are seen as laudable or desirable yet in [00:33:00] reality, are actually harmful and detrimental to the individual and to society as a whole. And this can manifest in any number of ways, whether it is measuring your worth as a man by your capacity for inflicting violence, or deciding your value by your sex drive or how much sex you've had, or for that matter, the belief that anger, rage, lust, and stoic indifference are the only acceptable emotions for men to feel, and that love and vulnerability are considered to be feminizing and weak and associated with sexual desire. Just, you know, to name a few.

But like I said, non-toxic or positive masculinity doesn't mean apologizing for being a man, nor does it mean trying to be as gender neutral as possible.

There are a lot of behaviors, beliefs, and traits that are coded masculine that are very positive: honor, discipline, intellectual curiosity, compassion, generosity. But at the same time, this [00:34:00] doesn't mean that masculine-coded traits equate to masculinity. 

The point of positive masculinity isn't to just switch out one set of definitions for another; it's to expand what it means to be a man -- physically, mentally, emotionally, even socially. Part of what makes toxic masculinity so harmful is that it very narrowly defines what it means to be a man. It restricts manhood to a very limited definition that few, if any, can live up to, yet all men are essentially punished for never achieving.

It's ironic when Tyler Durden in Fight Club says, "Is this what a man is supposed to look like" when he's being played by Brad Pitt, who in this movie, yes, looks exactly like what a lot of men believe a man is supposed to look like, and quite frankly, kill themselves attempting to achieve. 

But while it's easy to talk about what toxic masculinity isn't or what positive masculinity is, it can sometimes be a little difficult to actually picture it. And admittedly, whenever we talk about positive [00:35:00] masculinity, the mental images that come to mind are usually either Terry Cruz or Captain America. And to be fair, these are actually excellent examples of positive masculinity. But there are more ways of being a positive example of manhood than to be a big slab of beef with an upper torso, like an inverted Dorito chip, no matter how sensitive or caring they may be. There are more ways of being a good man than just being Steve Rogers. 

So let's talk about a different Rogers for a minute. To an entire generation, Fred Rogers was a beloved figure from childhood, someone who invited children to be his neighbor, engaged their curiosity by teaching them about how the world works, took them to interesting places they might never otherwise see, and who encouraged them to be open and caring and honest. 

Part of his message was that you were special exactly as you were and deserving of love and caring. And to children who might not fit in for any number of reasons, that was a [00:36:00] really important message to hear. 

Despite being incredibly gentle and soft spoken, Mr. Rogers taught children how to live in a world that could often be confusing or chaotic or scary, and he did so with compassion and empathy. He would directly address confusing, even scary concepts -- concepts that some adults would not think were appropriate for children, like death or even the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy -- because he believed that children deserve to be treated with respect and not to be talked down to, and not to be hidden away from the realities of the world. By directly addressing these issues, Mr. Rogers taught children how to be brave and how to confront their fears by taking things that children often had a hard time dealing with and explaining them in a way that they could understand.

And while his message was one of love and compassion, Fred Rogers never shied away from confrontation when it was necessary. Mr. Rogers stared down Congress in order to help secure funding for the Public [00:37:00] Broadcasting System. He would directly address social ills of the day, like racism and segregation. In fact, he enraged evangelical Christian groups because he preached a message of unconditional love and acceptance, and steadfastly refused to condemn LGBTQ individuals. But he did all of this in a uniquely Mr. Rogers way, with a smile and with kindness and a reminder to even those who he disagreed with or who opposed him that they were loved and special just as they were. He was never angry, aggressive, pushy, or stern. But in his own way, Mr. Rogers fought to make the world a better place. 

Another great example of positive masculinity comes from the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Now, Jonathan McIntosh has a great video as part of his Pop Culture Detective series, all about Newt Scamander and why he's a hero that we need. And I don't wanna repeat everything he said. So instead, I wanna point [00:38:00] to Jacob Kowalski. Kowalski is almost the textbook definition of a stock comic relief character. In any other movie, he would be there to be the foil to the macho adventures of the manly action hero. Kowalski's goal in life isn't glory or fame or riches, or to get the girl, it's to open a French patisserie. He's short, he's fat, he's not traditionally good looking, and he's mostly there to mug for the camera and react with crazy expressiveness over the wacky hijinks going on around him. But it's that very emotional openness that is part of why the audience is drawn to him. He's in turn terrified, enchanted, saddened, or awed by the things that go on around him, but we are never supposed to believe that this makes him weak, sad or otherwise lesser. In fact, it's that openness and that expressiveness that draws not just Queenie, but us as the audience [00:39:00] to him. And this is part of what makes him stand alongside Newt Scamander as a great positive example of masculinity. He's surrounded by witches and wizards with immense supernatural power. He knows that he will never measure off to them. He knows that he will never be as special as they are. And yet not only is he not jealous of them, he's not freaked out or scared of them either. To him, what makes them different is what makes them amazing. And while he will never be capable of the same miraculous feats that they are, he is the first to step up because they're his friends and they need him, and he will do whatever he possibly can.

The same could be said about Newt Geiszler from Pacific Rim. He's not exactly the platonic ideal of heroic manhood. He's a skinny, twitchy, nervous intellectual. He freaks out at the drop of a hat. He is very clearly the kaiju equivalent of that kid who had way too many spiders and bugs and reptiles in his bedroom.

And while he may not have perfect hair [00:40:00] and abs that you could bounce a quarter off of, he is as critical to the fight against the Kaiju as Raleigh Becket is. Without his brains and without his almost reckless courage and disregard for his own safety, the war against the Kaiju could not be won. 

What is Positive Masculinity: How Patriarchy Oppresses Men - Swolesome - Air Date 12-2-22

FINN - HOST, SWOLESOME: Positive masculinity is whatever we want it to be. It is what men build together and model for boys to give them a brighter. Happier future, but far be it for me to leave it there and not provide some examples of some of the ways that we can do this.

I personally think that a good stepping off point is to actually examine what patriarchy has taught us and then ask how we can repurpose that into something that serves us rather than something we serve. So as an example, let's look at physical strength. Now, not all men are physically strong and being physically strong does not make someone a man.

But this is a pretty universal masculine attribute across a great many cultures patriarchy champions this trait specifically by laying the groundwork for violence. It asserts that male strength exists for the purpose of competition and dominance, and that violence is [00:41:00] inevitable because of this. This framing not only excludes men who are not physically powerful, but it leaves no room for cooperation.

And it sets up a framework for relationships that are inherently competitive and demand submission from other people. And let's be realistic for a moment here, boys. Is this it? Like is, is this what we want? Like let's assume for a moment that you actually are the most dominant guy. You are the most domineering person in any given room at any given time, and everyone submits to you.

But do they like you? Maybe you don't care whether or not they do, but I promise you that no amount of respect without actual affection is a remedy for emotional loneliness. In this context, submission is defeat and there is no love to be found there. So how can we turn male strength into something that brings us connection rather than something that scares others away?

Well, let's ask ourselves what the pro-social flip side of physical strength might look like. Instead of masculine strength being characterized by power and dominance, we can [00:42:00] reconceptualize it as something protective and collaborative. One of the most common responses that I get when I ask people to name the first trait that they think of when they hear positive masculinity.

Is protection strength specifically for the purpose of helping other people feel safe. So many of us have this capacity and it feels really good to develop it and then reach a place where other people trust you not to be confused with trying to protect people who are not asking for it. Mind you, what I'm describing here is more setting a precedent that says you're a safe person to call upon when needed.

That is how strength can be mutually empowering. Pumping iron is all well and good. Personally, I'm a big fan, but regardless of the numbers on the plates, a much more impactful measure of your strength is how well you can lift the people around you. Figuratively, mind you, not literally, at least not unless you have permission, but this isn't just about fostering healthier relationships and helping the people around us feel safe.

This approach also frees us from the pressure of always having to be on, always having to be. Dominant and showing it, and it still [00:43:00] lets us embrace the idea of masculine strength, if that is something that we feel is important to our identities as men. The point here is that physical power does not have to be violent.

Ask any martial artist and they'll tell you. It actually takes a lot more strength to pull a punch than to follow through with it. You can celebrate being powerful and how it defines your identity specifically by applying it in healthy ways. Embracing dominance and violence is one of the ways that patriarchy keeps us subservient.

We have a lot less time and energy to self-actualize when we're preoccupied with some asinine competition and you become very easy to manipulate when your baseline is one of constantly having to prove your manhood. All someone has to do is put you in a situation where you feel it's under threat and boom, you're their pawn.

But you don't gotta prove all my guy. And if you do feel that pressure, it might be worthwhile to ask yourself where it's coming from and who it's serving, because another service we're told to give patriarchy goes back to the idea of being expendable, that male bodies are tools of violence to feed the machine owed to labor and war efforts.

This is usually smuggled into our psyches and a Trojan horse labeled courage and [00:44:00] dedication. It begins with encouragement of recklessness and acting out amongst boys, a sort of devil may care attitude. When it comes to self-preservation and consideration of others, it twists courage into compliant foolishness.

But courage is not the absence of fear or caution. Courage isn't willingness to throw your life away. Courage is being scared of something that needs to be done and doing it anyway, like say, challenging traditional gender constructs at the risk of ridicule, rather than simply looking for grandiose ways to flaunt our fearlessness, we should ask ourselves what we truly fear and how we can face it.

This is what I was trying to get at in my video about vulnerability. It is not easy to go against the tide of patriarchal dominance based masculinity. In fact, it's quite terrifying. To use a personal example, I have faced backlash just by being myself and talking about the topics that I talk about. I'm often scared to put myself out there because of this, but I do it anyway because it needs to be done because enough people have told me that it helps them.

That on [00:45:00] its own is reason enough. But knowing that I'm helping people and the genuine connections that come from that make me feel good more so than the backlash makes me feel bad. And this incredible thing happens when you just start focusing on doing the things that make you happy and defining masculinity as you would like it to be defined.

When you step outside of this dominance based patriarchal manhood that we're taught, which is that when you leave the competition, You crush the very idea that your manhood is something that needs to be defended in the first place. You can ask yourself why you ever felt the need to prove anything to a group of people who built their own identities around being defensive and judging others.

Once you've escaped this thinking, you have a lot more space to explore the fact that masculinity is whatever you want it to be. You unlock a whole lot of autonomy around what it can look like and how you can customize it to be more fulfilling. And like I said, this does not mean you have to. Throw everything out and charge naked into nothingness with no sense of direction.

But it does mean that you unlock the ability to examine the constructs you've been given and to ask yourself whether or not they're working for you [00:46:00] or you're working for them. I'm not about to sit here and tell you that it's easy. It's not, but it is worth it. That much I can promise in some.

Patriarchal masculinity is the path of least resistance and least fulfillment. It is compliant, competitive, and imposed upon us. Conversely, positive masculinity requires boldness. It is active, courageous, and consciously chosen. So choose. If you've been playing the game and you're still hurting, stepping away isn't giving up.

It's breaking out, and it takes a lot of strength and bravery to do that. I will be speaking more about this because I think a key component here is making examples of positive masculinity, more visible archetypes to fill that space that is left behind when we throw away the things that aren't helping us.

Redefining Masculinity and Embracing Vulnerability Part 2 - Beyond the Scenes - Air Date 3-7-23

ROY WOOD JR - HOST, BEYOND THE SCENES: What tools can men take to build and deepen and strengthen the connections that they already have? 

NIOBE WADE: Normalize it. When I'm in classes, I will get a switch within four seconds -- I'm not exaggerating -- [00:47:00] I'll read a quote to 12-year-old boys that says something soft: " I love him so much" from my book, Deep Secrets. They will start cracking up. I'll say, "Why are you laughing?" They'll say, "The dude sounds gay." And I'll say, "Well, I didn't look at his sexuality. I'm just telling you that 80% of boys sound like that at some point in their teenage years." And they will say, inevitably, "For real?" And I'll say, "Oh yeah, for real. That's really what teenage boys say." And guess what happens, Roy? Within four seconds -- I'm not kidding -- they will immediately start talking about their own friendships, their desire for friendships. All they need is the permission to feel and the permission to ask. And once they know it's normal that they want friendships, then they can, then they know how to do it. It's natural. I wish the world could hear that the questions that 12-year-old boys ask when given a safe space, because they're geniuses. They're geniuses in terms of understanding how love works, how relationships work, how humans work. And so I just say normalize it. [00:48:00] And then in the homes and teachers and bosses, you just gotta make it normal, so that you create spaces where friendships are valued.

Teachers, don't separate out kids that are friends. Put 'em together. Put 'em together. And then talk about how they can help each other learn the material that they learn better with each other than by themselves. So don't do that thing of "we're gonna separate you 'cause you guys are friends." It's like, no, no. Actually use that relationship to learn. 

There's a beautiful study at UVA that has been replicated. The subject of the research stands in front of a hill and has to estimate the steepness of the hill with a backpack on their back. Okay? It's an experiment, a research experiment. They're standing next to a best friend in one condition, standing there, a stranger in another condition, by themselves or with someone they know who they don't know very well. Okay? So in each condition they have to estimate the steepness of the hill. You got it Roy? Those that are standing next to a best friend see the hill as less steep. [00:49:00] So what's incredible is that we actually see the world as less difficult when we're standing next to someone who loves us. We see the math problem, whatever you're doing as less difficult when you're next to someone who loves you. 

So use that in education, use that in the workplace. Put people who are close together, working on teams together. You see what I'm saying? So you disrupt all the -- even at home, talk about friendships. We gotta think as parents to say, "Tell me about..." Thinking about our own friendships. Talk about it with your kids. I don't share the intimacies of my own friendships, but I talk about when I get my feelings hurt with friends. I talk about how that made me feel bad when so-and-so didn't return my text. And I wrote her three times that she didn't write back, and that made me feel bad. And then I asked them for advice; they're teenagers. So I'll say, what do you think I should do? What do you think I should say? And I do that with my son as well, by the way. And so what the message they get from this is, this is normal. This is normal. This isn't some weird thing that you have to get special help for. 

TED BUNCH: You bring up a lot of great points and you're talking about your kids [00:50:00] and I'm a father also. They're between 21 and 33 now. But it was not unusual at all for me to ask, especially my boys, on a scale of one to 10, how do you feel today? Right? Or to have those conversations that were informal conversations around how they're doing and to really lean in and ask more and more questions. So that's really important.

To your question, Roy, for men, it's normalized that we are taught to not ask for help, to not need any help. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, all those kinds of things. And when we do spend time with each other, it might be around going and having a drink, or it might be around a sporting event or watching a game. That's where the bonding happens. Right? And what we need to be able to do, and what's helpful, is that we really lean into the strength in vulnerability. Like I'm really going through something, and I wanna share that with you. And what men often say is, okay man, it'll get better. Let's just move on. They don't really lean in and process in the same way that women are taught, honestly, in our society, to use more language and ask more questions. Because I'm sure your wife [00:51:00] asks more questions about what you're feeling than you might ask her.

You just wanna know, "You okay? Good. Okay. Now I don't have to talk about anything else." 

ROY WOOD JR - HOST, BEYOND THE SCENES: You don't ask enough questions, therefore you don't care. It's like, "I do care! I pay the bills. Don't you see this? You feel this warm heat in this house?" 

TED BUNCH: We absolutely care, but we are not comfortable asking those questions because we've been told you don't go into that emotional space. You stay away from that emotional space. So much so that even when we go to -- and just thinking about your listeners, I bet if there's a woman listening to the podcast, there's a man in her life, her brother, her father, a man she's dating, her husband, who's going to the doctor -- she's gonna make sure she goes with him. Why? Because he's not gonna ask the questions that he needs to ask. Because even that for us, is vulnerability, right? Even that for us is like, "Oh, I don't, I just wanna get in and out." "You go to the doctor?" "Yes." Well, did you ask him about this?" "Well, no." It's truth, right? So vulnerability is a strength. It really is.

And [00:52:00] honestly, when men become vulnerable, they're respected for that because other men see that, wow, that was vulnerable and that's a strength. So it isn't something we need to run away from, and that's gonna give us a better sense of wellbeing, a better sense of mental health to really have health mentally and to be able to support everyone else along the way. And it's gonna really make us feel better too. And it's modeling it for our children as well. 

ROY WOOD JR - HOST, BEYOND THE SCENES: So with all of that being said, let's end it here.

We've already unpacked ways that we can try and change the culture. What hope and optimism do you have for the future of manhood? 

TED BUNCH: I have a lot of hope. [back and forth banter] It looks like you're not finished, Roy. 

ROY WOOD JR - HOST, BEYOND THE SCENES: Well, we gonna see how this will grow up. You got to understand, my sample size is one. Y'all's the ones studying 150 people and writing books. I'm not writing books. I'm just raising one. He seems to be doing good so far. He's definitely in tune with his emotions, and [00:53:00] expressive about it way more so than I was at the same mile marker.

TED BUNCH: And that's what we need to allow, right? We really need to allow our children, like your son, to embrace and express his full range of emotions. And we need to do that too. When he's going through fear, we can say, "I feel afraid too, and this is what I do" and I wanna work through that fear. Because on the other side, no matter how it turns out, it's always good that I've worked through that fear. 

So we're not saying don't push our children to confront things even though they're difficult. We want them to. But we don't want to motivate them by denigrating them or using girls or women or others to say, don't be like that, or don't be like this. Those are the kinds of things that we really wanna do. Have them express through their language what's going on. 

So I have a lot of optimism about men, about manhood. I think that we've reached a point where it's clearly not working and we know that. And so now it's just a matter of time of how do we need to purge what needs to happen so that we can start [00:54:00] talking in real ways that really connect with our humanity. That's the real thing here, really connected, just as there's a racial awakening in a lot of ways, and it's difficult. It's painful. People are being triggered all the time, right? So it's difficult, but we have to get through it. And the same thing here around our own mental health and our own sense of wellbeing.

The New Masculinity Part 2 - ON BOYS podcast - Air Date 4-27-23

ALEX MANLY: Yeah, and I mean, look like I was a product of, of a, an environment where like, I wouldn't say either my parents are sexist.

They both have fairly progressive ideas about, uh, about gender and. They've both been sort of so supportive of, uh, not just my coming out as non-binary, but also like the work that I've done over the years in terms of like looking into masculinity and thinking about it. Still do feel like I just because of, of the culture that we live in.

I grew up in a house where I was definitely consuming like a lot more. Art by men, you know, because there's more art by men sort of in the world. You know, every year when the Oscar, uh, the Oscars give like, best director, uh, to, to a [00:55:00] man again, and you're sort of like, oh, like, you know, Three women have ever won this or whatever.

Mm-hmm. That kind of stuff is always, I don't know, for me it's a jumping off point of like, okay, like who is telling the stories that we surround ourselves by? Because that has such an impact on how people think. And I've heard so many stories of like, oh, we tried to raise our kids gender neutral, but you, you know, our daughter saw a Disney movie and now she wants to be a princess.

Mm-hmm. It's like, well, yeah. What that tells us is like, stories are powerful. So like thinking about the stories that we surround ourselves with, the stories that we kind of. Are kind of take for granted, but are breathing in or whatever that, you know, that can be a really useful avenue to thinking about how people come to see their gender, how people come to see other people's gender, how people come to see gender generally, and how important it is to them.

How, how they feel like, oh, like I'm a boy. That person on screen is a boy. He's acting this way, so it's appropriate for me to act this way. That kind of stuff is [00:56:00] something that I feel like we haven't really thought about enough yet as a culture. 

JANET ALLISON - CO-HOST, ON BOYS PODCAST: Yeah, as you're talking, I mean the, the director that comes to the top of my mind is Steven Spielberg and look at the movies that, I mean, he's got a range of movies, but it's still, it's Star Wars, it's action, it's that kind of story.

Mm-hmm. And then, you know, you hear the female directors are, Oh, she's got one movie or two movies and, um, so it's that. And it's it, as you said, it's just like, we just need to wake up to that of who is, who is feeding us the stories and ask the questions around that. And part of this too came out in the chapter about the bro culture.

Bro culture is a monoculture. Mm-hmm. Talk, talk about that a 

ALEX MANLY: little bit. Yeah, so what I tried to get into in that, that chapter was just the, the recognition that, as you said, like the, the monoculture is a culture that's always kind of in danger, I guess, because, you know, if you don't [00:57:00] have any diversity, this is true in nature as well.

You're, you're sort of fragile, you're vulnerable, and I sort of, Talk about this through the lens of, of the frats mm-hmm. As being bro culture, you know, taken to its extreme or whatever, but just the idea that you put only guys in a room, or only straight guys, or only cis guys, or only like, you know, white guys or whatever, or, or, or the room is mostly that kind of person and you know, anyone who's not every one of those attributes is sort of a little bit of an outsider.

Then that ends up becoming, I don't know, just, just likely to produce kind of. Outcomes, that privilege those kind of people over everyone else. You know, when you have a room that's a bit more diverse, you can end up with a much more democratic and a much more interesting and a much more balanced, uh, kind of group viewpoint that doesn't necessarily that, where it's not as easy for kind of unhealthy attitudes and unhealthy behaviors to take root and to kind of spread.

Mm-hmm. It's tricky, I think because there [00:58:00] has been some conversation and I have, I have seen sort of some of the people who are trying to create a healthy, you know, new version of masculinity, saying like, we do need all male spaces just for guys to kind of talk through what it's like to be a guy. And I'm sympathetic to that.

Mm-hmm. But I think. It's also important that not all of a guy's spaces are all male spaces, you know? And that he feels comfortable being in spaces where he's maybe in the minority, you know, because like for white men, that's very rarely the case in our culture. You know, they're, they're so used to being in spaces where they feel comfortable.

Then other people, women and people of color, and queer people and and disabled people are so often used to being in the minority in, in a given room. And that totally changes. You know, how comfortable you feel, how you feel articulating your true thoughts, how likely you are to kind of rise up the ranks or whatever, if, if that's a, a thing.

So that chapter is definitely an [00:59:00] attempt to kind of interrogate the, the ways that having too much of one thing can definitely be problematic. Guys can just end up in these situations where they're hearing their own perspective kind of. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Open back to them and reinforce. 

NIOBE WADE: I like how you frame that just now as kind of a moderation.

Hmm. Because I do think, especially for young men in this age group, 18 to 25, you say you're talking to, you know, these are guys that have come up in the, the past 20 years or so where there has been a lot of shifts in our culture. Mm-hmm. And shifts regarding. Our expectations or experiences of gender and like, I don't know what you want me to be.

And there's some, you know, frustration and confusion. And so I do think for some of them, you know, they gravitate to other guys just to be like, can I actually say what I'm thinking about all of this here? And that can be healthy, as you said. Mm-hmm. When that is all that you [01:00:00] experience, it can become an echo chamber, which can be dangerous.

So there's need sometimes to be with people that are like you in a lot of ways, but when that is your whole world, that's 

JANET ALLISON - CO-HOST, ON BOYS PODCAST: stifling. That's what we're seeing with social media. Your feed is all the things that you're already familiar with, that feel comfortable, that have the same philosophy that you're developing, and you don't see the different perspectives.

ALEX MANLY: The important thing, I guess, about an, an all male space that's healthy or one that's useful and necessary, like you said, to be around people who are like you as opposed to, uh, uh, sort of in these more diverse spaces is just, are you.

Capable of being vulnerable in that space. Is it a space that is okay with vulnerability or is it a space that encourages everyone to put on their row mask and, and be tough and either, you know, explicitly or implicitly lie about like who they are and what they're going through? The all male spaces that we [01:01:00] associate with that kind of quote unquote toxic masculinity, like the sort of.

Golf country club or the, you know, the, the frat house or whatever, you know, it's spaces where everyone's trying to like, outdo each other and like one up each other and show off how great they are. And you know, when I think about the spaces that are maybe more healthy, I'm thinking about like a, a group sort of therapy session, or I'm thinking about like, like a bunch of new dads getting together and talking about the reality of being, uh, you know, a parent and the ways that it's changed their lives or whatever.

And those are situations where like what you're gaining from everyone around you being a guy is, you know, people who have been in similar situations with you, uh, as you and, and can speak to and understand what you're going through. Instead of, there's this sense of like, oh, like let's put down everyone who's not in this room or whatever.

It's, you know, how can we heal together? How can we be together? Mm-hmm. Part of the challenge that we face culturally is just sort of getting guys to shift towards those [01:02:00] kind of more healthy spaces where it's like, okay, like this is a space where we can be vulnerable together and we can explore like what it is we're struggling with as opposed to, uh, the opposite, which is far too often the case.

Why Allan Energy Is The New “Big D_CK Energy” - Barbie Movie - Fashionistas - Air date 8-4-23

Why does Alan have such limited screen time, yet feel like the protagonist we've been waiting for? What does his presence reveal about our definition of a good man? Does he represent the future of masculinity? Let's examine the dynamics between Barbie, Ken and Alan, and explore why this overlooked character might be the key to understanding the film's cultural impact.

What lessons can Alan teach us about embracing our true selves? The Barbie movie has the internet divided. While critics are raving, some men seem strangely triggered, is the real threat to masculinity, Barbie or Ken. And who is this mysterious? Alan representing a new vision of manhood. Ken embodies toxic masculinity at its most cringe-worthy, but the character of Alan offers redemption is can [01:03:00] the problem or the solution.

So who is Alan and why does he matter so much? Here are five reasons why Alan is the unsung hero of the Barbie movie. One, he's comfortable being different while Ken strives to fit in with the other Kens. Alan doesn't seem bothered by being an outsider. He stays true to himself even when the Kens mock him and doesn't compromise.

Just to be accepted, Alan shows men they don't have to conform to traditional masculine stereotypes to have worth. He's confident and secure even in his uniqueness. Two, he respects women. Unlike the Kens who feel entitled to Barbie's attention, Alan treats women as equals. He stands up for Barbie and her friends without expecting anything in return.

Alan is chivalrous, not because he views women as helpless, but because he genuinely cares about their wellbeing. He's the ally that feminists have been waiting for. Three. He's not afraid of his emotions. When Ken starts crying over Barbie, [01:04:00] the other Kens shun him for showing vulnerability. But Alan encourages Ken to feel his feelings instead of repressing them.

Alan isn't constrained by traditional standards of stoicism. He knows that owning your emotions is necessary for growth and wants that freedom for Ken too. Four. He uses force mindfully. When Barbie's friends are under attack, Alan springs into action and forcefully defends them, but he doesn't default to violence in every situation.

Alan understands that aggression and physical strength can be useful when applied consciously. He's not controlled by toxic masculinity, but uses his power judiciously. Five. He's his own man. The narrator observes that there's only one Alan. While there are many identical Kens, Alan doesn't look to others to shape his identity.

He knows who he is and what he values without seeking external validation. Alan represents the inner freedom that comes from defining yourself on your own terms. [01:05:00] The takeaway. In many ways, Alan is the real protagonist of the Barbie movie. While Barbie goes on a journey of self-discovery, Alan already knows who he is.

He represents a model of confident, compassionate masculinity that supports women without needing their approval. His presence shows boys that they don't have to be Ken's to have worth. Alan May be a side character, but his influence reverberates throughout the film. So the next time you watch, keep an Eye out for this unsung hero.

The future of masculinity isn't about repressing emotion or dominating women. It's about embracing all of who you are. Like Alan, the world needs more men like him.

Final comments on why emotionally stunted men are a social, not individual, problem

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with The Daily Show describing the problem of role models. The Gray Area looked at the right wing pitch for masculinity in Josh Hawley's Manhood. The ON BOYS podcast looked at the health impacts of toxic masculinity. The Daily Show explored [01:06:00] the damage caused by gendering universal attributes of humanity, like thinking and feeling. Paging Dr. Nerdlove compared various versions of masculine role models, including Fred Rogers. Swolesome explored what patriarchy teaches boys to be. And The Daily Show discussed some of the tools to help build positive masculinity. That's what everybody heard, but members also heard the ON BOYS podcast discussing the balance needed to create healthy spaces for male vulnerability. And Fashionistas looked at the Barbie movie and highlighted the positive masculine traits of Alan. 

To hear that, and have all of our bonus content delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support, or shoot me an email, request any financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

Now to wrap up, [01:07:00] I've been mulling over this episode for a bit today, thinking about what I wanted to say about it, and I think the quickest summary I've come to is this: we rightfully spent a lot of time and energy changing how men and boys talk to women, but almost no time changing how they talk to each other. And since the sort of stoic, unemotional, unfeeling character of a man was the norm before, and we did nothing significant to change that, the pattern is continuing into the next generation. Even among boys who have otherwise been raised to be good feminists, believing in gender equality and all that, they may not think of feminine traits as bad and shameful anymore. They may just think, They're not for me. 

As we heard today, continuing to think of universal human traits, like thinking and feeling, as being gendered is destructive because of how it limits people. And as long as men and boys don't feel comfortable expressing [01:08:00] emotion and can't speak with each other with an emotional connection any deeper than a shared joy or grief over a sports game, we will continue to have emotionally stunted men who will be susceptible to backsliding into misogyny.

But not only that, they're the ones who will also end up being on the front lines of the deaths of despair of the future. Weak, brittle friendships based on the more frivolous aspects of life are the ones most likely to either break or simply wither away. And loneliness is one of the biggest contributing factors to those deaths of despair.

But most importantly, this needs to be understood as a social, rather than individual, problem. No one can solve it alone by deciding to change their behavior or their thinking individually. It'd be like being the one person at a party who's decided to not take out their phones in order to be more present and connected in the moment, try to [01:09:00] connect with other people. If no one else joins you in that way of thinking, and they all still get distracted by constant notifications from their devices, then your effort to form a deeper connection will be useless. And that's why having these types of conversations loudly and in public is important. It's a mechanism by which we change social norms across the board when they can't be changed one on one.

Now, I could be wrong about this, your personal mileage may vary, but my impression is that phone culture has actually taken a step back in recent years. Hundreds of articles and podcasts and millions of personal conversations about how distracting and annoying phones are has sort of normalized the idea that it's a bit rude to take one's phone out during a conversation. And frankly, you know, seven to ten years ago or whatever, that really wasn't the case., people would take our their phones, or go to a party full of people, [01:10:00] and everyone would be on their phones. Now, I think the culture has shifted a bit in a positive direction, pulling that back, normalizing the idea that like, Dude, put that away, we're here for a reason, we're here to connect with each other, right? So, similarly, hundreds of articles and podcasts, millions of individual conversations about how much better it is to be a man who's able to connect with other men about real shit in their lives could start to move the needle. And the 12 year olds we heard talked about today set a pretty good example for the rest of us. They were initially resistant to talk about anything emotional right up until they were given permission by the understanding that they wouldn't be the only ones who wanted to do it.

No one wants to be the first to make a move in a new direction when they're unsure how that move will be received by their peers. But these conversations get this sort of new idea out in the [01:11:00] zeitgeist so that it requires less and less bravery to be the one to step out of the old conventional way of thinking and into the new one.

That is going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave us a voicemail or send a text to 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist trio, Ken, Brian, and LaWendy, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, webmastering, and bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships at bestoftheleft.com/support. You can join them by signing up today. It would be greatly appreciated. You can find that link in [01:12:00] our show notes along with a link to join our Discord community where you can continue the discussion. 

So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from bestoftheleft.com.

Air Date 8/19/2022

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] During today's episode, I'm going to be telling you about a show I think you should check out. It's the Future Hindsight podcast. So take a moment to hear what I have to say about them in the middle of the show, and listen to Future Hindsight wherever you get your podcasts. 

And now, welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, in which we shall take a look at how Big Tech is currently scrambling to bring untested AI products to market, over-promising, under-delivering, and working hard to obscure and ignore any possible downsides for society. Big Tech needs AI regulation now before we all suffer the easily-foreseeable consequences, as well as some of the unforeseeable ones. 

Sources today include Adam Conover, Summit, What Next: TBD, Democracy Now!, The Data Chief, Science Friction, and Your Undivided Attention, with an additional members-only clip from Monastic Academy.

A.I. is B.S. - Adam Conover - Air Date 3-31-23

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, ADAM CONOVER: Artificial intelligence is a real [00:01:00] field of computer science that's been studied for decades, and in recent years, it's made major strides. But I'm not talking about that kind of AI. I'm talking about the marketing term "AI" the tech companies are using to hype up their barely functional products, all so they can jack up their stock price. See, tech companies are powered by hype. It's not enough to be profitable. No! In tech, you have to be able to convince investors that you have cutting edge, disruptive technology that will let you dominate an entire industry, like Google did with Search, Apple did with the iPhone, and Amazon did by making workers pee in bottles and passing the savings on to you.

But now that all that low-hanging fruit has been plucked off the innovation tree, tech companies have started just making up new words that they claim are going to revolutionize everything in hopes of flimflamming their way into that investor cash. You know, words like the Metaverse, Augmented Reality, Web3, and who [00:02:00] can forget Crypto. Last year, every company was racing to pivot to the blockchain. But now that Bankman-Fried has been exposed as a bank fraud man and put the crypt back in crypto, they need some hot new hype to hawk. And that's artificial intelligence. 

So in a desperate bid to juice their stock prices, companies from Snapchat to Spotify to BuzzFeed now claim they're going to jam AI into their products. Hey! And maybe next they can program an AI to read BuzzFeed too. That'd take a lot of unpleasant work off our plates. 

Now, a lot of this hype is just transparent bullshit. I mean, Spotify just released an AI DJ that will create a personalized radio station just for you. Wow. Very impressive. Except that Spotify already fucking does that. What's your next feature? An AI volume knob? 

You can't just release something that already exists and call it AI. "Hey, come on down to Papa Tony's AI Pizza [00:03:00] Shop! We got AI cheese, AI sauce, and the computer was involved somehow." That was fully a vampire voice. 

But it's not all empty talk. The biggest tech companies are unleashing an experimental technology called "generative AI" onto the public, despite the fact that in most cases it straight up cannot do what they claim and is making all of our lives worse.

This actually isn't the first time the tech industry has turned us into their AI Guinea pigs. Remember self-driving cars? For years, companies like Google, Uber and Tesla have told investors that any day now they're gonna replace the 228 million license drivers in the US with AI autopilots. Hell, Elon's been predicting that Tesla's will be fully self-driving next year since fucking 2014. These companies were so successful and making the technology seem inevitable that multiple states actually allowed self-driving cars to be deployed [00:04:00] on the roads that real people drive on. So how did that turn out?

NEWS CLIP: A Tesla, believed to be on autopilot, started braking, causing an eight-car pile up on Thanksgiving.

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, ADAM CONOVER: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Nope, nope, nope. It wanted to hit the truck. Okay, but in the AI's defense, that child was blocking the lane to Whole Foods. 

After years of broken promises and a hundred billion dollars wasted, pretty much everyone has finally agreed that self-driving cars just don't, uh, work. But the truth is, They never did. It was always a lie. Tesla is currently being criminally investigated by the Department of Justice because it turns out the videos they made promoting their self-driving feature were literally faked. They also falsely advertised their cars as having autopilot and full self-driving. [00:05:00] And since the world is full of gullible sims, who believe every tainted word that falls out of Elon Musk's idiot mouth, that inspired some drivers to take their hands off the wheel and go all Luke Skywalker on the I-95. [Obi-wan Kenobi voice] "Use the AI and... let go." Goddamnit, that's the second kid today. 

People died as a result. Last year, 10 people were killed by Tesla's self-driving cars in just four months, which might be why the government just made them recall 300,000 cars. 

What even people in the tech industry are starting to realize is that there are certain things that computers are just fundamentally ill-equipped to do as well as humans.

Humans are incredibly good at taking in novel stimuli we've never experienced before, reasoning about who's responsible for them and why, and then predicting what's gonna happen next. If you were stopped at a [00:06:00] crosswalk in Los Angeles because, say, James Corden was blocking the road and doing a stupid dance in a mouse costume, well, you'd combine your knowledge of irritating pop culture with your understanding of human nature and the bizarre sight in front of you and conclude, oh, I appear to be in the middle of some sort of horrible viral prank for a late night talk show, and there's nothing I can do but grit my teeth and wait for it to be over. But your self-driving car hasn't seen the Late, Late Show. It doesn't even watch Colbert. So it might conclude, oh, that's a mouse, hit the gas and flatten the motherfucker. And you know, that would be a way funnier segment for the show, but we wouldn't exactly call it intelligent. 

Now look, a lot of self-driving tech is genuinely really cool, and it does have important real-world uses like collision prevention and enhanced cruise control. But the idea that we'd all be kicking it in the backseat with a mai tai while a robo-taxi drove us to work was always a science fiction fantasy. And when companies like Tesla told us it was coming, it [00:07:00] was a lie. A lie told to boost their share price and to trick us into doing what they wanted. To change our laws to permit they're untested, in many cases fraudulent, technology onto the public roads, where it hurt and killed people. And guess what? That same cycle is happening again. Massive tech companies are making us the Guinea pigs for their barely functional bullshit. Only this time they're calling it "generative AI". 

Center for Humane Technology Co-Founders Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss The AI Dilemma Part 1 - Summit - Air Date 6-15-23 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: A few months ago, some of the people inside the major AGI companies came to us and said that the situation has changed. There is now a dangerous arms race to deploy AI as fast as possible, and it is not safe, and would you, Aza and Tristan and The Center for Humane Technology, would you raise your voices to get out there to try to educate policy makers and people to get us better prepared? And so that's what caused this presentation to happen.

As we started doing that work, one of the things that stood out to us was that in the largest survey that's ever been done for AI researchers who've submitted to [00:08:00] conferences their best machine learning papers, that in this survey they were asked what is the likelihood that humans go extinct from our inability to control AI, go extinct or severely disempowered? And half of the AI researchers who responded said that there was a 10% or greater chance that we would go extinct. So, imagine you're getting on a plane, right at Boeing 737 and half of the airplane engineers who are surveyed said there was a 10% chance if you get on that plane, everyone dies. Right? We wouldn't really get on that plane, and yet we're racing to kind of onboard humanity onto this AI plane. And we wanna talk about what those risks really are and how we mitigate them. 

AZA RASKIN: So, before we get into that, I wanna sort of put this into context for how technology gets deployed in the world. And I wish I had known these three rules of technology when I started my career. Hopefully they will be useful to you. And that is, here are the three rules. 

One: when you invent a new technology, you uncover [00:09:00] a new species of responsibilities. And it's not always obvious what those responsibilities are, right? We didn't need the right to be forgotten until the internet could remember us forever. And that's surprising. What should HTML and web servers have to do with the right to be forgotten? That was non-obvious. Or another one. We didn't need the right to privacy to be written into our laws until Kodak started producing the mass-produced camera. Right? So here's a technology that creates a new legal need, and it took Brandeis, one of America's most brilliant legal minds, to write it into law. It doesn't, privacy doesn't appear anywhere in our Constitution. So when you invent a new technology, you need to be scanning the environment to look for what new part of the human condition has been uncovered that may now be exploited. That's part of the responsibility. 

Two: that if that tech confers power, you will [00:10:00] start a race for people trying to get that power. And then three: if you do not coordinate, that race will end in tragedy. And we really learned this from our work on the engagement and attention economy. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: So, uh, how many people here have seen the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma? Okay. 

AZA RASKIN: Wow. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Most? [audience applause] Awesome. Really briefly, about more than a hundred million people in 190 countries in 30 languages saw The Social Dilemma. It really blew us away. 

AZA RASKIN: Yeah. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: And the premise of that was actually these three rules that Aza was talking about. What did social media do? It created this new power to influence people at scale. It created, it conferred power to those who started using that to influence people at scale. And if you didn't participate, you would lose. So the race collectively ended in tragedy. 

Now, what does The Social Dilemma have to do with AI? Well, we would argue that social media was human's first contact with AI. Now, why is that? Because when you open up TikTok or Instagram or Facebook and you scroll your finger, [00:11:00] you activate a supercomputer pointed at your brain to calculate what is the best thing to show you. It's a curation AI. It's curating which content to show you. And just the misalignment between what was good for getting engagement and attention, just that simple AI, that built-to-lead simple technology, was enough to cause, in his first contact with social media, Information overload, addiction, doom scrolling, influencer culture, sexualization of young girls, polarization, cult factories, fake news, breakdown of democracy, right?

So, if you have something that's actually really good... it conferred lots of benefits to people too, right? Many, all of us, I'm sure many of you in the rooms all use social media and there's many benefits. We acknowledge all those benefits, but on the dark side, we didn't look at what responsibilities do we have to have to prevent those things from happening. And as we move into the realm of second contact between social media, between AI and humanity, we need to get clear on what caused that to happen. 

So, in that first contact, we lost, right? Humanity loss. Now, how did we lose? How did we lose? What was the story we were telling ourselves? [00:12:00] Well, we told ourselves we're giving everybody a voice. Connect with your friends. Join like-minded communities. We're gonna enable small, medium-sized businesses to reach their customers. And all of these things are true, right? These are not lies. These are, this is real. These are real benefits that social media provided. But this was almost like this nice friendly mask that social media was sort of wearing behind the AI and behind that kind of mask was this maybe slightly darker picture. We see these problems: addiction, disinformation, mental health, polarization, et cetera. But behind that, what we were saying was actually there's this race, right? What we call the race to the bottom of the brainstem for attention, and that is kind of this engagement monster where all of these things are competing to get your attention, which is why it's not about getting Snapchat or Facebook to do one good thing in the world. It's about, How do we change this engagement monster? And this logic of maximizing engagement actually rewrote the rules of every aspect of our society. Right? Because think about elections. You can't win an election [00:13:00] if you're not on social media. Think about reaching customers of your business. You can't actually reach your customers if you're not on social media, if you don't exist and have an Instagram account. Think about media and journalism. Can you be a popular journalist if you're not on social media? 

So this logic of 'maximize engagement' ended up rewriting the rules of our society. So all that's important to notice because with this second contact between humanity and AI, notice have we fixed the first misalignment between social media and humanity?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: No. 

AZA RASKIN: Yeah, exactly. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: And it's important to note, right? If we focus our attention on the addiction, polarization, and we just try to solve that problem, we will constantly be playing whack-a-mole because we haven't gone to the source of the problem. And hence we get caught in conversations and debates like, Is it censorship versus free speech?, rather than saying - and we'll always get stuck in that conversation - rather than saying, let's go upstream if we are maximizing for [00:14:00] engagement, we will always end up at a more polarized, narcissistic, self-hating kind of society. 

Tech's Mask Off Moment - What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - Air Date 8-13-23

CELESTE TEDLEY - HOST, WHAT NEXT: TBD: The tech industry has long been defined by being outside of the mainstream. The move fast and breakthinks culture. And for a while the general perception of the industry was that it was a force for good, bridging gaps between people and culture. Google’s original guiding principle was don’t be evil.

 Fast forward to now. That phrase was removed from Google’s code of conduct years ago and scandal after scandal has tainted public perception of the company and the entire industry. And amidst the tarnishing of brands, many of the big names in tech have also embraced the values of the populist right.

ANIL DASH: I mean, there’s a lot of intersecting causes. It is a space that made room for people who wanted to be outside the mainstream in good and bad ways. And so I think there was this both sincere and opportunistic libertarianism that shaped the current tech industry. I think there were [00:15:00] people that were genuine about this as their policies, but also every single major libertarian movement in America has always sort of made space for a lot of racist thought and movement and people have different relationships with that within that movement. It’s not mine to comment on, but you can sort of see that pattern over time.

And so the sort of tech libertarianism set the stage or made the space to welcome in these folks. But then there was a really clear concerted effort. If you look at Peter Thiel, sort of the most visible of these, but even Marc Andreessen, they had this combination of, they’re smart people and they recognize the social trends that are happening and whether it favors them or not. And if you are trying to build extractive systems, and they are, who do you have to appeal to in order to keep your perch in that position of power? And so I think there’s a very intentional strategy of appealing to, like any politician would, to a sense of grievance, [00:16:00] to a sense of being unjustly wronged.

CELESTE TEDLEY - HOST, WHAT NEXT: TBD: And often that’s throwing support behind far right ideologies. And worse. We see it now when elon musk is talking about birth rates, anti-trans talking points, and colonizing Mars. But Anil also saw this happening more than a decade ago when Marc Andreessen was tweeting his support for colonialism.

ANIL DASH: He said that anti-colonialism was the worst thing that ever happened in India. And I and many others sort of pointed out, in my case, I pointed out I have family members who were killed under that imperial regime who would be alive today if not for that. Not ancient history, living history. My living parents' siblings are amongst that list. To endorse colonialism as a tycoon of industry is to say, If my plans for expansion of our economic opportunity include causing the death of your family members, that’s acceptable to me.

And so understandably, I mean, it’s funny because - not funny, but telling - [00:17:00] he’s a Facebook board member, and this was the one time he was chastened, that he was actually forced to apologize and do the thing. Facebook actually lost out on their bid to be providing what they called free internet access in India, but it was really at the cost of theirs being the only service that you really got for free was Facebook’s app and WhatsApp which they also own. And they lost out on that policy initiative really as a direct backlash to Andreessen’s comments. And I think the idea that there would be some kind of accountability and that people would call him out and that it would be effective at stopping him, flipped a switch. Which was, How am I not the one in control? How is it that one tweet can have an impact that I don’t get to be the one to decide for billions of people that they are using our services? 

And so I think that accelerated. I mean, that was an inflection point. There were many others like that, but that was one that was really clear, because that’s when he deleted his Twitter account and became part of the professionally aggrieved class, right?, of convincing [00:18:00] himself that he was the martyr.

You fast forward to whatever it was two years ago when everybody was talking about Clubhouse. That was the streaming audio, or the audio chat app that, funded by his VC firm, they promoted it. The partners and their families were actually involved in promoting content on Clubhouse, and Andreessen would hang out in a chat room called how to "Destroy the New York Times", which is about ending accountability and ending critical journalism explicitly. That’s the goal. That’s why he funded Clubhouse, to have a platform to do that thing. That’s radical behavior. It’s not normal behavior.

 I’ve been a CEO. I have raised tens of millions of dollars in funding. I have faced public criticism. Some of it fair, some of it I didn’t feel was fair. And you suck it up because that’s why you get to be in the seat and make the big money or have the name out there in the world or whatever, and I don’t have billions like he does. But that’s the cost of doing business, is you sort of accept the good and the bad because you get to the chance to do these things. [00:19:00] And they really worked each other up into a lather of they should not have to countenance criticism, especially valid criticism, from anyone.

 And then the real catalyst, I think, is the rising labor movement of the last several years. They see it across industries, including tech. But you look at Chris Smalls organizing Amazon workers in Staten Island, and it is directly connected to their idea of, like, we cannot allow there to be those people making those moves to organize in those places.

CELESTE TEDLEY - HOST, WHAT NEXT: TBD: A defining characteristic of the right in the tech industry is the idea that they’re somehow held to a different standard and thus can say or do whatever they want without consequence. And in order to keep that idea up, they make sure to prop up other like-minded thinkers whenever they can. People like Hanania.

ANIL DASH: And the thing is, they’re not very secret about it’s, not like some secret group chat or whatever. It would sort of openly [00:20:00] say, you people have no right to keep me from doing whatever I want to do all the time. With, you know, Hanania, the really clear example is this week when he’s unmasked, if you want to call it that, I mean, I think it’s sort of like the very obvious thing turns out to be true. He is who we thought he was. But in any case, there’s clearly a mass media moment of reckoning with this visible person. Two key things. One: part of the reason his profile had risen in recent months was Substack went all in on promoting him. And Substack is a media platform that is funded by Andreessen Horowitz and was designed just as Clubhouse was, as part of their, like, let’s undermine mainstream media. So Substack goes out by funding all of the most prominent anti-trans, and those aligned with the intellectual interests know the Thiels and Andreessens of the world. And they did a sort of special, unprecedented promotion of a podcast for Hanania. They didn’t have to do it. They went out of their way to do it, and [00:21:00] they said, this is a voice everybody should be listening to. It’s not like this is a level playing field. They put their thumb on the scale to say, There, that’s sort of a catalyst moment. It all comes to a head, as you expect it would, when you see somebody that’s outed as an avowed White supremacist, and Musk responds by following the guy on Twitter, or X. And so again, in the time when any right thinking, decent person would say, My gosh. Even if you were, Oh, I’m intellectually curious and I didn’t know, and Substack told me I should check him out, and so I was following a guy and I didn’t know. After this week, you sort of say, Of course I’m not going to listen. This is a repugnant person. This is a person with these sort of vile, hateful views. Musk has the opposite, like, I didn’t follow him before, but I’m going to now. That says it all.

 

Pregnant Woman's False Arrest Shows "Racism Gets Embedded" in Facial Recognition Technology - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-7-23

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Roberts, I wanted to end by asking you about this shocking story out of Detroit, Michigan, involving a woman named Porcha Woodruff. She was eight months pregnant when police arrested her at her door for [00:22:00] robbery and carjacking. Six officers showed up at her home as she was getting her daughters ready for school. She was held for 11 hours, released on a $100,000 bond. She says she started having contractions in jail, had to be taken to the hospital after release due to dehydration. A month later, prosecutors dropped the case because the Detroit police had made the arrest based on a faulty facial recognition match. According to the ACLU, Woodruff is at least the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology — all six people Black. Porcha Woodruff is now suing the city of Detroit.

The New York Times had a major story on this, saying, “Porcha Woodruff thought the police who showed up at her door to arrest her for carjacking were joking. She is the first woman known to be wrongfully accused as a result of facial recognition technology.” She was 32 years old. “They asked her to step outside because she was under arrest for robbery and carjacking.” She looked at them. She pointed to her stomach. She was eight months pregnant. And she said, [00:23:00] “Are you kidding?”

Professor Roberts, can you talk about the significance of this and what she went through in that last month of pregnancy?

DOROTHY ROBERTS: This story captures so much of what we’ve been talking about, so much about the devaluation of Black people’s lives, Black women’s lives, and the way in which these deep myths about Black biological difference and inferiority, and the need for regulation and surveillance, get embedded into technologies. They’re embedded in medical technologies. They’re embedded in policing technologies. They’re embedded in artificial intelligence algorithms and predictive analytics.

And so, just one piece of this is the fact that the six [00:24:00] cases we know of false arrest based on false AI facial recognition are involving Black people. Now, that’s not an accident. That’s because racism gets embedded into the technologies. It’s in the databases, because the databases are based on police arrests already or police action, which we know is racially biased or targeted at Black people. And so the data itself gets embedded with racism. The way in which algorithms are created have assumptions that are racist. With the facial recognition, the way in which the recognition technology is created is more likely to target Black faces. [00:25:00] All of this has been shown in research. So, there’s this idea that AI is going to be more objective than the biased decision-making of judges and police and prosecutors, but if it embeds prior biased decisions, it’s going to produce these oppressive outcomes. And also, if it’s being used by police departments that are racist, they’re going to be used in racist ways.

And that gets me to the next point, which is the way in which she was treated. She, as an obviously eight-month-pregnant woman, was treated cruelly and inhumanely by these police officers, which reflects the way in which police interacted with Black communities in general, but also the devaluation of Black women’s childbearing — again, back to this point we [00:26:00] started out with — the devaluation of the autonomy, the worth, the humanity of Black women. And a key aspect of that, in fact, a key aspect of the subjugation of Black people in general, has been the devaluation of Black childbearing. The idea that Black women pass down negative, depraved, antisocial traits to their children, almost sometimes it’s stated in biological terms. And that devaluation of Black women, especially in terms of their childbearing, is part of the basis for reproductive servitude, which we were talking about earlier, but also part of the reason why Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes, maternal mortality, than white women in America.

[00:27:00] So, this one incident reveals this deeply entangled way in which carceral systems in America rely — rely — on this myth of biological race and innate inferiority of Black people, which is so deeply embedded that many people just take it for granted.

Princeton University's Ruja Benjamin on Bias in Data and A.I. - The Data Chief - Air Date - 2-3-21

CINDI HOWSON - HOST, THE DATA CHIEF: When Joy first talked about the problems with the facial recognition and the way it was being used, some of the large tech companies tried to dismiss her, and there's this term that are often applied to women, "gaslighting", you know, she's not competent or what have you. How much do you think that continues to limit how seriously the work of these researchers are taken? 

RUJA BENJAMIN: I certainly think that it's an ongoing issue and at the same time, you know, I think we can point to the [00:28:00] problem much earlier in the process, or the so-called pipeline, where many people who would be able to point out these issues don't even get the chance to, they don't even get the opportunities, the internships, the positions, you know, the training in order to really be heard in the first place. And so certainly the kind of gaslighting in these more high profile cases is ongoing, but at the same time, we have so many people with potential who could be contributing to more socially conscious design and technology that never get even the opportunity to make good trouble, as it were. And so that's also part of the issue, I think. 

CINDI HOWSON - HOST, THE DATA CHIEF: Yeah. We had a wonderful intern. We were debating this, why are they not given the opportunities? Is it the unconscious bias in hiring?, And even the job recommendation and resume matching algorithms? But she also said to me, I feel like people [00:29:00] give up so early on, because maybe even at her high school, calculus wasn't even offered. And their first laptop they only get in college. So, we have these different factors going on. It's almost like the double whammy. 

RUJA BENJAMIN: Mm, yeah. Certainly there is the various ways in which people are pushed out, whether through those kind of structural economic opportunities that are sorely missing at the high school and even earlier, but also people who have PhDs in various fields, experience all kinds of discrimination. And so one of the things I would just say is that the F word - that is the word "fit" - when we think about, you know, whether someone is a good fit for our company or organization, that F word is a pretty loaded word because within it contains all kinds of assumptions, what sociologists call homophily, that we often drawn to people who we see as like us, whether [00:30:00] in terms of our gender or race or background, you know, whatever kind of like, you know, regional background. And so we want to mentor people who we see as many versions of ourselves. And so, if for generations, a narrow demographic have held onto and monopolized positions of power, that means through this process of homophily, they will continue to reproduce themselves rather than looking for potential and looking for capacity in people who don't necessarily fit that profile.

CINDI HOWSON - HOST, THE DATA CHIEF: And to be fair, this goes back to our survival, you know, bias and seeking out people who look like us goes back centuries to the way people survived. But I have seen that oftentimes people are dismissed for lack of cultural fit. And that's that... I thought you were gonna say a different F word. 

RUJA BENJAMIN: Yeah. [laughing] There's so many F words, Cindi, we can have a [00:31:00] whole show just called "F words". 

CINDI HOWSON - HOST, THE DATA CHIEF: [laughing] Okay. But yeah, that we need to stop saying this lack of culture fit, because it's too much of an excuse for failing to empathize and understand somebody else's different education or upbringing. But I wanna ask you, So why do you think now is such a critical time to address bias in technology?

RUJA BENJAMIN: Well, you know, one of the things we've seen in the last nine months or so, you know, with the killing of George Floyd and that kind of high profile public protests, all of the different companies and organizations that have come out with statements in support of Black Lives Matter, you had even the president elect it inauguration using the phrase White supremacy in his speech. So, there's all kinds of public attention and awareness around this, but part of the danger is that people conflate in their heads White supremacy with people who hang [00:32:00] nooses, or White supremacy with people who burn crosses, or a very narrow definition of what counts as racism, and point over there to people like that who would storm the Capitol as the problem when actually it's a... we have so many varieties of racism, genres of White supremacy, and many of them are right in our own backyards. It's the everyday practices, the business as usual that people won't necessarily reckon with. And so the reason why it's so important now to deal with this is that the more that we shine a light on this very high profile, kind of obvious racism, the other varieties will get a pass. They'll go underground. They'll become more mediated by technology in our technical systems, in our employment practices. And so now we need to pay attention and again zoom the lens out and shine a light on the variety of ways that these issues manifest, rather than just point a finger at the obvious [00:33:00] forms of White supremacy that get all the attention.

CINDI HOWSON - HOST, THE DATA CHIEF: So it's the less obvious that we don't notice or that we forget about. 

RUJA BENJAMIN: Yes, and technology has a huge role in making those types of racism invisible. As I mentioned earlier, we bake these forms of discrimination into our technical systems through automated forms of decision making and prediction and profiling. And so they become even harder to detect, and that's why it's so important for us to spend energy and resources on shining a light on those. 

AI ethics leader Timnit Gebru is changing it up after Google fired her - Science Friction - Air Date 4-17-22

NATASHA MITCHELL - HOST, SCIENCE FRICTION: It's never a straightforward decision, is it, to make a decision to work on the inside of a dominant culture that you are critiquing and that you are a minority within? So did you enter with a mix of hope and trepidation, perhaps skepticism? 

DR TIMNIT GEBRU: Most of it, trepidation. It was so many red flags from the very beginning and I almost did not sign my offer until Meg actually invited me to [00:34:00] co-lead her team. So, I thought at least I can work with Meg and we can maybe create a safe environment in our little team and then we can have some amount of power to change things. And I didn't have any illusions about steering this big ship that's Google, but that was kind of how I got into it. That was kind of my hope.

And also there was a team in Ghana, the first AI center in Africa that they were creating, and I was really excited about and know, I thought I definitely need to help with that in keeping with what I care about in terms of increasing the number of the visibility of Black people in the field of AI. And so I was hired to do just what I got fired for, right? Analyze the impacts of AI technology and figure out how to minimize the negative impacts on society. And also just do AI research in a way that is beneficial to us and not cause harm. So that was in my job description. 

NATASHA MITCHELL - HOST, SCIENCE FRICTION: And did you manage [00:35:00] to do that work successfully while you were inside its doors?

DR TIMNIT GEBRU: You know, I think that we were able to move the needle, but it was a battle. When I analyzed the amount of headache and harm that I endured in order for the slight sort of a needle, I don't think it was worth it. But we were able to -- for instance, we were able to grow our team into one of the most diverse teams at Google. We were able to make it normal to hire people who don't have a degree in computer science or related fields in order to work in this kind of area, because we said we need to have an interdisciplinary team. So we hired the first social scientist to be a research scientist at Google in our team, Dr. Alex Hannah, but she also left and we started trying to come up with strategies of how to get them to change. So we said, you know what? We have much more respect as researchers on the outside, outside of Google, than we do inside of Google. So [00:36:00] let's publish a paper and if the paper gets traction, then maybe they'll be shamed into actually doing something, right?

So that's what we did. We would do something like that. And so we just had to come up with all of these different strategies for survival. 

NATASHA MITCHELL - HOST, SCIENCE FRICTION: What particularly were you wanting Google's management and Google's leadership to do differently in relation to the enormous investment that that company has made in machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence, perhaps amongst the biggest investment in the world.

DR TIMNIT GEBRU: It's just to spend a little bit more resources to make those products safe and not jump into research. That just seems like an arms race. So our last paper that I got fired for was about this technology called large language models. And all of these people -- Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook, they're all racing to have these models that are just larger and larger and [00:37:00] larger in scope. So that means they take more data to train, more compute power, more everything -- just larger. 

NATASHA MITCHELL - HOST, SCIENCE FRICTION: And what do these large language AI models do? I gather they drive Google Search, for example. 

DR TIMNIT GEBRU: They're an underlying technology in a lot of things. They use them in machine translation to translate from one language to another. They use them to rank queries of search. They use them to have these, I think, question and answer boxes in these autocorrect kind of things that you see in your email, or auto-complete, those kinds of things. And I'm sure there's more, but some of those things come to mind. And we just were very alarmed by this "I want bigger," or "mine should be bigger" kind of motive for working on these things. And so what we wanted to do is just get people to think about the potential negative consequences of working on these large language models and just slow people down a little bit. 

We [00:38:00] spent a good portion of it discussing the data that is used to train these models. So that is very similar to my work on gender shades, right? What data do they use to train these models? They look at all of the internet. So there's this illusion that if I have huge data sets that consists of the entire internet, then I'm gonna have a diverse set of voices represented. But that's actually not true. That's an illusion. So we talk very extensively about what kinds of voices are represented on the internet. Who is left out? Not only because many people don't have access to internet, but also moderation practices of a lot of these websites that are used to train large language models. For instance, Wikipedia. How many women are even represented on Wikipedia or Reddit? I don't ever go to Reddit 'cause I get harassed. It's so hostile. Or you look at the social media networks. So we talk about those things. And then we talk about what it means when you [00:39:00] train a large language model on these kinds of data that represent the dominant hegemonic views that have lots of ableism, sexism, racism, homophobia, et cetera, et cetera, and then unleash it into the world. You can do lots of harm. You can misinform and do mass hate speech and mass kind of radicalization, et cetera, especially when you combine it with social media networks. 

And we also talk about what it means when these kinds of models generate coherent text. They sound to you like they're coming from another person or something like that. And when they do, for instance, machine translation, you get really coherent texts that sounds grammatically correct, but it might be totally wrong. So there was this example of a Palestinian guy writing "good morning" on Facebook Translate and it was translated to attack them and he was arrested, right? He was later let go, of course. But he was arrested. 

There are so many risks. But what [00:40:00] is unbelievable is that just recently Google came out with another paper with yet another huge language model. And they even cited our paper, which was so crazy. And then they're like, well, you know, it could be racist, but whatever. Hopefully somebody else will fix that. What other industry can do that? What other industry can say, "You know, we haven't even tested if our drugs work on everybody. It might kill certain segments of the population, but, oh, well, you know, here it is."

Center for Humane Technology Co-Founders Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss The AI Dilemma Part 2 - Summit - Air Date 6-15-23

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: They say in all the sci-fi books, the last thing you would ever want to do is you're building an AI, is connect to the internet, because then it would actually start doing things in the real world. You would never want to do that, right? Um, well, and of course the whole basis of this is they're connecting it to the internet all the time.

Someone actually experimented. In fact, they made it not just connecting it to the internet, but they gave it arms and legs. So there's something called auto, G p T. How many people here have heard of auto G p T? Good half of you. So, auto, G p T is basically, um, people will often say, Sam Altman will say AI is just a tool.

It's a blinking cursor. What is it? What harm [00:41:00] is it gonna do unless you ask it to? It's not like it's gonna run away and do something on its own. That blinking cursor when you log in, that's true. That's just a little box and you can just ask it things. That's, that's just a tool. But they also release it as an a p i.

And a developer can say, you know, 16 year olds like, Hmm, what if I give it some memory? And I gave it the ability to talk to people on Craigslist and TaskRabbit, then hook it up to a crypto wallet, and then I start sending messages to people and getting people to do stuff in the real world. And I can just call the open AI api, just like instead of a person typing to it with a blinking cursor, I'm querying it a million times a second and starting to actuate real stuff in the real world, which is what you can actually do with these things.

So it's really, really critical that we're aware and we can see through and have x-ray vision to see through the bullshit arguments that this is just a tool. It's not just a tool. Um, now at least that the smartest AI safety people believe that they think there's a way to do it safely. And again, just to come back that this, this one survey that was done, that the 50% of the people who responded thought that there's a 10% or greater chance that we, we don't [00:42:00] get it right. So, and Satya Nadella, the c e o of Microsoft self-describe the pace at which they're releasing things as frantic. The head of alignment at Open AI said before we scramble to deploy and integrate LLMs everywhere into the world. Can we pause and think whether it's wise to do so? This would be like at the head of safety at Boeing said, you know, before we scramble to put these planes that we haven't really tested out there, can we pause and think maybe we should do this safely.

Okay, so now I just want to actually, let's actually take like a breath right now in, so we're doing this, not because we wanna scare you. We're doing this because we can still choose what future we want. I don't think anybody in this room wants a future that their nervous system right now is telling them, [00:43:00] uh, I don't want. Right? No one wants that, which is why we're all here because we can do something about it.

We can choose which future do we want. And we think of this like a rite of passage. This is kind of like seeing our own shadow as a civilization. And like any rite of passage, you have to have this kind of dark night of the soul. You have to look at the externalities. You have to see the uncomfortable parts of who we are or how we've been behaving or what, what's been showing up in the ways that we're doing things in the world.

You know, climate change is just the shadow of an oil-based, you know, $70 trillion economy, right? Um, so in doing this, our goal is to kind of collectively hold hands and be like, we're gonna go through this rite of passage together. On the other side, if we can appraise of what the real risks are, now we can actually take all that in, is design criteria for what? How do we create the guardrails that we want to get to a different, different world? 

AZA RASKIN: And this is both like rites of passage are both terrifying because you come face to face with death, but it's also incredibly exciting 'cause on the other [00:44:00] side of integrating all the places that you've lied to yourself or that you create harm.

Right. Think about it personally when you can do that. On the other side is the increased capacity to love yourself, the increased capacity, hence to love others, and the increased capacity, therefore to receive love, right? So that's at the individual layer. Like imagine we could finally do that if we are forced to do that at the civilizational layer.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: One of our favorite quotes is that you cannot have the power of gods without the love, prudence, and wisdom of gods. If you have more power than you have awareness or wisdom, then you are going to cause harms 'cause you're not aware of the harms that you're causing. You want your wisdom to exceed the power.

And one of the greatest sort of questions for humanity that Rinko Fermi, who's part of the atomic bomb team says, why don't we see other alien civilizations out there? Because they probably build technology that they don't know how to wield, and they build themselves up. This is in the context of the nuclear bomb [00:45:00] and the kind of real principle is how do we create.

A world where wisdom is actually greater than the amount of power that we have. And so as taking this problem statement that many of you might have heard us mentioned many times from El Wilson, the fundamental problem of humanity is we have paleolithic brains, medieval institutions. In godlike tech. A possible answer is we can embrace the fact that we have paleolithic brains.

Instead of denying it, we can upgrade our medieval institutions instead of trying to rely on 19th century, 19th century laws. And we can have the wisdom to bind these races with God-like technology. And I want you to notice, just like with nuclear weapons, the answer to, oh, we invented a nuclear bomb.

Congress should pass a law. Like it's not about Congress passing a law. It's about a whole of society response to a new technology. And I want you to notice that there are people, we said this yesterday in the the talk on game theory. There were people who are part of the nuclear, um, the Manhattan project scientists who actually committed suicide after the nuclear bomb was created because [00:46:00] they were worried that there's literally a story of someone being in the back of a taxi and they're looking out in New York, it's like in the fifties and someone's building a bridge.

And the guy says like, what's the point? Don't they understand? Like, we built this, this horrible technology, it's gonna destroy the world. And they committed suicide. And they did that before knowing that we were able to limit nuclear weapons to nine countries. We signed nuclear test ban trees. We created the United Nations.

We have not yet had a nuclear war. And one of the most inspiring things that we look to as, as inspiration, uh, for some of our work, how many people here know the film the day after? So quite a, quite a number of you. Yeah. It was the largest made for TV film event in I think, world history. Um, it was made in 1983.

It was a, a film about what would happen in the event of a nuclear war between the US and Russia. And at the time, Reagan had advisors who were telling him we could win a nuclear war. And they made this, this film that based on the idea that there is actually this understanding that there's this nuclear war thing, but [00:47:00] who wants to think about that?

No one. So everyone was repressing it. And what they did is they actually showed a hundred million Americans, um, on primetime television, 7:00 PM to 9:30 PM uh, or like 10:00 PM this film. And it created a shared fate that would shake you out of kind of any egoic place and shake you out of any denial to to be in touch with what would actually happen.

And it was awful. And they also aired the film in the Soviet Union in 1987 four years later, I. And that film decided to have made a major impact on what happens. I, uh, one last thing about it's, they, they actually, after they or the film, they had a democratic dialogue with TED Koppel hosting a panel of experts.

 And this aired right after this film aired. So they actually had a democratic dialogue with the live studio audience of people asking real questions about like, what do you mean you're gonna do nuclear war?

Like this doesn't make any logical sense, at least, you know. And so a few, uh, years later, when in, in 19, I think 89 when in Reykjavik, president Reagan met with Gorbachev, the director of the film the day after, who we've actually [00:48:00] been in, in contact with recently, um, got an email from that, the people who hosted that summit saying, don't think that your film didn't have something to do with this.

If you create a shared fate that no one wants, you can create a coordination mechanism to say, how do we all collectively get to a different future? Because no one wants that future. And I think that we need to have that kind of moment. That's why we're here. That's why we've been racing around. And we want you to see that we are the people in that time in history, in that pivotal time in history, just like the 1940s and fifties when people were trying to figure this out.

We are the people with influence and power and reach. How can we show up for this moment? 

Can We Govern AI? - Your Undivided Attention - Air Date 4-21-23

MARIETJE SCHAAKE: While I was in the European Parliament, we adopted a whole bunch of laws because in Europe the thinking about regulation is actually far more advanced than it is in the United States. And also not just the thinking, but also the doing. And so, For me, the need to put in place guardrails, checks and balances oversight mechanisms is normal and we should also normalize it.

It is not an attack on tech [00:49:00] companies or Silicon Valley that Europeans wanna do this. It is actually a very normal response to the growth of an industry, and in particular, the urgent need now to mitigate all the harms that I know you've worked on so intensively. 

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah, so why don't we, um, take a step back and ask, you know, what even is regulation?

Why do we need guardrails on this? 

MARIETJE SCHAAKE: Regulations are, are essentially rules that everybody should adhere to, and I think it's really important to keep that in mind that laws are not only there to protect people from the outsized power of companies, tech companies, but also to protect people from the outsized power of government.

And in the discussion about tech policy that is often lost, it often seems like, you know, the governments or the lawmakers Congress in Washington is just out there to make life miserable for companies to take away the fun services like TikTok. You know, a very current discussion that we've had where you see all these content makers saying, you know, don't take away our business, don't take away [00:50:00] the fun of our teenagers.

But obviously, you know, just. Just showing the entertainment value or the market value does no justice to the harms that you talked about. So I think of regulation as a level playing field, the same rules that apply to everyone, and that create a bottom line, the the lowest sort of necessary safeguards for public health, public safety, wellbeing of people, the protection of children, the protection of the common good.

So I actually think regulation, if done well, Is great. It is what guarantees that we live in freedom and that also the rights of minorities, for example, are respected. Now taking that to ai, what kind of regulations might we need to deal with this rapidly developing new class of technologies? I think there are a couple of fundamental challenges to navigate that make AI different than other technologies, but also other products and services that have been regulated before.[00:51:00] 

One is the information about the use of the technologies, but also the data sets going in to change them is not accessible to lawmakers, to journalists, to you and I it is. Im proprietary hands. These companies guard the secrets to their algorithmic settings with their life. The second thing is that with the constant new iterations and the very personalized experiences that people have, the product or service is fluid.

You can't hold it. You can't pinpoint it. Hold it down. It is different for you. Than it is for me. It is different today than it was last week. And so imagine being a regulator that is supposed to establish whether illegal discrimination has taken place or whether consumer rights have been respected.

Where do you begin? And so with the combination of lack of access to information and the fluidity of the service and the product, that makes it very hard to regulate. So maybe I'll leave it there for [00:52:00] now to give you a sketch of what I think makes AI and AI regulation specific and particularly challenging compared to, let's say, pharmaceutical regulation.

TRISTAN HARRIS - HOST, YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION: Yeah, I think it 

is helpful to establish a baseline of other kinds of regulations that are much more straightforward or easy to do. You know, we think about pharmaceuticals which also have unpredictable effects on the body, or interaction effects with other pharmaceuticals. And so there is sort of a, an interesting parallel there where you release social media into the world and maybe it works, you know, well for an individual user and there's no obvious harms.

Those don't emerge as discreet harms like Twitter caused this, you know, prick of blood to emerge from my body where something actually went wrong or a drug that has an adverse side effect where I get a stomach ache or something like that. So I think it might be helpful maybe to set some ground on what makes regulating social media or AI or just runaway technology in general different than previous classes of let's say airplanes or pharmaceuticals or food.

MARIETJE SCHAAKE: Let me start by where they are the same. I [00:53:00] think nobody would ever say that regulation is easy. So even if we think that regulating AI and other technologies is hard. Think about chemicals, think about financial services, think about food, the enormous complexity, wide variety, constant innovations that happen in those sectors too.

I mean, there's constantly new combination of, of chemicals, of foods, of financial services. So we should not be discouraged is what I'm trying to say by the fact that a problem is complex. We should great point, trust that we can really make it work. And it's also high time that we make it work for a number of these technologies because it is.

Entirely normal that there are rules to be safe and to, for example, also have a place to go when you've been wronged. Like let's imagine you've been poisoned by the use of of a medication. Well, then you wanna go somewhere and not just be left on your own with all the harms that it's done to you. So in that sense, I think we need to normalize tech regulation and not see it as an exceptional set [00:54:00] of problems that cannot be solved.

It will just require unique steps, just like the chemicals and the pharma and the food have required unique steps. What does make it somewhat different is, um, the global nature of companies, the fact that they may operate from one jurisdiction, but they reach consumers, users, internet users, citizens, completely in a different context on the other side of the world, where that different context creates different circumstances and can make people vulnerable, can lead to all kinds of new problems.

Buddhism in the Age of AI - Soryu Forall - Monastic Academy - Air Date 6-21-23

SORYU FORALL: We have exponentially destroyed life on just the same curve as we have exponentially increased intelligence. And perhaps these are the two most consistent themes of human history. But in any case, since then, we have seen, just in the past seven years, we've seen us kill most of the animals [00:55:00] on the planet. So 70 years ago, there were twice as many wild animals on this planet as there are now. That's the rate of destruction of life that we are facing right now.

And we have to face that this intelligence, this craving, while we humans have been its best host up until now, with the cognitive revolution we became a very good host for this force. There's no reason to think that it's going to stop and preserve us, as if we really are special. We've been given a lot of resources for several thousand years because we've been good hosts, good slaves to this. But if there were to be something that was a better [00:56:00] host, well then there's no reason to think that we wouldn't be treated like cattle and factory farms or various species who have been driven to extinction.

And so, with that dire circumstance as a jumping off point, we enter into a study of the dharma. And why? Because in the same way that we saw with the cognitive revolution, we saw that some people were able to use intelligence in order to break free of craving, in order to become the most trustworthy beings the planet had ever seen -- the most caring, the most wise. And just the same way when we [00:57:00] look at the agricultural revolution, we see that the Buddha came forth and taught the dharma and was even more effective at producing trustworthy, wise, caring people who had gone beyond intelligence, delusion, insanity, beyond craving, and clinging and selfishness. And those people found ways to have an impact on the societies that they lived in, in order to promote good for all beings. We see that the Buddha was able to create an entire community, a Sangha, a professional class whose job was to study the dharma, become trustworthy, become wise, compassionate, and show people how to develop a society in accord with those qualities.

[00:58:00] And so in the same way that previously a few people became wise and selfless -- but mostly we caused harm -- with the agricultural revolution, we caused even more harm, but we became even better at creating wise, caring, selfless, compassionate people.

So now as we enter into this next intelligence revolution, in which we see that in all likelihood, narrative will no longer be the medium by which collective intelligence functions, and instead algorithms will become the medium by which collective intelligence functions. [00:59:00] That we need to know exactly how to bring the dharma, these methods to make people, and even other beings, trustworthy, wise, caring. We see the necessity of bringing that into this new medium.

But in order to do that, we need to know what the dharma is. We have gone through it step by step, looking at many different teachings, mostly focused on the Theravada, expanding out into the Mahayana, a little bit on the Vajrayana, and then just a little, little bit on this Navayana, this fourth turning of the wheel, if we dare to call it that, in which we have the goal [01:00:00] of creating an enlightened society. No longer is our aim the enlightened individual, or even bringing everyone along eventually, but the entity that we're trying to teach becomes the society. The global civilization is the student.

And this is inspired primarily by the work of Babasaheb Ambedkar. But we should note that since he brought Buddhism to the world, and in particular to the Dalits Of India, since then, tools have emerged -- in particular, what we've discussed is artificial intelligence -- but tools have emerged that make [01:01:00] that a real possibility. And why? Because these new tools are able to base a global consciousness on one single global intelligence.

This artificial intelligence, "artificial intelligence," which as you know I claim is actually the fourth version -- it's AI version four -- through human history. This is the fourth type of artificial intelligence. And it for the first time, due to a lot of glass and metal and plastic strewn about the planet, some software code mixed in, suddenly makes it possible [01:02:00] for this internet -- which is what I'm referring to as plastic and glass and metal strewn about the planet with some code mixed in -- this internet to create an intelligence, mediated primarily by algorithms, on which a global consciousness can alight. And that consciousness is just our consciousness. And the algorithms that work are the ones that encourage us to give it as much of our consciousness, our attention, our life energy as possible. And in the past few years, even more so a few months, we've seen an incredible increase in the amount of attention given to this, even though some of us have been warning about this for many years.

So we here have thrown ourselves in to truly [01:03:00] understanding the truth, so that we can bring that into a totally new format, so this global consciousness can walk the spiritual path and can become trustworthy so that it -- we -- can actually care for all living things. 

 

Final comments on the difference between Microsoft's marketing and the realities of capitalism

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today starting with Adam Conover breaking down why AI is primarily a hollow marketing term, for the moment. Summit featured Tristan Harris and Eiza Raskin from the Center for Humane Technology discussing the upstream source of the problem with big tech. What Next TBD explained how explicit bias gets baked into datasets and algorithms.

Democracy Now! looked at a case of mistaken identity which resulted in a pregnant woman being wrongly arrested for carjacking. The Data Chief pointed out that those who are the best situated to see and point out problems with the fundamentals of AI [01:04:00] systems are rarely in the rooms when decisions are being made.

Science Friction discussed the difficulties of trying to make change from within a big tech company. Summit continued with Tristan Harris and Asa Raskin, making the case for how we can choose a better future. And Your Undivided Attention discussed some of the nuts and bolts of regulating AI. That's what everybody heard, but members also heard one more bonus clip from Monastic Academy, which featured a talk by monk Soryu Foral looking at AI through the lens of Buddhism and the evolution of human intelligence.

To hear that and have all of our bonus content delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at Patreon.

Now, to wrap up, I just want to reiterate the need for international cooperation to manage the risk of AI that was [01:05:00] talked about in the show. For anyone who looks at the state of humanity and takes comfort in the fact that, well, we haven't destroyed ourselves yet, so we must be you know pretty good it's not doing bad things it's important to remember the why of that fact and in essence it's regulation international agreements treaties the un these are all mechanisms by which we've regulated extremely dangerous things like nuclear weapons and we should see huge technological leaps like they claim ai will be similar caution The short and pithy phrase I heard recently and like that describes this is, You can't invent the ship without inventing the shipwreck.

Downsides are inevitable and need to be looked out for, managed, and mitigated. And, in keeping with the nautical disaster theme, just yesterday there was a story about how in 1995 Bill Gates wrote a memo saying that the internet was going to take over the [01:06:00] computing business like a tidal wave. And, Microsoft's current CEO, Satya Nadella, just echoed that memo suggesting that AI would be as big and profound a change as the internet was.

If true, there will undoubtedly be benefits to come, but we know that the internet has brought downsides as well, including having a large hand in destabilizing global society and democracies. So, to do anything other than act cautiously would be ridiculous. With the forces of unrestrained capitalism at play, acting with caution is simply not something we can ask companies to do on their own.

It requires regulation from the state. There was another quote from the article with the Microsoft CEO worth noting. He said, We in the tech industry are classic experts at overhyping everything. What motivates me is I want to use this technology to [01:07:00] truly do what I think at least all of us are in tech for, which is democratizing access to it.

End quote. So, I think that there are two clarifications that need to be made. The first is that there's a difference between what individuals who work in tech think and say, and what the structures of capitalism will actually allow them to do. So, I'm going to translate what I think that statement really means, but I'm not implying that he's lying.

He may really feel that way, and might even convince himself that Microsoft's business goals are in line with that statement. That democratizing access really will be good for humanity and their bottom line. But what he means is not actually democratization. All he really means is that he wants to maximize their user base.

[01:08:00] Microsoft as a corporation, driven by the profit motive, has no interest in democratizing control of their tech. And without control, there is no democracy. They want centralized control, privatized control. And maximum private profit, which to them means no regulation that might cut into those profits. So don't be fooled by their marketing.

That is going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about this or anything else. You can leave us a voicemail or send us a text to 202 999 3991 or simply email me to jay at bestoftheleft. com. Now thanks to everyone for listening.

Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist trio, Ken, Brian, and LaWendy for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, [01:09:00] graphic designing, webmastering, and bonus show co hosting.

And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships at bestoftheleft. com slash support. You can join them by signing up today. It would be greatly appreciated. And if you want to continue the discussion, join our Discord community. There's also a link to join in the show notes.

So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, My name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left Podcast, coming to you twice weekly. Thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from bestoftheleft. com. 

Air Date 8/6/2022

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast, in which we shall take a look at the education curriculum reforms currently being pushed through in Florida through the lens of the long pattern of choosing to see our history in a way that comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted.

Sources today include Deconstructed, Alex Wagner Tonight, The Muckrake Political Podcast, The I Doubt It Podcast, The Benjamin Dixon Show, The Majority Report, and The Readout, with additional members only clips from Think About It with Michael Leppert, America's Workforce Union Podcast, and Why Now? A Political Junkie Podcast.

And I just want to point out that the first clip you'll be hearing is from Deconstructed, a regular source of ours, but their guest is Christopher Ruffo, one of the people leading the conservative effort to remake Florida education in their own image. So... Not a regular source of ours, but someone who's worth [00:01:00] hearing from to fully understand the contrasting perspectives.

Meet the Man Driving the Right’s Culture War Panic - Deconstructed - Air Date 7-28-23

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: What’s big in the news lately is his new curriculum that Florida rolled out around African-American history.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Sure.

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: The thing that the media has really fixated on is; teachers are supposed to instruct kids that slaves learned skills. That some slaves learned some skills that they could potentially use in other aspects of their life.

Setting that aside, I feel like that’s better understood in the broader way that the curriculum approaches the history, which is; it felt to me like some dorm room arguments I’d heard from conservatives back in college in the ‘90s. You hear things like look, they had slavery in Africa also, before they had — And then look, actually slavery was worse in the Caribbean. Which, true, it was. Look, being a serf in Europe, that was really bad too.

 All of it, coupled with the slaves learned some skills that they could use later — all of it brought together feels like saying; yes, obviously slavery was bad but [00:02:00] relatively speaking, maybe it wasn’t as bad as people say. So is that where the conservative embrace of CRT ends up going? And why?

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: I don’t think so. You still hear those arguments today, right? You’ve heard them, I’ve heard them. Many of them are based in facts, as you say, but I think they’re ultimately not —

 That’s 

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: all in the curriculum. Those things that I heard in the dorm room, all of these things, there was slavery in Africa. It’s all true, but it’s like, why?

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: I think that— to take the point of this line that has caused controversy — And really, I think, you and I would both agree that the left-wing critique is that; DeSantis is saying that slaves benefited from slavery. No, that’s not what it means.

 What I think the point is, and this is actually has a long lineage in African-American — it’s really the kind of — within American Black philosophy, and political theory, and activism, there is a strand of [00:03:00] thinking that says; the solution — and Thomas Sowell, you can bring it back to Booker T. Washington — but there is a strand of thinking that says; the attitude that should be prioritized is one of resiliency, is one of hope, is one of triumph over adversity. Yes, when you oversimplify it can be a ridiculous Horatio Alger story. It can minimize some of the historical inequities, really and truly.

 I think that line was basically to say; these people who suffered under unimaginable brutality and evil conditions were resilient, they had capacities, they had talents. Even though they were smothered and held back under the system of slavery, which was evil and wrong, they were able to emerge from those immense difficulties and actually have capacities that they could realize once [00:04:00] slavery was over.

I traveled in the deep south as I was making the film. One of the things that really shocked me and was really quite inspiring was; in the Mississippi Delta, there was these free cities that were all Black. Small cities and towns that were established by freed slaves. They had their own kind of thriving industries and economies in still some very difficult conditions. They had businesspeople, they had civic leaders, you can see all the old history, and I talked to folks about the history of these places.

 To me, that was a triumph of spirit, and of ingenuity, and of resilience, and in courage. I think that you can’t tell a story that is only that, right? You can’t minimize what these people faced, and we should confront it honestly and totally. Also, you should not minimize these accomplishments, which are not trivial by any measure, and should not [00:05:00] be covered over by people today who see them as an impediment to their own left-wing politics. I think that’s so — in the textbooks in places, even in the Deep South, those stories should also be highlighted. I think those stories are quite effective.

My opposition to, let’s say, on these issues, right? Race issues. My opposition to Critical Race Theory, it’s been hashed out, anyone can go see my opposition. For something kind of new: the opposition to, let’s say, even something like reparations, or something like affirmative action, stems from my observations in a place like Memphis. Where I really saw [that] the more that the government and the state seeks to engineer social outcomes on these crude measures, actually, the worse things get.

For me, after that long observation, I just feel very skeptical that these social engineering projects — the government can do pretty [00:06:00] good physical engineering. The New Deal taught us that. Some of those bridges are still American landmarks. Social engineering is something quite different, and we’ve never been able to do it successfully. I’m quite skeptical in that regard.

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: If you’re still helping with the curriculum, if they’re still working on it, I’d suggest adding in something on Robert Smalls. In general, talking about slave uprisings and resistance. To couple it with; good that somebody became a blacksmith, but also talk about the kind of way that there was constant effort to overthrow slavery from the enslaved people themselves.

DeSantis culture war drives AP Psychology out of Florida schools - Alex Wagner Tonight - Air Date 8-4-23

GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS: That's part of our course catalog. It's being offered. I think they have taken it back. I think that's a mistake, and I'll bet you it'll end up being offered. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: That is governor Ron DeSantis today, pushing back on an earlier announcement from the College Board that Florida's Department of Education had effectively banned AP psychology in the state, because AP Psychology violates Florida's Parental Rights and [00:07:00] Education Act, that is also known as the Don't Say Gay law. 

The College Board, which administers the AP courses, said in a statement yesterday that Florida's school districts are free to teach AP psychology only if it excludes any mention of sexual orientation and gender identity. The College Board said it cannot modify the course in response to laws that would censor college-level standards.

But the idea of no more AP psychology in the entire state of Florida has stirred up some controversy here. So the Florida Education Commissioner just a few hours ago fired back with the statement insisting that the department believes that AP psychology can be taught in its entirety in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.

But that sort of leaves a lot of questions there, doesn't it? Specifically, what does the state of Florida think is "age and developmentally appropriate," and does that involve any mention of sexual orientation and gender identity? Now, so far, the College Board is focused on the part of the statement [00:08:00] that says, AP psychology may be taught in its entirety, but what does that actually mean for the teachers who need to begin school in a matter of weeks?

Joining me now is Rachel Chapman, a high school teacher in Orlando, Florida, who has been teaching AP psychology for the past 17 years. Ms. Chapman, thank you for being here. I know it is not easy to talk, perhaps critically, about what's going on in the state of Florida if you are employed in the state of Florida. So I really appreciate you coming on television tonight. Let me just first ask, what is going on in your classroom? How are you preparing for the next year? 

RACHEL CHAPMAN: It's kind of difficult right now because everything is still up in the air. There's a lot of change, a lot of movement still happening, so there's a still great unknown to what is this year going to be looking like.

Our students start next week and we're still not entirely sure what's going to happen. And this new information coming from the state, it's kind of muddying the waters a little bit, so it's really difficult for me to prepare in the way that's necessary [00:09:00] for my students starting next week. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: For people who didn't take AP Psych -- I'm one of them -- can you just explain why it's necessary to have content that addresses gender and sexual orientation in an AP psych class? 

RACHEL CHAPMAN: Excellent. AP psychology is all about the study of the human mind and behavior. And when we try to understand human behavior, we need to look at it from multiple lenses. And by looking at it through these multiple lenses, we can understand all of humanity. And to take out bits and pieces, we're missing out important aspects about what makes psychology, psychology; what makes us us. So it's not like a pick and choose. We can't just decide we're going to look at certain parts of ourselves. We need to look at all of it. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: What do you think is behind the state saying Yeah, you can't do that anymore in an AP psychology class in the state of Florida. I mean, what does that signal to you? 

RACHEL CHAPMAN: It's really difficult [00:10:00] to really interpret what they mean. We don't know if they're doing that because they don't want discussion at all about gender and sexuality. We don't know if they want a reduced -- what do they want? And when we hear that message from them not to include it, it really makes me wonder, do we want all discussion about these individuals out of the classroom entirely? 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: To the outside world, this reminds me of the Stop Woke Act, which really chilled any discussion of race, racism, institutional racism, slavery, basic sort of questions about how you teach history in the state of Florida are up for grabs because of the vagueness of the law and the haphazard way with which it's enforced. And I wonder if the same might be happening in the field of psychology or the teaching of AP psychology in classes, that it remains purposefully vague to have effectively a chilling effect on teachers and lesson plans. Are you worried about your ability to teach [00:11:00] going forward? 

RACHEL CHAPMAN: I do have concerns. Teachers love clarification. Teachers thrive on information. And we need that clarification to make sure that we are not ourselves going to be getting into trouble. Walking on eggshells in the classroom is never helpful for students. It's not going to help them understand what we're trying to talk about. So clarification is so important. The vagueness of what's happening right now is really putting us in a situation where we cannot prepare and we can't teach effectively. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: This is obviously not the only AP course that's come under fire in terms of, or intersected with, Governor DeSantis's agenda. The same is true notoriously for the AP African-American Studies class. I kind of wonder: if you start targeting these advanced placement courses and the students who take them, what does that say about the level of education in Florida? What does that do to parents who are looking to get a great education for their kids in Florida public schools? Does it make them want to [00:12:00] take their kids out? What are you hearing from parents whose children are victims of the sort of culture war agenda here? 

RACHEL CHAPMAN: It's complicated, because there are many parents who are concerned. Are their students going to be competitive when it comes to college? Are they going to be competitive when it comes to career readiness? But at the same times, I really wanna let people know that Florida teachers are hard workers. We're really good at what we do and we are gonna do what we can to do what is best for the students to make sure they're getting the highest quality education that we are able to give them.

We Actually Have To Explain To DeSantis Why Slaves Didn't Benefit From Slavery - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 7-25-23 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: One of the thing that's coming out of one of our favorite states, that's right the state of Florida everybody, is that; Florida education, in its continuous unending war againsts woke, is now going to push for educational standards that are going to portray the enslavement of human beings — chattel slavery, that is right. They're going to say that slavery was actually very beneficial to the enslaved. Much like having an internship, they learned some lessons, [00:13:00] they gained some skills. It actually, there are both sides to this issue. It's an incredible thing. Is it not? 

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Oh, no. Oh no. Don't say any of that. Please. You're making me upset.

 It's interesting. Would you like to hear what the retort was to the criticism of this new — because I kind of wanna jump right to that. I feel like it's interesting to hear what the right will say about this. 'Cause, again, the idea that slave slaves would've benefited from the skills they might've learned as slaves in their linger lives is really not about that — can I just read this real quick too? 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Nick, I'll say this. I will only listen to the retort as long as it is even handed reasonable and will not upset. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Well let's find out. This is from foxnews.com, because I happened to stumble upon that when I was doing my research. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: That's my homepage, so let's go.

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Okay, good, and you're not lying. " There have been questions raised about language within a benchmark clarification of standard that says blah, blah, blah, which says instruction includes; how slaves [00:14:00] develop skills, which in some business can be applied for their personal benefit." The statement reads, "the intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades, which they benefited."

This is factual and well documented. Some examples include; blacksmiths like Ned Cobb, Henry Blair, Lewis Latimer, John Henry. Shoemakers like; James Ford and shoemakers Paul Cuffe and Betty Washington Lewis. Fishing and shipping industry workers like; Jupiter Hammon, John Chavis, William Whipper and Crispus Attucks.

Tailors like; Elizabeth Keckley, James Thomas and Marietta Carter. Teachers like; Betsy Stockton, and Booker T. Washington, because nothing says education, learn how to be an educator, than being a slave, right? 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: That's literally like saying, there was a good side to genocide, a lot of real estate opened up. It's the absolute most insane thing, and to even propose it in the first place is an absolutely indefensible thing. I wanna give people a quick little lesson. I talked [00:15:00] about this a little bit in the Midnight Kingdom, but if you haven't had a chance to read it yet, this is an example of what's called paternalism.

The idea here that was in the American Confederacy during the slave period, it was the idea that the enslaved were real simple people. They couldn't take care of themselves. It was almost like they had a parental obligation to take care of these poor souls, to put a roof over their heads to make sure they were fed, not educated.

Mind you, we didn't want them reading, in case they like put two and two together and got outta hand. It was this idea that these were subhumans that needed to be taken care of by their white slave masters. In other words, white supremacy is built on a foundation of believing that you are actually helping people, you are actually teaching them skills.

You are actually making sure that their lives are better than they would be, if they were back in Africa, or if with they were with their families, or if they had freedom. This is only a new iteration of it, and it is as [00:16:00] insidious as it sounds. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Especially if they weren't being tortured and maimed and killed in the middle. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: And sexually assaulted.

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: So it really is disgusting, and we've talked about this before, and how — and by the way, this isn't in a vacuum. If you were to examine, I know you have the teaching standards in the South particularly of slavery in general, I think you'd find decades upon decades of this type of thing happening. Where they try to soften the effects of slavery and what slavery meant so as not to make white people feel bad about it. When in fact, I think that's the point. I think we all should feel bad about it, so we don't fucking do it again. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yeah, we should probably learn from slavery, and genocide, and exploitation, and all of these awful things. You're absolutely right about the South. One of the reasons why the education systems are so abysmal is because it's an intentionality. It's actually making sure that nobody can take a look at the way things [00:17:00] are. It's not a coincidence that these deviations from what it's like in the North, and the West, and the East, and all that. 

It's no coincidence that they happen to take place in things like, again, slavery during the antebellum period, the civil rights period, in which people were murdered and beaten and oppressed. In all of these sort of ways that the South has manifested white supremacy, as much if not more than these other places — I will also say while we're on this subject; I lived in Georgia for a decade and I have to tell you, very early on I wanna say it was only a few months of getting there, I noticed that these are the conversations that are always happening. It's not just a caricature. There are lots of conversations about not just the War of Northern aggression, and how, the South was actually just a lost cause. It was a beautiful time. 

It was also a conversation about how; Black people, they like to complain about what happened during slavery, but a lot of them actually had it better than they have it now. It's a narrative that [00:18:00] perpetuates, and not only is it keeping people from feeling guilty, it's keeping any type of progress and any type of addressing of this inequality — which is intentional, from ever being addressed. It is a strategy, and what's happening right now is that strategy is being advanced. 

"Heat Wave!, PragerU in Florida Schools, and Robot Ron DeSantis." - I Doubt It Podcast - Air Date 7-28-23

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Florida is now using PragerU content in public school classrooms. 

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Making it available and in encouraging educators to utilize Dennis Prager, quote unquote "university," right-wing unhinged clips in a classroom to indoctrinate -- that's what this is, to indoctrinate -- children with lies and propaganda about the white-washed version of history. 

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: And we want you to be fully informed about what this means. So we're gonna start with a promotional video that the PragerU CEO, Marissa Streit, posted on the Prager account on YouTube, notifying parents her [00:19:00] excitement that Florida is now going to be using PragerU videos. And I want you to listen to the language that this woman uses when she is describing the content that will now be shown in public schools.

MARISSA STREIT: Friends, I'm ecstatic to make this groundbreaking announcement. PragerU is now making it into schools. A couple of years ago, we launched PragerU Kids because parents have been frustrated, teachers have been frustrated. We have seen that our schools have been hijacked by the left. They have been politicized. They have been used by union bosses. They have been doing everything under the sun, not for our children. And so we have launched PragerU Kids and we started providing great edutainment, educational entertainment for children across America. But we didn't just stop there. Now we are actually making turnkey curriculum content for your schools.

And the state of Florida just announced that we are now becoming [00:20:00] an official vendor. This means that if you are a teacher in Florida, you cannot be fired for using PragerU content. You can also rely on our resources in your classrooms. 

And we are just getting started. Additional states are signing up.

Go to our website, PragerU.com and find out which other states have been working closely with us so that we become an approved vendor in additional states across America. 

You should know that the left is trying to fight us. They're trying to take us out of the schools, and we need your support. So please go to PragerU.com and signed our petition to keep PragerU in schools.

We know that you know that our content is clean, it's great, it's patriotic. We teach civics. We teach financial literacy. We teach goodness and wisdom and all of the things that should have been taught in schools but are not. And so help us stay in schools, help us make it into your schools. Go to PragerU.com, find out how you can get involved, and help us fight for [00:21:00] America's kids.

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Do we need to teach patriotism? Do we need to teach those values? Is that the role of education? Aren't we supposed to teach the truth, the accurate history? Not propaganda that they're celebrating that they're making it into schools and oh, by the way, now you can't be fired.

What, what is happening? 

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Yeah. it's scary stuff. I spent two hours watching PragerU videos.

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Better you than me, sister. 

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: And let me tell you, they have interesting segments. Not that they're good. I'm saying that they are created to appeal to kids. They're very colorful. 

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Yeah. 

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: They have a series that we're gonna play a lot from, Leo and Layla. They travel all over the world. They time travel. They have a little remote where they type in a place or a person and then they travel there and they talk to Martin Luther King Jr., all these different people, which we're gonna get -- 

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Booker T. [00:22:00] Washington.

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Yeah. But they also have a segment where it's like Around the World, I think is what it's called. And they go to different locations. The one in Canada, they criticize the healthcare system in Canada.

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Of course. 

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: And in LA they talked about the police. That was the topic of the one in Los Angeles.

And we're not gonna play a large part of this, but I wanna give the audience a flavor for how they describe George Floyd. We know how George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin. He was choked. Derek Chauvin's knee was on George Floyd's neck for 10 minutes. We know how he died. 

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Derek Chauvin, convicted of murder for this offense. 

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Right. Now that you know that, and your memory has been refreshed, I want you to hear how the Prager Kids lesson will teach kids about George Floyd.

PRAGERU CLIP: Then in May, 2020, George Floyd, a black man who resisted arrest and was held under the knee of a police officer, [00:23:00] died while in custody.

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Died while in custody.

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, I DOUBT IT PODCAST: I was not ready for that. Died -- while in custody -- by a man who was convicted for his murder, not for manslaughter or whatever lesser charge. Murder. 

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Mm-hmm. 

JESSE DOLLEMORE - HOST, I DOUBT IT PODCAST: But this is what they wanna teach children. We could end it right there and everybody could be satisfied that our claim that this is propaganda and lies in just a conservative narrative. They would get it. 

BRITTANY PAGE - I DOUBT IT PODCAST: Yeah. And they're gonna teach kids this. They're gonna teach young people, some teacher in Florida is excited that they're able to show these videos. And a kid may learn about George Floyd for the first time from this video, and that is what they're gonna come away believing.

It's horrifying. 

Why a Leftist is Defending Conservatives Over Desantis' Racist Florida Curriculum - The Benjamin Dixon Show - Air Date 7-30-23

BENJAMIN DIXON - HOST, THE BENJAMIN DIXON SHOW: Byron Donalds, who is the Congressman from the 19th Congressional District of Florida. He has come under fire, [00:24:00] not by me, but by the Ron DeSantis campaign because Byron Donalds had the unmitigated gall to call out, and again let me not say call out —

His response to Ron DeSantis' new curriculum stating that Black people, or enslaved people, benefited from slavery, it was really timid. It was gentle. Let me read for you what Byron Donald said that got him to be the target of the DeSantis campaign. This is what he said on Twitter, "The new African-American standards in Florida are good, robust and accurate. That being said, the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong and needs to be adjusted. That obviously wasn't the goal, and I have faith that the Florida Department of Education will correct this."

Listen, this is lighter than a slap on the wrist. He did everything he could to [00:25:00] gently massage the criticism, the critique. To say; white conservatives, I don't wanna fall outta grace with you. I'm not trying to get out of line, but this is just the bridge too far. Christina Pushaw, who is the social media director for Ron DeSantis, this is what she said on Twitter and ratioed him.

She said, "Did Kamala Harris write this tweet?" Now to be fair to her, which I don't have to be, that was the mildest response of all the conservatives. This is another response saying quote, "You'll never get my vote again. Sell out." Another one said, "You really have sold out for Trump." 

 Then another said, "It didn't take you long to sell out, did it?" then another said, "Here comes the sell out. Pathetic dude. Pathetic." What Byron Donald said was so mild. He's basically saying; you got a 99% Ron [00:26:00] DeSantis on your curriculum, but that 1% difference is something that I feel like you can correct, and would you please, sir, please consider correcting it?

 The DeSantis campaign said hell no. DeSantis supporters said, get in line, get back. So much for all the times I've heard Byron Donalds call Black people who vote Democratic, and he says that they're on the plantation of the Democratic party. Who's being whipped? Ron DeSantis has responded to Byron Donald's mild criticism of the language in the New Florida curriculum. This was his response to Donald's: 

GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS: At the end of the day, you gotta choose, are you gonna side with Kamala Harris and liberal media outlets? Are you gonna side with the state of Florida? I think it's very clear that these guys did a good job on those standards. It wasn't anything that was politically motivated.

These are serious scholars. You've seen Dr. Allen out on TV talking about the stories, talking about his own [00:27:00] family history and everything like that. So don't side with Kamala on that. Stand up. 

BENJAMIN DIXON - HOST, THE BENJAMIN DIXON SHOW: So Ron DeSantis is now telling Black conservatives not to stand up for their Blackness, but rather stand up for his particular Florida curriculum.

He's not siding with Kamala Harris. I can certainly tell you that. If you ask any Black conservative what they think about Kamala Harris, they are not siding with Kamala Harris. Ron DeSantis, they're siding with their Blackness. They're siding with the reality that under no circumstances should we try to cast a single facet of slavery in a positive light.

Here is Matt Walsh from The Daily Wire. This is what he said on Twitter, "Any Republican who repeats Kamala Harris talking points loses huge amounts of credibility. Very disappointed to see from Byron Donalds. The curriculum briefly mentions that some slaves utilize skills after being freed. This is objectively true and, 'we shouldn't teach it because it hurts my feelings' isn't a legitimate or respectable position."

See [00:28:00] Byron, see what they really think about you. The fact that the truth about what happened after slavery is just almost as bad as what happened during slavery. The amount of laws that were wielded against us to block us from making any progress on our own, the amount of violence that came down on Black people after they were freed.

How many Black people had to stay because they had no other they were not given any resource. They were freed to say, go and be on your own accord. Just survive on your own. Then to try to frame it — I should not have even argued this from the position of where Matt Walsh was trying to argue. He's trying to argue that last generation, how many generations before that lived and died in slavery without the opportunity to utilize any of the skills that were passed down to them from generation to generation? Because we had skills when we arrived here. When you brought us here. The cruelty is the point, right? I think they enjoy [00:29:00] pouring salt into the open wound that is America's original sin.

 My original take was almost to just say, you know what Black conservatives? I told you. You know what, I can admit when I needed to shift and change a little bit because despite the fact that I disagree with the politics of these Black conservatives, I can't help but to be extremely proud of the fact that; when the rubber met the road, these partic — not all Black conservatives, but these Black conservatives, Byron Donald, who I have never said a kind thing about.

I have to admit that I am proud of this brother taking a stand against Ron DeSantis at the risk of his own career. The rest of Byron Donald's politics suck. He still supports Donald Trump, but when it came down to his Blackness he said, "No, I'm gonna draw the line here." So I salute that brother, even if it's in a limited sense.

You even have a Senator Tim Scott, who came out and said the exact thing. That there's no [00:30:00] reason for anyone to try to cast a single component of slavery as something positive. Listen, have you ever heard me say something positive about Tim Scott? I would be remiss, it would be a shame on my Blackness, if I allowed my disdain for all of the rest of their politics to make me ignore the fact that in this moment they're speaking the truth.

Listen, listen to this clip. I apologize for the quality of the audio. It's a little difficult to hear, but if you listen closely, Tim Scott is speaking the truth. 

SENATOR TIM SCOTT: As a country founded upon the freedom, greatest deprivation of freedom for slavery. There's no silver lining in freedom and slavery.

The truth is that anything you can learn, any benefits that people suggest you had during slavery, you would've had as a free person. Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans, and even raping their wives. It was just devastating. So I would hope that every person [00:31:00] in our country, and certainly running for president, would appreciate that.

 Listen, people have bad days. Sometimes they regret what they say and we should ask them again to clarify their positions. 

BENJAMIN DIXON - HOST, THE BENJAMIN DIXON SHOW: They did ask them again and see, this is where I started parting ways with my conservative brothers and sisters. I part ways with them because they are giving Ron DeSantis too much of the benefit of the doubt.

Fox News BUSTED For Rewriting History Of Slavery - The Majority Report - Air Date 7-26-23

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Jesse Watters spoke with William Allen. He's one of the authors of the curriculum. He is apparently a political scientist, not a historian, but again, irrelevant.

Here is Allen trying to make his case. 

JESSE WATTERS: Now one of the authors of the Florida curriculum, Dr. William Allen, joins me now. So Dr. Allen, why do you think Kamala Harris is being dishonest about what's being taught about slavery? 

DR. WILLIAM ALLEN: Permit me not to give you Kamala Harris's motives. They're invisible. I don't know them. We can all have suspicions that there's a dishonest purpose afoot. But what's more important than that [00:32:00] dishonest purpose is the truth. And this curriculum is devoted to telling the truth, whereas Kamala Harris has retailed a lie. Now, it may only have been a falsehood the first time she stated it, but when you repeat a falsehood, it becomes a lie.

JESSE WATTERS: Tell her right now what specifically this component of the slavery course teaches. 

DR. WILLIAM ALLEN: Well, permit me to have Frederick Douglass tell her. He wrote an autobiography in which he described how the mistress of his slave owner began to teach him to read. She pulled back the curtain through which a glimmer of light shown before the master forced her to close it. But that glimmer of light was enough for Frederick Douglass to illumine a bright flame that he exploited to his benefit and his country's benefit thereafter. Such examples are numerous and they're retailed in the stories of people who suffered the indignity of [00:33:00] slavery time and again. 

And quickly permit me to say what this curriculum is about is having people who live the experience, who live the history, tell their stories. And nothing is more important than that. We never, ever erase the stories that the people who live the stories tell. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: All right. So first off, again, let's just even take what this guy's saying. And you notice the flowery language that he needs to obscure, he needs the, the flame, the passion, blah, blah, blah.

The implication is that Douglass would not have learned to read were he not a slave. But the reality is it's the opposite. That there not only would Frederick Douglass not have to rely on the mistress of the master to make him see the concept of reading, start this light, and [00:34:00] we're gonna examine even that question. But just even if we were stipulate that she was to sit down with him for years and taught him to read and taught him grammar and taught him all these things, well, there's every reason to believe that if Douglass was not a slave he would've had an opportunity to read. It wouldn't have been disallowed.

In fact, there would be more than Frederick Douglass. There would be many Frederick Douglasses who would have learned to read, but for slavery. So the real question isn't whether slavery allowed for skills that benefited them. The real question is, but for slavery, would these people have had skills? And the answer is undoubtedly no. No, no, no. There's not a "but for slavery," no, it is, but for slavery, there would be a lot more people with skills. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: The fact that the skills were honed is not because of [00:35:00] slavery. It is in spite of slavery. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Exactly. Exactly. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: This guy was a Reagan appointee as the chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. I couldn't find too much about him, so I just went to good old Wikipedia and there you go. Appointed by Reagan and then Bush, the first. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: This Twitterer, they are a Texas A&M statistics PhD student. We'll pop it up. They did a tweet thread on William [Frederick] Douglass, the way that he presents it within the context of his biography. And you can scroll down here. We're not gonna go through the whole thing, but bottom line is, yes, his mistress, who he says, had no experience in slavery before she married his master, and therefore was open to the idea of introducing to him literally the alphabet. And then not only did she stop teaching him when her husband [00:36:00] said, stop doing that -- this is Mr. And Mrs. Auld -- " she assisted me in learning to spell three or four letters, words of three or four letters, like "dog," maybe " cat." And then once she was forbade from doing it, you can scroll down to where it gets into the capitalize. It was in fact not those letters that she taught him. Rather it was when the master said this: "What was going on? At once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her among other things that it was unlawful as well as unsafe to teach a slave to read, to use his own words further, he said, 'If you give an [N-word] an inch, he will take an L. An [N-word] should know nothing but to obey his master to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best [N-word] in [00:37:00] the world. Now,' said he, 'if you teach that [N-word],' speaking of myself," that being Douglass, "'how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.'" And then Douglass goes on to write, "These words sank deep into my heart. These words" -- remember that -- "these words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation explaining dark and mysterious things with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty, to wit the White man's power to enslave the Black man. It was a grand achievement and I prized it [00:38:00] highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I least expected it. While I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction, which by the nearest accident I had gained from my master."

In other words, the true inspiration for him to read came from not the alphabet that he was taught by his mistress, not the three letter words that he was taught, but by the understanding that it was the master preventing him from reading, which was keeping him mentally and physically enslaved.

Then he went on to learn to read in secret because had he not had that revelation, his use of three-letter [00:39:00] words or the alphabet would probably have just been of some minor utility to him in his enslaved duties. 

‘I was teaching before he was born’: Professor slams DeSantis for quashing Black history education - The Reidout - Air Date 1-23-23

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Your book is called A History of Florida Through Black Eyes. It contains photos that were unearthed over 50 years of research, documenting lynchings and other crimes against black folks in Florida. You also donated a collection in 4,000 photos to FIU, Florida International University, which I know very well. Is your book, in your view, in your mind, as you understand this "Stop Woke Act", is it legal to teach your book in Florida schools? 

DR MICHAEL DUNN: Oh, no. No, no. If a teacher in Florida schools was caught taking this book to school, he or she could be fired, could be charged with a felony. This book is not allowed in Florida schools because it touches on the very things that DeSantis wants hidden from Florida students. So, no, this book is not admitted, could not be admitted, into the Florida classroom. That's part of what we're facing here in [00:40:00] this crisis. I was teaching at Florida International University before Ron DeSantis was born. Now he sidles up to me and tells me what I can't teach in my classroom. Excuse me, sir, you're not my boss. You're not the boss of me. Uh, this man, when he taught school for a very brief period of time, some of his students claim that Ron DeSantis taught the Civil War as if the Confederates had a point, that they had lost property. Some of his students said that Ron DeSantis taught them that abortion was wrong. Now he's teaching this in his classes, his political agenda, his personal agenda. Now he comes as governor and tells us we can't teach unless we respect what he prescribes as very, very rigid rules of academic freedom. He's a hypocrite. He's an absolute hypocrite. And what he's doing, frankly, is just totally destroying education in Florida. I dare this man to show me one school in Florida where Critical Race Theory is being taught. Just one school, one school in Florida where students are being told, Feel [00:41:00] bad because of something someone did 200 years ago. Where is that happening, Ron? He cannot point out what... this is all made up. It's fake. Aimed at getting him to the White House. This man is running for president and using race as a cudgel to beat the votership over the head. 

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: To your very point, I mean, the things that they claim are their concerns, because you've already had Florida's College Board rejected, the African-American studies course rejected. You've had Florida schools that are under the, you know, sort of the regime of the governor come back and say, No, no, no. We promise we're not teaching Critical Race Theory in our schools. As you said, they don't. But they've already backed down and said that they won't do it. You actually went right at Ron DeSantis. You are one of the members, uh, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that is trying to challenge the Stop Woke Act. You tweeted references to your own family's history at Ron DeSantis, and you said to him, This is the history of my own family. These are the things that we have dealt with: [00:42:00] collecting used books from all-White schools because they couldn't be allowed to have new books; being on the migrant trails in the 1940s; your father not being allowed to be a cook in the Navy during World War II because he was Black. Have you received a response from Ron DeSantis on the challenges you put forward about your own history?

DR MICHAEL DUNN: Not a word. I wrote to Ron and to Manny Díaz asking them, What kinds of things am I not allowed to teach? How am I supposed to teach the Holocaust without feelings? How am I supposed to teach slavery without feelings? How am I to explain to students a woman having her baby snatched from her and sold out to someone else and not express my sense that that's evil? So, what we're being asked to do is to super-sterilize American history, to take race out of it and act as if race wasn't a factor. If DeSantis had his way in the teaching of slavery, for example, slavery in Florida would be taught, uh some Africans came over, worked for free for a while, and that was it. That's slavery. [00:43:00] Mentioning [that] some people took some people and killed them. That's it. Take the race out of it. He is so determined to kill our history that it just makes me and others even more determined to save it and to protect it. I don't shrink from DeSantis. He is a bully. He is an autocrat and he is a little guy trying to become a big guy. He's a baby Trump. And I think the people of this country will recognize that, particularly when they see what he's gonna do to our schools, if he becomes president.

It’s hard to vilify DEI training, without announcing one’s racism - Think About It with Michael Leppert - Air Date 8-1-23

MICHAEL LEPPERT - HOST, THINK ABOUT IT: If the average American were to learn about diversity, equity, and inclusion training through its discussion in the political arena of alone. Suspicion of it should be expected, and hostility toward it would be understandable.

Duh. That applies to just about everything these days. On July 21st, vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Jacksonville, Florida to object to that state's newly approved standards for how Black history is taught. The new instruction will teach, quote, how slaves developed skills, which in [00:44:00] some instances could be applied for their personal benefit end quote, the objection to the benefit of slavery in the standard led to Governor Ron DeSantis initially claiming it was the Florida Department of Education who wrote it, not him.

But that only lasted for a moment before he realized there was an opportunity for a fight here. DeSantis quickly pivoted to defend the controversial language and attack anyone who didn't like it. That predictable and disgusting position got more complicated when the highest profile black Republican elected officials cited with Harris.

Florida representative Byron Donalds, the state's only black member of Congress, objected first followed by other black members of the house, representative John James of Michigan, and Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas, even presidential candidates. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina joined the objectors again, duh.

The language in the Florida standards is racist. Plain and simple. It is so clearly [00:45:00] racist. It is silly to even debate it. Delete it. Apologize for it. Learn from it. Move on. The Florida d o e could use some training in d e I. Acronyms are easy to villainize in our post fact culture. It's easy to hate DEI when the first primary and constant things one hears about it are that it is bad, that it is a ploy to take something away from someone, that it is a conspiracy to harm.

Just as Americans didn't know what social distancing or coronaviruses were before 2020, that was also the year that DEI entered our mainstream vernacular. In the wake of racial justice riots, following the killing of George Floyd, organizations of all kinds began investing time, energy, and resources into understanding each other better.

Excellent. There can't be a downside to that. Can there be, let me save some time and just answer that question bluntly. No, there [00:46:00] is no downside. There is no loss to anyone. There is no harm. So what is DEI training? It is an organized educational program that aims to promote awareness and understanding of how people with different backgrounds, cultures, ages, races, genders, sexuality, religions, physical conditions, and beliefs can best work together harmoniously.

I am a communication professor and consultant. It is impossible to train a student to communicate effectively just as it is to serve a client well without a focus on the audience. When delivering messages today, the most obvious error is people focus on what they want to say instead of what they want their audience to hear.

There is a profound difference. Words and tone matter, appearance and posture matter. All kinds of things matter differently to an audience based on who they [00:47:00] are and considering who the audience is when communicating can only help. Likewise, if one wants to be a better listener. Reader or recipient of messages, that same training will also help what doesn't DEI training do?

It doesn't create inequities, unfairness, quotas, or my favorite horror story. It doesn't make any anyone weak. The US House recently passed language banning, DEI initiatives from the military speaker Kevin McCarthy said of the measure quote, A military cannot defend themselves if you train them in woke end quote.

Really, Kev, if the US military, which is similarly diverse as its citizenry, learns to communicate better with each other, it will somehow be less strong, less capable, and less able to defend itself. Even the Florida DOE would have to strain to come up with a curriculum that dumb. Every student in [00:48:00] my graduate school cohort would agree that the most valuable part of our training was the series of seminars re we received on DEI.

All 20 of my classmates learned invaluable lessons on how to connect with people better. And most of us were already professional communicators. Those expressing hostility toward DEI programs are almost uniformly expressing hostility to the other. And in this context, the other is usually defined by race.

Yes, the hostility is racist. There is nothing being taken from anyone when training them to understand each other better. There is nothing meaningful being risked, committing to do it is not even provocative. It's obvious. It is such a no-brainer. We should find a way to convert the acronym from DEI to duh.

Andrew Spar, Florida Education Association President and Scott Slawson, UE Local 506 President - America’s Work Force Union Podcast - Air Date 7-26-23

ANDREW SPAR: The level of vitriol against those of us who work in public education, those of us who are union members in the State of [00:49:00] Florida, is just off the chart. And so what we have right now is yet another attack on a group that the governor, you know, has decided are political adversaries, in this case African-Americans. And what, uh, the State Board of Education recently approved after a very, very short process of about four months, a complete rewrite of the African-American history standards. They put together a work group. Many of them on the work group were appointed by the governor directly. They added a few teachers in to that work group and the work group had to demand to meet. That's how bad it was. The governor was trying to push these through without even the work group really doing anything other than being handed paper, saying sign off on it. And so there was all kinds of controversy even through the process. But these new standards are problematic in so many ways and lemme just quickly say, uh, the difference between what we're seeing now and what they're trying to move to. In elementary school, when you typically have standards, you typically say you want the kids to learn [00:50:00] something. So you'll say things like, Students need to understand, or, Students need to compare and contrast, or, Students need to analyze. Those are common terms used in standards because it shows depth of understanding. And what these standards say in elementary is, Students just need to identify key African-American figures in history. They don't need to know what they did. They don't need to know what their contributions are to society, or why they're important in history. Then it goes on to middle school, which is one that we're hearing a lot about, the most controversial standard where again, it says that slavery may have actually provided a personal benefit to those who were enslaved. This crazy concept that somehow slavery may have been a good thing, is what is in the standard saying teachers must teach that. And it also is important to point out that from elementary school through eighth grade in Florida now, students will have no formal education under these standards on what's happened in African-American history since the Emancipation Proclamation [00:51:00] 150 years ago, since Reconstruction. And so that's concerning as well. And then high school, the standards have these massive gaps. For example, it talks about Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark ruling from the Supreme Court ending segregation, but it leaves out the fact that Florida, as well as many other states, pass laws saying that the Supreme Court ruling was null and void in our state, and that it took years before segregation actually ended in Florida. That whole part of history, which is important, especially living in the State of Florida, is left out. And that's just one of many examples where we see massive gaps in the learning and it seems like an intentional whitewashing of these standards. And, you know, as people, as an educator, as someone who cares about our country there's that old saying, If we don't learn from our history, we're destined to repeat it. And that's of course one of the driving concerns around these standards. It's [00:52:00] a revisionist history, a whitewashing, again, of what should be taught in schools and it's deplorable in a lot of senses. 

ED "FLASH" FERENC - HOST, AMERICA'S WORK FORCE UNION PODCAST: So, Andrew, this just happened and this was the Florida Board of Education, and here we are, um, it's gonna be August in a couple of days. School's gonna start. When is this all supposed to take effect? I mean, did they expect this to happen, like, in a couple of weeks, or what? Or is there gonna be some pushback on this? 

ANDREW SPAR: There's definitely pushback. We're working with a lot of groups, including the NAACP and other groups called, another group in Florida called Equal Ground, and another group called Florida Rising, and a bunch of other groups, League of Women Voters and so on. So there's a broad coalition right now working on a strategy regarding to how we push back on this. But the expectation is these standards are gonna start to be implemented this school year. With full implementation next school year. At least that's our understanding. The timing of it is a political timing. It's not an educationally-sound timing. Again, usually when you rewrite standards, you spend at [00:53:00] least a year with groups meeting regularly, going back, writing, having conversation, dialogue, rewriting. None of that happened with these standards. This was just a political move by the governor who wanted to say he rewrote the African-American standards. And it's interesting 'cause he's trying to spin it as if it's a good thing. He's trying to spin it and say that these rewrite of standards is to really add focus to African-American history. It's just the wrong kind of focus, I guess you could say. And even as, I think it was yesterday, the governor came out in a statement saying, trying to distance himself from what the State Board just did. So, now he's realizing the backlash is pretty severe and he is got his campaign in a tailspin. So, now he's trying to distance himself from something he pushed.

The Court Room of History - Why Now_ A Political Junkie Podcast - Air Date 7-29-23

CLAIRE POTTER - HOST, WHY NOW?: One of the things I loved about this book is it took me back to a conversation we had decades ago about how Southern history isn't really Southern history. It's the history of this nation. And I think the three Lumpkin sisters, in their travels, in what they [00:54:00] embrace, in what they reject, point to the importance of Southern history in understanding our dilemmas today. So, can you tell our listeners why they should read this book now? 

JACQUELYN DOWD HALL: Well, you've drawn attention to one of the reasons that I think they should read it, and I remember this conversation you're talking about very well. They should read it to get a different view of the South than the conventional view. The South's cultural impact and political impact goes far beyond the geographical boundaries of the South. You can't ignore the South and write off the South politically, for example, and think you're going to change the country or move the country in a progressive direction. This book is in part about the Southern diaspora, [00:55:00] the diaspora of ideas and people. So much of what we think of, say, even as Southern literature, really is a matter of Southern expatriates with the South in their heart, but living elsewhere in other contexts, looking back, and writing about the South. And that's what these women did. So, in that sense, the South has an impact that goes far beyond the old Confederacy. 

Another way in which you might think about the South differently is that the South has played a particular role in the American imagination and the role that it's played is as a kind of repository for racism and backwardness. So, America is innocent and great and victorious. The [00:56:00] South is where we put all the defeat and the poverty and the failure and, as I said, the racism. And that is a really, really self-defeating way of looking at those issues. It's not true, and it gives a false sense of what America is. And one of the big goals that Catherine in particular had, and Grace, too, in her younger and better days was to oppose the idea of a monolithic South and to bring forward a story of the progressive South, a story of different kinds of feminism in the South and, in Catherine's case, she writes about this in a way that I found very brilliant and [00:57:00] touching in her autobiography. She goes through this whole process of things that happened to her, from childhood on, that made her begin to see the South in a different way. But in the end, as long as she still believed in. The unique, monolithic South, then she felt that to be critical of the South, to be a different kind of Southerner, was to betray the South, not to be a Southerner, that she had to say, you know, had to reject her own family and her own past. And it was when she began to learn about a more complicated Southern history, and Southern history that was not monolithic, that she was able to both affirm herself and her identity and her history and to be a [00:58:00] person of the world and of the country.

Final comments on how education curriculum is helping maintain power imbalances

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with Deconstructed, speaking with Christopher Rufo, giving his conservative perspective on Florida's education curriculum. Alex Wagner Tonight discussed the chilling effect of creating uncertainty about what is allowed to be taught. The Muckrake Political Podcast explained Florida's efforts as part of a long pattern of attempting to obscure our history. The I Doubt It podcast lamented the inclusion of PragerU as approved Florida educational material. The Benjamin Dixon Show highlighted the very light pushback by Black conservatives in Florida. The Majority Report broke down the story of Frederick Douglass learning to read and highlighted why we should never see slavery as having benefited enslaved people. And The Reidout spoke with a Black professor and author of A History of Florida Through Black Eyes about Ron DeSantis. That's what everybody heard, but members also heard bonus clips from Think About It with Michael Leppert, who looked [00:59:00] at the not-so-controversial DEI framework.

MICHAEL LEPPERT - HOST, THINK ABOUT IT: If the average American were to learn about diversity, equity, and inclusion training through its discussion in the political arena alone, suspicion of it should be expected and hostility toward it would be understandable. Duh.

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: America's Workforce Union Podcast looked at Florida's education through the lens of DeSantis's political enemies.

ANDREW SPAR: The level of vitriol against those of us who work in public education, those of us who are union members in the State of Florida, is just off the chart. And so what we have right now is yet another attack on a group that the governor has decided are political adversaries, in this case African-Americans. 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And Why Now? A Political Junkie Podcast discussed the nuances of understanding Southern history.

JACQUELYN DOWD HALL: The South has played a particular role in the American imagination and the role that it's played is [01:00:00] as a kind of repository for racism and backwardness. So, America is innocent and great and victorious. The South is where we put all the defeat and the poverty and the failure and, as I said, the racism. And that is a really, really self-defeating way of looking at those issues. 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: To hear that, and have all of our bonus content delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support or 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.

Now to wrap up, I just want to point out that this whole topic is a classic example of how a system of power defends itself against critics. The key to doing this is [01:01:00] creating a straw man argument that frames power as being an all-or-nothing situation. This is a completely wrong framing. It makes no sense, but it's really easy to disprove.

So, they use that straw man as their opponent's opinion, they misrepresent their opponent's position, and then everything flows from that misrepresentation. So, right now, I'm thinking mostly of the Black academic who was interviewed on Fox News to describe how Frederick Douglass's enslaver's wife began to teach him the fundamentals of reading. Now, they seem to think that by highlighting a story like this, they are breaking through a sort of conspiracy of thought that would otherwise silence this line of teaching. And the simplified version of this straw man argument is this: basically, one side says that slavery is 100% bad, and the contradictory perspective will argue that if anything [01:02:00] ever good happened within the context of slavery, then the first argument must be untrue, or even that the person arguing that slavery is 100% bad doesn't want you to know that anything good could have ever happened under a slave system, partially to, you know, trick you or something like that.

This is a strawman argument because both ideas can be simultaneously true. Slavery can and should be considered as 100% bad, totally unjustifiable, completely irredeemable, and this is not changed by any instance of kindness, for instance, between an enslaved person and their enslaver. The crux of the strawman argument is the all-or-nothing fallacy. They're presenting a sort of cartoon version of a system of oppression that they imagine as being an environment in which nothing good can possibly [01:03:00] happen to the oppressed and everything good must happen to the oppressor. Then ,because we don't live in a black and white world and that sort of black and white thinking is obviously not going to be true, they can knock down that straw man and in doing so it puts doubt into the minds of many about the legitimacy of the claims of oppression overall.

In reality, systems of oppression are never all-or-nothing. It's never that the oppressor gets 100% of the benefit and the oppressed gets zero, that nothing ever good happens for them. Because a system like that would topple under the weight of their own, you know, obvious overwhelming injustice. So, there's always a veneer of some sort of justice to give the perception of legitimacy. Now, in the case of slavery that's a really heavy lift to try to find anything that an enslaved person [01:04:00] benefited from, from their enslavement, which is why you always hear the same arguments. Basically, they always come back to, Well, they got free housing. And I think they kind of know that they're scratching the absolute bottom of the barrel there, which is why that wasn't the primary argument used then or now. The primary argument was to completely dehumanize and turn enslaved people into objects of pity so that slavery itself could be looked at as a kindness in the minds of many. Then any action, no matter how small, like teaching Frederick Douglass the alphabet, could be put into that paternalistic frame of helping people who they believed couldn't help themselves. 

But as we heard today, that was all a distraction. It zooms in so closely on one set of facts that it actually works to obscure the wider [01:05:00] reality, that teaching an enslaved person to read doesn't soften the institution of slavery, but only highlights the injustice by acting as a reminder that access to reading, a fundamental human right, was systematically denied to enslaved people, specifically as a mechanism to keep them oppressed. 

Now, I think knocking down arguments that slavery wasn't so bad is a little too easy, so I'll move to one that I think people have a little bit harder time with, because this pattern plays itself out over and over again, and it did so with patriarchy as well. Patriarchy was designed to grant more power and wealth to men while keeping women subservient, and it was done with the help of cultural norms that were established that appeared to be beneficial to women, like chivalry, which framed women as weak and in need of help and protection from men. That's how you get things like doors being held open for women [01:06:00] and women and children being rescued from sinking ships first. But the same reasoning was used to keep women out of certain categories of jobs that often paid better or had more power than the jobs they could get hired for. And so the power differential was maintained in favor of men with the help of a veneer of paternalism for women. That's all it takes to give some people the belief that maybe there isn't much of a power differential at all. Maybe it's just differences in how the benefits to each gender are doled out. Now, that's not a correct perspective, but you can see how a relatively reasonable person who doesn't think too hard about it might get tricked into thinking this. And sometimes it's just that small amount of doubt that is enough to help a system of power perpetuate itself while avoiding being challenged too harshly, because enough people have enough doubt that they think, Well, I don't know, do we really need to fight against this? It seems okay. Whereas [01:07:00] if there were a genuine all-or-nothing power dynamic where men had all the power, all the money, had all the doors open for them, got priority rescue from sinking ships, and women were forced to do all of the most dangerous jobs, then the imbalance would be so obvious, the injustice so clear, that reasonable people wouldn't be likely to be fooled by it, and resistance to that system of power would be much more pronounced. 

This is what is most important to understand when hearing what can sound like fairly reasonable perspectives about telling Frederick Douglass's full story or framing skills learned during enslavement as having been a benefit that a formerly enslaved person could use to lift themselves up when free. These stories, though there may be technical truth to them, are just another example of this pattern of oppressive power dynamics maintaining themselves by making those with power [01:08:00] feel morally justified in maintaining that imbalance, by obscuring the larger context that is much more important to understand than the specific details of who taught Frederick Douglass to read. 

And this isn't just a relic of the past. As we heard today, echoes of these arguments can still be heard about slavery today that impact modern perceptions of Black people as a group, poisoning the discussion today about how to move forward as a society that has still not fully overcome the legacy of slavery, segregation, and structural racism.

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 this or anything else. You can leave us a voicemail or send us a text to 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected] Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist trio, [01:09:00] Ken, Brian, and LaWendy, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, webmastering, and bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships at BestOfTheLeft.com/support. You can join them now by signing up today. It would be greatly appreciated. And if you want to continue the discussion, join our Discord community. There's a link to join in the show notes. 

So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from BestOfTheLeft.Com.

Air Date 8/2/2022

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