Speaker 1: Hello the Internet, and welcome to Season two ninety eight,
Speaker 1: episode two of daylyes I Guys Day production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: This is a podcast where we take a deep dive
Speaker 1: into American share consciousness. It is Tuesday, one of our
Speaker 1: special EPPS Deep Dive Epps. It's August first. Welcome to
Speaker 1: August first. Welcome, Welcome to August first. Welcome to August
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three. Yeah, eight one twenty three miles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's International Majong Day. Okay, just so you know, International
Speaker 1: Child Free Day. I don't know what that means. Hopefully
Speaker 1: it just means, hey, do you World.
Speaker 2: Cancer, World Lung Cancer Day, Respect for Parents' Day, National
Speaker 2: Minority Donor Awareness Day.
Speaker 1: We got it all.
Speaker 2: We've got it all.
Speaker 1: Talk Respect for Parents' Day feels like it was created
Speaker 1: by a dad in shorts and lung sucks saying you
Speaker 1: will respect me.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, weird, I gave you love.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I say weird.
Speaker 1: Because I just said that five minutes ago. My kids,
Speaker 1: my name's Jackobrah. Aka. Let's talk about space, baby, Let's
Speaker 1: talk about you a piece. Let's talk about all the
Speaker 1: tech things, non human things and n FT's courtesy of
Speaker 1: Blinky hagg on the discord are UAP bros. The new
Speaker 1: NFT bros. Feels like there's a certain portion of people
Speaker 1: who are like the UFO praise on Capitol Hill last week.
Speaker 1: It's just the new u NFTs, the new thing that
Speaker 1: captured the attention and entire hearts of the gullible. And
Speaker 1: to that, I say to the moon that remained personally
Speaker 1: fascinated by the story, even if they're lying, like it's
Speaker 1: such a wild lie to tell on Capitol Hill. So anyways,
Speaker 1: I'm thrilled to be joined as a by my co host,
Speaker 1: mister Miles.
Speaker 2: Grab Miles break k.
Speaker 1: I'm here under oath. I swear this is real.
Speaker 2: I'm bold, and I have named prying States on UFOs
Speaker 2: delusionistic claim. Just watch the film real there's no deep
Speaker 2: bake to forty p that Dick take is their born. Okay,
Speaker 2: shout out to Razac again, Natalie and Brookly a torn Also,
Speaker 2: I also caught that at the karaoke party with that
Speaker 2: this weekend, but they were not doing UAP adjacent lyrics.
Speaker 1: So thanks there at Razac on their problem. Man. Yeah, Miles,
Speaker 1: we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat
Speaker 1: by when we decided to do the Deep Dive episodes.
Speaker 1: Probably the first name that came up the executive director
Speaker 1: of Civil Rights Corps, which is a nonprofit dedicated to
Speaker 1: fighting systemic injustice. He's been a civil rights lawyer, a
Speaker 1: public defender. He was named twenty sixteen's Trial Lawyer of
Speaker 1: the Year by Public Justice. He's the author of several books,
Speaker 1: most recently the incredibly compelling Usual Cruelty. Most importantly a
Speaker 1: great follow on social media, please welcome the brilliant, the
Speaker 1: talented Alec carricotsons.
Speaker 3: Hi, everyone thinks having me back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks course, thanks for being bave you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The first time, I forget exactly what we talked about,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure there was some very stupid stories in
Speaker 1: there and we were like yeah. We were like, man,
Speaker 1: I'd like to just hear Alec talk about Alec things.
Speaker 1: And then we created a new format of episodes. Let
Speaker 1: Alec cook is what they've been saying on the discord.
Speaker 1: These are the let Alec cook episodes. Yeah, yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: thrilled to have you here, thrilled to talk to you
Speaker 1: about Usual Cruelty. Let's get to know you a little
Speaker 1: bit better. What is something sir from your search history.
Speaker 1: That's revealing about who you are.
Speaker 3: That's such a good question. So lately I've been making
Speaker 3: a lot. I make a lot of paintings in general,
Speaker 3: and lately I've been making a lot of mosaics. And
Speaker 3: I was making a bunch of mosaics from flowers that
Speaker 3: I grew and then I dried, and then I take
Speaker 3: different colors and try to make little designs. And then
Speaker 3: I tried to get a little bit more ambitious and
Speaker 3: make mosaics out of like wine corps. And so I
Speaker 3: asked a bunch of my friends family to collect wine
Speaker 3: corks for me. But but I, you know, I guess
Speaker 3: they don't drink enough, so I don't have enough wine quarks, right,
Speaker 3: And so I started searching, you know, how do you
Speaker 3: buy There's a whole market on.
Speaker 1: The internet used wine like us wineqorks.
Speaker 3: Different sizes, shapes, designs, colors a little overwhelming. So I've
Speaker 3: been googling wine corks that I can make a very
Speaker 3: large wine cork mosaic.
Speaker 2: Wait, how what's what's like the market for Lucy's what
Speaker 2: we call loose wine corks.
Speaker 3: You know, it depends on you know, the exact size
Speaker 3: and shape you know champagne corks. Do you want quarks
Speaker 3: that are stained with red wine? Do you want right,
Speaker 3: don't have a red wine stain? You want quarks that
Speaker 3: have a design on the top, design on the side.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's really kind of it's overwhelming, and you
Speaker 3: can sort of go down some rabbit holes there. But
Speaker 3: I just want, you know, some simple, straightforward wine corks
Speaker 3: that I can paint different colors.
Speaker 2: Right, right, right, yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I noticed a couple of times and usual cruelty when
Speaker 1: you're talking about things that could be funded instead of
Speaker 1: of you know, a police state and an unjust carceral system.
Speaker 1: You talk about like the arts and funding the arts
Speaker 1: and public education and for youth education. Is that something
Speaker 1: that you like? How do you keep that as a
Speaker 1: part of your life? Is that something that kind of
Speaker 1: keeps you grounded as you're dealing with some pretty real
Speaker 1: difficult subjects during the course of your work.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, When you think about, for example, do you know
Speaker 3: about hundreds of billions of dollars that this country spends
Speaker 3: on things that destroy things like bombs and fighter jets
Speaker 3: and weapons and police prisons, et cetera. Even a tiny
Speaker 3: fraction of that money could be spent giving it to
Speaker 3: people to make things, whether it's theater performances or murals, gardens, poetry, writing, film.
Speaker 3: I mean, we could be filling our society with beauty
Speaker 3: and providing hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process,
Speaker 3: all for just a tiny fraction of the money that
Speaker 3: we spend destroying things. And for me working with artists,
Speaker 3: we do a lot of work in our organization with
Speaker 3: artists who've been in prison, artists who are thinking about
Speaker 3: how to create beautiful art in their communities that documents,
Speaker 3: you know, some of the horrific things that are happening,
Speaker 3: but also some of the hope and some of the
Speaker 3: beautiful things that people are coming up with in the
Speaker 3: spheit of fighting back against these systems. And so we
Speaker 3: have an artist and a poet in residence every year
Speaker 3: in our organization who are people who've been in prison
Speaker 3: and who are now making a living as artists. And
Speaker 3: we've had exhibits in major museums across the country, and
Speaker 3: we're constantly trying to think about how do we tell
Speaker 3: the story of what's happening in the criminal punishment bureaucracy,
Speaker 3: which has a tendency to dehumanize and to become the
Speaker 3: sort of assembly line system of punishment. How do we
Speaker 3: tell stories in a really different way that reaches people,
Speaker 3: maybe in a way that lawyers can't typically do it
Speaker 3: with their legal arguments, but through art, and so art
Speaker 3: has always been a really big Music has always been
Speaker 3: a big, really big part of my life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, have you did you grow up painting or is
Speaker 1: that something that kind of came late?
Speaker 3: No, I have absolutely no skill when I say I'm
Speaker 3: a scene because I really I really shouldn't even be
Speaker 3: saying that in public. They're not. I grew up back
Speaker 3: playing the piano. Actually, I was trained as a classical
Speaker 3: pianist and doing musical theater and was never permitted to
Speaker 3: do any artwork because I was I had just absolutely
Speaker 3: no skill. But I really like making art now, and
Speaker 3: so that's kind of my hobby of choice when I
Speaker 3: get a chance, although I'm not going to be winning
Speaker 3: any art awards.
Speaker 1: Yeah, late in life getting into painting feeling like the
Speaker 1: other example that popped into my mind is is one
Speaker 1: of my favorite artists, George W. No, Bob Dylan like
Speaker 1: went through a stage in his career where he started
Speaker 1: painting and like it kind of unlocked some of the
Speaker 1: best albums of his career. And then you see his
Speaker 1: paintings from that time, they're like not, you know, they're
Speaker 1: not great. I'm sure they've sold at auction for like
Speaker 1: a lot of money before, but you know, just the
Speaker 1: act of painting seems seems to unlock things. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because you're you're quite You're like, it's another language you're using.
Speaker 1: If you're not make used to making, if you're not
Speaker 1: a visual artist, and you start doing like getting into
Speaker 1: the visual arts, you're gonna you're activating parts of your
Speaker 1: brain that you were not previously. So I can totally
Speaker 1: see how that would be super creatively stimulating. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think Blood on the Tracks was one that he talked
Speaker 1: about like painting being a big thing, like he was
Speaker 1: experimenting with new painting styles or something and that created
Speaker 1: new kind of concepts of time. Anyways, And that's not
Speaker 1: to say you are late in life, just later in
Speaker 1: life than most people start painting. I don't want to
Speaker 1: suggest you're an elderly man.
Speaker 2: No, No, we're not doing that.
Speaker 1: What is something you think is overrated?
Speaker 3: I think prisons are overrated. You know, we we have
Speaker 3: a society that's putting people in prison at rates unprecedented world.
Speaker 3: We put black people in prison six times the rate
Speaker 3: of South Africa at the height of apartheid. We put
Speaker 3: all people in prison at six times our own national
Speaker 3: average prior to nineteen eighty. And when you read the news,
Speaker 3: when you listen to the radio, you know every single
Speaker 3: social problem that our society has the solution of people
Speaker 3: in powers while we need more prisons. You know, we've
Speaker 3: got a drug use problem, We've got prisons, We've got
Speaker 3: homelessness prisons. So I think the idea that prisons are
Speaker 3: somehow connected with our safety is one of the most
Speaker 3: extraordinary myths of our modern society. And in reality, what
Speaker 3: we know from decades of empirical research is that prisons
Speaker 3: actually don't reduce crime at all, and actually slightly increased crime.
Speaker 3: And really importantly, and a lot of people don't know this,
Speaker 3: but every year in prison takes two years off a
Speaker 3: person's life expectancy. And so because the US imprisons so
Speaker 3: many people, and this is one of the most incredible
Speaker 3: statistics that no one knows, our overall life expectancy is
Speaker 3: an entire country is almost two years lower than it
Speaker 3: would be if we incartrate people the same as other
Speaker 3: comparable countries like Europe, Canada, South America, et cetera. So
Speaker 3: we're literally with prisons costing hundreds of millions of life
Speaker 3: years in our society. It's really remarkable, and so I
Speaker 3: think prisons are one of the most overrated things in
Speaker 3: our society.
Speaker 2: That's wild that that number that like, because America will
Speaker 2: never get to like eighty years old. It's as like
Speaker 2: seventy eight, seventy seven ish. That too, like we'd maybe
Speaker 2: be more in line with the UK, which is around
Speaker 2: eighty if we just weren't locking people up. And that
Speaker 2: was I didn't realize how much that was affecting life expectance.
Speaker 3: It really does for a variety of reasons. Right, people
Speaker 3: are exposed to infectious disease, they don't get medical care,
Speaker 3: they don't get nutritious food, stress, there's violence. People who
Speaker 3: grew up with parents in prison are more likely to
Speaker 3: enter the foster care system or more likely to enter
Speaker 3: the criminalsism, which then creates these cycles. And so there's
Speaker 3: a lot of mechanisms that cause it, including people can't
Speaker 3: get jobs after they get out of prison. They can
Speaker 3: so like the longer you're away, the lesser you're able
Speaker 3: to enter their workforce, you're lesser able to find stable housing.
Speaker 3: So it's really remarkable and it's not discussed very much,
Speaker 3: but it has a huge impact on all of our
Speaker 3: life expectancies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean that like you just did it there,
Speaker 1: but like something that your book and you know, following
Speaker 1: you and reading you consistently, I feel like you you
Speaker 1: do a good job of like making people see the
Speaker 1: insanity of our current system with fresh eyes. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll we'll continue digging into that. What is What's
Speaker 1: something you think is underrated?
Speaker 3: You know, I've been thinking a lot recently about David Graber,
Speaker 3: who died in during the pandemic and is one of
Speaker 3: my favorite writers and thinkers, and I think he's really underrated.
Speaker 3: A lot of people in mainstream US society don't know
Speaker 3: about David Graber, who wasn't professor at Yale, and he
Speaker 3: was sort of forced out of Yale for being too
Speaker 3: progressive and ended up teaching in the UK in London
Speaker 3: for the rest of his career. And you know, if
Speaker 3: I had to recommend one thing, super fun, short, amazing
Speaker 3: book called Utopia of Rules, which you can even read
Speaker 3: for free online, It's an incredible introduction into so many
Speaker 3: things about our society. Has everything in it, from a
Speaker 3: critique of the Batman movies, superheroes generally, to a critique
Speaker 3: of bureaucracy and capitalism and really great thoughts and ideas
Speaker 3: about how we live our lives. It's just an incredible
Speaker 3: and a brilliant book. He was one of the leading
Speaker 3: anthropologists in the world, but he used those anthropology skills
Speaker 3: to really turn his eye toward analyzing some of the
Speaker 3: ways in which our society is actually incredibly violent. And
Speaker 3: he was also really interested in the concept of play,
Speaker 3: and he was a big proponent and that people should
Speaker 3: be working less and playing a lot more. And so
Speaker 3: he has other great essays, for example, on why it
Speaker 3: is that the police hate puppets. He has really great
Speaker 3: work on why it is that animals really love to
Speaker 3: play and and why modern society is crushing the spirit
Speaker 3: of play and people. And so I think it's a
Speaker 3: really beautiful, funny, uplifting, but also very intelligent set of writing.
Speaker 3: So David Graeber is something I recommend. Its underrated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's one of my favorites. I talk about him
Speaker 1: a lot on the show that the Dawn of Everything
Speaker 1: is so great. Bullshit jobs we talked about a lot
Speaker 1: on the show, but yeah, the way The Dawn of
Speaker 1: Everything uses anthropology to like dig into like that there
Speaker 1: was that myth that like, well, even though like there
Speaker 1: are problems with modern society, you pink like pinker's a
Speaker 1: whole narrative that like when when you look before colonialism,
Speaker 1: things were a lot worse than like, everybody was way
Speaker 1: more violent, and he just like demolishes that and it's like, actually,
Speaker 1: like we're way, way worse than those And then like
Speaker 1: takes you through some of the ways that civilizations that
Speaker 1: you don't learn about in generally in American educational systems
Speaker 1: organize themselves and like really interested in some like indigenous
Speaker 1: communities and valued these things that have been completely written
Speaker 1: out of our society. And again like really makes you
Speaker 1: see the some of the assumptions that I think a
Speaker 1: lot of us take for granted on a day to
Speaker 1: day basis about the world we live in again with
Speaker 1: fresh eyes, it makes them kind of stick out to
Speaker 1: you as being as weird as they should seem to you.
Speaker 1: Why do police hate puppets? I Actually I've never read,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to immediately act on this underrated and
Speaker 1: read Utopia of Rules. I've read, you know, Bullshit Jobs
Speaker 1: and History of Debt and The Dawn of Everything, but
Speaker 1: I never read Utopia of Rules.
Speaker 3: Of those books, I think Utopia Rules is my favorite.
Speaker 3: I think it's it's his best, most concise work. So
Speaker 3: I think you're in for a treat. And Okay, the
Speaker 3: other essay you can read for free online is called
Speaker 3: on the Feminology of Giant Puppet Puppets, and it's a
Speaker 3: sort of a It has a lot of pictures in it.
Speaker 3: It's about sort of the protest culture of the early
Speaker 3: two thousands and why police always target puppets when they
Speaker 3: go to protests, and why they always try to destroy puppets,
Speaker 3: and why police officers are so infuriated by my puppets.
Speaker 3: And I don't want to give too much away, but
Speaker 3: it's also a great essay.
Speaker 1: Wow, all right, well we're going to take a break.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go read that, and we'll come back
Speaker 1: in like three hours too with our puppet continue talking
Speaker 1: about puppets. Now, we're going to take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna dig in to some of your work,
Speaker 1: and specifically the book Usual cruelty. So we'll be right
Speaker 1: back and we're back and Alec, you know, we can
Speaker 1: talk about how you're an author and a civil rights activist,
Speaker 1: but I'd be curious just to here kind of you
Speaker 1: talk about like your day to day and the ethos
Speaker 1: that drives you, Like what is your central kind of
Speaker 1: ethos that propels you and what is the work that
Speaker 1: you're kind of doing on a regular basis. He kind
Speaker 1: of talked about it a little bit with working with
Speaker 1: imprisoned people and art and some of that, but you
Speaker 1: just kind of speak to how you use your life
Speaker 1: to address some of the things that you talk about
Speaker 1: in your book.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. So I started my career after I graduated
Speaker 3: from law school as a public defender and I was
Speaker 3: representing people who were accused of crimes. I was working
Speaker 3: in Alabama at the time, and those clients of mine
Speaker 3: were people who were accused of serious crimes but couldn't
Speaker 3: afford a lawyer, so I was representing them. And that
Speaker 3: was a really incredible way to start my career because
Speaker 3: I saw up close just how senseless and ineffective and brutal,
Speaker 3: the chronal punishment pure acer she was. You know, so
Speaker 3: almost exclusively poor people who are prosecuted in our society,
Speaker 3: right about ninety percent of he'll prosecute are poor. The
Speaker 3: criminal punishment system has separated tens of millions of children
Speaker 3: from their parents in the last couple of decades in
Speaker 3: this country, with absolutely no evidence that it does any
Speaker 3: good or makes anyone any better. And so I got
Speaker 3: I eventually became a public defender martian in DC, and
Speaker 3: then in twenty thirteen I got a grant from Harvard
Speaker 3: Law School to start my own nonprofit organization that you know,
Speaker 3: use a lot of the insights that I had learned
Speaker 3: from that work as a public defender, and really was
Speaker 3: a new project for me. I was trying to not
Speaker 3: defend individual criminal cases, but to affirmatively use civil rights laws,
Speaker 3: which are really powerful. You know, we have actually like
Speaker 3: pretty decent civil rights laws on the books. We have
Speaker 3: in theory, at least in writing. We have a fairly
Speaker 3: decent constitutional protections. They are almost never obviously enforced in practice,
Speaker 3: especially for poor people people of color. But the idea was,
Speaker 3: what would it look like if we use civil rights
Speaker 3: laws affirmatively to attack mass incarceration, to attack the really
Speaker 3: profitable centers of like revenue generation in the criminal punishment system,
Speaker 3: et cetera, and really try to stop the system from
Speaker 3: metastasizing the way that it was. And so for the
Speaker 3: last ten years I've been engaged in that project, and
Speaker 3: obviously that work is really, really difficult. We've had enormous success.
Speaker 3: You know, our cases have gotten hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 3: people out of jail. You know, we've helped put the
Speaker 3: issue of the money bail system on the map. You know,
Speaker 3: in this country and the Philippines are the only two
Speaker 3: countries in the world with a for profit, multi billion
Speaker 3: dollar commercial money bail system where private corporations decide who's
Speaker 3: in jail and who's not pending trial. And that's a nasue.
Speaker 3: We've worked on a lot. We've had enormous success on
Speaker 3: many many issues, is whether it's police brutality, prosecutor misconduct,
Speaker 3: the fines and fees system, where hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 3: people are jailed every year in this country just because
Speaker 3: they can't afford to pay debts to the court from
Speaker 3: things like traffic tickets, et cetera. But you know, after
Speaker 3: all of that work, the system really hasn't changed in
Speaker 3: any kind of fundamental way. Over the last few years,
Speaker 3: we've made it, you know, a little bit less harsh.
Speaker 3: When I say we, I mean, you know, largely the
Speaker 3: people who are most impacted by the systems working in
Speaker 3: their own communities all over the country, with the assistance
Speaker 3: of sometimes you know, lawyers and organizers and others, but
Speaker 3: all of us collectively have been working on this for
Speaker 3: a long time. We've made some progress, but the fundamental
Speaker 3: architecture of the system just continues to grow. And that's because,
Speaker 3: like any big government bureaucracy, with lots of people profiting
Speaker 3: it every single turn, it's really really hard to shrink it.
Speaker 3: There's at every stage, from the moment you're arrested until
Speaker 3: the moment you walk out of the prison door after
Speaker 3: serving twenty years sentence, someone is making a profit off
Speaker 3: of every single thing that happens to you. They even
Speaker 3: got rid of in person visits at jails all over
Speaker 3: the country on the theory that if you let kids
Speaker 3: come in and hug their parents, they won't spend as
Speaker 3: much money on phone calls. And so they signed all
Speaker 3: these contracts in thousands of jails around the country to
Speaker 3: eliminate the ability of children to hug their parents because
Speaker 3: they wanted to charge higher rates and get more money
Speaker 3: for prison and jail phone and video calls. That's what
Speaker 3: we're dealing with here. Yeah, and people like, you know,
Speaker 3: the person who owns the largest for profit telecom company
Speaker 3: for jails and prisons is also the owner of the
Speaker 3: Detroit Pistons, And it's very powerful. People in our society
Speaker 3: are making hundreds of millions of dollars off of every
Speaker 3: single aspect of the system. And so every day, you know,
Speaker 3: my job looks like trying to identify new areas where
Speaker 3: people are being harmed and suffering, and meeting with families
Speaker 3: and organized and academics and researchers and other folks who
Speaker 3: care about these systems, and trying to come up with
Speaker 3: ways of solving these problems, whether it's policy solutions or
Speaker 3: sometimes a lot of time we have to sue people.
Speaker 3: We do a lot of suing people in court over
Speaker 3: their violations of people's rights. And I think the one
Speaker 3: overriding thing that keeps me going is looking at these
Speaker 3: systems and how ineffective and wasteful and fraudulent they are. Like,
Speaker 3: I'm very confident that if more people in the US
Speaker 3: really knew what was happening in their name in these systems,
Speaker 3: they would not support them. It's scandalous. You know, the
Speaker 3: amount of money that's being wasted, amount of pain that's
Speaker 3: being caused. We could very easily have a different world,
Speaker 3: and that that hope and that thought is really what
Speaker 3: keeps me going, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, brief brief footnote for people to listen to our
Speaker 1: episode on private equity because that prism phone calls and
Speaker 1: profiting off of people in prison and you know, basically
Speaker 1: their misery and their separation from families is one of
Speaker 1: the industries that private equity has come in and take over,
Speaker 1: taken over and the past couple decades. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that was one of the things that jumped out
Speaker 1: to me. Like if you sit people down and told
Speaker 1: them that stat there five hundred thousand people who are
Speaker 1: in prison tonight because they don't have enough money, like
Speaker 1: that would fuck them up. Like if you just if
Speaker 1: you told them that that was the case about like
Speaker 1: Victorian England, like you know, Oliver twist Era, like that
Speaker 1: the ninety percent of people who are arrest it can't
Speaker 1: afford a lawyer like that, you know, they'd picture a
Speaker 1: world of debtor prisons like from some other time and
Speaker 1: like ours is worse than that shit, Right, there is
Speaker 1: a broad feeling that we talk about sometimes on this
Speaker 1: show that like, young people are more leftist than past generations.
Speaker 1: Do you do you feel that, do you, like take
Speaker 1: any any hope in like the a sort of more
Speaker 1: leftward move of younger people as as they age, and
Speaker 1: as if the current generation and power ever rolling quishes power,
Speaker 1: like if they somehow don't figure out how to live forever,
Speaker 1: like the wind will eventually be at the back of
Speaker 1: people who are trying to make these changes.
Speaker 3: I have some hope for that. Obviously, we have to
Speaker 3: cling to whatever hope we can muster in a time
Speaker 3: of rising authoritarianism and ecological colaps. You know, we have
Speaker 3: to have some hope. And I do see amazing young people.
Speaker 3: I meet them every day in our work, and I
Speaker 3: see them all over the country, and they definitely are
Speaker 3: more attuned to these injustices then I was at that
Speaker 3: age than my friends were that. You know, if you
Speaker 3: look at the kinds of things that are being caught
Speaker 3: in school. I'm not talking about you know, public schools
Speaker 3: in Florida now with the Santis' new curriculum, but I mean,
Speaker 3: just in general, if you look at like the classes
Speaker 3: that are being caught at universities, community colleges, grad programs,
Speaker 3: even high schools all over the country, there's a totally
Speaker 3: new awareness to these issues of racial justice, these issues
Speaker 3: of economic justice. I see it all the time talking
Speaker 3: to hundreds of teachers across the country about their curricula.
Speaker 3: So I think, young people, if you look at some
Speaker 3: of the you know, subgenres in TikTok, you see like
Speaker 3: a lot more chatter about these issues than there was.
Speaker 3: At least this is only my anecdotal experience, but then
Speaker 3: I remember even fifteen years ago. However, like I worry
Speaker 3: that some of this stuff is really superficial. The depth
Speaker 3: of understanding these systemic injustices and the systems that cause them,
Speaker 3: and the overlaying the layers of propaganda is really difficult,
Speaker 3: deep work that requires a lot of reading, a lot
Speaker 3: of experience, a lot of critical thinking, a lot of humility.
Speaker 3: And so it's not just being able to say I
Speaker 3: hate capitalism, it's really being able to understand how it's
Speaker 3: functioning and also developing a deep personal commitment to making
Speaker 3: life better for everyone in our society that won't go
Speaker 3: away at the first sign of adversity that can be enduring,
Speaker 3: because any meaningful fight against these systems is very hard.
Speaker 3: People make it unpleasant for you, and so I think
Speaker 3: it remains to be seen whether this generation has the
Speaker 3: depth of understanding and also the fortitude to keep going.
Speaker 3: And that's why I talk to a lot of young
Speaker 3: people about the importance not only of watching videos and
Speaker 3: doing reading on your own, but getting involved with other
Speaker 3: people and building relationships and like building a set of
Speaker 3: people that you're in solidarity with and community with you
Speaker 3: can hold each other accountable, because doing this fight alone
Speaker 3: will inevitably isolate people and will inevitably make you give up.
Speaker 3: And so the only chance that I see us having
Speaker 3: is taking some of this increased energy and building lasting relationships.
Speaker 3: And that's what I try to talk to young people
Speaker 3: about all the.
Speaker 2: Time, right because I think, you know, another thing you
Speaker 2: always point out is just sort of how societally we've
Speaker 2: just become numb to what our you know, quote unquote
Speaker 2: criminal justice system is or is not in that label,
Speaker 2: and how you know, for the most part, we just
Speaker 2: aren't like in our minds like oh yeah, people are
Speaker 2: like locked up in cages Okay, what's what else is
Speaker 2: going on? But really the fact that we're not able
Speaker 2: to really sit with just the reality of that and
Speaker 2: begin to see like the humanity of that. And I
Speaker 2: know that's like a huge bridge for I think a
Speaker 2: lot of people to cross. And to your point, like
Speaker 2: it's not enough about saying like, well, I don't like
Speaker 2: capitalism too, it's like, can you see all of these
Speaker 2: relationships manifesting in front of you? Because especially like over
Speaker 2: the last few years, with so much talk about public
Speaker 2: safety or crime and things like that, I think we
Speaker 2: have so many things we have to begin to redefine
Speaker 2: as what they are, Like is crime the idea that
Speaker 2: there are just evil people out there who want to
Speaker 2: fuck shit up? Or is it the fact that these
Speaker 2: are the society societal failures that are manifesting in certain
Speaker 2: you know, certain behaviors or people having to do things
Speaker 2: like survival crime or things like that, and understanding, well,
Speaker 2: where what are the like what actually makes us safe?
Speaker 2: Because I think right now the default is well, put
Speaker 2: this put the scary poor people in fucking jail. Like
Speaker 2: that's and it just sort of our thinking ends there
Speaker 2: without really trying to grapple with like this idea of
Speaker 2: what is the system built for because it ain't justice,
Speaker 2: and then then diving into that reality, like what do
Speaker 2: you think, what are the what are the like I
Speaker 2: think important steps I guess for someone to begin to
Speaker 2: embrace that redefinition because I think that's something that people
Speaker 2: get scared of, because I think, well, then there's no jail,
Speaker 2: then I'm not safe. And you know, like we have
Speaker 2: all these just sort of cliches that immediately kill like
Speaker 2: our ability to analyze it any deeper. Like, what what
Speaker 2: I guess for you and your work, how have you
Speaker 2: been able to really present these ideas for people to
Speaker 2: like what is the process of being able to fully
Speaker 2: embrace or becoming more sensitive to the humanity of it
Speaker 2: all and knowing what to do next?
Speaker 1: You're programming people who are part of the cult of
Speaker 1: the New York Times's what's your message?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, first, don't read the New York Times. It's
Speaker 3: the first step. I'll just say. I've been thinking about
Speaker 3: this a lot because I just agreed to write another
Speaker 3: book on copaganda and the way in which it changes
Speaker 3: how all of us think about safety and about how
Speaker 3: to create safety. I think a first step, Miles is
Speaker 3: like learning a little bit about like how the system's
Speaker 3: actually functioning right now. So you know, for example, only
Speaker 3: four percent all police time is spent on what the
Speaker 3: police call violent crime. So you know, over the last
Speaker 3: few years in this country, the police have chosen to
Speaker 3: arrest more people from marijuana possessions than all violent crime combined.
Speaker 3: Police and prosecutors virtually ignore completely things like wage step
Speaker 3: packs of Asian corporate fraud. Right, These cause orders of
Speaker 3: magnitude more harm than all their property crime combined. These
Speaker 3: are the kind of things that lead to hundreds of
Speaker 3: thousands of people dying through poverty, through eviction, through lost jobs, etc.
Speaker 3: Et cetera. Same thing with illegal dumping of chemicals in
Speaker 3: the water in the air. I mean one hundred thousand
Speaker 3: people die every year in this country because of air pollution.
Speaker 3: That's five times the number of homicides combined. So we
Speaker 3: need to think about questions like, well, what are police
Speaker 3: spending their time on, right, Like, if you've got a
Speaker 3: force that chooses to arrest people for drug possession instead
Speaker 3: of testing rape kits right, that hardly ever investigates or
Speaker 3: arrest people for sexual assault, doesn't do undercover operations to
Speaker 3: uncover sexual assault, right, you know, cross and this is
Speaker 3: the kind of thing I talk about usual cruelty. I
Speaker 3: give hundreds of examples like this, along with data and
Speaker 3: evidence to back them up. But the first step I
Speaker 3: think is understanding that although in the second half of
Speaker 3: the twentieth century we started to be told that the
Speaker 3: system of policing and punishment was to keep us safe,
Speaker 3: actually those systems were never developed to lead to holistic safety, right.
Speaker 3: And if more policing and prisons and punishment made us safe,
Speaker 3: the US would be the safest society in the world
Speaker 3: because nobody else even comes close. But we're not the
Speaker 3: safest society in the world. We have lots of violence, right.
Speaker 3: And so one of the key things to understand is
Speaker 3: this system is not designed for safety or for justice,
Speaker 3: but it is extremely profitable and beneficial. So, for example,
Speaker 3: if you're someone who benefits from inequality in our society,
Speaker 3: you might like a system that arrests and jails people
Speaker 3: who are homeless rather than builds new housing for them, right,
Speaker 3: or ensures that our society is more equal distribution of land.
Speaker 3: So I think these are like fundamental social problems that
Speaker 3: when you when you stop to think about it, it's
Speaker 3: common sense that like things like crime are much more
Speaker 3: a function of poverty and inequality, lack of access to housing,
Speaker 3: lack of access to medical care. We know that, for example,
Speaker 3: one of the most important things in predicting future crime
Speaker 3: is investment in early childhood education. All of these things
Speaker 3: dwarf any impact that like a prosecutor or a police
Speaker 3: officer have on crime. So the first step I would
Speaker 3: say to answer your question is really like deepening our
Speaker 3: understanding of what do these systems do and why do
Speaker 3: we have them? And from there, I think you can
Speaker 3: start to think about, well, what are some of the
Speaker 3: ways in other countries, other societies, certain places even in
Speaker 3: the US are actually adopting really different strategies to safety.
Speaker 3: They're actually much more effective than these systems of punishment
Speaker 3: and pain that so much of the US isn't obsessed with.
Speaker 2: Right, It's like, objectively, you can, like, I think the
Speaker 2: most compelling thing that I always tell people who are like,
Speaker 2: you know, not really thinking about this kind of shit
Speaker 2: is just positing to them for how much money is spent?
Speaker 2: Do you think like that's like this experiment is working
Speaker 2: for the what near trillions of dollars that have been
Speaker 2: spent on this, you know, this our form of crime
Speaker 2: and punishment. It's not born out in the results at all.
Speaker 2: It's just created an entire industry where people are profiting.
Speaker 2: So in that sense, like you're like, well, it's an
Speaker 2: l because you're not showing me anything that shows that
Speaker 2: the money spent is there. The return comes in the
Speaker 2: form of safety or lower crime, and that's like, you know,
Speaker 2: that's usually like the one thing that you're like, well then,
Speaker 2: and what do you say to that? And most people
Speaker 2: are like, well, I don't know, it's just like probably
Speaker 2: tough for whatever. It's like, no, it's cause it's not.
Speaker 2: It's not designed to do that. Like look how many people,
Speaker 2: like people you know who are cops who brag about
Speaker 2: the overtime they get and then what their pensions look like,
Speaker 2: and they're like it's fucking sweet dude, Like I'm getting
Speaker 2: paid like six figures forever, like and that's it. It's
Speaker 2: not because I have I have any interest in doing,
Speaker 2: you know, about public safety, but because it's an arena
Speaker 2: that allows me to exercise absolute power and I get
Speaker 2: paid really handsomely for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just broadly, they're there's some anecdotes about the
Speaker 1: shocking lack of accountability and lack of an appetite for
Speaker 1: statistical you know, evidence that like these methods that they've
Speaker 1: been using for a long time actually work, and you
Speaker 1: talk about like that there are forensic methods that were
Speaker 1: determined to be like scientifically fraudulent that the police like
Speaker 1: kept kept using for like forever, like they kept using
Speaker 1: them just because nobody's paying attention to whether the current
Speaker 1: system works and just talking about like, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Another detail that you bring up usual cruelty that made
Speaker 1: me see kind of this current system a little bit
Speaker 1: more clearly is I've never seen the war on drugs.
Speaker 1: You know, the rise of the quote unquot war on
Speaker 1: drugs and this investment in just out of control aggressive
Speaker 1: caging of black bodies, and you know that next to
Speaker 1: the backing away from prosecuting white collar crime and like that,
Speaker 1: there was this two part movement like starting kind of
Speaker 1: in the eighties with Reagan where suddenly they stopped holding
Speaker 1: corporations and you know, white collar people responsible. And we
Speaker 1: saw the result of that, or the culmination of that,
Speaker 1: I guess in the two thousand and eight economic crisis,
Speaker 1: where it was just you know, fraud on a massive
Speaker 1: scale that is costing everyone in America so much money
Speaker 1: and nobody is held accountable, right, and that is happening
Speaker 1: at the same time that they've decided to start caging
Speaker 1: other people for drug crimes, like crimes that you know,
Speaker 1: it's been shown against bally that this doesn't make anyone
Speaker 1: safer from drugs.
Speaker 3: It's not really happening at the same time, but it's
Speaker 3: part of the same plan. Yeah, you know, the administrations
Speaker 3: of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, they all made and then Bush too,
Speaker 3: they all made explicit decisions to transfer like literally jobs
Speaker 3: away from things like antitrust, white collar crime, et cetera,
Speaker 3: to the DEA, to FBI terrorism and drug like. So, like,
Speaker 3: one of the things people don't really appreciate is police
Speaker 3: prosecutors only investigate and look for some crimes committed by
Speaker 3: some people some of the time, and the things that
Speaker 3: come into the criminal punishment bureaucracy are the things that
Speaker 3: they decide to look for. So if you take away
Speaker 3: we have several hundred fewer people in the Anti Trust
Speaker 3: Division than we did in nineteen seventy nine. So if
Speaker 3: you take away hundreds of people that look for anti
Speaker 3: trust violations by companies, and you give those people a
Speaker 3: new job saying we want you to look for drug
Speaker 3: crimes committed by poor people and immigrants, and you're going
Speaker 3: to start prosecuting a lot more people because those are
Speaker 3: the cases that are brought into the system. It's the
Speaker 3: same thing with local police. If you say to local police,
Speaker 3: we're going to give you financial incentives to set up
Speaker 3: a checkpoint in poor neighborhoods to pull over cars and
Speaker 3: search for drugs, instead of we're going to give you
Speaker 3: money to test rape kits from sexual assault survivors. You're
Speaker 3: going to start prostituting a lot more drug offenses than
Speaker 3: you are rape cases. And that's exactly what we've seen
Speaker 3: across the white collar spectrum in the US over the
Speaker 3: last thirty or forty years. Just you can be very
Speaker 3: very safe if you're a white collar potential criminal, be
Speaker 3: very safe in knowing that you're very very unlikely to
Speaker 3: get caught because we just are not investing the sort
Speaker 3: of resources into looking for those crimes. That's why we
Speaker 3: have over one trillion dollars in IRS estimated tax evasion
Speaker 3: by wealthy people every year in the US. I mean
Speaker 3: that is to put that in perspective, that's about one
Speaker 3: hundred times all other property crime combined. And when you
Speaker 3: hear in the news every day about these waves of
Speaker 3: shoplifting and organized retail theft, it's pales in comparison to
Speaker 3: the kind of crimes that the wealthy people are engaged
Speaker 3: in without anyone paying attention to it.
Speaker 2: Well, I will hold on alec because I feel like,
Speaker 2: if you did the math on thirty math books stolen
Speaker 2: from an Apple store, it probably comes out to like
Speaker 2: a trillion dollars. I would like to check the math.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean think of poor
Speaker 2: cvs too, obviously, And you know that's actually funny. That
Speaker 2: was I think one of the last things we did
Speaker 2: talk about when you came on the show, because the
Speaker 2: fucking idea of again these like these sort of media
Speaker 2: fed narratives that are purposefully kept to obscure our understanding
Speaker 2: of the horror or and the inhumanity of you know,
Speaker 2: this criminal punishment bureaucracy. Great phrase. I like that, like,
Speaker 2: and I guess does that I'm imagining. That's why a
Speaker 2: lot of you, you're a lot of you have a
Speaker 2: lot of smoke for The New York Times too, because
Speaker 2: every time like we're like I was like, oh, Alex
Speaker 2: got another fire thread against the New York Times, Like
Speaker 2: I got to open this.
Speaker 3: I'm sure.
Speaker 2: I'm sure because for you, you see that as part
Speaker 2: of one of the barriers for our ability to become
Speaker 2: more sensitive right to what the scenarios and situations are
Speaker 2: around us.
Speaker 3: Obviously, the New York Post and Fox News and a
Speaker 3: lot of the sort of right wing radio they're horrible
Speaker 3: on these issues as well, and they spew misinformation and lies,
Speaker 3: and it's all Willie Horton's style, you know, misinformation, But
Speaker 3: like that's less interesting to me, and and and and
Speaker 3: it's much more overtly nefarious. And I think a lot
Speaker 3: of like well intentioned people can easily see through at
Speaker 3: this point some of the propaganda undo that Fox News
Speaker 3: is spewing, right, and that's kind of widely understood. But
Speaker 3: ideologically what's so fascinating and so damaging and so harmful
Speaker 3: is that a lot of like, you know, self conscious
Speaker 3: liberals or self described liberals, I should say, people who
Speaker 3: think of themselves or who want to think of themselves
Speaker 3: as progressive. You know, they're consuming these these news sources
Speaker 3: like NPR, the New York Times, the Atlantic that in
Speaker 3: many respects are spewing almost exactly the same authoritarian ideology,
Speaker 3: many of the same underlying assumptions, but those news sources
Speaker 3: have adopted like an air of sophistication, slightly different tone,
Speaker 3: slightly different words that are catered at their more liberal audience.
Speaker 3: And so I think it's more interesting and potentially more
Speaker 3: you know, better use of my time rather than pointing
Speaker 3: out how every Fox News article is racist and is
Speaker 3: trying to you know, increase the profits of the bail
Speaker 3: industry whatever it is, pointing out how these these outlets
Speaker 3: that are seen as more prestigious, more liberal, more balanced,
Speaker 3: more objective, are actually doing many of the same things
Speaker 3: in a more sophisticated way that's harder to see for
Speaker 3: a lot of well meeting people. And that's why I've
Speaker 3: focused a lot on New York Times in particular. That's
Speaker 3: why I find the Washington Post and pr MSNBC, CNN,
Speaker 3: you know, all these outlets that are doing a lot
Speaker 3: of the same right wing propaganda but under the guise
Speaker 3: of like objective even progressive news as being more harmful.
Speaker 3: And that's why I've focused on them a lot more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's take a quick break. We'll come back and
Speaker 1: continue talking about that. And we're back. And I thought
Speaker 1: a couple of times during reading the book of the
Speaker 1: Mitchell and Web sketch where like the one Nazi turns
Speaker 1: to the other Nazi and like they're both wearing like
Speaker 1: fucking skulls on all their uniforms and he's like, wait,
Speaker 1: are we the baddies? Like are we? Are we the
Speaker 1: bad guys? And just like no nobody can read this
Speaker 1: book and not come to that same conclusion. But I
Speaker 1: think what we're talking about with regards to the New
Speaker 1: York Times and NPR, and you know that that is
Speaker 1: sort of the edifice and like sort of the barrier
Speaker 1: that is put in between people looking in the mirror,
Speaker 1: looking at each other and being like, wait, are we
Speaker 1: the bad guys? So I'd love to kind of continue
Speaker 1: talking about like what what are some like watch words
Speaker 1: or just things that you see, Like you talk about
Speaker 1: how you your alarms go off when you see criminal
Speaker 1: justice reform as as a concept, or just like that
Speaker 1: phrase is like because it usually means that there's going
Speaker 1: to be more investment in prison and in the systems
Speaker 1: that jail people and police people but can you just
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about like what you are
Speaker 1: looking for when you read the New York Times or
Speaker 1: the Washington Post or you know, some of these liberal
Speaker 1: quote unquote l let's.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, first of all, I love that Mitchell and
Speaker 3: Web sketch. It's great. It's so funny, and it does
Speaker 3: really capture a lot of how I feel when I
Speaker 3: look at The New York Times. I think that, you know,
Speaker 3: first of all, obviously these these mainstream news outlets curate
Speaker 3: the kinds of issues they talk about. So you know,
Speaker 3: you see a ton of articles about retail theft, for example,
Speaker 3: but like rarely an article about wage theft or or
Speaker 3: building safety code violations or illegal dumping of chemicals. So
Speaker 3: that's obvious, right. So they also do something I think
Speaker 3: really in the very which is they kind of make
Speaker 3: us think through the way they like tell their stories,
Speaker 3: through which stories they tell, through who they interview in
Speaker 3: these stories and who they don't interview, what perspectives they include,
Speaker 3: what perspectives they don't, what background context they choose to
Speaker 3: provide versus choose to omit. They make us assume and
Speaker 3: think that these that the punishment bureaucracy is like acting
Speaker 3: in good faith, that it's like genuinely there to make
Speaker 3: us safe, that it's that the people who run it
Speaker 3: are trying their best to figure out these complex and
Speaker 3: difficult questions.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's like they'll have an article about homelessness, for example,
Speaker 3: and the entire time they won't mention inequality or capitalism
Speaker 3: or real estate developers or anything like that. It's all about,
Speaker 3: you know, how do people feel about seeing a homeless
Speaker 3: person on the subway or what is how many police
Speaker 3: is Eric Adam's going to send into the subway in
Speaker 3: New York to deal with homelessness. So the entire article
Speaker 3: is sort of framed as like, well, the only options
Speaker 3: our society has are these government bureaucrats who are going
Speaker 3: to punish people into having housing, and so they an
Speaker 3: article after article, issue after issue. They make it seem
Speaker 3: like the only solution to these problems are more police,
Speaker 3: prosecutors in prison. And then there's a whole other category
Speaker 3: of article, which I think maybe more what you're getting
Speaker 3: at with your question, which is like, sometimes the injustices
Speaker 3: and the brutality and the violence of this system becomes
Speaker 3: too much for them to ignore, so they usually ignore it.
Speaker 3: Every day. But sometimes, like with the murder of George Floyd,
Speaker 3: the murder Eric Garner, the murder of Breonna Taylor, right,
Speaker 3: it's impossible for them to ignore because something really horrific
Speaker 3: has been captured in a way that captures the public imagination.
Speaker 3: And you know, the murder of Tyree Nichols and Memphis
Speaker 3: is a really good example of this with the New
Speaker 3: York Times coverage that I wrote about. But what you
Speaker 3: see in those moments is a mobilization of copaganda that
Speaker 3: tries to get the well meaning reader, the people who
Speaker 3: don't want to live in a society of rampant police violence,
Speaker 3: of rampant racial injustice, to think that, well, something is
Speaker 3: being done about that, right, So they trot out all
Speaker 3: of these experts and all of these things, these these
Speaker 3: want these sort of these catchphrases like accountability and community policing. Right,
Speaker 3: They never defined those terms. They never bring on any
Speaker 3: experts who say, did you know that in every major
Speaker 3: instance of police violence is nineteen thirty. Immediately afterward they
Speaker 3: started talking about the need for better training, more accountability,
Speaker 3: better technology for the police. And every single time over
Speaker 3: the last one hundred years, after police violence, the police
Speaker 3: have been given more resources, more training, more weapons, Right,
Speaker 3: has it ever made police less violent? No? I mean,
Speaker 3: after all the conversations about George Floyd in twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: US police killed more people in twenty twenty one than
Speaker 3: they did in twenty twenty and then they killed even
Speaker 3: more people in twenty twenty two than they killed in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one. And so what I wrote about a
Speaker 3: lot in a series on my Substack, which is going
Speaker 3: to be in The Cop Again in the book, is
Speaker 3: an analysis of how does the punishment bureaucracy use its
Speaker 3: own failure under the guise of reform to actually increase
Speaker 3: its own budgets. I think the best possible example of
Speaker 3: this is body cameras. So body cameras are now trotted
Speaker 3: out as like the reform that everyone loves for illegal policing.
Speaker 3: But what a lot of people don't understand is that
Speaker 3: for many years, the police and the multi billion dollar
Speaker 3: companies that produce the body cameras and the facial recognition
Speaker 3: software and the cloud computing databases that they rely on,
Speaker 3: they actually wanted to get every cop in the country
Speaker 3: a mobile surveillance camera that the cops themselves controlled. But
Speaker 3: they couldn't figure out how to get liberals in control
Speaker 3: of local governments to pay for them. There's billions of dollars, right,
Speaker 3: so what do they do. They came up with a
Speaker 3: marketing strategy. After Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson, they came
Speaker 3: up with the marketing strateg to say, well, we need
Speaker 3: body cameras as a method of a police accountability. It's
Speaker 3: no longer about surveillance and increasing police control and et cetera.
Speaker 3: And the real reason they wanted them, you know, the
Speaker 3: biggest reason they wanted them was that since police control
Speaker 3: of videos, they can use it. It's a much better
Speaker 3: form of evidence for prosecutors and police to coerce people
Speaker 3: to play guilty more quickly. So they turned this tool
Speaker 3: of surveillance that they all wanted but couldn't pay for
Speaker 3: into a tool of reform and then got all the
Speaker 3: money they needed. And that, to me is one of
Speaker 3: the most insidious roles of the media in the aftermath
Speaker 3: of so you know, another great examples of The York
Speaker 3: Times is when they did the summary of all the
Speaker 3: George Floyd protests. They wrote these series of articles about
Speaker 3: how every major review in every major city had found
Speaker 3: that the police engaged in widespread brutality and illegal, illegal
Speaker 3: suppression of the protests. They were beating people, they were
Speaker 3: pepper spring people, they were using chemical weapons, they were
Speaker 3: using tanks and batons, they're hitting journalists, they're running over
Speaker 3: their cars, et cetera. And the Times concluded that this
Speaker 3: was because they were unprepared and lacked training, and they
Speaker 3: lacked proper technology, and they didn't have enough intelligence to
Speaker 3: be tracking the protest leaders in the advance. So the
Speaker 3: Times framed what was in actuality a highly coordinated, consistent,
Speaker 3: very well trained police response. If the purpose of the
Speaker 3: response was to squelch descent and repress so social movement,
Speaker 3: they made it seem like police were just hapless and
Speaker 3: with a little bit more money for better training and
Speaker 3: more money for intelligence divisions so they could infiltrate social
Speaker 3: movement groups, police would have been better. And so framing
Speaker 3: the whole problem as one of actually police needing more
Speaker 3: training and more resources is I think one of the
Speaker 3: most insidious and nefarious roles that the mainstream corporate media
Speaker 3: has played in our understanding of what the real problems are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you talked about a quote from you use
Speaker 1: a quote from Fucau about just how reform has always
Speaker 1: been a part of the prison system. That's just a
Speaker 1: way that it feeds itself. Essentially, is having that two
Speaker 1: way conversation where it's like, oh, we got to reform
Speaker 1: and suck in more resources to just kind of continue
Speaker 1: building out right.
Speaker 3: I highly recommend the book Walls and Bars by Eugene Debs.
Speaker 3: It's a really amazing It's a memoir that he wrote
Speaker 3: in the nineteen twenties when he was in federal prison.
Speaker 3: He actually ran for president, got over a million votes
Speaker 3: from prison. He was imprisoned on you know, ludicrous charges
Speaker 3: that obviously by lead the First Amendment for his anti
Speaker 3: war advocacy and other sort of union organizing activities. But
Speaker 3: the whole book he's making points just like the ones
Speaker 3: I'm making right now. I mean, he's talking about this
Speaker 3: over one hundred, you know, about one hundred years ago,
Speaker 3: and it's remarkable to see how the system responded to
Speaker 3: him and how the prison system grew after that, right,
Speaker 3: and and how we're making the same points about the
Speaker 3: It's I think very review. When you read something like that,
Speaker 3: you can see we're not stuck in a prop way.
Speaker 3: It's not like we don't know the solutions. It's not
Speaker 3: like we're dealing with something new here. These systems have
Speaker 3: been doing this for a long time.
Speaker 2: Right, And you know, I think because a lot of
Speaker 2: the times, you know, as we all look at this
Speaker 2: and we're more and more people become interested in the
Speaker 2: idea of you know, what what liberation looks like. I
Speaker 2: really like the points that you make about how like,
Speaker 2: while there's no like just sort of magic solved to it,
Speaker 2: one part is about creating enough of a tipping point
Speaker 2: in terms of like mass movement for our courts and
Speaker 2: our politicians to respond to because without without a show
Speaker 2: of power from people, especially the ones that are most affected,
Speaker 2: it takes a long time. Obviously, it takes decades for
Speaker 2: the Supreme Court to respond to anything, or you know,
Speaker 2: politicians because they're more like, yeah, what's the status quo,
Speaker 2: We'll reinforce that, great, what's the next case, versus seeing like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's this many people who think everything is absolutely backwards.
Speaker 2: Maybe we do need to consider that. What for you,
Speaker 2: I know you've you've talked about the importance of connection,
Speaker 2: but you know, for as we look towards something a
Speaker 2: little more just something more equitable. What are those steps
Speaker 2: that you feel are the most potent things that you
Speaker 2: know we can kind of put to the front of
Speaker 2: our mind to understand. Well, I don't want to be
Speaker 2: obviously I'm not a lawyer or part of the you know,
Speaker 2: quote unquote legal system in a formal way. But how
Speaker 2: do I, as a conscious person contribute or put my
Speaker 2: head in the right space to know, Okay, this is
Speaker 2: how we move forward, and this is the way we
Speaker 2: need to all be moving.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in any communities are places you see a different approach,
Speaker 1: like Miles describing kind of working that you wish got
Speaker 1: more attention.
Speaker 3: I think there's so many different ways people get involved,
Speaker 3: and people with different skills can get involved in different ways.
Speaker 3: If you're a coder, you know, if you're a lawyer,
Speaker 3: if you're member of a church, if you're a writer,
Speaker 3: if you're a web designer. I mean, there's so many
Speaker 3: places that like basically anyone with any skills can plug in.
Speaker 3: And so I encourage you to like figure out like
Speaker 3: who in your local community is working on, you know,
Speaker 3: reducing the size and power of the punishment bureaucracy, who's
Speaker 3: trying to close a jail, Who's trying to prevent a
Speaker 3: jail from getting built. Who's trying to reduce the police
Speaker 3: budget and to get more money invested in alternative first
Speaker 3: responders and mental health care and housing. Who's organizing tenants,
Speaker 3: who's building work around co ops. We need to be
Speaker 3: building the mechanisms through which all of us will connect
Speaker 3: and form stronger relationships and bonds. So I'm really if
Speaker 3: you're interested in the criminal system, I'm really interested in
Speaker 3: the growing movement of court watching. There's lots of groups
Speaker 3: in different cities across the country, whether it's the DC
Speaker 3: area where I am, or Pittsburgh where I grew up,
Speaker 3: or Los Angeles where we have our big case challenging
Speaker 3: the money bail system. Because court watch programs are literally
Speaker 3: anyone and my mom did this when she retired, can
Speaker 3: sign up and to start watching court and documenting what
Speaker 3: the wh and prosecutors are doing and then reporting those
Speaker 3: in groups of people that you other sort of volunteers. Right,
Speaker 3: There's all kinds of things that flow from that. There's
Speaker 3: getting involved in a local bail fund. There's running for
Speaker 3: local library board or the water board, or there's so
Speaker 3: many different things that actually, like conservatives have mobilized for
Speaker 3: and are therefore in charge of the utility commissions in
Speaker 3: a lot of different places, et cetera. And like, this
Speaker 3: is an enormous consequences for the climate movement. This is
Speaker 3: enormous consequences of a lot of these. You know, Houston
Speaker 3: just decided, for example, the school board to fire a
Speaker 3: bunch of librarians and replace the school libraries with disciplinary
Speaker 3: centers for punishing kids. Right, these are things that like
Speaker 3: people in their local community need to be organizing against
Speaker 3: and rising up and fighting. And so get together with
Speaker 3: your neighbors, do a reading group, learn about some of
Speaker 3: these issues, figure out who's already doing the work in
Speaker 3: your area, ask them how you can get involved and
Speaker 3: plug in. Like there's no one size fits all answer,
Speaker 3: but that the one thing I will say is like
Speaker 3: you have to be in, not involved, in organizing your
Speaker 3: local community around something, then you should get involved, because
Speaker 3: we're never going to win these things unless we actually
Speaker 3: and you know, it's sometimes it's not the most glamorous work,
Speaker 3: it's not the most thrilling stuff, right, but like, unless
Speaker 3: we participate and fight, we're going to lose any semblance
Speaker 3: of democratic life, and we're gonna have fully authoritarian society before.
Speaker 2: We know it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Alec, such a pleasure having you. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is kind of why we started doing these deep
Speaker 1: dive episodes. And you know, having you on to talk
Speaker 1: about this didn't disappoint. Where can people find you? Follow you,
Speaker 1: read you all that good stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you can follow me on Twitter at Equality Alec.
Speaker 3: That's my name on very social media, although I've only
Speaker 3: ever posted once on Instagram.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: Thousand pages, it's yeah.
Speaker 3: I just start posting some of my mosaics. People can
Speaker 3: laugh at me. I think that. You know, I wrote
Speaker 3: a newsletter on Substack called Alex Copaganda Newsletter, which I'm
Speaker 3: going to be turning into the Copaganda Books. So keep
Speaker 3: your eyes out next year for the Copaganda Book. And
Speaker 3: in the meantime, you know, you can also follow the
Speaker 3: work of Civil Rights Core, which is at civ Rights
Speaker 3: Core on Twitter and Instagram and it's a really amazing organization.
Speaker 1: Amazing And is there a work of media that you've
Speaker 1: been enjoying?
Speaker 3: You know, this last week I've been looking at some
Speaker 3: of the old Tornado O'Connor performances and thinking a lot
Speaker 3: about I had never really been a fan of her, music.
Speaker 3: I just I just wasn't I don't know. It was
Speaker 3: something I kind of kind of missed, and the courage
Speaker 3: that she displayed. It's so rare to have someone that
Speaker 3: prominent make the kind of sacrifices that she made for
Speaker 3: the things that she believed in. You know that that
Speaker 3: Saturday Night, there's a tweet circulating with that video of
Speaker 3: Tim Robbins introducing her on Saturday Night Live and then
Speaker 3: her tearing up the photo of the Pope. You know,
Speaker 3: that was an act of courer. It's hard for people
Speaker 3: in this country to understand what that meant in Ireland
Speaker 3: at the time, in the early nineties, and I'm just
Speaker 3: I just I marvel at the lack of courage. You know,
Speaker 3: the NBA players, for example, can't even get their act
Speaker 3: together to condemn Tom Gores for making hundreds of millions
Speaker 3: of dollars off black children by ending the right to
Speaker 3: hug their parents in jails right right. The level of
Speaker 3: removal of many prominent people in this country from the
Speaker 3: extraordinary injustices of our time is really profoundly depressing. And
Speaker 3: I've been really encouraged by just watching her and thinking
Speaker 3: about how inspiring it was that she did that, and
Speaker 3: all the pain and sacrifices she made that accompanied it,
Speaker 3: So I think it's worth honoring that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it cost her everything, you know, in a time
Speaker 2: when you're making a point that now is sort of
Speaker 2: a normal, valid criticism that we think now it's like yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: of course, yeah, there are bad things going on with
Speaker 2: the Catholic Church, Whereas back then, I mean, like who
Speaker 2: was it Joe Peshi or someone or well, I forget
Speaker 2: one of these people can't like I can't believe she
Speaker 2: did that crap or whatever at the time, because yeah,
Speaker 2: we weren't willing to like look at some of these
Speaker 2: issues with these sort of objectivity it deserves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Miles, how about you? Where can people find you
Speaker 1: as their working media?
Speaker 2: You've been enjoying Yeah, Twitter, Instagram, threads, wherever at Miles
Speaker 2: of Gray. Check out my new podcast, The Good Thief,
Speaker 2: talking about the Greek robin hood Vasilis Palio Costas. It's
Speaker 2: a really dope show. We're talking about somebody who is,
Speaker 2: you know, doing some good old fashioned wealth redistribution. And
Speaker 2: also with Jack and I got the basketball podcast Miles
Speaker 2: and Jack out Man boost Ees and for twenty Day fiance.
Speaker 2: If you like hearing about trash reality shows tweet I
Speaker 2: like it's from at Equality Alec. The tweet is for
Speaker 2: each dollar stolen in shoplifting, there's at least five dollars
Speaker 2: in wage theft and one hundred dollars in tax evasion.
Speaker 2: Have you ever heard about a wage theft or tax
Speaker 2: evasion quote crime wave? What do you think this tells
Speaker 2: you about how reporters determine what is quote news and
Speaker 2: what is ignored and who benefits? And I think it's
Speaker 2: just the kind of shit we need to keep it
Speaker 2: in the front of our mind when we say what
Speaker 2: is crime exactly?
Speaker 1: Who are the bad kish?
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore O'Brien
Speaker 1: and on threads at Jack Underscore, Oh underscore Brian tweet
Speaker 1: I've been enjoying you know, Aleck, you almost had it,
Speaker 1: but I gotta go with at smooth Dunk, who tweeted
Speaker 1: I am become death. Oh really, Oppenheimer? Do you also
Speaker 1: has cheeseburger? You two thousand and seven mean sounding motherfucker?
Speaker 1: And I just enjoyed that so almost went with one.
Speaker 1: I had to go done with it. You can find
Speaker 1: us on Twitter at daily Zeikeeist. We're at d daily
Speaker 1: Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have Facebook fan page and a
Speaker 1: website Daily zeikeeist dot com where we post our episodes
Speaker 1: and our footnotes. We'll link off to the information that
Speaker 1: we talked about in today's episode, as well as a
Speaker 1: song that we think you might enjoy. Myles, what song
Speaker 1: do you think people know?
Speaker 2: It's a track called Nebulous Tango, which feels like an
Speaker 2: appropriate track name for today's topic. But it's by the
Speaker 2: artist Heather h E t h e R. And I
Speaker 2: believe they're like a producer, but the it's like a
Speaker 2: minute track but really really dope instrumental. You know how
Speaker 2: I get down this is. It's a it's a next
Speaker 2: Snapper but it's a one minute banger, So just check
Speaker 2: it out. Nebulous Tango by Heather H g E t
Speaker 2: h e R.
Speaker 1: All right, we will link off to that in the footnotes.
Speaker 1: The Daily Guys is the production of iHeart Radio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: That is going to do it for us this morning,
Speaker 1: back this afternoon to tell you what is trending and
Speaker 1: we will talk to you all that fight.
Speaker 2: Bye.