Speaker 1: Also media, Ah, what's probably I feel like saying something
Speaker 1: about what happened in Baltimore, but there's really no respectful
Speaker 1: way to do that. The fucked up though, right it.
Speaker 2: Seems that way people. Yeah, you see that Twitter is
Speaker 2: already blaming DDI.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would have stapped the boat from shorting out from.
Speaker 2: Yeah, having a fucking blackout.
Speaker 1: Well, they're obsessed. It's also shows none of them understand
Speaker 1: how fucking container ships work, because they're all like, look
Speaker 1: because the they had like a DEI captain aboard this
Speaker 1: mask vessel. Marisk has a DEI program. No one from
Speaker 1: Marisk was piloting the ship. They're never allowed to in
Speaker 1: a harbor's it's never a pilot who works for the
Speaker 1: company anyway.
Speaker 3: Whatever, I still think it's batshit that like, for hours
Speaker 3: and hours after this happened, that like National News wasn't
Speaker 3: covering it at all, they had like, yeah, they had
Speaker 3: like two dollars trust every journalist, commemorative commercials going on.
Speaker 3: They had just like the stupidest interviews.
Speaker 1: Like why why did we need.
Speaker 3: One on one with Alf Franken in the middle of this,
Speaker 3: and like that's why we still use fucking Twitter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is it's all bad. I do think you
Speaker 1: could get a job doing that, Dave. But you've got
Speaker 1: to lay in on the DEI stuff, you know, be like,
Speaker 1: are you do you have any Daves? You know, Dave,
Speaker 1: equity and inclusion. You got to put some Dave's on
Speaker 1: the team.
Speaker 2: Equity and inclusion. Yeah, I'm going to push that now.
Speaker 2: I'm going to put that on my resume.
Speaker 1: Now. I definitely have this is behind the Bastards. I
Speaker 1: don't think I introduced the podcast that this is. That's
Speaker 1: what you did. And David Bell's here again, and David
Speaker 1: Bell's here again. Yeah, Dave, speaking of this. You you
Speaker 1: in your writing for Some More News. You also help
Speaker 1: on a podcast network called Gamefully Unemployed. You to do
Speaker 1: a lot of great stuff, including chronicle Fox Molders, baffling
Speaker 1: career decisions in the X Files. But a big part
Speaker 1: of what you do for Some More News is research
Speaker 1: the increasing right word veeer of our society and the
Speaker 1: growth of conspiracy culture, which relates to this whole boat
Speaker 1: problem in Baltimore as people have blamed it on DEI,
Speaker 1: and it relates to like kind of everything that's wrong
Speaker 1: with our country, this like fracturing of consensus reality that
Speaker 1: has kind of made it impossible to like fix anything.
Speaker 2: The fact that everything I would argue, and I know
Speaker 2: that conservatives would say the literally the exact same thing
Speaker 2: about the left, but I would argue that conservatives have
Speaker 2: politicized pretty much everything in the country at this point.
Speaker 1: I am literally looking at a picture of a car
Speaker 1: with Honda with Texas plates that has a dozen different
Speaker 1: bumper stickers that say variations of Helen Keller is a fraud.
Speaker 1: Helen Keller was not deaf.
Speaker 2: It's well, that's just facts problem.
Speaker 1: What was she What did she have to gain?
Speaker 2: I have a sub reddit, I'll link it to you.
Speaker 1: He's got a Denier bumper sticker. How is that a thing?
Speaker 2: Incredible? I mean, yeah, I'm not surprised. We got to
Speaker 2: a point where the CDC where a fucking pandemic happened
Speaker 2: and it was let's take some basic precautions and that
Speaker 2: became political.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's real bad. It's real bad right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, It's it's shocking how bad some stuff has gotten.
Speaker 1: And that relates to what we're talking about today, because
Speaker 1: we ended our last episode talking about the Powell Memorandum, right,
Speaker 1: which was this document that was written for the Chamber
Speaker 1: of Commerce that that a a a lawyer who is
Speaker 1: going to become a Supreme Court justice by the name
Speaker 1: of Lewis Powell, whose previous work had been fighting against
Speaker 1: d s ggregation and cheering on the bombing of Dresden,
Speaker 1: wrote this thing where he's like, we need to attack
Speaker 1: liberalism everywhere it exists, and we need to in a
Speaker 1: comprehensive method destroy it. Part of that was destroying people
Speaker 1: like Ralph Nader, who at this time was like forcing
Speaker 1: had basically done a lot to force the auto industry
Speaker 1: to add basic safety features to cars. Right, So a
Speaker 1: chunk of this is we need to be able to
Speaker 1: destroy people who want to make extremely modest changes that
Speaker 1: cost corporations money and save countless lives. I'm going to
Speaker 1: guarantee you a significant percentage of the people listening to
Speaker 1: this podcast, including probably me, would be dead if not
Speaker 1: for seat belts. Oh yeah, it's not a minor chunk
Speaker 1: of us.
Speaker 2: I've raced on the highway multiple times. It's just funny
Speaker 2: because this is that point where let's go after liberalism.
Speaker 2: Liberalism is not defined as any effort to make things
Speaker 2: marginally better in a very practical way. Like we talked.
Speaker 2: I think of the last episode about how like like
Speaker 2: I was talking about how I don't even know the
Speaker 2: definitions of things anymore. And that's because things like this
Speaker 2: where I'm like, yeah, is that liberal? Like is it
Speaker 2: liberal to want to take safety precautions? Yeah? To I
Speaker 2: guess it is if it costs.
Speaker 1: If you would go back in time to even to
Speaker 1: Richard Nixon and tell him what modern conservative media people
Speaker 1: call liberalism, Nixon would be like, what the fuck are
Speaker 1: you talking about? What do you mean? They won't take vaccines.
Speaker 2: It's like it's like the term wokeness, you know, it's
Speaker 2: it's that same shit. Yeah, the vaccine stuff is always like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know how these hippie liberals love vaccines. It's like, no,
Speaker 2: they don't.
Speaker 1: No, it was the opposite. They were so long they
Speaker 1: were the.
Speaker 2: First to not like vaccines. What is happening?
Speaker 1: That was what my mom Arch Reagan conservative. One of
Speaker 1: the things she hated about like the left is their
Speaker 1: anti vax shit, because she was like, why wouldn't you
Speaker 1: want to take vaccines?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: It's it's wild how much that shit is. Like, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this this pal memoranda is it's not just he's
Speaker 1: talking about, like we need to cultivate political power. Wealthy
Speaker 1: people in corporations need to be donating a percentage, like
Speaker 1: a significant percent of their advertising budgets to funding think
Speaker 1: tanks and efforts to put basically to flood the zone
Speaker 1: with shit that make that can act as like a
Speaker 1: defense against any attempt to, for example, add seat belts
Speaker 1: to cars or anything like that. But beyond that, that's
Speaker 1: not the only thing the Palm Mirandum orchestrates. He is
Speaker 1: also the first guy, in a real concerted form to
Speaker 1: say the future for the right, because of how demographics
Speaker 1: do not favor us, the future for the right is
Speaker 1: in taking over the courts. He is if you're looking
Speaker 1: at what has happened to the Supreme Court in the
Speaker 1: last eight years, Powell is the guy who starts that process,
Speaker 1: who is laying out the strategy that is adopted by
Speaker 1: the entire conservative movement, at least everyone with money in
Speaker 1: the conservative movement, and his specific goal in having conservatives
Speaker 1: take over the courts is to establish an oligarchy. In
Speaker 1: one section of the memorandum, he uses the title for
Speaker 1: a Neglected Opportunity in the Courts, and he suggests a
Speaker 1: strategy for quote, exploiting judicial action to turn back progressive
Speaker 1: and liberal victories in government and culture. Quote. Under our
Speaker 1: constitutional system, especially with an activist minded Supreme Court, the
Speaker 1: judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic,
Speaker 1: and political change. And he is responding to this raft
Speaker 1: of Supreme Court decisions that happened during the Civil rights
Speaker 1: era and after that are responsible for really ending the
Speaker 1: Jim Crow and segregation, right, Like, that's a big part
Speaker 1: of what the Supreme Court's doing in this period. And
Speaker 1: he's like, we have to take these back so that
Speaker 1: we can reverse these trends.
Speaker 2: It's wild how mad they were about desegregation. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: about because I'm actually we're going to do a video
Speaker 2: on how the right hi check Christianity And that's kind
Speaker 2: of that moment that it starts happening, is desegregated schools
Speaker 2: caused a bunch of racists to go to private religious schools,
Speaker 2: and then they started using this religious liberty thing yep.
Speaker 2: And so it's it's just that is it's it's wild
Speaker 2: how that's like the moment, you know, it's like it's
Speaker 2: like the it's like the dance in Back to the Future,
Speaker 2: Like that was the that day is like where everything
Speaker 2: went down, and it's the same with this.
Speaker 1: And that is what's we've done a two part of
Speaker 1: ourselves on how Christianity got co opted from Christianity as
Speaker 1: a political force is more tied to progressivism in the
Speaker 1: nineteen teens and twenties. Right, it's like the labor movement
Speaker 1: and stuff, right, and that all starts to change in
Speaker 1: the post war period, but it's it's during the same
Speaker 1: period where the pal Memorandum hits in the seventies that
Speaker 1: the religious right becomes a thing, and a lot of
Speaker 1: the same money that the guys that Powell is speaking
Speaker 1: to are going to pump into think tanks also pumping
Speaker 1: money into what becomes the religious right. This is all
Speaker 1: happening at the same time. This is kind of the
Speaker 1: other side of that story. And this is one of
Speaker 1: those things. The success that Powell sees, the fact that
Speaker 1: this memorandum is followed and becomes it's considered a foundational
Speaker 1: document of neoliberalism, right, Like, that is a big part
Speaker 1: of the privatization of everything, Right, Like, that's why you
Speaker 1: want to take over these think tanks to make the
Speaker 1: case for cutting government services, for cutting the idea that
Speaker 1: there should be any kind of like shared social responsibility
Speaker 1: in our society and turning everything into a profit driven machine. Right,
Speaker 1: that's part of what he's suggesting. But also, like the
Speaker 1: end of Roe v. Wade, you can tie it directly
Speaker 1: to this memorandum because he's talking about, like we if
Speaker 1: we're going to turn back these victories the left and
Speaker 1: liberals have had, we have to do it through the courts.
Speaker 1: And I really think I talk a lot about Osama
Speaker 1: bin Laden on this show and how I think historians
Speaker 1: when historians are writing about this one point where none
Speaker 1: of them are angry about nine O Elove because it's
Speaker 1: too distant, right, the way that people aren't angry about
Speaker 1: the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand today, Right, we could just
Speaker 1: sort of like talk about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe some are still, but yeah.
Speaker 1: I think he should I think they should have killed
Speaker 1: him twice. But that's my opinion.
Speaker 2: No, it's the farther we get away from nine to eleven,
Speaker 2: it's going to become this weird abstract and yeah, kind
Speaker 2: of fascinating to me.
Speaker 1: And my opinion tends to be that when we get
Speaker 1: enough distance, historians will generally agree that Osama bin Laden
Speaker 1: was one of the best strategic minds of the twenty
Speaker 1: first century. He had a plan, he had a plan
Speaker 1: for what would happen in the long term as the
Speaker 1: result of that attack, how it would damage American power,
Speaker 1: and it worked the way he thought it would. And
Speaker 1: I think Powell is probably a similar mind for the
Speaker 1: twentieth century in terms of like political strategy. He lays
Speaker 1: out what the right is going to do from the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies to today, and it's worked very well for them.
Speaker 1: With a significant demographic disadvantage, they have in fact captured
Speaker 1: the courts and over time turned this country to the
Speaker 1: right in a way that people in the seventies would
Speaker 1: not have really thought possible. So, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 2: Yes's frog and a hot plate stuff. Yeah, where it's
Speaker 2: like we we talked about this last last episode of
Speaker 2: how Like when people try to say, like, you know,
Speaker 2: Trump is gonna is going to spell the end for democracy,
Speaker 2: that doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna happen right away, right,
Speaker 2: It's like these things just have lasting harm that it's
Speaker 2: gonna be really hard.
Speaker 1: To yeah verse, yeah, it doesn't even mean he'll necessarily
Speaker 1: win again. And I don't take that as a given
Speaker 1: the way some people do, I certainly think it's at
Speaker 1: least a fifty to fifty shot. But even if Biden
Speaker 1: wins reelection, like the idea has been normalized that you
Speaker 1: can just try to take over to the capital with
Speaker 1: a bunch of angry goons, and that's really bad for
Speaker 1: the future of democracy.
Speaker 2: It's pretty bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not great. So Pal's memo is at first
Speaker 1: circulated mostly among the chain of commerce, which is again
Speaker 1: all these wealthy business owners and CEOs, right, that's where
Speaker 1: they interface with the government, is the chamber of Commerce.
Speaker 1: So this is a private memo, and he's basically using
Speaker 1: a government agency to send this memo about how to
Speaker 1: capture the courts for the right to all of these
Speaker 1: guys and asking for their money. David Harvey, who's a
Speaker 1: Marxist anthropologist, cites this is kind of the foundational document
Speaker 1: in the birth of neoliberalism. It's like the neoliberal declaration
Speaker 1: of Independence. Right, that's how some people tend to see this.
Speaker 1: Its influence, though, is much larger than just that, and
Speaker 1: it's much larger than I'm going to cite today. But
Speaker 1: one of the things that absolutely did was supercharged donations
Speaker 1: and the establishment of right wing think tanks. Wealthy conservatives
Speaker 1: realized the power of having organizations that were like RAND
Speaker 1: but were geared entirely towards espousing an ideology. And the
Speaker 1: ideology they wanted these organizations to espouse was that taxes
Speaker 1: should be low, workers should know their place, and school
Speaker 1: should probably be segregated. Also, they should be allowed to
Speaker 1: jail anti war protesters, right, sure, sure.
Speaker 2: Why not? Yeah, fuck it. If we're thrown at all
Speaker 2: on there might as well put some bonuses.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. And the opportunity to do that came when
Speaker 1: the economy shit the bed in the nineteen seventies, quote,
Speaker 1: A corps of politically active conservative intellectuals, most prominently Irving Crystal,
Speaker 1: began to argue in publications like The Public Interest and
Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal that if business wanted market logic
Speaker 1: to regain the initiative, it would have to create a
Speaker 1: new class of its own scholars whose career prospects depended
Speaker 1: on private enterprise, not government or the universities. You get
Speaker 1: what you pay for, Crystal in effect argued, and if
Speaker 1: businessmen want an intellectual horsepower, they would have to open
Speaker 1: their pocketbooks. Traditionally, corporate philanthropy had been directed either towards
Speaker 1: charity or towards independent organizations like the Ford, Rockefeller, and
Speaker 1: Carnegie foundations. Pressured by the media and by academics to
Speaker 1: make gestures of broad mindedness. Businessmen seem to feel that
Speaker 1: they could gain social approval only by sharing their proceeds
Speaker 1: with credential intermediaries would use the money to fund attacks
Speaker 1: on capitalism. Paying to have oneself attacked was a kind
Speaker 1: of corporate abolution. So that's that's what a big thing
Speaker 1: Crystal is saying, And Crystal is kind of the most
Speaker 1: influential of this first wave of like think tank guys,
Speaker 1: is you're spending all of this money on foundations that
Speaker 1: do actual charity, and that partly funds the work of
Speaker 1: people who are critical of you. Why not give your
Speaker 1: money to someone who's going to say you should have
Speaker 1: even more power and money and work to make that real,
Speaker 1: you know. And obviously that's a good deal for you
Speaker 1: if you're a rich psychopath.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're going to pay people, you might as
Speaker 2: well pay people to say you're great.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that's that's why we hired Garrison. It didn't work,
Speaker 1: actually worked with terrible disaster there there's very mean.
Speaker 2: In your place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, correct, that I tried, but they just moved to Atlanta.
Speaker 2: M man, damn him. You gotta get them, get.
Speaker 1: Them back, got to get them back. Kinda fish about
Speaker 1: new party. The work of men like Crystal was like
Speaker 1: a refreshing, cool breeze on the faces of rich fail
Speaker 1: sons whose daddies had been disappointed by the side the
Speaker 1: US took in World War Two. Some of these guys
Speaker 1: are literally the business plot guys, right. The guys were
Speaker 1: telling Smedley Butler, what if you tried to become a dictator?
Speaker 1: And Smedley's like, sure, let me just talk to Congress
Speaker 1: real fast. Henry Ford the Second resigned from the board
Speaker 1: of the Ford Foundation around this time in the seventies,
Speaker 1: furious because it was putting out work he viewed as
Speaker 1: anti capitalist. Other Men like Joseph Coors, you know, the
Speaker 1: beer guy, and the inheritors of the Olin Chemical and
Speaker 1: Smith Richardson pharmaceutical foundations started looking for places they could
Speaker 1: pour money to generate opinions that coincided with their endlist
Speaker 1: need for more money. This is a big part of
Speaker 1: why the pharmaceutical industry is the way that it is,
Speaker 1: right is that these guys start putting money in the
Speaker 1: think tanks that say, hey, you know what would be
Speaker 1: great for everybody's health if these guys were allowed to
Speaker 1: jack up the price of fucking insulin, you know, to
Speaker 1: umpteenth degree. What if we really fucking deregulate healthcare as
Speaker 1: an industry, wouldn't that make everybody healthier?
Speaker 2: And what we're learning now is that it's way harder
Speaker 2: to reverse these things.
Speaker 1: Yes stuff, yes, yes, once you get this stuff. And
Speaker 1: that's one of the things they know is once you
Speaker 1: get this stuff established, it's like the war on drugs. Right,
Speaker 1: Once you have the war on drugs, anything you do
Speaker 1: to try to fix it, people, there will still be
Speaker 1: drug epidemics, right, Like No, like fentanyl gets into the
Speaker 1: country and suddenly everybody who's been working very hard to
Speaker 1: try and reform things has to deal with the fact
Speaker 1: that people are dying of this new substance. And there's
Speaker 1: this built in infrastructure to say, just to have more cops, man,
Speaker 1: we just got to lock people up. That's what's going
Speaker 1: to fix it, you.
Speaker 2: Know, right. Because it's also it reminds me of when
Speaker 2: we built our highways, because we consulted with car companies
Speaker 2: for that, and so it's that thing where they get
Speaker 2: together they decide to do this thing that's kind of irreversible,
Speaker 2: that's like a foundational idea. Uh. And then by the
Speaker 2: time we realize that it doesn't work, yeah, it's already there,
Speaker 2: firmly there.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: We only realize these things over time of going like, wait,
Speaker 2: this strategy was bad. It's resulting in bad things. And
Speaker 2: at that point it's like, well, what are we going
Speaker 2: to do? Uproot everything, start over.
Speaker 1: And this can work on the good side of positive example,
Speaker 1: this would be Obamacare, which is deeply flawed, but like
Speaker 1: we saw, the Republicans tried to kill it and realized
Speaker 1: in the Trump administration, we really fucking can't.
Speaker 2: This is social security, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, social security. Libraries or you would never get libraries
Speaker 1: to be a thing today. If it was a new concept.
Speaker 1: People would be willing Conservatives would be willing to kill
Speaker 1: and die to stop libraries from existing. But they're just
Speaker 1: a thing now, you know, still under attack, but they're
Speaker 1: a thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, you try ever, try to like harass a
Speaker 2: librarian like they can handle themselves, and they have all
Speaker 2: those library ghosts on their side too. And because a
Speaker 2: library is haunted, I.
Speaker 1: Believe strongly, Dave in like ending firing everybody in the
Speaker 1: Department of Homeland Security. But we take all of their guns,
Speaker 1: all of their weapon and we give it to the librarians.
Speaker 1: No training, We don't tell them how to use any
Speaker 1: of this. That's up to them. Whatever they want to
Speaker 1: do with all those tanks and machine guns is their
Speaker 1: their choice.
Speaker 2: You know what's not going to happen anymore. No one's
Speaker 2: going to be turning in books late. I'll tell that much.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, get you're condamn right there fucking no knock
Speaker 1: raids for overdue books.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that situation that will be handling.
Speaker 1: So one step in the process of building this like
Speaker 1: think tank network, like one of the things they knew
Speaker 1: they had to do because there weren't a lot of
Speaker 1: really prominent popular right wing media figures right who were
Speaker 1: influential in public policy. That wasn't nearly as common as
Speaker 1: people who would have considered themselves liberals, right, you know,
Speaker 1: in reality, like you would say centrists or whatever. So
Speaker 1: a big part of what they had to do here
Speaker 1: was fine people who were liberals and even some leftists
Speaker 1: who were influential in academia in public policy and turn
Speaker 1: them right. Now we see this happen today. You're seeing
Speaker 1: all of these like formerly liberal left see some of
Speaker 1: the shit that likes the Young Turks guy has been
Speaker 1: saying and about like crime in cities and stuff this
Speaker 1: like weird right wing turn that a lot of guys
Speaker 1: was Jimmy Dre that guy who used to be kind
Speaker 1: of lefty, and then the pandemic hits and he goes
Speaker 1: hard right because he's an anti vax weirdo. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is like a thing we see today and this
Speaker 1: is really the first time it happens in an organized way.
Speaker 1: And what they would do is they would go to
Speaker 1: these guys who are like influential liberal academics and they
Speaker 1: would say, and this is an actual example, iverat hey,
Speaker 1: we're starting this think tank. We would like to hire
Speaker 1: you on as like an expert.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: We're basically pay you to do whatever research you want
Speaker 1: to do, and occasionally you just have to put out
Speaker 1: some papers that are in line with the stuff that
Speaker 1: we want put out. And in return, and this is
Speaker 1: like in the seventies eighties, you'll get a two hundred
Speaker 1: one thousand dollars a year's salary for life whether or
Speaker 1: not anything gets done. We just need to be able
Speaker 1: to use your name. You know.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, that's like a billion dollars.
Speaker 1: That's so much money back then, right, you know, you'll
Speaker 1: have to occasionally rubber stamp some specific ideas. And that's
Speaker 1: what for some of these guys, it literally is I'm
Speaker 1: just like throwing my name on some shit so i
Speaker 1: can get a paycheck. Others really take to the idea
Speaker 1: of being more influential than they'd ever been, of having
Speaker 1: I'm not just being people that got listened to sometimes,
Speaker 1: but people who have this massive, hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: dollars in funding effort behind them, right, and they can
Speaker 1: be the mouthpieces of it. And some of these people,
Speaker 1: these are folks like Gene Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Ben Wattenberg.
Speaker 1: These are all people who switched sides politically because of
Speaker 1: the amount of money and clout that they saw building
Speaker 1: in the think tank industrial complex. The founder of the
Speaker 1: Ethics and Public Policy Center, Ernest Lefev, had even been
Speaker 1: a conscientious subjector in World War Two. Michael Horowitz, one
Speaker 1: of the most influential conservative theorists of this period, had
Speaker 1: been a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: and Horowitz kind of pioneers the tactic of being a
Speaker 1: liberal intellectual and like political guy and then pivoting right
Speaker 1: and suddenly getting very rich. You know, he's one of
Speaker 1: like the architects of that switch.
Speaker 2: I mean, conservatism pays very well. Oh yeah, we're not
Speaker 2: over here. Like look in the Daily Wire. I would
Speaker 2: love to get some fracking billionaire money, but sadly they
Speaker 2: won't give it to me.
Speaker 1: I will take fifty million dollars. Yeah, I'll endorse some
Speaker 1: fucked up shit for fifty million dollars.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, yeah, I take bribes. I've said it before,
Speaker 2: I'll say it again.
Speaker 1: Listen, fracking billionaires. You've got me and Dave. We can
Speaker 1: sell people on fracking. Oh Dave, you love it when
Speaker 1: the ground light's on fire, don't you?
Speaker 2: Oh God? Yeah? Water like when it's murky. I love
Speaker 2: me a nice glass of murky water.
Speaker 1: Look, the popularity of Lacroix has proven we all like
Speaker 1: our water with a little something extra.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Gasoline makes our cars go. Gasoline in our water
Speaker 1: probably makes us more efficial.
Speaker 2: Makes us go. Yeah. Uh, that's some science. I think
Speaker 2: this is science.
Speaker 1: What you just said, this is what you could have
Speaker 1: fracking billionaires. Come on, hit us up.
Speaker 2: I'll take two hundred thousand. I don't give a shit.
Speaker 1: So two years after Goldwater's failed candidacy, an aging movie
Speaker 1: star named Ronald Wilson Reagan decided to run for governor
Speaker 1: of California. Now, his initial rise to power is against
Speaker 1: an incumbent Democrat who's fairly well liked and reasonably popular
Speaker 1: prior to the election, a guy named Pat Brown. This
Speaker 1: is an uphill battle, at least on paper. It doesn't
Speaker 1: wind up working out that way, and a huge part
Speaker 1: of the strategy that hands Reagan a victory he bases
Speaker 1: a massive chunk like kind of the centerpiece of his
Speaker 1: campaign is attacking Berkeley University, right higher education in general,
Speaker 1: but specifically going to war with Berkeley. Talk about, Oh,
Speaker 1: they fucking hate it, and that's what we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about. But you know who loves Berkeley, No one really,
Speaker 1: but our sponsors don't hate it. That I'm aware of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe you on that. That sounded convincing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, unless it's the Washington State Highway Patrol again. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we're talking about Ronnie Reagan you know,
Speaker 1: husband of the throat goat herself and how he wins election.
Speaker 1: Sophie just had a look when I said.
Speaker 3: That, I did not enjoyed that description.
Speaker 1: That's what Look, this is documented. We're not slandering. That's
Speaker 1: not even history. Yeah, that's just history.
Speaker 2: It'd be slander if we called Ronald the throat goat, right,
Speaker 2: but that.
Speaker 1: A man would have been terrible at sucking Dick.
Speaker 3: I just want to give a shout out to to
Speaker 3: Joni as We Yeah, yeah, who really made all the
Speaker 3: decisions for that family.
Speaker 1: Yes, they're astrologer yep. So the fact that Reagan is
Speaker 1: going to make the centerpiece of his campaign hating on
Speaker 1: Berkeley goes over really well with the kind of rich,
Speaker 1: fail sun demographic that is funding this like New Conservative movement.
Speaker 1: These guys believe that they had lost to the New
Speaker 1: Deal Democrats for a mix of reasons. One of those
Speaker 1: was that Christianity was overwhelmingly aligned with progressive, pro labor
Speaker 1: and social welfare values at the start of the century,
Speaker 1: and the religious right, which is coming together in the
Speaker 1: same period. It's going to the first time the religious
Speaker 1: right is really influential in US politics. It gets Reagan
Speaker 1: elected right, that's coming together at this point in time.
Speaker 1: The other thing that they saw as losing the day
Speaker 1: was that all of those new Deal policies had enjoyed
Speaker 1: the support of professors and subject matter experts with fancy
Speaker 1: titles and actual expertise. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: was happening in that period, a lot of those experts,
Speaker 1: it came from kind of the first generation of college
Speaker 1: graduates that weren't all super rich guys, right. It was
Speaker 1: still mostly people who were better off, but it was
Speaker 1: starting to become democratized. And by the seventies college was
Speaker 1: extremely democratized. Right. Some of that's as a result of,
Speaker 1: like you know, kind of some of the changes that
Speaker 1: come in as a result of the GI Bill, but
Speaker 1: like in general, a lot more particularly women and black people,
Speaker 1: are graduating from college in this period, and they're seeing
Speaker 1: this as like this will inevitably destroy us unless we
Speaker 1: destroy the ability of these people to get college degrees. Right.
Speaker 2: Right, They had their own little club, right, that was
Speaker 2: the whole thing. They love, having their own little clubs. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they could do or say whatever they wanted in
Speaker 2: these little clubs. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And what the think tank boom is is a war
Speaker 1: on expertise, and the other half of the war on
Speaker 1: expertise is destroying higher education, right, because that will stop
Speaker 1: poor people from being able to exercise agency. In Paul,
Speaker 1: that's what they see, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, happen I mean hearing that this is still happening today. Yes,
Speaker 2: it's one of those like such an obvious red flag
Speaker 2: where it's like, if you're going after education, I don't know.
Speaker 2: That seems very sus right, like, h that's weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And the easiest way to get middle class and
Speaker 1: poor conservatives on board with this crusade was to attack
Speaker 1: universities as hotbeds of anti war radicalism. Reagan understood this instinctively,
Speaker 1: and that's why he goes to war with Berkeley University
Speaker 1: during his candidacy. At that point, the school was basically
Speaker 1: free for Californians. If you are a state resident, you
Speaker 1: basically don't pay to go to Berkeley, and this had
Speaker 1: led to a dangerous number of poor people, particularly black
Speaker 1: people and women, getting educations at are respected university, which
Speaker 1: is a big part of why Berkeley is in nexus
Speaker 1: of organizing for protests against the Vietnam War. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that Reagan is going to be furious
Speaker 1: at is that the president of Berkeley, a guy named
Speaker 1: Clark Kerr, refused to expel student organizers. You know, the
Speaker 1: conservatives are yelling at this guy, like you need to
Speaker 1: kick kids out for organizing against the Vietnam War. And
Speaker 1: Clark is like, why the fuck shouldn't students be allowed
Speaker 1: to protest?
Speaker 2: Why isn't it like.
Speaker 1: An am about that? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Is this whole freedom to speak? I don't know.
Speaker 1: One Berkeley professor would later summarize as a matter of
Speaker 1: Reagan's honest convictions, but also as a matter of politics,
Speaker 1: Reagan launched an assault on the university. Now, on the
Speaker 1: campaign trail, Reagan promised to clean up the mess at Berkeley.
Speaker 1: He attained the approval of John mccohone, head of the CIA,
Speaker 1: and Jay Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who held
Speaker 1: an unprecedented joint meeting to discuss Communist influence at universities,
Speaker 1: which mcohone wrote definitely required some corrective action. Hoover himself
Speaker 1: reached out to Kerr to tell him to crack down
Speaker 1: on student activities, and Kerr, you got to respect this
Speaker 1: guy says no to the director of the FBI. And
Speaker 1: when Kerr says, no, Hoover and McCone reach out to
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan and I want to I want are really
Speaker 1: hammering how impressed in this is? For one thing, I
Speaker 1: know these are both evil fed agencies. The CIA and
Speaker 1: the FBI hate each other, like traditionally. They are fighting
Speaker 1: it constantly.
Speaker 2: They're like kits and dogs.
Speaker 1: They're like, yeah, exact, or just two cats that don't
Speaker 1: know each other's in a small apartment. Yeah, the small
Speaker 1: apartment is like the US budget for shady shit.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you ever have an FBI agent in your house,
Speaker 2: they'll knock shit off your desks.
Speaker 1: Hopefully not Dave, they will knock shit off your desks.
Speaker 2: Though, they will. They love knocking shit off of desks.
Speaker 2: They'll they'll be like can I come in? And you
Speaker 2: open the door and then they kind of wander away,
Speaker 2: and then you're like, what are you coming in? You're
Speaker 2: not coming in? What's going on?
Speaker 1: I would like to replace the FBI with cats, And
Speaker 1: just like if one of the if one of all
Speaker 1: cats are the FBI, And so if a cat just
Speaker 1: walks into your house, you can't you can't make it leave.
Speaker 1: You gotta feed it, you gotta pet it. You know,
Speaker 1: give it whatever it wants. Badges, Yeah, little badges, just
Speaker 1: just cats wandering around airports checking shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think it's a good idea. Several countries already worked
Speaker 1: that way. If you've ever been to Istanbul, that's more
Speaker 1: or less how the city functions.
Speaker 2: I love that they just have loose cats everywhere there.
Speaker 1: So this is so the FBI and the CIA are
Speaker 1: basically like, yeah, we Ronald, you are our guy, because
Speaker 1: you are going to fire this fucking dude and crack
Speaker 1: down on this school that we see as a major
Speaker 1: threat to the United States. Yeah, it's cool, it's it's I.
Speaker 2: Just can't help but to think about good old meatball
Speaker 2: ron of today Ronald DeSantis. Yes, and where like people
Speaker 2: very rightfully pointed out when he was like, I don't
Speaker 2: like Disney's politics, therefore I am going to just bully
Speaker 2: them with the government, and I'm not you know, I'm
Speaker 2: not on Disney's side. Well, I guess in this case
Speaker 2: I am, but I'm not a huge fan of corporations.
Speaker 2: My point being that, like, aren't they the guys who
Speaker 2: don't want the government doing this stuff getting involved in
Speaker 2: everybody's business. I can't help but to feel like this
Speaker 2: is the same situation where they're like, yes, let's get
Speaker 2: really involved in people's business because we don't like what
Speaker 2: they're doing, even though that's against everything we claim that
Speaker 2: we're in for.
Speaker 1: It makes it clear that, like when they're talking about
Speaker 1: we have to we're doing this because the Communists want
Speaker 1: to take away freedom. They're not and I'm not an
Speaker 1: apologist for the Soviet Union. I would not have wanted
Speaker 1: to live under that regime either, right, but they're not
Speaker 1: talking about freedom because they want to take away people's
Speaker 1: freedom to protest a war that's killing millions. What they
Speaker 1: mean by freedom is rich people being able to be
Speaker 1: rich people. Yeah, yeah, that's that's the threat.
Speaker 2: There's no there's no like extremely good sides here. It's
Speaker 2: just that, Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: Very The students who are trying to stop the Vietnam
Speaker 1: War are but like, yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean even they were probably insufferable people, but yeah, well.
Speaker 1: Sure, I mean they're they're at Berkeley, right, so you know,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have wanted to have lunch with them, but right,
Speaker 1: they're on the right side of this.
Speaker 2: It's so easy to go after colleges because all you
Speaker 2: have to do is step on a college campus. Yeah, man,
Speaker 2: I hate it here. Yes, it doesn't know when I
Speaker 2: was in college.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're doing a Reagan Dave. We're doing it.
Speaker 2: I need to do.
Speaker 1: Everybody, go watch PCU when you finish this. You know
Speaker 1: that's John Favreau with John Favreau and with Jeremy Piven
Speaker 1: playing a playing a man who's supposed to be a
Speaker 1: college senior and clearly in his mid forties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, forty five year old Piven.
Speaker 1: Beautiful, beautiful stuff. So Reagan becomes the FBI's preferred candidate.
Speaker 1: One of Hoover's memos at the time describes him as
Speaker 1: dedicated to the destruction of student activism. The assistant chancellor
Speaker 1: of Berkeley at the time described Reagan's tactics this way.
Speaker 1: Reagan took aim at the university for being irresponsible with
Speaker 1: failing to punish these dissident students. He said, get them
Speaker 1: out of here, throw them out. They are spoiled, and
Speaker 1: they don't deserve the education they're getting. They don't have
Speaker 1: a right to take advantage of our system of education.
Speaker 1: In a two thousand and four article for UC Berkeley News,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Kahn argued that they were two main themes of
Speaker 1: Reagan's first campaign for the governorship, quote to send the
Speaker 1: welfare of bums back to work and to clean up
Speaker 1: the mess at Berkeley. The latter became a Reagan mantra,
Speaker 1: so that again I can't overemphasize this isn't just a
Speaker 1: side issue he's hitting sometimes. This is like one of
Speaker 1: the two pillars of his campaign for governor, which is
Speaker 1: why he becomes president ultimately, is attacking Berkeley.
Speaker 2: It's so dumb because it's also like just from a
Speaker 2: practical sense, like I don't know, like he's running on
Speaker 2: the campaign of really focusing on a single school in America,
Speaker 2: and it's like, boy, I feel like there are other
Speaker 2: problems to focus on here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, during the Vietnam War, maybe maybe.
Speaker 2: DA There's a lot of other things you could be
Speaker 2: doing one or two. It's just it's such a weird.
Speaker 2: It's such a weird policy to run on and then
Speaker 2: succeed with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a bummer.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So a little bit when he Reagan wins spoiler alert
Speaker 1: for the past and Reagan immediately he leans on he
Speaker 1: can't fire Kerr directly, but he's able to lean on
Speaker 1: the university administration, basically threatening to take even more money
Speaker 1: from the school, and they eventually fire Kerr. And this
Speaker 1: was a tacit acknowledgment that attacking the school had been
Speaker 1: a lynchpin of his electoral strategy. Earl Chite, dean emeritus
Speaker 1: of the School of Business at Berkeley, later said one
Speaker 1: of his great skills was to understand popular feeling. He
Speaker 1: really tapped into the discontent people felt about what was
Speaker 1: happening on the campus. I have no doubt that this
Speaker 1: was a big factor in his election as governor. One
Speaker 1: of Reagan's first acts as governor is to cut funding
Speaker 1: for all California public colleges. He starts going after Berkeley,
Speaker 1: but he cuts funny and he tries to do it
Speaker 1: by like ten percent across the board. The legislature doesn't
Speaker 1: agree to go quite that hard, but he does cut
Speaker 1: funding to every California public college. And he frames this
Speaker 1: as a necessity, not a political attack. He says, we're
Speaker 1: doing this because of a budget shortfall. John Schwarz, formerly
Speaker 1: of The Intercept, describes how Reagan made his case to
Speaker 1: cover the funding shortfall. Reagan suggested that California public colleges
Speaker 1: could charge residents tuition for the first time this, he complained,
Speaker 1: resulted in the almost hysterical charge that this would deny
Speaker 1: educational opportunities to those of the most moderate means. This
Speaker 1: is obviously untrue. We made it plain that tuition must
Speaker 1: be accompanied by adequate loans to be paid back after graduation.
Speaker 1: And this is where student loans come from.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course Reagan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Ronny fucking Reagan.
Speaker 2: I mean, it all comes back to Reagan.
Speaker 1: It always has, it, always fucking does.
Speaker 2: He was really really bad for the country, and that's
Speaker 2: what we're now in, right, we this is the era
Speaker 2: of this. It's the find out to the fuck around,
Speaker 2: right Yeah, where we've all been now hurting because of
Speaker 2: this ship that yep, they let Reagan do. How did
Speaker 2: he sell this to the public, Like, I like, I
Speaker 2: get selling this to rich people, but like it's it's
Speaker 2: always so weird when they like, how do you go,
Speaker 2: great news, we are now making your schools worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, because he doesn't frame it that way.
Speaker 1: First off, he frames it is like, look, we've got
Speaker 1: a budget shortfall, things are contracting, everybody's got to tighten
Speaker 1: their belt, and hey, these kids were caught. And again,
Speaker 1: the anti war movement is not as popular as people
Speaker 1: remember it being right, right, So there's a huge amount
Speaker 1: of people who are like, yeah, why are we paying
Speaker 1: for these these these communist kids to go to school?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And He's like, they're going to pay their own way.
Speaker 1: It's personal responsibility, you know, They're going to pull themselves
Speaker 1: up by their bootstraps, right, right.
Speaker 2: Because like, what does that even equate to in terms
Speaker 2: of taxes? You know, like how much of a difference
Speaker 2: is this going to make in your taxes to do this?
Speaker 1: Taxes are even higher now, by the way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just so silly because it's like why why
Speaker 2: would we like vote and be concerned about like government
Speaker 2: budget stuff. It's like, we pay you to figure this out.
Speaker 2: Go figure it out, you know, we want to have
Speaker 2: the free schools. Keep the free damn schools.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is why.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: France has a lot of problems of its own, but
Speaker 1: their strategy of whenever they try to take away a
Speaker 1: public entitlement, burning down Paris has worked several times. This
Speaker 1: doesn't always work, but it has sometimes.
Speaker 2: No, but I like how they roll, you know, I
Speaker 2: like it. Or if a government person so much as
Speaker 2: like farts in the wrong direction. Yeah, they're like well,
Speaker 2: time to chop off some heads.
Speaker 1: I guess it burned down the city. So Reagan also
Speaker 1: proposed that Berkeley starts selling off the rare books in
Speaker 1: its library so rich people could put them in their
Speaker 1: private collections. The legislature, that's just such a cartoon villain
Speaker 1: thing to do. The legislature doesn't approve this or the
Speaker 1: full extent of the cuts he wanted to the UC system.
Speaker 1: But they do a lot, and he would soon have
Speaker 1: his chance to try these ideas out on the national
Speaker 1: stage with a compliant Congress. The success of Reagan's attacks
Speaker 1: on California public schools inspired conservative politicians across the US.
Speaker 1: Nixon decried campus revolt. Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed
Speaker 1: that thanks to open admissions policies, unqualified students are being
Speaker 1: swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.
Speaker 1: That's all, sorry, that was all a Schwartz quote from
Speaker 1: John's article in the Intercept. So reform of higher education
Speaker 1: becomes a major cause for public conservative intellectuals. This is
Speaker 1: again the think tank set, and they start putting out
Speaker 1: papers arguing that what Reagan wants to do will benefit
Speaker 1: that it'll cut down the amount of money that you know,
Speaker 1: the public has to spend, it'll be able to lower taxes,
Speaker 1: it'll be better for students. All this jazz, right, And
Speaker 1: they frame this as, you know, not just cost cutting
Speaker 1: and like making the budget make more sense, but also
Speaker 1: it'll help these students because a lot of young people
Speaker 1: are getting these useless degrees in the liberal arts. They're
Speaker 1: getting weighed down by these educations they don't really need,
Speaker 1: and if they have to pay for it, they'll be
Speaker 1: more discriminating and they'll get more useful degrees that'll benefit
Speaker 1: the economy more in the long run. That's what they're
Speaker 1: saying in public. In private, we're a lot more open
Speaker 1: about the real reason they're doing this. Schwartz continues, quote
Speaker 1: one worry that free education may be producing a positively
Speaker 1: dangerous class situation by raising the expectations of working class students.
Speaker 1: Another referred to college students as a parasite feeding on
Speaker 1: the rest of society, who exhibited a failure to understand
Speaker 1: and to appreciate the crucial role played by the reward
Speaker 1: punishment structure of the market. The answer was to close
Speaker 1: off the parasitic option. These are all think tank guys
Speaker 1: saying that like this, this is giving poor people an
Speaker 1: unreasonable expectation of progress that they might be able to
Speaker 1: live good lives. And they don't understand how the market
Speaker 1: works because we're not making we're not making them destroy
Speaker 1: their financial futures to get a college degree. Right, we
Speaker 1: have to add debt to this situation, and that'll stop
Speaker 1: them from being parasites.
Speaker 2: Right, They're kind of they're kind of kicking down the
Speaker 2: ladder after they already got up there. It's it's it's
Speaker 2: ridiculous because it fundamentally misunderstands what the idea of school
Speaker 2: is for, Like why society has school, which is to
Speaker 2: train people to exist in the society that's been built.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's just very silly that you would look
Speaker 2: at like people in school and go, those are parasites. Like,
Speaker 2: don't get me wrong, there is you know, the academic
Speaker 2: world isn't perfect. There are people who can sort of
Speaker 2: drift through school.
Speaker 1: I have I know a couple of people who have
Speaker 1: done that.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, oh yeah, but like that's that's like that's
Speaker 2: not a justification for this. And and then also like
Speaker 2: that's years of also like just schools, yeah, changing over the.
Speaker 1: Years, A certain percentage of people who get into the
Speaker 1: academic system, you know, especially if it's basically free, we'll
Speaker 1: just spend their whole lives being students in various things,
Speaker 1: and that might wind up being bad for that person,
Speaker 1: But as a societal problem, it does not compare to
Speaker 1: the scale of the problem of an entire generation burdened
Speaker 1: by student loan debt they can never repay, right, they
Speaker 1: will wind up paying many times the principle and like
Speaker 1: basically be garnishing their wages for the rest of their lives,
Speaker 1: like unable to buy a home, unable to like the
Speaker 1: sheer amount of damage it does, like one is worse
Speaker 1: than the other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this is the whole thing. Like, this
Speaker 2: is why it's that idea of like, well, we shouldn't
Speaker 2: give to homeless people because what if one of them's
Speaker 2: a liar and it's like who cares?
Speaker 1: Yeah, who gives like shit?
Speaker 2: Yeah, like yeah, that's most people loon be.
Speaker 1: We have a lot of data on how just giving
Speaker 1: homeless people cash works. Most of them use it to
Speaker 1: get houses, well, you know, apartments or whatever.
Speaker 2: But yeah, why are we using this fear of this
Speaker 2: small percentage is or is not to do something that's Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's broadly good. And this feels like the same thing,
Speaker 2: which is like, well, some of them will be leeches,
Speaker 2: and it's like let them, let them be leeches. Isn't
Speaker 2: this what a good society is is something that takes
Speaker 2: care of their people unconditionally.
Speaker 1: It's so like you, no, you don't use this logic
Speaker 1: wor else. And nobody says if you're like I should
Speaker 1: exercise to get into better shape. No one is like, oh,
Speaker 1: but you know what, it's theoretical that I might get
Speaker 1: hurt exercising, so I'm never going to move my body, right,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, like you would say, well that's irrational, right right.
Speaker 2: But it's the same like a hospital where it's like,
Speaker 2: well some of them might be fake, faking their symptoms,
Speaker 2: and it's like yeah, I mean that doesn't mean we
Speaker 2: get rid of the hospital.
Speaker 1: Some number of doctors will be bad at it and
Speaker 1: kill their patients, so we shouldn't have any medical professionals.
Speaker 1: Just let nature take its course.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't make this argument for anything else. But
Speaker 2: when it comes to like talking about poor people getting things.
Speaker 1: Look, one percent of people are allergic to antibiotics, so
Speaker 1: let's just let everyone die of preventable infections. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's frustrating, so it's silly. The National Review, a conservative
Speaker 1: journal of opinion in news that largely served as a
Speaker 1: vehicle for distributing the work of these think tanksuggested that
Speaker 1: the solution to the problem of parasitic college students was
Speaker 1: to cut public funding for colleges, which be made up
Speaker 1: by charging more or anything at all in some cases
Speaker 1: for tuition. They recommended quote a system of full tuition
Speaker 1: charges supplant supplemented by loans which students must pay out
Speaker 1: of their future income. And this is all coming together
Speaker 1: in this period. In May of nineteen sixty nine, things
Speaker 1: came to a head. Student activists had created a people's
Speaker 1: park on a vacant plot of land in Berkeley. Jeffrey
Speaker 1: con writes students and activists had begun an attempt to
Speaker 1: transform a vacant plot of university property into people's park.
Speaker 1: Attempting to head off the activists, the university engaged a
Speaker 1: fencing company accompanied by two hundred and fifty police to
Speaker 1: erect a chain link fence around the land at four
Speaker 1: am on May fifteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Five hours later,
Speaker 1: a rally was called on Spool placet to protest. The
Speaker 1: action resource, a current UC Berkeley reference guide for new students,
Speaker 1: relates the story of how Reagan intervened, sending in a
Speaker 1: National Guard. The rally, which drew three thousand people, soon
Speaker 1: turned into a riot as the crowd moved down Telegraph
Speaker 1: Avenue towards the park. That day known as Bloody Thursday.
Speaker 1: Three students suffered punctured lungs, another a shattered leg. Thirteen
Speaker 1: people were hospitalized with shotgun wounds, and one police officer
Speaker 1: was stabbed. James Rector, who was watching the riot from
Speaker 1: a rooftop, was shot by police gunfire. He died four
Speaker 1: days later. Damn yeah, thanks Ronnie.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And by the way, this just happened again. They just
Speaker 1: cracked down violently on people's park, which they were like,
Speaker 1: homeless people were like basically it had been turned into
Speaker 1: effectively a place where they could like camp and exist,
Speaker 1: and the police just shut it down. A bunch of
Speaker 1: protesters came up, they beat the shit out of everybody.
Speaker 1: Same same story, twenty twenty four. I mean, I'd love
Speaker 1: to see it.
Speaker 2: Cops love a good beating of college protesters, all right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: they're too young to fully know they're rights, like, you'll
Speaker 2: probably get away with it a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: You can shoot them, sure, yeah, yeah, fire and apparently rooftop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got the shooting at roots.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I don't want to trivialize his death, but
Speaker 2: I'm imagining that guy being like, I'm nice and safe
Speaker 2: up here. Yeah, Like, ah, don't worry about me, I'm
Speaker 2: on the roof. Oh my goodness. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the riot was great pr for Reagan because the
Speaker 1: media pretty much cited with him and putting the blame
Speaker 1: for it on the protesters. He got to do the
Speaker 1: strong Man Act and call in twenty two hundred National
Speaker 1: Guard troops to deal with a state of emergency in Berkeley.
Speaker 1: This created an absurd situation where guardsmen who were Berkeley
Speaker 1: students were activated to police the campus. Con cites at
Speaker 1: least one man who was shot at and injured by
Speaker 1: cops during the riot and then got home to a
Speaker 1: notice telling him to report for duty. More than a
Speaker 1: thousand people were ultimately arrested. Reagan's war with Berkeley was
Speaker 1: a blueprint for other conservative politicians, and the coalition of
Speaker 1: right wing policy wonks and campaigners that coalesced around him
Speaker 1: began to plot grander schemes, and we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about those schemes. But first, you know who's got the
Speaker 1: grandest scheme? Dave me. Oh, well, yes, you you do
Speaker 1: have a plot. I'm always plotting, always scheming. And part
Speaker 1: of Dave's plot is that you buy some of these products.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, we're back.
Speaker 1: So nineteen seventy Dave Reaga year runs for reelection. He
Speaker 1: had become known as a charismatic speaker, the great communicator
Speaker 1: of conservative thought to the masses, and there was no
Speaker 1: issue that served him better than attacking those damn Marxists
Speaker 1: in academia and the shiftless college students ruining America's good
Speaker 1: time in Southeast Asia. In May of that year, he
Speaker 1: shut down all twenty eight use campuses over protests against
Speaker 1: the bombing of Cambodia. A few months later, in October,
Speaker 1: his education advisor, Roger Freeman, gave a press conference, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote here from an article in the Intercept.
Speaker 1: Freeman's remarks were reported the next day in the San
Speaker 1: Francisco Chronicle under the headline professor ces peril in education.
Speaker 1: According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, we are in
Speaker 1: danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite. We have
Speaker 1: to be selective on who we allow to go to college.
Speaker 1: If not, Freeman continued, we will have a large number
Speaker 1: of highly trained and unemployed people. Freeman also said, taking
Speaker 1: a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism, that's
Speaker 1: what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.
Speaker 2: It's incredible because it's it's the big you know, you
Speaker 2: step back from this and it's like, okay, so we're
Speaker 2: bombing people, we're doing we're doing terrible things in a war,
Speaker 2: and you know, it's always kind of pretty terrible. And
Speaker 2: then our young people who we've taught you know, you know,
Speaker 2: I presumably even the seventies, we taught them, you know,
Speaker 2: compassion and basic morals as a kid, and then they're
Speaker 2: in school and they're learning about the world and they're
Speaker 2: saying like, you know, we don't like that you're doing this.
Speaker 2: And you step back and you look at that, and
Speaker 2: you're like, we better shut down these colleges. That's the problem.
Speaker 2: It's just so funny how that's that's the conclusion that
Speaker 2: they drew from where it's like, hey, stop doing this
Speaker 2: terrible thing, and it's like you're right, we should find
Speaker 2: a way to silence you from saying that you're so right.
Speaker 2: And then it's a dystopian that it comes down to,
Speaker 2: like these riots of them.
Speaker 1: Just it's just a big part of Freeman as a
Speaker 1: guy who comes out from this culture. Again he's born
Speaker 1: in a monarchy, and his attitude, and this is the
Speaker 1: attitude of basically all of the landed aristocracy in the
Speaker 1: United States and in Europe, is that like no bless
Speaker 1: oblige rite this idea that like, well, you have an
Speaker 1: obligation as part of the uppercross to run society and
Speaker 1: to take care of it. And you have within sort
Speaker 1: of your noble cast, you have your progressives and your
Speaker 1: conservatives and your progressives who are advocating for the little people.
Speaker 1: But they always understand, because they come out of the aristocracy,
Speaker 1: that their first is to their class and to maintaining
Speaker 1: the wealth and power of their class. Of course, and
Speaker 1: these these poor proletarians getting an education that can't be
Speaker 1: allowed to happen because they don't have any loyalty to
Speaker 1: the same class that we're in. They might just want
Speaker 1: to make things better for the poor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really comes down to that doesn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's pretty hideous.
Speaker 2: It goes back, it goes to the whole civility thing
Speaker 2: where it's like, how dare you protest that way? How
Speaker 2: dare you do like, you know, like acting like the
Speaker 2: protests are worse than the the actual enemy or the
Speaker 2: actual people that they're harming. It's just and then of
Speaker 2: course linking it to like they must all be socialists
Speaker 2: or they all must be communistic because they're protesting this
Speaker 2: thing that we're doing against these people. It's just it's
Speaker 2: such I don't know, it's it's incredible, like I don't know, trickery.
Speaker 1: It's very funny to me that he's like, this is
Speaker 1: what happened in Germany because like, no, it's not.
Speaker 2: It is true.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of highly trained and unemployed people,
Speaker 1: and that contributed to the Nonazis. They weren't highly trained
Speaker 1: college students. They were veteran soldiers. They were trench fighters
Speaker 1: with head injuries who were really good at killing people
Speaker 1: and back the Nazis because the Nazis said, you know what,
Speaker 1: the best thing is killing people, right, that's not all
Speaker 1: of it. But like the Nazis did not not that
Speaker 1: they had no college graduates, like Hitler wasn't an educated
Speaker 1: college graduate. That's not why Hitler was powerful.
Speaker 2: You know, I mean we we sure love, we sure
Speaker 2: loved pretending the Nazis were a lot of things that
Speaker 2: they weren't. Right, Like, there's just so much like, well,
Speaker 2: that's what the Nazis did, and it's always just like
Speaker 2: very vague broad strokes of it.
Speaker 1: There was certainly a chunk of the Nazis who were
Speaker 1: well educated and whatnot, but like that was not the
Speaker 1: center of their power, right, their early power, the street fighters,
Speaker 1: the movements were like vets and hooligans.
Speaker 2: You know, it's very funny to be like the Nazis
Speaker 2: were educated. Education makes you Nazi. Yeah, it's like the
Speaker 2: Nazis drink water, therefore we shouldn't drink water. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's yeah, it's ridiculous. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this guy Roger Freeman, who is who is saying
Speaker 1: all of this really hideous shit is again he's in
Speaker 1: Austrian born in nineteen oh four. He'd fled after Hitler
Speaker 1: annexed Austria and wound up serving under Eisenhower and Nixon.
Speaker 1: He was also a fellow at the Hoover Institute, which
Speaker 1: was Stanford's think tank, right, and it was a pretty
Speaker 1: conservative think tank. Right. This is kind of contrary to
Speaker 1: the republican frenzy of our Marxist academics, but like the
Speaker 1: Hoover Institute is pretty right wing. And that's where this guy,
Speaker 1: who was in a lot of ways the architect of
Speaker 1: the student loan system, this is one of Reagan's education advisors,
Speaker 1: comes out of. He is a think tank guy. Right
Speaker 1: University he believed was something only the wealthy should have
Speaker 1: access to, because you know, they had an understanding of
Speaker 1: their obligation to maintain the status quo. Reagan becomes the
Speaker 1: center then of a plot to co opt the energy
Speaker 1: in the enthusiasm of the new right in order to
Speaker 1: help the old right remake the economy in their image
Speaker 1: and destroy anything that hints at being a public benefit.
Speaker 1: He is the first candidate that benefits from both the
Speaker 1: newly forged religious right, which at this point has two
Speaker 1: major causes, keeping black kids out of private schools and
Speaker 1: turning back women's rights. And he's also the first think
Speaker 1: tank president.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Some of this stuff had started creeping in during Nixon's administration,
Speaker 1: but it's really Reagan that is the first you know
Speaker 1: all this shit in the pal memorandum and the religious
Speaker 1: right stuff. Reagan is the first president to really benefit
Speaker 1: from all of it, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's I know that Jimmy Carter of
Speaker 2: all people was like the first like Christian president, right that,
Speaker 2: like really yes, put that, And so it's like he
Speaker 2: was like the practice run where they're like, Okay, well
Speaker 2: that can work. I mean, not him, but like you know,
Speaker 2: a guy I like him, or maybe even not even
Speaker 2: a guy like him, because I'm pretty sure Reagan was
Speaker 2: not very religious. Uh oh god no no, no, yeah,
Speaker 2: get godless, Hollywood Hollywood actor. So yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So as kind of this this think tank, you know,
Speaker 1: so Reagan has his re election in nineteen seventy, nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty obviously is going to be his presidential campaign. In
Speaker 1: that period in between, you have both the religious right
Speaker 1: growing in power, and you have these think tanks really
Speaker 1: start to get to get moving, right, Like this is
Speaker 1: really when you're having a bunch of them founded in
Speaker 1: quick secession. In nineteen seventy three, two congressional aids quit
Speaker 1: the Hill and start the Heritage Foundation. In nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: a former Brookings guy starts the Ethics and Public Policy
Speaker 1: Center in nineteen seventy seven, will get the Cato Institute
Speaker 1: named after a pretty insufferable Roman by some equally insufferable Americans.
Speaker 1: And this all contributes to a nineteen eighty Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: winning his election. And you know, one of the things
Speaker 1: that had been a through line in his presidential campaign
Speaker 1: had been these constant series of attacks on this growing
Speaker 1: class of administrators and thinkers, kind of liberal academics and
Speaker 1: think tank people who had crusted together at the upper
Speaker 1: levels of government. Right, And Reagan basically says, these guys
Speaker 1: are burdening the doers. We have too many thinkers in
Speaker 1: there and not enough men of action.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But as soon as he takes office, he's going to
Speaker 1: fill the White House with nothing but think tank guys.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Despite like this, these complaints they'd had about how all
Speaker 1: of these people were gumming up the works of government.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote from an article in the
Speaker 1: Atlantic here about that process. When plump positions started going
Speaker 1: to them, conservatives discovered that the new class wasn't so
Speaker 1: bad after all. Norman Tour, one of the original supply siders,
Speaker 1: supported himself through the late nineteen seventies by taking donations
Speaker 1: for his Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation.
Speaker 1: While Ronald Reagan was composing his first cabinet, Turre wrote
Speaker 1: a paper for the Heritage Foundation advocating, in the best
Speaker 1: new class style, the creation of a new government post
Speaker 1: that of Treasury Department Under Secretary for Tax Policy, and
Speaker 1: after some assiduous circulating of the paper with resume attached,
Speaker 1: landed the job for himself. Following the change of administrations
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty, some conservatives found think tanks useful vehicles
Speaker 1: for advancing their ideas in their careers. Colin Gray, a
Speaker 1: nuclear hardliner known for a foreign policy article titled Victory
Speaker 1: as Possible, failed to land a top position at Defense
Speaker 1: of the National Security Council. So we started the National
Speaker 1: Institute for Public Policy, which produces studies on beam weapons
Speaker 1: and other Star Wars components.
Speaker 2: So this works.
Speaker 1: It can be as directly as in the case the Terrez.
Speaker 1: You start a think tank, you write papers about how
Speaker 1: the government needs to have this specific position making sure
Speaker 1: that taxes get cut, and then you get that fucking
Speaker 1: job for yourself because you sent that paper around Reagan
Speaker 1: people with your resume attached.
Speaker 2: It's such a good grift.
Speaker 1: It's a great grift. I kind of want to steal
Speaker 1: that one from myself in all.
Speaker 2: Kind of I don't know. We talked about the value
Speaker 2: of a good font. It's that thing where like I
Speaker 2: get why this is kind of weird. I get why
Speaker 2: fly earthers exist. Yeah, I get why weird like conspirac
Speaker 2: see people or like, because to regular people, it's all
Speaker 2: just like books, right, Yeah, it's all like most people,
Speaker 2: no one gets to see the world from space, no
Speaker 2: one gets to experience history. We all just it's just
Speaker 2: we grew up at schools giving us books and going like,
Speaker 2: trust me, this is what it is. We've passed this
Speaker 2: down and so like it seems really easy to be
Speaker 2: able to hijack that and go like, see, we have
Speaker 2: a study. You love studies, we have experts, and here's
Speaker 2: a piece of paper. Here's a book, a pamphlet that
Speaker 2: says this thing very officially, that says that I should
Speaker 2: get this job.
Speaker 1: That is the stated goal. Is like, when we're having
Speaker 1: arguments about what we do with taxes, should we have
Speaker 1: this public benefit? You know, should should college be free?
Speaker 1: And you know, liberals trot out these papers by the
Speaker 1: Brooking Institute. We want to have twice as many papers
Speaker 1: from our institutes because that's all a lot of people
Speaker 1: care about. It's like, well, that's a thicker stack of papers.
Speaker 1: They must have more evidence.
Speaker 2: It's ridiculous. We have on the internet more than an ever.
Speaker 2: Like studies, the concept of a study where it's like,
Speaker 2: there's so many studies and they say different things, and
Speaker 2: then you actually dig into the study and you're like,
Speaker 2: this barely says this thing. Yeah, but we love it
Speaker 2: doesn't matter. It's just how many studies.
Speaker 1: How many studies you get in this thing. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: by the time the Reagan administration gets underway, US conservatives
Speaker 1: have exhibited their remarkable talent for flexibility by deciding the
Speaker 1: professional thinker class is good actually and ought to be
Speaker 1: employed telling the rest of us what to do. Every
Speaker 1: major shift in economic policy and defense policy under Reagan
Speaker 1: was supported by an ocean of think tank publications beyond
Speaker 1: the Powell Memo. A major intellectual touchstone of this movement
Speaker 1: was Wealth and Poverty, a book by George Gilder. Gilder
Speaker 1: was a New York child whose father died flying for
Speaker 1: the army in the Big Dub Dub dose. He grew
Speaker 1: up on a farm in Massachusetts and was raised in
Speaker 1: part by the Rockefeller family, which would give you an
Speaker 1: idea ask his economic state, right, David Rockefeller is his godfather.
Speaker 1: He is as blue a blood as it's possible to be.
Speaker 1: He's too and fine and wealth and poverty. Espouses a
Speaker 1: supply side economics philosophy that is amenable to the people
Speaker 1: who already had fortunes. Like as godfather. This basically becomes
Speaker 1: the bible of the Reagan administration's economic policy. Gilder argues
Speaker 1: for tax cuts, but he does so in a way
Speaker 1: that is utterly novel. This is the foundation of trickle
Speaker 1: down economics. Right, you need to cut taxes because it'll
Speaker 1: improve the economy for everybody. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from the Atlantic again here, Adam Smith, he said, had
Speaker 1: it wrong. Capitalism isn't a voodoo through which many selfish
Speaker 1: acts inexplicably advance the whole. It's a magnanimous organism in
Speaker 1: which everybody wants the best for everybody else, since, after all,
Speaker 1: one person cannot prosper selling his product unless many others
Speaker 1: are prosperous enough to buy. Big tax cuts, Guilder said,
Speaker 1: will trigger an outburst of altruism. Now, funny, we know
Speaker 1: that's not true. All they do is park the money offshore,
Speaker 1: trillions and trillions of dollars of it, enough money to
Speaker 1: solve a significant chunk of the problems we face healthcare, homelessness,
Speaker 1: to be goddamn certain, all of it's parked in. They're
Speaker 1: this is what the Panama papers field. That's why they've
Speaker 1: bombed a journalist car.
Speaker 2: It's not true, yea we I mean when was the
Speaker 2: Christmas Carol written? Like we've always known it's not true.
Speaker 2: It's so weird that they got away with saying like, yeah,
Speaker 2: just help out the rich people and they'll help everybody
Speaker 2: else out.
Speaker 1: I think what you're getting at, Dave, because I don't
Speaker 1: think it's capitalism to like going and being able to
Speaker 1: buy stuff at the mall. That's like a market, and
Speaker 1: markets are nice. We like markets. That's why every city
Speaker 1: in history is founded around a market. It's nice to
Speaker 1: go pick up fresh food. It's nice to get a
Speaker 1: to get a nice thing to wear or whatever. Like,
Speaker 1: it's not nice to have your entire society structured around
Speaker 1: the fact that there's a couple of thousand dudes who
Speaker 1: own every company because they have shares of a thing
Speaker 1: in the stock market, and everyone else's life and comfort
Speaker 1: and survivalist secondary to them always getting a return on
Speaker 1: their investment, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the thing. This is, This is anti
Speaker 2: what they claim to be. It's anti free market. A
Speaker 2: lot of this stuff too, where it's like they're just
Speaker 2: we're in a situation where there's certain companies that it's
Speaker 2: like there's no competition anymore for them, like they've just
Speaker 2: demolished everything.
Speaker 1: No one has an issue with the idea that Steve
Speaker 1: Wozniak and Venner of the personal computer might have a
Speaker 1: nice beach house and a fancy car, right, Yeah, nobody
Speaker 1: has an issue with the fact that Danny DeVito probably
Speaker 1: has a nice vacation home. We're all happy for Danny DeVito.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I hope he has an island. I hope he
Speaker 2: has his own little Danny DeVito island.
Speaker 1: I'm not thrilled with Mark Zuckerberg hollowing out the center
Speaker 1: of a major Hawaiian island to build an apocalypse bunker
Speaker 1: where he can recreate civilization.
Speaker 2: It's like that. It's getting silly. Yeah, it's getting real silly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Just people don't need that much stuff any no, no, or.
Speaker 1: That much control of anyway. We're all we're preaching to
Speaker 1: the choir here, and we're certainly not preaching to Guilder,
Speaker 1: because Guilder's attitude is if we just let these people
Speaker 1: get as rich as possible and leave everything up to
Speaker 1: them by gutting our social programs, they'll take care of it.
Speaker 1: One way or the other. It'll trickle down and it'll
Speaker 1: we'll all get richer.
Speaker 2: This is also based on the assumption that rich people
Speaker 2: are smart and good. Yes, And it's just very funny
Speaker 2: because this is all about them being like, we need
Speaker 2: to make colleges exclusive for them and make the world
Speaker 2: pave the way for them and give them all this
Speaker 2: stuff and they'll be smart enough to know what to
Speaker 2: with it. And it's like, really oause it sounds like
Speaker 2: you're putting everything on a platter for them, and they
Speaker 2: have all this generational wealth and you're ensuring a bunch
Speaker 2: of dipshits with a lot of money and no idea
Speaker 2: how to actually do any.
Speaker 1: Sure does seem like that. And Guilder, the guy who
Speaker 1: is who puts together you know, this argument that becomes
Speaker 1: the center of Reagan's economic policy is a career think
Speaker 1: tank guy. He was a program director for the Manhattan Institute.
Speaker 1: He was chairman of the economic portion of the Lairman Institute.
Speaker 1: And so again he comes entirely out of this project.
Speaker 1: By these rich guys to fund the creation of an
Speaker 1: intellectual class that says what they want being said, and
Speaker 1: by framing the incredibly selfish economic policies that the elite
Speaker 1: support as altruistic, he is able to preside over a
Speaker 1: sea change in how conservatives talk to the country. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies. Gen Kirkpatrick has criticized Republicans for being
Speaker 1: able to quote conceive of no greater good than a
Speaker 1: balanced budget. Starting with Reagan, balanced budgets are no longer
Speaker 1: a priority, and the deficit simply wasn't worth talking about
Speaker 1: unless a Democrat happened to be president. Greg Easterbrook notes
Speaker 1: in his History of Conservative think tanks that the Heritage
Speaker 1: Foundation didn't even use the word debt in its mandate
Speaker 1: for leadership until page two hundred and nineteen. In the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen the Ethics and Policy Center, another think tank,
Speaker 1: started holding conferences on how market mechanisms could benefit the
Speaker 1: poor quote not once were welfare queens or ghetto cadillacs,
Speaker 1: the sort of small minded crochets that would have dominated
Speaker 1: a similar Conservative conference a decade ago. Even mentioned conservatism,
Speaker 1: by acquiring a positive vision, had become warmer. A huge
Speaker 1: amount of this strategy, that kind of the lynchpin of
Speaker 1: it working, hinges on journalists and particularly the way lazy
Speaker 1: journalists meet their deadlines. The way legacy publications tend to
Speaker 1: work is that when you're discussing a debate over public policy,
Speaker 1: you want to be able to present quotes from both
Speaker 1: sides of the debate. This is called being unbiased. Powell
Speaker 1: and his fellow ideologues knew that, since most journalists are lazy,
Speaker 1: if you made it very easy for them to get
Speaker 1: quotes from you by sending them piles of information whenever
Speaker 1: they asked for a question, they would reward you by
Speaker 1: giving your ideas more sympathy in their coverage. The Brookings Institute,
Speaker 1: which tended to do rigorous work, charged journalists who wanted
Speaker 1: to access their studies. None of these right wing think
Speaker 1: tanks charge. They also write in a way that's more
Speaker 1: accessible to the layman. Since they're not actually saying anything
Speaker 1: with any evidence, they're able to like throw into entertaining
Speaker 1: prose by guys like William F. Buckley. Right, this is
Speaker 1: a big part of why this works.
Speaker 2: Have you read the da Vinci Code, Robert No The
Speaker 2: book The di Vinci Code is practically written in screenplay format,
Speaker 2: and it's just reminding me of that. Where they're making it.
Speaker 2: They're basically like, you read the da Vinci Code and
Speaker 2: you're like, he wanted this to be a movie. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and he made it as easy as possible for it
Speaker 2: to be a movie. And that's what you're describing here,
Speaker 2: which is like science papers and studies, they are difficult,
Speaker 2: they're very Having worked on some more news and going
Speaker 2: through them, it's like sometimes they feel like they're purposefully
Speaker 2: worded to be hard to understand. Yeah, And it's almost
Speaker 2: like a gatekeeping It's like when you do your texts,
Speaker 2: you realize it's kind of a gatekeeping process. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: makes sense that this would be a really important step because,
Speaker 2: like you said, journalisms, journalists are lazy expected. I think
Speaker 2: the nicer way to put it is they're expected to
Speaker 2: cover everything, and that means they are expected to be
Speaker 2: like kind of experts and everything to understand everything, and
Speaker 2: so they will glom On. If you go like here, yeah,
Speaker 2: ik it easy, Here's a really easy way to explain
Speaker 2: this thing.
Speaker 1: Or here's a column by one of our fellows on
Speaker 1: this issue. You know, you can just publish this and
Speaker 1: you'll have something to put in your little newspaper. The
Speaker 1: American Enterprise Institute or AEI, was perhaps the most successful
Speaker 1: of the bunch. It was founded in nineteen forty three
Speaker 1: by Lewis Brown, a wealthy industrial magnate. He had been
Speaker 1: the bagman for the president of Montgomery Ward T. F. Mercel,
Speaker 1: and during the end of the nineteen twenties, a firm
Speaker 1: called John's Manville discovered the profit making potential of an
Speaker 1: incredible fire retardant substance called asbestos, and they hired Tf
Speaker 1: to be their chairman. He brought Brown, the founder of
Speaker 1: the AEI, and then he dropped dead suddenly, almost immediately,
Speaker 1: which made Brown president of the s Bestos Company at
Speaker 1: age thirty five. He becomes the s The guy who
Speaker 1: founds like the most influential think tank of the Reagan era,
Speaker 1: was previously the asbestos king of the United States.
Speaker 2: He's got the whole world in his problem.
Speaker 1: He share it does and he's given it all cancer.
Speaker 1: He is the president of the s Bestos Institute, which
Speaker 1: is the sort of think tank digit dedicated to s
Speaker 1: bestos working. Great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you love to see it out there sitting around,
Speaker 2: just like Sniffin' pile.
Speaker 1: These people are all such ghouls because he's the the
Speaker 1: AEI founder, is the s bestos guy, the author of
Speaker 1: the Powell Memorandum, which lays out the strategy for all
Speaker 1: this is the fucking Tobacco Institute lawyer, Like, these people
Speaker 1: have such money.
Speaker 2: They should get they should make they should get some asbestos.
Speaker 2: Roll it up in a cigarette they used to smoke it. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's the good stuff, you.
Speaker 1: Know, And I bet it hit like, Oh man, I
Speaker 1: would take one. I would try an asbestos cigarette.
Speaker 2: Dad got him right. It's like human meat, you'd like.
Speaker 2: You're like, well, I wouldn't seek it out, but if
Speaker 2: it's handed to me, I'm gonna have to try it, obviously. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I ate what was basically a fish stuffed with human meat,
Speaker 1: and it was pretty tasty. Day.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's good. I got admit, I don't like fish,
Speaker 2: but I'd probably just pick off the fish.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, just just eat the man.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Of course. So while he ran the company, uh, the
Speaker 1: asbestos company. It became obvious that asbestos was causing asbestosis
Speaker 1: among workers who made it. This is inflammation and scarring
Speaker 1: off the lungs due to inhaling asbestos fibers, and it
Speaker 1: leads to fun things like mesothelioma and lung cancer. It
Speaker 1: became this motherfucker Brown's crusade to pump out disinformation about asbestosis,
Speaker 1: to maximize the amount of time that they could put
Speaker 1: asbestos in everything before they got stopped from doing that.
Speaker 1: And his goal for this was it was the same
Speaker 1: thing that people the tobacco industry would later do. It's
Speaker 1: the same thing the oil and gas industry has done
Speaker 1: with climate change. Confuse the issue until everyone's dead, right,
Speaker 1: so you can keep making money off of it.
Speaker 2: I don't I don't believe in hell, But if this
Speaker 2: guy like showed up in hell, I feel like he
Speaker 2: wouldn't have to ask, Like, he wouldn't be like, what
Speaker 2: the hell? What did I do?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: This scance? Yeah, this is about right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So when one of his company's contractors, who is
Speaker 1: actually like doing the manufacturing of the asbestos from this
Speaker 1: company called Unarco, they started this company like starts identifying
Speaker 1: employees who are like getting medical tests through their company
Speaker 1: health care and showing signs of asbestosis. Unarco like sends
Speaker 1: them letters saying like, hey, you've got the disease asbestos
Speaker 1: gives you. And Brown is livid about this, and he
Speaker 1: basically like tries to get them to stop telling employees
Speaker 1: that they have asbestosis when they get sick. One Unarco
Speaker 1: employee would later testify in a federal investigation on their
Speaker 1: never forget. I turned to mister Brown. One of the
Speaker 1: Browns made this crack that Anarco managers were a bunch
Speaker 1: of fools for notifying employees who had aspestosis, And I said,
Speaker 1: mister Brown, do you mean to tell me that you
Speaker 1: would let them work until they dropped? He said, yes,
Speaker 1: we save a lot of money that way.
Speaker 2: Yep. Again, it's it's it's looking at the problem like
Speaker 2: being like, Okay, so the problem is what we're making
Speaker 2: is killing all our employees, and we have to tell them,
Speaker 2: and then someone being like, you know what we should do,
Speaker 2: just don't tell them.
Speaker 1: It's just not.
Speaker 2: Problem is solved. Yeah, it's like a fucking it's like
Speaker 2: something they do and always Sonny like it's it's it's
Speaker 2: just a the dirt bag bit. Yeah, through and through,
Speaker 2: it's incredible.
Speaker 1: It's so good. Now, despite being a wealthy ghoul with
Speaker 1: a body count to rival most warlords, Brown was unfulfilled.
Speaker 1: He saw what his fellow rich guy, Robert Brookings, had
Speaker 1: done with the Brookings Institute, which had become an intellectual
Speaker 1: powerhouse that was widely respected. Brown wanted that kind of
Speaker 1: respect for himself, and that's why he founds the AI
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty three, and that's where we get the
Speaker 1: American Enterprise Institute Now. It was stymied at first by
Speaker 1: the fact that Brown didn't believe in anything beyond having
Speaker 1: more money and was really incapable of analyzing the world
Speaker 1: in a lens beyond this. So it wasn't until nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four, when a guy named William Burrudi took over,
Speaker 1: that the AEI turned into something worth talking about. Berrudi's
Speaker 1: parents were Lebanese immigrants, and he was a Greek Catholic
Speaker 1: who served in the Navy during World War Two and
Speaker 1: then worked for the Chamber of Commerce. He was Barry
Speaker 1: Goldwater's main advisor in nineteen sixty four and a close
Speaker 1: friend to Dick Nixon, a man who did not have
Speaker 1: any close friends. He restructured the American Enterprise Institute to
Speaker 1: the copy Brookings and started hiring fellows to put out
Speaker 1: work that would make the case for supply side conservative
Speaker 1: economic policies. Burrudi's goal was to reach the mainstream, and
Speaker 1: as a result, they started hiring famous people in popular writers,
Speaker 1: people like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Gerald Ford, and Philip habeeb It
Speaker 1: strove to entertain as well as to inform, and its
Speaker 1: fellows wrote articles with titles like Curse of the Mummy's
Speaker 1: Tomb and Dictators and Double Standards. That last one by
Speaker 1: Jeane Kirkpatrick mocked Jimmy Carter for failing to support the
Speaker 1: Shah of Iran and Anastasio Simosa, the dictator of Nicaragua.
Speaker 1: Kirkpatrick argued that basically, you know, obviously communist regimes are bad,
Speaker 1: but traditional autocrats are okay, right, because they stop the
Speaker 1: communists from getting into power. Quote. Traditional autocrats do not
Speaker 1: disturb the habitual rhythms of work in leisure, habitual places
Speaker 1: of residents, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because
Speaker 1: the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable
Speaker 1: to ordinary people who growing up in the society learn
Speaker 1: to cope. Revolutionary communist regimes claim jurisdiction over the whole
Speaker 1: life of society and make demands for change that so
Speaker 1: violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the
Speaker 1: tens of thousands. And that what Kirkpatrick is saying here
Speaker 1: is that like, well, communists might cause a problem that
Speaker 1: makes people flee the country, but normal dictators are miserable
Speaker 1: in a way that people feel like they can't escape.
Speaker 1: So that's what we the United States should encourage, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I guess he's not wrong. It's it's hard,
Speaker 2: it's hard. It's hard to push for like change, for
Speaker 2: fundamental change. We were talking about this before with the infrastructure,
Speaker 2: with the things that how they are like people are
Speaker 2: going to resist anything where you're like, we have to
Speaker 2: we have to change these things in a really meaningful
Speaker 2: or deep way that's going to affect you. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess he's not wrong that well, dictator.
Speaker 1: He isn't that these dictatorships are going to cause huge
Speaker 1: numbers of people to flee the country because they kill
Speaker 1: lots of people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's good.
Speaker 1: Problem you know, it's it's this is part of why
Speaker 1: like this article. You know, the thing it's arguing is
Speaker 1: that the US should encourage democracy, but only slow, gradual demidocracy,
Speaker 1: And if a dictatorship faces an uprising, or if a
Speaker 1: democracy elects a left wing leader, we should murder them,
Speaker 1: right like, because that's dangerous, right, that's too likely to
Speaker 1: make people flee the country. So we have to you know,
Speaker 1: dictatorships we can work with, but anyone who tries to
Speaker 1: improve the country in a progressive direction, the United States
Speaker 1: has kind of a responsibility to kill.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, how dare they? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan loves this fucking article. He thinks that Gene
Speaker 1: makes a brilliant argument, and he directly this article is
Speaker 1: directly credited with her getting appointed to be US Ambassador
Speaker 1: to the U Win and her broader argument helps create
Speaker 1: the Reagan administration's policy in Latin America, which is why
Speaker 1: we start sending weapons to the contrast. This is this
Speaker 1: is like why the Reagan administration so assiduously embraces the
Speaker 1: policy of sending arms to any dictator who promises to
Speaker 1: use them on leftists, right like this This is kind
Speaker 1: of a direct result of this think tank, you know, ecosystem,
Speaker 1: it really helps. Maybe they would have done it without that, right,
Speaker 1: because that's what these kind of people always want to do.
Speaker 1: But Kirkpatrick's article kind of provides the intellectual scaffolding that
Speaker 1: makes it kind of respectable.
Speaker 2: Right, right, they're enabling them. Yes, that's all we talked about,
Speaker 2: like the idea of a friend who's like, yeah, you
Speaker 2: can have one more drink. It's fine. It's that they're
Speaker 2: they're looking for people to say, like, what you're doing
Speaker 2: is actually very good. Yeah, the thing you were gonna
Speaker 2: do anyway that benefits you directly. Oh yeah, that turns
Speaker 2: out to be the right.
Speaker 1: It's actually good for everybody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it is.
Speaker 1: It's maddening to admit, but pretty undeniable. That AEI is
Speaker 1: what makes conservatism quote intellectually respectable. As one Reagan White
Speaker 1: House official told the Atlantics Greg Easterbrook, quote without AEI,
Speaker 1: Reagan never would have been elected.
Speaker 2: And again that's a.
Speaker 1: Member of the Reagan White House. Right. This think tank
Speaker 1: created by the Asbestos.
Speaker 2: Baron that's so bleak that they're so this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that the Asbestos think tank arguing dictatorships are
Speaker 1: fine is a lynchpin of Reagan getting into power.
Speaker 2: It's basically I'm sort of saying, like, we know that
Speaker 2: we don't have everybody's best interest in mind. Yeah, we really,
Speaker 2: we know that we don't care about the poor even
Speaker 2: like middle class. We see them as nothing. But this
Speaker 2: is making it seem like we have a viable like
Speaker 2: thing to offer everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, another major thing that the think tank industrial
Speaker 1: complex is able to do for the Reagan administration is
Speaker 1: help launder his ideas about space based anti nuclear laser weapons.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: This is the so called star Wars program. Now, Yeah,
Speaker 1: experts not being paid by think tanks. Was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe someday this will be a thing, but like, we
Speaker 1: just can't do it right now. It's insanely expensive and
Speaker 1: likely it might a lot of this might just be impossible. Right,
Speaker 1: But a strong counter argument emerged, backed by a variety
Speaker 1: of right wing defense focused think tanks. The goal of
Speaker 1: this Reagan program, officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative
Speaker 1: or SDI, was to, in Reagan's words, render nuclear weapons
Speaker 1: impotent and obsolete. Now, this was considered a dangerous goal
Speaker 1: because nuclear deterrence is largely what stopped the US and
Speaker 1: the USSR from like directly throwing hands too much. Ballistic
Speaker 1: missile defenses eventually started costing the US more than four
Speaker 1: billion dollars a year, which made them the most expensive
Speaker 1: weapons program in the Pentagon budget. As the Institute for
Speaker 1: Policy Studies, ironically itself a think tank, eventually acknowledged in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine, the overall program has been described as
Speaker 1: high risk and a rush to failure by a number
Speaker 1: of respected missile defense experts. The Pentagon's Director of Operational
Speaker 1: Testing and Evaluation released his annual report in February two
Speaker 1: thousand and pointed out that the aggressive schedule established for
Speaker 1: the NMD program presents a major challenge. The NMD program
Speaker 1: will have to compress the work of ten to twelve
Speaker 1: years in eight or less years. This pattern has historically
Speaker 1: resulted in a negative effect on virtually every troubled DoD
Speaker 1: development program. A panel headed by the former Chief of
Speaker 1: Staff of the Air Force, General Larry Welch, released a
Speaker 1: report last November harshly critical of the program. The Welsh
Speaker 1: report argued that the failures of the program were not
Speaker 1: the result of random malfunctions, but an indication of systemic
Speaker 1: flaws and design planning and management, stating that instead of
Speaker 1: unusual clarity, there is a usual fragmentation and confusion about
Speaker 1: authority and responsibility. And that's because this was never a
Speaker 1: plan to actually build an effective missile defense system. It
Speaker 1: was like, number one, a way to shovel a lot
Speaker 1: of money into defense contractors, and number two a thing
Speaker 1: for Reagan to promise that would make people feel safer. Right,
Speaker 1: We're going to have these laser defenses that will render
Speaker 1: us immune to nukes. You know.
Speaker 2: It's like you duck and cover, right, It's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it'll be fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll get it. We'll get a lockdown, we'll get
Speaker 1: a lockdown. Don't worry. I mean, once they.
Speaker 2: Learn it doesn't work, what are they going to do? Complain?
Speaker 2: They'll be ash.
Speaker 1: It's the thing, nuclear defenses. If they fail, not.
Speaker 2: Your problem, exactly, Y's win win. Now.
Speaker 1: I find it personally fascinating how few actually different sounding
Speaker 1: names there are for these think tanks. I just quoted
Speaker 1: the Institute for Policy Studies, and the think tank that
Speaker 1: largely backed the Strategic Defense initiative was the National Institute
Speaker 1: for Public Policy. What was said and the actual rigor
Speaker 1: behind the conclusions in the papers didn't matter, volume was
Speaker 1: what mattered. This is something you were getting at a
Speaker 1: bit ago, right, you just have to have more paper
Speaker 1: than the other guy.
Speaker 2: And by this science, yeah, more official.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this really simple, shallow metric is what causes
Speaker 1: conservatism to advance by leaps and bounds from the eighties
Speaker 1: up to the yearly two thousands. And there are some
Speaker 1: some of these think tank guys will even admit this.
Speaker 1: Michael Horowitz of the Heritage Foundation Total Reporter quote, Historically,
Speaker 1: conservatives in the United States have come across as racists
Speaker 1: and know nothings. It was essential to create a moral
Speaker 1: and intellectual basis for conservative beliefs that had its own
Speaker 1: vision and wasn't just a reaction against liberalism. And I
Speaker 1: do that's fucked up that it worked. I am a
Speaker 1: little hopeful that like they've gone back to just being
Speaker 1: a reaction. That might suggest that they're kind of out
Speaker 1: of ideas. And I wonder if that's part of why
Speaker 1: the demographics are turning so starkly against them. I guess
Speaker 1: we'll see in the next ten years we sure.
Speaker 2: Well. Yeah, it's it's just interesting because there there I
Speaker 2: think there is a pattern that I've seen now of
Speaker 2: them sort of wanting to do back the things that
Speaker 2: the left quote unquote like does to them, this idea
Speaker 2: of like when Biden is in power, they're like, well,
Speaker 2: we'll do an impeachment. And it's like it's like a
Speaker 2: kid who learns new words and then uses them improperly
Speaker 2: against their parents, where it's like, yeah, but we're we
Speaker 2: you know, Trump was being in peace for a reason.
Speaker 1: You try to throughout the country right now, they're like.
Speaker 2: Well, you get an impeachment or like I remember Tim
Speaker 2: Poole using started learning learned the Friends death cult and
Speaker 2: it's like, no, we were saying death cult because you
Speaker 2: guys were like because the right was acting like a
Speaker 2: death cult around the face mass and pandemic, like it
Speaker 2: was in this context. And what you're what you're sort
Speaker 2: of indicating here is that idea of like, well the
Speaker 2: liberals they had all this fancy education stuff and studies,
Speaker 2: we need our own. Yeah, it doesn't matter if it's real.
Speaker 2: It's like if for example, the Daily Wires started making
Speaker 2: uh content, started.
Speaker 1: Making stuff and movies yeah, and being like, well.
Speaker 2: We need ours, but it's so hollow because it comes
Speaker 2: from a reactionary place.
Speaker 1: Exactly. They are reactionaries. And that's fundamentally what that means.
Speaker 1: There's nothing inside these people.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about regular voting people who are just
Speaker 1: more considered or get trapped by this ideology. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about the ideologues.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: All they really have is a desire to be rich
Speaker 1: and powerful. Everything they're doing is just trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how to further that end. But they don't believe
Speaker 1: in things beyond.
Speaker 2: That, right, and the idea to politicize everything where a
Speaker 2: lot of this comes from. We're like, well, the left
Speaker 2: have their studies, and it's like, no, they aren't the
Speaker 2: left studies, they're just studies.
Speaker 1: And the studies that they stay, yeah, you don't like.
Speaker 2: The well, we have our own, and it's like that.
Speaker 2: It's that framing of like, oh, it's left versus right,
Speaker 2: and it's like, no, it's you versus reality. It really
Speaker 2: is for at least a lot of this. That isn't
Speaker 2: to say that people on the left doone also have
Speaker 2: their problems and and will overpoliticize things. But when it
Speaker 2: comes to these studies and stuff where it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: we need a counter thing about the asbestos, and this is.
Speaker 1: Why they insentially just land On, like let's just break reality, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's the that's where they go.
Speaker 2: And I think the again, the problem with this grift
Speaker 2: not for them, the problem for us, the people being grifted,
Speaker 2: is that it like asbestos is a good example where
Speaker 2: it's like, well time, you need time, and by the
Speaker 2: time you figure out this thing is wrong, the damage
Speaker 2: was done. You lead pipes or or or trickle down
Speaker 2: economics by the time we figure out, like, hey, this
Speaker 2: was dumb for a lot of this stuff, like lead
Speaker 2: pipes is a good analogy for it because it's like
Speaker 2: you look at that and you go, well, we have
Speaker 2: to tear out all these goddamn pipes. That's gonna take
Speaker 2: so much time. And it's sort of the same with
Speaker 2: the stuff that they're planting here is it's like we
Speaker 2: can't just undo this stuff. It's embedded deep.
Speaker 1: It's the center.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, cool stuff, cool stuff, Yeah, yeah, it's it's good stuff.
Speaker 2: You can put sunglasses on it. It's so cool.
Speaker 1: We've been talking about like Gene Kapatrick, Michael Horowitz, you know, Crystal,
Speaker 1: like these big names in the think tank writing, you know,
Speaker 1: and these guys, these are people who are like popular
Speaker 1: enough that they are bylines in the period of time
Speaker 1: when magazines sold could sell magazines, right, And that's a
Speaker 1: big part of like getting some of these famous thinkers.
Speaker 1: Getting Gerald Ford writing columns and stuff is a thing
Speaker 1: that will can help launder your ideas because people are
Speaker 1: already famous. It'll get eyeballs right for the less famous
Speaker 1: grunts at the think tanks actually putting together a lot
Speaker 1: of these papers, doing the background work. The ultimate goal
Speaker 1: of a career working in these think tanks is to
Speaker 1: earn yourself a coveted presidential appointment. Lawrence Korb, a DoD
Speaker 1: employee turned think tanker turned Raytheon executive, describe the focus
Speaker 1: on presidential employment among think tank employees as obsessive because
Speaker 1: that's how you get rich, right. Think tankers also made
Speaker 1: attractive options for new administrations because the logistical burdens involved
Speaker 1: in bringing them on were basically non existent. All you
Speaker 1: have to do to move from AI to the administration
Speaker 1: is walk across the street.
Speaker 2: He says.
Speaker 1: You don't have to move your family to DC because
Speaker 1: you're already there. You don't have to give up a
Speaker 1: good job you might not get back because the think
Speaker 1: tank will always take you back. You don't have to
Speaker 1: put your assets into some kind of complicated trust. If
Speaker 1: your background is academics, you don't have any assets, and
Speaker 1: a business manner lawyer coming into government usually has to
Speaker 1: make a financial sacrifice to someone from academia. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, sixty thousand dollars, the typical pay for a
Speaker 1: high level appointee is a raise. So what he's saying
Speaker 1: there is like and again, this is a guy who
Speaker 1: starts out working for think tanks, gets a presidential appointment,
Speaker 1: becomes a Raytheon executive. Right, you can if you're an academic,
Speaker 1: if you agree to go to the dark side, you
Speaker 1: can make an okay living at a think tank, make
Speaker 1: a decent living in politics, and then when you're out
Speaker 1: of politics, you get to be an executive for Raytheon
Speaker 1: where you get rich. You know, it's a path to
Speaker 1: wealth for people who otherwise wouldn't have had it. And
Speaker 1: that's part of the promise. If you make the argument
Speaker 1: that we can't change anything that would lead to a
Speaker 1: reduction or end to our landed wealthy aristocracy to this
Speaker 1: oligarch class, then you'll get to become a little bitty,
Speaker 1: petty oligarch. Right, that's the promise the think tank makes
Speaker 1: the people who work there. You know, during the height
Speaker 1: of its influence, more than half of AEI's funding came
Speaker 1: directly from donations from corporations who defrayed their own tax
Speaker 1: burden by paying people who influenced the government to lower
Speaker 1: their taxes even further. Sometimes this hurt their bottom line.
Speaker 1: Easterbrook noted in nineteen eighty six that quote an advocate
Speaker 1: of relaxed anti trust laws. AEI notes in its current
Speaker 1: annual report that the waf of corporate mergers led to
Speaker 1: a reduction of more than one hundred thousand dollars in
Speaker 1: its support last year because several friendly companies were gobbled
Speaker 1: out of existence. But you know, the wealthy men who
Speaker 1: spend their money and the money of their corporations on
Speaker 1: these think tanks always remember in the end to keep
Speaker 1: them topped off right, at least as long as they
Speaker 1: need them. We'll see if they finally win. I don't
Speaker 1: think these think tanks will keep getting funded to the
Speaker 1: extent that they have been, but they were for quite
Speaker 1: some time. Really, up through the Bush years, this system
Speaker 1: kind of dominated a lot of the ideological conversation in
Speaker 1: this country. It was kind of dethroned in the Trump years,
Speaker 1: not totally. These they still have a decent amount of influence.
Speaker 2: But because yeah, I can see Trump, I mean, maybe
Speaker 2: you'll tell you you're probably gonna say, yeah, I can
Speaker 2: see Trump as the kind of jerk who does not
Speaker 2: listen to think tanks. No, And honestly, that's probably one
Speaker 2: of the good things, one of the few good things. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, and it's it's also that like Trump is kind
Speaker 1: of new right. We don't, we use different terms for
Speaker 1: it now, but in like the late nineteen eighties that
Speaker 1: we're talking about, these the people that we just like,
Speaker 1: we've come to just call fascists as the new right,
Speaker 1: and these are like these very reactionary, very aggressive, not
Speaker 1: traditional sort of like polite, respectable conservatives. And these people,
Speaker 1: from the beginning of their time on the political stage
Speaker 1: have not liked the think tank set right in part
Speaker 1: because these think tanks make a big deal of how
Speaker 1: influential they are and they're not you know, this this
Speaker 1: evangelical this kind of alliance of evangelical right wingers, Christian
Speaker 1: nationalist culture warriors. Right, they're important, but they kind of
Speaker 1: represent a threat to the new right type guys, and
Speaker 1: so you know, it's possible their hour has started to pass.
Speaker 1: We'll see if things shift back in the other direction.
Speaker 1: But they did their bit right, They they shifted the
Speaker 1: culture successfully. They got us to the point that we're at.
Speaker 2: There'll always be people like them because I think when
Speaker 2: it comes down to what these things takes are are
Speaker 2: their middle management when when Trump they are like when
Speaker 2: Trump talked about the concept of a deep state, he
Speaker 2: was wrong about what it was, but I don't think
Speaker 2: he's wrong that there is a form of that, and
Speaker 2: that is people whose entire careers are maintaining their careers,
Speaker 2: where like they just they they just you know, it's
Speaker 2: like I was reading about like we did we did
Speaker 2: a video about like how elections are their own economies.
Speaker 2: There are people whose entire jobs or a better example
Speaker 2: is taxes right, H and R block these companies that
Speaker 2: only exist for this system that we've created that to
Speaker 2: keep them around, and they lobby specifically to keep taxes
Speaker 2: the way they are so they can continue to exist.
Speaker 2: And I can see someone like Trump sort of looking
Speaker 2: at people like that and seeing like, oh, these are
Speaker 2: these are people we can cut or rejecting them. I
Speaker 2: don't think he's doing it out of the goodness of
Speaker 2: his heart. But I can see him doing it for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it might weaken them in the long run,
Speaker 1: strategically in the same way that like Trump, he's done
Speaker 1: a lot of damage. He's also like right now spending
Speaker 1: all of the rnc's money on his legal bills, right
Speaker 1: which might hurt them, you know, not just in the
Speaker 1: presidential election, but across the board. You know, I guess
Speaker 1: we'll see. It's this kind of like the risk of
Speaker 1: letting a single dude get that much power as he
Speaker 1: can really just these these well laid plans, this twenty
Speaker 1: thirty year plan to take over the judiciary fifty years,
Speaker 1: all this kind of shit.
Speaker 2: You know, it's he's he's a threat to the establishment,
Speaker 2: just not the way he advertises he's a threat to
Speaker 2: the establishment, the way letting a drunk they are into
Speaker 2: a Walmart is a threat to the establishment, where it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you're just in, You're just an asshole, Like you're just
Speaker 2: a liability for them, right, Like you'll just they can't
Speaker 2: tell him anything as they'll just say it out loud
Speaker 2: or he'll fuck it up. Like that's how he's actually
Speaker 2: a threat to them. Which is like they're their little
Speaker 2: slow playing that they're doing. They don't like it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well well Dave, that's it. Where ah, where do
Speaker 1: you Where do you go? Where do you live?
Speaker 2: Oh? I live right here. We're doing this over zoom,
Speaker 2: so you know, I don't have I don't have anywhere
Speaker 2: to go. I'm just gonna I'm just gonna take off
Speaker 2: my pants when this is done. You know, are you
Speaker 2: talking about plugs.
Speaker 1: Or like, yeah, yeah, your sluggables all that good stuff.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean you mentioned it. Gamefully Unemployed go
Speaker 2: to patreon dot com, slash gamefully Unemployed, or better yet,
Speaker 2: just google gamefully unemployed GA M E f U l
Speaker 2: O Y unemployed. Uh I uh. It's a podcast network
Speaker 2: I do it tom Ryman Ryman where we mostly talk
Speaker 2: about movies, not politics, you know, movies X files. And
Speaker 2: then I am the head writer for some More News
Speaker 2: and just you know, google some more news if you
Speaker 2: like more politics. Uh, that's what you can get. You
Speaker 2: can get that. It's right there in the name some
Speaker 2: more News. Hell check that out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, check that out. Check out some more News,
Speaker 1: check out gamefully Unemployed, and check out the New Roadhouse.
Speaker 2: Check out that new Roadhouse.
Speaker 1: Check out the New Roadhouse. Or if you don't want
Speaker 1: to see the New Roadhouse, just kick the ship out
Speaker 1: of somebody. Just find a stranger and just really start
Speaker 1: kicking the son of a bitch.
Speaker 2: Get in a fight.
Speaker 1: It's always good to get into it. There's no consequences
Speaker 1: to getting into a fight. Fight animals. Sure, yeah, fight yourself,
Speaker 1: fighting yourself. You know, like that fight club guy in
Speaker 1: that movie.
Speaker 2: Do a fight club, a club club. We should do
Speaker 2: a fight club.
Speaker 1: Let's do a Dave and I are going to go
Speaker 1: do a fight club. The rest of you.
Speaker 2: Credit card companies, right, that's what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to bleep that we're just joking. Credit
Speaker 1: card companies. You can let us into your building. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's over.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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