Speaker 1: I recently rewatched that Stomp HBO special from the la.
Speaker 2: Oh. It's just so stomped.
Speaker 1: Like we were like, damn, bro, these.
Speaker 2: People are playing cards, but it's rhythmic and.
Speaker 3: And I just like, yo, they're not even playing They're
Speaker 3: playing pots and using brooms and ship I feel like
Speaker 3: there were a couple things, like just commercials, like the
Speaker 3: basketball commercial where.
Speaker 2: Like the dude is dribbling. They edited together that, or
Speaker 2: that one Volkswagen commercial where the windshield wiper starts like
Speaker 2: going to the beat, and then everything outside the windows starts.
Speaker 4: Going to the beat.
Speaker 2: Stop dude. The influence of stomp. They started stomping. It
Speaker 2: was so stumped, We stopped every everything so stumped. Hello
Speaker 2: the Internet, and welcome to Season three eighty, Episode two
Speaker 2: of Daily Night Day, a production of My Heart Radio.
Speaker 2: This is a podcast where we take a deep dive
Speaker 2: into America share consciousness. It is Tuesday, March eighteenth, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep, It's National ag Day, Shout out to Agriculture,
Speaker 1: National Sloppy Joe Day, National Awkward Moments Day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good times, good times, Slopy Joe, Awkward Moments. I know,
Speaker 2: let's just have an awkward moment the HR people who
Speaker 2: are really into these national.
Speaker 5: Days DM like, oh, okay, awkward, Now we have to
Speaker 5: put this one up and put on the bulletin board.
Speaker 2: Did not have that one on my twenty twenty five
Speaker 2: but had on my calendar. Yeah, tried to force an
Speaker 2: awkward moment. Okay, that was so awkward. It's like, no, oh.
Speaker 1: Don't you love Joe Biden.
Speaker 2: Oh okay.
Speaker 4: Anyways, my name is.
Speaker 2: Jack O'Brien aka Potatoes O'Brien, and I'm thrilled to be
Speaker 2: joined as always by my co host, mister Miles Gris.
Speaker 1: Yes, he's still out here. Look, you can actually find
Speaker 1: me on Linkerson Boulevard from time to time. Now, even
Speaker 1: the boulevards of Ventura or Magnolia, you never know, because
Speaker 1: I'm in the San Fernando Valley, the Shogun Window gun.
Speaker 2: Yes in d Yeah, stay out here. You're just all
Speaker 2: just walking making turning the value into a lot of city.
Speaker 2: Do a lot of walking, nice, a lot of walking.
Speaker 1: They call me Chris.
Speaker 2: Well, mister Walkin.
Speaker 5: We are thrilled to be joined in air third Seat
Speaker 5: Wow by the executive director of Civil Rights Corps, which
Speaker 5: is a nonprofit dedicated to fighting systemic injustice.
Speaker 2: He's been a civil rights lawyer, a public defender. He
Speaker 2: was named twenty sixteenth Trial Lawyer of the Year by
Speaker 2: Public Justice. The author of several books, The incredibly compelling
Speaker 2: Usual Cruelty and The brand New Copaganda, which we got
Speaker 2: to read an advanced copy of, is dropping April fifteenth,
Speaker 2: so good go pre order right now. We'll be talking
Speaker 2: about it. Most importantly a great follow on social media,
Speaker 2: of course, please welcome the brilliant and talented Alan Carcasone.
Speaker 6: Thank you all for having me back.
Speaker 1: Oh man, always open door. I got excited when I
Speaker 1: read the word zeitgeist at the end.
Speaker 4: Of your book.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, yeah, shout out to the show. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: great word.
Speaker 6: I was thinking of you guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course, totally.
Speaker 6: Man, I've been well, I mean, at least as well
Speaker 6: as can be. I'm excited to have this book out
Speaker 6: there in the world, and I think the ideas are
Speaker 6: so important now and at times rising authoritarianism and a
Speaker 6: real assault on basic notions of kindness and truth and love.
Speaker 6: And you know, so I was I was trying to
Speaker 6: explore the last few years, you know, like what do
Speaker 6: we make of the mainstream media and how they're leading
Speaker 6: us to these really dark places, and I'm just glad
Speaker 6: to be able to be able to talk about it
Speaker 6: now in public.
Speaker 2: I'd give them an a minus. I think I think
Speaker 2: they're mostly nailing it. What do you guess thinks? Sorry,
Speaker 2: I didn't read the book. But we like the mainstream media, right,
Speaker 2: They're cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I love the New York Times games. I mean, with
Speaker 2: with many a guest, we like to get to know
Speaker 2: them a little bit better and do a search history underrated, overrated,
Speaker 2: But we got a lot to cover, so we want
Speaker 2: to just kind of dive right in, if that's all
Speaker 2: right with you, Alec, unless you had a search history
Speaker 2: underrated or overrated that was particularly pressing that you wanted
Speaker 2: to get off your chest.
Speaker 6: You know, I don't do anything other than think about topaganda.
Speaker 6: So okay, I said, better just dive right in, you know,
Speaker 6: all right, let's do it.
Speaker 2: I was actually it was funny.
Speaker 1: Yesterday I was hanging out with some people who are
Speaker 1: from out of town, and like they hit me with
Speaker 1: the is LA Safe because.
Speaker 7: Like, and I was like, you, okay, yeah, Kelly's great man,
Speaker 7: what are you talking about?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 7: Because I see a lot of like you know that
Speaker 7: people running into stores and like grabbing stuff and things
Speaker 7: like that, and I'm like, oh, my sweet, sweet child, Yeah,
Speaker 7: this is These are like cherry picked videos that they
Speaker 7: play over and over again to sort of create that narrative.
Speaker 1: Like crime is actually going on, Like whoa really?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 6: One of the things, the thing that I just think
Speaker 6: about a lot, is the curation selectively of anecdote. You know,
Speaker 6: you know, you could you could take a video montage
Speaker 6: of every missed shot that Michael Jordan took in his career,
Speaker 6: put them all together, and you make them look like
Speaker 6: a bad shooter.
Speaker 2: He's the worst player in the history of the NBA.
Speaker 2: You can't make a friend shot.
Speaker 6: That's essentially what the mainstream media does with crime. So
Speaker 6: the most effective propaganda, this is such an important lesson
Speaker 6: that I learned in my years of studying this. The
Speaker 6: most effective propaganda is actually based on true anecdotes. Because
Speaker 6: if you do something that's that's blatantly blatantly false, unless
Speaker 6: it's something that people can't really figure out it is false,
Speaker 6: you actually lose credibility. But if you use a bunch
Speaker 6: of true anecdotes to suggest kind of false interpretations or
Speaker 6: then you actually have much more sophisticated propaganda. It's a
Speaker 6: lot harder to tell the difference. And so what we've
Speaker 6: seen the last few years as the example like you gave,
Speaker 6: you know, there was one video that went viral of
Speaker 6: shoplifting from a Walgreens in San Francisco that itself spawned
Speaker 6: three hundred and nine articles around the country, that one
Speaker 6: little video. And at the same time, in that one
Speaker 6: month period that these hundreds of articles are written about it,
Speaker 6: and nightly newscasts all over the country, by the thousands,
Speaker 6: there is virtually no stories about wage staff or tax
Speaker 6: evasion things that are happening way way more and that
Speaker 6: cost orders of magnitude more money for people. And that's
Speaker 6: the selective creation an anecdote that gets us afraid of
Speaker 6: of all of the wrong things.
Speaker 2: And if in case people are like yeah, but like
Speaker 2: it's better like storytelling, or it's like more salient to
Speaker 2: like see the violent thing happening. The wage theft is
Speaker 2: stealing from you, right like those people are stealing from Walgreens,
Speaker 2: a massive corporation. They're doing it like on a one
Speaker 2: off basis, and it's being strapolated into like a massive
Speaker 2: trend they're stealing from a corporation, and the wage theft
Speaker 2: is happening to you and it's not getting reported on right,
Speaker 2: and the Walgreens story is being you know that we've
Speaker 2: got to protect Walgreens. And that is why I gave
Speaker 2: them an a minus instead of a straight A, you know,
Speaker 2: because they they do they have some lapses. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 2: I just want to We're going to get into that
Speaker 2: because I think you do a great job of like
Speaker 2: kind of explaining how some of these things that if
Speaker 2: you ask the average American if these institutions are right
Speaker 2: or left, they are going to say left, like the mainstream,
Speaker 2: like Ivy League, universities, the Democratic Party. You do a
Speaker 2: great job of explaining like how they are some of
Speaker 2: the main ways that this kind of catastrophic system that
Speaker 2: we're all living inside of perpetuates itself. But you actually
Speaker 2: close your book with some amazing talking points that I
Speaker 2: just want to open with because I do think to
Speaker 2: your point, they put people in the right mind frame
Speaker 2: to have this conversation, if that's all right. So you
Speaker 2: have one about how police spend and this specifically relates
Speaker 2: to what has happened in the past four or five
Speaker 2: years since the conversation about defunding the police and all
Speaker 2: these stories that have come out, like they're the only
Speaker 2: thing that we have and they're the only thing keeping
Speaker 2: you safe. You point out that police spend about four
Speaker 2: percent of their time on what they categorize as violent crime.
Speaker 2: Such crimes account for only five percent of the rests
Speaker 2: that police make. For many years, until recent legalization, in
Speaker 2: dozens of states, the police made more arrests for marijuana
Speaker 2: possession than for all violent crime combined with marijuana legal
Speaker 2: and almost half the states marijuana possession arrests are still
Speaker 2: about half of all arrests for all violent crime combined.
Speaker 2: So just that idea, I think because of all the movies,
Speaker 2: all the TV shows that we've been fed about police
Speaker 2: for like in my entire lifetime, Like that's the main genre,
Speaker 2: right is just like cops solving violent crime is like
Speaker 2: a top genre of movies. It's just it's not there.
Speaker 2: It's not there. It's just not supported by fact at all.
Speaker 6: It never has been. Yeah, there has never been a
Speaker 6: time in US history when the significant bulk of police
Speaker 6: activity has been geared at violent crime. You take a
Speaker 6: look through the eras you know, the origin of the
Speaker 6: modern police forces had to do with capturing enslaved people
Speaker 6: who had run away and crushing union organizing in the
Speaker 6: rest of the country. And that's how the modern police
Speaker 6: force developed. And at that point they weren't even they
Speaker 6: didn't feel a propaganda need to make themselves out as
Speaker 6: agents of public safety. They were quite open about what
Speaker 6: they were doing. And as the twentieth century evolved and
Speaker 6: our sort of collective democratic values started to be articulated differently,
Speaker 6: police developed more and more and more of a propaganda
Speaker 6: need to justify their existence not as preserving distributions of
Speaker 6: wealth and power and racial and economic hierarchy, but as
Speaker 6: quote unquote public safety. And so then you see a
Speaker 6: massive effort in the modern era, through huge investments from
Speaker 6: the CIA, from the DoD, from the DEA, from local
Speaker 6: and prosecutor of to the multi billion dollar police pr
Speaker 6: industry today to shift the way we think through through video,
Speaker 6: through TV, through movies, and then, as I argue in
Speaker 6: the book, through a massive and mostly secret and kind
Speaker 6: of unprecedented network of relationships with the liberal media. And
Speaker 6: this is something in this book. As you mentioned, this
Speaker 6: book is really about the role of liberal institutions and
Speaker 6: the way that police and prosecutors and prisons and the
Speaker 6: multi billion dollar industries that profit off of them have
Speaker 6: co opted. Each of these institutions that is thought of
Speaker 6: as liberal, from the kinds of research that are done
Speaker 6: to the kinds of stories you see on your local news,
Speaker 6: And none of it is about helping us understand the
Speaker 6: things that are the greatest threats to our safety. And
Speaker 6: instead it's about creating and sort of a narrative that
Speaker 6: the things that we should fear are the things that
Speaker 6: poor people, immigrants, people of color, strangers due to us,
Speaker 6: and and those are actually not the greatest sources of
Speaker 6: risk that all of us are exposed to on a
Speaker 6: daily basis. For example, just to take one example of
Speaker 6: something that's almost completely ignored by the police, sexual assault
Speaker 6: or child sexual assault. Almost no police time, relatively speaking,
Speaker 6: is devoted to this. Right, they don't have undercover squads
Speaker 6: of officers going to frat houses and other places of
Speaker 6: rampant sexual assault. That's what they do for drugs in
Speaker 6: poor neighborhoods. You also don't have undercover cops going to
Speaker 6: frat houses for drugs, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fuse probably doing a lot of drugs, But.
Speaker 1: Do the laziest undercover works that copy uniform like you
Speaker 1: guys got some like.
Speaker 2: Blow cane or something like yeah last week.
Speaker 6: For years, in many major US police departments they had
Speaker 6: hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits, and instead the
Speaker 6: police were spending tens of billions of dollars on drug enforcement.
Speaker 6: This had nothing to do with keeping us safe or
Speaker 6: making intentional, reasonable decisions about which crimes should be prioritize
Speaker 6: and which crimes should not be. It had everything to
Speaker 6: do with using the police force to control certain populations
Speaker 6: and huge amounts of profit that could be made from
Speaker 6: policing of drug cases, which I explain a little bit
Speaker 6: more in the book, but I think that's a really
Speaker 6: important thing to understand. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have the quote from Nixon's assistant to Domestic
Speaker 2: Affairs saying like literally just being like, yeah, this was
Speaker 2: our plan. Make it illegal to be either against the
Speaker 2: war or black or we can't make it illegal to
Speaker 2: be against the war black. But by getting the public
Speaker 2: to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin
Speaker 2: and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,
Speaker 2: like just straight up, we could arrest their leaders raid
Speaker 2: their homes, break up their meetings. And this is like
Speaker 2: when they came up with the war on drugs in
Speaker 2: its like nineteen eighties, nineties and kind of modern incarnation,
Speaker 2: and they just they straight had the plan and executed it.
Speaker 6: And I want you to understand, I mean, just take
Speaker 6: Chicago for example, at the height of the civil rights movement.
Speaker 6: I'm not even going to count the federal officers, so
Speaker 6: this let's leave out the Feds. The Chicago police had
Speaker 6: five hundred officers devoted to infiltrating and crushing the civil
Speaker 6: rights movement. Five hundred full time cops. Right now, the
Speaker 6: history of our current era has not been written. We
Speaker 6: really have very limited window into what the current police
Speaker 6: are doing with their intelligence divisions, right and the variety
Speaker 6: of informans they're using. But take a look, for example,
Speaker 6: at Chicago itself. After the police murder of Lakwan MacDonald,
Speaker 6: which the police had a video of and hid for
Speaker 6: a long time to get rama manual back elected. When
Speaker 6: McDonald was killed by the Chicago police, they had four
Speaker 6: full time dedicated public relations officials at CPD. Wow, in
Speaker 6: the couple of years after it started becoming a scandal,
Speaker 6: they jumped to thirty and then forty and now they've
Speaker 6: over fifty full time pr people the Chicago Police Department.
Speaker 6: This is this is affecting the information that you and
Speaker 6: I see on the news.
Speaker 2: Right, full full court press all the time. By the way,
Speaker 2: Chicago was it was it a Chicago cop who grabbed
Speaker 2: the back of your neck and told you he had
Speaker 2: your DNA?
Speaker 8: Was it?
Speaker 7: Or no?
Speaker 2: It wasn't any blew my fucking mind.
Speaker 6: Yeah that was in Texas.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, that was fucking mind blowing. Yeah, grabbed. It
Speaker 2: was basically like, I now have your DNA, I know,
Speaker 2: and here's the make a model of your car, and
Speaker 2: just the most like sinister threatening shit for what I
Speaker 2: have to assume you were holding up a room full
Speaker 2: of people with a handgun.
Speaker 6: Close I was. I was suing the jurisdictions around the
Speaker 6: country for legally jailing people. So that's just threatening to them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 6: But that's the thing you have to understand too, is
Speaker 6: is a lot of people don't talk about this, but many, many,
Speaker 6: many people around the country, progressive local and state officials.
Speaker 6: I've had judges, prosecutors, mayors, state assembly officials all come
Speaker 6: to me over the years and share vivid and well
Speaker 6: documented stories of police threatening them and their families if
Speaker 6: they took anti police stances. The organized right wing police
Speaker 6: bureaucracy is extremely unaccountable and goes to enormous lengths to
Speaker 6: threaten anybody like even me, just a visiting civil rights lawyer.
Speaker 6: You know, the idea that they would follow me and
Speaker 6: document the make and model of my car and take
Speaker 6: the time to you know, threaten me in that way.
Speaker 6: And I was, you know, I was also in another situation.
Speaker 6: I was leading a spring break trip. I was actually
Speaker 6: traveling with a New York Times reporter and a law
Speaker 6: student intern from Harvard, and I was detained by a
Speaker 6: group of armed sheriffs. You know, they've had their hands
Speaker 6: on their guns, on their hips, and they locked me
Speaker 6: in a room and they started demanding that I answer
Speaker 6: questions to them. But what I was, and all I
Speaker 6: was doing at that point, was was asking for publicly
Speaker 6: available records at a courthouse. So this is the kind
Speaker 6: of thing that happens a million times a year. You
Speaker 6: never hear about it, but right deeply shapes how the
Speaker 6: public officials you see taking pro police stands. A lot
Speaker 6: of that is actually driven by fear, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean I felt like that in La right where
Speaker 1: in the summer of twenty twenty, like there was a
Speaker 1: lot of pressure on the city council to be like,
Speaker 1: are you going to address these budgets, and like these
Speaker 1: motherfuckers pulled up like they were going to get like
Speaker 1: all these cops pulled up to sort of protest that
Speaker 1: they thought it would be detrimental for budgets to be
Speaker 1: touched in any way. But it was so menacing that
Speaker 1: you knew that it was. It wasn't merely to be like,
Speaker 1: we're concerned about our wages. They're like, you know, fuck
Speaker 1: around with us and see what you know, you can
Speaker 1: learn how sort of off the rails we can get.
Speaker 1: And I remember just sort of like that image really
Speaker 1: sort of I think always inherently you have a belief
Speaker 1: that like these who are not here to protect us
Speaker 1: at all, But then you could really just see how
Speaker 1: organized they were in protecting this right to just execute
Speaker 1: violence on people for whatever reason and.
Speaker 2: Get paid for it.
Speaker 1: That was very, very very scary, but also part of
Speaker 1: like I think what is important about this book is
Speaker 1: for us to have a bit of an evolution on
Speaker 1: how we're even looking at it because to Jack's point,
Speaker 1: we're all raised to be like, yeah, they're the good guys,
Speaker 1: and they like to break dance sometimes at the local
Speaker 1: basketball court, and they're fun people. But then they also
Speaker 1: keep us safe and these other things, while meanwhile we
Speaker 1: are hearing directly from their mouths, like in the case
Speaker 1: of like people in Nixon's cabinet, we're like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: like we need we need these people to sort of
Speaker 1: create the air that people that are sort of opposed
Speaker 1: to what we're doing as a government or municipality that
Speaker 1: this is illegal, and we use the activity of the
Speaker 1: police to sort of connect the dots for people as
Speaker 1: a shorthand to be like, yes, hippie's bad, Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: this makes sense now.
Speaker 6: And another thing you have that I talk about in
Speaker 6: the book that you have to understand is that what
Speaker 6: we're told now is called, in our current sort of
Speaker 6: propaganda discourse, community policing. And you know this this idea
Speaker 6: that you were just mentioning a cops breakdancing, and you
Speaker 6: know they were during the twenty twenty uprisings, there were
Speaker 6: some cops that were doing the macarena with protesters, and
Speaker 6: every local news station runs a story every now and
Speaker 6: then about like a midnight basketball league that the cops
Speaker 6: are running, or like a Thanksgiving turkey giveaway for four families.
Speaker 6: But you have to understand about all that is it's
Speaker 6: all extremely intentional and it derives from counterinsurgency theory that
Speaker 6: was developed by the French military in Vietnam and the
Speaker 6: British military in the Middle East, and it was used
Speaker 6: to great effect by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 6: And this there's huge police training industry and the industry
Speaker 6: of police consultants that got to work on converting what
Speaker 6: they used to call counterinsurgency. And they knew they need
Speaker 6: they couldn't call it counterinsurgency in the US. So actually
Speaker 6: Harvard made a mistake a few years ago and they
Speaker 6: had an ex military person teaching a class on counterinsurgency.
Speaker 6: A bunch of Harvard students were going to go into
Speaker 6: a black neighborhood in Massachusetts and help the police do counterinsurgency,
Speaker 6: and they just forgot like that you're supposed to call
Speaker 6: it community policing in the US the goal of and
Speaker 6: so the Harvard had to cancel the class. So they
Speaker 6: have just called it something different. They could have gone
Speaker 6: forward and even been celebrated for it, you know, But
Speaker 6: a lot of liberals over the last twenty or thirty years,
Speaker 6: and this is something that I try to delve into
Speaker 6: great detail into the book with lots of sources and
Speaker 6: recommendations for further reading for people. But liberals really to
Speaker 6: advance this idea that we can repackage authoritarian and repressive
Speaker 6: stuff that our military and other militaries were doing around
Speaker 6: the world to native populations. We can try the same
Speaker 6: strategies in the US but call them reform. And this
Speaker 6: is a central feature of the way the news media
Speaker 6: has covered policing over the last twenty or thirty years,
Speaker 6: and it's been a central strategic focus of the police
Speaker 6: to co opt certain marginalized leaders in different communities to
Speaker 6: get them to support these policies which actually result in
Speaker 6: more people being surveilled, more people being arrested, higher rates
Speaker 6: of incarceration, more profits for the policing industry. They're not
Speaker 6: a reform in any sense of the word, but they
Speaker 6: have come to have and have a whole thing in
Speaker 6: the book, and they've written a separate article which is
Speaker 6: also going to be a book on police body cameras,
Speaker 6: because LA plays a really prominent role in this. You know,
Speaker 6: for years, police body cameras were this thing that the
Speaker 6: policing industry wanted so badly, but they couldn't get the
Speaker 6: money for it. They wanted it so badly that the
Speaker 6: LAPD got people like Steven Spielberg to donate body camera
Speaker 6: technology to the cops.
Speaker 2: And I mean, who better. The guy works with cameras,
Speaker 2: you know, James, he's an issue, yeah, but minority report.
Speaker 2: Really he's bringing us into the future of police.
Speaker 6: And but for years the police dreamed about this because
Speaker 6: you know, companies like Amazon and Microsoft and and Taser,
Speaker 6: which then rebranded as Axon after its tasers started killing people.
Speaker 2: Much evil sounding Axon exactly fun.
Speaker 6: These companies used to talk privately and even you know,
Speaker 6: to shareholders and at policing conferences and stuff about how
Speaker 6: much money there This is a multi billion dollar potential
Speaker 6: industry if they could get the government contracts. But they
Speaker 6: couldn't get a lot of these most big city local
Speaker 6: governments in the US are run by liberals, they're run
Speaker 6: by democrats, and they couldn't get the fun thing for this.
Speaker 6: So actually what they did was they used Michael Brown's
Speaker 6: killing in twenty fourteen, where there was no video of it,
Speaker 6: and and they used that in Obama, you know, requested
Speaker 6: several hundred million dollars for body cameras, and it became
Speaker 6: a mantra of the Democratic Party all over the country.
Speaker 6: And and uh, Meanwhile, the policing folks were beside themselves
Speaker 6: with joy because they wanted to connect. They wanted billions
Speaker 6: of dollars to give every cop in the US a
Speaker 6: mobile surveillance camera. They could connect to artificial intelligence, facial recognition,
Speaker 6: voice recognition, They could go to a protest and scan
Speaker 6: the crowd with their chest camera and have everyone's identity.
Speaker 6: They also wanted and they knew that this evidence was
Speaker 6: only going to be used against very poor people. This
Speaker 6: is how they were going to get video evidence that
Speaker 6: the cops controlled to arrest unhoused people, you know, to
Speaker 6: do drug busts and things like that. They knew it
Speaker 6: was never going to be used or at least very
Speaker 6: very rarely ever used against police. And so we have
Speaker 6: this situation now where there's reams of evidence. Even the
Speaker 6: federal government admits that body cameras do not have any
Speaker 6: positive effect on reducing police violence or making them more accountable,
Speaker 6: more transparent, but they do dramatically increase the extent which
Speaker 6: police can prosecute and get people to play guilty more
Speaker 6: quickly because they have these videos that they that they control.
Speaker 6: So anyway, that's a good example of something that in
Speaker 6: the public imagination, and if you look at and I
Speaker 6: read every single article that I could find, hundreds and
Speaker 6: hundreds and hundreds of articles about body cameras in the media,
Speaker 6: they were all portrayed as an initiative for accountability and transparency,
Speaker 6: when in fact they were developed exactly the opposite. They
Speaker 6: were built exactly to give police more power and less
Speaker 6: accountability by giving police control over what is filmed from
Speaker 6: what angle and when that film is edited and how
Speaker 6: it's edited and when they can release it in public.
Speaker 1: Right, I'm curious, just like along with that to create
Speaker 1: that narrative, like, were they also doing like performative resistance
Speaker 1: to make it feel like it was like a measure
Speaker 1: of accountability.
Speaker 2: Were they giving us body cameras?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what I mean, like just to kind
Speaker 1: of help that, because I feel like the flow of
Speaker 1: an article like that is like liberal politicians like we
Speaker 1: need the need for it and then there'd be like
Speaker 1: the police version where they're like, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: quite necessary to sort of create that tension, or was
Speaker 1: this just sort of like they were like, no.
Speaker 2: No, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think there are a couple of interesting and complicated
Speaker 6: the internal dynamics going on with the policing bureaucracy. First
Speaker 6: of all, yes, some of it was performative, and you
Speaker 6: can I don't know if you've ever watched body cameras,
Speaker 6: but I've seen, you know, hundreds and hundreds of body
Speaker 6: care of viadas, especially when as a public defender. But
Speaker 6: the police are trained, so the cameras looking outward from
Speaker 6: their chests, so the camera is actually not showing what
Speaker 6: the police officer themselves is doing. And so if you
Speaker 6: notice in a lot of these videos the cops are
Speaker 6: just screaming, stop resisting, stop resisting, stop resisting, right, That's
Speaker 6: something they're trained to do, so that they're taught that
Speaker 6: it makes it harder to convict them of anything or
Speaker 6: hold them liable civilly because they're they're creating what they
Speaker 6: call a contemporaneous record of resistance, which then justifies their
Speaker 6: use of force, even though you can't actually see like
Speaker 6: what's actually going on anyway. But the internal dynamics were
Speaker 6: that some of the police frontline officers, who have the
Speaker 6: least power in the policing bureaucracy, were worried about you
Speaker 6: wearing cameras. They worried that it was going to enable
Speaker 6: their bosses to spy on them and reduce their their
Speaker 6: ability to engage in some of the activity day that
Speaker 6: might be illegal, et cetera that they tend to want
Speaker 6: to engage in. They weren't sure like what policies and
Speaker 6: protocols they were going to be for when they were
Speaker 6: being recorded, and who was going to control the video
Speaker 6: and so. But at the same time, police leaders and
Speaker 6: leaders in the surveillance industry really wanted them because they
Speaker 6: thought this would enable them to even more completely control
Speaker 6: the behavior of beat cops. And so initially there was
Speaker 6: a much stronger appetite for body cameras among police leadership
Speaker 6: and the companies that make them and that make the
Speaker 6: software then there was among beat cops. But then once
Speaker 6: it became clear that these that they had the right
Speaker 6: protocols in place that was going to make sure that
Speaker 6: the cops were you know, unless the cops really made
Speaker 6: a mistake. They were never going to be recorded doing
Speaker 6: something that they you know, that they didn't want to
Speaker 6: be recorded doing. And also they could control and edit
Speaker 6: the video. And also it was by and large going
Speaker 6: to make it much much more easier to prosecute the
Speaker 6: poor people, because keep in mind, like the body cameras
Speaker 6: have no say over like which neighborhoods are we going into,
Speaker 6: and which neighborhoods are we not? Where are we looking
Speaker 6: for drugs? And where are we not looking for drugs?
Speaker 6: These bigger questions that are really the core of like
Speaker 6: the discriminatory nature of policing in our society. Body cameras
Speaker 6: just ignore all that, Right, So cops became convinced that
Speaker 6: actually body cameras were not going to be a threat
Speaker 6: to business as usual, And there's now much more uniform
Speaker 6: support among even the lowest level line cops for body
Speaker 6: cameras than there was initially.
Speaker 2: All right, just real quick, I also wanted to do
Speaker 2: the talking point that just I think at the broadest
Speaker 2: level is helpful for people to learn that this is
Speaker 2: not normal. Is that the US confines people to jail
Speaker 2: cells at six times its own historical average five to
Speaker 2: ten times as much as other comparable countries and imprisons
Speaker 2: black people at six times the rate of South Africa
Speaker 2: during apart time. So many people have probably heard that.
Speaker 2: I think it's worth just stating up top, for anybody
Speaker 2: who are abnormal and unfucked up, it is very abnormal.
Speaker 6: And that's why you use so much propaganda, right, right,
Speaker 6: I mean exactly, Like, You've got a bureaucracy that is
Speaker 6: larger than any bureaucracy in the modern history of the world.
Speaker 6: Like no country, let alone any country that thinks of
Speaker 6: itself as democracy, has ever tried to spend this much
Speaker 6: money jailing its own people. And in the face of that,
Speaker 6: you've got enormous bodies of scientific evidence that show that
Speaker 6: imprisoning people actually does not make us safer, it actually
Speaker 6: makes us less safe. And you've got even more robust
Speaker 6: bodies of empirical research that show the things that make
Speaker 6: us safer and reduced crime are things like housing, healthcare,
Speaker 6: you know, early childhood education. Like it's obvious, right, And
Speaker 6: so you need a giant propaganda apparatus to get people
Speaker 6: so afraid of strangers and poor people and immigrants that
Speaker 6: they inspired of what all the evidence shows. They constantly
Speaker 6: think that they're in fear and danger that the only
Speaker 6: solution for them is increasing the amount of money that
Speaker 6: our society spends on police.
Speaker 2: Right, let's take a quick break and then we'll come
Speaker 2: back and we'll focus on some of these allegedly liberal
Speaker 2: institutions that are doing a lot of the a lot
Speaker 2: of the legwork and what we're talking about.
Speaker 4: We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 2: We're back. And there's this one moment, as Trump was
Speaker 2: like taking office and dropping a bunch of like fascist
Speaker 2: executive orders and just attacking trans people, the Wall Street
Speaker 2: Journal had another op ed on the front page of
Speaker 2: their paper that was all about how Colleges two woke,
Speaker 2: and I was just I was kind of amazed at that,
Speaker 2: but it it really just was kind of an illustration
Speaker 2: of how relentless they have been and continue to be
Speaker 2: in painting these institutions. We're going to talk about Harvard
Speaker 2: and Columbia, The New York Times and like other mainstream
Speaker 2: media outlets, the democratic part, like these institutions that I
Speaker 2: guess benefit from being like, yeah, we are actually very
Speaker 2: liberal and just basically they are there to perpetuate the
Speaker 2: existing power structures, and you know, wealth distribution, But yeah,
Speaker 2: I wanted to start with Harvard. There's Harvard gets mentioned
Speaker 2: a few times in the book. Specifically, you talk about
Speaker 2: the study where two academics who claim to be coming
Speaker 2: from the left and to be like really bummed out
Speaker 2: by the conclusion that they arrive at are like, guys, sorry,
Speaker 2: we're just calling balls and strikes here. We're just re
Speaker 2: doing the math. And unfortunately, the only way for us
Speaker 2: to move forward as a progressive society is to like
Speaker 2: double the number the already record high number of cops
Speaker 2: that we have on the street. We just need to
Speaker 2: like become even more of a police state. But just
Speaker 2: more generally, you write in the book, I learned over
Speaker 2: time the most important qualification for teaching students. Oh no,
Speaker 2: this was actually a tweet of yours. You wrote, over
Speaker 2: time the most important qualification for teaching students at elite
Speaker 2: schools willingness to use your mind, position and power to
Speaker 2: preserve distributions of wealth and misery. But you just talk
Speaker 2: about like kind of what was this surprising to you
Speaker 2: at a certain point that these institutions like Harvard and
Speaker 2: Columbia were just so in the bag for the existing
Speaker 2: kind of power structure.
Speaker 6: I was pretty naive when I when I got to
Speaker 6: you know, went to college at Yale, at the law
Speaker 6: school at Harvard, and I was pretty naive when I
Speaker 6: got to these places.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 6: I was sort of thinking, Oh, these are institutions of learning,
Speaker 6: and they're so prestigious, and like, people who come here
Speaker 6: must be smarter, and they must be you know, really
Speaker 6: rigorous thinkers. And that's really not what goes on at
Speaker 6: these places at all. I don't want to speak a
Speaker 6: too broad of brushstroke, because like you know, I've a
Speaker 6: lot of incredible friends and relationships that I've made there.
Speaker 6: There are a lot of scholars at these institutions, just
Speaker 6: like at many other universities and colleges and non academic
Speaker 6: institutions around the country. There are people doing amazing scholarship
Speaker 6: and scholarship matters like research and matters. I'm not saying
Speaker 6: that those things are not important. That's not the lesson
Speaker 6: of the book. But one of the key functions of
Speaker 6: a place like Harvard is to launder policies and ideas
Speaker 6: that are designed to preserve existing distributions of wealth and
Speaker 6: power in our society, launder them with a veneer of
Speaker 6: academic backing and of rigorous thought and things like that.
Speaker 6: You learn very quickly at a place like Harvard, what
Speaker 6: does it take not only to succeed there as a student,
Speaker 6: but what does it take to becomefessor? What does it
Speaker 6: take to get tenure? And everybody who it's very political,
Speaker 6: and everybody who's there understands that certain kinds of research
Speaker 6: that benefits certain kinds of people in our society and
Speaker 6: certain institutions is going to be a ticket to success,
Speaker 6: and other kinds of research and views are not. And
Speaker 6: and Harvard is a you know, has an endownment worth
Speaker 6: tens of billions of dollars, is a huge industry, and
Speaker 6: so a lot of the scholarship that is produced at
Speaker 6: a place like Harvard is skewed by these other incentives.
Speaker 6: In other words, it's not this kind of pure place
Speaker 6: where like the best ideas are espoused and the people
Speaker 6: who are the smartest and best researchers with the kindest
Speaker 6: souls are the ones who succeeded it. You know, it's
Speaker 6: not how it works. And I think the example that
Speaker 6: I use in my book, I've a whole chapter devoted
Speaker 6: to this. I think it's one of the funniest. And
Speaker 6: I try to, by the way, throughout the book, I
Speaker 6: try to talk about all these issues with humor and
Speaker 6: get a little bit of joy, because to me, like
Speaker 6: life is not worth living unless you can laugh a
Speaker 6: little bit about these horrific things.
Speaker 2: And these are definitely teetering on the edge of laughter
Speaker 2: or crying one or the other. Yeah.
Speaker 6: And if you can't laugh about two Harvard professors, you know,
Speaker 6: sort of proposing the greatest expansion of policing in modern
Speaker 6: world history by adding five hundred thousand police officers to
Speaker 6: you as based on rudimentary errors that they made that
Speaker 6: are somewhat comical, then you can't laugh about anything, right.
Speaker 6: And these two guys are particularly funny to me because
Speaker 6: they portray themselves not only as progressives but as socialists,
Speaker 6: and they understand something really important, which is it's very
Speaker 6: good for your future as a scholar at Harvard if
Speaker 6: you can be seen as one of those you know,
Speaker 6: it's almost like a false flag opera, right, It's like
Speaker 6: you're parading around as a leftist, socialist progressive, but the
Speaker 6: ideas you're promoting are right wing and serving the interests
Speaker 6: of the people who financially back Harvard and their social circles,
Speaker 6: et cetera. So it's very smart, actually if what you
Speaker 6: were thinking was that you wanted to advance your career.
Speaker 6: But anyway, these guys propose, and I think one especially
Speaker 6: comical thing about it is that in journal that they
Speaker 6: published this call for five hundred thousand more police. And
Speaker 6: by the way, the call for more police is, as
Speaker 6: I talk about in the book, it's absurd they made
Speaker 6: this proposal without counting the social costs of more police.
Speaker 6: You can't you know, say I want it. It'd be
Speaker 6: like installing a new heater in your house and not
Speaker 6: only getting the measurements wrong for the heater, but you
Speaker 6: neglected to include that this heater spews carbon monoxide into
Speaker 6: your house, you know, And.
Speaker 9: So you're saying this heater, yeah, They're like, well, you know,
Speaker 9: we're installing this heater in this house and it's going
Speaker 9: to increase you know, the heat by a degree over
Speaker 9: other heaters, you know, And not only did they get
Speaker 9: that measurement wrong, but they also just neglected to tell
Speaker 9: you it's also going to kill your whole family.
Speaker 6: Right, So you can't promote, you don't make a social
Speaker 6: policy proposal without even asking the question of, like, what
Speaker 6: are some of the costs and downsides to the proposal?
Speaker 6: Right and anyway? But I think like the funniest part
Speaker 6: about it to me is that the journal they published
Speaker 6: this in was created in the wake of the twenty
Speaker 6: twenty George Floyd uprisings by Harvard as a way of
Speaker 6: pacifying student unrest. They're like, we're going to create this
Speaker 6: Journal of Law and Inequality, and it's going to be
Speaker 6: this new thing that people publish to like confront these
Speaker 6: issues of our day. And then and then just a
Speaker 6: short time later, that Journal of Law and in Equality
Speaker 6: or whatever they call it is already publishing bold Please
Speaker 6: by Harvard professors to add five hundred thousand cops.
Speaker 2: Yes, I remember when it came out and we were like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, the mainstream media is going to eat
Speaker 2: this shit. Yes, and sure enough they did. There's also
Speaker 2: just a little detail in that because you kind of
Speaker 2: you know, came at this study and pointed out all
Speaker 2: the ways that it was ridiculous and speaking of these
Speaker 2: two Harvard professors as comical figures, just the fact that
Speaker 2: they were using their students to try to construct arguments
Speaker 2: against your critiques of their book. Was pretty pretty wild.
Speaker 4: Sure.
Speaker 1: Oh wait, so they were asking the students to basically
Speaker 1: like defend this against evil alec.
Speaker 6: Well, no, I mean I think I don't know that
Speaker 6: they were. I don't think that they were, you know,
Speaker 6: specifically talking about me. But they were instead of like
Speaker 6: testing students on like the basics of first year criminal law,
Speaker 6: you know, one of the professors during the exam was
Speaker 6: apparently asking and the students you know sent me these
Speaker 6: exam questions. They sent in the screenshots of them to me,
Speaker 6: and and he was asking for their help developing counter
Speaker 6: arguments to his proposal more police.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 6: It's weren't meet you the wrong way about it, But
Speaker 6: I thought was really funny about it. Was like he
Speaker 6: was he was asking students for help with this research project,
Speaker 6: you know, just.
Speaker 2: Like crowdsourcing, like the fleshing out of research project.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And it turned out like the students you know
Speaker 6: told me that like we had like raised a number
Speaker 6: of the objections that you've lad helpfully with them privately before.
Speaker 6: They So it's not like these people just like had
Speaker 6: like a huge brain fart and forgot about, you know,
Speaker 6: a lot of the critiques and they just like didn't
Speaker 6: care to respond or even rigorously addressed in the first
Speaker 6: place these things. And that's why I think the copaganda
Speaker 6: book that is full of this stuff.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: What I try to do is take some of the
Speaker 6: most outrageous, funniest examples of kind of mainstream liberal institutions,
Speaker 6: whether it's it's professors or news organizations, journalists or whatever
Speaker 6: nonprofits sometimes and illustrate stuff that is actually really important
Speaker 6: that we might miss if we just look at the news.
Speaker 6: Because it's not just these Harvard professors are publishing this stuff.
Speaker 6: It's how does that stuff then get translated into the
Speaker 6: mainstream news that you consume right as conventional wisdom, right,
Speaker 6: And that's that's the process that I really try to
Speaker 6: examine in the book with some humor, because you know,
Speaker 6: this is it's you know, there's a lot of upsetting
Speaker 6: stuff in here about about how we're being lied to
Speaker 6: and misled and how many of the institutions that we're
Speaker 6: told to trust are actually really untrustworthy and we need
Speaker 6: to develop better mechanisms of critical thinking. And that's another
Speaker 6: reason why you know this book. We've raised money so
Speaker 6: that any teacher who wants to teach any part of
Speaker 6: this book in school, any person in prison. We have
Speaker 6: free copies of the book available with the people, like,
Speaker 6: obviously I hope that you support the book and and
Speaker 6: all the I don't make any money off the book, right,
Speaker 6: any copy that sold, all the worlties go to the
Speaker 6: Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which organizes on house people in
Speaker 6: skid row in Los Angeles. But even if if you
Speaker 6: can't afford the book, you know, we can get free
Speaker 6: copies to people because we just want people to have
Speaker 6: a more critical understanding of the news that they're being shown.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is like interesting that the way you ring
Speaker 1: up Harvard, it immediately relates to the newsroom, right, like
Speaker 1: the way professors and academics can ascend. It's not that
Speaker 1: there's like marching orders, but you can pretty clearly into it.
Speaker 1: You're like, Okay, if I talk about this in this way,
Speaker 1: this is how I get my things pop in, which
Speaker 1: I feel like is another criticism we have of a
Speaker 1: lot of journalism too, where clearly other journalists know, Okay,
Speaker 1: if I write from this perspective or stories with this
Speaker 1: sort of bend to it, that's how I'm able to ascend,
Speaker 1: and that's how it further just sort of reinforces this
Speaker 1: kind of thing, and I think, you know, the New
Speaker 1: York Times is probably a great example of this kind
Speaker 1: of thinking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was really You have a great quote from
Speaker 2: David Graeber, who we talk about a lot on this
Speaker 2: show about like the Superman and Batman where they're both
Speaker 2: essential essentially like instituting fascist policies with their superpowers, because
Speaker 2: that's all we can imagine. And like that kind of
Speaker 2: tied back to how I think about the mainstream media
Speaker 2: point that Miles was talking about, where it's like they're
Speaker 2: playing to the audience, like the audience wants to see
Speaker 2: I think there's like a part, at least a part
Speaker 2: of the audience that kind of wants to see this
Speaker 2: fucking fascism like that. That's why Batman does that, That's
Speaker 2: why Superman does that, and so they know they're going
Speaker 2: to get readers, and it's just this like cowardly thing
Speaker 2: that's you know, pleasing their corporate overlords. But I think
Speaker 2: it's also like pleasing some dark, horrible part of the
Speaker 2: audience too that is like, yeah, I want to believe
Speaker 2: that this is the police, good guy, right, and.
Speaker 8: This is it It's an easy solve, Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 8: think there's there's definitely part of that, but I don't know,
Speaker 8: because I mean, I think it's easy to envision you
Speaker 8: could have really compell local news story.
Speaker 6: Like, for example, if instead of of installing a reporter
Speaker 6: to read all the police press releases and regurgitate them
Speaker 6: for the news every day, what if you had a
Speaker 6: reporter whose job was to report on like landlord tenant
Speaker 6: court and every day you had like a bad landlord
Speaker 6: of the day article or a bad employer of the
Speaker 6: day absolute Like I think people would watch and be
Speaker 6: interested in finding out what landlords are doing to their
Speaker 6: tenants across la or across Chicago or across in the country.
Speaker 6: I think if you if you installed somebody at all
Speaker 6: of the sites that are that are figuring out who's
Speaker 6: polluting our drinking water, who is emitting dangerous gases that
Speaker 6: are hurting our children. And you know, by the way,
Speaker 6: air pollution kills one hundred thousand people in the US
Speaker 6: every year. Okay, that's four to five times all homicides
Speaker 6: can buy. There are people every single day in all
Speaker 6: these cities who are actually just emitting stuff that's killing
Speaker 6: our children and people. Yeah, and I think I think
Speaker 6: people would I mean, I hear what you're saying. I
Speaker 6: definitely think there's part of like they feel like they're
Speaker 6: they're playing down you know, it's like reality TV or
Speaker 6: Law and Order. Like they definitely think they're what they think,
Speaker 6: they know what their audience wants. But I believe audiences
Speaker 6: would tolerate different types of villains and different types of
Speaker 6: stories about who is causing us harm that were more
Speaker 6: consistent with reality. And that's another thing I talk about
Speaker 6: in the book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean you have so there's so many
Speaker 2: wild an like what while the Wallgreens shoplifting panic was happening,
Speaker 2: they had to settle a massive lawsuit about like wage theft.
Speaker 2: But get that gets you You make a good point
Speaker 2: about how anytime there are multiple, you know, cases of
Speaker 2: shoplifting or just like viral videos of shoplifting, that becomes
Speaker 2: a wave or a trend or you know, out of control.
Speaker 2: But these things, the you know, the Walgreens wage theft
Speaker 2: settlement is treated as a one off thing. And then
Speaker 2: when you talked to editors, they were like, well, we
Speaker 2: reported on a different company doing that last month, so
Speaker 2: we can't like that that story's been done essentially, which
Speaker 2: is so so wild and doesn't really doesn't really make
Speaker 2: any sense unless you're taking into account. Yeah, but we
Speaker 2: can't like make them mad because they are the big
Speaker 2: corporate overlord.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, I think you have to understand also
Speaker 6: how the news media works. And there's lots of scholarship
Speaker 6: written about how the media functions. But they it organizes
Speaker 6: things into news themes, and it categorizes things so that
Speaker 6: people can understand them. And so I give this great
Speaker 6: example from the late seventies early eighties of this person
Speaker 6: who supporter, who was embedded in a newsroom, and he
Speaker 6: watched the creation of a supposed crime wave by youth
Speaker 6: of color against old people. And there was this panic
Speaker 6: that emerged that all these young people of color were
Speaker 6: robbing and stealing from and mugging and hurting old people,
Speaker 6: and every time that happened during this period, it was
Speaker 6: seen as further evidence of this trend. But when you
Speaker 6: take a step back and look several years later, you
Speaker 6: actually see that the only thing that had been created
Speaker 6: was this news categorization and this news trend. Actually incidents
Speaker 6: of young people stealing and mugging and robbing old people
Speaker 6: were actually down during that period, and this is it's
Speaker 6: very hard for people to understand. But sometimes the news,
Speaker 6: you know, for example, after the East Palestine trained derailment
Speaker 6: in Ohio a couple of years ago, there were there's
Speaker 6: more of an interest in the news media in covering
Speaker 6: trained derailments. Those are things that are happening all the time,
Speaker 6: right like, but now that you're focused on it and
Speaker 6: it's a theme of your news, it's going to play
Speaker 6: into this idea and the same thing is happening. There
Speaker 6: was a massive society wide panic about shop and retail theft,
Speaker 6: even though retail theft we now know is down, and
Speaker 6: so how we categorize things, it's just so so important.
Speaker 6: It's like the Michael Jordan example I gave earlier. If
Speaker 6: you're looking for it, and if you just only document
Speaker 6: the missed shots, you're going to not capture the full story.
Speaker 6: And that's what makes the media they have such an
Speaker 6: awesome responsibility because they have a choice. Every single day,
Speaker 6: out of the millions and millions of things that have
Speaker 6: happened in the world, they're going to tell us about
Speaker 6: ten or fifteen of them, or twenty of them. And
Speaker 6: also they're going to suggest in their coverage, how should
Speaker 6: we think about this. In other words, is that wildfire
Speaker 6: connected to climate change? Or is it some isolated event?
Speaker 6: Is that airline crash connected to DEI programs at you know,
Speaker 6: like Trump said, right, you know yeah? Or like So
Speaker 6: this is an awesome responsibility because just by juxtaposing two
Speaker 6: stories together or two ideas together, Like I give an
Speaker 6: example in the book where they claim that a certain
Speaker 6: kind of crime went down in a certain city, and
Speaker 6: they say just they just note that also the police
Speaker 6: had been holding a charity basketball tournament. So it's like
Speaker 6: they're suggesting that, like, and what they didn't report is
Speaker 6: that that particular kind of crime had gone down nationwide,
Speaker 6: not just in the place where there's a police youth
Speaker 6: basketball tournament. So these are all these category categories and
Speaker 6: these causes. They're highly manipulable. And if you take nothing
Speaker 6: else away from the book, I want you to take
Speaker 6: away the idea that there are a lot of very
Speaker 6: smart people being paid billions of dollars a year to
Speaker 6: shape how you think about what is newsworthy, what's happening
Speaker 6: in the world, what the causes are, and therefore what
Speaker 6: should we spend money on as the solutions.
Speaker 2: Let's take one more quick break, and then I just
Speaker 2: want to talk to you about like where we go
Speaker 2: from from here, because obviously things are shifting. Some of
Speaker 2: this fascism that has been ignored for a long time
Speaker 2: is getting louder, and so I just want to kind
Speaker 2: of hear your thoughts on that.
Speaker 4: We'll be right.
Speaker 10: Back and we're back, We're back, and yeah, I mean
Speaker 10: we have been living with as your book does a
Speaker 10: really good job of illustrating extraordinary you know, fascism and
Speaker 10: authoritarianism and injustice for years and much of the.
Speaker 2: Mainstream media and much of these you know, supposedly liberal
Speaker 2: institutions have been just ignoring it. And now it feels
Speaker 2: like it's becoming louder and harder to ignore. Like that,
Speaker 2: you know, the truth comes quietly at first, and then
Speaker 2: it speaks louder, and then it's you know, then it's
Speaker 2: a shrieking tent alarm fire, and there are it seems
Speaker 2: like we're entering in some ways kind of a world
Speaker 2: that's recognizable if like net now that you know you've
Speaker 2: illustrated all these things, what once people have read your book,
Speaker 2: you'll be like, oh, a lot of this stuff has
Speaker 2: been happening for a while. But it also feels like
Speaker 2: with the arrest of Michael Khalil and you you wrote
Speaker 2: on Twitter that you've never seen a more clear cut
Speaker 2: First Amendment violation. It just it does feel like things
Speaker 2: are escalating. And so I'm just kind of curious how
Speaker 2: you are thinking about the position. Has it changed, how
Speaker 2: you're thinking about the situation Americans find themselves out?
Speaker 6: Yeah, And look, I'm just one person, So who knows.
Speaker 6: I mean, I think we're all all people of goodwill
Speaker 6: are struggling right now, think about what can I do?
Speaker 6: What's the one do when society is teetering on the
Speaker 6: brink of such an abyss, and how do we how
Speaker 6: do we come together with other people who care? And
Speaker 6: I don't purport to have all the answers, And I
Speaker 6: think different people are in a different position to do
Speaker 6: different things, and we all have to do whatever we can.
Speaker 6: I think there's I mean, I offer some tips in
Speaker 6: the last chapter of the book about you know, one
Speaker 6: of the first steps is like fortifying your own mind
Speaker 6: against you know, relentless propaganda, and like what are some
Speaker 6: things to read and what are some daily practices to
Speaker 6: employ in your life. Also, it's very important who you
Speaker 6: surround yourself with and what kinds of like sort of
Speaker 6: critical thinking communities you put yourself in. And then also
Speaker 6: like I think what's so so so important in this
Speaker 6: moment is the fascists when when people are so afraid,
Speaker 6: but also I'm so hopeless and feel like everything is futile,
Speaker 6: and and I think it's a great time for able
Speaker 6: to get involved wherever they are in their own communities,
Speaker 6: whether that's geographically like getting involved in your local library
Speaker 6: or your local school board, or mutual aid groups that
Speaker 6: help people in your community, or at work or at school,
Speaker 6: like organizing and getting together with people other people really
Speaker 6: any to It could be the smallest little things that
Speaker 6: you're fighting for together, but when you organize other people
Speaker 6: and you fight for things like something that is really true,
Speaker 6: something that is in some small way trying to counter
Speaker 6: the meanness that pervades so much of our society. And
Speaker 6: by the way, I do a lot of work all
Speaker 6: over the country, in rural areas, all over the country,
Speaker 6: in big cities, Democrat Republic and whatever, like it's very
Speaker 6: different from what the world is that we see on
Speaker 6: like Twitter or social media or like people want to
Speaker 6: be connecting to each other relating to each other in community,
Speaker 6: and like it's easy to forget when you see how
Speaker 6: isolated one feels by just spending a lot of time
Speaker 6: on social media. Maybe and maybe that's just me, but
Speaker 6: you have to just remember that, like a we are
Speaker 6: such a social species and there's so much we can
Speaker 6: do for each other if we just adopt the spirit
Speaker 6: of kindness instead of a spirit of meanness. And I
Speaker 6: keep coming back to that it's important now more than ever.
Speaker 6: And then we all just have to fight. I say
Speaker 6: this in the book, and this is one of the themes,
Speaker 6: but I think a lot about Orwell's nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 6: And one of the themes of George Orwell's book is
Speaker 6: that the sort of authoritarian government is constantly trying to
Speaker 6: get people to say, to think tuplus two ekals five,
Speaker 6: tupless two eqals five, touplus two goos five. And in
Speaker 6: whatever way is true to us, we need to be
Speaker 6: able to every day remind ourselves toopus two egos four,
Speaker 6: remind the people that we're close to. And that just
Speaker 6: means the way that I see that, like in our
Speaker 6: civil rights work, even if the courts are getting more
Speaker 6: and more hostile to the kinds of cases that we do,
Speaker 6: even if people are being jailed illegally in violation of
Speaker 6: the Constitution, and just the act of us fighting them
Speaker 6: is our way of saying too plus two of four,
Speaker 6: two plus two equals four. Just standing up to that
Speaker 6: and never becoming you know, like, that's why I think
Speaker 6: is so harmful about what Columbia has done, what Chuck
Speaker 6: Schumer is doing, what a lot of these universities do.
Speaker 6: They are giving in, they are appeasing, they are refusing
Speaker 6: to say touplus two equals four. And once you do
Speaker 6: that as a society, all is lost. And so we
Speaker 6: have to just in our own little ways find our
Speaker 6: strength and courage to keep saying touplos tuoical four.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I thought that was really an amazing part at that
Speaker 1: last part of the book, because I think so many
Speaker 1: people right now are just in like this fight or
Speaker 1: flight response to everything and just looking for like a
Speaker 1: silver bullet answer.
Speaker 2: Like what do we do now?
Speaker 1: And you know, myself included all, and I think I
Speaker 1: really loved how again you're talking about what's also important
Speaker 1: is that we fortify our minds to sort of hell
Speaker 1: this kind of messaging and internalizing these sort of like
Speaker 1: lies and making those our reality. But also like again
Speaker 1: it's like really basic things like you're talking about like
Speaker 1: fostering your sense of community, like deepening those relationships with
Speaker 1: people around you, and then even like just engaging with art. Also,
Speaker 1: I thought was, like, that's really brilliant too to just
Speaker 1: think about again, because you're talking about how different messages
Speaker 1: are going to hit our brains differently when they're expressed
Speaker 1: artistically and things like that. So I just thought, yeah,
Speaker 1: like there's sort of like holistic view of it is
Speaker 1: really helpful, and I think helps also like when you
Speaker 1: say the whole thing of like we got to remind
Speaker 1: ourselves two plus two is four, that that gives us
Speaker 1: a better view of sort of like the long term
Speaker 1: nature of like this endeavor that's in front of us.
Speaker 1: It's not like, Okay, everybody do these three things and
Speaker 1: it's over. It's like, no, there are many things that
Speaker 1: we're going to be doing. But the biggest thing too,
Speaker 1: is like you're saying, maintaining that sense of humanity and hope.
Speaker 1: So I hope we're all able to do that. And
Speaker 1: I feel like that's the biggest thing that we want
Speaker 1: to be able to do right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, thank you Alex so much for coming on again,
Speaker 2: and congratulations on the book. It's really awesome. Where can
Speaker 2: people find you? Follow you and where can they find
Speaker 2: the book?
Speaker 6: Yeah, so thank you guys both for having me on.
Speaker 6: And I hope, I hope this book sells more copies
Speaker 6: than my last book, which I think was maybe just
Speaker 6: my grandma and my parents maybe about it.
Speaker 2: But it has to do well. This is going to do.
Speaker 2: This is where we're going to get it out there.
Speaker 2: It's going to get the TDZ bump baby, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: the famous bump.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Well, so people can can google or search whatever
Speaker 6: you use to find copaganda and my book. You can
Speaker 6: buy it wherever books are sold. I've been encouraging people
Speaker 6: to buy it from this really great black owned bookstore
Speaker 6: in Flint, Michigan that I've been working with called Comma
Speaker 6: c MMA. You can just pre order it there and
Speaker 6: they'll send it to you. And no matter where you live.
Speaker 6: But also if you have a favorite local bookstore, the
Speaker 6: easiest thing to do is just go into your local
Speaker 6: bookstore and order it from there or ask them to
Speaker 6: carry it. Because go to your local library ask them
Speaker 6: to carry it. That's actually how we get these books
Speaker 6: out there is people just going in and talking about it.
Speaker 6: And if you have friends or family who who are
Speaker 6: liberals or progressives, who you know, because this book is
Speaker 6: really written for well meaning liberal progressive people you know
Speaker 6: to to or or you know, I don't I hate
Speaker 6: these terms, but like a political people are moderate people
Speaker 6: who you know, I'm not really writing this book for
Speaker 6: the far right right. If you know people like that
Speaker 6: in your life, just encourage them to look up the book.
Speaker 6: They can also find me on all the social media
Speaker 6: platforms at Quality ALEC, and you can look at our
Speaker 6: work at Civil Rights Core as well to see some
Speaker 6: of our civil rights work that really led me to
Speaker 6: explore the ideas that are in the book.
Speaker 2: One of the best books I've read in a long time,
Speaker 2: and one of the best follows anywhere on social media.
Speaker 2: So let's go do it, everybody, ALEC. Is there a
Speaker 2: work of social media or media or anything you've been enjoying.
Speaker 6: I've been actually reading a book called Ministry for the Future. Yeah,
Speaker 6: by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: We that would encourage people to check that out.
Speaker 2: We did a whole episode on the Ministry for the Future.
Speaker 2: It's so good, awesome, great recommendation. Miles, where can people
Speaker 2: find you as their working media you've been enjoying?
Speaker 1: Yeah, just everywhere they got at Symbols at Miles of
Speaker 1: Gray check Jack and I talking basketball on Miles and
Speaker 1: Jack on mac Boosties and then I'm talking about ninety
Speaker 1: day Fiance. That's my solf where I really just can
Speaker 1: disconnect from talking about news on for twenty day Fiance.
Speaker 2: A work of media.
Speaker 1: Yes, at Juniper dot beer on b Sky. But the
Speaker 1: eye is actually a one I believe all right now,
Speaker 1: maybe a nuppercase l but Juniper. This is kind of
Speaker 1: just funny because it aligns with sort of what we're
Speaker 1: talking about. It says, whenever I see people posting their
Speaker 1: own acab includes blank posts, I get PTSD flashbacks to
Speaker 1: four years ago when I posted a police car themed
Speaker 1: children shopping cart, and a segment of Twitter genuinely got
Speaker 1: enraged at me.
Speaker 2: Hey it does include that shopping cart. Yeah, you can
Speaker 2: find me on Twitter at underscore, Brian on Blue Sky,
Speaker 2: at jack ob The number one tweet I've been enjoying
Speaker 2: is from at PPy Onna tweeted hate one anxiety gives
Speaker 2: me stomach problems, Like baby you are supposed to be
Speaker 2: a mental disorder. Please stay in your lane and I relate.
Speaker 2: You can find us on Twitter at daily Zegeist and
Speaker 2: on Blue Sky at daily Zekes at the Daily Zekeist.
Speaker 2: On Instagram, you can go to the description of this
Speaker 2: episode wherever you're listening to it, and you can find
Speaker 2: the footnotes, which is where we link off to the
Speaker 2: information that we talked about in today's episode, and where
Speaker 2: we link off to the book Copaganda, which you have
Speaker 2: to go by. It is an assignment local. Yeah, also local,
Speaker 2: stay local. We also link off to a song that
Speaker 2: we think you might enjoy. Miles, is there a song
Speaker 2: that you think people might enjoy? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Every like I feel like every sixteen months the Internet
Speaker 1: finds out Chumbo Wambas, like this anarchist band and they
Speaker 1: play this like sort of a cappella song the day
Speaker 1: the Nazi died, and this clip kind of resurfaces again
Speaker 1: at this like sixteen month pace, and I saw it
Speaker 1: bubbling up again and I was.
Speaker 2: Like, oh, yeah, people need to hear this.
Speaker 1: So anyway, it's on their album, but the live version
Speaker 1: where they performed in Dusseldorf, Germany is probably like the
Speaker 1: vibeest performance of it all but Chumba Wamba.
Speaker 2: The day the Nazi died for Yeah, tell you never
Speaker 2: has a anarchist group sounded more like a type of
Speaker 2: bubble gump Yeah. The Daily Zeiche is a production of
Speaker 2: My Heart Radio. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
Speaker 2: visit the Heart Radio, ap Apple Podcast, or wherever you
Speaker 2: listen to your favorite shows. That's gonna do it for
Speaker 2: us this morning.
Speaker 4: We're back this
Speaker 2: Afternoon to tell you what is trending, and we'll talk
Speaker 2: to you all then Bye.