March 18, 2025 • 59 mins
In episode 1830, Jack and Miles are joined by author of Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, Alec Karakatsanis, to discuss… Seemingly Liberal Institutions That Do A Ton of Damage, Copaganda, Mahmoud Khalil Case and more!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
I recently rewatched that Stomp HBO special from the la.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Oh. It's just so stomped.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Like we were like, damn, bro, these.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
People are playing cards, but it's rhythmic and.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
And I just like, yo, they're not even playing They're
playing pots and using brooms and ship I feel like
there were a couple things, like just commercials, like the
basketball commercial where.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Like the dude is dribbling. They edited together that, or
that one Volkswagen commercial where the windshield wiper starts like
going to the beat, and then everything outside the windows starts.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
Going to the beat.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Stop dude. The influence of stomp. They started stomping. It
was so stumped, We stopped every everything so stumped. Hello
the Internet, and welcome to Season three eighty, Episode two
(01:07):
of Daily Night Day, a production of My Heart Radio.
This is a podcast where we take a deep dive
into America share consciousness. It is Tuesday, March eighteenth, twenty
twenty five.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yep, yep, It's National ag Day, Shout out to Agriculture,
National Sloppy Joe Day, National Awkward Moments Day.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah, good times, good times, Slopy Joe, Awkward Moments. I know,
let's just have an awkward moment the HR people who
are really into these national.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
Days DM like, oh, okay, awkward, Now we have to
put this one up and put on the bulletin board.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Did not have that one on my twenty twenty five
but had on my calendar. Yeah, tried to force an
awkward moment. Okay, that was so awkward. It's like, no, oh.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Don't you love Joe Biden.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Oh okay.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Anyways, my name is.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Jack O'Brien aka Potatoes O'Brien, and I'm thrilled to be
joined as always by my co host, mister Miles Gris.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yes, he's still out here. Look, you can actually find
me on Linkerson Boulevard from time to time. Now, even
the boulevards of Ventura or Magnolia, you never know, because
I'm in the San Fernando Valley, the Shogun Window gun.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yes in d Yeah, stay out here. You're just all
just walking making turning the value into a lot of city.
Do a lot of walking, nice, a lot of walking.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
They call me Chris.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Well, mister Walkin.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
We are thrilled to be joined in air third Seat
Wow by the executive director of Civil Rights Corps, which
is a nonprofit dedicated to fighting systemic injustice.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
He's been a civil rights lawyer, a public defender. He
was named twenty sixteenth Trial Lawyer of the Year by
Public Justice. The author of several books, The incredibly compelling
Usual Cruelty and The brand New Copaganda, which we got
to read an advanced copy of, is dropping April fifteenth,
so good go pre order right now. We'll be talking
(03:10):
about it. Most importantly a great follow on social media,
of course, please welcome the brilliant and talented Alan Carcasone.
Speaker 6 (03:20):
Thank you all for having me back.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Oh man, always open door. I got excited when I
read the word zeitgeist at the end.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Of your book.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I was like, oh, yeah, shout out to the show. Yeah, yeah,
great word.
Speaker 6 (03:31):
I was thinking of you guys.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Yeah, of course, totally.
Speaker 6 (03:37):
Man, I've been well, I mean, at least as well
as can be. I'm excited to have this book out
there in the world, and I think the ideas are
so important now and at times rising authoritarianism and a
real assault on basic notions of kindness and truth and love.
And you know, so I was I was trying to
explore the last few years, you know, like what do
(03:59):
we make of the mainstream media and how they're leading
us to these really dark places, and I'm just glad
to be able to be able to talk about it
now in public.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I'd give them an a minus. I think I think
they're mostly nailing it. What do you guess thinks? Sorry,
I didn't read the book. But we like the mainstream media, right,
They're cool.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
I love the New York Times games. I mean, with
with many a guest, we like to get to know
them a little bit better and do a search history underrated, overrated,
But we got a lot to cover, so we want
to just kind of dive right in, if that's all
right with you, Alec, unless you had a search history
underrated or overrated that was particularly pressing that you wanted
to get off your chest.
Speaker 6 (04:37):
You know, I don't do anything other than think about topaganda.
So okay, I said, better just dive right in, you know,
all right, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I was actually it was funny.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yesterday I was hanging out with some people who are
from out of town, and like they hit me with
the is LA Safe because.
Speaker 7 (04:53):
Like, and I was like, you, okay, yeah, Kelly's great man,
what are you talking about?
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Like?
Speaker 7 (04:58):
Because I see a lot of like you know that
people running into stores and like grabbing stuff and things
like that, and I'm like, oh, my sweet, sweet child, Yeah,
this is These are like cherry picked videos that they
play over and over again to sort of create that narrative.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Like crime is actually going on, Like whoa really?
Speaker 6 (05:16):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (05:16):
You know.
Speaker 6 (05:17):
One of the things, the thing that I just think
about a lot, is the curation selectively of anecdote. You know,
you know, you could you could take a video montage
of every missed shot that Michael Jordan took in his career,
put them all together, and you make them look like
a bad shooter.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
He's the worst player in the history of the NBA.
You can't make a friend shot.
Speaker 6 (05:41):
That's essentially what the mainstream media does with crime. So
the most effective propaganda, this is such an important lesson
that I learned in my years of studying this. The
most effective propaganda is actually based on true anecdotes. Because
if you do something that's that's blatantly blatantly false, unless
it's something that people can't really figure out it is false,
you actually lose credibility. But if you use a bunch
(06:04):
of true anecdotes to suggest kind of false interpretations or
then you actually have much more sophisticated propaganda. It's a
lot harder to tell the difference. And so what we've
seen the last few years as the example like you gave,
you know, there was one video that went viral of
shoplifting from a Walgreens in San Francisco that itself spawned
(06:26):
three hundred and nine articles around the country, that one
little video. And at the same time, in that one
month period that these hundreds of articles are written about it,
and nightly newscasts all over the country, by the thousands,
there is virtually no stories about wage staff or tax
evasion things that are happening way way more and that
cost orders of magnitude more money for people. And that's
(06:49):
the selective creation an anecdote that gets us afraid of
of all of the wrong things.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
And if in case people are like yeah, but like
it's better like storytelling, or it's like more salient to
like see the violent thing happening. The wage theft is
stealing from you, right like those people are stealing from Walgreens,
a massive corporation. They're doing it like on a one
(07:15):
off basis, and it's being strapolated into like a massive
trend they're stealing from a corporation, and the wage theft
is happening to you and it's not getting reported on right,
and the Walgreens story is being you know that we've
got to protect Walgreens. And that is why I gave
them an a minus instead of a straight A, you know,
(07:35):
because they they do they have some lapses. Sure, yeah,
I just want to We're going to get into that
because I think you do a great job of like
kind of explaining how some of these things that if
you ask the average American if these institutions are right
(07:56):
or left, they are going to say left, like the mainstream,
like Ivy League, universities, the Democratic Party. You do a
great job of explaining like how they are some of
the main ways that this kind of catastrophic system that
we're all living inside of perpetuates itself. But you actually
(08:17):
close your book with some amazing talking points that I
just want to open with because I do think to
your point, they put people in the right mind frame
to have this conversation, if that's all right. So you
have one about how police spend and this specifically relates
to what has happened in the past four or five
(08:39):
years since the conversation about defunding the police and all
these stories that have come out, like they're the only
thing that we have and they're the only thing keeping
you safe. You point out that police spend about four
percent of their time on what they categorize as violent crime.
Such crimes account for only five percent of the rests
that police make. For many years, until recent legalization, in
(09:01):
dozens of states, the police made more arrests for marijuana
possession than for all violent crime combined with marijuana legal
and almost half the states marijuana possession arrests are still
about half of all arrests for all violent crime combined.
So just that idea, I think because of all the movies,
(09:26):
all the TV shows that we've been fed about police
for like in my entire lifetime, Like that's the main genre,
right is just like cops solving violent crime is like
a top genre of movies. It's just it's not there.
It's not there. It's just not supported by fact at all.
Speaker 6 (09:48):
It never has been. Yeah, there has never been a
time in US history when the significant bulk of police
activity has been geared at violent crime. You take a
look through the eras you know, the origin of the
modern police forces had to do with capturing enslaved people
who had run away and crushing union organizing in the
(10:13):
rest of the country. And that's how the modern police
force developed. And at that point they weren't even they
didn't feel a propaganda need to make themselves out as
agents of public safety. They were quite open about what
they were doing. And as the twentieth century evolved and
our sort of collective democratic values started to be articulated differently,
(10:35):
police developed more and more and more of a propaganda
need to justify their existence not as preserving distributions of
wealth and power and racial and economic hierarchy, but as
quote unquote public safety. And so then you see a
massive effort in the modern era, through huge investments from
the CIA, from the DoD, from the DEA, from local
(10:59):
and prosecutor of to the multi billion dollar police pr
industry today to shift the way we think through through video,
through TV, through movies, and then, as I argue in
the book, through a massive and mostly secret and kind
of unprecedented network of relationships with the liberal media. And
this is something in this book. As you mentioned, this
(11:21):
book is really about the role of liberal institutions and
the way that police and prosecutors and prisons and the
multi billion dollar industries that profit off of them have
co opted. Each of these institutions that is thought of
as liberal, from the kinds of research that are done
to the kinds of stories you see on your local news,
(11:41):
And none of it is about helping us understand the
things that are the greatest threats to our safety. And
instead it's about creating and sort of a narrative that
the things that we should fear are the things that
poor people, immigrants, people of color, strangers due to us,
and and those are actually not the greatest sources of
(12:04):
risk that all of us are exposed to on a
daily basis. For example, just to take one example of
something that's almost completely ignored by the police, sexual assault
or child sexual assault. Almost no police time, relatively speaking,
is devoted to this. Right, they don't have undercover squads
of officers going to frat houses and other places of
(12:25):
rampant sexual assault. That's what they do for drugs in
poor neighborhoods. You also don't have undercover cops going to
frat houses for drugs, right.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Yeah, fuse probably doing a lot of drugs, But.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Do the laziest undercover works that copy uniform like you
guys got some like.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Blow cane or something like yeah last week.
Speaker 6 (12:48):
For years, in many major US police departments they had
hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits, and instead the
police were spending tens of billions of dollars on drug enforcement.
This had nothing to do with keeping us safe or
making intentional, reasonable decisions about which crimes should be prioritize
(13:08):
and which crimes should not be. It had everything to
do with using the police force to control certain populations
and huge amounts of profit that could be made from
policing of drug cases, which I explain a little bit
more in the book, but I think that's a really
important thing to understand. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah, you have the quote from Nixon's assistant to Domestic
Affairs saying like literally just being like, yeah, this was
our plan. Make it illegal to be either against the
war or black or we can't make it illegal to
be against the war black. But by getting the public
to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin
and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,
(13:46):
like just straight up, we could arrest their leaders raid
their homes, break up their meetings. And this is like
when they came up with the war on drugs in
its like nineteen eighties, nineties and kind of modern incarnation,
and they just they straight had the plan and executed it.
Speaker 6 (14:02):
And I want you to understand, I mean, just take
Chicago for example, at the height of the civil rights movement.
I'm not even going to count the federal officers, so
this let's leave out the Feds. The Chicago police had
five hundred officers devoted to infiltrating and crushing the civil
rights movement. Five hundred full time cops. Right now, the
(14:23):
history of our current era has not been written. We
really have very limited window into what the current police
are doing with their intelligence divisions, right and the variety
of informans they're using. But take a look, for example,
at Chicago itself. After the police murder of Lakwan MacDonald,
which the police had a video of and hid for
(14:45):
a long time to get rama manual back elected. When
McDonald was killed by the Chicago police, they had four
full time dedicated public relations officials at CPD. Wow, in
the couple of years after it started becoming a scandal,
they jumped to thirty and then forty and now they've
over fifty full time pr people the Chicago Police Department.
(15:06):
This is this is affecting the information that you and
I see on the news.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Right, full full court press all the time. By the way,
Chicago was it was it a Chicago cop who grabbed
the back of your neck and told you he had
your DNA?
Speaker 8 (15:20):
Was it?
Speaker 7 (15:20):
Or no?
Speaker 2 (15:21):
It wasn't any blew my fucking mind.
Speaker 6 (15:24):
Yeah that was in Texas.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Jesus Christ, that was fucking mind blowing. Yeah, grabbed. It
was basically like, I now have your DNA, I know,
and here's the make a model of your car, and
just the most like sinister threatening shit for what I
have to assume you were holding up a room full
of people with a handgun.
Speaker 6 (15:45):
Close I was. I was suing the jurisdictions around the
country for legally jailing people. So that's just threatening to them.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (15:54):
But that's the thing you have to understand too, is
is a lot of people don't talk about this, but many, many,
many people around the country, progressive local and state officials.
I've had judges, prosecutors, mayors, state assembly officials all come
to me over the years and share vivid and well
documented stories of police threatening them and their families if
(16:17):
they took anti police stances. The organized right wing police
bureaucracy is extremely unaccountable and goes to enormous lengths to
threaten anybody like even me, just a visiting civil rights lawyer.
You know, the idea that they would follow me and
document the make and model of my car and take
(16:38):
the time to you know, threaten me in that way.
And I was, you know, I was also in another situation.
I was leading a spring break trip. I was actually
traveling with a New York Times reporter and a law
student intern from Harvard, and I was detained by a
group of armed sheriffs. You know, they've had their hands
on their guns, on their hips, and they locked me
in a room and they started demanding that I answer
(17:00):
questions to them. But what I was, and all I
was doing at that point, was was asking for publicly
available records at a courthouse. So this is the kind
of thing that happens a million times a year. You
never hear about it, but right deeply shapes how the
public officials you see taking pro police stands. A lot
of that is actually driven by fear, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
I mean I felt like that in La right where
in the summer of twenty twenty, like there was a
lot of pressure on the city council to be like,
are you going to address these budgets, and like these
motherfuckers pulled up like they were going to get like
all these cops pulled up to sort of protest that
they thought it would be detrimental for budgets to be
touched in any way. But it was so menacing that
(17:43):
you knew that it was. It wasn't merely to be like,
we're concerned about our wages. They're like, you know, fuck
around with us and see what you know, you can
learn how sort of off the rails we can get.
And I remember just sort of like that image really
sort of I think always inherently you have a belief
that like these who are not here to protect us
at all, But then you could really just see how
organized they were in protecting this right to just execute
(18:06):
violence on people for whatever reason and.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Get paid for it.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
That was very, very very scary, but also part of
like I think what is important about this book is
for us to have a bit of an evolution on
how we're even looking at it because to Jack's point,
we're all raised to be like, yeah, they're the good guys,
and they like to break dance sometimes at the local
basketball court, and they're fun people. But then they also
keep us safe and these other things, while meanwhile we
(18:31):
are hearing directly from their mouths, like in the case
of like people in Nixon's cabinet, we're like, no, no, no,
like we need we need these people to sort of
create the air that people that are sort of opposed
to what we're doing as a government or municipality that
this is illegal, and we use the activity of the
police to sort of connect the dots for people as
a shorthand to be like, yes, hippie's bad, Yes, yes,
(18:53):
this makes sense now.
Speaker 6 (18:54):
And another thing you have that I talk about in
the book that you have to understand is that what
we're told now is called, in our current sort of
propaganda discourse, community policing. And you know this this idea
that you were just mentioning a cops breakdancing, and you
know they were during the twenty twenty uprisings, there were
some cops that were doing the macarena with protesters, and
(19:18):
every local news station runs a story every now and
then about like a midnight basketball league that the cops
are running, or like a Thanksgiving turkey giveaway for four families.
But you have to understand about all that is it's
all extremely intentional and it derives from counterinsurgency theory that
was developed by the French military in Vietnam and the
(19:41):
British military in the Middle East, and it was used
to great effect by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And this there's huge police training industry and the industry
of police consultants that got to work on converting what
they used to call counterinsurgency. And they knew they need
(20:02):
they couldn't call it counterinsurgency in the US. So actually
Harvard made a mistake a few years ago and they
had an ex military person teaching a class on counterinsurgency.
A bunch of Harvard students were going to go into
a black neighborhood in Massachusetts and help the police do counterinsurgency,
and they just forgot like that you're supposed to call
it community policing in the US the goal of and
(20:25):
so the Harvard had to cancel the class. So they
have just called it something different. They could have gone
forward and even been celebrated for it, you know, But
a lot of liberals over the last twenty or thirty years,
and this is something that I try to delve into
great detail into the book with lots of sources and
recommendations for further reading for people. But liberals really to
advance this idea that we can repackage authoritarian and repressive
(20:50):
stuff that our military and other militaries were doing around
the world to native populations. We can try the same
strategies in the US but call them reform. And this
is a central feature of the way the news media
has covered policing over the last twenty or thirty years,
and it's been a central strategic focus of the police
to co opt certain marginalized leaders in different communities to
(21:13):
get them to support these policies which actually result in
more people being surveilled, more people being arrested, higher rates
of incarceration, more profits for the policing industry. They're not
a reform in any sense of the word, but they
have come to have and have a whole thing in
the book, and they've written a separate article which is
also going to be a book on police body cameras,
(21:34):
because LA plays a really prominent role in this. You know,
for years, police body cameras were this thing that the
policing industry wanted so badly, but they couldn't get the
money for it. They wanted it so badly that the
LAPD got people like Steven Spielberg to donate body camera
technology to the cops.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
And I mean, who better. The guy works with cameras,
you know, James, he's an issue, yeah, but minority report.
Really he's bringing us into the future of police.
Speaker 6 (22:06):
And but for years the police dreamed about this because
you know, companies like Amazon and Microsoft and and Taser,
which then rebranded as Axon after its tasers started killing people.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Much evil sounding Axon exactly fun.
Speaker 6 (22:21):
These companies used to talk privately and even you know,
to shareholders and at policing conferences and stuff about how
much money there This is a multi billion dollar potential
industry if they could get the government contracts. But they
couldn't get a lot of these most big city local
governments in the US are run by liberals, they're run
by democrats, and they couldn't get the fun thing for this.
(22:41):
So actually what they did was they used Michael Brown's
killing in twenty fourteen, where there was no video of it,
and and they used that in Obama, you know, requested
several hundred million dollars for body cameras, and it became
a mantra of the Democratic Party all over the country.
And and uh, Meanwhile, the policing folks were beside themselves
with joy because they wanted to connect. They wanted billions
(23:05):
of dollars to give every cop in the US a
mobile surveillance camera. They could connect to artificial intelligence, facial recognition,
voice recognition, They could go to a protest and scan
the crowd with their chest camera and have everyone's identity.
They also wanted and they knew that this evidence was
only going to be used against very poor people. This
is how they were going to get video evidence that
(23:25):
the cops controlled to arrest unhoused people, you know, to
do drug busts and things like that. They knew it
was never going to be used or at least very
very rarely ever used against police. And so we have
this situation now where there's reams of evidence. Even the
federal government admits that body cameras do not have any
positive effect on reducing police violence or making them more accountable,
(23:48):
more transparent, but they do dramatically increase the extent which
police can prosecute and get people to play guilty more
quickly because they have these videos that they that they control.
So anyway, that's a good example of something that in
the public imagination, and if you look at and I
read every single article that I could find, hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of articles about body cameras in the media,
they were all portrayed as an initiative for accountability and transparency,
(24:14):
when in fact they were developed exactly the opposite. They
were built exactly to give police more power and less
accountability by giving police control over what is filmed from
what angle and when that film is edited and how
it's edited and when they can release it in public.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Right, I'm curious, just like along with that to create
that narrative, like, were they also doing like performative resistance
to make it feel like it was like a measure
of accountability.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Were they giving us body cameras?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Yeah, you know what I mean, like just to kind
of help that, because I feel like the flow of
an article like that is like liberal politicians like we
need the need for it and then there'd be like
the police version where they're like, I don't think it's
quite necessary to sort of create that tension, or was
this just sort of like they were like, no.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
No, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (24:57):
I think there are a couple of interesting and complicated
the internal dynamics going on with the policing bureaucracy. First
of all, yes, some of it was performative, and you
can I don't know if you've ever watched body cameras,
but I've seen, you know, hundreds and hundreds of body
care of viadas, especially when as a public defender. But
the police are trained, so the cameras looking outward from
(25:18):
their chests, so the camera is actually not showing what
the police officer themselves is doing. And so if you
notice in a lot of these videos the cops are
just screaming, stop resisting, stop resisting, stop resisting, right, That's
something they're trained to do, so that they're taught that
it makes it harder to convict them of anything or
hold them liable civilly because they're they're creating what they
(25:39):
call a contemporaneous record of resistance, which then justifies their
use of force, even though you can't actually see like
what's actually going on anyway. But the internal dynamics were
that some of the police frontline officers, who have the
least power in the policing bureaucracy, were worried about you
(25:59):
wearing cameras. They worried that it was going to enable
their bosses to spy on them and reduce their their
ability to engage in some of the activity day that
might be illegal, et cetera that they tend to want
to engage in. They weren't sure like what policies and
protocols they were going to be for when they were
being recorded, and who was going to control the video
(26:20):
and so. But at the same time, police leaders and
leaders in the surveillance industry really wanted them because they
thought this would enable them to even more completely control
the behavior of beat cops. And so initially there was
a much stronger appetite for body cameras among police leadership
and the companies that make them and that make the
software then there was among beat cops. But then once
(26:42):
it became clear that these that they had the right
protocols in place that was going to make sure that
the cops were you know, unless the cops really made
a mistake. They were never going to be recorded doing
something that they you know, that they didn't want to
be recorded doing. And also they could control and edit
the video. And also it was by and large going
to make it much much more easier to prosecute the
poor people, because keep in mind, like the body cameras
(27:06):
have no say over like which neighborhoods are we going into,
and which neighborhoods are we not? Where are we looking
for drugs? And where are we not looking for drugs?
These bigger questions that are really the core of like
the discriminatory nature of policing in our society. Body cameras
just ignore all that, Right, So cops became convinced that
actually body cameras were not going to be a threat
(27:28):
to business as usual, And there's now much more uniform
support among even the lowest level line cops for body
cameras than there was initially.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
All right, just real quick, I also wanted to do
the talking point that just I think at the broadest
level is helpful for people to learn that this is
not normal. Is that the US confines people to jail
cells at six times its own historical average five to
ten times as much as other comparable countries and imprisons
black people at six times the rate of South Africa
(27:59):
during apart time. So many people have probably heard that.
I think it's worth just stating up top, for anybody
who are abnormal and unfucked up, it is very abnormal.
Speaker 6 (28:10):
And that's why you use so much propaganda, right, right,
I mean exactly, Like, You've got a bureaucracy that is
larger than any bureaucracy in the modern history of the world.
Like no country, let alone any country that thinks of
itself as democracy, has ever tried to spend this much
money jailing its own people. And in the face of that,
you've got enormous bodies of scientific evidence that show that
(28:34):
imprisoning people actually does not make us safer, it actually
makes us less safe. And you've got even more robust
bodies of empirical research that show the things that make
us safer and reduced crime are things like housing, healthcare,
you know, early childhood education. Like it's obvious, right, And
so you need a giant propaganda apparatus to get people
(28:55):
so afraid of strangers and poor people and immigrants that
they inspired of what all the evidence shows. They constantly
think that they're in fear and danger that the only
solution for them is increasing the amount of money that
our society spends on police.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Right, let's take a quick break and then we'll come
back and we'll focus on some of these allegedly liberal
institutions that are doing a lot of the a lot
of the legwork and what we're talking about.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
We're back. And there's this one moment, as Trump was
like taking office and dropping a bunch of like fascist
executive orders and just attacking trans people, the Wall Street
Journal had another op ed on the front page of
their paper that was all about how Colleges two woke,
and I was just I was kind of amazed at that,
(29:55):
but it it really just was kind of an illustration
of how relentless they have been and continue to be
in painting these institutions. We're going to talk about Harvard
and Columbia, The New York Times and like other mainstream
media outlets, the democratic part, like these institutions that I
(30:18):
guess benefit from being like, yeah, we are actually very
liberal and just basically they are there to perpetuate the
existing power structures, and you know, wealth distribution, But yeah,
I wanted to start with Harvard. There's Harvard gets mentioned
a few times in the book. Specifically, you talk about
(30:40):
the study where two academics who claim to be coming
from the left and to be like really bummed out
by the conclusion that they arrive at are like, guys, sorry,
we're just calling balls and strikes here. We're just re
doing the math. And unfortunately, the only way for us
(31:01):
to move forward as a progressive society is to like
double the number the already record high number of cops
that we have on the street. We just need to
like become even more of a police state. But just
more generally, you write in the book, I learned over
time the most important qualification for teaching students. Oh no,
(31:21):
this was actually a tweet of yours. You wrote, over
time the most important qualification for teaching students at elite
schools willingness to use your mind, position and power to
preserve distributions of wealth and misery. But you just talk
about like kind of what was this surprising to you
at a certain point that these institutions like Harvard and
Columbia were just so in the bag for the existing
(31:44):
kind of power structure.
Speaker 6 (31:46):
I was pretty naive when I when I got to
you know, went to college at Yale, at the law
school at Harvard, and I was pretty naive when I
got to these places.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
You know.
Speaker 6 (31:56):
I was sort of thinking, Oh, these are institutions of learning,
and they're so prestigious, and like, people who come here
must be smarter, and they must be you know, really
rigorous thinkers. And that's really not what goes on at
these places at all. I don't want to speak a
too broad of brushstroke, because like you know, I've a
lot of incredible friends and relationships that I've made there.
(32:19):
There are a lot of scholars at these institutions, just
like at many other universities and colleges and non academic
institutions around the country. There are people doing amazing scholarship
and scholarship matters like research and matters. I'm not saying
that those things are not important. That's not the lesson
of the book. But one of the key functions of
(32:41):
a place like Harvard is to launder policies and ideas
that are designed to preserve existing distributions of wealth and
power in our society, launder them with a veneer of
academic backing and of rigorous thought and things like that.
You learn very quickly at a place like Harvard, what
(33:03):
does it take not only to succeed there as a student,
but what does it take to becomefessor? What does it
take to get tenure? And everybody who it's very political,
and everybody who's there understands that certain kinds of research
that benefits certain kinds of people in our society and
certain institutions is going to be a ticket to success,
(33:23):
and other kinds of research and views are not. And
and Harvard is a you know, has an endownment worth
tens of billions of dollars, is a huge industry, and
so a lot of the scholarship that is produced at
a place like Harvard is skewed by these other incentives.
In other words, it's not this kind of pure place
(33:43):
where like the best ideas are espoused and the people
who are the smartest and best researchers with the kindest
souls are the ones who succeeded it. You know, it's
not how it works. And I think the example that
I use in my book, I've a whole chapter devoted
to this. I think it's one of the funniest. And
I try to, by the way, throughout the book, I
try to talk about all these issues with humor and
(34:04):
get a little bit of joy, because to me, like
life is not worth living unless you can laugh a
little bit about these horrific things.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
And these are definitely teetering on the edge of laughter
or crying one or the other. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (34:19):
And if you can't laugh about two Harvard professors, you know,
sort of proposing the greatest expansion of policing in modern
world history by adding five hundred thousand police officers to
you as based on rudimentary errors that they made that
are somewhat comical, then you can't laugh about anything, right.
(34:39):
And these two guys are particularly funny to me because
they portray themselves not only as progressives but as socialists,
and they understand something really important, which is it's very
good for your future as a scholar at Harvard if
you can be seen as one of those you know,
it's almost like a false flag opera, right, It's like
(35:01):
you're parading around as a leftist, socialist progressive, but the
ideas you're promoting are right wing and serving the interests
of the people who financially back Harvard and their social circles,
et cetera. So it's very smart, actually if what you
were thinking was that you wanted to advance your career.
(35:21):
But anyway, these guys propose, and I think one especially
comical thing about it is that in journal that they
published this call for five hundred thousand more police. And
by the way, the call for more police is, as
I talk about in the book, it's absurd they made
this proposal without counting the social costs of more police.
(35:41):
You can't you know, say I want it. It'd be
like installing a new heater in your house and not
only getting the measurements wrong for the heater, but you
neglected to include that this heater spews carbon monoxide into
your house, you know, And.
Speaker 9 (35:57):
So you're saying this heater, yeah, They're like, well, you know,
we're installing this heater in this house and it's going
to increase you know, the heat by a degree over
other heaters, you know, And not only did they get
that measurement wrong, but they also just neglected to tell
you it's also going to kill your whole family.
Speaker 6 (36:13):
Right, So you can't promote, you don't make a social
policy proposal without even asking the question of, like, what
are some of the costs and downsides to the proposal?
Right and anyway? But I think like the funniest part
about it to me is that the journal they published
this in was created in the wake of the twenty
twenty George Floyd uprisings by Harvard as a way of
(36:37):
pacifying student unrest. They're like, we're going to create this
Journal of Law and Inequality, and it's going to be
this new thing that people publish to like confront these
issues of our day. And then and then just a
short time later, that Journal of Law and in Equality
or whatever they call it is already publishing bold Please
by Harvard professors to add five hundred thousand cops.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yes, I remember when it came out and we were like,
oh my god, the mainstream media is going to eat
this shit. Yes, and sure enough they did. There's also
just a little detail in that because you kind of
you know, came at this study and pointed out all
the ways that it was ridiculous and speaking of these
(37:20):
two Harvard professors as comical figures, just the fact that
they were using their students to try to construct arguments
against your critiques of their book. Was pretty pretty wild.
Speaker 4 (37:32):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Oh wait, so they were asking the students to basically
like defend this against evil alec.
Speaker 6 (37:39):
Well, no, I mean I think I don't know that
they were. I don't think that they were, you know,
specifically talking about me. But they were instead of like
testing students on like the basics of first year criminal law,
you know, one of the professors during the exam was
apparently asking and the students you know sent me these
exam questions. They sent in the screenshots of them to me,
(37:59):
and and he was asking for their help developing counter
arguments to his proposal more police.
Speaker 9 (38:06):
You know.
Speaker 6 (38:06):
It's weren't meet you the wrong way about it, But
I thought was really funny about it. Was like he
was he was asking students for help with this research project,
you know, just.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Like crowdsourcing, like the fleshing out of research project.
Speaker 6 (38:21):
Yeah, And it turned out like the students you know
told me that like we had like raised a number
of the objections that you've lad helpfully with them privately before.
They So it's not like these people just like had
like a huge brain fart and forgot about, you know,
a lot of the critiques and they just like didn't
care to respond or even rigorously addressed in the first
(38:44):
place these things. And that's why I think the copaganda
book that is full of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Right.
Speaker 6 (38:49):
What I try to do is take some of the
most outrageous, funniest examples of kind of mainstream liberal institutions,
whether it's it's professors or news organizations, journalists or whatever
nonprofits sometimes and illustrate stuff that is actually really important
that we might miss if we just look at the news.
(39:09):
Because it's not just these Harvard professors are publishing this stuff.
It's how does that stuff then get translated into the
mainstream news that you consume right as conventional wisdom, right,
And that's that's the process that I really try to
examine in the book with some humor, because you know,
this is it's you know, there's a lot of upsetting
(39:31):
stuff in here about about how we're being lied to
and misled and how many of the institutions that we're
told to trust are actually really untrustworthy and we need
to develop better mechanisms of critical thinking. And that's another
reason why you know this book. We've raised money so
that any teacher who wants to teach any part of
this book in school, any person in prison. We have
(39:53):
free copies of the book available with the people, like,
obviously I hope that you support the book and and
all the I don't make any money off the book, right,
any copy that sold, all the worlties go to the
Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which organizes on house people in
skid row in Los Angeles. But even if if you
can't afford the book, you know, we can get free
copies to people because we just want people to have
(40:15):
a more critical understanding of the news that they're being shown.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, which is like interesting that the way you ring
up Harvard, it immediately relates to the newsroom, right, like
the way professors and academics can ascend. It's not that
there's like marching orders, but you can pretty clearly into it.
You're like, Okay, if I talk about this in this way,
this is how I get my things pop in, which
I feel like is another criticism we have of a
lot of journalism too, where clearly other journalists know, Okay,
(40:39):
if I write from this perspective or stories with this
sort of bend to it, that's how I'm able to ascend,
and that's how it further just sort of reinforces this
kind of thing, and I think, you know, the New
York Times is probably a great example of this kind
of thinking.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, that was really You have a great quote from
David Graeber, who we talk about a lot on this
show about like the Superman and Batman where they're both
essential essentially like instituting fascist policies with their superpowers, because
that's all we can imagine. And like that kind of
tied back to how I think about the mainstream media
(41:13):
point that Miles was talking about, where it's like they're
playing to the audience, like the audience wants to see
I think there's like a part, at least a part
of the audience that kind of wants to see this
fucking fascism like that. That's why Batman does that, That's
why Superman does that, and so they know they're going
to get readers, and it's just this like cowardly thing
(41:34):
that's you know, pleasing their corporate overlords. But I think
it's also like pleasing some dark, horrible part of the
audience too that is like, yeah, I want to believe
that this is the police, good guy, right, and.
Speaker 8 (41:49):
This is it It's an easy solve, Yeah, yeah, I
think there's there's definitely part of that, but I don't know,
because I mean, I think it's easy to envision you
could have really compell local news story.
Speaker 6 (42:01):
Like, for example, if instead of of installing a reporter
to read all the police press releases and regurgitate them
for the news every day, what if you had a
reporter whose job was to report on like landlord tenant
court and every day you had like a bad landlord
of the day article or a bad employer of the
day absolute Like I think people would watch and be
(42:21):
interested in finding out what landlords are doing to their
tenants across la or across Chicago or across in the country.
I think if you if you installed somebody at all
of the sites that are that are figuring out who's
polluting our drinking water, who is emitting dangerous gases that
are hurting our children. And you know, by the way,
air pollution kills one hundred thousand people in the US
(42:42):
every year. Okay, that's four to five times all homicides
can buy. There are people every single day in all
these cities who are actually just emitting stuff that's killing
our children and people. Yeah, and I think I think
people would I mean, I hear what you're saying. I
definitely think there's part of like they feel like they're
(43:04):
they're playing down you know, it's like reality TV or
Law and Order. Like they definitely think they're what they think,
they know what their audience wants. But I believe audiences
would tolerate different types of villains and different types of
stories about who is causing us harm that were more
consistent with reality. And that's another thing I talk about
in the book.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, yeah, I mean you have so there's so many
wild an like what while the Wallgreens shoplifting panic was happening,
they had to settle a massive lawsuit about like wage theft.
But get that gets you You make a good point
about how anytime there are multiple, you know, cases of
shoplifting or just like viral videos of shoplifting, that becomes
(43:48):
a wave or a trend or you know, out of control.
But these things, the you know, the Walgreens wage theft
settlement is treated as a one off thing. And then
when you talked to editors, they were like, well, we
reported on a different company doing that last month, so
(44:08):
we can't like that that story's been done essentially, which
is so so wild and doesn't really doesn't really make
any sense unless you're taking into account. Yeah, but we
can't like make them mad because they are the big
corporate overlord.
Speaker 6 (44:27):
Yeah, I mean, I think you have to understand also
how the news media works. And there's lots of scholarship
written about how the media functions. But they it organizes
things into news themes, and it categorizes things so that
people can understand them. And so I give this great
example from the late seventies early eighties of this person
(44:47):
who supporter, who was embedded in a newsroom, and he
watched the creation of a supposed crime wave by youth
of color against old people. And there was this panic
that emerged that all these young people of color were
robbing and stealing from and mugging and hurting old people,
(45:08):
and every time that happened during this period, it was
seen as further evidence of this trend. But when you
take a step back and look several years later, you
actually see that the only thing that had been created
was this news categorization and this news trend. Actually incidents
of young people stealing and mugging and robbing old people
were actually down during that period, and this is it's
(45:31):
very hard for people to understand. But sometimes the news,
you know, for example, after the East Palestine trained derailment
in Ohio a couple of years ago, there were there's
more of an interest in the news media in covering
trained derailments. Those are things that are happening all the time,
right like, but now that you're focused on it and
it's a theme of your news, it's going to play
(45:53):
into this idea and the same thing is happening. There
was a massive society wide panic about shop and retail theft,
even though retail theft we now know is down, and
so how we categorize things, it's just so so important.
It's like the Michael Jordan example I gave earlier. If
you're looking for it, and if you just only document
(46:14):
the missed shots, you're going to not capture the full story.
And that's what makes the media they have such an
awesome responsibility because they have a choice. Every single day,
out of the millions and millions of things that have
happened in the world, they're going to tell us about
ten or fifteen of them, or twenty of them. And
also they're going to suggest in their coverage, how should
(46:35):
we think about this. In other words, is that wildfire
connected to climate change? Or is it some isolated event?
Is that airline crash connected to DEI programs at you know,
like Trump said, right, you know yeah? Or like So
this is an awesome responsibility because just by juxtaposing two
(47:01):
stories together or two ideas together, Like I give an
example in the book where they claim that a certain
kind of crime went down in a certain city, and
they say just they just note that also the police
had been holding a charity basketball tournament. So it's like
they're suggesting that, like, and what they didn't report is
that that particular kind of crime had gone down nationwide,
(47:21):
not just in the place where there's a police youth
basketball tournament. So these are all these category categories and
these causes. They're highly manipulable. And if you take nothing
else away from the book, I want you to take
away the idea that there are a lot of very
(47:42):
smart people being paid billions of dollars a year to
shape how you think about what is newsworthy, what's happening
in the world, what the causes are, and therefore what
should we spend money on as the solutions.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
Let's take one more quick break, and then I just
want to talk to you about like where we go
from from here, because obviously things are shifting. Some of
this fascism that has been ignored for a long time
is getting louder, and so I just want to kind
of hear your thoughts on that.
Speaker 4 (48:12):
We'll be right.
Speaker 10 (48:13):
Back and we're back, We're back, and yeah, I mean
we have been living with as your book does a
really good job of illustrating extraordinary you know, fascism and
(48:36):
authoritarianism and injustice for years and much of the.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Mainstream media and much of these you know, supposedly liberal
institutions have been just ignoring it. And now it feels
like it's becoming louder and harder to ignore. Like that,
you know, the truth comes quietly at first, and then
it speaks louder, and then it's you know, then it's
a shrieking tent alarm fire, and there are it seems
(49:06):
like we're entering in some ways kind of a world
that's recognizable if like net now that you know you've
illustrated all these things, what once people have read your book,
you'll be like, oh, a lot of this stuff has
been happening for a while. But it also feels like
with the arrest of Michael Khalil and you you wrote
(49:30):
on Twitter that you've never seen a more clear cut
First Amendment violation. It just it does feel like things
are escalating. And so I'm just kind of curious how
you are thinking about the position. Has it changed, how
you're thinking about the situation Americans find themselves out?
Speaker 6 (49:47):
Yeah, And look, I'm just one person, So who knows.
I mean, I think we're all all people of goodwill
are struggling right now, think about what can I do?
What's the one do when society is teetering on the
brink of such an abyss, and how do we how
do we come together with other people who care? And
(50:07):
I don't purport to have all the answers, And I
think different people are in a different position to do
different things, and we all have to do whatever we can.
I think there's I mean, I offer some tips in
the last chapter of the book about you know, one
of the first steps is like fortifying your own mind
against you know, relentless propaganda, and like what are some
(50:29):
things to read and what are some daily practices to
employ in your life. Also, it's very important who you
surround yourself with and what kinds of like sort of
critical thinking communities you put yourself in. And then also
like I think what's so so so important in this
moment is the fascists when when people are so afraid,
(50:51):
but also I'm so hopeless and feel like everything is futile,
and and I think it's a great time for able
to get involved wherever they are in their own communities,
whether that's geographically like getting involved in your local library
or your local school board, or mutual aid groups that
help people in your community, or at work or at school,
(51:13):
like organizing and getting together with people other people really
any to It could be the smallest little things that
you're fighting for together, but when you organize other people
and you fight for things like something that is really true,
something that is in some small way trying to counter
the meanness that pervades so much of our society. And
by the way, I do a lot of work all
(51:34):
over the country, in rural areas, all over the country,
in big cities, Democrat Republic and whatever, like it's very
different from what the world is that we see on
like Twitter or social media or like people want to
be connecting to each other relating to each other in community,
and like it's easy to forget when you see how
(51:56):
isolated one feels by just spending a lot of time
on social media. Maybe and maybe that's just me, but
you have to just remember that, like a we are
such a social species and there's so much we can
do for each other if we just adopt the spirit
of kindness instead of a spirit of meanness. And I
keep coming back to that it's important now more than ever.
(52:18):
And then we all just have to fight. I say
this in the book, and this is one of the themes,
but I think a lot about Orwell's nineteen eighty four,
And one of the themes of George Orwell's book is
that the sort of authoritarian government is constantly trying to
get people to say, to think tuplus two ekals five,
(52:38):
tupless two eqals five, touplus two goos five. And in
whatever way is true to us, we need to be
able to every day remind ourselves toopus two egos four,
remind the people that we're close to. And that just
means the way that I see that, like in our
civil rights work, even if the courts are getting more
and more hostile to the kinds of cases that we do,
(52:59):
even if people are being jailed illegally in violation of
the Constitution, and just the act of us fighting them
is our way of saying too plus two of four,
two plus two equals four. Just standing up to that
and never becoming you know, like, that's why I think
is so harmful about what Columbia has done, what Chuck
Schumer is doing, what a lot of these universities do.
(53:20):
They are giving in, they are appeasing, they are refusing
to say touplus two equals four. And once you do
that as a society, all is lost. And so we
have to just in our own little ways find our
strength and courage to keep saying touplos tuoical four.
Speaker 4 (53:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (53:37):
I thought that was really an amazing part at that
last part of the book, because I think so many
people right now are just in like this fight or
flight response to everything and just looking for like a
silver bullet answer.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
Like what do we do now?
Speaker 1 (53:51):
And you know, myself included all, and I think I
really loved how again you're talking about what's also important
is that we fortify our minds to sort of hell
this kind of messaging and internalizing these sort of like
lies and making those our reality. But also like again
it's like really basic things like you're talking about like
fostering your sense of community, like deepening those relationships with
people around you, and then even like just engaging with art. Also,
(54:16):
I thought was, like, that's really brilliant too to just
think about again, because you're talking about how different messages
are going to hit our brains differently when they're expressed
artistically and things like that. So I just thought, yeah,
like there's sort of like holistic view of it is
really helpful, and I think helps also like when you
say the whole thing of like we got to remind
ourselves two plus two is four, that that gives us
(54:37):
a better view of sort of like the long term
nature of like this endeavor that's in front of us.
It's not like, Okay, everybody do these three things and
it's over. It's like, no, there are many things that
we're going to be doing. But the biggest thing too,
is like you're saying, maintaining that sense of humanity and hope.
So I hope we're all able to do that. And
I feel like that's the biggest thing that we want
to be able to do right now.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Yeah, Well, thank you Alex so much for coming on again,
and congratulations on the book. It's really awesome. Where can
people find you? Follow you and where can they find
the book?
Speaker 6 (55:08):
Yeah, so thank you guys both for having me on.
And I hope, I hope this book sells more copies
than my last book, which I think was maybe just
my grandma and my parents maybe about it.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
But it has to do well. This is going to do.
This is where we're going to get it out there.
It's going to get the TDZ bump baby, oh yeah,
the famous bump.
Speaker 6 (55:25):
Yeah. Well, so people can can google or search whatever
you use to find copaganda and my book. You can
buy it wherever books are sold. I've been encouraging people
to buy it from this really great black owned bookstore
in Flint, Michigan that I've been working with called Comma
c MMA. You can just pre order it there and
(55:45):
they'll send it to you. And no matter where you live.
But also if you have a favorite local bookstore, the
easiest thing to do is just go into your local
bookstore and order it from there or ask them to
carry it. Because go to your local library ask them
to carry it. That's actually how we get these books
out there is people just going in and talking about it.
And if you have friends or family who who are
(56:05):
liberals or progressives, who you know, because this book is
really written for well meaning liberal progressive people you know
to to or or you know, I don't I hate
these terms, but like a political people are moderate people
who you know, I'm not really writing this book for
the far right right. If you know people like that
(56:27):
in your life, just encourage them to look up the book.
They can also find me on all the social media
platforms at Quality ALEC, and you can look at our
work at Civil Rights Core as well to see some
of our civil rights work that really led me to
explore the ideas that are in the book.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
One of the best books I've read in a long time,
and one of the best follows anywhere on social media.
So let's go do it, everybody, ALEC. Is there a
work of social media or media or anything you've been enjoying.
Speaker 6 (56:53):
I've been actually reading a book called Ministry for the Future. Yeah,
by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Speaker 2 (57:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (57:00):
We that would encourage people to check that out.
Speaker 2 (57:02):
We did a whole episode on the Ministry for the Future.
It's so good, awesome, great recommendation. Miles, where can people
find you as their working media you've been enjoying?
Speaker 1 (57:11):
Yeah, just everywhere they got at Symbols at Miles of
Gray check Jack and I talking basketball on Miles and
Jack on mac Boosties and then I'm talking about ninety
day Fiance. That's my solf where I really just can
disconnect from talking about news on for twenty day Fiance.
Speaker 2 (57:27):
A work of media.
Speaker 1 (57:28):
Yes, at Juniper dot beer on b Sky. But the
eye is actually a one I believe all right now,
maybe a nuppercase l but Juniper. This is kind of
just funny because it aligns with sort of what we're
talking about. It says, whenever I see people posting their
own acab includes blank posts, I get PTSD flashbacks to
four years ago when I posted a police car themed
children shopping cart, and a segment of Twitter genuinely got
(57:51):
enraged at me.
Speaker 2 (57:54):
Hey it does include that shopping cart. Yeah, you can
find me on Twitter at underscore, Brian on Blue Sky,
at jack ob The number one tweet I've been enjoying
is from at PPy Onna tweeted hate one anxiety gives
me stomach problems, Like baby you are supposed to be
a mental disorder. Please stay in your lane and I relate.
(58:18):
You can find us on Twitter at daily Zegeist and
on Blue Sky at daily Zekes at the Daily Zekeist.
On Instagram, you can go to the description of this
episode wherever you're listening to it, and you can find
the footnotes, which is where we link off to the
information that we talked about in today's episode, and where
we link off to the book Copaganda, which you have
to go by. It is an assignment local. Yeah, also local,
(58:42):
stay local. We also link off to a song that
we think you might enjoy. Miles, is there a song
that you think people might enjoy? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (58:50):
Every like I feel like every sixteen months the Internet
finds out Chumbo Wambas, like this anarchist band and they
play this like sort of a cappella song the day
the Nazi died, and this clip kind of resurfaces again
at this like sixteen month pace, and I saw it
bubbling up again and I was.
Speaker 2 (59:07):
Like, oh, yeah, people need to hear this.
Speaker 1 (59:10):
So anyway, it's on their album, but the live version
where they performed in Dusseldorf, Germany is probably like the
vibeest performance of it all but Chumba Wamba.
Speaker 2 (59:20):
The day the Nazi died for Yeah, tell you never
has a anarchist group sounded more like a type of
bubble gump Yeah. The Daily Zeiche is a production of
My Heart Radio. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the Heart Radio, ap Apple Podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. That's gonna do it for
us this morning.
Speaker 4 (59:39):
We're back this
Speaker 2 (59:40):
Afternoon to tell you what is trending, and we'll talk
to you all then Bye.
I recently rewatched that Stomp HBO special from the la.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Oh. It's just so stomped.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Like we were like, damn, bro, these.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
People are playing cards, but it's rhythmic and.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
And I just like, yo, they're not even playing They're
playing pots and using brooms and ship I feel like
there were a couple things, like just commercials, like the
basketball commercial where.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Like the dude is dribbling. They edited together that, or
that one Volkswagen commercial where the windshield wiper starts like
going to the beat, and then everything outside the windows starts.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
Going to the beat.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Stop dude. The influence of stomp. They started stomping. It
was so stumped, We stopped every everything so stumped. Hello
the Internet, and welcome to Season three eighty, Episode two
(01:07):
of Daily Night Day, a production of My Heart Radio.
This is a podcast where we take a deep dive
into America share consciousness. It is Tuesday, March eighteenth, twenty
twenty five.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yep, yep, It's National ag Day, Shout out to Agriculture,
National Sloppy Joe Day, National Awkward Moments Day.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah, good times, good times, Slopy Joe, Awkward Moments. I know,
let's just have an awkward moment the HR people who
are really into these national.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
Days DM like, oh, okay, awkward, Now we have to
put this one up and put on the bulletin board.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Did not have that one on my twenty twenty five
but had on my calendar. Yeah, tried to force an
awkward moment. Okay, that was so awkward. It's like, no, oh.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Don't you love Joe Biden.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Oh okay.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Anyways, my name is.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Jack O'Brien aka Potatoes O'Brien, and I'm thrilled to be
joined as always by my co host, mister Miles Gris.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yes, he's still out here. Look, you can actually find
me on Linkerson Boulevard from time to time. Now, even
the boulevards of Ventura or Magnolia, you never know, because
I'm in the San Fernando Valley, the Shogun Window gun.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yes in d Yeah, stay out here. You're just all
just walking making turning the value into a lot of city.
Do a lot of walking, nice, a lot of walking.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
They call me Chris.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Well, mister Walkin.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
We are thrilled to be joined in air third Seat
Wow by the executive director of Civil Rights Corps, which
is a nonprofit dedicated to fighting systemic injustice.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
He's been a civil rights lawyer, a public defender. He
was named twenty sixteenth Trial Lawyer of the Year by
Public Justice. The author of several books, The incredibly compelling
Usual Cruelty and The brand New Copaganda, which we got
to read an advanced copy of, is dropping April fifteenth,
so good go pre order right now. We'll be talking
(03:10):
about it. Most importantly a great follow on social media,
of course, please welcome the brilliant and talented Alan Carcasone.
Speaker 6 (03:20):
Thank you all for having me back.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Oh man, always open door. I got excited when I
read the word zeitgeist at the end.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Of your book.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I was like, oh, yeah, shout out to the show. Yeah, yeah,
great word.
Speaker 6 (03:31):
I was thinking of you guys.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Yeah, of course, totally.
Speaker 6 (03:37):
Man, I've been well, I mean, at least as well
as can be. I'm excited to have this book out
there in the world, and I think the ideas are
so important now and at times rising authoritarianism and a
real assault on basic notions of kindness and truth and love.
And you know, so I was I was trying to
explore the last few years, you know, like what do
(03:59):
we make of the mainstream media and how they're leading
us to these really dark places, and I'm just glad
to be able to be able to talk about it
now in public.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I'd give them an a minus. I think I think
they're mostly nailing it. What do you guess thinks? Sorry,
I didn't read the book. But we like the mainstream media, right,
They're cool.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
I love the New York Times games. I mean, with
with many a guest, we like to get to know
them a little bit better and do a search history underrated, overrated,
But we got a lot to cover, so we want
to just kind of dive right in, if that's all
right with you, Alec, unless you had a search history
underrated or overrated that was particularly pressing that you wanted
to get off your chest.
Speaker 6 (04:37):
You know, I don't do anything other than think about topaganda.
So okay, I said, better just dive right in, you know,
all right, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I was actually it was funny.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yesterday I was hanging out with some people who are
from out of town, and like they hit me with
the is LA Safe because.
Speaker 7 (04:53):
Like, and I was like, you, okay, yeah, Kelly's great man,
what are you talking about?
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Like?
Speaker 7 (04:58):
Because I see a lot of like you know that
people running into stores and like grabbing stuff and things
like that, and I'm like, oh, my sweet, sweet child, Yeah,
this is These are like cherry picked videos that they
play over and over again to sort of create that narrative.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Like crime is actually going on, Like whoa really?
Speaker 6 (05:16):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (05:16):
You know.
Speaker 6 (05:17):
One of the things, the thing that I just think
about a lot, is the curation selectively of anecdote. You know,
you know, you could you could take a video montage
of every missed shot that Michael Jordan took in his career,
put them all together, and you make them look like
a bad shooter.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
He's the worst player in the history of the NBA.
You can't make a friend shot.
Speaker 6 (05:41):
That's essentially what the mainstream media does with crime. So
the most effective propaganda, this is such an important lesson
that I learned in my years of studying this. The
most effective propaganda is actually based on true anecdotes. Because
if you do something that's that's blatantly blatantly false, unless
it's something that people can't really figure out it is false,
you actually lose credibility. But if you use a bunch
(06:04):
of true anecdotes to suggest kind of false interpretations or
then you actually have much more sophisticated propaganda. It's a
lot harder to tell the difference. And so what we've
seen the last few years as the example like you gave,
you know, there was one video that went viral of
shoplifting from a Walgreens in San Francisco that itself spawned
(06:26):
three hundred and nine articles around the country, that one
little video. And at the same time, in that one
month period that these hundreds of articles are written about it,
and nightly newscasts all over the country, by the thousands,
there is virtually no stories about wage staff or tax
evasion things that are happening way way more and that
cost orders of magnitude more money for people. And that's
(06:49):
the selective creation an anecdote that gets us afraid of
of all of the wrong things.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
And if in case people are like yeah, but like
it's better like storytelling, or it's like more salient to
like see the violent thing happening. The wage theft is
stealing from you, right like those people are stealing from Walgreens,
a massive corporation. They're doing it like on a one
(07:15):
off basis, and it's being strapolated into like a massive
trend they're stealing from a corporation, and the wage theft
is happening to you and it's not getting reported on right,
and the Walgreens story is being you know that we've
got to protect Walgreens. And that is why I gave
them an a minus instead of a straight A, you know,
(07:35):
because they they do they have some lapses. Sure, yeah,
I just want to We're going to get into that
because I think you do a great job of like
kind of explaining how some of these things that if
you ask the average American if these institutions are right
(07:56):
or left, they are going to say left, like the mainstream,
like Ivy League, universities, the Democratic Party. You do a
great job of explaining like how they are some of
the main ways that this kind of catastrophic system that
we're all living inside of perpetuates itself. But you actually
(08:17):
close your book with some amazing talking points that I
just want to open with because I do think to
your point, they put people in the right mind frame
to have this conversation, if that's all right. So you
have one about how police spend and this specifically relates
to what has happened in the past four or five
(08:39):
years since the conversation about defunding the police and all
these stories that have come out, like they're the only
thing that we have and they're the only thing keeping
you safe. You point out that police spend about four
percent of their time on what they categorize as violent crime.
Such crimes account for only five percent of the rests
that police make. For many years, until recent legalization, in
(09:01):
dozens of states, the police made more arrests for marijuana
possession than for all violent crime combined with marijuana legal
and almost half the states marijuana possession arrests are still
about half of all arrests for all violent crime combined.
So just that idea, I think because of all the movies,
(09:26):
all the TV shows that we've been fed about police
for like in my entire lifetime, Like that's the main genre,
right is just like cops solving violent crime is like
a top genre of movies. It's just it's not there.
It's not there. It's just not supported by fact at all.
Speaker 6 (09:48):
It never has been. Yeah, there has never been a
time in US history when the significant bulk of police
activity has been geared at violent crime. You take a
look through the eras you know, the origin of the
modern police forces had to do with capturing enslaved people
who had run away and crushing union organizing in the
(10:13):
rest of the country. And that's how the modern police
force developed. And at that point they weren't even they
didn't feel a propaganda need to make themselves out as
agents of public safety. They were quite open about what
they were doing. And as the twentieth century evolved and
our sort of collective democratic values started to be articulated differently,
(10:35):
police developed more and more and more of a propaganda
need to justify their existence not as preserving distributions of
wealth and power and racial and economic hierarchy, but as
quote unquote public safety. And so then you see a
massive effort in the modern era, through huge investments from
the CIA, from the DoD, from the DEA, from local
(10:59):
and prosecutor of to the multi billion dollar police pr
industry today to shift the way we think through through video,
through TV, through movies, and then, as I argue in
the book, through a massive and mostly secret and kind
of unprecedented network of relationships with the liberal media. And
this is something in this book. As you mentioned, this
(11:21):
book is really about the role of liberal institutions and
the way that police and prosecutors and prisons and the
multi billion dollar industries that profit off of them have
co opted. Each of these institutions that is thought of
as liberal, from the kinds of research that are done
to the kinds of stories you see on your local news,
(11:41):
And none of it is about helping us understand the
things that are the greatest threats to our safety. And
instead it's about creating and sort of a narrative that
the things that we should fear are the things that
poor people, immigrants, people of color, strangers due to us,
and and those are actually not the greatest sources of
(12:04):
risk that all of us are exposed to on a
daily basis. For example, just to take one example of
something that's almost completely ignored by the police, sexual assault
or child sexual assault. Almost no police time, relatively speaking,
is devoted to this. Right, they don't have undercover squads
of officers going to frat houses and other places of
(12:25):
rampant sexual assault. That's what they do for drugs in
poor neighborhoods. You also don't have undercover cops going to
frat houses for drugs, right.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Yeah, fuse probably doing a lot of drugs, But.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Do the laziest undercover works that copy uniform like you
guys got some like.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Blow cane or something like yeah last week.
Speaker 6 (12:48):
For years, in many major US police departments they had
hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits, and instead the
police were spending tens of billions of dollars on drug enforcement.
This had nothing to do with keeping us safe or
making intentional, reasonable decisions about which crimes should be prioritize
(13:08):
and which crimes should not be. It had everything to
do with using the police force to control certain populations
and huge amounts of profit that could be made from
policing of drug cases, which I explain a little bit
more in the book, but I think that's a really
important thing to understand. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah, you have the quote from Nixon's assistant to Domestic
Affairs saying like literally just being like, yeah, this was
our plan. Make it illegal to be either against the
war or black or we can't make it illegal to
be against the war black. But by getting the public
to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin
and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,
(13:46):
like just straight up, we could arrest their leaders raid
their homes, break up their meetings. And this is like
when they came up with the war on drugs in
its like nineteen eighties, nineties and kind of modern incarnation,
and they just they straight had the plan and executed it.
Speaker 6 (14:02):
And I want you to understand, I mean, just take
Chicago for example, at the height of the civil rights movement.
I'm not even going to count the federal officers, so
this let's leave out the Feds. The Chicago police had
five hundred officers devoted to infiltrating and crushing the civil
rights movement. Five hundred full time cops. Right now, the
(14:23):
history of our current era has not been written. We
really have very limited window into what the current police
are doing with their intelligence divisions, right and the variety
of informans they're using. But take a look, for example,
at Chicago itself. After the police murder of Lakwan MacDonald,
which the police had a video of and hid for
(14:45):
a long time to get rama manual back elected. When
McDonald was killed by the Chicago police, they had four
full time dedicated public relations officials at CPD. Wow, in
the couple of years after it started becoming a scandal,
they jumped to thirty and then forty and now they've
over fifty full time pr people the Chicago Police Department.
(15:06):
This is this is affecting the information that you and
I see on the news.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Right, full full court press all the time. By the way,
Chicago was it was it a Chicago cop who grabbed
the back of your neck and told you he had
your DNA?
Speaker 8 (15:20):
Was it?
Speaker 7 (15:20):
Or no?
Speaker 2 (15:21):
It wasn't any blew my fucking mind.
Speaker 6 (15:24):
Yeah that was in Texas.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Jesus Christ, that was fucking mind blowing. Yeah, grabbed. It
was basically like, I now have your DNA, I know,
and here's the make a model of your car, and
just the most like sinister threatening shit for what I
have to assume you were holding up a room full
of people with a handgun.
Speaker 6 (15:45):
Close I was. I was suing the jurisdictions around the
country for legally jailing people. So that's just threatening to them.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (15:54):
But that's the thing you have to understand too, is
is a lot of people don't talk about this, but many, many,
many people around the country, progressive local and state officials.
I've had judges, prosecutors, mayors, state assembly officials all come
to me over the years and share vivid and well
documented stories of police threatening them and their families if
(16:17):
they took anti police stances. The organized right wing police
bureaucracy is extremely unaccountable and goes to enormous lengths to
threaten anybody like even me, just a visiting civil rights lawyer.
You know, the idea that they would follow me and
document the make and model of my car and take
(16:38):
the time to you know, threaten me in that way.
And I was, you know, I was also in another situation.
I was leading a spring break trip. I was actually
traveling with a New York Times reporter and a law
student intern from Harvard, and I was detained by a
group of armed sheriffs. You know, they've had their hands
on their guns, on their hips, and they locked me
in a room and they started demanding that I answer
(17:00):
questions to them. But what I was, and all I
was doing at that point, was was asking for publicly
available records at a courthouse. So this is the kind
of thing that happens a million times a year. You
never hear about it, but right deeply shapes how the
public officials you see taking pro police stands. A lot
of that is actually driven by fear, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
I mean I felt like that in La right where
in the summer of twenty twenty, like there was a
lot of pressure on the city council to be like,
are you going to address these budgets, and like these
motherfuckers pulled up like they were going to get like
all these cops pulled up to sort of protest that
they thought it would be detrimental for budgets to be
touched in any way. But it was so menacing that
(17:43):
you knew that it was. It wasn't merely to be like,
we're concerned about our wages. They're like, you know, fuck
around with us and see what you know, you can
learn how sort of off the rails we can get.
And I remember just sort of like that image really
sort of I think always inherently you have a belief
that like these who are not here to protect us
at all, But then you could really just see how
organized they were in protecting this right to just execute
(18:06):
violence on people for whatever reason and.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Get paid for it.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
That was very, very very scary, but also part of
like I think what is important about this book is
for us to have a bit of an evolution on
how we're even looking at it because to Jack's point,
we're all raised to be like, yeah, they're the good guys,
and they like to break dance sometimes at the local
basketball court, and they're fun people. But then they also
keep us safe and these other things, while meanwhile we
(18:31):
are hearing directly from their mouths, like in the case
of like people in Nixon's cabinet, we're like, no, no, no,
like we need we need these people to sort of
create the air that people that are sort of opposed
to what we're doing as a government or municipality that
this is illegal, and we use the activity of the
police to sort of connect the dots for people as
a shorthand to be like, yes, hippie's bad, Yes, yes,
(18:53):
this makes sense now.
Speaker 6 (18:54):
And another thing you have that I talk about in
the book that you have to understand is that what
we're told now is called, in our current sort of
propaganda discourse, community policing. And you know this this idea
that you were just mentioning a cops breakdancing, and you
know they were during the twenty twenty uprisings, there were
some cops that were doing the macarena with protesters, and
(19:18):
every local news station runs a story every now and
then about like a midnight basketball league that the cops
are running, or like a Thanksgiving turkey giveaway for four families.
But you have to understand about all that is it's
all extremely intentional and it derives from counterinsurgency theory that
was developed by the French military in Vietnam and the
(19:41):
British military in the Middle East, and it was used
to great effect by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And this there's huge police training industry and the industry
of police consultants that got to work on converting what
they used to call counterinsurgency. And they knew they need
(20:02):
they couldn't call it counterinsurgency in the US. So actually
Harvard made a mistake a few years ago and they
had an ex military person teaching a class on counterinsurgency.
A bunch of Harvard students were going to go into
a black neighborhood in Massachusetts and help the police do counterinsurgency,
and they just forgot like that you're supposed to call
it community policing in the US the goal of and
(20:25):
so the Harvard had to cancel the class. So they
have just called it something different. They could have gone
forward and even been celebrated for it, you know, But
a lot of liberals over the last twenty or thirty years,
and this is something that I try to delve into
great detail into the book with lots of sources and
recommendations for further reading for people. But liberals really to
advance this idea that we can repackage authoritarian and repressive
(20:50):
stuff that our military and other militaries were doing around
the world to native populations. We can try the same
strategies in the US but call them reform. And this
is a central feature of the way the news media
has covered policing over the last twenty or thirty years,
and it's been a central strategic focus of the police
to co opt certain marginalized leaders in different communities to
(21:13):
get them to support these policies which actually result in
more people being surveilled, more people being arrested, higher rates
of incarceration, more profits for the policing industry. They're not
a reform in any sense of the word, but they
have come to have and have a whole thing in
the book, and they've written a separate article which is
also going to be a book on police body cameras,
(21:34):
because LA plays a really prominent role in this. You know,
for years, police body cameras were this thing that the
policing industry wanted so badly, but they couldn't get the
money for it. They wanted it so badly that the
LAPD got people like Steven Spielberg to donate body camera
technology to the cops.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
And I mean, who better. The guy works with cameras,
you know, James, he's an issue, yeah, but minority report.
Really he's bringing us into the future of police.
Speaker 6 (22:06):
And but for years the police dreamed about this because
you know, companies like Amazon and Microsoft and and Taser,
which then rebranded as Axon after its tasers started killing people.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Much evil sounding Axon exactly fun.
Speaker 6 (22:21):
These companies used to talk privately and even you know,
to shareholders and at policing conferences and stuff about how
much money there This is a multi billion dollar potential
industry if they could get the government contracts. But they
couldn't get a lot of these most big city local
governments in the US are run by liberals, they're run
by democrats, and they couldn't get the fun thing for this.
(22:41):
So actually what they did was they used Michael Brown's
killing in twenty fourteen, where there was no video of it,
and and they used that in Obama, you know, requested
several hundred million dollars for body cameras, and it became
a mantra of the Democratic Party all over the country.
And and uh, Meanwhile, the policing folks were beside themselves
with joy because they wanted to connect. They wanted billions
(23:05):
of dollars to give every cop in the US a
mobile surveillance camera. They could connect to artificial intelligence, facial recognition,
voice recognition, They could go to a protest and scan
the crowd with their chest camera and have everyone's identity.
They also wanted and they knew that this evidence was
only going to be used against very poor people. This
is how they were going to get video evidence that
(23:25):
the cops controlled to arrest unhoused people, you know, to
do drug busts and things like that. They knew it
was never going to be used or at least very
very rarely ever used against police. And so we have
this situation now where there's reams of evidence. Even the
federal government admits that body cameras do not have any
positive effect on reducing police violence or making them more accountable,
(23:48):
more transparent, but they do dramatically increase the extent which
police can prosecute and get people to play guilty more
quickly because they have these videos that they that they control.
So anyway, that's a good example of something that in
the public imagination, and if you look at and I
read every single article that I could find, hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of articles about body cameras in the media,
they were all portrayed as an initiative for accountability and transparency,
(24:14):
when in fact they were developed exactly the opposite. They
were built exactly to give police more power and less
accountability by giving police control over what is filmed from
what angle and when that film is edited and how
it's edited and when they can release it in public.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Right, I'm curious, just like along with that to create
that narrative, like, were they also doing like performative resistance
to make it feel like it was like a measure
of accountability.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Were they giving us body cameras?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Yeah, you know what I mean, like just to kind
of help that, because I feel like the flow of
an article like that is like liberal politicians like we
need the need for it and then there'd be like
the police version where they're like, I don't think it's
quite necessary to sort of create that tension, or was
this just sort of like they were like, no.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
No, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (24:57):
I think there are a couple of interesting and complicated
the internal dynamics going on with the policing bureaucracy. First
of all, yes, some of it was performative, and you
can I don't know if you've ever watched body cameras,
but I've seen, you know, hundreds and hundreds of body
care of viadas, especially when as a public defender. But
the police are trained, so the cameras looking outward from
(25:18):
their chests, so the camera is actually not showing what
the police officer themselves is doing. And so if you
notice in a lot of these videos the cops are
just screaming, stop resisting, stop resisting, stop resisting, right, That's
something they're trained to do, so that they're taught that
it makes it harder to convict them of anything or
hold them liable civilly because they're they're creating what they
(25:39):
call a contemporaneous record of resistance, which then justifies their
use of force, even though you can't actually see like
what's actually going on anyway. But the internal dynamics were
that some of the police frontline officers, who have the
least power in the policing bureaucracy, were worried about you
(25:59):
wearing cameras. They worried that it was going to enable
their bosses to spy on them and reduce their their
ability to engage in some of the activity day that
might be illegal, et cetera that they tend to want
to engage in. They weren't sure like what policies and
protocols they were going to be for when they were
being recorded, and who was going to control the video
(26:20):
and so. But at the same time, police leaders and
leaders in the surveillance industry really wanted them because they
thought this would enable them to even more completely control
the behavior of beat cops. And so initially there was
a much stronger appetite for body cameras among police leadership
and the companies that make them and that make the
software then there was among beat cops. But then once
(26:42):
it became clear that these that they had the right
protocols in place that was going to make sure that
the cops were you know, unless the cops really made
a mistake. They were never going to be recorded doing
something that they you know, that they didn't want to
be recorded doing. And also they could control and edit
the video. And also it was by and large going
to make it much much more easier to prosecute the
poor people, because keep in mind, like the body cameras
(27:06):
have no say over like which neighborhoods are we going into,
and which neighborhoods are we not? Where are we looking
for drugs? And where are we not looking for drugs?
These bigger questions that are really the core of like
the discriminatory nature of policing in our society. Body cameras
just ignore all that, Right, So cops became convinced that
actually body cameras were not going to be a threat
(27:28):
to business as usual, And there's now much more uniform
support among even the lowest level line cops for body
cameras than there was initially.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
All right, just real quick, I also wanted to do
the talking point that just I think at the broadest
level is helpful for people to learn that this is
not normal. Is that the US confines people to jail
cells at six times its own historical average five to
ten times as much as other comparable countries and imprisons
black people at six times the rate of South Africa
(27:59):
during apart time. So many people have probably heard that.
I think it's worth just stating up top, for anybody
who are abnormal and unfucked up, it is very abnormal.
Speaker 6 (28:10):
And that's why you use so much propaganda, right, right,
I mean exactly, Like, You've got a bureaucracy that is
larger than any bureaucracy in the modern history of the world.
Like no country, let alone any country that thinks of
itself as democracy, has ever tried to spend this much
money jailing its own people. And in the face of that,
you've got enormous bodies of scientific evidence that show that
(28:34):
imprisoning people actually does not make us safer, it actually
makes us less safe. And you've got even more robust
bodies of empirical research that show the things that make
us safer and reduced crime are things like housing, healthcare,
you know, early childhood education. Like it's obvious, right, And
so you need a giant propaganda apparatus to get people
(28:55):
so afraid of strangers and poor people and immigrants that
they inspired of what all the evidence shows. They constantly
think that they're in fear and danger that the only
solution for them is increasing the amount of money that
our society spends on police.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Right, let's take a quick break and then we'll come
back and we'll focus on some of these allegedly liberal
institutions that are doing a lot of the a lot
of the legwork and what we're talking about.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
We're back. And there's this one moment, as Trump was
like taking office and dropping a bunch of like fascist
executive orders and just attacking trans people, the Wall Street
Journal had another op ed on the front page of
their paper that was all about how Colleges two woke,
and I was just I was kind of amazed at that,
(29:55):
but it it really just was kind of an illustration
of how relentless they have been and continue to be
in painting these institutions. We're going to talk about Harvard
and Columbia, The New York Times and like other mainstream
media outlets, the democratic part, like these institutions that I
(30:18):
guess benefit from being like, yeah, we are actually very
liberal and just basically they are there to perpetuate the
existing power structures, and you know, wealth distribution, But yeah,
I wanted to start with Harvard. There's Harvard gets mentioned
a few times in the book. Specifically, you talk about
(30:40):
the study where two academics who claim to be coming
from the left and to be like really bummed out
by the conclusion that they arrive at are like, guys, sorry,
we're just calling balls and strikes here. We're just re
doing the math. And unfortunately, the only way for us
(31:01):
to move forward as a progressive society is to like
double the number the already record high number of cops
that we have on the street. We just need to
like become even more of a police state. But just
more generally, you write in the book, I learned over
time the most important qualification for teaching students. Oh no,
(31:21):
this was actually a tweet of yours. You wrote, over
time the most important qualification for teaching students at elite
schools willingness to use your mind, position and power to
preserve distributions of wealth and misery. But you just talk
about like kind of what was this surprising to you
at a certain point that these institutions like Harvard and
Columbia were just so in the bag for the existing
(31:44):
kind of power structure.
Speaker 6 (31:46):
I was pretty naive when I when I got to
you know, went to college at Yale, at the law
school at Harvard, and I was pretty naive when I
got to these places.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
You know.
Speaker 6 (31:56):
I was sort of thinking, Oh, these are institutions of learning,
and they're so prestigious, and like, people who come here
must be smarter, and they must be you know, really
rigorous thinkers. And that's really not what goes on at
these places at all. I don't want to speak a
too broad of brushstroke, because like you know, I've a
lot of incredible friends and relationships that I've made there.
(32:19):
There are a lot of scholars at these institutions, just
like at many other universities and colleges and non academic
institutions around the country. There are people doing amazing scholarship
and scholarship matters like research and matters. I'm not saying
that those things are not important. That's not the lesson
of the book. But one of the key functions of
(32:41):
a place like Harvard is to launder policies and ideas
that are designed to preserve existing distributions of wealth and
power in our society, launder them with a veneer of
academic backing and of rigorous thought and things like that.
You learn very quickly at a place like Harvard, what
(33:03):
does it take not only to succeed there as a student,
but what does it take to becomefessor? What does it
take to get tenure? And everybody who it's very political,
and everybody who's there understands that certain kinds of research
that benefits certain kinds of people in our society and
certain institutions is going to be a ticket to success,
(33:23):
and other kinds of research and views are not. And
and Harvard is a you know, has an endownment worth
tens of billions of dollars, is a huge industry, and
so a lot of the scholarship that is produced at
a place like Harvard is skewed by these other incentives.
In other words, it's not this kind of pure place
(33:43):
where like the best ideas are espoused and the people
who are the smartest and best researchers with the kindest
souls are the ones who succeeded it. You know, it's
not how it works. And I think the example that
I use in my book, I've a whole chapter devoted
to this. I think it's one of the funniest. And
I try to, by the way, throughout the book, I
try to talk about all these issues with humor and
(34:04):
get a little bit of joy, because to me, like
life is not worth living unless you can laugh a
little bit about these horrific things.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
And these are definitely teetering on the edge of laughter
or crying one or the other. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (34:19):
And if you can't laugh about two Harvard professors, you know,
sort of proposing the greatest expansion of policing in modern
world history by adding five hundred thousand police officers to
you as based on rudimentary errors that they made that
are somewhat comical, then you can't laugh about anything, right.
(34:39):
And these two guys are particularly funny to me because
they portray themselves not only as progressives but as socialists,
and they understand something really important, which is it's very
good for your future as a scholar at Harvard if
you can be seen as one of those you know,
it's almost like a false flag opera, right, It's like
(35:01):
you're parading around as a leftist, socialist progressive, but the
ideas you're promoting are right wing and serving the interests
of the people who financially back Harvard and their social circles,
et cetera. So it's very smart, actually if what you
were thinking was that you wanted to advance your career.
(35:21):
But anyway, these guys propose, and I think one especially
comical thing about it is that in journal that they
published this call for five hundred thousand more police. And
by the way, the call for more police is, as
I talk about in the book, it's absurd they made
this proposal without counting the social costs of more police.
(35:41):
You can't you know, say I want it. It'd be
like installing a new heater in your house and not
only getting the measurements wrong for the heater, but you
neglected to include that this heater spews carbon monoxide into
your house, you know, And.
Speaker 9 (35:57):
So you're saying this heater, yeah, They're like, well, you know,
we're installing this heater in this house and it's going
to increase you know, the heat by a degree over
other heaters, you know, And not only did they get
that measurement wrong, but they also just neglected to tell
you it's also going to kill your whole family.
Speaker 6 (36:13):
Right, So you can't promote, you don't make a social
policy proposal without even asking the question of, like, what
are some of the costs and downsides to the proposal?
Right and anyway? But I think like the funniest part
about it to me is that the journal they published
this in was created in the wake of the twenty
twenty George Floyd uprisings by Harvard as a way of
(36:37):
pacifying student unrest. They're like, we're going to create this
Journal of Law and Inequality, and it's going to be
this new thing that people publish to like confront these
issues of our day. And then and then just a
short time later, that Journal of Law and in Equality
or whatever they call it is already publishing bold Please
by Harvard professors to add five hundred thousand cops.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yes, I remember when it came out and we were like,
oh my god, the mainstream media is going to eat
this shit. Yes, and sure enough they did. There's also
just a little detail in that because you kind of
you know, came at this study and pointed out all
the ways that it was ridiculous and speaking of these
(37:20):
two Harvard professors as comical figures, just the fact that
they were using their students to try to construct arguments
against your critiques of their book. Was pretty pretty wild.
Speaker 4 (37:32):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Oh wait, so they were asking the students to basically
like defend this against evil alec.
Speaker 6 (37:39):
Well, no, I mean I think I don't know that
they were. I don't think that they were, you know,
specifically talking about me. But they were instead of like
testing students on like the basics of first year criminal law,
you know, one of the professors during the exam was
apparently asking and the students you know sent me these
exam questions. They sent in the screenshots of them to me,
(37:59):
and and he was asking for their help developing counter
arguments to his proposal more police.
Speaker 9 (38:06):
You know.
Speaker 6 (38:06):
It's weren't meet you the wrong way about it, But
I thought was really funny about it. Was like he
was he was asking students for help with this research project,
you know, just.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Like crowdsourcing, like the fleshing out of research project.
Speaker 6 (38:21):
Yeah, And it turned out like the students you know
told me that like we had like raised a number
of the objections that you've lad helpfully with them privately before.
They So it's not like these people just like had
like a huge brain fart and forgot about, you know,
a lot of the critiques and they just like didn't
care to respond or even rigorously addressed in the first
(38:44):
place these things. And that's why I think the copaganda
book that is full of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Right.
Speaker 6 (38:49):
What I try to do is take some of the
most outrageous, funniest examples of kind of mainstream liberal institutions,
whether it's it's professors or news organizations, journalists or whatever
nonprofits sometimes and illustrate stuff that is actually really important
that we might miss if we just look at the news.
(39:09):
Because it's not just these Harvard professors are publishing this stuff.
It's how does that stuff then get translated into the
mainstream news that you consume right as conventional wisdom, right,
And that's that's the process that I really try to
examine in the book with some humor, because you know,
this is it's you know, there's a lot of upsetting
(39:31):
stuff in here about about how we're being lied to
and misled and how many of the institutions that we're
told to trust are actually really untrustworthy and we need
to develop better mechanisms of critical thinking. And that's another
reason why you know this book. We've raised money so
that any teacher who wants to teach any part of
this book in school, any person in prison. We have
(39:53):
free copies of the book available with the people, like,
obviously I hope that you support the book and and
all the I don't make any money off the book, right,
any copy that sold, all the worlties go to the
Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which organizes on house people in
skid row in Los Angeles. But even if if you
can't afford the book, you know, we can get free
copies to people because we just want people to have
(40:15):
a more critical understanding of the news that they're being shown.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, which is like interesting that the way you ring
up Harvard, it immediately relates to the newsroom, right, like
the way professors and academics can ascend. It's not that
there's like marching orders, but you can pretty clearly into it.
You're like, Okay, if I talk about this in this way,
this is how I get my things pop in, which
I feel like is another criticism we have of a
lot of journalism too, where clearly other journalists know, Okay,
(40:39):
if I write from this perspective or stories with this
sort of bend to it, that's how I'm able to ascend,
and that's how it further just sort of reinforces this
kind of thing, and I think, you know, the New
York Times is probably a great example of this kind
of thinking.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, that was really You have a great quote from
David Graeber, who we talk about a lot on this
show about like the Superman and Batman where they're both
essential essentially like instituting fascist policies with their superpowers, because
that's all we can imagine. And like that kind of
tied back to how I think about the mainstream media
(41:13):
point that Miles was talking about, where it's like they're
playing to the audience, like the audience wants to see
I think there's like a part, at least a part
of the audience that kind of wants to see this
fucking fascism like that. That's why Batman does that, That's
why Superman does that, and so they know they're going
to get readers, and it's just this like cowardly thing
(41:34):
that's you know, pleasing their corporate overlords. But I think
it's also like pleasing some dark, horrible part of the
audience too that is like, yeah, I want to believe
that this is the police, good guy, right, and.
Speaker 8 (41:49):
This is it It's an easy solve, Yeah, yeah, I
think there's there's definitely part of that, but I don't know,
because I mean, I think it's easy to envision you
could have really compell local news story.
Speaker 6 (42:01):
Like, for example, if instead of of installing a reporter
to read all the police press releases and regurgitate them
for the news every day, what if you had a
reporter whose job was to report on like landlord tenant
court and every day you had like a bad landlord
of the day article or a bad employer of the
day absolute Like I think people would watch and be
(42:21):
interested in finding out what landlords are doing to their
tenants across la or across Chicago or across in the country.
I think if you if you installed somebody at all
of the sites that are that are figuring out who's
polluting our drinking water, who is emitting dangerous gases that
are hurting our children. And you know, by the way,
air pollution kills one hundred thousand people in the US
(42:42):
every year. Okay, that's four to five times all homicides
can buy. There are people every single day in all
these cities who are actually just emitting stuff that's killing
our children and people. Yeah, and I think I think
people would I mean, I hear what you're saying. I
definitely think there's part of like they feel like they're
(43:04):
they're playing down you know, it's like reality TV or
Law and Order. Like they definitely think they're what they think,
they know what their audience wants. But I believe audiences
would tolerate different types of villains and different types of
stories about who is causing us harm that were more
consistent with reality. And that's another thing I talk about
in the book.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, yeah, I mean you have so there's so many
wild an like what while the Wallgreens shoplifting panic was happening,
they had to settle a massive lawsuit about like wage theft.
But get that gets you You make a good point
about how anytime there are multiple, you know, cases of
shoplifting or just like viral videos of shoplifting, that becomes
(43:48):
a wave or a trend or you know, out of control.
But these things, the you know, the Walgreens wage theft
settlement is treated as a one off thing. And then
when you talked to editors, they were like, well, we
reported on a different company doing that last month, so
(44:08):
we can't like that that story's been done essentially, which
is so so wild and doesn't really doesn't really make
any sense unless you're taking into account. Yeah, but we
can't like make them mad because they are the big
corporate overlord.
Speaker 6 (44:27):
Yeah, I mean, I think you have to understand also
how the news media works. And there's lots of scholarship
written about how the media functions. But they it organizes
things into news themes, and it categorizes things so that
people can understand them. And so I give this great
example from the late seventies early eighties of this person
(44:47):
who supporter, who was embedded in a newsroom, and he
watched the creation of a supposed crime wave by youth
of color against old people. And there was this panic
that emerged that all these young people of color were
robbing and stealing from and mugging and hurting old people,
(45:08):
and every time that happened during this period, it was
seen as further evidence of this trend. But when you
take a step back and look several years later, you
actually see that the only thing that had been created
was this news categorization and this news trend. Actually incidents
of young people stealing and mugging and robbing old people
were actually down during that period, and this is it's
(45:31):
very hard for people to understand. But sometimes the news,
you know, for example, after the East Palestine trained derailment
in Ohio a couple of years ago, there were there's
more of an interest in the news media in covering
trained derailments. Those are things that are happening all the time,
right like, but now that you're focused on it and
it's a theme of your news, it's going to play
(45:53):
into this idea and the same thing is happening. There
was a massive society wide panic about shop and retail theft,
even though retail theft we now know is down, and
so how we categorize things, it's just so so important.
It's like the Michael Jordan example I gave earlier. If
you're looking for it, and if you just only document
(46:14):
the missed shots, you're going to not capture the full story.
And that's what makes the media they have such an
awesome responsibility because they have a choice. Every single day,
out of the millions and millions of things that have
happened in the world, they're going to tell us about
ten or fifteen of them, or twenty of them. And
also they're going to suggest in their coverage, how should
(46:35):
we think about this. In other words, is that wildfire
connected to climate change? Or is it some isolated event?
Is that airline crash connected to DEI programs at you know,
like Trump said, right, you know yeah? Or like So
this is an awesome responsibility because just by juxtaposing two
(47:01):
stories together or two ideas together, Like I give an
example in the book where they claim that a certain
kind of crime went down in a certain city, and
they say just they just note that also the police
had been holding a charity basketball tournament. So it's like
they're suggesting that, like, and what they didn't report is
that that particular kind of crime had gone down nationwide,
(47:21):
not just in the place where there's a police youth
basketball tournament. So these are all these category categories and
these causes. They're highly manipulable. And if you take nothing
else away from the book, I want you to take
away the idea that there are a lot of very
(47:42):
smart people being paid billions of dollars a year to
shape how you think about what is newsworthy, what's happening
in the world, what the causes are, and therefore what
should we spend money on as the solutions.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
Let's take one more quick break, and then I just
want to talk to you about like where we go
from from here, because obviously things are shifting. Some of
this fascism that has been ignored for a long time
is getting louder, and so I just want to kind
of hear your thoughts on that.
Speaker 4 (48:12):
We'll be right.
Speaker 10 (48:13):
Back and we're back, We're back, and yeah, I mean
we have been living with as your book does a
really good job of illustrating extraordinary you know, fascism and
(48:36):
authoritarianism and injustice for years and much of the.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Mainstream media and much of these you know, supposedly liberal
institutions have been just ignoring it. And now it feels
like it's becoming louder and harder to ignore. Like that,
you know, the truth comes quietly at first, and then
it speaks louder, and then it's you know, then it's
a shrieking tent alarm fire, and there are it seems
(49:06):
like we're entering in some ways kind of a world
that's recognizable if like net now that you know you've
illustrated all these things, what once people have read your book,
you'll be like, oh, a lot of this stuff has
been happening for a while. But it also feels like
with the arrest of Michael Khalil and you you wrote
(49:30):
on Twitter that you've never seen a more clear cut
First Amendment violation. It just it does feel like things
are escalating. And so I'm just kind of curious how
you are thinking about the position. Has it changed, how
you're thinking about the situation Americans find themselves out?
Speaker 6 (49:47):
Yeah, And look, I'm just one person, So who knows.
I mean, I think we're all all people of goodwill
are struggling right now, think about what can I do?
What's the one do when society is teetering on the
brink of such an abyss, and how do we how
do we come together with other people who care? And
(50:07):
I don't purport to have all the answers, And I
think different people are in a different position to do
different things, and we all have to do whatever we can.
I think there's I mean, I offer some tips in
the last chapter of the book about you know, one
of the first steps is like fortifying your own mind
against you know, relentless propaganda, and like what are some
(50:29):
things to read and what are some daily practices to
employ in your life. Also, it's very important who you
surround yourself with and what kinds of like sort of
critical thinking communities you put yourself in. And then also
like I think what's so so so important in this
moment is the fascists when when people are so afraid,
(50:51):
but also I'm so hopeless and feel like everything is futile,
and and I think it's a great time for able
to get involved wherever they are in their own communities,
whether that's geographically like getting involved in your local library
or your local school board, or mutual aid groups that
help people in your community, or at work or at school,
(51:13):
like organizing and getting together with people other people really
any to It could be the smallest little things that
you're fighting for together, but when you organize other people
and you fight for things like something that is really true,
something that is in some small way trying to counter
the meanness that pervades so much of our society. And
by the way, I do a lot of work all
(51:34):
over the country, in rural areas, all over the country,
in big cities, Democrat Republic and whatever, like it's very
different from what the world is that we see on
like Twitter or social media or like people want to
be connecting to each other relating to each other in community,
and like it's easy to forget when you see how
(51:56):
isolated one feels by just spending a lot of time
on social media. Maybe and maybe that's just me, but
you have to just remember that, like a we are
such a social species and there's so much we can
do for each other if we just adopt the spirit
of kindness instead of a spirit of meanness. And I
keep coming back to that it's important now more than ever.
(52:18):
And then we all just have to fight. I say
this in the book, and this is one of the themes,
but I think a lot about Orwell's nineteen eighty four,
And one of the themes of George Orwell's book is
that the sort of authoritarian government is constantly trying to
get people to say, to think tuplus two ekals five,
(52:38):
tupless two eqals five, touplus two goos five. And in
whatever way is true to us, we need to be
able to every day remind ourselves toopus two egos four,
remind the people that we're close to. And that just
means the way that I see that, like in our
civil rights work, even if the courts are getting more
and more hostile to the kinds of cases that we do,
(52:59):
even if people are being jailed illegally in violation of
the Constitution, and just the act of us fighting them
is our way of saying too plus two of four,
two plus two equals four. Just standing up to that
and never becoming you know, like, that's why I think
is so harmful about what Columbia has done, what Chuck
Schumer is doing, what a lot of these universities do.
(53:20):
They are giving in, they are appeasing, they are refusing
to say touplus two equals four. And once you do
that as a society, all is lost. And so we
have to just in our own little ways find our
strength and courage to keep saying touplos tuoical four.
Speaker 4 (53:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (53:37):
I thought that was really an amazing part at that
last part of the book, because I think so many
people right now are just in like this fight or
flight response to everything and just looking for like a
silver bullet answer.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
Like what do we do now?
Speaker 1 (53:51):
And you know, myself included all, and I think I
really loved how again you're talking about what's also important
is that we fortify our minds to sort of hell
this kind of messaging and internalizing these sort of like
lies and making those our reality. But also like again
it's like really basic things like you're talking about like
fostering your sense of community, like deepening those relationships with
people around you, and then even like just engaging with art. Also,
(54:16):
I thought was, like, that's really brilliant too to just
think about again, because you're talking about how different messages
are going to hit our brains differently when they're expressed
artistically and things like that. So I just thought, yeah,
like there's sort of like holistic view of it is
really helpful, and I think helps also like when you
say the whole thing of like we got to remind
ourselves two plus two is four, that that gives us
(54:37):
a better view of sort of like the long term
nature of like this endeavor that's in front of us.
It's not like, Okay, everybody do these three things and
it's over. It's like, no, there are many things that
we're going to be doing. But the biggest thing too,
is like you're saying, maintaining that sense of humanity and hope.
So I hope we're all able to do that. And
I feel like that's the biggest thing that we want
to be able to do right now.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Yeah, Well, thank you Alex so much for coming on again,
and congratulations on the book. It's really awesome. Where can
people find you? Follow you and where can they find
the book?
Speaker 6 (55:08):
Yeah, so thank you guys both for having me on.
And I hope, I hope this book sells more copies
than my last book, which I think was maybe just
my grandma and my parents maybe about it.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
But it has to do well. This is going to do.
This is where we're going to get it out there.
It's going to get the TDZ bump baby, oh yeah,
the famous bump.
Speaker 6 (55:25):
Yeah. Well, so people can can google or search whatever
you use to find copaganda and my book. You can
buy it wherever books are sold. I've been encouraging people
to buy it from this really great black owned bookstore
in Flint, Michigan that I've been working with called Comma
c MMA. You can just pre order it there and
(55:45):
they'll send it to you. And no matter where you live.
But also if you have a favorite local bookstore, the
easiest thing to do is just go into your local
bookstore and order it from there or ask them to
carry it. Because go to your local library ask them
to carry it. That's actually how we get these books
out there is people just going in and talking about it.
And if you have friends or family who who are
(56:05):
liberals or progressives, who you know, because this book is
really written for well meaning liberal progressive people you know
to to or or you know, I don't I hate
these terms, but like a political people are moderate people
who you know, I'm not really writing this book for
the far right right. If you know people like that
(56:27):
in your life, just encourage them to look up the book.
They can also find me on all the social media
platforms at Quality ALEC, and you can look at our
work at Civil Rights Core as well to see some
of our civil rights work that really led me to
explore the ideas that are in the book.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
One of the best books I've read in a long time,
and one of the best follows anywhere on social media.
So let's go do it, everybody, ALEC. Is there a
work of social media or media or anything you've been enjoying.
Speaker 6 (56:53):
I've been actually reading a book called Ministry for the Future. Yeah,
by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Speaker 2 (57:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (57:00):
We that would encourage people to check that out.
Speaker 2 (57:02):
We did a whole episode on the Ministry for the Future.
It's so good, awesome, great recommendation. Miles, where can people
find you as their working media you've been enjoying?
Speaker 1 (57:11):
Yeah, just everywhere they got at Symbols at Miles of
Gray check Jack and I talking basketball on Miles and
Jack on mac Boosties and then I'm talking about ninety
day Fiance. That's my solf where I really just can
disconnect from talking about news on for twenty day Fiance.
Speaker 2 (57:27):
A work of media.
Speaker 1 (57:28):
Yes, at Juniper dot beer on b Sky. But the
eye is actually a one I believe all right now,
maybe a nuppercase l but Juniper. This is kind of
just funny because it aligns with sort of what we're
talking about. It says, whenever I see people posting their
own acab includes blank posts, I get PTSD flashbacks to
four years ago when I posted a police car themed
children shopping cart, and a segment of Twitter genuinely got
(57:51):
enraged at me.
Speaker 2 (57:54):
Hey it does include that shopping cart. Yeah, you can
find me on Twitter at underscore, Brian on Blue Sky,
at jack ob The number one tweet I've been enjoying
is from at PPy Onna tweeted hate one anxiety gives
me stomach problems, Like baby you are supposed to be
a mental disorder. Please stay in your lane and I relate.
(58:18):
You can find us on Twitter at daily Zegeist and
on Blue Sky at daily Zekes at the Daily Zekeist.
On Instagram, you can go to the description of this
episode wherever you're listening to it, and you can find
the footnotes, which is where we link off to the
information that we talked about in today's episode, and where
we link off to the book Copaganda, which you have
to go by. It is an assignment local. Yeah, also local,
(58:42):
stay local. We also link off to a song that
we think you might enjoy. Miles, is there a song
that you think people might enjoy? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (58:50):
Every like I feel like every sixteen months the Internet
finds out Chumbo Wambas, like this anarchist band and they
play this like sort of a cappella song the day
the Nazi died, and this clip kind of resurfaces again
at this like sixteen month pace, and I saw it
bubbling up again and I was.
Speaker 2 (59:07):
Like, oh, yeah, people need to hear this.
Speaker 1 (59:10):
So anyway, it's on their album, but the live version
where they performed in Dusseldorf, Germany is probably like the
vibeest performance of it all but Chumba Wamba.
Speaker 2 (59:20):
The day the Nazi died for Yeah, tell you never
has a anarchist group sounded more like a type of
bubble gump Yeah. The Daily Zeiche is a production of
My Heart Radio. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the Heart Radio, ap Apple Podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. That's gonna do it for
us this morning.
Speaker 4 (59:39):
We're back this
Speaker 2 (59:40):
Afternoon to tell you what is trending, and we'll talk
to you all then Bye.
The Daily Zeitgeist News
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Jack O'Brien
Miles Gray
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