Also media.
Oh boy, well, welcome back to Behind the Bastards of podcast, where we just took a five minute break between part three and part four of the Oprah Winfrey episodes. If you're all like me, you mainline some doom scrolling news from your phone about how bad things continue to be and also how the Equal Rights abeddment is ratified, but
also not great stuff. You know, folks, Whenever I start to think we live in the dumbest society that's ever lived, and like, how sad for us to live in such a stupid, stupid society, I have something that helps me get some historical perspective, which is I have a very big book right next to my bed that I read a little bit of every night called The Assyrians. And that really helps because there's literally ass in the name of that culture, like ass just right on the front
of the book. So you know what, we're not so silly, you know, you know, at least you're not an ass Syrium. Right, it's fine, it's fun, We're good.
You done whatever it takes.
Whatever it takes. I'm just trying to feel better. I feel like other people don't enjoy the word ass being on the front of a book as much as I do, because they are no longer. Four. How's our guest today, bridget Todd and Andrew t How are we doing?
Doing well?
I had a really good Climbentine in the break.
Clutch that's good.
I convinced Jamie loft Is to cover a topic I wanted to cover in sixteenth minute. During that five minute break, I'm efficient.
Oh wow, and Andrew, I tried to make your salad and it was really good.
It's really good salad. It's not my salad, but unfortunately it's TikTok. They plagiarized it either way, but it is TikTok's salad. I guess that's sure. It's someone's alan. I understand that.
But TikTok has the best recipes, honestly, all right, question maybe.
Yeah, you don't know.
Yeah, I pledge allegiance to communist China.
You know what? We all pledge allegiance to communists China. I spent three minutes on what is that? What's the new one? I forgot the name of this joke I spent the joke's not going to work anymore. Whatever, fuck it, it's done. It's done. Oprah, pill us go I couldn't be less interested and a TikTok alternative or TikTok. I don't need either of them. What I do need is to tell y'all more about Oprah Winfrey.
The TikTok of her day.
The TikTok actually kind of yes, kind of yes, although Oprah again, I mean, I guess big difference is like TikTok had like really launched a popularity with like tweens and teens, whereas Oprah is immediately and for her whole career very very much locked into like thirty to fifty year old middle class American women. Like that is, as not the whole because she's popular all over the world, but like she has a lock that's like unequaled by anyone else on that specific demographic, which is like a
very influence. It's everyone's mom's right, Like I'm not saying I hope like people say that to be like joking. Like my mom, who I disagreed with but respect a lot, watched Oprah every single fucking day, right like everyone's mom did.
Yeah, Like I could tell when Oprah covered something on her show if my mom sat me down after school.
To be like, are you having rainbow parties, like me talking about rainbow parties, bridget.
So.
As I pointed out earlier, Oprah at this point in her career was kind of and we're talking the start of the nineties now indistinguishable from Jerry Springer. And I'm not talking about that on a like specifically even on a moral level, just in terms of that is how cultural critics talked about her. Right this was trash TV. It's hard to get to again, hard to get to grips with if, like you know, you grew up with her in the nineties when she was kind of in
between a movie star and a god like Oprah. Oprah was like sainted in a lot of households. But right around the time Winfrey started her satanic panicking, Ralph Nader named her as one of many talk shows in the country that got quote all their ideas from the National Inquirer.
Now in her excellent critical book Age of Oprah, And if you're going to read one book on Oprah Winfrey, I recommend Age of Oprah by Janis Peckett's not a biography, it's like an analysis of the role Oprah has played in the evolution of American society over the last like thirty years. Janis writes about the critiques that the wash that Washington Post writer Tom Shales had of Winfrey's program,
labeling it talk rot. Quote Shales to crime talk shows as a daily parade of wackos, looney stars, celebrities, freaks, geeks, and gurus. Referring to the Oprah Winfrey Show, he noted on one of her few serious, outer directed shows, Winfrey dealt with declining literacy among the young and the escalating crisis in American education, and promo, she looked into the
camera and asked, how dumb are we? There's every possibility that talk rot is making us dumber, and that's him saying that, right that, like Oprah's saying we're dumb for not reading, but like her show is making us dumber, and like, yeah, it's part of that loop. It's also Oprah's going to later become one of the people who's a major champion of literacy, although not in ways that are unproblematic too. Anyway, I actually.
Got a little glimmer of hope from that, just like a reminder that I know and I'm not like a teacher. I had lunch with a friend who was a teacher yesterday and he was like, the kids are not able to read. Yeah, but I do think this might be counterfactual to like survey data, But I do kind of think every generation thinks the current kids can't are dumber than ever before.
There's two there's two sides to this, right. One of them is that every generation, as soon as they hit a certain age, starts thinking that these next kids coming up are uniquely fucked up and like everyone's ruined, right, and like the world's going to hell in a hand basket,
and they're always kind of wrong. At the same time, every single new generation is fucked up in a unique new way, and like the TikTok kids are fucked up on TikTok and iPads in a way that didn't exist before, just like my gener our generation was fucked up by message boards and online gaming and the like in ways that were unique, you know to kids that had come previously, just like our but our Gen X friends were fucked up on leaded gasoline, you know.
Yeah, But it's also like, you know, the kids are getting fucked up on particularly spicy epigrams from contulis. You know. It's just like I think it's always been like this.
It has always been like this. There are unique ways in which every generation is like fucked up. And also, I'll just say this, kids, if you are a very young person coming up right now and you're trying to figure out how do I make it in this world, one of the chief things you have on your side is that everyone older than you thinks you're an idiot. And the truth is that they're all as stupid as you are. So take advantage of that. Take there's power in being underestimated.
Kids, That's actually very wise advice.
Yeah, I'm full of wise advice once every month.
Yeah.
And one of the things that's problematic here is that Oprah does deserve a lot of criticism for like the satanic panic shit, the McMartin preschool trial shit. There's also a lot of these big hoity twity cultural critics are attacking her because they also view they rightly are like, well, this satanic panic stuff is like smut, But also this woman talking about how she needs therapy in order to have a healthy sex life is smut. And so you see, like it's this blending of like, well but no, but
that's actually a good thing that Oprah was doing. With like, no, this is in fact smut, but it's all smut to a lot of these guys. So that's part of the problem of like looking at a lot of the criticism of Oprah from this era is a lot of it is attacking her for stuff that we're like, well, but no, that was one of the good things that she did.
Wow, that's the trip of engaging in this kind of discourse, right, Like, when you actually have substantive stuff to say, of course people are going to paint everything with such a wide brush when you also do these like satanic panic antics, right, Like part of me is like, that's kind of on you for having this in your portfolio in the first place.
Right well, also, like the satanic panic stuff is not bad because it's smut. It's bad because it's lies, right.
Right, right, right, Yes, that's a very good note, Andrew, like both of you very good notes. Thank you. Uh, It's it's a mess because like you're looking for you always want just a really good if you're doing this job, I want a really good like, ah, this guy nailed what's problematic, and it's always like this guy nailed part of what was problematic and then said something really really mean towards women. Yeah, I love the Washington Post.
It's fine. It's only getting better. They're turning it around.
They're turning it around.
God.
So one example of things that Oprah got attacked for that she probably shouldn't have been that, like this was considered smut by a lot of critics. What's her coverage of the transgender community? And boy howdie, I am not saying that it was what we would call today good.
What I am saying is that even as early as when she was on people are talking, which was the pre Oprah Winfrey Oprah Winfrey Show, she would bring on transgender guests, and she's doing it because it's lascivious and it gets attention, but she's also it's not like smut. Like one her early guest that had an impact on her, she finds this transgender mother with brittle bone disease. So this is both somebody who was transgender, and if you
read stories about it, they use the term transsexual. They're not trying to be shitty. That was the term in common parlance at the time. I'm obviously updating it, but this is a person who both is trans, is a mother, and is a disabled American and the fact that Oprah's letting her talk about her life is giving a sympathetic and humanizing portrayal to someone who had zero visibility in
the culture at the time. As Kitty Kelly notes, the show was criticized when it aired, but afterward Oprah happened to see the child with the transgender quadriplegic. It was just a moving thing, she said, I thought this child will grow up with more love than most children before. I was one of those people who thought all homosexuals or anything like that were going to burn in hell
because the scriptures said it. And this is Oprah was very homophobic as a child and as a young adult, and she would list this experience as key to her overcoming the bigotry that she had been raised with. Right, And I think it makes totally As a child who had lacked so much love in her life, the thing that turns her around on this is being like, but this lady's a really good mom, right, Like, she clearly loves this kid. This kid's going to grow up with That's all that matters to me as a kid who
was neglected, right. I think that's just worth stating too. Before we get back into the criticism because that's kind of beautiful. And the fact that she gets attacked for this too is again it's part of the like, well, if your Oprah, and you're trying to triangulate what is okay for me to do and what is not. I'm getting attacked both for the stuff that is bad and also for the stuff that it's like, No, it's great that she did this, Like, I'm glad she did, you know.
In January of nineteen ninety four, a thirty nine year old Oprah Winfrey announced her on air plan to stop talking about quote how bad things are and instead try to bring more peace to her audience and thus the planet. She had like a long speech about trash TV. This is kind of her being like, I think the winds are changing. I don't think that the smut kind of TV where we're you know, we're talking about here's people talking about like the fights they're having with their ex.
We'll bring them on and they'll fight on stage. That was not going to be, you know, coming into the late nineties as popular as it had been. And Oprah's like, I want to rebrand myself. I want to have some prestige, right and The way she does that, the way she starts her pivot into I am a serious intellectual and spiritual advisor, is to bring on friend of the pod mary Anne Williamson.
Here she is, Here's there. There we go. Forgot about this? She absolutely did.
This is This is when Oprah becomes a spiritual influencer. Maryann Williamson is like a key part of that. Here's how Janis Peck describes Williamson at this stage in her career, and this is ninety four. Williamson is quote a former nightclub singer. Describe spiritual psychologists, occasional advisor to Hillary Clinton, spiritual guide for Hollywood stars, and major inspiration behind Winfrey's own cosmology. What a resume?
Oh God, also doesn't believe in AIDS.
Doesn't Yes, we're about to talk about that. Mariette is a complicated person to unpack from a harm standpoint, Much like Oprah. They have a lot in common. I'm not
surprised they're friends. When she launched her twenty twenty presidential campaign, queer focused news outlets like The Pink News rightfully pointed out that during the AIDS crisis, Williamson, who had a huge queer following, and had founded a Center for Living in Los Angeles, published a book in nineteen ninety two which argued quote, cancer and AIDS and other physical illnesses
are physical manifestations of a psychic scream. Williamson went on to make an argument that is could be argued as not so far from the Christian conservative line on AIDS. We're not punished for our sins, but by our sins. Sickness is not a sign of God's judgment on us, but of our judgment on ourselves. Sickness is an illusion and does not actually exist. And it's complicated because you can translate all of that as like, well, she's saying people with AIDS brought it on themselves, and she kind
of is. She's also not just focusing on gay people there. She thinks if you have lung cancer, whatever, if you've got fucking childhood leukemia, you brought it on yourself through your bad thinking. Right, So it is it is not targeted against gay people. But it's also really problematic in that concept because you're saying everyone who gets sick brought the sickness on themselves by virtue of their thoughts.
Yeah, all the positive vibe shit is so like just consider the converse of what you're saying for two seconds.
I think everyone who yeah.
This child deserved to die because his vibes were off and it's it's.
Not she's she would say no, I'm saying that, like if you like, part of healing this is fixed people's attitudes and improving the way they think and talk about themselves, and that will help their physical health. I just think everyone who believes this should have to lecture about this to like a child cancer ward. Yeah, like explained to kids, if your attitude was better, your bones wouldn't be rotting inside you.
You know.
Yeah, it's such a hateful ideology and worldview. But like the way people I know people who have said shit like this, and it's like the way they dress it up as like no, it's actually like a really profound like it's the law of attraction, like you want this to be happening to you in some way. The way they dress it up like it makes them more superior.
I don't know. Something about that aspect of it really gets me.
It's interesting because and I also think there's so much of it that's so locked inside their heads, Like it's even separate from how someone like Maryanne acts because I found an article by a friend of hers called David Kessler, and it was on her webs was he posted on Medium and she had shared it. But this is a guy who knew her. He had operated during the AIDS crisis. He operated a home hospice for AIDS patients, and he claimed quote I saw firsthand how she, Marianne cared for
the community. Marianne is not a person who's against medicine. She was the one that sat with dying men with AIDS when there was no cure, and when medications became available. I saw her driving men to the doctor with AIDS. I witnessed her paying for medication for men with AIDS. So this is not a person who is like hateful and callous. This is a person who is able to sit with sick people and then also holding her head. This completely unhinged that if you take it to its
logical conclusion, you're saying they brought it on themselves. And that kind of cognitive dissonance is amazing to me. I don't know how you can have that.
I mean, I think it is just like the like only able to concentrate on the positive or right. You perceive as a positive. It's just it is like, yeah, I mean, you just have to be stupid, is the main thing. Like oh, I don't understand the B side of what I'm saying, because.
It is the answer so much more often than like outright evil is like oh, well, you just your brain's not function. You've got like somebody somebody dropped like a wrench in there, and it's.
Just like.
Yeah, yeah, I'm like tempting.
It's like so tempting to weigh overthink it, and Andrew, I feel like that you just really sum it up. Some people just aren't smart. That's what's going on. Don't overthink it.
I think it. I talk about this with our other host, Margaret Kiljoy a lot about how like you can meet people like out in the middle of nowhere who like, if you look at their politics, is they support some political things that are ghoulish, whereas the same people they would vote to hurt, they would like sacrifice for in person because like people are incoherent and not not all that bright, right, Like it comes down to that a lot of the time.
No, like there's there there just is no like even second consideration or like like what does this what does what I say mean, Yeah, they're just doing their thing, and like, yeah.
This is Kurt Vonnegut was often of the opinion that like, if we were just all a little bit too dumb to keep society and like if we if we all had like twenty percent less like like like got a little bit more brain damage, things would be better because like we it's it's this mix of we're so smart and we're so stupid that causes all the problems. If we were just like dogs, everything would be fine.
That's where I come back down to, Well, the problem is just like it only takes one or two slightly smarter evil dogs, yeah, to really function up, which is where we're living now.
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Anyway, speaking of where we're living now, Mary Ann Williamson was the beginning of Oprah's pivot to alternative medicine and spirituality. As we noted millions. Williamson's particular thing was A Course in Miracles, which is
a series of books. She did not write these, but this is like this is her Bible at least at this period of time, and a Course in Miracles is the underpinning one of the underpinning so is We've talked about a few others roots of what becomes like the secret, right, this is a lot of where we get that from. And a course in miracles is like, it's this set of books that claims to integrate psychology and spirituality, which
is kind of what scientology also claimed to do. It's it's what all of the good spiritual conmen claimed to do.
Right.
The author of this bookman Helen Shukman, claimed that it had been fully dictated to her by Jesus Christ, and she just wrote it down, so like, look, what are my citations Jesus baby like.
An, that's such a good thing to claim the ball to be like, oh, like, are you gonna go I'm not wrong?
You're saying Jesus is wrong?
Jesus. How many times does she get sacrificed on gogtha huh? Em an anna nail she got through your hands? Huh huh. Anyway, don't go to the doctor. Speaking of which, don't go to the doctor. Listen to these ads.
I was just gonna say, does an does no? None of these people find it sacrilegious, how stupid Jesus is in these instances?
Yeah, yeah, that he's that Jesus is like saying, medicine doesn't really work. It's all about thinking your way through problems. No nobody ever catches that, well, everyone does except for these people. And it's also, you know, part of if you're because William said, I'm not trying to like exonerate her totally. One of the things I think that you do. If you're like Harry's, you're like, well, I believe this, but the fact that she's saying Jesus wrote this whole thing,
that's probably not gonna play on TV. I probably want to keep that quiet, Like, so I'm going to And what what Maryanne does is she's like, all right, well, I think this is base good, but maybe the raw stuff is a little bit too uncut for this audience. So she writes her own book about a course in miracles titled A Return to Love. That's basically her taking, like, all right, how do I make this a little bit
more palatable. It's the late nineties, right, we gotta gotta we gotta fix this a little bit before we get this out into the audience. You know, I will attempt an abbreviated explanation of a course in Miracles and as a result, and you know, in addition to that, Williamson's book it argues that our home is reality, and reality is the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of God is a perfect place. Where as the talking heads remind us, nothing ever happens. Thus, all problems aren't real. Bad things
don't happen. There's no real problems. The things that you perceive as problems are the result of you delusionally separating your ego from reality. Our suffering, then, is something we project into the world due to our hallucinatory belief that we have sent.
Yeah, all of our faces on the screen are like that when writer trying to do a trigonometry equation meme, what.
Are we good? Does that make sense to everybody?
Totally check that out?
Yeah, all right, that all scants. Yeah, So again this is like, yeah, you can see a lot of the spirit or the secret in this. You know you and the ultimate the result of this is you fix your life by fixing your attitude. Right. I found a good summary of the book and a website titled Circle of Atonement, which I think is probably related to some sort of weird culture and other I don't know, but I'm going to read an excerpt from that because I thought it
was funny. The Holy Spirit's message is that we never sinned, never changed ourselves. We need only change our minds. The guilt and pain produced by the ego was stored in an unconscious level of mind, which also contains our call for God's love and help. The Holy Spirit's answer to our guest is that we did not do it, that we are still as God created us because the separation never recurred. The journey home is an illusion. We need not purify ourselves or make sacrifices. Instead, we can wake
up at any time we choose. The Holy instant is a moment when this is realized applied, a moment of doing nothing. The miracle is a free deliverance from the imprisonment of the human condition. It is our right because we never sinned.
Yeah, I listen, I'm a person that has like an obnoxious way of speaking. But is it truly not possible for just some like this just requires some child to be like what the fuck are you talking about?
Yeah?
Right, like like little the fuck is this shit? Yeah? We need you know, I mean you.
Need a comment section, I guess is what you need.
The cop I think what we need is a little more folk envinement on Bill Burr lately. We need to make that a government position where whenever someone starts doing this, we have like a roughly a slightly thumb looking man who comes to be like, what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, like, come on, stop this ship.
He should be he should be from Boston.
He should be from Boston. Ideally who just like when someone says that, there should be like a yeah, vaguely Bostonian guy going nah.
The problem is he should be from Boston, but not like.
That, not like like that, but not like not.
Like from Boston. If you know what I'm saying.
We need an Avengers initiative of guys who have that remarkable mix of like physiognomy and accent that people will be like, oh, yeah, that does sound kind of silly, Like when he says it's silly, I actually, yeah, maybe that is kind of stupid.
Yeah, oh my god, it's not yeah, materially dumber than anything. Elon Musk tweets.
Oh absolutely not. But I think it leads us there. In part and what of yes, when you get a lot of shit, Because this is Janis Peck's book, This is a lot of When you get a lot of like more left wing critiques of OPRAH, one of the running themes is like the whole The overriding message of a lot of her show is problems have are all problems. There's like, societal problems are individual problems, and they have
deeply individualistic solutions. And instead of like fixing systems, the answer comes down more down to fixing yourself and your individual attitude. And that can be very problematic, verging on solipsistic. Right when we get into this era, it's like nothing is the problems aren't real, and if I can make myself okay with them, then I don't even need to think about the other people who are suffering because the
problems aren't real. You know, this is a very narcissistic and dangerous way to think about the world.
I can see how it functions as a pretty useful like political and social ideology. Y, yes.
It's great for capitalists them like, yeah, if this is your attitude, once you get a nice house, climate change is no longer a problem. The Pacific palisades are a paradise. Hmmm, some smells odd on the air. Let me look at the.
Way, you know, your mind palace is your paradise.
Right right. Yeah, and when you're living in a twenty four thousand dollars a night hotel, because again the palisades burned down, your mind palace is still there for you. You know, that's the beauty. Ellie doesn't have a homelessness problem. We just need more mind palace palaces.
You know.
This is also, by the way, more or less the pitch from the bad guys in the Matrix.
It kind of is.
Yes, also that like literally you are you are like the Matrix. But but no, this is actually how how religio, how philosophy works, and religion works.
Yes, yeah, it's just like.
These are all that guy in the first Matrix movie He's like, look, man, the steak tastes good. I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah, this is the This is like the parable of the Cave. People just really jones in for some more cave.
Yeah yeah, hey, talking about that is what I took out of the allegory of the cave. Is like, cave's pretty cool, cave like shadows I love. Can you know? The new season of Severance starts tonight, so I'm gonna be sitting and watching some cave shadows. Baby, I'm good, I'm ready give me some Adam Scott. So, thanks to Williamson's advocacy and Oprah's platform, of course, in Miracles went
from fringe, it was getting more popular. I will say this, it didn't entirely gain its popularity, but Oprah is a large part of the fact that it sells more than two million copies. And Oprah doesn't just plug that book and her friend mary Anne's book. She and mary Anne sit down and they lay out in this and again, the point of this episode is Oprah announcing her show is pivoting from being about bad things and sad stuff to being about you know, empowerment and beauty. Right quote
during the hour, this is Jenny's peck. During the hour, the two women identified various social problems crime, drug addiction, TV violence, war, child abuse, prejudice as the price we pay for ignoring our souls. Born of denial, this collective, neglective soul had produced a diseased and dysfunctional society. The antidote Williamson proposed was a shift in the paradigm on the planet to activate an amazing healing force, the spirit
of divine consciousness. Which is within our souls. Well. She prescribed various steps towards planetary healing, from praying to participating in support groups. All were predicated on replacing negative thoughts with positive ones, because our thoughts determine the experiences of our lives.
I will just point out that if you substitute the word urge tree in there a few times, this is basically just elden ring.
Yeah, yeah, Well, Williamson has a writing credit on that. It was her and George R. Martin really like banging it out, and we know that's a lie. That's a life story. That's almost credible.
You said it in a way I truly for a second was like, I don't know if he's making a joker not.
I would sit and listen to George R. R. Martin and Mary Anne Williamson invent religion.
Oh my god.
So Oprah's pivot to Guru had begun. Over the coming years and indeed decades, she would help introduce millions of Americans to New Age thinkers like Eckert Toll, whose books The Power of Now and a New Earth represent what Slate writer Kurt Anderson described as a successful crusade against reason itself. Here's one of Toll's most favorite quotes. Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example, there's nothing wrong with cells dividing
and multiplying in the body. But when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate, and we have disease. And Toll's argument here is that, like, overthinking is a societal epidemic, and a lot of our suffering as a species is because we don't coast enough on vibes go with the flow more often. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you
are has been derived from mind activity. And like, I think there's actually more than a little bit of move fast and break things downstream of Toll. I don't think there's zero percent of of of that there, but more than that. Oprah's embrace of this guy represents a major salient in the war against reason, which, if you hadn't checked recently, reason is losing. Yeah, yeah, and this is the reason we start talking. It's reasons may be lost. YEA reason is at least like Great Britain on the
first day of the Battle of Britain. You know France has has surrendered. I don't know what the French equivalent of reason is.
Uh.
And yeah, we're watching those Stukas rained down on fucking London.
It's not good.
But what are you gonna do? I don't know. Yeah, I actually have no idea.
Andrew, don't worry, don't think so much.
Don't think so much. Why am I thinking all this time? Let's talk about Deepak Chopra. He is another gift that Oprah gave the world, and his career was in some ways a mirror of doctor Oz and honestly a less toxic one. Chopra starts out as a well regarded into chronologist until he quits that to become a guru to the kind of people who embrace new spiritualities. Based on airport bestsellers, Chopra is the kind of guy who peddles stuff that seems well meaning and even harmless if you
don't look too deeply into what he's saying. The harm largely comes from the fact that accepting his principles means embracing lies about how the world works and denying basic science. As doctor Chris Concilvio writes, he preaches the body as made of a quantum energy, and there exists a dynamic consciousness where the mind, body, and spirit are interwoven and
interconnected by an energy force that transcends matter and physical reality. Now, because of this, Chopra often advises his followers that modern medicine is useless or feudile, are fundamentally flawed in ways that make it less reliable than in racing pseudoscience. Here's a quote I found from an article on Chopra that he wrote for his own website titled why doctors Can't make You Well? What the public and most doctors hasn't found out is that the cause of illness is becoming
more and more murky. It's not just germs and genes. The germ theory of disease held sway for over a century after the discovery of microbes and the arrival of antibiotics to combat them. Gene therapy, long promise is the answer to almost any disease, hasn't actually achieved much success, although in certain cases, such as cancers that are caused by a simple genetic mutation, targeted drug therapies have been successful.
The bigger picture is that genetics has led us into a much more complicated view of the disease process, so complicated that it is beyond the skill of doctors. Too many factors are at work when illness arises, and the disease model itself sometimes breaks down theories wrong. Idpac Chopra can explain it. Your brain's not thinking good enough now.
I mean, but you know, I guess I feel like someone should just say that's not true.
His last that's not how it is, Like antibiotics are great.
Uh, the model doesn't break down.
The model doesn't break down, bringing in gene therapy along, like it's one of those things where's like, okay, well, depending on what you mean by gene therapy. Sure, there's a lot of shit that, like people talked about in sci fi that hasn't happened, but that has nothing to do with germ theory, right, Like germ theory is a very robust model. Choper writes a line he did He doesn't generally outright say don't take your meds. But the conclusion you're led to from a lot of his writing
is don't take your meds. That whole article I just quoted from is how doctors don't understand what causes schizophrenia, and I think the conclusion that you're supposed to be led to is maybe don't take those antipsychotics. Again, Chopra doesn't say this legally. I am not accusing him of saying this. I'm just saying I think a lot of people reading that who are like, should I take my antipsychotics? Might take from that article maybe I won't.
But I also saying it.
He's not saying it right.
It's also just like, you know, not like just because like there isn't a full understanding of schizophrenia you can really trust that chemotherapity, vaccine, et cetera.
Like, yeah, well, and there's always that real thing, which is that like yeah, man, there's actually a shitload of problems to the modern medicine tape, like treats and talks about schizophrenia. Absolutely, you don't know anything about this, Yeah yeah, like you're not helping.
Yeah. His hitches that I'm not burdened with all this knowledge and history of the process so I have a clearer insight into how to fix things.
Yeah yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Really annoys me about this is how they're so good at taking that one kind of like true thread, which is like plenty of people feel unheard by the medical space, and like, you know, they they feel like their their symptoms or whatever their illnesses are not being properly treated. And so I can see how this is so tempting to be like, oh, well, what do they know about anything?
Why should I trust any of this? They're all hucksters.
Like it's so it's such a callous but tempting way of getting people walking people toward this very dangerous line of thinking.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, no, no, I think that absolutely does. I think you hit it on the head. So Dpak has over the years claimed that human aging can be reversed by pure force of thought. He is as health law and science professor Timothy Caulfield argues, a profit of alternative medicine and the Great de Educator. Choper's book sold millions and millions of copies after he was featured as a guest on Winfrey's show.
And I don't know that.
I'd say he has no career without her, that's too much. But he has less of one, right, Like he's a lot less of a guy without Oprah. Without Chopra, we probably don't get shit like the bleach drinking church, people taking ivermectin to cure their cancer, and a decent chunk of the anti VAXX movement, which we'll be talking about later because Oprah's got some real involvement there and a
friend of the pod Jenny McCarthy. Now, one of the most frustrating things about Oprah in this time period after her pivot away from trash TV is in the mid nineties, is that in the middle of all of this new age WU that she is putting out and clotting our national arteries with which leads to the fatal stroke we're going to spend the rest of our lives living in.
She is also like she's right about some important things, but even when she's right about them, the kind of the lack of rigor to the way she talks about stuff means that she winds up wrong about them. And to make that makes sense, I'm going to talk about Oprah's war with the beef industry because this is a key moment in oprah history. In April of nineteen ninety six, Oprah dedicated a segment of her show to mad cow disease and brought on an animal rights activist in Vegetarian
named Howard Lyman. The UK had just had a major mad cow outbreak and had to cold vast numbers of animals, and Lyman predicted that the same thing would soon befall the US beef supply. He talked about what happens when humans catch mad cow from tat to meat and the horrific deaths that follow. Oprah declared the conversation quote stopped
me cold from eating another burger. Now, this has a massive impact on the beef industry, right, and they're going to sue her over this because there's some evidence that like millions of dollars in beef sales are like the price of the value of beef drops significantly because of Oprah talking about mad cow this way and the broader thing, which is that like our meat, Like, there's a lot of a lot of the stuff that's gross and inhumane and climactically awful about our addiction to beef and the
way this industry functions, and it deserves criticism. The problem is that the specific criticism Oprah is publishing and focusing on his mad cow disease and the US beef industry
really doesn't deserve that. Right. Lyman's prediction that like, we're going to have a UK style mad cow outbreak in the US hasn't come to pass, and in fact, in the decades since he said this, the US has had six confirmed cases of mad cow disease, the first in two thousand and three and the most recent in twenty twenty three, and these were all isolated and caught fairly quickly.
Preventing the spread of mad cow with something in the US beef industry has proved very good at particularly considering the fact that the UK and France, which normally have much more effective regulatory states, have had much larger problems with this. Now, that doesn't mean again that we're immune from, for example, even other prion diseases. Right. The spread of preon diseases due to farmed meat is a massively important story in the US, one with some potentially apocalyptic undertones. Right.
For example, we have this massive problem in a lot of the like the Great Lakes region in the East Coast, with chronic wasting disease, which is basically mad cow for deer, which number one gets a number of hunters killed, but also deer spread these like poisoned prions around in the soil and they don't really die, and there's like a lot of very worrying problems due to this, and it all got started almost certainly because people were trying to
farm venison, and you know, these all of these diseases result when you've got like we've got a bunch of animals we're trying to farm at scale, and their feed has pieces of their own spinal cords in it, right of like of their fellow animals, right like that. That's the I'm simplifying a lot of stuff. But like what I'm saying is meat as an industry has a lot of horrible problems that have some potentially near apocalyptic outcomes
for our society. But the specific thing Oprah has is really going after in this episode isn't a big problem for the beef industry, and as a result, they're going to sue her. Right, So, Texas is one of a dozen states with what's called a veggie libel law, which is a law that makes a person liable if they
make liberalist statements about food safety. Representatives of the cattle industry complained to Texas Agricultural Commissioner Rick Perry, who a letter to the state attorney general complaining the economic livelihood of our beef producers is at stake.
Now.
The reality of the situation is that again Oprah has exaggerated the risk of mad cow disease in the US, but not in a way that a reasonable person would call libelis I've just pointed out that she was kind of wrong for this to be the focus when talking about bad aspects of the beef industry. But like when you're seeing mad cowgo crazy in the UK, being like, it's probably a problem, that's not libel, right, that's speculative in a way, that's inaccurate, but it's not really libel.
The beef magnates disagreed, and they can considered Oprah enemy number one and saw the overall case as a way to stop anyone from talking badly about health and safety practices within the beef industry. Oprah, for her part, and this is where I give her a lot of credit, refuses to budge or settle, and so she is like, I'm not going to settle this case. I'm not going to retract or apologize. Let's go to court, motherfuckers. And so this turns into a showdown in fucking Amarilla, Texas
or shit is it? Abilene, I wrote Amarilla, but I think it might be Abilene. Look it up, folks. Maybe I got that one wrong. I'll say both. Fuck it. So she has to go to this small town that's like a massive beef center in Texas, right, and a normal person would have been like, well, all right, I've got to be in court for several weeks. I guess we'll put the show on hiatus. Right. Obviously, I'm not gonna fly my entire crew down to this show, to this town in Texas and just film the opra runfree
show from there, which is exactly what she does. So here's the Texas Tribune. Rather than putting your show on hiatus for a week, she brought it with her and framed parts of it as an homage to the city and state. She suddenly found herself in Winfrey Donda cowboy hat and drew cheers by occasionally mimicking a Texas accent. Texas born act actor Patrick Swayze came on and taught her how to two step. So you're on trial by day and you're doing the show by night. Whenfrey recalled
in twenty twelve, it was stressful. It was challenging to be on trial. May I just say it's one of the worst experience says of anybody's life. A gag order prevented Winfrey from talking about the case on her show, which she turned into a running joke. We're down here in Amarilla, y'all know why, she said during one segment, drawing laughs from the audience. Large crowd showed up both for winfrey show and outside the courtroom to catch a
glimpse of her Amilla Loves Oprah t shirts. She didn't testify until the latter part of the case, but by the time she got on the stand, the town loved her. Babcock said, and again, everyone on this jury has ties to the beef industry, and they vote unanimously to clear Oprah. That's how much juice this lady has.
I know we're here to talk about her as a bastard, but you gotta love that.
Like that is cool. That's pretty cool shit.
Yeah, I wish she had gone to war over a better criticism of the beef industry, but that is pretty cool.
You know.
You have to there's a lesson in there in terms of like how you deal with these like corporations trying to stifle speech, which was like, all right, motherfucker, like, let's lean into it. I will get this whole town on my side.
She's out of curiosity, though, did any of the people that she called like satanist, baby rapist, did they ever see her?
Does that of curiosity?
No? No, no, no no.
They don't have beef industry money for one thing. They're all bankrupted fighting the satan lawsuits. Bridges like these people owned a daycare. So Oprah Declaire's victory. Beef industry representatives to Claire Victory too, stating that the cost of the case would make other media figures more careful about spreading
this information. Americans largely went back to ignoring the harms of our addiction to cheap red meat, and the only real long term consequence to all this was that Oprah befriended a psychologist that she'd hired on as a jury consultant, Doctor Phil McGraw. Ooo again, folks, for an episode on bast Dream. We're not going to talk about doctor Phil or doctor osin these episodes because we've done two parters on both of them. Check those out if you want
to know why those guys suck. But this ends badly is what I'll say, you know what else ends badly, Sophie, Oh my god, your life. If you don't buy the products and services that are advertised on this podcast. You know, it's like a chain letter, right, If you buy the first thing that comes on, you'll have a happy life. You know, when you die, your whole family will be around you. There will be no pain. You'll hear you'll hear the trumpet of Saint Peter. Is it he him?
Then as a trumpet? You'll hear some fucking Trumpet'll be good, You'll get to have it. It'll be great, and we're back.
It's St. Gabriel and is.
It Saint Gabriel?
Cecilia?
A lot of them got trumpets? How am I supposed to?
It's like a SKA band up there, you know, lots of true.
God's sacred genre. Okay. The fact that Oprah's show was now a mix of spiritual gurus and crusades against various causes celeb did not mean that Oprah completely hit excised the smut. Despite her claim to have left trash TV behind, she knew that any topic involving teen pregnancy, teen drug use, child abduction, et cetera got views her audience of largely middle class moms tuned in when Oprah tur told them
their kids were in danger. The clearest example of this comes from two thousand and three, when Oprah Winfrey introduced the concept of Bridget so happy to be talking about this rainbow parties?
Got it?
You get a rainbow party?
You get it?
Well, I shouldn't phrase it that way.
Young Bridget fucking wishes no one.
Gets a rainbow party. That's actually the reality of the situation. I am sure we've got our gen z listeners and our old people listeners. Those are the two other kinds of people behind normal people. US millennials are all like, the fuck are they talking about? Rainbow party? Is this
somebody like LGBT thing? No, it's not. So this was yet another moral panic, and it's the first moral panic that we're talking about in the series that I was around four as a perfectly I'm a should be the same mistrue of you like this was a moral panic about my generation, my peers, and I that I was old enough to be like, what the fuck are you
talking about? So in order to introduce this concept, this comes up on The Oprah Winfrey Show for the first time during a discussion between Oprah, Oprah and Michelle Burford. Burford is a journalist at OH Magazine. Oprah had launched a magazine like ninety nine or something like, after her show has made its big pivot. They launched this magazine, which is the number one women's magazine basically for the whole time that it's in publication. They don't stop publishing
till twenty twenty. And Burford has just finished some hard hitting research on the millennials, you know, our generation, and she's reading oprah new slang term for sex and that our generation has cooked up. And again this is two thousand and three, so everybody prepared to take some notes.
Also, just the selection for more videos.
It's so fascinating stuff, fascinating stuff.
What is happening to Elmo?
Oh my god?
Yeah?
The Elmo thing is I think that's from the New Dune show. And that's clearly someone playing Matt Gates on SNL. Just because of how uncomfortable that woman looks, I can tell it's supposed to be Matt Gates anyway.
Okay, so I definitely what is a salad.
Top salad is get ready hold on to your underwear for this one. Oral anal sex. So oral sex to the anus is what toss Galad is.
My mom is an oral sex party.
It's a gathering where oral sex is performed and rainbow comes from all of the girls put on lipstick and each one puts her mouth around the penis of the gentleman or gentlemen.
Who are there to receive favors.
And another horrified MoMA, hence the term rainbow.
Oh fuck. I remember this like it was yesterday.
When I said that when my mom would sit me down after school and like it was time for us to have like a serious.
Talk about something.
I always knew it had been on Oprah, And I remember very clearly this episode because, as I said, I went to Catholic school. I went to all girl school. I was the biggest nerd in the world. I was not having sex with anybody. But my mom is sitting me down and being like, is this a thing that's happening at school?
I was like the way the to the fiction.
That like young people were doing things like rainbow parties.
It just yeah, it just really.
Is burned in my mind that like Oprah had really put a fantasy world in the head of people like my mom.
Yeah, Yeah, it's such a fucking absolute. It's such a fucking absolute like fantasy, because like I remember seeing this as like a fifteen year old and going, no, we're not, like I'm not look fifteen year old Robert not exactly doing a lot of sex parties. But also I knew enough about my generation to that like, neither were basically anyone else at my school. Right, there were some kids having sex, but there weren't rainbow parties.
Like people were like dry humping behind the wal mart and like.
That might hit like it wasn't like sex parties.
Yeah, everybody's got a different lipstick, and you compare the rainbows on you dick, what like where is it happening?
Shades many questions.
My mom asked me about this too. Yeah that was a weird thing.
And I went and I was like, I was like, mom, look at me, look.
At these things. I have it down to me.
You should always think this way whenever there's like a this is the new dangerous sex thing the kids are doing. Does it sound like something you and your peers might have done as fifteen year olds or does it sound like something an adult pervert invented? Because it made them Because they're sick, right.
I was going to say, horror invented this, truly needs to go to jail.
Yes, I was like, this is marketing child pornography. That's what you don't.
Well, they did look forward to this on that teen show to Grass even instead of it on the dicks. It was like rainbow bracelets. My mom asked me about that also.
That was another thing.
I don't think it was on Oprah, But if you wore like those jelly bracelets, it was, oh, if you wear a brown one, Yeah, it was that nobody.
But Sophie, now that you brought up to Grassy, I think I'm through the looking glass here because look, clearly this isn't a real thing. It was invented by a pedophile who was on to Grassy, famous pedophile Drake. Oh, we're through the looking glass.
Papers locked down. That man is suing people, come on, he'sing for defamation for being called a pedophile.
But Sir, I feel like the best case scenario here is that Kendrick and I become good friends and no one ever tells him that I mistook him from Maclamore once.
Robert I.
Robert I swore I don't know who people are like, not by looks or songs. I just thought people.
I don't know where people are. Take that secret to Margaret. It's the most angry I've ever been at.
The Internet's going to light on. I want to get off Scott free now.
And then we all made a pack in my car.
But we would never repeat this because it.
Was too honest to man.
Sophie, I can't. I'm like George Washington, this is my cherry Tree moment. I cannot tell a lie. I don't know who people are.
Yes, but Jesus Robert.
It's okay. I listened to a Kendrick Lamar song after that.
I think you were in my car.
I was pretty pretty good. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. Macklamore's not. I made a horrible mistake. Forgive me, don't forgive Drake. Look, I'm trying to deflect here, right, I'm doing the Trump thing, you know, like, ignore my sins, focus on Drake and the Rainbow parties. Let's blame him for that.
The disappointments back.
I don't know who people are. Look, it's gonna be hard to get back on track after this. Later in that interview, Oprah asks Burford if Rainbow parties are common, and Maria replied, among the fifty girls I talked to, this was pervasive. And here's a quick tip on like knowing if a journalist is not a good journalist. A good journalist if they had talked to fifty girls would say this number of them said that they had attended a rainbow party, versus this number of them said they
had heard of a rainbow party. That starts to give you some useful data as to like, oh, actually thirty of them said they'd heard of this. None of them have been to one. Maybe they're not real.
Like that.
That would be journalism, right, that's the start of it, at least you know. Burford says of the fifty girls I talked to, quote unquote, this was pervasive. Now I'll say this right now. Burford either made all that shit up because she knew Oprah would love it, or some teenage girls were paying a prank on her. A couple of researchers, Joel Best and Kathleen Boggle, actually looked into where this rumor started, and they traced it to a book called Epidemic How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids
by Meg Meeker. And if you want to know how hack. You're at this book? Was are there still kids? Sylvie checks note, Let's let's do a quick fact check. Okay, it didn't. We're good. Good news, everybody, teen sex didn't kill all the kids.
Hey, listen, At least we do have a name for the straight up fucking pedophile enabler at minimum.
Meg Meeker. Oh, she's great. She is a right wing pediatrician who has spent the last twenty years profiting off of convincing parents that their kids are fucking each other to death. She has never once been correct, but she has the ear of incoming President Donald Trump. She is awesome. Back in two thousand and three, Oprah laundered her conservative Christian propaganda because hey, sex sells best. End Boggle, who
wrote a book called Kids Gone Wild. But despite that title, the book is about how all this stuff is bullshit, right. It's about all these bullshit media myths about how bad kids are, right, and it busts a bunch of pervasive myths about teenagers and their wild, elaborate sex based parties. Both Boggle and Best clearly blame Oprah for launching the rainbow parties panic. Right like this becomes a media panic as a result of Oprah giving it so much oxygen.
I'm going to quote now from an interview with the authors of that book in Salon with Oprah, because that reaches so many millions of people, particularly women and women that have children. They're hearing that story and saying, oh my god, did you hear on Oprah? What's going on? We've been a quote in the book that looks at another reporter when they're looking at issues of youth and sex, a reporter by the name of Costello that says it
must be true. Didn't you see that Oprah episode? So even another reporter ends up citing Oprah as a fact checker on rainbow parties being real. So if you're following the evidentiary chain of custody here, Oprah's reporter says, I talked to fifty girls and like they said rainbow parties were pervasive. Did any of them say they'd been to one unclear? That turns into another journalist being like, well, they're real because it was on Oprah.
We're locked in baby, Yeah, the circular bullshit machine.
Yeah, this beautiful stuff. Another Oh, and actually this gets back to Degrassi. Another story of Oprah helped push around the same time was a panic around sex bracelets. This is again the idea that like girls have these color coded bracelets to signify all the sex acts they're down to perform. And I guess the boys are just going around being like, oh, that girl's get a bracelet for a foot job, I'm getting up with her. And it's like, that's just that's just not how teenagers work. That's not
how adults work. Nothing works that way except for like, I don't know, weird Jeffrey Epstein parties. Probably, I'm sure he had some parties like that. I'm sure he had parties like that because they watched Oprah and were all perverts anyway.
Yeah, it's also like that is such a healthier type of consent than anything that actually happens in fucking high school.
Right, Yes, yes, they're all having like the kind of key parties that like middle aged swingers had in nineteen seventy four.
Those bracelets were like very popular when I was coming of age, and they were genuinely like y'all could look this up.
They were banned from schools.
Oh YEAHU of high school. Yes, now this is another thing again, both this and rainbow parties. I'm sure, if you dug you could find examples of teenagers doing it after it becomes immediate panic because kids are like, all right, let's give it a shot.
Were doing it, yeah.
But yeah. It's not until professional media idiots like Matt Lauer Ormantel Williams make a big deal about it that it becomes a thing. And in that interview on Salon, Best and Bogel get to the heart of what's really going on with all of this. I think one of the things we show in the last chapter is that it's not just one group that likes these stories. Kids themselves like them because it's great gossip. What's better than to say, oh, the girl wearing the red bracelet you
know what she does. She gives lap dances. They make stories teens like to pass around that make interesting gossip. Parents are always worried about their kids, of course, and they've been fed a lot of media stories that feed into that. So the idea that their child, who they think of as innocent, might be corrupted by these other forces that feeds into something like they've been fed and believed for a long time. Schools want to show how
they have things under control. They know what's going on and they can talk to parents about it, so they can say we ban those bracelets to put a stop to that. Then, of course the media, there's both the idea that sex sells, but also fear cells saying, listen to this story. You have something to worry about. You have to listen to this because you don't know what's really going on and it could affect your child. That's what gets viewers and television producers and newspaper paper columnists
are aware of that. Now we're going to move on from the radio party stuff. But I wouldn't be doing my job as podcast host if I did not play you the rest of that clip.
So okay, and so what is so what does pretty boy mean?
A pretty boy is a sexually active boy, someone who's been fairly promiscuous. So it isn't what maybe what you would have thought pretty boy meant in your head. Dirty means what does dirty mean? A means a diseased girl. And along with that, the term that some teens are using to mean HIV is high five high and then the Roman numeral B high five. So if you got high fived by Jack, you got diseased by Jack.
I gave you HIV.
Yeah, what, So that.
Means you shouldn't go around saying the little kidding where I was a little boy and went to give me high five. Yeah, you shouldn't do that anymore.
And suddenly your kids want to make salad all the time.
You should be wondering, okay.
And booty call is pretty common, yeah, pretty pervasive. Yeah, that's an early morning or late at night call for sex that involves no real relationship.
Maybe two am.
Guy calls girl and says, meet me at so and so location, We have sex, we leave.
What do you call?
Y'all knew that, y'all got that right?
Okay?
Uh.
And then there's the term hoovering, which is a term used for a girl having an abortion. The yes, you get, you get the reference, the sucking of a hoover vacuum. She's having herself vacuumed out, so to speak. So these were just a few of the terms that I.
Want her teens referring to.
I got a whole new vocabulary book.
So why don't happen when they would say she got hoovered? If somebody, if you're talking to somebody in the beginning, before you got so right here, Yeah, before I got here? What would you what would if somebody said she got who would you just say? What do you mean? Yeah?
What do you mean? What do you mean?
What does hoover Ring mean?
She tell me a rainbow part.
He's pretty common, I think, so leaf among the pipy girls that.
I talked to.
Yea, that gets us back to what the we'd said before. But like, oh God Jesus, but the idea that like, kids have like a fun term for getting HIV.
So not to give notes on the slang, but shouldn't it be high four? I'm just I don't know, man.
Such a writer, Andrew.
I just like, it's tough that Hoovering really, you know, it used to be just suffering from the great a Great Depression and now so badly.
Oh yeah, it would have been pretty funny to just be a con man journalist in this period and be like, yeah, the kids can't stop talking about Herbert Hoover, you know, like he's their favorite president. He's the only guy on the minds of the youth these days.
I mean, obviously the internet is absolute poison, but truly, watching this clip of someone basically read fake Urban Dictionary on National TV does kind of give me like, okay, some things were improved, Okay.
Yeah, oh yeah.
Have y'all seen that meme where it's like iced tea from Law and Order SVU explaining or sake things. That's what that reminded me of, just someone sitting on stage being like, oh yeah, the kids are calling it cat littering.
It's been like that's what that was.
It's just somebody making up fake things for entertainment.
The idea that kids have like a casual slang term for getting HIV. It's it's like it's like it's doing something in a video game.
But also like I mean, obviously they were they had a vested interest and never thinking about this, but like nothing is more like universal than teens lying to all that.
Yeah, as if a journalist had ever tried to sit down with me and my friends and ask us like about if there's any sex slang, we would lied like cheap rugs like we would we would not have stopped talking until they had run out of space on their recorder.
You know, Like just like the credulousness is I mean, I guess that that I'm realizing now I guess is like Oprah's Big crime is just like.
Yes, yes, that's a big part of it. Or you know, if she's not credulous, because again she's a very savvy person. It's like marketing credulousness, right, yeah, and.
It's the mist ship you've ever heard. She'll just be like, I mean, listen, that's exactly what Joe Rogan does.
So right, yep, like that that is there's a really like you don't have Joe Rogan without the Oprah Winfrey show, you know, yeah, just like you don't have Oprah without Donahue. Now, Oprah is not the only person obviously who's spread this kind of stuff, but she is the biggest name in
the world of people doing this. As Vanity Fair stated in the year two thousand when launched Oh magazine, quote, Oprah Winfrey arguably has more influence on the culture than any university president, politician, or religious religious leader except perhaps the Pope. And I'm just gonna say it, John Paul the second I think was the pope at this time, and I believe Oprah had more of an influence than American culture at least, like who remembers, oh, JP, the
two you got shot once? Come on, I know popes who have been shot way more than that.
Also, do individual popes really have that much influence? I mean, they're still you.
Certainly did well.
I'm just I just mean, like they don't really have more influence than any other pope. Really, like you're still operating within the bands of Catholicism.
Look, most of what I know about the pope comes from the movie The Conclave, which is largely yeah, yeah, yeah, which is which is largely that Stanley Tucci looks incredible in Catholic vestiments, Like it's like he was poured into him, that that man can really pull off whatever you call those outfits. Also, Ralph finds, Oh my god, his teuch chains the tuch oh Man, and then John Lithgow out of nowhere love it, the vaping Cardinal, all sorts of good stuff in that movie.
Okay, I am more sold by the concept of a vaping car.
It's good they hire an Italian man whose face was made to angrily vape while wearing vestiments. It's amazing that casting director deserves the Medal of Honor. Okay, so yeah, I think that that's probably a broadly accurate statement. The Rainbow Party disinformation is part of a long tradition of Oprah episodes about how dangerous life has become for young children.
Every year, as violent crime fell and violence towards children usually fell, Oprah barraged her audience with ceaseless tales of child abductions, child sex trafficking, child drug abuse, and teen sex. Studies show consistently that Americans believe violent crime is much higher than it in fact is. We are in the midst of a very frightening moral panic over child sex trafficking right now, which does not resemble how child sex
trafficking actually looks. I'm speaking of right now about Tim Ballard, who lies about his life Rescuing kids from child sex trafficking networks were the basis of the blockbuster movie's Sound of Freedom. Ballard spent years claimed to be fighting an international shadowy network of child traffickers, while he just resigned after being charged with massive sexual misconduct and abuse himself.
Despite all of this, tons of people believe little kids are being targeted and stolen by criminal organizations, when again, they are usually being molested by people who are responsible for them, not random narco gangs abducting kids and parking lots by putting cheese on the doors of their mom's car. That's not the problem.
OPRAH bears a good share.
Of the blame for how unhinged many Americans are about the dangers that children face. And this is I'm making this allegation based on stuff like the Rainbow Party panic and other years of other similar episodes, but you know it's during my research. I ran into a really interesting thread in a website on free range parenting. And I'm not making I don't know much about free I'm not making a comment on that, but I found it interesting
to read what these people had to say. In a thread titled did OPRAH make us terrified for our kids? The author who identifies themselves as Laura Wrights. As I think about the litany of freak accidents and hidden dangers I need to be constantly worried about for my kids. Almost everything has one common recurring element. I saw it
on OPRAH. One time, baby drowning in an inch of water, healthy girl scrapes her knee and dies of MRSA child decapitated by an airbag, carbon monoxide from the car in the garage kills the family, dry drowning, school shootings, home invasions, and countless other tragedies then there are the abduction, molestation, and sexual predator stories. These were typically featured on OPRAH
at least once a week. Well, I applaud oprah's efforts to raise awareness, catch truly horrible criminals, and break the silence of abuse victims. This had to have an impact on the perception that there is a predator around every corner and you can never be too careful because anything could happen. And I think she's on the money there, right, Like the helicopter parenting, the fact that like kids, there's not zero OPRAH, and the fact that like kids stop going outdoors, you know, and like.
True crime podcasts. Now, it's like, just to make white women assume that the world is out for their kids, industry is the strongest thing going.
Yeah.
I mean, if you've ever seen videos of women moms who were like I was at the Walmart and a man looked at my child, Stay safe, mama, bears like it was the scariest thing that ever happened to me. We're like, it is this fantasy that around every corner
there is a threat to you and your child. And I think it's dangerous precisely because it keeps you from seeing the action threats that are there, right, like the creepy soccer coach, the creepy guy at church, right, Like yeah, And I also think, like with the Rainbow parties, if you are so busy thinking about these fabricated fictional threats to your kids, what if you're the things that are actually happening in your kid's life day to day at school?
How are they going to come talk to you? How are you going to foster a safe, open, communicative environment if you've been led to believe that, like these fictional threats are out there and that they're real.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, Also it's like, I mean, because it is you know, scout leaders, church leaders and their husbands that are doing most of this stuff. It's like those people are the ones that they have some responsibility for bringing into their child's life, whereas a narco gang is just randomly out there, Like you don't have to confront anything about yourself to protect a kid from the others.
Ding ding, fucking ding. I think right, It's so it's hard to raise kids, and like you can be a responsible, decent person who does their best with your kid and they can have a horrible life. That's the world, right, Like you can't stop that. And instead of like confronting that and confronting like, well, all I can really do is, you know, try to be the best parent for my kid.
You get all these like obsessions with things that just are not realistic threats and dangers, and you just feel like, if I continue scratching that fear itch by watching this stuff, maybe it'll make it less likely to happen to me. Right, maybe if I if I train my eyes on the eye of horace, it will be less likely to harm me and my loved ones.
You know.
Well, it's like the safety theater makes you feel better then again confronting the actual difficult shit that.
Yeah, yeah, like the danger of all of this stuff was less. You know, kids are having rainbow parties or you know, pedophile gangs or abducting kids in vans and more like, hey, uh, have you looked at your kid's Scout leader lately? Seems like here's a little one on one time with the boys. By the way, should somebody look at on that.
Scouts in general, it's also just like a right wing paramilitary organization, even without the funny business. You could learn to camp and fish and hunt without all the fucking like allegiances to order.
You know, Andrew, thank you, because I wanted to pivot to letting everyone know that if you give your kids to me for one week out of the year, they will come back. It's the Lawrence of Arabia school for children. They're going to learn how to blow up bridges and trains. Right, what do they do with that knowledge? That's up to them. I have no control of them. Once they've learned how to make the explosives and destroy bridge supports, it's no longer my responsibility after that point.
You know, the start of Robert starting a boy army.
Everybody does want a child army, you know, speaking of popes, Bridget like, that's that's like a third of the popes. Wow, solid subset of the pope population has child armies.
You know.
Anyway, I think that's an episode.
Yeah, so I was gonna say, we gotta we gotta stop.
Turns out we have a lot more Oprah to do. I don't know what we're gonna do about this, but everybody go away for the weekend. Bridget Pluggables.
Uh yeah, you can subscribe to my boy Army newsletter.
Notice kidding. You can listen to my podcast. There are our NCLs on the internet.
My podcast with Mozilla Foundation, the makers of Firefox called irl about who has the Power in AI?
And follow me on Instagram at bridget r.
And DC excellent Andrew T, I don't know man, Just osis Racist is a podcast?
Excellent, excellent. All right, everybody until next week. Remember the Robert Evans summer camp for kids to learn how to blow up trains and disrupt national infrastructure. It's not illegal if we don't tell them to do anything with the knowledge. Bye.
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