Hello the Internet, and welcome to this episode of the Weekly Zeitgeist. These are some of our favorite segments from this week, all edited together into one NonStop infotainment laugh stravaganza. Yeah, So, without further ado, here is the Weekly Zeitgeist. Well, mister walkin, we are thrilled to be joined.
In our third seat Wow by the executive director.
Of Civil Rights Corps, which is a nonprofit dedicated to fighting systemic injustice. 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 Ye Coppaganda, which we got to read. An advanced copy of is drop in April fifteenth, So good go pre order right now.
We'll be talking about it. Most importantly a great follow on social media, of course, please welcome the brilliant and talented Alan Carcasone.
Thank you all for having me back.
Oh man, always open door. I got excited when I read the word zeitgeist at.
The end of your book. I was like, oh yeah, shout out to the show.
Yeah yeah, great word.
I was thinking of you guys.
Yeah, of course totally.
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 of 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 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.
I'd give them an a minus.
I think I think they're mostly nailing it. What do you guess? Sorry, I didn't read the book. But we like the mainstream media, right, They're cool.
Yeah, 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, 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.
I was actually it was funny.
Yesterday I was hanging out with some people who are from out of town, and like they they hit me with the is LA Safe because like and I was like, you, okay, yeah, Kelly's great, man, what are you talking about? Like, because I see a lot of like you know, the people running into stores and like grabbing stuff and things like that, and I'm like, oh, my sweet sweet.
Child, Yeah, this is uh.
These are like cherry picked videos that they play over and over again to sort of create that narrative like crime is.
Actually going on, Like whoa really?
Oh? You know.
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.
Sorry, he's the worst player in the history of the NBA. You can't make a friend shot.
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 is false,
you actually lose credibility. But if you use a bunch of true anecdotes to suggest kind of false interpretations or then you actually have much more sophisticated propaganda's 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 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 nightly newscasts all over the country, by the thousands, there was virtually no stories about wage theft or tax evasion, things that are happening way way more and that cost orders of magnitude more money for people. And that's the selective creation an anecdote that gets us afraid of of all of the wrong things.
And 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. Uh, they're doing it like on a one off basis, and it's being strapolated into like a
massive trend. They're ceiling from a corporation, and the wage stuft 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, because they do they have some lapses.
Sure, andrew T.
We do like to ask our guess, what is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are?
All right? Get ready, motherfuckers.
So this is no uh, this is probably there's a reasonable chance this has already been one of my search histories. But I'll do it again if I have it, but maybe not. I made a fucking caved and made a viral ish recipe. I made tempora Inoki mushrooms, which were billed as this is like fucking vegan chicken vegan like fried chicken tenders or whatever. But you take an Oki
mushrooms such you're in a video episode. You take the nooky mushrooms, cut the little roots off, and you have a bundle of mushrooms that grow long ways, and you cut the bundles into like, I don't know, call it like half a center meter maybe three quarters or of a centimeter like slices, and you batter those motherfuckers so that the Enochi mushrooms are individually little thin mushrooms, but they come become like strands of if you really are.
Desperate for it.
Fake chickens are just fine on their own, and like we don't have to Yeah.
Their lovely. You didn't need to call it that. I'm sure.
Throw a little MSG into the recipe I found. It's you know, NBD.
But imagine though, as you're biting into them, imagine a chicken dying. Yeah, you just like, you know, like get that cool. Even feel like you're getting the power of another animal.
You know, I got the power of I don't know, probably eighty five mushrooms in that one bite. Though, so wow, lot of a lot of a lot of power there. So the the thing I'm pretty sure there's a reasonable chance I've already said, was what my search history is, how do I get rid of all this fucking deep fry oil?
Oh? Yeah?
Which just throw it? Right?
Yeah?
I probably The probably sort of distressing thing is by the time I had fried my batch of mushrooms, I made several batches, and I deepried it a little.
In another thing, why am I being coy shrimp fitters?
Don't be.
Escapades.
There wasn't that much oil left, so I just kind of like soaked it up with a paper towel and put it into a grocery bag and noted that up.
Harbage candidate.
I think we'll allow that, all right.
I just, like I said, I just throw it out my window. So whatever, this hippie shit you're doing, like fine to each their own, but I.
Don't need I just go right down the drain man, right down the kitchen, down the storm drain It's actually the only thing we put in the kitchen, saying because for some reason it's stopped draining water.
Yeah. No, you fill them up with water balloons and you throw them into the La River. Oh yeah, fuck it. I honestly can't be worse. There's no EPA monitoring of it anymore.
I have people from out of town visiting us, and we like, like, the part of like the value I'm in is right by the La River.
So we walked by it and we're like, and the famous La River And.
They're like, wait seriously, and I'm like, yep, that's the I'm gonna be.
For real, for real, especially because I'm sure municipalities are going to start having to generate their own revenue. LA really needs to have a for I don't know, five hundred dollars, one thousand dollars. You and your friend can ride a motorcycle and a semi down the l I wrote, yeah, or off the bridge you can do that one.
Or the drag race from Greece that also happened right there downtown. Yeah, any iconic l A River race.
Yeah yeah, just just that killed Keu Reeves in the Rush video back when that was my first celebrity crush. Every every Paul Abdul music video drop was an event in in my little perverted.
Was she had the chest of the cheetah.
That was yeah, obviously yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember just being a kid like that's the cheat, oh cat, And they're like, no, that's true, and I'm like, it is that that's the cheat cat?
It was. It was actually problematic that you can't tell them apart, man, don't find me cheating. What is something, Kristen that you think is underrated?
Aging is underrated?
I agree with this.
I think people, you know what, like I was raised I'm an elder millennial, okay, but I identify as gen X, which is the most gen Z thing I can do. But I grew up hanging out with gen xers, and so we were raised by boomers and they don't age. They don't want to age. Nobody wants to be called grandma anymore. You know, like they're getting new tits and licks into their seventies, and I feel like, no, who's knitting the baby blankets. No one's knitting, no one's aging,
you know. I feel like we should embrace that. Our generation should embrace aging, be proud to be a grandparent, be proud to you know, retire, play golf whatever. And these people they don't want to retire, they don't I want to stop fucking. They're out with boner pills, like on the loose.
Crazy right on the boner pills. Yeah, I'm always suspicious of like singular explanations of like what is wrong with this country. But there's I think I think somebody wrote a book that was like Generation Sociopaths, just about how like Boomers were all all like these narcissistic sociopaths, and they made it checked a lot of boxes for me.
Let's let's put it that way. They're I don't think they're all uniformly like that, and I don't think it's the only problem we've got, but like having one generation that is hoarding all the money and incapable of, you know, being concerned about the generations that come after them, Like if like that seems weird. It seems like we're currently taking it as like humanity just like wasn't able to deal with the challenge of climate change. What if it
was just like a very selfish generation. It was just like, actually, we just don't give a fuck about Once we're gone, it's gonna be okay.
There's another book that kind of touched on that called The Death of the grown Up by Diana West, and that was sort of talking about how like in the sixties all of like the rock and roll shit kind of like cows, like like the boomers are like I'm never leaving this like mental state either where it's about like forever young and all these other things that occur, I mean, your wealth.
And being uninhibited and like not inhibiting other people's sexual Oh sorry, no, not those parts, just just the irresponsibility part.
Guy, young young, I get to not care about other people.
The only thing they were retained out of woodstock was rolling around in mud.
Yeah yeah, and like one thing yeah.
No, they did for the generation that like hated their parents so much. It's like they really rebelled against aging. They invented the term anti aging. There was no creams or anything that that phrase didn't exist. And I feel like it's embarrassing to watch them just refuse to go off into the night.
It's like, sit down, Why accept the forward movement of time? You know? Why? When I'm supposed to just sit here and let it happen to me.
Come on, I'm gonna shoot up my grandkid's blood right into my veins. I'm gonna use my grand kid as a goddamn blood bank.
Right, how far we've come.
It's like, we used to have children to help, you know, in the fields for agricultural reasons, and now it's like now you gotta have like fourteen blood bags.
That's right, Kyle, what's up? Do you think is overrated? Uh?
Fucking robots, robots, real robots. I hate them. I hate robots.
You just watch electric age too, man, electric states or whatever.
I'm like, I don't want you to have to I don't want anything that does two things.
I don't like it. I hate you.
Like when you see posts now that's like, well we asked chat GPT what it thinks about.
I don't care. I don't want to know.
There's no value to that to me. It doesn't know words. I'm so tired of it all. Just yeah, I want people to do stuff. I don't want my car to have no driver in it. I am just tired. If we didn't make any more of them.
Yeah, every anything.
I think the rule of thumb now in our era feels like anything that keeps us away from interacting with people is the devil and we should be cast in a way because it's obviously like helpful methods and and things that robots do that help people and everyone's abilities are limited in different ways, and there's positives to this, but generally, generally, I'm just like the.
Robots that deliver food. I hate you.
Every everyone skirting in the shortcuts are But this is all stemming from me just seeing a bunch of stuff that's like, well, I asked, we asked chat GPT who should be president, and it said, I don't care.
It's not real if it agrees with you, and what Yeah, it's none of it. It's why are we giving it weight like it has an opinion.
It's a calculator. The only word calculators should know is boobs upside down. Yeah, and other or go to hell, go to hell. Yes for my t I eighty nine hackers. Yeah, I'm old. Other than that, I'm just like I've had enough of the robots. I'm just I'm sorry. I don't think we they're even fine. They don't need equal.
Weight two people.
Yeah yeah, yeah, well, I mean those articles are such like those are just coming from like chat GPT shill yeah.
Out.
You just see whole sports articles that are all written by a robot, and you're just like, you know, we can tell, I can tell when the art is the robot art. I don't know what you think. Yeah, you're not tricking anyone. It's a gradient. Yeah sorry.
Three caps are really have really been taken over by robots a way that I'm so tired sucks.
Oh that And now they're just like just summarizing bodycam footage video and under like a true crime genre on YouTube. And it's like on March eighteenth, twenty twenty two, this man was like, it's they're just basically putting like chat gpt ai narration over other videos and just making a ton It's that.
Whole when you google something and it's like, hey, just so you know, now we lead off with incorrect misinformation and then we'll get to the links and I'm like, I don't want I don't I know I can turn it off.
I don't want to.
I don't want to have to take extra steps to stop a robot from telling.
Me what to do.
Yeah, just use a different webs This episode is going to be how I Die Like this, I'll be in front of the Robot Tribunal and yeah yeah yeah, probably three years and they'll be playing this back out of one of their stomachs.
That's like did you see like have you I just I don't know, just I was fucking bored as ship.
I was falling asleep.
But I turned on that Chris Pratt movie The Electric State that was with like a big flop on Netflix, and that whole premise is about the fucking robot wars and how like there had to be a truce between human and robot because they were going to rise up against the people, and there's like all this anti robot and I was just like, dude, this is so stupid.
I just turned it off, like.
Anti robot propaganda, like we're hearing from Kyle here.
Yeah, yeah, someone, Yeah.
I was. Somebody was saying that the robot car that drives you around way moo. I think like they I've never been in one, and they're like, oh, you gotta go in one, And I was like, what's good about it? Other like, I think it's slow from the gimmick, it's slower, and they're like, oh, you know, like you don't have to like talk to the driver. I was like, that is that? Yeah, that's not that that.
Yeah, I understand that that is the thing that that that people have anxiety about, and ultimately it feels short sighted to be like I think that that we shouldn't remove that simply because you know, I'm just like, I don't know, it's all.
I don't know.
Person shouldn't have a job because I don't want to talk to them.
Yeah, I know that there are every time I say anything on the internet, I'm like, I understand that there's three people who have specific limitations that this could really really affect. And I just I want to earnestly be like, but I don't mean this if for you, like if you are if you have something something that is like really affecting you in a real way. I ultimately I
just am so. I saw a way most stopped in Los Angeles because a guy laid on the hood and covered the cameras while it was at a light and it couldn't go anywhere and the person had to sit in it and wait for this guy to get off it.
Yeah, they do that.
There's another thing I saw in like San Francisco, people are putting his traffic cones on the hood and that would just completely fucking fry it.
And they're like, aha, bricked it. Yeah, I'm just so tired of it. I'm just so tired of everything being a robot.
Yeah, no, damn, bro, I know you sound like the beginning of the Electric State right now.
When they.
Viral marketing for the Electric State, we're actually we're rebooting it. We're doing a live action version of that live.
Action movie, live or action or even live or action.
Just cleaning it up a little bit. It's liver action. All right, let's take a quick break, we'll come back.
We'll talk about what's going on in the news. We'll be right back. And 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, but it it really just was kind of an illustration of how relentless they have been
and continued 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 that the democratic part like these institutions that I 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 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 were just calling balls and strikes here. We're just re doing the math. And unfortunately, the only way for us 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, 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 kind of power structure.
I was pretty naive when I when I got to you know, I went to college at Yale, at the law school at Harvard, and I was pretty naive when I got to these places.
You know.
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 too broad and brushstroke because, like you know, I've a lot
of incredible friends and relationships that I've made there. 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 a place like Harvard is to launder policies and ideas that are divigned 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. And you learned very quickly at a place like Harvard, what does it take not only to succeed there as a student, but what does it take to become professor? 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, and other kinds of research and views are not. And and Harvard is a you know, has 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 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's, you know, it's not how it works. And I think the example that I use in my book, I have 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 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.
And these are definitely teetering on the edge of laughter or crying one or the other. Yeah.
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.
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 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 operation, right, It's like you're parading around as a leftist socialist progressive, but the ideas you're promoting are right 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. 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. 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.
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.
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 pacifying student unrest. They were 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 just a short time later, that Journal of Law and in Equal or whatever they call it is already publishing bold please by Harvard professors to add five hundred thousand cops.
Yes, I remember when it came out and we were like, oh my god, the mainstream media is going to eat this shit, 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 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. Sure.
Oh wait, so they were asking the students to basically like defend this against evil alec.
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, and he was asking for their help developing counter arguments
to his proposal more police. You know, It's weren't me 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 like crowdsourcing, like the fleshing out of research project.
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 d 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 address in the first place these things. And that's why I think the copaganda book that is full of this stuff.
Right.
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 and journalists or whatever nonprofits sometimes and illustrate stuff that is actually really important that we might miss if we just look at the news. 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 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 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. You know, we have 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, that any copy that sold, all the royalties go to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which organizes on house people
and 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 a more critical understanding of the news that they're being shown.
Yeah, which is like interesting that the way you bring 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 now, Okay, 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.
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 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 fascist 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
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 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 compelling local news story.
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 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 every year. Okay, that's four to five times all homicide 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 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.
Yeah, yeah, I mean you have so there's so many wild an like what while the Walgreens 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 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 we can't like that that story's been done essentially, which is so so wild and don't 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.
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 who in this 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. 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 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
train derailments. Those are things that are happening all the time, right, there's like, but now that you're focused on it and it's a theme of your news, it's going to play into this idea and the same thing is happening. There was a massive society wide panic about shoplifting and retail theft, even though retail theft we now know is down, And so how we categorize things, it's.
Just so it's like the.
Michael Jordan example I gave earlier. If you're looking for it, and if you just only document 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 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 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, 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 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. Right, 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 on that.
We'll be right back.
And we're back, We are back, and the movie we all keep hearing about now the Air Up Now, Sorry, Kevin, a classic. That was what we were talking about before.
Brody in that one, Uh yeah.
He was.
He was Sally the African basketball player, the Kyle Airs up theres.
What So I I knew that they were making a snow White remake.
Because of the racist backlash, because of the races backlash.
That's basically how it came on our radar on this show. But yeah, they've been having a lot of success doing the Like I was blown a way to see like a couple of years after it came out, we were looking at like the top ten box office grossers, like, yeah, movies of all time, and like the Lion King Live action remake was like on there. It's like between Jurassic Park and like et it's like the quotation.
Marks around live action are doing a lot of heavy rifting in the animals talk movie. I'm not sure how many cameras were there, right, that's right, but the plates on cameras.
Yeah, and it's wild, like a movie that feels like it never happened. It's still like one of the most financially successful. Like whatever's that.
You just can't fathom all those people ever being in the same room. It's like an ungettable group of people, unbookable cast.
Yeah, but you just get it. Yeah, and they'll do it individually in separate you know, trailers or whatever. Everything's computer.
That's movies.
I do like the idea of someone like having like explaining to Beyonce how to change her input in garage band.
That's right.
Oh, I mean she's a recording artist. She probably knows how to do that. That's but she's the most famous person in the movie. I assume famous people can't use inputs.
John all of it your second pole, he would be to be your second poll from the.
Second most famous person Beyonce.
Kevin Bacon, Sabrina Carpenter.
All Right, so they're somewhat soulless, I guess is what I'd say. It feels a little like CGI slot, but it's incredibly profitable because so you got the two quadrants, all right, You got the people who saw the first movie and still like that movie, the first Lion King, and then you got these younger audiences who will never know the joy of seeing the first movie without having this kind of it's like.
High level AI slop is what it feels like a little.
Bit that is a good way of like they just copy pasted the YouTube link to the first movie.
Yeah.
And the other point that people have made is that like, like thinking about it like a business person, you're like, well, there's a lot of hard work that has already been done, Like they've already like designed these shots, and we don't have to pay those people at all, Like you don't have to pay them get.
A shot for shot remake of Psycho And we all dragged him for it, and then people at Disney were like, yeah, but what if we did this with other stuff?
Yeah? What if he did this like with stuff that actually everything we've ever done. Yeah, so this is a remake of a nineteen thirty seven film. So I actually am skeptical that there's a ton of people who are still left over from that initial right.
We hired a lot of the same animators, right, Yeah, the union was stronger back then.
A lot of people with the same mental state as nineteen.
Fo Yeah, some reason the history kind of rhymes, but
apparently it's good. Like the early critical reaction is that it's like pretty good for a snow White movie, like Rachel Ziggler, who is playing playing the titular snow White just you know, her star power shines through, according to early critics, and Disney's like burying it, which is weird, like that the the very opposite of what they did with The Lion King, when when it was just like the biggest media event of the year for a thing that ended up being kind of nothing.
It's been so many contras, like the fans, there's so many loud ass hater fans from the beginning that it's just like hammered Disney like into a corner. And then on top of that, like the the Rachel Zeggler saying things about the movie that people are like, how dare she talk up characterize a thing from nineteen thirty seven is potentially being backwards?
Yeah, she says one more thing has changed in a hundred years. I'm gonna lose my mind in my thirty dollars house.
Yeah, they are doing the thing that they like move the Flash that Ezra Miller Flash Movie did, where they like, don't let press come to the premiere, Like they're still throwing a premiere, but they're not letting press come to it.
What just happened earlier this week?
Yeah, Yeah, it's just the movie costs two hundred and seventy million dollars.
Yeah, yeah, is crazy that they're like, you know how much snow White costs Fox?
Right, we bought that Fox.
We bought that Fox for that that amount of money.
We bought all of the things a Fox em since right right, Yeah, No, it's because even too. The other thing that was really telling is like the pre sale for the tickets was like only like a week out from the premiere, where anytime you have like a supposed tent pole film, you're doing more than like a week to try and get pre sale figures up. And it seemed like very early on maybe people were yeah, yeah, already gets to like.
The Avengers Doomsday movie, right, really.
Yeah yeah in the twenty thirties, yeah, yeah, yeah, and then there, Yeah, there's a controversy. Rachel Diggler has said some things hugely controversial about the sexual politics of the first movie, which, by the way, like going back and watching the first movie. I did this for the Bechdel cast. Like snow White is only like anytime she does something with her own agency, she like knocks herself out, Like she like runs into the woods and like knocks herself out.
Like brning the buttons to a video game.
Yeah, the only exactly the only good things that happened to her is when she's unconscious, Like literally she's unconscious, and then all the animals like fall in love with her. She's passed out in like the dwarf's bed, and like the they are about to like stab her with an ice pick and then or with a X pick axe pick axe, and like they just fall in love with her because she's so pretty when she's asleep. When she's awake, she runs into the woods and like knocks herself out
by like running into branches. She she eats a poison the most clearly poisoned apple of all time in the history.
Even like even Eve was like whoa.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa, whoa, whoa.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then the ultimate thing that saves her. She's in a coma in like a weird glass coffin in the middle of the woods, and like Prince Charman comes by and saves her by like falling in love with her again because of how pretty she is while she's asleep. That that is her superpower is being pretty when she's not making decisions or like messing it up by being having free will, she's just passed out. It's
like fucking Bill Cosby wrote the movie. It's really a weird and has some weird angles.
Even like even when she was talking about she's just kind of like, yeah, it's a little you know, it's like nineteen thirty seven, so yeah, there's some things that yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and it's well again, this goes back to the racism because she's you know, Colombian and also Polish. That why can't they just focus on the Polish side and celebrate that, you know what I mean, Like, yeah, it's fine, you know, because they.
Have joke books in their bathrooms, I know.
But like you look at too, like even when Homegirl, who was Hermione, when she played Belle and Beauty and the Beast. She also was saying shit about like how you know the new Emma Yes, Emma Watson, Yes, thank you, super Catherine. She even had things to say about how the remake was like that there were just some things in the original that she was like, oh, I don't know, but that sort of didn't cause the same kind of controversy. But again, because everything is all about yes, they tell.
The difference in immediate reaction to these two actresses just really hard for me to find something that could cause a knee jerk reaction from someone ready to be upset online.
So she is being compared to Gal Gado, who is that plays the evil Queen Gal Gadot, who has served in the idea, literally served in the idea.
Hey, Daniel day Lewis got into character early.
Exactly, has been very outspokenly pro Israel since the start of the war in Gaza, and Rachel Ziggler, who's just said, you know, pro Palestine.
There needs to be a ceasefire.
I think that at least the way they could like come together is if Gal could get some sort of like vertical video song montage video put together to really just let us all unite.
Try try and imagine a world where that happens.
Never that I will. I will never forget about that. That's the turning point in every in celebrity warship as a culture, I believe.
I similarly think that that was a very important event. I'm still waiting for the the long read on how it came.
Back to the all of this Snow White reboot is shot in front of Galgadot's like pool side cabana where she's trying to relate to people.
That's right. So it also so at the time that it came out, Benjapiro was like, I mean, her name is snow White, like that, this is white supremacist, and that's a good, a good thing, I guess, so much so that he started launched his own version of snow White because snow White is a public domain starring a conservative like YouTube star.
And I thought you were joking earlier.
No, no, no. I thought it was like because.
Bench Sparro likes musicals and stuff, and I remember his reaction to Wicked being like a very viral thing. I thought you were actually messing with me.
No no, no, no, no no. He was like, we're gonna bring into our own and it's gonna be snow white, and she's gonna be really white. By the way, the prison just looks the same amount of white as Rachel Tigler. It's not like, yeah, it's not like dizzy He's out here trying to fight for diversity. But anyways, they put out a trailer looked like shit, and that movie fell apart. So unfortunately they won't make it. They'd never made it. No, no, no, no, no.
Of course, of course she's snow white. Other people like this is this is an American thing because it's Disney, And I'm like, can do you know anything about fucking snow white? Do you know who the brother's grim? Are they from America?
Yeah?
So Cleveland, I believe, Yeah, yeah, Cleveland and Germany. They explained the energy I have while I'm there.
But yeah, like, it really doesn't makes it if I had to guess why Disney is just completely burying a movie that costs them two hundred and seventy million dollars, whether it's their objection to Gal Gadot being pro Israeli or because they're ashamed that Rachel Ziggler says pro Palestine things every once in a while and because they're trying. They're scared of being criticized by the right during this administration. I don't know which side is more likely here, but yeah,
they're they're just it seems somewhat cowardly to me. It's also kind of in keeping with their legacy because they've kind of been dicks about snow White from the start. The actress who voiced snow White was paid twenty dollars a day and was not listed, was not listed in the credits, and Walt Disney just blackballed her from ever appearing in anything ever again, allegedly so that her because he was like, that would ruin the snow White illusion.
Right, That's why I also have her sleeping in this glass coffin in the middle of nowhere, and.
Right every now and then give her water and food. Yeah, yeah, I just don't want to destroy the illusion. Yeah.
That's so wild though too. They like that, like that old tiny way of doing this. I mean they're still blacklisting actors now, what am I saying? But like twenty dollars a day is like it's you can make almost double that now.
For voice acting.
Yeah, but yeah, just like for our whole equipment that texture of.
Being like you, I own you and the voice.
And I can disappear you, my pretty and that's the fucking end of it anyway.
So the actor I'm just reading the die the actress who voice also about being Adriana Cascilotti. I'm sorry, no one seeing her would change the image of snow white, right, I don't even know what she looks like. I'm picturing Adriana from the Sopranos, but purely based on name.
The mystique.
I guess there were eight movies then, you know they were like, well whoa whoahoa, no one can ride that train.
It came at the screen, do you know what I mean?
Right, they were point there's still that point of like movies where they're like, we don't want to ruin the.
Magic translates what Casablanca turns to. Do you know what I mean? He's gonna have some real gripes with where that movie took y R Right, what if they.
Were on the other side, I don't know, just just spitball in here, but yeah, they're like that. People are if if this woman goes out and goes on like one one of these talk shows she's people are gonna really like literally, Jack Benny invited her to come on his radio show and she was like yeah, and then they were like, we checked with Walt. Walt says no, because then people will think that the drawing is not singing. They'll know that you're an actual person.
And oh, only Walt Disney knew how dumb people are falling her deep fakes now where it isn't even the actual real person singing a song. Yeah, show him a Snapchat filter. Let's blow his frozen head.
Oh my god, he's probably fucking he'd probably redie. How is that a dog? No? I don't have ears like that though, or a big puffy snout.
All right, that's gonna do it for this week's weekly Zeitgeist. Please I can review the show if you like. The show means the world of Miles. He needs your validation, folks. I hope you're having a great weekend and I will talk to you Monday. Bye.