Afleveringen
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"Ex-officer Amber Guyger testifies in wrong-apartment murder trial: 'I was scared to death,'" a " story reported in 2019. "Starbucks Files Complaints with Labor Board, Accuses Union Organizers of Bullying and Harassment," reported Food & Wine Magazine in April 2022. "Labour MPs fear for safety as pro-Palestine protesters target offices," The Guardianwarned in November 2023.
Within the last decade, weâve seen the rise of a phenomenon weâll refer to as âelite crybullying," in which people in power engage in political manipulation in order to portray themselves as victims. Routinely, we hear that armed American police fear for their safety around unarmed civilians, lawmakers feel for the their safety after there's a sit in protest and corporate executives are being unfairly intimated by union organizers.
It's a sleazy, manipulative tactic that not only flattens, but flips, power dynamics. By claiming to have been bullied or traumatized by those who oppose them, wealthy and influential figures suddenly transform themselves from victimizers into victims. Meanwhile, by this same perverse logic, they characterize their actual victimsâbe they organizing workers and peace activists, who merely seek to stand up for themselves, or people killed by military and police violence â as victimizers.
On this episode, we explore the rise of ruling-class crybullyism, how elites increasingly traffic in the language of anti-bullying and therapy-speak to indemnify themselves from criticism, examine how cynical distortions of power relations recast the upholders of colonialism, labor abuses, and police violence as the oppressed, and the people who dare to object as the oppressors, all in an effort to silence dissent from the justifiably angry masses.
Our guests are Mari Cohen and Saree Makdisi. -
âTeachers Unions: Still a Huge Obstacle to Reform.â âCountering Iranâs Menacing Persian Gulf Navy.â âOpen Everything: The time to end pandemic restrictions is now.â âThe Good Republicansâ Last Standâ
Each of these headlines comes from the same magazine: The Atlantic. For 167 years, the publication has enjoyed elite stature in the American literary and journalistic worlds, publishing such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Barack Obama, and serving as a coveted professional destination for writers throughout the country. Founded by a number of esteemed 19th century authors, the magazine has long prided itself on its cultural and political depth.
But beneath all of its high-minded rhetoric about democracy, free expression, fearlessness, and American ideals is a vehicle of center-right pablum, designed to launder reactionary opinions for a liberal-leaning audience. As the employer of warmongers like Jeffrey Goldberg, Anne Applebaum, and David Frum, under the ownership of a Silicon Valley-tied investment firm hellbent on destroying teachersâ unions, The Atlantic, time and time again, proves a far cry from the truth-pursuing, consensus-disrupting outlet it claims to be.
On this episode, we dive into the history and ideology of The Atlantic, examining the currents of middlebrow conservatism, left-punching, and deference to boring business owners that have run through the magazine throughout its nearly 17 decades of operation.Our guest is Jon Schwarz.
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On this News Brief, we are joined by Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center to discuss the upcoming Johnson v. Grants Pass case, which will be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States on April 22nd 2024. This is the most significant case about the rights of homeless people in decades, determining whether cities can make it a crime to be homeless, to sleep outside, even when there is no safe shelter available to them. We discuss the boarder media narratives that got us to this cruel, irrational point.
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"Viet Cong Use Children as Human Shields," the Associated Press alleged in 1967. "'Civilian casualty?" That's a gray area," Alan Dershowitz argued in The Los Angeles Times in 2006. "We canât ignore the truth that Hamas uses human shields,â"Jason Willick wrote in The Washington Post in 2023.
For more than five decades, military forces with overwhelming firepower, including the U.S., Israel, and others have accused enemy combatants of using âhuman shields.â According to these allegations, militant resistance throughout the world, from the Vietnamese National Liberation Front to Palestinian militants, herd civilians in front of them, or hide in hospitals, religious institutions, and other public places, in order to evade attacks. In turn, they force the enemy to âriskâ killing civilians, and they themselves bear responsibility for those who are killed.
But rarely, if ever, have these accusations been true. Indeed, the term âhuman shields,â despite having a clear legal definition, has become a catch-all for militias or insurgency groups that merely operate among a civilian population, functioning as a convenient pretext for invading, occupying and colonial forces to kill civilians, and reinforcing racist conceptions about besieged populations. So why, and how, do media provide cover for governments that lie about and instrumentalize supposed âhuman shieldingâ?
On this episode, we dissect the decades-old âhuman shieldsâ accusation, examining how it dehumanizes and militarizes people living under occupation and invasions, demonizes resistance movements, and sanitizes civilian-killing aggressors as reluctant actors who "simply had no choice."
Our guests are Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini.
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"Join Wall Street. Save the world," The Washington Post urged in 2013. "How to Know Your Donations Are Doing the Most Good," The New York Times proclaimed in 2015. "I give 10 percent of my income to charity. You should, too," Vox advised last November.
Each of these headlines tops a piece that extols the virtues of Effective Altruism, a philanthropic philosophy, for lack of a better term, ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of the best ways to address large-scale, global ills like pandemics and factory farming, informed by âevidence and reason.â The school of thought, popularized by figures like the academic and author Peter Singer and disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, has been widely embraced â or at least uncritically boosted â in mainline media for years.
Superficially, this makes sense. Effective Altruism seems unimpeachably virtuous: Itâs great if people want to solve the worldâs problems, and so much the better if theyâve done their research. But beneath this surface lies a deeply reactionary movement, predicated on an age-old desire to characterize the wealthy as the solution to, rather than the cause of, the very problems they purport to want to solve.
On this episode, we parse the rise, motives, and influence of Effective Altruism. We look at how the doctrine gamifies wealth distribution, falsely portrays the rich as uniquely qualified to make decisions about public welfare, often provides cover for eugenics and racism, and masquerades as a groundbreaking ethos of data-driven compassion while it merely regurgitates a 100-year-old rich person ideology of supposedly benevolent control over the masses.
Our guest is Dr. Linsey McGoey.
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"Make sense of the dayâs news and ideas," urges The Morning, a daily New York Times newsletter. "Get smarter, faster on news and information that matters to you," Axios assures its readership. "This is how the news should sound," The New York Times again declares, via its podcast The Daily.
Over the last ten years, roughly speaking, weâve seen the proliferation of the daily digest-style newsletter and podcast at legacy and new media organizations. Inspired, at least loosely, by the so-called explanatory journalism of Vox and similar outlets that arose in the mid-2010s, publications now commonly offer bite-sized breakdowns of the news that allegedly matters most, delivered to the inboxes of upwardly mobile, dinner-party-hosting, perennially on-the-go professionals - or at least those who want to think of themselves as such.
Thereâs certainly nothing wrong with accessibility in news mediaâquite the opposite, in fact. But, for corporate âexplanatoryâ news models, itâs worth asking who makes the decisions about which news is the âmost important,â and about how that news is framed. How do seemingly benign, even folksy promises to âmake sense of the newsâ mask the ideology of corporate media institutions? And what are the dangers of herding audiences into a center-right political consensus that issues complaints like âcampus speech is vexingâ and âthe left is less welcoming than the rightâ?
On this episode, we examine the rise and hegemony of centrist micro-news platformsâfrom Axiosâs trademarked "Smart Brevity" to The New York Timesâ David Leonhardtâs newsletter The Morning and The Daily podcastâlooking at how they package left-punching, pathologically incurious, glib news nuggets served up to busy, upwardly mobile, well-meaning liberals.
Our guest is writer Jacob Bacharach.
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Get shredded! Get a hot trad wife! Close the Baxter Account! Join us Jan 30 at 8:30pm ET for a live show beg-a-thon with guest Hussein Kesvani, as we break down the most ridiculous and toxic rise-and-grind guys on social media, from David Goggins to Andy Elliott to Ed Mylett. We will be giving away merch, dunking on intense grifter assholes, and having a generally good time live on our YouTube channel.
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In this News Brief, we are joined by Adam's anonymous co-author of their two recent studiesâone of print and one of cable newsâdetailing US's media's double standards when covering the 'Gaza conflict.'
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âAging population to hit U.S. economy like a 'ton of bricks',â Reuters reported in 2021. âAging Is The Real Population Bomb,â the International Monetary Fund cautioned earlier this year. âHow an aging population poses challenges for U.S. economy, workforce and social programs,â PBS declared in June. âWhy weâre borrowing to fund the elderly while neglecting everyone else,â The Washington Postâs Catherine Rampell wrote just this past November.
Year after year, it seems, American media issues the same warning: The population of the US, due to - among other factors - rising life expectancy and falling birthrates, is getting older, which spells doom for our economy. A graying public, weâre told, will inevitably upend the labor force, destroy productivity, bleed programs like Medicare and Social Security dry, and thus place an undue burden on the younger population.
But the premises for this panic are based on misleading stats, goofy non-sequiturs, and misdirected faux class warfare. So, why do media keep insisting the olds are out for your hard-earned money? Who gets to shape our understanding of what an aging population actually means economically or socially? How does this narrative shift the burden from the state to the individual in terms of managing retirement benefits and systems of care? And what are the real harms of treating people over the age of 65 like theyâre a cancer on society?
On this episode, we examine the narrative that an aging population is necessarily dire, looking at how itâs instrumentalized to gut public benefits for seniors and thus for everyone, advance the financialization of retirement, and reframe the conflict between rich and poor as one between young and old.
Our guest is social security expert Nancy Altman.
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âU.S. shipment of 'lethal aid' reaches Ukraine amid Russia tensions,â NBC News reported in January 2022. âU.S. adopting 'deterrence posture' as aircraft carrier heads towards Israel,â France 24 announced in October 2023. The same month, The Hill warned about âNutrition: The national security threat no one is talking about.â This is part two of our two-part episode on the language of war. Last week, we discussed terms like âboots on the groundâ and âmilitary footprint;â âprecisionâ or âtargeted airstrikes;â âterrorismâ and the very Orwellian phrase âenemy noncombatant.â If you havenât listened to that episode, we definitely encourage you to do so. On this episode, we examine more of the most insidious terms that U.S. media and government officials use to sanitize military aggression worldwide, how this is affecting coverage of Israelâs nonstop murderous bombing of Gaza, and discuss how we all can and should use clearer, more accurate terms to describe the real human stakes of state violence. Our guests are Maha Hilal and David Vine.
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âIsrael Called Them âPrecisionâ Strikes. But Civilian Homes Were Hit, Too.,â The New York Times equivocated back in May 2023. âUS Military Footprint in Australia Expands to Counter China,â Bloomberg announced in July 2023. âNATO to launch biggest military exercise since Cold War,â the Financial Times reported in September 2023.
Far too often, media accept and parrot the terminology of the Pentagon, never pausing to consider how deceptive and pernicious this language may be. War reportage is regularly littered with euphemisms, metaphors, jargon, and esoteric acronyms that obscure the enormity of the warfare and war crimes waged and backed by the US, warping public perceptions of the violence happening throughout the world in service of US empire.
Some major news outlets, such as the New York Times, have adopted policies not to use terms like âenhanced interrogation techniques,â a Bush-era phrase used to sanitize the committing, sanctioning and outsourcing of literal torture by the US government. More recently, the BBC has said it will no longer use the term âterrorist,â as it is âa loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally.â But, troublingly, many loaded, euphemistic words and phrases remain in the vocabulary of leading news media, painting a woefully inaccurate and incomplete picture of both the past and the current state of US-led and US-backed violence around the world.
On this episode, Part I of a two-part series on the language of war, weâll examine five of the 10 most insidious terms that US media and government officials use to sanitize military aggression worldwide, discussing how journalists, writers, and others in media can use terms that are clearer and more representative of the human stakes of war. Next week, weâll complete the list of 10 with Part II.
Our guests are Maha Hilal and David Vine.
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âWriters Strike Fallout: $2B Economic Impact May Be Just the Beginning,â the Hollywood Reporter states. âLooming UAW strike could cost US economy more than $5B in just 10 days,â Fox Business announces. âIn a Strong Economy, Why Are So Many Workers on Strike?â the New York Times wonders.
Weâre regularly exposed to news mediaâs updates on some vague notion of âthe economy.â Though itâs never really defined, âthe economy,â we are told, is something that will suffer if a work stoppage happens, even though striking workers might stand a chance to reap some real economic benefits. Itâs also something that somehow does just fine, even thrives, despite rising homelessness, poverty, food insecurity, and general stress and anxiety among the public about their ability to afford basic needs.
Against all of this, pundits wonder why people in the US have doubts about the strength of the economy, when, by their standards, itâs doing so well. But when âthe economyâ is at odds with the interests of the working public, what does that tell us about mediaâs understanding and use of the term? Whose interests are truly reflected in mainline mediaâs definitions, or lack thereof, of the economy?
On this episode, we examine mediaâs use of the term and concept of âthe economy,â looking at how and why metrics reflecting the interests of capitalâ like the GDP, the Dow, or IMF reportsâare positioned as more important and accurate indicators of economic strength than metrics reflecting the needs of the average person. And how âthe economyâ is presented as a fragile precious thing that striking workers, protestors, and those seeking to interrupt the normal flow of life want to avoid damaging, at all costs.
Our guest is writer Kim Kelly.
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In this impromptu Live Show recorded 10/16, we breakdown the latest efforts by Democrats to support Israel's brutal bombing and collective punishment of Gaza while still looking "deeply concerned" about the logical outcomes of this bombing and collective punishment.
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In this public News Brief, we discuss the recent escalation in violence in "the middle east" and the quickly-forming bipartisan consensus to jam the issue into a simplistic, dehumanizing War on Terror narrative
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