Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Robert chronicles Oprah's war with the beef industry and her pivot to new age anti-science nonsense. Also: rainbow parties!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oh boy. Well welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a 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 equalal Rights Amendment 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 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 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 Syrian, right? It's fine.

It's fun. We're good. You done? Whatever it takes, it's fun. We're good. You done? Whatever it takes, dog. 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 Clementine in the break. Oh clutch That's good. I convinced Jamie Loftus to cover a topic. I wanted her to cover in 16th minute during that five-minute break. I'm efficient. Oh wow And Andrew I tried to make your salad And it was really good. Oh, it's a Andrew, I tried to make your salad, and it was really good. It's a really good salad.

It's not my salad, but it just... Unfortunately, it's TikTok, so I plagiarized it either way, but it is TikTok's salad, I guess. It's someone's salad, I understand that, but it's not mine. TikTok has the best recipes, honestly. RIP, question mark? Maybe, who knows? By the title of my name.

Get ready for a little red book. You don't know. I pledge allegiance to Communist China. You know what? We all pledge allegiance to Communist China. I spent three minutes on, what is that? What's the new one? I forgot the name to this joke. Little red book.

I spent three minutes. I don't know why they call it. The joke's not gonna work anymore. Whatever, fuck it. It's done. It's done. Oprah Pillows, go. I couldn't be less interested

in 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. John Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics

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It was big news. I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery, big, big news. A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story. I like saw, nothing happened. An arrest, trial and conviction soon follow. He did not kill her. There's no way. Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free?

Did you kill her? Listen to The Real Killer, Season Three, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The TikTok of her day. The TikTok? Actually, kind of, yes. BOTH LAUGH Kind of, yes.

Although Oprah, I mean, I guess the big difference is, TikTok really launched to popularity with like tweens and teens, whereas Oprah is immediately and for her whole career, very, very much locked into like 30 to 50 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 a lock that's like unequaled by anyone else on that specific demographic,

which is like a very, it's everyone's moms, right? I'm not, I hope people say that to be joking. My mom, who I disagreed with, but respect a lot, watched Oprah every single fucking day, right? Like everyone's mom did. 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?

I was like, Oprah, Oprah. We're gonna be 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 like specifically even on a moral level, just in terms of that is how cultural critics talked about her.

This was trash TV. It's hard to get to, again, hard to get to grips with if like, you grew up with her in the 90s 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 when free 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. Um, 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 Peck. It's not a biography, it's like an analysis of the role Oprah has played in the evolution of American society over the last 30 years. Janis writes about the critiques that Washington Post writer Tom Shales had of Winfrey's program, labeling it talk rot. Quote, Shales decried talk shows as a daily parade of wackos, loonies, 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. In promos, 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 saying we're dumb for not reading but like her stuff show is making us dumber and like Yeah, it's it's it's 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 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 handbasket, 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 gender 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 you know 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 Catullus, 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. 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-toity cultural critics are attacking her because they also view, they rightly are like, well, the satanic panic stuff is like smut. But also this woman talking about how she like 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 like 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 yeah 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 this 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. Yes, that's a very good note, Andrew. Yeah, both of you very good notes. Thank you. It's a mess. Cause 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. Oh, 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 was your coverage of the transgender community. And boy howdy, 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 of her early guests that had an impact on her is she finds this transgender mother with brittle bone disease. So this is both somebody who is 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. This is Oprah was very homophobic as a child and as a young adult. She would list this experience as key to her overcoming the bigotry that she had been raised with. 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. She clearly loves this kid. This kid's going to grow up with love.

That's all that matters to me as a kid who was neglected. 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 you're 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. Right. I'm glad she did, you know? In January of 1994, a 39-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 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 coming into the late 90s 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, Marianne Williamson. Here she is. Here's our girl. There we go. I forgot about this. She absolutely did! This is when Oprah becomes a spiritual influencer.

Marianne Williamson is like a key part of that. Here's how Janis Peck describes Williamson at this stage in her career. Again, this is 94. Williamson is quote, a former nightclub singer, self-described spiritual psychologist, occasional advisor to Hillary Clinton, spiritual former nightclub singer, self-described spiritual psychologist, 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. Marianne 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 2020 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 1992 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 deserve to die because his vibes were off And it's like it's not she's she would say no I'm saying that like if you like part of healing this is fixing 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 explain 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 you would, 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. And I also think there's so much of it that's so locked inside their heads. Like it's even separate from how something like Mary Ann acts. Because I found an article by a friend of hers

called David Kessler, and it was on her website. 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 was 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 hold in 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 think it is just like the only able to concentrate on the positive or what you perceive as the positive. It is like, yeah, 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 that is the answer so much more often than like outright evil is like, oh, well, you just your brains not function. You've got like somebody somebody dropped like a wrench in there. And it's just like, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm like, it's's so tempting to way 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, 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 all that bright. Right, like it comes down to that a lot of the time. Yeah, like 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 like if we if we all had like 20 percent less 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.

Um, to really fuck shit up, which is where we're living now. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Anyway, speaking of where we're living now, Marianne Williamson was the beginning of Oprah's

pivot to alternative medicine and spirituality. As we noted, millions of 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 underpinnings, because 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 what all of the good spiritual conmen claim to do, right? The author of this book, Helen Schuchman, 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. What an, that's such a good thing to claim.

Like I, the balls to be like, oh, like, are you gonna, I'm not wrong. You're saying Jesus is wrong. Like, I, I. Oh, you're saying Jesus is wrong? Huh? How many times did you get sacrificed on Golgotha, huh? Yeah?

How many nails 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. Hey listeners, I'm Lauren Bright-Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. Murder on Songbird Road revisits a controversial 2020 murder that occurred in southern Illinois.

It divided a community and pitted families against one another, but questions remain as to whether the mother of four serving time for the crime is actually guilty. I'm excited to tell you that you can get access to all episodes of Murder on Songbird Road, 100% ad-free and one week before anyone else with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today. So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear? I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to. I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success. Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at SoundItOutTogether.org. That's SoundItOutTogether.org.

Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. Can you hear it? It's the whisper of two wolves inside you. One says, you're not enough. The other says, keep going, you can do this. They're always talking. The one you listen to shapes your life. I'm Eric Zimmer, host of The One You Feed.

On my podcast, we explore how to hear the voice that matters, the one that leads you to courage, wisdom, and love. It's not about perfection, it's about direction. Millions of listeners have fed their good wolf. Now it's your turn. Listen to the one you feed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catch Jon Stewart back in action on The Daily Show, or wherever you get your podcasts. companion to stay on top of what's happening now. Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners, like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was just going to say, does none of these people find it sacrilegious how stupid Jesus is in these instances? Yeah, yeah, that he's the Jesus is like saying medicine doesn't really work. It's all about thinking your way through problems. Yeah, nobody ever catches that. Well, everyone does, except for these people. Right.

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 her is you're like, well, I believe this. But the fact that she's saying Jesus wrote this whole thing, that's probably not going to play on TV. I probably want to keep that quiet. Like, so I'm going to and what, what Marianne does is she's like, all right, well, I think this is basically 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 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 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 sinned. Yeah. All of our faces on the screen are like that Winona Ryder trying to do a trigonometry equation meme. Like what?

What? Are we good? Does that make sense to everybody? Totally checks out. Yeah. All right. That all sc God. Yeah, all right, that all scans, yeah. So again, this is like, you know,

you can see a lot of the spirit or the secret in this, you know, 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 in a website titled Circle of Atonement, which I think is probably related to some sort of weird cult or another. 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 guilt is that we did not do it, that we are still as God created us because the separation never occurred. 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 send. Yeah. I listen, I'm a person that has like an obnoxious way of speaking. But.

Is it like 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, what the fuck is this shit? Yeah, we need, you know, I mean, you need a comment section, I guess, is what you need. I think what we need is a little more folk. We all have been vibing 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 fuck are you talking about? Yeah? Come on stop this shit He should be from Boston. He should be from Boston ideally He should be from Boston ideally. Who just like, when someone says that, there should be like a vaguely Bostonian guy going, nah. The problem is, he should be from Boston, but not like that.

Not like that. Not in that way. 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 Physionomy 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

Materially dumber than anything Elon Musk tweets. Oh absolutely not But I think it leads us there in part, right? And what a- Yes. When you get a lot of- It's a sub-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. Instead of fixing systems, the answer comes down more to fixing yourself and your individual attitude. That can be very problematic. Verging on solipsistic, right? When we get to this area, it's like nothing is... The problems aren't real. 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 Could see how it functions as a pretty useful like political and social ideology. Yes. Yes. It's great for capitalism like like political and social ideology. Yes, yes, it's great for capitalism. Like, if this is your attitude, once you get a nice house, climate change is no longer a problem. The Pacific palisades are a paradise. Hmm, something smells odd on the air.

Let me look at the window. You know, your mind palace is your paradise, Robert. Right, right. Yeah, and when you're living in a $24,000 a night hotel, because again, the palisades burn down, your mind palace is still there for you, you know? That's the beauty. LA doesn't have a homelessness problem,

we just need more mind 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, literally you are like the Matrix, but no, this is actually how philosophy works and religion works, yes. Yeah, it's just like, ugh. 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 like the parable of the cave people just really jonesing for some more cave. Yeah That is what I took out of the allegory of the cave is like caves pretty cool. Okay, like shadows I love Kay, you know, 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

Shadows, baby. I'm good. I'm ready. Give me some Adam Scott. So thanks to Williamson's advocacy and Oprah's platform, A 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 2 million copies. And Oprah doesn't just plug that book and her friend Mary Ann's book. She and Maryann sit down and they lay out in the set. 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 empowerment and beauty. Quote, during the hour, this is Janiece 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 neglect of 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. While 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 war. Yeah, well Williamson has a writing credit on that. It was her and George R.R. Martin really banging it out in a week. No, that's a lie, that's a lie, I'm sorry. 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 joke or not. I would sit and listen to George R. R. Martin and Marianne 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 Eckhart Tolle, 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 Tolle'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 and disregard of the total organism cells proliferate and we have disease and tolls argument Here is that like over thinking 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 is then 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 0% 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 where we start talking. Or reason lost.

Yeah. Reasons may be lost. Reason is at least like Great Britain on the first day of the Battle of Britain, you know? France has surrendered. I don't know what the French equivalent of reason is. And yeah, we're watching those stukas rain down on fucking London It's not good, but what do you know what are you gonna do? I don't know Yeah, I actually have no idea Andrew

Don't worry. So much. I think Chopra 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 dr. Oz And honestly a less toxic one Chopra starts out as a well-regarded Endocrinologist 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 Dr. Chris Consilvio writes, he preaches the body is 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 futile or fundamentally flawed in ways that make it less reliable than embracing 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 promised as 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. Germ theories? Wrong. I, Deepak Chopra, can explain it.

Your brain's not thinking good enough Now Chopra I mean, but you know I guess I I feel like someone should just say that's not true his last That's not how it is like antibiotics are great The model doesn't break down The model doesn't break down. The model doesn't break down. Bringing in gene therapy along, it's one of those things where it's like,

okay, well, depending on what you mean by gene therapy, sure, there's a lot of shit that people talked about in sci-fi that hasn't happened, but that has nothing to do with germ theory, right? No. Germ theory is a very robust model. Chopra writes a line, 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 anti-psychotics. 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 were like, should I take my anti-psychotics might take from that article, maybe I won't. But also- He's not not saying it. He's not not saying it, right? It's also just like, you know, just because there isn't a full understanding of schizophrenia. You can really trust chemotherapy, vaccine, et cetera.

Like, yeah. Well, there's always that real thing, which is that like, yeah, man, there's actually a shitload of problems that modern medicine like treats and talks about schizophrenia. Absolutely. You don't know anything about this. Yeah, yeah. Like you're not helping. Yeah, his pitch is 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. What 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. I'm like, you know, they feel like their symptoms or whatever, or 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 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 Deepak 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 prophet of alternative medicine and the great de-educator. Chopra'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 got, 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-vax 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-90s is that in the middle of all of this new age woo 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 make 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 1996, Oprah dedicated a segment of her show to mad cow disease and brought on an animal rights activist and vegetarian named Howard Lyman. The UK had just had a major mad cow outbreak and had to cull 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 tainted 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 dropped 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 thought of stuff that's gross and inhumane and climatically 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 is mad cow disease. The US beef industry really doesn't deserve that. Lyman's prediction that 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 2003 and the most recent in 2023. And these were all isolated and caught fairly quickly. Preventing the spread of mad cow was something the US beef industry has proved very good at, particularly considering the fact that the UK and France, which normally have much Preventing the spread of mad cow with something 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 prion 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 Great Lakes region, 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, 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's, that's the, I, 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 libelous statements about food safety. Representatives of the cattle industry complained to Texas agricultural commissioner Rick Perry, who wrote 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 libelous. I've just pointed out that like, she was kind of wrong for this to be the focus when talking about bad aspects of the beef industry. But like when you were seeing mad cow go 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 take 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 Amarillo, Texas.

Or shit, is it Abilene? I wrote Amarillo, 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 going to fly my entire crew down to this show, to this town in Texas, and just film the Oprah Renfrew show from there, which is exactly what she does. So here's the Texas Tribune.

Rather than putting her show on hiatus for weeks, she brought it with her and framed parts of it as an homage to the city and state she suddenly found herself in. Winfrey donned a cowboy hat and drew cheers by occasionally mimicking a Texas accent. Texas-born 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, Winfrey recalled in 2012. It was stressful. It was challenging to be on trial, may I just say, is one of the worst experiences 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 Amarillo. Y'all know why,' she said during one segment, drawing laughs from the audience." Large crowds showed up, both for Winfrey's show and outside the courtroom, to catch a glimpse of her Amarillo 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. Ooh. I know we're here to talk about her as a bastard, but you gotta love that. Like that is cool 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 is like all right motherfuckers Like let's lean into it. I will get this whole town on my side Just out of curiosity though did any of the people that she called like Satanist baby rapist Did they ever sue her just out of curiosity? 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 declares victory. Beef industry representatives declare victory too, stating that the cost of the case would make other media figures more careful about spreading disinformation.

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, Dr. Phil McGraw. Again, folks, for an episode on Bastard Dream, we're not going to talk about Dr. Phil or Dr.

Oz in 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,

it's like a chain letter, right? If you buy the first thing that comes on, you'll have a happy life. When you die, your whole family will be around you. There will be no pain. You'll hear the trumpet of St. Peter. Is it him that has a trumpet? You'll hear some fucking trumpet

and then everything will be good. You'll go to heaven. It'll be great. Hey, listeners. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. Murder on Songbird Road revisits a controversial 2020 murder that occurred in Southern Illinois. It divided a community and pitted families against one another, but questions remain as to whether the mother of four serving time for the crime is actually guilty. I'm excited to tell you that you can get access

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It's the whisper of two wolves inside you. It's the whisper of two wolves inside you. One says, you're not enough. The other says, keep going. You can do this. They're always talking. The one you listen to shapes your life. I'm Eric Zimmer, host of The One You Feed. On my podcast, we explore how to hear the voice that matters, the one that leads you

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Is it St. Gabriel? And St. Jerome. And St. Cecilia. A lot of them got trumpets. How am I supposed to? It's like a ska band up there, you know? Like. I don't know, lots of trumpets. 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 had 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 told them their kids were in danger.

The clearest example of this comes from 2003, when Oprah Winfrey introduced the concept of, Bridget, so happy to be talking about this rainbow party Well, I shouldn't 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 Or like the fuck are they talking about the fuck is a rainbow party. Is this some 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 for as a perfectly I'm assuming the same mystery review. I like this was a moral panic that we're talking about in the series that I was around for as a perfectly, I'm assuming the same as true of you. 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? Yeah. So, in order to introduce this concept, this comes up on the Oprah Winfrey Show for the first time during a discussion between Oprah and Michelle Burford. Burford is a journalist at O Magazine.

Oprah had launched a magazine, I think in like 99 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 until 2020. And Burford has just finished some hard hitting research on the millennials, you know, our generation.

And she's reading Oprah new slang terms for sex and that our generation has cooked up. And again, this is 2003. So everybody prepare to take some notes. Also just the selection for more videos. It's so scary. Fascinating stuff. Fascinating stuff. What is happening to Elmo?

Oh my God, is that? Yeah, the Elmo thing is, I think that's from the new Dune show, and that's clearly someone playing Matt Gaetz on SNL, just because of how uncomfortable that woman looks, I can tell it's supposed to be Matt Gaetz, anyway. I don't know. Okay, so what is a salad toss?

A toss salad is, get ready, hold on to your underwear for this one, oral anal sex. So oral sex to the anus is what toss salad is. Hi mom. It's so big on the top. That mom looks so worried. That's so worried. It's 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 mom shaking her head penis hence the term rainbow Like it was yesterday 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 girls school.

I was the biggest nerd in the world. I was not having sex with anybody. But my mom sitting me down and being like, is this a thing that's happening at school? I was like, the fiction that young people were doing things like rainbow parties, it just, yeah, it just really is burned in my mind that 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. Cause like, I remember seeing this as like a 15 year old and going, no we're not. Like I'm not, look, 15 year old Robert, not exactly doing a lot of sex parties,

but also I knew enough about my generation to like, neither were basically anyone else in my school. Right, there were some kids having sex, but there weren't rainbow parties. Like people were like dry humping behind the Walmart. Right, right. And like that was it. Like it wasn't like sex parties.

Yeah, everybody's got a different lipstick and you compare the rainbows on your dick. What? Like where is this happening? Where's the lipstick shades? Many questions. My mom asked where is this happening? Where are you doing the lipstick shades? Many questions. My mom asked me about this too. Yeah.

That was a weird thing and I was like, I was like, mom, look at me. Look at these bags I have. Nothing is happening. 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've done as 15 year olds? Or does it sound like something an adult pervert invented because they're sick, right? Is that? I was gonna say, whoever invented this truly needs to go to jail. Yes! Like the concept is.

Yes! This is marketing child pornography. That's what you've done. Yeah, well they did like a version of this on that teen show Degrassi, but 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 like, oh, if you wear a brown one, you know what that means. This one's for blue jobs. Yeah, it's like nobody was doing that. Nobody.

But Sophie, now that you brought up Degrassi, 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 Degrassi, famous pedophile Drake. Oh shit. We're through the looking glass, people! Robert, we got this locked down!

Careful, that man is suing people! He's suing Kendrick Lamar, come on! He's suing Kendrick, he's suing 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 must've took him from Mack Lamar once. Robert, I swear! Wait, howlemore once. Robert, I swear. Wait, how does that happen? Robert, I swore on.

I don't know who people are. Like not by looks or songs, I just thought people. Robert, we swore we would take that secret to our grave. They couldn't have waterboarded that shit out of me. It's the most angry I've ever been at you. Yeah, the internet's going to light on fire. Drake's gonna get off scot-free now. And then we all made a pact in my car

that we would never repeat this because it was so dramatic. I'm too honest a 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 fuck, Robert.

It's okay, I listened to a Kendrick Lamar song after that. I knew you were in my car. It was pretty good. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. Macklemore'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? I guess it's working.

Like ignore my sins, focus on Drake and the rainbow parties. Let's blame him for that. Disappointments back. Oh my God. 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 50 girls I talked to, this was pervasive. Here's a quick tip on like knowing if a journalist is not a good journalist. A good journalist, if they had talked to 50 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 30 of them said they'd heard of this, none of them have been to one, maybe they're not real? Like that would be journalism, right? That's the start of it at least.

You know, Burford says of the 50 girls I talked to, quote unquote, this was pervasive. Now I'll say this right now. Burford says of the 50 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 accurate this book was, are there still kids? So the checks? No, let's let's let's do a quick fact check. OK, 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.

It came up with just. Oh, she's great. She is a right-wing pediatrician who has spent the last 20 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 2003, Oprah laundered her conservative Christian propaganda because hey, sex sells. Best and Bogle, who wrote a book called Kids Gone Wild, that 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 Bogle 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 even have 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 Rain Well Parties being real. So if you're following the evidentiary chain of custody here

Oprah's reporter says I talked to 50 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 cuz it was on Oprah We're locked in, baby. The circular bullshit machine. Yeah, it's beautiful stuff. Another. Oh, and actually this gets back to Degrassi. Another story 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 just going on being like oh that girl's got the bracelet for a foot job I'm getting them 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 schools. Right, right. Yes, yes, they're all having like the kind of key parties that like middle-aged swingers had in 1974. Yeah. 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 yeah, no, they were banned from 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 a media panic because kids are like well alright Let's give it a shot But yeah It's not until professional media idiots like Matt Lauer or Montel Williams make a big deal about it that it becomes a thing and In that interview in salon best in Bogle get to the heart of what's really going on with all of this Professional media idiots like Matt Lauer or Montell Williams make a big deal about it that it becomes a thing.

And in that interview and salon, Best and Bogle 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 chapters 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. They 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 could talk to parents about it So they can say we banned those bracelets to put a stop to that.

Then of course the media. There's both the idea that sex sells, but also fear sells 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 columnists are aware of that. Now, we're gonna 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 maybe what you would have thought Pretty Boy meant in your time. And dirty means what? Does dirty mean 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 V, high five.

So if you got high five'd by Jack, you got diseased by Jack. You mean he gave you HIV? He gave you HIV, yeah. What? So that means you shouldn't go around saying to the little kid anymore, I was like a little You got diseased by Jack. He gave you HIV. He gave you HIV, yeah. So that means you shouldn't go around saying to the little kids anymore, I was like a little boy, I went, give me high five. You shouldn't do that anymore, right? And if suddenly your kids want to make salad all the time,

you should be wondering. Okay. And booty call is pretty common, right? Yeah, that's pretty pervasive. Yeah, that's an early morning or late at night call for sex that involves no real relationship. Maybe 2 a.m. guy calls girl and says, meet me at so and so location. We have sex, we leave. Woody call. Y'all knew that.

Y'all got that, right? Okay. And then there's the term hoovering, which is a term used for a girl having an abortion. Yes, 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 her team's referring to. I got a whole new vocabulary book. So what would happen when they would say she got Hoovered?

Well, if somebody here talking to somebody in the beginning before you got so hip here. Yeah, before I got hip. What would you, if somebody said she got Hoovered, you would just say what do you mean right here. Yeah, what would you what would you say? Somebody said she got who would you just say? What do you mean? Yeah? What do you mean? What do you mean? What does who were you mean? She tell me a rainbow party is pretty common I think so at least among the 50 girls that I talked to yeah That gets us back to what we'd said before but like oh god

The idea that like kids have like a fun term for getting HIV The idea that like kids have like a fun term for getting HIV Also not to give notes on the slang, but shouldn't be high for I 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 it's so badly. Oh, man. Yeah. I 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 you all seen that meme where it's like iced tea from law and order SVU explaining fake things? That's what that reminded me of just someone sitting on stage being like Oh, yeah, the kids are calling it cat littering Like yeah, that was it's just somebody making up fake things for entertainment Idea that kids have like a casual slang term for getting HIV It's it's like it's doing something in a video game. But also, like, I mean, obviously they were they had a vested interest in never thinking

about this. But like, nothing is more like universal than teens lying to all those adults. 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 have lied like cheap rugs. Like 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 I'm realizing now, I guess, is like Oprah's big crime is just like criminal credulity. 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 consequences. It's like the dumbest shit you've ever heard. She'll just be like injured. I mean listen That's exactly what Joe Rogan does so like 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 2000, when Oprah launched O Magazine, quote, Oprah Winfrey arguably has more influence on the culture than any university president, politician, or religious leader, except perhaps the Pope. And I'm just gonna say it, John Paul II, I think, was the Pope at this time,

and I believe Oprah had more of an influence than he did in American culture, at least. Like, who remembers old JP the Two? You got shot once, come on. I know Popes who've been shot way more than that. Also, do individual Popes really have that much influence? I mean, they're still certainly did 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 that- Ooh, I just saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is largely that Stanley Tucci looks incredible in Catholic vestiments. It's like he was poured into him.

That man can really pull off whatever you call those outfits. Also, Ralph Fiennes, oh my God. His tooch chains? Oh, the tooch, the tooch. That was lovely. 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 cardinal. Oh, it's good. They hire an Italian man whose face was made to angrily vape while wearing vestments. It's amazing. That casting director deserves a 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 right now about Tim Ballard, whose lies about his life rescuing kids from child sex trafficking networks were the basis of the blockbuster movie Sound of Freedom. Ballard spent years claiming 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 in 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 during my research, I ran into a really interesting thread in a website on free range parenting. I don't know much about free range. 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 writes, 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. While 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 just the make white women assume that the world is out for their kids industry is the strongest thing going. Yep. 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 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 actual threats that are there, right? Like the creepy soccer coach, the creepy guy at church, right? Like, 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, what the things that are actually happening in your kids' 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 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 our 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 train my eyes on the eye of Horus, 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 is in the world. Yeah.

Like the danger of all of this stuff was less You know kids are having rainbow parties or you know Pedophile gangs are abducting kids in vans and more like hey Have you looked at your your kids Scout leader lately seems like he's a little one-on-one time with the boys By the way should somebody look it on that scouts in general. It's also just like a right wing paramilitary organization. Even without the funny business. Well, you can learn how 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 gonna 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? Is this the start of Robert starting a boy army? Everybody does want a child army. Speaking of popes, Bridget, that's like a third of the popes. Wow. Solid subset of the pope population has child armies. Anyway, I think that's an episode.

Yeah, I was gonna say we gotta stop. Turns out we got 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, plugables? Yeah, you can subscribe to my boy army newsletter. No, just kidding. You can listen to my podcast.

There are no girls 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 BridgettmarianDC. Excellent. Andrew T. I don't know, man. Just as you know, it's as racist as 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. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, listeners. I'm Lauren Bright-Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast, and I'm excited to share this riveting story with you. I'm also excited to tell you that you can now get access to all episodes of Murder on Songbird Road, 100% ad-free, and one week early through the iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple podcasts. Plus, you'll get access to other chart-topping true crime shows you love, like Betrayal, The Girlfriends, Paper Ghosts, Murder Homes,

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