The Daily Zeitgeist - Police: America's Favorite Failure feat. Alec Karakatsanis 08.01.23

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

In episode 1524, Jack and Miles are joined by Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps and author of Usual Cruelty, Alec Karakatsanis, to discuss…  "The Criminal Justice System" aka The Criminal Punishment Bureaucracy, Becoming Desensitized To The Normalization Of The System, Seeing It With Fresh Eyes,The History of White Supremacy Over White Collar Accountability, Wait Are We The Baddies? Steps To The Comprehensive Change We Need and more! LISTEN: Nebulous Tango by HetherSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's so much beauty in Mexican culture, like mariachis, delicious cuisine, and even Lucha Libre. Join us for the new podcast, Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12-episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre. And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar. Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts. In California during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles,

two women did something no other woman had done before, try to assassinate the president of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson. 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad-free and receive exclusive

bonus content by subscribing to iHeartTrue Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts. What happens when a professional football player's career ends and the applause fades and the screaming fans move on? I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. For some former NFL players, a new faith provides answers. You mix homesteading with guns and church.

Voila! You got straight away. They try to save everybody. Listen to Spiraled on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, the internet, and welcome to Season 298, Episode 2 of The Daily Zeitgeist! A production of iHeartRadio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into American shared consciousness. It is Tuesday, one of our special eps, deep dive eps. It's August 1st. Welcome to August 1st.

Welcome. Welcome to August 1st. Welcome to August 2023. Yeah. 8-1-20-23, Miles 23 miles yeah it's international mahjong day okay just so you know international child free day i don't know what that means but hopefully it just means hey do you uh world cancer world lung cancer day respect for parents day national minority donor awareness day we got it all we've got it all. We've got it all. Respect for Parents Day feels like it was created by

a dad in shorts and long socks saying, you will respect me. Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah, weird. I gave you love. Yeah. I say weird because I just said that five minutes ago to my kids. My name's Jack O'Brien, aka Let's Talk About Space Baby.

Let's talk about UAPs. Let's talk about all the tech things, non-human things, and NFTs. Courtesy of BlinkyHag on the Discord. Are UAP bros the new NFT bros? Feels like there's a certain portion of people who are like the UFO craze on Capitol Hill last week. People who are like the UFO craze on Capitol Hill last week. It's just the new NFTs, the new thing that captured the attention and entire hearts of the gullible. And to that I say, to the moon!

I remain personally fascinated by the story. Even if they're lying, it's such a wild lie to tell on Capitol Hill. So anyways, I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co-host, Mr. Miles Gray! Miles Gray, a.k.a. I'm here under oath. I swear this is real. I'm bold and I have named prying states on UFOs. Delusion is their claim. Just watch the film real.

There's no deep fake. 240p. That dick take is airborne. Okay, shout out to Ray Zach again. Natalie and Bruglia Torn. I also caught that at the karaoke party I was at this weekend, but they were not doing UAP adjacent lyrics. So thank you for that, Ray Zach.

It's their problem, man. Yeah. Miles, we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by when we decided to do the deep dive episodes, probably the first name that came up, the executive director of Civil Rights Corps, which is a nonprofit dedicated to fighting systemic injustice. He's been a civil rights lawyer, a public defender. He was named 2016's trial lawyer of the year by public justice. He's the author of several books most recently the incredibly compelling

usual cruelty most importantly a great follow on social media please welcome the brilliant the talented alec karakatsanis hi everyone thanks for having me back yeah thanks for being back yeah the first time i forget exactly what we talked about, but I'm sure there were some very stupid stories in there. I'm sure it's depressing. Yeah. We were like, man, I'd like to just hear Alec talk about Alec things. And then we created a new format of episodes. Let Alec cook is what they've been saying on the Discord.

These are the let Alec cook episodes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, thrilled to have you here. Thrilled to talk to you about usual cruelty. Let's get to know you a little bit better. What is something, sir, from your search history that's revealing about who you are? That's such a good question. So lately I've been making a lot of paintings in general.

And lately I've been making a lot of mosaics. And I was making a bunch of mosaics and I was making a bunch of mosaics from flowers that I grew and then I dried and then I take different colors and try to make little designs. And then I tried to get a little bit more ambitious and, um, and make mosaics out of like wine corks. Okay. And so I, I asked a bunch of my friends and family to collect wine corks for me, but, but I, you know, I guess they don't drink enough. So I don't have enough wine corks. And so I started searching, how do you buy,

there's a whole market on the internet. Used wine corks? Used wine corks of different sizes, shapes, designs, colors. It's a little overwhelming. So I've been Googling wine corks that I can make a very large wine cork mosaic. Wait, what's like the market for Lucy's, what we call loose wine corks?

You know, it depends on, you know, the exact size and shape. Do you want champagne corks? Do you want corks that are stained with red wine? Do you want corks that don't have a red wine stain? Do you want corks that have a design on the top, design on the side? I mean, it's really kind of, it's overwhelming overwhelming and you can sort of go down some rabbit holes there but i just want you know some simple straightforward wine corks that i can paint different colors right right right yeah yeah i noticed a couple of times and usual cruelty when you're talking about things that could be funded

instead of you know a police state and a unjust carceral system, you talk about like the arts and funding the arts and public education and for youth education. Is that something that you like, how do you keep that as a part of your life? Is that something that kind of keeps you grounded as you're dealing with some pretty real difficult subjects during the course of your work? Absolutely. When you think about, for example, the hundreds of billions of dollars that this country spends on things that destroy things like bombs and fighter jets and weapons and police prisons, et cetera, even a tiny fraction of that money could be spent giving it to people to make things, whether it's theater performances or murals, gardens, poetry, writing, film. I mean, we could be filling our society with beauty and providing hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process, all for just a tiny fraction of

the money that we spend on destroying things. And for me, working with artists, we do a lot of work in our organization with artists who've been in prison, artists who are thinking about how to create beautiful art in their communities that documents some of the horrific things that are happening, but also some of the hope and some of the beautiful things that people are coming up with in the spirit of fighting back against these systems. And so we have an artist and a poet in residence every year at our organization who are people who've been in prison and who are now making a living as artists. And we've had exhibits in major museums across the country. And we're constantly trying to think about how do we tell the story of what's happening in the criminal punishment bureaucracy, which has a tendency to dehumanize and to become this sort

of assembly line system of, you know, punishment. How do we tell stories in a really different way that reaches people, maybe in a way that lawyers can't typically do it with their legal arguments, but through art. And so art has always been a really big, and music has always been a big, a really big part of my life. Yeah. Did you grow up painting? Or is that something that kind of came late? No, I have absolutely no skill. When I say I make paintings, I really shouldn't even be saying that in public.

You're not... I grew up playing the piano, actually. I was trained as a classical pianist and doing musical theater and was never permitted to do any artwork because I was, I had just absolutely no skill, but I really like making art now. And so that's kind of my hobby of choice when I get a chance, although I'm not going to be winning any art awards. Yeah. Late in life, getting into painting feel like the, the other example that popped into my

mind is, is, uh, one of my favorite artists george w no uh bob dylan like went through a stage in his career where he started painting and like it kind of unlocked some of the best albums of his career and then you see his paintings from that time they're like not you know they're not great I'm sure they've sold at auction for like a lot of money before. But, you know, just the act of painting seems to unlock things. Well, yeah, because you're quite, you're like, it's another language you're using. If you're not used to making, if you're not a visual artist and you start doing like getting into the visual arts, you're activating parts of your brain that you were not previously.

So I can totally see how that would be super creatively stimulating. Yeah, I think Blood on the Tracks was one that he talked about, like painting being a big thing. Like he was experimenting with new painting styles or something and that created new kind of concepts of time. Anyways, and that's not to say you are late in life, just later in life than most people start painting. I don't want to suggest you're an elderly man. No, no, we're not doing that. What is something you think is overrated? I think prisons are overrated.

You know, we have a society that's putting people in prison at rates unprecedented in world history. We put black people in prison at six times the rate of South Africa at the height of apartheid. We put all people in prison at six times the rate of South Africa at the height of apartheid. We put all people in prison at six times our own national average prior to 1980. And when you read the news, when you listen to the radio, you know, every single social problem that our society has, the solution of people in power is, well, we need more prisons. You know, we've got a drug use problem. We've got prisons. We've got need more prisons. You know, we've got a drug use problem, we've got prisons, we've got homelessness, prisons. So I think the idea that prisons are somehow connected with our safety is one of the most extraordinary myths of our modern society. And in reality, what we know from

decades of empirical research is that prisons actually don't reduce crime at all. They actually slightly increase crime. And really importantly, and a lot of people don't know this, but every year in prison takes two years knows, our overall life expectancy as an entire country is almost two years lower than it would be if we incarcerated people the same as other comparable countries like Europe, Canada, South America, et cetera. So we're literally with prisons costing hundreds of millions of life years in our society. It's really remarkable. And so I think prisons are one of the most overrated things in our society. That's wild. That number, because America will never get to 80 years old. So it's like 78, 77-ish. We'd maybe be more in line with the UK, which is around 80, if we just weren't locking people up. And I didn't realize how much that was affecting

life expectancy. It really does for a variety of reasons, right? People are exposed to infectious disease. They don't get medical care. They don't get nutritious food. Stress. There's violence. People who grew up with parents in prison are more likely to enter the foster care system or more likely to enter the criminal system, which then creates these cycles.

And so there's a lot of mechanisms that cause it, including people can't get jobs after they get out of prison. So like the longer you're away, the less you're able to enter the workforce, the less you're able to find stable housing. So it's really remarkable and it's not discussed very much, but it has a huge impact on all of our life expectancies. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you just did it there, but something that your book and following you and reading you consistently, I feel like you do a good job of making people see the insanity of our current system with fresh eyes. So yeah, and we'll continue digging into that. What's something you think is underrated? continue digging into that. What is something you think is underrated? You know, I've been thinking a lot recently about David Graeber, who died during the pandemic and is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. And I think he's really underrated. A lot of people in mainstream US society don't know about David Graeber, who was a professor at Yale, and he was sort of forced out of Yale for being too progressive and ended up teaching in the UK, in London for the rest of

his career. And if I had to recommend one thing, the super fun, short, amazing book called Utopia of Rules, which you can even read for free online. It's an incredible introduction into so many things about our society. It has everything in it from a critique of the Batman movies, superheroes generally, to a critique of bureaucracy and capitalism and really great thoughts and ideas about how we live our lives. It's just an incredible and a brilliant book. He was one of the leading anthropologists in the world, but he used those anthropology skills to really turn his eye toward analyzing some of the ways in which our society is actually incredibly violent. And he was also really interested in the concept of play. And he was a big proponent in that people should be working less and playing a lot more.

And so he has other great essays, for example, on why it is that the police hate puppets. He has really great work on why it is that animals really love to play and why modern society is crushing the spirit of play and people. I think it's a really beautiful, funny, uplifting, but also very intelligent set of writing. So David Graeber is someone I recommend. It's underrated. Yeah, he's one of my favorites. I talk about him a lot on the show. The Dawn of Everything is so great. And Bullshit Jobs, too. Bullshit Jobs we talk about a lot on the show.

But yeah, the way the Dawn of Everything uses anthropology to dig into... There was that myth that, well, even though there are problems with modern society, pink like pinkers whole narrative that like when you look before colonialism uh things were a lot worse and like everybody was way more violent and he just like demolishes that and it's like actually like we're way way worse than those and then, takes you through some of the ways that civilizations that you don't learn about in generally in American educational systems organize themselves.

And, like, really interested in some, like, indigenous communities and value these things that have been completely written out of our society. our society. And again, like really makes you see the, some of the assumptions that I think a lot of us take for granted on a day-to-day basis about the world we live in, again, with fresh eyes, it makes them kind of stick out to you as being as weird as they should seem to you. Why do police hate puppets? I actually, I've never read it. So I'm going to immediately act on this underrated and read Utopia of Rules. I've read, you know, Bullshit Jobs and History of Debt and The Dawn of Everything, but I never read Utopia of Rules. Of those books, I think Utopia of Rules is my favorite. I think it's his best, most concise work. So I think you're in for a treat. And the other essay you can read for free online is called On the Pheneminology of Giant Puppets. And it's it's a sort of a it has a lot of pictures in it.

It's about sort of the protest culture of the early 2000s and why police always target puppets when they go to protests and why they always try to destroy puppets and why police officers are so infuriated by my puppets. And I don't want to give too much away, but it's also a great essay. Wow. All right. Well, we're going to take a break. I'm going to go read that and we'll come back in like three hours to continue talking about puppets. Now we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to dig in to some of your work and specifically the book Usual Cruelty. So we'll be right back. This summer, the nation watched as the Republican nominee for president was the target of two assassination attempts separated by two months. These events were mirrored nearly 50 years ago when President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks.

President Gerald R. Ford came stunningly close to being the victim of an assassin today. And these are the only two times we know of that a woman has tried to assassinate a U.S. president. One was the protege of infamous cult leader Charles Manson. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI in a violent

revolutionary underground. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer. This is Rip Current, available now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Substance use disorder and addiction is so isolating. And so as a black woman in recovery, hope must be loud. It grows louder when you ask for help and you're vulnerable. It is the thread that lets you know that no matter what happens, you will be okay.

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And Alec, you know, we can talk about how you're an author and a civil rights activist, but I'd be curious just to hear kind of you talk about like your day to day and the ethos that drives you. Like what is your central kind of ethos that propels you and what is the work that you're kind of doing on a regular basis? You kind of talked about it a little bit with working with imprisoned people and art and some of that, but can you just kind of speak to how you use your life to address some of the things that you talk about in your book? Yeah, absolutely. So I started my career after I graduated from law school as a public defender, and I was representing people who were accused of crimes. I was working in Alabama at the time. And those clients of mine were people who were accused of serious crimes, but couldn't afford a lawyer. So I was representing them. And that was a really incredible way to start my career because I saw up close just how senseless and ineffective

and brutal the criminal punishment bureaucracy was. So almost exclusively poor people are prosecuted in our society, right? About 90% of people prosecuted are poor. The criminal punishment system has separated tens of millions of children from their parents in the last couple of decades in this country with absolutely no evidence that it does any good or makes anyone any better. And so I got, I eventually became a public defender in Washington, D.C. And then in 2013, I got a grant from Harvard Law School to start my own nonprofit organization that, you know, used a lot of the insights that i had learned from that work as a public defender and really was was a new project for me it was trying to not defend individual criminal cases but to affirmatively use civil rights laws which are really powerful you know we have actually like pretty decent civil rights laws on the books. We have, in theory at least, in writing,

we have fairly decent constitutional protections. They are almost never obviously enforced in practice, especially for poor people, people of color. But the idea was, what would it look like if we used civil rights laws affirmatively to attack mass incarceration, to attack the really profitable centers of revenue generation in the criminal punishment system, et cetera, and really try to stop the system from metastasizing the way that it was. And so for the last 10 years, I've been engaged in that project. And obviously, that work is really, really difficult. We've had enormous success. You know, our cases have gotten hundreds of thousands of people out of jail. You know, we've helped put the issue of the money bail system on the map. You know, this country and the Philippines

are the only two countries in the world with a for-profit, multi-billion dollar commercial money bail system where private corporations decide who's in jail and who's not pending trial. And that's an issue we've worked on a lot. We've had enormous success on many, many issues, whether it's police brutality, prosecutor misconduct, the fines and fees system where hundreds of thousands of people are jailed every year in this country just because they can't afford to pay debts to the court from things like traffic tickets, et cetera. But, you know, after all of that work, the system really hasn't changed in any kind of fundamental way over the last few years. We've made it, you know, a little bit less harsh. And when I say we, I mean, you know, largely the people who are most

impacted by the systems working in their own communities all over the country with the assistance of sometimes, you know, lawyers and organizers and others. But all of us collectively have been working on this for a long time. We've made some progress, but the fundamental architecture of the system just continues to grow. And that's because, like any big government bureaucracy, with lots of people profiting at every single turn, it's really, really hard to shrink it. There's, at every stage, from it's really, really hard to shrink it. There's at every stage from the moment you're arrested until the moment you walk out of the prison door after serving a 20 year

sentence, someone is making a profit off of every single thing that happens to you. They even got rid of in-person visits at jails all over the country on the theory that if you let kids come in and hug their parents, they won't spend as much money on phone calls. And so they signed all these contracts in thousands of jails around the country to eliminate the ability of children to hug their parents because they wanted to charge higher rates and get more money for prison and jail phone and video calls. So that's what we're dealing with here.

And people like, you know, the person who owns the largest for-profit telecom company for jails and prisons is also the owner of the Detroit Pistons. And it's very powerful people in our society are making hundreds of millions of dollars off of every single aspect of the system. looks like trying to identify new areas where people are being harmed and suffering and meeting with families and organizers and academics and researchers and other folks who care about these systems and trying to come up with ways of solving these problems, whether it's policy solutions or sometimes a lot of time we have to sue people. We do a lot of suing people in court over their violations of people's rights. And I think that one overriding thing that keeps me going is looking at these systems and how ineffective

and wasteful and fraudulent they are. Like, I'm very confident that if more people in the U.S. really knew what was happening in their name in these systems, they would not support them. It's scandalous. You know, the amount of money that's being wasted, the amount of pain that's being caused. We could very easily have a different world. And that hope and that thought is really what keeps me going. Right. Yeah. Brief footnote for people to listen to our episode on private equity, because that prison phone calls and profiting off of people in prison and, you know, basically their misery and their separation from families is one of the industries that private equity has come in and taken over in the past couple decades. But yeah, I mean, that was one of the things that jumped out to me. Like, if you sit people down and told them that stat, there are 500,000 people who are in prison tonight because they don't have enough money, like, that would fuck them up. because they don't have enough money like that would fuck them up like if you just if you told them that that was the case about like victorian england like you know oliver twist era like that

the 90 of people who are arrested can't afford a lawyer like that you know they picture a world of debtor prisons like from some other time and like ours, ours is worse than that shit. Right. There is a broad feeling that we talk about sometimes on this show that like young people are more leftist than past generations. Do you, do you feel that? Do you like take any,

any hope in like the, a sort of more leftward move of younger people as, as they age. And as if the current generation and power ever relinquishes power, like if they, if they somehow don't figure out how to live forever, like the wind will eventually be at the back of people who, who are trying to make these changes.

I have some hope for that. Obviously, we have to cling to whatever hope we can muster in a time of rising authoritarianism and ecological collapse. You know, we have to have some hope. And I do see amazing young people. I meet them every day at our work, and I see them all over the country. And they definitely are more attuned to these injustices than I was at that age, than my friends were. That, you know, if you look at the kinds of things that are being taught in school,

I'm not talking about, you know, public schools in Florida now with DeSantis' new curriculum, but I mean, just in general, if you look at like the classes that are being taught at universities, community colleges, grad programs, even high schools all over the country, there's a totally new awareness to these issues of racial justice, these issues of economic justice. I see it all the time talking to hundreds of teachers across the country about their curricula. So I think think young people if you look at some of the you know sub sub genres in tiktok right you see like a lot more chatter about these issues than than there was at least this is only my anecdotal experience but then then i remember even 15 years

ago however like i worry that some of this stuff is really superficial. The depth of understanding these systemic injustices and the systems that cause them and the overlaying layers of propaganda is really difficult, deep work that requires a lot of reading, a lot of experience, a lot of critical thinking, a lot of humility. And so it's not just being able to say, I hate capitalism. It's really being able to understand how it's functioning and also developing a deep personal commitment to making life better for everyone in our society that won't go away at the first sign of adversity that can be enduring because any meaningful fight against these systems is very hard to make people make it unpleasant for you and so i think it remains to be seen whether this generation has the depth of

understanding and also the fortitude to keep going and that's why i talk to a lot of young people about the importance not only of watching videos and doing reading on your own, but getting involved with other people and building relationships and like building a set of people that you're in solidarity with and community with. You can hold each other accountable because doing this fight alone will inevitably isolate people and will inevitably make you give up. And so the only chance that I see us having is taking some of this increased energy and building lasting relationships. And that's what I try to talk to young people

about all the time. Right, because I think, you know, another thing you always point out is just sort of how societally we've just become numb to what our, you know, quote unquote, criminal justice system is or is not, and that label and how, you know, for the most part,

we just aren't like in our minds like, oh, yeah, people are like locked up in cages. OK, what's what else is going on? But really, the fact that we're not able to really sit with just the reality of that and begin to see like the humanity of that. And I know that's like a huge bridge for, I think, a lot of people to cross. And to your point, like it's not enough about saying like, well, I don't like capitalism, too. It's like, can you see all of these relationships manifesting in front of you? Because especially like over the last few years, with so much talk about public safety or crime and things like that, I think we have so many

things we have to begin to redefine as what they are. Like, is crime the idea that there are just evil people out there who want to fuck shit up? Or is crime the idea that there are just evil people out there who want to fuck shit up or is it the fact that these are the societal societal failures that are manifesting in certain you know certain behaviors or people having to do things like survival crime or things like that and understanding well where what are the like what actually makes us safe because i think right now the default is well put this put this scary poor people in fucking jail like that's and it just sort of our thinking ends there without really trying to grapple with like this idea of what is this system built for because it ain't justice

and then then diving into that reality like what do you think what are the what are the i think important steps i guess for someone to begin to embrace that redefinition? Because I think that's something that people get scared of, because I think, well, well, if there's no jail, then I'm not safe. And, you know, like, we have all these just sort of cliches that immediately kill like our ability to analyze it any deeper. Like what, what, I guess, for you and your work, how have you been able to really present these ideas for people to like, what is the process of being able to fully embrace or becoming more sensitive to the humanity of it all and knowing what to do next? That's such a great question. Deprogramming people who are part of the cult of the New York Times. What's your message? Yeah. First, don't read the New

York Times. First step. I'll just say I've been thinking about this a lot because I just agreed to write another book on propaganda and the way in which it, it changes how all of us think about safety and about how to create safety. I think a first step miles is, is like learning a little bit about like how the system's actually functioning right now. So, you know, for example, only 4%

all police time is spent on what the police call violent crime. So, you know, over the last few years in this country, the police have chosen to arrest more people for marijuana possession than all violent crime combined. Police and prosecutors virtually ignore completely things like wage theft, tax evasion, corporate fraud, right? These cause orders of magnitude more harm than all other property crime combined. These are the kind of things that lead to hundreds of thousands of people dying through poverty, through eviction, through lost jobs, et cetera, et cetera. Same thing with illegal dumping of chemicals in the water, in the air. I mean, 100,000 people die every year in this country because of air

pollution. That's five times the number of homicides combined. So we need to think about questions like, well, what are police spending their time with, right? Like if you've got a force that chooses to arrest people for drug possession instead of testing rape kits, right? That hardly ever investigates or arrests people for sexual assault, doesn't do undercover operations to uncover sexual assault, right? And this is the kind of thing I talk about in usual cruelty. I give hundreds of examples like this, along with data and evidence to back them up. But the first step, I think, is understanding that although in the second half of the 20th century,

we started to be told that the system of policing and punishment was to keep us safe, actually those systems were never developed to lead to holistic safety. And if more policing and prisons and punishment made us safe, the U.S. would be the safest society in the world because nobody else even comes close. But we're not the safest society in the world because nobody else even comes close. But we're not the safest society in the world.

We have lots of violence. Right. And so one of the key things to understand is this system is not designed for safety or for justice, but it is extremely profitable and beneficial. So, for example, if you're someone who benefits from inequality in our society, you might like a system that arrests and jails people who are homeless rather than builds new housing for them, right? Or ensures that our society is more equal distribution of land. So I think these are like fundamental social problems that when you stop to think about it, it's common sense that like things like crime are much more a function of poverty and inequality, lack of access to housing, lack of access to medical care.

We know that, for example, one of the most important things in predicting future crime is investment in early childhood education. All of these things dwarf any impact that like a prosecutor or a police officer have on crime. So the first step I would say to answer your question is really like deepening our understanding of what do these systems do and why do we have them? And from there, I think you can start to think about, well, what are some of the ways that other countries, other societies, certain places, even in the US are actually adopting really different strategies to safety. They're actually much more effective than these systems of punishment and pain that so much of the US is obsessed with.

Right. It's like objectively, you can, like, I think the most compelling thing that I always tell people who are like, you know, not really thinking about this kind of shit is just positing to them for how much money is spent do you think like that's like this experiment is working for the what near trillions of dollars that have been spent on this you know this our form of crime and punishment it's not borne out in the results at all it's just created an entire industry where people are profiting so in that

sense like you're like well it's an L because you're not showing me anything that shows that the money spent is there. The return comes in the form of safety or lower crime. And that's like, you know, that's usually like the one thing that you're like, well, then what do you say to that? And most people are like, well, I don't know. It's just like probably tough or whatever. No, it's because it's not it's not designed to do that. Like, look how many people like people, you know, who are cops who brag about the overtime they get and then what their pensions look like. And they're like, it's fucking sweet, dude. Like I'm getting paid like six figures forever. Like, and that's it. It's not because I have I have any interest in doing, you know, about public safety, but because it's an arena that allows me to exercise absolute power and I get paid really handsomely for it. like these methods that they've been using for a long time actually work and you talk about like that there are forensic methods that were were determined to be like scientifically fraudulent that the police like kept kept using for like forever like They kept using them just because nobody's paying attention to whether

the current system works. And just talking about, I don't know, another detail that you bring up, usual cruelty, that made me see this current system a little bit more clearly is I'd never seen the war on drugs, you know, the rise of the quote unquote war on drugs and this investment in just the out of control, aggressive caging of black bodies. And, you know, that next to the backing away from prosecuting white collarcollar crime. And that there was this two-part movement starting kind of in the 80s with Reagan, where suddenly they stopped holding corporations and white-collar people responsible. And we saw the result of that, or the culmination of that, I guess, in the 2008 economic crisis where it was just,

you know, fraud on a massive scale that is costing everyone in America so much money and nobody is held accountable, right? And that is happening at the same time that they've decided to start caging other people for drug crimes, like crimes that, you know, it's been shown, again, statistically, that this doesn't make anyone safer from drugs. It's not only happening at the same time, but it's part of the same plan. Yeah. So, you know, the administrations of Reagan, Bush, Clinton,

they all made, and then bush too they all made explicit decisions to transfer like literally jobs away from things like antitrust white collar crime etc to the dea to fbi um terrorism and drug like so like um one of the things people don't really appreciate is police prosecutors only investigate and look for some crimes committed by some people some of the time and the things that come into the criminal punishment bureaucracy are the things that they decide to look for so if you you take away, we have several hundred fewer people in the antitrust division than we did in 1979. Right. So if you take away hundreds of people that look for antitrust violations by companies and you give those

people a new job saying, we want you to look for drug crimes committed by poor people and immigrants, then you're going to start prosecuting a lot more people because those are the cases that are brought into the system. It's the same thing with local police. If you say to local police, we're going to give you financial incentives to set up a checkpoint in poor neighborhoods to pull over cars and search for drugs, instead of we're going to give you money to test rape kits from sexual assault survivors, you're going to start prosecuting a lot more drug offenses than you are rape cases. And that's exactly what we've seen across the white collar spectrum in the US over the last 30 or 40 years. Just you can be very, very safe if you're a white collar potential criminal, be very safe in knowing that you're

very, very unlikely to get caught because we just are not investing the sort of resources into looking for those crimes. That's why we have over $1 trillion in IRS estimated tax evasion by wealthy people every year in the US. I mean, that is, to put that in perspective, that's about 100 times all other property crime combined. And when you hear in the news every day about these waves of shoplifting and organized retail theft, it pales in comparison to the kind of crimes that wealthy people are engaged in without anyone paying attention to it. Well, hold on, Alec, because I feel like if you did the math on 30 MacBooks stolen from an Apple store, it probably comes out to like a trillion dollars.

I like to check the math. But yeah, I mean, think of poor, poor CBS, too, obviously. And that's actually funny. idea of, again, these like the, these sort of media fed narratives that are purposefully kept to obscure our understanding of the horror and the inhumanity of, you know, this criminal punishment bureaucracy. Great phrase. I like that. Like, and I guess, does that, I'm imagining that's why a lot of you, you're a lot of, you have a lot of smoke for the New York times too, because every time like we're like, I was like, oh, Alex got another fire threat against the New York Times. Like I got to open this. I'm sure, I'm sure because for you, you see that as part of one of the barriers for our ability to become more sensitive, right? To

what the scenarios and situations are around us. Obviously the New York Post and Fox News and a lot of the sort of right-wing radios they're horrible yeah on these issues as well and they spew misinformation and lies and it's all willie horton style uh you know misinformation um but like that's less interesting to me and and and and it's much more overtly nefarious and I think a lot of like well-intentioned people can easily see through at this point, some of the propaganda that Fox News is spewing, right? And that's kind of widely understood.

But ideologically, what's so fascinating and so damaging and so harmful is that a lot of like, you know, self-conscious liberals or self-described liberals, I should say, people who think of themselves or who want to think of themselves as progressive, you know, they're consuming these news sources like NPR, The New York Times, The Atlantic, that in many respects are spewing almost exactly the same authoritarian ideology,

many of the same underlying assumptions. But those news sources have adopted like an air of sophistication, slightly different tone, slightly different words that are catered at their more liberal audience. And so I think it's more interesting and potentially more, you know, better use of my time rather than pointing out every Fox News article is racist and is trying to, you know, increase the profits of the bail industry, whatever it is, pointing out how these outlets that are seen as more prestigious, more liberal, more balanced, more objective, are actually doing many of the same things in a more sophisticated way that's harder to see for a lot of well-meaning people. And that's why I focused a lot on the New

York Times in particular. That's why I find the Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC, CNN, you know, all these outlets that are doing a lot of the same right-wing propaganda, but under the guise of like objective, even progressive news as, as being more harmful. And that's why I focused on them a lot more. Yeah. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back and continue talking about that. This summer, the nation watched as the Republican nominee for president was the target of two assassination attempts, separated by two months. These events were mirrored nearly 50 years ago when President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks. President Gerald R. Ford came stunningly close to being the victim of an assassin today.

And these are the only two times we know of that a woman has tried to assassinate a U.S. president. One was the protege of infamous cult leader Charles Manson. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI in a violent revolutionary underground. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer. Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer. This is Rip Current.

Available now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Substance use disorder and addiction is so isolating. And so as a black woman in recovery, hope must be loud. It grows louder when you ask for help and you're vulnerable. It is the thread that lets you know that no matter what happens, you will be okay. When we learn the power of hope, recovery is possible. Find out how at startwithhope.com. Brought to you by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, Shatterproof, and the Ad Council.

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where the one Nazi turns to the other Nazi, and they're both wearing fucking skulls on all their uniforms. And he's like wait are we the baddies like are we are we the bad guys and just like no nobody can read this book and not come to that same conclusion but i think what we're talking about with regards to the new y Times and NPR and, you know, that that is sort of the edifice and like sort of the barrier that is put in between people looking in the mirror, looking at each other and being like, wait, are we the bad guys? So I'd love to kind of continue talking about what are some watchwords or just things that you see. You talk about how your alarms go off when you see criminal justice reform as a concept or just like that phrase because it usually means

that there's going to be more investment in prison and in the systems that jail people and police people. But can you just talk a little bit more about what you are looking for when you read the New York Times or the Washington Post or some of these liberal, quote unquote, outlets? liberal quote-unquote outlets yeah so first of all i love that michelin webb sketch it's great it's so funny and it does really capture a lot of how i feel when i look at the new york times i think that you know first of all obviously these these mainstream news outlets curate the kinds of issues they talk about so you know you see a ton of articles about retail theft for example but like rarely an article about wage theft or right or building safety code violations or um illegal dumping of chemicals so that's obvious right so they also do something i think really nefarious which is they they they kind of make us think through the way they like tell their stories through which stories they tell, through who they interview in these stories and who they don't interview, what perspectives they include, what perspectives they don't, that it's genuinely there to make us safe, that the people who run it are trying their best

to figure out these complex and difficult questions. It's like they'll have an article about homelessness, for example, and the entire time they won't mention inequality or capitalism or real estate developers or anything like that. It's all about how you know, how do people feel about seeing a homeless person on the subway? Or what is, how many police is Eric Adams going to send into the subway in New York to deal with homelessness? So the entire article is sort of framed as like, well, the only options our society has are these government bureaucrats who are going

to punish people into having housing. and so they they in in article after article issue after issue they make it seem like the only solution to these problems are more police prosecutors in prison right and and then there's a whole other category of article which i think may be more what you're getting at with your question, which is like sometimes the injustices and the brutality and the violence of this system becomes too much for them to ignore. So they usually ignore it every day, but sometimes like with the murder of George Floyd, the murder of Eric Garner, the murder of Breonna Taylor, right? It's impossible for them to ignore because something really horrific has been

captured in a way that captures the public imagination. And the murder of Tyree Nichols in Memphis is a really good example of this with the New York Times coverage that I wrote about. But what you see in those moments is a mobilization of copaganda that tries to get the well-meaning reader, the people who don't want to live in a society of rampant police violence, of rampant racial injustice, to think that, well, something is being done about that, right? So they trot out all of these experts and all of these things, these catchphrases like accountability and community policing, right? They never define those terms. They never bring on any experts who say, did you know that in every major instance of police violence is 1930? Immediately afterward, they started talking about the need for better training, more accountability, better technology for the police. And every single time over the last hundred years after police violence, the police have been given more resources, more training, more weapons. Right. The police have been given more resources, more training, more weapons, right? Has it ever made police less violent? No. I mean, after all the conversations about George Floyd in 2020, U.S. police killed more people in 2021 than the cop again, the book is an analysis of how does the punishment bureaucracy use its own failure under the guise of reform to actually increase its own budgets.

I think the best possible example of this is body cameras. So body cameras are now trotted out as like the reform that everyone loves for, you know, illegal policing. But what a lot of people don't understand is that for many years, the police and the multi-billion dollar companies that produce the body cameras and the facial recognition software and the cloud computing databases that they rely on, they actually wanted to get every cop in the country a mobile surveillance camera that the cops themselves controlled. But they couldn't figure out how to get liberals in control of local governments to pay for them.

There's billions of dollars, right? So what did they do? They came up with a marketing strategy after Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson. They came up with a marketing strategy to say, well, we need body cameras as a method of police accountability. It's no longer about surveillance and increasing police control, etc. And the real reason they wanted them, the biggest reason they wanted them was that since police control the videos, they can use it as a much better form of evidence for prosecutors and police to coerce people to plead guilty more quickly. So they turned this tool of surveillance that they all

wanted but couldn't pay for into a tool of reform and then got all the money they needed. And that to me is one of the most insidious roles of the media in the aftermath of... So another great example from the New York Times is when they did the summary of all the George Floyd protests, they wrote these series of articles about how every major review in every major city had found that the police engaged in widespread brutality and illegal suppression of the protests. They were beating people. They were pepper spraying people.

They were using chemical weapons. They were using tanks and batons. They were hitting journalists. They were running over people with their cars, et cetera. And the Times concluded that this was because they were unprepared and lacked training and they lacked proper technology and they didn't have enough intelligence to be tracking the protest leaders in advance. police response, if the purpose of the response was to squelch dissent and repress the social movement, they made it seem like police were just hapless and with a little bit more money for better training and more money for intelligence divisions so they could infiltrate social

movement groups, police would have been better. And so framing the whole problem as one of actually police needing more training and more resources is, I think, one of the most insidious and nefarious roles that the mainstream corporate media has played in our understanding of what the real problems are. Reform has always been a part of the prison system. That's just a way that it feeds itself, essentially, is having that two-way conversation where it's like, oh, we got to reform and suck in more resources to just kind of continue building out. I highly recommend the book Walls and Bars by Eugene Debs. It's a really amazing, it's a memoir that he wrote in the 1920s when he was in federal prison. He actually ran for president, got over a million votes from prison. He was imprisoned on ludicrous charges that obviously violated the First Amendment for his anti-war advocacy and other sort of union organizing activities. But the whole book,

he's making points just like the ones I'm making right now i mean he he's talking about this over a hundred you know about a hundred years ago and it's remarkable to see how the system responded to him and how the prison system grew after that right and and how we're making the same points about this and it's it's i think very revealing when you read something like that you can you can see we're not stuck in a problem. It's not like we don't know the solutions. It's not like we're dealing with something new here. These systems have been doing this for a long time. Right. And I, you know, I think because a lot of the times, you know, as we all look at this and we're more and more people become interested in the idea of, you know, what what liberation looks like. I really like the points that you make about how like, while

there's no like just sort of magic solved to it. One part is about creating enough of a tipping point in terms of like mass movement for our courts and our politicians to respond to because without without a show of power from people, especially the ones that are most affected, it takes a long time, obviously takes decades for the Supreme Court to respond to anything or, you know, politicians, because they're more like, yeah, what's the status quo? We'll reinforce that. Great. What's the next case versus seeing like, oh, it's this many people who think everything is absolutely backwards. Maybe we do need to consider that. What for you? I know you've you've talked about the importance of connection, but, you know, for as we look towards something a little more just something more equitable, what are those steps that you feel are the most potent things that, you know, we can legal system in a formal way. But how do I as a

conscious person contribute or put my head in the right space to know, okay, this is how we move forward. And this is the way we need to all be moving. Yeah. And any communities or places you see a different approach, like Miles describing kind of working that you wish got more attention? I think there's so many different ways people can get involved and people with different skills can get involved in different ways. If you're a coder, you know, if you're a lawyer, if you're a member of a church,

if you're a writer, if you're a web designer. I mean, there's so many places that like basically anyone with any skills can plug in. And so I encourage you to figure out who in your local community is working on reducing the size and power of the punishment bureaucracy.

Who's trying to close a jail? Who's trying to prevent a jail from getting built? Who's trying to reduce the police budget and to get more money invested in alternative first responders and mental health care and housing? Who's organizing tenants? Who's building work around co-ops? We need to be building the mechanisms through which all of us will connect and form stronger relationships and bonds. So I'm really, if you're interested in the criminal system, I'm really interested in the growing movement

of court watching. There's lots of groups in different cities across the country, whether it's the DC area where I am or Pittsburgh, where I grew up or Los Angeles, where we have our big case challenging the money bail system. There's court watch programs where literally anyone, and my mom did this when she retired, can sign up and just start watching court and documenting what the judges and prosecutors are doing. And then reporting those in groups of people that you, other sort of volunteers right there's all kinds of things that flow from that there's getting involved in a local bail fund there's running for local library board or the water board or there's so many different things that actually like conservatives have mobilized for and are therefore in charge of the utility

commissions in a lot of different places etc et cetera. And like, this is enormous consequences for the climate movement. This is enormous consequences of a lot of these, you know, Houston just decided, for example, the school board to fire a bunch of librarians and replace the school libraries with disciplinary centers for punishing kids, right?

These are things that like people in their local community need to be organizing against and rising up and fighting. And so get together with your neighbors, do a reading group, learn about some of these issues, figure out who's already doing the work in your area, ask them how you can get involved and plug in. Like there's no one size fits all answer. But the one thing I will say is like, you have to be, if you're not involved in organizing your local community around something, then you should get involved because we're never going to win these things unless we actually, and you know, sometimes it's not the most glamorous work.

It's not the most thrilling stuff, right? But like, unless we participate and fight, we're going to lose any semblance of democratic life and we're going to have a fully authoritarian society before we know it. Yeah. Well, Alec, such a pleasure having you. I mean, this is kind of why we started doing these deep dive episodes and, you know, having

you on to talk about this didn't disappoint. Where can people find you, follow you, read you, all that good stuff? Yeah, so you can follow me on Twitter at Equality Alec. That's my name on various social media, although I've only ever posted once on Instagram. But it's a hell of a post. About a thousand pages. It's a lot to work through.

I should start posting some of my mosaics. There you go. People can laugh at me. I think that I wrote a newsletter on Substack called Alec's Copaganda Newsletter, which I'm going to be turning into the Copaganda book. So keep your eyes out next year for the Copaganda book. And in the meantime, you know, you can also follow the work of Civil Rights Corps, which is at Civ Rights Corps on Twitter

and Instagram. And it's a really amazing organization. Amazing. And is there a work of media that you've been enjoying? You know, this last week, I've been looking at some of the old Sinead O'Connor performances and thinking a lot about, I had never really been a fan of her music. Like I just, I just wasn't, I don't know, it was something I kind of missed. And the courage that she displayed, it's so rare to have someone that prominent make the kind of sacrifices that she made for the things that she displayed. It's so rare to have someone that prominent make the kind of sacrifices that she made for the things that she believed in. You know, that Saturday night, there's a tweet circulating with that video of Tim Robbins introducing her on Saturday Night Live and then

her tearing up the photo of the Pope. You know, that was an act of courage. It's hard for people in this country to understand what that meant in Ireland at the time in the early 90s. And I marvel at the lack of courage. The NBA players, for example, can't even get their act together to condemn Tom Gores for making hundreds of millions of dollars off Black children by ending the right to hug their parents in jails, right? The level of removal of many prominent people in this country from the extraordinary injustices of our time is really profoundly depressing. And I've been really encouraged by just watching her and thinking about how inspiring it was that she did that and all the pain and sacrifices she made that accompanied it. So I think it's worth honoring that. Amazing. It cost her everything, you know, in a time when you're making a point that now

is sort of a normal valid criticism that we think now it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. There are bad things going on with the Catholic church. Whereas back then, I mean, like who was like Joe Pesci or someone or, well, I forget one of these people came like, I can't believe she did that crap or whatever at the time, because yeah, we weren't willing to like or I forget one of these people came like I can't believe she did that crap or whatever at the time because yeah we weren't willing to like look at some of these issues with the sort of objectivity it deserves yeah uh miles how about you where can people find you as their work in media you've been enjoying yeah twitter instagram threads wherever at miles of gray check out my new podcast uh the good thief talking about the greek robin hood vasily spalio costas it's a really dope show we're talking about the Greek Robin Hood, Vasilis Palio Kostas.

It's a really dope show. We're talking about somebody who is, you know, doing some good old-fashioned wealth redistribution. And also, Jack and I got the basketball podcast. Miles and Jack got Mad Boosties. And 420 Day Fiance, if you like hearing about trash reality shows. Tweet I like is from at Equality Alec. The tweet is, for each dollar stolen in shoplifting. There's at least $5 in wage theft and $100 in tax evasion.

Have you ever heard about a wage theft or tax evasion quote crime wave? What do you think this tells you about how reporters determine what is quote news and what is ignored and who benefits? Uh, and I think it's the kind of shit we need to keep in the front of our mind when we're, we say, what is crime exactly? Who are the baddies? All right. You can find me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien

and on threads at Jack underscore O underscore O'Brien. Tweet I've been enjoying. You know, Alec, you almost had it, but I got to go with at Smooth Dunk, who tweeted, I am become death. really oppenheimer do you also has cheeseburger you 2007 meme sounding motherfucker and i i just enjoyed that so almost went with uh i had to go dumb with it uh you can find us on twitter at daily zeitgeist we're at the daily zeitgeist on instagram we have a facebook fan page and a at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at The Daily Zeitgeist. On Instagram, we have a Facebook fan page and a website, dailyzeitgeist.com, where we post our episodes and our footnotes.

We link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode, as well as a song that we think you might enjoy. Myles, what song do you think people might enjoy? It's a track called Nebulous Tango, which feels like an appropriate track name for today's topic, but it's by the artist Heather, H-E-T-H-E-R. And I believe they're like a producer, but it's like a minute track, but really, really dope instrumental.

You know how I get down. It's a snap snapper, but it's a one-minute banger. So just check it out. Nebulous Tango by Heather, H-E-T-H-E-R. All right. We will link off to that in the footnotes. The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to your favorite shows. That is going to do it for us this morning. Back this afternoon to tell you what is trending, and we will talk to you all then. Bye. Bye. What happens when a professional football player's career ends and the applause fades and the screaming fans move on? I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite.

For some former NFL players, a new faith provides answers. You mix homesteading with guns and church. Voila! You got straight away. They try to save everybody. Listen to Spiraled on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In California during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before, try to assassinate the President of the United States.

One was the protege of Charles Manson. 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad-free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeartTrue Crime Plus, only on Apple Podcasts. Join us for the new podcast, Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12-episode podcast in both English and Spanish

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