Behind the BastardsRobert and Dave conclude our episode about think tanks.
Also media, Ah, what's probably I feel like saying something about what happened in Baltimore, but there's really no respectful way to do that. The fucked up though, right it.
Seems that way people. Yeah, you see that Twitter is already blaming DDI.
Yeah, that would have stapped the boat from shorting out from.
Yeah, having a fucking blackout.
Well, they're obsessed. It's also shows none of them understand how fucking container ships work, because they're all like, look because the they had like a DEI captain aboard this mask vessel. Marisk has a DEI program. No one from Marisk was piloting the ship. They're never allowed to in a harbor's it's never a pilot who works for the company anyway.
Whatever, I still think it's batshit that like, for hours and hours after this happened, that like National News wasn't covering it at all, they had like, yeah, they had like two dollars trust every journalist, commemorative commercials going on. They had just like the stupidest interviews.
Like why why did we need.
One on one with Alf Franken in the middle of this, and like that's why we still use fucking Twitter.
Yeah, it is it's all bad. I do think you could get a job doing that, Dave. But you've got to lay in on the DEI stuff, you know, be like, are you do you have any Daves? You know, Dave, equity and inclusion. You got to put some Dave's on the team.
Equity and inclusion. Yeah, I'm going to push that now. I'm going to put that on my resume.
Now. I definitely have this is behind the Bastards. I don't think I introduced the podcast that this is. That's what you did. And David Bell's here again, and David Bell's here again. Yeah, Dave, speaking of this. You you in your writing for Some More News. You also help on a podcast network called Gamefully Unemployed. You to do a lot of great stuff, including chronicle Fox Molders, baffling career decisions in the X Files. But a big part of what you do for Some More News is research the increasing right word veeer of our society and the growth of conspiracy culture, which relates to this whole boat problem in Baltimore as people have blamed it on DEI, and it relates to like kind of everything that's wrong with our country, this like fracturing of consensus reality that has kind of made it impossible to like fix anything.
The fact that everything I would argue, and I know that conservatives would say the literally the exact same thing about the left, but I would argue that conservatives have politicized pretty much everything in the country at this point.
I am literally looking at a picture of a car with Honda with Texas plates that has a dozen different bumper stickers that say variations of Helen Keller is a fraud. Helen Keller was not deaf.
It's well, that's just facts problem.
What was she What did she have to gain?
I have a sub reddit, I'll link it to you.
He's got a Denier bumper sticker. How is that a thing?
Incredible? I mean, yeah, I'm not surprised. We got to a point where the CDC where a fucking pandemic happened and it was let's take some basic precautions and that became political.
Yeah.
It's real bad. It's real bad right now.
Yeah, It's it's shocking how bad some stuff has gotten. And that relates to what we're talking about today, because we ended our last episode talking about the Powell Memorandum, right, which was this document that was written for the Chamber of Commerce that that a a a lawyer who is going to become a Supreme Court justice by the name of Lewis Powell, whose previous work had been fighting against d s ggregation and cheering on the bombing of Dresden, wrote this thing where he's like, we need to attack liberalism everywhere it exists, and we need to in a comprehensive method destroy it. Part of that was destroying people like Ralph Nader, who at this time was like forcing had basically done a lot to force the auto industry to add basic safety features to cars. Right, So a chunk of this is we need to be able to destroy people who want to make extremely modest changes that cost corporations money and save countless lives. I'm going to guarantee you a significant percentage of the people listening to this podcast, including probably me, would be dead if not for seat belts. Oh yeah, it's not a minor chunk of us.
I've raced on the highway multiple times. It's just funny because this is that point where let's go after liberalism. Liberalism is not defined as any effort to make things marginally better in a very practical way. Like we talked. I think of the last episode about how like like I was talking about how I don't even know the definitions of things anymore. And that's because things like this where I'm like, yeah, is that liberal? Like is it liberal to want to take safety precautions? Yeah? To I guess it is if it costs.
If you would go back in time to even to Richard Nixon and tell him what modern conservative media people call liberalism, Nixon would be like, what the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean? They won't take vaccines.
It's like it's like the term wokeness, you know, it's it's that same shit. Yeah, the vaccine stuff is always like, yeah, you know how these hippie liberals love vaccines. It's like, no, they don't.
No, it was the opposite. They were so long they were the.
First to not like vaccines. What is happening?
That was what my mom Arch Reagan conservative. One of the things she hated about like the left is their anti vax shit, because she was like, why wouldn't you want to take vaccines?
Right?
It's it's wild how much that shit is. Like, but yeah, it's this this pal memoranda is it's not just he's talking about, like we need to cultivate political power. Wealthy people in corporations need to be donating a percentage, like a significant percent of their advertising budgets to funding think tanks and efforts to put basically to flood the zone with shit that make that can act as like a defense against any attempt to, for example, add seat belts to cars or anything like that. But beyond that, that's not the only thing the Palm Mirandum orchestrates. He is also the first guy, in a real concerted form to say the future for the right, because of how demographics do not favor us, the future for the right is in taking over the courts. He is if you're looking at what has happened to the Supreme Court in the last eight years, Powell is the guy who starts that process, who is laying out the strategy that is adopted by the entire conservative movement, at least everyone with money in the conservative movement, and his specific goal in having conservatives take over the courts is to establish an oligarchy. In one section of the memorandum, he uses the title for a Neglected Opportunity in the Courts, and he suggests a strategy for quote, exploiting judicial action to turn back progressive and liberal victories in government and culture. Quote. Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change. And he is responding to this raft of Supreme Court decisions that happened during the Civil rights era and after that are responsible for really ending the Jim Crow and segregation, right, Like, that's a big part of what the Supreme Court's doing in this period. And he's like, we have to take these back so that we can reverse these trends.
It's wild how mad they were about desegregation. Yeah, and about because I'm actually we're going to do a video on how the right hi check Christianity And that's kind of that moment that it starts happening, is desegregated schools caused a bunch of racists to go to private religious schools, and then they started using this religious liberty thing yep. And so it's it's just that is it's it's wild how that's like the moment, you know, it's like it's like the it's like the dance in Back to the Future, Like that was the that day is like where everything went down, and it's the same with this.
And that is what's we've done a two part of ourselves on how Christianity got co opted from Christianity as a political force is more tied to progressivism in the nineteen teens and twenties. Right, it's like the labor movement and stuff, right, and that all starts to change in the post war period, but it's it's during the same period where the pal Memorandum hits in the seventies that the religious right becomes a thing, and a lot of the same money that the guys that Powell is speaking to are going to pump into think tanks also pumping money into what becomes the religious right. This is all happening at the same time. This is kind of the other side of that story. And this is one of those things. The success that Powell sees, the fact that this memorandum is followed and becomes it's considered a foundational document of neoliberalism, right, Like, that is a big part of the privatization of everything, Right, Like, that's why you want to take over these think tanks to make the case for cutting government services, for cutting the idea that there should be any kind of like shared social responsibility in our society and turning everything into a profit driven machine. Right, that's part of what he's suggesting. But also, like the end of Roe v. Wade, you can tie it directly to this memorandum because he's talking about, like we if we're going to turn back these victories the left and liberals have had, we have to do it through the courts. And I really think I talk a lot about Osama bin Laden on this show and how I think historians when historians are writing about this one point where none of them are angry about nine O Elove because it's too distant, right, the way that people aren't angry about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand today, Right, we could just sort of like talk about it.
Yeah, maybe some are still, but yeah.
I think he should I think they should have killed him twice. But that's my opinion.
No, it's the farther we get away from nine to eleven, it's going to become this weird abstract and yeah, kind of fascinating to me.
And my opinion tends to be that when we get enough distance, historians will generally agree that Osama bin Laden was one of the best strategic minds of the twenty first century. He had a plan, he had a plan for what would happen in the long term as the result of that attack, how it would damage American power, and it worked the way he thought it would. And I think Powell is probably a similar mind for the twentieth century in terms of like political strategy. He lays out what the right is going to do from the nineteen seventies to today, and it's worked very well for them. With a significant demographic disadvantage, they have in fact captured the courts and over time turned this country to the right in a way that people in the seventies would not have really thought possible. So, yeah, that's cool.
Yes's frog and a hot plate stuff. Yeah, where it's like we we talked about this last last episode of how Like when people try to say, like, you know, Trump is gonna is going to spell the end for democracy, that doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna happen right away, right, It's like these things just have lasting harm that it's gonna be really hard.
To yeah verse, yeah, it doesn't even mean he'll necessarily win again. And I don't take that as a given the way some people do, I certainly think it's at least a fifty to fifty shot. But even if Biden wins reelection, like the idea has been normalized that you can just try to take over to the capital with a bunch of angry goons, and that's really bad for the future of democracy.
It's pretty bad.
Yeah, it's not great. So Pal's memo is at first circulated mostly among the chain of commerce, which is again all these wealthy business owners and CEOs, right, that's where they interface with the government, is the chamber of Commerce. So this is a private memo, and he's basically using a government agency to send this memo about how to capture the courts for the right to all of these guys and asking for their money. David Harvey, who's a Marxist anthropologist, cites this is kind of the foundational document in the birth of neoliberalism. It's like the neoliberal declaration of Independence. Right, that's how some people tend to see this. Its influence, though, is much larger than just that, and it's much larger than I'm going to cite today. But one of the things that absolutely did was supercharged donations and the establishment of right wing think tanks. Wealthy conservatives realized the power of having organizations that were like RAND but were geared entirely towards espousing an ideology. And the ideology they wanted these organizations to espouse was that taxes should be low, workers should know their place, and school should probably be segregated. Also, they should be allowed to jail anti war protesters, right, sure, sure.
Why not? Yeah, fuck it. If we're thrown at all on there might as well put some bonuses.
Yeah yeah. And the opportunity to do that came when the economy shit the bed in the nineteen seventies, quote, A corps of politically active conservative intellectuals, most prominently Irving Crystal, began to argue in publications like The Public Interest and The Wall Street Journal that if business wanted market logic to regain the initiative, it would have to create a new class of its own scholars whose career prospects depended on private enterprise, not government or the universities. You get what you pay for, Crystal in effect argued, and if businessmen want an intellectual horsepower, they would have to open their pocketbooks. Traditionally, corporate philanthropy had been directed either towards charity or towards independent organizations like the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations. Pressured by the media and by academics to make gestures of broad mindedness. Businessmen seem to feel that they could gain social approval only by sharing their proceeds with credential intermediaries would use the money to fund attacks on capitalism. Paying to have oneself attacked was a kind of corporate abolution. So that's that's what a big thing Crystal is saying, And Crystal is kind of the most influential of this first wave of like think tank guys, is you're spending all of this money on foundations that do actual charity, and that partly funds the work of people who are critical of you. Why not give your money to someone who's going to say you should have even more power and money and work to make that real, you know. And obviously that's a good deal for you if you're a rich psychopath.
Yeah, if you're going to pay people, you might as well pay people to say you're great.
Yeah. Yeah, that's that's why we hired Garrison. It didn't work, actually worked with terrible disaster there there's very mean.
In your place.
Yeah, correct, that I tried, but they just moved to Atlanta.
M man, damn him. You gotta get them, get.
Them back, got to get them back. Kinda fish about new party. The work of men like Crystal was like a refreshing, cool breeze on the faces of rich fail sons whose daddies had been disappointed by the side the US took in World War Two. Some of these guys are literally the business plot guys, right. The guys were telling Smedley Butler, what if you tried to become a dictator? And Smedley's like, sure, let me just talk to Congress real fast. Henry Ford the Second resigned from the board of the Ford Foundation around this time in the seventies, furious because it was putting out work he viewed as anti capitalist. Other Men like Joseph Coors, you know, the beer guy, and the inheritors of the Olin Chemical and Smith Richardson pharmaceutical foundations started looking for places they could pour money to generate opinions that coincided with their endlist need for more money. This is a big part of why the pharmaceutical industry is the way that it is, right is that these guys start putting money in the think tanks that say, hey, you know what would be great for everybody's health if these guys were allowed to jack up the price of fucking insulin, you know, to umpteenth degree. What if we really fucking deregulate healthcare as an industry, wouldn't that make everybody healthier?
And what we're learning now is that it's way harder to reverse these things.
Yes stuff, yes, yes, once you get this stuff. And that's one of the things they know is once you get this stuff established, it's like the war on drugs. Right, Once you have the war on drugs, anything you do to try to fix it, people, there will still be drug epidemics, right, Like No, like fentanyl gets into the country and suddenly everybody who's been working very hard to try and reform things has to deal with the fact that people are dying of this new substance. And there's this built in infrastructure to say, just to have more cops, man, we just got to lock people up. That's what's going to fix it, you.
Know, right. Because it's also it reminds me of when we built our highways, because we consulted with car companies for that, and so it's that thing where they get together they decide to do this thing that's kind of irreversible, that's like a foundational idea. Uh. And then by the time we realize that it doesn't work, yeah, it's already there, firmly there.
You know.
We only realize these things over time of going like, wait, this strategy was bad. It's resulting in bad things. And at that point it's like, well, what are we going to do? Uproot everything, start over.
And this can work on the good side of positive example, this would be Obamacare, which is deeply flawed, but like we saw, the Republicans tried to kill it and realized in the Trump administration, we really fucking can't.
This is social security, right.
Yeah, social security. Libraries or you would never get libraries to be a thing today. If it was a new concept. People would be willing Conservatives would be willing to kill and die to stop libraries from existing. But they're just a thing now, you know, still under attack, but they're a thing.
Yeah. Yeah, you try ever, try to like harass a librarian like they can handle themselves, and they have all those library ghosts on their side too. And because a library is haunted, I.
Believe strongly, Dave in like ending firing everybody in the Department of Homeland Security. But we take all of their guns, all of their weapon and we give it to the librarians. No training, We don't tell them how to use any of this. That's up to them. Whatever they want to do with all those tanks and machine guns is their their choice.
You know what's not going to happen anymore. No one's going to be turning in books late. I'll tell that much.
Well, yeah, get you're condamn right there fucking no knock raids for overdue books.
Yeah, that situation that will be handling.
So one step in the process of building this like think tank network, like one of the things they knew they had to do because there weren't a lot of really prominent popular right wing media figures right who were influential in public policy. That wasn't nearly as common as people who would have considered themselves liberals, right, you know, in reality, like you would say centrists or whatever. So a big part of what they had to do here was fine people who were liberals and even some leftists who were influential in academia in public policy and turn them right. Now we see this happen today. You're seeing all of these like formerly liberal left see some of the shit that likes the Young Turks guy has been saying and about like crime in cities and stuff this like weird right wing turn that a lot of guys was Jimmy Dre that guy who used to be kind of lefty, and then the pandemic hits and he goes hard right because he's an anti vax weirdo. Right. Yeah, this is like a thing we see today and this is really the first time it happens in an organized way. And what they would do is they would go to these guys who are like influential liberal academics and they would say, and this is an actual example, iverat hey, we're starting this think tank. We would like to hire you on as like an expert.
Right.
We're basically pay you to do whatever research you want to do, and occasionally you just have to put out some papers that are in line with the stuff that we want put out. And in return, and this is like in the seventies eighties, you'll get a two hundred one thousand dollars a year's salary for life whether or not anything gets done. We just need to be able to use your name. You know.
It's like, yeah, that's like a billion dollars.
That's so much money back then, right, you know, you'll have to occasionally rubber stamp some specific ideas. And that's what for some of these guys, it literally is I'm just like throwing my name on some shit so i can get a paycheck. Others really take to the idea of being more influential than they'd ever been, of having I'm not just being people that got listened to sometimes, but people who have this massive, hundreds of millions of dollars in funding effort behind them, right, and they can be the mouthpieces of it. And some of these people, these are folks like Gene Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Ben Wattenberg. These are all people who switched sides politically because of the amount of money and clout that they saw building in the think tank industrial complex. The founder of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Ernest Lefev, had even been a conscientious subjector in World War Two. Michael Horowitz, one of the most influential conservative theorists of this period, had been a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi in the nineteen sixties, and Horowitz kind of pioneers the tactic of being a liberal intellectual and like political guy and then pivoting right and suddenly getting very rich. You know, he's one of like the architects of that switch.
I mean, conservatism pays very well. Oh yeah, we're not over here. Like look in the Daily Wire. I would love to get some fracking billionaire money, but sadly they won't give it to me.
I will take fifty million dollars. Yeah, I'll endorse some fucked up shit for fifty million dollars.
Right, Yeah, yeah, I take bribes. I've said it before, I'll say it again.
Listen, fracking billionaires. You've got me and Dave. We can sell people on fracking. Oh Dave, you love it when the ground light's on fire, don't you?
Oh God? Yeah? Water like when it's murky. I love me a nice glass of murky water.
Look, the popularity of Lacroix has proven we all like our water with a little something extra.
Yeah.
Yeah, Gasoline makes our cars go. Gasoline in our water probably makes us more efficial.
Makes us go. Yeah. Uh, that's some science. I think this is science.
What you just said, this is what you could have fracking billionaires. Come on, hit us up.
I'll take two hundred thousand. I don't give a shit.
So two years after Goldwater's failed candidacy, an aging movie star named Ronald Wilson Reagan decided to run for governor of California. Now, his initial rise to power is against an incumbent Democrat who's fairly well liked and reasonably popular prior to the election, a guy named Pat Brown. This is an uphill battle, at least on paper. It doesn't wind up working out that way, and a huge part of the strategy that hands Reagan a victory he bases a massive chunk like kind of the centerpiece of his campaign is attacking Berkeley University, right higher education in general, but specifically going to war with Berkeley. Talk about, Oh, they fucking hate it, and that's what we're going to talk about. But you know who loves Berkeley, No one really, but our sponsors don't hate it. That I'm aware of.
Yeah, I believe you on that. That sounded convincing.
Yeah, unless it's the Washington State Highway Patrol again. Ah, we're back. So we're talking about Ronnie Reagan you know, husband of the throat goat herself and how he wins election. Sophie just had a look when I said.
That, I did not enjoyed that description.
That's what Look, this is documented. We're not slandering. That's not even history. Yeah, that's just history.
It'd be slander if we called Ronald the throat goat, right, but that.
A man would have been terrible at sucking Dick.
I just want to give a shout out to to Joni as We Yeah, yeah, who really made all the decisions for that family.
Yes, they're astrologer yep. So the fact that Reagan is going to make the centerpiece of his campaign hating on Berkeley goes over really well with the kind of rich, fail sun demographic that is funding this like New Conservative movement. These guys believe that they had lost to the New Deal Democrats for a mix of reasons. One of those was that Christianity was overwhelmingly aligned with progressive, pro labor and social welfare values at the start of the century, and the religious right, which is coming together in the same period. It's going to the first time the religious right is really influential in US politics. It gets Reagan elected right, that's coming together at this point in time. The other thing that they saw as losing the day was that all of those new Deal policies had enjoyed the support of professors and subject matter experts with fancy titles and actual expertise. And one of the things that was happening in that period, a lot of those experts, it came from kind of the first generation of college graduates that weren't all super rich guys, right. It was still mostly people who were better off, but it was starting to become democratized. And by the seventies college was extremely democratized. Right. Some of that's as a result of, like you know, kind of some of the changes that come in as a result of the GI Bill, but like in general, a lot more particularly women and black people, are graduating from college in this period, and they're seeing this as like this will inevitably destroy us unless we destroy the ability of these people to get college degrees. Right.
Right, They had their own little club, right, that was the whole thing. They love, having their own little clubs. Yeah, and they could do or say whatever they wanted in these little clubs. Yeah.
And what the think tank boom is is a war on expertise, and the other half of the war on expertise is destroying higher education, right, because that will stop poor people from being able to exercise agency. In Paul, that's what they see, right.
Yes, happen I mean hearing that this is still happening today. Yes, it's one of those like such an obvious red flag where it's like, if you're going after education, I don't know. That seems very sus right, like, h that's weird.
Yeah. And the easiest way to get middle class and poor conservatives on board with this crusade was to attack universities as hotbeds of anti war radicalism. Reagan understood this instinctively, and that's why he goes to war with Berkeley University during his candidacy. At that point, the school was basically free for Californians. If you are a state resident, you basically don't pay to go to Berkeley, and this had led to a dangerous number of poor people, particularly black people and women, getting educations at are respected university, which is a big part of why Berkeley is in nexus of organizing for protests against the Vietnam War. And one of the things that Reagan is going to be furious at is that the president of Berkeley, a guy named Clark Kerr, refused to expel student organizers. You know, the conservatives are yelling at this guy, like you need to kick kids out for organizing against the Vietnam War. And Clark is like, why the fuck shouldn't students be allowed to protest?
Why isn't it like.
An am about that? Right? Yeah?
Is this whole freedom to speak? I don't know.
One Berkeley professor would later summarize as a matter of Reagan's honest convictions, but also as a matter of politics, Reagan launched an assault on the university. Now, on the campaign trail, Reagan promised to clean up the mess at Berkeley. He attained the approval of John mccohone, head of the CIA, and Jay Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who held an unprecedented joint meeting to discuss Communist influence at universities, which mcohone wrote definitely required some corrective action. Hoover himself reached out to Kerr to tell him to crack down on student activities, and Kerr, you got to respect this guy says no to the director of the FBI. And when Kerr says, no, Hoover and McCone reach out to Ronald Reagan and I want to I want are really hammering how impressed in this is? For one thing, I know these are both evil fed agencies. The CIA and the FBI hate each other, like traditionally. They are fighting it constantly.
They're like kits and dogs.
They're like, yeah, exact, or just two cats that don't know each other's in a small apartment. Yeah, the small apartment is like the US budget for shady shit.
Oh yeah, you ever have an FBI agent in your house, they'll knock shit off your desks.
Hopefully not Dave, they will knock shit off your desks.
Though, they will. They love knocking shit off of desks. They'll they'll be like can I come in? And you open the door and then they kind of wander away, and then you're like, what are you coming in? You're not coming in? What's going on?
I would like to replace the FBI with cats, And just like if one of the if one of all cats are the FBI, And so if a cat just walks into your house, you can't you can't make it leave. You gotta feed it, you gotta pet it. You know, give it whatever it wants. Badges, Yeah, little badges, just just cats wandering around airports checking shit.
Yeah.
I think it's a good idea. Several countries already worked that way. If you've ever been to Istanbul, that's more or less how the city functions.
I love that they just have loose cats everywhere there.
So this is so the FBI and the CIA are basically like, yeah, we Ronald, you are our guy, because you are going to fire this fucking dude and crack down on this school that we see as a major threat to the United States. Yeah, it's cool, it's it's I.
Just can't help but to think about good old meatball ron of today Ronald DeSantis. Yes, and where like people very rightfully pointed out when he was like, I don't like Disney's politics, therefore I am going to just bully them with the government, and I'm not you know, I'm not on Disney's side. Well, I guess in this case I am, but I'm not a huge fan of corporations. My point being that, like, aren't they the guys who don't want the government doing this stuff getting involved in everybody's business. I can't help but to feel like this is the same situation where they're like, yes, let's get really involved in people's business because we don't like what they're doing, even though that's against everything we claim that we're in for.
It makes it clear that, like when they're talking about we have to we're doing this because the Communists want to take away freedom. They're not and I'm not an apologist for the Soviet Union. I would not have wanted to live under that regime either, right, but they're not talking about freedom because they want to take away people's freedom to protest a war that's killing millions. What they mean by freedom is rich people being able to be rich people. Yeah, yeah, that's that's the threat.
There's no there's no like extremely good sides here. It's just that, Yeah, it's.
Very The students who are trying to stop the Vietnam War are but like, yeah.
I mean even they were probably insufferable people, but yeah, well.
Sure, I mean they're they're at Berkeley, right, so you know, I wouldn't have wanted to have lunch with them, but right, they're on the right side of this.
It's so easy to go after colleges because all you have to do is step on a college campus. Yeah, man, I hate it here. Yes, it doesn't know when I was in college.
Yeah, we're doing a Reagan Dave. We're doing it.
I need to do.
Everybody, go watch PCU when you finish this. You know that's John Favreau with John Favreau and with Jeremy Piven playing a playing a man who's supposed to be a college senior and clearly in his mid forties.
Yeah, forty five year old Piven.
Beautiful, beautiful stuff. So Reagan becomes the FBI's preferred candidate. One of Hoover's memos at the time describes him as dedicated to the destruction of student activism. The assistant chancellor of Berkeley at the time described Reagan's tactics this way. Reagan took aim at the university for being irresponsible with failing to punish these dissident students. He said, get them out of here, throw them out. They are spoiled, and they don't deserve the education they're getting. They don't have a right to take advantage of our system of education. In a two thousand and four article for UC Berkeley News, Jeffrey Kahn argued that they were two main themes of Reagan's first campaign for the governorship, quote to send the welfare of bums back to work and to clean up the mess at Berkeley. The latter became a Reagan mantra, so that again I can't overemphasize this isn't just a side issue he's hitting sometimes. This is like one of the two pillars of his campaign for governor, which is why he becomes president ultimately, is attacking Berkeley.
It's so dumb because it's also like just from a practical sense, like I don't know, like he's running on the campaign of really focusing on a single school in America, and it's like, boy, I feel like there are other problems to focus on here.
Yeah, during the Vietnam War, maybe maybe.
DA There's a lot of other things you could be doing one or two. It's just it's such a weird. It's such a weird policy to run on and then succeed with.
Yeah, it's a bummer.
Yeah.
So a little bit when he Reagan wins spoiler alert for the past and Reagan immediately he leans on he can't fire Kerr directly, but he's able to lean on the university administration, basically threatening to take even more money from the school, and they eventually fire Kerr. And this was a tacit acknowledgment that attacking the school had been a lynchpin of his electoral strategy. Earl Chite, dean emeritus of the School of Business at Berkeley, later said one of his great skills was to understand popular feeling. He really tapped into the discontent people felt about what was happening on the campus. I have no doubt that this was a big factor in his election as governor. One of Reagan's first acts as governor is to cut funding for all California public colleges. He starts going after Berkeley, but he cuts funny and he tries to do it by like ten percent across the board. The legislature doesn't agree to go quite that hard, but he does cut funding to every California public college. And he frames this as a necessity, not a political attack. He says, we're doing this because of a budget shortfall. John Schwarz, formerly of The Intercept, describes how Reagan made his case to cover the funding shortfall. Reagan suggested that California public colleges could charge residents tuition for the first time this, he complained, resulted in the almost hysterical charge that this would deny educational opportunities to those of the most moderate means. This is obviously untrue. We made it plain that tuition must be accompanied by adequate loans to be paid back after graduation. And this is where student loans come from.
Yeah, of course Reagan.
Yeah, Ronny fucking Reagan.
I mean, it all comes back to Reagan.
It always has, it, always fucking does.
He was really really bad for the country, and that's what we're now in, right, we this is the era of this. It's the find out to the fuck around, right Yeah, where we've all been now hurting because of this ship that yep, they let Reagan do. How did he sell this to the public, Like, I like, I get selling this to rich people, but like it's it's always so weird when they like, how do you go, great news, we are now making your schools worse.
Yeah, I mean, because he doesn't frame it that way. First off, he frames it is like, look, we've got a budget shortfall, things are contracting, everybody's got to tighten their belt, and hey, these kids were caught. And again, the anti war movement is not as popular as people remember it being right, right, So there's a huge amount of people who are like, yeah, why are we paying for these these these communist kids to go to school?
Right?
And He's like, they're going to pay their own way. It's personal responsibility, you know, They're going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, right, right.
Because like, what does that even equate to in terms of taxes? You know, like how much of a difference is this going to make in your taxes to do this?
Taxes are even higher now, by the way.
Yeah, it's just so silly because it's like why why would we like vote and be concerned about like government budget stuff. It's like, we pay you to figure this out. Go figure it out, you know, we want to have the free schools. Keep the free damn schools.
Yes, this is why.
You know.
France has a lot of problems of its own, but their strategy of whenever they try to take away a public entitlement, burning down Paris has worked several times. This doesn't always work, but it has sometimes.
No, but I like how they roll, you know, I like it. Or if a government person so much as like farts in the wrong direction. Yeah, they're like well, time to chop off some heads.
I guess it burned down the city. So Reagan also proposed that Berkeley starts selling off the rare books in its library so rich people could put them in their private collections. The legislature, that's just such a cartoon villain thing to do. The legislature doesn't approve this or the full extent of the cuts he wanted to the UC system. But they do a lot, and he would soon have his chance to try these ideas out on the national stage with a compliant Congress. The success of Reagan's attacks on California public schools inspired conservative politicians across the US. Nixon decried campus revolt. Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed that thanks to open admissions policies, unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism. That's all, sorry, that was all a Schwartz quote from John's article in the Intercept. So reform of higher education becomes a major cause for public conservative intellectuals. This is again the think tank set, and they start putting out papers arguing that what Reagan wants to do will benefit that it'll cut down the amount of money that you know, the public has to spend, it'll be able to lower taxes, it'll be better for students. All this jazz, right, And they frame this as, you know, not just cost cutting and like making the budget make more sense, but also it'll help these students because a lot of young people are getting these useless degrees in the liberal arts. They're getting weighed down by these educations they don't really need, and if they have to pay for it, they'll be more discriminating and they'll get more useful degrees that'll benefit the economy more in the long run. That's what they're saying in public. In private, we're a lot more open about the real reason they're doing this. Schwartz continues, quote one worry that free education may be producing a positively dangerous class situation by raising the expectations of working class students. Another referred to college students as a parasite feeding on the rest of society, who exhibited a failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played by the reward punishment structure of the market. The answer was to close off the parasitic option. These are all think tank guys saying that like this, this is giving poor people an unreasonable expectation of progress that they might be able to live good lives. And they don't understand how the market works because we're not making we're not making them destroy their financial futures to get a college degree. Right, we have to add debt to this situation, and that'll stop them from being parasites.
Right, They're kind of they're kind of kicking down the ladder after they already got up there. It's it's it's ridiculous because it fundamentally misunderstands what the idea of school is for, Like why society has school, which is to train people to exist in the society that's been built.
Right.
Yeah, And it's just very silly that you would look at like people in school and go, those are parasites. Like, don't get me wrong, there is you know, the academic world isn't perfect. There are people who can sort of drift through school.
I have I know a couple of people who have done that.
Yeah yeah, oh yeah, but like that's that's like that's not a justification for this. And and then also like that's years of also like just schools, yeah, changing over the.
Years, A certain percentage of people who get into the academic system, you know, especially if it's basically free, we'll just spend their whole lives being students in various things, and that might wind up being bad for that person, But as a societal problem, it does not compare to the scale of the problem of an entire generation burdened by student loan debt they can never repay, right, they will wind up paying many times the principle and like basically be garnishing their wages for the rest of their lives, like unable to buy a home, unable to like the sheer amount of damage it does, like one is worse than the other.
Yeah, I mean this is the whole thing. Like, this is why it's that idea of like, well, we shouldn't give to homeless people because what if one of them's a liar and it's like who cares?
Yeah, who gives like shit?
Yeah, like yeah, that's most people loon be.
We have a lot of data on how just giving homeless people cash works. Most of them use it to get houses, well, you know, apartments or whatever.
But yeah, why are we using this fear of this small percentage is or is not to do something that's Yeah, it's broadly good. And this feels like the same thing, which is like, well, some of them will be leeches, and it's like let them, let them be leeches. Isn't this what a good society is is something that takes care of their people unconditionally.
It's so like you, no, you don't use this logic wor else. And nobody says if you're like I should exercise to get into better shape. No one is like, oh, but you know what, it's theoretical that I might get hurt exercising, so I'm never going to move my body, right, Like yeah, like you would say, well that's irrational, right right.
But it's the same like a hospital where it's like, well some of them might be fake, faking their symptoms, and it's like yeah, I mean that doesn't mean we get rid of the hospital.
Some number of doctors will be bad at it and kill their patients, so we shouldn't have any medical professionals. Just let nature take its course.
Yeah, we don't make this argument for anything else. But when it comes to like talking about poor people getting things.
Look, one percent of people are allergic to antibiotics, so let's just let everyone die of preventable infections. Yeah, it's it's frustrating, so it's silly. The National Review, a conservative journal of opinion in news that largely served as a vehicle for distributing the work of these think tanksuggested that the solution to the problem of parasitic college students was to cut public funding for colleges, which be made up by charging more or anything at all in some cases for tuition. They recommended quote a system of full tuition charges supplant supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income. And this is all coming together in this period. In May of nineteen sixty nine, things came to a head. Student activists had created a people's park on a vacant plot of land in Berkeley. Jeffrey con writes students and activists had begun an attempt to transform a vacant plot of university property into people's park. Attempting to head off the activists, the university engaged a fencing company accompanied by two hundred and fifty police to erect a chain link fence around the land at four am on May fifteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Five hours later, a rally was called on Spool placet to protest. The action resource, a current UC Berkeley reference guide for new students, relates the story of how Reagan intervened, sending in a National Guard. The rally, which drew three thousand people, soon turned into a riot as the crowd moved down Telegraph Avenue towards the park. That day known as Bloody Thursday. Three students suffered punctured lungs, another a shattered leg. Thirteen people were hospitalized with shotgun wounds, and one police officer was stabbed. James Rector, who was watching the riot from a rooftop, was shot by police gunfire. He died four days later. Damn yeah, thanks Ronnie.
Yeah.
And by the way, this just happened again. They just cracked down violently on people's park, which they were like, homeless people were like basically it had been turned into effectively a place where they could like camp and exist, and the police just shut it down. A bunch of protesters came up, they beat the shit out of everybody. Same same story, twenty twenty four. I mean, I'd love to see it.
Cops love a good beating of college protesters, all right, Yeah, yeah, they're too young to fully know they're rights, like, you'll probably get away with it a lot of the time.
You can shoot them, sure, yeah, yeah, fire and apparently rooftop. Yeah, I got the shooting at roots.
I'm like, I don't want to trivialize his death, but I'm imagining that guy being like, I'm nice and safe up here. Yeah, Like, ah, don't worry about me, I'm on the roof. Oh my goodness. Yeah.
So the riot was great pr for Reagan because the media pretty much cited with him and putting the blame for it on the protesters. He got to do the strong Man Act and call in twenty two hundred National Guard troops to deal with a state of emergency in Berkeley. This created an absurd situation where guardsmen who were Berkeley students were activated to police the campus. Con cites at least one man who was shot at and injured by cops during the riot and then got home to a notice telling him to report for duty. More than a thousand people were ultimately arrested. Reagan's war with Berkeley was a blueprint for other conservative politicians, and the coalition of right wing policy wonks and campaigners that coalesced around him began to plot grander schemes, and we're going to talk about those schemes. But first, you know who's got the grandest scheme? Dave me. Oh, well, yes, you you do have a plot. I'm always plotting, always scheming. And part of Dave's plot is that you buy some of these products.
Absolutely, we're back.
So nineteen seventy Dave Reaga year runs for reelection. He had become known as a charismatic speaker, the great communicator of conservative thought to the masses, and there was no issue that served him better than attacking those damn Marxists in academia and the shiftless college students ruining America's good time in Southeast Asia. In May of that year, he shut down all twenty eight use campuses over protests against the bombing of Cambodia. A few months later, in October, his education advisor, Roger Freeman, gave a press conference, and I'm going to quote here from an article in the Intercept. Freeman's remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline professor ces peril in education. According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, we are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite. We have to be selective on who we allow to go to college. If not, Freeman continued, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people. Freeman also said, taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism, that's what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.
It's incredible because it's it's the big you know, you step back from this and it's like, okay, so we're bombing people, we're doing we're doing terrible things in a war, and you know, it's always kind of pretty terrible. And then our young people who we've taught you know, you know, I presumably even the seventies, we taught them, you know, compassion and basic morals as a kid, and then they're in school and they're learning about the world and they're saying like, you know, we don't like that you're doing this. And you step back and you look at that, and you're like, we better shut down these colleges. That's the problem. It's just so funny how that's that's the conclusion that they drew from where it's like, hey, stop doing this terrible thing, and it's like you're right, we should find a way to silence you from saying that you're so right. And then it's a dystopian that it comes down to, like these riots of them.
Just it's just a big part of Freeman as a guy who comes out from this culture. Again he's born in a monarchy, and his attitude, and this is the attitude of basically all of the landed aristocracy in the United States and in Europe, is that like no bless oblige rite this idea that like, well, you have an obligation as part of the uppercross to run society and to take care of it. And you have within sort of your noble cast, you have your progressives and your conservatives and your progressives who are advocating for the little people. But they always understand, because they come out of the aristocracy, that their first is to their class and to maintaining the wealth and power of their class. Of course, and these these poor proletarians getting an education that can't be allowed to happen because they don't have any loyalty to the same class that we're in. They might just want to make things better for the poor.
Yeah, it really comes down to that doesn't.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's pretty hideous.
It goes back, it goes to the whole civility thing where it's like, how dare you protest that way? How dare you do like, you know, like acting like the protests are worse than the the actual enemy or the actual people that they're harming. It's just and then of course linking it to like they must all be socialists or they all must be communistic because they're protesting this thing that we're doing against these people. It's just it's such I don't know, it's it's incredible, like I don't know, trickery.
It's very funny to me that he's like, this is what happened in Germany because like, no, it's not.
It is true.
There were a lot of highly trained and unemployed people, and that contributed to the Nonazis. They weren't highly trained college students. They were veteran soldiers. They were trench fighters with head injuries who were really good at killing people and back the Nazis because the Nazis said, you know what, the best thing is killing people, right, that's not all of it. But like the Nazis did not not that they had no college graduates, like Hitler wasn't an educated college graduate. That's not why Hitler was powerful.
You know, I mean we we sure love, we sure loved pretending the Nazis were a lot of things that they weren't. Right, Like, there's just so much like, well, that's what the Nazis did, and it's always just like very vague broad strokes of it.
There was certainly a chunk of the Nazis who were well educated and whatnot, but like that was not the center of their power, right, their early power, the street fighters, the movements were like vets and hooligans.
You know, it's very funny to be like the Nazis were educated. Education makes you Nazi. Yeah, it's like the Nazis drink water, therefore we shouldn't drink water. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, it's ridiculous. Yeah.
So this guy Roger Freeman, who is who is saying all of this really hideous shit is again he's in Austrian born in nineteen oh four. He'd fled after Hitler annexed Austria and wound up serving under Eisenhower and Nixon. He was also a fellow at the Hoover Institute, which was Stanford's think tank, right, and it was a pretty conservative think tank. Right. This is kind of contrary to the republican frenzy of our Marxist academics, but like the Hoover Institute is pretty right wing. And that's where this guy, who was in a lot of ways the architect of the student loan system, this is one of Reagan's education advisors, comes out of. He is a think tank guy. Right University he believed was something only the wealthy should have access to, because you know, they had an understanding of their obligation to maintain the status quo. Reagan becomes the center then of a plot to co opt the energy in the enthusiasm of the new right in order to help the old right remake the economy in their image and destroy anything that hints at being a public benefit. He is the first candidate that benefits from both the newly forged religious right, which at this point has two major causes, keeping black kids out of private schools and turning back women's rights. And he's also the first think tank president.
Right.
Some of this stuff had started creeping in during Nixon's administration, but it's really Reagan that is the first you know all this shit in the pal memorandum and the religious right stuff. Reagan is the first president to really benefit from all of it, you know.
Yeah, I mean there's I know that Jimmy Carter of all people was like the first like Christian president, right that, like really yes, put that, And so it's like he was like the practice run where they're like, Okay, well that can work. I mean, not him, but like you know, a guy I like him, or maybe even not even a guy like him, because I'm pretty sure Reagan was not very religious. Uh oh god no no, no, yeah, get godless, Hollywood Hollywood actor. So yeah, yeah, yeah.
So as kind of this this think tank, you know, so Reagan has his re election in nineteen seventy, nineteen eighty obviously is going to be his presidential campaign. In that period in between, you have both the religious right growing in power, and you have these think tanks really start to get to get moving, right, Like this is really when you're having a bunch of them founded in quick secession. In nineteen seventy three, two congressional aids quit the Hill and start the Heritage Foundation. In nineteen seventy six, a former Brookings guy starts the Ethics and Public Policy Center in nineteen seventy seven, will get the Cato Institute named after a pretty insufferable Roman by some equally insufferable Americans. And this all contributes to a nineteen eighty Ronald Reagan winning his election. And you know, one of the things that had been a through line in his presidential campaign had been these constant series of attacks on this growing class of administrators and thinkers, kind of liberal academics and think tank people who had crusted together at the upper levels of government. Right, And Reagan basically says, these guys are burdening the doers. We have too many thinkers in there and not enough men of action.
Right.
But as soon as he takes office, he's going to fill the White House with nothing but think tank guys.
Right.
Despite like this, these complaints they'd had about how all of these people were gumming up the works of government. And I'm going to quote from an article in the Atlantic here about that process. When plump positions started going to them, conservatives discovered that the new class wasn't so bad after all. Norman Tour, one of the original supply siders, supported himself through the late nineteen seventies by taking donations for his Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation. While Ronald Reagan was composing his first cabinet, Turre wrote a paper for the Heritage Foundation advocating, in the best new class style, the creation of a new government post that of Treasury Department Under Secretary for Tax Policy, and after some assiduous circulating of the paper with resume attached, landed the job for himself. Following the change of administrations in nineteen eighty, some conservatives found think tanks useful vehicles for advancing their ideas in their careers. Colin Gray, a nuclear hardliner known for a foreign policy article titled Victory as Possible, failed to land a top position at Defense of the National Security Council. So we started the National Institute for Public Policy, which produces studies on beam weapons and other Star Wars components.
So this works.
It can be as directly as in the case the Terrez. You start a think tank, you write papers about how the government needs to have this specific position making sure that taxes get cut, and then you get that fucking job for yourself because you sent that paper around Reagan people with your resume attached.
It's such a good grift.
It's a great grift. I kind of want to steal that one from myself in all.
Kind of I don't know. We talked about the value of a good font. It's that thing where like I get why this is kind of weird. I get why fly earthers exist. Yeah, I get why weird like conspirac see people or like, because to regular people, it's all just like books, right, Yeah, it's all like most people, no one gets to see the world from space, no one gets to experience history. We all just it's just we grew up at schools giving us books and going like, trust me, this is what it is. We've passed this down and so like it seems really easy to be able to hijack that and go like, see, we have a study. You love studies, we have experts, and here's a piece of paper. Here's a book, a pamphlet that says this thing very officially, that says that I should get this job.
That is the stated goal. Is like, when we're having arguments about what we do with taxes, should we have this public benefit? You know, should should college be free? And you know, liberals trot out these papers by the Brooking Institute. We want to have twice as many papers from our institutes because that's all a lot of people care about. It's like, well, that's a thicker stack of papers. They must have more evidence.
It's ridiculous. We have on the internet more than an ever. Like studies, the concept of a study where it's like, there's so many studies and they say different things, and then you actually dig into the study and you're like, this barely says this thing. Yeah, but we love it doesn't matter. It's just how many studies.
How many studies you get in this thing. Yeah. So by the time the Reagan administration gets underway, US conservatives have exhibited their remarkable talent for flexibility by deciding the professional thinker class is good actually and ought to be employed telling the rest of us what to do. Every major shift in economic policy and defense policy under Reagan was supported by an ocean of think tank publications beyond the Powell Memo. A major intellectual touchstone of this movement was Wealth and Poverty, a book by George Gilder. Gilder was a New York child whose father died flying for the army in the Big Dub Dub dose. He grew up on a farm in Massachusetts and was raised in part by the Rockefeller family, which would give you an idea ask his economic state, right, David Rockefeller is his godfather. He is as blue a blood as it's possible to be. He's too and fine and wealth and poverty. Espouses a supply side economics philosophy that is amenable to the people who already had fortunes. Like as godfather. This basically becomes the bible of the Reagan administration's economic policy. Gilder argues for tax cuts, but he does so in a way that is utterly novel. This is the foundation of trickle down economics. Right, you need to cut taxes because it'll improve the economy for everybody. And I'm going to quote from the Atlantic again here, Adam Smith, he said, had it wrong. Capitalism isn't a voodoo through which many selfish acts inexplicably advance the whole. It's a magnanimous organism in which everybody wants the best for everybody else, since, after all, one person cannot prosper selling his product unless many others are prosperous enough to buy. Big tax cuts, Guilder said, will trigger an outburst of altruism. Now, funny, we know that's not true. All they do is park the money offshore, trillions and trillions of dollars of it, enough money to solve a significant chunk of the problems we face healthcare, homelessness, to be goddamn certain, all of it's parked in. They're this is what the Panama papers field. That's why they've bombed a journalist car.
It's not true, yea we I mean when was the Christmas Carol written? Like we've always known it's not true. It's so weird that they got away with saying like, yeah, just help out the rich people and they'll help everybody else out.
I think what you're getting at, Dave, because I don't think it's capitalism to like going and being able to buy stuff at the mall. That's like a market, and markets are nice. We like markets. That's why every city in history is founded around a market. It's nice to go pick up fresh food. It's nice to get a to get a nice thing to wear or whatever. Like, it's not nice to have your entire society structured around the fact that there's a couple of thousand dudes who own every company because they have shares of a thing in the stock market, and everyone else's life and comfort and survivalist secondary to them always getting a return on their investment, right.
I mean, that's the thing. This is, This is anti what they claim to be. It's anti free market. A lot of this stuff too, where it's like they're just we're in a situation where there's certain companies that it's like there's no competition anymore for them, like they've just demolished everything.
No one has an issue with the idea that Steve Wozniak and Venner of the personal computer might have a nice beach house and a fancy car, right, Yeah, nobody has an issue with the fact that Danny DeVito probably has a nice vacation home. We're all happy for Danny DeVito.
Yeah. I hope he has an island. I hope he has his own little Danny DeVito island.
I'm not thrilled with Mark Zuckerberg hollowing out the center of a major Hawaiian island to build an apocalypse bunker where he can recreate civilization.
It's like that. It's getting silly. Yeah, it's getting real silly. Yeah, Just people don't need that much stuff any no, no, or.
That much control of anyway. We're all we're preaching to the choir here, and we're certainly not preaching to Guilder, because Guilder's attitude is if we just let these people get as rich as possible and leave everything up to them by gutting our social programs, they'll take care of it. One way or the other. It'll trickle down and it'll we'll all get richer.
This is also based on the assumption that rich people are smart and good. Yes, And it's just very funny because this is all about them being like, we need to make colleges exclusive for them and make the world pave the way for them and give them all this stuff and they'll be smart enough to know what to with it. And it's like, really oause it sounds like you're putting everything on a platter for them, and they have all this generational wealth and you're ensuring a bunch of dipshits with a lot of money and no idea how to actually do any.
Sure does seem like that. And Guilder, the guy who is who puts together you know, this argument that becomes the center of Reagan's economic policy is a career think tank guy. He was a program director for the Manhattan Institute. He was chairman of the economic portion of the Lairman Institute. And so again he comes entirely out of this project. By these rich guys to fund the creation of an intellectual class that says what they want being said, and by framing the incredibly selfish economic policies that the elite support as altruistic, he is able to preside over a sea change in how conservatives talk to the country. In the nineteen seventies. Gen Kirkpatrick has criticized Republicans for being able to quote conceive of no greater good than a balanced budget. Starting with Reagan, balanced budgets are no longer a priority, and the deficit simply wasn't worth talking about unless a Democrat happened to be president. Greg Easterbrook notes in his History of Conservative think tanks that the Heritage Foundation didn't even use the word debt in its mandate for leadership until page two hundred and nineteen. In the mid nineteen the Ethics and Policy Center, another think tank, started holding conferences on how market mechanisms could benefit the poor quote not once were welfare queens or ghetto cadillacs, the sort of small minded crochets that would have dominated a similar Conservative conference a decade ago. Even mentioned conservatism, by acquiring a positive vision, had become warmer. A huge amount of this strategy, that kind of the lynchpin of it working, hinges on journalists and particularly the way lazy journalists meet their deadlines. The way legacy publications tend to work is that when you're discussing a debate over public policy, you want to be able to present quotes from both sides of the debate. This is called being unbiased. Powell and his fellow ideologues knew that, since most journalists are lazy, if you made it very easy for them to get quotes from you by sending them piles of information whenever they asked for a question, they would reward you by giving your ideas more sympathy in their coverage. The Brookings Institute, which tended to do rigorous work, charged journalists who wanted to access their studies. None of these right wing think tanks charge. They also write in a way that's more accessible to the layman. Since they're not actually saying anything with any evidence, they're able to like throw into entertaining prose by guys like William F. Buckley. Right, this is a big part of why this works.
Have you read the da Vinci Code, Robert No The book The di Vinci Code is practically written in screenplay format, and it's just reminding me of that. Where they're making it. They're basically like, you read the da Vinci Code and you're like, he wanted this to be a movie. Yeah, and he made it as easy as possible for it to be a movie. And that's what you're describing here, which is like science papers and studies, they are difficult, they're very Having worked on some more news and going through them, it's like sometimes they feel like they're purposefully worded to be hard to understand. Yeah, And it's almost like a gatekeeping It's like when you do your texts, you realize it's kind of a gatekeeping process. Yeah, it makes sense that this would be a really important step because, like you said, journalisms, journalists are lazy expected. I think the nicer way to put it is they're expected to cover everything, and that means they are expected to be like kind of experts and everything to understand everything, and so they will glom On. If you go like here, yeah, ik it easy, Here's a really easy way to explain this thing.
Or here's a column by one of our fellows on this issue. You know, you can just publish this and you'll have something to put in your little newspaper. The American Enterprise Institute or AEI, was perhaps the most successful of the bunch. It was founded in nineteen forty three by Lewis Brown, a wealthy industrial magnate. He had been the bagman for the president of Montgomery Ward T. F. Mercel, and during the end of the nineteen twenties, a firm called John's Manville discovered the profit making potential of an incredible fire retardant substance called asbestos, and they hired Tf to be their chairman. He brought Brown, the founder of the AEI, and then he dropped dead suddenly, almost immediately, which made Brown president of the s Bestos Company at age thirty five. He becomes the s The guy who founds like the most influential think tank of the Reagan era, was previously the asbestos king of the United States.
He's got the whole world in his problem.
He share it does and he's given it all cancer. He is the president of the s Bestos Institute, which is the sort of think tank digit dedicated to s bestos working. Great.
Yeah, you love to see it out there sitting around, just like Sniffin' pile.
These people are all such ghouls because he's the the AEI founder, is the s bestos guy, the author of the Powell Memorandum, which lays out the strategy for all this is the fucking Tobacco Institute lawyer, Like, these people have such money.
They should get they should make they should get some asbestos. Roll it up in a cigarette they used to smoke it. Yeah, Yeah, that's that's the good stuff, you.
Know, And I bet it hit like, Oh man, I would take one. I would try an asbestos cigarette.
Dad got him right. It's like human meat, you'd like. You're like, well, I wouldn't seek it out, but if it's handed to me, I'm gonna have to try it, obviously. Yeah.
I ate what was basically a fish stuffed with human meat, and it was pretty tasty. Day.
Yeah that's good. I got admit, I don't like fish, but I'd probably just pick off the fish.
Yeah yeah, yeah, just just eat the man.
Yeah.
Of course. So while he ran the company, uh, the asbestos company. It became obvious that asbestos was causing asbestosis among workers who made it. This is inflammation and scarring off the lungs due to inhaling asbestos fibers, and it leads to fun things like mesothelioma and lung cancer. It became this motherfucker Brown's crusade to pump out disinformation about asbestosis, to maximize the amount of time that they could put asbestos in everything before they got stopped from doing that. And his goal for this was it was the same thing that people the tobacco industry would later do. It's the same thing the oil and gas industry has done with climate change. Confuse the issue until everyone's dead, right, so you can keep making money off of it.
I don't I don't believe in hell, But if this guy like showed up in hell, I feel like he wouldn't have to ask, Like, he wouldn't be like, what the hell? What did I do?
Yes?
This scance? Yeah, this is about right.
Yeah. So when one of his company's contractors, who is actually like doing the manufacturing of the asbestos from this company called Unarco, they started this company like starts identifying employees who are like getting medical tests through their company health care and showing signs of asbestosis. Unarco like sends them letters saying like, hey, you've got the disease asbestos gives you. And Brown is livid about this, and he basically like tries to get them to stop telling employees that they have asbestosis when they get sick. One Unarco employee would later testify in a federal investigation on their never forget. I turned to mister Brown. One of the Browns made this crack that Anarco managers were a bunch of fools for notifying employees who had aspestosis, And I said, mister Brown, do you mean to tell me that you would let them work until they dropped? He said, yes, we save a lot of money that way.
Yep. Again, it's it's it's looking at the problem like being like, Okay, so the problem is what we're making is killing all our employees, and we have to tell them, and then someone being like, you know what we should do, just don't tell them.
It's just not.
Problem is solved. Yeah, it's like a fucking it's like something they do and always Sonny like it's it's it's just a the dirt bag bit. Yeah, through and through, it's incredible.
It's so good. Now, despite being a wealthy ghoul with a body count to rival most warlords, Brown was unfulfilled. He saw what his fellow rich guy, Robert Brookings, had done with the Brookings Institute, which had become an intellectual powerhouse that was widely respected. Brown wanted that kind of respect for himself, and that's why he founds the AI in nineteen forty three, and that's where we get the American Enterprise Institute Now. It was stymied at first by the fact that Brown didn't believe in anything beyond having more money and was really incapable of analyzing the world in a lens beyond this. So it wasn't until nineteen fifty four, when a guy named William Burrudi took over, that the AEI turned into something worth talking about. Berrudi's parents were Lebanese immigrants, and he was a Greek Catholic who served in the Navy during World War Two and then worked for the Chamber of Commerce. He was Barry Goldwater's main advisor in nineteen sixty four and a close friend to Dick Nixon, a man who did not have any close friends. He restructured the American Enterprise Institute to the copy Brookings and started hiring fellows to put out work that would make the case for supply side conservative economic policies. Burrudi's goal was to reach the mainstream, and as a result, they started hiring famous people in popular writers, people like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Gerald Ford, and Philip habeeb It strove to entertain as well as to inform, and its fellows wrote articles with titles like Curse of the Mummy's Tomb and Dictators and Double Standards. That last one by Jeane Kirkpatrick mocked Jimmy Carter for failing to support the Shah of Iran and Anastasio Simosa, the dictator of Nicaragua. Kirkpatrick argued that basically, you know, obviously communist regimes are bad, but traditional autocrats are okay, right, because they stop the communists from getting into power. Quote. Traditional autocrats do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work in leisure, habitual places of residents, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who growing up in the society learn to cope. Revolutionary communist regimes claim jurisdiction over the whole life of society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens of thousands. And that what Kirkpatrick is saying here is that like, well, communists might cause a problem that makes people flee the country, but normal dictators are miserable in a way that people feel like they can't escape. So that's what we the United States should encourage, right.
Yeah, I mean, I guess he's not wrong. It's it's hard, it's hard. It's hard to push for like change, for fundamental change. We were talking about this before with the infrastructure, with the things that how they are like people are going to resist anything where you're like, we have to we have to change these things in a really meaningful or deep way that's going to affect you. So, yeah, I guess he's not wrong that well, dictator.
He isn't that these dictatorships are going to cause huge numbers of people to flee the country because they kill lots of people.
Yeah, yeah, that's good.
Problem you know, it's it's this is part of why like this article. You know, the thing it's arguing is that the US should encourage democracy, but only slow, gradual demidocracy, And if a dictatorship faces an uprising, or if a democracy elects a left wing leader, we should murder them, right like, because that's dangerous, right, that's too likely to make people flee the country. So we have to you know, dictatorships we can work with, but anyone who tries to improve the country in a progressive direction, the United States has kind of a responsibility to kill.
Yeah, I mean, how dare they? Yeah?
Ronald Reagan loves this fucking article. He thinks that Gene makes a brilliant argument, and he directly this article is directly credited with her getting appointed to be US Ambassador to the U Win and her broader argument helps create the Reagan administration's policy in Latin America, which is why we start sending weapons to the contrast. This is this is like why the Reagan administration so assiduously embraces the policy of sending arms to any dictator who promises to use them on leftists, right like this This is kind of a direct result of this think tank, you know, ecosystem, it really helps. Maybe they would have done it without that, right, because that's what these kind of people always want to do. But Kirkpatrick's article kind of provides the intellectual scaffolding that makes it kind of respectable.
Right, right, they're enabling them. Yes, that's all we talked about, like the idea of a friend who's like, yeah, you can have one more drink. It's fine. It's that they're they're looking for people to say, like, what you're doing is actually very good. Yeah, the thing you were gonna do anyway that benefits you directly. Oh yeah, that turns out to be the right.
It's actually good for everybody.
Yeah, and it is.
It's maddening to admit, but pretty undeniable. That AEI is what makes conservatism quote intellectually respectable. As one Reagan White House official told the Atlantics Greg Easterbrook, quote without AEI, Reagan never would have been elected.
And again that's a.
Member of the Reagan White House. Right. This think tank created by the Asbestos.
Baron that's so bleak that they're so this.
Yeah, yeah, that the Asbestos think tank arguing dictatorships are fine is a lynchpin of Reagan getting into power.
It's basically I'm sort of saying, like, we know that we don't have everybody's best interest in mind. Yeah, we really, we know that we don't care about the poor even like middle class. We see them as nothing. But this is making it seem like we have a viable like thing to offer everything.
Yeah. Now, another major thing that the think tank industrial complex is able to do for the Reagan administration is help launder his ideas about space based anti nuclear laser weapons.
Right.
This is the so called star Wars program. Now, Yeah, experts not being paid by think tanks. Was like, yeah, maybe someday this will be a thing, but like, we just can't do it right now. It's insanely expensive and likely it might a lot of this might just be impossible. Right, But a strong counter argument emerged, backed by a variety of right wing defense focused think tanks. The goal of this Reagan program, officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI, was to, in Reagan's words, render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. Now, this was considered a dangerous goal because nuclear deterrence is largely what stopped the US and the USSR from like directly throwing hands too much. Ballistic missile defenses eventually started costing the US more than four billion dollars a year, which made them the most expensive weapons program in the Pentagon budget. As the Institute for Policy Studies, ironically itself a think tank, eventually acknowledged in nineteen ninety nine, the overall program has been described as high risk and a rush to failure by a number of respected missile defense experts. The Pentagon's Director of Operational Testing and Evaluation released his annual report in February two thousand and pointed out that the aggressive schedule established for the NMD program presents a major challenge. The NMD program will have to compress the work of ten to twelve years in eight or less years. This pattern has historically resulted in a negative effect on virtually every troubled DoD development program. A panel headed by the former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Larry Welch, released a report last November harshly critical of the program. The Welsh report argued that the failures of the program were not the result of random malfunctions, but an indication of systemic flaws and design planning and management, stating that instead of unusual clarity, there is a usual fragmentation and confusion about authority and responsibility. And that's because this was never a plan to actually build an effective missile defense system. It was like, number one, a way to shovel a lot of money into defense contractors, and number two a thing for Reagan to promise that would make people feel safer. Right, We're going to have these laser defenses that will render us immune to nukes. You know.
It's like you duck and cover, right, It's like, yeah, it'll be fine.
Yeah, we'll get it. We'll get a lockdown, we'll get a lockdown. Don't worry. I mean, once they.
Learn it doesn't work, what are they going to do? Complain? They'll be ash.
It's the thing, nuclear defenses. If they fail, not.
Your problem, exactly, Y's win win. Now.
I find it personally fascinating how few actually different sounding names there are for these think tanks. I just quoted the Institute for Policy Studies, and the think tank that largely backed the Strategic Defense initiative was the National Institute for Public Policy. What was said and the actual rigor behind the conclusions in the papers didn't matter, volume was what mattered. This is something you were getting at a bit ago, right, you just have to have more paper than the other guy.
And by this science, yeah, more official.
Yeah, and this really simple, shallow metric is what causes conservatism to advance by leaps and bounds from the eighties up to the yearly two thousands. And there are some some of these think tank guys will even admit this. Michael Horowitz of the Heritage Foundation Total Reporter quote, Historically, conservatives in the United States have come across as racists and know nothings. It was essential to create a moral and intellectual basis for conservative beliefs that had its own vision and wasn't just a reaction against liberalism. And I do that's fucked up that it worked. I am a little hopeful that like they've gone back to just being a reaction. That might suggest that they're kind of out of ideas. And I wonder if that's part of why the demographics are turning so starkly against them. I guess we'll see in the next ten years we sure.
Well. Yeah, it's it's just interesting because there there I think there is a pattern that I've seen now of them sort of wanting to do back the things that the left quote unquote like does to them, this idea of like when Biden is in power, they're like, well, we'll do an impeachment. And it's like it's like a kid who learns new words and then uses them improperly against their parents, where it's like, yeah, but we're we you know, Trump was being in peace for a reason.
You try to throughout the country right now, they're like.
Well, you get an impeachment or like I remember Tim Poole using started learning learned the Friends death cult and it's like, no, we were saying death cult because you guys were like because the right was acting like a death cult around the face mass and pandemic, like it was in this context. And what you're what you're sort of indicating here is that idea of like, well the liberals they had all this fancy education stuff and studies, we need our own. Yeah, it doesn't matter if it's real. It's like if for example, the Daily Wires started making uh content, started.
Making stuff and movies yeah, and being like, well.
We need ours, but it's so hollow because it comes from a reactionary place.
Exactly. They are reactionaries. And that's fundamentally what that means. There's nothing inside these people.
Right.
I'm not talking about regular voting people who are just more considered or get trapped by this ideology. I'm talking about the ideologues.
Right.
All they really have is a desire to be rich and powerful. Everything they're doing is just trying to figure out how to further that end. But they don't believe in things beyond.
That, right, and the idea to politicize everything where a lot of this comes from. We're like, well, the left have their studies, and it's like, no, they aren't the left studies, they're just studies.
And the studies that they stay, yeah, you don't like.
The well, we have our own, and it's like that. It's that framing of like, oh, it's left versus right, and it's like, no, it's you versus reality. It really is for at least a lot of this. That isn't to say that people on the left doone also have their problems and and will overpoliticize things. But when it comes to these studies and stuff where it's like, oh, we need a counter thing about the asbestos, and this is.
Why they insentially just land On, like let's just break reality, right, Like that's the that's where they go.
And I think the again, the problem with this grift not for them, the problem for us, the people being grifted, is that it like asbestos is a good example where it's like, well time, you need time, and by the time you figure out this thing is wrong, the damage was done. You lead pipes or or or trickle down economics by the time we figure out, like, hey, this was dumb for a lot of this stuff, like lead pipes is a good analogy for it because it's like you look at that and you go, well, we have to tear out all these goddamn pipes. That's gonna take so much time. And it's sort of the same with the stuff that they're planting here is it's like we can't just undo this stuff. It's embedded deep.
It's the center.
Yeah.
Yeah, cool stuff, cool stuff, Yeah, yeah, it's it's good stuff.
You can put sunglasses on it. It's so cool.
We've been talking about like Gene Kapatrick, Michael Horowitz, you know, Crystal, like these big names in the think tank writing, you know, and these guys, these are people who are like popular enough that they are bylines in the period of time when magazines sold could sell magazines, right, And that's a big part of like getting some of these famous thinkers. Getting Gerald Ford writing columns and stuff is a thing that will can help launder your ideas because people are already famous. It'll get eyeballs right for the less famous grunts at the think tanks actually putting together a lot of these papers, doing the background work. The ultimate goal of a career working in these think tanks is to earn yourself a coveted presidential appointment. Lawrence Korb, a DoD employee turned think tanker turned Raytheon executive, describe the focus on presidential employment among think tank employees as obsessive because that's how you get rich, right. Think tankers also made attractive options for new administrations because the logistical burdens involved in bringing them on were basically non existent. All you have to do to move from AI to the administration is walk across the street.
He says.
You don't have to move your family to DC because you're already there. You don't have to give up a good job you might not get back because the think tank will always take you back. You don't have to put your assets into some kind of complicated trust. If your background is academics, you don't have any assets, and a business manner lawyer coming into government usually has to make a financial sacrifice to someone from academia. On the other hand, sixty thousand dollars, the typical pay for a high level appointee is a raise. So what he's saying there is like and again, this is a guy who starts out working for think tanks, gets a presidential appointment, becomes a Raytheon executive. Right, you can if you're an academic, if you agree to go to the dark side, you can make an okay living at a think tank, make a decent living in politics, and then when you're out of politics, you get to be an executive for Raytheon where you get rich. You know, it's a path to wealth for people who otherwise wouldn't have had it. And that's part of the promise. If you make the argument that we can't change anything that would lead to a reduction or end to our landed wealthy aristocracy to this oligarch class, then you'll get to become a little bitty, petty oligarch. Right, that's the promise the think tank makes the people who work there. You know, during the height of its influence, more than half of AEI's funding came directly from donations from corporations who defrayed their own tax burden by paying people who influenced the government to lower their taxes even further. Sometimes this hurt their bottom line. Easterbrook noted in nineteen eighty six that quote an advocate of relaxed anti trust laws. AEI notes in its current annual report that the waf of corporate mergers led to a reduction of more than one hundred thousand dollars in its support last year because several friendly companies were gobbled out of existence. But you know, the wealthy men who spend their money and the money of their corporations on these think tanks always remember in the end to keep them topped off right, at least as long as they need them. We'll see if they finally win. I don't think these think tanks will keep getting funded to the extent that they have been, but they were for quite some time. Really, up through the Bush years, this system kind of dominated a lot of the ideological conversation in this country. It was kind of dethroned in the Trump years, not totally. These they still have a decent amount of influence.
But because yeah, I can see Trump, I mean, maybe you'll tell you you're probably gonna say, yeah, I can see Trump as the kind of jerk who does not listen to think tanks. No, And honestly, that's probably one of the good things, one of the few good things. Yeah.
Well, and it's it's also that like Trump is kind of new right. We don't, we use different terms for it now, but in like the late nineteen eighties that we're talking about, these the people that we just like, we've come to just call fascists as the new right, and these are like these very reactionary, very aggressive, not traditional sort of like polite, respectable conservatives. And these people, from the beginning of their time on the political stage have not liked the think tank set right in part because these think tanks make a big deal of how influential they are and they're not you know, this this evangelical this kind of alliance of evangelical right wingers, Christian nationalist culture warriors. Right, they're important, but they kind of represent a threat to the new right type guys, and so you know, it's possible their hour has started to pass. We'll see if things shift back in the other direction. But they did their bit right, They they shifted the culture successfully. They got us to the point that we're at.
There'll always be people like them because I think when it comes down to what these things takes are are their middle management when when Trump they are like when Trump talked about the concept of a deep state, he was wrong about what it was, but I don't think he's wrong that there is a form of that, and that is people whose entire careers are maintaining their careers, where like they just they they just you know, it's like I was reading about like we did we did a video about like how elections are their own economies. There are people whose entire jobs or a better example is taxes right, H and R block these companies that only exist for this system that we've created that to keep them around, and they lobby specifically to keep taxes the way they are so they can continue to exist. And I can see someone like Trump sort of looking at people like that and seeing like, oh, these are these are people we can cut or rejecting them. I don't think he's doing it out of the goodness of his heart. But I can see him doing it for sure.
Yeah, I think it might weaken them in the long run, strategically in the same way that like Trump, he's done a lot of damage. He's also like right now spending all of the rnc's money on his legal bills, right which might hurt them, you know, not just in the presidential election, but across the board. You know, I guess we'll see. It's this kind of like the risk of letting a single dude get that much power as he can really just these these well laid plans, this twenty thirty year plan to take over the judiciary fifty years, all this kind of shit.
You know, it's he's he's a threat to the establishment, just not the way he advertises he's a threat to the establishment, the way letting a drunk they are into a Walmart is a threat to the establishment, where it's like, yeah, you're just in, You're just an asshole, Like you're just a liability for them, right, Like you'll just they can't tell him anything as they'll just say it out loud or he'll fuck it up. Like that's how he's actually a threat to them. Which is like they're their little slow playing that they're doing. They don't like it.
Yeah, well well Dave, that's it. Where ah, where do you Where do you go? Where do you live?
Oh? I live right here. We're doing this over zoom, so you know, I don't have I don't have anywhere to go. I'm just gonna I'm just gonna take off my pants when this is done. You know, are you talking about plugs.
Or like, yeah, yeah, your sluggables all that good stuff.
Oh yeah, I mean you mentioned it. Gamefully Unemployed go to patreon dot com, slash gamefully Unemployed, or better yet, just google gamefully unemployed GA M E f U l O Y unemployed. Uh I uh. It's a podcast network I do it tom Ryman Ryman where we mostly talk about movies, not politics, you know, movies X files. And then I am the head writer for some More News and just you know, google some more news if you like more politics. Uh, that's what you can get. You can get that. It's right there in the name some more News. Hell check that out.
Yeah, well, check that out. Check out some more News, check out gamefully Unemployed, and check out the New Roadhouse.
Check out that new Roadhouse.
Check out the New Roadhouse. Or if you don't want to see the New Roadhouse, just kick the ship out of somebody. Just find a stranger and just really start kicking the son of a bitch.
Get in a fight.
It's always good to get into it. There's no consequences to getting into a fight. Fight animals. Sure, yeah, fight yourself, fighting yourself. You know, like that fight club guy in that movie.
Do a fight club, a club club. We should do a fight club.
Let's do a Dave and I are going to go do a fight club. The rest of you.
Credit card companies, right, that's what we're talking about.
We're gonna have to bleep that we're just joking. Credit card companies. You can let us into your building. Okay, it's over.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
