Podcast appearances and mentions of matthew schwartz

This Day in Legal History: Lincoln is Shot at Ford's TheatreOn April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth, an act that would alter the trajectory of Reconstruction and American legal history. Lincoln's life story makes the moment even more striking: born in poverty in a Kentucky log cabin, largely self-educated, and rising through persistence rather than privilege, he embodied a form of democratic possibility rare among world leaders. Over time, his legal and political thinking evolved in meaningful ways, particularly on questions of equality and civil rights. While early in his career he held more limited views, the Civil War years reshaped his outlook, pushing him toward support for Black suffrage and, by some accounts, openness to broader enfranchisement, including for women.Frederick Douglass, who met with Lincoln during the war, captured this complexity well, noting that Lincoln was “preeminently the white man's President,” yet also “the first to show any respect for the rights of the black man.” Douglass emphasized that Lincoln's greatness lay not in perfection, but in growth—his capacity to move, under pressure and moral reflection, toward justice. By April 1865, Lincoln was publicly advocating limited Black voting rights, particularly for Black soldiers and educated men, a position that suggested further expansion might follow in his second term.That possibility was cut short on the night of April 14, when Booth entered the presidential box during a performance and fired a single shot at close range. Lincoln died the following morning, and with him vanished a moderating but increasingly progressive force in Reconstruction policy. In the years that followed, many of the shortcomings we associate with Reconstruction—including the narrowing of federal protections seen in cases like United States v. Cruikshank—took hold in a political environment Lincoln never had the chance to shape. His assassination opened the door to a more fractured and often less protective approach to civil rights enforcement.A little-known but striking footnote to this story involves Edwin Booth, the brother of Lincoln's assassin, who months earlier had unknowingly saved the life of the president's son, Robert Todd Lincoln. At a crowded train platform in Jersey City, Robert slipped and fell between the train and the platform just as the car began to move. Edwin Booth, standing nearby, quickly grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to safety, preventing what could have been a fatal accident. The two men did not recognize each other at the time, and Booth only later learned whose life he had saved. The incident has since taken on a symbolic quality in legal and historical writing, illustrating the strange intersections of fate surrounding the Lincoln family in the days leading up to April 1865.Legally and historically, April 14 stands as a hinge moment: not only the loss of a president, but the loss of a developing constitutional vision. Lincoln's trajectory suggests that Reconstruction might have unfolded differently under his continued leadership, particularly on voting rights and federal protection of equality. Douglass later reflected that Lincoln's legacy should be judged not by where he began, but by how far he traveled. That journey—from humble origins to an evolving commitment to equality—remains central to understanding both the promise and the unfinished work of American law.After his death, Abraham Lincoln's body was carried on a funeral train that retraced, in reverse, the route he had taken to Washington as president-elect in 1861, passing through many of the same stations and drawing massive crowds at every stop. The train's journey from Washington, D.C. to Springfield became a rolling national mourning, with citizens lining the tracks to pay their respects to the fallen leader. In a deeply symbolic sense, the trip marked the completion of Lincoln's final journey—returning him to the place where his political life had taken root, even as the nation he led struggled to carry forward the work he unwittingly left unfinished.President Donald Trump announced plans to nominate Matthew Schwartz, his personal lawyer in the New York hush money case, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Schwartz is a longtime partner at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and joined Trump's legal team in 2025 to handle the appeal after prior attorneys moved into government roles. Trump praised Schwartz as a strong opponent of government overreach and highlighted his experience in high-level federal and state litigation. In addition to the criminal appeal, Schwartz is also representing Trump in a civil fraud case brought by Letitia James, where his team recently urged the state's highest court to dismiss the claims as politically motivated. Schwartz previously clerked for Samuel Alito and worked at Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP, and he is a graduate of Columbia Law School.Trump Taps Personal Attorney for Second CircuitAn Illinois jury in Cook County added $17 million in punitive damages to an earlier $53 million award against Abbott Laboratories in a case brought by four mothers whose premature infants developed necrotizing enterocolitis after being fed the company's formula. The jury previously found in favor of the plaintiffs on claims including failure to warn, negligence, and product defect, awarding individual damages based on the harm suffered by each child, all of whom survived but face lasting health complications.Plaintiffs argued they were not informed of the risks associated with the formula and would have made different feeding decisions had they known. Abbott disputed liability, maintaining that its products are safe and that scientific evidence does not support a causal link between its formula and the condition, and said it plans to appeal. The trial judge allowed punitive damages after finding evidence the company may have withheld risk information, and also criticized testimony suggesting mothers should not be told about such risks. The case is part of broader, ongoing litigation over infant formula, with mixed outcomes in courts across the country.Ill. Jury Adds $17M Punitive Award To Baby Formula Verdict - Law360In my column for Bloomberg this week, I argue that new IRS guidance on opportunity zones largely revives the original program from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act without addressing its core flaws—and may even worsen them. While the framework still aims to direct private capital into distressed communities through tax incentives, the updated rules expand where zones can be drawn and lower investment thresholds, particularly in rural areas. In practice, that means more projects will qualify, but fewer are likely to deliver the kind of transformative impact the policy was designed to achieve.The first iteration showed that investment tended to flow toward already developing areas with stronger returns, not the communities most in need, and the new guidance does little to change that incentive structure. Governors retain broad discretion in selecting zones, a feature that previously led to politically influenced designations rather than data-driven ones. By easing standards like the “substantial improvement” requirement, the revised rules make it easier for incremental upgrades—not meaningful redevelopment—to receive tax benefits. As a result, the program risks continuing to function more as a subsidy for already viable projects than as a tool for economic revitalization. I suggest that a more effective approach would tie both zone designation and tax benefits to measurable outcomes like housing growth, job creation, or business investment, while reducing discretionary selection in favor of objective economic criteria. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Special Episode: Moontraveling x Roster Music Club — A Crossover CelebrationThis episode is truly something special. I'm honored to host a crossover between two of my absolute favorite podcasts: Moontraveling and Roster Music Club — each with its own distinct heart, voice, and deep love for music.Moontraveling is hosted by Aaron Sprinkle (from legendary bands like Poor Old Lu, Fair, and Rose Blossom Punch) and Matthew Schwartz (of Pacifico and Pacifi Records). The show explores the emotional, spiritual, and often mysterious ways music shapes our lives. Their conversations are vulnerable, insightful, and always full of heart.Roster Music Club, hosted by Joey and Jared Svendsen (you may know them from Bad Christian), is a deep-dive love letter to overlooked or underappreciated albums. Every episode feels like hanging out with old friends who absolutely love talking music—and who have the knowledge and passion to back it up.As someone who's been deeply impacted by both of these shows, this crossover means a lot to me personally. These are the kinds of podcasts that remind me why I fell in love with music in the first place—and why I keep falling for it again and again.This episode is more than a conversation—it's a celebration of community, creativity, and connection. I'm thrilled to bring these voices together for something truly one-of-a-kind.Pls enjoy!

Summer officially starts this Thursday. With Las Vegas on track to hit ⁠record-breaking heat⁠ again this year, locals face heightened health risks, including an increased threat of skin cancer. Protection from the desert sun requires more than the bare minimum sunscreen application. Dr. Matthew Schwartz from Comprehensive Cancer Centers of Nevada joins co-host Dayvid Figler to give the sunny details and dark realities of sun exposure in our city and what we should do to learn not to burn. Learn more about the sponsors of this June 17th episode: ⁠Babbel⁠ - Get up to 60% off at Babbel.com/CITYCAST Want to get in touch? Follow us @CityCastVegas on ⁠Instagram⁠, or email us at ⁠lasvegas@citycast.fm⁠. You can also call or text us at ⁠702-514-0719⁠. For more Las Vegas news, make sure to sign up for our morning newsletter,⁠ Hey Las Vegas.⁠ Looking to advertise on City Cast Las Vegas? Check out our options for podcast and newsletter ads at⁠ citycast.fm/advertise⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As artificial intelligence (AI) penetrates practically every facet of the marketing and advertising industry, marketers could be forgiven for thinking whether AI is a threat to their jobs. Matt Miller, SVP of strategy and analytics at Level Agency, says that while it's still early in the game,  there's a growing onus on CMOs and marketing teams to figure out how to make sure that  AI will enhance marketing jobs rather than replace them. Miller, whose clients include Better Mortgage, Pathstone, and Sphera, joins host Matthew Schwartz to answer some burning questions about where things go from here and if marketers' concerns are justified.

Jose Villa, president of marketing agency Sensis, joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss how marketers increase their appeal with the Hispanic market, the fastest growing contributor to the U.S. economy. Villa, whose worked with such clients as Anthem, One West Bank, and Cal State LA, says that brands that are eager to boost engagement with Hispanics must deploy an integrated marketing strategy that blends social media, paid media, and earned media. Perhaps most important for brand managers to realize is that the Hispanic market is not a monolith, but a community rich in diversity.

Jamie Barnard, CEO of Compliant, joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss the consumer privacy landscape following Google's decision last summer that it is no longer deprecating third-party cookies and will keep them operational within its chrome browsers next year and beyond. While marketers may consider Google's move a reprieve, Barnard stresses that forward-thinking brands are putting third-party cookies to pasture and cultivating both zero-party data, or information provided by users through feedback forms and surveys, and first-party data, or information collected directly from consumers.

Generative AI has promised to reshape the practice of law ever since ChatGPT emerged. However, it's been unclear just how large law firms are using AI. Has it changed how practitioners do their jobs on a daily basis? Are we witnessing the emergence of a revolution in how lawyers do their work? Uncommon Law's Matthew Schwartz sits in as guest host on this episode of On the Merits. He talks with John Quinn, founder and chair of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, as they discuss his firm's stance on artificial intelligence and the future of the billable hour.

Generative AI has promised to reshape the practice of law ever since ChatGPT emerged. However, it's been unclear just how large law firms are using AI. Has it changed how practitioners do their jobs on a daily basis? Are we witnessing the emergence of a revolution in how lawyers do their work? Uncommon Law's Matthew Schwartz sits in as guest host on this episode of On the Merits. He talks with John Quinn, founder and chair of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. They discuss Quinns' firm's stance on artificial intelligence and the future of the billable hour. Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690

Can you develop an “Excel Love Language?” Maggie Gross, head of strategy and brand practice leader at Deloitte Digital, says it's an increasingly effective way for CMOs and senior marketers to communicate the benefits of brand building to the C-suite. By crafting a homemade Excel Love Language, marketers can meld soft metrics, such as brand awareness and brand recall, with hard metrics demanded by the company's CFO like lead-gen revenue and new acquisitions.Gross joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss how marketers speak the “Excel Love Language” and provide some strategic thinking for how marketers change the conversation about branding.

Matthew Schwartz spent 40 years in TV news and won more than 200 awards including 4 Emmys and 4 Edward R. Murrow awards for investigative reporting. His 2020 memoir, "Confessions of an Investigative Reporter" was an Amazon #1 bestseller. He writes a weekly blog for Hudef Sports and plays pickleball 6 days a week. Matthew offers an expert and insider view of the world's fastest growing game. He shares invaluable tips about equipment, strategy, health benefits, and effective drills to quickly raise the level of your pickleball game.

Matthew Schwartz spent 40 years in TV news and won more than 200 awards including 4 Emmys and 4 Edward R. Murrow awards for investigative reporting. His 2020 memoir, "Confessions of an Investigative Reporter" was an Amazon #1 bestseller. He writes a weekly blog for Hudef Sports and plays pickleball 6 days a week. Matthew offers an expert and insider view of the world's fastest growing game. He shares invaluable tips about equipment, strategy, health benefits, and effective drills to quickly raise the level of your pickleball game.

With consumers tuning out pretty much anything that interrupts their media flow, it's getting harder and harder for brands to break through the noise. When it comes to the creative side, marketers must be a lot more supple and, perhaps more important, media agnostic. Kara Buckner, president and chief strategy officer at Fallon, joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss how marketers are changing their approach to whipping up what they hope will be ad creative that truly resonate with their audiences and will get people talking.

Wither performance marketing? Doubtful. However, branded advertising is becoming a much bigger consideration among B2B brands that are eager to bolster their appeal to small- and medium-sized businesses and tout their values (as opposed to price points). It's a tall order. Lydia Michael, owner of marketing agency Blended Collective, and De'Lon Dixon, team leads at CX (customer experience) at Glassbox and founder of Think Technologies, join host Matthew Schwartz to discuss how B2B marketers build relationships with SMBs and borrow a few pages from the consumer playbook to turbocharge their messaging.

Sports reporter Matthew Schwartz joins the podcast.

Chris Oswald, EVP, head of law, ethics and government relations at the ANA, joins host Matthew Schwartz to provide some salient tips for marketers and brand managers grappling with an increasingly complicate legislative terrain at both the federal and state levels.

Jamie Gier, CMO at DexCare, joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss the latest trends in relationship marketing, which emphasizes customer retention, satisfaction, and lifetime customer value. One option is for B2B marketers to reclaim socializing from social media, as relationship marketing is based on getting out into the field to engage customers and cohorts and make their jobs and lives easier. Gier provides some salient examples for how B2B marketers cultivate their relationship marketing efforts without being preoccupied by the transaction.

JuHee Kim, president of ad agency MuteSix, joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss some of the key questions marketers need to ask when they want to align their brand with a cultural moment (or movement) and why serendipity may play a bigger part in such activations than brand managers appreciate.

Tapping into Gen Z is at the heart of a new influencer marketing network launched by Rubix Foods, which provides food flavors and ingredients to restaurants. Shannon O'Shields, VP of marketing at Rubix Foods, and Megumi Robinson, VP at Belle Communication, join host Matthew Schwartz to talk about the network, as well as some of the larger trends swirling around influencer marketing, which is expected to reach, which is expected to reach $8.1 billion this year and $9.2 billion in 2025, per eMarketer.

Michael Farmer, chairman and CEO of strategic consultancy Farmer & Company, and author of Madison Avenue Makeover: The Transformation of Huge and The Redefinition of the Ad Business, joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss the growing schisms between client-side marketers and their advertising agencies, and how to enhance their relationships.

Marketers who fail to make their voices heard in the growing debate regarding data privacy could be in for a rude wakening if they don't step up to the plate. That's according to Arun Kumar, author of the recently released book The Data Deluge: Making Marketing Work for Brands and People, and former chief data and marketing technology officer at The Interpublic Group of Cos. Kumar joins how Matthew Schwartz to discuss why the marketing field is may be making a grave mistake deferring to Big Tech when it comes to influencing the conversation about fostering online privacy.

Randi Stipes, CMO of The Weather Company, joins host Matthew Schwartz to talk about how marketers sharpen their weather strategy, the growing relationship between weather and consumer trust, and how marketers leverage weather-related data that can be deployed across the organization.

Lou Aversano, CMO of The Cigna Group, joins host Matthew Schwartz, to discuss the performance marketing versus branded advertising debate heating up throughout B2B precincts, why there's a growing onus on B2B firms to thread more emotional elements throughout their messaging architecture, and taking a more realistic approach toward breaking down the silos between sales and marketing.

Sally Percy, journalist and author of “21st Century Business Icons: The Leaders Who Are Changing Our World,” joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss how senior marketers bolster their leadership skills, why remote work is changing the so-called “70/20/10” rule of communications, and the increasingly key role empathy plays among successful leaders. 

Chris Comstock, chief growth officer at software firm Claravine, joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss how marketers bolster their data standards, why embracing failure is a path to success, and what the pending demise of third-party cookies means for brand advertisers and consumer engagement. 

Greg Boosin, EVP of global B2B and product marketing at Mastercard, joins host Matthew Schwartz to break down the ANA's 2023 Marketing Capabilities Framework. The document provides a roadmap for how marketers navigate an increasingly complicated terrain as well as how to sharpen their career path. “It's not a Monopoly Board,” Boosin says, referring to the Framework “It's a template to shoehorn into your [company's] marketing capabilities.”

Ryan Kutscher, founder and CEO of ad agency Launch Party, joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss how B2B marketers recalibrate their ad-creative strategy, why less is more when it comes to quality content, and the marketing benefits of listening to the Broken Record Podcast hosted by legendary music producer Rick Rubin.

Listeners, please welcome Prof. Ben Trumble to the show! Prof. Trumble joins us to talk about his fascinating research on how oral health can affect cardiovascular disease risk and cognitive health later in life. Find the publication discussed in today's episode via this citation: Benjamin C Trumble, Matthew Schwartz, Andrew T Ozga, Gary T Schwartz, Christopher M Stojanowski, Carrie L Jenkins, Thomas S Kraft, Angela R Garcia, Daniel K Cummings, Paul L Hooper, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Kenneth Buetow, Bret Beheim, Andrei Irimia, Gregory S Thomas, Randall C Thompson, HORUS Team, Margaret Gatz, Jonathan Stieglitz, Caleb E Finch, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan. Poor oral health is associated with inflammation, aortic valve calcification, and brain volume among forager-farmers, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, 2024;, glae013, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1093/gerona/glae013 ------------------------------------------------------------ Benjamin Trumble is an associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Center for Evolution and Medicine and the Institute of Human Origins. His work focuses on chronic diseases of aging, working to understand how environmental conditions like parasites, pathogens, food availability, and social interactions impact human health. Taking an evolutionary life history perspective, he uses field and laboratory studies to understand variation in human endocrine systems, and how this influences chronic health conditions like benign prostatic hyperplasia, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer's dementia. Prof. Trumble's website can be found here: https://trumblelab.org/ ----------------------------------------------------------- Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association: Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation Website: humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc Courtney Manthey-Pierce, Co-Host, Website: courtneymanthey-pierce.godaddysites.com/ E-mail: cpierce4@uccs.edu, Twitter: @HolyLaetoli Alex Niclou, special returning Co-Host Eric Griffith, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer E-mail: eric.griffith at duke.edu

Bill Duggan, group EVP at the ANA, joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss the results of the “ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study.” The report, which was released in December 2023, shows that marketers incur an awful lot of waste in programmatic ad buying, and could save $22 billion in efficiency gains. Indeed, just 36 percent of every dollar invested by an advertiser that enters a DSP (digital signal processing) effectively reaches the targeted consumer. Duggan offers several tips to help marketers optimize their investments in programmatic media and provides the key questions that marketers need to ask sellers, so they don't get burned.

Francesco Lagutaine, chief marketing, communications officer at M&T Bank, and Jacqueline Kolek, senior partner and chief innovation officer at PR and marketing agency Peppercomm, join host Matthew Schwartz to discuss the long-standing relationship between M&T Bank and Peppercomm and why it's increasingly important crucial that brand managers view their PR agencies as partners and not vendors.

Peter Prodromou, president of marketing and PR agency Boathouse, joins host Matthew Schwartz to talk about how the rise of generative AI is affecting marketing communications as well as agency-client relations. “There's an opportunity for organizations to blend generative AI with human storytelling and for using AI to be smarter rather than just placing content,” says Prodromou, whose clients include Mass General Brigham, Project Liberty, and Eversource. Amid the onslaught of AI, he adds, marketers must be clear on what the most important metrics are for boosting engagement and driving growth. “Use [AI] to assess the data and come up with better insights.”

Let's Back Track Back to 2009 as the guys are joined by Matthew Schwartz to talk about the Pacifico album Thin Skin And An Open Heart. Friends & Lovers and Elliotts, let's get into it and Shine On.If you like what you hear, please rate, review, subscribe, and follow!Connect with us here:Email: churchjamsnowpodcast@gmail.comIG: @churchjamsnowTwitter: @churchjamsnowFB: https://www.facebook.com/churchjamsnowpodcastPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/churchjamsnowpodcast

Gilbert Dávila, co-founder of AIMM and President and CEO of Dávila Multicultural Insights, joined host Matthew Schwartz to discuss where the marketing industry's diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts go from here and how companies brace for what's expected to be a turbulent year. The president of the Society of Human Resource Management was quoted in The Guardian late last year saying that DEI policies within U.S. companies will “come under full-out attack in 2024.”

As the pressure for marketing accountability grows, creativity is getting to be a much tougher sell to upper management. Ann Marie Kerwin, Americas Editor at marketing research firm WARC, joins host Matthew Schwartz, to discuss WARC's new study, titled “Building a Culture of Creative Effectiveness.” The study provides a road map for brand managers who are eager to make a business case for the value of marketing and advertising and develop a valid framework for their entire organization.

Ed See and Robert Tas, partners at McKinsey, join host Matthew Schwartz to discuss the results of their recent survey titled: “The Power of Partnership: How The CEO–CMO Relationship can Drive Outsize Growth.” The survey, based on the responses from more than 100 C-level executives and 21 CEOs from B2B and B2C companies of all sizes and across multiple industries, offers some salient and actionable advice for how chief marketers foster a more productive relationship with their CEO. Seldom a beacon of corporate synergy, the dynamic between CEOs and CMOs seems to be getting worse, as upper management ratchets up the pressure on marketers to spike both the top and bottom lines.

In this latest episode I welcome Matthew Schwartz (Pacifico, Pacifico Records) and Aaron Sprinkle (Poor Old Lu, Rose Blossom Punch, Fair) from the Moontraveling Podcast. This is an awesome conversation with the 2 legends regarding there beginnings in music and a few of the records they have worked on. We talk with Matt about 2 of the Pacifico records and with Aaron we focus on the Fair records. We also touch on the latest vinyl release for Aaron's record Moontraveling that is up for preorder now. https://aaronsprinklemusic.com/ https://www.instagram.com/moontravelingpodcast/ https://pooroldlu.bandcamp.com/merch https://open.spotify.com/artist/7bF1C4SzAZF9FuqGmLXBUZ https://open.spotify.com/artist/4kKX2Dc7HBE6fozhXYzPw8 https://open.spotify.com/artist/3tTyMb425q0FBGdkPa6TGu https://open.spotify.com/artist/0aXdXHxUgb1qBvOjopd8Bo https://open.spotify.com/artist/6ABeWdskFYawDKWbTz4WVO https://music.apple.com/us/artist/pacifico/725100920 https://music.apple.com/us/artist/poor-old-lu/571795 https://music.apple.com/us/artist/fair/155930705 https://music.apple.com/us/artist/rose-blossom-punch/1475231034 https://music.apple.com/us/artist/aaron-sprinkle/17757026 Produced by Brian Jerin @jerinkid Music by Brian Jerin @jerinkid Artwork by Jared Chase Bowser @jaredchasebowser --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/therumorsaretruecast/support

Avoid groupthink. Don't get sucked under the marketing bubble. Recognize that it's impossible for brands to be all things to all people. These are just a few tips for marketers who are grappling with dramatic and rapid changes in advertising and consumer behavior, compliments of Allen Adamson, cofounder of Metaforce.com, and author of the recently released “Seeing the How: Transforming What People Do, Not Buy, To Gain Market Advantage.” Adamson, former chairman, North America of branding agency Landor, joins host Matthew Schwartz to talk about why it's incumbent upon brand managers to “zoom out” on their audiences to bolster consumer engagement and generate better returns.

Doug Novack, managing director of U.S. business and industrial markets at Google, joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss the ongoing debate throughout the B2B field about performance marketing versus brand advertising, the rapidly growing role of generative AI in both branding and lead generation efforts, and why it's incumbent upon B2B companies to pivot to a full-funnel marketing strategy.

We're joined by Aaron Sprinkle & Matthew Schwartz of Moontraveling Podcast to talk about the record that started it all. Moontraveler is Aaron Sprinkle's debut solo record, and the namesake of their show. From stowaway basement studios to cold war spies, this record has plenty of stories. We were honored to sit down with two musical greats to cover this record, and we did it All In a Day's Work.Be sure to subscribe to Moontraveling to hear more from Aaron & Matthew!Visit colliderecords.com and use promo code “churchjamsnow” for 20% off your first purchase!If you like what you hear, please rate, review, subscribe, and follow!Connect with us here:Email: churchjamsnowpodcast@gmail.comIG: @churchjamsnowTwitter: @churchjamsnowFB: https://www.facebook.com/churchjamsnowpodcastPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/churchjamsnowpodcast

Erika Katz, head of brand marketing and studio at New York Road Runners (NYRR), joins host Matthew Schwartz to discuss the NYRR's rebranding campaign that launched earlier this year, getting the message out for the upcoming New York City Marathon (November 5), and making sure the event's marketing and advertising efforts resonate with a global audience.

Live from the Heart of America—I'm Steve Gruber— your Soldier of Truth ready to fight for you from the Foxhole of Freedom—asking the questions you wish you could and nobody else will—giving you better analysis and defending this great nation—this is the Steve Gruber Show—   Here are 3 big things you need to know right now—   Number One— The pandemic may have one more victim—and that is Tony Fauci—with Rand Paul accusing the Doc of lying to Congress—and sending an official criminal referral—   Number Two— The Climate Zealots have a new Public Enemy #1— and its called Summer! And because they want to cancel July going forward—they are going after the farmers! If you thought food was expensive now—just wait!   Number Three— The Department of Justice in the latest subtle move to hide the truth—actually took a shot at getting the star witness to the Biden corruption scandals—tossed in jail before he could appear before a hearing in front of Congress—which is set for a little bit later today—   Devon Archer is the long time friend and business partner of Hunter Biden—and he is expected to tell members of Congress that Joe Biden—as Vice President—and maybe as President—was not only present—but an active participant in many of the shady dealings pulled off by Hunter and his friends—   So, in one of the most blatant moves yet by Bidens Lieutenants to keep the scandal hidden—they are pushing for Archer to report to prison now—that according to brand new court documents and a letter that was sent on Saturday—that's right an official DOJ letter sent on the weekend! Nothing fishy about that of course—   Archer was previously sentenced to one year in prison for a conviction all the way back in 2018—for a scheme to defraud Native Americans—to the tune of roughly $60 million dollars—Archer has been fighting the conviction and has been out on bail for months now—but his attorney says this latest development is unusual—and he will be filing a formal response by mid-week—   This is just another bizarre twist—and it is being noticed by those on both sides of the aisle—   Archer's attorney—said his client is aware of speculation that the DOJ move is an attempt by the Biden Administration to intimidate him before his appearance today behind closed doors with the House Oversight Committee—   The attorney, Matthew Schwartz says his client doesn't believe that is why the DOJ is sending its demands on a weekend—BUT we do—   Schwartz says Archer will be there—and will answer all the questions put to him honestly—and as a result—James Comer says he could be a hero—   But the blowback on Hunter, Dad and the entire clan—could be damaging—it could be a disaster for the entire Democrat Party in a way we have not seen in recent years—this could be a real game changer—and that's why the Democrats are getting their talking points in order—and rehearsing them already—   So it was Donald Trump that weaponized the DOJ and went after his political enemies? Can I get some examples of that please? That was the biggest pile of horse manure I've heard in awhile—and that is quite something—it seems to me that the Blue Team is frightened—and they know the damage that can come from Devon Archers testimony—and of course this comes on the heels of the Delaware Disaster—where the sugar sweet plea deal got tossed out by the judge—for a blanket immunity deal that she refused to accept—   So that is going to get re-negotiated—and returned to the courtroom in about a month or so—BUT by then the wheels may come off—because the Hunter Biden story instead of going away—got a whole lot bigger with that mess—   Of course that is the part of the story—where Hunter and the entire Biden family have tried to pretend that a daughter he has with a former girlfriend—is actually his— But I digress—   The real meltdown was inside the courtroom—and the real problem for the Bidens is everything that could lead too—so why did the judge say no?    And whether or not Democrats are willing to tell the truth—there are plenty of people willing to step up and do it—   And when you look—the amount of money that may have flowed in to the Biden's bank accounts is absolutely obscene from all of this—   And that of course can only lead to one outcome—as long as Republicans are in the majority—and that is not a place Dems want to be in an election cycle with The White House on the line—   So the flailing continues—and the circling of wagons continues—because Democrats know—that the guy they sold as a moderate united—is in fact a far left hack—and a completely dishonest one at that—and that is going to be really hard to get the stink off by November—    But how about just one more denial—from Dementia in Chief—Joe Biden—  

This week on The Download: Advertisers and audiences refute the idea that podcasts are on the wane. NewsGuard: Programmatically-placed ads for major nonprofits and government orgs on dozens of misinformation websitesWhy Black creators say brands are ‘quiet as a mouse' on Black History Month and Juneteenth this year. Quick Hits: Podscribe Launches YouTube Conversation Modeling. The new dashboard unifies RSS and YouTube metrics into one location.ARN and Magellan AI announce Top 15 Podcast Advertisers in Australia for Q1. The list includes familiar faces like Apple, Amazon, and McDonald's.‘The Turning' Podcast Studio Rococo Punch to Merge With Audily by J. Clara Chan. From the article: “When two independents come together, we can do much bigger things.” ARN uses geo-location to deliver headlines on Your News Now podcast. The new podcast uses geotargeting to create a sub-three-minute episode covering local news, sports, and weather forecast. Missing the Sounds Profitable Podcast this week? Check out the latest episode of the ANA's podcast Champions of Growth. The episode, titled Is Podcasting the Future of Branded Advertising, features both Bryan Barletta and Tom Webster talking with Matthew Schwartz

This week on The Download: Advertisers and audiences refute the idea that podcasts are on the wane. NewsGuard: Programmatically-placed ads for major nonprofits and government orgs on dozens of misinformation websitesWhy Black creators say brands are ‘quiet as a mouse' on Black History Month and Juneteenth this year. Quick Hits: Podscribe Launches YouTube Conversation Modeling. The new dashboard unifies RSS and YouTube metrics into one location.ARN and Magellan AI announce Top 15 Podcast Advertisers in Australia for Q1. The list includes familiar faces like Apple, Amazon, and McDonald's.‘The Turning' Podcast Studio Rococo Punch to Merge With Audily by J. Clara Chan. From the article: “When two independents come together, we can do much bigger things.” ARN uses geo-location to deliver headlines on Your News Now podcast. The new podcast uses geotargeting to create a sub-three-minute episode covering local news, sports, and weather forecast. Missing the Sounds Profitable Podcast this week? Check out the latest episode of the ANA's podcast Champions of Growth. The episode, titled Is Podcasting the Future of Branded Advertising, features both Bryan Barletta and Tom Webster talking with Matthew Schwartz

Seamless video-capture of every procedure & AI-powered patient selection for clinical trials, these are a few of the services Virgo can offer. Join the conversation with Matt to learn about the origins of Virgo, their first MVP, their funding journey, their unique business strategy, future of GI data and a bit about Astrophotography!Special thanks to Matthew Zhao (UCLA) for intro and conclusion!

Bob Garfield sits down with private equity tycoon and author David Rubenstein to discuss his latest book, The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream, consisting of interviews with scholars and other notable Americans.TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield, with Episode 23… “The Botched Experiment.”In his day job, David Rubenstein is a private equity tycoon who made his fortune buying undervalued companies, restructuring them into profitability for his investors and earning huge management fees as a steward of their stakes. The Carlyle Group, which he founded, has enriched him to the tune of $4.5 billion. Rubenstein also has many side hustles, from philanthropy to amateur historian to T.V. interviewer of the rich and powerful. In these excerpts from Bloomberg T.V. we hear George W. Bush and Oprah Winfrey.RUBENSTEIN: Over much of the past three decades I've been an investor, the highest calling of mankind, I've often thought, was private equity, and then I started interviewing. GEORGE W. BUSH: (laughs)RUBENSTEIN: When I watch your interviews I know how to do some interviewing. OPRAH: (laughs)His conversations with cultural, political and business icons have been edited into two books, the latest being The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream. Collected within are conversations with the likes of Madeline Albright, Ken Burns, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Wynton Marsalis and Billie Jean King.While acknowledging inequities and fault lines in our society, these conversations are in all a celebration of the so-called “American experiment,” which Rubenstein compares to the unique assortment of genes that determine the nature of the societal organism. Had they not converged, he says, “we would not be who we are, we would not be who we are. Rubenstein joins me now. David, welcome to Bully Pulpit.RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.GARFIELD: Your book takes these 13 genes and kind of divides them up among various scholars and cultural icons. What's on the list? RUBENSTEIN:Well, the genes are ones like the belief in the democracy, the belief in the importance of voting rights, the importance of of things like the military should not be in control of the civilian government, the civilians should control the military, the belief in the importance of diversity and importance of the belief in and then having elections and the right to vote. Those are the kind of things I think are parts of our culture; now, increasingly, the belief in diversity is a very important part of our culture, and the belief in the American dream is an important part of our culture. GARFIELD: I want to begin, as you do in the book with the Democracy Gene and your conversation with Harvard professor Harvard Professor Jill Lepore, author of the staggering 900 page survey of American democracy, titled These Truths. She has two insights which blew me away. One was the democratizing role of permitting personal bankruptcies, non-corporate bankruptcies — which was unknown to the world — and which played out as a safety net for entrepreneurial risk. Right in your wheelhouse, that one.RUBENSTEIN:Yes, her point is that when individuals couldn't pay their debts before they were put in jail as opposed to be allowed to be bankrupt, and that the fact that that was changed was an incentive for people to try to take greater risks than they might have taken before. So, yes, it's a very good point that she made. GARFIELD: Yeah, freedom of religion it ain't, but has taken an outsized role in the development of the democracy, but also the American form of capitalism. RUBENSTEIN: That's correct. You know, remember in our country we started, which started for religious freedom, but only to make sure that people could worship the way that those people wanted to worship. The Puritans and pilgrims didn't really want people to worship any way other than theirs. Now we have a system where people can worship the way they want it. But our Founding Fathers honestly didn't believe so much in the idea that you could worship any religion you wanted.GARFIELD: Yeah. Hold that thought because we will return to it. Lepore's second poignant observation was the grotesque collateral damage of the victorious American Revolution and that damage being the perpetuation of slavery, which the British had vowed to abolish. Instead, slavery and its associated injustices have been with us now for 400 years. You used the term original sin. Now, at least in Catholic doctrine, that is something inherent that permanently corrupts our nature, and it has sure done that, slavery has. Now you are in the valuation racket. Was the independence from Britain worth the incalculable human cost? RUBENSTEIN: Well, counterfactuals and history are always difficult to come up with and give definitive answers. I think they — if we had not won the Revolutionary War, I suspect we would have become like Canada, a member of the Commonwealth of Britain, and basically had pretty much the country we've had. But I think that the British probably would have ended slavery quicker than we did, though, because Britain had ended slavery in its country before. But I don't know that it was going to be that easy to end slavery that quickly in the 1700s; the economy of the South increasingly depended on it.GARFIELD All right. So if the slave trade was, as you put it, our original sin, after 150 years came the the bloodbath of the Civil War and after that, the reconstruction of the South, brief, as it was. You spoke to Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., about the ruinous backlash to reconstruction from the infamous compromise of 1877 that effectively obliterated reconstruction and laid the foundation for Jim Crow and white supremacy to the retrograde Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” decision. Gates also told you something I'd never heard of that, the newly restored white power structure called itself “Redemption” — that was how they described the the end of reconstruction. It occurs to me that maybe this foreshadows today's Christian Right using biblical text to whitewash what to my eyes are obscene ideas. With redemption like that, who needs sin? RUBENSTEIN: Well, the redemption that he was referring to was basically the belief that they had restored the white order that had existed before the Civil War. Their so-called lost cause of those in the South was what they believed in, that they had a cause — not to preserve slavery, that was what they were saying they weren't fighting for as much as preserving the southern way of life. But in the end, it was really to preserve slavery. But they believed that they were restoring the original sin or restoring the Southern Order was what redemption was all about. GARFIELD: Now, since the end of World War Two, there have been acts of legislation and judicial decisions now enshrined in law — the principles of the founding documents codified: women's suffrage, desegregation, the Miranda decision about the rights of the accused criminals, removing prayer from public schools, marriage equality and so on, as the United States followed a general Western path towards liberal democracy. These very advances have infuriated conservatives for 60, 70 years, because they believe that their values and their hegemony are under attack. Make America Great Again seems to share a viewpoint with Redemption. Which country are we, do you think? Are we open hearts or are we closed minds? RUBENSTEIN: Well, that's a difficult question to answer. I would say that the beginning, the rhetoric, of the Founding Fathers was wonderful: all men are created equal. But as we all know, we had slavery; we didn't allow women to have certain rights, including the right to vote; so we've been trying to live up to the rhetoric over the 250 years, and we still have a long way to go. Many people in this country, as you suggest, are not happy with the idea that minorities have the same rights that majorities have, that women have the same rights as men have, that people of different skin color are to be treated the same as whites. There are many people who think that that's not necessarily the way the country should be. In my view, that's a mistake, but that's the way that many people look at the situation.GARFIELD: A mistake? I would say a nightmare — an ongoing nightmare. To what extent do you believe that what we haven't done as a nation to fulfill our founding promises has corrupted the American experiment?RUBENSTEIN:  The American experiment has been evolving over 250 years. It still has a long way to go. We still are a country that more people want to come to than any other country. Forty-seven million people in this country are immigrants. Very few people leave this country voluntarily, so it's still the best country on the face of the Earth. But we have these challenges that are just endemic. One of the challenges is income inequality, racial discrimination, also homelessness and illiteracy. We have an enormous amount of illiteracy in this country. It's hard to believe that such a wealthy country can have 14 percent of its population being functionally illiterate. But anyway, that's the case. So I would say that we are a country of — it's a tale of two cities, as Charles Dickens might say. We have the wealthy people, the internet-connected people, the people that are well-educated, and then we have the underclass. And I think the gap between those two is getting wider and wider. GARFIELD:  Well, we shall return to this. And in fact, let's turn now to the subject of capitalism, which you discussed with author Bhu Srinivasan. He says that the notion, and we discussed this earlier, the notion of religious pilgrims fleeing persecution and putting down roots in the new world is at best exaggerated, such as in this educational video.NARRATOR: About 400 years ago, 13 years after the first English settlement in America called Jamestown, there was another group of travelers who came to America in search of religious freedom. They wanted to worship God in their own way and separate from the Church of England.That America was a capitalist endeavor, an explicitly capitalist endeavor from the get-go, supercharged by the industrial revolution, the invention of the cotton gin, the Louisiana purchase and, of course, slavery. And we know it has all yielded a superpower of unimaginable wealth and influence in the world. Yet you have these regrets about inequity and you regret those who, in your terms, have been left behind. How so? RUBENSTEIN: Well, many people in this country have believed in the American dream and have lived the American dream. I feel I have lived the American Dream coming from very modest roots and to be more successful in life than my parents ever dreamed possible. But many people have given up on the American dream, and they think that they can't catch up to where they should be or where they'd like to be. And therefore, we have lots of poverty, lots of inequities, and it's a real challenge. GARFIELD: Yeah, Kristin Lems's song comes to mind.LEM: (singing) It's $1200 a month before the SSI and tax, the take-home pay is 900 and a half, and the rent takes half of that leaving $475, and a hundred for the groceries to keep us all alive…RUBENSTEIN: Overall, I think the American experiment has worked reasonably well, but not perfectly well. And I think right now the country is assessing whether we can move forward together or whether we're just going to move forward in a divided way if move forward is the right verb. Because right now the Congress is divided. We have a very difficult time getting anything through Congress, and social progress is made very, very sparingly right now and it's been hurt a lot by COVID because a lot of people have been left further and further behind than they were before COVID.GARFIELD: [00:11:48] Yeah, well, more details on the collateral damage: In the past 50 years, as the inflation-adjusted GDP has grown 400 percent, real wages have grown 10 percent. Now, you've just enumerated some of the reasons that society has failed its citizens. You say “regrettable,” I'd say “s**t show.” But turning it to you, not as an author or interviewer or a businessman, but to you as a citizen: I've gone through your writings and I don't see you advocating for more regulation of banks, or high marginal tax rates or higher minimum wages, or a far more robust social welfare system to provide for working parents or universal preschool or free higher education or other entitlements such as Europe largely provides. I mean, if we were to accept your DNA analogy — and it's a pretty good one — must we not also recognize the fact of genetic mutations, changes or errors in the DNA that can make the organism adapt or just go completely haywire? As a video from HealthTree University explains:MAN: Every once in a while a mistake occurs in a gene, in which one of those bases, one of those coding segments, gets altered and if it gets altered in a gene that causes more cells to more rapidly divide, that's a mutation we want to know about.”GARFIELD: Such as: campaign finance, systemic racism, gerrymandering, deregulation, vilification of the free press, stripped away voting rights and what I see as the broken founding promise to promote the general welfare. In short, David, you've achieved the American dream, but what the hell has happened to so many others? RUBENSTEIN: Well, obviously, the American dream hasn't worked for everybody, and we have lots of social challenges here. We are not likely to go to the European style of social capitalism or socialism that many European countries take great pride in; it's just not endemic to our American system. Capitalism has been ingrained in our system, and capitalism leaves a lot of people behind. So I just don't think we're going to change it dramatically. I haven't written on all these issues because that's not my role in life, probably, to address every social issue as possible. And I, you know, my basic mission in life has been to kind of move forward my career. I'm now giving away all my money, but giving away all my money is not going to solve our social problems, I don't have enough money to solve those problems. So I'm trying to point out some of the challenges, but I don't claim to be a great reformer and I don't claim to be a politician. If I had the answers to all these problems, I would have been in Iowa and New Hampshire a long time ago.GARFIELD: All right. We will continue momentarily, but please let me remind you what we are trying to achieve here with Bully Pulpit and the other BooksmartStudios.org podcasts. We are here to coalesce a community of listeners who value complexity over glibness, argument over doctrine, curiosity over certainty.  It's a community, in other words, built around both skepticism and  intellectual honesty. But as our friends in public broadcasting also incessantly remind you, it is a costly enterprise. Our content is largely free of charge, but our future hinges on your willingness  to pitch in. Please consider a paid subscription, which gets you not only our basic offerings, but bonus content from all three shows and my weekly column, which is a really, really good MRI of my tortured soul. Eighty-four bucks a year — less than a preowned 1985 Cabbage Patch doll on eBay. Please consider investing in BooksmartStudios.org, and please, please rate us on iTunes. Those ratings and reviews really matter. Now then, I was about to ask David Rubenstein my next question.You say that you don't see us going towards the European model of —RUBENSTEIN: That's correct. GARFIELD: — socialist capitalism or capitalist socialism, where there's greater entitlements, the welfare state is much more robust. Now, apart from our particular political problems of the moment, why do you think we'll not veer in that direction?RUBENSTEIN: Because I think the country is not, in its DNA, a socialist country. We've experimented with things that are maybe not as capitalist-oriented as we currently have and during the Great Depression, there was a view that maybe socialism would be the better system, but we've rejected that in the country by and large and I would say right now, it's hard to see any interest in the kind of socialist capitalist system that they have in Europe. If anything, we're probably retrogressing and providing fewer social benefits in some ways than we provided in the past. GARFIELD: Although, It was never great. Here's an excerpt from the Phil Donahue Show in 1979, where an audience member challenged economist Milton Friedman — the high priest of trickle-down economics. I'm cutting off his answer; it's the questions that still resonate:WOMAN: Why is it we have so many millionaires and everything in the United States and we still have so many impoverished people who try to get up into the world. Why is it we have this lack of money where people who can't support themselves decently and get a decent job, where all these big men are up on top making oodles and oodles of money — they don't need it, they can only eat that much. FRIEDMAN: And what do you suppose they do, if they don't need it and don't use it —WOMAN: They hoard it.GARFIELD: And what about business regulation and soaking the rich? Well, at least at the highest marginal tax rates.RUBENSTEIN: Congress clearly reflects the fact that it doesn't want to do that. All the efforts to increase marginal tax rates don't seem to be getting very far. And I suspect that Congress is just not going to get there. Remember, the Congress is dividing pretty much 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, and it's generally thought that the Republicans will win Congress for the midterm elections, so I don't see any of those kinds of changes that you're talking about likely to happen. GARFIELD: This conversation on Bully Pulpit will follow a two-part series with Anne Nelson, who has written about the Council for National Policy, which I guess is an anodyne-sounding name for the great right-wing conspiracy. They have stuck to their knitting and put their shoulders to the wheel for 60 years to kind of hack the democratic system, to take advantage of gerrymandering and the Electoral College to create a kind of permanent majority in legislatures for what is, by the numbers, clearly a minority party. Does it concern you that these archaic structures of democracy are subverting democracy?RUBENSTEIN: Well, it's interesting. We believe in democracy, but actually, when the Founding Fathers created it, they didn't let American citizens vote for senators; the state legislatures did that. And we created the Electoral College, which is anti-democratic, you could argue. In fact, I think of the last seven presidential elections the person who got the most majority — the most votes — didn't necessarily become President. George W. Bush didn't get the majority of popular votes when he was elected President, and obviously Donald Trump didn't get the majority of popular votes when he was elected President. And so we've got a system where people who are minority, in terms of popular vote, often get elected President. It's not a perfect system, but it's not going to change. To change the system of electing presidents requires a constitutional amendment which requires two thirds of each house and three quarters of the states. And it's inconceivable that you're going to do that.GARFIELD: Such as in this educational video:MAN: “Of the nearly 7000 amendments proposed in the centuries since, only 27 have succeeded.”GARFIELD: There's a chapter in your book that is particularly dear to my heart: your conversation with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the subject of civics education. RUBENSTEIN: Right.GARFIELD: I myself am a co-founder of an organization called the Purple Project for Democracy, which seeks to address the plummeting faith and trust in American democracy and an accompanying appetite for extreme politics, including violence. It's my belief, and Sotomayor's, that a big problem is that Americans have lots and lots of opinions about government, but vanishingly little knowledge of even the most basic facts of how it all is meant to work and how it does work. Is that fixable? RUBENSTEIN: It's fixable, but we have to remember a couple of things. One, it has been a problem for some time. It's not like all of a sudden people don't know much about government. If you go back to surveys 50 years ago, it was a similar problem. Secondly, you're pointing out the reality that ninety one percent of people who take the citizenship test to become citizens who are foreigners pass, whereas a majority of Americans cannot pass these tests, whereas given by an organization recently in 49 out of 50 states, a majority of Americans couldn't pass the basic citizenship test that foreigners have to pass. So it's a sad situation. We don't teach civics very much anymore, as you know, in school and people know very little about the way our government works and operates.GARFIELD: And so there's ignorance; I don't mean that pejoratively, there's just a lack of basic knowledge. And there is the tidal wave of misinformation and disinformation, which competes very well against no information. Any thoughts about —RUBENSTEIN:Well, yes. Yes, look, I'm involved with a lot of civic education efforts and will announce some more projects that I'm going to support to do that. But right now, we have not only misinformation and disinformation, but we have I-don't-care information, which is to say some people put information out, they don't really care whether it's true or not, they just think it's politically helpful to them. And so we have another factor where a lot of people aren't really checking whether these facts are true when they say something and people are being misled, in my view, dramatically.GARFIELD: All of what we've discussed has made me look at America's future with a sense of doom. You don't see it that way.RUBENSTEIN: I don't think doom; I would say we've always had challenges. The Civil War was a big challenge, we got through that; the World War II was a big challenge, in many ways, we got through that. But clearly, the most recent stress-test of the election and the January 6th event is not a cause for optimism. So I think we have to address it, but I think we can't put our head in the sand and just say, “woe is me, the country is falling apart”; we have to try to do the best we can as you're doing and others are doing to educate Americans and basically inform them on the theory that the best informed democracy will be a better democracy. So we want to make our citizens well-informed. But it's not going to happen overnight. GARFIELD: Would you go long in American democracy? Would you short it? What?RUBENSTEIN: It depends on what period of time, of course, but I think generally nobody betting against American democracy has generally made a lot of money. America is going to be a strong country and a very powerful country for quite some time. Our democracy is not quite as beautiful as many people would like it to be, and many people around the world question whether our democracy is as good as we say it is. We say to people around the world, “Follow our system,” but many people say, “Well, your system isn't working so well, look what's going on in your country.”GARFIELD: One last thing, David. Over Thanksgiving, you hosted the President and the First Lady for a few days at your bungalow, is it Martha's Vineyard? I don't remember where your summer place is. But before they left, did they strip the beds? I mean, were there wet towels all over the place? Was Biden blasting his Motown playlist all night?RUBENSTEIN: Well, actually they used the place that I owned. They used it before, when he was vice-president. I was not there, so I can't talk about the issues that you're asking me about. But, you know, I did see him since then. I saw him at the Kennedy Center Honors over the weekend, he said he had a very good time. And he does listen to Motown a lot, as he said in his remarks at the White House recently.GARFIELD: Uh huh… So you don't know if he's a good houseguest. He didn't burn it down. RUBENSTEIN: I never heard any complaints from any of the people that have been working there. So I think he's a very good houseguest and I'm sure you know you'll be enjoying having him as your house guest at some point if you invited him.GARFIELD: Uh, well, it's a thought. It's a thought. Let's see. What can I say that would be even remotely funny? (Mumbles in Bob.) You know, I don't think it's possible. I don't think — I use 2% milk and I don't; I think he's a whole milk kind of guy. David, I want to thank you so much.RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure. Thank you very much.GARFIELD: Private equity billionaire David Rubenstein is author of The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream. All right, we're done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of BooksmartStudios.org. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Broadway-bound songsmith Frank Loesser wrote “Baby It’s Cold Outside” as a call-and-response duet for he and his wife to perform at parties. Several years later, the tune made its way into a movie and soon took the Christmas canon by storm. But is it a “rapey” relic of a bygone era that should be buried permanently in the winter snow? Amna Khalid investigates.Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we’re offering 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios until the end of the year. You’ll get extra written content and access to bonus segments and written transcripts like this one. More importantly, you’ll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today. Thank you for your support.* TRANSCRIPT *MAN: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Do we have any more requests?WOMAN: Baby, It's Cold Outside!MAN: I think we can make that happen. Who wants to take the duet?AMNA KHALID: In the new Netflix rom-com Love Hard, Josh volunteers to sing a duet with his girlfriend — his pretend girlfriend, actually — Natalie:JOSH: Natalie and I got this one, Dad.KHALID: The two are out caroling with his family in snowy Lake Placid.NATALIE: Over my cold, dead, lifeless body. I am not singing that — that is like the sexual assault theme song.KHALID: Natalie refuses at first to sing that Christmas song, because, you know, it's that song — the one in which a man is possibly pressuring a woman into spending the night. But Josh has an idea.JOSH: Look, this is what we’re gonna do, okay? You just do your part. I will change my lyrics so the song doesn't sound so, uh, rapey. NATALIE: Fine, let's just get this over with.JOSH: Dad, hit it. 🎶NATALIE: I really can’t stayJOSH: No problem, there’s the doorNATALIE: I’ve got to go awayJOSH: I hear you, say no moreNATALIE: This evening has beenJOSH: Totally consensualNATALIE: So very niceJOSH: I hope you get home safe tonightKHALID: It's become fashionable in recent years to alter the lyrics of Baby, It's Cold Outside to make them less “rapey,” as the character Josh put it. Others have pushed back, however. The song, they claim, is about a desirous woman battling not the unwanted advances of her date but the unsolicited judgment of society.🎶LYNN GARLAND: I really can't stayFRANK LOESSER: But Baby, it's cold outsideGARLAND: I've got to go awayLOESSER: But Baby, it's cold outsideGARLAND: This evening has been —LOESSER: Been hoping that you'd drop inGARLAND: So very niceLOESSER: I'll hold your hands, they're just like iceKHALID: I'm Amna Khalid. On this episode of Banished, The Bother with Baby.CHRIS WILLMAN: The song was written in 1944 as a song that Frank Loesser and his wife originally sang at a housewarming party.KHALID: Chris Willman is a longtime music journalist, currently at Variety.WILLMAN: Kind of like, the night’s about to end, we’re about to kick you out, and here’s a song about whether to stay or whether to go.KHALID: Wow, I would have loved to be at that party.WILLMAN: Oh, yeah. And apparently they performed it over a period of years to the point that, when it was licensed for a film in 1949, Frank Loesser’s wife resented it. She may have been joking, but she was resentful that it was no longer their private thing because they were such a hit on the party circuit with it.KHALID: The song existed in private for five years, sung only by Loesser and his wife Lynn Garland. The two made one of the very first recordings of the song, which we’re listening to now. 🎶LOESSER: Baby, make my conscious your guideGARLAND: I really can't stay LOESSER: Oh, Baby, don't hold outGARLAND AND LOESSER: Ah but it's cold outsideLOESSER/GARLAND in the clearKHALID: Baby was evocative of the holidays, it was redolent of cigarettes and booze and, yes, it was sexually suggestive.GARLAND: And it was our song.KHALID: That’s Lynn Garland from the documentary Heart and Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser:GARLAND: And we became the most desired guests at parties from coast to coast. And we never failed to slam.KHALID: Garland recalled once that, "Parties were built around our being the closing act.”🎶LOESSER: I thrill when you touch my handGARLAND: But don't you see? LOESSER: How can you do this thing to me?KHALID: It was merely the opening act, however, for the song itself. Baby was such a sensation at private gatherings that Loesser worked it into his score for the 1949 movie Neptune's Daughter. This would be the first time anyone heard the song outside of someone’s living room.WILLMAN: And when it went public in 1949 it kind of exploded. Immediately, people started covering it. My favorite version of the song, by Johnny Mercer and Margaret Whiting. I think that was the biggest hit anyone had with it that year.🎶WHITING: I really can't stayMERCER:  But Baby, it's cold outsideWHITING: I've got to go awayMERCER: But Baby, it's cold outsideWHITING: This evening has beenMERCER: Been hoping that you'd drop inWHITING: So very niceMERCER: I'll hold your hands, they're just like iceKHALID: No fewer than 10 separate recordings were made in 1949 alone. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Doris Day, Dinah Shore. They all put their stamp on the song, but the version you’re probably most familiar with is the one that Chris Willman prefers. The one you hear on adult contemporary radio stations every December, when they switch over to an all holiday format. The classic recording by Johnny Mercer and Margaret Whiting.🎶WHITING: To break the spell MERCER: I'll take your hat, your hairs looks swellWHITING: I ought to say no, no, no sir MERCER: Mind if I move in closer?WILLMAN: I like it partly because it sounds like 1949. It really puts you in that era where these people are really playing out these roles. I think when people do modern versions it sounds kind of ridiculous because you don’t really buy it, that they have to go through this dance. It’s coming through the same radio where we hear all these incredibly sexually — not just suggestive but explicit songs — and so it’s hard to hear modern singers and still have that sense of reserve and that there are these restrictions on what they have to go through. And for some reason the sexual heat seems more intensified to me when it sounds like it’s happening in that era. Johnny Mercer sounds horny when he’s doing it.KHALID: Yeah!WILLMAN: And Margaret Whiting too. And then, you know, when you hear Willie Nelson and Norah Jones doing it, it’s just not the same.KHALID: And that’s precisely the question for many modern listeners of the song. It may be apparent that Mercer feels the “sexual heat” — but what about Margaret Whiting? Is she feeling it too? That all depends on how you choose to interpret the lyrics, or, in the case of Neptune’s Daughter, what you choose to see on the screen.🎶ESTHER WILLIAMS: I really can't stayRICARDO MONTALBAN: Baby, it's cold outsideWILLIAMS: I've got to go awayMONTALBAN: But Baby, it's cold outsideKHALID: In the 1949 movie, Ricardo Montalban repeatedly tugs at the arm of Esther Williams. He pulls her gently back onto the couch and even removes her hat and stole when she puts them on to leave. To 21st century sensibilities, this pas de deux can seem more predatory than playful. But that's not likely the way that audiences viewed it 70 plus years ago, when Baby won best original song at the 22nd Academy Awards.COLE PORTER: The winner is Frank Loser for “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” (Applause)KHALID: That was Cole Porter presenting Loesser with his one and only Oscar, for a song that stumbled from parlor to parlor on the party circuit, into the motion pictures and onto your Spotify holiday playlist. Or maybe you’ve deleted it from the playlist. Because it’s that song. Chris Willman.WILLMAN: And I never imagined it being controversial, in my naïvete. And then I remember going to an Aimee Mann Christmas show, sometime in the early 2000s I think. And she was having a dialogue onstage with a comedian, and they started talking about quote/unquote rapey the song was and why doesn’t anybody notice that — comically taking off on some of the more sort of, possibly predatorial aspects that people might pick up on in the song. And then all of a sudden in the late 2000s, this becomes a serious topic of debate. And that kind of shocked me, how seriously people were taking the idea that the song was quote-unquote “rapey.”REPORTER: A Bay-area radio station has now yanked the song from its airwaves.REPORTER: Well you won’t be hearing it on WDOK in Cleveland. The radio station’s decided to pull the song from their playlist.WOMAN: You know, it’s a sweet, flirty, fun holiday song.REPORTER: Is it a song about Christmas or creepy behavior? That’s the debate that has led radio station KOIT to ban a popular holiday tune from the airwaves.REPORTER: And you know what? It’s giving people yet another thing to disagree about.WILLMAN: Really in the late 2000s was when it reached peak controversy with radio stations suddenly banning it. The CBC said they were taking it off the air in Canada. There were stations in San Francisco and Denver and somewhere else that said we’re getting rid of the song. But certainly there were lots of serious essays being written too, from a feminist perspective, about how times have changed, people need to recognize that the song celebrates sexual coersion. And then there was the backlash to the backlash from people like me, saying: No, this song is not what you think it is or what you’ve come to believe it is. It’s actually very feminist, very sex-positive to use kind of a corny term.KHALID: According to Chris Willman and other fans of the song, it’s a mistake to interpret the song as if it were written today. Not only is that ahistorical, it’s simply incorrect. Simply put, the song doesn’t mean what many think it means.WILLMAN: People who read it as a date rape song would seize on things like What’s in this drink? As if the guy had placed a drug in her drink. Which is a very contemporary reading because nobody was talking about date rape drugs in 1949, and the, you know, real interpretation of the lyric is that it’s just a strong drink. But reading further into it, she’s trying to pass off the excuse for her own sexual desire onto these things like, “It must be the alcohol affecting me.” But she is the one saying maybe just a cigarette more or maybe half a drink more. It’s really about her putting up every excuse she can think of for why people might not think it was right that she spent the night. You know, one of the key lines to me is I ought to say no, no, no. She’s not saying I want to say no, no, no. It’s I ought to. Just in that word choice alone I think you understand where the song is coming from circa 1949, those expectations of society.🎶ELLA FITZGERALD: I really can't stayLOUIS JORDAN: But Baby, it's cold outsideFITZGERALD: I got to go awayJORDAN: But Baby, it's cold outsideKHALID: In the mid-1940s, the idea that a woman would desire casual sex was taboo. For her to say as much explicity would be deemed “prurient” by network censors, and so Loesser had no choice but to employ subtext. 🎶FITZGERALD: And father will be pacing the floorJORDAN: Listen to the fireplace roarKHALID: In the version you’re listening to now, also recorded in 1949, you hear Ella Fitzgerald chafing at the double standard, when her reputation as a Lady would be ruined if word got out that she stayed the night. Meanwhile, Louis Jordan is free to plead his case for a one-night stand.🎶BETTY CARTER: I really can't stay RAY CHARLES: Betty, it's cold outsideKHALID: Loesser uses musical counterpoint to underscore that Baby is more conversation than conquest. It’s a technique you may recall from his opening number to Guys and Dolls — but his mastery of it is evident in the brilliant 1961 recording of Baby by Ray Charles and Betty Carter. Here Carter emerges from the stifling hypocrisy of the 1950s onto the cusp of a more liberated decade. Both Charles and Carter are softly stepping onto each others’ toes as they negotiate their roles and desires.🎶CHARLES: Beautiful, please don’t hurry.CARTER: Well, maybe just a half a drink moreCHARLES: Why don’t you put some records on while I pour CARTER: The neighbors might thinkCHARLES: Betty, it’s bad out there CARTER: Say, what’s in this drink? CHARLES: No cabs to be had out thereKHALID: Carter is perhaps weary of having to pretend and — without her friends and family fretting and finger-wagging — might make known her own sexual appetite. That’s what Lady Gaga did when she and Joseph Gordon-Levitt gender swapped the parts back in 2013 on the Muppets Holiday Spectacular:🎶GORDON-LEVITT: I really can't stay GAGA:  But Baby, it's cold outsideGORDON-LEVITT: I've got to go away GAGA: But Baby, it's cold outsideGORDON-LEVITT: This evening has been GAGA: Been hoping that you'd drop inGORDON-LEVITT: So very nice GAGA: I'll hold your hands, they're just like iceKHALID: But Gaga wasn’t the first woman to bare her libido in the song.WILLMAN: The woman who helped popularize the song, Zooey Deschanel in Elf, she’s part of a duo called She & Him. They introduced it into their repertoire when they made a Christmas album (and they’re doing a tour this year) where they did a role reversal on the song. I think that’s alright. I mean, there’s a tradition of doing a role reversal with the song that goes back to the original movie, Neptune’s Daughter, where first you see Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams doing it the way you know it. And then there’s a more comedic reprise where Red Skelton and I believe Betty Garrett do it and she’s virtually attacking him to the point that it almost seems really predatorial in that regard.🎶SKELTON: I really can't stay GARRETT:  But Baby it's cold outsideSKELTON: I've got to go away GARRETT: But Baby it's cold outsideSKELTON: This evening has been GARRETT: Been hoping that you'd drop inSKELTON: So very nice GARRETT: I'll hold your hands, they're just like iceWILLMAN: But then to hear Zooey Deschanel say that the only way they could do the song on their Christmas tour was to do the role reversal … made me kind of sad.KHALID: For those who find Baby creepy, a role reversal, it turns out, is not the only way to perform the song. I said at the beginning that it’s become fashionable in recent years to simply rewrite the song. In 2016, Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski performed their updated lyrics on the Minnesota radio station The Current.🎶LIZA: I really can't stayLEMANSKI: Baby I'm fine with thatLIZA: I've got to go away LEMANSKI: Baby I'm cool with thatLIZA: This evening has been LEMANSKI: Been hoping that you get home safeLIZA: So very nice LEMANSKI: I'm glad you had a real good timeLIZA: My mother will start to worry LEMANSKI: Call her so she knows you are comingLIZA: Father will be pacing the floor LEMANSKI: Better get your car a-hummingLIZA: So really I'd better scurry LEMANSKI: Take your time.LIZA: Should I use the front or back door?LEMANSKI: Which one are you pulling towards more?KHALID: The video of this performance has been viewed well over a million times on YouTube alone. And that romantic comedy Love Hard — the one in which Josh changes the lyrics to make them less “rapey” — that’s been showing up on lists of the year’s best Christmas movies.🎶NATALIE: Or maybe just a half a drink more.JOSH: Slow down, that’s quite a pour. NATALIE: The neighbors might think JOSH: Just my old friend Troy NATALIE: Say what's in this drink? JOSH: It’s just Lemon La CroixNATALIE: I wish I knew how JOSH: To take a hint? NATALIE: To break the spell JOSH: Do you know how to spell farewell? NATALIE: I ought to say no, no, no. JOSH: I’ll call you an Uber, they’re close. NATALIE: At least I can say I tried. JOSH: I feel like you’re not trying at all. NATALIE: I really can’t stay.JOSH: Well, maybe just go out. NATALIE: But Baby, it’s cold outside. JOSH: But Baby, just go outside. KHALID: Some of these rewritten versions are admittedly clever and funny, but I confessed to Chris Willman that the controversy took me quite by surprise.KHALID: And in part, I should say, it’s because of where I come from. You know, I come from Pakistan and I’ve grown up with Bollywood films — Bollywood films of the 70s and 80s — and, in that time period, any kind of explicit reference to sex or a sexual encounter or desire was, of course, not considered socially acceptable. Hence all these songs in Bollywood films. That’s their purpose, it’s to be suggestive. And this trope of one of them saying stay — usually the guy — and the girl saying No I must go because look at what the world will say if I stay is so commonplace in Bollywood. Have we gone to the other extreme where we’ve lost the sense of what constitutes romance and by overemphasizing the need for explicit consent and reading everything through that lens?WILLMAN: Well it’s funny, that comes up when people have done rewritten lyrics, where they’re emphasizing consent. And I think initially that was done  satirically, like at every turn the guy is saying, Well, yeah, maybe you should go … Get outta here, I’ll … sure, I’ll call Uber. And I thought that was a funny take on it, but then you see people seriously rewriting it. And first off the song is hilarious. Let’s just say that. It’s a comedic song. And when you’re gonna take the comedy out of it, along with the dance of seduction or agreement or whatever is happening and say, Would you sign this contract please? There’s not much of a song at that point. You know, it’s such a masterpiece, really, of songwriting — the way the rhyme scheme happens between the two different parts simultaneously back and forth, you know it’s very sophisticated as a duet. To take all that away and say that nothing is important about the rhymes, or the themes or the general tone of the song is really to lose the point.🎶“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (1949) in DanishWILLMAN: You know, it holds such a unique place in the Christmas canon, even though it’s not a Christmas song, because it is flirty and racy and you just hear so much Christmas music that is not really about romance. Or if it is, it's extremely schmaltzy. To hear two people come on who are suddenly expressing real feelings in these very funny and literate lyrics, there’s nothing else on the radio like it. There’s nothing that funny or that sexy in the Christmas music canon, and so even the people that think they should be offended by it can’t bring themselves to get rid of it.KHALID: And that’s perhaps the song’s single greatest contradiction. Why hold onto it at all if we have to censor it? And yet there it is, year after year. More than 450 covers of the song and counting. Role reversals and rewrites and translations, including this Danish language recording that is among the very oldest, from 1949.If you liked what you heard today, help us spread the word and support our work at Booksmart Studios. Become a paying subscriber and you will get access to full interviews, bonus segments, written columns and more.Don’t forget to rate what you've heard here today on whichever platform you listen on and leave a comment so we know what you think. Our success here at Booksmart depends as much on you as on us.Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. And I, as always, am Amna Khalid.CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this piece, the singer of the duet with Ray Charles was misidentified as Betty Page. The actual singer was Betty Carter. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

SPECIAL WAR BULLETIN24 DEC 2021Not since Edward R. Murrow has a reporter so bravely brought home the terrible soundscape of war.Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we're offering 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios until the end of the year. You'll get extra written content and access to bonus segments and written transcripts like this one. More importantly, you'll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today. Thank you for your support.* TRANSCRIPT *TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 22: Live from the War on Christmas.[RADIO STATIC]ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to bring you a special report. Bully Pulpit's Bob Garfield is on the battle lines of a terrible conflict, which is setting the world afire. In the midst of the mad fray, without care for his own safety, Mr. Garfield recounts the sights and sounds of war. We now take you to the North Pole.[THE SOUNDS OF WAR]GARFIELD: This is the North Pole. Last night, some young reindeer fetched me here. These heroes, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid and — with grim and  fantastic irony — Donner and Blitzen, describing the very scene that in this benighted duchy now unfolds. The pilot on our journey was called Rudolph, his caribou nose casting light through the smoke and darkness. The team was determined, for here resides the greatest center of holiday production. The shooting of cannon and ack-ack guns, the shrill roar of a diving airship, fills the night with a deathly din.A reporter cannot help but cower in the ruins. The secular humanists, in league with communists and cosmopolitans, are upon us. These are the sounds of the war on Christmas.From my icy shelter (the frozen remnants of a leveled doll factory) the fury seems fantastical. The insurgency began only 13 years ago, in what seemed to be flailing propaganda against a dubious oppression. This is when America first heard from the defenders of Jesus Christ about the godless machinations of the Macy's department store.BILL O'REILLY: This year they are touting Santa Claus who will help you “with your holiday wishlist.” So here's my question to Macy's: What holiday is Santa celebrating? The winter solstice? The birthday of a reindeer? What?GARFIELD: That lowly broadcaster, whose name is now lost to history, used his bully pulpit to speak of conspiracy against not just a persecuted religious minority, but a way of life.O'REILLY: Everything was swell up until about 10 years ago when creeping secularism and pressure groups like the ACLU began attacking the Christmas holiday. They demanded, demanded the word “Christmas” be removed from advertising and public displays, and many people caved into that. GARFIELD: It all began in a series of small partisan skirmishesO'REILLY: I'm like a guerilla fighter in the war on Christmas. You know what I do? I put little shepherds right in front of city hall in my town. Or if I know that there's a secular person in my town or the town neighboring me, I'll put a little baby Jesus on their windshield. GARFIELD: For years he would strike small blows against the Godless conspiracy, then melt away to his sacred country club. But like all guerilla fighters, armed with little but his half wits and audience of seething nativists 5 million strong, he incited rage against the false prophets of basic respect. In time, he would all but vanish from the fight. Smeared by the secularists for merely trying to spill his heroic seed wantonly among the faithful, he retired to a life of falafel and shame. Still the movement grew and grew, gathering the momentum history rewards for the zeal of the righteous. From fellow broadcasters…GRETCHEN CARLSON: I am tolerant! I'm all for free speech and free rights, just not on December 25th!GARFIELD: …to more fellow broadcasters…SEAN HANNITY: Welcome to Hannity. The War on Christmas is upon us again.GARFIELD: …to the emotionally-disturbed imbecile aspiring-dictator community.TRUMP: And speaking of Christmas, you're gonna be saying “Merry Christmas” again, okay? You're gonna say “Merry Christmas.”GARFIELD: Suddenly the dirty gray clouds turn white and the advance grows merciless. The Jews and Muslims and Satanists pour through the outer searchlight defenses. Aloft, a flying machine tumbles toward the pole, ablaze. It is a great, golden, slow-moving meteor slanting earthward. Yellow flares shoot up in bright relief, revealing the airship to be a sleigh, whose desperate escape has been foiled in a hail of flak. The pilot, intrepid Rudolph, with his shiny nose, lights the spiraling path to oblivion. What I am witnessing is a calculated, remorseless campaign of destruction. Now the little men, brave bantams one and all, are ragged and shivering in the final battle wondering what is it all for. They are but elves, laboring amid the chaos to meet quota. Moments ago, just as a projectile burst in the sky, I witnessed a little gnome utter his last words. In the strange argot of these industrious pixies, and in a squeaky impish voice, he declaimed: “FML. We have product to turn around.” And then he fell, his slippered toes curled toward the blazing heavens.  [RADIO STATIC]ANNOUNCER: You have been listening to Bob Garfield in an eyewitness report of his experiences at the North Pole. Now I see we have received a telegraphed dispatch from Mr. Garfield. I quote directly from his wire:“The North Pole has not fallen. Repeat: not fallen. [stop]“The advancing cosmopolitans were not waging war against Christmas. [stop]“It appears to have been some sort of celebration, with fireworks, in the spirit of seasonal good tidings that grace the world. The war on Christmas, it must now be reported, is a figment, neither waged nor declared. [stop]“Perhaps I was feverish with Omicron, or brainwashed, but assessing the aftermath what I have discovered is evidence only of a very big party. [stop]“No elves have died. The casualties were limited to an Amazon warehouse, where some workers simply collapsed from exhaustion. [stop]“Christmas is alive and unmolested the world over. The birth of Jesus Christ is on the lips of billions.[CHURCH BELLS]“I can hear the bells. I can hear the bells. [stop]”GARFIELD: All right, we're done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan.  Bully Pulpit is a production of BooksmartStudios.org. I'm Bob Garfield. Merry Christmas.TRUMP: They are saying “Merry Christmas” again, we got that. That was a big part of what I was doing. I would say it all the time during that period, that we want them to say “Merry Christmas,” don't shop at stores that don't say “Merry Christmas,” and I'll tell you what, we brought it back very quickly. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Part 2 of Bob's conversation with author Anne Nelson about the Council for National Policy, which has spent decades exploiting bugs in the system to gain minority control of our politics — and our future.* TRANSCRIPT *TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely, there never was a fight better worth making than the one in which we are in.GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I'm Bob Garfield. With Episode 21, “The 60 Year Coup: Part Two.” DONALD TRUMP: Together, we're committed to protecting the American people, preserving American values, defending America's heritage, and keeping America safe, strong, prosperous, and free.GARFIELD: That was Donald Trump, hat in tiny hand, singing for his supper before the Council for Domestic Policy, the umbrella group of evangelical Christians and big energy interests, that for decades has been the patient and ruthless architect of the great right wing conspiracy. In last week's episode I spoke to Anne Nelson, research scholar at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and author of Shadow Network: Media Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. In part two of our conversation, we'll consider the powerful synergy of CNP and a pathological demagog and the destruction that that synergy wrought. Anne, welcome back.NELSON: Thank you.GARFIELD: All right. Let's now turn to the more-or-less present: the rise of Trump and the now violent assault on democracy. How was CNP involved in Trump's ascent?NELSON: The CNP was involved with Trump, initially, very reluctantly. He wasn't one of them, he had no particular religious background, he was multiply divorced, and he really didn't reflect their values in many ways. Their favored candidate was Ted Cruz, but they had a problem - which was that Cruz had a tremendous charisma deficit, and as he lost the primaries, they realized that either they supported Trump, the primary victor, or they lived with Hillary Clinton's presidency, which was unacceptable to them.GARFIELD: Oh, I - I'm sorry, I just - I just have to interrupt to remind you what then Senator Al Franken (laughs) said about Cruz.AL FRANKEN: I probably like him more than most of my other colleagues like Ted, and I hate him (laughs).NELSON: That is the case. Cruz is a formidable intelligence and strategist. He was not a winning candidate outside Texas. So the fundamentalists convened something, like, a thousand leaders and representatives in New York City in June of 2016 at the Times Square Marriott. They brought Trump out to parade him before them, and they had a number of leaders from the Council for National Policy there on the program. And publicly, what that event was about was to sell Trump to this thousand fundamentalist leaders, many of whom had been Never Trumpers, and they were like, “This is going to be your guy. You need to go home and tell your flocks that this is the plan.” But the second part of that agenda involved meetings where they cut a deal with Trump. They said, “You don't have a war chest, you don't have ground troops for the election canvassing, you don't have a strategy. And all indications are you're going to get creamed.” So we have all three of those that we can put into your service. But in return -GARFIELD: We have a shopping list. NELSON: We have a shopping list, and it's basically got three items. The first one was enact some of our policies by executive orders. So when suddenly the Republican platform has this new anti-trans, anti LGBT language that was literally written by the president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, Trump enacted the anti-trans policy for the Pentagon against the Pentagon's wishes, which, you know, the Pentagon said, “This is disruptive of our operations and trans people are not a problem,” but Trump had to deliver on his deal. The second part was to create an evangelical advisory council. Obama had a religious advisory council, but it included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims. This one was 100% Protestant, and none of these other religions needed to apply. The leadership of this council were in and out of the White House on policy discussions and photo ops on a weekly basis. The third was by far the most important, far reaching, and devastating to our democracy. And that was when they got Trump to agree that any federal judges he nominated would be approved from a list that was submitted by three organizations run by members of the Council for National Policy. These were the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Now, what business the NRA has in recommending federal judge nominations? I do not know, but that's how it played out, and after his first confirmation, he invited the representatives of these groups, most of them from the Council for National Policy, for a little victory luncheon at the White House.GARFIELD: So that was the origin story of Trump's deal with the devil, a man with not only no religion, but no ideology to speak of creating himself in the image of his political and financial sponsors. Over the ensuing - well, so then he was elected, more or less - and then over the ensuing four years, many of Trump's 30,000 lies, big and small, find their provenance, what do you know, in the CNP. So, can we just tick a few of these off beginning with the COVID hoax, and the savior drug hydroxychloroquine?NELSON: So if you get to the beginning of 2020, the Trump campaign is in trouble and the Council for National Policy recognizes it. They had hoped that the 2020 elections would be won with a popular vote, that was cast into doubt. COVID set in a couple of months later, and the whole strategy of the Trump campaign had been built around mass rallies and data harvesting from attendees of the rallies and building on that to secure a victory. Well, mass rallies became impossible because of COVID restrictions, so there was a critical phone call that involved the president of the Council for National Policy and members of the Trump campaign staff, where they said, “We need to open up society, get the economy roaring again, and people are afraid of COVID, but they trust doctors. We have a group of doctors who will say that COVID is a hoax, will argue for the reopening of society and the mass rallies.” So that summer, these doctors were convened by Jenny Beth Martin in Washington. Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots and a leading figure in the Council for National Policy. At that point, the point person - when Dr. Simone Gold announced that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for COVID - she was put on partner media platforms of the CNP, including the Charlie Kirk Show and the Christian Broadcasting Network, spreading this disinformation SIMONE GOLD: With the tyranny of medical apartheid nipping at our heels, rise up. Rise up. Rise up.NELSON: And that has now expanded into a small army of unethical physicians who are continuing the hydroxychloroquine hoax. They've added ivermectin as a cure and, in fact, they have online prescription services charging money to people who are ordering ivermectin as a COVID cure.JAKE TAPPER: Poison control centers are reporting that their calls are spiking in places like Mississippi and Oklahoma because some Americans are trying to use an anti parasite horse drug called ivermectin to treat coronavirus, to prevent contracting coronavirus. What would you tell someone who is considering taking that drug?FAUCI: Don't do it.NELSON: There's no evidence that it helps against COVID and, in fact, there are several cases of deaths. Not just from COVID and the failed approach of ivermectin, but people taking overdoses of ivermectin. At the same time, they're discouraging vaccination, and the purpose that lies behind this is, I believe, to discredit any federal agency, to discredit the CDC and the NIH, and to have their followers distrust any kind of fact based authority. Whether it's science, whether it's professional journalism, whether it's federal agencies, and work them into this stoked anger and frustration that is then politically mobilized, and so is chaos.GARFIELD: And not just because they're elites and look down at the silent majority, as Nixon called Middle America, but because there is a vast conspiracy to make money for Bill Gates or to turn children against their country, or to put right wing political dissidents into concentration camps or, you know, whatever the crazy talk is. It wasn't enough just to make people suspicious of - of expertise and authority, but to brainwash them that they were actually active enemies of the people.NELSON: I would say that the strength of the Council for National Policy is to figure out what I call the raw nerves of our culture and to further inflame them. So right now, parents - with kids in public schools - are stressed on so many levels. Are the schools open or are they not open? Are there mandates? Are there not mandates? Can working mothers go to work if their kids aren't in school? Right? These are real, real issues. And then you put on top of that our very difficult conversation nationally about race. When the Black Lives Matter protests happened, the way that the CNP's media and other media systems played it was, “these are violent riots,” and they cherry picked photos of buildings and flame and violence in the streets and amplified it and exaggerated it. These were not invented or doctored photos, these things happened, it's just that they happened as very, very few cases and very small percentage of the peaceful protests. But that's not what their audience saw.TUCKER CARLSON: This may be a lot of things this moment we're living through, but it is definitely not about black lives. And remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will.NELSON: Their audience saw these violent images repeated across multiple media platforms. Then they saw it repeated on Fox News and Sinclair stations. They heard it referred to on the fundamentalist radio stations. That makes all of these appeals for advancing racial justice sound to them like condoning violence.MAN: The black thugs are burning our cities down.NELSON: So we have a real problem in this country with these parallel media systems that don't reflect the same reality. And I really do fault a lot of the more prestigious media organizations and companies and corporations that have allowed the local news media in the middle of the country to die off. And all too often, the answer is, “Oh well, The New York Times and The Washington Post are national news organizations and they've increased their circulations.” That does not fulfill the need for the trust and the hometown newspaper that reflects the local interests and values. And that's something that urgently needs to be addressed.GARFIELD: All right. Indulge me once again, please, in a brief pause to remind you what's happening here. Bully pulpit and the other Booksmart studio shows are here for you, specifically for an audience of listeners who value curiosity, skepticism, dimension, rigor, scope, and an honest argument about things that matter. God knows if you crave doctrinaire or simplistic rhetoric, you have a zillion options for validating your worldview. Many fewer programs tackle complexity, but like public broadcasting, our future hinges on a community of people willing to pitch in. Please consider a paid subscription which gets you not only our basic offerings, but bonus content from all three shows and my weekly column, which is sometimes about horse vending machines, sometimes about political insanity, and sometimes about life and death. And what a gift for your loved ones, or for your Secret Santa partners, or for your employees. Eighty four bucks a year, less than the cost of a HP 414, a black ink toner cartridge. Please consider investing in Booksmartstudios.org and please, please rate us on iTunes. Those ratings and reviews really matter. Now, I was about to ask Anne Nelson my next question. We were ticking off the list of CNC successes: abortion rights and marriage equality. Tell me what they accomplished there.NELSON: Well, abortion has been a particular interest of theirs. And ironically, as of the 1970s, southern Protestants were not that far away from everyone else in terms of opinions on abortion policy. And I would say that there's been consistently general agreement that abortion in the first trimester for various reasons is regrettable, but acceptable. Abortion in the third trimester should be only under the most extreme circumstances. That reflects the reality. But what happened in the years following Roe vs. Wade, people connected to the Leadership Institute and other Council for National Policy partners realized that there was a way to play this and again to mobilize these Protestants in a new way. They found a term, partial birth abortion, which does not exist in medicine. You know, it's an invented term, but it is a term that evokes a very visceral response. And they found that if they told their audiences that Democrats supported partial birth abortion, they could use this as a wedge issue. Then they built on that, and this is all about emotion. This is not about medicine. This is not about scientific fact. They created these videos, which I've seen, which show animated drawings of so-called abortions. And of course, they had to use animated drawings because they were not based in reality, of the abortionist reaching into the womb and tearing the fetus apart limb by limb. And they showed these in church sanctuaries as part of their organizing activities.GARFIELD: And who is the “they” in this “they”?NELSON: So the Council for National Policy works with various groups connected to religious organizations. One of them is the Family Research Council. The Family Research Council has what they call a ministry of pastors that is a national organization that claims tens of thousands of pastors across the country. And this group is called Watchman on the Wall. They have an entire film and video production enterprise, as well as voter guides that are placed in the church bulletins. These churches, these Protestant churches, they may be fundamentalist, they may be Pentecostal, et cetera, have been an untapped voting block. And this is how they've tried to mobilize them, and they've done so with a great deal of success. They've accessed church directories through this organization, compared it to voting rosters, organized Get Out the Vote drives in these churches and even driven the Republican voters to the polls from the church. And the most recent development of this has been the language, “birth day abortion on demand.” And they claim that Democrats approve the execution of newborn healthy babies.JACKIE WALORSKI: That's why we need to be able to vote on H.R. 962, the Born Alive Abortion Survivor Protection Act. I've long fought to defend the unborn. I'm shocked that we are now defending the right to life of newborn infants, and it's something that we have to stand together. This is extreme.GARFIELD: That was Republican Indiana Congresswoman Jackie Walorski.NELSON: So the idea of birth day abortion is that a woman has her full term child healthy nine month pregnancy, and she changes her mind and can go into an abortion clinic and say, “Terminate it now.” And that's just not - that doesn't exist. But, “birth day abortion on demand” is the slogan they're selling and people buy it.GARFIELD: And the president of the Family Research Council?NELSON: Tony Perkins, and by the way, “birth day abortion” is a phrase that's been used not only by Ted Cruz, but by Donald Trump as well.GARFIELD: Well, you can knock me over with a feather. NELSON: And by the way, as part of my research I get mailings from the Family Research Council that shows the rosy cheeked little newborn baby saying,”Democrats want to kill this baby.”GARFIELD: And as Roe v. Wade stands very much in jeopardy before the court, Trump appointees Barrett, and Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch are certainly not expected to be abortion rights warriors in the judicial debate.NELSON: Well, let's remember that all three of the Trump appointed judges were chosen from the list provided by Council for National Policy Affiliates. So there was definitely a litmus test involved there. The challenge to the Texas law is whether individual citizens can serve as vigilantes in enforcing the law. And so, it's not clear how abortion rights will be determined on a legal basis moving forward, but I would say that they are certainly more under threat than they've been since Roe vs. Wade.GARFIELD: All right, let's get now to the apotheosis of right wing conspiracy, and that is Stop the Steal and the insurrection that flowed from it. It all began with attempts by the council to suppress minority votes leading up to the 2020 presidential election, and eventually mutated into creating suspicion and rage over a supposedly rigged election. As I understand it, there is smoking gun evidence that this pivot to questioning the election results was planned at the CNP before the election ever took place.NELSON: The way I describe it is that a year in advance of the elections, when the CNP realized that Trump's reelection was not a done deal, they over time develop Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, Plan E. Plan A was he wins the popular vote in the Electoral College. Great. Plan B was he loses the popular vote, as he did in 2016, but he wins the Electoral College. And his majority in the Electoral College was a matter of some seventy seven thousand votes in three states, the equivalent of a not very big town, (laughs) right? He won by a narrow margin, in terms of the Electoral College, against losing three million votes in the popular vote. Plan B was a repeat of 2016, but then the Electoral College started to come into question and they were losing certain critical states. So they said, “Well, how do we keep him in power if he loses the popular vote and the Electoral College?” That's when they began to explore ways that they could challenge fraud in the election, get Republican legislatures to substitute their own electors, as opposed to those that resulted from the state election -GARFIELD: To literally subvert the election process.NELSON: Well, it would counteract the electoral process, but it turns out that in our constitution, our elderly constitution, there is a clause that involves the independent state legislature doctrine, where the founders said, “maybe you can't trust the voters and the state legislature needs to step in when there are charges of fraud.” So there were these moments of tension after the election and pressures on state officials, including Republican state officials, but they just were not able to implement it soon enough. Then the next step in our electoral process was the certification of the Electoral College votes, January 6th. In the weeks leading up to this date, Ali Alexander was starting the Stop the Steal movement; he had been on the roster of the Council for National Policy. Ginni Thomas, who is in a leadership position, wife of Clarence Thomas, tweeted her support for the January 6th protest. Charlie Kirk tweeted that his organization would be sending protesters to Washington on January 6th. I believe that the House Investigatory Committee will be coming out with a lot more details on this, but what is obvious is that the CNP was actively supporting the events of January 6th. We don't know how many of them, and how far they were going, but I will say that Jenny Beth Martin, the Tea Party Patriots co-founder and a - and a very active leader in the CNP, was on the program for January 6th. And Simone Gold, the doctor leading the hydroxychloroquine hoax, made the incursion into the Capitol, and she has recently been named a member of the CNP and has been leading anti-vaccination rallies in critical states. So they're all over the event.GARFIELD: And then there was Cleta Mitchell, who was a former Oklahoma politician, who was in the thick of Trump's attempts to get state officials, notably in Georgia, to audit their elections and dig up the votes that would be required to overturn the Biden victory.NELSON: Yeah. Dig up or create, (laughs) or -GARFIELD: Here Mitchell is infamously on the phone with Trump and Georgia state officials. TRUMP: You have all these different people that - that voted, but they don't live in Georgia anymore. Uh, that was that number, Cleta, it was a pretty good number too. MITCHELL: Well, the - the number that - the number who had registered out of state after they moved from Georgia. Um, and so they - they had a date when they moved from Georgia. They registered to vote out of state, and then they - it's like forty five hundred. I don't have that right in front of me, but it's something like that - TRUMP: And then they came back in and they voted!GARFIELD: And Mitchell has CNP ties, no?NELSON: Oh yes, she's a longtime member and she's an astute lawyer who knows a lot about election law, which makes her especially adept at subverting it. She's been a specialist in terms of their strategy, and she's still going strong.GARFIELD: All right, so here we are. At this critical juncture for the future of American democracy. And, you know, we can draw a straight line back to the late 70s, early 80s and the convergence of fossil fuel interests like the Koch brothers, and the then nascent religious right. Does that alliance still represent the core of CNP?NELSON: The religious right and the fossil fuel interests are very, very powerful in the CNP, and I think that what's really happened is that they have converted the religious right into basically a political organization. The longer they go, there's less recognizable religion, and some of the trappings of some sects of Christianity are used as recruitment measures. But (laughs), I would say it's far more political than spiritual in nature, and in some ways it's ferociously intolerant.GARFIELD: It is now increasingly understood that Christian nationalists are way more nationalists than they are Christian, that they're - they're nativists and they're often explicitly white supremacist, and that the Christian part is just sort of a - a way to get their foot in the door for really ugly nationalism.NELSON: I have esteemed colleagues who use the term Christian nationalist. I don't favor it because ultimately a lot of the people we're talking about are voters, and there are a lot of people who are being misled and lied to and don't have a clear ideology. They might be working class people, they might be rural people, and farmers who are in information starved environments. So assuming they are operating from an ideology when they're actually acting from a deeply flawed information environment, it may mean that you - you lose the chance to connect with them and to engage and talk to them.GARFIELD: Well, I hear you, and certainly the news desert that has formed in many communities that hitherto were well-served by local newspapers and other outlets has contributed to the dominance of right wing media and social media in feeding misinformation and disinformation to the - the civically and politically undereducated, right? On the other hand, you know, cops, bunco squad cops, people who investigate frauds on individuals. Historically, they don't show a whole lot of sympathy for the people who get conned because they think that they were predisposed to try to get something for nothing.EDDIE JONES: Grifters got an irresistible urge to be the guy who's wise. There's nothing to whippin a fool. Hell, fools are made to be whipped.GARFIELD: Don't you think that these fascist emotions reside deep in the nerve roots of the society, and some people are just predisposed to be propagandized to and to be demagogued?NELSON: Hmm, interesting question. I think every society has aberrations in many of its pockets. And if somebody is a true psychopath, you don't want to put them in a position of power (laughs), you know? And when you have violent dictatorships, that's often what happens - is psychopaths and their allies achieve positions of power and have their way with the population. But otherwise, I do believe in the incredible power of propaganda, and one thing that breaks my heart is that these people are preyed upon from their better instincts. They want those little babies - those little newborn babies to live. That's a kindness. And if they're being told, I mean, if I were told that Democrats wanted to execute all the newborn babies, I would abhor that as well. It's just not true.GARFIELD: No, they only want to execute a relatively small percentage of the newborn babies.NELSON: (laughs) But when they're being blanketed by their media systems with this and surrounded by people who are repeating these things, you know, it's all confirmation bias, right? GARFIELD: Yes. NELSON: Then they don't have much of a shot at the correction. And as you said, the news deserts are a huge part of this.JOHN OLIVER: The newspaper industry today is in big trouble. Papers have been closing and downsizing for years, and that affects all of us. Even if you only get your news from Facebook, Google, Twitter or Arianna Huffington's block quote junction and book excerpt clearinghouse, those places are often just repackaging the work of newspapers. And it is not just websites.NELSON: When I was growing up in Oklahoma, our newspaper had, in our small town, had a substantial circulation percentage wise, and the front pages carried stories from The Associated Press, and the New York Times Syndicate, and people were more or less working from the same page of facts and reporting. Now that newspaper is struggling to survive and many of the other newspapers in the state have gone under. And what has rushed in to fill that breach are these right wing radio talk shows, Sinclair, Fox, all of these organizations that are not working according to basic journalistic principles. I see it as a huge part of the problem.GARFIELD: I think it's fair to say the various tentacles of the Council for National Policy, arm in arm with Trump, have entirely taken over the Republican Party, or nearly entirely. There are a few so-called moderates remaining. I don't know how moderate they are, but I guess they're not Trumpistas. Now, with the understanding that you can't fight napalm with rhetoric, I ask you this very basic question: Where the f**k have the Democrats been for four decades while this has been going on? Why haven't they built machines to fight, you know, Koch brothers dark money to win in legislatures, to play the long game the way these right wingers have? Why aren't they using software so cleverly? Why aren't they finding new ways to educate and inspire voters? Where the hell have they been?NELSON: I think following the triumphs of the Democrats, you know, with the New Deal, they thought they'd identified their MO's and they were relying on trade unions, and they were relying on the major media to tell their story correctly. And they also became complacent regarding demographics. They could point to the numbers and say it's clear that the United States is becoming younger, more diverse, both racially and religiously, and all of that works in our favor. That was true. It left them playing defense, and on the other side, they said, “All right, so in order to snatch victory away from the demographics, we have to work twice as hard, be twice as smart, and have a plan that truly understands the actual mechanics of our government, not the aspirational ones.” A lot of people in the United States still think that we've got a democracy that rests on the popular vote. That is simply not the case. Our system is a patchwork. Much of it's obsolete. The role of the state legislatures and the differentials in the election law from state to state, oh my goodness, it takes years of study to even understand how it works, and it doesn't work the way you were told it worked in your civics class. It's much more complex and manipulable than certainly I thought in the past. So I see signs that Democrats are starting to take data more seriously. The Koch brothers funded this massive data operation called i360 that's been a major help to the Republicans, and the Democrats are just now coming up to speed on the use of data. The other thing is that the Democrats have donors and strategists, they certainly do. They don't have the same kind of nonpolitical party ground troops, and their dependency on the trade unions has been a problem because trade union membership in this country has plummeted over the last few decades, including in industrial states, which is why Democrats start having trouble in places like Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.GARFIELD: And the political sympathies of the rank and file, the working class rank and file, have also drifted towards Republicans.NELSON: Well, there are a lot of reasons for that. They see Democratic policies, trade policies and others, even environmental policies, right, as taking something away from them. For example, in my home state of Oklahoma something like a quarter to a third of people are employed in various capacities at the oil industry. And if you say, all right, we're doing away with fossil fuels now for the sake of the environment, they say, well, what will happen to us? And I don't hear a lot of answers to that question and that questions legitimate. I mean, I'm all in favor of great policies on climate change, but you need to talk to the affected population and show them that they are in the picture, that they're looking out for them, they're going to have a life in the future, or they're not going to vote for you. I also feel that a lot of the conversation about white nationalism sounds alienating to many voters who don't consider themselves racist.MAN: I don't have a racist tone in my body, I never have.MAN: You know, giving me a fair shake, I'm not a racist. You know, I don't have a racist bone in my body. I never have.WOMAN: President Trump today declared, “I don't have a racist bone in my body.” NELSON: They think they're not racist, but they're told that they're racist, whether they think they are or not. And then they feel that there's this adversarial dynamic going on and then, “vote for us, even though we've just been calling you a racist.” And - and that formula doesn't doesn't work very well.GARFIELD: (laughs)NELSON: Engagement and inclusive language may take longer to accomplish in reforms, but they may be more effective in the long run.GARFIELD: All right, so there's this question I sometimes ask at the end of conversations like this. I ask it for two reasons: One, I just have no other way to conclude because I'm not that good at my job. NELSON: (Laughs) GARFIELD: But the other is that I believe I know the answer and I despair of it. And the question is: Anne, what's going to happen?NELSON: Well, over the next 11 months, I believe this country is going to have the greatest moment of truth it's had, certainly, in my lifetime. I think of it as a battle royale. The radical right realizes that this is perhaps their last chance to seize power and, if they succeed, they will change enough more laws in terms of gerrymandering and voter suppression that they will consolidate their hold on power for the foreseeable future. They'll have more time to prepare the way to substitute electors in 2024 if they need to. And at that point, if they can secure Congress, the executive branch, and the judiciary, they can institute the equivalent of a one party state. Will that happen? It depends on what everybody else does in the meantime. If everybody else goes into a non-strategic approach to the elections, where they think that acting out anger on the streets in protest is going to win votes in swing states, then it's playing into their hands. If people who want to defend democracy look at the electoral map and figure out what needs to be done, in which districts, with which parts of the electorate then there is a chance of a reprieve, which would be long enough to enact some of the reforms that would need to happen in order to forestall a virtual dictatorship in the future.GARFIELD: There were two rulings early in the Roberts court which seem to have gotten the GOP about 80 percent towards their goal. One was to regard political money as political speech and, therefore, pretty much out of the purview of Congress to limit it, which was a big, fat gift on a platinum platter to the Koch brothers and others of their ilk. And the other was to say the federal government no longer was needed to police voting rights in certain southern states, which after the Voting Rights Act of, I believe, 1960 were required to pass federal scrutiny so as not to systematically keep mostly black people from the polls. Those are now the law of the land. Is there any way to recover from such fundamental aberrations in the administration of government?NELSON: Not without winning some elections and making some compromises in states that we're not used to talking to. There's a project called Issue One that I recommend, and it's made up of many former congressmen, Democrats and Republicans, who are concerned with saving democracy. And I think that it is very important to frame it like that, and not devolve into this animosity and labeling and name calling, but saying, you know, what is democracy? What is the biggest tent we can manage where we don't have to agree on specific policies, we never have in our history. But we have to agree on the process of negotiation. That is our political system. And if we lose that and have religious dominionists who want to exert dominion over the rest of the population without that kind of process, then we've - we've lost a lot. So I think it's important for people to really rethink how they approach our national conversation and reach across state lines or political lines and engage and listen to each other. If that can happen, there might be some hope.GARFIELD: (Sighs) From your lips to God's ears. And thank you so much.NELSON: Hope he's listening! GARFIELD: I hope she is. NELSON: (laughs) GARFIELD: Anne Nelson is a research scholar at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and author of the newly updated, and couldn't be more zeitgeist book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. All right, we're done here. Bully Pulpit is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

In this unholy amalgamation of interview and free-form kibbitz between two cranky former employees of WNYC, Bob Garfield and Alec Baldwin discuss life, acting, and the great Stockton Briggle. Plus, find out more about Bob's split with “On the Media.”TRANSCRIPT:TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 12: Alec Baldwin Is Everywhere (Including Here, Right Now).ALEC BALDWIN: I'm a game show host. I'm a podcast host. I'm a father of seven children. I'm out of my mind....GARFIELD: ..and see what I mean? That's him, star of stage, screen, Page 6, iHeart Radio, and, in this case, Instagram Live, where he appears once a week for his 2.1 million followers in conversation with actors, musicians, and at least one dashing, elderly podcaster. Why? Because he graciously wanted to call attention to this show. It was something of an interview, something of a promo appearance, and something of a free-form kibbitz between two cranky former employees of WNYC radio in New York City. I warn you, like other friendly conversations you've overheard, it comes with a lot of random digressions.BALDWIN: I'm here with the one and the only Bob Garfield to talk about his new show, Bully Pulpit, to talk about his career in journalism (his long and wonderful career as a journalist), to talk about the fate of journalism. We might talk about that for like 60 seconds, because what's the point? But first of all, Bob, tell me, you left public radio--you were on public radio for quite a while. On the Media, wonderful show. Of course, I'm obviously a fan of yours, a huge fan of yours. But when you left there, talk about the genesis of Bully Pulpit, how did that come together? GARFIELD: Well, first of all, I left there the way an artillery shell leaves a cannon. I was fired. And you know, we can get into that a little bit. The lawyers prevent me from being, you know, too candid. But yeah, we can talk about that. Can we just observe one thing, since this conversation is taking place the day after the Facebook shut down and the Instagram shut down and two days after this blockbuster interview on 60 Minutes with the whistleblower? We are on Instagram, which we now well understand triggers self-loathing in kids, right? Because, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, if we're talking like evil, he makes Vladimir Putin look like Mr. Rogers. So I guess what I'm saying is, kids, please love yourself and we love you too. That's where I want to start. I apologize for talking to you, Alec, on this particular platform because evil. BALDWIN: [coughing] I'm choking. GARFIELD:  I know, it was poignant. I understand.BALDWIN: It's very moving. [coughing]GARFIELD: You know, if that were in a movie (that little episode), in 12 minutes, you would die of consumption.BALDWIN: Well, someone wrote “Trump 2024,” so I immediately started convulsing. GARFIELD: [laughs]BALDWIN: Well, listen, I am someone who Instagram is my primary, if not sole social media source. I have a Twitter account which I keep open just as a placeholder for my name. Facebook--I have a Facebook page for myself, for my foundation. My wife and I have a charitable foundation. We have a Facebook page for that. But Instagram is it for me. And I guess Instagram is owned by Facebook, correct?GARFIELD: It is. And you know, obviously it's a fantastic utility, but it is both utopian and dystopian, and the dystopian side is really dystopian. I mean that because Mark Zuckerberg and company know exactly what the deleterious effects are of the social dynamic on these platforms, and they will not do anything to remediate them because it screws up their business model. So they are constantly apologizing and explaining and being on the defensive, but they never actually fix what's broke. So, nonetheless, like I said, really good utility, and I'm delighted, de-freaking-lighted, to be talking to you on this or anywhere because I'm always delighted talking to you. BALDWIN: Well, thank you. Now a guy who shall remain nameless contacted me quite a while ago, probably last year in the heart of the first waves of the COVID (probably more than a year ago), to talk about a more user friendly platform. Like this with more integrity. Everybody'd have to register. You'd have to give all your real information. You'd have to give a photograph. You'd have to be completely transparent. It's you as you, being you, doing you, posting as you. The question, of course, is how many people really, really want that? Or do most people really kind of like the way it is, where you can hide and you can conceal yourself and say just hateful things?GARFIELD: Well, it's a playground for the id, right? And it, you know, it empowers you to have power, even if it's only the power to intimidate or to terrorize or to bad mouth. And, you know, it taps into something that unfortunately is all too human.BALDWIN: Yeah.GARFIELD: Can I say one other thing, Alec? This is so weird. I'm sitting here looking at your face because Instagram, right? So, last night I was watching the Jerry Lewis documentary, which popped up on Amazon Prime, and there you were. A couple of weeks ago, I was watching the John DeLorean docu-drama--FRAMING JOHN DELOREAN CLIP: I'm gonna try to be DeLorean.GARFIELD: --and there you were, not only as DeLorean, but as yourself commenting on the DeLorean saga. I just watched you in the mini-series, (I think on Peacock), Dr. Death--DR. DEATH CLIP: Duntsch is never going to stop on his own.GARFIELD: --which is a really, really, really perverse story. And I watch you every week on the Match Game.MATCH GAME CLIP: We're looking for….penis. GARFIELD: Well, OK, that's actually not true, I don't watch the Match Game. But Alec, I'm afraid to open the f*****g fridge because I think you're going to be in there like drinking my orange juice from the carton. BALDWIN: There I am on the missing — I'm missing on the carton.GARFIELD: I don't understand. You've got between like 6 and 47 kids. How do you have the time to be everywhere all at once? I don't understand this.BALDWIN: I wish that were true. But Peacock--we started Dr. Death in March of last year. They shut down. They came back and were rebooted and ready to go with all of their protocols by mid-October. We shot from mid-October to the end of like, I think middle or end of February, you know, because we have the holidays. It was like a almost five month shoot to do eight episodes because of all the shutdowns and protocols. But it was a group of people--what you see very often in the business now is how hard people are working to keep everything going. They don't want to be the one that shuts down the production. They don't want to be the one that brings the COVID on the set. They're working really, really hard--like my kids' school. When you go to my kids' school and we drop them off at school, everyone's working really hard, masking, gloves, spraying things down, and distancing. And everybody on the staff is vaccinated. Everybody on the faculty is vaccinated. And I would imagine most of the parents are vaccinated as well, and we're assiduous about all of this because the kids can't be vaccinated yet. So we're always trying to protect unvaccinated children. So the job I did with Peacock (and my part was rather small. I mean, the real star of it was Joshua Jackson--played the eponymous character, if you will.)GARFIELD: Very well. He does a sociopath very, very well, that guy. BALDWIN: Wonderful performance. And so, everybody worked really hard to protect everything COVID-wise. I'm leaving to go to New Mexico in a little while to go shoot a film very quickly, and that's the same thing. Everyone just busting their back to keep everything safe for everybody. GARFIELD: A Western, by the way. BALDWIN: Yes, I'm going to do a Western. GARFIELD: Is this your first Western? BALDWIN: I actually did--the producer was a dear friend of mine. I love this guy. And his name was Stockton Briggle. And we did a--for CBS TV back in the 80s, we did a remake of The Alamo with James Arness and Brian Keith.THE ALAMO: THIRTEEN DAYS TO GLORY CLIP: News is that Santa Anna has crossed the Rio Grand. [crowd noise]What about Fannin and the boys from Goliad? Same with Houston, what about him?Both Fannin and Houston are on the march to come to our aidWhen do they get here, Jim?As of this moment..How about it Jim?As of this moment, we are on a battle alert. BALDWIN: ...and the Alamo Historical Society picketed the sets because they said that the two other men were old enough to play the fathers of their character. They were both long in the tooth for their role. So, I did a Western once. I did The Alamo for CBS, and it was memorable, but not for the right reasons.GARFIELD: I'm sorry. What was the name of the producer?BALDWIN: Stockton Briggle.GARFIELD: Right, of course, the Stockton Briggle. I once did a piece, that involved the director of the McLean Symphony Orchestra, whose name, as you know, is Dingwall Fleary, and that was a career highlight. BALDWIN: Well I'm always looking for names to stay in hotels under. And my favorite, one of my favorites was the great Mozart biographer who wrote the great books on Mozart. His name was Cuthbert Girdlestone.GARFIELD: Yeah, you know what, his name was actually Shecky Cuddlestein. And you know, he changed it at Ellis Island.BALDWIN: Real name was Phil Cohen.GARFIELD: Yeah. [laughs]BALDWIN: But I want to ask you--Bully Pulpit, how did that come about?GARFIELD: Well, it came about because I got fired...BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bob Garfield is out this week, and as many of you know by now, every week. GARFIELD: ...under the allegation that I had violated the WNYC'S anti-bullying policies. Not that I was a bully, per se, not that that nicety ever came through. As far as the world is concerned, I'm a bully, and, you know, to some degree canceled, but I'm certainly fired. And it was catastrophic in many, many ways: financially, reputationally. I am fighting it, and I probably will prevail, although there's no such thing as a slam dunk in this kind of law. But in the meantime, I still want to journalize. So a friend of mine, who was my co-host on a podcast that Slate did called Lexicon Valley...LEXICON VALLEY: From Washington, DC, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Vuolo.GARFIELD: It was a wonderful podcast...LEXICON VALLEY: Today, Episode 64, titled “Yada Yada Yada: Europeans Don't Get Seinfeld,” wherein we discuss why the classic American sitcom doesn't translate. Hey, Mikey. Hey, Bobby. How you doing, buddy?Splendid, thank you. And your own self?I am great...GARFIELD: ...which we both--we left. He went and did one thing about Supreme Court decisions. I went to do another thing about MacArthur Genius laureates. And then it was handed over to a Columbia professor, a linguistics professor, named John McWhorter. Anyway, Mike Vuolo his name is, came to me and said, Look, I'm starting this company with my friend, Matt Schwartz, from NPR, and it's called Booksmart Studios, and we would like you to consider doing your thing for us. And I said, Yes! Yes! This is the best part about getting my ass fired and being humiliated and everything else that comes with my fate, now I can do exactly what I want--the same kind of social and political media criticism that I wanted to do, (I don't want to mischaracterize this), but without having to deal with, let's say, the internal politics of an organization, without having any kind of sort of received ideology that has to be at the bottom of it. I'm free to be me, you know, asking the kind of questions and making the kind of observations that I want to make. And that has been very liberating. You know, I wish I hadn't been fired, but I could not be more delighted to be doing this particular show because it's just been a fantastic experience and very well received among the 11 people who listen to it. BALDWIN: I had a show for quite a while. I was several years at NYC.HERE'S THE THING WITH ALEC BALDWIN: My first clip is from an interview with the legendary Barbra Streisand who talks here about how she wanted control of her films in a way that...BALDWIN: When the show ended, when I left NYC to go to iHeart and go from public radio to commercial radio, it was difficult because I was sad to leave behind, figuratively, the public radio audience. I like the public radio audience. And I was always getting--people would tell me how much they liked my podcast in New York more than anything else I was working on. It was kind of funny. But NYC was a place where--I'm a fan of public radio, but not all public radio stations are created equally. And NYC, which has a huge nut, they are, in the COVID era, I would imagine, obsessed with raising money. But NYC, of course, got into the kind of firing jag: Lopate had to go, Jonathan Schwartz had to go, and Hockenberry.I was given a mandatory set of questions that I had to ask Woody Allen. And I said to them, I said, now Woody Allen told me in my conversation with him--we had one conversation, and I said, you know, they're coming after me to ask unanswered questions. And I just find asking those questions--again, not that there's anything wrong with them, but it doesn't mean a good show. He's already been over this a thousand times. And they said, well, if you don't ask these questions, we're not going to air the show. I mean, I found the chuck. This is public radio. They said, if you don't ask the questions--the guy, whatever his name was. What was that guy who was in charge of content there?GARFIELD: I just, I see no need to bandy about names, Alec. Let's just leave them anonymous. BALDWIN: I'd love to put his name right up on the screen, but he was the one that said, yeah, if you don't ask these questions, we're not going to air the show. So in my mind, that was it, I was going to quit. I was out of there. And so, I said to Woody, they're demanding that I ask these questions. I apologize. This isn't at all what I had in mind. He said, listen, he said, don't worry about it. So we do the show. He was great. I mean, he was great, great, great.WOODY ALLEN: I was coming from a position--people were thinking, my god, this older person has seduced this young girl, and he's taking advantage of her. You know, it looked awful. I understood that. I mean, I can understand that. BALDWIN: And then we finished and I called my lawyer and I said, I'm out of here. They didn't care. So I just kind of took a deep breath and I said, you know something, I mean, just about anywhere has got to be better than here. Do I like being on commercial radio? There's benefits to it. Now, you're on commercial radio now as well. GARFIELD: I wish there were more commerce. it's an interesting model. We are on Substack, which is a platform for independent creators of content who are not in the employ of media companies to fend for themselves. You know, put their content out there and be paid by subscriptions by their followers. And Bully Pulpit is, in effect, a Substack talent. And at the moment, we are three shows. There's Bully Pulpit. There is Lexicon Valley, which Mike and I started, and McWhorter now does for us.MCWHORTER: Having a pronoun to mark nonbinary identity could be seen as pretty basic. It could be seen as something that a critical mass of people could agree is a moral advance if you think about history, if you think about what seems to be the case in all cultures.GARFIELD: Then there's Banished by an academic, a professor named Amna Khalid, which looks at what loosely is called “cancel culture” and looks at its implications for the society and so forth.KHALID: To what extent is this just kind of generating frankly b******t work and legislation to make a political point and just to kind of grind down the machinery and keep the conversation going around these issues? And to what extent do they genuinely think that they are going to be able to control the space that is higher education?GARFIELD: She really asks smart questions, and, you know, listens carefully to the answers. And it's something. I mean, when you listen to an episode, when you're done, your jaw aches because of the tension of this moment in our society. And yes, of course, in answer to your question, yes, you can subscribe to all of them for free at Booksmart Studios. BooksmartStudios.org. And if you ask me later, I'll also plug the shows.BALDWIN: [laughs] What are the benefits of the show you're doing now as compared to where you were before? GARFIELD: Well, I get to be me. I don't have to worry about other people's ideology, about their their red zones, you know, I don't have to worry about their aesthetic. I mean, collaboration is great, and I worked with extremely, extremely, extremely talented producers. But they weren't me, and there were times when I was stymied in my wishes for a particular piece of subject matter (often subject matter) or an approach, a line on a piece or something like that. And now I am free to either soar or f**k up all by myself. I'm free to be me, if you call that freedom.BALDWIN: Now, you had on one of the episodes your friend who you've known for many years, who did the 911 Museum documentary. Correct?GARFIELD: Yeah. Steve Rosenbaum.BALDWIN: Rosenbaum--the director or the producer or both?GARFIELD: Both. BALDWIN: And Michael Shulman, I remember that clearly he was the kind of protagonist of the piece.ROSENBAUM: I mean, he's quite brilliant in the way that lots of thoughtful New Yorkers are about images and sound and picture. He's just not a museum person in that he doesn't play by the rules...BALDWIN: I liked the film a lot and I just couldn't get enough of Shulman. I wanted to see more of Shulman.GARFIELD: Shulan. Shulan. BALDWIN: Oh, Shulan? Yeah, Michael Shulan. Sorry. So, you know Rosenbaum from where?GARFIELD: I've known him for, you know, six or seven hundred years. I was a--believe it or not, this is going to sound ridiculous, but before I got into the media criticism racket, I was an advertising critic. I was a, believe it or not, world famous advertising critic because I worked for Advertising Age, which was the global publication for media and marketing industry. And I passed judgment on new commercials and campaigns and print ads and so forth. And as such was--[laughs] it's crazy. “BOB GARFIELD: EXCELLENT RADIO MAN”: Good, old Bob Garfield is the best man in the whole wide world. Good, old Bob Garfield is very intelligent. Good, old Bob Garfield is the nicest man who ever lived. GARFIELD: You know, you know what it's like to walk down the street in Cannes during the movie festival in May and people turning their heads and going, [whispering]. Well, that's what would happen to me when I walked down the Croisette in Cannes in June for the advertising festival.BALDWIN: I thought you were going to say that that was what it was like when you walked down Madison Avenue in the 70s and 80s. That was your Croisette.GARFIELD: As you well know, Alec, as a native New Yorker, nobody makes eye contact with you on Madison, so.CHARLI XCX: Why you looking at me? Why you looking at me? All these  b*****s looking at me.GARFIELD: You know, it's easy to be anonymous walking down at North to South Street. Anyway, so he called me once to book me for a speaking gig, and we became friends. BALDWIN: You were a person who was immersed in the world of advertising. I used to do voiceovers in the early days with the Young & Rubicam and of course, my favorite piece of  Madison Avenue trivia, my favorite anecdote, was when someone said that BBDO (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) was the sound made by what? What was the joke?GARFIELD: A trunk falling down the stairs. And it was Fred Allen, said it on his radio show back in 1644.BALDWIN: Batten, Barton...GARFIELD: Durstine and Osborn, yeah. [laughs]BALDWIN: What's your media diet? I mean, I talked to a couple of people, all of them say the same thing, and I don't fault them for that. Their go to in the morning is The New York Times online. They're all reading The Times first and foremost. What's your media diet every day? What are you committed to listening to, reading every day? GARFIELD: Well, as we've discussed, the major thing that I consume it turns out, is Alec Baldwin movies, which is is getting to be a problem.GLENGARRY GLENN ROSS SPEECH: You see this watch? You see this watch?Yeah.That watch costs more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing. GARFIELD: You know, I read The New York Times. That's my first go. And then, because I'm always looking for story ideas, the other thing I read is everything. Now, one of the things I really miss, one of the things I really miss about On the Media is the producers in the aggregate had far more scope in their media diets than I did, and they would bring stuff that I otherwise would not have found. And, you know, sometimes it was from Atlantic or The New Republic or The Nation or some even less brand name publications, but far greater than I personally consumed. And now, because I have constantly to be on the lookout for ideas, for pieces and commentaries and essays, I just obsessively scroll everything. So the answer to your question changes hour by hour, but I'm just going to go with everything.BALDWIN: So again, the podcast is called Bully Pulpit. It can be found at Booksmart Studios? GARFIELD: BooksmartStudios.org. You can subscribe for free. You can pay $7 a month and get bonus content from Amna and John and from me. I write a weekly text column, which might be even funner for me than the audio pieces. You know, in my life, I've written 3 or 4,000 columns. That's really how I got started in this business. What we do, or at least what I do, is observe. I observe my ass off, try to look at what is happening in our society, and ask questions that for whatever reasons some are uncomfortable about asking. And I may sometimes seem polemical. But the key is I make an argument. I don't just say things as if they were received truth. I make an argument and the arguments are pretty strong and it's often kind of funny. Have you heard any of the pieces?BALDWIN: Yes. I listened to the one about the tortillas. I listened to one about the documentary. Yeah.GARFIELD: So, I mean, in two words and one of them being “transcendent,” how would you characterize Bully Pulpit from BooksmartStudios.org.BALDWIN: Almost transcendent. GARFIELD: [laughs]   BALDWIN: To get back to your media diet, no TV for you? You're not watching any TV news at all. That's hopeless to you. GARFIELD: Well, cable news is not news. It's just highly conflicted people arguing about the news, right? Fox News obviously is not news because it's just political propaganda and opposition research. And it's, you know, it's a cancer on the society. And the local news is, you know, people standing in front of police tape talking live from something that happened yesterday. So that's utterly useless. And unfortunately, local news reporting, it's all but disappeared. We are awash in national political reporting. But the collapse of the media industry has devastated, decimated, the journalism business everywhere in this country. In some places, there are vast deserts where there is no local news available. And you know who's behind that too? You know who is at the heart of that collapse? Well, the digital revolution in the first instance, because it bollixed up the advertising model and it created an endless glut of content and not enough advertising to support it. But then Facebook and Google snapped up everything. They own the advertising economy, and everybody else has to fight for scraps. So, on top of all of the other evils of Mark Zuckerberg that we began with, they have, more than any other institution including the Trump administration, eviscerated the news business here and around the world, and from this, I believe we shall never recover.BALDWIN:  You don't see any hope?GARFIELD: No, I mean, I'm in the despair industry, but there's not a lot I see. Let's just say the planet does not burn into a cinder, about which I'm also increasingly skeptical. I don't see the problems, the intractable problems, in the news business doing anything but getting worse and worse and worse. BALDWIN: The show is called Bully Pulpit. The site is BooksmartStudios.org. I'm especially interested in both the other podcasts--Banished, and what's the other one, Lexicon Valley?GARFIELD: Lexicon Valley. They both are transcendent. And also Alec, I should say I'll be at the Valley Forge Music Fair June 7th, 8th and 9th, and I'll be doing some summer stock in Meridian, Mississippi. I'm doing Music Man. It's long been a dream of mine. I will be playing the Shirley Jones character. BALDWIN: I'm so sorry to miss that. Let's record that. Anyway, my very best to you. I look forward to Bully Pulpit, Lexicon Valley, and Banished on BooksmartStudios.org.GARFIELD: Thanks, man. It's always a pleasure. BALDWIN: My pleasure. We'll talk to you down the road.GARFIELD: All right, we're done here. You now know what my conversations with Alec Baldwin tend to sound like and you also know more about the origins of this show. In due course, you will learn more about my WNYC ordeal. It is as frustrating, I promise you, to be muzzled as it was to be smeared in the first place, but I promise you in time the truth will emerge.Meantime, we encourage you to become a paid subscriber to Booksmart Studios, so you can get extra content from Bully Pulpit, Lexicon Valley and Banished. The big Bully Pulpit bonus is my weekly text column, which some have described as “like Bully Pulpit but you don't need earbuds.”Also, I can't emphasize this enough, if you like what you hear from our shows, please share with your peeps and go to iTunes to rate us. Those ratings to date are phenomenal across the board but scale matters a lot. So, please please weigh in. And I, of course, thank you very much.Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

Bob stumbles on a controversy about a media personality's enchilada recipe — and learns about truth, celebrity and Mexican food.TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. BOB GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 11: The Tortilla Scandal.Gotta tell you, this one is hard. Look, I think it's fair to say that in 44 years of journalism, I haven't shied away from difficult subjects — because that's what we do, right? That's why we are here, to shine light into some dark corners. Sometimes dark and damp. The kind of fetid hiding places where bad things happen out of public view. Unseen crevices, shadowy and, you know, moist.But journalism is all about venturing there, risks be damned, to protect the public's right to know. I'm looking at you, Armando Tinoco of Showbiz Cheat Sheet. He is the author of the blockbuster story headlined “‘Magnolia Table': Joanna Gaines Makes ‘Controversial' Substitute in Mexican Enchilada Recipe.”JOANNA GAINES: So I've got my 9x13 pan, and I'm going to put about half a cup of the enchilada sauce at the bottom.GARFIELD: The Magnolia Table episode starts out normally. As the old saying goes, “You can't make enchiladas if you're not willing to make enchilada sauce.” And the host, Joanna Gaines, for a while says and does nothing that would suggest controversy.GAINES: So, I'm going to add the shredded rotisserie chicken and then I like to add some mozzarella cheese. It's a nice go-to, safe recipe that everyone will love.GARFIELD: OK, trigger warning. I'm not going to show you this, because we have some technical problems with our video, but it turns out not to matter what Gaines says about “safe” and “everyone will love,” because pictures don't lie. She is wrapping her enchiladas in wheat-flour tortillas. It's like watching police body-cam video. And there were some in the audience who were all, like, am I really seeing this?MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY: Holy...f*****g s**t.GARFIELD: You can say that again, Matthew McConaughey, maybe even slower. Because Gaines totally courts the inevitable backlash, openly declaring, and I quote: “I grabbed a handful of fresh tortillas from Jesse's today. In traditional enchiladas, sometimes it's corn tortillas, but I like to use flour tortillas and it's quite controversial.”“Controversial,” she says. No wonder she got the attention of Showbiz Cheat Sheet, which zeroed right in (I mean, if we're to credit the headline) on this potential crime against humanity — like genocide, or cinnamon-raisin bagels. Is God okay with tortillas not made with corn? YEAH YEAH YEAHS: (Music) It's sacrilege, sacrilege, sacrilege, you say… It's sacrilege, sacrilege, sacrilege, you say…GARFIELD: This is precisely the matter explored by food vlogger Adam Ragusea, who painstakingly documented the relationship between white flour and white people.ADAM RAGUSEA: The soft-shell corn tortilla is the original tortilla, originating in pre-Columbian America. Wheat didn't even grow in this hemisphere until European colonialists brought it over.GARFIELD: I'll return to Adam in a moment. Because in media, controversy is a commodity and you really, really need to inspect the goods. For now though, let's focus on another important question: Joanna Gaines, the enchilada lover — who is she again? Well, here's who: a famous American. A cable-TV-famous, unthreateningly attractive, very white-teethed American, who, with her even more white-teethed husband Chip, were for five years hosts of HGTV's super popular home-renovation-porn show Fixer Upper.SNEAK PEEK OF FIXER UPPER EXCERPTS: “Lucas and Laney, today is the big day. Are you ready to see your fixer upper?”“Absolutely.”“Let's do it!”“OH MY!”“This kitchen…”“How did you do this?”“Ta-da!”GARFIELD: The show was a blockbuster, but is just ending a three-year hiatus while Joanna and Chip spent more time with their five kids, their lawyers, and their very own fledgling cable channel Magnolia Network, where, at the moment, Jo doesn't renovate old farm houses but cooks meals on TV. Yes, she is now a DIY celebrity chef, and as such, what she does with an enchilada matters.Ok, not “matters,” as in having any relevance to anyone's real life in this particular solar system. “Matters” as in feeding the industry built on the passing interest of many, many TV consumers who may or may not be up to speed on, say, the systematic erosion of voting rights for Black Americans or atrocities in Myanmar or the burning of our planet to a cinder, but definitely do feel a kinship with Jo and Chip, becausetelevision.In that universe, not only can Armando Tinoco gain employment writing about the tortilla ingredients of the rich and famous, but everything Joanna Gaines does (with the possible exception of her autonomic nervous system) is also newsworthy. I commend you, for example, to Rachel Askinasi's scoop for Insider headlined: “I Tried Joanna Gaines' Restaurant-worthy, Cereal-coated French Toast and It's Perfect for Family Brunch.”Pulitzer committee, take note. But the journalistic interest extends beyond Joanna herself to those with whom she shares DNA. Credit Nathalie Kirby of House Beautiful for ferreting out the story headlined: “Joanna Gaines's Younger Sister Just Opened a Plant Shop Called ‘Ferny's' and We Can't Wait to Shop There!”These exposés don't just land in a reporter's lap. Breaking this news required Kirby to roll up her sleeves and read Joanna Gaines's Instagram, which gushed about both Ferny's and sister Mary Kay — approximately like the Pentagon papers, if the Pentagon Papers had included an address and store hours.It is journalistic enterprise like this that keeps you and me free. Because We. Must. Know. More. I mean, Chip and Joanna's infidelity issues, don't even get me started. Access Live was all over Chip, and we are the better for it.INTERVIEWER: I'm thinking about your 18th wedding anniversary, the five kids, all the success, all the fame that's come. Has there ever been a moment for the two of you where you thought you were going to throw in the towel or that you couldn't do it?CHIP GAINES: You know, that crisis, Jo and I had multiple opportunities to quit and throw in the towel, and that was just not in our DNA. So now I think we've taken that and realized that, you know, it's like you can't ever lose if you don't quit. And Jo and I keep showing up day after day and sometimes it's right, sometimes it's not, but we keep putting one foot in front of the other.INTERVIEWER: Joanna, tell me about the engagement ring. GARFIELD: Now, amid all of this repertorial heroism, there is one small nitpick. When Showbiz Cheat Sheet caught Joanna Gaines preparing enchiladas with flour tortillas, it was possibly not exactly cultural desecration. It was more like what Mexicans call: “cooking.” YouTuber Adam Ragusea pressed the question with LA Times reporter Gustavo Arellano, author of the book Taco USA.GUSTAVO ARELLANO: Go talk to the people in Sonora. Go talk to the people in Nuevo Leon and Chihuahua--the borderlands. Go talk to the Tex Mex folks who have been right there on the border for generations, and for them, flour tortillas is what they grew up on. They totally speak Spanish. They look like you and I. Flour tortillas--our tradition. GARFIELD: Oh, so, no controversy after all. As they say, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. The moral of this story, I suppose, is that true journalistic courage comes in not caring if it's “right” or “wrong.” Or “significant.” We should all maybe beware of trading in pompous pieties when the sacred appetites of the audience hang in the balance. On the other hand, I suppose credibility does matter, right? For instance, that cereal-coated French toast. Is it really perfect for family brunch? How do we know? For the love of God, how do we know?Ok, we're done here. We encourage you to become a paid subscriber to Booksmart Studios, so you can get extra content — including my weekly text column — from Bully Pulpit, Lexicon Valley, and Banished.Meantime, please please please share our podcasts with friends, colleagues, relatives and your social networks: Twitter, Insta, Facebook. And also, rate us on iTunes, that is invaluable. We are trying to bring unapologetic scrutiny to the world of ideas, and we simply cannot do that without you. So please help, and, of course, thank you in advance.Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe

In the ongoing drama surrounding the murder of Gabrielle Petito, Bob realized that the media are telling us everything under the sun, except for what matters most.TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in.GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt. I'm Bob Garfield with Episode 10: Airing Dirty Laundrie. GABRIELLE PETITO: Hello, hello, and good morning. It is really nice and sunny today. It's only ten o'clock in the morning, but it rained all afternoon yesterday…oh, my God!GARFIELD: That's from a YouTube post a few weeks ago by wannabe travel vlogger Gabrielle Petito, documenting her cross-country van journey with her boyfriend Brian Laundrie. We see them hiking, taking in sunsets, eating camp-style, hugging and kissing and frolicking, doing cartwheels on Santa Monica beach — two attractive young people living the dream.That the dreamy footage obscured a gathering nightmare, of course, is by now, hardly news to you.FOX NEWS REPORTER: Yeah, good morning Todd and Gillian. Brian Laundrie and Gabby Petito were on a cross-country trip they were documenting for their YouTube series, but on September 1st, Brian returned home alone and has been hiding out at his parents' house, right behind me.Yesterday, North Port police named him a person of interest in this case.GARFIELD: Now, people go missing all the time in this country. One this month was Gregory Martin, a 70-year-old Buford, Georgia man, afflicted with dementia, who strayed away from his optometrist's office. You did not see anything about him on the news before he turned up safe and sound. You probably haven't heard of Quawan Charles, who was 15 when he went missing last year from his rural Louisiana home. If you were to Google “missing teenagers 2020,” you wouldn't find his picture. A lot of white schoolgirls, not a lot of black male schoolboys. His disappearance did not captivate the nation, or even the local police.LOCAL TV REPORTER: The family called the Baldwin Police Department and St. Mary Parish Sheriff's office to report him missing. Although the family asked that an amber alert be issued, officers declined to do so. The family claims the police downplayed their concerns, including speculating Charles may simply be attending a football game and not answering his phone. Charles' body was found days later, on November 3rd, in a wooded area about thirty minutes from his hometown. GARFIELD: And incredibly, in 2019, more than 5,590 Native American women were reported missing. You cannot name a single one of them. But when I say Natalee Holloway, or Jaycee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy — all of whom were TV news fodder for weeks or months at a time over the past couple of decades — you can most likely tell their heartbreaking stories, most likely in intimate detail. This is called “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” a term coined twenty years ago by the late journalist Gwen Ifill, and lately invoked by the New York Times and others in a “here-we-go-again” sort of way. This was Good Morning America: GOOD MORNING AMERICA REPORTER: Gabby Petito is one of so many reported missing each year. At the end of 2020, the FBI had over 89,000 active missing persons cases. 45% of those cases: people of color. Petito's story has renewed debate about which cases get attention and the media's seeming infatuation with missing white women. GARFIELD: If anything about that surprises you — I mean, anything — I don't even know what to say. Lookit: by American TV-news standards, the fact that Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson were brunette was practically affirmative action. So, of coursethe fate of skinny, blonde Gabby Petito, unlike Quawon Charles, has gripped the country as an irresistible true-crime mystery played out in real time. Clue by clue. Revelation by revelation. Twist by twist. Newsbreak by newsbreak — tragedy as infotainment, costumed (with all the obligatory sobriety and furrowed anchor brows) as journalism.LOCAL TV REPORTER: That's right Keith, good evening to you. North Port police admitted this search warrant last week. The detective writes that Gabby Petito's phone had been shut off for at least fifteen days. The investigator also says...TRAVEL BLOGGER 1: This is most definitely Gabby Petito's Ford transit van. TRAVEL BLOGGER 2: And I slowed it down, so you can possibly see it a little bit better.ABC NEWS REPORTER: In the last 24 hours, we've gotten more information on the final days leading up to Gabby's disappearance. Police just released audio of a 911 call out of Utah, where the caller reported seeing a domestic fight between Gabby and Brian on August 12th...CLARK COUNTY 911 CALL: “We drove by and the gentleman was slapping the girl.”“He was slapping her?”“Yes. And then we stopped, they ran up and down the sidewalk, he proceeded to hit her, hopped in the car, and they drove off.”ABC NEWS REPORTER: Police in Utah pulled the couple over last month, after responding to calls of a domestic incident while they were road tripping across the country. Officers said Petito was crying...POLICE BODY CAM: “What's your guys' names?”“Gabby.”“I'm Brian.” “Gabby, Brian. Ok. What's going on? Why are you crying?” “I'm not crying. We've just been fighting this morning.”FBI PRESSER: Human remains were discovered consistent with the description of Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito.CNN REPORTER: The news coming as the search is intensifying for Gabby Petito's fiance, Brian Laundrie, whose parents told police he disappeared a week ago today.LOCAL TV REPORTER: Yesterday, they, along with the FBI and several other agencies, spent the weekend scouring through the Carlton Reserve at the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park. They have not found anything yet. The search ended just after six pm last night. North Port police have yet to tell us if they plan to resume that search there today, but I can tell you it is a very large, dense place with lots of shrubs, so it will take some time to get through.LOCAL TV REPORTER: Detective work, DNA and digital foots prints. The FBI is fanning out and zeroing in. From a North Port family home to Wyoming.GARFIELD: Gabby's death is obviously an unspeakable tragedy for her, for her loved ones, and for the loved ones of Brian Laundrie. For almost everyone else on the planet, it's merely pulp non-fiction — undoubtedly destined to be formally Hollywoodized in a four-part streaming series. Which, wholly apart from the implicit racism, is tragic itself. There are deep problems in this world, politically and environmentally, and the media and audience both have invested their scarce time resources in a morbid drama that offers virtually no significance, no insight, no meaning to anyone but the principals. There is one flicker of possibility, about which more in a moment, but I need to remind you what all-Gabby-all-the-time has squeezed out of the news.VALERIE MASON: With further warming in the coming years, we expect to see new extremes that are unprecedented in magnitude, frequency, timing, or in regions that have never encountered those types of extremes.GARFIELD: That was climate scientist Valerie Mason-Delmotte, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a couple of weeks ago, joining the UN General Assembly in declaring Code Red for Humanity.ABC NEWS REPORTER: The report's authors are essentially sending the world's leaders a final wake-up call: Curb emissions and dramatically reduce consumption, or face a world that is fundamentally different.GARFIELD: Yeah, that lasted one news cycle. One. The end of life on Earth as we know it. One news cycle.Oh, we're awash in coverage of national politics and the latest on Trump's every utterance, including talking in his sleep, but the death spiral of the media business has meant vastly shrunken newsrooms, vanishing local coverage, empty statehouse bureaus — and the biggest stories in the history of the planet treated like wheat germ occasionally to be sprinkled on the Trump-ruptions.CNN REPORTER: Trump sent a letter riddled with lies to Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to decertify the results in Georgia, citing all sorts of debunked claims. GARFIELD: Celebrity crap.REPORTER: The Crown's Emmy nominated actress, Emma Corrin, made a bizarre fashion statement in a strapless frock and bonnet, quite a different look from her Princess Diana role.GARFIELD: And anti-vaccination a******s disrupting school board meetings.ANTI-VAXXERS: Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!GARFIELD: To which we can now add the story of Gabby Petito, who went on a travel adventure seeking fame, and achieved it, posthumously, like some sort of sick cosmic joke.But, as I said, a glimmer. A glimmer of something of value to be drawn from the morbid fascination with this mystery — namely, that it is not especially mysterious. Because as we comb through the endless clues and tidbits gathered by investigators, the press and random online civilians, we discover lurking within this saga a lesson.You'll recall the traffic stop, by Utah park police, who had seen the couple's van speeding erratically. The stop lasted 1 hour and 17 minutes, and the bodycam footage displays remarkably engaged and conscientious cops trying to get to the bottom of the couple's argument, in which Brian got scratched on the face and arms and Gabby had her face squeezed like a dog whose owner is trying to shut it up. What the police discovered, from both subjects, was that the two frequently triggered one another, leading to violent arguments that sometimes got physical. Brian said Gabby was very anxious and emotional and, you know, the girl crazy. And Gabby said, it's true. This led to a piece of advice from one officer to a crying Gabrielle. The relationship, he said, was toxic, and dangerous.POLICE OFFICER: It may be bad for your soul, just saying. I'm not telling you what to do with your life, but if you know you have anxiety, look at the situations you can get in, you know what I mean? Now, we're not here to be mean to you or anything but you know, there's a first time and then it usually...GARFIELD: And then, usually it gets worse. Because the pathology of domestic violence is a pathology of repeated episodes spiraling ever downward. If Brian was mishandling her in a speeding vehicle on unfamiliar mountain roads, the worst was surely yet to come. This is the lesson — the universal lesson — to be drawn from this horrifying saga. There are lovers' spats and there is battering and the difference, the fatal difference, is often on display. Every parent and every sibling and every friend of every woman — not to mention the cops who get called to the scene of a domestic — should be vigilant for these signs and be prepared to intervene before it is too late.But did that single salient issue dominate the news coverage? No. We have 24/7 on the search for Brian Laundrie. But to be reminded of the real stakes here, I had to happen upon a Facebook post, from an author named Julie Perkins Cantrell, who in a now viral message codified the thirty lessons of the Gabby Petito tragedy, culminating in this: “When we see someone at her emotional end during a domestic dispute, we shouldn't assume that she's crazy. We shouldn't buy into the false narrative given by the abuser. We shouldn't believe the cover-up story given by the target, who has been conditioned to carry all the blame and shame. And we shouldn't assume they're going to be okay.”All of America now knows Brian Laundrie is a suspect-- the only suspect -- in Gabby's murder. What we haven't been informed of by the media — but what we should internalize — is another Code Red for Humanity: the murderous ending of the online Van Life Journey was all too foreseeable before the couple even backed out of their Florida driveway.All right, we're done here. We encourage you to become a paid subscriber to Booksmart Studios, so you can get extra content — including my weekly text column — from Bully Pulpit, from Lexicon Valley, and from Banished.Meantime, please please please share our podcasts with friends, colleagues, relatives, total strangers, and your social networks: Twitter, Insta, Facebook. And then also please rate us on iTunes. That is invaluable. Look, we're trying to bring unapologetic scrutiny to the world of ideas, and we simply can't do that without you. Thank you in advance.Bully Pulpit is produced by Mike Vuolo and Matthew Schwartz. Our theme was composed by Julie Miller and the team at Harvest Creative Services in Lansing, Michigan. Bully Pulpit is a production of Booksmart Studios. I'm Bob Garfield. Get full access to Bully Pulpit at bullypulpit.substack.com/subscribe