Part Two: How Conservatism Won

Robert and Dave conclude our episode about think tanks.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Ah, what's probably I feel like saying something
about what happened in Baltimore, but there's really no respectful
way to do that. The fucked up though, right it.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Seems that way people. Yeah, you see that Twitter is
already blaming DDI.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Yeah, that would have stapped the boat from shorting out from.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, having a fucking blackout.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, they're obsessed. It's also shows none of them understand
how fucking container ships work, because they're all like, look
because the they had like a DEI captain aboard this
mask vessel. Marisk has a DEI program. No one from
Marisk was piloting the ship. They're never allowed to in
a harbor's it's never a pilot who works for the
company anyway.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
Whatever, I still think it's batshit that like, for hours
and hours after this happened, that like National News wasn't
covering it at all, they had like, yeah, they had
like two dollars trust every journalist, commemorative commercials going on.
They had just like the stupidest interviews.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Like why why did we need.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
One on one with Alf Franken in the middle of this,
and like that's why we still use fucking Twitter.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, it is it's all bad. I do think you
could get a job doing that, Dave. But you've got
to lay in on the DEI stuff, you know, be like,
are you do you have any Daves? You know, Dave,
equity and inclusion. You got to put some Dave's on
the team.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Equity and inclusion. Yeah, I'm going to push that now.
I'm going to put that on my resume.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
Now. I definitely have this is behind the Bastards. I
don't think I introduced the podcast that this is. That's
what you did. And David Bell's here again, and David
Bell's here again. Yeah, Dave, speaking of this. You you
in your writing for Some More News. You also help
on a podcast network called Gamefully Unemployed. You to do

(02:04):
a lot of great stuff, including chronicle Fox Molders, baffling
career decisions in the X Files. But a big part
of what you do for Some More News is research
the increasing right word veeer of our society and the
growth of conspiracy culture, which relates to this whole boat
problem in Baltimore as people have blamed it on DEI,

(02:27):
and it relates to like kind of everything that's wrong
with our country, this like fracturing of consensus reality that
has kind of made it impossible to like fix anything.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
The fact that everything I would argue, and I know
that conservatives would say the literally the exact same thing
about the left, but I would argue that conservatives have
politicized pretty much everything in the country at this point.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
I am literally looking at a picture of a car
with Honda with Texas plates that has a dozen different
bumper stickers that say variations of Helen Keller is a fraud.
Helen Keller was not deaf.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
It's well, that's just facts problem.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
What was she What did she have to gain?

Speaker 2 (03:10):
I have a sub reddit, I'll link it to you.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
He's got a Denier bumper sticker. How is that a thing?

Speaker 2 (03:20):
Incredible? I mean, yeah, I'm not surprised. We got to
a point where the CDC where a fucking pandemic happened
and it was let's take some basic precautions and that
became political.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
It's real bad. It's real bad right now.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yeah, It's it's shocking how bad some stuff has gotten.
And that relates to what we're talking about today, because
we ended our last episode talking about the Powell Memorandum, right,
which was this document that was written for the Chamber
of Commerce that that a a a lawyer who is
going to become a Supreme Court justice by the name

(03:55):
of Lewis Powell, whose previous work had been fighting against
d s ggregation and cheering on the bombing of Dresden,
wrote this thing where he's like, we need to attack
liberalism everywhere it exists, and we need to in a
comprehensive method destroy it. Part of that was destroying people

(04:15):
like Ralph Nader, who at this time was like forcing
had basically done a lot to force the auto industry
to add basic safety features to cars. Right, So a
chunk of this is we need to be able to
destroy people who want to make extremely modest changes that
cost corporations money and save countless lives. I'm going to
guarantee you a significant percentage of the people listening to

(04:36):
this podcast, including probably me, would be dead if not
for seat belts. Oh yeah, it's not a minor chunk
of us.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
I've raced on the highway multiple times. It's just funny
because this is that point where let's go after liberalism.
Liberalism is not defined as any effort to make things
marginally better in a very practical way. Like we talked.
I think of the last episode about how like like
I was talking about how I don't even know the

(05:03):
definitions of things anymore. And that's because things like this
where I'm like, yeah, is that liberal? Like is it
liberal to want to take safety precautions? Yeah? To I
guess it is if it costs.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
If you would go back in time to even to
Richard Nixon and tell him what modern conservative media people
call liberalism, Nixon would be like, what the fuck are
you talking about? What do you mean? They won't take vaccines.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
It's like it's like the term wokeness, you know, it's
it's that same shit. Yeah, the vaccine stuff is always like, yeah,
you know how these hippie liberals love vaccines. It's like, no,
they don't.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
No, it was the opposite. They were so long they
were the.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
First to not like vaccines. What is happening?

Speaker 1 (05:44):
That was what my mom Arch Reagan conservative. One of
the things she hated about like the left is their
anti vax shit, because she was like, why wouldn't you
want to take vaccines?

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Right?

Speaker 1 (05:54):
It's it's wild how much that shit is. Like, but yeah,
it's this this pal memoranda is it's not just he's
talking about, like we need to cultivate political power. Wealthy
people in corporations need to be donating a percentage, like
a significant percent of their advertising budgets to funding think
tanks and efforts to put basically to flood the zone

(06:15):
with shit that make that can act as like a
defense against any attempt to, for example, add seat belts
to cars or anything like that. But beyond that, that's
not the only thing the Palm Mirandum orchestrates. He is
also the first guy, in a real concerted form to
say the future for the right, because of how demographics

(06:36):
do not favor us, the future for the right is
in taking over the courts. He is if you're looking
at what has happened to the Supreme Court in the
last eight years, Powell is the guy who starts that process,
who is laying out the strategy that is adopted by
the entire conservative movement, at least everyone with money in
the conservative movement, and his specific goal in having conservatives

(06:59):
take over the courts is to establish an oligarchy. In
one section of the memorandum, he uses the title for
a Neglected Opportunity in the Courts, and he suggests a
strategy for quote, exploiting judicial action to turn back progressive
and liberal victories in government and culture. Quote. Under our
constitutional system, especially with an activist minded Supreme Court, the

(07:20):
judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic,
and political change. And he is responding to this raft
of Supreme Court decisions that happened during the Civil rights
era and after that are responsible for really ending the
Jim Crow and segregation, right, Like, that's a big part
of what the Supreme Court's doing in this period. And

(07:40):
he's like, we have to take these back so that
we can reverse these trends.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
It's wild how mad they were about desegregation. Yeah, and
about because I'm actually we're going to do a video
on how the right hi check Christianity And that's kind
of that moment that it starts happening, is desegregated schools

(08:06):
caused a bunch of racists to go to private religious schools,
and then they started using this religious liberty thing yep.
And so it's it's just that is it's it's wild
how that's like the moment, you know, it's like it's
like the it's like the dance in Back to the Future,
Like that was the that day is like where everything

(08:28):
went down, and it's the same with this.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
And that is what's we've done a two part of
ourselves on how Christianity got co opted from Christianity as
a political force is more tied to progressivism in the
nineteen teens and twenties. Right, it's like the labor movement
and stuff, right, and that all starts to change in
the post war period, but it's it's during the same
period where the pal Memorandum hits in the seventies that

(08:52):
the religious right becomes a thing, and a lot of
the same money that the guys that Powell is speaking
to are going to pump into think tanks also pumping
money into what becomes the religious right. This is all
happening at the same time. This is kind of the
other side of that story. And this is one of
those things. The success that Powell sees, the fact that

(09:13):
this memorandum is followed and becomes it's considered a foundational
document of neoliberalism, right, Like, that is a big part
of the privatization of everything, Right, Like, that's why you
want to take over these think tanks to make the
case for cutting government services, for cutting the idea that
there should be any kind of like shared social responsibility
in our society and turning everything into a profit driven machine. Right,

(09:37):
that's part of what he's suggesting. But also, like the
end of Roe v. Wade, you can tie it directly
to this memorandum because he's talking about, like we if
we're going to turn back these victories the left and
liberals have had, we have to do it through the courts.
And I really think I talk a lot about Osama
bin Laden on this show and how I think historians
when historians are writing about this one point where none

(09:58):
of them are angry about nine O Elove because it's
too distant, right, the way that people aren't angry about
the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand today, Right, we could just
sort of like talk about it.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
Yeah, maybe some are still, but yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
I think he should I think they should have killed
him twice. But that's my opinion.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
No, it's the farther we get away from nine to eleven,
it's going to become this weird abstract and yeah, kind
of fascinating to me.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
And my opinion tends to be that when we get
enough distance, historians will generally agree that Osama bin Laden
was one of the best strategic minds of the twenty
first century. He had a plan, he had a plan
for what would happen in the long term as the
result of that attack, how it would damage American power,
and it worked the way he thought it would. And
I think Powell is probably a similar mind for the

(10:44):
twentieth century in terms of like political strategy. He lays
out what the right is going to do from the
nineteen seventies to today, and it's worked very well for them.
With a significant demographic disadvantage, they have in fact captured
the courts and over time turned this country to the
right in a way that people in the seventies would

(11:04):
not have really thought possible. So, yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yes's frog and a hot plate stuff. Yeah, where it's
like we we talked about this last last episode of
how Like when people try to say, like, you know,
Trump is gonna is going to spell the end for democracy,
that doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna happen right away, right,
It's like these things just have lasting harm that it's
gonna be really hard.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
To yeah verse, yeah, it doesn't even mean he'll necessarily
win again. And I don't take that as a given
the way some people do, I certainly think it's at
least a fifty to fifty shot. But even if Biden
wins reelection, like the idea has been normalized that you
can just try to take over to the capital with
a bunch of angry goons, and that's really bad for

(11:50):
the future of democracy.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
It's pretty bad.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, it's not great. So Pal's memo is at first
circulated mostly among the chain of commerce, which is again
all these wealthy business owners and CEOs, right, that's where
they interface with the government, is the chamber of Commerce.
So this is a private memo, and he's basically using
a government agency to send this memo about how to

(12:14):
capture the courts for the right to all of these
guys and asking for their money. David Harvey, who's a
Marxist anthropologist, cites this is kind of the foundational document
in the birth of neoliberalism. It's like the neoliberal declaration
of Independence. Right, that's how some people tend to see this.
Its influence, though, is much larger than just that, and
it's much larger than I'm going to cite today. But

(12:35):
one of the things that absolutely did was supercharged donations
and the establishment of right wing think tanks. Wealthy conservatives
realized the power of having organizations that were like RAND
but were geared entirely towards espousing an ideology. And the
ideology they wanted these organizations to espouse was that taxes
should be low, workers should know their place, and school

(12:58):
should probably be segregated. Also, they should be allowed to
jail anti war protesters, right, sure, sure.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
Why not? Yeah, fuck it. If we're thrown at all
on there might as well put some bonuses.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Yeah yeah. And the opportunity to do that came when
the economy shit the bed in the nineteen seventies, quote,
A corps of politically active conservative intellectuals, most prominently Irving Crystal,
began to argue in publications like The Public Interest and
The Wall Street Journal that if business wanted market logic
to regain the initiative, it would have to create a
new class of its own scholars whose career prospects depended

(13:33):
on private enterprise, not government or the universities. You get
what you pay for, Crystal in effect argued, and if
businessmen want an intellectual horsepower, they would have to open
their pocketbooks. Traditionally, corporate philanthropy had been directed either towards
charity or towards independent organizations like the Ford, Rockefeller, and
Carnegie foundations. Pressured by the media and by academics to

(13:53):
make gestures of broad mindedness. Businessmen seem to feel that
they could gain social approval only by sharing their proceeds
with credential intermediaries would use the money to fund attacks
on capitalism. Paying to have oneself attacked was a kind
of corporate abolution. So that's that's what a big thing
Crystal is saying, And Crystal is kind of the most
influential of this first wave of like think tank guys,

(14:15):
is you're spending all of this money on foundations that
do actual charity, and that partly funds the work of
people who are critical of you. Why not give your
money to someone who's going to say you should have
even more power and money and work to make that real,
you know. And obviously that's a good deal for you
if you're a rich psychopath.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah, if you're going to pay people, you might as
well pay people to say you're great.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Yeah. Yeah, that's that's why we hired Garrison. It didn't work,
actually worked with terrible disaster there there's very mean.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
In your place.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yeah, correct, that I tried, but they just moved to Atlanta.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
M man, damn him. You gotta get them, get.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Them back, got to get them back. Kinda fish about
new party. The work of men like Crystal was like
a refreshing, cool breeze on the faces of rich fail
sons whose daddies had been disappointed by the side the
US took in World War Two. Some of these guys
are literally the business plot guys, right. The guys were
telling Smedley Butler, what if you tried to become a dictator?

(15:16):
And Smedley's like, sure, let me just talk to Congress
real fast. Henry Ford the Second resigned from the board
of the Ford Foundation around this time in the seventies,
furious because it was putting out work he viewed as
anti capitalist. Other Men like Joseph Coors, you know, the
beer guy, and the inheritors of the Olin Chemical and

(15:37):
Smith Richardson pharmaceutical foundations started looking for places they could
pour money to generate opinions that coincided with their endlist
need for more money. This is a big part of
why the pharmaceutical industry is the way that it is,
right is that these guys start putting money in the
think tanks that say, hey, you know what would be
great for everybody's health if these guys were allowed to
jack up the price of fucking insulin, you know, to

(16:00):
umpteenth degree. What if we really fucking deregulate healthcare as
an industry, wouldn't that make everybody healthier?

Speaker 2 (16:07):
And what we're learning now is that it's way harder
to reverse these things.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
Yes stuff, yes, yes, once you get this stuff. And
that's one of the things they know is once you
get this stuff established, it's like the war on drugs. Right,
Once you have the war on drugs, anything you do
to try to fix it, people, there will still be
drug epidemics, right, Like No, like fentanyl gets into the
country and suddenly everybody who's been working very hard to

(16:32):
try and reform things has to deal with the fact
that people are dying of this new substance. And there's
this built in infrastructure to say, just to have more cops, man,
we just got to lock people up. That's what's going
to fix it, you.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
Know, right. Because it's also it reminds me of when
we built our highways, because we consulted with car companies
for that, and so it's that thing where they get
together they decide to do this thing that's kind of irreversible,
that's like a foundational idea. Uh. And then by the
time we realize that it doesn't work, yeah, it's already there,

(17:06):
firmly there.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
You know.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
We only realize these things over time of going like, wait,
this strategy was bad. It's resulting in bad things. And
at that point it's like, well, what are we going
to do? Uproot everything, start over.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
And this can work on the good side of positive example,
this would be Obamacare, which is deeply flawed, but like
we saw, the Republicans tried to kill it and realized
in the Trump administration, we really fucking can't.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
This is social security, right.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah, social security. Libraries or you would never get libraries
to be a thing today. If it was a new concept.
People would be willing Conservatives would be willing to kill
and die to stop libraries from existing. But they're just
a thing now, you know, still under attack, but they're
a thing.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah. Yeah, you try ever, try to like harass a
librarian like they can handle themselves, and they have all
those library ghosts on their side too. And because a
library is haunted, I.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
Believe strongly, Dave in like ending firing everybody in the
Department of Homeland Security. But we take all of their guns,
all of their weapon and we give it to the librarians.
No training, We don't tell them how to use any
of this. That's up to them. Whatever they want to
do with all those tanks and machine guns is their
their choice.

Speaker 2 (18:17):
You know what's not going to happen anymore. No one's
going to be turning in books late. I'll tell that much.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Well, yeah, get you're condamn right there fucking no knock
raids for overdue books.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yeah, that situation that will be handling.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
So one step in the process of building this like
think tank network, like one of the things they knew
they had to do because there weren't a lot of
really prominent popular right wing media figures right who were
influential in public policy. That wasn't nearly as common as
people who would have considered themselves liberals, right, you know,

(18:54):
in reality, like you would say centrists or whatever. So
a big part of what they had to do here
was fine people who were liberals and even some leftists
who were influential in academia in public policy and turn
them right. Now we see this happen today. You're seeing
all of these like formerly liberal left see some of
the shit that likes the Young Turks guy has been

(19:15):
saying and about like crime in cities and stuff this
like weird right wing turn that a lot of guys
was Jimmy Dre that guy who used to be kind
of lefty, and then the pandemic hits and he goes
hard right because he's an anti vax weirdo. Right. Yeah,
this is like a thing we see today and this
is really the first time it happens in an organized way.

(19:35):
And what they would do is they would go to
these guys who are like influential liberal academics and they
would say, and this is an actual example, iverat hey,
we're starting this think tank. We would like to hire
you on as like an expert.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
Right.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
We're basically pay you to do whatever research you want
to do, and occasionally you just have to put out
some papers that are in line with the stuff that
we want put out. And in return, and this is
like in the seventies eighties, you'll get a two hundred
one thousand dollars a year's salary for life whether or
not anything gets done. We just need to be able
to use your name. You know.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
It's like, yeah, that's like a billion dollars.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
That's so much money back then, right, you know, you'll
have to occasionally rubber stamp some specific ideas. And that's
what for some of these guys, it literally is I'm
just like throwing my name on some shit so i
can get a paycheck. Others really take to the idea
of being more influential than they'd ever been, of having
I'm not just being people that got listened to sometimes,
but people who have this massive, hundreds of millions of

(20:30):
dollars in funding effort behind them, right, and they can
be the mouthpieces of it. And some of these people,
these are folks like Gene Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Ben Wattenberg.
These are all people who switched sides politically because of
the amount of money and clout that they saw building
in the think tank industrial complex. The founder of the
Ethics and Public Policy Center, Ernest Lefev, had even been

(20:53):
a conscientious subjector in World War Two. Michael Horowitz, one
of the most influential conservative theorists of this period, had
been a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi in the nineteen sixties,
and Horowitz kind of pioneers the tactic of being a
liberal intellectual and like political guy and then pivoting right
and suddenly getting very rich. You know, he's one of
like the architects of that switch.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
I mean, conservatism pays very well. Oh yeah, we're not
over here. Like look in the Daily Wire. I would
love to get some fracking billionaire money, but sadly they
won't give it to me.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
I will take fifty million dollars. Yeah, I'll endorse some
fucked up shit for fifty million dollars.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I take bribes. I've said it before,
I'll say it again.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
Listen, fracking billionaires. You've got me and Dave. We can
sell people on fracking. Oh Dave, you love it when
the ground light's on fire, don't you?

Speaker 2 (21:46):
Oh God? Yeah? Water like when it's murky. I love
me a nice glass of murky water.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
Look, the popularity of Lacroix has proven we all like
our water with a little something extra.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah, Gasoline makes our cars go. Gasoline in our water
probably makes us more efficial.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Makes us go. Yeah. Uh, that's some science. I think
this is science.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
What you just said, this is what you could have
fracking billionaires. Come on, hit us up.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
I'll take two hundred thousand. I don't give a shit.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
So two years after Goldwater's failed candidacy, an aging movie
star named Ronald Wilson Reagan decided to run for governor
of California. Now, his initial rise to power is against
an incumbent Democrat who's fairly well liked and reasonably popular
prior to the election, a guy named Pat Brown. This
is an uphill battle, at least on paper. It doesn't

(22:43):
wind up working out that way, and a huge part
of the strategy that hands Reagan a victory he bases
a massive chunk like kind of the centerpiece of his
campaign is attacking Berkeley University, right higher education in general,
but specifically going to war with Berkeley. Talk about, Oh,
they fucking hate it, and that's what we're going to

(23:03):
talk about. But you know who loves Berkeley, No one really,
but our sponsors don't hate it. That I'm aware of.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
Yeah, I believe you on that. That sounded convincing.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yeah, unless it's the Washington State Highway Patrol again. Ah,
we're back. So we're talking about Ronnie Reagan you know,
husband of the throat goat herself and how he wins election.
Sophie just had a look when I said.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
That, I did not enjoyed that description.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
That's what Look, this is documented. We're not slandering. That's
not even history. Yeah, that's just history.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
It'd be slander if we called Ronald the throat goat, right,
but that.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
A man would have been terrible at sucking Dick.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
I just want to give a shout out to to
Joni as We Yeah, yeah, who really made all the
decisions for that family.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yes, they're astrologer yep. So the fact that Reagan is
going to make the centerpiece of his campaign hating on
Berkeley goes over really well with the kind of rich,
fail sun demographic that is funding this like New Conservative movement.
These guys believe that they had lost to the New
Deal Democrats for a mix of reasons. One of those

(24:27):
was that Christianity was overwhelmingly aligned with progressive, pro labor
and social welfare values at the start of the century,
and the religious right, which is coming together in the
same period. It's going to the first time the religious
right is really influential in US politics. It gets Reagan
elected right, that's coming together at this point in time.
The other thing that they saw as losing the day

(24:48):
was that all of those new Deal policies had enjoyed
the support of professors and subject matter experts with fancy
titles and actual expertise. And one of the things that
was happening in that period, a lot of those experts,
it came from kind of the first generation of college
graduates that weren't all super rich guys, right. It was
still mostly people who were better off, but it was
starting to become democratized. And by the seventies college was

(25:12):
extremely democratized. Right. Some of that's as a result of,
like you know, kind of some of the changes that
come in as a result of the GI Bill, but
like in general, a lot more particularly women and black people,
are graduating from college in this period, and they're seeing
this as like this will inevitably destroy us unless we
destroy the ability of these people to get college degrees. Right.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
Right, They had their own little club, right, that was
the whole thing. They love, having their own little clubs. Yeah,
and they could do or say whatever they wanted in
these little clubs. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
And what the think tank boom is is a war
on expertise, and the other half of the war on
expertise is destroying higher education, right, because that will stop
poor people from being able to exercise agency. In Paul,
that's what they see, right.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yes, happen I mean hearing that this is still happening today. Yes,
it's one of those like such an obvious red flag
where it's like, if you're going after education, I don't know.
That seems very sus right, like, h that's weird.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
Yeah. And the easiest way to get middle class and
poor conservatives on board with this crusade was to attack
universities as hotbeds of anti war radicalism. Reagan understood this instinctively,
and that's why he goes to war with Berkeley University
during his candidacy. At that point, the school was basically
free for Californians. If you are a state resident, you

(26:35):
basically don't pay to go to Berkeley, and this had
led to a dangerous number of poor people, particularly black
people and women, getting educations at are respected university, which
is a big part of why Berkeley is in nexus
of organizing for protests against the Vietnam War. And one
of the things that Reagan is going to be furious
at is that the president of Berkeley, a guy named
Clark Kerr, refused to expel student organizers. You know, the

(26:59):
conservatives are yelling at this guy, like you need to
kick kids out for organizing against the Vietnam War. And
Clark is like, why the fuck shouldn't students be allowed
to protest?

Speaker 2 (27:08):
Why isn't it like.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
An am about that? Right? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (27:13):
Is this whole freedom to speak? I don't know.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
One Berkeley professor would later summarize as a matter of
Reagan's honest convictions, but also as a matter of politics,
Reagan launched an assault on the university. Now, on the
campaign trail, Reagan promised to clean up the mess at Berkeley.
He attained the approval of John mccohone, head of the CIA,
and Jay Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who held
an unprecedented joint meeting to discuss Communist influence at universities,

(27:40):
which mcohone wrote definitely required some corrective action. Hoover himself
reached out to Kerr to tell him to crack down
on student activities, and Kerr, you got to respect this
guy says no to the director of the FBI. And
when Kerr says, no, Hoover and McCone reach out to
Ronald Reagan and I want to I want are really

(28:00):
hammering how impressed in this is? For one thing, I
know these are both evil fed agencies. The CIA and
the FBI hate each other, like traditionally. They are fighting
it constantly.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
They're like kits and dogs.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
They're like, yeah, exact, or just two cats that don't
know each other's in a small apartment. Yeah, the small
apartment is like the US budget for shady shit.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
Oh yeah, you ever have an FBI agent in your house,
they'll knock shit off your desks.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
Hopefully not Dave, they will knock shit off your desks.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Though, they will. They love knocking shit off of desks.
They'll they'll be like can I come in? And you
open the door and then they kind of wander away,
and then you're like, what are you coming in? You're
not coming in? What's going on?

Speaker 1 (28:39):
I would like to replace the FBI with cats, And
just like if one of the if one of all
cats are the FBI, And so if a cat just
walks into your house, you can't you can't make it leave.
You gotta feed it, you gotta pet it. You know,
give it whatever it wants. Badges, Yeah, little badges, just
just cats wandering around airports checking shit.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
I think it's a good idea. Several countries already worked
that way. If you've ever been to Istanbul, that's more
or less how the city functions.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
I love that they just have loose cats everywhere there.

Speaker 1 (29:12):
So this is so the FBI and the CIA are
basically like, yeah, we Ronald, you are our guy, because
you are going to fire this fucking dude and crack
down on this school that we see as a major
threat to the United States. Yeah, it's cool, it's it's I.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
Just can't help but to think about good old meatball
ron of today Ronald DeSantis. Yes, and where like people
very rightfully pointed out when he was like, I don't
like Disney's politics, therefore I am going to just bully
them with the government, and I'm not you know, I'm
not on Disney's side. Well, I guess in this case
I am, but I'm not a huge fan of corporations.

(29:51):
My point being that, like, aren't they the guys who
don't want the government doing this stuff getting involved in
everybody's business. I can't help but to feel like this
is the same situation where they're like, yes, let's get
really involved in people's business because we don't like what
they're doing, even though that's against everything we claim that
we're in for.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
It makes it clear that, like when they're talking about
we have to we're doing this because the Communists want
to take away freedom. They're not and I'm not an
apologist for the Soviet Union. I would not have wanted
to live under that regime either, right, but they're not
talking about freedom because they want to take away people's
freedom to protest a war that's killing millions. What they
mean by freedom is rich people being able to be

(30:32):
rich people. Yeah, yeah, that's that's the threat.

Speaker 2 (30:36):
There's no there's no like extremely good sides here. It's
just that, Yeah, it's.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
Very The students who are trying to stop the Vietnam
War are but like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
I mean even they were probably insufferable people, but yeah, well.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
Sure, I mean they're they're at Berkeley, right, so you know,
I wouldn't have wanted to have lunch with them, but right,
they're on the right side of this.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
It's so easy to go after colleges because all you
have to do is step on a college campus. Yeah, man,
I hate it here. Yes, it doesn't know when I
was in college.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, we're doing a Reagan Dave. We're doing it.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
I need to do.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
Everybody, go watch PCU when you finish this. You know
that's John Favreau with John Favreau and with Jeremy Piven
playing a playing a man who's supposed to be a
college senior and clearly in his mid forties.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
Yeah, forty five year old Piven.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
Beautiful, beautiful stuff. So Reagan becomes the FBI's preferred candidate.
One of Hoover's memos at the time describes him as
dedicated to the destruction of student activism. The assistant chancellor
of Berkeley at the time described Reagan's tactics this way.
Reagan took aim at the university for being irresponsible with
failing to punish these dissident students. He said, get them

(31:46):
out of here, throw them out. They are spoiled, and
they don't deserve the education they're getting. They don't have
a right to take advantage of our system of education.
In a two thousand and four article for UC Berkeley News,
Jeffrey Kahn argued that they were two main themes of
Reagan's first campaign for the governorship, quote to send the
welfare of bums back to work and to clean up
the mess at Berkeley. The latter became a Reagan mantra,

(32:09):
so that again I can't overemphasize this isn't just a
side issue he's hitting sometimes. This is like one of
the two pillars of his campaign for governor, which is
why he becomes president ultimately, is attacking Berkeley.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
It's so dumb because it's also like just from a
practical sense, like I don't know, like he's running on
the campaign of really focusing on a single school in America,
and it's like, boy, I feel like there are other
problems to focus on here.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah, during the Vietnam War, maybe maybe.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
DA There's a lot of other things you could be
doing one or two. It's just it's such a weird.
It's such a weird policy to run on and then
succeed with.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yeah, it's a bummer.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
So a little bit when he Reagan wins spoiler alert
for the past and Reagan immediately he leans on he
can't fire Kerr directly, but he's able to lean on
the university administration, basically threatening to take even more money
from the school, and they eventually fire Kerr. And this
was a tacit acknowledgment that attacking the school had been
a lynchpin of his electoral strategy. Earl Chite, dean emeritus

(33:20):
of the School of Business at Berkeley, later said one
of his great skills was to understand popular feeling. He
really tapped into the discontent people felt about what was
happening on the campus. I have no doubt that this
was a big factor in his election as governor. One
of Reagan's first acts as governor is to cut funding
for all California public colleges. He starts going after Berkeley,

(33:40):
but he cuts funny and he tries to do it
by like ten percent across the board. The legislature doesn't
agree to go quite that hard, but he does cut
funding to every California public college. And he frames this
as a necessity, not a political attack. He says, we're
doing this because of a budget shortfall. John Schwarz, formerly
of The Intercept, describes how Reagan made his case to

(34:01):
cover the funding shortfall. Reagan suggested that California public colleges
could charge residents tuition for the first time this, he complained,
resulted in the almost hysterical charge that this would deny
educational opportunities to those of the most moderate means. This
is obviously untrue. We made it plain that tuition must
be accompanied by adequate loans to be paid back after graduation.

(34:23):
And this is where student loans come from.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
Yeah, of course Reagan.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
Yeah, Ronny fucking Reagan.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
I mean, it all comes back to Reagan.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
It always has, it, always fucking does.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
He was really really bad for the country, and that's
what we're now in, right, we this is the era
of this. It's the find out to the fuck around,
right Yeah, where we've all been now hurting because of
this ship that yep, they let Reagan do. How did
he sell this to the public, Like, I like, I

(34:56):
get selling this to rich people, but like it's it's
always so weird when they like, how do you go,
great news, we are now making your schools worse.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah, I mean, because he doesn't frame it that way.
First off, he frames it is like, look, we've got
a budget shortfall, things are contracting, everybody's got to tighten
their belt, and hey, these kids were caught. And again,
the anti war movement is not as popular as people
remember it being right, right, So there's a huge amount
of people who are like, yeah, why are we paying
for these these these communist kids to go to school?

Speaker 2 (35:29):
Right?

Speaker 1 (35:29):
And He's like, they're going to pay their own way.
It's personal responsibility, you know, They're going to pull themselves
up by their bootstraps, right, right.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Because like, what does that even equate to in terms
of taxes? You know, like how much of a difference
is this going to make in your taxes to do this?

Speaker 1 (35:44):
Taxes are even higher now, by the way.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Yeah, it's just so silly because it's like why why
would we like vote and be concerned about like government
budget stuff. It's like, we pay you to figure this out.
Go figure it out, you know, we want to have
the free schools. Keep the free damn schools.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
Yes, this is why.

Speaker 3 (36:06):
You know.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
France has a lot of problems of its own, but
their strategy of whenever they try to take away a
public entitlement, burning down Paris has worked several times. This
doesn't always work, but it has sometimes.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
No, but I like how they roll, you know, I
like it. Or if a government person so much as
like farts in the wrong direction. Yeah, they're like well,
time to chop off some heads.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
I guess it burned down the city. So Reagan also
proposed that Berkeley starts selling off the rare books in
its library so rich people could put them in their
private collections. The legislature, that's just such a cartoon villain
thing to do. The legislature doesn't approve this or the
full extent of the cuts he wanted to the UC system.

(36:47):
But they do a lot, and he would soon have
his chance to try these ideas out on the national
stage with a compliant Congress. The success of Reagan's attacks
on California public schools inspired conservative politicians across the US.
Nixon decried campus revolt. Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed
that thanks to open admissions policies, unqualified students are being

(37:09):
swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.
That's all, sorry, that was all a Schwartz quote from
John's article in the Intercept. So reform of higher education
becomes a major cause for public conservative intellectuals. This is
again the think tank set, and they start putting out
papers arguing that what Reagan wants to do will benefit

(37:29):
that it'll cut down the amount of money that you know,
the public has to spend, it'll be able to lower taxes,
it'll be better for students. All this jazz, right, And
they frame this as, you know, not just cost cutting
and like making the budget make more sense, but also
it'll help these students because a lot of young people
are getting these useless degrees in the liberal arts. They're
getting weighed down by these educations they don't really need,

(37:50):
and if they have to pay for it, they'll be
more discriminating and they'll get more useful degrees that'll benefit
the economy more in the long run. That's what they're
saying in public. In private, we're a lot more open
about the real reason they're doing this. Schwartz continues, quote
one worry that free education may be producing a positively
dangerous class situation by raising the expectations of working class students.

(38:13):
Another referred to college students as a parasite feeding on
the rest of society, who exhibited a failure to understand
and to appreciate the crucial role played by the reward
punishment structure of the market. The answer was to close
off the parasitic option. These are all think tank guys
saying that like this, this is giving poor people an
unreasonable expectation of progress that they might be able to

(38:35):
live good lives. And they don't understand how the market
works because we're not making we're not making them destroy
their financial futures to get a college degree. Right, we
have to add debt to this situation, and that'll stop
them from being parasites.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
Right, They're kind of they're kind of kicking down the
ladder after they already got up there. It's it's it's
ridiculous because it fundamentally misunderstands what the idea of school
is for, Like why society has school, which is to
train people to exist in the society that's been built.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
Right.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah, And it's just very silly that you would look
at like people in school and go, those are parasites. Like,
don't get me wrong, there is you know, the academic
world isn't perfect. There are people who can sort of
drift through school.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
I have I know a couple of people who have
done that.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah yeah, oh yeah, but like that's that's like that's
not a justification for this. And and then also like
that's years of also like just schools, yeah, changing over the.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
Years, A certain percentage of people who get into the
academic system, you know, especially if it's basically free, we'll
just spend their whole lives being students in various things,
and that might wind up being bad for that person,
But as a societal problem, it does not compare to
the scale of the problem of an entire generation burdened

(40:02):
by student loan debt they can never repay, right, they
will wind up paying many times the principle and like
basically be garnishing their wages for the rest of their lives,
like unable to buy a home, unable to like the
sheer amount of damage it does, like one is worse
than the other.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
Yeah, I mean this is the whole thing. Like, this
is why it's that idea of like, well, we shouldn't
give to homeless people because what if one of them's
a liar and it's like who cares?

Speaker 1 (40:26):
Yeah, who gives like shit?

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Yeah, like yeah, that's most people loon be.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
We have a lot of data on how just giving
homeless people cash works. Most of them use it to
get houses, well, you know, apartments or whatever.

Speaker 2 (40:38):
But yeah, why are we using this fear of this
small percentage is or is not to do something that's Yeah,
it's broadly good. And this feels like the same thing,
which is like, well, some of them will be leeches,
and it's like let them, let them be leeches. Isn't
this what a good society is is something that takes
care of their people unconditionally.

Speaker 1 (40:57):
It's so like you, no, you don't use this logic
wor else. And nobody says if you're like I should
exercise to get into better shape. No one is like, oh,
but you know what, it's theoretical that I might get
hurt exercising, so I'm never going to move my body, right,
Like yeah, like you would say, well that's irrational, right right.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
But it's the same like a hospital where it's like,
well some of them might be fake, faking their symptoms,
and it's like yeah, I mean that doesn't mean we
get rid of the hospital.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Some number of doctors will be bad at it and
kill their patients, so we shouldn't have any medical professionals.
Just let nature take its course.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah, we don't make this argument for anything else. But
when it comes to like talking about poor people getting things.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
Look, one percent of people are allergic to antibiotics, so
let's just let everyone die of preventable infections. Yeah, it's
it's frustrating, so it's silly. The National Review, a conservative
journal of opinion in news that largely served as a
vehicle for distributing the work of these think tanksuggested that
the solution to the problem of parasitic college students was

(42:04):
to cut public funding for colleges, which be made up
by charging more or anything at all in some cases
for tuition. They recommended quote a system of full tuition
charges supplant supplemented by loans which students must pay out
of their future income. And this is all coming together
in this period. In May of nineteen sixty nine, things

(42:24):
came to a head. Student activists had created a people's
park on a vacant plot of land in Berkeley. Jeffrey
con writes students and activists had begun an attempt to
transform a vacant plot of university property into people's park.
Attempting to head off the activists, the university engaged a
fencing company accompanied by two hundred and fifty police to
erect a chain link fence around the land at four

(42:44):
am on May fifteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Five hours later,
a rally was called on Spool placet to protest. The
action resource, a current UC Berkeley reference guide for new students,
relates the story of how Reagan intervened, sending in a
National Guard. The rally, which drew three thousand people, soon
turned into a riot as the crowd moved down Telegraph
Avenue towards the park. That day known as Bloody Thursday.

(43:05):
Three students suffered punctured lungs, another a shattered leg. Thirteen
people were hospitalized with shotgun wounds, and one police officer
was stabbed. James Rector, who was watching the riot from
a rooftop, was shot by police gunfire. He died four
days later. Damn yeah, thanks Ronnie.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:23):
And by the way, this just happened again. They just
cracked down violently on people's park, which they were like,
homeless people were like basically it had been turned into
effectively a place where they could like camp and exist,
and the police just shut it down. A bunch of
protesters came up, they beat the shit out of everybody.
Same same story, twenty twenty four. I mean, I'd love

(43:46):
to see it.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
Cops love a good beating of college protesters, all right, Yeah, yeah,
they're too young to fully know they're rights, like, you'll
probably get away with it a lot of the time.

Speaker 1 (43:56):
You can shoot them, sure, yeah, yeah, fire and apparently rooftop. Yeah,
I got the shooting at roots.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
I'm like, I don't want to trivialize his death, but
I'm imagining that guy being like, I'm nice and safe
up here. Yeah, Like, ah, don't worry about me, I'm
on the roof. Oh my goodness. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
So the riot was great pr for Reagan because the
media pretty much cited with him and putting the blame
for it on the protesters. He got to do the
strong Man Act and call in twenty two hundred National
Guard troops to deal with a state of emergency in Berkeley.
This created an absurd situation where guardsmen who were Berkeley
students were activated to police the campus. Con cites at

(44:34):
least one man who was shot at and injured by
cops during the riot and then got home to a
notice telling him to report for duty. More than a
thousand people were ultimately arrested. Reagan's war with Berkeley was
a blueprint for other conservative politicians, and the coalition of
right wing policy wonks and campaigners that coalesced around him
began to plot grander schemes, and we're going to talk

(44:55):
about those schemes. But first, you know who's got the
grandest scheme? Dave me. Oh, well, yes, you you do
have a plot. I'm always plotting, always scheming. And part
of Dave's plot is that you buy some of these products.

Speaker 2 (45:10):
Absolutely, we're back.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
So nineteen seventy Dave Reaga year runs for reelection. He
had become known as a charismatic speaker, the great communicator
of conservative thought to the masses, and there was no
issue that served him better than attacking those damn Marxists
in academia and the shiftless college students ruining America's good

(45:40):
time in Southeast Asia. In May of that year, he
shut down all twenty eight use campuses over protests against
the bombing of Cambodia. A few months later, in October,
his education advisor, Roger Freeman, gave a press conference, and
I'm going to quote here from an article in the Intercept.
Freeman's remarks were reported the next day in the San
Francisco Chronicle under the headline professor ces peril in education.

(46:03):
According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, we are in
danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite. We have
to be selective on who we allow to go to college.
If not, Freeman continued, we will have a large number
of highly trained and unemployed people. Freeman also said, taking
a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism, that's

(46:24):
what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
It's incredible because it's it's the big you know, you
step back from this and it's like, okay, so we're
bombing people, we're doing we're doing terrible things in a war,
and you know, it's always kind of pretty terrible. And
then our young people who we've taught you know, you know,
I presumably even the seventies, we taught them, you know,

(46:48):
compassion and basic morals as a kid, and then they're
in school and they're learning about the world and they're
saying like, you know, we don't like that you're doing this.
And you step back and you look at that, and
you're like, we better shut down these colleges. That's the problem.
It's just so funny how that's that's the conclusion that
they drew from where it's like, hey, stop doing this

(47:11):
terrible thing, and it's like you're right, we should find
a way to silence you from saying that you're so right.
And then it's a dystopian that it comes down to,
like these riots of them.

Speaker 1 (47:23):
Just it's just a big part of Freeman as a
guy who comes out from this culture. Again he's born
in a monarchy, and his attitude, and this is the
attitude of basically all of the landed aristocracy in the
United States and in Europe, is that like no bless
oblige rite this idea that like, well, you have an
obligation as part of the uppercross to run society and

(47:47):
to take care of it. And you have within sort
of your noble cast, you have your progressives and your
conservatives and your progressives who are advocating for the little people.
But they always understand, because they come out of the aristocracy,
that their first is to their class and to maintaining
the wealth and power of their class. Of course, and
these these poor proletarians getting an education that can't be

(48:08):
allowed to happen because they don't have any loyalty to
the same class that we're in. They might just want
to make things better for the poor.

Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah, it really comes down to that doesn't.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's pretty hideous.

Speaker 2 (48:18):
It goes back, it goes to the whole civility thing
where it's like, how dare you protest that way? How
dare you do like, you know, like acting like the
protests are worse than the the actual enemy or the
actual people that they're harming. It's just and then of
course linking it to like they must all be socialists
or they all must be communistic because they're protesting this

(48:42):
thing that we're doing against these people. It's just it's
such I don't know, it's it's incredible, like I don't know, trickery.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
It's very funny to me that he's like, this is
what happened in Germany because like, no, it's not.

Speaker 2 (48:55):
It is true.

Speaker 1 (48:56):
There were a lot of highly trained and unemployed people,
and that contributed to the Nonazis. They weren't highly trained
college students. They were veteran soldiers. They were trench fighters
with head injuries who were really good at killing people
and back the Nazis because the Nazis said, you know what,
the best thing is killing people, right, that's not all
of it. But like the Nazis did not not that

(49:18):
they had no college graduates, like Hitler wasn't an educated
college graduate. That's not why Hitler was powerful.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
You know, I mean we we sure love, we sure
loved pretending the Nazis were a lot of things that
they weren't. Right, Like, there's just so much like, well,
that's what the Nazis did, and it's always just like
very vague broad strokes of it.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
There was certainly a chunk of the Nazis who were
well educated and whatnot, but like that was not the
center of their power, right, their early power, the street fighters,
the movements were like vets and hooligans.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
You know, it's very funny to be like the Nazis
were educated. Education makes you Nazi. Yeah, it's like the
Nazis drink water, therefore we shouldn't drink water. Yeah, yeah,
it's yeah, it's ridiculous. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
So this guy Roger Freeman, who is who is saying
all of this really hideous shit is again he's in
Austrian born in nineteen oh four. He'd fled after Hitler
annexed Austria and wound up serving under Eisenhower and Nixon.
He was also a fellow at the Hoover Institute, which
was Stanford's think tank, right, and it was a pretty
conservative think tank. Right. This is kind of contrary to

(50:31):
the republican frenzy of our Marxist academics, but like the
Hoover Institute is pretty right wing. And that's where this guy,
who was in a lot of ways the architect of
the student loan system, this is one of Reagan's education advisors,
comes out of. He is a think tank guy. Right
University he believed was something only the wealthy should have
access to, because you know, they had an understanding of

(50:52):
their obligation to maintain the status quo. Reagan becomes the
center then of a plot to co opt the energy
in the enthusiasm of the new right in order to
help the old right remake the economy in their image
and destroy anything that hints at being a public benefit.
He is the first candidate that benefits from both the
newly forged religious right, which at this point has two

(51:14):
major causes, keeping black kids out of private schools and
turning back women's rights. And he's also the first think
tank president.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Right.

Speaker 1 (51:21):
Some of this stuff had started creeping in during Nixon's administration,
but it's really Reagan that is the first you know
all this shit in the pal memorandum and the religious
right stuff. Reagan is the first president to really benefit
from all of it, you know.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Yeah, I mean there's I know that Jimmy Carter of
all people was like the first like Christian president, right that,
like really yes, put that, And so it's like he
was like the practice run where they're like, Okay, well
that can work. I mean, not him, but like you know,
a guy I like him, or maybe even not even
a guy like him, because I'm pretty sure Reagan was

(51:57):
not very religious. Uh oh god no no, no, yeah,
get godless, Hollywood Hollywood actor. So yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
So as kind of this this think tank, you know,
so Reagan has his re election in nineteen seventy, nineteen
eighty obviously is going to be his presidential campaign. In
that period in between, you have both the religious right
growing in power, and you have these think tanks really
start to get to get moving, right, Like this is
really when you're having a bunch of them founded in
quick secession. In nineteen seventy three, two congressional aids quit

(52:31):
the Hill and start the Heritage Foundation. In nineteen seventy six,
a former Brookings guy starts the Ethics and Public Policy
Center in nineteen seventy seven, will get the Cato Institute
named after a pretty insufferable Roman by some equally insufferable Americans.
And this all contributes to a nineteen eighty Ronald Reagan
winning his election. And you know, one of the things

(52:52):
that had been a through line in his presidential campaign
had been these constant series of attacks on this growing
class of administrators and thinkers, kind of liberal academics and
think tank people who had crusted together at the upper
levels of government. Right, And Reagan basically says, these guys
are burdening the doers. We have too many thinkers in
there and not enough men of action.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
But as soon as he takes office, he's going to
fill the White House with nothing but think tank guys.

Speaker 3 (53:20):
Right.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
Despite like this, these complaints they'd had about how all
of these people were gumming up the works of government.
And I'm going to quote from an article in the
Atlantic here about that process. When plump positions started going
to them, conservatives discovered that the new class wasn't so
bad after all. Norman Tour, one of the original supply siders,
supported himself through the late nineteen seventies by taking donations

(53:41):
for his Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation.
While Ronald Reagan was composing his first cabinet, Turre wrote
a paper for the Heritage Foundation advocating, in the best
new class style, the creation of a new government post
that of Treasury Department Under Secretary for Tax Policy, and
after some assiduous circulating of the paper with resume attached,
landed the job for himself. Following the change of administrations

(54:03):
in nineteen eighty, some conservatives found think tanks useful vehicles
for advancing their ideas in their careers. Colin Gray, a
nuclear hardliner known for a foreign policy article titled Victory
as Possible, failed to land a top position at Defense
of the National Security Council. So we started the National
Institute for Public Policy, which produces studies on beam weapons
and other Star Wars components.

Speaker 2 (54:24):
So this works.

Speaker 1 (54:26):
It can be as directly as in the case the Terrez.
You start a think tank, you write papers about how
the government needs to have this specific position making sure
that taxes get cut, and then you get that fucking
job for yourself because you sent that paper around Reagan
people with your resume attached.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
It's such a good grift.

Speaker 1 (54:42):
It's a great grift. I kind of want to steal
that one from myself in all.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
Kind of I don't know. We talked about the value
of a good font. It's that thing where like I
get why this is kind of weird. I get why
fly earthers exist. Yeah, I get why weird like conspirac
see people or like, because to regular people, it's all
just like books, right, Yeah, it's all like most people,

(55:08):
no one gets to see the world from space, no
one gets to experience history. We all just it's just
we grew up at schools giving us books and going like,
trust me, this is what it is. We've passed this
down and so like it seems really easy to be
able to hijack that and go like, see, we have
a study. You love studies, we have experts, and here's

(55:30):
a piece of paper. Here's a book, a pamphlet that
says this thing very officially, that says that I should
get this job.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
That is the stated goal. Is like, when we're having
arguments about what we do with taxes, should we have
this public benefit? You know, should should college be free?
And you know, liberals trot out these papers by the
Brooking Institute. We want to have twice as many papers
from our institutes because that's all a lot of people
care about. It's like, well, that's a thicker stack of papers.
They must have more evidence.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
It's ridiculous. We have on the internet more than an ever.
Like studies, the concept of a study where it's like,
there's so many studies and they say different things, and
then you actually dig into the study and you're like,
this barely says this thing. Yeah, but we love it
doesn't matter. It's just how many studies.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
How many studies you get in this thing. Yeah. So
by the time the Reagan administration gets underway, US conservatives
have exhibited their remarkable talent for flexibility by deciding the
professional thinker class is good actually and ought to be
employed telling the rest of us what to do. Every
major shift in economic policy and defense policy under Reagan

(56:38):
was supported by an ocean of think tank publications beyond
the Powell Memo. A major intellectual touchstone of this movement
was Wealth and Poverty, a book by George Gilder. Gilder
was a New York child whose father died flying for
the army in the Big Dub Dub dose. He grew
up on a farm in Massachusetts and was raised in
part by the Rockefeller family, which would give you an

(56:59):
idea ask his economic state, right, David Rockefeller is his godfather.
He is as blue a blood as it's possible to be.
He's too and fine and wealth and poverty. Espouses a
supply side economics philosophy that is amenable to the people
who already had fortunes. Like as godfather. This basically becomes
the bible of the Reagan administration's economic policy. Gilder argues

(57:23):
for tax cuts, but he does so in a way
that is utterly novel. This is the foundation of trickle
down economics. Right, you need to cut taxes because it'll
improve the economy for everybody. And I'm going to quote
from the Atlantic again here, Adam Smith, he said, had
it wrong. Capitalism isn't a voodoo through which many selfish
acts inexplicably advance the whole. It's a magnanimous organism in

(57:45):
which everybody wants the best for everybody else, since, after all,
one person cannot prosper selling his product unless many others
are prosperous enough to buy. Big tax cuts, Guilder said,
will trigger an outburst of altruism. Now, funny, we know
that's not true. All they do is park the money offshore,
trillions and trillions of dollars of it, enough money to

(58:05):
solve a significant chunk of the problems we face healthcare, homelessness,
to be goddamn certain, all of it's parked in. They're
this is what the Panama papers field. That's why they've
bombed a journalist car.

Speaker 2 (58:19):
It's not true, yea we I mean when was the
Christmas Carol written? Like we've always known it's not true.
It's so weird that they got away with saying like, yeah,
just help out the rich people and they'll help everybody
else out.

Speaker 1 (58:32):
I think what you're getting at, Dave, because I don't
think it's capitalism to like going and being able to
buy stuff at the mall. That's like a market, and
markets are nice. We like markets. That's why every city
in history is founded around a market. It's nice to
go pick up fresh food. It's nice to get a
to get a nice thing to wear or whatever. Like,
it's not nice to have your entire society structured around

(58:54):
the fact that there's a couple of thousand dudes who
own every company because they have shares of a thing
in the stock market, and everyone else's life and comfort
and survivalist secondary to them always getting a return on
their investment, right.

Speaker 2 (59:08):
I mean, that's the thing. This is, This is anti
what they claim to be. It's anti free market. A
lot of this stuff too, where it's like they're just
we're in a situation where there's certain companies that it's
like there's no competition anymore for them, like they've just
demolished everything.

Speaker 1 (59:25):
No one has an issue with the idea that Steve
Wozniak and Venner of the personal computer might have a
nice beach house and a fancy car, right, Yeah, nobody
has an issue with the fact that Danny DeVito probably
has a nice vacation home. We're all happy for Danny DeVito.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
Yeah. I hope he has an island. I hope he
has his own little Danny DeVito island.

Speaker 1 (59:42):
I'm not thrilled with Mark Zuckerberg hollowing out the center
of a major Hawaiian island to build an apocalypse bunker
where he can recreate civilization.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
It's like that. It's getting silly. Yeah, it's getting real silly. Yeah,
Just people don't need that much stuff any no, no, or.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
That much control of anyway. We're all we're preaching to
the choir here, and we're certainly not preaching to Guilder,
because Guilder's attitude is if we just let these people
get as rich as possible and leave everything up to
them by gutting our social programs, they'll take care of it.
One way or the other. It'll trickle down and it'll
we'll all get richer.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
This is also based on the assumption that rich people
are smart and good. Yes, And it's just very funny
because this is all about them being like, we need
to make colleges exclusive for them and make the world
pave the way for them and give them all this
stuff and they'll be smart enough to know what to
with it. And it's like, really oause it sounds like
you're putting everything on a platter for them, and they

(01:00:46):
have all this generational wealth and you're ensuring a bunch
of dipshits with a lot of money and no idea
how to actually do any.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
Sure does seem like that. And Guilder, the guy who
is who puts together you know, this argument that becomes
the center of Reagan's economic policy is a career think
tank guy. He was a program director for the Manhattan Institute.
He was chairman of the economic portion of the Lairman Institute.
And so again he comes entirely out of this project.

(01:01:14):
By these rich guys to fund the creation of an
intellectual class that says what they want being said, and
by framing the incredibly selfish economic policies that the elite
support as altruistic, he is able to preside over a
sea change in how conservatives talk to the country. In
the nineteen seventies. Gen Kirkpatrick has criticized Republicans for being

(01:01:35):
able to quote conceive of no greater good than a
balanced budget. Starting with Reagan, balanced budgets are no longer
a priority, and the deficit simply wasn't worth talking about
unless a Democrat happened to be president. Greg Easterbrook notes
in his History of Conservative think tanks that the Heritage
Foundation didn't even use the word debt in its mandate
for leadership until page two hundred and nineteen. In the

(01:01:59):
mid nineteen the Ethics and Policy Center, another think tank,
started holding conferences on how market mechanisms could benefit the
poor quote not once were welfare queens or ghetto cadillacs,
the sort of small minded crochets that would have dominated
a similar Conservative conference a decade ago. Even mentioned conservatism,
by acquiring a positive vision, had become warmer. A huge

(01:02:21):
amount of this strategy, that kind of the lynchpin of
it working, hinges on journalists and particularly the way lazy
journalists meet their deadlines. The way legacy publications tend to
work is that when you're discussing a debate over public policy,
you want to be able to present quotes from both
sides of the debate. This is called being unbiased. Powell
and his fellow ideologues knew that, since most journalists are lazy,

(01:02:45):
if you made it very easy for them to get
quotes from you by sending them piles of information whenever
they asked for a question, they would reward you by
giving your ideas more sympathy in their coverage. The Brookings Institute,
which tended to do rigorous work, charged journalists who wanted
to access their studies. None of these right wing think
tanks charge. They also write in a way that's more

(01:03:06):
accessible to the layman. Since they're not actually saying anything
with any evidence, they're able to like throw into entertaining
prose by guys like William F. Buckley. Right, this is
a big part of why this works.

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
Have you read the da Vinci Code, Robert No The
book The di Vinci Code is practically written in screenplay format,
and it's just reminding me of that. Where they're making it.
They're basically like, you read the da Vinci Code and
you're like, he wanted this to be a movie. Yeah,
and he made it as easy as possible for it
to be a movie. And that's what you're describing here,

(01:03:38):
which is like science papers and studies, they are difficult,
they're very Having worked on some more news and going
through them, it's like sometimes they feel like they're purposefully
worded to be hard to understand. Yeah, And it's almost
like a gatekeeping It's like when you do your texts,
you realize it's kind of a gatekeeping process. Yeah, it

(01:04:00):
makes sense that this would be a really important step because,
like you said, journalisms, journalists are lazy expected. I think
the nicer way to put it is they're expected to
cover everything, and that means they are expected to be
like kind of experts and everything to understand everything, and

(01:04:22):
so they will glom On. If you go like here, yeah,
ik it easy, Here's a really easy way to explain
this thing.

Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
Or here's a column by one of our fellows on
this issue. You know, you can just publish this and
you'll have something to put in your little newspaper. The
American Enterprise Institute or AEI, was perhaps the most successful
of the bunch. It was founded in nineteen forty three
by Lewis Brown, a wealthy industrial magnate. He had been
the bagman for the president of Montgomery Ward T. F. Mercel,

(01:04:51):
and during the end of the nineteen twenties, a firm
called John's Manville discovered the profit making potential of an
incredible fire retardant substance called asbestos, and they hired Tf
to be their chairman. He brought Brown, the founder of
the AEI, and then he dropped dead suddenly, almost immediately,
which made Brown president of the s Bestos Company at

(01:05:11):
age thirty five. He becomes the s The guy who
founds like the most influential think tank of the Reagan era,
was previously the asbestos king of the United States.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
He's got the whole world in his problem.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
He share it does and he's given it all cancer.
He is the president of the s Bestos Institute, which
is the sort of think tank digit dedicated to s
bestos working. Great.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
Yeah, you love to see it out there sitting around,
just like Sniffin' pile.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
These people are all such ghouls because he's the the
AEI founder, is the s bestos guy, the author of
the Powell Memorandum, which lays out the strategy for all
this is the fucking Tobacco Institute lawyer, Like, these people
have such money.

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
They should get they should make they should get some asbestos.
Roll it up in a cigarette they used to smoke it. Yeah, Yeah,
that's that's the good stuff, you.

Speaker 1 (01:06:04):
Know, And I bet it hit like, Oh man, I
would take one. I would try an asbestos cigarette.

Speaker 2 (01:06:09):
Dad got him right. It's like human meat, you'd like.
You're like, well, I wouldn't seek it out, but if
it's handed to me, I'm gonna have to try it, obviously. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:18):
I ate what was basically a fish stuffed with human meat,
and it was pretty tasty. Day.

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Yeah that's good. I got admit, I don't like fish,
but I'd probably just pick off the fish.

Speaker 1 (01:06:27):
Yeah yeah, yeah, just just eat the man.

Speaker 2 (01:06:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:30):
Of course. So while he ran the company, uh, the
asbestos company. It became obvious that asbestos was causing asbestosis
among workers who made it. This is inflammation and scarring
off the lungs due to inhaling asbestos fibers, and it
leads to fun things like mesothelioma and lung cancer. It
became this motherfucker Brown's crusade to pump out disinformation about asbestosis,

(01:06:53):
to maximize the amount of time that they could put
asbestos in everything before they got stopped from doing that.
And his goal for this was it was the same
thing that people the tobacco industry would later do. It's
the same thing the oil and gas industry has done
with climate change. Confuse the issue until everyone's dead, right,
so you can keep making money off of it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
I don't I don't believe in hell, But if this
guy like showed up in hell, I feel like he
wouldn't have to ask, Like, he wouldn't be like, what
the hell? What did I do?

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
This scance? Yeah, this is about right.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
Yeah. So when one of his company's contractors, who is
actually like doing the manufacturing of the asbestos from this
company called Unarco, they started this company like starts identifying
employees who are like getting medical tests through their company
health care and showing signs of asbestosis. Unarco like sends
them letters saying like, hey, you've got the disease asbestos

(01:07:46):
gives you. And Brown is livid about this, and he
basically like tries to get them to stop telling employees
that they have asbestosis when they get sick. One Unarco
employee would later testify in a federal investigation on their
never forget. I turned to mister Brown. One of the
Browns made this crack that Anarco managers were a bunch
of fools for notifying employees who had aspestosis, And I said,

(01:08:09):
mister Brown, do you mean to tell me that you
would let them work until they dropped? He said, yes,
we save a lot of money that way.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
Yep. Again, it's it's it's looking at the problem like
being like, Okay, so the problem is what we're making
is killing all our employees, and we have to tell them,
and then someone being like, you know what we should do,
just don't tell them.

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
It's just not.

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
Problem is solved. Yeah, it's like a fucking it's like
something they do and always Sonny like it's it's it's
just a the dirt bag bit. Yeah, through and through,
it's incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:08:41):
It's so good. Now, despite being a wealthy ghoul with
a body count to rival most warlords, Brown was unfulfilled.
He saw what his fellow rich guy, Robert Brookings, had
done with the Brookings Institute, which had become an intellectual
powerhouse that was widely respected. Brown wanted that kind of
respect for himself, and that's why he founds the AI
in nineteen forty three, and that's where we get the

(01:09:03):
American Enterprise Institute Now. It was stymied at first by
the fact that Brown didn't believe in anything beyond having
more money and was really incapable of analyzing the world
in a lens beyond this. So it wasn't until nineteen
fifty four, when a guy named William Burrudi took over,
that the AEI turned into something worth talking about. Berrudi's
parents were Lebanese immigrants, and he was a Greek Catholic

(01:09:25):
who served in the Navy during World War Two and
then worked for the Chamber of Commerce. He was Barry
Goldwater's main advisor in nineteen sixty four and a close
friend to Dick Nixon, a man who did not have
any close friends. He restructured the American Enterprise Institute to
the copy Brookings and started hiring fellows to put out
work that would make the case for supply side conservative

(01:09:45):
economic policies. Burrudi's goal was to reach the mainstream, and
as a result, they started hiring famous people in popular writers,
people like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Gerald Ford, and Philip habeeb It
strove to entertain as well as to inform, and its
fellows wrote articles with titles like Curse of the Mummy's
Tomb and Dictators and Double Standards. That last one by

(01:10:09):
Jeane Kirkpatrick mocked Jimmy Carter for failing to support the
Shah of Iran and Anastasio Simosa, the dictator of Nicaragua.
Kirkpatrick argued that basically, you know, obviously communist regimes are bad,
but traditional autocrats are okay, right, because they stop the
communists from getting into power. Quote. Traditional autocrats do not

(01:10:29):
disturb the habitual rhythms of work in leisure, habitual places
of residents, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because
the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable
to ordinary people who growing up in the society learn
to cope. Revolutionary communist regimes claim jurisdiction over the whole
life of society and make demands for change that so

(01:10:50):
violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the
tens of thousands. And that what Kirkpatrick is saying here
is that like, well, communists might cause a problem that
makes people flee the country, but normal dictators are miserable
in a way that people feel like they can't escape.
So that's what we the United States should encourage, right.

Speaker 2 (01:11:10):
Yeah, I mean, I guess he's not wrong. It's it's hard,
it's hard. It's hard to push for like change, for
fundamental change. We were talking about this before with the infrastructure,
with the things that how they are like people are
going to resist anything where you're like, we have to
we have to change these things in a really meaningful

(01:11:34):
or deep way that's going to affect you. So, yeah,
I guess he's not wrong that well, dictator.

Speaker 1 (01:11:40):
He isn't that these dictatorships are going to cause huge
numbers of people to flee the country because they kill
lots of people.

Speaker 2 (01:11:48):
Yeah, yeah, that's good.

Speaker 1 (01:11:50):
Problem you know, it's it's this is part of why
like this article. You know, the thing it's arguing is
that the US should encourage democracy, but only slow, gradual demidocracy,
And if a dictatorship faces an uprising, or if a
democracy elects a left wing leader, we should murder them,
right like, because that's dangerous, right, that's too likely to

(01:12:14):
make people flee the country. So we have to you know,
dictatorships we can work with, but anyone who tries to
improve the country in a progressive direction, the United States
has kind of a responsibility to kill.

Speaker 2 (01:12:26):
Yeah, I mean, how dare they? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
Ronald Reagan loves this fucking article. He thinks that Gene
makes a brilliant argument, and he directly this article is
directly credited with her getting appointed to be US Ambassador
to the U Win and her broader argument helps create
the Reagan administration's policy in Latin America, which is why
we start sending weapons to the contrast. This is this

(01:12:49):
is like why the Reagan administration so assiduously embraces the
policy of sending arms to any dictator who promises to
use them on leftists, right like this This is kind
of a direct result of this think tank, you know, ecosystem,
it really helps. Maybe they would have done it without that, right,
because that's what these kind of people always want to do.
But Kirkpatrick's article kind of provides the intellectual scaffolding that

(01:13:12):
makes it kind of respectable.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
Right, right, they're enabling them. Yes, that's all we talked about,
like the idea of a friend who's like, yeah, you
can have one more drink. It's fine. It's that they're
they're looking for people to say, like, what you're doing
is actually very good. Yeah, the thing you were gonna
do anyway that benefits you directly. Oh yeah, that turns
out to be the right.

Speaker 1 (01:13:34):
It's actually good for everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):
Yeah, and it is.

Speaker 1 (01:13:37):
It's maddening to admit, but pretty undeniable. That AEI is
what makes conservatism quote intellectually respectable. As one Reagan White
House official told the Atlantics Greg Easterbrook, quote without AEI,
Reagan never would have been elected.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
And again that's a.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
Member of the Reagan White House. Right. This think tank
created by the Asbestos.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
Baron that's so bleak that they're so this.

Speaker 1 (01:14:01):
Yeah, yeah, that the Asbestos think tank arguing dictatorships are
fine is a lynchpin of Reagan getting into power.

Speaker 2 (01:14:10):
It's basically I'm sort of saying, like, we know that
we don't have everybody's best interest in mind. Yeah, we really,
we know that we don't care about the poor even
like middle class. We see them as nothing. But this
is making it seem like we have a viable like
thing to offer everything.

Speaker 1 (01:14:32):
Yeah. Now, another major thing that the think tank industrial
complex is able to do for the Reagan administration is
help launder his ideas about space based anti nuclear laser weapons.

Speaker 2 (01:14:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:14:46):
This is the so called star Wars program. Now, Yeah,
experts not being paid by think tanks. Was like, yeah,
maybe someday this will be a thing, but like, we
just can't do it right now. It's insanely expensive and
likely it might a lot of this might just be impossible. Right,
But a strong counter argument emerged, backed by a variety
of right wing defense focused think tanks. The goal of

(01:15:08):
this Reagan program, officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative
or SDI, was to, in Reagan's words, render nuclear weapons
impotent and obsolete. Now, this was considered a dangerous goal
because nuclear deterrence is largely what stopped the US and
the USSR from like directly throwing hands too much. Ballistic
missile defenses eventually started costing the US more than four

(01:15:31):
billion dollars a year, which made them the most expensive
weapons program in the Pentagon budget. As the Institute for
Policy Studies, ironically itself a think tank, eventually acknowledged in
nineteen ninety nine, the overall program has been described as
high risk and a rush to failure by a number
of respected missile defense experts. The Pentagon's Director of Operational
Testing and Evaluation released his annual report in February two

(01:15:53):
thousand and pointed out that the aggressive schedule established for
the NMD program presents a major challenge. The NMD program
will have to compress the work of ten to twelve
years in eight or less years. This pattern has historically
resulted in a negative effect on virtually every troubled DoD
development program. A panel headed by the former Chief of
Staff of the Air Force, General Larry Welch, released a

(01:16:15):
report last November harshly critical of the program. The Welsh
report argued that the failures of the program were not
the result of random malfunctions, but an indication of systemic
flaws and design planning and management, stating that instead of
unusual clarity, there is a usual fragmentation and confusion about
authority and responsibility. And that's because this was never a
plan to actually build an effective missile defense system. It

(01:16:38):
was like, number one, a way to shovel a lot
of money into defense contractors, and number two a thing
for Reagan to promise that would make people feel safer. Right,
We're going to have these laser defenses that will render
us immune to nukes. You know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:52):
It's like you duck and cover, right, It's like, yeah,
it'll be fine.

Speaker 1 (01:16:56):
Yeah, we'll get it. We'll get a lockdown, we'll get
a lockdown. Don't worry. I mean, once they.

Speaker 2 (01:17:00):
Learn it doesn't work, what are they going to do? Complain?
They'll be ash.

Speaker 1 (01:17:05):
It's the thing, nuclear defenses. If they fail, not.

Speaker 2 (01:17:09):
Your problem, exactly, Y's win win. Now.

Speaker 1 (01:17:14):
I find it personally fascinating how few actually different sounding
names there are for these think tanks. I just quoted
the Institute for Policy Studies, and the think tank that
largely backed the Strategic Defense initiative was the National Institute
for Public Policy. What was said and the actual rigor
behind the conclusions in the papers didn't matter, volume was
what mattered. This is something you were getting at a

(01:17:35):
bit ago, right, you just have to have more paper
than the other guy.

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
And by this science, yeah, more official.

Speaker 1 (01:17:40):
Yeah, and this really simple, shallow metric is what causes
conservatism to advance by leaps and bounds from the eighties
up to the yearly two thousands. And there are some
some of these think tank guys will even admit this.
Michael Horowitz of the Heritage Foundation Total Reporter quote, Historically,
conservatives in the United States have come across as racists

(01:18:01):
and know nothings. It was essential to create a moral
and intellectual basis for conservative beliefs that had its own
vision and wasn't just a reaction against liberalism. And I
do that's fucked up that it worked. I am a
little hopeful that like they've gone back to just being
a reaction. That might suggest that they're kind of out

(01:18:23):
of ideas. And I wonder if that's part of why
the demographics are turning so starkly against them. I guess
we'll see in the next ten years we sure.

Speaker 2 (01:18:30):
Well. Yeah, it's it's just interesting because there there I
think there is a pattern that I've seen now of
them sort of wanting to do back the things that
the left quote unquote like does to them, this idea
of like when Biden is in power, they're like, well,
we'll do an impeachment. And it's like it's like a
kid who learns new words and then uses them improperly

(01:18:53):
against their parents, where it's like, yeah, but we're we
you know, Trump was being in peace for a reason.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
You try to throughout the country right now, they're like.

Speaker 2 (01:19:02):
Well, you get an impeachment or like I remember Tim
Poole using started learning learned the Friends death cult and
it's like, no, we were saying death cult because you
guys were like because the right was acting like a
death cult around the face mass and pandemic, like it
was in this context. And what you're what you're sort
of indicating here is that idea of like, well the

(01:19:23):
liberals they had all this fancy education stuff and studies,
we need our own. Yeah, it doesn't matter if it's real.
It's like if for example, the Daily Wires started making
uh content, started.

Speaker 1 (01:19:36):
Making stuff and movies yeah, and being like, well.

Speaker 2 (01:19:39):
We need ours, but it's so hollow because it comes
from a reactionary place.

Speaker 1 (01:19:44):
Exactly. They are reactionaries. And that's fundamentally what that means.
There's nothing inside these people.

Speaker 2 (01:19:50):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:19:50):
I'm not talking about regular voting people who are just
more considered or get trapped by this ideology. I'm talking
about the ideologues.

Speaker 2 (01:19:57):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:19:57):
All they really have is a desire to be rich
and powerful. Everything they're doing is just trying to figure
out how to further that end. But they don't believe
in things beyond.

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
That, right, and the idea to politicize everything where a
lot of this comes from. We're like, well, the left
have their studies, and it's like, no, they aren't the
left studies, they're just studies.

Speaker 1 (01:20:16):
And the studies that they stay, yeah, you don't like.

Speaker 2 (01:20:18):
The well, we have our own, and it's like that.
It's that framing of like, oh, it's left versus right,
and it's like, no, it's you versus reality. It really
is for at least a lot of this. That isn't
to say that people on the left doone also have
their problems and and will overpoliticize things. But when it
comes to these studies and stuff where it's like, oh,

(01:20:39):
we need a counter thing about the asbestos, and this is.

Speaker 1 (01:20:43):
Why they insentially just land On, like let's just break reality, right,
Like that's the that's where they go.

Speaker 2 (01:20:49):
And I think the again, the problem with this grift
not for them, the problem for us, the people being grifted,
is that it like asbestos is a good example where
it's like, well time, you need time, and by the
time you figure out this thing is wrong, the damage
was done. You lead pipes or or or trickle down

(01:21:09):
economics by the time we figure out, like, hey, this
was dumb for a lot of this stuff, like lead
pipes is a good analogy for it because it's like
you look at that and you go, well, we have
to tear out all these goddamn pipes. That's gonna take
so much time. And it's sort of the same with
the stuff that they're planting here is it's like we
can't just undo this stuff. It's embedded deep.

Speaker 1 (01:21:33):
It's the center.

Speaker 2 (01:21:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:21:35):
Yeah, cool stuff, cool stuff, Yeah, yeah, it's it's good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:21:40):
You can put sunglasses on it. It's so cool.

Speaker 1 (01:21:43):
We've been talking about like Gene Kapatrick, Michael Horowitz, you know, Crystal,
like these big names in the think tank writing, you know,
and these guys, these are people who are like popular
enough that they are bylines in the period of time
when magazines sold could sell magazines, right, And that's a
big part of like getting some of these famous thinkers.
Getting Gerald Ford writing columns and stuff is a thing
that will can help launder your ideas because people are

(01:22:06):
already famous. It'll get eyeballs right for the less famous
grunts at the think tanks actually putting together a lot
of these papers, doing the background work. The ultimate goal
of a career working in these think tanks is to
earn yourself a coveted presidential appointment. Lawrence Korb, a DoD
employee turned think tanker turned Raytheon executive, describe the focus

(01:22:27):
on presidential employment among think tank employees as obsessive because
that's how you get rich, right. Think tankers also made
attractive options for new administrations because the logistical burdens involved
in bringing them on were basically non existent. All you
have to do to move from AI to the administration
is walk across the street.

Speaker 2 (01:22:44):
He says.

Speaker 1 (01:22:45):
You don't have to move your family to DC because
you're already there. You don't have to give up a
good job you might not get back because the think
tank will always take you back. You don't have to
put your assets into some kind of complicated trust. If
your background is academics, you don't have any assets, and
a business manner lawyer coming into government usually has to
make a financial sacrifice to someone from academia. On the
other hand, sixty thousand dollars, the typical pay for a

(01:23:06):
high level appointee is a raise. So what he's saying
there is like and again, this is a guy who
starts out working for think tanks, gets a presidential appointment,
becomes a Raytheon executive. Right, you can if you're an academic,
if you agree to go to the dark side, you
can make an okay living at a think tank, make
a decent living in politics, and then when you're out

(01:23:27):
of politics, you get to be an executive for Raytheon
where you get rich. You know, it's a path to
wealth for people who otherwise wouldn't have had it. And
that's part of the promise. If you make the argument
that we can't change anything that would lead to a
reduction or end to our landed wealthy aristocracy to this
oligarch class, then you'll get to become a little bitty,
petty oligarch. Right, that's the promise the think tank makes

(01:23:50):
the people who work there. You know, during the height
of its influence, more than half of AEI's funding came
directly from donations from corporations who defrayed their own tax
burden by paying people who influenced the government to lower
their taxes even further. Sometimes this hurt their bottom line.
Easterbrook noted in nineteen eighty six that quote an advocate
of relaxed anti trust laws. AEI notes in its current

(01:24:12):
annual report that the waf of corporate mergers led to
a reduction of more than one hundred thousand dollars in
its support last year because several friendly companies were gobbled
out of existence. But you know, the wealthy men who
spend their money and the money of their corporations on
these think tanks always remember in the end to keep
them topped off right, at least as long as they
need them. We'll see if they finally win. I don't

(01:24:33):
think these think tanks will keep getting funded to the
extent that they have been, but they were for quite
some time. Really, up through the Bush years, this system
kind of dominated a lot of the ideological conversation in
this country. It was kind of dethroned in the Trump years,
not totally. These they still have a decent amount of influence.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
But because yeah, I can see Trump, I mean, maybe
you'll tell you you're probably gonna say, yeah, I can
see Trump as the kind of jerk who does not
listen to think tanks. No, And honestly, that's probably one
of the good things, one of the few good things. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:25:07):
Well, and it's it's also that like Trump is kind
of new right. We don't, we use different terms for
it now, but in like the late nineteen eighties that
we're talking about, these the people that we just like,
we've come to just call fascists as the new right,
and these are like these very reactionary, very aggressive, not
traditional sort of like polite, respectable conservatives. And these people,

(01:25:32):
from the beginning of their time on the political stage
have not liked the think tank set right in part
because these think tanks make a big deal of how
influential they are and they're not you know, this this
evangelical this kind of alliance of evangelical right wingers, Christian
nationalist culture warriors. Right, they're important, but they kind of
represent a threat to the new right type guys, and

(01:25:54):
so you know, it's possible their hour has started to pass.
We'll see if things shift back in the other direction.
But they did their bit right, They they shifted the
culture successfully. They got us to the point that we're at.

Speaker 2 (01:26:07):
There'll always be people like them because I think when
it comes down to what these things takes are are
their middle management when when Trump they are like when
Trump talked about the concept of a deep state, he
was wrong about what it was, but I don't think
he's wrong that there is a form of that, and
that is people whose entire careers are maintaining their careers,

(01:26:32):
where like they just they they just you know, it's
like I was reading about like we did we did
a video about like how elections are their own economies.
There are people whose entire jobs or a better example
is taxes right, H and R block these companies that
only exist for this system that we've created that to

(01:26:53):
keep them around, and they lobby specifically to keep taxes
the way they are so they can continue to exist.
And I can see someone like Trump sort of looking
at people like that and seeing like, oh, these are
these are people we can cut or rejecting them. I
don't think he's doing it out of the goodness of

(01:27:15):
his heart. But I can see him doing it for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:27:18):
Yeah, I think it might weaken them in the long run,
strategically in the same way that like Trump, he's done
a lot of damage. He's also like right now spending
all of the rnc's money on his legal bills, right
which might hurt them, you know, not just in the
presidential election, but across the board. You know, I guess
we'll see. It's this kind of like the risk of

(01:27:39):
letting a single dude get that much power as he
can really just these these well laid plans, this twenty
thirty year plan to take over the judiciary fifty years,
all this kind of shit.

Speaker 2 (01:27:50):
You know, it's he's he's a threat to the establishment,
just not the way he advertises he's a threat to
the establishment, the way letting a drunk they are into
a Walmart is a threat to the establishment, where it's like, yeah,
you're just in, You're just an asshole, Like you're just
a liability for them, right, Like you'll just they can't

(01:28:11):
tell him anything as they'll just say it out loud
or he'll fuck it up. Like that's how he's actually
a threat to them. Which is like they're their little
slow playing that they're doing. They don't like it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:24):
Yeah, well well Dave, that's it. Where ah, where do
you Where do you go? Where do you live?

Speaker 2 (01:28:33):
Oh? I live right here. We're doing this over zoom,
so you know, I don't have I don't have anywhere
to go. I'm just gonna I'm just gonna take off
my pants when this is done. You know, are you
talking about plugs.

Speaker 1 (01:28:43):
Or like, yeah, yeah, your sluggables all that good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:28:48):
Oh yeah, I mean you mentioned it. Gamefully Unemployed go
to patreon dot com, slash gamefully Unemployed, or better yet,
just google gamefully unemployed GA M E f U l
O Y unemployed. Uh I uh. It's a podcast network
I do it tom Ryman Ryman where we mostly talk
about movies, not politics, you know, movies X files. And

(01:29:08):
then I am the head writer for some More News
and just you know, google some more news if you
like more politics. Uh, that's what you can get. You
can get that. It's right there in the name some
more News. Hell check that out.

Speaker 1 (01:29:21):
Yeah, well, check that out. Check out some more News,
check out gamefully Unemployed, and check out the New Roadhouse.

Speaker 2 (01:29:30):
Check out that new Roadhouse.

Speaker 1 (01:29:31):
Check out the New Roadhouse. Or if you don't want
to see the New Roadhouse, just kick the ship out
of somebody. Just find a stranger and just really start
kicking the son of a bitch.

Speaker 2 (01:29:41):
Get in a fight.

Speaker 1 (01:29:43):
It's always good to get into it. There's no consequences
to getting into a fight. Fight animals. Sure, yeah, fight yourself,
fighting yourself. You know, like that fight club guy in
that movie.

Speaker 2 (01:29:56):
Do a fight club, a club club. We should do
a fight club.

Speaker 1 (01:29:59):
Let's do a Dave and I are going to go
do a fight club. The rest of you.

Speaker 2 (01:30:04):
Credit card companies, right, that's what we're talking about.

Speaker 1 (01:30:07):
We're gonna have to bleep that we're just joking. Credit
card companies. You can let us into your building. Okay,
it's over.

Speaker 3 (01:30:21):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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