On this Live Show Beg-a-Thon, recorded on May 17, we discuss the pop culture phenomenon and appeal of pseudoarchaeology in its many forms, from fraudulent alternative history books like Erich von Däniken's 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, to television series like "Ancient Aliens" and "Ancient Apocalypse." Alongside guest Dr. David S. Anderson, we discuss how phony "what if?" theories often go beyond the goofy, guilty pleasure premises of extraterrestrial visitors and lost civilizations to promote Eurocentric, racist pap and a mindless distrust of "the scientific establishment" in the stupidest and least productive way possible.

"Thank God for the hard hats!" declared Richard Nixon during his first term. "Why the construction workers holler, ‘U. S. A., all the way!,’" read a 1970 New York Times headline. "The Day the White Working Class Turned Republican," read another New York Times headline, 50 years later in 2020. We're now more than five decades since this narrative first arose: The hardhats love America, and the hippies hate it. Whether Nixon or Trump is in the White House, news media, film, and TV tell us that the working class—good, honest blue-collar folk—are people of God, family, and country, unlike those spoiled, rich, out-of-touch lefty elites. This binary framework is presented as organic, the result of working people and unions feeling left out by the lofty exclusivism of the Left. But, as history shows, this didn’t happen entirely naturally or spontaneously; the "hardhats vs. hippies" narrative was, in part, manufactured by right-wing political and union operatives, more concerned with a McCarthyist imperative to destroy any and all social movements in the global south than with any notion of worker justice and liberation. On this episode, we explore this history, looking at the ways in which rightwing factions of organized labor bolstered dangerous US foreign policy throughout the Cold War, deliberately crafting the false yet persistent notion that union Our guest is labor historian Jeff Schuhrke.  

"Charting a different course in the Vietnam War to fewer deaths and a better end," muses a book review in the Washington Post. "The Vietnam War was begun in good faith, by decent people," a Ken Burns PBS documentary tells us. "The Iraq War Reconsidered," reads a headline from The Atlantic. Often, especially when an anniversary of a U.S. invasion or withdrawal rolls around, we're told that the devastation wrought by the US war machine was complicated, flawed, but ultimately necessary if not beneficial. Sure, the United States has killed millions, destabilized power structures, wrecked communities and economies, lied about the reasons for doing it all, and drawn the ire of people throughout the world. But, in hindsight, many in U.S. media insists, a horrible act of war from a world superpower wasn't an unequivocal, deliberate, and needless crime against humanity, but somewhere between a misunderstood righteous cause and a bumbling, good faith mistake motivated by humanitarian concerns. An ideological system of reassurance therefore emerges. Once wars are broadly viewed as either wrong or a "failure" in the popular imagination — as in the case of Vietnam and Iraq — a cottage industry of punditry and pseudo-history emerges in the subsequent years designed to soothe the egos of elites and muddy the waters of both memory and reality for casual media consumers. Put another way: we all see a dead body on the floor, no one can doubt this. No one can reasonably argue the destruction of Vietnam and Iraq didn't happen. So, this cottage industry springs into action, on behalf of those that caused the death, working to get the guilty party a charge of third degree manslaughter rather than murder. It was an accident, they were mistaken, they had bad intelligence, they were driven by concerns for freedom and human rights. After all, those who destroyed Vietnam remained in power well into the 2000s. And those who destroyed Iraq currently run our major publications, universities, nonprofits, and think tanks. They still even run the country itself. So the incentive to make sure they all plead guilty to third degree manslaughter rather than first degree murder is tremendous, otherwise, we’re just a country led by war criminals — and this simply cannot be. We need absolution. We must remain, when all is said and done, innocent. On this week's episode, we’ll explore the war revisionism industry, breaking down five ways in which media seek to sanitize and justify even the most notoriously unpopular and horrific U.S.-led and backed wars — namely Vietnam and Iraq — as unpleasant, imperfect, mistaken, but ultimately incidental byproducts of a noble and righteous empire that, above all, meant well. Our guest is The Intercept's Jon Schwarz.

"I Was A Teenage Conspiracy Theorist," The Atlantic magazine playfully titled a 2020 essay. "Choose your reality: Trust wanes, conspiracy theories rise," reported The Associated Press in 2022. "Do You Know Someone Who Believes in Conspiracy Theories? We Want to Hear About It," wrote The New York Times last year. Fears of "conspiracy theories" are a common trope in the U.S. media, a worry that's grown more acute with the rise of QAnon, anti-vaxx sentiment, anti-semitism and a host of other dangerous theories that unduly rot brains throughout the country. To a great extent, this understandable: Many ideas that meet the definition of "conspiracy theories" are, indeed, baseless and dangerous and can direct people's political energy and resources into wasteful, racist, and downright stupid rabbit holes. But that fact shouldn't delegitimize or foreclose all skepticism of those in power, but too often the term "conspiracy theory" is used to do just that. Repeatedly, media lump together so-called conspiracy theories, regardless of their accuracy, rationale, and ideology: at once, UFO chasers, QAnon, and the Black Panther Party being subject to FBI disruption are somehow placed in the same category of paranoid kooks. At the same time, unproven, and often debunked ideas advanced by media that also meet the definition of "conspiracy theories" — such as Saddam Hussein being behind 9/11 or so-called Havana syndrome — are treated as unassailable, meriting ongoing investigation, limitless resources, and of course, utmost solemnity. On this episode, we detail the double standards applied to conspiracy theories inside and outside of the realm of U.S. corporate media. We’ll examine the development of the concept of conspiracy theories and the media's selective invocations of the term to discredit real grievances directed at American power and the U.S. government, and moreover, how power-friendly conspiracies — namely those focused on Enemy States like the Havana Syndrome narrative — are permitted to fester and grow without pushback because their red yarn dot connecting implicates the right lists of Acceptable Bad Guys. Our guest is Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic.

In this live streamed News Brief from 4/26/23, we discuss the recent firing of Tucker Carlson and the meta-discourse around whether or not "the left" should see any utility in petty, racist demagogues.

Join us April 26 at 8:30 pm EST for our semiannual Beg-A-Thon live show! This time we will be discussing Ancient Aliens, Ancient Apocalypse, and all manner of racist, ahistorical History Channel and Netflix pseudoscience with Dr. Sarah E. Bond, Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa.

In this public News Brief, we detail how uncritical acceptance by centrist––and even liberal––media that the US is seeing an unprecedented "labor shortage" is helping justify repealing child labor protections in roughly a dozen states.

In this public News Brief, we break down Johnson's "surprise" win and how it undermines every lazy media trope involving local Democratic politics pushed over the last two years.

"Parents fighting schools to protect their kids are heroes, not book-banners," Fox News tells us. Are Privatized Public Libraries So Bad?" asks CityLab. "Huntsville Public Library could be privatized in aftermath of pride display dispute," reports Houston Public Media. For decades, public libraries have been under attack. Repeatedly, influential rightwing and centrist individuals, corporations, and governments––from Phyllis Schlafly to Ron DeSantis––have coordinated campaigns to weaken one of the most beloved and least means-tested public institutions in the country. They seek to, at best, restrict the materials, functions, and decision-making power of public libraries, and at worst, destroy public libraries completely, tossing aside the people who depend on them for education, employment, and often survival. What is it about public libraries that inspires such contempt? What's responsible for the chasm between the US population's perceptions of public libraries––which are overwhelmingly positive––and policymaking that seeks to ruin those libraries? And who suffers when one of the few true public goods left in the US is targeted and seized by reactionary forces? On this episode, we examine the decades-long right-wing assault on US public libraries, the history of book bans and defunding, attendant efforts to privatize public libraries, and how these intersect with the labor struggles of librarians nationwide. Our guest is president-elect of the American Library Association, Emily Drabinski.

"Our progress has been part of the living history of America," President Jimmy Carter declared in a 1979 speech. "America is a nation of progress, of moving forward," Senator Chuck Grassley stated in 2022 on the Senate floor. "The story of America is a story of progress and resilience, of always moving forward, of never, ever giving up. It's a story unique among all nations," President Joe Biden announced in his 2023 State of the Union. For decades - even centuries - policymakers, and media on their behalf, have employed some variation on the same rhetorical theme: the United States is a nation of progress, especially so-called "racial progress." Though our Great Experiment has been imperfect, we're told, it's constantly improving, steadily and automatically forging ahead toward its ideal state. Yes, we've been home to the violent oppression of untold sums of people, but look how far we’ve come! There have objectively been political gains for all groups historically and currently denied basic rights in the U.S. This is obvious. But the trajectory is far from linear, raising the question: How far have "we" really come? Are people, especially Black, Latino, and Native people, less likely to suffer through poverty than any time before now? Are police and prisons any less violent? To what extent have U.S. law and policymaking really evolved? On this episode, we dissect the liberal assertion that social, particularly racial, progress in the U.S. is inevitable, that there's this comforting "arc" of history bending towards justice. We examine how this idea came to be, who gets to define the metrics of "progress," and why it's dangerous to advance the tidy Vaseline-lens narrative that societal improvement is part of some preordained future. Our guest is Dr. Julian M. Rucker.