Matt Christman goes off live on http://www.twitch.tv/chapotraphouse
Topics: Matt's COVID report, non-local universe, Christ, the Diggers

Grill Stream

235 - Let the Bodies Hit the Space 12.23.22

"Surrounded by children, DeSantis signs the 'Parental Rights in Education' bill," ABC13 reports.  "Biden partnered with organization which questioned parents' rights to be notified about their kids' transition" Fox News tells us. "Parental rights isn't a partisan issue. It's what's best for our children," an opinion column in The Washington Times warns. We've heard these cries for over a century from reactionary forces: we’re just a bunch of scrappy "parents" protecting our kids from sinister, secular forces of state control.

But what does "parents' rights" mean exactly? Which parents' rights are we talking about? Which "rights" are we centering, and who funds which parents to assert which set of rights that, we are told, are essential to these "parents"?

There is, of course, no essential "parents" cohort with a coherent ideology and view on education. But, as a term, it's a useful stalking horse for far right political projects targeting education, namely those opposing secularism, anti-racism, LGBTQ existence, labor, and teachers unions. A skeleton key for whatever reactionary cause doesn’t want to be presented as such. After all, who could oppose "parents' rights." Like the clever term "pro-life," the "parents' rights" label is similarly designed to put advocates of secularism and progress on the defensive, to erase parents who oppose a far-right agenda, and court sympathetic and whitewashing coverage from corporate media.

On this episode, we discuss the history of "parents' rights" as a popular right-wing slogan, from its uses in opposing child labor laws in the early 20th century to pushing religious indoctrination in public schools in the 1990s to today's attacks on trans people and teachers unions; how its evocation by the right––and acceptance by media outlets––obscures the darker motives and political forces at work; and why any media framing of what "parents" want or don't want is inherently mugging bullshit.

Our guest is Jennifer Berkshire.

Ep176: How the “Parental Rights” Rallying Cry Has Been a Rightwing Stalking Horse for Over 100 Years

Artists Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson join the show to talk about the state of the animation industry, AI art, and of course the famous Garfield cum comic

BUY THE BOOK https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Justice-Warriors/Matt-Bors/9781952090226

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JUSTICE WARRIORS w/ Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson

"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.

Episode 179: From Budget Cuts to Book Bans — The Decades-Long Assault on Public Libraries

Matt Christman goes off live on http://www.twitch.tv/chapotraphouse
Topics: papal elections, Mormonism and frontier, anti-Masonic party, collective action, nuclear weapons

244 - Always Rootin' Never Tootin' 03.31.23

Hello Damned Fam, we're behind an ep because of Jake's landlord trying to kill him with a giant rat he made in a lab etc, so we've decided to release an ep or two from behind our paywall. Here's a great interview we did that should probably have been released publicly anyways. ENJOY

Author and activist Jarrod Shanahan comes on the show to discuss his books Captives and States of Incarceration. Be sure to send your feedback to Jake Flores@twitter.com

UNLOCKED: Go Directly To Jail w/ Jarrod Shanahan

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.

News Brief Live: Tucker Carlson's Transparent 'Contrarian Left' Co-Option Strategy

Bob Dylan goes to Deadwood, Thomas Friedman opens up some boxes, Cop City comes to West Virginia, Letcher County speaks its piece

Support striking WGA workers: https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/the-snacklist-support-striking-workers

And support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Episode 289: Work Smarter, Not Harder

"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.

Episode 181: US Media's 5 Most Popular Revisionist Tropes About the Iraq and Vietnam Wars

"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 members, and the working class more broadly, are and should be patriotic hawks at odds with the anti-war Left.

Our guest is labor historian Jeff Schuhrke.

Ep. 182: Hardhats vs Hippies and the Cold War Curation of the Conservative Union Guy Trope

This week we got bogged down in trying to answer some of the biggest ethical questions of our day

Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Episode 292: Advice Column Filibuster

Citations Needed is a podcast about the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. It is hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, and produced by Florence Barrau-Adams.

Ep. 182: Hardhats vs Hippies and the Cold War Curation of the Conservative Union Guy Trope

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