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.

Media's Credulous "Labor Shortage" Reporting Helps Lay Groundwork For Repealing Child Labor Laws

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

"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.

Episode 180: Havana Syndrome and the Power of Mainstream, Acceptable Conspiracy Theories

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

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Episode 289: Work Smarter, Not Harder

Matt Christman goes off live on http://www.twitch.tv/chapotraphouse
Topics: The Jetsons, More Gulf War trading cards

Grill Stream

248 - Wifi-Connected Vat-Grown Human Husks 05.05.23

This week on the Trillbillies we're disrupting the criminal justice system

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

Episode 290: The Penultimate Court

We talk about the history of the NYC based right wing vigilante group The Guardian Angels. But first, piss.

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Welcome To Fear City

"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

Matt Christman goes off live on http://www.twitch.tv/chapotraphouse
Topics: EUIV stream wrap up, Supreme Court, Debt Ceiling, Hollywood strikes

250 - Crunchwrap Supreme Court 05.18.23

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.

Live Show Beg-A-Thon: The Very Real Social Brain Rot of Ancient Aliens and Ancient Apocalypse

Might have gotten a little carried away on this one. Sorry in advance

Also, Tom lost his job, so we need your support on Patreon now more than ever: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Episode 293: The Shackleton Condition

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.

Live Show Beg-A-Thon: The Very Real Social Brain Rot of Ancient Aliens and Ancient Apocalypse

Citations Needed Podcast