Behind the Bastards - Part One: How Conservatism Won
Episode Date: April 2, 2024Robert sits down with David Bell to discuss how a consortium of rich failsons got together to fund a network of right wing think tanks and shift American culture in a fun new direction. (note: it was ...not actually fun at all) (2 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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What up?
I am Drammo's host of the Life as a Gringo podcast.
This is a show for the NoSabo kids, the 200 percenters.
Here we celebrate your otherness and embrace living in the gray area.
Every Tuesday, I'll be bringing you conversations around personal growth,
issues affecting the Latin community, and much more.
Then every Thursday, I'll be tackling trending stories
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Callzone Media
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is just disastrously hung over right now.
I am not doing well everybody.
It is the day after or around,
my birthday happened at some point in the last 48 hours
or perhaps right now. Happy birthday!
Hello Dave, how are you doing?
Woo!
Can I read the text message you sent me
at 4 or 5 in the morning?
Yeah.
I have alarms, but if they don't wake me,
you can call me.
You not spelled out like you normally do,
which was my favorite part.
Was it like E-W-E?
Yeah.
You can call me.
We did just have another you yesterday,
so that would make sense.
I can't believe it was your birthday.
Happy birthday.
Oh, lovely.
Dave, it was a happy birthday until I had to wake up.
Well, yeah.
I mean, that's yeah, it's life, man.
You know, just pummeling, just pummeling us.
But it's keep coming.
I don't know. I'm going to celebrate today.
Yeah, just to say, I'm really glad you were born good job
Yeah, thank you if anyone at home wants to celebrate my birthday
Just I don't know send me some of your fingernails
I want as many finger. No you're right someone will do that someone will do that. We probably shouldn't Dave
Yeah, it Bell. Yeah
Probably shouldn't Dave Yeah, it Bell. Yeah
Hi co-host
Co-impresario of the gamefully unemployed network network
Denmark my former co-worker at cracked dot com. That's
Man about town at some more news. That's come. How are you doing today Dave? I'm good. I'm living the dream. I'm wheeling and dealing
I'm I gotta figure out I got a schedule colonoscopy
You know just doing the things you know just this living it live in life. Yeah, that's good. That's good
You know I do you have is this a recreational colonoscopy or a necessary one? It can it be both?
Yeah, okay. That's fair. Yeah fair enough. I know I mean, I probably have nothing wrong with me
I just you know, I'm hitting 40. I
I have like a slight family history and and I talked to my I got a new I got a new doctor and
I was like what about them colonoscopies and they're like, yeah, let's do it. Let's fucking do it
And then where we're doing it
colonoscopy, yeah
Excellent. Yeah, it's exciting stuff, you know
Well, I have not had a colonoscopy yet
although their vibe soon, but you know what is the the moral equivalent of having a camera shoved up your ass? Ooh, what?
Living in the United States in an election year 2024
and a big part of why
It feels that way is because of a little concept that you might be aware of Dave the think tank. Ooh
Yeah, what do you know about the think tank. Ooh. Yeah. What do you know about the think tank as a concept?
I mean, I always picture like a SeaWorld style tank
filled with brine and just a giant floating brain
that a group of scientists sort of circle around
and that brain is hooked up to computers
and then the data gets printed out
and they take that data,
and then they use it or ignore it,
and then they just do whatever they wanna do politically.
Wow.
It's amazing, that's nearly the opposite
of what it really is.
So, what a think-take really is,
is a way in which to generate paper,
and then that paper convinces journalists
that your policies are real policies.
And then you take over the Supreme Court.
Now, I know this is gonna sound convoluted.
We're talking about how the Republican Party kinda won
and specifically how they turned around the situation
that existed in this country in the United States
that we don't talk about much.
It's very, especially because on the right, there's this need to believe that the 50s
and 60s were this era where everything was better and the whole country was more conservative.
And then there's this need among liberals on the left to believe that they have been ascendant lately
and the last couple of years of resurgent right-wing stuff has been a severe disruption
of the norm.
Neither of those is really accurate because the reality of the situation is that in the
50s and 60s, basically any commentator who was looking at it honestly would have told
you that liberalism well, liberalism
has clearly won.
We talk about liberalism, I'm not talking about like the way we kind of talk about liberals
today or the way liberals often like to see themselves as progressives.
I'm talking about like an economic and kind of social set of political beliefs that was the dominant way in which people viewed
politics by the 1950s.
Liberal economic policy and social orthodoxy reigned supreme
in the post-war era and it was it was like it had such a degree of
capture of the system that literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950 in the United States at this time
literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, in the United States at this time,
liberalism is not only the dominant,
but even the sole intellectual tradition.
He claimed, there are no conservative
or reactionary ideas in general circulation,
only, and I love this term, irritable mental gestures,
which seek to resemble ideas.
Now, a bunch of people are gonna be like,
thinking about all the fucked up shit
that they knew the government was doing in the 50s and 60s like overthrowing
governments in Latin America and getting into Vietnam and being like
Well, how can you say that liberalism was dominant in this period and I can say that because like well
It was liberals doing a lot of that right like it was JFK who got her asses into Vietnam
And LBJ the great society guy who accelerated it so I'm not yeah
Right and like I don't know what's considered liberal or leftist
Yeah, you know 50 years. Definitely not leftist. Yeah, yeah, but it's always gonna be different right like what you know I I you look at Star Trek which is considered pretty progressive
But then you go and look at TNG and you're like man
They're almost there, but they still don't quite, you know, like, I don't know.
They wouldn't let Riker kiss a dude, right?
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
And he wanted to.
Jonathan Frakes was in. Of course.
Yeah. I mean, he, he fucked everything.
And my favorite is he, the non-binary aliens.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where he immediately, like upon meeting them is like,
oh, I have to fuck one of these. I don don't care which I got a check off this box. Mm-hmm
poor Ryker
Mm-hmm, but yeah
so when we're talking about this we're talking about the idea that like and it makes some sense if you think about like what happened to
The right is as a result of World War two both like in the pre-war period you have this kind of like
isolationist reactionary strain that really has to retreat because we go to war
with the Nazis and they're like, oh shit,
we have to get very careful about how we talk about
some of the things we believe suddenly.
So it's just this very like fundamentally different period.
And one of the few things that is kind of similar and similar in how we look at liberalism from then to now is
that it was, and actually much more so back then, defined by this embrace of public spending
and huge public works projects.
That was pretty universally accepted as what the government ought to be doing.
The point where I can look at Dwight D. Eisenhower, famous Republican president,
builds a massive interstate highway system, right?
Which is not a thing that you would get a Republican supporting today, like a public
works project on that scale.
It's kind of inconceivable now, but that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about
how a lot of people in public policy at the time were like well, yeah this kind of liberal
Trend towards what the role of the state should be in society has clearly won and there's not really any other game in town
It's funny
You should talk frame it this way because i've actually i've talked about this with friends and stuff before and like
People always frame it kind of not
like, Oh, you know how they used to be liberal. It's more of like, you know, how what's considered
quote unquote leftist or liberal used to just be the norm where it's like, you know, we
used to fix our highways up and that wasn't seen as a political thing. Yeah. It was just,
it was just a thing you have to do when you run a government. Like, would you, would you
agree with that? Or would you say that they say that they were, it was seen at the time
as very liberal?
Because I feel like these are things that other countries do too that aren't seen as
political leaning at all.
Yeah.
And part of the story today and why we have think tanks is to make all that seem more
political than it used to.
But it's also just a matter of like, when you're looking back to that period of time,
you're looking at a period of time in which like,
the Republicans had a very strong liberal arm of the party.
There were like Rockefeller was a liberal Republican.
There were like, that was like a dominant part
of the Republican Party.
There were liberal Republican presidential candidates
who did pretty well, right?
And that's a really different situation today.
Like now, and again, I'm not saying none of these people
you would call like a leftist.
Although they are all people who if they ran today
would be called leftists by Republicans, right?
Like that's the thing, it's so hard to like
separate these words anymore. Yes, yes. And I know that's the thing, it's so hard to like separate these words anymore.
Yes, yes, and I know that's a frustrating part of this.
I think I've, like, I don't even know what to call myself.
I'm certainly, I don't think I'm a liberal.
I'm very left leaning and very progressive,
but like, I think I've accidentally called myself
just a liberal because they're all like,
like leftist liberal, they're all L words
that are just like, ah, they mean like, I I don't know but it's just interesting because like the idea of a
liberal Republican I'm just like yeah know how that works but then I think
about like you know Nixon I think it was Nixon created the EPA that's a great
example of how things have shifted we're like a guy like and Nixon went to China
and normalized relations with Mao right like another thing that you wouldn't really,
I mean, Trump kind of tried to do his version of it
with North Korea, but it was not really the same deal.
No, not at all.
And like, I don't know, a lot of this stuff to me
just seems like just things you have to do, right?
Where it's like, we need to protect our,
like forests and national parks.
It doesn't feel like it needs to be political at all, but it's just funny
when you start trying to figure that out.
Those labels.
When I'm when I quote these like guys from the 50s and 60s saying,
well, like liberalism is clearly one that's kind of what they're referring to is right.
So much stuff that is now seen as political,
spending any amount of public money on anything to help people is deeply political, right?
Right. It sounds like to some people it was political then so
It was there was a tiny number of those people who thought of it that way and they were mostly very very wealthy
business owners primarily people who had inherited businesses and whatnot from their families and
They're going to be kind of the folks who actually wind up creating the network
of think tanks.
Like that is the story we're talking about today.
Because this was all started as a way to shift public consensus away from the idea that like
the government can do things to benefit people and towards the idea that like any public
spending is communism, right?
Like that's a big part of what we're talking about today.
And there's a number of reasons why we went from FDR,
being the most beloved president in American history,
to, I think he's still, broadly,
people have fond memories of him,
but if anybody pushed policies today,
like FDR did, they would be called a dictator, right?
Right.
It would be unimaginably controversial.
And there's a number of reasons
why the status quo here started to change.
One of them was the Vietnam War, right?
And how much fucking money it cost.
And by the time you hit like the mid to late seventies,
you've got, you know, the economy sort of grinding
to a halt, inflation rising,
stuff that will never happen again.
And there starts to be this awareness among like public policy people in the United States grinding to a halt, inflation rising, stuff that will never happen again.
And there starts to be this awareness among public policy people in the United States
that like, oh, the unlimited money train from after World War II isn't going to keep going
on forever, right?
And so, yeah, we're going to talk about that because getting us from FDR to LBJ to Ronald
Reagan and then to Trump was in part the result of a concerted effort
to shift the culture by building a robust system for generating conservative thoughts
and then pumping them into the culture at scale so they looked like they had scholarly
support and public support.
They did that until they made it true.
I think a good place to start is with the development of the concept of the think tank.
These are not a uniquely American institution, but they are uniquely influential and powerful
in the United States.
There's not any other nation on earth that has its public policy or political culture
shaped so much by think tanks, which are basically dark money sinks where intellectuals who are
bribed generate the illusion of consensus in exchange for
money, right?
Like that's, that's what they are.
They're there for people who don't like reality, right?
Like it's the idea of like, I have a thing.
I want to get richer doing this thing, or I want to support these people.
But like reality, like studies and facts are showing that like it's bad to do this. So let's let's recreate studies and facts to look like they're pushing this thing I
want.
And one of the ways in which because you have think tanks that are more intellectually rigorous
and they all charge for their shit and a lot of the shitty think tanks that are like funded
by the oil and gas industry give out their papers for free.
So you'll have like journalists writing articles and they're like, wow, I need, I need two
different opinions on whether or not we should frack, uh, the oil fields in fucking Texas.
And one, you know, think tank that actually does real research will say you have to pay
us $1,200 for our papers on what will happen.
And the heritage foundation says, here you go.
Here's a thousand pages of shit that you can cite in your articles, and it's all free
That's like a simplified version of the game that's going on here, right?
It sounds a lot like studies like there's study studies were like you start looking into them
You're like wait. This doesn't actually say the things the headlines are saying and again sometimes it's done insidiously
really say the things the headlines are saying. And again, sometimes it's done insidiously.
Sometimes I think it's just people misinterpret things
or like they're trying to, like you're saying,
like actual work takes money because it takes people
and that's not very sexy.
No, but you can have a fancy name for an organization
and just put out papers that say whatever
you want them to say.
If you do it with a good letter ahead, people will trust that there's something to what
you're saying.
It's amazing how far a good font will get you.
The idea that we would have, and it's kind of worth going back to it and talk about how
the field of public policy analysis, which is kind of worth going back a bit and talking about how the field of public policy
analysis, which is kind of where think tanks as a concept come out of, how recent it is.
Because for most of the history of governments, you didn't have professional people who analyzed
policy and looked into how it was working, right?
Progress was, sometimes you'd get a king who was like reasonably smart and sometimes you'd get an inbred royal king
who would either like take things back a couple of decades
or be weak enough that like a couple of smart guys
could move things forward.
You get a dad, you get a dad.
You get a dad or two, you get a couple of world wars.
And then in the 20th century,
after we finally invented cigarettes, people got smart.
And that's when we start doing actual policy analysis.
It's really not until the 1900s that we actually start, in kind of a concerted way, looking
at a lot of...
Where you have these guys who are like, I'm an expert in urban planning, right?
I'm an expert in energy policy, right?
You had guys who were kind of doing that in the 1800s, but it starts to actually become like systematized in the 1900s, right?
Yeah, it's a bunch of people who's like I'm a pervert for this one thing. Yes. Yes
Yeah, and I can I can exist that way. Yeah, cool. You weird little freak. That's great
We'll consult you when we need questions about that thing. Mm-hmm
That's great. We'll consult you when we need questions about that thing.
And that's kind of like, that is kind of a quietly revolutionary concept because it implies
that like, well, whatever our society is doing right now might not be the best way to do
things.
And so we should always be looking at doing them differently.
And most of that hasn't always been like a thing you could expect from a society, right?
Right. And there's a really fun 1991 doctoral dissertation by Dr. Susan Marie Willis I found that notes
that in the period leading up to World War II, there was this kind of turning point in
the federal government's willingness to solicit expert advice in solving the nation's problems.
And as a result, quote, the country's intellectual magnet shifted from New York City to Washington,
DC during that time.
The shift is placed on reliance on policy experts earlier during World War I, when many
businessmen and academicians played key roles in wartime management on the war industries
board.
It is certainly true that Roosevelt had the help of his famous brains trust in formulating
some New Deal policy, and also that Woodrow Wilson took selected scholars with him to
the Versailles Peace Conference.
In both cases, these were individual consulting scholars and economists, many drawn from Harvard,
but not associated with any formal sense as a group or policy research body."
This is kind of when you start to get the idea that the president would not just bring
in his own people specifically, but might actually pick experts who were at least ostensibly
independent and they would advise him on stuff, right? That's when this starts to become more common, right? And that just seems like
Good leadership for the most it seems smart, right? Yeah
Yeah, I like I remember in film school talking about or like being a manager, right?
Where it's like part of being a good manager or a director is to consult the people who are very ultra into
Specific things and hear what they have to say. I mean now we got Wikipedia. So yeah
We don't need any of that
But you can see how there could be a good and a bad side right where if the president's trying to like I don't know
Deal with the aftermath of World War one
Yeah, you should probably bring an academic who knows something about like fucking Austria, Hungary, like, and it's different political factions and whatnot. That makes
sense. Seems like that guy should be there. Yeah, but they shouldn't necessarily. I mean,
it's only as good as the person, right? Exactly. If your expert is, say, a racist, then everything
they're going to do is tinted that way. Yeah. I mean, I think that's why people look to
like the idea of computers as being impartial.
But then also you need someone who has instincts on something as well.
Like being an expert in something should also mean being able to interpret that information
in a good way.
And also kind of the problem with this is that when it's just seen as like, well, yeah,
we elected this president and he and all of the people in his administration are all like, you know, members of the same
team. When you start to see like, well, no, some of the people giving him advice are like
independent experts and they're just trying to do what's best based on the facts. Well,
are they right? Like they won't always be. Sometimes they'll be just as political as
anybody else. The president might hire, but if you start thinking about them as like possessed of some sort of objective
wisdom that's above the fray, you can also wind up not being critical enough
of like what they're actually doing.
Yeah.
They also become, it's that thing it's we've seen it a million times where
someone's really smart about one thing.
Yeah.
Uh, that doesn't mean they're smart about everything.
Uh, and so like, you have to know how to use that person and that information.
Yeah.
And like know what to do with that information, the broader consequences of that.
Because experts, I mean, there's a reason why there's that weird stereotype of like, yeah, these snooty college types, right?
Where it's like, yeah, I sort of get it. Like, you know, if you're used to having a lot of authority in one thing, you start acting
with that authority on everything sometimes.
Yeah.
And kind of on the other side of things, if you're like some scholar who's a weird wonky
expert in different kind of obscure European political conflicts and shit, and the president
comes to ask you to help him at a peace conference, you might just kind of try to figure out what the president wants to hear and tell him that.
Right.
You know, because it's noteworthy that Wilson took all of these scholars with him to Versailles,
but like we all know that didn't go well.
That wasn't a good peace treaty, right?
It's like a famously bad peace treaty.
So this is sort of the prehistoric era in think tanks.
If you're thinking about like your evolutionary chart,
this is when like the fish gets onto land, right?
And the fish is eventually going to be named
the Heritage Foundation.
It's a good fish name.
But this period, you start in kind of the period
after Wilson, you get this groundwork laid
for what's gonna come after.
It becomes the norm that private economists,
lawyers and experts will be brought in
to advise presidents and Congress about like,
just over time during like their entire periods in office,
but also about specific issues, right?
It becomes more normal.
And again, this isn't like a clean break.
You could find examples of this
in earlier decades and centuries,
but it becomes normalized that like,
well, we're debating this bill on like setting up,
I don't know, fucking phone infrastructure for the country.
Let's bring in an expert on that, right?
Like an actual like policy expert to like talk about how
this should go or what they think will happen with this thing.
And it becomes really desirous for experts to get positions
like this and organizations, specifically corporations who
have a lot of vested interest in some
of these different bills being put for building infrastructure, start to realize that, well,
if we fund experts, if we have experts that we have paid to get to that position in society,
that could really help us out when it comes time to like, we want to make sure that these
laws are written in such a way that we get some of these government contracts, right? You get all of this happening at once, both this positive benefit of like, yeah, we want to make sure that these laws are written in such a way that we get some of these government contracts, right?
You know, you get all of this happening at once, both this positive benefit of like,
yeah, we actually have people who know what they're doing being consulted about laws.
And also, these people are often deeply corrupted because they need money before they hit that
point.
And there's always corporations willing to pay for people to become experts as long as
they know who buttered their bread right yeah, I mean
So money money's a real problem like it
It should be involved in everything we do no there should be things we do that don't have to be motivated by money
But you know that's the that's the beautiful dream of Star Trek that sometimes we could just act purely based on whether or not
Will Riker wants to fuck something and will right are always wants to fuck something his dick is its own currency. That's right
speaking of Rikers dick
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I used to have so many men. How this beguiling woman in her 50s. She looked like a million bucks
with zero qualifications. She had a Harvard plaque. Tricks her way past a wall of lawyers
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Is it like a mansion?
Yes, it's a mansion.
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About six million.
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Oh, we're back.
Now, before you can have someone who's an expert
in like any kind of policy field, you have to have,
I mean, I guess you don't have to have this,
but it really helps.
You have to have like the ability to get degrees
and stuff like economics and political science.
That wasn't always specifically like graduate degrees.
That was not always a thing.
It was kind of a process of consolidating these broad fields of knowledge into discrete
fields of studies.
It was sort of a thing that kind of happens along the late 1800s, early 1900s where you
actually start to get graduate schools
and a university system that looks like the one we have today.
We'll be talking about what happens to the university system because this is really going
to piss off a lot of people.
You start to get the very first modern-looking colleges that aren't just, among other things,
aren't just a place for
rich kids to go, right?
Where it becomes more normal for regular people to go and get degrees.
And then they can become experts in fields and influence public policy.
And that is kind of a quietly radical change.
It has a lot to do with why around the time of the Great Depression and the New Deal,
you get all of these to us seemingly radical policies,
is because you have all of these people who were educated in a time in which like there wasn't
really... education wasn't politicized in the kind of way that it is now. It still obviously had
plenty of biases, right? It reflected the biases of the culture that it was in. But you did not
have like right-wing schools, you did not have this kind of culture
warship over schools. And so as a result, educated experts tended to overwhelmingly be progressives.
And again, these are people who in a lot of ways we would consider deeply reactionary
today, but they were all pretty supportive of widespread, the idea that, yeah, you should
use the government's money
to help people, right?
To like do things, to have a society, you know?
That was the normal view of this kind of group of people.
I mean, yeah, that feels like
that's the point of a government.
It's a group that basically is taking control of land
and went like, all right, we're gonna make it easy
for everybody to live here.
And you know, in exchange, you won't chop our heads off.
Yeah, we should have roads.
Oh, everyone is starving.
We should give people jobs and just have them build stuff for a while
until this great depression thing shakes out.
Yeah, I'm not trying to be like, and all of the experts were progressive.
So the world was perfect because no, everybody was still racist as hell.
We did all sorts of fucked up stuff back then
Progressive then did not entirely mean the same thing it does today
But there were certain things that just like weren't controversial back then right?
Yeah, and among the first great think tanks of American society was the Russell Sage Foundation
Which had been established in 1907 from a ten million dollar donation
And I'm gonna quote from and that was a lot of money back then.
That's like in about 20 something years.
It's a lot of money for a dude.
That's not a lot of think tank terms back then.
But I'm going to quote from Willis again.
It brought together amateur social investigators and charity volunteers with professional social
scientists for the purpose of applying new research methods in the permanent improvement of social conditions.
There was a particular concern with child labor laws, child and family, and health services
and education.
The staff of educators, sociologists, and settlement house veterans comprised few academicians,
but they compiled statistics and other pertinent information on social problems and abuses.
These data were made available to the general public as well as to state and local governments
to guide them in practical policy formation.
This pamphlet was the most typical publication of the Sage Foundation at the time, and traveling
exhibitions which visited county fairs and schools were also sent out."
You can see some similarity in that a lot of these today, these kind of like particularly
more political think tanks will put out stuff that's meant to be widely consumed
Information that like, you know is meant to be sort of disseminated via social media or whatnot or be like widely quoted in the news
the Russell Sage Foundation is
Taking a more direct route because there's not as many organs for people to get that kind of stuff out
So they're just like handing out they're looking into, hey, how should we actually like educate children?
Is it bad for little kids to work?
We put together a pamphlet on this.
Like, let's all look into the,
and again, these people were extremely,
and when I say, I said earlier,
it wasn't really controversial to be against child labor
or be in favor of public spending.
It was among like very wealthy people. Obviously,
the business owners in America are going to stage a coup against FDR in the early thirties,
right? But not among these educate, like these academics and stuff. Yeah.
It's controversial. Like controversy, you know, I, it's, is the implication that there
are multiple competing views. And it's weird when we count the views of the people
who directly stand to gain.
You know, like it's weird to be like,
it's weird to say like there's controversy amongst
like the victims and the criminals that did this.
Like there's controversy amongst the bank robbers
and the bank.
Yeah, crime lovers, crime haters, can't agree about armed robbery the bank. Where it's like, no. Crime love us, crime hate us,
can't agree about armed robbery.
Yeah, it's just like, I mean,
it's just a group of people doing something bad
and then a group of people saying like,
yeah, what you're doing is bad.
And they're like, I disagree.
And it's like, oh, there's controversy.
But we'd like to keep doing it.
When it comes to the term think tank,
which again, kind of the Russell Sage Foundation
is one of the first organizations,
like institutions you could call a think tank. They weren't using that term back
then. And I, I wanted to look like, try to figure out like where the phrase comes from,
because as you noted, when we started this, it sounds like it should be a big tank full
of Brian with a brain in it. And that's actually pretty apropos to the history. One historian
traces it back to the forties ass as just a slang term for brain.
Like someone like,
my think tank's not ticking too well today.
Oh my God, that's such a good slang for brain
that I'm kind of mad that they took that away from us.
We can take it back, Dave.
We can take it back.
Pour some knowledge into your think tank, folks,
with this podcast.
I've heard another historian trace it to World War II, where it referred to like a war room,
right?
Like you get all of your military experts together into your think tank and they figure
out how to do a Normandy landing.
It's like a tank for thinking.
Yeah, yeah, maybe that too.
Yeah, makes sense.
And it's also possible that it comes from a guy named Burton Pines, who was a historian
who wrote about the traditionalist movement in the early 1980s. And used the analogy gathering different fish into a tank and concentrating the brain power Dave
Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say this. That's the dumbest right?
That's the dumbest I I wanted to try it because whenever I hear like an insane analogy like that
Like this is just a book about like traditionalists by this historian
And I'm like why the fuck would you use that analogy?
I haven't been able to get a copy of the book that he says this in.
It's not like online and aware that I was able to find it.
That's like I don't know what the context meant here.
Was this person a child?
Was they were they?
Because that's the sort of thing.
Like when you're a child and you hear about like earwigs, you assume it's a wig on an ear.
Like that's that's what a child would think
when they hear think tank.
It's like, oh yeah, like a bunch of fish are thinking.
You need to track down this person, Robert.
I do, I kind of think maybe he was making fun
of the traditionalists by being like,
they're as dumb as a bunch of fish in a tank.
Maybe.
That's also an insane way to call someone dumb.
Like, why would you do it that way just say they're silly man?
Yeah, you need to track this person down and find their family
Yeah, and have them on the show and yeah make them answer for themselves
See usually Dave when I suggest finding someone's family
someone then
Posit something that's a crime you're the first person to just say we should have them on the show
I'm not saying you can do a crime while they're on the show
It doesn't be a crime against them, but like they'll be crimes. You know see this is why you're a pinch hitter Dave
You're able to swing left and right yeah, so I don't know what the fuck why the fuck he used this phrase
It's it's baffling to me, But the development of what become known as think tanks,
really starting in the 80s primarily,
happens before we have a name for them.
And a big, like a guy who's kind of influential
in the development of this concept is Frederick Taylor.
If you've ever heard of Taylorism,
it's this thing that in kind of the mid century
is going to become increasingly common
in every different field of endeavor we
Taylorize police forces which was a more like well
What if we standardized police training and what if we try to have like metrics for police officers and see if we can make them
You know work better and more if and we do the same thing with factories. We're gonna Taylorize this factory
It's it's scientific management, right?
That all is in that same tradition.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's optimizing organizations and workflow for efficiency.
Taylorism is going to be a big deal every,
it's where we get Deloitte and McKinsey,
these consulting firms, right?
Like they all have Taylorism in their DNA.
And one of Robert Taylor's friends
is this guy named Robert Brookings.
And this is the Brookings sound familiar to you, Dave?
It does.
Yeah.
He's this is the Brookings Institute guy.
Right.
And the Brookings Institute is from this earlier generation of think tanks
that actually think about things, right?
They're not just going to put out stuff to like make one politician to the other.
Happy among other things, the Brookings Institute are the people who like help just going to put out stuff to like make one politician or the other happy.
Among other things, the Brookings Institute are the people
who like help put out the Vietnam papers
or the Pentagon papers.
Like they're the guys Ellsberg is working with.
And that doesn't make anyone in the government very happy.
Right?
Like that's just actually something that needed to get out.
So we're talking kind of about like the pre evil days here
although they're also not purely good either
Robert Brookings had spent time in German colleges in the early
1900s and like a lot of Americans who did this he came back with a thought that those Germans are on to something right surely their
Mechanistic obsession with pushing the limits of efficiency will only lead to good things for Germany. It's 1913 and I'm very optimistic
Germans they're doing something over there will only lead to good things for Germany. It's 1913 and I'm very optimistic. Yeah. Coming back to America, like those Germans,
they're doing something over there.
They're on a roll.
Make sure you run exactly.
They're on a roll.
So Brookings, unlike most Americans
who come back from Germany with ideas,
he just gets into the dry goods business.
And he does well enough in dry goods
that he becomes very rich and he gets a position
on the war industries board in World War I, which ironically puts him directly opposite
Germany.
The whole process of doing a world war and of advising the government through a world
war, because we had never had to mobilize the military.
The closest thing was like the Civil War, but that had been quite a while before.
So this is like a big deal.
And it convinces him that having the government bringing in experts like me really helped
the process of doing World War I.
So maybe we should make that normal across the board.
Maybe when Congress is voting on what the national budget should look like, they should
talk to experts, right?
And so he decides, I'm going to put a bunch of my money, this wealth that I've got, into
building an institution that can provide the government with the best possible information
so it can make better choices, right?
That's his dream, and that's where we get the Brookings Institute.
And he gets a bunch of his rich friends together, and he's like, put some money into this thing.
And it's important
This is going to be basically the same way think tanks work in the modern era where you get all of these think tanks that
Are paid by a company. Hey, we're exxon mobile
We want you to put out a bunch of research saying that gasoline is great for the environment, right?
The Brookings Institute looks like the same thing
It's not quite because at this point there is not really the expectation
that by putting money into this thing, it will only publish information
you want it to publish.
That's not really the case yet.
And people are going to get pissed about this as time goes on.
But yeah, yeah.
It seems like this seems like a good idea on paper, right?
And you can immediately kind of see like, what if we do this
like direct channel
into the government through experts,
like that won't get corrupted, like go bad, right?
Like they'll accept the information we give them,
even if the information is like, let's not do a war.
Like they'll listen to us.
We keep going back to Star Trek.
It's kind of like the Borg, right?
Where you shoot at them once and you can fuck them up,
but the second time their shields will have modulated.
So for a little while,
the Brookings Institute actually works
the way it's supposed to.
Rich people fund it and it puts out information
and it's usually just information based on
what these experts, they're not perfect,
they make mistakes, but it's what they actually think
is best in these different fields of endeavor, right?
It's actual attempts at analyzing policy and impact.
And it's not, again, this is not always good.
For example, the Brookings Institute
is going to oppose much of the New Deal
because they're really market driven.
And Roosevelt is saying we need more central planet, right?
Oh, interesting, yeah.
But by the time Nixon's in office,
they are seen and derided a lot by Republicans as the liberal think tank, right? And again,
by the time Nixon's in office, these are the guys who published the Pentagon Papers. So
like they are this symbol of like liberal progressive, like ethos and by the seventies.
And the fact that they switched like this is not because like there's much of an ideological
capture it's that they're, they're actually the people here are actually generally trying to do what they think is right again
That doesn't mean they're always right but like they are actually trying to analyze policy here for sure
there's always that like I
Mean when people you know, there's there's been a big push about like, you know
colleges and schools and being liberal
and stuff where it's that weird situation where you're like defending this thing, but
you're like, I'm not saying it doesn't have problems.
Yeah.
It's that weird in between where it's like, yes, it's more just like the criticism goes
so over the top that you're like, no, they can be criticized just not for the shit you're
saying.
Jesus. Yeah. It's like when we talk about like, oh, the good be criticized just not for the shit you're saying. Jesus.
Yeah. It's like when we talk about like, oh, the good old days when progressives were
ascendant, it's like, well, people called Woodrow Wilson a progressive and he was
like, maybe our most racist president.
Yeah.
Like we had presidents who were slave owners and Wilson might've been more
racist, like he was a terrible man.
There's a lot of nuance that gets lost in these conversations.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I'm not trying to paper over like,
oh, to go back to the good old days
of the progressive 50s.
Yeah.
Yeah, anyway.
So in the, it's one of those things where like the,
partly like after World War II in particular,
like the Brookings Institute is kind of a little bit more
what we might call conservative prior to World War II.
In the post-war years, half of the world's money, literally half of all of the wealth
in the world is in the United States.
For a period of time, debates over stuff like the budget and fiscal policy, part of why
Eisenhower is able to do these massive public works projects, part of why there's not that much organized resistance to the idea of public funding is that we have
all of the money there's ever been.
And so stuff like, you don't get a lot of people worrying over the budget so much in
the fifties.
One article I found from the Atlantic in 1986 by Greg Easterbrook describes the economy
in the mid-century as a dead
issue and writes, social justice in Vietnam, and this is by the 60s, dominated the agenda.
Brookings concentrated on those fields, emerging as a chief source of arguments in favor of
the great society and opposed to US involvement in Vietnam.
In the Washington swirl, where few people have the time to actually read the reports
they debate, respectability is often proportional to tonnage.
The more studies someone tosses on the table, the more likely he is to win his point.
For years, Brookings held a monopoly on tonnage.
Its paper supporting liberal positions went unchallenged by serious conservative rebuttals."
And so that's part of why there's not much counterweight to a lot of these liberal ideas
about how money should be spent is that the
only people researching them is the Brookings Institute.
If you're going to look at, well, what's the evidence on whether or not we should engage
in this policy where you've got 300 pages of shit from the Brookings Institute and nothing
else?
I guess it's easier to make that case, right?
Right.
Now, this is going to start to change by the period of the Nixon administration.
Part of what changes it is that this first wave of think tanks and expert advisors, a
decent chunk of them had been intimately involved in convincing the government that it was the
right time, that Vietnam was a good thing to get into, right?
This was going to go well.
These are not Brookings Institute people.
Again, they are pretty much
pretty consistently like this is a dumb idea. We're like fucking ourselves over by sending
troops to this war. But it's another think tank that's going to be heavily involved in
us getting into Vietnam. And that think tank is called the Rand Corporation. You hear to
these guys, these fun dudes, these cool guys.
Were they right? Were they right about Vietnam?
Yeah, it is really well.
Yeah, I just read Biden just signed a treaty with Vietnam,
so it must have gone well.
Yeah.
This is the last piece of history about Vietnam I read
until a week ago, so it seems like it all went well
in the end.
It all went well.
Why would we be at peace with them otherwise?
Yeah, exactly.
So the Rand Corporation is founded right after the big dub-dub-dos, and they're like a defense
industry think tank.
And their initial obsession, they come out of this period, we've just nuked Japan, the
Russians shortly thereafter get their own nukes, and we're like, we should probably
have some smart people figuring out what might happen as a result of the fact that we all
now have these weapons, right?
That's a good idea.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
It's not a bad idea, right?
Yeah, we all have doomsday devices.
Maybe get some of them Brainiacs to work this out.
Let me think about this.
Is this a good idea?
Nukes.
And what's going to happen is the Brainiacs are going to be like, no, everything's bad.
And they're like, cool, thanks.
I mean, we're not going to do it.
We're just going to keep them.
But thanks.
Yeah.
That is, if they had, this is kind of the Rand Corporation is kind of the first really like, cool, thanks. I mean, we're not gonna do, we're just gonna keep them, but thanks. Yeah.
That is, if they had, this is kind of,
the Rand Corporation is kind of the first
really influential think tank that is funded by a deep,
because they're funded by the US Air Force.
So they are not in fact going to be like,
perhaps we shouldn't have these things.
You know what this is all reminding me of
is when you go out with like friends,
I'm sure you can relate,
and you're making a, you're like're you're drinking or you're doing whatever and you're tuned
to your friend and go like, I can have more drinks. Right. And the friend goes, oh yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You're like, you look, you're looking to someone to just justify
the bad decision, you know, you're going to make. Yeah. And that's what friends are for.
And these things, things are like they're, they're good friends now. They go to them and go go like it's fine that we're doing this right and the thing is like yeah, it's fine, man
The experts say it's fine
Escalating our involvement in Vietnam is like me saying last night. Yeah, I can get up at 10 a.m. To do this podcast
And you did you did it so see Vietnam was fine
I have felt like this is my Vietnam since about when I ran out of coffee. Yeah
So the initial obsession of the Rand Corporation is thinking the unthinkable. That's kind of like their unofficial tagline, right?
Which is planning for a nuclear war, right?
The idea here and it's interesting like there so they're they're right in near where we used to work Dave
They're kind of in between Santa Monica and Hollywood.
Oh, we should have went and seen them.
We should have gone.
I don't know if they're still there, but they were for a time.
In fact, they were across the street from Mary Pickford's beach house.
And one description I've read at the time said that they, quote, did little but sit,
think, talk, write, pass around memos, and dream up new ideas about nuclear war.
Which sounds like a fun life.
It kind of does.
Yeah, I could do that.
Yeah, sure, why not?
Bring me on, guys.
And again, like everything here,
it's easy to see how it's like,
well, yeah, that could be a good idea, right?
You probably want someone thinking about this for a living.
Yeah. There's this romantic idea of like the quote unquote, like scholars, right? You probably want someone thinking about this for a living. It's yeah. Yeah.
There's this romantic idea of like the quote unquote, like scholars, right?
Yeah. This idea of like, OK, there's so many humans and we have so much money
and we've built the civilization.
People don't have to worry about just how to survive day to day.
Yeah. What if we have a building
where just a group of people get together and think about stuff and just like
like read all the books and like, then when we need an expert,
we go to them and go like, what do you think?
What if we put all of the smartest boys in a room? Yeah. How would that work?
It's a romantic idea. It's just that people are always going to be people too.
Yeah. And that's the problem. They've number one,
they're funded by the air force and number two,
the kind of guys who are both
Interested in and able to get a job thinking about nuclear war all day
They're the kind of people today we would cordon these people off to the from the rest of society
By getting them into warhammer forty thousand, right? This is why by the way instead of expert or enthusiasts. I often say pervert
Yeah, I think really breaks it down,
which is like, they're a weird little sick freak who's into this. Yeah, I think there's nothing
wrong with that. You just have to remember that. Right. Like, yeah, I love that idea, Dave,
because think of how different decades of like nuclear weapons policy would be if instead of
bringing in like nuclear weapons, X weapons expert was like nuclear weapons pervert
CNN
Thank you, I mean we're all aware that you're a weird pervert about this or we're gonna take it with a grain of salt
But thank you for your advice. Yeah. Yeah, so the Rand guy wants to jack off on the more ICBMs
Let's let's now talk to and not getting murdered experts. Yeah, exactly. No, not getting murdered, perfect.
Yeah, perfect.
You're right, you're right.
We gotta be consistent, Dave,
otherwise we have nothing.
So the Rand guys are a bunch of,
they're war gamers, right?
Like a lot of them literally are,
but that is the kind of guy that is drawn to this job.
These are like game theory nerds.
Yeah, exactly.
And they didn't have anything better to do
in the 50s and 60s,
because there weren't many good war games
than give the president bad advice about Vietnam.
Secretary of Defense and A-list war criminal,
Robert McNamara, got most of his top aides
from the Rand Corporation,
and they provided more recommendations
on US policy in Vietnam than any other organization.
In fact, Rand reports were critical in influencing every stage of the war in Vietnam.
And this is where we really get into the think tank evil. By the mid 60s,
LBJ was trying to decide should we escalate US involvement in the war or not. At this point, like
64 or something like that, the US could have backed out, right? We could have left. We could have said like,
But the US could have backed out, right? We could have left.
We could have said like, sorry, this regime is bad.
We made a mistake.
Let's go.
And North Vietnam probably would have been like, hey, that's great.
That's all we ever wanted.
Like, we're good.
No more conflict is necessary.
This is not what happens because a researcher named Leon Gower, who was a project headed
Rand, published several papers on morale among North
Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. He spends months traveling around the country talking to
captured North Vietnamese soldiers, Viet Cong militants who had been captured and stuff during
actions, and also just a bunch of villagers living around the line of contact at the time.
His conclusion based on these interviews is that Vietnamese morale is right around the line of contact at the time. And his conclusion based on these interviews is that
Vietnamese morale is right around the corner from collapsing.
If we just stick it out a couple more months,
victory is inevitable, that we've got them on the ropes.
Now, we do not have them on the ropes.
They talked to prisoners and was like,
I talked to all these people that were captured
and I predict their morale is low. They're really sad, I talked to all these people that were captured. Yeah. I predict their morale is low.
They're really sad. I think we're winning.
Yeah. I talked to all the people who would be sad.
That's ridiculous.
Of course not. Yeah.
You talk to the talk to the British people who were captured in 1940.
Yeah, they're probably pretty bummed about the way the war is going.
And this is the thing about experts or sorry, perverts,
which is that like it's so tunnel vision, right?
Where it's like it's also academic that a lot of the time the big thing they're missing is like the the big obvious thing
Or the human factor and that that happens, you know, that's like I think a legit criticism of like
Colleges and shit like that. Yes, it's just a legit criticism of the way human beings analyze.
There's that famous study of like World War II,
they're looking at like all of their planes
that get damaged.
Like where are they getting damaged?
Those are the parts of the planes we should reinforce.
You can see that diagram that's got like,
here are all the areas that planes are most often damaged in.
And then they realized later like,
well, but we're just counting the planes
that actually made it back.
So actually those aren't the damage, that's not the damage to focus on, just counting the planes that actually made it back. So actually those aren't the damage.
That's not the damage to focus on.
It's the planes that went down.
We should be paying attention to that's such a good example.
Yeah.
That's what's going to happen with all of Vietnam.
And I'm going to quote from a report in ramparts magazine,
which is the thing that no longer exists, but was fucking dope for a very long time.
And this is their report on the Rand Corporation in Vietnam.
It was Gower's analyses that provided the scientific underpinning for the light at the
end of the tunnel mentality that was so crucial to the escalation of the war and the devastation
that followed.
In 1966, his work was identified by Karl Rowan as the study which lies at the heart of President
Johnson's strategy.
The implications of the Gower study are profound, for they indicate yet another aspect of the
erosion of democratic decision-making process that has attended every phase of the present
conflict.
For both the rand interviews of the NLF cadre, the most complete portrait available of the
other side in this war, and the reports from Leon Gower were classified and kept securely
within the contract between
the war bent executive and the private corporation and thereby unavailable to the American people.
In fact, to this day, Gower's reports are unavailable to Congress and you will have
to read them in ramparts."
This is by far the best collection of information that we had at that point on North Vietnamese
people's thoughts on how the war was going.
It was entirely filtered through the lens of this very biased man who was being paid
effectively by the US Air Force, but was in a private corporation.
None of his work or methodology was open to being scrutinized by the public and his analysis that we were right around
Right around the corner from winning in Vietnam
Had the biggest impact on LBJ's decision to escalate of any like individual factor. That's bleak
That's it's really bad, right? You probably shouldn't do it like that. Right?
It's like according to this expert who literally like it's asking
an expert to look into whether or not they should continue to pay this person and you
should have the job too. Like it's that's like when when one of the possibilities of
like your study means that you no longer get to do the thing you're doing, you shouldn't
get to do that study, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's the same thing with like police departments,
like inspecting each other, investigating each other over crimes? Yeah. Yeah, it's the same thing with like police departments, like inspecting each other,
investigating each other over crimes. Yeah. Probably shouldn't let it because it is it
is like as the as ramparts, it's really anti democratic, right? Because you've got a bunch
of people saying, I don't think we should be involved in Vietnam, because why in the
fuck are we sending soldiers to Vietnam? And then you've got the president saying, well,
look, you're all a bunch of casuals,
a bunch of yahoos who don't know anything.
I've talked to the experts
and they say we're about to win.
You know?
Yeah, it's such a tricky,
this is where nuance comes into play
because there's this idea like, you know,
very recently we had something that happened
in this country where a bunch of experts were saying,
everybody needs to do this thing.
And people were like, ah, screw the experts. Yeah.
And there was sort of this battle over where it's like sometimes experts,
like when it's very, when it's very black and white is just like, yeah, you know,
you should probably just do what they say. Right? Like, you know,
if someone says, you know, where says don't lick toilet seats.
Well, I probably won't.
Yeah, it's very tricky because I understand why over years and years there
are people who are like, ah, fuck the experts, because then you get these cases
where it's like, like you're saying undemocratic, where everybody's sort of
saying like, we should do these, I should have the freedom to do these things.
Or I believe we should do this.
And it's like, no, we're going to consult this handful of people to make the decision. Feels very undemocratic.
And for the most part, it's just like it's, there's no right answer across the board, right?
Where it's like, I wish we were undemocratic about like climate change.
Like I wish governments would just go,
listen, this is what we're doing,
because otherwise we'll all die.
But that's very dangerous thinking across the board.
So it really is a case-by-case situation.
Yeah, I mean, the overwhelming lesson of history
is that there's actually no good way to do things.
Yes.
But the right way certainly isn't the one we're doing.
I think we can all agree on that.
And you know what else we can all agree on, Dave?
What?
Products and services.
Oh!
I used to have so many men.
How this beguiling woman in her 50s.
She looked like a million bucks.
With zero qualifications.
She had a Harvard plaque.
Tricks her way past a wall of lawyers and agents.
She's got all of these Maseratis and Bentley's
all in the driveway.
Is it like a mansion?
Yes, it's a mansion.
That this queen of the con uses to scam
some of the biggest names in professional sports out of untold fortunes.
About six million.
Approximately 11 million dollars.
Nearly 10 million dollars was all gone.
Employing whatever means necessary to bleed her victims dry.
She would probably have sex with one of her clients.
Hide your money in your old
Richmond because she is on the prowl. Listen to Queen of the Con, Season 5, The Athlete Whisperer
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We're back, Dave.
The Rand Corporation. When we left them off, they had just told LBJ,
hey man, just a few more guys,
just a few more hundred thousand US troops,
and it'll win us the war.
We're right around the corner.
Like the Vietnam's on the ropes,
Northern Vietnam can't hold out much more.
They're just about to give up, right?
Right, and then we won.
Yeah, yeah, as we all know, 1964 was the last year
of the Vietnam War before our glorious victory.
And we started air dropping McDonald's' into the jungle.
So when you look at like the kind of analysis
the Rand Corporation was providing to the US government,
the Johnson administration during Vietnam,
they kind of dispassionately advised this kind of ladder,
a ladder of escalation is how it's usually described, right?
Where like, if the enemy does this,
then you add more troops.
If the enemy does this, then you carry out an offensive.
If the enemy does this,
then we launch another bombing campaign, right?
And this was-
You said ladder of escalation?
Yes, yes.
It's called an escalator.
An escalator.
I don't know if they had them back then.
It was the 60s.
It was the 60s.
We hadn't invented science yet.
They were throwing spears out of planes.
That's how the Air Force worked.
And all of this, this like ladder of escalation that Rand advises, it's based off of their belief about what Vietnam would do in response
to us ordering a bombing campaign of the North or of their capital.
It was based on their understanding of this is what an opposing government would do in
this situation.
So they're thinking, if our capital was bombed, how would we act?
We would probably seek to sue for peace or whatever
because Americans would not put up
with the capital being bombed.
That would be a real issue for us, yeah.
We'd freak out.
We'd call french fries freedom fries for a while.
We would lose our minds.
Things would get very embarrassing.
Yeah.
Actually, I mean, the idea was that,
I think you've actually predicted what happened here
Which is that like well when they bombed our capital we went insane
We didn't we didn't seem that we didn't go for negotiations
But the rain corporation is like well if we bomb the capital via North Vietnam will want to come to the negotiating table
They'll make concessions to us then right? Yeah, it feels like we were we were riding high on nukes
Which is that
like, I get why, like, well, I mean, Japan had already surrendered, right? I'm pretty
sure or like, no, no, no. They, I mean, that's a whole separate, but like, it's all to say
that like nukes was a new thing. And so seeing a new, not knowing what it is, I can imagine
the government being like, Oh, okay, we're done here. You know, like, I don't know what that is.
Yeah. It, it, because like the nukes are such a, you know, we dropped two nukes on Japan
and the government sues for peace, right? Um, that's the, the reality of what was going
on is a bit more complicated than that. But because that's like kind of the last thing that happens,
you do get this attitude that like, well,
we can bomb our problems away with enough bombs.
And the reality is that, yeah,
we bombed the shit out of Japan prior to that,
and they didn't surrender until the nukes,
and we bombed the shit out of Germany,
and they didn't surrender because of the bombing, right?
Bombing doesn't make people surrender usually,
and it doesn't in the case of Vietnam, right?
The Rand Corporation has utterly misread North Vietnam.
Like they are not going to respond
to the ladder of escalation the way we expect they are,
as David Landau wrote in Ramparts.
Underlying almost all of Rand's work on the war
in the late 60s and early 70s was the unquestioned assumption
that the enemy in Vietnam would behave
just like any other sovereign power at war, that he could be lured
by attractive negotiating offers, which fell short of his stated position, or that, refusing
to negotiate, he could be brought to the peace table with the threat and use of force.
It was a universal failure to grasp the unique nature of the insurgency in Vietnam."
In other words, the kind of guys who work at Rand, who are like war gamers, who were obsessed
with their own careers and like rational thought, could not accept that like, well, there's people
over there that believe in things, right? The people running the war effort in North Vietnam
might not just come to the table because they get scared because of a bombing. They might actually
have principles that they're holding to, you know? Yeah, that seems like an oversight that's common,
which is like looking at them like NPCs, you know?
Where it's like, if we do this, then they'll get scared.
It's dehumanizing the enemy, right?
And the thing about doing that is it often screws yourself over,
where it's like, if you're not thinking about them
like human beings, then you don't actually know how to deal with them.
That's exactly it.
And it's the same thing you get with like we're seeing with the Houthis right
now, right?
Where it's like, okay, well, we sent, we started bombing them.
Oh, that hasn't changed what they're doing.
They're still still throwing cruise missiles at ships.
Yeah.
It's almost as if, yeah.
Yeah.
No, you can even scale it down.
Like, I think like that, that whole libs of Tik TOK interview where she just
froze up to me has that stinks of like, yeah, they have this idea in their head
of like a liberal journalist, this straw man. And then when you actually sit
down with these people or like Elon Musk and Don Lemon, where it's like, then
you realize like, Oh, they're completely unprepared for this situation because they had this straw
man in their head that they thought like, Oh, this will be easy. And then so like it's
this it, yeah, you can scale that up to war too, where it's like, it is like the same
psychological, like the, the, the Rand corporation in Vietnam are in the same position. Just
like, yeah, Elon Musk in that interview or the libs of TikTok lady when she got,
like, this happens repeatedly.
I mean, it's the same, you could go back to like Nazi Germany, right?
When they invade Russia being like, because they're very much, if you look at like the
Rand Corporation is telling LBJ, they're right around the corner from collapse.
Just push a little harder and they'll fall apart.
Hitler invades the USSR being like, yeah, if we just kick in the door, everything's
going to collapse.
It's like, no, it never quite works that way, does it guys?
No, especially not with Russia.
Anytime you're trying, you should think about this when people talk about like, oh, you
know, the Republicans, you know, don't have any real strength.
Like we outnumber them by so much, you know, Trump is on the ropes, right? All we have to do is push a little harder and we'll beat them forever.
Yeah.
Anytime anyone's telling you that about your enemy, no, people believe in things.
It's hard to actually win a fight like this.
It's wild how we keep doing it because like this, not to deviate too far, but like the Oscars this
year, they like read a Trump tweet on stage
and everybody had a good laugh.
And it's like, do you remember the first election?
Like you guys gonna, like they're such hubris.
And it's like, when does this ever worked out for you?
Jesus Christ.
Part of it, this reveals something like fundamentally
like kind of horrible at the center of a lot
of the human experience,
which is that a huge number of people don't wanna think
that there can be other people who believe
wildly different things from them and really believe it.
Not just like doing it to be like evil or like try to like,
but like actually have, like that is the center
of their being.
Like the idea to a lot of these guys,
the idea that like, yeah, in Vietnam,
there are actual committed communists,
nationalists who are willing to die,
lots of them for a cause
and are not willing to compromise on that cause, right?
You almost can't believe that
because then you have to kind of accept that like
People can live in a way that is wildly different from how I do and there's they're just as much people. They're not like
Brainwashed or anything like this is actually just a deeply held set of beliefs, right?
And even if you think they're doing it like they don't fully believe it or they're doing it now
I mean we have like what sunken cost felony or a fallacy or I call it being pot committed,
which is like that idea that when you've put so much into it,
you're not going to back out.
Yeah. And that's, that's, that's really where we're, we're headed here.
Cause the Rand corporation is very,
very much integral in the U S getting pot committed to Vietnam.
Obviously you can trace a lot of people's deaths back to the RAND Corporation's work
there.
This has two major effects on domestic politics in the United States.
One is that think tanks and experts, the concept of expertise.
You brought up the way in which a lot of people reacted to experts talking about what we should
do with COVID.
A big part of why there's such a rapid backlash
to like very basic public health shit,
it all kind of starts with the backlash to Vietnam.
All of the experts say, we're about to win,
throw some more shit in here, right?
Throw some more money behind it.
And they're horribly wrong.
And that kind of, that helps sort of fuel
this anti-expertise backlash in American popular culture, right? And it is you have to say that this is a big part of conservatism today
It's not wrong for there to be that backlash, right?
You should be really skeptical about people who claim to have expertise in this shit. Absolutely. Yeah
Yeah, all about the nuance where it's like being able to think critically about these things is a good idea.
Yeah.
It's just that that's not often what people do.
Yeah. Unfortunately, the response for some people is like, well, since all the experts are crooks, I'm just going to vote for the angriest man I've ever seen.
You know, well, that's not really a good idea either.
It's like, well, that's not really a good idea either.
The other equally important takeaway though, and this is kind of, it might seem like it's separate,
but a lot of people recognize both these things
is that think tanks have power, right?
A bunch of eggheads writing policy papers
helped provide support for an insane escalation in Vietnam.
And that means there's a lot of power
in having eggheads write policy
papers right and if you pay for those policy papers maybe you can get eggheads
to support any insane policy you want to push an American society right and this
is deeply attractive to the oligarchs who had fought like hyenas against the
New Deal these people had been infuriated by the Great Society as well.
That's LBJs right alongside Escalation to Vietnam.
LBJ is pushing some of the most substantial social welfare programs in the history of
our country.
These people who had fought against the New Deal but had given up were feeling kind of
hopeless at like, we can't stop the anti-war movement from rising.
That's continuing to frustrate them in like the mid-60s.
And also we couldn't stop this like raft
of social reforms from going through.
But what they sort of start to realize is that
because the liberal establishment
has gotten so in bed in Vietnam
and in bed with this kind of like cadre of experts
who backed their stupid ideas for what to do there,
there was an opportunity, right?
An opportunity to actually reverse this kind of feeling
that conservatism is always on the back foot
and start taking strides forward
to become the dominant ideology in the country, right?
This is like a thing that's starting to happen
in the mid-60s.
You could be forgiven if you had thought that like
the ideological battle between conservatism
and like liberalism had still been won by liberals
in the 60s.
It would have looked that way because 1964
is when we get the candidacy of Barry Goldwater.
And Goldwater is, he's like the craziest person
anybody has ever seen in 1964 in politics.
I talk about, people will always point out on the subreddit,
well actually he was like pretty moderate on a lot of things
by the end of his life, he was like pro-gay marriage
and pro-weed and stuff.
And like all of that's true, but in 1964,
he is the guy who is, he's coming up on stage
and he's saying like,
extremism and defense of liberty is no vice.
Let's lob a nuclear bomb into the men's room at the Kremlin.
Lazy, dole happy people wanna feed on the fruits
of somebody else's labor, right?
He comes up when he gives his speech at the RNC in 64,
he talks about how like the Democratic Party
and the network news programs are under the direction
of Marxist ballet dancers.
And that like their God is Mammon, right?
Like who is money?
Like money is the God of the liberal establishment.
He is kind of a maniac, right?
He's very reasonable compared to like modern Republicans.
But this is how people think about him at the time.
And Goldwater, like this is a very scary moment
for anyone paying attention because the,
what they'll notice, people who are at the Cow Palace, which is a very scary moment for anyone paying attention because what they'll notice,
people who are at the Cow Palace,
which is the place in San Francisco
where the RNC is happening then,
will note that his followers are,
they're proto-Trumpists, right?
They are into him and excited about him
in a way that nobody was for precedence, right?
It was this weird, Hitlerian kind of cult of personality that he had.
It was small, but the extremism with which he was embraced by these kind of what will
become known as the New Right was really concerning to a lot of people for good reason.
It might have looked because Goldwater loses badly.
LBJ gets 61% of the popular vote.
You can see how some conservatives were like, well, this means we're fucked forever,
right?
This guy Goldwater has set us back generations.
We went too hard, too fast, and we lost badly.
We have to go to the middle, right?
That's certainly what, if this were reversed, if you had an actual hardcore leftist presidential
candidate get defeated that badly
The Democratic Party's lesson would be we can never ever do anything again, right? Like yeah, it's back to the future
I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet. Yeah, I guess you guys are gonna love it. That is what happens here. Yeah, exactly
I mean this this plays into like I I've talked to like punks who were sentient in the eighties when
Reagan was elected and they talk about this idea of like when Reagan got elected, I thought,
Oh, the world's going to end. And then it didn't. And this is kind of what they did
to that movie Oppenheimer, that idea of like, yeah, it kind of did. Like that's the thing
we don't realize is when we say like, Oh, Trump's going to fucking destroy the world
or whatever.
It's like not immediately. It's more about the fact that these people are going to set
us into this direction. That's just going to keep snowballing where we've
now said, Oh, it's okay for this person to have to even run for even just
running for president. We're basically saying like we're now entertaining this
idea and maybe it wasn't,
maybe people didn't go for it this time,
but okay, let's just slowly roll it out
a little slower next time, you know?
There's some people on the left who are like actual,
like Lewis Lapham of Harper's,
who seems to recognize what Goldwater means.
Yeah.
You get a bit of that, Hunter S. Thompson
is kind of one of the people who sees the Goldwater
and is like
Oh fuck. Oh fuck because he he's just got a pretty good understanding of like American culture and like okay
This is going to keep being a thing
It's only gonna get bigger a lot of the people who had been Goldwater backers a lot of these these guys were talking about
This cadre of like super conservative
Multi millionaires most of them who had inherited their money.
They are like, they kind of have this brief flash of hope,
a lot of them for Goldwater,
but there's also like this deep crashing frustration
when he fails and this sense that like,
well, we've lost forever.
We just can't, we're not gonna be able to stop communism
for taking over the country.
And in this article for Harper's,
Lewis Lapham describes a meeting of these guys at Bohemian
Grove in 1968, which sets the mood of this particular cast well.
In the hearts of the corporate chieftains wandering around the redwood trees in the
Bohemian Grove in July 1968, the fear was palpable and genuine.
The croquet lawn seemed to be sliding away beneath their feet, and although they knew
they were in trouble, they didn't know why.
Ideas apparently mattered, and words were maybe more important than they had guessed.
Unfortunately, they didn't have any.
The American property holding classes tended to be embarrassingly ill at ease with concepts
that don't translate promptly into money, and the beacons of conservative light shining
through the liberal fog of the late 1960s didn't come up to the number of clubs in
Arnold Palmer's golf bag.
The company of the commercial faithful gathered on the banks of California's Russian river
could look for sucker to Goldwater's autobiography, The Conscience of a Conservative, to William
F. Buckley's editorials in National Review, to the novels of Ayn Rand.
But that was kind of all they had, right?
Was this kind of like aopian conservative fiction, because it seemed
like the situation was so bleak. But salvation was not far away. Nixon is going to win, right?
Yeah, he sure is.
Yeah, he's going to become the president, and that's going to be like kind of a fucking
disaster. But they couldn't really see that coming. It didn't seem likely until a bunch of other shit
falls into place later that year.
So it's a desperate time for these guys.
Obviously though, shit starts to go their way
pretty soon after this moment.
In 1971, a Richmond corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell
wrote a confidential memorandum.
He had been an intelligence guy in World War II.
His whole thing in World War
II, Lewis Powell had been like, he'd written lovingly about the bombing of Dresden. Like
this is, we did a great job with Dresden. This is really like the finest tower of our
air power, you know? Really murdering all of these civilians and not getting the Germans
to surrender. After the war, he chaired the Richmond School Board, where he, Richmond,
Virginia, where he had fought like hell against the attempts to desegregate public schools.
And then once he failed at stopping schools
from desegregating, he took a job representing
the Tobacco Institute during the height of its evil.
So this is like a guy, this is a man
whose business is being the devil, right?
I was about to say, when people ask, what do you do?
And he's like, you know, like evil stuff.
I'm evil, yeah, general evil.
Yeah, yeah, sundry evil. So this is like, I'm general evil. Yeah. Yeah. Sundry evil.
So this is like a pretty impressive bastard memorandum.
And so after Nixon gets into office,
a couple of years in conservatives are like
happy about some things, but there's also like,
especially the hard right, the Goldwater right,
doesn't really trust Nixon.
Cause even though he made his bones as an anti-communist,
he's like gonna be friends with Mao,
he establishes the EPA.
So there's still this feeling that like,
even though this guy's a Republican,
we're still losing the ideological war
if a Republican is doing all this stuff, right?
We need to get a real, Dick Nixon is too sane
and even-handed, we need a real maniac in there.
And so Lewis Powell in 1971 writes what becomes known as the Powell Memorandum. So this is,
to kind of provide some additional context, Powell is this, he's a very prominent lawyer.
He gets asked by Nixon in 69 to join the Supreme Court, and he's like, I don't really want
to be in the Supreme Court, right?
And so a couple of years later, Nixon asks again, and in 71, Powell is like, yeah, I'll
join the Supreme Court.
And in kind of the period before he actually takes that job, one of his friends, who's
the education director of the Chamber of Commerce, is like, hey, before you become a Supreme
Court justice, I need you to write a memorandum on how we can win the culture war in the United
States.
And so Powell writes this thing titled Attack on the American Free Enterprise System that
gets distributed to the Chamber of Commerce is like the body and the government that interfaces
with all of the corporations, right?
That's the basic idea of what the Chamber of Commerce is. So he writes this memo and it goes out to all of the people running the biggest
companies in the United States. This memo from this guy who's going to become a Supreme Court
justice. And he is not going to disclose that he's written this memo when he's being confirmed as
Supreme Court justice because of, as I described the memo, it will become obvious why he didn't
want to talk about this. Wait, so nobody knows he wrote it or he just, the public doesn't know.
All the rich people know he wrote it.
Okay.
The public does not.
So like Jerry, he Jerry Maguire'd all the rich people. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So the memo starts with him talking about like Ralph Nader, you know, as this
like boogeyman. He's like, we have a bunch of demons stalking the property classes in
America and chief among them is Ralph Nader.
Oh no.
Because in 65, Nader had published this book called Unsafe at Any Speed, which forced the
automotive industry to include seat belts and shit, right?
Right.
He writes this book, everyone is dying in their cars.
There are no safety features and everyone has one.
We should probably make it mandatory that there be safety features in cars.
This used to be what he was known for.
Yes.
Like before he ran for president, like this was his thing.
Yeah.
And it was a great thing to do.
And it's, this is part of this whole like sense of doom they have that
there's no stopping progressivism because this book comes out and immediately.
Like there's not like this massive counter punch to it where people are
like, we need to cancel Nader counter punch to it where people are like,
we need to cancel Nader for being too woke.
Everyone's like, oh yeah, we should have seat belts.
That seems like a good idea.
And automotive companies are like, but this is going to cost us a lot of money, right?
And Powell describes himself as terrified about the reaction to Nader's work because
he sees it as evidence that socialism is inevitably taking over the country, right? The first thing's corporate power is a pillar holding up American greatness and
they're eroding it. You know, that's how he describes it.
It's wild. This attitude we have about corporations that they, we see them as like a deity because
this idea of saying you've made something that's unsafe, we need you to make it more
safe and then corporations go, but that's going to cost us a lot of money.
The proper reply to that is, okay.
Yeah.
Like fine with us.
You still have to do it.
We're still going to make you do it.
You know, like, uh, you don't really have a choice.
You're making a product that's going out to the public.
It needs to be, it has to meet these standards
that we've deemed safe.
That's it, end of discussion.
And so it's wild that there's an entire political party
who's like, no, we can't do that to corporations.
Well, and that's, and these guys up to this point,
they still, they had felt that way the whole time
as the New Deal and Great Society
and all this shit is going on.
They had felt like we shouldn't let them do this to us and our sweet, sweet money, but
they didn't have a concerted way to counterattack.
What Powell says in this memo is like, the corporate class in America, the people with
money who run our businesses need to be attacking people like Nader. We need to build a mechanism to go to war
with Ralph Nader, right?
Otherwise they're going to inevitably bring this country
to communism, right?
Another guy that he rails against is William Kuntzler,
who's a civil rights lawyer.
He had a hand in everything from the freedom writers
to wounded knee, very influential guy.
And guys like Kuntzler and Nader are the enemy, right?
They're these sinister forces aligned to create a world
in which people have access to food and medicine.
Against such foul enemies, the only response, Powell wrote,
was the ideological equivalent to war.
And I'm gonna read a summary of his memorandum
from a speech in the Senate
by Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
The language in the Powell report is the language of battle, attack, frontal assault, rifle
shots, warfare.
The recommendations are to end compromise and appeasement.
His words, compromise and appeasement.
To understand that, as he said, the ultimate issue may be survival, and he underlined the
word survival in his report, and to call for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American
business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it."
Man, there's something about, when we talk about all these think-takes and experts and stuff,
I really think for the average person, the best metric really is like,
who's always wrong or who's always right? What is actually the result? You know, like this thing take with the Vietnam stuff. It's like, how did that work out? Does someone
consistently? And so with this stuff, it's just like, did we, did we slide into communism
to have seat belts? Did, did this cause like what, what is actually going on right now?
Do you think, do you think, you know, deregulating everything and making corporations get to
do whatever they want? Has that made things better? Are products better? Do things cost
perhaps a lot? Is it, is it, you know, like look at today and be like, what is the problems
today? What do you think caused that? And then perhaps should we listen to the, the
people or the institutions that caused that problem
and continue to cause problems?
It's just so obvious.
That's all.
Yes.
It's very silly.
It ought to be.
But the thing is, it's silly to pretend that this is good for anyone but the people with
money.
But Powell isn't doing that.
Powell is saying, hey, people with money, you are a threatened class in America and we have to organize to
Destroy the majority of the country who wants your money to buy medicine
You know we still we see this today
That the old billionaires is a slur or something like that exactly exactly
Or it's just weird that there is it's not just a class, but it's like a weird culture, right? Where we're rooting for corporations,
we're rooting for rich people.
Where like Elon Musk is a figurehead,
or like people go like, oh, Disney versus Sony.
And it's like, fuck, all of them.
Jesus Christ.
What you're talking about, Dave,
is the result, like that state of affairs
is the result of the pal memorandum success,
because he is laying out a battle plan
for these guys, for these rich fail sons and the companies that they run.
And Powell's vision here is nothing less than a plot to take over the US government from the inside
to damage its institutions so severely that no one would ever be able to take them back.
He directed this letter at the oligarchs in American society, people who are frightened of
any limit to their wealth and power.
He wrote to them, strength lies in organization, in careful long range planning and implementation,
in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing
available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through
united action and national organizations.
His attitude is it's the job of men like him, like me, as the thinker here, my job is to
be like the Rand Corporation in Vietnam, to plot out a path to victory.
It's the job of you guys, the people with money.
All you need to do is put money in my pocket and the pocket of other people like us, right? And we will finance, like if you finance think tanks and like pay for intellectuals for lawyers
like us, we will put out public policy and we'll get judges in place.
And one of Powell's big insights is like, cause again, he's about to become a Supreme
Court justice.
His attitude is like, conservatives need to take over the courts, right?
That's the best way to shift policy because these are lifetime appointments.
The more conservatives we get in the courts,
we can actually take the reins of culture and steer them.
Right?
He's not wrong.
He is not at all wrong.
He's very smart.
Yeah, it's almost as if we designed it badly.
Yes, yes it is.
It's weird that we were like, okay,
we'll have this branch of government, this branch,
and they get, you know, it's like every few years. Yeah, and then we'll have these like lifetime Kings
We should have some God Kings probably some God Kings. Yeah, definitely want a couple of God Kings in there. Yeah
That's so seems like a bad idea
I don't think we need God Kings
Pal's attitude is that every American business should donate 10% of their advertising budget towards propaganda, towards think tanks, towards funding
this stuff, right?
Like every corporation, Exxon and whatnot, they should all be putting money into think
tanks and consider that advertising, right?
To lobby the government and publish papers that push their agenda, right?
Which is, you know, what happened?
A big central part of his obsession is textbooks.
One thing he wanted is he wanted oligarchs to pay right-wing pundits to critique and
attack textbooks for being insufficiently pro-capitalist.
He wanted to pay for there to be organizations to monitor TV networks.
He believed that television should, quote, be monitored in the same way that textbooks
should be kept under constant surveillance.
The goal of all this was to make sure that corporate America got equal time
with like, you know, the interests of human beings.
He's basically saying the next time a guy like Ralph Nader
publishes a book about how cars are killing people,
we need to make sure every news agency gives equal time
to the car companies saying,
but we don't wanna put seat belts in cars.
It'll make them too expensive.
Yeah.
Both sides. Yeah. It'll make them too expensive. Yeah. Both sides. Yeah.
It's a it's it's really good stuff here.
And it's like there's a lot of very modern stuff here. Right.
Like Powell writes that like business owners should use political influence
and money to stem, quote, the stampede by politicians to support any legislation
related to consumerism or to the environment.
And he puts the environment
in quotation marks.
Political power is necessary.
It must be assiduously cultivated and when necessary, must be used aggressively and with
determination.
It is essential to be far more aggressive than in the past, with no hesitation to attack,
not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas and no reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose
corporate efforts
so
You know
Not great. Not great, but it all happens. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, they get it. You're right
Yeah, we're now in a situation where
It's not even like abnormal. We don't think of it as weird. Like it, it's, it's,
it's weird that like these things have to be debated or explained. They have devolved the
conversation, uh, successfully. Yeah. You know, we're like, because they, they follow Powell's
marching orders. Yeah. Right. Where we're, we're getting people who are saying like,
marching orders. Yeah. Right. Where we're getting people who are saying like.
You know, who are who are just publicly like,
this is going to hurt corporations and that's going to hurt you, the worker.
And people are just believing it.
It's kind of wild.
Like, it's wild that trickle down is a thing that's like, oh, yeah,
it'll get to you.
And it's like, why would anybody vote for that?
Why would anybody, an average person go like, Oh yeah, we should, we should
totally just let it go to the rich people and then it'll get around to us.
It'll trickle down to us like piss.
Like, it's just like, that's so weird that we, that people were able to sell
this idea that the upper class at the corporate owners are people that need to be
protected or need to be represented politically.
Dave, I love so much that you brought up trickle down economics because that's where we're
heading in part two.
But Dave, for right now, let's trickle down your pluggables to our audience. Mm-hmm.
I can, I mean, you mentioned Gamefully Unemployed, G-A-M-E-F-U-L-L-Y, Unemployed.
That's a podcast network I do with Tom Ryman where we talk about movies mostly.
We do reviews and we talk about movie news, so on and so forth.
We have a Patreon you can check out.
And then I am the head writer for Some More News, which is a political show that I'm sure
a lot of people are aware of if they're listening to this.
But if you're not, you should Google it.
I don't know when this is coming out, but we just did a two-parter on Lady Ballers,
you know?
Yeah.
The important stuff.
Hell yeah.
Well, everybody, this has been a podcast.
I have been Robert Evans.
Lady Ballers has been a bad movie,
but listen to what Dave thinks about it.
And go to hell.
I love you.
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