Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello.
Welcome to the call it like I see it podcast.
I'm James Keys, and in this episode of call it like I see it, we're going to discuss Florida's newly approved standards for teaching african american history, which, among other things, appear to assert that African Americans receive some personal benefit from slavery.
And we're also going to consider how what we're seeing here may compare to earlier efforts to rewrite history and in America's past, like the lost cause.
And later on, we're going to react to an op ed by Senator Chris Murphy about the dangers of social media and his efforts to do something about that. And we'll also take a look at the bipartisan effort he's a part of to regulate some of the operations of social media companies and the algorithms in particular, that they use to present content to users, particularly minors.
Joining me today is a man who, when he's podcasting, he tends to throw out some wild thoughts. Tunde Yoga and Lana Tunde, are you ready to show us why you're the one?
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Yeah, man. Whoever the wild ones are, remember that story? Guess I'm one of them.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Now, we're recording this on July 24, 2023. And last week, Florida's board of education set forth new standards for teaching african american history. And these standards are they take in a, take into account the anti woke, quote, unquote, policies that Governor Ron DeSantis has been working to put in place throughout Florida.
Now, this, the reports of this drew quite a reaction, with many people seeing this as an attempt to whitewash the curriculum and just going down a really dangerous path. So to get us started tonight, what are your thoughts on Florida teaching kids that, you know from in slavery, black folks may have received a personal benefit, or more generally, the apparent effort we're seeing here to rewrite and recast significant aspects of american, America's history in the name of not making certain white people feel ashamed or feel anything about what happened to.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: I think the biggest thing is that what we're seeing here is something we've seen throughout american history is kind of like a racial amnesia. And I find it interesting that it's the same group of people that keep saying they don't want to talk about certain subjects that keep forcing us to have to all deal with only their own version of these subjects, for lack of a better term, maybe propaganda. And so I think this is no different than what we've seen throughout history. And I think it's interesting for me at 45 years old to live through this. It's almost like this is one of those areas in our culture that I had thought the country had basically settled on agreeing that this history existed. We don't need to dwell on it and focus every 2 seconds on it, but to go back now and just kind of rewrite some of the basic narratives of it. And I think specifically, one of the issues people have had is that there's some references that slavery was beneficial in certain ways to some of the enslaved. You know, I just think that's, you know, for lack of a better term. Right. Whitewashing history in almost a literal sense.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
That one in particular does catch, and that's the one, you know, that led the headlines and so forth and for good reason. Because, you know, to me, though, if you actually look at that conceptually, it really, like, it's a very, very, very racist thing to do or just approach to take, you know, because it not only infantizes the people you're talking about, the enslaved people you're talking about, but it assumes it. Built into that is assuming that they had no skills beforehand, that they were, you know, just rolling around on the ground doing nothing beforehand. And then you pick them up and show them how to walk, and it's like, hey, now you can walk. You know, that's great. But it also assumes that they wouldn't have been doing anything productive in the meantime. Like, it's like the only way that they could have gotten any gotten ahead or gotten any progress in their life is through slavery. And that's the assumption. That's the underlying assumption that's in that statement. And so it's quite. It's quite fantastical to me to see people who call themselves serious people to try to get out there and try to defend that, or even the. That they sat around in a room and said, yeah, this is a good way to present this because it's like you're going a real, you're doing a lot of work there, you know, to get to, hey, you know, maybe you were the example that we've seen thrown out. Oh, maybe somebody learned to be a blacksmith. Like, yeah, they couldn't have learned that. I guess they couldn't have learned that any other place, or they couldn't have learned any other skill any other place. It's like the only way they get it is through this barbaric thing that you're going to experience with slavery and the other, I think you're on to something, though, as far as the people who always tell us they don't want, they call it a race card. They don't want to talk, but really they just don't want other people talking about this stuff in ways that they don't like. But they're happy to talk. They want to talk about it all the time, but only in a particular way that they want things presented. And that's what we're seeing here. It's like, oh, no, we want to talk about this, but only in this particular way. If you want to talk about it. 1619. If you want to have a debate about the 1619 stuff versus this stuff. No, no, we're not, we're not here for that. That's all crazy. But we just want everybody to, everybody just needs to agree with us, so to speak, is the way it is. And if you don't, then it's just all types of accusations. So there's a real intellectual dishonesty involved there as well with what you're seeing.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Well, let me piggyback on that because I think it's, I mean, you hit it on the head and I think I want to discuss the why. Like, I can hear someone listening to us and say, well, why is it racist that they said that? And like you said, well, that's what.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: I just explained because it infantizes it. You know, I mean, let me say it again. It infantizes. It assumes that there was no skill going in that the person, you didn't take somebody who was skilled. And you mentioned to me offline an example of where.
And then the other piece is that they wouldn't have been doing anything with their time in the meantime other than being enslaved. They would have just been doing but for slavery. They would have never developed skills. So that's my point as far as why I say it's racist is that it assumes.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: That's why I was, I was going to kind of throw in a few extras there because. Really?
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Well, you have examples.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why to explain, I mean, first of all, you know, and I think this is important for those listening that may actually, as we're talking, recognize that they might actually share some of these views, right? Like, I mean, there's some basic stuff, right? That part of our culture and the culture of white supremacy kind of historically, really beginning through european colonialism and the american colonies were just a part of that, right? Because the african slave trade was through all of the Americas, north and south and in Europe. So this idea that, this myth that needed to be fomented that blacks were inferior mentally and that blacks were lazy. So this idea that slavery somehow civilized blacks because they had no civilization in Africa. And so what it really points to is, number one, the ignorance of the european colonizers and then the want, even with all of the historical facts and information that have been uncovered, some through technology, I mean, just through, you know, scans from satellites underground to show certain structures that were made, you know, by. By certain groups of people over the. Over the eons.
And we have evidence of, you know, we've talked about this. There's more pyramids in the country of Sudan than in Egypt. Who built those pyramids? You know, like, there was culture and there was knowledge happening on the continent of Africa long before a lot of that knowledge reached Europe. And that's where, you know, you talk about the libraries of Timbuktu and Alexandria and the Greeks, people like Herodotus and Plato, citing the Ethiopians and their dark skin and where they got a lot of this knowledge. And let's not talk about how many times Ethiopia cited in the Old Testament. So Africa, if you look at it from that perspective, has been well known to be a place of knowledge and information, even during biblical times. So there was an effort made in the recent hundreds of years to erase that. And so this idea, like you said, that blacks needed slavery in order to earn skills like blacksmithing and making horseshoes and all that is an affront, and it's. And it's offensive. The second thing is to really expand on the history. Many slave owners and plantation owners actually sought and requested by slave traders certain skilled Africans. You know, there's a whole section of West Africa called the Gold coast for a reason, because they were skilled in mining gold. Europeans didn't have those skills. So the first african slaves brought by the conquistadors in Spain were actually experts in gold mining. And they used to call them negros oros, which meant kind of the gilded blacks, the golden blacks. And so. And then if you look at the southern colonies of the United States, or at least, you know, the british colonies at the time, there was a big demand for rice farmers in South Carolina and the Geechee area because Europeans didn't know how to farm rice. And so they looked for expertise from Africans. If you look at the first vaccines they were brought by Africans, the idea of things like that. So there's a lot of knowledge that was, we could politely say, borrowed from the enslaved Africans by their european colonists. And so information historically has been shared.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: But the first part is important as well. It's sought out. It's like, hey, we need this. Let's bring people who have this forcibly, but, I mean, you get the impetus is. It's one that needs to be resisted, I believe. Like, I understand where the impetus comes from. You and I have talked before, like, wherever there's some in the black community that are uncomfortable with or would rather not mention that there were black people in Africa that were a part of the slave trade. You know, they were going around rounding up people and bringing them to the boats, you know, and there's people that don't want to talk about that or, you know, like, they find that offensive, or it makes them uncomfortable. And it's. It's that same thing that, you know, they're out in front with it, you know, like, hey, we don't want things that make.
The way it's presented is any student. But again, they're nothing taken out. Things that would make a native american student feel uncomfortable or feel, you know, or taken out make a black student feel uncomfortable. But it's only things that are taken out is what they would think that a white student might have trouble with.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: Which is very sad, because many white people don't have a problem talking about this.
That's why it's this projection of this, I guess, smaller group of the certain who want to say, oh, this is, you know, everyone's gonna feel offended. A lot of white folks can talk about this stuff and feel fine, okay, without a problem.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Like, just, you know, that's why I said certain in the very beginning, because. And, yes, I think you're correct. As far as the projection issue, it's like, what you see, basically, is that someone like Ron DeSantis is made uncomfortable by this. Whether the idea of feeling empathy towards people is uncomfortable to him or he doesn't want other people to see things that might make them feel empathy towards someone else and their experience, what do they talk about when you talk about walking a mile in someone else's shoe? Well, it's literally here, like, hey, we got to make sure that people aren't equipped to walk a mile in someone else's shoes in terms of understanding context of where cultures may come from or have developed and so forth in this country.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Like, wow, maybe, maybe. Maybe the fact there was 36 equivalents of Tulsa in one summer means that, you know, blacks, the ability to have, you know, to organize capital, to grow their communities, and, you know, to be terrorized by groups like the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century, to be. To be terrorized and not participating in voting and things like that meant that for a century, a bunch of people were disenfranchised because they legally were allowed.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: To be, you know, or more pertinent right now. They may be more sensitive to efforts that happen right now to either disenfranchise people from voting and say, hey, well, hold up this. We shouldn't be doing this.
[00:12:19] Speaker B: I got an interesting example that I thought of before we jump, and I've mentioned this kind of example before, you know, because I compared this kind of denialism a little bit, like, to Holocaust deniers. And if you think about it, a lot of people don't know that. A lot of people have heard of the camp of Auschwitz, which was an extermination camp. It actually had three camps. There was Auschwitz one was a political prisoner camp for just people the Nazis felt were german, but maybe didn't agree with them.
Communists, people like that. You had the second camp, which was actually the skilled labor camp, where they made weapons and things like that for the war effort. And you had Auschwitz three, which I believe was Buchanau, which was the extermination camp. And there's Holocaust deniers that literally try and just focus on the first two camps. They say, oh, man, there were pools and gyms and people were. Had, again, skilled labor. Was there. Maybe somebody learned a skill in Auschwitz two and all that. No matter what you say about that, one can't deny the fact that in Auschwitz three, at the height of it, they were literally exterminating 10,000 humans every day. And so there's nothing like.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Well, no, but that gets to the point of this is.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: That's my point of saying, like, yeah.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: But you can deny it. That's. That's the point of this whole thing, is that what we're seeing here is an effort to recast or reframe history, to allow more people to deny it. Because if you're taught that, as a matter of fact, then conceivably you can. It's difficult to deny it. You acknowledge what? If you're seeking truth, then it's difficult to deny that. But if you're taught only about the first two, and then somebody later on comes, tells you about the third one, and you're like, well, hold up, I didn't learn about that. That's that, then you can deny it. And that's the analog of what we're seeing here is let's soften.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: That's my point.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Yeah. What's going to be taught so that people who later in life, if they're exposed to different things, they'll be resistant to it, and it's like, no, no, no, that can't be it, because I learned this this way, and then that's. And that stuff gets kind of rigid in your mind at that point. And another one of the, that we didn't mention was about the. When there'd be atrocities. A lot of times within these new standards, what they talk about, where whites were attacking blacks for trying to vote or whatever, they would. They would. In the new standards, they want to emphasize that it was violence perpetrated against blacks, but also by blacks, which is a pretty interesting way to, like, if. If you try to defend yourself from somebody killing you, then that qualifies as you and by you.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Sorry to bring it up, because I just. I just steeped in World War two history as well. Like, you know, people that know their history. There was. There was the Warsaw ghetto, where they're in Poland, where the Germans had rounded up all the Jews in that area of Poland, and it was extremely impoverished and all that. And there was what was called the Warsaw uprising. I mean, that would be like trying to teach the history of the Holocaust and saying, well, no, because the Jews actually got so upset and just stuck up for themselves this rare time in the Warsaw uprising. Then we got to equate both sides and say that the Jews were just as violent and aggressive against the Nazis and the Germans than they were. And that's my point.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: It's slight a hand, though, because they don't. They won't necessarily say, yeah, they won't necessarily say it was, oh, they were just as aggressive. But it's presented in a way to make you think it's a tit for tat. It's both sides of them, like, okay, I will shoot a gun at you and you will run out of the way, and we'll call that a gunfight. It's like, well, hold up.
[00:15:44] Speaker B: No, no, no.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: That wasn't a gunfight. One person was shooting, and the other person was ducking.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: But the real sorry, the more modern actually, in the sad, because I can see the video in my mind right now, is a kid, Ahmaud Arbery, when he got shot by those two guys in Georgia. Remember, he's sitting there jogging, running away. And then at the beginning, that's what their defense was. Oh, well, he tried to grab my gun.
Hold on. He did that after they shot him once already. You see what I'm saying? So that's why it's for guys like us who've seen this constantly in this country. It's.
I would say it'd be offensive if I wasn't used to it, let me just put it that way.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, definitely, you know, like, the thought of trying to make it something where you. Again, don't feel bad about this. Don't feel bad that in this tragedy where people were trying to vote or something like that and there's hundreds of people killed, don't feel bad about that. Or don't look at that and say, oh, man, that's messed up. You know? But I do want to get to the next part, because I know that you're. You're ready to go on that one. The. There's. This isn't the first time that we've seen efforts to rewrite american history and particularly involved with. With issues of race and slavery. And the other one that this kind of reminded both of us of when we were looking at it, was the lost cause. And, you know, I'll let you get into that, but did you just. I want to ask you. And you can kind of set the stage for it, but how do you think this compares to kind of the lost cause and what we've seen that where the effort to make. To recast the Civil War and the Confederacy and efforts by groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy, how do you think this compares to those efforts to rewrite the Confederacy in the Civil War?
[00:17:26] Speaker B: I think it compares a lot. A great deal. I mean, I would compare the daughters of the Confederacy as an organization like moms for liberty today, but I think it compares a lot. But the difference to me is I sympathize, at least with the south. Cause they went through a full war, had a lot of casualties, and had their big cities, like Atlanta, decimated. So in a certain way, I can appreciate that they needed to create some kind of myth as to explain to themselves first why they even engaged in this. I just think that's a natural human response. Like you said, a lot of black Americans are uncomfortable with the idea that black Africans helped Europeans in gathering slaves for the slave trade. It's an uncomfortable truth. And I think that the south, they needed to create a myth to get rid of their own uncomfortable truth, which is they went to war with the United States government and got their rear end handed to them. So the reality. And so that's what I'm saying. Like, at least then there was a war, and they try to cover up the real reasons why they went to it. That's why today, I don't understand what this whole trying to, again, whitewash 150 years ago history when it's all out there. And I think the lost cause is a good example to me in a certain way, and we'll get into it in a second. But of erasing recent or the attempt, let's say, to erase recent events, like the insurrection on January 6, and the same thing to go. That wasn't that bad, you know, just. But if someone else had done that, you know, if it was antifa and BLM, I'm pretty sure there would have been an airstrike on the Capitol that day. So it's. It reminds me that for 170 years, 150 years, however long it's been since the civil war, there's just this certain group of Americans that. And this energy that's there.
And for some reason, they're allowed to act in certain ways and behave more aggressive than every other American. And that's not a racial statement, because there's a lot of white Americans that don't behave this way or if they do, aren't given the deference and allowed to continue to behave this way. So I just. I just. It's just interesting to me that this energy is constantly there. And then we have now younger politicians like Ron DeSantis, who's 44 years old, trying to. He's actively decided he's gonna play to that.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: Well, you know, what was interesting to me, and you sent me a good YouTube link on, you know, kind of breaking down the lost cause and so forth.
You know, it laid out some of the tenets of the lost cause cause. As you point out, it's a myth. So there's. It's not, like, one doctrine that embodies all the lost cause, but there were several things it talked about. I'm gonna throw out a couple of them. The first one, slavery was good for slaves, which was like, hold up. So I guess what we're seeing here, I mean, immediately made the connection for me, is that these new standards that are being set forth by the department of Education in Florida is adopting some of the lost cause mythology, essentially.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:20:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, literally like that. That's a big part of. That's one of the tenets of kind of the lost cause mythology. So slavery was good for slaves, that slavery wasn't the primary cause of the civil war, and you know that it's a war of northern aggression, and that reconstruction and the amendments, the civil rights amendments that came in the 1860s and early 1870s, and the reconstruction time period was punitive. It wasn't to try to restore things. It was to be able to punish the south for seceding.
So you look at those things. And it's like, okay, the first one was the one where all the stars and bells and whistles started going off on me, like, oh, okay, yeah, this is what we're doing here. And so it's something that's very persistent in american culture to this day. The lost cause kind of mythology. You still will hear people talking about people who are smart people talking about, oh, well, you know, actually, the cause of the civil war wasn't really slavery as much as economic divisions and this and that and all that stuff. Overlooking the fact that the economic divisions were, as a result, a result of slavery, and even more importantly, overlooking the fact that the people who seceded, like the leadership of the confederacy, were very clear that their reason for seceding from the south was slavery. So I look at. When I look at. And I. And I learn and I refresh myself because we looked at the lost cause when we did our show on the Ricae instruction documentary. When I refresh myself on the lost cause, and then I look at it in this light, I'm just like, okay, I get it now. What this is basically is. I doubt this is the end point that the Department of Education wants to get to, but this is a step in the direction of trying to incorporate lost cause mythology into Florida state school, the education.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, there's something that strikes me as very childish and immature about this kind of attitude, because it's like the truth is out there. Like, you know, Alexander Stevens, who was the vice president to Jefferson Davis, who was the president of the confederacy. I mean, these guys spoke and told us what they were doing and what they were about. And this is all in. These are. Things are in the library of Congress. This is all in every history book. You know, it's very clear. And what's interesting, how un american these guys were in a certain. I didn't realize this until prepared for today, how Alexander Stevens was openly critical of the founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson, because he just felt that they were too soft about slavery, the fact that they were kind of squishy about it, and kind of wrote that, you know, that it was just a peculiar institution, that it was wrong, even though that it was going on when they were alive. And so I'm going to quote the famous speech, which is called the cornerstone speech, by Alexander Stevens, again, who was the vice president of the Confederacy. So he held some sway, I would think. And he talks about the new confederate constitution. So I quote, the new constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution african slavery as it exists among us, the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. So he says specifically, that's why. So then he goes, Jefferson is there. He's bashing Tom Jefferson. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this as the rock upon which the union was split. He was right. So. And then I'll forward it, because it's a long speech, and I'll quote the prevailing ideas entrained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, which we consider the American Constitution, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature, that it was wrong in principle, socially, and morally. And I keep going. And to end it off, he quotes those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. Talking about the founding fathers, they rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races. This was an error. So that's my point of saying, this is why I can't stand people like Ron DeSantis, and I actually can respect, you know, jokingly say in a series, I respect David Duke and Richard Spencer and these guys, because this is white supremacy at its height. What the Confederate States of America were attempting to do was to be the first country in the world to have their whole basis as slavery and the dominance of one group over another.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: Yeah. And now to reject the idea of equality.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: Equality. That's why he's basically dissing our own founding fathers, like George Washington, people that apparently most Americans hold in reverence and the same people that will hold a confederate flag. That's why none of it makes sense.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: And how this ties in is that despite all of the writings of the people who seceded from the Union, Stevens being one of them, he's not the only one, though. He wasn't speaking out of turn. But despite all that, the prevailing sentiment in the United States over the next 50 years or so became one that was much more aligned with the lost cause because the southerners, as it's been presented, it's complicated because it's tied up in southern identity as well, but the underlying basis is this racist ideology. And so. But what happened, basically, is that it became more, quote, unquote, common knowledge, because the effort to rewrite history was successful even to this day. There are textbooks that are in use in the south that teach a more lost cause presentation of what happened with the Civil War and the Confederacy. And so the risk here, you say, you know, as you point out, this stuff is all written. It's all there, you know, but the risk is, is that when you start going down this path of saying, okay, well, we're gonna change the textbooks. We're gonna teach people a certain way that can. That can work. It's not a given that just because there's some truth that it'll eventually make its way into people's minds. This is one of those other issues where it comes down to who wants it more. And right now, we're seeing and some people in Florida that are working really hard to make their version of what happened, regardless of how much truth there is to it, the version that people know and the version that people learn. And so that's the comparison I see to me. And it's going to take. It took decades, and it's an ongoing thing to try to unwind the historical understanding from the mythology of the lost cause. And so if the further along we let things like this go, the more difficult or it might become impossible with some parts of history, it's just lost to time. Like, we don't even know what really happened. And so it's possible that that can happen here. And so it requires a pushback, a concerted effort to push back against these kind of thing. And that's not just speaking up, but that's also, again, voting and stuff like that. That's how you speak as a citizen in a kind of country like this.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's interesting because, you know, how quickly people try and recreate the narrative, and we talk about things like myths and the need for humans to have myths. And, I mean, that's the battle I see right now with some of our recent. Just this last decade of history.
I was pretty amazed to learn in preparing for today that the first mention of the lost cause was a book actually written by a gentleman named Edward Pollard in 1866. So, one year after their war, I was thinking, man, he's writing this thing while the war is still going on, probably, and by the time it gets published and all that and distributed by 1866. So the book was called the Lost a new southern History of the War of Confederates.
Think about that. A new southern history of the War of Confederates. So it's kind of like when, you know, like alternative facts, like we're just gonna make up something new and just put it out there.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: Well, I mean, it anticipates the idea that southerners would feel shame.
[00:28:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Remember that term about what happened there? You know, they try. They were defending slavery. They tried to jump out. They lost embarrassingly. And then that's not something that they wanted to live with.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: That's where. And again, not to. This is now, I'm gonna be very clear in this, the way it is. We're having this conversation. I'm making this comparisons only to exactly what you said. People that, for whatever reason, feel the need to have to make up a new narrative because they either want to be empowered by something new or they're embarrassed by maybe what happened in the past. This has nothing to do with politics and all that, but I can't help but thinking about the need for some Americans with this kind of energy of, kind of constantly revolting against the system to just rewrite the history of January 6, three years ago, which we all saw with our own eyes. And it was very similar to me when I was reading, like, that speech of Alexander Stevens, which he said exactly why they're seceding. He said exactly why they're doing this. And he said it with pride. And I feel like we went from November of 2020 to January of 2021 with the same thing. People in positions of power telling us exactly what was on their mind, that the election. Telling the american people who supported them that the election was stolen. I remember that a gentleman on the stage the morning of January 6 used the term trial by combat.
There was all this rhetoric about violence and about taking the country back and all the plans that were supposed to happen on January 6 and send it back to the states and all that. And immediately when everything got dried up and everybody got busted and people started getting arrested, then it's all, oh, that was nothing like. Remember. I remember that night already some people on tv were turning it into antifa and BLM. That was a start. Remember, that was the first people who was.
[00:30:09] Speaker A: Then it became a false flag, creating a mythology. Yes.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: And now it's the FBI's fall, just like it was the war of northern aggression. Now it's now the us government's fault that they got attacked. You see? I'm saying, like, it's a very similar pattern and process. And I bet you whenever this stuff starts hitting the history books and textbooks in school in the next few years, there's gonna be arguments about telling the truth about how this actually happened, that this, you know.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: Well, no, you can bet there's gonna be efforts to cast this as, again, some. Some kind of. This is Biden aggression or, you know, some kind of thing that there's no.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: There'S gonna be more of BLM aggression. That's gonna be.
[00:30:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. There's gonna be something that recap. There's gonna be an attempt to recast this in a way that valorizes the people that did it. And we already know that's coming. And so that's where you get into who wants it more.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: Yeah. And the comparisons. I mean, we talked about on another show, the book Uncle Tom's cabin, that was the highest sold book in the whole century, of the 19th century, besides the Bible. And we never really learned that right in our whole life. Going to school and then the level of backlash to that book by people in the southeast. And it's the same thing I thought of with the 19.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: It was propaganda. They were saying it was propaganda.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: The same thing with the 1619 project and all this stuff, trying to just tell. Just not even a different narrative of the country, but of history, but just trying to open it up and include everybody's story. And I saw something this year.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: Perspective, I would say.
[00:31:39] Speaker B: Yeah, perspective. And this is something. I'll kick it back for your thoughts on this. So this year, during Juneteenth, I was watching one of these guys, he'll go unnamed. Cause I don't wanna give anybody any undue fame here, but it's a well known, kind of right wing pundit. And his whole rant was about Juneteenth. You know, they're trying to take away our heritage. They're trying to make this. This isn't Independence Day. This isn't a. You know, and that's what I was like. It's interesting because if you go to any black person, black american, you know, if one of these people actually decides to poke us, one of us on the shoulder and say, hey, Mandev, what do you think about this? Actually ask one of us. And not talking in their own echo chamber, I would be remiss. Unless there's someone that is mentally ill or something, to find a black American that would say, yeah, I think we should place replace July 4, the Independence Day, that we all go to have fireworks and have a good time with barbecues and all that, with Juneteenth as the whole national Independence Day of the United States. No one's ever said that. And that's what I found with all these topics. A lot of these people are just people talking to themselves that keep ginning themselves up with more fear because they actually don't talk to anyone else.
[00:32:51] Speaker A: It's a straw man tactic. You know, you create an enemy, or you create a position that is not a position that other people are really banging the drum for.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: And then you rail against that position as if everybody's confronting you. With that position. But, yeah, I mean, but some of that, though, I mean, that gets into kind of the media aspect of sensationalism, presenting things in ways that disturb people, is how you get attention, how you maintain attention. Which actually leads into our second topic.
[00:33:22] Speaker B: Today, which I got one last one before we jump.
And it's just on this theme of. Because I could also see, okay, what's different about now when people try and create a new narrative for future generations in something we're living through now. Because how were they able to create the lost cause and national it, you know, 120 to 100 years ago? And part of it was the result of what happened after reconstruction when all the Jim Crow laws started and all that, which is blacks were prevented through terrorist acts and then legal laws like Jim Crow laws, from voting and participating in this in southern states. So what happens is there was no counter narrative to the lost cause because anybody who cared to have a counternarrative was being excluded from participating in society, if they're lucky. Excluded. Yeah, if they might have been killed. Yeah. But. But being excluded from participating in any position of leadership in society, you know, so that's the difference with today, which is now we have people who are pushing back on this attempt to rewrite, let's say, past history, like the civil war era, all the way to right now. Right. Like modern, you know, times right now, at least right now, those of us who want to push back and be able to tell the truth in the whole story do have representation. I think to your point, this is where it's going to come down to who wants it more. And you're absolutely right. And everyone listen, listening needs to take James serious. There's no rights in nature, right? There's no rights in history. If we want. If we want these stories told, we got to keep talking.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: And keep voting. You know, like, because that's the other piece about it is just there's. There's no democracy or republic in nature either. Like, those things are set in place right now, and they have to be fought for and defended right now. They create a framework, as you said, war is politics by another means. But actually, we have a framework in place to be able to. To affect change without war. But if we. If we sit on our hands with that and don't use that, then we.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: Gotta talk and, like, compromise, and that's boring, man.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: At minimum, show up.
[00:35:43] Speaker B: Trial by combat sounds a lot funner, doesn't it?
[00:35:46] Speaker A: But, but, but showing up is probably the first step on that, though. I mean, like, all of that other stuff.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: You're right. I mean, in the end of the day, you're right. People gotta show up.
[00:35:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Because none of that stuff is a given. But obviously, I mean, generations of Americans, once they have those things, they tend to take them for granted. And that type of, that's a concern. That's a problem, you know, because the people that are good at ginning themselves up, as you point out, those people are always motivated about something that they made up.
[00:36:11] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: But, you know, our second topic today, we wanted to get to, there's an effort ongoing, a bipartisan effort going on to put some more regulations on social media companies. And it really boils down to this is a child or minor centered approach because it's looking at the effects that social media is having on minors. And there's some crazy things that have been circulating around as far as just how much minors have become. Our kids have become dependent on social media and relying on it and so forth. I saw one headline today talking about that kids are so into social media that they only want recommendations from social media. They don't even want to search on the Internet, things like that. But really what it is, the efforts to legislate some regulation goes into age verification. But also the big one is in which we'll talk about, you know, we'll talk about both of these. But the big one is to stop allowing social media companies to use people's history, browsing history and so forth, to then feed into their algorithm to keep them hooked to, you know, like if you're going to do, if you're going to present them stuff, you have to present them stuff in a more generic way, not in an individualized way, because of how effective, essentially, that is at hooking people when they're allowed to do the algorithms in an individualized way.
So what's your reaction to these efforts? These are pretty heavy. This would be pretty heavy regulation. What's your reaction on these efforts to legislate this, you know, and do you think this is something that has a shot, you know, so to speak?
[00:37:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think to fancy directly, I think it's good that they are attempting to, are continuing to attempt to look what's the job of the government right at the end of the day? And I think if we have this type of data that seems to directly correlate the proliferation and availability of social media with, like an immediate change in the average teenage kids behavior to the negative, you know, depression, suicide, things like that, then I think, yeah, this is what they should be doing. Talking about up there, not talking about Hunter Biden nude photos. So I do commend definitely a better.
[00:38:32] Speaker A: Better use of time.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: Better use of time and taxpayer money. And so I do think this will go somewhere because, you know, I'm glad to see that this is bipartisan. You know, you've got someone like Chris Murphy, who is maybe not publicly well known, but seems to be a more serious democratic senator, and he wrote an.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: Op ed, you know, the one where we saw this first in New York Times, and it's been picked up in other, other outlets as well.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: Yep. And then his, the co sponsor, one of them is a gentleman named Tom Cotton from Arkansas, who I would say is probably on the, on the writer side of the spectrum politically. So the fact that you have these two guys spearheading this makes me feel good in the sense that, you know, it's kind of, it's gonna be taken serious whenever they go talk to their peers because both of them are trusted within their own conferences, in a sense. And I think there is a genuine nature. Both, you know, this is, this is now about parents. Right? So this kind of different from the first topic we discussed today, where there's a disagreement amongst how to maybe educate kids about certain historical topics. I think there's a big agreement from most people in the political world that social media is doing something harmful to kids and they want to do something about it. So I think in the end, that's a good thing.
[00:39:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And the other senators just, you know, Brian Schatz and Katie Britt.
And so you have two Republicans, two Democrats. You know, that's helpful. And like you said, this is, this is what we would expect them to be doing is identifying issues and then trying to figure out ways that they can affect change to address those issues.
To me, I'm, first off, I'm just blown away that people aren't more upset about this in general, in terms of if the social media algorithms and social media, how social media is presenting things to minors is affecting people so much, how is this not page one? Everybody says they care so much about the kids and they're protecting the kids from this, protecting kids from that. And my only conclusion with this is that, well, there's two, two things that I think that contribute to the fact that this doesn't generate more outrage and anger. One is that I think a lot of times, things that get people more fired up are, like, things that gross them out, you know, and like, oh, it's this and that. Like, and I'm not saying it grosses me out. But, like, you mentioned something gay or something like that, and certain people just get fired up about it, and it's just like, oh, my God. Like, it's just. Okay. Yeah, that great. You know, like. Or the shows that they. People get so fired up about that. It's like, that wasn't even something that was on my radar, you know? Like, I'm just like, what are you guys talking about? Everybody's upset about these shows.
[00:41:24] Speaker B: I was gonna laugh and say that it doesn't involve black people. And if you said it doesn't grow.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: So much, well, yeah, we're black people is one of those triggers, too. But it's like, these triggers.
[00:41:32] Speaker B: You're right. Triggers. That's a great word.
[00:41:34] Speaker A: And it's like, things that I don't even think about. I see this and I'm like, all this. This is, like, worst thing in the world.
[00:41:40] Speaker B: Algorithms aren't that triggering. That's why.
[00:41:42] Speaker A: Apparently not. But the other thing, I think, is that I think we're just in a society where people kind of expect unhappiness. So to say that, you know, like, oh, yeah, algorithms are making your kids miserable.
Then they're like, that's definitely miserable, too.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Well, that's what I was going to say. I mean, part of it. And I hate to say this, and I. But I. But I'll say this as someone who left social media completely in 2019, except for LinkedIn, if someone counts that as social media. But I don't.
But in any case, I think the reality is something reflected on something, the theme you're going on, which is, I think most adults are miserable.
A lot of it because. Yeah. And a lot of it because of social media. And I think you're right, um, to really focus on what's going on here with kids would force us as adults to have to look at our own behavior. And the fact that most adults would then have to be forced to admit they're not happy either. Doom scrolling online and looking at their neighbors having a nice vacation, and, you know, someone who's in their early fifties in a nice bikini, looking great, and the friends of hers being jealous because they got a gut. You know, all that kind of stuff is real. And it. And it. And. But that's what causes people to be miserable. So if it's causing the kids to be miserable, it shouldn't. It wouldn't be surprising that the adults are miserable. And just like we talked about, again, not to compare too much to the first show, but people want to avoid things they're uncomfortable with. And so just, like, they want to avoid history, they want to avoid this stuff too, you know?
[00:43:17] Speaker A: But no, but that's the thing, though, that that doesn't seem to hold up when it comes to the social media stuff, because one of the things that Chris Murphy's talking about is, is that the social media companies have learned and have seen this is not something that social media invented. He even gives examples of how this permeates in regular media, but just things that upset people keep their attention more than things that make them happy. And so it's in the social media company's best interest to figure out how to show you as much things that will upset you without taking you. They want to keep you in this zone of upsetness. Not too upset, where you'll just turn it off, but not too happy. You know, you can't be happy, because then you'll. Then you won't need it. You'll go live life. And so this kind of fine tuning of. Okay, we want to keep people at a certain level of upset by showing them things that upset them is. It really does. I mean, it makes me think that from a societal standpoint at large, this. We might already be. It might be too late, you know, because this is our brain. Like, how our brains work. That's been hacked, basically. And this is like, okay, we can lock people in. And I'm someone who doesn't do the social media thing in terms of actually, like, I'll have a private profiles, but I don't go into it and, like, look at it. But the reason was, a long time ago, I real. I didn't like the way it made me feel. And I'm like, well, I'm not gonna do something like, my. I'm all hot now, you know, bothered by this, bothered by that. I'm like, I don't want that. You know, I want to just. I want to. If I'm doing something, I just want to do it. I don't want to have to, you know, worry about, you know, like, having bad feelings because of this. So to me, I went away from that, but apparently that's not the norm. And so to me, and the analog he gave was that. That's why the news media like news. If you go back, not modern news, but even go back 30 or 40 years, they would always show you the bad news, you know, particularly up front. They'd give you, oh, this, you know, shooting here on Main street, or, you know, like, here's. Here's this guy robbed. This other guy because that stuff keeps our attention. And it's a lot of times these things are attention games. But if that's what's incentivized by the social media companies, basically it seems like we may be in trouble.
[00:45:26] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and I think, look, it's like the forever chemicals conversation and all that stuff, because I thought about in preparing for today that the food industry is a good example of kind of the industrialization of controlling something of people. Right. When they figured out how to put the perfect amount of sugars and salts and, you know, trans fats and all that. And then what happens is then we realize two generations later that all that stuff is bad for you and all the negative health effects and all that. But it's almost like we can't get rid of it. Like we talked in some recent discussions, because you've got 8 billion humans on the world, you do need processed food. You do need, you know, certain preservatives in there that probably aren't that healthy, but that keep the food on the shelf because 8 billion people can't live on a farm. So we're going to have cities and the need to have food stored. And so I think that kind of like the forever chemicals that there's just certain things that we've done in the last hundred years that are probably either here to stay or here for a very long time, like the next few lifetimes, that I think now you're right. The way that we have allowed technology to permeate our daily lives and our reliance on it in general means that this isn't going away. And this may be now a new shift and change in the human experience. Just like obesity has become in the last 50, 70 years, you know?
[00:46:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:50] Speaker B: Obesity was not an issue 200 years ago in human society, all of human.
[00:46:54] Speaker A: History, until, you know, like, till now.
[00:46:56] Speaker B: Right now you've got a country. I mean, I'll pick on us. In the United States, it's 67, 68% of all adults are considered obese.
[00:47:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: And it's just because of we have food at our disposal which isn't healthy and we keep eating it. So probably.
[00:47:11] Speaker A: No, no, you can't leave out the piece that you just said. And it's been present industries, industry has been allowed to do it in a way from a profit motive standpoint that maximizes how much we consume of it, much more. So it removes, the concept of eating for sustenance is completely gone from us culturally.
[00:47:31] Speaker B: And I think that's, to me, that's the.
[00:47:32] Speaker A: I'll go ahead.
[00:47:33] Speaker B: I'm just going to finish off and say, I think we, we should expect that mental health concerns like depression and anxiety are probably now going to just like obesity ramped up in here to stay, you know what I mean? So it's not like no one was ever fat. Yeah. Before the 19 hundreds, but a lot more people are fat now. And it's like, not, it's not like no one was ever not depressed or anxious before this Internet stuff, but we're just gonna have a much higher percentage of people in that state of emotion and state of mind.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:03] Speaker B: And no, no.
[00:48:04] Speaker A: And I think that I like the effort. So I want to say that, yeah, they're doing something. I'm happy. I think what they're doing makes a lot of sense as well with there that a minimum age, I think it's 13. To be able to get on the social media at all.
[00:48:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yes.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: Better age verification, you know, so that, that'll make sure that the people who aren't of the age can't get on. Like, for real. Can't get on. And then the big one with the algorithm is. And what they're just do I. So I explain that a little better. What they're saying there is that right now the algorithms are set up to incorporate individualized for each person, their browsing behavior, and then use that to then determine based on their browsing behavior and then what may be deemed as analogs, you know, other people or whatever, or just what the algorithm knows already to then keep presenting content that they think is likely to keep you engaged, keep you there. And what they, what the bill is saying, okay, well, you can do the algorithm, but you can't use their, their Behr behavior. You can't individualize it to that person and say, okay, well, since you looked at basketball, then you looked at baseball, then you looked at real world MTV, then we know the next thing to show you is blank. You know, you can't use there. You can generalize it. You know, maybe you can general, I don't know what it would come into, but maybe you can say, okay, we can just show, we'll show 16 year olds this or we're so 16 year olds in Nevada this, you know, or something like that. They can generalize it, but they can't do it individually. And what this, what that sounds a lot like, honestly, is commercials, television commercials, because that's what they do when you watch cooking show, you get different commercials than you do if you're watching NFL game. And that's generalized by what they think the audience of that content in general would want. And so they're essentially looking to go from what I, the way I understand it, to more of that kind of a model, which is, which would be less, quote unquote, effective of making people unhappy. And thus the thinking would be getting them less addicted and also, you know, not having people as unhappy. The problem is that the profit mode has been established now, or, excuse me, the profit, the connection to the profit and the unhappiness has been established. And so essentially, the companies know that keeping you at a. And then this is, I'll use a quote from, from Murphy. He said that the algorithms on social media, quote, have been designed in a way that inevitably makes and keeps users unhappy. And they are doing that because they've determined that that's the best way to make money. So you can't unring that bell. You can tie one hand behind their back, you can make them cover one of their eyes in terms of the social media companies and their algorithms, but they're still going. If they're, if they're pushing for the profits the way that they're supposed to in a capitalist system, they're still going to try to figure out a way to make and keep their users unhappy in a way that keeps them engaged. And so it seems like, like, can't let that cat's out of the bag.
[00:51:02] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's, it's true, man. That's why I think there's no stopping it. I mean, like you said, I'm glad that they're making an effort, but I think just like with the food, we're going to see, you know, you've got people out there who are in great shape, that are disciplined, that study nutrition, and take care of themselves, and you got a lot of people that don't. And I think we're going to have the same thing. Now, from a mental health side, where you're going to have people that curate their news feeds that deal with cookies and things like that, and kind of like you and I discipline about, not pictures or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Not being on social media too much, because we recognize that it may change our moods and our state of emotion and all that. And you're gonna have a lot of people that won't be like that and will be swayed and in these, their own little bubbles, you know, of reality. And so, yeah, and then my point.
[00:51:53] Speaker A: Being just that we can tie, and we can and should tie the hands of the social media companies to prevent the most egregious forms of manipulation or whatever. But to your point, you know, it's the link between the unhappy causing people unhappiness and engagement has been established.
[00:52:13] Speaker B: Yeah. So we'll see how it plays out. We'll do a show in 30 years, see how this turned out.
[00:52:21] Speaker A: Well, no, but again, I don't think it should not be. I don't want it to get lost. I mean, I commend them for doing like they should do something about it. Like, there probably was a time with tobacco that they looked that people to you and I were, you know, 50 years ago were like, oh, I don't know how they're going to do it. You know, nicotine is chemically addictive and I don't know how they're going to ever get people to smoke less. And society's been able to make progress on that front, so it's not impossible. But it's just, again, I have a lot of faith that the market system and the profit motive ultimately wins out on a lot of these things.
[00:52:58] Speaker B: Well, when they can put porn into a cigarette, you let me know.
The Internet is a lot more enticing than a cigarette.
As much as I know nicotine's addictive, they put a lot of stuff on that Internet that's addictive.
[00:53:14] Speaker A: And on that note, yeah, we'll be out.
[00:53:17] Speaker B: I will leave before I do something else.
[00:53:19] Speaker A: In fact, you need to drop the mic after that one. That's the way to go out right there.
Wild thoughts, but now we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode. The call like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:53:37] Speaker B: I'm Tunde. Winlana.
[00:53:38] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next. Next time.
[00:53:43] Speaker B: I'm.
