Part Five: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

call zone media welcome back to bastards the behind podcast robert evans a uh your brain will put that together in the right order um or maybe that only works with written words maybe maybe it just sounds like i had a stroke i don't know let's ask our guests today uh bridget todd andrew t does it sound like i had a stroke always thank you thank you as a longtime friend of mine Bridget Todd, Andrew T. Does it sound like I had a stroke? Always.
Thank you. Thank you.
As a longtime friend of mine, Bridget, that really helps. As a longtime friend of mine, thank you.
That actually felt pretty coherent. That felt just like lag.
It didn't feel like you were having a stroke. It just felt like there's just some lag.
A little bit of a transmission problem, but it's fine. If that was your parent, you'd be like, let's keep's keep an eye on it.
He doesn't need to go home yet. Let's keep an eye on it.
Maybe we need to take the keys away though. Yeah.
Yeah. They shouldn't be driving that car anymore.
We got to get the F one 50 away from grandpa. He's going to go right through a fucking farmer's market.
Oh shit. I just occurred to me actually, because I met you both right around the same time In like mid 2018 To late 2018 It's been like six years that we've all been buddies Hey We should go to Vegas When did I meet you? Was it 2016? I think I've known Sophie I think I met you Sophie before I met Robert and I we went to a like you went to a Nazi thing together I met you guys to gather in DC that was a great weekend oh boy I remember no cause I'm the one that was like no Robert you're going to DC you have to hit up Bridget.
Uh-huh. Yeah, we had a great time.

We had a wonderful time. It honestly was great.

Yeah.

We had to yell.

There'll be opportunities to go to Nazi marches in D.C.

Ample, I'm sure, in the next coming years, unfortunately.

Oh, God.

I don't, yeah.

That's a subject for another day.

I will say I got to give a shout out because as we're talking right now, the U.S. Marines have entered the California, Mexico border and there's footage of them with V-22 Ospreys.
So we are we are just hours away from the first time a V-22 Osprey wipes out a squad of Marines on U.S. soil yet again.
If you're not aware, these are aircraft that exist almost entirely to kill United States

Marines that the Marine Corps continues to use for reasons that make complete sense if

you know a lot about the U.S. Marine Corps.

So I'm very happy to say that we're about to be suffering severe casualties in a war

without anyone to fight but our own aircraft.

The reason we use them is because they make the coolest G.I. Joe toys.
They look awesome. They're so cool looking, and they're just death traps.
They're just horrible death traps. Like, if you actually care, you would do more reducing American fatalities abroad, stopping the V-22 Osprey than wiping out ISISis it's it's just it's like a it's a drop ship but with it's like a helicopter with like twice as many points of failure yeah hell yeah yeah it's it's like what if you know how helicopters are absolute death traps what if we made it twice as much of a death trap yeah speaking of getting lots of people killed, y'all ready to get back to Oprah? Wow.
Wow. What a transition.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
people online were like, oh, only a matter of time before Oprah sues them. We've had, not to mention anybody, litigious subjects in the past.
We are so far under Oprah's radar. Like, again, the only people who have ever been more famous than her are certain pharaohs and Greek gods.
Like, she does not give a shit about this podcast, people. Wow.
So kind of pivoting off of that statement, I do suspect some of the youngins in our audience may be incredulous at me crediting Oprah with so much influence in trends that today seem like just like massive societal swings, stuff that's too big for one person to have incited. And I have to assure you, Oprah really was that influential.
There is, in fact, a direct line from Oprah to the sort of media that utterly dominates the digital attention spans of people today, particularly Gen Z kids, right? If you spend any time looking at surveys of what Gen Z claims to look for and value in media figures that they follow, you'll come upon one word over and over. Authenticity.
Now, I'm not saying they actually like authentic media figures, because authenticity is a costume that media figures put on. Nobody's really authentic, right? Like, because that's just not the way the media works.
You know, it's all some sort of dress up. It's all some sort of glamour.
But it's the ability to play at being authentic. And I want to quote now from a 2024 study by the NIH surveying the media diet and preference of Gen Z viewers.
Quote, the qualities that young people wish to find in media, especially on social media, revolve primarily upon spontaneity and authenticity. Quote, nobody has a perfect life.
I would like to see a real life that does not come from social media or reality shows. And this is them quoting a female Gen Z surveyed person.
They seek a life without filters, much like what is portrayed by influencers like Emily Polini, who, despite having acne, chooses to show herself without filters and accepts herself as she is. And I'm not saying anything about that specific influencer, but like that's the idea, right? That like Gen Z, they're moving away from like the super airbrushed and touched up, you know, mass marketed like celebrities of the past, which is, again, not true.
There's more ability to filter yourself than ever before, thanks to social media. But that's the that's the impression that people think that they want.
And that impression really gets started. Authenticity becomes a virtue for media figures in the age of Oprah.
More than any other single person, she sparks the shift towards relatable, authentic media influencers who deliberately sought to inculcate and feed a parasocial relationship with their audiences. Oprah did this in part by being open about stuff like her struggles with weight loss, which made people think, oh, she's dealing with the same shit I am, right? She is the same kind of person I am.
This is like, I like her because she's authentic. And that cuts out a lot, including the fact that like, well, Oprah has billions of dollars and enough money to hire personal chefs and personal trainers and take all of the different rich people drugs that make it a lot easier to you know lose weight and whatnot and stay youthful right but again it's perception it's really like pretty impressive how easily like everyone is fooled i think by this like like the difference between authentic and authenticism is like, it seems big to me.
Maybe. Am I just an idiot? Like, I'm just like, this is still very fake, guys.
No, I think there's a degree to which, I mean, you write for TV, Andrew. Like, you're in media.
Like, Bridget, you're in media. Like, we're all in media.
So we all have experiences experiences of like this is the product that people say is authentic and we are aware of the degree of work that goes into the background of like make i mean part of part of why i have the attitude i have on this is that like i have the life experience of turning myself into a public figure and deliberately figuring out like which aspects of my personality are more relatable and marketable to an audience. That's a thing that I did.
It's part of my business, right? But I would just argue that like every child I know with a phone knows the difference between use this pick, not this pick, which is the exact same thing. Like, oh, I look good in this one.
You also like like, everyone sees some, like, you know, the person, well, I like that they're honest. I like that they, you know, they seem like a really honest person.
It's like, well, but you are seeing what they've curated, you know? And I'm not even making a moral judgment about it, right? It's not bad. As a public figure, you have to curate yourself, right? Like, for one thing, you'll go insane if you don't have a part of you that's actually like your private human person, you will lose your mind, right? We see this in certain public figures that happen to be the richest man on earth, right? I wasn't even thinking about that, but yes.
Not even that, but just like the alternative would be a, what, 360 spherical constant surveillance, which is, I believe, a form of torture. It's a form of torture and also how a number of people a number of people get rich, at least doing that for limited periods of time.
Right. What is like a lot of the streaming ecosystem is I have for four hours a day.
I make a panopticon in my gaming chair, right? Like that is one of the most profitable forms of entertainment on the planet right now. And I think when the, because the alternative is like airbrushed and perfect and unattainable visions of people, especially for youth, I can understand why maybe deep down, you know, it's, it's like manufactured authenticity in scare quotes, but because the alternative is so clearly manufactured, it's easy to think like, well, this at least feels a little more authentic, even if it's bullshit.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, it may feel like, especially because of how universal that that kind of talk about I like authentic, you know, people in my media is that it may it may feel like a thing that people have always wanted, but it really is not.
I mean, again, if you remember the 90s, that was not like people were obsessed with guys like Tom Cruise. And the last thing anyone would ever say about Tom Cruise is like that man is authentic, right? Like, no, Tom Cruise is like a fucking like like a mirror that we project on to, you know.

But he's like his his his popularity came from his fundamental emptiness. Right.
And like Arnold Schwarzenegger was a guy who was like actively created during the period of time that he was like in the public eye. If you look at early Arnold and, you know, to the point where he kind of figured out who we was as a human being, like this is not the way we thought about celebrities the entire time that that has been a concept in like our culture.
And Oprah plays a huge role in this stuff. Reality TV is in many ways downstream from Oprah.
TikTok is downstream from Oprah. And the Trump presidency is downstream from Oprah.
Now, I'm not saying Oprah is to blame for this. I'm saying is downstream from, right? In that I'm saying the things that she did helped prepare the culture for that.
That's not implying a sort of moral responsibility for Donald Trump, a guy she

doesn't like and didn't want to be the president. It's saying that the changes that she helped wrought in our culture were part of why we are where we are today, right? And you can just see that at the level of influence.
This is a person who at her peak, 30, 40 million people are tuning into her show.

The degree to which

she has changed

the composition of our cultural soil can't be overstated. And I hope that people can like take what I'm saying without it being like Robert's saying we should blame Oprah for Trump.
I really don't think that's the case. I'm just saying part of why people like Trump is his authenticity, quote unquote.
You listen to his supporters. That's what they will say.
And that being a huge virtue, Oprah isn't the only person who started it or the only person who led to that being the way that it is. But Oprah being Oprah was a massive part of why that shift occurred.
Yeah. I also think something that she does so well that has really been made clear from the last few episodes is that idea of the personal being the political, like really being able to blend those things in this way that's like just irresistible.
And like, it's the reason why her audience was getting up and sharing like their sexual assault stories without even really being prompted. Like Me Too before Me Too was Me Too.

You know, like this idea of really being able to blend those ideas in a way that make people want to connect and engage. Yeah.
Yeah. I think that's that's a great way to point it.
And it's also weird that you make that comment about the personal being political because we're about to we're about to read a quote that's right along those lines. So in 1998, Jet Magazine defined Oprah, the word, as a verb, meaning to engage in persistent intimate questioning with the intention of obtaining a confession.
Now, a good example of how pushy she got with this, and this is I tried to find this clip. Every a lot of the bad Oprah clips that have gone viral have been purged from the Internet, as we'll talk about.
But in 2004, Oprah has the Olsen twins on her show as guests. Now, at this point, they are both 17 years old.
If you are on the younger side and you do not recall it, or you recall the Olsen twins as, you know, adult movie stars, which they are today. Let me kind of walk you through who the Olsen twins are culturally.
These were two of alongside Macaulay Coke and probably the two, like two, like of the three or four biggest child stars this country's ever had, right? They are famous from the point that they are very little kids and they are famous. And this is kind of unusual the entire time that they're children effectively.
This is not a thing where like they're in one big, and then they kind of drop out of cultural awareness, like Jake Lloyd or someone like that. They are in full house, and they remain in movies that are stuff like The Parent Trap all the way up until they are adults.
And some of this is just people like them. They're good child actors.
But also, there's a lot like very creepy pedophile stuff in here. A significant number, a shocking number of adult men will openly admit to keeping track of the when the Olsen twins are turning 18.
This was a big deal on the Internet in the early. It is as gross as it sounds, but it was not a fringe thing.
Like I am telling you right now, this was not a tiny number of weirdo pedophiles a lot of men were willing to put their names to keeping track of that ew yes what a fucked up time to be a young woman on the internet this is the internet we all came of age in yeah it's good to remember that as we talk about how bad it's gotten. Like, well, and great back in 2004.
God. There's like this trend that's going around on TikTok right now, but it's like, oh, you're so beautiful.
And then it's like, thanks. And then you list something that you grew up with that made you the way that you are.
And it's like, this is exactly what that is. It's like, oh, you're so beautiful.
You're like, thanks. I grew up in the era where grown men tracked how old the Olsen twins were.
Yeah. Like, oh my God.
We talk about thought crimes. That's like a fun little joke.
I'm generally against thought crimes. All of those men should have been arrested.
I know. That's.
Fuck. So as a result of all this, the bodies and the weight loss or gain of the Olsen twins became regular fodder for tabloids.
It should not be shocking that I think both of them developed eating disorders. Not really surprising.
So during their interview with Oprah, this comes up and the interview starts with some pretty anodyne stuff. Part one, you can still find unedited online and they're talking about like who's messier in their, in terms of keeping their room clean.
What's their allowance that their dad gives them, et cetera. Later on in the interview, though, Oprah starts to probe the two about tabloid rumors that they had and eating that one or both of them suffered from an eating disorder, saying, quote, I know a new rumor that's recently surfaced has really upset you, right? You know, the one about eating.
The girls get visibly uncomfortable, and Ashley immediately tries to shut the topic down. She replies, yeah, you know, people are going to write what they're going to write.
We try not to read the good or the bad because it just comes with the territory. Either you're too fat, too skinny, and people are just going to write what they, and then Oprah interrupts her asking, what size are you by the way? Now, Oprah, you have dealt with some of the most unhinged fucking obsession with your body weight that like we've tried, we were, I think, quite sympathetic of in previous episodes that's fucked up she's 17 god damn it like oh my gosh i mean not to like i know you've already you've probably talked about this when you did his episode but like dr phil taking teenagers up on stage and like asking if they had breast implants like right this this was like Yeah, this was like What was okay On like Mainstream Daytime television

And again and like asking if they had breast implants. Like this was like, yeah, this was like what was okay on like mainstream daytime television.
And when we talk about modern social media being downstream from this, think of all of the different parents who we now know were like, who got famous as like mommy bloggers or like, I've got a YouTube channel featuring my kids and their development. And it comes out three, four, five, six years later.
Oh, that was an incredibly abusive situation where they were basically turning their kid, like mining their children for money and deeply psychologically and often physically abusing them to make them more profitable. Right.
I mean, speaking of thought crime, the Internet, one of the Internet's sort of positive things is at least there's a paper trail for all this shit yeah like jesus christ yeah you know what's crazy you were saying so so that part of the clip is is scrubbed from the internet where oprah asked their size it is very hard to find so i want to finish finish the scene oh sorry so the girls respond after oprah interrupts them to ask their size like well like you know we're clothing tailored. Like, I don't know what my size is, right? I don't like go to a store and buy clothes yet, right? And Oprah responds, that's so interesting.
I'm obsessed with size. And you're like, I really don't know.
There's a lot there. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know.
Like, you put a team of psychiatrists on that, that two sentences. It was more just what I was trying to, what I was curious about was like, cause in the last episode we watched a clip of Joan Rivers doing a version of this to Oprah.
Right. And it seemed like on misery to man, it builds up like a coastal shelf.
Yeah. It's like, it's, it is wild to, for Oprah to have been upset by the Joan Rivers version of this.
And then, I mean, it's not surprising, but it is really like remarkably unselfaware or unempathetic. When we talked about how much she regrets her wagon full of fat incident, I really think that what she regrets is making like a lot of speculation about her weight personally.
I don't think she has any problem with the way that she is like foisted that same level of scrutiny about weight onto others. I think that she is perfectly fine.
And if that's complacent in that dynamic that has been so unhealthy for so many people. Yeah, I would agree 100 percent, Bridget.
Now, as we talked, I talked about a bit ago with you, Andrew, we're not watching this clip. I would have preferred to play it because it's been pretty well expunged from the Internet.
Now, I'm not going to say I did not spend hours on this, but I spent a good like 20 minutes or so trying to find this clip. And all that I was able to get are like viral clips on TikTok that are heavily edited because a couple of years ago, this particular chunk of the interview went kind of viral on TikTok because people have been one of the things that's been happening for the last two years or so on social media, TikTok primarily, but not exclusively, is people have been like kind of re-litigating some of Oprah's worst moments and she has been receiving some criticism.
So this went viral, and people were like, rightfully, this is pretty fucked up. As a consequence, though, damn near every pure clip, I have not been able to find a pure unedited clip of this moment.
I'm able to find TikTok videos where the audio is overlaid with some shitty AI voice or asshole narrating that makes me want to nuke every data center on Earth like the way these things are like edited and put together and like the whole screen is covered with text and I just hate it I hate the way this stuff looks and I haven't found a clean clip of it that's what I'm saying and that's often the case with some of Oprah's like worst moments you know a lot of this stuff has been purged and because most of her stuff was on daytime tv in eighties and nineties, a lot of it is effectively lost media for our purposes. Um, anyway, I just found that interesting.
There's someone's parents have this on VHS somewhere. Next time you're home for any holiday, check the tapes.
Yes. Probably my late mother, because she did tape Oprah's and she would watch them on VHS.
I have so many like burned in my memory clips of Oprah being not great, but like I probably could not find them. Like I think Nathan Lane has talked about how when him and the late Robin Williams were on the show, Oprah was really grilling him about his sexuality and that luckily Robin Williams stepped in to make a joke out of it and take the heat off of him because he wasn't out she did the same thing to dennis rodman like she really when it came to men and their sexuality she did some like i think we would look at back at some of those clips the way that she was grilling these people and think like well that really wasn't cool but all of those clips are so difficult to find.
Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's a little bit too, speaking of the political, that like, because she's a black woman, we make assumptions of what her like politics and values are that don't have to be true. And we see this in like the actual questions and like the editorial span, which is like fine.
And she's obviously allowed to have those opinions.

But I think there's a big, like, span, which is like fine. She's obviously allowed to have those opinions, but it's, I think there's, there's a big, like we build up as a culture, like who we think Oprah ought to be.
And, and the bastardy happens in the difference between those two things. Yeah.
That's, I think actually a very good way of, of talking about it, Andrew also shout out to the late Robin Williams.

You do like moments like this do like reveal character on behalf of some people.

And it's always nice to get like a,

okay,

he was a really nice man.

That's,

that's good.

I rewatched a goodwill hunting.

I think I may have been for the first time.

I had like vague memories of it.

And that like scene where he's hugging Matt Damon.

I just had the thought like, God damn, there's not a problem in my life that it wouldn't be fixed with a good Robin Williams hug. Like that man looked like he gave great hugs anyway.
Yeah. RIP.
We should probably talk about Oprah more. Around the same time Jet Magazine made Oprah a verb, the Wall Street Journal introduced the term Oprahfication in order to complain that political discourse in the country had become, and this is what you had mentioned, Bridget, public confession as a form of therapy.
Right? So great minds. Well, actually, I think you're considerably a better mind than anyone at the Wall Street Journal.
But you guys had the same basic take. And this is kind of noteworthy because therapy is at the core of Oprah's appeal.
And the growth in our understanding of not just the value of therapy, which I think is generally good, but in the use of like therapy speak in everyday life. And to some extent, the, I think, massive overuse of therapy speak in everyday life.

This is very much tied to Oprah. And the way in which therapy is tied to Oprah is not actual clinical therapy, which is, of course, potentially extremely valuable for people, but a simulacrum of therapy, one that apes the definitions and terms used by clinicians and often apes actual clinical expertise by bringing in oaths like Dr.
Phil, who are in no way actually doing good therapy and in fact are doing things that the ethics of the discipline condemn pretty strongly, but are doing it in such a way that people believe this is what therapy, this is medical work, right? This is somebody actually like functioning as a mental health clinician. And I think that does so in a way, again, a lot of the, a lot of dialogue of discourse on like Twitter is downstream from this, this birth of understanding that there's a value in like talking about mental health in a clinical way but also none of us are clinicians and none of us are doing it right and so we're like medicalizing shit in ways that are in a lot of instances deeply toxic uh and damaging to people a lot of that is tied directly to Oprah.
Spoken like a true gaslighting narcissist, Robert. Yes, thank you.
Thank you. If you ever want to win an argument in a certain kind of group house, you know what I'm talking about? Just be like, he's gaslighting me into taking out the garbage.
Yes, yes. And you'll win.
Yes, I'm being abused into doing the dishes. It's also like even in the absence of the like perversions of it, just the simple act of doing it in public or as a performance, even if it were otherwise largely fine, which it isn't.
I always think back to this happens every so often there's one like six months ago tens of thousands

of people like liking and sharing it of someone being like you know people with adhd have no sense of object permanence yes they do man that's not that's not five-year-olds have object permanence bro that is not adhd you are you are in an attempt to bring uh to to create create empathy for people suffering from severe ADHD, you are like dehumanizing them.

Like this is actually quite bad. Oh, my God.
That's like medieval, like, layman's understanding of the world. Like, that's just like burn the witch type shit.
Yeah, yeah. We're back.
Can we stop with some of of this i saw one that said people that have adhd uh can never pick a halloween costume because there's too many choices and then the reply on twitter was like damn can't y'all do anything yeah again my life is filled with and i have like adhd um the stuff people say about it online just feels like someone talking about aliens. I don't mean to like harp on it so much, but this is one I have like so much personal experience with that.

But I really – and I don't want to get lost down a rabbit hole here, but there's a very complicated issue in it's good for people to have an understanding of mental health and to have an understanding of like therapy. And there's value in that some of those discussions becoming more a part of like common parlance.
And also it can be very, very toxic because people use it and weaponize it to an extent. And a lot of the irresponsibility that we see now kind of reflected down in social media and the way people talk about this stuff really gets launched by Dr.
Phil on the Oprah Winfrey show, right? Where you are using actual clinical psychology as a costume as opposed to as a way to actually help people. Like you are dressing that way so you can say whatever and do whatever.
And in this case, it was for entertainment purposes, right? And a lot of this ties in directly to the self-help movement. And this is, I think, a toxic thing for therapy, right? Because therapy should not be a thing that you do instead of helping other people and trying to better the world.
And that's kind of the message of a great deal of like the way in which therapy is discussed on the Oprah Winfrey show. And you even see stuff like Jordan Peterson saying like you can't fix the world until you fixed yourself, which is simply untrue.
and this ties into this kind of American civil religion of self-help. If you remember the Woody Guthrie episodes, we talked about how during the Great Depression, starving farmers and their kids were listening to prototypes of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, right? Which is basically this shares DNA with prosperity gospel stuff, with The Secret and Marianne Williamson.
The core of it is this idea that like attracts like. So if you're negative thinking, that's what's bringing bad things to you.
And if you want to be wealthy, you have to think like a wealthy person, right? And some of the ways in which this gets passed down, like prosperity gospel, if you want to be wealthy, you need to give money you don't have.

Go into debt to give money to God. And then that kind of thinking will attract wealth towards you, right? Alternatively, if you put down $5,000 for this seminar on how to like automatically generate books and put them on Amazon, you know, in order to make money, that will attract wealth back too.
You have to make the universe needs to see you make a sacrifice in order to know that you're serious about this before you can start attracting the money. Right.
All of this stuff is it doesn't start, obviously, again, as we talked about, this has been going on since like the early 1900s. It doesn't start with Oprah, but by bringing on Marianne Williamson and then by pushing later the secret, she supercharges this shit and she supercharges it at the same time as she is continually on the show, pushing this, pushing therapy and a specific attitude towards therapy, right? Which the overall thing you're supposed to take away from this is you can fix every problem in your life by changing your attitude.
Now, that is simply untrue, right? There are social problems and like, like issues that affect people's ability to be happy that are rooted in politics, that are rooted in history, that are rooted in things you have no control over. And it is true, obviously, your own attitude, you know, can matter a lot and your resilience.
But there's this big thesis of like, every problem can be fixed by altering your attitude. You can even change the way the universe works by altering your attitude that gets wrapped up in the kind of pro-therapy ethos being pushed with Oprah in a way that warps what therapy is.
And yeah, it's just, it's, it's, uh, it's complicated, but I think very profoundly toxic. Yeah.
It turns therapy into like telekinesis magic. Yes.
Yeah. And, and sort of best where it's just like, and I guess me it's like all this shit it's like do you never consider the counterfactual of any of this like just like oh sorry kid sorry about all your cancer you should have had a better attitude like it's so fucking disgusting when you think about any failure case of this and it's oh i don't know it's so hard to argue against but it's just like you're it's so gross for that reason to me well i actually think like it's incredibly like it's i completely it's like gross it's toxic i completely.
But it's also so enticing, right?

Like, I'll give myself as an example.

I've been a little down in the dumps, shall we say, since January 20th.

And, you know, like, you can feel very out of control.

And there's so much happening that I really can't control.

Somebody coming in and saying, actually, you can control it. Don't be afraid because it's all in your head.
And if you just did X, Y, Z, or got right in this saying actually you can control it don't be afraid because it's all it's all in your head and if you just did xyz or got right in this way you can control it that is so intoxicating and especially as people feel out of control like i get why people like oprah turned to this because it works and i have to say like i get why it works i get why it's effective yeah because because there's like a germ of truth like speaking of like Jordanordan peterson i did have a moment where i was like you know most of these boys that listen to him really could clean their room more like and that would for sure improve their lives and then getting some sunlight might help yeah but then once once the little amount of information like actual value of value that they've imparted has paid off everything subsequent to that is complete bullshit yes and it's just like the line of like how valuable this is is i but it's such a like even as we're talking you see how you lose this argument because it's like well okay some of this works but like not all of none of it works and da, da, da. And you just, you become a dithering idiot in the face of all you have to do is be positive.
Like a simple lie is always going to be better than a laborious refutation. Yeah.
Yeah. I think that's right.
And I think fundamentally, you know, part of, part of what's so poisonous here is that it's taking therapy and it's turning it into magic, right? That like, this is a thing you can magically fix and have a breakthrough in 25 minutes sitting on a couch in front of an audience with Dr. Phil, like that's the way therapy works.
And also, that's the way fixing the world works is if you change your attitude, all of these good things will come to you. You don't have to worry about dealing with structural problems in legislation and the government and all of this shit.
Like it's just you. In reality, therapy and making the world better work the same way, which is slowly doing laborious work consistently over long periods of time.
Right. Yes.
That's the problem. You know, it's like that episode of and morty when rick goes to therapy and the therapist is like i get that this is like flossing for you and it's like not exciting and it doesn't happen all at once and it's just boring maintenance but like that's the trick like that's the magic is you do it a lot and you get small gains and maybe over the course of years you feel a little bit better consistently and ta-da, like people do want that magic solution and that magic bullet.
I get why that's really enticing, but that's just not the way it works. And I think this is someone who was in psychedelic culture 15 years ago.
This was one of the issues that we had with it, which is psychedelics, particularly LSD, mushrooms, MDMA have massive potential as a is therapeutic aids, but they aren't magic. And there's a degree to which people treated them both as magic and also as inherently positive.
At this point, I have gone through enough self-described radicalization journeys by Nazis who credited it to an LSD trip that I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. This is a knife what cuts both ways, my friends.
Yeah, it's just a big old scramble and you just wish it works. And also it's such a like insidious grift because it's so easy then when it doesn't work for you to point out that you didn't magic hard enough

in various ways.

Yeah, when your kid actually dies of the cancer they had

because their vibes were off,

you can just be like, oh, he didn't want it.

He didn't want to live enough or whatever.

It's like never the huckster's fault.

Yeah.

Now, speaking of your children dying,

they never will if you purchase the products and services

that are advertised on this podcast. It's the only way to keep your family safe, probably.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share. Gilbert King, I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed. I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.

Bone Valley, Season 2.

Jeremy.

Jeremy, I want to tell you something.

Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2,

starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And to hear the entire new season ad-free

with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

We're back.

So in her book, The Age of Oprah, Janice Peck quotes a history of psychotherapy by Philip Cushman.

He wrote in 1995, quote, every era has a particular configuration of self, illness, healer, technology.

They are a kind of cultural package.

They are interested kind of cultural package. They are interrelated, intertwined, interpenetrating.
So when we study a particular illness, we are also studying the conditions that shape and define that illness and the sociopolitical impact of those who are responsible for healing it. Janice continues, centrality of therapeutic discourse to the framing of the Oprah Winfrey show issues from the increasing ubiquity of therapy as a language of self and interpersonal relationships, and even as a way of life.
Winfrey's media enterprise draws heavily on a self-help model of therapy, with its peculiarly American belief that the individual's power to initiate a renaissance of self, of nation, of other. This promise of individual efficacy and liberation is the ground upon which Winfrey stakes her claim to empower her followers.
It is also the basis of observers' claims that she is an inspirational phenomenon, a public leader, and, quote, almost a religion. Yeah.
Yeah. You know, as we're talking, I just had the realization that, like, what Oprah offers is kind of like of like those like right-wing pregnancy crisis centers near like abortion clinics because it's like it's a simulacrum of the thing that you actually need and it just serves these horrible ends like yeah i guess those are at least directed and intentional and full of lies and throughout all this i will say the thing that is like still kind of there is like it doesn't it still doesn't seem like oprah is being intentionally or anyway there's enough plausible deniability here oh yeah yeah i mean there's there's a ton of And like, it's important not to as we kind of litigate bastardism.
Like this is not an attempt by Oprah to shift the culture. This is just sort of I think a mix of what she really believes.
She really feels like personally, she had so much stacked against her. It was her attitude that allowed her to be successful, right? Whereas the reality is, I mean, among other things, Oprah has said like she was an affirmative action hire that those programs and policies function the way they were supposed to, which was a person who maybe wouldn't have gotten that opportunity because of racism, got some opportunities that she proved to be excellently suited for.
In addition to that, she had the fortune of like having a father who chose to be her father did not actually have to take that role upon himself and provided her with a lot of resources she otherwise wouldn't have had. And like, it's not just it wasn't just her attitude that led to her success.
Right. You know, as in this is the case for everybody.
Right. But even what you're describing, among her peers, she at least will acknowledge things like affirmative action.
Whereas every single billionaire got to where they are with immense moments of chance. They high-rolled many many times in a row and like the overarching like common commonality between most of them is they believe that none of that was chance yeah over at least has a little bit of like like giving deference to someone else yeah absolutely like so there's toxic billionaire.
Yeah. Absolutely.
So there's an interesting bit about, because I think it is important the degree to which she was talked about as like a religious figure is kind of significant. And to kind of make that case, there's a chunk in The Age of Oprah that talks about an expensive self-help speaking tour Winfrey launched in the early 2000s, the Personal Growth Summit.
And through that, I found a review of the Personal Growth Summit in the LA Times, which is a real newspaper that was purportedly reputable, at least in that era. This is what this is the reviewer.
A prophet walks among us and her name is Oprah. You know her as a television talk show host, one of the most popular, successful and recognizable women of our time.
But make no mistake, she is also a healer sent to earth to spread the word. Perhaps it is only fitting that a 21st century wise man is a woman and that her chief medium is electronic.
Buddha might have taken to the airwaves had they been available. Gifted with a profound moral insight and exceptional rapport with her followers, Oprah Winfrey has grown from a masterful communicator into an inspirational phenomenon.
I need to know who wrote that and where they are now. I can pull that up.
Absolutely. Yeah, let's check this out.
Flocking to the church of Oprah, June 25th, 2000 time staff writer writer. They took a name off it.
Oh, you sons of bitches. That's when you know.
It's like somebody was embarrassed by that. And it was like, look at me, pull my name down.
I can't have this detached to me. I've done that.
Now, one thing that's really interesting to me about Oprah is that she demonstrates how quickly the worm can turn for a celebrity once they leave the public eye. Because like 2011, I think, is when her show stops being on the air as a daily thing.
And QAnon starts about a decade later, right? So she is, she stops being a daily figure for most Americans about a decade before QAnon. And yet in 2020, a sizable chunk of the QAnon movement starts spreading rumors that Oprah has been secretly arrested for sex trafficking.
Now, this is obviously untrue, but there are some things that fuel the allegations. One of them is Oprah's longstanding professional relationships with two men who definitely did sex trafficking, Harvey Weinstein and our old friend P.
Diddy. Now, for Weinstein's case, there is a photo of Oprah kissing Weinstein on the cheek, which you can find without much effort.
I have found zero solid information that implies anything beyond a professional relationship between Oprah, who stars in one movie produced by his company, and Weinstein. However, there have been allegations made by other celebrities.
I should note that when interviewed about Weinstein by Gwyneth Paltrow, Oprah said, what I knew about Harvey was that Harvey was a bully and that if Harvey's on the phone, you go, God, you don't want to take the call because you're going to get bullied in some way. That is probably true.
In that, a lot of people talk about, a lot of people who worked with Harvey talked about him that way. He's kind of the archetypal dick producer.
That said, people have alleged that Oprah knew more and was aware of a lot of the illegal bad stuff Weinstein was doing. I think that's also very likely.
A great deal of people in Hollywood knew something. And someone as powerful as Oprah was probably to some extent aware of Weinstein's problematic behavior.
Now, that does not mean she was directly enabling or helping to hide it. It's just the kind of gross thing that a lot of people in the industry did, right? I mean, Seth MacFarlane is like came out and made some joke about Weinstein during one award ceremony or the other that was like a big deal because everyone was aware of the fact that Harvey was, you know, maybe not certainly not the extent of what he was doing, but everyone knew he's not a safe guy to leave a young woman alone with.
Right. To the extent that like someone would make a joke about that.
And I think it was the Oscars, the Emmys or whatever. And people got it because he was that much of a famous creep.
And in the case of Rose McGowan, who called Winfrey as fake as they come as a result of her condemning Weinstein, her issue with Oprah comes from the fact that Oprah had been set to produce a movie about famed sex abuser Russell Simmons and then resigned from producing that movie. Oprah claimed she had creative differences.
I'm not interested in litigating that in part because that's all I can find on the matter. And that's not conclusive.
There's a lot of reasons why you would drop out of producing a movie that doesn't really count as like you're trying to cover it up. I haven't found any evidence she tried to stop the thing from being made, right? Rose is not the only celebrity who has alleged that Oprah knew more

about Weinstein than she let on.

Seal came out,

the guy who wrote Kiss from a Rose,

and has made allegations that basically you

knew a lot more than you're saying.

Again, this may be true.

Seal has also been accused

of and investigated for sexual battery,

so,

you know, I don't know where we want to go there i mean it is sort of that like not mudslinging because it's factual that that's like i mean again you're we're barely past the era of or not even we're still within the era of men on the internet being like, oh, I can't wait till they're, you know, X, Y, Z.

Yeah. or not even we're still within the era of men on the internet being like oh i can't wait till they're you know xyz like young woman is 18 i it's it's a little bit of that like this shit was definitely happening by the way definitely is happening and there's whispers about it but like you kind of just like there a limit to what you can do.
So like, yeah, it's that kind of thing where like every time, like, like Democrats go after Republicans and they're like, Oh, you wouldn't want this turn back on you. Like, Oh, we're going to, we're going to go after your heroes.
And it's like, truly like, yes, they're all fucking horrible people. Get them all out of there.
If you've done crime, I don't care what political party or like who you are in the culture. This does, though, there's also a murkier aspect of it where, again, when we say Oprah probably knew something about Weinstein, I'm not saying Oprah knew Weinstein had committed a litany of felonies.
Oprah knew he's kind of like a, he's like, he'll sexually harass you. He'll make gross comments.
You know, he might like, uh, or, or it's like Hollywood in that, like you heard a bunch of stuff. You don't have evidence of anything.
And like it, you can, there's legal consequences for just like accusing someone to powerful and wealthy without evidence of like being a sex offender. Like, and this is the kind of thing where it's like, okay, so we're attacking Oprah for stuff like her involvement in Weinstein.
I don't know how extensive it was. Everyone kind of involved in the mudslinging has ulterior motives and it's weird.
What I can prove is that Weinstein and Oprah worked together at some point and that likewise, Oprah went to a number of Diddy's parties. And these are specifically the white parties, right? The ones that were not exclusively devoted to sex crimes.
So part of the issue is that these two are both very famous people and in the industry Oprah was in. And so obviously she had personal and professional connections to them.
But again, when it comes to actual crimes, there is zero evidence of Oprah directly enabling or directly covering up either of those men's crimes. That evidence does not exist.
And from what I've seen, it looks like she's probably guilty of the same thing most people at her level in Hollywood are, which is being like, that guy seems fucked up. I'm just not going to get too close.
Yeah, I do want to give a plug to the documentary that she pulled out of because it did end up getting produced. It's called On the Record.
It tells it features Drew Dixon, who is this like very iconic hip hop producer who her entire career was almost derailed because of people like Russell Simmons. And so, yeah, I I also agree that I think that when it comes to Oprah and these powerful men, I think that like that I understand why it lends itself to conspiracy theories, because powerful, rich, famous people know each other.
They work together.

They're photographed with each other. Like that doesn't mean that some that doesn't mean that Oprah like had a direct hand in enabling Weinstein sex crimes.
But like, that's just how it works. Weinstein wouldn't need her for that.
Right. There's no there's no line between the women that he abused and like Oprah.
Unlike, for example, as we'll talk about, Oprah told women John of God was a safe guy to fly to fucking Brazil and get treated by. And a number of women got raped because they took the advice of the Oprah Winfrey show endorsing this man.
That is something that she should be held accountable for. I just don't have any evidence that she's done anything in the Weinstein case or in the P.
Diddy case. Now, the most bullshit thing she gets accused of by the QAnon types is involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.
If you Google Oprah Winfrey Epstein, you will also come across this randomly. You will find articles and viral tweets and and tick tocks, all of which have some variation of of the sentence Oprah Winfrey mentioned five times in files related to the Epstein case.
That sounds bad, right? Let's look into what that means. So one of the things that turned me on to this was a viral post on Facebook with the title, Justin, Oprah has been revealed as a client on the Epstein list, capitalizing the first letter of each of those words.
What's your reaction? And that's complete bullshit. Oprah's name shows up five times in documents for the Epstein case.
The first two times are because the files include screenshots of articles, one from Radar Online and one from the Daily Mail. Those articles in the bottom of them have a suggested other reading.
You know how articles work. You finish an article and say, hey, you might be interested in this article on a different topic.
Those articles that were suggested by the articles relevant to the Epstein trial mentioned Oprah. That's two of the five mentions, right? Is something completely unrelated to the case that just because somebody fucking screen grabbed the whole page, Oprah's name winds up on it.
The other three times come from emails introduced as evidence where a journalist working with one of Epstein's accusers on a book tells a book agent. I think this book will sell well to Oprah's audience.
Now, if you're keeping track,

what does that mean?

It means Oprah has nothing to fucking do

with Jeffrey Epstein.

I mean, the other just like heuristic way to look at it

is if these fucks had concrete evidence on a black woman,

you sure as fuck, we would know about it.

Yes.

Oh my God. Would you, there'd be pictures, there'd be screenshots, it'd be emails, timelines, the whole works.
Like, there'd be no need for insinuation if any evidence existed. I do have a question.
Oh, so, yeah, yeah. So, there are documented connections with Oprah and like, men who turned out to be creeps who were not safe to be around.
see. And she's there's a picture of her kissing Weinstein on the neck, you know? But like, why do you think people obsess about these bullshit claims about her connection to people like Epstein when there are documented connections between her and people who were like genuinely like that is a smoking gun where she said this guy was safe and endorsed him and then he wasn't like, why do people focus so much on the ones that are bullshit? Because the people who hate Oprah and are making stuff up about her primarily hate her because she is a liberal figure and a celebrity.
It's the same reason they're going after like Tom Hanks. Right.
Because he was pro vaccine. The other thing is the stuff she's done that's bad is stuff they do and love and don't think is bad.

Right. Yeah.
You know, like that's that's that's what it's why when people talk about the problem of child sex abuse and child sex trafficking, they obsessed with this largely fanciful idea of like three and four year olds being trafficked around the world in large numbers and abducted from their fucking white families, which is not really the issue. The issue is primarily adult men related to 16 and 17 and 15 year old girls molesting them,

you know, and part of why they don't like to do that is that an awful lot of the guys who obsessed with shoot your local pedophile think it would be fine if they married a 16 year old,

as long as, you know, they did it in a church and their parents were okay with it.

That's why, you know. And then also a other big portion of it is in the fucking church itself right right where you can marry 14 year olds in a lot of u.s states as long as you do it you know through god and their parents anyway we don't need to make that the subject every time we talk about this shit but um i think when it comes to like properly criticizing her one thing you have to note is that Oprah has made child abuse and child sex abuse, constant obsessive focuses with her fundraising activities.
She has done harm through spreading misinformation about child abuse, but she's not a sex criminal. This is something she puts a lot of, she very much actively has tried to reduce again in imperfect ways, but she's put her money where her mouth is a lot.
And one of the things she is really consistently puts effort into is trying to help underprivileged at-risk kids. And again, this is always a mixed bag.
And this brings me to the story of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, or OWLAG, as we're going to be calling it. Bridget, you were excited to get into this topic.
What have you heard of OWLAG? This is her South African school. I remember it very clearly because my mother and my grandmother and I watched these episodes like it was a special family event to get together and watch Oprah in Africa.
Like, y'all, this was a big deal. I remember this like it was yesterday.
Yeah. Yeah.
And it was, you know, this starts, um, it opened, the school opens in January of 2007. It is inspired the year before she's vacationing in South Africa.
She's hanging out with Nelson Mandela because when you're Oprah, you get to hang out with Nelson Mandela. Um, and she decides on the spot to, while they're talking and like looking, you know, going through, she's seeing the poverty of a lot of the poorest South African children.
She decides on the spot, I'm going to create a school for very bright and very poor South African kids. These are kids who are at the top of their public schools in terms of test scores and come from households that make less than $950 a month.
Right. Now, the project is instantly controversial among the wealthy neighborhood where the school is built.
They do not like that a bunch of poor black girls are going to be going to school in this largely white neighborhood. The administration is deluged with complaints.
Neighbors begin staking out the school during recess, watching the few girls in this white neighborhood as they play soccer. Oprah has the school put up hedges to block the field from view.
And so as we talk about the things that are criticizable about this venture, I don't want to lose the fact that she is really pissing off a lot of South African racists, which again, are the most racist racists. Like if we're ranking the racists, the very top of that pyramid is South African racists.
No one's ever been better. Speaking of South Africa, I'm fairly certain none of our sponsors are based in South Africa.
We're back. apartheid's not around anymore so i guess we probably shouldn't have a blanket band on South African sponsors but you know those guys are still doing I would say whoever the sponsor is high chance some South African racist has a stake in that company there's a very good old British British song.
I've never met a nice South African that gets into some of these issues. So Oprah is incredibly integral to the design of this school.
She is not just, this is not just a case for good and for ill. Oprah is not just somebody who like throws money at a problem to like her name attached to it.
This is a personal focus, and she pours hundreds of hours of her own personal labor into making this school. I want to quote from an article on Forbes.
Winfrey severed ties with the state and decided to go it alone, hiring the architects behind Johannesburg's famous apartheid museum. She donned jeans and a hard hat and oversaw every aspect of construction.

She thought of the little things,

the tubs of umbrellas outside each building,

for use during South Africa's rainy season,

when it pours almost nonstop for 40 days.

They're green, her favorite color,

to match the girls' uniforms.

At the school's first convocation,

Winfrey took the stage to address the girls

and their relatives,

bused in from across South Africa.

For many years, people always asked me why didn't I have children, she told the crowd. Now I know.
And, you know, that's largely good, but you can also see a little weird. Although, again, in a very sympathetic way, Oprah is, by this point, very rich, and being very rich also means you're coming increasingly unhinged as you age.
Some of the evidence for that is that in addition to the stuff that is pretty fine, right? Like, okay, yeah, give them green umbrellas because that's your favorite color, whatever, you're paying for it, that's your right. During the big opening event for the school, because they're having a bunch of celebrities, Nelson Mandela and like Diane Sawyer are showing up.
She has the groundskeeper, because it's during the dry season, she has the groundskeepers paint the yellow grass green. Which is again, not evil, just kind of like, oh yeah, that's the kind of thing you get to do when you have Oprah money.
Yeah. And the kind of thing you worry about.
It's just like, I guess. Yeah.
The school's not going to look good enough if the grass is yellow. Now, Oprah has to date spent more than $100 million on both the school.
This is initially, I think, supposed to be like a $6 million project. It balloons to $40 million.
And again, she's paid over like $100 million at this point. So for one thing you cannot fault her for is dedication.
This is not something she is casual about. This is not something where she was just kind of like siphoning some money off for a tax break.
She's personally involved in this. And this school has provided an excellent education for a lot of, I think a couple hundred girls have graduated at this point.
And Winfrey is also committed to pay for the secondary education of any girl who graduates from this school, which is where a lot of the cost comes from. She's not just paying for this school.
She's paying for these kids to go to college. And in fact, recently, the first of these girls received a Ph.D.
Oprah showed up at her graduation ceremony. And this is good.
This is, broadly speaking, a thing that has done good. There are valid criticisms of it, like the fact that Oprah's focus on luxury means that this one school, which again has only graduated a couple hundred girls, could have paid for a lot more schools that had a similar educational quality, if not for some of the expensive things that are largely a result of Oprah's sort of focuses.
An article on the school in Reuters notes, ActionAid, a global development group, said the school exposes the stark disparities in South Africa's education system, still haunted by the legacy of apartheid, and is an insult to millions of poor children worldwide wanting a decent education. And that is harsh, but there's a segment from Forbes Africa based on an interview with Sam Blake, the director of operations, that does kind of back that up.
Quote, why were the girls sleeping on 200 thread count sheets? Why were there chandeliers hanging from the library ceiling and brightly colored mosaic tile pillars outside of the cafeteria? Blake grimaces when he's reminded of those early articles. When you walk into a beautiful place, you think better of yourself.

He explains simply. Again, I don't know that you would call, I don't think it would be right to call that evil, but it is like, this is what you get when you have a very serious problem and somebody who is not an expert on education, but has several billion dollars goes in to fix it.
is you can sometimes get a good thing to happen.

And I think overall, this school is a good thing,

but it's so much more expensive than it needs to be. And a lot more girls could be helped if, for example, that money had been like.
Like if Oprah paid correct taxes and then went into the education system. And since she's not South African, I think more to the point, if that money, if that hundred million had been handed to a group of actual education experts in order to build a system to improve educational quality for underprivileged kids in South Africa, probably would have helped a lot more kids, right? Yeah.
And that's not bastardism, right? Any more than you're not a bastard if you ordered takeout last night. That's like a of money right um well but like it helps kids it's just an it's an example of like what's problematic about even good billionaire charity yeah it's the same reason like batman is a bastard because batmanning is by far the least effective use of your billions to keep crime down.
Yeah. Like it's vanity and it's, it's just like,

it's not bastardy, but it's like, come on, how dumb are you? Evidence of like, yeah, we really ought to just tax these people a hell of a lot more so they can't exist as billionaires. But anyway, moving on.
When it comes to this school, what it's most famous for outside of South Africa is the allegations that have come out from within it that are problematic. I'm just going to list what's happened.

So within months of the school opening, there were allegations that the matron of the dormitory of the dormitories for the kids, Tiny Macopo is her name, had attempted to kiss and fondle as many as six teenage girls at the academy. Now, Oprah acted very quickly.
As far as I can tell, as soon as evidence came out, there are allegations that she tried to hide it before it came out. I haven't seen anything that actually backs those up.
What I have seen looks like she acted as quickly as possible. Who knows if there's stuff that I'm not, you know, that that's not public.
But that just seems to be people at this point kind of talking shit. She acts very quickly.
She fires Macopo. I should also say Macopo is tried and is found not guilty three years later.
So, again, I can't say I'm not going to do the Oprah thing and say she definitely did it. I don't know.
I'm not an expert on this case. Right.
The incident does, however, leave a stain on the school that deepens in early 2009 when seven students are expelled for bad behavior that includes sexual harassment of classmates. at around the same time a 17 year old student is found with a dead infant child in her handbag um yeah and this is like i think she had a uh a stillbirth or something like that like i think this is a case of like somebody who gets pregnant very young and like the baby doesn't make it um and these are all of this stuff the fact that you have a bunch of the kids there who are abusing other kids, this has and the fact that there's these allegations from this this teacher, this has led to accusations.
And you get this a lot in like the QAnon side of things that Oprah started like a sex abuse factory to molest kids in South Africa. And as a guy who has told stories about schools that were sex abuse factories for the express purpose of allowing certain people to molest children, I have to tell you, that's not what's happening here.
Aulag is a school for underprivileged kids living in a country where the deepest poverty is unimaginable to most Americans. As Winfrey herself said, By the time a girl gets to my school, normally she's suffered on average six major life traumas.
They've lost a parent or both parents, multiple accidents, death in your family, AIDS, rape, sexual molestation, all of it. Unimaginable things have happened.
Creating an institution where these students are taken in away from their families, I should note you, supported and asked to live together is a huge, messy, complicated thing. There's no way stuff like this wouldn't happen to some extent.
So what you have to judge the school on is, did they set up guardrails to make it possible to report this stuff to make it less likely? And did they act quickly when evidence came out? And as far as I can tell, more or less, yeah. Again, there's some critiques there.
It certainly was not a set up perfectly, but like generally, yeah, it seems to be the case. Well, this is exactly why I think the point that you two are making a moment ago is so salient, because I don't think that Oprah should have been involved in a school like this to begin with.
I think that's the fundamental criticism. Yeah.
Like you cannot take extremely at risk girls who have been living in extreme poverty. It doesn't matter how nice the sheets are or how the chandeliers are.
These are going to be girls who probably have problems. And it's like, of course, this is the kind of thing that's going to happen when they're all, you know, taken away from their support systems and their families and all of that.
I think it's the pinnacle of narcissism and vanity to be like, oh, well, certainly my money can foster an environment of safety for these girls. If you care so much, just give the money to people who know what they're doing, who are already doing this.
Don't try to set up a school with your name on it. It's one of my biggest pet peeves.
People who think like, oh, I've got money and my heart's in the right place. So I'll start my own nonprofit and it'll be in my image.
And it's like, no, people have been doing this. People know what they're doing.
There are people who specialize in working with at-risk youth. Give the money to them.
Like, don't do it on your own. For all like the billionaire classes railing against the inefficiencies of bureaucracy, like their own vanity and hubris is so much more wasteful and disgusting and damaging, and there's no way to make them see it.
I mean, part of what is here, it's like there's, because I was almost going to say like, you know, what is the comparison between what happened at the Oprah Academy and a baseline when you realize there is no baseline. There's nothing to compare this to.
Like nothing like this exists for a good reason. Yep.
And I really, there is a thing, this needs to be studied, wealthy people trying to open schools, like Kanye West doing it. Like there's something, I mean, I say this as a former educator where when you are an educator, everybody thinks they know how to do your job better than you.
People who have never been in a classroom before, people who have never been involved in education before somehow are all, you know, know exactly what to do. There's something about education that I think makes rich people who got successful in one lane feel like they could open a school or that they know how to do it.
It's very frustrating. Well, because it's partially, my guess is that like, everyone's like, well, I've been to school.
I've been a scooted before. I know what I didn't like about that.
That's really where a lot of this comes from with Oprah, where it's like, you, I had a lot of trauma as a kid. I was abused and like, but also very smart and i got an opportunity and so i succeeded so i know how other smart kids that are suffering in like difficult circumstances i know what they need and like no every kid's different oprah yeah like and also you don't fully understand all of the things that helped you because you weren't one of the you weren't your dad, right? Yeah.
Like there's things that just like all of us, we all, and this is part of the process of like reconciling, Oh, my parents did this stuff that was fucked up and also realizing, Oh my God, I never realized my parents did this thing that was like absolutely crucial in me turning out, like having these positive traits that was, must've been really hard for them. That's that's just like yeah i don't know how difficult it is like oh i was fucked up by this but like you're not aware of the choice that had to be made like yeah it's a little bit like being like oh i've eaten at a restaurant before therefore i can be a chef like right the fuck are you talking about it's than that, Oprah.
And like, this should not have been your gig. You know, every now and then you get one of these.
Really, the only time it's worked is like James Cameron becoming a deep sea explorer, but nearly every other time. I guess she is second, because at least the school is a good school, but.
And having, I remember so viscerally watching the Oprah in Africa specials. And again, like I want to give her grace because I get it, right? Like it's like the most beautiful, precocious little girls in green uniforms and like smiling ear to ear.
And it's shot with that like filter on it that everything looks kind of like a you know like the the like glazy filter it was beautiful i remember crying like i get why this is more why she would rather do this than just send money to somebody who's already doing it but it goes back to that idea of like the ease the thing that is boring and the kind of like commonplace isn't what you want.

You want your name on a school, girls in uniforms lined up smiling from ear to ear. Like that's the thing that gives you the warm fuzzies.
Yeah. And also it's like making one perfect school is something you can do.
Making a dozen pretty good schools for the same money. Fixing the system is a lot harder.
No, I mean, it's like when I started my summer camp to teach kids how to blow up trains and effectively conduct counterinsurgent operations, I wanted to teach them, but I had to eventually accept that like, look, I'm not an expert educator, which is why I trained an LLM on Lawrence of Arabia's book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. And I've just let that loose on the kids.
You know, now this AI is teaching them everything and it's gonna be fine. Robert, stop trying to recruit for your boy army.
They're not all boys. There's a lot of girls, non-binary kids.
Look, we don't discriminate as long as you are willing to man. What? Wrap it up.
If your fingers are nimble enough to get into the little grenade pins your finger exactly if you know how to mix gel ignite i don't care about anything else just like the okay we should probably stop at this point anderson says stop also are you preparing to wrap this part god willing great so there are some valid complaints about the school parents have voiced frustration that their time to see their children is unfairly curtailed. Restrictive rules for kids have been compared to some as prison-like.
An article for the Atlanta Black Star notes, there's also the recent firing of the former head of operations, Simon Matiko, after one year, was reported in December of 2023. Court documents reveal complaints about abuse of authority, intimidation, and victimization, as well as the mistreatment of learners.
Matiko alleges he was fired for his non-performance during private arbitration at the school. Further investigation found other employees who voiced their difficulty with management.
One said, working under pressure, threats, and other issues. We don't discuss issues with our management as we fear we will lose our jobs as we are not given clarity or relevant answers.
Another said, Outlag used to be a place where one contributed more than required because there was a culture of working together, listening, and respecting professional opinions. That has changed.
There is a culture of distrust and fear. And I don't know the perfect reality here, but again, I think we've litigated this more than enough.
The broader problem here is that like the issue of rich people launching into crusades to fix major problems without knowing much about them, you know? And, and that's, that's an issue, you know, that goes right to the top of this country and probably the best example of Oprah contributing to this in a really toxic way. Cause Alec at least has given a lot, you know, a couple hundred kids a very good education.
Probably the best example of her diving into something she was not really competent to handle that had a toxic knock-on effects is her support of orphanages in Haiti. She has, there's one specific orphanage that she's devoted a massive amount of attention and money towards.
And this is an orphanage that was started by an American family to protect and shelter some of Hades, hundreds of thousands of orphaned kids. That sounds great.
Unproblematic. What could be bad about supporting an orphanage? This is where we get to talk about the problems with the international adoption industry.
And largely the problems of the international adoption industry is that it is an industry that profits off of facilitating the adoption of, in this case, poor black children by white foreigners with money. In many cases, who are more interested in converting the child to their specific brand of Christianity or showing the child off to their friends than raising a traumatized child.
Now, to make this even worse, many, if not most, of these orphans aren't actual orphans. Yes.
After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the number of orphanages in the country more than doubled from 200 to 752 by 2013. Now, Oprah was just one of the men of the media figures making documentaries about these generally operated by foreigners orphanages.
And really, it's one of these like these heroic white missionaries coming to this dangerous place and really risking themselves in order to help these poor, underprivileged kids. Oprah is, again, not the only person doing this, but her sheer popularity gives her an outsized role in making this a popular cause.
At least 30,000 children wound up in Haitian orphanages, and about 80% of those 30,000 kids had one living parent at least. From CNN, quote, unable to sustain their children's well-being, these parents are persuaded to relinquish them to privately run orphanages that promise the children will receive shelter, food, and education.
This is often not the outcome. Instead, the children living in Haiti's orphanages face exploitation and trafficking unintentionally funded by foreign donors.
Jamie Vernalde of Lumos, an NGO advocating for the institutionalization of children, says this, This orphanage business, where orphanages are established and recruit children to raise donations from foreigners, is becoming increasingly recognized globally as a form of trafficking. These Haitian orphanages employ people called child finders who seek out struggling families and bribe them for their children.
The going rate is around $75. The money to pay these child finders to bribe families for their kids comes from the $100 million a year in mostly faith-based donations sent to these orphanages.
This is a much larger issue than Oprah, but she plays a significant role in it. And this whole period of time, she's running all of these teary stories praising missionaries who take children away from Haiti and actively defends a system that is desperately broken.
A good example of this comes in February of 2010. A group of 10 Baptists, mostly from Idaho, were arrested in Haiti with 33 children who were absolutely not related to them.
When confronted by authorities, these Baptists assured them the kids were all orphans being taken to loving homes in the United States. The Haitian authorities looked into this for three seconds and realized, no, they had no permission to be doing this, and also a lot of those children were in fact not orphans.
Here's how CNN describes the way those kids wound up in the care of missionaries. Most of the children appear to be from Cabela's.
Parents there told the Associated Press they had surrendered their children on January 28th, two days after a local orphanage worker, acting on behalf of the Baptists, convened nearly the entire village of about 500 people on a dirt soccer pitch to present the Americans' offer. The orphanage worker, Isaac Adrian, said he told the villagers their children would be educated at a home in the Dominican Republic, so that they might eventually return to take care of their families.
Many parents jumped at the offer. The village school had collapsed, and their homes were destroyed at Haiti's catastrophic January 12th quake.
They had no money to feed the children, they said. It's truly like, you know, you said it earlier, but it's like they're looking for child trafficking.
Here it is. They just don't like it because it's Christians.
Yeah, yeah, because this is the child trafficking.

Now, it is unclear to me how much the American missionaries and their leader, Laura Silsby, knew about what the Haitian parents had been told. Laura had met the child finder who got them these kids two days earlier, and it's possible he did the bulk of the line.
When questioned by authorities in the news later, Silsby and the missionaries insisted the kids had all been handed over by distant relatives who were frightened the kids might starve to death. Now, that's their side of events.
The child finder, Adrian, for his part, says he had no idea that the entire point Silsby and the Americans were in Haiti for was to take children back to the United States. He thought they were trying to take them to an orphanage in the Dominican where their families would still have access to them and be able to get them back at some point when conditions were better.
And I tend to think he may be the one telling the truth because of lines like this from that IP article. The parents of four children taken by Silsby said the Americans took down contact information for all the families and assured them that a relative would be able to visit them in the Dominican Republic.
So again, when questioned by authorities, Silsby and the missionaries are like, oh, distant relatives handed them over because obviously they don't have parents. When questioned, the parents say, no, no, no, like they gave us, they took our contact info and said we'd be able to visit their kids.
They were just going over the Dominican Republic. So if that's true, this really does sound like child theft on behalf of the missionaries and Silsby.
Now I'm going to spoil the end and say everybody but Silsby gets off scot-free. Although thankfully not with the kids.
Silsby did do time in Haitian jail, but it was essentially knocked down to like a misdemeanor, basically, even though the evidence, I think, might suggest something more nefarious. NPR dug into Laura Silsby and described her in an article as a woman who arguably found a lot of society's rules optional.
Silsby lied, both in interviews and to the Haitian government, about having proper paperwork. Back home, she ran a personal shopping internet business and was being actively pursued by creditors for failing to pay her employees or any of the other people she owed money.
Despite this, Sillsby convinced her church that she was in the process of putting together a Shangri-La in Idaho for the lucky Haitian kid she was about to rescue. The Wall Street Journal writes, quote, Ms.
Silsby and Ms. Coulter traveled the Dominican Republic and Haiti last July and late last year.
They were laying the groundwork then for opening an orphanage, said Mel Coulter, Ms. Coulter's father.
They coordinated with people who they thought were handling necessary details and running interference for them, he said. So they thought they had everything they needed in documentation, Mr.
Coulter said. Ms.
Silsby had an equally grand ambition greater to home, according to a local builder. The Idaho plan called for a multi-million dollar complex for runaway children on a 40-acre lot in Kuna County, Idaho, according to Eric Evans, owner of Evans Construction in Meridian.
Ms. Silsby told him it would have an indoor swimming pool, tennis courts, and dormitories for the children, said Mr.
Evans, adding that she had discussed having him build the project. Ms.
Silsby's mother said that she had never heard of any such plan. Oof.
I have to say, as someone who grew up in the church, so I can say this, you can get, like, church folk to hand over money and believe anything. Like, if you're like I, yeah.
Now to get back to where Oprah is involved, I'm not reading this for no reason. Oprah and her website and O Magazine, Oprah goes to bat for these specific missionaries writing very, having, having very sympathetic articles written, doing features on how these people are, they're just trying to help.
They got caught up in this corrupt government and it's just a big misunderstanding. But like these people are really good people trying to help, you know.
Here's a quote from Oprah's write up, the Oprah.com write up, I should say. Jim said he traveled with his group to a number of orphanages around Port-au-Prince.
During those visits, Jim says they were introduced to children who were Silsby's account, she was not planning to take these kids to the Dominican Republic. And also, a lot of the parents say, no, it wasn't an orphanage director that handed them over.
They got them from us, right? The closest we get to scrutiny of any of this in that Oprah.com article is this paragraph. Since the story broke, there have been allegations in the media that the group leader, Laura Silsby, intended to make a profit on the children by charging large fees to get them placed.
Jim says he doesn't know anything about those claims. I hope that not.
Open and shut case, that one. Open and shut case.
And I know Sophie's fuming right now because this has gone very long, but that is the end of the episode. I just felt we really had to end this one on the Haitian orphanages.
Makes sense. Thanks, man.
Yeah. Oh, Oprah, why'd you get mixed up with these people? Why, indeed.
And we have one more part left, don't we, Robert? We sure do. We have a sixth parter.
There are still 10 pages left in the script, which has finally come down to 24,468 words. Oh.
That's like a novel. It's half of what is generally considered to be the length of a book, right? 50,000 is kind of the cutoff.
Now, that said, I don't want to make it out to like, I wrote half of a nonfiction book here. I'm taking other people's original reporting and like chopping it up and, you know, remixing it.
That's what a lot of this is, is, oh, here's three different accounts of this thing. Well, I'm going to tell you the similarities and the differences between them.
Here's different attitudes these different people have about stuff, right? Like I'm not doing, I didn't go to Port-au-Prince. I didn't do the original reporting on this kind of stuff.
But this is one of the longest scripts we've ever done. This is a Kissinger-linked script.
It's wild. How are we all feeling? Oh, I'm honored to be part of this, like, mega episode.
This really is just, I mean, at least now we're really getting into like, having gotten the early biography out of the way, it's like, oh, Jesus Christ. This is fucking horrible.
Okay, yeah, yeah. This is the behind the bastards I'm used to.
I still think it has like, I don't know. I find, it's so weird.
I find myself rooting for her. When I hear the thing about like the Haiti thing, I'm like, damn, I was rooting for you, Oprah.
I want it to be the voice of like, no guys, it's really complex and nuanced, but here's shit like that. And it's hard to say that.
Yeah. Yep.
All right, everybody. Well, this has been behind the bastards.
You guys want to plug your pluggables before we roll out here? Yeah, you can listen to my podcast on iHeartRadio called There Are No Girls on the Internet. Check it out.
And you can follow me on Instagram at BridgetMarieNDC. My podcast is Joseph's Racist.
I don't know. Do whatever you want.
People have been finding me on Blue Sky. It's nice.
Find Andrew on Blue Sky. You know, stalk him a little bit.
Send him pictures of your food and see if he'll send you pictures of his food. They did! Oh, well, great.
That might have been off a Daily's Like Ice appearance, but definitely someone did. Excellent.
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