Part Four: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Call Zone Media. things continue to be and also how the equal rights amendment is ratified but also not great stuff um you know folks whenever i start to think we live in the dumbest society that's ever lived and like how how how sad for us to live in such a stupid stupid society i have something that helps me get some historical perspective which is i have a very big book right next to my bed

that I read a little bit every night called The Assyrians. And that really helps because there's literally ass in the name of that culture, like ass just right on the front of the book.
So you know what? We're not so silly, you know? At least you're not an ass Syrian, right? It's fine. It's fun.
We're good.

You done?

Whatever it takes, dog.

Whatever it takes. I'm just trying to feel better.
I feel like other people don't enjoy the word ass being on the front of a book as much as I do because they are no longer four. How's our guest today? Bridget Todd and Andrew T.
How are we doing? Doing well. I had a really good Clementine in the break.
Oh, clutch. That's good.
I convinced Jamie Loftus to cover a topic I wanted her to cover on 16th minute during that five minute break. I'm efficient.
Oh, wow. And Andrew, I tried to make your salad and it was really good.
It's a really good salad. It's not my salad.
Unfortunately, it's TikTok. Life goes on, baby.
I plagiarized it either way, but it is TikTok's salad, I guess. That's what I'm saying.
It's someone's salad. I understand that, but it's not mine.
TikTok has the best recipes honestly r.i.p question mark maybe who knows get ready for a little red book you don't know yep i pledge allegiance to communist china you know what we all pledge allegiance to communist china i spent three minutes on what is that what's the new one i forgot the name of this joke i spent three minutes the joke's not gonna work anymore whatever fuck it it's done it's done oprah pillas go i i couldn't be less interested in a tiktok alternative or tiktok i don't need either of them what i do need is to tell y'all more about Oprah Winfrey.

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.

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The tick tock of her day, the tick tock actually kind of. Yes.
Kind of. Yes.
Although Oprah, I mean, I guess the big difference is like tick tock, like really launched a popularity with like tweens and teens, whereas Oprah is immediately and for her whole career, very, very much locked into like 30 to 50 year old middle class American women. Like that is that's not the whole because she's popular all over the world, but like she has a lock that's like unequaled by anyone else on that specific demographic um which is like a very influential it's everyone's moms right like i'm not saying i hope like people say that to be like joking like my mom who i disagreed with but respect a lot watched oprah every single fucking day right like everyone's mom did yeah like i could tell when oprah covered something on her show if my mom sat me down after school to be like, are you having rainbow parties?

I was like, we're going to be talking about rainbow parties, Bridget.

So as I pointed out earlier, Oprah at this point in her career was kind of and we're talking the start of the 90s now indistinguishable from Jerry Springer.

And I'm not talking about that on like specifically even on a moral level, just in terms of that is how cultural critics talked about her, right? This was trash TV. It's hard to get to again, hard to get to grips with if like, you know, you grew up with her in the 90s when she was kind of in between a movie star and a god like Oprah.
Oprah was like sainted in a lot of households. But right around the time Winfrey started her satanic panicking, Ralph Nader named her as one of many talk shows in the country that got, quote, all their ideas from the National Enquirer.

Now, in her excellent critical book, Age of Oprah, and if you're going to read one book on Oprah Winfrey, I recommend Age of Oprah by Janice Peck.

It's not a biography. It's like an analysis of the role Oprah has played in the evolution of American society over the last like 30 years.
Janice writes about the critiques that Washington Post writer Tom Shales had of Winfrey's program, labeling it talk rot. Quote, Shales decried talk shows as a daily parade of wackos, loonies, stars, celebrities, freaks, geeks, and gurus.
Referring to the Oprah Winfrey show, he noted, On one of her few serious, outer-directed shows, Winfrey dealt with declining literacy among the young and the escalating crisis in American education. In promo, she looked into the camera and asked, How dumb are we? There's every possibility that talk rot is making us dumber.
And that's him saying that, right? That like Oprah's saying, we're dumb for not reading, but like her show is making us dumber. And like, yeah, it's part of that loop.
It's also Oprah's going to later become one of the people who's a major champion of literacy, although not in ways that are unproblematic, too. Anyway.
I actually got a little glimmer of hope from that. Just like a reminder that I know, and I'm not like a teacher.
I had lunch with a friend who was a teacher yesterday and he was like, the kids are not able to read. Yeah.
But I do think, this might be counterfactual to like survey data, but I do kind of think every generation thinks the current kids can't are dumber than ever before. There's two, there's two sides to this, right? One of them is that every generation, as soon as they hit a certain age, starts thinking that the, the, these next kids coming up are uniquely fucked up and like everyone's ruined right and like the world's going to hell in a handbasket and they're always kind of wrong at the same time every single new generation is fucked up in a unique new way and like the tiktok kids are fucked up on tiktok and ipads in a way that didn't exist before just like my gender our generation was fucked up by message boards and online gaming and the like in ways that were unique you know to kids that had come previously just like our but our uh gen x friends were fucked up on leaded gasoline you know yeah but it's also like you know the kids are getting fucked up on particularly spicy epigrams from catullus you know it's it's just like, I think it's always been like this.
It has always been like this. There's there are unique ways in which every generation is like fucked up.
And also, I'll just say this, kids, if you if you are a very young person coming up right now and you're trying to figure out how do I make it in this world? One of the chief things you have on your side is that everyone older than you thinks you're an idiot. And the truth is that they're all as stupid as you are.
So take advantage of that. There's power in being underestimated, kids.
That's actually very wise advice. Yeah.
I'm full of wise advice once every month. Yeah.
And one of the things that's problematic here is that Oprah does deserve a lot of criticism for like the satanic panic shit, the McMartin preschool trial shit. There's also a lot of these big hoity-toity cultural critics are attacking her because they also view, they rightly are like, well, this satanic panic stuff is like smut.
But also this woman talking about how she like needs therapy in order to have a healthy sex life is smut and and so you see like it's this blending of like well but no but that's actually a good thing that oprah was doing with like no this is in fact smut but it's all smut to a lot of these guys so that's part of like the problem of like looking at a lot of the criticism of oprah from this era is a lot of it is attacking her for stuff that we're like but no, that was one of the good things that she did. That's the trip of engaging in this kind of discourse, right? Like when you actually have substantive stuff to say, of course, people are going to paint everything with such a wide brush when you also do these like satanic panic antics, right? Like part of me is like, that's kind of on you for having this in your portfolio in the first place.
Right. Well, also, like the satanic panic stuff is not bad because it's smut.
It's bad because it's lies. Right.
Right. Right.
Yes. That's a very good note, Andrew.
Like it's just very good notes. Thank you.
It's it's it's a mess because like you're looking for you always want just a really good if you're doing this job. I want a really good like, ah, this guy nailed what's problematic.
And it's always like this guy nailed part of what was problematic and then said something really, really mean towards women. Yeah, I love the Washington Post.
It's fine. It's only getting better.
They're they're turning. They're turning it around.
Oh, God. So one example of things that Oprah got attacked for that she probably shouldn't have been that like this was considered smut by a lot of critics was her coverage of the transgender community.
And boy, howdy, I am not saying that it was what we would call today. Good.
What I am saying is that even as early as when she was on People Are Talking, which was the pre Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Winfrey show, she would bring on transgender guests and she's doing it because it's lascivious and it gets attention. But she's also, it's not like smut, like one of her early guests that had an impact on her is she she finds this transgender mother with brittle bone disease.

So this is both somebody who is transgender. And if you read stories about it, they use the term transsexual.
They're not trying to be shitty. That was the term in common parlance at the time.
I'm obviously updating it. But this is a person who both is trans, is a mother and is a disabled American.
And the fact that Oprah's letting her talk about her life is giving a sympathetic and humanizing portrayal to someone who had zero visibility in the culture at the time. As Kitty Kelly notes, the show was criticized when it aired, but afterward, Oprah happened to see the child with the transgender quadriplegic to her overcoming the bigotry that she had been raised with, and i think it makes totally as a child who had lacked so much love in her life the thing that turns her around on this is being like but this lady's a really good mom right like she clearly loves this kid this kid's going to grow up with love that's all that matters to me as a kid who was neglected right uh i think that's just worth, before we get back into the criticism, because that's kind of beautiful.
And the fact that she gets attacked for this, too, is, again, it's part of the like, well, if you're Oprah and you're trying to triangulate what is OK for me to do and what is not. I'm getting attacked both for the stuff that is bad and also for the stuff that it's like, no, it's great that she did this.
Like, right. I'm glad she did.
You know, in January of 1994, a 39 year old Oprah Winfrey announced her on air plan to stop talking about, quote, how bad things are and instead try to bring more peace to her audience and thus the planet. She had like a long speech about trash TV.
This is kind of her being like, I think the winds are changing. I don't think the smut kind of TV where we're talking about, here's people talking about the fights they're having with their ex.
We'll bring them on and they'll fight on stage. That was not going to be coming into the late 90s as popular as it had been.
And Oprah's like, I want to rebrand myself. I want to have some prestige, right? And the way she does that, the way she starts her pivot into I am a serious intellectual and spiritual advisor is to bring on friend of the pod, Marianne Williamson.
Here she is. Here's our girl.
There we go. I forgot about this.
She absolutely did. This is the,

this is when Oprah becomes a spiritual influencer.

Marianne Williamson is like a key part of that.

Here's how Janice Peck describes Williamson at this stage in her career.

Again,

this is 94.

Williamson is quote,

a former nightclub singer,

self-described spiritual psychologist,

occasional advisor to Hillary Clinton,

spiritual guide for Hollywood stars, and major inspiration behind Winfrey's own cosmology. What a resume.
Oh, God. Also, doesn't believe in AIDS.
Doesn't. Yes, we're about to talk about that.
Marianne is a complicated person to unpack from a harm standpoint. Much like Oprah, they have a lot in common.

I'm not surprised they're friends.

When she launched her 2020 presidential campaign,

queer-focused news outlets like The Pink News rightfully pointed out that during the AIDS crisis,

Williamson, who had a huge queer following

and had founded a Center for Living in Los Angeles,

published a book in 1992 which argued, quote,

cancer and AIDS and other physical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream. Williamson went on to make an argument that could be argued as not so far from the Christian conservative line on AIDS.
We're not punished for our sins, but by our sins. Sickness is not a sign of God's judgment on us, but of our judgment on ourselves.

Sickness is an illusion and does not actually exist. And it's complicated because you can translate all of that as like, well, she's saying people with AIDS brought it on themselves.
And she kind of is. She's also not just focusing on gay people there.
She thinks if you have lung cancer, whatever, if you've got fucking childhood leukemia, you brought it on yourself through your bad thinking. Right.
So it is it is not targeted against gay people, but it's also really problematic in that concept because you're saying everyone who gets sick brought the sickness on themselves by virtue of their thoughts. Yeah.
All the positive vibes shit is so like, just consider the converse of what you're saying for two seconds. I think everyone who, yeah.
This child deserved to die because his vibes were off. And it's not, she would say, no, I'm saying that like, if you, like part of healing this is fixing people's attitudes and improving the way they think and talk about themselves.
And that will help their physical health. I just think everyone who believes this should have to lecture about this to a child cancer ward.
Yeah. Like, explain to kids, if your attitude was better, your bones wouldn't be rotting inside you.
You know? Yeah. It's such a hateful ideology and worldview, but the way people i i know people who have said shit like this and it's like the way they dress it up as like no it's actually

like a really profound like you would it's the law of attraction like you want this to be happening

to you in some way the way they dress it up like it makes them more superior i don't know something

about that aspect of it really gets me it's interesting because and i also think there's

Let's go. they dress it up like it makes them more superior i don't know something about that aspect of it really gets me it's interesting because and i also think there's there's so much of it that's so locked inside their heads like it's even separate from how someone like marianne acts because i found an article by a friend of hers called david kessler and it was on her website it was it was he posted on medium and she had shared it but this is a guy knew her.
He had operated during the AIDS crisis. He operated a home hospice for AIDS patients.
And he claimed, quote, I saw firsthand how she, Marianne, cared for the community. Marianne is not a person who is against medicine.
She was the one that sat with dying men with AIDS when there was no cure. And when medications became available, I saw her driving men to the doctor with AIDS.
I witnessed her paying for medication for men with AIDS. So this is not a person who is like hateful and callous.
This is a person who is able to sit with sick people and then also hold in her head this completely unhinged that if you take it to its logical conclusion, you're saying they brought it on themselves. And that kind of cognitive dissonance is amazing to me.
don't know how you can have that I mean I think it is just like the like only able to concentrate on the positive or what you perceive as the positive it's just it is like yeah I mean you just have to be stupid is the main thing like oh I don't understand the't understand the B side of what I'm saying because I'm stupid. The answer is so much more often than like outright evil is like, oh, well, you just your brain's not function.
You've got like somebody somebody dropped like a wrench in there and it's just like. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm like, it's like so tempting to way overthink it.
And Andrew, I feel like that you just really sum it up. Some people just aren't smart.
That's what's going on. Don't overthink it.

I think it – I talk about this with our other host, Margaret Killjoy, a lot about how like you can meet people like out in the middle of nowhere who like if you look at their politics, they support some political things that are ghoulish.

Whereas the same people they would vote to hurt, they would sacrifice for in person because people are incoherent and not all that bright. It comes down to that a lot of the time.
Yeah. There just is no even second consideration or what does what I say i say mean yeah they're just doing their thing and like yeah this is kurt vonnegut was often of the opinion that like if we were just all a little bit too dumb to keep society and like if we if we all had like 20 less like like like got a little bit more brain damage things would be better because like we

it's it's this mix of we're so smart and we're so stupid that causes all the problems if we were just like dogs everything would be fine that's what i come back down to well the problem is just like it only takes one or two slightly smarter evil dogs to really fuck shit up, which is where we're living now.

Yep. Yep.
It only takes one or two slightly smarter evil dogs to really fuck shit up, which is where we're living now.

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Anyway, speaking of where we're living now, Marianne Williamson was the beginning of Oprah's pivot to alternative medicine and spirituality.

As we noted, Williamson's particular thing was A Course in Miracles, which is a series of books. She did

not write these, but this is like, this is her Bible, at least at this period of time.

And A Course in Miracles is the underpinning, one of the underpinnings, because we've talked

about a few others, roots of what becomes like the secret, right? This is a lot of where we get

that from. And A Course in Miracles is like, it's this set of books that claims to integrate

psychology and spirituality, which is kind of what Scientology also claimed to do. It's what,

If you're not going to integrate psychology and spirituality, which is kind of what Scientology also claimed to do. It's what it's what all of the good spiritual con men claim to do.
Right. The author of this book, Helen Schuchman, claimed that it had been fully dictated to her by Jesus Christ.
And she just wrote it down. So, like, look, what are my citations? Jesus, baby.
That's such a good thing to claim. The balls to be like, oh, like, are you going to, I'm not wrong.
You're saying Jesus is wrong. Are you saying Jesus is wrong? How many times did you get sacrificed on Golgotha, huh? Yeah.
How many nails you got through your hands, huh? Anyway, don't go to the doctor. Speaking of which, don't go to the doctor.
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Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.

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I was just gonna say does it does no

none of these people

find it sacrilegious

how stupid jesus is in these instances yeah yeah that he that jesus is like saying medicine doesn't really work it's all about thinking your way through problems yeah nobody ever catches that well everyone does except for these people right um and it's also So, you know, part of if you're because William said, I'm not trying to like exonerate her totally. One of the things I think that you do if you're like her is you're like, well, I believe this.
But the fact that she's saying Jesus wrote this whole thing, that's probably not going to play on TV. I probably want to keep that quiet.
Like, so I'm going to. And what Marianne does is she's like, all right, well, I think this is basically good, but maybe the raw stuff is a little bit too uncut for this audience.
So she writes her own book about a course in miracles titled a return to love. That's basically her taking like, all right, how do I make this a little bit more palatable? It's the late nineties, right? We gotta, we gotta, we gotta fix this a little bit before we get this out into the audience, you know? I will attempt an abbreviated explanation of A Course in Miracles and, you know, in addition to that, Williamson's book.
It argues that our home is reality and reality is the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God is a perfect place where, as the talking heads remind us, nothing ever happens.

Thus, all problems aren't real.

Bad things don't happen.

There's no real problems.

The things that you perceive as problems are the result of you delusionally separating your ego from reality.

Our suffering, then, is something we project into the world due to our hallucinatory belief that we have sinned. Yeah.
All of our faces on the screen are like that Winona Ryder trying to do a trigonometry equation meme. Like, what? Are we good? Does that make sense to everybody? Totally checks out.
Yeah. All right.
That all scans.

Yeah.

So, again, this is like, you know, you can see a lot of the spirit or the secret in this, you know, and the ultimate, the result of this is you fix your life by fixing your attitude.

Right.

I found a good summary of the book in a website titled Circle of Atonement, which I think is probably related to some sort of weird cult or another. I don't know, but I'm going to read an excerpt from that because I thought it was funny.
The Holy Spirit's message is that we never sinned, never changed ourselves. We need only change our minds.
The guilt and pain produced by the ego was stored in an unconscious level of mind, which also contains our call for God's love and help. The Holy Spirit's answer to our guilt is that we did not do it, that we are still as God created us because the separation never occurred.
The journey home is an illusion. We need not purify ourselves or make sacrifices.
Instead, we can wake up at any time we choose. The holy instant is a moment when this is realized, applied, a moment of doing nothing.
The miracle is a free deliverance from the imprisonment of the human condition. It is our right because we never sinned.
Yeah. I, listen, I'm a person that has like an obnoxious way of speaking, but is it like truly not possible for just some like this just requires some child to be like what the fuck are you talking about yeah right like what the fuck is this shit yeah we need i you know i mean you need a comment section i guess is what you need need.
I think what we need is a little more focus.

We've all been vibing on Bill Burr lately. We need to make that a government position where whenever someone starts doing this, we have a slightly thumb-looking man who comes to be like, what the fuck are you talking about? Come on, stop this shit.
He should be from Boston. He should be from Boston, ideally.
who just like, when someone says that, there should be like a vaguely Bostonian guy going, nah. The problem is he should be from Boston, but not like that.
Not like that. Not like that.
Not like from Boston, if you know what I'm saying. We need an Avengers initiative of guys who have that remarkable mix of like physiognomy and accent that people will be like, oh, yeah, that does sound kind of silly.
Like when he says it's silly, I actually, yeah, maybe that is kind of stupid. Yeah.
Oh, my God. It's not materially dumber than anything Elon Musk tweets.
Oh, absolutely not. But I think it leads us there in part.
Right. And what a- Yes, it's the same shit.
Because this is Janice Peck's book. This is a lot of, when you get a lot of like more left-wing critiques of Oprah, one of the running themes is like the whole, the overriding message of a lot of her show is problems have, are all problems.
There's like societal problems are individual problems and they have deeply individualistic solutions. And instead of like fixing systems, the answer comes down more down to fixing yourself and your individual attitude.
And that can be very problematic at verging on solipsistic, right? When we get to this era, it's like nothing is the problems aren't real. And if I can make myself okay with them, then I don't even need to think about the other people who are suffering because the problems aren't real.
You know, this is a very narcissistic and dangerous way to think about the world. I can see how it functions as a pretty useful like political and social ideology.
Yes. Yes.
It's great for capitalism. Like if this is your attitude, once you get a nice house, climate change is no longer a problem.
The Pacific Palisades are a paradise. Hmm.
Something smells odd on the air. Let me look at the window.
You know, your mind palace is your paradise, Robert. Right, right.
Yeah. And when you're living in a $24,000 a night hotel, because again, the Palisades burned down, your mind palace is still there for you, you know? That's the beauty.
LA doesn't have a homelessness problem. We just need more mind palaces, you know? This is also, by the way, more or less the pitch from the bad guys in the Matrix.
It kind of is, yes. It's are you are like the matrix but but no this is actually how really how philosophy works and religion works yes yeah it's just like these are all that guy in the first matrix movie he's like look man the steak tastes good I don't know what to tell you yeah this is like the parable of the cave people just really jonesing for some more cave yeah yeah that is what i took out of the allegory of the cave is like cave's pretty cool i like shadows i love cave you know you know the new season of severance starts tonight so i'm gonna be sitting and watching some cave shadows baby i'm good i'm ready give me some adam scott so thanks to williamson's advocacy and oprah's shadows, baby.
I'm good. I'm ready.
Give me some Adam Scott. So thanks to Williamson's advocacy and Oprah's platform, A Course in Miracles went from fringe, it was getting more popular.
I will say this, it didn't entirely gain its popularity, but Oprah is a large part of the fact that it sells more than two million copies. And Oprah doesn't just plug that book and her friend Mary Ann's book.
She and Mary Ann sit down and they lay out in this. And again, the point of this episode is Oprah announcing her show is pivoting from being about bad things and sad stuff to being about, you know, empowerment and beauty.
Right. Quote during the hour.
This is Janice Peck. During the hour, the two women identified various social problems, crime, drug addiction, TV violence, war, child abuse, prejudice, as the price we pay for ignoring our souls.
Born of denial, this collective neglect of soul had produced a diseased and dysfunctional society. The antidote, Williamson proposed, was a shift in the paradigm on the planet to activate an amazing healing force, the spirit of divine consciousness, which is within our souls.
While she prescribed various steps towards planetary healing, from praying to participating in support groups, all were predicated on replacing negative thoughts with positive ones because our thoughts determine the experiences of our lives. I will just point out that if you substitute the word urge tree in there a few times, this is basically just Elden Ring.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, Williamson has a writing credit on that.
It was her and George RR Martin really like banging it out. No, that's, that's a lie.
That's a lie. I'm sorry.
That's almost credible. You said it in a way where I truly for a second was like, I don't know if he's making a joke or not.

I would sit and listen to George R.R. Martin and Marianne Williamson invent religion.

Oh, my God.

So Oprah's pivot to guru had begun.

Over the coming years and indeed decades, she would help introduce millions of Americans to new age thinkers like Eckhart Tolle,

whose books The Power of Now and A New Earth represent what Slate writer Kurt Anderson described as a successful crusade against reason itself. Here's one of Tolle's most favorite quotes.
Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance.
For example, there's nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease. And Toll's argument here is that overthinking is a societal epidemic and a lot of our suffering as a species is because we don't coast enough on vibes.
Go with the flow more often. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease.
Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity. And like, I think there's actually more than a little bit of move fast and break things downstream of Toll.
I don't think there's zero percent of that there. But more than that, Oprah's embrace of this guy represents a major salient in the war against reason, which if you hadn't checked

recently, reason is losing.

Yeah. Yeah.
And this is where

we start talking. Oh, reason lost.

Reasons may be lost.

Yeah.

Reason is at least like Great Britain

on the first day of the Battle of Britain.

You know, France has surrendered.

I don't know what the French equivalent of reason is.

And yeah, we're watching those stukas rain down on fucking London. It's not good.
But what are you going to do? I don't know. Yeah, I actually have no idea, Andrew.
Don't worry so much. Deepak Chopra.
Don't think so much. Don't think so much.
Why am I thinking all this time? Let's talk about Deepak Chopra. He is another gift that Oprah gave the world and his career was in some ways a mirror of Dr.
Oz and honestly a less toxic one. Chopra starts out as a well-regarded endocrinologist until he quits that to become a guru to the kind of people who embrace new spiritualities based on airport bestsellers.
Chopra is the kind of guy who peddles stuff that seems well-meaning and even harmless if you don't look too deeply into what he's saying. The harm largely comes from the fact that accepting his principles means embracing lies about how the world works and denying basic science.
As Dr. Chris Consilvio writes, he preaches the body is made of a quantum energy and there exists a dynamic consciousness where the mind, body, and spirit are interwoven and interconnected by an energy force that transcends matter and physical reality.
Now, because of this, Chopra often advises his followers that modern medicine is useless or futile or fundamentally flawed in ways that make it less reliable than embracing pseudoscience. Here's a quote I found from an article on Chopra that he wrote for his own website titled, Why Doctors Can't Make You Well.
What the public and most doctors hasn't found out is that the cause of illness is becoming more and more murky. It's not just germs and genes.
The germ theory of disease held sway for over a century after the discovery of microbes and the arrival of antibiotics to combat them. Gene therapy, long promise is the answer to almost any disease, hasn't actually achieved much success, although in certain cases, such as cancers that are caused by a simple genetic mutation, targeted drug therapies have been successful.
The bigger picture is that genetics has led us into a much more complicated view of the disease process, so complicated that it is beyond the skill of doctors. Too many factors are at work when illness arises, and the disease model itself sometimes breaks down.
Germ theories? Wrong. I, Deepak Chopra, can explain it it your brain's not thinking good enough now i mean but you know i guess it's i i feel like someone should just say that's not true his last statement that's not how it is like antibiotics are great uh the model doesn't break down the model doesn't break down bringing in gene therapy along like it's one of those things just like okay well depending on what you mean by gene therapy sure there's a lot of shit that like people talk about in sci-fi that hasn't happened but that has nothing to do with germ theory right like germ theory is a very robust model chopper rides a line he He doesn generally outright say don't take your meds but the conclusion you're led to from a lot of his writing is don't take your meds that whole article i just quoted from is how doctors don't understand what causes schizophrenia and i think the conclusion that you're supposed to be led to is maybe don't take those antipsychotics again

chopra doesn't say this legally i am not accusing him of saying this i'm just saying i think a lot of people reading that who are like should i take my antipsychotics might take from that article maybe i won't but also saying it he's not not saying it right it's also just like just like, you know, not like just because like there isn't a full understanding

of schizophrenia.

You're going to really trust that chemotherapy, vaccine, et cetera.

Like, yeah.

Well, there's always that real thing, which is that like, yeah, man, there's actually

a shitload of problems that modern medicine like treats and talks about schizophrenia.

Absolutely. You don't know anything about this.
Yeah, yeah. Like, you're not helping.
Yeah. His pitch is that I'm not burdened with all this knowledge and history of the process, so I have a clearer insight into how to fix things.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What really annoys me about this is how they're so good at taking that one kind of like true thread, which is like plenty of people feel unheard by the medical space. And like, you know, they feel like their symptoms or whatever or their illnesses are not being properly treated.
And so I can see how this is so tempting to be like, oh, well, what do they know about anything? Why should I trust any of this? They're all hucksters. Like, it's so it's such a callous but tempting way of getting people walking people toward this very dangerous line of thinking.
Does that make sense? Yeah, no, no, I think that absolutely does. I think you hit it on the head.
So Deepak has over the years claimed that human aging can be reversed by pure force of thought. He is, as health law and science professor Timothy Caulfield argues, a prophet of alternative medicine and the great de-educator.
Chopra's book sold millions and millions of copies after he was featured as a guest on Winfrey's show. And I don't know that I'd say he has no career without her.
That's too much. But he has less of one, right? Like he's got, he's a lot less of a guy without Oprah.

Without Chopra, we probably don't get shit like the bleach drinking church, people taking ivermectin to cure their cancer and a decent chunk of the anti-vax movement, which we'll be talking about later because Oprah's got some real involvement there and a friend of the pod, Jenny McCarthy. Now, one of the most frustrating things about Oprah in this time period after her pivot away from trash TV is in the mid 90s, is that in the middle of like all of this new age woo that she is putting out and clotting our national arteries with, which leads to the fatal stroke we're going to spend the rest of our lives living in.
She is also like she's right about some important things, but even when she's right about them, the kind of the lack of rigor to the way she talks about stuff means that she winds up wrong about them. And to make that make sense, I'm going to talk about Oprah's war with the beef industry, because this is a key moment in Oprah history.
In April of 1996, Oprah dedicated a segment of her show to mad cow disease and brought on an animal rights activist and vegetarian named Howard Lyman. The UK had just had a major mad cow outbreak and had to cull vast numbers of animals and Lyman predicted that the same thing would soon befall the US beef supply.
He talked about what happens when humans catch mad cow from tainted meat and the horrific deaths that follow. Oprah declared the conversation, quote, stopped me cold from eating another burger.
Now this has a massive impact on the beef industry, right? And they're going to sue her over this because there's some evidence that like millions of dollars in beef sales are like the price of the value of beef dropped significantly because of Oprah talking about mad cow this way. And the broader thing, which is that like our meat, like there's a lot of stuff that's gross and inhumane and climactically awful about our addiction to beef and the way this industry functions and it deserves criticism.
The problem is that the specific criticism Oprah is publishing and focusing on is mad cow disease. And the US beef industry really doesn't deserve that, right? Lyman's prediction that like we're going to have a UK style mad cow outbreak in the US hasn't come to pass.
And in fact, in the decades since he said this, the US has had six confirmed cases of mad cow disease, the first in 2003 and the most recent in 2023. And these were all isolated and caught fairly quickly.
Preventing the spread of mad cow was something the US beef industry has beef industry has proved very good at, particularly considering the fact that the U.K. and France, which normally have much more effective regulatory states, have had much larger problems with this.
Now, that doesn't mean, again, that we're immune from, for example, even other prion diseases, right? The spread of prion diseases due to farmed meat is a massively important story in the U.S., one with some potentially apocalyptic undertones, right? For example, we have this massive problem in a lot of the Great Lakes region, the East Coast, with chronic wasting disease, which is basically mad cow for deer, which number one, gets a number of hunters killed, but also deer spread these like poisoned prions around in the soil, and they don't really die. And there's like a lot of very worrying problems due to this.
And it all got started almost certainly because people were trying to farm venison. And, you know, these all all of these diseases result when you've got like we've got a bunch of animals we're trying to farm at scale and their feed has pieces of their own spinal cords in it.
Right. Of like of their fellow animals, right? Like that's the, I'm simplifying a lot of stuff.
But like what I'm saying is meat as an industry has a lot of horrible problems that have some potentially near apocalyptic outcomes for our society. But the specific thing Oprah has is really going after in this episode isn't a big problem for the beef industry.
And as a result, they're going to sue her, right? So Texas is one of a dozen states with what's called a veggie libel law, which is a law that makes a person liable if they make liberalist statements about food safety. Representatives of the cattle industry complained to Texas Agricultural Commissioner Rick Perry, who wrote a letter to the state attorney general complaining the economic livelihood of our beef producers is at stake.
Now, the reality of the situation is that, again, Oprah has exaggerated the risk of mad cow disease in the US, but not in a way that a reasonable person would call libelous. I've just pointed out that she was kind of wrong for this to be the focus when talking about bad aspects of the beef industry.
But when you were seeing Mad Cow go crazy in the UK, being like, it's probably a problem, that's not libel, right? That's speculative in a way that's inaccurate, but it's not really libel. The beef magnates disagreed, and they considered Oprah enemy number one and saw the overall case as a way to stop anyone from talking badly about health and safety practices within the beef industry.
Oprah, for her part, and this is where I give her a lot of credit, refuses to budge or settle. And so she is like, I'm not going to settle this case.
I'm not going to retract or apologize. Let's go to court, motherfuckers.
And so this turns into a showdown in fucking Amarillo, Texas, or shit, is it Abilene? I wrote Amarillo, but I think it might be Abilene. Look it up, folks.
Maybe I got that one wrong. I'll say both.
Fuck it. So she has to go to this small town that's like a massive beef center in Texas, right? And a normal person would have been like, well, all right, I've got to be in court for several weeks.
I guess we'll put the show on hiatus, right? Obviously, I'm not going to fly my entire crew down to this show into this town in Texas and just film the Oprah Winfrey show from there, which is exactly what she does. So here's the Texas Tribune.
Rather than putting her show on hiatus for weeks, she brought it with her and framed parts of it as an homage to the city and state she suddenly found herself in. Winfrey donned a cowboy hat and drew cheers by occasionally mimicking a Texas accent.
Texas-born actor Patrick Swayze came on and taught her how to two-step. So you're on trial by day and you're doing this show by night, Winfrey recalled in 2012.
It was stressful. It was challenging to be on trial, may I just say, as one of the worst experiences of anybody's life.
A gag order prevented Winfrey from talking about the case on her show, which she turned into a running joke. We're down here in Amarillo.
Y'all know why, she said during one segment, drawing laughs from the audience. Large crowd showed up, both for Winfrey's show and outside the courtroom, to catch a glimpse of her Amarillo Loves Oprah t-shirts.
She didn't testify until the latter part of the case, but by the time she got on the stand, the town loved her, Babcock said. And again, everyone on this jury has ties to the beef industry, and they vote unanimously to clear Oprah.
That's how much juice this lady has. I know we're here to talk about her as a bastard, but you gotta that like that is cool that's pretty cool shit yeah yeah i wish she had gone to war over a better criticism of the beef industry but that is pretty cool you know you have to there's a lesson in there in terms of like how you deal with these like corporations trying to stifle speech which which is like, all right, motherfuckers, like, let's lean into it.
I will get this whole town on my side. Just out of curiosity, though, did any of the people that she called like Satanist baby rapist, did they ever sue her? Just out of curiosity.
No, no, no. They don't have beef industry money.
For one thing, they're all bankrupted fighting the Satan lawsuits, Bridget. Like these people owned a daycare.
So Oprah declares victory. Beef industry representatives declare victory, too, stating that the cost of the case would make other media figures more careful about spreading disinformation.
Americans largely went back to ignoring the harms of our addiction to cheap red meat,

and the only real long-term consequence to all this was that Oprah befriended a

psychologist that she'd hired on as a

jury consultant, Dr.

Phil McGraw.

Ew!

Again, folks, for an episode

on Bastardry, we're not going to talk about Dr.

Phil or Dr. Oz in these episodes, because

we've done two-parters on both of them. Check those

out if you want to know why those guys suck.

But this ends badly is what I'll say.

You know what else ends badly, Sophie?

Oh my god.

Your life

if you don't buy the products and services

that are advertised on this podcast.

It's like a chain letter. If you buy the first thing that comes on, you'll have a happy life.
When you die, your whole family will be around you. There will be no pain.
You'll hear the trumpet of St. Peter.
Is it him that has a trumpet? You'll hear some fucking trumpet, and then everything will be good. You'll go to heaven.
It'll be great. And we're back.
It's St. Gabriel and St.
Jerome. Is it St.
Gabriel? And St. Jerome? And St.
Cecilia. A lot of them got trumpets.
How am I supposed to? It's like a ska band up there. You know? Lots of trumpets.
God's God's sacred genre. OK, the fact that Oprah show was now a mix of spiritual gurus and crusades against various causes.
Celeb did not mean that Oprah completely had excised the smut. Despite her claim to have left trash TV behind, she knew that any topic involving teen pregnancy, teen drug use, child abduction, et cetera, got views.

Her audience of largely middle-class moms tuned in when Oprah told them their kids were in

danger.

The clearest example of this comes from 2003, when Oprah Winfrey introduced the concept

of, Bridget, so happy to be talking about this, rainbow parties!

Yes, finally!

We're doing it!

You get a rainbow party! You get it! Well, I shouldn't phrase it that way young Bridget fucking wishes no one gets a rainbow party that's actually the reality of the situation I am sure we've got our Gen Z listeners and our old people listeners those are the two other kinds of people behind normal people us millennials are all like what the fuck are they talking about the fuck is a rainbow party is this some like lgbt thing no um it's not so this was yet another moral panic and it's the first moral panic that we're talking about in the series that i was around for as a perfectly i'm assuming the same as true of you like this was a moral panic about my generation my my peers and I, that I was old enough to be like, what the fuck are you talking about? So in order to introduce this concept, this this comes up on the Oprah Winfrey show for the first time during a discussion between Oprah and Michelle Burford. Burford is a journalist at O Magazine.
Oprah had launched a magazine, I think in like 99 or something. After her show has made its big pivot, they launched this magazine, which is the number one women's magazine, basically for the whole time that it's in publication.
They don't stop publishing until 2020. And Burford has just finished some hard hitting research on the millennials, our generation.
And she's reading Oprah new slang terms for sex and that our generation has cooked up. And again, this is 2003.
So everybody prepare to take some notes. Also, just the selection for more videos.
It's so scary. Fascinating stuff.
Fascinating stuff. What is happening to Elmo? Oh my God.
Yeah, the Elmo thing is, I think that's from the new Dune show, and that's clearly someone playing Matt Gaetz on SNL. Just because of how uncomfortable that woman looks, I can tell it's supposed to be Matt Gaetz.
Anyway. I don't know.
So what is a salad toss? A salad is, get ready, hold on to your underwear for this one, oral anal sex. So, oral sex to the anus is what tossed salad is.
Bye, Mom. It's super good.
That mom looks so worried. It's an oral sex party.
It's a gathering where oral sex is performed, and rainbow comes from all of the girls put on lipstick, and each one puts her mouth around the penis of the gentleman, or gentlemen are there to receive favors and another horrified mom shaking her head penis hence the term rainbow i remember this like it was yesterday i when i said that when my mom would sit me down after school and like it was time for us to have like a serious talk about something I always knew it had been on Oprah and I remember very clearly this episode because as I said I went to Catholic school I went to all school I was a the biggest nerd in the world I was not having sex with anybody but my mom sitting me down and being like is this a thing that's happening at school I was like the the way the the fan the fiction that like

young people were doing things like rainbow parties it just yeah it just really is burned in my mind that like oprah had really put a fantasy world in the head of people like my mom yeah yeah it's such a fucking absolute it's such a fucking absolute like fantasy because like I remember seeing this as like a 15 year old and going,

no,

we're not like,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I,

I, it's such a fucking absolute like fantasy. Cause like, I remember seeing this as like a 15 year old and going, no, we're not like, I'm not look 15 year old Robert, not exactly doing a lot of sex parties, but also I knew enough about my generation to other.
Like neither were basically anyone else at my school, right? There were some kids having sex, but there weren't rainbow parties. Like people were like dry humping behind the walmart and like that was it like it wasn't like sex parties yeah everybody's got a different lipstick and you compare the rainbows on your dick what like where is this happening we're doing the lipstick shades many questions my mom asked me about this too yeah that was a weird thing and weird thing.
And I was like, Mom, look at me. Absolutely not.
Also, look at these bags I have. Nothing is happening.
You should always think this way. Whenever there's like a, this is the new dangerous sex thing the kids are doing.
Does it sound like something you and your peers might have done as 15 year olds or does it sound like

something an adult pervert invented because it made them because they're sick right i was gonna say whoever invented this truly needs to go to jail yes like the concept is yes it's like this is marketing child pornography that's what you've done well they did like a version of this on uh that show Degrassi, but instead of it on the dicks, it was like rainbow bracelets. My mom asked me about that also.
That was another thing. I don't think it was on Oprah, but if you wore like those jelly bracelets, it was like, oh, if you wear a brown one, you know what that means? Yeah.
Nobody was doing that. Nobody.
But Sophie, now that you brought up degrassi i think i'm through the looking glass here because look clearly this isn't a real thing it was invented by a pedophile who was on degrassi famous pedophile drake oh shit we're through the looking glass robert we got this locked down that man is suing people he's suing kendrick lamar come on he's suing for defamation for being called a pedophile but sir i feel like the best case scenario here is that kendrick and i become good friends and no one ever tells him that i must took him from macklemore once robert i swear how does that happen robert i swore i don't know who people are like not by looks or songs i just thought on- I don't know who people are. Like, not by looks or songs.

I just thought people-

Robert, we swore we would take that secret to our group.

They couldn't have waterboarded that shit out of me.

It's the most angry I've ever been at you.

The internet's going to light on fire.

The group's going to get off scot-free now.

And then we all made a pact in my car that we would never repeat this. Because it was so dramatic.
I'm too honest a man, Sophie. I can't.
I'm like George Washington. This is my cherry tree moment.
I cannot tell a lie. I don't know who people are.
Yes, but Jesus fuck, Robert. It's okay.
I listened to a Kendrick Lamar song after that. I knew you were in my car.
It was pretty good. I'm sorry.
Macklemore's not. I made a horrible mistake.
Forgive me. Don't forgive Drake.
Look, I'm trying to deflect here. I'm doing the Trump thing.
Ignore my sins. Focus on Drake and the rainbow parties.
Let's blame him for that. The disappointment's back.
I don't know who people are. Look, it's going to be hard to get back on track after this.
Later in that interview, Oprah asks Burford if rainbow parties are common, and Maria replied, among the 50 girls I talked to, this was pervasive. Here's a quick tip on knowing if a journalist is not a good journalist.
A good journalist, if they had talked to 50 girls, would say this number of them said that they had attended a rainbow party versus this number of them said they had heard of a rainbow party. That starts to give you some useful data as to like, oh, actually, 30 of them said they'd heard of this.
None of them have been to one. Maybe they're not real.
Like that, that would be journalism, right? That's the start of it at least. Burford says of the 50 girls I talked to, quote unquote, this was pervasive.
Now I'll say this right now. Burford either made all that shit up because she knew Oprah would love it or some teenage girls were paying a prank on her.

A couple of researchers, Joel Best and Kathleen Boggle, actually looked into where this rumor started and they traced it to a book called Epidemic, How Teen Sex is Killing Our Kids by Meg Meeker.

And if you want to know how accurate this book was, are there still kids, Sylvie?

Check notes, yes. Let's do a quick fact check.
Okay, it didn't. We're good.
Good news, everybody. Teen sex didn't kill all the kids.
Hey, listen, at least we do have a name for the straight up fucking pedophile enabler at minimum. Meg Meeker? Oh, she's great.
She is a right wing pediatrician who has spent the last 20 years profiting off of convincing parents that their kids are fucking each other to death. She has never once been correct, but she has the ear of incoming President Donald Trump.
She's awesome. Back in 2003, Oprah laundered her conservative Christian propaganda because, hey, sex sells.
Best and Boggle, who wrote a book called Kids Gone Wild, that despite that title, the book is about how all this stuff is bullshit, right? It's about all these bullshit media myths about how bad kids are, right? And it busts a bunch of pervasive myths about teenagers and their wild, elaborate sex-based parties. Both Boggle and Best clearly blame Oprah for launching the Rainbow Party's panic, right? Like this becomes a media panic as a result of Oprah giving it so much oxygen.
I'm going to quote now from an interview with the authors of that book in Salon. With Oprah, because that reaches so many millions of people, particularly women and women that have children, they're hearing that story and saying, oh, my God, did you hear on Oprah? What's going on? We even have a quote in the book that looks at another reporter when they're looking at issues of youth and sex, a reporter by the name of Costello that says, it must be true.
Didn't you see that Oprah episode? So even another reporter ends up citing Oprah as a fact checker on Rainbow Parties being real. So if you're following the evidentiary chain of custody here, Oprah's reporter says, I talked to 50 girls and like they said,

rainbow parties were pervasive. Did any of them say they'd been to one? Unclear.
That turns into another journalist being like, well, they're real because it was on Oprah. We're locked in, baby.
The circular bullshit machine. Yeah.
Beautiful stuff. Um, another, oh oh and actually this gets back to degrassi uh another story oprah helped push around the same time was a panic around sex bracelets uh this is again the idea that like girls have these color-coded bracelets to signify all the sex acts they're down to perform and i guess the boys are just going around being like oh that girl's got the bracelet for a foot job i'm getting up with her and it's like that's just that's just not how teenagers work that's not how adults work nothing works that way except for like i don't know weird jeffrey epstein parties probably i'm sure he had some parties like that i'm sure he had parties like that because they watched op Oprah and were all perverts anyway.
Yeah. It's also like, that is such a healthier type of consent than anything that actually happens in fucking high school.
Right. Right.
Yes. Yes.
They're all having like the kind of key parties that like middle-aged swingers had in 1974. Those bracelets were like very popular when I was coming of age and they were genuinely like, y'all could look this up.
They were banned from schools. Oh yeah.
Because of this bogus reporting. No, they were banned from my school.
Yes. Now, this is another thing.
Again, both this and rainbow parties, I'm sure if you dug, you could find examples of teenagers doing it after it becomes a media panic because kids are like, well, all right, let's give it a shot. If we're doing it, we're doing it.
Yeah. But yeah, it's not until professional media idiots like Matt Lauer or Montel Williams make a big deal about it that it becomes a thing.
And in that interview in Salon, Best and Bogle get to the heart of what's really going on with all of this. I think one of the things we show in the last chapter is that it's not just one group that likes these stories.
Kids themselves like them because it's great gossip. What's better than to say, oh, the girl wearing the red bracelet, you know what she does.
She gives lap dances. They make stories.
Teens like to pass around that make interesting gossip. Parents are always worried about their kids, of course, and they've been fed a lot of media stories that feed into that.
So the idea that their child, who they think of as innocent, might be corrupted by these other forces, that feeds into something like they've been fed and believed for a long time. Schools want to show how they have things under control.
They know what's going on, and they can talk to parents about it. So they can say, we banned those bracelets to put a stop to that.
Then, of course, the media. There's both the idea that sex sells, but also fear sells, saying, listen to this story.

You have something to worry about.

You have to listen to this because you don't know what's really going on, and it could affect your child.

That's what gets viewers, and television producers and newspaper columnists are aware of that.

Now, we're going to move on from the radio party stuff, but I wouldn't be doing my job as podcast host if I did not play you the rest of that clip. Okay, and so what does pretty boy mean? A pretty boy is a sexually active boy, someone who's been fairly promiscuous.
So it isn't maybe what you would have thought pretty boy meant in your time. And dirty means what? Does dirty mean a disease means a diseased girl.
And along with that, the term that some teens are using to mean HIV is high five,

high, and then the Roman numeral V, high five.

So if you got high fived by Jack, you got diseased by Jack.

He gave you HIV. He gave you HIV.

Yeah.

What?

So that means you shouldn't go around saying to little kids anymore.

I was like a little boy.

I went, give me high five.

Yeah. You shouldn't do that anymore.
And if suddenly your kids want to make salad all the time, you should be wondering. Okay.
And booty call is pretty common, right? Yeah, that's pretty pervasive. Yeah, that's an early morning or late at night call for sex that involves no real relationship.
Maybe 2 a.m. Guy calls girl and says, meet me at so-and-so location.
We have sex. We leave.
Woody call. Y'all knew that.
Y'all got that, right? Okay. And then there's the term hoovering, which is a term used for a girl having an abortion.
Yes, you get the reference, the sucking of a Hoover vacuum. She's having herself vacuumed out, so to speak.
So these were just a few of the terms that i heard teens referring to i got a whole new vocabulary book so what happened when they would say she got hoovered she got you well if somebody you're talking to somebody in the beginning before you got so right here yeah before i got here what would you what would if somebody said she got hoovered you would just say what do you mean yeah what do you mean what do you mean what does hoovering mean and she'd tell me. Are rainbow parties pretty common? I think so, at least among the 50 girls that I talked to.
That gets us back to what we'd said before. Oh, God.
Jesus. The idea that kids have a fun term for getting HIV.
Also, not to give notes on the slang, but shouldn't it be high four?

I just, I don't know, man.

Such a writer, Andrew.

I just, like, it's tough that hoovering really, you know, it used to be just suffering from a Great Depression, and now it's been tainted so badly.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

It would have been pretty funny to just be a con man journalist in this period and be like yeah the kids can't stop talking about herbert hoover you know like he's their favorite president he's the only guy on the minds of the youth these days i mean obviously the internet is absolute poison but truly watching this clip of someone basically read fake urban dictionary on national tv does kind of give me like okay some things were improved okay yeah oh yeah have you all seen that meme where it's like um ice tea from law and order svu explaining fake things that's what that reminded me of just someone sitting on stage being like oh yeah the kids are calling it cat da-da-da-da. That's what that was.
It's just somebody making up fake things for entertainment. There's the idea that kids have a casual slang term for getting HIV.
It's true, like... It's like it's doing something in a video game.
But also, like... I mean, obviously they had a vested interest and never thinking about this but like nothing is more like universal than teens lying to old ass adults if a journalist had ever tried to sit down with me and my friends and ask us like about if there's any sex slang we would have lied like cheap rugs like we would we would we would not have stopped talking until they had run out of space on their recorder you know like just like the credulousness is i mean i guess that that i i'm i'm realizing now i guess is like oprah's big crime is just like criminal credulity yes yes that's Yes.
That's a big part of it. Or, you know, if she's not credulous, because again, she's a very savvy person.
It's like marketing credulousness. Right.
Yeah. And it's the dumbest shit you've ever heard.
Yeah. She'll just be like, I mean, listen, that's exactly what Joe Rogan does.
So, right. Yep Yep.
Like that, that is, there's a really like, you don't have Joe Rogan without the Oprah Winfrey show, you know? Yeah. Just like you don't have Oprah without Donahue.
Now, Oprah is not the only person obviously who spread this kind of stuff, but she is the biggest name in the world of people doing this. As Vanity Fair stated in the year 2000, when Oprah launched O Magazine, quote, Oprah Winfrey arguably has more influence on the culture than any university president, politician, or religious leader, except perhaps the Pope.
And I'm just gonna say it, John Paul II, I think, was the Pope at this time, and I believe Oprah had more of an influence than he did on American culture, at least like who remembers old JP,

the two you got shot once.

Come on.

I know popes who've been shot way more than that.

Also do individual popes really have that much influence.

I mean, they're,

they're still certainly did.

Well, I'm just, I just mean like they don't really have more influence than any other Pope, really. Like, you're still operating within the bands of Catholicism.
Look, most of what I know about the Pope comes from the movie The Conclave, which is largely that- Ooh, I just saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which is largely that Stanley Tucci looks incredible in Catholic vestments. It's like he was poured into him.
That man can really pull off whatever you call those outfits. Also, Ralph Fiennes.
Oh my God. His Tucci chains.
Oh, the Tucci. The Tucci.
That was lovely. Oh, man.
And then John Lithgow out of nowhere. Love it.
The vaping cardinal. All sorts of good stuff in that movie.
Okay. I am more sold by the concept of a vaping cardinal.
It's good. They hire an Italian man whose face was made to angrily vape while wearing vestments.

It's amazing. That casting director deserves a medal of honor.
OK, so, yeah, I think that that's probably a broadly accurate statement. The Rainbow Party disinformation is part of a long tradition of Oprah episodes about how dangerous life has become for young children.
Every year, as violent crime fell and violence towards children usually fell, Oprah barraged her audience with ceaseless tales of child abductions, child sex trafficking, child drug abuse, and teen sex. Studies show consistently that Americans believe violent crime is much higher than it in fact is.
We are in the midst of a very frightening moral panic over child sex trafficking right now, which does not resemble how child sex trafficking actually looks. I'm speaking right now about Tim Ballard, whose lies about his life rescuing kids from child sex trafficking networks were the basis of the blockbuster movie Sound of Freedom.
Ballard spent years claiming to be fighting an international shadowy network of child traffickers while he just resigned after being charged with massive sexual misconduct and abuse himself. Despite all of this, tons of people believe little kids are being targeted and stolen by criminal organizations when, again, they are usually being molested by people who are responsible for them, not random narco gangs abducting kids in parking lots by putting cheese on the doors of their mom's car.
That's not the problem. Oprah bears a good share of the blame for how unhinged many Americans are about the dangers that children face.
And this is I'm making this allegation based on stuff like the Rainbow Party panic and other years of other similar episodes. But, you know, it's during my research, I ran into a really interesting thread in a website on free range parenting.
And I'm not making making, I don't know much about free-range, I'm not making a comment on that, but I found it interesting to read what these people had to say in a thread titled, Did Oprah Make Us Terrified for Our Kids? The author, who identifies themselves as Laura, writes, As I think about the litany of freak accidents and hidden dangers I need to be constantly worried about for my kids, almost everything has one common recurring element. I saw it on Oprah one time.
Baby drowning in an inch of water. Healthy girl scrapes her knee and dies of MRSA.
Child decapitated by an airbag. Carbon monoxide from the car in the garage kills the family.
Dry drowning, school shootings, home invasions, and countless other tragedies. Then there are the abduction, molestation, and sexual predator stories.
These were typically featured on Oprah at least once a week. While I applaud Oprah's efforts to raise awareness, catch truly horrible criminals, and break the silence of abuse victims, this had to have an impact on the perception that there was a predator around every corner, and you could never be too careful because anything could happen.
And I think she's on the money there, right? Like, the helicopter parenting, the fact that fact that like kids, there's not zero Oprah and the fact that like kids stopped going outdoors, you know? And like true crime podcasts now, it's like, just the make white women assume that the world is out for their kids industry is the strongest thing going. Yep.
I mean, if you've ever seen videos of women moms

who were like, I was at the Walmart

and a man looked at my child.

Stay safe, mama bears.

Like, it was the scariest thing that ever happened to me.

We're like, it is this fantasy that around every corner

there is a threat to you and your child.

And I think it's dangerous precisely

because it keeps you from seeing the actual threats that are there, right? Like the creepy soccer coach, the creepy guy at church, right? And I also think like with the rainbow parties, if you are so busy thinking about these fabricated fictional threats to your kids, the things that are actually happening in your kid's life day to day at school, how are they going to come talk to you are you going to foster a safe open communicative environment if you've been led to believe that like these fictional threats are out there and that they're real yeah yeah well also it's like i mean because it is you know scout leaders church leaders and their husbands that are doing most of this stuff it's like those people are the ones that they have some responsibility for bringing into their child's life whereas a narco gang is just randomly out there like you don't have to confront anything about yourself to protect a kid from that's the others ding ding fucking ding i Right. It's so it's hard to raise kids.
And like you can be a responsible, decent person who does their best with your kid and they can have a horrible life. That's the world.
Right. Like you can't stop that.
And instead of like confronting that and confronting like, well, all I can really do is, you know, try to be the best parent for my kid. You get all these like obsessions with things that just are not realistic threats and dangers.
And you just feel like if I continue scratching that fear itch by watching this stuff, maybe it'll make it less likely to happen to me, right? Maybe if I train my eyes on the eye of Horace, it will be less likely to harm me and my loved ones you know well it's like the the safety theater makes you feel better then again confronting the actual difficult shit that yeah is in the deal yeah like the the danger of all of this stuff was less you know kids are having rainbow parties or you know pedophile gangs or abducting kids in vans and more like hey uh have you looked at your uh your kid scout leader lately seems like he's a lot of one on one time with the boys by the way should somebody look in on that scouts in general it's also just like a right wing paramilitary organization even without the the funny business. Well, you can learn how to camp and fish and hunt without all the fucking like allegiances to order.
You know, Andrew, thank you, because I wanted to pivot to letting everyone know that if you give your kids to me for one week out of the year, they will come back. It's the Lawrence of Arabia school for children.
They're going to learn how to blow up bridges and trains, right?

What do they do with that knowledge?

That's up to them.

I have no control of them once they've learned how to make the explosives and destroy bridge supports.

It's no longer my responsibility after that point.

Is this the start of Robert starting a boy army?

Everybody does want a child army.

Speaking of popes, Bridget, that's like a third of the popes wow solid subset of the pope population has child armies you know anyway i think that's an episode yeah i was gonna say we gotta we gotta stop turns out we have a lot more Oprah to do. I don't know what we're going to do about

this, but everybody go away for the

weekend. Bridget, pluggables?

Yeah, you can

subscribe to my Boy Army

newsletter. No, just kidding.
You can listen

to my podcast. There are no girls on the internet.

My podcast with Mozilla Foundation,

the makers of Firefox called IRL

about who has the power in

AI and follow me on Instagram at BridgetMarieNDC.

Excellent. Andrew T.

I don't know, man.

Just the Yosus Racist is a podcast.

Excellent. Excellent.

All right, everybody. Until next week, remember

the Robert Evans Summer Camp for kids

to learn how to blow up trains and disrupt

national infrastructure.

It's not illegal if we don't tell

them to do anything with the knowledge. Bye.
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