Blacks who don’t adopt the doctrines of victimhood or critical social justice erode the narrative promoted by woke activists, Erec Smith, a professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Free Black Thought, says.
“The illogic that is inherent in a lot of anti-racist activism ... is absurd," Smith says.
Smith doesn't like how The New York Times' 1619 Project, authored by Nikole Hannah-Jones, only has furthered division within the nation.
Smith joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” from the Parents Unite conference in Boston on Oct. 1 to discuss why blacks who oppose critical race theory are being “erased.” Smith also explains what he would talk about discuss Ibram X Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” if he were given the opportunity.
We also cover these stories:
Democrats move to slash their $3.5 trillion social spending bill to $2 trillion.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announces that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, no longer will conduct worksite raids.
Eleven state-level school board groups put distance between themselves and a National School Boards Association letter to President Joe Biden asking for federal authorities to investigate parents.
How do global changes affect us on the local level, and vice versa? Today, writer and journalist James Fallows, and the founder of FutureMap, Parag Khanna, join us to discuss the interplay between the tectonic forces of geopolitics and the specific currents of the everyday. They contrast the narratives that are animating different regions of the world—especially in the United States and Asia around inequality, optimism, and defeatism—and forecast a future of migration and climate change adaptation.
Here comes the heel turn where we use the pod to get you to turn on humanity and embrace our new desiccated overlords. Once again we're joined by Matt Browne of Decoding the Gurus to help fine tune our guru messaging so everyone gets onboard. To destabilize your worldview and make you vulnerable to our plan, we discuss the problem of induction and why your belief about the future isn't actually rational.
The COVID-19 has exposed longstanding and massive health disparities in the U.S., resulting in people of color dying at disproportionately higher rates than other races in this country. Today on the show, guest host Maria Godoy talks with Usha Lee McFarling about her reporting — how new funding and interest has led to increased attention to the topic of disparities in health care and health outcomes, but also left out or pushed aside some researchers in the field — many of them researchers of color.
Percival Everett's page-turning new detective novel The Trees is at once gruesome and screamingly funny. A racial allegory rooted in southern history, the book features two big-city special detectives with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation who are sent to investigate a small-town crime. The murders are hideous in detail, the language is rough, there are racial epithets of all kinds, and somehow the politically incendiary humor is real. Everett talks with NPR's Scott Simon about how — and why — he blended these styles.
We chat with the creator of the investigative video games Her Story and Telling Lies about online surveillance, how Police are viewed in gaming, and FBI infiltration into green activism. Nerd time baby!
Rob explores Billy Ray Cyrus’s smash hit “Achy Breaky Heart” by discussing the new traditionalist movement in country music and how it affected Cyrus’s career.
This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music.
We are very pleased to be joined by returning guest Danielle Carr, anthropologist and historian of science who is finishing her PhD at Columbia, to chat about her excellent new essay on the (anti-)political epistemology of the pop sci style as represented by the work of the genre’s golden boy, Carl Zimmer. We discuss science as both an institution and ideology that, like other such things with authority and power in society, must be subjected to ruthless critical analysis. And yet, nearly all critique of science has been forfeited to the most extreme right-wing denialism. No longer! It’s time to reclaim ground for a leftist, materialist examination of science.
Follow Danielle: twitter.com/_danielle_carr
Read her article: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/carl-zimmer-virus/
Some other stuff we reference
• Against Method | Paul Feyerabend: https://www.versobooks.com/books/442-against-method
• How to Defend Society Against Science | Paul Feyerabend: https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp11_article1_defendsocietyagainstscience_feyerabend.pdf
•The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour | Simon Schaffer: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11622708/
• Neoliberalism for Polite Company: Bruno Latour’s Pseudo-Materialist Coup | R.H. Lossin: https://salvage.zone/articles/neoliberalism-for-polite-company-bruno-latours-pseudo-materialist-coup/
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Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)
Episode 134 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “In the Midnight Hour”, the links between Stax, Atlantic, and Detroit, and the career of Wilson Pickett. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.