How Fascism Is Creeping Into Our Educational System
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the new Indiana Senate Bill SB 167 that would give parents unprecedented and direct control over their children's school curriculum, and punitive measures to punish educators.
Jared also has a lively discussion with Dr. Amy Tiemann, safety expert, producer, and writer at her Substack Democracy OTL, on being able to recognize the threat of authoritarianism and how to take action.
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I'm just not neutral on the political ideology of fascism.
We condemn it and we condemn it in full and I tell my students the purpose in a democracy of understanding the traits of fascism is so that we can recognize it and we can combat it.
And I have no problem with the education system providing instruction on the existence of those isms.
I believe that we've gone too far when we take a position on those isms.
I'm not sure it's right for us to determine how that child should think, and that's where I'm trying to provide the guardrails.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckery Podcast.
I'm Jared A. Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
Listen, we got a good episode.
I'm pissed off about my home state.
I'll get to that in just a second.
But we are very, very happy to welcome to the podcast later, Dr. Amy Tiemann, a safety expert, a producer and a writer at the Substack Democracy OTL.
Really, really good conversation.
But Nick, before we get to that, before we get to anything else, we got to go to Hoosier land where they're just dropping the damn ball like they always do.
They didn't drop it in the movie Hoosiers.
So that's good.
You're just trying to make me feel better now.
Do you want to know a weird fact about Hoosiers?
The movie?
Yeah.
My town is in Hoosiers.
Oh yeah?
Which town is it?
Linton.
They actually play Linton in the semi-final before the state final.
They don't get our colors right, they don't get our mascot right, but Linton's in there.
I believe that Linton is on the scoreboard, isn't it?
Don't we see that?
I feel like in my mind's eye I can picture that name on the scoreboard.
You made me feel so much better already.
There it is.
It's a great movie.
It is.
I want to let you know.
And unfortunately, now I have to transition from Hoosiers, a beautiful, beautiful movie about the legacy of a state that I am from and that I love and that constantly breaks my heart.
We have to talk about this ongoing thing that we've been discussing and covering.
We've been telling you where this was going all along.
Now we need to get into it as it comes into fruition.
In Indiana, something called Senate Bill 167, pushed by Scott Baldwin, a state senator from Noblesville, which is a suburb of Indianapolis, if you want to read between the lines there.
Senate Bill 167, Nick, I gotta tell you, it takes on one of the biggest problems in the United States of America right now, something that is just Threatening all of us every single day.
It puts our lives in danger.
It keeps us in fear.
Do you want to take one guess what that is?
Oh, please enlighten me.
That's that's critical race theory, which, you know, keeps us in our homes, keeps us with the doors locked and the windows shut.
You know, it's not really...this is all about control, right?
This is really not even a thing about educating kids or what they learn.
I taught in public high school for four years, and I taught as a substitute teacher in the younger grades for maybe six months before that.
It's interesting.
The public schools, at least in California and L.A., there was never a notion of like the parents would have control over the curriculum specifically.
Why would they?
Why would they?
Why?
Why?
Why would they?
Well, it's their kids, Jared.
Are they teachers?
No.
Do they have training to be teachers?
No.
Are they experts?
Not in teaching.
Oh, so instead they're just an angry, pissed off mob who shows up at school board meetings and intimidates public officials and employees.
Okay, this makes a lot of sense though.
Let's follow this because are doctors experts?
Yes.
Are they trained for years and years and learned their whatever?
And do people not want to listen to them about the vaccine?
They don't want to listen to doctors about a lot of things, but yes, including the vaccine.
So I bet you that Venn diagram has a lot of overlap.
I bet that Venn diagram is a Complete and utter bullshit circle.
Nick, we're going to go through this very quickly.
We're going to break down what this is about and where this is coming from.
But let's go point by point through this absolute horseshit proposed law.
Senate Bill 167.
First things first.
Teachers must post lesson plans and curricular materials in advance with sufficient time for parental review.
Okay.
Listen, I have to tell you as a teacher, the idea of putting my curriculum out in front of people, number one, is just a pain in the ass.
Having to get it prepared and put it out there, that's awful.
But you have a syllabus, you hand it out, you ditto it, right?
I give a syllabus, but do you know what I don't need?
I don't need parents calling me up and saying, I don't think you need to teach this, which is what this is going to be.
It's going to make the lives of teachers miserable.
Even more miserable than they already are.
Well, at least they're paid enough to deal with that misery.
Oh, paid like kings and queens, my man.
And here's the thing, and before we move any further, Can we just go ahead and establish the critical race theory hysteria doesn't have anything to do with critical race theory, and it has nothing to do with reality.
Teachers are not indoctrinating your children whatsoever.
It is a completely made up political stunt conspiracy theory that is meant to mobilize parents and communities and for Republican and corporate Profit.
Right?
Is that fair?
Is this the next iteration of, you know, abortion is going to be outlawed and people are happy about that, so they need the next thing.
I wonder if this is that next thing that they realize they can manipulate.
Oh, go together.
Those things go together like peanut butter and rancid jelly.
Second, parents.
Are you ready for this, Nick?
Oh, yeah.
Because you're a parent.
I am.
You're a parent.
You get to, this is for you.
This is for you Nick.
Parents can opt their child from any part of the curriculum and the teacher will have to provide a different lesson plan for that child.
Yeah that's like double the work.
You know this is a little bit similar because like I had shown a movie I remember if you showed a movie that maybe a parent wouldn't want the kid to watch they could say well we don't want to watch that movie and that was like somewhat reasonable in some respects because Sure, I guess.
Yeah, but then again, if they don't watch the movie, then they can sit and read a book or whatever in another classroom.
They don't have to actually design a whole other curriculum for one student.
But the people didn't say, Why isn't evolution being brought up here?
Listen, I get it.
There are religious things involved there.
Like you don't want your child watching a movie talking about evolution, even though it's a consensus scientific fact.
We don't have to go down that road.
But wait, let's talk about that for a second.
Why isn't evolution being brought up here?
I didn't see that at all.
No, I'm sure that that's part of it.
That's the quiet underlying part of it.
Is it?
Oh, I guarantee it's not just critical race theory.
It's not just race.
It's not just politics.
It's also going to involve all facets of this stuff.
Like, I guarantee evolution's gonna be a part of it, the age of the earth, religious ideas.
So all of a sudden now, you are basically going to, as a parent, design your child's curriculum.
To which I say, if you wanna teach your kid, teach your kid.
Teach them at home!
All of a sudden, now you're putting the onus on teachers to suddenly cobble together a Frankenstein monster of a curriculum to make sure that nobody's upset?
Who wants that job, Nick?
Nobody.
But you're right, nobody.
Now, add to the fact that they're being pressured to go back to school to teach in the midst of a pandemic, because the students themselves, oh, they're not at risk.
Without anyone ever saying, yes, but what about the actual teachers in the room?
I would imagine this would lead to a lot of teachers leaving the field.
Yeah, and we'll get to that in just a second because that's part of this.
By the way, if I ran some sort of multinational company or whatever, corporation, and someone came to me and said, you know, I was a teacher at a large public school for 10 years and here's all the things I did, I would hire them.
That kind of experience is invaluable for everything else you'd ever have to do in your life.
I want to point out because something that you're bringing up here I think is really important.
A large part of this is not just about reverse indoctrinating children, right?
Keeping children from questioning your values, communal values, thinking about things, knowing actual history, actual politics.
It's also about driving teachers out of the field.
It absolutely is.
It's about making sure that people leave, particularly people who feel like their own values and their own principles are being trampled on with this stuff.
Well guess what happens if public education fails?
And I want to go ahead and tell you what happens based on the idea that have they or have they not been underfunding education for a very long time.
Oh, underfunding is not the word, but yes.
It's not even.
They've been attacking public education.
And the reason why they're attacking public education is because they want one big thing.
And I'll give you a hint of what that is.
It involves people making millions upon billions of dollars.
And that is privatization.
That is corporations and individuals and groups Going into what they believe is the one closed market where they can't make money whatsoever.
And guess what they're going to do?
They're going to gig economy this thing.
They're going to take teachers.
They're going to take graduates.
They're going to have them go in and teach this stuff.
They're going to hand them a script.
They're going to say, do this stuff.
And they're going to reap the financial rewards.
That's where this thing is going.
Well, what's amazing, though, is that one guy who's standing up to this in Indiana is a Republican.
And he's a history teacher, which might already kind of get him to the center.
But that was what was impressive, because there does seem to be a little bit of a pushback here.
That's how we've heard about it, right?
Because otherwise, this could have gotten swept under the rug, just kind of quietly passed.
Because who's paying attention to local politics like this when they are able to pass, you know, Bill 180, 167, right?
You don't know anything about it.
You just kind of, OK, fine.
It's so large, I'm not going to read it.
Thank God that we do have people who are actually reading this stuff and realizing that because, yes, I think that the, you know, if aliens came down and were observing this, they'd say, yes, you're trying to force teachers out of their workplaces.
That's what you want to do, right?
Like, that's the goal here.
And you want to provide a really terrible education for these people, so they have to get minimum wage jobs and fill this whole, you know, economy.
Yeah, that's what it looks like.
And I just, I don't know, I didn't really even process this before we started recording, but like, If we have to go through the monkey scopes trial again, through all of this, I don't know.
I was chilled for a second because I didn't even consider that.
But you're right.
It's general enough to allow them to say we don't agree with this and come in there.
I mean, this is like footloose, man.
Yes.
Yes, it is.
That's exactly what it is, and it is about limiting information as much as humanly possible.
I spent the morning, like most people do, had my coffee, and for the book I was rereading Trump's administration 1776 report.
Do you remember that?
Because it was just a blip, right?
It was the alternative to the 1619 Project.
And I was reading it and, like, it's so much wilder than I remember it being.
It's just, like, how dangerous it is to ever talk about race, how dangerous it is to talk about identity.
There's, like, an entire section about how civil rights went too far.
And there's, like, a picture of Martin Luther King next to it.
Like, it is wild stuff.
Well, they also make slavery seem, you know, Oh, it was the thing everybody was doing.
Who knew better?
There weren't abolitionists back then, right?
Yeah, they were fed.
They had a place to sleep, right?
Like that's sort of what they were trying to do.
They were treated well.
They were part of the family.
And, you know, with all of this and, man, just real fast, a couple more highlights.
There's going to be a committee that looks at these curriculums that are based on 60% parents and 40% educators.
How's that percentage treat you?
That works half the time.
Or something like that, I don't even know.
That works none of the time.
That is just designed to fail.
Also, by the way, and this is gross, this is actually, well, it creates a bounty system Because that's what all of these sickos want so bad.
They want to create a system in which parents and community members can point out people they don't agree with and get them arrested and or fined.
Those bounty systems are for teachers, but also librarians if you want to get a little bit Third Reich-ish on this whole thing.
And here's the grossest thing of all of it.
Are you ready for this?
Yeah, I am.
It bans educators from repeatedly interacting with students on social and emotional issues without prior parental consent.
Now, whenever we say those issues, we're not just talking, and the way that they'll present this is, you know, talking about transgenderism and talking about queerness.
That's obviously what the Republican Party is going to say.
It also keeps you from being able to talk to your students about anxiety.
It keeps you from talking to your students about abuse, it keeps you from talking to your students about problems at home, and basically cuts off every bit of sort of public oversight whatsoever.
It's insidious.
It's really disgusting.
I mean, when I was a high school teacher in 1998 to 2002, there were guidelines that were not really related exactly to this, but like, for instance, if a student wanted to talk to you one-on-one, you cannot close the door.
That door better be wide open.
Now, that's obviously protect the teacher himself, but it kind of goes along with the walking on eggshells.
We were so worried about things even 20 years ago about how these things could be perceived, what they might say, that this is just heightened to that to the point where the only interaction you would have with students is literally like, good morning, and then you can go and then lecture.
That's it.
I have to tell you, as my career has gone on and I've taught I've taught in higher education now for 16 years.
And one of the ways that my job has changed, particularly as college administrators, got rid of, you know, counselors, got rid of mental health services.
I enjoyed, by the way, and I wanted to note this before I move forward, that 16 of America's top universities got sued today for combining efforts to basically school financial aid.
Just to let everybody know what these people are capable of.
But as they got rid of counselors, as they got rid of mental health services, as they cut all of that and basically paid for athletic programs and lazy rivers that get you to the dining hall, professors became the mental health front line.
Like, we ended up becoming the people who not only taught, but we also ended up becoming the people who had to field mental health concerns.
We had to be there for students who were increasingly frustrated, stressed out, anxious, scared, often suicidal.
That got pushed on to us in the same way, undoubtedly, it got pushed on to public school teachers.
Because that's what happens in a country where you don't have these types of services.
In this case, the idea that you can't have conversations with your students about their well-being.
I'm sorry, but the classroom is an intimate location.
You're supposed to have a relationship.
It's supposed to be about trust and reciprocity and communication.
This is turning it into an assembly line, is what it's doing.
Yeah.
I mean, there are certain parents that are very threatened by the notion that their kids would need to have help and that somebody else would know about it.
You know, remember, this is the stigma of even going to get mental help was Yes.
atrocious was a terrible thing for a long, long time.
I thought as a society we kind of had moved past that, but it really feels like when you listen to these different kind of parents, and it goes into the CRT thing is, the idea that you have to have self-reflection or you can improve yourself emotionally by talking about issues, it still the idea that you have to have self-reflection or you can improve speed and that's a lot of people out there and they can't handle it because they don't have the control over their kids the way they would want to which is exactly like you know
I don't want to trivialize this but like footloose is the same kind of concept.
But it's also and footloose absolutely is because if you actually think about footloose it's a little dystopian you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Like let's talk about what this actually is.
Let's talk about what the Republican Party represents and what these movements represent.
There's a reason why these groups were opposed to women's rights and equality, right?
There's a reason why for years they tried to keep things like marital rape from even existing as a thing, right?
Or domestic abuse.
Or the idea that, like, corporal punishment of a child can be abuse.
They think that Child Protective Services, anything of the state that goes into the home, anything that deals with all that, they think that's tyranny.
And they always have because they don't want anybody telling them that they can't do what they do.
We are talking about just, and this is like bullet point, I don't know, six or seven on what this bill is, right?
And remember that the public school is one of the main ways that the state protects children.
They're able to go there five days a week.
Occasionally they can get food, although the Republicans have just tried to wipe that out, right?
One or two meals a day that they might get.
It's a place of safety.
It's a place of refuge.
It's a place for people to figure out that children are being abused.
If this were to actually go through, and this won't just be in Indiana, it'll be in every possible red state if it follows through, we're talking about Really, really awful, nightmarish consequences.
We're talking about child abuse.
We're talking about cycles of trauma.
And that doesn't stop there.
Because people who are abused, they can then go on and abuse, right?
Because it is a cycle.
It goes and it goes and it goes.
We're talking about a white supremacist patriarchal cycle here.
And it's nightmarish.
Well, it's the obvious reaction to someone who realizes that over time there's a progressivism that sort of is built into the community, to the country.
And we've seen it over the last, you know, since the 50s.
It's inevitable to some degree, but like obviously if you can get to your kids and control that, you can certainly stem that tide if that's what you want.
I mean, it got so bad that in one of the bullet points you mentioned was talking about how they couldn't characterize Nazis and fascists as bad things.
They had to present it as a neutral thing.
And that's what one of the history teachers said.
It's like, there's no way.
You'd have to fire me before I'd ever tell you the Nazis were not bad.
But, like, this is what we're dealing with now.
The guy tried to walk back the characterization of, like, what, you know, of course Nazis were bad and we're not afraid of having people say that.
But clearly this was not an off-the-cuff Bill, where they didn't think about these things before they put it down to paper and spoke about them before anybody pushed back.
So that's where we're at.
By the way, can I read that quote?
Yeah, go ahead.
This Baldwin asshole.
Because here's the thing.
You're exactly right.
He did walk it back after there was like a public outcry.
This thing went viral.
It went viral in Indiana.
He became a target very, very quickly because he's an extremist reactionary asshole.
And whenever somebody walks us back, sure, good on you for walking something back.
But what I'm getting ready to read, what I want our listeners to do, and this is important.
I want our listeners to imagine that they themselves are in the public arena, right?
They're out in public.
They're at a meeting.
They're discussing something.
You have power.
You have a microphone in front of you, and you are about to say something, right?
You are a person, supposedly, of respectable value.
And this comes out of your damn mouth.
He says, I have no problem with the education system providing instruction on the existence of those isms.
And this is Nazism.
Fascism.
I believe that we've gone too far when we take a position on those isms.
We need to be impartial.
I'm not sure it's right for us to determine how that child should think, and that's where I'm trying to provide the guardrails.
Imagine this.
You say that.
You can say you're sorry after it goes viral or whatever.
That he said it.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, that's what he thinks.
But even just reducing things like Nazism and Fascism to an "-ism." An "-ism," when you use that phrasing, it's like something that's not necessarily trivial, but it certainly doesn't capture the magnitude of what Nazism stands for.
Six million dead!
World War II, the overthrowing of orders and law and basic human dignity.
Right.
Absolutely.
How do you do that?
Remember how the Republicans have been complaining about indoctrination for decades and decades of the kids?
Green, and we can't have them learning about treating the environment well.
And so they go ahead and turn this around and now we're in the process of having to say, no, you are now trying to indoctrinate the kids.
And that won't land because they've been spending all this time, all this effort, fighting against what they perceive as indoctrination.
So it's not going to like... Projection.
It doesn't mean anything to them.
And again, we keep coming to these issues where we will continually butt heads here and there's no way to get a position through either way, right?
It's so firmly entrenched.
And it's again, it's rooted in religious extremism, basically.
Right.
And they're using this notion of like Judeo-Christian values on top of our society and our government and our school system.
That's the problem when it was clear that they weren't supposed to be doing that from the time they wrote the Constitution.
So here here is here's the turn here.
Here's the rub, what I think here, because you're exactly right.
When you were arguing this on its face, it's back and forth, because what the Republican Party and what the right has done for forever is project, right?
If they were in charge of education, which they were and they weren't, you know what I mean?
Like there's like a certain quote unquote liberal idea there.
That's the idea that you should give free education to people, right?
That progressive idea that people should be educated, paid for by the state.
They would say, you know what?
If I had power, this is what I would do.
I would indoctrinate people.
I would use propaganda.
And now they're trying to assert that control and do it.
That idea that we're talking about is true.
But it also becomes trench, right?
It becomes trench warfare.
What I think the difference is, and I think where some distance can be made up, is by talking about how this stuff happens.
How we've even arrived at this point.
So for instance, I'm working on this in the book right now.
This is all part of something that was created by a guy named Christopher Ruffo in order to go after, you know, what he saw as wokeness and he saw as a really good Republican attack tool or cudgel.
Guess who else sees it that way?
The Kochs.
The wealthy.
The think tanks.
Steve Bannon.
They look at this as a really effective political strategy.
If you start talking about the top-down nature as opposed to treating this as grassroots, right?
The people in Indiana are doing this.
The people in Virginia are doing this.
Instead, you talk about the millionaires, the billionaires, and these propagandists.
Not only does it ring true, Because that's what's actually happening.
But all of a sudden then you start, I think, cutting the lines and the wires on what is actually being said or being tried to accomplish.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
I think another part of that also is what we heard during the insurrection last year, January 6th, was People felt like, I own this Capitol building, right?
This is mine.
I pay you.
You work for me.
And I think it's the same thing with public schools.
I pay for this, so I own it, and I get to tell you exactly how it needs to be run, right?
That's sort of that same mindset.
That doesn't work with cops, by the way.
Does that work with cops?
Can you just tell a cop I pay your salary and it takes care of it?
I'm just checking.
I feel like I've seen those clips before they tase them when they're yelling that at them and then it doesn't go over.
They yell, don't tase me, bro.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But here, I keep trying to distill this into like, you know, it's hard to get into the mind of someone on that side because there's so many filters or so many different layers on top of each other that's kind of solidified into a molten, you know, cements that it's immovable.
But a lot of it, you know, there's some certain roots here.
And then one of those roots I feel like is, yeah, the notion that like, I own this, I pay all my taxes for this, and if I'm going to have to pay the taxes, which I don't want to do anyway, then I'm going to make sure I control whatever that you do completely.
You know, not that it matters that anybody else next to you that also pays the taxes, too.
No, no, no.
I pay my tax.
I'm going to get to control the whole thing.
And I'm going to find enough people around me who feel that way to be so extreme.
That's not a great way to have a society, right?
Because it disconnects us from the notion of community and the fact that we're all in this together to help each other.
And there are, you know, a myriad of examples of how politicians, particularly on the right, unfortunately, have promulgated this notion and had, you know, it.
Insidious or not, it's been deep-seated for a long, long time.
Again, we need better leadership, I suppose, to get us out of it.
And it's not going to end with just these citizen curriculum committees.
As it goes forward, it's about privatization.
That's what this whole thing is about.
If you actually look at all the documents, I'm talking about the International Monetary Fund, I'm talking about the World Bank, all of them when they talk about education It's constant, Nick.
It's just like, oh, this is just the worst possible way to give education.
The market doesn't allow innovation.
It doesn't allow things to win and to lose.
It's the one safe market, the one closed market, which, for anybody keeping track, this is why Betsy DeVos was Education Secretary, right?
That's her entire purpose.
She sees the ability to get in here and make billions and billions of dollars and to make sure that instead of your kid going to like Warren Wilson High School or John F. Kennedy Junior High, they're gonna go to Microsoft Junior High.
They're going to go to, I don't know, Pets.com Elementary.
And when that happens, And to be very clear, if we don't stop this, if we don't put our foot down and say, this is bullshit, we're not going to deal with it, this isn't going to happen.
When you get to the point where not only does a political ideology control these places, and corporations control it, all of a sudden you're not learning how to deal with that.
You're not learning how to push back.
You're not learning anything about problem solving, innovation.
It actually hurts the country as a whole as innovation is stalled, as people can't think outside of a box.
And we're going to be cogs in a machine.
But the entire point is to drive out teachers and to try and make public education a privatized entity for billions of dollars.
You know, there's a particular country I'm thinking of right now that wasn't always the way it is now.
And if you look at where they've ended up as far as how they treat their citizens and how they educate them, it's not hard to imagine that the beginning of that, where they are now, looked a lot like what we're seeing here.
And And that place I'm talking about is North Korea.
now or China even.
Hmm.
Although I have the feeling China might be a little bit better, in fact, in their educational system.
But like North Korea is, you know, and we already know how like Trump loves, you know, these kind of dictatorships.
So it's like he would probably embrace the notion of a school.
And then you mentioned the 1776 project where it's all propaganda and we learn that the president is like God and no one questions anything and no one actually learns anything and they don't learn how to learn.
And this is the first question.
This is where, I mean, I don't know, maybe it's hyperbole, and I can't tell anymore at this point.
I don't think it's hyperbole, because, and I'll forward this, because I think what you just brought up is really, really interesting, because it could be even worse than that.
Because at least in China or North Korea, the state controls aspects.
You know what I mean?
And in this case, this privatized model, this neoliberal idea, would basically move education completely outside of the purview of the state.
I think one of the really weird things that we're watching sort of form and change, and it's going to, there's no other way to put it, it's going to be a mutant, the likes of which we've never seen.
Which is an autocratic authoritarian state that allows a market to control most of society while it controls the enforcement of laws.
Right.
And it sort of enforces morals and ideas.
And so as a result, it's over here while the market's over here.
And unfortunately, neoliberalism is fine with that.
That's what you get with like Pinochet.
That's what you got with Chile.
You just got a situation where you basically have, you know, we were joking about this on the last episode.
You have a strong man to make their trains run on time and you just let the businesses do everything else.
And I got to tell you, there's there's one person in particular who loses in this situation.
And that's the normal common person.
Particularly vulnerable populations, particularly people of color, and women, and poor people.
Like, that's a nightmarish scenario that is in play here.
You know, for what it's worth, I have a feeling, even if they were to institute all these things they want in this bill, or they privatize the schools or whatever, you know that they're still going to find something wrong to complain about certain teachers, and they're going to not trust them.
That teacher, he seems different.
We're going to have to get him out of here.
Like, so it'll never end.
Like, it's never a thing where they actually have the trains running on time, which is an awful use of a metaphor here.
But, you know, they're never satisfied.
This is never a thing where they can actually stay and say, oh great, my kids are finally getting the racist education I've been waiting for this whole time.
You know, someone's going to say, we're all human, someone's going to say something that's too progressive, even in those classes, right?
And it's going to be a problem.
I was thinking about a very, very white reactionary couple in America sipping their folders and being like, my kids are finally getting that racist education that I wanted all along.
But no, you're right.
The personality that leads to this, the personality that tries to do this, they don't stop.
Right.
Like, there's not a moment, like, and again, like, Donald Trump is not, he's not an ideologue.
It's not like he wakes up in the morning and, you know, he reads Mussolini's fascist manifesto, right?
He just, it's who he is internally.
Like, he can't stop.
It doesn't matter how much money he makes, how much power he got, you know, how much attention, it's just a vacuous black hole that will just continue to accumulate and accumulate.
And it's the same thing with an autocratic power.
That's why they have to have wars.
They can't stop.
There's enemies.
And even if it ends up, and this is really, really bleak to say, but even if you wipe out everybody in the world, except for, you know, you and the people in your bunker, if you're that personality, you better believe that some of those people in the bunker are going to start looking pretty suspicious at some point.
You know what I mean?
Like you just, you can't stop that personality.
It doesn't, it doesn't quit on its own.
Yeah, that's, that, that was, that, that, that went places.
Yeah, I don't feel great.
We're going to beat them.
I guarantee it.
It's going to happen.
I have faith in it.
And I gotta tell you, stick around now.
We're gonna have a conversation with Dr. Amy Tiemann, a safety expert, producer, and writer at the Substag Democracy OTL, who has really, really good ideas about this and has a lot to say about the situation.
So, hang out for a minute.
Hi, everybody, we have a real treat today.
We have Dr. Amy Tiemann, who is a child safety expert and media producer and was the producer of acclaimed documentaries, including The Rape of Recy Taylor, A Crime on the Bayou, Olympic Pride, American Prejudice and Overland, as well as the writer on a new sub stack, a really, really good sub stack called Democracy OTL.
Thanks for joining us.
Oh, great to be with you, Jared.
I'm a big fan of the Muckrake podcast.
Oh, thank you.
We're a big fan of yours.
And, you know, I wanted to get you on and I wanted to talk to you.
You have a whole host of things.
I feel like you are sounding off on a lot of really necessary topics right now.
And I wanted to get your opinion on some of this stuff.
And I wanted to begin.
You did an interesting post.
I believe it was on the anniversary of January 6th, correct?
Yes, yes.
Okay.
And, and, you know, I, I read this and, and I, you might be aware, I was a little frustrated by how January 6th was treated as a day and an anniversary.
I'm, I'm, I'm halfway expecting mattresses to get sold in a couple of years, you know, and there'd be like a Honda and, and Ford trucks being sold for a discount.
No, please.
We, we unfortunately are not good in this country at recognizing problems.
Learning from the past, dealing with context, and particularly understanding threats.
And I thought you nailed it with a three word directive here, and I was hoping you could talk about it, which was perceive, believe, and act, which I think really perfectly sums up what needs to happen, but unfortunately what we're not doing in the United States right now.
Thank you for picking up on that.
I mean, So Perceived, Believe, and Act comes from my work as a personal safety expert in the field of child abuse prevention.
And it is, I've been interested in politics for a long time, specifically 2004 North Carolina to the present, which has been a real rollercoaster ride.
And to see- North Carolina's wild.
It is wild.
It's part of why I take things so seriously, because I see what happens when power shifts and goes off the rails and the levers are pulled.
So I'm sure we'll get to that.
It's really weird to see, you know, my personal safety work about how do you know when something is a threat?
How do you take it seriously and not talk yourself out of it?
And what do you do about it?
That all comes together in our politics now.
So the three steps are you have to perceive a safety problem.
You have to see it, hear it, be paying attention.
You have to believe that it can happen in your wonderful Family, school, city are this beautiful country of ours.
And being here in the South, I've kind of had to deal with the Southern slice of heaven mythology that people move to North Carolina because they want to get away from big city problems and get away from, you know, perceived threats.
But then I work with schools where teachers have been accused and arrested for Assaulting students.
So it can happen in the southern slice of heaven.
It can happen in Chapel Hill, NC or any town, any family, any school.
And so to see it happening on the national level, you know, I've seen this before and I've seen the levels of denial that we have to get through.
So believe just means believe what you see with your eyes, what you hear with your ears.
It's really important.
We know.
And what's interesting about that is I feel like the I feel like the swell of American politics, particularly, let's call it modern America, right?
Let's go back to 2001.
It feels like for the last 20 years, so much of America has been focused on imagined threats.
Right?
Like, for instance, after September 11th, there's this sudden idea that literally anywhere you can go, whether it's the mall or JCPenney or whatever, there's a possibility that you could be a victim of a terrorist attack, right?
There could be something that could possibly happen.
Meanwhile, we turn our back on very real issues, including mass shootings, including Lowering, you know, standards of living.
We're talking about health.
We're talking about infrastructure.
We're talking about a crumbling American situation, but it's so focused on these imagined ideas.
And I love that you brought up leaving the big cities because so much of that is based on the fear of the urban threat, right?
Like if you are in a city, you are somehow or another going to be violated.
Meanwhile, people are moving to cities where they're being violated.
Sometimes they're, you know, going to run into Problems, they're going to run into violence.
It's really amazing how much of America is based on the delusion or the sort of denial of real threats over imagined threats.
And absolutely.
And one of the things I teach about is I teach K through 12 educators about what they need to know about human trafficking.
And they don't the good news is they don't need to they don't need to become experts.
Right.
They don't need to become FBI agents, but they just need to know to see it when it's in their community.
And one of the things we're trying to, to convince people to do is change their frame of mind from even saying like, Oh, could this ever happen in my community to where is this happening in my community?
And some of the threat, some of the risk factors are things like being near a college campus, being near a military base, being near farming areas, you know, things that you wouldn't think about from.
What people are blowing up on Twitter about.
But so, yes, trying to get people to don't get distracted by the really out there theoretical threats, but really just take a look at what is happening in your actual community.
And it's hard because no one wants to think that abuse or human trafficking is happening in their community.
No one wants to think that their democracy could be under threat from an auto coup is the word I like to use for it.
But we have to, at the same time, take a real look at these threats.
What is it that keeps us?
I had a conversation a while back with somebody who had talked about that, you know, our bodies know when we're threatened, right?
There is an awareness, there's an instinct that there is an actual problem.
But many times we're talked out of it.
Sometimes it's a matter of trying to be polite, right?
Sometimes it's a matter of trying to hold up social conditions.
Other times, I think with something like a January 6th or the ongoing authoritarian movement in this country and anti-democratic actions in this country, it's almost like you don't want to be seen as hysterical.
You don't want to be seen as being reactionary.
What is it that leads people to sort of deny what they know deep down in the marrow of their bones?
I mean, it's a lot of things from defense mechanisms, almost like Freudian defense mechanisms of denial.
Like that's just not who we are.
That's not who we want to be.
To not knowing what to do about it.
I think there's some learned helplessness.
And I think I feel like that sometimes.
Like, okay, I'm one person.
What can I do about this?
But I've just decided I'm going to try.
It's my job to care and to try.
And that's why I'm here today.
But then obviously there has been huge Concentrated, concerted propaganda aimed to frame the insurrection of January 6th in a different way.
And I think, you know, when we talk about people going down a rabbit hole, um, part of my studies has actually taken me all into studying cults, studying high control, um, organizations.
And it really is the same thing about taking over people's information feed, taking over their mind to the point where.
If you're hearing the right information outlets, you know, people who would never go to the Capitol on January 6th, or who wouldn't have screamed the big lie from the, the rooftop are now just sort of saying, Oh, you know, I think there's something weird about the election.
I'm not sure I trust it.
You know, like, you know, 45 year old stay at home moms in North Carolina or whatever, or people who, you know, it's, it, it has diffused out into the information economy, like, like a real poison.
And I think we can't underestimate that.
I think it's, you know, it is an information propaganda operation.
Well, yeah, it's fascinating to me because it's one of those things where I try and tell people all the time, just because people who want to destroy democracy and democratic institutions don't trust them doesn't mean that you necessarily should.
I think there's been a long, slow problem in this country.
I think we've seen our officials Betray us.
I think we've seen a lot of things co-opted, whether it's by special interest or by, you know, moneyed powers.
There's a reason why most people feel like something's wrong.
And, you know, we were talking a little bit before we started recording about that idea of child trafficking.
And the truth is, there is child trafficking going on in the United States of America, and it's a really big problem.
But it's not QAnon.
It's not a satanic cabal.
It's not the elites doing this thing, even though there are obviously abusers within halls of power and within wealthy circles.
But that sort of change of what the problem is and that narrative and that cult-like mentality you were talking about, not only can lead people to radicalization, but it can allow people to look at an actual threat and sort of transfer that threat elsewhere.
Right?
Yeah.
Yes.
And I think that's part of the propaganda.
It's, you know, look over here.
Don't don't look over here.
And when I teach about human trafficking, I just, I try to thread that needle really carefully because I don't want to get people's defenses up either way.
And I'm talking to teachers and I don't know what their politics are, but I just say, make sure you check your sources of information really, really carefully, vet them, double check them.
You know, don't just go off something on Facebook or something on Twitter.
Don't let yourself get triggered and like just explode with big emotions and say, Oh my gosh, children are in trouble.
I'm going to go run and do something.
You really have to check your information out carefully.
And so we teach it in a very like calm matter of fact way.
And that's on purpose.
We use department of Homeland security information that's on purpose to just keep it on the level of.
Professional development.
You're a teacher.
This is what you need to know and look out for, and this is what you need to do if you suspect a problem.
Just trying to not get into that high emotion arena when we're talking about these issues.
So don't grab a long rifle and a revolver and go into a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C.
You kind of advise against that.
That was someone from North Carolina who did that, so I was hoping you would pick up on that.
Yeah, I was.
I was searching that whole thing this morning and it's so tragic because.
I think in a way, and again, going back to the three that you lay down here, the perceived to believe in the act.
The act is so important, right?
Because we have not.
We haven't really been taught what to do in this situation and It is a frightening time.
the idea that we could lose our democracy, the idea that our freedoms are under attack, the idea that men, women, you know, trans people, gay Americans, that they could literally not just be discriminated against, but oppressed in a major possible way. that they could literally not just be discriminated against, but So all of a sudden, that word, that need to act, you're exactly right.
On one hand, you can get high emotion.
And next thing you know, you're in the middle of, you know, ping pong pizza, or a comet ping pong pizza.
And And on the other hand, you can actually do possible real change that could make things better.
How would you recommend for people who are feeling that danger?
How would you recommend that they act?
What would be the avenue that you think people should go down?
I'm working on this every day for myself.
So I want to say, first of all, I don't have all the answers.
I am searching for effective action, which starts with finding allies.
Connecting with folks like you and some of the great podcasts that have just helped me literally stay sane and cut through the gaslighting.
So help me realize, yes, this is what I saw on January 6th.
And that's part of why when I wrote about January 6th, I just wrote from memory and from myself.
I didn't want to.
I didn't need to watch an hour long special on it, even by people I trusted.
I'm like, I watched it happen.
I don't need to revisit it.
I remember it.
But so finding People who you think are helpful, who are supportive, who are allies.
And then thinking, what can you do in your town, in your state?
I'm a big proponent of, please care about your state legislature, for example.
I think, I mean, that's the point I landed on.
Care about your state legislature, learn who represents you.
Those people have much more control over your life than Marjorie Taylor Greene or Madison Cawthorn, another shameful North Carolinian, by the way.
I mean, so it's like the least sexy thing in the world, the state legislature, but it really has an impact on your life.
The state legislature and Nick and I are going to talk about this on this episode because I'm from Indiana and this Indiana state senator.
Has just presented the most boneheaded, wrong-minded educational bill imaginable.
Like he is, you know, he's chasing CRT dragons, all of this stuff.
And the truth is what you just said is very important to know, which is those state legislatures, they have so much power.
And particularly right now, and this is one of the things I really enjoyed about your January 6 thing, which was you did say start paying attention to these people.
And I think it's going to be of the utmost importance because the federal government's losing power, and it is just divesting power into the states and these legislatures.
Um, they have so much control over money.
They have so much control over your daily lives.
And you're exactly right.
It's not sexy to talk about state state reps.
It's not, you know, it's not exciting to talk about these people in that legislation legislative process, but we don't have a choice anymore.
It's, it's, it's one of the most important things that we can do.
And the great thing is these people are accessible, right?
You and your friends, you and your indivisible group or your, You know, your neighbors, you, if you get 10 people calling a state legislator, they're going to take notice.
I mean, they will have a meeting with you.
They will, um, you know, you can get your advocacy advocacy groups and to see them generally.
So, I mean, you can encourage people to run.
You can probably drum up enough support to get them to win even in, in a lot of cases.
So it's the, I think it's a great, like that great right-sized action to take.
Yeah, and Amy, I wanted to talk to you about this, because the article that I first read of yours, it was over at the Prevail Substack from Greg O'Lear, and this idea of double-sided justice, more or less.
And this seems like a passion of yours, this idea that America obviously has this long history of oppression, tyranny, lynching on one hand, And on the other, we have Kyle Rittenhouses, who are now celebrities, or, you know, your Brock Turners, who are promising young men who shouldn't have their futures interrupted.
I wanted to ask, what it is about that that really motivates you?
What is it that gets you in the arena with this?
Because I think it's one of the most important things we've got.
Thank you.
I, you know, I think I've always had a strong sense of justice, but I think that becoming involved as a documentary producer at a time when When people are, you know, some people are saying, is there systemic racism?
I just like to say, OK, I'd love to have a conversation with you.
Please watch the three documentaries.
I've served as an executive producer.
And then if you have any questions, we'll talk about it.
And I want to say with a lot of humility that, you know, so I'm in my 50s and which is great.
That's, you know, the humility part is Just realizing I wasn't even really taught about Emmett Till growing up.
I mean, I knew the name, but I actually had assumed his killers had been convicted because I knew that we knew who they were.
And so to find out when I'm like, you know, my late forties, but no, they got away scot-free.
They got paid thousands of dollars to tell their story and Look Magazine, um, just has made me realize how much I don't know about American history.
And I am on a journey to learn.
So I'm working with great film directors like Deborah Riley Draper and Nancy Bierski to bring their visions to life.
And I've learned so much in the process.
I can tell you, like I when I was writing American Rule a few years ago, that was the first time I'd come across the the Red Summer after World War One, which was just massive lynchings of African-Americans, including then you add on to that the Tulsa Race Massacre and I had never heard anything about that whatsoever.
Yeah.
Wilmington, North Carolina, democratic government overthrown by a coup.
I just found that in the new book.
I had no idea about the Wilmington coup, which is the white supremacist campaign.
I was writing about that in the new book and it is shocking.
That's enough to like ruin your day, really.
And, you know, I found all of that stuff and like, I kind of had to double check.
I was like, there's no way that this isn't, you know, at least common knowledge.
Then all of a sudden over the past couple of years, it became common knowledge, right?
All of a sudden, you know, you have the Watchmen series on HBO.
All of a sudden there's like some specials on this and we start getting some momentum.
And this is the reason why we have the CRT controversy.
This is why we want to go after educators and why we want to shut this stuff down is because as these things are becoming more well known, as films like yours are starting to get seen, as books with the truth are coming out, all of a sudden, The vision of America that I think a lot of people were given.
I know that I was given when I was younger.
It melts away and all of a sudden things start to make a lot more sense, right?
And those conspiracy theories start to lose some of their power.
And if I could just highlight one of our films, I mean, I want to bring up two points so I can get to both of them, but Olympic Pride American Prejudice by Deborah Riley Draper, the first film I served as an executive producer.
It really changed my life in such an amazing way.
I love this film with every fiber of my being.
It's a story of the 1936 Olympics.
And everyone knows, kind of knows, like Jesse Owens stood up to Hitler.
Well, there were actually 18 African-American athletes who competed, including two women.
And, you know, there's so much more to the story than we knew.
And what I And this this film came out in 2016 when Barack Obama was president.
And now every time I've seen it since then, I see it in a different way.
And so on the one hand, we have the absolute richness of learning about these 18 athletes who are absolutely wonderful.
And there's amazing footage.
It's like a sports thriller is extremely well filmed.
Some of it, ironically, is filmed by Lenny Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist.
But boy, she knew how to film.
I was watching Triumph of the Will a couple of months ago for research, and it's incredible the technical propaganda that that regime had going for them.
Yeah.
So the other thing that is really scary, though, I mean, is seeing.
We talk about racism in America, the incredible racism that these athletes faced.
They actually, in a way, were more welcome in Berlin than they were at home, but it was all, you know, very carefully stage-managed show in Berlin, so we know it wasn't truly free, but, you know, Hitler was trying to put on this image.
But at the same time, 1936, Hitler's militarism is on display.
It's, you know, he has brown shirts, black shirts, like, lining the procession, and I'm like, every time I see it now, I'm thinking, oh my gosh.
Perceive, believe, act.
We weren't, we weren't doing that.
We weren't doing that.
We laundered him.
We were more than happy.
And I was going through the research for this too, talking about Hitler, talking about Mussolini.
And I mean, you even have like Winston Churchill talking about how good they are for the economy, how good they are for people.
And, and meanwhile, our magazines, our newspapers are just absolutely laundering it because It is.
They could not.
You're exactly right.
Everyone could just look at it and understand it was a threat.
But so many people were bought off by it and also in denial, like the war to end all wars had been fought already.
So and I believe the film is actually streaming on Peacock now.
I know it was a little while ago.
It might come back.
I hope it's still on there now.
So I hope you'll check it out and just ask yourself, OK, what did people think they were seeing in 1936 and what do we think we're seeing now?
And actually, the way Deborah Riley Draper found this story was she was researching a jazz era, like a Harlem Renaissance jazz musician, Valetta Snow, who ended up, I think, being a prisoner of war or got like caught up on World War Two when she was in Germany.
And she said, I wish I had gotten on the boat in 1936 for those other black people.
Yeah.
But and it's like, holy cow, I mean, That will always stay with me.
And that's what launched this film.
So it really makes me take this time very seriously.
I mean, when the documentary is made of 2024, when we have a little more perspective, I mean, what is it going to say?
And what did we do?
And that's part of why I'm writing this Democracy OTL sub stack is it's almost like what I want my hypothetical grandchildren to know that I did and tried at this time.
Well, and that's what I've been saying for a while.
It's like, you know, I don't know how this thing's going to turn out.
I'm hopeful in many ways.
Like, I've looked at history.
I think there's an opportunity to make something better out of this.
Avoid calamity.
Avoid massive tragedy.
But on top of it, I think you just have to be able to say to the future, you know, even if everything hits the wall or hits the fan, you have to be able to say, I did what I could do.
I mean, I think that's the only thing that you can go to sleep thinking.
But we need to do more.
That's what I'm telling myself.
Whatever we've done up to this point, we need to do more.
Even if it's, you know, get to know your legislator.
Like, that's more.
But write letters to the editor.
You know, keep connections to family members, even those you don't agree with.
But try to keep those people in your life to the best of your ability.
I mean, I think we all need to stay connected.
We all need to stay civil and kind.
You know, the presumption of goodwill, we need to maintain goodwill with each other.
And that may sound like a Hallmark card, but I think that's actually at the heart of a lot of what's, of what's going on.
Like the presumption of goodwill means we all agree that the constitution means what it says.
It means that we agree we're trying to make this work.
And we're not just going to let one party go off and, you know, get 25 lawyers to say, okay, here are 65 ways we can subvert this.
Like that's not going to work.
Yeah, 25 lawyers funded by 25 of the richest billionaires in the country to completely subvert the Constitution and liberal democracy as we know it.
Yeah.
So I think our job number one is to care.
I mean, I think it was Chauncey DeVega who said like his biggest fear is that we find out what happens on January 6th and nobody and people don't care enough to do something and react.
That's kind of my biggest fear, too.
So care and Take some action, some constructive, kind, collective action.
I couldn't agree more.
I think so much of the current crisis is based on alienation, fragmentation, people not being able to trust one another anymore, thinking that they're economic competitors, political competitors.
Meanwhile, you have everything from conspiracy theories to misinformation to demagoguery that just makes sure that We don't trust one another in any way, shape or form.
And there's all these divisions and rifts.
And, you know, I've been saying this for a while and you're right.
I don't want it to sound like a Hallmark card at all.
Like, that's actually the basis of democracy.
The basis of a healthy society is having real, actual conversations with other human beings about what's going on in the ground.
And how you can work together to make your lives better.
And, and we, we've kind of done a terrible thing by making that seem naive and making that seem sort of cringe and embarrassing, right?
Because it's, it makes you a dope.
It makes you a loser.
It makes you vulnerable to other people.
But I, I think that's the essence of it is overcoming that sort of idea.
And you know, I'm a mom, I have a 22 year old son.
And so I just think about, you know, what I want for him.
How I want him to, what world we want for him, but also how I want him to act to others, how I want to act that can inspire him to act that way.
So that my mom, my mom thing kicked in on that one.
So.
That's just being a good parent.
Well, good.
And before we get out of here, I wanted to ask you, you've given me a little bit of a preview of your next article in which you're going to be talking about Generation X, the leadership cliff.
I was wondering if you could tell the listeners a little bit about what you're getting right about.
Yes.
So as a proud Gen Xer, I have always had kind of the feeling that we are being squeezed out of leadership positions.
That's the Generation X feeling.
I went to get the data.
I'm a scientist.
I went to look at the data and there's a wonderful data set that shows the age of senators in the U.S.
Senate over time.
And I did find that, indeed, Gen X, who is about one out of three people who would be eligible to serve in the Senate, there's only 19 Gen Xers in the Senate and one millennial, John Ossoff.
So only 20 percent of the Senate is ages 57 or younger.
80 percent is older.
And when I went back for a comparison, I went to look in 1993, kind of when Bill Clinton was just elected and it was like, don't stop thinking about tomorrow.
Here's the new generation.
It was, I believe, half of the Senate.
I think it was 49, was ages 57 and younger.
And that included spry young 50 year olds like Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell.
So, I mean, 30, 30 years later, right?
Can you believe it?
Like 1992 was 30 years ago.
I really can't actually, that sounds so wrong.
30 years later, the difference between having 49 people of that age group versus 20 means that, you know, everything's kind of in the boomers hands and they want to keep going, you know, more power to them.
But 10, 15 years from now, when they've retired, I'm just worried that so many jobs are going to go from a, Boomer or older, you know, skip all the way over generation X to millennials.
And I love the millennials.
I taught them as high school teacher.
Like I have a lot of friends who are millennials.
I love them, but I don't think we want to go from an 80 year old to a 30 year old in every job.
And there's so much knowledge in, you know, people ages like 45 to 57.
Like we're like in the prime of knowing things.
And I'm just worried we're being passed over and not able to join, uh, you know, Congress or legislatures.
And, um, so I just want to really say that we're not done yet.
We are, we are in our prime.
There are a lot of people in media and civil service who are Gen Xers, but I just think we really need to find ways to build this bridge, whether it involves Gen X or not, but find ways to build the bridge between the boomers and the millennials.
And also just start supporting the millennials, giving them as much leadership training as we can, because I just worry all the bills are going to come due for them.
And, um, and it's not their fault that they have to fix climate change and, and all these problems that they didn't, didn't, uh, cause, but they're going to have a lot of, uh, a lot of really big problems to solve.
So more power to them.
And I just want to support them.
There's a lot of phenomenon, I think, that have sort of come together.
Not only the baby boom generation, of course, the largest generation, right, coming after the post-war, the numbers, but also the lengthening lifespan that I don't think anybody could have necessarily predicted.
There's a phenomenon that takes place there, but it also mirrors, weirdly enough, what happened in the Soviet Union.
And the Soviet Union, as it started reaching sort of its terminal point, The leadership was so much older and there was a gap between the incoming leaders.
And really when you look at how states are supposed to act, it is supposed to be a more fluid generational movement in and out as, as all of those concerns are sort of met and talked about.
And I think along with the baby boom generation, and that's not picking on any of our baby boom listeners, y'all are wonderful.
And I have much, much love for baby boomers.
And all of the information and all the history that you have and knowledge.
But there is something that has happened, I think, with like accruement of capital and capital power, right?
The ability to sort of control the way that things have happened, the way that American politics has been not just more conservative, but more sort of reactionary to what is necessarily happening.
So I think that there is A lot going on there, I think, that explains where we are and where we're going.
And we might look up, and this is a concern, I think, we might look up and there's not much of a bench there.
There's not much of an opportunity for other people to start picking up and learning real fast.
The pipeline, the pipeline.
Can I say one more thing real fast?
Yeah.
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, all born in 1946.
So that's wild.
The young president in 1992 is the same birth year as the old president in 2016.
And Joe Biden is, of course, four years older.
So that's wild.
I don't I don't know if I'm going to be able to go forward with that.
That's a lot.
But that that's going to be up on Dr. Tiemann's substack.
And that is Democracy OTL.
Dr. Tiemann, you are wonderful.
Where can the good people find you?
Okay.
Yeah.
Democracy OTL is about democracy is on the line in 2022.
Also, you can find me, Amy Tiemann PhD on Twitter.
I love Twitter and amytiemann.com.
I wish I could say I love Twitter as well, but you know, I get the idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'd love to see your listeners on Twitter.
Let's put it that way.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
All right, we are back.
And that was Dr. Amy Tieman.
We thank her for coming on.
Really, really good conversation.
Yeah, you know, I didn't plan on getting to an apocalyptic bunker with an authoritarian personality looking around and thinking about the end of the world.
Sorry about that, Nick.
Um, well, it's okay.
I forgive you.
I'm so pissed off at Indiana.
I, you know, I was doing research on this book.
Do you remember the Religious Freedom Act?
I think it was called in Indiana.
Do you remember that?
No.
It was, so a lot of this stuff, and we'll be talking more about Christian nationalism and national conservatism here in the near future.
But this was this thing.
I want to say it was in 2015.
Mike Pence signed it.
And it was like it was back whenever they were like Hobby Lobby shouldn't have to pay for birth control.
Yeah.
Right.
And Notre Dame shouldn't have to pay for birth control.
And Indiana tried to tried to pass this bill for religious freedom, quote unquote.
And there was such a backlash that like the NCAA threatened to move the Final Four and other corporations playing a move and then they rolled it back.
Do you remember that?
Yeah, that sounds familiar.
Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, so Indiana is up in front doing some of this crazy shit.
It'll be interesting to see if there's any more corporate pushback or if corporations are gonna sit this one out.
You know, that's interesting, especially in the light of what we've seen recently with like the All-Star game that had been moved from North Carolina.
Maybe.
I mean, you know, the woke corporations seem to know what sells these days, or at least other states.
Yeah, I understand at least how to appear like they're good people that want to sell things to people.
Yeah, it's troubling and I feel like, you know, what was almost could be taken as nefarious is the guy that's pushing this bill.
Actually, remind me who it is.
Is it the governor who's interviewed?
In this article you're reading he actually invites the history teacher that stood up to them and said we can't do this.
He invited them in to say hey let's fix this together you and me we're gonna like bring the people who are all against this into the process.
I don't know I get I get my hair stands from the back of my neck when I hear that because I feel like that's just a way of corrupting something and trying to get someone who you know is in a good place to try and argue this to shut up or buy him off I don't know what.
I want to say this, and I want to say it very clear, and I want to say it very loud, with no ifs, ands, or buts.
There is no compromising with this shit.
There's not.
This is not innocuous.
This isn't bipartisan.
This isn't harmless.
This is really, really authoritarian, slippery slope territory.
You don't play around with this.
You say no, you reject it.
I agree.
Hey, you can't say, at least let me be in the room.
This is what Dr. Birx did.
I know you kids are having a good time burning your books, but if you could just hold it down while we try and go to sleep, that'd be great.
Trust me, I gotta be in here.
I gotta at least be in the room.
I can listen to what they're doing.
I can tell you what's happening.
This is what Dr. Birx did.
She's kind of gotten out of this, right?
We don't remember her being, you know, complicit like she should be remembered.
And, you know, anyway, it's a real problem.
And, you know, living in California, it's like, I don't, we don't feel that at all.
By the way, as a teacher, I had no curriculum.
I had to make it up myself with no guidance from the department at all, which is like equally ridiculous, right?
Like that's ridiculous.
And so, I can remember, you know, there's different extremes with this, but at the very least, we need to be able to teach the facts of what happened in this country.
We need to be able to have a discussion where you're not so afraid for your job.
Because remember, the penalties here are really, really terrible.
It's not even the fact that, you know, here, I'll read it to you.
A penalty for being perceived to violate this law.
A parent could file a complaint leading to the unpaid suspension, termination, and license revocation of the educator.
This complaint need not be filed by a parent of a student in the teacher's class.
Guess what?
It gets worse.
There is no statute of limitations for filing a complaint.
You could go back 20, 30 years.
Man, I hated my teacher in history when he said so and so.
Let's go, you know, get him out of there.
Take that, Mr. Jackson.
Yeah, yeah, and then obviously librarians could be jailed for disseminating material deemed quote-unquote harmful.
And by the way, what is that?
That's any material that includes gayness, it includes ideas about transgender, it's anything that these people deem inappropriate.
Well, I think one of the books they were referencing was like Native American, somebody feeling like it was a life of a Native American kid and how they get treated differently.
As if that is, we can't be reminded of that.
I don't want to put that in my face.
I don't want my kids to learn about how bad, you know, they're gonna find out soon enough, Jared, how bad the world is.
Why do we have to tell them about it in seventh grade?
Like, I don't know.
I want everyone to know how bad this damn world is as soon as possible, Jared.
And so we can figure our way out.
I completely agree.
All right, everybody.
So we're going to come back for the Weekender episode on Friday.
A reminder, all you have to do to gain access to that is go to patreon.com slash monkrakepodcast.
The Weekender, one of the best parts of my week.
You're going to want to hear this.
And join the Muckrake community.
We have a bustling Discord.
Some of the best social media that you're going to find.
Really, really good people.
Great conversations.
Again, that is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Thank you to everybody who supports us.
If you need us before Friday, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
