00:06:12.620Just a lot of things really to whip up the fear.
00:06:16.680And what's interesting is that that was precise.
00:06:19.620It's as if the Moms for Liberty were the answer to a problem that a lot of far-right organizations had been looking for.
00:06:29.480Meaning, if you look at when a lot of these groups, like the Leadership Institute, the Heritage Foundation,
00:06:36.260a lot of these far-right, very well-funded groups started in the 1970s, and they had been somewhat successful.
00:06:46.640But when moms suddenly arrived with the very message that kind of mobilized, just, I mean, you saw it on TV, school board meeting, they mobilized people in ways that these far-right groups had been unable to do.
00:07:06.340And so it was a very natural alliance. What I noticed was interesting is at the first Moms for Liberty Summit in June 2022, their main sponsor was the Leadership Institute, which has been training conservatives since the late 1970s.
00:07:25.200And there were only a few tables. I mean, you could walk out of the ballroom and there was six, seven, just a handful of tables.
00:07:32.860When I went to the Moms for Liberty Summit in Philly this past July, their main sponsor was Patriot Mobile Action.
00:07:43.880And we can talk about Patriot Mobile in a minute, but they were corridors and corridors and corridors of far right groups with tables set up to, you know, attract, cater, involve the moms.
00:07:59.660At that first conference, I remember having a conversation with the leader of the Noah Webster Institute, which is, you know, one of these conservative groups that had just decided to offer school board training online and was he was so excited that he had had a couple of hundred people sign up.
00:08:19.160So it's as if all of these organizations in that same summer, the Leadership Institute started online school board training.
00:08:26.220It's as if school boards had for a long time by the far right just been overlooked as trivial offices because they, you know, it was something, it was education, it was women, it was moms.
00:08:39.080And, you know, moms have been very invisible in terms of power.
00:08:43.420But these far-right organizations, in essence, saw just a wonderful natural constituency.
00:08:51.480At that first summit, Ron DeSantis stood up and announced that he had endorsed, for the first time ever, school board candidates.
00:09:03.440And he had everyone who was running stand up.
00:09:06.300Now, the women who were standing up and the women all around were just so impressed that someone, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, would deign to endorse school board candidates.
00:09:22.580What he was doing, I realized as I was sitting there, was basically feeding a ground game.
00:09:29.140So it wasn't as if he was doing them a big favor as they felt.
00:09:35.440And that's really how this system has played out.
00:09:39.380So I grew up in Idaho and I did a lot of reporting there over the last five, six, seven years.
00:09:46.400And I'm very familiar with how the far right works there and the entire movement for, or like part of the mechanism, the recruiting mechanism for people to move to Idaho to be part of, whether it's the American Readout, which is a, not really a place, but like sort of a place.
00:10:05.260in north idaho eastern washington western montana but like part of it is we have educational freedom
00:10:11.480here right so a lot of these ideas are very familiar to me and i've seen them in action for
00:10:16.860for a long time and and watching as essentially other organizations figure out oh like here's how
00:10:24.040we can infiltrate every single corner of the legal system the educational system the ideological
00:10:33.640playing ground, basically, in a place like that's what's happened already in North Idaho. And now
00:10:38.960they're trying to duplicate that playbook in other places. Okay, we got some really great
00:10:46.020questions from our listeners. And we're going to start with the how and why of Moms for Liberty.
00:10:51.200This first question comes from Hannah and Melody is going to read it.
00:10:54.500I'm wondering about why I'm seeing so much of their organizing at the school board level,
00:10:58.980like targeting school board policies, speaking at meetings, or running for school boards.
00:11:04.500Why this institution particularly? Are school boards uniquely susceptible to this kind of
00:11:10.380right-wing takeover? So I think even the idea that school board members are elected, that is
00:11:17.360really interesting to me. And that you do not have to be a parent of a student or even participate
00:11:23.440in the public school system, besides obviously paying your taxes, in order to take this role.
00:11:28.420So what do you think it is about the way that we have organized school boards that make it susceptible to this sort of ideological takeover?
00:11:37.440Firstly, school boards have been much overlooked for a very long time.
00:11:41.600As someone who's covered education for decades and decades, until I was working on this book and watched hours and hours and hours of school board meetings, I had not really attended many school board meetings.
00:11:56.100I was a school board rep in high school and, as I admitted in the book, would often fall asleep after, you know, sports practice and homework and everything to the drone of adult voices like debating, you know, school bus routes.
00:12:09.660The issue is that school boards actually are very flexible in what they have as far as control.
00:12:18.460I know someone that I interviewed in the book is a longtime trustee in Upper Dublin School District in Pennsylvania, and he said, we take a very hands-off approach.
00:12:36.680But that has certainly not been the case.
00:12:38.620And we have so many examples now of where you get a far right school board and the school board is suddenly meddling in issues from curriculum to bathroom use to what teachers can hang on their doors or their walls.
00:12:56.520So school boards are very kind of malleable way to gain power, to gain cultural and social power in a district.
00:13:07.180What's interesting is that because they are often overlooked races, voter turnout in some of the races that I followed were as low as 10%.
00:13:16.800So it doesn't, there are people who are losing by a few votes.
00:13:21.020In North Idaho, I did a story for Hechinger Report and Vanity Fair recently.
00:13:26.620And, you know, one race that turned the school board to the far right was lost by eight votes.
00:13:34.960And the person who lost said, everyone just assumed I was going to win.
00:13:40.360So what you have happen is you have school boards having this power over the functioning
00:13:56.420They suddenly changed the whole way the books were purchased for libraries.
00:14:00.540And then instead of librarians who are exquisitely trained to curate collections that suit their communities, suddenly the school board set up new rules with a whole matrix of what could and couldn't appear in books.
00:14:20.500and a process by which books needed a 30-day review of the public,
00:14:26.340and then each book purchase had to be approved by the school board.
00:14:31.240So I watched one of these five-and-a-half-hour-long meetings
00:14:35.140where a middle school librarian in the district came up to the mic
00:14:39.200and basically said, we cannot buy, we cannot obtain in a timely manner
00:14:44.880books on camels or squirrels or football.
00:14:47.420We cannot get the latest Guinness Book of World Records or the Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
00:14:53.220And she said, kids who read a lot are coming up to me and saying, where are all the new books?
00:14:59.740And she said, I don't tell them the truth, which is that it's political.
00:15:03.920There's an example of how you flip a school board and suddenly kids can't get books about
00:15:09.260camels and squirrels and football in a timely manner.
00:15:12.080So there are real consequences to this.
00:15:15.180And there's a financial aspect to all of this, too, right?
00:15:18.460Yes. So one of the reasons why these school boards can be flipped is because it used to be that people would run for school board, maybe spend a couple hundred dollars, maybe a thousand dollars, Xerox things, and their friends would help them.
00:15:32.660What you had happen in Texas is that Patriot Mobile, for those who don't know, and I did not before I started doing this research, is a Christian cell phone company in Texas, and they donate 5% of their profits to far-right causes, and they list them right on their website.
00:15:54.640And in January 2022, they started a political action committee, a super PAC called Patriot Mobile Action.
00:16:04.240There were 11 school board races in four districts in North Texas that spring, spring of 2022, that they poured in over $400,000 to those races.
00:16:18.460Because they were a super PAC, they couldn't donate directly to the candidates, but then through different local PACs that were set, education PACs that were set up to support the far right candidates.
00:16:30.000And I, you know, looked at all, you know, I was looking at a lot of campaign finance reports and looking at where the spending was happening.
00:16:38.620And a lot of spending was happening on behalf of these candidates at Axiom Strategies, which is a national political strategy group based in Kansas City, Missouri,
00:16:50.300and happens to also do a lot of work for Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, for national political candidates.
00:17:00.700So what you have then is you have national level strategists and marketing people producing materials for local school board races.
00:17:13.920Patriot Mobile supported those 11 candidates through their super PAC.
00:22:16.220Extremism is about destroying public schools.
00:22:18.900It's not about being part of the conversation.
00:22:21.620And to your point about what's different now, I would say speed and money.
00:22:26.040The kind of rapidity of messaging, video, things that can be shared, clipped, moved, changed, recast to be endlessly persuasive creates a very dangerous situation, which people believe things that are not true.
00:22:46.580In that Pico Island Tree School Board censorship issue, when they were pulling books from the library and banning them, the school board just insisted upon it.
00:22:59.460And one of them was Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
00:23:04.400And their strategy, similar to the strategy we see now at school boards, is people would read objectionable sections of the book aloud.
00:23:13.520And so I remember one of the objections to Slaughterhouse-Five was that Jesus was called a bum.
00:23:22.040And the member said, you know, I don't care if the rest of the story is good.
00:23:26.300You know, that's enough for me to just to exclude it.
00:23:30.700So that seems kind of very mild to us now.
00:23:36.140But maybe in another couple decades, this will seem pretty mild.
00:23:41.260But yes, this stuff comes around and around again because people find that schools and curriculum and books are a way of imposing values and political will.
00:23:54.800I think the Moms for Liberty in particular got a head start.
00:23:59.680You know, pandemic gave people a head start on that.
00:24:02.380Right. So our next question takes us back to something that we've discussed a little bit already, and it's all about parental rights.
00:24:09.980I live in Ohio, and I've heard the phrase parental rights come up often in the recent passing of legislation against transgender youth receiving gender affirming care, sometimes in conjunction with Moms of Liberty. How did parental rights become such a rallying point for conservatives? What do they really mean by this idea? It seems like a thinly veiled attempt at control tactics to me.
00:24:29.380Yeah, so this is about parental rights for people who want only a specific types of parental rights, right? Like, not for parents who want, you know, affirming health care for their trans kids, or parents who want their kids to have sex education. So those people don't have parental rights. It's only the people who want a different sort of parental rights. So is this the first time that this phrase has been used? Like, who came up with it? Where did you first encounter it? Let's talk more.
00:24:57.060Well, I first encountered it as a journalist back in the 90s in Newton, Massachusetts, when there was a plan for a sex ed pilot.
00:25:06.280And you have to understand that this was, you know, after AIDS, you know, AIDS really changed how schools thought of their job relative to sex education and that it was important to have conversations that they hadn't had before for student safety.
00:25:23.240And so there was this pilot that was planned, but then there was a small but very vocal resistance that I ended up writing about, and they claimed not to be involved with the Christian coalition, but I found a lot of connections between this local group.
00:25:41.440And ironically enough, the leader of that local group in Waltham Mass now leads to a national anti-LGBTQ group.
00:25:51.100But it was at those school board meetings, and they were packed.
00:25:56.300There were cameras to overflow and people standing in the parking lot just to kind of hear this.
00:26:04.540You know, these are our parental rights.
00:26:06.080We have the right to not have homosexuality mentioned or, you know, sex education.
00:26:13.180Now, parents have always been allowed to opt their kids out of things and decide that, you know, they didn't want that for their child.
00:26:21.340What's frustrating and sticky about parental rights is that it's really in imposing your set of what you think parental rights mean on everyone else.
00:26:32.200It's meant to look at like we're just protecting our own children, but it's actually quite the opposite.
00:26:38.100It's like let us dictate for everyone's children what should be the standard.
00:26:43.640And what was interesting, going back to Idaho for a second, is when I was there, actually on Election Day this past fall, I met with a father of eight who had six children in the public schools.
00:26:59.400You know, his Facebook page, as he pointed out, has the American flag in the Second Amendment.
00:27:06.240And yet he said this kind of presumption of, you know, that our kids are being indoctrinated that is, he said, paranoid bull honky, which I love.
00:27:21.040And he said, I have my children, and he said, if I cannot, as a parent, challenge something they might have heard or be involved or know what they're thinking or learning in school, then I'm not doing my job.
00:27:36.540He said, of course they're going to hear things that I disagree with.
00:27:42.200But it's my job as a parent to really counter that and to discuss that with them.
00:27:48.060And I thought, what a refreshing way of thinking about it, because it's absolutely 100 percent right.
00:27:55.520The parental rights sounds like it's this, you know, big endowment of, you know, parenting roles where it's a really very reductive act of let me try to impose my set of parent rights, my view of parenting.
00:28:10.600And we know if we get, you know, if you get 20 parents in a room, everybody does it a little bit differently.
00:30:34.000Some kids are more mature than other kids.
00:30:36.380That's why we need professionals. And what this whole crusade is doing is undercutting
00:30:42.060the professionalism of librarians and teachers and people who work with children every single
00:30:47.800day. And not just your child, but lots of different children.
00:30:51.340That's such a good point. And we have a lot of librarians and educators in our listener audience.
00:30:56.280So I know that they will appreciate that as well. So our next question is about the who
00:31:02.380and also the how. And this is from Laura.
00:31:05.560I'm a late Gen X, and I know you're an elder millennial. These women are our contemporaries. What in the world happened? Banning books in the age of the internet? Such deep homophobia? Relatedly, can you pull the threads on some of the astroturfing origins of this group?
00:31:31.720so we've talked we've talked a little bit about the astroturfing so i think we can
00:31:37.080direct this person back to that section but the profile of the typical moms for liberty person
00:31:44.800like is it a upper middle class suburban woman is it more like the people that i0.97
00:31:52.440knew growing up in idaho who are very much involved in like the more white nationalist
00:31:58.120parts of this like is it that there there's a certain leaders and then people kind of get
00:32:03.320grouped into it because they agree with the phrase like it's gotten too woke in schools like0.73
00:32:09.060what is what's going on what the fuck is going on well i can tell you that my first reaction at the0.98
00:32:14.920first moms for liberty conference was that geez i should have brought my high heels because it was0.98
00:32:20.240it was a very kind of well coiffed and like um you know southern audience and it was a lot of0.84
00:32:27.640people from Florida. The one in Philly was a little different. Who are these people? It's,
00:32:33.580I mean, a lot of them are suburban for sure, but there are a lot of also Moms for Liberty adjacent
00:32:40.800groups that draw in people of all ages. Fear speaks to people at all ages. There is this
00:32:50.020prototype of the Moms for Liberty for sure. It is very white, but it's not only white.
00:32:57.640Um, do you get there? There are a whole range of people, right? I don't think it's just one single
00:33:03.440demographic. So Laura's question was about why there's this sort of regression. And like, this
00:33:09.420is not new, right? Like, the 1960s were, yeah, it maybe you understand that as a time of like
00:33:16.180cultural rebellion. I personally understand it as like the birth of the modern conservative
00:33:20.380movement, right? Like, like, there's all these things that there's always this counterweight
00:33:25.020that's happening, particularly in America.
00:34:02.320And if you can kind of rally all your uncertainty around the one problem of protecting your children against, you know, evil threats that may not be real, but there's a whole team there that will support you in doing that.
00:34:16.900I mean, it's not that different than, you know, team sports.
00:34:48.600And that's not the conversation that we're having right now. We need to get back in because there are legitimate, real problems and we're not going to solve them if we're just fighting over, you know, what books we have in the library.
00:35:01.880Okay, so our next question is all about pushing back against this sort of activism. We had a lot of questions about this because I think people are genuinely, you know, they're curious about what Moms for Liberty is and why it works the way that it does, but they also want to fight them in their communities. So this question is from Caitlin.
00:35:21.340What is Moms for Liberty doing that Moms Demand Action isn't? And what can other groups learn from the, quote, success of Moms for Liberty? Like, truly, how are we having serious conversations and seeing actual policy change about young adult novels but not automatic weapons?
00:35:40.480All right. So Moms Demand Action was founded in 2012, also has significant financial backing from Bloomberg.
00:35:51.340And it's specifically about gun policy. So are these similar groups? Is it fair to compare them? How do we think about it? And then the other thing that I feel like we have to mention is that in the 2023 election cycle, so many Moms for Liberty candidates lost. They might be successful in bringing these issues to the forefront, but I also think that they are not as successful as their public profile might suggest.
00:36:19.020I think both of those things are true. In terms of the pushback, you know, Caitlin, great question. I think that, you know, Moms for Liberty has been successful. And I think there are some people who align with them who are not officially Moms for Liberty.
00:36:37.940Moms for Liberty has effectively defined a kind of language for talking about things that scare
00:36:45.220people. So they have a very effective kind of playbook that way. But people are fighting back
00:36:50.480and actually very effectively. And I think we saw some of that in November. Red Wine and Blue
00:36:56.300is one organization that was started by Katie Paris. She was a, you know, a DC political0.93
00:37:03.340operative, involved, moved to Ohio and said she imagined herself living in a kind of interesting
00:37:09.840purple state. And when she saw, you know, kind of things happening there, realized that she
00:37:15.840wanted to do something about it and went around and was having conversations with women, she said,
00:37:22.160often over a glass of wine. So it's called red wine and blue. Not that you have to have wine,
00:37:26.980but it's fine. But the point of it was that it was social and to engage people, not just like
00:37:35.480sign them up to do tasks, but to create a community around pushing back and organizing.
00:37:44.240And if you look at that strategy, that approach is actually what you see in a lot of places.0.94
00:37:50.700you have Stop Moms for Liberty. So that started out in Brevard County by Liz Mkhitaryan. And what0.84
00:37:58.080was interesting is that I was talking with her recently and she said, when Moms for Liberty
00:38:05.620first started in Brevard County, she said, we just didn't even take it seriously because their
00:38:10.380claims were so absurd. And she was a 24 or 26 year veteran teacher. And she said, we were in
00:38:15.940the schools. We knew that their claims were not accurate. We didn't think they would catch on.
00:38:20.700Now they have 46 chapters around the country.
00:38:24.380And there are a lot of local groups that are pushing back in their communities.
00:38:27.920And I think of in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, as one great example, that was where you had
00:38:33.340a far-right school board, but then you had a mom, you had Kate Nazemi and a retired English
00:38:38.860teacher, and they started Advocates for Inclusive Education.
00:38:42.820and that brought in teachers, parents, community members, and has just done the hard work
00:38:51.340of detailing every, you know, a policy comes up. What does it mean? What are the implications?
00:38:56.740What are the results of this policy? Educating people, bringing people together. And I actually
00:39:02.700talked with Kate actually last week, and I said, you know, everyone's been really cheering the
00:39:10.000the results in Pennsylvania and the Moms for Liberty just being kind of turned back. And I
00:39:16.040said, you know, are you guys done? She goes, oh, no, not at all. She said, we already know
00:39:21.640that they are plotting to retake this in the next round. So she said, we have to be really vigilant.
00:39:29.460I'm on their email list. I got an email today about a turnout for, you know, there are three
00:39:33.760meetings. Try to attend one of these. It was like school board and finance and another committee
00:39:37.900meeting, just really keeping people informed, but also building a sense of community around
00:39:55.500She said, broad swath of people from around their district would come and do candle making.
00:40:01.340She said, when people are doing crafts, they kind of settle in and start talking.
00:40:06.580And she said, we have hard discussions, but there's a kind of feeling that we're all doing this together.
00:40:13.640And I actually think what a brilliant way of rebuilding some of what is getting lost in the kind of NFL style, our team fighting that's going on.
00:40:26.520So building community, we don't all have to agree on everything, but we have to agree that our children matter, that they deserve an excellent public education, and that that involves professionals.
00:40:41.920It doesn't involve parents with an agenda meddling in whatever a teacher says, whatever books, whatever's on the wall.
00:40:49.580It should not involve that level of parental oversight.
00:40:54.880I also think about the comparison between moms going up against the gun lobby, which is so entrenched in so many ways. And, you know, at the very top, right? Like all the way at presidential candidates all the way down versus a group of people going up against a librarian who can be more readily delegitimized, even though they have so much training.
00:41:24.380They know how to do their job. But one thing that we often do with feminized professions like librarians is say, oh, it's a job that anyone could do. All you have to do is love books, which is a ridiculous thing to say or to understand about the work that librarians do.
00:41:39.660But it's easy to say like, oh, well, you know, as we talked about earlier, here we can come up with better standards on how we can get books into the school.
00:41:49.160You know, to think that like the incredible humors of that, to think that you could do that yourself.
00:41:54.840And I think that is part of why there has been more success, quote unquote success, for groups on the far right like Moms for Liberty than Moms Demand Action.
00:42:07.240Well, you know, also gun laws are like the third rail of American politics, right?
00:42:13.960I mean, and the truth is that a gun in rural Idaho for hunting is different than a gun in New York City and how people feel about them and the role they play in their lives.
00:42:31.540And as part of doing this research, I actually interviewed quite a number of librarians.
00:42:37.640And I said, just walk me through what's required.
00:42:42.020Walk me through the process of how you choose.
00:42:45.520And you realize it is extremely complicated.
00:42:49.940Every school library is different from every other school library.
00:42:54.060And the books must be, you know, practices that you curate the books that reflect your
00:42:58.960community. And you weed books. I never knew about weeding books, that if books, you don't want
00:43:05.580books to be in libraries that are so old as to have inaccurate information or to be out of date.
00:43:12.460So if students are using them for reports or tests or research, they're not useful. So there's a lot
00:43:18.680of attention that needs to be paid. And librarians take these jobs extremely seriously. And they
00:43:26.140apply a lot of expertise. I mean, to be a librarian, you need advanced degrees in which
00:43:32.580you have studied library sciences. There's a lot to learn. Yeah, this is great, great setup for our
00:43:38.800last question, which is from a librarian. And this is from Brooke. I work as a public librarian and
00:43:45.380finding this group on a national level is important, but even more important is effectively
00:43:49.660working against them locally. What are the best ways to combat this insanity at a local level,
00:43:54.980especially when local politicians are happy to do the work for them.
00:43:59.400So I loved our discussion about like creating community around public schools and places where
00:44:06.060people can have these conversations that are a little bit less fraught than the meetings
00:44:11.340themselves. But what are the other strategies, particularly for people like librarians,
00:44:16.100people who are closer to the public school system and doing that work?
00:44:20.320Well, back to Bucks County, when I was doing some reporting there, I was there on banned books week. And there was a part of the event that I went to one evening was one in which people showed up and wrote postcards of encouragement to librarians just to let them know that they were, you know, that that you're taking a lot of harassment publicly, but that you also have a lot of support.
00:44:47.060You know, that strategy of constantly letting people know that you have their back, that you are supporting what they're doing, that, you know, that you're recognizing the expertise and the skill that they're bringing.
00:45:00.240And I think that going forward is more of a conversation that we need to be having on a local level is instead of just complaining about this, you know, what you see so often is people take a broad national kind of set of grievances and just use them on the local level.
00:45:18.300But I think on the local level, we need to be talking about what our librarians are actually doing, what are our teachers actually doing, what is happening in the schools, what are the projects kids are working on, what are the ideas they're sharing, because there's a lot of great stuff that happens in schools.
00:46:37.920And personally, and I imagine you probably feel the same.
00:46:41.240I think the lack of a robust press is part of this problem.
00:46:49.220I remember growing up, the newspaper was at our school or at a school all the time, just
00:46:54.980taking pictures of kids doing kids stuff at the school.
00:46:58.580And then you also have all of the attention that's paid to sports in various capacities.
00:47:03.680But I think that it helped fill in that imagination of what are kids doing at our schools with
00:47:09.940visuals and then also with little stories. And now if Facebook's the only thing that's filling
00:47:15.980that thing, and it's all these negative understandings of what your kids are doing,
00:47:19.940or like your friend of a friend saying, like, I've heard this. A grandparent's friend said
00:47:27.420that all the kids in the schools now are trans. That's sort of just like fear mongering. There's
00:47:33.020nothing to be afraid of if a kid is trans, clearly. We can agree on that. But that idea
00:47:38.420that somehow the schools are turning kids trans, which is not how it works. Anyway.
00:47:43.560Well, it's interesting that you bring that up because in 2021, the Heritage Foundation
00:47:48.420was concerned about this, and they commissioned a nationally representative survey
00:47:55.300of political opinions of K-12 teachers. And not surprisingly, they found that teachers tended to
00:48:02.720be more liberal, not kind of way left. But what they did discover and what they found and announced
00:48:10.540in their reporting was that that didn't necessarily impact children. And this is a quote from the
00:48:17.300report. It says, we find little evidence that a large percentage of teachers are systemically
00:48:24.040imposing a radical political agenda in K-12 classrooms. That's the Heritage Foundation.
00:48:30.300Can you say where the Heritage Foundation is?
00:48:33.880The Heritage Foundation is one of the far-right organizations founded in the 70s who is actually there on the ground in Kanawha, West Virginia, but has been a big far-right supporter.
00:48:46.240So what's interesting is that just a few years ago, they were perfectly willing to say that teachers might be more left-leaning than the population, but the teachers view their jobs as being teachers.
00:49:07.160They're really not ideologically imposing their views on students.
00:49:12.820and we have to remember that because what we hear now is something different and we're hearing
00:49:18.460something different not because anything's changed but because it's politically expedient to claim
00:49:24.920that that's what's happening this has been such a great conversation it's pissed me off it's made
00:49:30.800me hopeful i you know that's kind of how i feel about the far right whenever i talk about them
00:49:36.840um uh at least in terms of the hope comes from like what we can do and how we can move forward
00:49:43.360if people want to find more of you where can where can they look well um laura papano.com i have uh
00:49:49.960all my articles from i mean they don't go back 30 years because the internet didn't happen then
00:49:56.060um but yes there's a lot of um stories there's other things there are links to events and
00:50:01.380podcast, we'll put this up there. And I'm also on Twitter and I have a Facebook page. And I did
00:50:10.360start an Instagram at the urging of my children. So as I go around, do these conversations in
00:50:18.100different places, I'm going to put a little bit up there. Awesome. Thank you again so much. This
00:50:22.960has been a really great conversation. Thank you. Okay. For our Ask An Anything segment,
00:50:29.280we are answering a follow-up question from the episode on Stanley Tumblers that came out a few
00:50:34.300weeks ago. And it's especially relevant to those of you who have piles of stickers laying around
00:50:38.800who can't commit to sticking on anything. You can subscribe and get access to all of the Ask
00:50:44.380and Anything segments if you go to culturestudypod.substack.com. Thank you so much for
00:50:49.980listening to the Culture Study Podcast. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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00:51:29.740The Culture Study Podcast is produced by me, Anne Helen Peterson, and Melody Rowell.