00:02:19.680You've probably seen by now that last week, Kanye West and right-wing extremist grifter extraordinaire Candace Owens wore White Lives Matter t-shirts at Paris Fashion Week.
00:02:31.800And when Vogue magazine editor Gabrielle Johnson, the first Black woman to ever style a Vogue cover, joined the chorus of people who didn't think that White Lives Matter shirts at a fashion show were such a good idea, Kanye responded pretty predictably for him.
00:02:48.460And by that I mean, he responded by leaning into targeting a Black woman.
00:02:53.620Posting Gabrielle's picture to his millions of followers on Instagram with the caption,
00:03:46.460I'm Joan Donovan, and I'm the research director at Harvard Kennedy Shorenstein Center, and I'm the director of the Technology and Social Change Project.
00:03:56.580And I'm Emily Dreyfuss, and I work with Joan at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center.
00:04:03.120I'm the senior managing editor of the Technology and Social Change Project, and I'm a journalist.0.78
00:04:09.500From White Lives Matter to lock her up or build the wall,
00:04:13.640memes have had an outsized role on our political discourse.
00:04:17.260Dr. Joan Donovan and Emily Dreyfuss study memes.
00:04:20.780Along with their co-author, Brian Friedberg,
00:04:23.700their new book, Meme Warfare, charts the history of memes
00:04:27.120and how they've been shaping our political and social landscape.
00:04:30.660How did this come to be something that interested the both of you?
00:04:57.600And then how do they coordinate that participation towards some kind of social change?
00:05:02.200So interestingly enough, over the years, we have this broad sweeping changes in our technological landscape that has led to many, many academic studies about pro-social movements, anti-capitalist movements, any kind of movement that might be called a hashtag movement, for instance, like Me Too or Black Lives Matter or even Occupy Wall Street or the Indignados movement in Spain.
00:05:32.200So I had become very acquainted with that organizing style. But one of the most understudied pieces of this field was about the media created by these movements. And so over the years, I've kept an eye on it. I've kept track of it, working very closely with our colleague and co-author, Brian Freeberg.
00:05:52.720We looked very indepthly over the years at the development of different meme campaigns. And then when I switched my focus to looking at right-wing movements and trying to understand how they get coordinated online, memes seemed to take on a very important relevance, especially memes that were about what we now call culture wars.
00:06:19.700So you would see these content wars play out, much like you would see culture wars play out in the media.
00:06:25.480And memes were the mechanism and the arsenal by which different shots were fired.
00:06:32.200So after I looked at research how left-wing movements were coordinating online, I switched gears and started looking at how the right-wing movements do that.
00:06:42.760And this was during the rise of Trump in 2015, and I had been studying the far right and the use of DNA ancestry tests as a way to mark identity.
00:06:55.300And so I was already embedded in these communities when Trump was rising to power, and I was able to track the rise of the alt-right in real time.
00:07:05.180And from there, I realized that memes were having an extraordinary impact on our political communication. But because they're funny, and they're ironic, and they're hard to decipher, most people that study the internet and social movements disregard memes.
00:07:24.880They don't think about it as something that's going to move fringe ideas to the mainstream.
00:07:30.520However, once you start studying memetic theory and you start trying to understand cultural transmission, it's a very useful set of theories for understanding how our politics change.
00:07:44.800So, you know, I have a totally different background to Joan, right?
00:07:52.560and I am a failed philosophy major with a bachelor's degree in English only because I
00:08:02.560tried to major in philosophy but I didn't want to finish the requirements and I it turned out I'd
00:08:07.780accidentally fulfilled the English major requirements without even trying because I'm a
00:08:11.880writing nerd but so we have we come at the this from a really different background and then you
00:08:18.180know I went on to become a journalist because I didn't know what else you do with your life when
00:08:23.040your only skill is writing um but one of my things I've been obsessed with kind of my you know since
00:08:31.080my philosophy days is how do we make meaning and like where does knowledge come from and cultural
00:08:38.660understanding of like if we have core beliefs as a group of people but where do those beliefs come
00:08:45.380from and where did they start? And I didn't get that much of a chance or I didn't really
00:08:51.340have a good framework for how to think about those questions when I was doing straight tech
00:08:56.880reporting. But then during the 2016 campaign, I was running Wired's coverage of the campaign.
00:09:07.700And Donald Trump just presented this, you know, such posed such a problem for us in the media.
00:09:15.380because he was just constantly saying things that weren't true and yet they it didn't seem to matter
00:09:22.060people didn't seem to care that it wasn't true truth seemed in some ways irrelevant so i started
00:09:27.780looking into like how and why do these beliefs form around and and and is social media a part of
00:09:35.580it um and so i was like i did some articles about um how social media allows for such intense
00:09:41.880repetition of ideas, which this is an old, um, you know, psychological and philosophical
00:09:49.000idea that like, the more you repeat something, the truer it seems. And there's like cognitive
00:09:54.480neuroscience to back it up. And that, so that basically means like the more someone hears
00:10:00.760something, they will think it's true than when they hear it again. Um, what would that, no matter
00:10:06.100what the context is. And so once I was learning about that, you know, it struck me that social
00:10:12.580media is the perfect vector for that. Like social media is a repetition machine and you can blast
00:10:19.120out with bots. You can use a hashtag over and over again. And then, uh, and right around the
00:10:25.320same time that Joan was transitioning to look at the right wing internet, that was when I also
00:10:30.080started grappling with having to take memes seriously. Cause as Joan was saying, a lot of
00:10:34.980people were dismissing memes in academia and and elsewhere and i will say for myself mea culpa like
00:10:41.180i as a journalist who was assigning culture stories about the internet and assigning political
00:10:45.940stories about the internet was certainly not for a long time paying attention to memes i didn't
00:10:51.260understand how powerful a vector for communicating an idea they are and it wasn't until the 2015-2016
00:10:59.540election cycle that these memetic phrases like lock her up and basket of deplorables. And then
00:11:08.160that's where I even first became aware of this idea of a meme war when all of these online trolls
00:11:13.900started or trolls and various others started taking credit for this real life thing. So that's
00:11:20.940when I started to get interested in it. And then by the luck of fate, I got to join Joan's team in
00:11:28.2602020. And that year spent looking at the pandemic and everything that was happening in the media
00:11:35.720online through the frame of media manipulation and, and memetic warfare really like gave me
00:11:44.820such a whole different understanding of how everything worked. And then boom, January 6th
00:11:50.300happened. So I want to take a step back because I thought as a pretty online person, tech podcast
00:11:58.720person that I was like, oh, certainly I know what a meme is. But I was surprised in reading part of
00:12:03.820Meme Wars that the origin of the term meme goes way back. I assumed that it was like, oh, it must
00:12:10.160be pretty new because we're talking about something that like is a thing on the internet. So just to
00:12:15.060levels at. What is a meme? So in our book, we lean on some early memetic theory. Richard Dawkins
00:12:23.980first introduced the idea in the 70s to describe essentially cultural transmission. How do
00:12:30.100people within a culture get access to the same ideas? And then also intergenerationally,
00:12:38.080how do these ideas proliferate? You could even take a meme like Grumpy Cat and start to think
00:12:44.140about well what are the other famous and antagonistic cats through history like you know
00:12:50.620right now yeah the one that wants temptations right away you know when you know but garfield
00:13:00.240he clip um you know there the list goes on the cat in the hat and and uh of course um
00:13:07.920the Cheshire Cat and whatnot, you know, cats as tricksters. And so within our culture,
00:13:15.120we have memes that surround us every day. Advertising as a profession really monetized
00:13:22.020memes, especially around jingles. In particular, you can think about jingles like just do it or
00:13:28.900I'm loving it. And you instantly know what brand they're referring to. And so memes are all around
00:13:35.860us. There's nothing new about them, but they do help us understand how small bits of culture
00:13:40.960move through groups and move to new generations. And what's most interesting, I think, about what
00:13:47.760we draw from in memetic theory is that there's four main characteristics of memes over time,
00:13:54.480which is that good memes tend to be, or memes that go viral tend to be anonymous. They tend to
00:14:00.400be very sticky. That is, they'll have a pithy saying that might ring out in your head. They
00:14:06.360usually are three words. They can be participatory. That is, people will remix them.
00:14:15.280And then they have this feature of bringing in in groups and separating out groups. So if you
00:14:21.260see a meme and you don't know what it means, you just move on. It's not like you spent a lot of
00:14:25.920time trying to unpack it. So when we were thinking about memes in particular in the far right,
00:14:32.120these are acting as similarly to political dog whistles. If you know what certain color schemes
00:14:40.520and skull face masks look like with, you know, some veiled racist language, you could have,
00:14:49.460if you're on the in-group, you know that that might be something that was generated by
00:14:53.660Atomwaffen Division or Generation Identity or some other far-right group. But if you don't
00:15:01.500understand those signals and those dog whistles, you often don't know where these messages are
00:15:07.300coming from. In particular, in the 2016 election throughout Trump's presidency, he was tweeting
00:15:14.940all kinds of memes, in particular, Build the Wall, which came from 2004's Minutemen
00:15:23.400vigilante border enforcement gang that had started in the early aughts patrolling the
00:15:33.300border on their own. So that Build the Wall phrase, once you realize its racist origins,
00:15:39.440not just because it's overtly racist already, but that Trump was borrowing these things from
00:15:45.540other places and remixing them. And so throughout the book, the memes act as characters that bring
00:15:53.860together actors and the content and different behaviors. And then what we try to help people
00:16:00.240understand is how the internet didn't invent memes, but the design of social media surely
00:16:09.420has impacted the way that we communicate and the way that we coordinate. And certain groups,
00:16:17.060particularly ones that want to hide who they are or what their motivations are, will use memes as
00:16:23.760a vector by which they spread their ideas without having them attached to all the symbolism
00:16:30.620and the outright racism, sexism, misogyny, and transphobia of the groups that are producing them.
00:16:39.420Well, and Bridget, I identify myself in the book writing process and just in life as a normie.
00:16:48.320And so like my normie definition and like understanding of memes before I got into this was really that a meme was a picture shared on the Internet with images on it.
00:16:59.820and and that is that is a meme that's a form of a meme but actually that's a specific subtype
00:17:07.680of meme that they call macro macro images macro image memes um and with dawkins who's an
00:17:14.920evolutionary biologist who's the guy who coined it he he was trying to create a word that was
00:17:19.720commensurate with gene so if genes are something that travel through people through bodies through
00:17:24.400generations and like you will have the same you'll inherit them from your mother or whoever in your
00:17:29.800community um well definitely your mother and also others in your community um same with memes
00:17:35.960meme was supposed to be like a unit of culture in that same way that gets um transmitted so
00:17:42.020as joan's saying like all of these phrases can be memes slogans can be memes but so can a flag
00:17:49.320become a meme so can a gesture if you think about dabbing or like you know there are there are
00:17:57.300there are some I'm sorry I just have to interrupt you because your normie mom voice came out there
00:18:03.300on dabbing I was like wait you know I was like oh my god Emily come on I mean I am a normie mom
00:18:11.080though you know like I'm trying I'm a deeply entrenched extremely online normie mom in my day
00:18:18.620it was planking the kids were doing oh you know planking yeah so so that dates me as well
00:18:27.300But so but so you can see from all those things that like means as an idea, if we just think of it as this kind of consistent idea that can be transmitted, it can be visual, it can be oral, like it can be a ditty, but it could also just be like a shape or whatever.
00:18:43.920What has to happen is that it's consistent and that it can be put into different contexts and that in those contexts it is conveying some central idea, even if that idea changes over time.
00:18:56.360so like the um the we start the book by explaining that the gadsden flag the that snake that's coiled
00:19:05.120up and says don't tread on me is a meme um it was meant as a meme in the first place it was meant to
00:19:11.160but it was created by benjamin franklin um and he he created it to say like don't tread on me
00:19:17.840me is us the in group of the u.s united states you know and that and it was talking directly to
00:19:24.660an out group uh and it was memorable and it was pithy and all these things and then it became a
00:19:30.340it wasn't maybe a meme when it was created when it was created it was a flag it became a meme
00:19:35.160when it became adopted by all of these various identity groups and different people who used it
00:19:40.780as a signifier of their beliefs and as a signifier of their identity um and then it's such a
00:19:48.440successful meme because it can be used in all these different contexts so we think of it as
00:19:52.140like libertarian but before it was libertarian it was actually white supremacist kkk people using
00:19:57.740don't tread on me meme but it it also didn't have its origins are not white supremacist and then
00:20:03.660it's been used even by people who are like um anti who are pro-abortion activists who are like
00:20:11.080pro-choice activists um to say don't tread on my body you know and but it's also then been used as
00:20:16.560like a don't tread on me for anti-vaccine folks you can see its flexibility and memorability and
00:20:23.140then when you see it out in the world it gives you a sense of maybe rightly or wrongly who the
00:20:29.480person is that is sharing it or like holding it up yeah the way that you put that in the book is
00:20:34.560so interesting because I didn't know any of that history of that flag but you know the way that
00:20:39.260the meme has this ability to be recontextualized co-opted and used against its creators because
00:20:44.460As you said, originally that flag was meant to be like the United States and then the way that it is, you know, adapted by people who are probably not super into the United States government or like that kind of thing, like how it is then used against the people that originally contextualized it in the first place.
00:22:14.460The weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:22:24.540I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:22:31.880I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:22:35.440From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:22:41.540It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
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00:22:58.620Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:23:30.600Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.0.99
00:23:33.740unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling
00:23:41.040that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted,
00:23:48.540stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:23:54.620They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with
00:24:00.180Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:24:11.580At our back. It's pretty easy to not take memes seriously, but in their book, Joan and Emily
00:24:19.140describe how memes can actually be a powerful means of spreading an idea and pushing it into
00:24:24.280the mainstream and what they describe as meme warfare. So if that's your understanding of what
00:24:30.800a meme is, what are the meme wars? Yeah, so in our book, we try to open up with an understanding
00:24:38.400that meme wars are something that have gone on long before the internet, especially in this
00:24:45.940moment. We do open with the insurrection and we end with the insurrection. And then in the
00:24:53.300in-between chapters, what we try to understand is the ways in which people are fighting over
00:25:01.140certain definitions of culture. So we go deep into Occupy, not just to elucidate what Occupy
00:25:09.080was all about, but to understand it as a kind of meme war where there was this new emerging
00:25:16.020definition around this identity of the 99%. What did it mean to go through this major stock market
00:25:26.040crash and economic crisis? People were losing their homes. And then how did that get distilled
00:25:32.260into these very pithy memes like, you know, we are the 99% or, and in particular, the memes that
00:25:41.540we started to focus on because we didn't want to tell the same history that others have already
00:25:46.820told artfully, we went in and started looking at, well, what were the right-wing elements that were
00:25:51.740fighting for visibility at that same exact time that we were having this more anarcho-libertarian
00:25:59.060type movement in Occupy? In 2011, I was pretty big into the Occupy movement, the global movement
00:26:07.340against economic inequality that had folks like me camping out in places like Zuccotti Park in New
00:26:12.960York or Freedom Plaza here in D.C. And if you were involved in the Occupy movement back then,
00:26:18.300you know that memes were a big part of how that idea spread. From the rallying cry,
00:26:23.540we are the 99% to represent the global majority of people of the world who are not billionaires
00:26:29.640to the image of a police officer casually pepper spraying Occupy demonstrators at the
00:26:35.040University of California. While these memes spoke to leftists like me, it's actually been
00:26:40.900far-right extremists who have really harnessed the power of memes to spread an idea.
00:26:46.820Emily and Joan chart how those memes set the stage for the meme warfare that we see today
00:26:51.980and beyond. So we were looking at memes like End the Fed and Pepper Spraying Cop and all of the
00:27:00.020ways in which the issues of the day were being both nuanced and then flattened into these
00:27:08.600different mimetic catchphrases and sometimes fun and participatory memes online. But the rest of
00:27:18.580the book after that, we trace out of that moment people like Andrew Breitbart, who did pass away,
00:27:25.780but was a very important and key figure over the years in bringing together right-wing media online
00:27:32.000and learning how to mobilize people on the internet towards specific political ends.
00:27:38.660We look at the movie that Breitbart made with Steve Bannon called Occupy Unmasked
00:27:44.460and why that was such a key moment for the right-wing to figure out how to mobilize large groups of people online.
00:27:52.260We look at Alex Jones and how he participated in Occupy by hosting a couple different Occupy events. And then we go deep into Ron Paul and the Fed movement so that we can understand that this doesn't just come out of nowhere. This comes out of a struggle for definition, a struggle for the definition of movements, the definition of the situation.
00:28:15.300And so as we go through the book, we look at the development of the manosphere and misogynist groups online and how they learned to mobilize in Gamergate.
00:28:28.440We look at groups like white supremacists and looking at the ways in which they organize online and maintain their anonymity, while at the same time trying to mainstream certain sayings and slogans and also mainstream political violence through their manifestos.
00:28:49.440We also, oh, you want to say a moment?
00:28:53.180I was just going to interrupt really quick to just make the point that the reason you're giving those examples is because all of those are communities that have engaged in meme wars.
00:29:04.460And meme wars are when people come together in a coordinated way to use memes, political memes, to push their agenda into the mainstream, whether it's a white supremacist agenda, whether it can be a pro-social agenda.
00:29:24.140Like there could be a, a meme war that is using the internet in a coordinated way, all coming together, using memes to push an idea that is good, you know, that is like, uh, moral.
00:29:38.340And then, but then more often in the ones that we are looking at in the book are ones where it's a specific, like ideological agenda, like women deserve this kind of a life or whatever, you know, coming from a place of like that.
00:29:53.820And then they use memes as the artillery in the warfare and the way that the meme wars, like the terrain, is to use the internet to get other people into your army, to recruit and draft people into your army.
00:30:08.680Yeah, like Emily's definition is probably a little bit more clinical than my own of Memoirs in the sense that for me, it's not necessarily just about recruitment.
00:30:21.820It's mostly about the spreading of an idea.
00:30:25.280That's what makes it great about having three authors is we can still debate and disagree or agree to agree.
00:30:32.820And that's where, you know, I actually feel like the real research gets done is when we can challenge each other.
00:30:39.800And I'm not disagreeing with you, Emily.
00:30:42.040What I'm saying is that for me, it's not quite as linear because there's a lot of adaptation.
00:30:49.120So, for instance, we, in our book, look at White Lives Matter.
00:30:54.800So Emily, Joan and I talked just days after Kanye and Candace's stunt at Paris Week with the White Lives Matter T-shirts.
00:31:02.680And somehow, a few days after we recorded this interview, it got worse.
00:31:08.440Kanye's Instagram and Twitter accounts were both locked because he tweeted outright anti-Semitic threats of violence to go, quote, dead con three on Jews.
00:31:18.860And other comments that really played into anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish people, like conspiracy theories that a shadowy bunch of Jewish people are to blame for all of society's problems.
00:31:30.340What's kind of sad to me is had Kanye swapped the word Jews for a dog whistle like bankers or globalists,
00:31:39.620I don't know if I can say that those tweets would have been taken down.
00:31:44.760Kanye West has 31.4 million followers on Twitter.
00:31:48.900That's double the amount of Jewish people in the world globally.
00:31:53.100So Kanye using his massive platform to spread white supremacist, anti-Semitic talking points is really dangerous.
00:32:01.040And his comments were full of separating people into groups, you know, the usses and the thems.
00:32:06.120And it's really difficult to see someone with his visibility and platform doing this kind of thing as anything other than a clear normalization of anti-Semitism, which we know is connected to real-world violence.
00:32:20.120Last year, there were 2,717 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in the United States, an increase from 2020.
00:32:29.320So Kanye is making these statements against the backdrop of a very real rising climate of hatred and violence toward Jewish people.
00:32:36.200And of course, Kanye's comments are making the rounds in exactly the kind of circles that you would expect.
00:32:42.260Extremists, conspiracy theorists, and white supremacists.
00:32:44.860He did a very weird interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and even Alex Jones went on his show to take credit, saying, we woke up Kanye West, folks.
00:32:56.000So if I don't sound very thrilled to be talking about Kanye West, it's because I know that doing so is its own tricky thing.
00:33:05.300Because Kanye West wants people like me to be doing exactly this, talking about what he's doing.
00:33:13.400Of course, it's all the rage in the news this week because Kanye West and Candace Owens wore White Lives Matter t-shirts to his fashion show. And so decidedly unfashionable as the t-shirts were very banal. They were so banal. I mean, come on, at least bedazzle them or something, you know, like no more insulting to the fashion world.
00:33:38.700But that meme comes straight out of white nationalist groups. It's not the case that they're saying all lives matter, which is a different kind of meme about who gets to participate in these identity based movements and the, you know, the washing out of, you know, what a politically important saying,
00:34:07.820Black Lives Matter is. But to say White Lives Matter is something where you are catering0.60
00:34:15.360explicitly to white supremacist groups online. And it is more than a dog whistle. It's a notion
00:34:25.300of supremacy. And of course, they're going to hedge, ironically, and say, well, what's wrong
00:34:31.100with two Black people saying White Lives Matter? I mean, we're out here. And they're just playing
00:34:35.300that same identity game that then turns into a meme war. And if you look at online, who's really
00:34:42.260happy to hear that Kanye and Candace stepped out for the White Lives Matter crew, it's white
00:34:49.160supremacists. And they're the ones getting all the attention and bravoing this controversy for
00:34:59.200controversy's sake type of act. And so as we think about the meme wars, we have to think about
00:35:07.200not just that, you know, someone would get recruited into a different kind of movement,
00:35:12.240which definitely does happen. But what happens to people then when they start to Google or search
00:35:17.680for White Lives Matter? Where do they end up? Because they're seeking, you know, to follow
00:35:24.240whatever kind of intentionality Candace and Kanye had. And what they end up with is getting loaded
00:35:30.980straight into white supremacist message boards who've been saying this for years, who've been
00:35:36.980organizing around it for years. And so it's just an unfortunate and also very predictable kind of
00:35:44.500media manipulation tactic that our book tries to show in many different ways how the meme wars can
00:35:51.740be triggered and play out and then lead people into these groups that um have this really
00:36:00.820disgusting politic well and to jump on that and and just build off of what joan is saying um the
00:36:08.400kanye and and uh candace owens example is really points out also uh an essential part of the meme
00:36:15.700wars like really one if meme war is usually a cycle um and one essential part of that cycle
00:36:23.320is media attention and so kanye is you know an ultimate he's a celebrity like he's an ultimate0.61
00:36:30.220influencer uh and same with candace owens like candace owens is out there fighting meme wars0.64
00:36:37.400amplifying meme wars on behalf of the people that she agrees with in a lot of a lot of times and it
00:36:42.760is that we find that that kind of amplification is then what drives media
00:36:47.420attention. And then media attention is,
00:36:51.100even if it's critical media attention can be a way that then that meme war
00:36:55.140reaches more people. So, you know, we wrote about white lives matter.
00:37:00.700We wrote the book now a year ago, because publishing takes a long time.
00:38:58.120They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:39:02.580But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:39:06.040They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:39:09.640Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:39:18.100If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:39:23.080This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:39:36.500I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:39:43.480I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:39:46.740from best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments
00:39:51.640nothing is off the table it's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling
00:39:58.180characters and that is a trojan horse whether you're looking for literary deep dives smart
00:40:03.460pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much
00:40:08.220you're in the right place listen to pro society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever
00:40:14.680you get your podcasts see you between the pages let's get right back into it i used to there was
00:40:28.080a time in my life where i loved kanye west right like i idolized him i could go i could tell talk
00:40:33.780all day about how much i used to like him and so reese more recently college dropout is one of my
00:40:38.760favorite albums of all time I'm not gonna lie college it's good it is the album that gave me
00:40:44.580the courage to drop out of grad school I was in grad school and I put that I came home and I put
00:40:49.540that album on repeat and I was like I have to leave grad school and if that line where he says
00:40:54.920uh she couldn't afford her car so she named her daughter Alexis I was like every Alexis that I
00:41:01.040knew at that point got a text message I was like it was good it was a good record it really was
00:41:07.380What a shame. And I guess here's my question. So in the recent years, I've been like, Kanye, like, I love you, but I'm just we're done. I'm not gonna, you know, I kind of divested from Kanye. And when the White Lives Matter thing happened, just the other week, obviously, I was, you know, I was like, Oh, this is same old Kanye.
00:41:26.440how i agree with you emily that it is it is a attention and media attention like that is
00:41:34.800why you do something like that right like it's a stunt you hope people talk about it even if
00:41:39.160critiquing it how how do we responsibly talk about it you know pick it apart whatever in a way that
00:41:47.220it's not giving them what they want i i really so i have been basically trying to ignore the0.56
00:41:52.640white lives matter. Sure. I was like, how do I, at any way that I talk about it, I know that people
00:41:56.980like Candace Owens, they feed off of attention. That's what they want. And so how can we walk0.96
00:42:01.580that line of talking about it, critiquing it, putting it in the context of the ongoing me
00:42:06.940mores that you all are doing while also not feeding into what they want, which I believe
00:42:11.540is attention. Well, so I think one of the most powerful ways to do that is as a journalist,
00:42:19.180when you cover it, because some of these things need to be covered, right? And some can be ignored
00:42:24.840because they're just media spectacle, but some have real world impact or trying to,
00:42:29.160and they really do need to be covered. So one of the most responsible things you can do is
00:42:33.160when covering it and when talking about it, talk about the origins of the thing that this person
00:42:40.100is amplifying, talk about who created it, why it was actually made as a response to
00:42:48.820something so in this case it was like a response a negative response to people declaring that black
00:42:54.920lives mattered um was why then this hashtag came up as a reaction to that so talking about that
00:43:02.460and kind of uh the history of these events i think kind of takes the this the wind out of the sails
00:43:09.300in the immediate moment of it having a media spectacle because you can then reveal like this
00:43:15.780is this is not just like some guy this isn't even kanye like doing something transgressive of his
00:43:21.440own accord like this has a long long history and there have been a lot of people who've been waiting
00:43:27.080and hoping that someone like kanye would amplify this exact idea um you know it kind of changes
00:43:34.180the valence of the coverage i think of it and then you know joan was talking earlier also about how
00:43:40.580these kind of meme wars will influence the search results for phrases like this. So if someone
00:43:45.720hears it or they see it and, or they see it on Kanye's shirt and they Google it, one important
00:43:52.340thing is that like high quality journalism does rank well in search results. And so it's not,
00:44:01.900we use, you know, there's, there's a way in which we say like, maybe there are certain things the
00:44:05.600media should not amplify. But if something's already out there, because it's at the level
00:44:10.720like Kanye West is amplifying it, then it's actually helpful to provide high quality journalistic
00:44:17.540explanations about it. So that when someone goes online to learn about it, they're not only going
00:44:23.800to find information that was left there by the meme warriors who are pushing that agenda. And
00:44:29.660then the other thing, which I totally didn't take my own advice, but I'll give it now and I'll try
00:44:33.680to do better going forward um is that you can talk about these things without actually repeating
00:44:40.500the phrase that is the thing that they're trying to get everyone to repeat so like we can talk
00:44:46.460about how kanye wore a shirt that was a negative reaction to black lives matter and that um wore a
00:44:53.380hashtag that people have tried have been trying to mainstream without using the hashtag in our
00:44:57.820coverage too much just just so that we literally don't repeat it into people's brains over and over
00:45:02.700and over again. The reason why we are particularly attentive to this right now is while we were
00:45:09.200writing our book, Brandi Collins-Dexter was writing Black Skinhead and has a chapter on
00:45:14.800Kanye West in particular. And this notion of the Black Skinhead is something that came up in a song
00:45:22.160of his that she then titled her book after. But she's really charting the rise of these Black0.99
00:45:27.720political outsiders. And so as I was watching his interview on Tucker Carlson, it really
00:45:33.320resonated with me that he is, even though he's probably the most famous Black man that's a pop
00:45:41.820culture superstar, very iconic, he still struggles to find voice and political relevance, which is
00:45:50.540really interesting when you start to think about the evolution of what it means to be platformed
00:45:56.460And what it means to say things in public and how artists and musicians have this enormous platform, especially ones that are celebrities who get covered in the media.
00:46:09.200But for some reason, and I don't know if this is just an ethic of the right wing or whatnot, they always assume they're being silenced in some way, even when their voices are so loud.
00:46:21.500And I just thought that was really interesting, this idea that he speaks on his own behalf. He says his only audience is God. But then at the end of the day, I think he's very influenced in the fact that he himself has been struggling to find an audience that really respects him enough to listen to these opinions that he has.
00:46:46.340And, and that's, it's just, it just dawns on me that even when you have the biggest platform in the world and you can, you know, own everything you want to own, being listened to is what's desirable. And that's something you can't make other people do.
00:47:05.320that's such a good point and it makes me think john about how um like when uh bridget when you
00:47:13.560were saying how much he used to like kanye like i remember the moment i liked kanye and like first
00:47:18.540became aware of him really um was when he was like george bush hates black and i was like watching
00:47:25.020that newscast live and it was just such a transgressive moment where like he said something
00:47:31.700that was so much like, you're not supposed to say that, you know? And he's always been
00:47:38.520transgressive. And this reminds me of, in our book, you know, a lot of the characters, we go
00:47:46.020behind the scenes of these meme wars and introduce you to the people who are fighting them and why
00:47:50.960and show you, you know, what their reasoning is in their own words. And it's confusing because
00:47:56.620they don't all agree on things. You know, they're not a monolith in a way that I kind of had thought
00:48:01.580far right okay they all agree on this they don't they have things that they feel really
00:48:06.200they have disagreements about things um but one way one thing that binds them together is
00:48:11.940transgression that they like to be transgressive and then that's also why one of the reasons why
00:48:18.560uh donald trump was such an appealing figure because he's a he was a really transgressive
00:48:23.120media figure and similarly with kanye both trump and kanye have succeeded in both having a platform
00:48:32.180and making themselves seem like a victim of not having a platform yeah um and and they are being
00:48:39.960like transgressive against like in in donald trump's case the meme like the deep state um you
00:48:45.420know who's actually in control so even if he's even if he's in charge he's not really in charge
00:48:49.320So therefore, he's a victim. But in Kanye's case, it may actually be more like the real structure of mainstream culture and media coverage is in some ways not stacked in his favor. And so in order to be transgressive, I just think there's something there that is the same. It's this idea that they want to go against a status quo.
00:49:12.140Yeah, that's so interesting. This is such a weird example, but it reminds me of every kind of edgy, in air quotes, guy that I knew who loved edgy jokes and edgy humor and edgy memes.
00:49:28.340And I could tell that the reason why that felt like empowerment for them was because it felt transgressive. It felt like I'm doing something against the grain. But what they couldn't see is you're actually doing the same thing that every other edgy teen is also doing.
00:49:49.100Like, you're trying to paint yourself as this, you know, iconoclast while simultaneously doing the same thing that everybody else is doing.
00:49:57.600And you're saying at once that, like, I am, you know, doing something different, but you're doing something completely the same.
00:50:05.360That is so true. And I know I have met so many men like that.
00:50:09.100I mean, why is it always men who are like that?
00:50:11.840I met a man a few years ago who was trying to flirt with me, I think.
00:50:16.500and and his way of flirting with me was to tell me that he doesn't eat food that he's different
00:50:21.860from other other other men other humans because he doesn't like to eat food i was like dude0.76
00:50:27.020you know i know you're trying to be cool but like that just doesn't make any any fucking sense at0.55
00:50:33.160all what does he eat yeah those are then i stood there talking to him for so long to try to figure0.52
00:50:39.060out what he eats and then i realized like i've been suckered into a conversation with a person
00:50:44.360who was just trying to be like provocative and transgressive on purpose in order to get me to
00:50:50.280talk to him and what am I doing? It's so boring. Yeah. It's the equivalent of I don't watch
00:51:00.880television. Oh, right. So do you even content though? Like, come on, don't watch TV. We love
00:51:08.940tv you know like tv is like childhood so no but i you know when it comes to the transgressiveness
00:51:15.860of means i think that uh one of the things that as a kind of academic practice here is
00:51:23.780you know once you get to the root of a thing and you realize how many levels of abstraction
00:51:28.740have had to happen so that it can get mainstreamed and into the culture there is some kind of bitter
00:51:35.740bitterness to the fact that white lives matter couldn't be mainstreamed by white supremacists
00:51:43.580so it has to be mainstreamed by two black people uh who are looking for different kinds of media
00:51:50.800attention right and so it's the wrong way in which the meme enters into public consciousness as well
00:51:59.220And so what we're going to watch for and probably we'll see is this battle over who gets to represent the meme now that it's out there and the mainstream media is paying attention.
00:52:12.260And I just did a quick look on Google to see what was coming back.
00:52:16.400And, yeah, we're looking at hundreds of media outlets that are putting White Lives Matter in their headlines.
00:52:20.900And the ensuing meme war that's going to happen is going to involve people resurrecting old zombie content that already existed.
00:52:33.980And then we already see about half a dozen online shops trying to sell a version of this T-shirt.
00:52:43.360And you will see it start to crop up and become something that it never was intended to be.
00:52:49.200And I think that that's one of the main points of our book is that these things take on a life of their own and then the people who are behind them, eventually they fade into the distance.
00:53:00.960And some of them in our book in particular, if you look at those that were trying to mainstream certain right-wing memes after the election, and those that went to the Capitol on January 6th to quote-unquote stop the steal, many of them are up on charges or they've lost their livelihoods, they've lost their money.
00:53:26.940Many people that were very close to Trump have lost their jobs and their credibility. I mean, the crying Brad Parscale meltdown is one such instance. But, you know, the moon wars don't tend to work out well for those who try to participate in them.
00:53:46.940And that's where we are going to look at and pay a lot more closer attention to what's coming in 2024, because I have a feeling we're going to see many candidates dipping a toe into QAnon.
00:54:00.900There's already a couple dozen candidates that are running in the midterms that are using QAnon type slogans and hashtags. President Trump is now trying to revive QAnon through Truth Social.
00:54:16.940It's likely once Elon Musk takes full control of Twitter that Trump is going to return to the platform and we're going to see many new memes and many old adversaries come back.
00:54:30.040But I think the one thing that our work really is future casting is really able to, you know, I don't want to say that we can predict what's going to happen in the meme wars, but in these midterms that are coming up, America First seems to be much stronger than the candidates that are running on the America First platform.
00:54:53.840And this meme, America First, dates back to, what was it, Johnson?
00:55:04.400And then from there, the KKK pick it up.
00:55:06.920And then it's had many different utterances within the right wing over the years.
00:55:12.260But our chapter on Joker politics shows how the radical fringe of the right wing that really wants to, quote unquote, destroy the GOP have utilized this moniker of America first to bring about their sort of whitened cultural utopia online and to discuss America as a kind of isolationist state.
00:55:42.260and this is feeding into politicians who want to have an audience online so that they can spread
00:55:50.020their messages and they can spread their campaign materials and so we're going to see a lot more of
00:55:56.240these meme wars leading into 2024 and if it is the case that Trump does return to social media
00:56:04.580as we see this rise in conspiracism and this kind of culture war is playing out through
00:56:14.300popular celebrities, we're not going to be able to depend on the same kind of defenses that
00:56:21.020movements have been depending upon for the last couple of years with deplatforming and de-indexing.
00:56:26.920It's just not going to work when it reaches a certain scale and the people who are running
00:56:33.480these companies are not sympathetic to the needs of community safety and so unfortunately i i wish
00:56:41.260our book wasn't so much of a crystal ball here but when i when i look back at history and i think
00:56:49.180about the future i i get really um vexed by thinking about how much pain and antagonism is
00:56:59.480is going to be sort of part of our political future
00:58:21.460When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.
00:58:27.340I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:58:33.700I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.
00:58:37.400I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything.
00:58:45.500Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:58:49.720I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:58:54.500I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:59:02.100They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:59:06.000But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:59:09.440They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:59:13.080Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:59:20.860If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:59:27.760This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:59:39.920I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:59:47.060I'm going to have to look up this story.
01:01:36.800And that's why I get so upset about the way in which our communication system has been over the years and maybe even the last 60, 70 years owned by and monopolized by a very few companies.
01:01:55.540And the hope of the internet was that it wouldn't be the case, that it could be decentralized. But more and more, we're seeing certain companies take control over our global information commons and then not be proper stewards or librarians of that information.
01:02:14.580And so we need a broad whole of society approach to returning to a public interest internet, lest we end up with what we're getting now, which is more of the same very, very rich people who don't need to care how we survive this because it's not going to affect them or their families or other people that they care about.
01:02:43.660And so the stakes couldn't be higher, I think, for a broad global movement to return communication to the people.
01:02:54.200So, okay. My answer is, or my instinct is to be hopeful because like we're, we're living on this
01:03:03.240planet, you know, like we're not, here we are. I got kids. Like I need them to be able to
01:03:10.420be safe. And, uh, and I do think that I have a couple of things that make me a little bit
01:03:16.060hopeful maybe more hopeful um than not one is that by like writing this book in through the
01:03:25.720process of writing this book what I learned is that all of these things that seem out of control
01:03:32.120like QAnon which to me just seemed like it whoa it came out of nowhere like what is this thing0.95
01:03:36.740the insurrection like holy you know where the fuck did that come from why is this happening0.92
01:03:41.000it actually comes from somewhere it all comes from somewhere and it's planned and it's coordinated0.97
01:03:47.120and and we can know that and we can find that out um and i so i guess that i think that there's
01:03:53.640something to be hopeful about the fact that you can be empowered by knowledge like we can tease
01:03:58.740out how these systems work and lay that there for people and i we hope that this book is like doing
01:04:04.620that as a first step. And then the reason to do that, right, is not just so that like individual
01:04:11.400people like us can be like, hey, the reason that happened is this, but actually so that then we
01:04:16.700could all come together and like advocate for some kind of systemic whole of society response
01:04:22.060that Joan is talking about. And we should advocate for that. And we can advocate for that in some
01:04:29.300ways that you know learn from some of the memetic theory that we're looking into like you know you
01:04:37.420know the thing i said about repeating a lie over and over again makes it seem true well also
01:04:41.720repeating a truth over and over again makes it seem truer like repeating the things that you
01:04:47.300believe in over and over again if they're pro-social beliefs you know bear repeating and
01:04:52.620sometimes people will be like oh you know obviously the bedrock of progressive progressives in america
01:04:58.940and liberalism is like a multi-racial democracy
01:05:28.940It did result in a lot of talk. It resulted in like a GoFundMe campaign that maybe will send Steve Bannon to prison. But it didn't result in an actual border wall. But what it did do in a very crucial way is expand people's understanding of what's possible.
01:05:52.080so like anti-immigration folks who already had anti-immigration beliefs were not before that
01:06:00.520calling for a wall and they may not ever get one but now they think of it as an option and one
01:06:07.040thing that i think the left frankly like doesn't do a great job of is helping people have an
01:06:13.860imagination about what's possible and what's better. So, you know, we can ourselves like
01:06:21.820start talking about how there are things we really want. And like right now there are cases in front
01:06:27.180of the Supreme Court. I spent the whole morning trying to figure out these two cases that are
01:06:31.360going to be in front of the Supreme Court that have to do with Section 230 of the Communications
01:06:36.520Decency Act to try to figure out like, is this going to be a thing that's going to fix this?
01:06:40.480Like, are people going to be held accountable? And what I learned is that those cases, though they seem to have a lot of merit, are not even being considered on the merit.
01:06:52.200The merits are not being considered. It's a procedural question before the court. And just which brings me to this idea that like so much of the reason why we think change is not possible is because of bureaucracy and like entrenched procedures and norms in our legal system and in our government system and in our education system and in the infrastructure of the Internet that was built in a specific way that ended up incentivizing specific things.
01:07:22.100And we think we can't change it. But the truth is, like, actually, those things can be changed and we could still have an amendment.
01:07:29.180We could make an amendment to the Constitution that would, you know, codify Roe and give rights and do all of these things.
01:07:37.080But we don't even ever talk about that because we're like, oh, that's not possible.
01:07:41.000But anyways, I'm hopeful that we could begin expanding our imagination of what's possible, put it out there.
01:07:48.280And then who knows what could happen? Maybe something good could come of it.
01:07:50.940Very rosy. Very rosy. You want a constitutional amendment to protect women's rights.
01:07:59.260Well, I do, because frankly, amendments are like, this is me like learning my how the government works so late in life.
01:08:07.920And you know what? I've been learning a lot about it from TikTok. So thank you influencers.
01:08:12.200but like amendments give amendments give rights you know laws don't give rights laws like in some
01:08:21.860cases um curtail rights they they take away rights they um they enforce rules but they don't
01:08:30.680give rights rights or amendments and like i don't think that there's been a new one in my lifetime
01:08:36.020and that is is i mean there probably has so definitely fact check that i'm not an expert
01:08:41.300but there hasn't been one in a long time and there's this i spent this morning learning why
01:08:46.280and it's like all stuff that can change and actually like we could decide to work on that
01:08:54.640and then we could codify i don't know i don't have a lot of faith in government these days
01:08:59.720teach yourself home health care joe joe's not gonna let us make her hopeful about this she's
01:09:12.400It's Friday, it's sunny now, for me anyway.
01:09:15.660But yeah, no, I hear you about wanting to have hope in this world
01:09:20.400and wanting to have a positive social vision of where we need to go.
01:09:27.080But I don't know if that's possible with so many of these types of people
01:09:36.220at the helm of our politics and our communication and uh maybe i've been totally nihilistic
01:09:45.140in my descriptions today but um i'm not having a bad day you know like it's like yeah you know
01:09:55.200i'm out here laughing i'm out here understanding the the contingencies and i agree with you that
01:10:02.280if people like the key here and the key is the question that began the you know decade of
01:10:09.600research that i've done about the internet which is how do people coordinate to do anything
01:10:14.400right and and there's a time for social protest there's a time for lawyering there's a time for
01:10:22.720uh hiving and swarming and so i agree it's going to take all of these things but i also
01:10:31.040know that if we don't get our communication infrastructure in line then it's going to be
01:10:39.580used by those in power to further polarize and divide us and this is the big lesson of the last
01:10:47.040you know five or six years of digital organizing which is that it's amazing to have all of these
01:10:54.600open platforms and forms of communication that allow us to meet each other, to meet across the
01:11:03.060globe, to have these grand visions. But the only people I see building technology for
01:11:12.240these political purposes is the far right. And this isn't what it was like 10 years ago at
01:11:20.160post-Occupy, there was an explosion in leftist and anarcho creation of social media platforms.
01:11:32.040The first Facebook clone I ever used was developed by people in Occupy. And so there seems to be a
01:11:39.580lack of investment in the infrastructure that allows for that kind of organizing that you're
01:11:45.300talking about, Emily, to really take shape. And we're not going to get there without our
01:11:51.740technologists getting on board and seeing this through. Because for so long, I think we've been
01:11:57.660able to depend on, for worse, the organizational means by which Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter
01:12:06.420have provided. But I don't think we're going to be able to count on that in the long term.
01:12:11.600And I don't think that organizing in public is going to be as useful as organizing in smaller local groups has been for many, many decades.
01:12:24.760And so I think part of this is about trying to think through the obligation to move out of just these myopic online spaces and to think about what is the infrastructure that we're going to need to unite people who want to do the street protesting with the people who want to do the lawyering, with the people who want to change our institutions.
01:12:51.360and I think that to do that we're going to have to ask for a different internet and we're going
01:12:56.740to have to build it and we're going to have to fund it in many different ways and you know I0.96
01:13:03.020love the name of this podcast there are no girls on the internet because it really reminds me about1.00
01:13:08.740how all of the invisible work of women over the years with infrastructure labor the fact that0.61
01:13:15.260women were our first telephone operators and it's because, you know, women with really long arms
01:13:21.040would get hired at AT&T and Bell because they could operate the switchboards easier. You know,1.00
01:13:28.600that women have been the backbone of our communication technology for so, so many years.
01:13:34.260And I think it's possible to do something bright and workable if we invest in the means to do it
01:13:44.940and we resource it well, but I hesitate to say we can get it done with what's around at this point
01:13:53.020because I just don't see the political will within these companies in particular to build the internet
01:14:03.460that creates broader public interest and information. Instead, we see more and more drive to monetize
01:14:14.400and marketize information and even though our communication one-to-one has gotten cheaper than
01:14:21.120ever uh we're paying the price of that in our politics in our education in our economy because
01:14:30.100a few people have used this technological uh change as a smash and grab operation on
01:14:38.320the rights and civil liberties uh of the rest of us and so maybe i sound like a crazy marxist at
01:14:46.860the end of the day but i do believe that communication should be free and i do believe
01:14:52.380that if we don't make that a possibility that the power of the internet and the power of these
01:15:01.200networks is going to be reserved for the chosen few who have always managed to come out on top.
01:15:09.720And when I say that, I'm saying particularly our political elite and the 1% who have bought up
01:15:19.640these communication networks or made themselves millionaires in the process. And then we'll
01:15:27.660glom on to saying, well, we don't need content moderation because everybody has the right to
01:15:33.500free speech. But when that free speech is being used to hunt people down and stop doctors from
01:15:40.920giving care to people, then we have to question if that's really about free speech. Sorry,
01:15:47.080I'll get off my soapbox now, Bridget. No, I love it. I wouldn't even necessarily say that's not
01:15:54.380hopeful it's just a different it's like hopeful for a different kind of thing hopeful for
01:15:58.880kind of us like tearing down our current systems and rebuilding them so that they work for more
01:16:05.540people that's it's a big it's a tall order but it's it's not absence of hope yeah
01:16:12.220i hear you and in the meantime you know i'll be selling white lives matter shirts
01:16:21.420oh my god at least at least bedazzle them at least make them you know jazz them up a little bit
01:16:28.240the best ones out there I mean I still can't believe that you know I'm sitting here in
01:16:34.120disbelief looking at it thinking to myself how did we go so wrong and how is everybody taking
01:16:41.780the bait on that and yeah so maybe that's where a little bit of my disillusionment is coming in
01:16:47.540and um and i won't i obviously i'm not going to be selling anything on ebay
01:16:53.500if my sarcasm isn't coming through i know it is relish the canceling that's on my way that's
01:17:02.740coming my way so joan you said earlier that maybe your answer sounded nihilistic um and i have been
01:17:09.860thinking about nihilism a lot this morning um and i also i will my final parting thought is that i
01:17:17.060used to think of myself as a nihilist because like lol nothing matters is like my favorite and
01:17:22.000only meme i paid attention to before you know writing this book and doing this research lol
01:17:27.480nothing matters was my meme um and i've realized that lol nothing matters is not nihilism lol
01:17:35.100nothing matters is absurdism which is that nothing matters but that means we get to make
01:17:42.100the meaning we get to do whatever we want and we should we can do good we can do we can have fun
01:17:48.740and like our systems are not working right now they're not working for like a vast majority of
01:17:55.120people um but we can we could remake them and also like i was learning about first amendment today
01:18:02.720hate speaking about hate speech like the first amendment doesn't actually protect hate speech
01:18:08.380as an amendment that's part of the law that has been built up over the years of interpreting it
01:18:14.560and who wrote who did that interpreting largely white male judges you know so like that's not
01:18:20.560necessarily surprising that they carved out a that like hate speech decided to be included
01:18:26.060so lol nothing matters but therefore we can change everything if we want ourselves words0.60
01:18:34.580to fucking live by the book is meme wars the untold story of the online battles offending0.79
01:18:40.960democracy in america joan emily thank you so much for being here um is there anything that i did not0.95
01:18:47.400ask that you want to make sure gets included by black skinhead by brandy collins oh yes we're
01:18:54.520gonna have her on it's all in your pocket get her book yes uh we're gonna have her on very soon um