Michael Phillips
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: Dr. Oz: Why 'America's Doctor' Is A Bastard
I'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on Good Company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi, for a conversation that's anything but ordinary.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: Dr. Oz: Why 'America's Doctor' Is A Bastard
We dive into the competitive world of streaming, how she's turning so-called niche into mainstream gold, connecting audiences with stories that truly make them feel seen.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: Dr. Oz: Why 'America's Doctor' Is A Bastard
Get a front row seat to where media, marketing, technology, entertainment, and sports collide. And hear how leaders like Anjali are carving out space and shaking things up a bit in the most crowded of markets. Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: Dr. Oz: Why 'America's Doctor' Is A Bastard
I'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on Good Company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi, for a conversation that's anything but ordinary.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: Dr. Oz: Why 'America's Doctor' Is A Bastard
We dive into the competitive world of streaming, how she's turning so-called niche into mainstream gold, connecting audiences with stories that truly make them feel seen.
Behind the Bastards
CZM Rewind: Part Two: Dr. Oz: Why 'America's Doctor' Is A Bastard
Got you, I got you.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Space Magic from Venus: A Literary Odyssey
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 179
Pretty good, you know, besides living in the world that you just described. Past that, everything's going great.
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Especially if it helps one simply survive these times. So, you know, I encourage a healthy dose of coping or sort of a mental bifurcation if that's what we need to do to get up in the morning and get through it all. Yay.
Behind the Bastards
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So yeah, it's not confusing at all. And yeah, I mean, I think the root of it, at least in like a modern philosophical sense, is Nietzsche, or at least that's a common reference point. And when Nietzsche is talking about nihilism, especially in a book like The Genealogy of Morality and a lot of other places,
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He is making the argument that sort of Christian European culture, and particularly Christian European culture influenced by idealist philosophy, creates nihilism. The reason he says it creates nihilism is because people care more about heaven than they do about earth. They care more about... the life they're going to have in eternity than the life they have in the here and now.
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So for him, it's like this devaluement of life that happens via Christianity. More broadly speaking, nihilism has a, I guess, more positive usage, which is the, you know, disbelief in the inherent or necessary meaning in an overarching system.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, so you kind of have this distinction and some people use of positive and negative nihilism. And to be really crass and simple here, negative nihilism is nothing means anything. So I don't give a shit. I'm just going to hang out and do whatever. Positive nihilism is there's no inherent meaning in reality. But cool.
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Now me and the homies can construct meaning as we see fit, which is more like the existentialist response. We're going to create meaning where maybe there wasn't natural meaning in this like old school platonic or Christian sense.
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Yeah, I mean, I think there's the sense in which it is the kind of weird Jordan Peterson-y, alt-right philosophy version of nihilism, which just means, like, people that think the dominance of the West is bad. And it also reeks a little bit of, like, Big Lebowski nihilism for... Totally, totally. And, of course, in that movie, nihilism is represented by...
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crew of i think austrian techno producers called autobahn who are also nihilist and they say throughout the film like we are nihilist we believe in nothing which is a really and obviously coen brothers made that film at least one of them was a philosophy major so they know what they're doing that's kind of the really basic not good enough version of this thing that it seems like the fbi is operating with like people who don't believe in the goodness of the western project
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can I say something that stood out to me about those definitions? The hatred thing I found really interesting in like the very first definition you give that nihilism is defined as like in a motive state. Because again, I think nihilism is classically conceived totally is almost more like ontological or metaphysical. And by that, I just mean looking at these structures of belief in the world.
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So rather than being like motivated by hatred or love or fear or whatever, um, A more classically nihilist view is just, again, like, oh, I've been sold a bill of goods on what the meaning of existence is or what the undermining underlying principles of political reality are. And now I see that they are maybe BS.
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Yeah. I guess there's just like this negativity associated with all that language. And of course I was having never heard the definitions that you were just bringing up, you know, the way in which it just quickly zigs and zags to like some very dark stuff in terms of like radicalization. It seemed like there was a reference towards like a, like, like pedophilia or something there.
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Yeah. So it just the getting from A to B there is more like getting from A to Z or something. It's just not a connection that I think would be obvious to anyone who has thought about, read about, written about nihilism as more of an intellectual or even like a political and philosophical concept.
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Yeah, but which is still a far cry from believing in causing active harm psychologically, physically, whatever, to human beings.
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Yeah, there's a sense in which it's painted as like if you knew nothing else and you were to read those definitions and you were just a scared suburban insurance salesman or something, it would sound as if it was like a death cult infecting the minds of children, like zombie-esque little super soldiers.
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When I was growing up, acceleration just meant accelerating the contradictions of capitalism. But kids these days, that's right, direction, not a good one.
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Well, that isn't so shocking hearing all this as someone that doesn't know all these details. I mean, A, I feel like the blinders just got taken off me and I'm seeing the world anew. But B, shocking that from a more normie perspective, in my mind, I would think all of these types would be pretty excited about how things are going politically, not trying to tear things down further.
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Oh, so just desensitizing yourself to them, it just makes you a more violent person and capable of doing these things yourself.
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I've already transitioned to the sort of person who can now laugh at this because of the absurdity. Oh, my gosh.
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This is another one where my brain is more pure than yours, I guess, at this point. But it's about to get ruined, so let's do it.
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Well, and to even speak to the flip side of that, you know, over the years making... philosophy stuff on YouTube, I've gotten in touch with people who've reached out to be like, Oh, I've been watching stuff since high school. When I was like 15, I was watching these like philosophy YouTube videos on heady ideas and reading stuff. So like me, I was one of these people. Yeah.
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There's like young folks out there who take big ideas very seriously and they have more access than ever to these things. So it doesn't, I mean, it doesn't shock me at all that some teen could go down that rabbit hole or even could start reading like a Curtis Yarvin or Nick land and going down those rabbit
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holes and stuff especially now that some of these people are you know put on like the new york times and stuff like that so exactly yeah it seems weird to to dismiss that i can understand the the impulse to be like this just seems like a a very stupid evil teen kid totally it seems just as plausible like you're pointing out that there could be an actual engagement with ideas and that's it's important to recognize that because then you have to get at the root of that exactly and like these people aren't necessarily like philosophical nihilists or existential nihilists
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So would you say, like, when you bring up the Tesla example, is one of, to be very reductive here, the big risks at play that, like, someone who starts Tesla on fire or causes some damage at a Tesla dealership, largely for the motivation of trying to stick it to Elon Musk or something like that, gets classified in a way by the FBI that is similar to some of the folks you have previously talked about doing things that most rational humans could agree are deeply more insidious than, like, setting a car on fire.
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Yeah, it makes me think of like climate activism as well. And, you know, the work of those in the climate community that call for like the destruction of equipment and not the harm of human life. Totally.
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I mean, and the irony, of course, that you could call someone, you know, disabling an oil pipeline, a nihilist extremist when the act they're doing is precisely for the purpose of ensuring the continued existence of human civilization on a large scale.
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You know, and I consented to it. You've extracted a part of my soul and put it into a cosmic toilet today. I know more than I've known before. As a human, as an American, as a parent, I'm terrified on every front.
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And, you know, my simple guy takeaway here is, yeah, like the idea that this is going to both let some of the worst folks off the hook or at least make it harder to classify them with the groups they should be classified with, while also making it easier to lump in forms of what many of us would consider more reasonable political activism under that umbrella. is quite bad.
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And I think, of course, for me, due to my pet interest, all of these instances of continuing to pervert and misuse philosophical terms that have meanings developed over hundreds and thousands of years for these political ends is very upsetting.
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Yeah. I mean, a really simple one that I talk about way too much is Kierkegaard's The Present Age, which you find in this book called Two Ages that's easy to buy. It's normally really cheap or you can just read it online someplace that kind of describes a society in which people get caught up in media and reflection and the BS they are told rather than developing their subjectivity for themselves.
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I think that one's really great in terms of more contemporary stuff. I've been very Frederick Jameson-pilled recently. Nice, nice. I mean, I've read Jameson before on and off, but recently dove in more deeply. And there's one... Okay, I have it at arm's reach so I can say the title correctly. that I've really been enjoying.
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It's called An American Utopia, Dual Power and the Universal Army by Frederick Jameson, edited by Slavoj Zizek. And it's this large Jameson essay about what he sees as an alternative for leftist power in America, responses from a bunch of other scholars.
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I have found it very interesting, but for me at least, I find comfort in the fact that others have accurately diagnosed and understood what is happening right now, and at least give us the tools, to understand the thing so it feels less nebulous and mysterious.
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Yeah, I have a recently launched YouTube channel that's just under the name Michael O. Burns. And I think it's literally just YouTube slash Michael O. Burns.
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I'm quickly... Yep, YouTube slash Michael O. Burns, where I'm going to be doing more stuff quite regularly, like streams and video essays, largely doing some of the stuff we were just talking about, using philosophy and concepts from theory to try to understand what's going on in both the political and the social and interpersonal levels. I'm working on a...
Behind the Bastards
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In 1963, the Houston Chronicle surveyed doctors about their views of abortion. About 18,000 abortions took place in Texas every year, the newspaper reported, and that, quote, an increasing number of doctors believed abortion should be legal for reasons beyond saving the life of the mother. Texas women fought fiercely for the right to control their bodies.
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In North Texas, the Women's Alliance, the first Unitarian Universalist church in Dallas, launched an education campaign about the need for the state to reform its abortion laws. Meanwhile, Dr. Hugh Savage of Fort Worth, the president of the State Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, lobbied the Texas Medical Association to draft a statement supporting abortion rights.
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The state's abortion ban was, he said, in conflict with actual practice of reputable hospitals across the state. Doctors regularly provided abortion care when a woman's life was in danger, and they interpreted that mandate broadly. In 1969, members of the Texas Medical Association who were surveyed approved liberalization of abortion laws by an overwhelming vote of 4,435 to 536.
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largely neglected by her parents. But Covey had suffered abuse at the hands of men throughout her life and was a frequent drug user. After giving up one child for adoption and having another taken by her mother, in 1969, she was pregnant for a third time while she was living in Dallas.
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McCovey tried to end the pregnancy herself with a home remedy of peanuts and castor oil, but she only succeeded in making herself nauseous. She was eventually told about an illegal clinic, but when she got there, Dallas police had already shut down the clinic. Quote, nobody was there, she said later. It was an old dentist's office. Then I saw dry blood everywhere and smelled this awful smell.
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She believed that she falsely claimed that she had been gang raped by African-American men. A doctor might be willing to provide her an abortion. She was unsuccessful, but a doctor referred her to an attorney who connected her with a pair of lawyers who were seeking to challenge the Texas anti-abortion law.
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These attorneys, Linda Coffey and Sarah Weddington, filed a class action suit against Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, claiming that the Texas anti-abortion law, which allowed the procedure only to save the patient's life, violated the constitutional right of privacy.
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Wade reportedly joked, quote, any prosecutor could convict a guilty man, but it takes a real pro to convict an innocent man. Emanuel Wade provided prosecutors after the Civil Rights era provided tips for excluding African Americans and Mexican Americans from juries.
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Wade left the district attorney's office in January 1988, and as of 2008, 19 criminal defendants convicted by his team had been exonerated through DNA evidence.
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On November 24th, 1963, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby had murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of John Kennedy, as he was being escorted by police in front of a nationwide TV audience. The case should have been open and shut.
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Wade's staff won a conviction in March 1964, but the verdict and death sentence Ruby received was unanimously overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on October 5, 1966, in part because the judge should have granted a change of venue, but also because Wade's team had introduced improperly obtained evidence at the trial.
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Ruby was awaiting a new trial when he died of pneumonia and cancer in 1967.
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No one laughed, and a Texas legal team would win a landmark legal victory. On January 22nd, 1973, news anchor Walter Cronkite made the earth-shaking Roe v. Wade decision, the lead story on the CBS Evening News.
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News of the road decision had to compete not only with coverage of Johnson's death and the planning for his funeral, but also the recently negotiated American withdrawal from the Vietnam War. No one could have guessed how deeply this one decision would reshape the makeup of the Democratic and Republican parties over the next half century.
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Americans divided almost evenly soon after the Supreme Court announcement. A Gallup survey indicated that 46% supported a woman's right to choose and 45% opposed granting women access to abortion care in the days following the Roe decision. Reactions were often surprising. W.A.
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Criswell, the arch-conservative pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the nation, initially applauded the court. Perhaps the pastor, who had repeatedly warned 13 years earlier that the election of a Catholic, John Kennedy, as president would mark the end of religious liberty, was relieved that the Supreme Court was not controlled by the Vatican.
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By the late 1970s, Criswell would emerge as a national leader of the religious right and would help make opposition to abortion and gay rights a centerpiece of Republican politics. Shortly after Roe, however, he struck a very different tune.
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Quote, I have always felt it was only after the child was born and had a life separate from its mother that became an individual person, Criswell said, and it always therefore seemed to me that's what's best for the mother and the future should be allowed.
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The movement soon came to be dominated by right-wing Republicans, and the occupations of clinics soon became violent. Abortion ponents pouring noxious chemicals into clinic ventilation systems. Anti-choice extremists had fired the clinics, bombed them, and even murdered doctors and clinic staff providing abortion care.
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One set of Texans may have won the decisive battle for abortion rights in the past half century, but a different set of Texans would lead the charge to reverse those gains.
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McCovey died in 2017 at her home in Katy, Texas. By that point, anti-abortion politics had become orthodoxy in the Republican Party. In 2008, the state passed the misleadingly named Women's Right to Know Act, which mandated that physicians share misinformation about alleged fetal pain during abortion with women who sought the procedure.
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In 2013, a state senator, Wendy Davis of Fort Worth, staged a dramatic 13-hour filibuster of Senate Bill 5, legislation that banned abortion after 20 weeks, required clinics to meet the same demanding standards as hospitals and surgical centers, and required doctors performing the procedure to hold admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.
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Davis's filibuster stopped the bill from being voted on before midnight June 25th, the mandated end of the legislative session. She killed the legislation for the time being, and the pink tennis shoes she wore became a symbol of abortion rights activism around the world. However, Rick Perry called a special session of the legislature the next day, and Senate Bill 5 passed.
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Her efforts propelled her into the 2014 gubernatorial race, but she was crushed by Greg Abbott by a 21-point margin.
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In 2023, the Texas Supreme Court denied Kate Cox of Dallas the right to end her pregnancy even though her fetus suffered from full trisomy 18, a severe genetic anomaly that guaranteed that the child, if it survived pregnancy, would only live minutes. If the pregnancy continued, Cox may have lost the ability to have children in the future.
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She fled this state in order to obtain an abortion where the procedure remained illegal. In 2023, Amanda Zawarski almost died waiting for a life-saving abortion when doctors hesitated to provide care because they feared criminal prosecution. For years, abortion-right activists had chanted, pro-life, that's a lie, you don't care if women die.
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In fact, the state legislature and Governor Greg Abbott did nothing as the deaths of pregnant women in Texas soared 56%.
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This is Michael Phillips, an historian in Texas. I'm the author of a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
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On October 28th, 2023, 18-year-old Neva Crane was six months pregnant. She began vomiting and she became soaked in sweat during a baby shower at her home in Beaumont. She too was miscarrying.
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Her boyfriend drove her to nearby Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas, where they waited for five hours in a waiting room before doctors diagnosed her with strep throat and gave her a prescription for antibiotics. sent home or conditionally worsened. Crane was driven to another hospital in town, Christus Southeast, Texas, St. Elizabeth.
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Her fever soared to 102 and she was bleeding, but her doctors continued to do nothing but administer antibiotics. Eventually, she is wheeled into a third emergency room. Doctors gave her two ultrasounds to, in their words, confirm fetal demise. Crane's mother, who had long been opposed to abortion, screamed at the medical staff to help her dying child.
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Crane suffered for 20 hours before her heart failed.
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When Harris lost, anti-abortion extremists exuberantly celebrated Trump's triumph. Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who if right-wing rap artist Kanye West got to go to dinner in 2022 with Trump, saw the Republican victory as an opportunity to reduce women to the status of property.
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In 2022, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito authored the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision.
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Alito's majority opinion reversed the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade outcome that established a woman's constitutional right to an abortion through the first trimester, permitted states to impose limits to protect the health of the mother in the second trimester, and gave states leeway to ban abortions in the final trimester.
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The Roe decision, based on a Texas case, had survived with modification for almost half a century. In Dobbs, however, the Supreme Court denied that women held a constitutional right to an abortion and gave the individual states the power to determine whether such procedures were legal at any point during a pregnancy.
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In the Dobbs case, Alito seemed to suggest that the concept of abortion rights was a modern aberration. MSNBC pundit Lawrence O'Donnell zeroed in on one key phrase in Alito's opinion.
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Through it all, Texas became a central battlefront in the culture wars surrounding women's bodily autonomy. One group of Texans won women the right to an abortion in the Roe case, while another worked almost immediately to reverse Roe and to recriminalize choice. Meanwhile, a Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade, played an underappreciated and underexplored role in the battle.
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Women typically endured seven to eight live births, and the experience was often grueling and life-threatening, particularly as they got older. Seeking relief and physical safety, women frequently terminated their pregnancy in a variety of ways. From Native Americans, white women learned which local herbs were considered abortifacients.
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White and black women also sought advice from midwives who provided wisdom on how to relieve menstrual cramps, get pregnant, and breastfeed. Midwives provided abortion services as well. Women attempted to end pregnancy with varying degrees of success by consuming pennyroyal tea or savin juniper or a combination of iron and quinine.
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They took hot baths or rode horses bareback in order to cause a miscarriage.
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A dramatic shift happened after the 1847 founding of the American Medical Association. Established by men, the organization began lobbying states to ban abortions in an attempt to discredit midwives, who represented major competition for female patients. Medical journalists began to dismiss midwives and male doctors who provided abortion services as dangerous, ill-informed quacks.
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AMA members were still unaware that germs existed, and they didn't clean their hands or equipment when examining wounds or during surgeries, thus causing many of their patients to die of sepsis. So-called regular doctors often use dangerous treatments such as bleeding to treat illnesses.
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Yet, in spite of their high body count, AMA members persuaded major press outlets, such as the New York Times, to sensationally cover cases in which women died during abortions performed by midwives. This created momentum for the enactment by 1880 of laws banning and criminalizing abortion in every single state except Kentucky, where state courts had already rendered such procedures illegal.
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In the 1880s, Texas was still seen by much of the country as an unsophisticated frontier, but was home to a highly influential doctor with a national following, Ferdinand Eugene Daniel, who became editor of the Texas Medical Journal.
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A eugenicist with a national audience, the surgeon had served in the Confederate Army and argued that masturbation and homosexuality were dangerous indications that an individual came from a family line that had not fully evolved or was biologically regressing. Fully evolved individuals, he believed, had less of a sex drive and kept their minds on intellectual pursuits.
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Daniel argued that before the Civil War, Americans had endangered their future by bringing Africans into the country as slaves and were compounding the error by allowing what he called, quote, the dregs of Europe, Jews, Greeks, Italians, and others to immigrate to the United States.
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The only way to save America's biological future, he said, was by castrating not just gay men and masturbators who would cause the evolution of white America to swing in reverse, but also to sterilize the sexually promiscuous, the mentally ill, those with disabilities, and the criminal element as well.
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In an 1887 issue, he published an account of a debate among doctors held by the Medical Society in Terrell, Texas. The topic was whether saving the life of a mother was the only acceptable reason to allow an abortion.
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Some doctors in the debate argued that abortion was morally acceptable for, quote, an intelligent and chaste woman who had gotten pregnant after being deceived by a scoundrel into participating in premarital sex.
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In 1899, in Waco, Texas, Mary Wheat discovered she was pregnant and sought an abortion. The procedure had been illegal in Texas since 1856, a year before the recently formed American Medical Association began a campaign to prohibit abortion in every state. By 1880, the AMA had achieved its goal.
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In spite of the ubiquitous bans, abortions were frequent, and there were a large number of doctors willing to provide the prohibited medical procedure. Wheat, called Maddie by friends and family, found such a physician, Dr. S.M. Jenkins.
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Jenkins' trial did not go as prosecutors planned. Jenkins testified that the fetus Wheat was carrying had died and that the abortion was an attempt to save her life. According to a reporter for the Houston Post, Jenkins and his attorney were pleased with how the trial was unfolding.
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Quote, the defense seemed to be well satisfied with their showing so far and public opinion had changed considerably in favor of the defendant, the newspaper told its readers. But then the trial came to an abrupt and shocking end.
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Abortion politics were far more unpredictable in the American past than Samuel Alito had asserted. In 1873, anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock of Connecticut successfully lobbied the Congress to pass legislation known as the Comstock Act that made distribution to the U.S.
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mail or common carriers of birth control devices or any information about birth control or how to obtain an abortion a federal crime.
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I'm Michael Phillips. I wrote a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis and have co-authored an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
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School board meetings used to be boring. Board members typically spend hours discussing financial reports, land purchases, plumbing contracts, and other tedious topics.
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But beginning in 2020, Christopher Ruffo, a former documentary filmmaker and fellow at the Right-Wing Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025, launched a campaign to convince Americans that public schools have become communist indoctrination centers.
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Ruffo falsely claimed that public school teachers were brainwashing schoolchildren with something called critical race theory, or CRT for short. Adherents of critical race theory argue that racism has become so intrinsically entwined in American politics, law, and culture that anti-discrimination laws typically fail.
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While CRT is studied in some graduate schools and law programs, it hasn't been taught at the grade school level where the outrage has been directed.
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Rufo's timing could not have been more perfect. The artificial CRT panic broke out during the COVID pandemic. Parents already felt frustration and fury about the hardships of campus closings, remote learning and mask mandates.
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Now convinced that their children were being taught to scapegoat white people for all the country's problems, parents across the country exploded in rage at local school boards. Reuters reported on one meeting that turned violent in Loudoun County, Virginia.
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Textbooks before the 1950s and 1960s civil rights era were explicitly and astonishingly white supremacists. School books in the South, for instance, portrayed Confederates as gallant gentlemen fighting for a noble lost cause. This influenced popular culture, as we see in films like Gone with the Wind.
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Meanwhile, school kids were taught that abolitionists who wanted to end slavery before the Civil War were terrorists who needlessly plunged the country into civil war. And this, too, steeped into the public imagination of movies like Santa Fe Trail, starring Van Heflin.
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According to the myths promoted first in schools, then echoed in mass entertainment, slavery would have gone away eventually if only white slave-owning southerners had been left alone to figure it out themselves. Screenplay writers have often echoed what they heard in the classroom, as we see in this scene from the 1940 film Santa Fe Trail.
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Here, Raymond Massey plays John Brown, a white abolitionist who tried to start a slave rebellion in Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859. Massey portrays him as a thoroughly crazed maniac, while Errol Flynn depicts future Confederate General J.E.B. Seward as sweetly rational.
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American schoolchildren, furthermore, learned from their teachers that so-called radical democracy was not a good idea, and sometimes dictatorship was the better option. The 1924 textbook, Our World Today and Yesterday, A History of Modern Civilization, published two years after Mussolini's fascist government took over Italy, had nothing but praise for that nation's new dictator.
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The authors told the impressionable high school students the following about the world's first fascist leader.
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I tell it, the Italians of America who are working to make America great. Another textbook published in 1935, The Record of America, told students that the so-called founding fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, were not big believers in democracy, an attitude the authors seemed to endorse.
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In 2015, Ronnie Dean Barron got a text from her son, Kobe. who was glancing at a ninth-grade geography textbook published by McGraw-Hill, assigned him by his high school in Paralin, Texas, near Houston. He sent her a video highlighting a map in a shocking caption. Soon Burren posted her son's video online. That video, as KPRC reported, spread outrage across the nation.
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The caption wasn't an accident. McGraw-Hill had given the state of Texas what it wanted. Rather than anything like critical race theory, the State Board of Education in 2010 adopted changes in Texas curriculum standards for public schools, known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.
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that imposed a whitewash of American slavery, raised doubts about human-caused climate change, and imposed other right-wing content. To be sold in Texas, school textbooks had to meet the board's standards.
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The demands Texas makes of textbook publishers matter, as PBS reported a decade ago.
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This is how Kobe Burin ended up with the World Geography textbook that used the word workers to describe chattel slaves. Kathy Miller of the anti-censorship group Texas Freedom Network said, quote, Those serious about education aren't laughing, however.
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In 2018, the state board removed Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be presidential nominee of a major political party, from the list of major historical figures Texas students must learn about. A decision later reversed after embarrassing news coverage.
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In 2010, the board mandated that textbooks depict the Civil War as primarily a struggle over states' rights and not slavery, a choice that was later modified in 2018 to return slavery as the primary cause, but still maintained that, quote, states' rights and sexualism were key contributing factors.
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Approved books still tell students that segregated black schools in the Jim Crow era, quote, had similar buildings, buses, and teachers as white schools, maintaining a hint of the separate but equal logics that upheld segregation. One textbook included a cartoon in which a space alien lands on Earth and asks if he's eligible for affirmative action programs.
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Students can get dramatically different versions of American history based on which state they attend schools. A New York Times comparison of textbooks used in California and Texas showed that both versions of the same history textbook include an annotated Bill of Rights.
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In reference to the Second Amendment, however, the California textbook notes that several federal court rulings have allowed regulation of gun sales and ownership. The Texas version of the same book replaces this commentary with a, quote, blank white space, as the New York Times reported.
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As the New York Times reported, the California version of a history textbook addressed the issue of white flight, the phenomena whereby parents move from cities when schools became integrated and moved to overwhelmingly Anglo suburbs. The California textbook said this.
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The Texas version of the same textbook deleted the sentence referring to racism as a motive for white flight, but left the reference to a fear of crime, reframing what students learned about why suburbs grew so rapidly after World War II.
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The Texas State Board also specifically asked one textbook publisher to emphasize how many clergy signed the Declaration of Independence and to underscore the supposed importance of religion to the founders. These particular demands were the result of intense lobbying by a Texas Christian nationalist, David Barton.
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In 1988, Barton founded Wall Builders, a nonprofit the organization says is dedicated to, quote, educating the nation concerning the godly founding of the nation. Barton believes that Americans have been deceived about the true meaning of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which declares, quote, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion.
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The founders, Barton claims, only meant that Congress should pick a particular Protestant denomination as the national faith.
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Barton also argues that Thomas Jefferson meant that the wall of separation between church and state should operate only in one direction, that the government should not interfere with religion, but that Christians should dominate the government, as Barton said in an interview.
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There were some states that objected to this notion. The state governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts, for instance, initially interpreted the First Amendment as meaning only Congress could not establish religion, but states could. Citizens of those two states paid taxes that supported the Congregationalist Church, respectively, until 1818 and 1833.
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For decades, some states had so-called, quote, Jew laws that prohibited non-Christians from holding office or had similar bans on Catholics. Such laws were the exception, however, and fell by the wayside by the end of the 19th century.
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The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, placed the same limits on state power that are placed on the federal government regarding the establishment of religion, a limitation upheld in the 1947 Supreme Court case Everson v. Board of Education.
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Martin believes that not just the Bible, but also the original United States Constitution, which includes provisions protecting slavery, such as the Three-Fifths Compromise, were directly inspired by God. He asserts again, with no evidence and without defining terms, that 52 of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were, in his words, quote, "...Orthodox or Evangelical Christians."
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In reality, the early leaders of America didn't speak with one mind regarding religion. Many were deists who saw God not as a deity invested in the daily lives of humans, but as a dispassionate clockmaker who put the gears of the universe together, wound it up, and let it run on its own. Their God didn't intervene in history or perform miracle healings at spiritual revivals.
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When Ben Franklin proposed opening the first session of the 1787 Constitutional Convention with a prayer, the proposal was voted down, with only four approving Franklin's motion and a gathering that as many as 55 attended on any given day.
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Barton's books and speeches are filled with misquotes and statements attributed to historical figures that no credible scholars have been able to find. He cherry-picks evidence to bolster his claims about the founder's religious beliefs. Barton, for instance, made up a story that Jefferson started the practice of holding church services in the U.S. Capitol.
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More reputable scholars argue that while there's evidence that Jefferson attended one service held at the Capitol building, there's no evidence that he approved them officially. What's more, Jefferson was far from an Orthodox Christian or the sort of Christian that dominates conservatism today.
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He edited and published The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jeffersonian Bible, which is a condensed version of Jesus' teachings from the Bible that excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, the resurrection, the raising of the dead, and so on.
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These sort of facts are the subject of Barton's 2022 New York Times bestseller, ironically titled The Jefferson Lies, exposing the myths you always believed about Thomas Jefferson.
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In spite of his flexible relationship with the truth, Barton is a major player in Republican Party politics. On a podcast, Barton claimed that Republican U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson consulted with him about staffing at the Capitol.
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Johnson made a speech at a wall builders event, telling the audience that the theocratic evangelist had, quote, a profound influence on me, my work, my life and everything I do.
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Huckabee has long produced so-called history videos for school children that promote Christian nationalism and the idea that the United States has a unique relationship with God, such as a series aimed at older children called One Nation Under God, which portrays a Revolutionary War soldier and George Washington suggesting God was on their side.
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Meanwhile, Martin's political and cultural influence has grown exponentially over the last decade. One of his political action committees played a major role in getting Ted Cruz elected to the United States Senate. He is close allies with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who wields power typically held by governors in other states.
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Patrick said this at a 2022 Conservative Political Action Convention in Dallas about who he thinks wrote the U.S. Constitution.
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In Texas, regardless of a lack of evidence, textbook publishers are required to tell students that Moses, the prophet depicted in Judeo-Christian scripture as well as the Koran as leading the Hebrews out of slavery, was a major influence on the authors of the Constitution.
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Furthermore, under Barton's influence, the state of Louisiana enacted a law in June 2024, which requires every public school classroom in the state to prominently display a version of the Ten Commandments from the Book of Exodus derived from Protestant translations of the Bible. This past November, a federal court issued an injunction barring enforcement of the law.
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The history of posting 10 Commandment signs or plaques or building such monuments in public spaces over the last 70 years has an origin that might shock many right-wing cultural warriors who associate Hollywood with godless liberalism.
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As Cruz points out in his book One Nation Under God, How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the three-hour, 40-minute epic movie The Ten Commandments was a monster hit and wowed audiences with its 25,000-member cast and advanced special effects when it was released in 1956. The movie grossed more than $85 million. The film's politically conservative subtext was unmistakable.
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The director, Cecil B. DeMille, hated the New Deal and testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that communists exercised malign influence over unions, including those in Hollywood that drove up the cost of filmmaking.
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Meanwhile, an adult actor, Woody Strode, appeared in the film in two markedly different roles. A former NFL star who broke the 13-year informal NFL ban on African-American players when he signed with the Los Angeles Rams in 1946, Strode played both an Ethiopian king and the enslaved attendant of Moses' adopted Egyptian mother.
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DeMille thought that the audiences could tell whether a swaddled white baby was a boy or a girl, but apparently assumed they wouldn't notice a black actor playing both a king and a slave because of the racist belief that all black people look alike. Meanwhile, a movie set in ancient Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula featured an almost entirely light-skinned cast.
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Even though DeMille's mother was Jewish, the only Jewish actor to play a major role was Edward G. Robinson, who earlier became famous playing gangsters. And he won DeMille's favor perhaps because he was a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the communist witch hunts.
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Thus, the one prominent Jewish face in the Ten Commandments was cast as a bad guy, a Hebrew named Nathan, who continually tries to undermine Moses and convince the escaped slaves to return to their Egyptian masters.
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The contemporary obsession with festooning public spaces with religious artifacts has as much to do with malevolent nostalgia as with religious zeal.
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Men like anti-CRT crusader Christopher Ruffo, along with Barton and Patrick, want to return to the world that made the Ten Commandments film, a world in which white people are centered, the accomplishments of dark-skinned people are erased or expropriated, and where America stands as an untainted beacon of freedom in spite of its history of enslavement, imperialism, and genocide.
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And now, once again, advocates of historical amnesia have a friend in the White House.
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In the civil rights era, black and brown parents boycotted public schools that discriminated to undermine their funding, created their own freedom schools that provided lessons in black and brown history, and marched against the old Jim Crow laws. Parents who want their children to receive an honest accounting of the nation's past will do well to learn from these predecessors.
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and to disrupt the meetings of right-wing school boards as loudly and enthusiastically as the parents who were conned into a frenzy about the phantom dangers of CRT. This is Michael Phillips. And this is Stephen Monticelli.
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I'm Michael Phillips, an historian, the author of a book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co-author of an upcoming book about the eugenics movement in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
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Since the late 1990s, Alex Jones built an extensive media empire, spreading outlandish conspiracy theories from his home base in Austin, Texas. a native of the Dallas suburb of Rockwall. Over the years, Jones has claimed that the Apollo 11 moon landing was fake. So too, he said, was the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting he claimed was staged to justify new gun control laws.
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According to Jones, the U.S. government can control the weather and has intentionally caused floods and other weather disasters to punish Texas and other conservative states.
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He has insisted that chemicals intentionally placed in American drinking water are turning frogs gay, part of an experiment by the American government seeking a way to undermine the nuclear family, while peddling dubious supplements with unproven health benefits. Jones began his broadcasting career with a call-in public access cable TV show before moving on to radio and then online.
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In spite of his outlandish claims, in 2015, Jones was able to set off a panic in Texas that inspired action from Governor Greg Abbott.
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The crazier the conspiracy theory got, the more Texas's far-right political leaders were willing to pander to Jones and his ilk. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to monitor U.S. Army troops near Austin.
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Texas Senator Ted Cruz pledged that he would demand answers from the Pentagon about the military's intentions and said he completely understood the widespread paranoia.
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Suffice it to say, the Obama administration did not overthrow the state government. The intense outrage and fear generated over Army combat preparations might have seemed perplexing to those outside of Texas, a state that prides itself on being patriotic and pro-military. However, seething distress of liberal elites is a lucrative business in Texas.
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Alex Jones built a fortune of $270 million with his internet show and sales of dubious health and survivalist products advertised on those broadcasts. This is nothing new south of the Red River. From the beginning of its history, the state has been an incubator for outlandish and occasionally not completely unreasonable conspiracy theories.
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A decade later, the tide shifted, and Texas was hurriedly annexed in 1845 after widespread rumors gripped Washington, D.C., of a British plot to annex Texas and convert it to a haven for African Americans escaping slavery.
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In the 1850s, even prominent Texans like Sam Houston flocked to the American Party, also known as the Know-Nothings, that claimed the Pope had ordered Catholics from Ireland, Germany to immigrate to the United States in order to take the country over and hand power over to the Vatican.
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Panics over suspected rebellions by the enslaved gripped Anglo-Texans in 1835, 1838, 1841, and in 1856, when perhaps as many as 400 African-Americans held in bondage in Colorado County and South Central Texas apparently plotted to rise up against their white oppressors and battle their way to freedom in Mexico, where slavery had been abolished.
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A wave of labor unrest, including the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 and the rise of the populist movement, which called for the government seizure of railroads and telegraph lines.
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In addition to a global panic amongst the well-to-do about anarchism after a series of bombings in Europe and even the United States from the 1880s to just after World War I, convinced economic elites in Texas that revolution was in the air.
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The Ku Klux Klan, which in its original incarnation during Reconstruction served as a goon squad to keep newly freed African American labor under tight control, came to dominate cities like Dallas in the 1920s, where one in every three eligible men were members of the KKK at its peak. The KKK charged that both Jews and Catholics were conspiring to control the world.
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Texas politicians like Representative John Box of Texas, in a column in Henry Ford's anti-Semitic newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, charged that Jews had manipulated the Congress to add loopholes to American immigration laws passed in 1921 and 1924 in order to let Jewish people escaping the Russian Empire into the United States as part of a scheme to undermine American society.
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John Owen Beatty, the longtime chairman of the English department of Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1951, authored one of the first and perhaps the best-selling of all time book promoting Holocaust denial, Iron Curtain Over America. Beatty claimed that the Jews of today were not the Hebrew heroes of what Christians call the Old Testament.
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Instead, they were descended from a sinister Asian trot called the Khazars that converted to Judaism around the year 800. Too arrogant to assimilate with Christian Europe, Beatty wrote, Khazars undermined society under their stolen identities and caused the communist revolution in Russia in 1918.
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After immigrating to the United States in large numbers, they took over the Democratic Party, Beatty said, and moved it to the radical left. Beatty also claimed that Jews controlled Franklin Roosevelt's administration and pushed into war against Hitler's Germany, which Beatty described in his book as, quote, the historic bulwark of Christian Europe.
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A mere six years after Soviet and American troops had liberated Nazi concentration camps, Beatty claimed that most of the victims there died from disease and the Holocaust was a fraud used after 1948 to blackmail the West into political and financial support of Israel. The SMU professor urged the United States to expel Jews from the United States.
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After World War II and the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in China, the uber-wealthy giants of the Texas oil industry to a large degree funded what came to be known as McCarthyism.
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Clinton Murchison, whose son in 1960 became owner of the Dallas Cowboys National Football League team, became one of the largest financial contributors to red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. In Houston, hard-right organizations like the Minute Women fought against school integration and took over the school board.
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firing the assistant superintendent, George Ebay, because he previously lived in California and Oregon, where he had nice things to say about Roosevelt's New Deal and the African-American freedom struggle. A math instructor got fired after he carelessly commented in a teacher's lounge that he supported Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democratic Party nominee for president in 1952 and 1956.
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The Eastern School Board yanked books from campus libraries that said positive things about the United Nations, while right-wingers in Dallas forced the city library and the Museum of Fine Arts to ban artists like Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso because of their supposed communist sympathies.
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The Lifeline show was hosted by a former FBI agent named Dan Smoot and broadcast on more than 80 television and 150 radio stations. Hunt believed that democracy was the instrument through which wealth would be seized from billionaires such as himself and redistributed to the lazy and the worthless.
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Hunt once raged at Smoot when the Lifeline host claimed on air that democracy was a political outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Hunt corrected Smoot, condemning democracy as the handwork of the devil and a phony liberal form of watered-down communism. Hunt innovated a number of ways to alarm audiences about far-left plots.
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The John Birch Society also saw the African-American civil rights movement as part of a Bolshevik conspiracy to divide the country and argued that efforts of towns and cities after World War II to add fluoride to public water supplies was part of a sinister scheme to weaken men physically and make them less able to resist the radical takeover of the United States.
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That particular Berkshire conspiracy theory made a long-lasting impact on the American psyche. Cities across the United States banned fluoridated water.
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Today, the John Birch Society is still active in North Texas, where recent gubernatorial candidate and car dealer Don Huffines has published anti-fluoridation essays on the Dallas Express, a right-wing website that repurposed the name of a historic black newspaper that went defunct in the 1970s.
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Walker was a painfully dull public speaker. In the end, he couldn't bring his version of deliverance to his own state, finishing a distant sixth in the 1962 gubernatorial race. That would not prevent him and his allies from creating mayhem over the following months.
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He got arrested and was ordered to be psychiatrically evaluated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy after he incited racial violence during the integration of the University of Mississippi in September 1962. Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations, would confront Walker and a mob of his followers when the diplomat visited Big D on October 26, 1963.
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Stevenson was shouted down as he attempted to deliver a UN Day speech to the Dallas Council on World Affairs. Mr.
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On the morning of November 22, 1963, Kennedy and his entourage felt foreboding as they prepared for a short airplane jaunt from Fort Worth to Dallas. The president just examined a full-page ad in the far-right Dallas Morning News that featured a bold-faced headline, Welcome, Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. The advertisement, paid for in part by H.L.
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Hunt's son, Nelson Bunker Hunt, and the future owner of the Dallas Cowboys, H.R. Bumbright, featured accusations that Kennedy was soft on communism around the world and radicals at home, while persecuting conservatives who criticized him. The same morning, a group distributed leaflets designed like a wanted poster with front and side photos of the president with the caption, Wanted for Treason.
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How can people say such things, the president said to First Lady Jackie Kennedy. We're heading into nut country. Soon the Kennedys would make their fateful flight to Dallas, and the president would die from an assassin's bullet shortly after noon.
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Sometimes conspiracy theories have deadly consequences. William L. Pierce spent his teen years attending a military academy in Dallas as the city stewed in anti-communist dread and anti-Semitic hatred. As a young adult, he had joined the John Birch Society, but grew frustrated because it wasn't racist enough.
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He became a leading figure in the American Nazi Party and at the age of 41 formed the Neo-Nazi National Alliance. Beginning in 1975, he published in serial form one of the most influential examples of white supremacist literature, The Turner Diaries, a novel which told the story of a white nationalist revolution in the United States in the near future.
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This revolt is sparked by a Jewish-authored law outlying private ownership of guns. The hero, Earl Turner, joins an underground terrorist army, the Organization, which battles a Jewish plot to destroy America not just through gun control, but also through uncontrolled non-white immigration and by using rock music and drugs to encourage interracial sex.
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At one point to save the white race, Turner blows up the FBI national headquarters in Washington, D.C. with a truck bomb.
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White nationalists have since seen the Turner Diaries as both an accurate description of the modern world and as a manual on how to win a race war.
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From 1983 to 1984, The Order, a white supremacist terrorist group that took its name from the secret circle the fictional Earl Turner joins, robbed a pornography shop, banks and armored cars, heisting more than $8 million they later distributed to several white supremacist groups with the intent of funding a white revolution. Along the way, they assassinated Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg.
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The Turner Diary became the favorite novel of Timothy McVeigh, a bitter, disgruntled veteran in the 1991 Gulf War, who saw the deadly confrontation between the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the gun-toting Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993, as a major step in a government plan to seize firearms from law-abiding Americans.
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Kennedy was a classic Cold War liberal in support of an aggressive military intervention to stop communist expansion abroad and, with varying degrees of commitment, economic and civil rights reforms at home. But because of his assassination, by the 21st century, many on the far right saw him as a martyr to the liberal deep state.
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Beginning in 2017, a very online far-right conspiracy theory arose that centered on cryptic messages first posted on the 4chan message board and then on 8chan by an anonymous person who identified themselves as Q. The pseudonym was for reference to the Q clearance, which gives government officials access to high-level security secrets.
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Kennedy would be central in the imagination of what came to be known as the QAnon movement.
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QAnon believers were a heavy presence during the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021. And QAnon banners competed with Trump and Confederate battle flags for attention. In November of that first year, we saw the first of a series of rallies that Steve just referred to. They went to Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy had been murdered 58 years earlier.
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Over the course of many months, QAnon disciples kept returning to the site of JFK's death, some staying at a local hotel so they could be nearby when the Kennedy return happened. This was covered by Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA in November 2021. Reporter Kevin Reese interviewed some of the ones gathered at the Kennedy assassination site.
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Conspiracy theorists often pay a high personal price for beliefs that marginalize them from family, friends and mainstream society.
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With the return of Donald Trump to the White House on January 20th, conspiracy theories will move from the fringe to the seat of power. JFK Jr. won't emerge and grab the reins, but a different Kennedy will, Bobby Kennedy Jr. Bobby Kennedy Jr. has insisted that Wi-Fi causes cancer and that AIDS might not be caused by HIV. Vaccines, he claims, against overwhelming evidence cause autism.
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Antidepressants cause school shootings, and chemicals in water lead to gender dysphoria. One of these chemicals, RFK Jr. insists, might be an old obsession of the conspiratorial right.
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These enemies of freedom somehow pull all the strings, incite unseen, manipulate every aspect of the world's politics, culture, and finance, manipulate elections, engineer depressions, urban riots, and even hurricanes. Yet for all their cleverness, they leave just enough clues so that amateur sleuths, if they are just smart enough, can crack the code.
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Conspiracy theories make history an understandable contest between ruthless bad guys and intrepid heroes who then feel superior because they've unveiled the master plan. As they discover kindred spirits, they find community otherwise lacking in their lives. Perhaps if just enough people know about the conspiracy, they hope, the bad guys will fall and the millennium will follow.
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That fantasy offers a simpler, more emotionally satisfying vision of the future than planning on how to dismantle capitalism or figuring out how to persuade white people, for instance, to surrender their privileges that come with skin color. Conspiracy theories are mostly a distraction, but unfortunately they are often, from Oklahoma City to the U.S. Capitol, a call for deadly action.