Are We All Falling for 'Copaganda'? with Alec Karakatsanis

In this episode, I’m joined by Alec Karakatsanis, a trailblazing civil rights lawyer, Founder and Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps, and author of Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. Together, we pull back the curtain on how everyday headlines shape what we believe about crime, safety, and justice, and how those beliefs serve the powerful and not necessarily the public.

We dive into:

• How to spot propaganda hiding in plain sight
• Real, non-punitive approaches to addressing harm that actually work
• The ways police practices distort crime data to fit certain narratives
• Why mainstream media leans on fear to keep the criminal legal system intact

This conversation will change the way you read the news — and maybe even the way you see the world.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Copaganda and Its Impact

03:05 Defining Copaganda: Features and Implications

07:01 Challenging Perspectives on Propaganda

10:39 The Construction of Crime and Its Reporting

17:27 Understanding Harm: The Overlooked Crimes

22:17 Manufacturing Fear Through Media

28:22 The Punishment Bureaucracy: A Flawed Solution

35:02 Rethinking Safety and Community Solutions

40:10 Navigating Media Consumption Critically

Links:

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Credits:

Created and hosted by Abbie Henson

Edited by Isabelle Kerby-Mcgowan

Website by Sarah Lords

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Copaganda and Its Impact
• 3:05 Defining Copaganda: Features and Implications
• 7:01 Challenging Perspectives on Propaganda
• 10:39 The Role of Media in Shaping Perceptions of Safety
• 17:27 Understanding Harm: The Overlooked Crimes
• 22:17 Manufacturing Fear: The Media's Role
• 28:22 The Punishment Bureaucracy: A Flawed Solution
• 35:02 Rethinking Safety and Community Solutions
• 40:10 Navigating Media Consumption Critically

Transcript

Please listen carefully.

Welcome to Critical Conversations. I'm Abbie Henson, a criminologist and qualitative researcher passionate about sharpening our critical thinking skills so we can all play a role in building a more just and compassionate world. In each episode, we'll unpack complex perspectives, challenge our assumptions, and invite the kind of growth that deepens our connection to ourselves, each other, and the communities we move through.

Today's episode features Alec Karakatsanis. Alec is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps and has spent his career challenging what he calls the punishment bureaucracy in the United States, taking on prosecutors, judges, police, and private companies who profit from human suffering. His legal work has helped free hundreds of thousands of people from jail, returned tens of millions of dollars to low-income families,

and reshaped the way our courts handle fines, fees, and bail. Before founding Civil Rights Corps, Alec was a public defender in DC and Alabama, co-founded Equal Justice Under Law, and earned degrees from Yale and Harvard Law School, where he was Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review.

His advocacy has earned him national recognition, including the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award and the 2023 New Frontier Award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Alec is also the author of Usual Cruelty and Copaganda, writes a widely read newsletter, and frequently collaborates with artists who create work that challenges our ideas of justice.

Speaker 1 (01:46.54)
Our conversation speaks specifically to his most recent book, Copaganda, How the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. This conversation really challenges our concepts of trust when it comes to journalism, and it breaks down what copaganda is, how to be aware of it, and how to not fall victim to it, as many of us have and do. You'll leave this conversation with tangible tools for consuming media in a more critical and aware way.

and hopefully walk away with a more informed perspective on alternate and empirically better approaches to safety than what we traditionally rely upon. I would love to hear your thoughts and questions this conversation may raise for you. So shoot me a text or email. The contact info can be found in the show notes. Also, I keep this podcast free of all advertisements and therefore really rely on you all as listeners to spread the word.

and try and increase exposure through your reviews. I love reading them and seeing the impact and just feeling in community with you. So again, I hope that you enjoy this episode and feel expanded through its content. I'm hoping that we can just start for our listeners to have you define what copaganda is.

For me, Copaganda really has three main features. The first is that it narrows our conception of what safety is and of what threat is. So if you look at the news or you watch a lot of movies, you might think that we should only be afraid of poor people, people of color, immigrants, strangers, right? And that these are the only people or groups of people that commit harm. Whereas, you what we know from the actual evidence is that the vast bulk

of harms in our society come from other institutions and entities. So, for example, people who know each other are way more likely to be the perpetrator of harm than a stranger. Or if you think about other types of social harm, wage theft by companies is about $50 billion a year. So that's, depending on how you estimate it, five to six times all other property crime combined.

Speaker 2 (04:00.546)
that the police are recording or tax evasion, like a trillion dollars a year. This is like 60 times all other property crime combined or things like air pollution, much of which is criminal acts of air pollution by corporate entities, right? That kills about a hundred thousand people in the US alone every single year, air pollution. So that's like five times all homicide combined. I could go on and on with water pollution and other types of crimes. So.

The things that are most likely to threaten us are actually not the things that the news is obsessing over as threats to our safety. And that's the first feature of copaganda. It's just making us only afraid of things that generally are done by people who have less power, marginalized people, and kind of ignoring the things that are dangerous to our health, wellbeing, and safety that people with power do. The second thing that copaganda does is having narrowed our conception of threat, it

makes us constantly afraid more and more and more and more. It makes us think that those threats are increasing and increasing and increasing at any given moment. That's how, when you get these polls, every single year people seem to think crime is going up. When in fact, every single year, almost without exception of the last 25 years, crime as reported by police in our society in the United States has been going down. And what's really interesting about this second feature of copaganda is like if you actually drill into the survey data a little bit and you ask people about crime in their own neighborhood,

they're much more likely to be accurate. So when their perception is influenced a little bit more by their own experiences, it's less distorted, it's still distorted, and we can talk about why, but it's less distorted than it is when they're mediating their experience through the mainstream news media, et cetera. And then the third and final kind of feature of copaganda, at least as I define it in the book, Copaganda, is that having narrowed our conception of threat.

made us more more more afraid. It tells us that the only solution to all of our fears is always more and more more more investment in the bureaucracy of punishment. And so this is, think, maybe the most important feature because it's the thing that keeps us stuck in this perpetual cycle of all of these horrible social problems and pursuing so-called solutions that actually have nothing to do with those problems. So it's steering us toward more police, prosecution, prison, surveillance, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (06:14.454)
instead of, let's say, reducing inequality and poverty or early childhood education or access to healthcare or combating toxic masculinity or loneliness and isolation and all of the things that the research and the scientific body of evidence actually shows are more connected with levels of interpersonal harm in a society. So I think for me, those are the kind of the three main features. When I'm talking about copaganda, I'm kind of thinking about those things.

Yeah, yeah, I want to get into kind of the nuance of each of those three. But before we get into it, what might you say to a listener who might challenge that your book is propaganda for progressives or for people who are anti-establishment in this way?

Yeah, so I think that how we define propaganda is always an interesting question. for me, I think that not all arguments or advocacy is propaganda. Although I think, you know, my book is clearly trying to convince people of something. And my book clearly has biases and a perspective, right? And that perspective is really the result of how I've spent my career.

like all people, by my life circumstances and the things that I've experienced and seen. And so my entire legal career for the last 17 years has been representing the most marginalized and oppressed and poorest people in our society when the government tries to put them into cages. And so that's the perspective that I have. So I'm not expecting everybody who reads the book to agree with everything that I say or for the things that I believe to immediately resonate with them. I mean, I've tried obviously with

with as much integrity as I can muster to think critically, to challenge my own assumptions and biases, to use evidence to support my views. But at some point, all opinions and all perspectives come down to certain biases. And for me, doing academic work, doing public facing work is all about centering my heart with the most vulnerable and marginalized people in our society.

Speaker 2 (08:28.726)
and then trying to relentlessly tell the truth as I see it about how those people are being treated and why and asking questions like who benefits from this. And so one of the reasons I don't use the term criminal justice system is I think that is a term of propaganda. It's kind of like when the United States government changed the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense.

It wasn't like it marked some huge shift in how the United States actually behaved in the world. It marked a shift in how it felt it had to justify that behavior. could no longer justify wars of imperial aggression. It had to frame things as self-defense. That's something like what we've seen in the second half of the 20th century with police. They used to be much more open and honest about what their job was. And then as they professionalized and society became a little bit more committed to certain liberal values in the second half of 20th century,

they had to frame a lot of what they were doing in terms of public safety as opposed to control and domination. And so I think for me, what I would say to someone is yes, this book is an argument. It's an attempt to convince you of something. I probably personally wouldn't call it propaganda in the sense that I believe that propaganda kind of requires a widespread apparatus of kind of either state or quasi-state sort of equivalent kind of

institutional power. If you're going to be a propagandist, you can't just have like work at a little nonprofit or something like that, you know. You have to have some access to or interest in kind of like controlling and shaping sort of widespread dissemination of information. So I think the news media and a lot of the corporate institutions and state institutions that I talk about in the book are definitely engaged in propaganda work. And if you want to say, you know, I would say that I'm engaged in counter propaganda or anti-propaganda work, but I don't think

something being biased or propaganda or an argument is a reason to discount it completely. I think like with anything that you consume, you should read my book and listen to my arguments with some amount of skepticism and ask really serious questions about sort of like what I'm saying and why I'm saying it and who benefits from it, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (10:39.948)
Yeah, I think one of the important points that you raise is that in the concept of propaganda, too, is a veil of objectivity. And you do a really good job, as you just did in that response, of situating your perspective in your subjective experience. And what we see and what you demonstrate throughout the book is that so much of what we are consuming in mainstream media is proposed as objective truth. And there is very little transparency.

in who the experts are that are being quoted in the articles. There's very little transparency around why these arguments are being made in the first place. So I want to kind of go through the three jobs of copaganda with a bit more nuance. The first job you mentioned was narrowing our understanding of harm to particularly street crime. And I think one of the points that you make that

is seemingly obvious, is really profound when you actually take a moment to think about it is that our crime rates are essentially manufactured through police action and policy. So police have discretion in the stops that they're making in the actions that they are considering crime or criminal. So what we think of crime is simply the acts that the police have deemed.

worthy, which we now know, well, we've known is deeply contextual and based in power often. Those who have power are often the ones who are not deemed criminal. And so I'm just wondering if you can speak a bit to not only how crime rates come about in terms of the quantitative numbers, but also what's missing from those numbers often is the crimes committed by police themselves. Yeah.

That's such an important point you make. So, crime is a socially constructed concept. What I mean by that is that jargon is not that important, but it's all I mean to say is that in different periods of our own history and in different societies across the world, people define crime really differently. And what constitutes a crime? This is really, in many respects, most of my first book is about, Usual Cruelty, where I really talk about a deconstruct kind of like,

Speaker 2 (13:02.242)
Well, what is a crime? And I have a little bit of that in this book too, but it's really, really important to take a step back and say, there are some societies where seeking reproductive healthcare is a crime and there are other societies where it's not. There are some societies where sexual harassment at the office is a crime. Some societies where it's not. Some societies where physical violence against an intimate partner is criminalized and some where it's not. There are societies where hoarding wealth is a crime and societies where it's not.

societies where joining a labor union or not joining a labor union, or, you know, I could go on and on and on, certain types of speech, know, certain types of treatment of animals, criminalized versus not criminalized, societies are constantly defining what's a crime and what's not a crime. And then those definitions tend to be controlled by people who have power in a given society. In our current society, the kinds of things that are criminalized tend to be things that benefit people who have a lot of money.

So even more importantly though, once you've decided that some given activity is a crime, those same interests then determine where are we gonna look for those crimes? How are we gonna so-called enforce those laws? So you could have a crime that says possessing a certain plant is illegal. And then you could choose to look for people possessing that plant in a poor black neighborhood instead of looking in the dorm rooms of Yale University. Now,

People are possessing those plants and other substances that are illegal to possess in both places at equal rates. And in fact, almost in most places at higher rates in more elite spaces. But where you choose to look for the crime is really, really important. And everybody has to understand that the police, prosecution and prisons in our society only enforce some laws against some people, some of the time in some places and how they make those decisions. So a fight at a

you know, very poor public school might result in criminal prosecution for the children who are fighting. The same fight at a wealthy boarding school might result in a call to the parents. In one of those instances, it has now been recorded as a crime. In the other instance, that event that happened, like so many sexual assaults in our society, for example, especially those committed at fraternities or on university campuses, are just never recorded at all as crimes.

Speaker 2 (15:24.48)
So a lot of the crime that police themselves commit is never recorded as a crime because the police themselves are the ones who do the recording. So this is a really, really important feature of crime data and crime statistics. It's also a really important and under-reported aspect of violence in our society because the police are committing orders of magnitude more violence than is being recorded. And when we talk about crime in our society,

we're almost always excluding most of the crime committed by police. So just to give you an example, there have been millions over the last several decades, millions of sexual assaults committed by jail and prison guard. If you trust the federal government's methodology for tracking these things, not through crime reports, but through investigations and interviews and surveys and things like that. And most of them are just never recorded as a crime. Los Angeles County is just...

came up with a multi-billion dollar settlement for all the children that were sexually assaulted in Los Angeles in the juvenile jail. That's happening everywhere. The amount of child sexual abuse and adult rape in the punishment bureaucracy itself would utterly change rates of crime if it were actually counted and included. I'm just giving you that one example. You could talk about these examples across a wide range of activity like banking, healthcare, insider trading by politicians.

There's all kinds of stuff, I guess the main point to understand is that everything that you read about and hear about with respect to crime is distorted by who is both defining crime and then who is deciding when we're counting certain crimes.

Yeah, that's something that I speak to with my students and in any public forum that I'm in is just that crime is contextual and it's acts that are deemed criminal by those in power. And I think that we really need to hold on to that when we think about perceptions of danger, like the most dangerous neighborhoods. Like is that

Speaker 1 (17:27.02)
danger that we're defining or is that just simply the most hyper surveilled and under resourced neighborhoods? You're talking about how, you know, we are we are essentially defining our levels of personal threat based in what we're seeing in the news, which is typically about street crime. You mentioned in the beginning some things, but what would you say are actually some of the most harmful behaviors that are impacting

our listeners that are impacting everyday people that we might not be seeing so frequently in the news.

There's such a long list because the crimes of elite people are enormously consequential. You know, there are sort of various forms of medical fraud and criminality that are costing like tens of billions of dollars that really disturbs the functioning of things like Medicare. There is, as I mentioned before, air pollution and water pollution kind of dwarf all physical violence combined, you know, when you actually count.

kinds of harms. Plastic pollution, there's several trillion little pieces of plastic that are polluted, most of which illegally, so much so that all of us, as we're talking right now, have a spoonful of plastic in our brains under the latest estimates. These are profound effects on global ecosystems. Fish, microbiotic life, human fertility, cancer. I mean, as a society, we're really in denial about a lot of this stuff. I mentioned earlier things like wage theft,

corporate securities fraud by $800 billion, and I mentioned tax evasion. You can go on and on and on and on. Then there's all kinds of other crime that is really consequential, like most progressive politicians that I've interviewed, whether they be judges, prosecutors, city council people, mayors, have been threatened by the police for their, whenever they propose stuff that the police don't like. Huge criminality and corruption throughout the American government systems at every single level.

Speaker 2 (19:29.546)
I myself have been illegally detained at gunpoint. The intentional violation of somebody's constitutional rights is a federal crime. Every single time the police search someone intentionally without probable cause, it's a crime. Every single time prosecutors intentionally withhold exculpatory evidence, it's a crime. Every single time the judges detain someone pretrial without complying with basic legal requirements about what findings they're supposed to make, et cetera, that should be a...

a crime. So we're talking about millions of crimes a year that are committed by people within the punishment bureaucracy that are just virtually never even discussed. And I remember I went once, had a meeting with a federal prosecutor because we uncovered that all of the judges in a particular city had committed federal and state felonies. And in fact, the prosecutor in the local jurisdiction, who was kind of like a right-wing guy, had

Uncovered that all the judges were committing these crimes and he only knew about it because he used to be a judge and he was doing it and then he had a political fight with the judges and he wanted to get back at them so he wrote a letter to the Attorney General documenting all their crimes and I went you know had an interesting meeting because I was suing all the judges at the time for something else another crime different kind of crime they were illegally jailing people to extort money from the poorest people on tickets in order to support their own insurance and other kind of benefits but I had this meeting with the US Attorney I'll never forget he said to me well, yeah

They're all committing all these crimes, but we can't just prosecute all the judges. You know, the whole criminal legal system would crumble. And so they didn't. And that's the same approach that like Obama and Holder took with the CIA torture program. It's like, yes, crimes happened. Over a hundred people died in torture, you know, committed by the United States. You know, Holder and Obama at the time, they said their famous line, we have to look forward, not backward. Now think about that for a second.

we could apply that logic to any crime. Anyone who's arrested for, you know, holding up a 7-Eleven could get arrested in the back of the police car and say, well, look guys, we're looking forward, not backward. We're not gonna look backward at me robbing the 7-Eleven. We're gonna only look forward from now on, you know? So sad fact is most crimes in our society are lost to history. No one's there to record them. And the kinds of crimes that eventually make their way into the news are filtered out through a variety of different filters that

Speaker 2 (21:51.958)
mostly benefit people who own things in our site.

Yeah, that's one of the things in terms of the filtering. So you say the second job is manufacturing fear. And I'm wondering if you can speak to the data about how the volume in which crimes, particularly street crimes, are being discussed in the news does not necessarily align with the rate of occurrence that it's happening.

This is one of the most important, maybe the most important thing to take away from the book. I call it the volume of crime news and the selective creation of anecdotes. So I'll give you an example. There's a famous basketball player named Michael Jordan, and he was really famous when I was growing up, right? And I played high school basketball and I was following basketball and he was one of my idols. But a lot of kids today have never seen Michael Jordan. So.

If you asked me to explain who Michael Jordan is to a 10 year old, I could prepare a video for that child and I could make a montage for that kid of Michael Jordan's career. But I could only include all of his missed shots. It'd be like a nine hour video of just Jordan missing shots. Missing shot after shot after shot after shot. And I show it to this kid who's never seen Michael Jordan play and the kid will conclude, well this is not a good basketball player.

He's a really bad basketball player. He's just missing shots. How did this person even make it in the NBA, right? Let alone be the greatest player of all time. What I've done there is I've taken entirely true anecdotes, but I've curated them in a way that creates the false impression that Michael Jordan was not a good shooter. This is really what mainstream news media does with shoplifting and with all crime, right? So there was a famous shoplifting incident that went viral in San Francisco a years ago.

Speaker 2 (23:37.934)
It was actually kind of a funny incident. This person was on a bicycle and they were stuffing their bags on the other side of the bicycle with stuff and then they somehow managed to balance their way out the front door of the pharmacy. That had tens of millions of views. In the first four weeks after that video went viral, that single video spawned 309 news stories. In the same period, there was not a single national news story about wage theft by that pharmacy chain of its own employees, which

was worth far more money, right? So the volume of news, how many times we're told about something affects how we feel subjectively scared or not about it, affects our perception. It was very, very hard during that period for a couple of years for me to tell people that property crime and shoplifting and theft were not up in our society, you know? And it can be very difficult to counteract the selective curation of anecdote. And that's partially what explains the polling data I gave you earlier, where

People are constantly thinking crime is up when it's not. So you can manipulate way people think if there's 10 murders a year in your town and there's 10 stories about those murders, people might have a certain understanding. If the following year there's only eight murders but there's 200 news stories about them, people might think that murder is up because there's much more news about it. So this is one way that people's perceptions are manipulated and this is a key point I borrow from the really

incredible French scholar Jacques Ellul, whose study of propaganda in 1960s, I think, was really important. He studied Nazi and Soviet and Western European and Chinese and American corporate propaganda. And he concluded that the very best propaganda is propaganda based on true facts. It's much more convincing and enduring and harder to to unsettle if you're basing it on facts that aren't easily verifiably false. And so this

selective creation of true anecdotes is something I weave through the whole book and I show people how the New York Times and publications like that are particularly good at verifying the individual facts that they're telling you in stories, although they often make comical errors and are very, very sloppy on some issues like the genocide or like policing. By and large, the most effective New York Times propaganda, especially

Speaker 2 (26:00.642)
propaganda that's meant for liberal people. And I talk also in the book about how liberals are the most susceptible of anybody to propaganda for a variety of reasons. The key point with like New York Times is that it's based on true facts. So it's a lot harder to prove that what's being, but the true facts are being used to create the false impression. So one of the big ones is this false, just totally false impression that the punishment bureaucracy is

trying and effective at making us safer. So they always juxtapose things like murder and carjacking and robbery and shoplifting with like interviews with the police and discussions of little policy tweaks, more prosecution, more jail, longer sentences. That's like climate science denial because none of those things meaningfully affect the levels of which those behaviors are occurring in society. They would be much better off discussing those things in conjunction with access to housing and healthcare and early childhood education and lead poisoning.

Just the mere juxtaposition of those things together, even without saying anything like directly false, is itself a really powerful form of propaganda.

Yeah, one of the things that you mentioned, there are a couple of things that you mentioned. One is that there was an article like 30 years ago about the San Francisco police policing heavily on drug crimes in the Tenderloin and saying, you know, we're we're doing this so that we can get a handle on the drugs and we're deploying as more police than ever before. And 30 years down the line.

there's still an issue of overdose and substance abuse. And so we're seeing that policing doesn't actually impact the conditions that lead to people engaging in behaviors that are illegal or harmful. And another thing you mentioned as an article about sexual assaults,

Speaker 1 (27:56.312)
taking place by prison guards and they lean it on budget issues and a lack of staffing. And so the solution posed is more guards for an issue perpetrated by guards. Again, you're moving beautifully through these three. You're segueing us perfectly. We're right into the job three of viewing the punishment bureaucracy as the sole solution to these issues. And I think

What Copaganda has done so well is, and you give a Noam Chomsky quote from this about how essentially they've created kind of boundaries around acceptable reforms so that anything outside of that seems outlandish or radical. And so what you just mentioned of thinking about access to health care or housing has been kind of seen as soft and

seen as letting the criminal go and not being hard on crime. And if we're thinking about the last 50 years of mass incarceration and the fact that people are still harmed to this day, because I don't think either of us are denying that harm does indeed happen and violence does indeed occur, but it's that our solutions haven't really made

much of an impact at all. And I recently did a research project interviewing police officers and they will corroborate that. They will say, you know, we're not, we're not preventing harm from happening. We are a reactionary institution. We are a band-aid approach to the fallout of poor social policy. And we should not be policing homelessness. We should not be policing mental health issues. We should not be policing substance abuse.

because they see the impact on the streets day to day where they're cycling people in and out of the jails and they're not getting the resources they need. you know, in terms of thinking about the punishment bureaucracy as the solution, I think this is the most timely interview from what we're seeing with Trump deploying the feds in DC saying that this is the solution to what he's framing as a massive rise in crime when it's again demonstrated that it's at a

Speaker 2 (30:25.59)
Yeah, think I've often in my conversations with police and prison guards, you know, often heard them say that as well, to their credit that we're not a solution to these problems and we shouldn't be trying to solve social problems and we're a bandaid. I think that lets them off the hook a little too easily in the sense that band-aids typically don't make a problem worse, like a cut. So I think a better analogy is like...

trying to cure some disease while using something else that's really toxic that makes the disease and other things worse. like trying to treat someone's cold with arsenic or leeches or something, you know, like because all of the investment that's going into the police, prostitution and prisons is not only money that could be going into things that actually work, but those institutions, as I mentioned, have crushed and infiltrated every major progressive social movement in modern history.

from women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, to anti-war movements, to economic justice movements, the environmental justice movement, to indigenous movements. They are actively oriented toward preserving the social and economic and political arrangements in our society that cause those social problems. So...

More investment in police means more investment in the surveillance and punishment bureaucracy, which then crushes the civil rights movement or whatever it is. Also, they, and I talk about this in a lot more depth in the book, but the investment in police also destroys the ability of communities to have the capacity to handle conflict and do other things internally. So it's actually much, much worse than a bandaid. And, um, I think that's a really, really key thing to understand. And I think.

people tend to understand it a little bit more when they start thinking about all these, and you mentioned this, these articles about the shortage of prison guards or the understaffing of prison guards, right? So one of the most, I think, insidious types of news article that you see in the liberal or mainstream news media is like a genuinely well-meaning reporter trying to capture the horrific conditions inside these places, talking about the rape of children, talking about the astronomical

Speaker 2 (32:40.768)
numbers of rapes of adults in these facilities that horrific medical care or lack thereof, forcing people to eat maggots and to sleep in pools of feces and blood and mucus and urine, and then of course the brutal beatings and murders inside these facilities. But the idea that the solution, that the problem is understaffing as opposed to over incarceration, for example,

or that the solution to like too much rape by prison guards is like having more guards is deeply damaging. And articles and stories like this that they get liberals all worked up about certain problems and then point them toward solutions that only exacerbate those problems are really important and special kind of copaganda. And it's a kind of analysis that the mainstream news media loves to publish.

constantly giving their journalists resources to make it look like they care and because many of them genuinely do care about some of these problems, I don't want to suggest that it's all kind of like fake and nefarious, but it would be like, know, writing this devastating article about climate change and then saying that the solution is more coal plants and like people, what a lot of people don't understand is that it's not a critique of who they are as people or of their intent.

to point out how the sort of standard narratives here and the narratives that they let the interests who run the punishment bureaucracy kind of run with. It's, all these articles now that say there's a shortage of police officers, they're just using as a baseline the amount that the police department says they need. That's as if it's some kind of magical amount that's set in stone from on high and that it's not very different in

Canada or Japan or France or Wichita or Boston or like this idea that like there's some obvious and objectively correct number of these people above which no violence would ever occur is just ludicrous. So anyway, I think all of this stuff goes together to make the just general point that the solution to social problems is generally going to be investments in the material conditions of people's lives.

Speaker 2 (35:02.326)
and not investments in the bureaucracies of state repression that are meant not to solve those problems, but to control the manifestations of those problems, like homelessness or the extent to which politicians are right now really worked up about people with mental illness existing in public, et cetera, et cetera, as if the solution to that is like more cops to like tase them and jail them, as opposed to building and developing a healthcare infrastructure in this country that was accessible and adequate.

Yeah, I had this experience. I was in LA and I was at an outdoor restaurant and someone ran by and another person ran after them and was like, that guy just assaulted me. And two cops who just happened to be walking down the street start chasing this guy who's running ahead. So there's no no we don't know what.

if it actually happened, we don't know anything. They get the guy and this guy is clearly unwell. He's not in the right state and they're trying to detain him and he's fighting back. And ultimately in the end, he got tased right in front of us. So the ambulance comes.

He goes in the ambulance and all of these people start walking by and they're looking in the ambulance and they have their hand on their heads and they're just like, my God. And it turned out right next to the restaurant was a cafe that was owned by this person for many years. And then a hotel was opened across the street and they had a cafe and they put this other cafe out of business. And when that cafe went out of business, the person who owned it essentially had like a mental break and it was that person.

who had just kind of been hanging around behind the cafe and one of the workers at the restaurant said that he assaulted him. We didn't see it. We don't know what actually happened. And this person was tased, like right in front of us. So as the officers are running, they're like, back up, back up. I mean, there must've been 10 cars that all swarmed this area. There were two helicopters going around. I mean, it was crazy, all for this one person.

Speaker 1 (37:13.102)
who went out of business because of a corporation that took away his financial stability. And so I just give that antidote to say that yes, it's there are like when I was doing the interviews with police, they did lament the lack of staffing because they were so flooded with calls. But so many of the calls that they had to attend to were the result of A, because we have only seen

the punishment bureaucracy as the solution, it's calls that they don't feel that they have the capacity to handle because they don't have the expertise in what these people are calling for because we, as you said, haven't provided enough resources in the community to handle conflict themselves or given people enough resources so that they don't have to shoplift diapers from the 7-Eleven or so that they

don't have to deal with deep alcoholism in their family that then is leading to a domestic issue. And so of course there needs to be response to harm, but there are other ways that have demonstrated success in addressing these issues like crisis response and other deployed, no one knows about 9-8-8. No one knows that we have an alternative to 9-1-1.

which is based in crisis response. And I wonder if the lack of knowledge is due to copaganda because no one's publicizing or they don't have a very good marketing team, I'll say that. But I do think it's really important for listeners to understand that more police, more prisons, more prosecution is not, like, I don't know why we have synonymized

tough on crime as a good thing. You know, like, I don't know why that has been standardized as good. And also, you know, there's a great book about restorative justice by Danielle Sered. And one of the things that she mentions is how what would really be tough on crime is something like restorative justice, which makes you

Speaker 1 (39:30.446)
come in contact with the people or whoever that you've harmed and actually apologize and actually hear the impact that it had. So there are other ways of addressing harm. And one of the things that Coppaganda does a really good job of is frames abolition or defund as the segue to chaos. And if anything, what we've done

with the expansion of the criminal legal system is increased chaos because of that. And I think that's a really important thing for listeners to recognize and what your book does a really good job of demonstrating. Thank you.

That was really well said and a really good anecdote. And the book obviously also tries to really go in deeper than I've been able to go into here on some of these topics. It also tries to do with a little bit of humor because these are really difficult, upsetting topics, especially because they kind of destabilize what's, least, you if you were like me, I consumed a lot of these outlets and trusted them to some degree for a long time and wasn't consuming them really critically. And so it can be destabilizing.

So I try to include a lot of humor and jokes and the publisher did remove all of my cat photos from the final book because it was too expensive, I guess, to print all these photos of my little cats that I take care of. it's still, I think, hope, a fun read and a good introduction into trying to understand this authoritarian moment that we're in and the complicity of lot of liberal institutions in that moment.

Yeah, I loved the humor and the words that you were giving out throughout the book. So just to close on some actionable orientation, because you're right, it is destabilizing. Who do we trust? And so for listeners who are like, read the New York Times, I read the Atlantic, I thought these were legitimate sources. Like, what do I do now? Where would you advise listeners to absorb news to

Speaker 1 (41:31.896)
get information and what might be some of the key questions to hold in their minds as they are consuming media so that they have more sense of truth.

Well, one good thing is that there's lots of really great journalism out there. And so there's a lot of places you can go to learn more about the world. And first place I'd start is chapter 16 of the Copyganda book, because the whole last chapter of the book is an attempt to answer this question. And not just what can you read and watch, but also when I give specific recommendations of podcasts and outlets and movies and stuff. I think that the...

critical point of that is that you can't do it alone. You have to build into your life communities that help hold each other accountable and that engage with this stuff together in a critical way. That's the number one thing. If we're isolated and alone, then we're really, really good targets for propaganda. But if we have communities that actually every single week get together, or every single month get together, or every single day get together, even on text threads, but also just like in person and calls where we're like,

or we're doing things like mutual aid or court watch or participatory defense or other kind of actions that we're doing together with book clubs are really amazing. It's easier to fortify your mind. I also have a lot of stuff in the book about consuming art, music, theater, poetry, other things that keep your mind really sharp. I think one thing is like people really shouldn't be consuming daily news in my opinion, especially from the mainstream news. If you find it really, really hard to give up on daily news, I would recommend something like democracy now and

curating a collection of really good independent journalists on the topics that you care about. So whatever it is, whether it's antitrust or foreign policy, there are independent journalists who are collecting and reporting in really rigorous ways on each of these issues. I tend to think that daily news kind of creates a certain, just by the very nature of the simplification and shortening that it does, is really harmful. And I think

Speaker 2 (43:34.232)
People tend to learn more, and there's a lot of research about this too, but when you read a book about something or listen to a longer podcast or documentary or long form investigative journalism, you'll end up absorbing and retaining more about that issue and about that, then if you consume like 30, 300 word or 400 word headlines and a little bit of an article that you might read. So resist the urge to like absorb it all every day and just like use that time instead to go a little bit deeper on something that interests you.

I think that's a generally better approach to how to inform yourself of what's happening in the

I love that idea. And the last thing to close out, what are three things that are top of mind to you right now outside of copaganda and the punishment bureaucracy? Are you listening to anything, watching anything, reading anything, or doing anything that's just got your attention right now?

Great question. I'm, yeah, I mean, I'm always, you one of the things like the work that we do is, you know, inside jails and prisons around the country is just so difficult and it's always important to try to remember the beautiful things in life. And so I am always doing lots of different stuff. I am finishing a series of paintings now that are actually like mosaics of like wine corks that all my friends kind of collect for me.

and then also flowers that I grow and then I dry the flower and I make mosaics out of the different colors of the petals. And so I usually do most of these pieces on like old salvaged pieces of like wood and metal. So that's one thing, just trying to like make stuff is something I always think about creating time and space for. I'm reading a really cool book called Ministry for the Future, which is a kind of deeply researched science fiction book about the future of global climate change policy and

Speaker 2 (45:25.994)
It's a science fiction book that is very much grounded in actual science. And so it's quite interesting if you like that kind of thing. And also just trying to plan a series of hikes that I like to try to do something in the wilderness every summer. And so I'm trying to think about if I can get a little bit of time away to go on some hikes. But those are some things that are, as Trump takes over DC.

where I live and deploys the National Guard and federalizes the DC police. Those are some things I'm thinking about that are maybe not so dire and dark.

Yeah, well, love that. Thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Thank you so much, my pleasure.

Speaker 1 (46:08.354)
Thank you so much for listening to that critical conversation. love this notion that we can't do this alone. The idea that we need to be in community to hold us accountable to what we're consuming and what we're thinking about different things. I love that idea. I want to start a book club immediately. Maybe there should be a critical conversations book club and we just read the books of the people that we're chatting with or some of the books that they recommend. Let me know if you're into that. So send me a text

or email, but I wanted to read a couple of the questions that Alec poses in that chapter 16. He titles it a guide for posing questions to punishment bureaucrats and politicians, but I really think that these are questions that we just need to hold and think about as we are consuming media. One of them is, why do you choose not to arrest bosses for wage theft, but you choose to arrest

poor people for shoplifting. Another is why do you choose to devote almost all of your undercover resources to drug busts and not to undercover investigations of white collar crimes, sexual assaults on university campuses, or police corruption? Another is does the fact that about 90 % of the people arrested by your department are too poor to afford an attorney say anything about the kinds of crimes that you choose to investigate?

I just think these are really thought-provoking questions that we need to give time and attention to. I really highly recommend you all read this book. It takes a deep dive into some of the media outlets that you probably view as legitimate, that are probably your daily sources. I know they've been mine, and now I'm going to take a much more critical approach when absorbing them. I know that these

concepts can be challenging to the status quo. The idea that more police would actually lead to less safety is not something that a lot of us think is right or accurate, but the data does show. And the truth of the matter is that most of us have been susceptible to copaganda our entire lives. So again, I hope that you enjoyed this. Feel expanded, and I'll talk to you next time.