Part Four: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Robert chronicles Oprah's war with the beef industry and her pivot to new age anti-science nonsense. Also: rainbow parties! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Ah, boy. Well, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we just took a five-minute break between part three and part four of the Oprah Winfrey episodes. If you're all like me, you mainlined some doom-scrolling news from your phone about how bad things continue to be and also how the Equal Rights Amendment is ratified, but also not. Great stuff. You know, folks, whenever I start to think, we live in the dumbest society that's ever lived and like, how sad for us to live in such a stupid, stupid society. I have something that helps me get some historical perspective, which is I have a very big book right next to my bed that I read a little bit every night called The

• 0:46Robert Evans?

  Assyrians. And that really helps because there's literally ass in the name of that culture. Like ass, just right on the front of the book. So you know what? We're not so silly, you know? You know? At least you're not an ass Syrian, right? It's fine. It's fun. We're good.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  You done?

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Whatever it takes, dog.

• 1:08Robert Evans?

  Whatever it takes. I'm just trying to feel better.

• 1:13Robert Evans?

  I feel like other people don't enjoy the word ass being on the front of a book as much as I do because they are no longer for. How's our guest today? Bridget Todd and Andrew T. How are we doing?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Doing well.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  I had a really good Clementine in the break.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Aw, clutch.

• 1:33Robert Evans?

  That's good.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  I convinced Jamie Loftus to cover a topic I wanted her to cover on 16th minute during that five-minute break. I'm efficient.

• 1:41Robert Evans?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  And Andrew, I tried to make your salad, and it was really good.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  It's a really good salad. It's not my salad, but unfortunately, it's TikTok, so I plagiarized it either way, but it is TikTok's salad, I guess. It's someone's salad. I understand that, but it's not mine.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  TikTok has the best recipes, honestly.

• 2:06Robert Evans?

  R.I.P. question mark?

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Maybe, who knows?

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Little red book.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  We don't know.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  I pledge allegiance to Communist China.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

  You know what? We all pledge allegiance to Communist China. I spent three minutes on, what is that? What's the new one? I forgot the names.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Red Note.

• 2:27Robert Evans?

  This joke immediately does it. I spent three minutes.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  I don't know why they call it.

• 2:29Robert Evans?

  The joke's not gonna work anymore. Whatever. Fuck it.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  It's done.

• 2:34Robert Evans?

  It's done.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Oprah pillars. Go.

• 2:36Robert Evans?

  I couldn't be less interested in a TikTok alternative or TikTok. I don't need either of them. What I do need is to tell y'all more about Oprah Winfrey.

• 2:48Speaker 04

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• 2:52Speaker 05

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• 3:59Robert Evans?

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• 4:32Speaker 02

  The TikTok of her day.

• 4:33Robert Evans?

  The TikTok. Actually, kinda yes.

• 4:38Robert Evans?

  Kind of yes. Although Oprah, I mean, I guess the big difference is like TikTok like really launched to popularity with like tweens and teens, whereas Oprah is immediately and for her whole career, very, very much locked into like 30 to 50 year old, middle class, uh, American women. Like that is, that's not the whole, cause she's popular all over the world, but like she has a, a lock that's like unequaled by anyone else on that specific demographic. Um, which is like a very influen- it's everyone's moms, right? Like I'm not, I hope like people say that to be like joking. Like my mom, who I disagreed with, but respect a lot, watched Oprah every single fucking day, right? Like everyone's mom did. Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Like I could tell when Oprah covered something on her show, if my mom sat me down after school to be like, are you having rainbow parties? I was like, oh, it was on Oprah.

• 5:29Robert Evans?

  We're gonna be talking about rainbow parties, Bridgette. So, as I pointed out earlier, Oprah at this point in her career was kind of, and we're talking the start of the nineties now, indistinguishable from Jerry Springer. And I'm not talking about that on a, like specifically even on a moral level, just in terms of that is how cultural critics talked about her, right? This was trash TV. Um, it's hard to get to, again, hard to get to grips with if like, you know, you grew up with her in the nineties when she was kind of in between a movie star and a god. Like Oprah, Oprah was like sainted in a lot of households. But right around the time Winfrey started her satanic panicking, Ralph Nader named her as one of many talk shows in the country that got, quote, "all

• 6:12Robert Evans?

  their ideas from the National Enquirer." Um, now in her excellent critical book, Age of Oprah, and if you're going to read one book on Oprah Winfrey, I recommend Age of Oprah by Janice Peck. It's not a biography. It's like an analysis of the role Oprah has played in the evolution of American society over the last like 30 years. Uh, Janice writes about the critiques that the Wash- that Washington Post writer Tom Shales had of Winfrey's program, labeling it "talk rot," quote.

• 6:41Robert Evans?

  Shales decried talk shows as a daily parade of wackos, loonies, stars, celebrities, freaks, geeks and gurus. Referring to the Oprah Winfrey show, he noted on one of her few serious outer directed shows, Winfrey dealt with declining literacy among the young and the escalating crisis in American education. In promo, she looked into the camera and asked, how dumb are we? There's every possibility that talk rot is making us dumber. And that's him saying that, right? That like Oprah's saying, we're dumb for not reading, but like her show is making us dumber. And like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's part of that loop. It's also Oprah's going to later become one of the people who's a major champion of literacy, although not in ways that are unproblematic, too.

• 7:24Robert Evans?

  Anyway.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  I, I actually got a little glimmer of, of hope from that. Just like a reminder that I know, and I'm not like a teacher. I had lunch with a friend who's a teacher yesterday and he was like, the kids are not able to read.

• 7:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  But I do think, I, this might be counterfactual to like survey data, but I do kind of think every generation thinks the current kids can't are dumber than ever before.

• 7:55Robert Evans?

  There's two, there's two sides to this, right? One of them is that every generation, as soon as they hit a certain age, starts thinking that the, the, these next kids coming up are uniquely fucked up and like everyone's ruined, right? And like the world's going to hell in a handbasket and they're always kind of wrong. At the same time, every single new generation is fucked up in a unique new way. And like the TikTok kids are fucked up on TikTok and iPads in a way that didn't exist before. Just like my gen or our generation was fucked up by message boards and online gaming and the like in ways that were unique, you know, to kids that had come previously, just like our, our Gen X friends were fucked up on leaded gasoline, you know?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's also like, you know, the kids are getting fucked up on particularly spicy epigrams from Katolists, you know, it's just like, I think it's always been like this.

• 8:49Robert Evans?

  It has always been like this. There's, there are unique ways in which every generation is like fucked up. And also, I'll just say this, kids, if you, if you are a very young person coming up right now, and you're trying to figure out, how do I make it in this world? One of the chief things you have on your side is that everyone older than you thinks you're an idiot. And the truth is that they're all as stupid as you are, so take advantage of that. Take, there's power in being underestimated, kids.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  That's actually very wise advice.

• 9:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm full of wise advice once every month. Yeah, uh, and one of the things that's problematic here is that Oprah does deserve a lot of criticism for like the satanic panic shit, the McMartin preschool trial shit. There's also a lot of these big hoity-toity cultural critics are attacking her because they also view, they rightly are like, well, this satanic panic stuff is like smut. But also, this woman talking about how she like needs therapy in order to have a healthy sex life is smut. And, and so you see like it's this blending of like, well, but no, but that's actually a good thing that Oprah was doing with like, no, this is in fact smut. But it's all smut to a lot of these guys. So that's part of like the problem of like looking at a lot of the criticism of Oprah from this era,

• 10:03Robert Evans?

  is a lot of it is attacking her for stuff that we're like, well, but no, that was one of the good things that she did.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  That's the trip of, of engaging in this kind of discourse, right? Like, when you actually have substantive stuff to say, of course, people are going to paint everything with such a wide brush when you also do these like satanic panic antics, right? Like, part of me is like, it's kind of on you for having this in your, your portfolio in the first place.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Right. Well, also like the satanic panic stuff is not bad because it's smut. It's bad because it's lies.

• 10:33Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Yes, exactly. That's a very good note, Andrew.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Like.

• 10:39Robert Evans?

  Both of you very good notes. Thank you. It's a mess because like you're looking for you always want just a really good if you're doing this job. I want a really good like ah this guy nailed what's problematic. And it's always like this guy nailed part of what was problematic and then said something really, really mean towards women.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:00Robert Evans?

  I love the Washington Post.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  It's fine. It's only getting better. They're turning it around.

• 11:06Robert Evans?

  They're turning it around. Ah, God. So, one example of things that Oprah got attacked for that she probably shouldn't have been that like this was considered smut by a lot of critics. What's your coverage of the transgender community? And boy, howdy, I am not saying that it was what we would call today good. What I am saying is that even as early as when she was on People Are Talking, which was the pre Oprah Winfrey Oprah Winfrey Show, she would bring on transgender guests and she's doing it because it's lascivious and it gets attention. But she's also, it's not like smut. Like, one of her early guests that had an impact on her is she finds this transgender mother with brittle bone disease. So this is both somebody who was transgender and if you read stories about it, they use

• 11:51Robert Evans?

  the term transsexual. They're not trying to be shitty. That was the term in common parlance at the time. I'm obviously updating it. But this is a person who both is trans, is a mother, and is a disabled American. And the fact that Oprah's letting her talk about her life is giving a sympathetic and humanizing portrayal to someone who had zero visibility in the culture at the time. As Kitty Kelly notes, "The show was criticized when it aired, but afterward Oprah happened to see the child with the transgender quadriplegic. It was just a moving thing," she said. "I thought this child will grow up with more love than most children. Before, I was one of those people who thought all homosexuals or anything

• 12:33Robert Evans?

  like that were going to burn in hell because the scriptures said it." And this is Oprah was very homophobic as a child and as a young adult. And she would list this experience as key to her overcoming the bigotry that she had been raised with, right? And I think it makes totally, as a child who had lacked so much love in her life, the thing that turns her around on this is being like, but this lady's a really good mom, right? Like, she clearly loves this kid. This kid's going to grow up with love. That's all that matters to me as a kid who was neglected, right? I think that's just worth stating, too, before we get back into the criticism, because that's kind of beautiful. And the fact that she gets attacked for this, too, is, again, it's part of the like, well, if you're Oprah and you're trying to triangulate what is okay

• 13:16Robert Evans?

  for me to do and what is not, I'm getting attacked both for the stuff that is bad and also for the stuff that it's like, no, it's great that she did this. Like, I'm glad she did, you know? In January of 1994, a 39-year-old Oprah Winfrey announced her on-air plan to stop talking about, quote, "how bad things are," and instead try to bring more peace to her audience, and thus the plan. And she had like a long speech about trash TV. This is kind of her being like, I think the winds are changing. I don't think the smut kind of TV where we're, you know, we're talking about, here's people talking about like the fights they're having with their ex. We'll bring them on and they'll fight on stage. That was not going to be, you know, coming into the late 90s as popular as it had been.

• 14:00Robert Evans?

  And Oprah's like, I want to rebrand myself. I want to have some prestige, right? And the way she does that, the way she starts her pivot into, I am a serious, intellectual and spiritual advisor, is to bring on friend of the pod, Marianne Williamson. Here she is. Here's our girl. There we go.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  I forgot about this. She absolutely did.

• 14:25Robert Evans?

  This is, this is when Oprah becomes a spiritual influencer. Marianne Williamson is like a key part of that.

• 14:33Robert Evans?

  Here's how Janice Peck describes Williamson at this stage in her career. Again, this is 94. Williamson is, quote, "A former nightclub singer, self-described spiritual psychologist, occasional advisor to Hillary Clinton, spiritual guide for Hollywood stars, and major inspiration behind Winfrey's own cosmology." What a resume.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Also, doesn't believe in AIDS.

• 14:56Robert Evans?

  Doesn't. Yes, we're about to talk about that. Marianne is a complicated person to unpack from a harm standpoint. Much like Oprah. They have a lot in common. I'm not surprised they're friends. When she launched her 2020 presidential campaign, queer-focused news outlets like The Pink News rightfully pointed out that during the AIDS crisis, Williamson, who had a huge queer following and had founded a center for living in Los Angeles, published a book in 1992 which argued, quote, "Cancer and AIDS and other physical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream." Williamson went on to make an argument that is, could be argued as not so far from the Christian conservative line on AIDS. "We're not punished for our sins, but by our sins.

• 15:42Robert Evans?

  Sickness is not a sign of God's judgment on us, but of our judgment on ourselves. Sickness is an illusion and does not actually exist." And it's complicated because you can translate all of that as like, well, she's saying people with AIDS brought it on themselves. And she kind of is. She's also not just focusing on gay people there. She thinks if you have lung cancer, whatever, if you've got fucking childhood leukemia, you brought it on yourself through your bad thinking, right? So it is, it is not targeted against gay people, but it's also really problematic in that concept because you're saying everyone who gets sick brought the sickness on themselves by virtue of their thoughts.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. All the positive vibes shit is so like, just consider the converse of what you're saying for two seconds.

• 16:30Robert Evans?

  I think everyone who, yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  This child deserved to die because his vibes were off.

• 16:36Robert Evans?

  And it's not, she's, she would say, no, I'm saying that like, if you, like, part of healing this is fixing people's attitudes and improving the way they think and talk about themselves, and that will help their physical health. I just think everyone who believes this should have to lecture about this to like a child cancer ward.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:54Robert Evans?

  Like, explain to kids, if your attitude was better, your bones wouldn't be rotting inside you. You know?

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  It's such a hateful ideology and worldview, but like the way people, I, I know people who have said shit like this and it's like the way they dress it up as like, no, it's actually like a really profound, like you would, it's the law of attraction. Like you want this to be happening to you in some way. The way they dress it up, like it makes them more superior. I don't know. Something about that aspect of it really gets me.

• 17:27Robert Evans?

  It's interesting because like, and I also think there's, there's so much of it that's so locked inside their heads. Like it's even separate from how someone like Mary Ann acts. Cause I found an article by a friend of hers called David Kessler and it was on her webs. It was, it was, he posted on Medium and she had shared it, but this is a guy who knew her. He had operated during the AIDS crisis. He operated a home hospice for AIDS patients and he claimed, quote, "I saw firsthand how she, Mary Ann, cared for the community." Mary Ann is not a person who was against medicine. She was the one that sat with dying men with AIDS when there was no cure. And when medications became available, I saw her driving men to the doctor with AIDS. I witnessed her paying for medication for men with AIDS. So this is not a person who is like hateful and callous. This is a person

• 18:10Robert Evans?

  who is able to sit with sick people and then also holding her head this completely unhinged that if you take it to its logical conclusion, you're saying they brought it on themselves. And I, that kind of cognitive dissonance is amazing to me. I don't know how you can have that.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  I, I mean, I think it is just like the like only able to concentrate on the positive or what you perceive as the positive. It's just, it is like, yeah, I mean, you just have to be stupid is the main thing. Like, oh, I don't understand the B side of what I'm saying because.

• 18:48Robert Evans?

  That is the answer so much more often than like outright evil is like, oh, well, you just, your brain's not functioning. You've got like, somebody, somebody dropped like a wrench in there and it's just like.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm like, it's like so tempting to way overthink it. And Andrew, I feel like that you just really sum it up. Some people just aren't smart. That's what's going on. Don't overthink it.

• 19:13Robert Evans?

  I think it, I talk about this with our other host, Margaret Kiljoy, a lot about how like, you can meet people like out in the middle of nowhere who like, if you look at their politics, is they, they, they support some political things that are ghoulish, whereas the same people they would vote to hurt, they would like sacrifice for in person because like, people are incoherent and not, not all that bright. Right? Like, it comes down to that a lot of the time.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like, there's, there, there just is no, like, even second consideration, or like, what does this, what does what I say mean?

• 19:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  They're just doing their thing. And like,

• 19:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is, Kurt Vonnegut was often of the opinion that like, if we were just all a little bit too dumb to keep society, like, if we, if we all had like 20% less, like, like, like, got a little bit more brain damage, things would be better. Because like, we, it, it, it's, it's this mix of we're so smart and we're so stupid that causes all the problems. If we were just like dogs, everything would be fine. That's what I come back down to.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Well, the problem is just like, it only takes one or two slightly smarter evil dogs.

• 20:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  To really fuck shit up, which is where we're living now.

• 20:30Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Anyway, speaking of where we're living now, Marianne Williamson was the beginning of Oprah's pivot to alternative medicine and spirituality. As we noted, Williamson's particular thing was A Course in Miracles, which is a series of books. She did not write these, but this is like, this is her bible, at least at this period of time. And A Course in Miracles is the underpinning, one of the underpinnings, because we've talked about a few others, roots of what becomes like the secret, right? This is a lot of where we get that from. And A Course in Miracles is, like, it's this set of books that claims to integrate psychology and spirituality, which is kind of what Scientology also claimed to do. It's what, it's what all of the good spiritual con men claim to do, right? The

• 21:15Robert Evans?

  author of this book, Helen Shukman, claimed that it had been fully dictated to her by Jesus Christ, and she just wrote it down. So like, look, what are my citations? Jesus, baby.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  What an, that's such a good thing to claim. Like, I, the balls to be like, oh, like, are you gonna, I'm not wrong. You're saying Jesus is wrong.

• 21:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, are you saying Jesus is wrong? How many times did you get sacrificed on Gogoth, huh? Yeah? How many, how many nails you got through your hands, huh? Huh? Anyway, don't go to the doctor.

• 21:51Robert Evans?

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• 23:05Robert Evans?

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• 23:46Robert Evans?

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• 24:11Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say, does it, does no, none of these people find it sacrilegious? How stupid Jesus is in these instances?

• 24:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that he, that Jesus is like, medicine doesn't really work. It's all about thinking your way through problems.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:28Robert Evans?

  Nobody ever catches that. Well, everyone does, except for these people.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:32Robert Evans?

  And it's also, you know, part of if you're, because William said, I'm not trying to like exonerate her totally. One of the things I think that you do, if you're like her is you're like, well, I believe this. But the fact that she's saying Jesus wrote this whole thing, that's probably not going to play on TV. I probably want to keep that quiet. Like, so I'm going to, and what, what Mary Ann does is she's like, all right, well, I think this is basically good. But maybe the raw stuff is a little bit too uncut for this audience. She writes her own book about a course in miracles titled A Return to Love. That's basically her taking like, all right, how do I make this a little bit more palatable? It's the late 90s, right? We gotta, we gotta, we gotta fix this a little bit before we get this out into the audience, you know?

• 25:14Robert Evans?

  I will attempt an abbreviated explanation of a course in miracles and as a, and you know, in addition to that Williamson's book. It argues that our home is reality and reality is the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God is a perfect place where, as the talking heads remind us, nothing ever happens. Thus, all problems aren't real. Bad things don't happen. There's no real problems. The things that you perceive as problems are the result of you delusionally separating your ego from reality. Our suffering then is something we project into the world due to our hallucinatory belief that we have sent.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  All of our faces on the screen are like that Winona Ryder trying to do a trigonometry equation meme?

• 26:07Robert Evans?

  Are we good? Does that make sense to everybody?

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Totally checks out.

• 26:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. All right, that all scans, yeah. So, again, this is like, you know, you can see a lot of the spirit or the secret in this, you know, you, and, and the ultimate, the result of this is you fix your life by fixing your attitude, right? I found a good summary of the book in a website titled Circle of Atonement, which I think is probably related to some sort of weird cult or another. I don't know, but I'm gonna read an excerpt from that because I thought it was funny. "The Holy Spirit's message is that we never sinned, never changed ourselves. We need only change our minds. The guilt and pain produced by the ego was stored in an unconscious level of mind, which also contains our call for God's love and help. The Holy Spirit's answer to our guilt is that we did not do it,

• 26:54Robert Evans?

  that we are still as God created us because the separation never occurred. The journey home is an illusion. We need not purify ourselves or make sacrifices. Instead, we can wake up at any time we choose. The Holy Instant is a moment when this is realized, applied, a moment of doing nothing. The miracle is a free deliverance from the imprisonment of the human condition. It is our right because we never sinned."

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, listen, I'm a person that has like an obnoxious way of speaking, but

• 27:32Speaker 02

  is, is it like truly not possible for just some, like this just requires some child to be like, what the fuck are you talking about?

• 27:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Right? Like, what the fuck is this shit? Yeah.

• 27:46Robert Evans?

  We need, you know, I think we've all been vibing-

• 27:48Speaker 02

  You need a comment section, I guess, is what you need.

• 27:51Robert Evans?

  I, I think what we need is a little more folk. We've all been vibing on Bill Burr lately. We need to make that a government position where whenever someone starts doing this, we have like a, a roughly, a slightly thumb looking man who comes to be like, what the fuck are you talking about?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:05Robert Evans?

  Come on, stop this shit.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  He should be, he should be from Boston.

• 28:09Robert Evans?

  He should be from Boston, ideally.

• 28:13Robert Evans?

  Who just like, when someone says that, there should be like a, yeah, vaguely Bostonian guy going, nah.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  The problem is, he should be from Boston, but not like that.

• 28:23Robert Evans?

  Not like that.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  But not like, not like from Boston, if you know what I'm saying.

• 28:29Robert Evans?

  We need an Avengers initiative of guys who have that remarkable mix of like physiognomy and accent that people will be like, oh yeah, that does sound kind of silly. Like when he says it's silly, I actually, yeah, maybe that is kind of stupid.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Oh my God. It's not materially dumber than anything Elon Musk tweets.

• 28:50Robert Evans?

  Oh, absolutely not. But I think it leads us there in part, right? And what a,

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:54Robert Evans?

  When you get a lot of, because this is Janice Peck's book. This is a lot of, when you get a lot of like more left wing critiques of Oprah, one of the running themes is like, the whole, the overriding message of a lot of her show is, problems have, are all problems. There's like societal problems are individual problems and they have deeply individualistic solutions. And instead of like fixing systems, the answer comes down, more down to fixing yourself and your individual attitude. And that can be very problematic, verging on solipsistic, right? When we get to this era, it's like, nothing is, the problems aren't real. And if I can make myself okay with them,

• 29:35Robert Evans?

  then I don't even need to think about the other people who are suffering because the problems aren't real, you know? This is a very narcissistic and dangerous way to think about the world.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  I could see how it functions as a pretty useful, like, political and social ideology, though.

• 29:51Robert Evans?

  Yes, it's great for capitalism. Like, if this is your attitude, once you get a nice house, climate change is no longer a problem. The Pacific Palisades are a paradise. Hmm. Something smells odd on the air. Let me look out the window.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  You know, your mind palace is your paradise, Robert.

• 30:09Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yeah. And when you're living in a $24,000 a night hotel, because again, the Palisades burned down, your mind palace is still there for you, you know? That's the beauty. LA doesn't have a homelessness problem. We just need more mind palaces, palaces, you know?

• 30:26Speaker 02

  This is also, by the way, more or less the pitch from the bad guys in The Matrix.

• 30:31Robert Evans?

  It kind of is, yes. Also, that, that like, literally, you are, you are like the Matrix, but, but no, this is actually how, how religi- how philosophy works and religion works. Yes.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's just like, ugh.

• 30:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, these are all that guy in the first Matrix movie. He's like, "Look, man, the steak tastes good. I don't know what to tell you."

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is, this is like the parable of the cave people, just really jonesing for some more cave.

• 30:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  What the fuck are you talking about?

• 30:57Robert Evans?

  That is what I took out of The Allegory of the Cave is like, "Cave's pretty cool. I like shadows."

• 31:03Speaker 02

  I love cave.

• 31:04Robert Evans?

  You know? The new season of Severance starts tonight, so I'm gonna be sitting and watching some cave shadows, baby. I'm good, I'm ready. Give me some Adam Scott. So, thanks to Williamson's advocacy and Oprah's platform, A Course in Miracles went from fringe, eh, it was getting more popular. I will say this, it didn't entirely gain its popularity, but Oprah is a large part of the fact that it sells more than 2 million copies. Uh, and Oprah doesn't just plug that book and her friend Mary Ann's book. Uh, she and Mary Ann sit down, and they lay out in this, and again, the point of this episode is Oprah announcing her show is pivoting from being about bad things and sad stuff to being about, you know, empowerment and beauty, right?

• 31:48Robert Evans?

  Quote, "During the hour," uh, this is Janice Peck, "During the hour, the two women identified various social problems: crime, drug addiction, TV violence, war, child abuse, prejudice, as 'the price we pay for ignoring our souls.' Born of denial, this collective neglect of soul had produced a diseased and dysfunctional society. The antidote Williamson proposed was a shift in the paradigm on the planet, to activate an amazing healing force, the spirit of divine consciousness which is within our souls. While she prescribed various steps towards planetary healing, from praying to participating in support groups, all were predicated on replacing negative thoughts with positive ones, because our thoughts determine the experiences of our lives."

• 32:33Speaker 02

  I will just point out that if you substitute the word Erdtree in there a few times, this is basically just Elden Ring lore.

• 32:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Williamson has a writing credit on that. It was her and George R.R. Martin really banging it out in a week. No, that's a lie. That's a lie. I'm sorry. That's almost credible.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  You said it in a way where I truly, for a second, was like, I don't know if he's making a joke or not.

• 32:55Robert Evans?

  I would, I would sit and listen to George R.R. Martin and Mary Ann Williamson invent religion.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 33:04Robert Evans?

  So Oprah's pivot to guru had begun. Over the coming years, and indeed decades, she would help introduce millions of Americans to new age thinkers like Eckhart Tolle, whose books, The Power of Now and A New Earth, represent what Slate writer Kurt Anderson described as "a successful crusade against reason itself." Here's one of Tolle's most favorite quotes: "Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance." For example, "There's nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues, in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease." And Tolle's argument here is that overthinking is a societal epidemic, and a lot of our suffering as a species is because we don't coast enough on vibes,

• 33:46Robert Evans?

  go with the flow more often. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity. And like, I think there's actually more than a little bit of move fast and break things downstream of Tolle. I don't think there's 0% of that there. But more than that, Oprah's embrace of this guy represents a major salient in the war against reason, which if you hadn't checked recently, reason is losing.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And this is where we start talking. Reasons may be lost.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:22Robert Evans?

  Reason is at least like Great Britain on the first day of the Battle of Britain, you know? France has surrendered. I don't know what the French equivalent of reason is. And yeah, we're watching those stukas rain down on fucking London.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  It's not good.

• 34:40Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. But.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  What are you gonna do?

• 34:42Robert Evans?

  What are you gonna do? I don't know. Uh.

• 34:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I actually have no idea, Andrew.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Don't worry.

• 34:49Robert Evans?

  Talk about Deepak Chopra.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Don't think so much.

• 34:52Robert Evans?

  Don't think so much. Why am I thinking all this time? Let's talk about Deepak Chopra. He is another gift that Oprah gave the world. And his career was in some ways a mirror of Dr. Oz. And honestly, a less toxic one. Chopra starts out as a well regarded endocrinologist, until he quits that to become a guru to the kind of people who embrace new spiritualities based on airport bestsellers. Chopra is the kind of guy who peddles stuff that seems well meaning and even harmless if you don't look too deeply into what he's saying. The harm largely comes from the fact that accepting his principles means embracing lies about how the world works and denying basic science. As Dr. Chris Consilvio writes, "He preaches the body is made of a quantum energy and there exists a dynamic consciousness

• 35:36Robert Evans?

  where the mind, body and spirit are interwoven and interconnected by an energy force that transcends matter and physical reality." Now, because of this, Chopra often advises his followers that modern medicine is useless or futile or fundamentally flawed in ways that make it less reliable than embracing pseudoscience. Here's a quote I found from an article on Chopra that he wrote for his own website titled, "Why Doctors Can't Make You Well." "What the public and most doctors hasn't found out is that the cause of illness is becoming more and more murky. It's not just germs and genes. The germ theory of disease held sway for over a century after the discovery of microbes and the arrival of antibiotics to combat them. Gene therapy, long promise as the answer

• 36:19Robert Evans?

  to almost any disease, hasn't actually achieved much success, although in certain cases, such as cancers that are caused by a simple genetic mutation, targeted drug therapies have been successful. The bigger picture is that genetics has led us into a much more complicated view of the disease process, so complicated that it is beyond the skill of doctors. Too many factors are at work when illness arises and the disease model itself sometimes breaks down." Germ theories, wrong. I, Deepak Chopra, can explain it. Your brain's not thinking good enough.

• 36:56Robert Evans?

  Now, Chopra-

• 36:57Speaker 02

  I mean, but you know, I guess it's, I feel like someone should just say, "That's not true," his last statement.

• 37:03Robert Evans?

  That's not how it is. Like, antibiotics are great.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  The model doesn't break down.

• 37:12Robert Evans?

  The model doesn't break down. Bringing in gene therapy along, like, it's one of those things where it's like, okay, well, depending on what you mean by gene therapy, sure, there's a lot of shit that like, people talk about in sci-fi that hasn't happened, but that has nothing to do with germ theory, right?

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:28Robert Evans?

  Germ theory is a very robust model. Chopra writes a line, he doesn't generally outright say, "Don't take your meds," but the conclusion you're led to from a lot of his writing is, "Don't take your meds."

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:41Robert Evans?

  That whole article I just quoted from is how doctors don't understand what causes schizophrenia, and I think the conclusion that you're supposed to be led to is, "Maybe don't take those antipsychotics." Again, Chopra doesn't say this. Legally, I am not accusing him of saying this. I'm just saying, I think a lot of people reading that, who are like, "Should I take my antipsychotics?" might take from that article, "Eh, maybe I won't."

• 38:05Speaker 02

  But also-

• 38:06Robert Evans?

  He's not not saying it. He's not not saying it, right?

• 38:09Speaker 02

  It's also just like, you know, not, like, just because, like, there isn't a full understanding of schizophrenia, you're gonna really trust that chemotherapy vaccine, etc. Like, yeah.

• 38:24Robert Evans?

  Well, and there's always that real thing, which is that, like, yeah, man, there's actually a shitload of problems that a modern medicine tape, like, treats and talks about schizophrenia. Absolutely. You don't know anything about this.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:36Robert Evans?

  Like, you're not helping.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. His pitch is that, "I'm not burdened with all this knowledge and history of the process, so I have a clearer insight into how to fix things."

• 38:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  What really annoys me about this is how they're so good at taking that one, kind of like, true thread, which is like, plenty of people feel unheard by the medical space. I'm like, you know, they, they feel like their, their symptoms or whatever, their illnesses are not being properly treated. And so, I can see how this is so tempting to be like, "Oh, well, what do they know about anything? Why should I trust any of this? They're all hucksters." Like, it's so, it's such a callous but tempting way of getting people, walking people toward this very dangerous line of thinking. Does that make sense?

• 39:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, no, I think that absolutely does. I think you hit it on the head. So, Deepak has over the years claimed that human aging can be reversed by pure force of thought. He is, as health law and science professor Timothy Caulfield argues, a prophet of alternative medicine and the great de-educator. Chopra's book sold millions and millions of copies after he was featured as a guest on Winfrey's show, and I don't know that I'd say he has no career without her. That's too much. But he has less of one, right? Like, he's got, he's a lot less of a guy without Oprah.

• 39:54Robert Evans?

  Without Chopra, we probably don't get shit like the bleach drinking church, people taking ivermectin to cure their cancer, and a decent chunk of the anti-vax movement, which we'll be talking about later because Oprah's got some real involvement there and a friend of the pod, Jenny McCarthy. Now, one of the most frustrating things about Oprah in this time period, after her pivot away from trash TV is in the mid 90s, is that in the middle of like all of this new age woo that she is putting out and clotting our national arteries with, which leads to the fatal stroke we're going to spend the rest of our lives living in. She is also like, she's right about some important things, but even when she's right about them, the kind of the lack of rigor to the way she talks about stuff means that she winds up wrong about them. And

• 40:38Robert Evans?

  to make that make sense, I'm going to talk about Oprah's war with the beef industry because this is a key moment in Oprah history. In April of 1996, Oprah dedicated a segment of her show to mad cow disease and brought on an animal rights activist and vegetarian named Howard Lyman. The UK had just had a major mad cow outbreak and had to cull vast numbers of animals, and Lyman predicted that the same thing would soon befall the US beef supply. He talked about what happens when humans catch mad cow from tainted meat and the horrific deaths that follow. Oprah declared the conversation, quote, "stopped me cold from eating another burger." Now, this has a massive impact on the beef industry, right? And they're going to sue her over this because there's some evidence that like millions of dollars in beef sales are like the price of the value of beef dropped significantly

• 41:23Robert Evans?

  because of Oprah talking about mad cow this way. And the broader thing, which is that like our meat- Like, there's a lot of stuff that's gross and inhumane and climatically awful about our addiction to beef and the way this industry functions, and it deserves criticism. The problem is that the specific criticism Oprah is publishing and focusing on is mad cow disease, and the US beef industry really doesn't deserve that, right? Lyman's prediction that, like, we're going to have a UK-style mad cow outbreak in the US hasn't come to pass. And in fact, in the decades since he said this, the US has had six confirmed cases of mad cow disease, the first in 2003 and the most recent in 2023. And these were all isolated and caught fairly quickly.

• 42:08Robert Evans?

  Preventing the spread of mad cow was something the US beef industry has proved very good at, particularly considering the fact that the UK and France, which normally have much more effective regulatory states, have had much larger problems with this. Now, that doesn't mean, again, that we're immune from, for example, even other prion diseases, right? The spread of prion diseases due to farmed meat is a massively important story in the US, one with some potentially apocalyptic undertones, right? For example, we have this massive problem in a lot of the, like, the Great Lakes region, the East Coast, with chronic wasting disease, which is basically mad cow for deer, which number one, gets a number of hunters killed, but also deer spread these, like, poisoned prions around in the soil, and they don't really die.

• 42:53Robert Evans?

  And there's, like, a lot of very worrying problems due to this, and it all got started almost certainly because people were trying to farm venison. And, you know, like, these all, all of these diseases result when you've got, like, we've got a bunch of animals, we're trying to farm at scale, and their feed has pieces of their own spinal cords in it, right? Of, like, of their fellow animals, right? Like, that's, that's the, I'm simplifying a lot of stuff, but like, what I'm saying is, meat as an industry has a lot of horrible problems that have some potentially near-apocalyptic outcomes for our society. But the specific thing Oprah has is really going after in this episode isn't a big problem for the beef industry. And as a result, they're going to sue her, right?

• 43:38Robert Evans?

  So Texas is one of a dozen states with what's called a veggie libel law, which is a law that makes a person liable if they make libelous statements about food safety. Representatives of the cattle industry complained to Texas agricultural commissioner Rick Perry, who wrote a letter to the state attorney general complaining the economic livelihood of our beef producers is at stake. Now, the reality of the situation is that, again, Oprah has exaggerated the risk of mad cow disease in the US, but not in a way that a reasonable person would call libelous. I've just pointed out that, like, she was kind of wrong for this to be the focus when talking about bad aspects of the beef industry. But like, when you're seeing mad cow go crazy in the UK, being like, "It's probably a problem", that's not libel, right?

• 44:21Robert Evans?

  That's speculative in a way that's inaccurate, but it's not really libel. The beef magnates disagreed, and they considered Oprah enemy number one and saw the overall case as a way to stop anyone from talking badly about health and safety practices within the beef industry. Oprah, for her part, and this is where I give her a lot of credit, refuses to budge or settle. And so she is like, "I'm not going to settle this case. I'm not going to retract or apologize. Let's go to court, motherfuckers." And so this turns into a showdown in fucking Amarillo, Texas. Or shit, is it Abilene? I wrote Amarillo, but I think it might be Abilene. Look it up, folks. Maybe I got that one wrong. I'll say both. Fuck it.

• 45:03Robert Evans?

  So she has to go to this small town that's like a massive beef center in Texas, right? And a normal person would have been like, "Well, all right, I've got to be in court for several weeks. I guess we'll put the show on hiatus." Right? Obviously, I'm not going to fly my entire crew down to this show and to this town in Texas and just film the Oprah Winfrey Show from there, which is exactly what she does. So, uh, here's the Texas Tribune. Rather than putting her show on hiatus for weeks, she brought it with her and framed parts of it as an homage to the city and state she suddenly found herself in. Winfrey donned a cowboy hat and drew cheers by occasionally mimicking a Texas accent. Texas-born actor Patrick Swayze came on and taught her how to two-step. "So you're on trial by day and you're doing the show by night," Winfrey recalled in 2012.

• 45:48Robert Evans?

  It was stressful. It was challenging to be on trial. May I just say is one of the worst experiences of anybody's life. A gag order prevented Winfrey from talking about the case on her show, which she turned into a running joke. "We're down here in Amarillo. Y'all know why," she said during one segment, drawing laughs from the audience. Large crowds showed up, both for Winfrey's show and outside the courtroom, to catch a glimpse of her "Amarillo Loves Oprah" t-shirts. She didn't testify until the latter part of the case, but by the time she got on the stand, the town loved her, Babcock said. And again, everyone on this jury has ties to the beef industry, and they vote unanimously to clear Oprah. That's how, that's how much juice this lady has.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  I know we're here to talk about her as a bastard, but you gotta love that. Like, that is incredible. That's a cool shit.

• 46:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I wish she had gone to war over a better criticism of the beef industry, but that is pretty cool, you know?

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Fucking Oprah.

• 46:46Robert Evans?

  There's a lesson in there in terms of like, how you deal with these like, corporations trying to stifle speech, which is like, alright, motherfuckers. Like, let's lean into it. I will get this whole town on my side.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  Just out of curiosity, though, did any of the people that she called like, Satanist baby rapist, did they ever sue her? Just out of curiosity?

• 47:05Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no. They don't have beef industry money. For one thing, they're all bankrupted fighting the Satan lawsuits, Bridget. Like, these people owned a daycare. So Oprah declares victory. Beef industry representatives declare victory too, stating that the cost of the case would make other media figures more careful about spreading disinformation. Americans largely went back to ignoring the harms of our addiction to cheap red meat, and the only real long-term consequence to all this was that Oprah befriended a psychologist that she'd hired on as a jury consultant, Dr. Phil McGraw.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Boo.

• 47:44Robert Evans?

  Again, folks, for an episode on Bastard Dream, we're not gonna talk about Dr. Phil or Dr. Austin these episodes, cuz we've done two-parters on both of them. Check those out if you wanna know why those guys suck. But this ends badly, is what I'll say.

• 48:01Robert Evans?

  You know what else ends badly, Sophie?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 48:06Robert Evans?

  The, your life, if you don't buy the products and services that are advertised on this podcast, you know, it's like a chain letter, right? If you buy the first thing that comes on, you'll have a happy life, you know? When you die, your whole family will be around you. There will be no pain. You'll hear, you'll hear the trumpet of Saint Peter? Is it him that has a trumpet? You'll hear some fucking trumpet and then everything will be good. You'll go to heaven. It'll be great.

• 48:32Speaker 05

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• 49:03Robert Evans?

  You love the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, but you've got questions. Don't worry, everybody does. To answer them, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rosso just dropped a new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. For all your burning questions, the guys turn to the experts, including Dr. Dimitri Daskalakis, an infectious disease doctor, public health honcho and big time advocate in LGBTQ+ health, HIV prevention and health equity. Think of it as the after show to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, where the crew dives deep into topics and stories from that week's Tuesday episode. Episodes cover topics including testing and why are they swabbing there? Finding a doctor who's not so judgy? And so much more.

• 49:48Robert Evans?

  It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. Now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 50:08Robert Evans?

  And we're back.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  It's Saint Gabriel and Saint Jerome.

• 50:12Robert Evans?

  Is it, is it Saint Gabriel?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  And Saint Jerome. Saint Jerome? And Saint Cecilia.

• 50:18Robert Evans?

  A lot of them got trumpets. How am I supposed to? It's like a ska band up there, you know?

• 50:25Speaker 01

  I don't know. Lots of trumpets.

• 50:27Robert Evans?

  God's sacred genre. Okay. The fact that Oprah's show was now a mix of spiritual gurus and crusades against various causes celeb did not mean that Oprah completely had excised the smut. Despite her claim to have left trash TV behind, she knew that any topic involving teen pregnancy, teen drug use, child abduction, et cetera, got views. Her audience of largely middle-class moms tuned in when Oprah told them their kids were in danger. The clearest example of this comes from 2003, when Oprah Winfrey introduced the concept of, Bridget, so happy to be talking about this, rainbow parties!

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Yes, finally!

• 51:03Robert Evans?

  We're doing it! You get a rainbow party, you get it. Well, I shouldn't, I shouldn't phrase it that way.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Young Bridget fucking wishes.

• 51:11Robert Evans?

  No one gets a rainbow party. That's actually the reality of the situation. I am sure we've got our Gen Z listeners and our old people listeners. Those are the two other kinds of people behind normal people, us millennials. Uh, are all like, what the fuck are they talking about? The fuck is a rainbow party? Is this some like LGBT thing? No. Um, it's not. So, this was yet another moral panic. And it's the first moral panic that we're talking about in the series that I was around for as a perfectly, it should be the same as true of you. Like, this was a moral panic about my generation, my peers and I, that I was old enough to be like, what the fuck are you talking about?

• 51:52Robert Evans?

  So, in order to introduce this concept, this, this comes up on the Oprah Winfrey Show for the first time during a discussion between Oprah and Michelle Burford. Uh, Burford is a journalist at O Magazine. Oprah had launched a magazine, I think in like 99 or something, like after her show has made its big pivot, they launched this magazine, which is the number one women's magazine, basically for the whole time that it's in publication. They don't stop publishing until, until, until 2020. And Burford has just finished some hard hitting research on the millennials, you know, our generation and she's reading Oprah new slang terms for sex and that our generation has cooked up. And again, this is 2003. So everybody prepare to take some notes.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Also, just the selection for more videos. It's so

• 52:37Robert Evans?

  Fascinating stuff. Fascinating stuff.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  What is happening to Elmo?

• 52:43Speaker 06

  Oh, my God.

• 52:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the Elmo thing is, I think that's from the new Doon show and that's clearly someone playing Matt Gaetz on SNL. Just because of how uncomfortable that woman looks, I can tell it's supposed to be Matt Gaetz. Anyway. I don't know.

• 52:58Speaker 06

  Okay, so what is a salad toss? Salad is, get ready, hold on to your underwear for this one, oral anal sex. So oral sex to the anus is what toss salad is. Hi, mom.

• 53:10Robert Evans?

  It's so big.

• 53:13Speaker 06

  Is an oral sex party. It's a gathering where oral sexes perform and Rainbow comes from all of the girls put on lipstick and each one puts her mouth around the penis of the gentleman or gentlemen who are there to receive favors and

• 53:29Robert Evans?

  Another horrified mom shaking her head.

• 53:31Speaker 06

  Hence the term Rainbow.

• 53:34Robert Evans?

  Oh, fuck.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  I remember this like it was yesterday. I, when I said that when my mom would sit me down after school and like, it was time for us to have like a serious talk about something. I always knew it had been on Oprah. And I remember very clearly this episode because as I said, I went to Catholic school. I went to all girls school. I was the biggest nerd in the world. I was not having sex with anybody, but my mom is sitting me down and being like, is this a thing that's happening at school? I was like, the way that the fan, the fiction that like, young people were doing things like rainbow parties. It just, yeah, it just really is burned in my mind that like Oprah had really put a fantasy world in the head of people like my mom.

• 54:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's such a fucking absolute, it's such a fucking absolute like fantasy. Cause like, I remember seeing this as like a 15 year old and going, no we're not. Like, I'm not, look, 15 year old Robert, not exactly doing a lot of sex parties. But also, I knew enough about my generation to like, neither were basically anyone else in my school, right? There were some kids having sex, but there weren't rainbow parties?

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Like, people were like dry humping behind the Walmart and like, that was it. Like, it wasn't like sex parties.

• 54:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, everybody's got a different lipstick and you compare the rainbows on your dick. What?

• 54:57Speaker 03

  Like, where is this happening? Where are you getting the lipstick shades? I have many questions.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  My mom asked me about this too.

• 55:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  That was a weird thing and I went and, and, and I was like, I was like, mom, look at me.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  Absolutely not.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Look at these bangs I have.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  Nothing is happening.

• 55:14Robert Evans?

  You should always think this way, whenever there's like a, this is the new dangerous sex thing the kids are doing. Does it sound like something you and your peers might have done as 15 year olds? Or does it sound like something an adult pervert invented because it made them, because they're sick, right?

• 55:30Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, whoever invented this truly needs to go to jail. The concept is, it's like.

• 55:39Robert Evans?

  This is marketing child pornography. That's what you've done.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Well, they did like a version of this on, uh, that TV show Degrassi, but instead of it on the dicks, it was like rainbow bracelets. My mom asked me about that also.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  That was another thing. I don't think it was on Oprah, but if you wore like those jelly bracelets, it was like, oh, if you wear a brown one, you know what that means.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Nobody was doing that. Nobody.

• 56:05Robert Evans?

  But Sophie, now that you brought up Degrassi, I think I'm through the, the looking glass here. Because look, clearly, this isn't a real thing. It was invented by a pedophile who was on Degrassi. Famous pedophile Drake.

• 56:18Robert Evans?

  We're through the looking glass, people. We got this locked down.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  That man is suing people.

• 56:25Robert Evans?

  He's suing Kendrick Lamar, come on.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  He's suing Kendrick, he's suing for defamation for being called a pedophile, but, sir.

• 56:33Robert Evans?

  I feel like the best case scenario here is that Kendrick and I become good friends and no one ever tells him that I mistook him from Macklemore once.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Robert, I swore.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  How does that happen?

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Robert, I swore on-

• 56:43Robert Evans?

  I don't know who people are, like, not by looks or songs, I just thought people-

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Robert, we swore we would take that secret to our group.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  They couldn't have waterboarded that shit out of me.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  It's the most angry I've ever been at you.

• 56:57Robert Evans?

  The internet's going to light on fire. Drake's gotta get off scot-free now.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  And then we all made a pact in my car that we would never repeat this, because it was so traumatic.

• 57:08Robert Evans?

  Sophie, I can't, I'm like George Washington, this is my cherry tree moment, I cannot tell a lie, I don't know who people are.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Yes, but Jesus fuck, Robert.

• 57:20Robert Evans?

  It's okay, I listened to a Kendrick Lamar song after that.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  I know you were in my car.

• 57:25Robert Evans?

  It was pretty, it was pretty good, yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, Macklemore's not, I made a horrible mistake.

• 57:33Robert Evans?

  Forgive me, don't forgive Drake, look, I'm trying to deflect here, right, I'm doing the Trump thing, you know? Like, ignore my sins, focus on Drake and the rainbow parties, let's blame him for that.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  The disappointment's back, oh my god.

• 57:46Robert Evans?

  I don't, I, I, I don't know who people are, look.

• 57:50Robert Evans?

  It's gonna be hard to get back on track after this. Later in that interview, Oprah asks Burford if rainbow parties are common, and Maria replied, "Among the 50 girls I talked to, this was pervasive." And here's a quick tip on like, knowing if a journalist is not a good journalist, a good journalist, if they had talked to 50 girls. Would say this number of them said that they had attended a rainbow party versus this number of them said they had heard of a rainbow party. That starts to give you some useful data as to like, oh, actually 30 of them said they'd heard of this. None of them have been to one. Maybe they're not real?

• 58:32Robert Evans?

  Like, like that, that would be journalism, right? That's the start of it at least, you know? Burford says of the 50 girls I talked to, quote unquote, "This was pervasive." Now, I'll say this right now. Burford either made all that shit up because she knew Oprah would love it, or some teenage girls were paying a prank on her. A couple of researchers, Joel Best and Kathleen Bogle, actually looked into where this rumor started, and they traced it to a book called Epidemic: How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids by Meg Meeker. And if you want to know how accurate this book was, uh, are there still kids, Sylvie?

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Uh, checks notes, yes.

• 59:07Robert Evans?

  Let's do a quick fact check. Okay, it didn't. We're good. Good news, everybody. Teen sex didn't kill all the kids.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Hey, listen, at least we do have a name for the straight up fucking pedophile enabler at minimum.

• 59:22Robert Evans?

  Meg Meeker, oh, she's great. She is a right wing pediatrician who has spent the last 20 years profiting off of convincing parents that their kids are fucking each other to death. She has never once been correct, but she has the ear of incoming President Donald Trump. She is awesome. Back in 2003, Oprah laundered her conservative Christian propaganda because, hey, sex sells. Best and Bogle, who wrote a book called Kids Gone Wild, but despite that title, the book is about how all this stuff is bullshit, right? It's about all these bullshit media myths about how bad kids are, right? And it busts a bunch of pervasive myths about teenagers and their wild, elaborate sex-based parties. Both Bogle and Best clearly blame Oprah for launching the rainbow parties panic, right?

• 1:00:07Robert Evans?

  Like, this becomes a media panic as a result of Oprah giving it someone's oxygen. I'm going to quote now from an interview with the authors of that book in Salon. "With Oprah, because that reaches so many million..." Means of people, particularly women and women that have children, they're hearing that story and saying, oh my God, did you hear on Oprah, what's going on? We even have a quote in the book that looks at another reporter when they're looking at issues of youth and sex, a reporter by the name of Costello that says, "It must be true. Didn't you see that Oprah episode?" So even another reporter ends up citing Oprah as a fact checker on Rainwell parties being real. So if you're following the evidentiary chain of custody here, Oprah's reporter says, "I talked to 50 girls."

• 1:00:48Robert Evans?

  And like, they said rainbow parties were pervasive. Did any of them say they'd been to one? Unclear. That turns into another journalist being like, "Well, they're real because it was on Oprah."

• 1:00:59Robert Evans?

  We're locked in, baby.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  The circular bullshit machine.

• 1:01:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's beautiful stuff.

• 1:01:08Robert Evans?

  Another, oh, and actually this gets back to Degrassi. Another story Oprah helped push around the same time was a panic around sex bracelets. This is again, the idea that like girls have these color-coded bracelets to signify all the sex acts they're down to perform. And I guess the boys are just going around being like, "Oh, that girl's got the bracelet for a foot job. I'm getting up with her." And it's like, that's just, that's just not how teenagers work. That's not how adults work. Nothing works that way. Except for like, I don't know, weird Jeffrey Epstein parties, probably. I'm sure he had some parties like that. I'm sure he had parties like that because they watched Oprah and were all perverts. Anyway.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's also like, that is such a healthier type of consent than anything that actually happens in fucking high schools.

• 1:01:56Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yes, yes, they're all having like the kind of key parties that like middle-aged swingers had in 1974.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  Those bracelets were like very popular when I was coming of age and they

• 1:02:09Robert Evans?

  They were genuinely like, y'all could look this up. They were banned from schools. Oh, yeah. Because of this bogus reporting. My school, yes. Now, this is another thing. Again, both this and rainbow parties, I'm sure if you dug, you could find examples of teenagers doing it after it becomes a media panic because kids are like, well, all right. Like, let's give it a shot. If we're doing it, we're doing it. Yeah.

• 1:02:34Robert Evans?

  But yeah, it's not until professional media idiots like Matt Lauer or Montel Williams make a big deal about it that it becomes a thing. And in that interview in Salon, Bestin Bog will get to the heart of what's really going on with all of this. I think one of the things we show in the last chapter is that it's not just one group that likes these stories. Kids themselves like them because it's great gossip. What's better than to say, oh, the girl wearing the red bracelet, you know what she does? She gives lap dances. They make stories teens like to pass around that make interesting gossip. Parents are always worried about their kids, of course, and they've been fed a lot of media stories that feed into that. So the idea that their child, who they think of as innocent, might be corrupted by these other forces, that feeds into something like they've been fed and believed for a long time. Schools want to show how they have things under control. They know what's going on and

• 1:03:18Robert Evans?

  they can talk to parents about it. So they can say, we banned those bracelets to put a stop to that. Then, of course, the media. There's both the idea that sex sells, but also fear sells, saying, listen to this story. You have something to worry about. You have to listen to this because you don't know what's really going on and it could affect your child. That's what gets viewers and television producers and newspaper columnists are aware of that.

• 1:03:41Robert Evans?

  Now, we're going to move on from the rainbow party stuff, but I wouldn't be doing my job as podcast host if I did not play you the rest of that clip.

• 1:03:51Speaker 06

  So, okay, and so what is, so what does pretty boy mean? A pretty boy is a sexually active boy, someone who's been fairly promiscuous. So it isn't what maybe what you would have thought pretty boy meant in your time. And dirty means what? Does dirty? Means a disease girl. And along with that, the term that some teens are using to mean HIV is high five. High and then the Roman numeral V, high five. So if you got high fived by Jack, you got diseased by Jack. He gave you HIV. He gave you HIV. Yeah.

• 1:04:21Speaker 07

  So that means you shouldn't go around saying to little kids anymore. I was like a little boy and I went, "Give me high five."

• 1:04:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Speaker 07

  You shouldn't do that anymore.

• 1:04:28Speaker 06

  And if suddenly your kids want to make salad all the time, you should be wondering.

• 1:04:32Speaker 07

  Okay. And booty call is pretty, uh, common, right?

• 1:04:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's pretty pervasive. Yeah, that's an, uh, early morning or late at night call for sex that involves no real relationship. Maybe 2 AM, guy calls girl and says, "Meet me at so-and-so location. We have sex, we leave." Booty call.

• 1:04:49Speaker 07

  Y'all knew that.

• 1:04:49Speaker 06

  Y'all got that, right?

• 1:04:50Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:04:52Speaker 06

  And then there's the term "hoovering", which is a term used for a girl having an abortion. Um, the, yes, you get, you get the reference, the sucking of a Hoover vacuum. She's having herself vacuumed out, so to speak. So these were just a few of the terms that I, you know, heard teens referring to. I got a whole new vocabulary book.

• 1:05:11Speaker 07

  So what would happen when they would say, "She got hoovered"?

• 1:05:14Speaker 06

  She got hoovered.

• 1:05:14Speaker 07

  Well, if somebody, if you're talking to somebody in the beginning before you got so hip here.

• 1:05:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, before I got hip.

• 1:05:19Speaker 07

  What would you, what would, if somebody said, "She got hoovered", you would just say, "What do you mean by that"?

• 1:05:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, "What do you mean? What do you mean? What does hoovering mean?" And she'd tell me.

• 1:05:25Speaker 07

  Are rainbow parties pretty common?

• 1:05:27Speaker 06

  I think so, at least among the 50 girls that I talked to.

• 1:05:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, okay. So that gets us back to what we'd said before, but like...

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 1:05:35Robert Evans?

  The idea that like kids have like a fun term for getting HIV?

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  Also, not to give notes on the slang, but shouldn't it be high four?

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  I just, I don't know, man.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Such a writer, Andrew.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  I just, like, uh, it's tough that hoovering really, you know, it used to be just suffering from the great, a great depression and now

• 1:06:03Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. Yeah. I, it would have been pretty funny to just be a con man journalist in this period and be like, "Yeah, the kids can't stop talking about Herbert Hoover", you know? Like, he's their favorite president. He's the only guy on the minds of the youth these days.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  I mean, obviously, the internet is absolute poison, but truly, watching this clip of someone basically read fake Urban Dictionary on national TV does kind of give me like, okay, some things were improved.

• 1:06:31Robert Evans?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  Have you all seen that meme where it's like iced tea from Law and Order SVU explaining fake things? That's what that reminded me of, just someone sitting on stage being like, oh yeah, the kids are calling it cat littering. It's when da-da-da, like, that's what that was. It's just somebody making up fake things for entertainment.

• 1:06:51Robert Evans?

  There's the idea that kids have like a casual slang term for getting HIV.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  It's, it's so like.

• 1:06:58Robert Evans?

  It's like it's doing something in a video game.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  But also, like, I mean, obviously, they were, they had a vested interest in never thinking about this, but like, nothing is more like, universal than teens lying to old ass adults.

• 1:07:17Robert Evans?

  Oh, if, if a journalist had ever tried to sit down with me and my friends and ask us like, about if there's any sex slang, we would have lied like cheap rugs. Like, we would, we would, we would not have stopped talking until they had run out of space on their recorder, you know?

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Like, just like the credulousness is, I mean, I guess that, that I'm, I'm realizing now, I guess, is like Oprah's big crime is just like criminal credulity.

• 1:07:45Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, that's a big part of it. Or, you know, if she's not credulous, because again, she's a very savvy person, it's like marketing credulousness, right?

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Robert Evans?

  And it's consequence.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  The dumbest shit you've ever heard, she'll just be like, I mean, listen, that's exactly what Joe Rogan does, so like.

• 1:08:04Robert Evans?

  Right. Yep, like, that, that is, there's a really, like, you don't have Joe Rogan without the Oprah Winfrey Show, you know?

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:14Robert Evans?

  Just like you don't have Oprah without Donahue. Now, Oprah's not the only person, obviously, who's spread this kind of stuff, but she is the biggest name in the world of people doing this. As Vanity Fair stated in the year 2000, when Oprah launched Oh Magazine, quote, Oprah Winfrey arguably has more influence on the culture than any university president, politician, or religious, religious leader, except perhaps the Pope. And I'm just gonna say it, John Paul II, I think, was the Pope at this time, and I believe Oprah had more of an influence than he did on American culture, at least.

• 1:08:47Robert Evans?

  Like, who remembers old JP the Two? You got shot once, come on.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Jesus, Robert.

• 1:08:55Robert Evans?

  I know popes who've been shot way more than that.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Also, do individual popes really have that much influence? I mean, they're, they're still.

• 1:09:03Robert Evans?

  The song certainly did.

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  Well, I'm just, I just mean, like, they don't really have more influence than any other pope, really. Like, you're still operating within the bands of Catholicism.

• 1:09:16Robert Evans?

  Look, most of what I know about the pope comes from the movie The Conclave, which is largely.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Ooh, I just saw that.

• 1:09:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is, which is largely that Stanley Tucci looks incredible in Catholic vestments. Like, it's like he was poured into him. That's, that, that man can really pull off a, whatever you call those outfits. Also Ralph Fiennes, oh my god.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  His, his Tucci chains?

• 1:09:40Robert Evans?

  Ah, the Tucci, the Tucci.

• 1:09:43Speaker 05

  That was lovely.

• 1:09:45Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. And then John Lithgow out of nowhere, love it, the vaping cardinal, all sorts of good stuff in that movie.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  There's, okay.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  I'm, I am morselled by the concept of a vaping cardinal.

• 1:09:58Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's, it's good. They, they hire an Italian man whose face was made to angrily vape while wearing vestments. It's amazing. That casting director deserves a Medal of Honor.

• 1:10:13Robert Evans?

  Oh, okay. So, yeah, I, I think that that's probably a broadly accurate statement. The Rainbow Party disinformation is part of a long tradition of Oprah episodes about how dangerous life has become for young children. Every year, as violent crime fell and violence towards children usually fell, Oprah barraged her audience with ceaseless tales of child abductions, child sex trafficking, child drug abuse, and teen sex. Studies show consistently that Americans believe violent crime is much higher than it in fact is. We are in the midst of a very frightening moral panic over child sex trafficking right now, which does not resemble how child sex trafficking actually looks. I'm speaking right now about Tim Ballard, whose lies about his life rescuing kids from child sex trafficking.

• 1:10:56Robert Evans?

  Networks were the basis of the blockbuster movie Sound of Freedom. Ballard spent years claiming to be fighting an international shadowy network of child traffickers, while he just resigned after being charged with massive sexual misconduct and abuse himself. Despite all of this, tons of people believe little kids are being targeted and stolen by criminal organizations, when again, they are usually being molested by people who are responsible for them, not random narco gangs abducting kids in parking lots by putting cheese on the doors of their mom's car. That's not the problem. Oprah bears a good share of the blame for how unhinged many Americans are about the dangers that children face. And this is, I'm making this allegation based on stuff like the Rainbow Party panic and other, years of other similar episodes.

• 1:11:40Robert Evans?

  But, you know, it's, during my research, I ran into a really interesting thread in a website on free range parenting. And I'm not making, I don't know much about free, I'm not making a comment on that, but I found it interesting to read what these people had to say in a thread titled, "Did Oprah Make Us Terrified For Our Kids?" The author, who identifies themselves as Laura, writes, "As I think about the litany of freak accidents and hidden dangers I need to be constantly worried about for my kids, almost everything has one common recurring element. I saw it on Oprah one time. Baby drowning in an inch of water. Healthy girl scrapes her knee and dies of MRSA. Child decapitated by an airbag. Carbon monoxide from the car in the garage kills the family. Dry drowning, school shootings, home invasions, and countless other tragedies. Then there are the abduction, molestation, and sexual predator stories.

• 1:12:23Robert Evans?

  These were typically featured on Oprah at least once a week." Well, I applaud Oprah's efforts to raise awareness, catch truly horrible criminals, and break the silence of abuse victims. This had to have an impact on the perception that there was a predator around every corner, and you can never be too careful because anything could happen. And I think she's on the money there, right? Like, the helicopter parenting, the fact that, like, kids, there's not zero Oprah in the fact that, like, kids stopped going outdoors, you know?

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  And like true crime podcasts now, it's like just, just the make white women assume that the world is out for their kids industry is the strongest thing going.

• 1:13:03Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  I mean, if you've ever seen videos of women moms who were like, I was at the Walmart and a man looked at my child, stay safe mama bears. Like it was the scariest thing that ever happened to me. We're like, we're like, it is this fantasy that around every corner there is a threat to you and your child. And I think it's dangerous precisely because it keeps you from seeing the actual threats that are there, right? Like the creepy soccer coach, the creepy guy at church, right? Like, and I also think like with the rainbow parties, if you are so busy thinking about these fabricated fictional threats to your kids, what if you're, what the things that are actually happening in your kid's life day to day at school, how are they going to come talk to you? How are you going to foster

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  a safe, open communicative environment if you've been led to believe that like these fictional threats are out there and that they're real?

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  Well, also it's like, I mean, because it is, you know, scout leaders, church leaders and their husbands that are doing most of this stuff. It's like those people are the ones that they have some responsibility for bringing into their child's life. Whereas our narco gang is just randomly out there. Like you don't have to confront anything about yourself to protect a kid from the others.

• 1:14:23Robert Evans?

  Ding ding fucking ding, I think, right? It's so, it's hard to raise kids and like, you can be a responsible, decent person who does their best with your kid and they can have a horrible life. That's the world, right? Like you can't stop that. And instead of like confronting that and confronting like, well, all I can really do is, you know, try to be the best parent for my kid. You get all these like obsessions with things that just are not realistic threats and dangers. And you just feel like if I continue scratching that fear itch by watching this stuff, maybe it'll make it less likely to happen to me, right? Maybe if I, if I train my eyes on the eye of Horus, it will be less likely to

• 1:15:06Robert Evans?

  harm me and my loved ones, you know?

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  Well, it's like the, the safety theater makes you feel better. Then again, confronting the actual difficult shit that.

• 1:15:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  Is in the world.

• 1:15:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like the the danger of all of this stuff was less, you know, kids are having rainbow parties or, you know, pedophile gangs are abducting kids in vans and more like, hey, have you looked at your your kid scout leader lately? Seems like he's a little one on one time with the boys. By the way. Should somebody look it on that?

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  Scouts in general. It's also just like a right wing paramilitary organization.

• 1:15:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Even without the funny business. Well, you could learn how to camp and fish and hunt without this, all the fucking like allegiances to order.

• 1:15:54Robert Evans?

  You know, Andrew, thank you, because I wanted to pivot to letting everyone know that if you give your kids to me for one week out of the year, they will come back. It's the Lawrence of Arabia School for Children. They're going to learn how to blow up bridges and trains, right? What do they do with that knowledge? That's up to them. I have no control of them. Once they've learned how to make the explosives and destroy bridge supports, it's no longer my my responsibility after that point, you know?

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  Is this the start of Robert starting a boy army?

• 1:16:21Robert Evans?

  Everybody does want a child army, you know? Speaking of popes, Bridget, like, that's that's like a third of the popes. Wow. Solid subset of the pope population has child armies, you know? Anyway, I think that's an episode. Yeah, I was gonna say, we gotta, we gotta stop. Turns out we have a lot more Oprah to do. I don't know what we're gonna do about this, but everybody go away for the weekend. Bridget, pluggables?

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, you can subscribe to my boy army newsletter. No, just kidding. You can listen to my podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet, my podcast with Mozilla Foundation, the makers of Firefox, called IRL, about who has the power in AI and follow me on Instagram at Bridget Marie in DC.

• 1:17:07Robert Evans?

  Excellent. Andrew T.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  I don't know, man. Just, he was as racist as a podcast.

• 1:17:13Robert Evans?

  Excellent. Excellent. All right, everybody, until next week, remember the Robert Evans Summer Camp for kids to learn how to blow up trains and disrupt national infrastructure. It's not illegal if we don't tell them to do anything with the knowledge. Bye.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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