Democracy in Chains
Ralph Nader Radio Hour
Ralph Nader
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2018
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ralph welcomes Duke University historian, Nancy MacLean, to discuss her book “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” which delves into the destructive “libertarian” ideology the Koch brothers fund to keep the minority in power. Also, Ralph talks to English professor, Tymofey Wowk, about his strategies for teaching students in the age of social media.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the K-P-F-K Studios in Southern California, |
| 0:03.6 | it's the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. |
| 0:05.7 | Stand up, stand up. |
| 0:07.8 | You've been sitting great to long. |
| 0:18.0 | Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Scrovan. Along with the man of the hour, Ralph Nader. Our co-host David Feldman is on assignment in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his sometime employer Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. |
| 0:28.0 | I assume it's more than just following him around with a plastic bag, although it's just a puppet, so I suppose the worst I'll have to pick up is lint. |
| 0:35.0 | Anyway, hello, Ralph, how are you? |
| 0:38.0 | Good, and we've got a program today's going to challenge our listeners. |
| 0:42.0 | We do, we do, and I have to say personally one of my frustrations |
| 0:46.7 | with mainstream news programs like Meet the Press or Jake Tapper or George Stephanopoulos or any of the countless shows on broadcast and cable |
| 0:56.4 | is that they all pretty much follow the same format. They talk to a politician and |
| 1:02.2 | then the host engages with a quote-unquote panel of experts. |
| 1:06.0 | Those experts tend to be partisan political hacks who are there to give what they advertise is both sides of the story. And while we do need |
| 1:15.3 | journalists to talk to our politicians and get them on the record, what's |
| 1:18.4 | frustrating to me is that these politicians are very good at being well politic in other words they are very good in not telling you anything |
| 1:26.3 | That's how they're wired they've got their talking points and that's pretty much it and then the panel tries to spin all of that nothing in the direction of their own point of view it's |
| 1:35.0 | it's like nothing in the direction of their own point of view. It's maddening to me and if I may coin a phrase here it's like cotton candy. |
| 1:40.0 | I want to call it cotton candy journalism. |
| 1:42.0 | Sweet, it's pretty, it's well spun, |
| 1:45.0 | melts in your mouth immediately and has absolutely no nutritional value. |
| 1:50.0 | That's why on this show we very rarely speak to politicians. We speak to mainly journalists, advocates, scholars and historians. |
| 1:58.0 | In other words, people actually do stuff, people actually know stuff. People have studied issues very deeply and are not |
... |
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