The Backchannel

Amy Coney Barrett appears to be on a glide path to confirmation to the land's highest court. Why haven't Democrats been able to find a cohesive narrative to stop her? Zaid and Shant discuss.

The U.S. Department of Education takes Princeton literally, but maybe not seriously. Education Secretary Betsy Devos is opening an investigation into Princeton University following the president's claim that racism persists at his university. Is Devos's civil rights investigation just trolling or is there a more serious point to be made about how careless statements can make civil rights enforcement difficult?

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National Public Radio recently featured a provocative new book called "In Defense of Looting," which is exactly what it sounds like. It wasn't long before every corner of the Internet was picking it apart, sharing absurd material from the text of the book. At the Backchannel, we decided it would make for a hilarious game show. We took five real passages from the book and created five of our own. Play along with us and see if you can tell what is real from what is satire.

Kenosha isn't just a place where riots broke out after a controversial police shooting. With the media and the President of the United States converging on the Midwestern town, we invited journalist Steve Horn, who grew up there, to tell us about the Kenosha we don't know. We explore the town's history, economy, culture, and political climate in an in-depth interview.

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WTF is happening in Portland? A lot of Americans are asking themselves that as protests and riots have now rocked the city for over 80 days following the death of George Floyd. Reason contributor Nancy Rommelman, a former Portland native who has reported on the demonstrations from the ground, joins us to lay out what's happening.

Read her latest dispatch from Portland here: https://reason.com/2020/08/24/when-you-say-yes-to-hate-dispatch-from-portland/

Is the Democratic Party serious about addressing wealth inequality? During negotiations with Republicans about upcoming coronavirus stimulus packages, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer wants to repeal the cap on the federal deduction for state and local taxes, which would primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans. Shant and Zaid discuss the wider Democratic Party's approach to inequality, or lack thereof, by talking about the party platform for 2020.

It increasingly feels like parts of the left and right agree that they should be able to dictate your personal morality, forcing you to adopt certain norms and values.

One new study suggests that this is because parts of the far-right and woke left share the same "Dark Triad" personality traits -- including narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Another finds that these same traits are associated with strategically deploying victimhood to manipulate people.

Shant and Zaid discuss these studies and what it says about contemporary politics.

Read the first study here:

https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-cont...

and the second one here:

https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology...

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The right has spent years arguing that immigrants don't assimilate well into American culture, while the left has played up America's flaws, arguing that the country simply isn't as desirable as we're told.

What if they're both wrong?

On this episode, Zaid and Shant talk about a recent piece Zaid wrote for the online magazine Persuasion, in which he argues that immigrants are among the most patriotic and hard-working Americans, and that if we want to strengthen America's civic culture, we should embrace immigration.

Zaid's Persuasion piece on immigration:
https://www.persuasion.community/p/immigrants-are-far-more-patriotic

Pew's data on what countries are most optimistic about the future:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-developing-economies-much-more-optimistic-than-rich-countries-about-the-future/

Brookings survey showing poor blacks and hispanics are more optimistic than poor whites:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-are-black-poor-americans-more-optimistic-than-white-ones/

Chris Arnade’s piece at American Compass:
https://americancompass.org/immigrants-and-the-american-dream/

Why is the left starting to act more like the right? To answer that question, The Backchannel is joined by two of the country's most prominent left-of-center writers: Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald. The five of us discuss how puritanical attitudes have become so prominent on the progressive left.

If you enjoy our show, please help us to keep making it! Contribute via our Patreon: http://patreon.com/thebackchannel

Further reading:

• Matt Taibbi on the left becoming the right: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right
• Matt Taibbi on "cancel culture": https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what-kind
• Matt Taibbi on "White Fragility": https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility
• Matt Taibbi on the media: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself
• Glenn Greenwald on "cancel culture": https://theintercept.com/2020/07/14/cancel-culture-martina-navratilova-documentary/
• Leighton Woodhouse on Antifa (2017): https://leightonwoodhouse.com/the-ugly-side-of-antifa/

The U.S. is experiencing an unprecedented surge in gun purchases by first-time gun buyers amid the pandemic and a period of civil unrest. We talk about why it's happening and what studies show the long-term consequences could be.

Studies:

Pandemics, Protests and Firearms: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3593956

Ecological and Cultural Factors Underlying the Global Distribution of Prejudice: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0221953