This week, an Our Body Politic encore: Farai interviews Steven Thrasher, LGBTQ scholar, journalist and author of “The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Diseases Collide.” Thrasher offers insights from his new book on how systematic marginalization determines who is most affected by public health crises like HIV/AIDS, COVID-19 and mpox. Then, Farai speaks to Howard Polskin, president and founder of “TheRighting,” a newsletter, site and social media feed that compiles and disseminates far-right political commentary to cross-pollinate the divided media audiences in the U.S. and combat disinformation in the news.
Farai Chideya:
Hi, folks. We are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you haven't yet, remember to follow this podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. And if you have time, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback.
This is Our Body Politic, I'm Farai Chideya. This week we're bringing you an episode from our archive that's relevant for our times. One of Our Body Politic’s missions is to bring context to the news. And part of that process is drawing lessons from the past. I hope you enjoy the show.
When is a disease not just a disease? When we add signifiers about who is worthy of care based on issues like race, gender, sexual orientation, and poverty, and create self-fulfilling cycles of who gets hit hardest by epidemics. That's a core thesis in the work of journalist and LGBTQ+ scholar Professor Steven Thrasher. His new book is The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. Thrasher has long studied the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV. His work on that virus lays a foundation for his insights into other ones, including what the COVID-19 pandemic and other viral diseases tell us about our society's inequality.
Farai Chideya:
Over a million people have died from COVID-19 in the US. Despite ways that anti-vaccine disinformation actually raised the death rate for some white Americans, Black, Hispanic, and Native populations still have had higher COVID related hospitalizations and death rates. Among other things, people of color are disproportionately likely to have been essential workers and less likely than whites to have been able to work remotely or relocate to avoid the pandemic. Now we're also seeing questions of identity in class emerge in treatment of monkeypox outbreaks.
Farai Chideya:
But more than any one epidemic, Professor Thrasher's work is a document of the choices modern society makes in including or excluding people from care. I spoke with Professor Thrasher about his book, The Viral Underclass, and what we can learn from companions that have been part of our human journey for thousands of years. That would be viruses. Welcome, Steven.
Steven Thrasher:
Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
This book that you've written really explains so many intersectional vectors of how different parts of society fit together. What is the viral underclass?
Steven Thrasher:
The viral underclass is a way to think with viruses to understand the class dimensions of our lives. Similar populations are affected by viruses again and again, and sometimes they're extremely different kinds of viruses. The connection between monkeypox and HIV, there are sort of similar ways we might understand why they biologically might track together, but it's harder to understand and perceive why it is that LGBTQ people were much more affected by COVID-19 than straight and CIS people. And that actually has nothing to do with sex or sexual orientation or gender identity directly.
Steven Thrasher:
LGBTQ people were more affected by COVID-19 because they're more likely to be poor, more likely to work in retail, more likely to not have insurance and to be in the pathways of viruses in the first place. A theory of a viral underclass helps us think with the viruses to see why do we see these populations coming into relief around sickness and how are they affected? It's a dynamic that's I've seen, I've written about around the world.
Steven Thrasher:
A particular component to how it works out in the United States is that once people become infected by viruses, they are much more likely to become harmed economically, because we don't have any kind of universal healthcare and we don't have much social support when people are sick. In the US, we will mandate somebody go home and quarantine for the good of the community, while also refusing to give them economic support. And that makes it likely that they're going to tumble down the economic ladder.
Farai Chideya:
Your book was beautifully and intimately written, and I just want you to share a little bit of it with us.
Steven Thrasher:
Sure. I'm going to read a short passage from the introduction. In this part, I'm thinking about what it means to survive and thrive in the viral underclass. The truth that viruses reveal could topple the systems meant to divide us. We, the people, are connected to one another, and so war metaphors are not helpful ways to think about public health. Like airplanes dropping bombs and residents too poor to flee the city that pilots are ostensibly liberating, waging war and viruses will often kill humans in the viral underclass, but not only them.
Steven Thrasher:
For viruses are wherever any of us meet and how can we declare war in where we meet, hug, make love, where our lips touch and our hearts beat, where we sing, dance, laugh, and pray together. Without romanticizing them too much, viruses have been some of my greatest teachers. Even in avoiding them, we find them pulling our consciousness down out of our minds, don't we? And in the ways they've drawn me around the world and even taken human lives, they've taught me that I could love and mourn more deeply than I ever knew was possible.
Farai Chideya:
That's beautiful. Thanks for sharing that.
Steven Thrasher:
Thank you.
Farai Chideya:
When I read your book, I thought about members of my extended family. There was the daughter of one of my grandmother's sisters and she died of HIV after her ex-husband infected her with HIV. Her husband had intravenous drug use and she was out of the relationship before she knew she had HIV. I think about some of the members of my extended family in Zimbabwe. I heard where a pastor asked people to believe in God and stop taking antiretrovirals. A woman in my extended family died because of that, because she believed in that. You get into so many sectors of society.
Farai Chideya:
You get into faith. You get into sex. You get into breathing, which can be a vector for viruses. How do you think about our human condition when it comes to dealing with not just the viruses, but how we put meaning it in our families, in our communities, in our societies?
Steven Thrasher:
Thank you for sharing that. Unfortunately, that tale has happened in various places in the world that faith leaders have encouraged people not to take their medications. I find viruses to be really incredible teachers for how we navigate intimacy, because viruses transmit where we are intimate with one another. Intimacy takes many different forms. There's sexual intimacy and injection drug use, which are sort of being considered vice the most and get the least sympathy. And then of course, there's sharing food and being in church services or going to school, casual contact, hugs, touch, also just breathing.
Steven Thrasher:
These are the places where viral transmission happens. Sometimes they're considered less stigmatized. Sometimes they're also demonized as we're trying to mitigate pandemics. I think that the viruses teach us very much that we are interdependent, that our lives simply are livable because of our relationships with other people. I often try to think, what can we learn from our interactions with viruses, because it's inevitable that we'll have to negotiate life with some of them. We don't need to have so much. And certainly in the United States, we've kind of given up to endless transmission when we could be mitigating it a lot more and having a lot less sickness and death.
Steven Thrasher:
I look into people who did do activism around HIV and AIDS and develop forms of harm reduction, develop ways that people still could be intimate with one another and learn those lessons. The lessons are very broad. Sometimes they're social, sometimes they're technical, but to great advantage. For instance, most people don't know that your doctor and dentist did not wear gloves before AIDS and HIV. That your dentist would just be in your mouth with their bare hands. Of course, the benefits of wearing gloves are widely felt. They stopped all kinds of other things.
Steven Thrasher:
These interactions can teach us things that we can do to create less sickness, but they also really show us that we are interdependent. They disprove the idea that any of us is an island, that any one of us is a singular person that can just make their way through life alone. We are connected. The ways that we manage that physically are important to our health, but it also gives us the opportunity to manage intimacy in an interdependent way emotionally. And that can have great value to the ways that we lead our lives and the forms of love and support that we experience.
Farai Chideya:
I've been really struck by the way you approach this book. You have a lot of science, you have a lot of social science, but you also have a lot of yourself. You talk about a wide variety of viral illnesses, which elucidate where we stand as a society. Your PhD thesis talked about the criminalization of HIV/AIDS, and that's a lot of your book. But what was it in you that drove you to do this work?
Steven Thrasher:
Originally, I got an assignment to report on this case of this young man facing life in prison for HIV. I'd already been writing about HIV and AIDS for a couple of years, and I had been writing about race and LGBT matters for even longer than that. I'd written a lot about the marriage equality movement, which is kind of coming to a close. But I had a sort of political consciousness awakening or shake up where I understood at some point marriage left a lot of questions unanswered and a lot of justice matters unsolved for LGBTQ people. It dealt with some important things, but it didn't deal with everything.
Steven Thrasher:
Once I started reporting on HIV and AIDS and understanding that it was not in the past, as I had mistakenly thought of it, but that it was still a real crisis, I started saying, "Oh, HIV and AIDS, looking at this virus, really brings into relief all of the social problems that I care about, economics, incarceration, homelessness, police brutality." Through this virus, I could kind of have a prism for writing about different things. I was trying to think about what kind of book I would write from my dissertation when this new virus broke out, COVID-19.
Steven Thrasher:
As the world started to shut down, in conversation with my book agent and not knowing if there would still be book publishing or if we'd all lose our jobs, or if I would lose my university jobs.
Farai Chideya:
If we would all be in a Tundra fighting off the zombies.
Steven Thrasher:
Right, right. I mean, February, March, April, those were very concerning times and no one really knew what was going to happen.
Farai Chideya:
They were grim.
Steven Thrasher:
I thought to try to use a viral underclass as an analytic to reflect on what I'd been doing on AIDS for almost 10 years at that point, but also to sort of read what was happening in the COVID-19 pandemic. I knew that I wanted to document those early deaths, and a lot of those early deaths were happening in the same geographic maps and boundaries that I'd already been writing about with police violence and HIV and AIDS. The concentration of who was getting sick and dying first and fastest were sort of familiar ground to me about where to look for social conditions that affected people with viruses, even different viruses.
Steven Thrasher:
But then George Floyd was murdered by the police in Minneapolis. Many people forget this, but the autopsy revealed he had the novel coronavirus. I started thinking about had Minneapolis spent their money differently, and they spent almost 40% of their money on police, had they spent their money differently, maybe Floyd would've gotten the help he needed. Maybe the police never would've interacted with him. Maybe he wouldn't have gotten COVID-19. He was one of 40 million people who lost their jobs in those first few months. If we had a society that valued things differently, he might not have come into the path of that virus or come into the path of the police.
Farai Chideya:
That was Professor Steven Thrasher, journalist, LGBTQ+ scholar, and author of the new book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. Coming up next, we continue our conversation with Professor Thrasher on what viruses and pandemics reveal about race, class, and discrimination. Plus, a conversation with Howard Polskin, the president and founder of TheRighting, which compiles daily commentary from right wing media outlets for moderate and liberal audiences. That's on Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. If you're just tuning in, we're talking to journalist and LGBTQ+ scholar Professor Steven Thrasher. His new book is called The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. It reveals the deep impact of race, class, and identity on who gets treated or denied care during epidemics and what that tells us about social inequality. Professor Thrasher draws upon his prior research around the spread of HIV/AIDS to understand the effect of other viruses like those currently causing COVID-19 and monkeypox to spread. Much of the book is also told from Professor Thrasher's own deeply personal experiences. Here's more from our conversation.
Steven Thrasher:
I knew that I would be a figure in the book. I thought I would be much more in the background, but I ended up writing about two people. One died with HIV, but not of AIDS, and another one who died of COVID-19. I ended up writing about them very personally. The one who died of COVID-19 was one of my mentor editors.
Farai Chideya:
Tell us about Ward, who he was. It sounds like it was a very weird set of coincidences that led him into the path of the coronavirus.
Steven Thrasher:
Yes, certainly. Ward Harkavy was a really great gruff, old school alt-week editor. He'd grown up in Oklahoma. He had this great twang, and he was one of these editors that really taught me how to write, how to get on my own head, how to listen to people, and actually edited my first story that had a reference to AIDS. Ward was always online. We would see him every day, and then he just stopped posting one day. This was, I don't know, two or three weeks into when was the really hitting the fan in New York City. He lived just outside the city and found out he had a badly infected tooth, and that had given him an infection that landed him in the hospital.
Steven Thrasher:
He was very weak after this infection, harmed him a great deal. This was when nobody dared go stay with them because we didn't want to kill him if we had the virus and he was very weak. There was no way to get him home help. We tried very hard and he ended up in a nursing home to recover. And that was when the Cuomo administration in New York State was sending people with COVID to recover in nursing homes, which, of course, is disastrous and ill-advised as it sounds. Ward ended up getting the COVID virus during his recovery and dying in a nursing home. It was really heartbreaking because we didn't get to talk to him.
Steven Thrasher:
That was almost a period of five or six weeks. He didn't have a cell phone with him. There was no way, of course, to go to visit people back then. It was really heartbreaking, and it was extremely painful during those months. It still happens now, but there was a very pronounced sense from politicians of just saying the old people should be allowed to die. He wasn't that old. He was 72. But I think about what he meant to me as a young journalist. Well, he continued to. We corresponded.
Steven Thrasher:
He was one of my touchstones that really helped me make sure I was staying grounded in my values. That was a tremendous loss to me. It illustrated to me the cruelty of what happens when we say old people have nothing to give.
Farai Chideya:
I want to just jump in because you and I both and over the context, what you've been referring to is in part linked to Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who was doing an interview with Tucker Carlson and said, and I quote here, "No one reached out to me and said, 'As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?'" He basically was saying, "Look, if you believe in America, you should just be prepared to die if you're older." It was pretty stunningly frank.
Steven Thrasher:
It was. It was disturbing. We saw the mask come off in a lot of ways, and that sentiment became genocidal in this period, the loss of more than a million people in the United States alone. But the fact that people were even in that position, why I kind of think of a viral underclass has to do with how we treat one another and how we manage relations. Elderly people in nursing homes, one to 10 died in that first wave, but also people in congregate care of all ages who are disabled, one in 12 of them died.
Steven Thrasher:
A problem before and after this acute period of death is that we tend to just warehouse and put out of sight elderly people and disabled people who have every right to live in the world and live in community with one another, but who also would add so much value to everyone else's lives if we made sure we lived in an integrated society. That was a lot of what I lived with and experienced and seeing words death and also getting to handle some of the elements of his death after he died.
Farai Chideya:
I mean, I have a friend whose father died of COVID, which he also like Ward got in a recovery center and it wasn't handled well. You have covered different key people in your research. I want to talk about one who you really approached as a subject and one you approached as an intimate, digging into the question of the Tiger Mandingo case. Tell us who the man was behind this legal case that was fueled around his stage name and how he was treated and what that says. And then I want to ask you about Olivier, who you paint a beautiful portrait of in this book.
Steven Thrasher:
Sure. Thank you. The seed for this book was really born when I started reporting on a case called the Tiger Mandingo Case. There was a young man. I had only heard his nickname online initially when he was charged with either criminally exposing or transmitting HIV to six different men. His screen name, his online name was Tiger Mandingo, which is a really salacious name and, of course, reels people in and evokes a Mandingo fantasy that has haunted the United States for centuries. I've often thought about this, how not everyone would want to be known in their entirety from one part of their social media life. But that's what happened with this young man. His actual name is Michael Johnson.
Steven Thrasher:
When I first met him, he was 23 and he was a college student. He was in his fourth or fifth year, but only a junior in a college. When I met him, he was very odds with the public portrait. So much news media was treating him as if he was a global menace to people getting HIV, which was ridiculous to see stories about him in Australia. 35, 40 million people live with HIV worldwide. One person in the United States, of course, is not responsible for that. But his story really dovetailed with our myths about Black male sexuality and misnomers about Black predatory sexual nature. Most of the people accusing him were white. That itself was a very intimate thing to report, even though it wasn't my story.
Steven Thrasher:
I have my own experiences with these things. But the case was fascinating and disturbing because he said he told everyone that he had HIV, his sex partner said he did not. But despite their conflicting accounts, what was quite obvious was that everybody on this college campus or many people really wanted his body. He was well liked as a student. He was very sought after sexually. He was also really being used by the university for his body, because he was almost done with college and he really couldn't read or write. He had been used as an athlete for the glory of the school, while being completely ill served as a student.
Steven Thrasher:
As soon as he got HIV or it came out that he had HIV, nobody wanted anything to do with him. I met him in a jail cell eight years ago now, and he entrusted me to write about his story. I found that he was not purposefully trying to harm anyone at all. I reported on that case for years in his trial, kind of every disaster of Black America came out of it, every level of homophobia. The science of these HIV laws are extremely outdated. Most of them were written in the 1980s when it was considered a death sentence, and it's been easily treatable with medication for more than 20 years now. I got to interview Michael in prison. I attended his entire trial.
Steven Thrasher:
Eventually his sentence got overturned and he eventually got out of prison, but it took about six years for him to get out. Now, I'm very grateful that he's leading sort of a normal life of a young person, but it was really haunting to see how one person was held as a scapegoat for all the anxieties of the society. He wasn't without any responsibility in his life, but he was taking on all the responsibility. And that often happens with viruses. One person say they're bad or they're "dirty" or they're irresponsible for doing these very normative life things, rather than try to understand... This statistic came out while I was reporting that case.
Steven Thrasher:
Why is it that one in two Black gay men are projected to become HIV positive? If your odds are 50/50 of that being you if you're a Black gay man, how can you blame anyone individual and not look at the structural? It's somewhat analogous to blaming people for becoming infected with COVID when we require no masks or ventilation or other mitigating things. I did not write as a journalist during those times, but I do in the book kind of reflect on my own position in reporting that case and what it was like as a Black gay man.
Farai Chideya:
I want to follow up after this, just on the big picture, but I do want to just thank you for your incredible sharing of your intimacy with the gentleman, Olivier, who you describe his journey through understanding what HIV means to him. And also it sounds like he made a bit more sense about what it's like to be a viral underclass to you.
Steven Thrasher:
Thank you. It was the hardest chapter to write. I didn't want to write it. I'd given it for technical review to an epidemiologist friend and historian to check some things I'd written about act up, and I only had a paragraph about Olivier near the end. He, as good editors do, said, "I feel like you're hiding something sort of in plain sight.I think this chapter's really about this person that you clearly care about." I went back and rewrote that chapter the last. I'm writing about this person. I only met him in person four times over six years, but we had this very intense connection and wrote each other all the time.
Steven Thrasher:
He was someone who sort of avoided me at one point because he had HIV and he didn't want me to reject him the way that he'd been rejected by so many other people, and that really hurt my heart a lot to understand. Eventually he died by suicide. I didn't realize until after he died how few people seemed to know he had HIV. I thought a lot about how heavy that must have been for him to feel like he had to keep that secret. I've known many people who are HIV positive and many who do feel like they have to keep it a secret. They're feeling a lot of stigma and shame about whether or not they can tell other people and whether anyone will share intimacy with them again.
Steven Thrasher:
Olivier, for me, really illustrated the harmful things that happen when we treat people like they are wrong or bad if they are living with a virus. Suicide's very complicated. You can't just blame it on one factor. But I did research after he died and throughout the epidemic and continuing today, rates of suicide are much higher, about three times more likely to die by suicide, people who are living with HIV. That really illustrates the weight of stigma and the isolation that it puts people to. And especially when people understand they're HIV positive, it's extremely cruel that that is the time that they need social support the most.
Steven Thrasher:
And yet, it might be the time where they feel like they can come to the people they care about the least. I write about them briefly in the book. I love a group called What Would an HIV Doula Do? They try to support people with HIV a way a doula would with the birth of a child and say, "This is not yours to deal with alone. We are a community here to support you, to celebrate you, and to love you, and to be with you as you begin this new phase of your journey and live with this virus."
Steven Thrasher:
If we had that kind of attitude towards people with any kind of virus, rather than treating them like pariahs who have to be alone, it would not only help them emotionally, that would actually help a lot of the conditions to suppress viral transmission going forward.
Farai Chideya:
A lot of people paid the price in the early days of the COVID pandemic, but what your book points out is that a lot of people have paid the price in any number of pandemics, whether it is HIV or COVID or... Honestly, I'm a little freaked out that polio is back in the New York City sewer system. You can tell that there are people with polio. Where are we with viruses?
Steven Thrasher:
Some people are starting to talk about a virucene, similar to the anthropocene. We are heading into a period of accelerated interaction with viruses. There was a pretty major paper in Nature a few weeks ago about how climate changed is already affecting the movement of bats, and bats are the most likely animal vector from which we came into contact with SARS-CoV-2. But that's just a dynamic that we see playing out with climate change, that more living beings are being shoved onto smaller parts of the earth.
Steven Thrasher:
The deeper that forests are cut into, the more rivers dry up and animals start looking for other forms of water, we're going to have more and more interaction between species and that increases the likelihood that there'll be more of what are called zoonotic jumps, when a virus moves from an animal to a human. Equally important, and this is true with monkeypox as well, is that it can also go from humans back into animals. For many decades with monkeypox, it was only in a handful of countries in West and Central Africa, because there was a reservoir of animals that that virus was living in and sometimes it would come into contact with humans.
Steven Thrasher:
Now that monkeypox is in a hundred countries around the world, first we have to, of course, heal and give treatment to and stop transmission amongst humans. But with so many humans with it now, that increases the likelihood. It can then move into animals. In which case, it could move in all these countries and become endemic around the world. Climate change makes all of this more likely. I still think the problems that it brings up are manageable. They need a fundamental reordering of the way most human societies are structured, but that's something human beings can do.
Steven Thrasher:
It's not as complicated as trying to warm down the temperature of the earth, but they really do show us that we must work together. Example with monkeypox is it's had a significant mutation or change in the past few years that has made it so that it's behaving differently than it did for several decades. The first person to notice this was Dr. Ogoina in Nigeria who saw an unusual outbreak in 2017 and said that there needs to be more study. It seems like maybe it's moving now through genital secretion, but no further study was done. His research was not further supported.
Steven Thrasher:
The United States had and has had all kinds of vaccines for a long time that it actually also could have given to people in other countries to help keep human movement, but it hasn't done it. I think that climate change is unfortunately strengthening national borders, and that's why we're seeing an increase in military spending and police spending, where countries know that people are going to be forced to migrate because of heat and a lack of water as the climate gets hotter. They're trying to fortify their borders to keep climate migrants out.
Steven Thrasher:
When actually what we need to do, and viruses give us the path to do this, is work internationally and cooperate with one another to make sure that humans are taken care of wherever they are. And if we do that, the US had invested money and the research of this warning bell that came from another country, or if the US was not only trying to get vaccines made for monkeypox for ourselves right now, but also trying to get it for poorer countries, then we might be better off. This is all a game plan for what we're going to have to do with climate change, because we're absolutely going to have to work together internationally.
Farai Chideya:
As we wrap up, what should we take away from your work?
Steven Thrasher:
I have a lot to say in the book, so I kind of want to let people take their own lessons that they find important or that interact with their own lives. But I think the biggest takeaway for me in some ways is that viruses are teachers. They are living organisms that vastly outnumber us. As Alice Wong, the disability activists, talked to me about in the book, we need to respect viruses. They are thrilling living organisms and how they move forward. The blessing of an opportunity is to understand how connected we are and can help us act on that. And that I think is the biggest takeaway.
Farai Chideya:
Well, Steven, thank you so much for sharing The Viral Underclass with us. There is so much more that you say about how viruses shape our world and how we shape the transmission of viruses, but we're going to have to leave it here for now. We're grateful to have had you. Thanks, Steven.
Steven Thrasher:
Thank you so much, Farai.
Farai Chideya:
Coming up next, a conversation with Howard Polskin, president and founder of TheRighting, which aggregates and analyzes right and far-right media to inform moderate and liberal audiences a political commentary they might miss
Howard Polskin:
Every morning, I parachute behind enemy lines and I bring them back information on how the other half of the country is thinking.
Farai Chideya:
You're listening to Our Body Politic. Welcome back to Our Body Politic. Each week on the show, we bring you a round table called Sipping the Political Tea. Joining me is Howard Polskin. He's the president and founder of TheRighting, a newsletter site and social media feed which aggregates and shares articles from right and far-right outlets for moderate and liberal audiences. It's in effort to cross-pollinate the divided media audiences and also point out the narratives and disinformation shaping American politics in society.
Farai Chideya:
Polskin has had a long career in print and television media and has witnessed the ups and downs in both media and politics that reshaped the industry these past 20 years. Hey, Howard, thanks for joining us.
Howard Polskin:
It's great to be here, Farai.
Farai Chideya:
One of the things that I'm very aware of is that doing a show, which our show centers women of color in politics, and we have on guests of different genders and different races, but we center women of color in politics. To me, the truth should stand isolated from any party affiliations, so should this show. I don't consider this show any one thing, but we really in covering women of color have to follow the ways that women of color are perceiving politics. How does your work around covering right wing media and far-right media add to the general understanding of politics? What is the purpose of what you're doing?
Howard Polskin:
The reason why I started TheRighting was on the morning after Trump was elected in 2016. I woke up and I said, "How did this happen? I don't understand it." I thought I was educated. I read The New York Times. I read The Washington Post. I watch NBC News. I listen to NPR, but still it baffled me. How could half the country believe in this man enough to vote for him? I went on a journey of discovery and went to places I had never been before. I'd never been to Breitbart. I'd never been to Infowars, The Washington Examiner. I didn't even know the dozens of conservative websites that were out there.
Howard Polskin:
And that led me to think like, "Wow! I wish there was someone who could aggregate all those stories every day, so I don't have the hassle of going to 40 sites every morning to find out what the right is thinking." No one was doing it and all of a sudden, that became my mission.
Farai Chideya:
We're talking today on a Wednesday before our episode drops, and I happen to get another dispatch from you. You have all sorts of different things. Are Republicans blowing the midterms from the website American Greatness. A lot of criticism of Dr. Fauci and Liz Cheney, all these different things. And of course, Are we headed for civil war? Just laying it out there from WND. A lot of people don't read the publications that you read. I am someone who has spent years covering extremism, covering political organizers on the left, covering the broadest spectrum that I could of American politics.
Farai Chideya:
To me, what you're doing here kind of brings up the question of what filter bubbles we live in. Sometimes I feel like honestly, just really naked without my filter bubbles. I certainly have strong feelings and opinions, as well as a strong affinity for the facts. When I get out there and see some of the things folks are saying, it makes me just... Is terrified too calm of something to say? I really worry that we are a heavily armed and emotionally unstable country at this point.
Howard Polskin:
I would agree with you. I mean, what you get from reading all of these publications every morning, which I spend the first two hours of my day doing that, to put together this free newsletter that goes out to thousands of subscribers, it feels that they love their guns and the theories they believe in are quite unhinged. I'm not saying that every right wing publication is on a first class ticket to crazy town. It's not like everything posted every day is absolutely bonkers, but there's a steady diet of that that's in there that's getting pushed down into the nation's information bloodstream every day and it's poisoning a good part of our country.
Howard Polskin:
That's what scares me. Now, the article you referenced, Are we headed to civil war, I thought about that before posting it, because that could have come from the left or the right.
Farai Chideya:
Howard, some of the articles that you disseminate for our consideration are really out there, but the civil war article cited more research, things like the Pew Research on political divisions. It's more to me a signal that more people, people on the right and left, are starting to use terms like civil war, but it's disturbing to see that this is where we are. This is where we think we are at least.
Howard Polskin:
I have that fear too about civil war. What was even disturbing, I think it was about a year or two ago, Trump said about civil war. He goes, "Well, our side has the guns." Like whoa!
Farai Chideya:
Yep.
Howard Polskin:
I'm a child of the '60s. From '68 to '72, I think there were several thousand bombings in the US by left wing domestic terrorists. This was actual bombings taking place, but I don't... And the country was...
Farai Chideya:
Weather Underground, et cetera.
Howard Polskin:
Yes. The Pentagon was bombed. People walked into a bathroom in the Pentagon, planted a bomb there. Bank of America was a constant target. But the reason why the country wasn't as fractured, and it was very fractured, was there wasn't as many media choices. Social media didn't exist. We didn't have 24 hour cable news. Right now we can't get away from this anymore and that's what's also leading to this poisonous atmosphere.
Farai Chideya:
And at this point, we have such a fire hose of immediate information. There's really so little time for history and context. What is the role of history and context in the work that you do?
Howard Polskin:
Well, when you say what is the role of history for most of the work that I do, I'm living in the now. I am chasing what happened in the last 12 hours every morning. That's how I'm filtering it all. I wish I had time to look back further in history to put things in a better context. I am not a student of conservative history. I am a student of the conservative movement now.
Farai Chideya:
What filters do you bring to that? You talked a little bit about being rooted in your growth in the '60s, understanding a context then. To me, having a frame of history isn't just about like are you examining it now, but who you bring to the table. Like me growing up Black in Baltimore in the '70s and '80s has had a profound effect on my career, where my whole life was a laboratory of looking at race and class. How do you bring the parts of yourself that understand America into this work?
Howard Polskin:
First of all, every morning I parachute behind enemy lines. I go where most people who are in the middle or in the left don't want to go, and I bring them back information from behind enemy lines on how the other half of the country is thinking. Personally, what I bring to this is as a lefty from the '60s, I bring in a sensibility that was like, "Wow! The FBI, they spy on you. You go to an anti-war demonstration, there could be FBI informants in the crowd. Watch who you talk to. Watch what you say. Government institutions were not necessarily to be trusted."
Howard Polskin:
That's some of the context, my own personal history context, that I bring to the work I do. I am pro democracy. That is my north star. What is good for democracy? That's where I'm going.
Farai Chideya:
You're listening to Sipping the Political Tea on Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. This week, we're doing a special round table on misinformation with Howard Polskin, the president and founder of TheRighting. That's TheRighting with an R, R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G. It's a newsletter site and social media feed that compiles right wing and far-right articles and writings for moderate and liberal audiences to try to cross-pollinate the dialogue. Howard, I'm on a bazillion listers, and one of them is a feed that is sent out under the name of Deroy Murdock, who is a Black and gay conservative. I used to doing the whole political commentary thing.
Farai Chideya:
I used to hang out with him. We haven't seen each other in years, but what's interesting to me is that he's now very much not only a MAGA Republican, but someone who is... Essentially there's a bunch of interlinked newsletters that sort of echo each other's content and he's part of that. The headline of a recent article I got was Betrayed: Capitol Police knew BLM did the rioting. It's fascinating that a Black gay conservative, and you can be a Black gay conservative, that's part of the American Dream, would be putting out this. I'm quoting here, "Breaking internal memo reveals Capitol Police were warned BLM from Baltimore was busing in rioters disguised as Trump supporters on Jan. 6."
Farai Chideya:
The whole idea busing in, there's so much busing now. There's migrants being bust from Texas to New York, and all of these signifiers. You're starting to have writers unpack the language. Busing to me is like a ding, ding, ding, ding word. It implies like a certain type of liberals throwing the rest of America under the bus. There's this whole conspiracy theory that people were bust in. I don't see it. I don't see any evidence. I used to hang out with people from time to time like Rod Dreher, Deroy Murdock. I mean, that was just... The '90s seemed so innocent. Liberals and conservatives would sit down and have beverages together.
Howard Polskin:
Yes. It all seems so quaint now.
Farai Chideya:
Yes, it really does.
Howard Polskin:
But to that point, I go out of my way to have phone conversations with the publishers of the far-right publications.
Farai Chideya:
Oh wow!
Howard Polskin:
The reason why I did that was three years ago, I published my first article about conservative media in the Columbia Journalism Review. Right away I got an email from The Heritage Foundation, which is when the leading conservative think tanks in the country. They said, "If you're ever in Washington, stop by."
Farai Chideya:
Oh, I love this.
Howard Polskin:
Three weeks later, I stopped by and I had a great time there. Now, I have a running dialogue with The Heritage Foundation, and things I don't understand about conservative media, they're helpful to me.
Farai Chideya:
I love that.
Howard Polskin:
I try and have an open mind on that. There's also a publisher, one man operation in Southeastern New Hampshire. He publishes a blog called Conservative View from New Hampshire, and I speak with him once a month. We have friendly conversations. We both have the same point of view, which is like, if this country is going to heal, again on the path to healing, both sides have to have discussions. I say to him, "I disagree with 90% of what you write," and he goes, "I get it, but we..."
Farai Chideya:
We have to have these dialogues.
Howard Polskin:
We have to talk. When I talk to him, it's not as scary. When I read some of the things that get written, I'm like, "Ooh, I'm having trouble with that." But at least the lines of communication are open and that's kind of the first step. I love who you've been friends with and stuff like that, but I think you raise an important point is that there's a career path for conservatives like that. Farai, there's an entire website devoted to conservative Hispanics called El American. It's been publishing a year and a half, and it's backed by two Stanford University Business School graduates. I think they're on something.
Farai Chideya:
There was a really great interview that Baratunde Thurston did with one of his colleagues at Puck, Tina Nguyen, who she had spent a lot of time being nurtured in a conservative universe. She was basically someone who got a lot of funding for her early career from conservative funders. I think that conservative funders understand that in the greater media sphere, they need to put money into nurturing talent. Whereas people in the liberal media sphere are like, "Well, you should just do this because it's right."
Farai Chideya:
Therefore, you have a much greater power for institution building. People who are doing certain types of messaging are much more heavily resourced. And that also adds to the dynamics of what is able to be done in the course of one's career. What do you think that mainstream media should do?
Howard Polskin:
Well, mainstream media is in a bit of a bind, because being in the middle I don't think works anymore because the right says that you're a lefty. That's what being in the middle means now. No such thing. Where does that leave them going forward? I think that's what gives rise to outlets like Fox News. I think Newsmax is coming on very, very strong.
Farai Chideya:
I met Chris Ruddy years ago on a trip to Switzerland. Longer story for another time, but he has been a very key strategist.
Howard Polskin:
I'm trying to do a visit to his office on Midtown and stop in and say hi, but media continues to fracture and the big mainstream players are getting weaker.
Farai Chideya:
What needs to happen for democracy? Where is democracy right now and how does media affect it? And how does your work stand in a position to be of service?
Howard Polskin:
Well, first of all, my feeling is that democracy is in peril. From doing the work I do every morning, I come away feeling like, "Wow, we're in trouble." There's nothing ordained that says that democracy in America has to exist for another 250 years. It's something that we have to fight for and we have to work for. We have to pay attention to what's going on. I thought when Biden took over, a lot of the problems would drift away and the pandemic would end, the economy would come back roaring, and all would be great and all would be forgiven. And that has not come to pass at all.
Farai Chideya:
Well, Howard, there's so much to talk about, but I think where I want to wrap it up is I think that your work acknowledges that probably most people exist in filter bubbles. What your work is doing is trying to say, "Look, you may be in your filter bubble as a moderate or left-ish person and you need to pay attention to this information." I personally learn a lot because I try not to live in a filter bubble. I try to have opinions and try not to make up my own facts. I believe that there's a common truth. I also believe that that idea has been threatened. Howard Polskin of TheRighting, thank you for joining us.
Howard Polskin:
Thank you for having me, Farai.
Farai Chideya:
That was Howard Polskin, the founder of TheRighting, a newsletter site and social media feed that compiles right and far-right headlines in one place and analyzes them to reach a broader audience.
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts.
Farai Chideya:
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I'm the executive producer and host, Farai Chideya. Our Co-executive producer is Nina Spensley. Bianca Martin is our senior producer. Traci Caldwell is our booker and producer. Emily J. Daly and Steve Lack are our producers. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers.Producer Teresa Carey contributed to this episode.
Farai Chideya:
Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas. Today's episode was produced with the help of Lauren Schild and engineered by Mike Goehler [GAY-lur] and Archie Moore.
Farai Chideya:
This program is produced with support from the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.