#1626 America’s Fascination with Conspiracy Theories

Listening to America

#Politics #Unitedstates #History #Society #Listening To America #The Americans

18:09

HR is no longer just about managing people—it’s about shaping the future of work. Jens Baier, BCG’s HR transformation expert, discusses how AI and shifting employee expectations are forcing companies to rethink talent strategies. From re-recruiting to upskilling employees, HR must adapt to a rapidly changing landscape. Learn More: Jens Baier: https://on.bcg.com/41ca7Gv BCG on People Strategy: https://on.bcg.com/3QtAjro Decoding Global Talent: https://on.bcg.com/4gUC4IT…

рік тому 50:49

MP3•Головна епізоду

Clay talks with guest host David Horton about America’s obsession with conspiracy theories, from the notion that the moon landing in 1969 was faked on a Hollywood sound stage to the view that 9-11 was an inside job designed to secure more oil for the United States and justify a war against Islam. What is the psychology of this strange phenomenon? Do the perpetrators believe their assertions, or are they merely seeking fame and profit? What should we make of obviously false claims, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s insistence that Jewish lasers touched off the forest fires in California or Alex Jones’ appalling claim that the Sandy Hook school shooting was an inside job perpetrated to lock up America’s guns? Because Clay recently spent a couple of days in Dallas, Texas, exploring the landscape of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, a considerable portion of the program explores the conspiracy theories around that horrific event. Are Americans more susceptible to conspiracy theories than other people around the world? If so, what does this signify?

487 епізодів

Listening to America

#1626 America’s Fascination with Conspiracy Theories

Listening to America

1,779 subscribers

published рік тому

Поширити

MP3•Головна епізоду

487 епізодів

#Politics #Unitedstates #History #Society #Listening To America #The Americans

Усі епізоди

Listening to America

1
#1642 The Myths That Hold America Back 56:37

14 hours тому56:37

56:37

Clay is joined by Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Dr. Casey Burgat to discuss a new book, We Hold These “Truths”: How to Spot the Myths That are Holding America Back. The book aims to tackle 13 myths at the core of political dysfunction: lobbyists are evil, Congress doesn’t do anything, the Supreme Court has become too political, and there is a demand that we keep politics out of sports. Clay and his guests try to make sense of how much weight they should give to the vision of the Founding Fathers, who Lindsay notes were not saints or Platonic sages but men (and a few women) who put together what they hoped would be a self-sustaining American republic. They grieve the death of civics education in America’s schools, without which we are all subject to political notions that may have no factual or historical basis. And no, says Casey Burgat, we do not want term limits for members of Congress.…

Listening to America

1
#1641 Author, Hampton Sides on Captain James Cook’s Amazing Third Voyage 56:18

7 днів тому56:18

56:18

Clay interviews Hampton Sides, the author of a dozen outstanding books, including studies of Kit Carson, Martin Luther King’s assassin James Earl Ray, the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in Korea, and most recently, The Wide, Wide Sea, Sides’ study of the third and fatal voyage of Captain James Cook. How does one write about a British explorer like James Cook in the 21st century when Cook’s statues around the world are being defaced, decapitated, or torn down due to his role in disrupting the indigenous cultures he encountered in his voyages? Sides talks about his strategy of coming down somewhere in the middle on this cultural and political question. He takes comfort in that his book, The Wide, Wide Sea,has been criticized from both ends of the political spectrum. We talk, too, about his forthcoming book about the Sand Creek Massacre in eastern Colorado on November 29, 1864.…

Listening to America

1
#1640 Traveling America in Search of Its History and Stories 52:28

15 днів тому52:28

52:28

Clay sits down with Nolan Johnson, fellow North Dakotan and Listening to America’s talented videographer and podcast editor. Nolan joined Clay with cameras and drone in hand at key points along Clay’s 21,000-mile Travels with Charley journey in 2024. The two discuss plans for this year’s Lewis and Clark trek from Monticello to Astoria, Oregon, and back again. Clay notes that following John Steinbeck’s 1960 journey was relatively simple with only a dozen must-visit places on the Travels with Charley trail. With Lewis and Clark, things are much richer and more complicated. How can one pay respect to a river journey across the continent by driving along those rivers pulling an Airstream trailer? Nolan has his own history with the expedition’s winter quarters at Fort Mandan in North Dakota and is excited to join Clay at Lewis and Clark sites across the country. Clay outlines his plan to get on each of the principal rivers of the 1804-1806 expedition, his goal to do a series of public events at Lewis and Clark interpretive centers, and his hope of making genuine discoveries along the way.…

Listening to America

1
#1639 Jefferson and the Lewis and Clark Expedition 56:57

22 дні тому56:57

56:57

Guest host Russ Eagle interviews Thomas Jefferson about the American West. When he became the third president in the spring of 1801, Jefferson hired Meriwether Lewis to be his private correspondence secretary. Two years later, he selected Lewis to explore the American West by traveling up the Missouri River to its source, crossing the continental divide, and following tributaries of the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Jefferson discusses his lifelong fascination with the West, his previous attempts to get an exploring party up the Missouri River, his secret message to Congress to get funding for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and his famous instructions to Lewis, which embodied the principles of the Enlightenment. Lewis and Clark led the most famous exploration in American history, so why did Lewis commit suicide just three years after the successful conclusion of his travels?…

Listening to America

1
#1638 Joe Ellis on the 2024 Presidential Election 57:21

29 днів тому57:21

57:21

Clay's discussion with Pulitzer Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis, author of over a dozen outstanding, award-winning books on the Founding Fathers and America's early national period. Joe shares his comments and insights on the 2024 election and the return of Donald Trump to the White House, only the second time this has occurred in American history. And who was Grover Cleveland anyway? Joe and Clay discuss the tenacity of racial tension in American history, the failure of Jeffersonian democracy to create conditions of harmony, compromise, and mutual respect, and the need for a new constitutional convention to address fundamental problems in American public life. Joe is, at heart, an American optimist. He believes we are going through a predictable reaction to rapid social and technological change and that we will get through this as we always have. He thinks the America, which will emerge in the next couple of decades, will come closer to the Founders' visions than might seem presently apparent.…

Listening to America

1
#1637 Historical Integrity in a Hyper-Partisan Time 1:00:59

5 weeks тому1:00:59

1:00:59

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Clay discuss the challenge of maintaining historical integrity during political turmoil and uncertainty. How does a professional historian differentiate between her personal politics, her status as an American citizen, and her responsibilities as a professional historian? In other words, how can the public trust a historian when we venture into something as controversial as the current president, who is a self-styled disrupter of American traditions and norms? How does a historian contextualize current events in the matrix of what is known with certainty about the past? Lindsay is exemplary in her intellectual discipline, but it doesn’t come easy when things we all thought were settled and taken for granted are being assailed by a populist revolutionary. In particular, we talk about Mr. Trump’s first-day pardon of 1,500 individuals convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Can a historian provide an analysis that puts this moment into a context that helps the American people know where we are and how we got here?…

Listening to America

1
#1636 Special Episode: Listener Mail On Clay's Great Steinbeck Adventure 56:23

6 weeks тому56:23

56:23

Clay and special guest Russ Eagle take up listener mail about Clay's recently completed Travels with Charley tour of America. Thousands of people followed Clay's 210-day, 21,400-mile journey across America and sent along numerous suggestions and questions; these included recommended detours, great places to camp, restaurants to visit, and great spots along the route that Steinbeck did not give himself time to visit. Russ and Clay also talk about a recent report regarding the source material Steinbeck used for his classic, Grapes of Wrath. Was Steinbeck a plagiarist? Answer: no. They also preview plans for Clay's 2025 adventure that will follow the Lewis and Clark Trail from Jefferson's Monticello to the Pacific Coast, including how Steinbeck's journey differs from the explorations of Lewis and Clark.…

Listening to America

1
#1635 Peaceful Transfer of Power 55:52

7 weeks тому55:52

55:52

Clay is joined by David Marchick, the author of the acclaimed book, The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America’s Presidential Transitions. The transfer of power in 2021 was not peaceful and it was not efficient. The transfer of power in 2025 will certainly be peaceful, but President-elect Trump is deliberately violating norms that have been in place in U.S. politics for most of a century. David Marchick’s book explores the history of transitions: Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln, arguably the worst in our history, all the way to G.W. Bush and Barack Obama in 2008, perhaps the finest and smoothest transition in our history. We spend some time talking about the transition in 2016-17 from the Obama to the first Trump administration, when Chris Christie worked for months to vet hundreds of potential appointees and provided a brilliant roadmap for Trump, only to see his dozens of binders literally tossed into the dumpster by Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner.…

Listening to America

1
#1634 AI and Quantum Computing, Ready or Not 54:19

8 weeks тому54:19

54:19

Clay and frequent guest David Horton talk about the coming Artificial Intelligence revolution. Like it or not, we are already wading (if not rushing) into that brave new world, and we all better come to terms with what’s ahead of us. Horton’s portfolio at Radford University includes questions of technology, appropriate technology, and the laws of unintended consequences. Horton briefly defines AI and Quantum Computing and suggests how these things are already transforming life. Clay’s concerns are primarily about the future of privacy and intellectual property. The program begins with an examination of how Thomas Jefferson aggregated information for multiple purposes and how the third president might respond to the infinite rain of information in our time. Clay and David also discuss the implications of apps like Chat GPT for the future of education.…

Listening to America

1
#1633 The History of Presidential Transitions 56:30

9 weeks тому56:30

56:30

Clay and frequent guest Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky discuss how an incoming president prepares to govern the United States. In what ways does the outgoing administration advise and guide the one coming in, particularly when the new president wants to make a sharp break with his predecessor’s policies and style? We examine the first four presidencies: Washington, the only unanimous president, who had been preparing for this role his whole life; John Adams, who made the mistake of keeping Washington’s cabinet in place, not knowing until too late that those ministers were betraying him at every turn; Jefferson, whose preparation in 1800 was hamstrung by the constitutional crisis in which the House of Representatives took 36 ballots to certify his election; and the ways in which Jefferson tried to ease the path of his handpicked successor James Madison in 1808.…

Listening to America

1
#1632 A Survival Guide for the Next Four Years 55:13

10 weeks тому55:13

55:13

Guest host David Horton and Clay discuss New Year’s resolutions. Never more important than at present. People across the political spectrum are nervous about the next years of American life. But what’s to be done? Clay offers several ways of coping—taking up a craft that involves one’s hands and not merely one’s brain, reading with discipline and purpose, learning from Aristotle’s dictum that wisdom is knowing which battles to fight and which to leave alone, and much more. Clay and David wind up quoting Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity prayer in unison. Read the complete works of your favorite author. And when things really go south, watch Leslie Nielsen films: Naked Gun, Airplane, Naked Gun 2 ½ .…

Listening to America

1
#1631 The Annual Christmas Show 55:00

11 weeks тому55:00

55:00

Guest host David Horton of Radford University and Clay discuss the history of Christmas, especially its modern invention during the mid 19th century in England and the United States. Thomas Jefferson, a deist, did not celebrate Christmas, but as someone who grew up in the Anglican tradition, he did not shun it the way New England Puritans of the period did. Jefferson was likelier to observe Boxing Day than Christmas, which protestants regarded as another Saint's Day. Clay recites Waddie Mitchell's cowboy poem about Christmas. Clay and David exchange Christmas memories and their favorite recipes for Christmas cookies. At the end of the program, Clay reads his favorite Christmas story, a chapter from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie.…

Listening to America

1
#1630 The Vietnam War: An Interview with Historian Geoffrey Wawro 50:31

12 weeks тому50:31

50:31

Clay welcomes University of North Texas historian Geoffrey Wawro for a discussion of the War in Vietnam (1961–1975), which cost more than 58,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of deaths in North and South Vietnam. Wawro, the author of seven books on the history of war, explains how a superpower got into a quagmire in a small Asian country. Why did Lyndon Johnson escalate the war between 1964 and 1968, when President John F. Kennedy made it clear that he would wind down America’s involvement after he was re-elected in 1964? As the British essayist Christopher Hitchens insisted, is Henry Kissinger a war criminal? What was Richard Nixon’s role in prolonging the agony? How should we assess Secretary of War Robert McNamara? Absent politics, could the war theoretically have been won by the United States and its reluctant allies?…

Listening to America

1
#1629 The Declaration of Independence and Conspiracy Theories 55:09

13 weeks тому55:09

55:09

One of Clay’s favorite guests, Beau Breslin, talks about the early National Period as rife with conspiracy theories. The Declaration of Independence, for example, argued that the ministry and crown of England were engaged in a systematic conspiracy to “enslave” the colonists. Beau argues that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was a conspiracy—even a cabal—of self-selected white men aiming to tear up the legitimate Articles of Confederation without authorization and begin again. The existing Articles authorized a few amendments but not a wholesale rewriting of the nation’s social contract. We also discuss the South’s paranoid (but sometimes legitimate) feeling that the faraway national government, dominated by commercial and industrial interests, was destroying Southern state sovereignty and meddling with an institution they could not possibly know enough about. And, at the end, we take a quick look at one of the enduring conspiracy theories in America: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.…

Listening to America

1
#1628 Civil Rights Pilgrimage with Russ Eagle 1:04:28

14 weeks тому1:04:28