Dear Dr. Date,

There’s no way around it: my girlfriend is obsessed with Andrew Garfield. It all started when we watched Tick Tick… Boom! on Netflix a few weeks ago. We were about halfway through the movie when my girlfriend started commenting on how talented and attractive she thinks Andrew Garfield is. Not gonna lie, he is a pretty good-looking dude and I understand why people are attracted to him, but her crush is starting to get out of control. 

My girlfriend’s TikTok “for you” page is EXCLUSIVELY clips of Andrew Garfield, and she likes literally every single one of them. Not only that, but the only YouTube videos she watches are of Andrew Garfield interviews (the fact that he’s British only makes me more upset). She’s made me watch nearly every movie he’s in and gets mad at me if I start talking during them, especially during Amazing Spider-Man 2. But that was only the beginning.

When I went to her apartment the other day, I was horrified to discover that her shower curtain was covered in pictures of Andrew Garfield’s face. My girlfriend seemed to think it was funny, but I went home and cried. I don’t know what to do anymore. If she’s spending all her time thinking about Andrew Garfield’s symmetrical face… when does she take the time to think about mine? Ever since this addiction has started she’s been texting me less and less – I don’t know where that leaves this relationship.

How do I tell my girlfriend that her celebrity crush is hurting my feelings?

Signed,

Caught in a web of despair

Dear Caught in a web of despair,

First of all, it is completely normal for people to have celebrity crushes, even those who are in relationships. As a certified doctor, I can also attest that many of us on campus have our own Andrew Garfield obsessions, especially since Tick Tick… Boom! came out – I’m glad to hear that you’ve had your fair share of looks into his dreamy eyes.

Eyes aside, it is understandable that you feel upset and insecure about your girlfriend’s celebrity crush, as it seems to have become a prevalent part of her life. The best thing you can do is sit down with your girlfriend and tell her how you’re feeling. Tell her that hearing her talk about Andrew Garfield makes you feel bad and that it’s having a negative effect on your relationship. Remind her that her heart (probably) has room for both her celebrity crushes and her partner. Hopefully, she will begin to keep the Andrew Garfield fangirling to a minimum.

Signed,

Dr. Date

Are you romantically bewildered? Are you sexually consternated, and is your relationship status a little too complicated? Want advice from the Minnesota Daily’s in-house love doctor? Email Dr. Date at drdate@mndaily.com.

The University of Minnesota will pay a former graduate student $75,000 for damages and attorney fees as part of a settlement agreement after the student was sexually harassed by a professor in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. 

As part of the settlement, the student will be able to complete her degree tuition-free. The settlement also requires the Humphrey School to provide students and faculty with harassment and bystander training to recognize and report sexual harassment and grooming. The Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) announced the settlement Friday and will monitor the University for four years to ensure compliance, according to an MDHR press release.

“Schools should be places where students go to learn more about the world and what kind of person they’re going to be,” said MDHR Commissioner Rebecca Lucero in a statement released Friday. “They cannot be places where professors sexually harass students.”

While the report does not name the professor, the student worked under former human rights professor James Ron as a research assistant as reported by the Star Tribune.

Ron held significant influence over her grades, employment and future career goals, according to the MDHR statement. 

Ron made inappropriate comments toward the student about his sexual relations after his divorce, asked her to move into his home as a renter and said he wanted to be her boyfriend once she graduated. The student missed classes and declined going to New York to present her capstone project out of fear that Ron would show up.

The student has not returned to classes since 2018.

Ron was initially suspended from teaching, and the University paid him nearly $200,000 after he resigned from the Humphrey School in July 2020. 

“What should have been a safe and sacred relationship between a professor and a student instead became an unsafe and abusive space,” Lucero said in the statement. “Sexual harassment must stop. Students deserve better.”

Zach: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Daily Discourse with Zach and Matt. I’m Zach.

Matt: And I’m Matt, if I sound weird today, it’s because I’m participating over the phone. I came down with a bit of a cold this week. 

Zach: Yeah. You know, Matt, this, this gig just keeps getting better every single week I get to talk politics. They pay me to do it. And now I don’t even have to look at you when I do it. And this is great.

Matt: No need for the nose plugs either to sit in the room with me. 

Zach: Right. Well, and I’m sitting in the room alone, so I don’t even need to wear a mask either.

Matt: Beautiful. 

Zach: So, today we’re talking now after already having given and discussing our monologues. And I think I can say for both of us that they’re quite interesting. Mine was about what we can learn from the pandemic and about our government’s ability to help us and Matt’s monologue covers the Senate hearing with Attorney General Merrick Garland. Matt’s monologue sparked a good discussion on polarization and rank choice voting. You will want to stay tuned for that. But before we get to all of that, we’ll have a quick discussion about the reconciliation bill. But first, we have a word from the Minnesota Department of Transportation. 

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Zach: So, Matt, I think the news of the week, the news of the past month, the news of the past couple months comes down to the reconciliation bill in Washington. It’s really the most interesting thing I think of the past couple of months that we can talk about. I think before we get going, I’ll just read off where we’re at right now. This is the $1.75 trillion plan as the White House outlines. So there are $400 billion going to childcare and preschool, $150 billion going to home care, $200 billion going to the child tax credit, an earned income tax credit, $555 billion going to clean energy and climate investments, $130 billion going to Affordable Care Act credits include into those uncovered red states, $35 billion in Medicare hearing, $150 billion in housing, 40 billion in higher ed and workforce. And then there’s just some other stuff in their equity and other investments, $90 billion adding up to $1.75 trillion, or as they say $1,750 billion either way. So what are your thoughts, Matt, before we get going on this?

Matt: Well, it’s obviously not what, at this point, it’s not really what anybody had hoped for going into it. It’s whittled down from, I forget what the original was. Three…

Zach: Yeah, 3.4. When Bernie started negotiating, he was up even higher than that, but the agreement that some people thought we had was around 3.4 trillion, but now we’re down even farther.

Matt: So it’s a lot of compromise that’s happening. But that’s kind of how these things go. I mean, even though the 3.4 seemed like a more sure thing, and now we’re all the way down to 1.75. I think this is still, there’s still value to be had here. Hopefully this is as low as it goes and we could maintain a lot of these services and steps forward, but I’m, happier than, than if it was zero, I guess.

Zach: Yeah, that’s totally fair. I think the issue that I would say I have with it is I think, and Jeff Stein, who’s probably my favorite reporter that I read on Twitter, he does a great job of analyzing all of this and he knows everybody. The thing that he outlined is the debate that was being had was whether to do just a few programs really well, or to do a bunch of programs and just give them a little bit of funding. And it seems like they’ve more so opted towards that second option where they’re giving a ton of programs, just a little bit of funding, which, you know, people are going to — the issue with doing the first option, doing only a few programs well, is everyone has their thing, you know. Bernie will always talk about Medicare expansion to 60 and including dental, hearing, vision, those types of things will be his big thing. Other people might say they really want to expand the child tax credit. There’s some people who really care about housing and they all want their thing. So then it turns into this mess. If you ask me when you’ve got just a bunch of different things — and I’m totally on board with you, that any amount of money is better than $0. The issue that I have is if Americans see us spending $1.75 trillion, they’re going to expect it to be good and really make an impactful, noticeable impact on their lives. And I’m just not sure, as this is constructed, if this is necessarily going to do that, I think they would have been better off if we could have gotten climate money, expanded Medicare, lowered it to 60 and done child tax credit. I mean, whatever the number ends up being, if that ends up being lower than 1.75, I still think that would be better than what we have right now. 

Matt: Yeah, I think one of the, one of the kind of responses that I have to that is, it seems to me like the goal here by making it a really broad bill is to kind of touch as many Americans as possible, and making sure that everyone stands to gain somehow from this. If you specifically had a large, expensive climate policy bill, then if some people don’t really care about climate spending, then they’re not going to back it, but if we can have something that’s really, really broad and at least has like some sort of effect and some sort of benefit for pretty much every American then I think, you know what I’m saying? You can get wider support for it.

Zach: No. Yeah. I mean, I agree. And I think only time will tell what actually ends up happening. But the thing that I worry about with the route that they’re going and all of this means testing, which I think, you know — I wrote a column on that. Hopefully people check out that column if they haven’t, shameless plug, never hurt anybody. 

Matt: Always.

Zach: But the problem that I have is with all of this means testing that is bound to happen is they try to hold on to as many of these programs as they can, but they have to cut them, so that means means testing. The thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to miss people when you means test. Oftentimes that means you’re going to miss the poorest Americans who maybe don’t even meet a work requirement. But if we expanded these programs, made them universal, even if we had fewer programs, you kind of avoid that. Which, I don’t know. I mean only time will tell, but I think that the route that we’re going is bad politics, and I think it’s just the White House saying, you know what, we don’t care. We just need to check a box and say, “we completed a large reconciliation bill.” That is the largest since whenever, I mean, technically you can say it’s the largest if you act like inflation isn’t a thing, which I’m sure that they’ll probably try to do. They’ll probably try to do that, which is obviously a little bit misleading, but I don’t know.

Matt: No, I totally take your point. I think that a lot of this too, is this kind of rhetoric about like bringing the country together and having something that we can all be united about and agree upon. I think partly this, this approach seems like an effort to have a really really broad package that people can at least find something they like about. And whether that will actually be effective in practice or not, like you said, we’ll just have to wait and see, but I totally see where you’re coming from.

Zach: Yeah. I, I don’t know if you ever read The Onion. This is going to sound very, very informal discussion for a supposedly formal podcast, but —

Matt: I think we’re all right.

Zach: But the thing that I saw and I’m trying to pull it up, but I’m not going to be able to pull it up in time. Is there’s talk about, you know, doing what I say and doing what maybe you say or what some other people would say, which is the debate about doing a few programs well, or doing a lot of programs and cutting them. And I think the thing about all of this is that Biden is kind of just hanging around and letting whatever happens happen. And The Onion headline that I was talking about was “Biden concerned ambitious agenda could be stalled by him not really caring if it happens or not.” And I think that kind of nails it on the head that Biden is just kind of hanging out and he’s letting you know, he’s letting Bernie, especially, stick his neck out for him. He’s letting the progressive caucus in the House stick their neck out for him. But he’s kind of just hanging around and not really playing as much bully ball as I think many people like me would like him to where … he’s the president of the United States, and I think if he came out and he said, “You know what, no, this is what we’re doing,” and he said it to the American people at seven o’clock on all the networks for everyone to hear. I think that would have a lot of pull, but he just seems to not really care. And it’s just, “whatever happens happens,” which I don’t think is good, but we’ll see what happens. 

Matt: Yeah. I think that’s a really good point. I think putting forward this framework, the most recent one, is something at least, but the kind of public push for it hasn’t really come from Biden himself. I think that’s a good point.

Zach: Right, and that framework while yes, it was released by Biden, it was whittled down because of Manchin and Sinema who are really just running the show right now. It seems whatever Manchin and Sinema want seems to go without really that much public pushback from Biden and I understand that maybe Biden’s having some pushback behind the scenes, but if you really want to make something happen, go public with it, go to the American people and say, you know, “Sinema and Manchin are against you. They’re against me. And we’re going to run a primary opponent against them. If they don’t do what I say,” you gotta say whatever you got to say, but actually care about your own agenda and whether it passes. It doesn’t seem like he has really put much effort into that.

Matt: Yeah, no, that’s a good point and something to kind of keep paying attention to throughout the rest of his first term at least and see how active he is talking to legislators.

Zach: Yeah. And I guess the distinction I like to make, because obviously a lot of what we talk about is public policy. This is just politics, and no matter where you lie, whether you agree with Biden on his policy proposals or not, this is just bad politics. He’s not doing a good job of getting what he wants. You know, Trump, I mean had Trump had bad policy proposals, but he was much more willing at least than Biden to play some bully ball and rip on a Senator if they weren’t doing what he wanted them to do, which you got to have, if you want your agenda to happen. 

So I think we’ll leave that discussion about the reconciliation bill there. We’ll take a short break. We’ll come back and we will have Matt’s monologue for you.

Matt: On October 4th, the Department of Justice released a memorandum addressing what they call a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff” at public schools. The memo announces that within the thirty days following its release, the DOJ will solidify steps that it will take in response to the trend. For example, Merrick Garland has directed the FBI and each U.S. attorney to convene meetings with local law enforcement and prosecutors to increase communication on these issues. The express purpose of the memo and the meetings it will produce is to ensure that local law enforcement has lines of communication for identifying, reporting, and possibly prosecuting federal crimes in the context of the tension at public schools. That is the whole extent of the language in the letter. 

I have to be totally clear here as well. The memo that AG Garland wrote seems to be almost completely informed by a letter sent to the White House by the National School Board Association on September 29. In that letter, the NSBA cited threats and acts of violence against school staff and school board members from coast to coast, at one point likening these threats to domestic terrorism and hate crimes. The NSBA has since rescinded the letter, maintaining their continued concern for school safety, but apologizing for some of the language. 

The whole saga has unfolded during a very real increase in tension at school board meetings. The original letter sent by the NSBA detailed threats, angry mobs and acts of real violence that have been reported to them in the last year. Most of the tension comes from hot-button issues like teaching Critical Race Theory and requiring masking in schools. Both issues have become emblems of the ideological, culture war side of American politics that seems to be taking the main stage in the Trump and post-Trump era. And of course, politicians looking to get a quick sound bite and convince potential voters of their cultural leanings are quick to take advantage of the opportunity. It seems to me that one of the ready-made platforms for these easy quips is congressional hearings, and Republican congresspeople like Tom Cotton (R-AR), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) have used 3 separate hearings of Garland and Deputy AG Lisa Monaco to address the topic of the memo. 

Now, I get pretty disillusioned watching these committee hearings. You may remember former Iowa Republican Representative Steve King questioning Sundar Pichai about an issue he had with his granddaughter’s iPhone. (Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google and had no idea how to answer the question). Or worse, only about a month and a half ago, Senator Jim Risch of Idaho made Secretary of State Blinken laugh by asking him whether or not there was a mute button that someone in the White House could press and stop Biden in the middle of giving a speech. They can be a little outrageous. 

When Senators and Representatives, specifically Republicans in this case, asked Lisa Monaco and Merrick Garland about this memo, however, I noticed something slightly different. All of the questions made heinous leaps of logic from what the memo actually said, to what the consequences of the memo could be. I heard Republican congressperson after congressperson equate the DOJ’s memo with sicking the FBI on parents, politicizing the Justice Department, and calling upset parents a domestic terror threat. None of which it did. At all.

Let’s put it into context. The memo’s language expresses concerns arising from a spike in three things: harassment, threats of violence and intimidation. All three of these are legally defined terms, which Garland reiterated over and over in his testimony. We all may feel intimidated or feel harassed by certain things; we tend to say “he intimidated me” in casual conversation, and it may seem like Garland is using a subjective word. That doesn’t really matter here. Yes, in theory, person A could accuse person B of threatening them when person B really was just passionately expressing their opinion. But (if you have any trust in the legal system at all), person B would not be persecuted or prosecuted in any way if they didn’t commit a crime, and surely would not face any consequences. Keep in mind here that the memo was addressed only to law enforcement and prosecutors at the federal level, who fully understand what these definitions are, and understand that when the Attorney General sends a memo with these terms in it, he is referring to the legally defined version of them. Further, the memo only states that the FBI and federal prosecutors will convene meetings with their local counterparts to discuss plans moving forward. There is no mention of the FBI infiltrating school board meetings, no conflation of parents with domestic terrorists. 

Senator Josh Hawley used his time at an Oct. 5 hearing to tell Lisa Monaco that “I think we both agree that violence shouldn’t be condoned or looked aside from in any way swept under the rug, but harassment and intimidation … what do those terms mean in the context of a local school board meeting?” He goes on to make the point that “in the first amendment context, we talk about … the chill to speech. If this isn’t a deliberate attempt to chill parents from showing up at school board meetings — for their elected school board meetings I don’t know what is.” Tom Cotton, junior senator from Arkansas, asked Monaco and Garland on separate occasions whether or not they think that parents expressing concern are akin to domestic terrorists. Both called for Garland’s resignation in response to their own misreadings of his memo. The examples continue, and I urge you to watch the hearings if you want more, but it takes too much time to go through them all here. I’m more interested in this pattern. 

You see, Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley went to Harvard and Yale Law Schools, respectively. Ben Sasse, who also had some choice, but misleading, words for Garland, got his undergraduate degree at Harvard and his PhD in history from Yale. Whatever that may mean to you  (I know there are inequities in how colleges and universities select their students), but I take it as evidence that these guys are at least relatively smart. Even worse, they understand the difference between legal language and casual language, and they understand that an AG’s letter to law enforcement and prosecutors uses the former. I worry more than anything that it isn’t Garland that is chilling people and whipping up tension surrounding school board meetings, but these Republican Senators. The one page memo never once says that parents are domestic terrorists; it encourages spirited debate. It never once says that FBI will be present at school board meetings. It only says that local officials should have open lines of communication to report crimes that have occurred. Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn said in her questioning of Garland that “sometimes perception is reality” to tell Garland that people may perceive his words as chilling. But all I saw was Garland trying desperately to set the record straight that no one who is within their rights has any need to worry about persecution. The only people I see stoking fear in the hearts of the Republicans are the Republican senators. 

All right, Zach. So I’m kind of interested in what you might have to say about these trends, where we see people specifically kind of stepping to one side of this culture war, in the context of primaries that are coming up. All of the senators that I mentioned in the monologue are Republicans from pretty solidly red states, and I wonder what you have to say about the ways that our election system and the primaries may shape this kind of rhetoric.

Zach: Yeah. So, right at the end, you kind of alluded to the point that I was going to make, which is that you’ve got these people that went to Harvard and Yale, and they have law degrees, and they have a PhD. These aren’t dumb people that are making these comments in front of the Attorney General of the United States. So they know exactly what they’re doing. And if you are Josh Hawley from Missouri, if you’re Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee, if you’re Tom cotton from Arkansas, you’re not worried about a Democrat beating you in a future election. 

Matt: Yeah.

Zach: The only thing you’re worried about is a primary. And so they know that the way that our primary system works now is you need to win a very narrow base in a primary election where it’s only Republican voters that are voting, and those are usually the most polarized voters, and not everyone is going to vote. So you just have a very narrow base that you need to cater to and say the things that you know that they want to hear. And this is a case where you have Joe Biden in an office and he nominated Merrick Garland to be the Attorney General. And they’re just trying to score political points, asking dumb questions, dumb things.

Matt: Yeah. I mean, also Merrick Garland was the nominee for the Supreme Court that the Republicans shut down at the end of, or debatably at the end of, Obama’s second term. So there’s kind of a history here with  scoring points by taking sort of cheap shots at this figure who’s established as kind of a mainstay in the federal legal system, I guess you’d say.

Zach: Right. Absolutely. And I mean, we’ve kind of alluded to it already, but I think kind of what this shows is that we’ve got the incentives wrong in politics and just in democracy where if you have this primary system where in many states it’s closed primary system, so you actually have to be registered as a Republican or a Democrat to vote in that primary. These are the results you’re going to get. And if you have something more like a rank choice voting system, which you now have in Alaska, you don’t see Senator Lisa Murkowski out here making these dumb comments in front of the Attorney General because she needs to cater to the whole state of Alaska, even Democrats. And she needs to win an approval of actually everyone in the state, not just the Republicans. 

Matt: Yeah and not just the vocal minority, right? Because the people who vote in primaries usually are the most engaged, most passionate, people that may not be representative of the state as a whole.

Zach: Right. And we need to understand that. And I think people need to look at it from both angles where I don’t know about you, but I know personally, I am probably someone who is further left than a lot of people. And I am also someone who votes in primaries and we need to understand that not everyone is like me. Not everyone votes in primaries. And if you want to have the best democracy, I think the thing is we need to realize quickly, before long that ranked choice voting is kind of the way we have to go, because these are just meaningless conversations that are only going to spark more outrage, and it’s going to rile up some more people who, this is all they see. And it’s another reason for them to hate Democrats and not like Democrats. And it just doesn’t really do anything positive other than help Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn avoid a primary that’s … that’s all it does.

Matt: And I think the important thing too, to mention here is it certainly can go both ways, with the Democrats. This can be a phenomenon on both sides, because I think it is attributable to the way that we decide to elect representatives. In this case I’m using the Republicans. And I think that if you talk to anyone, if you talk to most people that I know at least, we’d probably agree that the Republicans are in a little more of a fraught situation than the rest of them. Yeah, I guess more than the Democrats, but yeah, so I use them here as an example, but it’s not just a Republican thing.

Zach: Yeah. You know, I agree Matt, and I think we can really expand this to everything in the culture war, you know, you mentioned critical race theory. I think that applies well. You can apply it to mask mandates, vaccine mandates, that really the whole goal for these Republicans and these Democrats is to keep getting elected. It’s not necessarily about enacting good public policy. It’s not about bringing the country together. It’s about winning elections and making sure that you stay in office. And the best way to do that is to cater to your hyperpolarized base and say the things that they want to say, and these politicians on both sides of the aisle are too good at that. 

Matt: Yeah, I completely agree. 

All right, we’re going to take a quick break and we’re going to come back with Zach’s monologue about celebrating the effectiveness of government and what we can learn.

Zach: Alright we’re back.

This past year and about eight months has been tough on everyone. The pandemic has changed how we do many of our day-to-day activities, and it has changed the way we look at many things, especially for me in the world of politics. In my monologue today, that is my main goal — to try and show how the world has changed because of the pandemic, and how this should change our views on our government. 

The most obvious way our lives have changed since the pandemic began was with the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. Contrary to popular belief, these vaccines were not wondrous inventions that we should forever be thankful to the private sector for. The United States government gave over a billion dollars to Johnson and Johnson for vaccines, in addition to spending over a billion dollars on the vaccine doses themselves. The U.S. also funded much of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, giving them billions of dollars. The only covid vaccine in the US that wasn’t funded by the US government is the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. That one was funded in part by 445 million dollars from the German government. 

In short, these vaccines would not have happened nearly as quickly as they did if not for billions and billions of dollars in public, taxpayer money going to not just research, but also into pre-ordering these vaccines before trials were even completed. 

I, personally, am quite thankful for the good that these government-funded vaccines have done. As I’m giving this monologue, my mom is just about a week out of quarantine after having covid herself. She was fully vaccinated, so I had little reason to worry about her getting seriously ill. People are often quick to trash on the government, but this is a clear example of the government doing good and helping people. Why don’t we let the government help us more often? 

The vaccine isn’t the only way our government has done good since the pandemic hit in March of 2020. What about those cash payments? Census data estimates the first two stimulus checks lifted an estimated 11.7 million Americans out of poverty in 2020. The Child Tax Credit expansion has drastically cut child poverty, and if the payments are extended, estimates are that the child poverty rate could drop from 14.2% to 8.4%. 

Since the neoliberal era began with Ronald Reagan, the idea that the government is bad has become the mainstream ideology. You might remember Republican president Ronald Reagan’s famous quote: 

Ronald Reagan: “I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”

Zach: … and you might remember Democratic president Bill Clinton’s famous quote: 

Bill Clinton: “The era of big government is over.”

Zach:  Those on the left are sometimes wishy-washy in their response, but I won’t do that; Reagan, Clinton, and conservatives in general are wrong. Not only is the government not always bad, but actually sometimes it can do some good. 

Now, I’m left wondering: why don’t we extrapolate this success? Why can’t the stimulus checks and Child Tax Credit expansion’s success lead us to a universal basic income, or at the very least an even more robust child allowance program, so we can permanently make drastic cuts to child poverty and poverty in general? Why can’t our success at funding vaccines that are free at the point of service lead us to realize that our government could fund everyone’s health care and make it free at the point of service as well?

As Twitter user James Medlock once tweeted, “The era of ‘the era of big government is over’ is over.” Or it should be, at least. Imagine the good that could be done if we all agreed — as Operation Warp Speed, stimulus checks, the child tax credit expansion, and more have shown us — that our government can do good for us all. But only if we let it.

So Matt, that’s kind of just something I’ve wanted to rant about for a while that people will say that, you know, the government is bad and we need small government, but actually the government can do some good. And I think someone needed to say it. So I said it, and I don’t know what your thoughts are.

Matt: No, I think I totally agree. I think at the very least coming out of the pandemic is signaling a sort of inflection point where we are rethinking what big government can do for us. I think these kind of blanket statements about whether or not government is good or bad or is helpful or unhelpful, statements like that are kind of, they don’t say enough for me. I think it’s important to find out where government can be helpful and then use it for those things. I think one example of this kind of broader discussion happening in the country is with the reconciliation bill, widely expanding social services, I think, is a manifestation of exactly this stuff you’re talking about. Maybe a large swath of the American people are rethinking what government can do for us. But yeah, I think you tapped into something.

Zach: Yeah. You know, I agree that I think a lot of people in the United States would agree with us that these are some programs that we should implement. I think the issue still is going to be getting Congress to implement it on a full scale, because if you looked at the full $3.4 trillion reconciliation bill, that polled like it was looking pretty popular, but now we’re down to 1.7 trillion. I mean, who knows what it actually is going to end up being, but that’s what we’re looking at now, 1.7, 1.75. And if this ends up being a flop by over means testing things and really making things look ugly, could this actually turn out poorly? I worry about that with the reconciliation bill.

Matt: Yeah. Almost like a step backwards, like one step forward, two steps back.

Zach: Right. And I think, I think part of the problem is I think, you know, where I stand on this politically, but I think they tend to overcomplicate these things. You know, a book I’m reading right now is by Annie Lowrey, she’s a writer for the Atlantic and its titled “Give People Money” and it’s talking about poverty, give people money. That’s how you solve poverty. And I think part of the issue is we try to make things so complex with how we’re going to implement it. And I hate to rip on Manchin in Sinema again, but … 

Matt: Do you?

Zach: … they just like to make things so complex that sometimes I worry if that will actually slow the success.

Matt: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s no denying that the reconciliation bill, its original plan, would have been a big step forward, and however people whittle it down regardless to me, and this is what I think is important is: It was popular, and whatever Congress decides to do, I think the popularity of it at the beginning is representative of the American people being a little more open to big government solutions to their everyday problems, like how are they going to get their kid childcare? So I think that that is exciting and hopefully the actual government will kind of catch up, but it’s exciting to me.

Zach: Yeah. I absolutely agree. And I think the distinction that I’ll make and we’re getting a little bit off track, but it’s whatever. The distinction I’ll make is that sometimes I think both Democrats and Republicans will overestimate our ability to implement positive change in other countries. Like if you think about Afghanistan or Central America with Ronald Reagan.

Matt: Yeah, sure.

Zach: But we underestimate our ability to just help people in the United States where we currently are. And even though it was temporary, the good that those stimulus checks and the child tax credit expansion have done shows us that we can do good. The government can do good in the United States, as long as we just let it, as long as people agree that it can because we’ve shown that it can.

Matt: Yeah, no, I completely agree. I hope that that’s the direction we move towards, but I also think it will be really important for the proponents of these services, the people who want big government solutions to these problems, they need to kind of pick their battles really specifically too and make sure not to overextend only in that there are a lot of Americans who still don’t want these things, right? There are still a lot of Reagan Republicans out there that you’ll run into who are really against big government. And they’re kind of set in that track, and incremental steps are still steps. We need to choose which services we decide to expand, how we pick the issues that we want to fix with big government. We need to do that carefully to kind of bring more people under this tent.

Zach: Yeah, I agree. But I think we’ll leave that there. We’ll take a short break and we’ll come back with a short conclusion.

Matt: That’s it for us today at the Daily Discourse. We had a lot of fun talking about congressional hearings and the efficacy of big government and we’re glad that you came along for the episode. Thanks for listening. And we’ll be back with another episode in a couple of weeks.

On more than one occasion, I have talked with fellow college students about our job prospects, and the conversations have rarely been positive. As many of us accumulate a mountain of debt, the utility of our degrees — the job prospects directly resulting from our degrees — seem to be diminishing.

These concerns are sometimes portrayed as being completely unfounded. After all, an undergraduate diploma is a powerful ticket to more lucrative careers after graduation, at least when compared with a high school diploma. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that those with an undergraduate degree make 67% more money on average than their high school-educated counterparts. The same data reflects a significantly higher rate of unemployment for those lacking an undergraduate degree. This suggests that graduates are invariably better off than non-college graduates.

However, that is only one part of the picture. Despite being a key to greater financial success, the purchasing power of the undergraduate degree has come under suspicion in the last decade. According to Peter Capelli, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, in 2015 degrees from about a quarter of colleges in the U.S. earned a negative rate of return. In other words, these degrees were bad investments that never fully paid off. Although college graduates earn more than high school graduates, they do not necessarily make enough to justify going to college for the sole purpose of making money after graduation.

In the search to remedy these findings, much attention has already been given to the increasing cost of U.S. higher education. The average cost of tuition has skyrocketed since the 1970s at both public and private institutions, shooting from $323 to $7,411 and $1,533 to $32,417, respectively. One dollar in 1970 had the purchasing power equivalent to $7.07 today. This means that for tuition to cost the same as it did in 1970, it should be an average of $10,838 at private institutions and $2,238 at public ones. This increase in tuition cost has come under fire and is considered one of the main causes of the ballooning of U.S. student debt. U.S. News reports student debt is currently $30,000 per student on average, creating a deep hole for college graduates to climb themselves out of after school.

The damage done in part by such high prices for college tuition is exacerbated by a phenomenon known as “degree inflation.” While the number of people earning an undergraduate degree each year has tripled since 1970, the actual population has only grown by about half that in the same period of time. The percentage of people with undergraduate degrees has grown steadily, flooding the job market with college educated, “high-skill” workers. The market, however, did not keep up by producing a high enough percentage of jobs that actually required these degrees. As a result, more college educated job-seekers are forced to look to “middle-skill” jobs, which traditionally did not (and in reality still do not) require their college credentials. The higher cost of college tuition is thus even harder to pay because these middle-skill jobs that many recent graduates are forced into usually pay less than high-skill jobs.

The question of whether or not the college degree is worth it hinges on how much it costs the student and how much it can benefit the student. The current discussion surrounding student debt forgiveness or cancellation as well as the push to make public colleges free certainly addresses the cost factor. It solves the problem of non-graduates making less money by simply saying that everyone should be able to pay for college. But making college financially accessible does not mean everyone will actually be able to take classes. College takes time and effort that some people (due to their financial situations or something else) simply cannot expend. Even completely free college does not give everyone equal access to a degree.

In addition to making college more accessible, we need to make sure that people without college degrees can still get hired at jobs that used to be available to them. The flood of college degrees has pushed college educated job seekers to apply for mid-skill level jobs. These jobs are believed to require a high school degree, but not necessarily a college degree. Still, in response to the influx of educated individuals, many of these jobs (over 60% according to a 2019 Harvard Business School Study) have imposed some form of diploma requirement to weed out applicants, because they guarantee certain basic competencies (reading, writing, ability to work on deadlines). This intrusion of college graduates has thus pushed those who cannot get a degree even further down the totem pole.

Frederick Hess, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute suggested in 2018 that the diploma requirement may in fact be illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act essentially bars employers from making applicant requirements that have a disparate impact on minority groups without demonstrating why said requirement is necessary for the job. Hess argues that because Black and Hispanic populations currently have significantly lower graduation rates than other racial groups, they are disparately impacted by the requirements. Further, because justification for the necessity of a diploma is tenuous at best for most of these jobs (service industry, office managers, etc.), Hess may have a point.

We need to make sure that people who choose not to, or are unable to, go to college still have paths to at least the middle class. As long as employers at mid-level jobs are allowed to require diplomas without good reason, non-college graduates will continue to be forced into lower-skill jobs. Abolishing this unnecessary requirement allows many to skip college and still make a decent living for themselves while forgoing expenses or lost time spent at college getting a degree they are not passionate about in the first place.

Whether you are lucky enough to go to college or not, and whether you go as an investment in your future financial success or not, we need to understand the utility of our college degree. Making college a financial possibility for a larger group of Americans is a start, but as long as college takes time and effort, some people will be left behind. As long as lack of college education precludes the attainment of classically middle class jobs, more people will go to college simply to make more (though not enough) money, making an investment that may never give them real returns.

Higher education is an amazing opportunity and a blessing to be thankful for every day. That said, people should not be forced into it to get a mid-skill level job that does not require any skills learned in college, and people who do choose to further their education should be able to get jobs that value their skill set.

Zach: Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Daily Discourse with Zach and Matt. I’m one of your hosts, Zach. 

Matt: And I’m Matt, your other host. 

Zach: It’s great to be back, Matt. We must have not done that bad of a job on the first episode, they let us come back. We have not been fired… Yet.

Matt: Yeah. I’m hoping that we can keep these coming. It’s been a lot of fun. 

Zach: Yeah, I agree. We have a lot to get to, so let’s just get right into it. From here on out, we will each be writing a monologue on a topic that is of particular interest to us followed by a back-and-forth conversation on it. So this week my monologue is on Andrew Yang, his new book, and his new third party called the Forward Party. Matt’s monologue is on this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners, which dives deeper into the state of our media worldwide today. That one, especially, sparked a great conversation. At this point we’ve already recorded our monologues and discussions. So just let me tell you, you really do not want to miss them, but before we get to those monologues, we should talk about ACR homes.

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Zach: You know Matt, with that ad read, I think it feels like we should be co-hosts in like a 7-9 o’clock , or like a 4-6 o’clock like radio show, you know, as you’re driving to work. We did a good job on that one. Anyways, before we get to the monologues, we have some current events in the world of politics that we wanted to discuss. We’re going to talk about Dzhokar Tsarnaev and the Biden administration now seeking that the death penalty be re-instated in his case, he was one of the Boston Bombers, as well as the interesting discussion surrounding Katie Couric and former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Matt, I’m interested in  hearing your thoughts on both of these topics, but let’s start with Tsarnaev and the death penalty. 

Matt: Yeah. So I think the Biden administration’s choice to promote the death penalty for Tsarnaev is a strange choice. and I think hypocritical because Biden mentioned in his campaign that he was against the death penalty at the federal level. The DOJ reinstated the moratorium on federal executions this summer. And it’s a strange, backwards choice to me to now be promoting the death penalty for a specific person, even someone who committed as heinous an act as Tsarnaev committed, the Boston marathon bombing, but yeah, I think it’s a moral failing. 

Zach: Yeah. I mean, I agree. And I guess the way that I would frame it is when you have these discussions about these types of issues, the death penalty being one of them, you really learn people’s true colors when you bring them to the extreme like this. So I’m anti-death penalty. Period. End of story. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev belongs in prison for the rest of his life, but do I think that the government should have the power to kill him? No. During the democratic primary and the general election, it seemed that Biden thought the same thing. But, maybe he thought that was politically advantageous because if you’re advocating for the death penalty for one person, that means you’re not anti-death penalty. That means you’re in favor of the death penalty. But I think, as you’ve been saying, when we’ve discussed this off-air and stuff, this is almost worse, where you’re just going to allow the government to have the authority to step in and say, well, in this situation, yes, we’ll execute the person. But in this situation, maybe we won’t. Are we just going to leave that up to the federal government to decide when they want to and when they don’t want to? 

Matt: I mean, I guess the federal government can’t quite decide — it’s going to the Supreme Court. So I guess there you have it. But, it concerns me that the Biden administration is willing to promote the execution of people who’ve committed crimes that may have a certain political tinge to it. An act of terror, you can use that as a president to kind of make patriotic gains, almost. Where he’s saying, yeah, we’re going to execute this man who committed an act of terror against our country. And that worries me because it doesn’t seem like the stance against the death penalty was authentic. It seems like it was politically motivated, which, you know, maybe it is there, they’re all politicians, but it’s still a hard pill to swallow.

Zach: I mean, I guess my issue with that is when you get to something like this, the death penalty, I don’t know if any stance is going to be politically advantageous because yeah, you’re going to make some people happier if you follow through with executing Tsarnaev, but like, you’re also gonna piss off me if you execute Tsarnaev. So, I mean, that’s just the reality is I don’t know if there’s really a net win that you can have. Yeah. But like, I mean, we don’t need to go on, but I think giving the government the discretion or the government trying to have the discretion of executing people or not is maybe even worse than just having a blanket death penalty, which I also think is bad.

Matt: Yeah, I agree. 

Zach: But, we’ll leave that conversation there. Let’s move on to our other conversation that we said we wanted to have, which was related to Katie Couric and former Supreme court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So Katie Couric recently came out with, she came out with her memoir, which detailed many things, you know how memoirs go. But one of the things that she talked about was people kneeling during the national Anthem. Pro athletes, I mean, Colin Kaepernick was probably the most well known for it. And Katie Couric asked Ginsburg for her thoughts on it. And these are some quotes from her. Ginsburg said that such protest “showed a contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.” She went on to say, “which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from. As they became older, they realized that this was youthful folly, and that’s why education is important.” So some kind of stunning quotes there first, Matt. So what are your thoughts on this whole situation?

Matt: Well, I don’t know, I think there’s a lack of integrity there. For Katie Couric to, you know, include parts of the conversation with RBG and to cut out ones that may not depict her in the light that we kind of came to know her for. It was shocking to hear that RBG said things like that. I don’t think that’s really what her image was, or is, for most of us, just because of what she stood for on the bench and as a public figure. But yeah, I think just kind of plain and simple, there’s a lack of integrity there with cutting out parts that may not be as favorable. 

Zach: Yeah. I’ll also say that Couric did release some of the comments originally at the time, like at the time they said that Ginsburg said that Kaepernick was “really dumb” was one of the things that was released at the time. But obviously I think we can agree that the things that were released in her memoir were probably worse. And I don’t know why you would admit, ‘fess up’ to these things, which it just seems like as a journalist, she failed to meet what she should have done at the time. I don’t know why he would admit to that.

Matt: Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree.

Zach: So I mean, not much to talk about with that. Just kind of an interesting thing. So we’ll leave that conversation there. We’re going to move on to our monologues, but first we have a message to bring to you from the Minnesota department of transportation. 

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I really enjoy doing these ad reads, Matt. Anyways, we’ll take a quick break and we’ll be back with our monologues. Stay tuned. 

Matt: Alright, and we’re back. For this week, Zach is going to give us a rundown of Andrew Yang’s new party, the Forward Party, and he’s going to share a few of his opinions on the problematic nature of our two party system.

Zach: Great. Thank you, Matt. So I think you all should know by now that I’m a little bit of a political nerd. I’m interested and curious about it all, especially on the national level, that curiosity leads me to many questions. Some that I find answers to and some that I don’t, one keeps coming up. What the heck is going on with Andrew Yang? The former presidential candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary just keeps popping up in the news and on my Twitter feed. First, he outperformed his expectations in the presidential primary, going from an unknown to someone that outlasted people like Kamala Harris. Then, he went on to canvas and even temporarily live in Georgia to get out the vote for the two crucial Senate runoff elections. Obviously the Democrats won both of those seats, securing the Democrats a narrow majority in the Senate. Since then, things have gotten even more interesting for Yang. He unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York, seemingly changing his whole persona from the well-liked figure he was in his presidential campaign to a politician, in the worst way. He tried to pander to everyone, said what his Bloomberg consultants wanted him to say, and in the end he had a disappointing fourth-place finish in the Democratic mayoral primary. Enough with his life story, though. Yang recently started his own party called the Forward Party and released a book titled Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy. That’s what I’m here to talk about. The book begins almost like a memoir of his time on the presidential campaign trail, but then shifts to his thoughts on the status of our country, policy proposals to fix the issues we have, and then ends with him laying out the platform of his new third party. As Yang keeps popping up on cable news channels and on Twitter feeds some seem to just keep hoping he goes away. I’m quite the opposite. Whether we agree with politicians on the answers they give or not, we need people in politics that ask the right questions. Yang has been doing just that. For those like me that follow Yang on Twitter and regularly listen to his podcasts, there were a lot of stories, questions, and phrases in his book that you’ve likely heard before. Some of them are crucial to understanding our state of politics today, and I wanted to talk about them more. First, the question of Donald Trump’s supporters, regular readers of the Daily will member that I wrote a column on this issue back in February of this year, titled, “Not all Trump supporters are bad.” While many, including the Democrats, 2016 nominee, Hillary Clinton are willing to write off Trump supporters as worthless, Yang has it right. If 74 million people do something, it’s pretty crucial that we try to understand it. Next, he’s told a story time and again about voters he interacted with on the campaign trail. I’ll play the clip and be back on the other end. 

Don Lemon: Democrats don’t do a good job of speaking to working class people. What do you say to that? You’re supposed to be fixing that. 

Andrew Yang: I’ve experienced countless times on the trail, Don, where I would say, Hey, I’m running for president to a truck driver, a retail worker, a waitress in a diner. And they would say what party? And I say Democrat, and they would flinch, like I’d said something really negative, or I’d just like turned a different color or something like that. And there’s something deeply wrong when working class Americans have that type of a reaction to a major party that, theoretically, is supposed to be fighting for them. So you have to ask yourself, what has the democratic party been standing for in their minds? And in their minds the Democratic party, unfortunately, has taken on this role of the coastal urban elites who are more concerned about policing, various cultural issues than improving their way of life that has been declining for years. So if you’re in that situation, this to me is a fundamental problem for the Democratic Party, because if they don’t figure this out, this polarization will get worse, not better.

Zach: That was Yang answering CNN’s Don Lemon and Yang is absolutely right. I can sit here and say that, yes, I agree with the Democrats far more than the GOP policy-wise, but I can’t sit here and say that working class voters in this country should be pleased with the party that has, time and again, been ran by neoliberal elites like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that, quite simply, didn’t do nearly enough to help the working class to succeed or thrive. If you’re a working class voter and say, screw the Democratic party, I totally see where you’re coming from. But if you’re a Democrat or a left-of-center independent like myself, you need to be asking questions like Yang does. How did this happen? I’ll start with one stat. The last time the federal minimum wage was raised with a Democratic presidency was during the Clinton administration in 1997. It’s been damn near a quarter of a century since Democrats have done the simplest thing to help poor, working Americans — raise the federal minimum wage — and we seriously wonder why many of them feel neglected by the Democratic party? Next, Yang went on Tucker Carlson’s daytime show recently to discuss his new book and new party. Many on the left criticized Yang for daring to go on his show. CNN’s Jim Acosta questioned him on it, and Yang gave a good response. I’ll play the clip and continue on the other end. 

Jim Acosta: Andrew, I just have to ask, I mean, Tucker Carlson, I mean let’s just say he’s just a bad person and he represents so much of what is wrong in television news these days. You know this all too well, he spouts off white nationalist talking points. And so why would you even go on his show and why didn’t you go after him when he’s citing the Unabomber and talking, I mean, just crazy stuff? 

Yang: One of the things we have to do, Jim, is try and take the temperature of the country down, and the only way to do that is to reach out to people where they are. As you know, Tucker commands a massive audience. And if you wanted to try to build a unifying popular movement, that does call attention to the fact that our system’s not working, really for anyone, you know, you have to again, reach out. And that’s what I was doing on that show. I mean, the goal is to have Republicans who are discontent to channel their discontent in a positive way. And right now, in my view, it’s not going in a positive direction. I’d like to help change that. 

Zach: I’m not a fan of most cable news in general, but Yang hits it on the head here. How the heck are we going to come together as a nation politically, if we don’t even try to talk to the other side? So you might not agree with Yang, the things he’s doing or the answers he’s giving, but we need to acknowledge that he’s asking the right questions and recognizing the correct problems. And we need more people in politics, both left and right, that do the same. And Matt, I mean, whether you agree with them or not, I’ve just always found Andrew Yang to be just a fascinating figure and the things he talks about and the things that he says. I mean, no one was talking about UBI before he got on the democratic primary campaign trail. So just what are your thoughts first on that monologue before we get going? 

Matt: Yeah. I think Andrew Yang is going to be an interesting figure moving forward for a while. It’s not everyday that someone tries to start a new party and has the platform going into it that he already does. So I think he’ll be in our discussions for a while. One thing that I wonder about is that Yang isn’t necessarily saying anything new about how polarized we are as a country. I feel like that’s been on our minds before Trump was in office. And I hear people on both sides make these kind of shallow calls for bipartisanship, for unity. And I wonder why does Andrew Yang think that he needs to start a brand new party from the ground up, rather than try and change one of the two major parties from the inside, what’s driving him to go at it from this angle? 

Zach: Yeah. So, I think the issue about, should he go from the third party perspective or should he kind of do it how Bernie does it and kind of do it from within the Democratic party, because, you know, Bernie is in that weird territory where he’s an independent, but he caucuses with the Democrats and he ran for the Democratic primary. Even though he technically wasn’t independent, he’s in that weird situation. So it’s interesting whether we would go that route or go the third-party route. I mean, to be honest, I’m not a big fan of him going the third party route with the way that our system is structured right now, because if you’ve got a two-party race really what’s going to happen is, you’d think if they’re running on the same platform that Yang runs on, they’re just going to pull away from the Democrat and the Republican’s going to win all the time. I think Yang doesn’t want that. And he’s talked about it. I mean, obviously this isn’t, you aren’t the first person to ask this question. He’s been asked this question. So kind of, I think what he’s hoping for,, I don’t want to speak for him, but it almost is going to feel like a PAC at the beginning where they’re going to, they’ll endorse certain candidates and they’ll kind of push for their policies in that way. And if they build up enough of a coalition, then they’re able to give one of the two major parties a run for their money. And I know that doesn’t sound like a great answer, but I mean, I think that’s where he’s at right now. 

Matt: I think you bring up an interesting point about how this may affect the voting for Democrats because he ran as a Democrat before, generally Democrats might be seen as more aligned with his policies, universal basic income for sure. And I think that says a lot for the Tucker Carlson interview and how Jim Acosta seemed to kind of miss the whole point of that, where Andrew Yang has to reach a lot of Republicans to have a chance at this really, or a lot of people who generally vote Republican. Because otherwise he’s just going to be pulling a few Democrats or a few democratic voters, and really just steal from the Democratic candidate. 

Zach: Yeah. I mean, that’s totally fair. I guess the one way that I would push back on that is, I don’t have the polling in front of me, but, Yang, it looked like, was doing well in the primary for president, with people who that were before Trump voters, and who said like, if Yang doesn’t win the Democratic primary, I would go and I would vote for Trump for president. 

Matt: Really? 

Zach: Yes. I think part of that, I guess, I don’t know, he’s less quick to, you know, just straight up rip on Trump. I mean, obviously there’s things to rip on Trump for, but, I would say to a certain degree…

Matt: He’s diplomatic.

Zach: Right. No, that’s totally fair. And also, I mean, universal basic income. While yeah, a lot of leftists will advocate for universal basic income, I mean, even a person like Milton Friedman was big on negative income tax, which is, I mean, not the same thing as a universal basic income, but similar. So there is some crossover there, which I guess is where he gets interesting, where he’s not totally on the left. I mean, I agree that he would totally pull more from Democrats than he would from Republicans. 

Matt: Yeah. So kind of speaking of this and speaking of what platform he might align with most, I hear him asking a lot of good questions, calling out that the political landscape is polarized. Politicians aren’t reaching the real people in their day-to-day lives, the way that they should be at least. But I haven’t heard a lot of the Forward Party’s main answers to these questions. So I guess what is his platform? Can you give us a rundown? 

Zach: Yeah, so he has six main proposals. I would say I’m a fan of them, but some of them just come off as generic and maybe being words that don’t really say that much. So first is a good one. It’s ranked choice voting and open primaries. So that’s probably going to do a lot about polarization. I mean, I’ve written a column on ranked choice voting. I think that we need to have ranked choice voting. And the reason we don’t is because Democrats and Republicans don’t want more competition because that wouldn’t be good for their game now, would it? And the open primaries thing, I mean, you can get into it with what exactly he means by that one example is, it’ll be called like final five voting where you have Democrats and Republicans come in for a primary. So it’s not like the Democrats have a primary and the Republicans that are primary.

Matt: Yeah. 

Zach: And you vote for your person in the primary, no matter who it is, you vote for your person, your one person like we traditionally vote. And then, when you narrow it down at the end of that, you have five people who are the top five vote getters. And then they move on to the final round and what we would think of as our traditional election day and those final five are you rank them one to five in what rank choice voting would be. So, that is kind of his idea with that, which I think would be good at kind of alleviating the whole two party system, because obviously in that system, it’s not really like, your party matters that much because we don’t have to deal with this whole thing about like, if you’re stealing votes from someone you might align with them, that whole thing.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. 

Zach: So there’s a, there’s that one which I tend to agree with and I would think maybe, you do too. 

Matt: Yeah. That’s kind of, that’s kind of solving a problem that he’s creating as a third party. Or not creating, but you know what I’m saying? It’s solving, it’s solving his own problem there.

Zach: Absolutely. And then, number two, now this is a great one. It’s fact-based governance. I mean, like the thing about that is he writes that and a lot of politicians will do this as they’ll write generic statements. That would be like, like ‘we want strong education.’ And it’s like, I mean, I agree with you, but like, what are you going to do about it? Like, I agree that we should have fact-based governance, but like, what are you going to do about it? 

Matt: I don’t disagree. And I wonder if there’s any party out there saying we have fiction based governance. 

Zach: Exactly. So, I mean, that’s that one. And human-centered capitalism, which it sounds like it’s the same thing and it is to a certain degree, but I’m a fan of it. So it kind of thinks about, you know, we have capitalism, but should capitalism really be all about like GDP, and growing the GDP, and getting headline unemployment down as low as possible? And, Yang has gotten into this a number of times, and I agree with him. It’s like, no, it’s not like we go into work everyday, like, you know, I want to do my part in increasing the GDP. It’s like, no, I want my family to be happy. I want my kids to grow up and not be depressed. And it looks at things like we should look at, if drug overdose rates are going down or if suicide and depression rates are going down and how unemployment is kind of a problematic stat and we should look at other things too, like, you know, underemployment. So if you’ve got a four year degree, but you’re working at Starbucks, you’d be underemployed. 

Matt: Yeah.

Zach: Or like labor force participation rate. So that kind of gets into the whole thing about how, if you don’t have a job that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re unemployed, which is something that labor force participation rate looks at. So it’s that one that, which I kind of like,  I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that? 

Matt: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. It would change a lot of how policy is made, to completely change the metric of ‘how do we judge a successful economy?’ But also I wonder how that, it seems like it would be a driver of policy rather than an actual concrete policy. It’s a different way to frame economic policy. 

Zach: Right. So I think it kind of gets into his, like I say, he asks the right questions. It’s not necessarily about the answers. Where like,  even if you go back to like the 2016 Trump/Hillary race, where, you know, I’m really dumbing it down, but Trump was talking about ‘Make America Great Again,’ which you can say what you want about his policies, it’s a good slogan. Because you have people who are, I mean, you have people who are sitting here and they’re saying, you know, Hillary is talking about how she’s going to do the same thing as Obama for the most part and how Obama created this good economy, which in some metrics he did, but in some metrics, you know, if you’re sitting here and you’re hearing one candidate say I’m going to keep doing the things that created this great economy. And you’re like, well, I lost my job. So I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s the type of thing where we need to look at different metrics that are actually going to look at how people are doing. So then the next one is another one that I’m not a huge fan of. It’s “effective and modern government.”

Matt: Interesting. 

Zach: So, I mean, he gets into how, you know, our government isn’t really up to par with where they should be as far as like technological infrastructure and that type of thing, which, I mean, it’s totally a good point, but maybe a little bit vague and say an effective and modern government. And then the next one, universal basic income. I think we’ve already talked about this one to a certain degree. I’m a fan. And I mean, Yang is really someone who’s brought it to the forefront and who knows, but I’m not convinced that we would have had the same discussion around, you know, the child tax credit benefit increase going out to parents or, you know, the stimulus checks, if not for him or at least I don’t think to the same degree it wouldn’t be talked about. I saw one thing, I don’t know if you saw it like a top Google search recently, it was like fourth stimulus check. Like, will I get a fourth stimulus check or something like that? I’ll probably need to CQ that one or our editor will get mad, but they definitely said something like that. And then, then the last one. Here’s another great one. It’s grace and tolerance. 

Matt: Gotcha. 

Zach: So, I mean, again, it’s a good point, but like, I don’t know.

Matt: It’s the things like, it seems to me from those, what was it? It seems to me that Yang’s big thing is reframing how we do a lot of policymaking and how we judge our democracy rather than, it sounds like the only concrete policy position there is universal basic income.

Zach: Well, and I mean, yeah, and I guess you could say the rank choice voting one. 

Matt: Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely ranked choice voting. But that kind of makes sense too, is that this is why you start a third or another party. Because these are kind of fundamental changes to how politics works right now, or at least how we judge it, how we analyze it that I’m not sure it would be possible just joining the Democrats or the Republicans, because they seem pretty entrenched in their ways as it is. 

Zach: Right. And I guess the thing that I worry about is I’m like, I’m going to be completely blunt. I’m a fan of Yang and many things that he stands for, but I don’t know if his message would have gotten out the same way had he not run on the Democratic primary ticket in 2020. You know, those debates are all on TV. I don’t, other than, you know, like, the the driver’s license clip, I’ve never watched a libertarian party primary debate, you know the driver’s license cliff I’m talking about? You don’t need a driver’s license to drive. You shouldn’t need it.

Matt: Yeah. I’ve seen that. 

Zach: But like, other than that, like, I’ve never watched a third party, like I’ve never watched a green party debate. Yeah.

Matt: And that video was circulated as a joke, right? It was a real video, but no one was applauding their policy stances. It was laughing.

Zach: Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, I guess I agree with, we need to look at different things. Because I mean, I wrote a column on it, but I don’t know if you remember the, like, the Mr. Potato head thing and the Dr. Seuss thing. 

Matt: And actually when I was interviewed for a position at the Daily, Sammy, our last editor, asked what my favorite column was that I had read. And that one was my favorite. Because I thought it was what people needed to hear because that was nonsense. 

Zach: Right, and it’s like, my friends would ask me like what I thought about it, and, to be honest, my opinion was just like, who cares? Like, we’ve got, you know, unemployment, we’ve got so many problems with healthcare and polarization and it’s like, you really asking me my thoughts on Mr. Potato Head? Like, I do not care.

Matt: And with Andrew Yang, I hope that he starts to kind of talk about some more concrete policy issues because it’s one thing to say, you know, we need to come together as a country. We need ranked-choice voting as a way to do it. But it’s another thing to start addressing the issues that are so divisive. There’s reasons that people disagree on things like healthcare or stimulus checks for COVID. And it’s because people actually have different views on how we should do these things. Sometimes. Sometimes it’s because they’re too tied to some party or whatever, but Yang is going to have to do a lot more than just address the divisiveness in the country. Because he’s put himself at a disadvantage by creating this new party. So he’s going to need to come up with some really, really good ideas. And I think he’s promoting a couple there already, but I think it’ll be interesting to see too, as he kind of elaborates on things like effective and modern governance and proposed infrastructure changes and updates that can be done in government. But yeah, it’ll definitely be interesting to see how he moves forward with these things. 

Zach: Yeah. I mean, I should be fair. He does also have a page on his site basically talking about some of his proposals. So he has ranked-choice voting on there. He has universal basic income on there. He has democracy dollars on there, which is an interesting idea. If you’ve never heard about it, it’s basically, as a way to flush out, with the Citizens United that we talked about a couple of weeks ago, as a way to flush out that money. If you just give every citizen like a hundred dollars that they can only spend on campaigns. So it’s like a voucher basically. So that would be a good idea. I mean, he’s got ideas on here. 

Matt: Yeah, yeah, I’m sure. 

Zach: But I think part of it is his messaging maybe is a little bit off with, he’s talking about, he’s got his six core values and like, I mean, you can agree with them, but it’s like grace and tolerance?

Matt: It’s like, it sounds managerial like the, I don’t know, like when you’ve got a manager at work, who’s got their core competencies that they’re promoting and it’s like “sharing, happiness.”

Zach: Right. No, absolutely. 

Matt: But that said, I mean, something like a, what did he call it? His six. 

Zach: Core values.  

Matt: Six core values. I mean, there is something there too where it’s like, yeah, you’re not going to elaborate every little policy outcome. That’s going to come from your six core values. But I guess as I’ve seen Yang go on these news shows, I haven’t heard him talk very much about the kind of nitty gritty and I’m excited to see him do that as hopefully he holds onto this, this platform that he’s got right now.

Zach: Right. Yeah. No, I agree. So, very interesting conversation about Andrew Yang. I think we’ll leave it there. We will take a quick break and I’m excited for this conversation about Matt’s monologue. So we’ll have Matt’s monologue followed by a conversation. We’ll be back. 

Alright. We’re back. Matt has prepared an interesting monologue on this year’s Nobel peace prize winners, as well as the state of journalism worldwide today. I enjoyed reading it and I’m sure you all will enjoy listening to it as well with that, Matt, take it away.

Matt: Alright. So the Nobel peace prize is often thought of as this objective award given to a person or organization for their pursuit of peace, justice and prosperity, for all the people of the world. In many cases, the description fits pretty obviously: Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the three-time winner International Red Cross all come to mind, but sometimes not quite. In 1973, the Nobel Foundation awarded Henry Kissinger a joint Peace Prize for negotiating the ceasefire in the Vietnam War, a war in which he played an outsized role. In 2019, Abi Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia who is now waging a civil war in the Northern Tigray region, was given the prize for ending the conflict with neighboring Eritrea.

These winners were used to send a message on behalf of the Nobel Foundation. While these people may not be perfect emblems of peace and prosperity, they were a pivotal part of at least one change: an internationally, politically relevant move towards peace. And this makes sense. There are millions of people fighting every single day, spending tireless hours devoting their lives to peace. These millions of peace promoters may not get the prize, but Henry Kissinger on the other hand does. My point here is that the Nobel peace prize can be a strategic attention grabbing tool. Often it’s not so much about rewarding a specific person as promoting a specific agenda. This year, the foundation chose to use its platform to award two journalists, Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia.

If you haven’t been keyed into Filipino politics or the Russian independent news scene, you aren’t alone. They don’t have the mass following or name recognition of some of the award’s previous winners, but they have each been fighting for decades to promote freedom of expression within their respective countries.

In 2012, Maria Ressa co-founded the news site Rappler, which started sas a Facebook page and quickly turned into a fiercely independent and widely read news source in the Philippines. As we all know, with attention comes criticism and Ressa and her site quickly became a target for anti-media campaigns.

Shortly after, current Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016. He implied that his administration was behind the killing of a crime reporter in Manila. The exact quote, “just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination. If you’re a son of a bitch, freedom of expression can not help you if you’ve done something wrong,”

The president continued the war on journalism with several legal battles aimed at dismantling the free press in his country, suing outlets, forcing news channels off the air, and even prosecuting reporters on trumped up charges. These efforts were widely accepted among those in the media as attempts at intimidation and censorship of those who couldn’t be shut up.

Ressa and Rappler continued to report on injustices perpetrated by the Duterte administration drawing the ire of him and his supporters who blasted the site online, calling it fake news and berated Ressa personally, with a flurry of derogatory remarks. Eventually the legal battles found Ressa as well. When she and the journalists at Rappler were convicted of “cyber libel” in June of 2021, facing up to seven years in prison for making an edit to a column written in 2014. The case was thrown out this August. When the professor i.e. prosecution withdrew the complaint, Dmitri Muratov the other winner of this year’s peace prize has a similar story. Editor in chief of one of the new, one of the few remaining independent news sources in Russia, Novaya Gazeta, Muratov is no stranger to the dangers of his profession. In fact, during his tenure as leader, killings have rocked his staff, one being the famous 2006 murder of journalist, Ana Politikkovskaya, who was a prolific reporter on human rights abuses in Chechnya. Five other staff members have been killed since Muratov took over the Editor in Chief position at Novaya. Nineteen journalists have been killed in Russia since 2002. Muratov has dedicated the award to the killed staff members of his team. 

In choosing such figures, these spearheads of independent, state critical journalism, the Nobel Foundation made their message clearer than ever this year. Media outlets across the world are under immense pressure. The 2010s were mired with reports of media freedoms declining globally, with rises in restriction, so-called “lawfare” (strategic and aggressive campaigns of legal actions against media outlets, like in the Philippines), and general lack of public trust taking the main stage. The Pandemic may drag these issues in darker form into the 2020s. The International Press Institute reported in May 2020 that some governments had begun to take advantage of real misinformation online to ban certain reporting on the pandemic, while others used it to rush through laws banning “misinformation” in general. The throughline here is that governments imposed restrictions on reporting under the guise of verifying COVID information, but with the real intention of censoring and controlling narratives about the pandemic and government behavior. The same study reported a veritable increase in violations of press freedom across the globe during what we now consider the first few months of the pandemic. The IPI’s report includes references to high numbers of physical attacks and arrests of members of the press in all corners of the globe. 

The last time a journalist was given the Peace Prize was 1936, and his name was Carl Von Ossietzky. He reported on Germany’s breach of the treaty of Versailles, and was jailed for libel, just like Ressa. The Nobel Foundation’s rationale for awarding him the prize was “for his burning love for freedom of thought and expression and his valuable contribution to the causes of peace.” Their reasoning for awarding Ressa was her unending fight to “safeguard freedom of expression.” Surely, the reasoning behind giving the Peace Prize to Von Ossietzky and giving it to Ressa and Muratov are slightly different, but each represents the Foundation’s emphasis on promoting the relevant issues of the day, especially when it’s democracy at stake. Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov are representatives of the fight to maintain press freedom during the pandemic. The Nobel Foundation has used their platform this year to make a statement. Press freedom is under attack across the globe, and by bringing this issue to the center stage, they make their point clear: we must do more as a global community to protect the freedom of expression, and freedom of the press.  

Matt: So, Zach, I’m interested to hear what you may have to say about the government and its relationship to journalism. Maria Ressa’s company, Rappler, was started as a Facebook page and with Frances Haugen (or the Facebook whistleblower’s) testimony before Congress recently, there’s a lot of buzz about the role that the government should play in regulating speech online. There are two sides of this one being the government could take over and start censoring people, but there’s also the sentiment that the government needs to step in and regulate these private companies that promote certain content. But overall as such a politically minded young man, what are your thoughts?

Zach: Yeah, so, I mean, first before I get going, I’ll say that this is a very complex issue, with a lot of things playing into it, but I think something good about this is we might not totally agree on this. So I think that’ll play for a good discussion, hopefully. So, I mean Facebook’s complex and is Facebook perfect? No. Facebook has a lot of issues. Not even getting into politics. I mean, I think if you think about young girls and young boys on Facebook and it played a major role in sparking,  depression and just  general unhappiness, I think there’s a lot of problems there with people being on it too much. And you know, Facebook’s a business and they’re trying to make money. But the problems with that, trying to make money, is that you’re just driving more people on there, more people on the app and they continue to become sadder and sadder as human beings. I mean, we could say the same thing about, you know, TikTok. I mean Instagram is maybe the worst of it, which is obviously owned by Facebook as well. But really any of those social media apps, Snapchat, same thing, that you can get really deep into this formula with their algorithm and what they’re going for, but really all it is is people on their app for longer and longer and longer. So that’s one issue with Facebook, but talking about the issue of misinformation, I’m not sure if the issue is letting the government step in. I understand it’s more complex than that, but the thing that I worry about, and I mean, Facebook doesn’t do a good job of deciding what is misinformation or what isn’t, but who is to say the government would do a better job?

Because I mean, the government has lied to us. I think about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there weren’t weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And I mean, you can go back. If you look at the United States during the Cold War, and if you want to call them fibs, we told about the way that things were working in Latin America and what we were actually doing there. I mean, you could go on and on about the ways that our government has lied to us. And I understand this is different, but really it’s not. And those would be the same people. And to a certain degree, they could be policing themselves. So you get into a little bit of a dicey area there, I would say. But the way that Facebook works right now doesn’t work either. I guess the thing that I’ll say is I worry about really letting anyone censor what we can say, because while a big government getting too powerful and this will be bad, I also think a big Facebook getting too powerful would be bad.

So I suppose where I go to is that I just wonder how much power they should have to censor really much of anything, because you can sit here and say that, yeah, they’re going to sensor, you know, this anti-vax information, which you can sit here and say, that’s good. But you can also turn right around on your head and say that they could also take that, and Bernie Sanders says something about Medicare for all, and if Facebook gets paid off by whatever, some big pharma corporation, they could just pin a big ol’ headline saying that no, what Bernie Sanders says about Medicare for all is false. And that changes the way that public opinion goes and, and the way that that whole thing goes. So I just wonder if maybe both of these players have too much power and if we just need to restrict both of their powers.

Matt: Both these players as in the government and Facebook? 

Zach: Yeah. 

Matt: I think either way you go, whether you think that Facebook should be handling the regulation, or the government should be handling regulation of content on Facebook, there are nightmare scenarios either way really. But also I think that what we’ve got right now is in need of some reworking. 

Zach: Absolutely. 

Matt: I agree with your idea or your sentiment that it’s scary to think of any sort of censorship online. People talk about discussion on Facebook and on all these other social media platforms as kind of free speech adjacent in that, no, it’s not free speech because it’s happening on these private platforms, their companies, they get to regulate what they want to, but hese sites are so incorporated into how we work as a society at this point. And there’s no denying that. So to me, I say we need some sort of government interaction with what is said on the sites, because they really are, they’re private companies, but they are a center of public discourse. And I kind of line up with what Frances Haugen was saying in her testimony, which was, we don’t necessarily need people shutting down certain speech. But we need some sort of regulation on how the algorithms work. And this’ll be interesting because Congresspeople have no idea how Facebook works. There were all those videos that came out. I think it was, it was in 2020. It was after the election, of Congress kind of grilling Mark Zuckerberg and AOC had had some good questions, but AOC is also very young.

Zach: There was one, it was something like, “Mr. Zuckerberg, can you explain how you make money, if you don’t charge for your app?” And then it’s like, “we have ads on our platform.”

Matt: I think someone, someone asked the CEO of Google. I forget his name now. 

Zach: Oh, they asked him a question and it wasn’t about his company. 

Matt: Yeah, it was about Apple. So that’s concerning, right?. And we need, these are brand new technologies as far as the lives of people in Congress go. But also, so what people talk about a lot is section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which basically says providers of interactive computer services shall not be treated as publishers or speakers of any information provided by another content provider. So these platforms are not responsible for what is said by other people on their platforms, is basically how that’s been interpreted. And my issue with it, and I think what’s going to be interesting, in this conversation moving forward is that frames these providers as passive, which they objectively are not in the conversations that happen on their sites. They can interact with content without being the poster of the content. So when, I don’t know, if someone posts some COVID-19 misinformation, right? If it’s, really, really crazy, it’s going to get a lot of engagement. And the way that they currently run is engagement based ranking. The more engagement it gets, the more play it gets, whatever. It kind of ends up being, if it bleeds, it leads. And the craziest stuff gets promoted the most. So without Facebook itself, as an entity, actually putting content out that’s misleading or whatever, or inflammatory, they can still promote that content. And that’s where it comes to me, where it’s, maybe it’s not about shutting down certain speech, but it’s about regulating how Facebook promotes different speech, because, I don’t know, I think there’s this almost sort of like natural, if people, we would just kind of flatten the ranking, right? I think there would still be chances for public discourse and free sharing of information to happen. And the really important things that need to be shared would still get shared. I just think it’s concerning that there’s no regulation of that as it stands right now. 

Zach: Yeah. I mean, I guess I see your concern with that. And I also think part of that is that, you know, if you say that Facebook and Twitter kind of raises the temperature in the room politically, I absolutely agree. I guess, I don’t know what regulation you maybe are saying would impact that. And I also agree with  section 230 to some degree Facebook, and these other social media companies are kind of defined in the wrong terms, as far as what they are. Should they be just a platform where you post stuff and it can’t be regulated or are they a publisher where they have control over the content? So are they more, just like you’re walking down the street, that would be like a platform, but if they are more like a newspaper that will be like a publisher, can they totally control what you want? That would make them a publisher. And that would open them up to far more regulation as far as what they can and can’t do. You think about the Washington Post can’t just write what Joe writes on Facebook. I think that if you’re going to categorize them as a publisher, that would be the end of Facebook as we know it, which might not be a good thing, but if you’re going to say that ‘yeah, there’s lines where that we need to change it,’ I think I absolutely agree that there’s lines where Facebook and Twitter might need some regulation. I guess I don’t know quite how that would work, but generally speaking, I guess I would agree with you on that. 

Matt: Yeah. To be honest, I don’t know how it’ll work either. I don’t think many people know how it’s going to work. The Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, kind of alluded to a couple mechanisms that Facebook could use to mitigate this spread. One of the things comes down to things as trivial as, internal research at Facebook showed that, just asking someone to click a, “Are you sure you want to post this?” button before they post whatever, could help stop the spread of these things. And that doesn’t feel to me like any sort of real regulation on people’s speech. But yeah, it’s going to be interesting. I think it’s going to take research and it’s going to take  transparency on Facebook’s part. It’ll be something that we see moving forward for a long time. I just think that I worry about people being too flinching, too hard hearing about potential government regulation on these things, because I think there are ways that we could do it that stay far away from limiting any type of free speech. 

Zach: Yeah. And something else that I want to hear your thoughts on. I know I have thoughts on it. Former president Trump being banned from Twitter, what are your thoughts on that?

Matt: I think it’s sort of a scary precedent moving forward, but also I think it was an unprecedented moment when he was banned, or he was banned for unprecedented reasons, I guess you would say. I don’t know. I worry about how that moment could be interpreted moving forward, and whether or not the same thing could be done to someone like Bernie Sanders, like you said before, if he started, I can’t imagine a scenario where he starts saying things similar to what Donald Trump was saying on the run-up to him being, banned from all those platforms. But yeah, I don’t know. I guess it comes down to how I want regulation to happen in the first place. 

Zach: I guess the line, the line where I draw it and where it worries me is, you know, if I say something crazy, I’m just an average Joe. If I say something crazy on Twitter and they’ve got rules and stuff that I can’t say this, and they want to ban me, that’s cool with me. But I guess where I draw the line is Trump won an election in 2016. However many million people voted for him and he won the election. And then you can have a very powerful company, a corporation turn around and ban what the sitting President of the United States has to say, is something that worries me about the power that a corporation or a company like Twitter or Facebook would have in kind of setting who can win elections.

Because, I mean, if you think about it, Trump was never going to win a presidential election if he didn’t have Twitter. Because that’s kind of where he took off and where people really started to follow him, and that’s where he gained his following. I mean, you could say the same to a certain extent about Andrew Yang or, I mean, especially AOC, if you think about, very recently AOC took off on Twitter and just social media in general. So I worry about the power that gives those types of companies. If they can regulate, you know, people running for office or sitting politicians, if they’re able to say, no, you can’t tweet anymore. And I understand that you can say it’s more complex than that because in early January and you know, ever since, I guess the 2020 election, Trump was lying about how he lost, there’s no way around that. But I still think it sets a bad precedent that a company can just ban the sitting President of the United States.

Matt: And I think part of the issue with that, and this is, this is why I try to stay away from even discussions about whether or not these platforms should be able to regulate actual speech. I stay away from that because there’s always the cop out of ‘these are private companies. They’re allowed to do what they want.’ And then there’s the flip side of that, where it’s, ‘these are private companies. They shouldn’t be able to shut down the President of the United States, even when he’s saying something crazy.’ I think what we should learn from that is what we should learn from what is happening right now is that they should, I don’t think they should be allowed to regulate speech as it is to shut down. Well, okay. There are obviously limits to that… 

Zach: Well yeah, but I mean, yeah, I see where you’re going, but I’ll stop you for a second. I think the rules should be different for you and me versus Joe Biden, I guess is what I would say. 

Matt: Yeah. I’m not sure if I agree with that. 

Zach: Just because crazy it is, people deserve to hear what he thinks. And he’s a sitting president of the United States. And if he’s thinking crazy things and saying crazy things, this is a democracy and voters should be able to hear that and know that. 

Matt: Yeah. I think the Trump situation too is interesting because, and something needed to be done about what he was saying… I guess. But I don’t know. I get tied up with this one because I don’t think a private company should be able to shut down such a huge platform for the sitting President of the United States. But also I think they should be responsible for what is said on their platform. And that’s why I think it comes down to, what active role are they playing in what is being said? And being a corkboard for people to pin up their crazy thoughts and ideas is one thing. But promoting them is another. And I think that, so Trump already had his platform, right? He didn’t need to get promoted very much when he was on the run up to him being banned. He was the President of the United States. But I think that if Twitter, Facebook, all these platforms that banned him right in, January, wasn’t it? 

Zach: Yep. Yep.

Matt: They only to me needed to take responsibility for their active role in it and shutting down an actual account, I don’t think in his case, is as horrible as what he was saying was, I don’t think the correct move was to shut him down, but I don’t think it would be to shut down anyone. I think their job is to be responsible for the part that they play in promoting the content.

Zach: I would say that that’s fair. I think that the issue is when we think about Trump and talk about anti-vax or how he lost the election, but he keeps on lying about that. I think I see that being more the fault of players in the game, like Fox News or Newsmax or OAN than I see it being the fault of Twitter. So, I mean, kind of tying it back into your Nobel peace prize monologue, I think I see more of the problem with some of this misinformation coming back to journalism. I don’t know how to just say we need better journalism or we need better, more honest journalists. But the role that Twitter played in the game, in that game, yes, they played a role and Facebook the same, but if we had Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, if there was better local journalists, that people actually trusted, if you had those people laughing Trump off stage and saying, this is a load of crap, Trump lost the election. I think that it would have ended differently. And I guess that’s the thing that I see is, if that we had an environment where on Twitter, it didn’t need to be Twitter, this massive company, saying that the things are wrong. If we had an environment, which obviously we don’t, where we could have journalists saying, this is where they’re wrong. And it was actually an environment where we trusted them? I think that is the environment I guess I would aim for for combating that. Which sounds like utopia. I understand. 

Matt: There’s journalists right now that are in a very politicized role and I don’t, I don’t know the history of journalism enough, I guess. But I’m sure there’s always been an element of that. I just worry about “journalists” like Tucker Carlson. 

Zach: Yeah, I was, I was going to say some people are going to give them crap for, I just referred to Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson as journalists.

Matt: But yeah, it’s like this is one of the other issues is when you talk about we need good journalism. That’s true. And the kind of, I guess the not absence of it, but the presence of really bad journalism in people like, like OAN and like Fox, specifically. 

Zach: Right. Or just, there’s still a piece in the Atlantic that I want to get to reading. About how just these hedge funds are just kind of sucking up local journalism and then just either shutting them down or completely gutting them so that they don’t have the same kind of investigative power or they just cut their investigative journalism or whatnot, because I mean, local journalism is just so important to just keeping trust in society and in institutions and that whole thing.

Matt: Yeah. And I wonder what, because what I see as happening is, there’s an obvious, there’s this presence of not great journalism, journalism without integrity, at places like OAN and Fox and the presence of those things can be exploited for governments to start shutting down real news outlets. And that’s what I think about with Rappler where it was a fake news campaign, you know, that’s what Duterte had had kind of latched onto. And it’s something we hear all the time is fake news, fake news, fake news. Because we know that misinformation is out there. We know that shoddy journalism exists, but it’s really hard to, I guess, separate those things. Or it’s easy for an executive with a lot of power to exploit the presence of misinformation to shut down the information that he doesn’t like. So we need to figure out how to legally separate those things or something. And I don’t know if it comes from fact checking news outlets more and more and more and more, but then who has the power to do that? Because when we talk about regulating misinformation, we need to figure out what is misinformation in the first place, because right now, people who care about regulating misinformation people can, people are taking advantage of that essentially, to regulate actual journalism. 

Zach: Right. And I think I agree kind of with your idea that maybe the problem isn’t the crappy journalism at the top, but that we don’t have enough good journalism overall. And I mean, I guess the way that I look at it is, so I come from, you know, small town, Willmar, and if we had more people reading that local newspaper, than I think do, because they keep shrinking as do all local newspapers, it seems. If we had more people reading that and you know, their neighbor down the street, who is an investigative journalist, or is a political journalist, and, you know, they trust that guy down the street rather than watching Tucker Carlson, which is kind of the way that things are shifting on more of a macro scale. You take that across all small communities or all areas that are losing their local journalism. If you take that across everything, it’s just going to create just that misinformation that comes, I guess, is the way I look at it. 

Matt: Yeah. It’s interesting. And it’s something that may be a product of the internet and the 21st century, but it may just be something that’s always been around and is going to be exacerbated now because the wealth of information out there is staggering and it’s hard to regulate all these things. So we just need to figure it out. But yeah, it’s going to be a question for us moving forward, I think for a long time. 

Zach: Right. Alright, so great discussion on that Matt. I think sadly, we’re going to have to leave it there because otherwise we’re going to turn into like a Joe Rogan, three-hour podcast. So we’ll just leave it there, take a quick break, and we’ll be back with a short conclusion, 

Matt: I don’t know about you, Zach but I had a great time with these topics. It will be interesting to see how the Forward Party proceeds in the coming years.

Zach: Yeah, I do too. And it was very interesting  talking more about, especially, the Frances Haugen testimony on the Facebook whistleblower before Congress, as well as on the Nobel peace prize and just journalism more generally, and the idea of misinformation on Facebook, while we disagreed on some aspects of it, I thought it was a very meaningful discussion where, you know, I think I learned more about what I think and I mean, maybe you would say the same.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Alright. With that, we’ll wrap things up. Thank you for sitting in on this second episode of the Daily Discourse with Zach and Matt. We will be back in two weeks with another discussion.

As a 30.5-point favorite against Bowling Green, Minnesota’s shocking 10-14 defeat was statistically the biggest upset in college football this season and the biggest in two seasons. The monumental upset has raised the question of where it ranks among the Gophers’ most surprising losses in their 139-year program history.

What makes a loss bad is obviously subjective, but there is no escaping a historic upset. There is ultimately a reason why you play the games, no matter what the talent difference is, either team always has a chance to leave with a victory.

“I don’t evaluate losses, losses are losses, losses are lost,” Gophers head coach P.J. Fleck said after the game. “Bad losses, good losses I get all that. There are bad wins, good wins, it’s either a win or a loss and you get a chance to learn from all those.”

The Gophers have played nearly 1,300 games in their program’s history, losing 521 of them, but five losses in particular stick out over the rest.

Oct. 5, 1898: Minnesota: 0 Alumni: 5

A game that took place over 122 years ago obviously does not have the same box score or context as one would today. The Gophers played a team called Alumni three times in their history (1887, 1898 and 1899) with the only loss coming in 1898.

One could speculate that the team was made up of alumni of the University of Minnesota and its football team, but there is no telling how old the alumni were. In today’s context a loss to a team made of modern Gophers’ alumni would be much more than a surprising upset.

Sept. 27, 1986: Minnesota: 20 Pacific: 24

In a game played under a much more modern context of football, the Gophers suffered a surprising 20-24 loss to Pacific. The University of the Pacific located in Stockton, Calif., played the 1986 football season at the NCAA Division 1-A level (FCS).

Before they took on the Gophers, the Tigers’ last winning season came in 1977, and they had been far from the storied program like Minnesota.

In John Gutekunst’s first season as head coach, the Gophers lost a home game in September to Pacific, who would go on to finish 4-7 on the season and remove its football program less than 10 years later. The early loss was a less-than-ideal way for Gutekunst to begin his career with Minnesota.

Aug. 30, 1997: Minnesota: 3 Hawaii: 17

In another Minnesota head coach’s first season, Glen Mason’s Gophers team came up short against the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors. It’s a tough task for any first year head coach to win his first game, but a loss to a Hawaii team that was coming off a 2-10 season the previous year was still very disappointing.

The Rainbow Warriors would go on to finish 3-9 in the 1997 season. However, Mason did not let his early struggle define his Gophers’ coaching career, earning the fourth most career-wins in program history (64).

Sept. 11, 2010: Minnesota: 38 South Dakota: 41

After Mason’s replacement four years into his tenure as head coach, the Tim Brewster-led Gophers were knocked off at home by FCS foe South Dakota. Competing at a whole division lower than Minnesota, the Coyotes’ upset victory was the highlight of its season as they finished 4-7 in 2010.

The shocking defeat would be Minnesota’s second in program history against an FCS opponent, the first of which came against Pacific 24 years earlier. 2010 would be only the Coyotes’ third season at the Division 1-A level.

Sept. 10, 2011: Minnesota: 21 New Mexico State: 28

New Mexico State football has had two winning seasons since the turn of the millennium. The Gophers shocking loss in only Jerry Kill’s second game as head coach was to an Aggies team that would finish the season with a 4-9 record.

The on-field result was far from the only story, as Jerry Kill would be rushed to the hospital with only 20 seconds left in the game after suffering a seizure on the field. Given the circumstances, the result of the game was far less important, but nonetheless a game that the Minnesota football program would like to forget.

Just as Bowling Green shockingly took down the Gophers on Saturday, Minnesota will have every chance to take down every other opponent it faces this season. One loss has never written the story of a season, and this one will not be the first.

The 2021 edition of MLB’s annual draft continued on Monday, July 12, as two Gophers heard their names called. Alec Willis was selected by the St. Louis Cardinals in the seventh round and Zack Raabe was selected by the Milwaukee Brewers in the eighth.

Regis Jesuit High School’s Alec Willis was selected No. 211 overall in the seventh round by the St. Louis Cardinals. The 6-foot-5-inch right-handed pitcher became the highest drafted incoming freshman in program history.

Many viewed Willis as the No. 1 high school player in his home state, Colorado. He was dominant in his senior season, recording a 0.77 ERA and striking out 54 batters in 29 innings in 2021. Prior to this week’s draft, he ranked as the No. 130 prospect among draft-eligible college and high school prospects according to MLB.com.

Zack Raabe joined Willis as an MLB selection. In the eighth round of the 2021 MLB Draft, the Milwaukee Brewers used the No. 237 selection on the second baseman. He is the highest drafted Minnesota position player since Terrin Vavra was selected No. 96 overall in the third round by the Colorado Rockies in 2018.

Hailing from Forest Lake, Minnesota, Raabe epitomized Gophers’ baseball throughout his three year career. He was the second of his family to don the Maroon & Gold, as his father, Brian, earned All-America honors during his career as a Minnesota infielder in the 1990s.

Zack lived up to the family name, leading the nation in hits for the 2020 season and leading the Big Ten in batting average, en-route to earning Collegiate Baseball Newspaper second team All-America honors. He followed up his big sophomore season, hitting .315 with 6 HRs and 11 RBI in 35 games in 2021 on his way to earning second team All-Big Ten honors.

According to multiple reports, Willis and Raabe are both expected to sign a contract with the teams that drafted them. Willis’ signing bonus with the Cardinals is expected to be $1 million. When the official contract terms are reached, he will officially forgo his commitment to the University of Minnesota, without ever playing a game for the Gophers. The value of Raabe’s contract has not been released, but the slot value for No. 237 pick is $175,000.

2021 marks the seventh MLB Draft in a row where a Gophers player was selected within the first 10 rounds.

It was an overcast day in late April, one day before Earth Day 2021, when Kendra Kloth put on joggers and a fleece jacket and stepped out of her residence hall, ready to pick up trash. 

Armed with reusable gloves, trash bags and plenty of layers to protect them from the chilly spring air, Kloth and her team of nine marched into the Como neighborhood near the University of Minnesota campus and started stuffing their bags full with discarded wrappers, bottles and other garbage littering the streets. 

Scattered around the Dinkytown and Marcy-Holmes neighborhoods were 35 other students, also picking up trash as part of a campus-wide trash cleanup in honor of Earth Week.

Kloth, a second-year student at the University, is a member of 365Green, a club dedicated to sustainability at the University and one of the organizers of the cleanup. Founded in early 2020 by the club’s current president, Jacob Bechtold, the club promotes sustainability through advocacy and action. 

“Our main goal is to provide students with education or action through social media, political policy impacts and partnerships with local organizations to further education and action for climate change on campus,” Kloth said. “We want to get as many people involved in trying to understand what sustainability is and how sustainability can better our climate change fight.”

Bechtold is an incoming third-year student at the University studying industrial and systems engineering. He said that at the onset of the pandemic, he observed that many sustainability issues were “taking a backseat” to the virus and decided to take action from his home. 

“I just reached out to a bunch of my friends from high school and college and we just met on Zoom a couple times and came up with the idea,” Bechtold said.

Bechtold’s dad came up with the name, a nod to the club’s dedication to sustainability.

“The idea behind it is that we try to promote sustainability and make the world a more “green” place, 365 days a year,” Bechtold said in an email. 

The Earth’s temperature has risen by about two degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century — largely due to human activity. Due to increased carbon emissions around the globe, sea levels are rising, glaciers are shrinking and the ocean is warming up, according to NASA. 

365Green is one of more than 30 student groups at the University that seek to address some aspect of sustainability and environmental responsibility. 

Though 98% of 365Green’s members are enrolled at the University, the pandemic and virtual platforms like Zoom made it possible for the group to include members from other schools like the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Drake University, Bechtold said.

Staying green during the pandemic

While many clubs have stopped meeting regularly over the summer, 365Green continues to hold events and biweekly meetings.

In June, the group went on an evening hike to Hidden Falls Park in St. Paul. On July 1, members gathered for a vegetarian grill-out and on Sunday, the club picked up trash along their adopted portion of Highway 212 in Chaska.

“It helps that a lot of us have just become pretty good friends,” Bechtold said. “With COVID, sometimes 365Green was one of the only social things I did that week. So we’re all pretty tight now. Everybody wants to go do fun things together.”

Because the club began mid-pandemic, in-person events and meetings were few and far between over the past year. However, Bechtold said that club members have been engaged and ready to learn, even virtually. 

Over Zoom, 365Green hosted a variety of guest speakers, such as professors from the University and leaders from environmental activism groups in the Twin Cities. Other meetings were “informational action meetings” where one member of the group would talk about a local or global issue affecting the environment, and then the members would break out into groups to discuss. 

Luisa Nothaft, one of 365Green’s executive board members, lives in Brazil. Nothaft used one informational action meeting to conduct a presentation about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

“The entire meeting was just a conversation about the Amazon rainforest, the destruction and how local politicians are reacting to it,” Kloth said. “I feel like I learned a new thing about an issue every meeting, which is super exciting.”

Along with learning about the environment, the club has also contributed to local environmental activism around the Twin Cities. Last summer and fall, Bechtold and his team worked with the Bloomington Sustainability Commission to create a declaration defining climate change as a crisis in the city.

In late March, members of the club organized a protest outside of a Chase Bank building on campus. The national bank is a financial supporter of the Line 3 oil pipeline project. 

The Line 3 pipeline project is a proposed expansion to an existing tar sands pipeline that runs from Alberta, Canada to Superior, Wisconsin. Activists are protesting the expansion of the pipeline, citing environmental concerns and a violation of the treaty rights of the Anishinaabe people. 

“I feel like that had a really powerful impact on my view of the club because we were able to socially distance, but get together and promote a cause,” Kloth said. “I’m excited to do a lot more of that next year.”

365Green moving forward

The club had its first set of elections last April. Kloth was elected as the new partnerships lead  — a position designed to work with local organizations to promote their businesses while advising them on how to implement more sustainable practices.

The club’s Cut Out Cutlery campaign — a campaign encouraging businesses to stop using or giving out plastic utensils to customers — is taking off this upcoming school year. This past year, the team had conversations with Coffman Union about their compostable cutlery system.

“We are going to try to connect with restaurants in Dinkytown and move them towards more sustainability practices, whether it’s offering a couple more plant-based options for their menu, or trying to avoid [disposable cutlery],” Bechtold said.

Next year, Bechtold said the club will continue to do campus clean-ups, and he hopes to start a “sustainability olympics” with the other environmental activism groups on campus. 

The club also plans to create a community garden in Van Cleve Park near campus, an idea spearheaded by Evan Redepenning, the vice president of 365Green. 

“Starting the conversation and getting people involved and to know about [sustainability] is the first step in making change,” Kloth said. “I’m still having conversations with my parents and my friends about these things, like, every week. That way, people are more aware, because it is such a big issue.”

The University of Minnesota is a special place — and I’m not just saying that because my education is the largest purchase I’ve ever made. It is one of the original land-grant universities as established by the Morrill Act of 1862. Essentially, the Morrill Act designated land to states who then sold that land and used the profits to establish public universities. While the ethics regarding land ownership are deeply questionable, in the age of skyrocketing college tuition and educational inaccessibility land-grant universities often provide a more affordable option to private colleges and universities.

Today, the “land-grant” designation means that some portion of that funding comes in the form of federal and state funding. The one-to-one match requirement is a key component of the identity of land-grant universities: The home state of the university must match federal funding for these institutions, dollar for dollar. However, at the end of the day, the state legislature determines whether or not that matching actually occurs.

The University of Minnesota financial requests for the 2022-23 fiscal years are lower than they have been in the last 20 years. Amid pandemic-related deficits and government delays, it seems strange for the University to request less funding from the state, not more. The question remains: Will the budget deficit fall on the shoulders of students?

President Gabel’s proposed budget already allots $49.7 million dollars to be reallocated from lower priority projects. It also states that “the projected increase in tuition revenue of $13.6 million results from projected enrollment changes, a proposed increase in the general resident and nonresident, graduate and undergraduate rates on all campuses of 1.5%, the continued phase in of the tuition surcharge for the TC College of Science and Engineering and a proposed surcharge for the UMD Swenson College of Science and Engineering, and various market driven rate changes for various masters and professional programs.”

In a June 9 email statement, Director of State Relations Kelly Mellberg stated that, in the agreement published by the legislature’s higher education working group, only 82% of the University’s proposed budget was fulfilled by the legislature. Provisions that were not included by the working group include a request to decrease undergraduate tuition and a reduction in funding for Regenerative Medicine Minnesota.

The University’s budget does more than dictate tuition prices: It directly affects the economy of Minnesota. The University of Minnesota system employs over 27,000 people across the state and is considered one of the best employers not only in the state, but also nationwide. At a legislative breakfast, Gov. Tim Walz stated that “there’s strong agreement that the foundation of this state’s economic engine, cultural engine [and] social engine has been our University systems and of course, the University of Minnesota being the flagship.”

While the legislature’s decision remains subject to change, the impact of the University’s budget goes much farther than the boundaries of the Twin Cities campus. With budget requests at a 20 year low, it is unacceptable for the state legislature to deny the University this funding. It is deeply unfair for budget cuts to fall on the shoulders of the student body — many of whom spent the last two semesters paying full price for online courses — or on employees.

Community feedback on the proposed budget for the 2022 fiscal year can be submitted here until midnight on Wednesday, June 23.