Part Four: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part Four - Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Release Date: January 23, 2025
Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

In the fourth installment of "Behind the Bastards," host Caitlin Durante, along with co-hosts Bridget Todd and Andrew T., delves deep into the complex and often controversial legacy of Oprah Winfrey. This episode critically examines Oprah's profound influence on American culture, media, and societal norms, ultimately questioning whether her actions and decisions merit labeling her a "bastard."

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1. Oprah Winfrey's Unmatched Media Influence

The episode opens with a candid discussion among the hosts about the pervasive impact of media moguls, with Oprah standing out as a central figure. Caitlin Durante emphasizes Oprah's unparalleled reach, especially among middle-aged American women, stating:

"Oprah is immediately and for her whole career very, very much locked into like 30 to 50-year-old middle-class American women... everyone's mom watched Oprah every single day."
— Caitlin Durante [05:03]

Oprah's ability to shape opinions and trends is acknowledged, setting the stage for a critical analysis of her more contentious actions.

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2. Transition from "Trash TV" to Spiritual Guru

Oprah's evolution from a staple of daytime television to a spiritual influencer is a focal point. The hosts discuss her partnership with Marianne Williamson and the introduction of New Age philosophies into mainstream media. Janice Peck's book, "Age of Oprah," is cited as a key resource in understanding this transformation.

"Oprah's pivot to guru had begun. Over the coming years, and indeed decades, she would help introduce millions of Americans to New Age thinkers like Eckhart Tolle."
— Caitlin Durante [15:23]

Marianne Williamson's influence is scrutinized, particularly her controversial views on illness being manifestations of one's psyche:

"Marianne... argued that cancer and AIDS... are physical manifestations of a psychic scream."
— Caitlin Durante [16:49]

The hosts criticize this stance as not only scientifically unfounded but also potentially harmful, especially regarding serious illnesses.

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3. Promoting Moral Panics: Rainbow Parties and Sex Slang

One of the most significant criticisms leveled against Oprah is her role in igniting moral panics, specifically the infamous "rainbow parties." These alleged teenage gatherings, characterized by extreme sexual activities, were widely propagated through her platform despite lacking substantive evidence.

"Oprah's reporter says, I talked to 50 girls and like they said rainbow parties were pervasive. Did any of them say they'd been to one? Unclear."
— Caitlin Durante [65:30]

The hosts highlight how Oprah amplified unfounded rumors, leading to widespread fear among parents and shaping misguided perceptions of youth behavior.

"Oprah laundered her conservative Christian propaganda... as sex sells best."
— Caitlin Durante [60:45]

This dissemination of misinformation contributed to heightened anxiety and "helicopter parenting," as parents became increasingly paranoid about the supposed dangers facing their children.

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4. The Mad Cow Disease Showdown

A pivotal moment in Oprah's career, detailed in the episode, was her public battle with the beef industry over mad cow disease. In April 1996, Oprah dedicated a segment of her show to this issue, featuring activist Howard Lyman, who predicted a catastrophic mad cow outbreak in the U.S.

"Oprah declared the conversation, 'stopped me cold from eating another burger.'"
— Caitlin Durante [46:36]

Despite the industry's efforts to discredit her claims, Oprah stood her ground, leading to a high-profile legal battle. The episode recounts how Oprah creatively integrated the trial into her show, endearing herself to the Texas audience and ultimately winning the case.

"Everyone on this jury has ties to the beef industry, and they vote unanimously to clear Oprah. That's how much juice this lady has."
— Caitlin Durante [46:36]

While Oprah's stance brought attention to legitimate concerns about meat industry practices, her specific focus on mad cow disease was criticized as exaggerated.

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5. Endorsement of Alternative Medicine and Pseudoscience

The episode scrutinizes Oprah's endorsement of figures like Deepak Chopra, who advocate for alternative medicine and pseudoscientific beliefs. Chopra's claims about reversing aging through thought alone and his dismissive views on modern medicine are particularly condemned.

"Chopra often advises his followers that modern medicine is useless or futile or fundamentally flawed."
— Caitlin Durante [37:09]

The hosts argue that Oprah's support of such figures perpetuates dangerous misinformation, undermining public trust in established medical practices and contributing to public health risks.

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6. Amplifying Fear and Distrust in Institutions

Oprah's consistent focus on sensational and fear-inducing topics, such as child abductions, sexual predators, and catastrophic societal failures, is critiqued for fostering a pervasive sense of fear and distrust among her audience.

"Oprah bears a good share of the blame for how unhinged many Americans are about the dangers that children face."
— Caitlin Durante [73:13]

This relentless propagation of fears, often without substantive evidence, has had long-term effects on societal perceptions, leading to overblown anxieties and diverting attention from genuine issues.

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7. Conclusion: Evaluating Oprah's Legacy

The episode concludes by weighing Oprah Winfrey's extensive influence against the negative repercussions of her actions. While acknowledging her role in promoting literacy and providing a platform for marginalized voices, the hosts argue that Oprah's propagation of misinformation, moral panics, and support for pseudoscience significantly tarnishes her legacy.

"Oprah's contribution to spawning sensational moral panics and perpetuating unfounded fears position her as one of the more problematic figures in modern media."
— Caitlin Durante

Ultimately, the hosts deliberate whether these actions are sufficient to categorize Oprah Winfrey as a "bastard," reflecting on the broader implications of her media empire on American society.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• "Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance."
  — Eckhart Tolle, as discussed by Caitlin Durante [34:45]

• "Children are molested by people who are responsible for them, not by random narco gangs."
  — Caitlin Durante [73:25]

• "It's a chain letter, right? If you buy the first thing that comes on, you'll have a happy life."
  — Caitlin Durante [48:11]

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Final Thoughts

"Behind the Bastards" presents a compelling and critical examination of Oprah Winfrey's multifaceted influence. Through incisive analysis and thoughtful discussion, the episode illuminates the ways in which Oprah's decisions have both shaped and distorted societal perceptions. By highlighting the consequences of her actions, the podcast invites listeners to reconsider the true impact of one of America's most influential media figures.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Media.

[Caitlin Durante]

Oh, boy. Well, welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast where we just took a five minute break between part three and part four of the Oprah Winfrey episodes. If you're all like me, you mainlined some doom scrolling news from your phone about how bad things continue to be and also how the Equal Rights Amendment is ratified, but also not great stuff. You know, folks, whenever I start to think we live in the dumbest society that's ever lived and like, how sad for us to live in such a stupid, stupid society, I have something that helps me get some historical perspective, which is I have a very big book right next to my bed that I read a little bit of every night called the Assyrians. And that really helps because there's literally ass in the name of that culture. Like ass just right on the front of the book. So you know what? We're not so silly, you know? You know, at least you're not an ass Syrian. Right? It's fine. It's fun. We're good. You done?

[Bridget Todd]

Whatever it takes, dog.

[Caitlin Durante]

Whatever it takes. I'm just trying to feel better. I feel like other people don't enjoy the word ass being on the front of a book as much as I do because they are no longer four. How's our guest today? Bridget Todd and Andrew T. How are we doing?

[Andrew T.]

Doing well.

[Bridget Todd]

I had a really good clementine in the break.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, clutch.

[Caitlin Durante]

That's good.

[Robert Evans]

I convinced Jamie Loftus to cover a topic I wanted her to cover on 16th minute during that five minute break. I'm efficient.

[Caitlin Durante]

Oh, wow.

[Andrew T.]

And Andrew, I tried to make your salad and it was really good.

[Caitlin Durante]

Oh, it's a really good salad.

[Bridget Todd]

It's not my salad, but unfortunately it's Tick Tock, so I plagiarized it either way. But it is Tick Tock's salad, I guess. I'm sure it's someone's salad.

[Robert Evans]

I understand that, but Tick Tock has the best recipes. Honestly.

[Andrew T.]

Rip, question mark.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe.

[Andrew T.]

Who knows?

[Bridget Todd]

Get ready for a little red book.

[Robert Evans]

We don't know.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yep.

[Bridget Todd]

I pledge allegiance to communist China.

[Caitlin Durante]

You know what? We all pledge allegiance to communist China. I spent three minutes on. What is that? What's the new one? I forgot the names of this joke. Little redeemed. I spent three minutes.

[Bridget Todd]

I don't even want to call it.

[Caitlin Durante]

The joke's not gonna work anymore. Whatever. Fuck it.

[Robert Evans]

It's done.

[Caitlin Durante]

It's done.

[Robert Evans]

Oprah pillas go.

[Caitlin Durante]

I couldn't be less interested in a TikTok alternative or TikTok. I don't need either of them. What I do need is to tell y'all more about Oprah Winfrey.

[Jon Stewart]

Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at the Daily show, which means he's also back in our ears on the Daily Show Ears Edition Podcast. Join late night legend Jon Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is the second term we can all get behind. Listen to the Daily Show Ears edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Hey listeners, I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast and I'm excited to share this riveting story with you. I'm also excited to tell you that you can now get access to all episodes of Murder on Songbird Road 100% ad free and one week early through the iHeart True Crime plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts plus you'll get access to other chart topping true crime shows you love like Betrayal, the Girlfriends, Paper Ghosts, Murder Homes, Unrestorable, the Godmother, and more. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for I Heart True Crime plus and subscribe today. Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Trimorki.

[Andrew T.]

And I'm Holly Fry. Together we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Each season we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art themes thieves.

[Andrew T.]

We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.

[Andrew T.]

Listen to criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Caitlin Durante]

It was big news. I mean white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery. Big, big news.

[Nancy Grace]

A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.

[Robert Evans]

I like saw one thing that an.

[Nancy Grace]

Arrest, trial and conviction soon follow.

[Caitlin Durante]

He did not kill her. There's no way is the Real Killer.

[Nancy Grace]

Rightly behind bars or still walking free. Did you kill her? Listen to the real Killer Season 3 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Bridget Todd]

The TikTok of her day.

[Caitlin Durante]

The TikTok actually kind of yes. Kind of yes. Although Oprah again, I mean I guess the big difference is like TikTok like really launched to popularity with like tweens and teens, whereas Oprah is immediately and for her whole career very, very much locked into like 30 to 50 year old middle class American women. Like that is that's not the whole look because she's popular all over the world, but, like, she has a. A lock that's, like, unequaled by anyone else on that specific demographic, which is like a very influen. It's everyone's mom's. Right. Like, I'm not. I hope, like, people say that to be, like, joking. Like, my mom, who I disagreed with, but respect a lot, watched Oprah every single fucking day. Right. Like, everyone's mom did same thing. Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Like, I could tell when Oprah covered something on her show if my mom sat me down after school to be like, are you having rainbow parties? I was like, oh, we're gonna be.

[Caitlin Durante]

Talking about rainbow parties, Bridget. So, as I pointed out earlier, Oprah at this point in her career was kind of, and we're talking the start of the 90s, indistinguishable from Jerry Springer. And I'm not talking about that on a, like, specifically, even on a moral level, just in terms of that is how cultural critics talked about her. Right. This was trash tv. It's hard to get to. Again, hard to get to grips with if, like, you know, you grew up with her in the 90s when she was kind of in between a movie star and a God like Oprah, Oprah was, like, sainted in a lot of households. But right around the time Winfrey started her satanic panicking, Ralph Nader named her as one of many talk shows in the country that got, quote, all their ideas from the National Enquirer. Now, in her excellent critical book, Age of Oprah, and if you're going to read one book on Oprah Winfrey, I recommend Age of Oprah by Janice Peck. It's not a biography. It's like an analysis of the role Oprah has played in the evolution of American society over the last 30 years. Janice writes about the critiques that Washington Post writer Tom Shales had of Winfrey's program, labeling it talk rot. Quote, Shales decried talk shows as a daily parade of wackos, loonies, stars, celebrities, freaks, geeks and gurus. Referring to the Oprah Winfrey show, he noted, on one of her few serious outer directed shows, Winfrey dealt with declining literacy among the young and the escalating crisis in American education. In promo, she looked into the camera and asked, how dumb are we? There's every possibility that talk rot is making us dumber. And that's him saying that, right? That, like, Oprah's saying we're dumb for not reading, but, like, her show is making us dumber. And like, yeah, it's part of that loop. It's also, Oprah's going to later become one of the people who's a major champion of literacy, although not in ways that are unproblematic, too.

[Bridget Todd]

Anyway, I actually got a little glimmer of hope from that. Just like a reminder that I know and I'm not like, a teacher. I had lunch with a friend who was a teacher yesterday, and he was like, the kids are not able to read.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

But I do think this might be counterfactual to, like, survey data. But I do kind of think every generation thinks the current kids are dumber than ever before.

[Caitlin Durante]

There's two sides to this, right? One of them is that every generation, as soon as they hit a certain age, starts thinking that these next kids coming up are uniquely fucked up. And, like, everyone's ruined, right? And, like, the world's going to hell in a handbasket. And they're always kind of wrong. At the same time, every single new generation is fucked up in a unique new way. And like, the TikTok kids are fucked up on TikTok and iPads in a way that didn't exist before. Just like my gener, our generation was fucked up by message boards and online gaming and the like in ways that were unique, you know, to kids that had come previously. Just like our Gen X friends were fucked up on leaded gasoline, you know. Yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

But it's also like, you know, the kids are getting fucked up on particularly spicy epigrams from Catullus. You know, it's just like, I think it's always been like this.

[Caitlin Durante]

It has always been like this. There are unique ways in which every generation is, like, fucked up. And also, I'll just say this, kids, if you. If you are a very young person coming up right now and you're trying to figure out, how do I make it in this world, one of the chief things you have on your side is that everyone older than you thinks you're an idiot. And the truth is that they're all as stupid as you are. So take advantage of that. There's power in being underestimated, kids.

[Andrew T.]

That's actually very wise advice.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah, I'm full of wise advice once every month. Yeah. And one of the things that's problematic here is that Oprah does deserve a lot of criticism for, like, the satanic panic shit, the McMartin preschool trial shit. There's also a lot of these big hoity toity cultural critics are attacking her because they also view they rightly are like, well, this satanic panic stuff is, like, smut, but also this woman talking about how she, like, needs therapy in order to have a healthy sex life as smut. And. And so you see, like, it's this blending of, like, well, but no, but that's actually a good thing that Oprah was doing with, like. No, this is, in fact, smut, but it's all smut to a lot of these guys. So that's part of, like, the problem of, like, looking at a lot of the criticism of Oprah from this era is a lot of it is attacking her for stuff that we're like, well, but no, that was one of the good things that she did.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, that's the trip of engaging in this kind of discourse. Right. Like, when you actually have substantive stuff to say. Of course, people are going to paint everything with such a wide brush when you also do these, like, satanic panic antics. Right. Like, part of me is like, that's kind of on you for having this in your. Your portfolio in the first place.

[Bridget Todd]

Right. Well, also, like, the satanic panic stuff is not bad because it's smut. It's bad because it's lies. Like.

[Caitlin Durante]

Right, right, right. Yes, exactly. That's a very good note, Andrew. Like, both of you, very good notes. Thank you. It's. It's. It's a mess because, like, you're looking for. You always want just a really good. If you're doing this job, I want a really good, like, ah, this guy nailed what's problematic. And it's always, like, this guy nailed part of what was problematic and then said something really, really mean towards women.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah.

[Caitlin Durante]

I love the Washington Post.

[Bridget Todd]

It's fine. It's only getting better. They're turning it around.

[Caitlin Durante]

They're turning it around. God. So one example of things that Oprah got attacked for that she probably shouldn't have been, that, like, this was considered smut by a lot of critics was your coverage of the transgender community. And boy howdy, I am not saying that it was what we would call today good. What I am saying is that even as early as when she was on People are Talking, which was the pre. Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Winfrey show, she would bring on transgender guests. And she's doing it because it's lascivious and it gets attention, but she's also. It's not like, smut, like, one of her early guests that had an impact on her is she. She finds this transgender mother with brittle bone disease. So this is both somebody who is transgender and if you read stories about it. They use the term transsexual. They're not trying to be shitty. That was the term in common parlance at the time. I'm obviously updating it. But this is a person who both is trans, is a mother, and is a disabled American. And the fact that Oprah's letting her talk about her life is giving a sympathetic and humanizing portrayal to someone who had zero visibility in the culture at the time. As Kitty Kelly notes, the show was criticized when it aired, but afterward, Oprah happened to see the child with the transgender quadriplegic. It was just a moving thing. She said, I thought, this child will grow up with more love than most children before. I was one of those people who thought all homosexuals or anything like that were going to burn in hell because the scriptures said it. And this is. Oprah was very homophobic as a child and as a young adult. And she would list this experience as key to her overcoming the bigotry that she had been raised with. Right. And I think it makes totally, as a child who had lacked so much love in her life, the thing that turns her around on this is being like, but this lady's a really good mom. Right. Like, she clearly loves this kid. This kid's going to grow up with love. That's all that matters to me as a kid who was neglected. Right. I think that's just worth stating too, before we get back into the criticism, because that's kind of beautiful. And the fact that she gets attacked for this too is again, it's part of the like, well, if you're Oprah and you're trying to triangulate what is okay for me to do and what is not, I'm getting attacked both for the stuff that is bad and also for the stuff that it's like, no, it's great that she did this like some. I'm glad she did, you know. In January of 1994, a 39 year old Oprah Winfrey announced her on air plan to stop talking about, quote, how bad things are and instead try to bring more peace to her audience. And thus the plan. And she had like a long speech about trash tv. This is kind of her being like, I think the winds are changing. I don't think the, the smut kind of TV where we're, you know, we're talking about, here's people talking about like the fights they're having with their ex, we'll bring them on and they'll fight on stage. That was not going to be, you know, coming into the late 90s, as popular as it had been. And Oprah's like, I want to rebrand myself. I want to have some prestige. Right? And the way she does that, the way she starts her pivot into I am a serious intellectual and spiritual advisor, is to bring on friend of the pod, Marianne Williamson. Here she is. Here's our girl. There we go.

[Andrew T.]

I forgot about this. She absolutely did.

[Caitlin Durante]

This is when Oprah becomes a spiritual influencer. Marianne Williamson is like a key part of that. Here's how Janice Peck describes Williamson at this stage in her career. Again, this is 94. Williamson is, quote, a former nightclub singer, self described spiritual, spiritual psychologist, occasional advisor to Hillary Clinton, spiritual guide for Hollywood stars, and major inspiration behind Winfrey's own cosmology. What a resume.

[Andrew T.]

Oh, God also doesn't believe in aids.

[Caitlin Durante]

Doesn't. Yes, we're about to talk about that. Marianne is a complicated person to unpack from a harm standpoint, much like Oprah, they have a lot in common. I'm not surprised they're friends. When she launched her 2020 presidential campaign, Queer focused news outlets like the Pink News rightfully pointed out that during the AIDS crisis, Williamson, who had a huge queer following and had founded a center for living in Los Angeles, published a book in 1992 which argued, quote, cancer and AIDS and other physical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream. Williamson went on to make an argument that is could be argued as not so far from the Christian conservative line on aids. We're not punished for our sins, but by our sins. Sickness is not a sign of God's judgment on us, but of our judgment on ourselves. Sickness is an illusion and does not actually exist. And it's complicated because you can translate all of that as like, well, she's saying people with AIDS brought it on themselves. And she kind of is. She's also not just focusing on gay people there. She thinks if you have lung cancer, whatever, if you've got fucking childhood leukemia, you brought it on yourself through your bad thinking. Right? So it is. It is not targeted against gay people. But it's also really problematic in that concept because you're saying everyone who gets sick brought the sickness on themselves by virtue of their thoughts.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, all the positive vibe shit is so like, just consider the converse of what you're saying for two seconds.

[Caitlin Durante]

I, I think everyone who, yeah, this.

[Bridget Todd]

Child deserved to die because his vibes were off.

[Caitlin Durante]

And it's. It's not. She's. She would say, no, I'm saying that, like, if you like, part of healing this is fixing people's attitudes and improving the way they think and talk about themselves, and that will help their physical health. I just think everyone who believes this should have to lecture about this, too. Like a child cancer ward.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah.

[Caitlin Durante]

Like, explain to kids if your attitude was better, your bones wouldn't be rotting inside you, you know?

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, it's such a hateful ideology and worldview, but, like, the way people. I know people who have said shit like this, and it's like the way they dress it up as, like. No, it's actually like a really profound. Like you. It's the law of attraction. Like, you want this to be happening to you in some way. The way they dress it up, like, it makes them more superior. I don't know. Something about that aspect of it really gets me.

[Caitlin Durante]

It's interesting because. And I also think there's. There's so much of it that's so locked inside their heads. Like, it's even separate from how someone like Marianne acts. Because I found an article by a friend of hers called David Kessler, and it was on her website. It was. It was. He posted on Medium, and she had shared it. But this is a guy who knew her. He had operated during the AIDS crisis. He operated a home hospice for AIDS patients. And he claimed, quote, I saw firsthand how she, Marianne, cared for the community. Marianne is not a person who is against medicine. She was the one that sat with dying men with AIDS when there was no cure and when medications became available, I saw her driving men to the doctor with aids. I witnessed her paying for medication for men with aids. So this is not a person who is, like, hateful and callous. This is a person who is able to sit with sick people and then also hold in her head this completely unhinged, that if you take it to its logical conclusion, you're saying they brought it on themselves. And that kind of cognitive dissonance is amazing to me. I don't know how you can have that.

[Bridget Todd]

I mean, I think it is just like the. Like, only able to concentrate on the positive or what you perceive as the positive. It's just. It is like. Yeah, I mean, you just have to be stupid is the main thing. Like, oh, I don't understand the B side of what I'm saying.

[Caitlin Durante]

He is the answer. So much more often than, like, outright evil is like, oh, well, you just. Your brain's not functioning. You've got, like, somebody dropped, like, a wrench in there, and it's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew T.]

I'm like. It's like, so tempting to way overthink it. And, Andrew, I feel like that you just really sum it up. Some people just aren't smart, and that's what's going on. Don't overthink it.

[Caitlin Durante]

I think it. I talk about this with our other host, Margaret Killjoy, a lot, about how, like, you can meet people, like, out in the middle of nowhere who, like, if you look at their politics, they support some political things that are ghoulish, whereas the same people they would vote to hurt, they would, like, sacrifice for in person because, like, people are incoherent and not all that bright.

[Andrew T.]

Right.

[Caitlin Durante]

Like, it comes down to that a lot of the time.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah. Like, there's. There. There just is no, like, even second consideration or, like. Like, what does this. What does what I say mean? Yeah, they're just doing their thing.

[Caitlin Durante]

And, like, yeah, this is. Kurt Vonnegut was often of the opinion that, like, if we were just all a little bit too dumb to keep society, like, if we. If we all had, like, 20% less, like. Like. Like, got a little bit more brain damage, things would be better. Because, like, we. It's this mix of we're so smart and we're so stupid that causes all the problems. If we were just like, dogs, everything would be fine. That's where I come back down to.

[Bridget Todd]

Well, the problem is just, like, it only takes one or two slightly smarter evil dogs.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

To really fuck shit up. Which is where we're living now.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Anyway, speaking of where we're living now, Marianne Williamson was the beginning of Oprah's pivot to alternative medicine and spirituality. As we noted, Williamson's particular thing was A Course in Miracles, which is a series of books. She did not write these, but this is, like, this is her Bible, at least at this period of time. And A Course in Miracles is the underpinning. One of the underpinnings. Cause we've talked about a few others. Roots of what becomes, like, the secret. Right. This is a lot of where we get that from. And A Course in Miracles is like. It's this set of books that claims to integrate psychology and spirituality, which is kind of what Scientology also claimed to do. It's what all of the good spiritual con men claim to do. Right. The author of this book, Helen Schuchman, claimed that it had been fully dictated to her by Jesus Christ, and she just wrote it down. So, like, look, what are my citations? Jesus, baby.

[Andrew T.]

What. What an. That's such a good thing to claim. Like, I. The balls to be, like, oh, like, are you gonna. I'm not wrong. You're saying Jesus is wrong.

[Caitlin Durante]

Like, oh, you're saying Jesus is wrong.

[Andrew T.]

Huh?

[Caitlin Durante]

How many times did you get sacrificed on Golgotha? Huh? Yeah. How many nails you got through your hands? Huh? Huh? Anyway, don't go to the doctor. Speaking of which, don't go to the doctor. Listen to these ads.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Hey, listeners. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. Murder on Songbird Road revisits a controversial 2020 murder that occurred in Southern Illinois. It divided a community and pitted families against one another. But questions remain as to whether the mother of four serving time for the crime is actually guilty. I'm excited to tell you that you access to all episodes of Murder on Songbird Road 100% ad free and one week before anyone else with an iHeart True Crime plus subscription. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for I Heart True Crime plus and subscribe.

[Jon Stewart]

Today, Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at the Daily show, which means he's also back in our ears on the Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. The Daily show podcast has everything you need to stay on top of today's news and pop culture. You get hilarious satirical takes on entertainment, politics, sports, and more from John and the team of correspondents and contributors. The podcast also has content you can't get anywhere else, like extended interviews and a roundup of the weekly headlines. Listen to the Daily Show Ears edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Nancy Grace]

Beautiful young women full of life and dreams, murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions, and memories. I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Bridget Todd]

I was just gonna say does it.

[Caitlin Durante]

Does. No.

[Bridget Todd]

Do none of these people find it sacrilegious how stupid Jesus is in these instances?

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah, yeah. That he. That Jesus is like saying medicine doesn't really work. It's all about thinking your way through problems. Nobody ever catches that. Well, everyone does except for these people. And it's also, you know, part of if you're. Because William said, I'm not trying to, like, exonerate her totally. One of the things I think that you do if you're like her is you're like, well, I believe this. But the fact that she's saying Jesus wrote this whole thing, that's probably not gonna play on tv. I probably wanna keep that quiet, like. So I'm going to. And what Marianne does is she's like, all right, well, I think this is basically good, but maybe the raw stuff is a little bit too uncut for this audience. Should she wr her own book about a course in miracles titled A Return to Love. That's basically her taking, like, all right, how do I make this a little bit more palatable? It's the late 90s, right? We gotta fix this a little bit before we get this out into the audience. You know, I will attempt an abbreviated explanation of A Course in Miracles. And, you know, in addition to that, Williamson's book, it argues that our home is reality and reality is the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God is a perfect place where, as the talking heads remind us, nothing ever happens. Thus, all problems aren't real. Bad things don't happen. There's no real problems. The things that you perceive as problems are the result of you delusionally separating your ego from reality. Our suffering then, is something we project into the world due to our hallucinatory belief that we have sinned.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

All of our faces on the screen are like that Winona Ryder trying to do a trigonometry equation meme. Like, what are we?

[Caitlin Durante]

Good? Does that make sense to everybody?

[Andrew T.]

Totally checks out.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah. All right. That all scans. Yeah. So, again, this is like, you can see a lot of the spirit or the secret in this. And the ultimate the result of this is you fix your life by fixing your attitude. Right. I found a good summary of the book in a website titled Circle of Atonement, which I think is probably related to some sort of weird cult or another. I don't know, but I'm gonna read an excerpt from that because I thought it was funny. The Holy Spirit's message is that we never sinned, never changed ourselves. We need only change our minds. The guilt and pain produced by the ego is stored in an unconscious level of mind which also contains our call for God's love and help. The Holy Spirit's answer to our guilt is that we did not do it, that we are still as God created us because the separation never occurred. The journey home is an illusion. We need not purify ourselves or make sacrifices. Instead, we can wake up at any time we choose. The holy instant is a moment when this is realized, applied, a moment of doing nothing. The miracle is a free deliverance from the imprisonment of the human condition. It is our right because we never sinned.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, I listen, I'm a person that has like an obnoxious way of speaking, but is. Is it like truly not possible for just some. Like this just requires some child to be like, what the are you talking about?

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah, right. Like, what the is this? Yeah, we need, you know, I mean.

[Bridget Todd]

The comments section, I guess, is what you need.

[Caitlin Durante]

I think what we need is a little more focus. We've all been vibing on Bill Burr lately. We need to make that a government position where whenever someone starts doing this, we have like a roughly, a slightly thumb looking man who comes to be like, what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, like, come on, stop this shit.

[Andrew T.]

He should be from Boston.

[Caitlin Durante]

He should be from Boston, ideally. Who? Just like when someone says that there should be like a. Yeah, vaguely Bostonian guy going, nah, the problem is he.

[Bridget Todd]

Should be from Boston. But not like that.

[Caitlin Durante]

Not like that.

[Bridget Todd]

Like that. But not like, not like from Boston, if you know what I'm saying.

[Caitlin Durante]

We need an Avengers initiative of guys who have that remarkable mix of physiognomy and accent that people will be like, oh, yeah, that does sound kind of silly. When he says it's silly. I actually, yeah, maybe that is kind of stupid.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah. Oh my God. It's not materially dumber than anything. Elon Musk tweets.

[Caitlin Durante]

Oh, absolutely not. But I think it leads us there in part. Right? And one of the. Yes, when you get a lot of. Because this is Janice Peck's book. This is a lot of. When you get a lot of, like more left wing critiques of Oprah, one of the running themes is like the whole. The overriding message of a lot of her show is problems have. Are all problems. There's like, societal problems are individual problems and they have deeply individualistic solutions. And instead of like fixing systems, the answer comes more down to fixing yourself and your individual attitude. And that can be very problematic, verging on solipsistic. Right. When we get to this era, it's like nothing is. The problems aren't real. And if I can make myself okay with them, then I don't even need to think about the other people who are suffering because the problems aren't real. You know, this is a very narcissistic, dangerous way to think about the world.

[Andrew T.]

I could see how it functions as a pretty useful, like, political and social ideology, though.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yes, it's great for capitalism. Like, if this is your attitude, once you get a nice house, climate change is no longer a problem. The Pacific Palisades are a paradise. Hmm. Something smells odd on the air. Let me look at the.

[Bridget Todd]

You know, your mind palace is your paradise, Robert.

[Caitlin Durante]

Right, Right. Yeah. And when you're living in a $24,000 a night hotel, because, again, the Palisades burn down, your mind is still there for you, you know? That's the beauty. Louisiana. Doesn't have a homelessness problem. We just need more mind palaces.

[Bridget Todd]

You know, this is also, by the way, more or less the pitch from the bad guys in the Matrix.

[Caitlin Durante]

It kind of is, yes. Also that, like, literally, you are like the Matrix. But no, this is actually how philosophy works and religion works. Yes.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah. Just like these are all.

[Caitlin Durante]

That guy in the first Matrix movie, he's like, look, man, the steak tastes good. I don't know what to tell you.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, this is like the parable of the cave people just really jonesing for some more. Cave.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

What the fuck are you talking about?

[Caitlin Durante]

That is what I took out of the allegory of the cave is like, cave's pretty cool.

[Bridget Todd]

Cave.

[Caitlin Durante]

I like shadows.

[Bridget Todd]

I love caves.

[Caitlin Durante]

The new season of Semberance starts tonight. So I'm gonna be sitting and watching some cave shadows, baby. I'm good. I'm ready. Give me some Adam Scott. So thanks to Williamson's advocacy and Oprah's platform, A Course in Miracles went from fringe. It was getting more popular. I will say this, it didn't entirely gain its popularity, but Oprah is a large part of the fact that it sells more than 2 million copies. And Oprah doesn't just plug that book and her friend Marianne's book. She and Marianne sit down and they lay out in the set. And again, the point of this episode is Oprah announcing her show is pivoting from being about bad things and sad stuff to being about, you know, empowerment and beauty. Right. Quote during the hour. This is Janice Peck. During the hour, the two women identified various social problems. Crime, drug addiction, TV violence, war, child abuse, prejudice as the price we pay for ignoring our souls. Born of denial, this collective neglect of soul had produced a diseased and dysfunctional society. The antidote Williamson proposed was a shift in the paradigm on the planet to activate an amazing healing force, the spirit of divine consciousness, which is within our souls. While she prescribed various steps towards planetary healing, from praying to participating in support groups, all were predicated on replacing negative thoughts with positive ones, because our thoughts determine the experiences of our lives.

[Bridget Todd]

I will just point out that if you substitute the word erdtree in there a few times, this is basically Just Elden Ring.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah, well, Williamson has a writing credit on that. It was her and George R.R. martin really, like, banging it out and. No, that's a lie. That's a lie. I'm sorry. That's almost credible.

[Andrew T.]

You said it in a way where I truly for a second was like, I don't know if he's making a joke or not.

[Caitlin Durante]

I would sit and listen to George R.R. martin and Marianne Williamson invent religion.

[Bridget Todd]

Oh, my God.

[Caitlin Durante]

So Oprah's pivot to guru had begun. Over the coming years, and indeed decades, she would help introduce millions of Americans to New Age thinkers like Eckhart Tolle, whose books the Power of Now and A New Earth represent what Slate writer Kurt Anderson described as a successful crusade against reason itself. Here's one of Towles most favorite quotes. Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example, there's nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease. And Toll's argument here is that, like, overthinking is a societal epidemic and a lot of our suffering as a species is because we don't coast enough on vibes, go with the flow. More often, compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity. And like, I think there's actually more than a little bit of move to fast and break things downstream of Toll. I don't think there's zero percent of that there. But more than that, Oprah's embrace of this guy represents a major salient in the war against reason, which, if you hadn't checked recently, reason is losing. Yeah, yeah. And this is where we start talking. Reasons may be lost. Yeah, Reason is at least like Great Britain on the first day of the Battle of Britain, you know, France has surrendered. I don't know what the French equivalent of reason is. And yeah, we're watching those Stukas rain down on fucking London.

[Bridget Todd]

It's not good. But what are you gonna do?

[Caitlin Durante]

What are you gonna do? I don't know. Yeah, I actually have no idea. Andrew, don't worry so much. Deepak Chopra.

[Andrew T.]

Don't think so much.

[Caitlin Durante]

Don't think so much. Why am I thinking all this time? Let's talk about Deepak Chopra. He is another gift that Oprah gave the world. And his career was in some ways a mirror of Dr. Oz, and honestly, a less toxic one. Chopra starts out as a well regarded endocrinologist until he quits that to become a guru to the kind of people who embrace new spiritualities based on airport bestsellers. Chopra is the kind of guy who peddles stuff that seems well meaning and even harmless if you don't look too deeply into what he's saying. The harm largely comes from the fact that accepting his principles means embracing lies about how the world works and denying basic science. As Dr. Chris Consilvio writes, he preaches, the body is made of a quantum energy, and there exists a dynamic consciousness where the mind, body and spirit are interwoven and interconnected by an energy force that transcends matter and physical reality. Now, because of this, Chopra often advises his followers that modern medicine is useless or futile or fundamentally flawed in ways that make it less reliable than embracing pseudoscience. Here's a quote I found from an article on Chopra that he wrote for his own website titled why Doctors can't make youe well. What the public and most doctors hasn't found out is that the cause of illness is becoming more and more murky. It's not just germs and genes. The germ theory of disease held sway for over a century after the discovery of microbes and the arrival of antibiotics to combat them. Gene therapy, long promise is the answer to almost any disease hasn't actually achieved much success, although in certain cases, such as cancers that are caused by a simple genetic mutation, targeted drug therapies have been successful. The bigger picture is that genetics has led us into a much more complicated view of the disease process. So complicated that it is beyond the skill of doctors. Too many factors are at work when illness arises, and the disease model itself sometimes breaks down. Germ theories wrong. Idpak Chopra can explain it. Your brain's not thinking good enough now.

[Bridget Todd]

I mean, but you know, I guess I feel like someone should just say, that's not true.

[Caitlin Durante]

His last that's not how it is. Like, antibiotics are great.

[Bridget Todd]

The model doesn't break down.

[Caitlin Durante]

The model doesn't break down. Bringing in gene therapy along. Like, it's one of those things where it's like, okay, well, depending on what you mean by gene therapy. Sure, there's a lot of shit that, like people talked about in sci fi that hasn't happened, but that has nothing to do with germ theory. Right? Like, germ theory is a very robust model. Chopra rides a line. He doesn't generally outright say, don't take your meds, but the conclusion you're led to from a lot of his writing is don't take your meds. That Whole article I just quoted from is how doctors don't understand what causes schizophrenia. And I think the conclusion that you're supposed to be led to is maybe don't take those antipsychotics. Again. Chopra doesn't say this legally. I am not accusing him of saying this. I'm just saying I think a lot of people reading that who are like, should I take my antipsychotics? Might take from that article. Maybe I won't.

[Andrew T.]

But also saying it.

[Caitlin Durante]

He's not saying it right.

[Bridget Todd]

It's also just like, you know, not like, just because, like, there isn't a full understanding of schizophrenia. You can really trust that chemotherapy, vaccine, et cetera. Like, yeah, well.

[Caitlin Durante]

And there's always that real thing, which is that, like, yeah, man, there's actually a shitload of problems that modern medicine, like, treats and talks about schizophrenia. Absolutely. You don't know anything about this.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, yeah.

[Caitlin Durante]

Like, you're not helping. Yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

His pitch is that I'm not burdened with all this knowledge and history of the process, so I have a clearer insight into how to fix things.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew T.]

What really annoys me about this is how they're so good at taking that one kind of, like, true thread, which is like, plenty of people feel unheard by the medical space, and, like, you know, they feel like their symptoms or whatever or their illnesses are not being properly treated. And so I could see how this is so tempting to be like, oh, well, what do they know about anything? Why should I trust any of this? They're all hucksters. Like, it's so. It's such a callous but tempting way of getting people, walking people toward this very dangerous line of thinking. Does that make sense?

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah. No, no, I think that absolutely does. I think you hit it on the head. So Deepak has, over the years, claimed that human aging can be reversed by pure force of thought. He is, as health law and science professor Timothy Caulfield argues, a prophet of alternative medicine and the great de educator. Chopra's book sold millions and millions of copies after he was featured as a guest on Winfrey's show. And I don't know that I'd say he has no career without her. That's too much. But he has less of one, right? Like, he's got. He's a lot less of a guy. Without Oprah, without Chopra, we probably don't get shit like the bleach drinking, church people taking Ivermectin to cure their cancer, and a decent chunk of the anti vax movement, which. Which we'll be talking about later because Oprah's got some real involvement there. And a friend of the pod, Jenny McCarthy. Now, one of the most frustrating things about Oprah in this time period after her pivot away from Trash TV is in, in the mid-90s, is that in the middle of like all of this new age woo that she is putting out and clotting our national arteries with which leads to the fatal stroke we're gonna spend the rest of our lives living in, she is also, like, she's right about some important things, but even when she's right about them, the kind of the lack of rigor to the way she talks about stuff means that she winds up wrong about them. And to make that make sense, I'm going to talk about Oprah's war with the beef industry because this is a key moment in Oprah history. In April of 1996, Oprah dedicated a segment of her show to mad cow disease and brought on an animal rights activist and vegetarian named Howard Lyman. The UK had just had a major mad cow outbreak and had to cull vast numbers of animals. And Lyman predicted that the same thing would soon befall the US Beef supply. He talked about what happens when humans catch mad cow from tainted meat and the horrific deaths that follow. Oprah declared the conversation, quote, stopped me cold from eating another burger. Now, this has a massive impact on the beef industry, right? And they're going to sue her over this because there's some evidence that like, millions of dollars in beef sales are like, the price of the value of beef drops significantly because of Oprah talking about mad cow this way. And the broader thing, which is that, like, our meat, like, there's a lot of stuff that's gross and inhumane and climactically awful about our addiction to beef and the way this industry functions. And it deserves criticism. The problem is that the specific criticism Oprah is publishing and focusing on is mad cow disease. And the US Beef industry really doesn't deserve that. Right? Lyman's prediction that, like, we're going to have a UK style mad cow outbreak in the US hasn't come to pass. And in fact, in the decades since he said this, the US has had six confirmed cases of mad cow disease, the first in 2003 and the most recent in 2023. And these were all isolated and caught fairly quickly. Preventing the spread of mad cow was something the US Beef industry has proved very good at, particularly considering the fact that the UK and France, which normally have much more effective regulatory states, have had much larger problems with this. Now, that doesn't mean, again, that we're immune from, for example, even other prion diseases. Right. The spread of prion diseases due to farmed meat is a massively important story in the US One with some potentially apocalyptic undertones. Right. For example, we have this massive problem in a lot of the, like the Great Lakes region, the east coast, with chronic wasting disease, which is basically mad cow for deer, which, number one, gets a number of hunters killed. But also deer spread these, like, poisoned prions around in the soil, and they don't really die. And there's like, a lot of very worrying problems due to this. And it all got started almost certainly because people were trying to farm venison. And, you know, these all, all of these diseases result when you've got, like, we've got a bunch of animals we're trying to farm at scale, and their feed has pieces of their own spinal cords in it. Right. Of, like, of their fellow animals. Right? Like, that's. That's the. I'm simplifying a lot of stuff. But, like, what I'm saying is meat as an industry has a lot of horrible problems that have some potentially near apocalyptic outcomes for our society. But the specific thing Oprah has is really going after in this episode isn't a big problem for the beef industry. And as a result, they're going to sue her. Right. So Texas is one of a dozen states with what's called a veggie liable law, which is a law that makes a person liable if they make libelous statements about food safety. Representatives of the cattle industry complained to Texas Agricultural Commissioner Rick Perry, who wrote a letter to the state attorney general complaining the economic livelihood of our beef producers is at stake. Now, the reality of the situation is that again, Oprah has exaggerated the risk of mad cow disease in the US but not in a way that a reasonable person would call libel. As I've just pointed out that, like, she was kind of wrong for this to be the focus when talking about bad aspects of the beef industry. But like, like, when you are seeing mad cow go crazy in the UK being like, it's probably a problem, that's not libel. Right. That's speculative in a way. That's inaccurate, but it's not really libel. The beef magnates disagreed, and they Conti considered Oprah enemy number one and saw the overall case as a way to stop anyone from talking badly about health and safety practices within the beef industry. Oprah, for her part, and this is where I give her a lot of credit, refuses to budge or settle. And so she is like, I'm not going to settle this case. I'm not going to retract or apologize. Apologize. Let's go to court, motherfuckers. And so this turns into a showdown in fucking Amarillo, Texas. Uh, or shit, is it Abilene? Um, I wrote Amarillo, but I think it might be Abilene. Look it up, folks. Maybe I got that one wrong. I'll say both. Fuck it. Um, so she has to go to this small town that's like a massive beef center in Texas. Right? Uh, and a normal person would have been like, well, all right, I've gotta be in court for several weeks. I guess we'll put the show on hiatus, right? Obviously, I'm not gonna fly my entire crew down to this show, to this town in Texas and just film the Opal Renfrey show from there, which is exactly what she does. So here's the Texas Tribune. Rather than putting her show on hiatus for weeks, she brought it with her and framed parts of it as an homage to the city and state she suddenly found herself in. Winfrey donned a cowboy hat and drew cheers by occasionally mimicking a Texas accent. Texas born actor Patrick Swayze came on and taught her how to. Two steps. So you're on trial by day and you're doing the show by night, Winfrey recalled in 2012. It was stressful. It was challenging. To be on trial, may I just say, is one of the worst experiences of anybody's life. A gag order prevented Winfrey from talking about the case on her show, which she turned into a running joke. We're down here in Amarilla. Y'all know why? She said during one segment, drawing laughs from the audience. Large crowds showed up both for Winfrey's show and outside the courtroom to catch a glimpse of her Amarilla loves Oprah T shirts. She didn't testify until the latter part of the case, but by the time she got on the stand, the town loved her. Babcock said, and again, everyone on this jury has ties to the beef industry, and they vote unanimously to clear Oprah. That's how much juice this lady has.

[Andrew T.]

I know we're here to talk about her as a bastard, but you gotta love that. Like, that's cool.

[Caitlin Durante]

That's pretty cool, Chef. Yeah, I wish she had gone to war over a better criticism of the beef industry, but that is pretty cool. You know, you have to. There's a lesson in there in terms of, like, how you deal with these, like, corporations trying to stifle speech, which is like, all right, motherfuckers. Like, let's lean into it. I will get this whole town on my side.

[Andrew T.]

Just out of curiosity though, did any of the people that she called, like, Satanist baby rapists, did they ever sue her? Just out of curiosity?

[Caitlin Durante]

No, no, no, no, no. They don't have beef industry money, for one thing. They're all bankrupted fighting the Satan lawsuits, Bridget. Like these people own. They care. So Oprah declares victory. Beef industry representatives declare victory too, stating that the cost of the case would make other media figures more careful about spreading disinformation. Americans largely went back to ignoring the harms of our addiction to cheap red meat. And the only real long term consequence to all this was that Oprah befriended a psychologist that she'd hired on as a jury consultant, Dr. Phil McGraw. Again, folks, for an episode on Bastard Dream. We're not gonna talk about Dr. Phil or Dr. Oz in these episodes. Cause we've done two parters on both of them. Check those out if you wanna know why. Those guys suck. But this ends badly is what I'll say. Boo. You know what else ends badly, Sophie?

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God.

[Caitlin Durante]

Your life. If you don't buy the products and services that are advertised on this podcast, you know it's like a chain letter, right? If you buy the first thing that comes on, you'll have a happy life. You know, when you die, your whole family will be around you. There will be no pain. You'll hear the Trumpet of St. Peter. Is it him that has a trumpet? You'll hear some fucking trumpet and then everything will be good. You'll go to heaven. It'll be great.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Hey, listeners, I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. Murder on Songbird Road revisits a controversial 2020 murder that occurred in Southern Illinois. It divided a community and pitted families against one another. But questions remain as to whether the mother of four serving time for the crime is actually guilty. I'm excited to tell you that you can get access to all episodes of Murder on Songbird Road 100% ad free and one week before anyone else with an I Heart True Crime plus subscription. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for I Heart True Crime plus and subscribe.

[Jon Stewart]

Today, Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at the Daily show, which means he's also back in our ears on the Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. The Daily show podcast has everything you need to stay on top of today's news and pop culture. You get hilarious satirical takes on Entertainment, politics, sports, and more from John and the team of correspondents and contributors. The podcast also has content you can't get anywhere else, like extended interviews and a roundup of the weekly headlines. Listen to the Daily Show Ears edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nancy Grace]

Beautiful young women full of life and dreams, murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions and memories. I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Caitlin Durante]

And we're back.

[Robert Evans]

It's St. Gabriel and St. Jerome.

[Caitlin Durante]

Is it St. Gabriel? Fuck it.

[Robert Evans]

Jerome, St. Cecilia, a lot of them got trumpets.

[Caitlin Durante]

How am I supposed to. It's like a ska band up there, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Honey, lots of trumpets.

[Caitlin Durante]

God's sacred genre. Okay. The fact that Oprah's show was now a mix of spiritual gurus and crusades against various causes celeb did not mean that Oprah completely had excise the smut. Despite her claim to have left trash TV behind, she knew that any topic involving teen pregnancy, teen drug use, child abduction, et cetera got views. Her audience of largely middle class moms tuned in when Oprah told them their kids were in danger. The clearest example of this comes from 2003 when Oprah Winfrey introduced the concept of Bridget. So happy to be talking about this. Rainbow parties.

[Andrew T.]

We're doing it.

[Caitlin Durante]

We're doing it. You get a rainbow party, you get a. Well, I shouldn't, I shouldn't phrase it that way.

[Andrew T.]

Young Bridget fucking wishes.

[Caitlin Durante]

No one gets a rainbow party. That's actually the reality of the situation. I am sure we've got our Gen Z listeners and our old people listeners. Those are the two other kinds of people behind normal people. Us millennials are all like, what the fuck are they talking about? The fuck is a rainbow party? Is this some, like, LGBT thing? No, it's not. So this was yet another moral panic. And it's the first moral panic that we're talking about in the series that I was around for as a perfectly. It should be the same as true review. Like, this was a moral panic about my generation, my peers and I, that I was old enough to be like, what the fuck are you talking about? So in order to introduce this concept, this comes up on the Oprah Winfrey show for the first time. During a discussion between Oprah and Michelle Burford. Burford is a journalist at O Magazine. Oprah had launched a magazine, I think in like 99 or something. Like after her show has made its big pivot, they launched this magazine, which is the number one women's magazine basically for the whole time that it's in publication. They don't stop publishing until. Till 2020. And Burford has just finished some hard hitting research on the millennials, you know, our generation. And she's reading Oprah new slang terms for sex and that our generation has cooked up. And Again, this is 2003, so everybody prepare to take some notes.

[Robert Evans]

Also, just the selection for more videos. So good.

[Caitlin Durante]

Fascinating stuff, Fascinating stuff.

[Robert Evans]

What is happening to Elmo?

[Andrew T.]

Oh, my God, is that.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah, the Elmo thing is. I think that's from the new Dune show. And that's clearly someone playing Matt Gaetz on snl just because of how uncomfortable that woman looks. I can tell it's supposed to be Matt Gaetz. Anyway, I don't know.

[Michelle Burford]

Okay, so what is a salad tossed salad is. Get ready, hold onto your underwear for this one. Oral, anal sex. So oral sex to the anus is what tos Dalad is. Hi, mom.

[Caitlin Durante]

It's zooping.

[Michelle Burford]

In this heart is an oral sex party. It's a gathering where oral sex is performed. And rainbow comes from. All of the girls put on lipstick and each one puts her mouth around the penis of the gentlemen or gentlemen who are there to receive favors and.

[Caitlin Durante]

Makes another horrified mom shaking her head.

[Michelle Burford]

Hence the term rainbow.

[Caitlin Durante]

Oh, fuck.

[Andrew T.]

I remember this like it was yesterday I. When I said that when my mom would sit me down after school and like it was time for us to have like a serious talk about something. I always knew it had been on Oprah. And I remember very clearly this episode because as I said, I went to Catholic school. I went to all girls school. I was the biggest nerd in the world. I was not having sex with anybody but my mom sitting me down and being like, is this a thing that's happening at school? I was like, the way the fiction that young people were doing things like rainbow parties. Yeah. It just really is burned in my mind that Oprah had really put a fantasy world in the head of people like my mom.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah. Yeah. It's such a fucking absolute. It's such a fucking absolute fantasy. Cause I remember seeing this as a 15 year old and going, no, we're not. Like, I'm not. Look, 15 year old Robert, not exactly doing a lot of sex parties. But also I Knew enough about my generation to know that, like, neither were basically anyone else in my school. Right. There were some kids having sex, but there weren't rainbow parties.

[Andrew T.]

Like, people were like, dry humping behind the Walmart and, like, that was it. Like, it wasn't like, sex parties.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah. Everybody's got a different lipstick. And you compare the rainbows on your dick. What?

[Andrew T.]

Like, where is this happening? Where did you get the lipstick shades? Many questions.

[Robert Evans]

My mom asked me about this, too. Yeah, that was a weird thing. And I went. And I was like. I was like, mom, look at me.

[Caitlin Durante]

Look at these.

[Robert Evans]

Look at these bangs I have.

[Andrew T.]

Nothing is passed down to.

[Caitlin Durante]

You should always think this way. Whenever there's like a. This is the new dangerous sex thing the kids are doing. Does it sound like something you and your peers might have done as 15 year olds? Or does it sound like something an adult pervert invented because it made them. Because they're sick. Right.

[Bridget Todd]

I was gonna say, whoever invented this truly needs to go to jail. The concept is.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yes, it's like, this is marketing child pornography. That's what you've done.

[Robert Evans]

Well, they did like a version of this on that teen show Degrassi, but instead of it on the dicks, it was like rainbow bracelets. My mom asked me about that also.

[Andrew T.]

That was another thing. I don't think it was on Oprah. But if you wore like those jelly bracelets. Oh, if you wear a brown one, you know what, that blue jelly.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Nobody was doing that.

[Andrew T.]

Nobody.

[Caitlin Durante]

You know, but Sophie, now that you brought up Degrassi, I think I'm through the looking glass here. Because, look, clearly this isn't a real thing. It was invented by a pedophile who was on Degrassi. Famous pedophile Drake.

[Bridget Todd]

Oh, shit.

[Caitlin Durante]

We're through the looking glass, people. We got this locked down.

[Robert Evans]

That man is suing people.

[Andrew T.]

He's currently Kendrick Lamar.

[Caitlin Durante]

Come on.

[Robert Evans]

He's suing Kendrick. He's suing for defamation for being called a pedophile. But, sir, I feel like the best.

[Caitlin Durante]

Case scenario here is that Kendrick and I become good friends and no one ever tells him that. I mistook him from Macklemore once.

[Andrew T.]

Robert, I swear. How does that happen?

[Caitlin Durante]

Robert, I swore I don't know who people are. Like, not by looks or songs. I just thought people. I don't know who people are.

[Robert Evans]

Take that secret to our group.

[Andrew T.]

They couldn't have waterboarded that shit out of me.

[Robert Evans]

It's the most angry I've ever been at you.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah, the Internet's going to light On Drake's Gotta Get Off Scot Free now and then.

[Robert Evans]

We all made a pact in my car that we would never repeat this.

[Caitlin Durante]

Because it was so funny. I'm too honest a man, Sophie. I can't. I'm like George Washington. This is my cherry tree moment. I cannot tell a lie. I don't know who people are. Yes, but. Jesus fuck.

[Andrew T.]

Robert, it's okay.

[Caitlin Durante]

I listened to a Kendrick Lamar song after that.

[Robert Evans]

I knew you were in my car.

[Caitlin Durante]

It was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. Macklemore's not. I made a horrible mistake. Forgive me. Don't forgive Drake. Look, I'm trying to deflect here, right? I'm doing the Trump thing. You know, like, ignore my sins, focus on Drake and the rainbow parties. Let's blame him for that.

[Robert Evans]

The disappointment's back. Oh, my God.

[Caitlin Durante]

I don't. I. I don't know who people are. Look, it's gonna be hard to get back on track after this. Later in that interview, Oprah asks Burford if rainbow parties are common. And Maria replied, among the 50 girl I talked to, this was pervasive. And here's a quick tip on, like, knowing if a journalist is not a good journalist. A good journalist, if they had talked to 50 girls, would say, this number of them said that they had attended a rainbow party versus this number of them said they had heard of a rainbow party. That starts to give you some useful data as to like, oh, actually 30 of them said they'd heard of this. None of them have been to one. Maybe they're not real. Like. Like that. That would be journalism, right? That's the start of it, at least. You know, Burford says, of the 50 girls I talked to, quote unquote, this was pervasive. Now, I'll say this right now. Burford either made all that shit up because she knew Oprah would love it, or some teenage girls were playing a prank on her. A couple of researchers, Joel Best and Kathleen Bogle, actually looked into where this rumor started. And they traced it to a book called Epidemic How Teen Killing Our Kids by Meg Meeker. And if you want to know how accurate this book was. Are there still kids? Sovie.

[Robert Evans]

Check. Snow.

[Caitlin Durante]

Let's. Let's do a quick fact check. Okay? It didn't. We're good. Good news, everybody. Teen sex didn't kill all the kids.

[Bridget Todd]

Hey, listen, at least we do have a name for the straight up pedophile enabler at minimum.

[Caitlin Durante]

Med Meg Maker. Oh, she's great. She is a right wing pediatrician who has spent the last 20 years profiting off of convincing parents that their kids are fucking each other to death. She has never once been correct, but she has the ear of incoming President Donald Trump. She is awesome. Back in 2003, Oprah laundered her conservative Christian propaganda because, hey, sex sells best. And Bogle, who wrote a book called Kids Gone Wild that despite that title, the book is about how all this stuff is bullshit. Right? It's about all these bullshit media myths about how bad kids are. Right? Right. And it busts a bunch of pervasive myths about teenagers and their wild, elaborate sex based parties. Both Bogle and Best clearly blame Oprah for launching the rainbow parties panic. Right? Like this becomes a media panic as a result of Oprah giving it so much oxygen. I'm going to quote now from an interview with the authors of that book in Salon with Oprah because that reaches so many millions of people, particularly women and women that have children. They're hearing that story and saying, oh my God, did you hear on Oprah what's going on? We even have a quote in the book that looks at another reporter when they're looking at issues of youth and sex. A reporter by the name of Costello that says, it must be true. Didn't you see that Oprah episode? So even another reporter ends up citing Oprah as a fact checker on Rainwell parties being real. So if you're following the evidentiary chain of custody here, Oprah's reporter says, I talked to 50 girls and like they said rainbow parties were pervasive. Did any of them say they'd been to one? Unclear. That turns into another journalist being like, well, they're real because it was on Oprah. We're locked in, baby.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, the circular bullshit machine.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah, it's beautiful stuff. Another. Oh, and actually this gets back to Degrassi. Another story Oprah helped push around the same time was a panic around sex bracelets. This is again the idea that like girls have these color coded bracelets, bracelets to signify all the sex acts they're down to perform. And I guess the boys are just going around being like, oh, that girl's got the bracelet for a foot job. I'm getting up with her. And it's like, that's just, that's just not how teenagers work. That's not how adults work. Nothing works that way except for like, I don't know, weird Jeffrey Epstein parties probably. I'm sure he had some parties like that. I'm sure he had parties like that because they watched Oprah. And were all perverts anyway.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, yeah. It's also like, that is such a healthier type of consent than anything that actually happens in fucking high school.

[Caitlin Durante]

Right? Right. Yes, yes. They're all having, like, the kind of key parties that like middle aged swingers had in 1974.

[Andrew T.]

Those bracelets were, like, very popular when I was coming of age. And they were genuinely like, y'all can look this up. They were banned from schools because of this book.

[Caitlin Durante]

They were banned from high school. Yeah. Yes. Now this is another thing again, both this and rainbow parties. I'm sure if you dug, you could find examples of teenagers doing it after it becomes a media panic. Because kids are like, well, all right, let's give it a shot. It's an.

[Andrew T.]

We're doing it.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah. But, yeah, it's not until professional media idiots like Matt Lauer or Montel Williams make a big deal about it that it becomes a thing. And in that interview in Salon, Best and Bogle get to the heart of what's really going on with all of this. I think one of the things we show in the last chapter is that it's not just one group that likes these stories. Kids themselves like them because it's great gossip. What's better than to say, oh, the girl wearing the red bracelet, you know what she does? She gives lap dances. They make stories teens like to pass around that make interesting gossip. Parents are always worried about their kids, of course, and they've been fed a lot of media stories that feed into that. So the idea that their child, who they think of as innocent, might be corrupted by these other forces that feeds into something like they've been fed and believed for a long time. Schools wanna show how they have things under control. They know what's going on and they can talk to parents about it. So they can say, we ban those bracelets to put a stop to that. Then of course, the media. There's both the idea that sex sells, but also fear sells, saying, listen to this story, you have something to worry about. You have to listen to this because you don't know what's really going on. And it could affect your child. That's what gets viewers. And television producers and newspaper columnists are aware of that. Now, we're gonna move on from the radio party stuff, but I wouldn't be doing my job as podcast host if I did not play you the rest of that clip.

[Michelle Burford]

So, okay, and so what is. So what does pretty boy mean? Pretty boy is a sexually active boy. Someone who's been fairly promiscuous so it isn't what, maybe what you would have thought pretty boy meant in your. And dirty means. What does dirty means? A diseased girl. And along with that, the term that some teens are using to mean HIV is high five.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

High.

[Michelle Burford]

And then the Roman numeral V, high five. So if you got high fived by Jack, you got diseased by Jack, he gave you hiv. He gave you hiv? Yeah.

[Caitlin Durante]

What?

[Michelle Burford]

So that means you shouldn't go around saying good little kids anymore. I was like a little boy and I went, give me high five. Yeah, you shouldn't do that anymore. And if suddenly your kids want to make salad all the time, you should be one.

[Andrew T.]

Okay.

[Michelle Burford]

And booty call is pretty common. Yeah, that's pretty pervasive. Yeah, that's an early morning or late at night call for sex that involves no real relationship. Maybe 2am Guy calls girl and says, meet me at so and so location. We have sex, we leave booty call. Y'all knew that. Y'all got that right.

[Caitlin Durante]

Okay.

[Michelle Burford]

And then there's the term hoovering, which is a term used for a girl having an abortion. Yes, you get the reference. The sucking of a hoover vacuum. She's having herself vacuumed out, so to speak. So these were just a few of the terms that I heard teens referring to. I got a whole new vocabulary book. So what would happen when they would say she got hoovered? Well, if somebody. If you're talking to somebody in the beginning, before you got so hip here. Yeah, before I got hip. If somebody said she got hoovered, you would just say, what do you mean by. Yeah, what do you mean? What do you mean? What does hoovering mean?

[Caitlin Durante]

And she.

[Michelle Burford]

Tell me, are rainbow parties pretty common? I think so. At least among the 50 girls that I talk to.

[Caitlin Durante]

This is pervasive. That gets us back to what we'd said before, but, like, oh, God, Jesus. The idea that, like, kids have, like, a fun term for getting hiv.

[Bridget Todd]

Also, not to give notes on the slang, but shouldn't it be high four? I just. I don't know, man.

[Robert Evans]

Such a writer, Andrew.

[Bridget Todd]

I just, like. It's tough, that hoovering, really. You know, it used to be just suffering from a great depression and now tainted so badly.

[Caitlin Durante]

Oh, man. Yeah. It would have been pretty funny to just be a conman journalist in this period and be like, yeah, the kids can't stop talking about Herbert Hoover. You know, like, he's their favorite president. He's the only guy on the minds of the youth these days.

[Bridget Todd]

I mean, obviously, the Internet is absolute poison, but Truly, watching this clip of someone basically read fake Urban Dictionary on national TV does kind of give me like, okay, some things were improved.

[Caitlin Durante]

Okay. Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Oh, yeah. Have y'all seen that meme where it's like ice T from Law & SVU explaining fake things? That's what that reminded me of. Just someone sitting on stage being like, oh, yeah, the kids are calling it cat littering.

[Caitlin Durante]

It's wind.

[Andrew T.]

Da da da da. That's what that was. It's just somebody making up fake things for entertainment.

[Caitlin Durante]

The idea that kids have, like, a casual slang term for getting hiv, it's.

[Bridget Todd]

It's so like.

[Caitlin Durante]

It's like it's doing something in a video game.

[Bridget Todd]

But also, like, I mean, obviously they were. They had a vested interest in never thinking about this. But, like, nothing is more like universal than teens lying to. To old ass adults.

[Caitlin Durante]

If a journalist had ever tried to sit down with me and my friends and ask us, like, about if there's any sex slang, we would have lied. Like, cheap rugs. Like, we would not have stopped talking until they had run out of space on their recorder.

[Bridget Todd]

You know, like, just like, the credulousness is. I mean, I guess that I'm realizing now, I guess is like, Oprah's big crime is just like criminal credulity.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yes, yes. That's a big part of it. Or, you know, if she's not credulous. Cause again, she's a very savvy person. It's like marketing credulousness. Right?

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah. And it's got the dumbest shit you've ever heard. She'll just be like, I mean, listen, that's exactly what Joe Rogan does. So, like.

[Caitlin Durante]

Right? Yep. Like that. That is. There's a really. Like, you don't have Joe Rogan without the Oprah Winfrey show, you know?

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah.

[Caitlin Durante]

Just like you don't have Oprah without Donahue. Now, Oprah's not the only person, obviously, who spread this kind of stuff, but she is the biggest name in the world of people doing this. As Vanity Fair stated in the year 2000 when Oprah launched O Magazine, quote, oprah Winfrey arguably has more influence on the culture than any university president, politician, or religious leader, except perhaps the Pope. And I'm just gonna say it. John Paul ii, I think, was the Pope at this time. And I believe Oprah had more of an influence than he did on American culture at, like, who remembers old JP the two you got shot once. Come on, Jesus, Robert. I know popes who have been shot way more than that.

[Bridget Todd]

Also do individual popes really have that much influence? I mean, they're still weighing in.

[Caitlin Durante]

Popes certainly did.

[Bridget Todd]

Well, I just mean, like, they don't really have more influence than any other pope, really. Like, you're still operating within the bands of Catholicism.

[Caitlin Durante]

Look, most of what I know about the Pope comes from the movie the Conclave, which is largely.

[Andrew T.]

Ooh, I just saw that.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is largely that Stanley Tucci looks incredible in Catholic vestments. Like, it's like he was poured into him. That man can really pull off whatever you call those outfits. Also Ralph Fiennes.

[Bridget Todd]

Oh, my God, his tooch chains.

[Caitlin Durante]

The tooch. The tooch.

[Andrew T.]

That was lovely.

[Caitlin Durante]

Oh, man. And then John Lithgow out of nowhere. Love it. The Vaping Cardinal. All sorts of good stuff in that movie.

[Bridget Todd]

Okay. I am morseled by the concept of a vaping cardinal.

[Caitlin Durante]

It's good. They hire an Italian man whose face was made to angrily vape while wearing vestments. It's amazing. That casting director deserves a medal of honor. Okay, so, yeah, I. I think that that's probably a broadly accurate statement. The Rainbow Party disinformation is part of a long tradition of Oprah episodes about how dangerous life has become for young children. Every year, as violent crime fell and violence towards children usually fell, Oprah barraged her audience with ceaseless tales of child abductions, child sex trafficking, child drug abuse, and teen sex. Studies show consistently that Americans believe violent crime is much higher than it in fact is. We are in the midst of a very frightening moral panic over child sex trafficking right now, which does not resemble how child sex trafficking actually looks. I'm speaking right now about Tim Ballard, whose lies about his life rescuing kids from child sex trafficking networks were the basis of the blockbuster movie Sound of Freedom. Ballard spent years claimed to be fighting an international shadowy network of child traffickers, while he just resigned after being charged with massive sexual misconduct and abuse abuse himself. Despite all of this, tons of people believe little kids are being targeted and stolen by criminal organizations when, again, they are usually being molested by people who are responsible for them. Not random narco gangs abducting kids in parking lots by putting cheese on the doors of their mom's car. That's not the problem. Oprah bears a good share of the blame for how unhinged many Americans are about the dangers that children face. And this is. I'm making this allegation based on stuff like the Rainbow Party Panic and other years of other similar episodes. But, you know, it's. During my research, I ran into a really Interesting thread in a website on free range parenting. And I'm not making. I don't know much about free. I'm not making a comment on that, but I found it interesting to read what these people had to say in a thread titled did Oprah Make Us Terrified for Our Kids? The author, who identifies themselves as Laura, writes, as I think about the litany of freak accidents and hidden dangers I need to be constantly worried about for my kids, almost everything has one common recurring element. I saw it on Oprah one time. Time Baby drowning in an inch of water. Healthy girl scrapes her knee and dies of mrsa. Child decapitated by an airbag. Carbon monoxide from the car in the garage kills the family, Dry drowning, school shootings, home invasions, and countless other tragedies. Then there are the abduction, molestation, and sexual predator stories. These were typically featured on Oprah at least once a week. While I applaud Oprah's efforts to raise awareness, catch truly horrible criminals, and break the silence of abuse victims, this had to have an impact on the perception that there is a predator around every corner. And you can never be too careful because anything could happen. And I think she's on the money there. Right. Like the helicopter parenting. The fact that, like, kids, there's not zero Oprah in the fact that, like, kids stopped going outdoors.

[Bridget Todd]

You know, and like true crime podcasts now, it's like just, just the make white women assume that the world is out for their kids industry is the strongest.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yep.

[Andrew T.]

I mean, if you've ever seen videos of women moms who were like, I was at the Walmart and a man looked at my child, stay safe, mama bears. Like, it was the scariest thing that ever happened to me. We're like, it is this fantasy that around every corner there is a threat to you and your child. And I think it's dangerous precisely because it keeps you from seeing the actual threats that are there. Right. Like the creepy soccer coach, the creepy guy at church. Right. Like, and I also think, like, with the rainbow parties, if you are so busy thinking about these fabricated fictional threats to your kids, what if you're. What the things that are actually happening in your kids life day to day at school, how are they going to come talk to you? How are you going to foster a safe, open, communicative environment if you've been led to believe that, like, these fictional threats are out there and that they're real?

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah.

[Caitlin Durante]

Yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

Well, also, it's like, I mean, because it is, you know, scout leaders, church leaders and their husbands that are doing most of this stuff. It's like those people are the ones that they have some responsibility for bringing into their child's life, whereas a narco gang is just randomly out there. Like, you don't have to confront anything about yourself to protect a kid from the others.

[Caitlin Durante]

Ding, ding, fucking ding. I think, think, right? It's so it's hard to raise kids and, like, you can be a responsible, decent person who does their best with your kid and they can have a horrible life. That's the world, right? Like, you can't stop that. And instead of like confronting that and confronting like, well, all I can really do is, you know, try to be the best parent for my kid. You get all these, like, obsessions with things that just are not realistic threats and dangers. And you just feel like if I continue scratching that fear itch by watching this stuff, maybe it'll make it less likely to happen to me, right? Maybe if I train my eyes on the Eye of Horus, it will be less likely to harm me and my loved ones, you know?

[Bridget Todd]

Well, it's like the safety theater makes you feel better. Then again, confronting the actual difficult shit.

[Caitlin Durante]

That is in the world, the danger of all of this stuff was less, you know, kids are having rainbow parties or, you know, pedophile gangs are abducting kids in vans and more like, hey, have you looked at your, your kid's scout leader lately? Seems like he has a lot of one on one time with the boys. By the way, should somebody look in on that?

[Bridget Todd]

Scouts in general. It's also just like a right wing paramilitary organization even without the funny business. Like you could learn how to camp and fish and hunt without all the fucking, like, allegiances to order, you know, Andrew, thank you.

[Caitlin Durante]

Because I wanted to pivot to letting everyone know that if you give your kids to me for one week out of the year, they will come back. It's the Lawrence of Arabia school for children. They're gonna learn how to blow up bridges and trains. Right. What do they do with that knowledge? That's up to them. I have no control of them. Once they've learned how to make the explosives and destroy bridge support supports, it's no longer my, my responsibility after that point, you know.

[Andrew T.]

Is this the start of Robert starting a boy army?

[Caitlin Durante]

Everybody does want a child army, you know, Speaking of Popes, Bridget, like, that's, that's like a third of the Popes. Wow. Solid subset of the Pope population has child armies, you know? Anyway, I think that's an episode. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I was gonna say we Got it.

[Caitlin Durante]

We.

[Robert Evans]

We gotta stop.

[Caitlin Durante]

Turns out we have a lot more Oprah to do. I don't know what we're going to do about this, but everybody go away for the weekend. Bridget Pluggables.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, you can subscribe to my Boy army newsletter. No, just kidding. You can listen to my podcast There are no girls on the Internet. My podcast with Mozilla foundation, the makers of Firefox called IRL about who has the power in AI and follow me on Instagram at bridgetmarieandc.

[Caitlin Durante]

Excellent. Andrew Taylor.

[Bridget Todd]

I don't know man.

[Andrew T.]

Just.

[Bridget Todd]

Yo, is this racist as a podcast?

[Caitlin Durante]

Excellent. Excellent. All right, everybody. Until next week, remember the Robert Evans Summer Camp for kids to learn how to blow up trains and disrupt national infrastructure. It's not illegal if we don't tell them to do anything with the knowledge. Bye.

[Robert Evans]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Jon Stewart]

Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at the Daily show, which means he's also back in our ears on the Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend Jon Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind Listen to the Daily Show Ears edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Hey listeners. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. And I'm excited to share this really riveting story with you. I'm also excited to tell you that you can now get access to all episodes of Murder on Songbird Road 100% ad free and one week early through the I Heart True Crime plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts plus you'll get access to other chart topping true crime shows you love, like Betrayal, the Girlfriends, Paper Ghosts, Murder Homes, Unrestorable, the Godmother, and more. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for I Heart True Crime plus and subscribe today. Welcome to the Criminalia podcast. I'm Maria Tremorki.

[Andrew T.]

And I'm Holly Fry. Together we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Each season we explore a new theme. From poisoners to art thieves, we uncover.

[Andrew T.]

The secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching, and.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.

[Andrew T.]

Listen to criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Caitlin Durante]

It was big news. I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery. Big, big news.

[Nancy Grace]

A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.

[Andrew T.]

I like, saw one thing that happened happen.

[Nancy Grace]

An arrest, trial and conviction soon follow.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

He did not kill her.

[Caitlin Durante]

There's no way is the Real Killer.

[Nancy Grace]

Rightly behind bars or still walking free. Did you kill her? Listen to the real Killer, Season 3 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.