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- [00:01]
Alex
Yeah, sure thing. Hey, you sold that car yet?
- [00:04]
Ben
Yeah, sold it to Carvana.
- [00:06]
Alex
Oh, I thought you were selling to that guy.
- [00:09]
Ben
The guy who wanted to pay me in foreign currency. No interest over 36 months. Yeah, no. Carvana gave me an offer in minutes, picked it up and paid me on the spot. It was so convenient.
- [00:21]
Alex
Just like that?
- [00:22]
Catherine
Yeah.
- [00:22]
Alex
No hassle?
- [00:23]
Ben
None.
- [00:24]
Alex
That is super convenient. Sell your car to Carvana and swap. Hassle for convenience. Pickup fees may apply.
- [00:30]
David
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- [02:14]
Matthew Remski
Hello everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Matthew Remski. We are on Instagram and threads conspiritualitypod and and you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. We are independent media creators and we really appreciate your support. Now, this is typically our Saturday brief slot, but what we're going to do in this post election wreckage week is unlock a recent bonus episode from our Patreon feed that Derek published back on October 28th. It's called Tucker Carlson's Daddy Issues. And in it, Derek uses the triggering prompt of Carlson spouting off at a turning point Trump rally in which he brayed that Trump was coming home to spank all of the very bad girls. You probably remember this now, there was a dozen directions that Derek could have taken this in, but he focused and this was really effective, in my view, on what it brought up for him personally in relation to his father. So it is a personal story and I won't say much more about it, except that I think it's really powerful in the aftermath of Harris's defeat to reflect on the many deep and personal ways in which impatience and failures to communicate can lead to cycles of violence that can disrupt the most intimate parts of our lives and contribute to societies of power rather than societies of care. So this episode is not about voting or demographics or messaging or the electoral spectacle, but I would say it holds an important piece of how our politics are plagued by implicit and explicit violence. And the last thing I'll say is that that important piece holds some hope because at one point in the story, Derek is walking with his father across a bridge and he finally asks, why did you do that to me? And his father's answer was honest and vulnerable enough to repair their relationship. Now, in a gracious world, this is a moment that could model a conversation that countless sons and fathers might have to finally end the violence that haunts our lives and twists our politics into what we find today. I think we're all crossing a bridge together, looking for repair. So here's Derek.
- [05:04]
Derek Barris
If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous, if you allow your 2 year old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14 year old to light a joint at the breakfast table, if you allow your hormone addled 15 year old daughter to like slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you're gonna get more of it and those kids are gonna wind up in rehab. It's not good for you and it's not good for them. No, there has to be a point at which dad comes home. Yeah, that' dad comes home and he's pissed. Dad is pissed. He's not vengeful he loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because there is children. They live in his house. But he's very disappointed in their behavior. And he's going to have to let them know. He's going to have to get to your room right now and think about what you did. And when dad gets home, you know what he says? You've been a bad girl. You've been a bad little girl and you're getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it's not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it's not. I'm not going to lie. This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You're getting a vigorous spanking because you've been a bad girl. And it has to be this way. It has to be this way because it's true. And you're only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did.
- [06:58]
Catherine
No, Tucker, it doesn't have to be this way. And that's what I want to talk about first. This was at the Turning Points USA presidential rally that Tucker Carlson spoke at. He claims it was the first political rally that he's ever spoken at in his career. It prefaced Donald Trump, who would later come to the stage and say things like he stopped a war with France. But it's really disturbing just thinking about where we are politically, where now the day you'll listen to this, or at least the day it'll be published eight days before the election. And the closing argument includes someone who cosplayed a journalist for a very long time and still tries to do that, talking about the necessity of hitting children. And of course, all of the fear mongering and the lies and the misinformation and the disinformation coming from Trump's mouth himself. All of the enemy is within rhetoric that his cronies try to spin as if he's not saying what he's saying. This is the closing argument and wherever you land politically, just to take a screenshot of the two different closing arguments, one trying to lift up American people with hope and some something to grasp in the future. And the other side not relying on a completely different tactic on the topic of corporal punishment. And that's what I want to briefly talk about today with an anecdote. Matthew has covered this topic pretty extensively in the past few years, rightfully so, because he's thought about it a lot. He's done research into it. He's talked to experts about it. Julian has also touched it as well, as both of them are parents and have a much deeper vested interest in what that means for raising children into today's society. So you can listen to them for much more research, probably a lot more thoughtful commentary on the totality of what that entails. But I want to flag now that this isn't that this isn't me doing my normal thing where I hold up influencers claims and then I talk about clinical studies that refute those claims and don't show the efficacy. This is purely my story about why I think corporal punishment is a terrible idea. And the fact that somebody who could be president in a week, that this is part of their closing argument to the American people is so troublesome. I'm Derek Barris, and this is a conspirituality bonus episode about a topic that's really tough. Let me start all this with a little bit of hope because I think that's really important and it is actually a hopeful story. And I also promise that by the very end, there might even be some laughs because there have been different responses to Tucker Carlson's ridiculous statements. And I'm going to play one that I think is a great way to respond to such inflammatory and such insulting and dangerous rhetoric. But here's the story. It's the late 80s, 1998, I think. I had graduated college a year before, living up in New York City. And my father was visiting. He was still living in New Jersey at the time. And he came up to see me, and we're in Lower Manhattan about to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. One of the things that I inherited from my father was a love of exercise, and that includes walking. He is 80 years old now, and he still walks miles a day in his adopted home of Las Vegas. And so when we get together our whole lives, we've just walked. Now, when I was younger, there was a lot more anxiety and tension around. And that's partly why hearing Tucker say dad comes home hit me in such a intimate place. But at this point in our lives, my dad and I have grown much closer and we're about to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. And I think to him, I think to myself, I have a question that has been turning over my mind for. For quite some time. And I finally ask him, I say, why'd you hit me? Why'd you hit me so much? Growing up, that was really tough. It was really confusing because in general, we had a good family unit. And it wasn't like there was regular abuse all the time. But at Times, often for things that I didn't think warranted the level of violence. There'd be. There'd be some physical abuse. And he turned to me and this kind of gives a framework for what I think is my own anecdotal response to Tucker. And he said to me, I didn't know how to talk to you. I didn't know how to talk to children. I had a really tough time with that. And it tracks. By the time I was in high school and then college and after college, he's honestly now one of the closest people in my life. I talk to him almost every day on text, regularly on the phone. I have a chain with my sister and my dad that we talk regularly. And I'll just say my sister was also the recipient of. Of some of this as well when she was younger. But he said that, and it was authentic and it was true, and it's not an excuse, but he apologized and there was actually a moment when he stopped doing it when I was, I think, 10ish years old. I'll get to that in a moment. But since that day, we've been very close friends. Since that day, I've been able to honestly tell him everything. I remember when I was going through my divorce, he was the first person I called when it was starting to happen. When I found out I had cancer, he was the first person I called. So that said things do change and things can be healed, which is really good. But the sort of instinctual ramifications and the instinctual responses I've had to a lot of stimuli in my life still go back to that time and that I don't know if it's ever truly healed because it became sort of a survival mechanism. That response to seeing someone much bigger than you, that you love, that you came from hitting you, is something that I think most people, if they've experienced it, grapple with for their entire lives. And what did it look like? It was never a closed fist. It was normally a belt. But sometimes it was a shove, sometimes it was a slap repeatedly. I remember one day where something was hap happened, had happened at school, and I was a rambunctious child. Sometimes I think back upon it and, you know, if I was growing up now, there might have been some medication that I was put on. And so I acted out in different ways. And I had done something that warranted a teacher's note coming home. And that's why that dad comes home part really shakes me when I hear someone say in front of 10,000 people, and they're cheering him on, because I know what that is. I know that fear. And I remember him coming home and at first acting fine, saying, hey, let's go. Let's go play some air hockey. We had a. We had a playroom where a bunch of the stuff that we did was. And my toys. And in my head I was like, oh, huh, Maybe we're just gonna talk. And as I walked into the room in front of him, he threw me into the air hockey table, knocked it down. And then, you know, the yelling began. And there was some hitting again, to be clear, no punching. But there was some abuse. There are other times. And a few moments ago, I. I had mentioned that there was a belt until there was no belt any longer. And I didn't know until this day when we're walking in lower Manhattan, the reason for that. And it is this. Normally the belt required me laying down on the bed and getting the lashes. And then one day, and he told me this, and I really take him at his word, for some reason, he told me to pull down my pants. He had never done that before. It was always over the clothing. But something had infuriated him to the point that he wanted to actually make contact with the skin. And so I did it. And at that moment, it clicked for him where I pulled down my pants. And he saw the bruises that had been there from the previous lashing that had been a couple weeks before. And then he didn't do it. And then he never, ever laid a hand on me again. That was the last time I even remember a day. Like I said, I was probably 10ish, so this was like 85, I would guess. And a few years later, right before my 17th birthday, I was arrested with a friend of mine. We had tried to steal a few CDs from a local store. Stupid. Really, really stupid kid stuff, but the terror of it. My mom actually worked in commissary at the local prison at the time. And so I, you know, I had some familiarity with the police and the system, and my name was often recognized for that reason. But, you know, they let me go. They let my sister pick me up. But I remember the. The ride home and how terrified I was. And even in my head then, I had figured that some sort of physicality was going to become as part of a punishment. And when I got home, initially my parents were shocked that I would do that, and so was I, because it was out of character. It was a very stupid thing. And we went into my backyard and we sat down and talked. And my dad talked about the stupid things he did when he was a teenager and how he eventually overcame that. And I was punished. But there was no yelling. There was actually communication that happened. And of course I'm piecing these things out both from conversations with him and from my own experiences in life. But that directly stems back from that day where you saw the bruises. And he knew that that was not the right thing to do to a child. One of the things about being my age, which I'll be 50 next year, being firmly in the middle of Gen X, a lot of my friends who I've talked to, especially as adults, we had similar experiences. A lot of my friends were touched, hit, slapped, lashed in some way. And what I found is that at least from my conversations with them and also with my sister who has three beautiful children, none of them lay a hand on their children because they knew what it does to us. We know how it affects us, how it leaves these just long standing imprints on our consciousness and how it actually frames how we view the world. And I believe my friends when they tell me, and I watch, I actually watch their relationships with their young children, and they're just different. They're qualitatively different. There is respect, but not fear. And those are very different things. They can cross over at times, but you don't need to fear someone to respect them. And. And that's what gets me so much about hearing Tucker's ridiculous statements there, the idea that respect has to be won through fear. That's the only way it could be happened. And in my head, and again, I'm not someone who studies this because I've decided not to have children in my life. And I would be lying if I didn't say that part of the reason wasn't because I was afraid how I would react in those situations, Would I perpetuate what my father did, or would I catch myself in the moment and I have friends and family as precedent that, no, you don't have to go that way. And it's not the main reason at all of why I decided not to have children, but I'd be lying if I would say it wasn't in there. So when I hear Tucker, or honestly anyone, because I've seen this kind of rhetoric come on Twitter, usually about corporal punishment, is that, oh, you just don't know how to communicate with children. And I'm totally speaking on an anecdote of one in this, but it's something that I think would translate at least part of the time for People not knowing how to speak to someone is often what leads to violence. It's. It's kind of like the sentiment that's been getting around lately. Like conspiracy theories usually happen when you just have gaps in information, when you don't know something. It's not a long journey to get to a conspiracy. I just had this conversation right before I hit record right now with some people because I was in a yoga class, a lovely yoga class that I've been taking recently here in Portland. And really, like the teacher, really good class. But it's so easy for this type of language to slip in. In two classes I've taken with her, she just happened to say toxes twists are detoxifying, which is completely untrue. It's not how our body's detoxification system works works. And I didn't. Wouldn't call her out personally, I see it all the time. I just happened to make the statement on threads and I had a number of people come in and challenge me on it. And so one of them didn't know that there has been research into this. So I shared something. And then their immediate response was to deflect and move on to somewhere else. But that's what happens when you don't know something. The ignorance creeps in and then you start to repeat things that are not true. And that's how these ideas proliferate. I don't know why those people were screaming and cheering Tucker on. You might have heard that women were the loudest. They were positioned closest to the microphone. I'm sure that's. That's why you heard that. But to hear that is really jarring. And I just wonder, is this something that you have no experience with and you're just saying it to rile up the crowd, Those people cheering, Is it something that you've experienced and you've been hurt and so you want to perpetuate the harm onto the next generation? I don't know the answer to those things. And that's why, again, I have to qualify everything that I'm saying here with the fact that I can't say for sure it is my ignorance that you would turn to violence because you can't communicate. But I have experienced that specific instance and I think it's at least one of the factors that's important to point out. And I'll leave you with this closing thought of my anecdote. And then I said, I promise something that'll hopefully bring a smile because I think it is a good response to this. The idea that someone of an adult size, I'm 6:3, I'm 200 pounds. The idea that I would look down at someone who's 3ft tall, weighs 70 pounds, I don't know the exact ratios at this point. I'm far beyond that part of my life. But to think that I would put my physical body and my strength on that to prove a point, because I can't actually reason, because I can't share and communicate to that person, it. It just. It doesn't register. It doesn't register as something that would be beneficial to anyone, including myself. So I don't understand, and I do apologize. A lot of times. I. I like to do these episodes and I like to think clearly through the different chains of thought to actually come to a resolution. I've been doing a lot, a lot of that recently with these Public health episodes where I'm like, okay, Maha is saying this, and we know this isn't going to work, but what is the solution? And in this instance, and maybe it is because it's so intimate, and it's also not something, again, that I research and read on. But just purely speaking from experience, I don't know why you would do that to a child. I don't know how you could profess to love something so much and then harm them in that way. And I don't know what the right answers for discipline are. I agree that discipline, discipline was important when I got punished for shoplifting for an entire summer, you know what? Never stolen anything again. And there are a number of reasons into it, but that's part of understanding the consequences of your actions. So I think through to what he's saying, what Tucker is saying there, and the consequences of doing that to a small child is so malicious and twisted and dangerous. And I don't understand what type of lesson, but I do understand that you can very well feel that for the rest of your life, and it will affect your relationships in some capacity. The clip that I just played has made its way through a bunch of social media and talk shows. The Daily show clipped it. It was pretty funny. I think it was Michael Costa who covered that. But I want to close with a little clip from Stephen Colbert show from this week. And the entire thing. I'll. I'll include it in the show notes so you can watch if you'd like, because I'm not playing all of it. But that's my experience, and that's what happened. What I just shared. The first time I saw this clip, I had a very visceral Reaction, obviously, considering. I just wanted to talk about it for a few minutes and, and thank you for listening to that. Again, a bit of an abnormal episode. I didn't have a script. I'm literally just thinking and talking about something that has been turning over my mind for my entire life. But there are other ways to react and I think humor is also a good way. So Colbert had clipped different moments of that, what I, what I just played. And hopefully this will bring a smile to your face because when I watched this on my couch the other night with my wife, we were, we were cracking up, having already had talked about this very clip and some of the, some of the more challenging emotional aspects of it. To actually just sit back and be like, yeah, yeah, Tucker, you're a fool. And an.
- [28:12]
Derek Barris
If you allow your hormone addled 15 year old daughter to like slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you're gonna get more of it.
- [28:19]
Gina
Everything at home. Okay, Tuck, is that you? If you allow your teenagers to wait till you fall asleep on the couch, then draw a penis on your forehead with a Sharpie, and when you ask who did this, they just laugh and say, oh my God, the penis just got a vein in it. Because dad is so angry. And if you say, and if you say no, if you say, there will be consequences, then you fall and bang your actual penis on the corner of the coffee table because they tied your shoes together and you're so startled you let out a big fart and then your wife starts laughing too and they film it all and post it online and now you're going viral as hashtag penis fart. Dad, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, you're going to get more of.