 I thought we said we were doing masks. I'm so curious. What? Good evening and welcome to my weird hair for your reference brought to you by your friendly neighborhood librarians from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I am Robin Biedenbough. I'm Paris Whelan and I'm Sarah Johnson. Welcome back guys season two episode two and as usual, I have a question to get the show started. Have either of you ever used one of those meal kit delivery services? To like look at different ones like pretend and like window shop, but I'll ever actually like purchase them. Yeah, I there are like way too many services for me to make a decision. I'm too indecisive to pick one. Sort of similar here. We have a friend who does one of these and she went to town recently and forgot to cancel her her meals for that week. And so, you know, we got to call him. He's like, hey, you want to you want to have some free food? And we're like, sure. So we, you know, I drive over to her house and steal a package from her porch. You know, totally smooth. Bring it home in like the the first night we make the wife and I make this, you know, nice little shrimp dinner. It was pretty pretty good. And the next night, wife's out of town and I'm making this all by myself. So it's a nice little salmon meal kit. You know, they give you the recipe card and it tells you exact instructions for what to do and here like the exact amounts of food you're supposed to have. So I'm working on this. I got the salmon going in the pan and just as the recipe instructs, I'm working on the salad while the salmon is cooking. So get, you know, get just the right amount of leafy stuff. For a salad for two. Right about the same amount of cherry tomatoes, you know, some cheese and everything, a little bit of vinaigrette. And what also comes along with this salad is a cucumber that is approximately the size of Florida. So very explicit instructions to cut the cucumber lengthwise and then cut it into half moons and mix it all up with the salad. And so as I'm working on this cucumber, I realize I'm getting angrier and angrier. Who knew I had so many opinions about salad and textures in salads? This is way too much cucumber. Secondly, these half moons on this cucumber are way too large in proportion to the size of the cherry tomatoes. And I'm adding just matter and matter and matter at this recipe. And it took me way too long to realize that that this recipe is not the law. The spot team is not going to show up. And they haven't like exactly how I have prepared this cucumber. So like finally, like I was like, okay, look, what I'm using probably a third of this cucumber. I'm cutting into the little quarter size pieces because that is the right size for this salad. Anyway, so I'm glad you didn't like that cucumber. Dictate how much you put in there. Exactly. Cucumbers are not law. What was that, Sarah? Cucumbers are not law. Okay, so tonight we have some special guests with us as usual. And the first our first two guests are going to be are here to talk about power and how it works to get issues on the congressional agenda. This is reviewer two. I would like to extend a very warm welcome to our first guest tonight. She is Dr. Janna Morgan, professor of political science at the University of Tennessee. Hey, Robin. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Good to have you here. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work? Yeah, sure. So yeah, I'm a professor in the political science department here at the University of Tennessee. And my work has to do with questions of power and inequality, and I'm specifically interested in how unequal power and exclusion can distort the way that democracy works and harm citizens' lives. Sounds like very, very interesting stuff. Glad you're here to talk to us about it. So playing the role of reviewer two tonight, we have Dr. Nathan Kelly, also professor of political science at the University of Tennessee. Welcome. Hi. Glad to be here. So why don't you tell us a little bit about you and what you do? You have some interesting interests. Yes, absolutely. So I'm a professor of political science here at the University of Tennessee Knoxville as well. And the work that I do is focused primarily on economic inequality in the United States. I'm really interested in connections between politics, policy, and the distribution of income and how the distribution of income is connected to the distribution of political power in the United States and more broadly in the Western Hemisphere. Great. Great. So we're very happy to have you here to talk tonight, and we have a very specific question that you two are going to talk around. And that question is, why does it so often seem that politicians ignore the problems that really matter for people's lives? And I will remind the audience if you're out there and you have questions as these two are talking, feel free to go ahead and type those in the comments on YouTube or Facebook, and we can surface those after the talk. And a reminder to you two that as soon as you see my face, show up on the screen again, it's about time for Q&A. All right. I'll let you two take it away. Great. Thanks, Robin. All right. That sounds good. So that opening question that's at the bottom of the screen is really central to the book that we're going to talk about tonight. So maybe I'll just ask Jana to start out a bit with giving a general overview of the argument that we make in our book before we start diving into some of the more specific evidence. Yeah. So we're going to talk a bit about our book that came out from earlier this summer called Hidacking the Agenda. And it focuses a lot on how money and power shape the kinds of issues that politicians care about. So the opening question is why do people think that politicians ignore the problems that really affect ordinary people? And my short answer to that question is it seems that way because they really do pay very little attention to the issues that affect ordinary people, especially compared to the attention they give to matters that concern wealthy individuals and corporations. So really the core argument and empirical finding of our book is that those groups in American society that have a lot of financial resources get outsized attention from politicians and policy outputs often align with their goals and address their concerns. And this may seem kind of obvious. Like, yeah, we already think this. Everybody thinks this. It's sort of just like out there. Everybody believes that money gets you what you want in the American political system. But surprisingly, maybe political scientists are just a little bit dim or something. I don't know. But surprisingly, perhaps, before our book, very little research actually had been able to uncover empirical evidence that supports this basic intuition that everybody believes, which is that wealthy interests dominate the US policymaking process. OK, OK. So you're saying that it's kind of conventional wisdom that economics and politics are intertwined in a way that those with lots of economic resources like businesses and the really, really wealthy people have big advantages over the poor in the middle class in politics and policymaking. It's like, yeah, we all know that, right? But you also said that there's a lot of researchers out there who have tried to find systematic evidence of these sorts of elite advantages in Congress. And they haven't really had much luck finding those convincing effects. So can you tell us how this can be and what's different about our work that makes it more likely to find these effects that others have struggled so much to identify? Well, I mean, while I'd like to think that we're just smarter than everybody else, I don't think that's true. I think that basically what we were able to do was kind of break down the process a bit more than maybe previous scholars had done. So I think we do two things in the book that are a little bit different that help us to get at this question empirically in a way that provides what I think is some pretty compelling evidence in support of this basic intuition. So the first thing that we do is that we look in detail at the policy process and we really analyze not just outcomes, like which bills get passed, but we analyze the issues that members of Congress actually talk about. So that helps us to understand not just whether a bill gets passed or not, but whether certain issues actually get onto the agenda and the composition of those pieces of policy as they move through the policy process and so we're able to identify lots of nodes in the policy process where money and power influence outcomes. And so breaking down the process and really looking at speech. So we analyze congressional speech and what members of Congress talk about and that really helps us open up and get a bit more at their underlying motivations that maybe looking at conventional kinds of outcome variables might allow us to do. So I think that's one really important thing that we do in the book that's different than what's been done before. The other thing that we do is that we think about how influence works in a little bit of a broader way. So lots of the work that's tried to show that money or that power matters for politics has looked at money. So they've looked at campaign contributions and tried to show that if an organization gives money to a member of Congress then the member of Congress does something on their behalf. And finding evidence of these kinds of very clear transactions can be a bit tricky because politicians aren't stupid. They don't want to look like they're just doing what wealthy interests tell them to do, right? So they're a lot more clever than that. And so we need to look beyond these like outright transactions and we want to look not just at money which we do in the book. We definitely look at campaign contributions but we also look at the broader power system that shapes kind of the big picture of what kinds of issues get on the agenda at all. And so what we do is we kind of break down power into two components. So one is what we call in the book kinetic power and this is kind of like the things that we think of organizations doing to try to influence politics. So it's money, campaign contributions, lobbying. These are the two like most obvious things but it could also be like grassroots efforts. So if an organization wants to influence Congress they might try to get a bunch of people to call or send emails or stages sit in, right? Those are kinds of grassroots examples of kinetic power. But we don't stop with these things that are really super observable. We also look at something that we call structural power and structural power isn't about doing something to make politicians respond. Structural power is about laying claim to the idea that your value to the country or for our purposes your value to the economy is just so important that politicians have to listen to what you want because not listening to you would be damaging for the whole economy. And so structural power is really kind of close to a trump card in the policy process where if a group can say, look, if you don't do what we want then you don't, the economy is going to go to hell in a hand basket. That's a pretty powerful thing to be able to claim. And so this is something that we really look at and we provide empirical evidence that structural power is really important in the policy process. So I wouldn't be a good reviewer too if I didn't throw you for a loop at least one point in the conversation. Oh, you're so bad. Just a lot of these things. I wanted to just raise one point and go back to something you said earlier. You said that what we do in the book is that we analyze the things that members of Congress say. But members of Congress talk all the time. I would say that probably a lot of people who are watching this would say, of course members of Congress talk. They are so full of hot air that's all they ever do is talk. So the question I have is, how is it useful to pay attention to what members of Congress are saying when everybody knows that talk is cheap and they can just say whatever they want to? Well, first of all, I would say talk isn't exactly cheap, right? So we're talking specifically here not just about what they say any old time but what they choose to say on the floor of Congress. So this is what we analyze. We analyze members of Congress speech that gets entered into the congressional record. So there's a finite amount of space on that floor that they have. And so they have to choose how to use that time. But there's also lots of other things competing for members of Congress time. And so it isn't just cheap. It is somewhat costly to take a position on the floor of Congress about a bill or about an issue that a member cares about. So first of all that, second of all, we're able to show through our analysis that what members of Congress talk about actually affects what happens. It affects which provisions get into bills. It affects which bills get on the agenda. It affects which bills get debated and voted on and ultimately passed. So the speech matters. Okay, I'm easy to convince on that point. But so you've given an overview of the argument that we have that the political system is tilted to those at the top of the economic heap because of structural and kinetic power inequities. And we have an approach that might allow us to find real systematic evidence of these advantages. So what do we find? What sort of evidence do we have from the book and the analysis that we did that those with lots of economic advantages can tilt the political process in their favor? So we use two main empirical strategies in the book and both draw on the text of the congressional record as a key source of data. And the first is quantitative text analysis where we examine the volume of speech on different economic issues and analyze the relationships between members' speech and the contributions that they receive. So this part of the analysis is kind of big picture stuff. But the other part, which is I think more fun, is the part that's focused on specific policy processes where we examine how congressional attention is influenced by structural power and the ways that organizations kinetically leverage resources. So the book's intentionally multi-method and its approach. And the qualitative process analysis really lets us look at how the sausage kind of gets made. So we do a bunch of different policy process tracing in the book, but just to give you some examples, for instance, we carry out detailed analysis of the policy process that produced a major financial deregulation bill in the late 1990s. And this bill essentially deconstructed the entire financial regulatory system that had been put in place following the Great Depression. And this financial system had essentially prevented the US from having any major financial crises for 60 years. But the big financial institutions around the country and in New York on Wall Street had become frustrated with the system and the limitations it placed on the size and scope of their business. And so they were wanting to deconstruct that regulatory system, which they succeeded in doing an incidentally in less than a decade. We had the Great Recession, which was in large part due to inadequate regulatory oversight. So clearly the old system wasn't all bad. But anyway, our analysis shows that wealthy interests got what they wanted in this process. And we bring together a lot of evidence identifying both structural and kinetic power. So just to give you some concrete examples, legislators in their speech in the congressional record demonstrated that they really fundamentally believed that what was good for big financial institutions was good for the country. This is structural power. They believed that if they did what was good for big banks and big insurance companies, that the whole economy would prosper. So let me just give you a few quotes. So here's Phil Graham, who the bill was named after. This was the Graham Leach-Bliley bill. He was one of the authors of the bill. He said, Wall Street is the foundation on which Main Street is built. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, also argued that this bill was vital for the future of our country. Sorry, not just our economy, vital for the future of our country. And John Boehner said that the financial services sector is the irrigation system for our economy. It provides the fuel that the rest of our economy needs to grow. And opponents of the regulations saw this structural power operating, and they tried unsuccessfully to unmask it and use that unmasking to prevent the bill's passage. So here is Paul Wellstone, a Democrat from Minnesota. He lamented that, quote, the influence of finance is felt at the systemic level. Government officials and members of Congress will be prone to confuse big financial corporations' interests with the public interest. He was trying to say, yo, guys, there's the structural power thing happening here. Maybe we need to worry about other things besides spade corporations. That didn't work. We also see evidence of kinetic power. So one thing that we do that's cool in the book is we trace the behavior of specific legislatures in conjunction with the positions of their key contributors. We can show that members of Congress behaved in ways that were inconsistent with their party's positions on the bill or inconsistent with their own expressed ideological values. But when we look at their contributions and where they came from, we can make sense of their behavior. So let me just give you one example of this. Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich was a Republican. He ideologically would have been in favor of deregulation. But a major campaign contributor to Newt Gingrich was the insurance sector. And insurance was a little bit unsure about deregulation in the mid-1990s. And during that time, Gingrich repeatedly maneuvered in his role as Speaker of the House to keep deregulation off the House agenda. So other big financial interests were pushing for deregulation. Gingrich's ideology and party would have suggested that he should be in favor of deregulation. But he worked really, really hard to keep deregulation off the agenda until insurance changed its mind in 1996. And at that point in time, then Gingrich becomes this big advocate of deregulatory reform. And he actually gets it onto the House agenda and the House passes a bill. This bill was not ultimately the bill that became law. But he worked really hard. As soon as insurance changed its attitude, so did Gingrich. So, and we can show this, there are other examples along these lines. Here's a Democrat one. John Lewis actually received a ton of money from insurance as well. And he was a consistent opponent to deregulation. So if we just looked at his votes, we wouldn't see any influence of the contribution. But if we look at his speech, we can because John Lewis would always, if there was a bill, specifically a bill that promised to threaten the interest of minority communities, John Lewis would be a big opponent of the bill and very vocal. So in a previous debate on a Savings and Loans bill that was introduced about five years earlier before deregulation, he said on the floor of the House, I am outraged by the treatment that blacks and minorities have been getting from our nation's banks. The facts clearly reflect open and blatant racial discrimination, yet the Federal Reserve does nothing. I think we have a moral obligation to act. So he was a big proponent of protecting the interests of minority communities from large financial institutions. But when deregulatory reform came onto the agenda, Lewis was silent. He didn't say anything. He voted against the deregulatory of reform. But unlike some of his other colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, Lewis was silent. So you can see evidence if you start to break down the behavior and especially the speech of members of Congress and see evidence of this influence. So Nate, I keep talking about being focused on previous policy processes. Do you think that there's any way that we can see some of this stuff happening today? Yeah, we'll start to wrap up with this. I think that anybody watching will notice that my co-author would do really well in the Senate where they have the filibuster. And you can just keep talking in order to close it. But yeah, I think that there are some current events that are very much in line with the patterns that you're talking about. Right now in Congress, they're trying to work out this reconciliation package and it's really a negotiation among the Democrats. And two of the key players are Joe Manson and Kristen Sinema. And both of those players, you can see the way that money is influencing the things that they are being attentive to. So Joe Manson, for example, you talked about structural power. He has a lot of connections with the coal industry. And in West Virginia, there's this sort of accepted belief that what is good for coal is good for everyone. It's a very clear example of an industry that has structural power in the state of West Virginia. And his resistance, Manson's resistance to the climate change legislation and things like that really fit nicely with our patterns with regard to structural power. And on the Sinema side of things, you see that she's been recently holding fundraisers with very conservative organizations and is now putting up roadblocks to raising taxes on the very wealthy and some of the policy proposals like that. So you can see a clear linkage again on sort of what's on the agenda, what these senators are caring about and how it isn't really what they're caring about. But it's about structural power and it's about kinetic power coming into play in this current policy debate. All right. And I'm back to shut down conversation. That's what I do around here. Thank you both so much for joining us. We've already got a few questions coming in. We're going to let Michelle go first here. Why do voters seem unable to hold these Congress people to account? Why do we not ever seem to have political candidates who see this and yet are unable to resist the coming to this influence? Shall I take a crack at that one? I mean, so on the one hand, there are a lot of structural advantages that give incumbents advantages in legislative races. And so challengers are sort of at an inherent disadvantage to begin with. But I think the core answer is that for the most part, people are not paying attention to these kinds of nuanced details. The level of information that people in the mass public have is about politics is shockingly low. So the fact that you're watching this probably suggests that you're very, very different from the average voter. Because you're seeking out this kind of information and interacting in this way, it means you're probably different than the average voter. And the average voter just doesn't really pay very much attention to these kinds of things. And for that reason, you're not that likely to see accountability along these lines. So you are giving some specific examples, you know, mansion and cinema. And are these examples really part of a larger pattern that you see as you working through? Yeah, they really are parts of bigger patterns. And I mean, we collected a lot of data. We looked at millions of words. And I actually brought along a couple of charts. And there's one chart that's like a comparison between the amount of words that were spoken about labor and workers as compared to corporations and businesses. And you can just see in this chart, look how much more often members of Congress talk about corporations and businesses as compared to labor or workers. I mean, those corporate interests just have an extreme advantage in terms of the agenda. And if you look at another chart that breaks this down even more specifically, where we look at very specific words, inequality, depreciation, dividend, portfolio. Depreciation, dividend, and portfolio are words that are very specifically about corporate interests. Whereas inequality is something that's a lot more involved in middle class and lower class interest. And just look across the board. You see that the word portfolio, which is usually mentioned in the context of stocks, easily doubles up the amount of words that are spoken about inequality. So these are clear and consistent patterns that exist when you're looking at millions and millions of words that cross dozens of years. And we also conducted quantitative analysis where we looked at really rigorous statistical models that can capture the effect of money on what members of Congress talk about. And that's a third chart here. And what we can see is that there are two kinds of contributions that we look at. The white bars are contributions from labor and the dark bars are basically contributions from corporations. And it's hard to see with inequality, but this pattern really goes across the board on this. When we're talking about issues that are lower and middle class issues, like inequality and wages, when labor makes more contributions to a member of Congress, they talk more about those issues that labor cares about. However, when members of Congress get money from corporations, they talk less about those issues that middle class Americans really care about. And if you look at issues like the deficit, it's much more likely that members will talk about that issue if corporations are making contributions to a member of Congress and less likely if they're receiving money from labor. So even when we do a very generalizable quantitative analysis, we see these patterns definitely popping up over and over and over again. So it is very much part of a broader pattern. It's not just my stories, right? It's like big patterns. Yes. All right. I think we, let's squeeze in one more question here from Milt Kelly. It would seem that the problem is only getting worse as is income equality. What can we do to reverse the trend? Is there any hope? Go ahead, Nate. Well, everyone is usually more optimistic than me. Everyone says that when they read my books, they are always depressed and not usually very happy when they read the books. And I'm sorry about that. But I think that if we understand problems, it's more likely that we'll be able to figure out ways to solve them. I don't think there are any magic bullets in this context, absolutely no magic bullets. You can point to campaign finance reform and do things to try to make it harder for big money interests to have direct influence through monetary contributions. But that is unlikely to really solve this problem because when you talk about structural inequities, those are baked into the system and changing the money side of things doesn't change the structural side of things. So that's a problem that's an answer, a solution that's not really going to completely solve the problem. What I think you have to do is take a multi-pronged approach and what really needs to be done is that economic inequalities have to be tackled. They have to be put front and center because in a capitalist economy and in any kind of a political system, it is likely that those with more are gonna have more power than those with less. So the core way to narrow those power differentials is to narrow the economic differences. So putting in your policy agenda a clear emphasis on reducing economic inequality is essential for overcoming this problem in the medium to long-term. And I would just add to that that I think empowering lower-class groups also is really important. We see that labor at some points in time in our analysis, we didn't talk about it much, but there have been moments where organized labor, for example, has been able to exert some form of counterbalance to the interests of corporations and other wealthy groups. And but organized labor has really been deteriorating in power over the past few decades. And so those types of grassroots organizations that represent the interests of lower and middle-class Americans really could kind of provide at least some counterweight to a wealthy interest. Awesome. Thank you again. Those of you for joining us tonight. The book, let me see if I can get it in the camera here. Hijacking the Agenda, Economic Power and Political Influence. As you can see, I've read it. I've bookmarked some spots in here. It's a really interesting book. I should get you to go out and find it. You can actually check it out now from Hodges Library as of this week. And thank you both again. Thanks, Robin. Thank you. All right. And now we send you over to the panel. Over to Paris Whalen with Check This Out. One, thanks for joining us again on the Check This Out segment. I'm your host, Paris Whalen, and I'm the Media Literacy Librarian here at University of Tennessee, not still. And this is basically the portion of the podcast where we talk about information literacy in relation to the topic at hand. And this evening we're going to follow that same trend, but instead of a subject liaison, which is what I've been doing, usually from U2K, our guest today is going to be a local activist and friend who has recently found their voice and is using it to incite change. So, hey, Drea, thanks for taking the time to hang out with us this evening. We're glad to have you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm so excited. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, you're great. Okay, sweet. Yeah, I realize when Paris called me up that I technically am a local activist. I was like, what can I bring to the table because we have professionals, but theory and practice are both really important. And I just was hoping to make it sound more accessible to other people today. So, yes, that's me. Sweet. Thank you so much for that little introduction. So I brought you on to kind of talk about your experience and what resources you use. But before we go there, before we start talking about that, I want to just draw a quick parallel between our topic and information literacy. So as many of our viewers may remember, or if not, I'm hanging there with me, information literacy is the ability to kind of find and use information effectively and ethically, okay? So keep that in mind as you listen in today and think about controversial topics and subjects that you kind of feel strong about. Kind of consider taking those next steps and taking those thoughts further by using the resources provided by UCK Libraries. I know I stand on that soap rocks every single time this podcast airs, but I'm serious about it. I'm harping it just a little bit more. As I don't know, not only can you use the UT Libraries resources to access scholarly articles, newspapers that are international, national, local, or congressional transcripts, but if you really don't know where to start and you're looking for kind of your one-stop shot, you have your research guides, which is something that I've talked about in the past as well. Specifically for this subject, we have a political science research guide which is curated by the subject librarian, Chris Bronstead. That is Chris K.R.I.S. Bronstead. So check that out if you get a second. It has a lot of awesome resources, such as databases, interest groups, newspaper links, and things like that. The one thing I do want to harp on that I found to be super helpful is a resource called CQ Press Researcher. So CQ is in CUE Press Researcher. And this resource basically contains reports and current reports and controversial issues. And it's really excellent for finding an overview of a topic. There's a list for the pro and cons. There's a timeline and a list of key resources. So if you're just starting off with a subject and you need a general place to start to figure out both sides and get your bearings, go ahead and log in to CQ Press Researcher to start you out. So I'm going to start talking now and actually include Andrea in this conversation. So let's start off where many of our viewers might be at the beginning of their journey. So what moment did economic disparities and political priorities become apparent? So that moment when you felt like something wasn't right and you were moved to explore it a little further. Yeah. So those resources sound great. And I'm happy to answer that question. So I grew up in a bubble. I am a white individual. I grew up middle class. I was raised in the South for half of my youth. And so I thought racism and sexism and all the isms were fixed in the 60s. And that's how I was raised. And I wasn't really looking for activism, to be honest. I thought we were all good. And I went to Miami after I graduated undergrad from UT with my degree. And I did AmeriCorps in a high need public high school for two years. And my first week there, I get there. And they give us like a two week down and dirty all the information that you need to know about the community that you're going to be serving in. And it was really thorough. And it talked about the systemic nature of racism in our country and how it's structural. It's not about somebody said something mean or there was a slur. Somebody didn't include someone else. It's about highways going up in black neighborhoods and that destroys families and where they used to live or not having tax dollars for the school and having no teachers for my students. I had students who didn't have a teacher for months in the school year and we just had rotating substitutes. And I remember thinking I went to a public high school and I had teachers that had PhDs and they had teaching awards. And how come I'm at a public high school because public high schools are all made the same. And my students are getting yelled at and they don't have teachers and they don't have books and the teachers have to buy the books themselves. And there's no computers. And there's gun violence. And I just thought, oh my gosh, I don't know anything. I don't know anything about anything. And I have a degree. So that's kind of how I got started was just kind of, you know, thinking that everything was fine. Going somewhere else and realizing it's not because we kind of went through some diversity trainings and historical trainings. But then I had the blinders on and thought, oh Miami has problems but Tennessee doesn't have any problems. It's fine. And then I came back and didn't realize that we have a 42% poverty rate in East Knoxville which is predominantly black. And we have a lot of problems. We have a lot of problems with a lot of gun violence. We had a lot of police violence. And all those problems exist here. And that's why I got involved with working and trying to be an activist here. Sweet. Thank you for that real raw answer. I think it's super important that our listeners kind of hear how it starts. Because you know, not all of these stories, not all of us have parents who are super active or things like that are super crazy stories. So a little bit of curiosity and even a little bit of disagreement is a really good opportunity to kind of explore a topic from a different perspective and hopefully with an open mind, right? But so once you realize how important these issues were to you, what programs and events did you participate in in the beginning to gain perspective? And how do you kind of continue learning? And I know you touched on this when you mentioned AmeriCorps, but I know you have tons of other experiences as well. Yeah. So programs and events that I participated in to get perspective, like I said, I didn't know anything. And so once you realize you don't know anything, you're like, wait a minute, how much do I not know? And so I started seeking out, you know, I was meeting a lot of people that I'd never met before, people that were, you know, not white, people that were not straight, people that were not Christian, and just making friends with them. And then also just looking up on my own to like the movies that they recommend or the books they recommend or things that I stumbled upon myself. I wasn't asking them for recommendations and don't do that because it's not for them to do. You can use the internet. But like we'd be talking about stuff and they'd be like, oh yeah, have you watched The Color Purple? Have you done this? Have you watched this documentary? And I was like, well, I have not. And so a lot of 2014, 2015, 2016 was, I'm not an activist, I'm just learning stuff. And then after I kind of started learning enough, I was like, all right, I am with people who are doing things and then they invite you to do things with them. Like, hey, we're going to go help with voter registration. Do you want to come along? Sure, that sounds fun. Or, hey, we're going to go do a march. Do you want to come along? Yeah, that sounds fun. And then if you go to enough things, sometimes people ask you to talk with them and then you're talking and then you're like, wow, I'm like becoming a football activist. So a lot of it's network and it's very social. You know, being community organizing and community involvement is like really social thing. And so a lot of it you'll just find through, you know, friends or through social media. And so, yeah. Sweet. Thank you so much for mentioning voter registration. I just want to bring up a couple of resources because that's what I do. So for those of you who have already started being working, or looking at political issues that you're interested or you're just getting started and you want to kind of figure out what's going on locally, I want to talk about two things. OpenSecrets.org and the Federal Election Commission. If you wanted to find out what type of, what contributions are being made to a campaign and by who to say our senators and things like that, these are great resources for you to check into and see who's funding the situations as Jana was talking about earlier. So I would suggest you tune into that. That might be a second level thing. You might just need to start out in CQ press researcher for now, but just consider that in the future. Do you have anything you want to add to voters rights or anything like that? Go vote. City Council elections are right now. You can go vote this week. Do it. Early voting. So how did you find interest groups that you wanted to be a part of? I know we talked a little bit about social media and kind of the pros and cons that come with that on Sunday, but do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah. I was talking to Paris about this yesterday, but I'm a perfect case study for with and without social media. So I got rid of all of my social media, except for LinkedIn. So people don't think I'm a serial killer when I apply to jobs. I got rid of all my social media in like 2014 or 2016. And so I was watching documentaries and stuff, but I wasn't connected with anyone. And then there was a lot of Black Lives Matter protests last summer, and it was very easy to know when things were going on because a lot of people were going to them. But after that, I thought to myself, there has to be more happening. I saw all these people come out on the streets and you all like, what's the next move? What are we doing? What's the next pressure point to get these things past that we were talking about? And I couldn't find anyone because I don't social media. So I would like talk to people and be like, hey, can you look something up for me? I'm like, okay, this is stupid. Let me just make a Facebook burner account. I have no friends on it. It's not my name. I just use it to look at events. And so I check it periodically before the weekend or whatever and see what's going on. And just with that, I've been able to connect with people in real life because you find an event of something you're interested in and then you see who's going and there's an event and you go to it and then you meet people, whether it's on Zoom or in person. And then they know people and then they're involved in other things as well because a lot of people are not just single issue people. Like I care about voter rights. I care about climate justice. I care about what the matter, LGBT rights. And so there's a lot wrapped up in there. And so there's overlap. So if you go to something for climate justice, you might meet somebody who's also going to an abortion rights rally later or is trying to hold an event to get public interest. And so, yeah, I found them through social media. So I have a Facebook voter account. And then another thing is like, I was just saying to her, to Paris yesterday, this sounds so unofficial and like not professional at all. But a lot of things I found just through derping around Twitter. Well, you find one person, you know, maybe it's a politician that you really like or it's a movement leader that you really like. They follow other people, they interact with their posts and you can see more people. And then you like what they're saying and, you know, verify the resources that they're providing. So a link up or they put a post up about something. Go check it out, see if it's real. And, you know, I know that's very hard in this day and age to know what's misinformation, especially when social media is not very regulated at all. Speaking of deregulation. But some really easy ways are like, are there tons of ads on this page? Who wrote this? Like can I go look up who wrote this or what are they funded by someone? You know, so I do think you can do your own research that way, but to make sure you're not following a crazy version. But social media can be really helpful. For example, I was following a sitting house member and she tweeted out about Sunrise Movement, which is a climate change movement. And like, hey, check out to see if you have a local hub. And then I joined it. And then now I make videos for them and my best friend makes videos for them. And she's on their like video core team for their national projects. It's because we were just hanging around on Twitter. So you never know. That's awesome. We also spoke about how there are different forms of activism. So we talked about podcasts. We talked about trolling. Do you want to expand a little bit on that? Yeah, I think a lot of people, especially introverts, I'm also an introvert. Surprisingly, I know. Oh, I can't do, I can't do activism because I don't want to be in the streets. I don't want to be marching. I don't want to be tear gas. I don't want to be, you know, whatever it is. I don't want to do that. I don't want to leave the house. You don't have to the ways you can be an activist. It's literally anything. Even having a show like this is helping raise awareness. So anything you can think of can be activism. And that includes, you know, making videos, making graphic design art for posters or social media. You know, talking to people, writing petitions, making TikToks, you know, making music, calling your friends, cold calling strangers, canvassing. You know, it could really be anything. And trolling is in there. And one example is there are some very suspect laws going on around the country, in my opinion. And there are some websites where you can tell on people if they get certain things done to their body and get $10,000 cash rewards for doing so. Yeah. And we have TikTokers and youths who know how to code. They know how to make algorithms. And they're like, what if I made an algorithm that crashed this website that is unethical? And they do it. And then it works. And then the website's down and they've just done something. And you know, you could say, oh, well, that's illegal or whatever. But in my opinion, things that are legal are not always right. Discrimination is legal for a very long time. Slavery was legal. Women weren't allowed to vote. That was legal. Internment camps were legal. So what's legal is not always what's ethical. And so if you find something really unethical and going against your human rights, there are ways to be an activist without being violent. And activism in a trolling fashion is one of them. I don't know if that was... Yeah, that was it. Perfect. Thank you so much. So I'm going to wrap it up with this question. What is a topic that you would like to put on the map for our listeners? And where can we find more information about it? So many. Like for other people said or other hosts said, the Build Back Better plan, not only is this already a compromise in my opinion, but the certain democratic people are trying to make it whittle down even further. And we know that they are paid by the coal industry and by health insurance industries. And if we really want to have two individuals lock saving the planet, then you will do nothing to stop them. And you will stay home and you will not call anyone. But if you would like to live above floodwaters and not in fire and not, you know, with a blizzard every other day and without national disasters all the time, then you would do something to stop them because it's literally two people that are doing this. So yeah, the Build Back Better plan should not be cut down any further. They're already compromised. So that's fun. And in the future, we want to have a great new deal because that's what's really what we need in this moment. The new deal was what everybody hearkens back to as the, you know, the good old days. Those were the good old days. Like I was able to afford a house and my grandpappy was able to do this and not the other because we had social spending. That helped people and not corporations. And small donors, small dollar donors can make a difference. And there are certain people in office who get 62% of their donations from small donors. And that's big. So not a lot of people do it. They want to take big money, but it is possible for us to have grassroots funded candidates. It takes a lot more work, but it's possible. And that's the type of thing that makes me excited. Well, thank you so much for sharing with us today. I really love talking to you. I always feel super inspired. I hope that our viewers feel inspired as well. Remember that you can be a part of the change. You don't have to be on the front line, but the first step is going to be becoming informed. So use those resources that I talked about. This basically concludes our Check This Out segment. Andrea, thank you again for joining us. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. It's been great. Next, we have stories from the stack with our new host, Sarah Johnson. Welcome to Stories from the Stacks. I'm Sarah Johnson. Great to be here. So tonight, we're going to talk about crime fighting and who doesn't love a good crime story. But even more so, the story is how someone uses their power for their own agenda. Does that sound familiar? So our main character tonight is U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver. Yep, you heard that right, a U.S. Senator. So Kefauver's crime hunting days became so popular among the American public that he turned out to be pretty famous in the 1950s. So famous that he ran for president a couple of times. And one of those times he beat out Harry Truman, who was the sitting president at the time. So he won the 1950 Democratic primary of New Hampshire and beat Truman, which is, wow. And in the end, Kefauver didn't make it to the presidency. However, it's still a noteworthy piece of history because he was essentially a freshman senator at the time. Like he was just starting out. But he had attracted so much attention nationwide that it boosted his standings with the American people, or at least the people of New Hampshire. So now you might be wondering, what did Estes Kefauver do that was so intriguing? And how did crime hunting play into this? Well, I'll tell you. But first, let's get the lay of the land of what crime looks like in the 1950s and specifically organized crime. So after World War II, the economy boomed. This like left people with a ton of extra money and they were spending it on things like gambling and prostitution, which were illegal at the time. And then we got J. Edgar Hoover, who's the director of the FBI. And Hoover paid no mind to crimes like these. He actually refused to acknowledge organized crime and he spent his time concerned with communism along with most of America. But people were noticing that these goods and services were being sold illegally, but that like people were getting away with it. So now we've got the lay of the land. In comes Kefauver and his crime fighting unit. No, really it was an actual unit. So Kefauver was chairman of the United States Senate special committee on organized crime and interstate commerce. Try saying that 10 times fast. It was also known as the Kefauver committee. This committee was charged with exposing networks of crime. And Kefauver made sure to find ways to circulate this information and do his best at snuffing out these networks. So the committee held hearings in 14 cities and they heard from over 600 witnesses. But the really juicy thing is these hearings were put on television. And just to be clear, so these were exploratory hearings. They were not legal proceedings. And so there weren't any rules about not televising them. But it was still a really controversial decision to be made to be to put them on television. But also they were super popular and people love them. So these hearings got better ratings than regular TV shows. And networks would play the hearings at a loss because people couldn't get enough of them. And Kefauver won an Emmy for bringing the work of the government into the homes of the American people. So Kefauver had essentially become a character in his own right by this point. And also keep in mind, like TVs were getting really popular at this time. More and more were being bought and put into households. That meant that these hearings and the work of the committee on organized crime was reaching out to a large and growing audience. And then along those same lines are print resources. Creating and distributing print media was becoming increasingly easy and consumers were really grasping on to the organized crime mobster storylines. I mean, I feel like that's still today. So what did Kefauver do? He used it to his advantage. He began using his connections with journalists and his position in Congress to continue getting his stories out to the public. Now it worked both ways because the journalists were happy to sell this story because they knew that it was going to benefit them as well. But if we look at the beginning, Kefauver was always using his connections and power to get his message out. The interesting thing about it is that even with the fame and popularity, the Kefauver committee didn't lead to anything substantial in terms of bills or laws. Kefauver organized this group to fight against something that he cared about, but it didn't actually create any legislation. However, they had a very significant impact on the culture, changing the way that people viewed crime and putting it front and center by streaming it into the home. That was a big deal. This gives you a glimpse of how politicians can ignore the needs of the American people and use their power for their own agenda because who doesn't want fame and fortune? But as Kefauver, it's actually a silver lining example of politicians using their power for their own benefit because while I think Kefauver did do this, I'd like to also think that his intention was helping the American people because organized crime. Another example, though, that I'd like to mention about Kefauver is one of his most notable legislative achievements that didn't have anything to do with this was the Kefauver-Harris Drug Act of 1962, which actually required drug makers to provide proof and effectiveness and safety of the drugs before they were approved. So even though I say all of that, I think that we can all be really thankful for his work on that act. And this is just like a teeny tiny glimpse into Kefauver's story. If you're curious to learn more, please visit our political archives, which is the division of the Betsy B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives here at UT. And then I just would love to give a really big thank you to Chris Bronsett, who was mentioned earlier, the modern political archivist who curated this information that I was able to share with you tonight. You rocked. No, that was it. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. OK, well, that brings us to the end of another show. And from overly large cucumbers to income inequality to crime-voting, we've covered quite a bit of ground. So and the planning for this episode was fun, because especially, if you all remember when the producer was joking about us making cucumber likenesses of ourselves. Oh, can you imagine? You were joking? Wait. You were joking? I did it. Awesome, Sam. Doesn't it work just like me? That actually is kind of a remarkable likeness. I love the glasses. Beautiful. Glasses really make it. Take a bite, Aaron. Say goodbye, cucumber Sarah and Sarah in Paris. That's all for tonight, folks. See you again on November 18th for our final show of this fall semester. Take it easy.