Utterly Moderate Podcast

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Michael Huemer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is here to talk about political myths and why they are dangerous. Political myths are factual claims which are believed by members of a political tribe that strongly support an element of that tribe’s ideology—yet they are demonstrably false or highly misleading. Professor Huemer has written a book taking a look at how political myths operate among liberals in America titled, Progressive Myths, available on Amazon. In his book, Huemer writes that: “I think truth matters. Society cannot be reliably improved through lies, exaggerations, and misleading stories; it requires knowledge of the real, factual situation we face, in whatever area we seek to improve matters. . . To be clear, my problem is not that progressives have bad values, nor is it that I don’t like them or that they don’t belong to my tribe. My problem is that they are factually mistaken. They hold beliefs that objectively conflict with the way the world is in many respects; they misunderstand the current state of society, the causes of social problems, and the effects of social policies. This leads them to advocate policies and behaviors that worsen society and even undermine their own values.” Political myths are a problem in America today, as people are more and more isolated in ideological silos and bombarded with questionable claims that feel right to their side and are shielded from information that might undermine those claims. We hope you enjoy our exploration of this problem! For more, check us out at connorsinstitute.org.

Today’s Utterly Moderate podcast episode focuses on the positives and negatives of President Trump’s first 100 days in office in this his second term. We are joined by Jim Swift, a longtime Republican and senior editor at The Bulwark. If you aren’t familiar with the work that they do over at The Bulwark, it is an online publication founded by longtime Republicans from the now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine. They aim to provide good faith, intelligent, center-right and center-left perspectives on the news of the day in the form of articles, newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube videos. Above all they aim to defend America’s democracy, put country over party, and oppose tribalism and polarization—just like us here at the Connors Institute at Shippensburg University. Enjoy the conversation! ------------- Episode audio: "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive), "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive), "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive), and “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

This episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast deals with liberal bias in higher education and what to do about it, with a specific focus on the field of sociology. According to Gallup, a strong majority (68%) of Americans believe that higher education is headed in the wrong direction. Barely more than a third (36%) of Americans express a high level of confidence in U.S. colleges and universities, down from 57% only a decade ago. Americans give the following reasons for this low confidence: political agendas, wrong focus/teaching the wrong things, and cost/expenses. Is this concern about “political agendas” warranted? Let’s first take a look at the politics of American professors. In a 2016-2017 survey, UCLA researchers found a liberal-to-conservative (L:C) ratio of 5:1 among American college professors. Other studies show a much larger gap. When Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens analyzed the voter registrations of college professors, for instance, they found a Democrat-to-Republican (D:R) ratio of 8:1. Among the same sample, they found the D:R political donor ratio to be a whopping 95:1. A discrepancy between the public—American voters are about evenly split between Democrats and Republicans—and the professoriate is not a problem by itself. It becomes a problem if it impacts the teaching and research being done at American colleges. On this count, it seems to have become a problem. Many academics blur the line between activism and research, letting their leftist beliefs and values skew their work. This includes a number of big claims about systemic racism, police shootings, implicit bias, microaggressions, free markets, sexism, sex differences, transgender issues, single parenthood, IQ, and more. It is of course not the case that all or even most of the teaching and research happening on college campuses is corrupted by ideology. But far too many academics—perhaps most notably in fields in the humanities, social sciences, and education—make high-profile claims about social phenomena that go well beyond what the evidence will support, and these claims frequently align with leftwing ideologies. This can distort the public discourse, workplace practices, and social policy. You can read a much deeper discussion of this in the book, The Poisoning of the American Mind, as well as the documentary of the same name. On this podcast episode, we discuss liberal bias in higher education, why it is a problem, and what we might do about it. Enjoy! ------------- ------------- Episode Audio:

America is separating into two nations with two different experiences of reality itself: Red America and Blue America. As Robert Talisse, Vanderbilt University political theorist and today’s Utterly Moderate podcast guest, writes: “[O]ur everyday social environments are increasingly segregated along partisan lines. It is no exaggeration to say that in the United States today, opposing partisans live in different social worlds. For example, liberals and conservatives live in different kinds of neighborhoods, shop at different stores, purchase different products, drive different vehicles, express different aesthetic preferences, work in different occupations, and form different kinds of family groups. They eat different foods. They understand words differently and even exhibit different patterns of pronunciation. The familiar narrative of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states goes far deeper than geography. In the United States today, political affiliation is more of a lifestyle than an outlook on the purposes of government.” Utterly Moderate host Lawrence Eppard has written about similar phenomena: the increasingly distinct epistemologies of left and right. On this episode of Utterly Moderate, Eppard and Talisse discuss the troubling state of polarization in America today, and how each of us might better ourselves in order to better our democracy. Enjoy! ------------- ------------- Episode Audio:

From all of us at the Connors Institute at Shippensburg University, we thank you for listening and hope you have a truly Happy Thanksgiving! Wherever you spend the holiday and whoever you spend it with, we hope you have lots to be thankful for and good people to be thankful with. On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, social scientist Mark Rank is here to discuss his newest book, The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us. We hope you enjoy this conversation during a time that you are counting your blessings—and your lucky stars! Don't forget to join our FREE SUBSTACK! ------------- ------------- Episode Audio:

Before we begin, don't forget to check out Lawrence Eppard's new book, The Poisoning of the American Mind, and to read the newest piece in the Connors Journal on single parenthood in the U.S. Now on to the podcast. . . Kimberly Wehle, a constitutional law expert at the University of Baltimore's School of Law, joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss her new book, Pardon Power: How the Pardon Power System Works—and Why. Wehle and host Lawrence Eppard discuss a variety of topics, including: Enjoy the conversation and please consider JOINING OUR MAILING LIST! ------------- ------------- Episode Audio:

Single parenthood has risen dramatically in the United States over time. Today, 34% of all children live in a single parent household, up from 9% in 1960. There are regrettable negative consequences of these statistics, as The Bulwark’s Mona Charen notes: “[C]hildren in mother-only homes are five times more likely to live in poverty than children with two parents. And children in father-only homes were twice as likely to be poor as those in married-couple homes. Poverty is not conducive to thriving, but even for kids who are not poor, those who grow up with only one parent fare worse than others on everything from school to work to trouble with the law. And the consequences of fatherlessness are more dire for boys than girls. Boys raised without fathers and/or without good adult male influences in their lives are less likely to attend college, be employed as adults, or remain drug-free.” And as the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz writes: “Kids in single-parent homes have lower educational achievement, commit more crime, and suffer more emotional problems, even when controlling for parental income and education. Not only do young men and women from intact families (regardless of race and ethnicity) get more education and earn higher earnings than those raised with single mothers; they also do better than children who have a stepparent at home. Children growing up in an area where single-parent families are the norm have less of a chance of upward mobility than a child who lives where married-couple families dominate (regardless of whether that child lives with a single parent or with married parents). The evidence that the prevalence of single-parent households poses risks to individual children and communities goes on and on.” There are large variations in single parenthood rates by race/ethnicity, with 63% of Black children, 50% of Indigenous children, 42% of Latino children, 24% of non-Hispanic White children, and 16% of Asian American children living in single parent households. University of Maryland economist Melissa Kearney has published important research on how family structure impacts American children, including her new book, The Two Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind: “The most recent research, much of which incorporates advanced statistical techniques, continues to show that children who are raised in single-mother households tend to have lower levels of completed education and lower levels of income as adults, even after statistically accounting for observable demographic characteristics (for example, where the family lives or the mother’s level of education)” (p. 52). In Table 1, Kearney shows how children of single parents differ in their life chances compared with children of married parents. For children of college-educated mothers, for instance, 57.0% have a college degree by age 25 if their mother was married, but only 28.6% of those raised with a college educated single mother. In Figure 1 you can see, as Mona Charen alluded to, the strong correlation between the dominant family structure in a neighborhood and the upward mobility rate of children raised there. Even for children who themselves are raised in married parent households, they are statistically more likely to struggle in adulthood if they are raised in a community where there is widespread single parenthood. If you want to dive deeper into this subject, this paper from the Connors Institute has got you covered. Table 2 shows the large variations in poverty rates between American families with different structures. Taken together, all of these data strongly suggest that parents really matter. We discuss rising single parenthood and its consequences for children on the most recent episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast. Joining us in this discussion is Kay Hymowitz, a research fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She writes not only on family...

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, the authors of the brand new book, The Poisoning of the American Mind, talk about the book and its implications for America. So what is their argument? A significant amount of research suggests that most people seek out news and information sources that mirror their worldviews, avoid ones that don’t, and interpret information using cognitive filters that force an alignment with what they already believe. As social psychologist David Dunning writes, “Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs—narratives about the self, ideas about the social order—that essentially cannot be violated. . . And any information that we glean from the world is amended, distorted, diminished, or forgotten in order to make sure that these sacrosanct beliefs remain whole and unharmed.” As they document in their brand new book and their free online documentary of the same name, the evidence suggests that this problem afflicts both conservative and liberal Americans. Conservative Americans tend to place their trust in very few sources of news and information, and those sources tend to be low-quality, like the openly partisan Fox News. Conservatives also tend to cocoon themselves within a partisan media ecosystem of like-minded low-quality outlets, an “internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenge[s] it.” Liberal Americans are more likely than conservatives to trust legitimate journalistic outlets, but those sources often unknowingly spread misleading claims that they truly believe are backed by “the science.” Why do they believe this? Sometimes it’s because the outlet doesn’t fully grasp the preponderance of the evidence on the issue at hand. But too often it is because irresponsible experts, who news outlets should be able to trust, said “the science” backed their claims when it didn’t. Consider the following statements that many on the left assume are backed by “the science”: Discrimination is a primary cause of the gender pay gap (this is more than likely not true in America today).Gender affirming care reduces suicide risk for gender dysphoric individuals (the weight of the empirical evidence does not support this claim at the moment).Police officers kill a disproportionate number of African Americans due to racial bias on the part of officers (this is a claim being vigorously debated and without a clear answer at the moment).We can reliably identify microaggressions, whether they are motivated by racial bias, and whether they cause harm (the evidence for this claim is extraordinarily weak). None of these claims are backed by strong evidence. At best, the research is mixed, not clearly pointing in one direction or the other. At worst, the evidence supports the opposite conclusion. But many on the left believe these statements are backed by “the science” because prominent academics have made big, irresponsible claims that go far beyond what the preponderance of the evidence supports. In Poisoning, the authors give equal attention to epistemic failings on both sides. They believe the evidence shows that Americans across the political spectrum fall for questionable assertions from sources that they believe to be trustworthy and authoritative, sources which often present the information in a manner that appeals to the sacred beliefs of consumers’ in-groups. They make no assertions about which side’s epistemic failings are “worse” due to their honest inability to quantify such a thing—and they are not sure it matters as much as some may think. Both red and blue America face epistemic crises that act like serious illnesses that sicken American society—even if you could measure which one makes us feel “worse” as a nation, the reality is that either one would make our country seriously ill, and experiencing them simultaneously is a nightmare. In Poisoning the authors discuss not only...

We want to express our deepest sympathies and condolences to the family of Corey Comperatore. He was killed during the attempted assassination of former President Trump. According to NBC Philadelphia, Comperatore raised two daughters with his high school sweetheart and spent his final moments shielding his family that he loved so much from the gunfire. May he rest in peace. His family is in our prayers. We also want to wish a quick recovery to those who were injured in the assassination attempt, including former president Donald Trump and rally attendees David Dutch and James Copenhaver. And lastly our condolences to all others impacted by this political violence. Violence has absolutely no place in a civilized society. Given how much our democracy and country have been through, we thought on this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we would lighten things up a bit and talk about something that perhaps we all might have some positive feelings about: one of our founding fathers. It is July after all, America’s month of celebrating our independence. In the spirit of July and America and trying to find some positivity right now, on this episode we bring you a replay of our conversation with George Washington University historian Denver Brunsman. He previously joined the show to share his insights on the life and career of George Washington, as well as his general reflections on the study of history and its place in the modern university. Enjoy the conversation and don’t forget to sign up for our free email newsletter in one click! ------------- ------------- Episode Audio:

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, host Lawrence Eppard and Connors Institute co-director Jacob Mackey discuss techniques and shortcuts that you can use to spot real expertise in a world where people with expert credentials are sometimes frauds and where people without expert credentials are often very knowledgeable. They also discuss crucial techniques for examining your personal biases and the limits of your own knowledge. This conversation is based on two really good readings, and we hope you will not only listen to this episode but go to these websites and read these short but very illuminating pieces: Connors Newsletter click HERE to readclick HERE to read Enjoy the episode! And PLEASE subscribe to our newsletter in just one click! ------------- ------------- Episode Audio:

Before we talk about this episode, we hope you didn’t miss the latest research from the Connors Institute on the gender pay gap. Check it out now! We talk quite a bit on this podcast about some of the things that many liberal and conservative Americans believe that just ain’t so. In fact, we just released a free online documentary about this titled The Poisoning of the American Mind. On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Wilfred Reilly, political scientist at Kentucky State University, to talk about misleading claims that have made their way into educational curricula in the U.S. Friend of the show Jacob Mackey joins the conversation as a special guest cohost. Our guest, Dr. Reilly, is the author of several books, two of which are particularly informative in this discussion: Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About.Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula (June 2024—preorder now!), which includes the following chapters: Lie #1: “Brutal ‘True’ Slavery Was Virtually Unique to America and the West” Lie #2: “The ‘Red Scare’ Was a Moral Panic That Caught No Commies” Lie #3: “Native Americans Were ‘Peaceful People Who Spent All Day Dancing’” Lie #4: “Hippies Were the Good Guys, the Sexual Revolution Was Great for Women, and the Vietnam War Was Unpopular and Pointless” Lie #5: “The Founders Counted Slaves as Three-Fifths of a Person and the Only Victims of Lynchings Were Black” Lie #9: “‘Southern Strategy’ Racism Turned the Solid South Republican” Enjoy the conversation, and don’t forget to subscribe in just one click to our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER! ------------------- ------------------- Episode Audio:

Before we talk about this week’s podcast episode, don’t forget to check out the Connors Institute’s new documentary, The Poisoning of the American Mind, an illuminating film about how conservatives and liberals in America regularly fall for misinformation and disinformation. On this week’s episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, we are joined by everyone’s favorite astrophysicist, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Dr. Varoujan Gorjian, to discuss a number of science-related topics, including: smashed through the roof of a home in FloridaUtterly Moderate host Lawrence Eppard was by an asteroid that recently came too close to Earth for Eppard’s liking.Dr. Gorjian has seen any famous scientists get embarrassingly drunk at academic conferences (will he name names?).Earth-like planets.recent solar eclipse that swept the nation and whether an esteemed astrophysicist like Dr. Gorjian gets excited by them anymore (spoiler: he really does!).James Webb Space Telescope.Hubble Tension. Barbenheimer. Enjoy, and thanks for listening! ------------------- ------------------- Episode Audio:

We’ve talked a lot on the Utterly Moderate Podcast about how both liberals and conservatives in America are bombarded with misleading information on a regular basis. On the left, unfortunately, a lot of this bad info comes from an academic research community which is overwhelmingly liberal. A recent study found the least imbalanced discipline to be engineering, which was still 62% liberal professors. Political science was 89%, psychology 94%, and sociology 98%, while some disciplines had no political conservatives at all. This significant one-sidedness means that the people doing the research as well as the people checking to make sure that research is high quality before it is published all have similar ideological blind spots, and this is allowing too much misleading information to make it into the public discourse, where it is often perceived by average citizens as being backed by solid evidence when that just isn’t so. On this episode host Lawrence Eppard is joined by anthropologist Michael Jindra from Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs to talk about this problem and hopefully offer some ways to save the social sciences from themselves. Check out just some of the great insights Jindra has to offer in his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “When Ideology Drives Social Science.” And don’t forget to sign up for our CONNORS NEWSLETTER! It’s just one click and it’s FREE! ------------------- Episode Audio:

It is extremely hard for the average citizen to understand what the “state of the science” is on many issues. We can all type our queries about a particular topic into Google but, when we get the flood of results, most of us are not trained to be able to (a) understand the complicated statistical methodologies employed in many research studies, (b) compare studies and evaluate their strength relative to each other, or (c) assess what the preponderance of the evidence is across tens or even hundreds of studies. On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, we are joined by Dr. Sallie Baxendale to help us think about how we might make such judgements. She also goes into detail about ways in which the scientific process can go wrong, as it has been in some areas of gender-affirming care in recent years, as Joshua Cohen discusses in Forbes: “In the U.S., a politically partisan divide is shaping up between states that allow for and guarantee access to youth gender-affirming care and states that ban such treatment altogether. Twenty-two states have passed bans on the use of cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and surgery in minors. In Europe political divisions on this topic aren’t nearly as conspicuous as they are in the U.S. Rather, the debate is much more fact-based. An increasing number of countries have conducted systematic reviews of evidence to determine the benefits and risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. And the findings from these reviews—that the certainty of benefits is ‘very low’—have informed changes in policy regarding treatment of gender incongruence in minors. . . All things considered, according to European health authorities and medical experts, there isn’t yet a medical consensus for the use of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in gender dysphoric minors. And so authorities are ‘tapping the brakes,’ shifting from care which prioritizes access to pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, to a less medicalized and more conservative approach that addresses possible psychiatric comorbidities. . . In the U.S., on the other hand, talk of introducing guardrails like the ones being incorporated in Europe is sometimes met with being branded ‘transphobic’ or a ‘science denier.’” You can read about Dr. Baxendale’s own troubling experiences with this field of research in her recent UnHerd article. Dr. Sallie Baxendale is a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College of London’s Institute of Neurology. She has over three decades of clinical experience working with people with epilepsy in London and Oxford, is the current chair of the International League Against Epilepsy Diagnostic Methods Commission, and serves on the Board of Governors for the International Neuropsychological Society. As you listen to this fascinating episode, also make sure to subscribe to our FREE NEWSLETTER! ------------------- Episode Audio: "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)"Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)"Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)“Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Jacob Mackey to discuss two big gender-related stories in the news. The first story is positive, and we have covered it in the Connors Newsletter—a big new research study shows that we have made great progress combatting sex discrimination in the labor market. This is great news! Then there is a difficult and troubling story. According to leaked internal files from WPATH, a leading global organization which advocates for transgender health care, WPATH has not been completely forthcoming about their internal concerns about the evidence behind gender affirming care for minors as well as the ethical issues surrounding informed consent for such care. The first part of this conversation is really positive, while the second half is a difficult subject that we hope we treat fairly and with an appropriate level of concern. Thanks for taking a listen. ------------------- Episode Audio: Free Music ArchiveFree Music ArchiveFree Music Archivethe Riders in the Sky

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined again by Lisa Selin Davis, a writer who covers issues related to gender and gender affirming care. Davis joins the program to discuss a recent UnHerd article “Why did three journals reject my puberty-blocker study? Trans children deserve to know the facts,” written by Sallie Baxendale, a clinical neuropsychologist at University College London. Baxendale details an academic article she wrote about the state of the research on whether puberty blockers are harmful to people’s cognitive function. Baxendale argues that the responses that she got from peer reviewers suggest that ideology is clouding the judgement of the experts responsible for making sure that the best science is available to transgender children and their families when they are making life-altering decisions. Lisa Selin Davis discusses this article and its broader meaning within the larger conversation about whether some sciences are allowing ideology to get in the way of doing the best research possible. Enjoy the episode and don't forget to sign up for our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER! ---------------- Episode Audio: Free Music ArchiveFree Music ArchiveFree Music Archivethe Riders in the Sky

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we discuss recent controversies at and concerns about colleges and universities in the United States—from highly publicized instances of campus unrest to a lack of intellectual diversity among faculty to hypocrisy on free speech. This episode’s guest is Jacob Mackey, associate professor at Occidental College and coeditor with host Lawrence Eppard of The Poisoning of the American Mind, which is due out later this spring. Check out the podcast episode and also check out two reports that were recently released from the Connors Institute, the “Connors Institute Media Report Card” and “Place Matters.” In the media report card Connors researchers take a rigorous look at numerous news and information sources in the U.S. and evaluate their bias and accuracy. Check it out yourself to see which outlets made the grade and which ones missed the mark. In “Place Matters” Connors researchers examine the impact of neighborhoods and communities on American children’s chances of success. The efforts and choices of the individual children themselves of course matter for their success, as do the efforts and resources of their families. But this research shows that the neighborhoods and communities where children are raised matter a great deal for their success as well—take a look at the report yourself and also take some time to examine your own neighborhood! And don’t forget to subscribe in just one click to our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER! ----------------------------------- Episode Audio: Free Music ArchiveFree Music ArchiveFree Music Archivethe Riders in the Sky

Before we get to today’s episode, check out this article about the Connors Institute in The Sentinel newspaper! On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Robert VerBruggen from the Manhattan Institute to discuss a new documentary which claims to disprove that George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, as well as a new research study which claims to disprove that income inequality in the U.S. has been rising since the 1960s. The documentary in question, The Fall of Minneapolis, was produced by Alpha News, an organization that has a history of low-quality journalism that is often inaccurate, biased, and misleading. Podcast host Lawrence Eppard and guest Robert VerBruggen will discuss the claims in the documentary and why they fall short. They also discuss a new and important research study which calls into question whether income inequality has really been rising since the 1960s like we have all been led to believe. While this new paper does not completely disprove the argument that inequality has in fact been increasing, it raises serious concerns about how certain we can be about the dominant narrative that inequality has been rising out of control. Don’t forget to subscribe to our FREE email newsletter in just one click! Episode Audio: Free Music ArchiveFree Music ArchiveFree Music Archivethe Riders in the SkySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the Connors Institute at Shippensburg University! Since this Utterly Moderate episode is both our Christmas program and our 100th PODCAST EPISODE, we thought we would try to be as uplifting as possible. In that spirit, we are being joined by Johan Norberg, author of a number of books including Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. In that book, Norberg presents extensive data documenting how the world has gotten much better over the centuries across several measures, including freedom, life expectancy, poverty, violence, hunger, sanitation, the environment, literacy, and more. The book helps us not only to avoid being so doom and gloom about the state of the world, but to identify the reasons why we have made so much progress in the first place, avoid derailing those efforts, and help us build on them for a better tomorrow. Enjoy this conversation, and very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all. Sign up for our FREE NEWSLETTER in one click at ConnorsInstitute.org. Episode Audio: "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive) "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive) Free Music ArchivePiper KullPiper KullSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jim Swift from The Bulwark joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss the fraught nature of the immigration debate in the U.S. Both sides in the immigration debate have important points to bring to the table, and good faith discussions and compromises are badly needed. Unfortunately, such efforts often get sidetracked by misinformation and disinformation about this thorny issue. Swift discusses a story of his that had a number of important issues—legal immigration, unauthorized immigration, and disinformation—all wrapped into one. Enjoy the conversation! And don’t forget to subscribe to our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER in just one click at ConnorsInstitute.org! Episode Audio: "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive) Free Music ArchiveFree Music Archive“Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.