theintercept--2020-07-02--Prison Officials in Kansas Ignored the Pandemic. Then People Started Dying.

Lansing Correctional Facility , a state prison in northeastern Kansas , first heard about the Covid-19 pandemic from the news or from relatives on the outside .
There were no known cases in the state — but at the prison , dozens of men had begun to fall ill , some severely .
Rachad Austin was counting down the days left in his four-year sentence , but as news of the virus continued to trickle in , he grew increasingly worried .
He had a collapsed lung due to a gunshot wound — and sometimes he suffered from chest pains @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people around him were beginning to show symptoms , “ and next thing you know , they ’ re passed out , ” Austin told me on a recent call from prison .
“ It was a really scary time .
… We were all wondering what was going on.
” Sherman Wright was also worried .
Like some 40 percent of those incarcerated in the U.S. , he had asthma and diabetes , making him particularly vulnerable to complications from Covid-19 .
At 56 , he was also one of nearly 200,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the U.S. — another factor that contributed to his vulnerability .
Wright ’ s sister , Cynthia Crawford , at first thought he ’ d be safe in prison , where Wright was 32 years into a 66-years-to-life sentence over three robberies he had committed in his youth .
“ I thought , well , they ’ re confined so how can it get to them ?
” she told me during a recent interview .
“ But it did .
And when it did , my worry went from 10 to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hardly got any sleep .
I worried about him every day , I woke up with him on my mind.
” Worried families soon started calling the prison , but officials did not publicly acknowledge the threat posed by the virus until mid-March , when they shut down visits and encouraged inmates to wash their hands more frequently — hardly the mundane task in prison that it is outside .
By the time three staff members tested positive , on March 31 , most men incarcerated at Lansing suspected that they , too @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — and yet it took prison management nearly a month to start testing them in large numbers .
When they did , they found that some units of the prison had as much as a 75 percent rate of positive tests .
“ We all knew we were positive , ” said Austin .
“ This was not the situation anyone would want to be in — but we were trapped.
” By the end of May , both Austin and Wright had indeed tested positive — as had nearly 900 others of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Four incarcerated men and two staff members had died , and the prison had become the 14th largest cluster of coronavirus cases in the country and the largest in Kansas .
As pressure on officials had mounted along with the number of cases , Gov .
Laura Kelly had promised in early April that some vulnerable people would be released to home confinement .
But weeks into the process , only six inmates in the entire state had been freed , and none from Lansing .
Kelly , a Democrat who had campaigned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the state ’ s overburdened prison system , said releasing people “ is very complicated , legally ” — though critics noted she had the legal authority to do so .
As The Intercept has reported , prisons and jails have become epicenters in the coronavirus pandemic .
There are more than 53,000 nationwide cases among residents , including at least 616 deaths , and among staff more than 12,000 cases and 48 deaths .
The story of how the pandemic unfolded at Lansing reveals many missteps by state and prison officials who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ virus : delaying testing , transferring and mixing exposed people , and initially failing to distribute and require masks even as cases surged .
And the situation at Lansing was made worse by chronic issues in the Kansas prison system , which was already plagued by severe overcrowding and staff shortages .
But as was the case in many prisons across the country , the outbreak at Lansing was also largely avoidable , and officials ignored a series of warnings from staff , families , and attorneys and for weeks failed to take @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ It was clear what was going to happen , ” Jennifer Roth , a Kansas public defender , told me in a recent interview .
“ All you had to do was look at other prisons and jails across the country , and what medical professionals and other scientists were saying .
It was clear what could happen , and then it did happen.
” By the time the prison moved to more aggressively contain the spread of the virus — after a riot had broken out in one of its units @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was too late .
“ They took too long , ” said Roth .
“ I think they honestly just didn ’ t care what was going on with us because we ’ re inmates , ” said Austin , who is scheduled to be released on Thursday at the end of his sentence .
“ They didn ’ t want to deal with it.
” Gov .
Kelly ’ s office did not respond to a request for comment .
A spokesperson for the Kansas Department of Corrections did not answer detailed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a statement that “ just as others have around the country , we are facing this unique challenge which placed previously unimaginable stress on our system.
” “ The Lansing Correctional facility is in the Kansas City metro area where the first cases of COVID-19 were experienced in Kansas , ” the spokesperson added .
“ And being first at a time when public health officials , using currently available science , were not yet aware of asymptomatic persons , masks were not recommended , testing supplies were limited at best , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for everyone factored into our response.
” “ As the science and recommended guidelines changed , we adapted quickly and implemented recommended changes.
” On March 7 , Kansas officials reported the state ’ s first case of Covid-19 in Johnson County , not far from Lansing .
There are several other prisons and jails in the area , and staff moved frequently between them and around nearby Kansas City .
But nearly a month later , with cases surging in the state and Kansans under a stay-at-home order , very few people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Kayla Donley , Rachad Austin ’ s fiancée , had called the prison to ask whether she could mail him one , and she told prison staff that she was required to wear a mask at the hospital where she worked , even though her job kept her at a far greater distance from people than inmates and guards were from each other .
But the prison staffer she spoke to told her she couldn ’ t mail the mask .
Austin could cover his face with a T-shirt , she said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might face disciplinary action if he did .
“ It ’ s like they didn ’ t even care , ” said Donley .
“ I feel like no one knew what was going on at Lansing during this time , and they brushed it off and acted like it wasn ’ t a big deal .
… None of them took it seriously.
” Those incarcerated at the prison weren ’ t the only ones without masks .
In the early days of the outbreak , several inmates complained to relatives and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ faces , even though some had been out sick with apparent Covid-19 symptoms .
And David Carter , a Lansing correctional officer who quit his job in April over the prison ’ s mishandling of the virus , said that guards had actually been discouraged from wearing masks by management .
“ They were told it was going to cause a panic among the inmates , ” said Carter .
“ A couple staff members were threatened with disciplinary action for wearing a mask.
” Carter , who worked as a correctional officer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that staff who had tested positive to the virus were required to show up for work unless they were symptomatic .
He shared text messages between prison staff that appear to confirm the policy and suggest that the prison was trying to figure out how to keep staff who had tested positive separate from inmates who had not .
“ I have seen a lot of ineptitude over 15 years , ” said Carter , who since his resignation has publicly blamed the state ’ s corrections officials for the six Covid-19 deaths @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But there was a level of intentional ignorance — like they wanted to stay in the dark about Covid-19 , they just wanted to stick their heads in the sand.
” “ They spent about a month , maybe five weeks , just ignoring it completely , ” added Carter .
“ They didn ’ t think it was going to be as big as it was because every level of government was science deniers that were basically saying that it ’ s a hoax , and it ’ s not going to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Carter said , was officials ’ decision to quarantine inmates who had been exposed to the virus in a new and already troubled facility built by the private prison giant CoreCivic and leased to the state .
The move was not expected for months because the prison was not ready and the prison ’ s staff was already stretched thin at the old facility .
Then , after a riot broke out at the old facility , officials began to move more inmates to the new facility , exposing them to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a very volatile security situation at the new facility , which he said was dangerously understaffed .
“ The current and ever-growing atmosphere of ‘ do more with less ’ has put in danger every single staff member that regularly interacts with offenders , ” Carter wrote in his resignation letter .
“ I can no longer be associated with a facility that is a ticking time bomb.
” “ The line staff are just as concerned about this as the inmates are , ” he also told me .
“ It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mentality .
If there ’ s an us versus them , it ’ s the line staff and the inmates versus the ineptitude of the top , really.
” Officials justified the move to the new facility as necessary to isolate inmates .
Then weeks later , after a number of positive cases emerged at a work-release facility in Wichita , more than 200 men who had lived there were also moved to Lansing .
The transfers proved to be disastrous .
“ I really don ’ t know if these decisions were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health officials , ” said Lauren Bonds , the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union ’ s Kansas chapter .
“ But we do know that there were people from Wichita who got infected because they were kind of thrown into a hot spot at Lansing , when they were really facing a much smaller risk when they were in Wichita.
” “ I still to this day don ’ t know why that decision was made , ” she added .
“ But it definitely has panned out that it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stopping transmissions and reducing infection rates.
” Kansas officials were repeatedly warned about the devastating impact a Covid-19 outbreak could have on the state ’ s prisons and jails .
In the early days of the U.S. pandemic , a group of Kansas attorneys made fliers explaining what was known about the virus and how people could protect themselves , and asked jails across the state to post them .
They had written letters to each of their clients to explain what Covid-19 was and how it spread , and they had promised @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their power to get them released , said Melody Brannon , one of those attorneys .
On March 31 , a group of attorneys wrote a letter to Gov .
Laura Kelly that was “ chock-full of science and the experiences of what was going on in other places , ” said Roth , the public defender .
From the very beginning , she and others called on officials to release as many people as possible , arguing that rapidly reducing the number of incarcerated people was the only meaningful way to curb @ @ @ @ @ @ @ correctional officers ’ union also raised the alarm , calling on the Department of Corrections to put in place measures to stop the spread of the virus , according to Carter .
“ The union was trying to get them to at least have a plan in place , ” he said , noting that they weren ’ t even asking for additional resources like masks or other protective equipment .
“ They literally were just asking for a ‘ what if ’ scenario to be put in place .
And they refused @ @ @ @ @ @ @ April 9 , the same day that a riot broke out in one of Lansing ’ s units , the ACLU of Kansas filed a class-action lawsuit demanding the urgent release of vulnerable inmates and those close to the end of their sentence .
The ACLU argued that the prison ’ s response to the pandemic had been inadequate : Inmates were still being charged for soap , most staff weren ’ t wearing masks even though the prison had finally begun to issue them , and there was no effort to maintain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s response and the state ’ s response was that some of this is just inevitable in a correctional setting , ” said Bonds .
“ And people are just going to get sick , and we can only do what we can do , and unfortunately this is as much physical distancing as we can provide , this is the best we can do.
” A judge ruled that the ACLU had failed to prove that the state ’ s response had been inadequate enough to violate the Eight Amendment , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dismissed the suit .
When the suit was filed , there had been between 20 and 30 known Covid-19 cases in the state ’ s prisons .
“ That number wasn ’ t that scary , ” said Bonds .
“ But basically as soon as our case was dismissed , we were starting to hear numbers in the hundreds .
… That ’ s how we ended up with close to 900 people testing positive and getting infected — and that ’ s 900 inmates , that ’ s not even including @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In early April , the governor promised that officials were reviewing a list of inmates with close release dates and “ viable plans ” for reentry .
More than 500 cases were reviewed as part of the process , according to Bonds , but by early May , only six people had been released .
By that point , hundreds of people had been infected at Lansing .
What most frustrated Roth is that throughout the process , Kelly admitted that the state ’ s prisons were overcrowded and that too many people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these things through this process , but still wouldn ’ t actually move on releasing people , ” said Roth , who also blamed the state ’ s legislature for their failure to do more .
“ I believe they did not want to wade into having to defend releasing people.
” As The Intercept has reported , Kansas was hardly the only state to release a negligible number of people during the pandemic — and despite nationwide calls to reduce the risk of Covid-19 in prison by drastically reducing the number of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ released .
That decision was dictated by politics rather than public health , critics say , partially because releasing people would likely draw further attention to the fact that far too many are incarcerated to begin with .
“ If they start releasing people and it works , and there isn ’ t mayhem in the streets , then it really helps the argument that we are over-incarcerating in the first place , ” said Brannon .
“ If you release people , and they find that there wasn ’ t a huge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re going to have to admit that there really is mass incarceration and over-incarceration that is unnecessary , and Covid proved it .
And as long as they resist and keep people in , you won ’ t have that evidence.
” Cynthia Crawford had hoped her brother , Sherman Wright , who had serious preexisting conditions , might be one of those the state would consider for early release .
By that point , the families of the men incarcerated at Lansing had started receiving updates from the prison — usually when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when the governor had said the state was reviewing some inmates ’ cases for possible early release , “ that gave me hope , ” she said .
Crawford wrote to the governor twice but never heard back .
“ I wrote to everybody trying to get some help , ” she said .
Wright was serving what amounted to a life sentence because of Kansas ’ s “ three strikes ” law , after he had been convicted in the 1980s for three robberies during which no one was hurt .
Wright @ @ @ @ @ @ @ earning him a sentence of more than a year for each dollar .
Since its class-action lawsuit was dismissed , the ACLU of Kansas has launched a clemency initiative , filing dozens of clemency applications on behalf of the most vulnerable people incarcerated in the state , and Crawford now hopes her brother might qualify for early release that way .
His first parole hearing is not scheduled until 2026 .
“ We were very poor , ” said Crawford , who for years has visited her brother every two weeks , until @ @ @ @ @ @ @ visitations .
“ Stealing is a crime , OK , do your time .
But not your whole life.
” Days after the first Lansing guards tested positive , the prison switched course on masks , and men incarcerated there began making masks to be distributed to staff first , and then to inmates themselves .
“ They ’ re coming out , passing out masks three months after people got sick , ” said Austin , who had also hoped to qualify for early release , since he had only a few @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s unclear why , but when the masks arrived to Lansing ’ s C2 block , they were never handed out to the men living there .
“ They got locked into an office somewhere and ignored , ” said Carter .
“ And that ’ s ultimately what set the inmates off.
” Austin , who didn ’ t live in that block , said that the men there , including several who were sharing their cells with four other people , had also been denied showers .
“ The guys @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ They just wanted to take a shower , and they wanted face masks.
” Videos of the riot — which some inmates themselves took with contraband cell phones — went viral .
Nobody was seriously hurt , and when officials retook control of the block , they began to move people to the new facility at Lansing , where inmates who were exposed to Covid-19 had already been quarantined .
A few days later , a smaller riot also broke out at a different prison , the Ellsworth Correctional Facility , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ working at Lansing was sent to Ellsworth without first quarantining .
After the Lansing riot , prison staff there started going around to measure everyone ’ s temperature , said Austin , and the National Guard sent in medics to make up for the shortage of nursing staff at the prison , many of whom had also been exposed to the virus .
By that point , most inmates at Lansing were presumed to have been exposed .
Those who complained of symptoms were given Tylenol and told to drink water .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ changes , they couldn ’ t do anything because they knew we were all positive , ” said Austin .
“ They were only taking the worst of the worst to the clinic .
Unless you were on the verge of dying , you basically just had to deal with it.
” Austin tested positive for Covid-19 at the end of April .
But the prison didn ’ t tell him until more than a week later , after his fiancée learned of his results during a phone call with a prison official @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and said they would have the results back in 48 hours and they never came back and told him anything , ” said Donley .
“ It ’ s honestly sickening how inhumanely they treat these guys just because they are in prison.
” Austin didn ’ t develop severe symptoms , and he was never tested again , including before his release from Lansing on Thursday .
Earlier this month , the Kansas Department of Corrections declared the outbreak at Lansing “ contained.
” But this week , as men incarcerated at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prison and as cases once again spiked in Kansas , so did questions about how officials might handle a new wave of Covid-19 at Lansing , or in other prisons across the state .
“ The Department of Corrections can say , ‘ Oh well , we are taking all these precautions.
’ But clearly that did not work out for them before , at least not at Lansing , ” said Roth .
“ What happens when the next phase occurs ?
” Bonds , of the ACLU , noted that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of officials criticizing the prison ’ s private medical provider , Corizon Health .
This month , Kansas switched to a new contractor to provide medical services in prisons — though it ’ s not clear whether the pandemic or cost-saving measures were the reason behind the state ’ s decision not to renew Corizon ’ s contract .
A company spokesperson wrote in an email to The Intercept that “ the Corizon team is grateful for the chance to care for the patients in custody with the Kansas DOC these last several @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the care provided.
” Advocates who had predicted the disastrous impact of Covid-19 on Kansas prisons are now once again raising the alarm .
“ I don ’ t think they are ready , ” said Bonds , who also noted that the ACLU had received several reports of loosening safety measures in the state ’ s prisons .
“ There ’ s a sense of fatigue , like ‘ Everyone ’ s sick already , let ’ s stop wearing masks.
’ Some of the precautions that were being taken are being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back to business as usual.
” As inmates returned to their prison jobs and guards continued to move between facilities , Bonds also warned of the possibility that a different prison might see an outbreak next time .
“ I think that we could very well see another wave or spike , ” she said .
“ I don ’ t think the state identified a way to prevent another Lansing .
”

The men incarcerated at Lansing Correctional Facility, a state prison in northeastern Kansas, first heard about the Covid-19 pandemic from the news or from relatives on the outside. There were no known cases in the state — but at the prison, dozens of men had begun to fall ill, some severely.
Rachad Austin was counting down the days left in his four-year sentence, but as news of the virus continued to trickle in, he grew increasingly worried. He had a collapsed lung due to a gunshot wound — and sometimes he suffered from chest pains and had difficulty breathing. Dozens of people around him were beginning to show symptoms, “and next thing you know, they’re passed out,” Austin told me on a recent call from prison. “It was a really scary time. … We were all wondering what was going on.”
Sherman Wright was also worried. Like some 40 percent of those incarcerated in the U.S., he had asthma and diabetes, making him particularly vulnerable to complications from Covid-19. At 56, he was also one of nearly 200,000 people over the age of 55 incarcerated in the U.S. — another factor that contributed to his vulnerability. Wright’s sister, Cynthia Crawford, at first thought he’d be safe in prison, where Wright was 32 years into a 66-years-to-life sentence over three robberies he had committed in his youth. “I thought, well, they’re confined so how can it get to them?” she told me during a recent interview. “But it did. And when it did, my worry went from 10 to 100, and as it progressed I hardly got any sleep. I worried about him every day, I woke up with him on my mind.”
Photo: Courtesy of Cynthia Crawford
Worried families soon started calling the prison, but officials did not publicly acknowledge the threat posed by the virus until mid-March, when they shut down visits and encouraged inmates to wash their hands more frequently — hardly the mundane task in prison that it is outside. By the time three staff members tested positive, on March 31, most men incarcerated at Lansing suspected that they, too, had been exposed to the virus — and yet it took prison management nearly a month to start testing them in large numbers. When they did, they found that some units of the prison had as much as a 75 percent rate of positive tests. “We all knew we were positive,” said Austin. “This was not the situation anyone would want to be in — but we were trapped.”
By the end of May, both Austin and Wright had indeed tested positive — as had nearly 900 others of the prison’s 1,700 inmates. Four incarcerated men and two staff members had died, and the prison had become the 14th largest cluster of coronavirus cases in the country and the largest in Kansas. As pressure on officials had mounted along with the number of cases, Gov. Laura Kelly had promised in early April that some vulnerable people would be released to home confinement. But weeks into the process, only six inmates in the entire state had been freed, and none from Lansing. Kelly, a Democrat who had campaigned in part on the promise to reform the state’s overburdened prison system, said releasing people “is very complicated, legally” — though critics noted she had the legal authority to do so.
Read Our Complete Coverage The Coronavirus Crisis
As The Intercept has reported, prisons and jails have become epicenters in the coronavirus pandemic. There are more than 53,000 nationwide cases among residents, including at least 616 deaths, and among staff more than 12,000 cases and 48 deaths. The story of how the pandemic unfolded at Lansing reveals many missteps by state and prison officials who consistently underplayed the threat posed by the virus: delaying testing, transferring and mixing exposed people, and initially failing to distribute and require masks even as cases surged. And the situation at Lansing was made worse by chronic issues in the Kansas prison system, which was already plagued by severe overcrowding and staff shortages. But as was the case in many prisons across the country, the outbreak at Lansing was also largely avoidable, and officials ignored a series of warnings from staff, families, and attorneys and for weeks failed to take significant action to stop the virus.
“It was clear what was going to happen,” Jennifer Roth, a Kansas public defender, told me in a recent interview. “All you had to do was look at other prisons and jails across the country, and what medical professionals and other scientists were saying. It was clear what could happen, and then it did happen.”
By the time the prison moved to more aggressively contain the spread of the virus — after a riot had broken out in one of its units over a lack of masks — it was too late.
“They took too long,” said Roth.
“I think they honestly just didn’t care what was going on with us because we’re inmates,” said Austin, who is scheduled to be released on Thursday at the end of his sentence. “They didn’t want to deal with it.”
Gov. Kelly’s office did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Kansas Department of Corrections did not answer detailed questions from The Intercept, but wrote in a statement that “just as others have around the country, we are facing this unique challenge which placed previously unimaginable stress on our system.”
“The Lansing Correctional facility is in the Kansas City metro area where the first cases of COVID-19 were experienced in Kansas,” the spokesperson added. “And being first at a time when public health officials, using currently available science, were not yet aware of asymptomatic persons, masks were not recommended, testing supplies were limited at best, and social distancing was a new concept for everyone factored into our response.”
“As the science and recommended guidelines changed, we adapted quickly and implemented recommended changes.”
Intentional Ignorance
On March 7, Kansas officials reported the state’s first case of Covid-19 in Johnson County, not far from Lansing. There are several other prisons and jails in the area, and staff moved frequently between them and around nearby Kansas City.
But nearly a month later, with cases surging in the state and Kansans under a stay-at-home order, very few people were wearing masks at Lansing Correctional Facility. Kayla Donley, Rachad Austin’s fiancée, had called the prison to ask whether she could mail him one, and she told prison staff that she was required to wear a mask at the hospital where she worked, even though her job kept her at a far greater distance from people than inmates and guards were from each other. But the prison staffer she spoke to told her she couldn’t mail the mask. Austin could cover his face with a T-shirt, she said the staffer told her, but he might face disciplinary action if he did.
Photo: Courtesy of Kayla Donley
“It’s like they didn’t even care,” said Donley. “I feel like no one knew what was going on at Lansing during this time, and they brushed it off and acted like it wasn’t a big deal. … None of them took it seriously.”
Those incarcerated at the prison weren’t the only ones without masks. In the early days of the outbreak, several inmates complained to relatives and attorneys that guards were not covering their faces, even though some had been out sick with apparent Covid-19 symptoms. And David Carter, a Lansing correctional officer who quit his job in April over the prison’s mishandling of the virus, said that guards had actually been discouraged from wearing masks by management. “They were told it was going to cause a panic among the inmates,” said Carter. “A couple staff members were threatened with disciplinary action for wearing a mask.”
Carter, who worked as a correctional officer at Lansing for 15 years, said that staff who had tested positive to the virus were required to show up for work unless they were symptomatic. He shared text messages between prison staff that appear to confirm the policy and suggest that the prison was trying to figure out how to keep staff who had tested positive separate from inmates who had not.
“I have seen a lot of ineptitude over 15 years,” said Carter, who since his resignation has publicly blamed the state’s corrections officials for the six Covid-19 deaths of Lansing inmates and staff. “But there was a level of intentional ignorance — like they wanted to stay in the dark about Covid-19, they just wanted to stick their heads in the sand.”
“They spent about a month, maybe five weeks, just ignoring it completely,” added Carter. “They didn’t think it was going to be as big as it was because every level of government was science deniers that were basically saying that it’s a hoax, and it’s not going to happen.”
But the “final straw,” Carter said, was officials’ decision to quarantine inmates who had been exposed to the virus in a new and already troubled facility built by the private prison giant CoreCivic and leased to the state. The move was not expected for months because the prison was not ready and the prison’s staff was already stretched thin at the old facility. Then, after a riot broke out at the old facility, officials began to move more inmates to the new facility, exposing them to the virus and causing what Carter described as a very volatile security situation at the new facility, which he said was dangerously understaffed.
“The current and ever-growing atmosphere of ‘do more with less’ has put in danger every single staff member that regularly interacts with offenders,” Carter wrote in his resignation letter. “I can no longer be associated with a facility that is a ticking time bomb.”
“The line staff are just as concerned about this as the inmates are,” he also told me. “It’s not this us versus them mentality. If there’s an us versus them, it’s the line staff and the inmates versus the ineptitude of the top, really.”
Officials justified the move to the new facility as necessary to isolate inmates. Then weeks later, after a number of positive cases emerged at a work-release facility in Wichita, more than 200 men who had lived there were also moved to Lansing. The transfers proved to be disastrous.
“I really don’t know if these decisions were made at the advice of any public health officials,” said Lauren Bonds, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Kansas chapter. “But we do know that there were people from Wichita who got infected because they were kind of thrown into a hot spot at Lansing, when they were really facing a much smaller risk when they were in Wichita.”
“I still to this day don’t know why that decision was made,” she added. “But it definitely has panned out that it was not in the best interest of stopping transmissions and reducing infection rates.”
Wasted Warnings
Kansas officials were repeatedly warned about the devastating impact a Covid-19 outbreak could have on the state’s prisons and jails.
In the early days of the U.S. pandemic, a group of Kansas attorneys made fliers explaining what was known about the virus and how people could protect themselves, and asked jails across the state to post them. They had written letters to each of their clients to explain what Covid-19 was and how it spread, and they had promised them that they would do everything in their power to get them released, said Melody Brannon, one of those attorneys.
“The state government was entirely unprepared for this,” Brannon told me, noting that her federal clients, who are held in local jails, continued to be charged for soap for weeks as Covid-19 spread, and that attorneys at her office pitched in out of pocket to put money in the commissary accounts of clients who couldn’t afford to buy it. People who were sick were charged $8 for requesting a visit at the infirmary, and then $8 for the actual visit, she added, and that was excluding the cost of any care they might have received. “Even in good times they have such a hard time managing health care within a prison,” said Brannon. “There are so many inequities built in.”
Photo: John Hanna/AP
On March 31, a group of attorneys wrote a letter to Gov. Laura Kelly that was “chock-full of science and the experiences of what was going on in other places,” said Roth, the public defender. From the very beginning, she and others called on officials to release as many people as possible, arguing that rapidly reducing the number of incarcerated people was the only meaningful way to curb the spread of the virus.
The correctional officers’ union also raised the alarm, calling on the Department of Corrections to put in place measures to stop the spread of the virus, according to Carter. “The union was trying to get them to at least have a plan in place,” he said, noting that they weren’t even asking for additional resources like masks or other protective equipment. “They literally were just asking for a ‘what if’ scenario to be put in place. And they refused to even do the planning.”
On April 9, the same day that a riot broke out in one of Lansing’s units, the ACLU of Kansas filed a class-action lawsuit demanding the urgent release of vulnerable inmates and those close to the end of their sentence. The ACLU argued that the prison’s response to the pandemic had been inadequate: Inmates were still being charged for soap, most staff weren’t wearing masks even though the prison had finally begun to issue them, and there was no effort to maintain social distancing. “The prison’s response and the state’s response was that some of this is just inevitable in a correctional setting,” said Bonds. “And people are just going to get sick, and we can only do what we can do, and unfortunately this is as much physical distancing as we can provide, this is the best we can do.”
A judge ruled that the ACLU had failed to prove that the state’s response had been inadequate enough to violate the Eight Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, and dismissed the suit. When the suit was filed, there had been between 20 and 30 known Covid-19 cases in the state’s prisons. “That number wasn’t that scary,” said Bonds. “But basically as soon as our case was dismissed, we were starting to hear numbers in the hundreds. … That’s how we ended up with close to 900 people testing positive and getting infected — and that’s 900 inmates, that’s not even including the staff members who tested positive.”
In early April, the governor promised that officials were reviewing a list of inmates with close release dates and “viable plans” for reentry. More than 500 cases were reviewed as part of the process, according to Bonds, but by early May, only six people had been released. By that point, hundreds of people had been infected at Lansing.
What most frustrated Roth is that throughout the process, Kelly admitted that the state’s prisons were overcrowded and that too many people were incarcerated. “She said all these things through this process, but still wouldn’t actually move on releasing people,” said Roth, who also blamed the state’s legislature for their failure to do more. “I believe they did not want to wade into having to defend releasing people.”
As The Intercept has reported, Kansas was hardly the only state to release a negligible number of people during the pandemic — and despite nationwide calls to reduce the risk of Covid-19 in prison by drastically reducing the number of incarcerated people, very few were actually released. That decision was dictated by politics rather than public health, critics say, partially because releasing people would likely draw further attention to the fact that far too many are incarcerated to begin with.
“If they start releasing people and it works, and there isn’t mayhem in the streets, then it really helps the argument that we are over-incarcerating in the first place,” said Brannon. “If you release people, and they find that there wasn’t a huge surge in crime, then they’re going to have to admit that there really is mass incarceration and over-incarceration that is unnecessary, and Covid proved it. And as long as they resist and keep people in, you won’t have that evidence.”
Do you have a coronavirus story you want to share? Email us at coronavirus@theintercept.com or use one of these secure methods to contact a reporter.
Cynthia Crawford had hoped her brother, Sherman Wright, who had serious preexisting conditions, might be one of those the state would consider for early release. By that point, the families of the men incarcerated at Lansing had started receiving updates from the prison — usually when someone died, said Crawford — and when the governor had said the state was reviewing some inmates’ cases for possible early release, “that gave me hope,” she said.
Crawford wrote to the governor twice but never heard back. “I wrote to everybody trying to get some help,” she said. Wright was serving what amounted to a life sentence because of Kansas’s “three strikes” law, after he had been convicted in the 1980s for three robberies during which no one was hurt. Wright claims he stole about $60 — earning him a sentence of more than a year for each dollar. Since its class-action lawsuit was dismissed, the ACLU of Kansas has launched a clemency initiative, filing dozens of clemency applications on behalf of the most vulnerable people incarcerated in the state, and Crawford now hopes her brother might qualify for early release that way. His first parole hearing is not scheduled until 2026.
“We were very poor,” said Crawford, who for years has visited her brother every two weeks, until Covid-19 forced her to switch to video visitations. “Stealing is a crime, OK, do your time. But not your whole life.”
Second Wave
Days after the first Lansing guards tested positive, the prison switched course on masks, and men incarcerated there began making masks to be distributed to staff first, and then to inmates themselves.
“They’re coming out, passing out masks three months after people got sick,” said Austin, who had also hoped to qualify for early release, since he had only a few weeks left on his sentence.
It’s unclear why, but when the masks arrived to Lansing’s C2 block, they were never handed out to the men living there. “They got locked into an office somewhere and ignored,” said Carter. “And that’s ultimately what set the inmates off.” Austin, who didn’t live in that block, said that the men there, including several who were sharing their cells with four other people, had also been denied showers. “The guys were frustrated already,” he said. “They just wanted to take a shower, and they wanted face masks.”
Videos of the riot — which some inmates themselves took with contraband cell phones — went viral. Nobody was seriously hurt, and when officials retook control of the block, they began to move people to the new facility at Lansing, where inmates who were exposed to Covid-19 had already been quarantined. A few days later, a smaller riot also broke out at a different prison, the Ellsworth Correctional Facility, apparently after a guard who had been working at Lansing was sent to Ellsworth without first quarantining. After the Lansing riot, prison staff there started going around to measure everyone’s temperature, said Austin, and the National Guard sent in medics to make up for the shortage of nursing staff at the prison, many of whom had also been exposed to the virus.
By that point, most inmates at Lansing were presumed to have been exposed. Those who complained of symptoms were given Tylenol and told to drink water. “They told me that unless my breathing changes, they couldn’t do anything because they knew we were all positive,” said Austin. “They were only taking the worst of the worst to the clinic. Unless you were on the verge of dying, you basically just had to deal with it.”
Austin tested positive for Covid-19 at the end of April. But the prison didn’t tell him until more than a week later, after his fiancée learned of his results during a phone call with a prison official. “They came and tested him and said they would have the results back in 48 hours and they never came back and told him anything,” said Donley. “It’s honestly sickening how inhumanely they treat these guys just because they are in prison.”
Austin didn’t develop severe symptoms, and he was never tested again, including before his release from Lansing on Thursday. Earlier this month, the Kansas Department of Corrections declared the outbreak at Lansing “contained.”
Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing, Kansas. Still: Stuart Harmon
But this week, as men incarcerated at Lansing reported a new outbreak at the prison and as cases once again spiked in Kansas, so did questions about how officials might handle a new wave of Covid-19 at Lansing, or in other prisons across the state. “The Department of Corrections can say, ‘Oh well, we are taking all these precautions.’ But clearly that did not work out for them before, at least not at Lansing,” said Roth. “What happens when the next phase occurs?”
Bonds, of the ACLU, noted that the only acknowledgement of mistakes at Lansing consisted of officials criticizing the prison’s private medical provider, Corizon Health. This month, Kansas switched to a new contractor to provide medical services in prisons — though it’s not clear whether the pandemic or cost-saving measures were the reason behind the state’s decision not to renew Corizon’s contract. A company spokesperson wrote in an email to The Intercept that “the Corizon team is grateful for the chance to care for the patients in custody with the Kansas DOC these last several years, and we are proud of the care provided.”
Advocates who had predicted the disastrous impact of Covid-19 on Kansas prisons are now once again raising the alarm.
“I don’t think they are ready,” said Bonds, who also noted that the ACLU had received several reports of loosening safety measures in the state’s prisons. “There’s a sense of fatigue, like ‘Everyone’s sick already, let’s stop wearing masks.’ Some of the precautions that were being taken are being abandoned, it’s kind of back to business as usual.”
As inmates returned to their prison jobs and guards continued to move between facilities, Bonds also warned of the possibility that a different prison might see an outbreak next time.
“I think that we could very well see another wave or spike,” she said. “I don’t think the state identified a way to prevent another Lansing.”


theintercept--2020-07-02--Can We Build a Politics of Hope?

Can We Build a Politics of Hope?

humans really selfish , brutal , and cruel ?
For much of the last century , the most famous experiments @ @ @ @ @ Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram ’ s electric shock study to the 1971 Stanford prison @ @ @ @ @ prove that we all have a monster lurking just behind a carefully crafted social veneer @ @ @ @ @ “ Humankind : A Hopeful History , ” Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman aims @ @ @ @ @ this idea by examining the latest social science research , knocking over some of the @ @ @ @ @ in the process .
The book offers optimistic answers to anyone looking for a way @ @ @ @ @ political turmoil and confusion .

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Deep down, are humans really selfish, brutal, and cruel? For much of the last century, the most famous experiments in social science, from Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram’s electric shock study to the 1971 Stanford prison experiment, have purported to prove that we all have a monster lurking just behind a carefully crafted social veneer.
In his new book “Humankind: A Hopeful History,” Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman aims to shed new light on this idea by examining the latest social science research, knocking over some of the discipline’s sacred cows in the process. The book offers optimistic answers to anyone looking for a way forward in this era of political turmoil and confusion.
Rutger Bregman: Well, if I were to give a short summary of my book, it would be something like: Most people are pretty decent, but power corrupts. And I think that’s also a pretty good description of what’s happening in the U.S. right now.
[Musical interlude.]
Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Mehdi Hasan.
Are you feeling down, depressed, about the state of the world — the state of the human race? Maybe today’s show will raise your spirits, give a boost to your optimistic side.
RB: It seems to me like we’re in an extraordinary moment, full of hope, and the authoritarian response on the right seems like the last gasp of breath of a dying ideology.
MH: That’s my guest today, the Dutch historian, journalist, and best-selling author Rutger Bregman.
He’s got a big new book out called “Humankind” that’s making waves over its pretty simple yet pretty radical idea: human beings, he says, based on mountains of research, are good people. We’re not all selfish bastards.
So, on Deconstructed today, a truly important discussion: Are we, deep down, fundamentally decent, and, if so, what does that mean for our politics and our political ideologies in 2020?
Human beings are pretty awful, right? That’s what we’ve been told for years; that’s what the state of our crazy, war-torn world seems to often suggest.
Plus, we grew up reading novels like William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” where we saw young kids turn into violent savages once they’re removed from a rules-based, civilized society.
We grew up reading political philosophy from the likes of Thomas Hobbes, who said that without strong government keeping us all in check, our lives would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Or we read social psychology from the likes of Philip Zimbardo, whose infamous Stanford Prison experiment showed ordinary students in a mock prison setting suddenly becoming OK with torturing their fellow students.
We were told by biologists and anthropologists about “veneer theory,” which says all of our human morals and ethics are merely, “a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish and brutish nature,” ready to fall apart at a moment’s notice, in a moment of crisis, or war, or natural disaster, where we humans turn on each other like animals.
And, of course, in terms of our politics, conservatives on the right made it very clear that the only way to order and organize our society was around free markets, the profit motive, every man for himself — because, they effectively argued, human beings are motivated mainly by our material desires, by our greed, by our selfishness.
In fact, you could say conservatism itself is based on a pretty negative and pessimistic view of human nature. Conservatives say you can’t build a socialist utopia — a left-wing heaven on earth — you can’t shoot for the progressive stars, because human beings aren’t built for that. We’re not built for cooperation or mutual trust. We’re not generous altruists; we’re selfish individualists.
But the Dutch intellectual, journalist, and historian Rutger Bregman takes a hammer to that rather cynical view of the world, to that particular view of human beings, in his new book “Humankind: A Hopeful History.” He tells us at the very start of the book that he’s on a mission to uncover a “a radical idea” — one that has been “erased from the annals of world history.” You could even call it, he says, “a new view of humankind.”
And what is it? That human beings, at their core, are “friendly, peaceful, and healthy.” That “most people, deep down, are pretty decent.” In the words of one reviewer, Rutger is intent on demolishing what he sees as “the big lie that human beings are fundamentally evil and self-interested, and that our normal civilized behavior is a veneer that tends to collapse under pressure.”
In fact, Rutger even argues that we were better off during our nomadic times, before what we now call civilization came along, before agriculture and the domestication of animals. “Civilization has become synonymous with peace and progress and wilderness with war and decline,” he writes in the book. “In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.”
Rutger wants us to feel a little less cynical, a little less jaded, about humanity. Based on his own deep research and study, he now has faith in humankind; I mean, the subtitle of his book — released in the midst of a pandemic — is “A Hopeful History.”
So, if he’s right about humankind, and I hope he is — though I’m not a hundred percent sure he is, I hope he is — what does this all mean for our politics, for our society, for the left in 2020? And how does this view of human nature fit with some of the huge, almost unprecedented political and social developments we’ve seen so far this year — the global pandemic and the lockdowns, mass unemployment, the anti-racism protests, the ongoing debate over refugees and borders?
Today I’ll ask the author himself, lefty historian and public intellectual Rutger Bregman.
You may have heard of Rutger from his first best-selling first book “Utopia For Realists,” in which he made the case for, among other things, a universal basic income — UBI. Or more likely you may have first heard of him last January when he went viral online, after calling out the global ruling class themselves, the 0.1 percenters, to their faces, at — where else — the World Economic Forum in Davos:
RB: This is my first time at Davos, and I find it quite a bewildering experience, to be honest. I mean 1,500 private jets have flown in here to hear Sir David Attenborough speak about, you know, how we’re wrecking the planet. And, I mean, I hear people talk in the language of participation and justice, and equality and transparency, but then, I mean, almost no one raises the real issue, of tax avoidance, right? And of the rich just not paying their fair share. I mean, it feels like I’m at a firefighters’ conference, and no one’s allowed to speak about water.
I mean, this is not rocket science. I mean we can talk for a very long time about all of these stupid philanthrophy schemes, we can invite Bono once more. But, c’mon, we gotta be talking about taxes. That’s it: taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit, in my opinion.
MH: And then, of course, there was my own personal favorite clip of him, that also went viral, on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, where he called out Carlson to his face, and after Carlson, the coward, refused to air the interview on his show, Rutger released a covert recording of it online — and it was awesome:
RB: I mean, you’re probably not going to air this, but I went to Davos to speak truth to power, and I’m doing exactly the same thing right now. You might not like it, but you’re a millionaire funded by billionaires, and that’s the reason why you’re not talking about these issues.
Tucker Carlson: But I am talking about these issues.
RB: Yeah, only now. But, come on, you jumped the bandwagon. You’re all like, “Oh, I’m against the globalist elite. Blah blah blah.” It’s not very convincing to be honest.
TC: And I want to say to you, why don’t you go fuck yourself, you tiny brain. And I hope this gets picked up. Because you’re a moron. I tried to give you a hearing, but you were too fucking annoying —
RB: You can’t handle the criticism, can you?
MH: So that’s my guest today. He’s author of the new book, “Humankind: A Hopeful History,” and he joins me now from his home in the Netherlands.
Rutger, thanks for coming on Deconstructed.
RB: Thanks for having me!
MH: “Catastrophes bring out the best in people,” you write in your new book, “Humankind: A Hopeful History.” You say, “I know of no other sociological finding that’s backed by so much solid evidence that’s so blithely ignored.” Do you believe the current coronavirus catastrophe has brought out the best in people? Because a lot of people, especially in 2020, would say otherwise.
RB: Well, I mean, there are a couple of examples here and there of people, I don’t know, hoarding toilet paper, and we can count on the press to give a lot of attention to that. But if you zoom out just a little bit, I think we can clearly see that, you know, there’s been this explosion of cooperation. Billions of people around the globe, you know, quite radically changing their lifestyles and abiding by the, the procedures and rules of the health authorities. That’s the real headline here.
MH: You said recently in an interview with the BBC that we humans, we’re not fundamentally good, but we are fundamentally decent. What’s the difference?
RB: The difference is that, sort of, being good is, yeah, it’s really a moral judgment. And sometimes the right thing, the moral thing, to do is to be unfriendly and to be nasty. You know, we see this in the whole history of progress. You look at the history of feminism, or anti-racism, and so often, progress starts with people who are willing to go against the status quo and who are willing to be a little bit unfriendly.
And, in that way, they’re actually going sometimes against their nature as well, because what evolutionary anthropology tells us these days is that we human beings, we have evolved to be friendly and to work together. For millennia, it was actually the friendliest among us who had the most kids, and so had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. It’s deeply embedded in our evolutionary history that, also at times of crisis, but also just generally in life we prefer to work together and be friendly most of the time.
MH: You mentioned human nature. Your book is a fascinating discussion of all of the latest science and research on human nature. But you also delve back into good old philosophy. Talk about this clash between Rousseau and Hobbes, the two famous philosophers of the Enlightenment, which you hang a lot of the book on that clash —
RB: Yeah.
MH: — their very different views of human nature, on how humans interact with one another.
RB: Uh huh. So let’s start with Thomas Hobbes, the British philosopher, who argued that in the state of nature, as they called it back then, when we were still nomadic hunter gatherers, that we lived these lives that were nasty, brutish, and short, and there was some kind of war of all against all going on back then. That was his theory.
Now, Rousseau made the complete opposite argument. He said that no, when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, we lived these lives that were pretty good actually. But then we invented civilization and you know, everything went downhill from then on.
So, I think that a lot of, how do you say that, a lot depends on who was right. Rousseau is sort of the father of revolution, of the left, you could even say, and Hobbes is the father of what they call political realism, of saying, you know what, we just need people in power to make sure that people don’t kill each other, because deep down we’re all savages.
MH: And you reject the Hobbesian view, you reject the veneer theory of human morality, which is associated with Hobbes, which says that our goodness is just a thin veneer, which covers up a pretty selfish, brutish nature underneath, which is ready to come out at a moment’s notice. Is that how you started the book? Did you start with that position, that, you know what, this is B.S. or were you kind of Hobbesian and switched to Rousseau-ian, if I can call it that?
RB: Yeah, I think the latter, you know? I used to have a much more cynical view of human nature. I used to believe in veneer theory. I had, you know, read “Lord of the Flies”; I had read about what happened on Easter Island, where this civilization killed itself. I had read about the Stanford Prison Experiment in which, you know, pacifist, hippie students very quickly turned into savage monsters.
So, yeah, I had to change my mind on quite a lot of things while writing this book.
MH: So I do want to touch on those examples you mentioned in a moment, but just sticking with the Hobbes-Rousseau, why do we have to pick a side? Why can’t we say that human beings are complicated, we have a brutal, selfish, cynical side and we have an altruistic, cooperative side?
I mean, if you look at the recent mass protests against racism and violence, that’s our good side — those protests, you could argue. And then you look at the racism and violence that provoked those protests, that’s our bad side. It’s both.
RB: Well, if I would give a short summary of my book, it would be something like: Most people are pretty decent, but power corrupts. And I think that’s also a pretty good description of what’s happening in the U.S. right now. I mean, millions of peaceful protesters, very courageously, you know, going on the streets every day and showing this extraordinary self control, and then the savage violence from the Leviathan, you know, from those at the top, and the police, and the army, you name it. It’s actually the complete opposite of what Thomas Hobbes argued.
Now, why I think this is important is because our view of human nature tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And throughout history, a more cynical view of who we are has been used by those in power to legitimize their power. Because if people cannot trust each other, if they’re really, deep down, just savages, then we need the army, and the police, and the kings, and the generals, and you know, we need hierarchy.
But if people are — maybe not angels, but on average, pretty decent, at least most of us, then maybe we can move to a very different kind of society that is much more egalitarian and genuinely democratic.
MH: It’s interesting, you talk about self-fulfilling prophecy, because you see that in the language of the right where Donald Trump came to power warning that, you know, society is about to fall apart; the foreigners are coming to kill you; that I alone can fix it; that America’s in carnage.
RB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s the classic law-and-order argument. You know, again,
It goes back all the way to Thomas Hobbes, like: you need us because you can’t trust each other, because there will be some kind of war of all against all if I do not interfere right now.
MH: So you wrote this book, in which you say actually the evidence suggests we can trust each other.
RB: Yes.
MH: You talk about our species being homo-puppy — friendly, cooperative, decent. That’s our superpower, you say; that’s what allowed us to survive, homosapiens, where the Neanderthals and others couldn’t. You even suggest we were better off — happier, less violent —back then in the prehistoric, the pre-civilizational period. How do you know that? I know you’re good at research, there’s a lot of footnotes in this book, but you don’t have a time machine, do you? You can’t go back and see for yourself.
RB: No, and I must admit that this is partly speculative. We’ve got a lot of evidence from anthropology and from archaeology. So what you can do is to look at excavations of all skeletons and see, you know, if there are any signs of violence; turns out that you know, there’s hardly any evidence for war in prehistory. You can also look at cave paintings — you know, if there really was a war of all against all, going on 20,000-30,000 years ago, you would expect that, at some point, you know, some Picasso from the Stone Age would have made a nice you know, Guernica of that, right? You know, sort of this depiction of this war of all against all. We haven’t found it.
But then after we became civilized — or “civilized,” I should say — when we settled down, and we became farmers, invented agriculture, then suddenly you do see a lot of these cave paintings. So that is some evidence.
What you can also do is study nomadic hunter-gatherers, who lived in the 19th century or the 20th century, that, you know, that we have ethnographic field reports about. And then there are obviously huge cultural differences between different nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes around the globe, but there are also striking similarities. If you look at the political systems of these kind of societies, it turns out that they’re quite egalitarian; humbleness is really prerequisite. You could argue that they are almost proto-feminist — you know, there’s this interesting equality between the sexes as well.
And that makes sense, because actually more equal societies, where people just have more friends and more social connections, they also display more social learning — they learn more from each other — so they get more inventions. And I think that this is what made the difference, in the end, for us as a species.
MH: But you’re not saying you want to kind of unwind the clock, you don’t want to go back, you’re not saying that hunter gatherer societies are superior societies to the ones we have today.
RB: No, I’m not saying that. I mean, we can’t go back. That’s the first thing.
MH: [Laughs.] I mean, I’d be crap with a bow and arrow.
RB: [Laughs.] Well, if you would have the theoretical, you would have to choose between living a life as a nomadic hunter-gatherer or a life in civilization, then I would advise you to choose the life of a nomadic hunter-gatherer. Because if you look at the whole history of civilization, the last 10,000 years, 99 percent of that was horrible, absolutely horrible — you know, up until the year 1800, the vast majority of people was a slave, you know, bonded to some kind of powerful man. It was usually a man, obviously.
We have made extraordinary progress. I mean, Steven Pinker’s right about that in the past couple of decades. We are richer, we are healthier, we are wealthier than ever, even though there’s still a lot to be done. But then the question is: How sustainable is it, really? Right? Maybe we’re dancing on top of a volcano. Maybe this is just a very small bit of our history, once climate change ends the whole show.
MH: People like Steven Pinker, of course, say, you know, “We’ve never had it so good. Things are getting better and better, et cetera.”
Steven Pinker: Violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and, today, we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.
MH: But you’ve been a critic of his. Why?
RB: I mostly disagree with his take on our life in prehistory. So, I think, for his ideology, I mean, someone like him would always deny to be ideological, right? They always say, “Oh, I’m just rational. I’m just looking at the facts.”
MH: [Laughs.]
RB: I think we should be very suspicious of those people because usually they’re the most ideological of all.
MH: Definitely.
RB: So what he wants to paint is some picture of our history that is like the march of progress — with some ups and downs, but, you know, generally things get better all the time, right? We invent things like writing, and the wheel, and we start to live in states. And then the Enlightenment, obviously, which was the greatest thing ever.
And now, there’s nothing guaranteed; he’ll never say that, you know? He won’t present us with a sort of whiggish version of history, but he does want to paint sort of this gradual line that goes up.
If you look at the latest evidence that we have, actually, from history, archaeology, and anthropology, you know, you get to see this very different shape. What you actually see is that for 95 percent of our history, we lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, and these lives were relatively good, you know, working weeks of around 20-30 hours, relatively peaceful, no evidence for war, relatively egalitarian as well. Then we settled down, and we became farmers. And that was just a huge, huge disaster: our health deteriorated, we got so many infectious diseases, like measles, and the plague, and Covid-19, which is also a disease of civilization because we live too close to our animals, which is a modern phenomenon. Wars broke out, we invented hierarchy, patriarchy — which is also a quite recent phenomenon. So yes, you get to see this very different shape of our history.
Now, again, we’ve made a lot of progress, especially, I think, since the end of the Second World War. But this is all very, very recent.
MH: Hmm, and you suggest it could be tentative, too?
RB: Well, I mean, this book is called “A Hopeful History.” So it’s about the possibility of change. You know, my previous book was called “Utopia For Realists,” in which I argued that we also always should have some, you know, something on the horizon. Because every milestone of civilization was once a utopian fantasy — end of slavery, democracy, you name it. So we always need to have something to work towards, but that’s no guarantee.
MH: You do a lot of evidence-based and very well-researched debunking of some conventional wisdoms and common tropes in the book, which, I have to say it’s partly what makes it so fascinating and entertaining. For example, you take aim at “Lord of the Flies,” the famous 1954 novel by William Golding, which many of us were forced to read and absorb in school; I was never a fan. That is a book which has a very Hobbesian view of human nature, a bunch of British school kids get stranded on an island, they turn into violent, hate-filled savages, they turn on each other in their “natural state.”
You say that’s not based on any real-world examples, and you even found a real world case of six Tongan boys who were stranded for real on an island in the South Pacific for over a year back in 1965. And you say they didn’t end up like the “Lord of the Flies,” fictional kids.
RB: Yeah. And if this will be a fictional story, people would say, “Oh, that is so unrealistic. That would never happen. This is so sentimental. This paints this naive, Rousseau-ian picture of what kids are like.” But turns out that, yeah, this is what really happened.
The real “Lord of the Flies” is a story of friendship, of hope, and of resilience. These six kids managed to survive for 15 months —
MH: Wow.
RB: — until they were found by an Australian Captain named Peter Warner. And yeah, they stayed the best of friends.
MH: But they didn’t turn on each other on the island, they didn’t fight or kill each other?
RB: No, not at all. Not at all. So they managed to get a fire started after three months, they never let it go out. They worked in teams of two — two to be on the lookout, two to cook, two to tend to the garden. Sometimes they ended up in fights; I mean, this is what happens with humans. But what they did is one would go to one side of the island, and the other would go to the other side of the island, cool off a little bit, come back and say “sorry.” And that’s how they kept cooperating for 15 months.
I managed to track down two of them — and I’m now actually in contact with all of them after the story was published — and they’re still friends today, you know, 50 years later. And they also became friends with this Australian captain. So it’s, as I said, it’s a very sentimental, unrealistic story. But yeah, it really happened.
MH: Whereas the “Lord of the Flies” story, which you say there’s no evidence for, well, that’s the one we’ve been imbibed with since childhood and that we all know and that we all assumed to be the case, and your book is saying that assumption is built on very weak, real-world foundations.
Just on the kids issue, in your book, you also described an experiment run by Yale’s Infant Cognition Center or “Baby Lab,” which looks at tribalism in babies. And you point out that the researchers put a puppet in front of the kids — two puppets, one mean and one selfish in a puppet show — one mean and selfish, one generous and kind. And the infants had a preference for the good puppet. But then what happened in terms of the tribalism? Talk about the tribalism involved in that experiment?
RB: Yeah. So then when they let the kids choose between — what is it, graham crackers, and another piece of food — and they would also show the preference of the puppet, then suddenly, people would choose the puppet that had the same food preference, even when that puppet was nasty, right?
MH: Yeah.
RB: And that sort of shows the capacity we have for —
MH: Pick your side.
RB: Yeah, for groupthink. And for in-group, out-group behavior.
MH: But doesn’t that undermine part of your thesis, then? Because you’re saying at the very beginning, they were good and they picked the good puppet, even as babies.
RB: Mhmm.
MH: But then they allowed their tribalism to take over.
RB: Hmm. Well, what I’ve tried to give in my book is a quite paradoxical view of human nature. So, on the one hand, we’ve evolved to be friendly, and we’re the most cooperative species in the animal kingdom, you could even argue that. But on the other hand, this friendliness is quite often exactly the problem. So often we do the most horrible things in the name of comradeship, and of loyalty. It’s very often that, sort of, these qualities that we tend to regard as good, are implicated in our worst behavior.
MH: Yeah. A lot of people don’t realize how much of the scholarship on for example, “jihadist terrorist groups” focuses on the fact that a lot of guys join because they want solidarity with their friends, peer pressure.
RB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
MH: They want to look out for their communities or their friends.
RB: Yeah, and it’s not about condoning. But it’s about understanding. So, in my book, I’ve got a chapter about, you know, more effective ways to design the whole criminal justice system and also to do counterterrorism.
Now, my own country, I’m from the Netherlands, has an interesting tradition here of counterterrorism that we call the “Dutch Approach.” So what does the Dutch Approach entail? Well, it means that you don’t talk about terrorism, you only talk about sort of criminal behavior or violent political activism. And what you do is you try to approach kids that seem to radicalize with kindness and friendliness. And now, that takes real courage because it goes against your intuition.
MH: Yes.
RB: But it turns out that these approaches are way more effective. So back in the 70s, when there was a lot of left-wing violence, and things went completely out of hand in Germany and in Italy, Rote Armee Fraktion and the Brigate Rosse. In the Netherlands, something very different happened, and many of the terrorists later complained that ,you know, it just wasn’t, it just wasn’t fun to be a terrorist in the Netherlands —
MH: [Laughs.]
RB: [Laughs] — because, you know, yeah, it was like, the authorities were too soft.
MH: Yes. Something else you take aim at, you debunk in the book, is the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which I remember having to study back in university. This is the famous social psychology study in which college students were picked to become either prisoners or guards in a simulation.
Archival Voiceover: They were led to a simulated prison block consisting of three small cells, a narrow hallway, and a closet designed for solitary confinement. This would be their entire world for two weeks.
MH: And the ones who became prison guards instinctively embraced pretty brutal, sadistic, authoritarian personalities.
Philip Zimbardo: Some of the guards were behaving sadistically, brutally, and many of the guards who were not were helpless to do anything about it — indeed, allowed it to go on.
Prison Guard: I really thought that I was incapable of this kind of behavior. This was a part of me I hadn’t really noticed before.
MH: And that experiment was supposed to show how we’re all capable of becoming, basically, tyrants in the right circumstances. You say that’s not true, that it was a bit of a bogus experiment.
RB: Yeah. It’s one of the most famous experiments in psychology, though. Still today — millions of students around the hear about the Stanford Prison Experiment that supposedly show, you know, shows that there’s a Nazi just below the surface in each and every one of us.
Quite recently a French sociologist called Thibault Le Texier, published a book in French that, sadly, has not been translated. And the book is called “A History Of A Lie.” And that’s basically what we’re talking about here.
We now know based on archival evidence, you know, because the archives have opened up, that Philip Zimbardo, one of the most famous living psychologists today, specifically instructed his students to be as sadistic as possible, you know, to behave in a nasty and brutal way.
MH: He put his finger on the scale.
RB: Yeah, exactly. Then many of these students said that they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to do it because they said: No, that’s not who I am. Then Zimbardo said: You got to do this because I need these results, then we can go to the press and say look, prisons are horrible environments. We need to reform the whole thing. That was actually a movement in the 60s where people said, you know, we got to abolish prisons totally.
And the terrible irony of this movement, which, and Zimbardo was was part of that as well, is that it was was then later used by conservatives to say, oh, well, if prisons you know don’t work at all, if rehabilitation is not an option, then, you know, let’s just throw people in prison and throw away the key, right? Let’s just lock people up for life, because then that’s the only option. It’s a history full of dark ironies.
But yeah, the Stanford Prison Experiment is — I think it can only be described as a hoax and it’s very sad that this has been taught to students for 50 years.
MH: But the other experiment that is taught to students, this very famous experiment, is the Stanley Milgram experiment where, you know, students were asked to exercise authority over others via electric shocks, you know, imaginary electric shocks that they were supposed to administer.
Archival Voiceover: The results are disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature cannot be counted on to insulate men from brutality, and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority. A substantial proportion of people do what they’re told to do, irrespective of the content of the Act, and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.
MH: You weren’t able to debunk that one, though, you?
RB: Well, not totally, no. It’s a problematic experiment as well. The archives have opened up, again, and we now know that many of the subjects didn’t believe the situation was real. And we also know that the people who went all the way, to give 450 volt shocks, yeah, the chance that they would do that was higher if they didn’t believe the whole thing was real.
But, then again, you’re right. I mean, maybe it was not 65 percent, as Milgram initially reported, maybe it was — the real number is 50 percent, or 40, or 30, but it’s still way too high. It’s still a very dark and sinister experiment that shows that, indeed, friendly people can do this.
But I do think the experiment needs to be reinterpreted. So Milgram made the argument that people became sort of rigid robots, that they just blindly followed orders, just as many Germans said after the war, you know, “I was just following orders.” But I think what really happened in that experiment was something different. It was about joining; it was about followership. It was about people wanting to help the scientist, and yes, sort of feeling part of his group — which is not a comfortable message, right? It’s not a comfortable message at all. We talked earlier about, you know, how so often we do the most horrible things in the name of loyalty and friendship. And I think that’s also how we should interpret this experiment.
MH: But you’re not denying, are you, that, you know, people talk very casually, sometimes, you know, human beings have a dark side? Your book and your research hasn’t led you to the conclusion that we don’t have a dark side?
RB: No, of course not. I mean, this is one of the ironies about writing a book about human kindness and cooperation is that you have to go on for hundreds of pages about all the dark pages in our history, right? And all the atrocities. How do you explain ethnic cleansing? How do you explain the Holocaust and wars, etc, etc?
The psychology of violence is really interesting here. Violence is quite difficult for most people. I mean, eating food is easy, and we, I mean, everyone understands that, that that is nice and we need that in order to survive. Same is true for sex; I mean, if we stop having sex, you know, species will go extinct. But with violence, it’s different. Often we pay a high psychological price: soldiers go to war, they kill an enemy, and they come back with PTSD. So that suggests to me that even though we’re capable of it, especially with technological means, you know? If we manage to increase the distance with the enemy, for example, or with the conditioning or brainwashing, there are a lot of procedures that are used in the military and also actually with police officers. I mean, many American police officers have been brainwashed, basically, to be violent. But that’s not how they were born. And that’s, I think, that’s important to keep in mind.
MH: Let’s talk about the Holocaust. You mentioned it a couple of times. I’m sure when you sat down to start writing this book — this book that says how fundamentally decent we are — you must have thought to yourself, “I’m gonna have to deal with the Holocaust.”
RB: Yeah.
MH: How do you deal with it in the book? How does it fit with your thesis? The Nazis, the Holocaust, industrialized mass killing?
RB: Well, I mean, I obviously can’t pretend that it’s sort of, you can explain the Holocaust. I mean, libraries full of books have been written about it.
I do criticize the standard explanation that we often hear, which is: How do you explain the Holocaust? Well, there’s just a Nazi below the surface.
And this was also the message of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiments. And I think that those explanations trivialized, actually, what was going on. We need a much more complicated layered explanation.
So if you look at soldiers of the Wehrmacht, for example, why was this the most effective fighting force in all of history? Well, it had a lot to do with comradeship, we now know. There have been a lot of interviews of prisoners of war in the last two years of the war, and it turns out that many of them were not fighting because they were fanatical Nazis, but because they didn’t want to let their friends down.
Now obviously, that explanation doesn’t work for camp guards or for fanatical S.S. idealogues, right? That we need something —
MH: Or the entire leadership of the country.
RB: Yeah, exactly. So there we need something different, that has — well, I think you really need to look at the whole history of Nazi Germany, where evil was normalized. I mean, I mean, that’s, I guess the most important point that I tried to make in the book, is that it just takes years and years and years before a society becomes so lost and so poisoned that something like this happens. And that’s important to keep in mind.
MH: What about the other famous or infamous genocide of the last hundred years, the Rwandan genocide? That happened in a matter of weeks or months.
RB: Oh, I think that often in the West, we have a very simplistic view of the Rwandan genocide. Right? We — many Western commentators — have tried to paint this as, “Oh, these Africans suddenly became savages.” And, you know, that’s that’s really not what it was.
In many ways, it’s just, you know, it’s been a modern genocide with many of similar mechanisms that we also see in the build-up to the Holocaust. You know, where modern, mass propaganda was used; where the process of dehumanization have been going on for years and years and years. And then, yes, the, the unthinkable became possible; which is, again, I mean, it’s a very dark truth about who we are as a species. And there’s no — I’ve never heard of a penguin that says, oh, let’s lock up an old group of other people and exterminate them all.
So I’m not, you know, in many ways, I think this book is not a comfortable book.
MH: No, and there’s and there’s no easy answers to some of this stuff. But let me just take some of your, kind of, very strong statements. You say in the book: “Precisely when bombs fall from the sky or dikes break, the best things come out in humans. That’s a quite sweeping statement. A lot of people would look at something like 9/11 —
RB: Mhmm.
MH: And say, OK, 9/11 — after 9/11 the worst things came out: illegal invasions, torture, rendition, surveillance, demonization of Muslims, all backed by an American public that was bent on revenge.
RB: Yeah.
MH: The polling shows most Americans signed up for all of that. They even re-elected George W. Bush three years later.
RB: Yeah, yeah. And you wonder, sometimes, could it have been different? Because the first initial response that I’m talking about in the book was so different. You know, we’ve got eyewitness accounts of people who were going down the stairs of the burning Twin Towers, and literally saying to each other, “No, you go first.” “No, you go first.” “You go first.” So this extraordinary decency, even in such a, you know, such a scary situation.
Now, we all know what happened after that, and how this crisis was abused. And we got two illegal wars and massive surveillance of citizens by the government. But maybe there’s a different possibility.
One of my favorite books about this is written by Rebecca Solnit, the American writer who published the book, “A Paradise Built In Hell,” where she also talks about the extraordinary evidence we have from sociology about what happens after natural disasters, and she goes into the case study of Katrina. You know, 2005, the press was full of stories about looting and plundering and violence —
MH: Exaggerated stories.
RB: — but what exactly happened was an explosion of altruism and cooperation. But elites just look at us, and they look in the mirror, and they think that, “Oh, other people are just as selfish as we are.” And then they send in the military and they send in the police, right?
MH: No, I understand that. But just sticking with 9/11. I understand your point about going another way. And you know, the Iranians came out with a candlelight vigil after 9/11.
RB: Yeah.
MH: There was a moment there for some, you know, reconciliation between those two countries. All of that was missed, because unfortunately, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were in charge.
RB: Mhmm.
MH: But the fact is, Americans did get behind those horrific policies that I mentioned.
RB: Yes. Yeah.
MH: They didn’t take the path that you mentioned could have been taken, and surely that undermines some of the thesis of your book.
RB: Well, I think it’s the connection again, with, on the one hand, you have the corruption of power, and on the other hand, you have this tribal behavior from sort of ordinary people who could, in fact, be decent. I think this is sort of a very toxic combination that you so often see play out in history; there are ways to try and get around this though. There’s a very old theory in psychology that’s called the contact hypothesis. It’s very different, a simple idea, that’s just that if you put people in contact, they find it much harder to hate each other.
I’ve got one chapter in the book about, you know, something that many people have heard about, you know, the Christmas truce in 1940, during, in the midst of the First World War —
MH: Yes.
RB: — when soldiers stop fighting.
Archival Voiceover: All of the sudden, I saw lights all along the German trenches, all coming up, there’s sort of Christmas trees, and they started singing Christmas carols, singing “Silent Night.”
RB: And it’s really interesting, actually, is that the people who hated the Germans the most, they were the people who, at home, reading the newspapers, and the journalists and the editors, but the actual soldiers in the trenches, they often find it hard to keep on fighting, because, you know, they were so close to the enemy that very often you would have these outbreaks of peace, and that was very hard to control for, for the generals and the officers.
MH: You’re on the left of the political spectrum, and you’ve written a book your conservative critics might say, which conveniently affirms your own politics, your own ideology. After all, conservatives say we humans are fundamentally flawed, we’re selfish, individualistic people, while it’s people on the left — socialists, for example, who have utopian ideas about collective action and solidarity between human beings. What would you say to people who say, “Well, this just, you know, it firms your own biases?”
RB: Well, it’s a book that, for me, has, in many ways, been a reckoning with my own ideas. I used to believe in the Stanford Prison Experiment. I used to believe in the cynical story of Easter Island, you know, how the civilization killed itself. I used to believe in veneer theory, so that has to say something.
And I also think that very often on the left, you also find this, I don’t know, bit more paternalistic view of people that we have to help them to make the right decisions. While, I think that, in the end, what I’m advocating is a more anarchistic view of who we are as a species — that most people are quite decent, but power corrupts. The problem with anarchists, though, is that they’re not very good at building institutions. And that’s where, really we need to do better.
MH: [Laughs.] By definition.
RB: Yeah.
MH: You said in a recent interview with my former colleague, George Eaton, over at The New Statesman magazine in the UK, that you believed the Overton Window, the range of policies deemed acceptable to the voters, is moving left. You said, “It’s a wonderful time to be a social democrat.”
RB: Mhmm.
MH: And yet, just a few months ago, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party were heavily defeated in the UK election. Just a few weeks ago, here in the U.S., Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were both rejected by Democratic primary voters.
RB: Mhmm. And then the standard response here is obviously what Sanders said himself, as well, is that he won the battle of ideas.
Now, that may sound like a bit of a weak response, but I mean, if you zoom out, it’s really true. It’s really — you can clearly see it, if you just look at the climate plans of Joe Biden, who is, I totally agree with people, is a boring, moderate, and there are many problems with his platform. But his climate plans are more ambitious than Bernie Sanders’ climate plans of 2016.
If you look at how the window has shifted, when it comes to taxing the rich, you know, people are — it’s true that actually Biden is relatively radical, if you look at the history of Democratic candidates in the U.S..
And the same is true, I think, for the UK, is the actual spending of the conservatives on social services in the past couple of years has been closer to the UK, or the Labour manifesto of 2017, to the plans of the conservatives themselves.
MH: And yet, and yet these left-wing parties and candidates frustratingly keep losing.
RB: Yeah, but maybe that’s — I mean, it would be nice, I totally agree with you, to win an election for once. And maybe, I think people on the left also have to become better at building coalitions.
MH: Yes.
RB: I’ve just read this really great book by Helen Lewis, it’s a history of feminism —
MH: Another former colleague of mine.
RB: [Laughs.] Well, there you go. It’s a history of feminism in Great Britain.
MH: Yeah.
RB: And she talks about the women’s right to vote, and the whole campaign for that. And it’s so interesting, because what they managed to do is build this huge coalition of working class women and aristocrats. And then they reached a compromise in what is it, in 1918? Just a partial right to vote for women, only women over 30 who had property. And then 10 years later, they got the whole thing.
So that teaches us something. If you want progress then sometimes you need to do things that you don’t like, and I think this is sometimes a bit of a problem among the left is that we like to stay in our corner of the internet and be retweeted by people who already agree with us.
MH: Yes. That is —
RB: But that’s not how you actually change the world.
MH: — that is a problem across the political spectrum. By the way, Helen Lewis’ book is called, “Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights.”
RB: Yeah.
MH: If you want to check that out. We’re running out of time, but I do have to bring up a major issue, because when I came across your book and the thesis of your book, even before I started reading it, the first thing that jumped into my mind, as a counterpoint, was not Nazi Germany or the Stanford Prison Experiment or whatever it is, the number one thing that jumped into my mind was immigration, and I think about human decency, and cooperation, and sticking up for other people, and then I look at the record of the West in recent years, as refugee numbers have ballooned around the world, Syria imploded.
We didn’t see people across Europe or North America opening their arms to refugees, to immigrants. We saw the exact opposite, we saw the scapegoating of those people, the demonization of those people. We saw voters elect Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orbán — almost even elect Geert Wilders in your country, Marie Le Pen in France. How does the backlash against immigration fit with your thesis about our basic decency, because I so want to believe in your thesis, and then I look at the immigration debate, and I just want to tear my hair out.
RB: Well, let me say one thing about my country’s cause I’ve seen the reports about Geert Wilders supposedly becoming the leader of this country. Well, he got, like, I don’t know, 15 or 20 percent of the vote at max, and he’ll never get more. Actually, 80 percent of the country strongly dislikes him [laughs]. And, what we’ve also seen here, is that for every refugee that came in, there were two or three volunteers who wanted to help. This was actually a problem; we had too many volunteers.
And, you know, I remember a conversation with my sister, I had at the time, who was angry; she had signed up to be a volunteer, and people from the city had said, “You can’t do anything anymore because we’ve got too many people already who want to help.”
Now, this is, these are sort of the banality of the good; it’s what, especially the news, doesn’t really focus on. Because the news is mostly about, I think, the nastiness, about the negative.
MH: Yes.
RB: Now I’m not saying that doesn’t exist —
MH: Yeah, that’s the thing: I agree with you on the news, and I know you’re very critical of the news, and you’re right about the media industry, and the way that we consume news is a drug that makes us pessimistic, cynical, you know, brings out our worst qualities and the point you made earlier about self-fulfilling prophecy — all great points about the media; I share them totally.
But, we can’t deny the fact that there’s ths growing, far-right, “populist” — I hate that word — nativist, xenophobic, anti-migrant wave across the West, and then you come out with this book saying we’re actually really decent people. I’m like, well, the wave of politicians being elected doesn’t seem to support that.
RB: No. But at the same time, you have these millions of protestors across the U.S., in all 50 states. I don’t know. It seems to me like we’re in an extraordinary moment, full of hope, and it seems to me, many of these, I don’t know, the strong man and the authoritarian response on the right — I don’t know. It seems like, the, how do you say that, last gasp of breath for some of these people, of a dying ideology.
MH: A death rattle.
RB: Yeah.
MH: I hope you’re right, Rutger. I pray to god that you’re right.
RB: Well, maybe it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, if we actually believe it. That’s what the book is about, as well.
MH: Yeah. Maybe we’ll have to get you back on this show in November to talk about how you were right to be hopeful in this moment.
RB: [Laughs.]
MH: Before we finish, we’re out of time, but I do, I want so much more to discuss with you, and I recommend listeners read the book, because there’s so many fascinating anecdotes, studies, interesting & provocative points that you make.
But just on a separate subject, I do want to ask you one last question: you became very famous last year when you went to Davos, when you took on the “elites” in Davos to their faces, and I played a clip earlier on the show of you doing that. And then, of course, you went on Fox News, on Tucker Carlson’s show, which went viral, where you challenged him on his kind of biases, and awful output, and kind of apologism for billionaires. Let me just ask you this: When you went on Tucker’s show, did you go planning to do that or did that just happen in the spur of the moment? I wanted to ask you that for a year now, because it was brilliant.
RB: [Laughs.] Well, it’s been a bit of both. So, it was 2 AM. It was in the middle of the night in Amsterdam, and I had forgotten about the interview, to be honest, because I was moving to a different place. And that Monday, I realized, “Oh god. I still have this Tucker Carlson interview. What am I gonna say?” And I arrived at the studio, and there was just one producer — as I said, it was the middle of the night. And I joked to him, that, you know, I was going to do this interview and they were probably not going to air it because I, I don’t know, I was in the mood of telling him the truth.
And I asked him, the producer, I asked, “Can you record the thing?” Because then I have something nice to say, you know, next Friday, when I’m going to drink beers with a couple of colleagues and I’ve got them a nice video to show them. And he said, you know, that he couldn’t do it. That he didn’t have the equipment there to do it.
So I just went to the interview, expecting that, I don’t know, nothing would happen; I just would have a nice anecdote and they would never air it. And then we had this bizarre conversation where he really exploded, and to be honest, I thought it was hilarious; I thought it was absolutely hilarious —
MH: It was hilarious.
RB: — that he completely lost it.
And then, the interview was over, and this guy came in the studio, and he said, “You know, I’ve got the whole thing on my iPhone, I couldn’t resist, you know, recording it.” And then he airdropped it to me on my phone, and I immediately tried to post it on Twitter, but it didn’t work. You know, my Internet wasn’t working.
And so we went downstairs, had a couple of beers. And I guess, at that point, I didn’t really realize what had happened.
And then the next morning I woke up and I watched the video, and I was like, “Holy shit, this is a hand grenade.” [Laughs.] And then we consulted, I don’t know — three, four lawyers, before we had the guts to actually publish it. So that’s how it happened.
MH: Well it was definitely fun to watch, and I’m glad someone kind of stuck it to Tucker Carlson, the faux populist and white nationalist of our time.
Rutger Bregman, we’ll have to leave it there. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the book. Carry on being thought-provoking.
RB: Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.
[Musical interlude,]
MH: That was Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian and journalist, and author of the new book “Humankind: A Hopeful History.” I’m hopeful, after listening to him speak; he sure does make a passionate, thought-provoking, well-argued case. And what’s so important is that progressives use such arguments, use books like his, to fight for a better future, to imagine a better world, and not get lost in cynicism or despair — especially at a time like now.
That’s our show! Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.
And I’m Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please do subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice: iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review — it helps new people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!
See you next week.