Why Are We Like This?

Billy Corben, director of hit documentaries like Cocaine Cowboys, The U, and most recently HULU’s God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down A Dynasty, joins us to talk about Miami’s undisputed status as the capital of crypto scams and million-dollar ape jpegs.

Come for the crypto convo where we dissect Art Basel’s role in supporting the wheezing, dying collection of scams that we consider the “crypto industry” and stay for a rousing game of Guess The Grifter, the new quiz show that was made just for Miami.

You can follow Billy on Twitter @BillyCorben and you can stream God Forbid now on HULU and Disney+.

This is the story of a multi-million dollar heist of taxpayer funds into private hands that has played out for more than a decade and shows no sign of slowing down. As the school calendar flips throughout Florida, we look at how Charter Schools and “school choice” have successfully played into the American (and Floridian) dual ethoses of “freedom” and “choice, creating a system where there’s no freedom to fix what’s broken and the only choices are bad.

We explore the powerful, well-funded political project that aims to harness conservative anxiety and grievance into an anti-education movement, molding American secondary schools into a caste system where the kids with means pay for-profit schools for the privilege of attending a decent school, and the rest get the underfunded, neglected leftovers. Sure, they’re undermining the public/community school model that has educated generations of kids, but who’s profiting from it?

Our guest is Jen Cousins (@JenCousinsFL), founding member of the Florida Freedom to Read Project, which can be followed on Twitter @FLFreedomRead, and the Students’ Rights Coalition, @SRCforEd.

You can follow WAWLT on Twitter @WAWLTShow.

This episode features music by David Rosen, @ByDavidRosen.

The post CASE FILE: Proud Boy’ing Our Public Schools first appeared on Why Are We Like This?.

As a coda for this new show, we take a 10k foot view of why Florida is the way it is, the forces conspiring to implement creeping authoritarianism in recent years, the anti-democratic sentiment guiding right-wing “culture”, its status as a laboratory for the American conservative project, and how bulwarks like Miami-Dade, Broward and Central Florida are barely holding on.

And the whole conspiracy starts with one uninsured bungalow in Coral Gables...

This week’s guest is Anna Eskamani. You can follow her @AnnaForFlorida.

You can follow WAWLT on Twitter @WAWLTShow.

This episode features music by David Rosen, @ByDavidRosen.

The post So, Why Are We Like This, Anyway? first appeared on Why Are We Like This?.

In the '90s, Miami's hip-hop scene was undergoing a radical transformation that would evolve the then-Booty Bass-obsessed city into a critical outpost for a new MC/lyric-driven iteration of the genre. Names like Pitbull, DJ Khaled, DJ Raw and many more would come to define "Miami Hip-Hop" in the years after 2 Live Crew and Luther Campbell blazed trails.

John Cordero was there, editing the underground Miami rap magazine The Cypher, and this week he recounts some of the stories from his recently released retrospective, The History of Miami Hip Hop: The Story of DJ Khaled, Pitbull, DJ Craze, and Other Contributors to South Florida's Scene, which you can find on Microcosm Publishing or at your local bookseller.

We made a companion Spotify Playlist to go with this episode, which you can find here. You can follow John on Instagram @Omen305, pick up the book at Lucky Records in Wynwood, and meet him on March 18th at Soul Garden in Wynwood where he will be signing copies.

Our humble podcast achieves the rare Eskamani Trifecta as we welcome back Ida Eskamani to help us preview what promises to be Florida's most unhinged legislative session in living memory, with GOP supermajorities in both houses and a governor focused on earning national conservative bona fides. We discuss the threats to groups like renters, LGBTQ Floridians, Black communities, and undocumented immigrants and their families.

Super fun stuff, but we wrap up on a high note with our Oscar picks.