This week, we are discussing police unions and how they protect bad actors. But it is also a conversation about the elected officials who don’t hold law enforcement accountable. This conversation is in part a response to the decision by the Pierce County Prosecutor to not charge Officer Phan for his vehicle attack in January 2021. It is also partly in response to the ongoing “slow-strike” Tacoma Police are engaging in. Lastly, it is inspired by the ongoing controversy around Ed Troyer, the disgraced Pierce County Sherriff, who is facing criminal charges.

Our guest, Aaron Brickman, is a Labor Relations Specialist who has worked with several major national unions. He joined us to discuss police unions, their contracts, and why so often police officers get to keep their jobs after committing gross misconduct.

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

Over the month of June, the US Supreme Court released a series of rulings that upended established precedent (accepted legal patterns) in American society. They weakened the first amendment’s establishment clause, the fifth amendment’s Miranda protections, the ability of states to regulate gun ownership, the EPA’s ability to issue regulations regarding climate change, and most notably gave states the green light to ban all abortions within their borders.

Other rights appear on the chopping block with the court’s belligerent 6-3 DGAF Conservative majority and their peculiar reading of the US Constitution. 

So we put up the Bat-Signal and were able to connect with legal nerd and policy activist Summer Stinson. Summer has a JD from the University of Oregon, was a law clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and currently leads the Economic Opportunity Institute. 

She appears today on the show in a personal capacity.

Cast of Characters

Going Further

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

The founding thesis of this podcast back in 2017 was that national politics in the US is largely broken, possibly irreparably, and that it’s essential to put our collective energy into state/local activism, issues, and elections. My life choices have taken me overseas since then but that ethos remains at the heart of this show and the Channel 253 Podcast Network.

The rightward momentum that in many ways inspired this podcast is arguably stronger than ever. In this week’s conversation with Will Horne we talked about three legs of the current Christian theocratic movement: white rage politics, the rejection of democracy, and anti-LGBTQ+ gender traditionalism.

Cast of Characters

Going Further

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

Dave Clark is the founder of Seattle Sounders blog, Sounder at Heart and a former color commentator for Tacoma Defiance. He came on the show to offer a mid-season check-in on the state of the season for both teams.

We also discussed the Emerald City Supporters’ decision to retire Take ’em All, a choice we both support.

Cast of Characters

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

The host of this show is not a crypto true-believer but I do dabble in the digital asset market. I remain unconvinced about the long-term value of current cryptocurrencies, but I think there is potential utility in the underlying technology. This is a conversation about both that doubt and that technological potential.

Jonas is based in Zurich, Switzerland, and is the host of Defire. His show is about cryptocurrencies, DeFi (decentralized finance), and NFTs. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Terra Luna Ecosphere and the crash of the crypto market in May, we brought him on to talk about lessons he’s learned and the real-life use cases for the technology behind cryptocurrency.

Only ⅓ of the world’s cryptocurrency assets are held by Americans. I think Jonas is an important voice in this conversation because he’s not one of the usual suspects–he’s not a right-wing “cryptobro” spouting Austrian economics and anarchocapitalist platitudes. 

Cast of Characters

Going Further

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

 

You know how we say “Black Twitter,” “Legal Twitter,” “Academic Twitter,” or “Soccer Twitter”? What if those were real and distinct communities? What if there was a smaller “[Whatever You’re Into] Twitter” free of ads, SPAM, and corporate ownership by Meta and Elon Musk? That’s Darius Kazemi’s vision.

Darius is a computer programmer and digital artist. He is also an outspoken critic of corporate social media companies and the creator of Friend.Camp, a decentralized social media network he built and moderates. He’s an evangelist for these kinds of communities, networks run by groups with shared interests, shared values, and diligently moderated by members of the community. He joined us to talk about how people can build these sort of communities. He’s even written a guide on how to do so. Give this a listen and see how you can Run Your Own Social.

Cast of Characters

Going Further

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

 

Vilson is a veteran of the classroom, a math teacher from the Bronx, and the author of This is Not a Test, Jose is currently away from the classroom pursuing a Ph.D. from Columbia.

He and Nate discussed lessons they’ve learned from their past education advocacy, finding your voice as an advocate, and how we can reclaim the narrative from the moral panickers and conservative race hustlers on issues of race and gender in schools. 

Cast of Characters

Going Further

 

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

Tori Douglass is an ex-evangelical, ex-conservative anti-racist educator. She was born and raised in the Portland Area and since 2015 has been an outspoken critic of American evangelicalism and the racism present in many evangelical communities. We brought her on for a conversation about Black conservatism. We tried to categorize the varieties of Black conservative activism we are seeing in US politics.  In segment two, Tori addressed the electoral peril the Democratic Party faces if it can’t better address the needs of Black communities across the country.

Cast of Characters

Going Further

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

Big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are swimming in an absolute ocean of our private data. In any ways, we have been worn down and lulled into a sense of helplessness about it. They track our searches, to sell us ads; they track our movement, to aggregate our location data; they track our purchases, sharing them with God knows who. But it’s more than that. Many tech companies share info about us with us with law enforcement agencies and other questionable actors, oftentimes without a warrant or our explicit consent. We tacitly agree to all this, when we accept the Terms of Service for online platforms, but who ever actually reads those? Is that really informed consent?

This is something I have been thinking a lot about lately, so I hollered at Bill Fitzgerald. Bill is a a former teacher an online privacy activist. We welcomed him on the show to help us all think about how to reduce our digital data footprint.

Cast of Characters

Going Further

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

Ramadan begins April 3. Millions of Americans and millions of students in the US will be fasting during daylight hours for a month.

We invited on Amy Daraiseh, a teacher and life coach from Chicago, as a Jordanian-American and observant Muslim, she’s offering her perspective on how we can do our best to support people in our lives who are fasting during Ramadan.

Cast of Characters

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member