It was stunning to me because their knowledge of the issues was so embarrassingly low that in 20 minutes, I was able to convince all of them to reduce police budgets.

And they had never heard anybody making certain really basic points.

And these are supposed to be some of the most educated people in our society.

I do need professors.

Thank you. And these are supposed to be some of the most. Alec Kurt Katsanas.

He's a civil rights attorney and the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps.

Welcome back.

Thanks for having me back.

Now, the impetus for your return is your new book, Copaganda, which I finished earlier today,

and which is an incredibly thorough and compelling argument for how the left half of our

political organization, the Democrats in particular in left-leaning liberal media,

have done such a disservice with respect to how they message around criminal justice issues.

But of course, it's not just about the sort of broader issue as we talk in the context of the

first months of the Donald Trump administration.

And we are seeing in real time the effect of consistently empowering our police forces over the

course of the last decades. I think that the message in this book is

particularly salient. So how will we start by defining what copaganda means? For me, in the book,

I really focus on the mainstream news media. I don't talk about the history of what I call

fictional copaganda, like the most famous of which in the contemporary world is, you know, to show

law and order or cops, or a lot of people don't really fully appreciate, let alone have some

people who have no idea about the extraordinary amount of money that the

military and the CIA and others have put into Hollywood and music and film and TV. Basically,

...