Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield

Episode Summary Since he became president for the second time, Donald Trump has launched the largest assault on free speech that we’ve seen since Japanese Americans were interned because of their family origins. Among many other things, Trump signed an executive order classifying “antifa” as a terrorist organization, even though there are no actual antifa organizations. The regime has also launched investigations against private citizen organizations like the George Soros-founded Open Society Foundation. Trump has stolen billions of dollars from private universities like Harvard and Columbia because they dared to tolerate student protests against Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.Trump has even demanded that all late night television comedians be fired for making jokes about him, and his FCC chairman’s threats against broadcast television companies have led to the cancellation of the number-one host, CBS’s Stephen Colbert, and the suspension of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel until public outcry forced Disney to bring him back.All of these attacks against free speech—and this is only just a short listing—must be fought tooth and nail. But censorship opponents must also realize that Trump’s censorship agenda is actually the fulfillment of what far-right Republicans have wanted for 70 years, as exemplified by the infamous Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, and his number-one defender and proponent, William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review magazine.Buckley’s love of censorship and his contemporary allies’ love of it as well should be more widely known, especially because the anti-freedom agenda that they had for America is now being enacted by Donald Trump today. Joining me to discuss this and a lot more is Seth Cotlar. He’s a professor of history at Willamette University, where he teaches and writes about the American right and early American history. He’s also writing a book on a white nationalist activist who became the chair of the Oregon Republican Party.The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content—William F. Buckley fought for control over the American far right rather than trying to exorcise it—How Fictitious Republicans hide right-wing extremism from the media and the public—The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the long history of Republicans pretending to be the real liberals—How right-wing college students invented canceling professors—Trumpy cultural products are horrible, here’s why—The mainstream media were ‘sanewashing’ far-right Republicans long before Donald Trump—Big Tobacco pioneered many of the propaganda techniques used today in the 1970s—Fitness has always been politicized, even if you didn’t realize itAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:52 — The Republican party’s entwined relationship with reactionaries11:05 — Do reactionaries distinguish between private criticism and state censorship?15:45 — William F. Buckley’s legacy of censorship22:33 — Antisemitism and conspiracy theories in reactionary thought25:15 — Ben Shapiro’s appearance on a white supremacist podcast30:29 — Taking Trump seriously and literally35:45 — The Antifa terrorist designation and its origins40:10 — Ezra Klein and the problem of engaging with bad faith actors47:02 — Thomas West and the absolute poverty of reactionary historiography54:45 — PragerU’s bizarre AI history videos01:00:58 — The anti-Americanism of the reactionary right01:06:32 — Trump’s declining poll numbers and the informed electorate01:10:37 — The pleasure some take in illiberalism and cruelty01:18:29 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So I wish we were talking under better circumstances, but the long and short of it is that the the recent assault on free speech and civil liberties that Donald Trump has been conducting, it’s come as a surprise to a lot of people. But for historians like yourself, this is actually the fulfillment of what the reactionary right in America has wanted since the very beginning.SETH COTLAR: Yeah, no, there’s a long history of this on the right, not necessarily inside the Republican party. But you know, as the Republican Party has moved rightward, it has kind of moved closer to those voices on the right. [00:04:00]They usually, at least since World War II, justified it in terms of anti-communism, was the way they understood it. So they, they thought, that communism was an existential threat to the United States, and hence communists should not have free speech rights in the U.S. And so, that’s how they justified their various efforts to run the kind of McCarthyite movement in the fifties, but then it continues on into the sixties and so on.And so, this is why when contemporary politicians refer to center-left American politicians as communists, it’s simultaneously kind of laughable, but it’s also kind of ominous. Because that it is the rationale that historically was used by people on the right to justify squelching free speech.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, It really has. And and I mean, and I guess we could say that it kind of started with the Red Scare, in the early 20th century. And they’ve never really gotten a different tactic since then, which is especially ironic considering that the Democratic party, economically speaking, has moved quite a bit to the right. And only recently, maybe has had some kind of pushback from their own voters against that.But you know, like the idea of Democrats being communists is just laughably stupid, but it’s effective, I think, for a lot of people.COTLAR: It is. Well, and, this is part of the deal with kind kind of right-wing propagandists, the charge of communism never really had to have much legitimacy to it, or heft. The John Birch Society famously regarded Dwight Eisenhower as a communist. Robert Welch claimed that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist, which at the time most people were like: Wait, seriously, you’re, kidding, right? And he wasn’t kidding.Like he really meant it. Yeah, he did. And somehow, I mean, at the time they were an object of great ridicule. But [00:06:00] enough people were kind of willing to plausibly believe it. And in the the late fifties and early sixties, reason why that charge sometimes stuck with some, particularly kind of deranged people, often it it had to do with the Little Rock Nine.And that Dwight Eisenhower sent troops to integrate the Little Rock School 1957. And And so by communism. Communism is is like a great floating signifier, right? And what, what, people meant by communism was like the integration of schools, for example, is one thing people associated with communism or that that Dwight Eisenhower might be, slightly okay with the existence of labor because of this, therefore obviously he was a communist, right? Because he was willing treat labor unions as if they have a right to exist. And so the charge of communism on the part of these right-wing activists has nothing to do with the actual understanding of the. They haven’t read Marx and they don’t understand communism is.It’s, a, it’s just a a smear that they can then link to other causes that they know maybe their audience isn’t happy about, doesn’t agree with. Common charge is that the L-G-B-T-Q movement is part of a communist effort demoralize and undermine the morality of Americans. Right? So communism just becomes this kind of catchall term that you use to explain why particular group or this particular movement is not just other Americans who are maybe different from you, but rather there are other Americans who are your existential enemy who must be silenced crushed in order to save America.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.The Republican party’s intertwined relationship with reactionariesSHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And, Trump, I mean, he’s made that viewpoint very explicit. It in the elite circles of the Republican party, [00:08:00] these types of expressions, they were, they tended. And you’ve done a lot of research on your own scholarship about how the, Republican party in Oregon and elsewhere had kind of, they relied on these reactionaries for votes and for money.But they always tried to keep them from having power and from the public knowing fully who they were. It was like they were the crazy wealthy aunt in the attic who owned the house, but they didn’t ever want to let her out. And that’s kind of the model that they followed for a long time, I think.COTLAR: Yeah, no, for sure. And there was a real so it’s been interesting to see people like Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz and Carl Rove speak out against what happened with Jimmy and I don’t know how much credence to give this, I don’t know how much faith actually making these arguments, but, they are saying what is the the right thing to say, which is that the FCC putting pressure on private companies to fire people because of their speech is, it’s like the low hanging fruit of Civics 1 0 1, right.That every educated American should know. And so, Princeton educated Ted Cruz, and I don’t know where Tucker Carlson college, but you know these are not unintelligent people—SHEFFIELD: Somewhere expensive.COTLAR: —So, yeah. yeah. So, so, and they’re now saying the right thing. Who knows? Why they’re saying it or what the impact will be But but, this is where having someone who is the head of your party who either doesn’t know or just doesn’t care, right. That, like, as the president, you don’t issue a statement telling NBC who who they’re supposed to hire and fire for their late night shows. I, believe according to the tenets of originalism that was in article two, that the president gets to decide on those late night shows.It’s so just facially, ludicrous, and authoritarian. But the GOP used to be dominated by [00:10:00] people who would immediately clock that and call it out and say, no, this is not the role of the president to do this. But now the party is comprised of a large number of people who are perfectly fine with the president doing this apparently.And then a couple people who are willing their neck out and say, this is bad, but who obviously are not going to do anything about it. And let alone. Criticize the president and the head of their party for doing it. So it’s the political culture of the party isn’t a really bad authoritarian place.And I, my worry is that, if we congratulate Ted Cruz too much right now for saying the right things can imagine a future, a few months down the road where Cruz is is like, well, I, this isn’t good, but, these people are communists. And so, free speech is a difficult issue.And so, we need to, in hard times, we need to rethink our principles. I hope he doesn’t do that. But as we’ve, the, past track record Republican politicians over the last 10 years should not give us great hope that they’re actually going to, stand up for principle.Do reactionaries distinguish between private criticism and state censorship?SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it should not.The other thing also in the right wing reactions to Jimmy Kimmo getting suspended indefinitely by a, b, C it’s also been kind of fascinating in that I think a lot of them do not distinguish between private actors criticizing somebody and a government official with force of law power criticizing someone and ordering someone to be fired.they don’t seem to like, they, make no distinction. So like I often I’ll see them say, oh, well, you guys got Gina Carrano, the actor, fired from Star Wars. And it was like, well actually those were private citizens expressing their opinions. Right. And the government had nothing to do with her being fired, But they, genuinely seem to place no distinction between, private media actors or [00:12:00] private citizens and the Democratic Party. Like, and this is also why, for instance, they impute any violence done at a left wing protest. that’s actually the Democratic party. The highest people in the party are responsible for that violence, even if they condemn it and don’t support it.It’s really astonishing. And, it’s not, I don’t think it’s an act though, which is weird. I don’t know. What do you think?COTLAR: Yeah, no, no, and it, right, it’s the distinction between civil society actors mean, there’s a long history of boycotts in the US right? I mean, yeah. Saying of course on the American Revolution right now.I mean, that was basically how the mobilization for the American Revolution worked, is that organized boycotts. They ostracized people who broke the boycotts. If you were caught drinking tea, your neighbors would tut at you and tell you shouldn’t do it. And sometimes if you refused, could get a little ugly, So, the history of civil society functioning in such a way as to persuade slash encourage people to alter their behavior in the name of contributing to a kind of broader project is hundreds and hundreds of years old. It’s like the most common thing in the world. And. Yes. That is a very different thing than someone with political power who has the ability to revoke an FCC license for a multi-billion dollar company telling you, telling that company what they should do.Right. are are completely things. The other thing thing that I will point out is that, back in, I think 20 18, 20 19 McKay Coppins wrote this great article for The Atlantic that was was all about this coordinated network of cancellation organized by Donald Trump Jr. And coordinated with Breitbart and, eventually lives of TikTok, I think was involved with this, where they collect all of this data on journalists and other a activists who they don’t in preparation for the time when they might have to cancel them.[00:14:00]So the the idea that like, this is such a terrible thing, is is like this is exactly their modus operandi, right? This is what they do in terms of their approach towards trying to use intimidation, et cetera. And oftentimes the information that they select is sometimes wrong, sometimes very like decontextualized, et cetera.But the, the idea that like they’re opposed to the cancellation of private citizens for what they say is just. Ludicrous. I mean, that’s basically, so, that is one of the main things that they do in as part of their, I mean, that’s what they’re doing now with like, people who said things they don’t like about Charlie Kirk online, they’re collecting, names of and trying to get them fired.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And also government officials saying that as well, JD Vance telling people call and inform on your coworkers and your friends family if they criticize St. Charlie the beloved,COTLAR: right?Yeah. And like, and there is a difference between the president’s son coordinating these networks with the owners of some of the largest, right-wing outlets in order to coordinate their messaging in order to target people.That’s a bit different than just some citizens on Blue Sky being like, man, I don’t Disney. I’m going to cancel my Disney subscription because I don’t like that they made this, decision. So, the the dynamics of power at play here, both economic power, but more importantly political power when the president does it or the vice does it, or the FCC chair does it. Yeah, completely different different things.William F. Buckley’s legacy of censorshipSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and then going back further in the history. I think a lot of people who are educated today have this false concept of William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review. That they, often, I [00:16:00] oftentimes people say, gosh, I wish the Republican Party was like, it was when Buckley was alive.And it’s like. You guys have paid attention to his actual life and the things that he did. I mean, his first book, God and Man at Yale, is literally him saying: ‘Yale, you’ve got to stop these commie and Jewish and atheist professors who like racial integration and writes for women and say, the Bible’s true. You got to fire him because we can’t have this, this is wrong.’That’s the whole point of his first book. And then his second book was a defense of Joe McCarthy called McCarthy and His Enemies. That basically it was effectively a well you don’t have to like McCarthy, but gosh, he’s sure going after the right people.And this is literally the same arguments that are being made now by many of these sort of Quisling Republicans for Donald Trump. They, claim not to like him, but You know, they also seem to think that even though Donald Trump is actively attacking the free press and trying to revoke licenses and censor teachers and history and revoke science budgets, that even though he’s doing all these horrible, illegal things he’s still somehow not as bad as some grad students who have purple hair. That’s seems to be what they think.COTLAR: Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s Buckley, I I mean, one of the things that I learned was kind of shocking to me is when is when he writing God and Man at Yale, there was a woman named Lucille Cardin Crane, who was running this organization called Educational Information Incorporated, that was basically looking through textbooks that were being used in school and identifying them as secret communist Trojan horses.These were like pablum social studies textbooks. But she had sussed out that these were [00:18:00] actually secret communists who were trying to brainwash children into communism. By which, and oftentimes the sign that these were communists had to do with the fact were pro racial equality was one of the offs her.And the person who funded her work was none other than bill Buckley, Sr. F f Buckley’s father. He was the guy bankrolling this entire project, which was actually quite, it’s kind of the Moms for Liberty 1.0. kind of, and it led to this kind of movement of women often sort of working in local school, boards to intimidate local superintendents, school superintendents teachers to drop certain textbooks that they considered to be communistic.was was especially potent in the South as white southern women tried to thwart this kind of imposition of a certain idea of America as a multiracial democracy. That was. You know, becoming kind of the the norm amongst social scientists and other kind of public figures post World World War II era, for understandable reasons, given what we just fought the war about.And so fighting off those efforts to kind of teach American history in such a way that sort of treated white people and black people and Native American people as equally human was a really important strategy for those sort of grassroots women activists. But it was also part of a broader kind of national network funded by people like William F. Buckley Sr. That provided those women the kind of ammunition to go into their school boards and explain to them why these books had to be taken outta the library, why they needed to be removed from the curriculum, et cetera.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, the other thing also about William F. Buckley Sr. is that he also for seemingly the, entire latter part of his life funded a local newspaper in South Carolina that was in support of segregation.And, and that obviously filtered into his son’s [00:20:00] views. the father said that his son was a hundred percent in support of segregation. And in subsequent decades after that passed through, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and some of the other cases got rid of segregation formalized, Buckley later admit said that, well, okay, yes.I think that those were good ideas, but then he still kept, there was a vestige of his former attitudes in that he opposed any sort of attempt to put embargoes or pressure on South Africa. National Review was till the very end, a very strong supporter of the South African segregation regime.And that’s a, it’s an important part of the magazine’s history that I think should be more widely known.COTLAR: For sure. And the Sam Tannenhouse biography just came out is really great on all of this. And sort of, you know, just, he’s the one that think has discovered this tie to this South Carolina.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he did.COTLAR: Yeah. Um, which was amazing research find on his part. does really out elements of, Buckley was one of these figures who is. Able kind of just straddle that line the kind of liberal conservatism and illiberal conservatism orSHEFFIELD: Conservative and reactionary as I call it.COTLAR: Right, right. That’s another way to think so that so that he be in in dialogue with friends with who were on that other side the line, people who were comfortable with actual, like government censorship, while could sort of maintain sort plausible position as well, not calling So, or his relationship to segregation. Wrote Why South Prevail in 1957 segregation.But he, he defends it in this kind wiggly sort way. And then says like, well, just that like for now, whites are the [00:22:00] advanced race. So he is claiming he didn’t believe in fundamental necess permanent racial inequality. It’s just now he wanted to protect black people from themselves, Right, right. That’s his argument. then makes this specious claim oh, he’d be in favor disenfranchising poor, uneducated white people too.Which he knew was never going to but he, that is way he. Justified his support for disenfranchisement black by claiming wasn’t about race. just, it’s about education him. Anyway,Antisemitism and conspiracy theories in reactionary thoughtCOTLAR: to me, part of what’s really out in that tannin house biography and think is important for our current understanding of why people are willing to consider acts that are to infringe upon speech is conspiracy theories heart of are.Really important, For understanding what makes so father was bucket. Antisemite, right? And, it’s important us to recognize that antisemitism in the 1930s, forties and fifties didn’t mean that one was just personally rude Jewish people. it’s a totalizing theory about how world this idea Jews are communists, Jews behind communist conspiracy.that that Jews further that communist is through their control of higher education. brainwash children that way their control media. brainwash children that way and through their control Hollywood and entertainment, another way which they brainwash So goes that and this is just. Empirically baseless ludicrous, but it’s, it, taps into the, that kind of antisemitism. And oh, also Jews were behind the civil rights movement as was the kind last piece this. so you can explain to people why is that we need to maybe some these media [00:24:00] outlets or some of these professors so on.Because they’re not really like us. They us. out destroy us, therefore this is just purely defensive. we silence these voices, so so the, con, the theory gets people look upon a pretty, like normal looking, professor the of Oregon like a new deal, FDR Democrat and say, oh no, that actually is part this shadowy secret conspiracy that seeks destroy and seeks to freedom and to destroy America.And that Buckley, very much participated in, but also tried distance himself bit from like, when criticized Robert Welch of Birchers, right?SHEFFIELD: Yeah. but never the Birchers.COTLAR: Never the Birchers themselves.SHEFFIELD: VeryCOTLAR: fineSHEFFIELD: people.COTLAR: All very fine people. It’s just Robert Welch who’s the problem, right?And so is where he, kind of, he allowed that conspiracy obsessed dimension of the American, right, which is to my mind, a very defining feature of the reactionary version of conservatism. He allowed that to flourish. Yeah.Ben Shapiro’s appearance on a white supremacist podcastSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and and he was, in many ways, I think one could say so the, term that I use to describe people like Buckley is a fictitious Republican.Somebody who knows how to use a salad fort, who’s a well-dressed white person. And so therefore, what they’re saying, can’t all be bad. And so we have to be in dialogue with these people because look at them: They know how to dress well!And and, we see that recently with Ezra Klein did a, an interview with Shapiro. I mean, Ben Shapiro has literally gone on a neo-Nazi podcast and bashed Jews. Ben Shapiro done this. Yes. I’ll, I’ll, actually play the audio for the listener here. Let me I’ll, pull it up him.COTLAR: Who was the host? [00:26:00] What was the podcast?SHEFFIELD: Um, It was the Red Ice show with Lana LokteffCOTLAR: Gosh. on that.SHEFFIELD: He went on that, yes. And he bashed Jews in Hollywood and said that they were conducting a war on Christianity.COTLAR: Oh my god. oh my, oh my gosh. The title of it straight up, I mean, I’ve got a million things in my archive that are just that title from, the White Aryan Resistance Newsletter or William Luther Pierce.Ben Shapiro: BEN SHAPIRO: There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood that they have a perverse leftist view of history pushed by the Soviet Union that what really destroyed Europe was Christianity. It was not fascism, it was not communism, it was not leftism, it was Christianity. And therefore, the cure to intolerance is to bash the hell out of Christianity.And so, there’s a war, there certainly is a war on Christianity, it’s coming from some people who are secular Jews, it’s coming from a lot of leftists. But yeah, I mean, there’s no question that evangelical Christians support Israel at a much higher clip and much more substantially than most Jews in America do. Because most Jews in America don’t care about Judaism. (Cut in source video)Ben Shapiro: BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, everybody who’s bad is by nature a member of the white patriarchy, and everybody who’s good is by nature a member of a minority group. This is why you have the stock character who is the wise black friend, right?It’s never the wise white friend, it’s always the wise female friend, or the wise gay friend, or the wise black friend. Because the impression is that the only wise people in our society are members of minorities.Which is not to say, of course, that there are not wise black people. There are plenty of them, right? I mean, Thomas Sowell is a very wise black man.But the idea that every person on television who is wise must be of minority persuasion is really a very subtle war on the white males in our society. Which, [00:28:00] of course, white males can take, but it does pervert the American mind as far as how we view certain segments of the population.Lana Lokteff: LANA LOKTEFF: Conservatives are always racist, sexist, homophobic. Right now, they’re pushing this anti-nuclear family, anti-white, anti-Christian, so what is it that they want here?Ben Shapiro: BEN SHAPIRO: Well, I mean, what they want is they want to destroy the foundations of American society. And there’s no question that this is what they want.I mean, this has been the case for the left since the 1960s, and they’re just part of the broader left culture, which suggests that American culture is deeply evil, that bourgeois are deeply evil.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.COTLAR: that’s a sentiment I’ve read many times over the course of doing my research and every time I’ve seen it in the past, that’s usually been said by a neo-Nazi type.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.Not by a Jewish person.COTLAR: Yeah, not by Jewish person!But anyway, I mean, That, yeah, that is truly shocking that someone. it’s really really complicated the relationship between Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians around Israel as an issue. think most orthodox Jews have a very um idea about this alliance and don’t really care about the theological reasons why evangelicals might be pro-Israel.Which usually involves a kind of vision of the End Times in which Jews go to hell. But but you know, if, you, and they’reSHEFFIELD: Burned alive, actually, right?COTLAR: Oh, nice. nice.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.COTLAR: So yeah, but you know, if you don’t believe that, if you don’t share that belief then know, what do you care what reasons people have, right?For supporting political interests? Yeah. So that, alliance is a really, opportunistic and strategic one. But it, involves not taking the Christian nationalism of some of these Christians seriously. And not understanding that for a lot of folks, what they like about Israel is that it is a religiously exclusionary state. And so therefore they imagined [00:30:00] that America could be like that.And the people that that they would want to exclude from their ideal America would be people like me and Ben Shapiro. And so Ben Shapiro apparently doesn’t take that that seriously as a potential future or potential threat. If knew much about American history, he would know that probably not some energies you want to be like just kind of toying with and playing in in the name of just advancing a particular foreign policy goal that you might have.Taking Trump seriously and literallySHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, you wouldn’t. And I think that attitude also certainly does extend to Donald Trump as well, because there’s that phrase that a lot of Republicans now have as a platitude regarding him. They say, well, you need to take him seriously, but not literally.And it’s like, well, his crackdowns on free speech and his going after licenses and demanding people be fired, demanding people pay him money in order to get approval for certain things. When he says it should be illegal for you to do something, he actually does mean that.And I think that a lot of these conservatives, they have this concocted version of Donald Trump in their head, who doesn’t take anything seriously, who has, and it’s true that Donald Trump, isn’t smart enough to have an ideology. But nonetheless, you he has a personal totalitarianism and peevishness is about him. It’s, it is a, totalitarianism, born of pettiness, but it is nonetheless a totalitarianism.COTLAR: It’s, and I think the reasons for poo-pooing it is because they take for granted the existence of liberal institutions that they themselves are also working to to undermine, but which they just take for granted.So, yes. Donald Trump doesn’t currently have the power to wave a wand and get people fired yet. Right. and in in part he doesn’t, because all these things have go through the courts and then the the courts will make a a rulingSHEFFIELD: Certainly trying to do that federal reserve.COTLAR: Well [00:32:00] right, right.So he, like, he pushes all of this stuff. And then there are these various guardrails in our system that are still, to some extent, limiting what he can do. And so The audience of of people who want you to think that, like, oh, the people warning about Donald Trump, they just have Trump arrangement syndrome, right?Like, they don’t know what they’re talking about. And to the extent that they are right, that Trump hasn’t successfully done all of these authoritarian things that he wants to do. To the that that hasn’t happened, it’s not because of anything about him, it’s because of of something about these institutions that the people saying, oh, don’t worry about Donald Trump.They themselves don’t care about institutions. They They themselves are undermining those institutions. And so to the, once those institutions are this is why, like for example, I don’t trust Carlson when he talks about this stuff. Like he’s been participating in the undermining of our judicial system and the legitimacy of the judiciary of anyone who doesn’t rule in the favor of Donald Trump, right?So like the idea that somehow he’s, he is contributing to the situation in which it may become possible that there are no guardrails stopping a president from just. To squelching the free speech of individuals. And and so, so that, that to me is the part that is really, frightening is how those guardrails that most, people who don’t study politics for a living or don’t study history for a living, like there’s there’s no necessary reason why they should know how our judicial works, right? Or how the Supreme Court rules.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It’s not relevant to their lives at all.COTLAR: Right. They’re busy, they’ve got other other things to do. Right. And so this is where, the fact that like just about everybody who studies this for a living is raising major, you know, warning flags about what’s happening.And that’s why they’re trying to undermine the universities trying to undermine, [00:34:00] academics. Because these are people who actually know stuff. This is why they’re trying to undermine, people like Tony Fauci or other, sort of experts around vaccines or other things.Is that. want to impose their particular vision of the world their their use of federal power. And anyone, or anything, journalists, academics, who stand in the way are their targets. And it’s just right out of the authoritarian textbook. and the, battle is for. The The minds of ordinary American citizens and whether or not, like what will they accept, right?will will they be willing to accept? And what they learned through January 6th is that 77 million Americans are willing to accept watching a coup happen on their television screens in their own US capitol. And then they will accept the idea that this was okay, and that the people who did it should be pardoned and that it was simultaneously an inside job by the FBI and also an a Day of Love by Patriots.And so if they they can get 77 million people to like, be okay with that, right? Or to get get a whole people to to accept the idea that COVID vaccines killed more people than they saved if they can that out there. What else can they tell us? What else can they tell the American people that they’ll just accept?journalist wasn’t actually a journalist, but was really a domestic terrorist. And so this is why this journalist has locked up, not because they were, taking footage that was embarrassing to to the government, rather because they were there as part of a domestic terrorist organization, so.The Antifa terrorist designation and its originsSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that’s what the the designation of antifa, quote unquote, as a terrorist organization is about, because of course um, as you certainly know, there is no national organization of [00:36:00] antifa and legally speaking, there is no local organization of these are anarchists. They have no organization by definition, they have no leaders.They hate the Democratic Party. They are not funded by the donors of the Democratic Party because they despise the donors of the Democratic Party. And to the extent that anybody ever helps them from a legal basis, it’s just purely a support for individual civil rights.And so hopefully the best case scenario that this is Jeffrey Epstein or Q Anon, as a sequel of that conspiracy theory that, they, allege there are these, there’s this giant, secret cabal that’s all running everything, and doing all these nefarious things. And then when they actually have the power to investigate it-- like they were very convinced that Patriot Front, which is a white nationalist group that holds marches across the country, they’ve been convinced since its beginning that it’s an FBI front.Well, that means then that Ash Patel is running Patriot Front then, is that, really what you believe, guys? But you know, like, it doesn’t have make sense because it’s all about identity rather than about logic.COTLAR: Right. So the, in terms of the, this designation of, antifa a domestic terrorist organization, I have a very Portland specific angle on So in 2019, in the summer of 2019, you probably remember this, there was A March A right far right March organized in Portland, and it was led by two guys named Joe Bigs and Enrique Terio, who who at the time were just kind of known as like, oh, maybe proud Boy adjacent and kind of right wing grifter types.We, both of them then were eventually convicted for their actions on January 6th, kind of important organizers of 6th, but obviously we didn’t know that in the summer of 2019. So two future January Sixers organized this March in Portland and they, there’s video of of of our local Portland [00:38:00] kind of far right activists involved with a group called Patriot Prayer who were recording themselves live on Facebook Live, saying to all of the kind of rank and file people who are going to go and join far right March, take video of what’s happening, be sure that that you tweet it at Ted Cruz and at Donald Trump.And tell them that they need to declare Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. So So is is 2019. Right. And I don’t know how they had identified. Ted Cruz as, I mean, Donald Trump makes sense, but I don’t know why Ted Cruz. But so this was the message that they sent out followers, was their goal this, action that they were taking on the street to Portland, was to record images of violence, send ‘em to Ted Cruz so that he can then pass a bill that would declare their local enemies in to to be domestic terrorists so that they could then be locked up.And so this has been part of this kind of far right activist communities agenda for quite a long And so, yeah. Yeah, and at the time, in 2019, it didn’t go anywhere and the president didn’t, I mean, there was talk about it, but it didn’t actually kind of result in, a bill as far as I know. Is just like, much like with many things in Trump 2.0, it’s a kind of continuation and an intensification of something.That was That was already kind of in place in Trump 1.0. But there were at also, at the time, there were guardrails, there were probably people in administration or in the Senate who were like, you can’t just just declare vague entity domestic terrorists and and go after them. Like, that’s obviously not constitutional.But anybody who would’ve said that is now pretty much gone. Right. the the Trump administration.SHEFFIELD: Yes, they are. this reactionary takeover of the re Republican party and the cancellation of, conservatives and moderates from within the party. This [00:40:00] has of course been a long running trend that really did begin with, Buckley and uh, the Goldwater takeover.But of course he failed so badly that they were set back with that.Ezra Klein and the problem of engaging with bad faith actorsSHEFFIELD: But just going back to Ezra Klein and his, friendly chit chat with Ben Shapiro, and he went to a, he’s has a conference called Abundance where he had, it’s sponsored by Marc Andreessen, a guy who hates democracy and has said as much, and Peter Thiel funded that conference, if I remember right.And so, and so like a bunch of these right-wing oligarch billionaires are, funding Ezra Klein’s endeavors now. And I don’t, it’s hard to say what’s in his, mind or in his heart, whether he actually agrees with these people or not, or if it’s just some pathological desire to know, oh, well we have, we share America, I mean, that’s what he says publicly. He says, well, we, share this country with these people, and so we have reach out to them.And this is the, the wrong way to understand outreach. Because the individual Republican voter. A lot of them are tremendously ignorant of what the party wants, and they don’t actually know.and you can, anyone can see that if you talk to a regular Republican voter, they don’t know what Donald Trump stands for most of the time. But the elites absolutely do, and they want him to be even worse. So the idea that you would engage with them is just ludicrously backwards. But it seems kind of common within a lot of the mainstream media.Like, you see CNN hiring that Scott Jennings guy some of of these other people who just constantly lie. Like Scott Jennings has nothing substantive to say about anything ever. And he doesn’t give, even, give you his own thoughts. He gives you what the talking points of the party are. So he adds nothing like engaging with these people who are the elites, gets you nowhere.And, in fact, these Jennings types or Shapiro, [00:42:00] they’re hated by the far right. You’re not actually deradicalizing anyone by, pretending that Shapiro is smart or that Scott Jennings honest. You’re, you, accomplish nothing by doing this.COTLAR: Yeah, no, I, mean, yeah, I think think you’re right.I mean, it’s, such a hard situation because like theoretically Yes, indeed. Like in a democratic society, our our job is to engage agonistic with people with whom we disagree. Like that is what a healthy democratic society like. like. the other hand when you have a party that is basically kicked out of its coalition, anyone who actually is a legitimate intellectual, I mean, so then who do you engage with?So what Curtis Jarvin. You’re supposed to like sit down and have a argument with Curtis Jarvin, who like doesn’t know anything about anything. Like I’ve read some of his stuff. It is so. Just laughable. Like if this dude was actually in conversation with people who knew things, maybe he would like have something to contribute and some insight.But like he’s just replicating the oldest, dumbest like right-wing memes that I’ve seen a million times in this stuff in the fifties and sixties from the newspaper edited by this like, know nothing chair of the Oregon Republican party I’m writing a about Right. Like so, so, if you’re you’re Ezra Klein, like, and you want to have an engaged, want to have a conversation with like thoughtful, engaged, knowledgeable, like right winger, who is it?Right? Like, Like, because they’ve kicked out of the party. Everyone who is like that over the last 10 Right. And And so creates just a structural problem, which is a problem that is a function of the dysfunction of the institution that is the Republican party. there’s the problem of our media e ecosystem, right? Is that if you want to reach just ordinary, voters who I agree with you are not. If you were to share with them Project 2025, most of ‘em would be like, what? They would would either read it and be able to [00:44:00] suss immediately. This is incoherent nonsense. This sense. Or they would find it repulsive, right?But they don’t know, of the of the media that they’re imbibing as part of this Republican culture is telling them this. And so, but they’ve been so kind of ensconced into this media world where they’ve by Donald Trump not to trust anything that NPR or PBS or NNBC or any of these companies, tell them any other media outlet, the New York Times, et cetera.It just just becomes a incredibly. Like challenging communications problem for the Democrats or for anyone on the left where huge swaths of our fellow citizens have been pre inoculated believing anything we would say, and somehow anything that they see in a reel from Tucker Carlson or whoever they’re willing to believe, right?Or Scott Jennings, they’ll just instinctively believe what he has to say even even though he’s lying most of the time. But so I, yeah. and so this is where it, I don’t know. don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah. if you believe in democracy is I do. Right? You should believe in a culture of like open and free expression in which people with different perspectives kind of talk with each other, right?And hash it out. the other hand, what do you do when part of the, folks who are part of your democratic culture don’t believe in a culture of open expression and want to destroy it in the name of, creating a in in which their voices are the only ones that get amplified or have any reach.And yeah. Uh Wish I had an answer for it, but,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, it, it, certainly is tricky. I mean, I would say, as somebody who came out of that world of right-wing media and activism and intellectualism before it was purged by Trumpism, I would say that having debates with those who are in it still really is not productive.But on the other hand [00:46:00] actually quoting their arguments at length and debunking them in a comprehensive fashion. I think that’s how you engage with these people. Because when they’re on the air and having to defend themselves, they’ll, they just lie all the time.COTLAR: Right.SHEFFIELD: Like, they say, oh, I don’t believe that. Oh, I didn’t say that.Well, no, you did. And we have it on, tape right here. Um, And, like, and like with the, thing with Shapiro, like here he went on a neo Nazi podcast, like he has never been challenged in the mainstream media for, going on a podcast that argues for white nationalism and antisemitism, uh, and in fact, the podcast--COTLAR: He signs Matt Walsh’s paychecks, doesn’t he? I mean--SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, it’s a, and yet they’re never, so they’re not asked about these things, but even if they were just lies. So you got to look at their arguments and dissect them.I think that’s the answer. and, when you do, it reveals just how shallow, how uninformed, how uh, self-serving these arguments and these individuals are.Thomas West and the absolute poverty of reactionary historiographySHEFFIELD: You did a Twitter thread a number of years ago about a book that I think that still lingers with me. I loved your dissection of it Seth, of book, Vindicating the Founders.COTLAR: Oh, god!SHEFFIELD: Yeah! By Thomas West. and, it was, it, what’s so revealing about it though, is that right wing intellectualism doesn’t really exist. It’s an oxymoron, basically.And so they can’t succeed. the, horrible irony, which they never get called on, is they have failed in the marketplace ideas. Their ideas, their history, their science, their governance. All, everything that they have argued, that they try to do. Whenever they come into power, they fail. So, like Oklahoma is run by, the most MAGA Republican secretary Education, they’re also the 50th in, [00:48:00] educational attainment.And instead of doing something about it somebody just introduced a bill Oklahoma to require every higher institution of learning in Oklahoma to have a shrine to Charlie Kirk. And that’s what they’re spending their time on and apparently watching porn in their meetings. Uh, This isCOTLAR: That probably happen, or it was, I don’t know.I, or I’ve read some stuff that suggested that it has a kind of innocent explanation. Not that I Oh, I know. Yeah, guy. But like, like, I don’t think, yeah, Yeah. But,SHEFFIELD: But, just going back to Thomas, so like, Thomas West though, like essentially, this is why they have such a militant hatred of, affirmative policies, right.Which in fact are not always about race. In fact, there’s lots of disadvantaged white people who benefit from affirmative action and DEI programs. But they don’t know that. And, so they hate these programs of inclusion though, because they want quotas for themselves. That’s what they want.And when, and they’re, the things they make like Thomas West, like. And I, this is me, my very long-winded way of asking you to tell us the story of his book Vindicating Founders.COTLAR: Man. So, so Thomas West is a, he’s a Plato scholar. I know nothing about Plato. So he, may be perfectly adept and good as a scholar of Plato.I haven’t, assess the quality of that work, but he he did write a book that’s all about and it was published in the late nineties and I, was asked to review it in the late 1990s when I was finishing PhD and I read the first 30 pages of it and I wrote back to the journal and I said, I don’t think this is a book that’s even worth reviewing. Like there’s just nothing there. This is just I, we we didn’t have the word troll at the time, but if we we had the word troll, I would’ve said like, this is just a book trolling the entire historical profession by someone who clearly has no idea what they’re talking [00:50:00] about. So like, this isn’t even worth seriously enough to review.And so I ended up not reviewing it but I did read it. then in the age of Trump, suddenly Thomas West became this like oracle for Hillsdale College. And as this great far seeing man who has been trying to tell the truth about American history and just no one’s been listening to him.And I was like, wait, Thomas West, that name’s familiar. And then I looked it up and I was like, oh my God, it’s that guy. Holy cow.And so in this book, he, I mean it just, even at the front step he refers to, and I can’t remember which historian it is, but some very mainstream conservative historian as a radical leftist.And it was the kind of thing where it would be like someone calling Joe Manchin a radical leftist, right? Where like when you read it, you just think, okay, this person just has no idea like what they’re about. And they completely misrepresent every historian and their interpretation that they talk about.And there’s also this very strange moment in the chapter on slavery where it seems to be suggesting that, the founders were white nationalists, but not in a derogatory way. Right? So it it seems to be saying that like in a good way hey, I’m not saying this is good, but like this is what they believed in.They had a right to believe that, but also they hated slavery. So don’t you dare accuse them of being racist. But also they probably thought America was only for white people, but they weren’t racist. And So it’s this really. of incoherent. I mean, it all starts just from the premise that that anything a white founder did in the 18th century must have been good.anybody who who would criticize them for anything obviously hates them and hates America, right? And be trusted to teach our And in an entire world in which historians were trying to bring and successfully did bring a ton [00:52:00] of nuance to how we understood the thinking of the founding generation and these white founders in ways that didn’t just.They were all racist. Therefore, America is a racist country like that. That’s his presumption of what people were saying. But that’s his misreading. It has that, was, it was far more nuanced and complicated what folks were doing. So it was just propaganda, right? It was just, a guy using the dress of the fact that he had a PhD and taught at a university.I could write a a book about Plato and show how Plato teaches us that like Donald Donald Trump is the worst person in the world and it’s our to like impeach him. I could, I could probably string together some quotes from Plato that would like, make that argument, but that doesn’t make me a Plato scholar.That just makes me a propagandist, right? A cynical propagandist. And that’s basically what this guy did with his book. But and he is the person who trained at one, and I think a few more of the professors who now teach at Hillsdale. So, and and Hillsdale College is basically the Harvard of the Trump administration.Now. They’re the ones who are running the one, one one of the groups running the two celebration of the 250th anniversary, producing a ton of content for effort. Prager You is another organization that, again, like if you know anything about the history and you watch PR u content, it’s so obviously misrepresenting and sometimes just outright making stuff up.And strangely enough, always on one side of the political aisle, weirdly, it always serves only one side they when they get things wrong. But this organization is now basically driving the way the, federal government is encouraging people across the country. And so they’re, abusing the trust citizens should rightly put in their their federal government, right, to not lie to them. They’re, abusing that trust with a, an assist [00:54:00] from from the Trump administration. So they are I mean, national memory is a complicated thing. It’s not like during the all of the of the content produced the bicentennial was, rigorous and historically accurate and wasn’t saturated with propaganda so on.So it’s as if we’re measuring it against some like perfect ideal that has existed in the past, but it’s just, just egregiously bad the way they’re approaching this now and egregiously partisan, which was not the case in with the bicentennial uh they were scrupulously bipartisan or or non-partisan in the way that they approached telling the history of the country back then.PragerU’s bizarre AI history videosSHEFFIELD: Which, yeah, I mean, you would think that that’s the basic standard, yeah. You had a, post recently where you noted how that one of the prager u well, PragerU has a whole series that the White House is putting out for them using absolutely bizarre, bizarre, freaky AI generated videos. One of which basically portrays John Adams as some sort of a predecessor to Ben Shapiro, actually.Uh, these videos, you’ve got to it. So to I’ll roll clip, here for the audience for that.AI John Adams: I am John Adams, blunt, stubborn, and the indispensable voice for independence. In the Continental Congress, it called me obnoxious and disliked. I call it telling the truth. Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes or inclinations, they cannot alter the state of facts. In other words, friend facts do not care about our feelings.While Jefferson penned the declaration, I drove the debate, [00:56:00] won the votes, and dared to speak when others hesitated. I stood on principle even when it cost me popularity.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so I mean, this is just bizarre stuff. And this is was what why I said earlier that, they cannot succeed in the marketplace of ideas.Their scholarship is trash. It’s, it is childish, amateurish stuff that even many high school students would realize is bad history historiography.COTLAR: Oh, for sure. and I I’ve, I’ve, showed several of these videos in my classes for students and asked them to kind of analyze them and, talk about them.And yeah, it’s not It, it, is where the, I think this is connected to their fantasy that like high school teachers and college professors are brainwashing students, and I think they have, which is false. Anyone taught knows that it doesn’t work that way. And, actually anyone who’s ever been a student knows that it doesn’t work that way.But I think they have this weird like well, because this is what leftists doing successfully brainwashing people. If If we just put out this content, we can get kids to love the founders with these incredibly boring and crappy AI videos. I think think going to work that I don’t think that is so, it’s simultaneously like embarrassing and horrible and I, don’t don’t like it and I don’t think our government should be doing it. But I’m also not sure we need to be that worried about it because they are so bad. Right. And. it’s, not good propaganda. It’s really boring and ineffectual propaganda.But it’s, I, think they’re interesting to analyze in terms of what they are trying to accomplish with it, which, and analysis of the entire [00:58:00] project is that basically. They’ve selected pe all the people who signed the Declaration of Independence and, created a little biographical AI generated video of them.Most of these people are, no one that anyone’s ever heard of before. They’re 50 some people who signed the Declaration of Independence. Some are famous, most are not. And for good good reason, most of them led I don’t know not particularly exciting lives.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, they signed the declaration. That’s it. Right?COTLAR: Which is something, that’s an important historical event and, it’s worth remembering, but there’s a reason why, like, no, most people don’t recognize most of the names on there, but I think the goal is to encourage kind of ordinary rank and file Republicans identify with the American Revolution a positive way in the sense of like the violent part of the Revolution Right. And the sense and the part that involved alienating their affections from what had previously been the kind of ruling authority under which folks had lived. Right. So the brave thing to do, much like Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage said it’s we’re, in American Revolution 2.0.That’s what Trump is, and it it will be bloodless as long as the left will allow it. Right. That was, those are his words. And there’s a lot of talk about invoking the American Revolution as seeing Trump as the continuation of it. The 3% militia stuff is kind of bound this. And so in other words, it’s, encouraging people to kind of gird their loins, put on the armor of God as JD Vance said the other day.And be prepared to what, what followed after the Declaration of Independence. Right. Like what, are they asking people to prepare themselves for and sacrifice themselves for? Yeah. And, they would never explicitly own this right. As what their project is. But it’s basically encouraging people to identify with ordinary, regular people [01:00:00] who decided that at that historical moment, they had no choice to Prepare themselves to fight, right. For the thing that they loved in which they were against. And in this case, they’re trying to frame the left as the British And to frame themselves as the Patriots. And, you know, it’s it’s so ironic given that they’re the ones who are sending military troops to occupy American cities.The left’s not doing that. Last I checked you know, if, if, you run through the list of grievances and the Declaration of Independence, Donald Trump’s ticked off a whole bunch of ‘em at this point. Yeah. But anyway, they’re supposed to. Yeah, right. Republicans are supposed to think of themselves as the Patriots in this scenario.And the left is supposed, even though the Republicans in control the entirety of the federal government, it’s apparently the left that is actually in control of everything and who are to to destroy you and squelch you. So you really have no other obligation but to fight back. I think that’s the kind of implicit here.The anti-Americanism of the reactionary rightSHEFFIELD: I think is.Yeah. And, and, it’s. This is a deeply anti-American message. Like these people actually hate America as it is, and they have this imaginary version in their heads in which they claim to like the founding generation, but they also like Confederacy. Donald Trump is very big on restoring the confederate uh, na, you know, military bases and putting back Confederate memorials, even though they were literal traitors to America, literal traitors, some many of whom, well, some of whom were actually killed for their treachery.And so this is, it’s, this is something that I think the, the, broader left has to take more seriously. That they really actually do want violence. They have wanted it, as you’ve seen in your own research on these radicals decades, this this is their fantasy.They, many of these reactionaries have fantasized about [01:02:00] killing their fellow Americans for over a hundred years.COTLAR: Unfortunately, that has has been a threat in American history. I mean, and I mean, another piece of it of it that I really want to also name is, a attack on empathy, right? And the ability to empathize.So like, for example, the, there’s, sympathy for the Confederacy is part of the kind uh, what historian David Blake called the the romance of of reunion, Where the Civil War gets turned into just a battle between brothers, a tragic battle between brothers and as a battle between white people and where white people have to come together and forgive each right?And say nice things about Robert E. Lee, that he was such a, and so, and you put the nation back together at the of of doing what was necessary to provide equal rights and opportunities for former, formerly enslaved people, right? So they get erased outta the picture. People to sympathize are the poor slave holders, right?Not formerly enslaved people with the revolution. It’s really notable that there are very few black people who figure in these PragerU videos. There’s, two and the, to the extent to which slavery is mentioned, it’s usually mentioned in the form of like the good, like good white people who freed which is usually technically true.But the actual reality of how that happened was far more but are are so many stories that they could tell from the revolutionary era about enslaved black people fighting for their rights, fighting for their freedom, and successfully gaining it. During the revolutionary era that would, you would think if these people actually wanted to present a form of America in which racism is not permanently embedded in the system, but is actually something that like white and black people have worked together of undo.You could tell the the story of own a judge who was an enslaved woman who got her freedom when [01:04:00] she ran away from George Washington. Uh You could tell the story of Prince Whipple, whose owner willing Whipple is one of the people whose stories is told by Prager, but they don’t tell the story of Prince Whipple, who was an enslaved man, enslaved by Will Whipple, who sued for his freedom, signed a petition with a group of other black enslaved people in New Hampshire, and eventually successfully gained his freedom.Not thanks to the generosity of William Whipple, but thanks to Prince Whipple’s concerted efforts to gain his freedom because he sow wanted to be free. Right? And these are super patriotic stories that one could tell right about aspirations for freedom in the revolutionary era by black Americans, but.They don’t tell those stories. Right. Those are not stories they tell. And maybe that’s that probably know this stuff, because they don’t anythingabout historySo, I mean, might, that’s probably the easiest explanation for why that’s not there. And they regard reading black history as somehow, I don’t know, it makes you, turns woke or anti-American.Right. But these these are not hard stories to find. they’re books about right This is, is, there’s plenty of information out there. went looking for it, an undergraduate intern could find it in 30 minutes with a Google search. Right? Right. But and so by not. Bringing, surfacing these which, if, we we had a Democratic administration in power, those stories would be part of how the history would be remembered in the 250th, on on the 250th But I guess we’re not, we don’t believe in inclusion anymore. Right. We don’t believe in diversity either. Right.And so, to me is a is a sign of how implicitly, if not explicitly uh, white their vision of American history is, um and their vision of the American future is. And, that’s pretty much the definition nationalism. Which runs counter to I was socialized to think [01:06:00] about what America was, that it’s it’s a multiracial democracy.That’s what made that’s that’s what World War II supposedly was about, right? Is what what during the the Reagan era I was taught, that’s what makes us exceptional, right? That’s what makes us special as a nation. And so to see one of our of our two parties kind of, walking away from that vision of what America was and should be would hope would be more alarming to our fellow citizens it seems to be.Trump’s declining poll numbers and the informed electorateSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, the good thing in polling lately though does seem to be the case that, Donald numbers since he began his power grabs really have gone into the toilet. And I mean, from when you look at the data, he won in 2024 on the basis of lying to uninformed people.Basically people who didn’t pay attention to news, like the, less attention you paid to the news, the more you supported Trump. And so his, goal was to expand the electorate with people who didn’t know very much about politics and lied to them a lot because the people who already had paid attention, they didn’t like him.And so the, people who paid it, who followed the news the most, the majority of them were against Trump, right? And so his only shot to win in 2024 was to lie to a bunch of people who didn’t, who hadn’t paid attention or were too young. Right. And so now, and, we can see that especially with his numbers, with Hispanic Americans, that they have just absolutely cratered since he began uh, you know, papers please authoritarian policy and, literally sued in the Supreme Court to say, we should have the right talk to anyone we want who looks Hispanic, right?And sadly, they, won that case, but, like that’s so, people have to pay attention. I mean, and that’s, I think that’s ultimately [01:08:00] why the reactionary right? Thinks that the education is liberally biased. Because when you know stuff you don’t like what they’re doing, that’s the long and short of it.COTLAR: Yeah. And, their messaging has now just been, it’s pure propaganda, most of which has no correlation with empirical reality. And so anyone whose antennas have a, any kind of sensor for BS can obviously pick up right on this on the lies and, distortions. And and so this is where I feel like a lot of, the social media controlled by Musk and controlled by Zuckerberg and other other folks are part of their goal is to basically stymie and kind of, kill the parts of people’s psyches that are like BS detectors, right?And of an environment in which people will be willing to believe anything, right? And when you create that sort of. Epistemological environment. It just makes it easier for shameless liars to, create whatever vision of reality they want to create and get people to accept it. Right.And, buy into it. But I do believe that most people don’t want to live in a world like that. most people don’t like getting lied to. Most people don’t like duped by people with great wealth and power. So most people like having a house or having healthcare, right? Yeah Or like not dying from an actual disease that really is dangerous to them.Like, people don’t like it when their kids die from measles, and they they especially don’t like it if their their kid gets measles then they find out that there was a vaccine that would’ve. Probably prevented but Someone they trusted told them that the vaccine wasn’t necessary. you know, knows how this will play play out or, the millions of stories of now, or I don’t know, millions.But there was a story in Politico [01:10:00] recently about some farmers in central Pennsylvania who are shocked that like the mass deportations have created a situation in which the undocumented people they used to rely do work on their farms aren’t available to do work on their farms, now they’regoingto losefarms. it’s it’s like, well, what, did you think to happen when guy who ran on the platform of doing doing mass deportations told you he was going to do that? So, people vote for sometimes quite irrational or idiosyncratic reasons but maybe. At At some point will put two and two together, right.The pleasure some take in illiberalism and crueltyCOTLAR: and recognize the kind of incoherence of But there, so there, there’s one thing though that I want to really emphasize, which is that this of, and I call it a liberalism. I know you call, it reactionary kind of conservatism. uh, a great book by Stephen Hanh called I Liberal America.It’s a History of America over the last 250 years, and he makes the argument that, know, this, thread has always been a part of our political culture. This expulsion is a a liberal thing. And the thing that we sometimes don’t recognize about is that for a lot of people, they really enjoy it and it’s meaningful to them.Like so to to folks who don’t enjoy watching, people being frog marched into a prison in El Salvador, which is I think the majority of us. It’s hard for us to get ourselves in the minds of someone who watches a video, a like a torture video like that and gets pleasure from it. Right. And I think that’s the part that’s a little bit harder to sit with.Right. That there are people, or, when Jimmy, when a late who you don’t even watch fired due to pressure for the president, most people, like, if this happened to some like right wing talk show host who I don’t follow, and and if Joe Biden had somehow like arranged with the FCC to get Greg Gutfeld fired, [01:12:00] would be like, terrible.Like, I don’t like Greg Gutfeld, but like the president should be, shouldn’t be arranging for him to get fired. That’s ludicrous. Yeah. Right. Or the very least you wouldn’t like it.Right. It wouldn’t gimme pleasure pleasure be right. And I think but for the folks who are getting pleasure somehow from Jimmy Kimmel getting fired that of of being in the world is really hard to like.Real people back from Right. My sense is that most people just probably don’t care, or they don’t even know. but the people who really do take pleasure in that, I don’t know what you say to that. Like, I don’t know. Or, likewise, people who get pleasure out idea of sending a person who’s undocumented in the US to some third country that they’ve never set foot in, where going to be up in gulag possibly for the rest of their lives.Who would want that for another human being? Like what, why would you want that? And and, if we, and there’s the impulse to be, well, this isn’t who we are. And it shouldn’t be who we not who most of us are. it it has been who some of us are. Right. And unfortunately, like that segment has been kind of cultivated.Amplified corralled into this like media safe space that the Republican party has created for those folks. And I find it to be incredibly just offensive and horrible what these people who know better are doing to their fellow citizens by lying to them so shamelessly. But it’s a a free country.I don’t know what, what, there is to stop it other than to to try to kind of just pump out counter messaging that tries to be accurate true. And like like you said, putting in people’s own own words what it is they’ve said and allowing people to make up their own minds about it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.Well that’s. That’s, why a lot of the pushback for people criticizing, [01:14:00] accurately, the things that that Charlie Kirk said, right. That’s why they were so against people doing that. And like, one of the guests on the program that we just ran an episode with Karen Attiah, she was fired by the Washington Post for quoing Charlie Kirk and not saying anything about him otherwise.And just saying, he said, these particular black women, uh, have no merit and stole their slots from white people, and presumably that they knew that Barack Obama was going to marry a, white woman or something. Like, I, don’t know what the hell that even means. How, is he, they, she stole a spot from a white person.I don’t know that, But that’s why they don’t want you to know what Charlie Kirk said. They don’t want you to know that Charlie Kirk demanded the execution of Joe Biden. They don’t want you to know that.COTLAR: Right.SHEFFIELD: They, that’s what this whole idea of fictitious republicanism is about. Right. And so they, that’s why they hate real history and real scholarship, because their ideas are not grounded in reality.And, and this, mentality that you’ve been, you were just talking about here, it is so foreign, so shocking that, a decent person doesn’t want to believe that their fellow human beings actually have these viewpoints. Right. And, so that I think, does cr create a lot of reticence. And I call this pathological liberalism. That’s what it is. That, you have to be able to stand up for your own values. Because if you don’t, then who will?COTLAR: Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, I mean, it’s a, to to my mind, I’ve come more and more to think that the the internet was a mistake. Social media, I mean, I love, there’s so much I love about it.There’s so many positive but that,SHEFFIELD: That’s how we know each other.COTLAR: Oh, exactly. Right. And that’s that’s I’m, obviously mostly I know and there’s not can do about it, it, but um, uh,you know, [01:16:00] the way that we’ve just created a, political culture where entertainment, it’s just become about entertainment and about attention and anger and emotion.And so it’s just 99% heat and 1% light, and that’s just not. What a a healthy, democratic culture should look like. It oftentimes be kind of boring, right? Like politics is kind of boring. If you get into the weeds of it, it’s really technical and detailed, It’s like it’s not going to be able to be easily sensationalized.And it’s not about like good versus evil. It’s about weighing all kinds of of like, complicated different considerations as to where train line is goingtothrough when we try to be able build high speed rail between these two cities and the, all the messiness that comes with the actual like.What politics is for, right? That all just gets pushed un under the rug, and it just becomes about identity and especially relational identity. And who do you hate and who do you like? Who’s your friend? Who’s your enemy? style of politics is very conducive to the reactionary, right? It’s like that’s what they want politics to look like because that serves their interests and folks on the left who actually want to, like, use government power to make everybody’s lives better.Doing that doesn’t involve identifying who your enemy is and owning them and crushing them. It involves like environmental studies to like see which chemicals are being produced by what factories are potentially harming kids. And so that. That approach to like governance in the public good just not well served by a political media environment that just prioritizes hot takes and memes and rage.And right has just really benefited from [01:18:00] the the way that our politics has become almost entirely defined that and and by the voices who amplify that and promote that with great pleasure and glee and with no sense at all of like, we’re we’re not actually making anybody’s lives better, right.By doing this. That just, that makes me really of enraged that folks are doing that, even though I though I just said we’re not supposed to be enraged. But anywayConclusionSHEFFIELD: Well. I think that’s a good place to leave it, Seth. So for people who want to keep up with your stuff what are your recommendations for that?COTLAR: I’m on, Blue Sky which is a very, a nice short form way to say things. It’s, we’re during the semester, so I, most of my time is devoted to teaching and grading my my work. But occasionally I get a chance to do some things on Blue Sky. And I also have a newsletter on which I’ve moved from Substack onto Ghost, which is called Right Landia.And that’s where I stuff related to the research project that I’m working on, which is about a. White nationalist anti-Semite with ties to domestic terrorists and neo-Nazis who became the chair of the Oregon Republican Party in 1978 in 1979. And it’s a kind of history of right-wing radicalization inside one state’s Republican party that runs from the 1950s the early two thousands sort of focusing on this one figure who almost nobody has ever heard of before.Who played a really important role in kind of pushing had once been a very moderate Republican party in Oregon to the far right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Sounds like a good book. We’ll look forward to having you on to talk about it when you get it ready. Thanks. All Alright. Good to have you.COTLAR: Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today.I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have [01:20:00] the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes, and we have subscription options on Patreon and on Substack. If you want to subscribe on Patreon, go to. patreon.com/discover Flux.And if you’re a paid subscribing member, thank you very much for your support. That means a lot. And if you can’t afford to do a page subscription right now, I understand that. But give us a written review over on iTunes or Spotify that’s very helpful. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified when we do another episode. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.communityEpisode Summary  Whether it’s the SwiftBoat Veterans or Moms for Tyranny, right-wing groups are notorious for popping up overnight in American politics, but this past year saw something very unexpected, an organization and collection of people saying they support a politics of “abundance” headed by people who are often perceived as being on the leftward side of the political spectrum, writers Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein.With its unhealthy obsession with bipartisanship, abundance politics is yet another example of pathological liberalism, but unfortunately, it’s worse than that. Scratch even a bit beneath the surface and you’ll realize that this endeavor is nothing more than neoliberalism rebranded—and paid for by the same reactionary billionaires who are bankrolling Donald Trump’s fascistic policies.Even worse, far-right activists are using the “abundance” branding as an attempt to market policies that harm Americans and democracy. The guest list at the Abundance Conference in DC earlier in September made this clear, featuring a speaker calling for “deportation abundance,” a governor who banned fluoride in public water, and a talk from an advocate of Trump’s illegal “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant prison.Warmed-over libertarianism is not the answer to what ails America, but it is nonetheless the case that governments at the federal, state, and local levels are failing to serve the public in many ways. It’s too difficult to start businesses, it’s too difficult to receive public assistance, and it’s far too expensive to get college degrees.Kate Willett, my guest on today’s episode, has done the hard work of digging into the funding and the origins of the Abundance movement. She’s also a standup comedian and the co-host of the Dystopia Now podcast.This audio-only episode is for paid Flux subscribers only. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere. Paid subscriptions are available only on Patreon and Substack.Related Content—The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the long history of right-wing re-branding—Republicans set up fake left political candidates for decades, here’s how they did it—How the ‘No Labels’ movement tried to divide and conquer Democratic voters—Americans want big ideas, but Trump’s opponents aren’t providing them—Inside the far-right origins of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency 🔒—After labeling themselves as ‘centrists,’ Silicon Valley libertarians are embracing overt authoritarianism—How centrist elites blocked necessary change and enabled the far right 🔒Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:14 — Major ‘abundance’ figures and the perpetual influence of libertarianism11:49 — Abundance is the libertarian attempt to re-brand neoliberalism15:41 — Silicon Valley billionaires have rejected ‘small government’ approach18:55 — The religious nature of techno-post-libertarianism24:31 — Peter Thiel’s Antichrist obsession and René Girard29:21 — ‘Dark Abundance,’ an explicit attempt to include fascism in the movement39:24 — How corporate interests hijack positive YIMBY movements43:43 — Building effective political coalitions48:59 — Toward a fusionist left policiesAudio TranscriptAvailable only to paid subscribers

Episode Summary In a generic sense, everyone knows that politics is about power. But when you look at how America’s two major parties use the power that they have, there’s no question whatsoever that Republicans understand power politics while Democrats have a much more passive attitude toward it.This has been true since at least 1964 when a dedicated group of reactionaries took over the Republican party and installed their extremist candidate Barry Goldwater and proceeded to systematically cancel and remove anyone who stood in their way. Now during the second administration of Donald Trump, his extremist administration is pulling all the levers of power it can to cancel budgets, cancel people, and threaten anyone who stands in its way.In response, congressional Democratic leaders have mostly resorted to writing strongly worded letters which obviously isn’t cutting it. But what can be done?Karen Attiah, my guest on today’s episode has been thinking and writing a lot about power and why it’s necessary to protect freedom. And she has direct experience at what actual canceling looks like, having been fired from the Washington Post for accurately quoting the late Charlie Kirk. This came after she had a course canceled by Columbia University following her speaking out against Israel's genocide in Gaza and in favor of racial equality.Since the Columbia incident, Karen has started Resistance Summer School, a new effort to teach the history of democratic rights movements which she started after Columbia University canceled a course she was teaching after the university was targeted by dishonest attacks from far-right activists trying to censor students and instructors.And since being fired by the Post, Karen will be redoubling her writing efforts on Substack, so be sure to subscribe. This is the exactly correct response to authoritarianism. Dictatorship is not inevitable, but it wants you to think that it is. The American people did not stand for Disney’s suspension of its late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, and after millions of people canceled their subscriptions, it had to reinstate him.Important Note: Our conversation was recorded September 10, 2025, before Kirk was shot at a public event in Utah so we do not discuss her reaction to it.The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content—After centuries of intellectual dominance, liberalism has become uninterested in defending itself—Far-right media will attack the broader left for any reason, even completely fabricated ones—Trump beat Harris because Republicans have an ecosystem while Democrats have a coalition—JB Pritzker’s tough response to Trump’s authoritarian acts and his progressive policies are pointing a better way for Democrats—Americans want big ideas, even if they’re terrible ones—Republicans treat politics like viral marketing, Democrats don’t—History shows that right-wing activists never believed in free speech and that ‘cancel culture’ panic was only about seizing powerAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction10:30 — Universities' lost touch with the people is why many keep folding to authoritarianism16:48 — The political right understands what power can do much better than the political left22:01 — How living in Texas made Karen not suppose that reactionaries were serious about their ideas31:01 — Liberals stopped explaining their ideas in an easy to understand way39:18 — Democratic and other left leaders underestimate the power of religious community and knowing47:09 — The personal, cult magnetism of Donald Trump52:23 — There's little need to reach out to right-wing leaders, but some of their followers can be persuaded59:56 — Fascism isn't inevitable, but you have to have a vision and a realization that power mattersAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So you've got a number of interesting things you are doing lately, but one of them is you've got a class that was canceled by the actual cancel culture of Donald Trump from Columbia University that you are teaching independently now. So why don't we start off with you telling us about that.KAREN ATTIAH: Sure. Yeah. It's been such a wild time on so many, in so many levels. Yeah, probably most people might know me as a journalist and a columnist and editor for, the Washington Post, but deep down inside have always wanted to teach. I've always wanted to be an academic. Actually, I ended up a journalist, but but yeah, most people might not know.My background is actually in international affairs, so I went to Columbia as a graduate student and wanted to basically like work in the UN or World Bank or maybe, diplomatic service, that sort of thing. But that experience really made me question a lot about our systems, particularly our international affairs development systems.And while I was a grad student at Columbia School [00:04:00] for International and Public Affairs, I definitely questioned like, wait a second. Why aren't we learning anything about how race intersects with development and how we see the world, how people relate to one another?And I definitely was aware that what we were being taught was a very, very, very, not only Western centric, but a very kind of American centric view of the world. And I was going to school with people from all over the world. So I just saw that as a gap. And so ever since then, I was like, man, I would love to be able to teach.What I didn't get taught as a student, so probably in the pandemic. Yeah. Columbia was like, Hey would you teach specifically with the School of International Public Affairs was like, Hey, would you like to come teach? And I, I kind of did the Heisman on him, kept them at arms distance for a little bit because I, I was like, I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready.But I was working on a syllabus on race and journalism. So I developed a syllabus for about two years or so before I finally said yes. Before I said yes to the dress, I guess, and decided to teach in 2020 for the spring of 2024. So a bit of context to that. I decided to come up with a course that explicitly looked at the development of kind of our ideas about race. Like all the way from. So 12th and 13th centuries to today, right? And looking at how this has always been a mediated process. So part of how, at a very basic level, how we develop ideas about who is us and who is them, who is like us and who is not, is through what we read, what we watch through photographs, all that stuff.So I basically explained to my students particularly when it comes to American media development of American media, that there's always been a link [00:06:00] between the relationship particularly of white colonists and European colonists and settlers with writing about non-whites without including them.And there's, there's evidence and, and really great work done about how. These early colonial papers actually made a lot of money pedaling stereotypes basically. So I ask a lot of my students, I'm like, huh, this sounds familiar, right? So fast forward a couple of months, of course went well and over-enrolled great reviews.And then I got a text message saying that my class was not going to be renewed for 2025. And obviously I was crushed. I mean, I never quite got a reason actually, whether it was. I mean, my costs over enrolled. I was also quite vocal about what I saw as Israel's assault on Palestinians during the time of the encampments and the protests that were happening at Columbia.So, and just in general, Matthew, I mean, I, I think I knew I, I cover race, I write about race. I've written about the attacks on critical white race theory and anti DEI, all of these sort of bogeyman attacks on anyone teaching about, and in particular the history of different racial groups. So I think I always kind of had a, I don't know, a bit of a, a, a, not a cloud per se, but just an, an awareness of the political climate, even at a place like Columbia.Right. I'd covered. Anti CRT efforts in Texas, in Oklahoma. And in my, the back of my mind, I think I always knew they're going to try to push this campaign all the way to the [00:08:00] top. And of course, as we've seen, it's reached the Ivys, right? So I think yeah, they canceled the costs. I was told to be quiet about it basically.So I sat on it for a couple of months, didn't say anything. People were like, you're going to hurt your career. Do you want to teach again? Don't, just wait, wait it out. And, then I saw, after Trump's victory and then I saw the attacks on DEI, I saw the, the pressure on campuses to basically, stop any programs on diversity, on DEI stop, anything that could be considered anti-white, basically, if we're going to be--SHEFFIELD: Or pro Palestinian. Yeah.ATTIAH: Or pro-Palestinian. All of that to me is connected. I don't see these things as, separate issues at all. So yeah, earlier this spring, I just was like, wait, why am I sitting around waiting for permission to basically do, at the heart of what teaching is, me talking to a group of people, like at the heart of it, it's like we all teaching and education is, is just gathering a group of listeners, having a speaker and transmitting, communicating to them.And I'm like, I don't need telling me to do that. I, I can gather people under a tree, like, like, so yeah, I put it on in Bluesky., Would anybody be interested in, in taking this version of this course? And honestly, I would've been happy with 20 people. I would've been happy with 30 people.And something like. Two or 3000 people responded. So I was like, okay, we're onto something. And just kept pulling, on the threads, put out an interest form. People were really willing to actually sign up, willing to actually, and, and what I did was offered on a sliding scale because part of the, I think injustice of what I saw even teaching is just not only are people going into crushing debt, right, to be able to [00:10:00] afford an Ivy League education, particularly in a shaky job market.But then adjuncts or a lot of people may not know is a lot of them are paid basically poverty wages and have no protections, no sort of, benefits, right? I've met adjuncts who can barely pay their rents, but they're teaching at these elite institutions that are trading off of their. Knowledge and their labor in order to power the whole thing.So for me, I was--SHEFFIELD: They can certainly afford to pay better.Universities' lost touch with the people is why many keep folding to authoritarianismATTIAH: Yeah. Right. I mean, and that's, the thing. I mean, a lot of people have probably seen the news about how big the endowments of these universities are and and how much they have in real estate. And it's just like, this doesn't make sense. At the heart of it is people who want to share knowledge and other people who want to receive it.But it's, as I said before, it's, it's almost like. And these institutions have become credentialist institutions that are hedge funds with a side of education. Right. So for me, I think it was an interesting experiment in jailbreaking that and saying, well, what if people didn't have to go into lifelong debt?And what if, as an instructor you could actually support yourself by going outside and kind of cutting out the middleman to an extent. And yeah. So we did our first class. 500 people sold out in 48 hours. We were able to do, we were able to give people scholarships and stuff. And yeah, it's been such a cool, such a cool experience.And I guess for me it's been freeing that I don't have to worry about. Some, administrator getting a chilling letter from the Department of Education or the Department of Justice and being investigated for teaching wokeness or that I can freely teach and provide a space for people about Israel Palestine because people are really hungry for that sort of, not only knowledge, but a space to be able to ask questions.So yeah, it's been [00:12:00] such a, it's birthing something out of, community outta cancellation has been, has been my thought. And, for me, like I said, I just. Seeing people? Well, it's cool that people actually really want to go back to school. I have readings of a syllabus, I have guest speakers and everything.But it's also just really cool to see people make friends, make connections, make like, just like in school, like meet new people. It's so hard to do that after you've left school. So many of us have, we're busy with our jobs and busy with our family. So I do this on Zoom, right? And I let people either watch on Zoom and then watch the recordings when they can.So I try to just make it as easy and accessible to people as possible. So. Yeah, it's been a lot of work, that's for sure. But it's definitely, I'd hope, provide a model of that. We don't have to take a lot of this lying down, and that there's no reason that, we should be banned from speaking to one another.And about history and about telling people, particularly when it comes to media, and particularly when it comes to, race. I tell my students a lot of times, I'm like, look, like I didn't learn this in school. Some of this stuff I did not learn until I was a journalist. So you shouldn't feel ashamed or guilty.You didn't, we're all taking remedial history. Yeah. So, and it doesn't matter how many degrees you have, I have PhDs in my class, I have people with master's degrees. The youngest student is 17, the oldest student is almost 80. Right. So, this is just something that everyone, everyone should know. I, I teach about the league of Nations in Woodrow Wilson and the attempt by Japan to introduce a racial equality clause at the beginning of the League of Nations, and how that was rejected actually in 1919.And for a lot of people, they're like, how do we [00:14:00] not know this? How do we not know that, that there was this effort that this was, actually a huge, huge deal for the quote unquote colored peoples of the worlds and the west just ignored it. Right. So it's a lot of that, it's a lot of unearthing history that we all, I think, should have known.But if I get the chance to reach more people this way before I was teaching 20 people, now I'm teaching 500. Then to me that's a win. So,Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. No, and that's, it is a, great way to, to get, make something good out of something bad that was done and, and there's a, have you ever thought about that there's a, bit of a parallel, although talk about structural inequality between what you are doing and what Barry Wes is doing?ATTIAH: I, it's so funny you said that. I think I just posted on Bluesky about her not only Free Press, but they're setting up, what is it? The, the, setup of the University of Austin, that kind of weirdo university, which is not too far from me, two and a half hours away from me. And I, I, I did think about that, right?Like, to an extent it was cool that the announcement that I made went viral to an extent about creating this out of Columbia. But I, I think, and I write and I speak all the time about the asymmetries of resources and funding when it comes to the right and the left or liberals and stuff. So, Barry Weiss being able to corral millions upon millions of dollars.me not so much. Literal millionaires. And so I'm also just like, and it's, it's, not to complain, but more so as just an observation that here is someone who, and I don't know, maybe, maybe I need to learn her dark arts and I should study [00:16:00] her instead of complaining, but rather it's, so stark to me that, she was able to corral the resources and funding to be able to do something like that. Whereas, I'm doing this still largely on my own and very much grassroots supported. So, and again, it's not just me, but I'm sure you've saw the kerfluffle over liberal influencers receiving money for for promoting kind of, or not even promoting, but rather just receiving monies, receiving $8,000 a month, some of them.And meanwhile, again, Bari Weiss, reportedly, we'll see what makes out of, but reportedly being offered hundreds of millions of dollars to be absorbed into CBS.The political right understands what power can do much better than the political leftATTIAH: So it's just sort of, I mean, I can whine or we can whine about. The right and they're doing this and doing that. But I've seen firsthand, particularly in my own reporting in, in Texas, that they put their money where their mouth is literally, literally. I'm seeing how millions of dollars gets poured into school board elections gets put into folks like Bari Weiss and these podcasters, and they seem to actually, maybe they actually, actually, the right believes in what they're doing, so much so that they're willing to fund it.So there are times when I'm like, does the left believe in what they're doing? Right? What's the, what's the starkest, what's the best way to show that you're committed to something which is putting resources and cash behind it? And until the left sort of works that out I'm not sure how we match what the right is doing. We have to stop being afraid of power, right? And not, and not just like moral victories and not just, but actual, you need cash, you need [00:18:00] organizing power.You need discipline. It's not enough just to be right. It also, you also have to be resourced and organized. And it's something that like fills me with dismay. Like when people seem to think that if you care about. Human rights or if you care about social justice there's this self-defeating narrative that like, you'll never make money doing it, it'll never work.We're supposed to be scraping for pennies all the time, and I'm just like, I don't think that helps our side. Martin Luther King, all of these people understood and believed in power. You have to have that in order to advance your values and in order to persuade people effectively of your vision.Without that, then, then you'll lose. Anyway, that's just me.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, you're, yeah, no, that's a really, important point. And I think you're right that in the broader left, it's not something that people. Get because, like I, and I, I think in some ways they took the wrong lessons from the civil rights movement because the civil rights movement was a multi-pronged political movement that not only were they just out there, protesting in the street, stop mistreating us.They were also seeking political power. They were running candidates, they were endorsing people, they were giving money to candidates. They were, putting people into, getting people into the, into judgeships. Like they were pushing at all levels of political power in American society.And it wasn't just simply, please stop being mean to us. Please stop hurting us. And obviously, that was important to let people know that this was happening. But if, all you're doing is saying, please stop hurting us, you're not going to [00:20:00] win.ATTIAH: You are not going to win. And like it or not, we're in this sort of. Political apparatus where largely there are two parties, and I don't think about this as only a, a, an electoral politics issue. But that being said, regardless whether it's putting more money towards a media apparatus whether it's thinking through, how do we actually build better institutions, right?I mean, that's not explicitly politics, but it is political. you need resources and you need power. And and people I have these conversations with, people who seem to think that power is bad, power is neutral. It depends on how you--SHEFFIELD: what you do it.ATTIAH: It's what, it's what you make, it's what you make of it.It's like, anyone who likes superhero movies or comics aren't like, oh my gosh, Superman is bad 'cause he has power. Like he used it to help save cities, even if it's flawed or whatnot, any of the heroes, right? Like so, I just, I think about these things. I think about these things a lot and it will require a lot of people to have like, almost like very personal kind of relation, like conversations with themselves about like their own narratives about power and why they think they don't deserve it or shouldn't have it.And 'cause the right definitely thinks they should, whether it's divine power. Some of like, plenty of them are motivated by literally God told them to do this and so this is what we're going to do. Or again, some sort of deep seated. Conviction that this is the world you want to live in, and in order to build that, you need power.So we'll see.[00:22:00]How living in Texas made Karen not suppose that reactionaries were serious about their ideasSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and yeah, that's, it is a really good point. And, I, and we were talking before this, I, think that part of why you were able to really understand this on such a gut level is that you're from Texas, you'refrom Dallas, and you have seen up close for all of your, for so many years of your life that.You are, that this is what these people want. They want to do terrible things to society. and you've seen that you, saw this coming a long time before. And whereas I think a lot of people in the kind of, commentary of the left or the, and the political operative class and the donor class and the politician class, they don't have direct contact withright wing extremists the way that you personally have.And I think that's, part of what, that's a big part of your analysis here. And, and it's also a big part of why they don't understand how to deal with Trump effectively. I think. 'cause when you think about when the Republicans are in the congressional minority. They're still able to cause all sorts of problems.And including, government shutdowns like hell, they shut down the government when Trump was the president, the congressional Republicans did. So like, and yet that, and the Democrats are not willing to, exercise the, they, they constantly talk about, oh, we have to protect democracy. We have to, this is a national emergency, Trump's a want tobe dictator.Well, if he's, if that's true and you really believe that, then why aren't you shutting down the government and demanding to protect people's healthcare or, a variety of things like protecting their, vaccines from RK Junior, like, or just demanding the, the restoration of all these funds that were illegally impounded against all these agencies.Like $500 million stolen from cancer vaccines. Like if Americans knew about that. They [00:24:00] would be really upset, you know, as the, you don't, you're not the president, so you don't have the bully pulpit, but if you shut down the government, people are going to be covering what you have to say.ATTIAH: Yeah, for sure, I mean, I think there's a lot of things going on in terms of, well, two things. It's like, it's almost sometimes like, not only not believing in your own. Values. So, not being committed in that, but it's almost like a, a, a disbelief that Republicans are going to, or, or conservatives are going to do what they say they're going to do.And they've been saying that they've wanted to end abortion end abortion access for, what, 50 years almost? Or, or at the very least four, yeah. 40 ish years. And being willing to align with the religious right in order to, achieve that. A lot of this, for a good chunk of America's history, abortion wasn't as salient in issue as it is now.And that was deliberately. Done through explicit alliances and again, resources, money and them saying, I grew up in these churches and, and the alignment of political figures and the religious anti-abortion kind of movement where ever since I was a kid, they're like, this is what we're going to do.This is what we're going to do. We are going to overturn Roe v Wade. And it's almost like the left being like, Ugh, that can't happen. Ugh, that can't happen. And I think for me growing up here, growing up in Dallas, where actually where I'm, I am right this second, it's like, are you like why? And it's not just what republicans say they're going to do.They organize, they give money, they are doing the thing. And so they've been praying for this. And so I think for, for me it's, and [00:26:00] not just praying for this, but altering the rhetorical battlefield, winning the narrative, I suppose, on these issues, having very simplistic narratives about any of their, their issues, right?And it's very hard. I see up quite often the left either seeding narrative grounds or just simply not believing that these people. We'll do what they want to do. They are willing to play the 50 year game. And I, I, I remember asking even some of my as we were talking beforehand, I, I grew up in the evangelical church.I was very, very, I was a youth leader, used to play piano for the youth groups was very deeply involved, I'll say that. And I remember, and then I left the church when I was in grad school, actually. And then I remember asking, or, or observing some of my former church friends, like, why, why did they vote for Trump?And for a lot of them they're like, ah, yeah, we don't really like him. But God's agenda is more important. And on God's agenda ending abortion is what is going to save this country from going to help, basically. So to your point about. Extremism particularly, coming from the Christian, explicitly Christian nationalist right?Is to them they don't see it as evil. They see it as saving us. Actually, they're doing us a favor. And that trickles into even sort of, and it's hard to understand. I, I know for people who haven't grown up in it. But I think that also extends to even the anti-vaccine stuff that we saw during COVID, the anti masking is, and for sure there are plenty of people who are sadistic and want to use their power to hurt other people and believe that, these people should go to hell.I've seen that sort of [00:28:00] vitriol, but I've also seen, and this is harder to dislodge the people who actually think they're doing good. So even with the vaccines talking to folks, they think that we who believe in science are the ones who are misguided. They're saying. We are trying to save you from ending your life or affecting your life early because you've been lied to by science.So it actually is pretty compelling because it seems to come from a deeply sincere place, if that makes sense. Not and it's, again, it's so easy to car caricature these folks as like, ugh, they're just stupid, or they're just ignorant. But. At least from what I've seen, it's like I've seen people who are like, no, no, no, don't, don't pay attention to science.I I really, I actually want to help you. Here's this other protocol. Because if you do what they say, they'll shorten your life. So, and we, we want to help you. Right? And so it's, a very we're living in extremely different information, completely different information worlds, right? Completely different realities.And I don't really know exactly how that gets bridged. Unless we come, I don't know. I, think about this a lot, but coming at these things from a place 'cause they're coming at this, it's weird to think about, but they're coming at it from a place of care. Just, it's weird to think about it though, but aSHEFFIELD: Yeah, a lot of them. I mean now JD Van, somebody like him, I don't think that's whathe's doing,ATTIAH: No, he's just a craven opportunist who is basically a puppet of Peter Thiel. He has no soul or no convictions, but people like that are able to move. People who do, and again, I won't deny that there's not a streak of destructive nihilism. Right.SHEFFIELD: And some of them, Yeah.ATTIAH: And, and, and plenty of them whose, whole [00:30:00] ethos is just own the libs that they would have no sort of reason to be if it wasn't for beating down on who they perceive to be as misguided and weaker and, and annoying them because we talk about.We think people should not be judged on their pronouns. Like, and we think that black people deserve to vote and have jobs like it's not, there are plenty of racists and there are plenty of bigots and, all of that. But I, it is hard. Yes, there is a destructive streak. And there are not just religious, but even from the sort of tech billionaires who, who don't particularly believe in humanity.And so, I, I look at these things as being like, are you wanting to fight for a nation that is pro-human or not, basically. But alas, we're not there yet.Liberals stopped explaining their ideas in an easy to understand waySHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, you And that point though about yeah. That a lot of people are kind of motivated by a, an altruism that has not been grounded properly. Like that to me is that it, it hits to a, to a difference between what, why the, that we, should dis make sure on the broader left to distinguish between conservatives and reactionaries.Like somebody like JD Vance or, or Steve Bannon, or, Steven Miller, like these are reactionaries, they're trying to. Tear down America and put it back to the Well, huh. In some cases, the confederacy, it looks like they Sure. Talk about the Confederate generals a lot now. And, but, but there are people who just have a more conservative moral viewpoint and they think, as you said, you know that they're doing the right thing.And in a lot of ways, that separation between, them and the, [00:32:00] institutions that the reactionaries are attacking. The reason why there's this gulf, I think, is that for, science stopped trying to explain itself in basic terms. And, in so many of the advances that we've had in society, the people who, who made them forgot to bring along everyone else.So in the same, and that same thing is true. I think with feminism. You know that a lot of the timism is no threat to men. That having women being able to choose what you want to do with your life, that's also, is means that men should have that choice as well. It doesn't mean that men should not have that choice.But, and, and that phrase, that famous phrase of that, a woman needs a, a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Well, that also works the other way around, that a man needs a woman the way that a fish needs a bicycle in, in other words, that you are your worth, your, you're worth your own.You, you don't need somebody to complete you. Your value comes from yourself. But I think in a lot of ways we, kind of stop saying that these kind of first principle arguments, 'cause like, I always see it from people saying, oh, I don't want to, a scientist saying, oh, I don't want to debate some anti-vax person, because if I debate them, then I'll be giving them credibility.And it's like: these people have millions of followers, like they have more credibility than you. And among, from people who have heard of them, like more people have heard of them than have heard of you. So who really has more credibility now on the science? You obviously you do, but in the public mind they.ATTIAH: Correct. And I'm glad you said that because I, think right now to, to deal with what's happening is like, it's a battle for the public's mind. And it's, no longer the case that expertise, hidden expertise is enough. If anything, the sort of [00:34:00] hidden expertise makes people in this country sort of feel like, oh, you must have something to hide.You must not be, but right now look, we're in a fight. We're, we're in a, we're in an absolute war and part of the war for people's minds and imaginations means that people will have to get out there and, explain. I mean, I think in terms of, And builds like I said, like bring people together, those podcasters or whoever, those people with audiences hate 'em all you want, and we'll see where the podcast economy goes or, and all that.But like, what they've basically done is they've been able to bring people together through their audience and, organize them and, and bring them back from day to day or week to week or whatnot. So this notion that you can just stay above the fray means that you're, yeah, you're seeding the imagination battleground to others.And I think there's a bit of, I think particularly on the left, and I'm not trying to bash the left, I've just been thinking about this a lot. 'cause again, I just think about like, what does it take to. Deal with this, to survive this. At the very basic, some of us are literally just trying to survive all of this.Other people, who, who might be less targeted right now should be thinking about these things. But it's this question of not only like what are you willing, what are you willing to do, what are you willing to, put your time and energy and resources into? But it's we're going to have to stop wanting to be perfect right now.I think there's a lot of, almost like perfectionism and purity. And again, caveat, caveat, I don't, certain things I don't believe are. Purity test. Personally, I think when it comes to people literally living or dying [00:36:00] whether it's in Gaza or whether it's people whose lives are being torn apart and broken by ice and you say, okay, like this candidate is supporting these things.Like, I personally don't see people being blown apart as, and caring about that as a purity test. But that being said people are going to have to learn to work with people and engage with people that they don't like. And I'm not, again, I'm not saying to engage with people who want to kill you because that's kind of different, but but it's just like, what does it look like to act, not just talk about building a.Broad-based soar across very, very, very different groups with very different kind of priorities. But again, to come together and actually build. Power. And I talked to lots of different groups amongst the sort of so-called left, and there's such wide disparities between groups who have no structural wealth, basically, who don't have the billionaires to be able to fund groups to certain groups that are maybe just in the beginning stages of trying to figure out what does it look like for maybe, Arab American groups who are like, okay, like this has shown we need to build actual power to advocate for the causes that we believe in.So I just, I think that consciousness is coming because things are so bad. Yeah. But but yeah, it's, we're literally in a, and then we haven't even gotten to AI and social media platforms and how actual facts and truths are, are, being warped. So how do you even build when we can't even agree.On whether or not what we saw on our phones coming outta the White House is real, right? As well as media organizations that are not only caving, but are sort of both sides, seeing what's happening, minimizing, averting their eyes [00:38:00] altogether. So yeah, I think this is a time for a lot of people to be out there in the public sphere and be, truthers to an extent and to, we're going to have to do a lot of persuasion work and a lot of like, work on people's.Minds And how do you organize around? Basically, like I said, for me, I think a lot of it comes down to I want a world that does the least amount of harm to people basically. And to, I think also one thing the w right has done is co-opted the language of freedom and liberty. Whereas I think for many of us who believe in humanist causes and that people should be actually free to not have to deal with systemic oppression.I'm like, I think we are the freedom fighters. Actually, you shouldn't, it shouldn't matter whether you're trans, it shouldn't matter whether you're Latino, it shouldn't matter. You should be a free. Human being in this country. So I think, I think it's just, it's going to take a lot of us being kind of creative in how we frame what we're actually fighting for and about.Democratic and other left leaders underestimate the power of religious community and knowingSHEFFIELD: Yeah that's right. And. And, also being able to, and being willing to reach people where they are, so not just so obviously as you said, like with podcasts and things like that, definitely we need a lot more of those. and not so many of these, wasteful television political ads got a wasted like $750 million on those in the campaign, the Harris campaign did.And there's other people who probably did too. So like, we need less of that because we, there's no return on that investment. All that money's flushed down the toilet now. Whereasif somebody had paid some of that to start, to fund people who are podcasting or start new ones, like they would still be here, [00:40:00] we would still be getting value out of that.So, but, also, there's. There is also, I think in the broader left, a, a lack of, of interest in trying to talk to people in a religious way as well and, and elevating people who have, a religious perspective that does align with with a liberationist at Ethos. We don't do that as much as we should, and, and that's a big blind spot because the majority of Americans are Christians.And so if you are not willing to present voices that can speak to them in language that they are comfortable with and that resonates with them, then how are you going to get anywhere?ATTIAH: Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and, and I, again, as a former evangelical, even though it's such a powerful group, and, and often they, they dominate the conversation about Christianity. They're not the only ones. There are and I, and I don't even want to say that this is just about. Christianity. There are obviously plenty of other religious groups that have been very involved in social justice and human rights in this country for a long time.And thinking about the Jew, the Jewish community during, especially like the Civil Rights movement the Quakers, the gosh I, I know of a very influential imams who are here in Dallas who are obviously very vocal about social justice and human rights. And these are, these are people, these are churches.These are institutions that again, are able to connect people and their politics to a bigger, a larger picture, something bigger than themselves. And as humans, that is just how we find meaning and significance. And that's what gives [00:42:00] people the sort of stamina, the spiritual stamina too. Not only fight for what they believe in, but to sustain it for a long time.I, I, like I said before, with abortion and Christianity, when people believe that they're working on this sort of eternal project to to save people from, damnation and hell fire, that's a pretty powerful reason. Now, I know it's going to, what people are going to say and what's going to happen is, is people are like, oh, keep religion outta politics.Keep spirituality outta politics. Particularly with the church and particularly with religious spaces that have not been welcoming to particularly L-G-B-T-Q people, all that is very, very, very much there. But there are religious groups explicitly, and again, I'm sitting here in Dallas, Texas, which actually has the largest L-G-B-T-Q mega church in the world.And they have long been fighting for justice and human rights. Here, there are these groups that are like, this is not what we believe. Or even some that they're like, okay, we don't understand this, but we, believe in your right to be safe. Right? So I just think about that a lot, that whether it was Malcolm X and Islam or Martin Luther King Jr.And of course himself being a pastor, I just, I am not sure how there would be a successful civil rights sort of counter to what's happening without people not only tapping into a deeper sort of spiritual well and com and community, but just the very basic pragmatic organizing power of religious communities.These are groups that are able to amass people in person usually every week, right? To be able to come together. They're able to collect money and channel resources into [00:44:00] projects. They're, they have, and not only an infrastructure, but ties in their communities that political consultants flying in from Washington DC just don't have.So I, I think about that a lot. And again, back to, I think there has been this disdain for religion. But in this country, this is what motivates people spirituality, spiritual groups working in concert with one another in order to advance their view of the world. So, we'll see. I'd, I'd be, I'm very, even though I'm no longer, I think.Practicing question. I, I find myself as being from that culture, right? And I see the power of it. And to me, again, I'm just interested in how do we use power? And if that comes from places we may be uncomfortable with, are, we going to place our discomfort over progress or over building power? A lot of people have to answer that for themselves.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and, and, and it's also that, the other thing about churches is that they. They help build community of a place where you don't, so you don't have to be alone inthe people move now so much for their jobs. Like they, they're in a city and they don't know anybody.They don't know their neighbors. They're neighbors are never home. They're never home. Like they just, there. It's, it's very difficult to meet people, you know at once. You're not in going to college anymore. And a friend, of course, the majority of Americans never went to college. and so like for them, those connections stopped when they went, stopped going to high school.And so, like, so, so, so religions do provide that kind of anchoring in a lot of ways. And, and there's an interesting. [00:46:00] Dynamic with regard to black Americans, that for black Americans the stats have shown that black Americans who don't go to church, are actually more Republican.And they're the only reli, they're the only demographic group where that's the case. Non-religious black Americans. and it's because the political culture of the black church by and large, does it, it, teaches the history of this is why we are voting, sup tending to support.And it's not even necessarily to supporting the Democrats. It's, this is why we are suspicious of the Republicans because here is how they've hurt our community and history and you should know it. And like, so this, this shared space, this shared history that you get like. That's so much of the, I feel like the appeal of Trumpism for a lot of people is that they do get to feel like that they're part of something that they're part of a community that, you know, and like from to a lot of us on the outside that we look at that and they're like, who the hell would want to be a part of worshiping that turd?The personal, cult magnetism of Donald TrumpATTIAH: But you're onto something like, I mean, and I've, I, think I wrote about it on Facebook at, one point, I wish I had written a, sort of deeper essay. I have been, I've had the, is it a privilege and experience? I don't know, being in the room with Trump personally at this 0.3 times in my life and what people need to under.have you ever met him or,SHEFFIELD: I have been in the room withhim yet.ATTIAH: You have. Okay, so maybe what I say won't be so surprising. This was my take when he met with the Washington Editorial Board and I was in that room, and Trump has a charisma, has a larger than life like, presence. Like this man is like a large human being.So there's that. He [00:48:00] is tall. He just, he takes up space and I've, I saw him. Sort of, work the room. And again, he's, this is someone who's been in the sort of the public culture for a long, long, long, long time. Those in New York? Yes. We'll say we've always hated him. We've always known he's a crook, all of that.But for those of us who grew up outside of New York, I grew up with Trump being a showman. Being on home alone. He was in Sex in the City, he was in music videos. And then I watched a lot of pro wrestling. Yeah. The Apprentice, and then of course The Apprentice. So he grew up, or I grew up with a, with Trump as a rich reality TV show like almost like this kind of brawler man with who represents, who still represents power.Right.SHEFFIELD: Well, and he had, a lot of crossover with hip hop too.LikeATTIAH: lot of crossover with hip hop.SHEFFIELD: timeATTIAH: Yeah. Limp Bizkit. I'm still thinking of Limp Biz's break stuff, video. He was in the break stuff. So he had,SHEFFIELD: talked about him all the time.ATTIAH: yeah, so he had, he built in a way, a sort of a profile a coalition of people from pro wrestling fans to to hip hop, to, sex in the city, which is supposed to be this feminist like cultural artifact.Yeah. Anyway, point is, is like to see him then come in person, Hess, how to work people. He has a personal like magnetism and power that I feel a lot of people on the left don't understand. So I remember being in those rooms and thinking just the way that. He made people kind of like, he's funny also, he made people laugh like he made.And I just remember thinking, and then he went into a bunch of lies and a bunch of like, nonsensical things and I was like, oh, here we go. But he charmed the room and I remember thinking like, [00:50:00] we are screwed if he has this level of, kind of hate him or love him, or, or at the very least you'll pay attention to him.You can't not pay attention to him. I remember thinking that, and then the second time when I really was like, oh, this man's going to win, was seeing him at the Republican National Convention and the way that he moved that crowd speaking about, lock her up, speaking about how terrible America was and bringing the way that that crowd responded to him.It was a religious thing to, it was they, it was almost like they had caught the Holy Spirit, what I used to see in the megachurches. And I remember coming back and seeing people just. Entranced and I was like, oh my gosh, this man is going to win. Because he has a, level of, and I know people hate to admit it, but he's been able to win twice, right.He's been a, there's a reason why he does so many rallies like that moves people. And to your point, and I've seen this in people I know, even close to my own family, who Trump is both a hero and an outsider. And he does, he's both powerful and powerless, hated by the establishment, just like Jesus, right? So if you're a follower of Trump, you then by extension are also someone who is somehow, it seems twisted, but yes.Marginalized and, I've seen how. People felt particularly in the beginning, that they couldn't be out and open with saying that they liked Trump. So it's almost like they would have like almost sort of secret chats with one another. Yeah.He built,SHEFFIELD: especially in black communities. ForATTIAH: yeah. And so now it's just that people are more open about it, right?Or are more open and comfortable. At the very beginning, if you remember, people were getting Disinvited left and right for liking Trump. Like you were kicked out of, family dinner [00:52:00] invite. So it's taboo. And now it's not so taboo, but there's, there's this, he's created a, a community, almost like a, a cult-like, sort of community where people who feel alienated by society in general gravitate towards a sense of belonging under him.There's little need to reach out to right-wing leaders, but some of their followers can be persuadedSHEFFIELD: For sure. Yeah. And like, and, I see there, there's a, that's a good parallel because when it comes to colts, other than Trump, people have a, more rational attitude in how to deal with them. So in other words. If you go and join Scientologists or some, one of these other groups, people, they don't necessarily impute moral failings or intellectual failings to you.They think, oh, well there's something that person is vulnerable right now to this message. And the problem with dealing with the cult of Trump, I think for people who are trying to get people out of it, is that, that we miss that, that, we miss that personal, not necessarily, and obviously, Hillary Clinton was right, that many of them are deplorables.We gotta say that, right? For sure. That's true. But it's still also the case, as you were saying, that a lot of people are not doing, are not supporting him for malicious reasons, like they. They, they have their own reasons that might not be terrible. They like, we, we might disagree with them. But you know, like, and, and so like, and I think that's another thing that you get as somebody who, who is from Texas, that you know you have from fans in your family.You understand that there's, that there, these are not evil people. And I think that there's, well, not necessarily evil and like there's, there's, a problem with I think with a lot of center to Left people that they want to [00:54:00] com they want to compromise with the elites of Trumpism. Those people, you can't compromise with them because they are irredeemable, like they're theATTIAH: should have known. Oh, those are evil. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Like, and, like, they don't get that the, outreach happen should happen at the, personal, voter citizen level. That's where we need to compromise the outreach, the, the talking and the care. Like, we don't, the, you don't gain anything by saying, oh, let's, let's understand Steven Miller and, maybe he's a good guy underneath it all.And it's like, no, we don't have to do that. But we do have to think about the people that are tricked by him. And Ithink that's the right emphasis, I think.ATTIAH: Yeah, I think, there are, like the folks like Steven Miller who is Peter Thiel, Alan Car, like the ones who are actually, in my opinion, the ones who should be dragged out to debate floors. Those are the ones that are actively shaping the society and, and in these sort of dark rooms with, their very sociopathic mentalities.And I think, that's why I, I, I don't, I've never loved the sort of hyperfocus on the kind of Trump voters in a diner sort of thing. Because even. Trump himself. Who is he listening to? Who is he influenced by? Who is, who is he being used as a vessel for? What are we being dis like, to an extent?How is Trump, I won't say exactly being used as a distraction, but definitely being used to advance certainSHEFFIELD: Yeah.ATTIAH: Yeah. Like, he's not, he is not, he's a showman, but he's not this evil genius. We actually have evil geniuses in this society who are [00:56:00] able to sort of operate, I think largely outside of, of public view.Those are the ones who do not deserve rest. Right. Like, and it's I find it strange that sort of there's this wanting to beat up on the tomato cans of, of like most, a lot of people like sort of low information voters. And we haven't even discussed like. Fox News and its dominance in the right wing, media, sphere and all that.But that aside, to me, the people who are advancing a white supremacist society with no checks and balances, who actually have openly said they do not care for democracy, basically, who do, who have actively said, I mean, Vance has said this, that he believes that the endowments of the higher higher ed colleges or elite colleges are basically war chest for the enemy.Like, this is how these people speak. And for some reason we are so hyper-focused on the people that it's in some ways like easier to beat up on than those powerful folks. Right? And part of it is, that's just how power works. It operates in the dark and operates in the shadows. And again, this is where the media should have, should be, should have been.Better in directing our attention and our span on who these people, not only who these people are, but how do we oppose not only who these people are, but they have a lot of money and are using their, their money and their influence to literally buy candidates to buy media. So it's yeah, I mean, obviously the game of politics is you're supposed to persuade as many people as possible to give, to punch the ticket in your favor.There is that, but the other realm of politics is the manufacturing of, of narratives and the advancing of, [00:58:00] worldviews and them deciding who's going to be the useful vessel for, that, for their business interests, all of that stuff. But that's just very hard to communicate very well to people who are in this society, especially.Just trying to get by on multiple, sometimes a lot of times multiple jobs, the economy's not so great right now. How do you even think about convincing people to think about these sort of higher brow issues when they're just trying to, A, put food on the table and B, realizing that if they miss a day of work, it could lead them on the street?Right. And to me, we are in an, in an age as well where power and money is so concentrated at the top and Americans in general are getting poor and more housing insecure, more food insecure. And yet we have so much access to information and yet literally in so many ways we are poor, particularly as middle, class, we are no longer my generation, especially and below, no longer thinking that the American dream is within.Reach home ownership, marriage, kids. so to me it's also, I mean, I think, I think a lot of these things are deeply spiritual questions, but I think it's also about what is the narrative of America now? What is the story of America now, I am not sure that the Republicans have a compelling one right now.Rather it's been, as you said before, obstruction and let's beat the liberals and let's be reactionary and claw back progress from, groups. But overall, what is the vision? What is the visionSHEFFIELD: From any side,ATTIAH: from any side.Fascism isn't inevitable, but you have to have a vision and a realization that power mattersSHEFFIELD: Yeah. That's, a great point. And, I [01:00:00] think the only way that vision can develop. Toward a anti-fascist direction is it, we have to reorient ourselves as well. And, that kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning of the recording here, that, not just about understanding power is, important and why you should use it, but also what do you want and,ATTIAH: What do you want?SHEFFIELD: And what you know, and like, and like I I, I think so much of the Trump second term is about kind of this sort of desire to emotionally blitz, cre, everyone who opposes them and to, make people think, oh, fascism is inevitable.Totalitarianism, this is our fate in America. I'm just going to sit back and doom, scroll on whatever websites I'm using. And that's what they want you to think.Um, and so like we have to figure out. What is watching the news a form of inter of entertainment. Like is that why you're, is that why you do it or is because you want to do something?ATTIAH: Right. And it's, it's I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I mean, I think very generally it's, a profound shift that will need to happen. Within people themselves and, and within the society. I think a lot about how I, I come from a more like a sociology background. So like, I think a lot about how our country and our economy is very much a consumerist economy.Very much on anytime something is going wrong for America, our leaders come out and tell us to go bye bye bye. And, and that we can somehow rely on others to create the things and we consume the things, which means it's very easy for activism and resistance to be packaged in such a way that it looks easy so that we can consume it on our phones.Same with news, like, just speaking of someone from the from the information [01:02:00] pedaling business, which is journalism, but that part of the reason even that I wanted to go into teaching right now is that we're, people are consuming this information. Not necessarily being able to have the opportunity to figure out how to apply that knowledge in their own lives.How to like I said, I think it's back to the drawing board with a lot of things. I think we all need reeducation in so many ways on, how we got here, but it's going to require Americans in general to get out of a very passive consumer consumptionist attitude towards how, towards a better society.We're not going to buy our way out of this. Yes, we're going to need to pull and organize resources. That takes a lot of work. And I think for a long time, particularly the white majority in this country has relied upon. Black people to do the organizing and to do the labor has relied upon learning from the marginalized groups.And now we're in a situation where like white folks are going to have to learn how to be in community and to organize and to probably abandon a lot of this cultural preferences for perfectionism, for well if I, I'm too scared. I, I don't want to get something wrong, so I'm not going to do anything at all.I'd rather just sit on the sidelines 'cause I'm just going to let others speak and I'm like, you have to get out there and try. Right. Because so many, so many people we're facing, particularly for black people, but I think for, a lot of targeted groups, it's like a lot of people are literally having their livelihoods blown apart right now.And we're seeing decades of losses ahead of us. So some people are just trying to survive, but the others who. Who really have the stam and the privilege. Like, it's not the time to crash out and wait for somebody else to do the [01:04:00] social justice, hard labor of it all. They'll have to, and, yeah, some of it'll be protesting fine.Some of it will be civil de disobedience. Fine. Some of it will be, it'll have to come in a lot of forms and we don't all have to do the same thing. Not everyone can be a general, not everyone can be a pilot. Right. But but yeah, it's, going to take a profound in a different way of thinking of how we do things.Again, it will come down to do you really believe, what is the story that you believe in America and what are you willing to do to make that a reality? Instead of yes, just sitting, on the internet or just. Doom scrolling. And people are doing the work. People are doing the work and have been, and have been on the grounds.Again, being in Washington seeing neighborhoods rising up against ice actively driving folks out using lawsuits, lose, using whatever levers of power that they have. So it's the work, A lot of that work is being done. And I think that there's room for, or ace necessity for putting more of those stories out there.'cause a lot of the stories out there are about how terrible things are, what the Trump administration has done. What they're doing is not to say that that's not important, but like there are stories of people who are fighting back and who are doing what they can to protect the marginalized. So.And just examples from history and from around the world, like we need hope as well. We definitely, at the very least, need to see examples, embodied examples. Even well credit where credit is due if I'm, I'm remembering correctly Epstein list. The. Accusers, having very real, real fears of retribution and being sued into oblivion if they speak.But I believe, and you may [01:06:00] correct me if, is it Marjorie Taylor Green and Thomas Massey maybe being willing to use their powers of, of speaking on the floor, basically like finding like a loophole in some of the procedural protocols to be able to still get that information out there. Yes, these are Republicans.I do not. Eh, eh, But it was not even just a Republican. These are just people who I, but credit where credit is due. It's like, all right, they're being creative. This is what resistance could look like. Yeah. So, so yeah, I just am very I. It's going to, it's going to have some uncomfortable conversations.What do we do with the Marjorie Taylor Greene, who all of a sudden is kind of criticizing Trump or saying the right things about Gaza? Now what do we do with figures like that who are like, oh, are they turning the page? Are they turning the corner? Or are, could they be allies on this issue? I don't know.A lot of people will recoil at that, but these are the really difficult really difficult questions when you're also looking at like, okay, where does hope like come from?SHEFFIELD: Yeah, Lot. There are lots of questions that need to be asked for sure. And we'll keep asking them. Well, so we're just over an hour here in the recording here.So I try to we could do this a lot longer, obviously, clearly but we don't want to do that to the audience. So, but for people who want to keep up with your stuff, Karen what are your recommendations for them?ATTIAH: Sure. You can also follow me on substack at karenattiah.substack.com. And my substack is called The Golden Hour. And I'm on all the social media platforms. First name Karen, last name Atiya. And for those of you who are interested in taking my class on race, media and international affairs, I will be hosting a [01:08:00] fall session beginning October 6th and October 8th.So you'll be able to see me lecture and see me do my thing and be with a merry band of resistant students who are coming to. And we, we talk a lot about these very issues that we discussed today, right? When it comes to learning from history and how media has both helped and hurt resistance movements.And it's just a good time. It's a great group of people. So would love to have folks sign up and come be in school with me.SHEFFIELD: All right. Sounds good. All right. Thanks for being here.ATTIAH: Thanks, Matthew. I appreciate it.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today.I appreciate you joining us for the conversation. If you want to get more, you can go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes, and we also have paid and free subscriptions as well. If you want to support the show and stay in touch, that would be great. We have an option on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/discoverflux and you can go to flux.community for the Substack option as well. And if you're watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button to get notified whenever we post a new episode. That would be awesome. Stay in touch. I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode Summary I don't get to do a lot of ancient history episodes on this show, but I always love it when I get the chance, and that's because history is a mirror of the present. Not because we judge or even fully understand the people who lived in ancient times, but because they were humans just like we are now.Ancient Egypt has always had a magnetic pull. In ancient times, people were very interested in what the Egyptians were doing, and with good reason. In more recent times, Egypt has developed an aura of mystery, especially for followers of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-day Saint movement.But there’s something even deeper than the hidden tombs and eternal life legends: A lesson of what makes us human, and what justice means.I'm pleased to be joined on this episode by Kara Cooney. She is a professor of Egyptology at the University of California Los Angeles, and she's written a number of interesting books on its history.We’ll be talking about some of the themes in one of these books in particular called The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World. She's also the host of the podcast Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, which will soon be appearing in the Flux podcast feed.The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Theory of Change and Flux are listener supported. We need your help to keep going. Please subscribe to stay in touch!Related Content--Kara’s “Out of Egypt” mini-series--The ancient Greek Skeptic traditions have renewed relevance in an age of misinformation and propaganda--Why pluralism was the biggest Renaissance invention--Inside the demon-haunted world of Christian fundamentalism--The desire to submit to authority is as old as humanity itself 🔒--Susan Sontag’s essay, “Against Interpretation”Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction04:40 — Ancient Egyptians were regular people, even though it's easy to forget14:11 — A brief overview of ancient Egyptian history20:35 — The Exodus narrative and historical evidence28:33 — The fall of civilizations and modern parallels32:11 — Mormonism's Book of Abraham and Egyptian lore38:53 — Religious neo-orthodoxy and Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation"45:08 — Akhenaten's religious revolution52:16 — The Ma'at goddess and wisdom traditions01:02:17 — Universal human understanding of fairness01:05:55 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: It's great to have you, but for people who don't know you, Kara, tell us give us a little background on some of the research that you've done. What do you do in Egyptology?KARA COONEY: I've been in the field now for 30 years, which is terrifying, but I started my PhD work in 1994. So there we are. My work started with Social competition and rich people competing with each other. And I did that through the lens of coffin research. So I will forever be associated with coffins and I call myself ‘Coffin Girl’ sometimes, which is strange.But, it's amazing what you can learn from a coffin as a social document. And that's been the gift that keeps on giving because I now am embedded in coffin reuse research. So I look at how rich people would take other rich dead people out of their coffins, and they might have been related to them, they might not have been, but they will reuse those coffins for—SHEFFIELD: Oh my God.COONEY: —freshly rich dead people. And it's very much associated with collapse and crisis and ripping up social contracts and, drought and collapse, which I think are very much on the mines. Of people today. And so that work on coffin reuse has been very topical and helped me to see what we're going through, what it means, how long such collapses last, when they're the worst, things like that.[00:04:00] And then the more—I won't say it's happy and fuzzy because it's not—but the more popular side of my work is on women in power. I teach a very popular class at UCLA called Women in Power in the Ancient World. And that has driven me to work on a number of books. One on Hatshepsut, another on six queens of the ancient world, five of whom became king.And then I'm working on a book about Nefertiti right now, which is damn is it hard to get through all of that scholarship and try to determine what my story shall be. I feel the weight of that book as I'm working on it now. So that's me in a nutshell.Ancient Egyptians were regular people, even though it's easy to forgetSHEFFIELD: Okay. And then, so all, if you could also talk about just like some of the challenges that are kind of unique about studying Egyptian history compared to some of the more well,COONEY: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Longer known historical please.COONEY: There, there are so many I, shall start with the over idealizing of Ancient Egypt. By us, by them, by everyone. It's a place that Herodotus said was more religious than any other, that the Egyptians were more religious than any other people. It's a place that perfected political propaganda through religious means.And because of that, we're, it's hard for us to then pull the veil aside and see authoritarianism instead of religious belief and freedom of religion and or to see a more cynical, brutal patriarchal taking rather than a fatherly guidance. And that is indeed why I wrote the book, the Good Kings, which annoyed many of my colleagues.But that book is about how we egyptologists and really the public at large, particularly in the western world, since the discovery of Alman and before that, since [00:06:00] Napoleon entered Egypt and created the description on do we really feel like we, we are connected to these people. But to have me come along and then say, you're drinking the Kool-Aid, you're becoming an apologist for these ancient kings.It's, a problem. So, I am exposing something. That is our positivism of this history at the same time, then what do you do? This is what people will say. Students will say it to me. Other colleagues will say, well, we have all of this documentation, we have these written records. How do you then parse them if what you've been given is not necessarily something that you can trust?and I say to that, well, what do you do with the Romans when they give you, you know that they're lying to you half the time? You know that every speech that somebody is giving, whether it's Mark Antony, or Cicero, has an alternative agenda. So how do you deal with that? And we need to deal with the Egyptians more in that way, but not with the politics we understand in our gut, but with a religious politics that really tries to transcend any sort of worldly grappling.And I think that's been something that I'm very much drawn to working through. But it's not easy. It's not easy to do. It demands a lot of hypothesizing from me, which means. Other scholars are like, well, now you're just making stuff up. And I have to say, well, what do you think you're going to get from King Kim Jong-Un's regime?what do you think you're going to get from a closed authoritarian regime where things happen seriously in a back smoky incense filled room? What do you, how are you going to solve this? And so that has been the really, the purpose of my career, revealing power that does not want to be revealed in a way that breaks many of the rules of scholarly training.And I, take joy in doing that. So,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And let's talk about this a little bit more though, because, I, I think an [00:08:00] unsophisticated critique of what you're doing, Kara, is that you're engaging in presentism, but in fact, not what you're doing.COONEY: No, it's not. no. I've been, accused of being universalist. And one, it was a very important book review written by Christina Riggs in the Times Literary Supplement of my first popular book on Hot. She, and she even quotes the scene that made her think that I was being universalist, where I talk about Hatshepsut's birth of her daughter.And, I made it a human visceral experience. And I talked about the blood and the shit and the screams and what any birth is like. And tried to imagine hot shep's, it's emotional state when she gave birth to a girl. I can't know any of these things. I say in the text that I don't know any of these things, but I was accused of being universalist, which you take to heart because it means that you're imposing your own scholarly ideals on or present way of living upon the ancient world.And what it instead I am trying to do is to un-fetishize The ancient Egyptians have been wholly separated from us as these people, as Zhi Haas would say. The, most famous egyptologists right now are people of magic and mystery. And, if you're a people of magic and mystery, then you've set them aside and you, don't treat them as we are. They are somehow different.And we do this with the ancient world quite a bit, but particularly with the ancient world, we feel less connected to. We particularize them. We, make the work about that particularism and we demand it. We say that, oh, you can't compare this and that because this is within this space.And these people were of their time and thinking of their time. And then I come up around and say. No, I can use the word harem. I understand it's an oriental imposition. I understand it was created by the Ottoman regime to explain their collection of young women for one man and the intensification of his birth [00:10:00] regime.But I think that the ancient Egyptians had a similar system. Was it different in particularities? Yes. Should I compare it? Yes. Because the same thing is happening to women in both places. and I'm going to take it further because I have a book contracted with Rutledge that I'll be working on later in 2026.That will compare all of these harems to what Epstein created to a, serial monogamy of Donald Trump going from one woman to another to this idea that, or Elon Musk gives us a great example too, right? Where he is creating all of these children, with different women and it is a kind of harem in a sense, and they present their masculine power in late stage patriarchy in that way. I think all of these things can and should be compared.And one of my main points when people accuse me of Presentism is to say that we are them and they are us. That they gave us this patriarchal system. They help create it. There are some of the primary foundational creators of it. We are, it's last recipients. Is it more complicated? Do we have computers now and phones we carry around in our hands, yes, but it's the same system, and if people reject that and think that they have this modern exceptionalism, one would hope that COVID would school them on that one would hope that the difficulties that we're dealing with right now in terms of women's rights and freedoms and, job security and payment would school people on that.But it doesn't, one would think that the way we treat the foreigner, the, nation state boundaries, I mean the, all of these things are in the ancient records. You could compare the Book of Exodus to ice kidnappings and, people saying, oh, they will replace us and white supremacy. There's too many of them, so let's move them aside.And, other people are saying, we need to return to our place of origin. I mean, it's all, there is what I'm saying. The ancient world gave us all of the stories, and we can learn from the past to deal with the extraordinary problems that we're going through. They're not [00:12:00] different. They're not separate. That's, my main point.SHEFFIELD: Other thing is that, saying that ancient people had the same emotions and many of the same social structures or biological needs, it's saying that they were human. That's what it is.COONEY: Yes, it's, that's what it's saying and people, their heads explode. They're like, how dare you? I'm like, so I can't say Egyptians are human. I can't say ancient people are human. That's what they're saying. Yeah. They had shorter lifespans. Yeah. They had diseases we don't have, but I think we're going back to those shorter lifespans in those diseases that we used to not have, and maybe it's time to learn from those things too.SHEFFIELD: And you can see a lot of the mentality, in with regard to diseases or, medicine, with a lot of people's approaches to COVID or vaccines, like they have a genuine mystical worldview of health that it is a spiritual thing rather than a, medical or scientificCOONEY: Interestingly,SHEFFIELD: so it's fair to say, to draw theseCOONEY: It is, but Well, but you're, saying that we don't have that spiritual worldview now, or they knowSHEFFIELD: No, I'm saying someCOONEY: itself. That we do Ah, yes.SHEFFIELD: that some people have it and you can see it, that there's an innate, be, because I mean, the, reality is that, how the brain works or why it works is still a mystery. And so therefore, there's always going to be some inherent there's the, temptation to say, well, there's something magical about us.And then the further back in history you get, the more magical people become. And, this is not helpful.COONEY: No, it's not. And the distrust of the modern medical community, I think is. Real right now for a variety of reasons. That's a different podcast. so it's, it would be good to talk about these things and make ourselves more human and less robotic, less, having to fall into certain parameters.Everyone will lose weight by following this diet or that diet. It's, we're, we need, by looking at the ancient [00:14:00] people as people, I think we can find our own, humanity better that I think we've lost in the modern age, that of the last a hundred years that we have lived through.A brief overview of ancient Egyptian historySHEFFIELD: I think that's a fair point. Yeah. Well, okay, so for people who haven't really read much Egyptian history, tell us, the, major periods here for, so for people, I just want to give them a quick overview so they can have some reference point in what we're talking about here.COONEY: Yeah. We're talking about a land that became the first regional state on the globe about 5,000 years ago, so around 3000 BCE Before Current Era. You can still use BC if you like. I don't really care. They're all arbitrary times. We saw Egypt coalesce into a centralized state with one man ruling it one and that became the first dynasty.You have a proto dynasties before that. You have a pre dynastic. It's a long history before it's complicated. But where I start and where my work starts is really with the centralization of power and with that creation of patriarchal structures in a state capacity. However you define the state, that's also super interesting question to ask because it changes through time.And then you go from that early dynastic period to what we know is the old kingdom, the, time period when the pyramids were built. Third pyramid, third dynasty of the step pyramid built by Djoser fourth dynasty. You have Khufu building the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau, old Kingdom Falls. And you have the First Intermediate Period, which is the first time of civil war crisis collapse economically, socially, environmentally.That then re coalesces in a bigger form. Every time it collapses, it becomes more complicated as it re coalesces. You could argue that's a truth for all of humans on the planet until now. We can, get to that. But you have the Middle Kingdom, then as Egyptologists call it, dynasties 11, [00:16:00] 12 and 13.Those that involves kings Senusret III, the third, that might be the, big shot of, that set of dynasties that falls apart with the second intermediate period, which is known as a time of foreign occupation.And that's when the Hyksos come in. So be like 16th century, 17th, 16th century BCE. There was then a coalescing of power in the, what we call the New Kingdom that took its shape in the military expulsion of a group of people called the Hyksos. And they'd set that up, these Theban kings of the 17th and 18th dynasties as a freedom expulsion, a way of making Egypt great again and bringing native power back to Egypt.Yeah. And, then you're in the New Kingdom, which is really a period that most people know. Like even, the people listening to your podcast will be like, oh yeah, I've heard of Thutmose III, I've heard of Hatshepsut, maybe who, ruled with and alongside him I've heard of Ramses the Great, Ramses II, right, of the 19th Dynasty. There, there are known Akhenaten in between right late 18th Dynasty, the man that arguably invented monotheism. His great hymn finds its way into the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible, which is pretty cool. And when the New Kingdom falls apart, you have what's called the Bronze Age collapse, which is very much in the zeitgeist.I think. Eric Klein's book on, on 10 77 BC and the year Civilization collapsed, I think is, important for many people and. That's a period that I really spend a lot of time in. That's where the coffin reuse data is that, that I work on so much. And this 20th to 21st dynasty collapse of society is I feel it. I see it.and I'm always telling my grad students, and anyone who will listen like your listeners, to not try to solve 20th Dynasty problems with 19th Dynasty solutions. So make sure that you're not using an old way to try to deal with [00:18:00] something that is being swept away. These, our systems are crumbling and, they will be replaced by us as we create workarounds and, are exploited and decide not to be exploited.it's a whole thing. but the Bronze Age Collapse is a place that I dwell a lot, and then after that Third Intermediate Period, that's what we call that, that time after the Bronze Age Collapse, you have what's called the late period. You have the 25th Dynasty. When the Nubian Kushite rulers come in and rule Egypt for 100 years. And then 26 Dynasty, which is a puppet of the Assyrians who came in and had sacked Egypt.And from that point on, Egypt is very much a, in the control of one empire or another. And you can list those empires off. So you have the Assyrians came in and sacked, and then you get, before it was the Cushite, then the Assyrians.Then, you have a brief foray with the Babylonians. The Persians come in and occupy and set up Atropy, and, they're driven out by Alexander the Great. You have the Ptolemys, it is its own occupation in a sense, and of Macedonian rule.And then after that you have the Romans, and then after that you have Islam, right? There's the Arabians. And, it arguably still continues to some extent to this day by Saudi and UAE, but that's, the history of Egypt in a nutshell.SHEFFIELD: It is. Yes. Very, a very quick tour there. I like it. Yeah, so, and one of the, things. It is interesting though about Egypt as a historical influence is that because the language was not read in the modern era for so long and not read in the medieval era, and that, a lot of people were not aware of just how much influence that it had.And, you can see that that because of that language gap, so many of the popular terms Hyksos itself is a Greek word and like a lot of the pharaohs that, or that people know [00:20:00] of, or like Memphis, that's not the word for it. And, and like, so, so many of our, of of what we think were Egyptian words or names, they're not. And they were known through the Ptolemys primarily.COONEY: I mean those, yeah, those colonial occupiers, those empires that took them over either the Greeks or the Romans. You're exactly right. And that's why, we used Thutmosa, or Thutmoses instead of Djehutymose, right? And if I started writing about Djehutymose III, I think people's heads would rather explode. So I try not to do that.The Exodus narrative and historical evidenceSHEFFIELD: yeah. But at the same time, a lot of cultures also want to insist that they have these links. So, and like we can see that obviously with the Exodus story. And, to this day, I mean, and, there's no record that there were Hebrews in large numbers in Egypt as a population. It didn't seem to have happened--COONEY: Oh, I opinion on that. I have a--SHEFFIELD: I want to, yeah. Well, and I to hear it, like, and like, but, and then, and, but of course the identity of who the Hyksos were, that is kind of one of the, big debates. So, maybe if you can talk, give us some context on that.COONEY: The Egypt is right next to the Levant, the Sinai, pop over, and you're, there. The East Delta is filled with people who have Levantine connections and it always was. And can't be today because there's these big state created blockades and, borders and other things that keep people apart, right.The Gaza border at Rafa being a case in point, but. In the ancient world, you didn't ha you had guarded, manned towers and fortifications and such. But you people, me went back and forth across these borders and you could argue, and that Niv Allon article that you sent me about Seth being Baal, mentions that the Ramesside kings associated themselves [00:22:00] very much with the Levite world were of from the Eastern Delta and, were named Seth, right?Seti the first, his name is the one of Seti or the one of Seth, and he is associated with a Levantine past. He's Egyptianized, that's a scarer word, but we'll, touch that third rail and use that word. Right now he's egyptianized, but he's still bringing in a Levantine self. So the Hebrews being a people that are not noted in any large numbers, that is correct. Right.There are no Israelites being mentioned. The, first mention of Israel is on the Meesa, and it's him going to them, right? Not them coming to him, but he does talk about bringing live captives back from all of these places. So it, it seems that there's a cultural unification of what it means to be Israelite or Hebrew happening vis-a-vis another place, which my colleague, and UCLA alumna, Danny Candor, describes really well with a comparison to Italian immigrants.Italian immigrants who came over in the 19th and early 20th century to the United States, thought of themselves as an Napolitan or a person from Sicily, or a person from Abru, abso, or something like that. When they came to the United States, then they were Italian. Right, and you have this centralization of what it means to be Italian.You could argue that Egypt created that for the Levantine person of the highlands at least, and created this idea of a Judean or Israelite ethnic or cultural identity that then helps to, place them within their own cultural milieu. But it is created vis-a-vis another. It's Egypt that's the grindstone that sharpens that ethnic identity.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well,COONEY: there were tons of Levite people in short, so there, there were, they were there and they're named. And, but this, is a [00:24:00] story of, them then leaving, right? So it's a, and that story being of the state being diminished and that's also there. It's happening in real time.The Bronze Age, col, it's in the Bronze Age Collapse. Egypt is being diminished. Its army is literally being swallowed. In a sense. Pharaoh is making boneheaded decisions that no one can figure out. People are trying to square why this is happening in their minds. How could the greatest state of the ancient world collapse like this?It has to be something supernatural. This is a way of understanding that Bronze Age collapse.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, that's why, the, Exodus narrative, it is important as a, anthropological self story. But you know, it's, and I, think for people that, they might have of a sort of, they might have a more secular interpretation of the Bible, and they're saying, well, these stories are probably not true.But, the, you guys actually know that that, there wasn't a large people that suddenly left. There were these plagues, like they're not documented. And, but it doesn't mean that there weren't Canaanites.COONEY: But there, the plagues are, I mean, from my perspective, the plagues are a way of explaining the diminishment of Egypt. And Egypt was horribly diminished from the 20th into the 21st and 22nd dynasty. So that it's, a, it's analog set of analogies to understand how this worked. And in the, you could also argue, and there does seem to be push-back against people from the Levant.There are some texts that talk about a distrust of people from the Levant of people with Semitic names of people that they don't [00:26:00] necessarily want there anymore. And there is evidence that when Egypt is thus diminished, that a lot of people go on the move and leave and go to other places, maybe return to a homeland that, serve them better. They still have connections with, so there's to say, oh, we know it's not true. I wouldn't say that. I think it's absolutely true in describing a larger human process, but within a moment, a story creates a moment.But we're talking about a process that took two, 300 years. So if you look at it from that perspective, it's, allSHEFFIELD: Well, yeah. But going back to what you were saying about we don't really fully know the motivations or the, veracity of anything these people say. That's what you have to think about with this story as well, because that. It means that there may, that there was something, there were periods where people were moving in and out in large numbers of Egypt.And so, there might be something there, and this may be multiple stories combined into one.so like the hio obviously, where's the second intermediate period? And you're talking about the third. So, like, and that's the, that is the, problem of historical documentation in the ancient world is that everybody has their own agenda.The, knowledge of what was happening was so imperfect much more worse than now. And we'll talk about Mormonism in a second, when I was growing up as a fundamentalist Mormon, I would always hear people say, oh, there's always so many, so much more disasters and famines.Now this is a sign that Jesus is coming back. And eventually as I got more aware of the world and technology, I would say, well, how do we know that's just not us becoming more aware of things that were always there. And they would say, well, don't talk about that, Matt.COONEY: I mean, but, and don't get me wrong, Egyptologists right now do not touch the Exodus. They don't want to, by and large, they don't want to think of it as a story that has kernels of truth in it, [00:28:00] because we are still a product of the modern secular world view. And that the person who tries to prove the Exodus as a historical truth is like seen of as a 1920s William Flinders Petrie type, and we're not going to do that.and so we now avoid connecting these stories to truth. Not every Egyptologist does that, but it's not something that people who study the third intermediate period in the Bronze Age collapse or not necessarily using the Exodus as a historical source.SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah. And,COONEY: an impression.The fall of civilizations and modern parallelsCOONEY: It's like, how could it happen? People are like, how could this happen? How could Egypt fall? How could it happen? And that's, what the story is also trying to answer. And we're discussing the same thing in places like the United States or Britain. It's like, how could this state with so much power and so much money, how could it fall?How could everyone make these boneheaded decisions? Well, we're watching it in real time and we are also writing our own stories about how it could happen. Bringing a supernatural answer to the question, I think it, it helps people to understand what's going on better.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and yeah, and it was, I mean, it's a, it is a natural thing to do,COONEY: Yeah, it is. Certainly is. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: But going back to this idea of, trying to oneself or one's ideas in the ancient past, because that is a natural human tendency to think. And, we see it now, with people saying, oh, well, my, scam medicine that I'm selling, ivermectin or whatever, that it's, it, was sold in the, in, it, comes from ancient China, or ancient India, or, like, so this idea that things that are old are more true, this is a very pervasive narrative.when, and, it's a, it is dangerous because it, the, entire f. Achievement of society is to have done things that are not natural. Like medicine is not natural. Like having having living in a city and having sanitation, these are [00:30:00] unnatural things. So that's not a good argumentagainst ipsoCOONEY: know because I read just recently about, I can't remember if it was a gorilla or a chimpanzee, but I think it was a gorilla who was, had a, skin infection and used a leaf of a plant and rubbed it on themselves. And that was to heal the infection. And they knew what plant to use and it was a repeated thing.And so it's pretty damn natural for a gorilla to go out and find a, tree leaf or a plant leaf, put it on an A wound and try to do something with it. We are still, this is the other thing what's natural. We are natural, we are products of this world which makes the computers we work with a product of this world too.So a lot of these separations we make between natural and unnatural are also hugely problematic. But yes. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, well, and that is my point, that our reason and our faculties and our cooperation, those are natural things. And so when we, make a medicine like a COVID vaccine or something like that, these are natural products. And so, and they're not any less natural than somebody who has a poultice that, know, that there, that some ancient tribe had discovered was effective on a certain malady, like are all natural.COONEY: Yeah. I think you're right that this idea of natural versus unnatural is brought in when really it's about restriction and boundaries of the one that you have to buy or you have to have a PhD to know how to make, or you have to work in a lab or the poultice that you can grab from a tree and get an essential oil and put on and do by yourself at home.And so there's also a, social liberation in involved with this, that becomes that much more challenging for people who are in the halls of power saying, well, no, you can't do this, you can't do that. Which is why ivermectin took off, right? Because people are like, well, I can get this, I can get this myself.It's meant for animals. It's, I mean, I can order off of Amazon or whatever. And they did. As opposed to the COVID shots, which were very hard to get at the beginning, if you remember. And people didn't know what was in them and who made them and what, there was a lot ofSHEFFIELD: And they didn't explain it[00:32:00]COONEY: no, they didn't.They really didn't. There's a reason that we distrust our, medical community, and I think that needs to be discussed by them internally. But but yeah. I see your, point.Mormonism's Book of Abraham and Egyptian loreSHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, so, but in, so, the idea though, that, again, like people trying to root their culture or their religion within Egypt. And Mormonism obviously is the best example of this that, so, so for, just as a review for people who are not, super famili fresh on this stuff that, so Mormonism, in addition to the Book of Mormon that is more famous, that they have, they have a couple of other smaller books, one of which is called the Book of Abraham.And that book was said to be a translation of some papyri that Joseph Smith bought from a guy who had, long chain of custody. Somebody had stolen it in one of Napoleon's soldiers had stolen it out of a grave in Egypt and was selling stuff or giving it away as they got back. And, and eventually he came into the hands of the Mormons.And, Joseph Smith said that these papyri, he had translated them and that they were the literal writings of Abraham. And that he had some other ones that were the writings of Joseph from the Bible as well. And that. That's, for me as somebody who wa was a very fundamentalist Mormon, it gave Mormonism a magical truth to me.And I took a college class and in Egyptology and I was so excited that the professor, I knew he, that he was going to talk about the Book of Abraham. And then about halfway through the course, I realized, oh, he's not going to talk because he doesn't and like, this is, this Mormonism trying to, has since then, trying the, now we have the papyri, and they're examined they areCOONEY: It's a book of breathing. it's a late Roman period. Book of the Dead, So, Or maybe not Roman [00:34:00] Greco Roman. I'm not sure of the date, but it's late. It's late later than what I work with.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is Ptolemaic for sure. And and, but at the same time, Mormons have been trying to. Try to come up with any possible alternative reading of these documents. And it's, something that every Egyptologist, it's, always there in the background, isn't it?COONEY: It is. And I will say that many people are attracted to Egypt and have been attracted to Egypt. So you can think of Cambyses and the story of him losing his army as he goes to Siwa to try to talk to the oracle. And you can think of Julius Caesar stationing his regiments in Alexandria, and that's where he meets Cleopatra. You can think of Mark Antony as he tries to become the next Alexander the Great. Egypt is a feather in his cap, and it's gotta be one, one step on a long journey to becoming king of the world, literally.And so Egypt seduced many. Egypt has this, and that's what my book The Good Kings, is partly about too, that Egypt has this power to make people think if they get a hold on this, if they can grasp it, if they can somehow own a part of it, that their power will thereby be enhanced.And I think Joseph Smith was, it worked for Napoleon until it didn't. It worked for the British Empire, and they still have many beautiful things in their museum. The Louvre is one of the most in Paris is one of the most amazing exhibition spaces of Egyptian objects in the world. So colonial powers have very much found their ownership of Egypt, their pieces of Egypt to be very important too.So I would put Joseph Smith into that-- into that milieu of time into that white European colonialism because he's just doing what everyone else around him is doing, which is finding ideological power through this antiquity. And he does. He does so and, it works for millions of people and millions of people around the world think that this [00:36:00] ancient Book of the Dead as it had holes in it.So he put in certain things that, that he thought were there rather than what was actually depicted. He misunderstood a scene that shows a man being mummified as a scene of human sacrifice. And there are Mormon Egyptologists who do studies on human sacrifice so that they can, and they can prove that the Egyptians actually did sacrifice that man, that it's not a caretaking of a mummy, it's something else.And. And so right now, it's funny that the modernism, the secularism that drive that Petrie, if you don't know who William Flinders Petrie was, he was essentially an archeologist to prove the Bible true. We went to the Near East, he went to Egypt, he found these ancient cities. He's like, look, the Bible's true. Right?And the last a hundred years, we've had all of these people saying, oh my God, look, the Bible's true. Joseph Smith is. he's holding on to, he's created his own Bible. And now you have a bunch of Mormons who have PhDs in Egyptology who are saying, look, the book of Abraham is true.And when you do that, and then you find the real Book of Abraham, you're able to study the actual thing. You have somebody like Robert Ritner write a, an excoriating a series of chapters about why this isn't, a sacrifice and why it's not what Joseph Smith represents. You're painted into a corner and then you can't use secular modernity to get your way out of it.You have to then use ideology or just lie to people. Just lie. Get your PhD. Say: 'I have a PhD from UCLA, I have a PhD from UPenn." And then you go to people and you say: "I have this PhD. Would I lie to you with this PhD I've been given this by the halls of modernity, the halls of secularism? They granted this thing to me. I'm looking at the same documentation. Those people aren't telling you the truth. I am.'And so now it's like a, they're using the same tools of secular modernity and it's, it is in my [00:38:00] opinion, blowing up in people's faces. But it's interesting to see the conversation evolve in that way.it was one tactic that Mormons and high positions of power obviously tried to do because they helped to fund these send them, send these young men out to, and sometimes women out to different universities to get these scholarly, accutrements and then to go out, back to the Mormon fold. That's where they, exist. They bring them back to Brigham Young or they go to Brigham Young, Hawaii or some place, some temple space.And then they become those people who use their secular modernity, little tokens to say, oh no, this is, actually real. It's actually true. And when somebody like me points out, wait, you're lying. Then, I'm, anti-religious freedom, but it's fine.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.Religious neo-orthodoxy and Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation"SHEFFIELD: and, the other thing is that as they've been doing, kind of filtering back they've created what I call Neo Orthodox Mormonism. And we see this also in, with regard to Christian apologetics as well, that essentially, so Susan Sontag had a very famous essay called “Against Interpretation,” which I will put in our show notes for everybody to read.It's an interesting, fascinating essay. And her thesis in the essay is that interpretation is distortion against a text. and it kind of dovetails very nicely actually, Kara, with what you have been saying here. That, so for, her, she says, we, we need to look at literature and, she was doing it in the context of literature, but this makes a hundred percent with regard to all ancient documents because they were all literature, they weren't, they, almost no one was saying they wanted to be a historian or and so, but anyway, so, so for Sontag, when you look at ancient documents or, something that someone else made and you say: 'this is what it really means.' And then you invent your own, version of [00:40:00] it. And that is completely divorced from what they intended. So, in other words, and she traces it with regard to like stoicism trying to reinterpret, various ancient mythologies or the way that, Judaism, evolved to start saying, well, the Bible isn't it wasn't meant to be true.It was really just these metaphorical things and this is what it really means. And the guys who wrote it, ah, they, this is not what they meant. And so, and she's saying, look, you can't do. You need to read ancient documents, how they were intended to be by human beings and what they wanted.And so, and this sort of neo orthodox interpretation of the Book of Abraham is doing the same thing. What they've done is that instead of saying, well, okay, yeah, even though it says in the Book of Abraham that this is, was written by the, by Abraham's own hand, even though it says that, well, it actually wasn't Abraham who wrote that scroll.It was some later Jewish scribes who were just copying it. and they, and and then they've created this other idea that they called a catalyst theory. That Joseph Smith, yes, he got these documents and he thought that they were from Abraham, but God knew that they weren't from him. And, he used the documents in front of Joseph Smith to give him a spiritual interpretation of the Book of And so therefore, there's no conflict, Kara, between the scrolls are just a regular funeral document and the book of Abraham saying all this false history, there's no conflict because it was a catalyst.COONEY: It is extraordinary. I mean, it's almost like you have a spirit guide who's like, no, you're not ready to know that information yet. This is the information you can know, which means it can always change. So it, doesn't, it's a floating narrative that never can be pinned down, but I know Egyptologists who got PhDs in topics [00:42:00] specifically associated with the Book of Abraham, I'm sure to prove it right.as you were thinking when you were a Mormon in, the Egyptian class, you're like, oh, we're going to, you know, I'm going to see how this is right. And these people are people like Kerry Muhlestein, John Gee. They are accepted into the halls of Egyptological power because they're willing to do service.Mormons are really good at service. They roll their sleeves up. They, can do a spreadsheet, they can organize things. Mormons are very good at this. You would agree?SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I credit them for that, yeah.COONEY: Yeah. Yeah. So, you're willing to do service that a lot of people in this dying higher education system can't take on. And so you see them running committees and in important positions of power. With an a priori agenda of using that power to further proselytize and or, and, or maybe proselytization is the wrong thing, but to have power over their, the, Mormon population in their community in whatever way. And--SHEFFIELD: To provide an answer. Yeah. No matter how vague it is. To, sorry. To give a, it's just to give an answer. Like, it's what they say would never be convincing to anyone who is not an LDS Mormon. But this father and son duo, they wrote a paper in which they purported to use Bayesian statistical analysis to prove that the Book of Mormon was true.COONEY: I love that. I love that. They should try it on the Bible. They should do that because it's not going to work. But you know this idea of truth T Capital T truth. You know what, is that? I don't, you were asking me how do you use ancient Egyptian sources? We're never going to find a capital T truth for all of this stuff.You're just pa you're just walking around in the dark, feeling around [00:44:00] trying to get the best understanding of the story that you can. And you're not trying to find capital T truth. They're dead, they're gone. It's about us. We're doing it for us. We're not doing it for them. We're doing it so that we can figure out our place in the world.I'm not telling all the historians in the world to go and make up shit because it doesn't matter because it's all about us. No, we're trying to find what kernels of truth exist in this narrative to help us to muddle through the world that we're in now. So, until we get that trusty time machine to go back and even when you're living in the present day and there's been, an Iraq war run by W. Bush.Do you know why? Do you know who started it? Do you know the mechanisms of it? No. It takes years and years to sort all of that out and there will still be disagreement. Oh, it was because of this. Oh, it was because of that. So even when you live in the actual space and time of where the history is occurring all around you, it doesn't mean that you can parse it out with any capital T truth. We humans are messy. It doesn't exist.Akhenaten's religious revolutionSHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And, but it is nonetheless true that the ancient Egyptian cultures and religious practices and beliefs absolutely did have a lot of in the ancient world. And, you mentioned Akhenaten maybe give us let's come, back to him in that regard.COONEY: Yeah. So we're dealing with the mid 14th century, BCE 1300s. He, ruled for about 17 years. That's the highest reign date that we have for him. He was not the first choice of his father. Amad Tip III, it seems there was another son by the name Thutmose who was preferred. He dies for whatever reason.Maybe there was plague, maybe there wasn't. But this. Akenna-- this man, Ahmenhotep was his name. He was the fourth of the Ahmenhoteps. He becomes king as an adult, not as a child like his father, Ahmenhotep III, not like a [00:46:00] a possible usurper like Thutmose IV, his grandfather. But as a full fledged adult and one who seems to have been steeped in solar religion for whatever reason, in whatever way was he a priest of Atum Re at Heliopolis? Maybe some suspect he had a part to play there.But as soon as he hits the ground as king, he starts running towards this solar theology that his father had already started. But he tries to perfect and propagate to some extent, but really it's more about the perfection of it.He's not interested in a grassroots spreading of the word necessarily. He's interested in a communication of his message and getting that message right, even if it doesn't bring along followers. he wasn't interested in creating followers. He didn't make this a religion that was a happy, fuzzy, inclusive connection to God.The connection was to him and his wife and the royal family. he told people explicitly that he and his wife, but particularly him, were the only ones who understood God. But he was the first one to really sit down with his pen and papyrus, and whether he wrote it himself or he dictated, he's trying to understand what divinity is, how it works, what it sources, and how.One then. Works with it, how it connects to the earth and the solar aspects are, prioritized. He includes the earth and the rain and the other natural elements, but it's very much a naturalistic present moment, philosophy of life and death. But, he, his, creation is definitely still reverberating today.And you could argue that what he created found its way, it certainly found its way into later Egyptian [00:48:00] philosophizing of religion and others who are religious scholars who have written much more on this than I, and much better obviously, Jan Asman eor. Both of them deceased but ha have written amazing things.But he affected how Egypt thought about God and moved them towards a monotheistic way of seeing divinity so that they could write a text like, ray is the face pat is the body, and almond is the, oh, I'm not getting it right. is somehow the spirit of it. But you, put all God into one and they actually say, all Gods are one.And then they, divide how, it works. And it's embarrassing that I can't get it right here. I'll, I could find it. But what he said also made its way into the Psalms. Psalm 104 scholars argue is a phrase for phrase connection to the great hymn of the Aten. and that's Akhenaten’s contribution.there's later Egyptian contributions from wisdom text that find their way into the proverbs and other things. But Egypt is always there in the creation of. Of Biblical wisdom. And biblical wisdom also finds its, or many of its stories, find their origins in ancient near Eastern tropes that go back millennia.Right. So it's, a collection of a, of ancient world material that works for these people called they, who called themselves the Israelites, among other things. But, yeah, Akhenaten is there. He haunts the discourse in a very interesting way. Joseph Smith would've loved him Too bad. he didn't really know about him.SHEFFIELD: He hadn't got to it yet.COONEY: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And just as a just as a little historical or philological note that, he literally changed his name to a—COONEY: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: honorific to other [00:50:00] gods to, of the Aten, the solar disc, which—COONEY: Yeah. AtenSHEFFIELD: Specifically a god—COONEY: He kind of, it's complicated. So, people discuss this, but in his year five, he moves his capital, his capitals were Memphis Helios and Thieves. And he moves to this out in the middle of nowhere place in middle Egypt, very remote and starts a new capital city. And at that point, he changes his name, but he had already given his God the Aten, that is the physical manifestation of the sun in the sky.A set of kingly names, contained in cartes, those long ovals with a little lion at the bottom that signifies the solar circuit. And he also, auten has his names in cartouches. So it's Don Redford who said that. That Anaan lowered the level of divinity and raised the level of kingship. I think it's a reasonable way of looking at it, but it's also, he's somehow taking the humanity away from God by taking the anthropomorphizing out.There's no hawkhead man, God that represents the son anymore, but he's trying to humanize the God in our terms, in terms of rule and, kingship that maintains Maat and things like that. So tho that those elements are, there, it's, not always clear what Okana was trying to do, but because he's changing things throughout his reign, you can tell that he's dissatisfied with some of his first attempts and.And he changes them like the name, he includes the name of the God, Ray Harti and the first attestation of the name he creates, or that is channeled to him or he receives whatever for the Aten. And he's not satisfied with that. He's like, no, the, there is only one. We can't use Ra Harti in here. I can't use the name of the God's shoe, the for light filled air, so I need [00:52:00] something else.And then he removes those elements and he's constantly trying to perfect what it is that he sees as God.SHEFFIELD: Yeah,it was like the a theologian very clearly I think we couldCOONEY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. Very muchThe Ma'at goddess and wisdom traditionsSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, now you mentioned Maat, that was, that's something I, is another big influence culture. I think and, one, but one that's not as nearly well known. Like people, I think a lot of people have some idea about Akhenaten, and monotheism.But Maat is much less famous. But even though to the Egyptians, that principle and the goddess who represented it—they were central. Tell us about Maat.COONEY: Maat is balance, truth, justice. We even have a hard time defining it. Ask five Egyptologists what Maat is and you will certainly get five different answers. And it's not something that you can easily pin down. And I think it's purposefully so, right? When you ask somebody what's justice, it's, not going to be easy to, it's like, well, what's right?Well, what's right for whom? In, in what circumstance? When you say law and order to a white CEO of a rich company, he's going to be like, yes, law and order. I like that. When you say law and order to a disenfranchised black person in East Baltimore, they're going to have a very different perspective of what law and order means to them, right?I think I have the same hesitations with Maat. I, understand that she's there as a divinity an element of that needs to exist. We need balance in the world. you don't want to have everything imbalanced and even, the more we learn about quantum mechanics or, [00:54:00] and I'm no specialist in physics, but you see that things are out balance and they try to come back into balance, right? Out balance, but then they need to come back into balance and there's this constant attempt to, find some sort of balance.That is something that a society needs. You can't have people running around lawless. However, when you have the concept of Maat and it, I'm not exactly clear on when it, this word was first written down.I would suspect the pyramid texts 2,400 BCE, but may find a verbal origin before that. But I suspect the concept of Maat is much older. I can't prove it. but let's say that it goes back to 4,000, 5,000 BCE, that there was this word, right? But when you create an unequal social system in which a few men are able to hoard and exploit and control a massive population, and contain them as shareholders and take, a massive pro part of their proceeds and just have the, this.I mean, Egypt is a top down society. Egypt is a still is. But in the ancient world, we think of it as this, as the top down society par excellence, the king gets what he wants and everyone bows down in gravels, right? It's that idea of a God king. As soon as you create that social inequality, and this would be around 3000 BCE, 3,500 BCE took some time for that to develop, right?But then you have to co-op the idea of Maat and, here's where I'm conflicted about the term, because I think our neurological human brain implicitly understands what balance and fairness means.SHEFFIELD: Animals have that.COONEY: Yes, exactly. Like if they've proven that if you take some snacks and you give it to a bunch of birds or, a bunch of chimpanzees and you give one a whole bunch to one and nothing to the others, they'll freak [00:56:00] out. It's not fair, it's not right. And when you're feeding the ducks, don't you try to like be fair to which ducks are getting what? But anyway, that's, maybe that's my game, but, our neurons understand what Maat is. Our 250,000 year old human brain understands that. But as soon as you develop the agricultural revolution or the domestic revolution, herding or farming, and you develop the social inequality that goes along with that for men, for women, with regards to men, for children with regards to adults for the disabled, with regards to the able bodied for the, non-binary sexually regards to the, with regards to the binary who can associate with the binary.As soon as you create that with the agricultural domestic revolution. Maad has to be co-opted. Maad has to be changed. And that's your conundrum. That's why the Egyptians wrote and wrote about it. That's why Y Oman's book is like this damn thick. because he can't figure it out because you're dealing with a concept that is co-opted.Every time a new king takes power, every time an elite man says, I get the big house because I inherited it, And you have to grovel before me because, so we lie to ourselves constantly about what law and order are, and we're constantly confused by it because it doesn't jive with who we are as humans. And that's exactly what I think we're going through right now. We are going through an anti patriarchal revolution. The earth isn't getting bigger. We're not going to be able to have another coalescing into an ever larger, more complex patriarchal scheme that gets more stuff to distribute to the, their lieutenants, because there's no more earth to go around.She's, given all, it's like the giving tree. She's like there as the stump. She's like, what do you want from me? I'm done. And, so given that reality, we either figure out a real Maat, like universal income and like AI is going to help us with that one too. But we're going to either figure out a real income, or we're, or real Maat, or we're going to, we're going [00:58:00] to perish as a human species.And it's a, it's damn, but it's an interesting time to be alive. But Maude is, it's, yeah, I know you're trying to go to the biblical part of it, and ISHEFFIELD: Oh, well, no,COONEY: butSHEFFIELD: It's more, it's bigger than that. But Yeah. I do want to come back to what you're saying though. But yeah, just real quick, like the idea though of, because I mean, Maat, it was both a principle and also a goddess, and there's no certainty as to which came first or whether they were the same regarded as the same exact thing.And it's all very, not undefined. basically it was what you, it was, you believed it when you knew it when you saw it.COONEY: Yeah, I mean, Maa and Maat, when you add a T to something in the Egyptian language, you nominalize it. So you take an adjective that is balanced, right? Something's balanced, something's fair, and then you say It is what is fair. It is what is balanced. You've added the T. And when you add a tea, you're also feminizing.So there's Amun, the God of hiddenness, and then there's is his female counterpart, Ammunet, right? And, so when you take Maa, what is fair, and you add the T, Maat, it is that, which is fair. You can then take a feminine divinity or a feminine avatar, as I know you like that word to encapsulate the concept of what it is. Is she a goddess? There's not any temples built to Maat.She doesn't really do anything. She doesn't have sex with anyone. She's not married to anyone. She doesn't have any sort of divine family. She's more of a concept. She's a concept. She's like a thing, an idea.And, so there, it's, even more complicated. And, Ana uses this word to go back to Ana. He's like, wait, she's, he's asking exactly what you're asking. He's like, is she a goddess? Is she not? And you know what his solution [01:00:00] was? He used the word Maat and would have the little. Figure of the divine woman after it when he first had his text done.And then he is like, no, we can't include the figure of the woman, the figure of the goddess. And he had his chisel bearers go and erase that image of her as a goddess and only keep the phonetics of the word Maa. And so for him, that distinction was very real. He was like, no, we can't have it personified.It's not divinized, it's just an idea. Because all di that is divine is of the Aten. All that is divine is of the sun God for him. So he even, he had some problems with that. But that doesn't mean that the idea of Maat didn't then spread out to other parts of the world and become subsumed into other people's philosophies that are better preserved to us, as you say. And the Egyptian origination texts are not, and so we think of it as, as something that is Greek or Roman or, or something else.SHEFFIELD: Or like Ḥokhmáh as the consort of, God as wisdom. And some, and, even, but even Ḥokhmáh is, she's very, also very ill-defined. In Judaism, in classical Judaism, what is Ḥokhmáh Is she God? Is she a part of God? What is, who the hell is she? No one knows.COONEY: So what is, balance for whom? Because the Egyptians grapple with that too. it's tough. I, think that one of the main problems with, did the Egyptians, I, create the idea of Maat, or truth or justice or whatever that is. I think that any culture, any human being anywhere inherently knows what's fair.And I think we've proven that-- cognitive scientists have proven that, right. But. And so I don't think you need to have a, an idea of fairness than being diffused around the world. However, if that idea of fairness takes a feminine principle and is there depicted as a [01:02:00] goddess, then I would go, Ooh, maybe the Egyptians did have something to say about how this was, how this concept, that concept of the feminine element of fairness was transferred. So that, that's I think where a lot of the main debate goes for the Egyptologists at least.SHEFFIELD:Universal human understanding of fairnessSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And let's, maybe end here by circling back to what you were saying about, just the idea of balance, of justice, of fairness. This is a universal human need and a universal human knowledge. We all know what's right. We all know what's fair. We all know that, the some guy getting up into, like Donald Trump apparently is putting posters of himself in Washington, dc at while having soldiers patrolling the streets.Like everyone knows that these things are wrong. We know it in, in who we are and, our history and in our cognition. And, and, I'm reminded what you were saying earlier, it reminded me of that line from, from WH Auden where he said that:Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police.We must love one another or die.And that's, I think that's, that is the theme kind of that you're, you are reaching toward here. And we were talking about it in our pre-discussion here. But I think that's, I think that's what we're talking about here, is that right.COONEY: Yeah, I think that's beautiful and I think that everything that. These systems have co-opted, whether it's a goddess of great power and strength like Hathor, or Isis, or Kali, or Durga in the Indian system, but Hathor and Isis, of course, Egyptian or Maat these, beautiful things when they're co-opted or in the Mormon situation, right? You take a, a text about re-creation after death and rebirth [01:04:00] also a beautiful concept of how do you deal with death? How do you face that mortality and, find a way through it? When they're co-opted, where some people get it and other people don't. Then it subverts all of it. And I think that these things have gone on long enough where we have all of those apologists saying, no, but let's parse it. Let's interpret it a particular way. It doesn't mean it exactly this, but not that.But really, I think you're right. it comes down to our care for each other and, and where that, authentic balance is to be found because it's not in this social system that we're living in now. It wasn't in the social system of Ramses II, it wasn't in the social system of Akhenaten.It is this constant search that people are trying to find for perfection. It's not in the domesticated sphere of farming or, herding. Those exploit and abuse too many people. What is it? That's what we're all asking. What is it? And that's why we're looking to the past. what did they do? How, did they.Solve this and we need to look further back. A shaman once told me that we need to remember what we have forgotten and forget what we think we know. And that's, kind of everything. So all of the systems that we, oh, we think we know this. Oh, this is how you solve disease. Oh, this is how you deal with psychological distress.Oh, this is how you deal with whatever. We, none of it's working. None of these systems are, working for us, whether it's education, or mental health, or healthcare or retirement accounts that we can go on. How do we care for ourselves and each other going forward? The answers are very different from the system we have now.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And they have to come from inside of all of us. It isn't one person talking or another person listening. It has to be dialogic.COONEY: Yeah.ConclusionSHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, all right, well, I think that's a good place to end it. We could definitely do [01:06:00] this much longer, but I, but well, we'll, we will save that for another time for us.But so, so, you we're going to be including your podcast in the Flux Podcast Network. So tell, us about it so we can look for it here.COONEY: Yeah. I have a podcast called Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, and we host it on a Substack platform. So if you search my name, Kara Cooney on Substack. you can find all of the episodes there, but you can also listen to it on Apple or Spotify or wherever you, listen to your podcasts and it's me with two co-hosts, Jordan Galczynski and Amber Myers, and we talk about everything ancient and try to make a connection to the modern world and why it matters, and what's, I, just made I'm making wine right now because my husband planted a merlott grapevine that's gone gangbusters after four years.And so we just did an episode we just recorded, haven't released an episode on wine making in the ancient world. So that was fun. But whatever we, feel the spirit to talk about, we release probably every two weeks or so. And I'm also on Substack where I just released a screed about my displeasure with how scholars, Egyptological scholars of women in power, have tried to create this positivist narrative of girl bossing and it pisses me off. So I had some things to say about that, and you can find all of that on yeah, on Substack and, wherever you listen to your podcast. So it's called Afterlives of Ancient Egypt.SHEFFIELD: All right. Sounds good. All right. Well, it's been great. Great discussion, Kara. I'm glad we had it.COONEY: Thank you, Matthew. Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you get unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your [01:08:00] support.You can join the show on Patreon or on Substack. We have free options as well. If you want the Patreon option, just go to patreon.com/discover Flux. And then you can subscribe on Substack if you go to Flux Community. So thank you very much for that. If you are able to do so, and if you're watching on YouTube, make sure to click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever we post a new episode or a clip.That would be great as well. All right, so that'll do it for this one. I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode Summary  For many years, non-Americans have assumed that the right-wing extremism that has powered the political career of Donald Trump was just an American phenomenon. But this is simply untrue. Far-right parties have been elected in nations like Italy, Poland and Hungary, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government is a coalition of openly racist and genocidal parties. And for the first time in modern history, far-right political parties are placing first in public opinion surveys in the UK, France, and Germany.These trends aren’t in place in every country, of course, but they do suggest that there is something deeply wrong with left liberalism as practiced in many nations. That’s especially true in the UK where Labour Party prime minister Keir Starmer has been systematically ceding policy ground to reactionaries like Nigel Farage in a way that would make even Chuck Schumer blush.Both Democrats and Labour seem to be operating under the impression that making concessions to the right wing will somehow mollify voters but the voting data keeps showing that this does not work. How has liberalism become so moribund? Is it a misunderstanding of how politics works, simple cowardice, or something deeply pathological about liberalism’s philosophical approach to governance versus politicking?I’d argue that it’s all of these things, and joining me in this episode to discuss is Toby Buckle, he’s host of the Political Philosophy Podcast and columnist who’s written recently about the lingering negative impact of the philosopher John Rawls. We also discuss the concept of “reactionary centrism,” a term that some American progressives have been using to describe people who self-describe as liberal but seem to almost never criticize the radical right. I don’t think it’s an accurate term, even though I agree that it describes something very real.The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content—Democrats won’t be able to defeat Trumpism without constantly telling the public about its awfulness—How far-right Christians replaced Jesus with Nietzsche—JB Pritzker standing up for Chicago and civil rights is the model for Democrats to follow—Politics has become more about psychology than ideology, but the broader left has failed to realize this—Reactionaries will always invent ‘phantom libs’ to be angry at—Republicans treat politics like viral marketing, Democrats do not—Americans want big ideas, but Trump’s opponents aren’t providing themAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction03:48 — John Rawls: A philosopher whose liberalism doesn't work in the 21st century06:18 — Liberalism's unearned sense of victory09:25 — Conservatism has lost its post-WWII memory of why fascism is terrible and stupid18:32 — Immanuel Kant's hollowing out of liberalism25:23 — An introduction to "reactionary centrism" via UK prime minister Keir Starmer37:16 — Isn't reactionary centrism mostly just conservatism?49:44 — Sam Harris and libertarianism masquerading asz liberalism01:00:53 — The bad politics of popularism01:09:47 — Most people vote according to values, not according to policies01:20:08 — Reactionary centrism encompasses conservatism, pathological liberalism, and the amoral01:25:01 — What the positive liberal case looks likeAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Toby Buckle. Hey, Toby, welcome to Theory of Change.TOBY BUCKLE: Hey, Matthew, thanks for having me.SHEFFIELD: Yes, good to have you. Well, so we have a lot to discuss here. I will confess that some of my favorite episodes are the political philosophy episodes. Because, as John Maynard Keynes said, the ideas of dead economists and philosophers animate things much more than people realize.And so--BUCKLE: "Madmen in authority, hearing voices in the air are usually distilling their their fervor from some academic scribbler."SHEFFIELD: Yep, that is right. Yeah. And to that end though, you published two pieces that I think are, worth discussing together. The first one that you came out with was a discussion of [00:04:00] the political philosopher John Rawls, who is somebody who I suspect a lot of people have never heard of. But this guy has a lot of influence on both the UK and the US. So, if you could maybe give a little background for people who aren't familiar with him and then we can go from there.BUCKLE: Yeah, it's an interesting dichotomy isn't it, in that if you are in political theory, he will be talked about as the most important liberal political philosopher of the 20th century.Possibly the most important political philosopher sort of period, certainly of the latter half. And yet it's not a household name, right? Rawls has never had the cut through of a Marx, or Rousseau, or something like that. Crowds have never gathered in the streets, chatting his slogans. He has had something of an influence at the elite level.So I use Obama as an example. Obama has clearly read Rawls and cites him a few times. It's also the type of thinking that would show up in, something like Supreme Court judgments. Something like Planned Parenthood versus Casey is quite Rawlsian in its reasoning. So there's a lot going on with Rawls.And I'm sort of happy to get into whatever particular areas he wrote big books like, like Theory of Justice is a doorstopper, Political Liberalism is a doorstopper. These came out in the late seventies and early nineties respectively, to give you an idea of timeframe. But the idea I really zeroed in on is this idea of neutrality.It's actually not how Rawls himself describes it, but it's how we sort of talk about it now. At its simplest, it's the idea that liberalism or the liberal state should be something like the referee of politics, neutrally, fairly deciding siding [00:06:00] between different players in the game, something like that.And I argued, I think that is a way of understanding liberalism that was always a bit confused, but is particularly maladaptive in the current moment. But there's, a lot of other stuff to Rawls as well.Liberalism's unearned sense of victorySHEFFIELD: This idea of neutrality though that it sees, liberalism as sort of having assumed the default position of all of reasoning and society, science, et cetera, and says, okay, so therefore now that we won our job is to manage this situation.And and to, be the, referee, as you said, between the all, between all the sides and all, the constituencies. And to position ourselves as above, above it all in a lot of ways.BUCKLE: Yeah. So one issue I'd take with that, I'm not saying you are arguing with it, but with that characterization is, yeah, I think that's exactly right.We've won, now everyone's playing the same game, and so now will be the referee. I think that's sort of the thought process of, like I say, elite liberals. This probably wasn't something that, like a proverbial man on the street thought, but elite, Supreme Court justices, right? Yeah. Stevens was huge on neutrality, for instance.The problem with that is he didn't win, like people talk about liberal hegemony or the liberal world order, but what, liberal hegemony, what liberal world order, the American constitutional design is partially liberal, but partially influenced by other philosophies are. Society is partially liberal, but partially conservative, partially reactionary. Liberal and what liberal world order, like if you look at the governments around the world, there's only a handful of liberal [00:08:00] ones.They're mostly conservative author or authoritarian regimes. Like liberalism is one power of amongst many. I don't mean to say it's powerless. We have the ability to get our views out there. We have the ability to wield power. We have the ability to fight, but it's not as if we suddenly reached a point sometime in the nineties or whenever one imagines this to be where liberalism just won.I don't think that sort of. Victory is possible, but yet that is one of the things that this worldview imagines, or perhaps to put it more charitably, it imagines a fundamental pluralism of comprehensive worldviews, but that there can be a point in the middle what Ians call an overlapping consensus on which everyone agrees.The center of the Venn diagram where everyone agrees to the basic rules of the constitutional order and that will be stable and permanent. That's sort of the Rawlsian project, and to a degree through like, like I say, maybe the nineties, the early two thousands, you could kind of look at the world and maybe see that like everyone bought into the same set of rules to an extent, but I think it was always a bit elusory to think that consensus could ever be stable or permanent.You get moments of overlap and then moments where they pull apart again.Conservatism has lost its post-WWII memory of why fascism is terrible and stupidSHEFFIELD: You do. And I think the reason that they had this illusion was that, that the political right after Nazim and fascism basically decided, oh, well we can't support these people because they are violent criminals. And so they stopped supporting them. Like that's ultimately what happened.But the, memory of that was lost over time. And you see that pretty much in every country. The further away [00:10:00] we get from World War II and the historical, personal, literal memory of fascism, the conservative mind seems more willing to to make common cause with it.I think this is what we're seeing here. and the problem for, Rawls and other mid 20th century liberals, people who came of age during that time, is that they mistook something that was a temporary lull, a temporary, temporary break of outbreak of sanity, if you will, among conservatives. They mistook that first for them having changed their psychological state. And I it was fundamentally erroneous, as you said.BUCKLE: I think we, yeah, we no longer have anyone in living memory of World War ii.That has to be part of it. I'd also add a couple of other things. Through, from the 70s through to 2008, you had like a long period of relatively stable and benign macroeconomic conditions, sometimes called the great moderation. You don't have these big swings in inflation and interest rates, for instance.You also have a period starting with, I know Goldwater in 64 or something of the southern strategy in which Republicans increasingly poach the white anti civil rights Southern block. But what that means is that instead of views about race being aligned to party, they cross cut parties. So politicians who want to appeal to racism have to do so in a coded way.They have to use dog whistles like states rights or welfare queens, stuff like this. And I think that allowed an illusion that. We were moving beyond these issues that no one was really a vient racist anymore. Whereas in fact, what it [00:12:00] was, the structures of our political coalitions were acting in such a way that it obfuscated the reality of American racism.Now, what happened through maybe the Obama period is that realignment ends. Everyone in that southern block is now Republican, and anyone who is anti-racist, or at least it's a deal breaker for them, is now Democrat. And so there's no longer that structural incentive to sanitize your language to talking dog whistles.Donald Trump can come along and be as overt as he likes about it, and when Donald Trump first starts saying these things in 2016, there's this shock of, oh, you can't say that because historically you couldn't. There would be consequences. Within the coalition that the Republicans managed. But Trump didn't create that reality, but he revealed it.He revealed a reality in which views on race now directly tied to political partisanship. So, so that's another one. There's a few, but through all of those, the overall picture is the same, which is that for us, our current period feels, it feels disordered and different, well certainly disordered, but in many senses this period of fairly benign nine economic conditions of cultural consensus, of more civilized speech.That was the aberration. That was the weird, unusual bit. So a long way to come back to where you started. I think you're exactly right. I think the sort of type of political culture. We were raised into, feels like the norm to us because we were raised in it. But that's actually the weird bet or the unusual bet.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And the other thing about that, post World War II [00:14:00] dynamic is that because so much of Europe was completely trashed everybody knew that the only entities that could pick up the pieces were the government because the private sector was destroyed. It didn't have the money, it had no power to tax.in many cases, their capacities were literally destroyed. So this was a moment in which it was obvious to pretty much everyone that the government has to step in and we need to not fear it because the government's really the only thing that can help. And that I think, did put, it was the fact though that in the US there wasn't that mass destruction of, the economy that also made it possible more possible for these, reactionary viewpoints to, to have currency.Because people didn't see the need for government. The thing about government, is that it's supposed to be, at least in the mind of liberalism, it's supposed to be there in the background and you never think about it. It's supposed to be a thing that you rely on but don't really understand and you don't have to understand.Like that's the goal of Rawlsian liberalism is to create a state that takes care of you and you don't have to know how or why. And the problem is that's unsustainable as a political matter.BUCKLE: Maybe, although to complicate that story a little, I don't think it's, because I think the story can sometimes be told that like it's just World War II and the aftermath of that, which certainly was a huge part of it.There's, I mean, there, there's also like ideological foundations and sort of the ideas and theories being laid decades in advance of that, of, as early as like the 1910s, the 1920s liberalism is increasingly [00:16:00] reevaluating how it sees the role of the state. It's increasingly reevaluating how it conceptualizes both practically and morally.Questions of poverty, of inequality, And, you get the reform movements of that sort of era. And then, through the thirties and so on, you have the age of canes, you have the age of ideas about a more attractive state, gaining a more, active, sorry, state gaining increasing currency, both in elite circles and also sort of the population.So by the time you come to the end of World War I, there's almost already this blueprint that, economists and elite thinkers have designed about what they want to do with the, new world order. And you get, FDR and all of that. In, the US you get the beverage report in the uk, which really is a sort of fundamental redesign of the society, but it's not something that just came out of nowhere.This was sort of in the intellectual work for decades. And then, ultimate causality is always really hard, right? With these things. Like why did things happen? But then in many ways, when you get the sort of Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, it's sort of the same in reverse. in that the, ideas, the economic theories, the political philosophies that have been gaining salience and have been gaining elite adherence are the conservative or the neoliberal or the libertarian.And then of course that reverses it all. So it, it's a story about material conditions and where we were left. In the aftermath of World War ii. Certainly. It's also just a story from an idealist point of view, right? Not, meaning idealist in the sense of [00:18:00] starry-eyed, but idealist in the sense that ideas matter and change the world in that liberal ideas, socialist ideas even had been making real headway in particularly the interwar years, both among the population, but also crucially, elite capture.And then through the sort of middle of the latter half of the 20th century, a much more conservative or restrictive vision of the state really made headway and captured elites, something like that.Flux is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Immanuel Kant's hollowing out of liberalismSHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think I would agree with that. and, to, just to go back to one of the things you said initially there that, that, this was a time when liberalism, they, it became apparent.That, they were winning the war. And it became apparent to them that also if you didn't want Marxism to win, then you had to make some major concessions to the broader general public. so I think, yeah, these are things that happened. but you know, as part of this liberal imagination phase that was there in the, let's say the, twenties, 1920s through the fifties, let's say.It was a lot of it also was hearkening back to the ideas of Immanuel Kant who was the muse of John Rawls, of course. But in the case of the New World Order that was set up post World War ii, I mean. Very much of it. So much of it was a, an attempt to refound the League of Nations, which itself was born out of the philosophy of Kant and his, his project of creating a political philosophy that was so completely denaturated, if you will, that it was [00:20:00] designed-- like this referee posture that you're talking about. This was Kant. Kant was the one who invented this and said, this is what liberalism needs to be because we keep killing ourselves over religion and over territoriality.And so instead, if we can abstract those things and just sort of put them on the shelf and say, well, liberalism won't touch religion and it won't touch nationalities and culture. That's the ticket to human progress. And in, in, in some ways he was right. But as a political matter this was a disastrous idea.BUCKLE: Do you think there's a connection? So yeah, Rawls is definitely intellectually sort of downstream of Kant. Here's something I've been thinking of, I don't have a great answer to. Do you think there's a connection between this sort of neutral liberalism versus comprehensive debate and like meta ethical questions?because what cant's really known for is a sort of rule-based, absolutely.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.BUCKLE: Right. Whereas, if you take John Stuart Mill, who I contrast Rawls with, he's obviously a famous utilitarian. Now that's not one for one. I can imagine, you could be a deontological comprehensive liberal or a utilitarian neutral liberal, but they do tend to run that way.Do you see those things as connected?SHEFFIELD: Oh, I absolutely do. And, the reason being that, so for Kant, he that for, Mill and the original generation of liberals, what they were trying to do was to create a political philosophy based on human potentiality and to unlock it. And, both to enable the individual to do that, but also to enable the state to, reach aggregate human potential to, [00:22:00] nece necessitate that.And, as an example, I would talk about the book, looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. That, which was, effectively a socialism. Of, of, a Christian sort. but he called it nationalism, which is interesting. And so this was a, it was a somatic liberalism, if you will, it a liberalism that was aware of the body and aware of, Where one comes from phenomenological, if you will. That's the original roots of liberalism and Kant responding to, given where he was as a German. that was the, crossroads of all of these, the bloodiest wars in human history up until that time, when he was alive. And, so he said, well, we can't risk this, idea of human potentiality.And what we have to do instead is to re-articulate liberalism as day ontology. So, day on, meaning duty from the Greek. butBUCKLE: the, yeah, I'm sorry. I probably should have defined that word because that's a bit of a jargon word. If you want to help, do, that for us.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so so d deontology coming from the Greek word dayon, meaning duty is what he wanted to move liberalism toward.And the, but the, horrible paradox is that and this isn't the etymological root of the word, but deontology meaning anti reality, that is actually kind of what t liberalism, Andy and liberalism is. It is a denial of human nature and a denial of the attempt to enable it that earlier liberalism was.And that's fundamentally the reason why liberalism is in such dire straits in the current moment, I would [00:24:00] sayBUCKLE: that's interesting. I mean, I, in none of my public writing on this have really connected it through to meta ethics, but it's worth noting perhaps the both, Rawls and Nozick who were kind of the two philosophers you'd get taught in like an intro to political philosophy 1 0 1 for the longest time, and in many ways were kind of the totems of center-left and center-right thinking for a long time. Rawls, on the one hand you've got fairness, justice, discourse, norms. Nozick, you've got rights, freedom, limited state, right? Both of them start with a rejection of utilitarianism. They both-- Anarchy, State, and Utopia and Theory of Justice-- both start by going, well, obviously utilitarianism is wrong and we're going to distance ourselves from that.And the reasons they do so are quite weak. Like Nozick has this thought experiment about hitting a donkey on the head with a baseball bat and Sure. But it's interesting they both feel the need to start with that. I don't know how much weight I'd put into that. I, because also, that's not a public debate in any, way.People aren't factional about this among the population. But it is interesting to hear you draw that link.An introduction to "reactionary centrism" via UK prime minister Keir StarmerSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, thanks. and I do think that is also this, deontology, this duty based morality. it also is the cause of the, phenomenon that you documented.The other column that we're going to talk about here today. You had, written recently about. How the, about the political ideology or political tactic of what is sometimes called reactionary centrism in the United States.Now, I happen to think that term is a very problematic term [00:26:00] and, confusing, of two people who were on the progressive side of things. But nonetheless, what you said, well, what you said in terms of the implications of it are, very true. So, but before we get into why I think that reactionary centrism is a bad term just if you can give us a little overview of your your argument in the piece about the, idea of never holding the right wing accountable for its actions or trying to.Philosophically oppose them from a moral argument.BUCKLE: Yeah. So there's been a few different accounts of this. I, it's not my term to be fair. yeah, I picked it up from, it's sort of been a, it's quite a recent term. I think it was coined in early Trump era, I believe. but I just sort of picked it up.I must admit quite uncritically. One of the things I've argued is pretty key to understanding divisions amongst people who are not overt Trump supporters is the idea of agency and politics. And I've made this key to my understanding of reactionary centralism, although other people have defined it somewhat differently, but I think we all have roughly the same idea in mind.So agency, do we see the political right Donald Trump as an action or a reaction if we look at, say. Popular dislike of minorities, be it immigrants or say trans people. Do we see that as a backlash to the over zeal of social justice, a reaction or We do. We see it as an action, as a top down propaganda campaign to inspire hatred of those groups.Now, for myself, I'm firmly on the action side. Fascism is an i, a gentle ideology. It has ideas, plans, and goals for the rest of us. Most of, in fact, the [00:28:00] last decade has been liberals responding to things it has done are not the other way round. But nonetheless, there are many people who have a sort of, I guess at its simplest, you could say, a reaction to woke narrative, right?Or a reaction to. Fill in the blank of what you find annoying about liberalism if only liberals hadn't done X and provoked the right. So that's why I like, I, I think that's why I gravitated towards the term reactionary. It's the reaction part that defines them. Now, what it means, if you see the world that way, is that you tend to spend a lot of time asking for empathy for the reactive party.If the writer merely reacting, then well, you've gotta see it from their point of view. Don't you understand? If you were in their shoes, you'd feel the same. And it means we spend very little time at all, maybe none, asking to see it from the point of view of the supposed provoking party. the type of person I'm describing when I say reactionary centurist.Virtually never. We did, really, never would say something like, well, yes, these woke kids on college campuses protesting are a bit annoying. But look, see it from their point of view. Understand the legitimate grievances that are inspiring them to say that they never say that the right cannot be blamed, but it should be understood.The left can be blamed and needent to be understood. That's the basic posture, and I pair that with cent because. I do think amongst this tribe, there is an instinctive conformist predisposition to position themselves in the center. Now, what you might be about to go on to say, and what many people have said, and I've heard from social media today is, but they're not really [00:30:00] centrists.That's more of just a posture, right? Sure, fine. I don't know what's in anyone's soul. And I'm not really claiming to, I would say the center, so I've described the reactionary side, seeing Trump as a reaction, the centralist side. Yeah. A grant is more of an affect. They're not a true centris in that they criticize both sides equally, but they nonetheless like to position themselves as being in the center.They like to present themselves and I think genuinely see themselves as being the grownup in the room. The sensible one, the one adjudicating it and sorting it all out. It's not a to, it's a bit of a different idea, but it's not a totally different idea to this one of neutrality that we've been talking about.It is a bit distinct. they like to be the seen as, I think, see themselves as the reasonable one, but it's not, I don't think. We can maybe disagree, agree on this. It's not a principled centralism. So you could imagine someone who's in the political center because that is just genuinely what they think.Or perhaps someone who has conflicted views. Someone who's socially left and economically right. Say who finds themselves in the middle. By virtue of that, I don't think it's that with reactionary ISTs. because they slide around too much. They argue too many different things. I think it's more like the, they want to be seen as the mature grownup who's in the middle of more.Dogmatic people. I think it's more like that. But anyway, those are the two sides. And why, that's why it connects for me as a term. because both of those sides have a story to them, the reactionary and the, ISTs. But it's been a persistent sort of way of thinking about the world in both the UK and the us.SHEFFIELD: yeah, I [00:32:00] think it has. And but so for people who don't follow UK politics, though, I think, you were, you cite your Prime Minister as a perfect example of this Mentality. Yeah. So for those who aren't following the Americans the, I think you have a, very good case in regards to him.BUCKLE: Was that an invitation to make it?SHEFFIELD: It was, yes. So please do.BUCKLE: Oh, okay. Yeah. So our prime minister's called Keir Starmer. He's the leader of the Labor Party, which I guess is a very rough analog, he is like the Democrats. I'm many center, left party, although the UK party system's a bit more complicated, but we needn't go into that.We've had a long period of conservative rule, I think 14 years. going back to David Cameron's victory in 2010, STAMA came in in. About a year, almost exactly a year ago now. He just passed his year anniversary with quite a significant victory. And this isn't like in the US where there's checks and balances and divided powers.It's essentially like whoever controls the house of the rep representative wins and nothing else matters. Right? So he has a free hand to do what he wants in a way that really no US president has. now he ran as a moderate, I think he was self-consciously course correcting against, Jeremy Corbin, who was the previous Labor Party leader, who was a strongly left figure and who led the party to a couple of general election defeats in 2017 and 2019.And so I was, we were all always expecting a moderate, nobody. Like maybe like a Tony Bla or Bill Clinton type figure, right? Like nobody expected this guy to be [00:34:00] like a Bernie Sanders or whatever. What's really become clear since then is the two instincts I described, that the right must be understood and appeased and that you try and find a position in the middle.Now, over the last year, our right on a number of issues have really fricking radicalized as is happening in many places, right? And Stama has moved in that attempt to find a middle ground wildly to the right, much more so than even any of your more centris democrats have. So on, like, to give you just one example, we're now in the process of doing a bathroom bill in the uk, excluding all trans people from all gendered spaces.So. In other words, not only can a trans women not use the women's toilets, they also under the, I think, a plausible reading of the new E-E-H-R-C guidance. Can't use the men's either, so just can't leave the house effectively. That is a very, radical proposition that is not just well to the right of star's, previous commitments.It's well to the right of previous conservative governments commitments. It's well to the right of many us not just Democrats, but many US Republicans. He's also swinging to the right on immigration. And at every stage doing this reactionary centris thing of saying, look, I get it. I understand. I see it from your point of view, which is what reactionary ISTs tell us you're supposed to say to the right.So he said recently, someone asked him the question, how would you feel if your daughter had to walk past a hotel? Housing refugees, asylum [00:36:00] seekers, which is obviously playing on this idea that non-white men are a threat to white women. Right. That's what the question's implying to which he said, and I quote directly.I get it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. As of today, we're going to do anything to her. Yeah.BUCKLE: yeah. Yeah. There presenceSHEFFIELD: isBUCKLE: a crime. Easy answer on the table for him, that's your chance to draw a more red line without having to, without having to be, I'm not even saying he needs to be like a radical socialist or anything.It would be nice, but I think what he could have just said there is absolutely, I would feel fine with my daughter walking past refugees. Of course. Now, that's not to say there's not problems with the current system. There's a huge backlog of asylum cases and it's inefficient. And we handed a mess from the past government and I under, and people are concerned about their taxpayer money being spent on this and they understand all of that.But let's not validate those really ugly fears. You could have said, listen, I understand there's practical concerns, but it was such a perfect opportunity for him to draw a model red line and he wouldn't.Isn't reactionary centrism mostly just conservatism?SHEFFIELD: No, he wouldn't. But, and this, it gets to the why I do think the term reactionary centrism is, misleading and inaccurate.And that is because it's actually masking two different philosophies or perspectives. and, it's, eliding them. So the, first perspective is conservatism. Like the, so many people in the us, UK and many other countries will self-identify as liberal, but in fact they are conservative.And we've seen that with, so many people that, when, Joe Biden was the president, they were, people like [00:38:00] Tulsi Gabbard or people like Joe Rogan. there, there's just a lot, so many of these individuals who, when, before Trump. looked, he was able to execute his comeback.They were self-identifying as, oh, I'm on the left. I'm on the left. But if you looked at their philosophical commitments, their policy viewpoints, their epistemic origins, nothing they believed was liberal. They were in fact conservative the entire time they were libertarian. if you want to be generous to these viewpoints, like Barry, Wise is another one that this is a person who, for her entire career has pre, has pretended, oh, I'm a liberal, I just don't like the left.And it's like, well then. Then in what way are you a liberal? Tell me how you are a liberal. So, so it masks, so I would say the majority of these people who are described as reactionary centrist are actually conservatives. and the, improper elision of conservatives into liberalism makes it so that they spend their energies fighting the left.Rather than fighting the crazy lunatics in their own side and the people who agree with them. And so, because they're just like, well, I don't like 'em, so I don't have to fight them. You guys are at least more rea you, you believe in reason, so I'm going to be over here and I'm going to tell you what to do. And it's like, well, that's not quite how it works.And, and, me as a former one of these people I can, I self-identified as a, conservative liberal, that was what I called myself or a liberal conservative, I guess it depended on my mood, the day, if you ask me that question. And, except for, in my case, I, was honest enough to admit that I was conservative.And then the, other phenomenon though that I think that is, is [00:40:00] improperly elated in the term reactionary centrism, is that not only does centrism not really exist as a philosophical viewpoint it's also that this tendency is to whatever extent that it's sincere and not just pure, Macheavellianism, to the extent that it actually is sincere.This is pathological liberalism. That's what it is. And it is this Sian Kantianism that we've been talking about here, that the, because they don't think that, well, let me step back. So it's this, Sian Kian, deontology viewpoint in which. They correctly note that reactionary viewpoints are psychologically disturbed, that they are not intellectually based.And so their viewpoint, instead of saying, wow, we have tens of millions of people who are psychologically disturbed and in need of severe mental health interventions by the government to help them. Instead of saying that, they say, well, this is just how they are and we have to we have to accommodate their views in some way.Instead of telling the general public, Hey, these people are fucking dangerous and they're coming for your rights. they don't do that. They'reBUCKLE: very ISTs. I think two things that are pretty universal in that tribe is a real concern about not being rude or mean to reactionaries. You can't say that about them, No. And also this idea, like you said, that they weren't persuadable that yeah, you can't move public opinion if people hate immigrants. They hate immigrants, and we've just gotta. Feed that hunger. I think that's all right. I find it interesting. Like the, are they sincere or like, is this, are they even further, are they like self-consciously fraudulent about this?I don't know. I don't know what's, in some [00:42:00] ways I find this like the hardest section of the ideological landscape to wrap my head around. because this is like, in many ways the one least like myself, it's like a progressive, comprehensive liberal. I certainly agree. There's not a comprehensive philosophy behind this.It's not like liberalism, socialism. You can, you've got a whole library of books there, right? That you can go back to as like an intellectual tradition. There's no real intellectual tradition behind centrism, nor do centris themselves even really claim it. It's more like a disposition as to like, are they really conservative?I think they're certainly, in many cases sympathetic to conservatism and they're certainly annoyed by the left. I almost wonder in terms of like what ideology they are really, is there even, one at all? Like when I look at Keith Farmer, like, does he actually, because I could rewind the tape not that long ago, three or four years ago, and find him saying the exact opposite to what he's saying now and professing the exact opposite values and, it's not even as if there was a moment.Where he said, you know what, I've really thought about this and I've changed my mind. He's just saying different stuff now. So toSHEFFIELD: yeah.BUCKLE: To maybe like to give a another case Obama. Right. I wouldn't call Obama a reactionary centris. He does definitely dabble in this sort of neutralist liberalism. Obama's interestingly actually read rules, unlike a, lot of politicians who are downstream of this.But when Obama changed his mind on gay marriage, he does this big speech where he said, I used to believe marriage was between a man and a woman, but I sat down and talked about it with my daughters and I really came to, now maybe that's all bs, right? But he felt the need to tell a story about why he changed his values, because Obama.[00:44:00]Stama perhaps isn't an idiot. And he gets that. That's how normal people think about politics. They think about it through the lens of values, and they want their leaders to have values. Consistency, maybe you change the details on a policy, but we want to know that your core values are stable.And so if he's going to change something that impacts values, he need, he knows he needs to have a story. Why with Stama, there's no story. I just, I wonder if the guy actually just doesn't have deep values of either sort in any sense. He's just sort of saying what he thinks he needs to say. Like, it's actually as dumb and vacuous as that.I, I, have no idea. I don't know what's in his head, but somehow if like, like the, just the lights weren't on in there, that actually wouldn't surprise me.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and here's the thing though. This is why they're conservative. Because that is literally what Edmund Burke said is the essence of conservatism.That it is not a system of beliefs, but rather a disposition. And if you read your Michael OShot, that's also what Michael OShot says, quote forBUCKLE: philosophical purposes. It is enough that the conservative sit and think for practical purposes. It is enough that he sit.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. and, and so much of the, especially oak shut, because Burke, was more of just a conventional politician in many ways, dealing with specific particular issues. Whereas OK Shot, he didn't have such obligation, so he was able to just, sit there and write political theory. and what he did basically is, provide the intellectual justification for the attitude you just described. And it is conservatism. And because it's the idea that we decide things based upon what is the correct or advantageous idea within the moment. But, [00:46:00] and don't call it on principle because in fact our principle is pragmatism. And so that for, so, so that's why I do think that it's, important to, to stop calling conservatives centrist or liberals.These are conservatives, and they just don't realize it. So Kirsten Sinema is an example of this of this conservative viewpoint and, but also so is, Joe Manchin, that these are people who they prefer the status quo ante and they don't want change to be too fast.And they have no consistent ideological program. Well, that's conservatism. It's not liberalism, it's not centrism.BUCKLE: See, I have a bit of a different model of conservatism and it'd be interesting if you disagree as a former conservative that would maybe put a bit of a distinction between that and what I'm describing as reactionary centris.Although, I mean, I should say off the bat, I'm not really a pains to defend reactionary centrists in any way. this is not my tribe of people or something I'm at all sympathetic to. So I'm not coming from the point of view of, of, trying to, protect dear old Kia. But, so in my. In my sort of model of the world, conservatism isn't just about a distrust of change.It's a bit thicker than that. Although this can largely be at a subconscious level. It's about a view of human society as being ordered by things that are beyond our control. That there is in the ideological theorists, Michael freedom's, words, an extra human origin of the social order. Now, this can change in different types of conservatism, back in the day, it could be today in fact, it could be the laws of God, it could be the laws of the free market, it could be the gender binary and the supposedly, [00:48:00] set things that it is to be a man and a woman. And the set social roles that need to, follow from that. It is not that conservatism is opposed to change exactly.It wants us to return to that underlying social order. Conservatives can be very radical indeed when they feel like we've gotten away from that social order, be it that Thatcher and Reagan revolution, revolutions wanting to do, wanting to bring us back to the laws of the free market or something like Trumpism wanting to bring us back to these purportedly natural hierarchies of race and gender now.Now, obviously people can share that to a greater or lesser degree. I would say more that reactionary center certainly can drift into that. Certainly there's a clear pathway, reactionary ISTs start as like, oh, I'm in the middle and end as being conservative. We see that all the time, but I wonder if it's dumber than that.Like they just fundamentally don't have a vision of society or of change, but they know that liberals kind of annoy them, and that when they see conservatives, they perceive them as a bit more authentic and empathetic because they perceive them as male. I think that's a, we can talk about the gender element to that, but I think that's a big part of it.And they just don't find the excesses of the right annoying in the same way as they find the excesses of the left, but they don't know why. But there's not. I don't know, I don't know what's in other people's heads. I really don't, my gut instinct with a lot of these people is there's really nothing behind the eyes.But I could be wrong.Sam Harris and libertarianism masquerading asz liberalismSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, I, mean, it is, yeah, it's hard to say for specific people. I agree with you there. But to your point though about the kind of the larger epistemic vision that, that, is [00:50:00] at play here. so, so the, the conservative economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell actually has a written on this particular topic and in his view, and I think it's largely correct, that he, says that politics is essentially a conflict between two different visions of humanity and human nature, and one is the constrained vision and the other is the unconstrained vision. And so the conservative and reactionary viewpoint is, well, there's just certain things to how humans are, and most people are terrible and stupid. and so therefore the, weak should suffer what they must, and the strong should do what they will.That is largely the,BUCKLE: that kind of fits with the story about social order, I've said. Right. They clearly reinforce each other. If there's like a set thing that is human nature, then it would seem to follow from that, that there's a set thing that is society. But if human nature is quite changeable and adaptable, that would also sort of imply that society is and could potentially, that would seem to imply a more futurist vision than a, recal story.So I don't, I wouldn't, I don't think those two things are in conflict necessarily. Those are just two different, they're two sides of the same coin, I think.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, that's what I'm saying is that if you have the con, the constrained view viewpoint, that is what makes you on the political right. and if you have the unconstrained viewpoint, then that's what makes you on the political left.and so that's, when we go back to circle back to what you were saying about kind of the, the, NOIC and Rawls idea in, some sense, they actually are on the, on joining the constraint vision. And so it is arguably a form of conservatism that they're advancing in their philosophies, even though they would never say that and never, would, blanch [00:52:00] at the assertion of that, I thinkBUCKLE: there's definitely a thing where more people are sympathetic to conservatism than would willingly endorse the label. That's, that seems absolutely, I, don't have like data to that effect, but like that feels intuitively true to me.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and I would say probably to some really great examples of that are the, the linguist and popular science writer Stephen Pinker, who claims to be a liberal, but in fact.Everything he does is about justifying libertarian conservatism. So he's not religious. Yeah, I, agreeBUCKLE: with you when it comes to pinker, I think. Yeah,SHEFFIELD: yeah. So, so, so, but at the same time, he self-identifies as a liberal. and the same thing is also true about Sam Harris. So during my time on the political right, I saw Sam Harris as somebody exactly like me, somebody who was non-religious, but also realistic about human nature.Now, and I knew of course, that he described himself as a liberal but you know, the, this is, it does go back to the fact that I think that Saul was fundamentally correct in that. But you have a, you said, had, told me off the air that, you had, listened to Harris quite a bit here. So I'm, curious on your, on what you think about that.Okay.BUCKLE: Sam Harris. Yeah, I mean, I followed the sort of new atheist movement for a bit. I, must admit, I haven't listened to Harris in a long time. So, yeah, I think with Harris, you also have a fairly good case of someone with conservative values using liberal language to sort of justify them, right?Because look, in a sense, right, political [00:54:00] ideologies are many things. They are these value systems, they are. Sense of policies. They are intellectual traditions. They are also just sort of languages for talking. You can talk about rights and freedom and free speech. It's sort of a language you can apply it to.You can express different ideas in that language and you can express conservative ideas in that language. I mean, how also seems to my mind, and I'm sort of doing the thing of like pretending I know what's in someone's head and I don't of being incredibly thin skinned, like, like it seems like he's got some pushback from people on the social justice left who are angry about what he said about Muslims say.Right. And he's found that. Criticism so, so enraging, whether let's just table whether it was legitimate or not. So enraging that he's essentially become a quasi fascist, like in response to it. I kind of don't know what to do about that. I think often when people have this reaction narrative, they're not talking about the public, they're talking about themselves.Like I don't think many people out there are becoming fascists because they had to attend a DEI seminar. I think most people roll their eyes at it like every other useless work meeting and they get on with their day. But like, I don't know, Sam really let social justice criticism get under his skin in a big way.Like he couldn't let it go, was my impression of him.SHEFFIELD: I think so. Yeah, absolutely. That is the case that he, blew up at all that and, again, like I, when you go back to his I, to his moral philosophy he's extremely Kantian. And he is kind of a, he's a conservative Kantian, that's what he is. That [00:56:00] he wrote an entire book called, The Moral Landscape, in which he argued that--BUCKLE: I have read it. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: --In which he argued that morality could be scientific, and that you could have objectively true moral viewpoints.BUCKLE: Now, see, I don't hold now these are nonsense with some of the moral landscape in that he's coming from like a sort of consequentialist worldview, which I largely buy, and I think a consequentialist worldview is sort of more correct in a sense, but he's clear target there.He's a sort of imagined left model relativism, a sort of multicultural mo moral relativism. That's clearly what he's got in his head to go after.SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah.BUCKLE: In that book right now, I'd actually agree as an object level point that I don't think relativism is a particularly good foundation for pluralism or multiculturalism.because I think some people will say, oh, well we don't really know who's right, therefore multiculturalism. But if you don't really know who's right, then what's to say that we shouldn't be respecting Hitler's views? So I think there are better ways of thinking about and justifying pluralism, but I think that's what Sam has in his head and he's going after in that book.SHEFFIELD: Oh, I think so. Yeah. And it's, I mean, this is the classic atheist reflex though. if you go back through history that, there, there is this reflexive notion that, well, I must have an objective moral basis for my viewpoints. And, I mean, for me, I would, I'm more sympathetic to the, Greeks Sophists or the Epicureans or the, the Academic Skeptics in this regard that I think that we can say that certain things are probably true or functionally true.but whether something is more than that is objectively true, well, that's actually not possible. And, David Hume [00:58:00] really destroyed that idea, and no one listened to him fully except for the scientists. But, and, but he was actually making it in many ways as a political point. And no one listened.BUCKLE: I'd also say, and this is a bit perhaps meta ethical, that when in, in the case, particularly of political ideologies, something like liberalism or conservatism, when we ask are they true?We're kind of asking a series of related but separate questions. are they internally coherent? Broadly speaking as are these sorts of, for instance we just talked about, is the theme of a sat human nature coherent with the idea of a changing society, right? Is the story they're telling a coherent one, is it externally coherent?Does it seem to be validated by facts about the world? they're also languages You can ask if they're a better or worse language, or more or less persuasive language. You can ask. They're also like guides to life, right? These are sort of toolkits for probably at a largely subconscious level, getting us through our day-to-day and just helping nudges along with the small and unimportant moral decisions that we sort of have to make along the way.Is it good for that? And those answers might not all cohere down to an ultimate point where it's like this exact version of liberalism. That's the one that's true. One of the points I made to bring it all the way back to the beginning in the Rawls article is this kind of two issues I take with the neutralist liberalism.One is, I don't think it's very good philosophy. I think the claims that are being made on a philosophical level just don't sit very well together. But the second one is that I, think in the current moment it's less persuasive that if you want to, activate, people to oppose a rising far eye, say you need to appeal to something a bit thicker, a bit more sort of flesh and blood [01:00:00] than this idea of the neutral gentlemanly referee.You've gotta talk about the types of lives that you want people to have. You've gotta talk about how freedom and pluralism are good, and I like living in a free society, and I don't want to lose this, and I don't want the next generation to, to grow up having worse lives than I do. You've gotta make these sorts of claims, right?And it's that confluence that makes it a compelling case for me and something that I'd. want to push is those don't necessarily have to go together. something could be philosophically cohesive but not particularly persuasive or vice versa. I think it's that, it's both. I think that it's, that it's bad philosophy and I think particularly in the current moment, it, doesn't seem persuasive.I, I think that it's both of them makes it a door that I want to push, if that makes sense.The bad politics of popularismSHEFFIELD: yeah, I think so. and the, problem with this as a pol political strategy it is both bad philosophy and bad politics. is that from, but from a political standpoint, if you are calibrating your, pol your policies or your rhetoric in pursuit of these elusive or usually imaginary voters that you actually will never reach them because their objections to you are not based on the things that they say. So in other words, if somebody says, well, they, spend all their time obsessing about trans people, or they spend all their time obsessing about how they hate Black Lives Matter.And if you, and, the US has the same issue, with, there, there are some political strategists who advocate for what they call popularism. Which is that, well, we should only have policies. That are popular. and Matt [01:02:00] Iglesias is an example of somebody who says this.And the problem is though, that if you only pursue policies that are popular and you dis go discard policies that are unpopular, then essentially what happens is that your policies become less and less popular. Your native policies, the policies that actually are passionate to you, that you care about, those will be discarded as well.Because the whole point of politics is to argue for your own perspective and why it should be the law. Not, well, let's just do what the people want. No, the people should do what I want and here's why. And it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what politics is for. when you do it this way, and this is why the right in the United States is getting ever radicalized because the left establishment never says, Hey actually public. Here's what our moral vision is. Here's what we want to do for you. And these people are fucking liars and criminals and you should stop them.BUCKLE: They don't say that the Democrats are in, some of them at least are like Pritzker or something, or a AOC.I think there are examples within the Democratic coalition who are sort of behaving in the way I handle,SHEFFIELD: yeah,BUCKLE: we'd want them to, yo, they're better than labor. Okay. Like Jesus Christ. Nothing will make you Stan as Labor party. I think that's right. I think also you, you talked about putting a values vision forward.I think people like Matt Yglesias, politics to them is all about policy. It's all about finding a policy consensus. And sure, policies matter. But people also, I think primarily actually judge politics through the lens of values. And what you can often do with these policy compromises is make your values proposition hopelessly incoherent.Now it's fine to tinker, it's fine. But you can [01:04:00] get to the point, and I think Stama in the UK is a great example of it, where the policies you are putting forward are just so with what Stama is putting forward on immigration or trans rights, is making the values proposition hopelessly and coherent.He's simultaneously saying that he believes in liberal core values and that he doesn't, and to the right that just appears hopelessly inauthentic and pew and to the left, it feels like a betrayal. Like that's the limit. You have to have a policy vision. Certainly you have to have, here's the things we're going to do with the country, but you also have to have the why.This is what we're doing it for. And I think people like. Matt, just, it's all about just, well, we'll just give the people the policies that they want and they have no sense of, because they have no sense of the why themselves, because they have no values themselves. They're very poorly placed to understand the motivations of people who do, which is most people and most voters.SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, I think that's right. And so, the, like the, Republican party before Trump was in the same kind of, meta political loop, if you will, that the Democratic Party has continuously been, and, Labor is currently that, the Republican party for so long, they had this, anti-government standpoint, which.They knew was horribly unpopular and no one liked, and their own voters didn't like, so I mean, when you look at surveys, when people ask republicans, when polls ask Republicans, so what should we spend less on? and they give them 20 different issues. Usually about the only thing Republicans say they want to spend less on is four and eight.That's it. So, so they don't, want to, actually go for this, [01:06:00] anti-government libertarianism that the Republican party before Trump, that's what they were devoted to. And so, and yet at the same time they, they wanted to hold onto that vision. And so what they would basically have to do is just kind of pretend to around the edges to.have a more, pro-government viewpoint. So they would say things like, George HW Bush had his thousand points of light where a kinder, and gentler America, you know, and, his son would say things like, compassionate conservatism and, so they would have all of these, these, viewpoints.And, as you said, with regard to the left and, this, pathological liberalism, that no one liked these viewpoints. No one wanted compassionate conservatism. No one wanted A Thousand Points of Light. everyone saw it for what it was as just blatant, naked electioneering and, and, so it was just disgusting.And so when Trump came along and said. Fuck that. Let's just tell people that we want to lock up people and that we want to be racist and that we want to be sexist. Let's just fucking go. And that was exactly what the party wanted and the voters wanted. and that was why he won. because like I remember, when Trump was in that primary of the, his first primary in, 2015, I wrote an article in, October of 2015 saying, Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination based on these trends and based on the fact that he has support across all of the ideological groups in the party.And it's his race to lose. And, people pushed back on me and they said, I can't believe he would say that. That's just ridiculous. How can you say such a thing?BUCKLE: Were you still on the right at that point, or do you laughed?SHEFFIELD: Well, at that point I was not. And I was, I had largelyBUCKLE: that as an ex conservative.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. or at least as a very, disenchanted one because like, in some [01:08:00] sense for me, Trump was a, in, in the, in that beginning point in time, if you remember like the, never Trump movement started because they thought Trump was not right wing enough. That was actually why they hated him with the exception of foreign policy stuff.So those people, the NeoCon Hucks were the exception, but everyone else thought that he was just a Democrat in disguise. That's why they didn't like him. But now, in my case, I, wanted Trump to be against Republican anti-government orthodoxy. I liked that, about him. And I thought that if he lost big, that it would be the, a possible sign of progress, and that the, the libertarian wackos would be thrown out on their ear and something better could happen.But that's not what happened. and, needless to say, but, after the administration came into office, I had not completely renounced the Republican party by that time, but I was offered a job in the Trump White House writing speeches for him. and, but I couldn't do it though because I thought, well, number one, I don't want my, words coming out of the mouth of this total buffoon but also that I, wouldn't ever want to write words justifying, some of his more monstrous viewpoints, which had by then become, very apparent Muslim bans and things like that.So, like that's the, but I mean, that's my long way of saying that yes, you're right, that you know when, you refuse to offer a clear moral vision to the public, well then they're not going to support you. People support someone who will do, something, even if they don't necessarily agree with it.Most people vote according to values, not according to policiesSHEFFIELD: that's, the thing that I, that the popularist or the neoliberals, they still haven't figured that out. the, abundance, agenda stuff and all that, none of that means anything [01:10:00] because as you said, people, they don't vote on policies. In many cases, people have no idea what the policies are.Like. When people ask, if you like people, sometimes you'll see men on the street interviews where they'll come up to people and they'll say, Donald Trump just said this. And they'll quote some, pro-abortion rights statement and they'll say, well, what do you think about Donald Trump saying this?and the Trump supporters will say, oh, yeah, right. That's good. They have no idea.BUCKLE: My, my favorite one of those is they pulled Americans on if they'd support military intervention, abar the fictional setting of Aladdin. And people have views. People like 34% of Americans supported military intervention.Yeah. it just seems like, have you, this is the thing with reactionary ISTs, right? Is they claim to sort of be the representative of the common man. They're going to let us, if defeat academics know like what the real, salt of the earth voters in Ohio are thinking, right? They're deeply in touch with them, but I've honestly never met, people who are more out of touch with how normal people think politically most of the time.Because most people, to use a simplified typology, and this is a bit of a simplification, but between values and policy, most people do not have detailed policy views. There might be like one specific thing that they know about, like if they work for a local high school, they will know about education policy, right?Or, whatever it might be for them. Or they might be one thing that is their hobby horse. Like every smoker in the world I know can cite chapter and verse on exactly why anti-marijuana laws are wrong, right? But overall, people aren't reading like policy blueprints and stuff, and their policy views are quite changeable and quite fungible.Even something as, do you support [01:12:00] X or do you support Donald Trump's plan for X? Or do you support Bernie Sanders plan for X? We'll get you like 60 point swings in what people think, right? But because people immediately jump from that to people aren't political or people are stupid, but people do have reasonably clear and coherent and stable over time senses of their values, right?Like, for a lot of people on the left that I'm a sort of tolerant, open-minded person. I believe in difference. I believe in diversity. That's definitely real and like it's consistent and reactionary. Centralism is all about the policy, right. But in a sense that's just not, that's not how voters think they think in terms of that's abnormal.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.BUCKLE: and I think there's this idea that like, so this is why I push back against the reaction narrative, that was just because of wokeness went too far and there was a reaction. Right? It's not that you. Voter in Ohio at a working class diner has like personally experienced these woke college kids on campus telling him about intersectionality.It's that he's heard about it through Ben Shapiro or something like that, right? That's the causality. And why does that matter? It matters because if you think it's all a reaction to woke, then you have to destroy woke. That's the root cause of it. So you have to say, all you guys need to shut up and never talk again.Oh, and by the way, if trans people could like stop existing, that would be great. We're going to do what the UK government is doing and basically outlaw you. Which by the way, has catastrophically hurt labor in the polls. Their right word, lurch. It's not working for them, which is exactly what my model of the world would represent.Labor are going to the right on immigration, they're going to the right on trans rights, and it's collapsing their polling [01:14:00] for them. Why? Because it wasn't ever about anything objective or real. It's about what they were being told about those issues by the right-wing press. Right. That's the underlying problem.And you see that actually in the empirics in the UK case. I imagine it's similar in the US public concern about immigration moves one for one with the news's coverage of it. The news sphere among us about it more concern goes up, less it goes down. It's like it's, absolutely, the two lines on the graph are like the same.So this reactionary center is posture. It's what we said before. It's both wrong, but also I just don't think it will work. It's both. No, it doesn't. It's both wrong to say, oh, we're going to throw immigrants and trans people under the bus. I also don't think it will work because those concerns aren't coming from the actual number of immigrants or anything that anyone on the social justice side is saying.Those concerns are coming from the right wing news and right-wing propaganda and right wing new media. That's the problem. And that problem remains.SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. Yeah. AndBUCKLE: it's no matter what policy concession you make, it doesn't touch it. because it was never about policy to begin with. Sorry.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That Oh yeah.no. Your, point is, absolutely correct because you know the, basically you have people who are, going for, Donald Trump, or going for Nigel Farage, they are doing it primarily for two reasons, and neither of them is about policy. One, the main reason for the main block of them, the bulk of them, is they are psychologically disposed toward authoritarian viewpoints.and, sort of historical naturalism. In other words that if a group was historically dominant, then it is natural that group is dominant and we must sustain that dominance. And whether that is [01:16:00] a viewpoint from religious fundamentalism or from, social Darwinism doesn't matter. It's still the same psychological viewpoint.So that's most of the, the Farage and Trump voters. But then there's the other, the smaller percentage of is people who, as you said, that are motivated by reactionary propaganda. And so, but with the, this first group though.Literally no issue actually is motivating them. So in other words, if he, if, Joe Biden or if Ki Starmer had taken the, right wing position, wholesale and just copied it, well, then the right wing would move on to another issue.BUCKLE: Like they're not what's happening in the uk. Yeah. Which is,SHEFFIELD: yeah. and that is because the, goal of Reactionaries is not to find that policy center of that raws and center.Their goal is to overthrow democracy and create fascism. So when you compromise with them, in, the vain hope that you're going to somehow mollify them, you will nev there's literally no position that you can take that will make them stop what they're doing other than to destroy democracy itself. DoBUCKLE: you think Reactionary ISTs know that? Because it seems I know they do. Right, right. So that's right. That's why I think they're conceptually distinct from conservatives because like, does Kia Staman know that he's laying the groundwork for fascism? My, again, who knows what's in the guy's head?My gut is that he doesn't he?SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I don't think so, and I don't think he does. But also conservatives generally do not understand that either about reactionaries. So when you look at the things that Barry Wise says about Donald Trump, so here is somebody, who, has made her entire career out of being, professionally [01:18:00] Zionist like.She is also on aiding and abetting, a fascist who appoints neo-Nazis, antisemites to his, his, I mean, hell, his vice president is, an antisemite, I would say. and, like she, but she doesn't understand that this is what they want. And the same thing you go, just go down the line. All of these conservatives that align, like, Joe Rogan, I don't, see Joe Rogan as some sort of reactionary or something like that. He's just, a dope conservative. And because, so, because I'veBUCKLE: been challenged on this literally today, right? Okay. Because, I just had the, Prospect Magazine article out that reactionary center is one. Right. And the pushback I got, I actually the pushback I got was that Reactionary center is too charitable at term.For them, and that actually these are people who are self-consciously trying to take us to fascism. now maybe that's true for like individual cases. You could go case by case to take the trans issue in the uk there are some people in the labor government who genuinely are like, quite bigoted, I think.And then I think the main position is just cowardice, essentially. They're just saying what they think they need to say to get through the next news cycle. And then there are, to be fair, a few conscientious objectors who have raised concerns. But I think that it feels to me like the bulk view is just cowardice.It's not more profound than that. But I've had a lot of people in my mentions today saying that I'm, giving them too much credit that actually these are people who. Want us to, move into an authoritarian, racist, whatever state. I don't know. I don't want to necessarily be in the position of defending them.Exactly. Like I say, I think it's dumber than [01:20:00] people are imagining. These aren't masterminds with a long term plan. They're cowards who are trying to get through the news cycle. But I could be wrong. I don't know. What's your view on that?Reactionary centrism encompasses conservatism, pathological liberalism, and the amoralSHEFFIELD: well, you're making me think that maybe reactionary centrism is encompassing three viewpoints rather than two, as I said earlier.So that it's it encompassing conservatism, which generally is most of these people. it's encompassing pathological liberalism, which is this, kind of, Ian Conan. Absurd, let's tolerate the intolerant kind of viewpoint. Yeah. And then there is just the cowards and the ignorants who just are like, well, let's just do what people want.I think that's, I mean, are those mutually exclusive though? Couldn't you have all three? One person? I think you could. Yeah, I think you could. And the fact, I mean, yeah, the fact is if you don't generally see people on the left who have truly e economically progressive viewpoints, except for maybe some, deranged tanky or something further left, people tend not to be upset about trans people existing and, having rights.So yeah, so like, I think there is a considerable amount of overlap. And you know what, to what extent somebody has these views is, I, wouldn't say for particular people, but do you think this is three.BUCKLE: Sorry, I know this is for an American audience. I've just been writing about British politics at the moment, so it's on my mind.But the UK case is quite instructive for the trans thing. because what's interesting with us is three or four years ago, no one cared. It's not like the states where we have like a long standing like sort of conservative, evangelical, religious. we've, I mean it's there in the uk, but it's nowhere near the scale or the force.Right. That's not a thing for us as much. Yeah. so as late as 2017 in the uk in the 2017 election, every single one of the major parties, including the then [01:22:00] governing conservative party under Theresa May, ran on making transition easier, changing the law. So the essentially it's easier to. Change like your Saxon your passport and your whatever, stuff like that.Right. So like everyone had essentially, I would say like a moderately protran possession and it was just, it wasn't an issue that came up at all. Right. In public discourse. And you had labor mps standing up and looking at what was happening in America and confidently declaring this is a quote from a labor MP called Capri.A bathroom ban will never happen in the UK that they are now supporting without ever having done the Obama thing of, I've thought about it and I've changed my mind. They're just supports it now. Yeah. Over the space of like a few years, it swung that fast and like what's going on in that person's head? I don't know.But like, I don't know when I look at that that's some schema who's had a long-term plan to walk us into fascism. That's not me giving them credit. We're talking about people who are willing clearly to do immense harm. But I don't know, it's, I think it's dumbness. I think it's lack of any real deep values yourself.I think it's just cowardice. I don't know, but that's my read of it. I don't see, because people have been pushing me today. These are just closet fascists. Maybe in some cases. My view is actually the dumb uncaring cowardice. It's, a less satisfying story in some ways, but that probably is the story. I don't know, that's just what people have been asking me about.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well I think that's, yeah, I think I'm inclined to agree with your viewpoint that, Hanlon's Razor is undefeated. and from my standpoint, never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. And [01:24:00] and, that's why I would say that generally speaking, there basically is no such thing as a centrist.That centrist are people who are either, self-proclaimed centrist, are either conservatives in denial, or they are people who have no coherent thoughts. and it's not really anything else because an actual centrist would, go after people on the left and these people don't, so this is not what they, so they're not any sort of centrist is what I thinkBUCKLE: what I'm talking about is the.Latter, the person with no coherent thoughts, right?SHEFFIELD: Yeah.BUCKLE: they have biases. They're sort of like a, conformist bias, right? Yeah. But they are unusually values free. Like I say, most people actually have fairly stable values. I'm not sure they do. but that's what I'm going after. So you can call it center us and you can call it whatever.I'm not wedded to the label, but I have found it useful and it does seem to resonate with people. But yeah, that's what I've been talking about recently.What the positive liberal case looks likeSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so maybe let's end if we, if you wouldn't mind, we've, talked about the need for a affirmative values case. So how would, and I don't want to put you on the spot, but, if you are, if you would like to make that affirmative values case, how would you, say that it should be done?BUCKLE: US or UK context or just sort of general?SHEFFIELD: Just general. Yeah. Okay.BUCKLE: We are living in an age of revising fascism. The same thing that we dealt with in the middle of the 20th century. It is back and it is just as dangerous. This comes to you in all sorts of forms. It comes to you through YouTube, through the right wing press. And here's what you really need to understand.These people are lying to you. They are [01:26:00] lying to you about what is hurting your society. They are lying to you about what will let you have a good life, and we will all burn if you listen to them. A much better world is possible. I think we live in societies that are partially free, and I think that partial freedom is great and I want to continue to expand it.I like living in a society that has different people who have different views and walks of life and religions and backgrounds. To me, I think that's great. I think it's good for me. I like that as a man, I can choose my hobbies. My personal hobby is cooking quite traditionally feminine. I like that I can do that in a liberal society.I don't like this conservative vision that, there is only one thing to be a man and one thing to be a woman, and you have to be forced into that. I'd rather not live that life and just by the, people who push that are dangerous and they're weird and you shouldn't be listening to them or letting your children listen to them.I want people to have the best lives that they can. I want people to be as free as they can, as happy as they can, and do as do we only have, what, 80 or 90 years on this planet to do as many interesting and fun and valuable things in their time as they possibly can in that time. Now I'll agree that is a vision.Very imperfectly realized. There's all sorts of things, be it economic equality, be it inequalities of opportunity, be it many of the just FAFs and stresses and annoyances of the world that get in the way of that. We have a lot of work to do, including political work, but let's do that.Let's not go back to top down control on the basis of race or gender or anything like that. We have seen where that road goes. I don't know, you asked me to freestyle it, but something like [01:28:00] that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I think that's good. Um, Well, so for, people who, want to, keep up with your things, Toby, you have a podcast of your own as well. You want to talk, about that a bit and, tell them what other publications, or social media you are using nowadays.BUCKLE: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. So my podcast is called The Political Philosophy Podcast. It's exactly what it sounds like. The website for that is politicalphilosophypodcast.com.I interview a range of people on, issues similar to what we've been discussing, honestly. I sometimes do audio essays. I also write increasingly, I've only been doing that for like a few months actually, but some of them seem to have had some traction and gotten a, decent reception.yeah, my main, I'm not on Twitter anymore. My main media is Blue Sky. You can search my name Toby Buckle, or my handle is Paul Phil Pod short for the podcast. but links, just my website is political philosophy podcast.com. Links to all of my writing podcast, ways to follow social media, all there.So yeah, just Google political philosophy podcast or political philosophy podcast.com. And thank you for having me on and an interesting discussion. I really appreciate it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, me too.All right, so that'll do it for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show. Where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes, and if you are able to become a page subscribing member of the show, then you have unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your support.And if you're watching on YouTube, make sure to click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever we post in your episode. That would be great. Thanks a lot. I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode Summary One of the most enduring myths of the Trump years has been that everyone who votes for him does so because they agree with him. Obviously a lot of his supporters do, but polls have consistently shown that Trump is a historically unpopular president with issue positions that most Americans have never supported.And yet, it remains the case that a majority of voters in the last election decided to vote for him anyway. We’ve talked in previous episodes of Theory of Change about how part of this is due to the enormous reach of right-wing media. It is the mainstream media for millions of Americans–whether they deliberately choose to watch it or not.But media saturation isn’t the only factor. Another significant factor behind Trump’s durable political appeal is that his opponents have been unable to present a larger alternative vision to MAGA. That matters because a lot of people aren’t interested in policy minutiae, they want to hear your big-picture vision.Democrats simply have not done this. And as a result, the party is facing some of its lowest approval ratings in years–including from people who identify as Democrats.Joining me to talk about all this is someone who has been doing this work from the ground up for over a decade: Seth Flaxman. He’s the co-founder of Catalyst for American Futures a new liberal group that’s building a broader-left political coalition that focuses on improving the country so that everyone has a fair chance, ideas that they’ve put into a new book called Out of Many, One: Writings on American Universalism and on a website, The All American.Previously, Seth led Democracy Works for twelve years, an organization that helps tens of millions of Americans get trusted election information.The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Theory of Change brings you in-depth conversations on politics, technology, and media like nowhere else. Please subscribe to stay in touch!Related Content* Black Americans expect more from Democrats, but do party leaders realize this?* Unions, churches, and local media were many Americans’ anchors to democracy, as they’ve faded, so has public faith in the country* Republicans took over the judiciary while liberals were pretending that jurisprudence was a science* The 2024 election was decided by people who disliked both Harris and Trump* How religious fundamentalism’s intellectual collapse powers Trump’s politics of despair* Bureaucratic obsessions are ruining America’s educational system* Harris’s loss has permanently discredited timid Democratic approaches to Trumpist authoritarianismAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction10:18 — American universalism as a political philosophy14:22 — The spirit of St. Louis and the civil war18:29 — Understanding modern authoritarianism21:14 — Building majority support for democracy24:31 — The need for open debate and disagreement28:02 — Problems with Democratic party messaging34:24 — The missing movement infrastructure37:19 — Economic solutions beyond neoliberalism41:09 — Learning from right-wing political tactics46:19 — The role of government in the modern economy49:38 — The importance of public rallies and engagement54:32 — Creating a new culture of political discourse58:28 — Working in coalitions despite disagreements01:01:59 — Lessons from the civil rights movement01:05:01 — Closing thoughts and contact informationAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Seth Flaxman. Hey Seth, welcome to Theory of Change.SETH FLAXMAN: Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, good to have you. Well, so, why don't we start off a bit before we get into the discussion just tell us a bit about your background and how you got into politics and what you've been doing since.FLAXMAN: Great, thank you. I mean, I I, don't even know if I would say I've been in politics. I've been working on strengthening US democracy for almost my entire professional career the last 15, 16 years or so. And I got into this space because I thought our democracy was in a really dangerous position. And for me, the warning lights like 2000 and going back 2009, 2010 maybe, were just low turnout in everything, especially anything local or primary election related. But then the rise of birtherism was terrifying to me. Also Proposition 8 was very scary to me at the time. [00:04:00] And I wasn't sure what to do because, for most of my peers, Barack Obama's president, everything's fine. And so I just felt like I was in a very different wavelength and I felt like the thing I can do is use this new force in our society technology to try to increase voter engagement because we know technology can do one thing very well if it makes things easier and more people will do it.So I spent a long time just trying to get the, like bugs and kinks out of the voting system, where can I make things easier and increased participation? And after doing that for 12 years and three presidential cycles, I came to the conclusion that it was valuable work. It was like critical for our democracy, but it was not going to solve the democracy crisis that we were facing.And. So I've been spending the last few years trying to understand what is this global rise of authoritarianism in addition to this, how it looks like in America and like what do other countries do about it? What have we done about it historically? And trying to help scale up different strategies and leaders that I think can get us outta this democracy crisis.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And that is a, good point regarding like, just participation because one of the things that, that I do on this show is there is look at people who don't participate and, often what they say in polls is it's not difficult to vote it's not difficult to register to vote.They just don't, they don't see the need to. They don't see a difference between the parties. They, whatever their objections are, they have, a bunch of them. And so, but it boils down to, it's not that it's too hard for them, it's, they don't want to, they're choosing not to because they think the system has failed. Yeah.FLAXMAN: And, that is an absolutely true segment of the non-voter population. It might even be as high as [00:06:00] 60 percent of it. Sometimes it's 50, but it changes by state. It Changes by age. If you look at census data, then the census will ask people often, like, why reasons they don't vote. It's part of the data that people don't often dig into. And you'll find often a collection of, like almost up though a dozen different process issues that people have. And you add it up and it does it does matter.And we know, from just like the modern economy internet age, when you like, make something easier, it changes customer behavior. that's why Amazon invented one click. So like, it's just, it's, yes, and it's, a part of the issue, and, but it's, certainly not the, whole issue. And I was, I'm very proud to spend so many years solving that problem to the extent that I could and, one can, but it's a necessary part of improving our democracy. But it's not going to be sufficient.SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, especially because, there's just so many barriers, which we'll talk about between what people need, what they think they need, and then whether the politicians are listening at all.And so, so, all right. And then, so currently you are working with the catalyst for American Futures and publishing over on the website called the All American. So, so tell us about The these endeavors.FLAXMAN: Yeah. this, came together working with my two co-founders Ilyse Hogue, who is most well-known for leading NARAL for over 10 years. And Peter Teague, who was a leader in philanthropy working on climate change. And we came to the conclusion that the civil society broadly is not ready for the authoritarian crisis that we're in. We're missing all sorts of infrastructure movements united front, that building that's needed.And I'm sure we'll go into it, but it, I don't think any of us [00:08:00] set out being like, oh, we, really want to build this new organization. We built it, because we felt like the country's in crisis and there are just like missing pieces of the solution.We needed to get stood up as quickly as possible in order to one, build a united front, which is how a lot of other countries successfully defeat authoritarian surges. And a key component of a United front is that it's a, it's a Coalition of multiple different. Ideologically distinct movements. And right now we have the progressive movement, which is important, but it's not going to be a united front by itself. And we have sort of a center right faction that's not yet a movement, but it's, building some effort, but there's a huge gap for a lot of Americans who feel politically homeless right now. And we needed to give them an on-ramp into United Front that could be a place, a new political home for them to organize from that authentically reflected their values and was rooted in sort of what we would say, like patriotic and universalist values that are sort of the normy values that a lot of Americans have, but they're not really the central organizing principle in movement spaces.SHEFFIELD: Well, and that's you're that's what the book that you guys have put together is really about. And it's called out of Many One Writings on American. I'm literally looking at itFLAXMAN: I know, I'm like, I don't have my copy of the book. Oh, actually, should I grab my prop?SHEFFIELD: Oh I’ve got it right here, I’m reading off it!FLAXMAN: Okay, great. All right, great. Thank you.SHEFFIELD: Okay. So it’s “Out of Many, One: Writings on American Universalism.”And so I mean, that, that's somebody might look at that and say, oh, that I have no idea what the hell that means, Seth. So, why don't we get into that through the essay that you wrote in there called The Spirit of St. Louis.FLAXMAN: Sure, Happy [00:10:00] to. We are not inventing the political philosophy of American universalism. It's a very old tradition. I think it's probably the best tradition in America sort of from a political theory perspective. And it's the idea that we're all endowed with equal rights and equal freedoms.American universalism and the ‘Spirit of St. Louis’FLAXMAN: And we want to elevate the, that idea at the heart of our work of, we're working for universal freedom, universal rights, universal opportunity. It's the idea that's powered every successful movement in American history has been that the expansion of freedom, equality, rights, and opportunity to all Americans who've been excluded.And that's the north star that we wanted to organize under. And so the my essay is focused on what I think is one of the most sort of strangely lost. Stories of a united front that came together and saved the country, essentially in 1861 in St. Louis. And it was a coalition that stretched across political divides, racial divides, workers business, and essentially, I mean, this, I, can really nerd out on this story.Do you want me, like what, level of nerding outon this story do you want to go into?SHEFFIELD: Oh, well, well, the story I, yeah, it's a story worth telling because like, that's what we do on the show why I, want people to tell theFLAXMAN: Okay, great. Okay. this is, a pro nerd, pro-wonk podcast.So essentially in 1861 in St. Louis, the largest arsenal of weapons outside the country, outside Washington, DC is there. And there is a plot to seize this, we to seize this arsenal of weapons. And as soon as it's seized by the [00:12:00] governor they're going to secede. And the plot is uncovered uncovered by the congressman at the time, who is the only Republican anti-slavery congressman in a slave state in the country. And he wires the Buchanan administration for support. because it's, still two months before Lincoln actually is inaugurated. And some of the cabinet members are complicit. Buchanan doesn't believe them. And so this Congressman Frank Blair calls on this coalition to come together to essentially save the city. And the people in this coalition hated each other. And so the, core of it you have to understand sort of who lives in St. Louis at the time, and the, bulk of St.Louis are Germans and Austrians. It's maybe like 60, 70% German and Austrian. And all these Germans hate each other. The Americans call them all the Dutch, the first wave comes in the thirties. They're more economic immigrants, 1830s, that is, they're economic immigrants. They're Lutheran, they're Catholic, they're Jewish, and they hate the second wave, which are these overeducated liberals and leftists who lead a failed revolution in Germany in 1848.And so those revolutionaries lose, they're trying to install constitutional republic in Germany against, the princes. And the princes kicked them out. So they flee to St. Louis and they blame each other. For losing this revolution. And they, don't want to talk to each other. They don't want to work together. They try to set up a political club that falls apart after three years with infighting. And these leftists these are literally the compatriots of Marx and Engels. This is the revolution. They, fight in 48, they come together in this united front when the city [00:14:00] is in crisis. And, the future of the country is in crisis. And they are, all vehemently anti-Catholic because they also blame the Catholic church for losing their revolution. But they call upon another party into the coalition that's entirely Catholic and they. called themselves at the time.FLAXMAN: there's like a, book written by one of the members of it. of the book is called The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. And it's written by a member of this aristocracy and they're from the pre Louisiana purchase French colonial era. And they're major land, landowners and business owners. And they don't have political voting rights, but because of their businesses and their wealth, they're actually the primary, one of the primary funders of the Republican Party in St. Louis and can control a decisive share of votes through their businesses as purchases purchasers or their tenants because they're landlords. And so they're despite being Catholic, they work with these anti-Catholic Germans. Where in that situation, the religious bigotry is a bigger hurdle almost in the racism to work together as part of a coalition. And and then there's the business community. And so anyway, I'm spending a lot of time just talking about like how diverse this coalition was in terms of having political opponents inside it. And they defeat five plots to steal the arsenal together through every means at their disposal. They are, tracking, there are spies hired to follow all the leaders around the city in this united front. And so they then hire every private investigator in the city to track the spies who are tracking them. And they play for time in the St. Louis courts and they play in the state [00:16:00] legislature to keep the state legislature from passing bills that would take away their freedoms. And they eventually organize under the banner of a ho of the wide awais, which then becomes the home guard. And they when the governor calls an election to secede as a special election for delegates to a constitutional assembly on SEC succession, they successfully win.they get, they, win on the turnout and then they're able to split the opposition in the vote. And so they think, oh, we've won through democratic means to keep Missouri in the union. And the governor then musters his private militia into the state guard and decides to take the arsenal by force.He's not going to let an election outcome determine what happens. And so there is like a mini war inside the city essentially. And the. steamboat to the capitol of Missouri because all the railroad bridges have been destroyed and defeat the governor before he can complete his plot.So it's a, it's just a wild story that has gotten lost to Time, and of course we're in a different time. I'm nottrying to tell people to.storm state capitals by Steamboat. I think non-violence is really, critical for any movement. But it, I, for me, it's It's an inspiring story of patriots saving the country. against truly impossible.odds. it's just wild. What they faced and what they were able to do in two months.And andtheybirthedthis vision of American universalism out of the Civil War and reconstruction.which is a, countrywhere we all have universalfreedom, rights, and opportunity.And it was the firsttime you had white, and black soldiers fighting under the same flag.Anda lot of our modern world and our modern,thinking about [00:18:00] universal freedom is rooted in that moment andSoit feels like a worthwhile story to raise up.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it. is. And One of the other notable things that I think comes out of that story and some of the other ones that are, people talk about in the other essays in the book is that if, we can maybe zoom out historically, even outside of the US is that, for fascist author.Understanding modern authoritarianismSHEFFIELD: So the fascism usually is the wrong word to use for this, I think because fascism, it's just, it is a, particular version of this philosophy. This is authoritarianism is what we're talking about. And, and it's, better to call it that because I think a lot of people, they, when they hear the word fascism, they're like, oh, it's, Hitler.Is that what you're saying? And it just, they just can't understand it that, yes. Political theory wise, there's a lot in common here. and in fact that people are literally citing fascist philosophers and, so like Carl Schmidt, so, so he, scholastic scholar, scholastically, that's the word.Yeah. Scholastically speaking. It is true to say that there are lots of comparisons to fascism, but it's better to say that it's authoritarianism and the, not just from a understanding point, but also because a lot of people who have kind of a psychological orientation toward opposing change or feeling discomfort with being around people that are different than them.They're the ones who are the sort of cornerstone of any sort of authoritarian regime coming to power because they may not themselves be, authoritarian, but they have that same discomfort with change. And and so when these more extreme reactionaries come along and say, well, we're not, only are we going to stop what makes you uncomfortable, but we're going to go back to the way things were.And that's, getting people who have [00:20:00] more conservative psychological orientation to say, no, you, that's not, we can't do that, that. And in fact, conservative means keeping things how they are. So trying to roll things back that's not conservative. Like, that's, I think is a point that isn't often made enough, I think.FLAXMAN: Yeah, the, authoritarian right, is very clear they want to lead a revolution.SHEFFIELD: A revolution.FLAXMAN: Like that's what they, that's the language they talk about and it's a revolution that's going to overthrow liberal democracy in the United States.And the central question of this time is, will we remain a constitutional democracy or will we just have one man rule and Whatever they say is the law and it's opposing them is punishable by whatever they decide.And the stakes are really high and we're in a really dangerous position already. But I, think for us, one of the reasons why we're setting a foundation in this idea of American universalism in our response is the response has to be majoritarian. It has to build a majority support for the idea of liberal democracy, A super majority for the idea of liberal democracy.Building majority support for democracyFLAXMAN: And I think the way we get there is by embracing a lot of the really widely hit shared values in America of like universal freedom and universal rights. People want don't. want to know that what you believe in and their rights as much as you believe in your own rights and their freedom as much as your freedom. And I think some of the polarization that played into the rise of authoritarian was the left scaring people into supporting authoritarianism because they thought they needed to be protected.And that's why we're trying to stake a position that we think we can build majority support for.SHEFFIELD: [00:22:00] So, okay, so what, does that mean though? A position? Like what that concept?FLAXMAN: Let me say that a, position, of VA set of values, a story, A narrative like tapping into the American tradition and ideas, which are, have not been held up as the primary banner of the, left in the last few decades.And so, without a champion for your patriotic universal values, I think people don't really know what Democrats, or the progressive movement stand for. Maybe it's not really what they stand for, or they believe. And so we're just trying to create a, raise a banner and create a movement that can be a movement home for people for whom that's what they're looking for.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I, if I I mean, as, I'm kind of seeing it. It's that, that what you guys are saying, you can correct me if I'm but that in a lot of ways that if you want to protect the social inclusion that has happened and you want more, you have to show that there's a continuity between what you want and what the, everybody else wants that you can't, you have, you can't just layer this new thing, new epistemology, this new. new. set of values on people and expect them to just accept it because they've never seen it.So, like, so you have to fit, it within the continuity. So as an example, I would say that when you look at a lot of the the original progressive movements goals and the, and their rhetoric. They framed much of what they did in Christian terms and that they, used theological language and derivations and scripture citations and whatnot to show that, giving people, workers [00:24:00] the right to strike and giving women the right to vote.And, being against segregation, that these are things that are, if, you say you're a Christian, then you should believe these things. And I think that too. I mean, obviously I'm not a, as somebody who's not a religious person myself I see that there's a, huge need to continue doing that and to, encourage people to be able to, realize that just because you do have religious viewpoints, it doesn't mean that you are excluded the future.The need for open debate and disagreementFLAXMAN: Absolutely. this is to, a few historical stories here that maybe can Help illustrate. One of the wildest stories to me from the 1850s is when Frederick Douglas is kicked out of the abolitionist society, and he's, kicked out by William Lloyd Garrison because he says, we should use every means at our disposal, including the US Constitution to end slavery. And Garrison says, no, if the, Constitution is a pact with the devil, we can't vote. We should not vote, we should not participate in this system. And Douglas says, no, like the slavery is not core to the Constitution. It's it's a, it needs to be exorcised from the Constitution. So he roots a lot of, am I, see him as a really, a founder and American Universalist thought, And he roots it in the Constitution, even in the darkest depths of, the slave ocracy of the 1850s.He's rooting. the movement to get out of that crisis in the US Constitution and, Christianity as well. And so it's not just like a marketing scheme to like, let me connect to the people in the way that they most connect. It's like, it's also deeply ideological. He, believe this is what he believes. And and it's also, it's politically savvy in [00:26:00] strategic, which is like let's take the best of what we have as a country and use it to move forward and not burn down the whole thing as the solution. And so that's attention in our politics and how to move things forward. And I think it's been unpopular–has been unpopular the last, decade or however long you want to talk about it because it's failed.It hasn't worked. We've had all we've had all these issues as a country and people have lost faith. And it's there's, a, oh, we're in this postliberal moment and, I think that's hurt us as a democracy to not have a clear home for people who really do believe in the promise of the country and a place to organize from.SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and, yeah, and, they, people want to have a, some sort of grounding for their belief. I feel like, because there's plenty of people, there, there are some people I'll say that, can, get to a political ideology or a system just through thinking about it or reading, history or whatever.Like, but that's not the majority of people. The majority of people want to know that, who, that somebody who is offering to lead them has, comes from somewhere they can see. And somewhere that's easy to understand. And yeah, and, I think you're right that, for a long time, especially in more leftist circles, there's just this dismissal of the idea that well, there's nothing worth saving here.We need to start over. We need a revolution. And it's like these are fantasy is what you're doing because, in the same way that you know, with slavery, like if you want, and, it also happened in the civil rights movement later, that, if you want to make political change, you can't talk out of the political [00:28:00] system.You can't say that history doesn't exist and that you are exempt from it. No, you're not.Problems with Democratic party messagingFLAXMAN: Right. part of the work of building a united front, front, I'm not trying to shit on the left. I have a lot of friends who are parts of the Progressive movement and who do great work and they're trying to create change in this. country and it's very important and I think for parts of the progressive movement, we often share very similar goals, but it's just a different North Star I I think. in the progressive movement there is a focus on, oppression, anti-oppression, social justice frameworks for change. And that's great if that's what motivates you, and that's where you feel like you want to create change in the world.But there's a ceiling for that in the United States for who just authentically shares that worldview and values. And if that's the only movement option available, then we're not going to have a majority in favor of liberal democracy.And so, we're trying to build a home for people who are more focused on organizing under what we call an American Universalist framework, where that's their North star.That's my north star. I want a country with universal freedom, rights, and opportunity for all Americans. And I believe I need a, that's. That's. America is an important invention in the world to bring that about. It helped end the era of monarchies, which was the era of almost all of human history, and we're in the effort of continuing to expand and perfect that way of expanding circles of freedom and rights in the world.So like, that's my my orientation. I think one of the, one of the challenges of the last decade or two is like John Podesta created this idea of the progressive movement. It was like a brand that was created because liberal became really unpopular. And so like, oh, let's let's create a new [00:30:00] brand and cold Paul Progressive. But there was, I don't think there was any, it, had echoes of the progressive movement of the earlier in the 19 hundreds, because that was the name as well. But it was just an amalgamation of several different groups. You had, I think, American Universalists in there, but you also had a sort of liberal social justice left.There. And then you also had elements of like the elib social justice left in there, all sort of like in the same tent. I don't think that worked as an organizing structure. I think other democracies, the way they organize for change is that people organize in movements that authentically reflect their worldview and their values and then they come together in grand coalitions when the democracy is threatened. But no one really knows what the Democratic party of Progressive movement stands for because it's just been this amalgamation for so long.SHEFFIELD: I think you're right that, there is this indefinite stance and people have no idea what things mean or what people want.And I think a lot of that boils down to that the, Democratic Party itself and the leadership had they think of politics simply as a matter of coalition management. And they, don't understand that people actually do want some sort of real vision. And they want, they do want a North star.And, for all of the, I mean, to like, that to me was the biggest point for Obama in 2008 was that he actually did offer. Something that people could point to and say, that's what I believe, that's what I want. And yet no one learned anything from, what Obama did with that. Because they, and it was like that, that happened almost by accident in some way.Because it seems like even the, White House itself and, [00:32:00] the the political operation of Obama after that, and, they just let organizing for America die on the vine. And, all of these things, like they had something that they could have really done something with and they didn't.And it was because apparently nobody understood this idea that you have to give people a vision of something, an overarching goal, an overarching view of the world.FLAXMAN: yeah, there let's I want to unpack this with you. This is great. I like, so, one of the big I think mental frameworks that I want to change as we think about how we get out of this crisis is a party, a political party, especially in the United States, is not a movement. Like the political parties are set up to perform certain tasks like run primary elections and like, buy ads for the candidate. There's things, and they could be doing those tasks much better. Like, but the movements are what provide people power and energy and ideas, and they funnel it into the party when they work together. But like a party is not a movement. And the and the parties are vulnerable. Honestly vulnerable. The parties are not, and the, and politicians are not thinking like, in like, oh, what's the best policy to support? Like, what's the, like, that's not how real politics work. Like, the parties are pulled by powerful factions or movements. And the de and the author, the Republican party, has been taken over in large part by an authoritarian faction. And then they've, kicked everyone who's not down with authoritarianism outta the party. That's like a faction like eating, becoming a movement, eating the party. But the Democratic party has just been subject to some of the most unpopular factions in American politics for over two decades. You have like a corporate faction, you have a identitarian left faction.You have a sort of just like Maximalist single [00:34:00] issue advocacy group factions. And if you just look at well, they're, these groups are just not popular with Americans and they keep pulling the party away from making Popular decisions and being concerned with what is big change that would actually get at root problems that are hurting the country and hurting people and our popular ideas.The missing movement infrastructureFLAXMAN: That's not, the orientation because there's no faction organizing along those principles and pulling the party towards those things is there's no like countervailing force. And so, I think one of the things we hope to accomplish is to. Organize that voice, which is out there. It just doesn't have the infrastructure to speak loudly enough to have any influence over, over the party.And so that, that's like, I think there's like a missing movement infrastructure that's part of the issue here. And it needs a North star. And that's why we, wrote the book is to ground ourselves in values. And, but to create a space where now we can sort of, we can start to hash out what are the big ideas that we want to run on that actually are in line with those values and that are popular and capture the imagination of the country.That's how we think we're going to move forward.SHEFFIELD: Well, so what and what are some of these, ideas and who run.FLAXMAN: I mean, I think the, biggest shift we would want to see is for. I would say, our fellow centrist and moderates. And there's a real problem with the brand of centrism in moderation and that it can, it does not communicate to the American people what a lot of centrist and moderates think. It communicates.It can communicate. The status quo is fine. We want to defend the status quo. It can communicate. We just believe in sort of averaging between the extremes. Like we [00:36:00] don't really stand for anything ourselves. Like we just, we just find the middle between people who have ideologies. Or it means to a lot of Americans like, corporatism because there's been a bipartisan centrist consensus for 20, 30 years around economic policies that have not worked. And so, I think the biggest debate we want to spark. Especially in this age of, wildly disruptive ai, which is going to up upturn an economy that's already upturned, is the people are looking to the extremes because not just that the middle hasn't held, the middle hasn't delivered, like the champions of liberalism haven't come up with an economy that actually has opportunity, universal opportunity for everyone, and people are rightly pissed. And so, I think we're we want to spark some real debates, like what are some ideas that are going to be big enough to actually create an economy people want to live in? And I think for example, folks cite abundance as an example of like a new economic policy. And I think like yeah, For some of that, like the government needs to be able to deliver.Economic solutions beyond neoliberalismFLAXMAN: We need much more housing. Let's just adopt that idea across the political spectrum. That should not be controversial in my perspective. And but that's only maybe 15, 20% of the solution. that's not a complete solution set. So how do we lay the, how do we lay, the table for some bigger economic ideas?SHEFFIELD: Well, and. And I, think what you're doing is you're trying to say that, this what is, ne what is often widely der as neoliberalism that doesn't work either. Because I think,FLAXMAN: Right,exactly.SHEFFIELD: from political history standpoint that as the Republican party [00:38:00] began canceling, literally canceling its more moderate members, they came into the Democratic party and then just sort of took over a lot of the more liberal infrastructure that was there, and the liberals didn't stand up for themselves or just kind of got displaced and, and so that's what the kind of more corporatist democratic stuff is.It's just warmed over republicanism and lib liberalism never asserted itself fully within the party and said, look, those ideas are not what we're, that's not where we come from. That's not who we are. And you're just doing libertarianism with a little bit higher taxesFLAXMAN: Maybe, but I, also think that there was a, there was a consensus that, maybe this'll work, like maybe if we open, I actually, my background is in free trade, for example. I, worked for two years for this free trade economist John dti. and so the core to the idea of free trade is yes, it creates a lot more wealth, but it is never evenly distributed.The only way everyone is better off is if you find some way to distribute the wealth. And that never happened. You're like, oh, let's open up free trade first. We'll figure that out later. And then now people are like, and you know what, now I don't want it either. I don't want you to redistribute it and like, you lied to me. And so, but there was a, real consensus and I was a part of it I was very excited for like, oh, we're going to, like, this is going to work. Like we're going to create an economy for everyone. I don't think you can just like blame the Republicans who moderate Republicans who came into the Democratic party. There was like a lot of thinking that neoliberalism could lift all votes. And the Americans are looking for other options. And liberalism has not provided a big solution in line with the values of [00:40:00] liberalism. And that's why I think we're seeing people drift towards authoritarianism on the right or illiberal left ideas. And so before we just point out the, big problems with like illiberal or backwards economic ideas on the right or the left, like folks who really do believe in liberalism need to come up with some bigger, better ideas.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And because people, I, mean, I think it's pretty clear that when you, I mean, when you look at polling, when you look at history but people, they want some form of capitalism, but they don't want it unchecked and they want it to, and, they want the government to have a role.But you know, what that is, Democrats really haven't pushed forward and you're right, that there hasn't been a non-par, a non-partisan outside of parties movement. Like that's really is one of the secrets of the right with the Republican party is that anytime their politicians become unpopular, they just turn on them and say, well, well you didn't do what we said.Learning from right-wing political tacticsSHEFFIELD: so, we're, going to get, we're going to get rid of you. And, so your unpopularity, your failures, whatever, Hey, that wasn't on us, it's on you. It And, we got some new people coming along and, and, you could, and one could argue that perhaps that's kind of nihilistic and whatnot.But you know what, it's, it is very effective from a, from an election electioneering standpoint because, I mean, that's, Trump built his entire brand saying how terrible the Republican party was, When you think about it.FLAXMAN: Oh yeah, I mean AB absolutely, I mean, Trump won because he ran against the lives of the Iraq war. I mean, that was a major part of his 2016 campaign. But he was like all these established Republicans lied to you about the Iraq war and he was right. AndAnd so there was a major revolt. And he also is a [00:42:00] demagogue and so he. Said a lot of, he said a lot of things that he didn't believe and that were lies and untrue, but he mixed in enough real lies from establishment Republicans that that's what people were looking for. And I, think the the challenge is, and then he, basically restored trust in a sense, in the party by getting rid of everyone who they were, like they lied and betrayed you. And so this is the, I think the challenge for how we move forward is how does, who is going to restore trust in the Democratic Party brand and eventually restored trust in the Republican Party brand. When everyone's lying, you know about different things and someone's going to have to run against it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and and to that point the, Democratic Party in polls is Yeah. Historically low favorability for it, and, and, then that's powered by people who vote for Democrats saying, these guys are terrible. and they don't. fight Trump hard enough.Like I, the Senate has so many rules that you can use to stop stuff. And Senate democrats almost never use them. Like they could be grinding so many things to a halt, and they haven't. And people see that, and they see American citizens getting picked up off the street by ice. They see, people being fired for no reason at all.Just because they, they, can't, they cross Trump in some way or even getting like, or just being friends with someone, like that gets you fired now by Trump. And, people see that and they're like, well, you gotta do something. I mean, like we saw with the, recent No Kings rallies, collectively, these were the largest.Rallies on a single day for a single purpose that had ever been done in American history. So there's a huge appetite there for [00:44:00] something more for, people to stand up and for leaders to stand up and do things and say something definitive and do things that matter.There is this huge amount of energy that people are so dissatisfied but the, party leaders really don't get it. And and now their readings are in the toilet because of that.FLAXMAN: it, this, is, goes to the example of the A, OC and Bernie rallies, From was that maybe it was in March or April. And huge turnout ma. I mean it was a whole tour, massive turnout. And, I'll have people ask me like, people in this sort of a moderate centrist camp or people in the progressive movement, like, oh, like, look at all, are all those people believe in a OC and Bernie, or like, what, are their politics?And I was like we don't know honestly. because they're the only ones holding rallies. There is such a. demand For people to just like show up and be together and show their strength and organize and rally around defending the country. And right now the only supply is coming from a OC and Bernie Sanders. So good for them. But this is part of, I think the frustration with sort of establishment centrism is y'all need to host some rallies like rally around saving the country. And I think that's where I want to see more leadership right now. And I think there's a a challenge in the Democratic party. because it's, it has a, bunch of, it, it's, it is ideologically diverse.It includes sort of social justice progressives and American universalists and different factions and the but people want to see you fight. And there's a way to do that, which is in line with majoritarian, American Universalist values. And just I think I'm, waiting to find the leader who's going to do that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. [00:46:00] Well, and to circle back though on, some of the policies it, I, it is really important for people that, let's say you don't want Democratic socialism. We have to understand that the government has to do more for the public. The public is not being served by this economy.The role of government in the modern economySHEFFIELD: Only the government can do something about that because only the government has the money. Like that's, it's just that simple. The private sector, is too divided, is too and no one has enough money and they should, we definitely don't want them to have enough money. Jeff Bezos or, Elon Musk or what, like you have to, this is the role in the computational age here.This is where the government has to function well and has to serve the people more than any other time in human history. Because if it doesn't, then, and you guys have an essay from your colleague Peter Teigan. There, you know about the, this is the, guilt. They, the right wing wants another gilded age.That is literally what they want, and only the government can stop them.FLAXMAN: And it's a great essay. but I do think there's, I want to add a little bit more nuance into this debate. I don't think the American people care if the government provides something or if the private sector provides something, they want it to work, they want it to be affordable, they want it to be good. And so in some cases it might be deregulation, like in the housing market. If that works,great, we probably need some government money too. And, no matter what happens, the government needs to be able to actually like, deliver on things with good staffing and good management and good technology. But in other solutions, like I, I live in, New York, people love universal pre-K that is a government program. Americans were not, they don't care whether the service is government provided or private sector provided. That's a sort of intellectual debate that I don't think most Americans truly, really care about. They're just paying attention. Like, does it work? Is it delivering? Is the country better? Is my life better?Is the economy [00:48:00] better? And so I feel a little bit. Ideologically agnostic it. I don't think the solution's going to be all deregulation. It's not going to be all government and regulation. It's going to be a mix of things depending on exactly what is the challenge. And when you look at the core issues, like food is just insanely expensive, housing is just insanely expensive. Like all of the core things you need to live are just too expensive. I'm happy with an approach that's going to put everything on the table.SHEFFIELD: But just to step back from, the policy for one second, that, it is worth noting that Joe Biden did have a lot of policies that were popular. With the American people and were very beneficial, like eliminating overdraft fees or doing a lot of, keeping tabs on these giant media behemoths that are, trying to propagandize the American public.the CFPB is a great agency, It does all kinds of amazing stuff for people. And, he had the, the infrastructure bill, which, is the biggest investment in, in, in environmental technologies to stop global warming. these were great policies, but they didn't know how to communicate them.They just thought that the policies would speak for themselves and, they don't. they work for some people, but the vast majority of Americans, well, I won't say vast majority, but like a lot of Americans, they don't vote on the issue. they vote on. How do you make them feel and what kind of media do they look at?The importance of public rallies and engagementSHEFFIELD: And, the Democrats. Have not invested. The, left broadly, center to Left hasn't invested in media. I mean, if you go to Iowa or Alabama or Idaho or whatever the, right winging media is, the mainstream media there in the, you go to a bar in these places and it's got Fox News there, [00:50:00] and you go to a, dentist office and they're playing News Max in the background, and you go to, the mechanic shop, he's listening to the O Vaughn or, one of these right wing podcasters.Like that's what's there. And if you're not out there telling people what you believe and, showing how things could be, and you're not literally coming to them where they are, then all your policy plans, they don't matterFLAXMAN: I mean,SHEFFIELD: never heard ' em. The public won't hear it.FLAXMAN: I want to, yes, and what you're saying, I mean, there is absolutely an issue of needing a way to communicate to the public that does not exist. And I think there is a deeper issue, which is that the Biden administration was saying, no, the economy is great and you can't, you, you can't that really pisses people off when you tell them, no, you're wrong about what you're feeling. That's, the opposite of good messaging. And I think one of the things that gives oxygen. To a lot of the and trust with more right wing media is they validate what people are feeling and then they come up with solutions that are going to make things much worse or are going to damage the country or hurt the people they're talking to.But they start by validating the reality of what people are feeling and seeing, which is that it's not like what we, the, policies we've been pursuing for 20, 30 years. Like they haven't been working. Like people are not better off. Some people are, but most people aren't. It's just much harder and things are much more expensive. And so even with the, some of the ideas that the Biden administration had, I agree. There was no narrative there was no communicationbut I,SHEFFIELD: infrastructureFLAXMAN: and No infrastructure for it, but also no validation of what Americans were feeling. There was like a gaslighting that I think angered [00:52:00] A lot of Americans about the economy and and then unfortunately about his age, which then was like, that was the nail in the coffin, reinforcing the counter narrative of like, they're not telling you the truth. So I think we can do a lot better.SHEFFIELD: yeah, I think so. And and it, and A lot of that begins by just opening up debate a lot more on, within the broader left that, let people put forward their ideas and to actually talk about it,FLAXMAN: Right.SHEFFIELD: it out and invest in media platforms so that people can have these discussions with the public.I mean, like, that's one of the, best things about talk radio for the reactionary movement and the Republican Party that they control is that, it, these are real focus groups, like focus groups in a room you get a bunch of people in a room, like it's a contrived setting. And usually they tend to be dominated by whoever talks the most.And so they're not accurate in a lot of ways. and, there's, a lot of research showing that they, can be highly problematic. Whereas with talk radio, these are people that they just call into their local talk, their local talk station and say what they have to say and obviously there's a self-selection thing, but, you know, these are people.If, you care enough to call into the talk radio station, you care enough to vote, you care enough to get involved with things. And so these are real, these are, this is bi-directional communication and there's really nothing like thaton the broader left that I can say.FLAXMAN: absolutely. and this is this is, people oh, you gotta meet people where they are, which honestly is, this was sort of like a. Academic phrase. I was like, what exactly are you meaning? But that's exactly what you're saying. Let people call in, say what they think authentically.Don't punish 'em for saying that. Engage with them in conversation.[00:54:00]And I think that is something we all have to do. And the, I, in terms of like us trying to build a new movement home I think for a lot of Americans who have felt either alienated by the sort of ideological rigidity of the left oral and also alienated by the sort of complacency of the center, there's a need for a new culture of doing this type of politics, which is much more open to disagreement and being like, disagreement is fine.Creating a new culture of political discourseFLAXMAN: That doesn't mean there's a civil war. Between, factions, it means that we're going to defend each other's ability to have political rights at all in this country so that we can solve the problem and we care about a solution so much that we want to have open debate about things more than folks have been having.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, letting the chips fall where they may, because ultimately people gotta realize, look, if, somebody has the votes to do something, you should let 'em try. Like, that's what democracy is about. Like, if you want to protect democracy, you gotta actually practice it.FLAXMAN: Right.SHEFFIELD: actually let people, if they win a debate, if they win a nomination, then that's, then you should support them.Like, that is how things work in the Republican party. They, don't there, there's that phrase that old phrase in politics that, democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. And you know what? That latter part is a lot more effective in terms of organizing. because I mean, when you look at the, polling, there there's probably only about 30% of Americans who have these reactionary, anti-modern viewpoints that want, that they hate democracy and, want to roll everything back and, criminalize homosexuality make women have no rights, et cetera, et cetera.and that's, it's only 30% of the public and or even less actually, if depending on how much you want to refine those beliefs. So, the, Washington [00:56:00] Republican reactionary class, they're not even the majority of the Republican party actually. because when they ask people in polls, should the government spend less money on this and this Like, break it down specifically issue. There's basically no issue except for foreign aid that even Republicans want to spend less on. And so, but they're so good at coalition politics that when they, that when they realize, okay, well this person won. Well, I'm going to support. And imagine if there were people that protected democracy that also had that same, commitment to democracy that I lost the election.Well, yeah, I'm sorry about that, but I'm not going to bad mouth. I'm not going to be like Andrew Cuomo and try to, sabotage the guy I don't like, like, it's fine. You don't like mom, God, he fine. Let him have his shot. And if he's so awful and he is so stupid, then people will throw him out, just like they did Eric Adams.FLAXMAN: Yeah, I, think there's a, I mean, there, there's, a lot to un unpack in what you were saying. I, think there's a there's a real trust issue in the Democratic party that is also exas, that is also making it easier for Republicans to coalesce around their candidates. And that's I think something that the Democratic party needs to also solve is how to make itself more attractive to a majority and to pay attention to running candidates in different parts of the country who authentically represent the values and ideas of different parts of the country. It doesn't need to be everyone ideologically in lockstep with the progressive movement and whatever the orthodoxy is. I think that's an important opening up of the Democratic Party that's needed. And then separately. Yeah, I think, in terms of like building a united front, we have to realize that like we're going to be in coalition with people to defend [00:58:00] democracy that we disagree with, that our, our political opponents sometimes enemies. But if we're willing to support each other's rights and freedoms, then we should be working together because that's the key question of the moment that are we going to remain a constitutional democracy? And it's not just about, oh, like moderates need to support progressives in general elections when they win the primaries.Working in coalitions despite disagreementsFLAXMAN: that's, there, there's, important inter-party behavior there to focus on. But I, do think we are not any politics as usual moment. we are in a moment of extraordinary political. threat.And So, I think we have to put forward our best ideas to actually fix the country, get rid of the underlying conditions that make authoritarianism popular, andbe willing to work in coalitions of people with whom we disagree on really major things.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, because you're, you have the same overarching commitment to protecting democracy and serving the people. Like that's should be the goal. And, to defeating the authoritarians, like those should be the goals of everybody who, calls themselves something on the left.And that understanding who the real enemy is, it's not each other.It is Trump and his corrupt Ron. That's the real enemy. And, go ahead.FLAXMAN: no. And, i, think I was just going to agree with you Iem.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, yeah, so, and like, I, and just, and the, examples work on the other side too, because like, you look in the Pen Pennsylvania Senate race in 2022 that you had Connor Lamb versus John Federman that, John Federman was running as the, outside the box progressed. And, he got all this support from the left.And then, they thought of, [01:00:00] of, Connor Lamb as just this mealy now centrist who wasn't going to do anything good, and now fast forward here we are in 2025, that, I think everybody, broadly speaking in the party, no matter, well maybe not everybody, but like a lot of people are saying, well, what the hell is happened to Federman?Like, he's just enabling Trump, constantly. And then, and then meanwhile counter Lamb is out, there, doing some real stuff and, hitting Trump hard. And people are like, wow, I guess I, I made the wrong choice with that. and obviously, it's, things are easier to see in hindsight, obviously, but you know this what I'm saying?These principles, they do work both ways that the main goal should be stopping the fascist. And and, that's what matters most. And, sometimes that means somebody supporting somebody who you don't like, whatever your political orientation is, you gotta, you have to be on the larger team.FLAXMAN: Yeah, and I, but I also think, for example, one way you can defeat authoritarianism is to say, I. I really disagree. Like you're saying, I really disagree with X person or X candidate, but I am going to work with them to fight authoritarianism. That's a good, that's a great show of what being in the United Front is all about. And in terms of like letting the debates happen, like that's how democracy works. E exactly. I think we need more persuasion in our politics and less like, and not trying to coerce or pressure people into believing things because that doesn't end up working out well for building consensus. We actually have to have more open debate and I, hope that we can start having it as a sort of pro-democracy coalition around, economic issues. because I think that's the patient zero for where we went off the rails.Lessons from the civil rights movementSHEFFIELD: [01:02:00] Yeah. But, And that's, it is ultimately what everybody agrees on. And and if you do have some other perspectives on other issues, you should make your case to the public. Like that's, I think one of the other unfortunate the wrong lessons we're learned during the civil rights era, I think because the Civil Rights Movement succeeded because it was, across the board, it did everything.So it, it was filing court cases, it was advocated to the public. It was, endorsing candidates. It was, it was doing all of these things and it was working within, trying to work within both parties. So, and it won because of that. But I think unfortunately a lot of the institutional left just focused on those legal victories that happened.And they put all of this money and all of this energy into imagining that there was this, universal liberal logic in the Constitution, that it would always mean what we thought it would mean. And that was objective reality. And and it just wasn't true. Like, meanwhile the Federalist Society was out there creating this nationwide network of people that, supported their viewpoints.And and, decades later, nobody on the left has even done anything commensurate to that to counteract it. and, now. This idea that, there's legal po legal positivism is what I'm calling it. That, it's in shambles, and it's a disaster. And, it's obvious to everyone now that there is no single way of interpreting a, statute.No, there isn't. Like the right wing people are going to, they're going to do what they want to do. And if you want to stop that, you don't stop that by making better arguments to them. You stop that by, getting your people on the courts, that's what you do.FLAXMAN: I mean, I, listen, I'm not smart enough in a lawyer to have a view on legal positivism. I'm not even sure what that is. But I will say, [01:04:00] I agree with your greater point, which is that that there's a great linking quote on this, which is like, if you have the public with you, there's almost nothing you can't do.And if you don't have the public with you there, you can't do anything. And so, whatever we do, we need to be, and I wouldn't even necessarily con, I don't even really consider myself on, the left. But whatever we do, you need to build majorities as supported. Like that's, if you don't have that, you're, not going to win. And maybe you can win temporarily, but you're not going to move the country forward. It, means like actually going going out there and like building support among the American people for the ideas that you have. There's no way around it.SHEFFIELD: Yep. You gotta do the hard work instead of living in a fantasy regardless of who you are and convince the people, not the judges, not the corporations, the public.Closing thoughts and contact informationFLAXMAN: Exactly.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right. Well, so, it's been a good discussion, Seth. If people want to keep up with what you are doing personally and with the organization give us some website addresses and social media if.want.FLAXMAN: And the most important thing is we hope people will subscribe to the All American. Go to the all american.com and you can also download a free copy of our book of essays, writings on American Universalism there. And that's where I'm doing more of my writing. And we will send out weekly updates we call the Spark in the Flag on how to fight authoritarianism, how to wedge their coalition, peel off different elements of the MAGA coalition that we think are not at their heart authoritarian. And how we can also avoid the traps being set for a broad united front because they're actively trying to split us among our [01:06:00] different ideological and other differences. And so, I hope people will subscribe.SHEFFIELD: All All right. Sounds good. Thanks for being here.FLAXMAN: My pleasure. Thank you.SHEFFIELD: Alright, , so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to Ethe of Change show where we have the video audio transcript of all the episodes. And you can also subscribe on Patreon or Substack. We have free options there as well.But if you can do a paid option, that would be much appreciated. I really would like that if you could, and if you're watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever we post a new episode. Thanks a lot, and I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode Summary Donald Trump in an unfamiliar situation. After years of being able to tell his followers what to think about almost everything, many of the MAGA faithful are upset at his administration for refusing to release the government’s files on the infamous sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.When he was running for office last year, Trump and many of the people who work in the highest levels of his administration repeatedly promised that they would release the documents on Epstein, including FBI, director Kash Patel, Deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. Now, both Bondi and Trump are saying that they will not be releasing the Epstein files.This refusal has been extremely upsetting to many Trump voters because believing that imaginary Democratic pedophiles secretly rule the world has become almost the cornerstone of being a Republican in the Trump era.  Faced such massive inter-party descent, the administration has taken to a strategy that they reportedly refer to as “zombie food,” throwing out stories that they know know to be nonsense in order to distract MAGA partisans from Trump’s Epstein betrayal.In the past several weeks, Trump has offered a veritable zombie food buffet of narratives to supporters. But the biggest dish by far seems to be a new effort re-frame the 2016 Russian hack and influence campaign as actually a secret plot by Trump’s former opponent, Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama.None of this is real, needless say, but I think particular episode is worth digging into further in real-time since we can see right now how zombie food is made and served up to the MAGA masses. Joining the show to discuss is Renée DiResta, a long-time friend of the show who has direct knowledge of this particular history because she was one of numerous experts who worked with the Senate Intelligence Committee to analyze the Russian hacking and disinformation campaign.The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhereTheory of Change brings you in-depth conversations on politics, technology, and media like nowhere else. Please subscribe to stay in touch!Related Content◘ The internet is a safe space for lying now, thanks to congressional Republicans◘ Covid contrarians were far more wrong than scientists were◘ What today’s internet propagandists owe to yesterday’s tobacco advertising executives◘ Countering the economics of disinformation◘ America’s political divide is psychological more than ideological◘ What’s actually in Tulsi Gabbard’s document dump?Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction08:26 — Marco Rubio and Senate Republicans said Russia tried to help Trump in 201612:21 — Trump’s “zombie food” distraction strategy15:13 — The Sydney Sweeney hoax controversy18:29 — File dumps as fake disclosure22:25 — Tulsi Gabbard’s desperation to reconcile with Trump after Iran debacle28:22 — Russian trolls only praised Clinton to damn her30:06 — Russian troll tactics34:15 — Right-wing figures falsely conflating media headlines with government actions37:30 — John Durham turned up nothing compared to Robert Mueller41:56 — Kash Patel’s burn bag story44:20 — What the Durham Report annex actually says48:48 — Right-wing media’s lower reading comprehension?55:48 — Russian idiom snafus01:00:05 — Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode SummaryRight-wing Republicans have lost in the marketplace of ideas. Their policy views that evolution never happened, that tax cuts increase revenues, and that science is a big left-wing conspiracy are laughable. Whenever reactionaries attempt to debate progressives and liberals, as they recently tried against Mehdi Hasan, they fall flat on their faces.The millionaire grifters you see talking to themselves on YouTube or talk radio are too afraid to debate actual progressive pundits, so instead, the reactionary right picks battles with imaginary Democrats. I know this because I used to do it in my former career as a right-wing activist. It’s a dead-simple method: Find an obscure person you can say is “on the left” and then make that person’s little-viewed TikTok video somehow representative of everyone on the center-to-left.Rupert Murdoch’s Fox cable channel pioneered this tactic decades ago with its infamous “War on Christmas” lies. In actuality, celebrating Christmas was popularized by the liberal cultural Christian Charles Dickens. The original right-wing Protestants, the Puritans like Oliver Cromwell, hated Christmas and banned it from being celebrated for its supposed pagan and papist origins.But truth does not matter to reactionary authoritarians. Only power. And we saw that most recently in the recent hoax generated by right-wing media over actress Sydney Sweeney’s decision to do an ad campaign for a jean manufacturer that we won’t name.Most people didn’t care about the Sweeney spot. It was one of thousands of celeb paid endorsements. A handful of people noted that using “jeans” as a play on the word “genes” had unfortunate echoes of eugenics, but mostly it was ignored—until far-right extremists like Libs of TikTok and Charlie Kirk seized on a handful of scattered online comments and inflated them into proof of a massive “woke” meltdown. In reality, the outrage they claimed to be responding to didn’t exist; they had manufactured it, using a well-worn tactic called nutpicking to pretend that Democrats nationwide were outraged by an ad they had never even seen.In this live Theory of Change episode, Noah Berlatsky of Everything Is Horrible joins to talk about the right’s history of lying about the left, the center’s falling for it, and why Donald Trump is desperate to have Americans talk about anything but his failed administration and cover-up for Jeffrey Epstein.The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content* The right-wing freakout about sorority dance videos is more disturbing than it looks* How 1970s right-wing college students invented canceling people and many of today’s political consulting tools* Inside the cult of Turning Point USA* It’s not just schools: Reactionaries are targeting public libraries as well* The fact that Ghislaine Maxwell is being considered for a Trump pardon reveals his absolute desperation* Trump’s many broken campaign promisesChapters00:00 — Introduction05:33 — Right-wing envy of progressive cultural influence09:53 — History of manufactured controversies14:25 — Beauty standards and eugenics19:01 — Trump's comments on minorities23:49 — Republicans love canceling people28:41 — History of Christmas celebrations32:36 — Trump's failed campaign promises36:46 — Economic policy failures40:21 — Right-wing media tactics44:36 — Online harassment campaigns48:43 — Trump and Epstein connection55:55 — The importance of distraction for TrumpTranscriptThe following is a computer-generated transcript of the audio. It is provided for convenience purposes only and is not proof-read.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: ​[00:00:00] This is Theory of Change. I'm Matthew Sheffield. Thanks for joining me for another episode. And we're doing a live one today with Noah Berlatsky to talk about one of the most absurd and stupid fake controversies cooked up by the right wing in a number of years. And I'm talking of course about Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle and the ad campaign that she did for them, featuring some her wearing a jean jacket and pants, and which it was. Basically kind of a play off of a very kind of infamous Franklin, ad from the, nineties, I guess it was the nineties. Yeah. Featuring Brooke Shields when she was 14 years old and, that was kind of creepy. And they were trying to basically do an edgy, quote unquote, type of ad and, get controversy, but it didn't work initially, and like people weren't really paying attention to it. and, there, there was a little bit of commentary here and there of people talking about beauty standards and euro, euro centra and that sort of thing.But overall, people are just like, oh, Sydney Sweeney did an ad. and a lot of people had never heard of Sydney Sweeney. Like, I think that's the thing that I, when I, have [00:02:00] posted about a, thread about it, a couple of, or yesterday I've gotten so many replies from people saying, who the hell is Sydney Sweeney? Have you have people said that to you, Noah?NOAH BERLATSKY: Not, I mean, I haven't talked about it a ton, but I haven't uhhuh, I mean, I kind of know who she is. I don't know that Oh, you do? Yeah.SHEFFIELD: You're, a, you, are a media and political writer, so Of course, so,BERLATSKY: yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I'm not that surprised 'cause she's, she's a relatively new, her, stardom is relatively new and she, I don't think she's been in any huge kinda blockbuster hits quite yet, so,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I'm not sure. It's not surprising that people wouldn't know necessarily, I think. but, I guess before we get further into it, so, Noah just give, people a little background of your site and, and how you got into all this, if you wouldBERLATSKY: please. Sure. I'm a freelance writer. I write about politics and culture.my site is Everything is Horrible, which is a newsletter on Substack. and I've written about Sydnee Sweeney a couple times. most recently I talked about this ad a little bit. and, yeah, I've talked about her movie Immaculate. And, she's kind of been a figure who the right's been interested in for a while.sort of both positive. I mean, they've kind of both praised and attacked her. She's kind of a figure that the right thinks about, so I've talked about that a little.SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, let me, yeah, that's right. and, she's interesting as a figure for the right, because, they, they were trying to make Taylor Swift, their mascot, a few years ago, and I think after that didn't work.Now they're [00:04:00] trying, they've tried to make Sydney Sweeney as sort of their avatar, which is really bizarre because like, that's the, one of the funniest. And the most absurd things about right-wing cultural commentary, is that, or cultural output is that they can't make anything artistic. and so, these people who have these avatars of, Greek sculptures and, Renaissance paintings, et cetera, et cetera, and they're talking about, oh, I'm here to protect the culture from the ravages of the left.Well, guess what? The left runs all of these museums. and they're the ones, you know who, well,BERLATSKY: I think that's right, and I think that there's, I think that the left and Democrats don't really think about that as an advantage or don't necessarily capitalize it on it the way they could. I mean, I was kind of thinking about this with, kind of, people are like, who's the Joe Rogan of the left?Right? Are, because Joe Rogan's kind of has a big audience and people think, oh, well, he's. Got this direct line to a lot of young men, even though his audience is not that young. and I was thinking about that. And the truth is, I mean, there's a lot of cultural product that is made by people on the left, whether you're talking about museums, whether you're talking about like Taylor Swift, who's, a Democrat and who is endorsing Democrats or Beyonce.The right’s envy of progressive cultural influenceBERLATSKY: I mean, there's just a lot of culture that comes from sort of the broadly progressive side of the spectrum. and, but you know, there's not a, what there isn't is there's not a lot of effort to people are willing to spend a lot of money to find the [00:06:00] next Joe Rogan, but like less money to do things like fund alternative weeklies, which help cultivate this kind of.Art scene, which is often quite progressive and, is interesting to people who are progressive and gets them interested in culture and in politics. the le I mean, the left doesn't really have an arts policy. I mean, that used to be, there was one of those in the thirties, right?I mean FDR was like, we're gonna fund, well that's, yeah. We kind of don't do that and Then they're like, well, why don't we have Joe Rogan? And it's like, you've got this large infrastructure, which you could do more to fund if you want it. And the right kind of knows that, which is why they're defunding it.Right. the, right is like attacking arts funding. And they're doing that because a lot of the arts are, sort of broadly progressive and they want, don't want people to be able to like, make a living doing that or communicate.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it's true. And and, essentially what they're trying to do is so, so mainstream culture, the reactionary, right.and I think it's important not to call them conservative because, conservatives want to keep things how they are. and Donald Trump is anything but conservative. conservative is somebody like Joe Manchin or Ki or, ki Sinema, that's a conservative. or like George will, or like those are conservatives.Donald Trump is a reactionary and authoritarian, fascist, whatever those words we want to use, I think. but like, they're, against, they are anti-American. Literally. They hate this country, how it is. And, the people that are in it, like they want to go back to, pre Jim Crow, they want to go back to the Jim Crow South.Like that's, and they say that frequently, like they, they [00:08:00] talk all the time about, oh, well, black people were better off, during segregation. There was less crime, there was less murder, and there was more opportunities and more capitalism. So they say these kind of, so they're letting us know what they want.They're anti-American. And, and we can see that I think with all of these fake controversies, that the right wing has been gin up for such a long time and for decades. And, the, and a few years ago, the folks at Media Matters did a clip, that talked about what I think the, set, what set the template for all of these fake controversy like Sydney Sweeney and the Genes is the war on Christmas.And so I'm gonna roll this clip that Media Matters put together of Fox News people making everything up about the war on Christmas.Fox News clip: Well, the war on Christmas is not real. They tell you all the time. It's totally fake. And if you believe in it, you're dumb. You watch Fox News or something. Isn't it amazing?The, attack, the assault, it's just unbridled and seemingly unprecedented against Christmas. It has to do with, at the root of It, it has to do with two things. Abortion and, the gay rights agenda. today we're talking a lot about sexual harassment. Well, cases like this are examples of spiritual harassment.And look, this is a part of the larger, not just war on Christmas, but the war against Christianity. Look, I'm tired of, we talk, we're gonna talk about this all the way through Christmas. You name one person who's said that Obama's waging a war on Christmas. I've heard many people on these airwaves talking about it.I've been on panels talking. Is this really happening? Yeah, I mean, I haven't said it. We've talked, I don't remember anybody saying Obama's changing. I talked about Christmas. Who's war on Christmas? Obama is Obama. I think we won the War on terror. I mean the war on Christmas already hostile toward Christmas and hostile toward Christians.History of manufactured controversiesFox News clip: The war on Christmas, heads to Sin City because there wasn't anybody else fighting this war on Christmas. I'll take kudos for that. [00:10:00] War on Christmas. And John, you've got a book for that title? Yeah, I did write a book about it and it, I thought maybe we'd be done with it. And the war on Christmas may be worse than ever.There is an attack on Christmas, which is kind of the tip of the spear when it comes to, and even greeter, battle brew.SHEFFIELD: and that video actually goes on for two more minutes. Like, this is the kind of b******t that the right wing has been shoveling for decades. as we saw in that clip. I mean, bill O'Reilly, that was Guy, hasn't been on Fox in a long time since he, got hired for harassing women.and, like, and there, there's a reason that I'm calling this, this attitude or this PR strategy, phantom Lib syndrome. And, I have to give credit to, one of my, Twitter followers who came up with a phrase, very excellent phrase. And, the reason it's phantom lib is that when you look at right-wing policy outputs, they don't exist.They literally don't exist. And in terms of like po they don't write policy papers that are coherent. and, the things that they do essentially amount to. The, what's your policy on next? Cut the budget. That's it. Like their model for how to respond to natural disasters is Katrina, their model. Like, and we saw that during COVID, when they had this, the policy that the Trump White House desperately wanted to do was just let people die.let it rip and let you know, kill grandma. And some of them even explicitly said that. so, so their policies are so dumb and so abhorrent. No one except for the most psychotic people, like, who run the Republican party would want to vote for that. and so they have to, so they can't argue for their policies or against, [00:12:00] more even centrist or liberal progressive.They can't argue against any of the other ones. So instead they make up liberals to get angry at, I think. And that's the phantom lib 'cause who, who better to argue with than someone that you meet up?BERLATSKY: Yeah, I mean, I think so I guess I think two things. I mean, I know you, there's a, you were talking about this New York Times article, which looked at who was actually talking about the, Sidney Sweeney.And it was, it's not democratic leaders or even mostly big accounts. It's mostly been, there were some smaller accounts and they kind of get cherrypicked and then the right kind of works itself up to yell at them is kind of your take. and I think that's true that they do that a lot.I think it's also, I mean, I think with Sidney Sweeney in that ad, they're not, I mean, like I said before, the right's been Richard Hanania especially touted Sidney Sweeney as a kind of, like at that she was an attack on the left just by existing. Because she's, conventionally attractive white woman, and he thought that that was somehow triggering for the left to ha as if there aren't any other, conventionally attractive.SHEFFIELD: Which is so absurd because like they also complain that Hollywood is filled with liberal leftists. So the, leftists are either controlling all of the women or none of them.BERLATSKY: Well, they also, I mean, the rights also vary anti-sex. So, there's, I mean they're, trying to censor, they're trying to censor pornography.They're trying to censor basically anything they see as talking about sexuality. So, yep. So there's that contradiction. But the point is that she's kind of somebody who is on the rights [00:14:00] radar before as somebody who they felt they could rally around. So, I mean, and I think this ad, I mean the, what I wrote about is, I mean, like, I don't think, I don't think personally that it's like that the ad was like intended to be this kind of like, white supremacist cheerleading statement or anything.Beauty standards and eugenicsBERLATSKY: Yeah, not at all. I mean, it's, but I do think, what I do think is that there's this, what I call kind of common sense eugenics. I mean, the idea that there's good genes and that good genes mean something like being, like, looking like Sydney Sweeney, which means, basically thin, white, able bodied.The idea that there is some sort of like good genetics to have and that Sidney Sweeney would embody that is sort of like conventional wisdom. I mean, people talk about good genes, people it's it's just a. Like people aren't, when people talk about that, they're not like, really thinking about being white supremacist.It's just kind of, there's this kind of default idea that to be white and thin is better. Right. And so, I mean, I think the Right, althoughSHEFFIELD: we should be clear, it doesn't actually say that.Unclear: well,SHEFFIELD: yeah, it says, I think they were playing into it says that they made to her the mascot. I think, they knew that to some degree.BERLATSKY: Right. But I mean, she says, I mean it's, her standing there and saying, I have good genes. And what I'm saying is that's that, I mean, just like there's kind of like a lot of ambient, sexism and racism in popular culture just by virtue of the fact that, most [00:16:00] movie protagonists are white men, right?I mean, like, there's these kind of messages you get from pop culture. Which are not exactly intended, but which kind of like default to sort of like common sense and about like what people think is attractive, who people think is important, so on and so forth. So, I mean, so I think that the right saw this as something to rally around because they felt spoken to and then they kind of, so they want to make it an issue because they feel like it's a way to sort of like rally around ideas that they, think the ad is supporting in which they like.So yeah, and it's, and aSHEFFIELD: lot of it's projection though, like in a, in the sense that I think that, so like you look at RFK Junior, like his solution for health is everyone needs to live exactly like me. and if you don't live my lifestyle, then you're not healthy. and if we magically just stop eating certain things that I don't like, then you'll be perfectly healthy.You'll never get sick. And, in the same way, like they were saying with COVID, it, you won't die from COVID. You won't get COVID. it will be nothing if you just, go and lift weights and run. And it's like a lot of people got sick from COVID, that were perfectly healthy, quote unquote.And it's, this individualization of, virtue as they see it, that there's no such thing as community, that everything's about the individual. And I think that's what they really latched onto with her, is that they see her as an archetype in some sense, even though they're just a bunch of losers.BERLATSKY: Well, right. I mean, it's the same. I mean, RFK Junior is big into eugenics and it's kinda [00:18:00] like the same 'cause it's not just, Live like me and you'll be great. It's also, I mean, it's like I'm a white, I'm a, I'm a white guy and we kind of don't care. Like, I'm a sort of able-bodied white guy, and if people who are less able bodied or less white get sick and die, maybe that's a good thing.Right. I dropped, inSHEFFIELD: fact. Yeah. Said that with, when he was asked recently about, why, do, why are these farmers, why do they need to have, the, A worker Visa program? Well, it's because these people who are, Hispanic, that they are coming over and they work just so much. They work, they live to work, and if they break, their arm or something, then they die.They die because that's the natural way. Trump was that right. Trump was saying that. Yeah, TrumpTrump's comments on minoritiesBERLATSKY: was saying that. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean the, so I mean, that's kind of this idea that, that there are some kinds, that there are ideal bodies that, there are, ideal genetics is something that the, and that, certain people are suited to rule and then certain people are suited to be off in the corner and not visible.You know what I mean? Those are things that the right is rallying around right now and they really believe. Yeah. What's, what I'm saying is it's not like with the Sydney sweetie, I mean, they're making up like they make up liberals to be mad at. Right. But also there is something in the ad that they're responding to that they like and that's not necessarily something that Sydnee Sweeney, I mean, like, I don't like the one.we don't really know what Sidney Sweeney's politics are. I mean, she didn't write the ad, she [00:20:00] just showed up there and did the performance. But I mean, the one, the her one Passion Pod project was Immaculate, which is a film about how patriarchy is evil. And it's like, women should control their bodies.It's, it's quite pro-abortion, right? Yeah. I mean, it's, but herSHEFFIELD: character on White Lotus also is kind of in that same vein that, oh, she, yeah, because like, she's like a, gen Z, girl with her friend who are constantly criticizing neoliberal parents, for being hypocrites, and pretending to be, virtue signaling with social issues and then, promoting inequality.I got it right.BERLATSKY: yeah. Yeah. But, so. So I don't know that she's, I mean, somebody said she registered Republican, which can mean, a variety of things. It doesn't necessarily mean that she's like, on board with Trump. but anyway, the point is kind of no matter what her particular politics are, and really the kind of like, even though, the, ad is just kind of, I mean like ads are just meant to be trivial and maybe edgy and make you buy jeans, But pop culture does have kind of different messages and some of those are things that the right is finds congenial or, wants to promote or talk about and, so I think that there's, they kind of frame it as like, the left wants to take away these things. But what they feel the left wants to take away or what they're claiming the left wants to take away is this [00:22:00] idea that, white people and thin people, able-bodied people are better than everybody else and deserve more space and, kind of more power than everyone else.And, the ad doesn't exactly. I mean, the ad doesn't, the ad is not a programmatic statement saying that, but it, it picks up on these tropes, which are in pop culture. And I think seeing those is why, seeing those makes the right say, we like that, we want more of that.So, so anyway.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, it's, and, it's interesting also to, to, place that in the larger context. So, when we look at the, right wing is constantly claiming that they're for free speech, right? Like they, they're against cancel culture. Right? But the reality is Donald Trump is the king of cancel culture.Donald Trump has literally banned hi, using the power of government, banned historians from saying certain things that he doesn't like. He has literally banned the Smithsonian Institution in its museums from promoting improper ideology. Like there is nothing remotely similar to what any democratic president in modernBERLATSKY: history has done in that all, I think there's kind of this confusion about like, like criticizing an ad is.Canceling someone. I mean, that's, it's not an attack on free speech. It is free speech. Like, saying, I don't like this ad for this reason. I think it, promotes bad ideas. Like that's dialogue. That's not canceling speech. That's not, you're sayingCancel culture and free speechSHEFFIELD: someone's a jerk.BERLATSKY: It's more, speech and like private entity is kind of not, well, Gina Carrano, right? I'm not sure I'm pronouncing her [00:24:00] name right,SHEFFIELD: but she,BERLATSKY: Disney,SHEFFIELD: the actress. Yeah,BERLATSKY: the actress. Disney stopped working with her because she made offensive statements about the Holocaust. I mean, she kind of compared, having to get a COVID vaccine to, Auschwitz, which is like, that's, like that's the sort of thing where people say, geez, that's, that's messed up.I don't know that I want to work with somebody who's, doing that. But now Disney has decided, because the Trump administration is pressuring people to work with people on the right, kind of whether or not they want to, and, forcing private entities to hire your ideological, friends as, that's not, that's the opposite of free speech.it's like saying that you have to print government propaganda in your paper, right? I mean, people generally think of free speech as like, oh, you're not, centering speech. You're not preventing us from saying something. But, control, like government control of speech can also be forcing you to say things that you don't really agree with or don't want to say.Right. And there's a lot of that now where, Trump is saying, well. you can't, if you print things criticizing me, I will sue you or I'll withdraw funding. But also, you have to hire at these universities, you need to hire people. I like you need to basically, which is quotas.Yeah,Like quotas, ideological quotas for conservatives. That's, that's forcing speech. that's censorship of speech, that's government controlled [00:26:00] speech. and all these, basically all these, like the war on, I mean the war on Christmas too, like, I mean the war on Christmas, like on the one hand it's ridiculous, right?I mean, like nobody is trying to like prevent you from celebrating Christmas. But what people do sometimes ask is that you recognize that there are people who are not Christians, right? Yeah. I mean, that's what Happy Holidays is, people are saying, well. I understand that, saying Merry Christmas to everybody doesn't necessarily make sense.'cause other people exist and we want to be inclusive.SHEFFIELD: Yep.BERLATSKY: And the war on Christmas is people saying, you are not allowed. Allowed, you're not allowed. We don't, we want, to use government force power and harassment to prevent you from, acknowledging that everybody isn't a Christian, that everybody isn't even religious to, we, feel that like everybody should be forced to basically promote Christianity.Yeah. Whether and they just, Trump just passed this thing where. Trump has this kind of anti-Christian bias task force, and he's just passed this. He's just put out, which runSHEFFIELD: only by Christians, of course.BERLATSKY: Right. Which he's put out a memorandum saying that, far right ones supervisors are allowed to proselytize, their employees.and, pe it's like, oh, we want free speech. But I mean, like, what you're doing is you're saying, if you're not Christian and you speak up, you may lose your job. Right.SHEFFIELD: And that's, that's essentially Yeah.BERLATSKY: Yeah. I mean, and that's what the war on Christmas is. The war on Christmas is a, it's a war for Christmas against [00:28:00] non-Christians, against anybody who's, and even against some, even against some Christians who like, have different faith traditions or whatever.I mean, it's, it's, you have to, if you have to be part, you have to. You have to speak for the ruling elite, and if you don't, we'll punish you.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and yeah, and on that point, with the war on Christmas, the, original war on Christmas was launched by right-wing Protestants. Like they, that was what Oliver, one of the things Oliver Cromwell did when he took over England was he prohibited people from celebrating Christmas.History of Christmas celebrationsSHEFFIELD: and like the, the entire idea of celebrating Christmas as a cultural tradition for Christians was made up by the liberal Christian Charles Dickens. It was literally the left that came up with Christmas as a public, spirited holiday. And like, so all of their history is just completely backwards.Like early Christians weren't interested in celebrating Christmas, as a thing, but Easter was the primary tradition, not, Christmas. and, and, as, the Puritans and many other, or, right-wing Protestants frequently pointed out, like a lot of these, the Christian. ideas and the timing were very related to, ancient pagan, festivals and whatnot.So, it was always absurd.BERLATSKY: Maurice, I mean, most Christmas, like a lot of the big Christmas songs areSHEFFIELD: written by Jewish people. that's the other thing. Yeah. So, yeah,BERLATSKY: I mean, it's not, yeah, it's absurd. Lots of people like, who, lots of people who aren't necessarily Christian like Christmas, you know?'cause kids like it. That's kind of the big thing. Yeah. It's appealing, but people in Japan love it. Yeah. But I mean, but forcing people to take part is, it's censorship and its government coercion.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And that's, and, that really [00:30:00] is a point that these guys don't. Like the, base I think doesn't understand any of this stuff.The, elites, they're, deceitfully manufacturing, all this stuff that they love, elevating things that are not significant. and they've done this for years. I mean, whether it's, yeah, I mean, I think the red scares, like imagining the communists under your bed everywhere and the black, like, again, all of the things that they talk about and the claim to that they're against, they're the ones who started cancel culture like William f Buckley's.First book God and Man at Yale is literally him saying for the entire book, professor doesn't believe in Jesus. Professor so and so said the resurrection never happened. Professor, what's her name says that, socialism is better than capitalism. Alumni, you need to not give them money until they fire these people.They need to be stopped. We have to have Christian supremacy, right-wing, Christian supremacy in this nation, because that's what we need to do. And they've been doing this ever since. Yeah. So I mean,BERLATSKY: I think one way to look at that is sort of what you're saying is like, it's hypocrisy, right?I mean, they're, saying one thing, but the truth is the opposite. And I don't exactly know that it's hypocrisy, and I don't know that the base is necessarily confused. Oh, it's not hypocrisy. I wouldn't say that. Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean it's, it's, like just they believe certain people deserve all the rights and everybody else should be crushed.Right? I mean, it's fascism and fascism is not about sort of saying, well, the playing field should be equal for everybody. Everybody should be able to speak. Everybody. I mean, like this liberal idea that, you know. Everybody should have rights. Everybody should be able to speak, everybody should be equally for the law.And think that's a terrific, right? I mean the Nazis didn't think that the, the founders didn't really think that, right? I mean, they thought [00:32:00] that equality should only be extended to people with certain characteristics. Who, if they were men, if they were sort of like relatively affluent, if they were white.And that was kinda, and that's kind of the fascist ethos. The idea that certain people have rights and that those rights are in large part the right to crush everybody else. the right to subjugate everybody else. And that's what a lot of this is. And I mean, like that's, again, that's why the Cindy Sweeney ad resonates.Trump's failed campaign promisesBERLATSKY: 'cause it's got this idea that, certain people are better. or that's how they interpret it. That's, I mean, I think it's there, I mean, I think it's a joke, but again, it's kind of like playing on this kind of, this folk wisdom that certain genes are better. but Donald Trump certainly says things like that.Donald Trump says things like that. Right. and that, that kind of relates to like, being able bodied, being thin, being white, whichSHEFFIELD: I guess he's not, he's neither thin nor able-bodied. Right. Which is ironic and has the brain of a sixth grader. Yeah. I mean, he says he has both thoseBERLATSKY: things.I think that's unfair to sixth graders, but, but yeah, I mean, so that's, kind of, I mean, that's where the impetus for the, I think that's where the impetus for embracing that it comes from, and, and that's also the impetus to find people online. this kind of constant cultural churn where you're constantly looking for people like one to be mad at.Right? So you're looking for people to be angry at, but you're also looking for people to target. Right? I mean, that's what Libs of TikTok does, right? I mean, she sort of scrolls through social media and finds [00:34:00] people to send, that her mob will send death threats to. And so that's a, it's kind of ridiculous.Like it's a way to like drive traffic and get money, right? So that's why the right wing media likes it. 'cause you want to get, keep people revved up and angry. 'cause otherwise theySHEFFIELD: actually start thinking and you can, yeah,BERLATSKY: right. I mean, they're not, and they won't necessarily tune in. But you know, it's also a way to like, I mean, it's also like a way to organize, right?I mean, you kind of have these constant, you kind of have this constant roving harassment campaign. Which you can then point at anyone, right? I mean, and, you can try to, like, if somebody like tries to, if somebody like pops up and becomes a rallying point for progressives or if somebody, like, or if some judge rules against you, right?You have this kind of like roving harassment campaign, which is ready to go after that or even to assassinate them, right? I mean like this woman got assassinated in, inSHEFFIELD: Minnesota, in the uk somebody did, as well. Minnesota, yeah. A couple years ago. yeah, A member of parliament.BERLATSKY: Yeah. And that kind of constant harassment and terror, is a mechanism in itself of silencing free speech because, I mean, anybody who's been, anybody who kind of like is on the left and has any visibility at all has been targeted for these harassment campaigns.I mean, you get death threats, you get people writing your employer. I mean this just, this is just what it's like being a left writer.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, I do want to go back to my own personal experience here as somebody who, was heavily involved in right wing media for a number of years.So, like, that's the hilarious thing to me is that when I, when right wingers [00:36:00] on Twitter, see the things that I write, and they're so ignorant about their own belief system, about their own culture, about their own history. They don't know any of these things and they're just sheep that Donald Trump tells what to do.They, and so the thing that they, is that basically right wing. Policy arguments are defective, they're stupid. So like they believe that tax cuts increase revenue. They literally believe this, and yet there is zero evidence for this belief. and, they, never admit that. And so, like, they, were constantly, every, budget cycle, when they control Congress and the presidency, they were always driving up the deficit.Economic policy failuresSHEFFIELD: They do it all the time. It is literally since Ronald Reagan came along, the Republicans have driven up the deficit more than the Democrats have. and they always do it. And so they've done it for so long now that when the CBO says, Hey, look, this budget's gonna, increase the deficit. They always say, no, it won't.We need to have dynamic scoring of the budget. and, so, and it will show that it doesn't increase it as much as you said, and then, but they never go back and look at their previous dynamic scoring of the budget because it never maps out. And all the things they do, they just don't care, are driving it up.So like, yeah, no, well, they don't, no, the elites don't care. But I'm saying the grassroots Twitter users, the brainwash masses, they actually believe the nonsense. They actually think that it's real. and I can say that because, when I was in right wing media, I had colleagues who believed this crap.and I, and and I would ask them sometimes because like, supply side nonsense is one of the first things that for me was, a crack in the dam. Because I would ask people who were, economics writers, some, self-proclaimed economics writers like Steven [00:38:00] Moore and other people like that.I'd say, okay, well what's the, can you gimme some evidence for this? 'cause I was an editor, I would say, well, let's have some evidence for this statement you made. And they would never give it to me. And I would say, okay, well I'm gonna take that out of your calling then, because you can't say something if you can't provide any evidence.Well, noBERLATSKY: wonder you weren't able to make a living.SHEFFIELD: You weren't able to. That's right. Well, I couldn't stand it. No. Like I was making a great living because they don't care about truth. and they'll throw money at anyone, with who's, who will repeat the talking points. But they don't want you to think for yourself.Like that's the, that is the awful irony of right-wing, reaction is, that they censor constantly. Like if you were somebody like, and, as, another example, like town hall.com, and red tech.com were owned by this Rightwing Christian radio company called Salem. they fired people who were anti-Trump Republicans.People who thought that Donald Trump was a rhino, Republican in name only. and if you thought that you would, you were shown the door because they censor anyone who disagrees with him every time they had power. And that was another thing that really kind of stuck in my cr, used the idiom that.they don't believe at all in free speech and they never have.BERLATSKY: Yep. Let me just, and it's unfortunate that they are now, in complete controlSHEFFIELD: because Yeah. Well, well, let's go back to though, to the Sydney Sweeney, graphic though, if we would. So the New York Times, they put out a report, and these are, these are indisputable numbers here, that, our right wing friends on Twitter and elsewhere, they, they love using anecdotes.Well, I saw this thing here, so therefore, blah, blah, blah. Well, sorry guys. The actual data, this is hard data. This is math, and it [00:40:00] shows that when the ad campaign. For Sidney Sweeney's jeans had started. There weren't very many posts about it. and it was only when, so basically there were some people that were making kind of aesthetic, sort of philosophical points like you were saying about, beauty standards and, that sort of thing about what, what constitutes good jeans.Right-wing media tacticsSHEFFIELD: Like the, and as a, just as cultural commentators, these, are things that people can, are, expected to make comments of that nature. But you, no one was saying, oh, this ad needs to be pulled down and removed from the internet. Sidney Sweeney needs to be fired. Nobody said anything like that. and, and, but what we saw is that there was just kind, and it, the publicity for Sydney Sweeney, as we see on the graph, started to go down, as the, end of July approached.but then it dramatically picked up because of right wing media, because they need somebody to be the object of the two minute hate. Because Donald Trump is a failure. he needs to talk about literally anything besides Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, that's really what this is about, is he doesn't want you to talk about Jeffrey Epstein and his coverup.BERLATSKY: I, I'd also point out, I mean, kind of, I mean, there have been various cycles of Sydney Sweeney discourse on the right. one of them was about the right, trying to cancel her, basically, or harassing her. she posted some, I think some photographer, got kind of candid pics of her in a bikini, and so these pictures were not as staged as usually like publicity shots of her are, or as, they weren't as, they weren't even as staged as like her selfies, I mean, she was not in control of these images. And so she looked, I mean, she looked [00:42:00] like, a very attractive human in a candid shot that was not, designed to like, optimize her appearance. And, a lot of people on the right were like, oh, she's mid, I feel like there were all these, there were a lot of posts about how, she wasn't really attractive and, basically how, dare she appear in public without being, sufficiently attractive or whatever.and that's kind of been memory hold now that, the le the right has decided, oh, she's on our side. But, I mean, I think that's also this kind of like,this idea that, women exist in public for men to evaluateSHEFFIELD: and comments about. Yeah.BERLATSKY: Yeah. This idea that, the whole, point is. Basically like who has the best genes and who looks the best or whatever. And, I mean, that's, and people don't, that's not necessarily something people think of as censorship, but of course, like, being a woman in the public eye and having, men constantly attack you for what you look like, even if you're Sidney Sweeney.it just makes it very difficult, it makes it more difficult for women to speak in public and, to Yeah. To have their voices heard. And, that's, much more of an issue in terms of like free speech and who gets to speak than, some people criticizing Sydnee sweetie had.SHEFFIELD: Right. but you know, yeah, just ask any woman who's been on Twitter for Yeah. More than a few months, like. How much do you get in your direct messages, like just rape threats, murder threats, [00:44:00] go kill yourself. Threats, those are, they happen every day to many women. And the right just wants to pretend that doesn't happen.Like, that is the ultimate cancel culture.BERLATSKY: Yeah. And again, the, I mean, the thing about, this sort of body image with the jeans ads, I mean, the thing about Sydnee Swee is, like, I mean, like, she gets accused of not being perfect enough to, I mean, it's, like when you have this idea that the whole point of women, like existing is to be rated by men, everybody is targeted.Online harassment campaignsBERLATSKY: Even somebody who s you know, who fits most of the beauty standards supposedly, like Sidney Sweeney.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, No, that's a good point. And, but, this idea though, and, again, I'm just gonna put the numbers on the screen, so, the, because, it, so many people now that the right wing discovered my Twitter thread on this topic, they're all replying with anecdotes.and it's like, no, guys, you're the ones that have driven this. and so, right wing republicanism, they don't have arguments in favor of anything. Like, I, want to go back to that because this is really important. Like Friedrich Nietzche is the, archetype of, today's Republicans.Like, he was a nihilist, he was against everything. and he was an authoritarian. And these guys, they literally have no policy platform other than cut, everything. And, and we saw that also with Doge. Like when you look at. What Elon Musk and all the propaganda that he was pushing, he didn't actually care that at all, that all the, work that U-S-A-I-D does in terms of like, if you actually are concerned about wasteful spending in the United States, U-S-A-I-D actually is far [00:46:00] more beneficial from us in the return on investment than it is.Yeah. I mean, IBERLATSKY: think, I think that Elon Musk, when he made a Nazi salute, I tend to believe him when he says that, if you make a Nazi salute, I, you're self-identifying as a Nazi. And I will, say, okay, if you're saying you're a Nazi, I believe you. And I think when somebody who like makes a Nazi salute goes out and passes policies, which, kill millions and millions of non-white people in the global south, I mean, I, think that.I don't think that's just like,SHEFFIELD: an accident. Yeah,BERLATSKY: an accident. I mean, I think that he wanted to kill people. I mean, that's, that's, well because they'reSHEFFIELD: not fit. They, don't fit. Yeah. In his, and it's notable Yeah. With the, that he's, in his obsessive desire to impregnate women, doesn't, do it with any black women as far as I've ever seen.and, and I think there might be one Asian woman, but overwhelmingly it's white and, and, we see that at, is bought into the, supposed white genocide of South Africa again. Like they, they keep running into all of these factual problems, like the whole, again, going back to Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump.Is trying desperately to tell Maga to move on from Epstein because he inflated this in their minds. He was the one who told them in many ways, so many ways, this is what you need to be obsessed with, that the Democrats are a secret pedophile network. And, and we're, gonna, that, that's, the entire point of Q Anon, which he said was, was this is people who love their country and has repeatedly boosted QQ Anon propaganda on his, untruth social website.like, so they've told their followers the true believers, and [00:48:00] again, the leads are like, like they don't believe anything they say. or if they do, they'll, they are willing to drop it just outta the drop of a hat. Like they have no consistent real beliefs other than that they deserve power and that everyone else deserves jail.and so, but the masses, the people that they have lied to and brainwash. They did believe that Q Anon was real. They did believe all the things about, Jeffrey Epstein supposedly having all this massive stuff and everybody being in on it. But now, it's, now that's become obvious that Donald Trump was a very, I mean, it was obvious before, but now that everybody knows it, it's undeniable that Donald Trump, according to Epstein himself, was his best friend.Trump and Epstein connectionSHEFFIELD: Donald Trump was Jeffrey Epstein's best friend, according to Jeffrey Epstein. Like, and so of course Donald Trump is going to suppress this information, and of course he doesn't want you to talk about it. And like that's. That's the message that I would give our maga people who are tuning into the live stream here.You guys are loving the hate watching. very clearly. Donald Trump has manipulated you and gaslit you. Donald Trump literally cut off funding for flood victims in Texas and took five days to respond to them after their lives were crushed. He refused to help them. And, took he, Christie Noam said, I'm not gonna approve the funding for this hotline for flood victims.'cause it's too expensive. These people's li their own voters. Like, that's the most horrible thing about Republicanism, in this day and age, is that they don't, they, don't even care about the people who voted for 'em. Like they hate everyone else, obviously, but they don't even care about the people who voted for 'em.Like, that's what's so sick.BERLATSKY: Yeah. We're all, gonna be miserable. I mean. And, [00:50:00] as as the recession hits and, we have pandemics and disasters that, there's no fema. So it's, that's the goal. Yeah. It's gonna be bleak,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and that's, but it, fits within this Nietzsche and tragic worldview because in this worldview that they all have, the base and the elites community doesn't exist.Shared responsibility, shared care for each other and other people. It's not real. It's not even possible. Gov like Ronald Reagan's infamous phrase, the two mo, the, most scariest phrase in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. do Right, right-Wing Republicans really think that when FEMA's calling to help them recover from a hurricane, would they say that, would they believe that?No, they wouldn't believe that, but they ultimately believe it for other people. So other people, not them, deserve to have to live in pen and poverty and homelessness. They deserve it, but not me. Like that's, that is the self-centered, egotistical epistemology that they've got and. And it's, and we see that every day, and we certainly see this with the Sydney Sweeney story.But, they just, they have to have an object of two minute hate, because, and they have to change it because people get bored. They need a new hate, like the, green m and m. Remember that one? can you remind our, the audience about that one? I mean, I apparently remember,BERLATSKY: yeah. I don't know. Do you remember if you It was something, yeah, itSHEFFIELD: was, yeah, it was that.So they were mad that M and Mss had given the green m and m lower heels. [00:52:00] Yes. And, they, talked about it for months. They were upset about that, and like they, they have to blow up these, things that don't affect anyone. and and, they even do this with like, and we can even see this on the issue of trans athletes, so like trans athletes, there are basically none of them in this country.and according to the NCAA president, Charlie Baker, he had testified before Congress that, so the NCAA has more than 550,000 athletes. And according to Charlie Baker, the NCAA president, there were fewer than 10 trans athletes. So this is, this is the Sydney Sweeney jeans. This is Warren Christmas.This is green m and m. That's actually what the tran anti-trans discourse is that trans people existing in public, they don't affect you. If you're like a rural Republican who lives, in, in, the middle of nowhere in Idaho or Arkansas or North Dakota, trans people are not affecting you in any way.so. Just leave them alone. Let them live. But they can't do that. Like, that's, that is the paradox of right wing of, fascistic, authoritarianism, other people existing differently cannot be allowed.BERLATSKY: Right. Well, I mean, and, attacking trans people is also a way to attack other queer people.It's a way to attack gender non-conforming people. And gender non-conforming people include, black people, especially black women, in their view. I mean, 'cause the, 'cause at the Olympic level efforts to ban trans people mostly ended up targeting black women. yeah. Ana, who's a, they decided that her hormone levels were wrong and [00:54:00] banter.And she's a cis woman, not a trans woman. But I mean, that's kind, I mean, the same thing with the, like, I. It's kind of the same thing with these like trans sports bands or trans bathroom bands. I mean, it's like, again, it's like a way to organize. Like it's not that these people are bothering you, but it gives you an excuse to target them and to target lots of other people too.I mean, the main people who get targeted using, using bathrooms or often other queer women or non gender nonconforming women, and I mean, people often know that they're not trans, I mean, if somebody like, if you, but it's an excuse. It's a sort of like, yeah, it's just an excuse to target trans people, queer people, and like just lots of people who might, look different or be gender non-conforming or be wearing the wrong thing or whatever, I mean, like these like. On the one hand, it's ridiculous and, silly. And it's a way to like, get people excited about stuff that isn't really affecting them. But again, it's also a way to justify and encourage and co-sponsor mob violence against a whole range of people, who, might be trans, might not be trans, but who are just like, somebody who you feel like is different.That's a way to build fascist power is to have these constant enemies to attack. and to Oh, and to distract. And to destroy, yeah. And distract well, andSHEFFIELD: to distract. 'cause like, I mean, you wrote earlier about that Trump hasn't fulfilled his campaign promises. Like he has not go into that, if you would please.Broken political promisesSHEFFIELD: That'sBERLATSKY: right. Oh yeah. Well, I mean, there are the, some, [00:56:00] sort of like spineless mainstream media who. We're saying that Trump had fulfilled his campaign. like why are people upset with Trump? 'cause he has fulfilled his campaign promises. but of course he hasn't fulfilled his campaign promises.His main campaign promise was to lower prices, to actually lower them. Like he wasn't just saying, I'm gonna, decrease inflation. He was saying, oh, I'm gonna get an office and prices will actually go down.SHEFFIELD: He literally had signs of that Trump lower prices, common and higher prices.BERLATSKY: That would be terrible.Like, you don't actually want deflation. That's a sign of a horrific re recession, which we may well get to, but, but yeah, I mean, he hasn't, lowered prices. I mean, he's put huge taxes on consumer goods, which is gonna raise prices. Inflation has been up anyway. so yeah, I mean, prices are up, inflation is increasing.it's gonna increase even more now that he's put these tariffs in place. So that's a big promise that he is done the exact opposite of what he said he'd do. he also, I mean, like, he said he'd be, he, I'm trying to think what else I talked about. he said another big promise he made is that as soon as he gets into office, these wars would end.The war in Ukraine would end the war in Gaza would end. Right. And he basically said, as soon as I get in office, within 24 hours, I'll have a negotiated settlement in both of those places. And of course, that, that did happen. the, war in Ukraine is worse. I mean, Russia has increased its aggression.There's more, deaths, there's more bombing. Gaza is obviously, a complete nightmare, and, Trump himself has kinda like, sort of half admitted both those things. I mean, even he has admitted that children are starving in Gaza. He is like, oh yeah, that looks kinda bad.And yeah. even he, I mean like he's kind of. Oh, I was [00:58:00] joking when I kept saying over and over that I could solve Ukraine. Yeah. Four hours. he said it was a joke. I was exaggerating. But you know, I mean, he did, he wasn't joking or exaggerating. He was. No, he was, making a campaign promise and pe you know, which people were supposed to vote on.So that did happen.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.BERLATSKY: and he also, he said, I mean, even the things where he's sort of like sort of doing stuff, he said like, he said, obviously he said, I'm gonna deport, basically he said, I'm gonna deport criminals. Right. Yeah. And that's what people heard.People heard him say, I'm gonna deport criminals. And they will, we, he is claiming that there are lots of dangerous criminals. Lots of dangerous immigrant criminals and he needed to deport all of them. So that was a lie. there weren't, there aren't lots of dangerous criminal immigrants.That's just not true.SHEFFIELD: They commit crime at a lower rate. In fact, they commit crime at aBERLATSKY: lower rate. Like the numbers he was talking about deporting, like, there just aren't that many people. I mean, he was talking about deporting 30 million people, Yeah. So what, so what you have instead is you have, going after, they're going after the exact opposite of criminals.'cause criminals are hard to find, right? I mean, you have to prosecute them. You have to identify them. So instead, he's going a, after people who are law abiding. 'cause it's easy to find them, they show up to their court dates, right?Unclear: Yeah.BERLATSKY: They show up to work. So it's all these people who are like, so he's deporting the exact opposite of the people.He said he would be deporting. He's, and these are, yeah. Exact opposite. So, so I mean, there are all these promises, he also was like, oh, pros, I mean his, maid promise was put me in office and. There'll be widespread prosperity, but instead unemployment is up. inflation is up.We're looking at a, like, horrific recession. Like we'll probably have stagflation. he's also like decimated particular industries. Tourism, is like destroyed in this country. 'cause nobody wants to come [01:00:00] here because Trump is like arresting tourists and throwing them in prison. People are like, I don't wanna do that.there's, he's wrecked the government sector, right? Cancer research. He's fi right? He's fired, like cancer researchers. He's firing all these people in government. Those are workers, like unemployment statistics are gonna go up. Would you like fire all these workers?He's stop, he's not funding education. He's refusing to fund healthcare. Like healthcare. He's refusing to fund it, both, lower ed and higher ed. so these are all, I mean, like he's, done all these things which are like designed to direct the economy. Which is not what he promised.he didn't promise people, I'm gonna come into office and wreck the economy. So, like there isn't really like, a confusion about why many of his voters are like, we didn't ask for this. I mean, I'd argue like, like in some sense they did, they voted for white supremacy.I think it was pretty clear that's what he stood for. And people were like, well, I'm okay with white supremacy as long as like, prices come down or something. But, he hasn't brought prices down. I mean, that's the thing, people, he said he was gonna do a list of things that he has that not done.And he's also, of course, he's like rated a lot of people, I mean, people are,SHEFFIELD: and he took away people's healthcare like he promised he wasn't going to take away Medicaid. that's correct. he said,BERLATSKY: I'm not gonna take away Medicaid or Medicare. And he put a big, he took a lot of people's Medicaid away, soSHEFFIELD: a trillion dollars of it.BERLATSKY: Yeah,and the way they're handling that is that, he could, if he wanted his poll numbers to go up, he could reverse those policies, I mean, he could add the tariffs, prices would go down. That would be easy. It's an easy fix. You just say, okay, this isn't working. We're gonna, we're gonna take away the tariffs so that we can keep prices down.he could stop arresting people, you know what I mean? Like, there's [01:02:00] all list of things he could easily do. He could, start funding, healthcare, again, it's all this stuff that you could do if you actually cared. But instead what he's doing is he's trying to rig the election right. By through gerrymandering, yeah, through targeting candidates, right?Through censoring the media, so it's all this, it's all this effort to cheat basically, rather than trying to actually do what his voters want him.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.Republican policy evolutionSHEFFIELD: Well, and, he, he ran on saying he was a different kind of Republican, but in fact he's, basically his first term he was Paul Ryan's, Aaron boy, and then in his second term he's Russell Votes Aaron Boy.Like, that's essentially how it's, well, Stephen Steven Miller and Steven Miller. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I he doesn't have the intellectual capacity to have his own policy agenda because again, this is a guyBERLATSKY: he has kinda weird, he has weird grievances, which are, like, like he hates windmills.He hatesSHEFFIELD: tariffs.BERLATSKY: Yeah. And loves tariffs.SHEFFIELD: those are, that's not a policy. Again, those are bothBERLATSKY: really stupid ideas, but, like, basically, so he like goes ahead on those. And then, Steven Miller gets to like, run a, to create his death camps, run a genocide idea.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's, and again, and I, that's why, this is why they have to invent these ima liberals like picking, like, one of the other things in my evolution outside of the Republican party is, again, I used to pay people to, to highlight random people on the internet, just like, libs of TikTok did.I have paid a guy that was reading democratic underground.com. and we, but eventually I realized there, there are people with, crazy viewpoints all across the [01:04:00] political spectrum. But the difference is those people have power. Lots of it in the Republican party and on the democratic side, they have nothing.like there was like Hank Johnson, the, or the congressman who, democratic congressman who infamously was worried about the island of Guam tipping over like. I got that as a response for, oh, well the Democrats are just as dumb. And it's like, you, cited a backbencher from, what was it, eight years ago?Like, that's the best that you can think of. And meanwhile, Donald Trump is out there on any given week saying that windmills cause cancer or that, I mean, they're, they make whales angry.BERLATSKY: when people in the Democratic party say conspiracy theory garbage, they tend to be ejected. And then they go over to the Republicans, right?I mean, that's T Gabo and RFK Junior, right? They were kind of wacko, conspiracy theorist, a******s who were Democrats. And Democrats said, f**k off. And now they're, in the Trump administration, which was their logical home, the home for, Grifters and cranks to, kill us all.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.Essentially. and that's, I mean, yeah, that is a great point. And and this is again, why they have to invent the elevate, the small level TikTok users, like, somebody, some random person posting a thing on TikTok. That person has no power over the Democratic party. They have no, and e even if there were, like, and here's the other thing is even if there were a million people, millions of people on Twitter and Instagram, TikTok elsewhere that were lefties, that were going after, that were condemning Sidney Sweeney.This is private citizens who are, were upset about a private citizen. Donald Trump literally every week demands that people [01:06:00] be fired as the president says a, B, C. You need to fire Jimmy Kimmel and his own FCC Director, commissioner, Brendan Carr. Has literally said that Stephen Colbert getting canceled by CBS is quote a consequence that comes from Trump.You can't, like, this is the President demanding people be fired for joking about him, for telling a joke. He wants the president gets you fired for it. and when he was president the first time, rolling Stone reported that he call his, he ordered his people repeatedly to call Disney lobbyists and executives and demand that Jimmy Kimmel be censored because he was telling jokes about him like, this is, what actual cancellation looks like.He's literally coming for their job and demanding it with someone who has the authority over their boss, like a random blue-haired person on TikTok saying, some guy's an a*****e. That's nothing.BERLATSKY: but I mean, it's also because they don't have any power that it. That the right is so excited about going after them because you can really Oh wow.I mean, you can destroy somebody, if you're a small, if you're a small account and you end up in front of lips of TikTok, you know they can destroy your life. And that's, part of the, that's the excitement is like, like it's precisely 'cause they don't have power. Well, that's the fascist dynamic, right?I mean, you, both sort of like claim to be victimized and claim to be, and claim to be super powerful. And so sort of like elevating these small accounts and claiming that they like control the culture and then, inciting an online mob to sort of destroy their life is like the quintessential fascist [01:08:00] dynamic where you are finding someone who isn't powerful claiming they are, and using that as an excuse to torment them.Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And silenceBERLATSKY: them. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, exactly. and, I think that's, for, people who have more of a, a liberal centrist type perspective, the, one of the things that I think is, that they haven't understood is that these right wing grifters and authoritarians like Trump, there's literally no policy that you can have that will make them not criticize you.Literally nothing. You do. So, and like I often hear people say, well, if only the Democrats did this or that thing that I personally believe, then it will magically make them, everyone love them. And it's like, look at the litter box fantasy. Like this is some, like the, so the Christian right invented this idea that schools were putting litter boxes in schools because elementary students.We're identifying as furries, and they wanted to use a litter box instead of a bathroom toilet. This literally never happened, never anywhere in the entire country. And we have tens of thousands of public schools in this country. Never happened, and yet they still have made it into a conflagration. And even to this day, even though this has been debunked for years, literally years, there are still people.And Joe Rogan was one of them. Like, he repeated that, that lie like six months or so ago, I think it was, or, I'm getting May beginning of the date wrong. But the, this story has been debunked for years and they still believe that it's real because it fits their priors. And so that's a thing that I, think all sides of the left need to understand.Impact on minority rightsSHEFFIELD: The problem that we have [01:10:00] is a channel problemBERLATSKY: because they'll just make up aSHEFFIELD: guy to get mad at.BERLATSKY: Yeah, I mean, you can see that, I mean, like, people like Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom are, circling around the idea of throwing trans athletes under the bus, right? They're like, oh, this is a real concern.not because it's actually something where it's happening, right? Or there are any trans athletes, not because it's an actual problem, but just because, oh, some people are concerned about it, right? And so, and rather than saying, look, this is ridiculous. This isn't a real problem.And this, we don't want to be in a situation where school authorities aren't, feel empowered to like, inspect young children's genitals, right? You don't want create a situation where like. People who, like, athletes who are like gender nonconforming or like, have to like, are like, can be targeted, because they're successful, right?Yeah. Like, it's really bad. You don't want to, like, you need to explain that like, giving into this stuff isn't just hurting, like trans people, which is bad enough. Like it's this tiny, marginalized community. We should be protecting them. We should be standing on their side. We should be refuting this.But if you don't, if you don't do that, you're gonna hurt a lot of other marginalized people too. because if you, like, if you let the conspiracy, if you say, this conspiracy theory is legitimate, let's take action against it. The actions you're gonna take are things that are gonna like harm.[01:12:00] Trans people, it's gonna har harm. it's, it's gonna harm like, cis girls andSHEFFIELD: it will,certainly harm gay and lesbian people. It'sBERLATSKY: gonna harm, it's gonna harm gay and lesbian, athletes. It's gonna hurt anybody who's gender nonconforming. It's gonna hurt all student athletes because anybody, you're kind of saying, okay, it's all right for basically anyone, any right wing wacko in the school district to to pick, some student and target them and say, oh, they're lying about their gender, and then have like a national pile on where this person's life is destroyed just 'cause they wanted to play sports at school,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's also that, that I think they haven't understood that the right wing is using trans people as. A proxy to go after all sexual minorities. Like they've never changed their mind. It's like includingBERLATSKY: women, I think.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah. They've never changed their mind about same-sex marriage and they are not going to, and in fact they will say, they say in their private spaces to each other, our goal is still to repeal, to, repeal it.And, they've already in fact, launched a lawsuit to overturn Oberg a fail versus Hodges because they're like, well, hey, we've rigged the Supreme Court in our favor now. And so since we got rid of Roe versus Wade and all of these other things, well, you know what? We're just gonna go and get rid of that too.And like, that's why you have to stand up for people who are, who are not popular, but who still deserve their rights because they are the frontier of freedom ultimately. and if you don't defend that freedom, then they will come for your freedoms as well. Is what I would say. [01:14:00] all right.Well, do you have any, closing thoughts here? I think, we can, get ready to wrap up.No,BERLATSKY: I think I'm, good if you are.SHEFFIELD: Okay. All right. Well, good. All right. Well thanks everybody for joining us live and we'll have this up, as a after the fact, later today. and so, that will do it for this one.Thanks everyone. Alright.BERLATSKY: Thank you. Thank you for having me out. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

On Tuesday, Brad DeLong joined me for a live Theory of Change episode to discuss Donald Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and how it is part of a decades-long war on sound economics and expertise in general waged by reactionary Republicans. We also discussed Brad’s own efforts to get economics as a discipline to understand complexity, and then wrapped with a discussion about the economy and artificial intelligence, one of his current research interestsVideo Timecodes00:00 — The Erosion of Expertise and Trust01:54 — Introduction and background04:35 — Historical context of labor statistics07:12 — Republican response to BLS firing10:35 — The problem of Republican truth-telling14:26 — The importance of judgment and expertise18:05 — Trump's broader attack on expertise26:01 — The first wave of AI development30:20 — The crypto grift and AI investment36:24 — The need for independent statistics45:27 — The value of government investment54:24 — Understanding AI's current state01:04:11 — The role of liberal education01:13:08 — The future of AI applications01:19:58 — Musk, Trump and the tech elite01:26:23 — Right-wing epistemology and AITranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: All right. So, for everybody who is, joining us, we're doing, this is a [00:02:00] live theory of change show and, we are here today with Brad Long of the, well, various places where you are at, but, primarily, your own Substack, we're going to be doing that. and, you are also you also have some affiliations. you're a professor at the University of California Berkeley.Brad DeLong: That’s the big one. Yes.SHEFFIELD: Yes. Okay.Brad DeLong: Important one.SHEFFIELD: Yes. and also, so, and I wanted to bring Brad on to do this with me today to talk about obviously, Donald Trump's firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, head, Erika McEntarfer, after he had the bad jobs support, a bad jobs number. But it's obviously, this is part of a much broader picture, I think, of the reactionary right’s hatred of expertise, and, continually exemplifying that, that old phrase from Stephen Colbert, that reality has a liberal bias.DELONG: A liberal bias.SHEFFIELD: It seems that's what they think.DELONG: Yes. In many ways, it is the end of a long and honorable American tradition. as another Erica, Groen, my class, my graduate school classmate, who was an earlier commissioner of labor statistics, as she said, I think on Bloomberg's surveillance this morning.It was in 1884 that Carol Wright, the first Commissioner of Labor Statistics, said that his contract with the American people was that they were going to produce the best possible numbers they could and get them out without worrying at all what implications they had for any kind of political movement.or social reform. Or social order, right. cause that it was not their job. [00:04:00] to do anything other than to get the most accurate numbers they could out and that they pledged, that's what they would do for the American people. Donald Trump is now trying to break that. He is going to face a lot of resistance from the bureaucracy, which is in this case an extraordinarily good thing because the bureaucracy does indeed do its job as best it can, and they are indeed addicted to the idea that it is their job to produce the numbers.Historical context of labor statisticsDELONG: That indeed, back in the 1870s, in the 1880s, people found themselves in furious political debates here in America. some of them saying that America was getting more prosperous, others pointing to falling prices of our farm goods and saying it was becoming less. Some of them saying that income distribution was becoming more equal.Others saying that from what they saw, it was becoming more unequal. And a whole bunch of people got together and said, we disagree on a huge amount, but we all agree we do not have reliable information about this, and we should spend some serious money creating governmental institutions that will in fact produce serious and accurate information.and that's what people interested in America, interested in, good governance, interested in a actual functioning, political sphere that does its job, got behind in the 1870s and 1880s. And that is the reason for the statistics movement. And first, the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, and then the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, were started as a result of that 140 year tradition.And now with I say the complete absence, the complete absence of any kind of pushback from. Any Republican whatsoever against this with no [00:06:00] resignations from Trump's staff with no hearings called by any senators with nobody in Trump's orbit willing to say, by and large, the economic news is likely to be good over the next four years.And by doing this, you have just made it certain that no one will believe it, right? That you've actually shot yourself in the foot fairly significantly. And the right thing for you to do is to say, you flew off the handle and actually, will you please come back and work for us? You're a great, person that after all you were confirmed, what was it, 93 to six with JD Vance voting, yes.are you saying that, does Trump saying that JD Vance made a big mistake in choosing a partisan democratic apparat to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in which case the wokeness is coming from inside the White House in a very severe fashion. You don't wanna say that. You wanna say you overreacted, you flew off the handle, and we should walk this back.Republican response to BLS firingDELONG: Nobody is saying that to Trump. In fact, Susan Collins and Bill Cassidy were writing to the Commissioner of Labor statistics even as she was being fired, saying, why are you producing lousy numbers? Right? and the answer is that you have to, that this particular set of numbers comes from the reports that corporations make as they pay Social security and other contributions into the government.And, those things arrive. They arrive with sometimes a lag. You know that not every piece of paper gets in all the time at the right moment, andSHEFFIELD: As a,DELONG: of paper are [00:08:00] missing, you guess what they are. But then you get the real pieces of paper later on. This causes problems for the statistics.There is an industry of economists, about how the Bureau of Labor statistics, is unlikely to hit turning points accurately because it will assume there is more inertia in the missing data in the system than there in fact is. And when the new data comes in, you say, oh, the economy actually started growing two months ago, or, oh, the economy actually started shrinking three months ago.And they frantically attempt to construct better models to do this without a great deal of success.SHEFFIELD: because it's flying blind in aDELONG: to demand that you produce numbers that are not revised. Is either a demand that you go out, you send your goons out and start firing or start fining people who don't get their social insurance contribution paperwork in on time, which is you make the government a lot more oppressive and nasty in terms of filling out forms.or you delay everything a month or two months, or you report on what the level of payroll employment in July was, not at the start of August, but at the start of October. And if that's what Susan Collins wants to see, she's an idiot. And if none of the members of her staff told her, wait a minute, if you complain about this.Then you are either calling for data to be delayed for two further months so it can be properly checked and assessed. or you are simply wanting to make some kind of headlines about how you can't trust government statistics for partisan advantage. And neither is a professional occupation for a senator. yet apparently Susan Collins staff has no one on it who will say, wait a minute. Susan Collins herself, who is after all my [00:10:00] 52nd favorite senator, was willing to go whole hog in on this, and she has not asked Donald Trump to reconsider the firing of the Commissioner of Labor statistics, which means essentially that the entire Republican party is gone, from the perspective of actually wanting.Ideas that are true rather than ideas that are convenient go out there in the world.The problem of Republican truth-tellingSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, it is notable that, the guy who was the previous Trump appointee. as the BLS head, has, in fact, he just came out with a statement criticizing, her or criticizing Trump for firing Erica the qar far. and, but yeah, it, only emphasizes your point though, that these are only the former Republicans, who are engaging in truth telling, in this regard.Like the actual people who are elected who could do something are, too intimidated and they're too intimidated by the Trumpian cancel culture against accountability. because like that's really, there, there's, this double game that has always been played since William F. Buckley came along and created, he, and others, created the, post-war reactionary movement that took over the Republican Party in which one party acts entirely in bad faith at all times.And everyone has to pretend that they don't. And so they attack all expertise and all data that, that counteract their beliefs and opinions. And then, everyone just has to pretend that it's serious. and this is why the Republican Party has, a higher approval rating than the Democratic Party does, because Democrats actually are willing to [00:12:00] criticize their own party, whereas Republicans don't.DELONG: yeah. No, I do remember being struck right in the last Trump administration, that, Economists, Robert Barrow and came out with a prediction that the then Trump McConnell Ryan tax cut would be a huge boost to American economic growth. Would in fact raise the level of investment in America by so much that by the time it had worked its way through, we would fully have two fifths additional as much machinery and buildings and infrastructure and, capital as we had now.And that enormous increase in capital investment would drive a huge boom to American labor, productivity and wages. And Larry Summers and Jason Ferman took them on the grounds that this was nonsense. what Barrow and Boskin were saying and said, we should at least be able to get together and not do this, and to get together and get behind.Say the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Brookings Urban Tax Policy Center, or the Tax Foundation to assess what the lab impact of a, like tax cut is likely to be. And Boskin wrote a very weird response, right? that it was very much that he was not going to sacrifice his analytical judgment to any other bunch of people, even the highly respected tax foundation or the highly respected joint tax center.and it was very important that the impact of this tax cut would be determined by how the regulations would be written. And it was very important for people like him to be in the room when the detailed regulations were written. and you read this and I read this [00:14:00] and I thought, gee.If I actually believe that this con, this policy, if I actually believe this policy would produce a huge investment boom in America and cause a doubling of productivity growth over the next decade, I would not be defensive. I would say I will not sacrifice my judgment. I would say, well, my judgment here is correct and your judgment is faulty.The importance of judgment and expertiseDELONG: And I will bet substantial amounts that my judgment is correct. And to the extent that the tax policy center and so forth are not in line with them, they need to reform their procedures because they're making bad estimates rather than the milk toast. we disagree. piece. So as I wound up thinking about it, I wound up concluding this is like the person blinking in the hostage video trying to blink in Morse code to say SOS, right?That is that Boskin thinks he is a force for good in the Republican party. And, telling public things I regard to be bald faced lies about the likely effects of tax cuts. things that Republicans have been telling since the Reagan tax cut of 1980, is his price of admission to the room where it happens.And do you know that it's better than he do this than the, true crazies run things. And so please don't be mean. and that seemed to me to be no way to be a professor. I must say. And. Do you know, the fact that there, none of them out there saying, this is really a bad idea.theSHEFFIELD: No, it's notable the, they'reBrad DeLong: you even like, makes me even less happy,SHEFFIELD: well, and it's the fact they're saying nothing, I thinkDELONG: yeah. The fact they're saying [00:16:00] nothing is interesting, at least they're not saying that, gee, this is a wonderful thing that will boost economic growth.SHEFFIELD: it shows that they don't believe that they do think it's wrong. because, again, if they thought this was just a neutral thing or it was a good thing, they would be saying thatDELONG: there would be saying that, right? That there are, a bunch of people who said back when, oh, who was it? Was it.Mitt Romney was running, it was then running for president and having a meeting. And the question was, what economic growth should we project? And Jeb Bush says, let's raise this by a percentage point. And a bunch of the, economists go along. Marty Feldstein, my teacher, who, the late teacher who I adored dearly, who is a dear, man, who is a brilliant man, was a brilliant man, all went along.As opposed to say, back in the Clinton administration, when Gene Sperling was asking Larry Katz to put an economic growth number forward. and Katz said, I think you should say X because there's an 80% chance we'll exceed that over the next four years. And, Spurling said, fine, you know that all the numbers sound reasonable.It's a reasonable one for budgeting and I would like to be in the position where you can validate me later on by saying I was pessimistic about what the effects of these policies were. that's not something you would have on the other side of the aisle. And that's, I think, a genuine loss for America.SHEFFIELD: It is. Yeah. and, of course this firing, is just of a piece with Trump's larger attack on expertise. And, probably the two biggest other areas that we're seeing this is with RFK Junior and [00:18:00] the, the Department of Health and Human Services. But, and in regards.Trump's broader attack on expertiseSHEFFIELD: To in particular funding of the National Science Foundation, that they're putting, freezing all these grants and prohibiting certain words from being used like, or, you get flagged if you use the word woman, literally.DELONG: Mm-hmm.SHEFFIELD: and I, wanna talk about, just so you know, this is a larger trend, but there does seem to be, I think there, there's like a, so there, I think, oh, wait for that. it, it seems like there are some, oh, hold on, weDELONG: Sorry,SHEFFIELD: okay.DELONG: I did not. Okay.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, hey, this is live recording here. So things like that happened, my dog just walked in the door behind me. I don't know if anybody could see that. but yeah, so I think though that there are so within, the broader, say, Le Center to left.Sometimes there are people who they don't know this history of bad faith and deliberate ignorance on the part of reactionaries, and they seem to think, and I think, Thomas Chatterton Williams as an example, he just came out with a book claiming that, if only liberals had been not so x like then the reactionaries would not be so, so deliberately ignorant and malicious.and it's like you don't actually know any reactionary political elites do you? Or you haven't really paid attention to what they say, because you wouldn't say that if you hadDELONG: there's also a view that the people I like have no agency. Right.SHEFFIELD: Or expand that if you wouldDELONG: that, the people you like, the people whose behavior you're excusing, are just reacting [00:20:00] normally, instinctively, reflexively. And it's your fault because you do not understand them and you are the only person who can change things because they're simply reacting in this particular way.as opposed to demanding that they have the ovaries not to be, malevolent idiots who care only about ideas that are convenient for them. As opposed to ideas that are true about the world. You know that one of the great things that happened with the coming of the Enlightenment, in was that for the first time you actually had a group of intellectuals where the principle test of an idea is not as it convincing and helpful to the guys at the top running the Society of Domination.That takes a third of everyone's crop for itself. Who are the people who pay me? but is this idea actually true about the world? that for some reason the Catholic Church thought it was very important to preserve a medieval cosmology by which humanity has been put by God at the center of the universe.And to say, gee, wouldn't the TMA model of astronomy be much, much, better if you understood that it wasn't the case, that there was just the earth and all these things revolving around it, but rather that the sun was at the center, the moon revolved around the Earth. The earth revolved around the sun, and Mercury and Venus are closer to the sun than the Earth while Mars and so on are further from the sun than the Earth.If you start with that, all of a sudden a huge number of things about the pathic meic model of the universe, [00:22:00] which is a good one for forecasting, where the planets are going to be a whole bunch of things about that model makes sense and you understand why Mercury and Venus in retrograde are so different.From Mars and the outer planets, and you understand why the moon moves so differently than the other planets and why the sun moves so differently from everyone. That all of those things are very accessible if you are a Copernican. While they are bunches of strange, mysterious things, if you are a T and Galileo was indeed shown the instruments and said, if you do, not recant, torture is the next step until you do.the view that is not the kind of way to run a society is a creation of the enlightenment and is, was a major, advance. And it is one that from the right perspective of the right, we have now lost.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, it is. And and, we see this also just going back to the, the labor hiring statistics that, the Trump tariffs and his constant. In uncertainty that he's creating about them, promising deals and saying, we're gonna have a deadline of this and then ignoring it, then we're gonna, no, we're gonna move it up.DELONG: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: it is creating all kinds of uncertainty for business owners and employers. And so of course the job numbers and other GDP numbers are going just going to be extremely erratic and he's the source of it, but they can't accept that.DELONG: it was very, yeah, as I say, the absence of pressure, to say,let's say if Governor Waller and if. Reserve Bank President Bowman, and [00:24:00] if hopeful, future Fed chair Kevin Walsh, say that the Fed really should lower interest rates. Yeah. They also need to say the Fed should lower interest rates because I am confident that policy uncertainty will be removed and that the Donald Trump administration will give us policies with pre economic predictability and sustainability to support growth.So that lowering interest rates will be a prudent thing to do. Right? If you're wanting to be a professional central banker, you make an ask to the rest of the government, which is that if you want a low interest rate policy, you undertake policies that make it prudent for me to do, which was very much what, Alan Greenspan did with Bill Clinton at the start of the 1990s.yes, I will lower interest rates. If you do policies that make it prudent for me to do so. Right. And Greenspan followed through. He lowered interest rates big time. And we got the 1990s, you had the best boom that America has seen except for the sixties, since God, since the 1920s in terms of its strength.and yet Bowman and Waller and Walsh will not even make that ask.SHEFFIELD: And, because they won't get hired, Trump won't pick them. ifDELONG: you know that Bowman, has a job is not really a serious candidate for Fed chair. Waller would probably be the best, I think of the likely candidates Trump might pick. And so maybe you can give him a buy. On those grounds.SHEFFIELD: Well, give us the background on them if you, for people who [00:26:00] don't know them,The first wave of AI developmentDELONG: No, I,SHEFFIELD: who these guys are,DELONG: no, that Bowman is a reserves or right wing reserve bank president and she stands out in my mind for someone who said that the reason that housing prices was too high was because immigrants, that the reason there was housing inflation was immigrants, which is law of false.SHEFFIELD: yeah.DELONG: Waller is a technocrat who's played a bunch of footsie with the Trump administration, but I think would be an extremely smart guy if he's willing to stand up to the White House, in a clever and appropriate way. The problem is that should have started now. Warsh is a guy who is for always for lower interest rates.So the economy can grow faster when a Republican is president and higher interest rates. So inflation is under control when a Democrat is president and switches with alarming frequency, remarkably rapidly, in my view, is a dangerous person to put there and is, I think his models of the economy even taking off the political part are not that sophisticated, are not that accurate.So,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the other thing is that I think Trump is, that there was talk early on in the administration that he was trying to push a new model of economics that, the Mar-a-Lago accords. and that was all the rage and in the last But I haven't heard a lot of people talking about it now.Like, what's, what, do you think is the deal with that? What'sDELONG: it was Steve.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.DELONG: Hoping that he could actually get his policies through by working for Trump and by saying whatever Trump said he actually wants my preferred policy.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.DELONG: And, you can have arguments about how his preferred policy [00:28:00] is actually not so smart, that what his preferred policy winds up doing is it winds up sacrificing the global, role of the dollar in exchange for a, in order to get a dollar worth less so we can have more manufacturing, ho here in the United States with the idea that manufacturing is a locus of the creation and maintenance of the communities of engineering practice that are uniquely value in pushing forward technology and in raising incomes and wages in the long run.The problem is it's not just manufacturing that's important. More important than manufacturing is investment. And the global role of the dollar allows us to invest in America at a much, much greater pace than we would be able to otherwise. So, you wind up sacrificing, you wind up sacrificing the dollar's global role.You make America poor, you make the dollar worth less, you wind up losing more in technology, forcing communities of engineering practice in investment, good sectors than you gain in manufacturing sectors and it's no longer So clear manufacturing is really gonna be so key over the next generation, even though it has been key for the past five.So, Trump wanders around expressing grievances essentially at random. Policymakers are then responsible for red, conning them into some particular view of the world. Trump will then endorse or deny your red conning depending on whether he likes you or not, and whether he thinks it sounds good and approved or not.SHEFFIELD: And what side of the bed he woke upDELONG: yes, this is a very dangerous game to play, but there are an awful lot of people who are eager to play it. [00:30:00] some I think because they genuinely think this is their only chance to possibly influence policy for the good. some, because there's going to be an awful lot of grifting done and money made from the Trump Kleptocracy complex and they wanna be in on it.The crypto grift and AI investmentDELONG: Right.SHEFFIELD: They do. Yeah. And the, thing also, that this, and I, and I don't think this is just miran, this does seem to be the reactionary fundamental economic assumption, which is they believe in negative, negative fiscal multiplier. That's what it seems like. They believe that aDELONG: Except they believe, in a positive fiscal multiplier, right? That the,SHEFFIELD: say that again.DELONG: that they change from month to month.SHEFFIELD: but it does seem like that, yeah,DELONG: the, so belief Yeah. The, that there are two beliefs, right? The, one belief is that taxes on capital are always too high. a second belief is that workers always have too much bargaining power.and it is a good thing if those without papers, are scared, lest their employer drop a dime on them. And so they want to be extremely valuable employees and that their employers are turn, are scared that a customer will report them to the I to, to the ICE. And so as a result, they're willing to offer real Americans good services at low prices.they love the idea of H one B visa holders. the idea that someone whose visa status is tied to their job with the added wrinkle that these days, if you fire an H [00:32:00] one B visa holder, you can then call up Christie Nome and say, deport this person tomorrow. And so H one B visa holders are now the equivalent of ERFs.And Elon Musk would love to have every single graduate from an Institute of Indian Technology Institute, Indian Institute of Technology in the United States as this kind of H one B erf, and it's spreading that We have discovered that if you're a green card holder and if Christi Nome asks Marco Rubio revoke your green card on the grounds of national security, and the Supreme Court will not help you, right?You then have to try to fight this revocation or a three year process from another country if you want to get back in. And, God knows what's going to happen to people with citizenship who in when they claim that there is some irregular irregularity, some lie on their citizenship papers. but I don't think Elon Musk or Melania Navs have to worry about the fact that they overstayed their visas in the past, while claimed on their citizenship papers that they had not. But quite possibly. Lots of other people will, and quite possibly the Supreme Court will not help them because four members of the Supreme Court believe that Trump is a righteous God, and two members believe we do not dare pick a foot fight with Trump because we might well lose it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.Well, and so, but, so, but going back to their economic consumption though, like they, they say at least currently as they, they do oscillate, especially when Democrats are in power, that they currently are saying that the reason why we want all these cuts to services like Medicaid or Medicare, and is that.Government spending takes money out of the economy, and is debt driven and therefore, [00:34:00] has a negative stimulus on the economy. That's what they claim. And then of course, they obviously don't believe this by virtue of the fact that they have increased the debt, by over a trillion dollars. So they don't believe what they're saying.But I do think it's important, to, for if you would like to push back on this idea that they, literally say that, the fiscal multiplier doesn't exist. And if it did, it's negative.DELONG: well, the more that government spending doesn't do, anything, and thenSHEFFIELD: say it's harmful actually.DELONG: well, but you know that it's harmful because it adds to the debt,SHEFFIELD: Yeah.DELONG: except when the debt is not a problem.SHEFFIELD: Well, granted, like I said, they don't believeDELONG: you say, it's not, that there are individual Republicans who have economists, who have views, who go in and out of favor, depending on what is the desired legislative policy, convenient proposal of the moment, and confidence that people will fall into line or at least stay quiet, when policy goes against them.that very much that it's not that. We need to work to find the economists who have ideas about how to make the economy grow faster and then implement their policies. It's that we know how to make the economy grow faster. it's to cut back on government spending wherever possible, cut back on regulations except those that we like and eliminate taxes on capital of all kinds.we know that and we don't need to know anything else. Yeah. and so economists are there to be hood ornaments for the car that we're driving, and if they're not willing [00:36:00] to pose properly there, we can find another one.SHEFFIELD: Which is yeah, the approach he's, he is doing. With BLS, clearly. I mean, and I think,DELONG: it's counterproductive. It is massively counterproductive from Trump's own perspective because he has just made it very clear that none of these numbers are to be trusted.The need for independent statisticsSHEFFIELD: Yeah.DELONG: that he has taken steps we see and almost surely steps we do not see to attempt to corrupt the statistical process.And, I will be surely cross crossing, reports that come out of the BLS and of the BEA and of the census going forward with other potential large sources of data. and indeed it is time for the financial times for Bloomberg, for the economists to themselves stand up a shadow statistics department of their own, to say, here's what the government reports, but here's what a big data.Assessment of the general information flow says,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, I think there, I think you're right that's almost inevitable at this point now that, Trump has tried to corrupt the process. but there is a, there's an interesting parallel, I think perhaps in what Trump had been trying to do to the, the National Weather Service, which provided very critical, forecast weather forecasting data and, recording information to specific small local communities.And, then Trump went and gutted it. and, the intent very clearly with regard to the NWS is to eliminate it. Like that seems to be the goal because they think that there's no point in government providing whether, whether [00:38:00] forecasting services seems like, and so I wouldn't be surprised if at some point you'll see soon Republicans saying, oh, well, who needs.BLS at all. Why do we need, why? Because like, I mean, if you remember, I guess it was about two months ago, they, fired a bunch of the advisory board that was contributing to labor statistics, if you remember that right.DELONG: Yeah. Yeah. but you know, the, poll point, or at least, in these are not things that have a material impact on the debt. and they are things that do have a material impact on say, the ability, if you're a farmer in Iowa, to figure out what a hailstorm is likely, or your ability if you are a commuter in, suburban Dallas, to figure out when you need to wait for 20 minutes, before heading out onto the road, that, that a world, that.We have an immensely complicated world that has enabled us to be quite prosperous, in which we have extremely large scale, you'll call them information and coordination services called the market economy, called Apple Computer called the Federal Government Bureaucracy of X. and all of these things need to be healthy and need to be working well, or we wind up with a much poorer society very quickly.Trump is probably not going to be able tobreak all that much for all that long, but do you know the point is that there are an awful lot of things that are, he will break, that [00:40:00] will be quite, damaging.SHEFFIELD: yeah.DELONG: and one way to think of it is that we have, or we had before Trump, we had productivity growth of maybe 2% per year, in America, coming from, investment in America of about 20% of our income a year in total.And so that's a net return on our investment spending of about 10%. and of that 10%, right, about 5% comes from about a 5% return on private invest sector, Amer investment in America flowing directly, flowing directly to the people, the corporations, the people who make those investments.You also have about 2% return flowing to other corporations and businesses that can see what one business is doing and taking advantage of it. Or flowing to workers who have advantageous market positions and get to share economic rents. but still the 17% of investment in America that comes from business multiplies 17%, 17 by, 0.7, 0.07.and you get, 0.12 right? Or 0.012, which means that. Two fifths of our economic growth, eight tenths of a percent per year of our economic growth comes from the public investments in infrastructure, in health, in education, in co, in technology,SHEFFIELD: Science.DELONG: and development in science.And so if [00:42:00] this part is getting indeed 0.08%, that's not a 5% return or a 7% return, that's a 20% return. And so hitting public investment is a uniquely damaging thing to do to American economic growth, and it's something the Trumpists appear to be very eager to do to the maximum extent possible.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it, also like that percentage, that's just the direct measure though. So in other words, like the, NHSI think is pro is such an incredibly successful investment vehicle. Nasa, you've got the, these two agencies that have, been at the cornerstone of so much worldwide innovation.DELONG: Oh yeah.SHEFFIELD: and, they more than paid for themselves over the decades. every single year they do.DELONG: And what I've done is purely an exchange value calculation looking at things that flow through the markets. But you know, there's also the use value calculation, that you need to do, right. that antibiotics, right? Antibiotics are productive things and they're an important part of our national income and product accounts.And when you produce, say, an antibiotic that allows. Oh, someone like me who got an infected abscess in his butt in his thirties and went down to the University Health service and, they glanced it, they poured antibiotic powder in it. They slapped a bandage on it. They said, come back in two days if it's still red.And then they yelled at me for getting, letting it get this bad. Nathan Mayor Rothschild richest private citizen in the world up to that point, up to the first half of the 19th century, got the same [00:44:00] thing in his fifties. He died, he died after being tortured by months for German doctors who were trying to figure out how to deal with this infection and could not.He died in his fifties before he got to see his grandchildren grow up. And, what fraction of his wealth would he have given for a single dose of antibiotic powder that could have killed this thing stone dead in five minutes when you don't even get to see a nurse. You just get to see a nurse's assistant.that we have, the value of, our, the value of our technology in terms of health, in terms of longevity, in terms of not just kid good health, but the ability to actually do things and be mobile and active in the world. Plus the value of our technology, not just in allowing us to consume goods, but to exchange ideas and laugh at ourselves.those themselves are massively greater than what the national income and product accounts tells us. And because those things do not flow through the marketplace, are not bought and sold, right? Those use values and those entertainment and those knowledge values are disproportionately created by government, as well.The value of government investmentSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And this, this general ignorance, that the reactionary right has about these, non, non-direct, or, in indirect account, stimuli and obligations and red and resonant effects. it's, it is just bizarre that this belief continues it, given that Adam Smith, their supposed hero, that explicitly.And it wrote an entire book about how [00:46:00] the, what, was the, just sort of conventional economics, if you will, that human societies are so much more than that. And they completely ignored him. and sure they did not read any of his books for that matter.DELONG: Right.SHEFFIELD: and, and the, and, just for, people who are interested that the book is the Theory of Moral Sentiments, it's definitely worth checking out to understand that. that it, is just not simply about, checks going in from one account to the other. Like, this is about soci. That's what the point of economics is supposed to be, is about. because it comes from the Greek word, omi, which is the management of the household. and it's not, so, it didn't mean just the budget.DELONG: Yes. Okay.SHEFFIELD: and that's something you have, been trying to, you've been trying to reorient economics, toward that more. I, we, I think. And how do you feel like that's gone outside of the Republican, party?DELONG: I think it's gone great. Right. I think economics as a discipline is in a much more healthy state Yeah. Than it was when I started in this profession 50 years ago. in large part because we are much more aware, of, the limits of the perfectly competitive model and also much better in figuring out how to deal with the fact that model has limits so that we are not just, in the business of saying, make this like a perfectly competitive market.But rather saying that since this cannot be made like a perfectly competitive market, here are all the second best things we can do to make it significantly better. [00:48:00] not just in terms of the market structuring part, but you know also in terms of the internal, within the organization management cybernetics.organize the organiza, create an organization that is properly responsive to what it needs to do and what it can know. and also with respect to human beings ability to successfully manage their desires so that they can live wisely and well, as in terms of understanding how great the market system is as a way of successfully coordinating a productive division of labor among now eight and a half billion East African plains apes.With respect to that, Adam Smith had most of it. but when you cannot get a perfectly competitive market in an industry or a sector, and when you cannot get well-informed consumers and when you have problems of designing a. Organizations that stand between the indi, larger, smaller in size than society, but larger in size than the individual that need to do necessary parts of the coordination because the price signal by itself does not have enough bandwidth.we've made so much progress on that in the last 50 years that I actually can be proud to be an economist in the way that one really couldn't, back when I started in this business.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it's, it is the, yeah, the understanding that markets, they're not just the creations of the government, that, but they have to be managed, in, they have to be overseen that the bounds without any sort of bounds or regulatory structure or, anti-monopoly structure, that they will collapse into monopoly.Like that's the natural tendency, especially with technological progress.[00:50:00]DELONG: Yep. That after all the whole idea was mean. The very idea that you would have a market economy was itself a radical expansion in the size of government, right? The idea was then that property rights and terms of trade, would not be, what local notables, what the local big man said should be property rights and terms of trade, and was not what either roving or stationary bandits, would say Should be yours.You are yours only as long as I can milk you. If God had man not meant you, to be sheared, he would not have made you sheep as the villain says in the magnificent seven. and I think most important at all, that the. Organization of property and contract, not be at the whim of the government's own functionaries, right?all these things that allow people to invest, accumulate, understand where their sphere of action is, and to figure out how their resources can be best used and what resources others have that they should trade for, that's an absolutely, truly remarkable thing, right? That's crowdsourcing the problem of economic organization in a remark, fruitful and productive manner.That earlier societies that said, you are a surf, you are a slave. Here's what you have to do. Here's what the big man says is yours. Here's what the big man says, isn't yours. Here's what it's such a huge advance and also very much a product of enlightenment, ideas about individual autonomy, agency action, and truth.You. Wonderful thing. Wealth of Nations. Absolutely wonderful book. Not [00:52:00] all of it, right? Not all of it.SHEFFIELD: it's not the full story.DELONG: by a long shot. And we, economists now have management cybernetics and behavioral economics and more sophisticated market structure ideas that we did not really have 50 years ago that allow us to properly situate the market in its place. Right? That after World War ii, there really was a belief. You only had to do three things. you only had to have fiscal and monetary policy to maintain full employment. You only had to impose the proper pollution and other taxes on things that were noxious. And you only had to have a progressive tax system and some kind of safety net in order to make the distribution of income and wealth not too unequal.Those were the only three functions of the government that plus national defense and so forth, that were truly legitimate. Now we understand that the proper way of structuring the economy in the society is much more complicated and requires much more subtle. And, and we're doing, with the exception of the past six months when you've been making rapid, backward progress, we're not doing that poorly.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, the proof is in the pudding in terms of that there has not been, since the rate depression, there hasn't been a rate depression,DELONG: Right.SHEFFIELD: the United States any large, major world economy, since then. So, but there, now there is, as, we come up on the hour here, there's, let's maybe turn the, focus to ai, because that's, I think is a source of a lot of uncertainty, with regard to people's careers, with regard to investment, with regard to the economy.there's, and I think that on the political [00:54:00] left, and, I'm curious what your thoughts are that there, there seems to be a lot of. Of, strong skepticism and on, on, with regard to a ai. Ai, they think it's a scam, that it's just a big nothing burger. and you don't seem to be of that opinion.I'm not of that opinion, but it me, but there's a lot more nuance here.Understanding AI's current stateDELONG: I mean, to the first order, AI is having tech platform oligopoly build data centers at an absolutely astonishing scale in order to provide natural language interfaces to their existing businesses. So that nobody else who constructs a better natural language interface to their business that responds more accurately and quickly to questions say for Amazon about where to shop for Facebook as to how to interact with my social network for Google as to how to search for Microsoft as to how to actually do my group team work, job, that no one with a better natural language interface to that can make a run and grab my markets and my monopoly profits away from me.And it is worth spending a large chunk of my current profits on building out these data centers and using these models in order to provide this particular kind of insurance against ai, natural language interfaces turning out to be really, big and really, important, and I cannot afford to be behind at all.Or else some upstart whipper snapper or one of the other platform monopolists, near monopolists might take my profits away from me, relatively quickly. That, that's what they're all doing with only Apple of the great platform near monopolists, hanging back. So that's the first order thing.whether these will actually [00:56:00] be used for their intended purposes or not, nobody really knows yet. But at any event, we will have an awful lot of data centers at the end and we can do an awful lot of data processing, as a result that if we can find something useful to do, it'll be neat to have all these GPUs hanging around.but it's probably not going to make a great deal of money for the tech incumbents. It's just a way to spend money to best way of buying insurance against disruption to preserve their current profit flows. The second most important. In terms of financial flows, use of AI is as a successor to the crypto grift as a way for not too ethical and extremely persuasive venture capitalists to separate gullible, venture capital organizers to separate investors and venture capitalists from a surprisingly large amount of their money.Right? That, crypto was a great grift and it took a lot of money away from a lot of people. and a lot of people now have crypto assets, which they think are worth something. And at the moment for each individual, they are worth something because you can sell it to another gullible investor.But long-term value of crypto does not look that bright for practically everything except possibly Bitcoin if it manages to make the jump to digital gold, which it will be interesting to watch if it does, but you know, everything else is gonna be toast.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And actually, sorry if I can interject on that point. I think you made, a, your rate made me think of something else. Is that the only way that crypto will increase in value over the long term is government like, it, so, it was, it, markets itself as this, anti-government, libertarian, utopian technology, but ultimately only government can make it have value by, [00:58:00] by, by giving it sanction.And yet they, and so they're all rushing to lobby and endorse candidates and give money, but they won't admit the fun, fundamental contradiction of their entire worldview that they're engaging in. But I go by, goDELONG: And, and, third most important at the moment, at least important financially, but also very, important for the quality of human work ismodern advanced machine learning models as not so much chatbots, but rather as text summarization and brainstorming engines. that, that back during World War ii, say for Richard Feynman to do his job as a calculating physicist at the Manhattan Project required 40 people, one, Richard Feynman to write down equations, and 39 women with.punch calculators, manual punch calculators to actually do computations come the spreadsheet. You need only one guy to write down the equations. and you can run through huge numbers of extra scenarios. You can do much more calculations than could the 40 person anthology intelligence, that was Richard Feynman plus his 39, female employees back during the Manhattan Project.It's a wonderful thing. It changes accounting, it changes analysis, it changes an awful lot of things because now you have a number processor that would actually really, works well. With the exception that you actually probably should really have become a real [01:00:00] computer programmer and done all your work in, FORTRAN or C because your Excel spreadsheet is impossible to debug and almost certainly has an error in it somewhere. but easy to use revolutionary entire back offices filled with people with calculating machine. Both calculators, mechanical calculators vanish overnight, just as with the coming of automatic switches. The 600,000 women who used to plug cables into plug boards to make telephone circuits work vanished over the course of 15 years or so.now comes, the modern advanced machine learning models as natural language interfaces to text processors. To expand a sentence into a paragraph, to contract a paragraph into a sentence to brainstorm 55 ideas. they have one big problem, which is that the way they were initially trained was because they were a text demonstrator, a technology demonstration by open ai.They trained them on the internet. So as a result, what you produced was something that was a pretty good model of the average internet troll, say a vibe poster, a meme poster, and you then, like, there's a huge industry, right? Andre Carpathy is especially eloquent on this, on all the things you have to do to a model to make it not just the level of the typical internet troll.But instead useful, rag, RLHF, this is the, that's the others, the different acronym of the day. Prompt engineering, context engineering, such, et cetera. it's going to be quite useful, [01:02:00] because we can now poke it into places where it doesn't think, but rather it repeats elements of human thought in ways where you can quickly say yes or no.And it has the possibility to get everyone up to what used to be a 90th level of facility with right 90th percentile, the level of facility for writing prose, which massively democratizes, the ability to make yourself persuasive. Yeah. it also, right. it also enables you to deal with information overload in a sense that you could not before.Because it allows you to survey, at least if it can find it, a huge chunk of everything that has been said and compress it and distill it in such a way that it can read more than you could and a year in a day. And then we'll give you a starting point of what things to read more deeply in order to acquire the information and then to conduct, urinalysis.I mean, when you think of it, we really don't need to build an artificial super intelligence. Some because we already have the anthology super intelligence that is the collective human mind as it has been building ever since the invention of writing 5,000 years ago. for the past thousand years, students who have gone to college have done so to learn how to be, Good draws on good users of good front end nodes to and in, the real super intelligence that exists today. The anthology, super intelligence of the collective human mind because individually we are not smart enough to know, remember where we left our keys last night. But as long as we can [01:04:00] draw on this anthology superintelligence of humanity, we can be very smart because we can draw on the best of all that has been thought and known.The role of liberal educationDELONG: And, the purpose of a liberal education, of an education for someone who will neither not have a choice because they're a surfer, a slave, or not have a choice because there'll be a thug with a spear who has a place in the society of domination that is quite a nice one and doesn't need a different job if you're in the middle.If you're in the middle, you have to make a living by your wits. And being a knowledge worker is the best way to do that. And by being a good one, by going to university and studying diligently, you both allow yourself to enrich your life by drawing on the best of all that has been thought and known. And also make yourself potentially useful to whatever thug with spear or their tame accountant, bureaucrat or propagandist has decided they need an extra person in the office.Right? It'll hire you. That's the origins of the university, that continues. Information technologies change, they change radically. there's the question of whether modern advanced machine learning models as text processors are more like the, are relative to the old fashioned typewriter. More like the, say more like the Moog synthesizer is to the piano.Or like the Moog synthesizer is to actually having a stick and a tin can, to bang it against. there's a question of how big a jump this is. This is a jump, but this is a jump that leaves the essentials of being a white collar worker intact. You have to survey the information and find the relative question that you, or that your bosses will want answered.You then have to process the information and you then have to disseminate the information [01:06:00] both in the form of making it accessible so that the next person to start asking this question can draw on you as you have drawn on all the people who have written in the past. And also persuasive so that the people who need the information you have produced, who need the conclusions you've reached to act on them, actually believe you.and you know this. Research question processing, answering, and then dissemination is still the same steps. And what you really need is you really need to demand from your professors an education that will let you do this for pros, especially in the age of information overload, in the same way that the data science tools that you do this for numbers.so people going to college especially need to demand that they be properly educated to become good front end nodes to the anthology superintelligence. And if you do that, you are going to be able to do very valuable stuff no matter what your job is, no matter who your boss is, because it's the same kind of process of figuring out what is thought and known and how do I make, reach the right conclusions about it, and then make those conclusions.Properly persuasive, both in fixed written form and in oral presentation or oral text chat form.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the interesting thing about all of this, to your point, about that the, the overall, a glutton nation of human knowledge over the past, 5,000 years of, writing, of literacy. Like it is also like we're at this moment now where the value of a liberal education.has been, has never been greater because now there's so much uncertainty with regard to professions, [01:08:00] with regardDELONG: kind of liberal education. It's the right kind ofSHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, but,DELONG: It's the kind that makes you be persuasive rhetorically in person. It's the kind that makes you persuasive on paper, either by. Figuring out how to use AI in order to get your pros up to what used to be the 90th percentile or becoming sufficiently expert in using it to push yourself from the 97th to the 98th or the 99th percentile in the words you actually commit, to the screen.And it's perhaps most of all, figuring out how to use these tools to do a better job for your research rather than just going to Wikipedia and regurgitating what you find there, which is not at all bad, right? Just not at all bad, but you know, how to become much better at actually finding what is the information I need to know to answer the question I ought to be asking, what is that question and how do I determine if this information is reliable?SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well what andDELONG: those are things, that are not closely add to the data science skills. And those are things that are not that closely aligned with current college curricula.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I agree. No, there's, gonna have to be changes.DELONG: yeah, like I was having lunch with my friend, computer sciences at Adam Quare, my friend from elementary school, Adam Qua yesterday here in Berkeley.And, talking about things and similar things and him still pushing for his, education at St. John's, right? That these are the 80 most important big canonical books. We will read them deeply. and me saying, well, yes, this is an ideal education for the 14 hundreds when there really are only 80 worthwhile books that have been written.[01:10:00] most of them in the Latin language. But these days you need to know how to be able to read shallowly and effectively, and to use all kinds of summarization engines as well, because, not all knowledge is gained by reading the 80 canonical books as deeply as you can. Even though say Martin Wolf and I were both enthus on the internet last month about how great a book Thomas Mons the Magic Mountain is and how important and valuable it is to read the Magic Mountain deeply.these days, and in some ways these days more than any others, since the days of the 1920s when it was first published, that deep reading has a place, video has a place, audio has a place. shallow reading has a place, summarization has a place, brainstorming has a place. saying that using AI is cheating, is I think educational malpractice.Saying we can't assign term papers because we don't know if they will actually write them, is also intellectual malpractice because you then call people in and have them talk to you for half an hour about their term paper. And by then, damned well how much of it is theirs in any real sense? in any real sense at all, getting people to learn deep reading, which is a very valuable skill, is I think a more difficult nut to crack.and is one where the current youths are not that great in getting worse as time passes, and I don't have a good solution to that at all.SHEFFIELD: Well, I guess that could be that, that, that's another episode then,DELONG: another episode, another call me in a month, call me in a month, and I may have ideas about pedagogy in the way of ai. Then [01:12:00] behind that, there is the remaining use of modern advanced machine learning models, which is outside of text summarization and processing. Outside of trying to protect, spending tens of billions of dollars to try to protect your existing profits by giving people the best natural language interface to your services behind taking money from gullible investors in venture capital.There also is extremely big data, extremely high dimension, extremely functional form regression and classification analysis of all kinds so that you no longer have to throw situations or people into say 15 different boxes and say, we treat things in this box this way and in this box that way. Instead allowing an algorithmic custom customization of how the complicated social system that is our society can deal with and react to individuals.The future of AI applicationsDELONG: So far, the only uses I have seen of this that are good on a large scale have been a bunch of mapping, a bunch of geographic uses of mapping things, and also Facebook claims that it's using it to massively increase its ad targeting. And thus it's ad revenue. Although whether this is doing this by showing people things that they will be happy they bought or hacking people's brains so they buy things they then regret is not a question that Facebook's minions are interested in giving us any information about.But there will be additional mammoth use cases from very large, very big data, very large dimension, very flexible, functional form, large scale classification [01:14:00] regression and prediction analysis. We just do not know now where they will be valuable for us, but they will be see my colleague Marian Haw and her co-author Kieran Healy, and I think the book may be called The Algorithmic Society.And since I have it upstairs on my bed, it's embarrassing that I'm too dumb to remember it. Say ought as an East African plains ape to have a better visual memory than I do. thus demonstrating we're really not that smart unless we can, as Isaac Newton said, stand on the shoulders of giants and draw on every good thought they have had.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And, it, you're reminding me here also that, there's a longstanding phrase within, techno reactionary circles that crypto is libertarian. Peter Thiel has said this, crypto is libertarian. AI is communist. And they seem to believe that because specifically that, the human corpus of knowledge does not seem to fit well with their anti-government, ideologies and, futile belief systems.and that's why they're cons. Elon Musk is the great example, of course, constantly complaining about his, grok and other AI LLMs being woke. and, they never stop to think, well, why is that? is it because you, what if your epistemic processes are inferior? and, that's, it's, a subject.I think that people who are not reactionaries, that we ought to be examining this question a lot more. I feel like.DELONG: I don't know. it's, [01:16:00] no, it, is very odd, right? That you got, that in some sense. The root of their problem seems to be that they seem to believe that they deserve some kind of respect, right? that they are not getting. But, it's,there's really no reason why they couldn't right? That. instead of trying, getting, making money by selling crypto grifts, mark Andreessen could be an evangelist for the web browser as a product category for democratizing access to global information. And do you know if he'd done that, he would be rich, not as rich as he is, but he would sleep easier because he would not have to think about, gee, all the people who put their money into these crypto funds, what's gonna happen to them and what's gonna happen to their customers?and he'd certainly, be rich enough, right? That I've long thought that, that most of them would very much rather have been Steve Jobs, right? who on the one hand was an incredible a*****e as a boss, but on the other hand was an incredible motivator and director of people who could take that and thought it was worth having a truly brilliant boss with his particular sense of taste and.Brain that actually had a finger on the technological pulse of the [01:18:00] world, from his grabbing Steve Wozniak and saying, you are gonna build the apple one through the Apple, two through the Macintosh, through the, iPod through the iPhone, you on, through the Apple Watch and the AirPods, every single major revolution in how we interact with our technology, led by people motivated by Steve Jobs following his aesthetic psychological taste, and, so he's rich.but he also was enormously respected and even loved, even though I know very, few people who would f found it any fun at all to work with him, or who thought he wasn't, especially. Good person except for the fact that his, I'm going to show you. Drive was focused. I'm, going to show you how to be about to make and ride a better bicycle for the mind.they could be doing this right. Instead, they thought that they would get to a point where when they made the most money by being venture capitalists, they would've won something, and indeed they have won something, but it's not what they want, and they somehow feel they need to reorient the culture.Sure. In a way that plutocrats like them get lots of respect. and then for some reason they think we should, they should all align themselves with kleptocrats to do things. Thinking that kleptocrats regard them as their friends, and actually kleptocrats regard them as their prey.SHEFFIELD: And we saw that with Trump and Elon Musk, that as soon as Musk wasn't useful, he was the fall guy. That's all heMusk, Trump and the tech eliteDELONG: Musk thought. I am [01:20:00] going to elect Donald Trump. I am going to give him more money than God has for him to win the presidency. And I am then going to, be the fall guy for actually cutting back on government spending by firing people. So Trump can then reverse whatever things I do he doesn't like.But he starts from a point of view of the federal government that's been severely reduced in size and in return, I get an end to legal harassment of my businesses by the government that actually wants, say, SpaceX not to pollute as much as it does. I get, carve outs from tariffs so Tesla can continue to function as a profitable global value chain enterprise.I get the, I get the tax credits for EVs continued and for Cafe continued. So Tesla is act not just a functional production network, but a highly profitable one that will actually support my claim to be the richest man out of live. And I get over time the entire NASA budget transferred to SpaceX. Musk thought he had gotten all those four things and had a deal with Trump and then Musk learned that he did not, the only thing he got was the end of what he regards as legal harassment of his companies.And Trump is threatening to return that unless Musk shuts up. it's an interesting example of how somebody or other says everything Trump touches dies, and confess that I don't know how Musk is going to function going forward. I'm. Personal bankruptcy is definitely not outta the question, given his current situation and given theSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Those, tax credits and the,DELONG: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: the, the, because so much of their revenue was coming from other car companies,DELONG: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And also, and also the market, [01:22:00] right? They, a 300 mile electric vehicle in a United States with a very spotty, fast charging network is a luxury purchase. Right, the sweet spot. If you are going to be, if you are a, if you live in normal America, rather than say San Francisco or Berkeley and want a car, the sweet spot is a plugin hybrid.both if you are worried about gas prices in the future as you should be, and if you want to do something for the environment, as you should as well, it's not an electric vehicle. Right? The electric vehicle was a bet made by environmentalists who wanted to declare allegiance to a forward looking, progressive future of new and high technology.And, to the extent that Trump, and Musk are seen as at all alike as together waging war on the woke unquote, and to the extent that the environmentalism drops away, the. The market for Teslas vanishes as well. It has effectively vanished in Europe already. people would like EVs that have, more modern platforms, have better build quality, and also have companies with nicer, more pro-environment figures that their heads, and the market, for Dukes of hazard themed cyber trucks with confederate flags painted on their sides is very, small. And yet that seems to be the direction that Musk cannot help but keep pushing himself.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it will be interesting. And, he's, and I, it, is notable that he, seems to have, been trying to pivot toward X ai, which [01:24:00] purchased Twitter in a paper shuffling, recently. And so, we'll, see how he ends up going there with that. But, there, there is with regard to grok, that Grok keeps having these, right wingDELONG: you know the point. Yeah. As we say the point, it's been trained, it's been trained on the typical internet, right? And the typical internet associates right wing beliefs with anti reality craziness. so as a result, you ask it to express rightwing beliefs and it then says what kind of words are linked to general Rightwing beliefs?Well, calling myself Mecca Hitler is linked.SHEFFIELD: Well, andDELONG: and behold, here we're,SHEFFIELD: Yeah.DELONG: this doesn't necessarily, it's simply that yo the reality based community has a liberal bias, I think for pretty good reasons, means that if you are going to create. a reality-based chatbot liberal views are going to leak in and scrubbing it, is extraordinarily hard and must has not been willing to invest in hiring millions of people to write essays that are half propaganda and half true facts about the world, and use those as the training as the basic raw pre-training corpus for X ai.SHEFFIELD: Well, and it's, interesting because like, so I'm working on a, a theory of, integrating dual process with, ai, which I can, share with you after we're done here. But, one of the things that, that I've discovered in working on this is that basically the psychological state of the right winger is the only difference between complete reactionary insanity and just milk [01:26:00] toast conservatism.In other words, they have the exact same epistemology, the exact same epistemology, is what I believe is true, because I believe it. and they have no method of adjudicating between something that is completely insane and completely nor,DELONG: And they'reSHEFFIELD: just of, a country club Republican.Right-wing epistemology and AIDELONG: That, Travis Kalanick going on a right wing podcast to say that my interactions with chat GPT have brought me to the frontiers of physics, and further advances are imminent, and the right wing hosts gull swallowing this.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Like they, they have no method of saying, well, what is truth? Independent of what I think. They don't have it.DELONG: That that,SHEFFIELD: when youDELONG: indeed, as we say, we, we are pretty dumb. We cannot remember where we left our keys last night. And we also are primed by evolution to reach agreement because it's better that the whole band go down to the water hole at once than someone digging his heels and say, I'm not going down to the water hole until half an hour later.This is too early. Right? The one who goes down half an hour later gets eaten by the leopard after all. and soSHEFFIELD: Yep.DELONG: are quite dumb, right? That, the ancient Germans, right, the ancient Germans. Actually believed that in some sense the rumble of the thunder was the rumble of the wheels of a giant cart in the sky drawn by two magical goats.And in that cart there was a very large red figure with, a enormous, magical hammer named Ner, an anger management problems. And, you did not want [01:28:00] to deal with Thor when he was angry. Therefore, do not stand on top of a hill during a thunderstorm. Right. conclusion is quite reasonable. It is good not to stand on top of a hill during a thunderstorm, but rather the cower in a ditch, I understand seeing a lightning strike and saying, what could this possibly be besides ulner, the mighty ma massacre of miscreants. But then one goes on to wearing a hammer. Around one's neck and praying to the guy to help you and to sacrificing useful animals and burning their corpses for so he can smell the smoke and so forth.we're easily misled even when the basic cognitive message don't stand on top of a hilltop during a thunderstorm is actually one that is very useful to know. And without actually a theory of electromagnetism kind of, it's Thor, he has a magic hammer and big anger management problems when he is driving fast is as good an explanation as any to lead you to the conclusion it's memorable and you know it's leads to good actions.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it's serviceable for a small, achievement, but not for anything bigger, basically.DELONG: On the other hand, Chris Hemsworth is truly excellent as the character. and do you know,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well,DELONG: very much, I'm very much on a Thor on the Thor side of the Thor versus Loki. I think Thor was better played than Loki in that.SHEFFIELD: well, I, we'll, have to let people sort that [01:30:00] out in the comments.DELONG: Okay. Alright.SHEFFIELD: all right. Well, Brad, so, for people who want to keep up with your stuff, what, where, what's your advice for them? You got any books you're working on or,DELONG: brad DeLong substack.com also my 2022 books vouching towards Utopia. The economic history of the long 20th century, I think are both supremely great. and the market appears to agree, as well or at least enough of the literate market, that it makes me very grateful, for my 50,000 Substack subscribers, more books.We'll see what I actually managed to accomplish this fall. I think there are four things that I might push across the line well enough to send out to publishers to see who wants to actually publish it, but thank you very much for inviting me to theory of changeSHEFFIELD: All right. Sounds good. All right. Thanks for being here.DELONG: You.SHEFFIELD: Uh, let's push stop here. All right. Ooh, so. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode Summary  If you’ve watched or listened to this podcast for a while, you probably know by now that Theory of Change is about stories—larger trends that happen and the narratives we tell ourselves about them.We’re finite beings; we exist for a moment within a small slice of spacetime. To understand anything at all about externality, we have to simplify it. But sometimes simplification makes things more complicated and confusing.The historical moment we’re sharing together is incredibly messy and confusing which is why I firmly believe that while the 20th century was the age of the economist, the 21st century is the domain of the philosopher—an era of interpretation.That’s why I’m excited to bring you today’s discussion with Virginia Heffernan, a really fantastic writer and thinker whose work you may have seen in the New Republic, Wired, or at her Substack, “Magic and Loss.” Virginia has written a lot of great journalism over the years, but at heart, she’s a literary critic—a profession that I think is very well-suited to interpret our interesting times in which the division between text and sub-text is often impossible to delineate.The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content• “This Present Darkness” and the fictionalization of evangelicalism• How an oversharing Christian blogger inadvertently documented his own radicalization• Why 90s Christian pulp fiction explains today’s Republican Party• How Democrats got trapped in the fictional politics of “The West Wing”• Jeffrey Epstein as the synechdoche of cruelty across political ideologies• The Big Ten rises up against TrumpAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:42 — The 21st century as the return of philosophy10:54 — Oral versus written traditions13:32 — The fragile nature of reason within society19:33 — The end of purist capitalism and communism20:35 — Universities as places of public goods versus privatized goods26:34 — Jeffrey Epstein as a synecdoche of corrupt compromise34:02 — QAnon as projected right-wing Christian fear about internal predation41:45 — Lewis, Tolkien, and the rise of fictionalized group interpretations of reality51:08 — Richard Rorty's continued relevance58:19 — Opposition to cruelty as a guiding principle01:04:53 — Understanding why people believe lies01:08:10 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Virginia Heffernan. Hey, Virginia. Welcome to Theory of Change.VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN: I’m so glad we’re doing this.SHEFFIELD: Yes, me too. Absolutely. Well, so why don't we start with that the title of your Substack is called politics–or the subtitle of it, I should say, is called “Politics for English Majors.” What do you mean by that?HEFFERNAN: Well, so title is the same as my book title from 2016 book, Magic and Loss, and I can tell you about that title if you are interested. But essentially comes from engineering. That's lossy. Lossy sound representation is representation that loses something obscure from the sound that we might not be able to perceive with our ears. But that can be quantified. And that's the loss.And then the magic is sort of that term of art. From tech or a term of marketing from tech that, any te technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. It was a big Steve Jobs word. So the book was about, the internet was about those two sides of the internet, something obscurity lost for which we're grieving and something gained that almost tripped our minds into kind of superstitious thinking, into magical thinking.And so that's the title of the book. That's the title of the of the, of, the Substack, which began a bit to be about tech 'cause that's what I had written about for so long. But I'm trained as a literary critic. I did a PhD at Harvard in, in, in English. And the topic of the dissertation was sort of finance and various novels about finance and in particular about inflation.So. short, the [00:04:00] idea that to save money is to lose it American fiction at the turn of the 20th century. And that has all kinds of consequences for nostalgia and preciousness money and value. so all those things were propelling this Substack as I went into to write it.And I really, but I had also very much since 2012, been writing about tech and politics since the digital election of 20 20 12, which I was, I wrote about Yahoo News. Just, pounding the pavement, going to the conventions, studying the Pinterest of, MIT, Romney's wife, like that kind of thing.So I, and, I had my old podcast Trump cast had just been ca ended because we thought Trump's reign of terror was over right after Trump's, after Trump lost the 2020 election.I looked forward to not writing about politics, to writing back about tech because I figured the ship of state had been righted with Biden as president and that politics would become boring again, and that I'd be able to write full time about AI, which I, was writing about for Wired at the time about AI and also some biotech with Ozempic and other drugs.And I figured that would be that would be my future. But then Trump was reelected and so it stopped being tech and politics and wanted to be, or I felt it wanted to be ta politics again, but all of it. Including the book Magic and Loss all the way through has been influenced by training, and I can only call it that as a iterate critic.I, don't say that to establish my authority as much as to say that's what I was soaking in for so long. My father was a literary critic. And it's, these things are hard to get out of once you have hermeneutic strategies and, methodologies, but also a [00:06:00] lot of politics seems to me. To come down to textual analysis.So a very simple one is, originalism, right? Like, it's crazy to hear people talk, to talk, hear constitutional law. People talk about originalism or to hear religious folks talk about fundamentalism without using the tools of literary criticism. Originalism has, there's a lot of faith that you can read words the way they are originally either intended or laid down, or, and this is kind of the work of literary criticism, is to understand why there's nothing simple and transparent about language that's put on a page.There's nothing that you can see through to either the intention of an author or to reality. And. Maybe you can, right? So that's another argument. But the fact that people have arguments about originalism absent the language of literary criticism and the methodology of literary criticism is just leaving a lot on the table.It's leaving a lot of tools on the table and I've seen computer scientists and other people kind of in philosophers, swoop in on conversations in, public domains in other domains and say like, you know what? We have something to offer here. This is Aristotle, and psychologists coming in with physicists or and so on.And that I'm an academic at heart. I like interdisciplinary studies, and I think it can be very useful to use some of the techniques of literary criticism, and I could give more examples of that to, understand kinds of facets of American politics.The 21st century as the return of philosophySHEFFIELD: Yeah, I definitely think that's right. And and, in a lot of ways the, politics of this moment, the, of the 21st century, I see it as the, this is the century of philosophy. The 20th century was the century of [00:08:00] economics. But we're, and, going back to philosophy as the, nexus of politics that is the historical reality of it.And that even, like the term economics, that, that comes from oikonomia, which, is the Greek word. And, Aristotle was one that put that in. So this wasn't a discipline that arose on its own. It was created by philosophy, just like so many it created so many other things, including religion.HEFFERNAN: I really, appreciate, and I do, I agree by the way, if with the implication that literary criticism or criticism is a subset of philosophy I, double majored in philosophy in English. My problem with philosophy and Aristotle as an example is just that I could read so little of it in the original.I mean, certainly not ancient philosophers, but also French philosophers and so on. So what I like about the, that I think some people forget when they think that what I, we study in English departments is, literature, right? We are trying to focus on just literature in English or in the American language and paying close attention to the way the English language works.So I have much, much less to say about than I do about what Whitman for obvious reasons. And I am not confident to. Even if I can get through a copy of Madam Bovary in French, not capable of reading it very deeply. Because my vocabulary's limited, because my understanding the grammar's limited because I haven't been soaking in it and I just am skeptical of the translations that I get when it comes to ancient texts.I'm not sure, you just did like a lovely translation. We had to, do in the PhD program I was in, we had to have two ancient language, sorry, two ancient, two modern languages. And one of my ancient languages was old English. So [00:10:00] we can do those translations, but it's incredible how revelatory they are when you press on them and you wonder how much you might be missing.So anyway, just emphasize that. Literary cri English literary criticism in English and American literate literature is a subset of philosophy, especially since it's got this incredible laser-like focus on the English, and particularly in my case, the American language.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And if we look at Socrates asa philosopher, you know, he explicitly said, I don't want to write anything, because to write down something means to, lose the meaning of what I was saying and that it can be misinterpreted. Uh, that people willsay that I was trying to say something when I wasn't trying to say it. And and I, but if I'm talking to them. They can be completely clear as to what my intentions were. and,Oral versus written traditionsSHEFFIELD: IThat's obviouslytrue.HEFFERNAN: I mean, I love thatSHEFFIELD: Yeah.HEFFERNAN: I don't know if Walter NG's work but he was, I think, a, minister in one of the founders of, Media Studies, if you take the University of Toronto with Marshall McCluen at the, as the avatar of it, as the birthplace of media studies.And he he contrasted the oral and written traditions in a somewhat similar way to say that, there's something that written language always ends with QED. It's like, I'm going to close the case. I'm not listening, I'm not, and I can do this as a, like, as a compulsive filibuster.I can like shut out the other person so that I can make my point. But that is in dialogue, not what dialogue, what conversation with other people exist to do. And very few people are talking aloud in a room where most writers are just writing in a room and making meaning together as Socrates did in dialogue is a wonderful, is maybe the only way to [00:12:00] really extend extend your thinking on a matter.I think David Graver and David Gro, who wrote the dawn of Everything together in that book, talk about how. Some, there's some neuroscience and I'm not going to get it right, but that says we can only hold a thought in our brain for a certain number of seconds.SHEFFIELD: Working memory as it's called. HEFFERNAN: Yeah, right. But in conversation, we could hold a thought forever. We could run, and you and I could probably go for hours here. And,SHEFFIELD: We could, but we won't do that, guys, I promise.HEFFERNAN: We'll spare you our mutual filibuster. But but anyway, so, so I think you, that's, I think that point about spoken language is absolutely right. I think that literary critics see themselves as in some kind of dialogue with another text.And that's the way we get around the idea that we're just, writing in our own heads. There's something incredibly intimate about reading about close readings. Justalmost begin to imagine, the author has. An infinite number of choices about what next word to use.And you're on a precipice in the spaces between words of what's going to happen next, and when you can start to make guesses about what it might be or sort of understand why that word was chosen. It's almost like riding the rails of someone's very nervous system, and that is, I think, a kind of intimacy that is like a Socratic dialogue.The fragile nature of reason within societySHEFFIELD: This is so relevant now because we're in this historical moment for humanity in which. There is a minority of people who do believe in the scientific method and what it means and apply it to their own lives, but we're the minority and we have always been the minorityand, yet, excuse me, and yet the that minority has [00:14:00] always operated as if it was the majority.HEFFERNAN: Yes. Right.SHEFFIELD: has a more functional and, a, an epistemic process in which can, layer upon itself, add, infinitum. It supposes that everyone else agrees with that, but in fact, the majority of people don't agree with it and probably have never really fully under understoodit.HEFFERNAN: I mean, I'm not sure. So do you mean by scientific method,SHEFFIELD: Well, I just mean the idea that, you know. That we can improve our understanding of reality by observing it and then creating hypotheses about how certain aspects of it function and then testing those hypotheses, like, and, then if they're not true, then we abandon those hypotheses. So it's, it is about continually falsifying our ideas and being open to the idea that nothing is always true.Oris indubitably true? As, as Carl Popper had, said very convincingly with regard to science, but that applies beyond science. Like the, that you have to keep an openness to revising your priors as peopleSometimes say,HEFFERNAN: I,I I just want, for listeners, it seems important to flag maybe where our opinions diverge and I mean, you can probably imagine that as someone who was sort of. Had was woken out of my own dogmatic slumbers by a philosopher. I started doing analytic philosophy when I was in college at the University of Virginia, and then the University of Virginia hired Richard Brody, a philosopher, but he refused to be in the philosophy department because he was had written his way out of philosophy and in particular analytic philosophy.First, he had been enchanted by continental philosophers including darida, including some of the ones most loathed by analytic [00:16:00] philosophers, and then had. Started to think that he mostly wanted to, be a literary critic and a lit, and for various reasons. And so he started the Department of the Humanities.And by that point I was exhausted by a JA and by sense data and little pennies that looked like an ellipse. And what we could do if there were actually data that floated before our eyes. I don't want to reduce analytic philosophy to just that, but there was some strange stuff going around that seemed to be taking me down a a path I didn't know.And because I was much more drawn to poetry than science I, and for many, contingent reasons came to believe that poetry had greater explanatory power for me than scientific method. So I wouldn't want to say that it's the tools of literary criticism that interests me more than the tools of science.SHEFFIELD: Sure. Yeah. But I'm just saying overall you understand that your personal beliefs are not the absolute truth.HEFFERNAN: absolutely. I mean, I would, saySHEFFIELD: yeah.HEFFERNAN: more than science. So like, I, yeah, I mean, both of us in that way are absolutely Socratic. What I'mAgainst is is an absolute conviction in my own, my own lack of wisdom that my own inability to perceive the world as it is.And, also my enjoy. It's like, like we must imagine the ignorant person happy, or the person seeking meaning happy in the sense of that, that, that, quest for a way to describe the world such that it, crystallizes my sense of identity and then a way to describe the world such that it describes a possibilities or how to improve the world and reduce suffering in the world.Those two different private public projects are a reason to seek some durable modes of expression. I mean, this is all quite, sort of, sounds [00:18:00] sort of boring or circum as opposed to scientific language, which sounds, much more direct, but I'm just a little bit afraid of, well, there are ways of, testing our delusions against reality or, falsifying beliefs or even settling on, absolutely true statements instead of useful and beautiful statements asSHEFFIELD: Oh, well, yeah.HEFFERNAN: Describe that.SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, except, I mean, popper explicitly said that the scientific uh, truth or actually just unf falsified beliefs, that's all they are. So, so that's, I, so I think we actually agree on it. We're just putting a different label.HEFFERNAN: IDo. And I think I, I really like learning that you sort of live in the flicker among these various disciplines the way that I do, because, we're probablySHEFFIELD: we need more of that,HEFFERNAN: of that. AndSHEFFIELD: I think.HEFFERNAN: it was just a very exciting time to come of age as young philosophers.There was just a lot to, at least it seemed exciting to me to have various philosophers kind of bringing us closer to scientific method and, also 'cause we, I wasn't an economist at the time, so we had a lot of space to ourselves. People were less, Bothered by people doing philosophy and criticism because economic economists were competing for these much more highly paid jobs and also paving a way for them to go into finance, which we was not a pathway open to English and philosophy majors.The end of purist capitalism and communismSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the other reason though, uh, just to go back to something I was, that I had said about, you know, that where this is the time of philosophy versus the time of economics is that, you know, the, end of the Cold War showed that Marxism was not. It was not a possible destination, it wasn't going to work. But then the intervening years since then have shown that pure capitalism doesn't work. [00:20:00] And that, and Peter Thiel, the, uber advocate of capitalism explicitly says in his view, capitalism is about the creation of monopoly.And so it is not about competition. In fact, competition is bad. If you are a capitalist, you want to have no competition. And so in that sense, events have, made economics obsolete in that pure communism, pure capitalism. Nobody wants those and they don't function and you can't even get to them. In fact but even if you could, it would be destructive all around.Universities as places of public goods versus privatized goodsHEFFERNAN: I, just published a piece in The New Republic about the Big 10 conference there, the Big 10 conference in the United States. I'm sure most people know this now. Comprises now includes 18 schools across 16 states. So there's nothing 10 about it, but incredibly powerful organization.Writing about it and writing about its capacities to oppose Trump and and fight back against the against federal overreach and the federal government. I discovered that it was founded by. education reformer who also happens to be the inventor of the game of American football. And just to, I'll, speed past some of this history that was very interesting is that the president of Harvard, the notorious racist Charles Elliot was against football because he thought it was brutal, that there was deception in it and that it shouldn't be, and students shouldn't.He was against intercollegiate football because students shouldn't be performing to entertain other people. That's not what education was and camp thought otherwise. He also ran a factory. He believed that, students should be taking orders and they should be, able to be part of a team, and then they should rise up until they can give orders themselves.So it's very coach driven way of thinking about well, coach driven and, unified executive [00:22:00] sort of presence that orders us into what to do. We take orders and then we ultimately we give orders. Now it sounds like one is somewhat dehumanizing and the other isn't, but one thing the Big 10 understood is that nobody, just to put it quickly, I mean like the Elliot loved competition, right?But William Camp's point is that nobody, that nobody likes competition. Everybody likes winning to your point, right? So it's not just that you want competition, you want a monopoly. And that's, I think that goes to your, idea that competition for its own sake, where not everyone is out for a monopoly makes no sense. Like there's no way that people in a gentlemanly way, even in the sort of Oxford system, are going to, throw the game of quidditch at the end in order to what? Right. It's, it, it's not the, they want a fair game, but they more than a fair game, they want to win.and I think that was actually a very crucial insight of camps and now. The Big 10 while Harvard dithers around with prestige and, backroom compromise and all this other small stuff, the Big 10 is still devoted to building up the most nuclear reactors of any university conference in the world to beating Europe and quantum to winning at football, to making 1.4 billion in untaxed revenue a year.And this thing is hiding in plain sight because it, it wants to win. It's not in the, it's not in the business of pretending to be pro capitalism. It's just trying to nail it's incredible scientific accomplishments and and, build up its resources. And in some ways I feel like it's the reason that you can have so many Marxists there is that there's no one arguing for capitalism.There's just people, making things you know, that are better than other people's [00:24:00] things.SHEFFIELD: Well, and it's also that they have a vision of public education for thepublic, and as an integral part to the, states and localities in which theyexist, and that does not exist for theIvy League, by And, large.HEFFERNAN: where the, where Harvard has little interaction with the governor of Massachusetts, although she's a Harvard alumna they, those schools are integral, to their state's economies, like the number four, number three employers in their states. And often they have former governors, or at least in two cases, former governors come and take over as presidents.The governors are, they really like it if they went to Purdue or IU or, Ohio State. And the, they have 44 million fans, the big 10 schools altogether, like the, like these are schools that. People don't have contempt for, like they do for Harvard and Yale. They have an allegiance to, and that allegiance is more strong and immediate than their allegiance to maga, for instance.No matter where they fall on the political spectrum. So, I think there's a lot going right at the Big 10. But the other thing I wanted to say is it's sort of outside that particular conversation about economics because they just are blissfully striving for, monopolies on, on, on things that people should be pursuing monopolies on.I mean, they ultimately are open source, right? 'cause they're public. But on medical research, they collaborate. They do collaborate of course with China on medical research, on green tech, on nuclear power. Because because capitalism, Secondary get arriving at answers, and being the first to arrive at answers, so, I mean, youSHEFFIELD: Yeah.HEFFERNAN: want science. You don't want science and progress without people out for monopolies. You want people who want to get there first.SHEFFIELD: The other [00:26:00] thing also that I think is illustrative about the Big 10 versus the Ivy League is that it is the relationship to. And, you've talked about it a bit here, but you know, just like the relationship to capital that, these schools do have large publicfunding and because they're so integral totheir states, it's a lot harder for the Republicans in their state to, to slash them and go after them.HEFFERNAN: IndianaSHEFFIELD: And they,HEFFERNAN: Yeah. You've probablySHEFFIELD: yes, unfortunately.HEFFERNAN: have basically been obliterated there. But,Jeffrey Epstein as a synecdoche of corrupt compromiseSHEFFIELD: yeah well, I was going to say, but the other thing that you know is different is that because the Ivys are mostly private they do, have to be going out and raising money a lot more. And one of the people who had very many connections to these schools was Jeffrey Epstein.And Epstein has since gone on to become, kind of a, a, figure that as, we were talking about before the recording here, that, you, I, think I correctly identified him as somebody who. Can be the representation of the corrupt bargain that is at the heart of modern institutions in a way that is easy for people to grasp no matter their ideology or how much informed they are or not.HEFFERNAN: So, well, I'll try to, I'll try to, I, as, I ended up in, in the, a circle of people called That was some people, I've been on podcasts to talk about it as a cult. But let's just say had some cult like qualities to it. But the worst thing about it was not that it was sponsored by Jeffrey Epstein.I didn't know who Jeffrey Epstein was at the time, and honestly didn't even know the name of the person that gave most of the money for it, but we can talk about it in a second. But what this organization or a group did is, and end up, and this is what I hated most about, it, was produce so much so sophistry so you can lay at its feet.Things like evolutionary psychology and certain kinds of neuroscience and certain kinds of [00:28:00] bad philosophy. And also in addition to intellectual fraudulence. And and a, lot of people missing the mark of the what's it called, the replicability crisis, right? Like whose studies couldn't be replicated.They also were exerting great dominance over people who worked for them to the point of lots of sexual abuse. And so, that combination of things the headquartered at places like Harvard and MIT where Jeffrey Epstein, supposedly smart washed or whatev some version of smart, washed his money, plowing it into eugenics adjacent departments and faculty and having these people to his house and all that stuff.PR produced office sophistry produced this kind of sexual abuse. And I can just name one after another. This isn't, I'm not, this isn't Q Anon right? This is like actually arrested, documented court documents. Same with Epstein, same thing that I was to some extent complicit in. And lots of people in the academy, in retail, in all these, Victoria's Secret, if you were interested in modeling in New York real estate, if you were in Hollywood where, Kevin Spacey and other celebrities were flew with and hung out with Epstein.Then you that the arts, so Interlochen is another place like arts and acting school in, where he recruited. So these are so many domains that, Epstein touched if you were anywhere near them, you had a creeping feeling that somehow the person that you were, was being compromised, that you were sitting with.Sitting, talking to a seemingly interesting person at a party, and then his girlfriend came up and she looked like she was 15. That happened, and you just didn't say anything about it. I, would tell myself everybody was getting a deal out of it. Or, and this is where I think conservatives I might've [00:30:00] listened to conservatives, my full throat of defense of Bill Clinton for having, getting a blowjob in the Oval Office was very like, oh, we're also, I call this sort of a swanky leftism.Miran has three families and it's all the greatest thing in the world you can do to be, not be puritanical. Right. And American and Jeffrey Epstein was that too. I, he, not know that he was trafficking women. Obviously. I never even saw him at a party, but I, I saw Donald Trump and Melania, and we are accepting what like 30 year age difference is just.It's just a kind of normal thing, right? It's like the thing we delore in Mormons was the thing that we thought was like really exciting and sophisticated and and really like camil foe with intellectuals and with with the rich. So those two things. My proximity to it. Then the distance of other people from it who must have thought seeing movies like Miramax movies that had, all kinds of like outlandish, abusive, cruel sexuality represented, had really weird codes of conduct that like, that, I'm not talking about Philadelphia, which is like a sentimental story that puts, puts Gay, sees the Humanity in gay people, but movies that, a lot of movies that Miramax came out with that were, had s and m dynamics, had dynamics of cruelty and that in the hinterlands or in the Heartland, you just didn't watch those movies and feel like there was something in it for you that was good, and then you were finding that your own. Shudder that you had toward those things was being vilified as like racism or bigotry, or corniness or puritanism provincialism. And I can imagine those two responses, my shuttering feeling, the uncanny response of, former Republicans or Republicans who turned to maga.[00:32:00]They, two responses were a response to something that was rotten in the state of Denmark. And one thing we might, as people who like abstractions refer to that thing as is neoliberalism, right? Or you say econometrics. And a consolidation of the ruling class, the proliferation of billionaires and monopolization of capital.That's how we might, in boring terms, explain what happened with Epstein. Then there is a much more exciting story that thrives in Q Anon, most of which is not true, but a fragment of which is freaking true, right? It's like, like Jeffrey Epstein at these crazy islands was like, it's a little like, we don't like to think that the Russian co like it's very immature or something to say, well, Russian collusion doesn't happen because, Putin comes up to Trump and is like, here's my, here's your tape of you having sex in the Ritz, or whatever it, nothing really happens like that.But Epstein did happen like that. And it's one, it is one way, I think the fact that most of us let, most of us, at least on the left, thought the Epstein thing was put to rest, thought that it was like ground by the pussy or the rape of Eugene Carroll, and it was just another Teflon thing that would roll off Trump.Moreover, I, until very recently thought, well, come on. He never, there's never been a real suggestion that he had sex with a teenager, with an underage person. But there is, and and so I. I feel in some ways that there's a, listening to Q Anon part of this, which is like you were, they were sensing that something was really, weird.And, incest and they, what they call age discrepant relationships or the rape of kids is very common in lots of institutions from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts and so on. And they weren'tSHEFFIELD: Yeah.HEFFERNAN: They weren't wrong. WeSHEFFIELD: Yeah,HEFFERNAN: a creepy feeling. And now we have a name for that creepy feeling.And, Jeffrey Epstein is a much more vivid name [00:34:00] than neoliberalism.QAnon as projected right-wing Christian fear about internal predationSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and uh, your point about the, that creepy sensation that a lot of, the Q anon people had I wrote recently a piece of just looking at the numbers that you know, right wing religious communities. Are disproportionately plagued by child abuse compared to, uh, other communities. And somebody went and, uh, did the stats on just like actual cases of people accused of child sexual abuse.And what they found was that of politics. So she, went and gathered literally more than 10,000 cases be between a yearspan. And what she found was that of politicians who had been accused of, that type of crime, that it was 67% of them were Republicans. And that 1.7, I think, or sorry, 2.2% or something like that were libertarians, which when you thinkof how few elected libertarians there are in this country, that's astronomically overrepresented that party is.Andso,HEFFERNAN: is amazing.SHEFFIELD: and.HEFFERNAN: yeah, go ahead.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, and the same thing is true that when you just look at abuse studies that you know, these far right religious denominations, they, the leaders that operate them do not, they have unquestioned authorityHEFFERNAN: Right.SHEFFIELD: people are not allowed to examine them. They don't provide accountability.And they often, have completely they don't do background checks on people because they know the God. They feel that the Lord tells them they should hire this person. And so they do.Anddon't bother to check whether they have had convictions or whatnot. And so this is why, all of the biggest abuse scandals that have happened have been in the theologically conservative denominations.HEFFERNAN: I mean, I think that we have to, [00:36:00] one of Trump's one of the. The biggest, you never has said to not call things Trump does missteps because he he's right on Surefooted, right? When he looks like he's stepping outside. But I think calling the, Jeffrey Epstein affair, and it's all of it.The crimes a hoax akin to the Russia hoax, which also was not a hoax, but the Epstein hoax Epstein thing. A hoax is saying, well, it all didn't exist right? Like he's, bill Clinton denied knowing what Epstein was doing and denied being a part of it. Trump has not issued a denial. He didn't deny, he doesn't deny a lot of things.He mostly just says it's all a hoax, right? Like that he never met EG and Carol. And so he usually, he doesn't mount a factual defense. He just says, this is all just didn't happen, or it's just not true. Like they, like, like Brett Kavanaugh did with, Christine Blasey Ford, and, parenthetically I would.Love it. If we got, speaking of empiricism, just one person who said, yeah, I didn't really know much about sex. I'm Brett Kavanaugh. I was drunk, I don't know anything. And I tried to take off this woman's clothes and she had a swimsuit on and I was got over ahead of my skis and we've all done it and I'm so sorry to her and I'm so sorry I affected you.And now here's my history of understanding the Constitution. And I'd like to be on the Supreme Court. I think most sane people would say, you know what? That thing sounds like it happened. the only thing that's making me crazy about you is that you just say it. Didn't, you just like obliterated it. You've just said it didn't happen.And I do think because we know. Jeffrey Epstein was friends with Donald Trump, that there's photographic evidence, that there's witnesses, that there's, we know that they were very close. And because we know that Jeffrey Epstein committed a lot of crimes, and we, this is all just o nobody right or left disagrees with any of this.I've never heard anyone [00:38:00] to say that it was a hoax. So to tell us that it's a hoax is to do, you know what Joe Rogan has said? What a, lot of people on the right have said is just to gaslight the shit out of us. And this is a time where we're not having it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.HEFFERNAN: I think that's, I, think that is a really interesting.Finally, at least there's one example, maybe fleeting of a time that, Trump told us to disbelieve the evidence of our eyes that, it was a hoax, like crop circles. Like I was thinking of things that was used before, right? Like world, of the world. That it was like something perpetuated to do by whatever, that this isn't an abstract issue like that.This isn't a complex issue with the word hoax in it that makes you do triple cognitive epistemological back flips. To understand that what each photo is a CGI photo, like all the things you'd have to do to imagine it's a hoax. We just don't want to rev up to do that again. Right now.SHEFFIELD: No.HEFFERNAN: want to just be there and say, you know what?Raping teenage girls is wrong. And I know it in my bones. It's wrong. The fact that it is common. in families we know it's common. We can't pretend that this is not a huge threat in human history. I mean, there's so many disturbing numbers on this, including the ones you just gave, but you probably saw that in England, God, I don't want to get this wrong, but there's some enormous number of people that are descendant from first degree incest father, whose grandmother and great-grandfather, whatever, had sex with each other.And this is this is a phenomenon that we can't deny either because we want to keep our heads in the sand or because we're party to it. Like the Catholic church, like the Boy Scouts like Jeffrey Epstein, like, Mike Jeffries, [00:40:00] who used to run Abercrombie and Fitch. We can't they might say this doesn't exist because they want to call the whole thing a hoax.And the rest of us who don't have those kind of relationships in our lives might want to say it doesn't exist because it doesn't exist for us. And it's too horrible to think that it does. But the truth is it's just incredibly common. And Jeffrey Epstein did it. And I don't know if I want to call it systemic, but I think the numbers are there.The complicity is there and and it in some ways it's incredibly satisfying to finally have an example of cruelty. Then we can all agree is cruelty and that we can all oppose, I thought the murders in Newtown of, toddlers were an example of cruelty. That we should do everything we could to prevent from happening ever again.Somehow the right did not think that. and they think that the, expansion of rights for trans people or even expansion of medical care for trans people represent some kind of cruelty. I don't see it as cruelty. So I was starting to despair that we could agree on an idea of what is something the strong, attacking the weak, causing deliberately causing suffering that we could agree that we collectively need to oppose, right?We don't even need to agree on any moral principles. We just need to agree on what a cruel act is that we see. And it's just very, satisfying to see brief coalition between people on the left and people on the right that trump's participation in the sort of Epstein machine is beyond the pale.Lewis, Tolkien, and the rise of fictionalized realitySHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. And that's it. It also cuts across what, you know, the, these, cross ideological understandings have been become a lot more difficult [00:42:00] because. Society has, really transitioned into kind of fictionalized versions of itself that everybody's developed their own, version of it.So like, you know, there's a famous, uh, evangelical book called, uh, this Present Darkness. And it's a novel about, uh, uh, a small town that is being being that demons are trying to gain possession of it through working with universities possessed universities and, a, small town pastor that fights against it, but, and it's a fictionalization, but, and i, bought a copy of it from a used bookstore, and it's fascinating that on the, on it was a 'cause I, like buying. Physical used copies of books because all you can see what previous readers thought about them. and the reader of this book had inscribed it as a gift to someone else. And it said something like, this book is fiction, but the idea is behind it are all real.HEFFERNAN: Amazing. Wow.SHEFFIELD: And like, and, but, and this, type of, a hermeneutic of reality,HEFFERNAN: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: is what a lot of people have. and you know, I think everybody probably to some degree, we all have this, you know, going back to, the idea of interpretation as reality or not you know, like it's, it, but it became much more of a thing beginning with the popularization of, mass fiction. So like CS Lewis or Tolkin,And the Matrix,That everybody thinks in terms of, well, maybe not everybody, but like a lot of people really do see reality in these metaphoric terms.And,Peter Thiel to circle back with him,He, names all of his companies after, Lord of the Ringsthings like PalantirHEFFERNAN: Yes.SHEFFIELD: And that, guy Curtis Jarvin, the, reactionary blogger, he sees himself as a [00:44:00] dark elf and people who agree with him.HEFFERNAN: yes. I mean, they are living in something that looks like middle earth or resident evil, 25 or, endless runner games. Like, like, like Elon Musk and I, you, I think you would know better than I do that, like Worlds of Demons, Satan, antichrist that have. Driven people in various panics at, in the past that there were so many in the madness of crowds, right?Like that, that, all of those, almost all of those are driven by panics about forces, and mostly they're mapped onto Christian onto Christian iconography. Yeah. And Milton obviously like huge influence on American life was Milton and Milton Satan. So the, yeah, so one of the other ways that we started by talking about politics for English majors, the fact that these texts, and I'm so glad you mentioned this, present darkness.I hadn't heard of that one. there are, the Scientology foundational Scientology books like Battlefield Earth. The, Turner Diaries is a work of fiction. Ayn Rand, who's always treated as a philosopher, is in fact an author of fiction. If you've read The Fountainhead, if you've read Atlas Shrugged, you've read a novel, right?And a novel by, and you may have thought because it's very unlikely that you read it for the characters, the irony, the metaphors, even, the plot. You come away believing the ideas are real and you may come away believe like you're in scriber of that book, and you may come away from, came, come away believing that you read a work of philosophy or allegory.And this is where the tools of literary criticism come in. And I'm just going to keep one thing succinct. People do not need to learn to fact check or understand facts. They need to learn to read fiction as fiction. Which is what literary critics teach you to do. So that's where the English major is useful.There is a beautiful state of mind and some people interacting with AI understand [00:46:00] this of willingly suspending disbelief and getting into this kind of trance where you're living with characters. People know it much better now, from Bingeable Netflix series. What are you doing when you watch a really cool detective series on Netflix, or you watch the succession on HBO, you're watching Forged History.You're watching people that kind of act like real people, but they speak in heightened language and things happen to them that don't happen to real people and anyone. a gift who grew up reading novels not allegories like the ones that we're talking about, but real novels with ironies and and fiction and characters that are aestheticized and created.Know when you're in the presence of art and take it in, this wonderful way. I mean, I, a great Netflix series or a great or succession is, has this wonderful effect on the brain. I mean, the willing suspension of disbelief is like, that's, coleridge's term is a trance. It's you're not believing.You're not believing what you read. That would be like reading Pizzagate and taking a gun and trying to find the people that are responsible for it. That's, you believe what you read. You read it like, oh, I am a thing happened in the world and I'm going to avenge people by taking out a gun. And again, parenthetically, there've always been people who mistakenly read like that.The Stephen King novel Misery, right? the, there's a reader, the Kathy Bates character in the movie who believes that misery, the central character in a novel is real and she must redeem her. And so she takes the author the author prisoner shaped hostage. There were people who believed Dickens' characters were real, notoriously wept when Little Nell died.And but re taking a novel as real means that you have not acquired the incredibly pleasurable capacity to get into the fiction trance and.SHEFFIELD: Well, it is catharsis as Aristotlecalled it.HEFFERNAN: Yeah. Well say more about [00:48:00] that. You mean in the presence of, in his case, right? Theater and poetry.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's still the same concept that it's, it is art. It is inhabiting a fictional moment as a heightened representation of reality that it's not just, it isn't a pale imitation. In fact, it is a exploration and zoomed in, a way that the actual, you can never get from observing real reality because you have to inhabit your own mind.But with, literature, we get to inhabit the mind of multiple people in the same story.HEFFERNAN: So that's where allegory comes in. And another feature of literary criticism is to help you understand genre. Allegory has a one-to-one correspondence between characters and places ideas in the world. And many of the books that the drive people are simple allegory of pilgrim's progress.The kind of act allegory in English was on people's beds next to the Bible. And taking literally the idea that a character, called Every man was person who then faced things, certain temptations that were like the slough of despondent he had to get through. And this was true and Dante also, but that, that he had to face down with Vanity Fair is another example. And resist these temptations and make this way through the make his way, through the, thickets of, seductions. In order to be godly. An allegory like that and there's like a key at the bottom. I mean, these are the kind of things, by the way, the reading that's taught in by homeschooling that is, that misses irony and metaphor.I'll just put it that simply. And so if I were going to teach anything, it would be to how to read fiction as fiction. What's great about reading as fiction, as opposed to fact checking, which I've also done for a living, is fact checking is incredibly tedious. It's pedantic, it's librarian.Nobody likes to be [00:50:00] corrected. Reading fiction as fiction is an absolute delight, and it's a way to be like, oh, I see, I know when. I am drinking a glass of wine versus, drinking a, refreshing glass of water. And I don't mistake one for the other. I don't think that I should seek hydration, nourishment, whatever in that, in this glass of wine that I might seek in a green smoothie or whatever.And that's true with fiction too, that it's not quite clear. It may give us catharsis, it may give us pleasure, it may give us better ways of understanding the world. It may give us, and this is what Rdy thought, better ways of understanding ourselves, because the metaphor, the idiosyncratic metaphoric, as he tediously said it existed in great literature.There's nothing like it for crystallizing a person's sense of identity and what dies when they die. And what dies when we die. At least I found that to be true. a lot of things are included in, literature there. Of course I've certainly count television and, scraps of thinking on the internet and epigrams from philosophy and all those things.Richard Rorty's continued relevanceSHEFFIELD: And just to go back to Rorty as we're coming up on the hour here in our recording that, I, he he wrote a book, his, finalbook was called Achieving Our Country. And it was a really, good book in a lot of ways, and I wish. That more people had read it in the late nineties when it came out. Because he was trying to, it was, I mean, in many ways a prophetic warning to the left about you have to be able to speak in something other than abstractions. You have to understand that truth is something that is, felt and always in motion and that everyone has to beincluded in it. And that their needs are also part of what truth is and answeringthem and providing for them. And, that [00:52:00] was ignored by neoliberalism.And but he also talked about trying to make sure of, avoiding two different types of dangers that movements that are trying to do some achieve social change.You want to talk about those?HEFFERNAN: Yeah, I I really would love to, I mean, is a, pressing interest of mine in the, in our, my podcast with Steven Metcalf called, I'll just plug it. What Rough Beast. Stephen and I both studied with Richard Bordy at the University of Virginia. That's how we met. And and, he, his kind of pragmatism, his version of pragmatism revelatory, I think to both of us.And and one of the points that he makes on this essay he includes in achieving Our Country, an essay he wrote for dissent in the nineties called Movements and Campaigns. Which is very short and and succinct I think Gatz said something extremely important. Now, Verde was disliked on the right and the left time equally, but he.that does not mean that he objected to the left more than the right. He thought that the pull, that the right, so let's just call it fascism, has on us, is tragic. The pull that some of the worst tendencies of the left has on us. He called a nuisance, which I think is a very good distinction when you hear complaints about ry, right?It's about woke, right? It's like, someone, when Trump was first elected, someone on my Facebook page said, better nuclear winter than more letters in L-G-B-T-Q. Right? And it had really gotten so that the nuisance of left wing, speech codes or kind of efforts to be accommodating, or maybe they were, it was small bits of penry.Were driving people into the hands of like extermination, fascism. That they'd rather die than, participate in this kind of nuisance ritual. And can't mistake the nuisances [00:54:00] from what's now called the woke or formerly politically correct. We can't mistake those for a tragedy and run from them into the hands of fascism.It's just, it would just be, it's a, terrible category error to think of them as equally terrible. However, he does talk about. The problem with what he calls movements. So movements mostly revolutionary. And movements that are extremely focused on utopia and focused on a moment that never comes.So the Kingdom of God or the apotheosis of the worker. Anything that you might have the thousand year Rike, anything you might have heard that's on a, extraordinarily long time timeline and far in the future? A moment that never comes and a moment that we can never fully realize, like there are no, as they would say in business there, there's, there are no deliverables.There's no, what is A-K-P-A-A product indicator? No key progress indicator. I don't know. There's nothing you could put up on your deck for venture when you're, try to get venture capital and say, well, we've realized this, we've realized this, right? Campaigns and so movements as we were talking about earlier.very quickly into two, terrible problems. One is infighting and purges. So like Stalin ish purges or Maoist struggle sessions to choose two, on the would be left. But also separation of rhinos from maga, right? Like rhinos or regular Republicans and MAGA republicans might vote alike on 80% of subjects.But if you read, as I just did Christy No's book about politics, she's so far right that the people that are really in her sights are like Paul Ryan. and she would probably do well to align with Paul Ryan since most of their [00:56:00] politics are the same. But her hatred for him is very, like the hatred on the left for say, the people that qualed in the women's March which were kind of pro-Palestine and pro-Israel feminists, and, that thing came, fell apart because of this kind of infighting and, desire for purity tests and to purge people who didn't agree with you on everything.Now, that is something that the left is often f faulted for because we come up with a lot of infighting because we're trying to have a big tent because a lot of people are included among, say Democrats, a lot of different people with different backgrounds. But that kind of infighting is definitely present on the right and it happens in primaries.And the first fights that Trump picked were with, Jeb Bush. So the, the idea that they didn't even share a set of values because Trump had to be a movement. He had to be like a one man, I don't necessarily want to say cult leader, but cults also style themselves as movements that were moving toward the promised land.Okay. The promised land almost always in the infighting, falls away. So you think of like David Ksh, right at Waco. He originally had some idea of a movement toward a kind of socialist, multiracial something world. But pretty soon. He was amassing guns and the federal government didn't like that he had guns and he had much younger girlfriends, and that was against the law of the land.And then the whole thing became a late stage cult where it's just about fighting against either people on the inside who aren't sufficiently committed or people on the outside who are trying to get you for something. And you've lost sight of this utopia that you first drew people in with. So movements, they lose their utopias and they devolve into infighting.But the last thing that happens is that they commit [00:58:00] cruelty. Because if what you're interested is in is the rapture, this is sort of your territory, but the rapture, the restoration of the kingdom of God on earth. If what you are interested in those things, that if those are the things that motivate you, then anything can be justified in their name.Opposition to cruelty as a guiding principleHEFFERNAN: And those things often turn out to be cruelty. So one thing Richard Ty says is, sum, bonum, any ultimate good can be cited to just by Nazis or by maoists to justify violence. So hope or even, I have trouble even with decency and kindness, even sort of the mild ones. But 'cause his argument was anything that you and I agree on at the philosophy table, that is like the ultimate good truth, right?You can imagine a Nazi or a Maoist torturing someone saying, I'm doing this in the name of truth. So as Ardi says, the thing that we oppose, don't have an ultimate good as pragmatist, but we have an ultimate evil. And that ultimate evil is not the antichrist. It's not the orcs, it's not sour on, it's not something from fiction, it's cruelty.It's. The infliction of suffering on people, on, on people. And the fear kind of cruelty. So let's take the ice arrests, engenders in people so we know cruelty when we see it. That's what I think is useful about Jeffrey Epstein. Why do we oppose cruelty? Why do we behave humanely? Because just because we don't derive it from some truth.There are probably, there are probably efforts once you start with truth, you can derive a, you can derive cruel actions, so you have to oppose the action at the end of it. And that's how you get people to do things, to change the world. So I was in a seminar with him and someone said, well, we would never have gotten desegregation without Christianity because.was a [01:00:00] Christian and because I have a dream cited Christian used Christian tropes and that people wouldn't have been moved to do it. And Richie, Richard Rdy said very memorably, I wish it weren't that way. Right? It's just like, I wish that you did not have to have some doctrine.Then someone else raised their hand and said, I find as a feminist that the kind of thinking around the gaze of the other, which was the kind of feminist, french feminist theory that was soaking up our minds at the time, I find that thinking around the gaze of the other, around the male gaze to be incredibly motivating Dy said, what does it motivate you to do?And she said, well really understand this and that. And he said, but how are you eliminating cruelty or promoting human flourishing? There are a shortage of, this is the nineties beds for female AIDS patients right now. is the kind of campaign that we could all be part of. And I, asked after the fires in Portland, Oregon, I asked a friend this was a couple years ago, like I had read something about someone opening his door from the inside and scalding his hand on the, his doorknob from the inside and getting blisters and burns.And I said, how could I help someone like that? I just want to cool off his body and get him some neosporin. And she said, well, oppose climate disinformation. And I just thought, I think that ship has sailed, right? I don't want a movement about saving the earth right now. I really want to get this guy some bottles of water and some, Some Neosporin for his hand and some burn treatments and a bandage. And that kind of, those kind of campaigns are the kind of thing Rty Rorty really appreciated. And there's a wonderful list in movements and campaigns of the campaigns that he had thought were extremely successful. And you can name tons of them in this country, [01:02:00] including reducing emissions.And a lot of the things, by the way that Trump is undoing. But campaigns that have made the world better public education and that you, and it's measurable, right? So you have a theory of change, but you can't have a theory of change without these indicators of progress, markers of progress toward your change.And some of those markers are the ones realized by campaigns. The most recent one I participated in was the te Tesla take down where the idea was to stigmatize driving a Tesla. And gad fly ish. Nobody likes it. It's annoying. We were yelling at Tesla drivers outside dealerships that like, shame, And this country, sales went down and the stock price dropped. And ultimately Musk was so troubled by it that the Tesla takedowns were included in dangers to the stock and got people to downgrade the stock because, as an insurance question, the fact that its reputation was taking a hit from protesters explicitly was affecting the value of the company.And he left the government in part to restore the Tesla stock price. So it was a very, effective. A campaign. And he was like, the, cruelty that was that we were opposing was his attack on U-S-A-I-D. He put it in the wood chipper and that put children in the wood chipper. So was something wonderful about that campaign, was it?Yes, we can, did it have a charismatic leader standing up there and getting us to effect on him and love him and imagine that there's some magic future? It did not. What it had was us yelling at car drivers so that they would finally decide it was too much of a drag to drive a Tesla. They weren't as cool as he thought people were going to slap incel inside stickers on it.And why not buy another kind of car? And and so that's an example of a campaign being successful. And I have a hard time thinking of a movement [01:04:00] that has ever been successful and have a very easy time of thinking of movements like the French Revolution or Maoism that turned quite cruel and bloodySHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I, would say further that, the idea of countering this tragic hateful political philosophy of Trumpism, it has to be done in, this way of, preventing cruelty and in letting people know that they do have afuture, even if they have these, antiquated superstitious beliefs that, like,and letting them know you, nobody's going to make you disbelieve thosethings.You can, if you want to believe these false beliefs, go ahead. we're not going to stopyou. You just can't impose them on everyone else, and you should be okay with that.Understanding why people believe liesHEFFERNAN: Yeah. There. The one, one last thing I'll say about literary criticism, which is obviously a passion, is that there was a, wonderful book by Janice Rodway called Reading the Romance from the eighties and. a lot in literary criticism, but the main thing it did for me was propose a reason that people believe lies and that they read compulsively.And for romance readers in the eighties, the books really rewarded someone who reads like a detective. So because the story was a man behaving cruelly to you, this is also the plot of pride and Prejudice actually loves you more than anyone. So you're like writing away the current abuse and cruelty in your head all the time in this incredibly pleasurable way.And, in pride and prejudice, Mr. Darcy is like, withholding and snobbish and terrible and imperious. But then it turns out that's the greatest love of all. And to make your life bearable while your husband is ignoring you, putting up a shield of a book. Sometimes these women were reading three, four books a day.They were reading the way people read [01:06:00] the internet now, just compulsive, Tell yourself a story over and over again so you know, you're a single man, as they always say, living in your mother's basement, but reading these things, you are actually Luke Skywalker, or you're actually, Legolas or or a wonderful hero or you're on the video, games believing that because it's, and it ends up being, at least in the case of the romance readers, your heart breaks.they're just as bruised. This was a group of people, women in the Midwest who identified as housewives and were reading these novels, you're just as bruised or, just as single or just as lonely as you ever were, but you've decided to devise a story in your head that, that tells it otherwise.That says, that redefines everything you're seeing as proof of your glory. And I don't know. I don't know. I don't, I, shouldn't say that. I think that's tragic, although that's a use, it can be put to, I mean, We all should read fiction that rewards readers, like the reader is the hero who sees things as not quite as they are.I mean, that's why I think we like detective stories so much. But and I don't want to deny people their pleasures or say like, well, you always have to just face the fact that the world is hitting you in the face and that you're not that cool guy in the video. I dunno what to say about that. I just think that to kind of conclude on something to do with literary criticism, reading fiction as fiction is not just a pleasurable thing to do.It is an incredibly useful epistemological thing to do because you will be drawn to fiction anyway and not deciding that it is fact not deciding you should take your marching orders from JRR Tolkien, but that you and, that you're going to make the world better. If you even read Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, you are, let's face it, not Odysseus, you are not on a hero's journey.You are trying to live your [01:08:00] life. That does not mean you don't read the Odyssey, but you read it as fiction. And there are some wonderful tools from literary criticism that will help you understand how to read fiction as fiction.Closing thoughts and where to find moreSHEFFIELD: Virginia, for people who want to keep up with all of your things what, tell us your recommendations.HEFFERNAN: oh, you mean where you can find me or what I'mreading? Where you can find me is almost everything I write washes up sometime on on my Substack, which is Virginia heffernan.substack.com. It's called Magic and Loss, but the link is Virginia heffernan do substack.com. And I also write quite regularly for the New Republic.So check in on the New Republic. It's, I'm in there about once a week, and I think I, and I have a big piece out this week on the Big 10 conference. And the last the last place. You can find me Is anywhere you get your podcasts. What Rough Beast is the name of the show? What? Rough Beast. It's Steven Metcalf and me talk to an extraordinary, interesting range of guests about everything from the IRA to Jeffrey Epstein to ice and and the guests are great.So just to plug it what Rough Beast and that is always free. It's, it was paywall once or twice in the very beginning, but it's always free. And there's free content on the substack too. You can also get a free trial. And and so that's “What Rough Beast,” virginiaheffernan.substack.com and the New Republic.SHEFFIELD: All right. Sounds good. Thanks for being here.HEFFERNAN: Thank you very much.SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show. Where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member to Flux, you can get unlimited access to the archives.So go to patreon.com/discoverflux if you want to do it on the Patreon side, or you can go to flux.community if you want to subscribe on Substack. And if you're watching on YouTube, please [01:10:00] do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever there's a new episode. And that will do it. Thanks a lot for joining us. I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe